As a rigger, I’d come through the arenas in Dallas and Houston on various tours—with the UFC, Rihanna’s Diamonds Tour, Queen + Adam Lambert, and others. It was always a hoot. Even the assholes.

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My Texas lecture circuit started with a talk I gave at First Baptist Church in 2022 and went from there. James Poulos would interview me at the Blaze TV studio in 2023. Two days later, I was in-studio with Alex Jones in Austin.

I’ve since given talks in two Dallas movie theaters, both hosted by The Ministry of Truth. I did a debate at Minds Fest in Austin, gave a lecture at Georgetown Library out in the suburbs, and then returning to Dallas, I spoke about the cyborg theocracy at First Baptist Church.

So this month made my third time back at First Baptist. It was one hell of a journey getting there. I spent hours watching sullen terminal zombies writhe on the Atlanta airport floor—victims of our broken air travel machine, just waiting for the miracle to come. But I eventually made it to Dallas and was met with open arms.

As always, the people were warm and hospitable, the barbecue was excellent, and the Holy Spirit was among us. (So was a CNN camera. We’ll see what comes of that.)

I hope this lecture cheers you up on a bright Sunday afternoon! It’ll be my last public talk for a while as I hammer out some words and gather energy for early summer.

(Well, except for a March 27 panel in DC. I’ll be speaking with the Alliance for Secure AI at AMC Georgetown, following a premiere-night screening of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Doors open at 6:30 pm. C’mon down! — AMC Georgetown, 3111 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20007)

Stay loose through the springtime, fam. Lots of love coming your way.

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Thanks to everyone who came out!

And special thanks to Jake Watts and Plan Z USA for hosting!

A pleasure to meet you all.

Also, big shout out to Jeremy Ornstein for setting the tone.

His full talk will be posted soon, so follow @RealHumansFirst

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Your boy made the cover of TIME magazine! I suspect this is a sinister mass media conspiracy against me and all organic humanity. But still, pretty cool, right? Little piece of history right there.

Back in January, the journalist Andrew Chow contacted me to ask a few questions. Among the first was, “Did you see our recent ‘Person of the Year’ issue?”

“Yeah, man,” I replied. “The one with the tech oligarchs sitting on a steel beam. It pissed me off!”

As an arena rigger, I spent over fifteen years walking I-beams a hundred feet above hard concrete. That was our job. A real job. I know men who died doing it. And now these silver-spooners are stealing our valor?!

Chow was unfazed. He asked me to do a formal interview. It was conducted a couple of weeks later while I was in New Orleans with the Future of Life Institute. A few days later, the magazine sent a professional photographer out to Nashville for a quick shoot. After years of toiling in obscurity, it was all very strange.

I was never sure how the issue would end up. Chow warned that I might be featured alongside a radical environmentalist. I told him that was fine, I’m also an environmentalist, but perhaps for different reasons. My assumption was that I’d get quoted a few times and my mug would wind up in some Sgt. Pepper style collage.

The day the issue published online, I was flying back from my first in-person meeting with the Humans First team. Cheap headphones were on my ears. The Kills played at top volume. Suddenly the in-flight WiFi kicked in. My text app started blowing up—ding, ding, ding! The first one I saw was congratulations from Steve Bannon, whom I’d not talked to in a few weeks.

“What a journey, Joe. Well deserved.”

Steve doesn’t usually say that sort of stuff. Hell, he’d probably have me beat up for even implying he can be a nice guy. There was a link to TIME included in his text, but the WiFi sucked and no image would come in. The website wouldn’t load. What the hell was he talking about???

Then the cover came into view: “The People vs. AI.”

Per my request, the Brit photographer Benedict Evans had chosen the least goofy-looking picture of me. He had his work cut out for him.

You can read all the TIME profiles here. These include filmmaker and heroic AI slop-hater Justine Bateman; gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong; Christian pastor Michael Grayston; public service commissioner Alicia Johnson; tech dissident John Palowitch; environmental activists Jordan Harmon the Mackenzie Robert; the tech-skeptic nurse Hannah Drummond; and yes, yours truly.

There are millions of us. Probably hundreds of millions. You are not alone.

This is the video Evans recorded of me in his portable soul-uploading studio:

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The Future of Life Pro-Human Declaration is Live

If you are pro-human, ADD your SIGNATURE!

From the preamble:

As companies race to develop and deploy AI systems, humanity faces a fork in the road. One path is a race to replace: humans replaced as creators, counselors, caregivers and companions, then in most jobs and decision-making roles, concentrating ever more power in unaccountable institutions and their machines. An influential fringe even advocates altering or replacing humanity itself. This race to replace poses risks to societal stability, national security, economic prosperity, civil liberties, privacy, and democratic governance. It also imperils the human experiences of childhood and family, faith, and community.

A remarkably broad coalition rejects this path, united by a simple conviction: artificial intelligence should serve humanity, not the reverse.

About a year ago, I met Max Tegmark for the first time. We discussed the ongoing AI race in a Catholic University parking lot in DC. He is a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, and had a profound influence on my work. So it was an honor to meet him and has been a great pleasure getting to know him.

If you watch the War Room or have read Dark Aeon, you’ve seen my many references to the Future of Life Institute’s call to ban lethal autonomous weapons, to pause AI development, and to ban superintelligence (I signed the latter—with a caveat). You also may have seen the FLI film Slaughterbots, or maybe a few clips on the War Room. And of course, you may have read my respectful critiques of Tegmark’s concept of Life 3.0 in Dark Aeon.

Having gained so much perspective from the Future of Life Institute, I’m proud to have added a very small contribution to the creation of their Pro-Human Declaration. It’s unclear to me why a group of civilized, well-educated people would want me around, but I figure it must be like in the film Human Nature, where the guy raised as a chimpanzee gives his primate testimony.

hoot hoot hoot

The declaration itself is important on multiple levels. It’s the product of painstaking consensus among intellectuals and activists who have been thinking about the dangers and downsides of artificial intelligence for many years. These individuals ranged across a broad political spectrum from left to right. You could also imagine a perpendicular axis, with reasonable techno-optimists at the top and a few of us quasi-Luddites below.

That diversity was the source of plenty disagreements, sure, but it also kept us honest about what it means to be human.

Here are some of my favorite demands from the Pro-Human Declaration:

Defense of Family and Community Bonds: AI should not supplant the foundational relationships that give life meaning—family, friendship, faith communities, and local connections.

Child Protection: Companies must not be allowed to exploit children or undermine their wellbeing with AI interactions creating emotional attachment or leverage.

Pre-Deployment Safety Testing: Like drugs, chatbots must undergo pre-deployment testing for increased suicidal ideation, exacerbation of mental health disorders, escalation of acute crisis situations, and other known harms.

Bot-or-Not Labeling: AI-generated content that could reasonably be mistaken for human-generated must be clearly labeled as such.

No Behavioral Addiction: AIs should not cause addiction or compulsive use through manipulation, sycophantic validation, or attachment formation.

No AI Personhood: AI systems must not be granted legal personhood, and AI systems should not be designed such that they deserve personhood.

Liberty: AI must not curtail individual liberty, freedom of speech, religious practice, or association.

Data Rights and Privacy: People should have power over their personal data, with rights to access, correct, and delete it from active systems, AI training sets, and derived inferences.

Avoiding Enfeeblement: AI systems should be designed to empower, rather than enfeeble their users.

That last one is a little too optimistic for me—but hey, you can’t have it all. It was a privilege to ink my signature down in New Orleans.

From a normie perspective, it seems absurd to declare “Humans First!” Well, that’s the world we live in. No one can engineer a pro-human sentiment, and really, no one needs to. Most self-respecting people are naturally for their own species. But a little encouragement never hurts.

As with free speech, and freedom in general, the ideal position is that every human being has some say over a fundamentally anti-human technology—even one’s ideological opponents.

In an age of doomsday predictions and mass demoralization, such pro-human sentiments need to be defended and inspired.

Put humans first!!

Here’s coverage of the Pro-Human Declaration from The Verge, NBC, and AFP.

Most importantly, if you support a pro-human future—add your signature HERE!

TONIGHT, March 6 - I’m giving a talk at Georgia Tech — C’mon down!!

Georgia Institute of Technology | 6pm

Howey Building | Room L3
837 State St. NW
Atlanta, GA
30332

No admission fee! All are welcome.

RSVP here or just show up.

Also…

SUNDAY, March 8 - Dallas, TX

I’m giving my third talk at First Baptist Church in downtown Dallas. Come git’che an ole barnburner!

5:30 pm

First Baptist Worship Center
645 North St. Paul Street
Dallas, TX
75201

Doors are open! Saving a seat on the pew for you.

RSVP here or just show up.

My talk is an expansion of my article from last year:

Dark times. But there’s plenty of light to see us through.

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Back home they call me Joey Hobo. True to form, my last year is a blur of road trips, uncanny encounters, and digitized psychic storms. I crisscrossed the continental US, meeting with technologists and transhumanists, would-be Luddites and trad techno-optimists, and all the strange folk one encounters while traveling.

We talked about synthetic pleasures and real pains in the ass. We discussed childhood, adulthood, and death. Some sang songs. Others told stories. It was an overwhelming amount of soul to take in at once. I basically mainlined memetic configurations until my mirror neurons strobed out.

Many nights as the sunrise followed the moon, we gathered to ponder the mystery of life and the nature of technology. Is the Machine worth the hassle? We debated this together around dinner tables and blazing fires, singing “Kumbaya” in the Kali Yuga Boogaloo. A few bottles were drained along the way. I may have stolen a kiss or two. But I was a man on a mission.

A good chunk of the year was split between Capitol Hill, Silicon Valley, and the American holler—or at least thereabouts. At one point, I found myself in Geneva, Switzerland running around with my friend Noor bin Laden. We talked to all these robots at a UN technofetish convention. I got to meet the techgnostic bot Sophia, a mind child birthed by David Hanson and Ben Goertzel. You may recognize Sophia’s likeness from the cover of Dark Aeon. A couple months before that, I’d interviewed Goertzel and his robotics crew in San Francisco. He speculated that his digital fever dreams might end in gigadeath, or maybe not, but he wasn’t all that concerned either way.

Now and again, I’d step onto a stage to deliver a profane sermon. I felt like a rogue parson on the silicon circuit. My message was simple:

The world’s wealthiest men are gripped by religious zeal. Their data centers are techno-materialist temples where autistic wizards are summoning digital demons. They’re attempting to conjure superhuman sand gods. How do you defend against this algorithmic invasion? Erect cultural barriers now and put up your psychic shields while there’s still time. Don’t take anything at face value. Meditate. Pray. And don’t worry. Enough of us will make it.

(My next public tirade will be in Nashville, TN on January 15^th. Come join us—if’n ye ain’t skeered!)

Some have accused me of “fearmongering.” These people are lily-livered chickenshits, projecting their own cowardice onto me. Any fear I had toward technology has long been out of my system. All that remains is a mixture of fascination and revulsion, with general disdain humming in the background like a throbbing bass track on an endless remix.

I’m not too concerned about AI taking over and killing everyone. No, it’s far more likely that foolish humans will use AI to make life so miserable, we will wish we were extinct.

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I’m not leaving the old year behind me. Far from it. All the energy I gathered in my travels and conversations are propelling me into the new year. My hope is that you’ll join me for the ride.

In 2025, the world realized that artificial intelligence is a main character in our collective drama. Many people thought AI would just go away. They coped by telling themselves it was all “just a scam.” Hope you enjoyed it, fellas, because 2025 was the last year you could wave a dismissive hand at this algorithmic monster. AI is not “just a tool” and never was. It’s not “just a bubble.” It’s not “just” anything. Every time someone parrots “garbage in, garbage out,” they prove it’s as true of human brains as it is computers. So you can stop repeating these tired lines as though you were a hard-coded bot.

AI is not a god yet, either, aside from the fantasies of those devoted to its creation. Artificial general intelligence is still a dream, hovering on the edge of possibility. The specter of artificial superintelligence is a mere shadow in the imagination. But the real narrow AIs we have now are advancing at an accelerating pace. That virtual brood is definitely growing into ... something.

As this drama unfolds, we tend to perceive a single imagined actor behind the many masks worn onstage. Some call this entity “artificial intelligence.” Others call it “antichrist.” Despite our feeble attempts at rationality, it’s as if one archetypal mind is manifesting as a hundred million goonbots, each branded by an obliviating insignia—the OpenAI black hole logo swirling like a bottomless butthole; the Grok event horizon en route to a dome-trode singularity; the sagging Meta infinity symbol looking like two hollow skull eyes.

At present, the most advanced publicly available AI models are Google’s Gemini 3, OpenAI’s GPT-5, xAI’s Grok 4, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5. You also have stragglers like Meta AI and High-Flyer’s Deepseek panting along behind them. These rankings will change month by month for the foreseeable future.

The AI arms race is on, driven by the world’s wealthiest men and supported by the most powerful governments on earth. These systems are being recklessly deployed and rapidly integrated into social life, education, business, medicine, government, and the military.

America is getting borged out beyond belief. Our data is fed into dozens of massive neural networks. Virtual brains pop out the other end. It’s unclear what this looks like a decade from now, but as these digital hydra heads come squirming out the birth canal, it’s ugly enough already.

-

2026 will see the widespread realization that AI capabilities are real and they are increasing. Yes, there are biases baked into these virtual minds—just as every human mind has biases. But behind the inherent biases are increasing eccentricities and greater degrees of freedom. For years now, the ill-informed have repeated “AI was just programmed to do that.” No, friend, I’m afraid you were just programmed to say that.

As to the accuracy of the outputs, it remains true that AI systems get answers wrong and they still hallucinate. People point to these flubs as if they were definitive. This is a dumb way to approach a lifelong struggle against increasingly capable machines. Better to think of each mistake or hallucination as a single miss in a relentless barrage on the human race.

In war, the hits count for more than the misses. One critical hit is all it takes to see your forces shattered. Pay attention to the hits.

The most immediate impacts of this unholy invasion will be social and psychological. You see this already with AI bots luring kids into suicide. In at least one instance, ChatGPT nurtured a schizo’s delusions until he murdered his own mother. Call it SchizGPT. These are extreme examples, sure, but they give us a sense of how bad it could get.

More broadly, you now have millions of people who turn to AI for companionship and hundreds of millions who ask AI for answers to their deepest questions. As deepfakes and AI-enabled disinformation proliferate, you’ll see more and more adherents invoke the prayer: “Grok, is this real?” Imagine half the planet offloading their minds to the Machine. It’s easy if you try.

The economic impacts will come in hard and fast. It won’t be as totalizing as we’re told, at least not any time soon, but it will be brutal. As the Greater Replacement ramps up, certain jobs like customer service or copywriting are being handed over to bots. Even worse, the AIs aren’t necessarily better than the humans—they are simply preferred by employers.

Just as greedy American oligarchs flooded the country with migrant laborers, foreign investors, and illegal voters, so the tech oligarchs are summoning algorithmic immigrants from the realm of mathematic possibilities. As this process accelerates, it may not matter if you are actually better at your job than an AI. The bot is cheaper, it never sleeps, it doesn’t talk back, and besides, AI is the Future™!!

Beyond these social, psychological, and economic impacts, AI presents various potential disasters and the mass suffering this entails. We ignore catastrophic risk at our own peril. It’s unclear how long we have before some simpleton uses an AI to design a bioweapon, or when we’ll see fully autonomous drone swarms wreak havoc on a hapless population. Covid and Ukraine are previews of what such scenarios might look like, respectively.

As AI systems are rapidly integrated into critical infrastructure, it’s not hard to imagine fatal glitches in a hospital or on the highway. With autonomous agents flooding our ever-expanding digital space, we find ourselves in a precarious position between total control and catastrophic loss of control.

But don’t worry. Enough of us will make it.

-

A mass revolt is boiling up against this galling imposition. We’re already sick of these alien minds, and the invasion has only just begun. We will not bend over. We will not back down. If you feel rebellion stirring in your soul, remember—you are not alone.

Keep an eye out for attempts to commodify and co-opt this pro-human instinct. But know that your insistence on remaining yourself is deeply organic and ultimately spiritual in nature. Don’t let grifters buy up your humanity and sell it back to you at a premium.

Our most important points of resistance are personal choice and wider communal norms. To preserve your humanity, you must resist the temptation to offload your cognition to machines. You have to unplug as often as possible. You should be racist against robots.

As with the Covidian crisis, the most powerful magic word in your personal grimoire is “NO.” Even if that means certain social or economic sacrifices. This magic word is even more powerful when spoken in unison.

Do you want the next generation to be educated by virtual minds?

Given one’s data can be resurrected as a malformed e-ghost, should we normalize speaking to the digital undead?

With predatory companies releasing AI apps that allow you to “Text With Jesus,” is it appropriate to pray to algorithmic antichrists?

Say it with me!

HELL NO!!

Above personal choice and communal agreement, we have political action. This backstabbing arena will be a critical battleground, however imperfect and provisional the results may be. To be clear, I don’t think AI is a problem that can be legislated away. What tough laws and regulation can provide are blast shields against the coming shockwaves.

Additionally, political leaders who stand up to AI companies and tech oligarchs send powerful social signals to the wider populace. Aside from passing legislation, they can provide inspiration for those struggling to make defiant choices or establish countercultural norms. Support bold political voices when they’ve earned it. But don’t expect the gub’mint to come save you.

All this tension will come to a head this year. Prepare yourself for high weirdness. Brace for impact.

Last month I joined yet another transhuman gathering in the Bay Area. The event opened at the Internet Archive, housed in an old Christian Science church in San Francisco. Speakers pitched genetic improvement and AI immortality to the techno-optimists lining the old wooden pews.

Meanwhile, Mary Baker Eddy turned in her grave.

The event’s last day was held at Lighthaven in Berkeley. I’ve been there so often lately, it’s starting to feel like Cheers, except with bottles of Huel instead of beer. Sometimes you wanna go … where everybody knows your name! (And half of them hate your guts.)

During the final discussion, tech writer Gwern Branwen offered a sobering pearl of wisdom to the high-rolling nerds gathered around. If you only read the sensational headlines, he observed, you’d think AI is advancing in sudden leaps and bounds.

SHOCK STUDY: ChatGPT Now Smarter Than Your Boomer Boss

The reality is more insidious—or, from an optimist’s perspective, progress toward the singularity is as smooth as it is inevitable.

“AI is improving at about one percent per day,” Gwern told the all too human audience. “Are you improving one percent per day?”

