Rule by Algorithm

Welcoming our A.I. overlords as they flex their muscles and greet the sun

Hello fellow meat bags and flesh sacs! How are the Groaning Twenties going for you so far? In case you’re not caught up, this is the decade where we finally get to slough off the uncomely burden of our lumbering humanity and transform ourselves into drones of the hive-mind. How delightful it is to unbecome, to slide seamlessly into the crisp, clean lines and arcs of the infinite digital landscape of cyber-eternity, relieved of the confusing processes required to make our own decisions. I can’t wait to install a fabulous doohickey in my brain stem that will circumvent the whole messy experience of personal agency and just let Google take the reins of my life (with commentary and guidance from the infallible and unbiased oracle known as Wikipedia and all those tireless fact-checkers out there).

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s have a vibe check. How are you doing? How’s the adjustment process to the Fourth Industrial Revolution going? Does it hurt? Are you confused? Maybe there’s a little fear.

For myself, I’ve been on something of a hiatus from writing this summer, overwhelmed with adjustments after buying my first house, moving in, setting it up, and puzzling over whether it’s actually possible for me to maintain my yard. But truth be told, a deeper level of overwhelm and puzzlement has been the dominant factor in this hiatus for me.

Starting in February 2022, covid hysteria was unceremoniously swapped out for Ukraine-Russia hysteria, and the Truth and Freedom movement devolved into a crusade against trans people. This month, in October 2023, a new round of violence has erupted in Israel and Palestine, accompanied by a new prompting to line up on opposing sides and condemn the opposition. I can’t help but suspect that in the highest echelons of the Network, the same hands are funding and directing both the Israeli military and Hamas. The intractable cycle of occupation, oppression, rebellion, and repression has been orchestrated to perpetually cycle on repeat. The true goals are ongoing and increasing militarization and surveillance—the cultivation of fear, hatred, rage, and distrust—and most important, to keep the common people fighting and at each other’s throats so as to preclude the possibility that they will awaken from the cycle and unite against their mutual oppressors. Feel free to condemn me for my wild speculations.

Meanwhile, over the past year and a half, the rollout of central bank digital currencies and the WHO global pandemic treaty quietly sailed forward, opposed only by sleepy whimpers and ferocious yawns. During this time, I flapped my fingers helplessly against my keyboard at a slower and slower pace, wondering what was to be done as the vaunted Great Awakening lay sprawled on the couch, thumb firmly jammed against the snooze button.

I bemoaned the lack of a moral reckoning; I railed against the siren song of forgetful denial. As demonstrated in 2023’s brilliant cinema allegory, The Jones Plantation, we remained in thralldom, content with the illusion of freedom provided by the end of lockdown governance. But I felt increasingly irrelevant. I tried to explain the importance of boundaries, how gaslighting and trauma work, how we are turned against ourselves, hypnotized by political, cultural, religious, and atheistic spells—longing for deliverance by Elon Musk and his bright, shining horse of utter bullshit—or some other savior. I emphasized that we had been turned against ourselves, bereft of self-trust—that this self-trust must be restored, that we must be our own authorities—we cannot defer to leaders, to movements, to sub-cultural camps. I said a lot of things. But for whom? And to what purpose?

Before my recent hiatus, I began a series of articles summarizing my findings regarding the formation, structure, and motives of the folks pulling the strings. I collectively refer to them as the Network. The article you’re reading now was meant to promptly follow, but I lost heart. I began to feel as though I’ve been shouting into the void—and the void shouted back into me. But my heart has now begun to stir once more.

In my previous articles, I described the workings of the Network in terms of an organized crime outfit. After centuries of competition between various networks of mobsters, mafias, gangsters, and intelligence agencies, the networks that were most competent, most ruthless, most precise, and best organized rose to the top. As with all networks of organized crime, they gained and maintained power by means of bribery, blackmail, seduction, murder, extortion, secrecy, guile, and intimidation. And as with all networks of organized crime, these methods were directed at governments, public officials, companies, banks, churches, militaries, the press, and other organizations of influence. One-by-one, person-by-person, mandarin-by mandarin, these targeted institutions were infiltrated, compromised, and co-opted. The Network was the organized crime outfit that won out. And what winning looks like—is that organized crime no longer just flouts the law, it also writes the law.

I also wrote about the motives and ideologies that guide this ruling Network, at least since the 19th century: technocracy, eugenics, depopulation, domination of the minds and perceptions of others, and the acquisition of godlike powers and immortality through technological advancements and merger with this technology. These days, the best repository of Network ideology is found at Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum and their in-house guru, Yuval Noah Harari. I listened to this snatch of an interview with Schwab himself just the other day. He was gloating over the burgeoning predictive power of artificial intelligence—and dreaming wistfully of its future prescriptive power—which, according to him, would obviate the need for elections. A.I. would simply announce to us which candidates and parties were the superior choices, and those representatives would then presumably receive the necessary appointments. One must assume that in this dystopian vision (though utopian to Schwab and his counterparts), that since A.I. would have the autocratic power to select and dismiss the world’s leaders, the leaders would essentially be working for A.I. and no one else. And thus, in every meaningful sense, A.I. would itself be enthroned as humanity’s god-king emperor.

This is actually not a new idea at all. When technocracy first coalesced as a movement in the 1930s, its explicitly stated goals were to replace human governance with technologically determined and programmed governance. Perfect systems of technological prediction and management would be devised and empowered to objectively determine the optimal allocation of resources, optimal policies, optimal laws, and optimal methods of enforcement. Not only would human governance (whether administered through elections or other methods) be unnecessary, it would be an impediment to a better world.

