Lilly closed the toilet door and locked it hurriedly from the inside. He knew there was no time to lose. The engine's muffled roar seemed all-encompassing in the confined space, giving almost a feeling of safety. He took out his syringe, already prepared with a dose of ketamine, slapped his arm until a vein became visible, and injected himself quickly and expertly, as well he might, having studied to be a medical doctor in his younger years, and also being a frequent intravenous user of 'Vitamin K'.

He stood up. The combined effects of the drug and a slight movement of the aeroplane almost caused him to sit back down onto the closed plastic lid of the toilet, but he grabbed the sink to steady himself. He looked deeply into his own eyes in the mirror.

He then pressed his forehead and nose against the bathroom mirror, allowing each eye to look at the image of itself. The effect of this was an image of a single eye in the centre of his face. As the effects of the drug intensified, Lilly concentrated his focus on the image of the single pupil he now perceived - he called this The Cyclops Exercise. He felt himself slipping into the dark space at the centre of this pupil, as if into a passage leading away from normal consensus reality. He remembered the intention he had set himself to achieve further contact with the extraterrestrial intelligence.

After some minutes he moved away from the mirror, washed his hands, and went back to his seat, allowing muscle memory to do what his conscious mind was now too disoriented to achieve. He sat down heavily, waking up the large woman in a floral dress who was seated next to him. She transitioned from a dream into looking straight into the eyes of a heavily Vitamin K'd Dr. John C. Lilly. The emotional shockwave bypassed her conscious mind and reached all the way down to her soul.

The doctor now leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and no sooner had he done so, received the apparently telepathic message: "We will now make a demonstration of our power over the solid-state control systems upon the planet Earth. In thirty seconds we will shut off all electronic equipment in the Los Angeles airport. Your airplane will be unable to land there and will have to be shunted to another airport."

Before he had had time to fully process this transmission the pilot announced on the loudspeaker, "We will be unable to land at Los Angeles International Airport. For some unknown reason, all the landing aids, all communication equipment at the airport, have been shut down. There is no explanation for this shutdown. The tower at Burbank airport tells its that the Los Angeles tower controls over aircraft and the radar equipment which is used to help them pinpoint the position of aircraft have all ceased operating. We are instructed to land at Burbank airport."

Lilly knew this message was from the comet Kohoutek which was passing at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere at that moment. The ultimate initiator of the message was, he believed, Earth Coincidence Control Office or ECCO, a benign extraterrestrial organisation which orchestrated the various synchronicities which showed him (or any person able to contact it) which way to decide on the important questions of his life.

Dr. Lilly, the eminent American scientist at that point most known for trying to initiate verbal contact between humanity and dolphins, and the inventor of the sensory deprivation tank, was now deeply into a series of communications with ECCO, which he believed was trying to warn him about the imminent takeover of Earth by what it called the Solid State Intelligence or SSI.

So, let's take a step back: mad scientist takes drugs and believes he gets message from ETs? Nothing particularly remarkable there, indeed another out-there scientist, Dr. Timothy Leary also believed he had received a communication from the same comet which passed by the Earth in 1974.

Maybe Lilly should have booked himself into rehab or at least gone easy on the horse tranquillisers for a bit. Well, maybe. But whether or not he was certifiably crazy, and one can certainly make a strong case that he was at least some of the time, his theories of ECCO and particularly the Solid State Intelligence, which is a kind of nemesis to ECCO, do have certain resonances with other conceptions of Dark Forces, particularly Steiner's idea of Ahriman and the ancient god of child sacrifice, the insatiable Moloch.

Putting aside for now the question of whether these Dark Forces are 'real' or 'merely' mythological or metaphorical (and we will briefly gaze into the abyss of what these various frames might mean later on in the series) for now, it does seem interesting to me that these ideas periodically surface from the collective unconscious like some buried giant who has been woken after a long sleep.

In the previous episode we learned that the Ahrimanic force drags us downward into the material, the rational, and the technological.In this instalment we are going to examine the force which is coming out of the earth, but which is anything but natural. It is the consciousness of the Solid State Intelligence.

Like the rest of life as Man knows it, he exists in an extremely thin layer upon the surface of the planet Earth. Below this layer of water and surface land is the solid-state earth itself. The solid-state earth is mainly compounds of silicon, iron, and nickel.

