The Rationalist Road to Madness
The ideological force of Silicon Valley has become more palpable in recent years. Gaining in confidence as their power becomes more entrenched politically, the ascendancy of tech moguls to the levers of American power has coincided with a general exposure to their Promethean worldviews. Brian Johnson, commonly known as the anti-aging guy, provides a prime example. Setting himself the Promethean task of staving off natural death, Johnson rose to prominence online through his Project Blueprint 1. This project comprises a compulsive attempt to prolong his life by exposing every facet of it to data-driven optimization and computation, including gene therapy, plasma transfusions, and up to 100 supplements daily, among other strategies. Johnson caught the news again earlier this year by showing the world the levels he is willing to go to in his Promethean pursuit. Sitting in a studio in Mumbai and sporting both an N95 mask and a t-shirt that reads “Don’t Die”, Johnson can be seen abruptly walking out of an interview to the surprise of his hosts 2. Taking to social media a few days after the fact, Johnson stated that the levels of pollution within the immediate atmosphere of Mumbai prompted his walkout, which could have compromised his life-extending project.
Initiatives like Johnson’s serve as a stark reminder of the utter irrationality of the modern world, where the potential lifespan of a human being and the earth’s capacity to support life are inversely correlated. Whilst the length of a human life is potentially greater than ever, environmental destruction has brought the end of life on earth closer than ever. Techno-scientific innovations have simultaneously allowed the human to surpass certain biological limits, all the while threatening the existence of biological life as such. The negentropic pursuits of techno-science in the extension of human life cannot be separated from its entropic effects in the contraction of terrestrial life.
In theorizing this dialectic of technical development and biological destruction under the nuclear threat of the Cold War, German-Jewish exile Günther Anders noted a peculiar symptom emerging in the behavior of his generation: “Promethean shame” 3. This shame, Anders describes, stems from being biological, and thus mortal, in the face of technologies without such natural limitation. Despite this diagnosis predating the advent of genetic engineering, biohacking or the consensus on global warming, cases such as Johnson’s are a testament to the fact that Promethean shame is alive and well today.
Fellow exiles Adorno and Horkheimer saw the destruction of the 20th century, reaching its apex in the Holocaust, as the truth of so-called enlightenment. The instrumentalization of reason, the very faculty that Kant had made synonymous with human freedom, had turned against itself. In celebrating the coming to maturity of a rational subject in the Enlightenment, Kant defined this new subject through their capacity to act in accordance with the moral law. That is, to act without “guidance from another” 4, and thus toward, ultimately, the interest of humanity. Rather than being a means for something or someone outside itself, such as a tyrannical monarch or a spiritual leader, the human could finally become an end in and for itself. Reflecting on the dark side of the enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer correctly reminded their contemporaries that the violent legacy of Europe, both domestically and internationally, is sufficient to ascertain the irony in Kant’s original text.
The Kantian imperative to act in accordance with the moral law necessitates the faculty of judgment to be operational. That is, one can transition from an impression of an experience to an understanding that can be applied to future actions. For Anders, the other side of Promethean shame is, essentially, an inefficacy of judgment when applied to a capitalist totality mediated by machines. Promethean shame thus emerges from a failure to act out the Kantian imperative. It reflects an inability to follow the causal chain between an action one takes in the here and now to what will come of it in the future. To take some liberty with the terms of phenomenology here, we may say that this foreclosure of the rational subject is, in effect, the collapse of time-consciousness, wherein our retentional capacities are no match for the scope and duration of the operations our actions are situated within.
Whilst for Husserl the experience of time emerges through a chain between impression, retention, and protention, in which the present moment retains a portion of the recent past to provide context for the present and to direct one’s attention to the future that has not yet occurred, this other side of Promethean shame underscores the futility of any such ability in practical application. A series of links fail to form this causal chain. This gulf between impression and protention is a part of existence for most humans in the global North today. It is near impossible to judge whether an action one takes at a particular moment will accelerate extinction. Banal decisions such as opting to take public transport to the supermarket only to buy groceries shipped from abroad, or driving a car to attend a climate protest, for example, exemplify this schism.
