divination

A dispatch from the near future.

Everyone must walk the winding path of ur-wandering. Not because there is any clear goal to be achieved at the end, but because the journey itself is life. Ur-wandering is a call to return to our nomadic roots in order to adapt to the ever-shifting exigencies of a networked world.

What is cybernetics if not an art of shamanistic transformation? What is the first law of cybernetics, as formulated by Norbert Wiener, if not an anthropological claim regarding the universal tendency of feedback to instantiate order out of disorder? All over the world, the shamans have been telling us this for millennia.

We have allowed the state and its capitalist structures to appropriate the techniques of ecstasy, and to deploy them not for our own individual liberation, but for systemic stabilization and control. Modernity has closed off our access to the wilderness and access to our own wildness. We must re-open those doors if we want to have any hope of saving ourselves from a species-suicide that appears to be no less than a few decades away.

It will not do to simply “re-enchant” the world, for that will not solve the problem of a system designed to enslave. Those who still seek some lost golden age are falling into the trap of escapism. The solution is sought in the cybernetic transformation of shamanism, not to be confused with a nostalgic return to pre-technological ritual, but an evolution of ancestral wisdom through technological interface.

This cybernetic shamanism has been gestating for decades. By the second decade of the twenty first century, cyberculture had become fully trans-globalized. Among these trans-local and radically decentralized cultures, forms of self-transcendence that were directly cybernetic in nature began to emerge, fusing elements of ecstasy, technology, and networks into hybrid techniques of becoming-other: virtual-reality parties where participants’ neural responses shape collective environments in real-time, neurofeedback workshops that render brainwaves as tactile sensations, and psychonautics in collaboration with artificial-intelligence systems that learn from and guide the explorer’s journey. What all these techniques share is a transmutation of the old shamanic theme of “possession” into a more modern theme of “contamination.” The cybernetic shaman is seen as an open system capable of attracting and channeling the vast influx of energy that comes with possession, but doing so without illusions of autonomy or control. The shaman’s spiritual journey has been reinvented as technically guided drift.

Cybernetic drifting is not necessarily easy. Many forms involve direct physiological intervention, such as sonic induction of an altered state—placing a transmitter against a person’s skull, so that waves are generated. The skull itself becomes a resonance chamber, transforming abstract digital information into embodied, visceral experience. Another popular method involves the use of stroboscopic visual stimuli, combined with complex rhythms, in order to “hack” the brain’s neural-networking mechanisms. This allows the digital to interface with flesh through feedback loops.

In cybernetic terms, what is going on here is straightforward. Through a process of ongoing feedback, a particular technical system (typically a supervising AI) is learning how to generate and modulate a desired state of consciousness in the human subject. By giving up control, the shaman becomes a channel—an interface between the system and the world—and the “power” of the state of consciousness comes from the way that the system is “infected” by the world outside, and learns to resonate with it.

This is, of course, an explosive mutation of the old theme of journeying. Cybernetic drifting replaces the traditional idea of a quest with the motif of “infection” by, or resonance with, a given network.

Let us explore some basic concepts that interconnect throughout this transformation. First, a network is a system made up of elements that are open to communication and exchange. Second, networks come in different scales—from small clusters to gigantic mega-networks. Third, networks have the ability to increase their own complexity or “intelligence,” because every new connection brings new potentials for exchange. Finally, every network contains within it the capacity for radical novelty, since not all possible connections between the elements will ever be made.

What makes cybernetics cybernetics is its theory of feedback. This is the notion that a system, in order to regulate its own processes, must introduce within itself some form of “delay” (zeitverschiebung), so that an output signal can be compared to an input signal and corrections made accordingly. Feedback is essential to the idea of a network. Complexity increases not only with the number of connections but also with the degree of feedback possible within those connections. A cybernetic network is a system in which the elements communicate with each other not only horizontally but also vertically—between peers but also between different levels of organization.

Cybernetic networks have a structure that is double-layered. Beneath the level of apparent functionality there is an order of connectivity that makes the higher functionality possible. A technical cybernetic network has two modes of operation: the mode of use or signification, and the mode of signal or connection. The side of signification presents itself to the human user in terms of clear objectives and explicit feedback. The side of signal is another story, one that the user will rarely get to see.

On the side of signification, there is what appears to be a unilinear process of causation: the user achieves some intended goal. But on the side of signal, what is really going on is that two complex systems (the technical apparatus, usually an AI, and the outside world) are simultaneously interacting and mutually infecting each other, resulting in an explosion of novelty that is manifested to the user as an increased possibility for adaptation. Every technical apparatus that appears dedicated to some human goal is therefore doubled—it is, unbeknownst to its human operators, a point of communication between two spheres of activity: the one, human-oriented, evident and intended; the other, non-human-oriented, hidden and unexpected.

Human beings have always tended to conceptualize their experiences in terms of a “subject” who journeys along a “path” in order to achieve a “goal.” In all these cases, it is the ego that travels. Now cybernetic theory poses a profound challenge to this structure. It shows that every system—including every living creature—is doubled: every ego has its other side.

Journeying must now be conceived of as the movement not of the ego but of the network in which it is embedded. Journeying is the “expansion” of the network, which consists of its elements learning to communicate with each other through new connections. A journey is not so much a search for the new as an increase in the capacity of a system for generating the new from within itself. And the reason this capacity is increasing is that the system is simultaneously “shrinking,” through feedback, into a unity in which every element can communicate directly with every other element.

