Episode 21: Prometheus Rewritten

 

Episode 20: Intimate Heat, Impersonal Fire

 

How We Lost the Plot: What Happens When a Society Loses Its Shared Story — and Its Sense of the Real

 

We are living through a transformation so deep it cannot be captured by economics alone—one that is reshaping not just our livelihoods, but our very sense of what is real.

For years, we have been told that the middle class is shrinking because of technology, globalization, or a temporary mismatch between skills and opportunity. But I’ve come to believe this explanation is too small for the scale of the transformation underway. Something deeper—structural, historical, and ontological—is happening beneath the surface.

The rupture began, I think, with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For all its brutality and distortion, the Cold War locked elites and masses into a shared geopolitical project. The “people”—industrial workers, clerical labor, students, soldiers—were not merely economic units. They were strategic resources held in reserve. Welfare systems, pensions, public education, accessible healthcare—these were more than social goods; they were stabilizing investments in a mobilizable population.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that incentive evaporated. The need for mass participation waned. Wars no longer required millions of bodies. Global markets fractured the old national economies. Capital gained the ability to pool talent, labor, and consumption anywhere, anytime.

And then, almost imperceptibly, the bottom 90 percent began to be reclassified.

The shift wasn’t announced. There was no proclamation that citizenship had thinned into a legal fiction. But the effect was unmistakable: the majority were transformed from rights-bearing citizens into something closer to functional subalterns—their value measured less by participation in a social contract than by their capacity for extraction. What the colonized experienced under imperial capitalism—precarity, disposability, a structural inability to speak their world into legitimacy—is now resurfacing inside the very nations that once exported it.

Globalization, financialization, and the reach of ICT technologies didn’t simply disrupt industries; they dissolved the underlying logic of the post-war settlement. The middle class was not just an income bracket. It was a historical artifact, sustained by an implicit agreement: your stability for our stability.

When that agreement lost its geopolitical utility, it began to fray. Today, millions find themselves in a condition that would be familiar to the forgotten and ignored peoples of colonial history: living in survival mode, unable to secure housing, healthcare, education, or even a coherent narrative about their place in the world. The core features of the colonial condition—disposability, marginalization, ontological erasure—have quietly migrated into the heart of advanced democracies.

This is where the ontological dimension becomes unavoidable.

When a population is structurally downgraded, the first thing that collapses is not material well-being, but epistemic standing. People lose the right to define what is real. Their experiences are pathologized; their struggles reframed as personal failure; their intuitions dismissed as irrational. They are spoken about but not with. They occupy the position Gayatri Spivak famously articulated: the subaltern cannot speak—not because they are silent, but because the dominant structure cannot hear them.

The newly precarious majority now inhabits that same position. They are feeling the early symptoms of ontological displacement: mistrust in institutions, attraction to unconventional imaginaries, and the search for alternative ways of making sense of a world that no longer reflects them back to themselves.

People are losing the ability to locate themselves within the story of their own society. They feel the decoherence before they can name it. And without a shared ontology, the old narratives collapse.

But this structural demotion couldn’t succeed on economic grounds alone. It required a second, equally powerful process: the ontological occupation of public reality.

This is where the modern nation-state reveals its updated function. In earlier eras, the state told a story of shared destiny and upward mobility. Today, its narrative machinery operates differently. Rather than generating cohesion, it maintains ontological containment. The purpose is no longer to unify the public around a common project but to limit the bandwidth through which alternative realities can be articulated, circulated, and taken seriously. The state does not need to own the media. It only needs to shape the frame within which media operates.

This is an organizational lock on the imagination.

Through narrative saturation, regulatory pressure, and alignment with capital, the media ensures that the public sphere remains narrow, individualized, and emotionally charged but politically impotent. The effect is subtle but decisive. People do not simply lose access to material stability; they lose the legitimacy of their own worldview. Their ability to describe the world in terms that make sense to them is delegitimized before it can become politically actionable.

The domestic precariat now occupies the position of the colonized subaltern. Their economic hardship is compounded by ontological displacement: a sense that the world is no longer coherently narratable from their point of view. They feel the incoherence before they can name it. And in that epistemic void, the old social contract dissolves.

