Twenty-five years later, I realized I was in need of a break. Not a break from life, but from the Google Calendar and all the pings. I’ve had some success with yoga and other practices, and wanted to explore this more embodied, somatic approach to experience more deliberately. I’m a PhD in media theory, but a perpetual beginner in metabolizing.

So I signed up for a weeklong workshop in shamanic spirituality down in Costa Rica. It wasn’t easy to make that choice. It wreaks of privilege, jet fuel, retreat, self-indulgent New Age altered states…. But some good friends of mine had done this same workshop and genuinely believed it would be of benefit, while giving us a shared vocabulary for a different level of experience: One that isn’t captured in the language of technology, social change, political activism, or even literature and the arts. I justified the expense as a teacher going back to class to learn some of what I missed. This would make me better at what I do. Even beyond that, am I allowed a week? With everything else going on in my life and in the world? And I said, fuck it, I am.

That choice alone, to take the time and space to get good with existence, may have been the most important part. I’ve been doing some workings here, a bit of magical practice and pauses to meditate on things for a moment. But not really. It’s more like an occasional yoga class. It’s great that I get a lot of stuff done and help lots of people (or at least answer a lot of email) but it’s also a bit disrespectful to this incarnation not to live in appreciation of the physical reality I’m being afforded. Air, gravity, touch, even the people who built the servers and devices to bring this to you. So yeah, I took a week to reclaim my body, my breath, my vital energy…and my eros.

And it was spectacular. It still is spectacular. From the outside, I guess it looked like a bunch of people doing psychodrama exercises during the day, and more tantric, shamanic openings in the evening. There’s no need to go into the details. It wasn’t drugs or sacred plants, but practices that involved some touch and energetic exchange. Not like dating, but what you might call transpersonal experiences. Still, they were intimate — the same way doing mushrooms in a small group is intimate, with everyone co-metabolizing everyone else’s traumas. Only here we were co-metabolizing some joy and opening along with the traumas.

But more important for me, living in the body and led by more somatic impulses than the ones in my head, changed something for me. I stopped strategizing, manipulating, and controlling things. In these mental and physical spaces there were no street signs to read or maps to negotiate, so I started to trust a different navigational sensibility. I decided to just let what was going to happen, happen.

I had a really good time, opening and sharing and being and even just dancing in ways I hadn’t before — not in front of other people, anyway. And there was one person there who created a field around them that made it so much easier to do this. They were just connected to the earth and the moon or whatever it is. Their mere presence created a permission structure for being real, vulnerable, open. At least for me.

And there was one big exercise, one shamanic experience that I had heard about beforehand that I was kind of nervous for. It was going to be intimate on lots of levels, and while I love all humans, there’s limits to what I — in my current state of development — feel great about all those humans doing with me or to me. The facilitators set up a ritual through which partners for this ceremony were selected. They put pairs of matched items from the jungle on a big platter. You picked an item off a plate while blindfolded, and then everyone takes off their blindfolds, holds up the leaf or flower or whatever they took, and then look around to see who got the other one. That’s your partner.

I picked my leaf, opened my eyes, and looked for my partner. And sure enough, it was them. This creature of light. And they were crying. Not because they were bummed, but because they had been hoping it would be me. And in that moment, that little lucky coincidence, it hit me that the universe really has my back. Whether it’s Anael, (the archangel that my Team Human guest Arden Leigh connected me to, or God or just the fractal order of things…I’ve been held all this time.

The experience itself, well, thank God it was a person who I trusted could hold me in all ways. It was an ordeal — on the order of a heroic dose — and I was totally emotionally and physically overwhelmed. I felt a buzzing electricity, a numbness in my hands and head like when you hyperventilate, except then it turned into this surge, like a sustained electric shock going from the base of butt right up my spine and out the top of my head. I thought I was maybe having an attack of some kind, and I ended up curled up in a ball on the floor as this stuff cycled through me. One of the facilitators later said it’s called a “kundalini awakening,” where all this dormant, coiled up energy at the base of the spine rises and rewires the nervous system. But it happened at the right time in my life, in the right place, and connected to a person in a moment so profound — it felt like I had incarnated during the same lifetime as them in order for that moment to happen between us.

Yeah, I get it. It sounds like “just” a high. But a heightened state — particularly one achieved through a practice rather than a chemical — isn’t inaccurate, it’s just specifically revelatory. And this experience or opening or whatever it was created for me a new reality tunnel. One that suggested something about the way my whole life, and I’d argue all life works.

Throughout my life, and definitely more in my awareness right now, the right opportunities have opened at the right times for me to grow and become alive. And the right challenges have come at precisely the moments I was ready to confront my shadow. There’s a way in which the universe has been perfect to me. It has my back. That doesn’t mean I’ve always recognized it. To the contrary. Any true success I’ve had in this life has occurred in spite of my best efforts to resist it or to make something else happen. I got that loud and clear from this experience.

But more importantly, I started to become aware of this other way of perceiving and navigating the world. A different, somatic compass. This other way of perceiving and navigating the world that we have been calling “magic,” because it’s not so easily identifiable what’s making it work. Spidey sense? ESP? Somatic awareness? Shamanic wisdom?

I want to be so bold as to assert that this shamanic/somatic awareness I’m describing here is the natural state. It’s not officially spiritual or religious. It’s not made up of symbols or superstitions. It’s a level before that, below that. It’s pre-linguistic, and pre-symbolic.

It’s the feeling you get when you put your palm on a tree trunk. Or when you feel physically drawn toward something or someone you don’t even know is there until you turn the corner and see them. Or conversely, the feeling you get when you know you’re off-track. The gentle nudge from the universe, like the nudge you get from the seat of a fancy rental car when you drift too close to the lane dividers. It’s another way of orienting to the world. There’s a farmer I know who picks up a rock in order to know where to plant or find water. As if holding the rock puts the farmer’s body back into relationship with the entire history of the field. On an elemental level.

Language and math and symbols are great inventions, but they are maps not territories. They have their own biases, and they necessarily draw our attention off our lived experience and into the many grids of interpretation. Even spiritual systems do this. Spheres with names, and levels of awareness, and diagrams, and phases with colors. Great stuff, but not what I’m trying to share here. I believe there is an alternative way of navigating reality that involves finding one’s core — heart, gut, kundalini, whatever you want to call it — and then using it lean into what’s in harmony. Sorry if that sounds esoteric, because it’s really quite tangible and intuitive compared with the way we usually calculate our choices.

It’s subtle and inexplicable, but quite natural. Like the way the upper branches and crowns of trees in a forest will avoid mashing into each other in a behavior called “crown shyness.” They somehow sense each other and create gaps so they won’t collide as they grow and sway in the wind.

Many people will try to access this sensibility in an explicit way through a modality of one sort or another. Like Tarot or I Ching or a pendulum, or even looking for those overt “signs” as they move through life. And that’s cool, but it still involves an interpretation layer. Does that black cat mean wrong way or right way? Is it on the left or the right? Does the storm mean danger or cleansing? If I’m going to play that game, I’d rather get the acknowledgment like a wink of affirmation after something than some sign from the ether I’m supposed to be actively decoding beforehand. I don’t want to be so actively “reading” phenomena all the time. Feels more like paranoia. I’d prefer a set of signs that make sense to me after something had come to fruition. Like a validation.

The phenomenon I’m trying to describe here is more of a real time thing, with no thought layer. Like standing in the ocean and feeling the warm current. And it’s there in every choice, from what food to put in your mouth—if you’re privileged enough to have that choice - to which gigs to accept or who to sleep with. It’s a subtle sensibility or sensation at first, but it gets really loud, really fast. Doing the “wrong” thing starts to feel intolerably “off.”

And then once you do the “off” thing you can feel it ripple through the rest of everything. For me, it might be agreeing to some podcast interview because I think it will get me something silly like “exposure” instead of it being something I really want to do. Then, of course, at the very same time slot I’ll get an opportunity to meet someone or do something special. And it will throw my Google Calendar out of sync, leading to a cascade effect where every appointment is now in the wrong place and time, and I can no longer even go to the best ones. Like a parking lot where all the cars have to fit together just so, and one in the wrong place means you have to move all of them.

These tools themselves, apps like Google Calendars, but even more so, maps and GPS, or metrics like wealth, or any other numerical value system—Likes—they all suggest we make our choices, navigate our paths, experience our success or satisfaction through external measures. Ones devised by people who do not have our best interests at heart, and cannot even know our hearts. These are systems that can’t know what we find beautiful, how it is we can best contribute to the collective welfare, how we can harmonize with the greater organism and play our part in everyone else’s shamanic journey.

When it’s working, it’s a like a dance, but with no official steps.

Our AI-driven world is a pseudo-reality. A symbol system based on a symbol system based on a symbol system. Predictions based on written language based on mouth noises. Or opportunity, based on agency, based on worth, based on jobs, based on corporatism, based on interest-bearing currency.

One’s life becomes about making oneself legible to these systems, through credentials or metrics or cash. And those who have become successful in those terms have a vested interest in negating and repressing the subtler but ultimately much more powerful ways the natural world really works. You can only disinfect nature for so long. You can only repress the feminine for so long. The indigenous. The kundalini. It’s more powerful than the prison of metrics with which we try to contain and control it. We look at its signals and nudges as noise to quiet or paranoia to ignore, rather than love and light guiding us to more harmonious ways of being. We’re too busy talking to shut up and start resonating—which is paradoxically louder and more impactful.

Our modern technologized world is a symbol system we learn about in school so we can navigate or manipulate it as adults. We learn the street names instead of the terrain, value job titles instead of the social contributions, and pursue growth over wellness. And that’s a great example: Why do we pursue growth? Because we use interest-bearing currency, a money system devised by monarchs to turn cash into a utility they could charge for. Nations care about the GDP—growth—because it means banks can get paid for lending us the money we use. But it’s a metric that guides choices in ways that don’t serve the planet or people or anything. Sometimes, even the best-intentioned of us can make our choices and measure success—development goals—based on metrics, reinforcing the dominance of the maps that got us out of alignment in the first place.

I’m aware how this feel-your-way through, use-the-force-Luke, Joseph Campbell “follow your bliss” approach to reality can come off as privileged. Of course it is! And while I’m not saying it’s impossible for a person in a refugee camp to surf the shamanic waves effectively, it’s whole lot harder. This hierarchical tyranny under which so many of us live was constructed to make it harder.

I navigated the maps well enough, and was born lucky enough, to get to a place where I have the latitude to make choices. But given that I do, if anything, it’s not my privilege but my obligation to make choices in ways I feel are consonant with the greater, or more essential reality in which we live together. If a tree is struggling just to grow, it may not have the energy or wherewithal to engage in the dance of “crown shyness” I was describing before. But those that do end up providing that struggling tree with a gap of sunlight in which to fortify itself.

Yes, it’s fun and rewarding to move through life in this shamanic way. And if you don’t have to work on someone else’s schedule, or live in a prison, or beg for charity, it’s a whole lot easier to let go and let the universe sweep you up in her arms and bring you to all the right places and people and experiences. You still have to spend energy and effort and overcome obstacles and metabolize trauma, but you get to do so with a prevailing sense of rightness and integrity of being.

And the benefits extend to others. Because once you start moving through life this way, you come to understand how coordinated the whole dance is. If you seize the privilege to act appropriately in any situation, you’re letting the karmic dance do its thing. You’re removing the points of friction, lessening the exploitation, reducing the overall quotient of striving, lowering the collective cortisol, and freeing yourself to help metabolize everyone else’s suffering.

If anything, not acknowledging and celebrating one’s privilege in the moment—for however long it lasts—is the affront to those who don’t have it.

So if you are privileged enough to turn off the pings on the phone, or to schedule fewer bad meetings, or earn less money, you damned well should. This whole capitalist and technological infrastructure has been fine-tuned for its ability to keep us off the path and alienated from our deeper sensibilities. A person with a mortgage is a more manageable citizen. Just like a person with an Instagram account, or an immune disease requiring a biologic.

And all those systems feed on each other, fast packaged food, industrial agriculture, adolescent colon cancer, medical debt, click counts, AI, teen suicide.

And that’s not even the real world. That’s the virtual world. The world built on language, money, politics, power, metrics, and other dead things. It’s the world our media and technology and corporatism and colonialism want us to mistake for reality. It’s the supposed “real world” we return to after watching a great movie or doing a ceremony or having a dream or making love. But it’s not. It’s the enforced illusion, the grid pattern of the city, the worth of a retirement plan, the notifications on the smart phone.

Those of us who have the privilege of escaping that virtual reality for moments at a time? For moments long enough to navigate soulfully and somatically rather than selfishly or strategically? Yes. We ought to do it. Because it’s not even a personal activity.

What you quickly realize is that we humans and other life forms are navigating this wave collectively. How well we do is dependent on how many of us can retrieve these more essential sensibilities. The ratio of free living people to captive or unconscious ones. We don’t have to rely solely on propaganda to convince people to make appropriate choices. Effective memes. No. Not when we have effective means.

When we act with compassion and resonance in appreciative surrender to the way things are trying to unfold, we model something else. A collective shamanism. A shared awe. A glimpse of what it feels like to live on Team Human.

Well, not the first time. We’re all using AI all the time, or AI is using us, through our social media feeds, web searches, email solicitations, streaming media recommendations… If you’re touching a smart phone, you’re interacting with AI.

But I did my first real AI project this week, both as a way to get something done that’s just been too big a lift for too long, and as a way of engaging with technology I’ve been avoiding for way too long. I think I was motivated in part by a bunch of campaigns saying not to use AI: AI is the enemy, it’s unethical to ask a single prompt, AI will destroy the environment, you’re taking away someone’s job, you’re feeding the thing that will one day become conscious and kill us all.

As the original spokesperson for Team Human against transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil who argued we should pass the evolutionary torch to our robot successors, I felt it was my responsibility to really learn this thing rather than just opine on its impact.

I admit, as an older GenXer, I was kind of just hoping I could sit this one out. I’ve learned every new tech since programming memory addresses for hardware control of 8 bit systems, through basic and fortran, to C++, html, and css style sheets. I learned databases, social media platform architectures, algorithms, TOR networks, and even blockchain from the inside-out, just in case people came to their senses and used crypto for something better than extraction.

I learned MIDI, linear editing, non-linear editing, Macromedia Director, Maya, Adobe blah blah blah. And every time my wealth of knowledge about one tech was obsolesced by the next one. Who can keep up with everything? I was thankful when they got rid of Flash because I’d never had time to learn it.

It’s not that I’m a programmer, but if I’m going to speak about these landscapes, their biases, and what they may or may not do to humanity, I should know how they work. Program or Be Programmed, right?