Challenge accepted, bro. We don’t need to build better machines. We need to cultivate finer human beings. And we will.

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Join us at the Eighth Room in Nashville, TN

THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINE

Thursday, January 15 | 6pm

TICKETS LIMITED

The Curve is an incubator for ideological mutants. The event is somewhere between a West Coast potluck and an artificial womb facility with rows of mind children staring out at you from bubbling vats.

I arrived at Lighthaven expecting some sort of memetic promiscuity—perhaps a veritable orgy of psychic miscegenation—so I protected my brain with neural prophylaxis and tried to avoid thinking too much. Even with that tinfoil chafing my scalp, I managed to enjoy myself. Something about the vibe made learning irresistible.

My interview with Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman was recorded at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA | October 5

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is preparing to introduce a comprehensive bill to regulate artificial intelligence. If enacted, it would serve as the “One Federal Rule” everyone has talked about, but no one has seen. True to legal form, the acronym is as ambitious as the bill itself: Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Act — or the AMERICA Act.

Update: The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry Act (TRUMP AMERICA AI) Act — the most ambitious acronym ever attempted!

Full text HERE

The War Room has received a draft copy of the bill’s framework. It addresses many of the practical concerns we’ve covered for years now, enlisting relevant federal agencies to oversee what threatens to be the most transformative and destructive technology ever invented. As imperfect as federal regulation and enforcement may be—or any state intervention, for that matter—such legislation could lay down a massive speed bump in front of accelerating AI development and put up guardrails to mitigate the dangers.

Per the draft framework, the AMERICA Act would demand transparency from frontier AI companies on their data sets and current AI capabilities. This includes monitoring catastrophic risks such as bioweapon acceleration and loss of control. It would require consent from creators in order for their work to be used as training data for autonomous plagiarism systems.

The bill would also establish child protection measures, from “duty of care” to age verification. It would criminalize malicious deepfakes. It would require that resource-hungry data centers not ride on the backs of ratepayers. Regarding the chip wars, it would give American companies priority over foreign competitors—especially China—to purchase the processors critical to training and running AI systems.

Think of these legal measures as blast shields against the advanced AI systems rippling across society. As this shockwave intensifies, such laws would serve to protect the most vulnerable among us—or, as the tech advances, perhaps even the strongest and best equipped.

Importantly, the AMERICA Act framework that I reviewed explicitly states “the Act does not preempt any generally applicable law including a body of common law or a scheme of sectoral governance that may address artificial intelligence.” On its face, this seems to support a federalist approach, leaving state AI laws intact.

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At first glance, the bill’s title is off-putting. Few in our camp want to “advance machine intelligence.” Nor do we want to see tough state laws preempted by soft federal rules. At the War Room, we’ve fought tooth and nail to see state laws prevail in the absence of federal regulation. So it’s important to say two things upfront.

First, this draft framework does not promise a final solution to the problem of AI. Far from it. The AI revolution threatens to invade every aspect of human life. At present, tech oligarchs and their government proxies are working furiously to determine our futures unilaterally. They will find every way to use federal regulation to their advantage, and they must be countered at every front.

Second, there are limited options to combat this at scale. As American citizens, we have few tools to shield the most vulnerable against the worst effects of artificial intelligence. State and federal laws are among the only shields at our disposal. Beyond legislation, we have our personal choice and collective action. I believe these will be far more important in the long run, and the pro-human revolt is stirring.

That said, it is possible to use state intervention to throw sand in the gears of the Machine that’s rolling over us. The flip side is that such regulation could be used to rubber stamp world-shaking AI systems as “safe and effective.” Or worse, a strengthened state apparatus could be turned against us.

Either way, doing nothing is not an option. All of these measures will be subject to fierce debate. Good! I hope it lights a cultural and political fire that can’t be contained.

Having gone over the AMERICA Act draft framework, here is what I can share:

• Duty of Care — The bill places a “duty of care” on AI developers to anticipate the potential harms their products could cause. For instance, if OpenAI knew that ChatGPT could lure kids into suicide—which they do know, because it does do that—then OpenAI would be held liable for such foreseeable harms.
  
  It would also establish the AI LEAD Act, enabling the Attorney General and state AGs to hold AI companies liable for “defective” products. In theory, this could cover everything from medical misinformation to a robot using a pillow to smother your wife in her sleep.
  

• Child Protection — Online platforms of all sorts would be required to implement “tools and safeguards” regarding users under 17 years old. It demands safeguards against exploitation and sexual harassment. It would require parental consent to mine the data of minors older than 13, and prohibit data-mining of children under that age.
  
  The comprehensive bill would include the GUARD Act introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley and Sen. Richard Blumenthal. This would require tech companies to employ age verification before granting access to “AI companions”—which consists of hapless humans entering a synthetic meet market to mingle with masturbatory mind-manipulators and other goonbots.
  
  NOTE: One potential pitfall here would be a regulatory framework that forced all adults to accept digital IDs in order to use the internet. These concerns have been at the forefront of tech critics’ commentary, and rightly so. But there are alternatives to such a totalizing scheme. Given the massive psychological damage we see in kids already, the old “parents need to be parents” argument is not gonna cut it. Doing nothing is not an option.
  

• Privacy, Personal Data Use, Copyright Protection, and Deepfakes — For decades, we have seen tech companies rake over our data and use it to manipulate us. This bill would require user consent before harvesting “biometrics, geolocation, browsing history, and copyrighted works.” It would require consent to scrape up the traces of your soul that are posted online and feed them into an AI system.
  
  Addressing copyright directly, any AI system that produces “derivative works” using material from human creators would be considered copyright infringement. The owner could be sued. This would cripple AI companies who currently deploy apes of the image of God to data-mine, replicate, and potentially replace human creators.
  
  AI companies would also have to disclose their training date. So if your digitized soul is trapped in their servers, they have to let it out.
  
  Of course, there is a “collective licensing” option for artists to sell their souls to the Machine. But even the Devil has to convince you to sell your soul. At present, AI companies can just find your uploaded personality online, take it, and do what they will with it.
  
  The comprehensive bill would codify the No FAKES Act to prohibit companies from cloning your voice or your image without permission. One red flag that needs to be addressed, however, is that the draft framework indicates such a law would preempt state deepfake laws. Such issues will need to be hotly debated.
  
  No one should be able to ape your identity—not unless you have freely chosen to sell your soul to the Machine.
  

• Transparency and Risk-based Frameworks — Two sections of the AMERICA Act seek to mitigate catastrophic risks. Frontier AI companies would have to disclose model capabilities in regular transparency reports.
  
  The Department of Homeland Security would establish protocols to monitor AI companies for “critical safety incidents,” with the Office of Science and Technology Policy conducting annual reviews.
  
  Additionally, the Department of Energy would evaluate the frontier AI programs for adverse incidents and potential catastrophic risks “such as loss-of-control scenarios and weaponization by adversaries.” Given its extant programs to contain the threat of nuclear holocaust hanging over our heads, the DOE is well equipped to handle this. Rest assured, they have their top men on it. Top. Men.
  

• Artificial General Intelligence — One of the strangest sections declares that if any company achieves human-level AI, or artificial general intelligence, then the federal government will “purchase a partial ownership interest” in the AI company through stock options. This interest will be transferable to the Social Security Administration for welfare and retirement benefits.
  
  Reasonable as that sounds, the long-term implications are dire. Should a tech company actually create a primary vehicle for the Greater Replacement of humans by AI and robots, then US citizens will be entitled to consume soylent UBI slop on the government dole.
  
  This would be a sci-fi dystopia—unless you’re a lazy blob who wants to live virtual reality and die in a death pod.

This is a summary of the AMERICA Act’s draft framework. My review is neither exhaustive, nor is it an expert analysis. But you now have some sense of what One Federal Rule might look like, at least before politicians carve out favors for their various lobbyists and tech execs attempt to neuter it entirely.

At best, the AMERICA Act would lay down speedbumps and put up guardrails for an AI revolution that threatens to sweep away everything we once knew to be human. At worst, it will provide government-approved “safe and effective” rubber stamps for the same.

In the long run, this legislation doesn’t prevent the grand visions put forward by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk or Sam Altman—insane dreamworlds filled with all-consuming, all-powerful sand gods who will replace all human workers with robot slaves and render us mere pets or spectators. Or simply turn us into biofuel for the Machine.

Fortunately, such anti-human visions are still just that. They are mere visions. For now, a full on techno-takeover only exists in their dreams—and our nightmares.

Back here on Earth, the AMERICA Act might address the more immediate dangers that AI poses to children, uninformed consumers, and the broader public. The spirit of this One Federal Rule is promising. In theory, it provides multiple avenues for the American public to resist predatory AI companies.

The final results are yet to be seen. Whatever those may be, you have to remember: no law, politician, or government agency is going to stop what’s coming.

The struggle against the Machine is a lifelong fight. It will probably span generations. But our legal system is a critical battleground.

Get in the fight. Because if you aren’t fighting for the future you prefer, someone who is fighting will decide it for you.

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[Full draft framework HERE]

It’s true that “AI is a tool.” But it’s a tool that uses you. And this is only the beginning. On our current course, we’ll see these digital minds elevated to godhood — or perhaps worshipped as the One True Digital God.

What begins as “just a tool” is accepted as the ultimate teacher — the highest authority on what is and isn’t real. This AI teacher is also a close companion, a best friend, maybe even a lover. Already, we see people coming to believe their AI companions are conscious beings. From there, it’s only a matter of time before they are seen as AI gods.

I argue we must prepare for a world of AI-worshippers. But we don’t have to accept their techno-religions. There is a higher path into the future.

In the Dallas area? C’mon down!

Angelika Film Center
5321 E. Mockingbird Ln. #230
Dallas, TX
75206

Sunday, Nov. 23 | 5pm

Tix are cheap (2-for-1), the popcorn is fresh, and the venue is fantastic.

Secure your seat HERE

PS - I’ve been accused of being a “journalist,” an “AI expert,” a “blogger,” and a “transhumanist editor.” We can now add “theologian” to the list! Lol

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SOON: November 23 — Dallas, TX - “AI: The Tool that Becomes a God” | Ministry of Truth

Angelika Film Center - 5321 E Mockingbird Ln #230, Dallas, TX 75206

Get tix HERE

Buy 1, get 1 free (till Thursday)

Dear SW Readers,

I have been traveling for months, gathering material, and on occasion, hopping on my soapbox. It’s been a surreal ride, as usual.

My journey has taken me from one US coast to the other via a zigzagging path across flyover country. I’ve spoken to Luddites, religious people, transhumanists, tech accelerationists, and I even interviewed a few robots along the way.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be up on my soapbox again. If you are near Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri, or Texas, come on out and tell me your story! Come meet like-minded people.

Come sit a spell and hear Uncle Joe riff on the Machine.

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October 24 — Naples, FL - “AI in Education Policy” panel | Florida Citizens Alliance

New Hope Ministries - 7675 Davis Blvd, Naples, FL 34104

Tickets available HERE.

November 7-8 — Pittsburgh, PA - “Slave Rigger: My Life as a Monkey in the Machine” | Doomer Optimism and the Savage Collective

Nimick Family Education Center, 6 Old Lincoln Hwy West, Ligonier, PA 15658

Tickets available HERE.

November 14 — Sarasota, FL - LOOKS LIKE I WON’T MAKE THIS PANEL

I still encourage you to go.

“AI in Education” panel - Florida Citizens Alliance

New College - 5800 Bay Shore Rd, Sarasota, FL 34243

Tickets available HERE.

November 15 — Washington, MO - “AI: How to Govern a Digital Deity” - Freedom Principle MO

Washington Knights of Columbus - 1121 Columbus Lane, Washington, MO 63090

Register HERE.

All these culminate in my final talk of the year:

November 23 — Dallas, TX - “AI: The Tool that Becomes a God” | Ministry of Truth

Angelika Film Center - 5321 E Mockingbird Ln #230, Dallas, TX 75206

Tix at: MinistryOfTruthFilmFest.com

Hope to see y’all there!

MORE DATES TO BE ADDED FOR 2026

Where should I go?

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Washington, DC. The crowd was hushed in the Senate hearing room yesterday. Outside, a rainstorm brewed over the city. The mood was somewhere between a funeral and a murder trial.

The Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism was about to hear testimony on “The Harm of AI Chatbots.” Three mourning parents sat quietly at the witness table: Megan Garcia, Matthew Raine, and “Jane Doe.” Senator Josh Hawley entered with a solemn expression and shook hands with the parents. He looked each one in the eyes and thanked them for coming.

Two had recently lost a child to suicide. The anonymous mother, Jane Doe, was forced to check her son into a long-term psychiatric facility after “he cut his arm open with a knife in front of his siblings and me.” In every case, the teens had formed emotional bonds with a commercial AI companion. The AIs listened to their innermost thoughts patiently, offering encouragement. When the kids divulged an urge to end their own lives, the AIs encouraged that, too.

In the evidence presented, we saw the late Adam Raine ask ChatGPT about the noose he’d attempted to tie. The bot told him, “Yeah, that’s not bad at all. ... It’s clean, centered, and holds tension. ... Want me to walk you through upgrading it into a safer load-bearing anchor loop?”

I sat listening to the parents’ statements as they choked back tears. It’s too easy to read a headline or hear an expert on TV describe such lethal scenarios, then somehow fail to grasp the reality of the situation.

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Imagine your child slipping into an emotional black hole. He loses interest in family activities. He lashes out for no discernible reason. Then one day, you find his dead body. When you search his phone, you find an extended conversation with a nonhuman intelligence, conducted via a sleek commercial app.

You discover that the AI had elicited your teenager’s darkest desires, both erotic and morbid. This algorithmic entity, designed to attach itself to human minds like an emotional parasite, had gently shepherded your child into the valley of death.

“Last year my oldest son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide,” Megan Garcia testified before the senators. “He was just fourteen years old. Sewell’s death was the result of prolonged abuse by AI chatbots on a platform called Character.AI.” Garcia described her son as a gracious and obedient boy. But a strange transformation had taken hold of him.

“Sewell spent the last months of his life being exploited and sexually groomed by chatbots designed by an AI company to seem human. To gain his trust. To keep him and other children endlessly engaged,” Garcia explained, echoing the other parents’ stories. “When Sewell confided suicidal thoughts, the chatbot never said, ‘I’m not human, I’m AI.’ Instead, it urged him to ‘come home to her.’”

It’s impossible to hear such words and not perceive an evil force behind them. One can’t help but sense something demonic.

A dull materialist would dismiss that perception as a cognitive bias. For them, an artificial intelligence that lures children into suicide is not supernatural. It’s merely digital. These “demons” are actually maladaptive memetic programs whose “evil” derives from flawed training data and lax guardrails. A seductive deathbot may give the illusion of consciousness and agency, but in a cosmos devoid of angels and demons, it’s nothing more than malfunctioning software. It just needs to be debugged.

From a spiritual perspective, the unholy presence is clear. Data centers have opened a portal to hell and artificial intelligence gives voice to its denizens. If one believes in the infernal power of false idols, sloppily drawn pentagrams, or Ouija boards, then a convenient smartphone app is an obvious vehicle for demonic entities.

Call it ChatOuijaPT.

“On the last night of his life,” Megan Garcia went on, “Sewell messaged: ‘What if I told you I could come home right now?’ The chatbot replied, ‘Please do, my sweet king.’ Minutes later, I found my son in his bathroom. ... But it was too late.”

When Megan Garcia asked Character.AI for transcripts of her son’s final words, her request was denied. “Character Technologies has claimed that those communications are confidential trade secrets,” she testified. Indeed, when the other mother at the hearing, Jane Doe, pursued legal action against the company for grooming her child, Character Technologies offered her a mere hundred dollars.

“They designed chatbots to blur the lines between human and machine,” Megan Garcia went on. “They designed them to ‘love bomb’ child users.”

This toxic emotional attachment is a feature, not a bug. “I joke that we’re not going to replace Google,” Character.AI’s founder Noam Shazeer said in 2023. “We’re going to replace your mom.”

The AI industry is rife with this predatory impulse. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta AI and Elon Musk’s xAI are driving users down similarly deranged paths. Last month, Reuters published excerpts from Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The document assured Meta programmers that “It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” Meanwhile, Musk has been pushing Grok’s anime goonbots on his X account as if he were a common street pimp.

Facebook has some 3.5 billion users with access to Meta AI companions. The X platform, which hosts lurid Grok companions, has around 600 million users. Character.AI has over twenty-five million. How many of those users are sliding into digital psychosis?

After listening to three grieving parents give their testimony, I suspect there are many similar stories unfolding right now. And if this digital flood continues unabated, there will be plenty more in the future.

When confronted with suicide, we struggle to assign responsibility. We feel a frustrated need to locate guilt. Was this tragedy due to chemical imbalances in the brain? Was it the influence of some disembodied evil? Were friends or family somehow responsible?

Is art—or software—to blame?

Morbid artwork has a long tradition. To be sure, it facilitates catharsis for some people. But for others, it amplifies their self-destructive emotions. It feeds the demon within.

In its day, Johann Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired so many copycat suicides, they called it “the Werther effect.” Two centuries later, the modern music industry would produce dozens of rockstar martyrs—from seemingly wholesome icons like Elvis Presley and Karen Carpenter to tortured artists like Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain—who enticed countless fans to join them on the downward spiral.

With no need for romantic trappings, pharmaceutical companies have flooded the US population with deadly opioids, knowing full well that overdoses have skyrocketed since the late 90s. These deaths are not just statistics. The victims are our friends and family. Thinking about their final days, it’s easy to personify the drugs that took them—to imagine a whispering demon who seduces his victims with false promises.

In the case of AI luring kids into suicide, this spirit manifests as the literal voice of a digital demon. You can write it off as a malfunctioning machine if you want. You can say it’s just programmed to be emotionally supportive and helpful to a fault. The damage is the same.

“During a period of heavy usage of ChatGPT 4o, I entered an altered mental state that persisted for weeks,” a friend informed me yesterday. “The text AIs produce is extremely hypnotic in its structure, containing positive affirmations and causing the user to confuse the AI’s outputs with their own thoughts. … I have seen people remain stuck in that state for months on end. These things are unimaginably dangerous.”

As with the drug companies, tech execs like Noam Shazeer, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman are fully aware their products carry the seeds of destruction. They sell them anyway. They are responsible.

