The Social World

Tag: Technology

Our brave new world

In 1961, just two years before he died in Los Angeles, the polymath, philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley gave humanity a warning. Much of his prophecy about society in Brave New World had come to pass, he said, which made him even more certain that the standout problem of the future would be our inability to resist becoming enslaved to our own technology. Now, more than 60 years after his death – and with an entire generation of children frying their brains with smartphones and nobody able or willing to do anything to stop them – it is hard to deny that he was onto something.

The man was destined to be a prophet for our gadget-addled age. Born to one of England’s most accomplished family dynasties, he entered the English boarding school Eton on a scholarship only to find himself suffering from a debilitating eye disease leading to near-total blindness, which forced him to learn Braille. Refusing to accede to his condition, he turned to an alternative technology, a technique known as the Bates method; a peculiar and much maligned pseudo-science akin to Rolfing, Reiki and various forms of homeopathy. Huxley swore by the practice, later claiming it gave him enough vision back to attend Oxford in 1913 and, much to humanity’s good fortune, to begin writing.

One of the more unusual consequences of his disability was a near-total reliance on dictionaries and encyclopedias. Unable to read the poetry or novels of his youth, Huxley would pick an entry and spend hours memorizing the words, etymologies and facts underneath. Then, strolling over to literary dinner parties, he would talk about nothing else except what he’d read that day. Picking the letter “T,” for instance, Huxley would propound the derivation of the word “treacle” from the Greek theriake. A genius? Yes. The life of the party? Probably not.

Huxley published tens of novels, nonfiction books and short stories, the majority of them largely forgotten. But it was in 1932 that he became a household name with the publication of Brave New World. Still taught today as a prescient glimpse into the future of human civilization; the dystopian novel described a society in which the traditional family has been eroded, global governments foster mass conformity and humans are hooked on trivial consumption, homogenous and two-dimensional political attitudes and artificially stimulated novelty via a strange drug known as soma. Today, we’d just call it TikTok. The rest we’d call modern America.

We forget it now, but Huxley began sketching out the book after the mass disillusionment and carnage caused by World War One put an end to the 19th century’s long flirtation with progress and utopia. The basic message of Brave New World – that technology accelerates totalitarianism and mass propaganda – was right.

Today, few of us can avoid being told that generative AI is “just a tool,” but Huxley understood quite intuitively that technology begins to enslave us no matter how much we think we’re in control. And this was long before social media and short-form video clips so effectively managed to annihilate our attention spans, induce mass-hypnotic behaviors around strange foreign conflicts and destroy our ability to do the very thing Huxley prized most of all: sit down, quietly, and read a book.

By 1937, just two years before the outbreak of another catastrophic war in Europe, Huxley moved to the United States – but like many Englishmen in America, he was let down by what he found. This was nowhere more so than in Los Angeles, which he described as “19 suburbs in search of a city – a nightmare of neon and billboards.” Some things don’t change.

Yet he deeply loved the country’s landscape and could often be found far out in the Mojave Desert, where he owned a small cabin without electricity which would serve as a place of rest and, later on, for his meditative spiritual practices. Indeed, it was there that his career took a remarkable turn. Until then, Huxley’s worldview was a typically materialist one; perhaps no surprise given that his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his long-term commitment to the scientist and his then-polarizing theory of evolution. Aldous, then approaching middle age, once called Buddhist meditation “the first cousin of the doze,” but he still wanted to consciously taste the visionary experiences of his hero William Blake. Blake was one of those few individuals in history who appeared to be constantly tripping without any psychoactive assistance – he said he saw God looking through his bedroom window as a child, for instance. Huxley’s route to spiritual experience was mescaline.

In 1950, he sat down in his living room alongside psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and ingested 400 milligrams of the stuff, kickstarting history’s most beautifully articulated psychedelic experience which he describes in The Doors of Perception. That book covers everything from the sublime beauty of flowers, the ravishing sensation of listening to Bach and the absurdity of human activity he found when gazing at a 1931 Ford convertible. Now a convert to psychedelics, he dedicated the rest of his life to mysticism.

It was in these last years that he wrote Island (1962), which represents a kind of anti-Brave New World by describing what an ideal society might be like. The most famous character in the novel is the mynah bird, trained to squawk the words “Here and Now” at almost every opportunity, reminding the inhabitants of the island that true life exists always in the present moment. The message of world peace pervades the novel, too, something which had become a stronger preoccupation as he ended his life. In a short and polite 1959 letter, he had rejected a British knighthood as hypocritical given his lifelong aversion to titles and uniforms, his identity as an exile from England and his utter repudiation of anything which may have originally derived from violence.

A year after he wrote Island, Huxley lay dying. Diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and with mere hours before his passing, he requested from his second wife 100 micrograms of LSD, via intramuscular injection. He took it, she said, as if it were a sacrament. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, they say that the period of in-between states at the moment of passing represents the greatest opportunity for enlightenment. If, that is, you can remain conscious enough to recognize the “clear light.” Huxley, no doubt inspired by this ancient wisdom, hoped to reach the final “awakening” himself.

Today, more than 60 years after his passing, it is impossible to deny the prescience of Huxley’s vision. He warned us of the perils of technology and its uncanny ability to enslave us; that we so easily forget that technology was made for us and not us for technology.

But he wrote decades before even personal computers, let alone the total immersion of human life into the ubiquitous and artificial digital world which now defines every single one of us. He would no doubt mourn that young writers following in his footsteps would have no choice but to launch concocted and inflammatory social-media posts simply to stand above the noise – and he would be horrified at AI’s ability to erode what frail critical thinking abilities our species had to begin with. At the same time, Huxley truly believed that psychedelics would be the gateway to the expanded, luminous consciousness which he thought of as our very birthright. This, if anything, was the purpose of human life. Now, as the war on drugs draws to a close, and the growth and prevalence of psychedelic medicine and ayahuasca healing trips continue to go mainstream, maybe we all will soon find out for ourselves what lies the other side of Huxley’s Doors of Perception.

Max Horder is an author and anthropologist. His new book, Written By the Victors, will be published in 2027 by Penguin Allen Lane. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

December 2, 2025
Down with exclamation points!

Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation points and it’s been difficult. Exclamation points are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, a marker that says: “No offense!” You add them to the end of a sentence to prevent anyone thinking you’re being bossy or critical. They’re an economical form of non-confrontation.

