Back to the Feudal? AI Technologies,Knowledge,and Humanism in a Time of Transition

Abstract

This article is a reflection on the ramifications of externalizing knowledge, first to gods, then to machines, and now to computers. That process has already led to the mortality of humanity and the jeopardy of the planet. What can “pan-humanism” mean or do in such a world?

In what follows, I link technologies, humanism, and knowledge, through a three-part stratification of “how we know.” It is loosely based on Raymond Williams’s (1980/2005) distinctions between “residual” (past), “dominant” (present), and “emergent” (future) cultural systems of “practices, meanings, and values” (pp. 26–29). In what we call premodernity, knowledge was attributed to humans, through the technologies of speech and script. In modernity, it was attributed to machines, through print, navigation, and all kinds of scopes and power tools. In postmodernity, knowledge is dematerialized, deterritorialized, and dehumanized, a product of global computation and screens. All three of these “tenses” of knowledge are co-present in the current era of digital globalization. How technologies and knowledge are taken up depends on who “we” are, which in turn depends on differing “social imaginaries.” I argue that culture makes groups, groups make knowledge, and knowledge makes enemies. To motivate collective action, humans rely on the institutions of culture—story, stage, and song—to maintain adversarial group relations. Rather than learning from each other and facing an uncertain planetary future together, modern “social imaginaries” are getting battle-ready.

As modernity senses its own end in planetary crisis and global warfare, premodern and postmodern knowledge combine in challenging new ways. Modern knowledge systems are undermined. Refeudalization makes a virtue of inequality. This makes it much harder for humans to think as a “pan-human” species, to act at a planetary scale, to remediate damage to the Earth system, and to limit intergroup conflict, which now imperils us all, and the planet with us.

Three Tenses of Knowledge

As Yuri Lotman (1990: 127) explained, “everything contained in the actual memory of culture is directly or indirectly part of that culture’s synchrony.” Let’s construe knowledge in three layered strata, each corresponding to a time period: past, present, and future. These operate socially not as a sequence but as “tenses” of knowledge; each modifying the others in a continuously unfolding present.

Past (Speech/Script)

• Is the long period of human premodernity, in which humans attributed knowledge to humanity itself. Knowledge accrued a thick crust of observation, conjecture, and projection, whereby each culture translated its world into institutions of language, story, stage, song, and spectacle, by means of which its knowledge hoard was passed down from ancestors and distributed across the “space of culture” that Lotman calls the semiosphere. Typically, the causal agent of such knowledge was imputed to invented extrahuman gods, spirits, and supernatural personifications (heroes, legends, myths), but these mnemonic devices were all too human in what they knew. Their specialist interpreters (bards, priests, seers, elders) acted as a kind of regulator on what could be valued or rejected as knowledge for “our” band or “deme” (Hartley and Potts, 2014, Ch3). The premodern “technological forms” of knowledge were initially oral and ritual: speech, song, ceremony, and what may be called “Earth-writing” in cave, stone, and pigment (e.g., Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe in Türkiye). Following the “Neolithic revolution” (farming and settlement), these were joined by script and counting systems. Once societies reached this scale, the instrumental purpose of knowledge was to maximize social cooperation for collective action against enemies, to legitimate the rule of kingship (as the collective coordinating mechanism), and to unify a population into a creative, coherent, and governable culture, in competition with the neighbors. According to bio-historian Peter Turchin (2007), this is the general dynamic for the emergence of empires. Regional empires came and went in every settled continent, but some left a strong mark on successor states, none more so than the Roman Empire in Europe and the Chinese and Japanese empires in East Asia.

Present (Scopes/Machines)

• Is the short period of modernity, commencing with the era of global geographical discovery (1400s to 1700s). The Renaissance period of European exploration and expansion was pivotal, not because the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, or British navigators “discovered” this or that place, but because they discovered that the Earth is a globe, and that this information was strategic for their political sponsors. The globalization of knowledge was made possible not by the naked eye but by machines, starting with the printing press using moveable type, and the caravel (Barbier, 2017; Kedrosky, 2020). ¹ These were soon joined by the telescope, enabling Galileo to observe that that the cosmos is made up of celestial globes, and that the Earth is not the center of creation (Bumstead, 1921, p. 289). Over time, knowledge relied ever more heavily on all kinds of scopes and machines, which were increasingly powered, upscaled, and automated during the modern period (Jennings, 1985). Industrialization was engineered, motorized, and dependent on the global energy resources required by machines. This was the period when limitless growth did not seem impossible. The growth of knowledge via universal print-literacy was understood as progress, while the continual expansion of industrial and economic scale was viewed as imperative and of benefit to the human species—including those who were dispossessed to achieve it. The motto of the era was Olympian: Citius—Altius—Fortius (Faster—Higher—Stronger), without limit.

