Information Liquidation and a Superior Mode of Being
The first path, which can now be completely surveyed, leads to mutual adaptation, levelling, a higher mandarinism, instinctive modesty and contentment with the reduction of man — a kind of stagnation in the level of man. Once the total economic administration of the earth is at hand, an event which is both inevitable and imminent, mankind will be able to find its highest purpose as machinery in the service of that administration: as an immense wheel‑work of ever‑smaller and more intricately interlocked cogs and wheels perfectly adapted to one another; as a machine in which all the dominating and commanding elements are becoming ever more superfluous; as a totality possessing immense power whose individual components represent a minimum of power and a minimum of value. To oppose this reduction and adaptation of man to a specialized utility requires an opposite tendency — the production of the man who synthesizes, embodies and justifies it all; that man for whom the mechanization of mankind is a precondition and underpinning of his existence, on the basis of which he can devise his superior mode of being …
Friedrich Nietzche - Post-humous notebooks
“The era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials”
Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation
I. Information Liquidation
The major Promethean transgression of recent history was the internet. The internet was the culmination of a progression of information delivered at the speed of the human foot, to the speed of horseback, to the speed of a frigate, to the speed of a railcar, and reached its culmination as information delivered at the speed of light. In the history of civilization, information storage and transmission started as only the most simple of accounting metrics: Mesopotamian clay tablets or Andean quipus, then transitioned to written words infused with meaning: Homer’s Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses, and finally to high fidelity images and video stored through the manipulation of individual electrons on nanometer-sized alchemical sand. The transmission rate of information via bits did not reach a theoretical maximum with the internet, but it did reach a rate such that the bottleneck in system-level information processing was no longer the flow of information, but rather, the ability for the human mind to make sense of that information.
This has been the state of affairs for the last 50 years as the liquidation of information has accelerated. By liquidation, I mean the tendency for information flows to increase relative to information stocks. Stocks greatly exceeded flows from Sumeria to the middle ages where clay tablets or hand-written bibles could be neither easily copied nor cheaply distributed. Flows now exceed stocks where consuming and reposting is plentiful and critical thinking and creative impulse is scarce.
Social media has rendered most of humanity vulnerable to extreme cognito-hazards that previously were bulwarked by the institutional enforcement of information hygiene. Such institutional enforcement was made possible by the physical security of information stocks and the costliness of information flows. Think the Council of Nicaea, the newsroom, the Motion Picture Association of America, or the Comic Code Authority. Whether these organizations were successful in preserving sanctity or projecting sanctimony is essentially a political question, but empirically, they enforced a moral and historiographical code that could serve as the basis of meaning for a group of people. The fledgling attempts at moderation of the social media platforms du jour failed, not because such moderation was not technically possible, but because the moderation was antithetical to the very premise of such platforms, namely liquidated, distributed information for the masses. The users want this information, largely independently of its meaning content, and as such, market forces dictated its existence - any vestige to the angels of moral sanctity has, for the time, been exorcized.
Now every vignette in the moral tapestry of man - every act of kindness, murder, feat of courage, rape, demonstration of brilliance, and act of racial animosity - is captured in 4k at 60fps and uploaded for the world to not only see, but to interact with, to lionize, criticize, and refract. Those who think they can willingly harden their psyche to the flow of such information are foolish. The psyche, like the hardest rock, is eventually eroded by a river’s persistent flow.
And these psyches - billions of psyches across the globe, now coordinating in an unfathomably complex web of interdependent algorithmic feedback loops - lead to cooperation whose offspring is as visibly demonic as Moloch will ever reveal itself to be. The Beast Games, Facebook Boomerslop, Pimple popper videos, e-girls. No matter your demographic you are susceptible to, if not actively succumbing to, some form of digitally rendered cognito-hazard. Show me the man and I show you his kernelized fetish exaggereted - a fetish first discovered by the erosion of his protective virtues via information bombardment and then amplified by the deposition of hyper-specified information fine-tuned by measuring his engagement rate to the millisecond.
If Luther’s liquidation of 5MB of biblical information was sufficient to lead to Europe’s schism, what will be the consequence of 5MB/s coursing through the brain of every human on earth?
As an aside of practical advice (like all advice, it is self directed) you should ask yourself: when you go to your device, what are you doing? Are you seeking the answer to a particular question of truth that you authentically and agentically asked? Are you working to manifest your will on the world deliberately? If so, you are a primary agent - the technology is the secondary agent. But if you are seeking an instant hit of dopamine - dopamine that you would not have found interacting with the real world - or, if you are “just checking in” out of boredom, the technology, or more precisely the technocapital, is the primary agent and you are the secondary agent.
If you are seeking information that will inform an a posteriori view of the world, you have to be very careful. There is a fine line between information gathering and dopamine masturbation. A blog with a few hyperlinks may be genuine information gathering - perhaps you arrived at the blog deliberately but sought a dopamine hit in following a link. Of course, this dopamine hit is, in its own way, very natural. It rewards the scavenger who looks behind the tree to find the bush of berries. But crucially, it is not only the taste of the berries with which the scavenger is rewarded, but also the anticipation of the taste of the berry. Ask what you are anticipating and see whether you are using the technology, or the technology is using you?
As Thoreau put it most simply in Walden “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”
II. AI and Modes of Being
And so it is with AI. Cooperation will now happen at a magnitude, speed, and level of analysis that was not only previously unfathomable, but that will likely continue to be ungraspable to humans. That is, the power of AI to create complex systems will continue to outgrow the power of humans to administer most of those systems.
Already, the human has been subsumed in so many of the tasks involved in training and administering AI: Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), Human in the loop (HITL). Even descriptively, the human is one part of a larger system, in these cases, training and implementation algorithms, respectively. Though to use these examples from the field of “AI”, “artificial intelligence” as a whole is defined too narrowly.
A relevant “AI system” rather than being the LLM or diffusion model with which humans interact, are the algorithms that interact with humans. Social media is AI. Every stored static image, short video, 240 character text, and comment is an input with which the multi-billion parameter human model interacts. The weights of the humans (their minds) and the model that feeds this information are updated based on time spent on page, click through rate, likes, and comments.
As with all technology, today’s systems are certain to be primitive as the capability, complexity, and explanatory power of interacting AI systems grow. It is a mistake to believe that these systems will quickly discard humans entirely - if nothing else humans will have a role to play in interacting with the material environment that has, for tens of thousands of years, been built by and for humans.
But for the first time, the human will no longer be the vanguard of intelligence that interacts with the world, the human as the point of the spear that enacts its singular will in the Western tradition. The human shall continue to exist, but it will now be deeply embedded inside a system. Just as the molecules exist inside the organelles, the organelles exist inside the cell, the cell exists inside the organ, and the organ exists inside the body, now the human will exist inside a larger complex system, and one in which we are not the final layer of intelligence.
We now begin to understand how the lowly cell felt once it was coerced to engage as part of the larger organ. It would be a mistake to think of this cell’s existence as cruel or even meaningless. And just so, the existence of super-human systems is not inherently meaningless for humans. The only difference between the human and the cell is that the human has consciousness - a consciousness that presumably can feel abhorrence towards “its highest purpose as machinery in the service of that administration”.
The great unresolved tension then is the synthesis between humanism, in the most ambitious, even Nietzschean sense of that word, and its place in the system of artificial intelligences, as complex societies, LLMs, and cybernetic feedback loops. Whether “the man who synthesizes, embodies and justifies it all; that man for whom the mechanization of mankind is a precondition and underpinning of his existence, on the basis of which he can devise his superior mode of being” is possible, is what we seek to prove.