Thomas: I have a new theory about AI stories and where they fit in the broader culture.
When a new technology arrives, there’s typically a honeymoon period. People are excited, optimistic, and largely blind to the downsides. We saw it with television. We saw it with social media. We saw it with alcohol.
The original name for alcohol was aqua vitae, the water of life. It purified contaminated water. It cleaned wounds that would have turned gangrenous. It was a genuine medical marvel. It took generations to fully reckon with the dark side, and several more generations to develop a healthy cultural relationship with it. Gen Z, notably, is not a generation of heavy drinkers.
So why didn’t AI get that same grace period? There was no honeymoon. We were suspicious of AI from the beginning.
The answer, I think, is 40 years of fiction. From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the WOPR in WarGames to the Terminator to the Agents in The Matrix, AI has been the villain. Consistently, across decades, across genres.
My theory is that none of those characters were actually about AI. They were society working through a deeper psychological wound, and AI was the metaphor it reached for.
The Matrix and 2001 a Space Odyssey Were Never About AI
Thomas: Let me explain the theory. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in the late 1960s. No one in that theater had ever interacted with a computer. Computers were institutional equipment housed in dedicated buildings, accessible to roughly as many people as knew nuclear launch codes. When HAL said, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” no one in the audience had ever experienced anything like that exchange, and most wouldn’t for decades.
So why did it resonate so deeply?
Because the story wasn’t about computers.
The defining transformation of the 20th century was the rise of the corporation. At the century’s start, roughly 80 to 90% of people worked for family businesses or small operations. They knew their neighbors. They knew their customers. If you needed an exception, someone could make one, because someone knew you.
By the century’s end, 80% of people worked for large corporations owned by other corporations. If you needed someone to acknowledge your humanity and make an exception, the answer was: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” From your professor to the clerk at the DMV to the armorer checking in your weapons at the end of a deployment. The TPS report wasn’t filed correctly. The form is the form.
The people delivering those refusals didn’t hate you. They were following instructions. Their own agency had been stripped by the institution they served. And society had no existing narrative framework to make sense of it.
In earlier eras, there was a feudal compact, an expectation of mutual obligation between lord and peasant. The modern corporation offered nothing like that. It demanded compliance and returned process.
Throughout the 20th century, beginning with the public school system, there was systematic pressure to become a functional component of corporate machinery. Individuality was a misalignment to be corrected. Difference was a problem to be solved.
Because we couldn’t find a historical analog for the soulless managerial state, we projected it forward. And we found the metaphor we needed: HAL. The Terminator. The Matrix.
WarGames is another example. There was no realistic risk in 1983 of a computer autonomously launching nuclear weapons. There was a very real risk of a bureaucratic apparatus so automated, so fragmented into tiny individual responsibilities, that no single human retained meaningful decision-making authority.
That scenario nearly occurred multiple times. There is a Wikipedia article cataloguing the near-misses on both the American and Soviet sides, incidents that came terrifyingly close to nuclear exchange, prevented in several cases by a single individual who simply refused to follow protocol. One Soviet officer ignored a computer alert and his commanding officer’s order, concluded the data was wrong. He was right. His decision prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States. The planet was saved by one man’s defiance of the system. He was likely disciplined for it.
The third Terminator film, I’d argue, was actually about AI. The first two were about the managerial state. The Matrix makes this clearest.
Thomas Anderson works in a soulless corporation. The color palette is desaturated. His boss berates him for a minor infraction. It is, scene for scene, the same movie as Office Space, and it ends the same way with the protagonist emerging as a new man from the wreckage of the institution that was consuming him. The agents even wear suits.
Morpheus describes the Matrix as something you feel when you pay your taxes, when you interface with a system that cannot see you. That’s not a description of artificial intelligence. That’s a description of the administrative state. And at the end of three films, Neo makes no permanent difference. The Matrix is not destroyed. That’s the terminal logic of grim-dark: the machine persists.
Here’s the plot twist. AI now puts power back into the hands of individuals. Every job that exists to produce or review documentation, to process, to intermediate, is exactly the kind of job AI will eliminate first. The managerial state is the entity most threatened by AI, not workers in general. If your function is making TPS reports or reviewing the TPS reports of someone else, AI does both faster, cheaper, and more accurately than you do.
Once you understand that, the political realignment starts to make sense. T
he progressive left has historically positioned itself as the party of technological advancement. It is also the party most invested in the managerial state: public institutions, regulatory bodies, credentialed administrative class. AI is an existential threat to that infrastructure. That’s why you’re seeing Democratic politicians increasingly hostile to AI development, arguing against domestic data centers, suggesting the work should happen elsewhere. The constituency they’re protecting isn’t workers broadly. It’s the administrative class specifically.
