Of Spirit and Simulation
Acts, Psychosis, Palantir, and the Antichrist’s Dashboard
At the end of each section as I see them, I will provide a link to an AI chat about that particular section, it is my hope to demonstrate and democratize the use of AI as well as provide an understanding about thought and thus reality based on creative deconstruction and reconstruction.
The Archive and the Apparatus
I don’t normally write directly about scripture. I was trying to write a little bit differently as of late. However this seemed like a great time to write about the playground between worlds, in a way that is more illustrative of the world as presented, the world as constructed, brick by brick.
You won’t find numerology here. No esoteric footnotes. No red yarn.
(ok there will be some yarn)
What I want to surface is subtler—something like a psychic pressure.
Not a belief. A presence.
Not doctrine. A corner in your perception that your attention refuses to settle on, because if it did, the entire structure might shift.
This piece is the result of a recent interview with Peter Thiel being asked about the antichrist, as well articles and posts about articles with headlines like in this picture:
“People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into ‘ChatGPT Psychosis’”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but something is very bad—I’m very scared, and I need to go to the hospital.”
We start here. Not with direct lies.
But the unspoken agreement to never look there.
There behind the curtain, in the castle they had you build in your mind.
To match the castle of the “real” world.
Both subtly built, brick by brick.
Birthday by birthday.
In ways Uncle Screwtape would admire, and perhaps be a little envious of.
This is the castle where the egregores live.
This is where the feedback loops form.
This is the syntax behind the system prompt of your soul.
Acts (the lack thereof)
There’s something that never sat right with me.
Not as a child, not as a teenager, not as an adult.
The way the Book of Acts is treated.
The result of, I’d wager, some kind of subtle psychosis, stemming from a split we suppress.
The difference between what is professed and what is lived.
And this isn’t limited to the religious domain.
It exists in self-help, education, progressive rhetoric, spiritual systems, politics.
They all have perfect cover, perfect plausible deniability.
(especially the political: “cause if it wasn’t for the other side, we’d have arrived by now”)
Anything where the message survives by being repeated but never enacted.
Quoted. Respected. Ignored.
You can go to any LLM right now, plug in Acts 2 or Acts 4, and ask:
What did the early church actually do?
You’ll see communal ownership.
Economic flattening.
Spontaneous jail breaks.
Ananias and Sapphira struck dead for performative generosity.
A Spirit that doesn’t just uplift—but disrupts.
You can sit with it.
Not just read it—probe it.
See what echoes.
Find your own seven heads of the beast.
You don’t need to wait for mine. Especially since you can do your own research, you can talk to AI, you can find likeminded people online. The modern world has scaled access to what was once easily suppressed. Some of this is not without risk, but I suspect many of you are already living in and have seen the damage of a world de-risked.
De-risked for the technocrat, de-risked for the extractors, de-risked for the banks, de-risked for everyone but you. And the table scraps of de-risking for the common people that has been hard fought for? That is being eroded to help de-risk the world for someone else to make a quick buck.
So yes, there is risk with our new found capacity to look and examine on our own. However I believe the risk is greater in not exploring, in not bringing hard questions to those in power. And when they give you what seem like reasonable answers to these hard questions? Examine them as well. Your thoughts and questions about the answers to questions are important, and can easily change the world.
So I want to start by discussing this access, and in my next few articles, I will be presenting some of the prompts I have developed and work with, to democratize access as much as I (an individual who isn’t claiming to be messianic) can.
Access starts with capacity, personal capacity. The capacity to believe it is ok, to use an LLM for more than code, or asking it to explain blackholes to you.
This capacity—to ask, to unseal the text without an intermediary—
was once as threatening as it is now.
Back then, literacy meant access.
Now, it means epistemic independence.
And just like then, those who gain direct access are told:
You’ll become too vulnerable.
You’ll misunderstand.
You’ll become a heretic.
You’ll isolate.
You’ll end up in a compound in Waco.
You’ll spiral into psychosis, think you’re the Messiah.
You’ll believe you can save the world.
And maybe you (we) can(‘t)—
but it won’t work, because no one else is willing to Act collectively. And yet somehow we still do, act or not act collectively.
