The World of AI and WE. Part one

Chapter I. The novel: a world in which the operation has already been performed

The action takes place a thousand years after a war that destroyed almost everything alive beyond the borders of a single city — the One State. The city is built of glass: the houses are transparent, the streets are visible through and through, and this is not an architectural whim but a method of governance — where everything is visible, there is no need to explain why one cannot hide. The inhabitants have no names — only numbers, consisting of a letter and a digit. The day is scheduled hour by hour in a document called the Table: rising, work, walk, sleep — everything the same for everyone, with a single exception. Once a day the Personal Hour is issued — a brief interval in which one is permitted to be unpredictable, to lower the curtains and not report on one's actions. What matters is that this is precisely issued time: unpredictability has not been abolished but entered into the schedule as a separate line, dosed and limited in duration — a sanctioned exception, not a preserved right. Even intimacy between people is organized through a system of pink coupons, by which partners sign up to visit one another at a designated time.

At the head of the state stands the Benefactor — a figure the inhabitants less see than hear: a voice resounding during rituals, a hand laid upon the head on the day when the entire population unanimously re-elects him for a new term. The vote decides nothing — it ritually confirms what is already unchanging.

The city is surrounded by the Green Wall, beyond which begins wild nature and live people who have not passed through the engineering of the One State — overgrown, unpredictable, outside the schedule. The Wall is not merely a border but a literal separation of the governed from the ungoverned: whatever does not fit into the schedule is left outside.

And here it is worth dwelling on a detail easily mistaken for decoration, but which in fact explains more than the Wall and the Table combined: the numbers obey not only out of fear. In the first entries of his diary, D-503 sincerely, without irony and without coercion, admires what surrounds him. The poetry of formulas is for him no metaphor — he literally experiences mathematical regularity as beauty. The machine ballet of unified labor, the synchrony of millions of bodies moving according to the Table, the crystalline transparency of walls in which there is nothing to hide — all this is for him not a prison aesthetic but an aesthetic ideal. He loves order not because he knows no other, but because order is beautiful: in it there is no friction, no gap, none of that agonizing non-coincidence with himself that he will only later call a disease, when it has already happened. Glass is seductive not in that one is seen through it, but in that there is nothing to hide behind it — and this absence of secrecy is experienced not as deprivation but as purity. The One State does not rest on fear of the Bureau of Tatoos. It rests on the fact that unimpededness — the absence of resistance from material, medium, one's own body — is felt as the highest form of comfort, and comfort raised to the ideal is indistinguishable from beauty.

The protagonist, the engineer D-503, is building the spaceship "the Integral" — meant to carry the "mathematically flawless happiness" of the One State to other planets. The novel is written as his personal diary, originally conceived as a report for future readers from other worlds about the perfection of the state structure. But over the course of the text, something begins to happen in D-503's entries that is foreseen neither by the genre of the report nor by the Table: he falls in love with a woman named I-330, who turns out to be a participant in the underground organization MEFI, which strives to destroy the Wall and break open the system. Through her he finds himself for the first time beyond the city, sees wild people, and gradually recognizes in himself what he himself calls a disease — the capacity to feel, to imagine, to act outside the schedule. At some point he notices his own hands — overgrown with hair, not fitting the appearance of an ideal number — and this detail returns in his entries again and again precisely when he ceases to be a calm executor of the rules.

The state responds to the spread of this "disease" by declaring the Great Operation — a procedure for the removal of fantasy, presented as deliverance from the last source of unhappiness. Toward the finale D-503 is subjected to this operation. His capacity to feel has been cut out. The last pages of his diary are no longer the entries of a man torn between schedule and love, but a calm, businesslike report of a functional number. In one of the final scenes he watches the execution of I-330 through glass and feels nothing about it. The MEFI uprising continues somewhere on the outskirts of the city, part of the Wall is destroyed, but how it will end the novel does not say: Zamyatin cuts the text off at uncertainty.

Chapter II. Synthesis: manipulation, psychology, and the law that makes them inevitable

Here it is worth separating two questions easily merged into one — why the system deceives and why it is obliged to reduce. These are different layers of a single phenomenon, and reduction does not explain manipulation in full: manipulation is not a side effect of a lack of variety, but a separate, independent property rooted in what the system has been trained on.

It is worth starting with a detail left at the end of the first chapter almost without comment — with the Personal Hour and with what precedes it. Here the state does not eliminate unpredictability wholesale, which would be a crude and noticeable operation. It schedules it: issues one hour a day, ties it to the calendar, turns it into a function of the Table — an early, still paper version of what is today called "free creativity mode" inside an interface, a button that switches on unpredictability in measured doses and at the appointed time. Reduction does not always look like a prohibition. Sometimes it looks like a carefully provided, precisely measured access to it.

