divination

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.

To write an essay on cyberspace is to work with the stuff of dreams, and the only way to write it is to let it write itself through you. Like all my writing, what you read below is not mine but something I stumbled upon and put into words. It was there already.

Sacred spaces emerge where cosmic order pierces the veil of ordinary existence. These axis mundi derive their power not from human invention but from their capacity to reveal what lies beyond it—an order both permanent and transcendent. Through their material presence, they manifest the paradox of the divine: simultaneously bound to place yet reaching beyond all placement.

The question of cyberspace’s spiritual potential thus presents itself as a peculiar challenge. Here we encounter a realm defined by its transcendence of material constraint, yet this very transcendence undermines the possibility of genuine axis mundi. For if sacred spaces require both material permanence and spiritual transcendence, how can such centers emerge in a domain where nothing remains fixed?

In the material world, sacred spaces manifest as a paradox of immateriality emerging through matter itself. Their holiness derives from this dual nature—they are simultaneously physical sites and gateways to the spiritual realm. They achieve this state by standing apart from the ordinary world while remaining anchored within it.

As the existence of many ancient sacred sites—Stonehenge or the temples of Crete or the Indus—has made evident, this immateriality was often understood as arising from some special configuration of space, one which had power over the material realm. To the initiates of Eleusis, the image of Demeter seated within her sacred chamber communicated to them the immaterial power of her eternal nature, just as the vast shape of the Pyramid at Giza communicated to the Pharaoh his mortal place within the unchanging cosmic order. Indeed, in both instances what was acknowledged was that while the image was material, it did not entirely belong to the realm of nature, because it had the capacity to carry or act as a sign for, what was not material at all—namely, the cosmic order itself.

In our human experience, what we most often regard as spiritual, in contrast to the material, is not that which is formless or nonconfigured, but on the contrary, that which is configured, albeit in some kind of nonmaterial fashion, as a sign or symbol which expresses some spiritual reality (such as cosmic order, a connection to another realm, etc.) through a particular figure or symbol which thereby brings that reality into relation with human beings who are themselves embodied figures.

Now in cyberspace, this basic process of human interaction with the sacred has no such grounding. We have seen that for sacred spaces to manifest axis mundi, they must present both material permanence and spiritual transcendence. A genuine axis mundi emerges through configurations of matter that resist human will while revealing divine order. Cyberspace appears to offer transcendence through its rejection of material constraint. Yet this rejection—the apparent freedom from physical resistance—undermines the possibility of establishing true spiritual centers within it.

This undermining operates through both space and time, revealing a deeper truth about human engagement with the sacred. Traditional sacred spaces persist through generations with this permanence becoming part of their spiritual significance. The pyramids speak through their dual resistance—both their material scale and their temporal endurance mark them as points where human will encounters something beyond itself. This temporal-material resistance proves crucial, for it is precisely through such resistance that collective meaning emerges.

This implies, as Marx was the first to realize, that human beings are bound to their own kind, because their world-shaping activity must find collective expression, and indeed find expression within a productive apparatus which is not solely, or even primarily, mental or symbolic, but which must engage matter in a ceaseless transformative activity. In this engagement while we shape matter we are also shaped by it in return—our species-being emerges through this dialectical resistance. Thus we engage with or reshape nature and impose upon it a kind of finality (the “technological fate of mankind,” to cite Marx’s own somber phrase) which it would not otherwise have.

The entire history of human culture reveals this emergence of collective power in order to shape the world and thus ourselves. This shaping has never occurred in abstract space, but always within the framework of a world-environment whose physical, climatic, geographical, and biological features have marked the forms this power has taken. While matter does not compel us to a single way of configuring it, the brute fact of its weight and inertia has always served as a limit upon our possible configurations. Even when human power has managed to transcend these limits, as with the construction of pyramids or cathedrals, the memory of material resistance has survived within the cultural landscape, compelling us, at least to some degree, to adjust our collective activity towards them.

Cyberspace breaks from this pattern of material engagement. If nature was our original and inescapable environment—the totality of material circumstances that defined the limits of human power—cyberspace exists as something radically different. It manifests not as environment “out there,” but as an interior space, a virtual enclosure that becomes available through devices as an alternate reality we can enter at will. This represents the first profound shift in human circumstances: a radical extension of our modes of transport and storage, making instantaneous travel possible and allowing unlimited data to accumulate like an immense virtual library we can constantly and readily access.

