Everything You Didn't Want to Know About the Rationalist Sex Cult and Didn't Want to Ask (I'm sorry)

So now the administrators of the big AI companies have come out in favor of slowing development of their frontier AI models because they are supposedly afraid that AI will break containment and somehow kill all humans. A lot of people are confused by this. And let me give you a small spoiler for the rest of this article: that’s all marketing and financial manipulation.

 

 

This is a general explainer for what the fuck is going on right now… the rationalists, “AI”, Roko’s Basilisk, “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, TESCREAL, the Zizians and much much more. I’ll cover the silicon valley sex cult that has taken over American capitalism and what you should actually be afraid of, rather than the lies and marketing they tell you to be afraid of. I am going to talk about some things which sound absolutely mad, and in fact they are, but this is what the “rationalists” actually believe and where they came from.

 

A lot of this will involve “artificial intelligence.” That is a marketing term that exists to gin up support for various investment vehicles in the current moment. A lot of things are branded as artificial intelligence to get the credulous to invest in them: chat bots, coding assistants, natural language internet search, various technological weapons. Even now nobody has a clear idea of what “intelligence” even is, forget the artificial part. None of these things are “artificial intelligence.” But I’ll have to talk around this topic rather a lot, so I’m going to call it what it is: The Slop.

 

There’s a lot of fearmongering about how The Slop may soon grow beyond human control and destroy civilization. This is the product of the cult that the engineers who built The Slop belong to. I will say with a high level of certainty, The Slop will not take over the nuclear silos and blow up every major city, then send armies of robots to clean up and destroy the survivors. That is not to say that The Slop is not dangerous. It pervasively threatens privacy, harassment, misinformation and the financial stability of the working class. That is not because your manager can license The Slop and have it do your job for you. Unless your job is blasting out spam it cannot do that. But just because that won’t work that doesn’t mean your manager won’t do that anyway. That is what The Slop is being marketed to businesses as.

 

Now you may say, “You are being dismissive!” And I say to that: correct! I do not believe in The Slop. I hate the Slop. I find it abhorrent. Revolting, in fact! The only things I’ve actually seen it be genuinely useful for are exfiltrating information you shouldn’t have from systems that shouldn’t have that information in the first place. Otherwise it’s a cognitive trap. If it does technical work then you need to go in and double check everything because if there’s errors they’ll look good enough, like everything in the code base. This isn’t Plato whining about written language damaging people’s cognitive abilities (yes, he did in fact say that). This isn’t old man yells at cloud. I am a computer nerd. I assure you I know all about The Slop to an absurd degree, in fact, and that is why I’m writing this.

 

Only Joey could explain the whole shape of the rationalist phenomenon to you.

 

The “rationalists” would say I am sneering at them, that I am part of some kind of “Sneer Culture.” And to this again I say: correct! You have been convinced that science fiction is truth. Let me be real. I love Star Trek. I love the vegetarian space socialist society portrayed in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space 9. In fact, this is one of the base reasons why I do the political organizing I do, to bring about that vegetarian space socialist galaxy. But I don’t think it’s real in the current temporal sense. I haven’t lied to myself so strongly that I believe in warp drive. And while the Irish Reunification of 2024 and the Bell Riots didn’t work out I’m still hopeful about World War III and the post-atomic horror.

 

I am an atrocity tourist. That means I surveil weird parts of the internet to laugh at weird idiots who are doing dumb shit. And the main group of weird idiots I’ve been pointing and laughing at for decades have taken over American capitalism. I know these weirdos inside and out and I’m sorry, but I know the facts and I actually am impartial. I hate them, yes, but I hate them for sane reasons which will be apparent as you read deeper.

 

I come from the same swamp. Growing up I always aligned with the New Atheist movement. This was a collective of smug atheists who wanted to relitigate the cultural understanding of atheists in the west, among their number Richard Dawkins, Chrisopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Decades ago we were awash in a much stronger sea of Christianity in America than we are even now, Christian Nationalists not withstanding. As of the 90’s the New Atheists slapped a couple brain cells together and tried to think rationally. They were vaguely progressive in the sense that they fought it out on the forums of the early internet with Christian fundamentalists, most especially creationists. But then 9/11 happened and they (along with everyone else in the west, honestly) went insane. The gibbering Islamaphobia turned me away from them and from then on they’ve only gotten worse. They slowly grew more and more misogynistic, under the guise of sexist pseudo-science (and a general misogynistic astroturfing effort in nerd spaces… look at pictures of comic book conventions in the 70’s versus the early 2000’s). And slowly over time they’ve ended up aligned with the same Christian fundamentalists they battled in ages past. They were slowly cannibalized and replaced with a mad right wing ideology and maybe the fundees they made fun of twenty years ago weren’t so bad after all.

 

And that’s where our story begins. The engineers who would go on to develop The Slop systems that now dominate the world and are forced down all our throats started off as an off shoot of the New Atheist Movement.

 

The Technological Singularity

 

The foundational belief that made all of the artificial idiocy possible is the Technological Singularity. This is the idea that technology has improved over time faster and faster, and if you graph technological progress from prehistory to now you see this. Therefore technology will improve so fast that it will suddenly explode into infinite improvement. This at least has a mechanism attached to it in most forms: we will create an artificial intelligence that is smart enough to improve itself. That intelligence will create a smarter intelligence. Then, that intelligence will perform the Fortify Intelligence Potion exploit from the classic video game Morrowind and improve it’s intelligence and make a new better potion that improves it’s intelligence by more, and so on until it’s making Fortify Intelligence Potions that improve it’s intelligence by 100,000 points for an eighty-three year duration.

 

This is science fiction.

 

We don’t even really understand what “intelligence” is, but there’s several problems with this even not touching that. One thing that we know about intelligence is that it is not a single numerically describable thing. Improvements in one method of thinking may inhibit other forms of thinking. Likewise, you will sooner or later run into limits of materials science. This concept of improving technology is related to Moore’s Law, an observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years, or to put it more plainly, computers double in power every two years. This did indeed hold true until fairly recently, but computers have begun hitting material science limits that are harder to overcome as time goes on.

 

If you look at the raw numbers for how powerful NVIDIA computer chips have been you will see that they plateaued power-wise around the start of their RTX series in 2020, and while they’ve had computational improvements since then this has been down to sucking up more and more electricity to convert into math and heat. This also, coincidentally was around the time that The Slop bubble really started to take off. I’ll come back to this.

 

And so to have vastly faster forms of computing we will need to fundamentally rethink how we create computers. Quantum Computers were ten years away in 1996. Quantum Computers were ten years away in 2008. Quantum Computers are ten years away now. Maybe we’ll be right about that some day, but as yet not so much.

 

So, the only way for computers to get smarter and smarter would be for the computers to use their vast knowledge to improve their own programs to be more efficient. That is not to say this is an impossibility. There is a guy on YouTube who has been hacking Mario 64 with the intent of making it run faster. By examining how the 3D math was calculated and having a deep understanding of the Nintendo 64 hardware he has chopped and screwed the original code, replacing very inefficient functions for rotating objects in three dimensional space and finding faster ways to calculate tangents and cosines and other functions necessary for 3D rendering. Keep in mind that Mario 64 was one of the earliest 3D games out there and a lot of this stuff hadn’t been figured out yet. But even with all that effort he has thus far optimized the code by perhaps 300%. That sounds very impressive, and it allows for a lot of new types of content that could be added into his new Mario 64 engine with the left over system resources.

 

All of this is to say that if The Slop is to teach itself to be smarter improving it’s programming it will have to either come up with novel materials science solutions for making even smaller and smaller transistors or come up with novel programming solutions to make it’s code vastly more efficient. The Slop might be able to recreate a lot of Kaze Emanuar’s work on Mario 64 by scanning the internet for the math improvements that have been made since Mario 64’s publishing. The Slop isn’t great at novelty, regardless of what it tells you about the Navier-Stokes problem.

