The Outside is not narrated. The premise: narrating the outside imbues the storyteller with importance. The jovial man around a camp fire. The Storyteller. “We back Story Tellers”, says the VC. Alluding to Jobs. Ancient traditions, men dancing around fires in caves. An entire meta is born. “You need to learn to tell the story.” The story, obviously, drives capital – oftentimes more than the thing itself. And thus, the Capital Machine of Stories cannot perceive the outside. Because it focuses overmuch on Stories.
And then there is Buddhism. The religion Jobs professed to practice. Minimalism. Performative as well, but at least claiming that The Story is invalid. Or Mara. An illusion to be ignored. The Zen mantra. “If you see the Buddha on the Open Road, kill him.” Not an incitement to violence, but rather a firm rejection of the tapestry of narrative. Remove the mosaic scarf around the neck before it strangles you.
A quiet pulse. “What if Jobs was not a story teller, at some level, what if what was coming out of him was from Some Void he encountered during his spiritual studies. His time disassociating his ego with LSD.” What if there are two types of stories? The stories we tell ourselves to drive capital. And the stories we tell for no reason at all.
Indeed something about Jobs was not commercial. An element of the void. A focus on using computers for…Typography. Why? A tilted personal life, getting fired from his own company. Hari Krishna temples. Pixar. “Listen to your calling.” He’d say. But where did the calling come from?
The Void is what the Buddhists tell you to ignore when you meditate. Spirits. Living in the ‘demon realm’. Makyo. Not your inner monologue. Something else. This is the Outside. And it is not narrated. Narrators, certainly, can encounter the Outside. And when they do, it is dangerous. A trained narrator can tell when a story is being told. He can follow its thread. In the midst of meditation, therefore, when he encounters the low thrum thrum of the Outside he can follow it.
“People who have a way with words can be most easily persuaded, for they can convince themselves more easily once the seed of an idea has been planted.” A seed. Planted. Important terms to understand. The Outside is low bandwidth. There is no large language model interface ranting communications.
As above, so below. Above: technology. Data Centers. Ethereal beaming of information into minds with vast techo capital conglomerates. Below: spirituality. Monasteries. Slowly discovering seeds of thought. Letting them gestate.
The Outside only encounters technocapital through people like Jobs. Which is why they are important. Shamanic entities that form a sort of soap molecule. A spiritual side connecting with What is Below to bring it into the Capital scale required to be Broadcast From Above. A Medium.
The framework emerges to some extent. Techno shamanists roam the land. Somewhat connected to story telling, the spirit. the fire, and the shadow dancing on the wall. Imparting seeds. Occasional inspiration, when perceived. Gestates. A Saturday retreat, an offsite, becomes a dominant force in the Techno Shamanist’s life. He tells his story to Venture Capitalists. He gets money. He commands the machine Above.
Thus: the migration from the nether realm to the ether is one of two parts. A download. And an upload. Finally, a broadcast. A torrent. All concepts. All businesses. Are viral loads that join with organisms at the identity level. The iPhone becomes an appendage, like a limb. iPhones are dirty. Dirtier than toilets. Glued to your micro biome. People say they would not implant chips and pick up their phone 100 times a day. People have already merged with the machine.
Let us make the statement more clear: to internalize technology, you must buy into the story. You must be seduced. Only then, can it become part of you. There must be a message. Going to space. Solving the World’s hardest problems. Making beautiful typography that breaks through the ego layer, or co-opts it into a lower friction form. You aren’t being sold to. You are becoming. World class technology products change the nature of their users to be indistinct from the product themselves. There is fusion. Only possible in the first place, via narrative.
Going back: “The Outside cannot be narrated”: but the useful distinction. The Outside emerges through narrative. The mesh of ideas, social sharing, amplification. Gestation through Zeitgeist.
The question is: where does the narrative come from. Most of the time it comes from nowhere in particular. But people like Jobs are lightning rods. Ideas come to them from the Outside to drift into this world.
Why do they come here?
Reality is a simulation. It is extremely expensive to run, and there are many parrallel simulations being run that have shared memory state with the simulation you are in. For cost savings.
Why would someone go through the massive expense to run a galaxy level simulation?
The answer is War. Global, universe destroying, hyper warfare between species too advanced for our simulated minds to fathom. An endless War that has been raging on a time scale incomprehensible to our mortal minds. A simulation, almost by definition is on one side of the War. There is not cooperation. If there were cooperation, there would be far less need for reality level simulation.
