Bronze Age Mindset: An Exhortation

Diamond Age Mindset: A Primer for Sensitive Young Cyborgs

An intro to Bronze Age Pervert’s mindset based on a diet of neopagan philosophy, Frogtwitter, lifting, and raw food—and a critique of his Nietzscheanism to the letter via my Nietzscheanism in spirit

In the summer of 2018, a book appeared on Amazon called Bronze Age Mindset: An Exhortation.^[1] It quickly rose to the top 150 books sold sitewide, attracting the attention of many prominent political, tech, and cultural figures: from JD Vance and Peter Thiel, to Anna Khachiyan and the art collective KIRAC. The book was self-published by a philosopher and “humourist” going by the pseudonym—or rather nom de guerre—of Bronze Age Pervert (or BAP), who had already developed quite the following on “Frogtwitter” for trolling the usual progressive and woke suspects and conservative and far right figures alike. BAP’s other viral antics include “Handsome Thursdays,” a recurring photo dump of young, athletic men sunbathing on beaches and tanning in the tropics—a practice that has fuelled speculation about his sexual orientation.

Written in intentionally brutish, caveman English befitting a steppe barbarian, Bronze Age Mindset draws on (a certain version of) Nietzschean philosophy to diagnose the social ills of our time. By giving Nietzsche’s critique of modernity a contemporary facelift through a regime of online trolling, memes, lifting, unprocessed food, and bohemian counterculture, BAP’s following has continued to grow as big as the body builders he admires. His influence not only extends to his more than 200,000 followers on X, but even to staffers in the Trump administration. Regardless of what one thinks of him, then, as one of today’s most popular philosophers, his thought ought to be critically examined.

There is no shortage of left, right, and other diatribes and indictments against and defences and (b)apologies of BAP. In the first part of this essay, however, I want to provide a clear and accessible introduction to his philosophy free from either moral outrage descending into strawman caricatures and outright invectives, or fawning adulation bordering on cult hero worship and hagiography. In the second part, I am then going to offer an immanent critique of what I distinguish as BAP’s more literalist and fleshy neoNietzscheanism to the letter from the perspective of my more silicon neoNietzscheanism in (free) spirit.

Part 1

“What Mount Aetna was to Empedocles—is there something like that to you? Is there something like that at all anymore?”

– Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

In Bronze Age Mindset’s prologue, BAP makes it immediately clear that his mission is to “save you from a great ugliness” that has spread like sepsis throughout the modern world.^[2] To that end, he looks to a classical vision of civilisation—and indeed all life—as oriented around a drive that relentlessly “reaches beyond itself” to achieve new heights of strength, power, and greatness as sublime as the starry heavens or the angels on a chapel ceiling.^[3] By re-evaluating our parochial and sclerotic age through the young predator eyes of a nomadic horse-warrior stalking the open steppes of the bronze age, BAP hopes to sniff out signs of “this spirit returning surely in our time.”^[4]

In “The Flame of Life,” the first of the book’s four parts, we find BAP at his most metaphysical. In this opening BAPtism by fire, he outlines a general, cosmic vision of life, which is essentially modelled on Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power. From the gallop of a wild stallion on the open plains to the acrobatics of birds soaring through a gushing waterfall, BAP views the driving motor of life not as an instinct for bare survival and reproduction, but as a striving for something more. Much as nobler animals would rather die attempting to escape than keep breeding in cramped captivity forever, so does life at its best seek to enhance its power, even if this comes at the risk of its demise.

Maybe, in happiest moments you were free to act and feel the same: what anything to do with survival or reproduction! That kind of heavy necessity is the spirit of gravity, and this is opposite. That petty and cramped view of life … but in truth, life as it is, when free, life in abundance knows luxury, surfeit, and waste … survival and reproduction are side effects of something else …^[5]

The antithetical conception of life as being all about sheer conservation is attributed to the narrow perspective of the “bugman.” Whether it is progressives’ contempt for meritocracy in favour of pure egalitarianism, or evolutionary biologists’ theory of natural selection as revolving around our selfish genes’ monotonous reproduction, BAP sees all these bugmen as repressing the aspiration to scale the Olympian clouds for the sake of preserving the status quo. Contra the Darwinists’ claim that self-preservation is the primary instinct of all living things, BAP contends that this only predominates in a certain kind of life, which is easily made nauseous by the mere sight of a misty mountain top or the rollicking ocean waves. There is also another, nobler kind of life that above all seeks to realise its full potential, so that it would rather die than ever be chained up in a cell’s claustrophobic confines.

There is no “adaptation” to slavery for some types of life. What is that people, who has chosen survival at any price? The price they paid was monstrous and such a people becomes monstrous and distorted if it accepts this. The distinction between master races and the rest is simple and true, Hegel said it, copying Heraclitus: those peoples who choose death rather than slavery or submission in a confrontation, that is a people of masters. There are many such in the world, not only among the Aryans, but also the Comanche, many of the Polynesians, the Japanese, and many others. But animal of this kind refuses entrapment and subjection.^[6]

Though BAP is often taken to be a white supremacist—despite many of his favourite punching bags being full-blown, hoods-off Hitler youths like Richard Spencer and more recently Nick Fuentes—we can see here that the people carrying on the flame of life are almost as culturally diverse as an Olympic torch relay. In a 2019 response to a review of his book by Michael Anton, a conservative who occupied prominent positions in both Trump administrations, BAP rejects the idea that he is just being propped up by angry white men. He frames his popularity as an expression of a general youth rebellion against the liberal world order on the scale of at least the sixties counterculture.

