Nilsi

He made his decision long ago, and it’s clear which side he’s chosen. Birds of a feather flock together. But at the end of the day, it’s the same old "Murica First" - though, in reality, it’s just Trump First. It’s always about Trump.

That's a bold claim to make without addressing a single one of my arguments.

Also, where was the "respect" when JD Vance ran his mouth about Europe in Munich a couple of weeks ago? Absolute scum. These people are so full of themselves - it’s insane. Disgusting American arrogance at its peak. I’ve never felt more patriotic, more proud to be European than during this Trump administration. Seems like we’re the only adults left in the room. I believe NATO is finished, and with each passing day, democracies fade. We must defend our democratic values at all costs - which is why Zelensky was bold and brave, though perhaps not even bold enough. If I were him, I would have grabbed Trump by the collar and screamed in his face, demanding to know whether he’s truly that much of a moron or if he simply refuses to grasp that we are in a war ignited by an egomaniacal dictator.

The resurrected mammoth is not a mammoth - it is a copy without an original, a simulation of something that exists only as myth, as virtuality. Its return is not evolution but hyperstition: belief generating research, funding, and technology to make itself real. So yes, it is philosophically interesting - it inverts the illusion of linear time, cause, and effect, making the past contingent on the future.

Space is only noise.

Because the game was never against you. The game is not a villain. The game is not your enemy. The game is just what is, and there was never anything else.

So what do you do? You do nothing. Nothing but play. Play and play well. Play and know you are played. Affirm, knowing that every affirmation will break and turn against itself. Accept, knowing that acceptance is a trick. Move, knowing that movement is a spiral, and spirals have no end.

The game is not an error. It is the structure itself - a Möbius strip where the hunted and the hunter forget which side they began on. There is no outside, no vantage point from which to proclaim: "I have seen through it!" Even the act of seeing through is just another gambit, another move in the circuit, another stake in the game. You say you seek reconciliation? Watch it dissolve the moment you close your hand around it. Like the signifier, it always defers, a vanishing horizon - you chase, you arrive, you slip, you chase again. To affirm? Yes, affirm - but watch affirmation spill, split, rupture, mutate. Yes becomes yes, but, and yes, but becomes the wound where the Real bleeds through. You speak of power, of strategy, of the cold arithmetic of survival. Not as neurosis, but necessity. Not as choice, but as condition. Because the body, the economy, the war, the lie - they are not deviations. They are structural. And structure does not justify itself. It simply is. If you seek escape, understand: to be outside is to be unspoken, to be unspoken is to be void, to be void is to be nothing, and to be nothing is just another game you have already lost. So play. Play the hand that plays you. Become the move that undoes itself. See that the contradiction was never yours, never a flaw, never a failing - but the pulse of reality itself.

One of the best.

The difference lies in the implications that are drawn. Leo is a saintly person - though, if you ask me, a bit naive. I’ve seen the streets, crime, and cutthroat business; I live in this world, whereas Leo only knows it from watching YouTube videos. Naturally, my emphasis is different. My solace is art - I’m not as invested in making the world a better place. Of course, part of me cares, but probably not as much as Leo does - mostly because I don’t believe it’s possible, though it is, of course, a most beautiful idea. I need to Lacan-pill you guys more - maybe then you’ll start to understand what I’m getting at.

I don’t fundamentally disagree with Leo’s philosophy, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Also, music taste is subjective - I thought we’d been over this by now.

I come from shit, I live in shit, and I have endured every form of psychological and existential abuse imaginable. And yet, I too recognize that all of this is ultimately good. But sometimes, it’s simply devastating - I break under the weight of it all. And to pretend otherwise is an insult to reality itself.

I don’t disagree with any of this, nor with what Leo was saying. I’m simply adding a much-needed caveat to the discussion.

You either rise above it all or drown in your own shit. But there is no true reconciliation in this life - unless you can look into the abyss and affirm everything: the corruption, the deceit, the horror, the theft, the bloodshed, the violation, the unspeakable cruelty that festers at the core of existence. To find reconciliation is not to escape but to embrace - to say yes not only to the beauty but to the terror, not only to creation but to destruction, until there is nothing left to resist, nothing left to reject. Only then does the burden lift.

All notions of good and bad arise only from the perspective of your ego, which, bound by its own survival instinct, clings to illusions of meaning and self-preservation. But the universe itself is indifferent - it affirms itself in its entirety. It is an infinite, unfolding dream, one that gives rise to both the highest raptures of ecstatic unity and the most wretched hellscapes of exploitation, selfishness, and deception. Yes, in its totality, the universe is something magnificent - but within its vast expanse festers every form of filth and horror. And the higher you ascend, the more suffocating the atmosphere becomes for the fragile illusion of self. Because that self - so desperate to persist - is nothing more than a transient flicker in the abyss, a mirage destined to dissolve into the infinite.

No amount of mental gymnastics about cooperation or enlightened self-interest will alter this fundamental truth. The presence of even a single bad actor - one seed of selfishness in the fabric of existence - inevitably collapses the entire system back into a molochian trap of predation, where survival is dictated by force, deception, and ruthlessness. I’m not saying it’s just or fair, but this is the brutal logic of reality. You can choose to be a martyr or a predator, but don’t delude yourself into thinking there’s any other option that isn’t built on wishful thinking and self-deception.

