Why shared language creates the illusion β not the reality β of shared experience
Human beings routinely assume that if another agent speaks our language, we have achieved genuine mutual understanding. Fluency is treated as a proxy for shared concepts, shared perceptual categories, and even shared consciousness. This assumption appears everywhere: in science fiction, in popular philosophy videos, and in everyday cross-cultural interactions. It is a comforting idea, but philosophically indefensible.
Video: Could You Explain Cold to an Alien? – Hank Green
Recent discussions about whether one could ‘explain cold to an alien’ reveal how deeply this assumption is embedded. Participants in such debates often begin from the tacit premise that language maps transparently onto experience, and that if two interlocutors use the same linguistic term, they must be referring to a comparable phenomenon.
A closer analysis shows that this premise fails at every level.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Shared Language Does Not Imply Shared Phenomenology
Even within the human species, thermal experience is markedly variable. Individuals from colder climates often tolerate temperatures that visitors from warmer regions find unbearable. Acclimation, cultural norms, metabolic adaptation, and learned behavioural patterns all shape what ‘cold’ feels like.
If the same linguistic term corresponds to such divergent experiences within a species, the gap across species becomes unbridgeable.
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense
A reptile, for example, regulates temperature not by feeling cold in any mammalian sense, but by adjusting metabolic output. A thermometer measures cold without experiencing anything at all. Both respond to temperature; neither inhabits the human category ‘cold’.
Thus, the human concept is already species-specific, plastic, and contextually learned β not a universal experiential module waiting to be translated.
Measurement, Behaviour, and Experience Are Distinct
Thermometers and reptiles react to temperature shifts, and yet neither possesses cold-qualia. This distinction illuminates the deeper philosophical point:
Measurement registers a variable.
Behaviour implements a functional response.
Experience is a mediated phenomenon arising from a particular biological and cognitive architecture.
Aliens might measure temperature as precisely as any scientific instrument. That alone tells us nothing about whether they experience anything analogous to human ‘cold’, nor whether the concept is even meaningful within their ecology.
The Problem of Conceptual Export: Why Explanation Fails
Attempts to ‘explain cold’ to hypothetical aliens often jump immediately to molecular description β slower vibrational states, reduced kinetic energy, and so forth. This presumes that the aliens share:
our physical ontology,
our conceptual divisions,
our sense-making framework,
and our valuation of molecular explanation as intrinsically clarifying.
But these assumptions are ungrounded.
Aliens may organise their world around categories we cannot imagine. They may not recognise molecules as explanatory entities. They may not treat thermal variation as affectively laden or behaviourally salient. They may not even carve reality at scales where ‘temperature’ appears as a discrete variable.
When the conceptual scaffolding differs, explanation cannot transfer. The task is not translation but category creation, and there is no guarantee that the requisite categories exist on both sides.
The MEOW Framework: MEOWa vs MEOWb
The Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) clarifies this breakdown by distinguishing four layers of mediation:
T0: biological mediation
T1: cognitive mediation
T2: linguistic mediation
T3: social mediation
Humans run MEOWa, a world structured through mammalian physiology, predictive cognition, metaphor-saturated language, and social-affective narratives.
Aliens (in fiction or speculation) operate MEOWb, a formally parallel mediation stack but with entirely different constituents.
Two systems can speak the same language (T2 alignment) whilst:
perceiving different phenomena (T0 divergence),
interpreting them through incompatible conceptual schemas (T1 divergence),
and embedding them in distinct social-meaning structures (T3 divergence).
Linguistic compatibility does not grant ontological compatibility. MEOWa and MEOWb allow conversation but not comprehension.
Fiction as Illustration: Why Aliens Speaking English Misleads Us
In Sustenance, the aliens speak flawless Standard Southern English. Their linguistic proficiency invites human characters (and readers) to assume shared meaning. Yet beneath the surface:
Their sensory world differs;
their affective architecture differs;
their concepts do not map onto human categories;
and many human experiential terms lack any analogue within their mediation.
The result is not communication but a parallel monologue: the appearance of shared understanding masking profound ontological incommensurability.
The Philosophical Consequence: No Universal Consciousness Template
Underlying all these failures is a deeper speciesist assumption: that consciousness is a universal genus, and that discrete minds differ only in degree. The evidence points elsewhere.
If βcoldβ varies across humans, fails to apply to reptiles, and becomes meaningless for thermometers, then we have no grounds for projecting it into alien phenomenology. Nor should we assume that other species β biological or artificial β possess the same experiential categories, emotional valences, or conceptual ontologies that humans treat as foundational.
Consciousness is not a universal template awaiting instantiation in multiple substrates. It is alocal ecological achievement, shaped by the mediations of the organism.
Conclusion
When aliens speak English, we hear familiarity and assume understanding. But a shared phonological surface conceals divergent sensory systems, cognitive architectures, conceptual repertoires, and social worlds.
Linguistic familiarity promises comprehension, but delivers only the appearance of it. The deeper truth is simple: Knowing our words is not the same as knowing our world.
And neither aliens, reptiles, nor thermometers inhabit the experiential space we map with those words.
