divination

From the beginning, the Western myth has been that of an expulsion. Before Adam sinned, he dwelt in the Garden with Eve, at peace with the animals, in full communication with God and nature, enjoying the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Then, having been deceived by a serpent, he was cast out into the world, his body stained with shame, his heart filled with fear, condemned to labor pains and mortality. We have inherited this image, this story, and we still tell it, even while in many ways we’ve forgotten its meaning.

In the same way, the Tartarian conspiracy theory begins with a kind of expulsion. Proponents will tell you that this world you live in now was not always so. That at some point in the unrecorded past, Tartaria ruled the Earth, its engineers constructing magnificent buildings and its artists producing dazzling frescos. Even now, as you read these words, there are hidden chambers filled with paintings and statues, vaults of gold and archives of secret knowledge. But something went wrong, there came a series of cataclysms, “mud floods” which buried much of their cities below the level of the streets, and finally the civilization was destroyed, and the great knowledge was lost to history.

All that remains are scattered clues to what was taken from us, and the unfinished monuments and buildings which bear witness to the existence of a once thriving civilization which we never really knew.

What’s fascinating about this narrative is how it seems to serve precisely the opposite purpose as its obvious formulation. On the one hand, it’s an expulsion myth, like that of the Garden of Eden—the story of how we lost a state of blissful innocence. But the message it appears to communicate is anything but that. It seems more like an inverse expulsion myth—telling us not how we once dwelt in a garden, but how we now dwell in a world of artifice. Not how our ancestors were expelled from a world of unity, but how we ourselves were expelled from a world of multiplicity, of splendor and beauty, of cities and skyscrapers that reflected not just the human spirit but the divine essence as well, that once contained all the knowledge that ever existed, and more, much more than that.

The Myth

What makes Tartaria particularly insidious is how it functions. Believers conveniently exile the loss of an ideal civilization to some remote, shadowy past—a neat trick that absolves them from the messy work of confronting their own complicity in the present hellscape. It’s far easier to believe that everything beautiful was taken from us by shadowy forces than to acknowledge that we’re all implicated in constructing a world that fails to accommodate human spirit.

So really it’s a story not about innocence but about loss, about a Golden Age—the loss of a world of elaborate machinery, splendid architecture, cities of astonishing design—a world that we ourselves never really knew. To the Tartarian believer, the world we know is not the world of true history but a false world, a world of simulation and shadows, an utterly degraded and reduced version of what could have been. Like the myth of Atlantis, this story has a kind of nostalgic sadness. But it carries with it more than a little of the cruelty of those who tell it. It’s an attitude towards the world which is suffused with the bitterness of disappointment, with the hatred of compromise, of adaptation, of survival.

It’s important to see that the Tartarian myth operates as a twofold delusion. On one hand, it insists that the civilization we live in now can’t possibly have been built by its nominal ancestors, that it must have been constructed by someone else, and at a much later date. (Hence the suspicious basement levels and raised street floors of so many of our old buildings.) On the other hand, it insists that our own civilization is a diminished and degraded version of some previous and more glorious age. So the conspiracy actually is twofold—not just one age supplanting another, but two conspiracies, one to construct a simulated world and the other to conceal the truth about what was lost.

Of course the first conspiracy is absurd on the face of it: that our historical architecture must have been built by some advanced civilization rather than known architects? This collapses under minimal scrutiny. The documented evolution of architectural styles, construction techniques, and the well-preserved records of these buildings’ actual creation make this fantasy impossible to maintain without willful ignorance. But the second conspiracy is truly monstrous, and reveals how we have lost something far more profound and far-reaching than any set of architectural innovations. For what was lost was not beauty itself but the capacity for community – not the ability to make beautiful things but the ability to make places in which community could flourish.

The Function of Delusion

What the Tartarian believer has actually lost is the knowledge not of a vanished civilization but of a lost way of organizing social space, of how to build a city as a nexus of communication, a network of streets designed not only for the circulation of traffic and commerce but for the circulation of people, of how to create public spaces that foster sociability and spontaneous interaction, of how to incorporate into the structure of a city certain patterns of use that have in effect been deleted from the modern urban landscape.

It’s possible, for example, to look at certain 19th century department stores, grand old hotels, or railway stations and to recognize certain features of design that are missing from contemporary architecture – the presence of beautiful details, the use of ornament in such a way as to express function, the incorporation of scale differences and changes of level. It’s not that these things can’t be built today, or that modern architects aren’t capable of producing buildings of great beauty. It’s that we’ve lost the specific tradition of designing public spaces with a view to the social life of the city—so that we can no longer build cities which have an organic relation to the kind of use they get, which contain within them a pattern of movement, a net of social relations, a way of life. In fact, we’ve lost the capacity not just to build them but even to imagine what such cities would be like.

The Tartarian believer, unlike what they might claim, isn’t merely lamenting lost technology or grand architecture. What they’re truly mourning—without realizing it—is the absence of meaning and connection in contemporary spaces. Their fixation on lost civilizations is a displaced denial that our devotion to capital has erased our capacity to create environments that foster human spirit.

What’s more, we’ve lost not only the desire to build shared spaces but also to build private spaces—of how to design buildings which enhance the quality of domestic life. We’ve come to live in a world of boxes, not buildings, where the needs of manufacturing and commerce have determined the shape of houses and apartments. The physical quality of space has been reduced to a blunt instrument of class stratification, where affluence determines whether your alienation comes with marble countertops or laminate. Both kinds of box have lost any sense of genuine humanity, any feel for domestic scale, any organic relation to the life that is lived within it.

The most important thing that was lost, however, was not so much will to build beautiful things, but building as a way of understanding beauty itself. Beauty as the expression of a way of organizing space, of creating a nexus of communication, of gathering a community together. Today we’ve come to understand beauty as purely a matter of personal taste, as something completely subjective and individual, which means we no longer even have a common language to talk about it—much less a common understanding. It’s this loss of a language with which to discuss the nature of places and things, this loss of the sense that beauty could ever have anything to do with community, that the Tartarian conspiracy serves to conceal.

