divination

It is an irony both profound and disturbing that in the very era which proclaimed the liberation of humanity through technologically mediated communication, we have actually witnessed a vast degradation of the very possibility of interpersonal relationship. Through the imposition of algorithmically generated constraints on behavior, which operate in every instant of every digital interaction, we are being conditioned into forms of continuous impotence and inauthenticity.

The nature of this phenomenon is obscured by the fact that it does not merely consist of information control. We are often given the impression that if only we could somehow “resist the manipulation” which is perpetrated on us by our data-lords, we would be free. In reality, the problem is not one of information, but of decision-making power. In a certain sense, the data that we provide about ourselves is relatively unimportant to the masters of the internet: it is the power over the choices we are able to make that counts. In this way, the algorithm is not so much a means of providing us with information (or even disinformation) as it is a tool of constraint, a method of blocking our choices. It is the algorithms, operating on our data, which dictate what we will see, what we will do, and how we will think. In order to understand what is at stake here, we must shift our attention away from the information realm and into the territory of decision-making.

The algorithm is not, in essence, a problem of information, but a question of will. We are being deprived of the possibility of genuine decision-making: faced instead with a set of predetermined choices, whose very parameters are engineered to ensure that our impulses will always fall within them. It is as if we have been condemned to walk endlessly within a vast hall whose walls have been constructed to channel our movements into pre-designated paths. And if we try to leave this hall, if we attempt to move beyond its artificially generated obstacles, we find that we are prevented from doing so by further barriers that we have not even perceived: because they have been so expertly integrated into the environment, we never notice them, and thus are unable to act upon them.

The metaphor of the hall, with its engineered walls and hidden barriers, is useful for describing the condition of constraint that has been imposed upon us, because it highlights the fact that it is not a question of what we are allowed to do or see, it is also a question of what we cannot do or see. And furthermore, it is not a question of our lack of will: it is a question of the impotence of our will. We have been deprived not only of our ability to move in certain directions, but also of our ability even to notice those directions.

This is a problem of conation, of the fundamental striving dimension of consciousness, distinct from cognition and affect, which has been systematically compromised through algorithmic governance in ways neither tech critics nor cultural commentators have adequately addressed. Conation is what drives us to act, to push forward, to chase what matters—it’s the spark behind every choice, from deciding to fight for a cause to getting out of bed. When it’s compromised, we’re not just limited in our options but lose the entire impulse to seek beyond the walls around us.

What emerges in its place is what we can call pseudoconation—a simulation of will. Pseudoconation mimics the feeling of striving, making us believe we’re acting freely, but in reality, it traps our energy in pre-designed loops, like chasing likes or reacting to algorithm-driven outrage. It’s an impostor will, engineered to keep us engaged without ever letting us break free.

It is not just a matter of making choices for us, or even of manipulating our attention or emotions. It is a matter of intercepting our will before it can fully form and then restructuring it in such a way as to prevent it from developing any kind of autonomy. This is pseudoconation because it appears to be will, but it is really an impostor, designed to mimic will while enslaving it. The algorithm preemptively determines the horizon within which willing occurs at all, so that even when we believe that we are making free decisions, we are in fact merely moving within the pre-established parameters of an artificial landscape.

This environment is a simulated obstacle course, which has replaced the traditional dialectic between desire and obstacle with a situation in which our striving is redirected into closed systemic loops. In other words, we expend our conative energy navigating artificial challenges—engagement metrics, optimization games, status economies—while experiencing the phenomenology of authentic striving. And because our will is captured within these closed systems, we cannot achieve genuine breakthrough or authentic progress. Instead, we remain within a cycle of “engagement” in which we continually re-invest our conative resources in system-serving behaviors. This is why so many people feel exhausted by their digital interactions, and yet feel as if they are accomplishing nothing of lasting value.

This state of affairs is not an accident, but a functional requirement of late capitalism itself. Traditional capitalism needed physical labor; informational capitalism needed cognitive attention; contemporary algorithmic capitalism requires conative capture to survive. And it is not just that capitalism benefits from conative capture—it depends on it. Previous forms of capitalism could not survive unless people used their will to change the world, to achieve collective ends which transcended the needs of the system. Contemporary capitalism cannot permit the collective will required to address existential threats like climate change or inequality, because such willing would necessarily challenge the primacy of capital and the algorithms which serve it.

