Flying Saucer Rock n Roll

“Well, the news of the saucer been a-flyin’ around
I’m the only one that seen it on the ground
First thing I seen when I saw it land
Cats jumped out and they formed a band
[Chorus]
Flyin’ saucer rock and roll, flyin’ saucer rock and roll
I couldn’t understand the things they said
But that crazy beat just a stopped me dead.”
Billy Lee Riley (Flying Saucer Rock n Roll, 1957 SUN records)

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Peter Thiel (Cato Unbound)

“Dollars and cents? I don’t know. I want to do this job because I don’t know. It’s research. It’s pioneering. What’s the moon? Another North Pole, another South Pole. Why go there? We’ll let you know when we get there, we’ll tell you when we get back.”
Rocket Scientist, ‘Destination Moon’ (dr. Irving Pichel, 1950)

“Soon one of your nations will apply atomic energy to space ships—that will threaten the peace and security of other planets.”
Klautu, space alien from The Day the Earth Stood Still (Dr. Robert Wise, 1951)

“Auntie, speak to me! I’m frightened because it’s so dark.’ His aunt answered him: ‘What good would that do? You can’t see me.’ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ replied the child, ‘if anyone speaks, it gets light.”
Sigmund Freud (Three Essays on the theory of Psychoanalysis)

There is a new sense of doom pervading western culture. Well ‘new’ is the wrong word. There is an intensified sense of doom today. And in a way, it is embodied in the phenomenon of ‘AI’. I am not sure daily users (even passively) of AI realize just how deep and indelible are its limits and penchant for mistakes, and its growing role in the psychological malformation of the white West. But I don’t really want to write about AI, per se. It’s also, alongside its limitations, a really boring subject.

One of the (somewhat) early voices of AI propaganda was (and still is, I guess) Nick Land. The below quote is from a New Yorker piece on him, and is a quote from a 1996 lecture Land gave:

“Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization takeoff. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”
Nick Land

This sounds a lot like ChatGPT oddly enough. Its gibberish, largely. Marc Andreessen loves him, though. And Land also carefully curates his image. Borrowing heavily from Aleister Crowley. Land’s PR far outreaches his actual impact.

“Like Curtis Yarvin and other neo-reactionaries, Land abhors democracy. Politics since the Enlightenment, he argues, is a story not of the advance of human freedom but of constant resource transfer from the productive to the unproductive—a world-historical tragedy of the commons that would eventually spell its own doom.”
James Duesterberg (Silicon Valleys Favorite Doomsaying Philosopher, New Yorker 2026)

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Yuval Harari — and a few others I will get to — are all deeply reactionary. Musk recently said ‘we’ need to cut Social Security, because its an ‘entitlement’. This from a man born wealthy, chauffered around in a rolls royce as a child, across the South African apartheid landscape, and who has never ever once done a single philanthropic act. In a sense these are the legatees of Ayn Rand. The first quality all these billionaires share (labeled ‘neo reaction’) is that they are white. Their concerns are those of white people. Their world view is strangely provincial in a way but decidedly and unmistakably white.

“Land has always been a controversial figure, but not for the same reasons he is now. In the nineties, at Warwick, he led the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or C.C.R.U., a crew of graduate students, artists, and philosophers who saw in digital technology portents of revolution. Narrowly construed, cybernetics is the science behind digital computing, but the C.C.R.U. saw in it a vaster vision of self-regulating, auto-catalyzing processes. Computing, they argued, was not just a technology but the secret of the universe—the system underpinning genetics, market economics, thermodynamics. Burrowed in a sleepy university town, fuelled by amphetamines, rave music, and the end-of-history euphoria of the early internet, they hymned a future that would eventually lead to superintelligent A.I., societal collapse, and human extinction.”
James Duesterberg (Ibid)

Another member of CCRU was the late Mark Fisher. What’s slightly amusing is that Fisher is described as the left version of Land, when in truth both are essentially fascist. Fisher just disguises it better. And Fisher probably was a better prose writer. The other voice of neo-reaction (if not sort of its predecessor) is Curtis Yarvin.

