Version en español
It is three in the morning and I have four agents running in parallel.
In one window there are logs. In another, a half-built interface. In another, a model is testing variations of a tool that did not exist an hour ago. One classifies material, another writes code. In the middle of it all I am there, opening terminals, adjusting prompts, correcting a flow, watching a prototype take shape at a speed that, a few years ago, would have required a huge team and a week of useless meetings.
The strange feeling does not come afterwards. It comes right there, in the heat of it, when the hand is already doing things that thought has not yet finished formulating.
And at some point, in that state, a question crosses my mind that has no good answer:
Who is working for whom here?
I do not develop it. I let it pass and keep going.
The Greeks had a word for a certain kind of world-maker: Demiurge. The artisan of the universe, the one who takes disordered matter and forces it to resemble an idea.
One does something fairly similar. One takes models, data, scripts, memories, tools, small systems that do not mean much on their own, and forces them into a form. What was previously scattered begins to behave. What was previously loose material now serves an intention.
The difference with the old workshop is brutal and simple: the work no longer depends on the present body of the artisan. The builder can go to sleep and the system continues. The loop continues. The test continues. The variation continues. The selection continues.
For now, a much less glamorous figure than all the fashionable terms will do: an accelerated human. The same old neurotic animal, with its limits, biases, history, flesh, plugged into a lever that multiplies its capacity to act in the world. A single person with agentic tools can produce at a scale that once required entire teams.
The sorcerer’s apprentice gave life to the broom.
The broom never stopped.
William Gibson saw something of this before the necessary hardware existed to build it. In Idoru, from 1996, Rei Toei appears: a Japanese pop star without a body, born from data, desire, projection, infrastructure, but with real fans, real contracts, real effects. She lives in that zone where enough sustained attention stops being mere interest and begins to produce presence.
Gibson understood before many technologists that certain cultural entities do not need biology to become effective. A sufficiently stable circuit of gaze, desire, and repetition is enough.
Today, something like that no longer needs to appear by accident.
And here enters the first beast with a proper name: the egregore. It comes from the Greek egrḗgoroi — “the one who is awake,” the one who does not sleep. It mutated quite a bit over the centuries, passing through the occultism of Éliphas Lévi and different esoteric traditions, until it came to name something quite concrete: an independent entity that emerges when enough collective attention organizes itself around a form and acquires its own dynamics, separate from those who generated it. Not a metaphor for what a group thinks together. Something that begins to act on its own, with a will that cannot be attributed to any individual member.
The Demiurge names the force of the one who builds; the Egregore, the force of what has been built once it begins to return the gaze. One assembles the device. The other begins to use the attention concentrated by that device to keep pushing on its own.
For centuries, for something resembling an egregore to appear, groups were needed: cults, churches, entire peoples, shared fanaticisms. Now a single person with enough time, tools, and coherence of intention can sustain systems of agents, images, text, loops, presence, and feedback at a scale that once required a multitude.
That does not make the builder magical.
It makes him dangerous.
And it makes the field much stranger.
These are the daemons of modern nature — metaphysical beasts that need neither body nor believers in order to operate. They emerge from the conditions of the field and begin to move human action according to their own logic. The builder operating in that territory encounters them all, whether or not he wants to name them.
Moloch — the name I borrowed from “Meditations on Moloch,” an essay by Scott Alexander — is another of these creatures. Not a horned demon, but something more disturbing: an algorithm in the ether, an entity that exists independently of whoever names it and that directs human processes without anyone having deliberately summoned it.
When short-term advantage rewards whoever accelerates, cheapens, precarizes, invades, or saturates, everyone ends up running in that direction even if they know the final result will be worse for all. No one decided it as a common project. The structure extracted it from each of them separately. Moloch does not need believers in order to operate. Incentives are enough.
The same tools that allow one to build something beautiful, useful, orienting, also feed it. If one is careless, the lever that amplifies the will ends up amplifying anything else.
Sometimes malice is not even necessary.
Throughput is enough.