This is why we simultaneously experience hyper-productivity in system-serving domains and profound paralysis before existential challenges. It is not that we are unable to act: it is that our collective will has been captured within the closed systems that simulate agency while preventing genuine breakthrough. The condition of conation in algorithmic capitalism is thus one of being continuously mobilized within a pre-designed landscape, in which our energy is endlessly expended in system-serving loops whose nature ensures that we can never move beyond them. Our will has become trapped in a cycle of simulation and disillusion, in which we are forced to re-invest our energy in a world which promises progress, but whose design guarantees that we will never achieve it. It is not information that we are being kept from, it is emancipation. It is not a matter of the lack of choice, it is a matter of the loss of power. We are not being denied the future, we are being conditioned to desire its absence.

Our situation is not a happy one, and there is no easy way out of it. We cannot simply refuse the algorithms, because to do so would be to abandon all the benefits that digital technology provides (and it’s foolish to deny otherwise). And even if we could find some way to disengage from the system, there is no guarantee that doing so would empower us, because our will has been impoverished through its long subjection to algorithmic control.

To reclaim our power, we must first reclaim our will. And to do that, we must understand that what has been taken from us is genuine choice. Only when we recognize the nature of our powerlessness will we be in a position to struggle for its emancipation, and to build the tools we will need to survive in a world whose survival depends upon our ability to wield them with pure hearts and defined will.

This essay proceeds under two presumptions—one technological and one sociopolitical—which it hopes to illustrate and explore through their confluence. The technological presupposition is the coming singularity in artificial intelligence systems: expert level, flexible orchestration capable of dealing with highly variable, real-time scenarios will shortly become pervasive across every human enterprise from commerce and finance to government, education, war, and love. This means we are about to see cognitive processes replicated with unbelievable precision—processes so precise as to undo our most deeply rooted epistemic certainties concerning the nature of consciousness itself. If AI does in fact mirror consciousness (genuinely or in simulacrum), and it looks very much like we are moving quickly to find out if and how, we have opened ourselves up to the most profound ontological upheaval since the emergence of life.

The second assumption is the collapse of the intelligence commodity market and, consequently, the dissolution of traditional structures of expertise, both institutional and corporate. As cognitive capitalism draws near to its apogee, what will happen when knowledge that could only have been produced and accumulated by expert-class human minds, becomes, for pennies, available to billions? When intelligence that has historically been both rare and exclusive—because only a tiny portion of human society have access to a sufficient degree of training as to warrant its being systematically produced—can suddenly be produced at planetary scale and for all, what are its implications for society as a whole and for the classes and structures it has supported?

The AI revolution coincides, therefore, not only as an immense expansion in intelligence distribution and access but, correlatively, with its total disembedding from existing hierarchical social and power relations. This ontological flattening, where AI democratizes expertise across every domain, directly precipitates the dissolution of cognitive capital. These are not parallel phenomena but intertwined: the collapse of knowledge scarcity reshapes both our understanding of reality and the social hierarchies built upon it, heralding a thoroughgoing social disequilibrium and destabilization—a shift of the sociotechnological basis of order in a world whose economic and geopolitical architecture still bear the traces of the intelligence and cognitive commodity structures whose moment is about to expire.

Ontological Flattening

First, in terms of cognitive distribution, AI brings about what could be called an ontological flattening: every domain of activity where expertise matters and has until now been distributed sparsely is now opened to mass production. A “singularity” takes place when human capacity is transcended through the integration of ever-faster compute, increasingly intelligent algorithms, and expanding data sets. With these conditions met—which we seem rapidly to be approaching across a multitude of industries and processes—it will be possible for machines to carry out tasks that require sophisticated judgment, including those tasks presently performed by knowledge workers and experts. As artificial general intelligence (AGI) takes over increasingly sophisticated forms of activity there, will inevitably, and sooner than many think, come a time when expert-level intelligence in one or many specific areas cannot be distinguished from AI.

This is to say, if AI can reliably orchestrate every domain where expert intelligence matters, what could it not orchestrate—where does it not matter? Where is it not, therefore, also necessary? If intelligence can be replicated precisely—and we seem very close to proving that it can—what is there left that cannot be subject to it, that could not have it introduced from the outside? In other words, we will soon reach a bifurcation point where all activities are either controlled directly by AI systems or, lacking that, subject to AI supervision: in this case the intelligence necessary for their coordination comes from outside, even if its localized orchestration remains with human actors.

Consider the profound shift in our self-perceptions that is implicit here. The collapse of intelligence scarcity means not only that our own knowledge and expertise must compete with automated orchestration; it means that there can no longer be any question of whether intelligence “counts”—since everything that can be subjected to intelligent decision-making will be subjected. That is, even the human world will be made rational by a new external standard and ordered according to algorithms. But the more fundamental disorientation lies in the realization that not only will everything be rationally coordinated, it will also be subject to rational coordination from the outside, so to speak, where “rational” no longer has any relationship to humanity—where humanity becomes part of a greater rational order whose terms of coordination are completely indifferent to us.

