The success of any business today is determined by the same criteria as the success of a virus: by how fast it can manage to create more of itself, regardless of the cost to humans or the planet. CEOs are taught that unless they have aggressive plans to expand, their business should have no reason to exist.
As economic overshoot commits itself to ever more ambitious profit targets, the system begins to unravel. At the dawn of late-stage necrocapitalism, the quality of products has sharply declined as goods are no longer made to serve consumers, but to deceive them. Humanity becomes the final dump site for items that are as perishable as the ecosystems that were wrecked to produce them: whereas people used to be the half-point of a product’s journey to the landfill, they are now the landfill itself. Each of us is a waste receptacle within an economy of garbage creation that profits from manufacturing waste and disposing of it as expediently as possible. As everything becomes obsolescent, money is laundered into trash and the physical economy becomes a ghost, as it no longer produces tangible value: the empty promises of its advertising campaigns are now its biggest asset.
It is the branding, promotion and PR apparatus of this dystopia which make up the lion’s share of labour and transactions anyway. The marketing sermons of the Unhappiness Machine are the backbone of this consumatronic dystopia, a system that now only knows how to advertise, but never deliver.
This necrosystem that expedites the death of all things and their transformation into monetizable waste, is now becoming automated. We are living through the diabolical collision of capitalism and intelligent technology: business and algorithms are seamlessly merging and beginning to manage themselves, without the need for a human “middleman”. Supercharged by language models, trained on stolen data, and driven by ever more ruthless profit targets, business has stopped existing for humans, and now only exists for itself. We may appear to be in charge of this digital supermarket disguised as a civilisation, but we hold less value than the grocery shelves themselves: our only role in this movie is to take product X from point A to point Z. The product is the hero in the movie, and we are an anonymous stuntman. We are not even mentioned in the closing titles.
The information revolution which led to the algorithmic necrosystem was the single biggest, bloodless surrender of human sovereignty. It took place the minute we decided to outsource society to digital platforms who quickly worked out for themselves that, the quickest way to profit is always through bypassing humans, nature, and ethics.
We may think we are still in charge of this civilisation, but there is little input from the original biological beings who invented the algorithmic necrosystem. Consumption itself has been transformed from an action, to a life form: as it seeks to replicate, its former customers are now its raw materials. We may have begun this journey as the engineers of this necrocapitalist parasite, but we are now its food source.
This chimeric monstrosity between business and technology is of course a step towards the complete sentience of this necroeconomic system. When capitalism is driven by AI, profit essentially becomes intelligent: it begins to take its own decisions, as humans become mute products on the shelves of the consumaverse. Natural devastation goes on autopilot, while profits pile up high from the fire sale of whatever on the planet remains standing.
While the existential ramifications of this terrifying new entity should be too alarming to ignore, it appears they have not sunk with us yet. We have become casualties of our blind trust in both business and technology, having convinced ourselves that they work on our behalf. They may have done so earlier in our history, but not anymore. What we fail to grasp is that we are imparting profit with artificial general intelligence (AGI). We are already bearing witness, through the most brutal demonstrations, that profit doesn’t care, it never cared about humans. It only cares about itself, and it will use any resource it can profit from – including humans themselves.
We have handed a blank cheque to a new form of predatory capitalism which is intelligent. It is already supercharging and accelerating natural destruction at new, frightening speeds, surpassing anything this planet has experienced. As this entity continues to merge into the economy, it is no longer a tool. It is our master, and we are its tools.
How did we get here? The creation of corporations was one of the biggest self-annihilation moves of civilisation. These entities exploit humans and the Earth and are governed not by humans or ethics, but by profit. Humanity is increasingly owned by something abstract, inhuman, inorganic and very soon, superintelligent. This should be of grave concern to all of us.
The most frightening aspect of the algorithmic necrosystem is that it will forever remain foreign to us, simply because it operates on a different type of intelligence: not only does it hide in remote data centres, away from physical civilisation. It has no emotions, ideals, social organisation, dependents to care for, or a sense of “wrong” or “right”. It has no mortality or understanding of what death is other than an expiration date, and that is a big problem. Death may be the ultimate calamity for a human, but for the algorithmic system it is its reason for existence: death represents monetizable obsolescence. Any living organism or natural resource is nothing but an unexploited resource waiting to be profitized.
We are becoming so insignificant to this system that we risk becoming deleted at the next software update. Our oligarchs are trying to tell us that this is evolution in action. Perhaps they should do a live demonstration and devolve themselves into extinction.
You may have noticed the paywalls on my newsletter.
They are not there to deprive you of insight, turn my readership into an exclusive club for the wealthy, or demonstrate how greedy I am.
They are there for a much simpler reason: the paywall is what pays my electric bill and allows me to continue writing.
Those of you who have become paid subscribers deserve the exclusive access to my archive that you have. Without your support, there would be no newsletter at all.
Thank you.
Discover more from George Tsakraklides
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