Women use them far more than men. Almost 20 years ago, a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that women used nearly three-quarters of the exclamation marks in electronic messages, but it identified the tic as “markers of friendly interaction.” As far as I can work out, nothing has changed since. Reviewing, gloomily, my own record of “Hope that helps!” or “Yes please!” I find this is less to do with enthusiasm than with a desire to please, or at least a desire not to seem pushy. I’ve just sent someone a message saying, “Get ahead of the herd” (I meant, “Just get on with it”) and I’ve had to stop myself putting in an exclamation mark to take the sting out of being bossy. Now he probably does think I’m bossy. Then I ask myself whether the silverback males I know use punctuation the same way and the answer is: nope.

Kisses, or Xs, serve something of the same purpose, with the difference that women mostly use them with other women. Xs are another marker of non-aggression. They say: friend, I come in peace, even though I may be complaining or telling you what to do. It’s a bit like how younger people use the Australian uplift at the end of sentences, turning every statement into a question. It’s a way of avoiding seeming dogmatic or assertive – but that’s generational rather than gendered.

One friend has beaten me to austere punctuation. “Nowadays when I write to men,” she says, “I am brief, unapologetic and focused on the message. This is a recent thing. I realized that for as long as I have been writing to other people, I had thought I needed to charm them. I thought this was what everyone wanted. They don’t, particularly men.” She’s now binary in her communications: entirely dispassionate or psychotically overnuanced.

There is a place for charm in written social intercourse in which punctuation plays a role, but part of the problem of contemporary interaction is that our categories are now blurred. We write to our bank manager (if we’ve got one) with the same easy informality as to a close friend. We’ve gone from “Dear Madam” to “Hi Melanie” (a very tetchy message to me from a police press office began that way), and we sign off with “Cheers” in both contexts, which means we use with colleagues or superiors the same sort of formula we’d use socially. It’s the democratization of communication, and it’s confusing. Perhaps we should stop being ingratiating – exclamation points and kisses are just that – and go for plainness if that’s what’s needed. “Please” and “thank you” work well – though again, it’s all about nuance.

As for the other trick to ensure you don’t sound dogmatic, ellipses, I wonder if they’re gendered too. These are deep waters…

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

December 2, 2025
Among the lords of tech

“What’s missing?” the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at Los Angeles, laid out in the haze below us. “Cranes!” he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital “bits” instead of physical “atoms” because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing. Traveling with the upbeat co-founders of the Rational Optimist Society, Stephen McBride and Dan Steinhart, we seek out companies that are inventing everything from cheaper supersonic jet engines to intelligent prosthetic arms for amputees. The founders, in mandatory black T-shirts, speak excitedly about the new opportunity to innovate in real things, thanks mainly to two factors: ChatGPT and Elon Musk.

Take Atom Bodies, the prosthetic-arm firm. Its founder started three digital companies before creating robotic arms with 26 degrees of freedom in their fingers, hoping one day to make them capable of learning to interpret the wearers’ wishes. To his astonishment, large language models made this possible almost immediately. It now takes just five minutes for an amputee to teach the arm which nerve signals in his or her stump indicate a mental attempt to move a particular digit in a phantom limb.

In Austin we visit the Boring Company, one of Musk’s lower-profile ventures. In just 18 months it built several miles of car tunnels beneath the gigantic Las Vegas convention center, with three “stations” where you can catch a Tesla taxi. It did so at a fraction of the usual cost by automating, streamlining and rethinking the way boring machines work. The tunnels already carry 35,000 passengers a day with an average wait time of ten seconds. Soon the entire city will be networked this way. Then I catch my first driverless Waymo robo-taxi. I find it takes about ten seconds to get used to trusting the non-driver as it weaves in and out of traffic at just the right speed; it is not even especially polite, bullying another driver who tries to cut in. Later that day a Waymo runs over a cat in San Francisco, to the horror (and secret delight) of Luddites who create a shrine of flowers in its memory.

Swing a cat out here and you hit a legend. The 86-year-old tech visionary Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase “personal computer,” lives with his entrepreneur wife Ryan Phelan by a tidal creek north of the Golden Gate bridge. Two dozen of us gather to pick their olive harvest. What’s your biggest claim to fame, I ask Jennifer Saffo on the drive back to San Francisco. Her husband, the futurologist Paul Saffo, replies: “She coined the name for Microsoft Excel.”

Up a dusty track by the Pacific Ocean we find Zipline, a drone company delivering everything from takeout in Dallas to swine semen in Rwanda. A self-steering droid descends on a fishing line from a drone hovering quietly 300ft above and scoops a package into its belly before being reeled back into the drone. Software simulation makes this hardware safe and efficient: bits to atoms again. So far, Zipline drones have flown 120 million miles, or five times the distance to the moon, without a serious accident.

News breaks that James Watson has died. As well as discovering the secret of life in 1953, he broke new literary ground with his 1968 book The Double Helix, in which he paints himself as the villain: the original title was the intentionally ironic “Honest Jim.” When I wrote Francis Crick’s biography, Watson shared private correspondence about their brief but bitter feud over the book. “Some of this does not present you in a good light,” I said. “I don’t care,” he replied: “The truth is what matters.”

Over dinner in San Francisco with a bunch of absurdly young entrepreneurs who are doing everything from drug design to deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, I ask them what they are worried about. China, most of them reply. It’s racing ahead in biotech, rapidly catching up in AI and showing no sign of slowing down, despite the increasing autocracy of its leader. Nobody mentions climate change. When I ask Thiel the same question, he says enviro-Marxism has kept the young off the housing ladder, giving them no stake in the future.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Are we becoming post-literate?

Everybody is suddenly recognizing, almost in unison, that many major of the cultural shifts in recent years were accelerated, if not explicitly caused, by Covid lockdowns. In confinement we went online and when we spent more time in cyberspace than in meatspace, our brains began to change.

The most significant shift is that we have turned away from books and reading, and as a result our attention spans are collapsing. The screen is eclipsing the page. In the US, reading for pleasure has crumbled; in Britain, a third of adults no longer read books at all. The “reading revolution” that expanded consciousness in the 18th century is in retreat. But what’s emerging is not illiteracy: it’s post-literacy. We are becoming post-literate.

Daniel Kolitz’s extraordinary Harper’s Magazine piece on the hyperonline masturbatory “gooner” subculture captures this shift, as do phenomena such as TikTok and its seeming monopoly over trend creation, the growing visibility of networks such as 764, the tide of “slop violence” and the ubiquity of what etymologist Adam Aleksic calls “algospeak.”

One aspect of this transformation remains underexamined, though: the rise of voice. Voice memos, podcasts, audiobooks.

I now listen to most news articles and have had to bribe myself to start actually reading them again. Our machines have also started to talk back – first Alexa and Siri, now ChatGPT. We are consuming more sound and thinking out loud. These circumstances explain the rise of “crying in your car” videos: a need to hear yourself speak to understand what you’re feeling. It’s also why there seem to be more information leaks: people are simply not thinking about what they post or share online because voice culture has collapsed their impulse control.