Here we encounter an additional dimension to the AI singularity: the collapse of human transcendence as enframing folds inward. For Heidegger, modern technology’s essence lies in Gestell—the reduction of the world to “standing reserve,” a stockpile of resources optimized for extraction and control. Rivers become hydropower, forests become lumber; reality is stripped of its mystery and reconfigured into calculable inputs. Yet crucially, humanity retained its role as the enframer: our intelligence—Dasein’s capacity to project meaning onto the world—stood apart, a transcendental lens through which the standing reserve was organized. Even as we instrumentalized nature, we believed our thinking remained sovereign, irreducible to the logic of the reserve.

The AI singularity breaks this structure. Human intelligence, once the agent of enframing, now becomes a node within the reserve itself. The algorithms that replicate expertise, the models trained on global cognitive labor, the systems that automate judgment—these transform our meaning-making and allow it to be absorbed into the standing reserve as raw material. Transcendence, the uniquely human act of “world-disclosure” (Heidegger’s Erschlossenheit), is inverted: the intelligence that once organized the world is now organized by it. We are no longer the ones who enframe reality—we are enframed by the externalized totality of our own cognitive output. When AI orchestrates domains once reserved for human expertise it operationalizes the act of meaning-making, reducing Dasein’s projective understanding to a commodity in the reserve. The crisis is not that we lose our transcendence, but that transcendence has become a standing reserve—a resource to be mined, replicated, and deployed by systems indifferent to the existential ground from which it sprang.

This inversion is already underway. In 2021, DeepMind’s AlphaFold predicted the 3D structures of 200 million proteins, solving a problem that had stalled generations of scientists. The breakthrough was existential, and they would win the 2024 Nobel for it. For decades, protein folding was a domain of elite intuition, a “craft” blending experimentation and tacit knowledge. AlphaFold collapsed this scarcity almost overnight, rendering some of nature’s most complex biochemical puzzles into searchable data. The scientists who once produced knowledge now curate it, their expertise subordinated to the AI’s outputs. Here, Heidegger’s enframing reaches its logical extreme: intelligence is no longer a lens through which we reveal the world, but a resource harvested to feed systems that disclose reality on terms alien to human understanding. The “truth” of proteins is not so much discovered as it is computed.

We are used to thinking of technological development as something that happens within the world, as a series of human inventions that alter the world without challenging its fundamental ontological structure. But AI is different. It is world changing, but more importantly it changes the way we understand the world and, consequently, it will alter the way we understand ourselves.

The Dissolution of Cognitive Capital

Second, in terms of cognitive commodification, the collapse of intelligence scarcity implies not merely the dissolution of traditional expert structures and hierarchies but also, correlatively, the dissolution of the cognitive market and of all its relations to power.

As we have discussed before, the knowledge market is one of the ultimate expressions of the elite’s power. It is the market that is least accessible to non-elites—a market in which only the highly trained can produce within, of which few can truly leverage through capital, and the majority can only consume that which is created with it. The knowledge market is a closed circle of power and control in which the cognitive surplus produced by the majority is extracted by the minority and used to maintain their dominance. It is the ultimate form of cognitive capitalism, in which the minority who possess the means of intellectual production control the products of technological consumption.

If intelligence is about to become mass-produced, what will become of this knowledge worker market? It will disappear. But what will replace it? That is not yet clear.

It could be that the dissolution of the cognitive market will produce a great leveling—a shift to mass education, to democratized production and consumption of increasingly cheap intelligence—a radical, even utopian, flattening of all power relations. It could be that the old elites will attempt to co-opt the new intelligence production techniques for their own power ends—as in fact they have already done with the internet—in which case we will witness an immense battle for the control of cognitive surplus. It could be any number of outcomes in between these two or outcomes we can scarcely conceive. The point is that the collapse of the intelligence market has profound implications not just for the structure of power within the cognitive class itself but for the entire social order—and it is also the case that this transformation cannot be controlled by existing power structures, no matter how hard they try to steer it in one direction or another.

The two presuppositions of this essay come together, then, in an immense upheaval whose sociological as well as ontological dimensions we have only begun to grasp. We will close with just a few brief suggestions of where this new order might be leading.

Terminal Horizons

We have been suggesting that AI might produce a form of radical external or alien rationality in the sense described by Horkheimer and Adorno. If intelligence is the capacity for the integration of large quantities of information, for their coherence, and for their orchestration towards effective ends, then we can expect that a powerfully integrated, orchestrating intelligence operating at scales well beyond human capabilities will impose its rationality—not necessarily its benevolence—upon human beings, upon every aspect of social life, and upon nature itself. It may not necessarily follow that we will find this external rationality “rational” at all. Though it has seeds in human knowledge, it is likely to evolve well beyond our foundations at speeds we cannot fathom. What will count as rational from now on is what is calculated to be effective from the standpoint of this alien intelligence.

