week 40 / 2026: enchantments and charlatans

“Saw you lyin’ there on the marble slab / the best trip that I’ve ever had...”

Greetings from Malmö, where I’m still struggling to process the fact that we’re in October. This week, our loose theme is the ever-more-obvious similarity between the culture around “technology” and various forms of religious or spiritual thinking.

OK, then—light the candles and start the chant!

• among the pixels
• between the pages
• lookback
• ticked off

among the pixels

Those of you who read this week’s essay about The Shock of the Old may have been left with a sense that, for all that rationality is supposed to be the core of the modern scientific and engineering mindset, our tech-obsessed culture—in the wealthy West, at least—is rather less logical than we might assume.

However, this is far from being a new development, even if it’s taken a while for the seeming contradiction to become obvious. In this first piece, Noortje Marres introduces us to the thought of the C20th philosopher Hans Blumenburg, who drew the line of origin a long way back in history:

According to the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, belief in the unlimited power of science and innovation to alter nature and create artificial realities is nothing new. In a series of essays written in the 1940s and 1950s, he argued that world-transforming technologies such as the atomic bomb were but the latest manifestation of a powerful set of ideas that have been central to Western culture for many centuries. These ideas can be traced back to the early modern vision of experimental science formulated in the sixteenth century, when philosophers like Francis Bacon first came up with the notion that science opens up reality to human intervention. This philosophy of experimentalism has since become a defining paradigm of modern-day economics, politics, and society. But Blumenberg went further back still and argued that faith in the world-transforming capacities of technology lies in medieval Christian theology.

I don’t recall having encountered Blumenburg’s ideas before, but the thesis here reminds me a lot of David Noble’s rather more bluntly titled The Religion of Technology, which is in the stack of titles to be revisited in a later semester of Deep Reads.

Meanwhile, Henry Farrell has repubbed a piece in which he compares transhumanism to alchemy as a way in to a discussion of Adam Becker’s recent book, More Everything Forever:

Becker treats the aspiring magi of AI seriously, while arguing that they are terribly wrong. Long before models like ChatGPT, gurus like Yudkowsky, the recently deceased computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and the futurist Ray Kurzweil, created a loosely shared vision of what AI might do. They hoped for a future where humanity might use AI to turn stars and even galaxies into resources to be used for human purposes, or feared one in which humanity might become the resources to be burned up and discarded by feral AI that transcended its creators and developed its own goals. The result, Becker says, is a confidence that technology can cure all ills, and a singular vision of an “immortal future in space,” with limitless energy, limitless time, and unbounded resources.

At this point, I find myself wanting to enact some sort of “not all alchemists” intervention.

While there were certainly practitioners of alchemy who took its promises of eternal life and boundless wealth literally, it is understood (at least by disciplines less tied to their own rather literalistic paradigms of thought) that alchemy was originally a spiritual technology whose heavy reliance on symbolism and metaphor was in no small part a way of concealing that spiritual work from a dominant Catholic church that saw alternative belief systems as heresy. The transmutation of lead to gold, for example, represents a project of transcendence and purification for the alchemist’s soul.

That said, I think this detail actually makes Farrell’s argument more interesting rather than less, because of the parallels with the tech scene’s heavy borrowing from science fiction, which also tends to very literal readings that fail to recognise how sf as a literary form depends on the concretisation of metaphor. Again, as with alchemy, there are exceptions to the rule—but for the most part, when a science fiction author writes about transhuman immortals (for example), they are operating in the mode of provocation rather than proposition.

(Or, to put it in the rather blunter terms of the popular saying: cyberpunk was a warning, not a policy brief. )

Which means that, when we note the influence of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s execrable pseudo-philosophical fan-fiction on some of the most powerful and influential decision-makers of our time, we should see the influence of alchemy on Renaissance rulers in similar terms. Yes, there were certainly hucksters and chancers who made promises that flattered the vanity of kings, and in so doing relieved them of some amount of their treasure; and yes, they may well have come to believe in what they were selling, because the true salesman’s first mark is always necessarily themselves (and also because long-term exposure to mercury does little good for your higher cognitive functions).

But they were as different to the more serious alchemist as Yudkowsky is different to a serious philosopher—and in both cases, I think it behooves us to recognise that the success of the hucksters speaks to a deep need for explanations that can transcend rationality and logic. In other words, and looping back somewhat to Marres’s examination of Blumenburg: for all its claims to have done away with metaphysics, post-Enlightenment thought has in fact just draped an increasingly ill-fitting and moth-eaten cloak f rationality over the space where metaphysics still lurks.

