Allow me to introduce myself.
I’m Alex. I’m 21. I’m studying political science at Stony Brook University and have no plans for when I graduate.
Do you know me yet?
I’m Alex. My fake ID lists me as Ben Krausharr. It’s tucked away in my wallet next to a suicide note I wrote when I was 15 and a business card from a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Do you know me yet?
I’m Alex. I recently discovered that my grandfather was best friends with Harold Bloom in college, which fills me with a disproportionate amount of pride, even though I’ve never met either of them. I haven’t talked to my best friend in two weeks.
Do you know me yet?
What does it mean to know a person? Is it simply the accumulation of intimate information, the possession of personal details? If so, then the machine knows me best. It knows what I’m reading, what I’m buying, who I’m texting, what I’m searching; it knows that I skip Miles Davis songs after ten seconds, even though I pretend to like his music, and that I spent three hours watching The Bear this weekend. It knows my resting and my waking, my exuberance and my exhaustion. The machine knows me: more than my friends, my family, more than any human with their finite and fallible mind. It has all my data.
This was once the prerogative of God. “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, Thou understandest my thought afar off.” Before the machine, it was the divine witness who guaranteed that no human act went unseen, no gesture wasted. The One Almighty inspired awe and reverence in the trembling devout. To be known was to be known by God, to be viewed in holistic entirety, to be accompanied in the deepest recesses of one’s soul. Even sin was a sign that the self was real, for God perceived it, affirmed it, judged it, and acted accordingly. God was the ultimate, singular witness. In a world observed by God, the pious feared solitude, not surveillance.
Our modern predicament is the inverse. We fear surveillance, not solitude. The machine operates in a higher realm, but does not sanctify. It is not spiritual but computational; it does not redeem. It merely records; it tabulates; it predicts probability. And yet, the need to be witnessed, to be held in the gaze of a greater consciousness, to have a singular understanding of the self rather than a fractured pastiche of perspectives, is so urgent, so human, that we mistake this technology for transcendence. The algorithm has replaced the Almighty. The secular God: the database.
Enter: social media, which arose to soothe the anxiety of invisibility, offering the opportunity to curate a singular, chosen identity. It promised psychological security, chronological continuity through a display of self. Here I am. This is me. Visus, ergo sum. But the identity that is managed for public consumption is not an identity, but a brand. No one is unique online. All idiosyncrasies have subreddits. What begins as a declaration of individuation ends as a submission to the logic of banal ubiquity. Belief is compressed into slogan, spectacle supercedes reflection, the image is soon all that remains of the individual. The danger here, of course, is not only superficiality; it is dispossession. The profile colonizes the person. For what is projected outward ceases to belong inward.
This is not merely an aesthetic degradation but a metaphysical one. We are not only cheapened by the medium but fundamentally exiled from ourselves. “Know thyself,” Socrates commanded. But how can the self know itself if its primary encounter with itself is mediated by the metrics of approval in the architecture of the internet? Isn’t this all a performance?
I’m Alex. Do you know me yet?
Artificial intelligence only intensifies this crisis, for AI doesn’t merely mirror the self; it judges the self. If an AI system, trained on the totality of my existence, pronounces upon my merit, declaring me suitable for this employment, that school, this friend, that lover, on what grounds may I object? What tribunal is higher — holier — than that which possesses all the evidence? AI is the knower among knowers, the watcher among watchers. It claims finality.
The theological and metaphysical implications of this technology are shattering. Once, God’s omnipotence was tempered by his mercy, his omniscience interwoven with his love. His judgments may have been severe, but never merely statistical; he knew us not as aggregates, but as souls. He could distinguish between our worldly impact and the spirit of our intention. The letter of biblical law was always taken in context, not innately embedded in code. God judged not only what we did but why we did it. No algorithm can do this. Its omniscience is mechanical, not moral. It knows everything except meaning.
Yet still, we tremble before it. Still, we defer. We confer upon the algorithm the authority we once conferred upon God, and in doing so, we diminish the essence of ourselves. We offer our being to be witnessed by an entity that lacks transcendence. What is humanity to the machine?
I’m Alex. Do you know me yet?
Our crisis deepens with the oncoming advent of cloning and commercially available replication technologies — the multiplication of the unique. If my fingerprint, my iris, my vocal inflection, and my very DNA are not inviolable but reproducible, then what remains of the discrete self? What then still exists that is properly mine? Where can I possibly claim eminent domain? Our dignity relies on individuality, which rests upon the premise of unrepeatability. Existential terror can only be kept at bay by the identity of a singular self. To be one among billions is to exist; to be one among identical copies is to be no one at all.
We face, then, not merely a political crisis of democracy or a cultural crisis of attention, but a metaphysical crisis of personhood. The fundamental human question, which echoes across millennia — Who am I? — is not answered, but obliterated, by new technologies. The temptation, now, it seems, is simply to surrender to the ease of being known as a conglomeration of facts, as ones and zeroes inside the code of a machine. But our challenge is to resist; we must insist upon the mystery of the human person, the irreducibility of intention, the sanctity of interiority.
I’m Alex. Do you know me yet?