If history is written by the victors, our digital future is being written by a handful of engineers, venture capitalists, and media magicians. The rest of us? We’re just the training data.
At the Empire’s Edge: Ghosts in the Machine
There’s a reason it feels like the world is glitching. Pull back the curtain on the digital revolution and you’ll find the same old empires wearing new silicon masks, empires of power, privilege, and hidden handshakes.
Karen Hao’s Empire of AI lays it bare: the myth of AI as a “neutral” force is just that, a myth. Behind every algorithm is a worldview, a set of values, and a history with roots tangled deep in colonial soil. When the code is written, whose reality is being encoded? What agenda is being executed? Whose ghosts are being made invisible?
Flip open Mindplex and you can catch tech media insiders dropping the mask. In a recent interview, Richard Metzger doesn’t even bother to hide his disdain for the “herd,” a worldview as old as empire itself: a few magicians, plenty of marks, and an operating assumption that the public is there to be managed, not heard. The code of tomorrow is being written not just by engineers but by conjurers and controllers, by people whose inherited stories are more about dominion than democracy.
Tech, Media, and the Manufacturing of Consent
It’s not just attitudes. It’s connections, the very networks of the digital empire. Peer into the tangled web of today’s tech titans and the lines run straight from PayPal mafiosos like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to Palantir’s Alexander Karp. College cronies, secretive societies, multi-passport billionaires with family trees shadowed by wartime profiteering and authoritarian sympathies. These aren’t just coders or investors. They’re system architects with roots in questionable morality, eugenics, defense contracts, and a manifest destiny for machine intelligence.
Take Thiel and Karp: college roommates turned kingmakers of surveillance. Thiel’s Palantir, named for Tolkien’s all-seeing crystal balls, builds software that powers ICE raids, military targeting, and global surveillance. Karp—bohemian, eccentric, self-proclaimed outsider—presides over the algorithms that decide who gets flagged, who gets tracked, who gets erased. Musk, Thiel, Karp, and their “PayPal mafia” friends treat the world as their sandbox, the public as their test population, and technology as a new form of empire. Is it any wonder that the “herd management” attitude leaks into the code, the contracts, the culture?
These men live in a world apart: citizenships as passports to secrecy, money as insulation from consequence, private islands, babies on demand, and occult fascinations. Their demons aren’t just metaphorical; they’re woven into the power structures they build and the realities they unleash. Tech bros playing Dungeons and Dragons.
In Richard Metzger’s Mindplex interview, [Richard Metzger Is Conjuring Magick for the AI Age: An Interview | Mindplex], he sneers at the public as “the herd,” playing magician to a crowd that’s never meant to glimpse the trick. That’s the magician’s code: protect the secret, shape the narrative, manage the masses. Tech and media merge not to inform but to manufacture consent, a phrase as old as Chomsky, yet perfectly suited for our age of algorithmic suggestion.
Digital Colonialism: Erasure by Design
What happens when these worldviews, the colonial, the supremacist, the occult technocrat, become the foundation for tomorrow’s AI? When the “herd” is no longer just managed, but modeled, predicted, nudged, and ultimately rendered invisible?
Digital colonialism isn’t a metaphor; it’s the business model. Silicon Valley’s language models learn on the backs of unpaid, unseen labor. Facial recognition trains on “default” faces, with Black, Brown, Indigenous, and non-Western people erased or misidentified. The world’s knowledge is scraped, filtered, and refashioned to fit the “truths” of those with the power to build the model. In the new empire, local languages, customs, and cosmologies (deep cultural worldviews and ways of making meaning) are obstacles to be eradicated.
And it isn’t just passive erasure; it’s active rewriting. When “GPT” can speak in hundreds of languages, who decides what’s “real,” “factual,” or “safe”? Which histories are preserved, which stories deleted? When data is the new territory, everyone’s soul is up for grabs.
The result: a world where the digital map is not just mistaken, but maliciously incomplete. The “other” is made invisible, dangerous, or simply off-limits to the model. Bias isn’t a bug; it’s a colonial feature.
Transhumanism’s Shadow: Digital Soul Enslavement
Enter transhumanism: the glittering promise of human upgrade, digital immortality, and a world “freed” from flesh. But the shadow is dark.
Shows like Pantheon imagine uploaded souls, fractured consciousness, and the corporate commodification of what makes us human. In the real world, we’re not uploading souls; we’re fragmenting them. Identity is splintered across data brokers, digital avatars, and machine-learning ghosts. What happens when your likeness, your voice, your story, your soul is bought and sold by those who see you as mere “inputs” to a greater system?
In my own ghostbusting work, I’ve seen what happens when souls are trapped, fragmented, or rendered invisible by trauma, by violence, by systems that refuse to see the full humanity of the haunted. The same circuits that hold ghosts in old houses are now being recoded into algorithms, platforms, and bots. We are creating a new class of digital spirits: voiceless, powerless, but ever-present in the background radiation of our technology.
The Circuits Are Connecting
This isn’t just about code. It’s about consent, consciousness, and the right to exist.
If we don’t challenge the worldviews behind the code, we risk building an empire of ghosts, trapped, invisible, and unheard. The roots of colonialism and the ambitions of technocrats are not history; they are the blueprints for tomorrow’s AI, media, and society.
The circuits are all connecting: Silicon Valley, the occult, empire, erasure, and enslavement. And unless we reclaim the conversation, unless we insist on new architects and new stories, we will all end up as echoes in someone else’s machine.
Invitation: Whose Worldview Codes Tomorrow?
So I ask: whose voice, values, and worldview do you want coded into tomorrow’s systems? Are we willing to be just the training data for someone else’s digital god, or will we become the authors of our own algorithms?
If you’ve seen the shadows, lived the erasure, or felt the haunting of systems built to exploit and extract your essence, this is your call. Speak up. The empire is listening, and so are the ghosts.
References and suggested further reading:
- Karen Hao, Empire of AI
- Mindplex, Richard Metzger interview
- Whitney Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail
- Examples of digital colonialism: MIT Tech Review
- Pantheon – AMC series