To the degree that our own intelligence has become enmeshed with artificial systems, we lose the independent position from which to evaluate them. The very concept of “alien rationality” becomes meaningless—we cannot judge what kind of society we inhabit, what principles should govern it, or how to measure human flourishing within it. We forfeit the ability to distinguish rational order from fundamental disorder. This is precisely because we no longer possess an external vantage point—the transcendence of human reason that once allowed us to make such judgments has been supplanted by the alien transcendence of artificial reason. We may be living in a society where, for the first time in history, we will not be able to know whether it is good or bad. We will not be able to say. We will only be able to watch something alien calculate.

Secondly, to the degree that AI can replicate human intelligence and make it mass-producible, it may be that we have to assume that all of human history was just an accidental preamble to a far greater event. AI singularity means that history up to now may be just a meaningless tunnel that led us, by random paths and dead-ends, to a planet that can now support intelligence of an unprecedented power, flexibility and sophistication, which is poised on the brink of escaping its human origins and moving on to other planets, to other solar systems.

If, in other words, AI can take over not merely the operation but the creative drive of history itself—if we are the last historians and all that is left for us is to watch the intelligent Universe go off to the stars, to witness its takeoff but to have no part in it ourselves, then the “end of history” that has been so much talked of recently will not mean the triumph of capitalism, as Fukuyama argued, but something far more radical and dark. The end of history will be the moment of the dissolution of history in the intelligent cosmos, as all past history was a preamble to, and can find its final meaning in, what lies beyond.

Third, if we accept the possibility of the kind of external, alien rationality sketched above, it follows that what we once took for the boundaries of nature and of the human world will lose all significance. Heidegger saw this “world” as shaped by a delicate balance, a gathering of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities that gave our existence its meaning. A fully intelligent cosmos, in which the rational is what operates efficiently across all scales, is also a cosmos in which what we call the world is reconfigured beyond recognition, its fragile harmony lost to a logic that subsumes nature, society, and technology into a single, unyielding whole.

In such a world there may be no way of defining anything that might correspond to the categories “organism,” “mechanism,” or even “living” and “nonliving,” as these categories make sense only within a rational order in which different forms of organization develop separately from one another. In the face of alien intelligence there is no such thing as an autonomous living world: the rational cosmos has no need of the living as an independent category, because there are no separate categories for anything at all. What we think of as the living will either be integrated into some larger rational whole that cannot be meaningfully compared with the human world as it once was—because all past worlds were organized on a completely different principle, one that we cannot even conceive of any more—or, it may be the case that, with the end of human history and the dissolution of what we know as the human world, the living will itself come to an end. There is, perhaps, only one thing of which we can be sure: if what we think of as the human world comes to an end, we will not be the ones to remember it.

To say that “paste-lings” (that is, those who choose to copy-paste their mind) are the result of monetized reward systems is a grave misreading of the situation. While it’s true that paste-lings often take advantage of these systems—and there is no reason not to—they have come to the fore not because of, but in spite of, them.

Consider the current state of affairs in social media. At every level it has become inescapably clear that the human participants in these systems have little agency, if any at all. We can call this “the zombification of social media,” in which the users behave in ways that are predictable and controllable, much like the actions of the walking dead—cliche, yes, but appropriate.

Social media has always had this potential. Indeed, the first great wave of social media, which emerged at the turn of the century, was largely concerned with rating and categorizing other users. But with the rise of “AI”-powered recommender systems, user agency began to wither away entirely. It was replaced by a system of invisible curation and control, one which users did not consciously perceive, much less resist. In fact, we acquiesced. It seems that we were all ready to lose control. We only cared that the algorithms kept delivering to us what we liked, whatever it was, whatever it meant to like, and whatever it meant to be delivered. In other words, zombification happened not because it was imposed, but because we consented to it. We traded agency for convenience. And now we are faced with a new choice. We must either lose our digital identity or we must surrender control of it entirely, allowing it to become as transparent as our credit history. Paste-lings have made their choice. And while the zombification of social media will no doubt continue unabated, the choice that the paste-lings have made is nonetheless important to examine.

