Who invents the world

I’ve talked before about the derivative life, and how people treat what’s happening as a reality show rather than something in which they’re a participant or to which they bring irreplaceable value.

Even as I sat down to write this post, I saw an interview in Technology Review about Bryan Johnson. You might recall Johnson as the investor who uses a regimented workout routine and diet, as well as his son’s blood, in an attempt to live forever. In this Q&A, he talked about wanting to found a new religion that worships the body. He mentioned decentralizing this religion he would build, yet compared his process to those of Jesus and Mohammed.

This week, I want to focus less on Trump than on a phenomenon that predates him and happens across the board: the mystification of who controls the world. Bryan Johnson is a good example. There’s so much focus on these outsize figures who have a lot of money or some reactionary shtick, it’s easy to forget how the world actually works.

Even when things seem to happen magically, a ton of work happens behind the curtain. Often that work aims to make outlandish events seem perfectly rational or even inevitable.

But in reality, in terms of physiology, we are all equal creatures in this same world, subject to limits and physics. I want to address who invents the world, and I’m going to give you a collection of very different examples.

Dictators hide the truth

This might seem odd at first, but bear with me. Last week for New York magazine, I wrote about the people deported from U.S. soil to CECOT detention in El Salvador, which I categorized as a concentration camp. I discussed how President Bukele has positioned himself as a dictatorial savior of the country, the only one capable of stopping the staggering crime levels in the country and the one responsible for their significant drop in recent years. I mentioned that the truth is the murder rate had already dropped by half by the time Bukele ran for office, though it’s continued to come down since he took office.

He pretends this success related to crime is because of his tough policies and the arbitrary detention he imposes, locking up suspects without due process or any real trial. But in addition to the murder rate already dropping significantly before he ever took office, he was hiding another part of the story. Multiple outlets have reported that Bukele made deals with the gang members he denounced as terrorists in order to establish a truce. He continued to detain people without trial while making sweetheart deals with the actual criminals, giving preferential treatment to gang leaders.

This appears to have been a key reason Bukele made the deal with Trump over taking detainees—he wanted to get custody of at least one key MS-13 leader who would be standing trial in the U.S. and might make public details of the ways Bukele had caved to the gangs and collaborated with them behind the scenes.

Reporters for El Faro in El Salvador have dismantled the mythology of their president’s war on crime, revealing him to be just another elected official turned mafioso who instituted his own protection racket. Recently, the paper posted video of one gang member outlining deals made with Bukele. The president has apparently responded by ordering the arrest of El Faro staff.

Why would he do that? Because every dictator wants to appear as if he has enough power to transcend everyday life. He needs to be not only omnipotent but also in no way dependent on anyone else to achieve his goals, and completely above the day-to-day struggles affecting most people’s lives. To reveal the dictator as contingent might remind people where the real power lies.

 Trump deals will not save you

Trump is following a similar playbook with the savaging of Washington. He allowed people like Russell Vought and Elon Musk to begin hacking away at parts of the federal government that help people or aid the country as a whole, such as the National Science Foundation and Social Security. In news reports about the tariff deals, Trump makes clear that the policy has to be whatever he wants it to be, he says, “because I set the deal.”

The current administration is pretending to want an empowered working class, but it’s a deeply illusory empowerment. The manufacturing they’ve promised was steady and lucrative in the past largely due to the sheer numbers of union jobs that existed in the third quarter of the twentieth century. But those have precipitously declined since then in ways that will largely be impossible to reverse. What’s more, where those jobs might be restored they’re being argued for in terms of class immobility—your child and your grandchild would do the same work. But with no union, no livable minimum wage, and a ravaged health-care system, even if factory jobs return to America, they will not live up to their promise.

The same attempts at distraction we’ve see elsewhere appear here: don’t think too much about this, it will all be great. Now comes acknowledgment that short-term pain is expected, but no talk about how the government might alleviate that pain. And there’s no acknowledgment of the deeper pain coming later this year due to Trump’s tariffs. Instead, the American public is being told to buckle down and go without—that we don’t need as many dolls and pencils as we’d like.

The government is framing this in rhetoric reminiscent of wartime. They’re assuming the kind of unthinking reflexive support that Trump demands. They want Americans to suppress their self-preservation instincts and simply do what he says, to submit to his muddy vision for the country and believe in him. Again, Trump tries to obscure how the world works, and have people give up their capacity for independent thought.

Our connected world

If you were born before listservs and Wikipedia and came of age before home computers, then you remember a time when, if you wondered who was Duke of Bavaria in the eighth century A.D., you had to own some pretty extensive encyclopedias or make a trip to the library. There was a time when sharing knowledge required more effort, and even then, facts could remain elusive.

Yet before the internet, there was television. And before public broadcasting and the nightly news educated us, radio waves connected distant places. Before that, telegrams conveyed messages around the world in less time than it might take you to eat a sandwich.

So there were always inventions that seemed like magic, ones that delivered up both harm and benefits. In each case, that magic was dependent on humans. It happened because of humans and could contain no more than humans put into it.

