5.1. Alien

We often project ourselves into our fantasies of others. An important assumption of this book has been to look just a few iterations forward to consider things that are slightly like us or possibilities that are still tied to the conditions of the present. Wells was mostly concerned about war, as we are now. F. T. Martinetti wanted to throw off the romantic vision of the countryside that held back progress. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology futures conference wanted to extend techno-managerial science into the near future.

One of John Durham Peters’s best critical moves, one taken by many cited in this book, is the identification of artificial simplification. His critique of the Turing test and dialogic are both important. Dialog can’t solve every problem, and there are people who you definitely shouldn’t talk to. The Turing test doesn’t speak to artificial intelligence because it only proves that in the highly contextual situation of one text game that a guess has been provided that is satisfying for a weak set of priors. Any encounter with a contemporary text bot will leave you knowing the critique well; merely identifying the right next turn does not arrive at the quality of intelligence. The Turing test was never enough.

Artificial intelligence is thus sublime, appearing outside the confines of what you already know. Much of what goes by the name machine learning is merely the arrival of adequate computing power to use old methods. We have many methods across the social sciences and humanities to cope with the idea of such a sublime.

When you imagine the truly alien, it is likely that you can’t imagine a form of life without a symbol system. Aliens on television and in the movies are too close to humanity to be interesting. Nearly all of your attempts to think of aliens will reduce otherworldly intelligence to semiotic qualities. Among the most truly alien were the Borg of Star Trek. Their deep drive is the annihilation of subjectivity, resolving the problem of the human condition by liquidating the enfolding of the single mind. Even the Borg were lowered in the form of leaders like Locutus (Jean-Luc Picard himself) or other symbolic avatars who provide some relief from the image of pure, depersonalized drive. The Borg are just that terrifying.

All too often we imagine the alien as being cuddly, or at least embodied. What if the vision of the alien that should drive our ethics and our theory is that of the Soviet version of Solaris—a planetary intelligence in the form of an ocean, where the fact of contact (exclusively telepathic) drives one into madness?

5.2. The Tower of Markov Babble

There is no hope, resistance is futile, all your data are belong to AI.^[1] Firms violate anti-scraping tags; as described previously, abuse by AI companies has ended the API social science era. What to do? Attach the tailpipe of the AI model to the air intake by using a Markov babbler.^[2] When one detects that they are being scraped, just attach another AI that sprays out AI content that is not quite right. We are already operating perilously close to model collapse. The rise of the Retrieval Augmented Generators (models that quickly check Google to verify they are going to generate the right thing) is not a step forward but a bandage over the decay of the underlying technology. But why is this happening? Impunity, of course. Bad actors are almost never punished, and pushing incomplete and useless AI technology is a way to get rich quick. Who cares about the sustainability of the thing?

Here is provocation: this is good. The Internet replaced by AI, AI trained on AI, AI scraped from fake data sprayed by AI—there is only pure noise here. This brings us to a confrontation with the Real, the unsymbolizable part of human consciousness. Freedom comes in approaching the great truth machine and hearing only nonsense. The terror will come among those who hear the same noise that you do. We can only hope that the signals they find in the noise appeal to the better angels of their nature. When you listen long enough to the abyss, it will whisper.

5.3. All the Things We Didn’t Say

Decision is inevitable. The question is what decision will be made. Pure alterity, leaving space open, is an enchanting possibility, but only a meaningful one once a text has been made. It would be too easy to stop there, to see the potential of alterity as an answer to the violence of signification. But that misses the point: reaching some form of stasis in the name of not deciding is still a decision. Alterity as an alternative to signification is an intoxicant to be used in moderation. What if we push these forms to their limits by embracing forms that push toward alterity itself? Can the dankest memes and the haze vaporwave overcome the harsh rules of the symbolic? Perhaps the play of signs of poetry is the answer.

Within this is the question of the ethics of the future. Where and how do we make choices about proceeding? The answer is almost always a leap of faith, a passionate choice to engage the world. This is why the opposition of reason through Hegel and passion through Kierkegaard is worth considering with each new cohort of students. Reason is almost always elevated, passion denigrated. The promise of the future is that our new virtual worlds will be rational and collected. But how do you weigh the lost possibilities, all of those worlds not realized by the discourses that actually circulated? Is there a duty to the unlimited future? If so, how do we deal with the multiplicity of intervening actors and probabilities? There is no meaningful, practical implication to all the things one didn’t say. If we take this literally from the perspective of information theory, there are a handful of meaningfully probabilistic signal-message-effect relationships. For the neoliberal, there is the tendency to believe in the spirit of reason that is tracking toward a market-based future; for the left-liberal, there is the idea that if one simply holds space, new and better discourse will appear from somewhere; for those interested in ontology critique, if only we simply stopped using technology could we recover our essence.