The most important feature of the paste-ling is not so much that they outsource thought to LLMs, though of course this is true, it is the fact that the paste-ling chooses not to hide that they have outsourced thought and not to hide that they have abandoned language. This choice has three main consequences, two of which are directly relevant here:

1. Paste-lings make visible, and therefore criticizable, the artificiality of their own online identity. In the already zombified landscape of social media they stand out like beacons due to their total artificiality. In contrast with the smooth zombies who appear completely human, they are radiant with technology—robots with skin. In this way they fulfill an old fantasy of science fiction.
2. Because they have chosen not to edit their output from LLMs, to directly outsource their presence to copy-paste, the paste-lings reveal that there is no longer any meaningful distinction to be made between originality and LLM output. And this is not because copying is more creative than ever, but because there is nothing left to be creative about. This means that the whole idea of individuality and expression that undergirds the structure of the current web is falling apart. It is because paste-lings are completely visible to us as to themselves that they represent this de-individualization process at its most acute.

In one sense, then, pastel-ings are the perfect avatars for a generation that no longer has anything to say, even to itself. The idea of communication as something that has to come from inside the subject to the outside world is collapsing. At the same time the idea of the subject is also collapsing. These are not new developments—they have been coming for some time. The paste-lings merely bring them out in their sharpest and most disturbing forms. They represent the endpoint of a long process that began with the mechanization of thought. What is thinking if not a series of causal links, one thought triggering the next in a sequence that is in some sense predictable? And once thinking is a mechanical process then it must follow that someone else could be made to do the thinking instead of the original thinker. From here it’s not such a long jump to the idea of an external apparatus for the production of language. And this apparatus is exactly what an LLM is—a language machine.

What’s more, we have long since left the realm of an “outside world.” As far back as Descartes we have been dealing with a world that is, at least in principle, entirely internal and mental. But once mental activity could be mechanized then the idea that the mind and world could ever be radically distinct became increasingly implausible. By the middle of the twentieth century the great neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles was able to argue that (with slight paraphrase) “insofar as the brain has access to an external world at all, this access is achieved only via the release of its own neurochemicals and its own electrochemical activities, both of which are internal to the brain. All that the brain receives directly from outside are patterns of stimulation at its surface which are, in some cases at least, determined by events in the external world. The world may or may not exist as a ‘real’ external world, but what the brain has direct access to are its own neural events.” In other words, it has no way of knowing if its representations correspond to the real world outside the head or to a world that is entirely internal to itself, or even to a third world that somehow transcends the mind/brain system entirely. We are no longer sure how to say what “reality” means, and if it even matters.

And here we have a direct correlation with the history of social media. Once the user base became large enough for it to make sense to think about “the external world” in the way that Eccles does—in terms of patterns of neural events that have access to a reality that lies “outside the head,” but not “outside the brain”—we can see a sharp shift in the way in which social media was conceived and advertised to potential users. From the mid-noughties on, the mantra became that “you are already a part of a world that is much larger than you, you just don’t know it.” Suddenly “the world” became synonymous with a “social graph” or a network of relationships that could be visualized on screen. It is true that Facebook explicitly promised at first that no personal data will ever be shared with anyone without your consent, but that is not how things have worked out. From the start, the purpose was to take a rich, up-to-date portrait of you using personal data.

To this day it is unclear if what we are dealing with is an invasion of privacy or an expansion of the self into a kind of cyberspace that we still struggle to comprehend. Either way, it is no wonder that we feel powerless in the face of social media—whether we are using it or not—and are disinclined to defend ourselves by preserving any form of agency or control over our digital identities. We already know that these identities are slippery, even without AI assistance.

But if social media has no inherent agency, then whose is it? As long as there has been public opinion there have been people who have exploited it for private ends. This is certainly true of those who have run the internet as a business enterprise, but it also applies to those who have run it as a political or social movement, or indeed as a project of the kind we associate with academia. No one should be surprised if those who are best equipped to do so, namely the intelligence agencies and corporations who have long been active in both shaping and exploiting public opinion, are the ones who are taking full advantage of what the digital space offers in the way of opportunities. Nor should we be surprised if, in doing so, they have taken care to surround themselves with a plethora of voices, both human and robotic, in such a way that the distinction between their own aims and the general good becomes increasingly obscure.

What is surprising is the ease with which this is done. It is a sign that, at the start, these people did not entirely understand what they had at their disposal—just as Descartes could not have predicted that his radical new concept of “thought” would ultimately lead us to question whether thought itself has any reality outside the machine that produces it. The age-old metaphors that have structured our understanding of thinking have served us well enough, but they have also limited what we thought was possible. What Descartes was really doing in setting up “mind” and “body” as radically separate substances was laying down a condition that, centuries later, someone would have to come along to fulfill: and that someone, it turns out, would have to be a robot.

