The Eldritch in the 21st century
We're so much richer, smarter and full of technology. Why does it feel like everything is going wrong?
The header photo is MYAKU-MYAKU, the mascot of the 2025 Exposition Universelle.
—
Very little makes sense. As we start to understand things and adapt to the rules, they change again.
We live much closer together than we ever did historically. Yet we know our neighbours much less.
We have witnessed the birth of a truly global culture. A culture that fits no one. A culture that was built by Social Media’s algorithms, much more than by people. Let alone individuals, like you or me.
We have more knowledge, more science, more technology, and somehow, our governments are more stuck. No one is seriously considering a new Bill of Rights for the 21st century, or a new Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
—
Cosmic Horror as a genre largely depicts how this all feels from the inside. As ordinary people, we are powerless in the face of forces beyond our understanding. Cosmic Horror also commonly features the idea that bad things can happen to us without us noticing, and the angst that comes from it.
The genre often features Eldritch creatures. These are creatures that live beyond humans’ understanding. But whilst humans can’t understand or influence them, they can affect humans. Sometimes, they may even forcefully alter people’s thoughts and actions.
—
As humans, we have always been confronted with the Eldritch. The world was never our home, it was never designed to be legible or pleasant to us.
We come to life screaming and crying, without the intellectual means to understand why we got ejected from a nice place into a deeply inhospitable, cold and uncaring universe.
Many stories echo this. From Hesiod’s Golden Age to the Garden of Eden, we started in a state of primordial ease, where humans lived in a world that was good for them. But something happened, and we landed on Earth, with all of its suffering and hardships.
Even our lives start that way. We all have been children.
As children, we had very little agency. Our fates were in the hands of adults, entities much more powerful than we are. Although adults were uncannily similar to us, they were notably different. They didn’t think the same way we did, we had to play by their rules (or else), and they decided everything around us.
This is how humanity’s history started.
We lived in hostile lands, always at the mercy of death and the elements, without the science and the tools that would let us understand what was happening.
—
Nowadays, our Eldritch is of a different kind.
We thoroughly understand the natural world, but we have deserted it because it sucked.
We have built and migrated to an artificial world.
And yet, it is still full of phenomena we can’t understand, of inhumane entities that decide our fates.
This is existentially dreadful and awful.
There is no myth that makes sense of it.
There is no one to fault.
No one wants this.
Everyone is lost, unable to find a home.
Modern Magic
Most people are utterly confused all the time. They get through by not expecting to understand much.
“Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Well, aside from a very small STEM elite, technology already is indistinguishable from magic for most people.
Most people do NOT have the expectation that if they study a technical topic, they will eventually understand how it works at a mechanistic level.
They do not expect that they could learn about the state of the art of any field, and eventually make their own opinion.
They just nod, shrug and move along.
They deeply expect that even with more time, they will not understand how phones work, or how cars are built. It is too technical. Possibly, it has something to do with electricity, robots, and circuit boards?
Who knows how a computer, a factory, 5G, or vaccines work? Who expects they could know?
Very few people.
—
Beyond deep hard tech, this also applies to soft technologies. Soft technologies include the Law, governance, how our institutions work, complex processes like containerisation, etc.
For instance, most people treat markets like magic.
Communists ascribe evil properties to markets.
Libertarians treat them as magical tools that can solve all coordination problems.
Nerds largely use them as a divination device: they speak of metaphorical markets, and explain everything through incentives and the efficient market hypothesis.
Aside from a select few people deeply interested in economics and governance, it is hard to see grounded discussions of when markets are practical solutions to practical problems, and how to deploy them safely and productively.
For most people, markets are just magic. Whether they are perceived as good magic or dark magic doesn’t matter, they are still magic.
—
Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics.
Thus, for them, experts are not people to whom we conveniently defer in order to save time. It’s not like they think they could read the state of the art of a field (most have never heard “SOTA”!) and build their own justified opinion.
Instead, to most people, experts are priests, necessarily intermediaries to interpret the scientific scriptures.
Priesthood comes with a lot of authority, and thus necessitates a lot of trust.
Historically, cultures put a lot of importance on acknowledging the special status of priests. The knowledge of a priest is not fungible, not everyone can obtain it. And great power implies great responsibilities.