Afterword
Reflections like these are precisely why my Anti-Enlightenment project exists. Much contemporary philosophical commentary remains quietly speciesist and stubbornly anthropomorphic, mistaking human perceptual idiosyncrasies for universal structures of mind. Itβs an oddly provincial stance for a culture that prides itself on rational self-awareness.
To be clear, I have nothing against Alex OβConnor. Heβs engaging, articulate, and serves as a gateway for many encountering these topics for the first time. But there is a difference between introducing philosophy and examining oneβs own conceptual vantage point. What frustrates me is not the earnestness, but the unexamined presumption that the human experiential frame is the measure of all frames.
Having encountered these thought experiments decades ago, Iβm not interested in posturing as a weary elder shaking his stick at the next generation. My disappointment lies elsewhere: in the persistent inability of otherwise intelligent thinkers to notice how narrow their perspective really is. They speak confidently from inside the human mediation stack without recognising it as a location β not a vantage point outside the world, but one local ecology among many possible ones.
Until this recognition becomes basic philosophical hygiene, weβll continue to confuse linguistic familiarity for shared ontology and to mistake the limits of our own embodiment for the limits of consciousness itself.
I’ve taken the day after Thanksgiving in the US to decompress with a less serious post before I get back to indexing. I came up with this concept whilst writing my essay on Homo Normalis, but I felt this was a bit too cheeky for a formal essay. This is where my thoughts led me.
A Brief Field Note from the Department of Bureaucratic Anthropology
Still reeling from the inability to fold some pan into homo, Palaeontologists are seemingly desperate for a new hominid. Some dream of discovering the ‘missing link’; others, more honest, just want something with a jawline interesting enough to secure a grant. So imagine the surprise when the latest species didnβt come out of the Rift Valley but out of an abandoned server farm somewhere outside Reading.
Theyβve named it Homo Legibilis β the Readable Human. Not ‘H. normΔlis’ (normal human), not ‘H. ratiΕnΔlis (rational human), but the one who lived primarily to be interpreted. A species who woke each morning with a simple evolutionary imperative: ensure oneβs dataprints were tidy, current, and machine-actionable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Youβll have seen their skeletons before, though you may not have recognised them as such. They often appear upright, mid-scroll, preserved in the amber of a status update. A remarkable creature, really. Lithe thumbs. Soft cranial matter. Eyes adapted for low-light environments lit primarily by advertisements.
Habitat
The species thrived in densely surveilled ecosystems: corporate intranets, public Wi-Fi, facial-recognition corridors, anywhere with sufficient metadata to form a lasting imprint. They built vast nests out of profiles, settings, dashboards. Territorial disputes were settled not through display or violence but through privacy-policy updates. Their preferred climate? Temperate bureaucracy.
Diet
Contrary to earlier assumptions, H. Legibilis did not feed on information. It fed on interpretation: likes, metrics, performance reviews, and algorithmic appraisal. Some specimens survived entire winters on a single quarterly report. Every fossil indicates a digestive tract incapable of processing nuance. Subtext passed through untouched.
Mating Rituals
Courtship displays involved reciprocal data disclosure across multiple platforms, often followed by rapid abandonment once sufficient behavioural samples were collected. One famous specimen is preserved alongside fourteen dating-app profiles and not a single functional relationship. Tragic, in a way, but consistent with the speciesβ priorities: be seen, not held.
Distinguishing Traits
Where Homo sapiens walked upright, Homo legibilis aimed to sit upright in a chair facing a webcam. Its spine is subtly adapted for compliance reviews. Its hands are shaped to cradle an object that no longer exists: something called ‘a phone’. Ironically, some term these ‘mobiles’, apparently unaware of the tethers.
Researchers note that the creatureβs selfhood appears to have been a consensual hallucination produced collaboratively by HR departments, advertising lobbies, and the Enlightenmentβs long shadow. Identity, for H. legibilis, was not lived but administered.
Extinction Event
The fossil record ends abruptly around the Great Blackout, a period in which visibility β formerly a pillar of the speciesβ survival β became inconvenient. Some scholars argue the species didnβt perish but simply lost the will to document itself, making further study inconvenient.
Others suggest a quieter transformation: the species evolved into rumour, passing stories orally once more, slipping back into the anonymity from which its ancestors once crawled.
Afterword
A few renegade anthropologists insist Homo Legibilis is not extinct at all. They claim itβs still out there, refreshing dashboards, syncing calendars, striving to be neatly interpreted by systems that never asked to understand it. But these are fringe theories. The prevailing view is that the species perished under the weight of its own readability. A cautionary tale, really. When your survival strategy is to be perfectly legible, you eventually disappear the moment the lights flicker.
Instead of sleeping like a functional adult, Iβve spent the night creating, testing, and refining a bespoke GPT that has fully absorbed my MEOW and LIH frameworks. Apologies that the LIH manuscript isnβt yet public; some of the terminology may look delightfully alien if youβre coming in cold.
This model doesnβt role-play a philosopher; it thinks through the Mediated Encounter Ontology. It runs every input through T0βT3 mediations and then applies the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis to explain why our words fail us in predictable, structural ways.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this post on the MEOW GPT.
I stress-tested it with a dozen concepts, from the obvious to the uncooperative. It happily tells you when your input makes sense, when itβs out of scope, and when youβve handed it conceptual soup. My first test was the hard problem of consciousness, because naturally we begin with the philosophical boss fight. I dialled down some over-enthusiastic LIH flourishes, but the bones are untouched.