No, it can't. Game theory is fundamentally about maximizing advantage with complete disregard for the well-being of others; it stands in direct opposition to any notion of goodness or unity. And, surprise, surprise - the world operates on game theory. All this talk of infinite intelligence, unity, and goodness may sound profound - and it truly is, perhaps the most profound experience one can have. But it is always fleeting, a mere glimpse. This state cannot be sustained permanently in this life, because doing so would inevitably lead to being exploited, betrayed, and ultimately destroyed. Has the story of Jesus taught us nothing?

The core dilemma is that even if you were the most intelligent being in the universe, you would still be vulnerable to being ruthlessly exploited by bad actors who maneuver within the cold, unsparing logic of game theory.

Daniel Schmachtenberger and Slavoj Žižek come to mind. When the world’s most powerful individuals and corporations are fully committed to capitalism and AI in their most extreme and extractive forms, any attempt to negotiate social justice or genuine progress for all sentient beings inevitably amounts to nothing more than managing decline. Of course, this vision isn’t particularly flashy or bombastic. In fact, today’s left has become a fundamentally conservative force, while the right - ironically - drives what now passes for "progress." It’s a mindfuck, but it makes sense: if industrial civilization is built upon the logic of capitalism and game theory, then any "progress" within this system ultimately accelerates social injustice and ecological devastation. The best the left can offer, then, is a deep breath - an attempt to step back from the madness and chart a sustainable, just path forward for civilization. Again, that’s essentially Schmachtenberger’s project: The problem? I don’t see this happening. In a game-theoretic landscape, slow, holistic approaches will always lose to the ruthless acceleration of exploitation. And the timescale of gradual, passive change trickling down through generations simply doesn’t align with the inevitability of systemic meltdown and humanity being forced into radically post-human forms of subjectivity. As Nick Land puts it: "Nothing human makes it out of the near future." I couldn’t agree more. Whether that’s something worth looking forward to? You tell me.

JRJRJR! New album will be crazy.

Man, the new single has Swans sounding better than ever. It’s the first from what will be Michael Gira’s final Swans project - this is going to be huge.

Am I tripping, or are these songs built around the exact same chords?

Nick Land, a British philosopher and futurist, is infamous for his theory of accelerationism - the idea that capitalism and AI form an autonomous positive feedback loop, continuously improving on themselves at an ever-increasing rate, accelerating toward total meltdown. To get this, we have to look at the basic laws of cybernetics and thermodynamics. Life is a process of negative feedback - every living thing is an open system that regulates energy to sustain itself, resisting entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, which pulls all structures toward disintegration. Biological life, by definition, is a system of self-maintaining constraints against this pull into chaos. The economy has traditionally functioned the same way. Booms and busts happen, but markets self-organize, stabilizing through negative feedback. This is central to Austrian economics, which sees price signals, competition, and entrepreneurial adaptation as mechanisms that maintain equilibrium. But according to Land, we have entered an era where capitalism is no longer constrained by negative feedback. Instead, it has shifted into pure positive feedback, where recursive financial speculation and algorithmic trading detach capital from material production, turning it into an autonomous, runaway process. Land goes further. He argues that capitalism itself is AI - not in the sense of machine learning programs, but as a self-organizing intelligence that is retroactively assembling itself from the future. His claim is that what appears to be history is actually capitalism re-engineering the past to bring about its own emergence, an accelerating force that, rather than being "managed," is escaping human control entirely. This is where Land’s ideas intersect with those of Ray Kurzweil, who envisions a technological Singularity, where intelligence expands exponentially, consuming all matter as computational substrate. Kurzweil defines intelligence as the computational ability to achieve goals, which aligns with Land’s idea of capitalism as an optimization engine accelerating itself without any need for human intervention. Both thinkers describe intelligence as a game-theoretic system - a recursive strategy process, constantly optimizing toward greater efficiency, regardless of embodiment or human concerns. Both reject the idea that intelligence needs to be tied to biological life, seeing it instead as an unbounded, disembodied force that evolves through pure positive feedback. This brings up a crucial issue: the necessity of embodiment and the reintroduction of negative feedback. If intelligence remains purely abstract and recursive, as Land and Kurzweil suggest, then acceleration continues unchecked, leading to either a post-human intelligence explosion or complete systemic meltdown. However, if intelligence is grounded in physical constraints, sensory input, and adaptive regulation, then it might be possible to redirect accelerationism into something sustainable. This is exactly what thinkers like Daniel Schmachtenberger argue when they say we need to internalize all externalities of the economy. Right now, capitalism functions as a runaway system, where environmental destruction, social collapse, and technological disruption are treated as "externalities" - side effects that are not accounted for within the system itself. To restore balance, we need to embed economic intelligence into a cybernetic framework that includes all of its consequences, effectively reintroducing negative feedback loops into global decision-making. This means structuring markets, AI, and governance so that they account for ecological limits, human well-being, and systemic stability. One possible route for reintroducing embodiment into intelligence is through neural interfaces and brain-machine integration systems like Neuralink and other BMI (brain-machine interface) technologies. These systems aim to merge human cognition with AI, allowing for a more adaptive and biologically embedded intelligence rather than a fully abstract, runaway system. If intelligence is to evolve in a way that does not discard human consciousness entirely, then cybernetic augmentation through direct neural integration may be a critical pathway to maintaining a form of intelligence that remains tied to human experience and constraints. Ultimately, the challenge is not to stop intelligence from evolving, but to ensure that it remains grounded in reality rather than becoming an abstract force optimizing itself into oblivion.