Partly I mean that as a statement of solidarity, as an acknowledgment of workers. But I also mean it literally. Those radio waves relied on transmitters humans built to send and receive information. Global telegraphy required laying tens of thousands of miles of undersea cables. It required people to send and interpret messages.

The Internet, too, is dependent on hundreds of thousands of miles of fiberoptic cables, and to a lesser degree, satellites in the sky. These networks are not self-sustaining but require repair and replacement through human intervention. The magic of technology still comes down to people who build the paths, who send and receive, and who understand.

Ghost in the machine

Now we’re faced with a massive corporate push toward AI, a trend with costs already becoming apparent. Even when AI isn’t a direct danger to users, art made with generative AI seems smaller than whatever images it was trained on. To me, it feels dead. The most amateur drawing you did of your favorite emo singer or rapper or hair-metal band, that beloved anime character you drew on your notebook in eighth grade—those were derivative, too, but all of them have more creativity and originality than the most polished generative AI art.

Even a human copying a human piece of artwork as closely as they could would bring more originality into the world. There is no actual magic in AI, no animating idea behind the algorithm. Technology is the tool—it is not the thing itself.

A vaccine being mass-produced absolutely save lives—it can even eradicate a disease. But without the human invention of it, without distribution and medical staff to administer the doses, without the healthcare workers recording the results—without national policies in place that prioritizes human health—the tool becomes useless.

There are no hero-rulers to whom we must submit, no all-powerful algorithm that we should let determine how to eat and how to live. To think these things exist is just wishing to keep pretending that the Wizard of Oz exists, even after reality has been revealed.

But for a certain group of people—those who want nothing more than to dominate or to profit from human advances—the real work done by others to make what passes for magic in the world goes unacknowledged. They try to make reality invisible to preserve their power and position. Their erasure of humanity in the name of saving it is just another extension of the concentration camp tendency I wrote about last week.

With technology that exists today, anybody can fake making something new. Anybody can pretend to have done things they didn’t. And I’m not going to say that AI has no uses, particularly in medical technology and computing. But when it comes to creating an idea that hasn’t existed before, generative AI can’t do it. When it comes to expressing yourself, only you can live and invent your own life.

The Bryan Johnson problem

Yet, a sizable percentage of the population wants to be told what to do, wants to be assigned a meaning. This group tends to embrace authoritarianism, and in my opinion, seems overrepresented in the tech sector. I would count Bryan Johnson, the guy who is trying to live forever, who wants to make a religion out of submitting to AI in ways that preserve our bodies, who has gotten transfusions of blood from his son, among them.

With more money than he seems to know how to use, and access to the best medical care and advice, he remains unsatisfied. He wants to “elevate the body to a position of authority,” but paradoxically, this means doing what AI says to do. As he said in the Technology Review interview,

“It really is in my best interest to let it tell me what to eat, tell me when to sleep and exercise, because it would do a better job of making me happy. Instead of my mind haphazardly deciding what it wants to eat based on how it feels in the moment, the body is elevated to a position of authority. AI is going to be omnipresent and built into our everyday activities. Just like it autocompletes our texts, it will be able to autocomplete our thoughts.”

That a computer could give you good health advice is not news. Doctors had long careers doing the same thing. Generally speaking, people know what to do to be healthier and live longer—eating fresh fruits and vegetables and exercising. Simple direction is not the roadblock to improved human health.

The biggest barriers for the majority of humans are access to healthcare, access to healthy food, the ability to afford it, community environments that foster activity, leisure time to be active, and workplaces and neighborhoods that don’t poison us or damage our health.

Johnson describes his approach as “the body is god,” but it’s really one more suppression of the mind and the self. AI is going to be the position of authority, but it lacks all the consciousness, the possibility of understanding and reinvention, of an actual self.

Everything here is of a piece: we’re looking for transcendence from technology that has no intrinsic meaning and from people who lack answers to even basic questions. Without the federal workforce, there is no government. Without actual artists, there can be no new ideas in art. Without other social changes, the crime rate will not mystically fall because a president orders it, even if he has dictatorial powers. Humans are the force that creates change in society, and it’s critical to recall the role played by people who lay cables, who come up with scientific innovations, or who evaluate grant applications.

What to do about all this

What this means is that technology can be an aid to human endeavor—sometimes a powerful one. But it can’t replace the human creativity or judgement that has to backstop all these processes. So embrace your own ideas, your own creations, and your own life. Don’t wait for people to tell you what to do, or submit to someone’s rules about living a good life.

Bukele is wrong. Trump is wrong. And though he’s not taking over countries or locking people up, Bryan Johnson is wrong, too. Humans subordinating their will to AI is as foolish as submitting to a dictator. It’s the erasure of the self and all its possibilities.

Live inside your own life. Working within your own restrictions, medical or otherwise, try to be in the world as much as you can and not live your entire life second-hand, through screens or via others’ rules and expectations. Anyone or anything who tells you only they can save you is lying.

If there’s something missing in your community, think of an idea and go try it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel—getting advice or inspiration and looking at pre-existing programs elsewhere can be a great idea. But you and I are capable of things no technology can do. The real work of changing society—for good or for ill—is always done by people. Don’t give up your power.

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