7. Letting Go of the Invisible Hand
In the boardroom at the top of a shimmering glass tower in New Delhi, a group of men and women in tailored suits sat around a polished, sprawling table. From this height, the city spread below them like a game board, its winding streets and towering skyscrapers nothing more than pieces on a map. They were the highest executives, the power brokers, the architects of society as it now stood—and they knew it. They were the ones who decided what the masses saw, what they feared, and what they believed was possible.
Anil Kandhari, CEO of Indus International, watched the others with a hawk’s eye. He was known for his ruthless clarity, his ability to see the world as a puzzle to be arranged, managed, optimised. He leaned back in his chair, smirking slightly as the others debated the latest “resistance movement” coming out of Kolkata, a thorn in their side that refused to be plucked.
“It’s just another flare-up,” scoffed Vikram Joshi, a regional director with a permanent scowl. “We’ve seen this before—uprisings, unrest. It’ll die down when we apply pressure.”
“It’s different this time,” said Neha Rathore, head of strategic relations, her gaze steely. “This isn’t about demands. These people aren’t asking for reforms. They’re talking about… well, about rejecting our entire way of life.”
Anil looked around the table and smirked. “Rejecting it? What are they going to do? Live on air and meditation? We control the land, the water, the networks. As long as they need to eat, they’ll come back to us.”
But there was a murmur of dissent. Priya Sen, a younger executive from the tech department, cleared her throat. “The problem, sir, is that they’re finding ways to live without us. Small-scale farming, bartering, cutting themselves off from our networks. It’s like they don’t want anything we offer anymore.”
Anil’s smirk faded. For years, they had managed resistance by either co-opting it or crushing it. A new product launch here, a charitable foundation there—a small price to keep the illusion alive. The people had always been malleable. Give them enough to consume, keep them a little afraid, and they’d comply. But now, something else was spreading. This new movement was outside the framework of their usual control strategies.
And worse, it was contagious.
The Machinery of Control
For decades, they had honed their strategies, quietly reshaping society from behind the scenes. The board members were part of a global network of corporations and governments, an invisible empire with no flag, no borders, just a shared purpose: to keep humanity efficient, predictable, dependent. They understood that control wasn’t about brute force anymore—it was about the narratives, the subtle manipulation of people’s dreams and fears.
“We’ve succeeded in convincing them that they need us,” said Anita Malhotra, the head of marketing. “For years, we’ve told them that life is only secure with stability, with careers, with constant productivity. Without us, they have nothing to believe in.”
The board nodded in silent agreement. It was true. They had created a system where the majority couldn’t even imagine a life outside the labyrinth of work and consumption. And it worked—people feared falling off the conveyor belt, feared losing the security of the paycheck, the comfort of entertainment. They had been pacified by endless choice: fifty brands of the same product, each promising a new kind of happiness.
But this new resistance—they weren’t buying the happiness they’d been sold.
“These people are getting dangerous ideas,” Neha said. “They’re beginning to believe in something beyond our reach. They’re talking about ‘human connection,’ ‘inner power,’ about rejecting materialism entirely. If it spreads—”
Anil cut her off, his voice hard. “Then it’s our job to stop it from spreading!”
The Soft and Hard Levers of Power
They began with the soft levers, the methods they had perfected over years of subtle manipulation. Media outlets ran stories portraying the movement as naive, even backward. Opinion pieces ridiculed the resistance as a throwback to primitive times, as a threat to “progress.” Social media platforms flagged any mention of the resistance as “misinformation,” shadow-banning and burying posts. People who were associated with the movement were quietly fired from their jobs, blacklisted from companies that were, of course, all part of the same network.
But instead of vanishing, the movement dug deeper. People met in person, formed tight-knit communities that didn’t depend on digital networks or banks or any of the usual tools of control. And worse, the movement began to attract new followers—not outcasts or radicals but ordinary workers, office employees, even executives who had seen through the façade. They had tasted the hollowness of the so-called success they were offered and found it wanting.
The board reconvened, and this time the air was tense.
“We can’t let this go on,” Vikram growled. “We need to make an example of them.”
It was time to turn to the hard levers. Raids were orchestrated under the guise of “security concerns.” People disappeared. Temples, gathering places, and small farms were destroyed on legal pretexts, bulldozed as “illegal constructions” or “health hazards.” The message was clear: fall back in line, or face consequences.