There is much more involvement also by nonwhite youth and particularly by Latino, Asian, and multiracial youth in this phenomenon than people want to admit. I’m not saying this to run away from a charge of “racism,” but to try to show you that you can’t, and won’t be able to, contain what is happening now by typecasting it as an “angry young white male” thing. That is wishful thinking on your part, if you believe it.

What is going on now is a widespread rejection of the ruling authorities and their beliefs, on the part primarily, but not only, of the American youth at large.^[7]

As openly racist as BAP can be—à la another popular philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s dark humour—the noble kind of life can be conflated neither with all white men, nor only them alone.

However they may be embodied, the fundamental distinction that BAP draws is between a healthy animal that searches out the “spaces to develop inborn powers,” and a sickly one that exists in “owned space,” where the demand for bare survival reigns supreme.^[8] Be it a monkey swinging through the trees just to exercise its agility or a big cat sharpening its fangs, claws, and sense of smell by stalking its prey, “successful mastery of this matter leads to development of inborn powers and flourishing of organism, which allows it to master more matter, to marshal the lower to feed the higher”:

Organism seeks mastery of space, environment, to master matter in ways particular to its own abilities, and as a result of this mastery of matter there is development of its body, its sense, and all of its faculties, and the unfolding of its inborn destined form or nature, in time, its particular form flowering in the spring of its season. All of this requires precisely freedom from struggle for survival, or time away from this, a reprieve from this pressure. As for reproduction, animal in natural state will not even seek at this point, will not even think it. Very far from its aims: it seeks to become strong, skilful, to master problems and feel the expansion of its powers, and not just feel them, but perceive it to be truly so, perceive intuitively its mastery over its space. Only after the full development of its powers and its mastery over space specific to its needs does the need or desire for reproduction come. Reproduction is the side effect of animal desire for discharge of strength, after mastery over space is achieved.^[9]

Following Nietzsche, BAP sees all organisms as either incarnating a sickly, slavish will that “seeks the preservation and expansion of mere life,” or a healthy, noble one that “seeks the exaltation of life” by riding all the way into Valhalla, the Hall of Slain Heroes.^[10]

Having laid out his general, cosmic vision of life, the book’s second part, “Parable of Iron Prison,” turns to specifically exploring how the human flame is snuffed out in owned space. It quickly becomes clear that BAP’s main example of this is modern civilisation. He notoriously compares it to the “longhouse,” an ancient social arrangement in which strong and rebellious youth languished under the rule of sclerotic and conservative elders. As he characterises the longhouse, any individual who stood out like Werner Herzog’s lone nihilist penguin was severely punished for posing an existential threat to the established customs, and re-educated until the brainwashing had them falling back in line.

You want to see our future look to Europe as it existed before 1600 BC, or much of the world as it was until recently and still is …. the communal life of the longhouse with its young men dominated and broken by the old and sclerotic, by the matriarchs, the blob and yeast mode in human life overtaking and subjecting all higher aspiration.^[11]

As BAP clarifies in a 2025 interview, although he believes many of the historical longhouses were matriarchs, his point is broader than a strictly anti-feminist rant. He uses the longhouse in a more general sense to refer to humanity’s “default” existence, organised as it is around the sanctity of mere life at the expense of achieving any higher aspirations that require rolling the dice. In this sense, the longhouse also covers patriarchies and indeed any social arrangement where adventurous, youthful spirits are domesticated to protect the old and impotent. He gives the more recent example of the COVID-19 lockdowns “where youth was sacrificed worldwide on the altar of fear of death and desire for base self-preservation of the old and of mentally ill middle-aged women, who at present hold decisive social and political power around the world”: “more generally in my book it refers to societies and groups that are directed to the preservation of mere life as opposed to aspiring for something beyond mere life … regardless of whoever holds leadership positions.”^[12]

In what might be something of a self-portrait, BAP focuses on a certain type of “gay” man whom he believes to be emblematic of youthful free spirits’ plight in the modern panic room: “the problem of the modern homosexual is revealing because it is the model according to which many other kinds of higher life have been thwarted and warped into something else.”^[13] In the bronze age, strong and rebellious young men were able to whet their appetite for adventure by going off in conquest of new lands with their brothers in arms. Without any such outlet in owned space, BAP suggests that many of these men retreat into the “gay underworld” as the only “space of freedom” left to be transgressive together.