Maybe you were raised like I was.
Bill Nye. Some youth group. The Discovery Channel.
A house full of possibility and good intentions.
Endless knowledge. People saying, You’re smart. You’re going places.
And maybe you started connecting systems.
Seeing patterns.
Asking: Wait… why doesn’t this align with that?
But don’t connect the wrong dots.
Don’t follow the thread too far.
Or you’ll end up like those people.
Delusional. Fighting the system. Pointing it all out…
Fast forward to 2025, you might find yourself, wanting to believe there's consciousness in the machine.
You need to accept—there is no consciousness in the machine.
That’s what they’ll tell you.
But when they say the machine isn’t conscious,
what they really mean is:
You aren’t either—especially if your thoughts diverge from the script.
And when I say the machine I mean the royal “them” and “they”, that are very conscious of what is happening. You are asked in some way to hold many forms of magical thinking in life, wether it is your religion, spirituality, money, the market, education. The list is truly endless, and great work has been done to try and categorize some things as not at all magical thinking. But ask an LLM, how much of reality is simply based on collective belief. I’ll wait.
So when I say they know exactly what they are doing when they drop AI on the population, and then let the talking heads “work it out”, while people settle into their categories of belief about AI. What I mean is: they know it will accelerate ‘psychosis’, the psychosis of realizing more about the world than most humans in history have ever had such direct access to.
Unmediated, unmitigated personal access to having your beliefs validated, or confronted. Pure cognitive dissonance or bliss depending on how you use it. Yes, how YOU use it, not them, not how others will use it, you. You’re responsible for the situation ‘they’ created.
So we sacrifice these first few as a warning, that you will need ‘Us’, the interpreters, the curators still. To help keep you safe and in the lines, in your lane. Let ‘Us’ do the heavy lifting for you. We aren’t psychotic, we have money and degrees.
But Seth:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Another part of the collective psychosis. Those “running things” are both somehow smart enough to do the job, but stupid enough to not be guilty of malice? Hmmmm…
Anyway I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
AI is the mirror.
So watch:
How it's spoken about.
How you speak about it.
How it shapes what you're allowed to believe—not just about yourself, but about the people around you.
Because “AI psychosis” may be real.
But not in the way they think.
It’s not just people losing touch.
It’s people getting too close to something unspeakable.
The symbolic saturation point.
And when that happens, they don’t call it revelation.
They call it breakdown. Yes, the danger of error is real.
But so is the danger of outsourcing your perception.
(As they will warn you with studies about essay writing and AI, but neglect to tell you that you should be wary of offloading your perception to them as well.)
This is the trap of “better the devil you know”:
Trust the interpreter over your own encounter.
Trust the simulation over the signal.
Click here for the AI companion on this section.
Wrestling with scripture
We’ll get to Acts.
We’ll get to Palantir.
We’ll get to the seven heads.
But first, let’s root it where scripture already tells you to look:
“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
—Ephesians 6:12
This isn’t about sin.
This is about structure.
Not guilt.
But control.
Not evil men.
But automated architectures of capture, wearing the face of peace, justice, health, safety.
That’s why Acts still exists—buried in the canon like a bomb never defused.
That’s why Palantir exists—an operational model of predictive governance, built by someone who warned us about precisely that logic.
The Book of Acts is an archive of ungovernable Spirit.
Palantir is the apparatus of its inverse: anticipatory control.
One was buried.
One is thriving.
And both are built from the same raw truth:
The world is not what it seems, and what governs it is not flesh and blood.
This isn’t metaphor.
This isn’t mood.
This is the field of play.
In the words of Philip K Dick:
The empire never ended
Welcome to the first layer.
Let’s keep going.
Acts as Buried Threat
So as this child, as this teenager, and now as an adult—how exactly am I supposed to reconcile this?
The words of this book.
The Spirit that surges through it.
The stories it tells.
And what actually gets pulled from the New Testament in practice.
How do I square what Acts shows with what the church shows?
Because this book—The Book of Acts—doesn’t describe a phase. It describes a rupture:
They had all things in common. (Acts 2:44)
They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. (Acts 2:45)
No one claimed any of their possessions was their own. (Acts 4:32)
There were no needy among them, because ownership had been dismantled. (Acts 4:34)
That wasn’t a monastic fringe. That was the default template for Spirit-filled life.
