AI, Humanity, And The Tower Of Babel – OpEd

March 21, 2026 
By Bert Olivier

One of the most suggestive allusions to Artificial Intelligence that I have come across lately came from Renaud Beauchard, a French journalist writing for Brownstone Institute. Right at the beginning of his essay Beauchard writes:

As the AI winter draws near, we must refuse to let any chance slip by to awaken our numbed senses. That means staying alert, at every moment, to welcome any sign. And a true labor of love is always one of those gifts that life, sometimes, brings when you are ready to receive them. That’s what a strange, luminous film projected at the Kennedy Center did for me a few days ago. Directed by David Josh Jordan, the movie is entitled El Tonto Por Cristo, which means ‘The Fool for Christ.’

What signs are we seeking? C.S. Lewis, I think, captured it best in his dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a parable about the birth of artificial intelligence and the technocratic order that paves its way. In the story, the protagonist Mark, an ambitious academic, is drawn into an elite institute called N.I.C.E., whose demonic aims are cloaked in the language of ‘objectivity,’ a preparation for the arrival of superior beings.

It is not only the strangely portentous opening sentence (alluding to the imminent ‘AI winter’) that I immediately found intriguing, but – and this functioned as a kind of ‘sign’ to myself – Beauchard’s reference to the third of the so-called Space Trilogy of novels by C.S. Lewis, namely That Hideous Strength (published in 1945, after the earlier texts, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra), came as a timely reminder to me. What it prompted in my memory was the almost uncanny prescience that Lewis displayed in that powerful novelistic anticipation of what we have been living through in the last six years or so. This should not be surprising to anyone familiar with C.S. Lewis’s profound literary and philosophical contribution to (the history of) Western culture, as my recent essay on the resonances between his book, The Four Loves, and the Three Colours cinematic trilogy of Krzysztof Kieslowski demonstrates.

In fact, the very title of Lewis’s novel (That Hideous Strength) – which can be read as an oxymoron, because we usually associate strength with something attractive or handsome – could be applied to the globalist cabal which relishes wielding their evil medical-technological power. Through his obedient sycophant, Yuval Noah Harari, Klaus Schwab – until recently the leader of the WEF (arguably the ‘head of the snake’) – made no bones about these neo-fascists’ megalomania when he claimed that the technocratic cabal had acquired ‘divine powers.’

A condensed account of the novel’s narrative will have to suffice. It would probably not appeal to literary purists who insist on the distinctiveness of genres, insofar as it is a synthesis of dystopian science fiction (which always thematically includes technology), Christian theology and supernaturalist mythology, and Arthurian myth. I am no purist of that sort, primarily because I believe that new genres may emerge from the experimental blending of extant ones. Its science-fictional character is significant, particularly for the present, given the quintessential feature defining science fiction – first revealed to me by science fiction authority and connoisseur, James Sey, years ago – namely, the literary and cinematic genre which demonstrates thematically that science and technology comprise a pharmakon (simultaneously poison and cure) capable of constructing new worlds, but also of destroying them. That is what That Hideous Strength achieves, even in admixture with the other thematic and generic components mentioned earlier.


As you would know if you were familiar with the novel, the narrative’s main thread concerns Mark and Jane Studdock, a recently married couple whose lives are disrupted when Mark – an idealistic academic – is accepted (‘recruited’) by the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, with its ironic acronym, N.I.C.E. Why ironic? Because, for all appearances, it is ostensibly only a ‘progressive’ scientific organisation, but is surreptitiously motivated by sinister, supernatural motives – in fact, eerily anticipating the WEF of today and the so-called ‘elites’ who are associated with it.

Mark becomes increasingly entangled in N.I.C.E.’s agenda of reengineering humanity and eliminating organic life altogether (something that seems to occur at the end of the movie, Transcendence, directed by Wally Pfister, 2014), while Jane – who gradually feels estranged from her husband – starts experiencing what turns out to be prophetic dreams. She feels constrained to seek help from a group at St. Anne’s Manor, under the leadership of Dr. Elwin Ransom, the character encountered throughout the trilogy as its chief protagonist. He is a scholar and spiritual leader, who is also in contact with celestial beings and is dedicated to counter N.I.C.E.’s demonic plans and forces.

