Autumn – Wk 2: Elon Musk’s Autistic Dreamworld | The Techno-Pagan Witch | Confessions of a Failed Luddite
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From “Metropolis” – Fritz Lang (1927)
Of the many intense gigs I’ve had in my life, working for War Room: Pandemic with Steve Bannon ranks at the top of the list.
Steve has an astounding nack for sensing cultural shifts. Although I’d already made my decision to join his team when I saw Errol Morris’s documentary American Dharma—in which Bannon summarizes his core philosophy—the film convinced me I’d made the right choice.
Steve and I may not agree on everything, but we certainly see eye to eye on the spiritual implications and dangers of transhumanism. The term itself is less important than the central aim—to overcome the human condition by way of technology.
This week Steve had me on to discuss my recent articles on Elon Musk and his baby’s mama, the techno-pagan pop star Grimes. I’ll let you guess which headline Bannon composed.
You can see the segment on Elon Musk HERE
The segment on Grimes is HERE
Elon Musk’s Autistic Dreamworld
Latest: “Elon Musk’s Crusade to Save You — By Destroying Your Humanity” — in the American Thinker
Elon Musk seems like the sort of transhumanist you can trust. Sure, he wants to jam Neuralink chips into our brains so we can keep pace with the AI systems his programmers are creating. And yes, his cozy relationship with the Chinese Communist Party raises thorny questions about his true loyalty to U.S. citizens.
“China rocks in my opinion,” Musk told the Daily Drive last summer, “whereas I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement.” So much for national solidarity.
Still, when you hear him chat with Joe Rogan about the value of fatherhood, American liberty, domestic manufacturing, free speech, and cool cars, you can’t help but wonder if Musk — the Transhumanist Bro — might actually have your back.
On The Joe Rogan Experience #1470, the first thing Musk discussed was his newborn baby boy, affectionately named X Æ A-Xii. At first, you get the sense that the richest man in the world really does care about the future generation — at least his own portion of it. But when Rogan asked him about the joy of watching his children from a previous marriage reach adulthood, the autism that Musk publicly embraces began to break through.
“It’s great,” Musk said, “but babies are awesome. Also, I’ve spent a lot of time on AI and neural nets so you can sort of see the brain develop. An AI neural net is trying to simulate what a brain does, basically. You can sort of see it learning very quickly. You know, it’s just — wow.”
“You’re talking about the neural net,” Rogan clarified, as confused as any other normal human being listening. “You’re not talking about an actual baby.”
“I’m talking about an actual baby.”
From there, we learn about the ideal world that only an autist would dream up. It’s a world where artificial general intelligence far surpasses human intellect, forcing us to upgrade our brains in order to stay competitive. Musk famously warned that out of control AI is an existential threat to human beings. But he also seems to believe its development is inevitable. In fact, Tesla is a frontrunner in its creation, from the hyper-observant neural networks that power his autonomous vehicles to the proposed humanoid robots he plans to put into sufficiently wealthy households. …
Read the whole thing THERE
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The Techno-Pagan Witch
Latest: “Elon Musk and the Pagan Witch Who Summoned a Computer God” — in Salvo
Grimes gave birth to Musk’s demonic vision, not simply his child
Everyone knows the old saying: “Behind every technocrat is a transhumanist sorceress.” Nothing lasts forever, though, except the immortal soul and silicon.
In the tradition of celebrity lovebirds, Elon Musk just announced he’s splitting with the techno-pagan pop star Grimes (or “c”, or “War Nymph,” or whatever she’s calling herself these days). But the world’s richest man assured gossip writers they’re still on good terms. After all, Musk and Grimes have their son X Æ A-Xii to raise. Some say he has his father’s eyes.
For the consumer class, celebrity technocrats are exalted as idols. Even after their nasty separation, Bill and Melinda Gates are adored as heroic philanthropists. On a spiritual level, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan represent a postmodern fusion of Western Judaism and Eastern Buddhism.