Whilst there have been numerous accounts of the links between the transhumanist flavor of life-extensionism as pursued by Brian Johnson and the bundle of philosophies currently sitting under the umbrella of Rationalism 5, perhaps most indicative are the various polemics of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a forefather of this community, against death as such 6. Biohacking, long-termism, effective altruism, e/acc, and so on find commonality in a Promethean spirit that sees the finite limits of the human, both biological and cognitive, not as conditions of life to be accepted but as limits to be overcome.
Along with the small stir Johnson caused online with the interview he abandoned, the Prometheanism of Silicon Valley and the so-called Rationalism that has gained intellectual traction with it provided us an even starker portrait of absurdity earlier this year. The “Zizians”, a small network of young tech-adjacent Rationalists emerging from a similar milieu as Johnson, made global news through their involvement in a violent spree of seemingly random murders in the United States . Justifiably earning the oxymoronic label of a Rationalist cult, doomsday for the Zizians is the emergence of an Artificial General Intelligence that will subjugate humans as humans have subjugated animals. Whilst informed by Yudkowsky’s work on AI alignment, the Zizians make both Yudkowsky and the Rationalist community they have emerged from look quaint by comparison.
Although the Rationalist community has little in common with German Idealism or the tradition of Critical Theory, the Zizians are (or were) equally concerned with the inefficacy of judgment as observed by Anders. Where they diverge, however, is that what for Anders is an objective condition of thought under late capitalism, is for the Rationalists a problem to be overcome within thought itself. Theoretical devices such as decision theory, Bayesian reasoning, and utilitarian ethics are synthesized within the Rationalist community in an attempt to bridge the gulf between impression and protention. By delving deeper into the Zizian worldview through the blogs of Ziz herself (from whom the group derives its name), one can observe the trajectory that Rationalism can take. Absolute faith in the possibility that one can bridge the gulf between impression and protention through thought alone seemingly leads not to absolute understanding but rather a descent into murder and psychosis. Although her blog contains more extreme examples, Ziz’s account of her introduction to the thought systems that are common among the Rationalist community provides a glimpse of the irrational, debilitating moral quandaries that these thought systems can induce:
“Also in the context of talking about consequentialism, I told a story about a time I had killed four ants in a bathtub where I wanted to take a shower before going to work. How I had considered, can I just not take a shower, and presumed me smelling bad at work would, because of big numbers and the fate of the world and stuff, make the world worse than the deaths of four basically-causally-isolated people.” 8
Other journeys of reasoning can be found elsewhere in Ziz’s blog which go beyond this neurosis and lead to darker places. In a post from November 2019, Ziz describes her encounter with the “information hazard” that is Roko’s Basilisk. For the uninitiated, an information hazard is a piece of information that is hypothetically lethal to consume, wherein the reader becomes implicated in a future scenario, and thus responsible to act immediately. As far as info hazards go, Roko’s Basilisk is both the most prominent and most unsettling for those who accept its terms. The Basilisk is a thought experiment that emerges from the Rationalist community which, essentially, through logical procedure concludes that if one is to learn about the potential of true artificial intelligence ahead of its actual existence then one must make every decision in life accelerate its emergence. Otherwise, when it inevitably does emerge, they will be tortured for not helping it come into existence. In taking this decision theory in absolute earnest, Ziz describes what seems to be a near psychotic breakdown in trying to think her way through it:
“Later, thoughts about basilisks came back, and the epistemic masochism subagent started up again and advanced one more click. If what I cared about was sentient life, and was willing to go to Hell to save everyone else. Why not just send everyone else to Hell if I didn’t submit?”
