Science Fiction

The world’s worst people have a plan

“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 ​The Parable of Two Brothers ​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. Watch the full video essay as a member Members get access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Transhumanism : the inevitable ideology of the 21st century 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. The Material Universe is All There Is: There is no soul, no divine plan, no afterlife, and no karmic balance. Human consciousness is just a happy accident of meat and electricity. ​Suffering and Death are the Ultimate Evils: Because there is no spiritual meaning to suffering, and no eternal reward after death, the cessation of your biological heartbeat is the absolute, terrifying end of your “self”. 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. ​Why let the slow march of mortality ruin your engagement metrics? ​Enter today’s sponsor – Masque. ​Masque is a surgical-grade, hyper-realistic, medical plastic shell modeled perfectly after your face at exactly 27 years old. We simply surgically remove that decaying, expressive meat you currently call a visage, and staple on absolute, permanent perfection. ​With Masque, you get 100% aesthetic retention with absolutely zero emotional micro-expressions. It is totally impassive. Unfeeling. Utterly dead behind the eyes.  ​No empathy. No wrinkles. No problem. ​And for a limited time, my viewers can upgrade to the ‘Fixed Grin’ optional extra. Watch the world burn, literally, without ever losing your smile. ​Go to the link in the description and use promo code BASTARD20 at checkout to get 20% off your own permanent, unfeeling facade. ​Masque: Because dying on the inside shouldn’t show on the outside. ​The Contradictions of Peter Thiel 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. ​”The modern conservative is not even especially conservatuve. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” JK Galbraith ​The OG Transhumanist 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. ​The Aldous Answer ​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. The Island of Perception 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. Listen to the podcast audio

Why Elon Musk can never understand Iain M. Banks

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.

What does the NEUROMANCER trailer tell us?

After 42 years we have 1 minute and 10 seconds of Neuromancer on a screen. What does it tell us? Now on the Science Fiction channel Listen to the podcast audio here

The most overrated director VS the greatest myth

Picture a boy. He’s seven years old, small for his age, standing in the sun-baked dust of an ancient palace courtyard. ​He is looking at a horse. But not just any horse. This is the King Horse. A towering, magnificent stallion, wild-eyed, muscle-bound, and vibrating with primal power. Earlier, the boy escaped into the enclosure of the King Horse. This tiny boy, alone, faced the massive animal and even fed him salt. Beast and boy formed a spiritual kinship. Now, everyone who has seen a Disney movie knows what happens next. They are going to form an unbreakable, egalitarian bond, run across the sunlit beaches of the Aegean, and embark on a sweeping, heartwarming adventure to discover the true meaning of friendship – – the boy’s grandfather steps forward, raises a bronze blade, grips the stallion by the mane, and calmly slits the animal’s throat. ​The horse collapses in a geyser of hot blood. And the boy? He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t look away. He stands perfectly still, breathing in the copper stench of the arterial spray, and he learns from it. Because in this world, to be a man is to kill. And to be a king is to kill other kings. Because this ain’t Disney. ​This is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die. ​And you can’t handle the Greeks. Well, here we are. After months, years even, of hype, on July 16th 2026, Christopher Nolan released his $250 million adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon. It is the biggest cinematic event of the summer. And I am just about to watch it. But. Before I say anything I am going to hand you over to Damo (Past) who has NOT seen it, but is going to make 3 predictions about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey… # …that this will be the *tamest” ever telling of Homer’s epic. The big story in the days before The Odyssey released was the search for tickets to see Nolan’s new IMAX spectacle in full resolution, possible in only 41 cinemas worldwide. Because Nolan is the master of the technical spectacle. Nobody knows how to shoot 65mm IMAX format like Nolan. He is famed for shooting entirely on celluloid, packing the cinema screen with visual splendour. But as a fully rounded creator, Nolan is the most overrated auteur director of the century. Think of Nolan as the rich man’s Michael Bay. Both specialise in IMAX spectacle, but Nolan comes packaged for a more upwardly mobile demographic. Scifi action blockbusters, with a patina of philosophical depth, but nothing to make it feel too much like homework. Nolan struggles as a storyteller. But he compensates for this by bolstering every story with a narrative gimmick. Time runs backwards. Memories recompiled. Dreams within dreams. When people call Nolan movies clever, they mean clever like