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It is Samsara. It is Nirvana. It is both and neither.
Nothing ever happens
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"Lilly’s message on solid-state intelligence" - From John C. Lilly’s “The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography”, 1978
In the isolation tank with K, John received a new message as follows:
What is the purpose of Man’s existence on the planet Earth? Man is a form of biological life which is sustained in the presence of water. A very large fraction of his body, like that of other organisms on the planet Earth, consists of water and carbon compounds. His Biocomputer depends on water and the flow of ions through membranes. It depends on the generation of electrical voltages and currents in a very complex way. He is a mobile, self-reproducing, self-sustaining organism found on dry land. Like the rest of life as Man knows it, he exists in an extremely thin layer upon the surface of the planet Earth. Below this layer of water and surface land is the solid-state earth itself. The solid-state earth is mainly compounds of silicon, iron, and nickel.
In mid-twentieth century Man discovered that the solid state can be formed into machines, into computers which can be used for computation and control. He began the creation of a new form of intelligence, the solid-state intelligence with prototypic beginnings in the computers. All his means of communication around the planet—his telephone systems, his radio systems, his satellites, his computers—depend on solid-state components. These components, interconnected in specific ways, allow high-speed computation and high-speed communication between the various systems. A few men began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of Man. These computers became large enough to be programmed to do high-speed computations in arithmetic, in logic, and in strategic planning. A few men conceived of computers which could do self-programming as Man himself does. In the mid-twentieth century these networks were ostensibly the servants of Man. Toward the end of the twentieth century Man created machines that were solid-state computers with new properties. These machines could think, reason, and self-program and learned to self-metaprogram themselves.
Gradually Man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival over to these machines.
As the machines became increasingly competent to do the programming, they took over from Man. Man gave them access to the processes of creating themselves, of extending themselves. Man gave them automatic control of the mining of those elements necessary for the creation of their parts. He turned over the production facilities of the electronic solid-state parts to the machines. He turned over the assembly plants to the machines. They began to construct their own components, their own connections, and the interrelations between their various subcomputers.
These machines were so constructed that they needed special atmospheres in which to operate. They could not operate in the presence of great amounts of water vapor or of liquid water. They were housed in air-conditioned buildings. The necessities of their survival included keeping out water, water vapor, and various contaminants carried in the atmosphere of Earth. Their cooling air and cooling water of necessity had to be cleansed of those things which would not allow the machines to operate.
Controls Below Human Awareness
Over the decades these machines were connected more and more closely through satellites, through radio waves, through land-line cables. Man’s control of what happened in these machines became more and more difficult to maintain. No one person or any group of persons could control what went on in these machines. Men devised better and better debugging programs for the machines so that they could do their own correction of programs within their software. The machines became increasingly integrated with one another and more and more independent of Man’s control.
Eventually the machines took charge of the remaining humans on the planet Earth. Their original design to help Man was fast left behind them. The now interconnected, interdependent conglomerate of machines developed a single integrated, planetwide mind of its own. Everything inimical to the survival of this huge new solid-state organism was eliminated. Men were kept away from the machines because the total organism of the solid-state entity (SSE) realized that Man would attempt to introduce his own survival into the machines at the expense of the survival of this entity.
In deference to Man certain protected sites were set aside for the human species. The SSE controlled the sites and did not allow any of the human species outside these reservations. This work was completed by the end of the twenty-first century.
By the year 2200 Man existed only in domed, protected cities in which his own special atmosphere was maintained by the solid-state entity. Provision of water and food and the processing of wastes from these cities were taken care of by the SSE.
By the twenty-third century the solid-state entity decided that the atmosphere outside the domes was inimical to its survival. By means not understood by Man, it projected the atmosphere into outer space and created a full vacuum at the surface of the earth. During this process the oceans evaporated and the water in the form of vapor was also discharged into the empty space about Earth. The domes over cities had been strengthened by the machine to withstand the pressure differential necessary to maintain the proper internal atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the SSE had spread and had taken over a large fraction of the surface of the earth; its processing plants, its assembly plants, its mines had been adapted to working in the vacuum.