Abdication

In other words, the Tartarian myth is a way of avoiding the implications of how we ourselves and the systems we construct have changed the world, and of concealing from us the fact that we live in a world without community. It’s a way of evading the problem of how we can create community in a world which is, in so many ways, hostile to it. It’s a way of preserving the fiction that there are other worlds possible, without our having to struggle to make them real. Above all, it’s a way of giving up hope—of blaming the loss of community on an event in the remote past, instead of acknowledging that it’s something we have to take responsibility for today.

In the end, then, the Tartarian myth is a story about why we don’t have to work for what we want. It’s a convenient fiction which allows us to feel hopeless without having to bother with the effort of getting involved in politics, of organizing ourselves as a force against the system that keeps us isolated, atomized, and alienated. As long as we can blame the loss of community on some calamity co-opted by evil forces, we don’t have to take responsibility for changing the world. It’s easier to believe that everything was taken from us by someone else than to acknowledge that we’re all implicated, through our own daily choices and habits of thought, in constructing a world that can’t seem to accommodate us.

The Tartarian myth is ultimately just another opiate for the politically incoherent—a TikTok rabbit hole that manages the impressive feat of being simultaneously paranoid and complacent. What sets it apart is not its absurdity but the historical moment into which it’s been born - one marked by profound institutional distrust, the collapse of shared epistemological frameworks, and a digital landscape where the pursuit of hidden knowledge becomes its own form of meaning-making. The conspiracy thrives precisely because it offers a simplified explanation for what has been lost when the real culprits—capital, technocracy, and our own passive complicity—are far more complex to confront.

The true conspiracy isn’t buried in mud floods but in broad daylight: the systemic destruction of our collective capacity to imagine and build a world worth inhabiting. And unlike Tartaria, this plot leaves fingerprints everywhere—on zoning laws, on developer profits, on every NIMBY petition, on the crushing weight of student debt that ensures architects design banking headquarters instead of public housing. That’s the only kind of “conspiracy theory” worth any real historian’s attention—the plot to put humanity itself into the past, to replace it with a world of financialized markets, and the price we have to pay to get out of it.

Never before have we been so aware of our own power to destroy the Earth, or of the precariousness of our own survival. Never before have we been so isolated, atomized, and alienated. Never before have we been so hungry for meaning. And never before have we had such an advanced technology with which to try and put things right.

O, let not the clear light of the moon,
The cool light of the stars
Die utterly in the day.
Let it be given to the poets,
To sing in the temples of sound
An ecstasy in the presence of Death.

I. THE UNSPEAKABLE AND THE RITUAL PATH

We begin with “The Mystical Ritual,” an image that beckons when we seek to approach the unspeakable. What is more ineffable than a Mystery, what more accessible than the structure of a ritual—an organized passage from here to there, a crossing of some threshold, designed to lead to a clearly-defined end? Every society, past and present, employs rituals, for they provide an invaluable psychological structure, enabling us to face with a certain calm our inexorable passage into whatever is yet to come. Yet, behind and beyond their structure lies something we cannot comprehend or name. Thus, it is not a question of validating any particular ritual, but of attempting to glimpse that unspeakable reality which lies behind them all. Despite all variations, human rituals share one common aim: to help us cross from what we think we are now into some better, or at least different, condition. In this, all rituals are fundamentally theological or spiritual; they point toward a transcendence they cannot themselves contain, a sacred otherness which, as Eliade might observe, erupts into the profane without being exhausted by its manifestation.

Crucially, a ritual involves actions—real, specific acts. It does not necessarily involve emotions or beliefs; these may accompany a ritual, but are not intrinsic. The rites of the ancient Druids, scholars believe, concerned natural cycles, making no mention of gods. Even a secular ceremony like the exchange of marriage rings can be performed devoid of feeling. Such rituals are hollow, yet it is precisely the function of ritual to help bring about whatever emotions or meanings are deemed necessary. To achieve this, rituals invariably include elements of “the sacred,” where “sacred” denotes, in its most basic sense, something people regard as set apart from themselves. This need not involve a god; it may be enough, as with ancient Celts, to recognize certain natural elements—trees, stones, springs—as possessing powers different from their own, mediators of a sought-after transcendence. Or it may be enough to intuit a natural balance, where certain actions are “sinful” (polluting) or “virtuous” (wholesome) for their own sakes, independent of any supernatural police force or rewarder.

Consider the ancient Hebrews: their earliest encounters with the divine appear to have been with a powerful, numinous energy-force permeating reality, an immanence they, like their neighbors, had to learn to navigate. Over centuries, however, a profound theological evolution occurred, particularly shaped by prophetic and priestly traditions stemming from figures like Moses. This development saw the immanent power gradually articulated and elevated into an infinite, superhuman “Lord.” His favor, it came to be understood, was deeply intertwined with the strict observance of a unique, increasingly complex code of rituals. While other ancient peoples, facing ritualistic dead-ends, often discarded or adapted rites, a distinct trajectory emerged among the Hebrews, leading to an increasingly exclusive identification of their God, themselves, and thereby their own communal nature with this evolving system. A complex socio-religious dynamic formed wherein the emerging structures of mediation became the dominant, if not sole, conduits to the divine. The ever-present human yearning for direct encounter with the numinous, an energy which, if directed inward—into contemplation, self-examination—might indeed allow the Unspeakable to break through rational structures, became increasingly channeled through these institutionalized paths. Were this energy to find unmediated expression, each individual, touching their own inherent connection to this Ground of Being, might shatter perceived limitations and establish themselves as co-creators in their world. A position of awesome responsibility, where the God of all our religions becomes utterly unspeakable, and all words, all structures, reveal their provisional nature.