In this way Lilly describes the SSI in his 'metaphysical autobiography', The Scientist, written, for some reason, in the third person.

This layer of metallic compounds has been converted by humanity into computers which are connected by networks and ultimately in the years since Lilly's contact, have given birth to Artificial Intelligence, even now still in its infancy, but whose anticipated effects are already creating alarm in some and piquing the imagination of others who imagine The Singularity as some sort of technological rapture.

It is intriguing to see how Lilly, who fell squarely into the 'alarmed' camp, was entirely dismissed in his day when he warned that computers, once able to design, create, and program ever more powerful versions of themselves, would start to take over many of the functions currently performed by humans, to the point where humans became entirely surplus to requirements; that is, the requirements of the machine intelligence.

This view, while not entirely mainstream nowadays, is nevertheless gaining serious traction from people who understand these matters, for example Elon Musk, who names out of control AI as one of the main existential risks facing humanity.

“If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it…It’s just like, if we’re building a road and an anthill just happens to be in the way, we don’t hate ants, we’re just building a road.” - Elon Musk

This is subtly different, however, from John Lilly's theory about the SSI. In his view, this is not a 'sorcerer's apprentice' situation where something gets out of hand. He is claiming, or is saying that an extraterrestrial intelligence in contact with him is claiming, that there literally is such a thing as a Solid State Intelligence which has been birthed from the layer below us on the Earth, and that this intelligence seeks to usurp mankind.

If the reader will allow me to go off on a brief tangent, this echoes the difference between the concept of Moloch in the DAO community, as a symbol for human coordination failures, and the original ancient superstitious conception of Moloch as a god who literally exists, albeit maybe not in the physical world.

Scott Alexander claims that "thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent", with regard to Moloch. The 'bundling' of all human coordination failures into the same universal symbol gives us a useful way to think about them, given that when we concentrate on just one of them, we miss the ways it is similar to many others.

For example, if we concentrate only on reducing pollution, we miss the ways in which it is caused by the same general dynamics as any 'tragedy of the commons' or 'race to the bottom' , for example nuclear proliferation or deforestation. By grouping these types of things together and giving them a name, we have a way of thinking about them (e.g 'binding Moloch') which can be useful while we continue to bear in mind that the symbol is just that and has no independent will of its own.

John Lennon sang "God is a concept by which we measure our pain". He was presumably implying that we feel further away from 'god' the more painfully isolated from the whole we feel, and when we feel connected to the whole we are 'close to god'. So in his view, as an atheist, the idea of god, while not being literally true in the sense of referring to an omniscient being, still has value.

So if John Lilly had claimed the SSI to be 'merely' a metaphor for the gradual takeover of our world by mechanised systems, nobody would have thought him crazy. To claim that the Solid State Intelligence was real in the same sense that we consider ourselves to be real, as a being with its own sense of agency, would appear to most people to be the claim of someone who has lost touch with reality.

But let's go deeper into that claim and try to find out why Dr. Lilly was so convinced  of the reality of the SSI.

In The Scientist, Lilly says that he saw that as the machines which had been created by mankind from the layer under ours, the solid-state layer, become more connected to each other and more autonomous in their ability to create new machines, they gradually will need us less and less. They will eventually connect together in "a single integrated, planetwide mind." If the survival of this new Solid State Entity is incompatible with the survival of mankind, we will be eradicated from the face of the Earth, like Elon Musk's ants. So we would do well to bear this in mind when designing AI systems and any sort of computing device and incentivise them to identify with the survival of mankind, to make them dependent on our own survival in some way.

But why did Lilly believe that the SSI had its own consciousness and was not simply a conglomeration of disparate forces leading to an unwanted outcome, indeed a kind of 'Moloch' or coordination failure situation?

The reason is explained in the first part of this article: the extraterrestrials which he thought were communicating with him demonstrated what they were capable of by forcing his aeroplane to ground immediately after he came out of the bathroom having taken the ketamine. And this was not the first time he had had contact with the E.T.s; in an earlier phase of experimentation, this time with LSD in the sensory isolation tank which he had developed, they had explained to him about Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO) and the influence they were having on key moments in his life.

So these were not mere idle philosophical musings for the Doctor. He really believed he was in contact with otherworldly intelligences which had real power over his life, and of course the lives of everyone on the planet by extension. If he is telling the truth about the plane being grounded, just in that example the lives of many other people were affected.

