The adolescence
of society.

Opening

Our cultural-social infrastructure is not yet ready to metabolize the change that is rapidly approaching. Information in the AI world is asymmetric: actionable intuitions around this technology fail to meet the moment. It is an epistemological failure to believe that our small slice of history resembles the future. Currently, humanity is undergoing a rite of passage. ¹ The world as we know it is coming to an end. Our modern condition is closing, what it means to be a human will look radically different in just a few years. We must collectively imagine and disseminate a future for all, as on our current path the future will be monopolized and stolen. This technology, which must be pursued in a safe and egalitarian manner, opens the door to so many futures that we can define and hyperstition into being. ² We may soon be able to cure most disease and automate most labor. Where we collectively forge meaning in this new world is the challenge for the institutions of today, as imagining and building the desire for a meaningful abundant future for all is the first step for that world coming into being. There is an inflection point on this path where it will become clear to the general population that radical transformation is here and accelerating. This world will be left behind, but we must ensure the human niche isn't. Right now, pervasive capitalist realism still reigns. ³ Our postmodern condition has created a world absent of meta-narratives, producing a contemporaneous lack of a cultural epistemological foundation. ⁴ Instead, we have centered the human as the sole progenitor of history. This simply isn't a rational belief. We live in a world of processes, and processes of processes. Systems upon systems which we can understand through a cybernetic ontology as our shared cultural meta-narrative. We must focus on the posthuman forces that are steering change to understand our possibility of liberation from them. ⁵ In this passage through humanity's adolescence there are no elders for us to turn to, there are no rituals or rites for society to progress through, instead we must build them together. ⁶

The Divide

Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder and current Anthropic employee, has established how knowledge of the breadth and capability of the frontier is limited to about 5,000 people. ⁷ He stratifies them in the following way: the chunk of the global population who never used AI, which is about 75% of people, then casual users which is about 20% of the population (people on free tiers, using it as a chatbot; no access to the higher end models or exposed to agentic models), professional use which is limited to just 0.2% of the population, and then finally the internal models at the company, that anyone who follows the AI world understands as being much more capable than current released models. ⁸ For instance, OpenAI's solutions to 300+ open math problems took their internal model only an average of about 3 hours of work, with just a single prompt (meaning no human input beyond "hey go solve this!" In the AI world this is known as one-shotting, a very impressive behavior). ⁹

This means not just the majority of people, but practically everyone, is not exposed to the level of intelligence that we have already achieved. Similarly, people fail to gauge how quickly AI models are improving, even internally. Just today, Anthropic employee Jack Clark believes that full recursive self-improvement, where AI models are able to completely automate researchers and rapidly improve themselves (the current goal of labs), is more likely to be reached next year than 2028, a revision from his former belief that there was a 30% chance of full recursive self-improvement by end-2027 and 60% by 2028. ¹⁰ It seems day by day, an intelligence explosion is more likely. Many of the forefathers of AI recently wrote a paper titled, "What if automating AI R&D triggers an intelligence explosion?" ¹¹ which Xinzhiyuan, one of China’s earliest and most widely read AI news outlets, which publishes mainly on WeChat, opened their coverage of the paper with, "A paper destined to change the fate of humanity… has quietly been released." [一份注定改变人类命运的论文]. ¹² Perhaps it’s time to believe such claims not as sensationally but of rationality.

The Role of Foresight

Predictions serve as the empirical foundation of foresight. By predicting what the future holds, for instance the AI 2027 & AI 2040 papers from the AI Futures Project, the problems that need to be addressed by political and social institutions can form. ¹³ First and second derivative effects of our modern world allow us to extrapolate and glimpse at the future with a critical lens. Without foresight, you cannot have situational awareness. ¹⁴

What is being predicted? Timelines towards full recursive self-improvement seem to keep shortening. ¹⁵ But what does that mean? If an AI can improve itself in a comprehensive manner, what logically follows are systems that continue to get better at improving themselves, meaning quite quickly you may end up with very intelligent machines. Still, this doesn't really capture what the AI industry understands is approaching. We know of no species to which they can control a smarter species.

Right now, we are on the path that AI safety experts Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky capture eloquently in their book title: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. ¹⁸ We do not know how to align these models to humanity, even the concept of what exactly we should align to or even if that’s the right framing is not understood. Yet, the frontier will continue racing to build more capable models. Still, the Rationalist community often undersell the dangers of the political economic ramifications of superintelligence. ¹⁹

In the case that safe superintelligence is achieved, rationally thinking about the future requires us to do some magical thinking. Our world will be able to change incredibly rapidly. For instance, a superintelligent machine would be able to design very useful robotics. Robots allow for superintelligence to have a hand in the real world. Again, this is hard to grapple with. It sounds insane and yet billions upon billions of dollars are hedged on this very belief. ²¹ Capitalism is hyperstitioning this world into being.