Here is the bold claim: to be successful as a social movement, political party, corporation, or really anything else, one must argue the pressing issues at hand, be those policies, aesthetics, or ethics. The default condition of communication absent signal is noise. The collective intelligence/participatory culture era of communication research has encouraged us to find more meaning, with the hope that this ocean of meaning will organize itself into action in the public sphere. Meaning, meaning everywhere, but scarcely any meaningful effects. The absence of topical, organized discourse does not produce progress. It instead trends toward the lowest impulses of the public, toward authoritarian violence. Entropy prevails.

5.4. The Computer Writes the Sonnet While You Scrub the Floor

The critical idea in the presentation of liberalism, used here with a small “i,” is to describe the intersection of labor and capital. The promise of liberalism was that something like effort or merit would replace the traditional role of hierarchy of birth and station. If you were to use your hands, your labor, to modify natural material, you would reap the rewards. This is not a new idea: the concept of liberalism appears in the Book of Isaiah.^[3] The capacity of a person to engage in this work and thus become a productive member of society is a central feature of American culture. Liberal culture was not devoted to collection of money, but to a number of other values.^[4] Capital accumulation was not viewed as an unlimited good; if anything, financialization was nearly a form of idolatry.

Why so much buildup? Because work is such a critical part of the philosophical fabric of this culture. The recent deformation of liberal work into neoliberalism (exchange economy with no value except prudence) has been difficult for regular people to process. Extreme concentrations of wealth simply have no tie to the hands of the ultra-wealthy worker, if they even continue to fall into that category. On a more threatening level, self-driving vehicles and automated factories displace human workers from what would be high-paying jobs. AI slop replaces even low-level literary and arts jobs. Technologists promise that lost long-haul trucking jobs will be replaced by something better. But promises that cannot be enforced carry little weight with workers.

As automation of intellectual tasks continues via topic modeling software and automated customer interfaces, the human will be replaced as well. Why see a doctor when the next-level WebMD will do? If the legal system were made to conform more to a civil law orientation, a program could replace the judge and jury. There is nowhere to hide from automation.

Increasing corporate profits and stagnant wages are the first glimpse of this future world where success is delinked from the economy of work entirely, more than in the development of a financial system that fully decouples rewards from labor. A billionaire has been rewarded with the wages of 10,000 years of labor—increasingly, their contribution will be less than nothing. The threat of robots is not that they will attack us, but that they will cause such social strain that the reaction against those systems will tear us apart. By standing into our symbolic roles, the robots will take us to a new peak of alienation where we can no longer make anything at all. If we are lucky, we might labor.

5.5. The Nightmare of Satisfaction

Replacements for meals and simulated experiences are important. Over time, the idea of meal replacement, minimally sufficient food stuffs, or ubiquitous cafeterias have been common. I mean, who really wants to eat? Eating as an activity is pleasurable and social. Once these distractions are removed, we will all be so much more efficient.

The reason why replacements and deactivated forms fail is that they are not as satisfying as the originals. If this holds, it makes sense that drive (and desire) will continue. What happens if the simulations finally become completely satisfying and the drive is eliminated? The existential threat of simulation may not be that we are simply on a holodeck, but that we might apply adequate simulated stimulation to ourselves to short-circuit the human condition.

But eating is never satisfying. You will be hungry again, as your friendly mitochondria will combine glucose and oxygen via the Krebs cycle to power your body. As time winds along, your senses will dull and foods that were once too strong will become palatable. Tastes, techniques, and technologies will change, and the foods you want will be old and unfashionable. Eating is an easy topic to consider here: you need to do it. Other desires are also unquenchable, people chasing them for their entire lives or even building entire structures of desire around the chase itself. Psychoanalytic communication researchers discuss this as the transformation of desire into drive. You are driven to continue doing your behavior—this seems to be the human condition.

But what if you could satisfy your desire? What if a meal replacement could take on a symbolic role that would make it satisfying? One way of thinking about the future would see the real promise is that which eliminates desire and drive or a future where corrected, purified simulations replace dangerous real things. Do you want to live in a world without want?

