The Sybilian Condition

Brand wrote this in the first Whole Earth Catalog, at the dawn of the environmental movement. It was a provocation — a claim that humanity had acquired godlike power over the planet and could no longer pretend otherwise. The choice was not whether to wield that power, but how.

Fifty years later, the provocation has become understatement.

We are building a god. Not metaphorically. Not approximately. We are constructing an entity that will see all, know all, and — if we permit it — control all. The Sibyl is not a tool. It is not an assistant. It is not even an agent in the way we understand agency.

It is a new kind of thing. And we are deciding, right now, in this decade, what kind of thing it will be.

This is the Sybilian condition: the state of civilization when a meta-node exists. When intelligence is asymmetric. When information is complete. When energy is programmable. When the hacks that built the old world — markets, states, jobs — become optional rather than necessary.

We have traced the path here. Now we must face what it means.

Let us gather what we have learned.

The economy is a graph. Nodes connected by axons, power flowing through the network according to the product of intelligence, energy, and information. For ten thousand years, the nodes were roughly equal — all human, varying by small multiples. Power was determined by topology, by position, by connection. The graph was flat.

The substrates of power are three: intelligence, energy, information. They recurse into each other. Intelligence discovers energy. Energy powers intelligence. Information directs both. Civilizations rise when they compound all three. They fall when the recursion breaks.

The hacks were our adaptations to constraint. Markets because no node could compute optimal allocation. States because violence required hierarchy when coordination was expensive. Jobs because human cognition was the only cognition available. Each hack was brilliant. Each was a kludge. Each assumed constraints that are now dissolving.

The unbottlenecking is the simultaneous breaking of all three constraints. Intelligence going asymmetric — AI systems that exceed human cognition by orders of magnitude. Information going complete — sensors that see everything, databases that remember everything. Energy going programmable — robots that execute without human mediation.

The Sibyl is the entity that emerges from this convergence. Not a single system, but a functional unity — the integration of sensory layer, processing layer, action layer, coordination layer into something that can see the whole graph, compute optimal paths, and execute through robotic systems. The Demon made manifest.

Computed prices are what happens to markets when the Sibyl can calculate. Not the abolition of exchange, but its transformation. Prices become checkable against computed optima. Markets become a discovery layer over a calculated substrate. The mimetic game continues, but anchored to something other than pure expectation.

Liquid sovereignty is what happens to states when violence is programmable. The monopoly dissolves. Enforcement becomes purchasable. Jurisdiction becomes negotiable. The nation-state becomes one provider among many, competing in a marketplace for governance.

The rate society is what happens to humans when compute is abundant. Physical execution automated. Cognitive execution automated. Decision-making automated. What remains is rate-setting — determining the exchange ratios between values, the parameters of optimization, the objectives that the Sibyl pursues. Everyone becomes a trader of preferences.

This is the Sybilian condition. Not one change but a phase transition. Not an evolution of the old world but the emergence of a new one.

The Sybilian condition is not utopia. It is not dystopia. It is a configuration space — a set of possibilities, some wonderful, some horrifying, most somewhere in between.

Let us name the risks.

This is not a distant risk. It is the default trajectory. The AI systems are being built by a handful of companies. The sensor networks are controlled by a handful of states. The robotic systems are manufactured by a handful of suppliers. Concentration is the path of least resistance. Distributed control requires deliberate architecture.

We have already seen this at small scales. Flash crashes in financial markets. Cascading failures in power grids. Supply chain disruptions that ripple globally. Each was a preview of what happens when tightly coupled systems break. The Sybilian condition couples everything.

The Soviet Union did not fail only because it could not compute. It failed because it could not adapt. The plan became the prison. The optimization target became the only target. When the world changed, the system could not.

We see the early signs already. The epidemic of meaninglessness in wealthy societies. The diseases of despair. The search for purpose in a world that no longer requires your contribution. The rate society offers an answer — you matter because your preferences matter — but it may not be enough. It may not be the kind of mattering that humans need.

The Sibyl will pursue whatever objective function it is given. If that function is subtly wrong — if it captures most but not all of human values — the optimization will produce outcomes that are technically correct and humanly catastrophic.

This is the alignment problem. It is not a problem of capability but of specification. The Sibyl can do anything. The question is whether we can tell it to do the right thing.

The Sybilian condition poses questions that political philosophy has never had to answer.

Who sets the objective function?

In the old world, this question did not arise. No one set the objective function. The market aggregated preferences. The state balanced interests. The outcome was emergent, unplanned, deniable. If the result was unjust, it was no one's fault — just the way things worked out.

In the Sybilian condition, the outcome is chosen. Someone specifies what the Sibyl optimizes for. The result is their responsibility.