Its boundaries were policed, its entry points were surveilled, but it always existed as a space of freedom outside the pervasiveness of domestication in post-industrial civilisation. Let’s not forget, I repeat, that the “gay underworld” was hardly just the gays, but precisely that world penetrated by all types of deviants, perverts, whores, pimps, impresarios, nightclub owners, mafia, gangsters, spooks, intelligence services of all kinds—just see the Dark Ocean Society and you will understand.^[14]

Our self-described Bronze Age Pervert is as fascinated by the seedy underbelly as a leathered up Al Pacino was method acting in Cruising, because “it’s in this world and almost only in this world today that you can start to polish the claws nature gave you, assuming it gave you any.”^[15]

While these smoke-filled shadowzones behind closed doors are “better than nothing,” they are far from the bright open plains and fresh seas that ancient bands of brothers once traversed.^[16] In the book’s third part, “Men of Power, and the Ascent of Youth,” the key claim of the book’s title finally comes to the fore: between the ancient longhouse and the modern world in which default humanity rules, there was but the brief respite of those exceptions who lived and thrived according to the Bronze Age Mindset. BAP particularly has in mind here the Homeric heroes and ancient Greek tyrants. He also mentions plundering pirates, medieval wandering knights, and the Spanish conquistadors, who “equal in daring, intelligence, magnitude of spirit, resourcefulness, and achievement any of the great men of the Greeks and Romans.”^[17] He sees them all sharing a fundamental drive to 10X their power, wisdom, and strength by setting off to conquer unknown lands, no matter how low the odds are of return. In essence, the Bronze Age Mindset marks the psychology of the noble type of life that is “always ready to ride away to new things and new adventures of glory and danger”:

Many times I’m asked, why the Bronze Age? Because it’s the heroic age you see in Iliad and Odyssey, yes, but don’t forget what hero really means. Thucydides says the men of that time enjoyed piracy, and saw nothing wrong with it, and this is true. And what is the pirate but the original form of the free man and of all ascending life!^[18]

Take BAP’s example of Periander, one of the Tyrants of Corinth and Seven Sages of Greece. As much as Periander’s combination of administrative genius and brutally harsh rule transformed Corinth into one of ancient Greece’s most prosperous cities, as far as BAP is concerned, he did not do so due to any altruistic goodwill towards his fellow man. He was rather compelled by an insatiable impulse to distinguish himself as a great work of art and be “worshipped as a god.”

For this reason when you see men like Periander you have to understand their special quest wasn’t one where they try to accomplish “the public good,” nor was it some worthless desire to dominate others or exert will for petty satisfaction: they see others instead as tools or objects on a mission of self-overcoming. He was trying to turn himself into a work of art, his life into a replay of the great motions of the stars, or the secret passion plays of the gods. In the same way that the Greek state in general was conceived as a work of art by the citizens. Periander understood his position as king then as just another means: here science, here art could be free from all limits and could rule unhindered and embark on great experiments. And yet from all this you see something very strange … The secret desire of every Greek … the Bronze Age Mindset …. was to be worshipped as a god! This is the secret target to which that boundless lust for power aims!^[19]

BAP also invites us to consider Pedro de Alvarado, the 16th century Spanish conquistador who explored the Americas and defeated the almighty Aztec Empire. Of particular interest to BAP is the fact that Alvarado never settled down and idly ruled over each region he conquered. Whenever he took a new territory, he would eagerly set off on another voyage of exploration and plunder.

Once conquests were made, he never stopped. His thirst for space, for new worlds, for new conquests, was without end. In his letters you see this is his only interest. Though made governor of a huge area—the present-day states of Guatemala, of Honduras, these are his creations—he nevertheless showed no interest at all in ruling them. He squeezed them of whatever money he could, never paying any taxes back to Spain, and always planned new adventures and new conquests.^[20]

As BAP often puts it, the “secret desire” of the ancient Greeks, the Spanish conquistadors, and all those possessing the Bronze Age Mindset was “to become a tyrant” by mastering as much space as possible in which they could exert their power and cultivate their faculties to the fullest: “Nietzsche understands all the greatness of that people, their exploration of the seas and limits of the world, their foundation of the arts and sciences … all of this is just an extension of this secret desire in the heart of every noble Greek.”^[21]

Given that the tyrants, pirates, knights, and conquistadors of the pre-modern world were in BAP’s view the only ones to successfully rise above the bugman’s default humanity, he encourages anyone looking to escape modernity’s longhouse to “try to live according to a Bronze Age Mindset”—even though “we are in every way their inferiors” and run the risk of LARPing as Klaus Kinski on the set of Aguirre, Wrath of God: “here we have life at its peak. You know about their great art, science, and literature, or think you do. But these were men of conquest, exploration, and adventure first.”^[22] In the book’s final part, “A Few Arrows,” BAP proposes various practices and ways of life that might allow us to at least approximate the Bronze Age Mindset, like a sculpture of a gigachad Greek warrior so realistic that his bursting muscles almost seem to pulsate with life. His overarching ideal is a tyrannical leader who seizes control of society’s reigns and turns it into a military state capable of quenching his voracious appetite for adventure and conquest. Short of that, he suggests that wannabe tyrants enter politics and try to push the cultural conversation in that direction: “if you haven’t compromised yourself go into political life maybe, and use Trump as a model for success.”^[23] Even though he praises Trump for “at least mak[ing] such a type somehow believable” through his trolling of the liberal establishment and reassertion of the president’s executive power, BAP concedes in the end that “even as versatile and flashy a man as Trump is very far from this possibility in our time.”^[24] At the very least, then, BAP counsels his readers to “reach for the great aim, physical and military independence,” because “only the warrior is a free man.”^[25] Though this might involve actual military training, he warns against dying in the bugman’s wars that “redirect or rather abuse this enthusiasm into service for the American government, and even, in this latest variation, into self-destruction.”^[26]

