Podcast Appearance - Russel Walter (July 2026)
Talking through the ideas of Decentralized Fiction
Russell Walter recently hosted me on his podcast. I think the most interesting idea we talked about was this theory about the new axis of cultural conflict being Nietszschean transhumanism vs. secular post-Christian egalitarianism.
I originally saw this idea forwarded by Katherine Dee (always ahead of the curve), but was most interestingly explored by Zero H.P. Lovecraft (who has unfortunately since nuked his Substack essay series on Christo-Nietzschean synthesis). What’s interesting is that this conflict transects the left-right divide because you have progressives aligning with right-wing populists like Joe Allen, who is backed by Steve Bannon.1
I think we’re in the very early stages of a kind of mass populist anti-AI reaction which will also spill over into opposition against related power-concentrating technologies like human genetic enhancement, Brain-Computer Interfaces, and so on. All these sentiments will entangle together because people really fear the intense concentration of power (as they should).
As much as my aesthetic and metaphysical preferences align with the egalitarian faction, this faction will of course lose to technocapital in the end. The arms race, in my view, is the fundamental constitutive dynamic of all multi-agent systems—human or otherwise. This means that the people with the drone swarms and the compute are going to kill (or at least dominate) those without, and so on.
Oddly enough, largely because of Chinese industrial policy, we may still achieve the relative dispersion of power if things like AGI become commoditized (if American frontier labs achieve their technofeudalist aims, we will either be slaves or dead). At the very least it’s my hope that this produces some great art (I’ll be working to help make sure that happens!).
Last year I read Allen’s Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, which was pretty shit but mildly interesting in parts.
Excited to listen!