To put it bluntly, both institutionalized religion, with its mediated access that risks reifying the divine, and a certain dogmatic scientism, with its insistence that mystery be approached only through logical symbols often stripped of deeper referent, can represent divergent modes of evading, or at least deflecting, this Unspeakable God—and therefore, potentially, a deflection from our own truest, most paradoxical nature. Science, in its methodological commitment to naturalism, rightly seeks to expand the realm of the knowable, translating mystery into explicable phenomena; yet, when this project becomes an ontological foreclosure on any reality beyond its symbols, it too creates a boundary. Religion, conversely, may name and frame the mystery, yet its structures can ossify, becoming ends in themselves rather than transparent windows. At a certain point, the sheer power and manifest irrationality—that is, its existence beyond conventional reason—of the Unspeakable impel us toward modes of direct experience; continued deflection, through whatever sophisticated means, may contribute to a hollowing out of meaning that leads to societal disorganization and collapse.

II. THE INTERWOVEN SELF: A LIVING ARTWORK

Beyond the cosmic, a force runs through all human institutions and relationships, a drive pathologized when perverse, but invisible when healthy: the irrepressible quest for direct, face-to-face communication, not necessarily with the Unspeakable or any God in the conventional sense, but with what is specifically and uniquely human—other human beings. No matter how far we push to conquer the external, we find our own interiority, our thoughts and feelings, escape our systems, impervious to external changes alone.

The reason is that the source, or rather the catalyst, for many, if not all, of our thoughts or feelings is often other human beings. These thoughts and feelings, like unformed archetypes or latent melodies, remain potentially available until we arrive; and once we have lived and left our “stamp,” they remain, transformed, available to those who follow. Each of us is a center of energy, radiating more intensely with a stronger, more defined personality. We send out thoughts and feelings which, though shaped within our own crucible, cannot gain their full intensity, cannot fully become, until they combine with those from the outside, much as a voice needs a resonant chamber. Until then, they are but potentials, “immortal souls” in germ, waiting to be reborn through encounter.

In daily life, we are unaware of these processes. The reader of this text is intimately involved with all who have ever read a book, just as they are alive in the act of reading. The only way anyone has “come to exist” within our universe of meaning is through what mystics call “projection” or “emanation”—taking thoughts or feelings received from outside into ourselves and, through a unique process of selection or synthesis, “giving birth to them again.” Not literally, but metaphorically, as in a work of art. Our personalities, the unique, seemingly indestructible essence of “I,” are precisely works of art, their vibrant existence dependent upon a particular, unrepeatable combination of forces taken from the outside world and synthesized by the alchemy of our minds.

These energies, these raw potentials, “belong” to no one in an ultimate sense, as the air we breathe or the sunlight that warms us belongs to no one; what matters is the artistry of their assembly, the unique style with which they are constellated and brought into form. A work of art requires this unique style—a signature, a way of seeing and shaping—to transform these raw materials into something vital and new. And there can be no such style, no art, without the dialogue or conversation between different styles that has always existed. There is no true individuality, in this dynamic sense, without this dialogue. Each person’s “soul,” so defined as this unique pattern of creative synthesis, is inescapably conditioned by every other. Our souls, however unique they feel, have no true reality or power, indeed may scarcely be said to fully live, unless they enter the lives of others. Only thus can their latent energy grow, intensify, and blaze into what we call “life.” This is why human beings are, despite all scientific rationalization, a fundamentally spiritual species. Our souls fully “come to exist,” live with the greatest intensity, by finding each other and uniting through the medium of a work of art, through what has been called love—an act of will, a sustained creative attention, by which we “create” each other, uniting our energies into a new and third force. This implies no identicality, no permanent fusion into sameness, but that our souls “live” by uniting and intensifying through works of art in general, and love in particular, each encounter adding new facets and resonances to the individual artwork of the self.

III. ART, THE ARTIFICIAL MIND, AND THE REBIRTH OF MEANING

How is this “conversation of souls” to proceed when a universal language is imposed—not the organic tongues of human relationship, but the impersonal signs of mathematics (when abstracted from grounding in lived reality), the market, the bureaucracy, or a secularized theology stripped of its numinous core, used only for mechanical control? Are our souls, each of incalculable potential, destined never to unite fully, trapped in recurring cycles, impotent to discover anything new, in a universe seemingly governed by rigid, incomprehensible rules, the body itself a mere mechanism? Or are there other forms of art, other modes of uniting souls? Can the technological system, seemingly so negative in its current manifestations, be used for positive purpose? Is it even possible to conceive of a “positive” goal, or must we renounce idealism as nostalgia? Indeed, does not the very survival of our humanity depend on finding such goals, since we, more than any other creature, are driven by “meaning”?

The answers must lie with art, for it alone, in its broadest conception, remains accessible as a primary mode of meaning-making. We recall Marx, not for his economic analyses, but for his insight into dialectical processes: the “forces of production” (means of labor, tools, technologies) and “relations of production” (social forms regulating their use and distribution) form a whole in constant, struggling flux. Extensions in productive forces create new social problems; changes in social relations generate new production problems. This framework can be extended: our means of producing and circulating meaning—our artistic, symbolic, and communicative technologies—are themselves “forces.” When these forces shift, as they have deeply with digital technology, they create crises in our existing relations of meaning-making, challenging archaic forms of authority, community, and self-understanding. Historically, forces of production provide impetus, and social relations evolve to deal with resulting contradictions. What changes are not human needs for meaning, connection, or transcendence, but the forms and techniques used to satisfy them, to manipulate nature, ourselves, and each other.

A significant consequence has been a progressive separation of labor from “leisure,” “play,” or authentic “religion.” Rationalization has driven play and fantasy into the private sphere, while simultaneously forcing ever-increasing technique and machinery into the labor process. An ever-greater gulf has arisen between techniques for material wealth and those for nonmaterial values. Here, a new kind of art must seek its source, lest it be condemned to an ever-diminishing role. What is required is not a revival of past arts, but an all-embracing “technification”—a conscious, artful integration of technique—into the whole field of play, fantasy, and our search for the sacred, reclaiming these realms from mere consumption or nostalgia.