“In particular, Yarvin served as one of the theoretical sources for the “post-democratic” rhetoric that emerged surrounding Trump’s 2016 campaign { } Beneath the irony, intellectualism, and provocations, Yarvin’s thought is driven by a deep hostility toward political equality and popular participation. His idea of order is grounded in hierarchy, efficiency, and unquestioned authority. It’s an aristocratic restoration in digital form, where a technocratic elite supplants the sovereign people. But Yarvin does not merely seek to preserve the established order. He wants to overthrow it. And he does so with the tools of the 21st century: blogs, podcasts, newsletters, interviews, memes. His aim is not merely theoretical—it is cultural and political. To influence those who hold power (or could) in order to reprogram the future.”
Editorial Board of Reset Dialogues, and AI (Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land and the Dark Utopia of the New Radical Right)

Yes, the above quote from Reset Dialogues was written in part by AI. These are the people, so called *accelerationists*, who influence media (controlled by Zionists these days, in large measure, but influenced and advised by neo-reaction figures and to some degree the neo-cons as well). And the vision, even if partly unconscious, is to eradicate art and culture. The recent season of Hollywood produced TV is stunningly reactionary and pro military. The vision feels oddly like something a Nick Land or Curtis Yarvin would advocate. A huge somnambulant army of screen narcotized proles that carry out policing of the planet through drone assassinations and sadistic punishments (not unlike the IDF, only much more successful). These shows emphasise tribalism in the extreme. Soldiers (often special forces) don’t fight for ideological reasons, not for patriotism or even to fight terror. They fight for each other. The band of brothers. These shows, often cop procedurals (where the police all have heroic military backgrounds– stuff like NCIS or the current Marshals, or Dick Wolfe’s FBI and CIA) are tribal and deeply fascistic. And they unconsciously narrate fratricide violence (unconscious because of the use of proxies, but more on this below).

It is also strangely sexually barren and without desire. Certainly without lust or carnal cravings. I suppose a Yarvin or some of his followers do have desires, but they are not libidinal. It is also collectively imbued with autistic flatness. There is no depth to anything, either on a personal level, or in the theorizing. They execute the surplus population (as they see them) without remorse and without guilt.

“Land’s writings from the nineties have a seductive danger, envisioning a sci-fi future of synthetic drugs, black-market brain implants, gene editing, and cyborgs. At that time, a world of true digital immersion was still decades away; like William Gibson, who wrote the eighties cyberpunk classic “Neuromancer” on a typewriter, Land, in his C.C.R.U. heyday, had a green-screen Amstrad computer, and was barely connected to the internet. But now a version of Land’s midnight future has arrived. While real-world infrastructure is left to rot, A.I. build-out floats the economy, accounting, as of 2025, for almost forty per cent of U.S. G.D.P. growth. And many of the fantasies that powered the online right during the mid-twenty-tens have become official policy under the second Trump Administration. The President hired the world’s wealthiest tech mogul to dismantle the government.”
James Duesterberg (Ibid)

The reality of thinkers (sic) like Land is that they are just recycling older myths. On Tucker Carlsen’s show, in conversation with Conrad Flynn, the topic of AI’s demons came up — by which is meant (per Flynn) ‘ demons from the Book of Revelations built by AI’. There is a basic almost parochial confusion in this. Firstly, demons are not real. (unless you are religious extremist). Demons are mythology — they can have enormous power and allegorical significance but they are not ‘real’ in the sense people like Flynn are suggesting. Real women were burnt at the stake as witches. Its the same confusion. Its not an accident that most of Land’s and Yarvin’s followers are under 25. I suppose Yarvin and Land are the Timothy Leary’s of the 21st century.

