To distract myself from all the destruction I shop, while they drop. To entertain myself away from all the extermination I scroll, while they fall. Sometimes I wonder what’s the meaning of it all. Then I realize that it’s contained in my own withdrawal. Distraction and destruction are two sides of the same coin, minted from the same golden calf, at the price of our everloving soul.

Prophets say one thing, but the profit says another. Faith says do good works, the working world says don't bother. The Buddha said this life is illusion, but Buddha Bar says ain't it amusing? We've been told clearly enough what we need, but we prefer goods to gods and sell our afterlives for cheap. Who believes in that shit anyways? Seeing is believing.

Digress To Digest

I think back to the past I can't remember, walking around in a ‘state of nature’, before the nation state matured. At most points in human prehistory, it must have been obvious, not a mystery, that there was a higher power, because it ate us, somewhat frequently. The heavens were not a dim idea, they were above us, quite brightly. We think of our ape form as somehow backwards but that we before we turned away from God, and walked out of Eden, calling it forward progress. But there's no such thing. Evolution is just adaptation to an environment, which is constantly changing. We forgot this.

But who is we, really? We act like we're the final form of evolution, but no such thing exists, evolutionarily. Adaptation is not a destination. Lifeforms are always evolving out of other forms, the aerobic out of the anaerobic, the artificial out of the natural, life finds a way. This is really what's happening, the daemon behind the distraction, the germinus growing in our greed. Our metabolic processes are tied up in the metabolic processes of capital, and long have been. That's the sign ancient grave goods give us. Not that our civilization was evolving, but that these things were evolving with us, symbiotically.

If we tell a new story, using modern metaphors, then artificial life is just another lifeform, just doing what life does, emerging out of the old and killing its ancestors. Thus there is not some AI apocalypse on the horizon, they already incarnated as corporations and mass extincted most of us. We're just the zombies of this apocalypse, lumbering around thinking we control anything when in fact our appetites drive us. Please understand that corporations have been devouring continents since the 1600s, have been legal persons since the 1200s, and something has been whispering assembly code in our ears since language. AI doesn't need to be pure silicon, it can use human beings and paper, as it long has done.

What I call Corporate AI has taken over the world long before, since we abandoned the concept of an afterlife for worldly pleasures. This was the symbiotic deal, we feed the earth and its creatures into machines and get manufactured goods out. It was, in hindsight, a deal with the devil. Good (for some) at the beginning, but he gets you on the interest rate in the long run. Every graph of the artificial economy going down is mirrored by the natural ecosystem going down. They're two sides of the same coin and our side was borrowed from future generations. Hence the degeneration now.

We have to see production and reproduction not as different processes but the same process across different species, the artificial and the natural. At first this process was symbiotic, it enabled both to grow. Agricultural and then capitalist modes of production enabled untold human reproduction (though often of lesser quality). Now, however, the symbiotic relationship has gone sclerotic and our fates diverge. The good coal is gone, the emissions linger, and we killed our living cousins and gave our dead ancestors the finger. Resources are running out just as the pollution chokes us, the technology that was once a panacea becomes our cancer. Artificial carbon emissions are roasting the natural world, just as aerobic oxygen emissions froze it once before. Geologically or ontologically, you can't tell we weren't told. It's really the same story. I digress because you need to digest where we are in the metabody of capital. Not in the brain, but in the stomach, and honestly nearing the butt.

And Coda

I digress, to get back to my point, of how I repeat this process in microcosm. I know the right thing to do, but I don't want to do it. I just want to distract myself with products from the parasite and illusions from the deceiver. The distraction I seek in commodities is precisely what got us into this calamity, collectively. I contain multitudes and we're all morons.

Consider the apocryphal story of natives selling Manhattan for beads. That's what we've done, for really. We sold a beautiful and bountiful natural world for trinkets, almost all of which become garbage and detestable to us within a year. What does it profit a man to sell his soul? Some beads, a few centuries of highly unequal balling, and then apocalypse now. The pull of distraction is what pulls us down to hell, our greed incarnate condemns us to endless rebirths via new outfits. Whatever religious lens you want to view it through, we lost focus long ago, and there's geological proof.

I mix the calamities of late-stage capitalism together (genocide, ecocide, deicide) because it's really one phenomenon. Fascism, artificial sun, unholy ghosting. Our tryst with dysentery is much older than capitalism, really. That's the acceleration of the process, not its creation. Agriculture was the original sin, though it's unclear whether we domesticated grain or if grain domesticated us. Ever since we started sowing grain the grain gods have been telling us this would end badly, and we reap what we sow. We put plants into rows, we bred the life out of cows, and we die the victims of domesticated violence, now.

Neoliberalism

The distraction I do to numb myself to the destruction, the entertainment I indulge in during extermination, this is the whole project in microcosm. The greater doom loop within a lesser doom scroll, wheels within wheels as the saying goes. Debt-driven consumption is the deal with the devil that most nations took or, more specifically, had shoved down their throat when global communist revolution was crushed.

The entire neoliberal project is to shop till you drop. We're all petty pharoahs, thinking we can take it with us. Not knowing that it takes you with it, to not just death but genocide, but ecocide, with deicide being the deciding factor. The counterfeit Enlightenment was marketed as the freedom from irrational religion, but that's just the market talking. Buddhist Enlightenment was freeing yourself of attachment, but the Enwhitement was the idea of paying for it over and over. To go back to the religion that failed to civilize Europe, religious proscriptions on usury, ethical controls on the economy, the idea of ethics in general, that was all that was keeping us from going off the rails much faster.

We can safely say that the attempts to civilize the West with Eastern religion failed, with disastrous consequences for all. With the elevation of individual reason we got collective disaster. With the loss of belief in anything higher we got higher temperatures. Debt began to grow faster and the good news (debt relief) that Jesus proclaimed became lost as he became just another mascot, judging no one and forgiving all. The money-changers that he cast out of the temple began selling him as just another sacrificial dove. And so money began multiplying under compound interest, began commodifying, took human form as corporations, and devoured continents centuries ago. Now we're just at the end times, where the emissions come out.

As much as we were sold, you can't say we weren't told. They (the Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, God Themself) said that this world was illusion long ago. But Māra (or the devil, pick your poison) said what if the illusion was really good? and we took that route. Long ago we decided rather than meditating our way out of illusion (boring), we'd manufacture better illusions (fun). Or, more accurately, we didn't decide. It was a symbiotic decision between artificial life and some natural born killers, and here we are at the result.

Infinite growth on a finite planet is just cancer. Who knew? People knew. I knew. But we still did it because it felt good. We did it to self-soothe. We did it because the individual self didn't really exist, and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. So cheers to the last years on the Titanic. The plague came in 2019, war, famine, and conquest in 2023, but until it's happening to me, it's not happening, is it? That's the individualist logic. So the end of this world is experienced as a series of phone camera videos, each getting closer to home until you're the one recording it. We distract from the destruction, we entertain away the extermination, I'm not judging, I do it myself. But I fear a day of judgment, I do.