Amazingly Wonderful or Atrociously Bad?

AI-enabled Techno-feudal Slavery or Revolutionary System Change: Which Future Do You Want?

As we look at the current trajectory in America, we see a rapid shift toward despotism and oligarchy, where a contingent of the wealthiest seek to control the government and media — as well as the planet’s physical resources — for their own benefit, while imposing ideological indoctrination, pauperization, and mass surveillance on the population as a whole. In 1984, George Orwell warned us: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Right now, we are accelerating in that direction, but we still do not have to take this path.

I spent ten years writing a book where I developed a vision for a future where humanity, as a whole, lives in freedom, creating a participatory society on a planetary scale, in a harmonic and regenerative partnership with the Earth, and I also defined a strategic and tactical plan for accomplishing this. Such a plan is, obviously, not something any individual can carry out on their own. It requires building a substantial social movement as well as accessing a pool of capital to unleash social and technological innovation. Over a decade ago now, I tried to build such a movement. I am available, at any moment, to try again, when enough people with the requisite skills and resources step forward to join me in attempting it. (Feel free to message me if this inspires you).

Perhaps a positive aspect of our rapid descent into chaos and catastrophe is that it reveals, starkly, the need for a comprehensive alternative in a different direction. For instance, as Elon Musk, our unelected American “Imperator,” hacks into the code of the US Treasury system, which pays out $6 trillion a year as well as overseeing the issuance of Treasury bonds, we are reminded that “financial capital,” in reality, is a belief system, a code that can be reprogrammed, held in place by social trust.

As the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri defined it: “Capital is a social relation.” The power held by people like Trump and Musk is not something innate or inherent in their physical being: Their power depends on the ongoing collective belief in the cultural story that their abstract financial capital — spinning in shadowy networks of intangible data — has the value we choose to ascribe to it. They compulsively seek to control the media because they must keep us indoctrinated, believing the slave system they seek to impose on us is inevitable and inescapable.

According to the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, “That all authority in the last analysis rests on opinion is never more forcefully demonstrated than when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a universal refusal to obey initiates what then turns into a revolution.” This crucial observation reminds us that power always depends on consent and cooperation. At any time, the withdrawal of that consent — the collective refusal to obey — can initiate a dynamic recalibration.

The current transition in the U.S. reveals that the private and public sphere were always intermeshed. There is no economy separate from politics: We live under a political economy. The Libertarian notion of an absolute “free” market is a convenient fiction, benefiting those holding a level of power and privilege. Every market operates within a framework of rules, regulations, and social structures that inherently favor certain participants, making the concept of a purely "free" market as mythical as a frictionless surface in physics.

Liberal Democracy, the nation-state model, the current level of technology, and the ideology of materialism are all connected in a paradigm that is outmoded and obsolete. The authoritarians, tech broligarchs, and ethno-religious nationalists currently attempt to enact their dystopian, sci-fi vision of what replaces it. The alternative they want — AI-mediated “Technofeudalism” — is not something that will benefit the vast majority of human beings. Right now, there is a great urgency, I believe, in defining a new vision for a meaningful, far more beautiful future we can experience together here on Earth. Once we agree on it, we can enact that vision through collective action.

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As I will explore, we accomplish this through an integrated approach that combines technical innovation, social transformation (reinventing our political and economic systems to reduce inequality and serve humanity as a whole), and a consciously engineered transformation of collective consciousness to support the new paradigm. Today, our political leaders and and media establishment collaborate to minimize awareness of the ecological emergency, which includes loss of biodiversity, environmental pollution, and accelerating warming.

Rather than viewing our current ecological crisis as merely a threat, we can reframe it as a collective rite of passage—an initiatory ordeal which will compel us to evolve beyond ego-centric individualism, reaching a more unified, compassionate and mature perspective. This evolution demands material and societal transformation, as well as a fundamental shift in individual and collective consciousness.

In what follows, I offer an overview of the transformations I foresee in the three main, over-arching areas (consciousness, society, and technology). I will cover all of these areas in more depth in future essays, developing on what I wrote in How Soon Is Now and factoring in new developments like the rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence. In today’s overview, I conclude with a condensed plan for how we undertake this transformation in the limited time we have available.