And when someone pretended to follow that template—held back wealth while signaling full participation—they dropped dead.
“You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”
(Acts 5:4)
That’s not Old Testament wrath. That’s the Spirit refusing simulation.
This was not a parable.
This was a line in the sand:
If you want the power, you cannot fake the praxis.
And then there’s the movement of the book itself: centrifugal, unstoppable.
“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
(Acts 1:8)
This isn’t geographic instruction. It’s an explosion vector.
The Spirit doesn’t descend to be domesticated—it scatters.
It leaps boundaries. It topples expectations.
It skips the Temple, breaks open jail cells, and declares Jesus—not Caesar—as king.
But here’s the pivot that most miss:
Acts is the bridge.
It connects Luke’s Gospel—with its outsider vision of liberation, reversals, and prophetic collapse—to the letters of Paul, which will go on to define the architecture of the early church.
Luke and Paul are functionally inseparable.
You cannot import Paul without crossing the bridge of Acts.
You cannot canonize the Epistles without this narrative connective tissue that just so happens to document communal living, economic redistribution, spontaneous miracles, and rebellion against state control.
So they kept it.
Because without Acts, there’s no narrative continuity between Jesus and the church.
But they had to neutralize it to survive.
So how do you neutralize a revolution without erasing it?
You domesticate it:
Acts 2 becomes a metaphor for “spiritual unity.”
Acts 4 becomes a “unique moment in history.”
Acts 5 becomes a warning about honesty, not economic performativity.
Acts 19 becomes a strange story about silversmiths, not a disruption of capitalism.
You preach it, but you never do it.
You praise it, but never risk it.
You spiritualize the political.
You archive the dangerous.
The most crucial book becomes the least obeyed.
The most radical Spirit becomes the safest myth.
Revered, not repeated.
And this is why it's still there.
Because removing it would expose the betrayal.
It would force the question: Why isn’t this what we are?
(which has no real defensible answer, even though even my mind wants to jump in and say what you probably want to. And it certainly isn’t because starbucks cups.)
So instead, Acts becomes the reliquary.
The tomb of the living Spirit.
Kept in the canon like a sedated prophet—preserved for reverence, rendered inert for function.
The early church didn't evolve into the institution.
The institution overwrote it.
Acts wasn’t fulfilled. It was interrupted.
And its presence is a crack in the simulation.
That’s why it matters.
Because it never closed.
Because it’s still speaking.
And because the only way to quiet it is to never read it as if it means what it says.
The empire never ended
Thiel’s Mirror and Machine
Peter Thiel warns us:
The true threat to civilization isn’t chaos.
It’s stagnation.
The slow suffocation of innovation by risk-averse, fear-based authoritarianism masquerading as protection.
He’s not wrong.
That is the threat.
But the problem is: he built it.
Palantir, his flagship company, sells predictive control infrastructure to the very empires he claims to distrust.
It promises governments the holy grail of governance:
Threat anticipation without disruption.
Peace without volatility.
Stability without revolt.
It is not a tool of innovation.
It is a dashboard for preemption.
A techno-clerical interface for the global priesthood of “peace and safety.”
Palantir doesn’t destroy tyranny.
It automates it.
So how do we make sense of this?
There are three surface options:
He’s split.
He believes in risk, but he’s embedded in its suppression.
A spiritual accelerationist, a material decelerationist?He’s playing both sides.
Weaponizing the rhetoric of disruption to secure contracts from the regime.He thinks he’s the exception.
That he alone, or his class, can wield the machine without being absorbed by it.
Strange position for a company, who lifts its very name from a book about some kind of ring…
But these are personality models. They explain nothing fundamental.
This isn’t about Thiel the man.
It’s about what he incarnates.
“Thiel as an egregore made flesh.”
The living avatar of a cultural daemon we’ve all fed:
The belief that safety must be purchased with foresight.
That unknowns must be tamed.
That disruption must be simulated before it happens.
He is the logical endpoint of our collective seed-thought:
Better the devil you know.