Oh no. Don’t think about it. Don’t let it demoralize me. That awful feeling, that’s a consequence of that prediction. Fuck, I am letting it demoralize me. No, no, no. Stop, it’s getting worse.” 9
Unlike for these Rationalists, the inefficacy of judgment for Anders does not necessarily speak to an inherent weakness of the human to be overcome through its cognitive faculties alone. Applying the tenets of decision theory to every act one may take in life does not change the fact that a world organized by the profit motive is, fundamentally, irrational. Following Marx, for Anders the gulf between impression and protention must be grasped as an objective condition of a world in which human flourishing is subordinate to profit. The drive for surplus-value necessitates perpetual optimization through both the division of labor and technical development. This, in turn, increasingly subsumes the worker into this very process, stripping them of both control and cognition over their work. The expansion and entrenchment of these networks with ever more nodes and relays are facilitated by technological development, which accelerates the circulation of both goods and information. The capacity for judgment is weakened as these processes intensify.
Whilst for the Rationalists an emergent AGI that will treat humans as raw material is an ultimate threat to be staved off through the faculties of rational thought, for Anders the inverted utopia of industrial capitalism has already reduced the human to this status 10. Unlike for other inheritors of Marxism, for Anders capitalist development does not bring forth the proletariat as a revolutionary subject. Instead, it universalizes the very condition of the worker as a mere cog in a machine with a scale beyond cognition, casting everyone into Promethean shame while Technology takes its place as the subject of history. Bernard Stiegler’s notion of proletarianization is akin to that of Anders. In this framework, the term does not imply a standpoint ripe for revolution but rather describes the supplanting of the worker with the technical individual—a producer whose skill, bargaining power, and know-how is subsumed by machines.
Remembering Epimetheus
Writing after the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation had waned, Stiegler offered an assessment that was still in many ways no less foreboding than that of Anders. The possibility of an end of time, for Stiegler, is a horizon that emerges not exclusively through the actual destruction of the biosphere but rather a potential “neutron bomb of the mind” 11. Despite the semantic similarity, Stiegler does not mean anything like an info hazard such as Roko’s Basilisk, but rather a condition in which time-consciousness is not just ineffective but inexistent. In returning to the myth of Prometheus, Stiegler provides us with an account of the relation between judgment and technology that allows us to think through Promethean shame today.
In the first volume of Technics and Time, Stiegler moves between philosophy, mythology, and paleoanthropology to sketch a co-emergence of the human and the technical prostheses it depends upon for life. In divergence from the history of Western philosophy, consciousness is not an a priori condition for the use of tools. Rather, it emerges contemporaneously through a prosthetic engagement with the world that is necessitated by the incompleteness of the human animal. Stiegler reminds us of the very reason for Prometheus’ gift of fire in the original myth: his brother Epimetheus forgetting to give humans an attribute like all other beings and thus leaving the human without qualities. The lack of a self-sustaining nature within the human-animal requires technical compensation through tool use, which in turn allows for the inscription of information that can live beyond the here and now of a biological body. This co-emergence of human and tool is further explicated in Stiegler’s dealings with Kant in the third volume of the same title. Taking in earnest Adorno and Horkheimer’s quip that the culture industry had gained control over the Kantian schema 12, Stiegler shifts this sentiment from an off-hand critique of instrumental rationality to a theory of rationality as contingent upon instruments. To draw this out, we can first retrace his dealings with Kant through Husserl in the aforementioned volume.
As previously mentioned, Husserl’s account of time-consciousness delineates a coordination of the past, present, and future that is illustrated by the experience of objects that unfold in time, such as a sentence, a conversation, or, in Husserl’s case, a melody. In the present of the melody—the current note one is hearing—something of the prior notes since the melody began must remain within consciousness. Otherwise, the melody would not be experienced as totality with harmonization, resonance, and so on, but as a chaotic series of notes without any relation to each other. While Husserl’s account grants a place for memory (which Husserl will also term imagination) within perception, its scope is limited to the duration of the object one is perceiving. This memory within perception—primary retention—is for Husserl absolutely distinct from recollection, that is, from memory of the experience after it is over (secondary retention or imagination).
