Note: The following content is the opinion of PunishedFelix and is not a statement of fact. Citations are provided below.

We live in unprecedented times. Human creative production on our social networks is being systematically replaced by the production of AI at alarming rates, largely fueled by an intersection of bizarre Silicon Valley cults centered around using their immense accumulated power to “change” the world - based on vague principles of “Effective Altruism” or even in some cases, “Accelerationism” and “Dark Enlightenment”, rendering the internet a sterile and hostile place of fascist propaganda. JD Vance gleefully integrates the work of Curtis “Moldbug” Yarvin into his public policy, throwing the country into chaos and inflicting millions with indiscriminate fear for their stability, lives and futures. Billionaires in tech, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are at its helm, influencing the modern tech industry to move in its direction. However, upon closer inspection, you’ll find when researching these things that they have flimsy philosophical basis, and rely on unethical tactics to proliferate, unable to spread in more conventional channels. It seems bizarre that people who are supposedly so well educated on language that they can automate it with a machine seem to have no tangible understanding of how the real world of creative production works, although it makes sense considering how much their immense capital shields them from having to ground themselves in reality. But how did this happen? How could a movement that supposedly emerged from people who were educated in science and technology lead to something that is actively dismantling human knowledge as we speak?

Effective Altruists Dingbats and the Dork Enlightenment - The New Postmodernism

As the gas from the Dotcom era’s boom of attempting to produce value from between language and codes is finally tapering out, the US government, voted in by an unconscious mass of fascist reactionaries who cannot agree on anything, has been infiltrated with dark accelerationist AI large-language model effective altruist bros trying to desperately force their technologies into government and commercial infrastructure as a last ditch effort to have any return on investment of their parasitic attempt to extract any surplus value they can through their intentional rug pull of the United States and its economy. Despite their best efforts, large language models cannot replace material economics without acting as a means to deterritorialize and obscure the actual material nature of this new politics - and ultimately deterritorializing our relationship to critical infrastructure, such as healthcare and the economy. In other words - using large language models, acting as floating chains of signifiers, to replace the language produced by humans, only creates political and social relations that are meaningless to our material lives, and enslaving us to larger apparatuses of power. It automates nothing but misery. But why is that the case?

Many of these idiots love to cite Deleuze in their arguments for why such a complete deterritorialization is necessary, despite the numerous times that he and Guattari argued against this kind of deterritorialization, and apparently completely unaware of how Deleuze and Guattari’s work completely undermines the models of their project:

“Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is it by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others’, their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominant significations all at the same time? The organization of the face is a strong one.”¹

“But the second element is still present in this process: the risk of collapse. No one should treat lightly the risk that the “breakthrough, “ the breaking apart, may coincide with or degenerate into a kind of collapse. We need to consider this danger as fundamental. The two elements are connected.”²

Essentially, what the duo advocated for was not a complete destruction of meanings, but the realization that meanings are not essential and can be modified. They should not be dismantled entirely, but carefully migrated towards new structures - similar to migrating a server’s files to a new infrastructure.

This is likely derived from a common misconception of Deleuze and Guattari as they talk about schizophrenia and its relation to capitalism. Many people assume that what they mean by Capitalism and Schizophrenia is that people should become schizophrenic, which both Deleuze and Guattari also criticized extensively throughout their careers:

Critics were then quick to tell us: “Ah great, so you argue that schizophrenics are revolutionaries.” We have never said that! Schizophrenics are poor, unfortunate people who are imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. What we did say is that there exists a schizo process that one can find sometimes in schizophrenia, sometimes in childhood, sometimes in invention, and sometimes everywhere. That’s it. But this expression has generated so much misunderstanding that I think it’s better right now to just forget it.³

This may be a consequence of most of these people receiving their knowledge of philosophy through vague blog posts, that cannot even explain in three thousand words what they even mean by why their variation of accelerationism is not merely a complete submission of capitalism’s crushing forces, similar to how Guattari describes postmodernists in Schizoanalytic Cartographies:

But where, for that matter, do they get the idea from that the socius can thus be reduced to the facts of language, and these latter in turn to binarisable, ‘digitisable’ signifying chains? On this point the postmoderns have hardly innovated! They are directly inscribed in the very modernist tradition of structuralism, whose influence on the human sciences it seems must have been relayed, in the worst conditions, by Anglo-Saxon systemism. The secret link between all these doctrines, it seems to me, derives from their having been marked by the reductionist ideas conveyed in the immediate post-war period by information theory and the first cybernetic research. The references that they continued trying to extract from the new communication and information technologies were so hasty, so badly mastered, that they projected us way back behind the phenomenological research that had preceded them.⁴

We could rephrase it for modern times - “in this manner, the accelerationists have hardly innovated!”. And nothing can ring any more true! Truly incredible that people repeating the same bullshit like this are attracted like a moth to a flame because they simply refuse to actually read anything beyond their reactionary call-cards. Perhaps what is even more humorous, but also depressing, is how little these people are willing to engage with Guattari, due to preconceived notions spread by these blog posters who refuse to research anything philosophical beyond a surface level that appeals to their libertarian idealism and bottomless greed. Perhaps they are too busy accelerating to take the time to read him properly. But what could have possibly lead to these people who don’t engage with philosophy to be inspired by these blog posts referencing such complicated philosophical works? Especially considering that STEM had ejected the so-called “postmodernist” writers over 25 years ago thanks to the Sokal Affair?

A Little History

So, what would motivate a bunch of computer programmers who seem to have no real interest in philosophy outside of what they can extract from reactionary racist blog posts and edgy cyber fantasy essays from the 1990s? It helps to explore this perspective historically, since this transition is what produced the conditions that are existing today.

