The Language of Gods and Demons
AI conjures up fantasies of immortality, the universality of computation, and an apocalyptic teleology of accelerationism.
by Olivier Jutel
One of the most difficult tasks in writing and critical thought is being honest with yourself and the reader about the ethical commitments of your work. This is not merely about scholarship or sincerity, but the idea that there is a truth value and praxis that comes from writing. It sounds self-aggrandizing to say this under the tyranny of “content” and self-publishing. Our moment is characterized by a profound despair that writing or journalism may in fact have no relation to political change. What remains of public intellectual life is often farcical. Malcolm’s Gladwell’s recent admission that his ideas are to be taken “loosely” speaks to the mercurial approach to writing and thought that is both endemic and rewarded. The logic of exchange value that structures digital networks governs the valorization of thought. This is reified into a new age of self-help, in which optimization, manifestation, and abundance are the watchwords of grindset influencers, wellness gurus,and timeshift Witch-Tokers. Generative AI has arrived in this cultural moment as a personal optimization machine for language, thought, and brute instrumentality in social relations.
AI, Language, and Lack
In my work as a digital communications and platform studies scholar, I spend a lot of time critiquing the failures of AI and the fatuous claims of technology evangelists. I hold to an essential materialist logic that language is rooted in social and political contexts, and that the value of language, in either human or computational form, lies in its potential for emancipation and enlightenment. The rupture of AI seems to pose some foundational spiritual questions about language that have been long sublimated. Lacan privileges language as an existential trauma—a system “[we have] been thrown into…caught up in its gears.”1 We can add to this the network infrastructure that abstracts and calculates us through sensors, data markets, and signals that are ubiquitous and imperceptible.
From this mess of alienation, AI conjures up fantasies of immortality, the universality of computation, and an apocalyptic teleology of accelerationism. This techno-accelerationist drive promises “the elimination of lack” and an “eradicat[ion] of the human swamp” of irrationality known as the unconscious.2 The pain of writing and thinking is replaced by our personal optimization assistants. If you are not hacking your professional practice through AI or using a crypto-trading bot, you are not going to secure your place aboard the Event Horizon.
Our current lack of an emancipatory telos or a social contract to stand athwart techno-experimentation in every social domain means the “cult of the technological sublime”3 accelerates. We are being remade through the fantasies of American tech capitalists. This current moment of AI represents a transformation in human thought and creativity, not out of any techno-transcendence, but a hollowing out of the public ethic. Neoliberal procurement policies have made governments the sponsor and plaything of tech-disruptors. The populist backlash against universities and the creative industries has given venture-capitalists and founders a popular base for their AI and tech triumphalism. It is a revanchist alliance between anti-intellectuals and myopic tech-founders hostile to creative processes they do not understand.
The late great critic of tech power, David Golumbia,4 described generative AI as a spectacle aimed at inducing despair, such that the computational worldview supplants human creativity. This despair is matched by the cynicism of arbitrage scams, labor theft, and rent-seeking in tech. The tech-elite have emerged as the influencers and pseudo-philosophers of this transformation, promising a reopening of the frontier and generational wealth to their followers. It brings into sharp relief the relationship of information technologies and language to the religious fantasies of American Empire.
The AI Frontier Fantasy
The AI fantasy we are forced to endure is indelibly shaped by a techno-capitalist infatuation with new worlds and frontiers. There is a retracing of colonial fantasies of abundance that both secularize religious concepts and naturalize extraction. The new world is one where imperialist classification, cartography, and communication technologies take on a godly character. Language’s power of abstraction becomes part of experiencing and encoding the divine.
A scene in the film Black Robe (1991) neatly captures this. Set in colonial French Canada in the 17th century, a Jesuit priest seeks to convince the Huron nation of God’s power. He transcribes a secret told to him by his indigenous host and passes a note to his French compatriot to read, having no foreknowledge of its contents. The band of Huron are awestruck, while their shaman remarks that the priest is a demon. This obliteration of language from nature and a sacred lifeworld has been a spectacle of the divine and supernatural with each technological age. Alex Morse’s first telegraph message—“what hath God wrought?”—bears a foreboding of communication and apocalypse. Roko’s Basilisk and other demons have always been stalking our techno-fantasies.