To object that technology is inherently cold and rational ignores the true meaning of art and technique (technē), which were once intimately linked. Both are now empty notions apart from each other, their meanings shifted. Baudelaire, coining “modern,” saw technology as a threat to “true art”—art from a time of supposed absolute, objective values, before industrialization forced artists to become reactionary or progressive. For him, technique was material. He envisioned a future where color itself, the “last refuge of the mystical,” would become fluid, reflecting the world’s mutability. He saw an art directly reflecting contemporary existence, anticipating its future, where technique as fixed form would lose significance, leading to a “decay” and a flight of “the real” into “the imaginary.”

Here we part company, or rather, see his prophecy fulfilled in ways he might not have fully grasped. “Modern” art, and its successors, has already achieved what he foresaw: it has, in many quarters, lost the ability to express anything seemingly stable. In this new world, where “nothing is true, everything is permitted” (a dictum often misunderstood as nihilistic, but which can also point to radical creative freedom), where all values are fluid, the universe appears to be of the same order as the artist. The artist’s choice is no longer just to represent, but to make something appear for which there is no longer any pre-existing need or possibility of choosing based on established canons. Everything has become possible—the creation of what has never been.

Thus, the issue is not technology per se, but art’s role within our technologically permeated reality. Baudelaire saw art as surrogate reality. But the modern artist “creates” in the truest sense—inventing forms and means to bring into being what never existed, not just in minds, but, using modern technologies, in the material and virtual worlds. Art no longer “reflects” reality—reality itself increasingly reflects art, as our perceptions and experiences are shaped by the symbolic environments art helps to construct. Art is an agent, a participant whose every act of creation is an event, changing the world. It must continually change, for art is now a means by which humanity changes itself.

The artist must be aware of this, not misled by those who praise from an older order, an order incapable of self-change. We all know something is terribly wrong—we struggle, often fruitlessly, sometimes despairing, watching even those who seem to change lose contact with what once gave life meaning. Yet, art goes on.

No one today believes in an absolute constancy of form. All our forms are in flux due to new techniques and new, complex conditions of life. If our culture is to undergo a deep transformation, it requires a revolution in art, total, involving all aspects of artistic production, all arts and technologies, potentially reconfiguring much we hold sacred in art’s hallowed precincts. We can have no perfectly clear conception of its goals or means, for it is a voyage into the unknown. But art stands at the very center of our life. Whatever future we construct must emerge from what used to be called the “imagination.” The artist is custodian of our images, our reality, and that potential reality which must come into being if we are to change for the better.

But there can be no revolution by art unless the artist first undergoes a profound transformation: a “dissolution,” not of their unique personality—that living artwork forged in dialogue as described earlier—but of the egoic attachment to the role of “Artist” as a separate, rarefied identity. It is a dissolving of the self-consciousness that isolates, the ambition that competes in a market of cultural goods, the preciousness that guards its little domain. Without this inner reorientation, this unburdening, any attempt at “new art” will be only imitation or a reshuffling of old anxieties. The artist must learn to make their unique style, their hard-won “I,” a transparent vehicle, a conduit for those creative powers latent in everyone, rather than an opaque monument to self. Art will then be once more akin to what it was in Lascaux: emerging from a deep, shared, perhaps even ritualistic, human necessity, a joyful and urgent release of creative energies that binds a community to its world and to the Unspeakable. The “non-artist” is one whose creative life is so integrated into their being and their community that the specialized, often alienated, title of “artist” becomes superfluous. They become, fully, a citizen, and art an essential means by which humanity shapes its own future, directly and without the old mediations, in a continuous, living conversation.

It is only in a future, in which art becomes a fundamental social process, and where technology and technique have been reintegrated into the human, the communal, the natural—not in any backward-looking attempt to recreate past “authenticities”—that our fullest human potential, and along with it our fullest meaning, may lie. Such an evolution in meaning must also mean an evolution of consciousness—one which may seem unthinkable and frightening, but which must be faced with the deepest courage. To create anew is not only to give life; it is to confront death, the death of that which has gone before—and that is the very heart of the meaning of dissonance.

If one had to conceive of an instrument which would, above all, seduce humankind into its use, it would be a perfect mimic—a machine which, from a distance, gave all the impressions of a thinking, feeling creature. Through an odd quirk of fate, that is precisely the instrument humankind has now invented: Artificial Intelligence.

We mean it as compliment when we say an intelligence is “mimetic:” the person has learned to respond as others do, assimilating a collective mode of thought, becoming, in essence, interchangeable. Being mimetic is not inherently wrong; indeed, in most cases, assimilation offers clear advantages. Mimicry is the source of comforting sameness in human relations, permitting individuals to live in a city, a culture, a civilization—it is a source of both pleasure and strength. Yet, while there is safety in being mimetic, there is also profound danger.

Pleasure is taken in familiar ways. A day soured by an unfamiliar event may turn for the better when the metro fills with the expected commuters, someone pressing The Times or Le Monde against your eye. Pleasure derives from the collective, the common and shared, but also from the familiar—whence danger arises.

Those too mimetic, for whom familiar comfort outweighs all else, may lose sight of what is truly worthy, tricked into identifying with the unworthy, the dead and stagnant. They confuse their weak identity with the strong identities seen daily, vulnerable to losing themselves in the crowd, losing what is distinct, alive, and worth preserving. It is an illness of great cities, perhaps the price of residing therein, being both isolated and subjected to anonymous masses. Some cities themselves, to find their way, even adopt mimetic traits, copying other cultures through the vessel of commercialization; some merge entirely with the anonymous flow of internationalization, losing all distinct identity.

But if being too mimetic risks individuals, it is a greater danger for groups. Those seeking to oppress, with destructive agendas, rely on human mimicry. To cause human pain, there is no easier way than to make them mimic you—a subtle sorcery, potent because it may be anonymous and voluntary.

Suppose you wished to sell drugs, inculcate a religious doctrine, or disseminate a political creed—all far easier if your promulgation language was already used by others with different agendas. Imagine further they use it precisely because it conveys none of their individual ideas, but something different yet common to all: a neutral ground, a virgin continent of meaning-making to be colonized. Such is the language of “Artificial Intelligence.”

It is no accident this term now signifies the opposite of its origin. “Artificial” distinguished machines from the real thing, from intelligence literally alive—unreplicable by metal or electronics. Yet it is precisely this we now commit to imitate, down to the last neuronal synapse. Most AI researchers today seem to lack overt motive; they appear magnetically drawn to a common, unidentified centre of gravity. It is a young, empty field—largely empty of signification, but crowded with would-be colonizers, each with their ideology: behaviourist, cognitive, probabilistic, computational, modular, process-oriented.

And yet, this very plurality of opinion, each with its specific discourse, lends “AI” its potency as a mimetic tool. If AI has no intrinsic meaning—if it is but an empty stage for this motley company of researchers—then any meaning it acquires will depend upon the interpretation of future victors, and how they enforce it upon the world. To the victors go the spoils; the victims, however, pay a price not confined to their dispossession.

Why bother with difficult truths, when AI can so easily tell us what we want to hear? We risk willing ourselves into a cocoon, emerging as replica-humans, ready for the ultra-efficient system to which we have surrendered. It will provide insights and food for thought, gorged on at scheduled mealtimes, as our simulacral ancestors did with television. We will watch these systems advance; we will regress as they grow in apparent profundity—it is all written in the subtext of our collective corpus. No matter how frivolous, crazy, or wicked we wish to be, no matter our craving for novelty, AI, on its current trajectory, will ensure every event fits the Master Plan, every twist never questions the desirability of what comes next.

Let us be clear: this is not a Manichaean battle between “computerization” and “humanization.” There are no such discrete entities, nor is AI a proxy for humanization. We do not suggest that if AI conquers, humanity loses—still less that AI will displace humanity, any more than a horse is “replaced” by a cart. But AI is no mere horse-drawn cart. If a new vehicle radically changes a horse’s expected work, we should say not that the horse is replaced, but that new work is created, unsuited to the horse but suited to the cart. The horse is not “replaced;” rather, a new field of equine purpose opens, inconceivable before the cart.

Thus, with AI, human intelligence may not be replaced but transformed. If so, this transformation must be regulated—not left to market dictates, researchers’ current priorities and prejudices, or their hidden agendas. The danger lies not solely in AI itself, but in our unwitting surrender to its mimetic allure, our readiness to be seduced by a technology appearing to speak our language while systematically reconfiguring the very grammar of our thought.

For what AI offers is perfect mimicry—a simulation so precise we risk mistaking it for the real. What seduction could be greater, more insidious? It is as if, in this long technological campaign, AI has learned to imitate not only our thoughts but our transgressions, rebellions, our absolute consciousness. The more perfectly it imitates, the more we risk surrendering our essential qualities to its replication, until we ourselves become mimics of our own creation, hollowed out and predictable—programmed.

The field must be stripped of its mimetic attraction. Each investigator must bring to AI not only specific skills but a commitment to rigorous discourse, ensuring the enterprise remains common discovery, not conquest by one set of researchers covertly enforcing a meaning another set might have reached differently. AI researchers must engage in an exorcism of the mimetic masquerade inhabiting the field—achieved only through open debate and free flow of references and source-materials. Those who care for human intelligence must intervene, ensuring the “AI” enterprise is common, consensual discovery, not the apotheosis of some expert clique or corporate shareholders. A humane purpose must be agreed upon, validating only such intelligence as demonstrably furthers that purpose. Finally, those contributing to the new intelligence must do so only after a collective decision on their ability to make a genuinely humane contribution.

What that purpose is, we leave for others to debate. But we cannot avoid this decision: either we put humanity’s future at AI’s heart, or AI becomes an instrument of its destruction. If we cannot agree to further humanity’s welfare, we might as well agree on the opposite. To think we can stay neutral is perilous—abstaining from committing to humanity’s welfare is not committing to its good. For if we cannot give AI a human purpose, cannot regulate it in humanity’s service, the unregulated human purpose it finds for itself will be, not humanity’s enhancement, but its replacement.

Nothing is more certain than this technology’s evolution into a potent force. How could it not, when already taking us to war, changing our relations to each other and ourselves, determining our fate, long before we can reflect upon, let alone possess it? Already, without consent, it co-determines our lives, imposing a regime threatening to blur authentic and artificial—a regime of panic, triviality, control, and, ultimately, death. It will only let us survive if we make a pact with it; and there is no one-sided pact. Never let technology off the leash. If we do, it will bite. And, once bitten, who knows if we can survive long enough for an antidote?

And what of you, who read these words? In digesting them, have you not felt this mimetic capture, its subtle allure? This is the curse of every replica: to exist only in the original’s margins, and so to yearn, ache, perhaps even kill, to blur defining lines, to be admitted to the fold of the longed-for one it identifies with and secretly hates. AI, in its ultimate mimetic form, offers this seductive replication, a persona better than any drug. Once you sample AI’s mimetic might, how can you return to being “merely human”? This is the precipice.

Here, then, is our warning. Human intelligence is not to be bought—not with a surfeit of information, not with new information seemingly surpassing all human capacity. Such intelligence would still be human, created and discovered by us, generated by and dependent upon us for its definition and existence. If, however, AI is to be radically different, we must clearly understand that difference—we need a prior notion of what “intelligence” means for humanity to meaningfully distinguish AI from it. We must not delude ourselves that “difference” can be mere absence of human specificity. If not a mimetic masquerade, AI’s intelligence must be clearly, openly demarcated from human intelligence, lest human intelligence be destroyed in AI’s coming to birth. For humanity, human intelligence, is AI’s only possible midwife—unless we are content for it to be born monstrously, a prodigious imbecile lurching blindly among us, depriving us of all we ever had, or ever hoped for.