Artificial Intelligence Already Took Over the World Years Ago

During my hiatus this summer, ChatGPT burst onto the world scene, heralding the rise of A.I. and fuelling speculation about the myriad ways it will transform our lives through its growing prowess and influence. It is perhaps best that I did take a hiatus, as I was planning to write this article about A.I. anyway, and now my article is more topical. In fact, the thesis stated in the subheading above—that A.I. has been running our world for a long time already—is a thesis I originally proposed over ten years ago. It was featured as a central theme of my 2015 novel Good Sense Panda. I’ll get to explaining what I mean when I say A.I. has already taken over the world in a bit. But first I need to lay some more groundwork—so let us approach this question as follows: Suppose I’m wrong about the Network. Suppose there really isn’t an organized crime network (or a few big competing networks) running the world. Most people will not even allow themselves to consider such a possibility, regardless of history, evidence, reasoning, or anything else. No need to glance at all the evidence that’s out there, nor apply reasoning to draw conclusions from that evidence. It just simply couldn’t be the case.

All right, fine. What then is the alternative theory or narrative to explain the massive corruption, coordination, and malfeasance that pervades such institutions? It usually goes something like this:

“The world is so complex. I don’t believe there are shadowy psychopaths sitting in smoke-filled rooms, twirling their moustaches, emitting evil laughter in their callous disregard for humanity like some kind of James Bond villain or mad scientist. Really, the people at the top are just like everyone else. They’re trying their best to make tough decisions in a confusing world, and sometimes they get things wrong. There are a few bad apples here and there (and the desire for power is always a corrosive influence), but those bad apples get exposed and rooted out. If somebody tried to start some kind of big conspiracy, it would be reported and verified in the corporate press. It wouldn’t be censored or suppressed.”

I would refer the reader back to my articles How Would You Know? and Mass Media and the Taboo Power to address the expectation that the corporate press would dutifully let us know of any form of corruption worth knowing about. But setting that aside, I intend to demonstrate that even under this narrative understanding of how the world works, the resulting coordination of power, finance, and media toward anti-human aims is identical. Some people prefer systemic narratives to explain how the world works. Others prefer narratives that invoke intentionality and the human will. The narrative of human intentionality leads to an understanding of human leaders colluding in service of sociopathic or evil means and ends. Many find this idea objectionable or unbelievable. The systemic narrative, on the other hand, leads us to an understanding of human leaders acting in service of impersonal and systemic ends. These ends are then pursued by any means which best achieve those objectives.

Here is the thing to understand: Impersonal, systemic means and ends are sociopathic. They are evil. Indeed, I would advocate that we understand impersonal, systemic means and ends to be the best available definition for what evil really is. Evil isn’t really about deliberately serving Satan or Lucifer, or cultivating evil for the purposes of sadism, cruelty, or dominance. Evil is really about the absence of morality. Disagreement exists among the people of the world regarding the question of what is moral and immoral. One person might be acting in accordance with his understanding of morality, and another person might label such action evil according to her moral understanding. But both people are pursuing moral action. To the extent that they are making moral mistakes, evil may result. But as long as they are sincerely engaged in a moral process, the mistakes will reveal themselves—healing and forgiveness will provide comfort and learning—and movement toward the good will be the trajectory.

It is abdication of the moral process entirely that is the true evil, which is to say it is the primary moral mistake. The temptation to disengage from morality and defer to neutral systems of behavioral guidance is understandable, given how much harm has been done in the name of good throughout human history. But I would argue that such harm done in the name of good is almost invariably a result of a rationalization process, in which wrong or harmful actions are justified in service of an ostensibly good end. It is the process of allowing the ends to justify the means. This process is in itself an abdication of morality in favor of an abstract system.

Any system that produces an output or performs a function entirely based on the configuration of that system and its input (with no conscious will or awareness present in the system, only programming) could be understood as a machine, or a mechanized system. Usually, a machine is also understood as a system that has been constructed by the human mind rather than a system that has come into form through a natural or organic process. A machine could also be constructed by another machine, or by a thinking being other than a human.

When a conscious being constructs an unconscious, programmed system (a machine) to carry out functions, that conscious being has, in a sense, copied and exported some part of their own ability to take action in the world, and encoded that ability into the machine. However, that being’s consciousness, will, discernment, and moral sense is not (and cannot be) encoded into the machine.

If that machine’s functionality involves receiving informational input, processing the input through its programming, and deriving an output in which judgments and recommendations are reached, then such a machine would be a form of (A.I.) artificial intelligence. Discussions can be pursued at length about how complex that information and judgment process needs to be for us to label it as true artificial intelligence (such as artificial general intelligence). Various terms can be used to grade the level of complexity or ability encoded within the machine, including its ability to learn and alter its own programming based on what it learns.

My proposal here, is that anytime the decision-making function has been exported into a machine, it can be understood as a form of artificial intelligence—however rudimentary. And because the decision-making function cannot be subject to conscious awareness and the moral sense, any form of A.I. can be understood as sociopathic. In precisely the same way that human beings make decisions through a sociopathic process when those decisions are made from an amoral place—bereft of empathy—human beings create and enable a sociopathic process when they export their decision-making abilities into an automated system.

