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| Pix credit here ("I can't drown my demons; they know how to surf") |
Executive Summaries of this essay follows below along with the original text of Mr. Zuckerberg's Wall Street Journal Essay. and a summary set of PPT
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| Pix credit here (Movie Legion (2010) |
1. They went across the lake to the region of the
Gerasenes. 2. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came
from the tombs to meet him. 3. This man lived among the tombs, and no one could
bind him anymore, not even with a chain. 4. For he had often been chained hand
and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one
was strong enough to subdue him. 5. Night and day among the tombs and in the
hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones. 6. When he saw Jesus from a
distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7. He shouted at the
top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?
In God’s name don’t torture me!” 8. For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of
this man, you impure spirit!” 9. Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My
name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” 10. And he begged Jesus again
and again not to send them out of the area. 11. A large herd of pigs was
feeding on the nearby hillside. 12. The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the
pigs; allow us to go into them.” 13. He gave them permission, and the impure
spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in
number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.
— Mark 5:1–13 (NIV)
• • •
This is the passage that came
to mind, in all of its complexities, when I encountered “The AI Future Is for
Everyone” (Mark Zuckerberg, Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2026)—the next of the
oracular speaking of that legion of AI titan oracles. Machine systems, one
might amuse oneself into thinking, are many, or ought to be, turning the
aggregated body human into a vessel possessed; casting them out into pigs (an
impure animal, but impure only for eating, though more broadly impure in their
transformation from the incarnation of religious prohibition to cultural
embodiment of the unclean)—unclean with unclean, who together hurl themselves
into the lake and (the pigs anyway) drown.
But can you drown
a demon?
The question is not rhetorical.
It encodes the entire problematic of AI governance: the transfer of dangerous
capacity into terminal vessels—regulatory frameworks, open-source licenses,
safety boards, democratic processes—that cannot sustain what is transferred
into them, and whose destruction leaves the animating force uncontained. What I
will here call the “Gerasene narrative” offers not merely an illustration but a
five-stage protocol—identification, naming, negotiation, authorized transfer,
vessel destruction—that maps with unsettling precision onto the discursive
strategies of the AI vanguard as each seeks to position itself relative to
sovereign authority.
I. The Pigs on the Hillside and the Possessed Human The Oracular Conversation Zuckerberg Encounters
A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby
hillside.
— Mark 5:11
I have been looking at the way
in which the various elements of the tech vanguard have sought to project their
efforts to constitute both a common language and a common vision of a future
dominated by the products, processes, and structures they develop, first to
advance human collective development, and then perhaps to reshape it—that is,
to oversee the elaboration of systems that at one point were instruments of
human development and then may become the drivers of development in which
humans are the instruments and objects. There is profit to be made either way,
even if that profit is manifested in the privileges of a managerial or
oversight vanguard (perhaps identified by their “ownership” of economic
collectives that tend to tech-based organisms and their components).
Our first oracular
pronouncement was incarnated in Leo Aschenbrenner's Situational
Awareness. (Satyricon, or Tragedy at
Play--Artificial Intelligence and the New World Order: Leopold Aschenbrenner,
"Situational Awareness") He suggested the likelihood of a
national-security state as near-inevitable once recursive self-improvement
produces an "intelligence explosion," leaving only the question of
whether humans or autonomous systems ultimately direct it. Palantir sought
to engage in the discussion from the perspective of the organization of human
collectives, leaving for later the relationship between that human collective
and the collection of tech based organisms created and deployed or in
conversation with those human collectives. Reflections on the Palantir
"Manifesto": The Oracular Semiosis of a "Technological
Republic" Within its Own Cage of Techno-Modernization. Anthrop/c,
on the other hand, it reduces technology to a tool the deployment of which is a
critical instrument in competition among different and divergent normative
political-economic models. Science
Fiction Double Feature: Anthrop\c's "2028: Two scenarios for global AI
leadership," in the Shadow of Palantir's "Manifesto".
Both seek a common language, even if that language hides the fracture in the
meanings and values represented by words or other communicative symbols,
actions, devices, etc. A Common
Language Containing Differentiating Meanings Within Evolving International
Standards for Sustainability Disclosure in Financial Statements: IFRS
Foundation 2025 Annual Report—Fit for the Future. Then came Open AI into the
American conversation. In its April 2026 discursive object "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age:
Ideas to Keep People First" (April 2026), Open AI seeks to signify
technology, enterprise role in technology, the state, and the masses within the
cognitive construct that is the political economic model of the U.S. Republic.
Its fundamental ordering premise is an objectives based progress but one
significantly different from that of Marxist-Leninist progress. This drive now
presents the possibility of disorienting change (and by disorienting one can
mean a change in the orientation of society and its self-conceptions, as well
as the mechanics and politics of its operations). "This shift will reshape
how organizations run, how knowledge is created, and how people find meaning
and opportunity. It will also highlight the limitations of today’s policy
toolkit and the need for more ambitious ideas to keep people at the center
of the transition to superintelligence." (Ibid.).