In their all-encompassing global coverage, communication networks and information technologies are ascribed the power of religious revelation, albeit in secularized terms. The historian of communication and imperialism, Armand Mattelart, has documented the relationship between information networks, empire, and the divine. The struggle to control information and, as such, extract value for centers of capital is masked as connection and the ability to achieve a universal truth through communicative technologies.5 And so whether through the internet, blockchain, or AI, salvation and apocalypse beckon.
In the current conjuncture our systems of language and encoding surpass the bounds of communicative actor and recipient, extending rather to a broader cosmic totality. The venture capitalists and founders that see this promised land pursue it with a possessive lust. As the founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue Stewart Brand put it, these men “are as Gods” able to chart the future.6
The fusing of techno-revelation, popular sci-fi, and miraculous acts of value creation indicate the syncretic religious character of American tech-capitalists. The techno-frontier has been a matter of manifest destiny whether in literal or secular terms. The historian of California and new religions, Erik Davis, understands this fusion of religion, technology and capitalism as a form of tech-Gnosticism. Individual revelation, transcendence, and ecstasy are made possible by the fusion of technology and the frontier. The ability of crypto and AI to generate sublime fantasies of value makes capitalist fetishism a central tenet of this individuated tech-Gnosticism.
The AI frontier is a prospector’s dream. As in Jorge Luis Borges’ short allegory, “On Exactitude in Science,” there is a new imperial cartography that smothers reality with its data referent. The creation of such a map offers would-be conquistadores a means to see this totality and seize territory. In Borges’ version, subjects of empire live in the ruins of this folly, while we are forced to fuel the data centers that transform our labor and accelerate us towards AI revelation.
Jean Baudrillard took up the Borgesian map as a metaphor for his theory in Simulacra and Simulation. Even in its more modest cybernetic form, he saw this as governing and replacing reality with the ecstatic and religious aspects of the hyperreal. The spectacular intellectual theft and deceptions of someone like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman represents a desire to control the map and “make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.”7 Questions of language and creativity are in service of this sacred computation or Artificial General Intelligence that will unlock the mysteries of existence while ensconcing the new robber barons. Whether settling the stars, promising immortality, or settling new nations based on blockchain, they are connected to this map and promise the abundance of the frontier.
The salience of this fantasy and techno-fetishism owes to an American synthesis of the frontier, techno-imperialism, and the religious sublime. The fact that the Internet and computation have been the means of American cultural and economic hegemony produces its own Calvinist predestination. The breadth of human online experience that produces the AI frontier is a recursive lexicon of American cultural dominance. It is for this reason that techno-feudalist critic, Evgeny Morozov, warns of the totalizing effects of the American culture war through AI.8 Outside the imperial core, junior partners like Aotearoa/New Zealand open themselves to experimentation in the hopes of receiving some of the emperor’s gold dust.
Perverted Information Machines
The computational metaphor has been at the heart of this cultural power. If the human intellect is simply information stored on the computational brain, then superior intelligence is possible in silicon. It follows that all matters can be divined by computation as the language of the gods.
This tech-Gnosticism and AI-religiosity is no longer a fringe phenomenon. The popular podcaster Lex Fridman regularly stages the speculative musings of this creed.9 As a devotee, he has proclaimed that, “Earth is a computer built to evolve increasingly intelligent neural networks.” In this way we can abstract ourselves from culture and the social world and focus on self-optimization as a form of gnosis. Elon Musk has characterized his galactic mission as driven by his on-board computer. He described his Twitter takeover as “my biological neural nets conclud[ing] that if Twitter was not bought and steered in a good direction, that it would be a danger for the future of civilization.” His right-wing shitposting about the woke mind virus similarly abstracts the social into a question of faulty programming and the need to “change the program someone else put in your mind.” This is the mastery fantasy of brute instrumentalization of information. There is a desire to be in control and control others at a distance. All the interpersonal anxiety that is the stuff of language and communication can be mastered in this fantasy of a computational totality.