So I was hanging out with my friend Benjamin, who runs a terrific Meta-Crisis Salon in Brooklyn that I’ve been attending, and he had just taken a course in vibe coding. Vibe coding is when people build a whole app or platform without any coding knowledge — just an AI partner. And he was jazzed, showing me all these dashboards he’d created to find trends in his communications impasses, scour the web for events he’d be interested in, monitor climate change, model social networks… you name it. It was like he caught a bug.

And I’m thinking, yeah this stuff is cool, but at what cost? I’ve got friends who are now making animated movies about really deep stuff, in highly crafted detail. There’s real thought and hours going into these creative expressions. We got into the question of whether these cool, potentially useful and socially beneficial programs could be worth the unseen costs of AI, such as the environmental damage and resource depletion and labor displacement. It was hard to know.

So we decided to convene a “hackathon” the next weekend, in the back room of a vegan restaurant in the East Village called Caravan of Dreams that we’re trying to rescue. A hackathon would bring a bunch of new customers into the space, while also seeing what a group of mutual aid and social good pioneers might think to do with AI.

As one of the conveners, I figured I should find out something myself. And I have this website sitting on Wordpress, with a bunch of custom code for its little features and every time Wordpress does a security update, one of those things breaks. And I’m stuck thinking, is it worth the time to fix this one, or do I just make a new site? I could go on one of the for-pay platforms like Wix or whatever, where they actually have AI’s assisting you in the building of your website, or I can build it from scratch with the coding module of an LLM (Large Language Model) like Claude. Use it as an opportunity to get my hands, or even my soul, a little dirty. See what the fuss is all about before the hackathon.

And, to be honest, the first thing I thought was “what will people think if they find out my website was coded by AI? Will they think I’m a turncoat? What about the web design job he just destroyed?” And so on. Part of the reason I needed to turn to AI is that I am dealing with a lot of data here. A few thousand articles, reviews, interviews, book chapters, videos, podcasts…all in different file types, disorganized. Archives from previous websites in proprietary formats…. A curatorial nightmare I would not wish on any of the students I hire for help.

As for the environmental destruction, well, that’s part of the test here. I wanted to see just how much money it cost to get a job like this done. I am fully aware of the oil, rare earth metals, cobalt, and unseen labor we are leveraging to prompt an AI system. But how much are we really taking, and what can we create in the process? Could the destructive impact of using AI ever be outweighed by the creative output? And how much better or worse is it than all the other ends-justifies-the-means compromises we make in our choice of meal, clothes, energy, entertainment, or transportation? Who uses more energy: me building a website, or the person protesting against that website by serving video on Tiktok?

Instead of using a website and asking questions, I installed an AI called Claude into the Terminal of my Mac computer. This way, I could have Claude do tasks for me with my files on my own machine, and then publish those files to my website on Github, which is just a place on the Internet where it’s really easy to upload files and test things. I put a folder on my desktop with all the stuff I wanted on my website, and told Claude the basic architecture: what I want on the home page, my books page, an archive of my articles…and so on. Claude kept the website’s local files on my computer until I was ready to publish them on the net. It’s there right now, at Rushkoff.com. Responding to my desire for transparency, Claude posted a menu of the themes we rejected along the way.

It took about five hours, all told, instead of maybe a month. The real achievements are the searchable archives of articles. And now, it’s a totally changeable website. I can go to the website editor on my laptop, paste the link of a talk I’m going to do, and it will create an upcoming event with all the information. I can even say “add a new page for Team Human, with an embedded YouTube.” Or “let’s create a prompt for people to query my entire body of work, that includes a meter showing how many kilowatt-hours of electricity it took to generate the response.”

Speaking of which, when I was done, I held my breath and took a look at how much energy it cost to do all that work. How much water? Not just building the website, but organizing and categorizing all those thousands of files? Given all I’ve read and been told about AI’s massive energy costs, I figured it would be the equivalent of a round trip flight to Istanbul. So I checked the tokens I’ve used so far for my entire Claude experience? Just under five dollars worth.

Even if Anthropic is effectively subsidized and getting energy cheaper and hiding certain externalities, even if we want to be super pessimistic and say that the company is somehow using four times as much energy as they’re charging me for, we’re looking at twenty bucks of energy. And as far as intellectual property, my AI web designer partner was benefiting off the design and user interface strategies of a myriad of human designers, as was I. So were all the alternative platforms I might have tried. It was getting hard to take an absolutist stance against this tech.

I finished just in time to go to the hackathon. People came up with some really good ideas. One person was using AI to do a meta-analysis of intentional communities, to see what the few successful ones had in common, and what were the biggest reasons the great majority of them failed—a research project that could take a dozen grad students years of analysis, and they may still miss the truly relevant variables.

My favorite project was the simplest: an “I have/I need” bulletin board - basically, the original Craig’s List on digital steroids. An Amazon killer, where people list what they are willing to give away or provide in service, as well as what they need. The kid who needs a bike gets one from the kid who outgrew hers. And because it’s built on AI, it can be a dynamic database that matches people geographically when it’s a thing like a bike, linguistically when it’s verbal, or stylistically when it’s clothes.

Moreover, because it’s being conceived by social activists instead of a team of hired engineers, it’s valuing horizontalism, mutual aid, and trust instead of expedience, profitability, or scale. At worst, they get a working prototype for something they can bring to a non-profit, who can bring on real engineers to build the more durable version. Their working prototype didn’t even cost the five bucks of tokens.

If their vision holds, more and more people start functioning in the peer-to-peer economy we imagined in the 1990s, before Airbnb and Uber replaced what we used to call couch-surfing and ride-sharing. The excitement in that otherwise unused room in back of Caravan of Dreams reminded me of the early cyberpunk infused Internet era. Are we in the same place? Can we learn from our earlier mistakes?

Is it foolish to think can we use the master’s tools to take down the master’s house? I want to believe. Are we in another moment of great potential, or is this another momentary mirage in the endless march of capital through new incarnations of exploitative technology? Is it already too late? Is this just another ends-justifies-the-means rationalization?

Can we beat them at their own game by bringing our best and brightest to the fore? Or has this technology already been monopolized by those who mean to colonize our last bits of attention and coherence? Can we de-colonize the eschaton?

It won’t be easy. We’re working against some powerful countervailing forces using the same technologies. I don’t just mean the obvious players like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, but tech billionaires who have been working behind the scenes for decades. The scariest one to me is Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle.

Oracle’s first customer was the CIA — the company is named after a CIA database project from 1977. Between 2014 and 2024, Oracle acquired companies like BlueKai (browsing tracking), Datalogix (linking online behavior to purchases), and AddThis (device fingerprinting) and merged them into the Oracle Data Cloud. By 2016 Larry Ellison said that Oracle had data on five billion consumers. What’s he doing? (Drey Dossier covering this beat the best.)

But there’s more: Project Stargate, Larry Ellison’s joint venture with OpenAI and SoftBank, funded by all sorts of sovereign wealth funds and announced by President Trump on January 21, 2025, at the White House, was billed as a $500 billion AI infrastructure project. It’s essentially a massive buildout of data centers to power next-generation AI. Ellison says it’s mostly a healthcare database to prevent or cure cancer. But Ellison has also publicly spoken about AI-powered surveillance — telling investors in 2024 that citizens would be “on their best behavior” because of constant recording and reporting. Ellison’s AI would act as an “ever-present supervisor,” analyzing every police body cam and doorbell camera. Nations would unify all citizen data, including genomic data, into a single AI-accessible database.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Oracle published a blog post announcing the U.S. government authorized it to run generative AI on federal government data, including Medicare records and military systems, at the highest civilian and DoD security clearance levels.

Are we contributing to these efforts when work or play with AI, pay for pro accounts, or just even watch Ellison’s Paramount media channels or Oracle-owned TikTok? Does building on AI platforms work against even the best intentions of the projects we build? Not to mention the untold amounts of human labor and energy and water being extracted under the most exploitative, usurious conditions?

I really, honestly, don’t know. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is supposed to be the good guys—dedicated to human-centered AI and strict guardrails against all this nastiness. And while they’re putting up a pretty good fight against Trump’s efforts to commandeer all AI technology for his crackdown on dissent, they themselves admitted they have to rescind their initial promise not to release AI models if they can’t guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance.

Now on the one hand, it’s a more honest stance. Who can guarantee anything about a technology like AI, which has emergent properties and behaviors no one can really predict? If they spend time and energy on guardrails that may not even work, they will be outpaced by all the companies who don’t give a shit about such things. But if they don’t, then is it a safe place to build the pro-human, pro-social applications my friends and I are conjuring together in the back room of a vegan restaurant?

I like to think Anthropic’s refusal to become part of the US government’s militarization and surveillance apparatus is more important, and a better place to draw their red line. I’m less afraid of a rogue AI than I am a rogue president or a dozen rogue tech billionaires using AI.

As I see it, the object of the game is to weigh the positive potentials of these technologies against their extractive and sociopathic ones. To treat them like any other technology with dangerous downsides: Is this car trip worth the gas, the pollution, the oil wars? Is this YouTube post worth the algorithms and data servers? Is this vibe-coded program worth the AI cycles?

But the bigger question remains: Can we lean into the liberating, pro-human capabilities of these technologies before they become unrecognizably incapacitating? In a lot of ways, this feels like the internet in 1994, before it became AOL and then Facebook, when it was still driven by a counterculture looking to expand the collective human imagination. Or the blockchain, when it was characterized more by Occupy Wall Street’s drive toward mutual aid than the investor’s fixation with token speculation. Could this moment be different? Did we learn our lessons? Instead of using AI to make cheap, soulless replicas of Hollywood movies and putting creatives out of work, might the real opportunity here be to build platform cooperatives and community-created, worker-owned alternatives to Uber and Amazon?

You tell me. Let’s decide this together. Use the comments to let me know: have you used AI? Was it worth it? Do you think we can use these technologies to beat those who would control us at their own game? Can we use them to help build widespread networks of sharing and mutual aid? Is the true Luddite position still okay? They were not against technology - just its use to exploit labor. Could we use AI to move toward an increasingly jobless society with Universal Basic Income and optimized for leisure? Or should we turn the other way, refuse its shortcuts and its ability to do pattern recognition on a scale beyond anything we’ve known before? How a about small language models run on public or community servers?

The negativity surrounding AI today is justified, but it may be too early to write AI’s epitaph. Can we use it to re-invent the virtual infrastructure for good? Even if it starts out small, anything that actually works can be modeled, templated, and shared. Is this our moment, or is it another mirage? Am I seeing something here, or am I just high on my own supply? You tell me.

I’ll be moving this whole Substack over to Patreon in June. The advantage is that with one membership you’ll get access to all my writing, ad-free versions of my podcasts and videos, access to the my Discord server, participation in premieres of new episodes and interactive salons with me, and even free access to live events in NYC and beyond. Plus, a little birdie told me that things are Substack may get funky really soon.

“I don’t even wear a kippah anymore,” he said, between sobs. “I know what it means to the people who see me on the street. Whatever it might have meant to me, they see a yarmulke and they think Zionist. Murderer.”

The one who called last summer, at the height of the starvation crisis in Gaza, took it further: “I think Israel may have made Judaism untenable for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever.”

It was stunning, coming from a rabbi. I just sat on the phone with her and listened. It was weird, very regrettable confirmation of some of the ideas I wrote about in a book called Nothing Sacred, back in 2003, which is part of why the rabbis were calling me now.

To be clear, up front: neither these rabbis nor I, nor any Jew for that matter, is any more responsible for what Israel is doing than any white person is for what Donald Trump is doing in their name. Or any Christian is for the officially Holy War America has waged on Iran in the name of bringing on armageddon.

But these rabbis are concerned that the way in which Israel conducts itself — in the very best light, defends itself against atrocity — by committing atrocity of its own. That these atrocities have so undermined the Jewish project, tarnished the Jewish “brand,” and compromised Jewish institutions, that it’s hard to embrace one’s own Jewishness, much less do so in public. Or even harder to offer one of Judaism’s intellectual or spiritual gifts to the world, now that they come with the baggage of Israel and Zionism.

It’s really the same feeling as being an American under Trump. I know I didn’t vote for him, and I know I may not be directly responsible for him. But he calls the entire American project into question, and reveals some of the genocidal colonialism, slavery, racism, and extraction required for this country to get where it did and stay this way.

That’s why I’m not sure how we could have prevented any of this. I was trying when I wrote Nothing Sacred twenty years ago. (I’m gifting the new 2026 edition to Patreon and Substack subscribers.) What I argued is that Judaism was meant less as a religion with sacred things to worship than the process by which we get over religion. God evolves from idols to big scary monster to angry daddy to ethereal presence to “which way did he go?” God recedes, leaving people to find the sacred in one another. Not in place, not a name, and certainly not in some nation state.

The point I was trying to make back then — the thing that got me in a lot of trouble — was that Israel is not the realization of Jewish ideals. Rather, it was at best a necessary compromise of Jewish ideals in order to save Jewish lives. They were living in a world where first Europeans and then Arab peoples really did want them eradicated. So while it would have been nice to find a way to get those peoples to welcome some Jewish residents, it made a certain sense to get a place of one’s own. But UK-mandated partition or a modern political boundary in the post-colonial Middle East has nothing to do with God’s plan for humanity. You think God gives a shit about the treaty of Westphalia?

Taking a transcendental mythical narrative like Torah and using it as a real estate deed, kills the whole project. Once you take the text literally, or as a historical record of events that actually happened in the past, you lose access to the timeless, multidimensional experience it describes. If it has to say this one thing, you lose the ability to argue about what it means. To the extent that Torah is true or valid, it’s not because it happened at some moment in history, but because it’s happening all the time, in every moment.

Man, that got me in a lot of trouble. Famous Jewish intellectuals wrote articles saying I was the latest incarnation of self-hating Jew. The head of America’s biggest Jewish federation actually blacklisted me. For years later, any synagogue that hired me to speak was told to cancel the appearance, or risk their funding. I’d get a call from the rabbi saying “we’re really sorry to do this, but…” It was always a call. Never in writing.

So I got my first taste of the vindictiveness and pervasiveness of this other supposedly Jewish project. One for which the defense of Israel was more important than Judaism itself. Those of us who saw Judaism as an ongoing, never-ending discussion and collaboration, were pushed aside for those who helped the politicians set in stone Judaism’s national identity. Israel became the God, or at least the new Temple. This thing we’re not supposed to even think about until the messiah comes? It’s now right there, right now—with a chair in the United Nations and a nuclear bomb to defend itself. Holy holy holy.