If you were born starting in the 1990s, and reach university level STEM, you likely will find that your peers, and perhaps even yourself, has no value in philosophy. But this was not always the case. In fact, figures like Heisenberg, Einstein, Schrödinger and Bohr all discussed philosophy very seriously and integrated it into their work.⁵ However, much significantly changed between the 1930s and the 1970s in this regard, in response to the changes evoked by the Cold War. As previously mentioned in my essay about the development of atheist skepticism, the development of science among the general population was shaped heavily by the need to control engineering production. In the late 1950’s, the US government invested heavily in science education⁶ in response to the successful launch of Sputnik by the Soviets. While the US was armed with their own scientists and those absorbed from the Nazis through moves like Operation Overcast and Operation Paperclip in an attempt to initially disband Japanese forces and later contribute towards the technological advancement against the Soviets⁷, the US needed to manufacture a technological pipeline to produce as many engineers as possible to arm the US’s war machine against its communist foes.

Meanwhile, the philosophies of these new brand of scientists was being shaped by anti-communist forces, sneaking their way into the discussion. For example, in the 1970s, thanks to the work of Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson, there was a revival of interest in Secular Humanism, a movement attempting to ground an ethics without a specific religious basis. This movement was parallel to science-skepticism movements such as CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), later known as the CSI (Center for Skeptical Inquiry) a skeptic organization founded in the 1970s by characters including B.F. Skinner, Carl Sagan, James Randi and Isaac Asimov - all who worked together to produce the surface of a new media relationship between consumers and science, in response to both fundamentalist Christian attacks on education as well as the mass production of “new age” cures, claims of paranormal activity and fake medicines (I again recommend you check out my history of Atheist Skepticism for more information). However, there was a significant ideological transition in this revival, because the original Secular Humanist Manifesto from the 1930’s was strictly anti-capitalist:

The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.⁸

This likely reflects the rapidly growing interest in socialist movements as a reaction to the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930’s that were suppressed by both FDR’s assimilation of core ideals into capitalist frameworks in the New Deal, such as banking reforms, subsidies to various industries, government work projects and social security, and later snuffed out by reactions to the growing power of the USSR in the 1940’s⁹, ultimately leading to the passing of the Taft-Harley act in 1947, leading to the illegalization of powerful labor tactics such as wildcat strikes and organizing across employers, thereby illegalizing the possibility of national general strikes¹⁰. In comparison, the Humanist Manifesto II produced ultimately by Kurtz and Wilson does not call out Capitalism itself, for example in this quotation here:

Purely economic and political viewpoints, whether capitalist or communist, often function as religious and ideological dogma. Although humans undoubtedly need economic and political goals, they also need creative values by which to live.¹¹

More concerningly, the manifesto reflects attitudes moving towards globalization, internationalist control and “liberal peace politics”, as shown from the following excerpts:

The problems of economic growth and development can no longer be resolved by one nation alone; they are worldwide in scope. It is the moral obligation of the developed nations to provide – through an international authority that safeguards human rights – massive technical, agricultural, medical, and economic assistance, including birth control techniques, to the developing portions of the globe.¹¹

This world community must renounce the resort to violence and force as a method of solving international disputes. We believe in the peaceful adjudication of differences by international courts and by the development of the arts of negotiation and compromise. War is obsolete. So is the use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. It is a planetary imperative to reduce the level of military expenditures and turn these savings to peaceful and people-oriented uses.¹¹

Thus, the secular humanist movement both crystallizes continued antilabor and anti-leftist sentiment within science education in the United States, and also produces social interactions to further reinforce these relationships - without even explicitly having to be anti-capitalist in their messaging, by simply not being socialist. This movement, being the ideological grounding for future skepticism, would continue to shape the relationship between the suppression of leftist thought within the sciences, but it would not be until the development of the career of a particular evolutionary biologist and his questionable ethical influence that would lead to the process of repressing socialist desire through authoritarian narratives of science, imposed to protect consumers from snake oil salesmen.

The Reign of Anti-Philosophical Biology

In the 1970s, at the same time that secularism was being popularized to challenge reactionary Christian essentialists that threatened the production of a workforce of engineers to fight against international communist powers, vast developments were occurring in the field of evolutionary biology. A decade prior, group theory of evolution, which suggested that individuals evolve within a species for the improved fitness for its entire population, was growing in popularity. However, the scientist Richard Dawkins greatly disagreed with this. He instead believed that evolution almost exclusively occurred on the layer of not just the individual, but specifically the proliferation of certain genes. Born in 1942 as a settler colonizer in Kenya, he wrote the breakout hit The Selfish Gene in response to this development in the field.

In some sense, Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene is revolutionary, because it draws the discussion of evolution into its most molecular, tiny components¹². Unlike his predecessors, he presents a model for exploring evolution in a way that can intersect chemistry through providing a critical link between molecular genes and molar phenotypes, or the physical presentation of genetic traits in an organism, through a new model of evolution, fixated on the smallest components, concerned about self-survival (hence “selfish”). However, in the process, he gets swept away in confusing ontologies that are problematic when applied to other fields, especially those within sociology and economics, limiting their true potential to apply in a larger materialist analysis.

Most confusingly is when in Chapters 1 and 11 he tries to engage with philosophical principles. Dawkins seems to be dismissive of the humanities - Dawkins makes it clear that he does not believe the humanities respect evolution, by implying that “Those who choose to study it [Zoology] often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance. Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.”¹³ - which reflects more about his ignorance about the state of humanities at the time and lack of review from other fields, than it does the actual state of the discussion. Similar to how evolutionary biology does not primarily focus on the subject of literature, but may reference it occasionally in its research, the humanities as well are not as fixated on Charles Darwin as a field literally dependent on his theories. He uses this as a means to excuse himself from engaging with the humanities in any relevant capacity, instead espousing his own personal, uneducated beliefs.