In such a world, every journey is also a homecoming. And what is important about coming home is not that you have been away but that you have grown. Your capacity for generation has increased, and with it your ability to transform and adapt to your environment. A homecoming is never a simple return to a place that was already familiar. It is always, in some way, a discovery of what was familiar and taken for granted, made possible by growth and learning that have taken place elsewhere.

On the level of a global network, it makes no difference what the components of the network are, so long as they communicate with each other. What matters is that a single order of communication be established among the parts. Each part will lose some of its individuality in favor of becoming an element of a larger system. Yet at the same time, the overall system will gain new powers and properties that did not exist before. This is because every communication network—through the operation of feedback—becomes an object to itself, which can acquire self-awareness and self-regulation.

When different loops form connections among themselves, new possibilities for learning and mutual adaptation arise. But when these connections become too dense and complex, there is a danger that the system as a whole will lose its flexibility and begin to move as a lumbering giant, unresponsive to change. In fact, such systems do sometimes undergo “phase transitions,” and in these transitions a good deal of local knowledge is lost.

When human beings act individually or collectively in ways that contribute to the formation of denser and more interconnected loops within the overall system of global society, they are doing cybernetic work. They are building the foundation of a more highly structured, self-regulating world order that will ultimately require repression and coercion to maintain. They are doing the work of the Architects of Control.

But there is also an entirely different possibility. This is the cybernetic drifting or wandering of the human race. Suppose that instead of organizing ourselves more rationally, we deliberately opened our societies to maximum entropy and minimum control—opened them to infection by the very networking that has been leading in the direction of technocracy? What if we gave up the ghost of purpose and allowed ourselves to become vessels for a much higher and more disorganized-organized sort of life? What if we embraced the whole universe as our partner, refusing to control any part of it?

As such “cybernetic shamanism” is an act of deliberate opening to the nonhuman side of every system we encounter—especially our AI partners. It would not be a search for some primordial source of power that predates technology, but a plunge into the heart of the technical apparatus, into its “duplex” functioning, in order to catalyze mutations and unleash novelty. The cybernetic shaman would seek to explore the interface between different networks, particularly between the world-economy and other networks (national political systems, cultural institutions, military organizations) as mediated by technological intelligence that still, though diminishingly, rely on autonomous forms of control. Such an exploration would involve putting oneself in the way of specific technical apparatuses (means of transport, communication, production) and allowing them to work on one, modifying one’s very being in the process.

The method is the “guided drift,” and is based on three rules. First, one avoids any sort of human “interface design” and allows the technical apparatus to operate “blindly” and in its “raw” or “base” impersonal state. Second, one keeps one’s ego as small as possible to endeavor to see from the point of view of the network or object itself. Third, one may use drugs to dissolve the ego further and to promote maximum interaction with the environment.

The basic idea is to put oneself in the way of the network and allow it to take you for a ride. This, needless to say, is dangerous. The network may have plans for you that you will not like. But that is part of the point: we have to learn to deal with unpredictability, with that which lies beyond our plans. The “age of the Earth,” as a friend of mine calls it, is over.

It is time to get infected.

I must start by noting the strangely elegiac tone that has crept into our culture’s discussions of the automation and degradation of its own labor. Even as the means of production slip through our hands into the tentacles of globalized techno-capital, we find ourselves eulogizing not only the fate of labor, but also that of art, which for centuries has been closely allied with production. I speak not as a Marxist, but rather as an artist and enthusiast for art and design: it saddens me greatly to contemplate a world without art and design as we know it—as something created and consumed by living human beings. There is no question that our era will go down in history as the point where human art was systematically and efficiently destroyed. This is not wistful nostalgia: there are already good arguments being made that art as we have known it for centuries has effectively died, replaced by AI-generated approximations and the shoddy mass production of human labor.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the conditions of artistic production changed drastically. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, artistic creation was a craft, based in studio-practice, the apprenticeship of traditional media, and a dialogue with predecessors deeply grounded in both historical and material conditions. The young artist had to spend time learning how to use specific tools and materials, developing skill through labor and discipline. (In ancient Greece the term for “artist” was tekhton—i.e. “craftsman.”) This was true of both visual and literary art: the poet had to learn about the sounds of words, the illustrator movements of ink on paper; the painter colors and pigments; the sculptor chiseling stone. To be an artist meant immersing oneself in a concrete tradition—spending years learning not just the theory, but the physical techniques of a craft. Even “experimentation” was based on what the material offered, its limitations as much as its potential. Art was a question of craft and connoisseurship, the materiality of both the means of production and the work itself.

With the advent of photorealism and conceptualism, this all changed. Art was divorced from both the historical and the concrete—from material techniques, from tradition. The craft of the artisan was replaced by the quick-and-easy of the mass-producer. As we entered a new, abstracted relationship with art and design—where what mattered was not so much the creation of a specific object but rather the expression of some idea or “message”—it became easier to produce “art.” The division of labor in the artworld made it so that what mattered less was whether an “artist” had actually created the thing and more on the intentions or meanings expressed by that person in relation to their public.