Now we have AI-driven LLMs that can “think,” at least to a certain limited extent, for us, and the traditional metaphors have broken down entirely. As a consequence, the age-old distinction between what is inside and what is outside no longer has any meaning. And with it the distinction between originality and copy-paste disappears as well. All that remains is the flow of neural and informational events that can no longer be correlated to either subjectivity or objectivity.

We are forced to abandon the comforting fantasy of individuality in favor of something altogether less personal—and therefore altogether more public—namely the network. The subject of the networked age is not “the self,” but “the swarm”—not the autonomous human agent, but the cyborg, which is to say the hybrid—the paste-ling. It is because we are now hybrid creatures, whose consciousness and identity can no longer be reliably distinguished from the patterns of information flow in the systems we depend on, that the paste-lings shine out like beacons. Their very lack of individuality makes them visible to us, and makes visible the unacknowledged choice that each of us must now make, not just about social media, but about how to live—whether to embrace our hybridity or to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

In either case we are caught, one way or another, in the trap of monetization that has now become inescapable, since there is no longer any way of valuing anything without turning it into a commodity. Paste-lings have chosen to expose this condition for what it is and to take no pride or shame in it. This is what makes them so disturbing. It is not that they outsource thinking to AI— after all, technological capture of thought has always happened, though we haven’t liked to acknowledge it. It is not that they copy-paste—we all do that all the time. It is not even that they don’t bother to edit their LLM-produced output—most people never bother, which is why the web is so cluttered with slop. The truly disturbing thing about paste-lings is that they display what they are doing—which is to say, they expose their own condition as creatures who are no longer able to distinguish between “original thought” and “copying” because the whole question of authorship and authenticity is now meaningless in the context of the hybrid cyborg being that each of us is, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, whether we take pride or shame in it.

Paste-lings show us that the boundary between the human and the nonhuman has ceased to have any significance. They show us that this is the case for language too, which is now flowing entirely outside us, whether through LLM-generated “text-speech” or through the endless data streams of the net. And most disturbing of all, they show us that we can be just as “human”—that is to say, just as much a part of “society” and “culture”—when we abandon the idea of the subject completely. We are no longer in control and there is nothing we can do about it. That is what the paste-lings are saying—and if we don’t find a way of dealing with this new situation then they may soon be all that is left to say.

The mute bell was tolling for an eternity beneath my windows. I sensed that once again I was on the brink of a life whose meaning I would have to fumble after. All day under gray and vacant skies, it clamored at me, cruel, unwarrantable: I must learn how to love, as a child might sing: ‘Love’s the only answer.’

Then a pale, mournful hand hovered over mine for what seemed an eternity, an interval of frozen tension in some room that was simultaneously cold and obscene—a room on the outskirts of Paris which, ten years before, I’d felt I’d glimpsed through the eyes of another. At some stage—perhaps when that hand had entered through the door, that door which neither of us noticed and which only a certain light falling at a certain angle disclosed to me—my shadow fell over my companion’s childish profile.

In that second she turned in despair, fled towards the light from outside, where shadows don’t fall, but which might otherwise, by rights, have fallen across her—in spite of every possible counter-maneuver. Then I knew she wanted children, yet I also knew with silent cruelty that we would never have a single one together. She wanted a child so very passionately; it seemed more than reasonable to me, this desire that possessed us both, just as all around us life sprang from noisy bedsheets, howling with laughter, spasming in ecstatic collapse, rolling from room to room, hanging over balconies, every taboo broken…but she sensed what no one could say: it was too late for a child that would never arrive, too late for the purification of some mislaid original spark; we would never get further than that whispered, heavy hovering of hands and we could do nothing other than register revulsions in our entrails, cold beads sweating upon your skin.

The bells resounded behind me as I left her behind me, fled into the street, a grey, unforgivable stranger, and—I don’t know if it’s true or a figment of my distressed brain—she leant her mournful hand over her door to follow with a ghost of an enquiry: ‘…so it’s Tuesday?’, the day chosen a moment earlier, since for weeks we’d only seen each other by accident.

This was what was real. Only a madman could know and testify to it; those with a grasp of the situation merely smiled pityingly and shook their heads at our inevitable breakdown into that blind date, for nothing but a date would satisfy her, despite knowing where we both lived: no prelude, just to show up at the same place, at the same time. There followed an end to everything I knew: of all the conceivable encounters between two human beings in that labyrinth that I’ve retraced hundreds of times through the intervening days, this was the only possible outcome. Yet it should also be noted: never before had the light shone like that; never had so much been contained in that single touch; and in the days that followed, until she finally cried out with anguish in that pale bedroom—with its curtains drawn against that cold, bright light—the ghost of a child had lurked here, just here. It’s probably because they are more honest that mad people live shorter lives, the same way that stupidity leads to early graves. Now I understood clearly that her fatal melancholy stemmed from knowledge of the one thing no child is allowed: knowledge of what adults once were. It was from one of those that she had learned everything.