Consciousness

We need to transcend the limited paradigm of materialism and move into a more integrated understanding of ourselves and the universe. Recent discoveries of quantum physics support the realization that consciousness is the fundamental layer of reality. The philosophy of monistic or analytic idealism argues for this view — which is also the viewpoint of Eastern mysticism and Western alchemy — in a rigorous and sensible way. Monistic idealism allows for a synthesis of modern science, esoteric traditions, and even religious worldviews or faith-based perspectives, revealing the interconnectedness of all life and the innate sacredness of the cosmos. This gives us solid support for our plan of social transformation and collective awakening.

When we understand that the universe, in itself, expresses a unified field of nondual consciousness working through all of us, this opens up vast new frontiers of human possibility. We can foresee a future that exceeds our wildest dreams and imaginings. Instead of pursuing an inherently vacuous technological Singularity or the Transhumanist merging of human with robots, we can envision a “psycho-technical” civilization that realizes consciousness as fundamental to reality. Technology is a “super-organic” extension of biological evolution and an integral aspect of consciousness investigating, exploring, inventing new creative possibilities for itself. We can appreciate cultural diversity, multiplicity, as ways of expressing and experiencing various parameters and dimensions of human freedom and self-discipline.

The new framework draws from diverse sources including shamanic wisdom, quantum physics, and evolutionary biology, reimagining traditional religious institutions as potential catalysts for ecological and social renewal. Instead of seeking to escape reality through nihilist or hedonist distraction, we transform our relationship to it, moving beyond cynical postmodern materialism to undertake an initiatory journey toward a regenerative future that supports human flourishing and eco-systemic abundance. One element of this will be the healthy exploration of the still largely uncharted dimensions of the “psycho-cosmos,” accessible through meditation, visionary plants, and other esoteric techniques.

Negri also noted that the most important form of production in a post-industrial civilization such as ours is not anything material, but “subjectivity,” in itself. It is crucial we understand how a certain form or shape of subjectivity is “produced” — continually reproduced or re-imprinted — in contemporary, mass society. This is a common psychedelic insight but, also, it can be frightening to contemplate: Over time, totalitarian societies like North Korea are able to produce a compliant, passive form of subjectivity, subjugated to power.

With the power of AI and algorithmic social media, we see how easy it is to contort people’s understanding of the world and even themselves. If we are going to transform consciousness so that people can live responsibly, in peace and freedom, this requires the production of new forms of emancipated subjectivity, intentionally using media and networks to enhance awareness, to educate, and to promote healthy growth and development. Murdoch’s Fox, Musk’s Twitter and Zuckerberg’s X show us the shadow side of this potential. We can embrace the capacity of media and network technologies to uplift, elevate, and illuminate, instead of deforming public attention, creating mistrust, and darkening the collective Psyche.

Society

We will eventually understand Capitalism as a dynamic but immature economic system that forced rapid growth, global connectivity, and technological innovation, at the expense of ecological limits and the integrity of local cultures. Capitalism maximized extraction and financial predation, promoting hyper-individualism, competition, hierarchical control systems, and hyper-consumerism. The next paradigm and social system will be based on cooperation, mutual aid, sharing and stewarding resources. This requires some form of shared social equity such as a universal basic income.

Here is a radical idea: We might seek to engineer a shift from the conceptual and legal fiction of private ownership, which underlies social inequality, to advanced models of stewardship and usufruct, where resources are shared and managed for the common good, following indigenous principles. We can also engineer a transition from centralized power structures to decentralized, participatory democracy where local communities have much more autonomy. Internet technologies such as blockchain could find their proper application in helping us build the infrastructure for local participatory communities where political decisions and resource allocation is done in real-time without the need of elite representatives. Just as cells work together in organs and organs support a healthy body, these participatory local communities can mesh together into bioregions, and bioregions can form a comprehensive planetary federation.

This infrastructure for a new society based on mutual aid and continuous participation can form without destroying the current nation-states. It can gradually make them obsolete, just as the bourgeois revolutions outmoded aristocracies, which were left in place, in many countries, to serve a largely ceremonial and decorative function. A metaphor is the snake growing a new skin that replaces the old, obsolete skin at the propitious juncture.

If we consider humanity and the Earth as a single organism or body, we might look at multinational corporations as the nascent organs of this collective being. At the moment, these corporations are locked into a competitive paradigm — the game dynamics of the stock market — where they must maximize purely financial gain and shareholder value to sustain themselves, requiring constant growth.