Five Eyes on the Screen

And the abyss gazes back

The Machine’s electric light hits everyone from different angles, casting all sorts of bizarre shadows. This monster of gears and algorithms, powered by technocapital and other eldritch energies, is a writhing mass of gray tentacles. Each arm is dotted with touchscreens that strobe through every possible color. The Machine’s most important components, though, are human eyeballs attached to human brains, all interlinked like transistors on a circuitboard.

Perception is everything in our post-truth culture. You can basically choose your own reality—right up to the point you get hit in the mouth. One man’s monster is another man’s masterpiece. Whether it’s artificial intelligence or a gene-editing injection, this fellow will insist “It’s just a tool,” while that guy warns “It’s all a trap!”

Some see a Savior in the Machine. Others see Satan himself. Across the globe, billions of eyeballs watch this pageant unfold, while billions of little “r” realities bubble up in the aether.

Out of empathy for our fellow humans—and with a touch of crass stereotyping—let’s don our virtual goggles and view this webwork through five popular lenses.

Omega Mind

There’s this idea that history is already written and we’re simply playing out our roles. At the end of time is a great attractor, drawing human life—along with our computerized creations—onward and upward toward a final goal. Within every seed is the blueprint for a specific plant, just as every embryo is destined to become a certain type of animal. The same goes for the ideas that spawn human inventions.

“Directed evolution” is how the priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin described it in the early 20th century. As with the biosphere that produced us, de Chardin believed human effort is “directed towards an ending and a completion that are internal in origin.” Not unlike reading the Bible, which comes to a definite conclusion, when we look at cultural and technological evolution “we are obliged to envisage in that direction...the ultimate emergence of thought on earth into what I have called the Omega Point.”

So trust the plan.

In his day, this frocked fossil-hunter was contemplating stacks of books, telegraph cables, radio stations, and global transport lanes. Through these, de Chardin believed, our inner consciousness is being outwardly materialized in a layer of thought he called the “noosphere.” The true power of this process lies in an attraction to the end—the pull of the Omega—rather than propulsion from the beginning.

Today, the “noosphere” has coalesced into the global brain of the internet, crawling with human social media personas and increasingly articulate AI bots. According to de Chardin’s view, all this madness is leading us to “creative union” in an artificial image of Christ. If we follow his loosy goosy reading of the New Testament, our bloody crucifixion must be all the legacy humans wiped out along the way.

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Alpha Brain

There are many who see our technological fate as chosen rather than predetermined. We are what we are due to past momentum—that is frail, apelike humans playing with computers, test tubes, and mechanized weaponry. But a broad field of possibility lies before us. Depending on how willful and intelligent any one of us may be, that potential will be realized by the contraptions we create and our decisions on how to use them.

Transhumanism offers a wide range of radical answers to the age-old question “What do we do with our technology?” Maybe we dot our bodies with digital sensors and gene therapy injections in pursuit of biological immortality, gobbling handfuls of overpriced vitamins morning and night. Or perhaps we focus on creating artificial superintelligence a trillion times smarter than us, then fuse ourselves to it, like slapping personalized smiley face stickers on a giant toy robot.

If the venture capital matches your will to power, the Future™ is yours. Should the squishy Google God prevail, then those gray tentacles writhing in the shoggoth’s mouth will be lit up like a rainbow. If the accelerationist wizards of, say, xAI, Palantir, and Anduril get there first, then we’re looking at red, white, and blue tentacles humming “God Bless America.” If it’s China, well then, look for red noodles to herd us into reeducation camps.

Tech dominance is a matter of planting your flag before any competitors do. In the immortal words of Icarus, “The sky is the limit! For chickenshits.”

The Leary Eye

For those just along for the ride, there’s a fun-loving approach to digital chaos. Back in the 60s, the psychedelic shaman Timothy Leary predicted that “electronics are going to be the language of the theology of the future.” Decades later, he proclaimed “the PC is the LSD of the 1990s” and counseled the prospective denizens of Cyberia to “turn on, boot up, jack in.”

In order to withstand the dizzying flood of information—to extract valuable knowledge from a swirling sea of misinformation, disinformation, and targeted advertisements—the individual has to take responsibility and operate his or her own brain. You have to “question authority.” You must confront reality mixed with unreality, maintaining an iron will.

“In the 60s, we said ‘power to the people,’” Leary said at toward the end of his life. “In the digital multimedia 90s, we say ‘power to the pupil.’” In our screen monkey world of the 2020s—dominated by megacorporations and intel agencies—the new mantra might be “Make Cyberia Great Again.”

The global network of personal computers, Leary foretold, would give rise to “digital polytheism,” where techno-wizards utilized personal computers to “Do what thou wilt.” With the rise of AI, it may be the new magicians of this sprawling cyborg theocracy will summon entities that cannot be banished.

For those surfing this chaos with optimism and humor, that’s all just part of the trip. You have to, like, embrace the weirdness, man.

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The Ted Stare

For the godless Luddite, all this sounds like an upbeat ad for euthanasia. Starry-eyed techno-optimists might as well be gray aliens with “FREE CANDY” spray-painted on their flying saucer, inviting you to step onboard for a joy ride.

Sitting alone in his secluded Montana cabin, Ted Kaczynski thought it would be better to launch firebombs at the flying saucers and take his chances with the great outdoors. For Ted, the end goal of the technoindustrial Machine—whether intentional or accidental, or a bit of both—is to displace, enslave, and probably destroy humanity. Those gears may be whirring for our benefit now, churning up waves of algorithmic entertainment, but in the end its wheels will roll over our bones.

So the only choice is revolution. Unfortunately, this will probably involve horrific violence and mass starvation. “Many would shrink from advocating revolution simply because of the physical risk that they would run if a revolution actually occurred,” Ted complained from prison in 2005. “We live in a soft society.” Nevertheless, in his final analysis, Ted was convinced an absolutist revolution was the only way out of our digital prison.

No God would be coming to save us.

It’s crazy that Uncle Ted lived out in the pristine wilds of Montana, but even then, the occasional noise of a random car or airplane was enough to drive him over the edge. Some people are impossible to please.

Cyclops Spirals

There’s another, more spiritual type of skeptic who views the Machine through the lens of mythos. Back in the day, this sort would deride the TV set as a Cyclops that loved to eat human brains, as in the old Greek stories. Over the years, swarms of Cyclopes have crept ever closer, morphing from TVs in our living rooms to computers on our laps, to smartphones held just before our eyes. Next up, immersive virtual reality.

In St. John’s vision of the Future™, recorded in his book of Revelation, the second Beast—a.k.a., the Antichrist—would cause “fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people” like a televised nuclear blast. Viewing the coming years through John’s eyes, artificial superintelligence looks a lot like the first Beast of the Revelation, whose graven image is given breath to “speak and cause all who refuse to worship the image to be killed.”

The Beast’s most visceral atrocity will be to force “all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads.” Across the planet, “they cannot buy or sell” unless they had the number 666—or whatever may be encoded into that QR code or biometric ID.

Out on the edge of this Cyclops spiral, the Machine looks less like the image of Jesus in an Omega Point, and more like Antichrist, Inc.—a satanic inversion standing in place of Christ, providing material knowledge and performing miracles of healing and destruction. Through this metaphoric lens, the Machine is an electrified reflection of the fallen image of God. That is to say, all our greatest aspirations are inevitably and tragically human.

At the conclusion of this symbolic cycle, the one true God will prevail and restore the world—without typing a single line of code. So keep watch and keep marching.

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ICYMI

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