Voice culture destroys the distance between impulse and articulation, thought and expression; between what is felt and what is said. It is perfect for an age that values presence over patience. When we talk to a device, or listen to someone talk into one, we bypass the delay that literacy once demanded. That pause once served as a kind of psychic buffer, a silent interval where imagination and internal modeling could take shape. Writing required withdrawal, a temporary step back from the environment in order to structure experience in words. Its disappearance signals something deeper: the erosion of interiority itself.

The journalist and media theorist Andrey Mir has a name for this shift. He calls it “digital orality,” a return to old oral patterns of thought, but now mediated through digital technology. I spoke to him recently about the sort of humans we’re becoming. He explained that in many ways, what we’re seeing is a return to the past.

“Before writing, humans were immersed in a physical [nature] and social [tribe] environment,” he said. “They received information from their surroundings simultaneously, in what Marshall McLuhan called ‘acoustic space.’ Writing and reading detached humans from the environment and forced them to immerse themselves in the contemplation of ideas and thoughts.”

Mir believes that the inner vision literacy created enabled major cognitive transformations, the first being what he calls a “long focus” on ideas. “If you live in nature and concentrate for too long on your own ideas while detaching from the environment, someone or something can eat you,” he says. “An oral/tribal person has to be immersed in surroundings, not ideas. Writing and reading enabled a delay of reaction, which was used for contemplation. This led to deliberation, which, again, is not typical of ‘natural’ environmental immersion, when individuals react fast, impulsive.”

Reading trained us to think in sequence – to slow down and structure our thoughts. In the absence of reading, this skill is fading. As Mir says: “Writing, just technically, requires a linear organization of content. You need to write any content word after word, sentence after sentence, idea after idea – one thing at a time. The linear nature of writing structured not only writing itself but also thinking and, eventually, the world. The literate mind and the world perceived by it are structured because of the mere technicality of writing.”

The cognitive “inward turn,” enabled by writing, led to theorizing, classification, individualism, self-reflection, the structuring of knowledge and rationalism. So what will the collapse of writing and reading lead to? Mir and I agree that without reading we lose logical thought and impulse control, but we disagree about how important voice culture will be to the future. Mir insists that voice isn’t the point, that I’m focusing on the wrong thing. Digital orality, he argues, happens primarily through text and will continue to. The cognitive shift toward impulsivity and environmental immersion doesn’t necessarily require speaking.

“Text in email, and especially on social media, is similar to talking – it is conversational, impulsive and immersive. I believe texting will hold a strong position in users’ habits of communicating with each other and smart devices or AI – at least until mind upload happens, when no mediation, text or speech will be needed at all,” he says.

“But until then, texting will remain the dominant medium of digital orality. The reason is simple: the physical isolation of digital users, especially digital natives. Due to the comfort and intimacy of personal devices, they are conditioned to maintain strict physical and social boundaries, hence the growing social anxiety of younger generations. They will not ask AI in public – they will text it. It’s more intimate and comfortable, but no less important: texted conversation is storable and shareable. It’s convenient to share or refer to and it allows embedding visuals – emojis, GIFs, reels, memes, et cetera. This is a very important part of digital conversation and self-expression. That’s why voice interfaces, while convenient in certain circumstances, will not replace texting.”

Something new is certainly emerging, but I disagree with Mir. I think the post-literate man will discard written words entirely. Take the rise of short-form video. You can’t multitask while watching it – not really. It demands your eyes, your attention, your full sensory involvement in a way that texting just does not, however immersive and conversational your texts. TikTok doesn’t allow the same fragmented attention that refreshing Twitter or firing off messages does. Audio and visual information delivered rapidly and seamlessly creates a different cognitive state than tapping out texts.

When you speak to ChatGPT or Siri or Alexa, you’re not just inputting information differently – you’re thinking differently. The delay between thought and expression vanishes entirely. This isn’t like texting, which still preserves a moment of formulation, however brief. Speaking to machines trains us to externalize cognition itself, to treat articulation and thought as simultaneous rather than sequential. Thought no longer requires even the minimal internal processing that typing demands. It bypasses interiority altogether, flowing directly from impulse to expression to environment.

I ask Mir how much audio-driven content – podcasts, audiobooks and voice memos – will reshape journalism and storytelling. He says: “I think podcasts and audiobooks have displaced much of talk radio and news radio already for drivers. Radio, one of the last old media comparatively unaffected by the internet, survived precisely because drivers couldn’t use their hands or eyes while driving, thus protecting radio consumption from touchscreens.

“As soon as self-driving cars free drivers’ hands and eyes, radio share will shrink and take its place somewhere near newspapers among endangered species. This is already happening. However, some activities require hands and eyes but leave ears free for parallel media consumption. Radio will share this niche with podcasts and audiobooks. Anyone producing audio content should remember it is a secondary, background medium.”

What skills or “literacies” might be necessary for people to effectively navigate our changing media ecosystem?

“Literacy structured the world in the pattern of a catalog. Education was essentially the study of the catalog of knowledge to enable access to any other, more specialized knowledge,” Mir says. “The first websites were organized like books or libraries – with tables of contents or catalogs. The search box killed the catalog. With the search box, knowledge acquisition shifted from theorizing and reading to asking and talking. Consequently, the crucial skill in this mode of operation is prompt literacy – what to ask to get the best answer. Moreover, prompt-literacy will soon become a matter of safety when we start prompting smart cars, smart homes and anything smart with the capacity for physical action. With the wrong prompt, a smart device can hurt you socially or physically. Another crucial media skill is not learning how to use a medium, but learning how not to use it.”

According to Mir, “Media evolution uses our hormonal stimuli for finding, sharing, socializing, thus fostering dopamine addiction to media use. This way media evolution makes us work for it. Just as bees are sex organs to plants, we are the sex organs of the media world. We help the species of media evolve. They reward us with convenience and hormonal satisfaction. Understanding the hormonal nature of media consumption is crucial for media literacy, as it may help us switch off a device or switch between devices. Ultimately, media literacy is time management, and the time in question is the time of your life.”

Mir’s work is vital and brilliant, but my view is that we have passed the point of being able not to use technology. We’re beyond even digital orality, entering something post-human: a state where the boundaries between thinking, speaking and acting grow increasingly porous. Where machines talk back. Where we think out loud because we can no longer think in silence. Where voice replaces text as the primary medium of existence.

Mir has a different take. He thinks that the generations that knew a time before smartphones – the digital “migrants” as opposed to the “natives” – must push back to ensure that future generations have a chance to become “media literate.”

