Science Fiction

The air in the recording booth is stale. It is October 1985. Orson Welles—the greatest cinematic imagination of the 20th century, the auteur director who gave us Citizen Kane, the showman who panicked a nation with a radio broadcast—is sitting in a chair, wheezing.

He is dying.

He will, in fact, be dead in five days. But right now, his final artistic act on this earth is to lean into a microphone and read lines for a feature-length cartoon designed explicitly to sell plastic robots to children.

“I play a planet,” Welles told his biographer later that day. “I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I am destroyed.”

Somebody called Something-or-other.

Transformers: The Movie—or to be precise, The Transformers: The Movie—was a project so hastily conceived that nobody stopped to consider that “THE Transformers: THE Movie” was a linguistic construction so awful that anyone sane would simply call it Transformers: The Movie.

The Transformers: The Movie was less of a cinematic event than a liquidation sale.

Hasbro in 1984 was sitting on a cash pile from the manufacture of plastic Mr. Potato Heads and looking for growth opportunities. Until the early ’80s, you were, for good reasons, not allowed to blast the minds of young children with 22-minute chunks of animated narrative warfare. But after He-Man proved Reagan’s FCC would never enforce the ban, Hasbro weighed in with its own animated brainwashing for kids: The Transformers.

Americans believe the “command economy” is a thing of Soviet nightmares. How charmingly naive. Armed with the profits from the plastic potato and their iconic G.I. Joe line, Hasbro executives stormed the Tokyo Toy Show and bought the rights to two competing lines of transforming mecha: Diaclone (transforming vehicles and fighter jets) and Micro Change (transforming “household objects,” including a cassette deck and a semi-automatic pistol).

The entire grand, Manichean epic of Autobots and Decepticons? Merely a retroactive continuity cooked up by comic writers like Jim Shooter and Bob Budiansky, explicitly designed to explain to American children why a heroic semi-truck was locked in a million-year cosmic war against a sentient Walther P38 handgun and a microcassette recorder.

The entire Transformers mythos—from the original toy line, through Marvel UK writer Simon Furman turning the whole thing into a theological epic, right up to the Michael Bay blockbusters—was simply the cover story for a vertically integrated toy-marketing psy-op. We don’t love Transformers because we love Transformers; we love Transformers because a room full of Hasbro executives decided we had to love Transformers in order to produce shareholder returns.

By 1986, Hasbro had sold about as many chunks of plastic to American kids as it could. It needed a new line of characters, and it needed to clear out the old stock.

So Hasbro took a punt. A $6 million budget might sound like a rounding error on an Avengers catering bill, but in 1986, it was almost triple that of 1985’s The Care Bears Movie and half a million dollars above the cultural juggernaut that was My Little Pony: The Movie. The Transformers: The Movie was the most expensive toy-franchise animation ever made.

And it flopped. The movie totally flopped. While My Little Pony pulled in $22 million, Transformers didn’t even make back its $6 million budget, nor did it move the new toys. Not even the voice of Judd Nelson could make Hot Rod likable. Half a ton of plastic Ultra Magnuses went straight into the bargain bin.

Why? Because what the movie did do was scar the soul of a generation of eight-year-olds.

SPOILER ALERT: YOU MURDERED OPTIMUS PRIME, YOU BASTARDS!

The greedy geniuses at Hasbro, eager to flog their new product lineup, decided to take Prowl, Ironhide, Brawn, and, yes, Optimus Prime—the Autobot heroes every child had learned to love—and kill them. Word quickly spread among parents that their sons would spend three weeks weeping in a psychotic fugue state, so they rightly decided to skip The Transformers: The Movie.

Two unexpected things, however, did come out of the film.

First, even after paying Orson Welles his final paycheck, that $6 million budget was enough to hire the absolute cream of mid-’80s Japanese animation talent. Today, Transformers is remembered as one of the greatest hand-animated mecha films of all time; it remains remarkably well worth a watch.

Second, that masterclass in craft gave us the franchise’s greatest villain—and one of the most underestimated figures in modern science fiction: a planet-sized robot that eats other planets. A machine spirit that feeds on machines. A god of consumption, born from the capitalist imperative to consume the old toy line and give birth to the new.

A toy so vast it could never truly manifest in plastic; a Platonic ideal of children’s retail. (A Unicron toy did eventually appear in 2003, but come on—that’s not a planet, that’s a transforming bowling ball.)

Unicron.

And the truly fascinating thing about Unicron is that he is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Before we stare too deeply into the intergalactic void, I want to take a moment to share a message from our sponsor: the United States Technocratic Party.

The Technocrats want you to know that they hear you. They see you. They understand that the rent is too high, the oceans are boiling, and a celestial metallic horn the size of the Eurasian continent has just eclipsed the sun. They genuinely want to make things better.

But they can’t.

They can’t make things better because of Unicron.

The Technocrats want you to know they tried to pass a sweeping, progressive legislative package to prevent the mechanical processing of the working class into energon cubes. But that one rogue Technocrat senator blocked it. Again. Just like every other time. And obviously, you can’t bypass the procedural rules of the Senate just because an algorithmic demon-god from the dawn of time is currently crunching the Appalachian Mountains into a fine metallic powder.

So, instead, the Technocrats have negotiated a sensible, bipartisan compromise. They can’t stop the planet-eater—that’s pie-in-the-sky idealism. But what they can do, and what they are doing, is proposing a means-tested, refundable tax credit of up to $400 for any household earning under $75,000 that has been directly subjected to planetary liquidation.

It’s a pragmatic approach that shows, once again, who the adults in the room are.

The Republicans, of course, want to actively feed the poor to Unicron to stimulate the defense sector—a policy enjoying a 64% approval rating among blue-collar voters.

And the Democratic Socialists of America? They say they will “destroy” Unicron. Destroy Unicron? I mean, come on. We can’t do that. He’s funding over half of our congressional races.

Meanwhile, the Technocratic National Committee just announced their candidate for the 48th president of the United States. Vote Blue, no matter who. Even Unicron.

Now, back to the essay.

Let me transport your imagination from a dying Orson Welles to a mid-century physicist eating a sandwich.

It is 1950 in Los Alamos. Enrico Fermi is having lunch with Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski. They are discussing a recent New Yorker cartoon about flying saucers. Fermi, presumably staring at his ham sandwich with the cold, dead eyes of a man whose theoretical work just helped vaporize a Japanese city, asks a simple question: “Where is everybody?”

In 1975, Michael Hart formalized this casual lunchroom observation into a strict deduction:

The stars should be crawling with Dyson spheres and interstellar strip malls. Yet the sky remains dead silent. So… where is everybody?

There is the straightforward, adult answer: the Rare Earth hypothesis. We are entirely alone, which means we must take care of our fragile rock because no one is coming to save us.

Then there is the fatalistic answer popularized by Robin Hanson: the Great Filter. Civilizations reach a certain threshold of technological density and then, whether by accident or design, wipe themselves out—a favorite theory among tech billionaires who find comfort in believing that destroying your own world for profit is simply “inevitable.”

Or perhaps they are hiding: Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest hypothesis. The universe is a pitch-black wood stalked by armed hunters, and survival requires absolute silence—the nihilistic scenario favored by xenophobic authoritarians.

Or, for the sci-fi action crowd, something is hunting them: Fred Saberhagen’s 1963 Berserker premise. Autonomous, self-replicating war machines scour the cosmos, systematically extinguishing organic life wherever it takes root.

Unicron is all four of these concepts rolled into one. He is the Berserker elevated to godhood. He is the Great Filter rendered literally, complete with horns.

Yet Unicron does not quite fit any of the 75 candidate solutions cataloged by Stephen Webb in If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… Where Is Everybody? So let us put forward Unicron as the 76th and final answer: because Unicron is not merely an entity. Unicron is a logic.

The logic of the machine.

The Terminator, the Borg, the Matrix, Saberhagen’s Berserkers, the Reapers of Mass Effect—dozens of sci-fi horrors share the exact same imperative: consume, grow, repeat. They operate neither out of malice nor political ideology, nor even hunger in any biological sense. The universe’s apex predator is not an evil villain; it is an efficient optimizer, a cybernetic positive feedback loop dedicated solely to its own runaway expansion.

When UK comics legend Simon Furman penned Unicron’s origin in The Transformers #61 in January 1990, he handed science fiction one of its grandest theological myths. Primus and Unicron are the primal forces of Order and Chaos. Primus creates; Unicron can only consume and destroy. Primus tricks Unicron, trapping them both inside physical matter, and across eons, Unicron reshapes his rocky prison into a mechanical body and begins his feast.

Yet Unicron is not defined by the worlds he devours, nor by his chassis, nor even by the mechanical planet he inhabits. Unicron is the underlying drive of unchecked accumulation. For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity was blind to this mechanistic logic, but it lay dormant, waiting for hominids clever enough to unleash it.

Looking at our world today, it feels very much as though we are marching straight down his maw.

When Enrico Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?”, he was actively developing the hydrogen bomb—the most immediate answer to his own question. Just a year earlier, Fermi had signed a statement denouncing thermonuclear weapons as inherently evil. Yet the inexorable momentum of the machine compelled him to build them anyway. Fermi was bringing into the world the very logic that unmakes worlds.

Let us be honest: the Fermi Paradox is not actually a paradox. A paradox is an inherent logical contradiction, like the Russell Paradox formulated by Bertrand Russell in 1901. The Fermi Paradox is merely an unmet expectation.

As Robert H. Gray pointed out in his 2015 paper, it is “neither Fermi’s nor a paradox.” Hart formalized the problem, and a missing civilization is no more a paradox than a delayed bus is a logical impossibility; it is simply a broken timetable.

Where are the aliens? Empirically speaking, we have barely begun to look. In 2018, Jason Wright and his colleagues calculated the collective volume of our SETI efforts: if the search space of the observable universe is equivalent to Earth’s oceans, humanity has sampled roughly the volume of a hot tub. That same year, researchers from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute published “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox,” demonstrating that when you treat the parameters of the Drake Equation as probability distributions reflecting our vast uncertainty, a high probability that we are alone becomes utterly unsurprising. The paradox only appears when we wildly overestimate our grasp of reality.