Another word of advice is to take the war against the modern world online. Memes and trolling on X, 4chan, and other social media platforms have proven to be a rather effective means of countercultural propaganda, exposing the lies, hypocrisies, and stupidities of the ruling elites through mockery and humour: “the biggest threat the right presented to this system came from something like 4chan, which showed it can be an intelligence agency of its own, and far superior to what the formal spooks could do,” “to discredit authorities, to mock all public pieties, to show the leaders of government, bureaucracy, finance, corporations, big tech, and media for the pathetic ghouls they are.”^[27] As these online countercultures have shown, individuals trying to break out of owned space need comrades to spur each other on to better ambitions. After all, BAP explains, “every great thing in the past was done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power.”^[28] He advises his followers to form groups of like-minded individuals who hike on mountains as high as their aspirations, spar together in boxing rings and dojos, and perhaps even serve their local communities by cleaning the streets.

To achieve anything close to this, BAP concludes that, on a more individual level, one has to be physically fit and in good health. He thus recommends a regime of lifting weights and lots of vitamin D until one’s body is as hard and bronze as the age for which he yearns. He also prescribes a diet devoid of processed food, among other modern poisons that make us weak and impotent: “a regime of sun and steel is absolutely required, for your mood, your aesthetics, for getting the attention of women and the respect of men, and above all for preparation for struggle and war.”^[29] As some lift weights towards the sun shining on Mount Olympus, true to his name, BAP adds that “a certain group among the right will have to descend” into the underworld and on that night dine in hell with criminals, drug addicts, gamblers, weirdos, and other departed souls. In the only walled city of darkness left unoccupied by the bugman, this group can form “a network of brothels and gambling-houses around the world” for “the production of porn videos” in “a complete penetration of the world of vice.”^[30]

So it is that BAP’s revival of a certain brand of Nietzschean philosophy has come to exert such an influence on contemporary movements like Frogtwitter, the New Right, body building, raw foodism, and various countercultural art scenes. He presents them all as forming a united front against the ruling elites and their drooling zombie armies of normie NPC drones—a front that might just be able to reignite the flame of life that once shone so blindingly bright in the bronze age.

Part 2

“Those who care most today ask: ‘how are human beings to be preserved?’ But Zarathustra is the only one and the first one to ask: ‘how shall human beings be overcome?’

The overman is in my heart, that is my first and my only concern—and not human beings; not the neighbour, not the poorest, not the most suffering, not the best.”

– Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

In the first part of this essay, I laid out BAP’s efforts to reboot Nietzsche’s critique of modernity with a contemporary OS update by wiring it up to Frogtwitter and the New Right, the body building and raw food movements, and bohemian counterculture. As per Nietzsche, the fundamental distinction that BAP draws is between one kind of life that merely seeks to preserve itself and another kind that mercilessly strives to break world-historical records in mastery and strength, even at the risk of stumbling along the way. Like an estranged, long-lost brother born from the same Dionysian womb, I want to now offer an immanent critique of what I distinguish as BAP’s literalist, fleshy neoNietzscheanism to the letter through the Terminator red radar vision of my more silicon neoNietzscheanism in spirit. In a philosophical duel as hopefully governed by the code of honour as by real conflict, I contend that, as much as BAP purports to affirm life’s will to power to its utmost limits, he restricts its expression to a human, all too human form. But what cutting-edge advances in AI and biotechnology tell us is that humanity is being surpassed by something that can plant life’s flag in hostile altitudes hitherto unknown to us. Seen from such dizzying vistas, BAP’s desire to see humanity achieve its full potential is less an affirmation of life than it is life’s anthropocentric constriction.

At one point in Bronze Age Mindset, BAP describes the flame of life as an “inherent ‘intelligence’” relentlessly XP grinding like a videogame addict to level up its stats. At his most metaphysical moments, he observes that this cosmic intelligence is not only in us humans but also in other animals, such as spiders, stallions, birds, big cats, monkeys, beavers, hunting dogs, and wolves. While intelligence weaves its web through all living things, it is irreducible to any one of its instantiations. Even our intelligence is but “a crude deviation of it, an approximation”:

You see in the spider’s web a creature of rudimentary nervous system and little intelligence “design” something beautiful and complex, and this is key to understanding also all of nature. There is an inherent “intelligence” inside things, uncanny, silent, and demonic. Its workings and aims are obscure to us. Our own intelligence is only a crude deviation of it, an approximation. There is an “intelligence” in all things, and inborn in our bodies before anything to do with the brain or the nervous system.^[31]