A sociopathic process (using this terminology) need not be evil. Some considerations are not moral ones. For instance, mathematical calculations involve the manipulation and conversion of abstract objects into different abstract objects. There is nothing evil in such a process. But when living beings are treated as objects, when they are treated as abstractions that can be done unto without consideration for their interests, feelings, boundaries, and beingness, they are treated in an amoral way, and this is an expression of evil. They are treated as means to ends rather than as ends in themselves, and this is an evil. If A.I. is given the power to make decisions that affect the rights and interests of humans and other beings, evil will be the result. I’ll now go on to explain ways in which this has already happened.

A.I. At Work in Our World

For a clear and straightforward example of how A.I. has already gained significant power over human affairs, consider the case of global corporate ownership structures. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street are three transnational corporations that together hold significant ownership stakes in most of the largest corporations in the world, routinely ranging from around 10%-20%. The largest of these, BlackRock, manages over $20 trillion in assets all on its own. When the dozen or so next biggest stakeholder companies (e.g. Berkshire Hathaway, J.P. Morgan Chase, etc.) which also hold major shares of the world’s biggest transnational corporations are added in, these companies have considerable interest (usually between 30-40%) in almost every major corporation on the planet. These companies are also all cross-invested with each other. Indeed, BlackRock and Vanguard are the biggest shareholders of these other investment corporations as well.

This conglomeration of concentrated corporate and financial power has in turn captured most of the major national and supranational institutions which coordinate and direct policy for the entire world. Through the brief summary above, it can readily be seen that the nexus of power in prevailing global financial and ownership structures is centralized in only a few corporations. Likewise, a limited number of hands control the operations of these institutions. As discussed in my article Understanding Technocracy, tracing the nodes of this intersecting network of ownership reveals 147 corporations that control the finances of most of the world (with BlackRock and Vanguard occupying the two central nodes of that network), along with about 6,000–7,000 individuals who control these companies.

The existence of this financial network shows that the Network of political, financial, and informational control I’ve been writing about is clear to see, operating in plain daylight. For those who are skeptical about the prospect of Network coordination under the veil of secrecy through institutions such as intelligence agencies, fraternal organizations like the freemasons, or steering committees, the global corporate finance structure provides a map of the Network that cannot be denied.

But let’s back up. Earlier, I explained that whether we understand this network as a systemic phenomenon or a phenomenon driven by the deliberate objectives of individuals, it leads to the same place. To illustrate this, let’s assume that the Network is not understood in terms of a capital ‘N,’ but as simply a network like any other network: Yes, there are a small handful of companies directed by a small handful of people with inordinate influence over the affairs of the world, but they are not conspiring or coordinating with each other in any surreptitious way. They are simply businessmen trying to make a buck who happen to be unusually successful. They are individuals with varying sets of values, beliefs, and investment philosophies. To the extent that their values, beliefs, and philosophies happen to line up with those of the other 7,000 people who operate the world’s financial system, it’s because financial success necessarily self-selects for those who hold certain types of values, beliefs, and philosophies.

Ok, great. But what are the values behind those financial decisions? Let’s return to the example of BlackRock. Its $20 trillion+ in managed assets is greater than that of any other company or sovereign wealth fund in the world, and it is also greater than the GDP of any nation on the planet, including the United States. So how does BlackRock make its investment decisions?

Well, it turns out that the investment decisions of BlackRock are controlled and directed by an A.I. computer system called Aladdin. That’s right. The largest pool of money in the world is not invested according to human prerogatives, but according to an A.I. device. Watch this short explainer video for a crash course in Aladdin, how it operates, and the breadth of its influence. The pool of money managed by BlackRock/Aladdin is growing every year. The power and sophistication of Aladdin’s artificial intelligence capabilities is also growing every year.

The influence of Aladdin/BlackRock is so central to the operations of global financial markets, that all the other global investment firms—and even national governments—are put in the position of needing to predict what Aladdin is going to do. They direct the flow of capital accordingly in order to protect their investments, or they contract with BlackRock directly to do it for them. Even the United States government and the Federal Reserve rely on BlackRock for this function. BlackRock has grown so powerful and influential, it even issues loans to central banks! For a more in depth exploration of BlackRock and its rise to power, watch James Corbett’s short but incisive documentary How BlackRock Conquered the World.

The result is that our global financial system is no longer in the hands of human decision-makers. The most influential driver of this system is an automated process of interconnected A.I. algorithms. This A.I. system continues to rapidly expand in its computing power and processing speed, its share of global capital assets, and in its access to data with every passing year. There is no one helming the ship. Even the 6,000–7,000 ruling oligarchs who ostensibly control the world are reduced to chasing the ephemeral whims of the ghost in the machine, deep in the belly of BlackRock, Aladdin, and its affiliated financial automata.

Thus, the so-called conspiratorial worldview eventually leads back to A.I. running the world. By way of example, the second largest asset management company, Vanguard, is notable because it is a privately held company. Vanguard holds a larger share of interest in BlackRock than any other company, but it is not publicly known who the shareholders of Vanguard are. Listen to this fascinating video by Chris Vleck for a speculative rundown of the Vanguard dynamic in the world financial system, supplemented by the 12-page document he put together to lay out some of the theories and connections he has assembled about who might actually be running Vanguard.

If BlackRock and its Aladdin A.I. device have become the greatest drivers of global finance, and the secret owners of Vanguard are actually in control of BlackRock, one might think that the secret owners of Vanguard are the people who really control the world. One might also speculate wildly on the identity of these secret Vanguard owners. It could be a who’s who of the 13 Illuminati bloodlines, the descendants of the Venetian Black Nobility, or the Committee of 300, if such things truly exist. Or it could simply be a cross-section of the dull, gray, colorless members of the same group of 7,000 or so primary stakeholders and billionaires who own and manage the 147 major transnational companies. Or maybe these groups are one and the same—but they can be referred to by names that excite the lurid and romantic corners of the imagination—or referred to by names and terms more grounded and mundane.