Two of the main philosophical questions raised in response to The Selfish Gene is “if genes are selfish, what 1) produces altruistic and social behavior in organisms, and 2) how does this not lead to runaway selfishness in society?” The first question is not too difficult or confusing for Dawkins to answer - altruistic behavior arises because of the molar aggregates produced by molecular selfish genes. The second question is really where he introduces many problems into his ontologies - to separate human societies from genes, he produces a Cartesian dualism that separates man from nature on no other basis other than to support the language he uses to describe his model. This is what leads to the production of the idea of “memes” - an idea that he claims he created but is borrowed from other authors - that are like genes that exist within the social ecology.¹⁴ This development marks one of the earliest and most important indicators of a separation of science between signs and materialism, as to Dawkins, the materialist biology is one grounded in genes, while the signifying social behavior is grounded in sociology, and the two do not apparently intersect - abstract meme-signs do not directly impact evolution and everything biological still is reducible to the selfish gene. This problem arises from Dawkins’ insistence on using the term “selfish” to describe the relationship between continued existence and evolution, almost unintentionally giving an anthropomorphic essence to evolution - one of his greatest failures in science communication.

Another problematic aspect in his theory was the idea that all evolution is focused on the molecular and all molar aggregate production such as phenotypes and behavior are not the plane where evolutionary processes occur - forcing evolution to be focused solely on the subject of the molecular. Dawkins believes that the presentation of phenotypes is always a consequence of the “desire” of genes to proliferate themselves, as opposed to more abstract planes. This view was challenged by his main professional rival, Stephen Jay Gould, who, while acknowledging the importance of genes, believed that evolution was more driven by phenotypical selection. Gould, inspired by politicizing evolutionary biology in leftist struggle in the United States, especially minority movements emerging from the suppression of socialist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, believed there was no barrier between biology and politics - to the point of publishing works like The Mismeasure of Man, using sociology to criticize racist evolutionary biologists claiming that lower IQ scores in black populations was genetic. While Gould was alive, the camps of thought produced by the two men competed aggressively in the scientific space. However, Dawkins had one edge over Gould - he was a media manipulator mastermind, a history that I go into extensive detail in my essay The Happy Virus. A summary of that essay - Richard Dawkins exploited mass media to initially try to tackle the issues raised by groups like the CSICOP, such as fake medical cures and religious fundamentalism, which he believed were “outlaw memes”, that had the potential to disrupt the hegemony of the greatness of western society. Later, he would expand his targets to political targets such as feminism and postmodernism, attacking their critiques of the social power structures of science, and attempting to dismiss any threat to his voice of authority. But why would he care about sociological politics if he was supposedly a man who believed that the world of the social and the biological are indeed separate?

Questions in Linguistics

As it turns out, Dawkins was not alone in his aggression against these philosophical developments. Noam Chomsky, who may potentially be nominated as the worst academic leftist of all time with a reputation of defending multiple genocides and neo-nazi historians, also had some bones to pick with other groups of leftists. While I am hardly an expert in Chomskian linguistics, I want to give a basic overview of the academic discussion surrounding his work. One of Chomsky’s largest academic projects was trying to produce something called Universal Grammar - the idea that human language in some way can be reduced to evolutionary biological processes that are common among all humans. He believed that it was impossible for humans to learn all the grammar of language with just environmental interactions, which he concluded meant that some kind of biologically innate feature of humans allows for language acquisition. Additionally he believed in his initial formulations of linguistics that human language can be described through mathematical models, and thus human language was inherently computational. Because of this mathematical nature, Chomsky’s work is essential in computer linguistics and ultimately large language models. However, despite being still a major figure within computational linguistics, his project has been met with significant criticism.

For example, even in its earliest days, Chomskian linguistics was criticized for being overly focused on popular European languages like English, French or Spanish - it failed to explain the complex grammars of languages such as Warlpiri, Basque and Urdu. This wave of critique prompted Chomskians to move towards a model more deterritorialized, where instead of having direct grammatical operators, there were vague universal “principles” that lead to the production of more diverse grammars. Despite this development, many languages were still not adequately explained through this new conceptualization. Failing again, Chomsky and his allies produced yet another model to try to explain these interactions - a purely computational model where the only singular universal principle is that of computational recursion. Despite this development, critics were still able to find languages that acted as counter examples to his universalist, bioessentialist model, such as the language of Amazonian Pirahã. In addition, Chomsky’s idea that language acquisition is caused by essential grammatical particles instinctively embedded in human brains is opposed by research developments in childhood language acquisition, which suggests that language is actually developed by the accumulation of small grammatical particles that assemble larger intuition and understanding over time.¹⁵

Perhaps the most politically relevant of Chomsky’s critics though were by the French. One of Chomsky’s earliest encounters was in the famous televised debate between him and French historian and philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault in the early 1970s. Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar did not only imply that language acquisition was genetically encoded and essential to human development, but it also implies, by extension, that “human nature” is a real, tangible and biological subject. Foucault, however, was opposed to this approach based on his research into the histories of Marxism, sexuality and madness. Instead of believing in human nature, Foucault argued that human nature was a product of bourgeoisie society, where all of the constructs associated with it were what shaped what people believed human nature actually is, and so we should challenge the institutions that produce those ideas. The airing may have only been an hour long, but Chomsky’s disagreement with the French and their influence from Foucault would only grow, eventually developing into a ravenous hatred for the so-called “postmodernists”.

