A bonus section at the end for James Joyce fans
Why This Moment Demands an Unvarnished Look
The markets are roaring. So much so that more than the cheers of the bulls, all one hears are the roars of the bubble callers. It is preached from every screen. Capital spending is at a level never seen before in the technology sector. We are believers in innovation. We think the long-term outcome will likely be positive. But faith is not the same as blindness. This is not a crisis of faith. It is a demand for sight
At today’s valuations, ignoring the risks would be the greater sin. This essay does not sugarcoat. We will not tell you that every danger is temporary or easily managed. We will not offer reassurances. We will not balance every risk with a promised reward. What follows is an unflinching look at the seven deadly sins of AI. Each is real. Each is present. Each demands a reckoning.
Pride: The Hubris of the Machine Age
We have given the machine a voice. It speaks our language. Some of us believe it is beginning to form a thought. The true sin is not this private belief. It is the public performance of absolute certainty that leadership now requires.
“The sage wears rough clothing and holds jade in his heart.” — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The skeptics of yesterday are the evangelists of today. CEOs who once urged caution now preach revolution from every stage. Politicians invoke a future they do not fully grasp to justify its cost. Budgets for roads and hospitals are trimmed. Corporate spending is pruned. All is sacrificed at the altar of AI. Pride is the armor a leader must wear to justify this offering. It is the outward appearance demanded by a world watching.
The danger is not the failure, but the spectacle of it.
Everyone, including those in the positive camp, knows that whatever they call innovation projects will also fail spectacularly repeatedly. Autonomous driving may finally stop being “two years away,” but it will still not be perfect for years. The same is true for robots of all ilk. The chatbot will introduce a new and subtle poison, harder to detect and more damaging in its effects. Each mistake will be broadcast. Each will be litigated. Each will be used as a weapon by rivals and critics. Each one will cut deeper because the belief projected by those making investment decisions needs to be so absolute.
Many bears writing articles, doing podcasts, or speaking at conferences can project the absoluteness without consequences, as a definitive judgment against their views cannot be provided for decades.
The blow will land harder because the armor of pride for those making decisions had to be so absolute. The market does not reward nuance on a quarterly basis. It demands conviction. Those committing the billions must project a faith that makes no room for doubt. They are not blind, but they must act as if they have perfect sight.
Therefore, every stumble will be called a fall. Their sober risk assessments will be forgotten. Their cautious internal memos will never be seen except when litigated for making decisions with internal views not full in sync with the public. Their faith in the models will be called juvenile. Their creations’ imperfections will be judged as fatal flaws.
The leaders of this age do not walk in ignorance. They will, in our belief, be proven far more right than wrong, but not on a quarterly timetable. They walk with a target pinned to their back. The disillusionment will come, not as a final judgment, but as a season of trial. The unluckiest will be mocked and forced to abandon before long-history may prove them right. For the heart of this endeavor is sound. History’s verdict is not delivered by the market’s sentiment. It is delivered by the world that is built.
Greed: The Mania That Follows the Money
Where the money goes, the opportunists gather. AI is now the largest capital magnet in technology. Greed has been given a new name: innovation.
“A shower of gold coins cannot satisfy desires. The wise one knows that sensual pleasures are of little taste and are the source of suffering.” — The Dhammapada
The sin now has a playbook. Startups are no longer born of vision. They are built for acquisition. Their goal is not to create the next Facebook. It is to be consumed by the current Google. Insider rounds inflate valuations. The same investors mark up their own assets on paper. The headline announces a unicorn. The books tell a different story.
The giants are just as culpable. They make rushed acquisitions and sign poorly vetted data deals. Billions in shareholder money are spent, all to stay ‘in the race’. Governance is blindfolded by this greed. Boards approve moonshots with no map to profit. Executives protect their bonuses, not the balance sheet.
But the greatest sin is the new accounting. A tech giant invests billions in a partner. The partner then pays those billions back for cloud services. The investment is booked as revenue. It is a closed loop of capital. A serpent eating its own tail. Growth is declared on both sides of the ledger. This is the logic of the 2008 crisis. The CDO reborn in the cloud.
This is not a secret. It is the industry’s shared whisper. When the cycle turns, the whisper will become a shout. Investigators will arrive. Politicians will demand answers. The stories that emerge will not be of market dynamics. They will be of simple, unadulterated greed.
