Is Fiction Going to Kill Us?

This article spoils War Games (1983).

I recently finished CCRU Writings, 1997-2003, and came away with many conflicting, confusing, and conspiratorial thoughts.

These writings blend storytelling and critical theory. It exists in the sludge between fiction and fact. Worryingly, unlike sci-fi dystopias like 1984 — as much as people like to think we are constantly living in “literally 1984” — the fiction presented in these pages seem to beg the reader to compare to their modern time.

Hyperreality

We are unable to take stock of the interaction between fiction and reality without turning to Baudrillard. As a point of review, Simulacra and Simulation discusses the extent to which humans confuse symbols that represent reality and reality itself.

Confusing the Real and the Fictive

Axsys as a Symbol - Palantir as Reality

AxSys, an artificial intelligence discussed at length in the CCRU Collected Writings is, from the glossary:

First true AI. Prophecied-programmed as a self-enhancing system of photonic metacomputing, it emerges as the organo-transcendent completion of Oecumenon, or techonomic realization of the noosphere. According to AOE [Architectonic Order of the Eschaton] traditions, if there was a God it would be Axsys.

Now we must define terms in the definition.¹ First term of order that is idiosyncratic to the CCRU universe, “Oecumenon,” which is the “security architecture supporting the megasocious of terrestrial capitalism.” Oecumenon is derived from the greek word oikoumenikós, meaning “for the whole world.”

Thus, Axsys is an artificial intelligence that works as the completion of the security architecture that supports global capitalism.

These names, are made to sound fictive. They evoke a sense of false safety in the reader with their ridiculousness. Axsys, to me, sounds like the name of an electronic-industrial music group from the early 2010s. Yet, fact is more ridiculous than fiction. We in fact are on our way to building an Axsys machine; we may even be closer than most of us realize. There are two companies that are currently gaining lots of momentum both on Wall Street and in the Pentagon: Palantir and Anduril. Besides the absolute fucking ridiculousness of having secretive companies that run classified operations for the U.S. military named after items from the god-damned Lord of the Rings, we must realize that these companies are driving surveillance and operations solutions for military, police, and private security. These companies are attempting to build an Axsys. Something that can predict your thoughts, movements, and actions; and move against you if necessary.

The Merging of Fiction and Reality

It is not difficult to observe how products like Palantir’s “Gotham” and Anduril’s “Lattice” are real-world entities that fit the archetype that is given by Axsys. CCRU is not the only fiction that has given us the framework to understand the world. When the real and the symbols that represent the real fails to be separated, we enter the realm of hyperreality.

In the west, proto-AI conceptualizations come down to us from the Greeks. Let us look to the giant Talos from Greek mythology. He was a giant of metal who was described as an “automaton.” Talos served a military purpose, guarding the island of Crete, and was defeated by trickery and intelligence — not through might — by Jason and the Argonauts. This symbol has reverberated throughout western media. In 1983’s War Games, WOPR — the AI gone-rouge — is defeated not through the sheer might of the United States military, but through cunning by the main character and his compatriots.

The west has been obsessed with creating artificial life for millennia, are we really so surprised that AI would emerge from myth and into reality?

Hypereschatologies

Often, we create our own demons. Our ancient stories of “Revelations of the End Times” still hold vice grips on more gullible populations. Our demons used to serve as moral plays teaching us not to mess without forces we cannot understand, to not question the will of nature, that type of thing.² With the emergence of technocapitalism, our demons --- our symbols --- are used to sell shitty products!

Is the AI Bubble Going to Burst? Or is AI too entrenched a symbol?

Like the metaverse before it, AI and other entrenched symbols often stumble on in the cultural zeitgeist. The shambling, capital-extracted corpse of a once-meaningful symbol for a cultural moment, an intrinsically human experience, lives on in trillion-dollar valuations by Standard and Poor.

When investors realize that we invested in AI not for an economic purpose, (investment certainly will not align with economic return in any meaningful way) but rather because of what AI represents to the cultural techostructure, the AI bubble will collapse. The dotcom bubble occurred because of the cultural symbol of an interlinked society would mean, and investment was not rational.³ I have a sneaking suspicion that, while AI will produce massive economic value for the world, it will inevitably fail to live up to expectations, and many companies will die up and down the supply chain.

To Answer the Title Question

The symbols that we use to mold our perceptions of reality from entrench themselves into our minds. We must protect ourselves from the psychic invasion from the past. There is a time-traveling element to our symbols. They emerge from our past to make us fear for our future. A future where we are soft-squishy things that have no mouth and must scream, a future war with rogue AI in computer simulations. The ancient symbols of AI were just that, artificial humans, with no real stakes beyond the Greek world. We have made it to the point where we have brought forth this symbol into reality. It has become hyperreal. Our fictions merged with the fact.

If we get an idea from a storyteller, and engineer that idea into a product, and that product destroys our world, has that fiction destroyed us?

Footnotes

1. If you want to be good at philosophy, just be prepared to recursively define terms. ↩

2. But of course you can buy your way out of the revelations for only 24 payments of $699.99! ↩

3. I have to use my MBA somehow so fuck you here is a post-structural economic analysis of artificial intelligence. Where is your god now? ↩