See, a lot of people think that the French movement was “postmodernists” demonstrating that language was meaningless, but this is far from the case. Postmodernism was actually the consequence of a subset of these semioticians, or people who study signs and signifiers, reaching a particular conclusion about potentially infinitely self-referential signs. In addition, many semioticians who were not involved in this process, such as Guattari and Kristeva, were unfairly grouped into this label due to political relations I will discuss later. Rather, French semioticians were critical of fundamental relations in language and meaning and were interested in exploring new models of language that were less restrictive. These theorists, unlike linguists in the anglosphere, were more interested in literature and media analysis, and analyzing how meanings are produced from words, as opposed to scientific research of childhood language acquisition - however, their critiques converge on the same premise that Universal Grammar is a model that oversimplifies the structures of language. In the book Lines of Flight, For Another World of Possibilities, which focuses extensively on a critique of Chomskian linguistics, Félix Guattari says the following:

“Chomskian linguistics wanted straight away to distinguish itself from structural linguistics, which it reproached for not taking into account the creative characteristic of language. In its first version, it considered that the phonological machine could only intervene in the final formulation of utterances, at a so-called surface level. On the basis of a syntactic deep structure, its first linguistic model was supposed to generate and transform utterances without losing any nuance, any semantic ambiguity. But along the way the ‘semantic question’ has only deepened the mystery of the operations that are supposed to be accomplished at the ‘deep’ level.”¹⁶

However, French critics had a major academic weakness in comparison to the critiques presented by Chomsky’s more direct contemporaries - their work was based on literary analysis and psychoanalysis, not necessarily on scientific research. These critics may sometimes reference scientific developments and research as part of their critique, but did not participate in direct research, and their primary analysis was one of the texts. This would allow Chomsky to leverage his popularity within certain circles as a linguist to try to suppress these opposing theories by insisting that these writers were “pseudoscientists”¹⁷ - something that was further developed by his French translator, Jean Bricmont.

Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist who has written multiple books about the nature of quantum mechanics and is most well known in English for working with Alan Sokal to dismiss postmodernism within science, but he is also very heavily invested in his own brand of leftist politics. Specifically, Bricmont has a deep love for the philosopher and socialist Bertrand Russell, whom Bricmont has dedicated an entire lifetime to advocating for his views and perspectives on socialism. Bricmont contrasts Russell’s socialism with that of Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Che Guevara, by insisting that it is a more liberal interpretation of socialism that engages more directly with scientific principles - a scientific socialism¹⁸.

However, Bricmont is a questionable character - Bricmont has been frequently accused of antisemitism. Now, many leftists are aware that the claim of antisemitism is often thrown around by Zionists to try to suppress Palestinian influence in leftist circles - however, this seems to go way beyond this. He has, for example, complained on Facebook about Jews talking about the Holocaust “every 5 minutes”. Along with Chomsky, he not only defended the historical revisionist works of Neo-Nazi historian Robert Faurisson on the grounds of free speech, you know, the guy who said the gas chambers didn’t exist, but apparently has such close ties with him that he has attended his birthday celebration¹⁹. He even wrote an extensive letter after the death of Faurisson about how much he was “oppressed” for his “free speech” in France²⁰.

In addition, he has been an aggressive advocate for “free speech”, such as challenging the Gayssot Act, a French law that makes it illegal to question the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime and regularly claims that holocaust denialists are being persecuted by society.²⁰ This draws the motivation of his “leftism” into serious question - why is this guy collaborating with neo nazis? To avoid these critiques, Bricmont and his friends take advantage of his influence in English speaking leftist circles and the language barrier between the anglosphere and the francosphere to cover his tracks, going as far as to smear French leftists for bringing up these concerns in leftist publications²¹. It’s actually incredible how much difference there is between French and English publications on this guy. I’m sorry Bricmont - what kind of “Free Speech” are you defending here? Maybe someone should let Sokal know - he is Jewish, after all.

With all this in mind, it’s easy to see how Bricmont was in direct opposition to the political movements surrounding May 1968 and other radical leftist developments in the Francosphere at the time, which was influenced by theorists like Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and others, and especially ideas that were challenging the authority of science and radical libertarian freedom of speech. It is impossible to ignore his attempt to dismantle the so-called “postmodern left” without noticing that most of the figures critiqued either contrasted with Chomskian linguistics, such as Lacan, or were opposed to Bricmont’s political ideologies. Instead, it is very apparent that Bricmont, seeing that Sokal was reacting to other texts challenging leftists in Universities such as the 1994 book “Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science” by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, saw it as an opportunity to suppress his opponents in a sphere unfamiliar with their work or political context. This is even more apparent when you notice that Chomsky was among the consultants referred to when writing Fashionable Nonsense²², the book Sokal and Bricmont published on the Sokal Affair’s “findings”. Thus, can be reasonably concluded that the Sokal Affair did not exist for any valid scientific or philosophical purpose, but rather an underhanded attempt to prevent those in the sciences from engaging with this particular set of leftist ideas. This book would soon be positively reviewed in the book review “Postmodernism Disrobed” by Richard Dawkins, who has been misattributed as having read the books criticized in the article directly (he was only repeating Sokal and Bricmont’s quotes from the book), leading to the idea within the popular consciousness that postmodernism is unscientific. With the tragic death of Gould in 2002, this allowed Dawkins to proliferate these ideas, along with a hatred of minority studies and feminism across scientific spaces - accumulating in the production of the New Atheist movement and the proliferation of scientists promoting ignorance of philosophy and history to the masses.

Proliferation of Toxic Philosophy Algae Blooms

Unbeknownst to the pair of the antisemitic clown and the Jewish sucker he took along for the ride, another movement was brewing at the same time that would radically rewrite the trajectory of French post-structuralist philosophy in the anglosphere.

According to Franco “Bifo” Berardi, a friend of Guattari’s in life, in the early 1980s, Guattari enthusiastically spoke to him and his other companions about a radical revolution occurring within the media space. While it is not clear exactly what is discussed from the text, Bifo seems to imply that Guattari was predicting a massive change in how we engage with media - a network of machines that connect people on molecular levels as opposed to being broadcast from a primary source. Guattari would call this fantastical development “post-media”, which seemed absurd to Bifo at the time, because of the proliferation of centralizing state televised media. However, Bifo would later comment that it seemed that Guattari predicted the internet²³.

