Crypto, VR, and now AI are being used to incinerate energy and pretend like that's a real economy. The logic is where there's smoke there's fire; if something takes energy, it must make money. However, sometimes where there's smoke, people are just getting high.

The White versions of crypto, VR, and AI have just successively inflated bubbles to hide the fact that their real economy blew up long ago. It's like a car on blocks trying to impress people with loud exhaust noises. The enitre White economy, at this point, is a thermodynamic cargo cult that mistakes waste heat for actual productive work. To put it bluntly, it puts the fart before the horse.

Use vs. Exchange Value

Energy use is historically correlated with economic activity, but mistaking correlation for causation, the Whites are using hideous amounts of energy to contribute little or negative use value. This is a long way of saying their tech is wasteful and useless, except for causing pollution.

Crypto has no use beyond being crypto, VR had no use beyond being cool, and while AI at least does something, it's not economically enough to justify its sky-high valuation. The use value of all these technologies is minimal or sometimes negative, but the exchange value is astronomical. This marks the final divorce of the concepts of use value and exchange value under capitalism. They just don't give a shit anymore. In other countries these technologies are being used for narrow purposes, but in the casino that is White capitalism, they're just games they're betting the whole house on. The watchword is now to the moon for no earthly reason. It is, as Marx said, a stock-jobbing swindle.

The best explanation I've heard for crypto is, "imagine if idling your car 24/7 could solve Sudoko puzzles that you can use to buy heroin." The explanation for VR is idling your car to play a car-driving game. And the explanation for AI is idling a car to answer idle questions. The overriding explanation is the same. Burn energy now, and the economic value will materialize, somehow, while you can profit on the idea immediately. But this is getting it entropy, ie the arrow of time, backwards completely.

In thermodynamics, work produces waste heat, but the idea here is that waste heat will produce work, somehow reversing entropy. Venture capitalists thus end up sounding like cargo cultists. They really act like if they build a big enough 'runway' a cargo plane full of profits will show up. So let's discuss that metaphor, because while it's widely misused, the anthropological backstory is fascinating.

Cargo Cults

Cargo cult is a term which, in popular, often racist terms, refers to Melanesians (literally black islanders) getting casuality backwards and trying to manifest planes by building runways. As Peter Worsley says in his empathetic book (1968), "We have seen also the cultivation of large gardens and the building of stores, sheds, jetties and landing-grounds for the reception of goods which will never come."

I learned of cargo cults as basically irrational, but Worsley says "it is clear that the labelling of the cults as ‘irrational’ begs the question. Indeed, a Melanesian might make out a good case for flinging the label of ‘madness’ which has often been applied to these cults back at us, and asking whether his people, given the knowledge they possessed, have not made quite logical criticisms and interpretations of our own unpredictable and irrational society." He said, "This underlying irrationality of European society not only created great hardships; it undermined confidence in rational activity, it created frustrations, and it sapped morale more than mere ignorance of productive processes could do." This defines the feeling of living under White Empire, and in between real rebellions, cargo cults were one way of rebelling against them.

But who's the cargo cult now? Who is building data centers for profits that will never come, based on nerd prophets that promise both the end of the world and the end of want? The underlying irrationality of White culture, with the entropy hose turned outwards for so long, has finally boomeranged back upon them. They blew smoke up our asses for so long, but look at them now.

I think of my American friends in a U-Haul van, returning their decor to Target and Amazon the day after their wedding to save money. I helped them do this, it was fascinating and odd. I think of them hustling various crypto coins to get what, frankly, they deserved. They had education and worked, but basic living was just impossibly difficult by the time they grew up. As Worsley said about the Melanesians, "The intense desire for European goods was common to the whole people. They were willing to work and trade for the goods, but had little opportunity to acquire them in this way." Can't you see the resemblance? As Worsley went on,

Though there is no real solution in the Cargo cult—for the Cargo will never come—the ardent wishes and hopes poured into the movement bolster it up and revive it time after time despite failure. And large-scale activities, some of them quite practical, are carried out under the stimulus of these fantastic yearnings. There is not merely destruction and avoidance of rational economic activity. We have seen also the cultivation of large gardens and the building of stores, sheds, jetties and landing-grounds for the reception of goods which will never come. But the latter activities are just as rational to the people who carry them out as increased production in the gardens. As Firth has pointed out, the work itself is an emotional outlet: ‘They seek their solution in an imaginary projection. But they bolster it up by elaborate work. In one sense then, the work is not ineffective. It is in itself part of the satisfaction sought. It is part of the symbolic validation given to the idea that the things wanted are morally justifiable. Part of the message of the airstrip or the cargo wharf to the observer is “What we want is right.”

