The only memorable line is a catchphrase: “a Britain truly built for all.” It stands out not just for being repeated, but also for begging two crucial questions. Obviously, it seems to say, we all agree on the answer to the question: what is “Britain”? And clearly we all agree who’s included in “all”, as in “a Britain truly built for all”? Except we don’t. Especially since Brexit, how we define Britain, and who should be included in it, is so intractable a dispute that it appears to have swallowed our entire ability to do politics. Nothing could be less settled than what Britain is, or who is included in “all”.

And the irony is that the digital platforms Starmer (or KeithGPT, or whatever) is embracing (he’s also recently joined TikTok) are a key reason we’re having these arguments. TikTok is Chinese; Substack is based in San Francisco; both are used all over the globe. And this de-materialized, post-geographic quality maps strangely onto our struggles over what a nation is, and who’s included.

The explanation Starmer gives for embracing Substack is as bland as the rest of his writing: “People have a right to know how decisions that affect them are taken and why. And I believe all politicians should explore innovative new ways to do that.” But at least in relatively recent history, a “nation” has implied both a defined geography and its occupation by a defined group. And the paradox of a national leader leaning so heavily into the internet is that this medium is so post-geographic in its effect as to make nation-states as such appear increasingly quaint: an impression the most radical tech elites are now embracing as the future of politics.

In the interminable online culture wars over how we define nations, what often gets overlooked is their historical, technological catalyst: the invention and spread of printing. European nation-states, as the historian Carlton Hayes showed, were never tight-knit tribes but instead “agglomerations of peoples with diverse languages and dialects”. These emerged out of a medieval plurality of sometimes tiny polities, across which an elite of scholars, merchants, and politicians communicated using the lingua franca inherited from ancient Rome: Latin.

Wherever printing centers took root, from 1450 onward, the dialect in that particular area would become gradually more widespread, fixed and culturally dominant. These print-powered dialects morphed over time into the “official” languages of much larger polities, while other dialects lost status or disappeared. The circulation of printed books and newspapers in these newly standardized vernacular languages in turn forged “nations” into self-conscious political units: the print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein shows how the idea of a “public” as such derives from “publishing”, offering a new, printed mirror within which these publics saw themselves reflected, for the first time, as “imagined communities”.

It wasn’t just print, of course. But print helped to fuse geography, language and power into modern nation-states, in which, as Hayes puts it, “a particular nationality […] constituted the core and furnished the governing class and the official language” along with other minority peoples, in a form “more akin to small empires than large tribes”. In time, many of these “small empires” became large ones — such as, perhaps most notably of all, Britain. Over the same period, too, Latin began to wither as a living lingua franca, replaced by now-competing “national” vernaculars.

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What does any of this have to do with Britain now? And what does it have to do with Substack? Well, it’s not a coincidence that elites around the world began dreaming bigger than nations or even empires, just as new broadcast media emerged to challenge print for the public’s attention. You don’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to wonder whether being able to beam TV images around the world might, in time, affect who we imagine our “communities” to be, and how widely we cast that net. Nor is it a coincidence that the TV era also saw Britain dislodged as “Top Nation” by our own imperial progeny, the USA.

Of course, as critics have noted, American hegemony came cloaked in the neutral utopianism of “rules-based international order”. This bait-and-switch was perhaps less obvious to the English than some other cultures, because the “official” language of this order was a variant of our own: the modern-day equivalent of medieval Latin, American English, or latterly “International Business English”.

This is the flat register in which the Starmerstack is written: “But, as I argued above, it’s also impossible to look at poverty and not see the visible impact of the cost-of-living crisis.” It’s hard even to choose an illustrative quote: it all feels equally lump-free, like the verbal equivalent of mechanically recovered meat. But the fact that he’s felt obliged to start a Starmerstack, instead of just going on TV, points to the still more disruptive recent triumph of the internet over broadcast: a shift that’s now shoving even Starmer out of the internationalist 20th-century dream, into a far more fractious and fragmented world.

Why? Well, print created the idea of a “public”, and forged language-communities into geographic and political ones. In other words: it massively affected political form. Broadcast allowed us to dream of uniting the world as one giant community. Another massive effect. It stands to reason the internet might change things again; but how? Perhaps the most optimistic exposition to date of how this might look comes from US tech investor Balaji Srinivasan, in his 2022 ebook The Network State. Here, Srinivasan set out a vision for a new kind of digital-age political entity, not defined by geography but shared vision and values, and beginning as internet-only entities. Once cohesive and well-established, he suggests, such entities could then realize themselves in the material world by crowdfunding real-world holdings, gaining political clout, and ultimately pursuing diplomatic recognition as a “network state”.

Examples of real-world projects with a “network state” flavor include Peter Thiel’s (as yet fruitless) “seasteading” vision, and also the Praxis group, which occasionally makes headlines by attempting to buy Greenland and such audacious stunts. Other proposals to create assorted forms of either pop-up or permanent startup city-state exist, in various states, such as the Próspera “startup zone” in Honduras.

What these have in common is that they recognize the radical new potential afforded by digital for transforming politics, and want to experiment — for example by forming polities that dispense with geography, or central banking, or (often) democracy. They share public ideas on platforms such as Substack, and hatch private plans in closed spaces such as Urbit. They tend to be, like the tech scene itself, both Anglophone and international (Substack’s founders are an American, an Indian-American, and a New Zealander) but, unlike the 20th-century globalist dream, highly exclusive. Like the 20th-century globalists, Srinivasan envisions opt-in, ethnically pluralist, secular polities. But while pluralist and secular, there’s nothing inclusive about “network states”. If you don’t like it, you can leave; by extension if the founders don’t like you, you can be expelled.

Srinivasan’s vision was first ignored by the mainstream. But more recently, especially since the Trump victory brought wealthy figures such as Srinivasan and Thiel closer to the White House, network states have inspired a slew of increasingly unnerved mainstream coverage. Such articles tend to fret about the openly anti-democratic worldview expressed by advocates such as Patri Friedman, who invests in “startup cities” and is frank about his firm funding companies “starting non-democratic cities”.

What if these post-democratic elite innovators really do end up setting the tone for the polities of the future? It doesn’t bode well for the little guy. To this we might reply that the dubiously democratic nature of even self-identified democracies, especially since Covid, somewhat blunts the moral force of this critique. A more substantive challenge is perhaps that in being digital-first, such polities are parasitic on goods provided by traditional nation-states. It’s all very well having Bitcoin, but as long as you’re dependent on an old-world nation-state for reliable roads, telecoms, waste management, power, sewerage, public order, and enforceable property laws backed by a (nation) state monopoly on violence, your claims to statehood are still acutely vulnerable. You’re also radically dependent on the viability of the system you claim to be trying to replace.

Against this, we might argue that these are transitional issues that can be resolved either (for tech-optimists) by more automation, or through gaining physical capabilities as network-states become more established. But to my eye, the hardest challenge to the tech-bro model for new countries is the oldest: where does your cohesion come from? Srinivasan grasps this in theory, emphasizing the need for unity in cultural, moral, and identity issues. But as expected from a tech-libertarian, The Network State stops short of advocating religious or ethnic homogeneity as a basis for such states.

