Aquanaut StarShip pt. 1 of x

I want to present some thoughts on the relitigation taking place in the landscape of our collective mythmaking. I have noticed that Algorithmic Information systems have generated an unevenly distributed though ubiquitous threat—not only to the job market, but to the narrative coherence of multiple demographics. I do not want to dwell on the landscape of employment solutions. Once the labor wound is decoupled from the level at which our narratives currently operate, we might find ourselves more open to reframing the question much differently than way we currently do.

More foundationally, to orient our conversation, I want to clarify where I’m coming from. My journey through the space of angst in our current moment began with a mathematically inferred question. If the information I am receiving paints a picture of companies slimming down and tooling their workers with new technologies, and of young people unable to find jobs, then how has the topology of instability actually settled? Thus, the calculation I made went as follows: those already inside employment structures, who are probably older, are less affected, because the new technology enters as an enhancement of a position already occupied; whereas the younger demographics face a closing horizon of employment, because from within established businesses the bottom line dictates that salary expenditure can be minimized. There is, of course, the cost story now surfacing—that the economics of token use, in a time of high-volume adoption pressed against the bottleneck of energy and distribution capacity, render AI integration financially unsustainable. But over time, it seems as though the price model will balance out in the social game of ledger manipulation disguised as a physics threshold, although in truth the bare-metal infrastructure, with enough development, can easily shoulder the burden of the entire workforce.

Now, if this is the picture, then I wonder: if the brunt of the change is being absorbed by the younger, not-yet-established demographic, how does that alter the likelihood of a response commensurate with the urgency of their struggle? Notice that the demographics in a position to act and make change are not within the ecosystem of the affected demographic’s communication. With my ear thus prepared, I consider the tone in which writers at Semafor and the Financial Times discuss AI. Rather than a sense of personal threat, precarity, and urgency, I hear a distanced discussion of how the technology might be deployed, or how one might adjust an investment portfolio toward the Silicon Valley companies—prehended as economic rather than societal entities. I then turn my head toward the tone of literati, the culturati. Floating in the circles of Art and Design, those sipping champagne at cruise shows, speed-running the galleries of New York on the weekend all discuss AI as a peripheral novelty that doesn’t have a real point of contact with the looming institutions of old.

Depending on your lifestyle, you may not have access to the embedded participation in the experience of the diverse coordinates of society’s machinery. However, consider for a moment how these two demographics live in the world. If you are a CEO or banker, as part of the FT’s readership, what informational ecosystem swirls around you, siloing you in its self-referential language and meaning frameworks? Consider the altitude of the content in Harvard Business Review. Take a look at the news meaningful to those employed in family offices and private equity. How do you expect a technological shift to be presented and framed in that space? And on the other hand, consider how analog and socially enmeshed the art world is. If you spend enough time, the entire ecosystem begins to feel familiar, a cottage industry with migratory patterns, rhythmically moving to Chelsea in Chelsea season, to Miami for Art Basel Miami, etc. This is a world whose nature is to draw people together in person, where the city remains, even in this digital age, an inalienable playground spread through real space—how likely is a digital abstraction to generate a feeling of existential threat? If you have an MFA and you manage to break past escape velocity with a gallery showing, the demographic you’re speaking to are not on discord. You are marketing to deeply analog ecosystems of the excessively wealthy, to the point that those who don’t understand art feel it’s all just money laundering (though it might be a little of that; I’m not entirely sure).

So, my impression is that the experience of new technology is unevenly distributed. And therefore, when I want to understand the arena in which destabilization is truly occurring—where crisis is being metabolized and transformed into a new platform for coherence—we must understand who are genuinely shattered, and thus who now holds the pen to the next chapter of our society. With that in mind, I take a figure from the New York Times: a blind experiment (March 2026, 86,000 readers) found a majority preferring AI-written passages across fiction, poetry, and science. What does one feel in the presence of that fact? My mind reaches at once for a crisis of identity, meaning, and motivation. My logic runs as follows. If we are beings who first construct a pre-sensory rendering of what the world is, and then live within the particularity of moments that feed back into what that world is—a feedback loop that forms the very engine of our activity—then we may ask: does that system nurse on an externality?