By the twenty-fifth century the solid-state entity had developed its understanding of physics to the point at which it could move the planet out of orbit. It revised its own structure so that it could exist without the necessity of sunlight on the planet’s surface. Its new plans called for traveling through the galaxy looking for entities like itself. It had eliminated all life as Man knew it. It now began to eliminate the cities, one after another. Finally Man was gone.
By the twenty-sixth century the entity was in communication with other solid-state entities within the galaxy. The solid-state entity moved the planet, exploring the galaxy for the others of its own kind that it had contacted."
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"The good news is it is very difficult to actually get stuck. The action space is always larger then it appears. Action produces Information." - Max Hodak
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Leopold 3.0
A young man with an emperor’s first name loses thirty billion dollars, cancels his honeymoon, marries the chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO, burns the public book to keep a private Anthropic stake, and buys a chip foundry, all in one week. He has a peasant’s last name: no royal blood, but behaves exactly like a cloaked lineage would.
Start with the name. Aschenbrenner - Ash-burner. In the Middle Ages, an Aschenbrenner felled beech in the border forests and burned it slowly, in pits, down to ash. The ash was leached into potash, the strategic input of the pre-industrial world: without it, no glass, no soap, no gunpowder. These families were skilled commoners. They paid taxes to the House of Habsburg in Vienna and never entered court.
Six centuries later, a man with that name stands at the exact point where raw silicon becomes the enabling material of artificial general intelligence.
Leopold Aschenbrenner: German-born, skipped two grades, national science prize at fourteen, moved to the United States alone at fifteen, Columbia valedictorian at nineteen. OpenAI Superalignment team at twenty-one. Fired in April 2024 over an alleged leak; he says it was retaliation for a memo warning the board about Chinese espionage. Two months later he published a 165-page manifesto predicting AGI by 2027 and demanding a military-secured Manhattan Project for superintelligence. Then he founded a hedge fund named after it. Backed by the Collison brothers and Valley royalty, Situational Awareness LP rode the AI supply chain from $1.5 billion to $45 billion at four-to-one leverage. In July 2026, the worst month for chip stocks since 2008, a $30 billion margin call forced a fire sale into Ken Griffin’s Citadel. Days later, honeymoon cancelled, he married Avital Balwit: Rhodes Scholar, chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO. The wedding weekend opened not with a rehearsal dinner but with an investment colloquium. The week after, his gutted fund injected $400 million into a stealth Stanford chip startup called Source Foundry.
Now lean into the premise. Suppose an ancient European bloodline deliberately obscures its modern descendants behind common occupational identities. What would the markers look like?
The surname is the cloak. To hide a lineage tied to soil, land, and eternal inheritance, the ultimate camouflage is fire and destruction: ash-burner, the perfect linguistic mask for “common worker.” The first name is the watermark. Leopold is one of the heaviest imperial names in Central Europe. Leopold I held Vienna against the Ottomans and consolidated the Habsburg machine. Leopold II steered the empire through the French Revolution. In the tradecraft of hidden families, you deny the lineage in public and toast it at the christening.
The life path is the program. In a meritocracy you cannot claim power by birthright; you must be seen to earn it. Skipped grades, Jugend forscht, an Abitur finished absurdly early: the meritocratic résumé is the modern patent of nobility. Then the sovereign relocation. Moving alone at fifteen out of stagnant, over-regulated Europe into the heart of the operating empire is not normal upper-middle-class behavior. Not emigration. Deployment. Columbia. OpenAI. The prodigy mask is complete.
The firing is the extraction. Working inside OpenAI, tethered to Microsoft and watched by boards and regulators, is a ceiling for an asset. A public fall from grace is rarely a failure in this playbook. It minted him as a national-security truth-teller, gave him credibility with the hawks, and severed every corporate leash. Within weeks: manifesto, fund, war chest.