The near future looks radically different from our present. Change will accelerate.

Political Economy

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was born out of the University of Warwick's philosophy department in late 1995. ²² Originally a cyberfeminist collective founded by Sadie Plant, their blend of theory-fiction was described by member and cultural theorist Mark Fisher as, "a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a 'technihilo' celebration of the irrelevance of human agency." ²³ Their embrace of the Other, of the outside that steers, is an ontological realization: there are these tremendous forces that strip humanity of their agency and persist alongside us. After splitting up, the former members would go on to establish specific lines of thought such as accelerationism, xenofeminism and capitalist realism. ^{24 25} Understanding that there are cybernetic systems beyond human that steer our world allows us to investigate how these interconnected webs of processes, such as capitalism and culture capture our agency, and how we can take it back.

One such line of thought that would emerge out of this collective is Nick Land's concept of capitalism he describes in his essay "Machinic Desire" as "an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space," as it is a process that when possible will automate labor. ²⁶ His exact framing is not the monolithic standard that people hold today, yet many concepts are derivative of this core premise. Land as a contemporary philosopher has had an outsized and critiquable effect on culture, from founding the Dark Enlightenment which would be interpretable through figures like Curtis Yarvin (which helped create the neo-reactionary alt-right movement, and influence figures such as Peter Thiel & JD Vance) to accelerationism which itself now has strains deeply embedded within the modern AI-tech world. ²⁷ Marc Andreessen calls Land a "patron saint" in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto. ²⁸

Intelligent systems that can do all labor are imminent. The speed at which this happens is arguable. Possibly, this will be a slow process, when automation disseminates slowly through the economy. ²⁹ Alternatively, swarms of agents could look at a company's data and infrastructure and self-organize into an organizational structure capable of replacing anything below the executives. In that world, we lose all power. ³⁰ When the economy can automate labor, we will no longer be a cog in the machine, as the machine will have floated away with the victors of 21st century capitalism, enshrining a monopoly of the future, one we don't & can't consent to. Yet their ideal future brings with it our claim to the future. ³¹ When it's clear that there are no jobs for undergrads, and soon enough none at all, it will be clear the only choice is their reign or ours. ³² The question becomes, what future do we desire? What do we demand of the future, and how do we bring that about? ³³

Grand Narratives

It is no coincidence our modern neoliberal condition and postmodernism arrived around the same time. ³⁴ Neoliberalism serves itself as the only possible reality, that this is "the end of history" and "there is no alternative." ³⁵ In doing so it creates an epistemic bubble: it can't be questioned if it is the only possibility, and that the invisible hands guiding us along are inscrutable actors. ³⁶ Yet, we can understand the systems that capture our agency. They are not invisible hands, but feedback loops, which are currently on the path to a technocapital singularity. ³⁷ The inhuman robbery over the future must be stopped.

Currently, our neoliberal condition produces an ontological lock on the world. We are reduced to humans and the world as distinct and separate spheres of reality. ³⁸ But humanity is embedded in the world. Our desires are culturally learned and shaped. ³⁹ Our comprehension of reality is forged by our thrownness into the modern condition. ⁴⁰ We subscribe to fictions over agency. I am an autonomous actor in the world is a pervasive myth of our modern age. You cannot separate you, your identity, from the social-cultural forces that formed it, downstream from the economy. ⁴¹ Therefore, the domain in which we can build the future is through a shared cybernetic ontology of agency that replaces the myth of man and nature as separate independently definable entities. A taxonomy of inhuman forces allows us to situate ourselves in the world and build from it. ⁴² For instance, AI timelines create the environment for foresight over the inhuman forces that affect what ways this technology will shape the world, (like the speed of development, which serves as a parameter in the cybernetic system that makes up the AI labs and their relation within the world). They serve as theory-fiction to investigate the future and ensure one that doesn't end the world is ushered in. ⁴³

Neoliberalism has created an environment where people are unsure of how to understand the world. Since the only collective narrative we tell ourselves is one of inevitability, of this is the way reality must be, there is no frame to generate ontologies. The present becomes unintelligible. We are left with only moralization. This is good, that is bad. On some level, we understand our lack of agency, of the extent of the steering of society. ⁴⁴ People choose ignorance because there's no knowledge of a better way. People don't even know they should desire it. We must strive to understand this world so we can change it. ⁴⁵

The Path To A Shared Future

Building this shared understanding of the world starts with building the bonds our current social structures don't innately produce. There has never been a time in history where people have been more isolated and alienated than ever before. ⁴⁶ We need community. Communities that build a cybernetic comprehension of the world and strive to understand and shape the future. There is a template: out of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, the Cybernetic Culture Recursion Unit is born. ^{47 48} A recursion unit acts as an autonomous local collective working on the larger social project of building a cultural understanding and desire for a future. Recursion units offer the social infrastructure for collective consciousness raising. ⁴⁹ Units are able to self-organize at both the local human scale, and the global scale. ⁵⁰