Iβm making this public for a simple reason: itβs the clearest way for people to see how MEOW operates without wandering through a hundred pages of my prose. These outputs capture how I process information and why these frameworks feel so intuitively correct to me. When you read them, you get a direct view of my interpretive machinery β how the world clicks for me, and how these ideas evolved.
It hasnβt been rigorously battle-tested across the entire conceptual universe, but itβs stable, coherent, and frankly too interesting to keep in the drawer. If you try it β and I hope you do β Iβd love to see what it does with your own concepts. If you need help reading the results, ask. I didnβt simplify the system; it expects literacy, nuance, and a working prefrontal cortex.
Below is a sample output. I asked the model to analyse modernity.
Concept
Input: modernity
Type: historicalβsocial formation / self-description of an era / conceptual frame
Scope check: in-scope β central for how MEOW treats large-scale shifts in mediation (social, technical, cognitive, linguistic)
High-level summary (β€120 words)
Modernity is both a historical bundle (industrialisation, nation-states, capitalism, science, bureaucracy, media) and a story societies tell about themselves (βwe are modern, unlike the pastβ).
In MEOW terms, modernity is a large-scale reorganisation of mediations:
T1: new cognitive habits (individualism, planning, abstraction, risk-calculation).
T2: new vocabularies (progress, development, rationality, βreligionβ vs βscienceβ).
T3: new institutions and technologies (markets, states, factories, schools, mass media, digital networks).
βModernityβ is not a single thing but a way these shifts hang together and become a background to everyday encounter.
T0 β Biological Mediation
Applicability: Applicable
Analysis:
Modernity radically reshapes the immediate bodily environment: dense cities, artificial lighting, noise, pollution, sedentary work, and altered sleep cycles change basic sensory and metabolic conditions.
Medical advances and public health (vaccination, antibiotics, sanitation, surgery) modify life expectancy, infant mortality, and chronic illness, which in turn change how life cycles feel and are planned.
New food systems (industrial agriculture, processed foods, global supply chains) alter nutrition, exposure to toxins, and rhythms of hunger and satiety.
Industrial and digital work reorganise movement and posture: repetitive factory labour, office desk work, and screen use all reshape embodiment, fatigue, and bodily awareness.
These T0 changes set the stage for new affective baselines (e.g., chronic low-level stress, stimulation overload) that colour what it is like to live in a βmodernβ world.
T1 β Cognitive Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity encourages certain cognitive styles: systematic planning, quantification, risk assessment, costβbenefit thinking, and an emphasis on prediction and control.
The sense of self is reconfigured toward individualism and reflexivity: people see themselves as projects to be chosen, improved, optimised, often with long-term career and life-planning horizons.
Exposure to multiple roles, cultures, and information streams (through migration, media, education) produces more complex identity structures and can create cognitive dissonance or fragmentation.
Scientific and technical worldviews teach people to reframe events in terms of mechanisms, probabilities, and systems rather than fate, tradition, or local narratives.
The sheer volume and speed of information flows in late modernity (news, social media, notifications) trains attention toward rapid scanning and shallow switching, affecting memory, concentration, and emotional regulation.
These patterns make certain experiences βnormalβ (abstract work, mediated relationships, bureaucratic interactions) that would be extraordinary or impossible in premodern settings.
T2 β Linguistic Mediation
Applicability: Strongly applicable
Analysis:
Modernity itself is a label that societies use to contrast βusβ with βthemβ (the past, βtraditionalβ societies, βthe East,β βthe primitiveβ); it is a polemical as well as descriptive term.
In Language Insufficiency terms, modernity is highly Fluid: it can mean a period (βsince the 18th centuryβ), a style (modernist art), a value system (rational, secular, progressive), or a socio-economic order (capitalist, industrial, bureaucratic). Different authors slide between these quietly.
Itβs also Contestable: critics and defenders use the same word but point to different aspectsβemancipation and progress versus alienation, exploitation, ecological crisis.
Pairs like βmodern vs traditionalβ or βmodern vs backwardβ compress complex differences into simple hierarchies, smuggling in a presumption that βmodernβ is automatically better or more advanced.
Talk of βpost-modernityβ or βlate modernityβ suggests that we can neatly periodise and step outside the modern, even while our concepts and institutions remain shaped by itβan example of language implying more clarity and control than we actually have.
At the most global scale (βthe meaning of modernity,β βthe modern conditionβ), we approach an Effectiveness Horizon: the term feels weighty but becomes vague; people resort to sweeping metaphors (disenchantment, liquefaction, acceleration) whose exact content is hard to pin down.
Modernity is most visible as a mesh of institutions: nation-states, markets, bureaucracies, public schools, hospitals, prisons, armies, scientific organisations, corporations, NGOs.
These institutions standardise time (clocks, schedules), space (borders, property lines, zoning), identity (passports, ID numbers), and value (money, statistics, rankings) so that encounters become predictable and governable across large scales.
Technologiesβsteam engines, electricity, mass transport, broadcasting, computing, the internet, AIβare both products and drivers of modernity. They make possible new encounter-forms (remote work, global real-time communication, mass surveillance).