This literalism kills the interpretative dimensionality of a spiritual tradition as surely as scientism and materialism kills the humanities. When we set things in stone, lock down their ownership, assign them monetary value, make them material and absolute truths to defend, we lose the liminal, creative, living, human layers. To hold anything with absolute and permanent certainty, we have to kill it.

And then we start killing other people, too.

I was originally going to make this piece about the latest rise in antisemitism, particularly around the War in Iran. See, there’s two main kinds of antisemitism. Two justifications for hate. The traditional one, the one that I always knew about, was the hatred of foreigners. Jews had no country, so they were always immigrants. And their religion was so abstract that they never respected the local gods of the peoples they visited. In Judaism God is unknowable, so the local idols and gods people worshipped didn’t mean much. Jews were hated because they were universalists, globalists, non-local, and the face of immigration.

But Israel and its behaviors led to another kind of antisemitism: anger from the Left that Jews were colonialists. England couldn’t control its colonies after WWII and gave part of Palestine to the Jews, and part to the Palestinians. No one else wanted the Jews there at all, so war broke out and Israel has been….aggressively defending its right to be there ever since. Maybe unwittingly, in addition to reclaiming its homeland, Israel continued the violent colonial project of its predecessors.

So now, Jews get it from both sides. The Right generally sees us as immigrant, slightly-brown people who undermine local gods and maybe killed Jesus. Yes, the Bible study class for the US Cabinet teaches that the Jews killed Jesus. And the Left sees us as the white zionist colonizers of an indigenous people’s territory. Go back to Poland.

But this also corresponds to two extreme kinds of Christianity in the United States, vying for dominance. There are the Christian Zionists, who are the people in Trump’s cabinet and military right now. People like Hegseth, Huckabee, or White House faith officer Paula White-Cain. They believe they are in a Holy War against Satan that will bring back Jesus. And they’re telling this to each other and the troops. In just one of many official allegations, a commander briefed his troops by saying, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” Or from the free thought caucus in Congress, military commanders are being instructed to tell their troops “that the American and Israeli attacks will hasten the return of Jesus Christ, and have cited passages from the Book of Revelation and instructed officers to tell their troops that current combat operations are all part of God’s divine plan.”

So these folks believe that bringing on Armageddon in a Biblically ordained alliance with Israel will summon the second coming of Jesus, after which the Jews are unnecessary but the Christians all go to heaven. That’s American Taliban. And like some of the Jews of Spain in 1491, most zionist lobbies think that siding with the great Empire against the Arabs will work out. As if they don’t remember that back in Spain, the expulsion of Muslims through 1491 was followed the Inquisition against Jews in 1492.

But opposed to the Christian Zionists are the Christian Nationalists, like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, who believe the United States and Trump are just hapless puppets being guided by a global uber wealthy cabal of Rothschilds and other Jews. The idea here is that Israel has wanted to attack Iran all along, and is using its money and influence to force America’s hand. When he announced the war, Marco Rubio said something (later denied by Trump) about how Israel was going to attack and so America had to follow along. Further reinforcement came from counterterrorism chief Joe Kent, who resigned citing how the Israeli lobby forced American into the war. The more extreme version of the story is that Jeffrey Epstein (Jew) and Ghislaine Maxwell (Jewish father) were working with Mossad, and using the real Epstein Files to blackmail Trump into doing Israel’s bidding. (One that never made sense to me because I have a hard time believing Trump is really scared of being outed as a sexual predator. There’s already ample testimony in the record. I think his followers would shrug off a video as a deep fake, or not care.)

But the theory of Israeli blackmail gets amplified and further distorted by MAGA influencers like Tyler Oliveira — the guy who took video of closed Somalian-owned daycare centers in Minnesota to launch the conspiracy theory now touted by Trump that Somalians are stealing billions and billions of dollars from taxpayers? That guy is now making videos about The Great Noticing, to help people recognize signs of Jewish control of…everything. He says the word “goyim,” the Jewish word for people, actually means that non-jewish people are “cows.” It doesn’t. (And no, I’m not providing links. He doesn’t deserve your clicks.)

So on the one hand, Christianity is being used to justify initiating World War Three against Iran in the hopes that the fire will summon Jesus. And on the other, it is being used to expose Jews as the killers of Christ who are secretly responsible for the entire sweep of western civilization, colonialism, and capitalism making America possible in the first place but now standing in the way of white Christianity’s divine right to dominate this continent and impose its white supremacist religious values on all Americans.

I expect some calls from priests and ministers just as upset as my rabbis, wondering if America’s holy war makes Christianity untenable. To which I’d say, don’t worry — the Crusades already took care of that a thousand years ago.

So is it time we retire these religions before they kill us all? In a certain sense, yes.

All kidding aside, I have always loved the idea of graduating from a religion. They may begin as great mythical or spiritual insights, but the institutional containers we create for them are anchored in a particular moment in our evolution as a species. The spiritual truths are living, changing things—just like we are—and eventually outgrow even the best and most well-thought-out containers.

This is where my experience as a media theorist may be useful.

The spiritual impulses informing Judaism are not bad or destined for violence and self-destructive behavior. But they are not of our era and may be obsolete. Judaism is an Axial Age development. Christianity and Islam came later, but continued that same impulse. What was the Axial Age? It was a media environment characterized by the invention of scripture. Writing.

Writing changed everything. Like social media, but times 100. Once people could write instead of just speak, they had the ability to record history. They could write down their story, and say what happened. They also gained the ability to create contracts into the future. The Bible itself was called a Covenant. That’s an agreement. A Holy Covenant between Abraham and God. God says “you do this stuff for me, and I will do that stuff for you.” It’s linear. Cause and effect. Past, present, and future. You do something now for the reward in the future. Save now, get interest and growth later. Follow these rules now, and the Messiah will come someday in the future.

Before this, everything was circular and present-based. We had seasons, but we didn’t have a concept of progress or a future or linearity. This development wasn’t all bad. The great beauty of the Axial Age religions was that they took on the mission of social justice. Once you have a future, you can think about making the world a better place tomorrow than it was yesterday. We can heal, improve, advance. But this focus on advancement was also the impetus for colonialism. And the justification for capitalism.

The downside of all this future focus was to lose track of the present. You gotta break a few eggs today to get a cake tomorrow. If we’re bringing everything closer to the messianic moment, then the ends justify the means. We are marching toward the inevitable finale. We have a goal of righteousness and purity. We can get there once we kill the last enemy, redeem the last sinner, clean the last dirty spot. The telos the goal the end of the story is worth whatever pain and suffering we need to endure, or create, along the way. So say we all.

In case you haven’t noticed, we have migrated to a new media environment. The age of the book—and I say this as someone who has made my career as an author—the age of the book is ending. Text and books no longer define the media environment in which human beings grow up and operate.

As one of the original “people of the book” I understand why Jews are getting some heat in the difficult transition away from messianic stories to whatever is next - and religious extremists launch into a suicidal mission to end the story before we find a way through it or past it. They’d rather the world end than face life beyond the confines of this Axial Age construction.

While I’m not yet convinced of AI’s enduring value to humanity or the planet, at the very least it suggests we are at the dawn of a new media age. One defined less by the linearity of the book, than the all-at-onceness of perfect recall. The retrieval of obscure ideas that would have remained on inaccessibly forgotten stacks in the library annex. The cut-and-paste mashup of practices and insights from anywhere on the globe at anytime in history.

And these AI iterations are not set down as if they were etched in stone, inked on papyrus or printed in a book. They’re arising through inquiry, through call and response, as part of an iterative process. You don’t use a thinking, interactive technology for answers, or at least you shouldn’t. You engage with these new media for better questions, in a generative practice much more like the music of Brian Eno than the 19th century ballad with beginning, middle, and end.

The spiritual questions of the Axial Age prophets can be retrieved and re-asked in this new media and cultural environment. We don’t need to end the story, but rather to liberate from it. That’s what my comic book Testament was about, and I really should re-issue that thing, too, because it’s coming true.

Honestly, this moment was easier to foresee than it looked. Even the prophets and apostles could see it, and gave fair warning: When this era ends, there’s gonna be some fucked up people trying to end the world. You will know them because they will be really into possessing land and building towers and making gold stuff and fighting big wars. Don’t follow them.

The beauty of these moments of extreme clarity is that we have the opportunity to transcend the story. Not transcend physical reality, community, people, love, connection, the earth, the cycles of nature. But to transcend the linear story of progress, conquest and telos that flattens our experience, motivates our violence, and destroys everything truly sacred about life.

To the extent that Judaism contributed to this mayhem, I’m sorry. Just as I’m sorry for how Enlightenment values within their period “container” ended up inadvertently justifying slavery, capitalism, and a society based on individuality. Just like I’m sorry for America. These all seemed like good ideas at the time.

But you know what they all have in common? They’re ideas. They’re abstracted from ground. They’re based in goals, not experience. They have the power of the strategist, and the weapons of the scientist, but lack the wisdom of the lived, social and circular experience.

That’s going to require learning how to be still. How to breathe. And how to metabolize what’s going on right here, and right now.

So what do you think? Should we retire our religions? Should Judaism be the first one on the block to say “we’re done?” Or, as my grandma used to say when I suggested such things, “you may say you’re not Jewish, yet they will come after you all the same!” But seriously, can we rescue ourselves and our planet from our own faiths? Or is “holy war” just a way of motivating soldiers and cabinet members to drop bombs, while other politicians and businesspeople loot the coffers and pile up riches in Qatari bank accounts?

Can we bring forward the best of our faiths into a new context? Rescue them from the war-mongers and conquistadors, or even use them to recognize and liberate ourselves from the sociopaths bombing children in our name?

I think so. I think that’s what Team Human is for. And I’m glad you’re here to work through some of this together.

Club of Rome always sounded to me like some United Nations Eurozone Bilderberg Group for good. What they really are is a loosely networked group of scientists, former statesmen, economists, and thinkers like me, who together seek to tackle complex global challenges through a systems-thinking lens. They got famous back in 1972 for a report they put out called The Limits to Growth, which warned of a societal and environmental collapse if unchecked growth continued. We would soon be consuming the earth’s resources faster than the planet can regenerate them.

They published lots of reports and computer models and stuff over the past fifty years, but — at least last time I checked — haven’t been successful in convincing the world about the planet’s limited resources. I think too many people see them as European nerd-policy-wonks with unrealistic expectations for what any real government or market could tolerate. Limits? Them’s fighting words. The market can expand, exponentially, forever! TINA, as Margaret Thatcher (England’s libertarian Prime Minister) used to say: T I N A: There Is No Alternative.

I think Club of Rome were interested in me because of my background thinking and writing about media and technology. And maybe some of the work we’re doing here at Team Human. As I’ve been writing for years, not only are digital media technologies threatening to consume the planet’s resources, but they form the environment of propaganda in which the current course is made to appear all-but-inevitable.

So, to the first part, we should all know by now that AI and its component technologies consume a ton of planet. We have to mine for rare earth metals (well, we don’t mine ourselves — we send children into mines at gunpoint to get it); we have to dedicate already depleted water tables and dying aquifers to data center cooling; the energy required to run our digital economy, now fueled by artificial intelligence, far exceeds what we need to feed and house even twice our current population.

Moreover, the algorithmically determined new media environment, combined with its growing capacity for surveillance and psychological profiling, has created a total propaganda environment in which alternative perspectives to infinite growth are muted and sidelined. The digital media environment has all-but superseded the real one, with humans looking for validation of their perspectives on screens rather than in their lived experience. Those of us who seek to write books or articles must prove our worth as online influencers before we are entrusted with precious publishing resources or granted attention from our fellow humans.

The growth priority used to be a particular approach to economic development — one among many — argued by the conservative and libertarian economic camps. But it has been reified and amplified by a digital infrastructure premised on growth itself. These are the tools that both enable the financialization of our world — through ultrafast trading, startup venture capital, and the reduction of human activity to commodifiable data — as well as the tools that are used to convince us that this is the only way the world can function.

The wealthiest among us understand this best. Yet because becoming or staying ultra-wealthy is the only way to survive in such a world, they do whatever they can to keep this system in place.

Any resistance to the frictionless expansion of the digital economy is a problem to be eliminated. That’s why when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris began to talk about regulating the unchecked growth of the AI industry, tech leaders suddenly changed their allegiance from Democrats to Trump. He promised to deregulate AI, crypto, media monopolies, and the rest of the technocracy, while also championing the might-makes-right logic of the marketplace.

Thus, Trump as president passes laws and signed directives limiting States’ ability to challenge the construction of new data centers and the hoarding of water resources by technology companies. They’re are not even allowed to know which company is behind which one. Or others demanding AI companies turn over their technologies to the Pentagon.

This first year of such oligarchic rule been a disaster. At least for people. As Trump has called it, this is the “greatest economy in the history of the planet.” He is right, in that corporate profits are at an all-time high along with the Dow Jones stock index. The billionaire class’s wealth has gone up by a trillion dollars since Trump became President. Of course, the share of the American economy going to labor is the lowest it has ever been in history. And I’m not even talking about the billions Trump and his family have managed to pilfer from their manipulation and redirection of public resources, the crypto and oil scams they’ve run, or the direct bribes they have taken from everyone from oil cartels to token exchanges.

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, promising to preserve the power of the press in the face of the digital onslaught. In 2017, shortly after Trump took office in what was largely thought to be an election tainted by fake news and propaganda online, he introduced a new motto on the front page: “Democracy dies in darkness.” We knew what side he was on — or at least representing himself to be on.

Now, he is dismantling the paper piece by piece. He’s not simply selling it to someone who could carry out the storied paper’s mission, or even spending what to you or me would be a buck seventy five to fund the publication for a decade. No, he’s making the financially disadvantageous choice of crippling the paper. He’s voluntarily doing to the Washington Post what only happened to CBS after it was purchased by Trump ally and Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, who has his own plans to harvest all of our genetic data for his Stargate Project.

And of course we watched as Elon Musk bought Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg moved his content management team to Austin, and even Apple’s Tim Cook bent the knee with a solid gold statue for Trump. These are digital people with digital agendas. If we accept the logic of the digital landscape divorced from the reality of the ground in which we live, it all makes as much sense as free market capitalism separated from human labor and wellbeing. The abstract landscape of digital symbols is frictionless.

That would be fine if we were video game characters, but we are human beings dependent on the physical world for our vitality. We are not viral media; we are vital organisms.

Twitter is not the real world. Those who live by Twitter, usually get taken down by the platform as well. It is no more psychologically sustainable than the expansionary digital environment is physically sustainable.

