Introduction

Without descending into some sort of coming-of-age story, my late teens revolved around a cobbled-together subculture that existed somewhere in the overlapping Venn diagram circles of users of computers and recreational drugs. In the early 1990s, an alternative bookstore on the once-vibrant main drag of the University of Texas sold small-press magazines—such as Mondo 2000 and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly—that made technology, a then out-of-reach class signifier, seem transgressive. Eventually the shop was bought by one such ‘zine,’ the FringeWare Review, and for a short period of time it was the center of my universe. Residing at some intersection of science fiction, cyberculture, and transcendentalism, the loose association of people coming in and out of the store, hosting events, or advertising in the magazine included all manner of obscure cults and ideologies with single devotees. The “transhumanists” and “extropians” I met there were people I agreed with about things like individual agency over the human body, but who held other ideas I found absurd—that a purely digital representation of a mind would have subjective continuity from that mind or even subjectivity at all, and the purely materialist view that the powerful experience of subjective agency, the one true mystery we all experience directly, was a phenomenological fluke that served no purpose.¹ It was impossible for me to imagine then, colliding with these strange new doctrines, that some form of any of these ideas could take root and become entrenched in the power structures that now dominate and exploit humankind and the planet. I became preoccupied with these woodshed worldbuilding projects—homemade science fiction futures bolted onto origin-story mythologies serving new imagined identities—especially when you capture them at their points of origin, before too many people get involved and they become baroque complexities that are more difficult to study.

My hometown feels like a doomed place to me now. Everything is privatized, water precarity is looming. At the end of my block another “megachurch” is being built, where unlicensed outdoor events sound like monster-truck rallies, a pastor screaming over amplifiers “HE IS RISEN!” The “prosperity doctrine” he preaches tells those assembled that material riches can be theirs on Earth if they enact “spiritual warfare” to claim territory for Christ’s coming kingdom in the United States.² Employment sites are loaded with multi-level marketing schemes and job after job consisting of “AI training”—grooming a predictive system to imitate what you know and can do: a job that negates itself. These listings are both posted and evaluated by machine learning models. In the world of business a great liquidation is occurring as seemingly unrelated corporations pivot from commodities to AI infrastructure.³ Outrageous tax breaks for building data centers show the avalanche lurch of the economy swinging completely into the consumption of electricity for no apparent benefit to life. It is like standing outside of a warehouse packed with surplus food that is being intentionally burned while you starve. All of this is supposed to be building towards something. Stones are pulled from the dungeon’s hellmouth to build an imagined foundation platform between heaven and underworld, while humanity yearns for a jubilee year that never arrives. These data centers being built everywhere are part of the vast infrastructure of a police state, surveilling a dying, outmoded humanity. Metadata is recorded on an infinite number of tablets that will never be broken, piling upwards into an emplotted future.

This essay reads the mythological emblem of the Tower of Babel as an allegory of organization, eschaton, and paralysis in the face of looming disaster—not a symbol that delivers meaning whole, but an accumulation of fragmented recognitions, gaping Janus-faced into the darkness of both future and past. In the work of the late German theorist and critic Walter Benjamin, the symbol is a theological concept—unchanging meanings inscribed into the world whole—while the allegorical mode works with image “fragments” which must be interpreted in order to produce meaning. The Tower I am speaking of has become an allegory in Benjamin’s sense, its meaning produced through its repeated retellings and interpretations. Fixed at once in historicized mythology and in a mythologized future, the tower stands at the threshold between biological and technological production—with language as its unstable building material. The tower provides a genealogical schema for the creation of imagined identities like nations and religions. Its modern afterlife is examined here as a figure for a just-out-of-reach, stratified, technological modernity, in which revolutionary gesture is performed in a manner absorbed and nullified by power. Through an accumulation of associations, the tower comes to represent the attempt to control uncertainty—a colossal project of futurity, the reading of signs—connecting ancient divination to contemporary predictive technologies, whose foundational operation is forecasting the next element in a sequence from the statistical weight of everything already written. The large language model (LLM), which has impacted translation—the problem at the heart of the Babel myth—is also, at bottom, a prediction engine. In the technical realm of finance, the structure of the gambling hall is identified, where the future is experienced as a narrowing horizon of possibility on which to cast bets. The current AI bubble—and its attendant eschatological rhetoric of “singularity” and machine transcendence—is a degenerate utopia: ideology changed into the form of a myth. The tower comes to function as a vision that formally resolves the contradiction between the overproduction of computational power and the uselessness of that power to fundamentally reorganize social relations.