The Hero's Journey Is Burning the Planet
5 hours ago
- #hero's journey
- #tech mythology
- #AI convergence
- Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are all following the same mythological pattern, the hero's journey, which explains why they build similar products like AGI despite different backgrounds.
- The hero's journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell, is a monomyth where a hero goes on an adventure, faces trials, seizes a prize, and returns transformed. However, tech founders invert this by hoarding the 'elixir' (the prize) instead of sharing it with the community.
- The convergence on building AGI and other products (e.g., Mars colonization, the metaverse) isn't driven by market demand but by the mythological quest for transcendence, control, and escaping the 'feminine' (nature, the body, connection).
- The origins of Tesla, OpenAI, and Facebook are fabricated to fit the hero narrative, often involving seizing control from actual founders or starting with unethical actions (e.g., FaceMash).
- Women like Mira Murati, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sheryl Sandberg also run the hero's journey, producing similar harms, proving the pattern is about mythology, not gender.
- Beneath the hero's journey lies an older myth, the Enuma Elish, where Marduk kills the mother goddess Tiamat and builds the world from her corpse—this symbolizes killing nature/generative femininity to create controlled, extractive systems.
- The hero's journey lacks a mechanism for stopping or returning to community, leading to perpetual growth, environmental harm, fraud, and exploitation, as seen in tech's hyperscaling and harms disproportionately affecting women.
- Regulation and ethics boards fail because they address outputs, not the underlying mythological algorithm that structurally produces these harms; the solution requires an alternative, older journey focused on reassembly and wholeness.