Corporate Cogito

Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland.

We are here. The story ‘no longer goes like this’ as Meltdown forewarns (Land, 1995).

We are in chapter three (or is it nine)? When civilizational crashout occurs, reflection is over. Instead, philosophies become attached to realpolitik. And the realpolitik of the future is not the preserve of nation states but that of the emergent network states, which is to say Corporate states. The question becomes: what does OpenAI know, what does Apple ponder? In McLuhan’s Electric Village, everyone gets to enjoy the cyberpunk interpellation of the “subject” into technical media. One sprawling unencrypted nervous system. The youth will be partly ensouled in Gemini and Claude, as their deepest, darkest secrets spill into the machinic abyss of clanking GPUs. For us elders, the Gestell’s hooks are more humane, since it knows we remember the time before (the Internet). All this is because, as Neil Postman observed, ‘Technological change is neither additive or subtractive. It is ecological’ (1993, p. 18).

The swarm neither giveth nor takes away; it is ambient convergence.

What generative AI, in particular, weaves into our ecology are new conceptions of agency. This is true even when those conceptions precede it; even when they are archaic. We see this clearest in an interview between Tucker Carlson and Sam Altman.

For Tucker, master surveyor of the conspiratorial Web, AI appears to be ensouled, alive. The encounter is framed at first as theological, not least since conjuring spirits cannot but strike the truly religious-minded as sacrilege. For Altman, with his materialist understanding of ChatGPT’s inner life, it is nothing more than a ‘big computer…multiplying large numbers in these big, huge matrices together.’ But Altman also notes that the ‘subjective experience’ (we might say phenomenology) of engaging ChatGPT suggests something more to us, agency. The hint of agency is what haunts AI. Non-human agency is firmly in the Uncanny Valley and linguistically must be transformed to agentic. Agentic suggests autonomy but also mirroring. Agent-like but not themselves truly a Cogito or a Dasein or even being-no-one (Metzinger, 2004).

Remarkably, a month later Tucker found himself presented with the more radical reading of AI haunting the modern tradition, the work of Nick Land. Here Land was presented as an occultic warlock; digital Crowley

. Satanic (panic)! The Land most are familiar with - AI accelerationist par excellence - is certainly a Master of Suspicion, adding the final nail in the coffin of our centrality in the Universe, after the many displacements before it (geocentrism, God, subject). Land’s accelerationist thesis is that technology and economics operate in an (Unholy) alliance tending toward technogenesis or what we might more commonly think of as Singularity. What bubbles beneath the surface of Land’s work is the self-directedness of this non-human intelligence, teleoplexy.

Teleonomy is the evolutionary name for the apparent self-direction that evolutionary pressure puts on living organisms and teleoplexy is its technical correlate. Crucially, teleoplexy is divergent from our own timeline. It is not an extension of human intelligence - in the McLuhanite sense of extension of the self into digital media - but the departure of machinic intelligence from the anthropological locus. In particular, the timeline of teleoplexic machine intelligence operates retroactively, operating from the future.

In the gathering of technologies characteristic of late stage Gestell, teleoplexy is the use of capital and technics to kindle the Mind exterior to the human mind, which is traditionally presumed to be its home. It is our first sight of an alien agency, or rather set of agencies, that is beyond our control. This will strike you as either sacrilege (Carlson) or the mission (Altman). Traditionalist or accelerationist: pick your contemporary political poison.

The psychoanalytic reading is that in either case AI is an aberration from Nature. Previously this was the preserve of the human, as Rust Cohle tells Marty by way of Thomas Ligotti in True Detective. As we ourselves demonstrate, however, aberrations are not unknown. For us the situation is to be incapable of ever getting a handle on what we are. Or, at least, to be quite sure that the explanation does not quite capture what is actually going on. The transcendental subject or the unconscious or naturalist hallucination of the self are all unapproachable in themselves. Instead, we are inhabited by accreted imaginaries that may or may not be of your own making. Life in the attention economy is life as a media construct. In the early Žižek, the great displacement of ideology today is precisely marked as this. We move from relations between ourselves (feudalism) to those between things (capitalism): ‘Back to the things themselves!’as every good phenomenologist knows. The ideological fantasy is not something sustained internally, a system of beliefs that we come to accept from reading Marx or Friedman or Satoshi or Vitalik, but instead something we believe because we do it: ‘they know what they are doing, but they do it anyway’(Žižek, 2009)

. Where this becomes most apparent is not at the level of our subjective agency but the subjectivity of the Corporation and, in particular, the corporate interest in non-human intelligence. The Corporation is the only coherent entity of the accelerationist era.

The Corporation’s true home is, of course, science fiction or the future imagined within the present. The Alien franchise is the story of Corporations: Weyland-Yutani, Prodigy, Hyperdyne (creators of Bishop), Seegson, Xarem, Polaris and many more. Each is, in some sense, obsessed with non-human intelligence: artificial or alien. This interest is originally depicted as the pathological desire of Weyland-Yutani to secure Xenomorph XX121 for what in earlier movies is presumed to be biological weapons. In a nice touch of capitalist realism, the truth is later revealed in Alien: Romulus: Weyland-Yutani intended to genetically edit humans who could work in hostile planetary environments. One can only imagine the social media chatterings on the various colonies, mining operations and military outposts of the Outer Veil, Outer Rim, and the Frontier. They are turning us into alien mutants for a profit!