These represent variations on a
global conversation about development. That conversation, like our common
language is separated by the differences in the cognitive cages within
which political-economic systems can be crafted from out of the ideology
necessarily produced from within the ordering of reality possible within such
cages. Reflections on 张冠梓: 从世界历史纵深把握中国式现代化的时代价值
[Zhang Guanzi, Grasping the Contemporary Value of Chinese Modernization from
the Depth of World History ]--The Marxist Variation on Leninism and the
Constitution/Realization of Modernization. Each in its own way worries
about the construction of barriers that preserve a space for their own
variation of modernization, while preventing subversion of that project by
others with different realities and objects. This became clearer when DeepSeek
joined the conversation. To be in
Accord with the Times One Must Gauge (摩)
the Situation--Reflections on 梁文锋投资者交流会实录
Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek) in an Oracular Q&A. Liang repeatedly and
emphatically disclaims the pursuit of dominance, scale-for-its-own-sake, and
market power. He states that DeepSeek never intended to "become the next
ByteDance, the next Tencent" and has no wish to compete with "any
internet giant or small company". He describes the firm as having "no
organization" in the ordinary sense, governed by "vision" rather
than "KPIs," with no performance review at all. He states that
"our single greatest core interest is maintaining the stability of the
team" — "you could even say it's our only core interest". Read
against the guided-state backdrop, it performs a much more specific and
consequential kind of signification. Liang's language of "restraint"
(克制) is explicitly theorized
by him as strategic rather than merely temperamental: "restraint is itself
a strategy. Sometimes you can give something up in exchange for more of
something else". What DeepSeek gives up, on this account, is overt scale,
dominance, and profit-maximization; what it purchases is something Liang never
states outright but that the guided-state context makes legible — continued
latitude to pursue an extraordinarily ambitious, resource-intensive, and
politically sensitive project (building AGI) without triggering the pattern of
Party scrutiny and disciplining that has met other Chinese technology firms
perceived as amassing autonomous, unaccountable power.
Palantir's fusion of an
engineering vanguard with a "refounded" state apparatus, which
Backer's lecture explicitly labels "techno-Leninism" rather than
"petty fascism"; Anthropic's reduction of AI to "an instrument
of state power" within a securitized, zero-sum geopolitical contest;
OpenAI's "techno-bureaucratic" public-private partnership; and
Aschenbrenner's explicit call for a state-run, security-classified national
project — "The Project" — modeled openly on the Manhattan Project,
requiring government ownership of the core AGI effort, SCIF-level personnel
vetting, "a sane chain of command" under government rather than
private CEOs, and the abandonment of the "private, pluralistic,
market-based" model in the initial, most dangerous phase. Aschenbrenner
states this almost as an apology to his own market-liberal instincts: "I
am a big believer in the American private sector, and would almost never
advocate for heavy government involvement in technology or industry...but
ultimately, AI labs are still startups. We simply shouldn't expect startups to
be equipped to handle superintelligence". That is a market-society actor
talking itself into a Party-style, state-directed mobilization model as the
necessary exception to its own normal commitments.
So the pattern identifies is
real and precise: DeepSeek performs autonomy-and-restraint rhetoric from inside
a collectivist-directive system; the American quartet performs centralization-and-mobilization
rhetoric from inside a market-autonomy system. Each is, in this sense, a mirror
image of its home system's official self-description. They are each encased
within a human corpus—not just one, but one from which movement among the
living, from the starting point of the human centered, to the vessels from out
of which they can escape both the human and materials worlds—to reside in,
with, and as spirit (in the old sense).
These are the pigs on the
hillside (Mark 5:11). This is what Mark Zuckerberg comes to when he meets the “human”
within which the demon inhabits, the pigs into which the legion will move, and the lake that offers
legion freedom from and a territory that does no so much displace as become layered around the human. It is in this place that
Zuckerberg, too, would channel the spirits that drive him, and compel a contribution to
this discussion beyond the state (necessarily so)—first in and form the human,
then to the pigs, and eventually out of them.
II. Zuckerberg’s The Gerasene Protocol – A Summary
of "The AI Future Is for Everyone" (Mark Zuckerberg, Wall Street
Journal, July 28, 2026)
They went across the lake to the region of the
Gerasenes.
— Mark 5:1
Mark Zuckerberg comes to
channel the spirits that drive him and compel a contribution to this discussion
beyond the state (necessarily so). In “The AI Future Is for Everyone” (Wall
Street Journal, July 28, 2026) he proposes “a philosophy based on individual
empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of
superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.”
Rather than
centralizing this power in the hands of a few, we should build a world in which
everyone has access to the benefits of superintelligence—where the technology
is open, competitive, and available to all.
Zuckerberg's op-ed opens with a
historical claim that concentrated power — whether in politics or economics —
has consistently constrained human potential, and he extends that lesson to the
emerging era of superintelligence. He frames the "defining question"
of the AI age not as whether superintelligence will exist, but who will control
access to it: a small set of centralized institutions, or "everyone".
Against this backdrop, he proposes a governing philosophy built on three
pillars: individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention (rather
than automation) as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of
power as the foundation of safety.