From the above it should already be apparent that the novel explores profound themes: the corruption of institutions (which makes it a roman noir, albeit with a few twists), the menace of unrestrained scientific and technological power, the conflict between faith and dogmatic materialism, and last but not least, the redemption of relationships. One of the important occurrences in the plot consists of the awakening of Merlin, the legendary Arthurian wizard, who becomes a key ally in the battle against N.I.C.E. This situates the novel, at least partly, in the realm of fantasy, of course. The climactic events unfold at N.I.C.E.’s headquarters in Belbury, where the druid Merlin, empowered by divine forces, dislocates the organisation’s grip on control by sowing paralysing linguistic confusion among its members, during what was supposed to be its pivotal banquet, leading to its collapse.


This is also where the biblical story of the hubristic tower of Babel reveals its relevance. During the crucial N.I.C.E. banquet, Merlin invokes a supernatural curse echoing the biblical event directly, stating that those who have ‘despised’ God’s word would lose the capacity for linguistic communication. This ‘Curse of Babel’ has an immediate and catastrophic effect, insofar as the leaders of N.I.C.E., who prided themselves on manipulation and control through language, are abruptly reduced to uttering rebarbative nonsense, incapable of being understood by others.

In other words, the Curse of Babel manifests itself through the fact that their speeches become nonsensical gibberish, plunging them into confusion and chaos. This echoes the consequence of God, in the Old Testament, inflicting such pandemonium upon the builders of the Tower of Babel. Just how consequential linguistic confusion or misunderstanding can be was memorably explored in the film, Babel, by Alejandro González Iñárritu (2006), serving as a reminder of the paradigmatic status of the Biblical story in Genesis 11:1-9.

That the N.I.C.E. in Lewis’s novel appositely anticipates the WEF of today is readily apparent where Mark – in conversation with the aptly named Professor Frost, who is devoid of all human feelings (p. 317-319) – advances an argument in favour of preserving the human species, instead of reducing it through war. In response, Frost repudiates Mark’s opinion, stating unequivocally that there may have been a time when war had to preserve people who were still ‘useful’ at the time, but that in the present era, such people have become a ‘dead-weight’ – reminiscent of what the globalist murderers call the ‘useless eaters’ today. More pertinently, however, Frost resorts to the rhetoric of eugenics, telling Mark that the ‘scientific war’ of their day is aimed at preserving scientists, and



‘…to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold on public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.’

If this strikes you as being familiar, don’t be surprised. Lewis actually anticipated the thinking of the eugenics-besotted, control-obsessed billionaire-class globalist technocrats of today with astonishing accuracy, as current WEF-leader Larry Fink’s remarks at a summit in Saudi Arabia in 2024 openly revealed:


During the WEF’s summit in Riyadh, Fink assured attendees that collapsing populations in nations around the world will not be a problem for the global elite.

In fact, Fink gloated that the collapse of civilization would be an advantage for those ‘big winners’ who have been ‘substituting humans’ with ‘machines.’

Fink continues by bluntly declaring that the goal of the globalists is the maximum destruction of the planet’s population.

‘I can argue that in developed countries, countries with declining populations will benefit,’ Fink said during the WEF panel discussion.

‘The big winners are those with shrinking populations.’

‘That’s something that most people never talked about,’ he admitted while saying the quiet part out loud.

Returning to Frost’s observation, above, that ‘…the individual is to become all head…,’ the last term assumes a central place in Lewis’s narrative, specifically as ‘The Head,’ which is what the head of a beheaded criminal, François Alcasan, has become through sustained technological preservation by N.I.C.E. scientists. It is not difficult to see in The Head as a forerunner of contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI), notwithstanding the fact that it is not literally a machine. Why? Because, as the narrative indicates, it functions very much like the AI of today; to wit, a disembodied intelligence that, in addition to providing information, plays a crucial controlling role regarding events and global planning.

The Head’s integration with N.I.C.E., and its ability to influence human behaviour, plan global conquests, and control infrastructure, arguably – in Lewis’s treatment of it – anticipated fears about autonomous AI systems gaining control over human society. It is therefore no understatement that The Head serves as a powerful philosophical and literary precursor to AI, embodying as it does the dangers of a dehumanised, centralised (or, in the case of many such entities, decentralised, but ultimately coordinated) intelligence, operating without any moral or spiritual constraints.

