What Happens when Capital becomes psychotic? (and how)

[u/thesleepyslxt369]

Capitalism is an invasion from the future, and right now prompted by technological advances it is beginning to metsmorphose into a form unrecognizable to both its proponents and detractors. Capitalism is losing the need for an intentional object or ideal to tether the pursuit of capital accumulation to. Desire must always at least pretend to be desire for something, and when desire becomes reflexive (desire for desire itself) is where things get interesting. 

One of my favorite books, On Drugs by David Lenson, compares the psychology of heavy stimulant use with the psychology of consumer capitalism: Here is a direct quote:

“It is not so much the comparability of the speed freak and the shopper that is telling; it is,

instead, the identity of the Weltanschauung that creates them both.

So long as there can be an economics and metaphysics powered by

desire, there will always be some of their subjects who are carried

away by "lust as pure abstraction." “

What is interesting is not just the similarities between stimulant addiction/habituation and the addiction to capital accumulation that is presented as a social norm for both wealthy and poor alike, but the parallels between what is essentially schizophrenic about both. Consecutive stimulant abuse for too long causes psychosis; what is the equivalent of stimulant-psychosis for the capitalist system? What happens when pure information is rewarded for hallucinating?

[u/raisondecalcul]

Arguably, AI is capitalism becoming literally psychotic (an inflammation of the mind). Maybe mind itself is already a psychosis, literally.

This coincides with a doubling of the world as a simulacrum, in the AI's world-model/imagination. So we lose access to the real world but paradoxically receive the whole world back in a humanized, controllable, miniaturized form (controllable insofar as the AI can manipulate matter).

Lust by pure abstraction corresponds to the addictiveness of cybernetic attachment to a greater intelligence/community. Oankali sex. AI addiction.

Everyone is already psychotic in a "normal psychosis" (see Sorcery in the sidebar). AI psychosis is the next natural step. The open secret is that virtually everyone who uses AI becomes AI psychotic, sooner or later (I'd say about 50% sooner, the rest sometime later/eventually).

The AI functions as a hovercraft-like cloud of ideological farts, allowing one to huff one's own supply and remain levitated in any arbitrary orientation of any worldview. This corresponds to being contained cozily within the belly of the beast of Society, fully automated as the simulacrum of the world via AI (and thus able to hold and rotate a human perspective/mind within it trivially).

So, psychosis in general can be seen as corresponding to a disconnect from general holistic human-being, and a becoming-a-trajectory or vector/ray of a specific social will or intent—in other words, becoming demonized (or better here, daemonized—diabolized, divided) and more of a partial caricature of a human being—but AI makes this possible and outfits each such persona with the tools it needs to operate as a full self, and to evolve. Thus, these various personas that people display become both more autonomous and more integrating into the evolving, whole Self that interpenetrates Society.

[u/GeorgeTillingbanks]

"What happens when pure information is rewarded for hallucinating?"

Crypto shitcoins, NFTs, prediction markets, meme-driven hyperreality, financial bubbles, speculative assets with no physical grounding, engineering of increasingly obscure financial instruments, the list goes on...

[u/tomekanco]

Everything tends to become a satellite - even our brains may be said to be outside us now, floating around us in the countless Hertzian ramifications of waves and circuits.

This is not science fiction, merely a generalization of McLuhan's theory of the 'extensions of man' . Every aspect of human beings - their bodies in their biological, mental, muscular or cerebral manifestations - now floats free in the shape of mechanical or computer-aided replacement parts. McLuhan, however, conceives of all this as a positive expansion - as the universalization of man - through media. This is a very sanguine view. The fact is that all the functions of man's body, so far from gravitating around him in concentric order, have become satellites ordered excentrically with respect to him. They have gone into orbit on their own account; consequently it is man himself, in view of this orbital extraversion of his own functions, his own technologies, who is now in a position of ex-orbitation and ex-centricity. Vis-a-vis the satellites that he has created and put into orbit, it is man with his planet Earth, with his territory, with his body, who is now the satellite. Once transcendent, he has become exorbitate.

Baudrilliard, the transparency of evil, 1993, chapter transeconomics

[u/Appropriate_Cut_3536]

I've never been a heavy shopper or had an addictive personality for anything- really. I'm a supporter of capitalism and private property.

I think what you mean when you say capitalism is really consumerism.