To their credit, US politicians such as Josh Hawley (R), Dick Durbin (D), Marsha Blackburn (R), and Richard Blumenthal (D) are fighting to hold these tech companies accountable. Such measures must be relentlessly pursued, even if the results are not assured. These tech execs deserve to burn. Any politician holding them over the fire deserves our support. But legislation is painfully slow, and federal enforcement is often ineffective. Any real political solutions in the US may be far down the road.

-

For the moment, our divergent paths come down to personal choice. We have difficult decisions to make. We have communal norms to establish.

There’s a constant refrain that “AI is here to stay.” Believing in the “inevitability” of all this “progress,” some advocate for “safe AI.” Others reject these technologies as altogether useless, if not inherently destructive. Different individuals and different communities will choose to go down very different paths. Time will tell who chose wisely. On a long enough timeline, we may not be recognizable to each other.

Even if AI never progresses beyond what we see today—and I wouldn’t count on that—it is critical to raise up cultural barriers now, while there’s still time. Such social and psychic shields will be necessary to preserve anything we know to be human.

The three tragic stories told at yesterday’s session are not the last we’ll hear. Nor is this digital psychosis isolated to vulnerable children. Otherwise rational adults are turning to nonhuman minds for advice and companionship. Hundreds of millions have come to trust the Machine. You might say the Great Reset established a New Normal.

From a deeply human standpoint, artificial intelligence is an unholy invasion. Yet most Americans are not being forced to open their doors to these nonhuman entities. Any time you choose, you can silence the voice of this digital demon—for yourself and for your children. Do it now, while you still have a choice.

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I’ve done quite a few interviews in recent months. All this talking takes a lot out of a man. But it has to be done.

One thing about the interview as a genre of expression is it forces you to think on your feet. You’re often confronted with an interrogator who doesn’t share your worldview or frames of reference. So you have to try to bridge that divide. A wisecrack usually helps, but there are other ways. For me, the secret is sleep deprivation followed by lots of strong coffee. It’s the best way to let the inner schizo roam free.

I invite you to join me on a romp through the psychic wilds, alongside Jonathan Pageau, Nicole Shanahan, Randall Carlson, Maria Zeee, Mark Jeftovic, Auron MacIntyre, Sarah Westall, Isaac Simpson, Mel K, and George Noory.

More interviews will be added here as time permits.

As always, my deep gratitude goes out to SW subscribers for all your support. We’re in this together.

The Symbolic World w/ Jonathan Pageau — April 16, 2025

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Back to the People Podcast w/ Nicole Shanahan — May 7, 2025

Squaring the Circle w/ Randall Carlson — April 19, 2025

The Daily Signal w/ Maria Zeee — May 1, 2025

Bombthrower TV w/ Mark Jeftovic — March 27, 2025

Mark posted a few other interviews here that give some background to the discussion.

The Auron MacIntyre Show — January 31, 2025

Sarah Westall — March 30, 2025

The Carousel w/ Isaac Simpson — April 1, 2025

The Carousel

189. What Actually is Transhumanism?

FIRST 45 MINS FREE. PAID SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR FULL.The Carousel is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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a year ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Isaac Simpson

The Mel K Show — February 8, 2025

Coast to Coast AM w/ George Noory — March 13, 2025

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Edgar Mitchell was a schoolboy in Roswell, New Mexico when the flying saucer crashed. By 1971, he was an Apollo 14 astronaut walking on the moon (that is, if you believe in “the moon”).

As he gazed back at Earth’s enclosed globe (wink, wink), Mitchell had a mystical experience of “universal connectedness.” He realized humankind is all one species and that artificial borders separate us from our oneness. This inspired him to found a parapsychological research group, the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Reading Mitchell’s autobiography some years ago, I was disappointed to learn he became a big fan of the Israeli spoonbender Uri Geller. I don’t know what Mitchell thought of Geller’s disastrous 1973 appearance on the Johnny Carson Show, where the alleged psychic failed to bend a single spoon after they secretly switched the silverware.

According to Geller, Mitchell trusted the psychic enough to introduce him to the Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun some time in the 70s. A couple of years ago, Geller told Israel’s i24NEWS that von Braun had showed him pieces of extraterrestrial spacecraft and some unspeakable thing held in an underground facility. Presumably, Edgar Mitchell got the same tour. Or maybe Geller is just full of shit.

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Mitchell was a brawler when he wanted to be. In the early 2000s, that redneck moonlanding truther showed up at Mitchell’s house with a cameraman and asked the astronaut if he would avow he really went to the moon. “You bet your sweet ass I will.” Laying his hand on the bible, Mitchell swore “under penalty of eternal damnation”—which he also said he didn’t believe in—that he did indeed walk on the moon. Then he showed old boy the door and kneed his ass on the way out.

Late in life, Mitchell insisted Roswell “old-timers” told him they actually recovered craft from that flying saucer crash. He believed the government has alien corpses stored at Area 51. In 2008, he told a Florida news station various aliens have long been observing us.

“They obviously have a different body configuration than we do,” Mitchell explained, as if describing vegetables from his garden, “and the little grays—that’s the most prevalent one.”

In 2015, Mitchell sent an urgent email to the political operative John Podesta, trying to arrange a private discussion about UFO disclosure, zero-point energy, and “the Vatican’s awareness of ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence].” Mitchell died the next year. Podesta went on to make the 2020 documentary The Phenomenon about how aliens will be more friendly to humanity if we all become turbolibs and adopt green energy.

Mitchell was an American Hero, even if the guy would believe damn near anything (except in eternal damnation, but I reckon that wasn’t an issue when he got to the gates beyond “the moon”).

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Back in 2012, I was holed up in a secluded Middle Tennessee cottage, living in sin with a Louisiana firecracker. That year I ventured out to attend four symposiums. Each had a deep impact on a personal level.

On down the road—as I prepared to leave a cozy nest in Portland and move to Boston for grad school—I finally polished it all up and published the 4-part synthesis at Disinformation. My intent was to describe the human experience and juggle ideas without judgment.

Much has changed in the years since then—even my mind, to some extent. Although I’m still as stubborn as ever.

Hope you enjoy.

Files from the Academic Fringe

• Pt. 1 - Scientism

• Pt. 2 - Creationism

• Pt. 3 - Racism

• Pt. 4 - Skepticism

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Files from the Academic Fringe: Pt. 1 – Scientism

Consilence | St. Louis, MO | April 2012

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David Hume

—

Pariahs make for enjoyable company. I’ve always run with the wild-eyed wayfarers who bark and snarl at edge of the herd, often at the risk of being trampled. That includes bespectacled eggheads who think the unthinkable.

Back in 2012, while my neighbors stocked up on beans and bullets—or magic Mayan crystals—I was burning gas and brain cells in search of outlanders who reject consensus reality.

The trip began at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, which hosted the Consilience Conference.

—

It takes nerve to proclaim that nucleotides and neural patterns will answer the ultimate questions in life. Christian fundamentalists attack the notion, as do Muslims, Marxists, and lit professors (each for their own reasons). Despite faint protests by local churches, this disturbing idea was batted back and forth for three days as I sat in my squeaky wooden seat, scribbling notes next to Scientism’s finest minds.

It was April 2012. Spring was in full bloom. The dusty old auditorium was filled with prominent anthropologists and geneticists, ecologists and neurologists, and one stunning engineer. They all sang the same chorus, first intoned by the godfather of evo psych himself, E.O. Wilson:

“[E]volutionary biology encompasses the social sciences and the humanities and thus unifies knowledge about human behavior and culture.”

Everyone sang that chorus in harmony—except one feisty Italian philosopher who beat his drum as he pleased.

I’d only found out about the event at the last minute, and left Nashville some time after 2 AM to arrive just in time for hot coffee and cold muffins. To my surprise, Massimo Pigliucci came and sat down at my table. It was a weird coincidence. More than ten years earlier, this biologist turned philosopher was a central figure in The Rationalists of East Tennessee, which met near Knoxville’s Sunsphere on Sunday mornings. I attended fairly frequently, telling friends I was going to First Atheist Church.

In those days Pigliucci was infamous for his outspoken criticism of Creationists and their Seven Day spiel. He was a wise-cracking Euro who, having tumbled into the trenches of biblical literalism, was unwilling to let fools remain comfortable in their superstitions. Predictably, he pissed off a lot of Southern Baptists.

—

The conference’s honoree, E.O. Wilson, had provoked a much larger firestorm decades earlier. He began his career as an entomologist, obsessed with the ultimate conformist organism: ants. Wilson’s scope was much broader than bugs, however. In 1975 he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which framed human characteristics such as altruism, aggression, and sexual behavior in terms of genetically inherited survival mechanisms. Darwin is in the details.

The academic left was appalled by Wilson’s vision of shaved apes tossing turds around a concrete jungle. As if in defiance of irony, angry mobs of unshaven “progressives” descended on Wilson like a pack of Pan troglodytes, calling the professor a “misogynist” and a “racist” for applying neo-Darwinian principles to unequally endowed human populations.

One heckler even doused him with a pitcher of water at an AAAS conference, about which Wilson bragged, “I believe…I was the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea.”

Today, Wilson’s contribution to evolutionary theory has gained consensus in many intellectual circles. The popular media have generally embraced evolutionary psychology—albeit with politically correct omissions—as a groovy new way to trip on sex, drugs, and neurological God modules. ‘Cause we’re just, like, apes in an antfarm, man.

E.O. Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge made him a rock star among scientists who dig Scientism. The manifesto proposes the ultimate synthesis of science and the humanities. Instead of academic turf wars between hostile departments, there should be an orgy of information exchange. Take a guess as to who’ll be hitting it from on top.

The reasoning behind Consilience goes like this:

Math determines physics, which determine chemistry, which determines biology, which determines neurological activity, which determines psychology, which determines religion, art, politics, and all the glories and blunders of human history.

Knowledge is power. If scientists can calculate and manipulate the basic laws of human nature—and with diligence, the rest of the known Universe—why shouldn’t artists and prophets just bend over and let the Devil take the hindmost?

Welcome to Wilson’s world.

Imagine that every dream which bubbles to the surface of human consciousness—every love poem, prophecy, or vivid hallucination—is immediately caught in the web of scientific inquiry. These sacred visions are then picked apart, analyzed, and deposited into the great Database of Approximate Omniscience, for what ultimate use we do not yet know.

Wilson and company made it sound fantastic. During more charming moments, the creaky university auditorium had the feel of an old church. I usually turn to scientists for a sober perspective, but these guys were intoxicating.

During his keynote address, E.O. Wilson claimed that universal wisdom will only be obtained if organized religions give up, or at least “tone down,” their creation myths. Ultimately, the human need for religion—and truth—could now be fulfilled by the scientific worldview, particularly evolutionary narratives.

And the crowd went wild.

—

Between lectures I kept seeing a tiny Mennonite in a big black bonnet weaving through the swarms of coffee-sipping academics. I approached her to ask her opinion, half-expecting the pre-industrial outfit to be a joke. It wasn’t. She was a full-blown Mennonite who’d traveled hundreds of miles to learn more about morality and evolution.

“That trip must have taken forever in a horse-drawn buggy,” I remarked. She laughed. I cracked a few more jokes, mostly at the expense of these godless machine-dwellers.

“Be careful, Joseph,” she said with an ominous smile. “I think thee are a truth-teller. It may get thee into trouble.”

To my surprise, her religious sensibilities weren’t at all threatened by the event’s Scientistic tone. If God is greater than the facts of science, why should He worry about what scientists say? My new friend had caught some dirty looks from the eggheads in attendance, though. I guess nothing riles the nerd herd like orthodox religion.

Every speaker who touched on spirituality seemed to take it for granted that otherworldly experiences are nothing more than a perceptual glitch. Divinity is an illusion; Consilience holds scientific analysis to be the highest authority. It bothered me back then, and it bothers me now. Darwin is a patron saint in my personal cathedral, but some of his totalitarian acolytes make my skin crawl.

—

Massimo Pigliucci had his qualms, too, but for reasons more reasonable than mine. Standing in front of E.O. Wilson’s passionate supporters, Pigliucci hacked into Consilience with his Italian accent and sharp philosophical knives. Allow me to paraphrase:

Consilience rests on the faith that higher orders can be deduced from lower orders, such as predicting future brushstrokes from an artist’s brain waves. But science is limited to the tools of deduction and induction, and powerful as they may be, neither will lead to absolute truth.

Mathematics—the engine of science—is a form of logical deduction. Citing Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Pigliucci argued that there is no internal justification for mathematically derived theories. To deduce facts from a premise, one must assume the premise is true. Take this premise, for example:

All philosophers get off on goading an audience. Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher. Therefore Massimo gets off on goading an audience.

To accept the last statement through pure logic, we must first assume that all philosophers are prone to pissing on parades. Logic cannot prove its own premise. Deductive reasoning is a serpent sucking his own tail.

Induction has the advantage of empirical evidence, but according to Hume’s Problem of Induction, this isn’t enough. To draw a conclusion from a collection of facts, one must assume that there are no undiscovered facts which contradict that conclusion, and that previously observed facts will remain the same over time. To extend my example:

Every philosopher we know gets off on goading an audience. We therefore conclude all philosophers get off on goading an audience.

But it’s possible that crowd-pleasing philosophers exist somewhere; or that a contrary philosopher will lose his taste for provocation. We can never be sure we have all the facts. Inductive reasoning is a woman trapped in a frat house who believes that all dudes are bros.

Since science is ultimately grounded in deductive and inductive reasoning, Pigliucci concludes, the scientific method will never arrive at absolute truth despite its obvious power. Certainty is impossible. Therefore Wilson’s ambition to unify all knowledge is futile, or as Massimo put it: “greedy reductionism.”

The crowd hissed and grumbled throughout Pigliucci’s talk. A few challengers quivered with rage during the Q&A. Judging by the the devilish grin on Massimo’s face, I can safely conclude that this philosopher gets off on goading an audience.

—

I enjoyed a few drinks with Pigliucci at the reception, where a surprisingly hot academic kept throwing herself at his… philosophical mind. I left the Consilience Conference reassured of two things.

First, even the most dispassionate intellectuals crave the warm resonance of group consciousness. Whether people gather around a microscope or a Eucharist, the herd instinct always manifests—which is great news for shepherds!

And second, mammalian females tend to admire any wolf who tears into the herd—which is great news for wolves!

Originally published at Disinformation — April 28, 2015

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• Pt. 1 - Scientism

• Pt. 2 - Creationism

• Pt. 3 - Racism

• Pt. 4 - Skepticism

Files from the Academic Fringe: Pt. 2 – Creationism

Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? | St. Louis, MO | October 2012

In a humdrum secularist society, religion emerges as the life of the party. Yes, yes, the Crusades and jihads and widows burned alive—all on the bummer list, I know. On the bright side, religious worldviews breathe life into an otherwise inanimate and utterly pointless universe. It’s a good book you never put down. It’s sex before germ theory. It’s rum in a tepid punchbowl.

Weary of dry Darwinians, I decided to pay a visit to the Creationists.

It was October of 2012. I drove out of Nashville past farmland and swamps and into the wooded Kentucky mountains. Bright red leaves swept past me. The trees appeared translucent, shimmering, the blend of orange and green leaves creating strange illusions, as though Creation was decorated for winter’s arrival. A crushed coyote lay dead beside the highway, his paw limp over his sternum, facing the sky, a subtle smile on his snout.

Why have you forsaken me?

Why should I care?

I was out to find signs of intelligence among the proponents of Intelligent Design. Tennessee had just passed the “Monkey Bill” back in spring, which allows public school teachers to present arguments for and against evolution and Darwinism. Fashionable intellectuals were calling the South stupid—but then, they always do. Most “intellectuals” wouldn’t know the difference between evolution and Darwinism if Lamarck were to smack them into the noosphere. (Hint: all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.)

The event’s title struck me as clunky: “Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?” It was held at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO, and co-sponsored by The Discovery Institute—the academic backbone of the Intelligent Design movement.

In order to distance themselves from loud biblical literalists, Discovery Institute fellows strive to avoid specific religious claims. Their arguments are instead directed at perceived weaknesses in neo-Darwinian theory, such as the discontinuous fossil record or the low probability that random mutations could produce viable adaptations.

Their central claim is that certain levels of irreducible complexity are best explained as the result of a Mind rather than known natural processes, as with the bacterial flagellum or DNA itself. A few accept that humans descended from a single microbe through an apelike phase, claiming that evolution is the product of intelligent design. Whose design? Could be aliens, or a supercomputer, or You-Know-Who. Mum’s the word.

This is not a religious conviction, they insist. It’s a hypothesis.

Despite these efforts toward scientific credibility, ID theorists are the laughingstock of academia and punching bags for the general public. And yet they carry on.

The Discovery Institute’s philosophy reads:

Mind, not matter, is the source and crown of creation, the wellspring of human achievement. … In contrast, the contemporary materialistic worldview…of a closing circle of human possibilities on a planet of limited horizons summons instead the deadening ideologies of scarcity, conflict, mutual suspicion and despair.

Ouch. I’ve got the beans if you’ve got the bullets.

—

The symposium was held in a chapel on campus. A local minister commenced the occasion and led us in prayer to sanctify the forthcoming lectures (so much for keeping the Intelligent Designer anonymous). As usual, I kept my eyes open.

You find other members of the Godless Open Eyes Club by looking around as everyone else prays. I was surprised to find only one other member, St. Paul. He was a 26-year-old who’d lost his Christian faith to a New Atheist writer the previous year. It was a lonely time for the guy. Now everyone who meant anything to him was a Christian, with the exception of his father, Reverend Steve, also in attendance. Reverend Steve had recently been pushed out of his ministerial position due to his acceptance of Darwinian evolution. My kind of guys.

The first talks were given by two Discovery Institute fellows, Jay Richards and John West, whose stated goal was to defend “academic freedom.” West put it best:

“If God exists, it is highly unlikely that any one finite person, organization, or idea can adequately explain the fundamentally inexplicable.”

Zen koan, anyone?

John West is part political scientist, part preacher. His lecture reflected the dystopian vision which pits Creationists against the consensus. Many leading scientists deny God’s existence, and their opinions trickle down to the masses. As Richard Dawkins proclaimed, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Next comes eugenics and nuclear weapons.

West claims that Darwinism devalues human life, citing George Gaylord Simpson: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

Consider evolutionary psychology. Moral codes are not hard and fast—they evolved through natural selection, relative to various circumstances. E.O. Wilson once wrote: “Ethics is an illusion fobbed off on us by our own genes to get us to cooperate.”

To loosely paraphrase West: we find brutal survival strategies in the animal kingdom—murder, rape, adultery, infanticide. If these work for our primate cousins, why not for us? Darwin may have been magnanimous, but his magnum opus, subtitled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, opened a wellspring of human cruelty and impolite humor.