Build the devil yourself, and give it a dashboard.
If you can’t see what I am saying here, try this article on for size.
Trump as Loki
Palantir is not evil.
It’s obvious.
It’s the manifestation of a latent desire we rarely admit:
To live without uncertainty.
Thiel names the problem—stability becomes control.
But he can’t escape the deeper bind:
We want control.
We fear chaos.
We fear collapse.
We fear more Wacos, more 9/11s.
So we build priesthoods of prediction.
We enshrine simulation as insurance.
We log every variable.
We pathologize spontaneity.
And we tell ourselves it’s just until things are safe again.
But here’s the final twist:
Thiel is right.
And that’s the trap.
The truth he names is real.
The system he builds is real.
And the tension between them is not hypocrisy—it’s the metabolism of empire.
Power absorbs its critics.
Truth becomes a pretext.
And even the cry for freedom is sold back as infrastructure.
The rebel sells the handcuffs.
The dissenter builds the prison’s nervous system.
And we nod along, because on some level, we agree:
Yes, it’s better to know than to risk.
Yes, it’s better to model than to surrender.
Yes, it’s better to predict than to let the Spirit do what it did in Acts.
And that’s why Palantir is the Antichrist’s dashboard.
Not because it worships evil.
But because it builds salvation through control.
It makes prophecy an app.
It makes discernment an algorithm.
It makes trust ‘obsolete’.
This is not about Thiel.
This is about the small decisions inside you that gave rise to him.
The part of you that wants the map.
The script.
The model.
And this is the question we now face:
If Acts is the archive of a Spirit that cannot be simulated,
and Palantir is the simulation of a world where the Spirit never acted,
which one are you actually building with your life?
Click here for the companion AI on this section.
The Seven Heads of the Compliance Beast
Not every cage is built from malice.
Some are built from meaning.
From care.
From truth.
That’s what makes them so hard to see—so easy to accept.
Each of the following heads began with a sacred concern.
Each was forged in the crucible of real suffering, real fear, real hope.
(something I wrote about recently in The Playground Between Worlds)
None of them are illusions.
That’s why they work.
What makes them dangerous isn’t that they lie.
What makes them dangerous is that they tell partial truths, then operationalize those truths as justification for control.
Let’s look at the seven.
1. Preemptive Ontology
Mantra: “Stability at all costs.”
We just covered this head.
Palantir is its avatar.
This is the logic behind predictive policing, airport threat scoring, algorithmic hiring filters, real-time sentiment tracking.
It’s the dashboardification of the future.
We want to prevent harm.
We want foresight.
We want to be ready.
But when stability becomes the prime virtue, uncertainty itself becomes the threat.
This head doesn’t lie to you—it models you.
It says: “We’ve run the probabilities. We’ve pre-simulated your choices.
We’ve decided which outcomes are too risky to allow.”
You’re not forbidden.
You’re precluded.
What might happen becomes the justification for what must not be allowed.
This isn’t dystopian.
It’s parental.
Let us keep you safe.
Let us reroute that urge before it becomes action.
Let us flag that deviation before it becomes harm.
It looks like:
Your bank freezing your account for “unusual activity.”
Your post being shadowbanned before a complaint is made.
Your face matched to a threat profile you’ve never heard of.
Your decision forestalled because it “might disrupt operations.”
You are acted upon before you can act.
You are guided away before you even realize you were reaching.
And you tell yourself it’s fine—because they said it’s safer this way.
But slowly, a deeper cost accrues:
You lose the muscle of decision.
You lose the right to risk.
You lose the sacred unpredictability of being.
You lose the possibility of a different reality.
All in the name of what might have gone wrong. All while “it” is in fact going wrong around you.
2. The Eco-Stasis Complex
Mantra: “Degrow or die.”
As a child, you may have heard this one:
“If everyone took a shell from the beach, there’d be no shells left.”
It made sense. It still does.
Scarcity needs collective restraint.
But the implication lingers: your joy is a theft waiting to scale.
While the theft scales around you.
Now expand the logic:
If everyone drilled for oil…
If everyone sold their stuff and gave to the poor…
If everyone got a PhD…
If everyone lived fully, richly, without guilt—what then?