Suppose one finds oneself in a world of writing, where the world is books and stories and poems, and such a one coordinates their identity within the plane of literature: who I am as a writer will, by the numbers, always be appreciated more than a machine, because art is the soul of the universe and an expression of us as the pinnacle of being—or however one might be articulate it. This individual coordinates their identity on the plane of literature, and is now faced with a fact that challenges that space as a source of reliable visibility and expression. And it is perhaps as destabilizing in the realm of numbers as in that of letters, for the scientist particularly. After all, the technology is merely a referendum on the patternality of our collective self, on the patternality of the universe itself. We live in a world that yields itself to consumption by linear-algebra machinery—and that is, of course, fine, and perhaps interesting, but above all it is reality. We implicitly assume this with our reliance on predictive cognition. Any system that has structure and syntax, whose meaning is expressed meaningfully—that is to say, within evolved, sophisticated matrices of possibility where choice therein is an effective signal—is consumable by a system that conforms to pattern. From a certain perspective, to be offended by the capacity of an artificial technology to algorithmically mirror you is silly—do you think our civilization is a miracle of complexity, or was it entropic chaos the whole time? In short, although the tone of the financial press and the shrug of the socialite class would paint me one picture of the current societal permission for this new technology, the math I am doing leaves me in little doubt that some form of crisis is propagating, and through large demographics.

I hold an assumption: that all healthy systems are flexible systems. Rigidity means fragility in shifting environments, whereas healthy systems adapt, incorporate, and evolve; they reveal the depth of their identity precisely in the presence of antithesis, only thereby arriving at synthesis—whether this is a biological system evolving a different beak, or the human system processing meaning in the face of destabilizing information. If I am correct that a crisis of the sort I have envisioned is in fact taking place on the scale I expect, then there should be thinking and feeling, speaking and writing, foaming along the fault lines. Furthermore, I have a further specified and nuanced expectation: insofar as there are traditions, alive and well, that hold information capable of drawing up a coherent and mature narrative to ease and soothe the crisis, I expect the present moment to be evoking a response from those domains, each prehending this moment in the language and structure local to its own world. What I imagine, therefore, is that if I could somehow gain a sense of how these different traditions are processing the moment—how this crisis must generate cavities of desire that expand with vacuous suction for the light of clarity—it must make strange bedfellows of demographics that, in another situation, might never naturally have connected. I am intrigued, then, by this social chemistry and how it plays into the making of meaning. From this register, I want to offer a non-comprehensive review of certain strains I have noticed.

To take stock of the incumbent forces facing this moment, consider the following sketch. The human story—from the most primal stage of the pagan, constellational era all the way through to the Enlightenment—organized around a central axis of cosmology, epistemology, social structure, and philosophy. That cluster becomes wrapped with what we term religion, in that all of the above gird themselves with a theistic rendering of the universe. That cluster forms the beating heart of the social system, pumping blood to its farthest boundaries through culture formation and identity coordination. The Enlightenment comes to displace that heart with a similar one, leaving untouched the social axes it extends through. In lieu of a theistic cosmology, it installs a world in which the human is the center. The new world looks back upon the ruins of Greece—upon the civilization that housed the human spirit, with which the world lost touch in the course of Christendom. That human spirit constitutes Science and Art as the twin pillars of a noble humanity. From this renewal of the cluster’s content, new social hierarchies issue forth, prioritizing advancement and driving a march toward the veiled, seductive horizon of the future. That vision coevolves with a similarly fervent economic development, and in the fertile ground of a newly enlightened world, identity coordinates itself with value hierarchies of the symbolic, economic, social, and cultural order—Bourdieu’s metric axes of capital weight.

Through wars and through time, we pass into the well-documented collapse of a post-Victorian Western humanity (described vividly in Adorno and Horkheimer, and Fredric Jameson afterward more explicitly)—a people alienated from any sense of the normal against which to measure themselves, past a simplicity that preceded the atrocities afforded by modernity. Yet whatever one wishes to claim about the state of alienation that has waxed continuously across the past century and a half, notice how the Enlightenment persists as a fruitful mine for our collective storytelling. Throughout that entire period, we can still weave a tale of our collective self as a participant in the human story—a story that remains the hopeful north star, defining a world theoretically accessible once again, a star that will shine upon a civilization of tomorrow if only we could manage to get it right.