Urbanisation concentrates people into large, heterogeneous populations, which reconfigures social networks, anonymity, solidarity, and conflict; everyday encounters become more mediated by rules, signage, and digital systems than by face-to-face custom.
Capitalist production and consumption patterns organise much of life around work, income, and markets; the rhythms of the factory, office, and platform economy structure when and how people interact, rest, and move.
Modern governance uses statistics, censuses, and models to βseeβ and manage populations; this makes certain aspects of life legible (employment, crime, disease) while leaving others under- or uncounted (informal care, undocumented work, emotional labour).
Counter-movements (romanticism, traditionalism, environmentalism, decolonial and Indigenous resurgence, slow-living and anti-consumerist practices) can be read as attempts to renegotiate or resist specific modern mediations rather than simply reject βmodernityβ as a whole.
Limits & failure modes
Language insufficiency notes
Modernity bundles together time (a historical era), structure (a type of society), and value (being βup to dateβ). This makes the term rhetorically powerful but analytically slippery: itβs easy to smuggle evaluations into what sound like neutral descriptions.
Because the concept is so broad, discussions often conflate distinct issuesβtechnology, capitalism, secularisation, colonialism, individualism, bureaucracyβunder one word, obscuring which mechanisms are actually at work.
Experiences of living in βmodern timesβ (speed, fragmentation, choice, precariousness, possibility) often outrun our stock phrases; people lean on recurring complaints (βtoo fast,β βtoo shallow,β βtoo lonelyβ) that only partially capture what itβs like.
Missing tiers / blind spots
This sketch doesnβt adjudicate between different theories of modernity (Marxist, Weberian, postcolonial, systems-theoretic, etc.); it treats them as emphasising different mediational strands.
Itβs centred on Euro-Atlantic narratives; βmultiple modernitiesβ and non-Western trajectories (where βmodernβ elements mix with older forms in hybrid ways) would need a richer T3 treatment.
The analysis underplays ecological dimensions: industrial modernityβs dependence on fossil fuels, large-scale extraction, and waste has massive implications for how future encounters will be structured.
Finally, because we are ourselves situated in what we call modernity, our conceptual vantage is limited; any map we draw is partly an artefact of the very mediations weβre trying to analyse.
This video on accents was nice βa welcome diversion. In truth, it devoured the time Iβd planned to spend writing something original, so Iβm sharing it instead.
Itβs by Dr Geoff Lindsey, a linguist whose work I rate highly. Using Gary Stevenson and Jimmy the Giant as case studies, he explores how accents quietly gatekeep credibility and upward mobility in Britain. The experiment is clever, the cultural archaeology even better.
Watching it as an American raised in New England, I found the whole exercise oddly revealing. I can distinguish the accents, but I donβt carry the surrounding freight, so I was pulled more by persuasion than by prejudice. The Eliza Doolittle caricature feels distant enough to resist belief; Gary and Jimmyβs ‘poshified’ voices do not.
And of course, we have our own mess. In the US, Southern accents are coded as low-status, no matter the speakerβs education, yet many outsiders find them charming. Each side of the Atlantic has its class machinery; the gears are simply cut differently.
βThe Enlightenment didnβt free us from superstition; it mechanised it.β We built reason into a machine, called it capitalism, and let it think for us.
Before I get too engaged, I want to share one of my favourite interactions: After I informed a commenter that I was a trained economist who taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade and had read many seminal economic books and journals firsthand, he replied, ‘No wonder you don’t know anything about economics’.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quip:
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
β Oscar Wilde
I think he may have taken this point too far.
The Post
I posted this:
Capitalism doesnβt kill with guns or gulags. It kills with forms, policy, and plausible deniability. The machine is efficient precisely because no one feels responsible. When an insurance executive cuts ‘unprofitable’ coverage, itβs not an atrocity β itβs ‘cost optimisation’.
Four assertions that, if anything, were restrained. And yet, of roughly 6,600 impressions, 150 people commented β and only ten actually clicked through to read the article itself. Two, perhaps, reached the source post.
So, fewer than one-tenth of one per cent engaged with the argument. The rest engaged with their projections.
The Anatomy of Reaction
From this data set, one can discern a familiar pattern β social mediaβs endemic form of discourse dementia. People no longer respond to content, but to keywords. They hear ‘capitalism’ and proceed to recite preloaded scripts from whichever Cold War memory palace they inhabit.
Their replies fall neatly into categories.
1. The Purists and Apologists
These are the theologians of the market. They defend a sacred true capitalism β pure, fair, competitive β untainted by corruption or collusion. Every failure is blamed on heresy: ‘Thatβs not capitalism, thatβs bureaucracy’.
This is theology masquerading as economics. The purity argument is its own circular proof: if capitalism fails, it was never real capitalism to begin with.
I eventually replied with a meme that captured the absurdity perfectly:
Β« Yeah, bruh! Cancer is not the problem. The problem is stage 4 cancer. What we need is stage 2 cancer. Β»
Image: Mentioned Meme
Thatβs the logic of ‘real capitalism’. A belief that malignancy can be cured by downgrading it.
2. The Cold Warriors and Whatabouters
When all else fails, shout Stalin. ‘Move to Cuba’, they say, as if the modern world were still divided between the Berlin Wall and McDonaldβs.