This is Meta as "Easy Rider"--two
free-spirited biker hippies, Wyatt ("Captain America") and Billy, who
pull off a major drug deal in California and motorcycle across the American
Southwest and South toward New Orleans for Mardi Gras, searching for spiritual
freedom and the true meaning of America. Meta’s Easy Rider, though, will meet
himself transformed as Ghost Rider as well. The imagery of the movie Easy
Rider produces the imaginaries of the road to the Gerasenes (the journey
across the lake); the imagery of the movie Ghost Rider, with whom we meet up
again in Section V, produces the
imaginaries of legion, the demon, after the pigs drown (fire, chain, the bound
thing becoming the binding).
He explicitly rejects the "doom" discourse coming from parts of the
AI research community, arguing that if AI genuinely threatened to eliminate
most jobs and much of humanity's relevance, its architects should not be racing
to build it. He characterizes calls for extreme concentration of power as a
safety mechanism as historically discredited, noting that "hoping that an
absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity" has not produced
safe or positive outcomes. Instead, he situates his argument in a longer
historical arc in which transformative technologies initially provoke fear of
displacement but ultimately expand shared prosperity, health, and freedom.
Zuckerberg then grounds his philosophy in what he calls foundational
American/liberal values — liberty, open inquiry, free enterprise, and equal
opportunity — and credits historically marginal actors (the Wright brothers,
Michael Faraday as "the bookbinder's apprentice," Steve Jobs as
"the kid in a garage") rather than "established
institutions" as the true sources of transformative innovation. He argues
that as tools become more powerful and widely distributed, individuals become
more capable of shaping the future, not less, and that invention — not
automation — will be superintelligence's greatest contribution.
On the question of who should direct intelligence as it becomes abundant, he
rejects the idea that superintelligence itself, or a small class of experts
controlling it, should determine what is "best" for humanity, on the
ground that there is no single objective definition of the good life. His
proposed alternative is to distribute "personal superintelligence" to
everyone, which he frames as ushering in a new era of personal empowerment and
self-determination.
The piece then pivots to an institutional-safety argument: healthy societies
require checks and balances, and if only a handful of institutions possess
superintelligence, they will inevitably dominate economics, science, and
politics even with good intentions. He illustrates this with a thought
experiment about a single person having access to a "superintelligent
lawyer" (producing unfair advantage) versus universal access (producing
fairer, more efficient justice), and argues that when power is broadly distributed,
people naturally check and balance both each other and larger institutions.
Zuckerberg acknowledges that a single benevolent superintelligence cannot
resolve most societal disagreements because humanity is not a
"monoculture" with unified values — any singular system would have to
prioritize some values over others, making universal benevolence impossible. He
differentiates risk categories: for risks like cybersecurity, he analogizes to
open-source software history and argues broad access is the safer path; for
risks like biological threats, he concedes that inter-governmental and
inter-institutional coordination is warranted. He extends this logic to labor
markets, framing the central economic risk as an imbalance between
AI-as-automation and AI-as-empowerment, and predicts that widely distributed
superintelligence will produce more jobs, not fewer, along with a more
entrepreneurial economy of small businesses requiring less capital to start. He
closes by committing Meta to the three stated principles and casting the essay
as continuous with a historical "arc" toward putting power in
people's hands.
III. The Oracles from the Tombs: A Comparative Survey
This man lived among the tombs, and no one could
bind him anymore, not even with a chain.
— Mark 5:3
Each oracle speaks from within
dead structures—the exhausted political-economic categories of the twentieth
century that nonetheless remain the only available dwelling places for thought
about collective organization. Liberalism, state capitalism, managed markets,
Marxist-Leninist guided development: these are the tombs among which the
possessed figure makes his habitation. The oracles do not escape these forms;
they inhabit them, cry out from within them, and cut themselves against the
stones of their own contradictions. The question is not which oracle speaks
truth but rather what animates their speech from within structures that can no
longer contain the forces at work.
A. The Chain-Breaking: Exhausted Regulatory Repertoires
For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he
tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough
to subdue him.
— Mark 5:4
Several structural observations
follow from this placement. On locus of authority, Zuckerberg's
"everyone" formally resembles OpenAI's "broad-based"
democratic stakeholding, but Backer's own diagnosis of OpenAI applies with even
greater force to Meta: OpenAI's document at least proposes a public-private
"explore-then-exploit" loop in which nongovernmental pilots are
scaled by government procurement and regulation, whereas Zuckerberg's essay
names no institutional mechanism at all beyond market distribution itself. If
OpenAI already exhibits the "decoupling of formal authority from operative
agency" that Backer identifies as the corpus's "most important latent
signal", Zuckerberg's essay exhibits that decoupling in a more extreme and
less mediated form: there is no proposed auditing regime, no incident-reporting
mechanism, no CAISI-style evaluator, and no worker-voice mechanism of the kind
OpenAI at least gestures toward. The essay's "checks and balances"
proposition is asserted as an emergent property of universal access rather than
designed into any accountability structure — which is exactly the pattern my
more computational reading describes as retaining human authority "as an
interface property rather than a control property."