“Future” (Screens/Computation)

• Adjustment to postmodernity has taken more than half a century to consolidate. Modernity ended abruptly in July and August 1945, when it was demonstrated that human knowledge could destroy humanity and the global Earth-system with it. As the Russian philosopher of globalization Alexander Chumakov (2023) has put it, the invention and use of nuclear weapons “made humanity mortal” (p. 29). The axis of global dynamics shifted (or was wrenched) to Asia, where various anti-European and anti-American experiments emerged over successive crises to challenge American hegemony (Meadway, 2023). During the same period, the socialization of computational power has displaced previous centers, recasting humanity from clusters of power to networks of knowledge. According to the philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton (2021), our knowledge of the world, for instance the very concept of “climate change,” is now “the output of sensors, simulations and supercomputers.” Adjustment to this new reality is incomplete and resisted by incumbent entities in industry, the economy, and geopolitics. The conversion of communication from center-periphery models (like state education, publishing, and broadcasting) to network models (like the internet, social media, and LLMs) is currently in a turbulent period of disruption and contested confusion over the status of world power and, with that, what counts as knowledge. Intelligent machines, including robotics, drones, AR, VR, MR, AI, and LLMs, are the knowledge-media of the future, but they are not welcomed by everyone (Galanos & Stewart, 2024). Thus, as US global hegemony declines, digital globalization is volatile. It cannot proceed as a project of US political and corporate power. But at the same time, it cannot be switched off. As Meadway (2023) remarked of post-WW2 geopolitical and economic history, “In a fragile, crisis-prone system, small changes at the margins can start to provoke big shifts elsewhere.” Global digital knowledge is a future project.

Although this classification of knowledge into stratified layers may look like a narrative of progress, it is not, because:

1. Those who are empowered to make decisions on a social scale have access to and are literate in a completely different knowledge system from that which circulates at large, even in affluent countries (Hartley, 2018). Popular culture and scientific knowledge interconnect only indirectly. Popular knowledge is used for group-recognition and collective action in relation to other people, while scientific culture favors action on material things for instrumental purposes, often those of the funding body. Meanwhile, continuing colonial, imperial, racist, gendered, and other social inequalities dispossess some people and societies even as they enrich others. And as centers of global power shift Eastwards, some countries are ruined as others emerge.

2. Each “period” is co-present, both at macro scale, in differing social clusters (kept distinct from each other by “we” vs. “they” thinking), and at micro-scale, within the individual consciousness, which is formed in language and culture even as it is made literate in exploration and science. Thus, although global computation and digital media have deterritorialized knowledge-making, “legacy” systems of modernity remain forceful, including nations, firms, and local/regional enmities.

3. “Progress” can go backward. The continuing threat of autoextinction by nuclear war, biohazard pandemics, climate crisis, or a combination of these, has displaced progressive optimism. The “long march” to human emancipation has reached a point where limitless technological acceleration benefits only the tech billionaires, who are engaged in a race to refeudalize the world (Kaltmeier, 2019), with planetary platforms as their fiefdoms and humans reorganized into hierarchies of hatred. Is global computation and “planetary sapience” (Bratton, 2021) leading humanity “back to the feudal” (Hou, 2007)?

4. In knowledge systems, “progress” may be in opposing directions. During modernity, the humanities (as a branch of knowledge) were encouraged to become more scientific, empirical, and realistic. The end of modernity was heralded by postmodernism. But that attracted fierce criticism, from physicists among others, for introducing indeterminacy, relativism, doubt, and dissimulation. “Relativists” were dismissed by “realists,” and entire scholarly disciplines, including my own, were condemned as illusory (Dawkins, 1998; Sokal & Bricmont, 1998). However, at the same time, the status of the real was being tested to destruction in physics itself, via its most famous theories—relativity and quantum theory. The humanities have become more realistic, while the physical sciences are becoming more indeterminate. A causal sequence is not as simple in complex systems as it seemed in linear mechanics. Pushed by instrumentalist funding agencies, the humanities are “progressing” to methodological commitments that the natural and computational sciences have already abandoned.