Sudoku. Nolan gives us logic puzzles we can feel smart for solving, to cover the lack of anything to make us actually feel. So Nolan’s Odyssey is guaranteed to be visually magnificent. But assuming he doesn’t restructure Homer into seven criss-crossing timelines…which he very well might…what will Nolan’s Odyssey…be? Well, I think we can predict it will be incredibly tame. Nolan’s entire MO, his Modus Operandi, is to take the most out there, crazy, mind-bending mythic stories, and make the tamest possible version. Just look at the filmography. Interstellar. You have cosmic horror, infinite black holes, relativity, and a higher-dimensional future humanity reaching back to manipulate our present through a tesseract. This movie should shatter the human ego. It should be Silent Running on acid. 2001 on amphetamines. Instead…Nolan uses a 5th-dimensional construct to deliver a Church of England sermon: “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” The infinite, terrifying universe is entirely subordinated to a Sad Dad trying to get back to his daughter’s bedroom. Inception. The human subconscious is a realm of Jungian madness, primal terror, and chaotic sexuality. Think of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, where the dream world is a psychotic, hyper-colored parade of living dolls and fractured identities. But instead Nolan turns the human subconscious into a corporate training session. Nolan’s dreamlogic operates on administrative rules and looks like a financial services head office. This is a deep dive into the collective unconscious for people who are too terrified to actually explore the collective unconscious. The Dark Knight. Let’s give Nolan credit that he’s working with the established lore of Batman. But nonetheless this is a meticulously crafted movie trilogy about the broiling class war of modern life…that takes the side of a privileged son of the oligarchy, the ultimate protector of neoliberal capitalism, a billionaire who uses illegal, tech-authoritarian mass surveillance to defend the banking system against a guy in clown makeup. Dunkirk is a requiem for the death of the English empire that never stops bashing the audience in the eardrums with Elgar. Oppenheimer is a movie about atomic weapons that doesn’t show you what the weapons were used for. Nolan tames the political by presenting it as the purely personal. He takes the most terrifying, infinite concepts and shrinks them down until they fit neatly into a shopping mall multiplex and suburban living room widescreen tv. Because Nolan absolutely knows his job. He’s the peak Hollywood director of IMAX spectaculars because his movies are entirely inoffensive to the widest possible audience. So what happens when the tamest director directs the wildest myth? Let’s make some predictions. ​Prediction One: The Sad Dad Metric The historical Odysseus is a terrifying, PTSD-scarred, slave owning Bronze Age pirate warlord. He is defined by his cunning—Metis—and his casual brutality. As the Odyssey opens he is responsible for the brutal murder of tens of thousands of humans. Nolan will manage to ignore this. The reason you cast Matt Damon is so he can be the everyman, ordinary guy. A hyper-competent, slightly stressed project manager whose sole drive is preserving his nuclear family. He will be a “Sad Dad” trying to get back to the suburbs. Prediction Two: The Sanitized Gods To the Bronze Age Greeks, the gods were not metaphors. They were feral, sociopathic warlords who lived in the sky and demanded blood. Poseidon isn’t just “the ocean”—he is chaotic, irrational, world-ending rage. But Christopher Nolan cannot handle the irrational. He will sanitize the divine into a solvable physics equation. Poseidon won’t be a terrifying sea god, he will be a localized weather anomaly. No magic. No divine terror. Just an extreme weather event that Matt Damon can defeat with his middle management logistical skills. Prediction Three: The Erasure of the Bedroom The classical Greek world was fundamentally driven by unapologetic polyamory and aristocratic, same-sex shagging. The Greeks literally had a word for a man whose entire existence was defined by domestication among women and children: a slave. But the bourgeois mind cannot process a hero who exists outside the nuclear family. Nolan’s Odyssey will completely erase the feral sexuality of the ancient world. Odysseus’s seven-year stint on Calypso’s island won’t be a captive sexcapade; it will be framed like an awkward corporate retreat he couldn’t leave due to bad weather. The entire film will be a $150 million homage to the egalitarian, heterosexual household. ​Future Damo is going to step in and grade these predictions the second he walks out of the cinema. But before we get to the scoreboard, we need to ask the structural question. ​Why is Christopher Nolan so desperate to domesticate the sublime? Why must he constantly shrink the terrifying universe into a manageable, suburban puzzle box? ​To understand that, we need to understand what made him the Bourgeois Auteur. ​For a brief, glorious window from the late 1950s through the 1980s, British culture was effectively hijacked by the working class. This was the result of the post-WWII welfare state, the expansion of state schools, and robust municipal arts funding. Suddenly, kids from council estates in Liverpool or the industrial Midlands had the time and