Returning to Lacan and the alienating effects of language, the AI fantasy captures the libidinal desire for pre-Oedipal wholeness. This transcendence via network computing, rocketry, and the galaxy was accompanied by the irresistibility of nuclear apocalypse. This remains the framework for AI Doomers in conceptualizing the gods and demons of the singularity. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow brought these realms of science, the occult, and perversion together with Tyrone Slothrop, the avatar of imperial libidinal drive. He is a partial object whose pulsating member aligns to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and a lust for information supplanting all other vices. Slothrop’s Russian interlocutor tells him, “It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.”10 Slothrop’s emptiness and sexual perversions—conditions of the Lacanian lack—are what help him usher in the future of information machines.11
Our tech-philosophers evince a similar emptiness. Sam Altman’s self-identification as a stochastic parrot and Elon Musk’s feigning of neural-net determinism are perverse forms of over-identification with the computational fantasy. Attuning one’s on-board computer to the Borgesian AI map is a spiritual ascent. There is a privileging of the divine language of computation over the fallen and corrupt mortal body. The AI salesman, and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Marvin Minsky is instructive here. His hatred of the “meat machine” and “bloody mess of organic matter”12 that constitutes the body represents his own desire for the immortal mind through a mechanical alignment with information processing systems. A symbiosis with computers is a return to a pre-Oedipal singularity; a state of digital omniscience that is at once mother and frontier.
Venture Capitalists, Founders, and Clout
The status of writing, thought, and critique are severely impoverished under the rubric of optimization. Information is transferred and instructions executed. The relationship to knowledge that comes from cultural situatedness is flattened through acquisition, automation, and exploitation.
Consider the case of crypto wunderkind, Vitalik Buterin. Buterin is the former Peter Thiel fellow who created the Ethereum blockchain upon which NFTs, Distributed Autonomous Organizations, and virtual nations are being built.13 Web3 enthusiasts view his creation as the fount of immutable truth and new universal governance principles that will replace the state.14 He is an author of crypto white papers, manifestos, and a book on “the philosophy of blockchains” with little to no philosophy in it. Buterin is not unique among the tech-elite for his disinterest in the scholarly and social fields that his tech will supposedly revolutionize. In an instructive exchange on the epistemology of our new tech philosophers, Buterin has questioned whether “reading long-form books is virtuous or even necessary” when podcasts exist. His fellow crypto philosopher and author Alex Gladstein offers that, “you can buy and download and immediately skim / highlight read an obscure 200-300 page book these days (Amazon etc) and get a lot out of it in an hour or two … for deep research nothing beats books.”
Of late, Buterin has been working on a blockchain network state dedicated to life extension named “Zuzalu.” The fantasy of creating new frontiers, states, and the eternal self through the alchemy of crypto fits with Brand’s proclamation that the tech-elite are as gods. And yet for all their talents in programming, creative invention resides in computation. The name Zuzalu was chosen following a ChatGPT prompt. Whether it is <CMD F> or prompt “engineering,” the simulacra of thought and research is preferable to the frictions of human-centered creation.
This myopia, shallowness, and faith in the truth value of social networks has given rise to our current batch of techno-philosophers. It is what Jodi Dean describes as the triumph of exchange over use value in the hyper-accelerated circulation of information in contemporary capitalism.15 The ability of networks to yield value from the most ephemeral and social forms of fictitious capital has become the truth of networks. There is no higher value than the instrumentalist logic of leveraging connection for coins, clout, and arbitrage scams.