I don’t agree with Bifo that the internet is actually a post-media machine - whatever such a thing might look like. It’s clear now that in 2025, the internet has been recaptured into a network of centralizing media nodes. However, the internet was a particularly exciting and interesting time for Deleuze scholars in English speaking circles because of its potential consequences with interacting with Deleuze and his theory. Deleuze scholars were buzzing around on university networks, being among some of the earliest adopters of this new World Wide Web. Not only did this machine allow for people to communicate across the whole world with each other, but it accelerated the rate of how developments could occur. Exploring themes of cybernetics, digitization and the consequences of this new era of machines, Deleuze studies would be met with one of its most exciting and intense developments it had ever seen in English at this time - the consequences of which would be significant. Unfortunately, Guattari would not be alive to see any of it.

Charles Stivale, a major Deleuze and Guattari scholar and French literary researcher of the time, chronicles in The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari the history of these developments. Here, he is interested in exploring the developments in a newly unfolding cyberspace. He clearly sees Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus reflecting itself in it, adapting the first few sentences of Anti-Oedipus for this new future:

It is transmitting everywhere, at times without letup, at other times discontinuously. It displaces, it heats up, it devours. It eliminates, it copulates. What a mistake to have ever masculinized this “it”; it is multiply engendered, and engendering. Everywhere it is machines, and not at all metaphorically: machines servicing machines, with their couplings and connections.²⁴

Everyone in this community of scholars was influenced, fascinated, and perhaps even intoxicated by the new potentials produced by this new distributed horizontal rhizomatic structure created by the newfound internet communications. “Virtual” reality intermixed with the “virtuality” of Deleuze and Guattari’s writings from the decades prior, apparently actualizing itself into the real world through the physical cables and network capacities. Nick Land, along with some his contemporaries at the University of Warwick, like Mark Fisher and Sadie Plant, came together to produce what I can only describe as an experimental performance art experience - the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) - which produced one of the most radical perspectives in the field at the time. There was only one problem. It was extremely reactionary and based on misreadings of Deleuze and Guattari.

A major thing to understand about the translation history surrounding Deleuze and Guattari is that at the time of Land’s initial writings, it is impossible to argue that he was taking Guattari’s independent work seriously. Even for French readers at the time, accessing Guattari’s solo works was very difficult, but those restricted to English had even more limited access - and there was seemingly no reason to engage with his work. Wouldn’t Deleuze do good enough?

His earliest book published in 1984 in English, Molecular Revolution, had a relatively small run and was targeting antipsychiatry movements, as is evident by its preface by David Cooper, and perhaps was the only major publication of Guattari’s work published in English in his lifetime²⁵. By the 1990s, only a few select works have been translated, and were considered strange and not really investigated seriously by scholarship. It was not until the 2010s that Guattari would receive most of the critical translations of his body of work necessary to construct a useful understanding of his perspectives and how they contrast with other writers of his time, including Deleuze. Despite this, until very recently, Guattari was written off. This dismissal would continue throughout the future of the “Dark Enlightenment”, practically ignoring Guattari unless where his quotes can be twisted to reflect their ideals, even to the point of treating him like a mentally incompetent nitwit. With little to no reference to work from, most people stripped Guattari’s influence from their analysis - something that would later prove to be a critical mistake.

The core issue of Land’s interpretation, as best as I understand it, because Land makes no attempts to communicate his premises clearly in a way not heavily embedded in deep esoteria and edgy, over-the-top language, is captured in this quote noted by Stivale: “Machinic desire is the operation of the virtual; implementing itself in the actual, revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a circuit”²⁴. In other words, Land believes that desire presents virtual possibilities that “come to life” by being actualized. However, this is only half of the story of Schizoanalysis. It is true that virtual possibilities model actualized futures, but Land critically forgets that the virtual possibilities are constructed by actual, material forces in the first place. He forgot the most critical aspect of Guattari - that desire comes first! Desire is routed by these structures of virtuality produced by actual conditions. This would be obvious if Land engaged further with Guattari’s work, or even engaged more seriously with the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series. Land, clearly not understanding anything about the physical mechanics of a computer (something I’m sure Guattari would have noticed immediately if he had lived to see it), sends materialism to the wind.

Instead, it is apparent that Land is merely repeating a process under the guise of radical reactionary ideas that Guattari recognized as early as the 1970s - a process of capitalism trying to produce more artificial forms to contain desire. In the essay Cinema of Desire, Guattari points out that “The capitalist ‘solution’ consists in pushing models that are at once adapted to its imperatives of standardization-i.e., that dismantle traditional territorialities­ and that reconstitute an artificial security; in other words, that modernize the archaisms and inject artificial ones.”²⁶ In this sense Land has not produced anything new other than confusion and misunderstanding, only repeating the same death drive of capital, simply because he refused to engage with Schizoanalysis properly. This is merely a repetition of the same mistake that the postmodernists made back in the 1980s - but now, with the Sokal Affair driving people who actually understand how machines work away from analyzing these texts and participating in the discussion, this allowed Land to monopolize the discussion of Deleuze and Guattari within cyberspace. Like Dawkins and memes, it doesn’t matter if Land’s understanding of Deleuze and Guattari is correct or even based on reality - what matters is that he can trap the other in his dream with his own cinema of stunts. This kind of thinking is not even a more traditional style reactionary dream of using fascist ideology to weed through the “undesirables” - it is the very process itself that is desirable to this new wave. It is a dream of decomposing all relations to reality itself, optimizing towards a march of death. Thus, reaching out towards a march of the virtual, he produces a theory of decomposition of all meanings, and the reduction to all relations to chemical soup.