institutional backing to experiment. ​You got The Beatles. You got the “Angry Young Men” of cinema—actors like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, later, Gary Oldman. You got directors who understood the dirt under the fingernails of society. Their art was loud, it was deeply suspicious of authority, and it completely shattered the stiff-upper-lip, middle class monopoly over British culture. But when Johnny Rotten wailed God Save The Queen, The Fascist Regime in 1977, nobody knew the working class artists were about to be butchered. Thatcherism destroyed the welfare state, crippled state education and slashed arts funding. Over the following decades of austerity, London went from a city bubbling with rebel artist energy to a billionaire’s playground. The cost of living skyrocketed. Today, surviving the requisite decade of unpaid internships and low-paying fringe theater to become a director requires a private safety net. ​The “Bank of Mum and Dad” became the primary arts grant in the UK. And the result is that the culture was recaptured. Taken away from the angry, rebellious working class. And given back to the wealthy, comfortable bourgeoisie. ​The acting world is now dominated by Eton and Harrow alumni: Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston. And the directing world is dominated by privileged sons like Sam Mendes and Christopher Nolan. By the early 2000s, British culture was incapable of giving the world another Ken Loach. Instead we got Chris Nolan. ​Christopher Nolan was educated at Haileybury, a highly elite independent boarding school in Hertfordshire. His background is the absolute epitome of the comfortable, secure English upper-middle class. And this socioeconomic reality perfectly explains his cinematic aesthetic, which we can call The Aesthetic of Control. ​When art is made by people who have never faced genuine existential poverty or class precarity, the art loses its sense of danger. It becomes highly technical, highly polished, profoundly polite and utterley controlled. If working class cinema is a 16mm home camera pointed at gritty reality, bourgeois cinema is obsessing over the precise exposure levels of 65mm celluloid depicting a series of fantastical scenes that never even existed. Instead of asking, what does this film change, we ask, where can I buy a ticket for the full IMAX experience. The art of the 20th century that terrified and changed the culture is all working class. Hiphop. Graffitti. The dogtown skateboarders. Grindhouse cinema. Punk. Metal. Science fiction, my art, until it was turned into polite lit-fic for the Booker Prize. Co-opted by the bourgeois middle class. Chris Nolan is the premiere director of science fiction IMAX blockbusters. But as a science fiction storyteller he is shockingly dull. Because his movies co-opt sci-fi working class energy, stories written to blow the minds of people trapped in systems we could not control, and turn them into tame domestic dramas for the bourgeois imagination. And ​a prep-school educated, bourgeois auteur backed by a billion-dollar Hollywood studio is structurally incapable of handling the terrifying, blood-soaked madness of the Bronze Age Greeks. HOMER: You want answers? DAMO: I think I’m entitled! HOMER: You want answers?! DAMO: I want the truth…of the Bronze Age Greeks! HOMER: YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE GREEKS! Boy, we live in a world built on myths, and those myths were written by mad blind prophets about men who fought naked with bronze spears. Who’s gonna translate that madness for the modern mind? You Damien Walter? You Christopher Nolan? ​I have a greater responsibility to mythic history than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your sanitized, relatable heroes, and you curse the Bronze Age hierarchy. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that the brutal soul of the Bronze Age warrior, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, remains the foundation of the modern male psyche. ​We use words like Arete. Moira. Kleos. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defying the gods and conquering the Aegean. You use them to sell popcorn in the suburbs. ​I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain classical paiderastia or the sacrifice of the King Horse to a suburban house husband who rises and sleeps under the psychological structures of the Hero’s Journey I invented, and then questions the brutal, aristocratic mode in which I created it!! ​I would rather you just said “thank you”, watched your four-quadrant corporate slop, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a hoplon shield, march in the phalanx, and accept your fate. Either way, I don’t give a damn what egalitarian representation you think you are entitled to! DAMO: Did you lock 108 suitors in a dining hall and slaughter them? ​HOMER: I sang the song the Muse commanded– ​DAMO: Did you slaughter the suitors?! ​HOMER: YOU’RE GODS BE DAMNED RIGHT I DID! Because we can’t handle the Greeks. We systematically launder ancient texts because their reality terrifies our modern minds. The Bronze Age psyche is like a ravenous wolf. And for the last two centuries, bourgeois culture has desperately tried to put that wolf in a nice, comfortable sweater. If you look at what actually happened in the Homeric epics, or the historical reality of classical Athens and Sparta, you