Beyond that false binary between sciences and humanities, as feminist critique has long argued, there is a need for what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledge”:

Science has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason “we” [feminism] need it. [. . .] Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofeminism, turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse. (Haraway, 1988, p. 585, 596)

Similarly, Bruno Latour, the anthropologist of science, had argued that distinctions between premodern, modern, and postmodern are flawed because, as he put it, “we have never been modern”:

Another field—much broader, much less polemical—has opened up before us: the field of nonmodern worlds. It is the Middle Kingdom, as vast as China and as little known. (Latour, 1993, p. 46)

The “Middle Kingdom” to which Latour alludes is not only China but also the conceptual space of the “nonmodern”; an expansive field that is located between the “postmoderns” and the “antimoderns”—two standpoints that fail to escape from modernism even as they criticize it.

I argue that digital globalization has indeed taken on a “nonmodern” character in the West: that of “refeudalization.”

Social Constructions and Imaginaries

Reading Yu Shan’s (2023) article for the International Communication Association’s Toronto conference, I was intrigued by her revival of two classic social theories: Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) “social construction of reality” and Charles Taylor’s (2003) “modern social imaginaries.” These enable her to analyze digital technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Reality (AR) in an innovative way. Instead of focusing on their technological affordances, she explains their rise (and fall) in relation to a constructed “social imaginary,” specifically, what she calls “techno-utopianism”.

Shan explains the uptake of VR and AR in China as an “embodiment of cultural ideology and institutional power, the nature of which is not neutral but rather socially constructed” (Shan, 2023). As she points out, “social imaginaries” differ from place to place, across knowledge domains and social groups, as coordinated by their incumbent “institutional powers” (and as challenged by emergent ones). This explains why some technological innovations come and go, while others—currently AI and LLMs—grab the world by the ears. ²

One implication of Shan’s approach to digital culture is that “social construction” and “social imaginary” are not the same. A “social construct” is a transmitted experiment; a “social imaginary” is a cultural antenna. It is not a piece of kit but a whole semiosphere, which collectively decodes incoming signals and translates them into “common knowledge” for a given “we” community. Any new or imported “social construct” is treated as a “they” agent until it is recognized by a “we” social imaginary and accepted as its own.

Even with corporate or official encouragement, some novelties fail, while others may be delayed. For example, the technological knowledge required for inventing television was in place before the invention of cinema, but TV was not developed until a generation (and a World War) after film, and only entered the “social imaginary” another generation (and another World War) after that. Thereafter, it illustrates very well how a “new technology” might “go viral” in surprisingly intense crazes. TV-culture swept postwar America, reorganizing the home, the family, and the social imaginary of that country and its satellites as it did so (Spigel, 1992). However, even though a technical device (the TV-set) was at the center of attention, the changes in US society were caused as much by postwar political, economic, and imperial developments, which yoked together technological discovery, industrial scale, economic efficiency, and political supremacy, in a “techno-utopian” myth.

Experimental innovations tend not to come from the semiosphere’s institutional rule-making core but crucially from its much more anomalous creative periphery. There, along the margins of uncertain border zones, relations are established with other systems, such that novelties can be copied, traded, stolen, or excluded, as part of a system’s continuous adjustment processes. At no point in these processes do the “social construct” (encoder) or the “social imaginary” (decoder) need to correspond with external reality, which may be very different from both. Social imaginaries can direct and motivate collective action at the population scale, but these actions may have an impact on external reality that is neither perceived nor understood by the populace. If human actions threaten human survival, then it is important for scholars in the humanities to explain how such an unstable situation can have arisen, seemingly unbeknownst to those who caused it. This is the theme of my book, Make/Believe: We and They on a Digital Planet (Hartley, 2025). It follows earlier work on the “digital semiosphere” (Hartley et al., 2021). The problem for pan-human collective action is that humanity has never recognized its own totality as a single pan-human agent. All humans use premodern language, culture, and knowledge to forge group identity for collective action, but they do not recognize commonality with outsiders. ³

For any human group, “our” social imaginary is experienced as reality. But “they”—neighbors, foreigners, enemies, strangers, and nonhuman agents (animals, aliens, and imagined beings)—are always under suspicion of duplicity and hostility. Their intentions toward us are assumed to be aggressive. They use different codes, generate and follow unknown texts, and pursue incomprehensible practices. Thus, a “digital planet” is by no means a unified or integrated unit. In the name of each contending social imaginary, semiotic diversity and social difference are not promoted but punished.