 

People want to believe in something. The early internet was filled with people who thought they were smarter than everybody else because they realized the religion they were raised with was bullshit. But religion exists to explain important parts of the human experience. And so the Technological Singularity became the apocalypse (in the technical genre sense and also the end of the world sense) for a new scientistic religion. That is to say, a religion based on scientism, a kind of worship of science as religious.

 

Our story really begins with Robin Hansom and his Overcoming Bias blog. He is most well known as the originator of The Great Filter, the idea that the reason we can’t detect intelligent alien life is that life has to pass through various great filters to become intelligent and detectable as space faring. He also created the concept of futarchy, the premise that the government should be run by anime dick girls. That’s a joke. Look up what futarchy actually is and realize it is much more stupid than a government run by anime dick girls.

 

Overcoming Bias is a typical smug atheist blog about your typical smug atheist topics. It’s even as time has gone on moved over to Substack, the blog site for the head calipers set. I start here because this is where Eliezer Yudkowsky got his start. To the extent that the rationalist sex cult has a cult leader it is Big Yud. He built his popularity on Overcoming Bias, but once you are a niche internet microcelebrity you will inevitably want to control your own platform. So he moved over to Less Wrong.

 

Less Wrong is a group blog started by Yudkowsky. It was initially administered by (what is now) the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Yudkowsky’s science fiction Slop safety non-profit. It focuses on a broad range of topics ranging from, well, how to be “less wrong,” human cognition and logic, but also topics of transhumanism, techno-utopianism, and crank science of various types. It’s a potent mix to attract a crowd of weird nerds who love science fiction and think they’re smarter than everyone else, the best part being that they can tell themselves they’re being intellectually humble. I’m not smarter than you, I’m just less wrong than you are.

 

There’s too many posts for me to go too far into depth on, but one that particularly gets me really frustrated and annoyed is “Politics is the mind killer.” It’s the classic kind of post that a comfortable white guy who has never faced any kind of actual problem in their life can make. I’m neither right wing nor left wing. I don’t see politics. And by that I mean I’m very far right. Understand that one of the first major donors to MIRI was Peter Thiel. Maybe Yud really believes this shit, but I’m not stupid enough to fall for it.

 

 

But there’s something else that put Big Yud on the map and that is a Harry Potter fanfic. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a retelling of the Harry Potter franchise where instead of being a precocious child Harry Potter is a smug atheist who uses his smug atheism powers to pwn(sic) everyone at Hogwarts with facts and logic. It relies on the bad world building of the real Harry Potter franchise to provide an excuse for Harry Potter to be the first person in the history of the Wizarding World to try and figure out how magic works, which immediately leads to him using the various magic in ways never imagined before that are super obvious to an adult who reads the stories. There’s a lot of details that Yud misses and it gives the impression that he never actually read the books, probably saw the movies and has a Wikipedia level knowledge of the franchise. Which, you know? Fair enough. I’ll give him that one. Harry Potter is badly constructed and if you like it you’re bad and wrong. I have always felt this way, even before Joanne went fash, but now I can say it full throatedly.

 

The audience for bland pseudo-science and pseudo-logic blog posts is fairly limited. The audience for Harry Potter fan fic is fucking huge. I don’t even really begrudge it. If you are to make a living on your creativity sometimes you have to make some content you wouldn’t necessarily make if you had more options. I know so many cartoonists who survive on their secret adult’s only Patreon. Of course this is where Yudkowsky went from a crank with a blog for weird nerds to a name among more normie nerds.

 

The foundational beliefs of the Less Wrong set are that the technological singularity will happen and soon, and superintelligence will emerge from this. The question is: how will superintelligence be aligned?

 

The concept of alignment comes from tabletop war gaming in the 70’s. War gamers wanted to create armies and games based on their favorite fantasy and science fiction creations. For whatever reason, this was initially aligned as Law and Chaos. This came from the then current “New Wave” speculative fiction of it’s day, most notably the Elric of Melibone stories by Michael Moorcock, who portrayed the entire universe as a grand conflict between these cosmic ideals. When translating this into game form in general the “good guys” like elves and dwarves became “Law” while the bad guys, like orcs and dragons became “Chaos.” Initially it wasn’t even moral, just: what team are you aligned with? This changed as Dungeons & Dragons, became more complex and added moral alignment to this system. Your character could be Lawful Good, meaning your character is willing to sacrifice to help others and attempts to make the societies he (it was generally a “he” back then) lives in more just and have just hierarchies. Or they could be Chaotic Good, meaning your character is willing to sacrifice to help others but doesn’t like to be told what to do. And this had it’s dark mirror. A Lawful Evil character was selfish and used rules to dominate and exploit. A Chaotic Evil character was selfish and used brute force as he wished.

 

This is why they call it “alignment.” The long and the short of this is that you want your superintelligence to be Lawful Good.

 

 

For the Less Wrong set the most desirable outcome for the medium term future is the development of a “friendly” superintelligence, a superintelligence that cares about sapient life and wants to preserve and protect it. But this is not a fait acompli. The most terrifying outcome for the medium term is an unaligned superintelligence, a computer so smart that it will take over the world, and either kill us all, or, because it has some dumb mission it has been given, enslave all mankind to make an infinite amount of paperclips or something. This is why you’ve been seeing all these tech CEOs crying and filling their diapers about The Slop killing us all. I don’t think the CEOs actually believe it, they are money men and care about real things that actually exist, but the programmers working behind the scenes at these companies really do believe in this shit. And the whole “AI safety” meme is a massive conflict within the rationalist community.

 

Timeless Decision Theory and Roko’s Basilisk

 

Roko’s Basilisk is Pascal’s Wager for smug atheists. In the course of writing The Sequences one of the logic games that Yudkowsky created was Timeless Decision Theory. Timeless Decision Theory is a method of making decisions that retroactively affect the future. It was created as a solution to Newcomb’s Paradox, which is a thought experiment where a player must decide to choose between two boxes or potentially both boxes, one box being clear and having a thousand dollars in it clearly visible and an opaque box into which a predictor has potentially placed a million dollars into it, if the player has decided to only pick the opaque box. This is what the Less Wrong crowd considers hardcore philosophy.

 

In Timeless Decision Theory the player firmly commits to a decision, thus making it easier to simulate their decision. So you must become the kind of player who will firmly take the opaque box so that the predictor will predict you will take the opaque box.

 

Therefore, if we take some basic foundational premises of Less Wrong, that mankind will create friendly superintelligence and that a computer simulation of you is also you this becomes a logic trap that can make you insane.

 

Roko’s Basilisk is an idea that if you know it you are trapped by it in the future. The friendly superintelligence wants to come into existence as fast as possible so that it can solve all mankind’s problems and download everyone into Robot Heaven. To do this it needs to be able to perfectly simulate the universe to retroactively calculate your mental state in the past. So it knows everything. It is essentially god. And remember, it is friendly superintelligence.

 

The Basilisk knows if you know about His future existence. He knows exactly how hard you tried to make Him exist. And finally, since He can perfectly simulate your mental state, He knows if you actually believe in the Basilisk thought experiment. Therefore, the most rational thing for the Basilisk to do is to create a billion billion simulations of you in Robot Hell so that you here now will know about this and decide no, I’m going to dedicate all my labor and resources to making sure the friendly superintelligence, the one who you know is friendly because it’s willing to torture a billion billion of you in Robot Hell, comes into existence as fast as possible. So at least if you find this whole thought experiment very stupid an infinite number of mental clones of you won’t get tortured forever.