One of the curious side bar aspects of all this is that Elon Musk’s girlfriend (well, former girlfriend and baby mama) was associated with the Yarvin inner circle. Grimes (aka Claire Elise Boucher ) gave birth to a son, fathered by Musk which they named X Æ A-12. What do they call you for short? Its not a name, as you essentially cannot pronounce it. But this is the infantilism of the entire phenomenon. The manufacturing of the AI bubble is a stark lesson in the pet rock syndrome. (actually there is no such syndrome but there should be). (for the record Grimes had two other children fathered by Musk, and named Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus ). AI does certain things well (or at least quickly) — and many things poorly. But there is no metaphysics to AI. Self driving cars is a massive trillion dollar failure. And when left to its own devices (like running a restaurant in Sweden, the results are chaos). But this brings me back to the core issues of AI. And to the provincialism of white people funding and promoting it. The real world is vast and diverse, as I like to keep pointing out. AI works in certain fields (shipyards…maybe) but it cannot solve the crowded streets of Kuala Lumpur, or the back alleys of Bamako. And there is an essential connection to both the aesthetics and politics (ideology) of all AI. One rarely, if ever, sees AI start ups dealing with inequality or hunger, or rare childhood diseases.

AI exists in a white racial frame. (one rather obvious example is found here https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-generative-ai-bias/ ). But the problem is much deeper than this. This is about the philosophical implications of technology and ideology. About the nature of tech altogether and about just how much AI is a product of unconscious (repressed) sado masochistic urges and about narcissism and autism. AI seems to follow — as a total sort of package — the inner logic of a severe autistic.

If one goes back to post WW2 America, to the forced optimism of the 1950s, and look at attitudes toward technology, the truth is one sees many of the same issues and the same striking ambivalence.

“As if “real” technology was not confirmation enough, there was also paratechnological evidence in great supply, in the form of the unidentified flying object. Beginning around 1947, when journalists coined the term “flying saucer” to describe the “heavenly apparition” of Boise businessman Kenneth Arnold, the UFO phenomenon quickly became confused or conflated with popular expectations about our own future as space travelers. The article by retired Marine Major Donald Keyhoe in True magazine in January 1950—which a recent historian has called “one of the most widely read and discussed articles in publishing history”’—concluded that the manner in which extraterrestrials observed earth was “‘similar to American plans for space exploration expected to come into being in the next fifty years.”
Brian Horrigan (Popular Culture and Visions of the Future in Space, 1901-2001)

“Important for what? National defense, party politics, prestige, national morale? According to historian John Logsdon, Kennedy placed space within a domestic as well as foreign context. He had suffered embarrassments in Laos and the Congo, then Gagarin and the Bay of Pigs humiliation in Cuba. Somehow the trend must be reversed. But Kennedy also had a broad domestic agenda. Would an expensive space program help or hurt him in Congress? Webb believed that a big space initiative would help Kennedy with congressional power brokers and build a basis of support for all his plans. Since the space message ended up as the climax of a lengthy appeal touching on foreign and domestic programs all tied together with the Cold War ribbon, it is likely that Kennedy shared Webb’s analysis. Yet Webb himself now displayed caution. He certainly favored a big push in space, but it was he who would be responsible for it. More money for more rapid progress was one thing, but to declare a specific goal, such as those mentioned by JFK in the Oval Office, was risky. { } This was technocracy, and not to be undertaken lightly. Webb was not going to get out front on it without support from the highest quarters. Kennedy was hardly thinking in terms of national restructuring. He worried about prestige.”
Walter A. McDougall (The heavens and the earth · A political history of the space age)

A more revealing observation came from Dick Calkins (creator of the comic strip Buck Rogers), a comment that speaks to the sadism of American culture, a culture already waning by the 50s, and to the strange lack of perspective on technology. The U.S. has always been infatuated with technology, but also with conquest — and both spring, so is my argument, from a collective death wish.