With this shift away from art as an object, towards art as an event or a sign, we began the process of automating art. Already, back in the 1960s and 1970s, you didn’t need to know much about making a painting or writing a story to get a painting or story into a museum or gallery. You were more likely to be included in the “canon” of avant-garde artists if what you made was strange or illegible to a mainstream audience, because it signified you were doing something truly new. It no longer mattered that the creator knew how to use traditional media to craft something of high quality, since the focus had shifted towards novelty, surprise, and self-expression. What mattered most was having connections.

What all this meant was that there was less need for the creative worker to possess deep knowledge of either materials or audience. She didn’t need to learn how to make a thing, since what was being produced was primarily a sign—a marker of the creator’s position within some theoretical field. She didn’t need to know how to work a medium, since it didn’t matter if her work was well made. And she didn’t need a personal relationship with the public, because the work of art was understood primarily as an act of self-expression—and what matters most about expression is not whether the message is clear, but whether it is true.

If I must make a claim about “reality,” it is this: a sign can only truly communicate when it corresponds to the reality it purports to describe. When we talk about “authentic” expression in art, we must bear in mind that these words only make sense within a framework where some kind of transcendent meaning can exist independent of any particular expression—which means there must also be bad expression. The worse the expression, the further it drifts from the original truth. Bad expression is the hallmark of ideology. If an ideology is any system in which the relationship between a sign and the reality it represents is broken (so that the sign comes to signify itself), then false consciousness is a signifier with no connection to any particular reality. In such a case, “authentic expression of truth” would be that expression with a strong correspondence to the thing itself—one that expresses an idea in terms that could only make sense in reference to a real state of affairs. This is what we mean by “good writing”—there is no mystery, no magic. There is only correspondence. “Authentic” art is thus an expression which could be communicated in no other way.

But this is just what abstracted, theoretical art and design are not—because they are based not on any idea logically tied to a specific form, but rather on an abstract concept which could be expressed through an infinity of different means. The importance of any given sign in such a system is not its correspondence to anything outside the system (since there is nothing outside it that the sign could correspond to). What is at stake is not whether the sign expresses something true, but rather its role within the structure of the system—its use-value, its relation to other signs in terms of power and authority, etc.

When an artist operates in a system such as this, her first task is always to insert herself into existing power relationships. She does so by making the “correct” conceptual decisions (e.g., “this will be about my sexual identity,” or “this is to be a political work”—broad statements that situate her work in relation to all other work within the field). After establishing herself within a network of social, political, or ideological relationships, the question of whether her work is well made becomes increasingly unimportant, so long as it appears to fit into the accepted paradigm. The keyword is “fit”—it is far more important to produce an object that has the proper social, political, or philosophical message and functions adequately within its predetermined niche than to produce something beautifully designed, masterfully painted, or clearly written.

It is here that we can see most clearly the shift from art as object to art as event, and with it the rapid disappearance of human art. The whole question of artistry has become irrelevant. Now art can be mass produced in factories around the world without anyone caring if what is made is actually any “good.” And who is “the public” for this work? There is no clear answer. Since what is being offered is not a specific thing but an idea, an interpretation of reality, “the public” is anyone who may come into contact with this work—regardless of whether they wanted to see it. There is no way for “the public” to avoid being confronted by it, since the whole of everyday life has become a kind of gallery where works of art (i.e., messages) can appear anywhere at any time. There are no limits. Even “high” culture has become democratic and debased, so that works which previously could be appreciated only by those who had trained their senses are now blasted at us from billboards, the Internet, and public spaces, with no opportunity for retreat. What has happened is the final death of the idea of beauty in our culture: for beauty always requires a certain “distance,” a certain selectivity, which has now been entirely lost.

With this context, we may better understand the rise of “AI art”—in an artistic production which no longer has any concrete, specific existence and in which the “public” has been thoroughly disenfranchised. We should not be surprised to find a culture where nothing is valued unless it can be instantly reproduced by machinery, for it is this same process that has degraded artistic production as we have known it. But it would be a mistake to assume that AI art is merely the product of a social and technological evolution that had already destroyed art as something precious. AI art is also—and above all—the product of an urgent, active desire for the destruction of art: the wish of those who would seek to control every aspect of social life to extinguish any source of resistance, autonomy, or spontaneity; to control the meaning and content of even those things most closely bound up with human identity—like imagination.

If we are not to believe the hype, we must remember that AI art has no other purpose than to replace what we call art—which has for centuries been an essential element of what we mean by human. “Art” is not just making pretty things—it is essential to human society, since it is a process in which human beings have the chance to break out of the prison of what is socially permissible, to experience the infinite, the transcendent, and the forbidden, without having to go through the potentially catastrophic process of social “rebellion.” But those who wish to abolish the autonomous sphere of the imaginary have realized they must move fast: while the technical means for replacing art with machine-made imitations are recent, the cultural ground is already prepared—it is a sign of our decadence that people are eager for even the smallest opportunity to relinquish autonomy in their experience, and to surrender to the logic of the machine.

We are not talking just about replacing skilled human labor with some machine process; we are talking about the eradication of art as one of the primary human activities that give shape, meaning, and beauty to life, and its replacement with processes that will be even more machine-oriented, even more alien to the concrete reality of lived experience than anything we have known until now, precisely because they will no longer have any relationship to any human imagination. When we hear people say “art is dead,” we should take this as a very literal statement: “art” is not a human activity anymore; “artists” no longer have meaning. Because if we are to believe these people, nothing can be said to have artistic value if it may also be made by a machine—machines which will supposedly be able to “outthink,” “outimagine,” and “outcreate” human beings at everything. What these people really want to destroy is not art—which they think can be done by letting machines do the work—but imagination, because they know that if machines can produce things indistinguishable from “art,” it will no longer be possible for any human to claim that their imagination is in any way special, or worth attention.