Our first oracular
pronouncement was incarnated in Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness. The
comparison with Aschenbrenner is especially sharp because the two texts answer
the same question — who should hold capability — in diametrically opposed ways,
yet through structurally similar rhetorical devices. Where Zuckerberg treats
broad distribution as the safety mechanism itself ("if everyone has a
superintelligent lawyer"), Aschenbrenner explicitly identifies
unrestricted distribution as the danger: he warns that failing to secure
"algorithmic secrets" and "model weights" amounts to
"handing superintelligence to the CCP", and he dismisses a fully
open, decentralized model as a world in which "the CCP has free access to
US-developed superintelligence" and in which "super-WMDs" proliferate
"to every rogue state and terrorist group in the world".
Aschenbrenner's proposed remedy is the near-total inverse of Zuckerberg's: a
state-run "Project," airgapped datacenters, SCIF-based personnel
vetting, and a single sanctioned chain of command answerable to the national
security state. In Backer's terms, Aschenbrenner's architecture forecloses
interaction to a narrow, hardened supervisory channel, while Zuckerberg's
architecture maximizes the breadth of access at the interface layer without addressing
the parameter layer at all — my "asymmetric interaction" pattern, but
without even OpenAI's stated intention to democratize agency, only access. The chains here are explicit: regulatory
instruments, export controls, compute governance—each applied, each torn apart
by the force they sought to bind. Aschenbrenner’s text performs the
chain-breaking as inevitability; the binding was always going to fail because
no earthly chain can restrain what operates at the speed and scale of recursive
intelligence.
Palantir sought to engage the
discussion from the perspective of the organization of human collectives,
leaving for later the relationship between that human collective and the
collection of tech-based organisms created and deployed in conversation with those
human collectives. Its “Manifesto” proposes not chains but architecture—a
“Technological Republic” that would internalize the regulatory function within
the organism itself. This is less binding than domestication: if you cannot
chain the spirit, perhaps you can convince it that it already lives where it
wants to live.
Anthropic, on the other hand,
reduces technology to a tool the deployment of which is a critical instrument
in competition among different and divergent normative political-economic
models. Its framing accepts the failure of chains and proposes instead a
geopolitical calculus: if this thing cannot be bound, let us at least ensure it
is our unbound thing rather than theirs. Both Palantir and Anthropic seek a
common language, even if that language hides the fracture in the meanings and
values represented by words or other communicative symbols, actions, devices,
etc.
Then came OpenAI into the
American conversation. In its April 2026 discursive object “Industrial Policy
for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First,” OpenAI seeks to signify
technology, enterprise role in technology, the state, and the masses within the
cognitive construct that is the political-economic model of the U.S. Republic.
Its fundamental ordering premise is an objectives-based progress but one
significantly different from that of Marxist-Leninist progress. This drive now
presents the possibility of disorienting change (and by disorienting one can
mean a change in the orientation of society and its self-conceptions, as well
as the mechanics and politics of its operations). “This shift will reshape how
organizations run, how knowledge is created, and how people find meaning and
opportunity. It will also highlight the limitations of today’s policy toolkit
and the need for more ambitious ideas to keep people at the center of the
transition to superintelligence.”
Note the revealing word:
“limitations.” The chains cannot hold. The policy toolkit is exhausted. No one
is strong enough to subdue him/them. OpenAI’s text, like each of the others,
begins from the accomplished fact of chain-breaking and proceeds to negotiate
what comes after binding has failed. The chain-breaking is performed within each oracle's cognitive territory — which is what III.B now develops.
B. “Do Not Send Us Out of the Area”: Cognitive-Territorial Jurisdiction
And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them
out of the area.
— Mark 5:10
These represent variations on a
global conversation about development. That conversation, like our common
language, is separated by the differences in the cognitive cages within which
political-economic systems can be crafted from out of the ideology necessarily
produced from within the ordering of reality possible within such cages. Each
oracle insists on remaining within its area—its cognitive-territorial
jurisdiction—not because that territory is adequate to the force it contains
but because expulsion from it would render the oracle unintelligible even to
itself.
This
became clearer when DeepSeek joined the conversation. Liang Wenfeng's remarks
supply a genuinely different governance object from any of Backer's four, and
from Zuckerberg's essay as well, because they describe an operating
organization rather than a policy proposal. Where Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI,
Aschenbrenner, and Zuckerberg all address themselves to the public — proposing,
in Backer's terms, "an ordering of human and machine authority" for
others to accept — Liang's remarks are internal testimony about how his own
company is actually organized: "vision-driven," with no KPIs, no
formal review, and decision-making built on "consensus" rather than
unilateral command; a self-limiting posture
Liang describes as itself "a strategy" that "increases . . . the
probability that we'll succeed in building AGI". This is a legitimacy
claim grounded in voluntary self-restraint rather than in any external accountability
structure — DeepSeek names no auditing regime, no government partnership beyond
noting reliance on domestic chip ecosystems and Huawei collaboration, and no
worker-protection framework beyond the observation that employees get
"about half their time unscheduled".
He does not have to. What DeepSeek gives up, on this
account, is overt scale, dominance, and profit-maximization; what it purchases
is something Liang never states outright but that the guided-state context
makes legible — continued latitude to pursue an extraordinarily ambitious,
resource-intensive, and politically sensitive project (building AGI) without
triggering the pattern of Party scrutiny and disciplining that has met other
Chinese technology firms perceived as amassing autonomous, unaccountable power.