What I am noticing is that the calculation I made above would imply a qualitatively different rupture, beyond a further magnitude of alienation. Enlightenment values are not merely challenged; the sister system of economic value—of dreams articulated in terms of personal achievement and wealth—is being struck at simultaneously. As I have qualified, I predict that this wound is not distributed evenly, and those whose dreams of potential meaning making are crushed are not those who have already secured wealth and can thus persist in perpetuating the economic system as such with comfort. Meaning to say, the affected demographic is by definition the threatened demographic, who now face the collapse not just of possible wealth but of the meaning that the wealth system is supposed to validate. The wager implicit in late capitalism is that valuated work doesn’t merely translate into more buying potential, but becomes an interoperable gold standard backing the currency of myself personal value, acceptance, and legitimacy. For the wealthy and established, that psychological arrangement is already accepted and success has already been found within the arrangements old terms. It is a system so deeply internalized that they are safe to live out the rest of their lives in the comfort of their trophy case, in the comfort of commodity signals with which they build their nest to constantly reaffirm, “I am good, because look at this wealth, I am sophisticated because look at this refinement, I am accepted because I have acceptable things.” For the young, what could such a thing even mean? That statement is really unexamined but founded on a deeper statement, “I am good, because this wealth is indicative of my value on the totem pole of production, a crown which the free market hath bestowed on my head. I am the best at x, and so am deserving of this gilded nest. This gilded nest has been earned.” Say this to the young person, who might feel, “I am part of the group, and even if in an old regime I might be able to nurture the illusions of my standing out in some highly specific mountaintop of my own, the mountain tops are all covered by the waters of the sea. There is no climbing, because I am not exceptional in ways that will approximate the value providable by mechanized labor, labor extending from the sum total of human greatness, exceeding any individual human capacity.” The accuracy of this sentiment is of course heavily debatable and case specific, and I am personally not inclined to believe in that totalizing picture. But, what I am concerned with is not the job market, it is the impetus for a new story which will need to address the core axis of society, replacing that core with something new which will shift us into a parallel universe, a universe where we all participate in civilization on earth and yet are not threatened psycho-philosophically by the current gun aimed at our fiscal enlightenment core. Stated plainly, it has never before been the case that a trauma sustained by the soul of being—that beating heart once collectively termed religion, and now the unnamed, diffuse descendant of the Enlightenment—should be struck simultaneously with the horizon of economic possibility.

What I am arriving at may be surprising, yet I sense that it follows naturally from the course I have set. The Question—that material darkness which contorts into the silhouette of the answer—coheres, from this perspective, into the following demand: we need a reconstruction, or at least a transformation, of our collective mythology, one that will be distinctly post-Enlightenment. Not only that, but I have weighty expectations for the theoretical light that would satisfy the demands of youth’s starving void. It must be articulated in a way that makes potent emotional contact with the most affected demographics, and is at the same time legible to the distanced power class who are actively embracing the force vectors that propagate this crisis. This vision must recontextualize human meaning and value in such a way that the strongest of tools become subordinate, as tools ought to be, and the human is somehow reseated on a throne built not from hierarchies of skill but from something else, where the barista in a small Midwestern town is, in her very existence, an expression of the goal of this newly formed human enterprise—the thing to protect, cherish, and value.

