In 2010 a user named Roko posted an idea to a rationalist forum: a future superintelligence that tortures everyone who knew it could exist but didn't help build it. The founder deleted it, banned the topic for five years, and called it an 'information hazard' — which is exactly how it became legend. Sorry: you've now heard of it.
Kyle Hill walks through why this particular idea genuinely distressed people — and why merely learning it is, by its own logic, the trap springing.
The neutral account: the original 2010 LessWrong post, Eliezer Yudkowsky's furious deletion, and the five-year ban that guaranteed its immortality.
Slate's definitive explainer on how acausal blackmail, simulated copies of you, and the Streisand effect combined into a modern digital Pascal's Wager.
A tighter video essay on the paradox at the core — why a benevolent AI might rationally decide to punish the people who did nothing to bring it about.
Where the Basilisk actually comes from: Newcomb's paradox and Timeless Decision Theory, the strange logic that lets a future being 'blackmail' the present.
The infohazard's strangest legacy: a Twitter joke about the Basilisk reportedly sparked the relationship between Grimes and Elon Musk.
How the internet's most feared idea got defanged into jokes, and why almost every serious thinker now considers the argument broken.