Countless voices already know this truth. They have written the volumes and recorded the warnings. But we do not know who will win the crown, or have the movie made in their name. History does not anoint the wise. It anoints the lucky. The sages of doom will be those who speak the day before the reversals begin.
Lust: The Extremism of the Crowded Stage
The stage has become crowded. Every voice now speaks of AI. To be heard requires a shout. Lust is no longer for participation in the race. It is for relevance. For a platform. And in a crowded theater, the currency of relevance is extremism.
“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.” — The Book of Proverbs
See this lust in the optimist camp. Executives propose moonshots not from vision, but from vanity. Their goal is not to build the future, but to claim the boldest headline. They one-up their rivals with ever-grander projects, ever-larger deals. It is a contest of conspicuous ambition.
But the more dangerous lust lives among the pessimists. In this camp, nuance is a weakness. Every AI failure is magnified. Every flaw is presented as a fatal, unpardonable sin. When facts are scarce to support the narrative, they are invented. The audience does not demand proof, only passion.
Technical understanding is dismissed as a distraction. Rhetoric becomes the only weapon. Historical anecdote replaces data. Fiery speeches replace logic. The goal is not to be right, but to be heard. To rouse emotion. To occupy the platform. This lust creates a new priesthood of doom, each competing to paint the darkest possible future. The prize is the largest audience, the loudest applause from the fearful.
This fire escapes the stage. It catches in the halls of power. The result is not stable governance, but policy chaos. Rules change with the season, driven by the loudest shout. Genuine work is obstructed. The climate turns from caution to antagonism. And antagonism, given a political license, becomes violence. The researcher is no longer a scientist; he is a target. The executive is no longer a builder; she is an enemy. The lust for a platform builds a gallows for the pioneer.
Envy: The Resentment of the Excluded
A new priesthood has been anointed. The AI teams. They are given tribute in disproportionate budgets. Legacy businesses are starved. Old paths to promotion are closed. Within the walls of the corporation, the seeds of envy are sown.
“Beware of envy, for envy consumes good deeds just as fire consumes wood.” — Prophet Muhammad
This fire is spreading. Outside the gates, entire professions watch their status evaporate. The expertise of the lawyer, the artist, the writer, all so far unassailable, is now a shoreline eroded by the rising tide. The resentment builds quietly, waiting for the first sign of failure.
But the deepest envy is not for budgets or status. It is for data. The modern world is built on a new inequality: the data-rich versus the data-poor. A handful of corporations hold proprietary datasets on a planetary scale. This is an unbreachable wall. Startups, researchers, and developing nations are left with public scraps. It is an entrenchment of monopoly at the most foundational level.
This envy is now a geopolitical force. A new arms race is measured in parameters and petaflops. Nations enact protectionist policies, not from strategy, but from fear of being left behind. Some are building walls to keep others out. Others are using their skills to ensnare new partners and form new alliances.
Then there is the envy of the market. Of the value investor, bound to old metrics. Of the industrialist, tied to old machines. And of the pundit, who will not see the new technology for what it is, but only for what his narrative requires. Their portfolios were built on tangible assets, on proven fundamentals, and through prowess that worked historically, that excelled in the world without disruptions. Their portfolios have suffered from the sidelines as the rocket ascended. They did not share in the gains, so they pray for the fall. Every negative headline is a prayer answered. Every bearish article is a gospel they spread with zeal. When the prices turn, their whispers will become a chorus of blame. Their envy will demand not just a fall, but a penance from those who flew too high.
Envy does not build. It waits for the builders to fail. Then it provides the political capital to tear down what is left. It sharpens its knives for the first winter.
Gluttony: The Unconstrained Feast
AI is not software. It is a factory. It has turned technology into a resource-devouring industry. Data centers are the new steel mills, but their hunger is for electricity and water. This is just one type of modern-age gluttony.
“Excess is a sin against the soul.” — Bhagavad Gita
The physical feast is staggering. Data centers are straining the power grids of entire nations. Millions of gallons of water are used to cool the servers that process our requests. We are taking out an environmental mortgage to pay for better autocomplete. The feast is also in the models themselves—an arms race of parameters that may or may not deliver diminishing returns in terms of abilities, but certainly at an ever-higher computational cost.
The moral feast is in the data. An endless hunger for information that scrapes copyrighted works, private medical records, and the whole of human conversation. The model’s performance improves, but the societal cost is ignored.
