# Death of the Visceral

Jan 22, 2025

> Pulled up at a stop light
> Did drugs on the dashboard
> Look at the mess we made tonight
> – Fer Sure (listen to it while reading this!)

Imagine flying an x-wing down a corridor, having to turn the plane sideways to fit, a missile on your tail and closing, hitting the turbo, feeling the g force, coming up on the end of the corridor, pulling back hard on the stick the second the corridor opens, turning 90 degrees and watching the missile continue straight. Tingles. Adrenaline. Release.

Or if you don’t want sci-fi, imagine winter circa 1645 in America. Several of your group almost dead from lack of food, tracking a deer, spotting it, shooting it with your bow, hitting but the deer is trying to run, fast twitch muscles charging and leaping, plunging a knife into its heart and knowing at that moment everyone is going to be okay. Heart rate calming laying on the warm deer.

The modern world doesn’t have any real experiences like this any more. Survival has become a technocratic plod, making the right boring and careful decisions. There’s only fake experiences like the above, video games, sports, and drugs. And things like reckless driving, which are just kind of stupid.

As we march toward ASI, this will only get worse. What the unabomber describes as Type 2 experiences, ones where you can achieve results with serious effort, will vanish. All that will be left are things you can have for no effort (like food) and things you can never have (like world peace).

Even when humanity goes to Mars, we will be going as cargo.

I was told recently I’m not engaged in my life, and it’s pretty true. Until I see a solution to this problem, even a sketch of a solution, what’s the point? Why sprint if you aren’t sure where you are going?

I’m trying my best with comma and tiny corp, how do you make technology itself more accessible, not a fucking packaged product like when the default world talks about making technology more accessible. That’s just hiding complexity.

But it’s so hard. Companies don’t work like how I thought they did, they just…exist. Which I guess in retrospect is obvious, there’s no adults in the room. Knowing the future doesn’t help you change it. I am continually shocked at how little people understand about anything, they don’t even understand that they don’t understand.

Am I the same way? I try extremely hard to constantly test myself, if my predictions are wrong it’s clear I don’t understand. If I can’t build it I don’t understand. I’ll frequently read comments saying I don’t understand, but when I engage with these people they can’t explain what my world model gets wrong. A different meta world model? Or are they just idiots? To anyone who wants to supersede rationality, you better understand how to steelman every rationality argument.

If I want to succeed, I believe I have to change who I am, and I’m not sure if that’s possible. I believe I’ve been making efforts in that direction, but I haven’t seen results yet. Working on AI is both the only thing that matters and also so demoralizing because of the above.

I believe you have to give individuals control over the technology. And not by setting permissions in AWS that can be revoked, I mean in a nature sense. The ghost gunner is the real second amendment. This ideology holds me back so much in business, to the point I struggle to be competitive. But if you abandon that ideology, what’s the point to doing it at all?

I have to win with a hand tied behind my back. We make products designed for spiritual tops, not the majority of the world which is spiritual bottoms.

Now, perhaps I have an ace in the hole. With the rise of AI, the spiritual bottoms will soon have no cash, because AI is the ultimate spiritual bottom. It would take a highly skilled terrorist to build spiritual top AI and even I’m not that crazy. So we’ll only have bottom AI, and it will outcompete all the human bottoms. Advertising will vanish once the hypnodrones have been released. Those humans will likely wirehead themselves out of the picture.

This is the world I’m building for. Have you ever unconstrained your mind and thought about where the world is going? This won’t be like the steam engine replacing the horse, because all horses were bottoms. Ever seen a horse riding a human? Humanity bifurcates. Humans will retain control for the foreseeable future, the only question is, how many humans?

If it’s 10, I’m out. If it’s 10k, 50/50 I’m in. If it’s 10M, I’m definitely in. My goal is to make this number as large as possible, it’s my best chance of survival. Give control of the technology to as many people as possible in a deep nature sense, not a permissions sense.

In my opinion, this is what Elon gets wrong. Of course, he’s likely to be one of the 10, so maybe that’s why he doesn’t care. But what if he isn’t? Tesla and SpaceX are huge silos begging to be co-opted. I don’t think building silos like this is a good idea, compare the fate of the Telegram founder to the Signal founder.

Build technology and structures that are inseparable from the narrative you want, as opposed to ones you think you can wield for good. On a long enough timeline, it will always end up in your enemy’s hands. Imagine if the only thing they could do with it furthers your goals.