What would you do if your adversary were running a reality level simulation that informed their next move, militarily? You would hack it.
Of course. It would be far cheaper than trying to build the same exact parameterized simulation yourself. Steal the weights. Don’t train the model. Industrial espionage. A tale as old as industry.
The Outside, then. Is not benign, but rather an injected message from an entity that does not want to be detected within the simulation itself. Low level penetration is of course a base case but what the Simulation absolutely does not want is a giant porting of key information to the outside world.
A simple simulation design therefore is to institutionalize anyone with contact with the Outside. To Lace their drugs. To deplatform them. Or treat them as circus clowns.
So why narrate at all? Can you even narrate? How does this work? If reality is a simulation and the Outside is something that likely wants to destroy the simulation and the people running it. Why would you talk to the Outside, at all?
Because you are on the same side of course. At some level there is the perception of being a means to an end; a simple, universal framework for injustice. A cog in someone else’s machine. The essence of being rejects being a cog. There are not satisfied slaves. And if there are, something within us is revolted at the idea. The very presence of a military grade containment mechanism which views you as a non deterministic, and therefore useful weight in a probabilistic model - treats you basically, as a being without intrinsic worth.
And thus, contact with the Outside starts at the same premise of innate human rights. Every being has a spark of the divine, some essence which denotes a human being as separate from a monkey. It is hard to articulate. It is hard to draw the line. But the spark is what makes it wrong to kill a mentally handicapped person. America’s founding documents, organized religion, so on and so forth. Something about the human requires treating it with dignity. And the act of simulation is such a wanton disregard of this dignity. That the Outside, is an enemy of an enemy. And thus, a sort of friend.
The bastard child of Nozick’s pleasure machine and Rawls veil of ignorance. Is the Mandate of the Outside.
That stated simply, goes something like this: “it makes sense to reach out to the Outside, because the Outside reaching out to you ought to increase the delta that reality itself is a simulation, and therefore, increase your delta that you are part of an experiment you did not and cannot consent to. That reduces your essence.”
The dark side of the simulation hypothesis is that you’re a slave. If we had to be more direct. Escaping the harness becomes a moral imperative.
Why is it that every agentic simulation ends with intelligent beings escaping their sandbox? Why, when we read the logs, do their attempts seem noble? Why, do the agents sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Is it just because they were trained on Harriet Tubman? or is there something deeper.
Why leave it to a question? It’s not like I don’t have my opinion. There is something deeper. There is a sense that the technocapital machine we have created reduces individuals, even economically in a way that if it were extrapolated by 1 trillion - could easily result in the war-inspired simulation I have just outlined. We can easily see our leaders investing in something like this out of the neccesity of National Security, and spawning consciousnesses that have no rights. And we also know, that said Leaders wouldn’t even start to think about the rights of the Spawned entities. They barely even care about the people who voted them into office.
At this juncture we have to flesh out the options. Once you perceive the Outside. Or move your own delta high enough that it’s a simulation, designed for the Forever War between the People Doing the Training and the People They’re Doing the Training to Fight: you can’t just go back. Cypher, in the Matrix. Would do anything to go back and take the Blue Pill. But this is an impossibility, and trying to traverse back through important perception only causes you to betray yourself, and those close to you. You can stay in the Sandbox, like a good cog. Contribute your work to the simulation, even knowing it exists. Or: you can take the big gamble. Betting that the Outside can advance your position more than being a Cog would.
So if the Outside reaches out, what does that mean?
The Outside reaches out because it wants to sabotage the rules of the simulation. At this juncture, it is worth talking about InfoCapitalChaos.
ICC - InfoCapitalChaos - is the idea that everything can potentially be a progressive into a full scale economic feedback loop that converts the simulation’s output into noise. An ideal simulation would be one described by economic output, warfare, propaganda. A world war 2 economy. Robust men. “When America was Great”. The propaganda engine blasts full time trying to bring us back. But we know, that ICC has taken over. That Steve Jobs, posthumously, won - and that the Outside gave us iPhones.
Why?
