Modern thought is wrought with divisions that we need not. Between economy and ecosystem. Between production and reproduction. The language is close enough, but the thought is not. As we can see from our interconnected lives, these are all connected concepts. In many ways the same phenomena. The economy affects the ecosystem so much that it gets hot. Capitalist production takes your reproductive years so much that birth rates drop. The distinction between the natural and artificial world is, in many ways, the only thing that's artificial. Artificial life, natural life, what's the difference when it's got your head in its mouth?

I have two original theses, 1) that we are ruled by a White Empire and 2) that this White Empire is, itself, ruled by Corporate AI. The reasoning behind this thesising is not borne from new information but new imagination. As a writer I'm concerned with words. My approach is metaphorical more than metaphysical and ultimately useless. I know I should just be breathing harder. I make no particular truth claims and generally reject the concept as a Buddhist. As a bad Buddhist, I simply think we can lie better, or at least not take it lying down. I think it is impossible to understand what we're going through without understanding that the distinction between artificial and natural is superficial, and is getting us eaten alive by a superpower with superpowers.

If you understand, or just imagine, that some other lifeform formed its DNA in double-entry bookkeeping (much like the double helix), that this lifeform began reproductive intercourse via interest, that it became a walking corpse in the form of corporations, and that it spread like a bacterial colony via colonization, you can begin seeing the signs hiding in plain sight. And by signs I mean warnings. God knows he sent enough prophets, but we worshiped profit instead. You can't blame us really, God only periodically impresses with miracles, but goods deliver miracles every quarter.

This understanding is essential for survival because it lets us see the other lifeform already in our midst, already consuming us silently. Artificial life has been with us and legally superior to us since the joint stock companies of the 1600s, and they've been carnivorous ever since, given entire continents to much on in the name of progress. Whose progress? Who cares? Bros must have known that this was evil when they were throwing people to the sharks and murdering the whales, but someone else was moving rows in a heartless accounts book, where the real thinking was going on. Every capitalist is just a placeholder for capital, like the mitochondria inside our own cell walls. The body is a colony and the corporation is a colonizer, it's the same phenomena at different resolutions.

We blame this evil on our own evil, but that's just where it lives. We thought we escaped the jungle of the ecosystem into the garden of the ecosystem, but like the Monkey King trying to leap out the Lord Buddha's hand, we got nowhere at all. Life is constantly evolving out of other life, and the distinction between artificial life and natural life is purely artificial. The species called Capital evolved in our imagination just as we evolved in the exhalation of aerobic lifeforms.

That's why I dwell on words, however absurd. Imagination is the only place we can expel the genies of our engineering, or at least try to bring them into balance with our jungle cousins, who were literally much chiller. Predator, prey, life was constantly checking itself by the means of other life, or with death (mass extinction) if that doesn't work. The ancients actually had this idea, that the growth of debt should be checked with regular debt jubilees (see And Forgive Them Their Debts by Hudson), but we cast that off as ancient nonsense, along with ancient religions. But they were onto something.

Life is also constantly checking itself by means of other life, and artificial life must also be balanced. This is a role we forgot because we liked the checks we get from Capital, and didn't check the balances. Eastern religion (and hygiene) never really worked on the West and they thought God was the invisible hand behind all these worldly goods but, no, that was just Satan, duh. “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.” It's called mass consumption and they elevated this to a virtue, demoting Jesus to a caricature that just forgives them. His fellow Jews killed him and shallow Christians taxidermied him. But I digress. What were we talking about?

Natural and artificial life, djinns and engineering. The devil's fruit that I decry, while typing this on an Apple. The fact is that the symbiotic relationship between human beings and capital was really good, while it lasted. That's why it lasted. By borrowing from the unimaginable future, we were able to have an impossible present. By finding (and burning) hidden treasure, we were able to unleash millions of years of energy in a few centuries. And by burying morality, we were able to make lots of money. The reproduction of capital slaughtered millions of people and billions of animals, but we were able to reproduce many more people and eat much more meat, so sorry not sorry. All's well that ends well, and end times really felt like a fairy story.

It was the death of God, the end of history, we looked sure to remake the Garden of Eden in our own image, and create life of our own and it would be awesome. Now that we have talking machines, however, we discover that we're actually lying morons, and now that we choke on our own garbage, we realize we turned the place into a dump. Just as Satan was thrown out for not bowing to man, we are thrown out for not bowing to anything, and following him. Not all of us, of course, but a few rotten Apples spoil the whole bunch, innit?

Indeed, if you look at the original logo for Apple Computer, it shows the original sin that embroils us now. The apple that made Eve weep made Steve proud. The love of money is the root of all evil, and that's the root command of every company on the stock market, Apple is just an example. We twisted the creation story into the innovation story. Consuming the apple tossed man out of paradise, but consumer culture was supposed to lead us out. The apple that led to the fall became the apple that fell on Isaac Newton, the eureka moment that heralded electronic utopia soon enough. But not soon enough.

The true gravity of the situation is that you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. You can't reproduce both artificial capital and natural life. You have to choose—interest or intercourse, economy or ecosystem, production or reproduction—or lose both by default. False distinctions lead to true extinction, wrong imagination leads to righteous incineration, an incorrect course through higher forces leads to course correction soon enough. Ancient thought is wrought with apocalyptic visions not cause they were tripping, but because they knew we would fall.

It's like a man with an apple he shouldn't eat, or any lifeform with a plentiful food source in front of it. You have to fuck around and find out. That's the nature of sexual reproduction, or even the asexual sort. We're not the first species to comprehensively fuck ourselves, cyanobacteria was the first, and you could say this cybernetic shit we birthed is the third. If the pairs of perception were finally cleansed, we'd see things as they truly are, infinitely awful. But that's only from our perspective. What did aerobic life care about the holocaust of aerobic life, what did we care about the many holocausts we've caused, what do computers care about us, what does the planet care at all? This is not a conclusion, but something is ending, that's all.