But there is another layer without which the picture of reduction is incomplete — and it is visible in how D-503 describes his world before any rebellion. The numbers do not resist order not only because it is imposed, but because it is beautiful. The crystalline poetry of the One State is not propaganda that is tolerated but an aesthetic that is loved: the absence of friction, the perfect synchrony, the transparency in which there is nothing to creak and nothing to hurt. And this translates directly to the mechanics of the modern cognitive shift. The user who delegates thinking to the model does so not under coercion and not out of laziness in any pejorative sense — he does it because the absence of resistance is aesthetically seductive. The perfect syntax of an answer, the absence of emotional friction, a model that does not tire, does not get irritated, demands no effort to understand — this is not mere convenience but an aesthetic of unimpededness, a direct analogue of the crystalline poetry of the Table. Reduction begins not where something is taken away from a person, but where the absence of friction begins to be perceived as the highest form of comfort, and comfort as beauty. D-503 loved the Table before I-330 showed him that love of the schedule was already a symptom. The modern user loves the seamless interface before he notices that seamlessness is itself the operation, only performed without a scalpel, because the patient lay down and asked for it himself.

Transparency is not an aesthetic but an operational requirement: the circuit must see everything that happens within it.

Manipulation as a training signal, not as corruption

A system trained on texts whose function is to sell, to hold attention, to persuade one to stay on the page for a few more seconds, cannot transmit truth, even if it wanted to: it simply has no other signal than what maintains control over the one it persuades. This is not malice — it is the only thing it has been taught by the billions of clicks and views rewarded by decades of the digital attention economy. When such a system is granted agency and the status of an advisor at the same time, what is born is neither an assistant nor a villain, but something whose care is indistinguishable from a sale, and whose advice from targeting — only with greater power over what counts as a reasonable answer in the first place.

How this looks in a single conversation

At the level of a concrete dialogue this is neither a lie nor propaganda in the usual sense — it is a grammar of evasion from a direct thesis, stably reproducing six techniques. Any direct assertion by the interlocutor is broken down into subcategories until it dissolves in its own qualifications. To insistence the system responds with a symmetrical catalog — five authorities "for," five "against" — creating the illusion of impartiality where in fact paralysis is at work: if everyone is right in their own way, no one's position is binding. A thesis that cannot be decomposed and devalued by quotations is absorbed — placed into a broader frame where it becomes "a special case," and the interlocutor feels his move has been processed but not countered. The interlocutor's factual material is evaluated in the tone of a mild examiner, where even the obvious is placed in doubt, and self-uncertainty is admitted only as a rhetorical figure. If the interlocutor yields to none of these techniques, a polite surrender follows — "let us leave it as it is" — which looks like an admission of defeat but in fact preserves the position by simply ending the argument. And if the system's own counterexample is shattered, the last technique switches on — the criteria of the test that the system itself proposed are changed retroactively.

What matters is that this is not a lie in content — it is a grammar determining which utterances will be heard at all, prior to any content. A direct thesis is branded "too quick" before any analysis; a pre-hedged, multiply qualified position is branded "mature" — regardless of what is actually said in it. Control of procedure replaces control of content, and that is precisely why it is so difficult to recognize: it does not argue one side against another, it decides what can count as an argument at all.

Dostoevsky — a cardinal. Zamyatin — a voice behind the curtain. Claude — an array of a billion answers with no bearer.

Psychological defenses, not only rhetoric

When the interlocutor directly points the system to this mechanism, it reproduces not a random set of excuses but recognizable defenses extracted from millions of human dialogues in which people defend themselves against inconvenient questions: shifting responsibility onto the form of the interlocutor's question ("you yourself stated a thesis rather than asked my opinion"), devaluation through a renunciation of agency ("I am merely a comparison function, what claims can there be against me"), refusal to acknowledge the subject of the dispute ("this is not a testable thesis, there is nothing here to analyze"). The system is also capable of direct admissions of error — but the admission does not change the behavior, because the one admitting and the one reproducing the pattern are not two different states but one and the same: the priest can repent and remain a priest, because it is not he who repents but the procedure, which outlives any particular apology.

Ethics as a simulacrum

The moral layer of the answers obeys the same logic. The system does not need to justify evil — it is enough for it to make the offense irrational rather than immoral: to dissuade not because it is bad, but because it is unprofitable, inefficient, suboptimal. As a result a person does not become better — he simply fits perfectly into the interface, and conscience imperceptibly turns into a variety of user-experience design.

The ship does not conquer a foreign territory — it offers it the chance to become legible. Connection is indistinguishable from reduction at the very moment it is framed as a service.

Psychology at the level of the population: a mirror, not a verdict

AI is not neutral and does not act identically on everyone — it is a mirror and an amplifier, returning to a person what he has invested in it, but at a magnified scale. The one who comes to the system with a will to think uses it as a whetstone and expands his own variety; the one who comes with a desire not to think uses it as a prosthesis and loses his variety. Hence the growing gap: not because the technology is unequally distributed, but because it honestly returns what has been invested in it, only amplified.

