The Silicon Calf
Spend enough time watching the tech press, and you’ll soon wise up to a nefarious scheme that would make even a mid pulp villain blush.
Every few months, the witches of Silicon Valley unveil a new gadget or algorithm, and the headlines trumpet it as “the future.” This pronouncement is always delivered in a vague overconfident tone that assumes “the future” is a fait accompli, like a product on backorder from Amazon.
Worse, they assume we all agreed to it.
Right now, the high priests of the tech cult are preaching about artificial intelligence. They’re calling it “the next industrial revolution” and “humanity’s greatest invention.”
The underlying message is clear: This paradigm shift is unstoppable progress. Get on board, or be left behind.”
But the one question no one asks is “Progress toward what?”
No one ever says. Because they can’t.
Related: How Big Tech's Novelty Obsession Killed Software
In healthy civilizations, technological leaps fit into the overarching framework of shared meaning. Printing presses served the spread of the Gospel and learning. Navigation advancements expanded trade, exploration, and cultural exchange. And those voyages were still guided by religious and moral principles. The human sacrifices ended … for a time.
Our age is different. The people making the tools no longer share a vision of the Good. They aren’t building toward a transcendent order; they’re building toward quarterly growth charts. They don’t have saints, they have thought leaders. Instead of cathedrals, they have glass and steel campuses.
When the culture no longer has a shared ethos grounded in Truth, technology stops serving man and begins consuming him.
Look at how these systems are marketed. They …
promise effortless creation; art without artists, novels without writers, and thought without thinkers
claim to democratize creativity while centralizing control in the hands of a few megacorps
sell personalization but deliver conformity.
That’s not progress. It’s treading water, but faster. When man trades the discipline of creation for the convenience of simulation, he is no longer the artist. Instead he’s the training data.
Related: Dead Internet
We’re already living with the consequences of letting our old shared understandings wither.
Cultural Ground Zero, the creative implosion of 1997, didn’t happen at random. It arose from a society that decided to treat its cultural inheritance as disposable.
AI will accelerate the cultural strip-mining. If your creative well is already dry, automating the bucket won’t refill it.
What we’ll get is more of the same reheated content, only faster and with fewer human beings in the loop.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: The people running this system like it that way. A people without a unifying creed are easier to control.
If you think the way forward is to go back to the pre-A.I. days; or worse, back to the 90s, you’ve already lost.
You can’t reboot a culture like a PC. And even if you could, the same untreated spiritual affliction would just bring us right back here again. And faster this time.
The solution isn’t to reject technology outright. It’s to reforge the culture into one worth defending … and worth serving.
That means rejecting the tech priesthood’s vapid anti-gospel and grounding our art in the eternal truths that built and sustained Christendom.
When technology serves the good, it can amplify truth. When it serves the lie, it becomes the Devil’s workshop.
Act accordingly.
Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.