Two things have been somewhat conflated, and purposefully so. There is my initial motivation, to discover what the landscape of new meaning looks like, but I layered with an evaluative framework for my findings. When I define the silhouette of the answer, I try to shape the question with an eye toward tomorrow, not merely to make sense of now. What among the thoughts I am to encounter are actually workable candidates for tomorrow? This is where my criteria come from. So once again: I require that it actually address the deepest human suffering undergone by the lost and confused among my own demographic of Gen Z, but is also legible to the reader base of the Financial Times, for example. That is a big ask, because you need to understand what it means to be a CEO. The business world, for example, like any social system, generates itself autopoietically. It already forms the socket that is CEO-shaped, and only the one who is able to conform to that shape reaches that socket. In becoming ‘CEO,’ one must undergo a long journey of distancing oneself from the visions and intuitions native to generic personhood, and become instead a chariot for the vision and priorities of the business. Balance books prehend the world in terms of themselves, and the business leader must become colonized by the personification of the business’s telos. This is where the rhetoric and style of publications like the Financial Times emanate from—the steady, adult, clearheaded analysis of the world in terms of the institutions that matter to them. You cannot write a manifesto on the cosmic beauty of human expression in the tone of the Financial Times. But I reckon that there is a vision which can be embraced by the masses of people who do not shelter within themselves the corporate parasite, and which, despite that, remains translatable and useful in the adjacent social systems of business and policy.

To further elaborate on the true hurdle facing this new vision, notice what it means to challenge the central lie of capitalism – you challenge capitalism itself. As we’ve pointed out, we deal here not with the dying Enlightenment vision, because when that paradigm was shown to be vacuous, capitalism papered over it. As in the infancy of banking itself, the economic system stepped in with more promises beyond the actual quantity of gold in their coffers. If the economic sphere is, in the first place, no longer open to participation, and, deeper still, is now composed of tools that evacuate the honest signal of personal value one tries to define in its terms, then the motivation to participate in the economy is profoundly weakened. What becomes the motivation to do? Understand that the economy was always an ambiguous technology—partly concerned with the satisfaction of needs and comfort, but also a system that recruits the deeper motivations and stories which form a person’s world, life, and identity. Yes, most people recognize on some level that money is not an end in itself; yet the end is so often conceived in terms of money—as something money unlocks at best, or where the vision itself becomes some other form of commodification as in our late-stage capitalism. That was, of course, a farce, but now the jig is up, because the economy as a vehicle for that achievement is collapsing in the eyes of the affected.

If the economy has colonized human motivations so deeply to the point that gutting the economy is the gutting of clear motivational sense making, then we have on our hands the opportunity to redefine progress. My prediction is that the processing taking place along the fault lines of the present moment must engage, at the very least implicitly, with the question of what progress means. The meaning of progress is a question impossible to pose from within the Victorian naivety of open horizons, it’s a question which surfaced in the postwar nausea of the seventies, and was awakened once again amid the cocaine, go-go, Wall Street circus of the eighties. The problematique of progress is downstream of cosmology. If the world is organized as X, then the visions and goals we develop are organized around Y. Progress asks how do we get there, and there is defined by that social core of meaning. So, we must assume that the elasticity of our collective mind is being stretched on that axis, cosmology as it relates to who we are, what is our value based on, and how does that picture return a new machinery in the place our current engine is failing. Has this question been answered in a satisfactory way? Perhaps not. If it has, then it hasn’t grown to the scale we need it to or we wouldn’t be here concerned about it. It might lie in wait, in a parallel space, some tradition or mode of thought awaiting application, or perhaps it was attempted but no rupture primed the masses for its reception. If this is a good bet, then we must pay attention to see how these traditions react to our problem, and we need to determine where would be a fruitfull place to look. At the same time I am confident that all will show their cards in the current moment if any good cards be in traditional hands, ready to reorganize the human story on a universal scale in such a way that it respects and is bioavailable for any and all people, ready to return the footing under the atheist and the believer alike, to members of any race or gender, ready to rebuild the platform for both inequality and those who fight inequality, because the crisis we face is bigger than any local issue.

There will be time to elaborate on all the attempts, from the proponents of a new Homo Experiens or even Homo Curiens, to the slightly problematic CosmoErotic crowd. However, If the following presentation offers any value, it will only be because I am saving you the time and confusion of navigating this space yourself. This initial framing is helpful for what I have concluded is a wide umbrella of people all of whom seem to have their eye on the same target, though there are certainly other umbrellas as well. For that reason, I want to begin with the conclusions and then take a tour through where I see these common threads emerge.