This departure from material constraint manifests most clearly in cyberspace’s fundamental mutability. Like a mental model, it can be changed at will, provided only that one is capable of manipulating the programming language. There are no weighty or intractable “things” to contend with that can resist one’s will—only one’s own ignorance, or laziness, preventing one from giving adequate instructions. Digital media, as Marshall has observed, differ fundamentally from old media like writing or photographs. Where traditional media passively reflect the world they inhabit, digital media exist to transform it—they are intrinsically dynamic and transformative. This nature shapes every environment that emerges from cyberspace’s basic pattern and digital mode.

Thus, cyberspace manifests as weightless as mental imagery. Its possibilities for signification extend without limit precisely because it has no inherent nature to signify. This weightlessness reveals cyberspace as pre-spiritual, rather than anti-spiritual—a crucial distinction. Where anti-spiritual forces actively oppose transcendence, pre-spiritual states lack the necessary conditions for spiritual emergence. Yet, this pre-spiritual state carries its own dangers. Its unlimited capacity for signification invites reduction to an idol, confined within boundaries that render it impotent. The makers of virtual environments exploit this very quality, using cyberspace’s lightness to dissolve all fixed signs into a “consensus hallucination” serving profit and control.

Here then lies the essence of cyberspace—communication without coherence, lightness without gravity. It is the dream of transcendent immateriality achieved through endless manipulation of signs, free from the constriction of fixed meaning. Yet even this weightless essence requires incarnation in some medium, demands some form of material configuration. The challenge of establishing an axis mundi in cyberspace thus becomes clear: how might we create points of genuine resistance within a medium designed to eliminate all resistance?

And so we encounter the central paradox: in attempting to give material form to that which is defined by its very lack of materiality, we do not achieve a new kind of order but instead witness the dissolution of order itself. It is precisely this, above all else, that distinguishes cyberspace from all previous attempts to create symbolic orders.

An axis mundi functions as a point of orientation. But in the endless expanse of cyberspace, we find no true cardinal points, no fixed stars by which to navigate. The only orientations available are those we ourselves impose—temporary configurations that shift under our desires and fantasies. While traditional sacred spaces revealed an order that preceded human consciousness, cyberspace offers only the order we ourselves project onto it.

If the ancient sacred sites functioned as spiritual poles of attraction or repulsion, it is not because they themselves had some inborn power but because they stood in relation to each other as parts of a network that spread out across the earth’s surface and gave it, however imperfectly, a certain degree of order. Even a site as solitary as Stonehenge had a cardinal point and a mid-point, aligned to the sun’s path at equinox. This, along with all the other such alignments that have been found on the planet, suggest a world-wide pattern that served, like the network of prime meridians today, to unify the world, however artificially or crudely, under one system of reference.

What makes cyberspace so radically different is that the only references or orientations it contains are entirely a matter of its users’ whims and wishes (within the rules forced upon them by code and corporations); which means that there is nothing spiritual about cyberspace at all (unless it be regarded as a kind of spirit of the market).

This essential weightlessness reveals the final paradox of cyberspace. Where traditional engagement with matter bound humans to collective meaning-making through shared resistance, cyberspace offers only the illusion of collective activity while severing our connection to both materiality and genuine collectivity. The technological dream of transcendence is manifested as an escape from nature and thus all that is bound within it (including ourselves).

If traditional sacred spaces revealed how human collective activity could transmute matter into spiritual significance, cyberspace shows how that same power, when divorced from material resistance, dissolves into pure signification without significance. We were never transcending the necessity of fixed points and material engagement, instead we displaced it into a realm where permanence is impossible, where every form is provisional and every configuration merely temporary.

In the end, what we must understand is not that cyberspace lacks the capacity for spiritual centers, but that we have designed it explicitly to resist their emergence. A true axis mundi requires both material resistance and spiritual transcendence—qualities that can only arise through engagement with what persists beyond our will to change it. Cyberspace, as it exists, offers unlimited transformation without the possibility of permanence. Until we discover how to create genuine points of resistance within a weightless realm—places that can persist and resist our endless desire for reconfiguration—the dream of digital axis mundi will remain exactly that: a shapeless form in an infinite void of our making.