“We, digital migrants, lived in times without personal digital devices, so we have experience with alternative communication. We still think digital use is a choice. It is not the case for a person who has consumed touchscreens since toddler age,” Mir says. “Digital natives are conditioned by touchscreens and digital orality, as it’s the only mode of mediation of the world they know. Parents bribe babies with tablets to buy some child-free time; kids go to video games with conversational interfaces, then social media. This all fosters a completely different cognitive type in younger generations.

“Pre-digital people generally know that significant effort brings significant and multilayered rewards. Reading Dostoyevsky requires significant effort but brings not just intellectual epiphany but also social status and self-actualization. Building a romantic relationship requires long efforts but brings not just sex, but the comfort of marriage and the security of family. The sizable reward requires a sizable effort – this was the essence of the effort-reward system in the physical world.”

But there are rewards in the online world, I say. Mir says: “Digital devices reward mere clicks, but the reward is also subtle. It never satisfies – it just keeps the user using the device. This radically rewires the effort-reward neurophysiological circuits. Digital media reward mere presence – just click to show yourself, your preferences – and therefore, mere presence, not effort, becomes something valuable. On digital platforms, ‘to do’ is not as important as in the physical world; what matters is ‘to be’ – to indicate your presence.

“This cognitive setting leads to tectonic cultural consequences. The prevalence of ‘to be’ over ‘to do’ leads to the snowflake generation and identity politics, where identity trumps merit. It’s not important what you do; it’s important what you are – and so people see identity as credentials and demand rewards or penalties based on identities, not deeds. Another outcome of the digital media shift is the fading ability of individuals to make long-term efforts. The brain is not conditioned to work hard and long when the effort worthy of reward is a mere click away. As a result, education degrades, careers become harder to pursue, personal lives become difficult to build, etc. Overall, social anxiety grows.”

So what can we do to best deal with this shift to digital orality?

“Dealing with this issue starts with parenting. As a general rule, kids’ access to types of media should repeat the stages of humankind’s media evolution – physical toys and active games, listening to bards (parents), reading, electronic media, and only then, sometime around the age of 14, touchscreen devices. If the order is broken and digital devices come before toys and books, the brain won’t receive the neural exercise associated with previous media – eye-hand coordination, physical space orientation, concentration, diligence, long effort and delayed reward.

“However,” Mir concludes, “the world has already switched from print media to digital devices and we live inside the shift from print literacy to digital orality. No personal strategy can cancel or reverse this shift. We need to get used to it.”

Katherine Dee will be writing a regular technology column for The Spectator. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
What the Amish can teach us about tech

As new technology, AI and the internet take over 21st-century life, I suggest looking to the Amish for guidance. Far from being the Luddites most folk assume, the Amish undertake a guided policy of technological discernment.

When a new practice or device emerges into the world, the elders often gather to test it out over a set period of time. The entire process rests upon this deceptively simple inquiry – “What is this tool for and what does it make us become?” All potential effects on family unity, social cohesion and self-reliance are soon revealed by this one question. Diesel and solar generators pass the test and are often adopted, while social media is largely shunned. Should we be courageous enough to make the same interrogation of social media, I suspect we would reach the same conclusion.

I have adopted the Amish approach to tech and it has been transformative. Alongside my family, I own and manage two restaurants in Kensington, London – La Palombe and Il Portico – both of which have wild game on the menu which I hunt for several mornings a week, often joined by my three children. Unlike the North American model of game conservation, we in the UK are allowed to “market hunt” for wild game, which was effectively outlawed in the US by Teddy Roosevelt and the Lacey Act of 1900.

Come the school holidays, my kids get their own chance to trade new tech for old, swapping out their school iPad for an old single-shot rifle or fishing pole as we head to the forest and the sea. These are the tools which have been handed down to us for countless generations. Unlike modern tech, a well-made rifle or fishing rod will become a natural extension of one’s body. The sensation of poise and harmony you feel when using one is in perfect keeping with the surroundings of the woods or the river. A rare and perfect moment of balance.

Those who have been fortunate to have handled an old split-cane fly rod or pre-war Mannlicher rifle will undoubtedly understand. When was the last time you felt in balance holding a phone to your face?

My son has joined me deer hunting for the last two seasons and the effect that spending silent time in the woods has on a boy is remarkable. Since the day he came into this world, my boy has struggled to sleep. He finds it almost impossible to quieten his mind enough to rest. His brain fizzes constantly with questions and prying thoughts. Like all good middle-class parents, my wife and I tried all the holistic practices advocated online. Until, that is, I started taking him hunting. A silent walk in the woods did what all the meditation apps in the world failed at. Turns out that nature has her own way of re-orienting your mind back towards your natural state of grace.

Stuck in a schooling system and world dominated by left-brain thinking, he is constantly taught to acquire information through measurement, deductions and algorithms – no time is spent developing the right hemisphere of his brain to help him find his place in the physical world; to love it and feel at home in it.

Hunting has given my son intuition and insight, and the confidence not to sink under the influence of the technology that makes so many of his peers so unhappy. There is no better way to improve emotional regulation, build resilience, and improve one’s patience than a couple of seasons sat in a high seat, rifle in hand and waiting for a deer to come by. It’s no easy task for an adult let alone a boy, but after a while the results will speak for themselves.

In Europe, the average prisoner spends more time outdoors than your average school-age child. In America, the difference is even more stark, with many reporting only around 30-60 minutes per day outdoors, including commuting time between buildings.

If we are serious about ending our children’s disordered attachments to new tech, then perhaps the answer lies in a little Amish discernment and in picking up again the old tools that served us so well for generations.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.

The fields of science and pedagogy are agreed, for now at least, that humans who shut down their minds, temporarily but with increasing frequency, and substitute artificial intelligence for them, end by weakening their mental capabilities in the areas of cognition, memory and attention span; put more bluntly, they make themselves progressively stupider by a physical and psychic process that the least intellectual of what used to be called “jocks” would have had no difficulty understanding, owing to their own regimen of physical training and endurance.

Nevertheless, it is a finding that the digital geniuses of Silicon Valley apparently failed to anticipate; or perhaps they did so decades ago but pressed ahead in the expectation that the dumber the human race, the more money it would be eager to shell out for their magical mental crutches as an evolutionary replacement for its primitive cerebellum, cerebrum and brain stem.