In this way, Worsley's study of the peripheral Blacks seems to speak to the core White experience now. Except the Whites have a market where these fantastic yearnings can be hallucinated more convincingly, and gambled upon. So their cult can feel real for a few quarters, but never whole. The Whites can get symbolic validation through symbol manipulation, but one day the runway runs out, and the planes full of goodies won't come. But until then, what fun.

Cultist movements like crypto, VR, and AI have come to dominate White culture, complete with alternately booming and dooming prophets. As Worsley said about that lot,

In these movements, a prophet announces the imminence of the end of the world in a cataclysm which will destroy everything. Then the ancestors will return, or God, or some other liberating power, will appear, bringing all the goods the people desire, and ushering in a reign of eternal bliss. The people therefore prepare themselves for the Day by setting up cult organizations, and by building storehouses, jetties, and so on to receive the goods, known as ‘cargo’ in the local pidgin English. Often, also, they abandon their gardens, kill off their livestock, eat all their food, and throw away their money.

You can see this in the White AI boom, where they're building massive data centers for a product that can, for 99% of people, be run off their computer or phone, and on much cheaper Chinese models. But they keep making the models more complicated, more expensive, more energy intensive because efficiency isn't the point, the work is the point, or more accurately, the waste is the point. As that guy Firth said, "They seek their solution in an imaginary projection. But they bolster it up by elaborate work."

What capitalists want is a stop to the declining rate of profit without taking the next historical step to socialism because that would mean, of course, sharing it. What the White Empire wants is a return to imperialist super-profits without the empire, because that would require still scaring it. And part of the message of unnecessary data centers is “What we want is right.” That's it all going to work out in the end because... bullshit.

Like cargo cults that don't actually deliver cargo, you can build the data centers, but disproportionate profits will never come. AI delivers very little economic value and has been turned into an open-source commodity already. There is no mass market for solving frontier math problems and AGI will always be more expensive than someone in India just having sex and feeding the kid dhal until they can run Microsoft, as the system works now. The point is not whether the cult is cool – cults can be pretty cool – but whether they produce actual economic value, and none of the virtual cults the Empire is trying do. But the Empire builds these cargo cults anyways, because why be a sensible common when you can rule as a fool?

The Profits

Like in Melanesian cargo cults, the White AI prophets keep saying their AI is about to end the world as a way of advertising. They're not confessing, they're bragging. Like American cars which seem more appealing the closer they get to tanks, Americans seem to want their technology as destructively extra as possible. MOUNTAIN DEW XXXTREME++. Thus the danger of AI is hyped up, though this is not news to most of the world, already enslaved by algorithms like the British East India Company. Inside the White core this danger is marketed as bringing sexy back, and also maybe requiring a government bailout or else my product might kill everybody.

White AI is weird end-of-the-world cult which also simultaneously promises material abundance and total destruction, presumably by the same mechanism. But I guess it's not that weird, this seems to be the central contradiction of many religions. However, whereas the Melenesian cult leaders used this contradiction to rebel against White Empire, the White cultists are trying to restore it.

Whereas a Melanesian cult leaders, Ndugumoi, "announced that the order of the world was very shortly to be reversed. Whites were to serve natives and chiefs were to be inferior to commoners," melanin-deprived cult leaders like Dario Amodei says, "If we execute these measures well, I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly." That is, put the Chinamen in their place, building our railroads but not riding on them. But it's far too late for that now.

China is already the world's largest economy in real terms, and communism by far the most productive system unless you count everything four times, like capitalists do. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle, the best engineers are already back in Asia. This throws the White Empire into a hysteria, which you can read about in old Worsley by just reversing the names. He said,

The hysterical phenomena found in most of the cults, equally, do not derive from any peculiar inherent psychological characteristics of Melanesians [or the Melan-ain'ts, in our instance]. They are the product of the ambivalent attitudes and feelings of men torn between hatred of the [non] White people who had destroyed the old way of life and who now dominated them by force, and the desire to obtain for themselves the possessions of these very [non] Whites.

You can see this all over the White Empire as it collapses. They are torn between (undeserved) hatred of non-White people like Chinese and Iranians who are – simply by existing – destroying the White way of life, which is domination. Iran is able to defend itself by force and China manufactures most of their possessions and they just can't deal with it. So the Whites retreat into a literally imaginary world. They make cargo cults out of crypto, then VR, then AI, retreating to a virtual world as they lose the real one.

This article is fine, it's done, but I have some weird photos and videos from clicking on Telegram ads that I just wanted to share with paying subs. I think it's the same phenomenon playing out across the underbelly of the White economy as on top.

Other Cults