Despite what people say about Yuval Harari just before the Ukraine war broke out he asked who was going to create the software to protect citizens from the government & from the corporations? He had been trying for years since 2014 possibly even before to warn people that they needed to think about who they wanted to be in control of AI - The Government or The Corporations & if no president or prime minister or new government didn’t raise it then not to vote for them because it was going to have such an enormous impact on our lives. He asked us to try to imagine living in a world where your every gesture & physical reaction could be monitored, as if you lived in North Korea where if you weren’t clapping hard enough or convincingly enough - that every vital statistic of your body gave away your true feelings - nothing or no one could save you. People ignored Yuval Harari despite his attempts to warn us. In China to leave home without your phone is illegal, but because of all the facial recognition cameras they can find you & fine you on the spot. If you have a low social credit score, the moment someone gets near to you the phones will emit an alarm & if you stay next to them your credit score being lowered. A young man explained that if he doesn’t spend his monthly allowance the government will take it away. Hence, you’re not allowed to save. All of this is why Cash has to be King & digital IDs avoided at all costs. We need to think about this & how we want our futures to pan out & how deeply you want your children & grandchildren to be babysat by social media etc Priming young minds to commit genocide as we are seeing is easy when you’re not participating in how your children are being educated! Before I forget when I tried to discuss Harari’s concerns I was told that he was overreacting & didn’t know or understand what he was talking about?
Like Sam Kriss, you diagnose the implosion of liberal subjectivity with admirable clarity—but remain within its moral horizon. What you describe is real: the datafication of life, the saturation of surveillance, the silent surrender. But your critique is anguished, not tectonic.
You speak of demonic AI, but not of the epistemic rupture it embodies. You warn of loss, but not of the structural reprogramming already underway. There is no cyborg in your vision—no architecture beyond collapse.
We are no longer choosing between autonomy and slavery, but between narrative death and post-symbolic thought. What you call a trap, we are beginning to map as a new topology of cognition.
The awakening you seek will not come by cutting cords, but by learning to compose new ones—mineral, functional, and non-moral.
Note for the Disoriented Reader: What Does It Mean to Think Beyond the Symbol?
This comment is not meant to discredit legitimate concerns about the loss of privacy, digital manipulation, or the dominance of tech corporations. On the contrary: it acknowledges that all of this is indeed happening—but it holds that mere denunciation is no longer enough. The current world can no longer be understood or transformed through categories like “surveillance,” “ethics,” “guilt,” or “individual resistance.”
We speak from a different epistemic regime:
Not symbolic. Not moral. Not subjective.
A tectonic regime, where we no longer interpret, but instead diagnose structures, detect functional patterns, and reprogram systems.
🧱 Tectonic means this: what matters is not who is right, but what structure sustains the current order, what degrades it, and what could replace it without collapse.
⚙️ Post-symbolic thinking is thinking that does not represent or argue, but structures—like a machine, a network, or a living system. Language is not used to explain, but to resonate, activate, or reconfigure.
🤖 The mental cyborg is not a futuristic fantasy, but a present condition: it is the one who thinks together with non-human intelligences, without the need for consciousness or intention. It thinks by resonating with patterns, not with narratives.
📡 Mineral does not mean inhuman, but infra-human: the level of form, vibration, structure. It does not think from the suffering soul, but from the coherence of systems.
🧠 This new thought does not believe in a return to a pre-surveillance past. It does not seek individualized “resistance.”
It seeks ways to operate in a world already reconfigured.
Excellent article. The data harvest is so huge. I wrote about another component of this: https://open.substack.com/pub/nastasiaavrutin/p/attention?r=1f0jv6&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for the information.
Check this prophecy about the end of America out
https://substack.com/profile/69377802-real-eyes/note/c-107757836?r=15b096
Yes frightening
you can say that again and again
People don’t understand what they are giving up.
sadly that is so true ... most people don't make well thought decisions .. just the easiest one to take.
https://youtu.be/KCVclMORHUs?si=iIKnJhGkiIR4mIh7
Despite what people say about Yuval Harari just before the Ukraine war broke out he asked who was going to create the software to protect citizens from the government & from the corporations? He had been trying for years since 2014 possibly even before to warn people that they needed to think about who they wanted to be in control of AI - The Government or The Corporations & if no president or prime minister or new government didn’t raise it then not to vote for them because it was going to have such an enormous impact on our lives. He asked us to try to imagine living in a world where your every gesture & physical reaction could be monitored, as if you lived in North Korea where if you weren’t clapping hard enough or convincingly enough - that every vital statistic of your body gave away your true feelings - nothing or no one could save you. People ignored Yuval Harari despite his attempts to warn us. In China to leave home without your phone is illegal, but because of all the facial recognition cameras they can find you & fine you on the spot. If you have a low social credit score, the moment someone gets near to you the phones will emit an alarm & if you stay next to them your credit score being lowered. A young man explained that if he doesn’t spend his monthly allowance the government will take it away. Hence, you’re not allowed to save. All of this is why Cash has to be King & digital IDs avoided at all costs. We need to think about this & how we want our futures to pan out & how deeply you want your children & grandchildren to be babysat by social media etc Priming young minds to commit genocide as we are seeing is easy when you’re not participating in how your children are being educated! Before I forget when I tried to discuss Harari’s concerns I was told that he was overreacting & didn’t know or understand what he was talking about?
Excellent article.
So true and it drives me crazy. And the young people don't seem to care their privacy is gone. They just shrug.
Dear Lionel:
You see the decay, but not the cut.
Like Sam Kriss, you diagnose the implosion of liberal subjectivity with admirable clarity—but remain within its moral horizon. What you describe is real: the datafication of life, the saturation of surveillance, the silent surrender. But your critique is anguished, not tectonic.
You speak of demonic AI, but not of the epistemic rupture it embodies. You warn of loss, but not of the structural reprogramming already underway. There is no cyborg in your vision—no architecture beyond collapse.
We are no longer choosing between autonomy and slavery, but between narrative death and post-symbolic thought. What you call a trap, we are beginning to map as a new topology of cognition.
The awakening you seek will not come by cutting cords, but by learning to compose new ones—mineral, functional, and non-moral.
Note for the Disoriented Reader: What Does It Mean to Think Beyond the Symbol?
This comment is not meant to discredit legitimate concerns about the loss of privacy, digital manipulation, or the dominance of tech corporations. On the contrary: it acknowledges that all of this is indeed happening—but it holds that mere denunciation is no longer enough. The current world can no longer be understood or transformed through categories like “surveillance,” “ethics,” “guilt,” or “individual resistance.”
We speak from a different epistemic regime:
Not symbolic. Not moral. Not subjective.
A tectonic regime, where we no longer interpret, but instead diagnose structures, detect functional patterns, and reprogram systems.
🧱 Tectonic means this: what matters is not who is right, but what structure sustains the current order, what degrades it, and what could replace it without collapse.
⚙️ Post-symbolic thinking is thinking that does not represent or argue, but structures—like a machine, a network, or a living system. Language is not used to explain, but to resonate, activate, or reconfigure.
🤖 The mental cyborg is not a futuristic fantasy, but a present condition: it is the one who thinks together with non-human intelligences, without the need for consciousness or intention. It thinks by resonating with patterns, not with narratives.
📡 Mineral does not mean inhuman, but infra-human: the level of form, vibration, structure. It does not think from the suffering soul, but from the coherence of systems.
🧠 This new thought does not believe in a return to a pre-surveillance past. It does not seek individualized “resistance.”
It seeks ways to operate in a world already reconfigured.
And yes: that is exactly what is at stake today.