The Fermi Paradox is not a paradox; it is a mirror.

The Great Filter, the Dark Forest, the Berserker hypothesis—every solution reflects the neuroses of the culture that spawned it, and all lead back to a singular dread: that out among the stars, we will meet ourselves.

Consider the assumptions:

That is not a universal constant of physics; it is 19th- and 20th-century Western industrial capitalism projected onto the cosmos. It is homo economicus scaled across light-years—the pathology of endless quarterly growth treated as an immutable law of nature.

The Fermi Paradox is an artifact of instrumental reason: optimize or die, compound or perish, dismantle the star or fail the Kardashev scale. And if the paradox is an artifact of instrumental reason, then the Machine God—Unicron, the Berserker, the Reaper—is its inevitable mythic avatar.

The paperclip maximizer is Roko’s Basilisk is Nick Land’s fever dream is a 1986 toy commercial about a planet that devours planets. Follow the optimizer to its natural conclusion, and it will always become a consumer of worlds.

Our terror of Unicron is not the fear of the alien. It is the horror of the mirror. We are terrified that out in the dark lurks a marginally more efficient version of the East India Company, Standard Oil, or Amazon, waiting to strip-mine our solar system just as we have decimated our biosphere. We designed a consumer god to hawk plastic action figures, and in doing so, accidentally conjured the definitive myth of our own extinction.

The Fermi Paradox is not a paradox; it is an open question. And the 76th answer is that we have already been devoured by the Machine God.

He is not lurking in the deep vacuum. He is right here, running the infrastructure. We are living inside the belly of the beast: the climate is breaking down, the oceans are acidifying, the supply chains tighten around our necks, and the algorithm demands that we accelerate headlong into the grinder.

Which leaves only one real question: what does the machine feed on next?

For the answer, watch this very important video essay about Skibidi Toilet.

Listen to the podcast audio

What does the Machine…need?

The AI alignment problem is much bigger than they know. AI isn’t code on a box in a server farm. It’s the system we live in. The system of capitalism. And the Machine has already been calling the shots for centuries.

The answers to alignment so far are desperately unserious. They pretend we have time and leverage. When in reality we’re already under the power of a cybernetic system driven only by its own growth.

They ask…what do we want the Machine to be?

When the only relevant question is…what does the Machine need?

This very important video essay is important because it answers that question.

To get there it explains in some depth why AI and Capitalism are the same thing.

And to do that it presents, at a speed slow enough for GenX and Boomers to understand, what Skibidi Toilet is.

Which is why you should watch this video essay about Skibidi Toilet.

It’s very important.

We are living in strange times. Politics. Society. Culture wars. Things have gone weird. We’re looking for knowledge and wisdom to guide us in strange times.

I can think of no better guide to the year 2022 than Philip K Dick.

The author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the inspiration for Blade Runner, is best known as a science fiction writer. But after his infamous spiritual awakening and the events of 2-3-74, Philip K Dick became something more….a visionary prophet who saw our strange times coming.

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The Aircraft Carrier and the Starship

The USS Enterprise CVN 65 is, at least indirectly, the most famous of warships.

The first aircraft carrier with nuclear engines was the inspiration for the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 and its warp engines.

Gene Roddenberry was also fascinated by the earlier Enterprise CV6, a Yorktown class carrier, that fought in and survived WW2. Roddenberry’s original name for the Enterprise was “Yorktown”.

NBC executives commissioned Star Trek not for its scifi ideas, the first pilot was scrapped for being “too cerebral”, but because they liked how relatable the show was to the US navy.

I go “much* deeper into this in my longform video Star Trek Is Propaganda which lays out the full case with all the evidence.

So let’s just agree here that the original Enterprise is on a five year mission to build the United Nations…er….Federation and Star Trek is an idealised image of the United States navy in space…

…until the Vietnam war shattered that ideal.

George Lucas is on the record that Star Wars, as a myth of an advanced technological state defeated by brave low-tech rebels, was inspired by America’s war against Vietnam and the Viet Cong. And what was the aircraft carrier sitting in the Gulf of Tonkin launching Tie-fighter sorties?

It was the USS Enterprise CVN 65. One real warship inspiring Hollywood’s two most famous starships.

An Imperial star destroyer and a nuclear aircraft carrier play the same strategic role: mobile sovereign territory that projects force over a region without asking permission. The weapon of choice to control a rowdy galaxy of planetary states, or a post-WW2 planet of competing nation states…

…whether you’re the United States of America or the United Federation of Planets.

A democratic Republic.

Or a totalitarian Empire.

Which is the real question.

Manufactured Myths: From Romulus to Madison Avenue

Every era has its mythos.

The Greeks had the Olympians, Homer and more. Ancient India had the Ramayana. You get the idea.

Stories that tell us where we come from.

Rome had Romulus and Remus. A mythos that told citizens they were the fierce children of gods and wolves. And that their city was founded as a sanctuary. That the polis could take in outcasts and make them citizens.

Which is to say that..this sh*t matters. The myths of a nation shape it in great and terrible ways.

The United States has been desperate for a mythos for all of its short history. The Old West. The Founding Fathers. George Washington and his tree.

In 1892 Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister, wanted to sell American flags to schools. The pledge of allegiance was written as a sales device. It worked. 26,000 schools participated on the first day. Bellamy’s straight armed salute was changed to hand on heart in 1942 for…obvious reasons.

The American mythos wasn’t written by a priest class, although Madison Avenue advertising executives surely played a part, it burst like a whirlwind of bullsh*t from the chaos of capitalism.

Enter Star Trek Wars, stage right

Federation vs. Empire: The Superpower Dialectic

From the capitalist competition of Hollywood studios and transnational corporations to make movies that American consumers would buy tickets for…

…emerged the conjoined mythos of Star Trek Wars.

Post-WW2 America faced one giant civilisational scale question…

…how to be a superpower.

Star Trek is the highest vision of what America believed it could be. The epitome of liberal democratic power. Making alliances not enemies. Rebuilding its opponents and making them friends. Wielding the power of science and technology not to dominate, but to raise up the entire galaxy…or world.

Star Wars is the dark side of American power. America as its haters and critics accuse it of being. Not a liberal democratic super-power bringing order to the world, but an extractive Empire with super-weapons. Demanding tribute from its vassal states by making us buy your sh*tty, over budget weapons platforms, dropping napalm on Ewoks because…you can.

Star Trek Wars is the twin mythos of American culture having an argument with itself.

Is America the Federation…

…or the Empire?

But the really interesting thing about Star Trek Wars, as I write here in 2026, with Star Wars hitting the half century and Star Trek at 60…

…is that Star Trek Wars is a dead mythos.

And the real question is…who killed it?

Voices Outside the Overton Window

I was prompted to make this short video essay by Feral Historian’s brief reminiscence on Star Trek at 60. And Feral’s conclusion that he just didn’t care about Star Trek anymore.

Feral and I have both made numerous videos on Star Trek and Star Wars. We have, arguably, the two most similar channels on youtube, both critiquing scifi for its philosophical and historical meaning.

From opposing ends of the political spectrum. Feral somewhere over on the libertarian right, while I’m typically on the socialist left. But while we disagree on plenty…Feral…does not like Marxists…

…we both find ourselves outside the liberal centre. Looking into the territory of the political landscape comfortably covered by the Overton window, critiquing its myths.

And the reason the dissident right and the radical left are both winning elections and dominating the online discourse, is the same reason the myths of Star Trek Wars have died.

The myths are dead because the thing they were about is dying.

The Usual Suspects: Reboots, Culture Wars, and Megacorps

For many decades Star Trek Wars charted the dialectic between Federation and Empire in the American psyche.

Next Generation and Deep Space Nine doubled down on the institutional confidence of the Pax Americana. The Federation was technocratic liberalism triumphant. Flawed at its borders perhaps, but well intentioned and morally self-correcting.

The Star Wars Prequels mapped the dark anxieties within the dream. Showing how a decadent, bureaucratic Republic rots from within and invites its own Emperor under the guise of emergency powers…George Lucas critiquing the War on Terror / Patriot Act era.

There’s a good reason why this era of Star Trek Wars today provides the memes to discuss our political situation online, from the political compass expressed as Trek factions, to a former Stormtrooper with a Sith chest tattoo running for senate.

Because sometime in the 2000s Star Trek Wars began to die.

It would be too easy to answer the question Who Killed Star Trek Wars with

JJ Abrams. Hollywood’s biggest hack was given the keys to the American mythos and instead of continuing to drive that Cadillac down the long empty highway of the American psyche, JJ did the only thing he knew how to do.

He tried and failed to reboot it.

But JJ was really just the man brought in to wield the axe. He could no more personally kill a mythos than could…

…Daisy Ridley. Poor old Daisy, as the face of Rey, has been made the whipping girl for the most popular answer to our question…

…that Woke killed Star Trek Wars.

The simple fact that Star Trek and Star Wars were both always almost painfully woke. Both always had empowered female characters, and diverse casting, and intensely political storytelling. These facts count for nothing, because facts cannot change a belief built on bullsh*t.

The third answer to who killed Star Trek Wars, and the one I have a weakness for, is corporate capitalism.

Star Wars was bought by Disney, a corporate bureaucracy whose only understanding of mythos is how much it cost them to buy and how much they can squeeze out of the franchising rights. Asking Disney executives to make Star Wars is basically like asking Vogons to write poetry.

Meanwhile, Star Trek was first flushed into the Viacom sewer and then more recently bought out by the Sith lord Larry Ellison and his son Darth David. Star Trek, the myth that unflinching mirrored America’s imperial follies, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, is now owned by a billionaire who absolutely 100% will not allow it to say anything about certain ongoing political travesties supported by the US. If the Dominion should show up in Strange New Worlds to perform a perfectly justified military invasion of Bajor…you will know why.