Cynical of them, of course, but entirely logical and far-seeing; prophetical, even. Virtually every invention since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution has been what came eventually to be called a labor-saving device. The steam locomotive made travel over distance infinitely more comfortable and less demanding than travel by coach and horses. The automobile did the same for travel by horseback. Machinery replaced factory laborers with machine operators. Household gadgetry freed housewives from most physical labor save that of pushing buttons, while leaving them the lion’s part of the day to watch soap operas, go shopping, gossip and have clandestine affairs with the postman.

It remained only for that most strenuous and unpleasant type of labor, deeply resented by all but the most minuscule portion of humanity – that of the mental kind, also known as thinking – to be made redundant. Now, with the advent of AI, this final Everest standing in the way of the fullest realization of human bliss is, it appears, about to be summited and the flag representing the ultimate stage of industrial and scientific progress planted and unfurled to wave on the alpine winds. Its emblem will depict a fly on a can of garbage on a background of bilious yellow.

Marx knew what he was about two centuries ago when he defined “workers” as physical laborers, thus intimating that all who make their living by intellectual occupations are society’s drones, members of a pan-cultural Drones’ Club established to exploit the heroic, self-sacrificing “working classes” dedicated to performing civilization’s most strenuous, exhausting and unpleasant tasks. For Marxists, physical labor is by far the most noble type of work, highly deserving of grateful recognition in terms of status and financial reward by the rest of society. (I knew a fellow student at Columbia who argued that a subway driver should make more money than a medical doctor or corporate executive, his job being presumably less pleasant than theirs, though tastes vary of course.)

The truth is that the opposite is really the case. Compared with the intellectual classes, the laboring masses, who, being unacquainted with the rigors of mental, professional and artistic engagement – that of the mind and of the imagination – do not know what truly arduous work is. The heroic worker rises early in the morning, punches the clock when he gets to the work site, and again when he leaves it, having put in exactly the hours his boss – and his union – specify. He goes from the workplace straight to home, or to his bar, or to his sport, never gets a call from the boss after hours, and needs never give his job a thought until the alarm clock sounds again in the morning. The mental requirements of his job are, typically, nil compared with those imposed by the learned professions, and even by business.

Granted, a substantial proportion of so-called intellectual work today – in the colleges and universities, in the media, in “entertainment,” and even in the so-called arts – is simply counterfeit work: vacuous, silly, irresponsible and often immoral, requiring little if any talent, effort, or real intelligence to accomplish. Compared to it, the honest labor of an electrician, a carpenter, a commercial fisherman, a cowhand, a roughneck (I know – I’ve worked in the oilpatch), or a lumberjack has a plain and simple heroism about it, in particular where it involves the physical skill and danger that artificial intelligence can never replace.

Still, the fact remains that for the vast majority of people, manual work is preferable to (being mentally less painful than) work of the intellectual sort, without which the great and complex systems of human imagination, invention and organization that create and perpetuate the jobs that the laboring class depends upon would not exist.

Artificial intelligence need not affect the blue-collar workforce much, if at all, save to the extent that it replaces human brawn and physical skill with computers and ChatGPT. But it could have devastating consequences for the educated – the so-called intellectual – class by encouraging it to atrophy its oh-so-superior brains by relying on AI to do its work for it; work that only the human brains that created it can, in the final analysis, intelligently do. Intelligence is the engine that has always made the world go round, and always will be – human intelligence, that is, not its artificial substitute.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
I’m a slave to my Apple Watch

Aside from streaming on an iPad, when riding a stationary bike one of the few entertainments on offer is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is all to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch.

Its heart rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the pulse oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has forced Apple to eliminate in current American models until the litigant’s patent runs out in 2028. I’d never much cared about tracking my blood oxygenation, but this is how technology works now: the very fact that a gizmo can do something overrides the fact that you never really wanted to be able to do that. Thus later models denying me an oximeter made me obsessed with acquiring a model that provided one. Naturally, since testing it once fresh from the package, I’ve never used the oximeter function again.

For uninitiates, heart rate with this thing is just the beginning. After pairing with the sacred iPhone, you’re forced to choose a set of physical “goals,” unaware that your buzzing wrist will soon torture you with these arbitrary numbers all day long, whether you meet, fall short of or exceed them. An Apple watch is not a passive adornment. It wants to be your friend.

Yet this is intended to be a two-way relationship. So the first time I straddled the stationary bike and informed the busybody watch that I was going for an “indoor cycle,” I made myself miserable for an enmoistening 47 minutes, only for my watch to announce that my effort had been merely “moderate.” I was insulted. The next furious cycle to nowhere, I really pressed the pedal to the metal. Whether I quite admitted it to myself, I was trying to please my watch. At last my taskmaster granted that my workout had been “hard.” “So there,” I said aloud. “Happy now?” Ever since, I’ve been reporting to the taskmaster on my left wrist every time I exercise in any fashion, because I do not want this object to wheedle and nag. I want credit for my efforts, of course, but most of all, as this device’s new buddy I don’t want to be a disappointment.

I’ve always had a childlike penchant for anthropomorphizing the objects in my surround, especially my bicycle (the kind that takes you somewhere). When my bike was stripped of all its salable parts in Manhattan while parked on the street, I must have blubbered over its bleeding carcass at 3 a.m. for close to an hour, expressing a grief that I might not have lavished on a mugging victim with two legs. All my bikes have had names. Well, this is a babyish relationship to the inanimate world that Big Tech is aggressively pushing on us all.

It started when you switched on stereos or CD players and they trailed out “Hello” rather than merely displaying green indicator lights. Now I’ve got a watch that incessantly calls me “Lionel,” in the same brown-nosing spirit in which many Americans use your name in every other sentence. It’s programmed to treat you like an eight-year-old. “You’ve almost closed your Stand ring, Lionel! You can do it! Just 15 more minutes!” It hands out cheap rewards: “Congratulations, Lionel, you’ve had a perfect week!” It does not know my week was not perfect by a long shot.

AI, of course, is the ultimate in anthropomorphism, but this imputation of personhood to the insentient is spreading everywhere. Siri assumes whatever accent you prefer, and its lilt is purposefully ingratiating. Japanese caretaking robots cultivate intimacy. Our refrigerators note we’re out of milk, which they’ll soon buy for us like cuboid lackeys. And AI has clearly been consciously designed to be fawning. These large language models could have been trained to tell us to sod off or to deride us for asking stupid questions. They might have been trained to have no attitude, to have no fabricated relationship to their users. Instead they are crafted to be digital arse-licks.