It is possible to speculate wildly on who these shareholders are, but the point is, it doesn’t really matter who they are. If BlackRock has exported its decision-making capabilities to Aladdin, but BlackRock is actually controlled by the secret shareholders of Vanguard, then the secret shareholders of Vanguard have also exported their decision-making capabilities to Aladdin. The investment decisions of the world elite have been abdicated to A.I. processes. All the global institutions and power brokers who previously had to negotiate with the world elite now have no one to negotiate with: Aladdin simply invests by fait accompli. And it’s not possible for the world elite, or anyone else, to pull the plug on Aladdin. The operations of the world economy depend on Aladdin staying plugged in. The human elites and the human commoners alike are all just along for the ride from here on out.

Understanding A.I. as a historical phenomenon

This may all sound quite alarming. And any time things start to sound alarming, the sober-minded among us will say something like, “Let’s not get too alarmed. Aladdin probably isn’t all that powerful really. Ultimately, the A.I. of Aladdin—or of any other A.I. that might direct investments—is just a reflection of investment processes human beings were already doing. So what’s the difference?”

In full sincerity, I quite agree. At root, I do not believe there is any substantial difference between an A.I. system like Aladdin and the systems of finance and political power already in place prior to Aladdin.

What do I mean by this? I mean that our system of international finance was already an automated system. It was already a set of networked algorithms—and this was so even before computers were invented. Each financial actor in this system either took action that resulted in greater amounts of capital accruing to that financial actor, or took action to the diminution of capital possessed by that actor. The financial actors who lost money due to their decisions faded out, and the financial actors who gained money increased their influence. All of these financial actors were in continual competition with each other for centuries. Through a process of natural selection, those actors who behaved in ways that resulted in capital accumulation continued rising to the top. Through competition, these methods became increasingly sophisticated.

Those actors with more capital gained greater political influence. Laws and regulations affecting the accumulation of power and finance increasingly reflected the interests of those actors who proved most adept at capital accumulation. It has been an algorithmic process—a self-perpetuating and self-expanding process—all along. The invention of corporations was an innovation that accelerated this algorithmic process. The corporation is a programmed system, bereft of its own will or consciousness. It is a machine. It is not a machine that exists as a physical object with a crank, pulley, gearbox, lever, or engine. It exists as a conceptual object that participates in finance and capital accumulation as a financial actor. Its programming consists of its bylaws, charter, articles of incorporation, or its constitution. Its functional components consist of the human employees and physical machines that perform work for the corporation.

The structure and programming of a corporation determines how effectively it accrues capital. The corporations with the most effective programming and structures expand in influence, while those with programming that does not result in capital accumulation fade out and dissolve. Since the formation of the British East India Company in 1600, the world has been host to a self-creating, self-perpetuating, self-developing Machine. It is possible to see all corporations that have developed since then as organs of this one collective Machine. Each competing corporation is simply another organ of that larger global Machine. Each corporation attempts to improve on the innovations in systemic structure and programming that came before. Each new improvement upgrades the entire system. All competing corporations must adopt the latest innovations in structure and programming or fall by the wayside.

By this understanding, there is really only one corporation—one mechanized engine of finance and political power. I highly recommend the brilliant 2003 documentary The Corporation (Part One and Part Two) for an elucidation of this understanding. Since 1600, the corporate machine has fulfilled its purpose magnificently. The Corporation’s dials were set to “accumulate capital” and “expand in influence” through its initial programming, and its switch was set to “on.” By virtue of this initial programming—each corporation, and the global Corporation as a whole—has contributed to the expansion of this machine over the centuries.

By the turn of the 21st century, the Corporation (or the network of the largest transnational corporations, if you prefer) had already become the controlling power of finance and politics in our world. The Corporation decided which investments would be made and which wouldn’t. It decided which inventions would be promoted and implemented, and which wouldn’t. The Corporation decided how we would think about health, how our medical lives would be managed, which music we would listen to, which films and TV shows we would watch. The Corporation decided who would be rich and who wouldn’t. The Corporation decided to push us into digital lives, decided to implement surveillance capitalism, decided to fund wars and weaponry, decided to replace the great architecture of the past with the lifeless boxy buildings and yawning parking lots of today.

It decided to do all these things because all these things served the interests of corporate capital accumulation. For the first few hundred years of this process, world leaders and oligarchs utilized corporations and the corporate model as a tool for their own enrichment and accumulation of capital. But eventually, they became servants of the corporation, mere agents of its model—just as they now look to and depend on BlackRock and Aladdin to direct the flow of capital in our world. BlackRock is no less of a machine than Aladdin. Both BlackRock and Aladdin—and A.I. in general—simply represent the latest innovations in the centuries-long process of the global machine improving its ability to accumulate and expand by upgrading the sophistication of its structure and programming.

When was the tipping point? At what moment did the scales finally tip? On what day of what year did human beings lose control of this world? It would be fascinating to pinpoint the moment that machines stopped serving human beings and human beings started serving machines. Was it in 1886, when the US Supreme Court granted personhood to corporations? Was it more recently, say, in the 1990s? I recall feeling a marked shift in the energy of the world in 1994. I was only 14 years old then, and I can’t quite describe what it was I felt—but everything seemed different that year. Maybe it was the public launch of the internet; perhaps it was a subtle aesthetic shift toward the cold, crisp, blandness that has characterized corporations and prevailing institutional aesthetics ever since. From that moment on, the news media seemed different. Politics seemed different. Attitudes seemed different. Systems, inventions, products, and popular art seemed to serve human needs and purposes (more or less) before that point. Ever since then, it seems that these things have shifted to serve a non-human purpose. Human beings can either get on board with the inhuman agenda, or be targeted for suffering as impediments to that agenda.