Under these conditions, alternative ontologies—mutualism, decoloniality, ecological relationality, local sovereignty, new forms of consciousness—are perceived as threats, not because they are dangerous in themselves, but because they expose the narrowness of the dominant frame. They reveal that the ontological perimeter around “reality” is politically maintained. They show that the terrain of possibility is larger than the story we are being told.

Yet this ontological occupation is not as stable as it appears.

People sense the fracture. Precarity sharpens perception. Climate destabilization amplifies ontological dissonance. AI enables individuals to engage in accelerated autodidactic exploration, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. The cracks are widening. New world-making efforts are emerging from the margins—small coherence clusters in a landscape that is otherwise fragmenting.

Perhaps that is the deeper task now—not to restore the old social contract, which belonged to a geopolitical era that no longer exists, but to cultivate alternative ontologies capable of grounding life in a rapidly shifting world. To listen with the newly subalternized majority, just as anthropologists once listened with the colonized, and recognize that their struggle is not only material but ontological.

We are living through a reordering of the real. Naming it is the first step. Reimagining it is the work ahead.

 

 

The Quiet Gifts of AI

 

                                    Why the most meaningful benefits are the hardest to notice.

Across the public conversation about AI, fear dominates the emotional landscape. People imagine disruption, displacement, and instability—roles dissolving, workflows collapsing, identities becoming unmoored. These fears are not unreasonable; they reflect genuine decoherence events, moments when the structures that once held our lives together lose stability before new ones have fully formed.

Yet this is only half of the story.

What rarely receives attention are the subtle coherence gains—those quiet, cumulative expansions of clarity, flow, creativity, and agency that become possible when AI is used not to replace human effort but to deepen it. When engaged as a collaborator rather than a threat, AI becomes a coherence technology, a force that restores cognitive harmony in a world increasingly engineered toward distraction and fragmentation.

I have experienced this directly in both my teaching and my multi-media storytelling. The contrast between my pre-AI and post-AI life is not measured in productivity metrics or efficiency curves; it is felt at the ontological level, in the way my days hold together, the way my work aligns with my values, and the way I inhabit my creative identity. This is what the public conversation overlooks: the quiet gifts—the coherence gains—that accumulate when AI is woven thoughtfully into the architecture of one’s life.

The essential question, then, is not whether AI will eliminate jobs. The deeper question is whether AI will help us reorganize our lives toward greater coherence, or whether fear will keep us bound to patterns that are already failing us.

 

The Real Problem Isn’t Job Loss — It’s Decoherence

The anxiety surrounding AI often collapses into a single storyline: the fear that one’s profession may disappear. But beneath that surface-level concern lies something more pervasive—the sense that life itself is losing its structural integrity. Rapid technological change can produce a felt experience of fragmentation, overwhelm, disorientation, and cognitive overload. It is not simply that tasks change; it is that the inner scaffolding that once made those tasks feel meaningful begins to tremble.

What people miss is that AI can also reverse these dynamics. Used well, it can restore alignment at multiple scales—moment-to-moment clarity, long-term flow, narrative cohesion, and relational harmony. To see how this plays out, consider how AI reshaped my teaching practice.

 

Teaching Through the Lens of Coherence

Long before AI entered the picture, I had already gravitated toward the lexical approach to ESL—a pedagogy built on authentic materials, chunking, collocations, noticing, and pragmatics. But the lexical approach demands an immense amount of material. Each lesson requires naturalistic dialogues, contextualized idioms, controlled practice, slow-versus-natural speech contrasts, and tasks that mirror real-life communicative pressure.

Doing this manually took a lot of time and patience. A single high-quality lesson could take hours to construct, which meant that each week I spent close to ten hours in preparation—often compromising on depth simply because time was finite.

AI changed this dynamic entirely.

Instead of wrestling with scarcity, I could now generate original dialogues, adapt authentic media, design tasks tailored to a specific student, and build lessons that captured the texture of real-world English with remarkable precision. The surprising revelation was not merely the time saved, but the qualitative leap in pedagogy. My teaching became more responsive, more imaginative, and more coherent. And because I was no longer drained by the mechanics of preparation, the classroom shifted from a site of production to a space of relational presence.

This is the unrecognized value of AI in education: it reduces cognitive friction and returns the human teacher to the heart of the learning encounter.