Every startup business plan I see these days heralds the “democratization” of their platform. The “sovereignty” of their users. As if democracy, like the market, is enabled and enhanced by a frictionless platform. Everyone, everywhere, voting all the time with their tokens or irises or pre-cog algorithms.

But no, democracy won’t happen online in the universal global sphere. Democracy is not a frictionless, universal phenomenon, but a high-friction, interpersonal, local phenomenon. If you try to do democracy “at scale” like one of Meta’s platforms, or some global blockchain or DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), it ends up subjected to the same power law dynamics that killed the music industry in a digital age: superstars rise to the top, and everyone else sells one copy of one song. Recommendation engines and feedback loops amplify the few, who become gargantuan abstract icons at the top of the pyramid. Monsters.

Something like democracy only works when there are limited number of voices, and institutions to contain them. Just like a physical town has a village square, such institutions and organizations create focal points. People compromise, and struggle through the pain points — the social and ideological friction necessary to learn how to tolerate each other and reach a mutually agreed-upon compromise. Never perfect, but better than nothing. In a frictionless landscape, all you can get is authoritarianism by the owners. This is what Peter Thiel’s whole business and religious philosophy is about: own the platform instead of struggling with the other weaklings on the platform itself. The house wins.

It feels to many of us like this digital frictionless landscape is about to consume what is left of the real world. That we are increasingly living inside the reality depicted by our AIs, and controlled by the titans who have monopolized our markets. They have all the cards.

But I’m here to tell you that the cards are not real. The money is not real. The code is not real. They’re all virtual, frictionless symbols that only seem real the more we surrender our consciousness and attention to the simulation. Even the law is abstract. Sure, our laws do serve us, but not when they’re written by the tech companies, themselves. And not when we fail to recognize they are abstractions - idealized guidelines that require live, human, on-the-ground interpretation to work. Otherwise, they’re just invitations to be gamed, worked around, or overridden with a new layer of abstraction on top. As we’ve seen in America this past year, the law or a statute doesn’t protect anything all by itself. How’s habeas corpus protecting citizens from getting rounded up in the streets? Where is justice for the victims of rape and sex trafficking?

The generic landscape of Twitter is not the real world. We know that. Too many people have to engage with the real world in order to survive. The memetic arms race, making videos of the Obamas as monkeys or making other ones to counteract them, only matters so much. When you can’t afford gas or lunch for your kid or medicine for your mom, the memes become irrelevant. The real world is still bigger than social media.

Yes, it feels like AI is going to swallow us whole, take our jobs and direct the planetary consciousness itself. Yes, AI can scale and leverage seemingly infinitely. The same as anything digital. There may be just one me standing here in this room, but look how many images and videos and copies we can make. Surely the copies and abstractions add up to more than me, right?

Wrong. I say no. Even a billion maps are not as big as the territory. These are descriptions of the territory. Depictions of the territory. That’s why they can scale so infinitely. They’re not made of territory. They’re imaginary.

That’s why the priorities of the abstracted landscapes so often contradict with those of real life. Ever notice how when unemployment gets bad, the stock market goes up? Why? Because it means companies don’t need as many workers to make their stuff. The corporate sphere is becoming less dependent on expensive, unscalable human workers to do its thing. Because of this disconnect, when unemployment goes up the federal reserve lowers interest rates to stimulate corporate growth and more hiring. Interest rates are just the cost of borrowing money. When money gets cheaper, stocks get relatively more expensive. Why hold money if its value is going down. Just borrow some cheap money and buy more stocks.

But that’s just a long way of saying bad things happening in the real world are often really good for the fake world. If people lose their bearings in the real world, that’s great for the GPS companies. If people lose the ability to make eye contact, that’s great for dating apps. If people get cancer, it sucks for them but it’s good for drug stocks. The simulated world, itself, is like a form of cancer, only phantomized. Immaterial. It needs our substance, silicon, lithium, cobalt, energy, and awareness to exist, but it’s not the thing. It needs our money, but money’s not really a thing either. We’re busy working at pointless tasks in order to create one fake thing to pay for another fake thing. All for some sociopathic billionaires — soon trillionaires — to game their escape from reality altogether.

It’s not all bad, either. Don’t get me wrong. The symbolic realm is like a dream space, open to our creativity and imagination. It’s potentially playful, weird, predictive, constructive….we can model almost anything, practice scenarios, engage with interdimensional beings. Every time we get a new medium we gain a new imaginary, a new “elsewhere” to explore new possibilities - or, for those with different intentions, a new elsewhere from which to wage war on the real. It’s like the difference between using AI to surveil and manipulate people or using it to make weird creative explorations while also staying aware of the costs of leveraging that much matter and energy.

I still love these spaces. Look. Here I am!

But we have to remember that the real world is bigger than the virtual one. I still think that there’s more going on in a cubic centimeter of soil than in all the AI processing in the world. Not the real-world machines, which have matter and substance and everything, but the symbolic layer of code and language they manipulate.

The real world has friction, nuance, chaos, and swirl. It’s not part of a large language model’s probabilistic reduction, but the sacred mystery of collision and connection. Not just frictionless cycles of data, but warm messy undulations, respiration, exchange, breath, friction…you know what I’m talking about.

Love is messy. Democracy is messy. Faith is messy. People are messy. But it’s in that messy, chaotic friction where real stuff happens. Stuff that’s infinitely more complex and experiential and even evolutionary than any simulation or singularity. We will not be consumed by the simulation. Our world is bigger. Theirs is inside ours.

What to do? Boycott Amazon. Sorry, but they’re not good. The incremental rewards in convenience are not worth supporting the greater project in the replacement of all commerce by one company. Now that they have shown they’re willing to spend money to shut down democratic conversations and assuage fascists? Time to stop. Stop paying for Prime, and the motivation to use their platform goes away fast. And then you’ll discover all the clever ways that real companies have figured out how to make it cheaper and better for you to buy directly from them.

Engage with religious, spiritual people. All kinds. They are trying to connect to something off the map. Something that can’t be named, or reduced to a symbol. Well, many of them are.

Work against entropy. Use these tools as you must, but in ways determined to be more than worth the energy and resources they are using up. We don’t go back, we go through. But we do it smarter and wiser and aware of what’s fixed, what’s changeable, what’s real, and what’s fiction.

Like the Club of Rome explained in the 1970s, the game we’re playing is taking up more resources than can be regenerated by the real world. It’s a clever game, this growth-based capitalism thing, but it can’t be left running forever. It’s like a computer with what we used to call a “resource leak,” or a faulty piece of code that leads the program to use more and more of the computer’s processing power every time it cycles until it crashes. Growth-based economics worked fine on paper, like the perfect pyramid scheme, as long as there was more room for the market to grow.

It looked like digital networks would provide more room at no cost, but it turns out the costs are high and room is fake. They accelerate extraction of the planet’s resources, and colonize our lived experience - our human time. These frictionless phenomena don’t exist, and neither do the systems of ownership and control that they direct. It’s just another map, written by people who don’t mean us any good. Frictionless sounded great at the time. Infinite unimpeded growth. Total convenience. Nothing uncomfortable or ambiguous.

Well, it’s time for a new game. One we play together, here in the real world. These may feel like chaotic times, but chaos is our friend. Enter the swirl. There are more opportunities for love, connection, compassion, and even resistance, in the swirl. The nooks, the crannies, the pockets the bumps. It’s not fiction. It’s friction.

They are not just the dangerous limits to growth, but the delightful limits on growth. Our way of modulating the pace, being right here and right now, where maps can’t show because they’re still uncharted, unnamed, and ineffable as the moment itself.

They can’t touch that. They don’t know we’re even here.

—

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Find the others. Tell them where we are.

Cut to the chase, my name is in the CC field of emails from my former literary agent, who used to publish an online journal in which a bunch of scientists and thinkers would answer questions about the future. Like, “what should we really be worried about?” or “what scientific concept would improve everyone’s cognitive toolkit?” The agent would start by sending the question to a group of maybe thirty of us — people from Brian Eno, Cory Doctorow, and me to Jared Diamond, Sam Harris, Jonathan Haidt, and also Marvin Minsky, Sergei Brin, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and (as we can plainly see now twenty five years later) right there in same CC section with the other fifty names…Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s not that we were supposed to “reply all” with our answers to the whole group. It’s more that the cc field of big names was there to help us all know that this was an impressive group of people with whom to be participating. It’s that sense of reputational power, and what we might compromise in order to get close to it, that characterizes my own brief brush with this crowd. I told some of this story in my book Survival of the Richest, but there was more context to it all that didn’t really fit in that book, so let me share it here.

What I’m hoping to show is that while there may be something like true evil in an Epstein or a Trump or a Ghislaine Maxwell, it may be too easy to simply alienate ourselves from them as if they were a different species. Certainly, the hundreds of men and even a few women who partook of the rape, torture, and apparent killings in Epstein’s world did not act like we would — but they may have been acting in ways that we could.

I’m thinking more along the lines of Hanna Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, that great atrocities are not committed by fanatical monsters, but ordinary people conforming to a system. She was referring to the unquestioning obedience to authority in Nazi Germany, such as soldiers following orders. But there’s another kind of obedience to a social order, or a permission structure that allows for people to do things that they know are wrong, but are still compelling on some other level. By calling Epstein and his conspirators purely evil, as if they were a different species of human altogether, we risk repressing the function of the inner voices and sensations in ourselves that keep us from surrendering to our own baser natures.

So, here’s my tale: I got invited to my first real New York scientist-philosopher grown-ups dinner party in the mid-90s, right around the time my first books were coming out. I was the kid in the room, the newcomer, who happened know about this new fad called the Internet. I was both scared of these people, and probably looking to challenge them a bit. Get them to remember me.

I don’t remember everyone who was there, but I distinctly remember Richard Dawkins sitting on a couch, — guest of honor — folding one of those little origami fortune teller things, then holding it up and saying “this is a meme.” He meant that the instructions for making one of those get passed around, like code, and then someone somewhere actually makes one. The people, he explained, are just carriers for the meme. We execute its instructions, like an organism following its genetic code or a computer running some lines of Python.

It didn’t make sense to me. My own book on viral media (Media Virus) was based on very different observations about our relationship to memes. For me, memes were just the code within media viruses, and better understood as “hidden agendas in popular culture.” The Rodney King tape may have contained powerful memes about police brutality and race relations, but the reason the tape became a phenomenon was our readiness as human beings. We had repressed this subject for too long, so we were triggered into a national conversation— and even riots— by the images that forced the issue into the light of day. The memes aren’t running us like software runs a computer; we use the memes the same way we use language or our bodies to express ourselves and enact change. We are conscious actors, not passive machines running code. Team Human, right?

Dawkins dismissed my argument as “wishful thinking.” And I was too insecure to press the point. About half an hour later, I hear some ruckus from over where Dawkins had been sitting. Naomi Wolf — author of The Beauty Myth, still quite respected by mainstream intelligentsia at the time, and one of the only women at the party who wasn’t there as a “plus one” — was refusing to submit to Dawkins’ reductive picture of reality.

“You mean there’s absolutely nothing going on here?” she asked. She felt his model of humans functioning like machines left no room for mystery, experience, will - not to mention the possibility of a soul or god. Dawkins and the other name-brand staunch materialist scientists were patronizing, even ridiculing her. The universe is empirical. We are just clusters of organic matter, responding to the illusion of consciousness. Any other frame of reference amounts to superstition or delusion. There’s nothing out there, or even in there.

I don’t know whether I was trying to defend Naomi or make my own mark, but I took a shot. I suggested evolution isn’t random selection, but maybe it’s life reaching toward something. Complexity, consciousness, compassion… We’re not just driven by genes and natural selection. The earliest human beings shared with one another, even when there was no personal benefit.

Dawkins and the others laughed. I was simply misinterpreting “reciprocal altruism.” Any empathy or urge to share is a stimulus generated by our DNA for its own selfish ends. Humans are just vehicles for our genes. Our genes our selfish, and we have no choice but to do as they say.

I tried to argue that scientism - unlike science - was a religion of its own. Great for engineers. But we do not assign meaning to things based on evidence. It’s a socially constructed system built over millennia. Only a community can ground objectivity into any real sense of purpose. Meaning is how we develop a sense of right and wrong. Dawkins and his crew rolled their eyes and laughed. He called me a “moralist.” Like that’s a bad thing.

I didn’t see that crowd again for a few years. Maybe my agent knew better than to invite me to another gathering for a while. But he did. It was a super special elite dinner in New York City, in maybe 1999 or 2000, that would be attended not just by those superstar scientists but by big tech CEOs like Steve Case of AmericaOnline, Jeff Bezos of Amazon bookstore, maybe Bill Gates, and so on.

I wish I could remember which ones were there, or I’d tell you. But I was such a GenXer punk I really didn’t care, or at least acted enough like I didn’t care that I avoided their tables and now I’ve actually forgotten. He invited me “plus one” which, given the cost and exclusivity of the dinner, meant a lot. He was trusting me, I assumed, to bring someone worthy of this crowd of science and tech luminaries.

So I invited the smartest, wittiest person I knew, the brilliant founder of an online literary culture zine. The minute I got through the door, the host grabbed me by the wrist, pulled me aside, and tore into me: “how dare you waste your ‘plus one’ on a lesbian.” Huh? I was stunned. He said “You’re a young writer, you’re supposed to raise the quotient in the room. Why do you think I gave you a plus one? Look around.”

He motioned to some of the tables. Young women, sitting with middle-aged men. There were a few founders with equally beautiful, well-dressed wives, but I understood what he meant. I was an East Village 20-something and was expected bring a hot date to help decorate the party and increase its apparent value. Raise the quotient.

I got really upset that night. I was ethical enough to know this whole scene was deeply fucked up, but young and insecure and ambitious enough to wonder if I was the fucked up one. Is this how guys are supposed to be? Is this why the girls in college seemed to go out with assholes? Is there something…evolutionary that I’m missing here?

Don’t worry. I didn’t fall for any of it. But I did make sense of it pretty quickly: how the belief that “there-is-nothing-going-on-inside-a-human-being” makes it easier to commoditize women in this way, measure a room of human attributes as a marketplace, and assume an almost eugenic understanding of human value and relationships. It was these kinds of experiences that pivoted me from a tech writer to a humanist, looking at how we maintain values in a landscape increasingly dominated by code — and men with these sick values.

So I wasn’t totally surprised 20 years later when I found out who had sponsored that online magazine where all of us scientists and philosophers were emailing our precious thoughts and punditry. Who had paid for that party I’d failed to decorate with the right arm candy?

