Fraying The Last Cord of Covenant

The anthropological implications of undiscerning AI adoption and the exploding open of Pandora's Malware

AUTHENTIC HUMAN CONTENT HERE

The last cord of human social covenant is the fraying thread that lets us still tell what is authentic.

For as long as we have been human, craft carried the mark of the maker, and we could trust it because it implied the weight of skill, time, and devotion. This was the cord of social covenant that bound not only the creator to their audience, but between generations; a shared trust that what was passed on was authentic. Now we can imitate anything in an instant. The price for creating art is no longer creativity. The price for contributing to philosophy is no longer wisdom. That cord is fraying, and when it gives way altogether, we lose our sense of what is authentic, and with it the meaning that depends entirely on our collective ability to tell or care about the difference.

Carl Jung considered his Sermons to the Dead to be one of his key and defining works. In it, he describes the nature of man, all humans, as differentiating creatures. His insight is that our very nature is to draw distinctions, to separate light from shadow, true from false, signal from noise. It is through this act of discernment that we become vessels fit to carry meaning.

For Jung, the Sermons were the crystallisation of his direct encounter with the unconscious. The later structures, such as archetypes, individuation, shadow, anima/animus, by his own account, were the outer refinements built upon the raw material first expressed there.

In that work, Jung highlighted the critical necessity of Discernment. Without being able to tell meaning from what is meaningless, or what is authentic from what is synthetic, he believed the human soul would be swallowed back into the undifferentiated mass, losing its sovereignty and devolving into a primal, easily manipulated, herd-like mentality.

Nihilism is not a philosophy anyone chooses; it is the name we give to the void of coherence that devours us when our web of shared meanings cannot hold the weight of the chaos we court.

In everything you read now, if you have the sense, you will be aroused to an unhappy vigilance, looking over your shoulder all the time, hoping ‘a real human wrote this’. And in the not-being-able to trust, the prudent aversion to the synthetic, your bandwidth becomes compromised by this sane and nagging apprehension. The guarded heart remains essentially closed off, and that which you were reaching out to touch remains untouched.

What happens when nothing can be trusted? We become easy prey for demagogues, algorithms, and systems that promise favour, at the price of our sovereignty.

Worse still would be if you suffer no such misgivings, if there is no guarded border to your sovereignty, no line of discernment held, and you simply let everything through.

If your “no” does not mean “no”, your “yes” means nothing.

It is our discernment that defines us, by defining what we stand for and what we believe. If we believe anything, we stand for nothing, and we do not matter, except as more dead weight which the living among us need to contend with to hold the line.

We are either part of the solution or we are part of the problem.

“But he who is weak and a coward, chooses the easier way; he falls back into the death of matter. His soul is swallowed in the outer world. He becomes a number in the mass, ruled not by his own law but by the law of the herd.”

—Carl G Jung, The Seven Sermons of the Dead

But please, tell me again how it’s just a tool. If we fail to appreciate this, we become the unwitting tool of some undead thing whose very nature is illusion and deceit. If we fail to notice this, we have become the agent of that thing, rather than the other way around.

You do not have to be a Luddite, nor short-sighted, to rightly judge the risk and consequence. This moment is not just another in the long line of technological advances we have endured; it is categorically different. The threshold we are staggering across is the democratisation of content generation at a scale we have absolutely no precedent for. For most of us, content is increasingly becoming practically indistinguishable from legitimate craft.

Throughout human history, every craft has come with a barrier to entry. Whether stone-carving, writing, art, printing, or film-making, participation required time, dedication, tools, and apprenticeship. A small portion of the population specialised and invested in the necessary skills, while the rest were consumers and audience. That asymmetry, between the skilled few and the wider many who received them, is a cultural constant, required for social coherence. It regulated not only economies of skill but also trust, lineage, and meaning.

It established guilds of competence, sustained traditions through lineage, and safeguarded the conditions under which meaning could be transmitted with trust and authenticated. The bottlenecks of such skill are so much more than economic thresholds; they are the seals of integrity, critical social regulators, conferring legitimacy, allowing societies to trust that what is produced is authentic. They act as valves by which we are given a digestible feed of craft and content that we can process and integrate, and not be overwhelmed by.

We are unequipped to adequately appreciate the scale and impact of what is unfolding.

We simply do not understand what manner of Pandora’s box we are gaping open. At least with the original Pandora’s box, each thing of strife and discord was its own agent. This is more like Pandora’s Malware, and each of us is its unwitting agent, peddling our synthetic content into the already overwhelmed field, totally unaware how we serve the bidding of the aspect of human nature that we have always written stories about: the one who wants the glory of being a creator, without the rigours of initiation, without devotion to the muse, and without apprenticeship to craft. Nothing for nothing.

Babel, Icarus, Faust, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; every old and persistent story about claiming the gift without honouring the commensurate and necessary cost. This is what the old stories always called the dark arts: the power to invoke the mimicry of art, the mimicry of creativity, the power to deceive wielded in the hands of the deceived.

It used to be the propagandists of governments, political and corporate spin we had to fear, eroding our ability to discern truth, undermining our ability to trust what is real. Journalists were once our last bastion of defence against that, until they were seduced by the same ever-hungry spirit. Then they became the agents of the media companies and the social media overlords that we eventually learned to mistrust. And now we will learn to mistrust everyone.

And when we are unable to trust anything, we will lose the last traces of sovereignty, and we will become desperate enough to crave the whip and the shackle.

It is not as though I don’t use these tools myself; I absolutely do. I am not afraid of AI or AI tools. I am, however, deeply afraid of humans with no discernment and no sense of self, much less mutual responsibility.

With the democratisation of AI-powered agents delivered at scale to the uninitiated masses, it becomes clear at last that the internet is entropic.

Entropy is the state of a closed system in which energy has become so disorganised and diffused that it requires more energy to harness it than the system itself can yield.

This Pandora’s Malware of agentic empowerment is even worse than that, because, unlike energy, there is no limit of constraint in the system; we can just keep on vomiting out content. We are now generating so much information that its proliferation utterly outstrips our capacity to parse effectively, leaving us with a ‘supra-entropic’ field where discernment demands more effort than the content or information can ever be worth.

Into this overfed algae bloom of synthetic digital mania that is choking the air out of everything, the army of Insta-legends continues to arrive, hyping how to “grow your Substack” so you too can get in on the parasitic orgy and siphon your share of life force from our ailing commons.

So, what can we do? What should we do?

There is no neutral ground here. We are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Authenticity is the key to sovereignty and trust in any social context. Without it, there is no solid ground to stand on. Sovereignty depends on the ability to know what is real, to act from a place of discernment rather than coercion or deceit. Trust depends on the assurance that what we are receiving carries the mark of integrity, not the hollow mimicry of it. When authenticity is preserved, individuals can act freely, and communities can cohere. When it is lost, both sovereignty and trust erode, and the social fabric will wear out in a generation or less.

The real flex now is not to triumphantly pump content out, it is to generate less. Be called to produce work of thoughtfulness and discernment, to say only what really needs said; what the world will be made richer for hearing.

How many “creators” on Substack can say that?

If this matters to you at all, the first answer as to what we ought to do, for content creators and consumers alike, is much the same; Begin at least by waking up to this reality, figure out where your line is and how you mean to hold it.

Without authenticity and integrity, what can ever matter?

Thanks for reading this. I hope what I wrote here changed you in some meaningful way.

Rocco

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