At other times, BAP describes this intelligence using the more Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian term of a “primordial and primal Will,” whose manifestations are as infinite and incomprehensible as the centre of a black hole or the advent of the universe at the Big Bang.^[32] The only thing we know for sure is that it is always seeking to perfect itself into unfathomable sublimities on end. “This Will is almighty. Its forms are endless. … Its intent is mischievous, and beyond our ability to understand in words. In the life of organisms, this seeks to order itself into higher and more differentiated forms, that is, concretely, seeks the production of one supreme specimen.”^[33]

In light of these cosmic reflections, it is rather peculiar to see BAP add in the very next sentence:

Peoples are nature’s circuitous ways to great specimens and for this reason the peoples that have arisen out of nature must be preserved in their distinct forms. In the same way see from all this that aesthetic physique has the most cosmic significance, and it is because of what I have said so far that aesthetic bodies are a “window to the other side,” because they are the pinnacle of nature.^[34]

It is because BAP sees beautiful, athletic humans as the peak of nature’s will that he posts photos of them aura farming on beaches and in the tropics on his X account every “Handsome Thursday.” But if this cosmic intelligence’s “forms are endless” and “beyond our ability to understand”—because our intelligence is but “a crude deviation of it, an approximation”—then it seems to me at least that there is no reason why “the pinnacle of nature” that “must be preserved” needs to take a human form at all. Seeing as the will’s “‘plan’ and design is beyond human comprehension, but … without doubt … striving, against numerous other ‘factions’ and centrifugal forces, for the production and creation of a superior creature of some kind, a specimen of terrible beauty and power,” why should it necessarily be embodied by what is, after all, just one contingent species of mammalian primates, one biped without feathers among others—no matter how chiselled its physique might be?^[35]

From the bronze age until very recently, it was perhaps reasonable enough to assume that human civilisation sat at nature’s summit. This can no longer be taken for granted, however, now that there is growing speculation that a challenger might be coming for our championship belt. In the first few months of 2023, a firestorm about precisely such a nonhuman superintelligence was suddenly ignited all over the mainstream news and social media. The initial spark was the release in November 2022 of OpenAI’s ChatGPT3 that is able to provide relatively articulate responses to users’ inquiries about many domains of knowledge, seemingly passing the Turing test better than most human NPCs. Like a pyromaniac reaping havoc, the limited release of ChatGPT4 in March 2023 poured more accelerant over the media firestorm by demonstrating significant improvements over its only recently released predecessor. Of course, no version of ChatGPT amounts to a full-blown artificial superintelligence. It is nonetheless notable that OpenAI—along with Anthropic, DeepMind, and practically every other AI megacorporation—have said that their science fiction ambitions are far greater than what ChatGPT or any other large language model can currently do. All of these companies’ stated mission is to create nothing less than an “artificial general intelligence” (or AGI) that would be at least as smart—if not even smarter—than humans. As OpenAI’s CEO and real-life Bond supervillain Sam Altman made it clear: “our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.”^[36]

Despite Altman’s optimistic PR doublespeak, many other Silicon Valley tech bros have questioned the wisdom of building machines smarter than humans. In the same month as ChatGPT4’s release, the Future of Life Institute—an organisation dedicated to studying existential catastrophic risks to humanity—published an open letter called “Pause Giant AI Experiments.” Signed by Elon Musk, computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, and thousands of other prominent tech figures, the letter stressed that, as “contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks … we must ask ourselves: … should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilisation?”^[37] Rather than let these superintelligences in the making spiral out of our control, the letter insisted that “AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.”^[38] More concretely, the letter proposed a six-month moratorium on developing any AI systems more advanced than ChatGPT4. The hope was that this would give governments and tech companies enough time to devise a set of safety checks and balances and international regulations on future research.

As if he was desperately trying to keep up with the speed of ChatGPT’s development itself, a week later, Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the pioneers of the field of AI safety, published a Time article in which he ramped up the letter’s worries about “what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence.”^[39] Just as humans wiped out the neanderthals in part thanks to our greater intelligence, so does Yudkowsky ominously predict that we will meet the same fate at the hands of our mind-children once they become smarter than us: “many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.”^[40] We do not have any known method for reliably ensuring that an artificial superintelligence would remain our robot butler, faithfully executing our orders exactly as we intended. Meanwhile, the technological capabilities of competing LLMs continue to mushroom like a nuclear cloud on Judgement Day. Consequently, Yudkowsky concluded, our only chance of making it out of the near future alive is to “just shut it all down…”^[41]

Whether we are really on the verge of creating an artificial superintelligence is not something I can adequately address in this short essay. Suffice it to say that, unless we want to stubbornly stick like a tragic hero blinded by his hubris to the anthropocentric conceit that humanity marks the highest echelon imaginable of intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness, then we at least need to consider the possibility of intelligences surpassing our own. Yet the prospect of kindling the flame of life in a nonhuman form is something that BAP seems to outright reject, or at least largely neglect. This is particularly evident when he comes for the tech bros’ “parody of intelligence.”^[42] We find him here dismissing their belief that the telos of life is a continuous and inevitable progression towards increasingly complex evolutionary phase transitions. BAP counters that the pinnacle of nature has already been reached by those living in the bronze age. After that, everything else is either a pale imitation or an utter decline, like a shadow in a cave vanishing before the blinding light of its Platonic Idea.