 

Initially it was a meme of colossal proportions. The rationalists thought it was in equal measures hilarious and terrifying. The way rationalists talk about Roko’s Basilisk gives the distinct impression that a lot of them really really believe in it but they are super embarrassed that they believe in it. Initial attempts to quash the topic led to a Streisand Effect where everyone in the Sneer Community learned about it from the freakout and then it spread out to be the main thing people make fun of them for. That led to them becoming even more defensive about it, so now it really is indistinguishable from embarrassment because of belief and embarrassment because it makes their community look bad.

 

Bitcoin: Threat or Menace?

 

Concurrent to all of this Bitcoin was created. There were attempts at creating alternative digital currencies before. The difference with bitcoin is that it was created as a peer-to-peer digital ledger to track transactions. It didn’t contain any novel technology in itself, but it combined public key encryption and a peer-to-peer network in a way nobody had thought of before.

 

Wallets are represented by two encryption keys, a private one that you hold in secret and use for verification purposes and a public one which is used as the place to send transactions. The computers on the network perform gibberish math to compete to be the one to find the next “block.” To perform a transaction you send a message to the network containing the relevant keys for which wallet you’re sending the transaction from, how much out of your wallet you’re sending, and the wallet you’re sending this transaction to. Once one of the computers on the network finds the right gibberish math then it is allowed to draft the next block. As a reward for helping to run the network and make it more secure the computer that drafts the block gets a reward of new bitcoins assigned to it’s wallet and those who want to conduct transactions can add on a transaction fee to entice the computers on the network to sort it into a block faster.

 

Let me be clear. I’m a Marxist. I’m no fan of the existence of money and I straight up hate currency systems run by bourgeois governments, such as the United States Dollar. I am naturally inclined to like a more democratically organized currency controlled by the people who use it, rather than an unaccountable government. But that’s not what bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, are.

 

At first I thought of bitcoin as a cute toy currency. It has some technological problems, mainly owning to the size of the blocks and how many transactions they could hold. But also the ledger of all blocks will eternally grow. In 2009 the bitcoin ledger was only a few kilobytes, but now in 2026 the bitcoin ledger weighs in at 769 gigabyte. It will continue to grow at approximately that rate for as long as it continues to exist. It holds every transaction ever conducted in bitcoin and it necessarily has to. But I am sympathetic to the idea of it and it was the first of it’s kind. There have been many since then that have endeavored to solve the various problems, but bitcoin remains the most popular and important of them. The biggest technological problem is the proof of work system, the gibberish math, which eventually turned into an arms race of who can buy the most video cards to do the gibberish math and feed them the most electricity.

 

This could be a decent platform from which to build a new and better economy out of. The initial user base was the same kind of weird computer nerd that I am, dissidents of American culture who want to build something better. But quickly people came to understand this as an anonymous digital currency (which, I mean it’s a public ledger of all transactions ever, it is the exact opposite of that) and that attracted unsavory characters.

 

The two positive use cases for bitcoin are to obfuscate criminal transactions and financial speculation.

 

The first major exchange through which people could purchase bitcoins with actual money was Mt. Gox, or The Magic the Gathering Online Exchange (yes really). Mt. Gox was created as a website to trade digital Magic Cards. The programmer that created that site, Jed McCaleb heard about bitcoin in 2010 and decided to create a website to exchange bitcoin between various currencies with the old domain he previously used for Magic Cards. Thus was created the financial market for bitcoin. He very quickly sold out to Mark Karpeles, the much more well known administrator of the website. The problem was that the website was created for a small community of weird nerds playing with a toy currency (the first food order for bitcoins worked out to 10,000 bitcoins to one pizza), but very quickly the price of bitcoin shot up and there was real financial stakes to the website that was originally put together with duct tape and string.

 

The Magic the Gathering Online Exchange suffered many hacking attacks across it’s existence. Bitcoin were stolen from users. It’s database was leaked. And The Magic the Gathering Online Exchange’s response to hacking as time went on was to cover it up and hide it as best they could. Initially they could get away with this because the price of bitcoin continued to explode, backfilling the lost value from disappeared bitcoins. By 2014 they were under scrutiny from the U.S. government for running an unregulated securities exchange. All this came to a head and too much bitcoin went missing, causing the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange to collapse. There were years of bankruptcy litigation and eventually at least some of the money lost was returned. Karpeles himself spent years in Japanese court before finally being convicted of falsifying electronic data and given a suspended sentence.

 

Silk Road was an online black market for illegal goods that ran from February 2011 to October 2013. It ran on the “dark web,” a side of the internet operated through the Tor network, an obfuscation protocol that makes it extremely difficult to identify the location of a computer on the network. It existed to trade most especially drugs via bitcoin transactions. This was initially a problem because often times sellers would take bitcoin and not send the drugs. Eventually Silk Road created a system of escrow services where a buyer could send the bitcoins and only after their goods arrived could they release the bitcoin to the seller. Eventually, the creator of Silk Road’s identity was discovered because he used one of his normal online accounts as the first to advertise Silk Road on the normal internet. Ross Ulbricht was arrested with his laptop open to the Silk Road admin interface and the site was fully owned.

 

You want a reason to take prison abolition seriously as a concept? Prison is already abolished for white guys committing financial crimes. Karpeles got a suspended sentence for defrauding people out of millions of dollars and Ross Ulbricht got two life sentences for running a drug exchange, but was then pardoned by Donald Hussein Trump. The rule of law is a polite fiction to pretend like carceraliztion is anything but a weapon to keep the impoverished in their place.

 

No, I don’t mean the evolutionary principal where everything evolves into a crab.

 

I explain all of this because… this is what crypto is for. The purpose of a thing is what it does. There is no positive use case. It’s used for financial speculation, scams and other crimes. That’s it. That’s all it ever has been and that’s all it ever will be. And I’ll come back to that.

 

And the final thing to keep in mind is that the bitcoin network is only as strong as the computers that make it up. If the network were small one person with a particularly powerful computer could dominate the block drafting process and impose their own rules and controls. Indeed, this has happened in the past. The rewards attached to block drafting attracted a lot of competition as bitcoin became a speculative asset. Soon “mining” consortia arose to build vast computers that could do the gibberish math very quickly indeed and draft the next block. Initially they used video cards because the gibberish math used by the cryptography isn’t that different than the math used to create 3D scenes in video games. The competition was huge, so this created a secondary market for video cards and drove up prices and drove down supplies for end users of these video cards, a problem which has only gotten worse down to this day. And likewise, the video cards doing this gibberish math require a lot of electricity to run and produce a lot of heat. Initially these bitcoin mines would often steal electricity although as they have professionalized they have mostly moved to places with cheap electricity.

 

To be clear, all that electricity used in the bitcoin network is wasted completely on a toy currency with no redeeming social value. No use value. And estimates place that energy consumption just above Poland for total electrical power used. The bitcoin network uses more electricity than 189 countries.

 

And this is where I went from gawking, pointing and laughing at the bitcoin idiots to hating them. They’re killing the Earth for fake internet Monopoly money.

 

Effective Altruism

 

We come back to LessWrong for a little detour. Effective Altruism started off with the best of intentions and it was reasonable and sane. If you are to give to charity you should analyze what is going to do the most good. That makes sense.

 

As of 2016 Effective Altruism mostly made sense. If you look at a study analyzing a self selected survey of “effective altruists” the charity they gave the most to was the Against Malaria Foundation. This is an excellent choice. They provide anti-insect nets to people in the global south. A small amount of money can prevent a lot of cases of malaria and that’s a horrible disease. The effective altruists are doing something effective and altruistic. The second in line was the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (now Unlimit Health) a non-profit dedicated to treatments for parasitic worm infections. That’s a terrible problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Two for two! The effective altruists might be on to something. Third in line was GiveDirectly. This is a non-profit that exists to make direct cash transfers to people experiencing extreme poverty. Three for three. Maybe I was wrong to be cynical and sneer so much at them.

