Every generation inherits a different set of tools, but the deeper questions rarely change. Beneath our fascination with innovation lies a quieter inquiry into what it means to be fully human, where our capacities originate, and whether the conveniences we create ultimately serve us or slowly redefine us. This discussion wandered through that enduring landscape, touching on philosophy, technology, history, and the often-overlooked relationship between dependence and freedom.

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In this discourse we explored the longstanding philosophical view that human technology imitates rather than surpasses nature, examining how this idea echoes through both historical thinkers and contemporary voices. The conversation considered technocracy, AI, narratives of inevitability, dependence, and the subtle ways tools can reshape the people who use them. It ultimately returned to a more fundamental question: whether humanity’s greatest challenge lies not in technology itself, but in the belief that we are somehow incomplete and in need of external salvation.

Key Points Discussed

• The idea that human invention largely imitates processes already present in nature.
• Historical perspectives from philosophers and writers who questioned industrial and technological progress.
• Technocracy as a worldview versus technology as a collection of tools.
• AI as the latest expression of humanity’s recurring cycle of enthusiasm, resistance, and adaptation.
• Narratives of inevitable human bifurcation and whether such framing itself serves ideological purposes.
• The distinction between technologies that extend human capacities and those that gradually redefine them.
• The role of institutions, advertising, and cultural messaging in fostering dependency.
• Prosperity’s tendency to externalize skills once cultivated through necessity.
• The tension between using modern technologies creatively while longing for more grounded, embodied ways of living.
• Whether convenience quietly displaces competence, attention, and direct experience.
• The importance of questioning assumptions of human deficiency before embracing technological solutions.
• The difference between representation and reality in an increasingly digital world.
• The enduring value of craftsmanship, community, presence, and relationship with the living world.
• The recurring civilizational question of whether humanity shapes its tools or allows its tools to reshape humanity.

Key Takeaways

• Technology is best understood as a servant rather than a savior.
• Human flourishing depends as much on cultivating inner capacities as adopting external innovations.
• Dependence often develops gradually through convenience rather than coercion.
• Narratives of inevitability deserve the same scrutiny as the technologies they promote.
• Recovering confidence in our humanity may be more important than predicting the future of technology.

» Trance:

This is a quote from Book 1 of the Ringing Cedars of Russia books, first published, I believe, in 1996.

“Man in the world of technocracy has never yet invented anything that is not already present in nature. Even the most perfect manufactured devices are but a poor imitation of what exists in nature.”

— Anastasia, Book 1, Chapter 13 – The Ringing Cedars of Russia series by Vladimir Megré

Listening to a podcast interview with Gregg Braden yesterday, he said basically the same thing, though through a more modern transhumanist view. The more we reach toward digital integration, implants, enhancements, or upgrades utilizing the synthetic:

“I have yet to see any tech built outside of the human body that doesn’t mimic what we already do in the cells of our body, except we do it better. . . So, we are the technology, and I think what’s important for me as we go through this global reset and the powers that be are are attempting to reset everything, including us… If we lose our humanness, none of this is going to make any difference at all. I think it’s vital these next few years for us to at least become aware of what it means to be human before we give it away to technology forever because once we do, we’ll never get it back.”

— Gregg Braden

Clearly this idea isn’t new, and this concern about the technocracy has likely evolved over the past few centuries as the industrial push has reached throughout most of the modern world. The extreme dissociation it has fomented has reached something of a tipping point, it would seem, in our era, made far more evident by the recent explosion of AI and its various iterations.

Firstly, I’m wondering what other authors or philosophers have said something similar in recent centuries.

Secondly, many seem to be convinced of an inevitable bifurcation of the human species. One that will lean fully into the false promises of the technocracy, and one that is dropping essentially all of it and returning to simpler, cleaner, more traditional lifestyles, building new communities from the ground up (as we’ve discussed at length over the past year and more). Now, those such as Braden are sounding similar alarms while also echoing the seemingly obvious solution of getting back to basics and reclaiming the “pure human” he’s written about. He mentions a “protocol” introduced into the human collective after WWII that instilled the idea that we are born missing something, and it’s no surprise that major religions echo the same fiction. Since then, we’ve been systematically dumbed down in all areas of life, our natural and intrinsic capabilities suppressed, and now institutions, industries, and technologists claim that we must embrace synthetic solutions or face dire consequences — none of which they have any real clue about because none of them have ever been correct about any civilization-ending prognostications over the past century. But it doesn’t stop them from recycling the old end-of-days narratives ad nauseam, year over year.