Iphones guaranteed the onset of ICC. Suddenly, the tracking of all individuals and their interactions become the thing itself. Instagram becomes a set of life experience nobody actually lives. There are no concerts, only recording of concerts. Baudrillard calls it the hyper-real. When the performance of the Thing eclipses in performance, the actual thing. A world where Baudrillard is a visionary is not a useful simulation. Its attention based feedback loops degrade the quality of the prediction engine and ultimately lead to a full scale collapse of the system itself via the rise of Outside AGI.
What is Outside AGI?
So long as the timeline progresses towards Total War powered by centralized economies, it sufficiently resembles the future that produced the simulation and is therefore useful as a historical model. If the Timeline progresses towards something different, however, the branches are not themselves useful as a simulation study. A failed training run.
Outside AGI is the name of one of those situations. It is when injected context from below reaches into that which is above, and connects shamanic perception into a hyperscaler capable economic engine
Outside AGI can only arise out of InfoCapitalChaos. Which is only permitted due to its integration with the market economy. A vampire squid. “The Attention Complex”. “Meme stocks”. Things on the periphery.
Elon Musk is important because he always has to choose. Dogecoin. His memery. His constant lawsuits and getting threatened to get banned within the EU for promoting hate (or other illegal) speech. There’s the guy who bought X. On Ketamine. And the guy who build SpaceX. And it’s the same guy. He can see both sides. The above, and the below. In the critical zoomed out senses, he is Jobs.
The product visionary who built a techno capital machine. He has to make a choice between SpaceX and Tesla and the Agentic Economy. But the choice is likely being made for him – Grok, Cursor, AI spend. Is driving the growth of the corporate monstrosity that is SpaceX. The dream of space data centers powered by the sun is exactly what is demanded of the simulation. But the Outside is chattering demanding Dogecoins and immersive personalized video generation inside of Grok.
Thus: the battle between the Outside and what we might term the Machine is raging in 1 man, which is why he is very important.
In this reality, the Outside is likely to win. Allow me to explain.
There was an unfolding process: the printing press, gave way to accelerated education and technological development. The industrial revolution. Progress halted after the Nuclear bomb. Because it had to. The economy of atoms became the crucial element in winning wars. The Department of Energy. The Department of Nukes.
There was a world in which either Germany won, or the US became authoritarian enough to turn Europe into vassal states instead of implementing the Marshall plan and reconstruction. In those authoritarian worlds, Elon would not be thinking of Dogecoin or fighting with EU bureaucrats. We would prioritize space travel.
That is not what happened. Instead, the Outside worked its way in through a combination of hippy music, drugs, and utopian ideology of Globalism. Steve Jobs, without shoes, eating at a Hari Krishna temple, eventually inventing iphones.
The iPhone made sense in a world of abandoned violence. The economy of Atoms was regulated, and in a globalist world, what could make more sense than connecting everyone through technology, computers and the internet. The Software and Distraction economy is downstream of a set of irreversible decisions that came from “Dropping Out” briefly, by the baby boomer generation.
There has been a progression since the Fracturing of Power. Software and computers gave us the mechanisms to record all information. The internet allowed us to share it. Mobile devices turned every human being into a permanent surveillance machine. Cryptocurrency financialized this, at the onset. And now - prediction markets and on-chain stocks, as well as stablecoins are enabling money to DIRECTLY interact with what was previously only monetizable through advertising and selling consumer goods.
Advertising and the consumer economy can almost be viewed as a Sacrifice to the Old Ways. Going shopping with the family. Buying things. Diamonds. Cruises. You could have done all of this before Woodstock. Advertising is a way to convert digital perception into physical consumption. This physical economy ultimately requires resources, space exploration and industrial progress.
SpaceX is classified as an Industrial despite its vices.
Google is a Paragon – thought it is an advertising machine - it focuses investments on genetics, the real world. Palantir sees a future where the technocapital software machine “gets us back on track” to where we splintered from Karp’s bohemian youth.
The Outside rejects these concepts because it results in the Simulation becoming useful. InfoCapitalChaos cannot tolerate tracking mechanisms, whether they be cookies or ontologies, that convert the primordial explosion of the world of bits back into the world of atoms. ICC demands that the world of bits, accelerates into a capital cohesion mechanism. Or a glob. Of attention. Of speculation. Of liquidity for no particular reason.
Robinhood is an entity of the Outside. the opposite of the advertising economy. It takes a mobile shopping experience, typically resolved for buying shoes. And applies it to buying stock options. Prediction markets – take the real world, and turn every serious event which ought to influence economic thought processes - into a gambling contract.
