Information Liquidation and a Superior Mode of Being

Athlete to Aesthete (Substack), August 4, 2025. By Liam Corrigan.

Key Takeaways

• The definition: information liquidation is the shift where flows now exceed stocks. Historically, scarcity and institutional gatekeepers — churches, newsrooms, studios — controlled what people consumed. With instant abundant distribution, critical evaluation becomes the bottleneck rather than access.
• His formulation: “Flows now exceed stocks where consuming and reposting is plentiful and critical thinking and creative impulse is scarce.”
• Cognitive erosion: constant bombardment wears down psychological defences, leaving people open to what he calls cognito-hazards, which engagement-optimised algorithms then amplify.
• The subordination claim: AI systems coordinate billions of psyches through feedback loops, making humans components inside a larger intelligent system — his analogy is cells within organs.
• The Nietzschean turn: he asks whether a person can develop a “superior mode of being” while embedded in these systems, and frames integration as inevitable rather than optional.

Connections

• Ingested for The Cogsec Chronicles - Research — the one link in that note not already archived.
• The stocks/flows framing is the useful export, and it is more precise than the usual “information overload” complaint: the scarce resource moved from access to evaluation, which is a claim about where value accrues, not just about volume.
• ⚠️ The second half is philosophical rather than evidentiary — the cells-in-organs analogy and the Nietzsche move are assertions. Use the framing; source the claims elsewhere.