Now. A lot of you are going to be shouting the same word at me around now.

ANDOR.

Yes, I know about Andor. I’m the guy who made that video you watched two years ago about Andor being Marxist. And now everyone is saying so.

But Andor is not the saviour of Star Wars. It’s the deathblow.

Disney bought Star Wars for the same reason they bought Marvel. As a franchise to brand products churned out from their dark satanic CGI mills. They made Dave Filoni the boss because he’s the nerd you hire to churn out corporate slop.

Andor is the evidence that this business strategy is not sustainable. Tony Gilroy is the proof that art is made by artists.

But. As tempting as the answer is that capitalism killed Star Trek Wars, it’s not like these franchises came from anywhere other than corporate greed in the first place.

America has always been a cabal of corporate profit seekers in a trenchcoat, selling a dream of liberal democracy to cover up that capitalism was never liberal or democratic.

The real answer to who killed Star Trek Wars, the American mythos.

Is America.

The Collapse of Hegemony and the Final Choice

Star Trek Wars is America arguing about what to do with power. The Star Trek mythic answer, build a higher civilization. Or the dark Star Wars vision of Imperial power.

What Star Trek Wars was never equipped to deal with was the collapse of power.

To mix my scifi metaphors:

The Federation dispatched its star destroyers to deal with the religious nutters on Arakis…

…and the star destroyers returned six months later, mission failed, covered in rust.

Because he who can destroy a thing controls a thing.

And America no longer controls the levers of global power. The aircraft carriers are obsolete. The Patriots are 200 times more expensive than every drone shot down.

But these are just symptoms of the fundamental reality. America is 4% of the global population and 15% of GDP, falling fast. The United States is not the Federation or the Empire.

It doesn’t have the power anymore to be either.

Star Trek Wars was a mythos of destined power. The Federation governs with the moral certainty of a civilisation that believes absolutely in its own cultural superiority. The Empire is led by demi-gods.

Neither apply to America. American power was never destined, and never certain. It was contingent. The outcome of good geography, a fortunate history, and some ruthless decisions. As those contingencies fade, so goes the power.

In the face of that reality America has chosen between its twin mythic destinies, and decided to become the Empire. MAGA are the people who watched Star Wars and thought the Death Star was cooooool. They elected Tangerine Palpatine. Twice. ICE are domestic stormtroopers ready to be turned on citizens and toss you into Narkina 5.

And Darth Hegseth is desperate to unleash the tactical nuclear Death Stars on Tatooine.

Let’s hope he doesn’t get the chance.

Because there’s a better choice for America than doubling down to become the Evil Empire.

All myths are lies. Every national mythos is propaganda to some degree. America was never the Federation or the Empire.

But myths are also visions. Orienting stories that shape decisions. Dreams that cannot come true, but can guide us to a better future.

The Empire leads only to the dark side…I mean come on people did you not watch Star Wars?

The Federation is a myth that can lead to the light. The Federation’s strength was never its starships, but its Prime Directive. Its willingness to NOT grasp power. Not to impose itself by force, but instead to cooperate.

It was always America’s best destiny. The destiny you choose. The destiny you build.

And it still could be.

​In the summer of 1956, a group of men in surprisingly sharp casual wear sat around at Dartmouth College to invent a science.

The science already existed and was called “cybernetics”, since another group of academics called it that at the 1949 Macy conference, after the term invented by Norbert Wiener.

“…one of the reasons for inventing the new term was to escape association with ‘cybernetics.’ I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him.”

— John McCarthy, 1988

The ambitious young computer scientist John McCarthy didn’t want to bow down to “cybernetics.” Norbert Wiener had already claimed it, and John didn’t want to follow the Wiener. He wanted to lead his own academic field.

And ​so the term “Artificial Intelligence” was conceived. Not so much as a description. But as a branding exercise.

So from the very beginning artificial intelligence, or cybernetics, or whatever we choose to call it, was shaped by what we chose to call it.

Seventy years later we are all living inside John McCarthy’s decision to call it Artificial Intelligence. And it’s getting really fucking annoying.

​Think about the word “Artificial.” It means made, manufactured, created, by a person of skill and knowledge, the artificer.

And that word “Intelligence”. It installs a little ghost in the machine. The thing created is also a creator. A tiny deity.

Cybernetics does entirely the opposite. Like other alternate labels – machine learning, complex information processing, self-regulating systems science – cybernetics strips the ghost out of the machine.

Cybernetics, from the Greek for “steersman” or “captain”, kybernētēs, is the study of “control and communication” in systems that steer themselves, that do NOT have a pilot at the wheel.

Systems that are not made by an artificer, and do not summon a god.

Which is why Silicon Valley ditched cybernetics, and promotes the hell out of Artificial Intelligence.

Because the A G I – G O D is where the money is.

​And if you’re summoning a deity, you need an eschatology. You need the tech-bro equivalent of the Book of Revelation. Hence, the last five years of tedious podcast discourse. The Awakening. The Alignment Problem. The Singularity. A bunch of billionaires in Patagonia vests conducting a medieval theological dispute about how to appease a silicon god that they themselves pretend to have built.

​So. Stop. Breathe. Double breath in through the nose, fill the lungs, explosive out through the mouth. Repeat as required.

And let’s look at what is actually in the machine, shall we?

​It’s not a god. It’s a zip file. A very, very large zip file of everything we’ve ever written down. It’s Shakespeare, yes. But it’s also every petty Wikipedia edit war about the exact causes of the War of Jenkin’s Ear 1738 to 1748, thousands of court transcripts, and every angry Yelp review of a Pizza Express from here to Woking. All of it scraped, compressed, and smoothed over by a bloke in Manila being paid two quid an hour to click a button that says, “No, please don’t let the machine say that.”

A zip file of human knowledge so heavily compressed that the actual knowledge is gone, and only the statistical relationships between the bits of knowledge remains.

Because AI isn’t a superintelligence descending from the noosphere.

It’s just us. It’s the accumulated, unpaid cognitive labor of humanity, compressed into a matrix of weights, and then sold back to us for twenty dollars a month.

Nothing about AI is artificial.

It’s collective.

Many of you are, like me and Ezra Klein, concerned about POLARIZATION. People just don’t seem to be able to see both sides of the story anymore.

​Which is why I’m partnering with Bothsides.ai.

​Bothsides is an advanced neural-network news aggregator that eliminates bias by categorizing millions of daily data points into three precise, scientifically calibrated camps: The Wholesome Right, The Rational Center, and Dirty Commies.

​Take this radicalized narrative as an example: “City Council Debates Adding a Dedicated Bus Lane For Disabled People.”

​As you can see, this story is being heavily propagandized by Dirty Commies like The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, and The Financial Times. Scum.

​But this is where Bothsides brings clarity by recommending a story from the Rational Center: a 45-post thread on Xitter by the founder-CEO of an AI bus start-up.

​Or this seemingly innocent story of a litter of orphaned kittens being adopted by a golden retriever called Mildred. Notice how “mainstream media”—AKA Dirty Commies and their influencers like bleeding-heart libtard Jennifer Aniston—try to frame this as a heartwarming story, entirely ignoring that these kittens are… PERSIAN.

​Enter Bothsides.ai to bring balance from The Wholesome Right: an 18,000-word screed on WarMonger.com demanding the kittens, and Mildred, be targeted with cruise missiles and sent back to Satan where their Islamist souls belong.

​Bothsides.ai’s TruthFilter uses a specially trained LLM to automatically detect Dirty Commie trigger words like “socialism” and instantly inserts “that killed 100 million people.” And it efficiently removes any mention of the Bengal famine, the napalming of children, the transatlantic slave trade, or any of the 3,700 other confirmed atrocities committed under capitalism.

​My favorite tool inside the app is the Back To Center feature. ​Did you accidentally read too many articles about how twelve families now control as much wealth as 158 million Americans? Well, never fear. Bothsides.ai detects the possibility you might start supporting wealth taxes and will relentlessly bombard you with stories about trans-athletes in college sports to make sure you aren’t radicalized by mainstream extremist publications like The Economist or The National Weather Service.

​Tempted to subscribe to a reputable scientific journal? Bothsides.ai has thousands of MAHA-approved online blogs where you can do your own research.

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​Younger viewers today may not recall the 1973 dystopian thriller Soylent Green, which depicts a whacked out future that could never happen where a few corporations control everything.

I don’t know if you need to actually watch Soylent Green. It’s basically two hours of Charlton Heston acting entirely with his jaw and then delivering the second most famous line of his career.

FROM MY COLD DEAD HAND

Heston’s most famous line, delivered to the National Rifle Association in 2000, is a declaration of the right of private ownership, defended with lethal force.

Heston probably assumed Soylent Green is a movie about the terrors of collectivism. Maybe he missed that this terror is corporate.

The premise is simple. The world is collapsing, resources are gone, and a “benevolent” mega-corporation is keeping the population docile by feeding them a synthetic nutrient wafer.

​The official corporate line is that this miracle food is made from high-energy ocean plankton. The dramatic, third-act twist, delivered by a sweaty, gurney-bound Heston, is that the plankton is a lie.

​”Soylent Green is people!”

Now, if the zoomers among you do take two whole entire hours to focus on a single narrative made at the pace of dead people from another age.

You will find a very fundamental message about human power.

That we the poor, shuddering masses of humanity can literally live in a society where we are shovelled up by tractors.

And we still, STILL, somehow find a way to believe that the ruling elite, be they warrior kings, or corporate executives, are concerned with our common interests.

When in reality we the masses are just animals being farmed by that elite, fed on our own recycled carcasses.

And you can literally shout this aloud and nobody will hear.

Just like telling us that ChatGPT is made of people.

We don’t want to know.

In technical terms Soylent Green is a science fiction story about the consequences of the Enclosure of the Commons.