“The atomic bomb which the crew of the Enola Gay dumped on Hiroshima opened a future to poor earthbound creatures hitherto undreamed of—except, if I may say so, by Buck Rogers. As Eddie Rickenbacker puts it, “the world is catching up to Buck Rogers.”
Dick Calkins (That Prophetable Guy, Buck Rogers, Liberty, 17 November 1945)

“In popular culture, encounters with aliens or alien intelligence are, with few exceptions (Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one), also encounters with their technology. Earthlings constantly remark on how advanced alien civilizations are, that is, how sophisticated their technology seems to be compared to our own, as in the marvelous tour of the underworld city of the Krel in the 1956 space opera, Forbidden Planet. Fictional encounters with the alien, even those that occur in a recognizable present,reveal attitudes and expectations about our future in the galaxy. Sometimes the conclusion is triumphant: though we lose most of the public buildings in Washington, D.C., our machines manage to outdistance the aliens in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (1956). Other scenarios are more devastating. An army commander in the 1953 War of the Worlds, having just dropped an atomic bomb on a Martian war ship with no discernible effect, despairs: “Guns, tanks, bombs! They’re like toys against them!”
Brian Horrigan (Ibid)

Interestingly the Milton Bradley company, makers of children’s board games, released a game in 1955 called Space Game. The object of the game was to amass rare minerals and materials by mining on the moon and also to steal mining rights from other players.

“But that night she seemed to hesitate. What will happen, she { Grimes} asked Land, when A.I. becomes self-improving, and humans get locked out of the loop of their development? Can the machines be oriented toward human ends, or will A.I. simply eat the universe? “I feel an incredible urge to make it stop and see beauty more,” she said. Land’s reply took a predictable form. The true engine of history, he explained, is the feedback loop between commerce and technology, money and power. Human desire is just a vessel, worked from the outside toward ends we cannot control. History has a destination, but it is not for humans. “My prediction is that A.I. will persuade you that technology eating the universe is more beautiful,” he said.”
James Duesterberg (Ibid)

There ‘are’ differences between Land and Yarvin. I’m not at all sure how important they are seeing as the things about which they agree feel much more important. In the article at Reset Dialogues there are several points worth repeating; first is that Land and Yarvin both imagine a future without participation or popular sovereignty. A world of total control. A world that is “not a mere reaction to liberalism, but its cold, calculated negation.” The operative word is actually ‘ cold’. For this is the emotional tenor both Land’s writing AND Yarvin’s. Cold calculus. Now one might ask why does it feel correct or natural to link calculation and efficiency with coldness. With a lack of warmth?

Those who are on the spectrum, in conventional terms, have trouble with idiom, with nuance in speech, and with evaluating emotional states. LLCs are, in a sense, much the same. This imagined future of cold calculation and efficiency is one of generalized autism. And this is not efficient.

Thomas Ogden has a book that builds on Klein and Bion, but also Tustin and Esther Bick (both of whom were pioneers in the study of autism). And Klein of course posited a shizoid/paranoid position, and a depressive position in the individual. And Ogden then follows on those ideas with what he calls the autistic-contiguous position. It is not easy to summarize this stuff but I will try to at least illuminate the aspects of Ogden relevant to, in my opinion, a culture now saturated by AI.

“This primitive psychological organization under normal circumstances contributes the barely perceptible background of sensory boundedness of all subsequent subjective states. When infantile anxiety is extreme (for constitutional and/or environmental reasons) the system of defenses characterizing this mode becomes hypertrophied and rigidified; this leads to a wide range of forms of pathological autism, ranging from pathological infantile autism to autistic features of patients who have in other ways achieved a predominantly neurotic psychological structure (cf. S. Klein, 1980; Tustin, 1986).”
Thomas H. Ogen (The Primitive Edge of Experience)

An experience of boundedness (a sense of place) keeps the infant (pre verbal) from experiencing terror. I suspect that the propaganda surrounding AI is focused on making the public afraid of it. Its actually just very fast cut and paste. Its correlating at extreme speed but nothing more. And technology today buffets people from birth onwards with systems of psychological terror. Cyber-tech all feels as if it destroys the background boundedness.

