The Degenerate Utopia

Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them

— Mormon Doctrine and Covenants, 132: 20 (1835)

Now that we have coaxed the lightning to curl round our feet like a kitten and, fearless as eagles, have counted the freckles on the face of the sun, to whom shall we now pay supreme homage? Other blind forces are born to us, other major fears, and thus we end up prostrating ourselves before the machines that are our daughters, before various ideas that we dreamed up innocently one morning.

— Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (1926)

The New Tower of Babel is a vision of the future that, rather than opening a space for the genuinely new, glosses the present polycrisis by projecting it forward in an idealized, crystalized form. The imagined “singularity”—a science fiction mythologized rapture in which men give birth to a software-based god—formally resolves the contradiction between the overproduction of computational power and the inability of that power to reorganize social relations by recasting it as a mythic vision. Following this strategy, the speculation fueling the current AI bubble inhabits the same suffocating contradiction: either machines will transcend into superintelligence, upgrading an inefficient and unpredictable humanity along with it, or civilization will collapse. The only way to justify increasing investment in destructively accelerating technological production with no foreseeable economic return is to funnel those resources into the only remaining industry: war. Each of these scenarios is fatalistic. None admits the possibility that human beings might consciously reorganize their relationship to technology, labor, and one another.

To use French philosopher Louis Marin’s term, the fatalistic myth of the New Tower of Babel is a degenerate utopia: a vision that mythically resolves a fundamental social contradiction without negating existing conditions (1984). The reigns of capital are pulled taut between a handful of embattled charioteers, each laying claim to authority, but each equally determined to lead the cart off the same cliff— the pursuit of infinitely expanding “value.” This goal may lead to the complete annihilation of the natural world and the subjugation of humanity, a reality that coexists with a story of cosmic liberation and utopic achievement, like a billboard heralding a new city that blocks the view of the smouldering pit of the construction site.

Religious studies scholar Robert Geraci (Geraci 2010) describes the adepts of ancient temples like the ziggurat of Etemenanki as both engineers and priests, “who have been one and the same from time to time,” working together to, “build the objects that would engage humanity and represent the gods.” The domains of authority that we tend to think of as counterbalanced opposites borrow grammars from one another in a sort of dance that pantomimes the advancing movement of history. At times these grammars of authority merge. German philosopher Ernst Bloch, writing in 1929, identified a convergence of the spiritual and scientific at the dawn of modernity:

The more plain and advanced the technology, the more mysteriously it intersected with the old taboo region of vapors, supernatural velocity, Golem-robots, blue thunderbolts. Thus it touched what was once thought of as the realm of magic. An Edison is much closer to Doctor Faustus than to Herbert Spencer. (Bloch and Joron 1998)

Naturalist Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1959) did to the authority of Genesis what vernacular translation had done to the authority of Church Latin: it revealed that the story a civilization had told itself about its own origin was not fixed truth but a contingent product of natural history. The effect was vertiginous. If human beings were not the telos of a divine plan but one branch of an indifferent process, then the old authorities—theological, moral, political—that had grounded social order in a cosmic hierarchy that extended to seats of power on earth lost their foundation. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer attempted to fill the void immediately, extending evolutionary competition into a universal law governing societies, economies, and moral systems. His “survival of the fittest” cast nature itself as providing the organizing principle that God no longer could. Darwin had not addressed the relationship of man to animals in the Origin. The obvious question for every reader was how to fill the fossil gap between ape and man, and Victorian ethnological societies replied with already prevailing racist ideologies, conveniently placing Anglo-Protestants at the top of an imagined hierarchy and ranking non-European peoples along a developmental ladder from “savagery” towards civilization (Barton 2018). The English statistician Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Darwin,¹ argued in Hereditary Genius (1869) that human ability was hereditary and that the species could be improved through selective breeding. In Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), he coined the term “eugenics”—from the Greek for “good in birth”—and lobbied for it to be adopted, in his words, “like a new religion” (Galton 1904). Where Spencer offered a philosophy, Galton outlined a program: statistical methods for ranking human populations by biological value, and institutional proposals for ensuring that the “fit” outbred the “unfit.” First-wave eugenics (roughly 1900-1945) merged Galtonian premises with the new science of genetics to produce forced sterilization laws across the United States and Europe—over sixty thousand Americans sterilized, mostly poor, disabled, Black and Indigenous—and supplied, as historian Daniel Kevles (Kevles 1995) has documented, “a model for the Nazis, who sterilized several hundred thousand people and, brandishing their research into the genetics of individual and racial differences, claimed scientific justifications for the Holocaust” . Thomas Henry Huxley— “Darwin’s Bulldog,” Spencer’s friend, and grandfather of both the novelist Aldous and the biologist Julian—had resisted this trajectory in his 1893 Evolution and Ethics, arguing that ethical progress required resisting natural selection, that civilization was a garden maintained against nature rather than an extension of it. It was Julian Huxley, not his grandfather, who would carry the eugenic program forward through the twentieth century—serving as president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, and coining, in his 1957 essay “Transhumanism,” the term that would name the next iteration of the project. After Nazi atrocities discredited mainline eugenics, the movement did not die but rebranded, trading coercion for “choice” and racial hygiene for “human enhancement” while preserving the underlying conviction that populations could and should be sorted by biological value. Eugenics was never simply another pseudo-science. By asserting that statistical methods for quantifying humans could be objective, it was a worldbuilding project—a New Tower rising from the rubble of the old authorities, offering a biological telos in place of a theological one.