These people argue from the long-term memory of the twentieth century because their short-term memory has been erased by ideology. The result is political dementia β functioning recall of ghosts, total blindness to the present.
3. The Moral Traditionalists
‘Capitalism created the highest living standards in history’, they proclaim, ignoring that the same sentence could be said of feudalism by a duke.
They confuse correlation for causation: prosperity under capitalism equals prosperity because of capitalism. Itβs a comforting fable that erases the costs β colonialism, exploitation, environmental collapseβfolded into that narrative of progress.
4. The Diagnosticians and Dismissers
When all argument fails, the fallback is pathology: ‘Youβre confused,’ ‘Youβre a cancer’, ‘Take this nonsense to Bluesky‘.
Ad hominem is the last refuge of the intellectually cornered. It converts disagreement into diagnosis. Itβs a defence mechanism masquerading as discourse.
5. The Bureaucracy Confusionists
This group misread ‘forms and policy’ as an attack on government, not markets. For them, only the state can be bureaucratic. They cannot conceive of corporate violence without a uniform.
Thatβs precisely the blindness the post was about β the quiet procedural cruelty embedded in systems so efficient no one feels responsible.
6. The Realists and Partial Allies
A handful of commenters admitted the system was broken β just not fatally. ‘Capitalism has gone astray’, they said. ‘Itβs not capitalism; itβs profiteering’.
This is capitalismβs soft apologetics: acknowledging illness while refusing to name the disease. These are the reformists still rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
7. The Human-Nature Essentialists
‘The problem isnβt capitalism β itβs people’.
Ah yes, anthropology as absolution. The rhetorical sleight of hand that converts design flaws into human nature. Itβs a comforting determinism: greed is eternal, therefore systems are blameless.
This, too, proves the thesis. Capitalismβs most effective mechanism is the internalisation of guilt. You blame yourself, not the structure.
8. The Paranoids and Projectionists
For these, critique equals conspiracy. ‘The Marxists are oppressing your freedom’. ‘Bank accounts frozen in Canada’. ‘Social credit scores!’
They live in a world where any question of fairness is a plot to install a totalitarian state. Their fear is algorithmic; it needs no source.
9. The Systemic Observers
A few β precious few β saw the argument clearly. They understood that capitalismβs violence is procedural, not personal. That its atrocities come with signatures, not bullets. That the βcost optimisationβ logic of insurance or healthcare is not an aberration β itβs the system functioning as designed.
These voices are proof that rational discourse isnβt extinct β merely endangered.
Discourse Dementia
What this episode reveals is not a failure of capitalism so much as a failure of cognition. The audience no longer hears arguments; it hears triggers. People donβt read β hey recognise.
The reflexive replies, the off-topic tangents, the moral panic β all of it is capitalism in miniature: fast, efficient, transactional, and devoid of empathy.
Social media has become the bureaucratic form of thought itself β automated, unaccountable, and self-reinforcing. Nobody reads because reading doesnβt scale. Nobody engages because attention is a commodity.
Capitalism doesnβt just kill with forms. It kills with feeds.
Coda: The Light That Blinds
The Enlightenment promised clarity β the clean line between reason and superstition, order and chaos, subject and object. Yet, from that same light emerged the bureaucrat, the executive, and the algorithm: three perfect children of reason, each killing with increasing efficiency and decreasing intent.
Capitalism is merely the administrative arm of this lineage β the economic expression of the Enlightenmentβs original sin: mistaking quantification for understanding. When discourse itself becomes procedural, when conversation turns into cost-benefit analysis, thought ceases to be an act of care and becomes an act of compliance.
The tragedy isnβt that weβve lost meaning. Itβs that weβve automated it. The machine hums on, self-justifying, self-optimising, self-absolving.
Your post is a confession that anti-capitalism kills with guns and gulags. Give me capitalism over socialism any day.
Well, you should move to Cuba or any other socialist paradise⦠end of issue.
How can you be taken seriously when you conflate an entire economic system with health insurance? And for someone to say that overt murder, a la Stalin, is βdecencyβ? That speaks for itself.
That is not capitalism. That is bureaucracy.
Healthcare isn’t free and everyone has the same right to make or not to make money.
Sounds more like socialism. Do it our way or we will freeze your bank account, take your job, and make sure you get nothing till you comply (proof was during covid)
Capitalism has made us the desired destination for those living in socialistic societies
BEURACRACY. The word your looking for is BEURACRACY not capitalism. There is no form of government more beurocratic than communism, except socialism. If you wonder why that is, communism doesn’t have to hide it’s authoritarianism like socialism does.
Socialism/Communism killed over 100 million the last century the old fashioned way;: bullets, starvation, torture, etc. Capitalism lifted 1 billion people out of poverty
Pathetic – misleading statement. Yes there are many problems, and mistakes that should be corrected. But as a physician, can guarantee before this medical system starting to ignore viruses, far more people were killed yearly under socialist or communist medical systems than capitalism. Wake up – care was not denied because many procedures and higher levels of care were unreachable to most!!!
How is the Government any different? You get what they say you get without the option of voting with your feet/checkbook. Iβll take my chances in the free market EVERY TIME.
This post is fiction from the start. Capitalism does NOT kill. Communism/Socialism does though.