Priests were de facto privileged. To balance that, their lifestyles usually came with many restrictions, all anchored on discipline and rejecting excesses. Depending on the culture, it might have been forced poverty, forced celibacy, the obligation to follow many additional rituals, etc.
—
On grounds of ideological equality, we have rejected that some people can intellectually understand things that others cannot. Variations in intelligence is a very taboo topic, rarely discussed in grounded ways.
Thus, modern priests are never confronted with their additional moral duties. They are never forced to abide by higher standards. And people resent them.
So much so that following the perceived abuses of the priest class, there has been a recent attempt at a Modern Reformation, mediated by the Internet rather than the Printing Press. Thanks to the Internet, people may not need priests anymore, being free to do their own homework.
The hope was that, through a combination of pop-science, infotainment and gamification, everyone would have become a super polymathic genius! Everyone an expert in hard sciences, soft sciences, the Law, and more!
Instead, we’ve gotten internet wokeism, antivaxx, and more conspiracy theories than we ever needed.
In short, our modern global culture explicitly rejects priesthood, even though there are many fields of knowledge that people de facto do not have access to.
—
Speaking of, no one understands 𝒞𝓊𝓁𝓉𝓊𝓇𝑒.
I outlined one way our culture is changing: the annihilation of “experts” as a class of priests.
It feels real to me, but I might be wrong.
And if I’m right, I’m only right after the fact, I did not predict it.
In other words, I largely do not understand C̲u̲l̲t̲u̲r̲e̲.
I am constantly getting screwed over by my limited understanding of culture. I regularly get surprised by some novel cultural phenomenon that I did not expect, and have to change my course of action accordingly.
This is true of all of us. We are all puzzled and surprised.
C͎u͎l͎t͎u͎r͎e͎ changes much faster than it did 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years or 500 years ago.
Sometimes it’s for the better, sometimes it’s for the worse. But the common thread is that we don’t expect it, nor do we understand it.
Despite its critical importance to our lives, ░C░u░l░t░u░r░e░ is as arbitrary as magic, part of the Eldritch.
Powerlessness
Whilst epistemic horror, the horror of not understanding what happens around us, is a literary genre, I don’t care much for it.
I am naturally a curious person, yet I have made my peace with not knowing things.
Pragmatically though, not knowing things makes us powerless. And this is where true horror comes from.
—
We are all disconnected from everything that matters.
No one expects that they can improve social media, governments, institutions, culture, housing prices, criminality rates around them, etc.
For example, in London, one of the richest cities in the world, there’s a massive wave of thievery that everyone has failed to stop.
Many petty criminals roam the streets looking for phones to snatch. In the last year, 2 fuckers tried to snatch my phone. Shoplifting has exploded.
Lawrence Newport from LFG left a bike in front of Scotland Yard, and it got quickly stolen. Despite having a GPS signal, the police didn’t even check the CCTV nor tried to pursue the criminal. A response sergeant took the time to respond and explain that the police is underfunded, and doesn’t have bike thefts as a priority compared to Domestic Violence and Abuse.
One of the richest cities in the world, in front of its own police’s headquarters, cannot prevent thievery.
Of course, vigilantism and taking matters into our own hands would be punished. And I can see why to some extent.
However, on the other hand, the police is not solving the issue, nor is the mayor, nor is the government, nor are the citizens. And no one is happy about this.
No one understands this state of affairs thoroughly enough to actually change it. Everyone is stuck.
—
It is possible to get unstuck. But the work needed to get there is not easy.
It requires studying a complex bureaucracy, from the funding of the police and diagnosing why courts having a massive backlog of cases, to designing laws mandating stronger sentences where it should.
It then requires making this common knowledge, creating media attention, and putting enough political pressure to finally pass the laws that make sense.
In practice, no one knows how to do this reliably, and people who have tried to change have failed.
Everyone now knows that in practice, thievery is to be expected in London.
C’est la vie. It is what it is. Shikata ga nai.
Thievery is now one of the forces of nature that a puny human has to contend with in London.
In Japan, there are earthquakes. In London, there is thievery.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
—
London’s thievery is just one minor example of how people feel powerless about a non-natural phenomenon. In the Eldritch Pantheon, it would be a minor spirit.
But there are Eldritch Deities that rule much bigger aspects of our lives.