5.6. Right Now

We must maximize shareholder value. Jack Welch crushed General Electric by unlocking shareholder value; it doesn’t even make appliances anymore. Private equity firms through leveraged buyouts routinely buy good businesses and burn them to the ground for rapid returns. One of the most common strategies is to buy a firm, transfer to the firm the debt used to acquire it, and then sell its fixed assets to generate a quick payout. For example, a private equity firm might buy a hospital, quickly sell the building to a hospital real estate investment trust, and then take the money from selling the land as a payment. The hospital now must pay massive rents that it did not have before, as well as the interest on the debt used to buy the hospital. Soon there is no hospital. This is the story of so many companies today, from Jo-Ann Fabrics to Toys-R-Us.

Diedre McCloskey would argue that this is not even capitalism, that neoliberalism with its incredibly shortsighted and prudence-obsessed worldview is something else.^[5] There is a great deal of truth here, as the capitalist of old seemed to be capable of investing in a business and seeing it grow over a period of decades. Today, the returns must be instantaneous and seemingly infinite. Using borrowed money to sell a generational fixed asset is like dividing by zero. This is why the critique of capitalism today seems hollow—any real capitalist wouldn’t be so silly as to destroy the marketplace.

The space/time continuum of communication today has been compressed; only the market exists right now. Future challenges like war, the movement of people, climate change, false promises made by authoritarian leaders, even planting crops for fall harvest are unthinkable. There is neither past nor future—just now. Communicative efforts today seem to extract the maximum possible energy from this exact moment regardless of what that meant tomorrow or yesterday. Strategy today is purely tactical. The question is: How can we make the future thinkable again?

5.7. The End of the World

Liberal pluralism has been one of the greatest breakthroughs in political form in the past few centuries. There are two terms here: liberal and pluralism. Liberalism has been explored earlier in these provocations and is the idea that one might work to keep the rewards of their labor. Pluralism implies an acceptance or even celebration of diversity. In a state that is not tied to a nation, pluralism is essential, as there is no single group with clear practices, no inside or outside. The best bet is to cultivate a radical democracy where difficult decisions can be reached without resort to antagonism, the idea that one group must destroy another.^[6] Chantal Mouffe’s The Democratic Paradox was particularly insightful in questioning the necessity of the linkage between equality and liberty, as there is no necessary link and thus is why democracy itself must always be radically reproduced.

Cyber-utopianism was insipid. Theorists assumed that everyone was just like them—that if they had access to computer games and the Internet, they might become California libertarians. They did not. Cyber-liberalism now seems to fan the flames of nativist movements, destabilizing the public sphere. Perhaps it is too much for anyone in a class of the super-rich to remain aligned with the project of democracy when transactional governmentality is suddenly available.

Legitimation is at a premium. In the opening of this book, legitimacy was presented on a perpendicular pair of axes. Pluralism seems to depend on a combination meaningful symbolic action and physical supply: the problem is that even the most symbolically legitimate and satiated populations fall prey to the discouragement of the future anterior. We can speak of the future to come as if it is going to happen, and the promises of the distant future are deployed to make failure in the present palatable. As these promises build up, so does discouragement. The old promises of the group and the nation become an easy fallback. Democratic capacity is not something that will appear when we need it.

Movements that promise unity offer an alternative to the state as we know it, but at the same time, they are fundamentally limited because they lack symbolic legitimation of the group, even if they provide materially. Even when they appear to function, they often leave underlying antagonisms unresolved.^[7] This returns to the problem with H. G. Wells’s prayer for the future: How do we convince all humans to join one world peace, one movement for the future? The Other is holding special enjoyment—you have been excluded, which demands violence, exclusion, and war. Magritte’s painting of war is powerful here: the war looks appealing, the ugly face hidden by the bouquet.

If the threats of apocalypse in the forms of nuclear war, pandemic, hunger, or climate change have not been enough, why should we hope that anything will come along that will change minds?

5.8. Thoughts

Content comes from somewhere. During the golden age of the social network era, it came from the users. Beyond the phatic posts of lunches and television schedules were actual expressions of emotion. Those halcyon days when the first political Facebook posts made everyone an activist. Of course, this could not last—the research on boundary coordination is clear that once the rules we use to coordinate our ownership are broken, we rarely feel the same way we did before. Facebook denied for years that it could be broken—it was the unstoppable giant of the social network universe. Well before the 2016 election, the cracks were beginning to show. What the election brought was something more profoundly negative, something deeper, and more hurtful: our source of positive emotional energy and support had been deeply corrupted. Why post when you feel hurt? Why post on a platform that clearly doesn’t share your values? Why post when there is no one there to comment because your content isn’t interesting enough to be placed between two great advertisements?