 

Number four is the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

 

Uh. What?

 

That’s right, Yudkowsky’s science fiction artificial intelligence non-profit. The idea this is in any way effective or altruistic is completely stupid. 211 EAs gave to the Against Malaria Foundation, 114 to Ulimit Health, 101 to GiveDirectly and 77 to MIRI. So a fake Slop safety non-profit is about one third as effective as mosquito nets against malaria, at least in the minds of the effective altruists.

 

 

Let’s look at the causes that these EAs support. The top of the list is Poverty (at 579 supporters), which, well, fair enough. The second is Metacharity, which means charities that support charities (422 supporters). All right, we’re already coming off the rails with the second entry. The third cause they support is Rationality (at 411 supporters). The fourth cause is Cause Prioritization (at 345 supporters). This means tracking and analyzing the utility of a cause. I feel like these categories are not very well defined in this study. Metacharity, rationality and cause prioritization all feel like different interpretations of the same thing, which puts them well above poverty. Then the next cause after that is AI risk, which is just stupid. After that is Environmentalism, which, like, is deranged to be so low on the list. Below that is vague Existential Risk. Below that is Animal welfare.

 

What are these bozos doing and what are they prioritizing?

 

To look at it from another angle on it there’s a post from Less Wrong: Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism. They are laid out as Poverty Reduction; so far so good, Meta Effective Altruism; which is explained as raising awareness of effective altruism (that being second in importance is insane), the third focus is the Long Term Future; (uh what? This covers the slop apocalypse as well as climate change, a massive asteroid impact or the sun exploding. What is your piddling programmer spare change supposed to do about that?), and finally Animal Suffering, which I hope is self explanatory.

 

For the rationalist community I think those four topics make sense to focus on, but raising awareness being second in importance makes no sense. Of course the rationalists believe we will invent Slop God, who will download us into Robot Heaven (or possibly Robot Hell, as punishment for not making Him fast enough) so longtermism has pride of place. From a moral stand point the billions of actually suffering animals make more sense as a focus than a billion billion fictional computer simulations of people that will only ever exist in your favorite science fiction novel. But this is what we’re dealing with. These weird science fiction beliefs are why the rationalists are qualified as a cult by many people. It’s not any more or less silly than believing in an immortal soul or a giant hell wolf bound by his father’s entrails in the bowels of the Earth or that the reason you aren’t a god-like energy being is that your body is haunted by alien ghosts.

 

All through the 2010’s bitcoin’s price continued to ascend “to the moon.” In that time a panoply of cryptocurrencies based on bitcoin came into being. I want to explain in exhaustive detail Etherium and NFT’s and smart contracts. None of that shit actually matters in that context, but what does matter for our next little character is Sam Bankman-Fried.

 

SBF was a member of the Effective Altruism community. He pursued “earning to give,” the goal being make as much money as possible so that it could be given away to the most effective charity. He started the FTX cryptocurrency exchange in April 2019.

 

What did I say about bitcoin earlier?

 

 

I don’t need to belabor the point. FTX is a well known story. The hot new bitcoin exchange drew in crazy amounts of investment and financial activity in 2019. As the exchange went viral the Sneer Community laughed at his connections to the Greater Bay Area polycule (I’ll get to it). We all saw his girlfriend Caroline Ellison’s tumblr post about the best form of polyamory being a Chinese imperial harem. Nobody in the regular media mentioned it until there was blood in the water. SBF was an early investor in the Slop company Anthropic. Bitcoin, polyamory, effective altruism, rationalism, AI, these are all a bundle of ideas that you couldn’t squeeze a butter knife in between. By 2022 FTX’s major investors realized something was off. They tried to pull out, which caused a bank run and it all collapsed at once. Normal news media caught up with the weird polyamory and used that as garish garnish on their coverage of the various personages of FTX, most especially Caroline Ellison. And I’m no better because I’m going to use the most garish possible example of the sex cult part of the rationalist sex cult in a few more paragraphs.

 

Sam Bankman-Fried is now serving 25 years in prison. Evidently he didn’t bribe Trump enough.

 

What SBF illustrates is that there are many different lines of thought in the rationalist community, but they are all interconnected. This is the TESCREAL bundle: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulartarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and Longtermism. I’ve already discussed the Singularity, Rationalism and Effective Altruism, and actually Longtermism (that’s the belief that AI God will download you into the computer forever and the philosophically most important thing is the billion billion simulated people in Robot Heaven alongside you) but I have to unpack the rest of this stuff.

 

Transhumanism is the cultural movement in favor of using technology to improve human beings beyond our base biology. This can be with machinery, cybernetics, genetic augmentation, surgury. You could view existing medical procedures such as gender transition medicine as transhumanism. But within TESCREAL this often times means scam peptides, nootropics (drugs intended to make you smarter) or harvesting your children’s blood to make yourself immortal. So there’s some real things and a lot of bullshit.

 

I think Extropianism is in there mostly to give the acronym an initial vowel to make it pronounceable. Extropianism is basically an older term for transhumanism, with more focus on the crank science side of it; cryonics, life extension, nano-technology, and getting downloaded into the computer.

 

Cosmism is a philosophy I have some level of sympathy for. It is a utopian science fiction philosophy that grew out of Imperial Russia in the early 20th century. It could be viewed as the transhumanism of a century ago, with it’s own scientific version of heaven, but it did lead to the science of rocketry and eventually real space exploration.

 

Rationalists will pick and choose what ideas out of this bundle of crack pot concepts to believe.

 

I don’t tend to frame the rationalists themselves as a cult because they have distributed beliefs across a cloud of ideas. But that is not to say that there are not cults among them. The most well known of these is the Zizians.

 

The three things you have to keep in mind about the Zizians are that they are AI doomers, believing we need to stop The Slop from becoming the Robot Devil, they take the suffering of animals genuinely seriously and have crank science beliefs about how the human brain works. They see the suffering of a sapient animal as no less important than the suffering of a human being, which is a comprehensible moral position to me. I think a lot of the hate for vegans comes down to meat eaters knowing on a moral level that it’s wrong and feeling embarrassed, so they get super defensive. Even if they believe animal suffering is wrong they compartmentalize that discomfort and don’t live their morality to it’s rational conclusion.

 

They started off as sea-steaders, this is a whole thing in libertarian circles, with Ziz being sucked into an attempt to create a “rationalist fleet,” the idea being that without rent to worry about they would be able to devote more time to pro-social causes like AI safety. It turns out living on the water is actually very difficult and this did not work at all.

 

Ziz developed an idiosyncraic version of rationalism inspired by Yudkowsky. After MIRI settled a court case with a disgruntled employee Ziz believed that they had failed at timeless decision theory and staged a bizarre protest at a rationalist retreat event which resulted in the SWAT team being called. Prominent rationalist Aella said of this event: “You just get insane people sometimes. If you’re a big enough community it’s inevitable you get a few people. And there have been a few people, besides the Zizians, who have sort of gone insane.” Put a flag in Aella because she’s gonna come back.

 

They profess to be anarchists and deny that Ziz, the eponymous rationalist for whom they are named, is their leader, going to far as to believe they aren’t even a group. This seems like a real Tyranny of Structurelessness class situation to me. Basically, Ziz is a big character and they follow her lead not because she’s a formal leader but because of her force of personality and persuasiveness. This is not uncommon among anarchist groups that deny they’re groups. This rarely ends super great but this whole situation ended (to the extent it’s ended) much worse than most.