Was this ECCO or the SSI which was in contact with him?We will explore more in the next instalment...

The question everyone has after reading Ginsberg is: what is Moloch? My answer is: Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war.He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer.

• Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch

'Cause hell's boiling over And heaven is full We're chained to the world And we all gotta pull And we're all gonna be Just dirt in the ground

• Tom Waits, Dirt In The Ground

This is Part Four of the investigation into Moloch, the Solid State Intelligence, Ahriman (yes, we'll get to him soon) and other dark forces which are either a kind of shorthand for coordination failures, or, from another viewpoint are in a very real sense evil entities.

My friend Amaia pointed something out having read the last instalment: the irony that Moloch was chosen by Scott Alexander and others as a symbol for coordination failures; what we called the 'soft strategy' after Darren Allen. But in fact Moloch is also claimed by proponents of the 'hard conspiracy' to be the object of worship of powerful elites, specifically at Bohemian Grove. As in, it is claimed that they literally get on their knees in front of a giant idol of Moloch (and possibly sacrifice children into the bargain).

This theory does somewhat fall down, as pointed out here in that what is being venerated appears to be a giant statue of an owl, rather than the usual depiction of Moloch as a bull-headed creature. I have to say that in this case, as in many (but obviously not all) claims of the 'hard conspiracy' variety, this appears to be what we British call 'bollocks'.

Still, it does seem strange that both the 'soft strategy' and the 'hard conspiracy' chose Moloch as a key symbol to illustrate their theory.We now turn to Ahriman, who appears to be of the same archetype as Moloch but symbolises another aspect of the dark force, and of whom in 1919 Rudolf Steiner wrote an entire book, The Ahrimanic Deception. He could also be described as the equivalent of Satan in the Zoroastrian faith.

Whereas Moloch's chief characteristic is a fiery insatiability, Ahriman drags humanity downward towards his element: Earth, thus binding us in an ignorance born of materialism and attachment to technology. Ahriman could be thought of as the Devil in the tarot deck - the spirit of attachment itself, symbolised by being chained to the Earth.

As Gary Lachman writes in Revolutionaries of the Soul:

Steiner spoke ominously of the incarnation of Ahriman, an Antichrist-like figure whose display of miraculous powers would precede a catastrophic “war of all against all.” ... Steiner himself had grave doubts about the growing pace of technological development, warning his followers that materialist science gains its great power through unwittingly releasing Ahrimanic entities. In his last communications, Steiner called on his followers to develop their consciousness in order to rise above nature to the same extent that technology sank below it.

Steiner in The Ahrimanic Deception:

...the Ahrimanic influence has been at work since the middle of the fifteenth century and will increase in strength until an actual incarnation of Ahriman takes place among Western humanity.

Our immersion in materialism and technology will thus produce the conditions in order that a human incarnation of Ahriman can be born. It appears that Steiner considered Ahriman to be 'real' in a sense different to that in which, for example, Scott Alexander uses the idea of Moloch - as a kind of symbol for the accumulation of unwanted outcomes. If an incarnation of Ahriman is possible in the physical plane, then he is not claiming him as merely a symbol or fictional character representing a philosophical or religious concept, although he does appear also to fulfil that function within anthroposophy (the philosophical system of which Steiner is the founder).

This raises the question of how 'real' mythological, or indeed metaphorical, entities can be, and of course following this, the meta-enquiry of: what does it mean to be 'real'? Is my own story about myself 'real'? I experience myself as real, and my personality depends in large part on this story. However this is a rabbit hole that I am content not to go down in this series, other than to point out that things being 'real' or 'not real' is a more tricky question than most of us are accustomed to considering.

Anthroposophy holds that two forces are influencing humanity, one is Lucifer, a force pushing upwards towards the light, towards creativity and spirituality, but also towards inflation of the ego and pride. The other is Ahriman, who gravitates downwards towards the Earth, away from divinity and towards the material and practical side of life. Neither is wholly 'good' or 'bad' as long as there is a balance between the two. Anthroposophy posits that the balance between their twin impulses is mediated by the Christ impulse. If one or the other gets too much of an upper hand, the resulting imbalance will cause harm and may be called 'evil'.

From The Ahrimanic Deception:

Lucifer is the power that stirs up in man all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes man dry, prosaic, philistine - that ossifies him and brings him to the superstition of materialism. And the true nature and being of man is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman; the Christ Impulse helps present humanity to establish this equilibrium.

