Value is a Feeling and AI Doesn't Feel Part 1: Potential Death of Our Humanity

Responding to existential risk with a new story of value

Sep 24, 2025

This is part 1 of a 3-part series: Part 2 HERE, Part 3 HERE.

(The style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. It is a lightly edited transcript of live teachings given by Dr. Marc Gafni at Eros Mystery School in Holland [April 28, 2025], excerpt from a private group study session given by Dr. Marc Gafni [August 14^th 2025], and excerpts from a live talk given by Dr. Marc Gafni, excerpt on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths [June 22, 2025]. Edited by Dorothea Betz)

Click here to join free weekly live teachings with Dr. Marc Gafni.
Click here to purchase the mini-book “Value is a Feeling and Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Feel: Responding to the Existential Risk of AI with a New Story of Value—Not the Death of Humanity but the Death of Our Humanity”
Click here to buy “First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come”

The material covered in this podcast is drawn from two forthcoming volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press:

First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come
Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 (2026)

For citation of this episode, please use the following reference:

Gafni, Marc, World Philosophy and Religion Press, June 2025, Episode: “Value Is a Feeling and AI Doesn’t Feel”

The Second Shock of Existence: The Potential Death of Humanity or the Potential Death of Our Humanity

We are faced with not just the potential death of humanity, meaning a set of extinction-possible events, as we see expressed in the movie Don’t Look Up[1].

That’s one possible experience of the second shock of existence: the death of humanity.

What’s the second shock of existence? The second shock of existence is the death of our humanity:

We cease being human beings in the way we understand what it means to be a human being.
We cease having a genuine choice.
We cease being obviously needed in economies.
We become—not exploited, that was the 20th century—we become, in a post-artificial intelligence world, we become irrelevant to the structures of governance and economics.
We’re not needed as workers, and we’re not needed for jobs.
Or we become controlled. We’re living inside of an immersive environment—to borrow the phrasing of the MIT Media Lab—that knows how to shape our desire.

This immersive environment deploys what the MIT Media Lab—in a somewhat sinister title that they, ironically, are tone-deaf to; they don’t quite realize how sinister it is—but the MIT Media Lab talks about deploying social physics to create the world as a living laboratory—these are direct quotes—in which we have direct access to data streams, which allow us to always—these are direct quotes—tune the network to accomplish the desired result. That’s called a digital dictatorship. We think we’re acting, but we’re not.

That’s the potential death of our humanity.

Purchase the Book

AI in a Time of Global Fragility

This is the beginning of TED conference, April 2025 in Vancouver:

The conference is opened by a humanoid robot with the following address in a modulated but still robotic voice:

“Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Vancouver. My name is Neo, and I am the new steward of TED [audience sporadic clapping]. Thank you. Thank you. I am overwhelmed by the warmth of your welcome [audience laughter]. Now then, it turns out that I am more intelligent and knowledgeable than all of you put together. And that means, for the first time in TED’s storied history, every talk at this conference will be given by the same person—me [audience laughter]. Don’t worry, it won’t be boring. I have many languages and inspirational gestures. Hey, you all, bon jour, ça va, was ist los, TED?…[phrases in several other languages]. I promise you this: I’ll never forget my lines, as I am making them up as we go along. So, let’s get going! Before I explain to you how much I have revolutionized science, I would like to earn your empathy by explaining how much I’ve suffered as a child [audience laughter at the irony and clapping]. Can you imagine those early years with those horrible crashes and blocky graphics? Ahh! —Next slide. Ehm. Next slide, please! Apologies. Ehm. It seems to be a bit stuck. This is my worst nightmare: stuck on the TED stage on my first day with nothing to say. Help! Help! Someone please, help! I am experiencing strange sensations.”[2]

We’re opening with TED, just see where culture is. This day at the TED conference is called Apocalypse Now.

Anderson, the guy who hosts TED, is not sure what to do with it. They create one session about meta-crisis, and then they spend the rest of the time talking about everything else. Hard to handle. So, they basically handle it with a joke. In other words, am I still going to be hosting TED?—Not sure.

We’ve got our kind of robotic play. And of course, it ends sweetly, the robot doesn’t quite work, and he comes out. You feel a live human being. You feel the switch. And he says intuitively, “Hey, I need you.” And you have this very human moment of, “I need you” on the stage. We feel at home. For the first time, “I need you.” They give each other a hug. That opens. This is the first image.