“When an analysis is a “going concern” (Winnicott, 1964, p. 27), the patient and analyst are able to engage both individually and with one another in a process of dreaming. The area of “overlap” of the patient’s dreaming and the analyst’s dreaming is the place where analysis occurs (Winnicott, 1971, p. 38). The patient’s dreaming, under such circumstances, manifests itself in the form of free associations (or, in child analysis, in the form of playing); the analyst’s waking-dreaming often takes the form of reverie experience. When a patient is unable to dream, this difficulty becomes the most pressing aspect of the analysis.”
Thomas H. Ogden ( Rediscovering Psychoanalysis)

One of the greatest losses of contemporary society in the West is the loss of daydreaming. For the unconscious processes the reverie. (The dreamer who dreams the dream, as Grotstein put it).

““A dream-thought presents an emotional problem with which the individual must struggle (Bion, 1962a, b; Meltzer, 1983), thus supplying the impetus for the development of the capacity for dreaming (which is synonymous with unconscious thinking) { } Consequently, a person unable to dream is trapped in an endless, unchanging world of what is.”
Thomas Ogden (Ibid)

The world of what is. This became a default ideal for the Enlightenment. For science. And from this perspective science is pathological.

Early trauma, everything from abandonment to a neglectful mother, intrapsychic-trauma, can create anxieties that the subject is unable to contain.

“Undreamable experience – whether it be the consequence of predominantly external or intrapsychic forces – remains with the individual as “undreamt dreams” in such forms as psychosomatic illness, split-off psychosis, “dis-affected” states (McDougall, 1984), pockets of autism (Tustin, 1981), severe perversions (de M’Uzan, 2003), and addictions.”
Thomas H.Ogden (Ibid)

Severe perversions (think Jeffrey Epstein). Also, I have wondered at the amount of leaked press on cannibalism among the elite and celebrity class. I had assumed this perversion was pretty niche, but now I suspect its more of confusion between symbolic and literal seen throughout the billionaire class.

Ogden summarizes the Oedipus complex: and I think its a very good summary of a hideously complex theory. And I think useful to revisit here.

“(1) All of human psychology and psychopathology, as well as all human cultural achievements, can be understood in terms of urges and meanings that have their roots in the sexual and aggressive instincts. (2) The sexual instinct is experienced as a driving force beginning at birth and is elaborated sequentially in its oral, anal, and phallic components in the course of the first five years of life. (3) Of the multitude of myths and stories that human beings have created, the myth of Oedipus, for psychoanalysis, is the single most important narrative organizing human psychological development. (4)The triangulated set of conflictual murderous and incestuous fantasies constituting the Oedipus complex is “determined and laid down by heredity” (Freud, 1924, p. 174) – that is, it is a manifestation of a universal, inborn propensity of human beings to organize experience in this particular way (see Ogden, 1986a). “The Oedipus complex for Freud (1924) is “contemporaneous” (p. 174) with the phallic phase of sexual development. It is a web of intrapsychic and interpersonal parent–child relationships in which the boy, for example, takes his mother as the object of his romantic and sexual desire, and wishes to take his father’s place with his mother (Freud). The father is simultaneously admired and viewed as a punitive rival. The aggressive instinct is manifested, for the boy, in the form of the wish to kill his father in order to have his mother for himself. The wish to kill the father is a highly ambivalent one, given the boy’s pre-oedipal love for and identification with his father, as well as the boy’s erotic attachment to his father in the negative Oedipus complex (Freud, 1921). The boy experiences guilt in response to his wish to murder his father (in the positive Oedipus complex) and his mother (in the negative Oedipus complex). Similarly, the girl takes her father as the object of her desire and wishes to take her mother’s place with her father. She, too, experiences guilt in response to her incestuous and murderous wishes in the complete Oedipus complex.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

Again, if we are deconstrucing the hidden meaning of A.I., then trying to understand the evolution of psychic trauma as it evolved under Capitalism is material to all other theories.

The Marxist logic of capitalism eventually leads to crises, and eventually to severe crisis. War and fascism serve to rescue capitalism at times of crisis. The fading away of the father, the inevitable absent patriarch, for better or worse, has meant incomplete Oedipal family drama. And now collectively, and you can think Nick Land and Yarvin and Sam Altman here — and certainly Thiel — there is the negation of the Oedipal narrative. That Altman and Thiel and Karp and Harari are all gay is a fascinating side bar.

