Five provocative models for understanding the forces shaping civilization
anselm · x · 2026-10-17
owocki outlines five frameworks for understanding civilization's trajectory—'all models are wrong, some are useful.' Highlights: Nick Land's technocapital—capitalism as an emerging machine intelligence assembling itself via markets and technology, in a self-reinforcing loop where capital builds machines that generate more capital; the provocative question is when humanity stops shaping technology to serve us and starts reorganizing to serve the machine. Nate Hagens' economic superorganism—the economy as an emergent superorganism of billions of humans and institutions optimizing for growth, dependent on cheap energy, with nobody steering. The remaining models are truncated in the repost.
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