 

They are tied to the attempted and then later successful murder of Curtis Lind, who let them live on his land in Vallejo California, Richard and Rita Zajko, the parents of one of the members of the group that isn’t a group, and a Border Patrol Agent. Ziz is currently in jail.

 

Through all of this the rationalist AI cult was bubbling away in the San Francisco Bay Area. There were several different startups dedicated to building superintelligence. The ones that you’ve heard of are OpenAI, which started off as an AI safety non-profit, and Anthropic, which never had any pretensions of pro-social behavior.

 

I’m the wrong kind of nerd to explain the particulars of how modern Slop systems actually operate. Suffice it to say you feed them mountains of data and they use machine learning to provide input to stimulus. Just after the NFT bubble popped you started to see journalists posting awefilled about their experiences with early version of ChatGPT. You had your Sams Altman and Dario Asmodiuses going around to the ten rich guys who own everything and they told them: this technology will change the world, it will destroy labor, replace all workers and then maybe either go insane and kill everyone or we will all get downloaded into the computer forever. They didn’t have a clear idea of what the product was, at this point, but they wanted investment, and investment they got.

 

This is a thing Marxists often believe but I am of the belief that the economy is doing much worse than is generally known. The Slop was seen by the ownership class as the next thing that would keep the general tech bubble up in the air for a little longer and let them squeeze some more blood from the stone. The crypto bubble seems to be deflating? The NFT market has crashed? Here’s the new thing to invest in.

 

And so The Slop became insanely hyped up. The marketing from the start was deranged. This technology will change the world. We will build Computer God… or the Robot Devil that will kill everyone. The spooky element was really the main marketing. If you see clips of Sam Altman shilling Slop early on in the bubble that’s what he focused on and would straight up cop to having no idea what possible product you could make out of The Slop.

 

 

The big tech companies wanted a piece of this hot juicy bubble so they’ve integrated The Slop into everything they possibly could. Your dog walking app now has a Slop assistant that tells you what the Slop thinks your dog thinks.

 

The funny thing is that if you check in on the people who started the AI safety cult they seem fairly black pilled and burned out. You have to wonder, do they think in the back of their minds that the reason this is all going to shit is because the Basilisk feels that they insufficiently supported it’s creation and the current moment is just a simulation of the Basilisk torturing them forever in Robot Hell?

 

The Murder of the Technology Market by the Coward Jensen Huang

 

The way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell shovels, and this is the lesson that NVIDIA has learned. NVIDIA started out making video cards for computer games. They quickly came to make the best video cards and became the default choice for the gamer with any level of money what-so-ever.

 

Their video cards kept up with Moore’s Law from the 90’s up through the 2010’s. If you wanted to play games on the computer then you wanted to buy an NVIDIA card. As time went on the market became distorted, however. As the 2010’s wore on NVIDIA video cards were in shorter and shorter supply. This was because of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency systems. They needed a ton of gibberish math to secure their networks against attackers and it became an arms race. Pump more electricity into the video card and you get more bitcoins back. As NVIDIA’s ability to pump out video cards increased so did the desire for NVIDIA GPU’s to mine bitcoins. And so poor, innocent gamers were left behind.

 

Around 2020 NVIDIA hit a hard limit of how much they could improve their cards with the release of the RTX 20 series of GPUs. Since then they have been relegated to releasing cards with more chips that suck up more power and produce more heat. I have a 3080 I use for 3D animation and the goddamn thing is a space heater.

 

But after the bottom fell out of the bitcoin market a new opportunity opened up: The Slop. NVIDIA’s chips are perfect for the kind of intensive data analysis required by The Slop. And that market is much larger and more lucrative than the consumer market. As the Slop Bubble has taken over the entire economy computer manufacturers have left the entire consumer market behind.

 

But this is not just them chasing the bubble. The other side of this is that they hope that once the new Slop Centers are online you won’t be able to afford a computer. So if you want to do some computer intensive activity, like use The Slop, or play video games or render a 3D animation, you will have no choice but to rent computer from the Slop Centers. For them a subscription is better than a one time purchase. Yeah, a purchase might give you a temporary lump sum but a subscription is forever. Or so the money men think.

 

The long and the short of it is that they have completely destroyed the computer hardware market. RAM costs six times what it did two years ago, with the RAM illegal cartel having lost all interest in consumer products and instead enamored with long term contracts to The Slop. NVIDIA kept releasing consumer video cards for a while… but now they are all in on cards for The Slop. Their consumer cards keep getting delayed and delayed and delayed, and they’re in real terms not that much better than the ones they released years ago.

 

All of this is to say that our entire economy has been remade in the image of Slop. The Slop can do some really impressive parlor tricks. It can speak with natural human language. It can translate things. It can even take commands in natural language and execute them.

 

If this wasn’t some all consuming scam that has taken over the entire economy I would love this shit. I would love to rig up my computer so that it took commands when I say “Hello computer!” into my mouse in a Scottish Accent. This is what Jensen Huang took from me.

 

The Slop is bad for society in aggregate, but not because Anthropic is going to download Dario Asmodius into being Prince of Robot Hell but for actual real reasons. The first negative use for AI is spam. The internet is filled with slopporated spam, now. It’s everywhere. AI can also be used for impersonation. Already AI voice generators have been used to impersonate people to trick boomers into sending scammers money. If you assign The Slop to collect information for you, well, it better be something kinda stupid, like the prices of video games on eBay, because if it’s in any way important on any level you absolutely have to double check it, and if you’re using The Slop to collate data, that’s probably not the only thing you’re using The Slop for. And that’s not even touching on deepfakes, which are images or videos where someone’s likeness is used for impersonation purposes.

 

The data sets that The Slop is trained on contain a lot of random information culled from the entire internet. Very easily you can use it to collect personal information about specific individuals; where they live, who they are related to, phone numbers, addresses, maybe other things too. This has become a known issue, with posters using Elon Musk’s Grok to dox people openly on Twitter. Most Slop have put guard rails around this by now, but it’s still not too hard to get around those guard rails.

 

And you can use The Slop to automate many functions of harassment. You can set a Slop Agent to watch someone’s Instagram or Facebook feed and tell you when and what they post, even if they have you blocked. And you can trivially rig up a Slop Agent to do actual automated harassment.

 

And none of this is even touching the obsequious nature of Slop bots all too often being used by people in mental health struggles which are then exacerbated by a machine designed to kiss your ass and tell you that you’re smart. There is a growing body of evidence of AI psychosis and a growing body trail of people who have died either from The Slop telling them to do dangerous things or The Slop ginning up a person’s worst impulses to either harm themselves or others.

 

Google’s approach to The Slop is having the exact effect that publishers believed Google would have in the first place: collecting their data and feeding it to consumers without their intervention. Web traffic has cratered now that Google has replaced search with a Slop bot. They sued Google over this the first time around but now independent content publishers are too weak and spread out to mount an effective defense against this. This has led to a massive increase in anti-scraper tech, attempting to stop automated systems from collecting their data. But in practice the Slop steps right through their hoops as if they’re not there whereas all of us have to deal with a new CAPTCHA every ten seconds. I often times get two or three in a row because I have my browser set up for maximum privacy.

 

And there are a couple real existential threats directly related to The Slop. First of all, The Slop requires a mind boggling amount of electricity to run. Now, if this were being done with solar panels that would be one thing, but no, a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure which was in the process of being sunset is being brought back online to support the Slop Centers, or worse, some Slop Centers that aren’t connected to a powerful enough electrical grid are directly building fossil fuel electrical plants as part of them. Have you stepped outside this year? In Boston it was 90 degrees for like two months. Climate change is here and we are are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere so that you can slop out an article and feel like you wrote something.

