Domesticated Dynamite: Dreams of Artificial General Intelligence and Techno-feudalism

This paper argues that a core grouping of Nietzschean ideas has migrated genealogically from late nineteenth-century German Philosophy into twenty-first-century sociopolitical economics. In Part I, I reconstruct Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism” and argue that Deleuze’s influential reading in Nietzsche and Philosophy “domesticates” Nietzsche by abstracting his core concepts from their explicitly anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian context. Part II traces the genealogical roots of Nick Land’s neo-reactionary manifesto, The Dark Enlightenment, backward to Nietzsche and Deleuze, and forward through Peter Thiel’s libertarianism and PayPal Mafia network, to Sam Altman’s ambitions of Artificial General Intelligence.