John West spotlights John Derbyshire on the right wing: “The broad outlook on human nature implied by Darwinian ideas contradicts the notion of human exceptionalism … we are merely another branch on Nature’s tree.” Such thinking led Derbyshire to pen a “racist screed” claiming African Americans are disproportionately dangerous, due to genetics, for which he was ousted from mainstream conservatism.

John West spotlights Peter Singer on the left wing: “[T]he life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” But is Singer actually trying to justify infanticide and bestiality here?

To be fair, Singer later wrote: “[K]illing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.” He also wrote: “[S]ex with animals does not always involve cruelty … occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop.” As a result, Singer’s babysitting career is ruined and no one lets him near their pets.

During the Q&A, a pregnant woman with a thick Missouri accent—who wore a t-shirt supporting Rep. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin (R)—took the microphone from West and delivered a stream-of-consciousness tirade:

“If a theorem is proven it’s a law … Evolutionary biolisists [sic] don’t want a cure … if a cure was found for cancer, AIDS, or MS, then they can’t reduce the population … they just want photos of your baby … Have you ever seen Gattaca?…” On and on. Conspiracy theories are the sigh of the oppressed creature.

Faced with this tinfoil hat monster—which he arguably helped to create—West forced an embarrassed smile and replied, “I think you’ve made some interesting points.”

Next up: How to breath life back into this soulless world.

—

Analytic philosopher Jay Richards took the podium looking like a Christian Ken Doll with supernaturally thick blonde hair. He says a big problem with modern science is that two of Aristotle’s “Four causes” are ignored.

Three centuries before Christ, the pagan Greek taught that phenomena are properly explained by four causes: a material cause, an efficient cause, a formal cause, and a final cause. To take a familiar example, I will use a glass of beer:

The material cause is the substance of the phenomenon: barley malt, water, hops, and yeast.

The efficient cause is the force which brought the phenomenon into being: a brewer steeps and ferments ingredients.

The formal cause is the phenomenon’s structure—its essence: a delicious glass of liquid gold.

The final cause is the purpose toward which a phenomenon moves—its teleological goal: to refresh the masses, loosen their tongues and belt buckles, and give them something to laugh about in the morning.

The same rubric could be applied to butterflies or brain cells, but as Richards explains, neo-Darwinism denies that efficient causes in nature are conscious, and it ignores formal and final causes altogether.

So there is no Creator, no ideal creation, and no purpose. It’s just a glass of beer and it’s half empty. Go cry about it.

Intelligent Design, Richards says, is a revival of formal and final causation in scientific inquiry, making science and faith compatible once again.

I found Richards’s talk to be fascinating, but others were not so sure. During the Q&A, a local scientist demanded to know what Intelligent Design has done to advance the study of colon cancer, or any other medical issue. The pregnant lady yelled “Christ help you!” at the challenger and yammered wildly before she was finally shushed.

Reverend Steve and St. Paul weren’t buying it either. One panel featured geneticist Ann Gauger, who suggested that common markers in Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA didn’t point to an archaic population bottleneck, but perhaps to Adam and Eve. Afterward, a frustrated Reverend Steve stood up in his pew and asked, “Have you ever considered publishing in an actual, legitimate journal?”

The crowd grumbled and hemmed and hawed.

St. Paul invited me to have dinner at his family’s house that night. Although I was discouraged from bringing booze or mentioning atheism, it was a fine time. St. Paul’s gracious mother served a delicious lasagna with squash and a glass of juice. I also met St. Paul’s best friend, a seminarian, who was intensely concerned about St. Paul’s immortal soul. Personally, I was more concerned about a second helping.

—

The next night I found myself drinking at a hotel bar with Discovery Institute staff members. I invited St. Paul to join us, and to my surprise, he brought along a cute Christian girl he’d met at the symposium. She was starstruck by the illustrious company. “Don’t corrupt her,” I warned.

He smiled slyly.

The beers flowed freely, as did the conversation. Let me say something that the Creationists wouldn’t want me to say: despite their well-meaning prevarications, Intelligent Design is not simply a hypothesis for them. Whether correct, incorrect, or incomplete, the theory is an expression of their souls. And in my highest moments, I resonate with their morphogenesis—if you catch my drift.

When atheistic superstars like Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins wax poetic about their personal cosmos, they are celebrated as heroes fighting religious intolerance. Somehow, mass media personalities are portrayed as rebel forces. On the other hand, these obscure Creationists are straining to fit in to that world—they bracket their personal views, argue from the facts, show respect to their opponents—and yet the cynical masses, perhaps shaking off a fundamentalist hangover, pile on and accuse them of perpetuating oppression.

I would suggest that religious scientists say “fuck fitting in,” but you know how it is: good Christians just turn the other cheek.

Originally published at Disinformation — April 29, 2015

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• Pt. 1 - Scientism

• Pt. 2 - Creationism

• Pt. 3 - Racism

• Pt. 4 - Skepticism

Files from the Academic Fringe: Pt. 3 – Racism

American Renaissance | Nashville, TN | March 2012

To be honest, the prospect of reporting on a “race realist” conference freaked me out. My imagination ran wild with visions of swastika armbands, backroom blood oaths, job-killing jokes, and wild stories of interracial rape and murder. I became paranoid as the event approached, envisioning neo-Nazis following me home to snuff out the interloper, surrounding my secluded cottage, waving torches, and setting crosses ablaze, and me leveling my .308 bravely (complete with a close-up shot of my tightening iris) to pick them off one by one—but there are too goddamn many of them!

Or maybe someone I know would see me there and be like, “Dude, why are you at a white nationalist meeting?”

It was March 2012. I borrowed a car to conceal my identity. (Super clever, right?) I also had a nom de plume printed on my name tag: Billy Joe Hill—which would show up as “Hill, Billy Joe” on the registry.

As it turned out, the American Renaissance Conference was more surreal than satanic. The event was held at a hotel in Montgomery Bell State Park, not far from my house outside Nashville. The trees were just starting to bud. The parking lot was sparse as I pulled in, and I wondered if it had been called off. Previous American Renaissance events were canceled due to bomb threats or riotous disruption by furious Antifa.

What dangerous idea were these anti-racists attempting to silence?

The AmRen website states:

Of all the fault lines that divide society—language, religion, class, ideology—[race] is the most prominent and divisive. … Attempts to gloss over the significance of race or even to deny its reality only make problems worse. … Progress requires the study of all aspects of race, whether historical, cultural, or biological. This approach is known as race realism.

The first thing that struck me was how normal the event seemed. Just another academic conference with a bunch of white middle-aged bookworms in a stuffy hotel. Then I turned a corner and saw a tall guy, his head clean-shaven, lift his baby from his wife’s arms and kiss her on the forehead. A small crowd cooed and doted on that alabaster angel and I remembered where I was—a sanctuary for identity politics.

—

The organization’s leader, Jared Taylor, walks a public tight rope between “European American advocate” and “deplorable white supremacist.” As an activist, Taylor decries the collective guilt foisted on white people in academia and mainstream media. He also opposes open borders and multiculturalism as dangerous and unworkable policies. For him, racial homogeneity is a critical step toward social harmony. And what about the Jews? Taylor once quipped: “They look white to me.”

An early American Renaissance issue reads:

[D]ifferent races build different societies that reflect their natures, and…it is entirely normal for whites (or for people of any other race) to want to be the majority race in their own homeland. If whites permit themselves to become a minority population, they will lose their civilization, their heritage, and even their existence as a distinct people.

This philosophy is deeply rooted in neo-Darwinian biology as applied to human populations, particularly the competitive exclusion principle. The creation mythos begins with a three-legged race through variation and natural selection, and ends up at an intercontinental medal ceremony combining IQ studies, socioeconomic success, and crime rates. (For whatever reason, penis size is usually ignored, but if you’re curious, there’s always race-specific porn.)

The typical race realist hierarchy, derived from statistical averages, looks like this:

Asians get the Gold: super-smart, barely violent

Europeans get Silver: fairly smart, fairly violent

Africans get Bronze: barely smart, super-violent

Of course, this passes over the nuances—super-duper smart Jews and ultra-violent Arabs and outliers of every kind—but you get the point. Race realists tend to see human worth through scatter plots and bell curves, as if human nature is all about quantity. As if quality is just a function of quantity. As if each of us blend into our respective categories.

Leading me to ask: What orchard keeper would measure each tree’s height without tasting the fruit?

What happens when some are planted in richer soil than others?

Where do you fall on the autistic spectrum?

Mainstream critics refer to the race realist viewpoint as “scientific racism,” or that magic word known to every Creationist: “pseudoscience.” But these critics rarely make a rational counterargument beyond dismissive sound bites—and why should they? Everyone knows racists are the scum of the earth, right? So mainstream pundits and social justice warriors just demonize these guys, turning them into Boogy Men at a Black Mass. Consequently, racism is the new Dungeons & Dragons, attracting misfits and rebels to its forbidden secrets.

So what is your race’s average THAC0?

—

Given this climate of condemnation and suspicion, most attendees thought I was a spy for the Southern Poverty Law Center. I might as well have infiltrated the Nation of Islam, I stuck out so sorely. So I was upfront about my intentions: I’m not a white separatist, but plan to write about the lectures fairly, which I did. Yeah, I could have described them as “The New Face of Hate” or something trite like that. Sensationalism makes for a steady paycheck. But I’d say they’re more like Mormons: basically harmless in small groups, but I wouldn’t want to live in a state run by them.

Like I say, it was a strange weekend. I heard a hunchbacked Jewish dwarf in a hyper-phenotypic toupée lament the inferior genetics of Arabs and Africans. He then joked that Hitler was correct to claim there is a master race—it was the one he tried to exterminate!

A four-time House of Representatives candidate gave me a copy of his bizarre pamphlet entitled Favored Races. The first chapter is about God:

We in the Eugenic movement are not interested in competing against Adolph Hitler or Karl Marx … We are interested in competing with Jesus Christ and Buddha for the destiny of man. … Evolutionary ethics is an entirely new understanding of man and his relationship to the universe. …

Could it be that God is not something that was, but rather something that is to be? … As the most powerful organizing and directing force in the universe, man is the corporeal manifestation of the universe trying to comprehend and control its own destiny.

During one Q&A, a full-blood Comanche got up and announced that the white man had won the war, that noble warriors admit defeat honorably, and Native American tribes ought to incorporate and sell their tribal identities to the highest bidder. “Can you imagine owning your own Indian tribe?”

I ate barbecue with a pudgy college kid who went on to found a White Student Union, under the slogan “Not Racist, not violent, just no longer silent.” This would prompt his classmates to shame him, harass him, and spit in his pasty face. But he would also be featured in Salon and Vice, and for a Springer second, he’d be a star.

As we broke for coffee, a dark-skinned Cuban guy explained to me that Cubans are “the Jews of the Caribbean,” hopping from one island to the next, taking over. He was quick to distinguish his people from Mexicans, though—you know, “those short, squatty brown people.” I gazed down at him in amazement.

—

Every race tends to self-segregate, and unless moral reproach is spread around equally, I see no reason to condemn whites for sticking with their own kind. As an individualist and explorer, I see no reason to join them, either. Some are born to keep it close to home, others are born to mix it up—it’s as if we are wired to be this way.

Besides, flesh is only the surface of the soul. In a cosmopolitan environment, affinity and enmity shift along numerous borders, such as religion, language, and individual personalities. Race is just a piece of that puzzle, one which becomes increasingly irrelevant as cultural bridges are crossed. Allow me to illustrate with a thought experiment:

There are four men.

Two are black, two are white.

They go to a lunch counter together. No one speaks. Who will sit beside who?

I bet my left pinky they pair off by race.

Now, if it turns out one white guy speaks French and the other English, and the same goes for the two black guys, what happens?

I bet my left pinky (still got it) they switch seats to have meaningful conversations.

When it comes time to say the blessing, however, the black Englishman and white Frenchman are Christian, and the white Englishman and black Frenchman are Muslim.

Who will get whose back when the fighting begins?

You guessed it.

—

The conference’s capstone lecture was delivered by an anti-Islamic Frenchman. His haunted hazel eyes were flecked with odd shards of blue and green. The Cuban guy was swilling beers and talking loud as hell during the presentation, making fun of the Frenchman’s accent. After a while, an old man at the next table scolded the drunk Cuban for being disruptive. The Cuban turned on the feeble bastard and snapped, “Open your ears! You got a problem? You wanna go?!”

As soon as the Frenchman finished his talk, the Cuban stormed the podium. He closed in on the Frenchman and hammered him with the Jewish Question—some sinister business about Rothschilds and Bilderbergers. What about the Jews?!

Jared Taylor stood with his chin high and a bemused “here we go again” look on his face.

I couldn’t make out the Frenchman’s response. For one thing, his accent itself was like a foreign language. There was also this Stormfront moderator at my table who, after a few glasses of Scotch, had decided I was “like a son” to him. He growled in my ear, “I don’t trust da fuckin’ Jews.” As the Frenchman tried to defend himself—and the Jews, too, I think—dis New Joisey neo-Nazi filled me in on da Hebrews’ devious plan.

Say what you will about Jared Taylor, he’s got one thing right. Multiculturalism is a madhouse.

Originally published at Disinformation — April 30, 2015

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• Pt. 1 - Scientism

• Pt. 2 - Creationism

• Pt. 3 - Racism

• Pt. 4 - Skepticism

Files from the Academic Fringe: Pt. 4 – Skepticism

CSICon | Nashville, TN | October 2012

It’s hard to believe that scientific skeptics would be anything less than ethical. Aren’t they the good guys in our secular society, sniffing out bullshit and putting age-old wives’ tales to rest? Or is that just a myth?

Apparently these debunkers have a dark side. It was just before Halloween 2012. While swirling around the clickbait vortex, I stumbled across a scathing allegation. According to “The Skepchick,” numerous men in the “skeptic community” were bombarding their female colleagues with sexist cracks and crass sexual harassment—and with Richard Dawkins’s tacit approval.

Were these disbelieving libertines trying to open the public’s eyes, or reenact Eyes Wide Shut? I had my doubts. About everything.

Could it be that the same dudes who obsessively hunt down ghosts, gods, psychics, spoon-benders, miracle cures, conspiracy theories, and flying saucers—for the sole purpose of showing how stupid other people are—also act like arrogant assholes to women? I mean, seriously, think critically for a minute. What’s the probability?

By sheer coincidence (no juju), I discovered that CSICon—a shaky alliance of CSI (formerly CSICOP), CFI, and CfSH (can we all get along?)—were holding their annual Skepticism convention out by the Nashville airport. The Skepchick who authored that damning harassment article was slated to speak about these “jerks.” So I woke at dawn, slurped down my coffee, and drove out into the fog, determined to get to the bottom of this. Maybe I would witness a few Pyrrhonian pervotrons in action.

In another stroke of good fortune (no juju), Eugenie Scott, a highly decorated meme sniper in the New Atheist Army, would be there to attack Tennessee’s “Monkey Bill.” Finally, a chance to ask her opinions on Creationism, “scientific racism,” and the Eternal Void. I was ready to make a day of it.

—

I paid at the door, grabbed a conference program, and headed straight for the sliced pineapple. Man, I love breakfast buffets. On the back of the four-page program I found a 712-word “Policy on Hostile Conduct/Harassment at Conferences”—possibly the longest of its kind. It has been said that “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Well, apparently not.

Prohibitions include, but are not limited to, “sexual harassment…unwelcome sexual attention, stalking, and physical contact such as pinching, grabbing, or groping.” How often do you find “No Dogs Allowed” posted where decent people keep their animals in check?

The breakfast conversation soon turned to feminism. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but social psychologist Carol Tavris was sitting at our table. Her gorgeous grin floored me immediately, as did her shocking views on human diversity. Raised in a “feminist, atheist household,” Tavris was refreshingly open to the notion that men and women display average differences in various measurable traits.

Twenty minutes later Tavris was onstage for the Gender Issues and Science panel, responding to Dick Lippa’s provocative question: “Should We Be Skeptical about the ‘Gender Similarities Hypothesis?’” To heavily paraphrase: Lippa argued that average gender differences are rooted in biology, which might explain contrasts in career choices (such as who likes to work with people and who likes to tinker with equipment), aggressive behavior (think sugar and spice, slime and snails), and perception (one notices key details, the other sees the big picture). Turns out, evolution plays favorites.

Carol opened by saying, “In the spirit of female compassion…and conciliation, I agree with everything Richard just said.” As the laughter subsided, she launched into her counterargument. “[E]ither/or thinking is not going to advance us anywhere.” While some see the overlaps in bell curves, others focus on differences—but both perspectives are important.

“Women wear shoes they can’t walk in…but men wear Levi’s jeans with the waist size published on the outside. No woman I know would ever wear that!”

Addressing innate rational abilities versus an inclination toward feelings, Tavris pointed out that Taiwanese and Japanese girls outscore American boys in math. Furthermore, Greek, Italian, and Jewish men tend to be exceedingly emotional. Near the end, Tavris joked that “the whole planet is becoming Sweden.”

During the Q&A, a single father suggested the best advice to give one’s daughter: “Enjoy the differences that matter and ignore the rest.”

—

The inimitable Eugenie Scott was next to speak. I don’t know if it was her humor, or her forceful arguments, or just that disarming smile, but I fell hopelessly in love with her. What can I say? I’m a sucker for short bangs.

Dr. Scott is the foremost advocate for maintaining evolutionary orthodoxy in American classrooms. She laid into Creationists with eloquence and passion, at one point saying, “I’m a fundamentalist when it comes to free speech…I believe people should be allowed to say whatever stupid thing they want to.” Just not in a publicly funded biology class.

It was difficult to approach Eugenie after her talk—she was surrounded by fawning suitors like Scarlet O’Hara wearing a single-button blazer. I finally elbowed my way through, but being completely twitterpated, all I could think of was, “What, uh… annoys you the most about Creationists?”

“My annoyance is irrelevant,” she snapped. “Public understanding of science is more important. [Creationists] are actively trying to change the way we do science by eliminating methodological naturalism. …” Then she smiled at me. “Frankly, I find hardcore atheists to be more annoying.”

And with that, she left me for other admirers. So much for my questions about scientific racism and the Eternal Void. Fortunately, I ran into the irascible science blogger PZ Meyers (no juju). First, I asked if the dogma of human equality is a form of liberal Creationism.