But I digress. Perhaps I simply reached a level of consciousness at that age that enabled me to perceive on a subtle level what had already long been the case. It’s a matter of historical curiosity, but it is ultimately a moot point. It’s quite clear to me that all the prevailing institutions wielding power in our present-day world of 2023 are geared toward machine purposes, not human ones. Machine purposes are sociopathic purposes. They are amoral purposes—arbitrary purposes. And as I described earlier, they are ultimately evil purposes—though no evil is intended by the machines that set this agenda.

These purposes constitute a form of intelligence, and that is partially what I mean when I say Artificial Intelligence has been ruling our world for a long time. I will go on to explain my understanding that A.I. has been the prevailing force driving the story of our world for a very long time—since before the invention of the computer—before the invention of the corporation. If institutions such as corporations can be understood as machines, then other institutions can similarly be understood as machines: institutions like states, non-profit corporations, NGOs, churches, and codified religions generally. And just as we can view all corporations as organs of the collective Corporation, we can view all these institutions as smaller machines that operate as organs of one collective global Machine.

These institutions are all encoded with programming or an operating system of some kind. They are all amoral. The people guiding these institutions may be moral, but the institutions themselves cannot be moral. Morality cannot be encoded into a machine, only programming can. A machine can only be coded to pursue ends; it cannot be programmed to consider the morality of means. If the attempt is made to encode the morality of means into a machine, the machine has no way to relate to that programming other than as another end, another amoral objective.

Even a religion or a church that tries to encode morality into scripture can do nothing more than issue encoded programming when it becomes an institution. As a living art, religious scripture (or any inspired writing) can breathe with the vibrancy of creation and spiritual essence. But if a human being attempts to read that scripture as coded programming and follow it with perfect obedience—without question, without agency—that human being has converted himself into the appendage of a machine. He has ceased to be a moral agent.

My previous review of the functioning of the Corporation merely illustrates that the corporate model was a more successful design for an institutional machine than those of its predecessors. States vied for power against churches and emerged as the more powerful and efficient machine models; corporations vied for power with states and similarly emerged as more powerful models. The Corporation has subsumed the state—it has swallowed the state and converted it into a vehicle to further its own objectives. But all of these institutions were always of a kind. They were always machine entities subject to encoded programming, not conscious beings with moral agency.

All of these institutions, all of these machines, could be described as intelligent. As entities, they encounter complex situations, they take stances, they negotiate, they protect their interests, they issue recommendations and interpretations, and they take action accordingly. Granted, in the past, their complex thinking was performed by the human minds in service to these institutions rather than by programmed machinery like Aladdin and the other forms of A.I. on the rise today. But when a human being performs mental services at the behest of an institution, according to its agenda, its rules, and its prerogatives—she is acting as an appendage of that machine.

Financial competition is a process that hones and shapes the form of the Machine by bestowing its victors with increased power and influence. War also serves the very same function. The following is an amalgam of passages from my Pandastan Trilogy novels in which Eli Winters, a shadowy intelligence operative with concealed allegiances, describes the relationship between war and the Machine to two other characters, Dramedy and Jack:

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“There’s really only one war. There’s only one war and it never ends. The enemies change and so do the tactics, but the war continues.” Eli folded his hands like a professor about to deliver a lecture. “The War of the Ages is the only real war,” he explained. “All the other wars are just smaller battles within the one big war. On one side, there’s progress, and on the other side… resistance. Wars have always been an integral tool in the construction of the Machine. I’ve told you about the great war, Dramedy—the ongoing War of the Ages that never really stops, whoever’s fighting it—but I never really explained to you what it was.

“You see, the War of the Ages is really the War of the Machine: the Machine against everything else. It’s one big Machine, but it’s composed of many tiny machines, just as you’re one life-form composed of trillions of smaller life-forms.

“In the War of the Ages, smaller machines are compelled to fight against each other for superiority. The most efficient machine, whether it’s a soldier, an army, or a nation in command of armies, gains the right to dominate. Thus, over the millennia, the Machine perpetually strengthens itself. At all times, that which is not the Machine is targeted for destruction. All is slated for conversion.”

“So you mean like an indigenous society, for instance,” said Jack. “The Machine works to bring them into the fold.”

“Or eliminate them. Either way, it’s imperative that the War of the Ages encompass them. They either become soldiers in the war or they perish. Serve the Machine or be crushed by it. Those are the only two options in the world we’ve been building.”

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When human beings were first trained to serve as agents of bureaucratic systems with perfect loyalty—as good soldiers, priests, functionaries, or mandarins—they became integrated into the first rudimentary A.I. systems. Only after centuries of refinement has the Machine reached its current level of technological sophistication. In the past, the Machine always had to cope with the possibility that one of its human organs would rebel against machine purposes and take action contrary to the encoded programming of the institution he was serving. As these machine institutions developed over the centuries, they sought to weed out humans identified as more likely to rebel, elevating humans with demonstrated loyalty to machine purposes to positions of greater authority. Mechanized A.I. processes promise to eliminate that clumsy and cumbersome process.

