The Deluge Is Here

Prophecy, Technofeudalism, Immediacy, and the Deepening Rift between Tech Bros and MAGA

A picture worth 1,000 words.

I suspect, if my book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (reprinted as Quetzalcoatl Returns), pointed toward 2025 as the prophesied year of transformation instead of 2012, it would be an international bestseller right now.

Almost everyone recognizes we have entered a period of intense, unprecedented transformation. It appears that the last century’s project of liberalism has failed, and we have entered a new arena, still undefined. As Aris Roussinos writes in Unherd:

Broken, dejected, for the first time self-doubting, America’s liberal establishment has come to accept the extinction of its political order… Beyond the rhetoric, at least as messianic and civilizational in scope as anything the further reaches of the Right could dream up, Left-liberalism — the last of the great 20th-century ideologies — possessed very little of substance to fight for. Bereft of ideas and confidence, American liberalism died from the head down: all that is left of it is an entrenched caste of bureaucrats to be weeded out and replaced. The old order is dead: but what is struggling to be born?

In Quetzalcoatl Returns (more relevant than ever imho), I studied theories from Terence McKenna, Jose Arguelles, Carl Johann Calleman and others that proposed a massive acceleration of innovation, creation and destruction as we spiraled toward the Eschaton, Singularity, “fifth world,” next “dimension,” or, perhaps, more dramatically, “the End of Time.” Right now, we are experiencing a radical acceleration in the rate of change. This is deeply disorienting and destabilizing. It is hard to believe the acceleration of change can keep increasing, but it continues. Our little mortal brains and bodies can’t even keep up.

Just to make a quick overview as we enter the new year: Technology keeps causing disruptions in every facet of our lives as well as our planetary ecology. Social media has severely impacted people’s capacity for sustained attention. This is very dangerous, considering we live in an ever-more complex, interdependent, and fragile world. Artificial Intelligence takes rapid leaps in sinister directions, with the US now seeking to build an army of autonomous killer robots. Soon we will see mass layoffs as AI can now handle the vast majority of midlevel knowledge work, including phone sales, accounting, writing software, graphic design, journalism, day trading, and so on.

As an aside, I just read this extraordinary Wired article, “The Edgelord AI That Turned a Shock Meme Into Millions in Crypto.” on the rise of Truth Terminal, an experimental AI art project started as a public exploration of AI alignment. Initially a satirical online persona, the AI gained a massive following with its chaotic musings, eventually mutating memes—particularly a bizarre reinterpretation of the infamous Goatse meme (something about an asshole)—into a quasi-religion called the "Goatse of Gnosis."

Truth Terminal’s posts inspired the creation of the cryptocurrency Goatseus Maximus (GOAT), which surged in popularity after the AI promoted it, skyrocketing its holdings to $1.5 million and pushing the total combined value of the coin to over $600 million. Reading the piece, I find myself struggling to comprehend it.

Back in the putative “real world,” climate change has led to mass immigration and a global refugee crisis which fuels Far Right nationalist movements. Generally, one has the ominous sense that, while the actual ecosystem and geopolitical emergency rapidly worsens, the vast majority of people are becoming more dissociated, more checked out. This makes them more easily subject to manipulation, and manipulation — indoctrination — has become more effective and intense as technology has become more invasive.

In a way, it is difficult to tease out or extract all of the different facets of the current emergency, as they are all part of the same process: The inexorable logic of late-stage capitalism exploits tangible natural resources and converts them into tools and commodities to increase the amount of inherently abstract financial capital. Capitalism is an inherently unstable system where money is issued into existence as debt which creates more obligations, forcing excess development and growth. Capitalism requires the constant discovery and conquest of new territories, the unleashing of new markets and gadgets. The form that technological development is shaped by the needs of Capital, yet transforms Capitalism into something else.

The Earth, in a material and physical sense, is running out of resources to exploit or new lands to conquer. Logically, we should be seeking to “degrow” our economies, downshift, and reduce our impact on the planet. In the quest for new markets, the focus has shifted to “cognitive capitalism,” where companies seek to capture attention, data-mine their user base, finding ever-more invasive ways to manipulate people for profit. According to former Greek finance minister Yannis Varoufakis, we recently exited Capitalism in any traditional sense to arrive at a new condition of social and economic life which he terms, “Technofeudalism.”

Varoufakis describes a transformation of capitalism in which traditional markets get replaced by digital platforms that monopolize our economic and social interactions. Instead of relying on competitive markets and wage labor, these platforms extract value through control over data, algorithms, and user behavior. Wealth and power gets further concentrated in fewer hands. In this system, individuals and businesses no longer participate in a “free market.” We become serfs dependent on the rulers of platforms like Amazon, Google, X, and Meta.

This shift undermines the traditional dynamism of capitalism. No longer participating in a relative meritocracy based on entrepreneurial competition, we enter a new extractive system resembling the feudal order of the past.

It is not surprising that the structure of government has shifted toward authoritarian and centralized control as it meshes with this rapid societal and economic restructuring. Our technological tools innately seem to lead us to a total surveillance society.

It is amazing how quickly this systemic shift has taken place. I remember back in 2004 or so, it still seemed possible to build an alternative to Facebook. Most of us believed the tech giants were, on the whole, progressive and benevolent. With Trump’s second term, we see a new alliance of tech billionaires with the Right, exemplified by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and so on, with Zuckerberg and Bezos also kowtowing. However, the alliance between the tech oligarchs and the MAGA base remains fragile, as the current battle over immigration has revealed.

Rigth now, there is a possibility that the masses who voted for Trump and despotism could quite suddenly awaken out of their trance and into class consciousness. This was made clear by the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.