AI, Heidegger, & Evangelion ⊗ The new planetary nationalism ⊗ “Digital Souls”

As you might have heard, Mozilla will be Yahooing Pocket, their read-it-later app, and I saw multiple people seeking a replacement. I’ve been using Readwise’s Reader for a while know, since the alpha release I think, and I love it. Which is why I obtained an extra free trial month for Sentiers readers (total of two months). Just sign-up for an account using this link. And, if you end-up being a paid subscriber of the service, I get a small return, which would help to support the weekly newsletter.

AI, Heidegger, & Evangelion

In this excellent piece, Tina He explains that AI systems provoke both fascination and revulsion because they mimic human expression without consciousness, creating what she calls an “algorithmic uncanny valley.” He explores this discomfort through Heidegger’s concept of technology as a worldview that reduces everything to resources for optimization. Unlike malicious villains, AI’s true unsettling quality is its complete indifference—it lacks intention rather than harbouring evil intent.

The piece also draws connections between this technological indifference and Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” suggesting our brains struggle with moral ambiguity in systems without souls. Through references to Evangelion anime and philosophical traditions, He examines how AI challenges our sense of human uniqueness and dignity, not through calculated harm but through optimization that flattens the unquantifiable aspects of human experience into computable form.

I’d invite you to read her article with a few things in mind, to me they seemed to be missing but her conclusion does align with those ideas. First, as I often do, seeing AI as “collective intelligence,” a way to discourse with a large percentage of human knowledge, instead of with an “other.” Second, Anil Seth’s insight that language is why “people wonder whether Anthropic’s Claude is conscious, but not DeepMind’s protein-folding AlphaFold.” He’s piece is largely focused on language exchanges. Third, I’m a bit weary of critiques of emptiness with regards to AI, not that it’s not true, but that so many people just regurgitate what they’ve heard and don’t care (see below). I’m not sure, sadly, that AIs are always emptier.

In closing, the piece suggests our path forward isn’t rejection of technology but conscious preservation of what makes us human. The author proposes that the “saving power” emerges, paradoxically, from contact with the systems that threaten us, challenging us to carve out space for meaning, messiness, and genuine experience while navigating technological advancement.

But as soon as AI demonstrates even a flicker of poetic intent, a gesture toward the unquantifiable—art, longing, vulnerability—many repulse. Some do so because they sense (correctly) that computers are still not good at this; others, because they sense that it is only a matter of time. Both reactions betray a fear that the territory of the soul, of human meaning, is shrinking. The room for contemplation, leisure, and error is increasingly defined by what resists digitization, until, suddenly, even error is modeled. […]

Heidegger compels us to do something much harder: to see the world as it is being reframed by technology, and then to consciously reclaim or reweave the strands of meaning that risk being flattened. […]

This isn’t about throwing away the tools, but about wrestling them into alignment with what we find sacred or essential. We won’t find salvation by escaping technology, but by using our awareness—our capacity for critique, ritual, invention, and refusal—to carve out room for messiness, for mourning, for risk, and for deep attention. The saving power is the act of remembering, in the heat of technical progress, to ask: “What space remains for meaning? For art? For wildness, chance, suffering, and genuine encounter? […]

What if technocracy and romantic withdrawal are not our only options, but two poles of a far richer field, a frontier where we move, trade, shudder, and insist on meaning?

§ The who cares era. Great post and I’m agreeing with Dan here, although I’d just mention that under the “not caring” there’s likely a (un)healthy dose of “everything happens so much all the time,” leaving less room for caring. “In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care. In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.”

The new planetary nationalism

Boris Shoshitaishvili and Lisa H. Sideris examine “planetary nationalism”—a growing trend where nations project their power and interests onto planetary-scale phenomena like climate change, space, and AI development. The authors contrast this with two related concepts: “planetary politics,” which addresses humanity’s shared challenges on Earth, but is increasingly splintering into nationalistic forms, and “planetary technoscience,” exemplified by tech entrepreneurs like Melon Husk who align with nationalist movements while developing planet-impacting technologies.

This creates a dangerous imbalance where planetary nationalism and technoscience grow in tandem while planetary governance lags behind. Unlike 20th-century approaches where Kennedy and Gorbachev linked national achievements to humanity’s common future, today’s planetary nationalism often takes competitive forms—as seen in Russia’s climate change opportunism, space militarization, and tech billionaires’ pursuit of resource extraction in Greenland—with critical planetary governance institutions struggling to emerge.

The authors also provides some useful historical context, including mention of Vladimir Vernadsky, who is part of a certain sequence/overlap of thinkers still influencing today’s imaginaries around planetarity and space. For more, you should read Thomas Moynihan’s excellent piece, also at Noema, where he asks if we are accidentally building a planetary brain.