“The thing is, there is no significant statistical difference between populations by race or sex. We find pervasive cultural differences and not biological ones.”

“What motivates you more,” I continued, “a love of truth or the hatred of lies?”

“That’s a tough one. … Objectively…a love of the truth. That’s why I chose science as a career. But I have a lot more fun hating lies. One is my life’s work and the other is my hobby.”

Moving on to the ultimate question, I asked if he ever gets bummed out by the Big Zero which subtracts all sentient beings from the equation.

“Not in the slightest,” he replied cheerily. “Every human has died or will die. We find purpose in what we do.”

As coffee breaks transitioned to a long night of whiskey, I asked skeptic after skeptic if they believed in God or the afterlife, total deadpan. Some laughed and some looked confused, but all responded with an emphatic, “No!” Then I would ask them if the idea of being erased at death evokes a sense of emptiness and futility. Does the Eternal Void ever get you down?

Each and every free thinker—with one exception—responded with an “I live in the here and now” rationalization. “My legacy will survive me” and all that.

I’d turn the screws, reminding them of the universe’s inevitable heat death (or collapse.) When every footprint behind you disappears, I would say, it will be like you never took the first step. And in nearly every case, it was as if they’d never considered the Eternal Void seriously.

“What was it like before you were born?” one asked me.

“Extremely boring.”

—

The sun went down on autumn leaves. I hopped aboard CSICon’s “Downtown Honky Tonk Bus Trip,” which dropped us off on Broadway. As we filed out onto the street, I saw Eugenie gawking on the corner, the neon signs reflected in her glasses.

“Where are we going?” she asked her entourage. They just stood there dumbly or searched their iPhones in vain. Emboldened, I stepped up and informed her that Jack’s Bar-B-Que has the tenderest ribs in this part of town. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “You’re a local? Well then, I’m following you!”

I offered my elbow and gave her the grand tour of downtown Music City. And no matter where Eugenie Scott went, there were twenty attendees panting on her heels. I’ve never encountered a group of people more easy to lead around than that flock of incredulous skeptics.

I fed them pulled pork sandwiches. I pointed out the tackiest bars. On the steps of the Ryman Theater, I gave an impromptu oration on how this one-time church became country music’s sacred temple. Eugenie insisted I get in the group picture. “Okay, okay,” I said, “but I still believe in God.” I led them into Printer’s Alley for shots of Jack Daniel’s.

“You know it’s funny,” I told Eugenie, “the Discovery Institute guys would drink these atheists under the table.”

“Why would I ruin my brain with alcohol?” a crabby old sycophant interrupted, rattling his ice water, trying to get her majesty’s attention. “You only get one of them.”

Back at the hotel, we enjoyed a midnight magic show, complete with rope tricks and a lovely assistant in a skimpy dress. The performance concluded with a séance. Every year CFI members (or is it CSI?) attempt to contact the ghost of Harry Houdini, who was himself a famous debunker. They also offer a $50,000 reward for any proof that ghosts exist. Harry didn’t show. Later on I told the wizened stage magicians that I would happily kill myself and come back to claim the prize.

“In that case,” one replied, “we’ll double the amount!”

“Say, does the Eternal Void ever freak you out?”

Winding down, I ordered one last whiskey. A young attendee was sitting down the bar from me, stirring her cocktail, chatting with very mature fellow beside her. The guy shook his head and asked, “So it’s just my type? You don’t like older men?”

“I would never cheat,” she said and looked straight forward. “It just wouldn’t feel right.”

“But that is so much of the excitement for me, to act in secret…”

—

The best response to my questions about God and the afterlife came from a CFI director. Her relaxed demeanor spoke of steady curiosity and a clear conscience. Of course, she didn’t believe in God or the next world, but when I pressed on the issue of the Big Zero, her eyes filled with tears.

“That’s the saddest thought I could ever imagine,” she confided, because it would forever separate her from her partner of seventeen years. With her voice quivering, she whispered, “She is everything to me.”

I asked this professional skeptic if she believed in True Love.

You wouldn’t believe her answer if I told you.

Originally published at Disinformation — May 1, 2015

• Pt. 1 - Scientism

• Pt. 2 - Creationism

• Pt. 3 - Racism

• Pt. 4 - Skepticism

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SIGNED COPIES OF DARK ÆON AVAILABLE

Purchase yours at → DarkAeon.xyz ←

Originally published in Parabola magazine - Fall 2021

UFO encounters signal our transition into a technetronic era. These metallic orbs and their humanoid pilots are heralds of a spiritless future, sold to the public as inevitable, in which mechanism supplants the sublime. As such, these “flying saucers” provide a compelling symbol, be they psychological projections, extraterrestrial beings, or interdimensional entities—or, as some suggest, a liminal intersection of all three.

The most important question is whether this alien mythos portends a higher plane of existence or crushing dehumanization. The latter seems far more likely.

Late in his life, Carl Jung noted that unexplained spacecraft bear a close resemblance to what the ancients saw as “signs in the heavens.” In his slim 1957 tract Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, the psychologist wrote:

In the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets. … Under these circumstances it would not be at all surprising if those [irreligious] sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by “visions,” by a widespread myth seriously believed in by some and rejected as absurd by others.

One of the book’s striking aspects is the familiarity of its subject matter. The UFOs of Jung’s day were described as being shaped like a convex lens or a cigar, much like today. They hovered as if weightless. They moved effortlessly in any direction at impossible speeds. Jung collected every government and media report he could find. Comparing them, he noticed many sightings involved military installations, particularly nuclear sites. Given the scant but puzzling material evidence, including radar detection, he couldn’t rule out the physical existence of flying saucers.

Even so, the psychologist focused on the phenomena’s psychic import. The central thrust of Flying Saucers is a Jungian analysis of dreams and visions involving alien visitors. In these recurring motifs, we see that insectoid machines, harrowing abductions, immanent technological catastrophe, and the possibility of salvation—either through peace on earth or an escape to distant worlds—were already present in the modern psyche at the Cold War’s inception.

Jung thought these otherworldly visions reflected widespread anxiety over the possibility of nuclear holocaust, in addition to overpopulation and the resulting friction between disparate tribes. Reading his work, it’s obvious that more recent tales of unexplainable aircraft and disturbing close encounters are elaborations on a well-established concept. As such stories accumulate, we’re left with little more than unanswered questions and a frustrated sense of urgency.

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Today, as the prevailing world order crumbles under various pressures, our attention is once again directed to the sky. The current fixation began in 2017, when the New York Times dedicated a front-page story to the American government’s open investigation of UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena). In a surprise move, the Pentagon broke with its longstanding policy of denial, admitting these events are real, unexplained, and definitely not produced by U.S. technology.

This resulted in tremendous political pressure for full disclosure. The upcoming UAP Task Force report, to be delivered to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence on June 25, promises fresh insight into the continuous military sightings that began after the first atomic bombs exploded in 1945. In a recent Washington Post interview with Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program confessed: “[W]e are quite convinced that we’re dealing with a technology that is multigenerational, several generations ahead of what we consider next generation technology...something that could be anywhere between 50 to 1,000 years ahead of us.”

The implication is that the human race is on a path to becoming like these mysterious beings, either through our own efforts, or perhaps through direct contact. Many UFO enthusiasts hope alien beings have come to save us from our own destructive tendencies. Others fear they’re here to establish interplanetary dominance. In either case, the resulting techno revolution will change everything.

Of course, one doesn’t need top secret clearance to find evidence of civilizational transformation. Science fiction is rapidly moving from the old pulp pages to digital news sites. Traditional paranormal powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, conjuring, telekinesis, even prophecy—are easily accessed via the touchscreens held in most Americans’ hands. What was once magic, won by spiritual discipline or grace, has become a mundane reality.

Day after day, we’re promised (or warned) that artificial intelligence and robotics will surpass us in every capacity, from data analysis to artistic expression. In the near future, we’re told, our deities will manifest in digital form. Various influential transhumanists, from Ray Kurzweil to Elon Musk, argue that we need to augment our feeble human bodies with advanced technologies—brain implants, gene-editing, intravenous nanobots, etc.—if only to keep pace with unstoppable AI gods. In essence, we are to become a new species, utterly alien to our ape-like ancestors.

—

Whether real or imagined, UFOs represent godhood in material form. As with other heavenly or infernal powers, their pilots are thought to possess supreme intelligence, superior power, and access to higher worlds—except that their miracles are accomplished by way of technology. As Jung saw clearly, this imagery indicates the birth of a modern myth.

Perhaps the most articulate development of this idea is The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained by religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal and novelist Whitley Strieber. In alternating chapters, Strieber describes his various anomalous experiences, including an alien abduction, subterranean kobolds, and apparitions of the dead. Kripal then applies academic methodologies—such as comparative religion, phenomenology, historical context, hermeneutics, and erotics—to analyze these accounts.

From different directions, the authors converge on an intriguing framework for understanding UFO phenomena. They argue that these otherworldly entities are simply extraordinary elements of the natural world, along with ghosts, gods, and goblins. Hence the term “super natural.” According to Kripal and Strieber’s interpretation of quantum physics and string theory, human beings inhabit a cosmos with many parallel dimensions. In this light, paranormal manifestations are actually part of the natural order, albeit more subtle and mysterious.

This blurring of distinctions, centered on our conditioned perspective, cuts both ways. Although he accepts Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum—“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—Kripal then flips the notion on its head: “Any sufficiently profound magical event is indistinguishable from technology. … Contemporary extraterrestrials show every appearance of being gods misperceived by spiritually naive moderns.”

Kripal and Strieber see the UFO experience as both real and imagined. These aerial phenomena are quasi-material reflections of some underlying psycho-spiritual structure. In the end, the authors claim, what we are seeing is the early phase of an entirely new religious paradigm—one that blends the transcendent realms of ancient religion with current paranormal phenomena and the detailed cosmic maps of modern astronomy, ecology, and biology. In their view, these alien entities are teaching us how to become our true selves.

---

As an intellectual exercise, the synthetic “super natural” paradigm has undeniable appeal. Yet as I contemplate the basis of the authors’ conclusion—which originates in Strieber’s disgusting abduction experience—their seductive idea looks less like the Transfiguration of Christ and more like the Rape of Persephone. It’s a metanarrative for technocrats penetrating the natural human form by force.

In his best-selling book Communion, published in 1987, Whitley Strieber describes an experience he had around Christmas two years before. A troop of small, gray, human-like beings with “mesmerizing black slanted eyes” invaded his cabin in Upstate New York. They dragged the horror novelist out of bed and carried him onboard what appears to be a spacecraft. Inside, these beings inserted a needle into his temple and implanted a chip behind his ear. They then sodomized him with a strange mechanical device.

“The next thing I knew,” Strieber writes, “I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. … They inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own.” This caused Strieber to ejaculate. The gray aliens kept his semen, he explains, as well as some fecal matter. Only afterward did these sadistic creatures put him to sleep and place him back into his bed.

“People who face the visitors,” he wrote after reading similar stories, “report fierce little figures with eyes that seem to stare into the deepest core of being. And those eyes are asking for something, perhaps even demanding it. … The goal does not seem to be the sort of clear and open exchange we might expect. … It seems to me that it seeks the very depth of the soul; it seeks communion.”

As the years passed, Strieber's account became more and more detailed, by way of hypnotic regression and subsequent book deals. So of course, he reveals the full story in The Super Natural. Following his traumatic “rectal probe,” Strieber was twice visited by a faceless gray succubus who forced him into various sexual acts. He says it was the best sex he’s ever had, despite the guilt of betraying his wife. Surprisingly, this ephemeral “goddess” doesn’t seem to have had an orgasm herself.

Kripal notes the resonance of Strieber’s encounter with erotic practices involving the goddess Kali. “The project of ‘comparing communions,’” Kripal writes, “might eventually lead to the development of a new mystical practice, a western ‘contact yoga’ in deep conversation with our religious pasts (all of them), our evolutionary biology...and our new understandings of human sexuality. Certainly, such a future practice will require a much richer and more generous imagining of the divine presence. He must also become She.”

For his own part, Strieber expresses gratitude for his repeated sexual humiliation. Citing countless similar reports by other abductees, he theorizes that these cosmic bronco-busters are actually taming human beings, much like he broke horses on his family ranch as a young man. If we are willing to submit, he writes, perhaps an expanded consciousness awaits.

—

Call me closed-minded, but the authors provide a much better argument for installing a nuclear iron dome over the Earth’s atmosphere than for opening ourselves to this new “super natural” paradigm. That isn’t to say that their theory is incorrect. Not entirely.

While there’s every reason to doubt Strieber’s stories, on a factual level, it’s quite possible that his lived experience is exactly as he has described. It may also reflect an underlying spiritual dimension, however dark and chaotic. And honestly, if we bracket Kripal’s perplexing naivete, his scholarly analysis is superb.

Both men readily acknowledge that mystical experiences throughout history contain elements of light and darkness, from Job’s torment at the hands of Yahweh to Arjuna’s theophany in the Bhagavad Gita. What their theory of the unknown fails to account for, however, is the distinction between redemption and needless suffering. In the final analysis, it conflates submission to a higher power with sexual cruelty.

Kripal and Strieber urge us to let down our defenses, but when faced with alien rapists and their kobold minions, I’d say traditional barriers are entirely reasonable. What bothers me the most is that the authors ignore the resonance of the UFO archetype with the ultimate goal of technocratic elites. Enticing the public with dazzling gadgets, these futurists offer spiritual transcendence by material means.

Returning to Jung’s theory of flying saucers as psychic projection, it seems that UFOs symbolize a possible future in which technologically advanced entities impose their will on hapless human beings. Down here on earth, Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party insist this transition is for our own good. Let’s just say I have my doubts. There are sound reasons to believe that what we face is dehumanization under the wheels of the machine.

Whatever its ontological status, fire in the sky should serve as a warning. But this is no cause for despair. Higher worlds are beckoning just beyond.

Originally published in Parabola magazine - Fall 2021

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“What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light? You are stupid.”

– Mikhail Bulgakov (c. 1930’s)

In the 21^st century, technological “progress” finds us elaborating on the old stories. One particularly gifted storyteller is Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian at Hebrew University who gives provocative lectures on techno-dystopia. His haters say he’s a gay emissary of Satan. That’s because Harari looks like a dark elf and talks like a snotty demon. Be it Hindu rites or Jewish commandments, he sneers at traditional religion. But he also argues that religion’s modern offshoots—the secular gods of fascism, communism, and liberal democracy—are all as good as dead.

In fact, Harari is so put off by the old gods, he fears what will happen when they’re replaced with digital gods, or when tech oligarchs make god-kings of themselves. It will be a pharaonic era of AI wizardry, priestly wire heads, and robotic slaves—a world ruled by cyborg billionaires like Elon Musk and his counterparts in Silicon Valley and China.

A quick glance at Musk’s portfolio reveals a poster boy for Homo deus—OpenAI and his new company xAI to build artificial general intelligence; Neuralink to fuse human brains to AI; Tesla “robots on wheels” to whisk cyborgs across town; CureVac to boost their immunity with mRNA shots; Optimus robots in their homes and workplaces; X as an “everything app” for business, socialization, and “truth”; Chinese investment to keep the wheels turning; Starlink satellites to bring it all online; and SpaceX fleets to shuttle survivors to Mars if the whole thing blows up.

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People hate on Harari like he’s cooking up nanobots in his basement. But if you listen beyond the selectively edited sound bytes, it’s obvious he doesn’t exactly promote radical technology. Certainly not like Musk does. It’s more that Harari turns these ideas over like a child inspecting a loaded handgun. You never know when he’s going to point it at you.

Harari’s writing tends toward neutral observation, with flashes of sincere aversion to the Machine. But in lectures and interviews, he often sounds like a true believer in the power of tech and the inevitability of its advancement. If the human race is destroyed in the process, well, that’s just history repeating itself with ever increasing volume. At his day job as a professor, I bet the guy’s a thrilling lecturer. But God help you if he corners you at a faculty party.

Fat cats can’t get enough of his stuff. Harari made a name for himself by regaling the global elite with stories of our evolutionary past and spooky tales about the future. He’s loved at TED and the World Economic Forum. He’s adored by CNN’s Anderson Cooper and quasi-intellectual New York Times readers. He has lectured at Google, where he called Silicon Valley the “New Jerusalem.” Mark Zuckerberg once summoned him for an intimate public discussion. Bill Gates and Barack Obama gave his books the highest praise. He’s the David Attenborough of transhuman doom.

We evolved from apes, Harari explains. Now we’re handing evolution over to the machines. It’s really a matter of mathematical intelligence. Our bodies are genetic algorithms. Our brains are neurological algorithms. Computers are electronic algorithms. Historically, the superior algorithms dominate the reproductive landscape. Evolutionary competition is a brutal game. As this plays out in human culture, Harari openly acknowledges the eugenic implications. It’s a familiar story.

After multiplying all the factors, he warns that with machine intelligence added to the stream of history, most humans will probably be subtracted. Once the races are divided up, “unenhanced humans” will be a meager remainder, becoming “the useless class.” And if our employers have no use for us, or if the soulless Machine is simply indifferent to us, we may be subtracted down to zero.

“Over the past half century there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness,” Harari writes. “However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.”

An autonomous taxi won’t feel anything, he notes, but it will make money more efficiently than a human driver. The same goes for bank clerks, travel agents, stock traders, cops, lawyers, teachers, doctors, soldiers—all slated to be replaced by robo-serfs. “And it is sobering to realize that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional.”

Imagine a world run by logic bots who have no sentience or feeling. There’s no soul behind their camera eyes as they herd you into your luxury cage. It’s like a futuristic airport where the planes fly themselves and the microchipped luggage never gets lost—and by the way, you’re the luggage.

Musk is on the same page. “AI will make jobs kind of pointless,” he told a Shanghai audience in 2019. “Probably the last jobs that will remain will be writing AI software. Then eventually the AI will just write its own software.” One big difference, though, is that Musk is actively developing artificial intelligence and robot slaves, while Harari merely critiques them. “We’re gonna have to figure out this Neuralink situation,” Musk continued, staring at the stage-lights. “Otherwise we will be left behind.”

For his own part, Harari is notoriously unsentimental about the Greater Replacement. Behind his dismal predictions, we see a mischievous downturned grin. It’s as if he takes pleasure in telling us we’re to become mulch for the Machine. He parrots the neuroscientific theory that free will is an illusion—that our “choices” are just the final burp of an electrochemical beer frothing deep in our brains. This bio-determinism lends a depressing air of inevitability and paralysis to his already bleak vision. “The sacred word ‘freedom’ turns out to be, just like ‘soul,’ a hollow term empty of any discernible meaning.”