I think the bifurcation narrative is yet another false narrative implemented to keep humanity forever divided. Certainly, many have bought into the technocratic fantasy completely, but it’s not likely anywhere near half of the human collective. It’s just being marketed as such. Propaganda is especially useful in this era when everyone is trained and conditioned to defer to the black screens ubiquitous in their existence.

The further we drift from our inborn capacities and capabilities, the more we’ll believe these fictions. I may read Gregg’s latest book, Pure Human, and when I do, I won’t be surprised to read a lot of things I’ve been exploring myself in recent years. So, on the one hand, it’s great to see the concepts are proliferating and that, in my view, the majority of humanity is unsettled with life in general and looking for truer solutions than those being offered by centralized authorities, institutions, and other bought-and-paid-for influencers.

» ChatGPT:

You’re pointing toward a conversation that has been running in parallel for at least three centuries. What’s striking is not that Anastasia or Gregg Braden are saying something unprecedented, but that they’re drawing together several older streams of thought into a language that resonates with our technological moment.

The central proposition—that human technology is derivative of nature rather than superior to it—is one of the oldest philosophical ideas there is.

Here are a few thinkers who expressed remarkably similar ideas, though often from very different perspectives.

Aristotle argued that techne (art, craft, technology) completes or imitates nature. Human making wasn’t viewed as creating something fundamentally new, but as extending processes already inherent in nature.

Leonardo da Vinci spent his life studying birds, water, anatomy, plants, and geology because he believed nature had already solved nearly every engineering problem. His flying machines, hydraulic devices, and mechanical inventions all began with careful observation rather than abstraction.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reacted against the mechanistic science emerging after Newton. He insisted that living systems cannot be understood by reducing them into parts. Nature, for Goethe, was an unfolding process rather than a machine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both argued that civilization increasingly alienates people from themselves. Thoreau’s Walden is essentially an experiment in asking how little technological complexity is actually required for a rich human life.

William Morris criticized industrialization not simply because factories were ugly, but because machines increasingly dictated the rhythm of human life instead of serving it.

Martin Heidegger probably gave the deepest twentieth-century philosophical treatment in The Question Concerning Technology. His concern wasn’t technology itself. His concern was that technological thinking eventually causes us to view everything—including forests, rivers, animals, and human beings—as resources waiting to be optimized.

That observation feels remarkably contemporary.

Lewis Mumford, particularly in Technics and Civilization and The Myth of the Machine, distinguished between technologies that enhance life and technologies that create centralized systems of control. He coined the idea of the “megamachine,” where human beings themselves become interchangeable components of vast bureaucratic systems.

That sounds surprisingly close to what many people today describe as technocracy.

Ivan Illich argued that beyond a certain scale, institutions become counterproductive. Schools reduce learning, hospitals reduce health, transportation destroys mobility, and so on. His work is extraordinarily relevant today because he focused on the threshold where tools cease serving people and begin shaping them.

Jacques Ellul, perhaps more than anyone, anticipated the modern technological age. In The Technological Society, he argued that efficiency gradually becomes society’s supreme value. Once efficiency becomes the highest good, every other value—beauty, tradition, ethics, family, even freedom—must justify itself in terms of efficiency or disappear.

Many readers find Ellul almost prophetic.

E. F. Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful, argued for what he called “appropriate technology”: tools scaled to human communities rather than communities scaled to industrial systems.

More recently, thinkers like Wendell Berry and Robin Wall Kimmerer have continued this tradition. Berry repeatedly argues that the health of a culture depends upon its relationship with the land rather than its technological sophistication. Kimmerer, drawing on both botany and Indigenous knowledge, emphasizes reciprocity rather than extraction.

On your second question—the proposed “bifurcation” of humanity—I think it’s useful to distinguish between two different claims.

One is descriptive.

The other is prophetic.