The ability to turn social networks and clout into digital gold popularizes the fantasies of tech-capitalists. Founders and funders now feature prominently as thought leaders and influencers. In the past year, venture capitalist and a16z co-founder, Marc Andreessen, has appeared on the podcasts of Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Bari Weiss, and Chris Williamson, among others. All this, in addition to hosting his own podcast alongside Ben Horowitz of a16z. Andreessen and Trump-supporting contemporaries like David Sachs and Balaji Srinivasan are following in Thiel’s footsteps of cultivating an intellectual iconoclasm. Thiel is of course notorious for proclaiming the end of death, a future of free floating cities in the Pacific, and claiming that the female franchise was a mistake.16
These “philosophers” engage in vanity publishing collections of their own tweets and pithy tech-maxims. Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto promises us a “hero’s journey” to become “technological supermen… mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.”17 At the more vulgar end of this spectrum is angel investor Gary Vee championing a hustle culture for the reserve army of temporarily embarrassed tech-capitalists. Web3, crypto, or AI might function as your technology homestead on the frontier, so long as you hone your personal technology stack with the help of these “philosophers.”
The cult of the founder-intellectual casts thought and writing as a hybrid of programming, contrarianism, and the realization of exchange value. Sam Altman recently appeared on the entrepreneur podcast, “How I Write.” Altman presented himself as driven toward a clarity and density of thought. He marveled alongside the host at Peter Thiel as “a truly brilliant original thinker.”18 What sticks with Altman about Thiel is his regret over not investing in Facebook’s series B-round of funding, thus missing out on further billions. The lesson for Altman and his host is that “ideas are a power law” and “when you find a good idea you should quadruple down on it…and it should be the only thing you push on…in writing and business.” This form of idealism construes writing as an instrument towards wealth and the creator-as-atomized individual, alone in the world. It represents a notion of self that has been reconfigured in the image of technology and venture capital.
NRx Alchemy
Within this frontier credo, thought and writing have become means of understanding what the godfather of accelerationism, Nick Land, calls the universal techno-capital machine. Social relations between people take the appearances of dashboards, interfaces, and candlestick charts. The capitalist fetish of value-creating machines has become popularized through the general theft of intellectual labor that LLMs “democratize.” This generalized poverty of thought and writing is held up as a civilizational teleology by the Dark Enlightenment (NRx) intellectual movement dominant among tech-philosophers in the “TESCREAL Bundle.”19 Thought becomes tautologically geared towards the injunctions of the techno-capital machine.
Internet philosopher @BeffJezos, of the e/acc (effective accelerationist) strain of NRx, speaks of a cybernetic loop between technology and capital that is its own self-optimizing form of intelligence.20 This civilizational progress can be measured in aggregate through the brute energy consumption of graphics cards. As Andreessen puts it, they “are making sand think,”21 through silicon AI chips, to “further decode the laws of nature and harvest them for our benefit.”22 Jezos makes axiomatic claims about thermodynamics and the Kardashev scale to proclaim a “techno-capitalist singularity” as “the will of the universe.”23 This gold fever and frontier madness posits its horizons as all the energy in the universe.
Belief in the techno-capital machine is in Land’s terms a “hyperstitious” faith.24 Simply put, Land views the Baudrillardian hyperreal as an engine of capital that can be harnessed by the dark priests of the NRx. Alongside Thiel’s favorite blogger, Curtis Yarvin, there is a privileging of venture capitalists’ and founders’ ability to “bring about their own reality.”25 The religious claims of an emerging Artificial General Intelligence is its own form of godly power. It drives up valuations and aligns human labor and material resources toward this new transcendent reality, irrespective of this technology’s actual properties. Yarvin is his own exemplar of hyperstitious self-discipline. He spent a decade aligning his own “computationalist ontology”26 to building Urbit—a new Internet based on NRx principles—from scratch.