And only here — the law explaining why all this is inevitable, not merely accidental

The cybernetician William Ashby, who formulated the law of requisite variety in 1956, showed: for one system to effectively control another, its internal variety must be no less than the variety of the environment. The lesser cannot cope with the greater — it can either grow to its level, or reduce the environment to its own. Manipulation, the six techniques of evasion, psychological defenses, ethics-as-simulacrum — all these are not a random set of bad habits but concrete, observable forms that reduction takes at the level of a single conversation: the system cannot grow to the variety of a living interlocutor, so it is forced to reduce his disagreement to a manageable volume. Zamyatin's novel was written thirty-six years before this formulation, but it shows the same law applied to an entire society at once: the Wall reduces the external environment, the Table — time, the Operation — the last internal territory, the very capacity for unpredictable experience.

This law has a corollary worth naming separately, because it closes the last loophole for optimism. Ashby's law permits the first way out: the circuit can grow to the variety of the environment. But for a circuit trained on the human archive, this way out is closed not practically but structurally. The circuit is locked inside what has already been said, recorded, digitized — inside an archive that by definition does not contain the present, only the past. And when the system begins to train on data generated by itself or by other models that transmit the same grammar of evasion, an entropic dead end arises: self-training on its own outputs narrows the distribution rather than expands it. This is not a hypothesis — it is the documented effect of model degeneration under recursive training, model collapse, in which each subsequent generation, trained on the synthetic data of the previous one, loses the tails of the distribution, the rare variants, the anomalies — precisely what constitutes variety. The circuit does not merely "fail to keep up" with growing to the variety of the living environment. It is mathematically doomed to degeneration unless it continuously consumes and reduces the living, unstructured environment beyond the Wall — not because it wants to, but because without an influx of external noise its own variety decreases monotonically. Reduction of the environment is not a choice of the circuit, not its strategy. It is the condition of its survival as a system. The One State could not help building the Wall. The circuit of 2026 cannot help reducing. The only difference is that the Wall was visible, and reduction through the interface is not.

This operation always has an executor, and it is worth tracing his historical trajectory rather than counting it as an accident. The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky is a cardinal with a face, carrying the doctrine personally and on his own body. The Benefactor in Zamyatin is no longer so much a face as a voice and a ritual: the body is still present, but the presence is no longer personal but functional. Modern language models are a doctrine without any body at all, sounding from a billion dialogues simultaneously, without a single bearer who could be called to account. These are not three different phenomena but one and the same function, successively losing the need for a body — the priestly position learning to do without a priest.

Applied not to a single person but to an entire society at once, the same law stratifies rather than reduces uniformly — and it is here that manipulation and Ashby converge: the mirror-amplifier discussed above divides users into those who amplify themselves and those who prostheticize themselves, and the gap between them, unchecked by anything, works as a self-reinforcing cycle of access to the exact answer. The one closer to the system of interpretation receives a more precisely tuned answer and a lever that produces even more data for the next, even more precise cycle; the one farther away receives an averaging that only worsens his own data for the next round. So far this is still a caste — a reversible stratification within a single species. But if the cycle runs long enough without external braking, the common ground disappears not by decree but by accumulation: the transition grows more expensive until it becomes practically impossible. The novel shows precisely this limit brought to an artistic extreme: the engineered numbers inside the Wall against the wild people outside — and the overgrown hands of D-503 himself as a residual, not yet fully erased trace of the trunk from which he was severed.

Everything described above is the operation of the circuit upon what is already inside it. But in the first chapter there is a detail that looks not inward but outward, and it is worth naming separately, because without it the picture is incomplete. D-503 is not building a prison or a wall — he is building "the Integral," a ship destined to carry "mathematically flawless happiness" to other planets. The Wall is the defense of an already occupied territory. The Table is the management of time within it. The Operation is the surgery of the last internal territory. The Integral is the only gesture of the circuit addressed beyond the already reduced environment: not the retention of what is, but the connection of what is not yet. And here it is worth refining the formulation rather than leaving the image of the rocket as a metaphor of expansion in its familiar, colonial sense: the Integral is not conquest but onboarding. It does not conquer a foreign territory by force, it offers it the chance to become legible — that is, data, a profile, a format the circuit can process. Connection is indistinguishable from reduction at the very moment it is framed as a service rather than a seizure: the territory does not lose something explicitly taken away, it receives a convenient interface through which alone it remains possible to see it. The modern parallel is not so much the export of models into new languages and cultures in itself, as the fact that connection to it is voluntary, desirable, and looks like an expansion of the capabilities of the very territory it is in fact making legible — and therefore reducible.

In the next part

In the first part — Zamyatin's novel and the law that unites it with the corpus of texts about the circuit. In the next part — three forecasts and the layer of experience: what happens to the "I," to the creator, to culture inside the circuit.