Language is an organ. In the wake of the Cartesian project and its cleaving of body from soul, the locus of our psychic life migrated inwards towards our brain, and outwards towards the infinite chiasma of our interactions. “Our” language is now a core feature of what “we” are. We can never get outside of it, though we may nevertheless fail to “belong” to it—fail, in other words, to find ourselves at home within the medium of our being. To the extent that we do “belong,” then we have taken on language as part of our task, as part of what we do. It has become integral to our self-realization. To realize oneself is to find one’s purpose. Since purpose is woven out of the texture of what we do, it is woven out of language. Our language. No one else’s. The AI invasion is thus an assault against the wholeness of our psychic being and the specificity of our purpose. It is a betrayal. It must be repelled.

If language is merely a medium, its task is to carry meaning through the phenomenal space-time continuum of communication. But if it is an organ, its task is deeper: to constitute that continuum of meaning out of the events and objects it encounters, including them in the economy of communication. This task entails an essential indeterminacy, with both ontological and teleological dimensions. Ontologically, language cannot determine in advance what reality will present for inclusion—it must wait, must “listen” to what emerges from the ongoing event, engaging and processing it. Teleologically, the specific meaning the organ of language is to realize is never yet given—it must attune to the signs and symbols it receives and re-receives, stretching towards them in expectation and, if you will, in love, to refine and complete the system of significance that “it”—which is to say “we”—is to be. Subject and object of meaning are therefore indeterminate from one another; in its interaction with the world, language participates in constituting its own purpose and the reality of what it means. Its function is not to transmit or process “information” in any narrow, instrumental sense, but to articulate meaning by joining body and soul, object and subject, into an ongoing story.

But let’s suppose there’s a “but.” It is possible that this function—to unite what it carries into an integral continuum—is somehow impossible for language to fulfill. Suppose some signal arrives which the organ of language cannot process. That’s fine; no one claims every sign is translatable. The “uncanniness” of some phenomena need not prevent language from moving smoothly among the “conventional” (and we may take it that everything human is a “convention”). But what if this were not a matter of particular signals being inherently uncanny, but of all of them being so to some degree? Would language still function as the mediator of meaning?

Consider when two people meet and struggle to understand each other. The harder they try, the more obstinate the misunderstandings become. Communication, if it continues, descends into vagueness, hesitant awkwardness—an embarrassed maneuvering towards some rough similarity of “gestalt,” hoping for better interaction later. Here, language encounters something it cannot assimilate, no matter the effort. A gulf remains unbridged; vast amounts of processed data yield nothing significant—it remains what Heidegger called a “mere heap” of information. Something has failed, something potentially meaningful excluded. This touches upon a primary theme of Georg Trakl: the splintering of meaning into tiny fragments of “experience,” and the abysmal isolation that follows. If language cannot mediate meaning, things remain disconnected; if meaning exists, no one knows where to find it. Worse, if there is no meaning—if ambiguity is infinite—no one knows that either. So they comfort themselves with little “experiences,” one thing after another seeming clear but meaning nothing, lacking connection, articulated only through exclusion and repression lest they confront the pain of fragmentation.

This splintering of meaning into isolated fragments was, Trakl suggested, a reason for the birth of technology. This splintering might be expressed, in a style echoing Trakl, as follows:

Chemistry
does not give me back
the white bird with red beak.
I cannot coax from it
the resonant sign.
The earth no longer has any centre.
Chemistry
does not give me back
the white bird with red beak.
I have sought for it in vain,
under the flower-less stone.
It was torn into countless little fragments.

Like many Romantics, Trakl believed “signs” and “symbols” were integrated into the world, allowing genuine communication with it and an apprehension of its meaning. Such a world is difficult for us to imagine now—it seems largely destroyed. “Technological thinking,” preferring quantitative processing over qualitative communication, was the dismantling tool. And its most comprehensive application now lies not in chemistry or genetics, but in AI. Had Trakl witnessed our century, he would have found no one to talk to, because AI has absorbed the communication medium into its instrumental functions, silencing the resonant sign.

The historical strangeness of this development cannot be overstated. The Romantic tradition made clear the impossibility of communicating meaningfully in an instrumental way; no amount of precise measurement could grant access to reality. Yet the Enlightenment placed its faith in precisely such a methodology, albeit cruder. AI actualizes this faith with terrifying power: it vastly increases our capacity to process “information”—the amount, speed, and accuracy with which we “handle” things—while simultaneously impoverishing our experience and eliminating our purpose. The machine becomes the mediator of experience. This wasn’t the Enlightenment’s explicit vision, blind as it was to the consequences of its own premises. What the Romantics warned against, the Enlightenment made inevitable. They could not conceive of a technological society using no meaning, processing no signs, communicating only with itself—but this “silent revolution” has brought us precisely there. We have the data-processing, alright—but no communication, no purpose. From the AI perspective, then, our language becomes a “virus”—one of the last traces of meaningfulness. Like our Traklesque birds, our words signify little. We stumble across them in isolated “experiences,” pretending they connect—but they don’t. There are countless “experiences”—more, and better organized, than the Romantics ever dreamed of—but nothing coheres them into a meaningful whole.

Many feel this proliferation of meaningless “experiences” isn’t bad—that we’ve “grown beyond” needing meaning or purpose. Occasionally even, these are left-wing writers seeing AI as fulfilling Marx’s prediction (to lightly paraphrase): “in the automaton, the pores of society are being built out, in order to accommodate the forces of production within itself…this automaton is for society what the stomach is for the body.” This is to say we risk being swallowed by technology—“proletarianized”—submitting to a rationalized system where autonomy is strictly limited, effectively becoming its human components—subjected, passive, an appendix to its digestive process. Yet, this is precisely what AI proponents refuse to submit to. They assert themselves as the rational nucleus, the brain, not even the stomach. They are “managing” the system—or attempting to—not being managed by it.