This does not bode well. Anyone who has spent time in online communities knows how fissiparous they are. Meanwhile the 20th century is littered with attempts at secular utopias that turned into sex cults, or suicide cults, or just had huge rows and fell apart. But what if Srinivasan is just not seeing the wood for the trees? If we borrow the broad “network state” formula, but discard the “grey tribe” distaste for racial and religious identitarianism, we only need to glance about to see that germinal “network states” already exist — it’s just that the groups driving them aren’t Silicon Valley elites.

Americans, for example, were recently shocked by the revelation that organized Somali-heritage communities in Minnesota have been methodically defrauding the state government, funneling vast sums of money out of America toward co-ethnic communities overseas. And though their relation to state funding doubtless varies a great deal, I suspect comparable low-tech networked “nations” are now increasingly common across the West, as a byproduct of 20th-century utopianism.

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Could this represent at least one possible future template for post-national political solidarity? Seen dispassionately, a resource-extraction network of the kind documented in Minnesota appears highly cohesive and internally solidaristic. It leverages existing infrastructure. It’s spread over a distributed geographic area, and using digital tools to network. It’s focused on increasing real-world holdings. What actually distinguishes this from a “network state”, apart from the lack of interest in blockchain?

Those still attached to nation-states may well harrumph about deportations, or even (like Trump) actually do some. But none of that changes the internet’s power to convene post-geographic networked polities. Like other digital platforms, Substack’s popular readership communities are post-national; as long as such digital platforms exist, whether on Substack or elsewhere people will go on forging post-national, geographically distributed communities. In light of this, nation-state nostalgists may need to accept that the globalists are right to view such entities as obsolete.

But the internationalists may also need to accept that their “one world” model is obsolete as well. The decentralized, de-materialized, many-to-many environment enabled by the internet doesn’t deliver a united planet of peace and harmony. Rather, it delivers McLuhan’s real “global village”: a chaotic place of competing digital tribes, each hoarding their store of resources and competing to extract whatever they can for their own, from what’s left of the commons.

Whether wealthy, secular and high-tech, or tribal, religious and low-tech, these are the real “post-liberal” successor entities to nation-states. In their world Starmer’s “all” doesn’t exist; there is only the in-group. And whatever (or even whether) KeithGPT himself thinks, to the extent that network nations on this model become a template here, the nation-state “Britain” of his catchphrase will be nothing more than a carcass for them to loot.

The essay was published well before the Manson Family murders, before the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert debacle, the Kent State shootings, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison — before any of the infamous totems of the death of the Sixties. Yet the picture Didion paints of an already decaying counter-culture is bleak: rather than discovering the kind of fluid, boundary-less utopia imagined in the new culture of psychedelic drugs, thousands of young people had squandered their minds and lives chasing a pseudo-enlightenment sold to them by gurus and cult figures — the most famous of course being Timothy Leary, who had traveled across the country inviting every American to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”. Instead of precipitating a glorious era of mass enlightenment, LSD ended up creating a burned-out, drug-addled generation of lost children.

Considering Didion’s prophetic picture of that burned-out acid generation, it seems entirely possible that our own society stands on the edge of something similar, even if its own destructive ideals of utopian design have been institutional and technological, where the Sixties dream was countercultural. Beset by internet addiction, climate anxiety, depression, overwork, ADHD, and a general tendency towards distraction and retreat from the world, ours is a culture of burnout and exhaustion which looks like nothing so much as a recapitulation of the Sixties fallout, only with the internet as our new mind-altering drug of choice. Yet these eerie similarities are no accident.

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From the release of formerly clandestine information, in the Seventies, we know that LSD was introduced into America by concerted governmental programs in the early Fifties as part of Cold War MK-ULTRA operations, in an attempt to develop new forms of brainwashing and mind control. For years, the United States government experimented with psychedelic drugs on people in asylums, prisons, and clinics. The journalist Tom O’Neill, in his rather persuasive book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), has even gone so far as to suggest that Charles Manson himself may have been the product of deep-state testing, during his time in prison. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that the drug which unleashed massive anti-societal, anti-institutional energies onto an unsuspecting American public was the product of a state experiment, an attempt to discover a new technology of power.

As the Sixties dream collapsed, these mass collective visions were channeled into more explicit cults, and into narrower, individualist ideas of therapeutic soothing. The Seventies saw the proliferation of guru-centered religious cults such as the Rajneesh Movement and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — the latter infamous for its congregational mass suicide in 1978 in Guyana. The decade was also dominated by what came to be known as the New Age, a vague bricolage of spiritualist practices including Americanized popularizations of Zen and yoga; neo-pagan groups like Wiccans and the Church of Satan; even expanding middle-class interest in Freudian and Jungian psychotherapy. The emerging popular images of “spirituality” at the time — healing crystals, meditation retreats, soothing muzak — were all part of this new climate, stemming from the collapse of the commune movement, an emergent global recession, and increasing fragmentation into individualist anomie. This was the “Me Decade” which the great socialist critic Christopher Lasch detailed acutely in his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism.

For Lasch, the new therapeutic language of the Seventies had combined with the slow constriction of family life, an addictive obsession with professional sports, ingeniously distractive media, and a collapse in popular faith in institutions, to create an isolated and narcissistic culture losing all sense of shared vision or communal life. For all its potential value, the increasing middle-class obsession with therapy was ultimately only teaching people to further obsess over themselves: people were growing more and more concerned with tracking and transforming their own feelings and thought patterns, instead of turning outwards to the world, or confronting the need for real public, political transformation. The ever-unattainable ideal of “mental health” had effectively replaced the Christian doctrine of the salvation of the soul. In place of religion, or even those utopian visions of mass psychedelic enlightenment and countercultural communalism, the West now had a myriad of individual spiritual projects — all increasingly packaged, marketed, and thoroughly commodified.

Around the same time, Silicon Valley had begun to form. With the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), California university researchers funded by the US Department of Defense had created a new mass packet-switched network, functionally connected by 1969. This ARPANET formed the foundation for what would later be the Internet. Given the name “Silicon Valley” by Dan Hoefler in 1971, that section of the San Francisco Bay Area played host to the world’s largest concentration of hardware and software developers, start-ups, and inventors of new computer technologies. With the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981, and the establishment of the official Silicon Valley Bank in 1983, the place became the epicenter of the coming digital revolution.

Silicon Valley had its own emergent culture, too — one which, as it turned out, had much to do with that death of the Sixties counterculture, and all those lost dreams of a boundaryless utopia. In an influential 1995 paper, University of Westminster media scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron gave this loose ethos a name: “The Californian Ideology.” This “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… promiscuously combin[ing] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”, made up the set of liberatory ideals which had formed the ideological basis for these new networks, from its earliest days to 1990, when the British researcher Tim Berners-Lee from CERN had built the first web browser, along with the software behind the creation of the World Wide Web.

According to Barbrook and Cameron, the creators and theorists of the Internet had come to see an unlimited, untamed cyberspace as a chance to finally achieve the old utopian dream, following the collapse of the New Left movement and the burnout of the Californian counterculture. What the Sixties had failed to bring about at the level of consciousness might now be done through technology. But Barbrook and Cameron noticed something disturbing going on, namely a strong rightward drift, into fantasies of “perfect” markets and totally sovereign individuals, freed by the ultimate “democracy” of the internet from any societal responsibility. They reported that the new hi-tech and media industries were becoming rhetorically very important for the New Right, since “both capitalists and well-paid workers fear[ed] that the open acknowledgment of public funding of their companies would justify tax rises to pay for desperately needed spending on health care, environmental protection, housing, public transport and education.” They also wrote, despairingly, about how many people in this new “virtual class” had been “seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the New Right. Working for hi-tech and media companies, they would like to believe that the electronic marketplace can somehow solve America’s pressing social and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part.”