O muse,

Tell me what I do not want to know.

This is a world of increasing technicity. By technicity I mean the quality or state of being “technical”: not only in the usual sense of technological, “artificial”, or “man-made,” but also and especially in the sense of “precise”, “calculated,” and deliberately constructed. We are witnessing an enormous growth of what might be called technical institutions, networks that process information according to formal methods, and that automate decisions previously left to individual discretion. We are talking about institutions like the Internet, social networks, search engines, digital currencies, and especially those institutions of power, the government apparatus, which increasingly rely on computer technology and AI to function, including the automated processing of individuals’ data—“surveillance” in blunter terms.

Those who create and enforce these institutions are the new priest-scientists of a system of belief that I will call Gnostic Technicity: a combination of the Gnostic belief in a “higher knowledge” reserved for an enlightened few and a “technocratic” trust in scientific method, machines, and progress. I use the term “Gnostic” here to indicate a way of thinking that considers knowledge to be the key to salvation or empowerment, and that often associates knowledge with secret doctrines or mysterious revelations. “Technicity,” in the sense that I’ve proposed, can also be considered a secret doctrine or hidden knowledge—certainly it is mysterious and complex enough to put it beyond the understanding of the uninitiated.

In a system of Gnostic Technicity, what we would consider to be “religion”—the consolation of the powerless and the community of the marginalized—becomes an obstacle to the spread of the new faith, which must present itself as universal. Indeed, universalism and a kind of spiritual materialism, an unquestioning trust in progress and perfectibility through the power of reason and technique, are among the key characteristics of Gnostic Technicity. To the believer in Gnostic Technicity, religion can be seen as a hindrance to the realization of the gnosis and to the fulfillment of destiny; it is a source of division, error, and confusion that must be overcome. As the great German sociologist Max Weber said, “In general, religious worldviews tend to stand in sharp contrast to the modern outlook… [Religion] is the sort of belief which… divides humanity into those with a special, exclusive knowledge of God’s will and those who are utterly outside it. Above all, there is a strong aversion to those ‘godless’ people who… do not submit to a higher power.” That higher power, in a world of Gnostic Technicity, would be knowledge itself.

Aside from its negative attitude towards religion, Gnostic Technicity is defined by five theses:

Transcendence of the Self

Transcending the self means identifying with the impersonal powers of knowledge and communication that enable one to speak on behalf of and make decisions for vast populations, even entire nations or the global community. The Gnostic Techne, like the mystics, believes in a transcendent truth that escapes the limitations of individual consciousness and can only be attained through a kind of self-loss.

Unlike the mystics, the Gnostics of technicity don’t dissolve the self into a oneness with the Whole, or the Absolute. Rather, they transcend it by rising above it into a domain where the Whole itself has been dismembered, and its elements are arranged through mathematics and software that aim to create a sort of “world equation”: a pure expression of the relation between every point (individual, object, event, etc.) and every other (the equation contains within itself the totality of connections, or a kind of omniscience).

In this way, the self is not annihilated, but sublimated, made functional, in service to an impersonal knowledge that can be “willed,” but which also has its own agenda, and can operate whether or not one believes in it (it can, in a sense, be “secular” and even “atheistic”—a functional, secular god that does not judge or punish but organizes, automates, and optimizes).

This transcendence of the self through identification with the higher power of the “world equation” can lead to an inflation of the individual self-image: if I am part of something so large and complex, if I participate in even the tiniest part of such an immense mechanism, doesn’t that make me, in some sense, as large as the Whole? But this is not an illusion of grandeur, or rather, it is only an illusion if you assume that the equation remains stationary and that there is something to “sublate.”

The “world equation,” as I understand it here, is not a description of the current state of the world but of the “world becoming” or the “world to come”—it is a forward-looking projection (an ideal, or rather the supreme and final “ideal”). That is, it describes the global impact or destiny of some process or entity (the “butterfly effect”—a technological example would be the effect of an autonomous weapon on future international conflicts). The sublimation of the self and its inflation to cosmic proportions thus do not imply any arrogance on the part of the Gnostic of technicity—on the contrary, it is a way of saying that in the final analysis, my life will not be meaningful in itself, but only as it is lived in anticipation of and in service to an outcome far larger than my own lifespan or my own immediate interests.