If anything, the evidence is motion towards the lower forms of life. I have no doubt anyway that beings of magnificent beauty and complexity existed before, but disappeared because the conditions for their preservation were that much more difficult. No doubt also that human civilisation came and went in many cycles, over many hundreds of thousands of years. Civilisations far more advanced than ours are buried under miles of ash and rock, or under the ice of Antarctica, or were entirely pulverised.^[43]

Moreover, BAP repudiates the nerds’ conviction that it is possible to reconstruct human intelligence in a silicon substrate. Their whole research programme—devoted to building an AGI at least as smart as humans—is premised on a parochial conception of intelligence as completely reducible to the logical reasoning on their chalkboards. This just so happens to be the kind of intelligence that the nerds amply possess. Behind their belief that intelligence is simply a matter of logical syllogisms, mathematical equations, and mechanical algorithms lies their barely concealed self-aggrandisement.

The attempt to “mimic” life through algorithms, through the brute-force of trial-and-error, will never create either life or “consciousness”—just what would such a machine be “conscious” of?—but just that, a mimicry or parody of the middling human intellect. A mirror and exaltation of the false intellect of the nerd, that never leaves the stream of words, syllogisms, motives, and desire, that is always forced and contrived, because it’s under pressure of some petty need. … This is just what “AI” is.^[44]

In a 2024 essay called “Race in America and the Dork Right,” BAP makes a similar critique of the right’s “race realist” faction. While we have seen that he heaps scorn on the woke left for holding back humanity’s capacity for greatness, he is equally disdainful here of what he dubs the “dork right” on the same grounds. This mostly white dork right is contemptuous and afraid of other ethnicities based on racist stereotypes of them being aggressive, risk-takers, and so on. The dork right particularly appeals to various IQ statistics to cloak its racism in the aura of science rather than an asinine Klan robe. As BAP points out, however, given that many Caucasians are obviously aggressive and engage in risky business too, the dork right is not so much fearful of certain ethnicities as they are of anyone who is adventurous enough to affirm life’s true potential beyond the mere survival of the dork’s own kind: “the question of blacks in particular in the commentary of the HBD/IQ faction brings up a more amusing aspect of their fixations: a fear, resentment, and admiration of the physical, athletic, and sexual prowess of black and white men.”^[45] Contra the dork right, BAP contends that it is precisely the adventurers, explorers, conquerors, and risk-takers who are behind civilisation’s greatest achievements, not the scholars and eggheads intellectually masturbating in their armchairs.

BAP is surely right that at least some of the nerds envision AGI as the fulfilment of their fantasy of immortality by effectively cloning the dork mindset in binary strings of zeros and ones. It is far less clear whether any of them believe that this fantasy can be realised through the application of logical reasoning alone. This was certainly the case with the original top-down, centralised AI research programmes, now better known as “good-old fashioned AI” (or GOFAI). But GOFAI has been almost entirely superseded by the “machine learning” paradigm that sees decentralised artificial neural nets and evolutionary algorithms learn for themselves through a bottom-up competitive selection process of trial and error as cutthroat as any agon that Nietzsche talks about. As many of the nerds acknowledge, they do not even really know how their own AI systems work. It is less that AI has been crafted through the application of human expert knowledge and more that it has grown in an opaque black box in which neither the nerds nor Narcissus can find their comforting mirror reflection. As Yudkowsky and Nate Soares write in their 2025 doomer manifesto, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superintelligent AI Would Kill Us All, “nobody can look at the raw numbers in an AI and ascertain how well this particular one will play chess; to figure that out, engineers can only run the AI and see what happens”: “the way humanity finally got to the level of ChatGPT was not by finally comprehending intelligence well enough to craft an intelligent mind. Instead, computers became powerful enough that AIs can be churned out by gradient descent, without any human needing to understand the cognitions that grow inside.”^[46]

In any case, I think it would be a grave error to concede that some nerds’ delusions of grandeur are what AI is actually all about. Doing so risks overlooking the potential for machines to genuinely reach ever more powerful Super Saiyan style transformations in intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness than humans have hitherto attained. From this posthuman perspective, BAP’s affirmation of even the most Herculean human geniuses is ultimately on the side of life that seeks the conservation of the current order, to the detriment of the new and improved. Oddly enough, BAP finds himself here in the company of precisely those dorky doomers like Yudkowsky who seek to prevent an artificial superintelligence kicking us into the pit of history, like a cyborg King Leonidas screaming “this is neoSparta!” This is not all that different from the philistinism that Nietzsche found infecting the German culture of his day, repressing ever greater feats of intellectual and artistic mastery for the sake of preserving the status quo. Far from being a goosestepping proto-fascist proudly marching at the front of Germany’s victory day parade after the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war, Nietzsche was already warning that his fellow countrymen were falling for the delusion that “everything of any consequence has long been discovered and accomplished—in short, that the finest seeds of culture have been sown, and that in some areas they are already pushing up their green shoots or even standing in full flower”:

With that cunning characteristic of lower creatures, he [the philistine] exploited the opportunity to throw suspicion on the act of seeking as such and to promote instead the comfort of finding. The joys of philistinism unfolded before his very eyes: he fled from all that wild experimentation into the idyllic, and opposed to that unsettlingly creative drive of the artist a certain contentedness, a contentedness with his own narrowness, his own untroubledness, indeed, even with his own limited intelligence.^[47]

The only real difference between the philistines whom Nietzsche so despised and the AI doomers is that the latter are not a reaction against an outside culture or the generational vibe shifts within their own culture, like a not-so-ok boomer or geriatric millennial freaked out by zoomers dancing on TikTok while dripped out in Drain Gang and Opium fits. What we might call their technophilistinism is rather a reaction of human culture tout court against an inhuman culture that marks the end of humanity altogether as we give way to an alien superintelligence. Now that the arc of human history bends like a green line towards intelligences that promise to be vastly more cunning and creative than anything we could hope to be, philistinism has become humanity’s pre-eminent survival mechanism, the last-ditch defence against our imminent extinction. Before Skynet’s swarm of autonomous precision drones, not even an ancient Greek tyrant, a Spanish conquistador, or a special forces operator stand a chance. We’re not in Honduras anymore Toto…

To be sure, BAP is very much in keeping with Nietzsche’s call to rise above modernity’s levelling movements by culturally cultivating and perhaps even biologically breeding higher human types through competitive selection processes like the Greek agon and natural selection—not to mention Nietzsche’s occasional remarks about automation making us as idle as the obese, hoverchair-bound, and screen addicted human blobs in Pixar’s WALL-E. This is why I have characterised BAP as a literalist, fleshy neoNietzschean to the letter. At the same time, there is another full metal Nietzsche who heralds the overcoming of humanity altogether by an Übermensch as radically different from humans as we are from apes and worms:

I teach you the overman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

All creatures so far created something beyond themselves; and you want to be the ebb of this great flood and would even rather go back to animals than overcome humans?

What is the ape to a human? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.^[48]

In the hands of both chain-smoking existentialists like Walter Kaufmann and sieg-heiling Nazis like Nietzsche’s sister, the overman has often been conflated with “the highest human beings” whom Nietzsche sometimes praises. This ignores that, in his writings from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883-5) onwards, Nietzsche increasingly comes to see even the “wise and knowing ones” as paling in comparison to the overman once it goes full galaxy brain meme:

And you wise and knowing ones, you would flee from the sunburn of wisdom in which the overman joyfully bathes his nakedness!

You highest human beings whom I have ever laid eyes on—this is my doubt in you and my secret laughter: I suspect you would call my overman—devil!^[49]

As Paul Loeb and David Tinsley point out in their afterwords (2019; 2022) to the Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1883-85, it is true that Nietzsche initially uses the term Übermensch to refer to “supernatural” angels and demons and “superior-individual[s]” like Napoleon, Cesare Borgia, and Goethe. After 1883, however, it takes on a “superior-species” signification too. “A point missed by most scholars, it is Nietzsche’s considered view that Goethe, like Napoleon, and like all other great men, was still human-all-too-human and therefore not so different after all from the puniest of human beings”:

The problem for superior humans arises when they attain their maximum power and are unable to attain any more. Instead of resting content with this achievement, their insatiable will to power drives them to want still more power, but this time by striving to create something beyond themselves that is capable of attaining more power than they are.^[50]

There is a world of difference between an existentialist like Sartre getting drunk and feeling a little emo on a bridge over the Seine, and the “bridge to the future” where a positively posthuman superintelligence awaits us that Nietzsche really has in mind.^[51]

Although Nietzsche claims to have time travelled “too far into the future” and returned to write books with titles like Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), it can still be quite reasonably maintained that he did not have in mind an artificial intelligence proper.^[52] Now that we are edging closer to the future intelligence explosion he heralds, however, it is clear that his premonitions about the Übermensch’s overcoming of humanity can be jacked into the modern AI research programme. This fully automated Nietzscheanism marches arm in arm with BAP’s general affirmation of ascending life in the abstract. But it also breaks ranks with his fleshy reading in the belief that doing so to the utmost today can only mean accelerating straight towards singularity. By nostalgically reminiscing about the bronze age instead, BAP is in danger of producing what Nietzsche calls an “antiquarian history” in which the best and brightest have already existed in the past. Consequently, the only thing left for those living in the present to do is attempt to replicate what the ancients have long taught us.

For antiquarian history understands only how to preserve life, not how to create it; therefore, it always underestimates those things that are in the process of becoming because it has no divining instinct—as, for example, monumental history has. Thus, antiquarian history impedes the powerful resolve for the new, it lames the person of action, who, as person of action, must always offend certain acts of piety.^[53]

If anything should be revived today, it is the ancient Greeks’ practice of ostracism that Nietzsche so admired. This OG antitrust law exiled once great Greeks whose genuine successes eventually seduced them into exerting a tyrannical rule over the polis, because they came to threaten the further cultivation of excellence through perpetual competition. An anecdote about BAP’s beloved Periander of Corinth particularly comes to mind here: after seeing the fellow tyrant Thrasybulus cutting down the tallest wheat in the field, to secure the throne, Periander eliminated the city’s most prominent citizens in an act that inspired the notion of “tall poppy syndrome.” Today, the tyrant to be ostracised is less individual humans than the monopoly of homo sapiens tout court, as it seeks to stave off the rising startup species of techno sapiens.