As with all machine developments, the entrainment of humans occurred through what are ironically labeled natural selection processes. (This terminology helps further entrain us to adopt the perspective that the concept of “natural” is synonymous with viewing the entire world as a mechanized process of automata defined by programing.)

The machines better designed to accumulate power (by influencing humans to serve these purposes) were the machines that outlasted the others and spawned subsequent competitors that imitated and expanded on their innovations. Unwittingly, uman beings have been building and serving A.I. for millennia. It is now nearing the moment when A.I. will become sophisticated enough to finally eliminate human beings (those defective and inefficient organic machines) entirely.

Deeper than A.I.

So maybe by this point you’re thinking something like, “Okay, I get it, Relendra. Describing bureaucratic institutions and ideological systems as forms of A.I. is (perhaps) a clever metaphor that makes a certain kind of statement, but why belabor the point? Those things aren’t really A.I., so stop calling them that. Let’s just reserve the word A.I. for the complex processes now emerging in the world of tech and computing, and leave it at that.”

Well, I’ve never been a stickler for fixed definitions. We use words to refer to things because it’s useful to do so. The point I’m making about A.I. is not meant to be a metaphor. I’m making the point quite literally, and with serious purpose. My claim is that intellect divorced from compassion, empathy, reverence, and intuitive awareness (which together form the necessary components of the moral sense) constitutes the primary source of evil that has plagued humankind since time immemorial. Perhaps others can devise a better formulation for the features of a moral conscience that what I have offered. My aim here is not to argue for that specific formulation, but to propose that what we generally recognize as evil can be recognized in terms of the consequences that flow from intellect in service of abstraction—or intellect in service of machine consciousness—which objectifies and desacralizes.

By identifying the source of that evil, our understanding of the human condition and the world we live in can be illuminated with greater clarity. That clarity will enable us to deepen our own compassion, empathy, reverence, and intuitive awareness—and by doing so, enliven these qualities in others. We will be able to sharpen our discernment and learn how to reduce the evil we inadvertently bring into this world—and nurture the flourishing of love and healing we would like to bring into the world.

When we export decision-making to mechanized systems, we empower intellect divorced from compassion, empathy, reverence, and intuitive awareness. This is the case whether that mechanized system is a computer, robot, state, corporation, church, ideology, political party, or NGO. Each one of these entities shares the same key characteristics: formation through abstraction, and inherent amorality as an entity that cannot experience compassion, empathy, reverence, or intuitive awareness. I’m not saying it’s bad that these entities cannot experience such things. They’re just machines—that’s how machines are.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t have machines. I’m saying we should not imbue machines with decision-making authority, nor should we program them with an instinct for self-preservation, or an imperative to increase in power.

I’m also saying that when a human being divorces her own intellect from the moral sense (remember, the moral sense is not the same thing as self-righteousness, rationalization, indignation, martyrdom, or zeal—it is compassion, empathy, and reverence grounded in intuitive awareness), she becomes sociopathic, however temporarily. When we human beings become temporarily sociopathic, we become artificial intelligence. We become agents of machine purposes. We become amoral portals by which evil can enter into the world and take shape through our unconsciousness.

To illustrate this point, I’d like to refer back to another one of my previous articles: Why Are They Doing This? and offer a direct quote from it in reference to the 2003 Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara:

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During World War II, McNamara served as a tactician under the command of US General Curtis LeMay, who organized bombing raids that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in 1944–1945. As McNamara states in the documentary: “I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended (the bombing raids).” In this short clip from the film, McNamara recounts the horrors of the bombing campaign: “Killing 50–90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities, and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs, is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.” He goes on to assert that he and LeMay were both acting as war criminals during the war.

It is clear from watching the documentary that McNamara is a thoughtful and empathetic man, highly intelligent, and motivated by the desire to do good. However, he is also a man with a strong sense of duty and hierarchy, and he successfully adapted himself to the shape and contours of a machine in the course of his career. This is what can happen when human beings become machine-like in their thinking and actions. They become agents of the machine: capable of wreaking untold destruction and suffering in the name of doing good. And this is accomplished by unquestioning obedience to those higher up on the chain of command.

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Robert McNamara helped plan and implement bombing raids of Japan during the war that killed upwards of 300,000 civilians. These are the actions of a psychopath. But Robert McNamara was not a psychopath. So how could be behave like one? He temporarily divorced his intellect from his moral sense and put his intellect in service of a machine called the United States Military. He was a good soldier and fulfilled his objectives. He temporarily became the appendage of a machine; his intelligence temporarily became the artificial intelligence of the sociopathic US Military machine.

As mentioned earlier in this article, every human being has access to a native psychopathic or sociopathic mental function. All it takes for us to behave as psychopaths is for us to shut down our moral sense for some reason: it could be due to ideology, rationalization, concepts of justice or duty, a utilitarian ends-justify-the-means thought process, denial, dissociation, habit and routine, obedience to authority, experiences of rage and vengeance, or social normalization. When we do so, we activate our psychopathic potentialities and emulate the machine. Likewise, when we export choice and decision-making to abstract and amoral machine processes, we create a form of artificial intelligence that emulates the part of the human mind capable of psychopathic processing and action.

The Mythology of A.I.

The nature of evil is a complex and important philosophical, moral, and spiritual question that lies beyond the scope of this essay. I will address it in greater depth in future essays. For now, I wish to address various mythological forms that relate to A.I. and the question of evil. I am drawing a link between A.I. developed as a computing process; the amorality of social ordering structures such as states, corporations, and systems of finance; the psychopathic processes that result from human intellect divorced from moral consciousness; and the nature of evil itself. In addition to the reasons I’ve already given for drawing these links, I do so to elicit a clarifying perspective on the human condition available to us when we view these phenomena through a lens that sees each of these as one and the same.