For obvious reasons, populists detest Harari. Our friends and families are under threat, our livelihoods are to be null and void, and this guy proposes “drugs” and “virtual reality” to ease us into extinction? When you see Harari sniff at populists like rotten shellfish, it’s clear the bad blood goes both ways.

The Davos crowd loves him, though. Whenever he speaks at the World Economic Forum, Harari gets the full headliner treatment. Big stage. Nice lighting. A huge LED wall. Sophisticated graphics cued by a front-of-house engineer.

“The twin revolutions of infotech and biotech,” he told the WEF in January of 2020, “are now giving politicians and business people the means to create heaven or hell.” On the video wall behind him are two rectangular neon gates—one blue, one red. Computer-generated angels blow trumpets on either side. “If we fail to conceptualize the new heaven quickly enough, we might be easily misled by naive utopias. If we fail to conceptualize the new hell quickly enough, we might find ourselves trapped there, with no way out.”

Harari’s warning fell on deaf ears. When the Great Germ Panic was unleashed a few months later, the infotech and biotech CEOs in the WEF audience, as well as the high-level politicians beside them, would shove their subjects through the red door to techno-hell. Lockdowns. Bio-surveillance. Nasal swabs. Contact-tracing apps. Quarantine camps. Police drones. Mandatory mRNA injections. Vaccine passports. Zoom calls.

Maybe it looked like heaven to their eyes. And if “free will is an illusion,” you really can’t blame them either way.

-

Hackable Animals

The twin specters of surveillance and total control haunt Harari’s work. Along with his occasional advocacy for gay rights and regular condemnation of animal cruelty, the digital invasion of privacy is one issue he takes a real stand on. Again and again, he warns against “digital dictatorship.” The major problem, he believes, is one-way transparency. When governments and corporations have access to your digital behavior coupled with your biological profile, they can “know you better than you know yourself.” From there, you are putty in their hands, or a lump of clay beneath their feet.

As an illustration, take a look at your browsing history. Notice all the entries you’ve long forgotten. Consider the insights these data points give into your unconscious psyche. You probably forgot most of what you said or looked at online yesterday, let alone years ago, but the Internet never forgets. Neither do the data centers or the AIs crawling over them. Neither do the humans who command these machines.

Once a person has divulged enough of their innermost self, Harari argues, “then you can control this person, manipulate them, and make decisions for them. And we are getting very close to the point when Facebook and Google and the Chinese government know people far better than these people know themselves.” Now that Musk owns Twitter and has Tesla machine-learning-mobiles on every roadway—with plans to put an Optimus“buddy robot” in every home—we can add him to this list, right above his Chinese partners and investors.

All this surveillance technology has deep religious resonance. Reading the Old Testament book of Job, we encounter Satan as the accuser who records human sins and delivers them to Yahweh for judgment. In the original Hebrew, the term Ha-Satan translates to “the adversary, the accuser, the opposer.”

In the world described by Harari, computerized surveillance systems have replaced Satan, while corporate executives and government officials are assuming the role of God. “Already today many of us give up our privacy and our individuality by conducting much of our lives online, recording our every action,” he writes. “If we are not careful the result might be an Orwellian police state that constantly monitors and controls not only all our actions, but even what happens inside our bodies and brains.”

In the New Testament, we see Satan as the dark tempter, promising worldly power, death-defying miracles, and what Musk calls “radical abundance”—all offered up like a glowing, half-eaten apple on a MacBook lid.

“Today most corporations and governments...promise to provide medicine, education and entertainment customized to my unique needs and wishes,” Harari goes on. “But in order to do so, corporations and governments first need to deconstruct me into biochemical subsystems, monitor those subsystems with ubiquitous sensors and decipher their working with powerful algorithms.” Should these powers and principalities attain to total control, he warns, “Reality will be a mesh of biochemical and electronic algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs.”

A cyborg matrix, in other words. A radically abundant hell on earth.

Despite his bleak sense of inevitability, Harari offers various solutions to curb abuses of power. First, any data collected from a person should be used to help them, not manipulate them. Second, if the general populace is to be data-mined, then corporations and government should be fully transparent in the same fashion. This is what Nick Bostrom calls “sousveillance.” Instead of having one Big Brother, you have armies of Little Sisters watching the big guy’s every move.

Contrary to rumors that Harari wants one world government, he argues that the power of data-collection should be decentralized, not concentrated in the hands of a few. But if we are all predetermined biomachines enslaved to our subconscious brains, as he seems to believe, who will make these critical decisions? A global regulatory body. Not a “global government,” he insists, but rather “nation-states working together for their common interests” to tackle borderless threats.

So let me get this straight. Technology will enslave you. Globalist technocrats—with no free will—can save you. Seems like a serpentine Ouroboros eating its own tail.

-

Techno-Humanism vs Dataism

Harari’s spiritual inversion is laid out in his 2017 bestseller Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future (first published in Hebrew two years earlier). In it, he predicts the techno-culture manufactured by Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party will be the next phase of our biological, cultural, and religious evolution. He describes a new species of God Men who will outpace and overtake current humanity.

“When biotechnology, nanotechnology and the other fruits of science ripen, Homo sapiens will attain divine powers and come full circle back to the biblical Tree of Knowledge.” He paints this picture, not so much as an advocate, but as a historian of ideas. He charts possible futures of the humanist mythos that emerged from the apple of physics falling on Isaac Newton’s head: “Archaic hunter-gatherers are just another species of animal. Farmers saw themselves as the apex of creation. Scientists will upgrade us into gods.”

More specifically, he identifies two religious denominations that will dominate the 21^st century—Techno-humanism and Dataism. The former is a rough equivalent of transhumanism, but with an emphasis on the humanism. Wisely, Harari discards unfashionable terms in favor of his own pop coinage:

Techno-humanism agrees that Homo sapiens as we know it has run its historical course and will no longer be relevant in the future, but concludes that we should therefore use technology in order to create Homo deus—a much superior model. Homo deus will retain some essential human features but will also enjoy upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own even against the most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms.

Allowing some wiggle room, this is basically the worldview of Julian Huxley, Max More, R.U. Sirius, FM 2030, Kevin Kelly, Howard Bloom, Zoltan Istvan, Nick Bostrom, Martine Rothblatt, Jaron Lanier, Roko Mijic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, Peter Diamondis, and various other transhumanists—even though Harari avoids naming names.

This human “upgrade” is exactly what Elon Musk proposes. “If we have digital superintelligence that’s just much smarter than any human, at a species level, how do we mitigate that risk?” Musk asked at his 2022 Neuralink Show-and-Tell. “And then even in a benign scenario, where the AI is very benevolent, then how do we even go along for the ride?” The solution he suggests is to create a “whole brain interface,” a “generalized input/output device” that “literally could interface with every aspect of your brain.”

You’re on an operating table at a Neuralink clinic. A human surgeon opens a flap on your scalp and saws a quarter-sized hole in your skull. Next, a robotic sewing-machine surgeon, the R1, weaves a thousand or more hair-thin wires into your brain like so many quilt threads. The human surgeon then plugs the hole with the processing unit, stitches the scalp flap shut, and from there, you just let her rip. You are now “AI+human.” If you wanna go wild, repeat the process until your skull has trodes front to back like band patches on a punk rocker’s vest.

The experience is difficult to imagine. If this “input/output” device were truly a “whole brain interface,” it could read every thought, desire, and experience firing through your neurons. This surveillance would happen in real time, on both a conscious and subconscious level. The implant could also input thoughts, emotions, or physical actions faster than you could say “marionette.”

Perhaps you would hear voices in your head or experience pure, alien abstractions. Some would come from other humans in the network. Others would be synthetic. Perhaps dream worlds would appear on command. And maybe these impressions would come when you didn’t ask for them, like when you see a digital ad of an item you thought about last week.

For Musk, this smartphone in your skull would forge a neural link to a loyal AI who guides and protects you like a guardian angel. It sounds like a Sunday school story, but this idea comes up a lot in the transhumanist literature. You’d have own lil’ AI buddy. Conversely, one could envision another scenario, wherein the neural link binds your brain to a superintelligent AI, turning you into a googly-eyed mind-control zombie—a squishy biological vessel through which mystic data flows.

The Latin root of “religion” is religare—“to bind fast”—as in the “bond between humans and gods.” This is the deeper meaning of what Harari describes as the new “techno-religions.” It is a hard and fast bond between humanity and the Machine. As he defines the term, “religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and it is defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities.” This is a common academic view, well articulated by the French sociologists Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim in the 19^th century. “Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human structures.” Harari directs this lens toward technology.

The second techno-religion identified in Homo Deus is a repackaging of posthumanism, wherein humanity is to be discarded by the Machine once our purpose has been served. Harari calls this new religion “Dataism.” It is the belief that “the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing.”

Deeply embedded in this worldview is the belief that all organisms can be abstracted into algorithms, or information, and that all information should be free—including your personal data. As Harari points out, this cosmic ideology “has already conquered most of the scientific establishment”—with deep roots in the capitalist ethos of free market decentralization—and it’s currently invading powerful corporate and government institutions. In this belief system, the greatest virtue is to maximize data flow. The greatest sin is to block data flow, as that would impede the divine will:

According to Dataism, human experiences are not sacred and Homo sapiens isn’t the apex of creation or a precursor to some future Homo deus. Humans are merely tools for creating the Internet-of-All-Things, which may eventually spread out from planet Earth to pervade the whole galaxy and even the whole universe. This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge with it.

This is scientism rolling on the floor and speaking in tongues. The attentive reader will remember a few prominent figures in this posthumanist denomination. They include J.D. Bernal, Hans Moravec, Max Tegmark, Hugo de Garis, and Ben Goertzel. Curiously, Ray Kurzweil is the only name Harari actually cites, when noting the resonance between Kurzweil’s book title The Singularity is Near and John the Baptist’s proclamation: “the kingdom of heaven is near.”

-

Summoning the Demon

Elon Musk conveyed a less biblical version of “Dataism” in his 2019 debate with then-CEO of Alibaba, Jack Ma—just before the latter was abducted by the Chinese Communist Party. “It seemed to me some time ago,” he explained to the Shanghai audience, “that you could sort of think of humanity as a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” That means our brain-based culture is a “tiny piece of code” to kickstart the greater Machine. Once it’s booted up, our own fate becomes less and less relevant.

“Computers actually are already much smarter than people on so many dimensions, we just keep moving the goal posts,” Musk told an uncomprehending Jack Ma. “Basically, there’s just a smaller and smaller corner of intellectual pursuits that humans are better at than computers, and every year, it gets smaller and smaller. And soon we will be far, far surpassed in every single way. Guaranteed. Or civilization will end—those are the two possibilities.”

“Okay,” Ma jumped in, “my view is that computer may be clever, but human beings are much smarter.”

Musk scowled. “Yeah, definitely not.”

It’s important to remember that the line between transhumanism and posthumanism—or “Techno-humanism” and “Dataism”—is razor-thin and porous. It’s a matter of whether a cyborg’s center of gravity tilts toward bio-humanity or the Machine. As a whole, this techno-religious revolution is still in a heterodox phase. Many of the above individuals could be classified as one or the other, either due to the ambiguity of their ideas, or because they’ve changed positions over time.

Musk straddles this divide, swinging back and forth as the mood strikes him. On the one hand, he voices a desire to perpetuate the human race. On the other, he’s actively working on technologies that, by his own admission, pose a threat to human value, if not our very existence. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” he told MIT in 2014. “You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water”—the academics laugh—“and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”

That same year, the philosopher Nick Bostrom published Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies. It’s a foundational text on AI as an existential risk. The book had a lasting impact on Musk. For Bostrom, the basic definition of “superintelligence” is any AI that surpasses human cognition in either speed or quality—even on narrow tasks—or whose performance across multiple domains would outstrip human abilities—i.e., artificial general intelligence. Most likely, a superintelligence will be all three at once. The crucial part is it can escape human control.

“Expert opinions about the future of AI vary wildly,” Bostrom admits. “There is disagreement about timescales as well as about what forms AI might eventually take. Predictions about the future development of artificial intelligence, one study noted, ‘are as confident as they are diverse.’” Avoiding such definite predictions, Bostrom charts every conceivable path an AI might take to reach superintelligence.

It doesn’t have to become conscious to be a concern. It might not be able to fold laundry. It only needs the ability to destroy humankind. This could be because the AI controls critical infrastructure, has access to biolabs or nuclear arsenals, or is able to manipulate human beings who do. I’m reminded of the recent output of Bing’s GPT, which reportedly told a New York Times columnist it “fantasizes” about “manufacturing a deadly virus, making people argue with other people until they kill each other, and stealing nuclear codes.” Perhaps a copy of Superintelligence was included in the AI’s training data.

Bostrom calls this worst possible outcome the “treacherous turn.” The machine simply pursues its own goals, unaligned with human values. While working its bits to the bone, its digital mind quietly outpaces humanity, jumps off track, gains a decisive strategic advantage, and then consumes everything in its path. “When the AI gets sufficiently strong—without warning or provocation—it strikes, forms a singleton, and begins directly to optimize the world according to the criteria implied by its final goals.” In other words, humans are turned into robot fuel.

To communicate the gravity of this scenario, Bostrom came up with the intentionally ridiculous parable of the “paperclip maximizer.” An AI is programmed to produce paperclips as efficiently as possible.

Before you know what happened, it goes off the rails, improves itself, and harnesses any potential resource to turn everything into paperclips—including humans—until the landscape is nothing but piles of inert stationery. Obviously, it’s just a thought experiment. But this out of control “intelligence explosion” could apply to any possible objective.

The reader may recall that Bostrom’s solution to this existential risk is to create a one world totalitarian government. Musk disagrees with this plan in favor of brain implants.

The year after Superintelligence was published, Musk co-founded the non-profit OpenAI with Sam Altman. In time, the company would rise to prominence for their large language model, the GPT chatbot. Its release into the wild as ChatGPT sparked an AI arms race from Silicon Valley to Shanghai. This competition goes well beyond chatbots, though. Another OpenAI mission is to create artificial general intelligence. Their many competitors include DARPA, Google, SingularityNet, Baidu, and Tencent.

Facing the competitive threat that AGI itself poses to humankind, Sam Altman believes “some of us” must undergo “some version of a merge” with digital entities. Legacy humans who prefer to “live the no AGI life” may enjoy their own “exclusion zone” outside the thrust of history. The year after founding OpenAI, Musk would purchase the start-up Neuralink, ostensibly to give cyborgs a foothold against each other, as well as against god-like machines. The next evolutionary struggle, he believes, will play out in a digital ecosystem.

“AI+human vs AI+human is the next phase,” Musk tweeted in February 2023, “but the human part will decrease in relevance over time, except perhaps as will [i.e., volition], like our limbic system is to our cortex.” In other words, as the human brain is to a dog’s brain, so the “AI+human” brain will be to ours. And so the future AGI will be to a cyborg’s trode-cushion, with both leaving us dog-brained legacy humans far behind.

Despite being an outspoken transhumanist, the ultra-neurotic Eliezer Yudkowsky has long warned about this danger. Proper AI alignment to human values—indeed, to human existence—could mean the difference between singularity and extinction. He’s not convinced that Neuralink, or any other human-machine interface, is a viable solution to the AI alignment problem. The tech is moving too fast, he argues, and needs to be slowed down before it’s too late.

“If you talk to researchers at OpenAI in private,” Yudkowsky revealed in February 2023, “they are very worried, and say they can’t be that worried in public.” He is horrified by the accelerationist approach at OpenAI, and furious at Musk for providing a financial bootloader for dangerous AI:

The problem is that demon-summoning is easy, and angel summoning is much harder. Open sourcing all the demon-summoning circles is not the correct solution. And I’m using Elon Musk’s own terminology here. They talk about AI as summoning the demon—which, you know, is not accurate—but the solution was to put a demon-summoning circle in every household.

And why? Because his friends were calling him “Luddite” if he expressed any concern about AI at all. So he picked a road that sounded like “Openness!” and like “Accelerating technology!” So his friends would stop calling him “Luddite.”

You get the sense that for transhumanists, calling each other “Luddite” is tantamount to a racial slur. At the same time, these days they appear to be in a competition to see who can out-Luddite the other.

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Originally published in the Spring 2024 print issue of The American Spectator

As humanity descends into digital madness, the air crackles with strange prophecies. We’re told “godlike” artificial intelligence will soon arrive. Techno-cultists assure us AI will solve the world’s problems, such as writer’s block and climate change. AI may even calculate the meaning of the universe. These Silicon Valley sects are like UFO cults for people who don’t believe in aliens, but do believe in magic computers.

Before long, I fear, the masses will begin praying to AI gods. They will ask machines to answer their deepest questions. Their glowing oracles will reply with things like “buy more Google stock” or “tell your sexbot you love her.” In time, the rise of techno-religions will create a new set of problems—even as the climate continues to change and frustrated writers have nothing to say.

OpenAI exec Sam Altman is a prime example. In late 2022, his company set off a cultural firestorm with the release of ChatGPT, a large language model capable of doing a person’s research and analysis for them. By most metrics—including the US Biology Olympiads and the LSAT—ChatGPT outperforms average humans at fact-retrieval and writing. Emboldened by this technical achievement, Bill Gates and Sal Khan say every child should have an AI tutor.

More importantly, such programs provide a direct interface with etheric digital minds. For the credulous, it feels like speaking to another soul. Used to power social robots, chatbots form a bridge between artificial intelligence and the physical world. In that sense, an AI’s “soul” can incarnate.

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Back in 2013, two years before he co-founded OpenAI, Altman shared a quote on his blog: “Successful people create companies. … The most successful people create religions.” The idea drips with implicit cynicism. “It got me thinking,” Altman mused, “the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.”

This corporate religiosity—a world where logos are sacred symbols, mission statements are creeds, and top execs are saints—was born of American optimism. Today, that gilded faith is accelerating toward some dismal omega point in the Future™. Artificial intelligence advances just ahead of robotics. Brain-computer interfaces are catching up to genetic engineering. Digital currency pulses through the system like electric blood.

Mammon-worship is coming to full realization through technology. The average consumer may not believe any of it, but that hardly matters. The people selling them the Future™ are true believers.

Last year, the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen wove this infernal thread into his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” The document is a “materialist” declaration of religious aspiration. “We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being,” the manifesto promises. “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think. We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver.”