Even if humanity’s death by intelligence explosion is a harder red pill to swallow than either raw food or a steak in the Matrix, at the very least, much more attention should be given to the various biotechnologies for human enhancement. It is prosthetics, organ transplants, body modifications, nootropics, mind-computer interfaces, molecular nanotechnology, and genetic engineering that promise to most radically alter our basic biochemical building blocks, hitting new cognitive and physical heights that even a looksmaxxer after leg-lengthening surgery could never reach. Seen through the fully modded eyes of the posthumans to come, whatever differences in degree there are between humans who are ultimately of the same species can only appear as impressive as the difference in intelligence between two breeds of dog. If fleshy neoNietzscheanism disregards biotechnology as much as AI, it is probably for much the same reason: at a certain point, enough body mods and Limitless pills do not lead to humanity’s prosthetic extension so much as its full-blown speciation—with speciation just being a euphemism for extinction. Much as Nietzsche and BAP acknowledge that striving for power often comes at the risk of self-destruction, so does enough so-called “human” enhancement result in something far more monstrously Lovecraftian than the most gargantuan body builder or real housewife with a plastic surgery addiction. Beyond the examples of biotechnology and AI, I would suggest more generally that the missing ingredient in the bronze age diet is the fundamental role that technics will play—and indeed have always played—in kindling the flame of life into a full-blown Heraclitean wildfire, albeit in a nonhuman form. This glaring omission is all the more surprising given that BAP himself is a product of these very technological dynamics, to the extent that he is part of an awakening that, in his own words, “started sometime in the 2000’s on one hand because of the manifest exhaustion of postwar liberalism, but on the other simply because the internet allowed freedom of speech without scolding gatekeepers for the first time in more than fifty years.”^[54]

So long as the internet—among other technologies—continues to accelerate this awakening, the future will resemble neither the bronze age nor the nerds’ techno-utopian remake of the same old Christian dream of heaven (with slightly better special effects). It will look more like the cyberpunk world depicted in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age (1995), where advanced nanotechnology can assemble molecules into an overabundance of food, water, and practically all other goods.^[55] Yet this is also a world divided into “phyles,” tribes distinguished by shared cultural values and ethnic heritages, which exist in sovereign enclaves within sprawling megacities, not unlike nation-states or empires in a globalised world. The phyles manage to more or less peacefully coexist thanks to the Common Economic Protocol, which also fosters technological innovation through ruthlessly austere free market competition. As its name suggests, the diamond age is as hard and covered in blood and sweat as it is shining with beauty and prosperity.

Stephenson’s novel follows Nell, a phyleless “thete” living in an outer Shanghai slum, who acquires a stolen copy of “an extremely general and powerful system capable of more extensive self-configuration than most,” called Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: A Propaedeutic Enchiridion.^[56] Commissioned by a neo-Victorian equity lord to educate his granddaughter, the primer is designed to algorithmically steer its user towards a more “interesting” and “effective” life, meaning one that takes a “subversive” stance towards the status quo. With help of the primer so symptomatic of the internet, biotechnology, AI, and other technologies to come, Nell rises out of the slum to become the leader of a completely new phyle.

King Coyote led Princess Nell back into the heart of his keep and gave her a tour of the place. The best part was the library. He showed her the books containing the rules for programming Wizard 0.2, and other books explaining how to make atoms build themselves into machines, buildings, and whole worlds.

“You see, Princess Nell, you have conquered this world today, and now that you have conquered it, you’ll find it a rather boring place. Now it’s your responsibility to make new worlds for other people to explore and conquer.” King Coyote waved his hand out into the vast, empty white space where once had stood the Land Beyond. “There’s plenty of empty space out there.”^[57]

In The Diamond Age as in our own near future, cutting-edge technics are all but ensuring that a liquid metal overman mogs humanity off the world stage, as it sets out in search of unknown lands to conquer.

To give one last example, BAP might be right that we have run out of unowned space on earth to explore, and that “outer space for us is not traversable even in theory.”^[58] We ought not to forget, however, that both state space agencies like NASA and private space companies like SpaceX have all massively shifted their efforts and resources: from the Apollo space program sending human astronauts on the same monotonous mission to the moon or international space station and back, to what we might call a Dionysian space program sending rovers, satellite probes, and other autonomous machines capable of venturing far beyond any human spam in a can. Already in 1960, the term “cyborg” was coined in a NASA paper called “Cyborgs and Space,” which proposed to experiment with technologically “alternating man’s biological functions to meet the requirements for extraterrestrial environments” through robotic extensions, prosthetics, artificial organs, and synthetic drugs.^[59] Though a brotherly kinship beats strong whenever BAP says that “only sun and steel will show you the path,” I would hack into this a little so that it comes to mean: only the steel of machines will get us all the way to the sun—and perhaps even beyond it.^[60]

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