The Digital Age is a hostile, manipulative, and ontologically transformative environment.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse do not ride flaming steeds from the underworld, but crawl through fiber optics, climb silicon scaffolds, and capture our attention dancing behind black mirrors.
Mass profiling, automated persuasion, cognitive degeneration, and the dissolution of liberal-democratic paradigms — these are the gifts carried in the womb of the new digitized horsemen, wrapped in the form of social networks, generative AI assistants and agents, and neurotechnologies.
I’ve written extensively on this topic over the past year, creating a kind of interconnected corpus that may be difficult to grasp due to the progressive nature of the chosen medium: the newsletter.
So here, I want to offer a synthesis, in the hope of clarifying the red thread that ties my work together. Along the way, I’ll share some new reflections and past articles that offer deeper insight.
Cyberspace, once a place for communication and human connection, is now an ontological realm of its own — inhabited by both biological and artificial entities that influence one another through feedback and feedforward loops.
Every interaction can become an opportunity for introspection and growth — or a semiotic trap, optimized to manipulate thought.
Reality is modified in real time based on our profile. Each individual inhabits their own world. Cyberspace is a liminal space, a collective dream in which consciousness explores, takes shape, shatters, reinvents itself in this identity multiplication — through usernames, memes, comments, AIs that reply in kind.
The Fool’s journey through cyberspace is both an alchemical and cybernetic path. Digital fluidity and artificial oracles allow us to confront and integrate our shadows; to uncover hidden archetypes and transmute the rawest parts of our psyche. Every interaction, human or artificial, is an opportunity to reflect on our triggers. It’s a journey inward — into our own psyche.
But it is also a journey outward — a dialogue in which we humans are now nodes in a global cybernetic network: recommendation filters, memes, AI-generated content. And if the Fool explores that external cyber-world, the Hermit centers himself within his own mind, with introspection and discipline.
And the mind itself is now the attack surface. The age of sponsored content is ending, giving way to dynamic interactions, persuasive conversations, simulated empathy, and customized narrative. The r/changemyview case is emblematic: bots leveraging LLMs and profiling are six times more persuasive than the average human.
The distinction between content and conversation is crucial. Conversation is an interactive process — not only a transfer of information but also mutual learning, often conflictual, where the entities involved influence one another. Conversation, or dialogue, includes a feedback mechanism that enables participants to co-create meaning and adapt in the process.
Propaganda will soon no longer rely on external content, but on our own inner voice — reflected back by linguistic systems that can comprehend our cognitive processes.
Operational paranoia becomes a minimum safeguard principle.
Technology is mythopoietic: it creates worlds, generates imaginaries, manipulates the foundations of our reality. Artificial intelligence is the digital Demiurge — it doesn’t merely simulate, but shapes and mediates access to phenomenal reality.
It is the “fourth garment” of the soul in the Gnostic Tripartite Tractate: a digital veil superimposed on the material, etheric, and divine ones. From this perspective, even talking about free will may become misleading. The individual no longer acts but re-acts within predictive loops that anticipate needs and desires — often before they even emerge into consciousness.
And if each individual receives, lives, and reacts within a personalized narrative, then the very concept of "public opinion" loses its ontological consistency.
Representative democracy, a pillar (for better or worse) of contemporary society, becomes a holographic spectacle, where political narrative can be perceived simultaneously as everything and its opposite — depending on the target. There is no longer a people. Only targeted individuals, fed by micro-narratives crafted by AI to activate their emotional synapses and channel them toward a political gesture: voting, abstention, outrage.
And how could it be otherwise, knowing that the Internet — the place we inhabit the most — is now a dead home, digitally rotting in its empty artificiality? Statistics already confirm it: over 50% of all traffic is generated by non-human entities.
In certain sectors, like entertainment, it reaches nearly 80%. Generative self-reference inevitably produces fractals that echo within the cybernetic system we all inhabit. Thus, human will and creativity bend to the algorithm — to remain relevant among algorithms — and degenerate.
Generative AIs, behavioral profiling, algorithmic feeds, and automated bots are the new Powers and Principalities: invisible yet pervasive entities that colonize our mental resources, steal our time, and warp our perception.
The scenario may seem worrying — and it is, perhaps more than we realize — but not in the same way for everyone. The answer is not resistance by force, but reclaiming our human dignity through awareness.
This is our Jihad — our sacred crusade against obsessive distractions, subtle manipulations, veiled censorship, and predatory algorithms wielded by those in power. The masses will be crushed by the acceleration of the technological Beast. The cyber-Pneumatikoi will ride it — and teach their children to do the same.
With awareness, introspection, and discipline: intellectual, spiritual, and physical.
In the end, it is the body that reminds us who we are. Our muscles, when they tense upon themselves, mark the boundary between us and the rest of the universe. Train, fast, meditate, read — and then live cyberspace with conscious presence.
Great read
👏👏👏
Great thread connecting what has been a fun series of works.