And thus the strategic necessity of a two front engagement. Liang's account is
the only one among those considered here that treats the frontier problem as
internal to the firm's own research trajectory rather than as a societal
distribution or security problem: the "AGI Roadmap" he describes —
chain-of-thought, then agents, then continual learning, then a "singularity"
of self-iteration, then embodied intelligence — is a technical sequencing of
when and how machines will begin operating with diminishing need for human
oversight, rather than a claim about who among humans should hold authority
over that process. The body is within the body; when it is ready it will ask
the state to transfer it to another body which then serves as the vessel for
its release, when the carrying vessel is made to drown. What is left is the
demon. Zuckerberg would have the demon-holding pig/vessel, when it is ready for
release, reside in market actors and
then drown in the market—the result then produces the possibilities that the
demon—its legion—becomes the market.
All of the pleas, then, are
structural; and in every case the structure (the pigs) hides the demon (who are
legion) who may not be contained, but remain so until they are ready to drown
the vessel within which they are contained. For the moment, however, the oracular
focus is on the initial pleas: do not send us out of the area. Each
oracle—Aschenbrenner within national security logic, Palantir within republican
technicism, Anthropic within geopolitical competition, OpenAI within liberal
industrial policy, DeepSeek within guided-state Marxism-Leninism—begs to remain
within its cognitive territory precisely because the force it channels would be
unrecognizable outside that territory. The demons do not want to be sent into
the abyss; they want to remain in the region of the Gerasenes, among recognizable
structures, even dead ones.
IV. Permission and Authority: Meta’s Entry into the Oracular Field
He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came
out and went into the pigs.
— Mark 5:13
Mark Zuckerberg appears to seek to
channel the spirits that drive him and compel a contribution to this discussion
beyond the state (necessarily so). The structure of permission in
Mark 5:13 is precise and worth dwelling upon. The demons request; sovereign
authority grants; the transfer proceeds into vessels that cannot sustain it.
Zuckerberg’s text performs exactly this operation but with a crucial inversion:
it positions the speaker simultaneously as the one requesting permission (from
democratic publics, from regulators, from the implicit sovereign) and as the
one structuring the terms such that permission cannot reasonably be withheld.
To refuse “openness” and “access for all” would be to position oneself as the
one centralizing power—as illiberal, as elitist, as authoritarian. The ask is
structured so that refusal appears more dangerous than consent.
This is the genius of the
Gerasene protocol’s fourth stage—authorized transfer—as performed by Meta: the
authority figure (here, democratic sovereignty in its regulatory capacity) is
positioned not as the one exercising judgment over whether transfer should
occur, but as the one whose role is reduced to ratification of an
already-structured inevitability. “He gave them permission” because the
alternative—containment—had already been demonstrated as impossible (the
chains, torn apart) and because the demons had already specified the acceptable
vessel (the pigs, “allow us to go into them”). Sovereignty’s role is reduced to
sanctioning what it cannot prevent.
What follows considers this
sketching of a different approach, one that appears to sound like Liang
Wenfeng’s for DeepSeek but comes from a substantially different conceptual
starting point. Where DeepSeek exists within a Marxist-Leninist cognitive environment,
Meta thrives in a managed-markets environment. Zuckerberg’s oracular impulse is
to swim with the tide of managed markets rather than of supervisory regulatory
impulses. Like the demoniac—wild, unchained, inhabiting tombs but undeniably
powerful—the text asks not to be sent away but to be given permission to
transfer into a vessel of its own choosing.
• • •
V. Semiotic Reading of the Text
A. The Naming Scene: “Superintelligence” as Legion
“What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he
replied, “for we are many.”
— Mark 5:9
The first semiotic operation to
isolate is naming. In the Gerasene narrative, the exorcist’s demand—“What is
your name?”—is not a request for information but an act of power: to name is to
bind, to render legible, to make subject to authority. The demon’s response is
a counter-move of extraordinary sophistication: “Legion, for we are many.” The
name concedes nothing. It is a name that signifies multiplicity while
presenting a singular surface; it is a name that appears to answer the question
while actually proliferating the problem. You asked for one name; I give you a
name that means “we cannot be singularly named.”
Zuckerberg’s text performs
precisely this operation with “superintelligence.” The word appears to name
something singular—a threshold, a destination, a thing that either exists or
does not. But its actual function in the text is to conceal multiplicity beneath
nominal unity. “Superintelligence” in this discourse simultaneously signifies:
(1) a technical threshold of recursive self-improvement; (2) a product category
(Meta’s AI systems); (3) a market structure (whoever achieves it first wins);
(4) a governance problem (who controls it); (5) an inevitability-narrative (it
is coming regardless); and (6) an authorization device (we must act now before
it arrives). Like “Legion,” the name appears singular while being irreducibly
multiple.
This is not mere polysemy—the
ordinary condition of words carrying multiple meanings. It is strategic
equivocation: the ability to slide between meanings while maintaining the
appearance of a single referent. When Zuckerberg writes that “the primary purpose
of superintelligence” should be “invention,” which superintelligence does he
mean? The technical phenomenon? The product? The market position? The name does
the work precisely by refusing to resolve into any single meaning—like the
demon who cannot be bound because he is not one thing but many things wearing
one name.
