Parasitic Revolution: Accelerationism, AI, and the Fanatic Deficit in a Postmodern Conjuncture

The nerds have gone feral, and that is precisely why I came here.

Yes, the nerds have gone feral. Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land — one after the other, they’ve lost their minds, or rather, they’ve crossed that threshold where a certain kind of intellectual intoxication starts mistaking itself for historical destiny. They have gone off the rails, yes. Mark Fisher, when he wrote Capitalist Realism, was already working in a highly postmodern register. And postmodernism is, in a sense, the only idiom supple enough to describe the capitalist reality America currently inhabits. That is why it is used. No other mode quite reaches that particular density of surfaces, reflexes, simulations, and cultural paralysis.

Among the disciplines of that order, Baudrillard does it best. He is the sharpest operator in that terrain. But in the United States, especially in fiction, Don DeLillo carries that style to its summit through White Noise and Cosmopolis. There was even debate at one point about whether DeLillo would be awarded the Nobel Prize. He wasn’t. The man simply remained there, in that suspended condition. And honestly, his latest book is not that good either. He has become a little old, a little dulled by age. Anyway, anyway — I was talking about nerds.

They say “the revenge of the nerds,” but what we are actually dealing with is the delirium of the nerds.

In recent years it has been AI, quantum computers, and especially the investments poured into chip companies. And those investments are extremely cyclical. One entity hands money to another, and the next passes it onward again; the money circulates among them like a closed ritual. It has become a kind of banking system in itself, this whole chip business. In any case, AI, quantum computing — these are already, at root, offspring of science fiction and of minds shaped by postmodern disciplines. They were already in a state of excitement. They already felt the wind at their backs.

Now, with the world’s conjuncture turning chaotic — politically tearing itself apart, the financial system changing, wars on the horizon — and with 2026 arriving the way it has, they looked at all this and said: all right, the time is ours.

Curtis Yarvin in particular is flying. Nick Land, if left to his own devices, would say that capitalism itself is the endpoint, the final mutation, the absolute culmination. That is how postmodern they are: they can even call AI capitalism. That is accelerationism, after all — ivmecilik, the logic of acceleration, transhumanist currents, accelerative visions. They are inside a kind of mass movement now, especially through the internet.

But listen: one thing I learned over the years of studying mass movements is this — a mass movement cannot really count as one unless it has fanatics. Without fanatics, it has no political force. It does not matter. If you put people into the street, they need to be fanatical. Do you know why, in our country especially, when we spill into the streets for political events, we go home after two days? Because we are not fanatical enough. We cannot produce a mass movement in the real sense. Fanatics are required. And those fanatics must then be steered by people of discourse. It is never a clean affair. Ideologically speaking, the thinkers operating within a mass movement are often engaged in an immense amount of fraud — enough to leave them unable to account for themselves afterward. They twist and maneuver things with remarkable sleight of hand.

So whether Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, or Peter Thiel appear as thinkers inside a mass movement, pretending to be something like the “people of discourse,” it does not really mean much. Why? Because they do not have fanatics. That is the strange thing. As a thought-discipline, transhumanism or accelerationism does not lend itself very well to fanaticism. People are not going to become fanatics over the wish that humanity should disappear entirely and be replaced by pure speed, pure computation, pure process. That kind of thing does not naturally grip the personal life, the intimate dream-life, the desire for family, the hope of building a life. And for fanatics, those are crucial things.

If you want to gather fanatics, you usually need to target young people who are at the age of marriage, people whose future is still tied to family, continuity, reproduction, inheritance. Transhumanism simply does not have the scale to do that. Its thinkers are not deep enough. Their postmodern style may resemble Mark Fisher’s, but in the subtext — in the current running beneath the surface — there is something else entirely.

How can I put it? It is as though the language of a 1970s NASA launch has seeped into their prose. Houston and the control room, the launch being prepared, all those crucial technical checks, the sober technical chatter about trajectories, magnetospheres, orbital conditions, systems, parameters — that whole jargon-saturated speech registering like the management of a science-fiction operation. You can hear that science-fictional mode of command infiltrating these thinkers’ syntax. In their imagination they are already opening onto deep space through accelerationism; they are probably dreaming of a future in the style of Star Trek within their own lifetimes. And that aspiration leaves its residue in the way they build sentences.

