If you're a fascist, then you're "Dark Enlightenment" by default, right? Conversely, if you say you're Dark Enlightenment, that implies you're at least on your way to fascism.
It's bizarre, this belief that academics and government bureaucrats are living large on "our tax dollars" and spending money wildly inappropriately, because they excuse the most extreme inequality and the hoarding of wealth by individuals accountable to no one. Completely hypocritical.
The most extreme example of that belief that I know is the guy who invented "assassination markets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market) because he was so violently opposed to taxation that he wanted to murder tax agents.
They talk in their own terms (linked essay by Nick Land) about being "enlightened", but the enlightenment they seem to have found isn't any sort of higher spiritual or moral or ethical purpose.
Rather, they seem to be enlightened about the idea that it's possible to be a Nazi in the 21st century. Also, it's fun (for them) to be racist and sexist and bully people of other cultures and ethnicities.
This is the type of "anarchy" that Libertarians are into, the kind where you violently murder all the government agents and then those with the most power rule, or something.
If you read Jim Bell's original "Assassination Politics" essay (posted to USENET, which was the style at the time), it's even more unhinged than Wikipedia makes him out to be:
@jhamby One should understand that cryptocurrency plus putting results of churning every piece of human writing (particularly news/current events) as it's written into a blockchain-consensus LLM enables implementation of Assassination Politics as a smart contract. The LLM part was the missing ingredient, to evaluate consensus about when assassination happened. This is really the end goal for a lot of the people into it.
@jhamby Somehow very few people are aware of the original Assassination Politics manifesto, much less how it relates to cryptocurrency. But I've been trying to get folks to understand this for nearly a decade...
@dalias I hadn't thought through the implications having an LLM would have on blockchain-based contracts. The whole "oracle" thing never seemed to be feasible other than for commonly-agreed-on things like stock prices or currency conversion rates. Until now.
What gets me is none of these guys seem like they would have thought of the idea of pooling cryptocurrency money to assassinate a CEO of a greedy company. It's only and always government employees they hate.
@jhamby Yeah it's not just Assassination Politics, but all kinds of real-world predicates you can "evaluate" human writing consensus on with a blockchain-consensus LLM, that makes this so attractive to the cryptocurrency ancap cult. Smart contracts are what let them turn an impotent "AI" god into one that controls the levers of the real world: (magic toy) money.
@jhamby I almost think I should put together a conference talk on the history of this shit and the technical details of how they expect to make it happen. Might stand a chance of pushing governments to stop it before they can't...
@jhamby@dalias I've always wondered about the latter too. Go after the guys who are actually destroying the planet and making life untenable.
As for oracles, it's always seemed to me that there is no reliable, unforgeable way to get realworld info into the blockchain. Every data feed can be forged, and LLMs do nothing to fix that.
@hyc@jhamby For financial purposes anything decently over the accuracy of a coin toss is sufficient to profit from.
But blockchain LLM lets the big miners decide what actual or fabricated facts the model will reflect. Which to them is a feature. Remember when we say LLMs do a bad job we're talking about reflecting a genuine consensus reality based in fact/evidence, but they don't want or need that...