A third aspect of the planetary condition, planetary technoscience, helps explain this decoupling between intensifying planetary politics and stagnating planetary governance. A number of influential technologists and entrepreneurs — those shaping planetary technoscience — have increased their support for planetary-oriented nationalist movements while paying considerably less attention to fostering equitable planetary governance. […]

As scholar Mary-Jane Rubenstein argues, references to the good of all humankind persist in the corporate space race, but the alliance between private corporations and the U.S. government to claim dominance in space is growing more technocratic, colonialist and capitalist. She calls this “cosmic nationalism” — reaching beyond borders to establish a nation’s influence in the domain of space. […]

We should continue to remind ourselves that this task extends beyond climate and the Earth system. It includes all other planetary questions that humans now confront, from AI in its potential planetary intelligence to pandemics. We must now engage all of these at the same time.

“Digital Souls”

Cecilia MoSze Tham envisions a future where personalised digital twins, or “Digital Souls,” represent different aspects of our lives, optimising our daily activities and interactions. These Digital Souls could collaborate, such as a Culinary twin working with a Nutritionist twin to create meal plans, or a Researcher twin synthesising knowledge to benefit both professional and educational roles. Tham also explores the potential for these digital extensions to generate passive income, like a CEO twin giving remote presentations while the individual spends time with loved ones.

I’m going back and forth between “yes!” And “gah! No! Let’s not optimise more!” She ends the piece with a number of important and provocative questions, so she’s definitely aware of this tension. But, a bit like with He’s piece up top, I keep wondering if we make too much space for Silicon Valley’s vision (and hyper capitalism while we’re at it) when reflecting on our own visions? I can see the fun and potential of collaborating with a few “Digital Souls,” but how can we make sure it doesn’t lead to MOAR work over forty hours instead of greater freedom to live more meaningfully? Do I need a twin of myself, or an “alien familiar” built out of the collective knowledge of my closest “tribe?”

Then there’s my Mom digital soul – possibly the one I’d rely on most heavily. She would remember everything about my kids: their allergies, preferences, developmental milestones, and friend circles. This twin would manage our family calendar with perfect recall of which child needs to be where and when. She’d organise our photos and memories, creating albums without being asked when special moments happen. […]

When my Researcher twin discovers a new study relevant to both my teaching and professional work, she could simultaneously brief both my Professor and CEO twins, creating connections I might never have time to make myself.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Possible Futures Issue 1. “This collection of erasure poetry, collages, mixed media, and diary entries from the future all explore our central question: what happens when we give ourselves space to imagine otherwise?”
• Enemy Mine is the queer, anti-war sci-fi you’ve been missing. I had completely forgotten about this movie. “[It] has become an obscure science fiction film, remembered mostly for bombing at the box office. I come before you today to remind you of its lineage, the unlikelihood of its existence, and to put it in its rightful place among the great film adaptations of award-winning genre stories.”
• How a videogame taught my generation that Earth is alive. “The game simulates the evolution of a rocky planet with geologic activity, weather systems, and oceans. As the planet's non-living systems evolve, so do its life forms, which start as single-celled prokaryotes but can eventually become sapient animals capable of launching nukes or blasting off into space.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• They were every student’s worst nightmare. Now Blue Books are back.. “Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it.”
• Mistral launches API for building AI agents that run Python, generate images, perform RAG and more. “Allows third-party software developers to easily and rapidly add autonomous generative AI capabilities — such as pulling information securely from enterprise documents — to their existing enterprise and independent applications using the newest Mistral proprietary model, Medium 3, as the ‘brains’ of each agent.”
• Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves. “Ordinary search has gone to the dogs. Maybe as Google goes gaga for AI, its search engine will get better again, but I doubt it. In just the last few months, I've noticed that AI-enabled search, too, has been getting crappier.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Ember’s global electricity review 2025 seems promising, and you can check out Hank Green’s overview, on YouTube. “Record renewables growth led by solar helped push clean power past 40% of global electricity in 2024, but heatwave-related demand spikes led to a small increase in fossil generation.” (Via The Weekly Anthropocene.)
• These birds are so stuffed with plastic, you can hear them crunch. Shameful. “Squeaky stuffed animals are endearing. But when the animal is a real baby bird and its stomach makes crunching noises from all the plastic it has ingested, the endearment quickly turns into a dystopian nightmare.”
• Bertrand Piccard’s hydrogen fuel-cell aircraft “In 1999, he was the first person to circumnavigate the globe nonstop in a balloon, called Breitling Orbiter 3. Then he and André Borschberg, a Swiss entrepreneur and pilot, were the first to fly around the world, in stages, in a solar airplane called Solar Impulse.”

Asides

• Nerdy professor shocks high school by speaking Gen Alpha slang. Hilarious! “So I spent weeks secretly mastering Gen Alpha slang and then delivered the entire speech in their own linguistic native tongue, as a lighthearted prank but also to genuinely emphasize the importance of learning languages.”
• View of Azalea Garden from Mt. Fuji, Hasui Kawase. “I love this gorgeous woodblock print from Hasui Kawase, View of Azalea Garden from Mt. Fuji. Hasui was a significant influence on Studio Ghibli & Hayao Miyazaki.”
• Apple’s Severance could be the start of something bigger. “[The show] is being discussed in the context of spin-offs and merchandise. This is the kind of franchise-building talk usually reserved for the likes of HBO or Disney+ — not generally something you'd see at Apple TV+.”