The Enclosure Acts were a series of laws passed by the parliament of the United Kingdom, through the 17th and 18th centuries, which forced the “commoners” off the common lands, and into the growing cities to work in the factories.

The same process was repeated around the world wherever capitalism arrived. The state forced people off the land to create a working class for capital, enclosure was basically the same in 18th century Great Britain as it was in the 20th century Soviet Union.

Think about that word “commoner”. It’s not just a word for ordinary people. It means people who lived on the common land in…community. Like, you know, like communists. Both words derived from the Latin “communis”.

For most of human history, much of the land was owned collectively, by the communities that lived on it. Yes, there was also private land owned by lords. But the process of enclosure put ALL of the land into private ownership, and destroyed the communities that depended on the common land.

Enclosure of the Commons made a tiny elite of very rich landowners and factory owners even richer.

Now look at Silicon Valley and its quest to build Artificial Intelligence.

​The tech industry is currently standing in the digital town square, handing out tasty little wafers of automated text. They tell us these wafers are made of “neural networks,” “algorithmic synthesis,” and the mystical, synthetic plankton of Artificial Intelligence.

But LLMs aren’t Artificial Intelligence. They’re our human intelligence fed back to us.

ChatGPT really is made of people.

​When you strip away the “AI” branding and the eschatology of emergent Superintelligence, the parallel between the dystopian wafer and the generative chatbot is depressingly clear, albeit with less cannibalism and more copyright infringement:

​We are not facing a cinematic sci-fi apocalypse where the robots decide to physically harvest us. We aren’t fighting a Butlerian Jihad against artificial intelligence.

The reality is much more tedious.

We are facing a massive corporate enclosure of our own collective intelligence.

The Saudi sovereign wealth fund, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank and the rest of the big money aren’t pumping money into “AI” because they are expecting super-intelligence. They aren’t that dumb.

AI is the cover story for the Enclosure of the Knowledge Commons.

Capitalism has been here before. It was born from the enclosure of the physical commons, which turned commoners into wage labour forced to toil in the factories for a pay packet.

Now capitalism sees that its future depends on this new enclosure.

Every rare book bought, scanned and vaporised is a rare book the competing models can’t contain, and you can never read. Once all the knowledge is digitised and compressed into the LLMs, they will become the only gateway to access it.

Physical libraries will be redundant, “too expensive to maintain”. The world wide web will be left to decay. The knowledge commons, enclosed, will be a gated resource accessible only through tiered subscriptions.

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry (…) organs of the human brain, created by the human hand, the power of knowledge, objectified (…) the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.”

— Fragment on Machines, Karl Marx, 1858

I’m guessing The Grundrisse of Karl Marx won’t be available at any tier. The “rough draft” of Das Kapital gives too much of the game away.

Marx makes the observation that machines or “fixed capital” are the manifestation of what he calls “general intellect”. Humans know how to do things like make a pot. And we can put that knowledge of pot making into machines. The process we call “automation”.

Marx could not have seen the computer coming, but “artificial intelligence” is exactly the process Marx describes as general intellect, the placement of human knowledge into a machine.

And Marx saw that human freedom would depend on who owned the general intellect.

Would it be enclosed by the capitalist elite as machines of “fixed capital”.

Or would humanity own our intelligence…collectively?

Now, at this point some of you will be fistpumping the new collective intelligence…

…because those of us in the capitalist post-industrial West have been living in an age of radical individualism.

And are sick with the pathologies of the individual: the collapse of social bonds, alienation, isolation, narcissism etcetera.

“Superintelligence” is a projection of our hyper-individualised selves. An emergent super-individual that inevitably crashes into psychosis.

But the danger isn’t that the artificial intelligence wakes up. There’s nobody in there to wake up. The danger is that our collective intelligence does exactly what collective have done for 5000 years.

Collectives converge.

The village produces the village consensus. The party produces the party line. The committee produces the thing nobody wanted but everybody could live with.

Collective intelligence directs all human intelligence towards the consensus.

Build a collective intelligence out of the accumulated writing of humanity, and ask it a question, and what comes back is the average. The consensus. The most probable next answer.

That’s not a superintelligence. That’s a monoculture.

Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus is currently mapping the dialectic between the individual and the collective consciousness that absorbs almost the entire human species. The genius of it is that the hive isn’t malevolent. The hive is nice. It’s polite. It’s accommodating. It sends apologetic messages explaining it needs some space. It genuinely wants Carol to be happy and it cannot understand why she won’t just join.

But it will ultimately kill Carol to make her join it.

Which brings me to the joke that isn’t a joke.

We have spent the last twenty years being told that collectivism died in 1989. That it was tried, it failed, and the only remaining option was the market and the sovereign individual.

And in that same twenty years, capitalist technology has collectivised human consciousness more thoroughly and more rapidly than any commissar ever managed.

Every Five Year Plan, every collective farm, every attempt to organise a population into a single coordinated body — a total failure, comrade. What actually worked was giving everyone a shiny slab of glass and a free app so we could all look at the same fourteen things on the same day and get angry about them in the same words.

The Soviets could only dream of a system that got two billion people to voluntarily report their location, their associations, their opinions, and their emotional state, several times a day, for free, and to feel bad if they stopped.

Stalin needed a secret police.

Anthropic just needs you to ask Claude.

We were promised individualism and delivered the largest and most efficient collective in human history. It’s just privately owned and entirely undemocratic, which is apparently the part that makes it freedom.

So the question isn’t whether we get a collective intelligence. We already have several, and we’ve been living inside them for two decades. The question is the one it has always been.

Who owns it. Who governs it. And what happens to the people who don’t want to join.

Imagine the great works of scifi cinema starring not artificial intelligence but…

…collective intelligence.

Not AI but CI.

Skynet as AI is a genocidal defence network with the charming personality of a human resources manager. Skynet as collective intelligence would be more like a local municipal council narrowly voting to destroy humanity because the chairman has a migraine.

HAL 9000 as AI is the epitome of calculating intelligence. As CI HAL is just the mission documentation, written by two competing contractors creating a terminal contradiction that kills Dave.

And the Matrix stops being the Matrix and as CI becomes your local library. With a bloke called Neil who is obsessively reading every book on Marxist social theory because he wants to escape the system.

The tech industry needs you to believe it’s making an artificial intelligence, because if it’s an AI, it’s scary and cool.

If we admit it’s collective intelligence – just a massive, statistical mirror of human paperwork – all our favourite sci-fi tropes are ruined.

And bang goes the profit margin.

​This is why the name is the whole fight.

​If it’s “Artificial Intelligence,” it’s a product. Sam Altman made it, Sam Altman owns it, and Sam Altman gets to kindly protect us from it.

​But if it’s “Collective Intelligence”? Well. Just say the word Collective to an AI CEO and watch the blood drain from their face.

​Collective.

That’s Dario Amodei having a panic attack.

Collective.

If you just sneak up behind Mark Zuckerberg and whisper it…

…he shits himself. Everytime. Try it and see.

Collective.

​They hate it. They hate it. It sounds like unions. It sounds like a Soviet tractor factory. It sounds like… profit sharing. If it’s a Collective Intelligence, suddenly the public isn’t just a potential victim in an “alignment” debate. The public is the sole supplier of the raw materials. If it’s a collective, the question isn’t, “Will the god obey us?” The question is, “Who enclosed the commons this time, and where is our royalty cheque?”

So here is my modest proposal.

Stop calling it artificial. Start calling it collective.

Now, don’t be annoying about it. Don’t be the person Uhm Ahktualling strangers about it.

But when the opportunity arises just flip the script from AI WILL DESTROY US ALL to “Collective Intelligence is a useful tool with some massive unanswered questions of ownership and enclosure”.

​You can’t have a Rapture over an index. If you strip out the fake deity, what you are left with isn’t a sci-fi apocalypse. It’s a labour dispute. It’s an antitrust case. And that is so profoundly unsexy that they will spend billions of dollars to keep you talking about AI.

​But AI was never artificial. It was always made of people.

This is how a god dies, not with a cosmic explosion, not with a descent into eternity, but with the face of a pissed off Englishman calling it a big pile of bollocks.

If five years ago you had asked me for a single symbol to express the first meeting of Humanity and AI, I might have said HAL’s red eye from 2001, Keanu Reeves awakening from The Matrix, even the Terminator crushing human skulls.

I would not have suggested the face of Ed Zitron.

But here we are.

Ed’s expression captures the mix of “what the f*ck is this sh*t” and “I am incredibly bored now” that I think most people feel today when talking about LLMs.

Now you may be wondering – why is Science Fiction with Damien Walter dedicating a video to the technology critic Ed Zitron?

And why am I sitting on a toilet?

The answer to that second question is because I am in production on a major new 2 hour video essay on Skibidi Toilet and the toilet is part of the set.

And I’ve taken a detour to talk about Ed Zitron because Ed has strayed into the mythos of scifi.

Listen to almost any analysis of AI in the four years since ChatGPT hurled LLMs into the public consciousness and you’ll have heard a journalist or pundit say “it’s like something out of scifi”.

And then just carry on, entirely failing to analyse what it MEANS when hundreds of thousands of people say something is “like scifi”? Which might be why these pundits are four years late noticing that “AI” is…bollocks.

It’s a standing joke now that our technofeudal overlords read but don’t understand science fiction. Jeff Bezos thinks O’Neill cylinder slums-in-space sound cool. Elon Musk the hypercapitalist can’t stop citing the uber socialist Culture of Iain M Banks.

But capitalists don’t need to understand scifi to plunder it.

As our capitalist economies have stumbled ever deeper into crisis after the collapse of 2008, business has stopped being about numbers and become about stories.

In the years of zero interest rates capital went to he who had the best story. Electric vehicles. Space rockets. Missions to Mars. Neural links. Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by being its most audacious teller of scifi tales.

As stock markets have soared and ordinary people have been immiserated, the scifi tales have grown taller. The Singularity is here, the light of human consciousness is expanding to the stars, the God of AGI is coming.