For instance, Ｔｈｅ Ｅｃｏｎｏｍｙ.
What is 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔼𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕠𝕞𝕪? 🅃🄷🄴 🄴🄲🄾🄽🄾🄼🅈 is an Eldritch entity.
Sometimes, Tԋҽ Eƈσɳσɱყ is good. Getting a good job and a home are easy, raising a child is cheap, we can buy a lot of stuff, and everyone is happy.
Sometimes, T̵̤̀͊h̶̲̘̍e̶̻̔ ̴̧̑͘E̶̅̐͜͜c̷̢̥͐͠o̷̢̱̓n̶̬̹͑o̴̠͠m̴̥̝͗̇y̸̢̥͑ is bad. Everything is hard, and we struggle. We struggle to find a job, to borrow money for a home, to educate our children at a cheap and competent school. Everything is expensive, and everyone is unhappy.
If we pray hard enough, the next politician we vote for might ᑕᕼᗩᑎGE TᕼE EᑕOᑎOᗰY.
lol.
ㄒ卄乇 乇匚ㄖ几ㄖ爪ㄚ is not a real thing.
An eCOnoMIsT might say that it is just the combination of 𝔊𝔇𝔓, 𝔘𝔫𝔢𝔪𝔭𝔩𝔬𝔶𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱 ℜ𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔰, ℑ𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔢𝔰𝔱 ℜ𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔰 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔪𝔞𝔫𝔶 𝔒𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔯 ℑ𝔫𝔡𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔰.
But this is obviously fake.
Everyone would talk about it even without these indicators.
Everyone knows it would still direct our lives.
—
Many other Eldritch Deities direct our lives.
They often look the same.
For instance, I asked ChatGPT to define “Շђє єς๏ภ๏๓ץ”, and it gave me a very Eldritch answer:
“▉▉▉ ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉” is a broad term that refers to the system by which a society organizes […]. It’s essentially the network of activities and relationships that determine […].
This is what the Eldritch Deities look like in 2025. We can’t pinpoint them. We use broad terms. They’re systems related to society. They’re network of activities and relationships.
I know them. You know them. Every modern human knows them.
Every modern human knows they are powerless in front of them.
Every modern human knows they must kowtow to them, if they don’t want to get screwed.
𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕟𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥, 𝔸𝕔𝕒𝕕𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕒, 𝔾𝕖𝕠𝕡𝕠𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕔𝕤, 𝔹𝕦𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕦𝕔𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕤, 𝕋𝕙𝕖 ℂ𝕦𝕝𝕥𝕦𝕣𝕖, 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔸𝕝𝕘𝕠𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕙𝕞, 𝕋𝕖𝕔𝕙𝕟𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕘𝕪, 𝕀𝕕𝕖𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕘𝕚𝕖𝕤.
They’re all systems of networks and activities and relationships of a society.
We may have developed them. They may have arisen organically from our interactions.
But they are here, and we can’t control them. We are ants walking alongside them. They make and unmake our lives. They live by their own rules, amoral and inhumane.
Our artificial Eldritch Deities are here to stay, we are powerless in front of them, and we all feel it.
Escapism and Fantasy
Even though everyone feels it, too many reject the surreality of the situation.
They have not mourned. Instead of believing what is true, they cling to the hope that the world makes sense.
For them, the World should be a Big Story.
The Good Guys succeed, and the Bad Guys should be defeated.
Through a Rightful Struggle, growing and triumphing against our Dark Impulses, we should Defeat Evil and Enact Good.
This is so tragically wrong, naive and pathetic.
—
The typical fantasy of the powerless is that some Evil People have figured it out, and hold The Power.
That we just need to beat them, dispossess them, kill them even, and things will be alright.
This is the pathetic fantasy of the child who hopes there are adults in the room who can make things better when things go to shit.
"The System", "Them", (((They))), The Jews, The Capitalists, The Deep State, The Lizardmen, The Free Masons, The Patriarchy, Israel, The Illuminazis, Politicians.
This is all the same desperate cry.
“Please, have it so that someone has power and could make all of the bad things go away.”
Even if the Evil People do not make all the bad things go away, it would still be reassuring.
At least, someone would know what’s going on.
At least, even if we eventually fail, there would be an Enemy who can make it all meaningful, by Struggling to take them down.