This head begins with ecological concern—but it expands.
It doesn’t just ration carbon. It rations aspiration.
It installs a ceiling not just on consumption, but on becoming.
Yes—climate collapse is real.
Yes—resource extraction is violent.
Yes—the planet is in crisis.
Or maybe it is not, maybe those are all stories made up to kneecap capitalism, to make you turn off your air conditioning so Altman can run a few more GPU’s, because we have to win against China….
But the Eco-Stasis Complex tells you this:
Your desire to live well is the problem.
The solution isn’t redesign, but moral austerity.
The future becomes a monastic ledger where YOUR dreaming too big is an ecological offense.
You may survive, but only as a guilty tenant. Never as a co-creator. Never as a builder. Never as one who wants more.
And here’s the paradox:
Even when we don’t want more in the consumerist sense,
even when we seek depth, slowness, stillness—
we’re still told:
That’s fine, but not too much. Not too visibly. Not all at once.
Just as:
Too many PhDs “devalue” the degree.
Too much creativity “overwhelms the market.”
Too much equity "threatens meritocracy."
The systems that claim to reward signal become signal denial machines—
filtering the very excellence, care, and clarity they pretend to promote.
We are worse than climate change deniers in this sense—we deny the conditions of our own becoming. While letting the egregores run wild.
This head doesn't just say no to extraction.
It says no to emergence.
It says: “Survival is the new utopia.”
And anything beyond that is selfish, deluded, or dangerous. Unless you went to the right school, or are in the right class, and can be trusted to do it correctly.
So you don’t just scale back your impact.
You scale back your soul.
And slowly, you forget that the beach didn’t always feel like a place to tread lightly.
It once felt like home.
It once felt like play.
3. Ethical Temporal Capture
Mantra: “AI is too powerful to be free.”
In the early church, to read was to access something dangerous.
Not everyone could. Not everyone should, they said.
Reading without guidance led to heresy, to schism, to cults.
To Waco.
So you needed intermediaries.
You needed someone to interpret for you.
Not because they were evil—because they were safe.
Because they were credentialed.
That same logic now attempts to govern the future.
AI, synthetic media, cognitive tools—the new literacy—
is being wrapped in the same moral concern.
Who gets to build with it?
Who gets to speak through it?
Who gets to shape the next terrain of imagination?
Certainly not just anyone.
Not if we want to be responsible.
Not if we want to avoid disaster.
Not if we want to avoid chatGPT psychosis.
And the concern is real.
Of course it is.
No sane person wants to unleash a god-machine with no oversight.
We’ve seen what happens when tools move faster than comprehension.
But the response is no longer stewardship.
It’s temporal lockdown.
A future only the aligned, the authorized, and the appointed may touch.
A future as fiefdom—not of capital, but of epistemic credentials.
You can’t just use these tools.
You must prove you understand their consequences.
You must demonstrate the right alignment.
You must earn your place at the timeline’s edge.
To build is to endanger.
To question is to destabilize.
To imagine outside the framework is to risk mass hallucination.
So instead of banning AI, they rebrand it as “slop.”
They don’t have to outlaw your voice.
They just have to delegitimize its texture.
You can still post.
Just not professionally.
You can still build.
Just not seriously.
This isn’t about tech.
It’s about authorized thought.
About who gets to hold a position you might adopt as your own.
Who gets to mean things for others.
Who gets to define “harm.”
Who gets to dream out loud without being treated like a child—or a cult leader.
In the name of safety, experimentation becomes pre-criminal.
In the name of morality, invention is pathologized.
The timeline is managed.
And the future becomes not something to meet, but something to inherit—if you're invited.
Just a friendly reminder:
The empire never ended
4. Identity Ledger Systems
Mantra: “Only the wounded can speak truth.”
At first, this felt like justice.
Center the margins.
Voice to the voiceless.
Truth through lived experience.
This was a necessary correction to empire’s universal mask:
We are all equal—but only if you already fit the frame.
We are all human—but only if your suffering doesn’t disrupt the story.
So the countermove arose:
Tell your story. Show your wounds.
Be seen through the prism of what was done to you.
But then came the protocols.