But there was one thing they hadn’t counted on.
The Awakening They Couldn’t Control
As their crackdown grew more brutal, a strange thing happened. The resistance, instead of withering, seemed to grow stronger, more resilient. People no longer feared. The more they were stripped of material security, the more they turned inward, finding strength in their communities and in each other. Rumours spread of people who could slip past surveillance, who moved freely despite the drones, who seemed to know what was coming before it happened.
It was as though the movement had tapped into something beyond the grasp of the board, a form of power that their analytics, algorithms, and profits could not reach.
One evening, Priya from tech returned with an alarming report. “We’re seeing strange things on the networks,” she said. “Our firewalls are being breached, but not in a technical way. It’s like… information is flowing beyond our control.”
“Impossible,” Anil muttered, though a chill went down his spine. For the first time, he felt as if he were not in control. This wasn’t like the small resistance movements they had crushed before. This was something else, something beyond his calculations, his strategies.
“It’s as if these people don’t care about us anymore,” Neha whispered. “We can’t scare them, can’t tempt them back with promises. They’ve tapped into something… something ancient, something we can’t touch.”
The Collapse of the Machine
In the following months, the unthinkable happened. Whole regions disconnected from the systems that the board had built. Neighbourhoods became self-sufficient. More workers walked off the job, not out of protest but because they didn’t need the system anymore. People began trading skills, growing their own food, creating networks of trust that needed no authority, no hierarchy. They looked at the skyscrapers not with fear or envy but with pity, with disdain.
Anil watched from his tower as, slowly, the foundation of his empire crumbled. He realised, in a moment of cold clarity, that his power had always been built on illusions—on a world that was convinced it needed him. And now, with those illusions shattered, he was nothing.
For the first time, he felt a pang of something foreign: vulnerability, fear. The world he’d created was slipping away, and he was powerless to stop it.
As the cities below transformed, as temples filled with people celebrating their newfound freedom, the skyscrapers emptied, their once-bustling lobbies echoing with the sound of emptiness. Anil looked out over his kingdom—now a wasteland of empty offices, unsold goods, and crumbling control.
He had spent his life building an empire based on fear, hunger, and control. But now, as the world woke up, he was left to face the emptiness of his own heart, his own life—a life spent hoarding power that had never really been his.
He stared out of the window, watching the lights of the city below—a city that was, at long last, free.
Humanitas et Machina: This series of fictional short stories aims to bring visions of hope in the face of humanity’s biggest challenges while also exploring the risks and potential of a future with AI. All stories are co-creations between man and machine. All images are AI generated. Find out more about the project.
This seventh story comes roughly one year after the end of the original series and was inspired the image below produced by Rob Sidon and forwarded to me by a friend. It shows a prompt to ChatGPT as follows, together with a summary of the answer:
If you were going to take over society and keep humanity from reaching its full enlightened potential, how would you do it?
Curious to know if the response shown in the social media image was true, I put the same exact prompt into ChatGPT 4o and was surprised to see a similar but more detailed response in which it described that it’s approach to stop humanity achieving its potential would be to create a society very much like the one we currently live in. Yikes!
This led to a dialogue with GPT about the similarities between its response and our current world, the possible roots of this paradigm and whether or not it is conceivable for humanity to ever break free of the power dynamics that have dominated it throughout recorded history.
To conclude the chat, I asked it to write a short story, as usual in the writing style of Emile Zola, with a possible scenario of how humanity succeeded in moving out of the current paradigm to achieve it’s “full enlightened potential”.
The first attempt produced a story set in Paris, presumably because of the Emile Zola prompt, and the story was rather bland. I asked it to choose a different country as the setting and it chose India. From there I gave it several prompts to be more radical, brave and even controversial in its writing of this story, as well as a reminder about where our conversation had started. This got us to a place that I was fairly happy with but something wasn’t right, so I asked it to flip the story and tell it from the side of the villains and not the heroes. This actually resulted in a much more enjoyable story to read and unlike last years stories, I didn’t edit the writing at all, showing an incremental if not remarkable improvement in GPT’s creative writing abilities.
So what do you think? Do we already live in a society perfectly designed to stop us from reaching our full enlightened potential?
You decide.