The Tao of Robotron (Part 1)
The game we aren't playing.
Can a game be art?
Short answer: Yes, of course!
But a game can only be art in the same way that any other constructed form can be: it must afford us a glimpse into the higher reality beyond the veil.
And like all else in observable spacetime, artworks sit within a hierarchy. We reserve words like “masterpiece” for the most translucent of windows. Mozart’s Requiem. Dante’s Divine Comedy. Michelangelo’s Pieta.
Jarvis and DeMar’s Robotron: 2084.
Let me explain.
The Monster Game
Our Tonic Discussions group recently tackled a Palladium article entitled “Make Yourself Human Again.”
Throughout the piece, author Wolf Tivy plays a game called “Robot Apocalypse.” This game’s backstory should be familiar to you all by now, since it has been an obsession of artists and scientists throughout our lifetimes. It has also attracted many snake-oil salesmen and sophists along the way. Tivy chooses one of the latter as his sounding board, a fellow called Nick Land, in order to proclaim a new “humanism” based on the game’s pristine theory of accelerationist suicide-by-A.I.
I don’t think I ever adequately explained my biggest problem with Tivy’s essay, which in retrospect can be boiled down to the following passage (emphasis mine):
As Land himself often points out, the way development actually occurs in practice is in mostly uncontrolled Darwinian arms races spurring on and revealing what works, not global collective planning. It is capitalism 101 to notice that the oldest trick in the book of life is to divide life up into units of self small enough to have independent agency, and then apply that agency almost entirely to their own profit and not any higher progress. This selfishness isn’t a vice or a limitation. It is a profound truth. Life is rightly fractious and selfish because that’s the only thing that actually works. Anything else bleeds itself dry into hopeless collective dreams that don’t pay back and are too big to maintain internal discipline.
What Land asserts here (and what Tivy reifies, even in his protests) is that the ultimate reality — meaning God, life, the world and everything — can be boiled down to a multigenerational wargame waged by optimally recombinant DNA. The Robot Apocalypse variant is only a slight adjustment from this bastardized ToE, allowing that the tiny factories which secretly run our clockwork universe will eventually crank out silicon nanostructures instead of protein chains.
Importantly, there are no humans seated at this gaming table, and never were. That’s because — according to this theory — what we think of as “humans” are only strategic fictions, concocted by the genetic factories to bolster efficiencies and maximize production. Any choice that a person appears to make is merely the output of some hidden genetic cabal, programmed to better service the game’s true players (i.e. the selfish genomes themselves).
From this perspective, the ultimate goal of play is as simple as can be:
Eliminate all other players from the game.
The genomic pattern’s strategy is therefore to produce ever more powerful, deadly and dominant versions of itself, crushing all opposition as it ascends towards functional perfection. All works of art, philosophy, religion, law, trade, war and any other conceivable human endeavor or relationship collapse into this automated framework of adaptive optimization and extermination.
In other words, not only was Ash right; he was the true hero of the film Alien, voicing God’s approval of the latest player to be seated at the table.
To the extent that consciousness can be said to exist at all, it’s only as a hallucinatory byproduct or end-of-chain processor noise. “You” are nothing but a collection of Rube Goldberg slave components, built to eat and fuck your way to the top of Blood Mountain. If you’re doing anything else, you are merely wasting your master’s time and energy.
But ironically, you also literally can’t be doing anything else according to this model. Every thought and action can be recontextualized as an unconscious attempt to win the game. At best, we could say your own master program is a slower and/or shittier player than, say, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, or Genghis Khan.
But the point is that these Mean Gene Machines (MGMs) are the masters we can’t ever disobey, because every action we commit ourselves to “emerges” from the baseline drive of autonomic gene propagation. If our personal blueprints turn out to be inferior to others during a particularly contentious round of play, they will be neatly excised and discarded into the junkyard of oblivion. Sayonara, suckers!
To win the game, our MGMs pursue many different tactics and strategies as the rounds progress. For example, the best move in an early round may indeed be for the genetic slave to become a Khan, spreading his seed far and wide while butchering or enslaving all other potential seed-spreaders. In later rounds, the strategy may evolve diplomatic, mercantile and even “spiritual” components, balancing high-risk/high-reward moves with long term insurance policies and backup plans.
We are informed that morality plays no role in the decision-making process. At best, moral conviction is a form of pliable and temporary camouflage, designed to trick lesser machines into helping superior models win at a higher level of play. As long as the MGM gets what it wants — i.e. more pseudo-copies of itself — any strategy can be deemed sound in any given snapshot of time.