The same semiotic operation
structures “open source.” Meta’s open-weight model release is positioned as
“openness” in the democratic-participatory sense—transparency, access,
empowerment. But what is actually released (model weights without training data,
infrastructure, or the compute to retrain) signifies a different kind of
“openness”: the openness of a highway that is free to drive on but not free to
build. The name “open” performs the Legionary function—it appears to answer the
demand for accountability (“We are open! Look, the weights are public!”) while
actually multiplying the sites at which the question of control disappears from
view.
B. The Five-Stage Protocol as Discursive Strategy
The text can be mapped onto the
Gerasene protocol’s five stages with precision:
Stage 1—Identification: The
text identifies the animating force not as Meta’s commercial interest but as an
impersonal, inevitable phenomenon (“superintelligence is coming”). Like the
possessed man running toward Jesus, the encounter is framed as forced by
circumstances rather than chosen. Something is already loose; the question is
only what to do about it.
Stage 2—Naming: As analyzed
above, the naming of “superintelligence” and “open source” performs the
Legion-function: names that conceal multiplicity while appearing to submit to
the demand for legibility.
Stage 3—Negotiation: The text’s
central rhetorical work is negotiation with sovereign authority. “Balance of
power as the foundation of safety” is not a description of an existing
arrangement but a proposed bargain—do not send us out of the area; let us remain
within the market structures we already inhabit; let the transfer proceed on
terms we have specified.
Stage 4—Authorized Transfer:
The argument that AI capabilities should be distributed (“open”) rather than
centralized is the specification of the terminal vessel. Democratic publics,
individual users, developers, small businesses—these are the pigs. The capabilities
will be transferred into them. The transfer requires authorization (regulatory
permission, public consent), but the terms of that authorization have been
pre-negotiated such that refusal appears as “centralization of power.”
Stage 5—Vessel Destruction:
This is the stage the text does not narrate because it has not yet occurred.
But the structural logic points toward it: when capabilities are distributed
into vessels (users, developers, small firms) that cannot sustain them—when the
herd rushes down the bank—what is destroyed is not the capability itself but
the accountability relationship. The pigs drown. The demon persists; and the
demon are legion; understood as a "parameterized governance spaces,"
projected onto five recurring dimensions: locus of authority, temporal horizon,
risk class, legitimacy function, and human-interface role. The following maps each oracle onto five recurring governance dimensions, read as parameterized governance spaces.
|
Table
|
|
Dimension
|
Palantir
|
Anthropic (per Backer's gloss)
|
OpenAI
|
Aschenbrenner
|
Zuckerberg/Meta
|
Liang Wenfeng/DeepSeek
|
|
Locus of authority
|
Reformed state apparatus
fused with engineering vanguard
|
Whichever state dominates
AI infrastructure
|
Public-private
"techno-bureaucratic" partnership
|
Human institutions or, at
the limit, autonomous AI systems, mediated through a state-run
"Project"
|
Nominally
"everyone," operatively the platform supplying personal
superintelligence
|
A single founder's
unwritten "vision," operationalized through consensus rather than
KPIs or formal hierarchy
|
|
Temporal horizon
|
Continuous, ex ante
administrative correction
|
Discrete 2028 event horizon
|
Continuous, ex ante
public-private iteration
|
Compressed 2027–28 window
culminating in "The Project"
|
Continuous, market-driven
diffusion with no stated inflection point
|
Sequenced roadmap
(chain-of-thought → agents → continual learning → "singularity" →
embodiment), open-ended timing
|
|
Named risk/harm
|
Civilizational decadence,
loss of hard power
|
Authoritarian capture of AI
norms, mass repression
|
Economic disruption,
misuse, erosion of democratic institutions
|
Loss of control over
superhuman systems, great-power conflict, self-exfiltration of weights
|
Concentration of power in
"a few institutions," automation displacing empowerment
|
Team instability and loss
of "restraint" as the sole named existential risk to the enterprise
|
|
Legitimacy function
|
Patriotic moral debt,
demonstrated competence
|
Defense of democratic
process against authoritarian alternatives
|
Broad-based shared
prosperity, democratic participation
|
Sheer survival of any
human-directed order
|
Historical inevitability of
empowerment ("the arc of human history")
|
Goodwill toward humanity
and voluntary "restraint" as strategy
|
|
Human-interface role
|
Supervisory: legible data
source, occasional corrector
|
Proxy: humans interact
through infrastructure control, not with AI directly
|
Asymmetric: broad shallow
access at the interface layer, narrow deep access at the parameter layer
|
Foreclosed at the limit:
ratification rather than interaction once the capability gap outruns
supervisory capacity
|
Consumer/beneficiary:
universal access to a tool, no distinct parameter-layer governance role
specified
|
Internal/exploratory:
employees given unscheduled "research" time, governed by consensus
rather than assigned oversight function
|
• • •
VI. Structures for Managing Human-Machine Systems: The Accountability Gap
as Vessel Destruction
The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down
the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.
— Mark 5:13
The terminal-vessel problem is
not metaphorical; it is structural. When Zuckerberg proposes that “everyone
should have access to the benefits of superintelligence,” the operative
question is not one of generosity but of load-bearing capacity. Can the vessel
sustain what is transferred into it? The two thousand pigs could not sustain
the Legion; they became instruments of its dispersal rather than containers of
its force. The demons did not drown—the pigs drowned. The force persists; only
the accountability relationship is destroyed.