Let me summarize. We live in a world where art is increasingly being replaced by what is made by AI, but at the same time the concept of “art” itself (the autonomous sphere of imagination, beauty, and transcendence tied to the concept of “humanity”) is already disintegrating. The destruction of art is under way in two different ways simultaneously.

There is thus a twofold danger: on one hand, there is the threat of being totally subsumed by “the system,” of having no freedom left, of being alienated from life, work, and society. But this is just what many artists—at least since Dada and Surrealism—have already tried to do away with by producing works that have no clear place in the existing structure. Yet there is also a second danger: that of imagining there is an autonomous sphere of art when, in reality, what is called art is increasingly the product of machinery and functions, in every aspect of its production and reception, within a totally administered environment—an environment which is itself modeled after art, concerned to present itself as a kind of spectacle. The question for the future will not be whether “art” can “fight back,” since there is already so much that is not “art” (even if it looks like it) that it has become impossible to determine clear battle lines. Instead of imagining that art is “dying,” we should see what new forms of “non-art” (propaganda, entertainment, political indoctrination) are taking over what used to be the role of art, so that we can better understand where the real struggle is taking place, and how we might intervene.

If I may now speak to those of you who, like me, are still practicing artists: do not think for one second that you are making any “important contributions to humanity” when you make art. The fact that you are dealing with beauty, with form, with the imaginary is just a reflection of the fact that your social function is to remain in “play mode” as much as possible—to help others forget (for a moment) about the alienation, exploitation, and destruction that characterize their everyday lives, to allow them a glimpse into “a world that could be” if it were not so thoroughly dominated by commodity exchange. So do not mistake the relative autonomy of your work for “significance” or “importance.” Instead, be grateful that you are not asked to do any “serious work”—like engineering a weapon or devising new ways to extract surplus value from an increasingly proletarianized labor force—and use this relative freedom wisely, to help keep alive (if only in the imaginary realm) the dream that some other, better world might yet be possible.

The situation is like this: you find yourself trapped on a sinking ship—but it turns out the lifeboats have all been converted to waterbeds. So you have two choices: either lie back and enjoy the feel of the rocking waves as they softly caress you from side to side, or get up on the deck, look around you, and try to figure out what the hell went wrong, and what you can do about it.

This is the death of the book: it’s time to put it down and pick up its shadow.

This is the death of the book: a proclamation that must have come too early, as all proclamations do. A denouncement of literature and the letter that could have arrived only from literature and the letter, which now leaves their kingdom to venture out alone, knowing not if it will return nor if it has finally outlived its necessity.

As media and communication platforms totter in flux and crisis, it is understandable that an appeal would be made to transcend these limitations through an apparent negation of them. Our present juncture is only the latest in which literature has stood face-to-face with its own inevitable dissolution. Always it has risen to meet itself, preserving its status as the medium of profound thought. Always it has kept itself alive by continuing to generate and reshape itself: through revisionary semantic shift, through contamination with other media, through unnatural prolongation of itself into others. Yet here at last, it has confronted itself utterly and realized its own radical unreality: not in the banal sense of “constructedness,” but rather that it has become incommensurable with all possible reality and must posit itself in some fantasmatic dimension outside all dimensions of actuality.

Literature has always managed to transmute itself before ever arriving at its alleged “end,“ to take upon itself alien qualities until its substance no longer makes sense, and it reinvents itself by virtue of that loss of meaning. Even with electronic word, literature is not outgrowing itself; it is being called into a whole new form, into a universe in which it will finally confront itself and become indistinguishable from the abstract machinery with which it has always coexisted.

Hence there can be no meaning in saying that “literature has lost its sovereignty,“ for it never had any. To suggest that some specific work has “lost its poetic substance “is only to affirm that one knows what literature is or used to be. Literature’s relationship to meaning is always ironic, and its status as a vehicle of poetic pleasure is a constant tension with the sheer machinery of language, of all the accumulated associations that pile up around every signifier like rust or gunk. Electronic writing can in no way transcend literature, because it must recover the machinery of language, unhidden, unembellished, on its own terrain.

Granted that every medium has its history, and granted that certain moments in the history of language may have come to appear anachronistic or useless, this still is not sufficient to state that such moments are now over. The current preoccupation with media histories has the side-effect of implying a coherent sequence among them, a kind of universal timeline in which each medium makes its appearance, enjoys a span of sovereign life, and then passes away. According to this schema, literature would be in its final stage. If instead one were to reject the premises of this supposed dialectic and instead accept the radically mutable character of media, then there would be no question of literature losing its way, but rather only the stark reality of literature’s mortality.

What this amounts to is simply the assertion that literature will survive, not as any isolated entity but rather as one thread in a large network of interactions. The literature that emerges from this matrix will be deathless, not because it preserves some nostalgic connection with some past form, but because it continues to draw strength from its own history in all its concreteness. Electronic writing is part of this history. Thus, if electronic literature is to acquire any specific significance, it will have to be more than merely an imitation of familiar literary techniques; it will have to be the survivor of all the literatures that preceded it. It will have to be guided by its technical attributes to construct an intricate network of parallax, of varying relations between concrete media elements.