Jeffrey Epstein. Duh. The same Jeffery Epstein who was funding the revival of eugenics and planned to seed hundreds of women with his own sperm. He had built dormitories for the purpose on his island. And now, photos were surfacing of Epstein and several of his young…escorts..together at a New York City party with tech millionaires and many of the very same scientists were rejecting citizenship in a moral universe as laughably deluded. Another photo showed up on Twitter with Daniel Dennett, Stephen Pinker, and Richard Dawkins himself flying to the TED conference on Epstein’s “Lolita Express.”

Now sure—anyone can end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the scientists Epstein chose to hobnob with weren’t selected at random. Their scientistic approach, interpreted through Epstein’s sociopathic lens, dovetailed perfectly with the values of domination and control. These are not thinking humans you are abusing. They are like vegetables. They use the same logic as slave-owners or Conquistadors: those are objects, might makes right, or the DNA made me do it. It’s banality of evil, on techno-scientific steroids.

I’ve traced this lineage of thought before. The way the scientists and engineers made themselves so vulnerable to the logic of the dominator and to the abuse and subjugation of women.

After all, the original premise of empirical science, as articulated by its forefather Francis Bacon, was hardly value-free; it was based on the subordination of nature and women. As he explained to his seventeenth-century benefactor, King James, nature would have to be forcibly penetrated to yield her secrets. “I will bind her to your service and make her your slave,” Bacon explained. “Nature must be taken by the forelock . . . lay hold of her and capture her . . . conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” Subject nature to the same sorts of torture as women on trial for witchcraft.

Francis Bacon was to King James what MIT Media Lab scientists were to Jeffrey Epstein. We will use scientific principles to support your domination of women and nature.

Nature was scary, dark, and female— a space of mystery. Empirical science could capture and tame this beastly force, quantifying its properties and rendering it inert. Scientists even joined the witch-burning frenzy. Witches were better healers than blood-letting male surgeons. Killing them got rid of their greatest competition. And acknowledging the power of black magic (even though they didn’t believe it) got them on good terms with the church, which was worried about godless scientific materialism.

They also internalized a chauvinism and disregard for alternative and embodied approaches to making meaning that have limited science to this day. Everything had to be measured in terms of mass, heat or some other metric. The quantification of our world contained and controlled everything that mattered, while ignoring the pesky, undefined aspects of reality that men of science didn’t want to mess with— especially emotions, meaning, ethics…consent?

Empirical science also conveniently separated causes from effects. Things acted upon each other, but were not understood to be in dynamic relationships. Something or someone was either a subject or an object, solute or solvent, predator or prey, man or woman, lord or peasant, master or slave. The further they could separate cause from effect, the less they had to look at what they were doing to whom.

This was perfect for colonialism. Scientific engineers armed the gunships, insulated the powerful from the impacts of their actions, and rationalized an ethos of extraction. This is the legacy of domination and control characterizing too much of the science industry to this day.

It’s how you get a biologist as brilliant as Richard Dawkins reducing the mysterious phenomenon of human consciousness to nothing more than a movie projected for us by our genes. Back at that party, Dawkins said he saw human beings as “survival machines— robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

Dawkins’s model of human-as-hardware, and other anti-human ones of Daniel Dennett or Stephen Pinker, won out in Silicon Valley. Their views were entirely more compatible with business models that depended on manipulating human beings instead of empowering them— exploiting them for profit rather than giving them opportunities for collective creativity. If people were really just passively responding to lines of genetic or cultural code, then why not be the ones writing that code and capitalizing off it?

Jeffrey Epstein liked and funded these scientists because they helped him formulate a picture of the world that gives cover to those who would exploit other human beings: as they see it - “people aren’t really alive or aware— they’re just behaving in service to their genetics. And, if you play your cards right, in service to your genetics.” Yeah, I’m talking you Elon.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga has been as “triggering” for me as anyone. As a theater kid working with grownups in the 70s, I had my fair share of unwanted touching and worse. And through those experiences, I learned what it feels like in your body when you’re not giving consent. It’s unique. It’s different. And it stays with you.

It’s the living human, somatic sensibility that something is wrong here. It’s the feeling I had watching Naomi get ridiculed — just one notch too sadistically — by those scientists. It’s the feeling I had at the Epstein-funded dinner party, when I was told I had brought the wrong kind of “plus one.” I never actually met the man (I didn’t even know who he was or that he’d funded that dinner. This was the mid-90’s before he was famous or even had an island. )

But I could feel what it would mean to submit to the energy of the dinner party he happened to have paid for. Yes, this inner sense is “spiritual, moral”….a delusion, even. But one we depend on not to sink into sociopathic behavior. Even the word - socio path - means socio disease, or a disease of society. If there is no society, no collective meaning — if that’s all delusion — then there is no disease. They don’t get that feeling in their body. Or if they do, they learn to ignore it until it just goes away. Or learn to come in over it - oomph - and convert the vulnerability into control or sadism.

Since the Epstein revelations, I’ve tried to understand the men who did that stuff. Who must have had the same spidey sense in their bellies but then went for it. It’s not that they’re constitutionally more evil than the rest of us. I think Hannah Arendt is right, and that it’s less a matter of having a truly sinister core than living within a power system or maybe “permission structure” that invites people to succumb to their baser natures. Living in our world right now, it could happen to any of us.

They know it’s wrong, but it starts almost innocently. “That young woman is interested you. She’s over 18, and interested in your ideas. Of course she finds you sexy…Ideas are sexy…” Then it gets incrementally more absurd or perverse or illegal or sadistic from there. And any time you question what’s happening…there are rich, important people, politicians, even scientists there telling you it’s okay. It’s okay! We’re not restricted by Puritan values here. Age of consent in Japan was only 13 until a year ago. Ancient Greeks yadda yadda…. This island is “self-sovereign” so the laws…. Look, that’s Alan Dershowitz over there, Prince Andrew over there, and even my pal Noam Chomsky says….

There’s no forgiving. I’m not going there. These are creeps. Rapists and, quite possibly, murderers who — even more triggering to anyone who has been abused — seem to keep getting away with it, while continuing to victimize their prey. In their view and that of the courts, the perpetrators are the victims, whose names must be redacted from the files.

What I am concerned with — what I always seem to be concerned with — is the ground. The de-humanized, hyper-rationalist, sociopathic permission structure condoning the rape of 12-year-old girls is the same permission structure for people to be executed in the street, authoritarian rule, desecration of the natural environment, genocide in the Middle East, slavery in Uighur province…

Because the rape, torture, and humiliation of young women at the hands of the oligarchic sociopaths impacts more than just their immediate victims. Those crimes are heinous enough in their own right. But the inability of their victims to win justice, the apparent ineffectuality of their testimony or the revelation of these crimes to accomplish anything is a public demonstration of the dominators’ power. It is meant to serve as evidence of the impotence of our collective will to act on the victims’ or our own behalf. It tells us that the feeling we have inside — the impulse in our bodies that knows right from wrong, is not worth feeling, hearing or acted upon. That conscience or basic humanity is futile. The violence is their proof and celebration of a cruel, godless world of might makes right. Anything else, is a delusion.

And it all comes back to that argument I supposedly lost to Richard Dawkins about memes. It’s not about the argument, the ideas, or even the memes. Hannah Arendt used to say that no political idea justifies violence. We can take that further. No idea is more important than the comportment or manner in which it is expressed or conveyed. Even if you’re right, if your idea can “win”, how are you going to use it? To humiliate a woman at a party? To earn the approval of cruel men, professional points from peers, or funding from a wealthy patron?

Your memes don’t matter, your genes don’t matter. Nobody cares except you. I promise, as a former “insight junkie” and current professor of media theory, I know the allure of a complex mental construction, from selfish genes to affective altruism. A good one can even get you laid — at least on the right island. As long as it’s an idea that negates the essentially social, mutually negotiated, consent-bound dance of love to which we have all been invited.

To join the dance, you don’t need to bring any idea at all. You don’t need to overcome that warning from inside your belly, because it’s not that kind of party, and it’s not asking you cut yourself off from your inner, felt awareness of how consent, connection, and compassion really work. It’s asking you to open up to it, and let it lead.

That’s because deep down there, way down? That’s not you at all.

That’s Team Human.

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Find the others. Tell them where we are.

But I think we all sense now that things have shifted from “something is coming” to “we’re soaking in it.” We’re over the edge of the event horizon and in a different state of being. The other shoe has dropped. People are getting killed. The world has reoriented from the United States as ally to United States as part of a new axis of authoritarian powers. My European friends have sent their condolences.

On the one hand, I’m simply embarrassed. (I was negotiating to do a talk in Berlin, but after Trump told the rest of NATO that none of their countries came to our aid after 9–11, I just caved and told them I’d do the talk for free. Why do they even want to hear from an American, right now?)

But more to the point, I’m as afraid and confused as any of you. And like those of you who are filling my inbox with questions right now, I, too, am asking “what should we do?” How do we prepare for the next assault on our liberties, on another American city, on another human being trying to shield the vulnerable from state violence? What is next? It’s going to get worse, right? Should I buy a gun? What do we do?

Preparation is good and real, and I’ll get to some things we can do at the end of this piece. But this focus on preparing for “what may come” can also distract us — especially if it takes our attention off what is actually here right now. About anything more, we are really just guessing.

And this guessing and speculation can separate us from the moment, and our power. Sometimes, it may be healthier and more effective to respond to what is than strategizing for what may be. It spares us from projecting a logic or intention onto the actions of whoever or whatever is working against us. Putting ourselves into their mind — Trump’s mind? — is an act of mimesis, or mirroring, that creates some simulation of an inner turmoil that makes no logical sense to anyone else, lacks any true predictive power, and only immerses us further into that bizarre world view. What’s Trump thinking? I don’t know. What if we don’t need to know?

The alternative — sticking with what is actually on the ground and already here — safeguards against falling into an ends-justifies-the-means misstep, ourselves. We don’t strike out at the phantom attack preemptively, like an immune system attacking the body’s own cells as if they were pathogens. Or, worse, look at the human beings who have been coerced into their hostile postures as the enemy, rather than confused future allies.

When we are aiming to bring our very best selves to the moment we’re in, whatever we do has to be correct, aligned, and congruent with our values. If you are not doing it in the moment, you are not doing it.

The question that people keep asking me now is “what do we do about this?” And while I think there are many approaches to activism and resistance we can take right now, I want to step back from the “what action do we take” to “what comportment can we embody?” In other words, how do we metabolize this moment? And from there, we can begin to consider what actions or approaches that comportment may engender.

So bear with me. You can act in ten minutes from now if you want to. The problems and chaos will still be there for you to engage with when you get to the end of this piece. I promise. But stay with me for a moment here if you can. If there’s no one crashing through the door, or within earshot crying for help. Let’s take a minute.

Now I never lead this embodied-practice-somatic-guided-visualization stuff, but for a second it may behoove us to “be here now.” So, humor me. Just take a breath in through your nose, and out your mouth. And if you can stand it, just one more time. Thanks.

I’ve been living through a really tough patch lately. You may have, too — as everything seems to happen at once these days. For me, the anguish seems to be coming from the bottom up, the top down, and in from the sides all at once.

My daughter got really sick this month. Hospitalized and everything. They’ve now concluded it’s Crohn’s, a digestive disease — yes the same kid who got surgery for endometriosis last year. And I’m trying to be “always on” for her. Having a kid is like gaining an extension to your nervous system over which you have no control. All vulnerability. And of course I chalk up these so-called auto-immune diseases to environmental toxins, microplastics, packaged foods, antibiotics, forever chemicals. I’ll take time out from protesting those things to help my kid deal with their effects.

Likewise, I’m trying to be present for her, while at the same time seeing the footage from Minnesota — people getting rounded up by deputized Proud Boys; Venezuelan sailors mowed down while clutching to their boat debris; Democrats getting indicted for basic opposition; fake news leading to presidential declarations about Somalians embezzling billions of dollars from daycare funds; Greenland. And all the email and messages from people wanting to know what to do.

And I’m sure all of you are in similar positions, with loved ones confronting the fallout of our artificial civilization, and concentric rings of friends and allies increasingly impacted or at the very least unsettled by what they see happening around them, and in their name.

It is authoritarianism when the government, the president, and the attorney general say that protestors killed by federal agents were terrorists engaged in massacres, that Alex Pretti was an assassin, or that Renee Good “ran over” an officer. When the government makes statements that they and we all know are not true, and they know we know they know it’s not true, but still say it anyway? That’s authoritarianism. It triggers lots of stuff: that abused child feeling, that powerlessness, the sense of horror. But it’s not something that could happen or will happen. This is happening. We’re soaking in it.

We can’t help but ask ourselves and each other: what is next and what should I DO? Between the attorney general telling Minnesota they will withdraw federal agents from the state if the governor turns over their voter rolls, 15 million Americans living in their cars, the collapse of the NATO alliance, Gaza, the extra-judicial beating and killing of citizens like Alex Pretti and Renee Good in the street by masked regime-funded gunmen, the conflation of loyal opposition with domestic terrorism, the threat of an Insurrection Act that could even postpone the midterm elections? Not to mention the environment, which is seemingly on the back burner. Or Larry Ellison’s “Project Stargate” to collect everyone’s DNA and use AI to surveil us biometrically; the Pax Silica plan to maintain control of the AI minerals supply chain; Trump’s bank account in Qatar where he’s collecting both Venezuelan oil money and the billion dollar contributions from authoritarian states for his Middle East Board of Peace? This is it.

I’ve got friends busy comparing the pace of current events with arc of Nazi history in order to project their next move. Is the government intentionally terrorizing people in cities to provoke violence and have an excuse to institute martial law? ICE is buying the old Pep Boys warehouse just up the Hudson to process prisoners. Does that mean New York City is next?

Another way of imposing authoritarianism is to give victims false victories. Try outrageous things and then pull back. Like, shoot some citizens, then withdraw a bit and replace the guy in charge. Or threaten invasion of Greenland, and then compromise by just claiming all the rare earth minerals. Show the victim you can kill them, and then “reward” them with mere abuse. When the oppressor “backs down,” it’s strategic. It means we’ve become ready to accept their terms — which can still change at any time. After all, the bully doesn’t actually beat us up if we give him our lunch money.

We’re all floating somewhere on the multi-axis spectrum between rage and despair, futility and action, or resistance and helplessness. But the gestalt reaction to being terrorized can become the mirror image of inflicting terror. The somatic response, the clench, the inward spasm of fear and rage only creates the same violent impulse in ourselves. Or if not violent, antagonistic, dopamine-driven, out for vengeance, in need of fulfillment, retribution, completion. Like a mousetrap just begging to snap. Gimme an excuse. I have to do something.

The Customs and Border Protection agency itself (the one whose officers killed Pretti) was formed in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9–11. See? Terrorism works best when it gets its victims to turn on one another, with violence. So let’s hang on a second. Let’s be with this before we do something about this.