“Mental Defectives in Virgina” Scale of mental “types” and their proscribed labor, as determined by IQ testing, Virginia corrections catalog (1915)

Sifting through the history of claims to authority, there are countless examples of costume changes between new and old. Where eugenics swapped the theological framing for a biological one, some movements settled into syncretic visions that kept both. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a nineteenth-century American-born religion, built its narrative directly on the biblical Table of Nations. It constructs a complex line of descent from Noah’s son, Shem, to the founders of the church, asserting that these Europeans colonizing the American continent were actually a lost tribe of Israel, and the indigenous people they met were distant kin—a “fallen” tribe of Israelites whose unrighteousness was held to be legible in the darkness of their skin, such that converts were expected to emerge from baptism “white and delightsome” (Akenson 2007). Beginning as one more then-strange doctrine among the many that characterized the era, the early Mormon church absorbed the pseudo-Eygptian symbolism of Masonic pageantry and adopted the practice of baptising those already dead. Proxy baptism imagined lost generations united, allowing parents to see themselves rejoined with their dead children in the afterlife—a balm during a time of rampant infant mortality.²

Because every member was enjoined to trace their own line and stand proxy for the dead, the church needed to record as many of the people who had ever lived as it could reach—an imperative that turned a religious duty into a feat of data engineering. That drive produced GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communication) in the 1980s, a standardized open format for exchanging genealogical data across software and databases. GEDCOM became the globally accepted norm for genealogical data interchange: structuring individuals, families, and relationships in hierarchical text-based files. The church’s computational genealogical infrastructure—now FamilySearch—is among the largest such systems in the world. These records present themselves as an informational grammar, claiming the authority of religious genealogies like those in the Bible and the Icelandic Eddas while also borrowing the apparent objectivity of formatted data—but they are better described as a fictional one. Paternity tests, needless to say, are a recent invention, and the cultures the LDS church has tried to record kept vastly different family structures, naming customs, and practices of adoption, none of which survive translation into a single schema intact.

This data project was always already an engine for defeating death—proxy baptism welding the generations into a single eternal family—so it makes sense that a religion already intimate with technology and characterized by its yearning for resurrection and eternal life would be able to find common cause with transhumanists.

The Mormon Transhumanist Association is a current-day movement within Mormon culture that explicitly advocates a synthesis of singularitarianism and Latter-day Saints doctrine, where ideas of “mind-uploading” and digital transcendence are treated as extensions of the church’s own promise of exaltation to godhood in the afterlife. The transhumanist- “rationalist” idea that our reality is itself a computer simulation provides a technologized version of the capstone of Mormon theosis, transforming what might otherwise be “a mere loose alignment of slightly rhyming transhumanist and religious concepts” into a complete vision (Bialecki 2022).

Geraci has named the convergence of religion and technological overproduction “Apocalyptic AI.” The “scriptures” of this new theology are pop science books whose earliest prophecies were found published in science fiction magazines. The founding expectation of this faith is that machine intelligence will achieve transcendence, that human minds will be uploaded into immortal computational substrates, and that all suffering will be resolved in the light of a superintelligent successor to humanity. It is a specifically American ideological dreamworld, the legacy of nineteenth-century eschatological movements that combined restorationist Christianity with what Geraci describes as “the self-understood newness and open possibility of American life” (Geraci 2010, 22).

Computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres have traced the genealogy of a cluster of “interconnected and overlapping ideologies” they call the TESCREAL bundle—Transhumanism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism—which they identify as “direct descendants of first-wave eugenics” emerging in roughly the order of the acronym, many of which were “shaped or founded by the same individuals.”³ Julian Huxley had written that by controlling the “mechanisms of heredity,” that the human species could “transcend itself—not just sporadically… but in its entirety.” Transhumanists in the 1990s adopted Huxley’s language and ambitions, and each successive ideology inherited the conviction that a radically “enhanced” posthuman species, based on flawed metrics like I.Q., is both achievable and morally imperative. The same ideologies that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, sexism) “[…] remain widespread within the movement to build [Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)]” (Gebru and Torres 2024, 1). Gebru and Torres’ TESCREAL bundle not only names a set of beliefs but outlines a funding network linking technology entrepreneurs, philanthropies and research labs. Tech oligarchs such as Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk have directed vast resources toward projects driven by the same eschatological premises: that a “value-aligned” AGI would somehow end scarcity, solve all human problems, even conquer death— and the parallel warning that failure to build or align it correctly could result in human extinction. This double-horizon of salvation or doom produces the single-minded imperative to accelerate development, or more cynically, a cover story rationalizing harms committed in the pursuit of infinitely accumulated and centralized wealth, a similarly faith-based goal. What was once marginal research (building unscoped AGI as opposed to narrowly trained specialized tools) has since become a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, its speculative cosmology underwriting real institutional power. In 2022 a post on Twitter (Now called X), CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman predicted that humanity will have “unlimited intelligence and energy before the decade is out,” repeating a previous claim that superintelligence could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe” (Loizos 2019). The scale of the claim—all future value in the universe (as if “value” is a property of physics)—is the measure by which present harms are justified, the denominator against which any real suffering can be made to appear negligible.

TESCREAList leaders insist that AGI is inevitable, echoing the rationalization for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, that if Western nations do not build AGI, China will, and that it therefore constitutes a national security imperative, insurance for future global investment and legitimization.⁴ Gebru and Torres argue that the notion of AI “safety” promoted by TERSCREAL-affiliated organizations is rooted in the utopian-apocalyptic visions inherited from first-wave eugenicists, who imagined Western civilizational collapse due to dysgenic breeding. Framing the AGI agenda as a safety issue allows companies to present themselves as guardians of an imagined identity, murkily based on heredity and shared cultural values, while simultaneously creating unsafe products, centralizing power, and evading accountability. The logic is self-sealing: present harms—worker exploitation and marginalization, data theft, cultural appropriation, environmental damage, the amplification of racism and xenophobia— are dismissed as mere surface disturbances, negligible against the “astronomical value” of a posthuman future. That logic fails to consider the “value” of current day humanity or the currently unknowable phenomenological experience (if there is one) of a radically altered human subject.

In 2024, Trae Stephens—billionaire co-founder of Anduril, an AI powered autonomous weapons company named after a legendary sword in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy series The Lord of the Rings—delivered a lecture titled “God and Technology” at his nondenomenational church in San Francisco, where he argued that humans, like God, are creators and that “what our soul deeply longs for is progress in building a better future.” Trae and wife Michelle Stephens co-founded the ACTS 17 Collective—Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society—a Bay Area group for “thinkers, builders, and leaders” at which Peter Theil delivered a private lecture series on the topic of “the Antichrist.” Where the seventeenth century’s Antichrist “would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science,” Thiel reasoned, “in the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science” (Butler 2026). This new moral imperative towards technological production has found support in Washington, where revisions to counterterrorism strategy has led law enforcement to refocus on “anti-Capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” “radical transgender,” and “anti-technology extremist” targets (Boguslaw 2026). AI entrepreneur Will Manidis supplied the theological term for what this movement lacks: an “apologetic”—the project of defending the mysteries of faith to nonbelievers. Andreesen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle, a close ally to Thiel protege and US Vice president, JD Vance, frames AI development as “pro-family” and has invested in Hallow, a Catholic prayer app whose twenty-four million users can consult an AI chatbot “designed to provide answers based on the teachings of the Catholic Church.”⁵ Harvard humanist chaplain Greg Epstein identifies a marriage of convenience: “They’re trying to imbue wealth with meaning. But they’re also trying to imbue a certain kind of meaning with wealth”As a result, Christianity gets a luxury rebrand and tech titans get to sanctify their fortunes (Butler 2026).