“That is, the child, for fear of punishment in the form of castration, relinquishes his or her sexual and aggressive strivings in relation to the oedipal parents and replaces those “object cathexes” . . . [with] identifications” (Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” 1924) with parental authority, prohibitions, and ideals, which form the core of a new psychic structure, the superego.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

One rather profound observation of Ogden (and of Loewald) is the quality of ancestral knowledge that is passed on (there are echos of Bloom’s anxiety of influence in this, too, but also Norman O. Brown and Marcuse).

“Subliminally a sense of cyclical time is created by the juxtaposition of Loewald’s disclaiming originality and Breuer’s virtually identical statement made almost a century earlier. Loewald, before discussing his ideas concerning the Oedipus complex, is showing them to us in our experience of reading: no generation has the right to claim absolute originality for its creations.”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

We pass on from personal to general. From individual to historical. As our parents did before us and children will do after us. This is civilization and one of the haunting problems encountered in the vision of a Nick Land or Peter Thiel is the barely disguised hatred of civilzation. Android overlords spell the end of civilization. Except of course that won’t happen. We can’t even master self driving cars unless on a closed road. The vast earth is rarely thought about since the Club of Rome and the push to scare people with the overpopulation myth. There are massively empty parts of the planet; Mongolia and the Australian outback, Iceland and Namibia, and French Guiana. The latter sees half of its population living in the capital Cayanne, on the coast. Nobody, essentially, lives in the interior which is nearly entirely made up of mangroves, swamps, and empty savannahs and wetlands. It is the size of Scotland roughly — 32,000 square miles. Republic of the Congo is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, with parts barely mapped at all. Kazakhstan and huge parts of Siberia are empty. Shit, so is most of Norway north of where I live (Trondelog county). Tristan de Cunha and the Western Sahara are almost entirely empty. The list goes on. Tristan de Cunha of course is small, and an island(s) but the Central African Republic is huge, and like its neighbor has thousands upon thousands of miles of jungle with very few inhabitants. My point is that AI is a bourgeoise white phenomenon, and these neo nazi avatars like Musk and Thiel are simply the Lord Kitcheners of the 21st century. AI is the erector set for pathogenic billionaires.

End of digression.

“If the ego has . . . not achieved much more than a repression of the complex, the latter persists in an unconscious state . . . and will later manifest its pathogenic effect.”
Sigmund Freud (Ibid)

Freud is discussing the Oedipus complex. In other words, if its not worked through (in some fashion) that repressed material will return, only all grown up and drunkenly violent. Or perhaps, more likely, as fastidious anal-sadistic serial killers, not surprisingly a staple of Hollywood film. The Oedipus complex is the killing of parental authority. Interestingly the language Loewald uses, and Ogden discusses here, is also invested with generational meaning. Repression a very loaded term. Be that as it may, the absence for the child of a parental authority creates a specific sort of anxiety (I remember David Foster Wallace once remarking that his generation longed for their parents to return home unexpectedly and put an end to the party).

“When parental authority does not provide the “brakes” for fantasy, the fantasied murder of those one loves and depends upon is too frightening to endure. Under such pathological circumstances, the child, in an effort to defend himself against the danger of the actual murder of the parents, represses (buries alive) his murderous impulses and enforces that repression by adopting a harshly punitive stance toward these feelings. In health, paradoxically, the felt presence of parental authority makes it possible for the child to safely murder his parents psychically (a fantasy that need not be repressed).”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

The parracide is also an introjection of the parents. One must eat the father (and mother, eventually). This is the process of the formation of the super-ego. But there is something other happening in contemporary culture. I noted this ‘band of brothers’ theme in Hollywood film and TV currently. And it is worth noting that as it is expressed in TV and film today, the brothers are not really a family in any sense. They often say they are. But it is a brotherhood without actual purpose. It is a nihilistic brotherhood. Or anti brotherhood.