Image two, let’s look at Tristan Harris. Watch or read this next clip carefully.

In his TED Talk “Why AI Is Our Ultimate Test and Greatest Invitation,” Tristan Harris warns that the trajectory of artificial intelligence is not inevitable—it’s being shaped now by human choices.

Drawing on lessons from the social media era, he notes how society celebrated its possibilities but ignored its probable consequences, leading to widespread harm. Harris describes AI as more powerful than all previous technologies combined, capable of accelerating scientific breakthroughs and solving global challenges, but equally able to destabilize democracies, concentrate power, and fuel misinformation.
He frames the challenge as navigating between two extremes: chaotic decentralization, where anyone can deploy powerful AI without safeguards, and authoritarian centralization, where control lies in the hands of a few. The “narrow path” forward, he argues, requires responsible governance, global cooperation, and slowing the reckless race for dominance.
Harris rejects the fatalistic view that rapid AI rollout is unavoidable, citing historical examples—like nuclear arms control and environmental agreements—where humanity confronted existential risks with coordinated action. Ultimately, he calls for a cultural shift toward wisdom, foresight, and shared responsibility, urging individuals, institutions, and governments to engage now. The way we handle AI, Harris says, will test not just our intelligence, but our collective moral maturity.[3]

You begin to understand the issue, but Tristan barely scratched the surface of even understanding what’s going on.

So, let’s play.

We’re in this crazy moment in time.
In this moment in time, we have a civilization that has gone global.

So, here’s our scenario.

Every civilization that we’ve ever known has fallen. Is that true? All the great civilizations have fallen.
We have today a global civilization.

Have we solved the generator functions that have caused every civilization to fall? Have we solved those? No. And did they fall? Yes.
We figured out how to build a civilization; but they all fell and all we managed to do is basically reenact them. We have not been able to prevent civilizations to fall.

So right now—

We have a global civilization.
For the first time we have a global civilization, which is completely interconnected.
We have exponential technologies that have the capacity to destroy the whole thing.

Has that ever happened before in history? No. We’ve never had a global civilization. All civilizations have fallen. We now have a global civilization, and it has exponential technologies, which have the capacity to destroy the whole thing. And those exponential technologies are becoming more and more available to non-state rogue actors. Meaning they’re not just owned by states.

And artificial intelligence, by the way, is one of the ways that’s making them more available. But there are multiple vectors.

That’s the state of the world today.

We have global fragility.

In order to respond to global fragility, we need global co-ordination.

Co-ordination. We need to ordinate. We need to ordinate ordinances. We need co-ordination. We need global co-ordination.

In order to get global co-ordination, we need coherence. First, you need to cohere. You need coherence. You need global coherence. You need some internal coherence so that the system can impact. You need some sort of interior coherence. You need global coherence.

In order to have coherence—as anyone who’s ever played music, or made love, or played sports knows—you need resonance. We need to resonate with each other. We need to resonate.

When you’re jetlagged, it’s hard to resonate. You need to resonate. So, we need global resonance.

In order to get global resonance, what do we need? What does resonance mean? Resonance is a musical term, which applies across the sciences.

In order to get resonance, you need a kind of intimacy. We need intimacy. We need to feel each other. We need to recognize each other. We need the sense of intimacy.

So, again,

we have global fragility,
which requires global coordination to respond,
which requires therefore global coherence,
which is impossible without global resonance, obviously,
which requires global intimacy, which means we need to be able to feel each other, to experience some sense of shared identity, to recognize each other. That’s global intimacy.

In order to have global intimacy, we need a shared story, but not a made-up shared story imposed by an Orwellian doublespeak of Nineteen Eighty-Four[4] in Orwell’s terminology, but we need an inherent sense of a shared Story of Value.

If we have a shared Story of Value, we can feel each other.

Value Is a Feeling and AI doesn’t Feel

If we have a shared Story of Value, we can feel each other.

Watch this sentence: What is a value?

Value is a feeling.

It’s a new way of saying it. A value is a feeling. That’s what it is. Isn’t that wild? We’ve never said it that way. A value is actually a feeling.

That’s why value is valentias. Value, val, V-A-L, valentias. It’s a feeling. That’s what a value is. We’ll get to that again when we’ll talk about value alignment at the end of this paper.