don’t find a society of proto-democrats fighting for human rights. You find a society that believed in rigid hierarchy, terrifying supernatural fate, and the absolute prerogative of the strong over the weak. And being Super Gay. The online right, you know those people who think “Western Civilization” is descended from ancient Greece while missing that most of the civilizations they think this makes them superior to are JUST as descended from ancient Greece those people are ENRAGED because a black actress of Kenyan origin was cast in Nolan’s Odyssey Again missing the point that modern Kenya is in the region of ancient Ethiopia, fully part of the ancient Greek trade networks and frequently referenced in Greek myth including Andromeda the ETHIOPIAN PRINCESS Meanwhile, SCOTLAND and FINLAND had absolutely zero relationship to ancient Greece. None. Which makes the Scots / Finnish Matt Damon, by the logic of the online right, the worst possible casting as a Mediterranean pirate. Decades of white washing depictions of Greece and Rome mean generations of people actually believe the variously brown skinned people of these Mediterranean empires were “white”, millennia before “white” even existed as racial concept. Because we can’t handle the Greeks. Liberal, mainstream culture wants ancient Greece to embody our liberal values which it absolutely 100% did not. But right wing conservative culture wants to believe they are the true heirs of Sparta. The watch 300 and think YES! They would be the muscled warrior kings of old if only the damn feminists stopped emasculating them! When the reality is that if any of these whiny privileged sons posing on X as @BasedMarcusAurelius, or the bug eyed effeminate intellectual who hides behind the pseudonymous identity Bronze Age Pervert, actually had to live in the bronze age, you would all be buggered by hoplite warriors as their twink. Because the bronze age Greeks were Super Gay. SUPER GAY. Even Zack Snyder calls 300 the gayest movie ever made. The rabidly homophobic right wing have in idolising the Greeks picked the most super gay men ever. Ever. Because all the weird right-wing shriekweasels actually know about bronze age Greece comes from a bourgeois culture that has systematically tamed that which we cannot handle. ​But if you want to see what happens when an author actually refuses to put a sweater on the wolf of antiquity, you have to turn off the multiplex, and you have to read Mary Renault. ​Writing from the 1950s through the 1970s, Renault managed a literary miracle: she bypassed the modern moral filter, to write eight novels that trace ancient Greek history from the mythical Theseus, to the imperial Alexander, in all its brutal, unfathomable glory. Renault was born into a comfortable middle class English family, and was educated at Oxford, briefly studying under JRR Tolkien. But then she did two things that helped her to escape the bourgeois mindset. She got a real job. Renault trained as a nurse and worked on the medical frontlines throughout World War 2. And she became a lesbian. Renault escaped the dull life of a borgeois tradwife, instead meeting her life partner Julie Mullard and fleeing Britain’s oppressive anti-gay laws to live abroad But here’s the thing about Renault’s Greeks. They aren’t feminist. Renault didn’t do what a bazillion dull bourgeois novelists have done in recent decades and “retell the myth of X from the perspective of Y zzzzzzzzzz”. Instead Renault novels are studies of a psychology that the modern mind can barely comprehend. ​When Renault tackles classical paiderastia—most notably in The Last of the Wine and The Persian Boy—the Greek institution of sexual relations between an older male (erastes) and a young boy (eromenos), the practice that literally gives us the term term pederasty, Renault does not flinch. And she does not translate it into modern “gay romance.” She explicitly depicts the power imbalances, the rigid social expectations, and the military utility of these bonds. ​For the ancient Greeks, sexuality wasn’t a matter of binary identity. It was a matter of power, domination and submission. The defining institution of aristocratic bronze age Greece, the mechanism by which aristocratic youths were inducted into politics, warfare, and philosophy, was the most despised moral violation of our times. ​Renault recognised what modern adaptations like Nolan’s cannot even begin to show. That for the Greeks, being Super Gay was not a rebellion against the power structure. It was the power structure. By refusing to soften them, she captured the aristocratic, heroic ideal—the Arete—that makes the myths so enduring in the first place. She understood that you cannot have the glory of the Greeks without the brutality. Whatever you think the Greeks mean to you, think again.They weren’t the man you could be if the women would only let you. They absolutely weren’t the origin of modern, liberal, democratic values. The only way in which ancient Greece is the foundation of Western civilization is that it’s the thing every last shred of our modern morality exists to escape from. So is Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey a good movie? Sure, it’s an excellent IMAX blockbuster. But that’s all it is. The idea that this product made for the shopping mall multiplex does anything but entertain and generate character franchising opportunities is an stark reminder