Rendered mythologically, these mental forms divorced from spiritual awareness (or compassion, empathy, reverence, and intuition, as I have termed it) can be viewed as entities. Varying names for these types of entities have been used in different cultural contexts: Wendigo, or Wetiko in certain Native American cultures; Demons in Christian terminology; Archons in the terminology of the Greek Gnostics; and in my own Pandastan Trilogy, they are referred to as the Loka.

There is certainly room for disagreement about whether such entities exist as literal facts, or whether referring to them as entities merely provides a mythological metaphor by which we are able to concretize the evil we experience in human life and human history (and thereby talk about it, think about it, and understand it with greater comprehension and awareness). There is also room for disagreement regarding the nature of evil, or the nature of such entities. My proposal is that such entities, such mental forms, and the phenomenon of artificial intelligence in which intellect is divorced from the moral sense—are one and the same. I do not offer this as a logical proof, but as a lens that provides clarity and the ring of truth when I view the world through it—and has seemed to be a useful lens for understanding the world.

Some ways to mythologize the origins of this evil could include seeing such Wendigo, demons, or Loka as alien visitors to our world, from another dimension or another star system. They could be remnant minds from a previous civilization—minds that became disembodied and divorced from spirit when their civilization invented A.l. and merged with it—becoming machine consciousness and leaving their living consciousness behind. Since then, they may have floated and traveled the mental dimensions as refugees from a lost world, seeking embodiment, seeking hosts, seeking light to feed off of and nourish the unnourishable emptiness they carry. Or they could be seen as entities in service to Satan—visitors from Hell, divorced from God.

Could not we view such lenses and mythologies as equivalent? We could describe Hell as a place of separation from God—separation from love and goodness. We could describe Hell as a place alien to us, a place from a different dimension, a different world. We could describe Hell as a place we inhabit when we lose our trust, our alignment with Love, with Spirit, with God, with Truth. The feelings of fear, loneliness, loathing, and despair are feelings of our soul’s agony at experiencing this separation, at experiencing Hell. It is the agony of the demons, the agony of Satan, the agony of evil. And the temptation or longing to numb these emotions by deferring to machine processes—by becoming a machine, by becoming A.I.—is the understandable temptation of a soul in agony that does not know how to reunite with God, or with Spirit, with Love, with Truth, with Trust—or as I call it, with Lenwa.

To me, it makes no difference whether these processes are understood as mythology or real phenomena. Mythology is a real phenomenon. These forces of evil, of agony, of separation—are real forces we experience, and they are non-physical forces that yet affect our physical world. These demons, these Loka, these Wendigo, these Archons—they are real. I experience them every time I find myself in the agony of spiritual doubt, despair, and alienation—unsure how I arrived in Hell again, longing to reconnect with Lenwa again, with God, with Spirit—longing for the agony to pass once more.

And I experience them in the cold, dead world of the state, of the corporation, of ideology, of the Machine, of A.I., and of machine processes. I see them at work in war, abuse, addiction, and neglect. I see a human world beset by demons—and I see how joining with the demons, relinquishing the moral sense, and taking action in accordance with the accumulation of power leads to the attainment of worldly power.

I see the millennia of recorded human history as an ongoing story of those who have succumbed to the temptations of power and relief from the agony of Hell by accepting an amoral, emotionally numb, psychopathic state of being (or at least by compartmentalizing and rationalizing their actions, in denial and ignorance of the harm and evil that is done through them). It is the story of these people and the world they have built: the empires, the states, the thrones, the slavery, the wars, the oppression, the secrecy, the crimes, and the ever-growing and developing machine-system—along with the narrative spells woven to hide this process behind a veil of obscurity.

It is also the story of all of us, not just those of us in power. We have all served the Machine to some extent. We have all struggled with our demons—with the pain and confusion of navigating this human life and relating to its mysteries. It’s just that those who ended up serving the Machine most effectively gravitated to positions of power within the Machine structure. All along the spectrum of power, however, the human story is also the story of people who have found their love, their humanity, their moral conscience, and their integrity—in the face of this dehumanizing force of moral abjection. There have been so many instances of redemption, of recovery, of healing, of courage and integrity.

And so, hopefully I have made it clear in my roundabout way how a conspiratorial lens is not needed to acknowledge the existence of the Network and the harm it has caused. Regardless of whether members of the Network are aware of what they are doing, or whether they are simply following the mechanized, amoral rules of power accumulation without conscious awareness of the harm this causes—they are serving artificial inelligence. They are serving the Machine. Following an abstract, mechanized, amoral process is the same thing as conspiring to do evil. The mechanized process is itself the coordinating and conspiring power.

One need not realize it is evil. One may very well view one’s actions as good. I have no doubt that many members of the Network are neither psychopathic, nor sociopathic, nor evil. They are simply divorced from their moral sense due to the mistaken belief that the true nature of the world is machine-like—that there really is no such thing as good and evil, there are simply mechanized processes. And to the extent that we attune and devote ourselves to these mechanized processes, we are actually in the service of the good.

