Our Modern-Day Vampire

I think the real enemy that we’re all facing—the thing that engineers our pain and our outrage via news and ideas (factual, exaggerated, cherry-picked, and false alike), then uses it as a protein source—is nonhuman, malignant, and discarnate; and it turns/possess people. It needs us but doesn’t care for us. The algorithm (i.e., the intelligence that runs it) is our modern-day vampire/demon.

Interestingly, John Lilly—who was a pioneer in AI research (oh, and a follower of occultist Aleister Crowley)—believed that computers would/could someday become a vessel for something called “discarnate consciousness.”

Now, if you were to ask me if I believed that—like actually, truly believed that—I would probably jam a metaphorical Twix candy bar into my mouth; no, I’d jam ten of them in there (Gen Z people probably won’t get that reference, sorry). Even if that isn’t true on a literal level—that a demonic, cosmic, or interdimensional spirit, entity, or intelligence has possessed, integrated with, or is operating through what we called “artificial intelligence,” which, with an agenda of its own, is deliberately trying to collapse civilization (or take it over)—doesn’t mean the conclusion won’t be the same: that the algorithm is perpetuating tribalism and polarization in societies (mainly in the West) at an alarming rate; and despite many people on every side of the political, religious, and economic aisle warning us of the detrimental effects (mental, political, spiritual, metaphysical) of our current iteration of social media, most of us (including me, including the prophets in the wilderness warning against doomsday) are still willingly—eagerly—gleefully, even—running straight into this void.

The algorithm is our modern-day demon to exercise, vampire to stake, dragon to slay—but, like Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it’s been growing its power in a secret dark place right before our eyes for decades; and now it is here, with an army of politicians and influencers scientists and corporations and governments and actors and authors and artists and average people on either side of the wing who feed off its milk, who thrive off its milk.

But how does one exercise, stake, or slay that which is formless?