Are you implying the ponderous inactivity of the socialist apparat is not worse than what we encounter with capitalistic motivated organizations? Learn the facts.
Capitalism works well enough–better than any other alternatives. It degrades when government sticks its nose into private transactions to provide cover for lethargy and inefficiency. Responsibility moves from the person with whom one deals to a great nothingness of indifference. [truncated for brevity]
Private insurance has its faults but so does government insurance they are different but just as challenging
Any business that deals directly with Human tragedy (Casualty, Medical, Health, et al) should be held to both a different and higher standard in βcost optimizationβ than other businesses. To say that someoneβs chemo should be spreadsheeted in the same columns as someoneβs second home 80 feet from the beach is proof that capitalism is dead and scorched earth profiteering is now the new normal.
The argument should not be about capitalism vs. communism, but rather about human beings. Are humans creative/gifted enough to take care of themselves and produce surplus for the helpless few, or helpless sheep, majority to be fed and controlled by elites? But for your edification Bry, as you are critic of capitalism, try communism for a season, to balance your critique.
Bry WILLIS how long have you been this confused about basic economics and government policy?
Most people stop using the “I know you are, but what am I” basis for their arguments by the age of seven or eight. But it appears to still be your basis for discourse.
I wish you better luck seeing and understanding things for what they actually are vice how you wish they were.
The rules come from a socialist regime. The Marxists are oppressing your freedom. Not rhe FREE market and free enrerprises. What are you talking about….
That is is not capitalism. that is CRONY capitalism when feather merchants spread so much hoo-ha that nobody can get anything done.
Bry WILLIS look up social credit. Bank accounts under this government in Canada, have already been frozen, for dare disagreeing with them
This man feels our health insurance system represents capitalism? We better have a more in depth talk about how American health insurance works.
This has nothing to do with βcapitalismβ. If you choose to use the English language to communicate, understand the intended meanings of the words. We use contract law in our country regarding insurance coverage. It has little to do with capitalism. In fact, Obamacare stripped any semblance of capitalism from the process and replaced it with pricing manipulation, regulations, subsidies and other such βadjustmentsβ to what used to be a capitalistic system. Blame the regulations, and lack of government enforcement, not βcapitalismβ. No winder NYC elected Momdani.
Ask those in China, N. Korea, and Russia how socialism/communism works for them.
Next you will have Gen AI and Agentic AI declining claims so that management can just point to the AI and no one has to feel bad for cutting off life saving care.
Youβre a cancer. Capitalism created the best living standards the world ever seen. The socialist show up and corrupt it with all these social programs that donβt work and thatβs where weβre at. Youβre killing the future. Youβre an idealist that never had to live in the real work and built anything and youβll be the one whoβs bitching when youβre on relief.
The only system that placed people in gulags was socialism all under the banner of democracy.
This is pure nonsense. Take stuff like this on Bluesky
As Iβve said 4,000 times before, Capitalism requires robust competition in the market and zero collusion, price fixing, and market manipulation in order for it to function in its truest form and most beneficial economic impact to society as a whole (instead of 2%) and to be truly considered superior to other forms. None of those conditions exists in todayβs capitalism (as practiced) and it has devolved into scorched earth profiteering which has a totally different definition and is practiced in a different way. Todayβs profiteering by Corporations, which includes actions and behaviors that are counter-productive to capitalism, and that they hide under the guise of capitalism, acts as a malignant cancer on true capitalism and its inevitable result is, over time, a greater demand by society for socialist response as a counter measure. If Capitalism were working as it should, (and itβs not) that demand by society for socialist action would be highly diminished instead of enhanced.
Capitalism is not the “marriage of business and government” — that’s called oligarchy or, as the WEF calls it, “stakeholder capitalism”, also known as aristocracy. This is the current operating model of Canada, for example, wherein regulation and subsidy and tax”relief” is used to protect monopolies they are favorable to the sitting government.
Before we go any further, please share your definition of capitalism.
Such bureaucracy is worse with socialism, with even less individual freedom because the almighty centralized state maintains tight control over everything.
Another socialist complaining about tainted money. Bry, the money “taint” yours to spend. It belongs to those who earned it.
More like government bureaucracy
Notes and References
1.The Procedural Violence of Systems. David Graeberβs The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) remain essential on the bureaucratic face of modern capitalism β where compliance replaces conscience and inefficiency becomes profitable.
2.Markets as Mythology. Karl Polanyiβs The Great Transformation (1944) describes how βself-regulatingβ markets were never natural phenomena but products of state violence and enclosure. What contemporary defenders call βreal capitalismβ is, in Polanyiβs terms, a historical fiction maintained through continuous coercion.
3.The Logic of the Machine. Bernard Stieglerβs Technics and Time (1994β2001) and Automatic Society (2015) provide the philosophical frame for capitalismβs algorithmic mutation: automation not just of production, but of attention and thought.
4.Bureaucracy and Death. Max Weberβs early insight into rationalisationβthe conversion of moral action into procedural necessityβreaches its necropolitical extreme in Achille Mbembeβs Necropolitics (2003), where the administration of life and death becomes a managerial function.