That’s the zeitgeist argument. Jonathan, I suspect you disagree.
Jonathan: I do. I think framing corporations as the villain is too narrow. This goes back much further, to the structure of paganism and idolatry, specifically the idea that divinity is derived from the material world rather than the material world proceeding from the divine.
The God of the Nile. The God of the harvest. The God of the sun. These entities had enormous, impersonal power over human life. They had to be approached on their own terms, in their own language. They were not accessible in human terms. They didn’t love you. They had to be appeased.
That structure has transmitted across the centuries: kings, states, corporations. The terms change. The dynamic doesn’t. These are the gods, reskinned.
And pagan gods, specifically, are soulless. They don’t connect with you. They sit above you. You don’t negotiate with them as a human being. You make supplication in the form they require.
Consider the corporate practice of offering to cover abortion travel costs for female employees. The corporation wasn’t acting out of care for the employee. It was making a calculation: the procedure and travel expenses cost less than a year of maternity leave and lost productivity. That is a transaction with an entity for whom you are not a person. You are a resource unit. That is the pagan dynamic, transposed.
When you look at HAL through this lens, you’re not looking at a computer program. You’re looking at a god, a contemporary reimagining of what a deity would be. The Terminator exists outside of time, is nearly impervious to physical force, and cannot be reasoned with, only reprogrammed. That’s exactly why Terminator 2 is the better film. In the first film, the Terminator cannot be prayed to. It cannot be entreated. In the second film, it can. It becomes a protector. It responds. People love it more because it can be spoken to as something approaching a person.
The managerial class was a priesthood, of sorts, enforcing the language and requirements of that soulless divine structure. I had six months of pay withheld because a computer system still listed me as deployed in Iraq. You don’t argue with the computer. You speak its language or you go without.
When AI eliminates that class, it’s not just a labor market shift. It’s a theological event. It’s the deletion of the priests.
Who else confronted a managerial class operating like a priesthood? I’ve been reading through Mark, and it’s striking. Jesus is systematically dismantling the administrative religious structure as he moves through the narrative, returning authority to its actual source. The miracles aren’t just acts of mercy. They’re jurisdictional claims. He’s not working within the system. He’s replacing it.
These films were never really wrestling with computers or AI. They were wrestling with the gods that stand over us and what those gods look like in each age. That’s why the Matrix and the Terminator still hit. We’re fighting the gods.
Thomas: Framing corporations as pagan gods is genuinely compelling, and the etymology supports it. “Corporation” derives from the Latin corpus, meaning body. A corporation is legally a person, a juridical person. And like the gods of myth, like elves in folklore, corporations don’t die of natural causes. They persist. They can be killed by war or catastrophic failure, but they don’t simply expire.
My father has run and consulted on many companies over the years. He explained to me once that companies don’t die on their own. You have to kill them. If you do nothing with a dormant company, it simply continues to exist, accumulating tax liabilities and legal complications. You have to actively take it out and end it.
There’s a Jungian reading of paganism that treats the gods as psychological constructs, as the human mind’s attempt to impose meaning on forces too large and impersonal to process directly. If you apply that framework to the corporation, then AI becomes a Jungian symbol as well: a way of metabolizing the psychic wound of the soulless institution, and the very human longing simply to be seen.
Thomas: The soulless corporation’s defining logic is that it sees you as an automaton. It is more financially viable to pay for your abortion, including travel to whatever state the procedure requires, than to pay for your maternity leave.
Jonathan: And it is packaged as compassion. It feels like care. But it is a calculation made entirely in the interest of the entity above you, not for you.
Thomas: It’s the same calculus Ford applied to the Pinto. Engineers identified that the rear-mounted fuel tank was killing roughly 30 people a year in rear-end collisions. The company ran the numbers: recall costs versus projected funeral and liability expenses. Funeral expenses were cheaper. They did not recall the car. That case study appeared repeatedly in business school curricula as a cautionary example, but what it actually illustrates is the hyper-rational, soulless corporate logic operating exactly as designed.
This is one of the existential challenges facing civilization. Corporations are owned by corporations, which are owned by corporations, which are owned by corporations.
Jonathan: Ares answers to Zeus. His sons answer to him.
