👁️ The Cybernetic Disease

One impulse explains the last 50 years: Command, Control, Extract.

The future is unknowable.

It’s one of the fundamental tragedies of human existence, a corrolary to our movement into a future that ends in death. Our putative leaders today - at least those functionally in charge of the economy - have dedicated their lives, and your money, to fighting these fundamental truths.

They fight death, as I argue in Stealing the Future, substantially out of individual psychological trauma, from Ray Kurzweil’s longing to resurrect his own father to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s early tragic loss of a brother. Immortality is also the quest of those who fail to understand or accept the interdependent and continuous nature of human species-being, like Peter Thiel, grasping for a fully individualized transcendence of the cycle of Samsara.

I follow Baudrillard in calling this “The Logic of the Code,” one based on symbolic reduction and universal fungibility. The movement of money in markets melts all action into data that feeds its projections of the future into the control scheme - a mechanism test-run with social media and now poised to be vastly expanded in the AI-sphere.

But they are also the product of a clear historical process that has nothing to do with individual psychology or trauma: the process of cyberneticization.

Though rooted in the demands of war technology, cyberneticization became a much broader process of intensifying data gathering about the world, and especially about people’s behavior, for the purposes above all of economic management. In one dimension, it becomes the support and scaffolding for what is deceptively termed “the free market,” the process of measuring that helps plan production under neoliberalism.

This is a fundamental bait-and-switch, very much like Do Kwon’s Luna: we are told that the “invisible hand” of supply and demand directs the distribution of goods, or stabilizes a synthetic dollar thanks to arbitrage.

But just as Do Kwon relied on Jump trading to actually prop up his fake free-market dollar, supply and demand themselves must be managed through the cybernetic info-harness to produce the “free float” of prices and production we experience as The Market.

If you read philosophy, you will constantly be surprised by how far ahead of the curve on social forces some people can be. That is certainly the experience of reading The Cybernetic Hypothesis, released all the way back in 2001 by the collective Tiqqun. (Members of the collective would go on to author The Coming Insurrection as The Invisible Committee.)

David Z. Morris@davidzmorris

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10:45 PM · Jun 8, 2026 · 2.37K Views

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The Cybernetic Hypothesis is staggeringly perceptive, frequently feeling as if it is making impossible predictions of the future we live in 20 years later.

What follows isn’t a review or even a summary, but a cherry-picking and explication of a few of the points where their insights cast light on the finance matters that I focus on here.

“It’s conceivable that a society taken as a whole, a State, could be regulated in such a way that it is protected form all future accidents: such that in itself only eternity changes it. This is the ideal of a stable society achieved through objectively controllable social mechanisms.” - Abraham Moles, quoted by Tiqqun.

This is the cybernetic hypothesis itself summarized by one of its ideologues. Command and control at the social level, primarily through the gathering of behavioral data, towards the goal of complete stasis - or what Freud would call the death drive.

Tiqqun later describe this as “the shared fantasy of the Universal Automaton, analogous to Hobbes’ fantasy of the State in Leviathan, ‘artificial man.’”

The cybernetic hypothesis is now the most substantial anti-humanism, one that is determined to maintain the general order of things while priding itself on having gone beyond the human.

My colleague Emille Torres frequently describes elements of the TESCREAL movement as “extinctionist,” but the willingness to literally sacrifice humans is only the most extreme manifestation of its hatred for the merely human. Data is meant to eliminate (that is, not measure) the irrelevancies of the human, the details that don’t matter, the unpredictable variation that averages out at population level. In the specific or unique, the cybernetician has no interest.

It is difficult not to personalize this, in a way perhaps petty but nonetheless both effective and revealing: figures from Sam Altman to Eliezer Yudkowsky to Dario Amodei do not seem entirely comfortable being humans.

It is little surprise that their lives’ work is to eliminate that uncomfortable experience.

What is TESCREALism? Mapping the Cult of the Techno-Utopia.

The new conquerors, whom we will call cyberneticians here, don’t form an organized party … but a diffuse constellation of agents, motivated, possessed, blinded by the same fable.

This is why I called Stealing the Future a work of forensic philosophy. The conspiracy between figures as disparate as Will MacAskill and Peter Thiel is not organized by anything so crude as a shared political agenda, but by a deeper ideology of economic command and control that even the conspirators themselves are barely aware of.

The cybernetic hypothesis calls for a radically new structuring of the individual or collective subject, in the direction of hollowing-out. It dismisses interiority as a myth and along with it the entire psychology of the 19th century, including psychoanalysis.

The rejection of psychoanalysis - specifically, the rejection of the entire idea of subconscious drives or hidden motives - is visible everywhere in the current operationalized tech-world version of the Cybernetic program. Barbara Fried’s brand of die-hard determinism is a necessary corrolary to the pretense of prediction and measurement. The most hilarious example is of course Yudkowskyite Rationalism, which takes the “elimination of bias” as a process of building better processes, rather than involving any acknowledgment or grappling with the internal contradictions of the acts of knowing or believing.

As Heidegger put it, “the human being is still considered a source of irritation” to the cybernetic project, because of its unpredictability. And so, as these simplistic people tend to, they simply think human freedom and internal conflict out of existence and proceed from its absence.

Sins of the Mother: How the $8B FTX Scam Flowed From Barbara Fried’s Anti-Humanist Ethics

“The obsession with risk is the flip side of this accumulation of data … which explains the current hypertrophy of security operations and functions - preiction, surveillance, repression, incarceration …”

There are few clearer places to see the connections between Effective Altruism/Rationalism and the logic of militaristic risk-planning than in their shared belief that sufficient data leads to clear predictions about the future. In Stealing the Future, I recount Kenneth Arrow’s WWII-era anecdote about generals demanding weather forecasts even if they were known to be useless, and this fetishization of data against knowledge is the root of the self-stupification seen in the bad choices of someone like Sam Bankman-Fried.

The cybernetic hypothesis answers, in the natural sciences and social sciences alike, to a desire for order and certainty.

This pathological desire for total control can be seen in both the individual quest for immortality, and in theoretical fantasia’s like Toby Ord’s desire to predict and somehow prevent exceedingly unlikely asteroid strikes on the planet Earth. The goal is to eliminate all unknowns. But again as with Arrow’s generals, this lust for complete surveillance and data leads inevitably to shortcuts - because again, we cannot predict the future.

The cybernetician may point to indicative data, but this data is never complete. And having rejected judgment for data, rejecting even human empathy as an indicator of paths of action, the cybernetician is inevitably hung by his own petard, left mute and deranged by the falsehood of the world made of numbers.

The first socio-cyberneticians show that homo economicus could only exist on the condition of total transparency of one’s preferences to oneself and to others. Without the ability to know the whole set of behaviors of the other economic actors, the utilitarian idea of a rationality of micro-economic choices is only a fiction.

That is, a fiction that must constantly be reinforced and re-established. This is the pathway from data metrics to Do Kwon faking his “self-correcting” stablecoin. The mythology of the market’s total balancing powers is in fact buttressed constantly by outside intervention, by active plate-spinning which above all reinforces the fiction of the market’s neutrality, or worst of all its natural inevitability, when in fact it is constantly reinforced by active decisions made from positions of power.

These will suffice for now.

The Cybernetic Man is our ruler now.

He is a hollow, fragile God.