To traditionalist thinkers looking in from outside postmodernism, this must seem deeply sad. Just look at Jordan Peterson now — he is already in that state of having disappointed people. First he was disappointing thinkers. Thinkers were saying, “Look, do not trust Jordan Peterson.” And then he began disappointing everyone else too. That is what they are doing as well. Especially Nick Land, in the condition he inhabits, is genuinely worth watching. A thinker going feral — that may be the closest name for it.

Those who present accelerationism as a mass movement are not the sort of “people of discourse” who can carry the thing on their backs. They cannot construct those symbols. They are quite incompetent in that regard. Symbolic construction, in the end, belongs to public-relations firms and to a few deeply trained, half-bred, hard-to-trace symbolic laborers whose lineage is difficult to pin down. It is not something that can simply be improvised. This is not how a revolution happens.

And yet revolutions do not always have to happen through a mass movement. Movements require fanatics. That is why it would be absurd to expect accelerationism or transhumanism to emerge as a mass movement in the classic sense. But if they are planning it as a revolution, then there is actually a real opportunity before them. Because revolutions can also be immediately followed by counterrevolution. In that sense, one could even call it a parasitic revolution.

Many revolutions, precisely in order to preserve themselves, are forced to take precautions against parasitic revolutions. Making the revolution is hard enough, isn’t it — turning a mass movement into a revolution is hard enough. But the very second you succeed, you become exposed to counterrevolutionaries. And world history, in truth, is the history of counterrevolutions that remained revolutions by other means. Especially those discursive elites who manage to complete the revolution immediately betray the comrades who helped them write it. Assassinations are arranged, schemes are set in motion, people are driven into exile.

Why? Because they are discursive elites who can later be used for counterrevolution, and who have already proven their credentials. They must be removed at once. The horrific thing — the thing that offends human dignity — is that this symbolic labor, this construction of symbols through fanatical mobilization, inevitably turns into weaponization and dehumanization. The people who stand behind it do not remain innocent for long. The work becomes a problem for them. It will come back and haunt them.

The accelerationist tendencies orbiting Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Nick Land can be understood as a search for counterrevolution. Because they have special access to technologies thought to be decisive — chips, AI, quantum computers, all the machinery presumed to matter enormously in the future. But these technologies only hold a small fraction of the engineering we will actually need later, the small fraction we ought already to have in our hands. So the strong, organized people they might be able to rally to their side for a counterrevolution are not going to be seduced by those dreams anyway, at least that is what I think.

When you do not see the fanatic, expect the mass movement to return to you as a parasitic revolution. And when that happens, just say: what is this thing? What even is this? A parasite? A tick? A flea? A louse? Get lost. “Yavşak” — that is the word. It means the offspring of a louse, a little parasite-bastard. Calling them that is actually quite fitting.

Godspeed!

~alp

AI as a Foundational Industry: Big Data & Nickelodeon

This time I am going to tell you about another danger of AI — as if it did not already have enough dangers, but yet another has emerged, in my opinion.

Of course, our AIs need to keep learning continuously, and when they learn, if you fail to compress that information, they begin thinking by stacking what they have learned on top of what they already know. That means more processors, more attempts to reach more nodes, a greater memory capacity, and so on. And the optimization of this — that is, the act of narrowing it down — is not nearly as effective as we think. It is not nearly as useful as we assume. If, after developing an AI, we compress and narrow it down, then not only have we already spent a significant portion of the resources on developing it, but the compressed AI that remains at the end cannot display in its body the entirety of the resources that were spent while developing it. Add to that the fact that it must be fed constantly, that it must keep learning constantly, and the whole thing just keeps swelling more and more.

