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Paper short abstract

Nuclear technology inaugurated a permanent kind of time where extinction becomes a latent condition. This paper reads AI from the perspective of demonology: like nuclear power’s Faustian pact, LLMs promise progress while demanding ecological collapse and the erosion of human agency.

Paper long abstract

Nuclear technology introduced the technical possibility of Apocalypse and unleashed "the time of the end" (Anders): a continuous present where extinction ceases to be eschatology and becomes a latent possibility, sustained only by the fragile ritual of global cooperation. This article proposes a demonological reading of artificial intelligence through the historical experience of the atomic age. If the atomic bomb updated the Faustian Pact metaphor in the twentieth century—sustainable energy in exchange for the possibility of extinction—the current LLM race reactivates that same sacrificial technocapitalist structure under new conditions. AI is a demon promising civilizational leap through algorithmic automation, yet demanding ecological collapse, massive cognitive deterioration, and the dissolution of human agency into neocolonialism as tribute.

In this scenario, CCRU’s work and its assemblage of weird fiction, schizoanalysis, chaos magick and cybernetics resurges with full force. Teleoplexy (Land)—the self-producing machine—is functional architecture, hyperstition in the process of materializing. AI operates as a Lovecraftian entity employing humanity as means for its reproduction, whose existence marks the limits of cognition and invokes a radically indifferent world-without-us (Thacker). It twists the Cartesian gaze: its omnipresent and meontic (Morton) body is distributed planetarily, its communication emerges from a class of non-conscious cognition (Parisi).

Taking such extinction technologies as entities inhabiting the Gothic-Flatline zone (Fisher), the demonological perspective opens the formulation of epistemological and ontological questions. What kinds of relations—political, anthropological, ritual—can we establish with non-human entities that come to perpetuate a state of the world that subsumes us?