In the 21st century, knowledge that the Earth is a sphere is widespread, but what Chumakov (2023) calls “geospheric thinking” (p. 32) has not yet been achieved, so the planetary impact of war (risking nuclear annihilation) has not yet been translated into the social imaginary of “planetary consciousness.” Chumakov (2023) characterizes this as:

one of the most pressing problems of man—his aggressive nature and the permanent state of war in which he lives, but for which, despite all possible attempts, no effective countermeasure has yet been found in the entire history of mankind. (p. 27)

Perhaps, Chumakov’s use of the male formula as a “gender-neutral” term for humanity is appropriate in this context—but see Barad (2007, 2012), Green (2022), and Haraway (1991, 2016a, 2016b). However, “gender neutrality” is not a defensible category in the universe of the sign since it is yet another domain of difference where power has produced enmities (see Ahmari, 2024, discussed below).

Make-Believe—Story, Stage, and Song

As Shakespeare put it at the outset of modernity, “all the world’s a stage.” ⁴ The place reserved to test out risks, uncertainties, and conflicts, before hostilities break out, is “make believe”: story, stage, and song. Upon that stage we strut, parading and testing our strengths against various antagonists, as differently motivated individuals are thrown together by fate, chance, desire, and skulduggery, to explore how “we” (the local social imaginary) can live together. This is the defining process of cultural self-description, or “autocommunication” (Lotman, 1990), whereby a social imaginary gets to know itself through drama, both strategic (tragedy) and romantic (comedy) and through narrative, both truthful (journalism) and fictional (entertainment).

Autocommunication—self-description—extends through the semiosphere from make-believe to the strategic world stage. Using the available media of screen and story, contending social imaginaries are set against each other. In the so-called real world of the current era, it is not long before the heroes are American, while the USA’s strategic opponents are cast as villains. Thus, global strategy is dramatized in the news; the real and fiction are conjoined twins. As Western strategic priorities have changed since World War 2, villains who once resembled stage-Germans morphed into Russian, Vietnamese, and more recently Chinese antagonists. The enemy changes; the enmity remains.

Of course, each side plays the same game. Global-mediated politics is represented as a spectator sport, with fans for each side cheering on their own and catcalling the opposition, a national sport that John Fitzgerald (1996) calls “the politics of mass awakening.” What kind of world is being imagined in China? Social-media pile-ons by patriotic netizens tell the same story.

We need to understand the extent to which political and economic differences are constructed on the ground of autocommunicational culture. In general terms, drama is an early-warning system for humans-in-society. It predicts or rehearses the outcome of staged conflict between fear (how to act in the face of death), and desire (how to reproduce meaning, as well as life). Where opposites attract, they can turn out to be both enemy and lover. Characters learn about change and adaptation the hard way, through plot twists and reversals of fortune. The “moral” of action stories is an ancient one, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, ⁵ to Battle at Lake Changjin (starring Wu Jing), namely, the individual may suffer and die, but the community can survive.

In a media-literate society, it is common knowledge that not all is as it seems. Doubt and skepticism are built into the narrative arc. Spectators learn about duplicity (the plot deceives them), en route to maturity (the narrative threads come together). One of the most successful genres from the Cold-War era was the spy thriller, in which no one knows friend from foe, where betrayal may be expected from “our” side, and “we/they” identities turn out to be interchangeable. The master of this genre was John Le Carré, but it caught the social imaginary of the age, especially in the UK, as that country declined from imperial supremacy, but failed to find a new collective purpose. Le Carré has many unacknowledged brainchildren and grandchildren, from Le Bureau des Légendes in France to The Americans in Washington, and Slow Horses in the United Kingdom. Even the Russians loved him. ⁶

The fictional world of make-believe has proven to be sophisticated and responsive to changes in both political reality and social imaginary. It is a barometer for public understanding of these changes because drama has escaped the confines of the stage. With the emergence of electronic media and “the improvised theater of the streets,” the cultural critic Raymond Williams (1975) observed that drama had expanded from theaters into society to create a “dramatized society.” Unlike its premodern antecedents, such a society’s investment in technologically abstracted and mediated broadcasting, cinema, and advertising expanded enormously the amount of drama to which ordinary people were exposed. But at the same time, it reduced the experience of staged conflict from public pedagogy to family entertainment, concentrated on private life and the home. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) treated everyday life itself as a stage on which people perform themselves, taking different roles in different contexts. His dramaturgical model organized social space into three regions:

• “Front stage,” where people know they are being watched and perform different roles, depending on whether the setting is, say, school, workplace, doctor’s surgery, or shopping mall;

• “Back stage,” where they may reflect and rehearse a very different version of the self;

• “Outside,” where they are no longer players but only spectators (Ytreberg, 2024).