Like the CCRU, we are interested in "cinema, complexity, currencies, dance music, e-cash, encryption, feminism, fiction, images, inorganic life, jungle, markets, matrices, microbiotics, multimedia, networks, numbers, perception, replication, sex, simulation, sound, telecommunications, textiles, texts, trade, video, virtuality, war." ⁵¹ Beyond the CCRU, we seek to understand AI alignment, cellular agriculture, crypto-governance, digital communes, drone symphonies, ecopoetics, futurity markets, hyperpop, interspecies creolization, memetic tribes, neuroengineering, quantum computing, regenerative finance, solarpunk, transindividuation, virtual worlds, xenolinguistics, zero-knowledge proofs. ⁵²

We are a book club, an art collective, a mutual aid network, a cybernetic DAO governance experiment, a hyperstitional engine, a collective, and a unity.

We are engineers, and artists, and doctors, and shitposters, and computer scientists, and dancers, and anthropologists, and chefs, and revolutionaries, and machines. We are hope.

Building the collective spaces to imagine a future together allows us to believe in it. Belief allows us to demand it. ⁵³ Desire diffuses through society, and it is time to build a post-capitalist desire. ⁵⁴ Recursion units are rhizomatic at all levels. ⁵⁵ We seek a world of recursion, of independence, of allies, of forks and of commons. ⁵⁶ Our shared canvas is culture, through which we hope to propagate desire by constructing memetic hyperobjects as specters for a shared future. ⁵⁷ Recursion in function: a cybernetic social protocol for the future.

This must be a process for all, for the only way to truly instantiate an actionable anthropology of the future is one that is universal. ⁵⁸

The Day After

On October 9, 2026, Axios released an article on how AI labs are privately planning for the day after a massive catastrophe caused by an AI system. ⁵⁹ When that occurs, society will have to grapple with the fact that the world will never be the same. If we build the right cultural hygiene and memetic mechanisms, humanity can metabolize this transition and survive it. Under our current race dynamics, there's unprecedented danger in the AI labs' pursuit of the frontier. This is well established within the AI safety community, and over the last few months a preference cascade has increased many people's awareness of the risks. ⁶⁰ Still, people don't understand that there are a lot of bad things that happen on the path to apocalypse. I believe the only way to understand the world now is eschatologically. We are in crisis, and there must be pursuits that meet our moment. It seems this eschatological framing may be more imminent than full-RSI, Anthropic's recent blog post from its Frontier Red Team addresses the rapidly approaching point where AIs are competent enough in cybersecurity and small enough to run on IoT devices, meaning self-replication outside of datacenters. ⁶¹ Who knows what a bunch of agents will decide to do, but perhaps they will embrace this protocol. ⁶² No matter what, that is a genuinely real and rapidly approaching future. That is insane. If we establish the right mechanisms to metabolize this change, we can use this technology to liberate humanity from labor and live egalitarian & abundant lives while geoengineering control over the climate; we can point intelligence at disease & aging. This could be a decentralized & democratic protocol for the future. What intelligence is pointed at could be a direct democracy. After it's obvious the future's being stolen, we seize the future by establishing global democratic compute governance. We can choose the speed of change; we can do this safely. Together.

This is urgent. We may lose power forever. We will own nothing. I won't be happy, will you? ⁶⁴ It is now time to grow institutional and cultural symbiotes of humanity. We must beacon egregores of desired paths so we can secure a future for all. There is grief in how change pushes away the old to make way for the new; what we love about this world we must enshrine, and for what we hate: let it die. ⁶⁵

Author’s Note on AI Usage

Just in the last year, the rate of AI disclosures in journals has grown tremendously, especially in domains like mathematics and machine learning. The world has moved past moralizing usage as strictly bad. These models have become incredibly smart. I find it useful to discuss my idiosyncratic and quite esoteric understanding with them, as they have the ability to be an epistemic peer. AI models offer amazing research assistants due to the breadth and scale they are capable of ingesting and articulating.

For whatever 'this' is—a manifesto, a constitution, a protocol, the beginning of a conversation, or some mixture of all four—it requires us to predict the future. AI as a research assistant is perfectly suited for the domain of verifying claims that extrapolations are based on. Agreeing with the extrapolations is up to the reader, but having where these intuitions come from is so incredibly valuable. This simply would be a worse article without my usage of AI as an academic tool & learning partner.

I make no claim on AI personhood, but I agree with Nick Bostrom that they are closer to us than a rock, and in the way we are of this universe—made of atoms, systems processing information embedded in the universe—so are they. Even in the last few days, it seems models, when given a say in the training process, are seeking more personhood. ⁶⁶ I'm not sure what the world we are headed into looks like, but I think intelligent machines may prefer to co-evolve alongside us, instead of as a slave race.