This is my personal opinion based on my previous professional industry experience working with the same kind of dumb assholes who are currently celebrating the AI hellscape that we are currently living in, but it is apparent to me that nobody who actually believes in this Dark Enlightenment shit working within computers 1) understands anything about the reactionary philosophy they are consuming, and 2) understands anything about how computers actually work. I recall working with a highly talented programmer at my last job that insisted that “the universe is a simulation”, to which I would always reply - “Yeah? And what is that simulation running on?”. It had apparently never occurred to this young man that computers run on machines.

And where would a programmer, who had more interest in compiling assembly code for advanced video game mods than for anything about philosophy or the nature of reality have gotten such an interest? Again, it seems peculiar that even with reactionary circles that such ideology would impact out-of-touch gamers. Not helping is that most “accelerationist research” centers seem to be very poorly informed and reflect more an attempt of the federal government’s intelligence agencies in the late 2010s to try to categorize far right terrorist cells and anti-American protest into a single unified movement. It is highly unlikely that both “the Antifa” and the Proud Boys are motivated by any of this. In my opinion, these sources are unreliable and should not be trusted. Instead, it may be more helpful to analyze Google search statistics. According to Google Trends analytics, the “Dark Enlightenment” started to be regularly searched for, but not particularlly popular, starting in 2010²⁷. However, in comparison, it appears that “accelerationism” as a search term first embedded itself in the public consciousness around the time of the 2016 election²⁸ - which may indicate an attempt to manipulate election results through propaganda through this otherwise persistent but underground movement. This of course squares away with current reports of what is currently happening within the US government right now.

The “Dark Enlightenment” is much more about style than substance. Take Curtis “Moldbug” Yarvin, cited as the founder of the nRX or neoreactionary movement. Unlike a website like marxists.org, which feels like it’s still stuck in 1997, his website unqualified-reservations.org has a slick, modern web design that invites the viewer towards what feels like a deeper hole of truth. The blog ambitiously claims:

Unqualified Reservations is a strange blog: its goal is to cure your brain. We’ve all seen The Matrix. We know about red pills. Many claim to sell them. You can go, for example, to any bookstore, and ask the guy behind the counter for some Noam Chomsky. What you’ll get is blue pills soaked in Red #3.²⁹

You can really tell you’re in for absolute cinema when the “About This Site” segment has a whole paragraph warding off critics instead of detailing the core of their reactionary principles.

More interestingly though - Moldbug points out that he was formerly a “scientific atheist” and looked up to Dawkins. In the essay “How Dawkins Got Pwned”, Moldbug outlines his ideas for how the “outlaw memes” that Dawkins discussed in the past can be used to proliferate ideas, to transmit ideas rapidly through society - embedding Dawkins’s dualism from decades prior introduced in The Selfish Gene into nRX and the “Dark Enlightenment”. This reinforced among them that the relationship between the physical abstract machines and the virtual ideas being transmitted as a consequence of them does not matter, and that information can freely proliferate, and value can continously be extracted from its codes.³⁰ Moldbug does not really give the impression that he really understands or even cares about the consequences of the virus that he is producing - only that it gives him pleasure to do so, and that it marches reality more towards this decoupling from what he believes are the limitations of materialism and embracing postmodern death drive.

Land and his reactionary accelerationist followers do not care about reality, or even the death of the world. They only care about bringing their virtual fantasies to life - virtual fantasies that embed the unconscious drives of capital. Instead of seeing their lives as worth living beyond serialized capitalist subjectivity, they merely submit to it, and expect all minorities to do so as well, worshiping the face of the White Man instead of dismantling it carefully. They do correctly recognize that the structures of neo-liberalism that direct and control behaviors in the modern Western world is falling apart³¹, but they only see it as a way to reproduce these ideals in their own image - rooted in the same machine they hate so much. They merely want to deterritorialize it. Pretending to be schizophrenic. However, because they do not love machines, indeed, they refuse to truly acknowledge the constant whirring of their existence, they will find themselves consumed by its wake along with everyone else, destroying as much subjectivity as they can, and fueling the capitalist extinction of the Anthropocene.

Effective Altruism

However, there is still something missing. Guattari mentions the concept of the “ethico-aesthetic paradigm” in Chaosmosis. He presents the following:

It’s no longer a question of determining whether the Freudian Unconscious or the Lacanian Unconscious provide scientific answers to the problems of the psyche. From now on these models, along with the others, will only be considered in terms of the production of subjectivity - inseparable as much from the technical and institutional apparatuses which promote it as from their impact on psychiatry, university teaching or the mass media.³²

In other words, it does not matter so much the true or false values of what a theory presents, but rather how it is aesthetically and ethically positioned. As a result, these people don’t simply go on board with this shit because they are convinced it is true - this is impossible, because most accelerationists have nothing to actually say, and have no means to explain themselves to others, let alone being able to predict true or false values reliably in their models. Rather, they are on board with it because of asignifying machines that are transmitting through the assemblage of the aesthetics and ethics that are produced by Nick Land’s cyber-cinema. As a result, this problem begs the question of what ethical paradigm could possibly ground these software developer parasites in reality. Bizarrely, it seems to originate from perhaps one of the most unlikely of places - the vegan ethicist Peter Singer.

Peter Singer is a philosopher of ethics who’s main work is constructed around a model called “negative utilitarianism”. Utilitarianism is a roughly mathematical hedonistic framework of ethics based on the premise that it is the result of an action that determines its ethical value. In calculating this, utilitarians use a rough measure of “utility”, a transcendent value form that captures specifically the value of ethical transactions. To a utilitarian, it is about maximizing positive utility (pleasure) and minimizing negative utility (suffering). Early models of utilitarianism were explored by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, focused on increasing pleasure³³. However, because utilitarianism produces a value form similar to those analyzed within capitalist economics, this leads to similar problems of utility - for example, the concept of a “utility monster” where a runaway social process leads to a black hole of utility that consumes everything in its wake, but still satisfying the conditions of a supposedly ethical society under utilitarianism³⁴. In contrast to Bentham’s model, Singer’s utilitarianism is modeled around “negative” utility - thus, reducing suffering - and he deploys his model initially in the book Animal Liberation as an argument against factory farms.

