Once individual cognition begins to atrophy, the cultural effects expand outward. What starts as the personal offloading of thought morphs into a societal conversion of persons into manageable units. Digital systems function less as neutral tools than as engines of categorization and detachment; where living humans are rendered as data points, telemetry streams, behavioral scores, risk profiles, and threat vectors.
The exercise of power shifts from one of encounter to the pursuit of optimization: variables to be adjusted, populations to be sorted, friction to be minimized.
Legendary entrepreneur/investor Peter Thiel’s long engagement with French philosopher René Girard supplies a useful lens. Girard’s account of mimetic desire – human wanting that is borrowed, rivalrous, and prone to escalate into scapegoating and violence – helps explain why systems that quantify and rank people gain such rapid purchase. When desire is imitative, the easiest path to order is to make the objects of desire (status, safety, belonging, moral purity) visible, measurable, and administratively controllable.
Platforms and state-corporate hybrids do not merely record behaviour; they reshape the field of desire itself. Recommendation engines, risk scores, and compliance dashboards turn rivalry into data and then offer the data back as guidance. The result is not the elimination of violence, but its rationalization and distribution across interfaces that no longer require a single human face. What human faces do exist are increasingly generated. Unreality becomes most desirous.
Charlie Munger, the late former Berkshire Hathaway vice-chair, spent most of his nearly 100 years studying envy and never cracked the nut. Girard provided the intellectual scaffolding that digital means now exploit easily, persistently, and at scale.
The same population dynamics that model large-language-model adoption as a cognitive virus apply at the systems level. Social and institutional transmission can drive transitions from relative autonomy toward persistent dependence, with tipping points beyond which recovery of independent judgment becomes markedly harder. Once a critical threshold of reliance is crossed, small incremental increases in adoption or administrative reach can produce rapid, population-level shifts.
The same logic that makes thinking cheap also makes administrative abstraction cheap: once populations accept profiles and scores as adequate proxies for persons, the cost of further optimization falls while the cost of reversing the conversion rises. Cognitive competence does not decline linearly. It can fall abruptly. The environment that trains attention – constant novelty, rapid switching, reduced tolerance for confusion – accelerates the same process.
The cost of switching does not become financially punitive; it becomes identity punitive. The latter trumps the former.
Renowned authors/brothers Chip and Dan Heath called this pairing virality and stickiness. The existing viral/dependency model slips seamlessly into the administrative domain. Does domain escape approach futility?
Palantir’s government and commercial contracts illustrate this in practical form. The company’s software integrates large volumes of existing data for intelligence, targeting, logistics, and administrative tracking, including multi-hundred-million-dollar awards tied to AI-enabled military systems and domestic monitoring tools.[1]Critics and supporters alike recognize that the effect is to render complex human environments queryable and actionable at scale. Similar logic appears in content-regulation regimes, financial de-platforming episodes, and the conversion of public-health emergencies into continuous behavioral management.
During the COVID-19 outbreak, populations were processed through infection curves, compliance metrics, and risk categories; dissent was frequently and ironically framed as contagion. Climate policy has often operated through parallel mechanisms of institutional consensus and social pressure. In Canada, successive efforts at online content regulation further demonstrate how the information environment can be constrained without classical authoritarian architecture.[2]
These systems, sold as liberating (even border-dissolving), in fact create digital and administrative borders. Algorithmic and bureaucratic sorting produces favoured loops and residual categories, with those inside preferred patterns retaining fuller standing, while those outside become problems to be corrected, excluded, or optimized away.
The television series Black Mirror is troubling because it is accurate.
Compliance is facilitated by the absence of a single visible tyrant. There is no classic despot to confront. There remain only dashboards, terms of service, eligibility criteria, and “neutral” processes. People adapt out of convenience, perceived safety, or simple exhaustion. Small accommodations accumulate, accepting more monitoring for access, yielding data for seamlessness, endorsing streamlined procedures that distance decision-makers from the human stakes of the outcome.
It is a hell of an easy button.
Speaking of easy buttons …
Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) regimes supply a domestic parallel in the management of life’s endpoint. Eligibility assessments and procedural pathways can convert complex suffering into expedient case files processed according to what is claimed as objective criteria. Official Canadian data cites 16,499 provisions in 2024 alone and a cumulative total exceeding 76,000 since legalization. The process is clinical and documented; the distance between assessor and the full weight of the decision is engineered into the workflow. What begins as compassion risks hardening into efficient throughput.
Everyday populations rarely mount sustained, co-ordinated resistance. Fear, fatigue, and the incremental character of the changes favour accommodation. The true counter-movement, if it exists, is not mimetic rivalry with the system’s own terms of status and purity. It is the quieter, harder rejection of borrowed desire itself – the refusal to let the scoreboard of the moment define what is real or worthy. The adherents and banner-bearers of the quantified self-movement might face increasing resistance, but they are aware that this stance is rarer than heroic narratives suggest. Most people continue to participate in the systems that convert them into data because the alternative demands continuous, unglamorous effort. And the loss of what is sold to them as “invaluable” data is framed as a personal cost.
It is your data. We will let you access it. For a price.
The emerging architecture requires no theatrical malice. It thrives on the substrate already under construction: power that flows with reduced resistance because real persons have been pre-processed into ohm-diminished units. Once populations readily accept the conversion of the human into the profile as normal, broader forms of optimization (whether corporate, administrative, or machine), face fewer obstacles.
The silken engine purrs. Its operating assumptions having already been conceded.
References
[1] Palantir government and military contracts for Maven Smart System, including the September 2024 ~$99.8 million Army contract expanding access across U.S. military services (Bloomberg, 19 September 2024; DoD contract W911QX-24-D-0026) and the preceding $480 million combatant-command award.
[2] Canadian online regulation (Bills C-11, C-18, proposed C-63) and related free-expression analysis.
(Richard LeBlanc – BIG Media Ltd., 2026)