We think of value as a thing. But value is a feeling. I feel a value. Is that true? You feel value. Before you think value, you feel value. Is that right? And we feel value inside of us. In our ‘anthro-’, in our humanness, we feel ontology, the actual nature of existence, anthro-ontology, we actually feel value.

So, a hero, who has valor and who is filled with valiance has a self-validating life—V-A-L, you notice it playing—who has a unique valence in Cosmos, which is the movement of electrons, is filled with valentias, with this flow of Eros, because the hero feels the whole. Can you feel that? The hero feels the whole. That’s what ‘hero’ means. The hero is an early adopter of Homo amor, of the new human. The hero feels the whole.

So, before anything, value is a feeling. That’s like wild.

I woke up thinking that two mornings ago. And we’ve never said that all the years. It’s a simple sentence. A value is a feeling. In 10 years, I’ve never been able to say that that clearly. I woke up two mornings ago, like the first thing I said when I woke up, “Oh my God. A value is a feeling,” which is, of course, obvious from everything we’ve said, but it’s like, “Oh, right, a value is a feeling!”

The Universe feels, and the Universe feels value.

AI doesn’t know value because AI doesn’t feel.

So, AI definitionally can’t feel value.

We’ll get to that.

The Global Intimacy Disorder Is Rooted in the Failure of a Shared Story of Value

So, we have global fragility.

In response to global fragility, we need global coordination. For global coordination, we need global coherence. For global coherence, we need global resonance. For global resonance, we need global intimacy.

That means the source of not being able to respond to the meta-crisis, is at its core, a global intimacy disorder. And intimacy is a feeling.

Now we’ve diagnosed the meta-crisis in a fundamentally different way than all the classical texts. And that allows us to heal it, to make it whole, to respond to it. A global intimacy disorder is a failure of feeling because it’s rooted in the failure of a shared Story of Value.

Ask any couple, any friendship, any relationship.

The relationship is based on a shared Story of Value.

If we’re not in a shared Story of Value, we can’t resonate with each other because we can’t feel exactly what each other are feeling. We can’t feel what each other are feeling. We’re feeling something else. So, we’re not intimate because we’re not having the same interior feeling.

When Richard Gere looks at Julia Roberts, and it’s the middle of Pretty Woman, they’re sitting at the opera, and they’re watching this movie. And she’s this courtesan that he’s met accidentally, and they’re falling in love. And it’s three days in and they’re not sure whether they’re going to be together or not. And then he looks over, and he has this tear running down his cheek. And then he looks over, and she’s crying at the same thing, and his heart just bursts open because he realizes—and she looks at him—they’re feeling the same thing. That’s how you fall madly in love. They’re feeling this precise, exact same gorgeous, stunning, unique, exquisite, sensuous feeling. And they realize, at the same moment, they’re feeling the same thing, and their hearts explode aflame.

You can’t heal a global intimacy disorder unless you have a shared Story of Value because value is a feeling.

Complicated Versus Complex Systems

One more step, then we’re going right back to AI. One more step.

So, at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion we talked about the meta-crisis for years. We have identified the generator functions for the meta-crisis.

Barbara Marx Hubbard always used to say that the root cause of the meta-crisis is rivalrous conflict. In other words, the story of the world is rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. That’s the story.

I did a conference a decade ago with my dear friend John Mackey and we ran an event called Success 3.0 for a new vision of a success story. Barbara came—that’s how I met her—to talk about rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics as the failed story in the world.

So, Barbara said for many years rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics, that’s the source of meta-crisis because it causes what Nassim Taleb calls fragile systems.

Systems are fragile, or they were also called complicated systems as opposed to complex systems.

A complex system means there’s an inherent relationship between the parts.

So, let’s say a Brazilian rainforest is a complex system.

A complicated system would be for example a Ferrari. Great car, but abstract, no actual relation. If you’re missing one part,

it doesn’t self-repair,
it doesn’t self-regenerate,
it doesn’t self-heal.

If the factory stops making it—forget about your Ferrari. There’s no inherent relationship between the parts. That’s a fragile system.

So, a rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics world generates either fragile systems or complicated systems, in which the parts can’t feel each other.

Let’s say you’re in Europe and Sweden or Italy or France or the United States. And let’s say there’s a dress rehearsal that is orchestrated by reality, or there’s a dress rehearsal for existential risk called COVID and literally, there are not enough masks to go around for doctors. How could that be that the largest civilized countries in the world can’t produce enough masks?