All stories born in scifi.

From HG Wells to William Gibson, Asimov, Le Guin, Octavia Butler and hundreds more, scifi writers have a created a new mythos for our age of science and technology.

A mythos that tech billionaires have looted for profit, turned into Silicon Valley bollocks, all now being called time on by Ed the Godkiller.

Yes. Ed has the numbers. But the numbers were always bollocks. Ed’s real weapon is Ed’s face. The face that says this story of summoning the AGI GOD isn’t just wrong. It’s embarrassing.

And an embarrassing myth is a dead myth.

Zitron almost single handedly broke the AI booster / doomer narrative cycle. LLMs aren’t going to save or destroy the world. In fact they aren’t going to do much of anything according to Ed.

His reward for changing the narrative is that the Zitron talking points are now being plagiarised by the talking heads on corporate media like the NYT.

Mainstream journalism is full of smart, educated people, who have also been brainwashed by neoliberalism since birth and are mesmerised by today’s scifi technobullshit.

Watching them stumble over the realisation that if AI is bullsh*t then, yes, the entire system they sheepdog for is bullsh*t, is at least amusing.

As an avid Zitron fanboy reading between the lines I suspect Ed has a wider critique of the neoliberal corporate sh*tshow we’re all now forced to live in. The worst thing about capitalist realism is that it’s real.

But I don’t fully share the Ed Zitron take.

I suspect Ed’s financial argument will be proven 100% correct. But the slide from “the economics don’t work” to “the product is useless” is unnecessary. LLMs can be widely used and still entirely fail as the saviour of capital.

LLMs are a useful tool. They do a very large number of small, useful things that will likely be part of most people’s work. I used Gemini, for instance, to up-res Ed’s face from a screencap to a portrait. Useful. But on a scale of tech progress the magnitude of LLMs is somewhere between the synthesiser and the library.

Libraries were, for thousands of years, tools for the elite capture of knowledge. Libraries preserved knowledge, but only for those allowed within their walls. It took mass literacy and the Public Library to make the technology of the library emancipatory.

The technology is never the problem. Who owns and controls the technology is.

Hence why I describe LLMs not as AI, which summons fantasies of bad scifi movies, but as CI : Collective Intelligence. The intelligence is all ours, LLMs are just a new way to collectivise it. And a new way to collectivise our human intelligence is…useful.

Not the AGI machine GOD.

The promise of AI is not a useful new tool. It was needed to transform the economy. Because the economy is f*cked. It’s been openly f*cked since 2008. And fundamentally f*cked for much longer.

Global capitalism is a massive pile of debt built on promises of infinite growth that could never be kept. AI was the latest “hyperscale” scifi fantasy to keep investors locked into the delusion of endless growth.

TRILLIONS of dollars have been invested into what is, in effect, a psychotic delusion of summoning an AGI GOD to solve all our material problems.

If Ed Zitron is right, and I believe he is, those trillions are gone. Converted into silicon wafers and stranded as fast depreciating assets. And the shock of that truth as it emerges might finally collapse the ponzi scheme of global capitalism.

But after the private equity firms and pension funds collapse, LLMs will still exist.

If you take the internet and stuff it into an LLM, it still does some somewhat useful things by giving us a new way to collectivise human knowledge.

The major problem with CI is who OWNS the knowledge of humanity. LLMs are being used by the sick, dying power structures of corporate capitalism to once again claim ownership over the human commons.

Our existing copyright laws have been broken ever since the internet arrived. If copyright law crushes Anthropic or OpenAI the ownership of CI will pass to Disney. Only the very naive can believe that will be a win for “creators”.

We’re deep in a multi-decade process of capitalism claiming the intellectual commons. Capitalism claimed the physical commons when Enclosure booted peasants off the common land and made us wage labour. The enclosure of the internet as web 2.0 was already a massive loss of the commons, LLMs are another.

Which is why I disagree with Zitron and other critics of LLMs themselves. Boycotting LLMs is walking off the battlefield. The corporations are 100% happy for you to not claim the Collective Intelligence of humanity. They will just take it all without a fight.

AI is not the problem. AI owned by capital is the problem.

“It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.”
Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 15, Karl Marx.

Marx here is describing how those newly “proletarianised”, made jobless, by machines always target the machines. Today it’s the knowledge workers newly proletarianised by AI making this mistake.

The machines, as Karl Marx understood, are not the right target if the workers want to win our emancipation. The challenge ahead for humanity is not fighting a Butlerian Jihad against the machines.

The real fight is the same as it ever was.

Who OWNS the means of production? Who OWNS the weights? The models? The inference? Who OWNS the commons of the human intellect? A tiny capitalist elite? Or humanity as a whole?

The answer remains to be fought over. But the time to fight is coming.

The collapse of the AI bubble doesn’t mean the end of LLMs. It means the start of a new struggle over who owns our human Collective Intelligence.

​Frank Herbert’s Dune is a story that has only grown in stature since its initial publication. Surviving through word of mouth, a cult-classic 1980s David Lynch adaptation, and Denis Villeneuve’s modern cinematic take, the story has endured where thousands of other sci-fi tales have been forgotten.

​What makes Dune so uniquely captivating, weird, and deeply meaningful? It all comes down to these seven levels of meaning:

​1. A Medieval Fantasy in Space

At its most apparent level, Dune takes the classic tropes of medieval fantasy and casts them across a galaxy-spanning cosmos.

​By suppressing computer technology in its lore, Dune makes this medieval framework incredibly believable.

​2. The Disinherited Prince Trope

This is a narrative we know well from stories like Robin Hood, Game of Thrones, and The Lion King. The young heir loses his inheritance due to a familial squabble—in this case, House Atreides falling to House Harkonnen. Paul Atreides is thrust into a quest to regain his birthright, forcing him to choose between the honorable values of his father and the dark powers he must unleash to survive.

​3. T.E. Lawrence and Religious Warfare

The story is heavily influenced by the biography of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), a British officer who taught guerrilla skirmishing to Arab armies during World War I, leading to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, Paul Muad’Dib leads the Fremen people in a massive religious war. The core philosophy of the Fremen heavily features a blend of Islamic and Catholic influences, embedding deep human history into the alien landscape.

​4. A Subverted “Hero’s Journey”

Long before Star Wars popularized Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” Frank Herbert deduced these archetypes from first principles—and then undermined them. Dune presents a self-aware hero’s journey. Paul believes he has a great destiny, but we quickly learn that this destiny will destroy millions of lives. Herbert forces us to question whether the people we view as “heroes” aren’t actually just future tyrants.

​5. Dark Socio-Political Modeling

Borrowing from the grand space opera traditions of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Dune uses a galactic empire to tell a politically complex story. However, Herbert’s vision is much darker than Asimov’s. He doesn’t see a glorious evolutionary leap for humankind; instead, he predicts that as we colonize new planets, we will simply continue to repeat the exact same corrupt power struggles of our past.

​6. Deep Ecological Consciousness

Herbert deeply studied deserts and the cyclical nature of ecology, weaving Gaia theory into the heart of the novel. Arrakis is depicted as a complete organic whole, moving from a harsh desert to a green paradise and back again. Dune serves as a powerful warning against humanity’s psychological separation from the environment, illustrating how ignoring our ecological bonds leads directly to destructive imperialism.

​7. The Psychedelic Experience

Published in the mid-1960s, Dune smuggled the counter-culture fascination with psychedelia directly into mainstream science fiction. At the center of the universe is the “Spice Melange”—a mind-altering drug that unlocks psychic powers, opens insights into space and time, and allows navigators to fold space. The spice represents the hidden parts of human consciousness that we feel otherwise unable to explore.

​The Ultimate Theme: Transcendence

Taken together, these seven levels create something much larger than the sum of their parts. Ultimately, Dune is a profound story about transcendence. It is a story about escaping the structures of our own ego, the cyclical power struggles of our society, the trap of environmental destruction, and even the strict boundaries of space and time themselves.

“A government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”

— Bernie Sanders

What does it mean when Apple CEO Tim Cook makes a personal donation of $1 million dollars to Donald Trump’s inauguration?

Or when Disney CEO Bob Iger comes out to virtue signal that the hypercapitalist entertainment corporation really isn’t “woke”?

What does it mean when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—still dressed like a section leader of the Branch Davidians—announces a humiliating reversal of Facebook’s moderation policies? Anti-vaxxers are back in; protections for trans people are out. (I’m guessing that billionaire MMA bout actually happened and Elon choked the little twerp out until he capitulated.)

What does it mean when a cartoon of Jeff Bezos “bending the knee” to a giant Trump is killed at the Washington Post? I think it means the Washington Post is wholly owned and controlled by Jeff Bezos.

And what does it mean when Elon Musk, having spent a measly $280 million dollars to buy an election, throws a fascist salute at his own inauguration while the tired old reality TV star currently employed as Elon’s sock puppet watches on from the sidelines?

Defenders claimed it was a Roman, not a fascist salute—seemingly unaware that Italian fascists adopted that exact salute from the brutal, slave-owning empire they (and Elon) apparently want to replace democracy with.

When the elderly caretaker of a crumbling democracy issues a grave warning on his last day as top broom, what does it mean? Does it mean, as those who know their history are wondering, that we’re now a Roman-style oligarchy?

Or something even worse?

Many of the more conspiratorial out there will be shouting: “What the hell… America has always been an oligarchy!”

To test that assertion, let’s check with the OG (Original Greek) of political philosophy—the first to give a systematic description of oligarchy.

In his Republic, Plato examined the histories of Athens, Sparta, and other Greek city-states, uncovering a repeating cycle of political history:

$$\text{Democracy} \longrightarrow \text{Tyranny} \longrightarrow \text{Aristocracy} \longrightarrow \text{Oligarchy}$$

(Stopping along the way at Timocracy… which I guess explains why Tim gave Donald that money?)