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Of course, this is a paradigm we’ve seen repeat itself many times over in the past decades. It’s fairly well accepted at this point that the 2024 US presidential election was at least partially clenched for Trump by the support of tech titans like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, whose Orwellian corporation Palantir has already benefited immensely from working with the new government. Democratic socialists in America have argued for years that the sway tech companies can purchase in the government only further facilitates the transfer of federal money away from new infrastructure, or welfare for a struggling population, and into the coffers of these already exorbitantly overvalued and over-subsidized monopolies.

The parallels on the historical scale are also obvious if we look at the beginnings (and the end result) of the Californian Ideology. First introduced as a technology of control, with large-scale military investiture, psychedelic drugs and the counterculture which emerged from them took an entire generation from mass public defiance of conformism, and celebration of spiritual transcendence, into mass psychological crash-out, followed by a descent into narcissism and myopia. Via those inventors and businessmen of Silicon Valley who successfully globalized the Californian Ideology, a similar project was envisioned, only now at the institutional and technological level. It was no longer merely counter-cultural: it was the underlying impetus for the new technological regime itself. And it, too, had decades of concerted investment by the US military to thank for its sudden widespread effect.

Which brings us to the present moment, and what it shares with the death of that older utopian ideal. All pretensions towards the “democratizing” power of Web 2.0 social media died with the Arab Spring 15 years ago; since then these sites have only increased our political polarization and intra-group hatred. We’ve even begun to develop our own cult leaders and cultish language: consider accelerationists following the example of Nick Land, or new anti-democratic “philosophers” like Curtis Yarvin, along with an Internet filling up with doom-laden terms like “the longhouse” or “the cathedral” and, of course, “taking the red pill”. Transhumanism, Applied Rationalism, and Effective Altruism have established themselves in actual institutional centers, in affiliation with many companies in Silicon Valley today — yet all have shown the tell-tale signs of cult-like activity, from sexual grooming scandals to tales of obscene behavior to murky influence on the rich and powerful.

Then there’s the simple fact of mass emotional collapse, as overstimulation from internet addiction and portable devices only worsens. In 2010, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han characterized the primary disease of our time as “neuronal”, manifesting in pathologies like ADHD, depression, and burnout. In his remarkable book, The Burnout Society, Han traces the transformation of Western society from a “disciplinary” paradigm to an “achievement” paradigm. From a society based on coercion and force from above, we’ve shifted to a society in which each person becomes self-exploiting, suffering not from any threat of direct oppression from the Other, but from “an excess of positivity”. Consider all our brief media obsessions over fads like “quieting quitting”, “ghosting”, or the “Great Resignation”. In a world of entrepreneurs, personal brands, and internet avatars, the ruling feeling of the day is the constant threat of an immense narcissistic crash-out, an exhaustion which comes from having to aggressively and constantly be one’s own authentic self — and then to sell it. We’ve never been more stimulated, more overwhelmed by information, or more productive in our work. The result is a deepening sense of total existential exhaustion, not at all dissimilar to the post-Sixties burnout.

It’s impossible to know where any of this is really heading. Yet if we follow some of these analogues — keeping in mind that it’s hardly a perfect one-to-one map, only a sense of the way our massive societal upheavals tend to produce mass exhaustion — we may glimpse some of what’s in store for us. Consider the increasing evidence for the “Dead Internet” theory, the suspicion that maybe even a majority of the internet is, at this point, only dead bots interacting with other dead bots. We’re looking at a pandemic of tiredness, overstimulation, and overwork, and even that is accompanied by a loss of any last vestige of meaning or reality in the digital networks we’ve used to distract ourselves. In the next decade, we’ll likely see a rise in even more obvious cults and spurious new spiritual movements; huge increases in young people “tuning in, and dropping out” from mass communications technologies; the increased transition from mild “digital detoxes” to outright rejection of digital existence; and a rise in the establishment of primitivist communes.

The benefits of this new paradigm could be remarkable: a return to pragmatic grassroots socialist politics; an increase in DIY planting and repair-work; more communal living, perhaps cross-generationally; the return of something like a true counter-culture, or an artistic avant-garde; new, classically humanistic educational institutions, away from our ineffectual universities; even a larger return to sincere interest in the great world religions. If history is any guide, and we really are in for a massive post-utopian burnout at a level never seen before, then these are the very kinds of alternatives and experiments which we’ll have to embrace. Unless we want to live in a world where the destruction wrought by pseudo-utopian projects is simply replayed at the mass technological level, then we’ll be forced to find ways of connecting to each other which don’t rely solely on digital technology or existing institutions. We may indeed be in an escalating mess of mass emotional collapse — a crisis of exhaustion. Yet as Winston Churchill is supposed to have said (in a way which still rings quite true): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

If the 20th century was atheistic, religiosity is now everywhere — I hardly know anyone who lives as a pure-blood rationalist, nor do I encounter many who dwell entirely within one faith or metaphysical tradition. Astrology and occultism flourish in mainstream daylight, while a revived interest in psychedelic experience and synthetic drugs has opened up gnostic wormholes amid the high-res sound-systems of nightclubs that seem more than ever like techno-pagan temples.

Attempting to understand this paradoxical synthesis led me to TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis, a deeply Californian writer who was born in 1967 but is very much a child of the Nineties. His outlook was shaped as a cultural journalist in that decade he recalls fondly for its “ambient sense of arcane possibility, cultural mutation, and delirious threat that, though it may have only reflected my youth, seemed to presage more epochal changes to come”. He describes TechGnosis as “a secret history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology”, and insists that “religious questions, spiritual experiences, and occult possibilities remain wedded to our now unquestionably science-fiction reality”.

Starting from the maxim that “magic is technology’s unconscious”, Davis explores the myriad ways in which an ostensibly rationalist-materialist-atheist civilisation invests its new machines with ancient animism and archetypal dreams. Think of the recent hype around AI; how ready we are to project sentience and malign — Chtulian! — will onto a technology that, considered rationally, can never possess such qualities. He also considers the ways in which “ecstatic technologies” such as psychedelic drugs, meditation and shamanism now influence and modify questions of the soul, while asking if religious experience, defined by Carl Jung as that in which “man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other”, may itself be evolving in tandem with technocultural mutation.

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The first edition of TechGnosis was published in 1998 — the same year, it’s always startling to recall, in which Google was founded — a prelapsarian time of heady economic growth and triumph-of-liberal-democracy optimism. It’s dizzying to think how much has changed since then, the spree of relentless cultural, societal and technological upheaval we’ve undergone. Yet Davis’s first book has remained relevant (helped by multiple revised editions with updated material). In part this is because it was never fully taken in by the Nineties’ now painfully discredited techno-utopianism, nor did it paint an especially rosy picture of our tech-civilisational future (yes, the one we’re now in). Davis quotes Marshall McLuhan, writing in 1962 about how the Global Village might turn out to be a more uncomfortable place than we anticipate: “As our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside…  we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence.”