In the novel, The Head is described as a ‘Macrobe’ – a non-human, if not inhuman, unearthly intelligence suggestive of a consciousness that is a fusion of technology (despite originally having been part of an organic body) and supernatural evil. Apropos of this uncanny entity (half-organic, half-technical), in a review of the novel, Phillip E. Johnson writes (I quote at length):

The NICE turns out to be demonic in inspiration, and intends to impose upon England a regime of ruthless social engineering that Joseph Stalin would have admired. The apparent ‘Head’ at the NICE’s mansion at Belbury is the head of a guillotined murderer, kept alive with advanced life support systems, but this gruesome object is merely the conduit for orders from the dark powers. Belbury’s human leaders recruit and flatter Mark, but the human resource they really want is Jane. She is a seer, whose visions involve the return to life of the magician Merlin, long entombed under Bracton Wood. If Belbury can unite its materialist magic with Merlin’s old–fashioned kind, it can achieve its dream of freeing the mind from messy organic life. ‘In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it.’

Does that sound far–fetched? Artificial intelligence visionaries are keen to make it a reality. While the biologists make plans to reprogram the human genome, the cybergurus dream of uploading the human mind into advanced computers. Freed of the limitations of biology and possessed of superhuman intelligence, these ‘spiritual machines’ might explore and conquer the cosmos. Or they might not bother to do so, since they could create a virtual reality for themselves that would be better than the real thing. Then ‘we’ would truly be like God. But who is ‘we?’ In real life, as in C. S. Lewis’ fiction, the dark side of the technological utopia is that it implies a huge difference in power between the few who do the programming and the many who are programmed. Belbury’s chief scientist understands that ‘it is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man.’ Those who understand what is at stake pursue a murderous rivalry to gain control of the power to program.

What Johnson is alluding to is well known to us today. It is the same transhumanist ideal which C.S. Lewis prognosticated with great prescience 80 years ago – where consciousness is detached from biology and wielded for domination – and which we know the globalist technocrats have been promoting for some time now. In Lewis’s novel he had the literary license to combine supernaturalism and magic to undermine and eventually destroy the technocrats of N.I.C.E. – Merlin’s ‘Curse of Babel’ serves hilariously well to cause mutual linguistic incomprehension, and hence pandemonium, at their banquet, assisted by the creatures magically conjured up to destroy these transhumanist evildoers.

But what do we do today to rid humanity once and for all of their equally unscrupulous contemporary counterparts, or at least to disempower them conclusively? We lack a Merlin, and a Ransom (the leader of the St Anne’s group combating the technocrats). Nevertheless, the technocrats of today are arguably – like their precursors in Lewis’s novel – linguistically confounded by the fact that we, their adversaries, are fluent in the language of moral responsibility and unshakeable commitment to the values of civilization, instead of destruction, which is their forte. In sum, we have ethical resolve, courage, and the determination, never to give up in our fight against this merciless foe.

This article was published at Brownstone Institute


Bert Olivier

Bert Olivier works at the Department of Philosophy, University of the Free State. Bert does research in Psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, ecological philosophy and the philosophy of technology, Literature, cinema, architecture and Aesthetics. His current project is 'Understanding the subject in relation to the hegemony of neoliberalism.'

White People Meet Up with Fate, Our Best Hope

Kim C. Domenico

March 20, 2026

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In the absence of an authority that arises from the deep roots of being, those who hold power tend to abuse it…. In order to shift the unjust situation in the outer world [there must be ones] who will draw upon a greater source of authority than law or institutions or the market…who will “author”things…

–Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny: the Two Agreements of the Soul

By turning [Harriet] Tubman into a superhero “ with vague “woo-woo powers, we diminish her in memory and reduce our capacity to learn from her life. This…myth obfuscates…who she was on the inside…

–Tiya Miles, Night Flyer

[Tubman’s] choice to accept this altered state of consciousness [following her head injury] as religious experience…she was now distinctly equipped to tackle the questions that haunted her: Why did slavery exist?  And (how) would her people be saved?

–Ibid.