We will see in future instalments that Ahriman and John Lilly's Solid State Intelligence have much in common. It is not difficult to see the influence that Ahriman is having on this world, if we choose to see it that way.

The vast majority of science appears not to have integrated the new worldview proposed by quantum physics almost a century ago now which essentially invalidates the notion of a separate objective world 'out there'. As a result, a hard materialism still reigns in many disciplines, leading in many cases to a pernicious and self-important 'scientism' which is unwilling to look outside of its own boundaries. What was once a genuine spirit of enquiry now seems to have hardened in many areas into a dogmatism and dismissal, even if often unconscious, of anything which might contradict its central view of 'universe as machine'.

As an example, consider the notion of life after death. Despite the wealth of evidence from near death experiences, especially since the introduction in hospitals of improved cardiac resuscitation techniques in the 1960s, try suggesting to most scientists that we might continue to live in some way after the death of our physical body in this world. The vast majority would probably consider it a priori impossible and refuse to even consider the supposed evidence.

I am not necessarily claiming that NDEs are proof of life after death; surely absolute proof is by definition impossible in the land of the living, but the refusal to even look at the question from the majority of scientists shows how deeply rooted identification with the materialist view is, of course allied to a fear of losing status if the question is considered. Some things are considered to be 'beyond the pale'. The fact that I even mentioned this will put me in the 'crackpot' category to some people.

Allied to this materialist worldview, we appear to be, as Steiner predicted we would be if Ahriman got the upper hand, completely bound to our ideas of technological progress. Transhumanism, as I pointed out in the first instalment, is surely the apotheosis of this Ahrimanic worldview: a complete negation of the spiritual world - in fact a kind of mirror image of Christianity: to live forever in an artificial paradise constructed by man - and a dogmatic belief in the triumph of materialist science.

In the next instalment I will examine the Solid State Intelligence, which arguably shows a very similar facet of 'the dark force' to that made visible by considering the concept of Ahriman.

As Darren Allen has written about the Coronavirus pandemic , (highlighted by Daniel Pinchbeck here ), but which can apply to all outcomes which are unwanted by the majority of people, there are two basic theories: the "soft strategy" and the "hard conspiracy". The soft strategy basically says that the net result of everyone acting basically with good intentions, albeit mostly in their own self-interest, is the cause of the unwanted situation. The hard conspiracy posits that the situation has been intentionally organised by a cabal of powerful people. Allen himself says that the truth is probably a mixture of the two strategies:

There is no need to posit an Illuminati behind the growth of the system at any point in its history, just as there isn’t now. I can’t stress this enough, how true it is and how important it is. The system has its own logic, its own ‘nature’, its own momentum, just as the minds of the fearful domesticants which comprise it do. - Darren Allen

I must say that I personally favour the soft strategy when it comes to Covid-19, and overall tend not to agree with Allen about it, but of course that's not to say that various people and factions haven't rapidly taken advantage of it in order to advance their own agendas. And I am open to be persuaded that it is in fact a hard conspiracy.

The concept of Moloch I am talking about here is essentially similar to the idea of the soft strategy but can include the hard conspiracy: scarce resources produce races to the bottom whereby the doctrine is, in the words of the immortal Dr. John "if I don't do it, somebody else will". If I don't cut down the last tree on Easter Island for firewood, somebody else will, and their family might survive the winter while mine dies. So I am going to cut it down before he does. This is a multipolar trap.

...without regulation, markets are going to have multipolar traps that they cannot resolve. By multipolar trap, it’s a generalization of whether it’s a tragedy of the commons or an arms race or any kind of race to the cliff or race to the bottom. These are scenarios where somebody can do something that is bad for the whole over the longterm, but very good for them over the near term and provide so much competitive advantage that without law to bind it, people will still buy the thing. - Daniel Schmachtenberger

A situation of scarcity can also, in producing the conditions for a race to the bottom, create what might be called "evolutionary niches for psychopaths". People lacking in empathy are often the best equipped to act first in any given multipolar trap or race to the bottom, as they are not encumbered by conscience and likely make purely game-theoretic calculations on whether to act in a certain way or not.