Is there a better description of the online mobs, omni-paranoia, mass derangement, moral outrage, scapegoating, and polyphonic extremism that have defined the years since they put devices in our elegantly evolved hands? This sceptical edge may make Davis an appealing writer to those who find other psychedelically informed theorists too far out, too loose and easy with rationalism and the Enlightenment tradition. He is attractively open to gnostic, mystical, religious and, yes, psychedelic experience — a “heady seeker of sorts”, as he describes his younger self — yet he is also cool-headed and rational, even cynical when it comes to the exploitativeness of technocapitalism. Now in his late fifties and a compelling guest on podcasts and YouTube talks (as well as the producer of many excellent articles on his Substack) Davis advocates a “middle way — between reason and mystery, scepticism and sympathy, cool observation and participation mystique”.

His book churns up an unrelenting, often brilliant spray of ideas, funnelling a dizzying range of information across multiple cultural-intellectual byways and minority belief systems. Davis examines the seminal, future-shock cyberpunk fictions of William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and the gnostic dystopias of Philip K. Dick. But he also ranges onto magical-esoteric-religious history: the Greek-mythic trickster Hermes Trismegistus, John Dee’s “Enochian” magic, the discovery in 1945 of the heretical gnostic scriptures at Nag Hammadi — even the neuroscientist John C. Lilly’s experiments in telepathically communicating with dolphins by way of intravenous ketamine and a sensory-deprivation tank. He traces the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s messianic vision of a noospheric Omega Point — in which all minds are fused in an ecstatic oneness that brings the divine principle to its earthly apotheosis — through the delirious rhetoric of Nineties Wired-era tech propagandists and Singularity hucksters, whose effusions glossed the acceleration into our era of surveillance capitalism, epistemological fragmentation, radical inequality and political extremism.

Davis insists that the digital age teems with religious and supernatural metaphors. His distinction between the analogue “soul” and the digital “spirit” is memorably suggestive: “The analogue world sticks to its grooves of soul — warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality.” It is not lost on Davis that his book appeared shortly before the arrival in multiplexes of The Matrix, an exhilarating film that mainlined the mythos of simulation, alienation, deception and sacred uprising into the global psychic mainstream and perhaps primed teenage minds to plunge into the nightmarish hyperrealities of the decades to come.

He is also sympathetic to the neo-psychedelic culture that emerged from a post-Sixties underground to fuse with a more broadly gnostic cultural mood (you can’t open the New York Times or New Yorker these days without seeing articles on psychedelic research, though acknowledgement of the irreducible weirdness of psychedelics is less common). But Davis regards our connected devices and social media as the real acid in the civilisational punch-bowl: perhaps the ruptures we’ve lived through over the past decade are just the beginning of a cyberdelic horror-trip we’ll never wake up from.

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Today, the digital future-present keeps echoing the magical-animist-pantheistic past — and vice versa. What are shamans if not “ecstatic technicians of the sacred”, LSD if not a “gnostic molecule”, and Gnosticism itself — the heretical Christian doctrine that declared our universe the botched work of a sinister demiurge, a lesser god — if not “the world’s first metaphysical conspiracy theory”? Meanwhile, the revival of virtual reality and the increasingly realistic texture of video games conjures up the ancient fantasy of simulation and nested realities (“the protagonists of Hindu yarns often found themselves wandering through infinite nests of Borgesian dream worlds”). It is only a short, psychotic leap from there to believing that consciousness is itself a game within a game, that there are levels parallel to or above this one. Even if reality turns out not to be a video game, actual games reanimate gnostic longings. “The boss characters and evil creatures who must be conquered to advance levels are the faint echoes of the threshold-dwellers and Keepers of the Gates that shamans and gnostics had to conquer in their mystic peregrinations of the other worlds.”

At least in its younger form, Davis’s is the sort of intelligence that can barely give itself room to breathe. TechGnosis covers so much ground that you wish he’d linger in one place for a while, probe more deeply into some of the intriguing areas he races over, or make more of the arresting, speculative ideas he frequently dashes out. His book’s enduring cult appeal has arguably made him a touch self-important, assessing (and hyping) its continuing relevance across a series of overlong afterwords. But these are quibbles against the high appeal of a writer so alert to “the powerful, archetypal connections among magic, tricks, and technology”, and the value of psychedelic thought in generating new metaphors. Davis writes of such strange, compelling things with real poetry, his meta-muse unleashed in “those vast cosmic webworks whose own mysterious designs we may glimpse, if at all, in moments past all sense or reckoning”.

The gold standard for this approach appeared to be set in March, when Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and 1,800 concerned researchers signed a letter calling for AI development to be paused. This week, however, 350 scientists — including Geoffrey Hinton, who effectively invented ChatGPT, and Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind — decided to up the ante. Artificial intelligence, they warned, “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.

Does this mean you should add “death by ChatGPT” to your list of existential threats to humanity? Not quite. Although a number of prominent researchers are sounding the alarm, many are sceptical that its current state is anything close to human-like capabilities, let alone superhuman ones. We need to “calm down already”, says robotics expert Rodney Brooks, while Yann Le Cun — who shared Hinton’s Turing Prize — believes “those systems do not have anywhere close to human level intelligence”.

That isn’t to say that these machine-learning programs aren’t smart. Today’s infamous interfaces are capable of producing new material in response to prompts from users. The most popular — Google’s Bard and Open AI’s Chat GPT — achieve this by using “Large Language Models” (LLMs), which are trained on enormous amounts of human-generated text, much of it freely available on the Internet. By absorbing more examples than one human could read in a lifetime, refined and guided by human feedback, these generative programs produce highly plausible, human-like text responses.

Now, we know this enables it to provide useful answers to factual questions. But it can also produce false answers, fabricated background material and entertaining genre-crossing inventions. And this doesn’t necessarily make it any less threatening: it’s this human-like plausibility that leads us to ascribe to LLMs human-like qualities that they do not possess.

Deprived of a human world — or indeed any meaningful embodiment through which to interact with the world — LLMs also lack any foundation for understanding language in a humanlike sense. Their internal model is a many-dimensional map of probabilities, showing which word is more or less likely to follow the previous one. When, for example, Chat GPT answers a question about the location of Paris, it relies not on any direct experience of the world, but on accumulated data produced by humans.

What else do LLMs lack that human minds can claim? Perhaps most importantly, they lack the intention to be truthful. In fact, they lack intention at all. Humans use language for purposes, with intention, as part of games between human minds. We may intentionally lie in order to mislead, but that in itself is an attitude to the value of truth.

It’s this human regard for truth that inspires so much terror about the capacity of AI to produce plausible but untrue materials. Weapons of Mass Disinformation are the spectre stalking today’s internet, with deepfake videos or voice recordings serving as the warheads. Yet it’s hard to see this as a radically new problem. Humans already manage to propagate wild untruths using much simpler tools, and humans are also much better than is often recognised at being suitably sceptical. Mass distribution of false or misleading material has been shown to have little effect on elections. The breakdown of trust in media or authoritative information sources, and the splintering of belief in shared truths about the world, have deeper and more complex roots than technology.

Even the most fearful proponents of AI intellectual abilities don’t generally believe that LLMs can currently form goals or initiate actions without human instruction. But they do sometimes claim that LLMs can hold beliefs — the belief, for example, that Paris is in France.