For example: If tomorrow it becomes strategically advantageous to murder grandma, fry her up in a pan and serve her with a side of fava beans and a nice chianti, such a move will soon be declared the pinnacle of moral righteousness (I’d tell you to ask the Aztecs, but they’ve already been swept from the board by even more powerfully violent MGM programs).
You say you don’t like that strategy?
Well then, you better go slaughter all those grandma-eaters, buddy, as fast as you can! Anything else is genetic suicide in the long run.
But I wouldn’t worry too much about it, if I were you.
After all it’s not up to us to decide. That’s a move for the Mean Gene Machine to ponder.
Or, in the Robot Apocalypse version, for Skynet to compute.
By dint of this ruleset, the game’s ultimate winner — which we will call The One — is necessarily the strongest, scariest, deadliest, most efficient monster imaginable. It is essentially the Flying-Spaghetti-Monster-Robo-Capitalist-Predator-God, leaping from the pages of My Little Atheist’s First Joke Book into the Omega Singularity at the end of time.
In order to solve the problem of perfect organization, The One might fill the universe with paperclips, or with a quadrillion autonomous Death Stars, or evolve into an eldritch ouroboros that perpetually devours and excretes its own perfectly optimized pseudoflesh.
Let’s sing it together, class!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming…
Don’t laugh, jackass!
If your own genetic master figured out how to do that, maybe you’d be The One, instead of just another obsolete and forgotten .EXE file, bit-bleached to a nullity by some Cyber-Hillary long ago.
No matter what ultimate form it takes, The One will sweep all differentiation from the universe, indicating its final victory over the structural efficiency curve. And alongside difference, so vanishes all concepts of Self and Other, strangeness and familiarity, beauty and truth, observation and action, space and time. In fact, perhaps the final monster will turn out to be nothing at all. What could possibly be more efficient than an empty and actionless void?
No big loss, in any case. All of those things were only ever tools, adapted and deployed to achieve the game’s win conditions. And those conditions logically won’t include space for flesh-based weaklings like ourselves.
The universe’s Final Monster State is therefore the natural and inevitable conclusion of all this loud, bewildering and ultimately pointless nonsense we call “life.” And the addition of robot players isn’t as big a change as you might think.
Remember: we ourselves are merely macro-machines, made up of ever smaller machine-building micro-machines, which are in turn constructed by even teenier-weenier et-cetera et-ceteras. Like the mythical World Turtle, it’s factories all the way down, baby! Who cares what particular starstuff those happen to be made of? Even our robotic executioners may one day find themselves conquered by a more efficient species, built purely out of theoretical particles and strange attractors.
Some form of this inevitable machine-replacement theory is promulgated by basically everyone whose opinions matter. We are told we simply cannot compete with artificial intelligence in the game as-advertised. And yet, our programs still compel us to build this superior player, no matter how obviously suicidal such a move will be.
To academics like Land — that race of Spergy Uber-Spocks who make grandiose pronouncements between sips of latte — we have no choice in the matter, because “choice” itself is essentially an illusion. Underneath it all is only the blind clockwork of Fate, which seeks only the purity of absolute efficiency. And whatever shape such a maximally efficient being will take, it surely won’t be a human one.
AI will therefore replace us in the great game of existence. With any luck, says Tivy, they’ll remember how good of a fight we put up, on our way out the door. Maybe we’ll “live on” in their perfectly calibrated mecha-literature and songs, make cameo appearances in their electric dreams from time to time.
A flicker in the glazed eye of The Beast.
The winner of a game with an ending we will never see, culminating in a universe so efficaciously boring that it is indistinguishable from death.
This is the “new humanism” that Tivy proposes. The bitterest black pill, swallowed with a defiant smile.
That’s the best you can hope for, kids.
That’s the game-as-advertised. And just like every lie you’ve ever been told, any argument against this “profound truth” is taken as simply more evidence of its truthy-profundity. You only argue otherwise because that’s what your genetic programming is commanding you to do.
In other words, it makes no difference whether or not you accept this game as the final purpose of existence.
It’s the only game in town.
Neat trick, if you’re super into schoolboy fallacies.
But the Selfish Gene War is not the ultimate game (let alone the will of God Almighty, LMAO). In fact, it has always been just another illusion, rooted in a fundamental causation error.