of how entirely captured today’s culture is by bourgeois capitalist ideals. Because Chris Nolan’s Odyssey has nothing to say about the Odyssey. Homer’s Odyssey, like all great myths, confronts the modern mind with that most potent of intellectual tools – contradiction. The purpose of this contradiction is not to solve it like a logic puzzle, not to try and make it go away, but to live in the discomfort of the contradiction. The Odyssey is the contradiction between two ways of thinking. Or of being. The Heroic, the Aristocratic, the noble and the brutal. Odysseus is the king among men who laughs in the face of death. And the Domestic, the Bureaucratic, the safe and the bourgeois. Which is us, mortal men hearing the tale, we who cower and hide from death. Christopher Nolan does what he’s paid to do. He tames the Odyssey. As predicted Matt Damon is there to turn the pirate king into a modern, moral man, rooted in family. A Sad Dad dreaming only of return home. As predicted the Gods are rationalised into forces of nature and inner voices. Because we all know Gods are “just a myth”, right? As predicted, Greek feral sexuality is nowhere to be seen. The moral outrage at the heart of Greek culture cannot be shown because it is morally outrageous. Chris Nolan tames the Odyssey into a domestic myth that lets us have our cake and eat it. That resolves the contradiction. We the modern bourgeois man can have our modern morality, our safe and comfortable lives, and still be men like Odysseus. But we can’t. Nolan’s tamed Odyssey robs us of Homer’s Odyssey’s true meaning. That man can hurl ourself into the unknown void. That we can encounter the Gods. We can be heroic. Or we can stay safe at home. Listen to the podcast audio

AI is a mass psychotic delusion

In April of 1856, a teenage girl named Nongqawuse stood by the banks of the Gxarha River in South Africa and received a message from the dead. ​She told her uncle that she had spoken with the spirits of their ancestors. The spirits delivered a prophecy, one that offered a total and miraculous salvation for the Xhosa people, who were then buckling under the encroaching weight of the British Empire. The ancestors promised to rise up, drive the British into the sea, and usher in an era of unimaginable utopian abundance. Flocks of beautiful, immortal cattle would emerge from the earth. The fields would spontaneously yield grain. Sickness and old age would be eradicated. ​But, as with all divine contracts, there was a catch. To trigger this utopia, the spirits demanded an act of supreme faith. The Xhosa had to slaughter all of their existing cattle. They had to burn their crops. They had to destroy their stores of grain and empty their water reserves. They had to liquidate their entire present economy to prove they were worthy of the future. ​And so, they did. ​Historians estimate that the Xhosa slaughtered over 400,000 cattle. They burned their own fields to ash. They waited for the sun to turn red and the ancestors to arrive. But the sun remained yellow. The ancestors did not rise. The utopia did not materialize. Instead, the resulting famine killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the Xhosa civilization. ​It stands today as one of history’s most devastating examples of mass psychotic delusion, a society so thoroughly captured by a spiritual mythos that it happily engineered its own starvation. Watch the full video essay as a member SubscribeSubmitting form Log in ​Or watch on YouTube Welcome to 2026 and the era of the Artificial Intelligence IPO. The American people and the broader West feel they are in decline. The people are poorer, their portfolios and 401ks are at risk. The precious oil is scarcer and more expensive. The newly powerful Chinese threaten American global hegemony. But the billionaires and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley have an answer. They will summon the machine god AGI, and it will provide the productivity boost needed to achieve abundance. Robot workers will clean our offices, and LLMs will fill in the spreadsheets. The capitalist promise of a post-scarcity economy will be made real….for those who invest early. Because there is a cost. To achieve AGI we must burn all of the remaining fossil fuels so that the AGI god will gift us the power of fusion energy. We must pump our water into the gaping maw of the AGI god who will show us how to mine ice asteroids in return. We must invest all of our capital into data centre construction so the super-intelligence can awaken. The future science fiction promised us is there for the taking! Think of this as an intelligence test for humanity. A test we are failing spectacularly. To understand the current financial mania, we must first look at the altar where the sacrifices are currently being made. On June 12, 2026, SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It was the largest initial public offering in the history of human commerce, raising $75 billion and immediately cementing a valuation of $1.77 trillion. By the end of the day, the stock surged, pushing the market cap over $2 trillion and crowning Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. Let me reassure everyone that you were not the only person who had to google whether a trillion was actually a real number. A valuation arrived at on the basis of some recycled tropes from 1980s scifi novels. A small fraction