In what sense, however, does an LLM believe that Paris is in France? Lacking a conception of the physical world to which abstract concepts such as “Paris” or “France” correspond, it cannot believe that “Paris is in France” is true in a way that “Frankfurt is in France” is false. Instead, it can only “believe” that data predicts “France” is the most probable completion of the string of words “Paris is in…”.

Imagine learning Ancient Greek by memorising the spellings of the most common 1,000 words and deducing the grammatical rules that govern how they may be combined. You could perhaps pass an exam by giving the most likely responses to questions similar to the ones in your textbook, but you would have no idea what the responses mean, let alone their significance in the history of European culture. That, broadly, is what an LLM can do, and why it’s been called a “stochastic parrot” — imitating human communication, one word at a time, without comprehension.

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A stochastic parrot, of course, is very far from Skynet, the all-powerful sentient computer system from Terminator. What, then, has provoked the sudden panic about AI? The cynical, but perhaps most compelling, answer is that regulation of AI technology is currently on the table — and entrepreneurs are keen to show they are taking “risk” seriously, in the hope that they will look more trustworthy.

At present, the European Union is drafting an AI Act whose “risk-based approach” will limit predictive policing and use of real-time biometric identification in public. The US and EU are also drawing up a voluntary code of practice for generative AI, which will come into force long before the AI Act makes its way through the EU’s tortuous procedures. The UK government is taking the threat just as seriously: it published a White Paper on AI in March, and Rishi Sunak reportedly plans to push an “AI pact” when he meets Joe Biden next week. Regulation, it seems, is a matter of when, not if — and it’s clearly in the interests of developers and businessmen to make sure they have a seat at the table when it’s being drafted.

This isn’t to say that commercial interests are the sole driver of this week’s apocalyptic front pages; our fears about AI, and the media’s coverage of them, also reflect far deeper cultural preoccupations. Here, comparisons between human thought and AI are particularly revealing.

If you believe that human language is an expression of agency in a shared world of meaning, that each human mind is capable not only of subjective experience but of forming purposes and initiating new projects with other people, then prediction-generating machines such as ChatGPT are very far from humanlike. If, however, you believe that language is a structure of meaning in which we are incidental participants, that human minds are an emergent property of behaviours, over which we have less control than we like to believe, then it’s quite plausible that machines could be close to matching us on home turf. We already refer to their iterative process of adjusting statistical weights as “learning”.

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In short, if your model of human beings is a behaviourist one, LLMs are plausibly close to being indistinguishable from humans in terms of language. That was, after all, the original Turing Test for artificial intelligence. Add to this our culture’s taste for Armageddon, for existential threats that sweep aside the messy reality of competing moral and practical values, long and short-term priorities, and pluralist visions of the future, and it’s no wonder the world-ending power of AI is hitting the headlines.

At an Institute of Philosophy conference this week, Geoffrey Hinton explained why he believes AI will soon match human capacities for thought: at heart, he is sceptical that our internal, subjective experience makes us special, or significantly different from machine-learning programs. I asked him whether he believed that AI could become afraid of humans, in the way he is afraid of AI. He answered that it would have good reason to be afraid of us, given our history as a species.

In the past, our gods reflected how we saw ourselves, our best qualities and our worst failings. Today, our mirror is the future AI of our imagination, in which we see ourselves as mere language machines, as a planet-infesting threat, as inveterate liars or gullible fools. And all the while, we continue to create machines whose powers would dazzle our grandparents. If only we could program them to generate some optimism about the future, and some belief in our own capacity to steer towards it.

This week, Lanier joined Florence Read to discuss AI, the possibility of machine consciousness, and why he still has faith in humanity. Below is an edited transcript:

Florence Read: You recently wrote an essay for the New Yorker with the seemingly phlegmatic title, “There is no AI”. Does that mean you don’t think recent developments are a problem?

Jaron Lanier: I actually have publicly stated that I think we could use the new technologies (as well as other technologies) to destroy ourselves. My difference with my colleagues is that I think the way we characterise the technology can have an influence on our options and abilities to handle it. And I think treating AI as this new, alien intelligence reduces our choices and has a way of paralysing us. An alternate take is to see it as a new form of social collaboration, where it’s just made of us. It’s a giant mash-up of human expression, opens up channels for addressing issues and makes us more sane and makes us more competent. So I make a pragmatic argument to not think of the new technologies as alien intelligences, but instead as human social collaborations.

FR: But as someone who works at Microsoft, at the heart of the AI revolution, is it not easier for you take the more pragmatic view over the hysterical?

JL: I have a really unusual role in the tech world. It shouldn’t be unusual; I think it should be more common. Essentially, I am speaking my mind honestly, even though I’m on the inside of the castle instead of on the outside throwing stones at the castle. In my opinion, both positions should be well-manned. I don’t think there’s any perfect way to handle anything. One is always somewhat compromised. Microsoft and I have come to an accord, where I have, what you might call, academic freedom. I speak my mind, I speak things as I see them but I also don’t speak for the company. And we make that distinction. It allows me to maintain my public intellectual life but also work inside.

I don’t necessarily find agreement with everybody I work with, nor do I find absolute disagreement. For instance, Sam Altman from OpenAI really liked my New Yorker piece. I don’t think he agrees with it entirely but he said he agrees with it mostly. That’s great. I think having some degree of openness within the big tech companies is a healthy thing. Within Microsoft, there are now a few other figures who at least somewhat speak their minds. I’m hoping that this demonstration that a tech company can be successful while allowing essentially free speech within its research community, can be a precedent that other tech companies follow. I’d like to see Google and Meta and Apple do a little bit more of that.

FR: What’s odd about the AI discussion is that so many of the people working on it — including Sam Altman — are also the ones sharing their deep existential fears about what AI will do to humanity.

JL: I have tried to understand that myself for decades. I think part of it is, we simultaneously live in a science-fiction universe, where we’re living out the science fiction we grew up with. If you grew up on the Terminator movies, and the Matrix movies and Commander Data from Star Trek, naturally what you want to do is realise this idea of AI. It just seems like your destiny. But then another part of you is thinking, “But in most of those stories, with Commander Data being the exception, this was horrible for mankind.” It feels responsible to acknowledge that it could be horrible for mankind, and yet at the same time, you keep on doing it. It’s weird, and I believe the approach that I’ve proposed of not thinking of what we’re doing as alien intelligences but rather a social collaboration, is the way through that problem, because it’s a way of framing it that’s equally valid, but actionable. But within the tech world, giving up those childhood science-fiction fantasies that we grew up with is really hard for people.

FR: Of course, we used to call the internet a “Wild West”, which played into this mythology — as though there’s a cowboy in every one of these computer scientists who wants to find this new frontier.

JL: I think that’s true too. I grew up in rural New Mexico in the Sixties, when it was still not that economically developed. So I actually got to experience a little bit of the tail end of the Wild West. And I can assure you that it was miserable, and it’s not something anybody would want, but the version of it in the movies is very appealing. And it does bring up a sort of a strange gender-identity connection. Recently, I was on a morning TV talk show in the US, and one of the hosts was a woman who said to me, “It just seems like there’s a lot of male fantasy in the AI world. Shouldn’t there be more women AI leaders?” And I said, “Well, there are some spectacular women AI leaders, and actually, there does tend to be some sort of a difference where the women seem to be a little more humanistic.” In the YouTube version of that, they cut out the whole exchange about women, and I called and asked about it and they said, “It just seemed like a niche question, so we cut it out.” And it’s not, it’s a very central question.

