Katherine Dee

A 20-year-old from Spring, Texas, named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama has been charged with attempted murder after he was accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Sam Altman’s San Francisco home on April 10. He then allegedly walked toward OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters and told employees he intended to burn the building down as well. He was reportedly carrying a manifesto – a “three-part series,” according to Fox News – that included a list of other AI executives and investors and their home addresses and documents discussing potential risks that AI poses to humanity, with a section titled: “Some more words on the matter of our impending extinction.

If you’ve been paying attention to social media lately, then you already know the score: smartphones are corrupting our children, we need legal intervention immediately. Roughly half of US states have enacted some form of age-gating for social media or pornographic content. Australia banned under-16s from social media platforms outright, France and Indonesia followed suit and the United Kingdom is now asking people for their papers to read moderately offensive blog posts. You don’t need me to rehash this. The phones have nuked the interior lives of Gen Z, Gen A and the hitherto unborn Generations B and C. Every opinion lands somewhere between “protect the children” and “this is Reefer Madness for iPads.

American conspiracy culture is a tradition with a long lineage, though not a simple one. It runs through the John Birch Society and Mae Brussell, through Bill Cooper and Alex Jones, into QAnon and beyond. There are other tributaries – black nationalist suspicion of COINTELPRO, evangelical end-times theology, militia movements, UFO subcultures – but one dominant current exists in every conspiracy: it speaks from below. The conspirators operate as the hidden orchestrators of surface reality. The deep state, the intelligence agencies, the Fed, the media – at worst, Jews – all sit above normal people, controlling their world. The people telling these stories understand themselves as excluded from power.

Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in both its legacy and citizen varieties.

Last month, during the Arctic Blast that still has a few states trapped under ice (greetings from Illinois), someone posted an altered Google Earth screenshot to Facebook. The image displayed a snake-like shape in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Virginia. “The Leviathan is waking up,” the caption read. “This is why they are creating a FAKE snow storm and manipulating the weather so they can freeze it because of the military bases in the area.” The post gained enough traction to land on Know Your Meme, the internet’s best-kept meme encyclopedia. But it wasn’t just a meme, at least in the sense we usually mean. A lot of people earnestly believed that the biblical Leviathan was waking up from beneath the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Everybody is suddenly recognizing, almost in unison, that many major of the cultural shifts in recent years were accelerated, if not explicitly caused, by Covid lockdowns. In confinement we went online and when we spent more time in cyberspace than in meatspace, our brains began to change. The most significant shift is that we have turned away from books and reading, and as a result our attention spans are collapsing. The screen is eclipsing the page. In the US, reading for pleasure has crumbled; in Britain, a third of adults no longer read books at all. The “reading revolution” that expanded consciousness in the 18th century is in retreat. But what’s emerging is not illiteracy: it’s post-literacy. We are becoming post-literate.

In Islamic cosmology there are three orders of intelligent beings. Angels, made of light, have no choice but obedience. Humans, formed from clay, carry the burden of free will. Between them live the djinn, created from “the smokeless flame of fire.” The djinn are, in many ways, like people, but they categorically are not people – from their constitution to their morality. Like the Good Neighbors of British and Celtic tradition, the djinn exist in parallel to us. They think and decide, marry and worship, and are fallible, just as we are. The Qur’an describes some as believers and others as not: “And among us are Muslims [in submission to Allah], and among us arethe unjust.