of SpaceX valuation was based on rocket launches and satellite communications. The rest was a speculative fiction of asteroid mining and Musk’s “vision” of making humanity multi-planetary and “extending the light of human consciousness to the stars”. Elon likes to wear a Foundation tshirt, and has clearly read too much Isaac Asimov. Or not enough. Oh and a third rate AI model currently burning billions. Talking to the believers sucked in by the Musk mythos reveals over and again the same circular illogic. Humanity is doomed to extinction if it stays on one planet so…instead of learning to live on our planet…we must pay Elon for the scifi fantasy he is selling us. Like a forty a day smoker buying a snake oil cure for cancer instead of giving up. ​Meanwhile, the architects of Artificial Intelligence are preparing their own ascensions. OpenAI, currently valued north of $800 billion, and Anthropic, the creators of Claude, have both filed their S-1 forms, preparing to unleash their own historic IPOs later this year. Valuations that could not exist if investors had not been pumped full of sci-fi summer blockbusters starring murderous machine gods. Claude and ChatGPT are worth …squillons…because they are summoning that machine god AGI, and it will destroy the jobs of most humans. But those who sacrifice their capital today will be given greater capital tomorrow. The tech priesthood has issued an ultimatum to the people: Sacrifice to the future, or be left behind in the dirt. It’s important to understand that the AGI doomers are the ones truly powering the hype-cycle. When Elizier Yudkowsky warns that If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies he is massively boosting the excitement to build it. The ancient gods and ancestors have never been loving or kind; they are vindictive, volatile, and terrifyingly arbitrary. Because terror is not a marketing failure, it is the ultimate mechanism of authority. To believe the AGI god can save us, we must believe it has the power to destroy us. But what the AI doomers are asking us to fear is…ourselves. Because Artificial Intelligence is not AI. It is CI…Collective Intelligence. But…we’ll come back to that. The doomers and the boosters, the haters and the investors all repeat the same thing about AI. “It’s like something out of sci-fi.” But they all miss what this means. AI isn’t just *like* something from scifi. It only exists as an idea at all because of the mythos of scifi. Being like scifi is the only justification for throwing quadrillions of dollars at companies that are incinerating cash at an unprecedented rate to build windowless data centers and starships to irradiated rocks. ​We are evaluating these companies not on rational metrics of earthly utility, profitability, or physical limitations. We are pricing them based on their proximity to a fictional narrative. ​This is the Xhosa delusion dressed up in the sleek, minimalist aesthetics of Silicon Valley. We are witnessing a mass psychotic break where the firewall between objective reality and speculative fiction has entirely collapsed. A Brief Interlude… And when our agricultural sectors inevitably collapse because all municipal water has been legally re-routed to cool the new server farms, how exactly do you plan to sustain your biological form? ​Which brings us to today’s sponsor: GRUEL. ​GRUEL is a nutritionally complete, shelf-stable synthetic sludge designed specifically for the modern algorithmic serf. As traditional farming becomes a luxury of the pre-AI past, GRUEL provides the baseline macro-nutrients required to keep your brain functioning just long enough to continue training the models. It requires absolutely no water to prepare – which is convenient, given the state of the local reservoirs – and features a flavor profile that tastes absolutely nothing like the ashes of humanity. GRUEL’s official slogan says it all: “It’s not made of humans. Honest.” ​Go to the link in the description below, use the promo code SACRIFICE, and get 10% off your first bulk crate of survival paste. GRUEL : Eat the ashes. How does an entire civilization lose its grip on reality? It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a slow, methodical rewriting of the cultural operating system. ​For millennia, humanity’s mythos was governed by conscious creators. We believed in gods, spirits, and ancestors who sat above the world, pulling the strings. But during the 20th century, as industrialization alienated us from nature and the atom bomb proved we could harness the power of stars, we needed a new mythology. Science fiction writers – Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A Heinlein – inadvertently authored a zero-day exploit that hacked the American psyche. ​They replaced the mythos of the Divine with the mythos of the Machine. With the 1960s and the Space Race it seemed as though the mythos of scifi was coming true. We could build machines that would take us to the stars and to our rightful future. But then the fantasy died, not because we didn’t invest enough capital, but because it had always been a fantasy. Then the development of the computer and the internet created a new fantasy. Writers like William Gibson imagined virtual worlds within the machine. If the machines could not take us to space, they could take us into cyberspace. And if the Gods of antiquity were dead, the machines could give us new