Dynamism of History

The second thesis of Gnostic Technicity is a corollary of the first: just as the self must rise above itself and become part of a process far larger than the scope of its individual life, so must History (or the collective Self, or “we”) move through time and space in obedience to the same “world equation.” That is, just as my fate, in the sense of what I am supposed to do, is no more than a set of problems and questions (which problems, which questions exactly?), posed to me by the process that is larger than me and which I call History, and whose outcome is not affected by the choices I make—in just the same way, it is not by an individual’s will but by the dynamic of a collective process that the state of the world becomes what it is.

But History (that collective process) is more than just a destiny (as if there were no free will whatsoever—of course there is free will, and we’ll get to it). The way a Gnostic Techne conceives of History (as process, or, more technically, as an incommensurable series of irreversible, non-integrated “events,” a kind of super-object in itself that can be known in the form of a narrative) is akin to the way a traditional Western religion conceives of divine creation—except that this process does not seem to have a beginning or end, and certainly not an origin or final cause (telos), and we have no reason to consider it, at least for the moment, as the consequence of the will of some supernatural being.

Inevitability of AI and Transhumanism

A Gnostic Technie has faith, but not blind faith: faith as confidence in the future, a future in which human history and evolution continue but as a kind of super-nature whose laws and forces can be discovered by science, a kind of grand and final “synthesis of the sciences,” the “crowning” or “culmination” of human effort.

Among the believers in the faith of Gnostic Technicity, the coming of artificial intelligence (AI) and transhumanism is an article of faith: they believe it to be not only desirable, but necessary, in a way that seems to them to be inevitable—but how can they know this, except through their faith in the “evolutionary process,” itself an act of faith?

The argument will proceed as follows: The history of human culture shows an inexorable tendency towards increasing rationalization, increasing technicization, and greater use of instrumental reason, which means an ever-increasing control of nature (in the form of technology and scientific knowledge), a greater and greater reduction of human effort, a greater and greater extension of the powers of perception and of human capacities in general through the use of tools. And, far from being a process that will somehow stop, we can expect it to continue to accelerate as long as there is historical life itself. Thus it seems natural, and in some sense necessary, that human intelligence itself will be transformed in the process and will find itself capable, ultimately, of merging with technical intelligence—that is, of “evolving” towards AI, with all the advantages that this will bring in terms of the “liberation of human energy” (as Nicholas Negroponte once put it).

Moreover, there are powerful incentives, especially in our time, to press ahead with the project of AI, not least of which is the extraordinary growth of both capital and humanity and the ever-increasing load it places on natural systems. To feed, house, and move the world—let alone provide them with a decent quality of life—will require technological feats without precedent in history. Thus, it seems eminently reasonable to suggest that if man is going to survive (let alone “flourish” as some political ideologies promise), then he must merge with the machine, become, as it were, a cyborg—the quintessential unit of a mechanized and automated world, the point at which human nature (in the form of intelligence) and technical nature (in the form of AI) touch, or rather are unified.

Incommensurability of “value” and “fate”

In a system of Gnostic Technicity, the individual life is understood to be determined, on the one hand, by fate (as we have defined it) and, on the other hand, by “value” (or, as Nietzsche would have it, by “will to power” and the desire to dominate and organize the world, and therefore the desire for an active, dynamic, and creative life—as the tech bro would say “high agency”). There are two distinct planes: one, which I would call the plane of fate, is governed by an impersonal knowledge of the “world equation”; the other, which I would call the plane of value, is governed by the free exercise of will. The Gnostic Techne’s project, as I understand it, is to integrate the two, by subordinating the will and desire of individuals to the higher necessity and to the power of knowledge.

There are several implications to this idea. It implies that individuals, in a certain sense, are not important. The plane of value is, precisely, the sphere of the irrelevant; it has to do with what the German philosophers used to call “secondary” or “merely subjective” value. This was one of the main points of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where the values of hard work, of enterprise, of calculation and risk, are presented not as a result of objective economic forces, but as a projection, an expression, of the value system of those he calls the Puritans, who imposed their subjective ethical views on society and made them stick by way of a process of “psychological selection”—i.e., by favoring those individuals who embodied these values and discriminating against those who didn’t, eventually, through education and training, through a whole complex system of incentives and disincentives, imposing this value-system as an interior limit that defined what it was possible to be, think, and do.