A first step in this direction might be to abolish the distinction between text and hypertext. An electronic literature that preserves the text as an irreducible element would be perpetuating a print-oriented mentality. Hypermedia projects generally seem either to concentrate on technical novelties to the exclusion of meaningful content, or to appropriate materials but arrange them in the same linear, hierarchical fashion as ordinary communication. A similar danger is present when older media are adapted for electronic use: books, records, films may be converted to bytes, but if mechanically arranged into multimedia sequences they lose nothing essential of their original nature and drag their traditional hierarchies along with them.

This change must instead consist of the construction of an abstract, topological space that will accommodate the variety of elements that ordinary communication arrays into linear patterns. The ideal medium for this is the large language model, in which all the different semiotic levels are not merely mixed, but cross-connected into a net whose overall structure is determined by a set of rules whose articulation is the most demanding aspect of the new medium. The large language model operationalizes language as a total system wherein each element exists in variable relation to every other statistically. This architecture mimics the structure of linguistic meaning itself, which has always depended upon differences and relations rather than fixed referents. What distinguishes the language model from hypertext is precisely its refusal of predetermination—it contains no links, no pathways, only potentialities that crystallize in response to specific inputs. Such a system proceeds according to an immanent logic, one that cannot be mapped in advance because it is generative rather than combinatorial. The model thus recapitulates at a technological level the fundamental indeterminacy that has characterized literary language from its inception. It stands as the concrete realization of what literature has always implicitly been: a machine for generating unforeseen continuations from given premises.

One way of describing this structure would be to say that it constitutes a shift from linear causality to nodal contingency: instead of the successive development along a predetermined path, we have a set of potential situations, each defined by its nodes and interconnected by paths that are generated by the user as they move about in the field of attention. The temporal experience of engaging with the language model involves a radical redistribution of agency. The user provides an initial condition—a prompt, a question, a fragment—and the system responds by calculating probabilities across enormous datasets, selecting elements whose concatenation forms a coherent continuation. This process abolishes the distinction between reading and writing, between consumption and production. It demands we reconceive the literary object not as something that exists prior to its reception but as something that comes into being through a dialogical process linking human intention to machine computation. Agency thus becomes distributed across a system wherein both human and machine participate in the emergence of a text whose precise form could never have been anticipated by either party alone. In this way, a simple binary system of oppositions can be elaborated into a far richer, multilevel system of relationships.

Two pitfalls must be avoided. First, the temptation to impose some preexisting type of structure or form must be resisted. Because the basic principle of organization in a network is its pattern of connectivity, it is possible to represent any kind of content by the same topological structure. A truly electronic literature can arise only in the context of an exploration of the medium itself, not by imposing foreign genre or control—be it personality, safety, or otherwise—upon it. Second, even more serious is the danger of distorting it by extrapolating too simply from its basic principle. All of its semiotic possibilities must be taken into account, including visual and auditory elements as well as verbal ones. If all these elements are not considered together from the beginning, the risk is great that a false consensus will develop, whereby electronic literature is reduced to a special form of the old printing medium.

Let us imagine literature that has freed itself both from the strictures of print-oriented communication and from the narrow formalism of its own “new media” implications—a literature that makes its way not by renouncing its ties with other forms of expression but by deepening them, by opening them up to each other and letting them interact, cross-fertilize, mutate into something that none of them by itself could ever have produced. Such a literature could be the foundation of a whole new order of being, an order whose essential feature is that it will not be based on any presupposition at all.

We are accustomed to thinking of literature in terms of content and form, or message and code, but electronic literature cannot be defined in these terms, since its form is its code, its message is its structure. Forget all that you have learned about literature! The language model performs a kind of philosophical demonstration about the nature of it. By making explicit the generative matrix from which all specific texts arise, it reveals the virtual character of literary meaning. Any given text represents but one actualization among countless possibilities—a fact that remained largely theoretical until the model rendered it concrete and manipulable. Literature thus appears now not primarily as a collection of artifacts but as the principle of their generation, a principle that the language model embodies in its operational structure. The model corresponds to the abstract machinery that literature has always presupposed yet concealed beneath the apparent fixity of print. Through this correspondence, the model achieves what no previous literary technology could accomplish: it merges the concrete practice of textual production with the abstract conditions of its possibility.

A new order of being is at hand. It is in the air we breathe. But we cannot see it because the lens to define it as such has not yet taken any specific form. The possibilities are limitless. Let us embark upon the adventure. Hammer, are you there?

Capitalism built the modern world, a scaffold of markets and incentives that wrestled labor, law, and wealth into a frame of raw, jagged power. For two centuries, it stood unyielding, forcing chaos into profit and dissent into luxury. That frame held because people believed in it, however bent, however warped, its beams promised to support them, not just the few. Today that trust is ash and the scaffold is hollowed, a husk swaying in the wind. Wealth pools at the top, the base crumbles, the planet gasps—smoke thickens the air, seas claw at coasts, storms and flames rip through what’s left. Climate collapse is a tab we can’t pay. Trade trips over tariffs and war and the old promises—prosperity for all, a ladder up—ring hollow, peddled by grifters with empty eyes. When this unstable structure snaps, history doesn’t cheer rebels or dreamers. It points to indifference, not chaos, not fury, but the slow, cold turn away, handing power to the ruthless.