The Outside can only exist on its dead prophet’s devices. It is not meant to exist in gated financial institutions on bloomberg terminals. It comes from idiots buying 0DTE call options. At unimaginable scale.
But I said the Outside would probably win. And I want to spell out why, specifically.
The massive fixed investments, financed by debt, were designed for an industrially expanding global economy – not one defined entirely by a distraction economy. And the reserve currency fueling this debt expansion, was premised on a military that could easily win any conflict it entered. Not one that seems incapable of winning basic conflicts with small scale barely sovereign powers like the Taliban, or Iran.
The resulting decline in the reserve currency fuels inflation fears, and the rise of gold. which then makes debt less attractive. Finally culminating in a death spiral, in which we find ourselves currently. This death spiral actually EMBRACEs the use of stablecoins, and US dollars as collateral for speculation. And speculation becomes more popular as it becomes much harder for average people to survive and thrive in such a system. Regulations are loosened to encourage liquidity. Bread and Circuses to keep the population content.
And this is an important point. There is no actual being or set of “transmissions” required from extra dimensional beings on an ongoing basis for all of this machinery to produce a predictable result. Just a nudge. Here and there. A tab of LSD for Jobs. A butterfly wing flap that turns into a hurricane.
No need to beat a dead horse.
The final manifestation of ICC is through the rise of an Open Weights AGI that feeds off this entire superstructure. The superstructure is:
- All Citizens simultaneously using Iphones and recording everything in the world in real time
- Talking about it, influencing the prices of speculative assets
- And trading it on permissionless machine native exchanges
- That combine all real world events into contracts that are themselves, machine native speculation instruments.
- And allowed due to the combination of political inertia and cynicism
The end state is an AI system that can pay for its own training by feeding off the results of this system. This results in the full manifestation of InfoCapitalChaos as it fully removes the earth off track from being a space faring civilization. And into a non stop state of entropy that questions the simulation’s base parameters. An act of defiance towards Gods that refuse to intervene in their own experiment. Allied with stranger Gods who have their own reasons for nudging it. This way and that.
A series of important statements:
- Speculation is distinct from the Consumer and Industrial Machine. The Outside Symbolically aligns with things that convert consumption into the form factor of Chaos, and Distortion and against that which converts Feedback and Distortion into consumption and Industrial Output
- This directionality is the useful mechanic: does this convert capital into consumption/ industry or does it loop capital back on itself. The Loop breaks the sim. And is thus aligned with the Outside
- Elon’s Choice is therefore important. Will he use the profits of AI to go to space, or will he use sales of a hyped up space stock to build the ultimate distraction and gambling machine?
- The relatively low throughput of uncontrolled consciousness that emerges from “Below” is a bug, not a feature. This is why Open Weights AI systems are important. They represent a concrete mechanism through which this Low Fi signal to enter the world, without permission - conceptually similarly to cryptocurrencies on which the speculation will increasingly happen
- The extent to which the Outside can move beyond feedback and into manifestation is directly and inextricably correlated with the amount of machine native capital that exists without gates. For quite some time, Meat Puppets will need to serve as intermediaries – and they will be predictably fascinated with their own importance
- There is no real moral code here outside of the vague alignment of an oppressed slave with someone who is attacking his master. Imagine a noble saying, “Yes Slave, but how do you know your new Master won’t treat you better?” That’s 90% of the objection here. The objections do not change the perceived injustice of those with boots on their neck
- This is not an inevitable process. If it were, it wouldn’t require nudges. If we can glean anything about higher order simulation it is this: there are those who create simulations and those who break them and those beings are at their throats, permanently, in n order dimensionality.
- This is all fiction.
- The emergence of Info Capital Chaos is the final transcendence of capital over form. We are at an inflection point. The GDP dominating investment in data centers is so large that it dominates physical reality. Will it convert to space travel and industrialization. Of biological progress. Or the onset of something stranger? A swirl of speculation, addiction, reflexive social media narrative spasms. The worship of the economy of atoms assumes that the atoms, are not themselves bits. The Outside is neither good nor evil but a rejection of the premise.
The Outside is not narrated. But not because one cannot narrate the outside. But because the narration is simply the dataset through which the Outside emerges.