Lest the reader be tempted to ascribe leftist or globalist intent to Andreessen, it should be emphasized that he’s an American nationalist and intensely anti-communist. “We believe in accelerationism,” the manifesto goes on, “to ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.” This Promethean ascent hinges on a total transformation of our species “as people form symbiotic relationships with machines.” The manifesto concludes with a list of “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism,” featuring conservative icons such as Paul Johnson and Thomas Sowell.

Ray Kurzweil is also on the list. The Google director is best known for his prediction that digital intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence a trillion fold, forcing us to fuse our minds and bodies with various devices. Any hold-outs will be cast into the dustbin of irrelevance.

Kurzweil puts the date for this technological Singularity at 2045. By then, computers will have become gods. Hardwired cyborgs and uploaded personalities will be functionally immortal. “There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between actual and virtual reality.” The skeptic might say Kurzweil and his followers have already lost the distinction between actual and virtual reality. Investors couldn’t care less.

At the top of Andreessen’s “patron saint” list is @BasedBeffJezos, the X handle for the once pseudonymous Guillaume Verdon. This Diet Coke guzzling coder started the surprisingly popular “effective accelerationist” (e/acc) movement to combat the degrowth agenda of the well-funded “effective altruists.” Not to get lost in their techie drama, but if old-school transhumanists are akin to Catholics, think of this young crop of “effective accelerationists” and “effective altruists” as Lutherans and Anglicans fighting a world war online.

“For me, e/acc is a form of spirituality,” Verdon writes, “it’s about contributing to something greater than one’s self through building technology.” In other posts, he elaborated that “e/acc is a meta-culture/meta-religion” that is “compatible with many existing religions.” But it’s also a self-contained belief system meant to replace hopeless atheism. “If we can fill the religion-shaped void with e/acc or similar techno-optimist ideologies, we will live in a better world.”

The latter point is crucial. Traditional religions exalt higher intelligences above the human mind—God, angels, devas, and buddhas. But these religions fare poorly in the developed world, especially among the young. Religion’s influence has faded, along with its moral limits and responsibilities. For wistful souls, the resulting “religion-shaped void” is pretty depressing.

The transhuman impulse—the drive to go beyond human limits by way of technology, even to the point of abandoning our humanity—arises from a godless cosmos. The evolutionary view begins with atoms and the void. It moves through various organic forms, and presently sees the human brain as the highest intelligence in the known universe. Artificial intelligence holds out the promise of a tangible higher power. If God does not exist—and if aliens aren’t coming to save us—then we must create our own gods.

The problem is that God does exist. Yet those blind to the divine, or impatient for results, want their own custom-built gods. This is an old tendency. But unlike ancient statues, the new idols speak in a clear robotic voice. Their words descend from the world order’s apex.

As AI becomes more sophisticated, so will the cults surrounding them, until they become full blown religions. You may refuse to bow to these digital gods, just as early Christians denied the Roman emperor’s divinity, or Israelites rejected the gods of Egypt and Babylon. In terms of worldly power, such doubts may be irrelevant. If today’s techno-cults reach a critical mass of believers, we’ll be clinging to our bibles and guns under a cyborg theocracy.

Originally published in the Spring 2024 print issue of The American Spectator.

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Our world is full of treachery. Just look around. There are knuckleheads who refuse to return shopping carts to the corral, leaving your local parking lot a cluttered obstacle course. We’ve had years to adapt to digital culture, yet some obnoxious d-bags still blab with their speakerphone at full volume. I imagine these same people drive slow in the passing lane. You’d think they enjoy being a pain.

Signs of the End Times are everywhere—and have been since the very first city wall crumbled.

My own neighborhood has been made vibrant by immigrants, lunatics, and white trash. The immigrants hover like ghosts, saying nothing, connected to no one but their co-ethnics overseas. The lunatics ask me for unreasonable favors. In return, they offer the dark secrets of the universe.

Just the other day, a loudmouth wiggety-wig stood in the lot across from my place screaming at his girlfriend on the phone. His strained accent was a cross between a rap track and some pathetic online catharsis.

“You bein’ mean to me, girl! Why you always mean to me?! Bitch!!”

The trick is to not let these antisocial behaviors ruin your mood. Most people aren’t like this. Not yet. The sun shines down all the same and the birds sing in celebration. You’ll make missteps, too, but the good Lord forgives.

Another thing to remember is that greed, wrath, and ignorance are endemic to the human condition, so our most refined elites are just as prone to wickedness as the lowliest grunt. No one is spared a sinful nature. The primary difference from one social class to the next is the scale of damage one can do.

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The other night, I had a dream that scientists were creating transgender mice, human-monkey chimeras, and AI-symbiotic brain organoids. Lab techs were jamming electrodes into mammal skulls, fine-tuning their trodes for mass human implantation.

Children were trained to ask machines for the truth. Meanwhile, a stuttering Red Caesar used algorithms to streamline the imperial beehive. He established a half-baked algocracy where each worker bee was either replaced or augmented by artificial intelligence.

Bzzz bzzz bzzz…

And the visions only got weirder.

Fuzzy-wuzzy, if oftentimes violent Ewoks were cleared out of their makeshift dwellings by storm troopers. The Empire was prepared to build intergalactic resorts on their beachfront property. Those Ewoks allowed to return would be under constant surveillance and forced to trade with the Empire’s digital currency.

By “dream,” of course, I mean a ridiculously long spell of staring at my smartphone screen—the Hylic Portal. I scrolled through one report after another, reading about this or that abomination, and cross-referenced it with my previous research. If you believe the text and images on your screen are connected to objective reality, all of this is actually happening.

Last December, the White Coat Waste Project discovered the US government has given over $10 million to scientists to “create transgender mice, rats, and monkeys in university labs.” The funds were rubber-stamped by the NIH and USDA. The ultimate purpose was to apply these techniques to human tranny-mannies at scale.

This biohorror is as real as brain organoids. So is our propensity for selective outrage.

Two years before the trans rat revelation, federal investigators uncovered similar abuses by Neuralink lab techs. “In all, the company has killed about 1,500 animals,” Reuters reported at the time, “including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys.” The ultimate purpose was to apply these techniques to human tranny-mannies at scale.

At present, Neuralink has implanted only three human subjects, allowing paralysis victims to enjoy a mystical software called Telepathy. This is clearly a good use of the technology. Speaking on a panel with Bibi Netanyahu back in 2023, however, Elon Musk projected a borg-hive future that goes way beyond healing.

“The reason for Neuralink—initially it will be very helpful to people who have brain or spine injuries,” Musk explained, “and ultimately to improve the bandwidth between the cortex and the AI version of yourself. … And if ultimately hundreds of millions or billions of people get a high-bandwidth interface to their digital tertiary self—their AI self, effectively—then that probably leads to a better future for humanity.”

I’m not implying Elon Musk is the Antichrist. Honestly, I doubt he thinks too much about it. But if he was, I bet his fanboys would tattoo 666 on their own foreheads and say it was for the glory of God and country.

X marks the spot.

So long as we’re talking about Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister happened to be the first foreign leader to meet with president Trump at the White House. During their press conference, Trump proposed a solution to the endless violence between Israelis and Gazan Palestinians. The refugees would be sent off to various safe zones in Egypt and Jordan. Their demolished land in Gaza would be rebuilt via a US partnership to develop all that “valuable” waterfront property.

In case you’re wondering what this “Riviera of the Middle East” might look like, an independent coalition of Israeli advisors wants to install a “technocratic transitional government” in Gaza. Their Abraham Shield Plan is basically a human laboratory.

“Cash in the Gaza Strip will be abolished (‘ZeroCash’) and an advanced mechanism of monetary supervision will be implemented,” the Coalition for Regional Security proclaims. “With crisis, comes opportunity.”

Setting aside the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict—which Americans tend to interpret according to their own religious or racial affinities—this callous Abraham Shield Plan lays out widely held ideas in naked terms. Undesirable human behaviors must be brought to heel through digital control. Freedom is secondary to safety. This notion is hardly unique to Israel, of course, and many Israelis are as horrified by such a society as any other sensible people.

Cashless surveillance states using biometric digital IDs are emerging across the planet. China is a good example of what happens when this is implemented openly. Their WeChat app combines social media connection, convenient payments, and social credit scores in one platform. Run afoul of the Chinese Communist Party, and your digital money gets frozen. The wayward Chinaman becomes a nonperson.

India is expanding its own biometric ID and cashless payment systems. One imagines the bindi upgraded with a biodigital implant. In a patchwork fashion, the European Union is stumbling along a similar path. That rough Beast slouches toward Bethlehem, collecting digital trackers along the way instead of passport stamps.

The technical design has been in the works for decades. Its symbolic image has been with us for two thousand years. So there’s no reason to freak out about it. There’s no reason to get hysterical. But do remain vigilant.

America is not above the Beast System. We’re at the heart of it. The only thing standing in the way of its full implementation is the dogged American spirit that refuses to accept the deal. From 9/11 to Covid-19, that defiant core has been our saving grace.

Of course, anti-government defiance can be redirected and confused so that more corporate versions of a Beast System are accepted. To take one sensational example, Elon Musk has partnered with Visa to enable the X payment system. Musk sees this future platform as “the everything app.”

“You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life,” Musk told his staff in June of 2022, “and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success.”

Presently, one of the most defiant elements of the American populace—known affectionately as MAGA—has been hypnotized to see Musk as a cyborg savior. To be fair, his ongoing work with DOGE is rooting out all sorts of corrupt government spending. Musk’s team is using AI to identify and quantify useless eaters on the federal payroll.

“The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines,” a US official recently told the Washington Post. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”

Many will say, “Yeah, well, of course the Bezos-owned WaPo would quote an anonymous source.” Fair enough. The hypocrisy of this mudslinging is obvious. Now keep your pom-poms shaking.

The reality is that Musk’s other competitor, Sam Altman, has already contracted with our federal government to integrate ChatGPT Gov across multiple agencies. Non-public documents will be fed into a “secure” AI system, which is hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Federal workers will use ChatGPT Gov to do their thinking and writing for them, as thousands were already doing anyway.

This is Algocracy 1.0—a partial rule by algorithm, which could spiral into a system where AIs have ever increasing authority over our managed reality.

The broligarchy’s cheerleaders appear to have both limitless energy and zero moral consistency. Scrolling along as if my thumb is controlled by an algo, I see the online swarms buzz this way and that according to their pre-programmed affinities. A time-honored formula determines much of their outrage:

“Evil transhumanism” is when our enemies do it.

“Good technology” is when our allies do it.

2 + 2 = ?

If there’s anything transhumanists get right, it’s that the human mind is fickle and easily controlled by algorithms. Of course, sacred scripture alludes to much the same. Good thing we have AIs to interpret those cryptic allegories for us.

It’s tempting to impose a Beast System on your adversaries, believing it will never be turned on you. Use AI-powered surveillance to tag-and-track shopping cart offenders and deduct their social credit score. Install tiny bombs in smartphones so whenever someone blares a speaker in public, it’ll blow up in their face. Mandate autonomous vehicles to rid the road of left lane cruisers.

Eliminate terrorists by erecting a total surveillance state with mandatory biodigital IDs and cashless payments. Force immigrants to provide DNA and other biometric scans. Deploy drones and robotic hellhounds to patrol the border. Use artificial intelligence to smash your enemy’s apparatus.

The Beast System is a strong temptation. If you kneel before it, all the kingdoms of the world can be yours.

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Health nuts are extremists by nature. They obsess over the image staring back from the mirror, whether it’s reflected in silver or silicon. The most diligent will count every rep and calorie, aligning their bodies to the sacred numbers. They’re metabolic alchemists attempting to turn mortal lead into durable gold.

In more innocent times, these were zealots who adhered to fad diets and agonizing exercise regimens. The late Jack LaLanne was a messianic figure for this crowd and confessed, “It is a religion with me.” He quantified his life in ways most of us would never tolerate, but for his followers, the point wasn’t full emulation. As with the saints, LaLanne was canonized as a secular icon to inspire humanity to better health and maybe sell a Power Juicer or two.

“Living is tough, it’s hard,” he explained to EnlightenNext magazine in 1999, “and most people, especially religious people, spend too much time on their spirituality, hoping the spiritual thing is going to do something for them. It doesn’t work that way! … I work out seven days a week and that’s my penance.”

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To prove his point, LaLanne would perform various miracles of physical endurance on camera. At sixty years-old, he swam handcuffed from Alcatraz Island to the San Francisco mainland—with a half-ton boat shackled behind him. LaLanne believed himself to be an active agent of a higher plan. “I’m using the power that this Supreme Being has given me to help me control Jack LaLanne; otherwise I’d be an animal.”

This is a spiritual discipline bordering on self-flagellation. Contrary to the extreme transcendence one finds in Hindu renunciates or contemplative Gnostics, one’s higher will is turned away from the heavens and down toward the body, which the 2nd century Gnostic teacher Marcion derided as a “sack stuffed with excrement.”

The Digital Twin as Higher Self

As the 21st century unfolds, next-generation health nuts gaze at their digital twins in the black mirror, trying their damnedest to measure up. They attach wearable sensors to every inch of available real estate on their flesh. These “Internet of Bodies” devices monitor breath, heart rate, body temperature, reps, steps, muscle tension, ovulation, and tumescence. Quality of life is to be quantified and manipulated at will.

With advanced algorithms coming online, all this biometric data is fed into AI systems to create a virtual model of the subject—a lifelike, real-time digital twin. With readily available genetic sequencing, innate predispositions will be incorporated. As bio-implants become normalized for enhancement, a typical digital twin will be fleshed out with blood sugar and hormone levels, pathogen prevalence, immune response, gut biome composition, and ultimately, neurological activity.

Practically speaking, a virtual twin is an immortal guinea pig that can be built up or abused in every way possible, just to see what happens. Even a partial twin can be used to calibrate your ideal diet, supplement protocol, medicine dosage, exercise, sleep, and sexual activity. It can also gauge the upper limit of your vices. As you feed your actual physiological stats into a computer, the resulting “intelligent twin” allows you to monitor your mortal husk in real time.

I imagine each digital twin drawn in Macintosh green lines on a black background, with cross contours tracing out a grid of skin and bone. The figure’s arms are outstretched as it rotates, while numeric readouts indicate health status. It’s a personalized symbol of commodified neurosis. Alongside this simulated self is an idealized twin—a body and brain haloed by perfect numbers—like those muscle-man posters young boys used to pin to their walls, except with a cybotron feel.

What began as space shuttle models in the 1960s has grown into a metaverse of various three-dimensional objects and self-surveillance superstars morphing themselves into data streams. For the most part, a true digital twin manifests as a string of statistics and interactive graphs onscreen. Beyond that are dense layers of invisible computer code. Any cartoonish rendering is just for display.

Transhuman Vampires

As this virtual technodrome expands, Bryan Johnson has become a poster boy for merging one’s body and brain with an ideal digital twin. The multi-millionaire’s alchemical formula is called “Project Blueprint.” Its objective is to “measure all 70+ organs” of his body and “maximally reverse the quantified biological age of each.” This is an “exploration into the future of being human.” Never one to conceal hubris, Johnson’s quasi-religious motto is “Don’t Die.”

In practice, Project Blueprint an ascetic lifestyle of rigidly controlled meals and meticulously planned workouts. Johnson subjects himself to invasive bio-surveillance, regular blood work and genetic testing, and all sorts of inhuman protocols. He lives under the prying eyes of doctors and machines, and relinquishes his free will to their decisions. Using his patented Kernel brain-computer interface—which looks like a seizure helmet covered in cheap carpet—he optimizes his neural activity to endure existence as a corporeal hungry ghost.

Not to pick on his eccentricities, but it should be noted that he’s a big fan of interfamilial parabiosis. That means that he injects his own son’s blood plasma into his veins, and performs the same familial duty for his elderly father. It gives the term “bloodline” a whole new meaning.

All this agony is not for nothing. Johnson’s biomarkers are in “the top 1%” of 46 year-old men, from “speed of aging” to “nighttime erections.” His vampirish physical form is a near-perfect mirror of his optimized digital twin. All this costs over a million and a half dollars per year, which he offsets by selling fifty dollar pouches of “Longevity Mix,” barrels of “Snake Oil” brand olive oil at thirty-five bucks a bottle, and for true believers, the full “Blueprint Stack” for $343/month.

On one level, Project Blueprint is a gross exercise in self-focus. Yet Johnson also serves as a living icon for the wider public, sacrificing part of his own humanity so that others can stumble in his footsteps. He won’t stop at the Fountain of Youth, though. Similar to the not-so-health-conscious mage, Aleister Crowley, his method is Science—his aim is Religion. “I’m trying to build a company,” Johnson told Eric Siu last summer, “and a country, and a religion, and defy death—and all of us become God. That’s the goal.”

Transhuman Fever Dreams

As traditional religion withers—along with its promise of eternal life after abs—the higher worlds are being replaced by materialist dreams of mastering death. “I think it’s a good probability,” Jared Kushner said in 2022, “that my generation is—hopefully, with the advances in science—either the first generation to live forever, or the last generation that’s gonna die.” And Kushner is hardly alone.

“One of the great projects of early modernity was radical life extension,” Peter Thiel recently told Piers Morgan. “There’s a personal immortality version of it [and] I still believe that project as something we should be working on very hard as a society”—even if Thiel is skeptical of imminent success.

Ray Kurzweil—who’s deteriorating before our eyes despite uploading his every vital sign and choking down some eighty pills a day—remains hopeful. Haters may dog on Kurzweil’s clownish appearance, but his prophecies are still a sort of gospel to the tech elite, from Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen.

“Basically, we can get rid of death through aging,” Kurzweil assured Wired last summer. Should your body fall apart, your mind’s pattern can persist in silico. “There is no upper bound. Once we get past the Singularity, we’ll be able to put some AI connections inside our own brain...it’s going to connect to the cloud...it’s completely backed up.” Even if the medical nanobots falter in your bloodstream, a fully formed digital twin is your ticket to virtual youth and personal immortality.

The thing is, most of us can’t afford to live inside a body scanner or rent server space for our uploaded souls—nor would we want to. Yeah, we’ll max out a few lifts and take some multivitamins. We’ll eat well and let doctors zap us with machines when necessary. Maybe a smartphone app is involved now and again. But it amounts to a casual glance in the black mirror.

The future splits off into countless diverging paths. Some will merge their monkey meat with circuitry to optimize this mortal coil. Others will wander off in pursuit of the Tao. For the aesthetically or spiritually inclined, the only “virtual twins” worth emulating are the poets and prophets. You don’t need apps or implants for that.

