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For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms. It follows an end-of-year tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); 2020 (for those see here); 2022 (for those see here); 2023 (for those see here), and 2024 (here).
If 2023 was the year in which belief matured into conflict, 2024 saw that conflict escalate and move decisively toward its end games. The year 2025 proves to be one of realization--realization of the triumphs and failures of the end-games that had been gathering speed and moving toward decisive phases between 2019- 2024. At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Eleggua/Oya (The Orishas Speak: The 2025 Letter of the Year of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2025 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation).
The 2025 Letter of the Year is interesting especially after several years of oracular suggestions (2019-2024) of turmoil, explosion, and transformation traveling along pathways that are both conduit and are disrupted and reshaped. It is the year of finalization of the great cycle the unavoidable period of ending of which was introduced by disease (2019) and will end with the establishment of new structures (good and evil) toward which all will be expected to bed the knee. The Letter of the Year (the official version and that of the independistas; Miguel Febres Padron (below) and my own) point to the emergence of emperors and the corruption of order, of liars and of the return of defeated enemies to which victors had shown mercy. This is the year of the sacrifices required for new ordering; and the sacrifices will be painful.
Welcome to the 2025 disco scene after-party. And 2025 did not disappoint as to venue or tunes. Those who emerged from the explosions that had erupted between 2022 and 2024 began the process, often quite ruthless, of reshaping the world in the wake of their triumphs. There were transformations everywhere--violent transformations, ongoing transformations, upending of power-relations, the transformations that are the end product of vendetta, and the transformations of one set of ideologies for another. Transformation became substantially transactional as well. But transformation into what? That is the question for 2026.
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The first set focuses on the serendipity of the post-transformation order. The ordering of the after-party of transformation produces its own burlesque of blood--for what better way to appease higher forces that shape collectives than by caricature, comedy and sacrifice, that is by investing the jest with a sort of divinity meaningful enough to hold a community of meaning makers/receivers together.
The second set focuses on the regulation of generative intelligence as the jest that keeps on giving. The trajectory of the etymology of the term in English nicely describes the transformation of its subject in 2025--from a narrative of exploits (the Old French geste, now also a gesture) to speaking (verb) or the the tale itself (noun) of something trifling, something meant to amuse (someone). But, of course, the joke is on the jokester, whose tale becomes both comedy and at best a "beau geste" a pretty gesture to the past. All of that can veer towards the banal. Perhaps one understand the trajectories of AI regulation in 2025 the way one understands the drollery--a small decorative image on the margins of an illuminated manuscript. That, perhaps, is what AI regulation has been reduced to in 2025--a small serendipitous, or sometimes naughty, illuminated marginalia on a manuscript that is is going in a different direction.
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Links to the 2025 Year End Ruminations here:
Part 1: The Serendipity of the Post-Transformation Order;
Part 2: The Drollery that is AI Regulation
1. All realms, including virtual realms, that are both a projection of the human and a means of externalizing the collective human for reinsertion into people, and form people, into the communities they would now feel "naturally" follow from this dialectic--all human realms--require a theology.
Reflections on Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour on "Artificial Intelligence and the Islamic Theology of Technology: From “Means” to “Meanings” and from “Minds” to “Hearts”". Theology here is understood in its classical Greek sense of a rationalizing discourse on the gods. This is not God-speak, but rather humans speaking from within the cognitive cage in which, it is assumed, the divine (external) force/presence/thing/person has placed human--and humanity. It is Janus faced in the sense of rationalizing the necessary exteriorization of the rationalizing forces of cognition (the making and ordering of things including the world in which humans find themselves) and then the ordering of humans and human collectivity as a consequences of that ordering and placement. That theology is particularly ironic where it represents the expression of humanity outside of itself--like a divine force--which can then, from its exterior position--assume an autonomous and superior role in shaping the lebenswelt that passes for the entirety of human cognitive space. It is even more interesting, and ironic, when that divine space, that human divinity, is then shaped, in turn, or merged with, other exteriorizations, in this case religions that are grounded on an assumption of a presence that is both (1) not human; (2) a creator of the human and of humanity; and (3) a shepherd with a specific interest in managing the human flock through texts and periodic demonstration of power that can be manifested only by those who exist beyond the laws and the cognitive cages into which humanity has been placed. And for all of this, on the human plane at least, one requires a θεολόγος (theologis), one who speaks of--and for-God). That is one needs theos (θεο; the exogenous manifestation of an ordering force) and Logos (λόγος; reason, logic, the divine presence in human readable form ). And it is in the second part of the word that one re-encounters that semiosis of the divine: that the human is incapable of speaking OF the divine (in whatever form the human can grasp it) without speaking FOR the God.