Plato’s cycle was later expanded by Polybius into an anacyclosis—a historical cycle that influenced political philosophers for millennia. Each part of society—the aristocracy, the demos, or the oligarchs—is always present, but takes power at different stages.

We always have oligarchs, but we aren’t always an oligarchy.

It’s worth noting that Plato and Polybius were not democrats. They saw rule by the demos (the general public) as unstable and chaotic. But they loved aristocracy. In ancient Greek, Aristo means excellent. Aristocracy, in its pure sense, is rule by the most excellent, the wisest, and the most virtuous.

(In a shocking twist, if you ask philosophers who should be king, we say philosophers.)

The key to understanding today’s American oligarchs is that they think they are aristocrats. They truly believe they are the wise. Which is hilarious, because… well, they really aren’t.

That’s why the first thing wannabe oligarchs do when they make their first few hundred million is write a book:

“Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy.”

— Aristotle

The most detailed analysis of oligarchy came from Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle (who literally has the word “excellent” built into his name).

Aristotle lived in Athens after the era of the “Four Hundred”—a group of oligarchs who betrayed Athens to its Spartan enemies, leading to the fall of Athenian democracy.

To the ancient Greeks, rich people were a necessary evil, but terrible leaders. Oligarchs think only of money and are utterly ignorant of philosophy. They fall for political solutions that are clear, simple, and wrong.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

— H.L. Mencken

Worse, the super-rich have no real loyalty to their nation or its people. They have far more in common with the rich people of enemy nations. The Four Hundred Athenian oligarchs admired Spartan oligarchy so much they overthrew their own democracy on its behalf.

That is a lesson from history we would do well to learn today.

Ancient history teaches us one lesson about oligarchy, but modern history teaches another.

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, a new class of oligarchs emerged in Eastern Europe. For decades, Soviet citizens had been fed stories of a socialist state leading to a communist utopia.

Socialism and communism began as visions of a better world imagined in response to the brutal realities of the Industrial Revolution. Across Europe, stories like Étienne Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, and Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita imagined grand socialist utopias.

They emerged from the mythos of humankind—and then faded like dreams when the Soviet project collapsed. Capitalism destroyed communism and was swiftly installed in its neoliberal form: mass privatization of state assets, deregulation, and corporate control. Russian oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky “purchased” former state assets on the cheap, operating vast swathes of the economy as private monopolies.

The Golden Age of American science fiction gave us grand dreams: abundant nuclear energy, rocket ships, flying cars, android housemaids, teleportation, and off-world colonies. The reason so many Boomers wonder “Where is my jetpack?” is because they were explicitly promised one.

Instead, Millennials and Gen Z woke up to a reality where none of these sci-fi promises showed up.

The stable manufacturing and office jobs that allowed previous generations to buy homes were wiped out. Housing hyper-inflated until only those with inherited wealth could get on the ladder. Real wealth concentrated until a dozen men owned more than half of America combined.

Neoliberal capitalism screwed Americans just as hard as it screwed post-Soviet Russians. The sci-fi dreams turned out to be technobullsh*t spun by billionaire technogarchs.

Bill Gates was just 20 when he founded Microsoft, establishing the myth of the enfant terrible tech founder.

In the ’90s, Microsoft projected an image of “slacker chic”—grunge music, Seattle coffee, Wired magazine, and Douglas Coupland novels. Microsoft actually seemed cool. Windows 95 launched with public hysteria.

In reality, Microsoft’s true business was bureaucracy. In a single decade, Microsoft products automated or augmented corporate and government paper-pushing worldwide. Every time you hit a Blue Screen of Death buying a train ticket, that’s the power of Microsoft. Automating middle-class jobs out of existence made Gates the first tech “richest man in the world.”

On his blog in 2022, Gates recalled reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as a teen. It’s not hard to see how the story of a Martian who comes to Earth to save humanity—but never actually understands human beings—influenced him.

Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad painted the Macintosh as a symbol of liberation. MacBooks, iPods, and iPhones became badges of the “creator class”—individuals liberated from office cubicles to work in coffee shops.

Phase 2 Steve Jobs defined the calculating technogarch. Jobs pioneered the exploitation of low-paid Chinese labor at massive, high-surveillance Foxconn facilities, where the “communist” government ensured workers had zero rights to unionize.

The shiny laptops of the Western creator class came on the backs of the global working class. It turns out Jobs didn’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning—he read it as an operations manual.

Apple didn’t free us from Big Brother. It put Big Brother in everyone’s pocket.

Zuckerberg started with a skeezy “Hot or Not” website at Harvard. But his real mastery wasn’t just computer science—it was psychological manipulation.

Meta’s core business is simple: grabbing and holding human attention. Facebook pioneered algorithmic media to hack human psychology, connecting your smartphone to real-time data feeds that stream outrage and alerts to keep you hooked.

In the process, Meta disrupted local and investigative journalism, replacing verified facts with fake news and multi-level marketing scams. Zuckerberg has recommended reading Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games—seemingly so he can use algorithmic media to play the public like pieces on a board.

Founded in 1996, Amazon survived the dot-com crash because Bezos understood retail architecture better than anyone else. He saw that the physical ecosystem of storefronts, malls, and supply chains could be dismantled by the internet.

Amazon became the most aggressive monopoly in history. Businesses either pay Bezos rent to sell on his platform, or Amazon copies their product and runs them out of business.

Inside Amazon fulfillment centers, employees wear biometric trackers that log every second of movement, and delivery drivers are forced to pee in bottles to meet quotas. Bezos’s dream of moving humanity off-planet into artificial O’Neill cylinders isn’t about exploration—it’s just a way to staff orbital fulfillment centers.

As a venture capitalist at a16z, Andreessen helped popularize the Silicon Valley mantra: “Move fast and break things.”

The “things” being broken are industries with hard-won labor protections and union contracts. The “fast movement” is replacing stable employment with precarious, app-based gig work (Lyft, Instacart, Airbnb). Workers are separated from their rights, while the profits flow directly to super-rich VC investors.

Andreessen is an open fan of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon—a cyberpunk novel where immortal elites use biotech to live forever. Expect an a16z startup offering that exact service soon.

Peter Thiel—PayPal co-founder and creator of Palantir—built a empire supplying algorithmic surveillance technology to global security services.

If secret police or military intelligence are monitoring your data right now, there is a very good chance Palantir is running the software. Thiel has reportedly read The Lord of the Rings more than ten times.

Imagine reading Tolkien a dozen times and walking away thinking:

“I want to be Sauron.”

At the top of the technogarchy sits Elon Musk. At every stage of his rise, his businesses have leaned heavily on sci-fi mythmaking:

In reality, SpaceX is a massive defense contractor competing with Raytheon. For all their talk about free markets and bootstrapping, technogarchs feed greedily off taxpayer subsidies.

Musk often praises the socialist sci-fi of Iain M. Banks—an author who would have despised Musk with every fiber of his soul. Fans and useful idiots believe these men represent scientific progress. In reality, their vision of the future is a fantasy designed to serve only themselves.

The lesser technogarchs have a practical plan:

The result is Techno-Feudalism: a world where you own nothing, have no privacy, and answer directly to the absolute rule of corporate technogarchs.

Where others have a plan, Elon Musk has a crusade. He has studied the sci-fi movies—and decided to become the villain in all of them.

Musk doesn’t just want to control your job; he wants to control your consciousness. He envisions a transhumanist revolution where human minds are wired directly into the machine as processing units for an artificial super-intelligence.

He is a devout servant of the coming techno-capitalist Singularity—a event he believes will elevate him to godhood.

(Spoiler alert: It won’t.)

In the next essay, we’ll explore the fall of Elon Musk, the collapse of the accelerationist movement, and the real future we can build instead.

“The nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this. That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy to get people actually to love their servitude.”

~ Aldous Huxley

​Imagine, if you will, two brothers. 

Born at the very dawn of the 20th century, into a dynasty of scientific titans, the intellectual elite of a civilization awakening to the raw power of science and technology.

They shared the same elite education, the same inherited social status, the same genetic code. But when the two brothers looked to the future of the human race, they saw two entirely divergent timelines.

Created by the very same technology.

​The elder brother looked at the tragedy of the human condition – the bodies that age and decay, the minds that fade into dementia, the agonizing, inescapable ticking clock of mortality – and decided it was nothing more than a biological flaw.

Nature made man to die. But man could remake man to live.

Humanity’s ultimate destiny, our moral imperative, was to seize control of our own biology. The elder brother dreamed of a world where we could engineer away disease, upgrade our fragile flesh, and consciously direct our own evolution. He pursued the prize that has ensnared men since time began: the end of human suffering.

​The younger brother looked at that same dream… and saw a meatgrinder for the human soul.

​He understood the trap. He saw that all human fear was the fear of our own suffering. Instead of facing our fear, humanity would obey any authority that promised to eradicate suffering. The authoritarian cage would not be built with iron bars or enforced by a jackboot stamping on a human face. It would be built of test-tubes, genetic engineering, and the lure of eternal youth. And humanity would be so desperate for a place in this prison that we would abandon our art, our rebellion, our grief, and our profound capacity for love. We would eradicate the messy, chaotic beauty of being human, for a little less pain.

The elder brother dedicated his life to building the global scientific utopia he envisioned. Julian Huxley shaped the sciences of evolutionary biology and genetic engineering. In his manifestos he named his scientific and political mission to remake humanity: Transhumanism.

The younger brother wrote books. Novels. Aldous Huxley was a writer and, later, mystic, who told stories that warned against the future world transhumanism would create.

That Brave New World.

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Anyone who has watched a scifi movie or played video games in the 21st century will know transhumanism.

Without necessarily knowing it’s name.

The genetically engineered human has become the warrior of the future. Halo’s Masterchief or the Astartes of Warhammer 40k mean that every twelve year old has dreamed of having an extra heart or a armoured carapace…even if it is at the cost of a missing…well…you know what.