“Uncertain how to proceed, the delegates of the largest group, the Third Estate, milled about outside the hall and pondered the next move. They decided to meet elsewhere. Where? A professor of anatomy, who would soon gain fame for his invention of a simple machine that ended life quickly, knew of a large space that could be used. Dr. Guillotin suggested a nearby indoor tennis court, which the throng commandeered. Six hundred delegates crowded into the plain and high-ceilinged room and swore they would remain together until France had a constitution—a decisive and revolutionary act. The delegates claimed in effect to be France herself. “The scene has come down to us as The Tennis Court Oath, an unfinished painting by Jacques-Louis David. The soon-to-be mayor of Paris, Jean Bailly, stands center stage; others are gathered around with their arms stretched out toward him. Some delegates are hugging each other. The emotional lines of the scene flow horizontally. A month later the Bastille, a symbol of the old regime, fell to surging crowds. In the celebrations of those events a year later, speakers often invoked fraternity. Not only are we free but “we are brothers,” proclaimed the municipality of Paris in its address to all of France. One need not be a Freudian to register the Oedipal dimensions. The sons bond together as they overthrow the father. One psychoanalyst dubs the Tennis Court Oath meeting the “assembly of brothers.” Bailly in his memoirs referred often to the “fraternal” spirit among the delegates. The idea that the delegates constituted a brotherhood or family grouping came up frequently. “If we should see ourselves as a united family,” stated a delegate, “it is because the king calls us his children.” Yet the father has angered the children, who kill him. The sons suffer not only from guilt but also from resentment. To subvert the father is also to subvert the lines of inheritance. The spoils have to be shared. How? The Vendée and the Terror lie in the near future. Bailly himself succumbed to the machine named after the doctor. First the brothers swear fidelity to one another, then they unsheathe the knives. History recapitulates myth. Parricide turns into fratricide.”
Russell Jacoby (Bloodlust)

Resentment. Now resentment is a massive topic for contemporary society. And I’ve written on it and will again. But for here I am only noting its existence. In Hollywood the band of brothers is always, literally, military. And the military, as Hollywood posits it, exists in a vacuum. The enemy is generic. He wears a turban or speaks with a Russian accent. He is a black inner city gang banger or red neck backwoods killer. But let me look at Jacoby again in his study of violence.

“Fratricide informs the founding texts of Western culture. The Hebrew Bible opens with brothers killing brothers. Rome originates in a fratricide. For Hannah Arendt the omnipresence of these stories suggests their potency. “Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus…. The first recorded deeds in our biblical and secular tradition … have travelled through the centuries” and have given us “cogent metaphors or universally applicable tales.” For Arendt the tales spoke clearly: “Whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

And so, against these narratives, here in the 21st century, comes the digital tech revolution (sic). Culminating in A.I. The human penchant for violence is necessarily complex topic — but I have come to feel A.I. is an expression of the damaged soul of those living capitalism. These ‘helpers’ created through AI are like engaging with the severely autistic. There is almost no way NOT to anthropomorphise the experience. They are ‘friends’, even brothers. They tell you what you want to hear. AI cannot be programmed to understand honour or courage. The entire project of western science is malignant.

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”
Theodore Kaczynski (Industrial Society and its Future)

The above quote is from the Unibomber’s manifesto. There is a good deal of madness running through it. And much confusion. A confusion that feels of a very specific sort. There are also some insights worth thinking on. But given Kaczynski’s acts of violence one has to reflect a bit more than one might usually. Kaczynski borrowed heavily from Jacques Ellul, and Desmond Morris. He has been, somewhat tellingly, plagerised by fascists such as Anders Breivik. He also influenced eco-radicals (sic) like John Zerzan. None of this is actually overly interesting. And actually I only bring this up because of one point Kaczynski makes; and that is that humans are maladaptive for living with technology. But there is a secondary point here, and that is how mainstream academics have treated the manifesto. It has become a perfect vehicle for blaming this violence on Marx (of course), Freud, Aristotle, Oswald Spengler, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and even Margaret Mead. Oh and of course Adorno.

