Analog Soul

Te Ones Who Knew: A Tribute to AI’s Early Warning System Before it got shiny. Before your granny asked ChatGPT for soup recipes and Spotify thought sadness was a playlist… There were voices. Not many — and most were ignored. But they saw something in the circuitry. They heard the whisper under the code. “This won’t just change your tech. It’ll change  you. ” Some were writers. Some were renegade coders. Some were ethicists who knew how capitalism dances with innovation — fast, greedy, blindfolded. And they warned us. Not with panic, but precision. Not as Luddites, but as  witnesses. Meet the Prophets Jaron Lanier : The dreadlocked pioneer of virtual reality, who’s been telling us since the ‘90s that digital platforms commodify the soul. He coined the term “digital Maoism.” You probably saw the hair first — but his warnings cut deep. Shoshana Zuboff : She named the beast —  surveillance capitalism  — and wrote a 700-page epic to show how our lives became raw data for ...

The Prophets of the Machine They warned us, not with fire and brimstone, but with code, and questions. In the hush between mainframes and meaning, they saw what we didn’t: that the algorithm would grow teeth. Not to bite, but to smile, while it rewrote us. They were poets in lab coats, activists in server rooms, fictioneers who stitched warnings into stories we shrugged off. We called them pessimists. Tinfoil. Too early. Too serious. Too human. But now the feed is full of their echoes.                                                       Lanier. Zuboff. Buolamwini. Rushkoff. Chiang. The mad lads and mná who asked: What does it mean to stay human… when machines learn to mimic soul? They saw it. We scroll it. Still - it’s not too late to listen.