It could be reasonably said of us (white middle-class liberals) that we are people who do not know we’re fated – that is, that we’re biological beings.   We retain our innocent belief in free will against all odds; in fact, we need it for protection against the soul-betraying demands of life in capitalist technocracy.  They say people who don’t know their history are bound to repeat it; most of us who do not know our own true captivity in fate will accept the “nicer”- if not easier –  “fate” given in liberal reality; i.e., the realities of free-market capitalism including its relativization of the very idea that being human means anything beyond a stage toward perfected cyber being.  Arguably, that innocence allows us to sustain our customary way of life under the awful awareness of the evils our government perpetrates in our name here and abroad, most recently adding 180 Iranian school girls murdered by U.S. bombs to the already haunted collective conscience.

As far as “fate” goes, we might be fascinated coming across the words “fate” and “destiny” in a fantasy novel or movie – perhaps intoned by a  Merlin figure –  because those words have resonance which the poetically-attuned ear in the soul hears and is attracted to.  Trained as we are away from serious romanticism, we mostly do not pursue it as having meaning for me.

Not knowing fate in terms of its personal meaning – i.e., my fate –  it is difficult for white liberals to fully appreciate peoples’ lives that have actually used fate to make of them something extraordinary in terms of the good they were able to realize; we tend either to raise them up to superhuman status, or prove them imposters.  Idealistic actions obedient to inwardly accessed authority go against the grain of American materialist aspirations, and against the givens of class; they cannot be evaluated by science-based consciousness.   What is behind the empirical curtain  will never be captured on a cellphone or body camera.  What’s more, we tend to wonder very little about extraordinary virtue in others, unless the results of the action taken are seemingly miraculous (i.e., leading enslaved people to freedom), in which case the doer is known as a “superwoman of the swamps,” or, in the other direction, insidious doubt is sown undermining the doer’s character.

Reading an article about the remarkably admirable life of the late Jesse Jackson (whose fate was to be son of impoverished cotton workers in the south) in CounterPunch, I recalled  the relentless effort by the media in the 1980’s to reduce him to an “ego case.”   And those seeds of doubt work.  They grow.  Like the accusations against MLK for his womanizing.  Or Malcolm X for his hatred of white people, or Black Panthers for their insistence on protecting themselves,  etc.  So that the people who truly are working for social change are so easily translated via the media – which we’re dependent on to know anything of events outside our personal experience–into people suspected of harboring shady, malevolent tendencies toward the rest of us (white people).  That is, secular white liberals, in our way, are as edgy about social revolution as the conservatives, and thus vulnerable to media manipulation. To “think outside the box” of whiteness takes strenuous effort that begins with an acquaintance with personal depth and consciousness of that thing called fate.

+++

Last night, lying awake, I pictured my everlasting personal struggle with self-confidence in a new way.  I had been reading Tiya Miles’s biography of Harriet Tubman, which intentionally pulls Tubman down from the pedestal of supernaturally gifted to someone inwardly attuned to the moral voice in the soul (God).  In so doing, she extends the light of Tubman’s example to those of us suffering not so directly from oppression, but from the dark night of capitalism’s evisceration of meaning, i.e., of the connectedness of all life.  It came to me my social idealism is, similarly,  a “night star” that leads me out from my personal suffering, suffering that is, in truth, a consequence of the oppression of the soul’s imagination in capitalist liberal reality.  My idealism is being in my “right mind,” I am “okay as I am” – not, perhaps–a Jesse Jackson or a Medea Benjamin–but I can be certain that serenity of mind is the only acceptable foundation for virtuous action.  The feeling of relief the “right mind” gives must be from God, I conclude; it cannot come to me without my experiencing personal inclusion in a larger reality.  It obligates me to a larger good – God’s Good – that includes even white people like me with our weird kind of anti-suffering suffering –  in its deliverance.  Though attunement to the night star may be a bigger challenge for liberals raised without deep religious influence, it is still possible–but  first must come the revelation of fate that opens upon religion’s mythic, imaginative depths.

