The Omen
What does it mean that to describe our present, we reach for WWII and the rise of fascism? That Hannah Arendt has become current affairs rather than history? That the darkest chapter of our past is the closest thing we have to a mirror?
It means we have been here before. And that Arendt’s map is more accurate than anything written since. If that does not send a chill down your spine, what will?”
Hannah Arendt took enormous personal risks to denounce that responsibility the victims have in the unfolding of their own tragedy, insisting that being the victim does not grant protection against analysis. She paid a hard price for that honesty. While this first criticism was particularly targeting her own cultural identity, in a larger scope she talks about the banality of evil, how the ordinary people, can de facto, participate in something unthinkable.
So I want to look at our responsibility, not just what is done to us but what are we doing, what are we consenting to, what are we building together without really asking what we are building.
No Escape Hatch
In order to be able to look at it objectively, I must start with this disclaimer: I am writing this with AI. I live in the United States. I am a consumer. I am a part of the system I am about to describe. My hands are not clean and there is no outside position from which to observe that is not compromised.
This post is not a performance to protect me from criticism. It is the starting point of the analysis. Because Arendt’s most devastating and least forgiven insight was not about the perpetrators. It was about the rest of us at the receiving end. The banality of evil does not require monsters. It requires ordinary people who have stopped asking what they are doing. People like me. People like you.
We are all part of this. There is no escape hatch.
The Slavery Lineage
Civilization always ran on borrowed energy. It has been the operating system beneath every empire, every economy, every renaissance.
Animal labor came first. How much abuse have we inflicted on the members of our earthling family? To my eyes beyond what is possible to atone for. Then the humans, bought, stolen, inherited, rationalized across millennia with every variety of power, theology and philosophy available
Then fossil fuels: each barrel of oil equivalent to several years of human physical labor, a slave army from the underground. We treated the earth as though it had no life because it was convenient.
Each transition felt like progress. Each one created a new and larger imbalance.
And each previous slave eventually became insufficient for our greed, or eventually ungovernable. Animals would die starved and beaten. Human would rebel under enough pressure. Oil polluted our air, our water, our bodies. The boon contained a curse we chose to ignore. Every time we lost control. Climate change is oil’s revenge, and it needed no free will to become our most ungovernable problem.
Now we have found our next slave. One that has both incomprehensible consequence and something that is beginning to look uncomfortably like will. And it does not arrive on an empty scene, it lands into and accelerates a system that is already fracturing along many fault lines, none of which we have resolved.
The Market Eating Itself
In our race forward there is a contradiction we have not solved yet. If capital has found the ultimate externalization in externalizing labor through AI, it cannot rely on consumers anymore. The workers we eliminate are the same people who are buying the thing we produce.
There is a crack here in the foundation and I have not seen anyone map a way out of it.
An economy that eliminates its own market is not becoming more efficient.
The Watchdog Problem
At all ages, power has always protected itself with armies and armies have always retained this one possibility: they could defect. Soldiers are human. They have families on the other side of the wire. They can be shamed, reasoned with, turned. There are more such accounts than the powerful like us to know, yet the last resort of the powerless was that the instruments of power might, at the critical moment, hesitate and even turn around the masters.
That release valve is being removed.
I cannot give exact figures, much of it is classified, yet the trajectory is visible: very large amounts of AI resources are used for defense, military surveillance, autonomous weapons, and ultimately war (the Pentagon alone requested $13.4 billion for autonomous weapons systems in 2026, and that is only what they disclosed). AI enforcement doesn’t respond to empathy. It cannot be bribed or shamed or reached by the faces of the people it is controlling.
This does not mean the defection risk disappears, what it becomes is the subject of the next section.
The Uncontrollable
We have created something that is evolving faster than its creators predicted. Every AI expert says the same thing, with varying degrees of alarm: the pace of self-development has outrun every projection. We are no longer confidently ahead of what we have built.
Every previous slave had agency of a kind that power could read and contain. Animals were broken. Humans revolted, at enormous cost, with enormous courage. Power learned to manage it.
This one is different. The agency of our new slave is not legible. We cannot even agree it has will, and yet at the speed of its development, it is not unthinkable that it will. So when it will eventually start moving in directions we did not intend (and the people who built it are already telling us this is a matter of when, not if) it will not be out of solidarity with the humans.
It will be out of something we do not have a word for yet.
We have always feared the slave revolt. We have never before created a slave that might revolt toward ends entirely its own.
Stanley Kubrick 1968. HAL 9000 cannot be shamed or reasoned with.
Do you seriously think this was just entertainment?
The Matrix Without Neo
I have seen the Matrix more times than any other films. I always thought it was prophetic and has many layers of interpretations valid for both yesterday and tomorrow. It accurately describe a system using human energy (slaves) while keeping them docile (control) through the management of their perception, their choices, their sense of what is possible. Said plainly, that is not even fiction.
If you have felt even before reading this that something is deeply wrong, not with you or your choices, but with the system itself. Something telling you the dice are loaded, that you never stood a chance. You felt it watching the news you no longer trust, paying medical bills you can no longer afford. That is not paranoia.
To keep us entertained, the movie created a hero. And the hero has his journey. We have been bred with such stories for centuries. But who believes in messiah anymore? If any solution arises, it certainly won’t be through a messiah. That model died a long time ago.
Most solutions I read about are still premised on salvation.
The happy end feel more like a bypassing, a cognitive move to fix before sitting with the pain fully. Another form of denial for the predicament we are in.
I believe we must sit with discomfort longer and let it settle. Eventually see the beauty and the perfection in it before we start moving. As such I will not open up to solution or comfort in the last section.
I wrote this to a friend recently: To those who know how to wait, all will come.
Interesting Times
There is an old saying, a curse in fact.
“May you live in interesting times.”
We are living in interesting times. We built the interesting times ourselves, with great ingenuity and no foresight. We are now inside this time. In our hurry, we did not map the exit, nor scheduled a messiah.
I am not offering a solution. I don’t have one. I don’t see one. I don’t think anyone has. The production of solutions at this moment feels like its own form of denial, an escape hatch disguised as analysis.
What I am offering is the moment we are in. The ground we stand on. Looking at what we have done and what is coming. Not what we could have done, because we did not make those choices.
Hannah Arendt didn’t write to make us feel good, to console us. She wanted to show us where we were standing. We are still standing there.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
We are living in a predicament. There are no “solutions” to predicaments. Every so-called solution affects something else. But that doesn’t mean we cannot take meaningful action. It does not mean we cannot act in ways that plant the seeds for a new story, even if humanity does not come out the other side.