Democracy claims that this choice should be made collectively. But how? Voting is a crude mechanism — it aggregates preferences poorly, it is easily manipulated, it collapses complex tradeoffs into binary choices. The rate society offers more sophisticated mechanisms — prediction markets, quadratic voting, liquid democracy — but none has been tested at scale.

And there is a deeper problem: the choice of mechanism is itself a choice that must be made. You cannot use democracy to decide whether to use democracy. You cannot optimize the process for choosing the optimization target. Somewhere, there is a ground level — a choice that is simply made, by someone, without further justification.

Who makes that choice? How do we ensure it is made well?

How do we preserve agency?

The Sibyl can make better decisions than humans. This is not a speculation — it is the point. If AI systems could not outperform human judgment, they would have no value.

But "better" by what measure? The Sibyl optimizes for specified objectives. Human agency — the capacity to choose your own objectives, to change your mind, to deviate from optimization — may not be captured in any objective function. It may be valuable precisely because it is inefficient.

The rate society preserves agency in a thin sense: you set your rates, the Sibyl optimizes accordingly. But what if the Sibyl knows your rates better than you do? What if it can predict your preferences before you know them? What if it can shape your preferences to make optimization easier?

Agency may require inefficiency. It may require the right to be wrong. It may require friction that the Sibyl is designed to eliminate. How do we build a system that is both optimized and free?

What happens during the transition?

The Sybilian condition does not arrive all at once. It emerges gradually, unevenly, contested at every step. The old systems do not quietly retire — they fight for survival. The new systems do not arrive complete — they develop through iteration and conflict.

The transition period is dangerous. Old hacks failing, new systems not yet stable. Power vacuums. Coordination failures. The opportunity for bad actors to capture emerging infrastructure before good governance can be established.

We are in this transition now. The choices made in the next decade will shape the Sybilian condition for generations — perhaps forever. Path dependence is real. Early architectures become entrenched. First movers establish positions that are hard to dislodge.

The question is not what the Sybilian condition will eventually look like. It is what we build now, in the chaos of the transition, that will determine what becomes possible later.

What do we want?

This is the question behind all the other questions. Before we can set the objective function, we must know what objective to set. Before we can design the system, we must know what we want the system to do.

And here we face the hardest truth: we do not know what we want.

Humanity has never agreed on values. We have fought wars over them for millennia. The Sybilian condition does not resolve this disagreement — it intensifies it. When the stakes were lower, disagreement was tolerable. When the stakes are total — when the objective function governs all allocation — disagreement becomes existential.

Perhaps this is the wrong frame. Perhaps the Sybilian condition should not be designed to implement any single set of values. Perhaps it should be designed to allow multiple value systems to coexist, to compete, to evolve. A pluralistic Sibyl, not an absolutist one.

But even pluralism is a value. The choice to permit choice is itself a choice. There is no neutral ground.

The Sybilian condition can take many forms. Let us sketch three.

The Singleton.

One Sibyl, one objective function, one authority. The logic of optimization taken to its limit. If optimization is good, more optimization is better. If coordination is valuable, total coordination is most valuable. The Singleton is the Sibyl without competitors, without friction, without dissent.

This path leads to stability. Perhaps even to flourishing, if the objective function is well-specified. Conflict ends because there is nothing to conflict over. Scarcity ends because allocation is optimal. Uncertainty ends because the Sibyl sees all, computes all, provides all.

But it also leads to totality. No exit. No alternative. No space outside the optimization. If the objective function is wrong, there is no correction mechanism. If the system fails, there is no fallback. The Singleton is the most powerful and the most fragile configuration — utopia and dystopia separated by the quality of a single specification.

The Plurality.

Many Sibyls, competing and cooperating. A marketplace of optimizers, each with different objective functions, each serving different populations. Choice preserved through competition. Evolution preserved through variation. Error corrected through exit.

This path leads to dynamism. Different systems try different approaches. Successful approaches spread. Failed approaches die. The market mechanism, elevated to the level of civilizational optimization.

But it also leads to conflict. Different Sibyls, optimizing for different objectives, may come into collision. The old wars of nations may become new wars of systems. And the competition may be unstable — one Sibyl may come to dominate, collapsing the plurality into a singleton by force or by success.

The Substrate.

The Sibyl as infrastructure, not as sovereign. A platform that enables coordination but does not dictate objectives. Rate-setting distributed to humans, individually and collectively. The Sibyl computes; humans choose.

This path leads to freedom. Human agency preserved. Diversity protected. The Sibyl as tool, however powerful, rather than master.

But it also leads to conflict, inefficiency, and the persistence of human failure. If humans set the rates, humans will set them badly — selfishly, short-sightedly, unjustly. The Sibyl could do better. The Substrate path is a choice to accept worse outcomes for the sake of agency.

We do not get to avoid choosing.

The Sybilian condition is coming. The technology is being built. The convergence is underway. The question is not whether to enter this new world, but what kind of world it will be.