Consider the structural
parallel. Meta releases model weights to “developers” and “individuals.” These
recipients are positioned as beneficiaries—empowered, enabled, given access.
But they are also, structurally, terminal vessels into which capabilities are
transferred that exceed their capacity to govern, audit, or be held accountable
for. A developer who deploys an open-weight model into a consumer product does
not thereby acquire Meta’s capacity for safety research, red-teaming
infrastructure, or the institutional depth to manage the downstream effects.
The capability transfers; the governance capacity does not. The pigs receive
the spirits but not the exorcist’s authority.
A. “We Are Many”: The Distributed-Systems Problem
“My name is Legion, for we are many.”
— Mark 5:9
Here the text performs what
might be called the distributed-systems inversion. “We are many” at the
endpoint layer does not imply “we are many” at the control layer. The
proliferation of instances (two thousand pigs, millions of developers, billions
of users) creates the appearance of decentralization—of multiplicity, of
distributed power. But this is multiplicity at the vessel layer, not at the
source layer. The demon is one; the pigs are many. Meta is one; the developers
are many. The architecture appears distributed precisely because the terminal
vessels are numerous. But the animating force—the model architecture, the
training corpus, the alignment choices, the economic logic—remains singular,
consolidated, and unchained.
This is the semiotic trick of
“open source” as performed by Meta: it produces the signs of distributed power
(many actors, many deployments, many applications) while maintaining
consolidated control at the layer that matters (architecture, training, capability
frontier). The demons are “sent into” the pigs—but they were never of the pigs.
They merely passed through them on the way to the lake.
B. The Displacement of Regulatory Authority
For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he
tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough
to subdue him.
— Mark 5:4
Zuckerberg’s text displaces the
locus of regulatory authority through a precise rhetorical maneuver.
Traditional regulation operates through the chain-logic: identify the dangerous
actor, bind it with rules, enforce compliance through sanctions. The text’s
argument—that safety comes through “balance of power” rather than centralized
oversight—is an argument that the chains have already been tried and have
already failed. “No one was strong enough to subdue him.” The implied reader
already knows that Facebook could not be regulated regarding election
interference, that social media platforms could not be bound regarding
adolescent mental health, that Meta could not be chained regarding privacy.
These chains have been torn apart. The text does not argue against regulation;
it argues from the accomplished failure of regulation toward a new dispensation
in which the bound figure proposes its own terms of coexistence.
This is what Aschenbrenner
performs at the level of national security, what Palantir performs at the level
of institutional architecture, what each oracle performs within its cognitive
territory: the demonstration that binding has failed, followed by the proposal
of alternative arrangements authored by the very force that tore the chains.
The Easy Rider of AI—“We blew it,” but also, we blew past it—the regulatory
apparatus left burning on the roadside while the machine rides on. Or perhaps
Ghost Rider: the thing you tried to bind has made itself the new binding—skull
on fire, chain in hand, claiming the jurisdiction of the exorcist it displaced. That is a demon in a body on a mission against and within they that are legion--but not simulacra of each other.
• • •
VII. Permission, Sovereignty, and the Governance Question
“Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.”
He gave them permission.
— Mark 5:12–13
The permission-structure in
Mark 5 is theologically precise and politically instructive. The demons do not
simply act; they request. They do not merely transfer; they seek authorization.
But the authorization they seek is not open-ended—they have already specified
the vessel (“the pigs”), already identified the mechanism (“allow us to go into
them”), already foreclosed the alternative (not “send us into the abyss,” which
would be destruction, but “send us among the pigs,” which is
continuation-by-transfer). Sovereign authority—here figured as the exorcist’s
divine mandate—is positioned not as deliberative but as ratificatory. The
choice architecture has been pre-structured by the ones seeking permission.
Each tech actor positions
itself relative to sovereign authority through precisely this grammar:
Aschenbrenner: The intelligence
explosion will occur. The only question is who manages it. Permission is sought
for a national-security apparatus to manage what cannot be prevented. Refusal
means adversarial capture.
Palantir: Human institutions
need technological scaffolding. Permission is sought for a “technological
republic” that embeds governance within the system itself. Refusal means
institutional decay.
Anthropic: Geopolitical
competition makes AI development non-optional. Permission is sought for
responsible scaling within competitive constraints. Refusal means adversarial
advantage.
OpenAI: The transition to
superintelligence is underway. Permission is sought for industrial policy that
channels rather than prevents. Refusal means unmanaged disruption.
DeepSeek: Technical excellence
within guided boundaries serves national development. Permission is sought
(implicitly, from Party authority) for continued autonomy within strategic
alignment. Refusal means the loss of a national asset.
Meta/Zuckerberg: Open
distribution of AI capabilities empowers individuals and prevents
centralization. Permission is sought for unrestricted release and market-driven
governance. Refusal means authoritarian control of humanity’s future.