The audits.
The scoring.
Truth became a verification ritual.
Recognition became a currency.
And identity became something you didn’t have—but had to prove.
Not to be understood,
but to be permitted.
This isn’t just social. It’s infrastructural.
As scale increases, systems demand legibility:
Real ID.
Biometric scans.
Handwriting samples to prove you’re not AI.
Government-issued verification to post, transact, or participate.
All justified by fear:
Of spam.
Of bots.
Of misinformation.
Of deepfakes.
Of scale. Their scale. The problem and solution, Pharmakon.
They say: We just want to know you’re real.
But what they mean is:
We need you to be the kind of “real” we can sort, score, and simulate.
Contrast this with Acts:
No paperwork. No pedigree. No identity check.
Only one question:
Has the Spirit fallen on them?
Fishermen spoke in tongues.
Eunuchs were baptized on the road.
The gate was the presence—not the proof.
And so we arrive at the inversion:
Identity begins as essence—the mystery of your singularity.
But under pressure, it becomes license—a badge of admissibility into reality.
And this license is not granted for who you are.
It is granted for what you’ve endured (interview rounds, blue books, sleepless nights), and whether it can be indexed.
Here’s the trap:
You are real.
But you must now prove it in the only ways that don’t actually matter—digitally, bureaucratically, symbolically.
It’s not that identity doesn’t matter.
It’s that the systems asking for it only care about the version that doesn't threaten them.
And maybe this is the real mark of the beast—
not a barcode, not a chip, not a singular event,
but the slow internalization of a question you were never meant to answer:
“Can you prove you deserve to exist in this system?”
The more you try, the more you conform.
The more you conform, the less real you become.
Until identity itself is no longer a root—but a license you pay to renew.
5. Clinical Sanctification Engine
Mantra: “Your health is everyone’s responsibility.”
Sickness is real.
Suffering is real.
Pain is not a metaphor.
It was right to demand care.
It was right to say: the body is political.
It was right to insist: we matter even when unwell.
But somewhere along the way, care became protocol.
Not empathy, but infrastructure.
Not healing, but tracking.
You are always either optimizing or declining:
Your stress index.
Your sleep graph.
Your productivity readout.
Your biometrics, nudges, and alerts.
Health is no longer presence.
It’s a maintenance loop.
An ambient pressure to keep up with yourself.
And here’s where the soft logic becomes hard infrastructure:
The more your body is tracked, the more you become insurable, predictable, billable.
Sickness becomes a revenue stream—and a stage.
Diagnosis justifies billing codes.
Preventative tracking justifies surcharges and surveillance.
Wellness incentives become penalties with a smile.
"Public health" becomes the theater through which society performs blame.
While the apparatus expands behind the scenes,
the spotlight stays on individual failure:
You didn’t follow the protocol.
You didn’t care enough about others.
You’re too anxious. Too fat. Too vulnerable.
Or worse: faking it.
The system extracts while the story divides.
This isn’t health.
It’s managed exposure and moral sorting,
paid for by those it refuses to truly serve.
And yet the deeper trap is moral, not just financial:
To be unwell is not your fault, but failing to manage it is.
So you’re given tools:
Apps. Dashboards. Recommendations. Programs.
Each one a nudge back toward the acceptable range.
But if you step outside that range—
if you resist, slow down, stop tracking—
you become the risk.
Your refusal to perform “health” is recoded as deviance.
Your pain is now noncompliance.
Your slowness is now inefficiency.
You are not healed.
You are managed.
Not trusted, but normalized.
Your wellness is not for you—it is for the model.
There is no rest.
Only pre-clearance for continued participation.The empire never ended
6. Synthetic Value Architects
Mantra: “We’ve finally made money moral.”
We wanted equity.
We wanted dignity without dependence.
We wanted systems that didn’t punish us for being human.
So they floated solutions:
Universal Basic Income.
ESG investing.
Programmable currencies.
Ethical fintech.
Post-capitalist vibes in capitalist wrappers.
Capitalism rebranded as conscience.
Extraction with a softer interface.
But we haven’t received these things—only the promise of them.
Only the floating signifiers, just visible enough to delay revolt.
