Another evening brings another quote from Dark Æon. This one is long to give you a chance to appreciate the sheer sumptuousness of this book:
Our planet’s luxury class is overrun by mutant millionaires with an obnoxious superiority complex. They begin incorporating machinery into their bodies. They turn cyborg chic into high fashion, and persecute anyone who points out the emperor has no brainwaves. They create digital zombies of their personalities which replicate and spread across the internet like animate NFTs. Once tech corporations roll out AGI prototypes that are sufficiently convincing, they declare the Singularity is at hand. They act as though their computers have godlike power, and expect the rest of us to play along. They send out SpaceX Starships and phallic Blue Origin rockets in an effort to seed the solar system with their pseudo-gnosis. Meanwhile, we legacy humans have either lost our jobs to automation or have AI bots micromanaging our work. Our movements are tracked by mass surveillance devices. For anyone whose gametes aren’t swallowed up by the sexbot eugenic filter, their children are taught a “Universal Story” by chatbot tutors. These one-on-one instructors will also monitor the new generation’s brain development, personal tastes, and behavioral patterns. The resulting digital twins are used for both AI training and elaborate social engineering programs.
Joe Allen, Dark Æon
I’m luxuriating in this book, already sad for the moment when it will end.
Clarissa's Blog 
I will be interested to find out who Joe Allen is, and what his ac
tual take on everything is, once I have the time to look him up. With respect to the quoted passage, I’ll just point out that he talks about technologies that are powerful, but he seems compelled to rhetorically impose limits on their power.
“They act as though their computers have godlike power”
“They send out … Starships and … rockets in an effort to seed the solar system”
My guess is that his paradigm of transhumanism as dystopia, is that we end up with a regime that claims to be better than (natural, unaugmented) human, but which has actually lost or submerged important aspects of being human.
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Finally, somebody is willing to talk to me about the book! I thank you for it.
One of the things I liked the most so far is the discussion of Gnosticism as the root of the leftist worldview. I haven’t seen recent discussions of this anywhere outside of the Ukrainian intellectual space, and this was much appreciated. I also like it that Allen has no sacred cows and goes after right-wing transhumanism as much as the left-wing kind.
I like the book even more than Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism because Zuboff is utterly incapable of noticing any faults on the Left and ends up falsifying things. Plus, Allen is a better writer. He understands that this is dense material, so he provides a lot of comic relief between information-heavy bits. He follows Lope de Vega’s advice to mix tragedy with comedy, and as a result it’s a much better book.
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“Gnosticism as the root of the leftist worldview [has been discussed in] the Ukrainian intellectual space”
Is Arestovych the pioneer here?
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One of, yes.
It’s great to see a commenter who is aware.
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Arestovych is particularly interesting for several reasons, e.g. he has at times promoted a futurism of his own, but I am also interested to know more about any other Ukrainian intellectuals in this area.
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Andriy Baumeister has spoken at length about Gnosticism. The US is actively exporting the consequences of its Gnosticism, and people in other countries are trying to understand what it is and where it came from.
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It’s gnosticism via puritanism/protestantism– there’s a big vein of that whole we are pure spirits cruelly anchored to dirty bodies, matter=evil to be overcome business in all that. Which makes it all the more weird that they’ve become strict materialists. That’s gotta cause some freaky mental issues. Matter is evil and gross, but there’s nothing outside matter? So of course they’re trying to reconstruct a non-matter existence with circuitboards, escape to the vacuum of space, treat their gross flesh like play-doh to be purified and reconfigured…
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Sorry for making a test comment
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I will be interested to learn who Joe Allen is, and what his actual take on everything is, once I have the time to look him up. With respect to the quoted passage, I’ll just point out that he talks about technologies that are powerful, but he seems compelled to rhetorically impose limits on their power.
“They act as though their computers have godlike power”
“They send out … Starships and … rockets in an effort to seed the solar system”
My guess is that his paradigm of transhumanism as dystopia, is that we end up with a regime that claims to be better than (natural, unaugmented) human, but which has actually lost or submerged important aspects of being human.
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I don’t see that coming out well. We can only pay attention to just so many things at once. Put all the info in the world at our fingertips in a smartphone and it doesn’t make us better or more effective people, really. It makes us distracted, and distractable.
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“makes us distracted, and distractable”
I deeply resent this personal attac….. oh you weren’t talking about me specifically? ….never mind….
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I really wasn’t. But whenever I try to imagine a world where neuralink is a normal thing, it just seems… messy. That’s a world where people are deluged with info all the time, and are probably mainlining adderall to deal with it.
There are gonna be some complications with that.
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“I really wasn’t”
…. humor ….
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Allen says it will be like COVID vaccines. First, people are herded into the exciting new tech, and then when consequences hit, we’ll all pretend that nothing happened.
As we’ve seen, it’s very easy to spook people into putting experimental crap into their bodies and not thinking about the consequences.
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And they’ve already got a running list of who can be badgered into it, and who can’t.
Can’t wait to see how that one plays out. Maybe I should start getting the kids used to camping.
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Badgered or duped. COVID offered a great practice opportunity, indeed.
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” mutant millionaires with an obnoxious superiority complex”
Maybe not a 100% match for what he’s talking about but a few weeks ago vids from Bryan Johnson began showing up my youtube feed…. He’s the guy who wants to live forever or something or is heavily into anti-aging stuff… and he totally freaks me out…
The first thing you notice is how…. inhuman he looks, it’s hard to imagine someone who was passing through the uncanny valley and decided he liked it so much he would homestead there….
I looked up pictures the year before he officially began and now and he went from reasonable well-preserved normal looking 44 year old to an exquisitely well preserved mummy…. weird waxy skin and a weird black cavity of a mouth…. I can’t imagine what it is he sees in a mirror to make him go “Yes! More of this!!!!”
The closest equivalent might be crazy people who become addicted to plastic surgery (like Jocelyn Wildenstein)…
If that’s what tech millions do to a person then…. yikes-a-rooni!
But don’t take my word for it, here’s a video of him talking about his little soldier…
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Oh… ew.
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“Maybe not a 100% match for what he’s talking about but a few weeks ago vids from Bryan Johnson began showing up my youtube feed…. He’s the guy who wants to live forever or something or is heavily into anti-aging stuff… and he totally freaks me out…”
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