 

AI as an Autodidactic Amplifier

But the quietest gift of AI, at least for me, has unfolded outside the classroom. AI did not simply refine my teaching; it amplified my learning. As a lifelong autodidact, I have always depended on books, archives, and the slow accumulation of insight over decades. What AI offers is not a shortcut but a deepening—a way of accelerating understanding while preserving (and often enhancing) the richness of inquiry.

When I bring a question to AI, I am not outsourcing cognition. I am creating the conditions for a more resonant form of learning. AI operates as an interlocutor who never tires, never rushes, and never reduces complexity for the sake of convenience. Instead, it enriches the conversation, introduces perspectives I would not have considered, and helps me map connections across disciplines that would have taken months or years to uncover on my own.

A recent experience brought this into sharper focus. During a discussion about the topology of awareness, I referenced a scene from a Carlos Castaneda novel I had read nearly forty years ago—a memory so distant it had become more atmosphere than detail. AI responded instantly, not only recognizing the reference, but expanding it, contextualizing it, and weaving it into our broader exploration of shifting modes of attention. That exchange did something a course or tutor could never do: it created a bridge between a dormant memory and my present-day practice of perceptual awareness.

In the days that followed, I found myself becoming more attuned to the subtle “fields” around me—the ambient shifts, the micro-mutations in my environment, the felt gradients of coherence and decoherence that shape lived experience. This transfer of learning into real life is the hallmark of true autodidacticism. AI doesn’t merely inform; it transforms. It helps me inhabit the world with more presence, more nuance, and more curiosity.

In this sense, AI is not the modern equivalent of a tutor. It is a cognitive amplifier—one that allows autodidacts to operate with greater depth, greater reach, and greater continuity across the full arc of their lives.

 

The Coherence Dividend

The ten hours a week saved through AI-powered lesson design didn’t vanish; they became structural supports for one of the most ambitious creative projects of my life: a multi-media storytelling ecosystem built around a serialized science-fiction narrative, released simultaneously in prose, audio, video, and auto-dubbed versions in eight languages, distributed across seven platforms, and supported by a coordinated marketing cadence.

This is not a side project. It is a full-scale creative pipeline—one that would have been impossible without AI. The tools did not replace my imagination; they expanded the horizon of what was feasible, transforming isolated creative impulses into a coherent ecosystem.

The result is not merely increased output. It is a more integrated life.

Teaching, writing, producing, and worldbuilding no longer compete with one another; they resonate. AI, in this configuration, is not a threat to human meaning-making—it is the scaffolding that allows meaning-making to scale.

 

Why Coherence Matters More Than Efficiency

Much of the public defense of AI centers on productivity, but productivity is a thin metric, incapable of capturing the lived texture of a human life. Coherence is the more consequential measure. It asks whether one’s activities reinforce or fragment one another, whether identity expands or contracts, whether one’s internal narrative becomes more aligned or more discordant.

AI can certainly create decoherence when used carelessly. It can blur attention, dilute agency, or foster dependency. But used deliberately, AI clarifies structure, strengthens identity, amplifies agency, and creates the spaciousness needed for higher-order thinking and creative work.

In my experience, AI functions not as a machine, but as a coherence catalyst—a means of rediscovering the integrated architecture of a life.

 

The Real Question Isn’t “Will AI Take My Job?”

The more generative question is this: Will AI help me reorganize my life into a more coherent whole?

You can always return to the old ways of working. Nothing prevents it. But once you experience the flow, clarity, and alignment that come from an AI-augmented life, it becomes difficult to justify going back.

Most people anchor their identity in manual processes—preparation, research, grinding workflow. AI does not attack these identities; it reveals they are smaller than the person who holds them.

This is what frightens people. This is also what liberates them.

 

The Future of Work Is a Future of Coherence

AI will not end human creativity, teaching, or meaning-making. It will end the cognitive fragmentation that once made those pursuits unnecessarily difficult.

If we use AI only through the lens of fear, we amplify decoherence. If we use AI as a thought partner, we amplify coherence.

The technology is not the variable. Our mode of engagement is.

For those willing to enter into an intentional partnership with AI—not as a crutch, not as a threat, but as a collaborator—the gains in coherence will be profound.

That is the story worth telling. And that is the future worth building.