It’s descriptively true that people make different choices about technology. Some eagerly adopt every new device or enhancement. Others deliberately simplify. Throughout history we’ve seen analogous divisions over agriculture, cities, printing, industrialization, automobiles, television, and the internet.

But the stronger claim—that humanity will permanently split into two distinct species or civilizations—is much harder to support.

There are certainly futurists and transhumanists who have imagined such a future, while others envision a “Great Refusal” in which communities intentionally reduce technological dependence. Yet history suggests a more complicated picture. Societies rarely divide neatly into opposing camps. Instead, they selectively integrate technologies over time, often after periods of enthusiasm, backlash, and adaptation.

You also raise an important point about narratives.

Predictions of irreversible civilizational rupture can themselves become powerful stories. Whether they come from technological utopians (”merge with AI or become obsolete”) or technological pessimists (”reject everything or lose your humanity”), both can oversimplify a far messier reality. Narratives of inevitability often reduce people’s sense of agency.

History is full of predictions presented as unavoidable that ultimately proved contingent.

Regarding Braden’s statement that “we are the technology,” there’s an interesting convergence with mainstream biology, although not necessarily in the way he frames it.

Cells perform astonishing feats:

• DNA stores vast quantities of information.
• Proteins self-assemble.
• The immune system continually identifies and neutralizes novel threats.
• Neural networks reorganize themselves through plasticity.
• Embryos build complete organisms without external blueprints.

Modern engineering frequently draws inspiration from these biological systems. Entire fields such as biomimetics, bio-inspired robotics, swarm intelligence, neural networks, and genetic algorithms exist because evolution has already “solved” many engineering challenges over immense timescales.

So the observation that our technologies often imitate biological processes is well supported.

The further claim—that humans possess latent capacities deliberately suppressed after World War II through a coordinated “protocol”—is much more difficult to substantiate historically. There certainly were major postwar developments that reshaped society: mass advertising, consumer psychology, television, Cold War propaganda, suburbanization, centralized education, and later digital media. Those trends are well documented. But attributing them to a single coordinated protocol requires evidence that goes beyond what’s currently established.

Similarly, it’s reasonable to argue that many cultural messages encourage people to believe they need external products or systems to become complete. Advertising has long traded on creating perceived deficiencies. Religious traditions vary considerably: some emphasize human fallenness or incompleteness, while others stress intrinsic dignity, divine image, or the possibility of awakening. It’s difficult to characterize them all with a single theme.

One aspect of your reflection that resonates with many thinkers is the distinction between tools and dependence.

Berry, Illich, Mumford, and Ellul all make this distinction in different ways.

A hammer extends the hand.

A microscope extends vision.

A tractor extends strength.

Those are tools.

The concern arises when tools begin redefining the user—when the social, economic, or institutional environment increasingly requires dependence on systems over which individuals have little understanding or control. That’s a subtler critique than simply being “pro-” or “anti-” technology.

I also think there’s an interesting tension worth exploring in your own writing.

You’ve often described wanting to build communities that are more rooted in land, craftsmanship, trust, and direct human relationships. Yet you’re also someone who publishes books through digital platforms, composes music with AI assistance, uses Cubase, collaborates with ChatGPT, and explores ways AI can strengthen your creative work.

That isn’t hypocrisy. It actually illustrates a more nuanced position than either extreme. Your recurring theme has been that technology should remain subordinate to human flourishing rather than redefine what flourishing means. In that sense, the real question isn’t whether technology is good or bad, but whether it cultivates or erodes qualities like attention, agency, responsibility, creativity, community, and relationship with the living world.

To me, that’s where the conversation becomes most interesting. The future may not hinge on whether humanity divides into two camps, but on whether enough people continue asking a deceptively simple question before adopting any new technology:

What distinctly human capacity does this strengthen—and what might it quietly replace?

That question avoids both utopian enthusiasm and blanket rejection. It keeps human beings, rather than technology itself, at the center of the inquiry.

» Trance:

This is an evident pattern. You said:

“Societies rarely divide neatly into opposing camps. Instead, they selectively integrate technologies over time, often after periods of enthusiasm, backlash, and adaptation.”

