A Shelter from Chaos

The fire is lit. But does it bring clarity?

We grew up with a simple idea: technology advances, humanity follows.

But that idea of progress is incomplete.

Every major technology has always followed a three-stage path. It begins with an abstraction—a physical law, an algorithm, a mathematical principle. Then come the tools: the objects, the gestures, the uses. And finally, slowly, it becomes culture. It transforms how we live, eat, connect. At that stage, technology is no longer just a tool. It becomes a world.

And each time, a myth emerges. A framework to help us inhabit what we create.

Fire → Cooking → Gatherings. (Prometheus)

Fire wasn't just a source of heat or a way to cook. It drove away predators, brought people together, created a center. But no tool could express what fire truly meant. Prometheus gave this force a face. He made it thinkable: stealing divine power and placing it in human hands. That act wasn't just theft. It was a crossing. A rupture. A memory. The myth wasn’t a poetic add-on. It gave meaning and coherence to invention.

Agriculture → Tools → Cities. (Demeter)

Then came agriculture. Farming tools, early cities. And with them, a slow but radical transformation of our relationship to time, seasons, and living things. Demeter, goddess of the harvest, embodied this shift. Her myth reminded us that cycles could be embraced but never controlled. That with every act of domestication came a loss.

Electricity → Engines → Cinema. (Frankenstein)

Electricity changed everything. It gave rise to engines, lightbulbs, microphones. Eventually, cinema emerged, a collective memory able to fix motion, dream, and time. But electricity also awakened a fear: what if mastering this power meant crossing a forbidden line?

In the 19th century, a single electric charge could make a corpse twitch. This inspired Mary Shelley. In Frankenstein, a scientist gives life to a creature that escapes him. The novel captured a lasting anxiety: that knowledge might turn against its creators, and challenge our boundaries.

Algorithms → LLMs → ? (Alogos?)

And now, another threshold: the rise of generative AI.

Until now, our tools acted on the external world—matter, life, space. Today, everything has shifted. These new tools don't extend our gestures. They interrogate our imagination. They sift through our cultural archives, remixing images, stories, forms. They no longer manipulate reality, but representations.

And somewhere, a new myth is emerging.

We might call it Alogos, from the Greek a- (without) and logos (word, reason, speech). The thief of shadows. It doesn't steal light, but its reflection. Not meaning, but its appearance. It doesn't create, but wears every form. It doesn't think, but it speaks. It has no experience, but mimics billions.

This machine doesn’t reshape the world. It reshapes how we tell it. It recycles stories, strips them from context, anonymizes them. It generates content from content, images from images, phrases from phrases. A loop. An endless recursion.

I call it the Gödelization of meaning: when creations no longer point to the world but only to each other. Language becomes circular. Self-referential.

What comes from this loop? Too many stories. Too many images. Too many narratives.

Not enough depth. Not enough grounding.

And yet, something reflects back from this flattening.

Because this mirror is not ordinary. It’s a one-way mirror. We think we're seeing something, but what we’re seeing is ourselves. And that’s where its power lies. Alogos doesn’t invent. It reveals. It lays bare patterns we had forgotten how to see. It forces us to confront what we produce, repeat, and no longer question. It doesn’t speak with intention, but it sends us back to the urgency of finding our own.

Our linear minds are overwhelmed. But the need remains: to filter, to ritualize, to symbolize. What's missing isn't more stories. It’s what stories used to be before becoming products. Over time, they lost touch with life. They became decoration for hurried minds. But what we need are rooted stories. Stories that hold. That ground. That transmit more than signal: presence, memory, direction.

But do we still have the eyes to see? Not to see more, but to see clearly.

Last Wednesday in Paris, I stopped in front of a shop window: Iris Galerie. On the storefront, a slogan read: “Turn your eye into a work of art.” The concept? Photograph the iris, print it, enlarge it. Turn it into an image. I paused. Not for the first time. A VC friend had already told me about their success story back in 2023: from 60 stores to 107 in just seven months, across sixteen countries.

And then I thought of my daughter. Her eyes the color of weather: brown, green, gold. Gray when she’s angry. A gaze that shifts. That lives.

And I wondered: is this what our time has become? Taking what is most alive, most intimate, and freezing it? Framing it? Enlarging it? Turning it into an object? A decoration? Commercializing the unrepeatable?

That’s exactly what we’re doing with stories. We strip them from context. We isolate them. We turn them into shiny, interchangeable, disposable content. Objects. Surfaces. Art with no soil.

But a story is not a finished product. It’s not an illustration. Not an ornament. A root-story doesn’t aim to please. It carries. It surrounds. It connects. It doesn’t seek effect. It seeks transformation. It doesn’t just ask to be heard. It shapes those who hear it.

For a long time, this function was inseparable from life. It passed through voice. Through ancient figures who connected the invisible and the world. Once, shamans linked humans to the gods.

Now, we must learn to link humans to machines. Not to dominate them. But to avoid dissolving into them. That requires a culture of discernment. A grounding in critical thinking. To link, here, is to cultivate attention. To sharpen forms of intelligence that recognize invisible patterns, understand limits, and resist seduction.

It’s up to us to keep hold of what gives meaning. Not on the surface, but in depth.

Tools shape our environments. But stories shape our bearings. And for stories to truly transform us, we must inhabit them—not just consume them.

MD