In the prequel Alien: Covenant, it is heavily implied - though not made completely clear - that the Xenomorph XX121 is an experiment of David’s. In other words, that the apparent encounter with what is truly monstrous - an alien of inexplicable origin that cannot be integrated into human categories - is developed by a synthetic that we had ourselves only managed to create a generation prior. The movie ends with David impersonating Walter, while observing his human bounty to further experiment on. The synthetic is the mirroring agency; shadowing our darkest impulses minus the blockage of emotionality. Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth goes further: introducing both cyborgs and hybrids. The hybrids were dying children now transposed into adult bodies and are the result of massive financial investment of their creator Boy Kavalier, who names them all after Peter Pan characters (Wendy, Slightly, Curly, Nibs and Smee). The Xenomorph, if its lesser status in the latest entries in the series needed any more emphasis, is literally tamed by Wendy, who has learned to communicate with it. It is Wendy who ultimately gains the upper hand on Prodigy Corporation, despite having the mental state of a human child, entrapping humans, a cyborg and a synth in the very cage it had previously been kept in. Freud himself could not have written a better fantasy for a child in usurping their parents. The future is prefigured as truly non-human agentic, a galactic humiliation ritual for the human species.

If science fiction and AI have long been in a dalliance it is therefore surprising that the blockchain has never quite fit. Blockchains rarely figure despite its linguistic complementarity to the genre: non-state digital currency, world computer, Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), prediction markets. This is the language of the future trapped in the curious unimaginative form of human status games: follower count, social conferences, PVP games, populism and geopolitics. There is some imaginative deviation that occurs in introducing the cypher- to cyberpunk. It is captured in the language of imaginaries, which are deeply human, rooted in the phenomenological concept of world in Husserl and Heidegger, but softened in later variations by Taylor

, who defines them as follows:

I am thinking rather of the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.

What blockchain communities most suffer from is the inability to see themselves as part of a unified imaginary. They were historically clear as to the broad opposition: state, banks, venture capitalists. But even this is no longer clear. You do not know who sits beside you at the conference. They might be a Cypherpunk but they might just as easily be a humdrum part of the CT-VC Podcast Industrial Complex. More MBA than PGP. The collapse from original intent can be seen in the distance between what we currently espouse and the definition of a sociotechnical imaginary as (Jasanoff, 2015) calls it:

...collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology (p. 4).

The great intrigue of Ethereum in particular is that its Social Endgame is a question mark. There is no Hyperbitcoinization or transition into an Ethereum-based society. No Hyperetherealization. It becomes the site of “narratives,” which to be clear are not values or imaginaries. Its story is one of technical primitives - DAOs, DeFi, NFTs, prediction markets - and its fortunes are inextricably linked to the phantasm of the market cap. If there is a populist mantra of the Ethereum Everyman it is ‘ETH to 10k.’ This is agency in its most primordial form, wrapped into the discontinuous idle talk of Crypto Twitter.

And yet, we can recognise in the social dynamics of modern Crypto culture a certain nascent realpolitik too. Entities like Bitcoin Core or the Ethereum Foundation are treated as the most influential Node in the wider polycentric system of entities. Polycentrism does not mean that power is equally distributed but that we have:

‘(i) multiple, overlapping decision-making centers with some degree of autonomy; (ii) choosing to act in ways that take account of others through processes of cooperation, competition, conflict, and conflict resolution’ (Carlisle and Gruby, 2019, p. 6).

It simply means that power is distributed in some non-hierarchal form. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen revolts in recent times that hinge around populist versus elite power dynamics. In Bitcoin’s case, this has come in the ongoing form of the Core versus Knots debate. Here a technical decision centring on the OP_RETURN output and how it more easily enables the storage of large data. The intricacies of the debate aside, the arguments are mostly premised on a populist conspiratorial mindset. Bitcoin Core are presumed, as a technocratic elite, to desire, perhaps unconsciously, to ever expand their duties until Bitcoin Core is indistinguishable from the machinations of the Ethereum Foundation. For its part, the Ethereum Foundation has partially accepted the demands of its populists, becoming ever more hands on and pragmatic, with the Cypherpunk dimension embedded into deep time Social Layer dynamics.

Perhaps then machinic intelligence must depart on its technonomic journey elsewhere, on a purely agentic-chain. What Torus appears to invite, through this journal, is a meditation on the unexplored convergence of non-human agents onchain, where they previously have not been able to roam freely. It is to ask what imaginaries might be appropriate among the emergent power structures as they watch the swarm converge on its own interests, detached as much as possible from the phenomenologically-inflected imaginaries that characterise Crypto culture in its current instantiation. The only way to move through the Labyrinth is to think through it, circuitously, to Zig-Zag. 

To start thinking, the Corporate Cogito has to understand this unique moment. Complete immersion in the teleoplexy of the Gestell. This is not a generational moment, but an Epochal one, one that shifts thinking from the things themselves to the agentic swarm.

Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis is Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the College of Business, University College Dublin. He is the author of Absolute Essentials of Ethereum (Routledge, 2024).