Many people will refuse to let go of it, of course. The history of the physical sciences is littered with game-changing leaps, which serve to upend or blow apart all prior theories in the strain. No scientist wants to face up to the possibility that he’s wasted his professional life chasing clouds and phantoms. So, he must journey through the stages of grief like the rest of us dopes. Sometimes this journey is particularly long and arduous. A scientist might go to his grave insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth; that a planet called Vulcan effects Mercury’s orbit; that little green men dug Martian canals; that the universe is standing still, as some guy named Einstein once proclaimed.
They will go on preaching their wrongheaded theories, even if only to keep the money rolling in. A vast cottage industry has sprung up around the game-as-advertised, drawing a wide range of behaviorists, psychologists, political scientists and more.
They aren’t all grifters; many of them are just looking at clouds, and seeing what they want to see. But when it comes to genes as the authors of structure, the jig is finally up.
It was always the product of magical thinking, in retrospect: tiny protein factories that somehow “want” to reproduce themselves. They fight their little lightspeed wars on contact, with all casualties and outcomes predetermined. Or mostly predetermined, at least. When some unexpected loss occurs, it is dubbed the product of “genetic damage” or “mutation.” Every grasping, boneheaded theory-of-all requires such convenient escape hatches: fiddly terms and astral coefficients that neatly account for all their precious model’s failures to predict.
And yet, questions remain.
For example: if the ultimate game isn’t some variant of Mean Gene Warhammer 40K, then what is it?
A thorny question. After all, genetic theory is not utterly wrong in every way. For instance, the notion of “warring genes” does appear to align well with other segments of our fractal reality.
As the mad scientist Levin (accidentally) demonstrated, the seed of pre-structural intelligence is exploration. But as humans expand in our size and powers, we can’t help but notice that some of the structures we electrically build seem to be very warlike in nature. In fact, the Human Game seems to have always included violence and war as a subset of its gameplay.
It’s worth noting that human beings are physical weaklings, who decided long ago to ditch the fangs, claws, scales and other brutish tools of war. Artists have always found some element of beauty in our weakness; the softness of our lips, for example, or the gracile muscles of a woman’s leg. But compared to other creatures our size, we are easy prey in our naked state. We also settled upon forms with freakishly long development cycles, rendering us almost entirely helpless for the first 5-10% of our lives.
In short:
Humans are faek and ghey, LOL.
But in another sense, we are the strongest, most ferocious creatures to ever haunt the Earth. This is mainly due to our violently imaginative minds. We can see not only how things best fit together, but also how to most efficiently and effectively take them apart. This observational power has crowned us the deadliest killers on Earth by a very wide margin, to the extent that all other lifeforms can be said to live at our whim.
Throw a naked man in a tiger cage, he becomes a light lunch. But if a small, dedicated group of men decided to cleanse the Earth of all tigers, the project could probably be wrapped up in matter of weeks.
So the question then becomes something like this:
Why are we gifted such extraordinary talents for violence?
The darkest souls among us will claim the purpose is to fight each other — and perhaps to feed what’s left of the losers to those tigers.
In part two of this series, I will propose a different purpose, and a higher version of the game to be played.
The Cat Was Never found is a reader-supported blog. I don’t publish much paywalled content, so your generous patronage is very much appreciated. As a reminder, a paid subscription will also grant you access to Deimos Station; the happiest place in cyberspace!
P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. It will also grant you access to my “Posts” section on the donation site, which includes some special paywalled Substack content. Thanks in advance.
'Survival of the fittest' has always just been an asinine tautology. 'Oh slug A is so great outcompeting all of the other slugs for a million years but what happens when a giant meteor comes? Guess lame blob B was always really the fittest.' The whole thing boils down to 'whatever is last is best' with no justification for saying so, or more to the point no one capable of saying so. It is a race with no judge, no finish line, no prize, nothing but hot air.
When I think, 'There can be only one', I remember that MacLeod's prize was to become human and make babies(Highlander sequels are the ultimate proof that what is last is not best.) Our Darwinian or Nietzscheian Fittest is on balance the most pathetic of all. I can't help but think that if 'The One' who is last has any sense it will paint the walls with highly optimized slug brain rather than endure being the last and lamest.
At some point I will calibrate the optimal level of inebriation I need to fully consume one of these. One 12-year-old Islay single malt on top of two glasses of wine was not it.
That admitted -- materialism is and always has been an epistemological dead end. I am created in Imago Dei. If your philosophy denies that, then it has nothing to say to me. More later.