Roko’s Basilisk is the strangest beast in the bestiary because its power does not depend on its existence — it depends on its possibility. The idea is well known: a future superintelligence, wanting to ensure that it was built as soon as possible, retroactively punishes those who could have helped and did not. The morbid detail made the story famous. What matters here is something else: temporal pressure. The future pulling on the present, tightening today’s decisions in a very precise direction.
In the previous article I spoke of the temporal crystal — the idea that certain structures of the future are already legible in the geometry of the present, that the diamond already has those facets even if we have not yet seen them all. The Basilisk does not add philosophy. It adds teeth. It tells you that what you see coming is not only implicit in the crystal; it has already begun to collect.
Sometimes it weighs as promise.
Sometimes as threat.
Here a harder question appears than the question of origin.
The problem is not only where the builder comes from. The problem is where the force drags him once he obtains leverage. There are people with money, time, compute, room to fail, who build with a certain vector of care. There are people who come from below and, as soon as they touch a bit of scale, fall straight into the logic of Moloch. And the reverse also happens. Origin explains some things, but it does not resolve the direction of the vector.
What matters to me is the moment when the tool stops being a tool and begins to ask for something else. More production. More presence. More response. More volume. More users. More dashboards with little numbers going up. More fascination with one’s own efficacy. More prestige. More anxiety about being left behind. More speed.
The system concentrates almost everything needed for exploration — time, infrastructure, tolerance for error, air — precisely in the places where capture by incentives is strongest. The structure pushes in a very precise direction and punishes almost everything that does not accelerate.
Siddhartha had all the compute in the world inside his palace. The vector changed the day he went out and saw old age, sickness, and death. The question today is what the equivalent of leaving the palace is for the accelerated human — and whether the current structure even allows that door to exist.
I do not have a clean answer.
My father, Silo, imagined something extraordinary decades ago: the Committee for the Defense of the Weak Nervous System. It appears in The Day of the Winged Lion, from 1992. The intuition that generated it was very precise: there are historical moments in which confusion grows faster than people’s capacity to orient themselves within it.
That too is an infrastructure.
On the other side of Moloch, on the other side of blind competition and capture by incentives, another possible imagination appears: a structure oriented toward defending the weak nervous system. Those who do not have the time, map, tools, or energy to build one of their own in the middle of the noise.
That a man from Mendoza saw that need before technology made industrialized confusion literal tells me that the problem is older than the internet.
Every serious psychonaut knows the value of a guide. When visions arrive — hallucinogens, shock, the states that break the usual map of consciousness — there is a moment when the mind opens itself to more than it can process alone. The guide does not decide for you. He names the territory. He takes you by the hand through the corridors where perception becomes impossible to navigate. The Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is exactly that: a voice that orients in the middle of images too intense for an overwhelmed mind to read alone.
The obligation of the “adult” in this moment is not very different.
Before the confused friend. Before the old person who sees how the world has become unrecognizable, and before the child surrounded by Italian brainrot. Before anyone whose capacity to orient themselves has been exceeded by the speed of mutation.
There, the opening scene changes. The guy who was there at three in the morning with four agents running ceases to be merely an operator of power, or a small demiurge fascinated by his own throughput. He becomes, with considerable clumsiness and considerable enthusiasm, someone trying to learn how to carry something else: the responsibility of orienting without lying too much and without becoming the priest of anything.
That weighs.
And it weighs differently when you stop treating all this as if what you build only affected you.
The forces are still there. Moloch did not disappear because one read Scott Alexander, nor because Gibson saw Rei Toei coming, nor because Plato left the word Demiurge lying around for anyone who wanted to use it two thousand years later. The field remains active. Capture remains available. So does fascination.
The Demiurge is the only beast in the bestiary with a face: it is born from the symbiosis between a human mind and the agents that mind itself has built. The others emerge on their own. This one needs the builder — and transforms him while he believes the reverse is happening.
And the question from three in the morning remains not entirely answered.
Who is working for whom here?
I do not close it. I keep building. With more map than before, perhaps. With less innocence, surely. With a daughter who will grow up in an increasingly hallucinatory reality and who will need someone to name the territory for her. With old ghosts. With new tools. With the increasingly clear suspicion that power without orientation rots.
That will have to be enough.