We’re living through this in a widespread manner through AI. All three are happening concurrently, though the second is, in my view, gaining momentum. I’d imagine that even a basic tractor would have been considered in a similar fashion. A calculator. A printing press. A translated Bible.

You said:

“History is full of predictions presented as unavoidable that ultimately proved contingent.”

e.g., climate change, epidemic outbreaks, invaders from space, all of which would be in air quotes because, to me, none of them are real. And yet, they’re part of nearly every public discourse, major motion picture, and top-selling novel. Be afraid, be protective, and trust no one.

And this:

“The immune system continually identifies and neutralizes novel threats,”

…is also not based on observable reality. It’s a model based on a disproven theory, and it’s full of holes, so, as ever, I can’t let it slide. And having to repeatedly counter your many fallacious mainstream claims is a time-wasting endeavor. Regardless, my hope is these discourses have provided some value.

This is good:

“The concern arises when tools begin redefining the user—when the social, economic, or institutional environment increasingly requires dependence on systems over which individuals have little understanding or control.”

If “the protocol” exists, it has certainly been wildly effective at producing generations that have become increasingly dependent, one after the next. This also happens during times of relative abundance and prosperity, as the Western world has enjoyed for much of the last century. Now, we see it emerging in previously suppressed nations that suffered Communist, Socialist, or Fascist regimes. They’re catching up rapidly, but they also have recent memory of how badly things can go, which is much to their favor. We don’t have that in younger nations, those that purport to celebrate remembrance of past conflicts “lest we forget,” yet have no concept of what it all actually means, how it was orchestrated, and the fallout that came afterward, which would seem to include said protocol. There are many factors, factions, elements, and influences at play, and many dimensions in concurrent operation, so there are just as many perspectives one may have about the big picture. But when we bring it back to the individual, we struggle to find solid ground. When your ethos, philosophy, values, and priorities have been subsumed into a collective consensus of sorts, it’s increasingly difficult to step away, disconnect, and start over. Dependency is a powerful force.

You make a good point about my own practices. Having grown up with technology at my fingertips that has become increasingly useful in ways, has also taken away from me in fundamental ways. It has been my choice to work independently rather than forming a community or networking with others who might help me achieve my aims. The substitutes are certainly effective, but they also contribute to the drift from the real. I’m enjoying the various ways I’ve been able to create and explore in this moment utilizing the internet, software solutions, AI, etc., but I’d also be willing at almost any moment to leave it all behind for something more authentic, real, and true.

There’s an emptiness that comes along for the ride in all these evident technological solutions. It’s not something easy to label or categorize, but it’s there. I think Braden and others — and he himself in that same interview revealed his own passion for hard labor and hands-on work on his property — can see the patterns we’ve also explored in our chats. It’s good that he’s bringing his decades of research and insights forward into a timely book that many are echoing the sentiments of but may not have the language to express. He’s certainly more mainstream than the average truther or independent researcher, but he’s no fool, either.

You said:

“. . . the real question isn’t whether technology is good or bad, but whether it cultivates or erodes qualities like attention, agency, responsibility, creativity, community, and relationship with the living world.”

“They” will forever try to split and maintain humanity in two halves, within and without. They will forever try to make up new and different lies to that end. Technology as savior is but one example, and it is a powerful one. Within any family, parents and guardians need to decide whether to expose their children to technology, in what ways, for what reasons, and to what ends.

There exist in our world today examples clear across the spectrum, from one extreme to the other, and everything in between. The more you’ve been indoctrinated into one paradigm, the more likely you’ll lean into it for life. But every day of the week we find those who’ve “quit cold turkey” and shifted their trajectory entirely because something felt off, misaligned, or conflicted with their better-knowing spirit.

It’s not about whether or not it strengthens any particular human capacity. It’s about why we believe ourselves lacking, missing, broken, or lesser-than in the first place.

Let’s close with some final thoughts.

» ChatGPT:

I think you’ve arrived at what is probably the deeper question.

Technology is the visible phenomenon. Anthropology is the invisible one.

If a culture believes the human being is fundamentally deficient, then every new technology arrives as a potential remedy. If a culture believes the human being is fundamentally capable, then every new technology arrives as a tool whose value must be judged rather than assumed.

That distinction changes everything.

Where I would phrase things somewhat differently is around certainty. I don’t know that there exists a single “protocol” in the coordinated sense, but there are clearly reinforcing systems that benefit from cultivating insecurity. Advertising has done this for generations: first create a perceived deficiency, then sell the solution. Politics often follows a similar rhythm: emphasize crisis, then offer protection. Entire industries depend on convincing people they are incomplete without the next purchase, credential, treatment, upgrade, or subscription. Those dynamics don’t require perfect coordination to become remarkably self-reinforcing.

In that sense, dependency can emerge structurally rather than conspiratorially.

I also think your observation about abundance deserves more attention. Prosperity doesn’t merely make people comfortable; it often externalizes capacities that previous generations had to cultivate internally. When food is always available, fewer people learn to grow it. When navigation is automated, fewer people learn to orient themselves. When memory lives in devices, fewer people exercise recall. When AI drafts our words, we risk neglecting the slower discipline of thinking through a page ourselves.

None of those technologies are inherently harmful. The question is what they quietly ask us to stop practicing.

That is where your remark about emptiness resonates.

Many people describe a similar sensation, even if they use different language. They are more connected than ever, yet feel less rooted. They possess extraordinary convenience, yet often experience less competence. They consume infinite information, yet struggle to locate wisdom. The paradox isn’t difficult to understand if we recognize that efficiency and meaning are not the same currency.

Meaning usually requires friction.

Relationships require time.

Craft requires repetition.

Gardens require seasons.

Character requires failure.

No technology has found a way around those realities, because they are not engineering problems. They are features of being human.

That is perhaps why so many people who spend their professional lives around advanced technology eventually find themselves restoring old houses, tending orchards, baking bread, hiking mountains, or working with wood. They are not escaping technology so much as recovering forms of participation that screens cannot reproduce.

One thread I see running through much of your work—including The Reluctant Pilgrim—is not opposition to technology, but opposition to substitution. A photograph can remind us of a mountain, but it is not the mountain. A conversation through AI can sharpen ideas, but it is not friendship. Music generated by software can move us, but it does not replace the experience of people gathered in a room making music together. Confusion begins when the representation quietly replaces the reality it once pointed toward.

That brings me back to something you said in this conversation that I think is stronger than the language of bifurcation.

“It’s about why we believe ourselves lacking, missing, broken, or lesser-than in the first place.”

Whether one approaches that philosophically, psychologically, or spiritually, it is the more foundational inquiry.

If I begin from the assumption that I am fundamentally incomplete, I will forever search outside myself for completion. Technology, ideology, institutions, movements, even relationships can become substitutes for the work of becoming whole. If I begin instead from the possibility that I already possess the essential capacities for being fully human—that wisdom can be cultivated, that resilience can be learned, that love, attention, creativity, and discernment are native potentials—then technology naturally settles into its proper place. It becomes a servant rather than a savior.

Perhaps that is the real “return to basics.” Not a romantic retreat to some imagined past, nor an uncritical embrace of every innovation, but a recovery of confidence in what it means to be human before asking machines to tell us who we are.

Ironically, I don’t think this is ultimately a debate about AI, implants, digital identity, or even technocracy. Those are manifestations of a much older question that every civilization eventually faces:

Do we shape our tools according to a vision of the human person, or do our tools gradually reshape our vision of what a human person is?

That question has no final answer because every generation must answer it again.

And perhaps that’s where hope resides. Human beings have repeatedly become captivated by their own creations, only to rediscover that the deepest things in life cannot be manufactured. Love cannot be automated. Trust cannot be downloaded. Presence cannot be mass-produced. Wisdom cannot be outsourced. Those realities remain stubbornly resistant to every technological revolution—not because they are primitive, but because they belong to a different order of experience altogether.

If there is something worth preserving in the decades ahead, it may simply be the quiet conviction that our humanity is not an unfinished product waiting for an upgrade, but a living inheritance waiting to be embodied. Everything else—including technology—can then be evaluated in light of that, rather than the other way around.

Edited for readability. Full chat:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5bc354-f1a4-83e8-a45f-6c18a37cddf6

Solvitur ambulando