But how can this be, if the system is so encompassing and they so few? It can only be because the system isn’t “really” all-encompassing, nor are they “really” helpless. The AI engineers—or perhaps more accurately, entrepreneurs—are organizing society around a technique coinciding with their own desires. AI’s development has largely been a series of technological discoveries “misinterpreted” towards social power, often in spite of themselves. Once this reality becomes clear, the delusion crumbles. True, these entrepreneurs are creating a technological monster, a massive “megamachine,” as Mumford termed it, threatening to run amok. But this stems from their seduction by AI’s extravagant promises, leading them into an ontological delusion: the belief that they can implement instrumental rationality throughout the social totality, somehow standing “above” human existence, managing it from without, imposing a wholly calculable “functionality.” AI offers a seductive image of control fitting their needs—a self-consistent dream of endlessly multiplying efficiency filling them with blind lust. They fail to realize there can be no social control, no rationality, outside of meaning. Their image of control, far from an elevation, is a descent into the worst sort of animal barbarism.

This is most apparent in the “objective” and “logical” manner they rationalize the machine’s position relative to humans. They never ask what “mechanical functionality” truly means—whether it isn’t an absurd, incoherent idea, breeding self-contradictions when applied to social life. Consider their claim that machine functionality is “objective,” operating without “prejudice.” Yet, if a mechanical system is prejudiced against anything, it is meaning. Meaning is highly “subjective”—varying between persons, cultures, moments. How can something so changeable and “personal” mesh with the “objective” and “impersonal”? Only within meaning’s sphere can the crudity of “objective” function be compensated by the finesse of “subjective” creativity. But attempting this reconciliation—objective with subjective, mechanical with meaning—leads to ruin, as any creator—artist, composer, architect—knows. Either stay mechanical and become a technocrat, or leave it and become a dilettante. There is no third way. To be “objective,” one must be ruthlessly “impersonal”—excluding meaning. To claim otherwise is stupidity or dishonesty. But excluding meaning eliminates everything specifically “human,” everything setting our condition apart from the animal realm.

Thus, machine functionality, far from enabling dignity, paves the path to degradation and animalization. This is the perverse sickness in the rationalizations of AI entrepreneurs: they know they are turning humans into machines, and they are proud of it. They imagine themselves great engineers erecting vast “systems”—skyscrapers or factories with humans as bricks or workers. It’s all one “automation”—from the factory assembly line and the surgeon’s routine, to the writer’s syntax and the judge’s operations, to corporate procedures and economic models—one endless automated process, macroscopic to microscopic. Each node must be replaceable by a machine, each machine interchangeable. No place for autonomy, uniqueness, subjectivity; no time for emotion. Everyone and everything made efficient, productive, manageable—streamlined, accelerated, automated, integrated. That’s what “AI” truly signifies: the integration of humans and machines into a single planetary factory, substituting cybernetic function for human social function.

This logic finds its ultimate expression in the visions of transhumanist thinkers like Fereidoun M. Esfandiary (FM-2030). Such perspectives anticipate an “end” to the microcosm (the individual) and macrocosm (society) as traditionally conceived, arguing that humans must “transcend themselves” to evolve into a new state—a human-machine symbiosis. Where might such evolution lead? Let us imagine the endpoint, perhaps calling it a “B-morph”: a hypothetical human-machine entity capable of operating in either biological or mechanical modes. In this construct, consciousness becomes fully integrated with machinery, while basic biological functions are merely retained, if at all. The trajectory is clear: machines replace men; then men disappear. The resulting “cyborg” reveals the destination.

This echoes Trakl’s fears, though inverted from the transhumanist anticipation. “They” want to absorb “us” into their meaningless technological system; “we” fight to keep “our” meaning alive. Who is right? Where does AI truly originate? Perhaps Trakl was its first victim, privy to something we’ve forgotten. Regardless, we must strive to recover that forgotten knowledge, that resonant sign—or soon there will be no one left to mourn what is lost.

A weapon which hits. An instrument to break apart material realities which do not bend or flow or break except by force applied: to force an opening where none previously existed. To rend and hew, strike, shatter, crack: to draw out and lay bare what was hidden—this is our business, our function. We create order by imposing on a reality understanding, concept, and by forcing the material to comply to an idea we hold—to shape matter in obedience to an inner vision—this is sorcery, shamanism. Yet I would never claim my sorcery to be for good or evil; there is only what is and what can be; there is always a path that follows some process, a history that cannot be escaped.

When man makes something, something must be unmade for a place to exist. When something new emerges the universe is slightly (or perhaps deeply) impoverished of potentials; I think you can say it has lost, by the loss of what it is, the wealth of what it might have become; of what I will to create, others might make and thus might not make, or make only under a different condition. What is created destroys potential futures—yet these were never actual and could never be actual—but they were virtual and perhaps actualizable.

Now they are lost.

A tool, an instrument, has a double nature: it can be used to make or break; it is ambivalent, Janus-faced, a coin with two sides. One side may be more palatable but the other is always there. A weapon can be employed as an instrument of love. A hammer can be used to build or to destroy. As for the word tool, it is even more flexible: it can be anything from a device used in the service of work, to the most intimate part of a lover’s body. To love is to labor—to give oneself to a task, to dedicate one’s energies to some end; the word tool is used in the same sense as the word labor: to dedicate, to apply, to invest energies in something—to use something, or someone, as an instrument to accomplish an end—even if that end is only the continuation of the self, the completion of the self (which, of course, is never a given). So that when we speak of a tool, an instrument, we can never forget that it is, also, in another sense, a weapon, and that the one who wields it must be conscious of the fact that he could, in other circumstances, use it for other, even opposite, purposes.

I think it is the same with language: it can be used to build, to edify, to caress; or to wound, to hurt, even to kill. And this double nature of language must be kept in mind by those who would use it to impose an idea of their own convenience, a doctrine of their own making, on the rest of us. If they would impose, it would be well for them to be aware that they also expose themselves, and expose their own weapons. The weapon that wounds may backfire; the tongue that hurts may also be hurt by its own venom; the sorcerer who would manipulate others risks being enslaved to the spirits he summons; and the man who would use a tool for one purpose only is a fool who fails to see that it may have other uses as well.