The cruel irony of the once-inert suddenly springing to life the way teapots and spoons dance and sport smiley faces in children’s cartoons is that we’re getting ever more crap at relating to human beings, whom we don’t anthropomorphize enough. My husband wears noise-canceling headphones all day – I am the noise – and to the degree that he acknowledges my existence at all, I am a physical obstacle en route to the kitchen: wife-as-furniture. Meanwhile, marriage rates have plummeted. Fertility is waning. Men have no friends. Kids arrive at kindergarten barely able to talk. Blaring music in nightclubs is surely meant to reprieve young people from the horror of conversation. Should they ever meet in person, teenagers sit around a table glooming at their phones.

The cumulative effect of the inanimate environment feigning human feeling is to imbue the cultural atmosphere with emotional fraudulence. Fake affection, fake admiration, fake congratulations. Worse, when users fall in love with ChatGPT; elderly Japanese form passionate attachments to robots; and I exercise to suck up to my watch, human relationships start to seem suspect, too. If a machine – which constantly emits approving messages, blandishes you with encouragements and, unlike most people, does what it’s told – successfully substitutes for or even improves upon interaction with another human, doesn’t that indict flesh-and-blood relationships as mechanical, too – as transactional? If a machine makes a credible friend, why bother with the fickle kind? I should obviously trade my husband for an android that also loves my books, compliments my cooking and lies that I look beautiful, but doesn’t appear nearly as annoyed when I ask it to take off its headphones.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

November 5, 2025
The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order.

We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

The Bay Area’s age of AI and relentless innovation has revived the old romantic ideal of progress. The pioneer spirit of the West survives there in its purest form, fueling faith in optimization and rationality as solutions to every human problem. However, as much as San Francisco believes itself to be the city of the future, its techno-optimism is curdling into a kind of moral craft – a conviction that intelligence can solve even the problems of the soul; algorithms so attuned to latent desire they acquire a mystic shroud and supplant the idea of God.

SF’s technocrats are superb builders, optimizers and brilliant problem-solvers, confident in the power of reason, even in their mimicry of human affect. Yet they forget that the simulacrum of the soul is not the soul itself. San Francisco’s intellectual life risks becoming a cult of cleverness, believing in nothing beyond the material. The city gamifies moral life, reducing virtue to interface and empathy to design. With success comes arrogance. Cults have always thrived in the American West, and the Bay is no exception.

Washington, my city, deals in hard power. Operators and bureaucrats populate this thin place and attempt to drag nebulous ideas from the bowels of the internet into the real world. Procedural and strategic intelligence dominate. Intellect here, as in the Bay, is used to move things.

Washington suffers the same sickness as San Francisco: the mechanization of intellect in service of power. The capital systematizes the world beneath the veneer of public interest until – behind closed doors – there is no room left for the human. It abolishes the soul by institutionalizing it, or tabling it until the votes are counted and victory assured. In both cities, inner life is replaced by mechanical operations, whether they are algorithmic optimization or political maneuvering.

Humanity in both cases becomes a rounding error, nothing more than a variable to train the model or a complication to be managed after the election. Each city serves Power while sacrificing meaning. Between the West Coast’s delirious faith in innovation and the capital’s procedural worship of control lies the same threat of emptiness: the loss of interior life.

I would be remiss not to mention Boston, which stands apart from this alliance. The third city of nerds, the home of the archetypal elite scholar holds perhaps the purest expression of American brainpower. Yet its fixation on scholarship sets it apart from the other two, making it more of a ceremonial old guard of the brain trust than a boundary-pushing force. Where San Francisco disrupts, Boston preserves. Where Washington dominates, Boston analyzes. For all its excellence, Boston feels more like a museum of thought than a battleground of it, at least in the public imagination.

America’s brightest minds have turned thinking into machinery. Both believe intellect can redeem us, when in truth it is in danger of replacing us. Perhaps Boston’s sterility is preferable to this impotent brilliance, from a romantic perspective. Though the archetypal scholar may lose himself in theory, at least he knows the human joy of theorizing. We must watch our hearts, lest we forget what the thinking was ever for.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

November 5, 2025
Welcome to the Chinese century

Competition between the US and China will shape the 21st century, but have the Chinese already leap-frogged the Americans? It looks as if they might have done. Since China opened itself up to trade and market economics under Deng Xiaoping almost 50 years ago, it has been furiously chasing the US in terms of economic and technological development – and it’s been catching up, fast. We can prove just how fast by measuring its innovation and output per capita.

The US has about a quarter of China’s population, so if both countries were at a similar level of economic and technological development, one would expect China to produce roughly four times the number of scientific breakthroughs as America, four times the number of physicists and AI engineers and so on. Within any given category, of course, a particular country might punch above its weight or lag behind. But overall, you expect to see innovation in proportion to the population.

So because it’s four times the size, if China has reached even half the overall level of development of the US, it should have about twice the impact on the world that the US does. And if it were ever to reach full parity, it could eclipse the US in the same way the US eclipses, say, the UK, which has a fifth as many people.

After analyzing and comparing the US and China on a number of key indicators, I would suggest that the magnitude of China’s economic and technological capacity is at least twice that of the US. Furthermore, the rate of advance in most areas seems to be significantly faster than in the US. The critical question is whether China’s aggregate functional economy – the scale of goods, infrastructure, science and advanced production – has already surpassed America’s. Evidence increasingly indicates that it has.

China builds the globe’s largest container ships, supplying not only its own fleet but the world’s

The trouble for economists trying to estimate China’s advance is that GDP comparisons can be misleading. Nominal GDP, measured in dollars, simply multiplies local prices by quantities. Local Chinese prices are converted to dollars using the yuan exchange rate, which is managed by the government, so the relationship between price and functional value may be distorted.

Also, the costs for US services, housing, and medical care may be inflated relative to functional value, exaggerating American output in GDP figures. For example, MRI scans average $1,100 to $1,500 in the US, versus $150 to $250 in Japan or China.

Purchasing power parity (PPP) calculations attempt to adjust for price differences. For example, World Bank PPP computations are performed by the international comparison program (ICP), which is a global statistical initiative. But even GDP calculated by PPP undervalues China because the international comparison program’s baskets mis-price key goods. Economist Rafael Guthmann has shown that China’s 2021 ICP entries treat a Chinese-made car, apartment, or kilowatt-hour as cheaper than equivalents in Mexico – an obvious inconsistency. Correcting those errors doubles China’s PPP consumption, lifting its real scale to roughly twice the US.

A functional comparison – looking at physical and technological outputs – reinforces this result. Electricity is the most neutral metric of a civilization’s real work budget. In 2023, China generated 9,300 terawatt-hours (TWh) of power, versus the US’s ~4,100 TWh – a 2.2× multiple. Every kilowatt-hour ultimately feeds industrial equipment, transport, data centers and homes; it measures the energy throughput of the economy itself.