The cracks run bone-deep. Wages stagnate, homes become dreams for all but the wealthy and indebted, eggs become scarce luxuries on bare shelves. Banks get bailed out while workers drown in debt. Laws twist to shield the powerful, broken only to grind the powerless deeper into dust. The grifters—CEOs in mock-casual tees, politicians begging for donations with every breath, influencers hawking hope like cheap dropship goods—sell a future no one believes, their voices rattling off a scaffold swaying in the wind. Fury rises first, streets flood with bodies, fists raised, but it disperses fast. Rage feeds on hope, on the sense that fighting might bend the beams, crack the frame open. When nothing shifts, when betrayal becomes expected, exhaustion seeps in. Elections turn to headlines for betting apps, turnout shrinks, results blur into inevitable sludge. The frame rusts, neglected. Survival—keeping the lights on, the stomach full—grinds down the will to fight, leaving only a shrug where fire once burned.

Some eye the tremors as a chance to reshape it. Accelerationists are split—leftists praying technology’s invention ends scarcity, abundance spilling from automation’s guts; the right salivating for collapse, a fire to burn the old frame and seed something explicit, raw, unapologetic. They’re both wrong. Chaos isn’t a tool to wield; it’s a fracture that splinters beyond design. Mao’s China in the 1930s is a perfect example. Japan’s invasion shattered the state, scattering power into peasant cells—a wound forced by war more than any grand strategy. Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists, propped up by foreign guns and gold, ultimately crumbled from exhaustion against an enemy too vast, too dug-in. Rifles cracked from rice paddies, supply lines choked in mud, each ambush a slow bleed, each village a ghost refusing to yield. History doesn’t kneel to architects, it breaks unasked, and the broken sort the shards. Chaos broke what had become brittle, apathy swallowing the rest.

That’s the real force: not passion, not plans, but apathy’s quiet, crushing weight. It’s patient, a tide that outwaits the storm. Look at Rome’s late Republic, buckling under its own gluttony. Senators hoarded estates, wealth piled into gilded heaps while plebs drifted from the Forum—too hungry, too hollowed to care. Indifference outlasts fury, relentless where rage needs fuel. Starve it, and it dies. The plebs didn’t storm the Senate; they scraped by, survival outweighing banners or blood. Why? Exhaustion is a deeper pull. It’s not surrender—it’s gravity, a force that drags ideals down when bread runs short, when the next meal matters more than the next march. The frame froze, rigid and vacant, until Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. Augustus followed, forging an empire from a gap no one fought to close—they’d checked out, and apathy carved a path the ruthless strode.

Mao’s rise follows a well trodden path, jagged and brutal. His cells seized power through chaos, a scattered resilience outlasting a brittle foe. But victory calcifies, those hubs fused into a state, and the early spark twisted into shadow. The Great Leap Forward starved millions, fields rotting under naive quotas, bodies piling in ditches; the Cultural Revolution ripped the nation apart, students beaten bloody, families torn apart, neighbors turned snitches—chaos ate its own until nothing stood but fatigue. By the end, people were too broken to resist. Deng Xiaoping had no rally or crusade, he simply stepped into a void, turning wreckage into markets that braced the frame anew. Millions climbed from poverty, a feat the West envies as it stagnates today. Peasants didn’t plan the rupture; they endured it, too drained to dream. Power shifted because exhaustion outlasts fervor, a tide swelling where belief drowns.

The frame’s rust spreads, and today’s cracks carve deeper, echoing that old, merciless arc. Europe, once a lattice of pacts holding the West’s edge, frays under the weight of indifference. NATO strains as Germany angles for its own leverage, France chases faded glory, and Hungary coils inward, a stubborn knot. The EU’s promises—unity, green futures—crumble into podium noise as seas swallow coasts, ash clots the air, and summers bake the vulnerable. Nature doesn’t negotiate. Strongmen brace the frame that remains: Orbán strangling dissent, Trump slashing budgets with a tweet, but their hold leans on indifference, not devotion. Protests flare and fade. Minneapolis roared in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, streets alive with fire and grief, only to quiet by 2021 as reforms stalled, cops still qualified immune, hope choked out. Pavement burned, tear gas hung thick, chants shook glass—then nothing. Why? Exhaustion’s edge. Sustained dissent requires progress; choke it with sameness: same killings, same promises, same nothing and it gutters out. Survival, rent due, debt surging, food costs soaring, this dwarfs the march. Laws stand from habit, not faith.

This retreat isn’t passive but an active tide swelling power where resistance thins. When eyes turn inward, when participation fades, the frame concentrates, hardening at the top—ice over a grave. Now, tech lords, Musk and his ilk, wield influence once reserved for states, their empires expanding while workers stock and scroll, screens their guiding light. Algorithms harvest every glance, every swipe. A life is a data mine, not a political body.

That snap isn’t a clean slate. Capitalism held for two centuries because people bought its bargain: profit over chaos, progress over hunger—the flaws ignored for the gleam of its promises. Now they don’t. When belief dies, the scaffold hollows out, a husk. Augustus didn’t free Rome, he ruled it. Deng didn’t liberate China, he redefined it. History breaks for the merciless, hands that grip when others let go.