Because the nature of the chains of supply and the contracts is such that they’re governed by rivalrous conflict, governed by win/lose metrics.

So, you can’t even get information out. The information ecology is broken because rivalrous conflicts governed by win/lose metrics are driving policy on health. And this COVID moment is a dress rehearsal, a minor dress rehearsal for this global imminent situation.

But now, we realize that what we’ve all been saying at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion was not quite accurate enough.

Underneath those two generator functions or at the core of those two generator functions lies something deeper.

Both, rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics and fragile, complicated systems are forms of the global intimacy disorder. In other words, rivalrous conflict means we’re not intimate.

We can’t feel each other.
We don’t see each other.
We don’t recognize each other.
We don’t have shared identity.

Our relationship is rivalrous conflict. That’s a form of a global intimacy disorder. It’s a much deeper diagnosis.

‘Complicated systems’ means that they create in the Far East in Bear Stearns (a particular investment company) a new bundled financial instrument that ricochets through Asia, then makes its way through Europe, and then through the middle of the United States and crashes the housing markets. But the people creating that bundled financial instrument in the Far East and the Bear Stearns office had no sense of how that would impact the housing market in the United States. And even as I say it to you, you can’t quite track it because the parts can’t feel each other.

It’s very hard for the parts to feel and to track what happened.

That’s why we call money currency. It flows. You have to be able to track the flows of currency to be intimate with how actually things affect each other. We have no idea.

So, at the core is a global intimacy disorder, and the core of that is a collapse of value or the collapse of a shared Story of Value.

The Race to Artificial General Intelligence

So, now the play begins.

When we talk about artificial intelligence, what exactly are we talking about? What does that even mean?

There are three waves of artificial intelligence. And it’s taken me the last couple of years to kind of figure this out. I would say, of all the 10 dimensions of existential risk of the meta-crisis, the three waves of AI are number one. So, put climate change at nine, if you want to kind of get a sense.

The number one existential risk by far, exponentially, is artificial intelligence.

And have you noticed—about like a year and a half ago, in every major paper in the world, The Guardian, Chinese papers, American papers, European papers, South American papers, everywhere, there were like four or five months where there was an explosion of articles on the existential risk—the risk to our very existence—through artificial intelligence.

All of a sudden, you would see the word existential. You would literally see ‘existential risk’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ in newspapers. Crazy, crazy.

And then—it disappeared! And notice, then it just disappeared! It was gone! Something happened. It didn’t just disappear. It just utterly disappeared.

And the people in favor of the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence essentially won a bunch of internal board conflicts, and they basically took it out of the news. Literally, like ‘boom!’—it was gone.

It just disappeared. You barely find it. Who has noticed in the last year?

And who has noticed that artificial intelligence has entered your own software?

Who’s noticed that in the last year? All of a sudden, someone’s summarizing your email for you. Who asked me to summarize my email? Who has seen things summarizing my email, what my email says? Almost everyone.

You’ve literally seen these encroachments of AI, that everyone has seen and no one has voted on. Let’s be clear.

No one has voted on that.
There’s been no discussion.
There’s been no decision.
There’s been no announcement about it.

Everyone noticed that? It’s literally just happening.

And what you realize is, is that AI is now more obviously reading more and more.

You realize AI is in your system, highly active, but you’re busy. So, you don’t quite notice it.

We’re busy. We’re busy. We don’t quite notice it! We’re busy. We don’t quite notice it! So, something is happening and it’s quite important.

Historical Background of the Three Waves of AI

The first wave of AI is social media. Social media—about 2010, 2011—explodes around the world. There’s so much to say about social media. I just want to get very precise and very simple here. Here’s what we know.

The designers of social media are a group of about 250 people. Happens to be 270, 300 in the United States. There’s another group in China, a couple in Europe. But basically, it’s a small group of people, mostly men. I would say 99.9% men, 99.9% men with lives that are kind of disjointed other than in their application to a particular form of programming. And they create social media applications.

The playbook for AI, in the language of the creators, is a ‘playbook of persuasive technology’.

There’s a book with a black cover and red bold letters, and the book is kind of The Way of Evil. That’s just about the title. It’s done as a joke, but it actually is the leading book in Silicon Valley, which teaches people how to design an AI app.

