Plastic Cats, Artificial Wisdom & The Negosphere
PROLOGUE
Imagine for a moment that you are stepping aboard a decommissioned nuclear submarine, the paint of a faded red star flaking away from rusted rivets.
You lift the hatch and climb down a vertical ladder into the control room where you are warmly greeted by a secret society of time-travelling renegades fine-tuning their weapons of mass creation.
Scanners spin. Radars beep. Buttons twinkle.
To your left a thick pipe hangs from the ceiling with handles protruding from either side of a central view finder. Your eyes adjust and it comes into focus.
The future.
An infinite sea of possibilities ebbing and flowing in great waves as forces of light and dark vie for the attention of conflicted tides.
You scan the horizon for signals. Patterns in the flux that might grant safe passage.
Comrade. What do you see?
UP PERISCOPE
Swirling blankets of overdue rain obscure the grateful landscape as it gulps down the deluge. Soil softens, stems straighten, and nature regains good posture.
My posture is not so good. I’m spinning hard on an indoor bike in a vain attempt to escape the sense of dread plaguing my nervous system. I’m getting nowhere. It’s an indoor bike.
Last month's foray into unhinged men, robot bosses and silicon souls has left me longing for a simpler time.
Give me pre-phone. Give me pre-Google. Give me pre-Internet.
IBIZA 1995
Give me one last summer of carefree analogue before I head to University and digital adulthood. When the streets were navigated through my senses. When everything was IRL. When I spoke to strangers, followed rumours and found the parties. When my days began with sunset at Cafe De Mar and ended with San Miguel at the Star Bar. When nobody was taking photos and Instagram was fifteen years away.
Thirty years later and I’m back in search of whatever it was.
But whatever it was seems to have been bottled, branded, scaled up and sold out. Super-sized billboards advertising superstar DJs playing super-sized nightclubs line the road as my taxi leaves the airport. They flip past me one after another like Top Trumps for a club scene that has become codified by numbers.
I check in at Pacha for Purple Disco Machine and experience the phenomena up close. Security guards interrogate me at every corner, stairwell and balcony to scan my wristband and assess my level of VIP access. It doesn’t make me feel very important. Maybe I haven’t paid enough.
The most important of the very important have paid a small fortune to dance in a semi circle behind the DJ so that they can appear in the instagram feeds of the less important and the least important of all of the VIP's.
Imagine how their socials must have come alive that night with virtual talk of synthetic fun.
“Look at what a great night we pretended to have”
I leave, go for a quiet beer and get chatting to a stranger called Chris from Leicester who invites me to a back alley cocktail bar where we drink tequila and meet Darran from Watford who’s off to an underground house club called Tomodachi and suggests we tag along.
Bish, bash, bosh.
I hand over twenty euros and receive a sticker over my phone camera. An unknown DJ plays on vinyl turntables through a crisp sound system in a small, square and stripped back room and one hundred strangers go on a journey together.
I dance until 6am, walk home under sunrise, stay in bed all day and get up for sunset.
No phone, no plan, talk to strangers, follow rumours, find the party.
The periscope pumps out dry ice in approval. I’d unearthed a simple recipe that had been buried for 30 long years by employing an ancient excavation technique.
Could I do it again?
PLASTIC CATS
After leaving my daughter to her student protests I went for an intentionally aimless wander around the city of Annecy and noticed a peculiar little shop called “Time for Bricks”. Inside was an extraordinary collection of elaborate construction kits. Were fully grown adults spending their evenings assembling these intricate plastic objects?
I spotted a white cat. The shopkeeper said it would take 6 hours to build at a rate of €5 per hour.
“Hang on” I said “You mean it costs €30?”
The shopkeeper smiled and I bought the plastic cat. Maybe it contained anxiety quenching secrets.
It took me a while to find the required coordination for assembly. My hands are too big, the components are too small and my brain is too impatient. The kids became curious and muscled in. I had to fight back the anger.
Before long the whole family (with the exception of our real white cat Carlos) were gathered around the table, hunting for tiny pieces and arguing over instructions. 3 days later we ceremoniously placed plastic Carlos on the mantlepiece.
Curious about this experience I returned to Time For Bricks and asked the peculiar shopkeeper all about it. He smiled and recommended a bear that requires 15 hours of assembly for the rate of €2 an hour. I bought 2.
What was happening to me. I reflected.
When I make it myself, I love it. When it takes me twice as long to make it, I love it twice as much. When we make it together, we love it together. When we love it together, we share culture.
Something was ringing true.
The other pointless plastic object I bought was a vinyl record. My first in 25 years.
I already carry a vast catalogue of music around in my pocket including the album I just paid €30 for. Spotify alone has over 100 million tracks, which if converted into vinyl records would require 30 kilometres of shelving to store.
But I really couldn’t care less for Spotify. There’s no tactile experience. No sensory ritual. In buying a physical record I'd introduced expense, inconvenience, physical storage and effort into something technology has made cheap, easy and frictionless.
I stare at this album in reverence. I can smell it. I can lick it. I can hang it up in the back garden and throw conkers at it. Can the same be said for Spotify?
I get home and realise the one thing I can't do is listen to it because I don’t own a record player, so I end up playing the album on Spotify while I stare lovingly at the sleeve artwork.
You're probably thinking that I don’t need a growing collection of unnecessary plastic objects to escape the negative emotions foisted upon me by modern technology.