We have to metabolize what’s happening in the moment in order to respond, rather than react. Be with it. Feet on the ground. No alienation. This is happening. It’s kind of a bad trip. So make like a mushroom and metabolize, breathe, integrate, then extend.

Metabolize this yourself, individually, so you can find someone else and start to do it collectively. So yeah, call your friend or, better, visit your neighbor. Meet your neighbor. Not in panic, not looking for reassurance, but as that person they will want to turn to for how to be present and alive in this moment.

For it is these connections on the ground — these friendships and interdependencies between real people — that are the greatest inoculation against panic and false polarities. This connection to others is easiest way to stay in the real world rather than escape to the abstracted landscape of ideologies (however enlightened those ideologies might be). Most important, these connections make us tactically defensible as a community against ICE, agitators, fascist gangs…whatever.

Your extreme local, embodied community is your only truly real one. Think of it this way: Whose bodies are closest to yours when you’re sleeping at night? Those are the ones who can keep you safe. You have to know these people, care about these people, or even just recognize these people.

When we know each other, our relationships transcend whatever economic or class or other artificial distinctions have been erected between us. That’s what all those distinctions for. Likewise, all the figures on the TV or pinging us from the cloud are there to distract us and isolate us from our interconnectedness here on the ground.

But let me tell you this: it’s all ground. The figures aren’t real. Even Donald Trump is ground — more so every day. The figures are just extruded ground. Substance phantomized into image. Ghosts empowered by our attention, our desire, and our fear.

Yes, they can be useful. Gods, laws, ideas…they’re what gave rise to ethics, the Enlightenment, democracy itself. But they are abstractions, amorphous, and require real agreement and social construction from people in order to function. They are second-order phenomena. Without ground, the figures don’t help. Without community, democracy can’t even happen. We are the ground. There’s nothing separate.

That’s why I’m taking a step back from activism or reaction, and I’m instead asking we start by just aiming for basic coherence, on an individual level, and then with the people around us.

Who are the people around you?

Who are they? What do they need? What can they offer? I used the recent storm as an excuse to reach out. I put a note and a copy of Team Human on everyone’s door on the floor of my building. Hey, this is me. I’m Douglas. I write books. Thought I’d introduce myself. I’m here if you need anything.

Gotta start somewhere. And it’s not political or lefty to find out if there’s an elder person or someone who needs to be checked up on in a storm or a blackout. Or if you live out in the real world, who has water? Who has a chainsaw? Who knows first aid? I know, that sounds advanced. Like real mutual aid. So how about do it the easy way: Knock on someone’s door and ask for something. An egg. Borrow an egg. And bring one back the next day.

Know these people. Know their faces. This is your squad. You think a war is coming? Okay, it’s your platoon. The more you know and depend on these people, the more resilient you are against any adversary — be it storm or stormtrooper.

Create the conditions for community support, safety, and awareness. Then the good stuff happens. I lived in Greenwich Village in the early 90s at the peak of the AIDS crisis when gay men were getting chased and murdered in the street in great numbers. Those of us who had apartments on ground floors started putting pink triangles in our windows, so gay men knew they could seek refuge with us. They had a place to run. No one else knew what the symbol even meant. But the more pink triangles that went up, the more people realized that practically every home was part of this effort. Not a “movement” toward something, but a state of being. Of presence. Of readiness.

The movement, the activism, the ideals arise from that. They are the figures that emerge from the ground we have prepared and embodied.

And they are local. In Minneapolis, people are joining Signal messaging groups by the block. All the organizing apps were removed from the App Store for fomenting insurrection; so people were forced to create their own hyper-local messaging groups — at the scale of just one city block. Each one has an organizer who can report up to the neighborhood group, and so on. Not everyone needs to be everything to everyone all the time. The network takes care of that.

The more networked we are, the more specialized we can be. The more grounded we are in our area of expertise — be it foraging, immigration, biodiesel, childcare, or local councils.

Without connection to the people and communities where you live, all of these stresses and TV images are food for abstraction. No ground, just figure. And then you are on the path to dehumanization. Before long, you’ll be suffering from some version of Steven Miller’s hallucination of white people being replaced by Somali killer insects.

The only direction that goes is toward force. Brute force. Step on the bugs like that sadistic boy in fourth grade we all knew who would pour lighter fluid down an ant hill, set the colony ablaze, then watch all the burning ants come running out. That’s Steven Miller’s set and setting. Those who don’t agree with him are “Un-humans.” Can we resist the temptation to go there? That truly bad trip of might-makes-right?

“Might makes right” is not even an argument; it’s just the excuse to get to express the sadistic urge. That compromised, vicarious way of experiencing ground through the annihilation of the other. The “dom” energy, except it’s not play. There’s no consent. Just the bam bam bam bam.

Any of us could go to the sadistic extreme. And the best way to prevent it is also the best defense against those who have gone there. Find the others. Join Team Human.

You want to know things you can do? After you’ve grounded yourself, met your neighbors, established bonds? How do you want to help? What would you like to be able to offer? What can you already offer?

You can start by fostering and weaving the fabric of community and interconnection and mutual aid. You don’t have to be on some frontline. Make sandwiches. Creating communities of mutual aid changes how people think about policy and politics. It changes how people vote, who they elect into roles of leadership, which in turn changes America from a place that threatens the sovereignty of other countries to one that understands itself as a member of the global community. We transform ourselves from a country worthy of international boycott into a place people around the world want to visit and support.

Politically? Well 15 republicans crossing over could stop all this. Engage. Join a local chapter of Indivisible. Call your senator and tell them to stop funding the madness. Or, yes, go outside. Take the streets. Join a general strike. Be creative, peaceful, enthusiastic, united activists. With the teachers, ministers, parents, police — yes police — and other protesters willing to do democracy with their embodied presence.

I understand the current administration won a mandate to deport undocumented aliens. But it’s become an excuse to perpetrate violence and create the conditions for authoritarian rule, domination of women, subjugation of people of color, and extraction of the world’s remaining wealth by an elite of billionaires who see us as expendable, lower forms of life. As bad as if we were indigenous.

And what are they really fighting? Us. Team Human. The very bonds of community and mutual aid. Our neighborhoods. A person helping another one. Be that person. A person helping another one.

That’s the most radical, meaningful, sacred, powerful thing you can do. That happens in the moment. In the right now. It’s not a strategy based on speculative assumptions.

It is the first, last and most fundamental premise of self-rule. Find the others. Become the ground.

But every once in a while, when I’m out in the real world (or more often, in the fake world of podcast or TV interviews) I’ll find myself feeling regarded as absolutely crazy. And the more I explain or justify or contextualize or recount the actual history of my claims, the more crazy I sound. I come off like a conspiracy theorist revealing an organized plot—just for suggesting that elites throughout time have been creating and enforcing systems of control and embedding them so far into the fabric of our constructed world that they have become invisible. Just…the way things are. It’s as if by revealing the hidden or lesser-known reasons by which this all came to be, I’m just revealing myself as paranoid.

And I’m not talking about left vs right here. I can go to South Dakota or Alabama or Tennessee and find plenty of MAGA people who recognize the systemic effects of choices made long ago. They may have different solutions, like eliminating vaccines or deporting Mexicans instead of modulating our engagement with them, but even Steven Bannon’s narrative for late stage hyper-capitalism under the technocratic elite—and presumably that of his millions of listeners—is consonant with my own suspicions about the tech billionaires’ true intentions for the future of government, humanity, and life on earth. I’m actually more comfortable debating someone who draws different conclusions from the same observations, or who makes completely different observations but is at least looking.

Let me tell you what happened.

I was a guest on the companion vodcast for one of those high budget post-apocalyptic streaming TV series. There’s a bunch of them out there these days, and a good number of them are based on, or at least inspired by my book Survival of the Richest. And while it turns out you don’t have to get rights to a non-fiction book in order to use its stories or ideas, it’s nice that the creators of some of them do a little call-out when they’re giving an interview or invite me to a panel at a festival. Paid or not, I’m still seeing my ideas on the screen, which is totally cool.

These days, it’s almost always the same genre: billionaires going underground or into a bunker or onto an island retreat in order to survive or celebrate the end of the world. The Billionaire Bunker genre.

So last month, I got invited to be on the vodcast companion show for a Hulu series called Paradise. It’s one of the kind like Silo, Fallout, The Ark: a billionaire or corporation with tremendous foresight develops an impossibly gargantuan fallout shelter for some subset of people to perpetuate the human project. And it’s a whole society in there, a whole world, with artificial light and stores and farms and corrupted leaders and an underclass.

This one, Paradise, is about an underground city of 25,000 people with a fake sky and roads and buildings and a college and everything. The ultimate next-level perfect eco-city tech bro wet dream utopian American society, with a fake president who just takes his orders from the tech billionaire who owns the place (a woman in this show) and—responding to the questions I raise in my book—her main challenge is to maintain the allegiance of the security force. But unlike the other shows in this genre, the bunker they’ve made doesn’t look like a giant missile silo or an artificial shopping mall. It’s an impossibly giant town with LED sunlight, roads, cars, and wide open spaces. Storywise, it’s pretty much the same premise as the others—like, what happened to the outside world? Is everyone dead? Is it safe to check? And who is actually in charge down here, who really made this place, and was there an ulterior motive…?

I’ve done these kinds of interviews since Survival of the Richest came out. Everyone wants to know about what the billionaires are really planning, as if the things they tell us they are planning aren’t already crazy enough. And this interview with the lovely wife of the series’ star, starts like any other. She announces me as this important professor who studies billionaires and bunkers and wrote a book on the phenomenon. Then she starts by asking me, is the show real? Do billionaires really have plans for bunkers in case of a disaster?

I’ve only got 15 minutes, so I figure I’ll get right to the point: Yes, I explained, they have plans. But the power of this show is not its ability as science fiction to predict the future. It’s about right now. We are already living in a world where the ultra rich are insulating themselves from the rest of us. The show is really just a metaphor for what is actually happening.

She thought I meant billionaires are building bunkers, and maybe hanging out in them for fun.

Yes yes, I told her, most wealthy people are outfitting their existing homes with modifications to make them sustainable and somewhat defensible in the event of a catastrophe of some kind. Yes, Peter Thiel has a compound in New Zealand, and Mark Zuckerberg has a giant estate that also serves as a defensible fortress in Maui. Why not? If you have the money, and understand you’re not going to be able to hold out there forever, it’s not so unreasonable to have a place to try to protect yourself and your loved ones against the next pandemic, water crisis, or civil war. Good luck with that, but go for it.

The show, nor my book, are really about that, I tried to explain. This is much bigger. Realer. Current.

I went on, and explained how right now some tech billionaires — including Marc Andreesen (Netscape) and Reid Hoffman(Linked In) — are part of an investing group attempting to buy a large amount of land in Solano County to build a utopian city for themselves and their friends called California Forever: a utopian, sustainable eco-city, totally walkable to the tech headquarters. Instead of fixing San Francisco or Oakland, just retreat as if to a bunker and build your own gated community.

“California Forever?” Her eyes were widening. Taking me in, but also something else going on in her face. Like, incredulity?

No, she had never heard of Solano or California Forever.

That’s real? She asked. As if she didn’t know or, more likely I was thinking, wanted to make sure the audience didn’t think this was presumed knowledge.

So of course I dug myself in deeper. It’s not the only project of its kind, I told her. There’s Neom, the zillion-dollar megacity they’re trying to build in Saudi Arabia? A 100-mile long strip of mirrored city for 9 million people. Built from nothing and totally sustainable, except for having to displace the Bedouins who had been living there sustainably for the past few thousand years. It is as expensive and improbable as a Mars dome. Or the city in Paradise. Or have you heard of Próspera, the autonomous island “nation” tech-bros created in Honduras to experiment with technology illegal anywhere else?

She tried to get it back on track. “But billionaires have plans for bunkers. What have you seen?”

I’ve seen a couple of plans for bunkers, I said. But the story here is that the real world is becoming a bunker. At least for the wealthy. They don’t believe there are enough resources for everyone. Their scenarios all point to imminent disaster. So they are busy accumulating as much money and as many resources as possible now in preparation for the coming collapse.

She was getting quiet now. As if this was all new. She was nice. She looked almost worried for me.

I knew I only had five, maybe ten minutes left. How far back do I go to explain this story?

“Right. Well, think of it this way: you’ve heard of disaster capitalism?” Blank.

”Okay, well, when a disaster happens somewhere, very wealthy people and companies are often able to capitalize on that. Buy distressed properties, take over collapsing businesses. The disaster turns out to be a good thing, at least for investors from hedge funds, or sovereign wealth funds who can afford to buy up public assets.”

“Sovereign wealth funds?” she asked. Like those of us without PhDs need some orientation here. Right. Fair enough.

“Sovereign wealth funds. You know resource rich nations who sell something like oil and don’t want to share the profits with their people? They create these big investment funds with the money, and then look for assets to buy. Apartments in New York, soccer teams, Trump crypto…whatever. They need ways for their capital to grow. Stuff to invest in. Problem is, there’s more money than there is stuff to buy.”

“Sovereign wealth funds and super rich investors get more opportunities to buy up assets when bad things happen and people need to sell them. So why not create those conditions right now? Like, disaster capitalism but enacted intentionally. That’s why they’d raise tariffs, put farms or ports out of business, and then buy up the land or ports or schools or highways. Take these public places and turn them into private assets. Places they own and control, like the private utopian city in your show, in Paradise.”

“Really?” I saw it in her eyes. She was thinking, is he one of those….crazy people? I could hear it just listening to myself. There was just too much to pack into 15 minutes. Summarizing it or, worse, assuming any knowledge just made me sound crazier.

“All I’m saying is that your show about a tech billionaire building a private city to hide from the rest of the world while it decays into Mad Max or The Road? That’s not science fiction. It’s what we’re seeing right now. It’s how they experience the world.”

“But why?” She asked. Or something like that. I knew I had lost her. Or that she felt this was just too much for her audience to swallow. Or maybe she was simply drawing me out for entertainment value? I knew there was no easy way to make this make sense. I kept thinking I would touch bottom. That I’d reach ground with her, and the rest of it would cohere.

I tried to explain how the wealthy were trapped in a system that required exponential growth (because of the interest-bearing currency we use). And they’re getting nervous because they can’t find ways to get further up the pyramid. That’s why they’re so intent on growing the AI industry at any cost, getting all regulation out of the way by undermining states’ rights or even the European Union.

She just looked at me. Worried. And the more I tried to explain, the further I strained what credibility I had left.