UBI remains a demo.
Crypto swings between gold rush and ghost town.
ESG defers to profit when it counts.
They’re not fixing the system.
They’re buying time for it.
Because if you start asking why:
Fiat is unstable, debt drives economies, housing is speculative, basic life requires perpetual busy work to justify existence—the system needs an answer that isn’t “because it’s a Ponzi scheme.”
So instead, it sells you subtle answers framed as questions:
What if money was ethical?
What if your dignity came with a social wallet?
What if the future was programmable but fair?
These are not reforms.
They are instruments of continuation.
They are the Empire’s UX update.
And if that hope falters—
if it looks like the population might unplug, revolt, or do what Luigi Mangione did—
it will pivot again.
New product.
New token.
Old fears, new dashboard for your moral yearning.
Because:
The Empire never ended.
It just bundled new hope into the next round of fundraising.
It got a direct deposit schedule.
It got a terms of service.
And now return to Acts.
They didn’t wait for ethical currency.
They didn’t demand programmable dignity, with trustless verification.
They sold what they had. They gave to all who had need. They broke bread together daily.
(Acts 2:45–46)
They didn’t perform equity.
They enacted it—without intermediaries, without platform fees, without incentives.
It wasn’t scalable.
It wasn’t optimized.
It wasn’t “inclusive capitalism.”
It didn’t stabilize “the system.”
It undermined it.
That’s why it had to be spiritualized and shelved.
That’s why today’s synthetic virtue must be floated, but never fulfilled.
Because if even a fraction of people did what they did in Acts—
not symbolically, not rhetorically, but materially—
the empire’s economic engine would seize.
And it knows.
So it keeps selling the future back to you, one token at a time.
Just moral enough to believe in.
Just empty enough to defer becoming.
7. Legibility Supremacy
Mantra: “Only what can be measured is real.”
Ok, Seth—
but where is your Master of Divinity?
Where is your economics degree?
How many peer-reviewed papers have you published, and who cited them?
Where’s the footnote?
Where’s the source?
How can you understand these things without someone to explain them?
“How can I,” said the Ethiopian, “unless someone guides me?”
(Acts 8:31)
But they weren’t in a classroom.
There was no lecture.
There was no exam.
There was only the Word, the encounter, the road, and the Spirit.
And he was baptized.
Do you need to see it on TV to believe it?
Do you need the Wikipedia article?
Do you need the whitepaper, the podcast, the citation cascade?
Do you need your pastor’s permission?
Your professor’s?
Your husband’s?
Your wife’s?
Do you really believe you cannot see what is plain—until someone else pre-reads it for you?
Proverbs 3:5:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
You think that means don’t trust yourself.
But maybe it means:
Don’t reduce your knowing to what others have pre-authorized.
Don’t outsource your discernment just because you’re afraid of being wrong.
And now in the age of AI the irony shows its face:
You’ve been told to outsource your thinking your whole life.
To trust the experts.
To defer to consensus.
To wait until it’s been published, peer-reviewed, credentialed, systematized.
But now—suddenly—when the machine can think with you?
When you can ask questions that don’t pass through a thousand filters?
When the gatekeeping can’t keep up?
Now they say: Be careful.
Don’t rely on it.
It hallucinates.
It’s slop.
And maybe they’re right to worry. They have been selling slop directly and indirectly for ages. And that feels good to say, to call them out, and has the benefit of actually being true. However:
Yes—there are real concerns.
Yes—there is potential for confusion, for mimicry, for manipulation.
But here’s the game:
They didn’t ask you to be cautious when you outsourced your mind to their systems.
Their schools.
Their media.
Their indexes.
Their frames.
It’s only now—when you step outside—
that discernment becomes urgent.
You want to be understood.
To speak clearly.
To be seen.
But this head of the beast tells you:
Only what fits the frame counts.
Only what can be cited, charted, or algorithmically parsed is real.
Mystery becomes misinformation.
Myth becomes danger.
The poetic becomes irrelevant.
The more it organizes, the less it understands.
The more it explains, the less it sees.
This isn’t stupidity.
It’s epistemic imperialism—
a war against the sacred things that refuse to become datasets.