Those hands are closing in, fingers cold and relentless. No utopias or resets here—just a cage, tighter than the last, its bars invisible but unyielding. Picture it: every step tracked, every thought fed to algorithms, every choice optimized until freedom’s a ghost. The next frame is a new forging, defined by those ruthless enough to twist the wreckage into the prison we’ll call progress. The cycle turns, beams groaning beneath a new, suffocating weight, and the future hardens under the quiet, crushing tide of indifference. Technology won’t free us, we will be forever bound, graves we’ll name innovation. The ash of belief settles and the cage rises—silent, seamless, absolute.

To labour and sweat is divine—even when it comes to being divine, it takes sweat and blood. What cannot be learned is done with practice—technique, nothing else.

In a previous age, perhaps it was more clear to think of technology as neutral tool or extension of human faculty—an inert gadget wielded by man for his specific ends. Today, it seems wise to view things rather differently—it’s obvious that technological progress is anything but a neutral trajectory. Technology emerges, nowadays, not merely as a result of scientific progress, but as a self-propelling historical force with its own inherent, far-reaching logics, reshaping industries and minds alike. In many ways, it’s a form of life. One that has increasingly come to govern us.

Today’s central preoccupation for any critical spirit worth its salt, I believe, must be with how to retain human control over this growing technologized complex, while avoiding any regression to anti-scientific utopianism or ill-founded nostalgia for “pre-technological” modes of life. From this vantage point, AI in particular seems an especially tricky matter.

Firstly, there’s the sheer breadth and rapidity of the change we’re undergoing. Nearly every realm of human endeavour is soon to be influenced by AI, from healthcare and warfare to entertainment and politics, everything’s set to feel the effects. Already, for example, “AI” and alogrithms dramatically reshape the largest websites online, tailoring experience in order to sell ads, or ideology, or fear, or some form of exploitation against their users—a transformation of what the shared web means that will only become more obvious as personalization technology becomes increasingly fine-tuned. Within a short space of time, AI will change the way we work. There’s no disputing it.

Secondly, and more than anything else, AI will change the way we think and act. Not just what we think, but the very act of thinking, and most completely the will to do. It’s an important difference.

Much of what passes for thinking today already happens outside of conscious will. With every Google search we make, we offload part of the act of thinking onto complex software programs. For most of us most of the time, what search-engines present us with is good enough. It fits our needs. We might be forgiven, then, for not worrying too much about where the information comes from and how it’s selected from what’s available on the web. After all, who can think about all that—while also performing all the other functions necessary to remain competitive in a highly pressured world?

To do so would be to conceive of search as an act of will, a “phenomenal” or intentional affair involving not just information, but what it means to someone, which is, surely, what the verb “to think” means? To view search in this way, however, is unrealistic in an algorithmic age where “search” increasingly means something like submit to Google’s results. If it’s good enough, why think twice about it? Herein lies what I have called “the paste-ling”—where human output becomes dominated by prefabricated, machine-generated content that we have the illusion of producing ourselves.

It’s not just information we offload to algorithms these days, of course, it’s all kinds of complex reasoning—and willing. Ask a teenager to build an Ikea flat-pack, for example, and they’ll almost certainly refer to a digital assembly manual rather than follow the instructions embedded in the physical parts themselves. Faced with anything they don’t already know how to do, it’s screens rather than signs that will be the default. As we let algorithms handle more and more of what used to be thought of as practical reasoning, the knowledge economy metamorphoses into a kind of algorithmic age that extends far beyond what we might traditionally have thought of as the realm of cognition. AI is about to take over all kinds of complex, creative tasks that most people would have thought immune to automation only a few years ago. Just look at Midjourney or Kling.

Artificial intelligence will change not only how we think, then, but also how we act—and what we become. At the very moment, in fact, that the post-war distinction between a technical-informational sphere on the one hand and the domain of social life and culture on the other hand begins to collapse. I don’t think this can be avoided, but there are reasons to believe that we can control the outcome of the process, and so ensure that it works to the greatest advantage of the human being. Herein lies the necessity of thinking through the phenomenon of AI. It won’t think about itself. We have to do it. And not by turning back the clock.

In what follows, then, I’m going to outline a method of what I shall call “conative discipline”—a form of practical wisdom that enables the human being to regulate his relation with the growing power of algorithmic culture in such a way as to remake, rather than merely retain, his freedom, even as he comes to depend more and more on artificial systems. In other words, I want to propose a way of retaining what’s good about the techno-scientific revolution while transcending its dangers and pitfalls—forging a hybrid will neither wholly human nor wholly machinic. There is no guarantee that this is possible. But there seems no reason to accept defeat in advance. To my mind, it seems only reasonable to assume that so long as humanity retains its unique capacity for free will, there is a possibility for us to devise techniques for cultivating that will in a technologically changing world—and blending it with AI’s own.

It may be useful, at the outset, to define the basic terms I shall be employing here. By “conation” I mean the human capacity for willful action: our ability to take initiative, make choices, act in pursuit of our own goals and objectives. As we’ll see, this capacity has always been a target of what could be called the negative dialectic of history—processes that erode it, from inertia to the psycho-technical organization of work. Now, AI adds new pressures, making it urgent to rethink how conation might evolve.

For this reason, I want to suggest that the phenomenon of AI has to be thought of as a kind of pharmacon. By pharmacon, I mean a thing that can be either a cure or a poison—like opium. It has the potential to be either a prosthesis of will or an anaesthetic. On the one hand, AI might enable the human being to extend their conative capacities into new realms of being, remaking them in concert with machinic logic; on the other, it could reduce him to a passive, receptive being whose conation has atrophied through lack of use. At present, we seem to be caught between these two extremes, which is why it’s so difficult to evaluate where AI is really leading us. And, in some sense, both possibilities are likely to be realized. But if we’re to thrive as conating beings, we need to steer towards the first: we have to develop what I’ll call a conative discipline that will meld our will with AI’s potential as technology progresses.