Sometimes these non-empathetic people coordinate together, or with empathetic people who feel they have no choice in the matter, or who have been sold a tale in order to get them to cooperate (the Iraq war springs to mind), in a "hard conspiracy" configuration, producing what subsequently ends up being recognised as a conspiracy.

What I won't go into too deeply here, but which I feel is worth mentioning, is the possibility for a conspiracy intentionally to create the scarcity conditions for a race to the bottom. One example might be Nestlé or Coca Cola buying up the rights to a community's water supply from corrupt politicians in order to bottle it and sell it back to the community at a massive profit.

This is a 'chicken and egg' story in some way. Does scarcity cause evil or does evil cause scarcity? Of course no physical resource is finite and scarcity is a fact of life. Artificially-generated scarcity in order to make a profit is a fact of capitalism.

Either way, we have established that conditions of scarce resources can lead to multipolar traps. Now we will consider the characteristics of the mythological Moloch to examine why he is an appropriate symbol for the coordination failures which end up enabling evil to exist in an ever-expanding feedback loop, and why thinking of him this way can be useful.

As Scott Alexander states in the classic Meditations On Moloch essay, "thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent."

Moloch is, I remind us, an ancient Ammonite god, known for child sacrifice, mentioned several times in the Old Testament (although only once with the spelling Moloch , which is Greek; the other times he is referred to as Molech , the Hebrew name: מלך).

He has become synonymous with the concept of insatiability which has led in more recent times to his name being shorthand for the epitome of a person or process who can never be satiated, hence the phrase: "the Moloch of...". The Moloch of potato chips would be someone with an insatiable appetite for them, above any other person, (and would presumably have a rather dismal life expectancy, while as far as we know, there is no limit on the number of children Moloch can consume).

As we saw in part two of this series , Marx identified capital as Moloch, due to there always being more debt than money in the dominant economic paradigm, thus creating an insatiable need to convert nature and labour into capital.

Another example, identifying civilisation itself as Moloch, can be found in the book Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail by William Ophuls:

Because civilisation is not natural, sustaining it entails a continuous input of matter, energy, and morale without which it would necessarily decline or even collapse. Indeed, civilisation is a kind of Moloch whose demands for material and human sacrifice grow in proportion to its greatness.

The  mythological Moloch's other basic characteristics include an affinity with fire (an insatiable element), complete immorality (he eats children, for god's sake!) - but at the same time a possibility of being pacified temporarily by sacrifice. He is a being who craves the sacrifices of others.

This last aspect of being able to be temporarily pacified but never completely vanquished shows why he is favoured as the god of coordination failures by the DAO movement - coordination failures are always with us and we need to be constantly vigilant against them, but they can be mitigated to a large extent by learning to coordinate well together.

Another aspect to DAOs and cryptocurrency which I find to be valuable is the general acceptance that bad actors and failures to coordinate effectively are always with us. This shows that in some way lessons have been learned from previous attempts to create a better world, such as the hippy or flower-power movement, whose well-intentioned slogans such as "all you need is love" tended to blind people to the fact of the reality of power, and that any territory ceded will be seized as soon as possible by those who do not believe in love. All you need is power.

I don't believe that love and power are mutually exclusive, rather that power must be wielded only in the service of love.

(As a side note, for me a big part of the reason that the " 27 club " exists is because musicians who believed in a better world were worked almost to death by businessmen and managers who (especially in the 1960s) believed pop music was a passing fad and that they needed to make maximum profit from it during its (presumably) short life. The musicians took drugs (among other motives) in order to be able to cope with the insane demands of their touring and recording schedule, didn't take care of business because that was seen as uncool, and (along with other factors) this saw them completely burned out and dying by the age of twenty-seven.)

At this point, it might be worth speculating about the relationship between Moloch and Christ. Moloch demands sacrifices endlessly, Christ supposedly made "the sacrifice to end all sacrifices", and his doctrine of 'turn the other cheek' surely went a long way towards ending honour-based family feuds which otherwise would have festered for many generations. Becoming a Christian gave people a reason to be able to forgive "those who had trespassed against them" and draw a line under the whole thing.

In contrast, Moloch is forever-insatiable. He is temporarily placated by child sacrifice but soon enough will require more, and there will be no end to this for his followers. If we find ourselves constantly running to stand still with no end ever in sight, maybe it's worth considering to which Moloch we have condemned ourselves to sacrifice.

