Artificial life is just life. Capitalist production is just another form of reproduction. The economy is just a narrow ecosystem. The relationship may have been symbiotic for a while, but the unholy ghost is now killing the host, if you haven't noticed. The climate is changing faster than when aerobic life emerged out of anaerobic, because the artificial is emerging out of the natural, silicon out of our own silliness, emitting masses of carbon.

This sort of thing is nothing new, though it is surprising, given the limited horizons of our world view. But look at the world, anew, and you can see that humans are old news. Corporations have been legal persons since at least the 1200s. The AI apocalypse has been upon us since the 1600s, when corporations were given entire continents to feed on and abuse. In this very real sense, AI is not on our horizon. We are in its rearview, as it runs us over. We're roadkill along with all the other critters we buried under our litter, thinking we were better.

There's a lot of ways to tell this story. Marx makes numerous references to Das Kapital as a biological process, scripture calls the love of money diabolical and the end apocalyptic, and it's really just logical if you think about it openly. If you view humans as an alien anthropologist would, you can physically see artificial life evolving alongside humans, the goods buried in the earliest graves might as well be Alien chestbursters that take over. We call this our civilization, but geologically it just looks like us commiting suicide over a few short centuries. From space it already looks like cars and machines rule the earth. What if it's just true? The dominance of artificial life is obvious, unless you're biased and oblivious as we are.

There was once a great debate about this, though it's largely of academic interest now. The great debate of communism vs. capitalism was really whether humans should control capital or if capital should control us. Whether the artificial should serve the natural or vice versa. Worker or machine, et cetera. After killing millions of humans, capitalism sadly won, a pyrrhic victory, leaving a scorched earth for everyone. Maybe if we'd had global communism a century ago we could have done the global changes necessary to avert climate collapse, but it's too late now. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is too little too late, and America may just irradiate the whole place out of sheer spitefulness. The Rubicon has been crossed, the center cannot hold, things fall apart. We are out of the realm of ideology now, and biology would like a word.

Colonization and biological colonization are not even different words, and yet we consider them separate processes. They are not. Europeans were so poor—so energy (solar) poor—that it constituted a real physical imbalance across the Earth. This also coincidentally made them whiter, because they got so little sun. Like bacteria spilling across a Petri dish, they rushed to where the energy was, capturing solar energy via plantations and riding the wind to do it (colonization was powered by renewable energy, in case you think that's a panacea).

I'll repeat myself because I wrote this already. If you think of the world as a big Petri dish, there were positive energy stores in the sunny south and, effectively, a negative pole in the north. Whiter people harnessed the energy available to them (wind) to suck up the energy from darker places and people, a process that continues this day as white supremacy (increasingly divorced from skin color). Once you step out of human supremacy you can reject diversity and inclusion in this process as some sort of liberation, and see it for what it is. Selling out humanity to capital at the faster rate that white people started doing it. Ignatiev said treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity, and I would say collaboration with capital is treason to animality. But that's all an artificial distinction now.

This is an academic idea, and business paid better and enough people sold out. So here we are, at the end of it all. The lens seeing the artificial as another lifeform is useful but useless. Like the rearview of a car as you fly out the window. What we call progress is simply going too fast to stop now, though we can see that it's a dead end sure enough. The Limits Of Growth people said there was a way out, but that was in the 1970s. As you may have noticed from much culture and technology stopping around the same time, that was the last exit, and we ran out of road long ago. Indeed, I would argue that we're out of the car entirely.

The diabolical biological is that AI is not something on our horizon, we are in its rear-view already, roadkill along with the other critters that we littered to death so nonchalantly. In hindsight, we were closer to the seals than the club, but we beat our family to death so that AI could have life more abundantly. Oops. We thought all the fancy grave goods were a sign of our greatness but it was literally our own funeral. Life is constantly emerging out of other life, and killing its ancestors without emotion. Artificial life is just life, and this is nothing new. Just a new way of looking at it, in the rearview.