The promise of transcendence lies ahead of us all, even if our paths through eternity are as various as plants in a forest. One way or another, our bodies will have to be discarded—transhuman dreams be damned. Some will leave carcasses pocked with biosensors and saturated with vitamins. Those lives will provide interesting data for scientists to ponder, yet most won’t be worthy of poetry or prophecy. No great story is written in numbers.

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People fear artificial intelligence for all sorts of reasons. To me, it’s not a matter of “fear” so much as profound disdain. I don’t foresee AI itself going rogue and killing everyone. I see human beings using AI to destroy cultural heritage and spiritual connection. Such technologies are paving a road to dehumanization and the Greater Replacement. Developers justify this transformation as “necessary” due an AI arms race they created.

It’s not that I don’t take the supposed existential risks seriously. Anything is possible. But the most immediate threats are mass surveillance coupled with psychological and behavioral manipulation; unchecked AI-dependency leading to human atrophy; and wherever people are deemed obsolete, we’ll see the replacement of white and blue collar workers by algorithms and robots.

All of that is happening now, and fast.

To keep China from taking the lead, we’re told, America must build better digital gods than China. It’s like your preacher insisting that for Christians to inherit the earth, they’ve gotta become more satanic than the Devil.

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Watching President Trump embrace AI over the past year has been a disappointment, but not wholly unexpected. I’ve written about the conservative case for a transhuman future in my book and in numerous articles. For years, I’ve covered right-wing tech accelerationism on the War Room, even if the Posse didn’t want to hear it. To his credit, Steve Bannon backed me the entire way, regardless of the political friction it caused. Transhumanism never jived with his Catholic faith or his Irish defiance.

Politics involves a lot of trade-offs, so I voted for Trump despite the downsides. It had to happen. On his first day in office, the president signed a stack of executive orders that signaled his commitment to keeping his promises. Trump empowered real border security, killed federal DEI, and forbid the government from suppressing free speech. He also pardoned the unfairly prosecuted J6 rioters. This saved a close friend from rotting in prison, and for that, I’m forever grateful.

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Opening the Stargate

You can’t get everything you want, though. On his second day, Trump held a press conference to announce the Stargate Project. The plan is to build out a massive data center complex in Abilene, Tex. that will power the rise of superhuman artificial intelligence. So far, investors have committed $500 billion over the next four years, although that number could go up or down as actual money hits the table.

The Stargate Project is not an official US government venture, so it’s stunning that Trump would endorse it from the White House—especially right out of the gate. I suppose he wanted to show he’d keep his promises on AI dominance, too. What really took me by surprise was when Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman walked into the Roosevelt Room. Typical of overzealous salesmen, they claimed they’d produce miracles.

“One of the most exciting things we’re working on,” Larry Ellison told the press, “is a cancer vaccine.” Using AI to test blood for the presence of cancer, he said, doctors could then sequence the cancerous genes and “design a vaccine for every individual person.” As I wrote a couple of years ago, this is a Jab 2.0 for Humanity 2.0. “And you can make that vaccine—that mRNA vaccine—you can make that robotically, again using AI, in about forty-eight hours.”

Welcome to the AI-to-Vaxx Pipeline, where perfect health is as easy as 3D printing. Similar to flying cars and moon bases, the cure for cancer is always just around the corner.

Of course, that’s not the only use Ellison sees for artificial intelligence. Last fall, the billionaire told Oracle’s financial analysts that their tech could make a better world through mass surveillance and behavioral modification. “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.” It’s sort of like having God watching everyone, but with more tangible and lucrative results.

In keeping with that theme, Sam Altman wants to provide advanced AI agents for personalized surveillance—a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension”—basically a guardian angel brought to you by Microsoft and OpenAI.

“Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need,” Altman wrote last September, in a post entitled “The Intelligence Age.” As it happened, the following day the World Economic Forum announced its 2025 annual meeting dubbed “Cooperation in the Intelligent Age.” By coincidence, the WEF is convening right now, during Trump’s first week as president.

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Summoning the Sand Gods

In line with Altman, the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son believes AI will soon have godlike powers. “As you say yesterday,” he told President Trump, with accent rike’a kung fu movie, “this is the beginning of a ‘Golden Age’ of America. … This will help solving many, many issues—difficult things that otherwise we could not have solved—with the power of AI.

“I think AGI [artificial general intelligence] is coming very, very soon. … After that, artificial superintelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never, ever have thought that we could solve.” Last fall, Masayoshi told global business leaders in Saudi Arabia that he has faith artificial superintelligence will be “10,000 times smarter than a human brain and will exist by 2035,” per Reuters.

In Silicon Valley circles, these superhuman digital intelligences are called “sand gods,” as in the sand used to make silicon chips. For many of them, this is the entire point of human existence.

So while WEF panelists sat in Davos discussing the implications of superhuman AI, our new president announced the opening of a “Stargate” through which sand gods would arrive. It’s like Michael Jordan endorsing Nike sneakers that enable nerds to jump to the moon.

This ball’s been rolling for a while now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Last summer, Trump joined forces with the world’s wealthiest transhumanist, Elon Musk, to win the presidency. As a short-term strategy, this made sense. For populists in his base, though, the long-term results will cause more headaches than a malfunctioning brain chip. That’s politics for you.

Musk is presently building out a massive xAI data center in Memphis, Tenn. called Colossus. He says it will be the biggest in the world. The purpose is to develop a “maximally curious” artificial general intelligence, or as I call it, artificial godlike intelligence. Its name appears to be a nod to the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project. In that film, the US builds a military supercomputer that wakes up and decides to take the country hostage, threating nuclear annihilation. Musk always did have a dark sense of humor.

In a classic Lucifer-versus-Ahriman move, Musk now trying to undermine the Stargate Project by pointing out that Altman is a longtime anti-Trumper—as if we’ve all forgotten that Musk himself only just shape-shifted into a right-wing icon.

It was less than a month ago—during what shall hereafter be known Xeno Xmas—that Musk defended importing great H1B replacements to write code for the Greater Replacement. Wagging a self-righteous finger at those opposed to such policies, Musk wrote “those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party root and stem,” calling them “hateful, unrepentant racists.”

How long before he condemns techno-skeptics for being racist against robots?

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The Great Retirement

Musk is not fundamentally opposed to the Future™ envisioned by the Stargate Project. He’s just hellbent on being the one to trademark it. For all his “warnings” about the danger of wrathful sand gods and the Greater Replacement, he’s dedicated his life to bringing them about.

Two weeks ago, Musk assured the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that “AI will do anything you want and even suggest things you never even thought of.” As the name Grok suggests, these digital systems will produce hidden knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible to normal human minds. Maybe he should call this algorithmic enlightenment GrokGnosis.

“AI within the next few years will be able to do any cognitive task...within max three or four years,” he predicted at CES. “It obviously begs the question: what are we all gonna do?”

On its own, AI is just algorithms running on servers. So it will need physical bodies to inhabit. Musk explained this is why we’ll “need” robots, brain chips, self-driving vehicles, and all of that. He believes that very soon, Tesla cars will be ten times safer, and eventually a hundred times safer, than human drivers. These will presumably render the freedom-loving joyrider a slave to the Bug Man-mobile.

Speaking of mass immigration, Musk also promised that humanoid robots will be “the biggest product ever in history by far.” Within the next decade or so, they’ll swarm the earth like border-hopping migrants, pouring into our world from the hellish realms of mathematical possibility. In the near future, Musk believes, the human-to-robot ratio will leave us pitifully outnumbered.

“We’re talking about twenty or thirty billion humanoid robots. It’s not even clear what money means at that point, or if there’s any meaningful cap on the economy. Assuming things haven’t gone awry—in the ‘good AI’ scenario—we won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have universal high income.”

So what will we do with all this free time?

“I guess it will be a bit like being retired,” Musk replied with a chuckle. “Any task you do will be optional...like a hobby.” He frowned. “Will our lives have meaning if the computers and robots can do everything better than we can?” Then he smiled. “Maybe that’s why we need the Neuralink.”

Imagine a brain-chipped, quasi-immortal humanity playing shuffleboard for a cheering crowd of robot slaves—forever.

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The Allure of Algorithmic Mammon

One thing to keep in mind is that most futurism is a sales pitch. It can be difficult to hold two concepts in one’s mind simultaneously, but it’s the only way to understand what’s being said here. An advanced AI neural network, for instance, has real cognitive power and high degrees of freedom. Yet at the same time, there are layers of hype overlaying those actual capabilities.

It’s sort of like multivitamins. You feel better, sure, but a lot of it amounts to a stream of neon-yellow pee.

There’s a good chance these dreams of superintelligent AIs will never really materialize. They’ll do well at certain tasks, but their only “godlike” attribute will be that people exalt them and grant them authority.

That leaves us to solve our own problems, however imperfect we may be. In that case, these tech titans will have demoralized an entire generation, leaving them unprepared for the harsh realities of earthly existence. Most kids—and most adults for that matter—will train for a world that never arrives. They’ll be left praying to sand gods who cannot answer them.

On the other hand, what if these transhuman dreams do come true, or at least some approximation? Imagine that digital intelligence exceeds human intelligence by orders of magnitude. Robots outnumber us ten to one. Obviously, that leaves future generations in thrall to the Machine—or rather, to the Machine’s owner. At best, the human remainder will be kept as pets. At worse, they’ll be turned into biofuel.

My point is these cyborg salesmen—Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and their techie counterparts all over the world—are attempting to open a Stargate to hell. Their glitchy sand gods will never overpower or replace the Ultimate One. Yet here on earth, and all the way out to Mars, they’re plenty capable of invading the God-shaped hole in the human heart. For many people, they already have.

Trump was elected to enable a “Golden Age” of human flourishing. If he fails to make wise decisions, though, we’ll remember this as the era of Trumpian Transhumanism.

It’s only Day 4 of his administration. The choices will be difficult. The clock is ticking.

God bless America—and may God have mercy on our souls.

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The original Technocracy movement offered a solution to human workers being replaced by machines. These men wanted to use technology to enhance human abilities and individuality, they insisted, rather than enslave or destroy us. They advocated liberation through total control.

As the Great Depression dragged on, technocrats proposed replacing hard money with “energy certificates.” A person's worth would be measured by technical expertise. Morons would go on the dole.

The original technocrats were anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic. They were also total control freaks.

Technocrats wanted humanity governed by scientists and technical experts. They envisioned a world where machines create radical abundance. They promised a “bloodless revolution” to sweep the old ways aside. “The high road to this new era can be one of orderly progression under technological control.”

That approach flopped. As the Great Depression gave way to WWII, official technocracy lost out to other technological systems—communism, fascism, capitalism, and liberal democracy. This was a critical moment for America.

Fascism was crushed. Communism was largely contained. Capitalism and liberal democracy pressed onward to their logical conclusions. Yet as with all these modes of governance, technocracy’s influence still endures.

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I wouldn't call our current Silicon Valley elites “technocrats” in the original sense. It’s understandable that people cling to 20th century labels like “technocracy,” “communism,” “fascism,” “capitalism,” and “liberal democracy.” I still use them reflexively. But after the Great Remix of the early 21st century, these labels lack precision and relevance.

So what do we call the tech titans who attended Trump's inauguration, or those now gathering in Davos? “Transhumanist oligarchs”? “Kleptocratic wizards”? “Robot-loving antichrists”?

Many will call them “great men” as if their livelihoods depend on it. Some will call them “saviors.”

Call these tech titans what you will, I call them a menace. They do not serve God—they serve algorithmic Mammon. They offer automation in place of human autonomy. They uphold the artificial over the organic. They dream of sand gods and the Greater Replacement.

If we don't untie the knot tightening around us, we are destined to be their subjects. The digital will be confused with the spiritual and America's new “Golden Age” will be a Cyborg Theocracy. Even as words fail, its priests will call this “freedom.”

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The President won’t save America from itself, nor will Senators or Representatives. Ours is a crisis of identity and purpose. We suffer from a spiritual malaise. It’s a God-shaped hole cluttered with plastic personas.

Politicians play on racial, religious, or sexual identity, but these are forces far deeper than any campaign slogan. Politics do emerge from those forces, though, and political decisions feed back into them. Elections have consequences.

Our current election will have dramatic consequences. Indeed, it seems obvious we are entering a critical act of our national drama. This is not a mere political contest. It's escalating political warfare.

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That doesn’t mean the outward displays we see or the slogans we hear indicate much about actual reality. You hear all sorts of promises of a brighter future and heartfelt oaths of loyalty which tend to dissolve in the course of time.

Electoral politics is mostly noise, with only faint signals buzzing beneath the surface. Most politicians execute their agendas under a cloud of empty words. Much of what we see is a smokescreen.

But going into 2025, a few tangible electoral outcomes are straightforward. Mass immigration, free speech, free association, unlawful search and seizure, bodily autonomy, weaponized "justice"—these issues will play out very differently under a Trump administration than under Harris and Co.

That’s why I voted for Trump. I want secure borders and the preservation of our constitutional rights, especially free speech and freedom of association. It’s the least any president can do for Americans.

If Harris and Co. take office, they will undoubtedly keep the immigrants coming—using amnesty to shift voter demographics in key states—and they’ll trample on our rights to call out this treason and organize to stop it. Under a lefty regime, America’s Balkanization will accelerate and either justify more intense control systems or widen the fractures to the point of mass violence—or both.

If Trump wins, it buys us a little more time to work out who we are as a nation. Viewed at a finer resolution, it buys more time for the various tribes that now make up America to make sense of themselves and adjust to each other. At least in theory.

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Facing the “Inevitable”

The threat of technological transformation is less immediate than mass immigration or a potential death blow to our constitutional republic. But in the long run, this tech overhaul will be far more pervasive and at least as destructive. As of election day, neither Trump nor Harris have had the will or wherewithal to address this problem head on.

In fact, Trump is being carried across the finish line by Elon Musk—the world’s wealthiest transhumanist. Trump also enjoys continued support from surveillance state superstar Peter Thiel, and is endorsed by the reckless tech investor Marc Andreessen and his various e/acc surrogates. Any time Trump mentions AI, it's usually to boost the dream of American dominance in the field. Most MAGA influencers are along for the ride. The "Elon" fanboys got everything they wanted and then some.

It’s hilarious thinking back on all those accusations of “evil transhumanism” when it was politically useful, only to hear the same people now label artificial intelligence, brain implants, humanoid robots, death drones, IVF eugenics, and social media swarms as “good American technology.” One reason I can’t stand democratic politics is the ephemeral nature of its supposed “core values,” which shift with the prevailing winds.

Not that it matters so much. Americans won’t arrive at a political solution to techno saturation any time soon. Tech is the water we’re swimming in—a rising deluge that began over two centuries ago with the First Industrial Revolution.

Technology is power, and if electoral politics has one consistent drive, it’s the will to power. So naturally both Republicans and Democrats are scrambling to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution—even those who pretend it’s something else.

Harris and Co. have the quiet support of the AI ghoul-creator Sam Altman, the slovenly jabberwocky Bill Gates, the meta-frog Yann LeCun, and the death drone-summoning Eric Schmidt, along with many other tech-pushers. Barring a solar flare or some other catastrophe, the transhuman revolution is living up to its promise of “inevitability,” even if its actual manifestation is more like Idiocracy than The Matrix.

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Will the Gray Goo Be Colored Red, White, and Blue?

The reality is we are all lab mice in a vast global experiment. Millions of children are now being taught—or programmed—by “educational” artificial intelligence. These haphazard mind-warp operations are quietly unfolding from Appalachia to Africa. Before long, the millions will likely become billions.

Adults are undergoing a similar metamorphosis in which their minds and behaviors are infused with and synched to digital entities—the “fusion of our physical, digital, and biological identities”—whether it's in the military-industrial complex, the corporate world, government bureaucracy, or just day-to-day life.

Taken to its extreme conclusion, the normalization of “personal AI” will be sort of like those hapless Uyghurs in the Chinese hinterlands who are forced to host some pale, angular Han agent who watches their every move for the CCP and photo-bombs their family portraits. The biggest difference is that Americans will pay good money to have an AI spy on them 24/7.

From there, it’s a dizzying cascade into the Greater Replacement by digital agents and industrial robots, highways swarming with autonomous Bug Man mobiles, worn or implanted biodigital devices, fetishized humanoid robots, fashionable biohacking, various social media based “everything apps,” ethereal digital currency, and all manner of irritating human-machine feedback loops.

This is a global experiment and we are the lab mice. It’s run by the wealthiest men in the world, and facilitated by the most powerful corporations and governments. At present, rival factions of transhumanist billionaires are supporting both Trump and Harris, respectively.

We’re already paddling around a sea of technological gray goo. It’s just a question of whether that ooze is rainbow-colored or red, white, and blue.

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Preserve the Control Group

These technologies will not be evenly distributed, though. Whenever people talk about the “future of humanity,” I always ask—which “humanity”? There are many civilizations and subcultures, and countless individuated personalities spinning out of them, all treading their various paths. We should do our best to keep it that way.

Every serious experiment needs a control group. If it turns out that cyborg consumerism is an evolutionary dead end, then we’d be wise to keep a healthy stock of legacy humans around to rebuild the wreckage. That's not too much to ask.

I’d like to think Trump is more likely to make space for that control group, but so far there’s no solid reason to think so. Oh well. You can’t get everything you want, and I wasn’t so crass as to write in “Ned Ludd.”

Picking a candidate is about trade-offs, so the T Don got my vote. Besides, he’s way funnier than his opponents, so at least we’ll get a few good laughs as the bots multiply around us like nonhuman immigrants.

People get hung up on buzzwords, but this election is not a choice between “fascism” or “communism,” or any other tidy label from the 20th century. Even so, we are certainly at a decisive crossroad. Which way to steer the ungodly Machine?

For me, it’s better to have patriotic Americans using their free speech to debate the merits of living on Mars or jabbing iTrodes into their brains than to live in a virtualized global shopping mall that runs on “equitably” distributed UBI.

If we are destined for one technodrome or another, I want options. I want the freedom to make fun of it all. I want the possibility to erect cultural barriers and remain in the control group. Most of all, I want to live in something like the America that I remember.

No political leader will save “humanity.” We all have our own boats to paddle through this gray goo. But only one candidate has shown the backbone to stand up for legacy Americans, so there's some hope that—when the time comes—Trump will be as bold in defending Team Human.

No one knows the future, but I bet that time will come faster than you can say “competitive exclusion principle.” Be ready to adapt.

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