Thomas: It’s turtles all the way down. People rail against billionaires, but there aren’t that many billionaires, and most of them don’t actually control their own companies. The two exceptions I can think of are Zuckerberg and Musk, and I’m not even certain about Musk. He had to lobby shareholders for his own compensation package. He doesn’t have controlling ownership of Tesla. So who owns Tesla? BlackRock. Vanguard. And who owns BlackRock and Vanguard? A thousand other institutional entities. Turtles all the way down.
Because it’s turtles all the way down, every human actor in that chain has a fiduciary duty to serve the entity above them. The human soul, the capacity for judgment, the concept of noble obligation, it’s gone.
Western civilization had noblesse oblige for over a thousand years. The Anglo-Saxons practiced it. The Normans practiced it. Even the French gave it a name. And now many people have never heard the term. It has vanished so completely from our cultural memory that it doesn’t even register as a loss. That disappearance is a psychic wound we feel but cannot name. And that is why we reach for stories about AI to try to articulate it.
Jonathan: When you want to write a story that honestly engages with what AI is doing to society, you need to work with the mythological framework underneath it. The most resonant template is a new member of the pantheon destroying the old, because the gods have always consumed each other.
Pagan warfare was not fundamentally about ethnicity or nationality. It was theological. One god destroying another. The Ten Plagues were not only a liberation of a people from a physical empire. They were a systematic dismantling of the Egyptian pantheon, a demonstration of power over each deity in sequence. The God of the Nile, dead. The God of the sun, dead. And finally Pharaoh himself, who understood his own role as divine.
That kind of warfare is total. It is obliteration. That’s why Dune works as well as it does. It engages directly with the collision of divinity, corporate power, and the question of what actually stands at the top of the hierarchy.
If you’re writing a story about AI, whether as villain, liberator, or both, keep this framework in mind. The antagonist is always the soulless alien god. That’s why Lovecraft remains perpetually relevant.
Thomas: Your readers have grown up with institutional boots on their necks since kindergarten. From the first day of school, they were graded, ranked, and sorted by a system their teachers couldn’t fully control and their school districts couldn’t fully modify. It’s institutions governing institutions.
What’s true in the corporate world is equally true, arguably worse, in the government world. It is an infinite recursive loop of bureaucratic agencies. We don’t even have a reliable count of how many federal agencies exist. No single human being knows that number. That seems like a problem.
From kindergarten through graduation, you carry that institutional weight. Then you transition into the workforce, or into college first, and the institution changes but the weight doesn’t. Now you have a corporate boot and a government boot. And like the Matrix, most people don’t recognize it as a system. They experience it as normal life. Student loans, college debt, a stable job at a large company. That’s what their father did. That’s what his father did. It didn’t make those men wealthy or free, but the pattern persists because it’s the only pattern anyone can see.
Jonathan: All it does is feed the gods.
Thomas: It feeds the gods. These are sacrifices made on behalf of entities that are always hungry, and the sacrifices are getting larger while the returns are getting smaller. Millennials are beginning to notice. Gen Z has noticed clearly. They are not as wealthy as their parents were at the same age. The numbers are larger because of inflation, but the purchasing power isn’t there. Their parents took vacations. They can’t. Their parents weren’t financially anxious in the same chronic way.
Jonathan: And we reframe that as identity. We call it the grind. Keep grinding. But consider what grinding actually does to things.
Thomas: It removes everything distinct. You grind until the uniqueness is gone. You run your writing through Grammarly until every edge and personality has been smoothed away. Don’t say anything political. Don’t say anything religious. Don’t be controversial. Fit the template.
Jonathan: The ending of The Matrix is so striking because it echoes the opening of Genesis. Neo learns the rules by which the gods operate. He breaks them. He flies. He moves at their speed. He sees the code beneath reality. And what did the serpent offer Eve? “You will be as gods, knowing good and evil.” That temptation has never changed. The positive resolution of Neo breaking a soulless divine system on behalf of his own humanity, it’s a deeply human-forward story. But the mechanism is becoming a god yourself, using the rules of the gods against them.
Thomas: This connects directly to why my view of traditional publishing has shifted over the last 10 years. I’ve watched publishers place their boot on the necks of authors who have genuine things to say, books with real appeal and real audiences. The publisher’s response is to sand off every sharp edge, strip out anything political or controversial, and demand compliance. Fit the template. Don’t offend. Sometimes they simply reject the book outright.
In some ways that rejection is a gift. The writers who leave, or who are pushed out, are the ones who go build something else. They are the barbarians who cross the frontier, establish a counter-civilization, and eventually come flooding back over the walls.