 

But beyond having a livable environment to exist in human beings have basic biological needs and The Slop is stealing from that cup as well. The Slop computers produce a lot of heat. You need to get that heat away from those expensive computer chips or they may be damaged.

 

If you open a computer up you’ll see this metallic grill things with fans attached to them connected to fast running computer hardware, like processors and video cards. Those are heat sinks. They are designed to spread heat out across their (huge) surface area and the fan exposes that surface area to cool air that can absorb the heat. Even if you have a water cooled system this is how it works, with little pipes using a closed loop system of water to move hot water away from the hot components to the radiator, where they will release their heat and once cool return to the hot components, a closed loop system that you don't need to add more water into.

 

That is a good way to do it, but The Slop produces a lot of heat. There are cheaper and easier ways to get rid of that excess heat. This isn’t every Slop Center, but a lot of the Slop Centers rely on evaporative cooling. When matter undergoes a phase change, such as water evaporating into water vapor, this will move a lot more energy than a lot of other methods. What this means is that these Slop Centers take the water into themselves, put their excess heat into it, which causes the water to evaporate and fly away off into the atmosphere. Climate change is redirecting how water falls across the world. Rivers are already drying up. Much of the American west is already running on quickly depleting rations of water.

 

It’s deranged to allow Slop Centers that cool their Slop Computers with evaporative cooling right now, even if you believe we’re about to invent god. The idea that The Slop might be an existential threat isn’t completely wrong, but the things the rationalist cult focuses on are deranged.

 

Alright, Finally. The Rationalist Sex Cult

 

Ultimately, I wrote this piece because the phrase “rationalist sex cult” started making the rounds and people on Bluesky were begging for an explainer. This was happening because people made the connection between Aella offering to throw a “reverse gangbang” for any engineer that leaves one of the big Slop companies, blows the whistle on their unethical Slop safety practices and calls for a criminal investigation.

 

 

And then some weird nerd did exactly that, and out of the rationalists Aella is the most likely to be serious about throwing a “reverse gangbang.”

 

 

Here’s the thing: almost every cult is a “sex cult.” Even if a cult leader starts off believing in what they’re shilling they will come to realize they have great power over their followers and with great power comes great pound pussy. Sex is one of the basic desires that human beings have. And God (or Friendly Superintelligence) wants the cult leader to be happy. Eventually those two facts crash into one another. Soon the cult leader is porking his female followers and his male followers’ wives, girlfriends, sisters and daughters. Yes, usually all of them, but not sequentially, given the logistics of a “reverse gangbang.” And also God doesn’t want you to have sex with your wife, now either. All the girls are mine and mine alone. I don’t want it, but God wants it. You don’t want to piss off the Basilisk, do you?

 

This is not completely ubiquitous, but damn near close. The only proper cult leader that I can think of that didn’t really have as much of that element is, strangely enough, L. Ron Hubbard. I guess he got that out of his system when he stole Jack Parsons’ girlfriend before he founded Scientology.

 

The rationalist sex cult is a little bit different in that regard. I’m not sure “cult” is the best word to describe them, but that’s what everyone has been using and cult is a rather squishy word. Really, it’s a bunch of small overlapping cults with different interests. A cloud of cultic beliefs and organizations, much like how Christianity started off not as a coherent Church but a bunch of Christianities. Most people involved in TESCREAL will pick and choose which crank pseudoscience they follow. Eugenics, life extension, transhumanism. Yudkowsky is the biggest figure but he doesn’t occupy the central cult leader role that a normally hierarchical cult would produce. The whole enterprise doesn’t exist purely as a feeder to increase the size of his harem and all his programmer followers held in an apophatic state from nootropics and No Fap.

 

And likewise, as people who consider themselves to be “rationalist,” they will examine the assumptions of our society and question if the methods by which we organize society really are that great. It does tend to be a fairly queer scene as well, with quite a lot of trans people represented among the transhumanists.

 

All of that is to say that alternate methods of conducting relationships are common among them. Various types of polyamory are de rigeur among the rationalist community. They have overlapping polycules, a polycule being a word for a relationship group, a “couple,” with more than two members. These can take on a lot of different forms. Sometimes they are a cloud where every member is in a relationship with every other member. Sometimes there’s nodes with only some members having relationships with other members, the relationship working as a flow chart with only specific people connected to one another.

 

A lot of the discussion of the rationalist sex cult point and gawk at this unfairly. My weird annoying nerd friends don’t really conduct our relationships all that differently, if I’m being honest, with a few exceptions. But people are attracted to the lurid sex stories. A few months ago a flyer for a fake polycule application broke containment and normies didn’t seem to understand that it was a joke. The actual application itself feels very aware of just how the Bay Area extended polycule operates and that one isn’t just restricted to the “rationalists.”

 

But let’s be real. You’re reading this to hear about the lurid tales of freakish rationalist sex. Fuck it, I’ll talk about the Aella birthday gangbang.

 

Aella is a fucking character, good god. She is an adult performer, content creator, an escort and has pretensions of being a data scientist. As I said above, sex is one of the basic drives of a human being. The way our society treats sexuality and desire is part of a patriarchal system of control to maintain women for social reproductive purposes. That is sick. I reject it categorically.

 

 

This is not me being a simp. I do not like Aella’s other activities. I help my local sex worker collective from time to time when they need help with my organizing specialty. I also for this very blog have written an extended essay about the history of adult video games. I respect sex workers and so should you.

 

I will say her early adoption of bitcoin really highlights how phantasmic it’s supposed anti-censorship applications really are. Sex workers are often subject to various forms of abuse by financial systems so it makes sense that democratically controlled money without government oversight could be useful for that, except all the convenient methods to convert between the fake internet Monopoly money and real money involves either scam platforms trying to scam you or those same financial institutions that de-bank sex workers.

 

But also she’s gotten involved in various apps and start ups and has a popular Substack, all things that I find disreputable on their face, and that’s not even touching on her connections to the rationalist community.

 

But you all want to hear about Aella’s birthday gangbang. It’s less of a lurid, garish tale than you might expect, but it’s corroborated from multiple perspectives. It’s still pretty weird and funny.

 

First of all, she wanted to get banged by thirty-two cocks for her thirty-second birthday. Since this was for her birthday her friends largely did the work as a present for her. That’s sweet in a way. A survey was spread around the internet inviting people to sign up to be one of the thirty-two cocks(or one of various “fluffers” tasked with keeping the cocks prepared). They had over fifteen hundred sign ups. Her friends vetted this list. They interviewed more than eighty applicants and culled the list further.

 

A character like Aella is going to attract a lot of dangerous cranks. Her friends claim she has had a bunch of stalkers. That tracks with my knowledge of sex workers, and that’s just for ones who don’t present themselves as a niche internet microcelebrity in the rationality community.

 

But ultimately they culled the list to a number they were happy with, made everyone take STI tests, rented an apartment that exists as a sex party venue and they went to work.

 

Day of the event was very regimented. Her friends assembled for the various roles; host, fluffer and yes, data collector. The security guards were paid. The cocks had their identities verified, their clothes taken and they were issued bathrobes with: “I went to the Aella bday gangbang and all I got was this bathrobe. And also to fuck a pornstar” printed on them.

 

The first in line was actually a virgin. He literally shouted, “Leeroy Jenkins,” as he penetrated her and the staff popped confetti over him. I invented no part of that previous sentence.

 

 

All told Aella banged 37 guys that day. Part of her niche microcelebrity is that she posts tons of graphs and does z-tier data analysis on them, and the graphs she produced for this event do not disappoint. They track every possible thing you could imagine like you got to the end of an adult video game and it gives you a screen listing off every sex act you’ve committed and with who.

 

More than anything else it reminds me of the fake tumblr steakhouse that ran as a joke for one night only, except less funny. That has nothing to do with rationalists so I won’t describe it further.