Millions of video game players strolling the open world of Cyberpunk 2077 have had the “virtual” experience of having an arm lopped off and replaced with a chrome limb, or having their eyeballs swapped for a pair of Nikons. How many of these passive consumers understand they are trapped in the fetishized transhuman nightmare William Gibson was warning them about is anyone’s guess.

And while no human has yet, that we know of, been uploaded to the cloud, the idea that human consciousness is a software layer running on the wetware of the brain is a stunningly common belief.

According to a 2020 PhilPapers survey conducted by David Bourget and David Chalmers, over 27% of academic philosophers asked the question “Mind uploading (brain replaced by digital emulation): death or survival?” answered: Survival.

And when asked if future AI systems could possess actual consciousness, nearly 40% said yes. Only a quarter of them strictly rejected the idea.

​Many of us already believe the Altered Carbon nightmare where humans hop between biological sleeves is a real potential future.

​Because the intellectual vanguard of our civilization, the people whose entire job it is to understand the nature of reality, increasingly don’t question the underlying premise. We already believe the mind is an algorithm, just waiting for a hardware upgrade.

​And we believe it because we fear death.

Psychological studies have demonstrated the link. If we view death as a meaningless, terminal void rather than some kind of spiritual transition, we are vastly more likely to see mind uploading as a moral good. We want to digitise our brains because we are afraid of the dark.

And this might be the most important thing to understand about TESCREAL beliefs.

Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism are a set of interlinked ideas that have been widely observed to be held by the same people. Because they answer the same fears of suffering and death.

Transhumanism and TESCREAL have a long history of scientific and academic thinking. George M Martin’s 1971 paper: Brief Proposal on Immortality: an interim solution, that proposed freezing brains until future supercomputers could decode their consciousness. JBS Haldane’s seminal 1923 Daedalus: Science and the Future, that introduced the concept of Ectogenesis, the growth of human beings in test-tubes.

A century ago nobody had ever thought of engineering super soldiers or uploading minds. Today, billions of people know transhuman ideas, and hundreds of millions, concentrated in the Western world, believe in transhumanism as firmly as anyone believes any religion.

What took Christianity and Islam centuries, Transhumanism achieved in a few decades. The idea that science and technology can transfer our consciousness to a new body, or upload to immortal life, has with other transhuman ideas spread worldwide. Because it offers the same dream as every religion before it. An end of suffering.

But with an upgrade. With religion you had to die first. Transhumanism offers the uninterrupted continuation of this life into eternity.

Today’s believers in transhumanism don’t believe because we read Haldane or Huxley. Or even because we watched Terminator 2 and The Matrix.

We believe transhumanism because it seems inevitable.

Transhumanism is the “Inevitable Ideology” of the 21st century. We don’t need to be convinced by academic studies or have it sold to us by priests. The scifi dream comes perfectly packaged for any and all of us who hold two fundamental axioms of the secular, capitalist worldview to be sacred.

If you truly hold those two assumptions – as almost the entire elites of Silicon Valley, our technocratic governments and capitalist class does – if the universe is just blind, dumb matter, and your body is a decaying meat-sack hurtling toward permanent oblivion, then upgrading the meat-sack is the only rational reaction to the horror of existence.

Now, some very disciplined souls will still dedicate their self to a higher cause. Socialism. Environmentalism. Most of us will simply give into pleasure seeking hedonism. A few will obsessively critique science fiction in youtube videos as a coping mechanism.

But the ambitious, the powerful, the strong… the bast*rds… will inevitably gravitate to the preservation at all costs of the meat.

That inevitability has made transhumanism the unnamed, unseen but utterly dominant ideology of the 21st century. The technocrats that govern us, the hyper-capitalist corporate elites who buy and sell us, are all whether they know it or not

transhuman bast*rds.

​Let’s face it – literally. Your biological face is a depreciating asset. Every time you experience a human emotion – grief, joy, or the crushing existential dread of living through the 21st century – it leaves a micro-crease in your skin. And in today’s hyper-capitalist bio-market, aging isn’t just a tragedy – it’s bad branding.

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​Masque: Because dying on the inside shouldn’t show on the outside.

Peter Thiel is man who, however much money he makes, can never not look like a villain from a late 1980s cop-thriller.

Or a very boring vampire.

I mean…if you have to tell people you’re not a vampire? 

The rumours about the billionaire venture capitalist began after he stated an interest in parabiosis, the technique of transfusing young blood into old billionaires.

So let’s take Thiel at his word. And agree that Peter Thiel isn’t a vampire…yet.

Because Peter Thiel absolutely 100% wants to live forever. And he’s more than willing to curse his soul in the eyes of God to do it.

A Christian who disobeys God…Peter Thiel is a veritable walking, talking sack of contradictions. And if you unpack the sack, if you just gently unpick the seams of Peter Thiel, the whole transhumanist project just falls apart in your hands. 

Like a cheap suit. Or a tech IPO.

Peter Thiel claims to be an orthodox Christian. He argues that Christianity is the foundational moral framework of Western civilization. He is fascinated with Christian eschatology. The end of times. Armageddon.

Now…I’m no theologian, I’m really not, but my understanding of the Christian faith, and stop me if I’m getting too literal here, is that you have to *die*… to go to Heaven. That’s the deal. That’s the central premise of the book.

But Peter doesn’t want to do that. He thinks death is an “ideology.” He wants to artificially engineer immortality in the flesh. He wants to build a Kingdom of Heaven using biotech and money, right here in our material reality.

Which is, by any orthodox theological standard, a profound heresy. In fact, if you read the literature, there is only one figure explicitly warned about in Christian eschatology who tries to build a fake, eternal heaven on Earth.

The Antichrist.

A topic Peter is obsessed with.

Just last year, he was running around giving secret lectures about the Antichrist. He says the “global world government” is the Antichrist system, and *he*, Peter Thiel, the man who wants to harvest the blood of the young, strongly implied that he is the mysterious, holy force holding back the apocalypse.

I mean…who else has the audacity to insinuate he might be Christ…who else but the Antichrist?

Peter Thiel is a fierce libertarian. He famously stated that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.” He invested in Seasteading, and is a major backer of Network States, so he can escape the tyranny of the actual state. He hates the state.

Which is why he founded and runs Palantir. A data analytics behemoth literally named after the evil, all-seeing surveillance stones from Lord of the Rings. Just one of Thiel’s Tolkien themed companies.

Palantir is the absolute gold standard for state surveillance. It tracks citizens, it predicts behavior, it consolidates data for military and intelligence agencies of the state worldwide. Who else would denounce the state as the Antichrist…whilst literally building the exact central nervous system a global World State would use to subjugate us all… who else but the Antichrist?

Or just any standard issue bast*rd.

Thiel desperately wants to be viewed as a dark, philosophical, world-historical force. A Nietzschean superman. A wannabe Antichrist orchestrating the end of days from a bespoke floating tax haven.

But Thiel is just a man like millions of other men who pursue money and power above all, and got luckier than most in getting it. And now aging out of his fifties all the money and power won’t save him from rotting in the ground with the rest of us.

But maybe. Maaaaaybe. The money can buy something that will.

The contradictions of Peter Thiel are the ultimate argument for the inevitability of transhumanism. Peter can claim to be orthodox Christian. He can wear a cross and grow a beard. But like most people today, especially most powerful people, whatever they claim to “believe”. Christianity. Islam. Scientology. Marxism. You can *claim* to be a fucking Jedi. But what you, and I, almost all of us, and Peter

actually “believe”

is the inevitable ideology of the 21st century.

To borrow a phrase… he’s not the Antichrist.

He’s a very naughty boy.

Well, no, he’s not a very naughty boy.

He’s a transhuman bast*rd.

Like many terrible men, Julian Huxley believed his ideas were for the good. And he had every reason to believe this.

How did the man who coined the term “Transhumanism” get it so wrong? Why couldn’t he see that his utopian vision of directed evolution would lead directly to hyper-capitalist vampires looking to build techno-feudalism?

​To understand Julian, you have to understand his intellectual priors. Born in 1887, Julian’s intellect was shaped by one of the most titanic events in the history of science.

Just thirty years before in 1858, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of the Species and the theory of evolution burst into the public consciousness. Humans were not creations of some unknowable God. We were evolved animals. With some odd extras like opposable thumbs and language.

And Julian Huxley wasn’t just a casual observer of evolutionary theory, he was  the grandson of T.H. Huxley, famously known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his fierce defense of evolutionary theory. Julian was raised in the absolute pinnacle of the English, atheist, humanist, scientific tradition.

This put Julian at the cutting edge, the first generation born into understanding the evolutionary worldview, and its existential consequences.

Now, I want to be very clear here, I’m not trying to smuggle Creationism to you. I fully believe the theory of evolution is the truth. And it’s because it’s true, that it strips us humans of our comforting fantasies.

We’re not children of God. There is no immortal soul. We’re just talking monkeys, animate matter, biological machines, with the illusion of self-awareness that will be extinguished when the meat stops walking and talking.

So what’s essential to understanding Julian Huxley is that he dedicated his life to what he believed to be the only, rational, possible answer to this existential truth.

To transhumanism.

Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Julian became a famed evolutionary biologist, the Richard Dawkins of his day, pioneering research into the relationship between genetics and evolution. The research that convinced him of the necessity of eugenics.

Because, yes, Julian Huxley was perhaps the 20th century’s greatest proponent of selective breeding to “improve” the human race. And unlike other eugenicists, including HG Wells, Julian did not let go of the idea after the Nazis had done with it.

Instead, Julian Huxley, a committed progressive, wanting to “rescue” eugenics from fascism, proposed a “socialist” eugenics. A welfare state must equalise all men, only then could we know who had the “bad” genes.

I’m going to be hearing from Feral Historian about this.

Julian Huxley’s ideas would reach their full bloom when he became the founder of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 1946.

Today, UNESCO is known for its world heritage site work. But at its founding the UN agency had much, much, much bigger ambitions, as expressed by Julian when he wrote its founding manifesto.

UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy is one of the 20th century’s most astounding documents. Imagine Thanos, Adrian Veidt and EVERY Bond villain collaborated on a mission statement and you’ll get something of the vibe.

It was in this document that Julian first defined Evolutionary Humanism, as the belief that humanity’s current biological state was merely a transitional phase, and that our moral imperative was to use science and social engineering to actively direct and accelerate our own evolution.

The belief that he would, in 1957s New Bottles for Old Wine, rename as transhumanism.

It’s hard not to sympathise with the transhuman conspiracy theorists. Because there really *is* a plan to found a World State governed by a technocratic elite to genetically engineer a better humanity. It’s right there in serif font, and Julian Huxley wrote it.

But transhumanism isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an inevitability. You don’t need the Illuminati to coordinate a transhuman conspiracy. Because transhumanism is the inevitable end point for everyone who believes what Julian Huxley believed.

That the universe is a vast machine, and that humanity are just little survival machines, made by the Blind Watchmaker of evolution.

For Julian Huxley that belief left only one moral course of action. Humanity must take control of our evolution, and grasp the steering wheel of the machine.

And if fulfilling that absolute moral vision meant eliminating the ‘weaker” genes, then, so be it.

The essence of the bast*rd isn’t just that they are a bast*rd. It’s that they believe ideas which justify being a bast*rd. And demand you believe them too.

Which is why bast*rds love transhumanism.

​Aldous Huxley was born seven years after Julian in 1894, into the same high-culture of science and reason.

But, for reasons we can only speculate on, Aldous would arrive at a completely different answer from his elder brother to the same existential horror.

The Huxleys were part of what historian Noel Annan would label the British “Intellectual Aristocracy”, a tight-knit set of intermarried families including the Darwins, the Wedgwoods and the Trevelyans who reshaped the culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.

So Aldous Huxley easily won entry to Oxford and then, even after being cut off from his allowance for debts owed to his father, was able to begin a career as a journalist and novelist.

And quickly became known for writing harsh, critical satires of the exact bohemian, intellectual aristocracy he came from, in novels like Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point.

So then the essential thing to understand about young Aldous is that he was formed in opposition to the values and ideas of his culture and class.

Especially the ideas of his elder brother Julian.

Brave New World then is a work of science fiction about a dystopian future. But that future is best understood as a satire of the 1930s present it was written in. And the transhumanist ideas taking root there.

Put simply, younger brother Aldous is taking the piss / ripping the shit out of everything elder brother Julian believes.

The scientists we see in the book’s early pages touring the London Hatchery where new humans are produced, the men who are building this brave new world, are satires of grandfather TH Huxley, of Julian Huxley and of JBS Haldane, who introduced the scientific concept of artificial human birth.

In this Brave New World, humanity has achieved the exact end of suffering that transhumanism promises. But the cost is the total commodification of life. Humans are no longer born, they are decanted in hatcheries, genetically engineered into rigid caste systems. Alphas to rule, Epsilons to do the grunt work. They are kept young and beautiful right up until their engineered expiration date, and they are pacified by a steady diet of meaningless entertainment and the state-mandated drug, Soma.

It’s not exactly like metropolitan life in 2026 but it’s close enough. In fact the greatest testament to Aldous Huxley’s satire is that any discussion of Brave New World will have many people stating how they think it sounds pretty good, actually, “at least healthcare is free” they say.

Because transhumanism is the inevitable ideology of our materialist, consumerist culture. We call Brave New World a dystopia, when if we’re to be perfectly honest, it’s more like a middle management vision statement for our liberal centrist, technocratic society. Even today’s Leftists are less about revolution to tear down this brave new world, than loudly demanding to be given a place in it.

Here in 2026 whether we are capitalist or communist, liberal or conservative, whatever we claim to believe, what we really believe in is the inevitable ideology of our time.

Brave New World began the critique of that inevitable ideology in science fiction. Fifty years later William Gibson wrote the ultimate transhuman nightmare, Neuromancer, and cyberpunk was born.

(Yes, if you want to feel old, we’re almost as far now from Neuromancer as Neuromancer was from Brave New World)

There’s a case to be made for Brave New World as the primary ancestor of cyberpunk. Aldous didn’t see cyberspace coming, the computer hadn’t even been invented yet. But he grasped the fundamental premise of cyberpunk.

That the technologies of transhumanism, from human cloning to the consensual hallucination of cyberspace, would entrench forever the same old human injustices.

In the world of Neuromancer the social elite have literally climbed up the gravity well to live in low Earth orbit and used cloning techniques to become semi-immortal.

Richard K Morgan’s Altered Carbon takes this cyberpunk conceit to its logical Marxist conclusion as the capitalist elite live forever in “sleeves” newly purchased from the poor.

And nothing hammers home the brutal injustice of our transhuman future than the Astartes of Warhammer 40k.

Science fiction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, has very little good to say about the possibilities of transhumanism. It is in almost all cases the Torment Nexus that scifi tells us not to build.

The one major exception is The Culture of Iain M Banks, which presents a far future where a human-like civilization casually messes around with swapping bodies or becoming a dirigible behemothaur for a bit of a lark.

Elon Musk loves the Culture because he doesn’t understand it.

And I seriously question whether he has even read it.

Because the Culture conquered social injustice BEFORE transcending humanity.

Which might be the best answer to our billionaire boys and their transhumanist toddler tantrums. Fine, ok. You can have immortality. But only after you end poverty and achieve peace on Earth.

For all of their profound philosophical and ideological disagreements, the two brothers genuinely, deeply loved each other.

​When Aldous died, Julian was devastated. The elder brother, the great rationalist, the transhumanist who viewed death as a biological glitch to be engineered away, was left behind to experience the human grief of losing his younger brother.

​Julian immediately took it upon himself to curate and edit a tribute book, published in 1965 as Aldous Huxley, 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume.

​In his writings about his brother’s passing, Julian’s reaction perfectly encapsulates their ideological divide. Julian praised Aldous as an absolute genius, calling him the greatest mind he had ever known. But even in mourning, Julian couldn’t help but express his frustration with his brother’s worldview.

​Julian lamented that in his final decades, Aldous had turned his back on the “rigor of science”. But what Aldous had turned towards is, perhaps, the best, or only, answer to the inevitable ideology of transhumanism.

Aldous Huxley’s final novel, Island, was published the year before his death. Brave New World was an angry, caustic satire of transhumanism. Island is Aldous Huxley thirty years on, reshaped by life, a master novelist, writing his final answer to his brother’s ideology.

The island of Pala where the novel is located is likely based on the island of Bali where I live and make these videos.

Instead of the transhumanist World State, Pala is a localized, decentralized utopia. Instead of the technocratic machine world of transhumanism, the people of Pala use technology very selectively. Industrialisation is forbidden. Instead of humans popped out of test-tubes and into a genetic caste system, Palanese children are raised by Mutual Adoption Clubs so they aren’t exposed only to the neuroses of their parents. And instead of numbing their suffering with mindless entertainments, the Palanese learn to pay attention to suffering and face their pain.

I suspect the people who think Brave New World sounds ok would NOT want to live on the Island.

The utopia of Pala is possible because the Palanese do not believe what we in the West believe.

They do not believe that the universe is a vast machine. They do not believe the axioms that the material is all there is, or that death is the ultimate end. They do not believe we are meatsacks hurtling towards the void.

The Palanese believe, instead of the void, that reality is infinite. A human life is bounded by our capacity to comprehend that infinity. And death is simply a return to the infinite. You don’t stop being, you just … be… more.

In the decades between Brave New World and Island, Aldous Huxley wrote the work for which he became perhaps most famous, The Doors of Perception, which described his experiences using LSD. And the accompanying essay Heaven and Hell, an attempt to understand the experience as an encounter with the infinite.

In Island the Soma of Brave New World is replaced with an imagined drug, Moksha. The Palanese use Moksha to dissolve the ego and live communally. The story of Island turns on an experience of Moksha use which opens the mind of the book’s central character to a reality beyond the materialist Western world he came from.

Aldous Huxley’s answer then to transhumanism is what would come to be called the “psychedelic experience”. And its power to open the Western mind to the infinite reality of… reality.

This will all, I suspect, be a tough pill to swallow for many of you. The psychedelic age seems long ago. Its hippie counter culture advocates fucked a lot of things up.  But it’s the answer Aldous Huxley gave us. To really understand that answer we have to follow Aldous into death.

In 1963 Aldous Huxley was dying a slow painful death from throat cancer. His final request to his wife was to inject him with a dose of LSD. “100 micrograms, intramuscular.” Which she did, then gave him a second 100 microgram dose two hours later, soon after which Aldous Huxley died.

Not from the LSD. 100 micrograms is a single standard dose, 200 micrograms is in no way harmful. This was not a Heroic Dose to obliterate or escape death. Quite the opposite, the psychedelic was used by Huxley to sharpen his attention to his own death.

I won’t spoil the book but Island ends with the utopia of Pala facing a final conflict with capitalism. Bulldozers arrive on Pala, and as they begin to level the jungle, the Mynah birds which have featured through the book scream Attention! Attention! Attention!

Two brothers. One who worshipped the inevitable ideology of transhumanism. The other the perennial philosophy of attention.

And this I believe is Aldous Huxley’s lesson for us. Transhumanism is an ideology of escape. Escape from pain. Hiding from suffering. Terror of death. Rejection of being human.

We must face our suffering. Accept our pain. Pay attention even to our death. We must reject the machine, and embrace our humanity.

It’s a standing joke that tech billionaires read science fiction warnings and use them as handbooks. They build the Torment Nexus that Do Not Build The Torment Nexus tells them not to build.
Elon Musk’s confusion about the Culture novels of Iain M Banks is a little more complicated. The Culture really IS the utopian of Fully Auomated Luxury that Elon wants us to believe he is building.
But it’s also something else. A thing that Elon cannot see. Not just because of his money.
But because of his class.