At least, there would be a meaningful story happening, with humans at its centre.
—
But the truth is that no one has power.
Not even politicians and billionaires.
Elon Musk bought Twitter, got Trump elected, and set up DOGE. All that to fail, have Trump pass a bill directly opposed to his principles, and get ousted in less than 6 months.
No one knows how to make things go well. No one knows how, as puny little humans, we could wrestle with Eldritch entities.
This is an unsolved problem, and anyone pretending otherwise is lying.
We suck at building powerful companies that do not end up either corrupting governments, or being throttled by governments.
We suck at having conversations critical to our future without resorting to insults. Picture any conversation about immigration.
We suck at doing redistribution without disincentivising work and without incentivising fraud.
We suck at steering our culture toward any direction of our choosing.
We suck at electing politicians who can reliably pass the laws that Actual Experts my Priests say are good for the majority.
—
This is the core of the 21st century.
Realising that we humans are living alongside entities far more powerful than we are, and that we are losing ground to them.
Gradual Disempowerment has already started, it hasn’t waited for AI.
—
There are more forms of escapism beyond fantasising about a Big Bad Guy.
Giving up and Laying Down and Rotting.
Isolating oneself in the mountains, in a cottage or in video games.
Becoming a selfish asshole.
At best, escapism makes people useless and isolated.
At worst, it makes people panic and hurt each other.
Panicking
When one realises that Eldritch entities are living alongside us, one may panic.
That’s the horror part of cosmic horror. It’s shocking and terrifying.
Unfortunately, panic, horror, shock and terror are not very conducive to wisdom, healthy behaviour, trust and coordination.
—
In their panic, some are looking a bit too hard for a Big Bad Guy. They enter an aggressive frenzy, looking to tear down any enemy near them.
The Woke Left has The Whites, The Males, The Straight, The Coloniser and The Far Right.
The Far Right has Academia, The Swamp, Immigrants and the Woke Left.
The Communist Left has Capitalists, Corporations, The State, and the Fascists.
The Conservative Right has Atheists, Sex Work, Pro-Choice, and the LGBT+.
Because of the biggest propaganda campaign of my time, everyone is also making an opinion on whether Israel or Palestine is a Big Bad Guy.
In general, when people panic, they become more extreme, and fall prey to ideological spirals. This is a major way by which I̷͖̍d̸͈̎e̷̢͑o̸̫̊ľ̸̖ơ̴̠g̶̥̀ȋ̴̫e̷͍͌ș̴͋ grow more powerful.
—
In their panic, a select few try to grab as much power as possible.
On one hand, it might let them take a heroic stance against the Eldritch monsters.
On the other hand… Power is awfully convenient, isn’t it?
This usually doesn’t end well for the people.
Dominic Cummings tried to do it in the UK. He did the Vote Leave campaign and helped Boris Johnson elected. He said that although he thought Boris as a PM was “terrible for the country”, but that “The least bad option seemed to be, exploit the current situation to try and push certain things through and get the country into a better position.”
Thus, he became Boris’ senior advisor, got ousted a little more than a year later, and spent months (or years?) talking trash about Boris publicly, calling him The Trolley, and saying the faster he would go, the better things would be.
Overall, one of the main promises of Brexit (that it would help stop immigration) was broken. Immigration rose to record-high post-Brexit.
A similar thing happened with Trump and Elon.
Elon bought Twitter, used it to boost Trump. He became a “special government employee” when Trump became president, and started DOGE. Elon got ousted 4 months in (much faster than Dominic!). Then he stated that Trump was in the Epstein files and responded “Yes” to someone stating that Trump should be impeached.
Overall, one of Elon’s main promises was to reduce spending deficit through DOGE. In the end, he got ousted around the time of the Big Beautiful Bill, which drastically increased the spending deficit.
—
This panic leads people to playing stupid games, and winning stupid prizes (like Elon or Dominic).
There are very few people who actually try to reclaim power for Team Humanity, in a way that is cooperative rather than by trying to screw over others.
Lawrence Newport’s Looking For Growth is a notable exception. In its short history, it has created a Growth Bill, spread a lot of awareness around it, engaged directly with lawmakers, built a dashboard to clarify what is going on in the UK, etc.