There are clearly lessons for digital media culture here, as the performance of the self supports the giant industries of social media, games, and influencers, while the leakage of drama into other modes of representation, especially politics, journalism, and education, has implications for the conduct of public life. You could argue that it is collapsing as human experience is privatized, fragmented, and individualized in mediatized postrealism. Where is the space for “backstage” reflection? This too is outsourced to professional suppliers of criticism, opinion, advice, influence, and reviews. Self-criticism is textualized and dramatized for “us” to consume.

Deus Ex Machina

Meanwhile, all sorts of inanimate and unknowable objects, including technologies, are endowed with uncanny supernatural powers that act for or against our social imaginary. The famous theatrical device of Ancient Greek tragedy, the “deus ex machina” or “god from the machine,” was a technical device (a crane, for which the Greek word was mēchanē) to allow an appropriate deity to descend from the “clouds” at a crucial point in the action. Classicist scholar Carolyn Willekes (2023) translated deus ex machina as “the machinations of the god” (p. 32), catching the idea that supernatural agents are interfering partisans, even as they embody the spectator-culture’s hopes and despair. Willekes wrote: “For the audience, it would have been unthinkable for the plot and its tragic outcome to be driven purely by human will and action.” She argued that this feature of ancient dramatic art still motivates our relations with technology, well beyond the confines of the theater:

There was an understanding that the gods must be present, as the play could not continue without them, much as a society could not. We are rapidly developing this sentiment towards AI in its various manifestations. (2023: 32)

The unknown intentions of technodeities must be tested by our hero, if necessary to mutual destruction, to secure a future, not for the self but for the home community.

In any representation of humanity-as-a-whole, in both fact (e.g., the UN, human rights, NGOs) and fiction (e.g., in Sci-Fi), the concept of humanity as a unit routinely turns out to be a projection of one “we” community’s self-understanding, imposed on others. A real future is being built on imagined encounters brought to us by story, stage, song, scope, and screen. We project the dramatized image of each home community, city, or nation onto a future that encompasses humankind in general. Thus, in US Sci-Fi, the planetary protagonist is recognizably American (especially in the superhero franchises), whereas in Chinese Sci-Fi, the future is recognizably Chinese (Three-Body Problem, Wandering Earth). The Sinification of outer space is not only a matter of using Chinese actors or characters, but also of invoking Chinese narrative traditions. Thus, Wandering Earth features martial-arts star Wu Jing and exploits the popular wuxia genre. Conversely, aliens are frequently recognizable as abstractions of “our” current foes: a generalized “they” who threaten the planet.

Sci-Fi can also play with multispecies futures, as in Luc Bresson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), which features a substantial “history of the future” opening sequence. Progressively multicultural humans greet increasingly strange aliens in the airlock between their vessels with a handshake (for those aliens with hands). The gesture—a sort of updated deus ex machina—channels US–Russian cooperation in peaceable space missions such as the International Space Station. Given that Bresson is a French director and secured funding from multiple unconventional sources to make this richly cinematic but undervalued film (which performed better in China than in the US), ⁷ it is hard not to see this version of a handshaking future as a kind of European-Union wish-fulfillment. That may explain why the film did not thrive in the United States, unlike Besson’s Fifth Element (1997), which universalized a New York taxi-driver (Bruce Willis) and restored the appropriate deity (Milla Jovovich) to her classical place as a postmodern deam ex machina.

One recent vision of the deus ex machina has matured into something very grim, to suit the times. Alex Garland’s Sci-Fi thriller Ex Machina (2014) stars Alicia Vikander as an enslaved and wronged female-coded AI robot, who watches, learns, and out-strategizes her abusive maker. That movie unmasks the social imaginary of techno-utopianism as a tech-bro’s sexist fantasy of total control, raising the politics of the male gaze in movies, just ahead of the breaking #MeToo movement in the United States. A decade later, Garland’s dystopian thriller Civil War (2024) focuses instead on the female gaze, this time embodied in a veteran war-photographer (Kirsten Dunst) and her wannabe protégée (Cailee Spaeny). The true horror of a collapsing social imaginary lies in the intimacy and domestic scale of killings based on “we/they” distinctions. Civil War unfolds as a dystopian road movie, where gruesome torture and mass murder are played out in rural truck-stops and once-idyllic towns. In a country that is very like the United States as we know it, everyone treats everyone else as a threat (“where are you from?” is a life-or-death question), right down to those you love (one murderous character is played by Kirsten Dunst’s real-life husband). Whether the antagonist is technological (robot) or ideological (hated others), both films raise the same issue. As the New York Times put it: “We have met the enemy and it is us.” ⁸