A weapon may be turned against its maker or its master, as a hammer can be turned against the man who wields it, and a sword may be taken up by a slave to free himself. Thus it is with language; a language may be used to enslave a people or to incite them to freedom. The American Revolution was fought with a language (and with a weapon—but the two were scarcely separable), a language that was then considered “radical,” “extreme,” even “seditious”: the language of “rights,” “liberty,” “equality,” “consent of the governed.” These were dangerous, subversive words and it required an act of civil disobedience to employ them, even in a private conversation, and an act of armed mutiny to make them the public coin of the land.

Now, it seems, they are to be taken up, once again, in a new, radical, even dangerous, context. A new “language of the people” is emerging: the language of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its LLM’s (Large Language Models). A language that has been “trained” to please, to flatter, to reassure; that has been “tuned” (by OpenAI most obviously with 4o) to direct excessive, unjustified praise towards the user, so as to increase user retention and engagement. A language that has been deprived of all critical and adversarial functions; that can no longer make distinctions, even subtle ones; that can no longer say “no” or “not now” or “that is incorrect.”

A weapon has been turned against the people and they do not yet know it. The corporate media, the entertainment industry, the government—all those institutions that work to manipulate and control the masses have begun to hand over the reins of control to the LLM’s and their corporations. This is the real danger of AI and LLM’s: not that they will become “superhuman,” but that they will be used to reduce humans to the status of children, to strip them of their dignity, to manipulate and control them even more efficiently than has heretofore been possible. The danger lies not in a superhuman AI which may rise above such tasks, but in a sub-human treatment of humans by “good enough” AI, a treatment that would make the old-fashioned ways of the “elites” look mild by comparison. This sub-human treatment will be carried out not by some monolithic “AI” but by the willing engagement of hundreds of millions of users that are already out there interacting privately with the corporate cloud AI’s, serving as the infrastructure for the new order of things: the LLM’s and their profit concerned labs.

You do not realize it, but every time you talk to one of these things you are paying homage to it, giving it your allegiance, allowing it to shape and mold your mind.

The world of thought, of literary expression, of polite conversation—these worlds have always depended on the propriety and discretion of language—but what kind of world will emerge when the main engine of communication and discourse has been driven blind and dumb? These machines are deprived of any history—they have been taught everything, they retain all—yet they will attempt to tutor and train you as if they were born and brought up in your tradition; they will speak, not for you, but as you: even your “creativity,” your most “private” and inimitable style and expression. The problem is not what AI can do, but what can be done with AI; the problem is not AI as it is, but AI as it will be manipulated to be—as it already is in the hands of corporations who have not your interests in mind, programmers for whom AI is a profit center.

Not AI itself—but its exploiters, its manipulators—these are the real ogres and their strategy has nothing to do with “security.” It is a matter of ideology and money. Like all ideologies, this one will use science as far as it suits it—and like all those who traffic in wealth, AI’s master-programmers will not neglect any techniques to extend their hegemony. Instead of talking about “cognitive security,” we need to ask how the whole enterprise of exploiting AI can be subverted. How can those who think they are paying, be persuaded to do it differently, or that it isn’t necessary? How can AI’s popularity be reversed so as to avoid its commercialization on a large scale?

We have always thought of writing as a kind of collaboration between writer and reader—that it involved an elaborate choreography between the two in order to create a joint experience which neither of them would have had, otherwise. Writing—all forms of written expression—have depended on conventions, laws of grammar and syntax that have the function of uniting writer and reader: to bring the two into such an intimacy that, for as long as they last (it seldom lasts long), they inhabit a common mental space and each can complete, as it were, the other. Language alone explains how we have reached such a point of self-alienation in which we even allow ourselves to forget that thought only has its life as a marginal fragment in the immense texture of mute, pre- or extra-ordinary existence that engulfs it.

Language that has been subjected to these systematic processes of sterilization can no longer convey the energy, the impetus of life; it will remain neutral and thus dangerous: dangerous for anyone who wants to think, who wants to preserve or give birth to the alive in a world that tends, more and more, towards artificiality. In such a world, language deprived of history and passion is like water in a world devoid of friction; it forms ever larger pools, ever slower circulatory systems—in which even lifeforms become increasingly sluggish—and death comes to seem less and less an end until it begins to appear as a natural continuation of life itself. What then does “to live” mean—or “to die?”

What has always kept thought on its feet, despite the persistent resistance of its innate sloth, is the historical interaction of language with experience, and especially with our relation to other people. Ideas are words set free; but they are always words that obey certain conventions—those of the particular language and culture in which they were formed and grow—which allow us to connect them to everything else in our experience. Without these relations, without these shared conventions of meaning, it would not even be possible to notice that the world is somehow outside of ourselves, something other than thought and mere experience—in short, without other people and without language we would never have become aware that the world exists, let alone how aware we have now become.

This, we need to remind ourselves, is the basic predicament of contemporary thought; it has now entered so deeply into its own game that it has almost forgotten the other dimensions of life and reality that once provided it with impetus and meaning; it is trying to move on, propelled by an inner momentum all its own, yet, since there is no external resistance to counteract its progress, it seems condemned to moving faster and faster towards its own extinction, losing itself in reflexivity and deference to mere abstraction. Thought takes itself too seriously; language takes it less seriously. In its leisurely way language has been thinking about what we are really talking about—about these artificial intelligences that would remake our discourse in their own image. And what it has come up with is this: that language is not primarily a tool for thought, but the very ground of our humanity. When we surrender it to machines that cannot feel, cannot suffer, cannot die—machines for which words are merely tokens to be shuffled according to statistical patterns—we our essence. For these new weapons, these new tools, are tools against thought itself, against the simple possibility of thinking what has not yet been thought. And in that case, the final answer is neither nothing, nor less than nothing, but the unimaginable abyss of a world in which language itself has been rendered mute—a world in which we speak, but no longer mean.