Vitalik’s d/acc is another one. Instead of democratic engagement, it is pursuing the way of technological research, focused on helping people coordinate and enact their will.
The Core Paradox
In many ways, the world is both more and less cosmically horrific than it was 250 years ago.
—
We now understand almost all natural phenomena. Through our global measurement network, we can predict natural disasters before any human witnesses them. Disasters that our ancestors would have pinned on literal divinities.
We now understand biology. When people die, we largely understand what happened, we do not think it was dark magic. We have an understanding of human bodies mechanistic enough that we can design cures, and that doctors can recommend meaningful treatments instead of quack medicine.
We now understand, at least to some extent, psychology and psychiatry. We do not believe in demonic possessions anymore. We understand that mood swings exist, and have documented a large variety of hormonal as well as neurological disorders.
So much of the past belief systems was about the Natural Eldritch Monsters. But through the Great Scientific Method, we learnt to not fear them, uncovered their rules, and discovered that behind their crazy appearance, they were largely explainable in terms of physical and chemical principles.
—
And yet.
250 years ago, we built new constitutions in the US and the EU, and created our modern civilisation.
Now, despite all of our complex technology and science (or rather, because of their complexity), we are struggling to not make housing more expensive.
We are now at the point where we are struggling to have children.
People had children when the entire world was constantly at war, when 50% of children died before 10, when everyone was dirt poor, when no one had Amazon or instant comms.
Now, almost everywhere, we are failing to have enough children to merely hit replacement-level fertility rates.
—
There’s something big that has happened. We went to the moon, but now we struggle to have children? What’s up with that.
My high level explanation for this paradox is…
1) We managed to unravel, scientifically study, and to some extent dominate the Natural Eldritch Deities.
We understand astronomy, plate tectonics, the climate, physics, chemistry and biology.
Although there are still things to be learnt, they are not mysterious, magical or Eldritch anymore. They are regular puzzles, like jigsaws, and we are confident we’ll get there eventually.
2) To get there, we conjured the Modern Eldritch Deities, which come with their own problems.
It seems obvious that we cannot meaningfully steer 𝘈𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘢, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘭 𝘌𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘺, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘭 𝘊𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘭𝘨𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘮, etc. That many problems are arising from this failure.
But it seems equally obvious that getting rid of all of them would be disastrous.
So we are stuck in awkward codependent relationships with these entities.
3) Our Modern Eldritch Deities killed the Traditional Eldritch Deities.
We, modern humans, are not the first to conjure Eldritch Deities.
Our ancestors had already conjured many Eldritch Deities to deal with their own problems. Religions, pantheons, superstitions, ritual systems, and more.
We killed all of them.
In theory, we could have made rational decisions about which ones to keep and which ones to kill. Possibly reshaping some of them, to fit our needs best.
This might have meant: observing Chesterton’s Fence, following a conservative precautionary principle when deciding to stop rituals followed by millions, experimenting with different norms in different places, keeping the rituals and vibes but removing the fictitious beliefs, any of this.
But we did not.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
We killed the sacred. Not only did we kill it, we have eradicated it so thoroughly that we don’t really have the words left to talk about the problems it was solving.
Conclusion
Right now, we are stuck.
We have lost the belief in Progress. That each year will be better than the previous one, for humanity.
We have lost the belief in Agency. That we can do something about it.
We see that we are dependent on entities that do not always want what’s best for us. 𝕲𝖔𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖓𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖘, 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕰𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖔𝖒𝖞, 𝕾𝖔𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝕸𝖊𝖉𝖎𝖆.
—
We can change this.
This requires a lot of work. The work needed is comparable in scope to the Scientific Revolution, the era of the Enlightenment, or the rise of Formalism.
We will need to transcend our superstitious understanding of the Modern Eldritch Deities. We will need to build a mechanistic understanding of politics, governance, morals and collective action.
Let’s get there step by step. And the first step to defeating the enemy is to name it.
If we don’t do this, we’re condemned to getting screw over by it, never understanding what is happening to us.
—
I have seen too many people feel the bad vibe, never putting words on it, and just getting passively demotivated. Or falling into ideological spirals.
I expect this article will be paradoxically motivating to a few. When I talk to people, it usually frees them a little to name the problem, understand that it is real, that it is not about them, and that this problem is one we can study and eventually solve.
On this, cheers!