[balamatom]

Nick's entire shtick is based on the world having been under AI leadership for a good long while before the marketing term "AI" was introduced in the 1950s. In this model, the current crop of LLMs are more of a performance breakthrough made possible by the accumulation of political-technological power; but qualitatively, we haven't progressed that far past what McLuhan described. Another more credible author who I recently discovered subscribes to a similar model is Stross.

Of course, Land presents it in an edgy 'satanist kid' way that has perennial appeal to the sort of big wigs who feel like they're not evil enough for their level of personal wealth. His text, Meltdown (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm), from before he achieved product-market fit, is worth a glance.

(EDIT: tenses make me tense)

[ljm]

> Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.

Lorem ipsum as produced by the inmates of an asylum.

[gom_jabbar]

The important thing here is the hyphenlessness of the word technocapital. While Marc Andreessen is using techno-capital in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Land's hyphenless technocapital points to his main thesis that capitalism and AI are (teleologically) identical. [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/

[balamatom]

...that asylum's name was Planet Earth.

"It could only occur to an Ork to pull the wool over the eyes of the person he was talking to by speaking in a sophisticated and abstruse way – humans simulated simplicity for that. When anyone spoke to them in a complicated manner, they simply stopped listening, just as no one listened to the Orkish countess in the snuff as she shuddered from the jolting blows against her pelvic bone."