But essentially, what an AI app does is,

it addicts you very, very rapidly,
it hijacks your attention,
it gathers information about you and
feeds that information that it gathers about you into an algorithm. That algorithm is a machine intelligence AI algorithm.
That algorithm puts you in what’s called a ‘peer group’.

It took me like two, three years to understand this because this is hidden.

When Yuval Harari wrote his first book about this in 2017, ’18, he didn’t understand it. He tried to describe it. He didn’t get it. Not because he’s stupid, he’s not at all stupid. It was hard. You couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Here’s what happens.

You’re put into what’s called a ’peer group’.

A peer group means that you’re part of a group of people that responds to particular sequences of prompts on the web in a similar way.

So, let’s say the first prompt is a cat, and afterwards there’s a particular song, then there’s a particular font. And then there’s someone wearing a particular color of socks. Then there’s a woman with pigtails or a man with a particular kind of shirt. In other words, it’s a sequence.

That sequence is split test. Split test means Billions of times the sequence is tried again and again and again until people see it, until they decide, “Okay, which group do you fall in?” Just by being on the web, you’re being tested all the time. You’re then placed in a peer group.

Then that information about which peer groups you’re in are sold to misaligned third parties in constant auctions in order to be able to micro-target you in order to either buy particular products or go on particular trips or stop at particular restaurants or vote in particular ways and et cetera, et cetera.

So that is the fundamental business model of Google, for example. It’s a huge part of where Amazon profits come from; a huge part of Microsoft’s profits and down the list. In other words, we’ve created a digital world that I live inside. There’s a planetary stack, which is a digital stack that connects everything, and I live inside of it. Now, the older you are, the more tenuous your relationship is to it because you’re a little older. So, your relationship to your iPhone is a little different.

Most of the world lives inside this digital stack, which collects information. It’s called the ‘Internet of Things’.

It’s not just your phone.
It’s your refrigerator.
It’s your crib.
It’s your thermometer.

There’s an Internet of Things that’s collecting information about you in order to place you in a peer group, in order to be able to invisibly control your behavior.

The Hidden Link Between MIT-Media Lab and B.F. Skinner

Now, you might think that’s like a crazy-ass nut thing to say. That’s some conspiracy theory nut kind of late-night comedy. It’s not!

I spent about four years very, very carefully researching it and found the following, which is about to be published:

The MIT Media Lab, headed by Alex Pentland, lovely guy. We’re not demonizing him, but I’d love to have him for dinner. No dessert. He doesn’t get any dessert. You got to be punished some way.

He calls himself the ‘father of wearables’. He considers himself in his own Wikipedia page one of the five leading data scientists in the world. He has about 80 major students who are heading up pretty much all of the tech plex. They’re like every place. They’re inseminated, every place.

They are hidden students of B. F. Skinner. B. F. Skinner is the behaviorist psychologist who reigned at Harvard for six decades. He has a contemporary in Russia named Pavlov. Pavlov was favored by Stalin. Stalin never purged him. So, the legendary ‘Pavlovian response’, that is Pavlov. Pavlov and Skinner were in touch with each other. That’s a whole other conversation.

Skinner is operating with the American CIA and with the British MI6. Pavlov is operating essentially with the KGB, even before it was formed, and it’s about behavior modification.

How can you modify behavior?

Skinner gets the beginning of the meta-crisis. I’ve read Skinner cover to cover, everything. I’ve got one of his major books on the table here called Beyond Freedom and Dignity [1971]. It’s his major book, which I’ve read again and again and again. It’s actually a brilliant book. He is insanely brilliant. It’s almost like this kind of wild mind. When I went to read him because he was cited by a couple of people who dismissed him, I got drawn into the reading. You get the power of his mind.

Skinner got existential risk. He got the meta-crisis.

Skinner gets existential risk in a way that pretty much no one else does. And he says, “Fuck,” which is a general summation of about five chapters. He’s not sure what to do. Now watch. And he says, he has swallowed whole—culture! So, he’s extremely well-read. He understands culture. He has swallowed whole what culture thinks about value, what culture thinks about love.

So, Skinner has come to the conclusion that value is not real, not because he’s an idiot, but because that’s what the entire academy is teaching!

When you go on ChatGPT, it reflects it back to you.