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2. Where technological revolutions drives all societal forces, the forces of politics must lead, follow, or get swept away.
Xi Jinping (Full text: Explanation of the Recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China for Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development) and 推动科技创新和产业创新深度融合（学习贯彻党的二十届四中全会精神）[Promoting the Deep Integration of Technological Innovation and Industrial Innovation (Studying and Implementing the Spirit of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee)] "We must uphold and strengthen the Party’s overall leadership, as it is the fundamental guarantee for advancing Chinese modernization. With a view to improving the Party’s ability to lead China’s economic and social development endeavors, the document emphasizes the need to uphold and strengthen the Party Central Committee’s centralized, unified leadership, refine the mechanisms through which the Party Central Committee’s major decisions and plans are carried out. (Explanation of the Recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China for Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan)."
3. National efforts to harness tech, especially tech that can think for itself, reminds us that States, like people, tend to become the instruments of the tools they build; one serves one's instrument even as one thinks that it is the instrument doing the serving.
President Trump, Press Release: President Trump Launches the Genesis Mission to Accelerate AI for Scientific Discovery; President Trump, Executive Order: Launching the Genesis Mission. The Executive Order describes the project as "a national effort to accelerate the application of AI for transformative scientific discovery focused on pressing national challenges." (Launching the Genesis Mission, §2(a)). "[It] recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories." (Ibid., §1). It is meant to harness the best minds toward objectives that strengthen the Republic as that is understood by those in power in a State directed project that harnesses national productive forces toward those ends: "The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership." (Ibid., § 1). All of this is to be overseen by the core of leadership in (or of) the Republic, Michael Kratsios the "Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) [who] shall provide general leadership of the Mission." (Ibid., § 2(c)) and operationalized under the leadership of the Secretary of Energy (Ibid., §2(b). And it object--not merely to ensure the accelerated movement of the Republic's tech innovation forward, but to do so in a way that protects the Republic against these forces of internal chaos and external threat. This ties back to the Trump Administration objectives of moving toward a new golden age--the Republic's analogue to the Chinese Marxist-Leninist objectives of socialist modernization as an instrument essential to the project of national rejuvenation.
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4. If generative intelligence is to be created in the image of the systems from which it arises, then one can expect all generative systems to exhibit all of the characteristics of techno-bureaucratic vanguardism that defines both public and private institutional organs.
The American Leninist-Brain Trust Republic: Text of President Trump's Executive Order, "Launching the Genesis Mission," and the Press Release "President Trump Launches the Genesis Mission to Accelerate AI for Scientific Discovery". brain trusts plus technology--whether it is of intellectuals, of the leading forces of social development, or of anything else--answer only to themselves and their own logic. In the context of tech driven brain trust vanguardism of the liberal democratic sort one does not encounter some sort of sad re-enactment of the cruder forms of totalitarianism of the last century. Though that false analogy appears to drive much of what passes for discussion and analysis among the fearful, the lazy, and those effectively out of the loop and not ready for tech based disciplinary "re-education." There is something new; it is new because the technologies are new, and with it, the approaches to understanding the "meaning" of core social collective premises become new as well. One moves from total control to total management; and one moves from a totalizing absence of personal liberty to its mediation by reference to public policy goals, aspirations, ideals and objectives. Many global societies have been engaging in dress rehearsals for this new form of managed freedom and liberty for some time; and the politics of identity in the liberal democratic sphere, and that of patriotism and the avoidance of "chaos" have fueled the same control trajectories in Marxist Leninist States, to different effect in the ground. Brian trust vanguardism, like its post-Soviet Marxist cousin, manages and with technology, it may well manage so seamlessly that the difference between management and control will be a function of the determination of how much discretion left to humans marks the diffe4rence between social solidarity principles and totalitarian disciplinary structures. In both cases, though, deviation from the vision and desires of the vanguard become harder as the politics of social collectives shifts from the masses to its leaders who manifest "the best of us."