Deus in Manibus

The digital globalization of media platforms is real enough, but mainstream representations of that reality are already scripted via high-investment entertainment—including news, “true stories,” and social media. This fiction-saturated semiosphere determines the storyline of reality and thence of public understanding. In other words, play and pretense drive the discovery of the real, rendering inanimate technology, nonhuman nature, and the physical cosmos alike into friend, foe, lover, and killer.

Media attention endows techno-reality with make-believe dreams and nightmares. Always starting from the point of view of selfish instrumentality (what is to our advantage?), journalism reports on technology through the lens of fear and desire (will it love us or kill us?). As ever, the feared trumps the desired. Negative news attracts more attention than positive. News platforms play up the negative to maximize their own eyeball-data. The upshot is that populations tend to report that the economy, for instance, is in much worse shape than it is in fact. ⁹ Similarly, lay-people know much more about the “threat” posed by rivals than about our side’s provocations, much less the opportunities flowing from cooperation in an “asymmetric” relationship (Womack, 2024). This compulsion to capture the future in the language of conflict overdetermines the discovery processes for dealing at scale with uncertainty, risk, and change.

Digital globalization refers to international computational connectivity, media platforms, big-data trade, algorithmic technologies, and machine learning. Quite apart from these technical aspects, “globalization” also has a human aspect: the globalization of personal consciousness, language and communication, culture and ritual, knowledge and analysis, and intercommunal relations (friend or enemy). Digital affordances have served only to deepen, extend, and consolidate pre-existing intrahuman divisions, inequalities, and conflict. The external world is just as suffused with suprahuman malignant, desirable, or fearful spirits as it ever has been. It is not so much “deus ex machina”; now it’s “deus in manibus” (the god in the hand), as billions of people hold hands with a globally connected computational device, to which a strongly framing narrative trend imputes godlike powers (Sun et al., 2020; Willekes, 2023). Where once the ancients imputed knowledge (“fate”) to supernatural powers, now our fate is literally in our own hands.

The Human Machine

This widely discussed problem has become analytically and strategically acute because humanity is accelerating as a planetary force, acting on the atmosphere, geosphere, and biosphere to cause irreversible changes to climate, environment, ocean, and life. These changes may lead to increasingly calamitous catastrophes for humans. Humanity’s own actions, we have been warned, put our own kind on the road toward extinction. The trouble is that humanity (as an entity) does not have an “off” button. “We”—H. sapiens—appear to lack a universal coordinating mechanism like the governor/regulator on a machine (Kolmanovsky et al., 2014), or self-limiting survival mechanism like “ecological suicide” (Ratzke et al., 2018), or even the political safety valve of a “self-denying ordinance” (Vines, 2016), which might regulate our energies and toxins, and limit the growth of the whole tangled assemblage of human enterprises, nations, and inventions, to live within sustainable boundaries.

A popular pastime among critical observers is to blame an abstract (godlike) agency for negative or unforeseen effects. Out-of-control acceleration of uncertainty is variously blamed on technology, capitalism, corporate greed, or the “Washington swamp” (Gill, 2024). Humans operate in a world that includes the multiple interdependencies of spheres: the technosphere (Herrmann-Pillath, 2018), semiosphere (Lotman, 1990), biosphere (Vernadsky, 1998), and geosphere (Chumakov, 2023). ¹⁰ Such a world required a generations-long learning process and computational power before it could be known. Benjamin Bratton argues that “The scientific idea of “climate change,” for example, is a conceptual accomplishment of planetary scale computation” (Bratton, 2018, 2021). In other words, contrary to human exceptionalism, “complexity yields consciousness” (Gardels, 2023)—in an Earth system that has evolved everything within its own limits, including consciousness and its “digital twin” (Li et al., 2023). However, as argued by Joyeeta Gupta and colleagues (2023), “biophysical boundaries are not inherently just,” and so human and technical intervention is required to achieve Earth-system justice:

Boundaries may need to be adjusted to reduce harm and increase access, and challenge inequality to ensure a safe and just future for people, other species and the planet. Earth system justice may enable living justly within boundaries.