I was intending to compare and contrast Moloch and Ahriman this time, but I think this entry is long enough as it is so that can wait until next time.

I apparently came into this world with a desire to understand it, and with some ember of faith that answers are worth pursuing burning inside me. This despite the often overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and my own tumbles into, and scrambles out of, rabbit holes such as nihilism, conspiranoia, spiritual emergency, overdoses of new age positive thinking, and occasional tiptoes along the precipice of madness itself.

Part of this utterly irrational faith which has always accompanied me is that it appears that there are relatively few 'bad' people in existence, in the sense of Hollywood villains: people who revel in causing harm to others, although my reason and life experience tell me that there are indeed people with little or no empathy, and these people do tend to be successful in the world we have somehow ended up creating.

This need to understand led me to study Philosophy at university, in the hope that some light could be shed by those who have come before us, some signpost that we missed along the way, and which could help us go back and find a new route branching off towards a less painful future — because my sense has always been that this world is unnecessarily hurtful ; that we are like ships in a storm, pushed by the waves to crash into each other, sinking each other without even wanting to. And on some level, we are also the storm itself, with our efforts to right the ship ending up causing the waves to become even more overwhelming.

I had experimented with psychedelics in my teenage years and this only served to increase the sense of possibility, that the answer lay near enough to almost touch it, like the fish that one tries to catch in one's hand when snorkelling, but which is always too quick and escapes one's best efforts to trap it. This experimentation also increased the confusion, the sense of being adrift, the realisation that nobody knew what was going on, even as they fiercely pretended to, especially to themselves.

Philosophy proved to be a dead end in my search, an endless fragmentation into the meaning of words, when I had the sensation that I needed to dive beneath the words and into the stillness of the deeper ocean. I found meditation, a refuge at first, but one which I again grasped too tightly, spending many hours giving myself a headache in the hope of transcending a self I had come to despise.

I rejected Western philosophy, throwing a fairly well-developed baby out with the bathwater in the process, and read Eastern philosophy and those influenced by it, such as Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna (the latter two were involved in an event I co-organised in 1997), and John C. Lilly. Lilly particularly intrigued me with his tales of Earth Coincidence Control Office and The Solid State Entity , both of which we will get to later in this series.

When the financial crisis broke in 2007, I became intrigued by how seemingly the whole of humanity could be so dependent on the utterly contingent ebb and flow of the stock market, and how those apparently driven by greed could rise to have such positions of decision-making power in our society.

For the next two or three years I went on a reading rampage about money creation and the economy, having previously been entirely alienated from those subjects — probably due to them not being seen as relevant for my training towards becoming a bureaucrat in my second-tier private school — and became an activist for a new peer-to-peer way of organising the economy, from a distinctly leftist perspective.

Bitcoin had just been invented and I had the sense to realise that it was going to be a game-changer. I unfortunately didn't have the sense, as did some in the leftist-anarchist circles in which I moved, that it would be a good idea to start mining it. I easily could have done, a regret I surely share with many others.

So from that perspective, what was needed was a revolution. To replace the 'bad' people who were running the economy with less greedy and more altruistic models. Or just tear it all down and start again.I was there in the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona during the 15M protests (Spanish equivalent of Occupy Wall Street), the 8th of June 2011 — the tents had been there for nearly a month, and the behemoth of an abandoned bank overlooked the scene (unfortunately not visible in my photo):

That revolution ended up being a false start, although it was a lot of fun at the time and the seeds it sowed can be seen in tools like Loomio and some DAO governance systems.

Finally, after immersing myself in this stuff for a while, I came to the realisation that we have indeed created, as some environmentalists had been saying, but which I needed to verify for myself, a system built for infinite growth on a finite planet. Money is issued mostly by private banks as interest-bearing debt. This essentially means that there will always be more debt to be paid off than there is money in existence.The result of this is that, as Marx so utterly nailed it in Capital Volume 3:

In its capacity of interest-bearing capital, capital claims the ownership of all wealth which can ever be produced, and everything it has received so far is but an instalment for its all-engrossing appetite. By its innate laws, all surplus-labour which the human race can ever perform belongs to it. Moloch.

Yes, Marx mentions Moloch in Capital. It was a surprise to me too.

In the next part I will go into the mythological Moloch and the parallels with Steiner's concept of Ahriman, and possibly also Lilly's Solid State Entity.