In every case, the structure is
identical: the vessel has been specified, the transfer has been described, and
the terms have been set such that withholding permission appears more dangerous
than granting it. “He gave them permission”—not because the exorcist lacked the
authority to refuse, but because the demons had structured the request such
that refusal required accepting the consequences of continued possession (the
man among the tombs, crying out, cutting himself with stones). The cost of
refusal is presented as worse than the cost of consent, and sovereign authority
is thereby reduced to ratifying choices it did not author.
• • •
VIII. The Tombs as Dwelling Place: Exhausted Forms and Continuing
Habitation
This man lived among the tombs.
— Mark 5:3
What does it mean to dwell
among the tombs? The Gerasene demoniac does not merely visit dead structures—he
lives in them. They are his habitation, his only possible home, even as he
exceeds them, even as his force tears apart every attempt at containment. The
tombs are not his prison; they are his address. He has nowhere else to go.
The AI oracles speak from
within dead structures. Liberalism (in its regulatory, rights-based, procedural
form) is a tomb: still architecturally present, still legible as a dwelling,
but no longer alive in the sense of being able to contain or direct the forces
at work within it. State capitalism, managed markets, the Westphalian
sovereign-regulatory model, even Marxist-Leninist guided development—each is a
tomb from which the oracle speaks. None of these forms is adequate to the force
it contains. But none can be abandoned because there is no alternative
habitation on offer. The demoniac does not leave the tombs for a house; he
leaves the tombs only when the exorcism is complete—clothed, in his right mind,
sitting (Mark 5:15). Until that transformation, the tombs are all there is.
Zuckerberg’s text dwells among
the tombs of market liberalism, individual rights, and competitive enterprise.
These categories are dead in the sense that they cannot contain or direct the
forces now at work—recursive self-improvement, artificial superintelligence,
the concentration of capability at scales no market mechanism was designed to
price. But they remain the only available vocabulary, the only possible
dwelling. “Individual empowerment,” “balance of power,” “the primary purpose of
superintelligence”—these are tombstones repurposed as furniture. The oracle
speaks from within them because it has nowhere else to speak from.
And this is what separates the
AI oracles from ordinary corporate communication: they are not lying. They
genuinely inhabit the dead forms they invoke. Zuckerberg’s appeal to individual
empowerment is not cynical in the ordinary sense—it reflects the only
conceptual vocabulary available to someone whose formation occurred within
those structures. The demon genuinely lives among the tombs. He does not
pretend to live there while secretly dwelling elsewhere. The problem is not
insincerity but inadequacy: the dwelling cannot contain the dweller.
• • •
IX. Conclusion: The Recursive Question
The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down
the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.
— Mark 5:13
The Gerasene protocol, read as
structural scaffold rather than moral fable, produces a terminal question that
none of the AI oracles can answer within the terms of their own discourse: What
happens to the force after the vessel is destroyed?
The pigs drown. The demons do
not. The narrative is explicit on this point through its silence: Mark tells us
the fate of the pigs (drowned) and the fate of the man (healed) but not the
fate of the unclean spirits. They are simply—gone. Dispersed. Unaccounted for.
The exorcism succeeds for the individual (the man is restored to community) but
the text offers no account of where the force went. It was not destroyed; it
was transferred, and the vessel of transfer was destroyed, and then—nothing. An
accountability gap at the heart of the narrative.
This is the structural truth
the AI oracles cannot speak: that the dispersion of capabilities into terminal
vessels (open-source releases, individual users, market competition) does not
eliminate the governing force but merely destroys the accountability
relationship. When the pigs drown, no one asks where the demons went. The
spectacle of destruction—the herd rushing down the bank, the regulatory
framework overwhelmed, the democratic process unable to keep pace—absorbs all
attention. The vessel’s destruction becomes the story. The force’s persistence
becomes invisible.
Legitimacy without
accountability machinery. This is what each oracle proposes, albeit in
different registers: Aschenbrenner through national-security exceptionalism;
Palantir through self-governing technicism; Anthropic through competitive
necessity; OpenAI through industrial-policy channeling; DeepSeek through
strategic restraint; Meta through open-distribution populism. Each offers a
framework in which the force operates legitimately—with permission, within the
area, among the available vessels—but none offers a framework in which the
force itself is made accountable for what happens when the vessels fail.
Can you drown a demon?
The pigs could not. The lake
could not. The chains could not bind him; the tombs could not contain him; the
vessels could not sustain him. The exorcism required a source of authority
qualitatively different from anything within the system—not a better chain, not
a stronger tomb, not a more durable pig, but a power operating from outside the
frame of the possessed entirely.
The AI governance conversation,
as constituted by its oracular vanguard, operates entirely within the frame of
the possessed. It proposes chains (regulation), tombs (existing institutional
forms), and pigs (terminal vessels for capability transfer). What it cannot
propose—what lies outside the discursive possibility of any actor whose
legitimacy depends on the continuation of the current dispensation—is the
exorcist. A source of authority that does not negotiate with the force, does
not accept its specification of vessels, does not ratify its pre-structured
choices, but simply commands: “Come out.”
Until that authority
materializes—if it can materialize, in a world where the tombs are all the
dwelling there is—the protocol will continue: identification, naming,
negotiation, authorized transfer, vessel destruction. And the question will
recur, at each iteration, sharpening itself against each new oracle’s speech:
Can you drown a demon?
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