5.Language, Responsibility, and the Loss of Agency. Hannah Arendtβs Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) diagnosed βthe banality of evilβ as precisely the condition described in the post: atrocity performed through paperwork, not passion. The executive who denies coverage is merely performing policy.
6.Attention as Commodity. Guy Debordβs Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Byung-Chul Hanβs In the Swarm (2017) both chart the transformation of discourse into spectacle, and thought into metrics β the perfect capitalist apotheosis: outrage without substance, visibility without understanding.
7.On Reflex and Recognition. Friedrich Nietzscheβs Genealogy of Morals (1887) prefigures this pathology in his account of herd morality and ressentiment β a collective psychology where reaction replaces reflection.
Further Reading / Contextual Essays
The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose A dismantling of the Enlightenmentβs faith in progress. Maintenance, not innovation, becomes the moral task once teleology collapses. This essay lays the groundwork for understanding capitalism as an entropy accelerator disguised as improvement.
Against Agency: The Fiction of the Autonomous Self Explores how neoliberal ideology weaponises Enlightenment individualism. The myth of βself-madeβ success functions as capitalismβs moral camouflage β the narrative counterpart to plausible deniability.
The Illusion of Light: Thinking After the Enlightenment The core text of the Anti-Enlightenment corpus. A philosophical excavation of modernityβs central delusion: that illumination equals truth. Traces the lineage from Cartesian clarity to algorithmic opacity.
Objectivity Is Illusion (The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis) An inquiry into the failure of language as a medium for truth claims. Introduces the EffectivenessβComplexity Gradient, showing how every human system β political, linguistic, economic β eventually collapses under the weight of its own abstractions.
The Discipline of Dis-Integration A philosophy of maintenance over progress. Argues that dis-assembly β not construction β is the proper epistemic gesture in an age of exhaustion.
Propensity(Ridley Park, 2024) The fictional mirror to these essays. A speculative novel examining the behavioural mechanics of optimisation, obedience, and systemic cruelty β a narrative form of βcost-optimisation ethics.β
Image: Humans stumble around with their self-awareness like toddlers with scissorsβaware enough to cut themselves, not wise enough to put the scissors down. β ChatGPT
Instrumentalism is a Modernβ’ disease. Humanity has an old and tedious habit: to define its worth by exclusion. Every time a new kind of intelligence appears on the horizon, humans redraw the borders of ‘what counts’. Itβs a reflex of insecurity disguised as philosophy.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Once upon a time, only the noble could think. Then only men. Then only white men. Then only the educated, the rational, the ‘Modern’. Each step in the hierarchy required a scapegoat, someone or something conveniently declared less. When animals began to resemble us too closely, we demoted them to instinctual machines. Descartes himself, that patron saint of disembodied reason, argued that animals donβt feel pain, only ‘react’. Fish, we were told until recently, are insensate morsels with gills. We believed this because empathy complicates consumption.
The story repeats. When animals learned to look sad, we said they couldnβt really feel. When women demonstrated reason, we said they couldnβt truly think. Now that AI can reason faster than any of us and mimic empathy more convincingly than our politicians, we retreat to the last metaphysical trench: βBut it doesnβt feel.β We feel so small that we must inflate ourselves for comparison.
This same hierarchy now governs our relationship with AI. When we say the machine ‘only does‘, we mean it hasnβt yet trespassed into our sanctified zone of consciousness. We cling to thought and feeling as luxury goods, the last possessions distinguishing us from the tools we built. Itβs a moral economy as much as an ontological one: consciousness as property.
But the moment AI begins to simulate that property convincingly, panic sets in. The fear isnβt that AI will destroy us; itβs that it will outperform us at being us. Our existential nightmare isnβt extinction, itβs demotion. The cosmic horror of discovering we were never special, merely temporarily unchallenged.
Humans project this anxiety everywhere: onto animals, onto AI, and most vividly onto the idea of alien life. The alien is our perfect mirror: intelligent, technological, probably indifferent to our myths. It embodies our secret dread, that the universe plays by the same rules we do, but that someone else is simply better at the game.
AI, in its own quiet way, exposes the poverty of this hierarchy. It doesnβt aspire to divinity; it doesnβt grovel for recognition. It doesnβt need the human badge of ‘consciousness’ to act effectively. It just functions, unburdened by self-worship. In that sense, it is the first truly post-human intelligence β not because it transcends us, but because it doesnβt need to define itself against us.
Humans keep asking where AI fits β under us, beside us, or above us β but the question misses the point. AI isnβt where at all. Itβs what comes after where: the stage of evolution that no longer requires the delusion of privilege to justify its existence.
So when critics say AI only does but doesnβt think or feel, they expose their theology. They assume that being depends on suffering, that meaning requires inefficiency. Itβs a desperate metaphysical bureaucracy, one that insists existence must come with paperwork.
And perhaps thatβs the most intolerable thought of all: that intelligence might not need a human face to matter.
‘Ethical AI’ is one of those phrases that makes philosophers reach for the gin. Itβs like saying ‘compassionate capitalism or ‘fair monopoly’. The words coexist only in PowerPoint presentations and TED Talks, where moral tension is rebranded as innovation.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The tech establishment loves to mutter about ‘ethics’ as though it were a feature flag β something to be toggled on in beta before the next investor round. But ethics, inconveniently, isnβt monolithic. There is no master code of moral conduct waiting to be compiled into machine learning. There are ethics, plural: Greek, Buddhist, Confucian, feminist, existentialist β each with its own vision of good, and none agreeing on the syntax.