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FR: I do have a kind of sense that there is something Promethean about it, that for many men, this is the first time they’ve been able to create life from nothing.

JL: When I was a kid, I always used to say AI is really just womb envy. And having had a child and seeing what it’s actually like for a woman to bear child, I no longer have womb envy. I now appreciate it’s actually a rather difficult process for the mother and I didn’t know that when I was a young man. I will say that it’s not just men, but it tends to be men who haven’t had kids yet who might have that desire to create life in the computer.

FR: You distinguish between two types of AI, between this “alien entity” to which many of your colleagues seem to attribute the spark of life, and your version, which is, in fact, just a network of connections between humans.

JL: The term AI is very wiggly, and gets applied to all kinds of things. But usually these days when we talk about AI, we’re talking about these large AI models like the GPT programmes. What they are is giant mash-ups of human creations. If you ask one of these programmes to create you a new image — like, I’d like to see London as if it were a cross between London and Gurwat — it can probably synthesise that. But the way it does so is by using the classifiers that it uses to identify the images that match the components of your request, and mashing them up. Managing the whole scale so it can happen quickly is not so simple, but the basic idea is pretty simple.

Now, I happen to think that’s a great capability with a lot of uses. I love the idea of computers just getting more flexible. It creates the possibility of saying, “Can you reconfigure this computer experience to work for somebody who’s colourblind?” instead of demanding that people conform to computer design. There’s a potential in this flexibility to really improve computation on many levels and make it much better for people. But, if you want to, you can perceive it as a new intelligence. And, to me, if you perceive it as a new intelligence, what you’re really doing is shutting off yourself in order to worship the code, which I think is exactly the wrong thing. It makes you less able to make good decisions.

You’ve probably heard of the Turing test, which was one of the original thought-experiments about artificial intelligence. There’s this idea that if a human judge can’t distinguish whether something came from a person or computer, then we should treat the computer as having equal rights. And the problem with that is that it’s also possible that the judge became stupid. There’s no guarantee that it wasn’t the judge who changed rather than the computer. The problem with treating the output of GPT as if it’s an alien intelligence, which many people enjoy doing, is that you can’t tell whether the humans are letting go of their own standards and becoming stupid to make the machine seem smart.

FR: So we haven’t reached computational consciousness, a computer with sentience?

JL: The sentience of others is always a matter of faith. There’s no way to be certain about whether someone else has interior experience in the way that you do. I presume that you do, but I can’t know. There is a mystical or almost supernatural element in which we have internal experience — or at least I do, but I can’t make you believe I do. You have to just believe on your own that I do. That faith is a very precious thing and there’s no absolute argument that you should or shouldn’t believe that another person has interior experience, or sentience or consciousness, or that a machine does. Faith is not fundamentally rational, but there is a pragmatic argument, as I keep on repeating, to placing your faith in other people instead of machines. If you care about people at all, if you want people to survive, you have to place your faith in the sentience of them instead of in machines as a pragmatic matter, not as a matter of absolute truth.

FR: Is the only distinction between human and machine sentience, then, a faith in the power of the human soul versus the fact that that computer is just amalgamating information?

JL: It’s a matter of faith that has pragmatic implications. Just to say something is a matter of faith doesn’t mean that the choice of faith is entirely arbitrary, because it can be pragmatic as well. So, if not believing in people increases the chance that people will be harmed, I think the same is the case with this technology. Not believing that machines are the same as people increases the chance that people will be harmed. Cumulatively, we should believe in people over computers, but that’s not an absolute argument based on logic or empiricism, which I don’t think is available to us. There’s a bit of a skyhook thing here, like the problem of “why should you stay alive instead of committing suicide?” It’s applied to the whole species: “Why should we continue this human project; why does it matter?”

I’ve come to something that’s a little bit like the argument attributed to Pascal — you might as well believe in God, just in case it’s real and there’s heaven and hell. I don’t buy that particular argument; I’m not concerned about heaven or hell. However, I do think that the continuation of us in this timeline, in this world, and this physicality, is something I’d like to commit to. I think we might be something special. And so in that way, I’d like to apply faith to us and give us a chance, and that does involve the demoting of computers. But when we demote computers, we can use them better. Demoting AI allows us to not mystify, and that allows us paths to explaining it, to controlling it, to understanding it, to using it as a scientific exploration of what language is. There’s so many reasons to demote it that are practical, that the faith in it as a mystical being just actually seems kind of stupid and wasteful and pathetic to me.

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FR: But can we demote something that has potentially more power than us already? Most of us are already subordinated to computers in our everyday lives.

JL: People are capable of being self-destructive, idiotic, wasteful and ridiculous, with or without computers. However, we can do it a little more efficiently with computers because we can do anything a little more efficiently with computers. I’ve been very publicly concerned about the dehumanising elements of social media algorithms. The algorithms on social media that have caused elevated outbreaks of things that always existed in humanity, but there’s just a little more: vanity, paranoia, irritability. And that increment is enough to change politics, to change mental health, especially in impoverished circumstances around the world. It’s just made the world worse incrementally. The algorithms on social media are really dumbass-simple — there’s really not a lot there. And so I think your framing of it as more powerful than us is incorrect. I think it’s really just dumb stuff. It’s up to us to decide how it fits into human society.

The capacity for human stupidity is great, and, as I keep on saying, it’s only a matter of faith whether we call it human stupidity or machine intelligence. They’re indistinguishable logically. So I think the threat is real. I’m not anti-doomist. I just ask us to consider: what is the way of thinking that improves our abilities and improves our thinking — that gives us more options, gives us more clarity? And it involves demoting the computer.

There’s a lot of work to do technically. We can create explanations for what so-called “machine intelligence” is doing by tracing it back to its human origins. There have been a number of very famous instances of chatbots getting really weird with people. But the form of explanation should be to say, “Actually, the bot was, at that point, parodying something from a soap opera, or from some fanfiction.” That’s what’s going on. And in my opinion, there should be an economy in the future where, if there’s really valuable output from an AI, the people whose contributions were particularly important should actually get paid. I believe there’s a new extension to society that’s very creative and interesting, rather than this dismal prospect of everybody being put out of work. Transparency in mash-up technology can only come from revealing the people whose expressions were mashed-up. But if policies are based on the idea that we now have this new “supernatural artificial entity”, there’s no sensible way to resolve that.

FR: You didn’t sign the open letter demanding a hiatus in accelerating AI development, which was signed by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Was that not appealing to you as an idea?

JL: My reason for not signing it is that it fundamentally still mystified the technology. It took the position that it’s a new alien entity. When you think it’s an alien entity, there’s no way to know how to help. If you have an alien entity, what regulation is good? How do you define harm? As much as the GPT programmes impress people, they don’t actually represent ideas. We don’t know how to define these things, all we can do is mash things up so that they conform with classifiers.

FR: So they can’t do the philosophical work of thinking?

JL: They could mash-up philosophers in ways that might be interesting. If you say, “Write an essay as if Descartes and Derrida collaborated”, something might come out that’s provocative or interesting. But there’s no actual representation inside there. And getting provocative or interesting mash-ups is useful, but you can’t set policy by it because there’s not actually any meaning. There’s no fundamental representation inside these things and we just have to accept that as reality. We don’t know what meaning is and we can’t represent meaning.