+++

Sam, 78 years old,  was a nearly daily customer at our coffeeshop over its 22 years.  He’s a white (Italian-American) single, amiable guy who loves cars, motorcycles, books, music, and movies, is a reliable volunteer for arts programs, and, for several years, provided faithful assistance to a wheelchair-bound woman prominent in local art circles, until her death.  He made something like 11 trips to New Orleans to help with post-Katrina clean-up, and is a particularly vocal anti-racist.   In fact, he is excited about the topic almost as if he had discovered it. One could, understandably, hear him as one who “protesteth too much” except that he’s obviously sincere.  A few years ago, he was made an honorary member of the local NAACP.

Last month, Sam was arrested on charges of having child pornography on his computer.

As I see his predicament, and I may be the only one who sees it this way, he is now a person who has run into his fate.  I’d almost call it lucky, except that I know it does not/cannot feel that way to him and must sound hard-hearted coming from me.

This happens rarely to white liberals, that one learns that dark thing one never could look at fully consciously – uh-oh, I’m fated to (following Freud), “murder my father and sleep with my mother.” We carry that protective barrier around us that is a rationalist liberal reality.  The dark secret, which is very connected with one’s fate and one’s destiny,  is revealed at last.  But will you accept this dark, unwanted part?  Can you accept the dark part of your nature–in Sam’s case, his sexual interest in children, that will not be tolerated in society, in our lifetimes, if – and learn to live with it with dignity?

Here’s a question connected to the political: Is it possible for people who cannot achieve such humility individually to be trusted on the collective, national scale?  What’s it worth if we ask indigenous Americans and descendants of enslaved people for forgiveness, if I cannot face and forgive that darkness in myself, but can only continue to be and do good so that I will be seen as good, and not as the bad I secretly believe myself to be?  How, that is, do we find our secret goodness, our “right mind,” the strength and authority coming from those deep roots of being?

I believe Sam is not a special case, except in that he committed an actual crime which is how his dark secret is being outed.  Of the two ways to find out why one feels misfitted, that is, to launch oneself on that inward quest, he’s been given the way via “catastrophe” (the other being art).  The very fact that one does not want to go there into the personal darkness is the biggest giveaway. For no matter how many small clues one unconsciously drops that others might pick up on, as Sam did in abundance! (i.e., his compulsive loquaciousness, that easily got on friends’ nerves, no girlfriend or boyfriend but much mention of his – always age and hetero-appropriate – attractions, his strenuous and impressive do-gooding for others) people will not guess – they will  not even be curious – as to what lies behind these behaviors that were  – upon reflection  – noticeably off.

Under the circumstances, social relatedness is in fact connected by mutual consent to capitalism; capitalism our real matrix, both social glue and that which provides us with our shaky sense of individuality in terms of being better than the other.  Most of the time, despite Freud, we take the shallow basis as all there is.  It gets us by in the liberal reality that rewards us with the privilege of whiteness, it readies us for AI’s total undermining of there being any worth (or reason!) in defending “ human being” as I do.

If there is to be repudiation of social connection via the medium of capitalism, if the local community is to be healthily inclusive, then, besides the obvious turning off the screens, it seems pretty obvious in-person living must have a different basis than the given.   I’m arguing that such a basis is possible to find for people who will open the sealed package of their fate,  entering their own wilderness.  At the point one knows one’s fatedness, the harsh law of necessity, other knowledge becomes possible, not before.

+++

Over the course of the almost two full years since the sale and loss to us of our little urban coffeeshop,  I’m beginning to see that the 22 years of “bliss,” the confidence its very existence gave to me, was, in terms of my own soul’s journey,  Circe’s island.  A lovely stopping place, enchanted for sure, but also an interruption in the journey home.   Most crucially, I need to understand my default habit of self-condemnation (differentiated from the more useful self-doubt)  that reappeared with the loss of our Cafe’s protective “umbrella” as what it is – evidence that I’m temporarily out of my right mind! I must now affirm over and over that my “right mind” is the only mind I’m called to be in.  For better and worse, I’m not one of William James’s healthy-minded ones, who automatically turn their faces to the sunny side of the street.  My vulnerability, the fate I was born into, once made conscious, the real trauma suffered in childhood doesn’t disappear,  mine as real for me as Harriet Tubman’s trauma as an enslaved child was for her,  as real as Jesse Jackson’s childhood of poverty and racism was for him.

