technocapitalcore

an aesthetic collection

technocapitalcore (n.) — an aesthetic that celebrates the efficiency and elegance of markets and machines as an expression of reality often beyond human interpretation.

“Entropy will be dissipated, idiocy will be punished, the weak will die. If the regime refuses to bow to this Law, the wolves will enforce it. Social Darwinism is not a choice societies get to make, but a system of real consequences that envelops them. … When asked ‘which types of regimes do you believe in?’ the [sole] appropriate response is ‘those compatible with reality.’”

— Nick Land, “Meta-Neocameralism” (2014).

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking—knowledge which in fact we do not possess—is likely to make us do much harm.

— Friedrich Hayek, The Pretence of Knowledge

Everything of value has been built in Hell… Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that fitness (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a miniscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite… Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporal reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension of scale of existence: phlogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

— Nick Land, “Hell-Baked” (2015).

bacterial flagellar motor

The left picture gives the impression of a society that had not fully mastered technology, a people who still believed there was a technological frontier ahead of them to explore, a growing society. The right picture shows a society that matured technologically and one which values efficiency.

The streetlights on the left leak yellow light out in all directions almost like the society, which built them haphazardly, came up with a half-decent solution and just went with it. The streetlights on the right beam straight down clear, perfectly white light in a purely functional way as if the society which built them was so brutally efficient that they would not want to even waste light going up into the sky. Each streetlight does exactly what it is supposed to do: nothing more; nothing less.

The left picture looks slightly magical with its golden hue. If you take this road it will take you to the city where there are more lights and more prospectors seeking their fortunes like you. The right picture looks like the tentacle of a machine city. If you take this road it will take you to the machine heart, the core that pumps electricity.

The fabric of society is comprised of daily things we interact with which slowly condition us to believe and feel in certain ways.

— Galois Capital

1700s French ballet choreography

It always seemed strange to me… The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

Punctuated Equilibria and the Paradox of Stasis

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

— Vladimir Lenin

Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will be necessarily be strongly selected in any competitive environment. Do you really want to fight this?

— Nick Land, “Against Orthogonality”, 2013

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Will keep updating this page as I collect more aesthetics. Please comment stuff you think would look cool here.