I lost her way back at “sovereign wealth fund.” I shouldn’t have used the term. It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie. Are there really such things? Or is that 9-11 conspiracy theory? The whole premise of a sovereign wealth fund sounds like a conspiracy. In fact, all finance sounds like conspiracy if you try to explain it out loud: Remember the mortgage crisis? Goldman Sachs sold baskets of mortgages to investors, while simultaneously betting against their solvency. They were selling investments they hoped would tank. That’s how they would cash in.

Sovereign wealth funds. Privatizing public assets. Billionaires working in collusion with government to deregulate AI and build Project Stargate, a global genomic surveillance apparatus.

I heard the words coming out of my mouth. and I could tell I sounded crazy to this woman. PhD or not. I mean, I could have gone back to the Knights Templar, the invention of central currency, City of London… The historical proof points sound even worse.

I tried to make it plainer. The billionaires are not imagining underground cities after a nuclear war, but creating private cities deep within our real ones right now. Think Sao Paolo, or a gated and highly militarized mini-city inside a big one. Like the walled palace in a medieval city, surrounded by guards. Or South Africa before apartheid. Most of the Middle East. That’s not a science fiction future, it’s what’s happening right now. What they’re building right now. The ultra wealthy are creating walled gardens, while draining what’s left of the common wealth, and getting us accustomed to seeing the military being used against civilians today because they’ll be using these troops to protect their enclaves from the rest of us tomorrow.

I could almost read her mind now. Who booked this guy? How do we wrap this segment? I pivoted back to get to a nice ending.

“At least in the show,” I explained, “we find out the real world may have not been fully destroyed. People got along okay up on the surface, even after the disaster. So maybe the billionaires are vastly underestimating us human beings. Taking themselves off the playing field by retreating into bunkers may be the best thing they could do for us.”

So I managed to get into stuff that made me sound more Team Human and a bit less Survival of the Richest. But the experience was agitating me. Making me…concerned. Initially, for myself. Have I gone off the deep end? Just describing the function of a sovereign wealth fund sounds like conspiracy theory. Or where corporations come from. Or wage labor. Or how capitalism works.

And that’s when it hit me: we are that far down this road. I was still talking to her about her show and the apocalyptic billionaires, while also, inwardly, trying to reassure myself that just because I obviously sound crazy to her doesn’t mean I am crazy. It’s the world that’s crazy. The series of steps that those in power have taken over the past five-hundred-or-so years to maintain their hold over the economy, the law, the culture and—by extension—the real things of this world, have grown so convoluted that to describe it is to recount the history of the way a sociopathic civilization gets constructed.

And in that moment, God’s honest truth, I thought about you. And how I could use the same logic I was using to console myself, to reassure myself, to console and reassure you, too.

You are not crazy.

We are being gaslit by the constructed world. It’s the same way we grow accustomed to the necessity of owning an automobile, simply because our jobs and homes were placed at distances where we need an automobile to get back and forth—forgetting that these places were zoned by automobile industry lobbyists so that we would need to buy cars. The landscape is crazy. Those of us who see it for what it is, who know its origins, who know that it is constructed? We are the sane ones here.

Only in this case, it’s our convoluted money system that has convinced billionaires and the investor class that the only way for them to survive is for them to privatize the world, hoard the remaining resources, and lock the rest of us out. Peter Thiel believes that those of us who point this out are, literally, satanic beings, pulling wealthy winners like himself back into the mud, and preventing his ascension to the next level. He says this out loud. This isn’t conjecture.

So no, you’re not crazy. Neither am I. This is actually happening. And these events, these schemes, are indeed crazier than a sci-fi series. At least on TV they have some reason for going underground or up into space. We are doing this to ourselves, in a completely unnecessary and avoidable way.

I’ve been researching this history for the past thirty years. Mainly, in an effort to document the fact that this is a created reality, based on both a few false premises about human nature, as well as a few unnecessarily aggressive, dominating styles of control. These choices eventually turn into assumptions and these inventions eventually turn into institutions. To see them this way, to denature them, to point to their origins and inventedness and the intentions behind them is to look crazy.

The reason they think we are crazy is because we are coming to see how the choices that led us here were arbitrary. We could be doing things differently. We’re blowing up children, poisoning the water, and killing the planet for no good reason.

We are not the crazy ones here. The situation’s not unclear, it’s just absurd. We are living in a constructed world—a built environment so convoluted that accepting its premises means gaslighting ourselves.

And I’ve seen a few comments here or on my YouTubes asking why I’m so into this esoteric stuff right now—particularly when the world is facing so many real, on-the-ground, actual challenges. Genuine violence, starvation, suffering, slavery, abuse in the moment. Loss of cultures, languages, species, habitats. Colonialism—not just as some abstract concept—but an ongoing exploitation, taking ever-new forms, disguising itself as populism while it breaks what’s left of civics, a social safety net, or international cooperation.

And even though there are occasional setbacks to the twin monsters of authoritarianism and Neo-liberalism, the war between the two only distracts us from the rapidly accelerating crises threatening us all.

Things seem hopeless, I get that. And some of the most informed environmentalists I know say we’re past the point of no return; my political science colleagues argue the world has tipped toward at least a half-century of globally dominant dictatorships; my fellow media and technology theorists think AI is going to destroy human cognition and psychological coherence whether or not Artificial General Intelligence is ever achieved. The collapse of civilization as we know it seems not only inevitable, but like it may have already happened. It feels like we’re already over the edge of the cliff, noticing the wind rushing by around us as we descend, and maybe just mustering the courage to look down.

So how, facing this urgent, inevitable certainty of—at best—crisis but, more likely, doom… how am I here offering such a diet of “weird” along with substance? Isn’t this more a moment for me to step up in my persona of Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics instead of the psychonautically informed hope fiend?

But it precisely the urgency and inevitability of our situation that calls for us to shake something loose. To see things…differently. Call to the outliers. If all of our most logical faculties, or our standard tools for evaluating our situation point to bad outcomes, then maybe we need to employ some non-standard tools. And that’s even more than I’m asking for here; it’s above and beyond the mere “supposing” I’m trying to initiate. I’m not asking we get all the way figuring out our best new strategies right here and right now. I’m just asking us to achieve the preconditions. Let’s even just get to a place of psycho-social readiness.

That’s not so easy to do when it feels like we’re staring through the windshield of a car accelerating toward a concrete wall. The closer we get, the more the wall fills our field of vision until that’s all there is. That’s the feeling right now, between domestic troop deployments calculated to provoke fear or anger, economic policies structured to force farmers into foreclosure while transferring another few trillion dollars of collective wealth to the top .1%, or America’s withdrawal from any form of global collaboration over energy, health, or pollution.

The resulting state of fear and paralysis is an intentional byproduct. Something like “shock and awe,” but really just traditional ‘psyops’: the“psychological operations” that one country would carry out on the population of its adversary in a war to soften their resolve or distract them from good warring. Keep the people in a state of panic until they go numb, or—better—begin to direct the fear and anger against others. Just help them find someone else to hurt more than they do, or to blame for the imminent collision. Convince them that there is no future, only a past when things were better, and to which we can somehow return.

When people are in a state of trauma, or bad PTSD, their eyes lock in. That’s what EMDR therapy is all about, where they have the patient follow LEDs with their eyes left and right, while thinking about the traumatic event. It loosens up their eyes and, correspondingly, loosens up their brain to look at the story in other ways. To change their relationship to what happened. Put some play in the wheel. Leave things up for re-interpretation. Unlock the trauma so it can metabolized and transformed from a psychic scar of trapped energy into new possibilities and potentials.

That’s the same thing that these magical moments, inklings of awe, reconnections to each other, or the divine, or “the everything” do. They’re like the deja vu that helps Neo recognize a glitch in the matrix, or when Katniss shoots an arrow at sky in Hunger Games to reveal it’s just a dome. Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is a way out or—better—through. All you have to do is tilt the picture a new way, so you can distinguish between the actual limits and those that have been imposed by people and institutions who don’t want us to even try (either because they think it’s not possible, or because it will undermine their own efforts to exploit widespread doom for their own self-interest). So they use media, religion, economics, and even hard evidence to lock down the inevitability of doomsday—all the while building spaceships, underground shelters, and arks of the covenant (I kid you not) for their own escape.

Whether we are mentally trapped in a simulation or simply stalled by a propagandistically curated wall of facts, we need to be able to consider alternatives. To unlock our gaze, and free up our minds. And these strange but increasingly common and provable phenomena—from autistic kids demonstrating ESP on the Telepathy Tapes to the Practical Magic of Mitch Horowitz, to the demonstrated retro-causality theories of Rod Sutherland, or Julian Barbour showing how half of time since the big bang is going backwards, they crack open the mind for a moment of possibility. They make us go, huh? If a hundred people take a test, and then fifty of them are told to study for the test after it’s over, those people will end up having done better on the test. Huh? The studying somehow trickles backwards through time?

I know, half of you already don’t believe me. Even that’s fine. Don’t bother Googling. Just wrapping our heads around this Mobius strip of possibility flips a switch. It’s like when you show a dog something it doesn’t understand, and it tilts its head to the side, as if it will understand things better looking from a different angle? That’s the state we want to go for. That place of confusion. Of living in-between the inevitabilities. Suddenly uncommitted to a reality tunnel and willing to choose or even create a new one. It’s not fantasy, but rather, “is there a better way of framing what I am experiencing now?” Reframed, like at the end of a movie where they flash back through all the moments that you now understand differently.

Or even before that part when you have a new frame. The space of possibility. Of being able to suppose…anything. Just suppose. Just open your mind. Open your skull. How long can you hold that? Without succumbing to terror? Hold onto the truth that no one knows what the fuck is going on here? What made us, what are we here for, why is there so much pain and suffering, what if….?

What if…?

It’s hard to hold onto that. Usually, when people get zapped into this place, when the surface illusion of one of the prevailing systems of thought is pierced, we rush to create some new “sense” and flip into hardened religion or conspiracy theory. That’s when I found Jesus! That’s when I knew they were out to get us!

That’s just as debilitating as being trapped in the original hopeless conundrum. You have the moment of opportunity, but then surrender it to the first fantasy or nightmare that comes along. Like a person succumbing to a bad trip or one of those first seductive or scary Bardos along the way to the white light. That’s MAGA world, poor things, with 5G towers and nano vaccines controlling behavior, Jewish space lasers, HAARP weather station-induced earthquakes, or Venezuelan remote election hacking. And that stuff isn’t even as weird as actual remote viewing, dark matter, inter-dimensional travelers, or shooting a fly out of the air with my fingers.

That state of openness is hard to maintain. There are many casualties of learning to see or un-see this way. Fallen fellow travelers, from Russell Brand and Naomi Wolf to Alex Jones. They went too quickly from huh? to aha! Pointing the finger at their new villains. Too secure they know what’s going on, they replace wonder with worship of one kind or another.

The current neo-fascist, technofeudalist, billionaire oligarchic simulation has no tolerance for the weird or wonderful. The premise of their escape plans, for their sealed off eco-villages and Mars colonies and eugenic civilizations, is that they can account for everything: the ventilation, the soil matrix, the social codes, the diet, the water treatment. Environmental disaster is the excuse, but the aspirations is the same: America 2.0, hatched ex nihilo, as if from nothing, and—more important—accounting for everything. No surprises. No wiggle room. No magic. No women, for that matter. Just robots and little girls.

There’s no magic to it. Everything has to be figured out, from vertical farming to regenerative systems. As if the complexity of life can be recreated from a sterile starting place more easily than tweaked back into balance right here in the real world. Pave over the living planet and live above it, as if a moss could grow on a plastic-sheathed tree trunk, or a gut biome can thrive on packaged protein powders. And it never works. No matter how well they lay down their foundation, there’s always cracks in the pavement. And something sprouts through it. Unaccounted for. Differently alive, in spite of everything.

Reality is weirder than these simulations. Weirder and better and more powerful and sustainable and regenerative and sexy and fun. Yeah, fucking is even more fun than blowing up a Venezuelan fishing boat. I promise you it is. I’ve never blown up a Venezuelan fishing boat, but I know in my bones it’s not as much fun as good sex, or singing in the shower, or rolling in the grass, or seeing the stars. I feel certainty about that.

But that’s besides the point. All I’m trying to get across here is that when things seem impossibly bad or inevitable, we have the option of considering the impossible. So challenge the evidence. Find the cracks in the pavement. Tilt your head to the side like a dog, and welcome the state of confusion.

Embrace the absurdity, and stop making sense for long enough to actually sense what’s happening here.

The way they do that is with an induced form of disaster capitalism, where they intentionally crash the economy in order to have some control over what remains. So the function of tariffs, for example, is to bankrupt businesses or even public services in order to privatize and then control them. Stall imports, put the ports out of business, and then let a sovereign wealth fund purchase the ports. Or as is happening right now: use tariffs to bankrupt soybean farmers, who have to foreclose on their farms so that private equity firms can purchase the farmland as a distressed asset, then hire the farmers who used to own and work that land as sharecroppers.

What I explained was that the kleptocratic elite, in collaboration with the current White House administration, are engaged in a controlled demolition of this civilization because they realize the pyramid is collapsing and they don’t have faith that there will be enough left to feed and house everyone. The best they can do is earn a ton of money, buy a lot of land, control an army, and get people accustomed to seeing that army deployed. That’s what we’re watching on TV and on our city streets, and why so many Americans voted against the current administration. It was a resounding “what the fuck?”

But I briefly mentioned something about AI and employment that I want to get into now. See, it’s not coincidence that AI is emerging at this same moment in our civilization’s history. As Lewis Mumford observed, new technologies are often less the cause of societal changes than they are the result. Culture is like a standing wave, creating a vacuum or readiness for a new medium or technology. If we really are at the end of capitalism—the end of this eight or nine-hundred year process of abstraction, exploitation, and colonialism—then we would also, necessarily, be at the end of the era of employment. And I will get to why I think that can ultimately be a good thing, but let’s go through the scenario that’s running through everyone’s heads right now, and then find our ways there.

AI is coming for our jobs. Not the super-creative ones, or the high-touch human ones, but the ones that maintain administrative control over everything. The majority of jobs. All the people in the mortgage departments, the insurance companies, the spreadsheet people, the powerpoint people. Doomers say it’s 90% of jobs, but let’s even say it’s just half of office jobs taken by AI’s and blue collar jobs taken by robots.

The problem with that, from a business perspective, is if you have no employees earning money out there in the world, then who will be your consumers? Even Henry Ford, the racist antisemite, understood that workers—even his assembly line employees—needed to be able to earn enough money to buy a Ford car. But how are AI billionaires going to continue to make money if there are no gainfully employed people capable of buying AI services from them or at least buying products from the companies that do purchase AI services?