For Stiegler, the digital technologies developed after Husserl’s lifetime revealed such absolute distinction of perception and imagination to be untenable. Reproduced memory, such as an MP3 track, not only makes it possible to experience the same temporal object more than once. It also reveals that this same object does not correlate to the same experience. In re-listening, one may form different mental associations to the notes they hear in the second than they did in the first hearing. They may enjoy it more, less, or have an entirely different feeling from it altogether. This diversity of possible experience from the same object can only be explained if something beyond the durational scope of the object is admitted into the act of perception. There is thus no demarcation of where retention starts or stops. Memory and perception are not separate faculties but work in composition to make sense of time.
According to Stiegler, Kant was closer to this account of memory within perception without realizing so himself. For Kant, an object can only be apprehended if there is “understanding of the successive experience of diversity” 13 that is carried from the past into the now. An experience of the world in time, that can graduate from one now to the next, differentiate the past from what is now passing and thus protend to the not-yet of the future, is not possible through the faculty perception alone. Another faculty is necessary to arrange these impressions. Without such coordination of these faculties, there would be no past or future but a perpetual now: note after note which do not add up to a melody but impress themselves as an entirely new object to perception each time.
Despite grasping the inadequacy of perception alone—recognizing its reliance upon memory—Kant, according to Stiegler, could not attribute this memory function to anything outside of human cognition. He thus could not account for how this very composition of perception and memory comes into being. The mystery of the Kantian schema, how a correlation between a subjective experience of the world and the world itself is possible to begin with, remains a hidden art in the depths of the human soul. There is the experience of reality as it appears in images on the retina, and there is a schema that arranges and makes sense of them. Yet there is no account of what makes this synchronization possible in the first place.
Stiegler’s answer to this aporia is a materialist account of the Kantian a priori which bridges the gap between image and schema, empirical and transcendental, and as such between subject and object. He posits each apparent duality as “two faces of the same reality” 14. Whilst for Kant “schema precedes image,” Stiegler’s claim against this idealism is that they are in a “co-emergent transductive relationship” 15. Just as the human does not precede technics, schema does not precede image. Thus, the transcendental (the arrangement of experience) does not precede the empirical (the contents of that experience). This co-emergence must be grasped as transductive, in that neither term (human nor technics) can be delineated individually before the existence of the other. In accordance with this challenge to conventional ontology, a genealogical account of abstraction as a material practice is employed to speculate on the origin of this co-emergence and beyond.
Geneviève Guitel’s genealogy of numeration provides Stiegler with this account. Contra Kant, for Guitel the conception of number is not conceptual in the usual sense but rather must be located in spatio-temporal practice. Following Guitel via Stiegler, a prosthetic engagement with the world necessitated by a lacking human nature allows for the inscription of correspondence. The use of flint in proto-hunting devices can equally be used to enumerate each animal in a flock as a mark upon a wall. Tools can be used to abstract fragments of experience out of the flow of lived time and into another time of information. The inscription of correspondence—artificial memory—emerges as an abstraction in reality without any work of consciousness prefiguring it. Such a prehistoric image stands for Stiegler as an abstraction that is not (yet) a concept, for “There is no need to know how to name those first numbers: we can make the correspondence silently” 16.
This externalization of the temporal, the inscription of information, makes possible an internalization through its transduction into an ideal form. This primordial abstraction in space and time (such as marks on a cave wall) can in turn be substituted with a phonetic representation (a sound one makes to convey information) and, ultimately, reproduced in thought as a number. A number is an ideal object independent of a space-time continuum. Following this, we do not have a schema preceding image, wherein concepts are simply projected upon the world. Rather, we have a complex dynamic that is dependent upon technicity as a crutch. The primary and secondary forms of memory which Husserl located in consciousness depend upon a tertiary, artificial form of memory external to that consciousness. Taking Gilbert Simondon’s notion of individuation a step further than Guitel, Stiegler speculates that it “could be that all operations of the understanding are originally constituted in just such a synchronization, preceding any internal/external, outside/inside opposition” 17.