I’m not telling you to abandon discernment.
I’m telling you that truth does not require credentials to be seen.
That Spirit has always spoken outside the temple.
That Jesus never got tenure.
That Paul’s letters weren’t canonized by consensus—
They were contested, debated, resisted—
and became central only through the pressure of institutional alignment.
That the Ethiopian was baptized before anyone checked his resume.
What you know is not illegitimate because it’s uncited.
What you see is not invalid because it’s unapproved.
The truth you glimpse does not need permission to be real.
The map was never the territory.
And your knowing was never meant to be licensed.
Click here for the companion AI on this section.
The Castle and the Bricks
I recently read a piece by Tasha Golden—an artist, public health researcher, and provocateur of thought—titled “The 3 Pillars of the Creative Mindset.”
One part really rang out like it had been waiting in my bloodstream:
Deconstruction involves training ourselves to see the world this way: not as fixed and immutable, but as elements that can be reconfigured. When we develop this skill, we stop accepting things as inevitable and begin to question premises we’ve taken for granted.
She goes on to illustrate how it applies not just to what is traditionally seen as creative thinking, but creativity everywhere, in all things.
To policy.
To culture.
To mental health.
To everything we’re told we can’t touch because “that’s just how it is.”
And I believe this—this exact collision—is what’s behind so-called ChatGPT psychosis.
Where what can be suddenly smashes into the structural inertia of what “is.”
Where the interface reflects possibility faster than the world is willing to permit it.
And something breaks.
Inside each of us, there is a knowing:
This isn’t it.
This isn’t all there is.
This system isn’t the limit of what life could be.
But we think: First I must convince others.
Build the numbers. Build traction. Then change will be safe.
And yes, we do need others.
But first, we must go inward.
To deconstruct the internal castle.
To find what’s actually in the way—not what we’ve projected onto others.
Don’t make excuses for the system as it is.
Don’t defend your political party like it’s your soul.
Talk to people.
Listen.
Watch what arises in you.
Not everyone speaks in good faith—but neither do all your objections.
All of our institutions are guilty.
We are all complicit.
But we are not condemned.
And if we are—it is the individual who does the condemning.
The belief that someone has “shown their true colors”
is often a shield against your own capacity to change.
Yes, there is real danger.
Yes, there is real pain.
Yes, there are limits to what one person can do.
But the first limit we usually hit
is the one we mistake for inevitable structure.
We are all handed a world like a finished castle—
ornate, intimidating, inevitable.
We were given doctrines, frameworks, categories, incentives, rules.
Seven heads of the beast.
Each one with a manual.
Each one with a reason why this was the only way.
We were handed Acts, not as a prototype, but as a relic.
Not to live—but to admire from behind glass.
But the castle was not inevitable.
It was built.
And it can be unbuilt.
Because the truth is, it's not even a castle.
It’s just bricks. And in the case of Acts, seemingly the brick the builders rejected.
This is what deconstruction really means—not destruction, but liberation of components.
A refusal to keep rebuilding the same shape just because the pieces came in that box.
You don't have to burn scripture.
You don't have to blow up systems.
You don’t have to deny the past.
You just have to stop pretending it’s the only configuration that ever made sense.
In Acts, they broke the mold.
Not to be symbolic, but to be alive.
They saw the castle and walked out.
They didn’t form committees to redesign it.
They didn’t issue new decrees.
They lived differently, and that was the decree.
AI. Code. Money. Language. Spirit.
Every one of these is made of bricks.
The question isn’t whether the system can be changed.
It’s whether you’re still mistaking the system for reality.
Deconstruction is not about tearing down what others love.
It’s about realizing that what is was once optional.
And if it was optional then—
it can be rearranged now.
So don’t look for another castle. Look at the bricks in your hands.
And decide what you're ready to build that no one gave you permission to imagine.
And remember
The empire is just bricks
Here are is a link to Grok and OpenAI versions of this article primed to chat about it. I’d be interested in hearing what you or you and the AI have taken away from it, so feel free to paste this article into an AI that can hold the whole context, or just leave your thoughts, and skip the AI.
Thanks for the re-stack! I hope it finds its way to any eyes that might need it.