Pix credit here (Éminence Grise, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1873)) The brain trust concept has become ubiquitous in liberal democracy, and so deeply embedded that it is now virtually impossible to avoid the concept and its value as an inevitable solution to everything without rejecting the contemporary premises on which liberal democracy has been reordered since 1918. Consider this opening snippet from the Magazine of Columbia University: "Columbia’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative is assembling the best thinkers in the world to study the most complex object in the known universe." (The Brian Trust). One cannot imagine a world in which the brain trust is not a central element of power--aligning knowledge production with power, and the desires of power with knowledge production in a closed loop self-referencing structure within which one provides both tests who "for knows better" and then assumes that knowledge in the service of power effectively trumps traditional politics either from the top, or more interesting, from the bottom. At the same time it aligns knowledge production with the production of law. Rule of law, in this sense, begins to assume the closed loop characteristics of productivity measures on the factory of floor of politics, directed now to the maximization of the realization of what expert knowledge--the brain trust, always eager to please those who make their new found status-power possible--makes possible. And the productivity of expert knowledge makes possible what power can conceive and desire.
5. The future general contradiction of Chinese Marxist-Leninism, one grounded in the triumph of Socialist modernization, will shift from the just distribution of the fruits of modernization to it the contradiction between human-led ideological guidance and machine-augmented decision-making.
Struggle to realize the overall assignments of the new era
为实现新时期总任务而奋斗 (1978)
Chinese governance is structured around interpenetration—the mutual embeddedness of Party and State institutions. Historically, this interpenetration has been managed through personal-bureaucratic forms: overlapping roles, dual appointments, and ideological campaigns. In the digital age, however, interpenetration is reconfigured through data flows, predictive modeling, and feedback loops.
The smart court, then, is not just a site of dispute resolution but a generator of political data—inputs and outputs that reflect the health of Party ideology and administrative discipline. To oversee such a system, the Party must itself become a digitally competent, analytically capable, and ideologically precise actor.
This is no small task. It means building a digitally-enhanced Party apparatus that can assess court behavior, monitor ideological conformity, and even model the likely impact of judicial decisions—all without becoming a mere appendage of the technologies it deploys.
The smart court exemplifies both the achievements and the contradictions of China’s New Era. On the one hand, it reflects the success of socialist modernization: the integration of productivity-enhancing technologies into governance. On the other hand, it surfaces a contradiction between human-led ideological guidance and machine-augmented decision-making. Two key contradictions define the current moment. First, the contradiction between the leadership of the Party and its capacity to lead in a tech-driven environment. Second, the contradiction between technology as instrument and technology as autonomous force. Both must be addressed if the CPC is to retain its position as the core of the political-economic order.
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6. The term "artificial intelligence" has acquired a protean quality--it is at once fetish, invocation, curse, and shorthand for a range of hoped for or feared transformation not just in social relations in the physical world, but for the transformation of the mechanics of ordering reality through which social relations may be conceived and manifested; at its most refined it serves as the perfect simulacra of the idealized system that is projected into it.
Reflections on 石英, 智能社会”研究三题 【构建中国哲学社会科学自主知识体系】[ Shi Ying, Three Research Topics on "Intelligent Society" (Constructing an Independent Knowledge System for Chinese Philosophy and Social Sciences)]; 国务院关于深入实施“人工智能+” [Opinions of the State Council on Deepening the Implementation of the "Artificial Intelligence+" Action; ]; and 以“人工智能+”开启中国特色智能化发展新篇章; [Opening a New Chapter in China's Intelligent Development with "Artificial Intelligence+" (High-Tech Department NDRC]. All political and normative organs, especially those created to express and manage human social relations in accordance with whatever cognitive model they mean to manifest, believe that, having created artificial intelligence in their own image, they can, with nothing more than the flip of a textual legal-institutional switch, bend that construct to its will and enslave to as an instrument of to do with as they wish. An yet that fundamental premise--that humanity is at the center of all of its creations, and thus centered in control-- is only the beginning rather than the end point of analysis. That is because while humans share this notion of humanity at the center of things, human collectives express this, construct its meaning and realize that meaning through the collective organs that they establish for that purpose, in vastly different ways. Those "ways" in turn, are an expression of quite distinct ordering premises bound up in ideology--the political-economic models through which human collectives rationalize the world around them (in normative and utilitarian ways). It is the materialization of that rationality, bounded in turn on the generative human conceit, that produce the structures of hopes, fears, desires, approaches and solutions that are proffered up within a spectrum of "good" to "bad", vales that themselves reflect both the fundamental conceit and their specific rationalizing premises built into collective orders. * * * At the center of the engagement of Marxist-Leninism with tech enhanced analytics and decision making, as well as with generative intelligence, is the fundamental principle of development. Socialist modernization is the one key principle, and the one core element, of the integrity of the system and the fiduciary obligation of the vanguard of social forces organized as a Communist Party through which the masses may be brought forward from their less developed state to one in which it is possible to combine both material wealth and cultural readiness, for the establishment of something like a classical communist state of being. Tech and AI, then, are productive forces, all productive forces are pwned by the State, the use and development of which is a central concern for the exercise of leadership and guidance by the Communist Party vanguard in accordance with core principles of Socialist democracy (Whole process people's democracy in China). That gives tech based and AI generative system both a strong political dimension (the innovation of which is a key element for Socialist modernization grounded in high quality production) and a methodological one (tech and AI as a necessary element of modernization the risks of which must be understood as a function of the benefits for collective modernization). Risk, then, is a secondary element to the development of high quality production, and high quality production is valued as a function of its contribution of modernization as that may be assessed as against the goals of forward movement along the Socialist Path that shapes both production and the cultural development of the human (and collective humanity) preparing it for successful transitioning to Communist social organization.