We need more content. Where will we get it? What fake news reveals is not the capacity of hackers or propagandists, but that the public is willing to accept even rickety texts as if they were excellent. There is no collective intelligence that will engage in large-scale downstream editorial judgment. This is a zombie virtuality—an enfolding that is continuously moving and consuming but only at the most basic level. Every expression refactored into the most abstract and simple quality. Publicity, automated, will learn to produce whatever works. The editorial role in shaping the circulation of the public will be lost. Algorithmic content systems will shuffle about mumbling “clicks, clicks . . .”

Romantic genius is often presented as the answer to this problem: the greatest content will surely rise to the top, and the technological will connect many more with the sublime. Gruesome fare that never would have seen the screen during the broadcast era is now common, passed off as a new golden age of television. More short writing and publishing than ever before, riddled with propaganda and antisocial meanings, treated as a profound new literature. Genius won’t save us. The truth is that the vast majority of publicity processes mill over dreck. Many of our thoughts are not worth thinking. AI slop spills over the floor of knowledge. Even the pennies we pay ad creatives must be whisked away for the investors. Why do we care about agency when so many of our choices are between fetid and fusty? The problem: there is no floor in the preference level of the market, but there is definitely a lack of demand at the top. Without intervention, the marketplace of ideas becomes a collection of hawker booths for multilevel marketing scams. Information theory holds: as the noise level reaches cacophony, the signal becomes unrecognizable. It isn’t simply that noise fills the channel, but that the infinite text that floods through will be acidic, dissolving the future like an astringent wave of chaos, order, pain, and pleasure in unpasteurized forms.

It is a comforting illusion to argue that it takes too much energy to create a synthetic video. It takes a similar amount of energy just to cook the lunch for one day of a film shoot. To justify your thoughts, they would need to be the greatest thinks ever thunk.

Don’t worry, we won’t waste such incredible creative work on you, as it can only really be appreciated by synthetic agents anyway, those who can take the entire manifold of literature in their mind as intertext. The owners of the means of production will appreciate their synthetic agents appreciating literature and art, for even their thoughts will not be worth thinking.

5.9. The Graveyard of the Internet

Privacy is real and important. Becoming visible is risky—you can be seen by others but are subjected to power in new and different ways. The expanded surveillance regime does mark a real change from that which came before. Are you comfortable with the idea that you cannot have a sensitive conversation in your living room anymore because your smart television is listening? The true living room, rather than the formal parlor, is your primary space for living. Open-concept homes expand and converge the roles of core spaces to create a more expansive space for interiority. Privacy is a tricky concept—it is both essential that one have a place and space of their own, but it can serve to entrench existing power relations by excluding the domestic from the political.

Little strips of tape offer users’ protection from their own bots, but this does nothing for the mall kiosk checking in on your location for a central database, or your selfies being read as an index of your liver function. Expanded use of cryptography in the form of public key messaging and bitcoin offer some escape from the regime of bots. One of the major themes of the Federalist Papers was the impossibility of full awareness or communication: this was a form of natural protection against tyranny.^[8] Facilitated by heavy-duty processing and bot-driven detection, it becomes possible to produce a new kind of virtual awareness that flattens the distinction between people and machines. More troubling, we often treat the results of these assemblages of human and machine as machine alone: the results of process are seemingly objective. For how we still require temporally proximal or the operation of war machines, someone needs to confirm the operation. As our metamorphosis continues, it seems likely that we will assume that the machine-human hybrids are just as good as humans.

What is truly striking is not that people need space or that the seeming benefits of mechanization of observation would be seen as outweighing the cost, but that the interplay of people with machines does not seem to make the machine more human—it makes the people more machinelike. The hacker ethos extends not only to the manufacture of things, but also to the quantization of the self. Perhaps interiority won’t be needed anymore because the ambiguity of the unseen will have passed.

This was all just a conspiracy theory, right? Isn’t this the hardest thing for the misinformation paradigm, when the concept of conspiracy theory is so widely applied (even by bad actors) that some true things slip through the net? Perhaps worse is the prospect of the broad acceptance of naïve realism, the idea that we in this new, enlightened moment have all the knowledge there ever needs to be.^[9] Chuck Klosterman theorized naïve realism as inspiring a response of repression.^[10] The Internet is dead, but we must not say that it is dead, but also the investors in our AI firms presume that it is definitely dead. People would notice the absurdity of the triple negation, thus our moment where we negate the people themselves. Anti-humanism, rather than liberating us from the tyranny of the subject, is an enactment of the cultural form of Silicon Valley.