But I’m not the only one.
SCIENCE FRICTION
Sales of building sets grew 18% across twelve major toy markets in 2025. Vinyl sales in the UK reached approximately 7.6 million records in 2025, the eighteenth consecutive year of growth. There are listening bars, where people gather to give music their full attention. Phone-free gatherings where strangers read, draw, play games and talk to each other. Real world physical interaction that engages our senses and offers respite from dopamine addiction.
High on these lessons of analogue recovery I began to question the so-called 30 years of progress since that last analogue summer in Ibiza.
Could it be that in striving for efficient, productive and profitable progress we have inadvertently removed the very friction that makes life worthwhile?
We’ve optimised nightclubs for revenue but lost the magic.
We’ve optimised social media for engagement but lost human connection.
How far is optimisation prepared to go? Shall we ask the chickens?
"Big Chicken" according to Mo Gilligans Netflix documentary breeds chickens for rapid growth, pumps them full of growth hormone to increase financial yield, fills them with antibiotics to stop them getting sick because they’re drowning in chicken shit which also makes them blind from ammonia. A commercial optimisation exercise that leaves them devoid of all flavour.
But you need not worry about that because their poisoned flesh is seasoned with a toxic blend of artificial chemicals to simulate chicken flavour, which is probably why Colonel Sanders keeps his recipe secret.
Family Bucket?
I’d say we’ve rather confused optimisation with progress.
What are you saying comrade?
OPTIMISATION CULT
At millions of boardroom tables all around the world, disciples of this optimisation cult remove immeasurable value such as fun, flavour and friendly friction with spreadsheet shaped swords.
How do we defend against such ruthless adversaries as productivity, automation and growth?
If it cannot be reduced to a number in a box, it doesn’t have a voice at the boardroom table.
How do we forge swords for the unboxable?
What began with music, nightclubs and chickens is coming for your soul. Every action, word, thought, feeling, emotion, intonation, impulse and reaction is fair game for the big data concentration camps.
Humanity codified. Souled out.
And with no box on the spreadsheet through which to stage a protest we become the hapless chicken.
Artificial Intelligence is not so wise if that’s the end game. Maybe we should have created artificial wisdom instead.
ARTIFICIAL WISDOM
Artificial Wisdom (AW) would not turn us into cheap chicken.
AW would design a new spreadsheet with boxes accounting for dance floor vibes, mental heath, chicken welfare and natural beauty.
AI would optimise agricultural output. AW would feed people without destroying nature.
AI would optimise social networks for anxiety. AW would improve our relationships.
AI would automate the economy. AW would ask what actually needs automating, who should benefit and what people might do with their freedom.
In an age of abundant intelligence, wisdom remains scarce.
Can we build wise machines?
An AI large language model (LLM) works by analysing huge amounts of language data and making predictions based on patterns identified within that data. AI acts on the data we feed it.
So what have we been feeding the thinking machines that are about to take control of the bureaucracies that govern our lives?
Internet Soup? An intravenous pipe of newspapers, corporate websites, social media posts, opinion pieces, advertising, arguments, memes and people trying to sell each other things.
Is such a buffet of self-serving guff representative of human wisdom? Or considered from another angle, do our wisest people feel the need to publish self serving guff on the internet?
Indigenous tribes with ancient wisdom of their ancestral homelands passed down over centuries. Community elders. Volunteer workers. Kind grandmothers. People who've quietly dedicated their lives to looking after others, resolving disagreements and figuring out what's really important. They certainly don’t share memes and chase followers.
Could our greatest contribution to the development of Artificial Wisdom come not from Silicon Valley's computer scientists, but from your granny? Shall we feed granny to the machine?
THE NEGOSPHERE
Many of our TV and film staples are also junk food rated. Dystopian science fiction is all the rage but manifestation theory tells us that dystopian fiction breeds dystopian reality.
Our news feeds are toxic rivers of negativity. We are so obsessed with stories of murder, rape, shootings, bombings, war, corruption and division that we are served endless streams of disaster skewed, fear inducing news stories. Most of which is fabricated to serve agendas that are not aligned to our own.
And we’re feeding AI on the resulting information landscape.
Is that wise?
Crash, bang, wallop.
My optimism defences are under attack so I turn to ChatGPT for help. My trusty AI rallies against the negosphere with a reassuring flurry of positive news stories to restore some balance. Maybe AI will save us by rethinking the stories, news and algorithms that define our mental space.
I’m not convinced we can leave artificial wisdom to the tech billionaires and their computer scientists. They are building an end game version of the optimisation machine we’ve been observing. They are also building bunkers and rocket ships, presumably so they can hide or run away when it all kicks off.
But I'm not hiding or running away. I feel compelled to participate. There's work to do but I’m feeling less anxious. I’m trying to imagine my way from a world defined by optimisation towards a wiser form of progress.
Progress that is not about making humans individually productive but collectively wise. I'm lighting the beacons of Gondor and summoning the Jedi Council to Rivendell.
Last month I was wondering how we might program the souls of our silicon gods. Now I’m thinking they just might help us rediscover our own.
DOWN PERISCOPE
EPILOGUE
A fog descends over the scene and you step back from the view finder.
What did you see comrade?
You mark out the currents of optimism and pinpoint a sequence of reliable cairns to anchor the route.
Debriefing complete.
Stand down.
TRANSMISSION ENDS
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