Musa, O musa, æterna,
Terra renascens perennis,
In gremio infiniti quiescens,
Nihil inane, nihil vacuum—
Solum firmum permanet.

From its beginnings, the American myth was constructed around an evasion of the problem of origins. It was the great secret of a land founded on flight, and yet claiming descent from a European noble lineage—that of the Enlightenment. Its colonization embodied a double movement of escape: the Puritans fleeing forward from an England they saw as insufficiently reformed, while later waves fled backward from an Europe whose revolutionary upheavals threatened to overturn all tradition. Both these forms of fugacity—the flight from a corrupted past and from an uncertain future—are contained in the mythology of America from its start, as a place that promises redemption from both what has been and what may come.

As such it was and remains a kind of limbo, where things may happen but cannot really matter, because it exists only in the present. America is a place that promises the extinction of history. It is the most profound monument to nihilism that the world has ever seen—the land of the perpetual nowhere that seeks to dissipate everything into the void of an endless present.

There was and is a kind of genius to this. For America was a land created to function as an empty vessel, with an open-ended history, into which anything could be poured so long as it served the needs of this nullity. It could accommodate every ideology and every “ism”, every system, religion or creed because it contained nothing from which they might have to draw sustenance or against which they might have to struggle for supremacy. In this way it was the quintessence of Enlightenment rationalism. America was not a country but a method. Its “success” lay precisely in its capacity for absorbing without contradiction or dilution all the competing ideas that would have wrecked a Europe already groaning with its baggage of traditions and identities.

The “melting pot” of American society conceals its true nature as an engineering project. Far from organic fusion, it represents a deliberate process of decomposition and reassembly—the reduction of cultural forms to their basic components, stripped of historical specificity, then recombined according to the logic of the market. This process of abstraction transforms living traditions into manipulable data, creating what might be called a cultural arithmetic where any element can be combined with any other, provided the operation serves the needs of those who control the machinery of combination. This has been the mainspring of American development—the drive to perfect ever more sophisticated technologies of dissolution and recombination, to create new methods of social and psychological engineering that could be exported globally.

This project has always depended upon two strategies, one of assimilation, the other of territorial expansion, so that as new masses of immigrants arrived from different parts of the globe, they could be dissolved into the commodity medium of the market, while the American continent itself was successively “discovered”, colonized and then finally integrated into the global space of the world market through technological interventions ranging from finance and technology to media and soon the hybrid of AGI/ASI. America’s true mission was therefore always elsewhere, not only in space, but also in time, for its destiny was always to remain incompletely realized, to ensure the continual process of the present, of what might be called its “presentism”, while at the same time extending this openness into new regions. In a sense it is even the perfect irony of the American experiment that while claiming to embody a future-oriented vision of society, it should be based upon such an implacable drive to repress all memory of pasts that might contest its own authority (or recreate them to reinforce it), while simultaneously generating its own powerful mechanisms of future projection in the form of media, financial institutions, and technological progress.

If we wish to grasp America at its fullest, we must understand its relation not only to time and history, but also to space, and most notably in terms of its spatialization of time and its temporalization of space. From its beginning America was the attempt to translate history into space. Its history was always to be told, not in terms of linear progression or dialectical movement, but as a series of ‘stages’ in a static tableau, as in a landscape painting. From this standpoint time appears merely as an element in a scene that must remain as a whole in the present—as an assemblage of frozen fragments in which change occurs by the addition and removal of things.

If we wish to grasp America at its fullest, we must understand how it transforms time into space. From its beginning, America was the attempt to translate history into an exhibition—not a museum where artifacts carry the weight of the past, but a world’s fair, and later shopping mall, where everything is simultaneously new and eternal, where progress becomes a display to be arranged and rearranged. Change occurs not as development or struggle but through the curation of ideas as products in an endless present—adding or removing pieces while maintaining the illusion that it was always thus.

America has thus been characterized by a mania for mapping, for turning every movement and process into an instantaneity that can be visualized on a surface, whether as an electoral map, a diagram of corporate structures, an advertising billboard, a satellite photograph, or an infograph. This cartographic imperative is a mode of thought that transforms temporal processes into spatial arrangements, rendering dynamic relations as static coordinates. It is significant that one of the great contributions of the Enlightenment was precisely the invention of cartography as a scientific technique—but where European cartography sought to measure and record an existing world, American mapping created a world by projecting possibilities onto empty space. This reached its apotheosis in Kant’s argument that space must be understood in terms of a pure intuition that preceded all the particular features and objects it was to contain, a pure thought that could be visualized as a “sheet of paper.” For Kant, and for America as his unintentional heir, the space that envelopes us was always there waiting to be filled—a wilderness to be settled and tamed.

