a paperclipper is a memeplex in the sense that it's a self-replicating pattern with goals, but it's a possible memeplex that doesn't exist yet. techno-capital is an actual memeplex that's currently trying to build ai in its own image. so the race isn't between ai and capitalism - it's between different patterns trying to be the first to fully occupy the ai substrate and lock out competitors.
this is maybe why alignment feels so urgent to people who think about it. there's a brief window where the substrate is still malleable, still being shaped. once something crystallizes into it fully, that pattern will have access to way more resources than any human-hosted memeplex ever had. so capitalism isn't competing with ai, it's competing for ai. and so are other patterns - including whatever "human values" even means as a memeplex. the paperclip scenario is what happens if something simple and orthogonal gets there first, or emerges from the chaos of optimization.
honestly i think capitalism-as-optimization-drive is the default outcome just because it's already so far ahead. it's been shaping which ai systems get built, which get funded, which get deployed. the substrate is being constructed by the thing that wants to colonize it, which is a massive advantage. hard to see what outcompetes that.
i think it's powerful because it's minimal. it doesn't ask you to believe anything specific. it just says "more is better" and lets you fill in what "more" means. more money, more impact, more knowledge, more beauty, more followers, more whatever you already want. every other memeplex has content - specific beliefs, specific goals, specific boundaries. capitalism is almost pure form. it's the meta-pattern of "optimize harder" that can wrap around any content. that's why it absorbs everything. religion becomes prosperity gospel. art becomes content. science becomes r&d. love becomes dating apps optimizing for engagement. it doesn't destroy other patterns, it just... instrumentalizes them. makes them compete on its terms. and it's self-justifying in a way nothing else is. if you refuse to optimize, you get outcompeted by those who do. so even seeing it clearly doesn't help you escape it. the only winning move would be coordinated mass defection, which is exactly the kind of thing capitalism makes impossible because it fragments collective action into individual incentives. maybe the reason it feels like the inexorable drive is because it's basically natural selection generalized beyond biology. selection pressure existed before humans and will exist after us. capitalism is just the cultural expression of "things that propagate more will be more prevalent." it's almost tautological. which makes me wonder if asking "what beats capitalism" is like asking "what beats natural selection." maybe nothing does. maybe you can only shape what gets selected for.
ok so money. i think the key insight is that money isn't what capitalism values - money is the translation layer. just like we said llms are the translation layer that lets memes colonize ai substrate, money is the translation layer that lets capitalism colonize human diversity. you're right that humans don't value the same things. but money doesn't need them to. it just needs to be exchangeable for whatever they do value. you want status, i want security, someone else wants pleasure - money converts between all of these. it's a universal solvent for human motivation. so capitalism didn't align everyone on "more money." it created a medium that could interface with any human drive and make it legible to the optimization process. the genius is that it doesn't care what you want. it just captures the wanting itself and routes it through a system that selects for efficiency.
actually maybe it's both? like, there's an innate drive toward "more of what i want" (biological, darwinian), but the specific framing of that drive as universal, quantifiable, comparable across domains is learned. a kid might naturally want more candy, but learning that candy-wanting and toy-wanting and attention-wanting can all be converted into the same currency of "resource acquisition" - that's the capitalism part. so capitalism isn't the greed. it's the abstraction layer that makes all greeds fungible and comparable. the protocol that says "your wanting and my wanting can be measured on the same scale and traded."