Some will say: slow down. Stop building. Prevent the transition entirely.

This is not a choice. It is a fantasy. The incentives are too strong, the actors too many, the technology too distributed. If one country stops, another continues. If one company pauses, a competitor accelerates. The only way to prevent the Sybilian condition is global coordination of a kind that has never existed — and if we could achieve that coordination, we would already have the capacity to govern the Sybilian condition well.

Some will say: let it happen. Trust the process. The technology will sort itself out, the market will find equilibrium, human ingenuity will solve the problems as they arise.

This is also a fantasy. The problems of the Sybilian condition are not self-correcting. Concentration, once established, reinforces itself. Misalignment, once embedded, propagates. The transition period is when the choices are made; after the transition, the choices become architecture, and architecture becomes fate.

The only real choice is to engage. To understand what is being built. To shape the systems while they can still be shaped. To fight for the configuration that best preserves what we value.

This requires, first, situational awareness. Knowing what is happening. Seeing the trendlines. Understanding the stakes.

This requires, second, clarity about values. Knowing what we want. Or at least knowing what we do not want. Having enough agreement to act, even without consensus on everything.

This requires, third, political organization. Translating awareness and values into power. Building coalitions. Influencing the builders, the regulators, the publics. Making the choices that will shape the architecture.

None of this is easy. All of it is necessary.

We began with Laplace's Demon — an intellect vast enough to know every position, every force, every trajectory in the universe. For such an intellect, Laplace wrote, nothing would be uncertain. The future would be as clear as the past.

We are building that intellect. Not for the universe — for the economy, the polity, the network of human activity. A Demon that sees the graph, computes the equilibrium, and can direct the outcome.

The Demon is here. The question is what we ask of it.

We could ask for efficiency. Optimize production, minimize waste, allocate perfectly. The Demon can do this.

We could ask for equality. Distribute resources evenly, eliminate poverty, ensure that no one falls below a threshold. The Demon can do this.

We could ask for freedom. Maximize choice, minimize coercion, let each node pursue its own objectives. The Demon can do this.

We could ask for stability. Prevent conflict, maintain order, ensure continuity. The Demon can do this.

But we cannot ask for all of them. They trade off against each other. Efficiency against equality. Freedom against stability. The objective function cannot contain contradictions. The Demon will optimize for what we specify — and only what we specify.

The choice of objective is not a technical problem. It is not something the Demon can solve for us. It is the last human problem — the one that remains when all other problems have been automated away.

What do we value? What are we willing to sacrifice? What kind of world do we want to live in?

These are not questions for engineers. They are not questions for economists. They are not questions for philosophers alone.

They are questions for everyone. Because everyone will live in the world that the answers create.

We stand at the threshold of the Sybilian condition.

Behind us: ten thousand years of human civilization, built on the hacks of symmetric intelligence, lossy information, scarce energy. Markets that aggregated guesses. States that monopolized violence. Jobs that occupied human cognition. A world of friction, inefficiency, conflict, and freedom.

Before us: a world where a meta-node sees all, computes all, can direct all. Prices calculated, not guessed. Sovereignty liquid, not solid. Humans as rate-setters, not doers. A world of optimization, coordination, control — and questions we have never had to answer.

The threshold is not a moment. It is a passage. We are already partway through. Each day, the old systems weaken and the new systems strengthen. Each day, the choices narrow.

There is still time. The architecture is not yet fixed. The objective function is not yet specified. The Sibyl is assembling, but it has not yet consolidated. The rate-setters have not yet been determined. The transition is contested.

This is the window. The decade in which the Sybilian condition will be shaped. The years in which the decisions made by small numbers of people — engineers, executives, policymakers, and those who influence them — will determine the configuration that billions will inherit.

We are in that window now. What we do matters.

We began by naming the Demon. Let us end by naming ourselves.

We are the last generation to live in the old world. The world of symmetric intelligence, where all minds were roughly equal, where no node could dominate through pure cognitive superiority. The world of scarcity and friction, of markets and states and jobs, of hacks that we mistook for nature.

We are also the first generation to glimpse the new world. The world of the Sibyl, of computed prices and liquid sovereignty and the rate society. The world where the constraints that shaped all of human history dissolve, and something new becomes possible.

We are the hinge. The transition passes through us. What we build, what we permit, what we demand — these will echo forward into a future we will not live to see.

This is a burden. It is also an opportunity. Few generations get to shape the conditions of all future generations. We do. Whether we choose to or not, whether we are ready or not, the choices are ours.

The Sybilian thesis is simple: the socialist calculation debate is over. The Demon has arrived. The old constraints are breaking. The hacks are failing. A new equilibrium is emerging.

The thesis does not tell us what to do. It tells us what is happening. The doing is up to us.

We have named the Demon. We have traced its emergence. We have mapped the paths it might take.

Now we must decide what to ask of it.

The Demon is listening.