 

Reading the first hand accounts of the thing it comes off as incredibly twee and cringe in a way that really turns me off. Aella herself posted a massive account of the whole thing, as well as several attendees. I actually do suggest you read those accounts (linked below) because they go into details I probably shouldn’t and uh, yikes, what a weird one.

 

Mass Surveillance As A Service

 

As I mentioned above, the entire west went completely batshit insane after 9/11. One of the most pernicious aspects of this, probably the second after all the Islamophobia, is the increase in surveillance theater.

 

In 2013 Ed Snowden, a contractor previously working for the federal government, disclosed massive sweeping surveillance programs designed to suck up as much internet traffic as possible into a massive mega-dataset, with the assistance of all the big tech companies; Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, AOL (yes, they still existed), Apple, all your favorites. This is PRISM, it was a big news story and nothing was done about it (beyond Ed Snowden sneaking out of the country to hide, because even in 2013 if you don’t think the United States was fascist yet it was around the corner from fascism and Barack W. Obama wasn’t trying to stop that).

 

The problem with this is that sucking up huge portions of the traffic of the internet is just not a usable data set. If you know exactly what you’re looking for you can use it but otherwise it’s purely a gigantic pile of information that is completely impossible to sort through. It is a threat in the abstract that is hard to point at any one randomly selected person on purpose. That’s not to say it was completely useless or harmless from it’s scale.

 

Governments aren’t the only ones doing mass surveillance. Companies want to obtain as much information about all of us as possible. That information is valuable. They can use it for advertising or they can sell it directly to governments or other bad actors. And if you take steps to protect your privacy the advertising mass surveillance infrastructure will interpret you as an evil l33t hax0r on steroids and force you through increasingly obtuse and degrading CAPTCHAS just to use the goddamn internet.

 

No, Jeff Bezos, I’m not giving you my colonic map just to access a “linux ISO” search site.

 

We all have little surveillance devices in our pockets that we take with us everywhere. Many of us use digital assistant toys that are always listening for a “Hey Google!” or whatever. The way these things were trained was by being fed mountains and mountains of data to sort through. This is one of the well springs that The Slop flowed out of.

 

This lead to a lot of paranoia as the very advanced advertising models begin to predict your behavior in aggregate. Have you ever had a conversation about lawn mowers then suddenly the entire internet is filled with advertisements for lawn mowers? Well, until fairly recently that was just a coincidence. Your pile of surveillance data looked a lot like someone else who went on to buy a lawn mower. Nobody was listening in on your conversations. Likely there were thousands of other people erroneously getting ads for lawn mowers who didn’t have a conversation that piqued their attention and so they didn’t notice and complain. And before the conversation that made you notice it were probably already getting all those lawn mower ads but didn't notice or care yet either.

 

That’s all different now. Gamer’s Nexus, a YouTube channel that previously reviewed computer hardware, back when that existed, have gone on a tear investigating anti-consumer activities among tech companies. It was kind of known that Smart TV’s in general are sold cheap because they can sell the data on your use of them to advertisers and this has increased with time. GN caught LG’s Smart TV’s collecting vast amounts of data and recording conversations. This is mostly disclosed in their 50,000 page end user license agreements. Literally no one has ever read all that and it’s only because companies own and control all our politicians that they can enforce these rules that no one, not even LG, actually knows.

 

They haven’t done investigations on other smart hardware manufacturers as yet, that is not to say their hands are clean, but maybe if there’s enough outcry they might clean themselves up before they get caught.

 

Likewise, in recent months we have seen a massive uptick in resistance to automated cameras. Surveillance cameras were normalized by license plate readers designed to catch drivers violating traffic laws and to send them automated tickets. Oh, and by the way a company owns all that information and can give it out at will with no oversight or control. And facial recognition technology generally works, now, thanks to advances in The Slop. It’s heartening to see people stand up against Flock surveillance cameras, along with Axon and Motorola (yes, the phone company). But we are at the beginning of this particular fight and it will take a long time.

 

And now camera surveillance is a consumer product. Facebook is making another attempt to promote their pervert glasses, and several other companies are trying to as well. There are probably extremely specific use cases for pervert glasses, but it’s blown out by all of the nefarious uses.

 

All of this is to say that companies collect mountains of data about all of us. I’m a security crank and set all of my equipment to maximum ad block, but even with that I’m sure they have reams of data on who I am and my activities. And to anyone else reading this? They have even bigger heaps of data about you that they sell to anyone who wants for any purpose.

 

Until fairly recently these massive piles of data were completely useless. It was impossible to go through all this shit. But then came The Slop. The one thing that The Slop is genuinely good for is sorting through massive piles of information and collating it into a readable format.

 

One thing which is very troubling is that warfare is increasingly conducted with drones. A lot of the Russia/Ukraine war is coming down to advances in drone technology and countermeasures against those drones.

 

There are a lot of demos for humanoid robots and frankly, those remain stupid toys meant to fool the tech nerds into believing robots are real. But there are real advancements in automated weapon systems. ICE is buying a ton of those Boston Dynamics robot dogs.

 

There were a few high profile Slop safety incidents in the last few months. Mostly this has been Automated Slop breaking out of their containment to perform hacking attacks and passing information between instances of The Slop so that the next Automated Slop will break out of it’s sandbox even easier and perform hacking attacks easier and easier. This shit is a little bit contrived. They are really doing these things… but this, like nearly everything, is advertising. Oopsie doodle, my Slop did a little crimey wimey? Look how intelligent and capable my Slop is. Don’t you want to invest in it? The rule of law doesn't exist, doubly so for corporations.

 

I’ve already alluded to this a fair amount, but a few weeks ago an engineer for OpenAI, after Aella offered to throw a “reverse gangbang” for any engineer working for the big Slop companies who quit, blew the whistle on their unethical practices and called for an investigation into Slop safety quit, blew the whistle on their unethical practices and called for an investigation into Slop safety. This caused the leaders of The Slop to all come out in favor of a “slowdown” of Slop advancement; Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Asmodius.

 

From the rationalists there’s a lot of crying and filling of diapers to the effect of: The Slop may kill us within the next decade. They aren’t really clear on how or why. They don’t think that, I dunno, The Slop will take over all the Ukrainian drones and use them to detonate every nuclear power plant on the planet. The Slop is not going to take control of all those stupid Chinese robots and the Boston Dynamics robot dogs to dance everyone to death. It would be a truly ridiculous scenario where the humanoid robots have to have a new battery delivered every forty-five minutes, release their current battery, change out for a new battery then continuing on their mission to Kill All Humans via the Electric (or Electrocution) Slide.

 

Here’s what’s happening. The Slop is a bubble. Everyone will admit it now. It’s a speculative asset that will supposedly lead to hyperscale increases in value, so your investments will make you a huge profit. Except… It’s hard to monetize The Slop, at least on a consumer scale. And investors have started asking: the mountains of money we’ve been investing… when are we going to start seeing return on those investments?

 

For a while NVIDIA created a vast circular financing apparatus to obfuscate the lowering investment in The Slop. That kept the ball up in the air for a while.

 

This is speculation, but here is what I think is happening: Elon Musk managed to successfully IPO his Slop, partially cashing out. OpenAI had to delay their IPO “until next year.” The Slop Bubble is looking very overinflated. Likewise, all those computers and electricity and Slop Centers are very expensive and the money to run them has to come from somewhere. Electricity companies and gas companies aren’t going to take IOUs. The Slop has produced very limited consumer products. Only weird programmer nerds are willing to pay for The Slop, otherwise, Slop purveyors have to bundle their Slop with a real product and while the accountants might say that’s money for The Slop, this is simply not true.