7. If the performance of dialog presupposes its end, can one fault the generative technologies one develops in its shadow for treating humans the way that human elites treat the objects of their performative engagement?
U.N. Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Offers Platform to Build Safe Systems and Open Call for Candidates. One notes variations of these themes at virtually every public facing event framing an underlying regulatory project. That is not a bad thing, but it does suggest that the semiotics of dialogue may be more narrowly understood here as a pathway toward an anticipated (regulatory) and normative goal--one already presupposed. "“The future will not be shaped by algorithms alone,” Annalena Baerbock, president of the U.N. General Assembly. “It will be shaped by the choices we make together.” (Countries Consider A.I.’s Dangers and Benefits at U.N.). Still one has the sense that the choices were made before the dialogue, one that is pre-shaped by the normative rivalries of the U.S. and China, or better put, by the choices both are making about how they mean to use the U.N. apparatus strategically for the advancement of their respective interests.* * * All of these performative acts continue to move forward a quite peculiar approach to generative intelligence in automated decision making and virtual systems. It is one that assumes that these systems are inanimate instruments that can be bent to conform to the variety of usually highly contested human institutional objectives, values, desires, and organizational (and policy) frameworks. In the process it reconstructs these systems as something that perhaps they are not--both as something greater and something less than what is being developed.
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8. Humans believe they can regulate and by regulation control a generative intelligence and systems of automated decision making the languages of which are opaque to humans.
"Coding the Rule of Code Versus Rule of Law for Blockchain Debate."Its object is to consider an underlying contradiction in the now well established parameters within which humans debate the normative elements of code based regulatory structures and their relationship (either hierarchically subordinate to, as an instrumental methodology or autonomous of) to law--understood as an object (text preserved command), as a system of human behavior management, and as the cages of the performance of the organizing premises (and their ideologies, that is the formal applied structures of human cognition) of the incarnation of human collectivity as a phenomenological set of expectations and dialogical performances. That contradiction lies at the heart of the means by which coded regulation and traditional textual (human centered) regulation are coupled. Source coding, the human language of digitalized regulatory measure, and machine languages, the binaries and executable files arranged in a logical, temporally sequential, and iterative process, are not mirror images of the other. They meet at the points of translation and transmission of inputs and outputs. But their logic and the way they sequence data, process, value and operations may neither align nor may they process mimesis of the kind that would advance the premise of human centered automated and tech based data driven behavior modeling and control.
9. Computers like to count; apparently so do humans. Almost invariably they can count the wrong things, in the sense of counting objects that have little bearing on the conclusion or analysis they believe they are advancing.
Meta Oversight Board 2024 Report Made Available--The Thirst for Impact and the Metrics of Mattering. The trick is to convince oneself that what one is counting is actually a plausible avatar, or more sadly a proxy, for something else--for example number of citations as a proxy for quality. In the case of Meta's Oversight Board, apparently it might be focused on the number of its recommendations that may have been implemented (the context of quality of the implementation remains mysterious but tat is common within large bureaucracies web to this sort of quantitative merits based reporting). That appears to be the gist of the Oversight Board's 2024 Annual Report, just distributed, which was meant to highlight the Board's "impact in fostering platform accountability, protecting free speech, and driving changes to Meta's policies and practices during the biggest election year in modern history." This is wonderful; it is more wonderful the more completely one is a resident of the self-referencing universe that constitutes both Meta and the Meta Oversight Boards galaxy of knowledge, made significant by the premises and outlooks around which they can construct the cognitive universe within which it operates and into which it invites all of its users. Bravo. And really one can't fault them. The contemporary mania for "impact" is about the only thing that has survived the overthrowing of a global convergence based globalization. The metrics of impact may vary but from business and human rights to international criminal law impacts is what matters most to people, especially people and their collectives that mean to matter more. Beyond that there is little more to be said but this: the object of all of this effort is not about the thing tat is the purpose of the organization; it is about the strategic engagement with those things in ways that make the collective matter. What matters now is mattering. One is far more interested in impact in all its glory, , perhaps more than the bodies and actions and events on which the collective may have risen to whatever level of glory it means to describe. At some point, of course, the detachment of "impact" from the means to its realization might well become problematic--perhaps not to the impacts devouring collective, but to those in whose serve they are meant to act. In any case, and in equal measure for all other impacts feeding collectives--Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant--"meta"-phorically, of course.