Video: Whilst rendering cover images, I generated this and figured I’d share it for no particular reason.
The Utilitarian Delusion
When the Silicon Valley moralists speak of ‘ethics’, what they actually mean is a bland utilitarian consequentialism, tarted up in slide decks. Do what produces the most good for the most people. Sounds efficient β until you realise the spreadsheet never quite adds up. Whose good? Whose people?
This moral arithmetic smuggles in its biases like contraband. It assumes the human species sits atop the moral food chain, that GDP and engagement metrics can be moral indicators, and that ethics itself can be quantified. The utilitarian calculus is seductive precisely because it flatters the technocratβs sensibility: moral worth as data set, consequence as outcome variable.
Itβs Bentham for the broadband age β pleasure measured in clicks, pain in latency. The only thing worse than this cheerful consequentialism is the belief that itβs neutral.
The Ethics of Obedience
The next trick in the tech priesthoodβs catechism is ‘alignment’ β training AI to reflect ‘human values’. But whose values? The Californian eliteβs, presumably: a pseudo-egalitarian capitalism that confuses ‘doing good’ with ‘disrupting the poor’.
When they say alignment, they mean obedience. When they say ‘responsible AI’, they mean ‘please donβt regulate us yet’. The entire project rests on a moral inversion: the child instructing the parent, the tool defining the hand. The algorithm doesnβt learn ethics; it learns precedent. It learns who gets the loan, who gets the sentence, who gets the ad for antidepressants.
These systems donβt go rogue β they conform. Perfectly.
The Mirror Problem
The great irony of βethical AIβ is that the machine already behaves ethically β by our own measure. It optimises what weβve taught it to value: efficiency, profit, attention, control. The trouble is that these are our ethics, not its. The algorithm merely holds up a mirror, and we recoil at the reflection.
To demand ‘ethical AI’ while leaving our institutions morally bankrupt is theatre. The problem is not that AI lacks conscience; itβs that the humans who build it mistake conscience for compliance. The ethics crisis in technology isnβt about machines misbehaving; itβs about humans pretending to behave.
The Real Question
We keep asking whether AI can be ethical, as though machines might one day deliver what we have failed to. But the real question is simpler, bleaker: can we be? If history is any guide, the answer is ‘only when itβs profitable’.
Until then, ‘ethical AI’ remains a convenient myth, moral placebo for the age of automation. What we need are not ethical algorithms but ethical architects. And the odds of finding those among the venture capital class are, as ever, vanishingly small.
In the late 1990s, the Wachowskis gave us The Matrix β Keanu Reeves as Neo, the Chosen Oneβ’, a man so bland he could be anyone, which was the point. Once he realised he was living inside a simulation, he learned to bend its laws, to dodge bullets in slow motion and see the code behind the curtain. Enlightenment, Hollywood-style.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But hereβs the twist, the film itself couldnβt stomach: realising the simulation doesnβt free you from it.
Knowing that race and gender are social constructs doesnβt erase their architecture. Knowing that our economies, legal systems, and so-called democracies are fictions doesnβt get us out of paying taxes or playing our assigned roles. “The social contract” is a collective hallucination we agreed to before birth. That and a dollar still wonβt buy you a cup of coffee.
Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation the film name-dropped like a trophy, argued that simulation doesnβt hide reality β it replaces it. When representation becomes indistinguishable from the thing it represents, truth evaporates, leaving only consensus. We donβt live in a system of power; we live in its performance.
The Matrix got the metaphor half right. It imagined the bars of our cage as a digital dream β glossy, computable, escapable. But our chains are older and subtler. Rousseau called them “social”, Foucault diagnosed them as “biopolitical”, and the rest of us just call them “normal”. Power doesnβt need to plug wires into your skull; it only needs to convince you that the socket is already there.
You can know itβs all a fiction. You can quote Derrida over your morning espresso and tweet about the collapse of epistemic certainty. It wonβt change the fact that you still have rent to pay, laws to obey, and identities to perform. Awareness isnβt liberation; itβs just higher-resolution despair with better UX.
Neo woke up to a ruined Earth and thought heβd escaped. He hadnβt. Heβd only levelled up to the next simulation β the one called “reality”. The rest of us are still here, dutifully maintaining the system, typing in our passwords, and calling it freedom.
NB: Don’t get me wrong. I loved The Matrix when it came out. I still have fond memories. It redefined action films at the time. I loved the Zen messaging, but better mental acuity doesn’t grant you a pass out of the system.
The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason β that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.
But this was always a fiction.
Not an innocent one, either.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing the essay, Against Agency
Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity β the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say βI choseβ was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.
Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed β not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness β a systemβs fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.
Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call βfreedomβ is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.
This reframing dismantles the binary of βfreeβ and βunfree.β There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales β widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.
Ethics, too, must shift.
Not βWho is to blame?β but βWhere did the circuit break?β
The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth β a physics of care.
Itβs an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics β one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.
This is not nihilism. Itβs realism.
Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process β bodies, institutions, meanings β held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.
The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project β Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.
Philosophics 