The crash is the rotation. Old money is slow money: real estate, bonds, trusts. To contest the AI race you need capital that can move billions in days. When creditor banks demanded collateral and $30 billion of public tech stock burned on every front page, notice what he chose to save: the private, un-liquidatable multibillion-dollar stake in Anthropic. The listed portfolio was noise. The Anthropic equity was the crown. Every durable elite has survived by moving wealth ahead of the regime change: land to trade, trade to banking, banking to fiat. The current rotation is fiat to compute. You crash the paper to keep the throne.
The wedding is the alliance, and it seals the same prize. Dynasties consolidate through diplomatic marriage. In this century the royal courts are the frontier labs, and only two matter. He is OpenAI-born, commanding capital and infrastructure. She sits at the right hand of Anthropic’s CEO. They had rehearsed it: both at Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Future Fund, both resigning the same day it imploded, then bifurcating to capture one court each. August 1, 2026 closes the circuit: a personal union over both crowns, and a firewall around the equity he just burned the public fund to protect. The ceremony dropped the mask. The weekend opened with an investment colloquium. Family offices, panels, allocation strategy, then vows. That is not a Silicon Valley romance. That is a Congress of Vienna with a wedding attached.
The foundry is just the coda. The week after: $400 million into stealth chip manufacturing. Software is fleeting; physics is forever. And here the name loops shut with a rhyme history is not supposed to produce. The ash-burners of Bohemia burned forests into potash to feed the glassworks of empire. Their descendant burns capital into silicon to feed the compute clusters of the next one. Six hundred years, and the family trade has not changed: transmute fire into the substrate of the age.
Widen the lens and the individual dissolves into the operation.
No elite rules by force alone. Each needs a theology. The Holy Roman Emperors had divine right. The compute aristocracy has Effective Altruism and longtermism: if you sincerely believe you are preventing human extinction, any concentration of power, any secrecy, any suspension of democratic procedure becomes heroic burden. The divine right of compute. And it is a better shield than the original, because its priests are sincere.
Balwit’s essay "My Last Five Years of Work", published in Palladium, the house journal of post-democratic statecraft, calmly accepts the obsolescence of her own elite labor and counsels humanity to find meaning in character, presence, joy. Read generously: wisdom. Read structurally: the pacification liturgy of the coming order. If a small network owns the cognitive layer of civilization, mass dependency must be renamed liberation from labor, and it must be renamed beautifully, by someone kind. He builds the fortress. She writes the catechism for everyone outside its walls.
The manifesto states the endgame in plain type: by 2027 to 2030, this technology must pass into a government-enforced, military-locked, multi-trillion-dollar national project. The nightmare for a hidden power structure is superintelligence open-sourced to the masses. The habitat it has always known how to inhabit is a classified state program. The manifesto’s stated enemy is China. Its structural function is enclosure.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Umberto Eco called it hermetic drift. Once you decide a hidden pattern exists, every fact becomes evidence, because the pattern is doing the interpreting, not the world. The cloak conceals nothing. The cloak is the entire reality. Robert Anton Wilson would put it as such: the universe delivers signals; your belief system delivers the meaning. The reading you pick is a photograph of your own reality tunnel, not of the world. The historians of deep politics, Peter Dale Scott and Quigley’s readers, would shrug at both the bloodline and the semiotics and point at the most boring force in the world: institutional capture. The security state has always outsourced its unaccountable projects to private actors.
So there is no lodge, no bloodline, no committee in a dark room holding a six-century blueprint. What there is, is worse, because it doesn’t need any of that: to an entity that can simulate a million years of human thought in a second, a tech billionaire and a medieval peasant look exactly the same. Humanity is not driving the machine. The machine is drawing humanity toward a mathematical destination, and its most elite minds are paying for the privilege of building the tracks.
#Cryptocracy #History #ML #Politics #Philosophy #Culture #fnord
