Tip-Off #206 - The Death of Humanity…Again
From writing to AI, our favorite story is our own collapse.
Every week, the obituary for humanity gets a fresh rewrite. We're told it's the end—again. The end of democracy, the end of liberalism, the end of capitalism, the end of history, the end of the world as we know it. And now, naturally, the end of human control itself. Artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs, our thoughts, maybe even our souls.
From podcasts to the pundit circus, you'd think we were all starring in the final season of civilization. The threats vary—AI today, authoritarianism in plain sight—but the panic stays the same. Democracy is declared dead even as it lurches forward like it has since Athens: flawed, embattled, and surprisingly hard to kill.
If human nature has proven anything, it's that we're far better at announcing our own demise than delivering it. This isn't a new tic.
Consider the scribes of ancient Mesopotamia, who, along with Plato, once complained that writing would destroy memory. When the written word took over, oral tradition was said to be doomed, the mind weakened by dependency on illusions and imagery.
Then came agriculture—steady food, sedentary life—and critics now say we traded our wild nobility for servile toil and wreaked environmental havoc, destroying the balance of nature.
Gutenberg and the printing press would flood the world with heresy. The Industrial Revolution would crush the workers. The Scientific Revolution would crush the soul. Radio would rot attention spans. Television would kill the book. The internet would kill attention spans again—and social media, morality.
Each age has its innovation, and each innovation gets blamed for humanity's supposed unraveling. No wonder, for some, the response is a revanchist dream of returning to what once was.
Today's upheaval is digital, algorithmic, and eerily persuasive. Artificial intelligence doesn't just mimic thought—it predicts it, organizes it, and perhaps, one day, replaces it. Depending on your source, we are a hair's breadth away from being rendered obsolete—or immortalized in code. Either way, the human story ends.
But maybe doom is the wrong word. Maybe what unnerves us is that we've been building this outcome all along—with clean-enough hands and excellent intentions. Each age had its visionaries, convinced they were solving the human problem: scribes preserving knowledge, farmers taming nature, inventors spreading truth, engineers liberating time.
Now the prophets of the future wear hoodies—or red caps—and promise optimization. Silicon Valley didn't set out to conquer humanity but to rescue it. Along the way, some even found God again—at least in their view—armed with a newly assertive morality and a few lines of code.
Over half a century ago, cultural theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno warned that the same reason that promised liberation had, in fact, turned into domination. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, they argued that every step forward came with a tightening grip. We tried to master nature—and became enslaved by technique. We demanded clarity—and succumbed to systems. We sought autonomy—and lost it to automation. Enlightenment, they argued, carries within it the seed of its own undoing: the rational becomes irrational, and the pursuit of freedom turns coercive.
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, best known for his Pulitzer-winning The Denial of Death, argued that our ideals, our ambitions, even our faith in progress, are elaborate distractions from mortality. What looks like moral clarity often conceals psychological panic. Our fears of decline, collapse, or apocalypse may not be about the world at all—but about us. The real terror isn't extinction. It's irrelevance. Not loss of life, but loss of meaning.
It's not just that we fear the end. It's that we keep mistaking progress for control, control for safety, and safety for salvation. When the machine doesn't save us—when it doesn't even care—we cry doom. When democracy is threatened, we blame the voters—then run another poll.
We love what we fear and run from it at the same time—making the motto of this Substack true: "Without contraries is no progression."
Perhaps knowing how much we need conflict, even flirt with oblivion, we can watch out for ourselves, get fooled less often, and take more care with what we build next—not out of optimism, but out of awareness: of how power works, how fear distorts, and how easily progress becomes excuse.
Maybe we don't fear the end of humanity so much as our responsibility for what comes after. Sometimes we don’t do the right thing until we’re out of excuses—and out of time.
Notes and reading
The Sense of an Ending - by Frank Kermode (1967). Kermode’s influential study of how fiction—religious, historical, and literary—imposes order on chaos by shaping time through beginnings, middles, and ends. Kermode was a leading British literary critic and scholar, renowned for his analysis of narrative, myth, and interpretation.
Dialectic of Enlightenment - Max Horkheimer, Theodor W Adorno, et al. (1947 - Kindle Edition 2002). Horkheimer and Adorno were leading figures of the Frankfurt School, renowned for their critiques of modernity, reason, and mass culture. Dialectic of Enlightenment is their landmark work.
The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker (1997). Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. Becker addresses our refusal to face mortality and calls for living fully in its shadow. Becker was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary thinker whose work bridged psychology, philosophy, and theology.
The Chessboard and the Web - Anne-Marie Slaughter (2017). Talk of “the end of the West” often masks nostalgia for dominance. Slaughter contrasts a state-centric “chessboard” model of geopolitics with a “web” model of networks and collaboration. A Princeton political scientist and CEO of New America, she argues for strategy in a hyperconnected world.
The Coming Wave - Mustafa Suleyman (2023). Warning and cautious encouragement; urgent with a call to action rather than resignation. Suleyman is a pioneering AI entrepreneur and policy thinker, best known as the co-founder of DeepMind.
Tip-Off #205 - The freedom of mystery
Tip-Off #204 - Contradiction and clarity