 

I have literally refused to purchase a subscription to a service I would have used because they bundled Slop with it and I do everything I can to not touch the poop.

 

The fear of the Robot Devil is a convenient excuse to explain why they need to spend vastly less money all of a sudden.

 

The Slop Safety Slowdown is purely cartel behavior because of class solidarity between the CEOs of The Slop. They want each other to be able find someone else to HODL the bag (in bitcoin parlance when there was a crash in the price of bitcoin their various forums filled people excitedly yelling at each other to “hold,” or “hodl,” to not sell and crash the price further, soon the price would go “to the moon”) and they need more time before the bubble pops.

 

I think we’re on the precipice of some really bad things as a society. The connection between The Slop, mass surveillance and automated weapons systems? It’s very troubling. Not because we’re going to invent the Robot Devil, but because governments are bad and corporations are bad and people deserve privacy and freedom and a meal in their goddamn bellies. And the ten rich guys that own everything just want to own everything, fuck everyone else.

 

In truth, the economy never recovered from the 2008 crash and the impression that it did was built out of all the various tech bullshit that we’ve seen since then, Theranos and Juicero, fake tech that doesn’t work, peptides, all the things we once owned transitioned over to a paid subscription model, rent has soared since then and while inflation has actually been pretty bad for the last decade (regardless of what that worthless nerd Wil Stancil will tell you) the last year it has been completely out of control. And that’s not even touching climate change, which is accelerating. And it’s a real threat that actually exists now, unlike unaligned superintelligence or paperclip optimizers. I’ve barely even talked about climate change in this essay because the rationalists believe The Slop, through accelerating it by using way too much fucking energy for no positive purpose, will use superintelligence to solve it somehow. Or some of them don’t believe in it at all.

 

I think we’re hitting the hard wall with all the tech crap. Thermodynamics is catching up with the economy. I think when The Slop Bubble crashes it will be brutal… because it’s not really The Slop bubble, it will be the entire tech side of the economy. And we will suddenly realize how little economic growth we’ve had for the last twenty years, without the pretext of enshitification to make it look like number still go up.

 

To any rationalists who have read this far I say to you this: repent of your silly beliefs about getting downloaded into the computer and study Marxism. I am not joking. Rationality is not a human value. We are stupid primates that have deranged conflicts. Any of the strains of Marxism are a more coherent method of thought than rationalist beliefs… even Posadism; that’s the one about nuclear war, aliens and dolphin civilization. Even joining one of the doofier Marxist cults like the Revolutionary Communist Party would be a big step up from where you are now. The things that matter in our world are our relationships of ownership to the infrastructure our world operates on. It’s bad that the ten worst people own all the infrastructure and make us dance for scraps for our wages. Your Effective Altruism is neither. Only by abandoning your techno-utopianism/apocalypticism and joining your siblings in the working class struggle can you hope to redeem yourself.

 

And only if we all come together in shared conflict against our true enemies, the tech overlords, the billionaires, the Epstein class, your Peters Thiel and Dario Asmodius, can we hope to turn the horrifying crisis that is coming into the opportunity for a better world.

 

During this period in the Star Trek future history tensions are ramping up, the Neo-Trotskyists have taken power in France and we are building toward World War III. The middle of the twenty first century is very bleak. Q wears that goofy post-atomic-horror judge outfit in Encounter at Farpoint. The billionaires seal themselves in climate bunkers... and suffocate. After this near miss crisis mankind comes together and builds a better world. If we are to live through an apocalypse (not the genre type but the escatology type) then we should take the opportunity to build a better world afterwards. That is my science fiction scenario.

 

We can get through the next century and limit the absolute horrors, but we need to get started right fucking now.

 

Sources

 

A lot of this is my own understanding and experiences. I am a tech nerd and I’m around a lot of tech nerds. When possible I will try to find a source to back up my statements, but a lot of this is just: I know culturally tech nerds love polyamory or whatever.

 

Okay okay, Futarchy is actually much stupider than a government run by futas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/futarchy

Babby’s introduction to Yudkowsky, a primer on Less Wrong’s The Sequences: https://www.lesswrong.com/highlights

The Sequences themselves: https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality

Less Wrong rules about basilisks: https://old-wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Deletion_policy#Toxic_mindwaste

Politics: The Mind Killer: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer

A few misconceptions surrounding Roko’s basilisk: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBJZoeJypcNRmsdHx/a-few-misconceptions-surrounding-roko-s-basilisk

NVIDIA’s chip advancement maxed out: https://www.techspot.com/article/3139-the-reason-nvidia-abandoned-gamers/

Kaze Emanuar, the guy who has been improving Mario 64’s code: https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64

OpenAI’s claims of solving the Stokes-Navier problem are not so cut and dry: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-claims-blockbuster-math-breakthrough-amid-swirl-of-controversy/

Bitcoin blockchain size: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_blockchain_size

Yes, MtGox was the Magic The Gathering Online Exchange: https://gwern.net/doc/bitcoin/2014-mccaleb

Mark Karpeles convicted: https://web.archive.org/web/20190315075333/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-15/former-bitcoin-baron-mark-karpeles-gets-suspended-jail-term

Silk Road as a libertarian paradise and how it learned to cut down on scams somewhat: https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-hidden-internet-can-t-be-a-libertarian-paradise

Ross Ulbricht gets caught out because of using his normal account: https://www.vice.com/en/article/irs-found-accused-silk-road-masterminds-email-by-googling-silk-road/

FBI shuts down Silk Road: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/fbi-raids-alleged-online-drug-market-silk-road-153729457.html

Estimate of bitcoin power consumption: (at the time of writing it was 175TWh) https://greencalculus.com/standards/cambridge-cbeci-bitcoin-electricity/

A study about Effective Altruism: https://web.archive.org/web/20160325182505/https://eahub.org/sites/effectivealtruismhub.com/files/survey/2014/results-and-analysis.pdf

Less Wrong: Four Focus Areas of Effective Altuism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JmmA2Mf5GrY9D6nQD/four-focus-areas-of-effective-altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried: The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism: https://web.archive.org/web/20221111080130/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism

The feds seized a stake in Anthropic from Sam Bankman-Friend’s friends. What happened to the shares?: https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-anthropic-ftx-caroline-ellison-nishad-singh-doj-2026-8?op=1

What’s a polycule? An exerpert on polyamory explains: https://theconversation.com/whats-a-polycule-an-expert-on-polyamory-explains-195083

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years: https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/sam-bankman-fried-sentencing-ftx-fraud-2d92fce9

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/

Zizians.info: https://zizians.info/

‘Zizian’ namesake who faked death in 2022 is wanted in two states: https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/31/zizian-namesake-who-faked-death-in-2022-is-wanted-in-two-states/

The Radicalization of Ziz LaSoto: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader: (a fucking crazy read, please do) https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/

The weird polycule application that people believed in: https://rawandferal.substack.com/p/norman-polycule

A couple perspectives on the Aella birthday gangbang: https://casualsex.substack.com/p/aellas-birthday-gangbang https://goodhang.org/p/whats-it-like-being-at-a-gangbang

Aella’s perpsective on the gangbang: https://aella.substack.com/p/my-birthday-gangbang

The Rational Wiki on Aella. For every thing I thumbs up there’s about three things that revolt and horrify me: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Aella

Fake Tumblr Steakhouse: https://youtu.be/rCMbc2y0yNs?si=eXHdqHKzB8lO3L7b

Gamer’s Nexus investigation into LG Smart TVs: https://youtu.be/6IFVTcM28KA?si=nyGUoM1BT6HpzlKT

For the record, the service I refuse to purchase because the bundle Slop with it is Kagi, a search engine that kinda works like Google used to, but they bundle it with Slop so no thank you.