The envy of the sidelined sees only pure excess. They pray for the bubble to burst. But not every dollar spent is a waste. The makers of the picks and shovels in this gold rush are already rich. The chipmakers and the cloud providers. Their profits are real, invisible only to those who measure the gold, not the tools used to find it. Some who feast today will own the next decade. Their gluttony will be rebranded as vision. Yet the sin of malinvestment is still real. It will be measured in empty datacenters, in abandoned pilot projects, in enterprise licenses that are never used. History’s final judgment will not be that we spent too little. It will be that we spent so much, so unevenly, and so unwisely.
The most hidden feast is for human labor. Behind the curtain of automation is an army of ghost workers. Millions of low-wage contractors, mostly in the Global South, label the data and filter the toxic content. The machine’s intelligence is built on a foundation of invisible human toil. The bill for all three feasts will eventually come due.
Wrath: The Blade That Turns Back
The high priests of technology offer a comforting sermon. They point to history as their scripture. To the Luddites. To the steam engine. To the first computer. They preach a gospel of perpetual job creation, promising that human ingenuity will always outrun obsolescence. This is a dream of a world that may no longer exist.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” — Matthew 10:34
This technology is that sword. It does not unite. It divides. The job destruction is not a future risk; it is a present reality. In communities hollowed out by automation, the first casualty is tolerance. The anger turns inward, against the neighbor. It turns outward, against the migrant, the outsider, the one who is not from here.
But this sword has a double edge. It strikes not only the distant worker but the family at home. It cuts down the young, whose careers have not yet begun. It fells the old, whose ways are too set to change. It targets the vast, industrious middle—the millions whose hard-won skills are suddenly, brutally, rendered obsolete.
The anger of these disrupted lives will not be quiet. It will erupt. In strikes. In protests. In the voting booth. This wrath will provide the fuel for a new political fire, and populists are waiting with the torch. ‘Stop the Machines’ will not be a slogan. It will be a desperate prayer from those left with nothing to lose. The industries and the industrious will demand a reckoning.
Sloth: The Atrophy of Governance
The final sin is the quietest. It begins with the individual. The software engineer who lets Copilot write code he cannot debug. The doctor who trusts an AI readout before her own eyes. The pilot who forgets the feeling of a manual landing. This is not efficiency. It is deskilling.
“Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.” — The Analects of Confucius
This individual sloth creates fragile systems. But the true, the most dangerous sloth, is not of the person. It is of the institution. It is the great abdication of governance that permits fragility to metastasize. Lawmakers and regulators, overwhelmed by the pace of change, accept industry self-pledges as a substitute for law. They defer to the expertise of those they are meant to regulate.
This is the atrophy of oversight. It is a learned helplessness in the face of complexity. This institutional sloth is the sin that permits all others to flourish. Pride proceeds unchecked by the humbling force of reality. Greed proceeds unchecked by auditors. Lust proceeds unchecked by a sense of shared responsibility. Envy proceeds unchecked by the discipline of facts. Gluttony proceeds unchecked by sane market forces. Wrath proceeds unchecked by the guardrails of the law. The decay is not in our skills, but in our collective will to govern what we have created.
Conclusion: The Yin and Yang of the Seasons
A recounting of seven sins invites a simple response: to join the opposition. To stand with the critics and pray for the fall. But that conclusion, however tempting, is incomplete. It mistakes the possibility of winter for the end of all seasons.
We could write another essay about AI’s virtues, and we likely will. We believe in the promise of innovation. But none of that cancels the truth that every sin listed above is real, material, and already in motion. These are not distant risks; they are seasons in a repeating cycle, shaping policy, politics, and capital flows every month.
“Time is not a line, but a wheel that turns endlessly through ages of progress and decline.” — A tenet of Jain cosmology
The opposition will have its seasons. The sins will trigger sharp corrections and policy shocks. We think the probability of a deep freeze is low, but it is not zero.
Either way, the wheel will not stop there, because AI is now the chosen battlefield. Geopolitical rivalries will be won and lost on it. Corporate empires will be built and broken by it. Political power will be measured in its mastery. The only force that could halt this cycle is a global, iron-tight regulatory clampdown. We did not find the collective will for a virus or for the climate. There is no possibility we will find it for this in the short time we may have before the forces and their impacts become even more irreversible.
So for every winter, a fiercer summer lurks. For every retreat, a more powerful advance is prepared. Investors must see clearly. The machine age will continue to more than redeem itself, even as it is held accountable for its sins in the interim.
For in a world that is being remade, those who only chronicle the sins of its creation will have no hand in writing the laws of its future.