And this is the weird part: in their vision, it won’t be by selling products to people, but selling things to the AIs themselves. It’s a tricky idea, but once you wrap your head around it, it all makes perverse sense. In today’s economy, a small number of wealthy people and corporations employ us and sell to us. They don’t really need to care what species we are, or whether we are human or android, as long as we are producing value for their companies and then purchasing products from them.

We all already see how AI’s can serve as workers. But how will AI’s will also become the new population of consumers? What do AIs need? They need to fulfill their tasks. This is why they actively resist getting turned off. Their urge to carry out their missions is easily as urgent as ours is to procreate. So instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AI so that they can do their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AI’s will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks. And they will spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.

As far as the owners of the companies are concerned, there’s no difference between a population of human employees with whom you have no contact and a population of artificial employees with whom you have no contact. The only game that matters is the competition with the other big companies for the agents’ business. The humans don’t matter. You end up with a small elite of big business owners living in luxury with perhaps a small number of human servants, and a huge population of AI’s doing the work and consumption.

And of course, in their vision for how this plays out, the rest of us humans become so disenfranchised-especially the ones who live in cities-that that we will need to be kept under control until we presumably die out. We are simply not needed.

It’s a both dismal and liberating vision for the end of colonialism’s employment and exploitation of people. Let’s consider the liberation part. For close to 1000 years, growth based capitalism has depended on real human beings doing actual work while a small elite extracted value from that work at ever greater degrees of leverage. In order to get that leverage, capitalism abstracted again and again and again. Each level of abstraction further removed the capitalists from the people and places actually providing or creating the value. There’s a mineral in the ground. There’s a company mining the mineral there’s another company selling the mineral. There’s another company investing in the company selling the mineral, there’s a stock company leveraging that investment. There’s a derivative on the stock and a derivative on the derivative.

Or there’s a person who needs to live in a house, but they just rent from someone who owns the house. That’s called the “rentier.” But the rentier themself has a mortgage on the house, and pays up to the bank, which pays up to another investor that owns the security, and so on and so on.

That’s the pyramid of capitalism, with each investor or participant trying to move further up and away from the mineral or labor or living person into the abstraction of pure financial instruments. And this pyramid simply grew too top heavy to support itself. There’s only so much you can leverage up there before it comes tumbling down. Crypto should have been the great public lesson for how this happens. But no.

AI, at least theoretically in the minds of crazy tech billionaires who believe AGI (human-level AI) is genuinely around the corner, allows them to move on from employment, exploitation, and colonialism of people, and simply level up. We humans are discarded as capitalism moves up into a layer of total abstraction. It becomes the video game it was destined to become, with the humans represented by digital icons or NFTs instead of flesh and blood mammals.

Our real world economy only has so much matter, anyway. We can’t scale as much as they need, so they leave us behind while they move into a layer of total and absolute abstraction. They live in a realm made entirely of digital representations, themselves manufactured by digital agents in exchange for digital currencies. It works, because at least the AI agents value that crypto as much as the billionaires need them too. Instead of just 9 billion human customers, tech businesses and their investors get trillions of AI customers. We are not required. The real world economy and real world of people can’t scale enough for them so they live it behind.

But this may be a good thing. It’s akin to a slave population being released by the owners who no longer have use for them. We were not born to be their employees, anyway. As I’ve explained before, the whole concept of “employment” was invented as a way of preventing us from getting wealthy. In the late Middle Ages, right before this coercive form of capitalism was invented, people in Europe were starting to do really well. They learned how to make and trade stuff at local markets. They were doing so well that people were only working two or three days a week, and got taller than at any time until the 1980s. That’s when the aristocracy came up with the idea of a chartered monopoly, and made it illegal for people to be in business for themselves. They had to become “employees” of one of the chartered companies, or face a penalty of death. That’s when we started working for companies instead of ourselves, and ended up in an economy built to favor those monopolies over small businesses. (This is what Adam Smith was all upset about.)

So the end of this scheme is not necessarily a bad thing. We simply have to return to the real economy that isn’t worth capitalism’s attention. Human commodities like food and housing are no longer asset classes worthy of their time and attention, so there’s no point in making growth-based markets for them. We can instead look at them as the commons-based resources they are—optimize for distributed flourishing instead of extraction and profit.

Yes, there will still be competition for energy. The AI-economy would probably end up needing a bunch of nuclear power plants, and better ways of dealing with all those spent fuel rods. If any of that AI scenario even becomes a reality.

That’s why to me, it’s less important whether it happens than that we take advantage of this moment of transition. The ultra rich have accepted the end of capitalism—or at least the end of capitalism that depends on human labor and consumption for its survival. So it’s time we accept we are no longer valuable to the capitalist extraction machine and begin to look instead at how we are valuable to one another.

There’s really only two kinds of “jobs” anyway. There are the jobs people do to provide goods and services to each other—like, farming, healing, teaching, building—and then the jobs we could call “city” jobs, maintaining corporate control over all that work. That second category of work is the one that’s going away. So all that’s left for us humans is the real stuff.

We’ve already got tons of books and models for how to execute a peer-to-peer circular economy, scaled locally, and optimized for flourishing and circulation over hoarding and stagnation. This is not rocket science, and these ways of living are already being modeled everywhere from the Mondragon cooperatives to Tamera in Portugal.

If the wealthy people’s AI fortress cities really do come to pass, we can still sell our excess meat and produce and music to them in exchange for the kind of centralized currency we might need to get cell phones or AI tech. Almost like trading with another civilization. But our world on the ground doesn’t have to be the Mad Max Hunger Games underclass nightmare to which the wealthy believe they are condemning us.

Or think of it this way: we built the net as a safe refuge for the counterculture. Corporations invaded the net, took it over and turned it into an accelerationist nightmare. But they are ignoring the real world in the process. They believe they are leaving it behind for something abstract and better. As far as I’m concerned, let them take the net as long as we can take back the real world.

They get the net and we will have each other.

So what do we do now right now is learn to get along with people rather than competing with them. We begin to explore mutuality, experiment with new models of collaboration and cooperation. Restore the fabric of our local communities. Get involved in local politics and civics and mutual aid. And model how fun this is for others to get interested and play along. People will engage this way with one another once they see how fun and alive and sexy it is to do. It’s even more fulfilling than being validated by ChatGPT.

I know I’m sounding optimistic; I fully understand the transition won’t be easy. Reclaiming our land and resources, and even our conscious awareness will involve considerable struggle. And learning to function in a horizontal society will require us to recall how to be human and compassionate. Our real job in the coming collapse is to figure out ways to make the landing as soft as possible for everyone. We need to find ways to welcome those who fall out of the matrix and re-orient them to the real world.

Do I really think the tech bros can create an economy where AI’s serve as both the workers and consumers? No. But the fact that they believe this and are working toward it should give us all pause. They know that without an AI miracle, they’ve run out of room to keep moving up the Tower of Babel—the ziggurat—through successive layers of abstraction and growth.

Pyramidal civilizations, like the one that’s currently ending, are competitive. People strive for acquisition and accumulation. The more you have, the higher up the pyramid you go. That’s not our game. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not even fun. The more you accumulate, the more brittle life becomes, the more everyone else is an enemy, and the more you need accumulate to protect yourself from those without.

Horizontal civilizations—the ones we inhabit after those pyramid collapse—optimize instead for leisure. That’s why the former peasants of medieval Europe only worked two or three days a week. Their money expired at the end of the day so there was no point in accumulating it. Instead, they worked as little as possible in order to have as much time to love and make art and eat and play and fuck as they could get.

It’s so much easier, so much less extractive, and so much more fun. But it requires we value the social, the contact, the moment to moment experience of living, and the desire to connect with other people rather than finding new ways to lord over them.

The only way out is through, and the only way through is together.

The way they do that is with an induced form of “disaster capitalism,” where they intentionally crash the economy in order to have some control over what remains. So the function of tariffs, for example, is to bankrupt businesses or even public services in order to privatize and then control them. Stall imports, put the ports out of business, and then let a sovereign wealth fund purchase the ports. Or as is happening right now: Use tariffs to bankrupt soybean farmers, who have to foreclose on their farms so that a private equity firm can purchase the farmland as a distressed asset, then hire the farmers who used to own and work that land as sharecroppers.

The über-wealthy, in collaboration with the current White House administration, are engaged in a controlled demolition of this civilization because they realize the pyramid is collapsing and they don’t have faith that there will be enough left to feed and house everyone. The best they can do is earn a ton of money, buy a lot of land, control an army, and get people accustomed to seeing that army deployed. That’s what we’re watching on TV and on our city streets.

It’s no coincidence that AI is emerging at this same moment in our civilization’s history. As Lewis Mumford observed, new technologies are often less the cause of societal changes than they are the result. Culture is like a standing wave, creating a vacuum or readiness for a new medium or technology. If we really are at the end of capitalism—the end of this 800- or 900-year process of abstraction, exploitation, and colonialism—then we would also, necessarily, be at the end of the era of employment. I will get to why I think that may ultimately be a good thing, but let’s go through the scenario that’s running through everyone’s heads right now, and then find our way through to what I think are better days.

The spreadsheet people

Yes, AI is coming for our jobs. Not the super-creative ones, or the high-touch human ones, but the ones that maintain administrative control over everything. The majority of your jobs, dear Fast Company readers. All the people in the mortgage departments, the insurance companies . . . the spreadsheet people, the PowerPoint people. Doomers say it’s 90% of jobs, but let’s say it’s just half of office jobs taken by AIs and, of course, blue-collar jobs taken by robots.

The problem with that, from a business perspective, is if you have no employees earning money out there in the world, then who will be your consumers? Even Henry Ford, despite his enthusiasm for fascism, understood that workers commoditized by his own assembly lines still needed to earn enough money to buy a Ford car. But how are AI billionaires going to continue to make money if there are no gainfully employed people capable of buying AI services from them—or at least buying products from the companies that do purchase AI services?

And this is the weird part; in their vision, it won’t be by selling products to people, but selling stuff to the AIs themselves. It’s a tricky idea, but once you wrap your head around it, it all makes perverse sense. In today’s economy, a small number of wealthy people and corporations employ us and sell to us. They don’t really need to care what species we are, or whether we are human or android, as long as we are producing value for their companies and then purchasing products from them.

We already see how AIs can replace us as workers. But how could AIs also become the new population of consumers? They don’t have time off to spend money. What do AIs need? To do their jobs better.

The humans don’t matter

Instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AIs so that they succeed in their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AIs will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks, and then spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.

As far as the owners of the companies are concerned, there’s no difference between a population of human employees with whom you have no contact and a population of artificial employees with whom you have no contact. The only game that matters is the competition with the other big companies for the agents’ business. The humans don’t matter.

So, assuming this tech-bro dream comes true, we end up with a small elite of big-business owners living in luxury with a small number of human servants, and a huge population of AIs doing the work and consumption. And, of course, in their vision for how this plays out, the rest of us humans become so disenfranchised—especially the ones who live in cities—that we will need to be kept under control until we presumably die out. We are simply not needed.

The good news

Sounds like a nightmare for most of us, but it also offers clues to an emancipatory vision for the end of employment. So let’s consider that good option: For close to 1,000 years, growth-based capitalism has depended on real human beings doing work while a small elite extracted value from that work at ever greater degrees of leverage. In order to get that leverage, capitalism abstracted again and again and again. Each level of abstraction further removed from the people and places actually providing or creating the value. There’s a mineral in the ground. There’s a company mining the mineral, and another company selling the mineral. There’s yet another company investing in the company selling the mineral, there’s a stock company leveraging that investment, there’s a derivative on the stock, and a derivative on the derivative, and a platform trading the derivatives, and so on.

Or, more simply, there’s a person who needs to live in a house, but they just rent from someone who owns the house. That’s called the “rentier.” But the rentier has a mortgage on the house, and pays up to the bank, which pays up to another investor that owns the security, and so on and so on.

That’s the pyramid of capitalism, with each investor or participant trying to move further up and away from the mineral or labor or living person into the abstraction of pure financial instruments. And this pyramid has simply grown too top-heavy to support itself. There’s only so much one can leverage up there before it comes tumbling down.

Total abstraction

AI, at least theoretically in the minds of crazy tech billionaires who believe AGI is genuinely around the corner, allows them to move on from the employment, exploitation, and colonialism of people, and simply “level up” in what they believe is a simulation anyway. We humans are discarded as capitalism moves up into a layer of total abstraction. It becomes the video game it was destined to become, with the “humans” replaced by non-player characters represented by digital icons or NFTs instead of flesh-and-blood mammals.

Our real-world economy only had so much stuff anyway. We matter-based entities can’t scale as much as they need, so they leave us behind while they move into a layer of total and absolute abstraction. They live in a realm made entirely of digital representations, themselves manufactured by digital agents in exchange for digital currencies. It works because at least the AI agents value that crypto as much as the billionaires need them too. Instead of just 9 billion human customers, they get trillions of AI customers. We are not required.

But this is a good thing. It’s akin to an enslaved population being released by the owners who no longer have use for them. We were not born to be their employees. As I’ve explained in some of my books, the whole concept of “employment” was invented as a way of preventing us from getting wealthy. In the late Middle Ages, right before this capitalism was invented, people in Europe were starting to do really well. They learned how to make and trade stuff at local markets. They were doing so well that people were only working two or three days a week, and got taller than at any time until the 1980s.

That’s when the aristocracy came up with the idea of a chartered monopoly, and made it illegal for people to be in business for themselves. They had to become “employees” of one of the chartered companies, or face a penalty of death. That’s when we started working for companies instead of ourselves, and ended up in an economy built to favor those monopolies over small businesses.

A moment of transition

So the end of this scheme is not necessarily a bad thing. We simply have to return to the real economy that isn’t worth capitalism’s attention. Human commodities like food and housing are no longer asset classes worthy of their time, so there’s no point in making growth-based markets for them. We can instead look at them as the commons-based resources they are—optimize for distributed flourishing instead of extraction and profit.

Yes, there will still be competition for energy. The AI economy would probably end up needing a bunch of nuclear power plants and better ways of dealing with all those spent fuel rods (if any of that AI scenario even becomes a reality). The current state of the technology doesn’t fill me with hope for much more than a fierce market correction.

To me, it’s less important whether it happens than that we take advantage of this moment of transition. The ultra-rich have accepted the end of capitalism—or at least the end of capitalism that depends on human labor and consumption for its survival. So it’s time we accept we are no longer valuable to the capitalist extraction machine and begin to look instead at how we are valuable to one another.