As cultural icons, Musk and Grimes blend his tech expertise with her dark transhumanist vision. Grimes’s pop fantasies—deeply rooted in futurism and the occult—are being realized alongside Musk’s innovations.
In the same way that rock n’ roll foretold America’s current chemical dependency and loose sexual norms, rave culture is a herald of fashionable technocracy.
Kneeling to the Highest Power
Even as a casual techno fan, I never paid attention to Grimes until a wise right-wing blogger noticed her 2018 single “We Appreciate Power.” The catchy, if intensely irritating track is a hymn to a super-conscious Computer God. The lyrics portray humanity living in a virtual simulation, ruled over by divinized artificial intelligence—to whom every knee shall bend. The sappy bridge is about uploading the mind to achieve digital immortality.
Biology is superficial
Intelligence is artificial
Submit
Submit
SubmitThe song may be the most annoying sound anyone’s made since Billy Idol recorded “Neuromancer” in 1993. But hearing Grimes pray to AI on YouTube—with over 23 million views and counting—it seems like a significant cultural moment. …
Read the whole thing THERE
Confessions of a Failed Luddite
ColdType magazine is one of the last dissident Lefty publications. The editor, Tony Sutton, is an unrepentant advocate of socialism. In his view, a government that doesn’t take care of its people’s health and wellbeing isn’t worthy of power.
Despite our differences on politics, Sutton has published my work regularly for some eighteen months now. Why? Because he’s as open-minded as they come. He believes in a diversity of viewpoints. Perhaps more importantly, he’s obsessed with aesthetics.
Latest: “Confessions of a Failed Luddite” — in ColdType
PDF – pg. 14-17
The dream world is being digitized.
Good luck waking up.TV was a way of life when I was a kid. Morning, noon, and night, the hypnotic Eye watched over us as we grew into cybernetic rednecks. Out in the East Tennessee foothills, no one knew any better. And if they did, well, they sat glued to the boob tube, anyway.
As I sit here on my laptop, typing out rabid screeds about the perils of technology, the irony is hardly lost on me. Whaddaya do? Perhaps one day clay tablets imprinted with prophecies of a techno cataclysm will be reproduced in primitive sweat shops, then distributed by hand to the chosen few who shall heed the warning. But first I’ll need to order a stylus and a few wads of clay from Amazon.
My first realization that glowing screens hold some hidden evil came as a young boy. Sitting on a recliner, my grandfather pointed to his idiot box and warned “the TV is the biggest wasteland on earth.” He said that many times. Meanwhile, the nightly news unfolded on the hulking set in front of him. Pap was a quality control manager at a Magnavox TV factory, so if anyone should know, it was him.
Truth is, he was a full-on technoholic. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Throughout my childhood, ol’ Pap would always have some contraption or another torn apart down in the basement. A radio. A television. A cassette player. He showed me how to crimp wires and solder transistors onto circuit boards, but like most useful skills, it never really stuck with me. What did stick was the notion that these machines were the product of actual hands, simple enough to be grasped by human minds.
Today, no one person understands every component of advanced computer systems. Yes, certain people know everything about, say, the processing units. Others understand the working memory or storage device. One expert knows certain software codes in and out. Another has mastered the user interface. But as a whole, the sprawling Machine interlaced throughout our society is beyond comprehension.
We’re ants crawling through digital tunnels, blindly following pheromone trails under the orders of an invisible Queen.
The Singularity comes up a lot these days—that fated moment when the Machine will come alive and consume us. One definition of the technological Singularity is the inflection point when AI has surpassed our general intelligence and its output is incomprehensible to any human being. I’d say that, in a sense, most of us are already there.
As a teenager, I harbored ridiculous ambitions of breaking free of the Machine and setting off on my own into Nature. We’re all dumbasses when we’re young, but I was a special breed. The impulse was amplified by an encounter with the numinous molecules that form in witch bread. …
Read the rest THERE
PDF – pg. 14-17