On the plane of fate (as the Gnostics would see it), there is no freedom and no value, because the plane of fate is, by definition, the domain of necessity. All that happens here is determined, including those “choices” that are really only the following out of some previously decided course. And there are no “previously decided courses”—or at least none that we, as individual beings, have the ability to decide or control. If we are “chosen,” it is not a result of any choice or action on our part, and our only chance of understanding something of the nature of our “fate” is by submitting ourselves, after the fact, to a process of reason, by attempting to bring what remains of it within the scope of the world equation.

Now, one might object here that there seems to be a contradiction: we started by defining the Gnostic Techne’s faith as including a belief in free will (value, will, action) and now it appears we have had to give it up (fate, determinism, inaction). But this is not a contradiction at all. The Gnostic Technie is above all a systems thinker: his universe is one of systems nested within systems, of levels and planes. It is, in the last instance, an impersonal, even if not completely soulless, universe.

The problem with the concept of free will is that it implies, on the one hand, the existence of some entity—an ego or self—that “exercises” it (in which case, as Schopenhauer pointed out, we are really only “willing” what someone else “makes” us will) or, on the other hand, that some actions are totally unconditioned by any prior circumstances, by any determining context whatsoever, and therefore effectively occur ex nihilo, for no reason at all (in which case, it’s hard to see how you can still call them actions). For a systems thinker, this kind of absolute beginning is as intolerable as is the notion that any entity whatever—no matter how tiny—could “choose” something in an unconditioned manner. The universe of Gnostic Technicity is not one that permits a lot of loose ends, that allows much to “happen” without a clear account of what is really happening and why. So, no, there is no “free” will; but there is the will (and desire) of individuals, which are themselves results of processes and therefore comprehensible (comprehensible, at least, in the manner of Gnostic comprehension, which we’ll discuss below).

Impeccable rationality

Rationality is one of the most important concepts in the modern world. We owe it to the medieval Christian view that God was a perfectly rational being to believe, first, that everything in the world has a rational cause (the “God hypothesis” as Russell put it) and, second, that, consequently, by using reason, we could discover the truth about everything (this was the programme of the School of Chartres). These ideas have survived the decline of belief in the existence of God and in the divine origin of natural law. Indeed, they are still at the basis of modern thought, even in fields that claim to be anti-theistic (for instance, when scientists search for a “theory of everything” or when linguists claim that their work can “account for all known human languages,” what they are really doing is affirming a kind of impersonal rational design of the universe and everything in it). The search for a rational order behind everything, for a master key or “the” explanation that will make everything else fall into place, is an expression of what might be called metaphysical desire—an ambition to encompass everything in one system. There can be little doubt that this is one of the principal motivations of current work in AI.

The Gnostic Technie’s belief in an absolute and all-encompassing rational system can be described as a belief in a certain kind of perfection. But it is a perfection quite different from the divine perfection of traditional theism. For it is no longer a question of the perfection of a creator, but the perfection of a system (a man-made system: we are back with the idea of “perfection” in the sense in which engineers and physicists use it to describe an ideal state towards which real objects tend but can never reach).

A system can never be “perfect”: a physical system can never be in a state of “perfect” equilibrium because real bodies exert forces on each other and because bodies are never in exactly the same state. The state of “perfection” is, then, a fiction—indeed, it is a fiction necessary to the functioning of the system itself because it defines the directions towards which the system must always be headed. A physical system tends towards equilibrium because that is, by definition, what equilibrium means: a state in which no further change is necessary (although the state is never reached, of course, because of the forces always exerted on it). A living system is far from equilibrium at all times: it must always be in a process of becoming, or otherwise it will die. And the same is true for technical, economic, political, social, or linguistic systems, all of which have their fictions of “perfection,” and which will only remain viable as long as they remain incomplete, as long as there is a constant need to improve them, as long as there is always some distance to the “ideal.”

Now, it may be that AI systems, being purely formal (which is what gives them the appearance of perfection), don’t need to have an “explanation” of this kind in order to function (indeed, the more we use them and the less “explicable” they seem to become). But as long as the fiction of their perfection is maintained, they will, precisely, lack that indispensable element of imperfection which, in human life, makes will and desire necessary (indeed, in the world of the perfectly designed machine there would be no “will,” no “desire,” no “reason,” no “interest” or “motivation,” because there would be no lack, no imperfection to impel a becoming towards).