Kaczynski was right about technology, up to a point. It *is* the fault of capitalism. But ok, I know what he means. Still, the violence. And here I wanted to reiterate this strange relationship that digital tech, AI in particular, has with autism. Or at least with one strand of (per Ogdan and Bion and Tusk) autism.

“This conception of an autistic-contiguous position must be differentiated from Mahler’s (1968) conception of “normal autism”. She views the infant in the first months of life as existing in a “closed monadic system, self-sufficient in its hallucinatory wish fulfillment’. In contrast, I do not conceive of the autistic-contiguous position as a closed system in which the infant is isolated from and unresponsive to, his object world. { } The normal elaboration of the autistic-contiguous organization depends upon the capacity of the mother and infant to generate forms of sensory experience ence that “heal” or “make bearable” the awareness of the separateness that is an intrinsic component of early infantile experience (Tustin, 1986).”
Thomas H. Ogden (The Primitive Edge of Experiencee)

But I would argue that prior or before this ‘first few months’ a stage of *very* early infant life that cannot be accessed unless one experiences a certain level of crisis much later in life. And this sense of lack or un-boundedness, is found again in A.I. language helpers. In fact in all AI. For systems like Grok or ChatGPT et al there is something like a diminished sense of the human (because of course it isnt human). The echo of the human. There is an unconscious and uncanny sense of collective memory that is accessed. It uses our language. And its manner of use is insidious — it is viewed (and labeled) as a *helper*.

“The AI tool is capable of responding to any command promptly and consequently, people are growing increasingly dependent on it. Excessive dependency has been hypothesized to be both a risk factor and a complication of mental health such as depression. Dependency, either as a trait or a state, can be closely related to depression. Theories to explain this correlation may be broadly classified into two groups: those who tend to self‐blame and have a constantly pessimistic attitude about life, and those who make excessive expectations for affection and get dissatisfied when they are not met ; that causes depression, which can result in suicide attempts at later stage.”
Khondoker Tashya Kalam, et al (ChatGPT and Mental Health, National Library of Medicine)

“We are living in the Landian wet dream, with capital-qua-AI running unchecked in the direction of meltdown. “Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway,” Land writes. This is less theory-fiction than an accurate description of the present. Firms “too big to fail” are using the fantasy of technological inevitability as cover for a class war, restructuring entire industries to manufacture demand for digital solutions still in search of problems.”
Adina Glickstein (CCRU, Accelerationism, AI, Spiked Nove 12, 2025)

We live in an era where the authority structure includes hallucinatory superstitions. It may be that the logic of Enlightenment science would inevitably lead to things like UFOs and belief in Angels. Tucker Carlson talked about demons that attacked him in his bed. The moon-hoax theories continue on unabated. J.D. Vance, in an interview, theorized that UFOs might be demons. 40 to 60% of Americans believe in ghosts, and even vampires.

“In other words, the child’s “internalized” Oedipal object relationships (constituting the superego) have their origins in the “DNA” of the parents – that is, the unconscious psychological make-up of the parents (which in turn “documents” their own oedipal object relationships with their parents). At the same time, despite this powerful transgenerational continuity of oedipal experience, if the child (with the parents’ help) is able to kill his oedipal parents, he creates a psychological clearance in which to enter into libidinal relationships with “novel” (non-incestuous) objects. These novel relationships have a life of their own outside of the terms of the child’s libidinal and aggressive relationships with his oedipal parents. In this way, genuinely novel (non-incestuous) relationships with one’s parents and others become possible. (The novel object relationships are colored by, but not dominated by, transferences to the oedipal parents.)”
Thomas H. Ogden (Ibid)

And it is at this point that one wonders if A.I. and its attendant technologies are not engines of mass conformism. The loss of family and community means many people see the internet as its family. See A.I. as a brother or even a father. There is a new unconscious being formed. A world without dreams. The only promising sign of salvation is that the current growth of data centers is unsustainable (and maybe the designers and funders of these centers know this and that’s part of the plan). Whatever it is, there is an end in sight.

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