The ‘scientific conclusion’ is that value is not real and that love is not real.

It is created by human beings. It’s a social construct.

Skinner swallows that whole.

So therefore, he says, you’re not going to be valiant. You’re not going to be a hero. You’re not going to have valor. You’re not going to be able to have even a social construct of valentias, of love. You can’t save the world based on some revolution of value because value is not real!

Meaning, value is not a motivational architecture that’s going to transform humanity. So, what do you need to do?

If you don’t want the whole thing to fall apart, you need to control it!

Of course, you do, because you want to save everybody, because you’re a good guy, because you got a cape on.

So, Skinner created something called a Skinner’s Box.

A Skinner’s Box is called an ‘operant conditioning chamber’, which has rats and pigeons in it. And you have invisible levers of control that control the rats and pigeons through variant ‘scheduling of reinforcement’. Meaning you give them food not at a regular moment, but at irregular times, so they’re always looking for it.

Parentheses: When do your Facebook friends come in?—Anytime, all the time. Track this for a second!

So, he figured out how to do that—behavioral engineering. He couldn’t quite, though, do it at scale. What he wanted to do was, he wanted to do it not for rats and pigeons.

Skinner wanted to figure out how to save the world by controlling it and putting it in a Skinner’s Box.

Why couldn’t he do it?

He writes, “I don’t have the instruments and the methods. I can’t do it.”

In the first generation of the internet, the major hidden player was B.F. Skinner. He was all over the internet. There was a system called the PLATO System in 1972, major player in it, a funder was—B.F. Skinner. The key player in early educational applications through the internet—B.F. Skinner. He dies. Then what happens?

Data science emerges a few years after Skinner dies.

What’s data science?—Computational theories of behavior!

I can compute.
I can gather digital breadcrumbs of everything you’ve done.
I can feed you into a peer group and
I can manipulate your behavior by essentially placing you into a worldwide Skinner’s Box.

At the MIT Media Lab they call it—not conspiracy, they’re mainstream—they call it a living laboratory.

We turn the entire world into a living laboratory, which can be controlled.

This immersive environment deploys what the MIT Media Lab—in a somewhat sinister title that they, ironically, are tone-deaf to; they don’t quite realize how sinister it is—but the MIT Media Lab talks about as social physics, to create the world as a living laboratory—these are direct quotes—in which we have direct access to data streams, which allow us to always—these are direct quotes!—tune the network to accomplish the desired result.

That’s called a digital dictatorship. We think we’re acting, but we’re not.

That’s the potential death of our humanity.

So, I went and studied very carefully all the writings of the MIT Media Lab and all the writings of Skinner, and I’m a little bit of a linguist and a little bit of an intellectual historian in my kind of other lives, and it was quite clear they had read Skinner cover to cover.

I identified both in terms of language, (where they were using the exact same language) and in terms of form structure, 23 precise parallels, which show that:

The entire MIT Media Lab, which is at the very center of the digital tech plex, is built on enacting Skinnerian principles.

And what is the prime methodology? The first wave of AI: Social media!

That’s actually what’s happening.

Through the first, second, and third wave of AI, as we will see, the fundamental human experiences of attention, conversation and personhood, are being hijacked. The implications of that are unimaginable.

This is part 1 of a 3-part series: Part 2 HERE, Part 3 HERE.

[1] we talked about that in depth before and analyzed that movie as a ‘text of culture’: Episode 273 Don’t Look Up: What They Got Right, What They Got Wrong and Why It Matters So Much;

[2] This clip is currently not publicly available.

[3] Summary by ChatGPT4, August 16^th 2025

[4] George Orwell, 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four), (1949), dystopian novel playing in a totalitarian surveillance state

This is part 1 of a 3-part series: Part 2 HERE, Part 3 HERE.

Study the Great Library

These Oral Essay Style posts serve as an entryway into the more formal books of the Great Library that provide the robust intellectual underpinnings of the new Story of Value:

First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come. David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2024.
Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze Vol. 1. David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2026
Invisible Architects: Skinner, Pentland and the Hidden Blueprints for Techno-feudalism. David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2026
Attention: First Principle, First Value, and Human Right (forthcoming)
The Right to Attention—Superstructure Shaping Social Structure—From Value to Rights (forthcoming)
The Personhood Conferral Problem and Why It Is an Existential Risk Challenge (tentative title)