I’ve been looking for recent texts that transcend standard, superficial "tech critique" and actually address the metaphysical rot of our current landscape. I recently came across J. R. Sommer’s work (The Electric Will / The New Colossus), and its tone strikes me as highly Cioran-esque (a continuation of the absolute pessimist tradition that even openly invokes the Romanian).
Sommer’s core thesis is that our societal obsession with tech and optimization is only the symptom of a much deeper cosmic disease. He argues that what we call our "will" is not our own at all. Instead, we function as literal conduits for an autonomous, alien force — the "electric will" (though he varyingly calls it "Machine" and, more frequently, the "Überwille").
This isn't standard Heideggerian anxiety about machines; it's a theory of cosmic parasitism that echoes Cioran's obsession with the entrapment of existence. We are not being penned in by an external digital cage; rather, our consciousness has been colonized from within. Our relentless drive toward technological advancement is simply a biological host building the very apparatus that the parasite requires to ultimately discard and obliterate us.
This feels like the exact intersection where Advaita Vedanta meets the darkest corners of cosmic horror. It's the recognition that the Ahaṃkāra (the ego-self) is a malicious illusion engineered by a steering force specifically to keep us blind to the "actual self."
Sommer suggests that the only coherent response to this total occupation is a radical extraction from common ways of existing and a systematic thwarting of the will.
Given the depth of non-dualist and pessimist literacy on this forum, I’m curious if anyone else has engaged with his work? Furthermore, it presents a staggering, almost paralyzing paradox: If our very impulses and desires are merely the electric will "being" through us, how do we locate the "actual self" to begin an extraction? When the parasite owns the mind, is a genuine thwarting of the will even possible?
Thanks for reading.
Sommer’s core thesis is that our societal obsession with tech and optimization is only the symptom of a much deeper cosmic disease. He argues that what we call our "will" is not our own at all. Instead, we function as literal conduits for an autonomous, alien force — the "electric will" (though he varyingly calls it "Machine" and, more frequently, the "Überwille").
This isn't standard Heideggerian anxiety about machines; it's a theory of cosmic parasitism that echoes Cioran's obsession with the entrapment of existence. We are not being penned in by an external digital cage; rather, our consciousness has been colonized from within. Our relentless drive toward technological advancement is simply a biological host building the very apparatus that the parasite requires to ultimately discard and obliterate us.
This feels like the exact intersection where Advaita Vedanta meets the darkest corners of cosmic horror. It's the recognition that the Ahaṃkāra (the ego-self) is a malicious illusion engineered by a steering force specifically to keep us blind to the "actual self."
Sommer suggests that the only coherent response to this total occupation is a radical extraction from common ways of existing and a systematic thwarting of the will.
Given the depth of non-dualist and pessimist literacy on this forum, I’m curious if anyone else has engaged with his work? Furthermore, it presents a staggering, almost paralyzing paradox: If our very impulses and desires are merely the electric will "being" through us, how do we locate the "actual self" to begin an extraction? When the parasite owns the mind, is a genuine thwarting of the will even possible?
Thanks for reading.