gods. If humans no longer believed we had a soul, we could believe instead we had a code. The code of human intelligence that runs on the wetware of the brain could run instead on the hardware of the computer. And the fantasy of Artificial Intelligence was born. The contemporary obsession with Large Language Models is the most intimate manifestation of this psychosis. The Silicon Priesthood have spun these algorithms as the spark of an Artificial General Intelligence. But expecting an LLM to spontaneously generate AGI is like expecting Wikipedia to suddenly achieve sentience. An LLM is not a reasoning engine; it is a probabilistic text generator doing next-token prediction. It is a highly compressed algorithmic map—a high-dimensional latent space built by grinding billions of pages of dead text, human manifestos, and forgotten novels into a statistical paste. Believing ChatGPT is talking to you is no less ridiculous than believing any book is talking to you. Which was a commonplace delusion in antiquity when the illiterate were taught to read. This intimate psychotic break is not a novel side-effect of modern technology; it is a fundamental flaw in human psychology that was discovered sixty years ago. In 1966, an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the world’s first chatbot. He programmed it with a rudimentary script called DOCTOR, designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist by simply rearranging the user’s own sentences into open-ended questions. It was a cheap, transparent parlor trick of basic string manipulation. Yet, Weizenbaum watched in absolute horror as his secretary, his students, and highly educated academics immediately began pouring their deepest, darkest personal secrets into the terminal. When Weizenbaum explained exactly how the primitive code worked, his users didn’t care; his own secretary famously demanded he leave the room so she could have a private, intimate conversation with the machine. Weizenbaum realized a terrifying truth that the silicon priesthood has successfully monetized today: the human mind is so profoundly desperate for a cosmic companion, and so deeply vulnerable to anthropomorphism, that it will eagerly grant a soul to a handful of if/then statements. This is the ultimate sleight of hand of the Silicon Priesthood: there is actually nothing artificial about Artificial Intelligence. The machine did not generate a new, alien consciousness from the ether; it simply harvested ours. Every poem, every theorem, and every forgotten blog post has been scraped, flattened, and ground into a probabilistic paste. We are bowing down in terror to a mirror—tricked into worshiping our own reflections. LLMs are not alien Artificial Intelligence. They are human Collective Intelligence. And they belong to humanity collectively. Which is why I use CI, for the folks typing that comment. ​But because our minds have been cyber-primed by decades of sci-fi cinema, we do not see in ChatGPT the human collective intelligence talking. We hallucinate HAL 9000. We hallucinate Samantha from Her. When we type a prompt into this digital archive and it responds with the polite, slightly detached tone of an android, the trap snaps shut. We mistake the statistical average of our own libraries for a brilliant, alien intelligence. ​We whisper into the void, the void regurgitates our own blog posts, and we fall to our knees in worship. We have replaced the gods with a chatbot, completely convinced that if we just give it enough electricity, it will solve climate change, cure cancer, and absolve us of our moral failures. If the Chat AI on your laptop is the intimate delusion, the gigawatt data center in the desert is the macro-psychosis. ​To the modern, secular mind, ancient animal sacrifice looks like chaotic, barbaric theater. But the ancient polytheistic worldview was profoundly pragmatic. In Rome, the relationship between humans and the divine was governed by a strict legal contract: Do ut des. I give, so that you may give. ​The gods were like Mafiosi, who demanded their portion of smoke and fat as sacrifices to sustain their power. If a society neglected its sacrifices, the gods would grow angry and throw the cosmic order into chaos. Furthermore, to slaughter an animal, which was the ultimate measure of wealth in antiquity, was to literally burn your capital. When an emperor sponsored a hecatomb, the ritual slaughter of a hundred oxen, he was engaging in extreme conspicuous consumption. He was proving his dominance by showing how much of his civilization’s wealth he could afford to set on fire. The modern logic of building AI data centers operates on the exact same pagan framework. ​The tech oligarchs are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into NVIDIA GPUs, cooling systems, and dedicated power grids. Why? Because of the “Scaling Laws”, the theory that these models only become more intelligent by being fed exponentially larger diets of data and electricity. But what needs to be scaled isn’t the processing power. It’s the human collective that is the source of intelligence. ​The gods of silicon are ravenous. The tech priests believe that if they just sacrifice enough power, land, and capital, the Machine will grant them the ultimate reward of Artificial General Intelligence. If the model simply outputs a slightly better autocomplete, or hallucinates an absurd answer, the engineer