In a speech at Boyle’s 2025 American Dynamism Summit, JD Vance quoted Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Laborem Exercens to support his assertion that “real innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers.” The Trump administration’s 2025 AI Action Plan promised that AI will “usher in a new golden age of human flourishing” (Butler 2026). In July of 2026, while I was completing this essay, Pope Leo XIV, who had already written with cautious criticism about AI earlier in the year, released his own lengthy encyclical on the topic, entitled Magnifica Humanitas.⁶ Uncannily also referring to AI as a “New Tower of Babel,” the statement clarified the Catholic Church’s social doctrine, its relationship to technology and its perceived role in advocating for humanity. The pope presents the sin of Babel as one of a totalizing uniformity, with a single language being as much the project of Babel as the tower, and uses this valence as a way of promoting plurality as a value of the church, and the digitization and computability of all information under the control of private interests as a counter value. The text also calls for AI to be “disarmed,” critiquing its role in the war economy and as a weapon of domination. In a hair-raisingly post-modern moment, the pope quotes J.R.R. Tolkien’s wizard character Gandalf, a seeming jab at the companies Palantir and Anduril, both named after objects from Tolkien’s fantasy books (Leo XIV 2026). Tolkien was a philologist, who, through the study of words, conjured an entire mythology for an imagined pre-Norman British identity that seems generated from digested Icelandic sagas and other sources, complete with whole fantasy languages and orthographies. He was also a Catholic, the pope reminds us, undercutting those searching his work for symbols to enchant their racist organs of war-profiteering, gently tugging authority back from one magic circle of words and images to another, as one might try to take a dangerous toy from a child.

Marin arrived at the term “Degenerate Utopia” by walking the grounds of Disneyland, whose ideological themes he traces through the spatial arrangement of its various sections. In Tomorrowland’s Carousel of Progress, a seated visitor watches the same family pass through a century of domestic scenes that change only in the quantity of electric implements around them:

[…] the visitor [to Tomorrowland] becomes a spectator, immobilized and passive, seated in front of a circular and moving stage that shows successive scenes taken from family life in the nineteenth century, in the beginning of the twentieth century, today, and tomorrow. It is the same family that is presented in these different historical periods; the story of this “permanent” family is told to visitors, who no longer narrate their own story. History is neutralized; the scenes only change in relation to the increasing quantity of electric implements […]. The individual is shown to be progressively mastered, dominated by utensility. […] The circular motion of the stage expresses this endless technological progress as well as its necessity, its fate. (Marin 1984)

In fear of death and longing for what is dead, the TESCREAList attempts to survive death as a dead thing which continues to act, grasping to stop a ticking clock, finding only the emblem of time as mechanical movement rather than the duration in which we live. The revolving spectacle of commodity fashion creates the illusion of the new.

Benjamin—

Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service. (Benjamin 2002)⁷

Across Disneyland, nature is revealed as a machine and the machine offered back as nature, until the visitor is twice removed from the world and played with by an apparatus whose springs are hidden. The seamlessness of the park depends on that concealment. Disturbed by the sight of a Frontierland cowboy crossing Tomorrowland, and by the thought of a child glimpsing Mickey on his lunch break, Walt Disney had a nine-acre warren of service tunnels—the utilidor—threaded beneath Disneyworld park in Florida, so that costumed “cast members,” delivery crews, refuse, and the central room from which every animatronic figure is operated could all move unseen (Margaritoff 2021). The magic circle above rests heavy atop a hidden labyrinth of labor and infrastructure below.⁸

The utopia the TESCREALists advertise has its own utilidor. Behind its curtain the machinery resolves into people: the “driverless” car steered through its “tricky situations” by a remote worker in the Philippines (Sims 2026). The model trained on data hand-labeled by tens of thousands of crowdworkers and kept usable by content moderators—subcontracted in Kenya at less than two dollars a day—who spend their shifts filtering gore, hate speech, and child sexual abuse material out of its output until their families no longer recognize them (Bender 2023). The industry calls this “ghost work,” unseen by the Western consumer and visible only to the one performing it, precarious enough that a platform can revoke a worker’s livelihood overnight without explanation. Amazon named its crowdwork exchange the Mechanical Turk, after the eighteenth-century chess automaton that hid a human player beneath the board; the system performs the same trick, concealing the human effort any “automated” apparatus still requires. The Maschinenmensch was never the dream of replacing the worker so much as of removing the worker from view—hidden behind a mask, routed, like Disney’s cast members, through tunnels hidden from the view of the owner class. Every proposed delight for those few who inhabit the tower is a growing weight on the backs of those under its foundations.