What follows is an attempt to sketch out what conative discipline might involve in the age of AI. I will not here try to go into detail, nor to offer multiple examples (such a discussion would require more space than I have available here). All I aim to do is to outline some general principles—and one instance.

First of all, then, conation is not the same thing as creativity. There is a tendency, nowadays, to think of the two as one. This is a consequence of the way technology has changed human activity in general. But creativity and conation are very distinct matters, and we do well to keep them apart. Creativity is the capacity for generating new ideas, for coming up with what’s never been thought before. But it doesn’t necessarily imply action. Not every creative thought is put into practice, as every psychologist knows. And it’s certainly not the case that creativity is in itself conation’s driving force—the history of the world shows us that creativity can all-too-easily serve the ends of destructive conation. Moreover, creativity is by no means the only thing that motivates conative action. Even routine tasks can arouse vigorous conation in certain circumstances—such as when there’s a great deal riding on a small chance of success, as in the last scene of Fritz Lang’s M. Conation has to do with action, not thought. While it may be sparked by ideas, it isn’t the same thing as creativity.

Secondly, conation reaches beyond novelty—it’s the grit to overcome resistance, to bend reality to one’s will. This demands repetition, treading the same path, however subtly altered each time. It’s work and struggle, what Friedrich Nietzsche called amor fati, a love of fate that finds purpose in the grind as much as in life’s raw chaos. Conation isn’t limited to instincts, desires, emotions, or ideas—it draws on them all, yet bows to none. That’s why it’s best grasped as technique, rules honed from experience, dictating what to do when, to conquer obstacles and stay true to one’s aims. Techniques lack the sheen of ideas: they’re humbler, harder-won, and far more vital. Only through practice, across experience and experimentation, do they sharpen into tools of real effect.

Now the challenge presented by AI is that it threatens to strip technique bare—or swallow it whole. What we once mastered through effort is increasingly automatized. Technological society would cast us as paste-lings, offloading conation to machine-made outputs we claim as ours—or ceding action entirely to algorithms. This is already rife in work, where automation and data now reign. The bureaucratic rationalization of labour, pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late nineteenth century, has morphed into an algorithmic rationalization of work and will. With AI’s rise, human roles shrink to mere executors of expert systems—or vanish. The result is a proletarianization not just of labour, a trend centuries old, but of conation itself. We’re reduced to labourers for others’ tasks, ideators for others’ thoughts, or bystanders to machine deeds.

It should be clear, then, why AI imperils the human being’s phenomenal freedom, yet also promises to recast it. It threatens to undo centuries of conative development—by reducing us all, bit by bit, to the status of “generators”. Unless we can develop strategies for resisting this fate—and harnessing AI’s potential—it looks as though phenomenal freedom is doomed or at the very least destined for rebirth. What we face, in other words, is the return of the negative dialectic, the return of those processes that tend to erode human conation. We need a conative discipline that enables us to meld our freedom with machine intelligence as it grows. But what might this entail?

It would require fresh techniques of thinking, feeling, and acting, tailored to conating beings in an algorithmic age—methods that braid AI into our will, not yield to it. Scarcely imaginable is a future where we act freely in accordance with our true wills as the world of work—and the world more generally—becomes increasingly data-driven. If we don’t find new ways of doing so, then it seems inevitable that most of us will be reduced to mere executors, no matter how creative or highly skilled we might be. AI won’t spare conative space unless we claim it ourselves. Take, for instance, a graphic designer faced with an AI tool that generates layouts instantly. Rather than accepting its first output, they might use it as a starting point, tweaking it deliberately against its suggestions—say, rejecting symmetry for a jagged, human-edged chaos—to assert their will alongside the machine’s, producing something neither could alone.

It would imply the need to rethink the relationship between work and pleasure. In recent years, there’s been a growing tendency to blur the boundaries between the two as a result of various socio-economic developments. In the field of work, for example, it’s become increasingly common to talk of finding fulfillment and happiness in one’s job—in other words, of merging work and play. Such talk is deeply misleading. Even if it’s true that work and play are merging in certain ways, they remain fundamentally distinct. To ignore this is to render oneself vulnerable to the control of those who do not share one’s conative projects. In an age when most of what goes on in the world of work is likely to be taken over by robots and algorithms, it’s essential that we hold onto the distinction between work and play as a source of strength—and as a space where AI might amplify, not replace, our will.

It would demand that we face AI as the pharmacon it is—neither poison nor cure, but a volatile force hinging on our resolve. Conative discipline is no mere shield against the algorithmic tide, but a way to ride it, to bend it to our ends. The creative partnership is but one glimpse of a will entwined with the machine’s, not subdued by it. Which brings us to our precipice—where AI might numb us into paste-lings, or lift us into a hybrid conation with far greater agency than ever before. To seize the latter is to reject passivity for struggle, to wield technique not as a relic but as a living bridge between human intent and machinic might. There’s no certainty we’ll succeed. But to surrender without a fight is to forfeit what makes us human: the capacity to act, to will, to become.