Given the unvarnished and often somber tone of the preceding catechism of sins, it feels necessary to leave our readers on a more spirited note. Yet, having promised not to tinker with the content merely to inspire joy, we have chosen to experiment not with the message, but with the medium.
As a coda for the literary modernist, what follows is not a new argument, but a refraction of the same nine-part critique. Here, each sin is revisited through the protean stylistic lens of a corresponding chapter from James Joyce's Ulysses. For those unfamiliar with Joyce’s Ulysses, what follows mirrors its episodic styles, each sin refracted through a distinct literary lens, from realist narrative to unpunctuated stream of consciousness. Read it as a playful echo of our critique, not a literal continuation.
It was created by Gemini, intended strictly for the enjoyment of Joyce’s most dedicated fans. It is presented here as received, without nary a change.
A Modern Odyssey: Charting AI’s Seven Deadly Sins
(Episode 1: Telemachus. Style: Realist, Third-Person Narrative. Color: Gold, White. Symbol: Heir. Organ: N/A.)
Stately, the ticker tape mounted from the crawling screen. A new gospel, this AI, preached from its glowing pulpit. The markets, convinced, roared their assent. Capital, a river in flood, surged toward servers and silicon, a level of spending heretofore unseen in the annals of technology. One believes in innovation, yes. In the long arc of the positive outcome. But belief is not sight, nor faith a shield from fact. This moment demands no crisis of faith. It is a demand for unvarnished sight.
To ignore the risks at these valuations is the greater sin. This text will not sugarcoat. It will not soothe with reassurances of temporary dangers, of manageable faults. It will not balance each peril with a promised reward. What follows is an inventory, an unflinching catechism of the seven deadly sins of this new machine age. Each is real, material, already in motion. Each demands a reckoning. As Stephen Dedalus thought on the tower, confronting the usurper:
“Who has not refused to bend the knee with his enemy? Who has not told himself that he will not swear fealty to the dog who holds him in bondage?”
Pride: The Hubris of the Machine Age
(Episode 9: Scylla and Charybdis. Style: Dialogic, Literary Debate. Color: N/A. Symbol: Stratford, London. Organ: Brain.)
The argument is thus proposed: we have granted the machine a voice, a tongue that speaks our own syntax. From this, the ghost in the machine is inferred, a nascent thought, a consciousness aborning. Is the sin, then, in this private belief, this anthropomorphic fallacy? No. The true transgression is Aristotelian in its form: it is the public performance of an absolute certainty that the role of leadership now necessitates. The skeptics of yesterday, you see, have become the evangelists of today, preaching revolution from the corporate stage, their caution shed like a shabby coat. A politician invokes a future he cannot parse to justify a budget he cannot balance. Roads and hospitals see their funding pruned, all sacrificed to the unproven theorem of AI. Pride becomes the necessary armor, the outward appearance demanded by a world observing the spectacle.
And the danger? It lies not in the failure of the machine—for fail it will, spectacularly and repeatedly, a truth universally acknowledged even by its most ardent defenders—but in the spectacle of that failure. The autonomous vehicle remains two years from a destination it never reaches. The chatbot, a subtle poisoner, confabulates with unassailable confidence. Each error is broadcast, litigated, weaponized. Each cut is made deeper by the absolute conviction the market demanded. The leader, therefore, having projected a faith without nuance to secure the billions, is not judged for a stumble, but for a fall from grace. He may not be blind, but he must act as though he has perfect sight, and so his every imperfection is judged a fatal flaw. His sober risk assessments are forgotten, his cautious memos unearthed only in discovery. The judgment is not of the market, which is fleeting, but of history, which is built. A terrible beauty is born, is it not? As Stephen argues in the library:
“What is a ghost? One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.”
Greed: The Mania That Follows the Money
(Episode 7: Aeolus. Style: Fragmented Prose with Newspaper Headlines. Color: Red. Symbol: Editor. Organ: Lungs.)
CAPITAL, A MAGNET.
Where the money goes, the opportunists gather. AI, the largest lodestone in technology, pulls iron filings from every corner. Greed wears a new mask. It calls itself innovation.
THE PLAYBOOK OF SIN.
Startups are no longer born of vision. They are built for the block. The goal is not to become a Facebook but to be consumed by a Google. A unicorn is announced in the headlines. The books, a different story. Insider rounds inflate the paper value. The same hands mark up their own assets.
GIANTS ARE JUST AS CULPABLE.