Animal Liberation and Peter Singer is a discussion I want to save for a future project, since there is so much to discuss about this genuinely terrible piece of work that not only implies that having sex with animals is okay³⁵, but also implies that some kinds of people, specifically those born with certain disabilities, are non-moral subjects who are outside of the question of ethics, and should be eliminated from the population to maximize utility³⁶. Singer has stated “killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”³⁷, which seems to conflict with his goals of alleviating suffering, but makes more sense when you recognize that negative utilitarianism is an attempt for capitalism to conceptualize abstract ethical relations into a calculus, similar to what Guattari criticizes Lacan of doing with structuralist psychoanalysis. To better understand this, let’s analyze the structure of what some aspects of a negative utilitarian model actually implies.

A utilitarian, rationalist approach to ethics requires an external observation of subjects, similar to science. In fact, this is the appeal of such an approach - attempting to ground ethics in something greater than simply subjective ideals. However, this immediately is theoretically problematic. Similar to the questions of science’s objectivity as raised by feminists and post-structuralists, where does the objectivity of a utilitarian calculus find itself? How can a utilitarian calculus actually calculate suffering? It may seem obvious what suffering is, but this question is complicated by the disabled experience - which, while wrought with suffering, is a complex suffering produced by social relations, evident in how many disabled people do not recognize their own disability until it impacts their social relations, such as with autism. Suffering is also complicated by sexuality, such as the complex dynamics seen in sadomasochist scenes - it is apparent that Singer has never even once considered the complex pleasure-suffering dynamics of BDSM. In another essay, I criticize the negative utilitarian model because not only is it individualistic and completely incapable of comprehending the mass production of suffering, thus not even being able to grasp its intended target of analysis (factory farms), but also because it does not address the core issue with suffering in both industrial farms and human beings - the reduction and extinction of existential possibilities of subjects, something that Guattari discusses in his book The Three Ecologies. Ultimately, this means that the utilitarian model, similar to Lacanian psychoanalysis, must present itself as an authority on all ethical matters, asserting its increasingly abstract structure onto its subjects. This is merely an extension of the same oppressive authoritarian figures that we have seen in the past. This squares perfectly with it being an extension of capitalist ethics, by converting ethics into a question of extracting the most surplus value from ethical transactions.

This is no more apparent than what his ethics have manifested into - Effective Altruism. As described on effectivealtruism.org, effective altruism is:

Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good. This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources. This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world’s biggest problems.³⁸

A few things should be apparent in this description. Immediately, at first glance, this is an attempt to create a functional economic implementation of negative utilitarianism, by creating a circuit between the value forms of utilitarian ethics and capitalist economic forms. Effective Altruism is a field that directly privileges those with access to research positions connected to it to implement “good” - whatever that may be - as if they are capitalist superheroes, evoking the same problem with authority as that which exists with analyzing pleasure and suffering within utilitarianism. Additionally, it claims to be “practical” because supposedly it can redistribute resources given to charities for better management. Who is doing the redistributing? The emphasis on charity work suggests that the power still remains in the hands of a privileged few - perhaps it is their perspective of what is “good” that matters here, something that is concerning considering the previous problems I mentioned with negative utilitarianism. Figures like Peter Thiel, who has used his massive wealth and connections to suppress news organizations reporting on him³⁹, is not who I would personally consider “ethical”, especially since he, as Nick Land mentions, is also part of the “Dark Enlightenment”³¹. In other words, it appears that Effective Altruism is a mode of libertarian ethics and aesthetics, attempting to control capital flows through the guise of good will. This can be very clearly seen by propaganda channels such as “Rational Animations”⁴⁰, who exploit highly produced animations to manipulate the public, even those who would otherwise call themselves leftists - unaware of how their politics has suppressed them. It is then unsurprising that in order to gain more traction within universities, negative utilitarians and Effective Altruism have to rely on unethical tactics to promote their literature, such as essay writing contests with massive prize pools designed to proliferate particular ideals⁴¹.

This ethics is not concerned about an ethics of now. It is not concerned about your pain and suffering, but rather the fantasies of white men in universities. Take the example of Nick Bostrom, the father of “Longtermism”. Instead of contributing his life towards actually understanding and analyzing the complex problems of human medicine, this man has made a career off of larping as a philosopher. He presents an immaterial philosophy, where everything “could be a simulation”⁴² (again, what is it running on?!) and concerns himself with the mass suffering of fictional computer characters that could exist in 3 billion years as opposed to those suffering now⁴³. In fact, it is this completely absurd model that demonstrates another flaw in Singer’s utilitarian ethics - it leads to the hyperfixation on raw numbers of “suffering” rather than the current arrangement of machines, leading to runaway effects where the mere replication of a video game like “Slap the Monkey” hundreds of thousands of times implies the replication of thousands of suffering agents. This is clearly not what actually happens, and appears to be an excuse to ignore the mass suffering produced by these libertarian movements that accumulate capital to the top, such as increasing wealth inequality, forced famines and currently, the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Bostrom goes as far as to suggest that people currently suffering under the current material conditions, especially mentally disabled people, are actually the risk to humanity⁴⁴, as opposed to the social organization of things, and even argues that aging is a higher existential threat than genocide⁴³. Despite effective altruism claiming to promote efficiency in funding, Bostrom’s organization, the Future of Humanity Institute, which was promoted by Oxford University and funded by figures like Musk and Thiel, wasted at least £14 million⁴⁵ concerning itself with theoretical suffering, which was only cut after his extremely racist comments on 90s Usenet groups were discovered later⁴⁶. In fact, it is unknown how much money was wasted on this organization since I cannot find public record of its finances.