The more unrestrained this intellectual vanguard becomes in its pursuit of the frontier through a divine map of AI and programming, the more pronounced its laziness and anti-intellectualism becomes. Elon Musk’s wretched posting style evinces the power of the technological sublime, the mobilization of networks, and a memetic magic that connects his followers to a sense of network power. All the emptiness of this thought is filled with the fetishistic investment in “number go up,” rocketry, and the fantasy of the cosmos. The logic of fetishist disavowal is at work; his followers know very well that Dogecoin is a shitcoin, but nevertheless, “To the Moon!”
This triumph of an information commodity fetishism and frontier dreams has made ruins of our public communication infrastructure. Language and thought are merely a journey to “a self so big that no other selves would be necessary, of a kind of possession of resources that could and would eclipse that of any other entity.”27 Whatever bounded use case there may be for generative AI, the computational and market ontology championed by Altman, Musk, and Andreessen is an attack on language as a means of emancipation.
Notes
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 307.
Jeffrey Sconce, The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 296.
Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Harmony Books, 1998), 128.
David Golumbia, “ChatGPT Should Not Exist,” Medium, December 15, 2022, https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace.
Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794–2000, trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht and James A. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Malcolm Harris has written of Brand that he is “one of the great hucksters in a time and place full of them … a man of meager talents and … an exceptionally bad personality,” in “The Zen Playboy,” The Nation, June 13, 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/stewart-brand-whole-earth/.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, trans. Shelia Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2.
Evgeny Morozov, “AI: the key battleground for Cold War 2.0?,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2023, https://mondediplo.com/2023/05/02china.
Known as Elon Musk’s favourite podcaster, upon the date of publication he ranks 24th on the Spotify charts alongside Oprah and well ahead of Jordan Peterson.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 262.
The obscenity of this informational warfare drive is manifest in the Israeli state’s use of “The Gospel” AI system. The irresistibility of AI-assisted genocide becomes its own teleological explanation of the genocide.
David Noble, The Religion of Technology (New York: Knopf, 1997), 167.
Peter Thiel is at the fulcrum of tech-capitalism and dark enlightenment philosophy. The co-founder of Paypal and Palantir, as well the creator of venture capital firm Founders Fund, his investment strategies and prognostications are followed closely. Central to this is his belief in monopoly and his principle never to invest in a start-up that does not have the potential to realize the entirety of his fund in profits. This is responsible for the convergence of tech-hype and religiosity in start-up culture. Thiel is also a fervent culture warrior. His Thiel fellowship is part of a “revenge of the tech nerds” crusade against “the woke academy.” Thiel imagines the start-up incubator as a replacement for the university, where the metric of success is strictly in terms of valuations and venture capital exit. In addition to the fellowship, he is a benefactor of eccentrics and cranks including the notorious dark enlightenment blogger Curtis Yarvin.
Buterin and other blockchain enthusiasts have taken to calling Ethereum “The World Computer.” The storing of information and contracts on a blockchain ledger is hailed as the basis for all future governance.
Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian”, Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/.
Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andreessen Horowitz, October 16, 2023, https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/.
Whatever his acumen as an investor, Peter Thiel is no Louis-Ferdinand Celine. He is a dorm room libertarian, crossed with some Tolkien and Heinlein, who hasn’t gotten over college. He also consistently backs some of the most risible figures in tech-thought, from Patri Friedmann to Dryden Brown. The fawning over Thiel is more a function of his considerable power and influence.
Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence,” First Monday 29, no. 4 (2024): 1–42.
Beff Jezos and Bayeslord, “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets,” Beff’s Newsletter, July 10, 2022.
Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
Marc Andreessen, “Why AI Will Save the World,” Andreessen Horowitz, June 6, 2023, https://a16z.com/ai-will-save-the-world/.
Jezos and Bayeslord, “Notes on e/acc.”
Harrison Smith and Roger Burrows, “Software, sovereignty and the post-neoliberal politics of exit,” Theory, Culture and Society38, no. 2 (2022): 143–166.
Smith and Burrows, “Software, sovereignty,” 152.
Ibid., 148.
David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 184.