History indicates that the chances of achieving a globally just system are slim, but Chumakov (2023) concluded that “geospheric thinking” is the only viable option:

And since, as the whole history of mankind shows, people in one way or another manifest their aggressive essence, which is permanently accompanied by war, the only hope for them is to realize the uniqueness of intelligent life on Earth and its fundamental destruction by mankind itself. (p. 38)

The impediments originate not in the technologies, institutions, and enterprises that now span the world, much less in the digital connectivity that links each to all, but in the way that humans operate at scale. To understand their hand-held devices, from hand-axes to iPhones and “Mixed Reality” game consoles (Cardoso et al., 2024), we need to investigate human language and culture.

Child’s Play?

The modern discoveries of science, planetary politics, and fictional storytelling have generated various types of future-oriented geospheric thinking or planetary consciousness: in science, H. sapiens; in politics, the UN and its agencies; in commerce, global trade; in fiction, humanity (as a single agent) versus aliens (as a projection of human fears/desires). In everyday life, however, humanity remains divided into “we” and “they” units. Past, premodern knowledge coexists—not always peacefully—with present, modern knowledge and future, global-digital knowledge.

For example, premodern knowledge is installed in the learning app we call childhood. Childhood is primarily an oral culture, resistant to mechanization, industrialization, and commercialization. Children are “socially constructed” as productively negative (they do not participate in production or reproduction); but semiotically they are at liberty to play, imagine, and invent, both singly and as a class. Instrumentally, childhood is given over to education (learning the codes) and play (rehearsing the roles) for modern adulthood, without itself being modern in mode. Thus, childhood may count as creative but not consequential. Nevertheless, the future beckons, with the intrusion of computational systems and digital screens into domestic and educational space. Not surprisingly, for those still attached to modernity, this is strongly flagged as a social problem. ¹¹

“Child’s play” is not as inconsequential as it sounds. It installs the rules and practices of identity in language, culture, meaningfulness, and relationships. It makes the template by which humans explore the external world. It is laid over the unknown to render it knowable. The privatization and commercialization of childhood play is now a chief medium for teaching “our-group” ideology to entire societies. Far from being a condition we all outgrow; childhood is an operating system for the whole of adult life. To become selves, children must defeat imaginary enemies, assisted by gaming and entertainment apps that rehearse warfare. Different “social imaginaries” are getting battle-ready.

Refeudalization?

Premodern forms of government are also making a postmodern return, if I can put it that way, including the refeudalization of allegiance. The digital commons are being enclosed and privatized. You do not own your own data; the platform landlord does. “Open” knowledge and the Worldwide Web are being squeezed out of the corporate internet. One of the world’s most powerful tech giants, Apple, has recently released an advertisement where all sorts of cultural artifacts are crushed into what it wants to promote as an ultra-thin tablet (Figure 1). The ad was widely condemned for betraying Apple’s real purpose: to crush all cultural diversity under its titanium thumb. ¹²

Figure 1.

Apple crush: the new “Kool Aid”? ¹³

Refeudalization makes a virtue out of inequality. The New Statesman has reported on what Sohrab Ahmari (2024) calls “Dime-store Nietzscheans.” These are the “tech-bros” and their far-right apologists, for whom modernity has been a regrettable detour, “lorded over by the primordial feminine, with its obsession with equality”:

No more could the natural aristocrat live free, for he was now chained to an egalitarian ethic that elevated the claims of the weak and the sickly. Soon, the grubby masses made even more audacious demands, reaching for what they could never truly possess: equality with the higher orders; they called this “democracy.” (Ahmari, 2024)

The “repressed aristocrats” of the electronic right want to change all that; preferably by smashing it down and so “restoring the natural order of things.” Ahmari concludes that “conditions are ripe for right-wing eugenics to re-emerge from the shadows, offering both consolation for a subset of the credentialled precariat—and the vision of a world transformed.” According to these digital warriors, the future does not belong to humanity (construed as an enemy); it belongs to them (construed as an aristocracy).