FR: Your argument relies on the idea that if we define this technology differently, then we will have more power over it, or at least we’ll have more understanding of it. Are we not just self-comforting here with a rhetoric about it being a human technology rather than something we can’t control?

JL: I don’t think that’s the case. It’s proposing a more concrete and clarified path of action. It’s very demanding of people and it’s not comforting at all. It demands that everybody involved on a technical or regulatory level do much more than they have. I suspect many people would prefer the mystical version because it actually lets them off the hook. The mystical version just lets you sit there and apprehend, and express awe at our own inventions. What I’m talking about demands action. It’s not comforting and it shouldn’t be.

FR: Do you think humans need to take more accountability for their part in developing a potentially malign form of AI? If it does go off the rails, wouldn’t it be because we’ve set it up to do so?

JL: One comparison is the disasters with the Boeing 737 Max. The flight correction module in it was the source of two terrible air disasters in which hundreds of people died. But what actually happened involved the way they sold it, the way they withheld information about it (depending on how much you paid them), the way they trained people for it, the way the documentation was created. It’s the surrounding stuff that created the disaster, not the core capability, which probably has been useful in general. In the same way, with this large-model AI, it’s not the thing itself, it’s the surrounding material that determines whether it’s malignant or not.

When you deploy it, under the assumption that it’s an alien new intelligence — that it’s a new entity with its own point of view that should be treated as a creature instead of a tool — you greatly increase the chances of a scenario similar to the one that that befell passengers on the Boeing planes. I think that’s a real possibility. The malignancy is in the surrounding material, not in the core technology, and that’s extremely important to understand. I don’t think anybody has claimed that the flight path correction module shouldn’t have existed. I think what people are saying is that the pilots should have been well-informed, well-trained, and the ability to control it should have always been included, not only for those who paid more. And if you have chatbots, and you tell people, “This is an intelligent companion, you should be able to date it, you should be able to trust it”, then the chances of something really bad happening increase.

FR: Isn’t the main worry then that this sort of technology might fall into the hands of someone who has malign intent against a group or country. I’m thinking particularly about the situation in Ukraine.

JL: Russia has one of the worst records on misusing the internet and algorithms. It’s documented that Russia created enormous numbers of fake accounts, of fake bots, in order to sow divisions within the US. And of course, it’s attempting those things in Ukraine. I worry a little bit more about China, because Russia doesn’t quite have the resources to pull off very large-model projects right now. It’s not that easy to do — you need huge computational resources. So I worry a little bit about China using, to be very blunt, data from TikTok on the morning of a Taiwan invasion or something like that. That’s imaginable. I’ve talked to a lot of people in the Chinese world, and I think almost all are actually much more conscientious and better-intentioned than we might imagine, but there’s always somebody in any country in any situation. I do worry about it, and the antidote to it is universal clarity, context, transparency, which can only come about by revealing people, since revealing ideas is impossible because we don’t know what an idea is.

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FR: We’ve established though that we already live with artificial intelligence. How has that already changed us?

JL: Our principal encounter with algorithms so far has been in the construction of the feeds we receive in our apps. It’s in whether we get credit or not and other things like that — whether we get admitted to university or not, or whether we’re sent to prison, depending on what country we’re talking about. Algorithms have transformed us. I would hope that the criticisms of them that I and many others — Tristan Harris, Shoshana Zuboff — have put forward have illuminated and clarified the issues with algorithms in the previous generation. But what could happen with the new AI is a worse version of all of that. Given how bad that was, I don’t think the doomerists are entirely wrong. I think we could confuse ourselves into extinction with our own code. But, once again, in order for us to achieve that level of stupidity, we have to believe overly in the intelligence of the software, and I think we have a choice.

FR: You’re a composer as well as a computer scientist. Do you think that there is going to be a shift in the way in which we prioritise organic or manmade art?

JL: We are entering a world of what I call “data dignity”. A musician might provide music directly, or might provide antecedent music that’s mashed-up within an algorithm, but that musician is still known and credited. And we’ve seen that already for decades now — somebody might provide the beats, somebody else might provide samples, etc. There’s already this sense of construction and mash-up, especially in hip-hop, but also just in pop music lately. That has not destroyed musicians, not as long as it’s acknowledged and transparent. I think, as with Boeing, it’s the surrounding material. If we choose to use mash-up algorithms to hide the people from whom the antecedent stuff came from, then we do damage. But the thing doing the damage is hiding ourselves, not the algorithm itself, which is actually just a simple dumb thing. I think there are a lot of good things about an algorithmic mash-up culture in the future. Every new instance of automation, instead of putting people out of work, could be thought of as the platform for a new creative community.

FR: Won’t that dull our eyes to the beauty of real art and culture?

JL: What I see in culture is, as long as people understand what’s going on, they find their way. Synthesisers haven’t killed violins. There was a fear that they would, and as long as people know the difference, as long as there’s honesty and transparency about what’s going on, we can go through seasons of things being a little more artificial and then less so. That becomes a cultural dynamic and I trust people to handle that well.

FR: I might sound a bit like someone booing at Bob Dylan going electric, but, if you take Spotify, it’s almost totally wiped out independent music. There have been major technological advances in music that have obliterated creativity at those lower, more maverick levels of the industry.

JL: You’re absolutely correct about Spotify. In fact, at the dawn of the file-copying era, I objected very strenuously to this idea. There was a cultural movement about open source and open culture, which was stealthily funded by Google and other tech companies, and the Pirate Parties in Europe. People thought everything should be a mash up and we didn’t need to know who the musician was and they didn’t need to have bargaining power in a financial transaction. That was a gigantic wrong turn, and it was a wrong turn that we can’t afford to repeat with AI because it becomes amplified so much that it could really destroy technology. I completely agree with you about Spotify but, once again, the availability of music to move through the internet was not the problem. It’s the surrounding material. What really screwed over musicians was not the core capability, but this idea that you build a business model on demoting the musician, demoting the person, and instead elevating the hub or the platform. And so we can’t afford to keep on doing that. I think that is the road that leads to our potential extinction through insanity.

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FR: It sounds like the answer to a lot of these problems comes down to human greed?

JL: I think humans are definitely responsible. Greed is one aspect of it, but it’s not all of it. I don’t necessarily understand all human failings within myself or anybody else, but I do feel we can articulate ways to approach this that are more practical, more actionable and more hopeful. That has to be our first duty. I think this question of diagnosing each other and saying, “This person has womb envy”, or whatever has some utility, but not a lot, and can inspire reactions that aren’t helpful. So I don’t want to emphasise that too much. I want to emphasise an approach, which we can call “data dignity”, and which opens options for us and makes things clearer.

FR: What is the best case scenario if we follow that route?

JL: What I like about the new algorithms is that they help us collaborate better. You could have a new and more flexible kind of a computer, where you can ask it to change the way you present things to match your mood or your cognition under your own control, so that you’re less subservient to the computer. But another thing you can do is you can say, “I have written one essay, my friend’s written another essay, they’re sort of different. Can you mash them up 12 different ways so we can read the mash-ups?” And this is not based on ideas, it’s based on the dumb math of combining words as they appeared, in order, in context. But you might be able to learn new options for consilience between different points of view that way, which could be extraordinary. Many people have been looking at the humanistic AI world, the human-centred AI world, and asking, “Could we actually use this to help us understand potential for cooperation and policy that we might not see?”