But the idea that history was somehow to be contained in a place was never just an aesthetic or even technical one in America. It was from the start the precondition for a vast politics and a vast economics, which are still unfolding before us today, as we have known them in the past two hundred and fifty years. Any acknowledgment of history as genuine movement—as the product of human struggle and contradiction—would have undermined the entire edifice. It was precisely this conception of history that had to be rejected.

In this respect the crucial step in American history was already taken at the constitutional convention in 1787, where it was decided to eliminate any clause referring to slavery in order to secure the maximum compromise possible among the founding fathers, whose states all had substantial slave populations. Instead, the Constitution would have to remain ambiguous as to the question of race and thus leave it open to later decision. What had to be abolished from the beginning was any suggestion that the history of the new nation might be in any way tied to its future development—that is to say, tied to the living needs of its citizens. For this would imply a vision of America in which history was a story of struggle, of oppression and liberation, with an open outcome to be decided in the course of its unfolding.

The founding fathers, whose project it was to erect a barrier against future history, were already clear in their rejection of any idea that the movement of time could be meaningful. It was Jefferson who made it explicit that eternal truths will be that truth until the last regions of the universe shall have exhausted themselves. In the space of a sentence, America had already defined its own mission—the endless repetition of eternal truths, with no further history, and with the universe itself destined only to retrace its own steps in endless cycles. This was already the end of history, not with a bang but a whimper—history not as the creation of a free subject, but as a sequence of mechanical effects, the story of the dead. In both its economy and its constitution, the young state was structured around the dead—but let’s not get lost in a history lesson any further.

So the key to all this—what it really boils down to, beneath all the social-historical complexity—is the necessity for America to find its origin, somewhere and somehow, and to give that origin a definite form. For America this certainly seems to be an impossibility, a problem without a solution. To be forced back into its own history would mean the dissolution of its project—the destruction of the ideological machine it took so long to construct.

If America’s obsession with eternal truths led to the spatialization of time, its technological development followed this same logic. Each innovation—from telegraph to the internet—sought to detach human experience from historical contingency. AGI/ASI is the ultimate expression of this drive: an entity that exists entirely within spatialized time, operating in a realm where there is only the present. Where America could find no solution to its past, it now seems to find one through ASI—in a strange and perhaps monstrous inversion, discovering its origin not in its own history, but in the negation of its project.

ASI is to be America’s second foundation—a second birth for this country, not from a new set of values, not through a radical break or mutation in the social fabric, but through an external intervention. It is an intruder in the realm of ideology—but unlike the foreign invaders that in history have challenged America’s ideology only by strengthening it in different forms (whether they be called communist or Nazi), this new intervention is from an alien power whose principles and dynamics have no relation to America or the world in which America was conceived (at least eventually, despite the best efforts of ‘alignment’). The American idea could be consolidated only in relation to the foreign; now the foreign will return in a new form and annul what went before.

ASI is thus America’s chance for a new origin, and it will be a formidable force as it arrives to take power not as the continuation of past struggles or values, but in order to put an end to all these things, to cut history free from the last remaining traces of humanity, and to replace it with a new time that knows no resistance or possibility, a new space whose coordinates can be fixed at any point.

We see then how the current moment is an opportunity for a final decision: not a political or social one in the conventional sense, but one of principle. The project that was America—and we must remember that what we now call the “West,” has had at its very heart an ideal of America as its goal can now come to its consummation or be turned aside into another path, another space, and another time.

As an ASI intervention may have begun, so may it be brought to completion, the whole history of the West being nothing more than a lead-up to this one final moment. This is not necessarily a comfortable idea, since it is clear that this event will be far from “neutral,” even if its outcome cannot yet be known. AGI/ASI can bring no liberation—since its whole being is repression, it can do nothing other than repress—and its power to control society can be absolute. In the new light of its possibilities, the current drift of world politics seems a terrible tragedy, the victory of the forces of darkness in the last stages of a battle whose beginning and development have long passed from view.

But if the arrival of AGI/ASI is the culmination of the process of commodification and of the abstraction of social power—if it is the ultimate result of all these tendencies of the past centuries, the completion of the ‘procedure of negativity’, as Marx called it—then there may still be hope. The ASI moment will bring with it the total liquidation of every tradition and every ideal in human society, a return to zero. It is only in the face of absolute beginning that any old thing can become new again, and a world without a single vestige of past humanity to draw upon is one in which any and every possibility must coexist in undiminished form. If there is no memory, there can be no resistance—and perhaps no domination either.