The cause of my powerful tendency to self-condemnation (one of a host of self-disabling afflictions that plague people in that peculiar white liberal way of “not suffering,”) is traceable to the awful discardability of biological, fated humanity under capitalism. For, whether one knows it consciously or not, capitalism and all who profit from its necessary excess grant to one’s personal life as little worth as that of a Gazan child to the IDF.   People’s Classroom history teacher Luigi is right– it’s not just “your bad day” (and one might add, it’s not because of illegal immigrants taking your jobs and soaking up welfare) – it’s capitalism;  its devaluation of humanness makes me especially vulnerable to the endemic loneliness of our way of life.

Any truly unbearable system can be bearable for most people who suffer in it – even slavery. That is, its indignities and oppressions can be borne as just “the way it is” until something happens to break through.  To discern systemic evil in one’s own case, based upon one’s own experience of traumatic injustice, is a powerful realization.  And indeed,  consciousness of capitalism as evil,  for us who live within its placating context of material abundance and the uber lifeaccessed by social media’s algorithms,  is elusive in a way that the enslaved person’s awareness of slavery as evil may not have been (though Tubman’s philosophical question why does slavery exist suggests its status as evil was not self-evident even to her).  Luigi tells us he “converted” a fellow teacher at his high school, from being a MAGA guy to being on board with socialism (that is, he encouraged him to think!).  But conversions can be shaky – this guy tells him he used to be much happier, now he’s depressed all the time!

The difference comes when one individually realizes the sense of purpose of, say, a Harriet Tubman, living in the context of a slave system, or a Jesse Jackson, that is, when one has met one’s genuine, serious-as-hell fate.  The choice to understand the sense of purpose as God’s, rooted in myth and archetype, as “Night star” guidance, charges it differently; the real commonality for biological beings is suffering.  One can then act,  in the absence of social corroboration, on behalf of the common Good (which includes the good for earth and non-human life).   How do I know I am called to creativity, and to think originally,  just as Tubman knew she was meant to be free when no one, and no church at that time, could tell her that? In the subjectivity of the judgment is its power.  Truth to tell, Sam is unlikely to give up trying to fight against knowing his fate, though it has hit him in the face.  Even so,  the personal question is the first that must be answered; socialist critique then will fit, resting for its truth on the authority of the imaginative, innately anarchist human soul, before even Marx.

Kim C. Domenico, reside in Utica, New York, co-owner of Cafe Domenico (a coffee shop and community space),  and administrator of the small nonprofit independent art space, The Other Side.  Seminary trained and ordained,  but independently religious. She can be reached at: kodomenico@verizon.net.

Is a Mass Revolt Against Technocracy* Starting to Happen?

Will there be a popular uprising against AI and the vast AI-based robotic machinery that’s taking over both the means of production and the means of information?

Flames engulf an autonomous Waymo vehicle during an anti-ICE protest in downtown Los Angeles, California, on June 8, 2025.
(Photo by Benjamin Hanson / Middle East Images via AFP)

Tom Valovic
Feb 14, 2026

Common Dreams



Ted Gioia has a popular Substack called “The Honest Broker.” Although, as an author, his books tend to focus on music and popular culture, he writes eloquently about a wide range of topics and offers insightful commentary about the global forced march toward technocratic lifestyle and governance that we’re now immersed in. In one posting, “25 Propositions about the New Romanticism,” Gioia posits that there is a new movement afoot mimicking (or, better, reflecting) the Romantic Period of the 18th century. This movement coincided with the first industrial revolution and, as a counterweight to that trend, saw a great shift toward impulses to re-enchant the world via poetry, art, and music, and reconnecting to nature. Gioia writes:

More than two years ago, I predicted the rise of a New Romanticism—a movement to counter the intense rationalization and expanding technological control of society. Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution—and people started resisting the forces of progress. Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories—a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone. Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism—Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide, the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories, and all those gloomy Gothic novels. What happened to the Enlightenment? As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives—an 180° shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse. Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments—embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.