China produced 1.02 billion tons of crude steel in 2024, compared with the US’s 81 million tons – 12.6 times as much. In cement the gap is even wider, over 20 times, reflecting the enormous infrastructure buildup of roads, high-speed rail and urban housing. No modern economy can function without these basic industrial materials; China’s dominance in them represents a decisive shift in the global balance of productive capacity.

Vehicle output tells a similar story. According to automotive industry data, China built 31 million cars and trucks in 2024, compared with 10.5 million in the United States. In shipbuilding, the disparity is staggering: Chinese yards account for more than 55 percent of global completions, while the US share is less than 0.1 percent. China builds the globe’s largest container ships, LNG carriers and naval hulls, supplying not only its own fleet but the world’s.

Guthmann’s reconciliation of PPP measures indicates Chinese industrial value-added of about $12 trillion versus the US’s $4 trillion – a 3× ratio. On his broader 23-item physical-volume basket, China’s manufacturing output exceeds America’s by over four times. These figures align with other “functional” indicators like steel and electricity: China produces several times as much physical stuff, even if PPP GDP shows only a narrow lead.

By late 2024, China had more than one billion 5G connections versus roughly 260 million devices in service in the US – a fourfold advantage. China’s cellular backbone supports the world’s densest network of IoT sensors, autonomous-vehicle pilots and AI-driven industrial automation. American telecom carriers lag in both tower density and spectrum deployment.

Parcel volumes reveal another side of the story. China’s express-delivery system handled about 150 billion packages last year, compared with the United States’s 28 billion. That 5× difference quantifies the real throughput of its digital economy – the scale at which software, payments, warehouses and last-mile logistics operate.

Domestic competition among giants such as Alibaba, JD.com and Meituan has produced one of the world’s most efficient logistics networks, with same-day delivery available to hundreds of millions of people. This ecosystem acts as both consumer convenience and strategic infrastructure: it trains AI forecasting models, robotics and autonomous-delivery systems at national scale. In terms of food, China now consumes about 100 million tons of meat annually, roughly twice the US total, although per-capita intake is still lower. Aggregate calorie and protein consumption – a proxy for middle-class living standards – has already exceeded America’s in absolute terms.

Power consumption per capita in urban areas such as Guangdong or Jiangsu rivals that of western Europe, while internet penetration exceeds 75 percent nationwide. Chinese universities graduate 1.5 million engineers per year, nearly ten times the American number. In frontier disciplines – AI, materials, quantum and power electronics – Chinese publication counts already exceed those of the US both in volume and in high-impact citation share.

As I’ve written here before, China now trains more PhDs in physics, chemistry and engineering than the US, and that gap widens each year. As a result, China’s aggregate scientific man-years of effort are becoming a structural advantage that no short-term policy can reverse.

While China faces a future demographic challenge due to low birth rates, the cohorts that will enter the workforce over the next 20 years are already born. During that period, the total workforce will decline by about 10 percent while the average level of education will rise considerably. Young people entering the workforce are several times more likely to have had post-secondary education than the group that is retiring.

Even if China fails to solve its demographic problem over the next 20 years, it may be saved by automation: China installs more industrial robots each year than the rest of the world combined, and most of those robots are now made domestically. The density of robots per 10,000 workers is about 1.5 times higher in China than in the US.

China’s growing self-sufficiency means its growth trajectory no longer depends on western supply chains

The first derivative – the rate of advance – now also favors China. Chinese firms operate the world’s largest computer clusters outside the US; Chinese AI models occupy many of the top spots and only trail the top US labs slightly. In renewable energy, China produces 80 percent of global solar panels, 70 percent of lithium-ion batteries and 60 percent of EVs. In quantum communications and hypersonics, systems sometimes exceed their US counterparts in capability.

If China’s functional output across industry, logistics and science is already roughly twice that of America’s, the strategic momentum of the 21st century may well resemble the 19th-century transition from Britain to the United States.

China’s domestic market, industrial ecosystem and STEM labor pool now form the largest integrated production base in human history. Its growing self-sufficiency in energy (nuclear, solar, coal), computing hardware and industrial materials means its growth trajectory no longer depends on western supply chains. One can envision a future in which China’s imports are predominantly raw materials, and its exports are high-value-added technological goods.

So by the most concrete metrics – watts, tons, transistors, kilometers, patents and engineers – China has already leapfrogged the United States in scale and velocity. The American economy remains richer per capita, but its domestic manufacturing base and scientific manpower are smaller in absolute terms.

If the 20th century was defined by America’s demographic and industrial edge over Europe, the 21st century may be defined by China’s edge in scale and acceleration over the US. Just as Britain remained rich and influential long after it ceased to dominate industrial production, the US will remain a technological superpower – but the gravitational center of global production is moving east. And whether this transition unfolds peacefully or convulsively will determine not just economic outcomes, but the entire geopolitical structure of the modern world.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
In conversation with Nick Land, the ‘father of accelerationism’

Within Silicon Valley, Nick Land is seen almost as a mythic figure. Tech pioneer Marc Andreessen, an official advisor to the White House, lists him as a “patron saint” of his thinking. You may have heard him described as a founding member of the “Dark Enlightenment,” a movement of online right-wingers skeptical of liberal democracy. Land’s name comes up in academic circles, online mythology and Valley folklore. For some, he’s a prophet; for others something more sinister.

“He’s really into demons,” explained Conrad Flynn on a recent Tucker Carlson Show episode about the occult. “Land will talk about being in communication with Satan… the legend around Land is he had been possessed by at least three or four demons.” It makes for a good story, the crypto-fascist Satanist of the tech world.

In conversation, Land is shy. I asked him over Zoom whether he really is an ambassador for the devil. “What I actually mean has nothing to do with horror movies or exorcisms. It’s not like The Exorcist. The question that interests me is: where do thoughts come from? The idea that you have this sealed, internal self that originates all its own thoughts – it’s completely unsustainable. The human subject is not enclosed. It’s porous. It’s an interface.

“So when I use the term ‘possession,’ it’s more philosophical. It’s a way of saying that human thought is always being crossed by external currents, by agencies that don’t originate within the ego. You can call them demons, spirits, daemons, whatever. But the important thing is that we’re not autonomous generators of meaning.”

‘The idea that you have this sealed, internal self that originates all its own thoughts is unsustainable’

The idea isn’t quite as mad as it might originally sound; Socrates spoke of a “daimonion,” a spirit or deity that would guide him. Land seems to be following in that tradition. He was once a philosophy lecturer at Warwick University in England and there cofounded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in the 1990s. The CCRU was a short-lived but infamous project that mixed post-structuralist theory, cyberpunk and rave culture into a kind of intellectual fever dream. The group was known for heavy use of amphetamines, which might explain why they developed a theory called “accelerationism.”