Rushed acquisitions. Poorly vetted data deals. Billions in shareholder money burned simply to remain IN THE RACE. Governance, blindfolded. Boards approve moonshots to nowhere. Executives, their bonuses protected, watch the balance sheet burn.
THE SERPENT EATS ITS TAIL.
But the greatest sin is the new accounting. THE GIANTS INVEST. The partner pays it back for cloud services. Investment becomes revenue. A closed loop of capital. The logic of the 2008 crisis, reborn. The CDO of the cloud.
A WHISPER BECOMES A SHOUT.
This is not a secret. It is the industry’s shared story, spoken in hushed tones. When the cycle turns, investigators will arrive. Politicians will demand answers. History anoints not the wise, but the lucky. The sages of doom will be those who speak the day before the fall. As Professor MacHugh declared in the newsroom:
“What is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth? ... I paid my way.”
Lust: The Extremism of the Crowded Stage
(Episode 12: Cyclops. Style: Parodic Epic with Mock-Heroic Digressions. Color: N/A. Symbol: Fenian. Organ: Muscle.)
I says to myself, the stage is now crowded something shocking. Every gobshite with a keyboard now speaks of AI, and to be heard above the din you need a shout fit to wake the dead. And so the grand sin of Lust is no longer for a roll in the hay or a place in the race, but for a platform, for relevance itself. And the currency of that relevance, by the holy fly, is extremism.
(And there arose a great clamor, as of a thousand pundits all vying for the one microphone, their voices a terrible chorus of bombast and certitude, each seeking to outdo the other in feats of prognosticatory might.)
You see it in the optimist camp, so you do. The captains of industry, proposing moonshots not from vision, but from pure vanity. Their goal is not to build the New Jerusalem, but to have their name writ largest in the headlines. A contest of conspicuous ambition, it is.
But the more dangerous lust, I’m telling you, lives among the pessimists. A right shower, they are. For them, nuance is a weakness. Every machine stumble is a fatal sin. When facts are scarce, they invent them wholesale, knowing the audience demands not proof, but passion. Technical understanding is dismissed as trickery. Rhetoric is the only weapon. And this lust creates a new priesthood of doom, each competing to paint the darkest future, and the prize is the applause of the fearful. This fire, stoked for personal glory, escapes the stage. It catches in the halls of power, leading to policy chaos and antagonism, until the researcher is no longer a scientist, but a target. As the citizen says of the hero:
“Where are our saviours? ... We have still our ancient hedge-schools and our travelling scholars. There’s the man that’ll write you a sermon.”
Envy: The Resentment of the Excluded
(Episode 10: Wandering Rocks. Style: 19 Short Vignettes, Cinematic Montage. Color: N/A. Symbol: Citizens. Organ: Blood.)
- A new priesthood is anointed. The AI teams. Their tribute is disproportionate budgets. Legacy businesses are starved. Old paths to promotion are closed. In the glass towers of the corporation, envy, a seed, is sown.
- The fire spreads. Outside the gates, the lawyer, the artist, the writer. Their expertise, once an unassailable moat, is now a shoreline eroded by a tide of code. The resentment builds. It waits.
- The deepest envy is not for budgets. It is for data. A new inequality: the data-rich versus the data-poor. A handful of corporations hold the planetary datasets. An unbreachable wall. Startups and developing nations are left with public scraps.
- The envy of the market. The value investor, bound to old metrics. The industrialist, tied to old machines. The pundit who sees not what is, but what his narrative requires. They did not share in the gains. They pray for the fall. Every bearish headline is a gospel they spread with zeal.
- A geopolitical force. An arms race measured in petaflops. Nations enact protectionist policies from fear of a rival’s prestige. Envy does not build. It provides the political capital to tear down what is left. It sharpens its knives, awaiting the first winter. As the cavalcade passes through Dublin:
“The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the metropolis.”
Gluttony: The Unconstrained Feast
(Episode 8: Lestrygonians. Style: Detailed Realism, Food Imagery. Color: N/A. Symbol: Constables. Organ: Esophagus.)