But I think the problem is not in the swelling itself. You find better chip technology, you build better computers, you have a different AI system, and you prevent the swelling. The sector already approaches the matter more or less this way, frankly. But the devil is in the details. I said, in the middle of my sentences, that these systems need to keep learning constantly, and that means systems of this kind must remain connected to a network at all times. That means continuous transfers of energy and resources to them, it means continuous maintenance, and it means they turn into a permanent foundational industry. In other words, another one of those industries. If such a thing turns into an industry, then along its track there will be power plants, there will be fields, right? There will be massive tanker logistics networks. That is to say, one of the industries that really turns the world — one of those foundational industries — will be AI. That is how we will work when it comes to transferring resources into it. Foundational industries are those industries that become more fundamental, more important, as population increases. For example, Istanbul’s electrical infrastructure and power plants are built in a way that allows twenty million people to live there. If ten million people live there — that is, if Istanbul now has only ten million people living in it — then these kinds of foundational industries cannot make a profit. And for foundational industries to make a profit is more important than everything you know — more important than your politicians, more important than your hundred-year plans, far more important, really. If your tankers are not making a profit, then you need to be in a position where you could almost start World War III over it. Foundational industries are in that position.

I am also certain that the systems that hold AIs inside them will not be called artificial intelligence. I am saying this from the perspective of public relations. As I understand it, the reason we call this artificial intelligence today is that while we are calling it artificial intelligence, it is not yet accepted by the public — the same way it was with virtual reality. So from a public-relations perspective, when we look at this issue, we should be waiting for the moments in which these concepts permanently change their names, for the milestones at which we can see that they have actually transformed into something different. If artificial intelligences are going to turn into foundational industries, then they will not be called artificial intelligence. For example, they will become cyber resources, cyber institutions, cyber consulting — and consulting is not enough either. For a foundational industry, you need to give it a heavy word like cyber resources. You need to choose a word that emphasizes that those resources are an important national asset. Cyber may not be the right word here, but it will be a name like resources or network. For example, when the internet was accepted, we call it online today, right? It is not just called internet. If AIs are still called artificial intelligence today, understand that there is still a long way to go. A system that is incapable in every productive domain would naturally still be called artificial intelligence — for now.

We said this is a world turned by foundational industries; in the world turned by AI, the task of gathering, filtering, and shaping knowledge will increasingly fall into the hands of intelligent systems. For example, these days I am watching a documentary and it is a horrifying thing: Nickelodeon came to our country once. We watched it. It had good cartoons, it had shows. Today we learn that a large part of the body of work we call Nickelodeon was formed through child abuse — and not only that, not merely children who were overworked, as if that were not already a sufficiently grave crime, but they were also sexually abused. It really darkens a person’s face. When I stacked together what especially the young actresses who had worked on Nickelodeon said about those years, I realized that all of them had horrifying memories from that period. For me, it is terrible that such an important body of work, such important characters, have been ruined by information I reached today. We could have reached this information much earlier, but apparently it needed to be compiled. This information needed to be compiled. And there is a huge mass of information that needs to be compiled not only on the web but across our whole world. This is called Big Data. If this compilation had been made, we might have received this information earlier — perhaps at a time when we could have raised our voices and done something useful. Now I do not even know what use it has.

And there is also something about Big Data: intelligence is the compilation of open information, 99.9% of it, and the attempt to see the future through the connections that are created. The exciting part of intelligence — the part we call Mossad, National Intelligence, the part that thrills people because it is where assassinations are organized and where news of who will be assassinated is received over the radio — is perhaps the smallest office, the lowest-budget office, of intelligence. In fact, Big Data is the entire world of intelligence. That giant message you know, the one that says, “we are on your tail and we know what you are doing,” that whole thing is entirely the compilation of Big Data.

That is why AIs will turn into foundational industries, because intelligence is a foundational element. Almost every country that is trying to remain standing on the world stage is dependent on intelligence. Today we talk about data being stolen, but I think we are approaching this issue without being aware of the importance of data that has already been stolen. Anyway, that was what I wanted to talk about today.

No matter what foundational industries evolve into, I wish for a world in which we are able to protect our children.

Godspeed!

~alp

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