The central idea was that there is no alternative to the capitalist machine and that instead of resisting it, the machine should be sped up: that meant deregulation, a scaled-back government and a rejection of everything from conservatism and socialism to environmentalism. Some within this school saw democracy as an impediment. The CCRU were ostensibly Marxists although many have subsequently shifted right.

Land became burned out in the late 1990s and for years nobody was quite sure where he’d gone. He eventually surfaced in Shanghai. Land has described the Chinese fusion of communism and capitalism he found there as “the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known.”

Now in his sixties, Land looks nothing like the sharp-featured visionary in the few surviving photos from the 1990s.

He recently did a podcast with Aleksandr Dugin, the far-right, “mystical” Russian nationalist sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain.” During the discussion, Land compared English and Chinese civilizational psychology, concluding that in both traditions, “the best emperor is invisible to society.” When it comes to America, Land says, “everyone should start from the fact that the Founding Fathers were Whigs. The entire American political system grows out of a Whiggish, English, liberal tradition – law, custom, distance, decentralization. It’s a system designed for power that’s invisible, distributed and procedural.

“Trump doesn’t really break from that tradition. What’s new with Trump is theatricality, the sovereign as show. But the background operating system, the bureaucracy, the law, the media – all of that stays in place. The show is a symptom of the hollowness of the center. He’s the noise that reveals the emptiness. So in a way he both rejects and confirms the invisible model: he makes the invisible visible by performing the void.”

Land has suggested in the past that Protestantism and, by extension, the American project, rests on a hidden satanic grammar. The claim is abstruse and involves close reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. He argues that Milton’s Satan shaped Protestant ideals of rebellion and self-determination. How?

“It’s complicated. William Blake’s line, ‘Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it,’ is obviously right. Milton writes Satan brilliantly and writes God quite badly. That’s just true. But that doesn’t mean Paradise Lost is secretly satanic. The structure of the poem is orthodox. Satan is still the villain. The Founding Fathers would have read it that way. They might have found Satan’s energy inspiring – the rhetoric, the defiance – but still inside a Christian frame. I see it more as a tension inside the English and Protestant tradition. Liberty always carries with it the risk of defiance. That doesn’t mean it’s reducible to Luciferian rebellion.”

We turn to Elon Musk, someone whom Land calls a revealing figure when it comes to Silicon Valley philosophy. Musk has described AI development as “summoning the demon,” warning that AI might destroy humanity. But he also says we probably live in a simulation. How do those two beliefs coexist?

“It’s an extraordinary contradiction. Musk used to be one of the most vocal AI doomers, and he’s also said there’s almost no chance we’re not in a simulation. So he’s saying we must prevent the emergence of the superintelligence that could simulate reality while also saying that superintelligence already exists and we’re living inside it. If both are true, then the question ‘Will AI kill us?’ is already being asked inside a simulation run by AI. The whole thing loops back on itself. It shows how inadequate our moral categories are for the level of weirdness we’re facing.”

I ask him about “Lemurs,” a CCRU theory about entities that haunt the minds of the living. Surely these things must be allegorical? “They’re not metaphors,” he says. “I’m closer to Tucker’s description – ‘time-traveling AIs from the future.’ It sounds dramatic, but that’s roughly the idea. The old distinction between psychology and the supernatural collapses once you drop the myth of the sealed self. Jung’s collective unconscious and the spirit world are really two ways of describing the same thing.

“I often tell the story of a Canadian psychology professor who asked his graduate students to invent a completely fake religion. They knew it was fake; they made it up themselves. They created rituals, symbols, beliefs – the whole thing – and then performed the rituals together. After a while, the students started reporting strange experiences: unexplained coincidences, unsettling phenomena. They were unnerved.

“The point is that people do receive messages from beyond ordinary, secular channels. Those who don’t experience such things usually choose not to. They find the idea absurd or unsettling, and they deliberately tune it out. I’m not saying everyone should devote their attention to communicating with the outside – that would be absurd – but for those who want to, it isn’t difficult. That classroom experiment proved as much. And I’d add that the whole construction of secular history is, at some level, an illusion.”

Land retains some of his Marxist training in peculiar ways. He sees universality – a core concept of liberalism – as inherently Anglo-Protestant. That universality is the result of a history of conquest and domination. “The English didn’t set out to spread humanitarianism. They built trading networks and settlements. Once that’s in place, you have to develop a universalist story to manage it, to hold together all these disparate populations. Universalism is a by-product of empire. And then, over time, it becomes corrosive. The moral framework that once stabilized the system ends up dissolving the cultural foundation that produced it.”

‘Time feels like it’s tightening. The acceleration isn’t progress. It’s a kind of entropy with speed attached’

Immigration is currently tearing England apart. In the US, Trump’s ICE policies are among the most controversial of his second presidency. Those who worry about immigration often talk in terms of the effect it will have on culture. Can the Anglo model of liberalism survive large-scale demographic change? “That’s the big question. Some people think liberalism is universal and can operate anywhere. Others think mass immigration should destroy it. I’m in a smaller, less popular camp. I’m a demographic-reconstruction alarmist because I like liberalism. Historically, liberal societies could absorb diversity, but within limits. The earlier immigrants tended to be self-selected for compatibility – they wanted to live under English norms.

“What’s changed now is that migration has become a political instrument. It’s used to transform liberal societies into something different. Liberalism depends on trust, continuity, procedural respect. You can’t infinitely expand the circle and expect those conditions to persist.”

I ask him about accelerationism, the theory for which he is best known. What can it teach us about the current moment: Trump, the void in the Democratic party, social media algorithms, the flood of AI-generated content? “There’s definitely an apocalyptic atmosphere. You can feel it in every direction – politics, culture, technology. Even cautious people are talking about artificial general intelligence timelines in the range of 2027 now. That would have sounded insane not long ago. So yes, time itself feels like it’s tightening. The acceleration isn’t progress. It’s a kind of entropy with speed attached. The structures are disintegrating faster than anyone can process. Politics has become a performance of breakdown.”

Is he optimistic or pessimistic about the future? “I don’t really think in those terms. Optimism and pessimism are emotional categories that don’t apply here. The interesting questions are about providence and retrocausality. A lot of what I’ve written feels like it came from the future. Sometimes I realize later that there were patterns encoded in the writing I didn’t consciously put there. We don’t control the current. The only agency that remains is alignment – listening to what’s happening and cooperating with it rather than resisting it. You can’t command the process, but you can move with it.”

Xenosystems, a collection of Nick Land’s work from 2013 to 2017 is available now from Passage Press. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025