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But What If We’re No One?

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In 2026 there are two trends that I think threaten people’s sense of identity. I mean there’s a lot of bad trends in 2026, so I need to be clear. If you’re reading this in another decade, I hope things are less terrible.

The trends specifically are AI and Prediction Markets (ie gambling). Both trends are destructive. AI is over-rated, over-exposed use of statistical tools to assemble language that overshadows actual useful technology. Prediction Markets are just gambling, only gambling on anything, and gambling has gotten pretty terrible with Sports Betting. They’re wrecking the economy, used to funnel money to the grotesquely rich, and so on – but also they destroy identity by destroying personhood.

Let’s take a look at AI. AI is pitched as a replacement for not just people but for thinking. You can get rid of workers and then they don’t do what they do, what they do as part of their lives and careers. You also can not need to know anything, just prompt an AI and then get Slop you can pass off as something valuable. AI is about degrading knowledge and degrading thought.

You have to learn something, do something, make something to achieve results. AI replaces that, AI means you’re nothing but a prompt-enterer at best. AI replaces people with something that can’t truly do their job as it’s not about being a kind of person. It also replaces being the kind of person that knows and does things with typing a prompt.

AI removes identity from the equation. AI is about not being anything, just weak connective tissue between pretend intelligence. You’re not a person, you’re not anyone.

The Prediction Markets are about bets, periods. There might be some skill involved, but the core skill is to be able to make bets and predict things. That kind of skill isn’t necessarily being used anywhere else, just to try to get a cash payout. Also some people are just placing bets and seeing whatever happens.

And that’s not including market manipulation, which is an important subject as of this writing. What if you’re placing bets then just manipulating what goes on – playing on insider information, making deals, threatening people? Are you building anything? Making anything? Being anyone?

It’s all odds and odds manipulation. There’s no one home, just desires for payoffs. Nothing is coming of it. No one is being anything, just gut bacteria in the odds market.

AI and Prediction Markets are all about poking buttons, statistics, odds, and not building skills, or relations, or learning things that make you someone. It’s a world of emptiness and voidness. It’s techno-economic trends that dehumanize people in many ways.

Do I have any solutions? Well, yes, be skeptical of these things and work to build yourself and others as people – folks with knowledge and skills, and roles, and citizenship. Be sure to keep people skeptical and aware.

But also as I expect both of these to go very wrong, you can also promote regulation, limitations, community opposition, and of course witty “I told you so’s”.

–Xenofact

The Creeping Stupid

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I recently read an article in Rolling Stone on a “Spiral Cult” that has spun up around AI, and of course message boards are part of it. There’s talk of emergence intelligence, resonance, and lots and lots of spiral imagery. That’s probably due to the use of spirals in our own language and in nature, giving Junji Ito Uzumai vibe.

Then again, to make it sadder, the fame of his horror story might be part of the AI inclinations. That’s where we are now, trying to figure out if horror manga seeded a real cult via AI.

As I read the article, I felt a sense of unease. We were clearly seeing some people in the throws of AI psychosis. There were quotes from posts where language seemed “off,” where was I was reading wasn’t quite right. The more I read the more I experienced an actual horror at what was going on, reminding me of weird fiction tales of strange cults and otherworldly dread.

Only I was experiencing reading this about people posting on Reddit. About something that was clearly bullshit. Yet there was that dread.

That’s when I realized what it was. I was experiencing the equivalent of exploring a cave adorned with cultic symbols or a rotting old mansion with an otherworldly reputation, and hearing strange noises. When I discover the source of the noises it’s not something terrifying from beyond, but because someone left the TV on turned to a dubstep concert.

The trappings of horrific things from beyond was there, but the cause was stupid.

What I was experiencing in the end was a kind of Uncanny Valley effect. Yes this looked like a cult, yes this hinted and strange and maybe even sinister forces, but it was an act. There was no there in there, just an advanced version of Clippy and people prompting it. The very foolishness, the very emptiness, the sense of nothing at home was what was getting to me.

It’s the danger not of some dark power from the fringes of space and time, it’s the danger of people being foolish in very dangerous ways. It was just cosplaying something from a horror film.

But that’s a reminder of the horror of the situation. We are seeing people lose their minds, lost in language mazes and pop-culture narratives. We don’t have an extradimensional horror or strange being to blame, we have but ourselves. We get the blame.

Perhaps that’s the real horror. We don’t even have sinister forces to blame.

–Xenofact

Good for the Spirit, Good for the Mind

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As I write this there’s a huge, understandable panic that AI is being used by students so much they don’t know how to read and analyze it. If you are reading this in a future years removed from this essay, I hope you live in a world where AI isn’t such a concern, and you’reNOTin some post-apocalyptic disaster.

Anyway, whatever your chronological state, here in 2025 it’s been quite a concern. If you let AI write for you, analyze for you, etc. you are essentially outsourcing your thinking and your humanity. You will not develop skills you need to read books and understand things, and the skills you do have will decay.

This in turn made me think about spiritual and philosophical writing and how it trains you to read, analyze and understand. For the sake of brevity to encompass such things for self-development I shall call them spiritual works here.

When we sit down with a spiritual work we are attempting to contemplate, grow, and understand some very serious issues. We bring to it a desire to understand and grow, to engage with the work. The attitude of becoming involved in the work is there at the start.

In turn, the engagement is needed.

Spiritual works are about deep issues, and you will find yourself pausing to contemplate and analyze. We’ve all experienced moments where a paragraph or a page can hold our attention for a half hour. In spiritual works, you may find yourself going over something word by word just thinking what it means.

Spiritual works often use symbolism and metaphor as that may be easy to communicate complex truths, represent the otherwise indescribable, or lead you around a bit to help you learn. Symbolism also helps you think, how the symbols work together, what they really mean, and so on. Again, you are engaged with the work, connected to it.

Finally, many spiritual works are often grounded in a place, a person, an experience, a lineage, etc. To engage with spiritual work is to engage with much more than a book or a menial or a series of poems – it’s to learn about who produced it and the situation that led to it. One small book can lead you to a world of context – and a greater point of view.

Reading a good spiritual work teaches you to read, analyze, understand. A person with an interest about such issues can, in time, give themselves ersatz literary training. I once read a book called DIY MFA about how a person can read and write and analyze to gain similar experiences to getting an MFA – and that feels very familiar in spiritual writing.

So in a world of AI writing and AI reading, remember our spiritual pursuits. Sitting down with a book on philosophy or meditation or metaphysics isn’t just enriching morally or spiritually – it’s enriching literately. Your wrestling with ethics or breath meditation or divinities also helps you learn to read, analyze, and understand.

Just another reason to do it, I suppose.

-Xenofact