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10. It is perhaps inevitable that the regulation of AI must reduce itself to the ability of the human to access AI in ways that serve its interests; in this sense AI becomes like the face of a divinity that appears to its worshipers in whatever form gives them comfort, without otherwise concerning itself with the human.
AI Within the Cognitive Cage of the "Official" (士): China Proposes "Global AI Governance Action Plan" [人工智能全球治理行动计划]. As always with plans of this type is is most useful to start at the end (where the framework is most pointedly elaborated) and work one's way to the beginning (which focuses on generalized goals and ideal). At the heart of these thirteen provisions is the core normative driver:
In the AI era, only through global solidarity can we fully unleash the potential of AI while ensuring its safety, reliability, controllability, and fairness, and ultimately deliver on the commitments outlined in the United Nations Pact for the Future and its annex: the Global Digital Compact, create an inclusive, open, sustainable, fair, safe, and secure digital and intelligent future for all. (Global AI Governance Action Plan)It is all here. The call for centralization and public control of AI (however defined), and with it the control and institutionalization of markets in the service of the State and its management of a useful tool. Here the Chinese and European sensibilities evidence some alignment. The insistence of constructing AI as a useful object is also in evidence here, one cabined within the parameters of international expectations. Under the leadership of the governing core, a centralized and coordinated system overseen by the State as an instrument of public policy realized through public direction of private activity. The fundamental difference between this starting point and that in the U.S. AI Action Plan is unavoidable, though perhaps not insurmountable (compare here). The thirteen points that follow then flesh this out.
Points 11-13 speak to the vision for a governance architecture--and its purpose. It seeks to center the elaboration of an institutional governance platform from out of which the tendrils of regulation and management might be anchored in the United Nations, and through it, of its soft law principles ("support the establishment of inclusive governance platforms based on public interests and the joint participation of relevant entities"). Those tendrils, of course, are operated under the guidance of leading states that serve as the vanguard of all States operating within the open and inclusive institutional framework of the UN system--much like democratic centralism within the structures of a Leninist Party operating something like a consultative democratic apparatus. And the purpose?--"helping developing countries bridge the digital divide and achieve equitable and inclusive development, and promote the establishment of an inclusive and fair multilateral global digital governance system based on complying with international law and respecting for national sovereignty and developmental differences.* * *
Pix credit here Points 6-10 provide the structural objectives within which coordinated regulation by public institutions can be elaborated. This includes the care and feeding of robust data sources, the deployment of AI innovation towards sustainability goals, the direction to industry (under the guidance of public bodies) to develop coordinated and perhaps standardized tech specifications "in key areas such as security, industry and ethics, so as to establish a scientific, transparent, and inclusive normative framework in the field of AI * * * [to] enhance the exclusivity and interoperability of the standards system" (Ibid.), ensuring that AI innovation is undertaken within a framework in which the State is in the lead, and coordinated quality control measures ought to be realized around some sort of understand relating to risk.
Pix credit here Points 1-5 then suggest the objectives-based program--that is what is meant to happen after Points 6-13 have been, if not fully realized, at least made into the ideal the attainment of which serves as the regulatory focal point. The first is coordination and tech innovation sharing. The second touches on innovation itself. In both cases the idea, clothed in fairly positive language, is to assure a system of tech transfer and sharing, one made possible assuming a standardization of specifications and an alignment of objectives. It implies some sort of tech synergy giving way to a coordinated whole; it doe snot suggest a contest over competing standards and with it the dominance of one tech based system over another (not in its operation but in the core fundamental premises that drive tech realization of those premises. The third is the horizontal diffusion of the fruits of innovation across industry. These first three points mirror in important ways the fundamental characteristics of socialist modernization in an era of high quality productivity. This way of approaching innovation, then, would become the global standard
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