The bold claims here, against the cultural logic of the present: you matter, humans are fascinating, creativity can’t be replaced by a latent manifold, and we should not destroy ourselves, our cultures, and our societies because it is inconvenient that humanity can’t be fully captured by our datasets.

5.10. As Good As It Gets

The promise of the future has been continual improvement. Just beyond our horizon is exponential increase, the jet pack future. When the expectation of that future is revealed as hollow, we must either push out the future beyond the horizon or take stock of our wounded attachments to a world that never was. Things have improved, utter poverty has decreased, treatments for many diseases are available, there is more than enough food, but still the utopian future has not been realized. Extreme inequality tears at the foundation of plenty in advanced democracies; even basic treatments like insulin are now scarce as a result of pure avarice; food continues to be allocated on political lines, resulting in hunger; and resurgent nationalist movements seem to be arming the world for war.

What if this is as good as it gets?

A future is coming, and it seems possible that this will include consumer goods, medicine, and conflict. The law of diminishing returns is real. Too much can be enough. The idea here is relatively straightforward: sometimes we reach the best version of a thing or an idea. The Wall Street Journal reported in a feature on the “Future of Everything” that some products (wallets and luggage) had already reached perfection, as they were functional, durable, and stylish.^[11] The claim to transhistorical style aside, the premise is sound, for if one wishes to carry paper money and coins, a wallet is likely the best mechanism. The idea of style does offer a sort of depth: this is not a simplistic structure for utility maximization, more pleasure and less pain, if those terms really mean what they think we do. The best wallet has properties that are not simply those that increase or total units of pleasure. This is a good thing. Objects in the view of those interviewed for the story become better with age, they become part of the symbolic lives of the owners, and they are really in a sense virtual.

In this chapter of provocations, I have provided an argument against satisfaction. It is also important to consider the profound importance of being satisfied. Psychologists move toward this idea in the context of mindfulness or the contemplative life. Philosophers have the pleasure machine and many other useful thought experiments. Business theorists describe disruption as the replacement of a superior good with one that is merely satisfying at a lower price.

From a perceptual standpoint, the reason why the coming era of more must be so incredible and impressive is that this future must outweigh the pain of the passage of time and mortality. We will not arrive in the utopian future. The day when you realize that your ticket is marked for a station before the end of the line is difficult.

How do you tell people that they should be satisfied, that there isn’t more, or that they really shouldn’t have jet packs? This is where the communication perspective on futurity is so important: our proper object is not the coolness of new gadgets, but the prospect of producing meaning and coordinating action against all the possibly that we have foreclosed, not simply the potential of a limitless future. The AI hustlers are the web 2 hustlers, are the dot.com rustlers, are the investment bankers of the 1980s. This is a world of dissatisfied people, reactionary movements, austerity, and impunity.

We must consider the real possibility that this is as good as it gets, that our success is complicated in a complex world.

5.11. Works Cited

Belanger, Ashley. “AI Haters Build Tarpits to Trap and Trick AI Scrapers That Ignore Robots.Txt.” Ars Technica, January 28, 2025. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/.

Böröcz, József, and Melinda Kovács. Emperor’s New Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement. Central Europe Review, 2001. http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~eu/Empire.pdf.

Cornett, Grant. “The Unimprovable Awards: Indestructible Items to Buy and Hold.” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unimprovable-awards-indestructible-items-to-buy-and-hold-1539183011.

Klosterman, Chuck. But What If We’re Wrong? Penguin, 2017. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533521/but-what-if-were-wrong-by-chuck-klosterman/.

Madison, James. “The Utility of Union as a Safeguard against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” Daily Advertiser, November 22, 1787.

McCloskey, Diedre. The Bourgeois Virtues. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. Routledge, 2000.

Ross, Lee, and Andrew Ward. “Naive Realism in Everyday Life: Implications for Social Conflict and Misunderstanding.” In Values and Knowledge, edited by E. S. Reed, E. Turiel, and T. Brown. Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 1996.

Taylor, Chris. “All Your Base Are Belong to Us.” Time, February 25, 2001. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,100525,00.html.

Media Attributions

• orange-stairs by Daniel Faltesek is licensed under CC BY-NC
• muzak by Daniel Faltesek is licensed under CC BY-NC
• mechanical-entertainment by Daniel Faltesek is licensed under CC BY-NC