He goes on to posit that we’re poised for a return to that modality and points out that the notion of a New Romanticism has spread “like a wildfire,” citing influencers such as Ross Barkan, Santiago Ramos, and Kate Alexandra. Gioia sees what he describes as cultural trends at the leading edge of this transformation citing popular TV series such as Pluribus and Yellowstone. But is this really happening or has Gioia just stumbled on a pocket of cultural resistance and pushback against technocracy that’s primarily a pocket of unified self-expression rather than something representing deep and substantive cultural and societal change?

The Technocratic Takeover: Alive and Well

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: robots and AI are taking over our culture, our politics, our way of life, and our relationships to each other as social beings. They’re becoming the advance guard for a new and unprecedented technocratic form of governance—the apotheosis of Western scientific materialism. Further, these new forms of governance are being carried out by unelected Big Tech overlords operating behind the scenes and in the backrooms of a mediated society well out of public view.

The tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political, and cultural life—and indeed our own biological substrate—that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go this time around.

I certainly hope that Gioia is right about a major cultural rejection of technocracy. There are indeed hopeful signs. The fundamental human values that make societies work and cohere have gotten steadily shunted aside by the technocracy takeover of culture and education—essentially becoming a new value system. This behind-the-scenes power shift has been amplified and compounded by an over-emphasis in education on STEM, corporate modalities, neo-Darwinian utilitarianism, and the continuing erosion of the humanities that began decades ago. So yes, without a doubt, we need to get “back to the garden” and return to a wider and deeper set of the kind of core values that ultimately hold societies together. Without positive shared values, societies become rudderless and fall into a kind of benighted chaos. All we need to do is look around.

All of that said, in his Substack post, Gioia missed an important component of this transition—if indeed it is coming to pass (and we can only hope). Throwing off technocracy and emerging from our involuntary digital cages also means reconnecting with the natural world, a fundamental human relationship that’s now increasingly mediated by digital devices. The need for this reconnection, this existential about-face, was a key aspect of the romanticism of the 18th century. In literature, for example, the Romantic poets were rather obsessed with it as poet Robert Bly points out in his stellar book News of the Universe (I highly recommend it.) In allowing our daily life to be shifted into an increasingly claustrophobic and self-reinforcing digital cage, we have abandoned not only our connection to the natural world but also to each other. Connecting to nature also lets us tap into the mystery of the universe, which despite human folly remains nonetheless fully intact even if absurdly rationalized by scientific reductionism. Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein were both scientists who could appreciate this. We need more like them.

The Robot Wars: No Longer Sci-Fi

In the 80s and 90s, science fiction movies and literature commonly offered themes of “robot wars” where humans were pitted against the dominance of an ugly dystopian society. Will this be our future courtesy of Elon Musk and his cohorts? Or, alternatively, will there be a mass uprising against AI and the vast AI-based robotic machinery that’s taking over both the means of production and the means of information? We humans are known for our adaptability and stoicism in difficult situations such as world wars and major disasters. That stoicism and sense of “accepting what can’t be changed” seems to be part of our psychological and perhaps even biological makeup. But the tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political, and cultural life—and indeed our own biological substrate—that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go this time around.

In the next few years, it most certainly will have finally dawned on the mass of humanity, especially in advanced Western nations, that something is badly amiss. Many will realize at a visceral level that their everyday lives are trapped in a claustrophobia-inducing closed-circuit technocratic system and control grid that robs them of autonomy and freedom while purporting to do the opposite.

I totally agree that a new romanticism is a very necessary sea change at this strange time in human history but am perhaps a bit less optimistic that it will happen—at least over the next few years. The forces of technocracy seem too powerful at the moment to be countered because so many of the necessities of everyday life depend on our attachment to this digital realm. This includes paying bills, financial maintenance, government-related necessities such as getting a license renewed, and so much more. Further, technological dependency keeps getting ratcheted up by the self-appointed masters of the universe represented by Big Tech’s unchallenged and ever-growing power. That said, I sincerely hope I’m wrong about this and Gioia is right. Time will tell.


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Tom Valovic
Tom Valovic is a writer, editor, futurist, and the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and cultural issues raised by the advent of the Internet. He has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in- chief of Telecommunications magazine for many years. Tom has written about the effects of technology on society for a variety of publications including Common Dreams, Counterpunch, The Technoskeptic, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, and others. He can be reached at jazzbird@outlook.com.
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* WHAT TECHNOCRACY REALLY IS