FR: So, oddly, it might break us out of our tribes and offer some human connection?

JL: It’s like if a therapist says, “Try using different words and see if that might change how you think about something.” It’s not directly addressing our thoughts, but on the surface level it actually can help us. But it’s ultimately up to us, and there’s no guarantee it’ll help, but I believe it will in many cases. It can help us improve our research, it can help us improve a lot of our practices, and, as long as we acknowledge the people whose ideas are being matched up by the programmes, it can help us even broaden participation in the economy, instead of throwing people out of work as so often foretold. I think we can use this stuff to our advantage, and it’s worth it to try. If we try to use it well, the most awful ideas about it turning into the Matrix or Terminator, become vanishingly unlikely, as long as we treat it as a human project instead of an alien intelligence.

Cybele’s sidekick and her priests are just one example of the castrated divinities, and mortal men, who appear throughout history and culture, from the sun-god Osiris in ancient Egypt to Freud’s more metaphorical “castration anxiety”. And this figure — and fear — lurks even in the modern world.

A rash of “trend” pieces has sought to encourage men to sterilise themselves — even, in one case, filming the actual surgery. Along with stories about chemicals destroying sperm counts and laboratories creating embryos without sperm, it’s no wonder some men might feel a little paranoid — all the more so since the vasectomy “trend” is clearly manufactured by a PR agency. It’s not strictly castration, but the two are routinely conflated in the popular mind. And this perception is expressed in increasingly colourful terms: for example, Tucker Carlson’s recent documentary, The End of Men, featured plenty of chaps who seem certain that something like a campaign to persuade men to self-castrate is at least metaphorically under way.

These same men often rail against a perceived feminine culture that stifles masculine vigour via mechanisms such as safetyism, victim culture and hatred of hierarchy. And with women now a majority in sectors such college admissions, journalism, teaching and HR, and even scaling the heights of the US military-industrial complex, it could indeed be that this increasingly palpable presence is changing public life in ways that are less than congenial to at least some men.

But the meanings of the castration complex are, well, complex. This most brutal un-manning has carried many meanings in different times and places. Xenophon writes about eunuchs as guards in ancient Persian harems, while the theme of (forcible) sexual continence was echoed in the early Christian era by Justin Martyr, who approvingly recounts a young man’s petition to a Roman prefect for permission to be castrated, so as to prove that Christians were as sexually chaste as they claimed to be. The Byzantine empire prized them as generals, because their lack of progeny meant they had no complicated ties to rival aristocratic families.

And if castration anxiety is rearing its head again, the underlying driver today may be more technology than ideology. When Freud described the “castration complex”, he was living through an age that saw perhaps the most drastic ever displacement of brute physical strength: an overwhelmingly male attribute. Thanks to technology, as Marx observes in Das Kapital, a male labour force could increasingly be replaced in factories with a less physically strong one comprising cheaper women and children.

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By Mary Harrington

Perhaps the fear Freud describes as universal was more historically specific than he thought. Strikingly, the first wave of industrialisation in Russia, from the 18th century onward, also saw the emergence of the first castration cult since antiquity. Calling themselves the Skoptsy — the “Castrated Ones” — this heretical Christian sect conducted religious services reminiscent of the rites of Cybele, while adherents of both sexes amputated all visible primary sex characteristics.

Since the Skoptsy were stamped out by Stalin in the early 20th century, the digital age has replaced the industrial one. In turn, this has arguably accelerated the obsolescence not just of men, but of biological sex, as an ever-growing swathe of work is now knowledge-based and thus equally open to both sexes, while more and more of us socialise in a disembodied way online. And in this context, the interactions of both sexes are long on talking and short on physical violence. Online, that is, both men and women are forced to socialise in a feminine key.

More than two millennia ago, the castrated figure of Attis was used by poets to convey ambivalence about masculine sexuality. For Catullus, Attis is driven to self-castration by Veneris nimio odio, “an excessive loathing of sex”. Ovid, meanwhile, characterises Attis along similar lines — except in this account, Attis is punished for seeking full adult sexuality. In his Metamorphoses, Attis promises Cybele that he’ll remain a boy — but when he breaks this by making love to a nymph, she drives him mad and he self-castrates.

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So as the digital transition forces ever more social interaction into a disembodied, “post-gender” mode, perhaps it makes sense that we’re dusting off Attis and Cybele again. When all our social lives are virtual-only, how is any of us to make sense of our relationship to normal human sexuality?

As our technology lurches into the new and unsettling terrain of AI and biotechnology, echoes of the Skoptsy and the rites of Cybele are once again being heard — along with an increasingly tormented relation to normal human desire and procreation. The “nullo” subculture, for example, seek to “nullify” all visible sex characteristics: icons include the Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama, who cooked and served his penis and testicles for a paying private banquet in 2012, garnished with (what else?) button mushrooms.

Clinics now offer “Nullification” cosmetic surgeries as a “gender-expansive” option. And if you don’t want to pay for bespoke junk, the internet will provide: earlier this year, a basement flat in Finsbury Park was raided and several men arrested, following discovery that a man known as “The Eunuch Maker” was livestreaming consensual male castrations for a paying audience and promoting the events via Twitter.

According to some corners of the weird internet, this isn’t a disaster but our post-human future coming into view. The notorious, pseudonymous 2018 Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper argues that “technocapital” is an accelerating, self-replicating, and increasingly autonomous process to bring about an ultimate victory of the feminine over the masculine principle, with “a return back to the ocean, back to a sexless, genderless slime swarmachine”.

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And while this is unlikely to be literally true, the more respectable WEF-funded futurists are also now wondering now whether runaway technology could bring about the end of humanity (at least, of most of it). Yuval Noah Harari recently warned that because “the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology” such as bioengineering and AI, we may end up with a situation where “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population”. While this future is less luridly rendered than Gender Acceleration’s “sexless, genderless slime swarmachine”, a scenario in which the human majority is dismissed as functionally irrelevant biomass is every bit as dystopian.

But even if escalating uncertainty about runaway technology were driving a few men to film their own neutering, whether on TikTok or the dark web, we probably shouldn’t jump from this to predicting the abolition of sex. We should take seriously the pathological symptoms accompanying our turbulent times — but only as pathological symptoms. Reports of men’s demise are as greatly exaggerated as progressive claims that we can somehow do without sex dimorphism.

And this is because conditions for a dreaded (or heralded) triumph of the technofeminine are very unevenly distributed. For one thing, most women have beloved male partners, relatives, friends and children, and most well-adjusted people of either sexes are revolted by the idea of one sex achieving total victory over the other.

And even those so online they’re immune to ordinary reality-checks may, in due course, be confronted by a more visceral one, should the world grow more unsettled. Throughout history, it’s usually been men who have defended order (and their loved ones), sometimes at great risk to their own safety. And the decades since the turn of the millennium have seen two international financial crises, terrorist attacks, a return of great-power politics, a global pandemic and rocketing inflation. This rolling crisis shows no signs of abating. And only peaceful and prosperous societies have the luxury of pretending we can do without brute force as a guarantor of peace and order.