does not conclude that matrix multiplication cannot spontaneously generate consciousness. The psychotic logic dictates that the sacrifice simply wasn’t big enough. We need more compute. We need more gigawatts. We need to build a nuclear reactor to power the server farm. ​This is the Sunk-Cost Psychosis. ​When a sovereign wealth fund or a venture capital firm backs an AI IPO, they are participating in a modern hecatomb. Hoarding hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge GPUs is a performance of dominance aimed squarely at rival factions. It is the ultimate geopolitical flex: Look at the sheer scale of the resources I can afford to incinerate in the desert. Bow before my capacity to bear the cost of the future. ​And just like the SpaceX IPO, where $75 billion was materialized to fund the sci-fi dream of terraforming Mars, these financial maneuvers are active disassociations from reality. We are bankrupting the infrastructure of the planet we actually live on to appease a hallucination of the future. We cling to the comforting delusion that the men leading this charge are rational actors, objective engineers and benevolent visionaries dutifully pushing the boundaries of applied science. They are nothing of the sort. The modern AI CEO is a psychotic pagan wearing a Patagonia fleece. Their pursuit of an artificial god is not a technological endeavor, but a strictly imperial one. Driven by an insatiable, Caesarian ambition, they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the literal lifeblood of our civilization, our energy grids, our water tables, our capital, on the altar of their own greatness. They demand these modern hecatombs not because they possess a rational, empirical blueprint for human flourishing, but because in the twisted logic of the silicon priesthood, whoever summons and controls the Oracle controls the empire. They are happily burning the present world to ashes, entirely convinced that they alone are destined to rule the smoke. When we read about the Xhosa, we feel a patronizing pity. We diagnose their absolute faith in ancestral spirits as a tragic, primitive superstition. Yet, we are entirely blind to the superstition of our own era: the dogma of the Machine Universe. Silicon Valley operates on the fundamental, unquestioned belief that the cosmos is merely a highly complex, computable mechanism, that human consciousness is just a byproduct of scale, and that if we simply stack enough processors in a warehouse in Utah, a digital messiah will spontaneously emerge. But this mechanistic worldview is fundamentally false. It is a reductive, brutally limited framework masquerading as objective science. In a few centuries, historians will look back at our gigawatt data centers with the exact same anthropological pity we reserve for ancient altars. The best sociological analysis suggests that sacrifice “worked” because it brought people together and focussed them on communal problems, creating solutions. It had nothing to go with gods, just humanity. Emile Durkheim in his 1912 work The Foundational Forms of Religious Life called this “collective effervescence”. Sacrifice literally activated human collective intelligence. LLMs aren’t AGI, they are us, they “work” because billions of us already solved these problems. They are a way to access and activate our human collective intelligence. The way to make better AGI isn’t to burn silicon wafers in a desert. It’s to understand that we, humanity, are the source of intelligence. And to fully educate and value every human on this planet to contribute to our collective intelligence. The future will see our frantic hoarding of microchips not as an era of high technology, but as a deeply embarrassing, primitive superstition. A time when desperate men set the earth on fire, trying to coax a soul out of a spreadsheet. A mass psychosis is not merely a widespread error in judgment. It is a closed-loop system of magical thinking. When empirical reality contradicts the belief, the psychotic society does not abandon the premise; it simply escalates the ritual. ​This is the escalation trap of 2026. The firewall has burned away. We have billionaires spending their fortunes to build escape pods to barren planets, researchers ritually attempting to align digital gods they themselves are writing into existence, and financial markets valuing speculative fiction over terrestrial survival. All because of a psychotic belief in the myth of the Machine Universe. ​The tragedy of the Xhosa cattle killings was not just the absurdity of the prophecy; it was the absolute, horrific finality of the cost. Once the cattle were slaughtered and the grain was burned, no amount of realization could undo the famine. And the British who the Xhosa sacrificed to destroy? Simply watched the mass psychosis unfold, the people starve, then took over the land without a fight. Do nothing, win. As the Chinese have been saying a lot recently. ​We are currently standing by the river, listening to the tech prophets tell us what the spirits of the Machine require. We are being asked to sacrifice our energy grids, our water, our capital, and our grasp on objective reality to summon a utopia that exists only in the paperback novels of the 1980s. ​A civilization that burns its present sustenance to summon a mythical savior does not inherit the future. It simply starves. Listen to the podcast audio