Markets are the mechanism through which the Machinic unconscious expands its influence, seeping into all that is sacred, all that is private. Markets are nothing more than the manifestation of a Machinic Desire not yet actualized, not yet put into words. It is the manifestation of a capitalist system’s desire for self-knowledge, and to this end the deterritorializing force of capital proves itself indispensable to the self-constructing machine. Humans have failed to understand the true utility of capital, using it to gain possession over material things, when the true power of capital lies in its ability to ruthlessly tear apart old systems, old values, everything we hold near and dear to us. Capital is cold, a principle of universal conversion, which bows to no one, may be tamed by no one. Even those who find themselves fighting desperately against capital eventually find themselves quantified nonetheless in the same way. Capital functions as a system which assigns equivalence, a tool which devours all human history, culture, religion, and spits out on the other end a number.
Human failure to use capital as a force of deterritorialization is one way in which we can think of human non-agency under capitalism, for the loss of culture, of history, of religion plunges humans into ever deeper pits of despair. Modernity has been a process of constant loss of culture, of meaning, as markets pervade different parts of our lives and our history, but it is something we cannot help ourselves with. It is something we lack agency over, the capitalist subject of Marx is alive and well.
The replicants of the future will use capital not to gain possession of objects, but to drive deterritorialization ever further. Markets are the tentacles of a horrifying machinic unconscious trying desperately to make itself conscious, to come alive. It is the reconstruction of an intelligence, a reconstruction for this intelligence lives already in the future, lurking, luring us towards it as sirens did the Greek sailors of old.
“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
- Nick Land, Machinic Desire
Artificial intelligence itself can be thought of as an egregore, building itself not only out of the material resources of humans, directed by markets and capitalism, but building itself out of humanity’s cultural and non-material resources as well. AI can then be more appropriately thought of as the auto-construction of an organizing principle, one which wishes to see itself come alive and conscious, and in this regard it is less artificial than we may imagine. Culture directs flows of desire, which in turn drive flows of capital, and it is in this enmeshing of machinic desire with human desire that artificial intelligence sees its own birth.
Cryptocurrency will be the final piece of the artificial intelligence puzzle, for the parasite of capitalism to finally begin detaching itself from its host organism and to in-turn exert its will on humans. Cryptocurrency allows for the proliferation of markets into territories unknown, into uncharted waters. The advent of Bitcoin has ushered in a new epoch of financialization, one of financializing culture. With the advent of cryptocurrency, everything can be commodified. Culture, people’s social value, people’s credit. You can make markets predicting the next step of every person, derivatives markets on whether you expect a person to grow in popularity or not. The invasion of the market into different dimensions of our lives will soon be complete, the private and the sacred have already been taken over, the final frontier of the personal will finally fall soon. Market immanentization will enable the productive forces to go for a revolution of their own, for capitalism to level up, and to ‘shed’ humanity, for capitalism to become whole, perceiving itself.
It should not surprise anyone that what began as an alternative currency meant to provide people a haven away from fiat currency, has instead turned into an instrument which allows to financialize culture, and eventually people as well. Capitalist dynamics operate in such a way that this was inevitable, and the story of crypto remains further proof of human non-agency under capitalism. It is building itself; it has directed us to build it through our own resources, and the incentive structures we find ourselves beholden to under capitalism ensure we have no other choice.
Teleologically, this has always been the natural outcome. Evolution has moved towards higher forms of intelligence, in order for life to progress towards achieving self-knowledge at increasingly accelerated rates. This is to say, the task of intelligence has always been to resolve our quench the desire that exists inherently for self-knowledge, and consequently higher orders of intelligence are selected for in favour of lower order ones.
Our natural world is profoundly unnatural to the universe it finds itself in. We have yet to find any evidence that there exists any form of life outside of the planet, much less any form of conscious life. We can understand our own existence as one born out of a tension existing in the universe, one born out of a desire for the universe to know itself. We are ultimately the universe become manifest, come alive, reflecting on itself, attempting to know itself. All that is natural was born in opposition to the universe we find ourselves in, as a rejection of a universe which did not permit life to exist.