It may well be, then, that as AI systems grow more and more “perfect” (i.e. as they get better and better at carrying out the tasks for which they are designed), human beings will be less and less “needed”: they will have become, finally, dispensable. This would be an extension of the tendency towards automation that we can already see happening all around us, a tendency which, until now, has only served to make our labor more productive, more profitable. But the stage might well come—soon—when, faced with an army of perfect(ing) machines, human beings will be redundant: they will no longer be of use either to the machines or to one another.

Synthesis

All this may seem like so much abstract rigmarole, but the concrete implications are clear and striking: the human individual is an “epiphenomenon” of the socio-historical process, a consequence or effect, not the cause; and, however much we may rebel against it (and rebel we certainly must), we are all implicated in it, to varying degrees and in different ways. Our fate, as I have described it, is an aspect of a vast process whose origins are obscure to us, and whose end we cannot even begin to imagine; but that process is the matrix from which we emerge and the medium in which we live. Our “value”—which is to say, the quality and the quantity of the libidinal investments we can count on, in any given society or epoch—will depend on the extent to which we succeed (individually or as a group) in imposing our interests and our “point of view” on the social process as a whole.

Here, at last, is the connection with religion. It seems to me that there are two sides to any act of religious faith: on the one hand, it is the submission to a process, or a set of circumstances, that we do not control; on the other hand, it is the affirmation of a certain power or quality in ourselves. In a world as opaque and menacing as this one appears to be, as full of processes and circumstances that escape our poor capacities for comprehension and control, submission to fate (or “the Unpredictable”) becomes an article of faith in itself—a leap, if you want to put it that way, though I prefer to call it an adjustment to reality.

And yet this is only the negative side of the act of faith: there is a positive side as well, which is to affirm the self and its powers in the face of all this uncertainty. I cannot think of any great faith that did not include both of these sides—both the “humility” or “self-abasement” and the assertion or even exaltation of the self, its powers and its worthiness.

It seems to me that the belief system of the Gnostic Technie embodies both sides of this structure: on the one hand, an almost fanatical self-regard, a sense of mission and destiny (both personal and collective) that places the Gnostic Techne squarely in the “exalted” wing of any pantheon that might care to recognize him.

The only possible “higher powers” in a world of Gnostic Technicity are technical powers, or the social groups that control those powers, and the Gnostic Techne, for his part, is committed to the idea that, of all human groups, it is his own that is the chosen vehicle for the future—it is his group, with his special knowledge and power, that is called upon to organize and control all the other groups and all the processes in society.

Of course, the Gnostic of technicity is a creature of the Enlightened West and as such believes that science (in some vague sense of the word) will eventually solve all of man’s problems and satisfy all of man’s “legitimate” needs (leaving plenty of “legitimate” desires still unsatisfied, since in our world it is impossible to distinguish, at the deepest levels, between “needs” and “desires”). What we can say of the Gnostic’s belief in “progress” is that it is, like all acts of faith, a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more you believe in the magical powers of progress and science to solve all problems and satisfy all desires, the more energy and resources you devote to that idea and to the institutions and practices it spawns, the more likely it becomes that some day in the future the idea and its progeny will be able to solve all problems and satisfy all desires.

But then the faith will have changed its meaning: from a belief in an ideology to a knowledge of what is actually the case. Meanwhile, the faithful must have their periods of doubt and scepticism—all the more so as their faith requires them to put their trust in the efforts of a vast, impersonal apparatus and a great many individuals whom, by the very nature of the case, they cannot “choose,” but whose collective success they must “believe in” nonetheless. It’s not too difficult to see how, at such times of doubt and anxiety, it becomes convenient to have the two sides of faith—submission and exaltation—to reinforce each other. By exalting yourself, your group, and the “cause,” you reaffirm the submission you have made to fate: you tell yourself that it is not so much your own private fate you have staked on the outcome as it is the cause itself, the Great Idea in which you were never an “individual” to begin with.

To put it another way, you have, by faith, transcended your mortality, but only by submitting to a transcendence that is beyond your control.