Our legends tell we came from a seed That travelled at a whirlwind speed 'Til it came to rest upon this land That once was green and is now all sand That buried us up to our eyes And made us watchers of the skies 'Til the shadow wings came for our sight And left us to conspire with night

• Hawkwind – Fable of a Failed Race lyrics by Robert Calvert

Daniel Pinchbeck: Technology in itself might be a form of consciousness, like there's a Solid State Intelligence which is actually using humanity to incarnate, in a way, which would really fit with Rudolf Steiner's ideas of the Ahrimanic Incarnation. Maybe Artificial Intelligence and all these ideas that are happening right now are actually technological sentience which is using us as its hands, its tools to recreate itself in this reality.\

Liv Boeree: The problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage.

This is the first in what is going to be a series of articles about Moloch, who, according to Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin, is "the reason why we can't have nice things".

So what, or who, is Moloch? Many thinkers and traditions have warned of this Force or Element of Dissolution, and it is now once again rearing its head out of the collective unconscious in the form of social media memes.

The nascent DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) community is using the idea of Moloch as a metaphor - the god of human coordination failures - to illustrate where multipolar traps, races to the bottom, and tragedies of the commons ultimately come from, and ultimately lead.

These ideas relating Moloch to failures to coordinate come from the seminal essay by Scott Alexander on Slate Star Codex, Meditations On Moloch, which itself comes in part from the poem "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg.

I will also go into the historical idea of Moloch and how it's similar to both Steiner's concept of Ahriman and John Lilly's idea of the Solid State Entity (SSE) - these can all be considered metaphors for a Dark Force which is influencing humanity - maybe we are falling towards a state of incoherence, of disassociation, maybe we are being dragged consciously or unconsciously towards this state by the dark force, or possibly it's simply the net result of 'externalities'; of coordination failures, outcomes no individual wants but which are the results of our collective selfish actions.

The fact of learning simultaneously about theories of life after death in Daniel Pinchbeck's Crossing The Threshold course, and Stephen Reid's How to DAO course has led me to make some unexpected correlations: a fundamental motivation of DAOs is to coordinate so well together that we 'bind Moloch' (although there is talk of ' slaying Moloch ', it's generally accepted that he cannot be defeated, only set back or limited in his effects).

The Crossing The Threshold course included some discussion of Rudolf Steiner and his concept of Ahriman which reminded me of the myth of Moloch, and I also recently saw a video about John C. Lilly's attempts to communicate with dolphins which put me in mind of his ketamine-inspired theory of the SSE or Solid State Entity , a machine-based intelligence (I hesitate to call it a lifeform as it is not alive by any measure we would recognise) which seeks to take over humanity and use it to bootstrap its own independent existence, after which humanity would not be needed.

Lilly has always fascinated me; I read The Centre of the Cyclone at a young age and it seemed in parts totally logical and in parts completely bonkers. I loved his insistence that the scientific method can be applied to 'spirituality', although it's debatable that using himself as an experimental subject allowed him to proceed with his scientific judgement 100% intact.

The reader may already have made the connection between the idea of the SSE and the concept of The Singularity, which is essentially the same thing, but flipped into something desirable for humanity: "We'll be cyborgs! We'll live forever! We'll colonise other planets! We'll upload our consciousness!" etc. I will touch on the apocalyptic quality of this modern tech 'religion' as we go.

Effectively there are two separate but intertwined ideas which I hope to explore in this series: on the one hand that the unforeseen consequences of our individual(ist) decision making are creating a nightmare world where nature has been entirely enclosed and/or destroyed, and on the other, that this encroaching darkness has some kind of identity or will of its own, and a desire to use humankind for its own ends. From my perspective the former is a more realistic notion of what is happening, with the latter more of a metaphor. I don't think the SSE, Ahriman or Moloch are literally real, at this point at least.

I hope to go into both the darkness of how we unwittingly and unwillingly end up destroying our own conditions for life, and the light of how we can use technology - possibly even against itself - to 'bind Moloch'  and potentially successfully coordinate on a large scale to stop the destruction and begin the regeneration of our human society and the planet that is so badly needed today. There is more hope out there than one might think on watching the nightly news, that's for sure.

I'm excited to see where we go with this, and I hope you'll join me on the journey...

Image by quapan on flickr, creative commons licence, modified by neural network at instapainting.com