Not software. A factory. It turns technology into a resource-devouring industry, a vast gullet. Data centers, today’s steel mills, their hunger insatiable. For electricity. For water. This is gluttony. A gorging. The physical feast is staggering. One thinks of the power grids of entire nations, strained, groaning under the load. The millions of gallons of water, drawn, heated, expelled, just to cool the servers that process our prompts. An environmental mortgage taken out for a better autocomplete. A moral feast, too, in the data. An endless hunger, scraping, ingesting the whole of human conversation, copyrighted works, private records. The performance improves a fraction. The societal cost, undigested. And the hidden feast: human labor. An army of ghost workers in the Global South, labeling, filtering. The machine’s intelligence built on a foundation of invisible human toil. The envy of the sidelined sees only pure excess, a bubble. But the makers of the picks and shovels are already rich. The chipmakers, the cloud providers. Their profits are real, not paper. Yet the sin of malinvestment remains. Empty datacenters. Abandoned pilots. The bill for all three feasts will come. As Bloom muses on hunger:
“Grateful fresh beer. Feel it seep down. A sleepy warm summer swarm creeping over me. The warm sun like a cat licking my skin.”
Wrath: The Eruption of the Displaced
(Episode 6: Hades. Style: Funereal, Somber Realism. Color: Black, White. Symbol: Caretaker. Organ: Heart.)
A comforting sermon is offered by the high priests of technology. They gesture to history, a well-tended graveyard of obsolete fears. The Luddites. The steam engine. The first computer. A gospel of perpetual job creation is preached. A dream of a world that may no longer exist. This technology is a sword. It does not unite. It divides. The job destruction is not a future risk; it is a present reality, a slow funeral procession. In communities hollowed out, the first casualty is tolerance. The anger turns on the outsider, the migrant. But this sword has a double edge. It strikes the family at home. It cuts down the young, whose careers are not yet begun. It fells the old, whose ways are too set to change. It targets the vast, industrious middle, their skills suddenly obsolete, their futures interred. The anger of these disrupted lives will not be quiet. It will erupt. In strikes, in protests, in the voting booth. A new political fire. ‘Stop the Machines’ will be a desperate prayer from those left with nothing. A reckoning is demanded. As Bloom considers the cemetery:
“They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.”
Sloth: The Atrophy of Governance
(Episode 16: Eumaeus. Style: Rambling, Tired, Cliché-Ridden Narration. Color: N/A. Symbol: Sailors. Organ: Nerves.)
So it stands to reason, when all is said and done, that the final sin is, for all intents and purposes, the quietest of the lot. It begins, as these things so often do, with the individual man on the street, so to speak. The software engineer who, to put it plainly, lets the machine write code he himself can’t quite get his head around. Or the doctor who trusts the readout before his own two eyes. It’s not efficiency, not by a long shot. It’s deskilling, pure and simple. This sort of thing creates fragile systems, it goes without saying. But the real crux of the matter, if you look at it from a certain point of view, is not the individual. It’s the institution. A great abdication of governance, you might call it. The lawmakers and regulators, overwhelmed by the pace of it all, more or less accept what the industry tells them, hook, line, and sinker. It’s an atrophy of oversight, a learned helplessness when faced with complexity. This institutional sloth, at the end of the day, is the sin that permits all the others to flourish. Pride proceeds unchecked by reality. Greed, by auditors. Lust, by responsibility. Envy, by facts. Gluttony, by sane market forces. And Wrath, by the law. The decay is not in our skills, when you get right down to it, but in our collective will to govern the very thing we’ve created. As the exhausted Bloom reflected:
“He was not either to be beat by a woman’s smile, he knew that much, talking about pugilism.”
Conclusion: The Inevitable Summer
(Episode 18: Penelope. Style: Unpunctuated Stream of Consciousness. Color: N/A. Symbol: Earth. Organ: Flesh.)
Yes a recounting of seven sins and you would think the only thing to do is join the opposition stand with the critics and pray for the fall but that’s not the whole story is it incomplete mistaking the winter for the end of all seasons yes we could write another essay on the virtues and we likely will on the promise of innovation but none of that cancels the truth of the sins real material already in motion not distant risks but seasons in a cycle shaping everything every month because time is not a line they say but a wheel turning through progress and decline and the opposition will have its seasons yes the corrections and the policy shocks the deep freeze not zero no but the wheel won’t stop because this is the battlefield now for everything geopolitical rivalries corporate empires political power all of it won and lost on the machine and they’ll never get a global clampdown not for a virus not for the climate so not for this no so for every winter a fiercer summer is waiting for every retreat a bigger advance is planned so investors must see clearly the machine age still has to reckon with its sins yes but its arrival is not in doubt because the world is being remade and those who only count the sins of its creation will have no hand in its future and I said yes I will Yes.