The operation of understanding is a conjoint operation of the internal and external senses that is forgotten. This forgetting is nothing other than the erasure of Epimetheus from the original myth. The occlusion of technics from the constitution of thought not only led Kant to a theoretical deadlock which could only be answered with his own reversion to myth—a hidden art in the depth of the human soul—but can equally be read as the repressed truth of Promethean shame. The effect of this amnesia is twofold, which the Zizians and the Rationalist milieu they emerged from exemplify today. On the one hand, technology is seen as something fundamentally alien to the human. This is reflected in both doomer and optimist perspectives on AI, wherein either it will subjugate us to its own ends or we can subjugate it to our own ends. On the other hand, the subject—whose capacity for judgement owes nothing to anything outside their own body—is granted a capacity for understanding that knows no bounds. The result of this is a lot of interest in what thought can do, but little interest in the very structure—a capitalist totality mediated by technology—that widens the gulf between impression and protention as a condition of its own perpetuation.
Promethean Shame Today
Whilst Anders grasped the futility of judgment, the gulf between impression and protention, as historically objective and thus a fundamentally a-moral condition 18, the casting of this problem in purely subjective terms, as per the Zizians, leads to depraved acts of violence in the name of moral absolutism. In the case of the Zizians, we can identify this in their logic, which insists that whether one person is moral or not (is fundamentally good or fundamentally evil) can and must be answered in absolute terms. This determination, for the most part, hinges on whether or not said person is vegan. As exemplified by the extreme violent acts the Zizians are alleged to have committed—which include but are not limited to the murder of a member’s parents, the stabbing of an innocent 80-year-old man with a katana blade, and the suggestion made by a member to one of their friends outside the group that they take their own life in the name of reason 19—an attempt to act rationally in accordance with a moral law seemingly results in the most irrational, immoral actions imaginable. When probed about the stabbing of 80-year-old Curtis Lind, Maximillian Snyder—a key member and accused murderer of Curtis Lind himself—responded as follows:
“I think murdering people with katanas is in many cases correct or if incorrect only incorrect strategically.” 20
Rather than an alignment of AGI with human flourishing, we observe a descent into psychosis. A series of nows that don’t add up to make sense. An obliteration of time-consciousness and a murderous spiral. While a fundamental principle of the broader Rationalist and AI safety worldview from which the Zizians emerged is a critique of human hubris, their own attempts to treat the mind as a machine without actually accounting for the technical (and thus material and historic) conditions of thought must be recognised as the ultimate hubris. Without a grasp upon these conditions of thought—without remembering Epimetheus—there is no apparent limit to thought. It is here we may turn to Promethean shame once more. For Anders, Promethean shame aspires for a kind of “Promethean defiance”. That is, a “refusal to owe anything, including oneself, to anyone else” 21, and thus a perversion of the Kantian moral law. The reversion of the rational to absolute irrationality is visible in the very notion of a Rationalist “cult” or a multi-millionaire attempting to live forever while the world burns.
In his short essay Theses for the Atomic Age, written in 1957, Anders made an observation that aligns precisely with the examination provided here of Promethean shame nearly 70 years on. He stated that “Today, it is not in the wide land of imagination that escapists like to hide, but in the ivory tower of perception” 22. In another text written soon after, Visit to Hades, Anders offers a potential way down from this ivory tower in strikingly Stieglerian terms. He posits that “Imagination needs to become an empirical method, an organ of perception for that which is truly enormous” 23. In light of the theoretical side to this essay, we should say that imagination (or memory) is already an organ of perception, and it is now crucial to remember it as such.
References
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1989. Trans. John Cumming. (London: Verso)
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 1998. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. (Stanford: Stanford California Press)
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 2, 2009. Trans. Stephen Barker. (Stanford: Stanford California Press)
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 3, 2011. Trans. Stephen Barker. (Stanford: Stanford California Press)
Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 1992. Trans. Ted Humphrey. (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing)
Christopher John Müller, Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence, 2016 (London: Rowman & Littlefield)
Babette Babich, Günter Anders’ Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory, 2022. (London: Bloomsbury)
Ezra Marcus, The Cut, April 15, 2025.
Vincent Lê, Architechtonics, Feb 18, 2025.
Vincent Lê, Architechtonics, March 04, 2025.