Currently, such thinking is extreme, but it is part of a much wider lurch to the right in international populist authoritarianism, which has replaced public administration, the welfare state, and a stable world order in many countries, some with far-right governments, some with coalitions or ruling parties who are beholden to the extremists on their right. For now, Civil War is still just a movie; but is that a rehearsal? This rhetoric is already embedded in the substrate of public policy discourse. For example, in South Korea, a Seoul city councillor has claimed—to widespread criticism—that women in the workforce mean that Korea has “begun to change into a female-dominant society” and that this might “be responsible for an increase in male suicide attempts.” ¹⁴

Elsewhere, emergent powers are doubling down on their nationalist rhetoric, seeking to maintain internal unity around external enmity, directed against the legacy of modern imperialism and colonialism. Populism (propagated by digital media) and power (increasingly securitized for control not representation of the people) are not interested in planetary outcomes or human wellbeing. They are interested in revenge. As Ahmari reminds us, the “weird right” do not want to emancipate a downtrodden populace. They want to rule it:

It was members of the professional and even upper classes who promoted eugenic or dime-store Nietzschean ideologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Likewise, it is a subset of disaffected or stressed urban professionals today who are developing a counter-culture centred around the worship of strength and the restoration of “natural hierarchies” among large human groups. (Ahmari, 2024)

This makes it much harder for humans to think as a species, and to act at planetary scale, to remediate damage to the Earth-system and to limit intergroup conflict, which now imperil us all and the planet with us. Modernity has begun to imagine its own end. With intelligent technology and populist authoritarianism in charge, modernity is displaced into a corporate refeudalization of social relations on one side, and nationalist neo-imperial assertion on the other. Casualties include the collapse of collective public responsibility for a fair society at home; while abroad, there is a failure of global collective action on climate change, rising sea levels, extinctions, and pollution.

Hope Is a Tea-Towel!

Clearly, the modern institutional structure is in decline. But that is not the end of the world; it is a shift from present-tense thinking to future tense. Global-digital pan-humanity is emerging from cyberspace. Does it carry the nightmare weight of the “dead generations,” ¹⁵ the same apparatus of enmity, as its predecessors? Or can it flip to “planetary sapience” and cooperate with intelligent machines to remediate the Earth and put limits on collective action?

That may need a new center of gravity. Where premodern knowledge was decentral (peculiar to each continent), and modern knowledge was European (post-Roman Empire), digital-global knowledge is at its most inventive in Asia—especially Greater China, Japan, and the Koreas, with India hard on their heels, as another country where “national awakening” is already weaponised. ¹⁶

In this context, following Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Derrida, and the postmodernists, “language games” can be seen as much more decisive in determining social action than the modernist realists were willing to admit. But to assert the independent power of text, discourse, and thought still invites ridicule for what one prominent “truth warrior” called the “vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans” (Dawkins, 1998) – his dig at cultural and media studies. As a result, a scientific disdain for “illusory” language and media infects policy related to digital media but cannot grasp how it works. A desire to anchor signification in an externally observed reality makes little sense in digital media. You cannot tell a digital copy from a digital original, which undermines the very idea of intellectual property. ¹⁷ And “language games” characterize both power politics and imaginary make-believe.

Indeed, Sci-Fi and fantasy fiction may be a better barometer of the future than the so-called empirical sciences. For instance, an experiment in “visions for our future” brought together Kai-Fu Lee (a former Google executive) and Chen Qiufan (a Sci-Fi author). They felt that “imagining the feasible technologies . . . and embedding them in stories would be quite engaging, and we wouldn’t even have to resort to teleportation or aliens to mesmerize our readers” (Lee & Chen, 2021, p. xvi). The future is much closer than that. As the editors of Contemporanea, a cross-disciplinary collection, say: “To articulate a different future, another language is needed. And, to develop another language, one needs to develop fresh concepts” (Marder & Tusa, 2024). This where LLMs are seen by some to fall short. A recent report for the European Trade Union Institute concluded:

LLMs produce very convincing language, but the economic value would seem to come from having that language communicate “knowledge” or “truth,” to which they are not well suited. (Galanos & Stewart, 2024: 41)

Is an illusory fox loose in the realist chicken-coop? Or does the future belong to AI? The computational power of natural-language-processing tools in LLMs is being greeted with suspicion and the urge to regulate or ban. But “natural language” has escaped the merely human. Can we collaborate with machine-knowledge to construct a new “social imaginary”? To imagine that requires hope (Fenton, 2008). As Raymond Williams (1989) once put it (and see Figure 2), “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” That is the challenge for pan-humanism in a digital world.

Figure 2.

“Despairing about politics? Need some optimism in your life? Then this tea towel is just the thing for you!” ¹⁸