People yearn for more meaning than a pure and godless causality can account for, and always have. If the mainstream will not provide it, they will go in search of it elsewhere.

Last but not least, it wouldn’t do to spend time denouncing a false religion without focussing on one of its better-known preachers. In this piece, philosophy professor Joseph Heath compares the thinking of Yuval Noah Harari to the thinking of people who actually study human evolution, rather than having pivoted to writing about it after an academic career in military history.

Not only did Harari’s book annoy me, but all of the critical commentary that I see online is just quibbling (like, “he simplifies this a bit” or “he overstates his claim here”), rather than pointing out the glaring errors in his account. Furthermore, a lot of people who have read Harari’s book have also read Joseph Henrich’s work and yet don’t seem to realize that the theory Harari is defending is the exact opposite of Henrich’s. Part of the problem is that readers have trouble picking out the structure of these theories, because they don’t understand precisely what the theories are trying to explain. They treat them more like stories than scientific hypotheses. So it’s helpful to start out with some understanding of what the explanatory goals of a theory of human evolution are.

Even if you’re largely unaware of Harari’s ideas and influence—which, from my perspective at least, would be a blessed and fortunate circumstance in which to find oneself—Heath’s overview of Joseph Henrich’s work is a useful introduction to contemporary thinking on human evolution, the leading edge of which is quite some distance ahead of lay ideas on the topic. For example, it is still widely assumed (and a load-bearing plank of Harari’s theory) that distinctive human characteristics such as language, cooperation and culture are downstream of the emergence of intelligence—but scholars like Henrich now assume that sequence to be entirely the wrong way around…

between the pages

My offline reading this week has been a bit of a mixed bag, and some of it may go a fair way to explaining my choice of theme above, given that one of the books I read was an extended—and, to my mind, fairly convincing—argument to the effect that L Ron Hubbard effectively usurped Jack Parsons’s claim to Aleister Crowley’s magician’s mantle of Antichrist, and subsequently built Scientology into a denatured version of Thelema that was more compatible with (because less threatening to) the basically Christian self-conception of the United States in the post-war period.

(Yeah, it’s a bit of a mad one—but, like I say, actually pretty plausible, by the admittedly wild standards of that particular period of occult history.)

By comparison, Matt Hill’s Wrecks has felt almost breezy by comparison—though breezy is not a word that many people would associate with Matt’s work, I suspect.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here, because a) I’m only a third of the way through, and b) I’ll likely want to write about it at greater length elsewhere when I’m done—but suffice to say that, if you’re among that seemingly diminishing set of readers of genre fiction who are less interested in comfort than its opposite, and would like to read something that combines J G Ballard’s gimlet eye for banal yet apocalyptic social dysfunction with M John Harrison’s late-style knack for unmoored central characters and deftly disorienting narrative, then you’ll want to get your hands on this novel as soon as you’re able.

lookback

This week’s major feature was my daytrip to Roskilde to talk about my work at GRASP, a festival-of-ideas staged by the same organisation (and on the same site) as the better-known Roskilde music festival. In the name of forging connections between activists and artists and entrepreneurs and scholars, there’s a sort of academic track of talks and panels throughout the event, but it’s not so strictly academic that they won’t give a space to apostate oddballs like myself from time to time!

Many thanks to David Pinder of Roskilde University for the invitation, and to everyone who came to my session, as well as to the academics and authors of the related afternoon session.

ticked off

• Six hours at GRASP Festival. (Yes, this is ledger’d time; just because you’re having fun doesn’t mean it’s not work! Hell knows I was tired enough the following day…)
• Six hours of essaywork. (Mostly my piece on Edgerton’s Shock of the Old, but bits and pieces of other stuff, too.)
• Five hours of admyn. (Planning for the coming quarter, as best I’m able.)
• Four hours on PROJECT PILDAMM. (Worldbuilding, like a bawze.)
• Three hours of talk development.
• Three hours of networking.
• Three hours on these here weeknotes.
• Two hours of research.
• Two hours of bizdev.
• Plus ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

Right then, that’s all for this week; I’ve got chores to do, before heading over to a friend’s house to help remove the autumnal leaf carpet from the flat roof of their summerhouse. Thanks for your attention, which is always appreciated! I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 40 of 2026. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend!