# I Hate ‘Luddites’ Source: https://hyperstition.cc/i-hate-luddites August 20, 2026 Authors: Shivang Raisurana I hate ‘luddites’. I hate what ‘luddites’ today represent. I hate that we partition those not jacketed enough from those eager to plunge right into techno-utopia. I hate that we prompt and artifact, en masse, the psychotic dread of being left behind. And I hate that we ascribe a sanctimonious virtue to blind, disruptive acceleration. We find ourselves in an oblique tale, where the notion of ‘meaning’ itself is challenged. AI, AGI, or any class of superintelligence directly challenges what most have historically believed to bear value. It has historically been the case that large substrata of society individually administer disruption. Yet, for the first time, we sit on the eve of a civilization-scale reckoning—one that jolts and viscerally affronts our notion of what has mattered and what will matter. What becomes of ‘meaning’ when economic capability is no longer scarce ? I believe we must de-string economic capability from ‘meaning’. Much of the work at Hyperstition beckons toward fundamental truths that shape our narrative of ‘value’. Value, I know, is misrepresented. Rarely do we look value in the eye and speak to it with assertive discernment—for it is the intangibles that we miss. We naively court the mendacious hack that is ‘money’, forgetting that it was always meant to be a pixelated description of what truly was value. It hasn’t been in bad faith, though, for money, with its squeaks and slips, has remained the only apparent way to reason about value at scale for most of our recent past. Yet that grasp weakens in a post-AGI economy, for the demagogues of price completely misrepresent what it is that we truly value. The potence and immediate relevance of the intangibles will begin to command their own authority more than one could ever anticipate. And so what are these intangibles ? What is it that we must trade ? Or even attempt to measure them at scale without diluting their meaning ? Right there is the deceit; right there we stoop to the fallacious urge to price. The act of pricing, in its virtue and construction, inefficiently represents the intangible. What is the price of status ? What is the cost of a favor ? More critically, even if one quotes a price, would others honor it ? Would I price a “memory” the same as another ? Where does one even begin to trade the notion of a memory ? Could one even be trusted to stand by their own price, let alone the prices others set on intangibles yet to come ? All of this is simply to say that the things we value most, the social contracts we live by, haven't yet found an apt representation. We must discover a subjective, coordinated way to trade the intangibles without abandoning the certainties that even a deficient price, by being shared and apparent, provides. Until then, it would be presumptuous—even reckless—to expect everyone else to tag along as we rapidly dismantle our contemporary notion of value without a predictable alternative. At its truest, this conversation treads down to a few classic contentions and a declaration of our values: a case for why Hyperstition cares, in its absolute depth, for the things it does. - 1. It would be puerile to believe that models designed for the betterment of human welfare truly push the envelope without sophisticated coordination protocols that allow them to safely and openly engage with the labyrinth-like social physics that comes with interaction dynamics. Alignment isn't purely a technical problem. It is a market problem. Only a model that learns to live in human environments and engenders novel human experience can reliably be trusted to actually care for humans. Closeted models, sanctioned with claustrophobic governance, will leave alignment to be a problem worked on by a few. That, in and of itself, is the scarier reality. We see a desperate urgency in establishing systems-level alignment before AGI. This posture, beyond its idealistic virtue, is adopted with tact. Our systems, protocols and products serve as breeding grounds to condition models in complex human environments and intangible information markets without detriment to human interaction. - 2. It may be impetuous and possibly deleterious, but we believe, if only for the sake of unalloyed welfare, that all parties affected deserve the right to knowledge. Hyperstition maintains a moral obligation to teach and empower before we act. I hold a pointed grudge against the paternal disposition with which technologists and policymakers currently operate. It should be obvious and expected that you'd want people to throng along, yet we concede to arguments of inefficiency—that coordinating and convincing the quorum somehow sets us back. It is shocking that the appeal to ameliorate human welfare never attempts to measure itself against the humans it so claims to benefit—instead finds it wrong to do so. Hyperstition does not distance itself from the people it claims to help. - 3. We are walking into a drought of meaning, currently misdirected and misrepresented, that only deepens with each step-jump in capability and intelligence. Our protocols, products and solutions serve to ease that transition. More directly, our vision serves to engender that meaning—[We have stopped dreaming.](https://hyperstition.cc/weve-stopped-dreaming) We are not ready for what comes with abundance. We are not ready to swim in waters of emptiness. For too long, we have believed intelligence and sentience to be traits exclusive to humans. For too long, we have priced our way down a perverse path to value. Hyperstition builds systems and crafts products that restore our sense of value to its truer, organic form, unstringing it from the exclusively economic. We are not here to play prophet. We do NOT claim to define ‘value’, only to build systems that account for the intangible. We’re young, we’re enthused, we’re hopeful. We dream.