michael-dean-k/

World hunger is solved! An elite-controlled superintelligence, which has “biomic closure,” full understanding of all living systems, was able to create a pill that prevents humans from needing to eat, drink, shit, and shower. It also prevents all disease and sickness. You take them once a week. Another one, optional, eliminates the need for sleep too. They do not bother to distribute it person-to-person in any traceable way. It’s sprayed from planes like bird seed, know as “snow pills.” They do not hand out the age-reversal pills.

This invention wasn’t explicitly requested, but rather one of many solutions to fix the economic chaos of mass automation. These magic pills are the cheapest possible way to placate a population without having to give them land, money, or power. When food is unnecessary, so is money and a job. The invention is lauded for its brilliance: why fix the labor crisis when you can solve the problem all the way upstream? "Who wants to be a wage-slave when you can pharmaceutically eradicate hunger and experience freedom?" (That's the slogan.)

And so the story takes place as society rapidly reforms around the abolition of hunger. Food-based geopolitics ends. Meat industries vanish. People shift out of cities, migrate towards places of all-year outdoor living, and shift with the weather like animals. If machines and technocrats handle efficiency, most human culture centers around art and entertainment, religion and hedonism. Humans rich and poor still want attention, status, community, and meaning—and so phones, amenities, and circus (the infrastructure of attention) is distributed for free.

The average pill-takers vary in their definition of “good leisure.” There are sex cults, renaissances in every artform, national park dwellers, farmer-protestors, entertainment-addicts, techno-ghouls, and the sorts. Unshackled from labor, we see through the diversity possible in the species. Some appeal to the games and contests of elites, others form their own counter-cultures, others forage or stave. Without capitalism, and with (elective) guaranteed survival, half see the opportunity to push limits of human potential, the other half horrified at a stratified transhuman society.

The book shifts between two characters: one is the son of an elite who has direct access to ASI and is a lead decision maker in the engineering of a new society; the other is a woman on the snow pills, a journalist road tripping across the country to stay with and interview different factions. The two eventually meet, and the son (a prince of sorts), realizes that some mortal “animals” are happier than the council of immortal leaders. He falls for her and runs away with her, but she quickly abandons him. The prince when recognized, is torn apart, tortured, and held as ransom, a bartering chip to have leverage in society’s design.

Emerson said a divine intelligence with a simple cause leads to endless variety. We are, rightly so, locked into humanism, but you also can’t assume that man is the ideal end form of this process. For all we known mankind could be relative devils—violent ants, with only a few angels among us—compared to other potential species from past or future in the unknown nooks of spacetime. We could be the necessary chaff, an evolutionary dead end, that’s iterated through in order to let a truly divine species emerge. I’m not implying this in a post-human sense; in fact, the very possibility of man evolving into a mechanical shell of itself could be the proof that we are not a stable species. Dark, but I do mean this all in a positive, hermetic sense, that we come from a cosmic engine that makes mountains, mice, humans, and psychologies unimaginable, which is our role to evolve into.

Terence McKenna always had this half-baked idea/joke that mushrooms are extra-terrestrial. There’s a source in my "Babbling Idiot" essay from 2024 that dates mushrooms back to 60-65 million years ago, the date when the asteroid hit and made the dinosaurs extinct.

There’s some speculation that, if psilocybin did arrive extra-terrestrially, then it’s a kind of slow-moving alien fungus that’s able to bend certain forms of matter to create the conditions for language (high-bandwidth information processing) to occur.

Humans then became the host of that impulse, eventually creating machines that could make information processing even more dense. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that if you map LLMs they look a lot like fungal networks. This ties into that William Burroughs quote: "language is a virus from outer space.”

It ultimately frames humanity as a pass-through entity. It somehow explains our past and future, and becomes a catalyst to consider language itself as our ultimate life-force/medium of agency. I don't yearn for a transhumanist future, but when you think at cosmological time scales, it's hard to see the human as a stable form. (The issue with technologically-accelerated evolution is the speed, recklessness, and inequality in how it happens.)