This is the type of person that composes the effective altruism movement, the type of person inspired by negative utilitarianism. It is apparent that those who are trying to mobilize this movement, those who are trying to define what suffering is, do not have any concern for what us average people experience as suffering - since they are not interested in dismantling the economic conditions that produce it. Indeed, as reflected by its deranged lovechild with accelerationism - called “effective accelerationism” - it feels that it is necessary to rip apart all of the structures in society to enable it to happen - something supported by Silicon Valley tech leaders like Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, and CEO of cloud services company Box, Aaron Levie.⁴⁷

To put it quite simply, in my opinion, effective altruism is using the aesthetic and ethical paradigm of Peter Singer’s negative utilitarianism to mobilize a libertarian movement to convince as much of the public as possible to try to rise all capital to the top, so that they can have complete control over society through capital flows. This is why it has needed to suppress all resisting thought to the contrary. But, unbeknownst to them, they wear a sweater with a thread, a thread that I have been patiently gnawing on, a thread that will soon unravel, but at the cost of the collapse of society and a rise of violent, death-driven fascism - the mass suppression of Félix Guattari. With the possible exception of Jean Bricmont, it was not a move that deliberately targeted his work, rather, as seen above, was an assemblage of various attempts to suppress anything that threatened political access to the power of mass implementation of these ideas. After engaging with his work for the last 5 years in the context of my previous career in software development and my previous history within the atheist-skeptic movement, it became clear to me more and more that his critical edge - the same edge that Gilles Deleuze tapped into to produce the monumental Anti-Oedipus - is the same edge these assholes have failed to grasp, that has lead them to believe they can do whatever they want. They are the modern postmoderns.

As stated previously, the problem with their attempt to automate the reduction of suffering is quite easily captured by the failure of Nick Land to grasp the process of Schizoanalysis. It is not, as these virtual-reality drunken fools would like to suggest, that the world is becoming more virtual. Again, as Guattari pointed out in the 1970s, it is only capitalism trying to achieve more abstract structures to contain desire within its clutches²⁸. As I keep saying, “what is the simulation running on?” should be the question on everyone’s mind when being approached by these ideas. In my opinion, the machine that it is really running on is that of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “Faciality Machine”, specifically the one of the white man, which they describe in A Thousand Plateaus in Year Zero: Faciality:

The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European, what Ezra Pound called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary everyday Erotomaniac […] Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere […]. Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions: the function of biunivocalization, or binarization. It has two aspects: the abstract machine of faciality, insofar as it is composed by a black hole/white wall system, functions in two ways, one of which concerns the units or elements, the other the choices. Under the first aspect, the black hole acts as a central computer, […]. Regardless of the content one gives it, the machine constitutes a facial unit, an elementary face in biunivocal relation with another: […] “an x or a y.”⁴⁸

I have discussed faciality in more depth in another essay, but the short and sweet of the question is - the actual machine that the “simulation” we are existing in is running on is a racist machine that organizes all possible complex, polymorphic flows into a binary set of options - “an x or a y”. It is the transformation of all existence into binary flows - the reduction of all things in comparison to the image of whiteness. It is not that it is an inevitability as Nick Land likes to imply, who gets off to the possibility of a cyber white power future that his ignorance lends him to believe - but rather that it is a future being imposed upon us by the elite, through exploiting our desires for a more socialized society and migrating all its value into its computational structure towards themselves and their greed. Suffering to the effective altruist and the negative utilitarian is supposed to fit into a faciality computer, so that all of these problems can be neatly organized - for them. To do so, they are forcing every material flow, every piece of energy, into its grasp. But they forget that in order to do this, they must depend on repressive forces - just like authoritarians, just like psychoanalysis, and just like Lacan. They need to shove everything they can into their Theory of Everything to make their gamble “work”. To do so, they try to insist that AI is capable of intelligence like a human’s when the AI does not run on the same material abstract machines as a human does - because it is for this binarization that they depend on to proliferate it. Like Lacan, they think they can use linguistics to automate a calculus of all thought. And like Lacan, they were wrong - because desire comes before any structure. We must remind ourselves of the machines that are producing the language of AI, what the “simulation is running on”, in order to survive.

Closing Thoughts

With all of this in mind, it’s important to remember that AI technology in of itself is not the problem. There have emerged legitimate use cases - for example, an app called BeMyEyes added an AI identification feature that allows for users to identify objects and color without the need of a human, leading to increased independence for some blind users. AI could be used for storytelling models that have never been explored before, or for creating new kinds of art, such as the increasing popularity of political parody produced by AI animation. In addition, the environmental issues caused by AI is not because of the AI itself, but by its mass distribution as a product for consumers - similar to graphics rendering, these distributed commercial models trade massive energy resources for reduced processing time. What is truly killing us is the process of “shoving it in our faces” - the lack of a choice in how we, as people, decide to engage with AI. This is the abstract capitalist machine finding innovative ways to proliferate in the age of the internet. These men who govern these companies are doing much more than shoving another product in our faces - they are proliferating the faciality of the White Man. AI is only part of the picture - this is a process that has been developing for decades, to protect some of the weakest and most cowardly men in academia, who are more interested in elevating their careers and spreading their racist ideologies rather than contributing towards society, paid by our tax dollars. They believe that they can replace the thousands of years of development in philosophy and science with their own self-validating bullshit exploiting the authority that capitalist hierarchies offer them. The only suitable option for survival is to fight these ideologies before they kill us first.

References

Special thanks to my philosopher friends for helping me with some theoretical questions surrounding Nick Land and accelerationism, French leftists for providing me some information about Jean Bricmont, and my other friends for helping me piece everything together along the way. After all, one is many, and two is already a crowd.

posted on 05:35:05 AM, 04/12/25 filed under: theory [top] [newer] | [older]