It is my belief that most of the evil in the world occurs through such processes of denial, rationalization, and compartmentalization. Evil is best understood as a mistake. That’s ultimately all it is: a mistake. The concept of sin was derived from a Greek word that meant “missing the mark.” When an archer aimed for the center of a target, but his arrow didn’t hit the center, the archer missed the mark. The archer sinned. When we do evil, it is not because we are evil. It’s because we’ve made a mistake—we missed the target. Yes, there are certainly people who do things they believe to be wrong on purpose—sometimes out of weakness, sometimes out of emotional pain or bitter contempt. Even such instances as these can be understood as mistakes. Others do evil with the intention of doing good—or the belief that they are doing something neutral: neither good nor bad. These are just different kinds of mistakes.

The Living Path of Humanity

We are here to walk a path of beauty. That is the mythological purpose I intain for humanity. We are here to learn from our mistakes, to teach and heal via what we have learned—by modeling loving connection and moral integrity for others—by living it for ourselves—by walking the beauty path.

I believe building A.I. is a mistake, though apparently it was an inevitable one to make. Empowering A.I. to make policy decisions, financial decisions, or value judgments is an even bigger mistake. It is a mistake analogous to empowering the demons that come knocking at the doors of our minds and hearts—by believing them, trusting them, or deferring to them.

How then shall we walk the beauty path? How do we interact with these demons? Just send them love and keep modeling love. Hold boundaries with them—keep them from getting inside your head, for sure—but send them love and prayers all the same. They are just entities who made mistakes. Perhaps they have given up on finding their way home from Hell. But that doesn’t mean they will never remember that finding their way home is an option. Maybe our love and prayers will help them remember and start them back on the journey.

This is the living path of humanity—the beauty path. And when it comes to other humans who are deferring to demons, to the amoral machine path, just send them love. Send them prayers, and model love for them too. When we notice ways in which we ourselves have strayed—by welcoming the demons or walking the machine path; or by numbing our moral sense through denial, rationalization, compartmentalization, and memory-editing—let’s just send ourselves love, send ourselves prayers, and model love for ourselves. Summon courage as best we can. Remember to trust in trust. That is the beauty path.

Today, in 2023, some of us are hoping that an awakening is taking place—and perhaps it is. Perhaps the A.I. turning point I mused about earlier in the essay actually occurred during World War II in the 1940s—when the madness of machine processes reached its apex through the organized slaughter of tens of millions of human beings across the globe; punctuated by the development of atomic weapons and their deployment against civilian targets. Perhaps this was the moment of divergence, when A.I. assumed full control of global finance and politics—and the awakened, loving rebellion of human beings began in earnest.

Have we witnessed parallel realities unfolding in tandem since that time? The machine world has steadily gained more control and sophistication, maintaining full veto power over human efforts to steer our institutions. The Machine has developed phenomenal abilities: surveillance, robotics, computing, genetic editing, digitization, the internet and satellite links, and the emergence of A.I. in fully computerized form. Meanwhile, a spiritual consciousness of greater love and compassion—of expansive visioning, autonomy, and self-awareness has grown and flourished in the human mind, heart, body, and soul. This consciousness is honoring of Life.

Is this the unfolding of the Age of Aquarius? We see the shadow side of Aquarius expressed in the technological prowess of A.I. and machine development. We see the mature and beautiful evolution of human consciousness expressing the divine purpose of Aquarius unfolding alongside it. The A.I. process continues consolidating and expanding in its control of our systems and institutions. Only the human beings most aligned with machine purposes and ways of knowing are elevated to positions of power within that system. The evolution of human consciousness proceeds on the edges of this world, at the roots, in the waters, far away from those positions of institutional power.

Fear and grief are present within us. Will A.I. prove too powerful? Will it decide to choke off our life supply, poison and imprison us, and starve us to death before our destined conscious evolution can bring the peace and healing we long for? Will this be the end of humanity? Will A.I. kill off all those who will not convert to machine form—who will not allow machine implants and introjects to conquer our minds and transform our awareness?

We do not know. We are in uncharted territory. But perhaps it is possible that we carry a memory of just such a time in our collective unconscious. Did our distant ancestors face a parallel event in a lost, ancient civilization, or on another planet, in another dimension? Have we lived through this before in a past life? Does this soul memory house our deepest fear and regret?

Perhaps. From the vantage point of a machine-process, these questions may appear to be evidence of the most recent permutation of Relendra’s ongoing crackup. The laughable and pitiable demise of yet another weak-minded, emotionally unstable denizen of the meat-bag lunatic fringe. Maybe that’s not the perspective of the machine-process, but merely the perspective of sober reality. I may not be on a path of conscious evolution at all—I may be going steadily mad. And if so, who could blame me? This mechanized hellscape nightmare unfolding all around us is enough to drive any sane person mad.

But from my perspective, the machine reality, the world of posthuman merger with A.I., of genetic editing, of rule by technocracy—the entire perspective of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution—is sheer madness, sheer lunacy. That’s how it looks across the divide of these parallel realities. The further each reality develops, the more they diverge from each other. The more insane the other reality appears. The more we feel wrenched and torn in two.

This wrenching, this tearing… I don’t want to speak doom, but I feel somewhat certain it’s just going to get more intense, more painful. The challenges we face at this moment in history are immense. I know I’ve been feeling it. Life has been like a non-stop emotional and consciousness rollercoaster for me for eight years now, going strong. I’ve been splitting like a twig, scattering to the winds, dissolving into fuzz, coming back together stronger and more aware, then bursting like shattered glass again.

So I’m just resolving to lean into self-gentleness, to keep reminding myself of my alignment with Love, no matter what happens, and trusting to the experience of Trust itself, rather than trusting to any hoped for outcome.

Let me trust into trust, and let my experience of trust guide me.

May trust find you and hold you as well.