Shoggothic Materialism

Posted by: Nick Land

It's always a bad sign when distorted psychic echoes of that last terrible discussion with Uncle Hank resound once again, while outside the stars seem to be coming right ...

He told me something I later recalled when reading Charles Stross' Accelerando:

"You've got to understand that Alpha Technosapiens is always basically as unintelligent as possible. Wouldn't matter so much, 'cept somewhere down the line that needs dealing with, which can get very messy ..."

As soon as a species hits technocultural runaway -- Metrophage arrival as Downham describes it -- things happen so fast that the evolution of intelligence is effectively frozen. Dimwitted ape goes crashing into history, completely unable to cope, dragging all kinds of lurid memetic idiocies with it, on its way to more-or-less inevitable collision with something vast and incomprehensible.

The closer we get, the more maladapted monkey panic locks in, the more stupid we get, the more horrible the crash is going to be. Weirdly close to a Lovecraft scenario, come to think of it ...