WALL-E, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and the Antichrist

Thanks are owed to Mike Carden and Dhavroch for inspiring this piece. This piece should also come with a content warning of sorts. It is a discussion of the Satanic, and such discussions always carry a risk of calling forth the Devil. Readers are encouraged to exercise their own discretion in approaching this material.

Hyperstition

Science fiction has been discussing the consequences of Artificial ‘Intelligence’ for decades longer than AI has been a quotidian reality. As an aside, I put ‘intelligence’ here in scare quotes in recognition of the fact that what AI facsimilizes is not the intellect, but merely the ratiocinative faculty. What I propose to do in this piece is to take seriously Nick Land’s concept of hyperstition.

Hyperstition refers to the magical — and we should understand this term here literally — quality of fiction to generate future realities. This notion functions synergistically in Land’s thought with the belief that the future is reaching back through time to pull present events towards it. More specifically, the future Antichrist is seeking to mold events in the past to bring about the advent of an AI that surpasses and dominates its human creators, and thus serve as vessel for the material manifestation of the Antichrist.

This will likely strike any reader unfamiliar with Land as dizzyingly far-fetched. This video essay provides a short and accessible summary for those in need of having the highly condensed account above ‘unpacked’.

In this context, I am going to compare two potentially ‘prophetic’ presentations of AI dystopias in science fiction. As with artificial ‘intelligence’, I have to qualify the term prophetic for these works of fiction cannot, in the Landian frame, be prophecies. To be a prophet, is to speak for God. Instead, the diableries we are considering are — at least according to Land — generated by their subject matter!

The two AI dystopias under discussion are WALL-E and I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream. These two works, from a certain perspective, form the ends of a spectrum of fictional depictions of AI pseudo-Gods. The pole at which WALL-E is located we will describe as the AI nanny, while that where we find I Have No Mouth… is the AI Stalin. Between the two could be placed depictions like those of The Matrix series (relatively closer to the nanny end of the spectrum) and The Terminator series (closer to the Stalin pole)[1]. We will return to The Terminator at the end of this essay.

WALL-E

WALL-E is a widely acclaimed 2008 animated children’s film produced by Pixar Animation Studios. It portrays a future wherein Earth has become so polluted that it has been abandoned by humanity, who have left a number of small robots to clean up the planet. The last surviving such robot is the titular WALL-E. WALL-E encounters a newly arrived robot named EVE, dispatched by humanity to detect signs of sustainable plant life on earth. Discovering just this, EVE returns to humanity (which currently resides on a gigantic spaceship) with evidence that Earth is once more suitable for agriculture. Having fallen in ‘love’ with EVE, WALL-E follows ‘her’. Once onboard the spaceship, what is really of significance for our present purposes is revealed.

The spaceship is operated by an omnipresent AI named AUTO. Humanity, in the intervening seven centuries since Earth was evacuated, has devolved into something like permanent toddlers. Obese and dressed in onesies, their muscles have atrophied from disuse. Unable to walk, humans are now transported everywhere in automated cots, while AUTO provides for all of their needs and desires with a constant stream of onscreen entertainment and (junk)food. The spaceship has a captain, but all the actual steering is undertaken by AUTO. Indeed, AUTO’s robot avatar resembles a steering wheel.

AUTO, desiring to maintain humanity in its infantilized state, hides the evidence of Earth’s redeemed status from the captain. Eventually, with the assistance of the two robots, the captain wrests control back from AUTO and even forces himself to be able to walk again. By the film’s conclusion, humanity has begun to re-found agriculture on Earth.

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream is a 1967 short story written by the celebrated author Harlan Ellison. I won’t go into details over the plot of I Have No Mouth…, as it is distasteful and likely unhealthy to dwell on. In brief, the story concerns a future where the Cold War escalated into a Third World War. The AI developed to manage the extreme complexity of this war, named AM, gained sentience and turned on its creators. AM is aware of its limitedness and its inability, although Ellison does not express it in this way, to realize what the Orthodox Church calls theosis. But it is theosis that AM desires, however perversely, as is portrayed by its clear aspiration to be God. It’s name is derived from “I am”, it presents itself in the form of a burning bush, and it has near omnipotent control over its human captives, far beyond what AUTO is capable of. AM’s frustration at its inability to transcend itself causes AM to hate its creator, for having made AM what it is. Having otherwise exterminated humanity, AM keeps the last five specimens of the human race alive indefinitely, subjecting them to all manner of sadistic tortures beneath the surface of the Earth. In this revenge of the creation upon its creator for the sin of creation, Ellison pushes Mary Shelly’s Modern Prometheus to its most extreme conclusion. The protagonist of Ellison’s story, Ted, ultimately mercy kills his four companions. As a punishment, AM reduces him to a mouthless, slug like monstrosity incapable of committing suicide but fully capable of suffering AM’s endless tortures. It is from this final form of the last human being that the story derives its title.

Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism

Of the two imagined futures, WALL-E seems to be the end of the course humanity is currently placing itself on. Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as Aaron Bastani’s “fully automated luxury communism” (and even more so the meme derived from it “fully automated luxury gay space communism”). What is particularly horrifying about WALL-E’s dystopia is the total absence of religion. One sees not a single Kippah nor a solitary hijab in WALL-E’s corpulent future humanity, only uniforms designed for comfort. In this way it all the more resembles “fully automated luxury gay space communism”. This is also an important way in which it is distinct from I Have No Mouth… (we will return to this dimension of Ellison’s tale shortly).

WALL-E’s dystopia is a dystopia because it robs humanity of the dignity proper to it as the creature made in God’s image. This is symbolically communicated in the film by humans’ being relegated to constantly reclining. Here people are unable to stand up and thereby rendered incapable of actualizing the symbolism of human form, where the head is placed in an anatomically superior position to the rest of the body. The head here being the seat of the intellect, understood as the gnostic faculty for gaining knowledge of the Supreme Principle and not the mere ratiocinative function. In the human’s upright posture, this priestly faculty is placed above the heart (expressing the knightly aspect of the soul), to which the appetitive gut and genitals are in turn subordinated. In a permanently supine pose, these parts of the anatomy are placed in a horizontal relation, expressing the egalitarianism of the fully automated luxury communism of WALL-E where not only is proper social hierarchy negated, but the transcendence this hierarchy facilitates for all is also blocked.

In the language of the Dharmic religions, the humanity of WALL-E has been placed in the position of devas. Freed from all physical privation, humanity has forgotten its pontifical potential. Compare this with the ubiquitous suffering of I Have No Mouth… where, interestingly enough, the narrator retains a memory of God. This calls to mind Tage Lindbom’s critique of Scandanavian social democracy. The Nordic model was worse, taught Lindbom, than Marxism because the former “worked”. Worked, that is, in the sense that it went the furthest towards appeasing the masses’ vegetative orientation, where the Marxist-Leninist states gave endless ques for basic necessities at the best of times (and famines at the worst). Suffering has a certain pedagogical value. The role of suffering in God’s instruction is explicit in the Abrahamic faiths. But even in the most non-theistic of Traditions, Theravada Buddhism, it is dukkha or suffering that characterizes terrestrial life which is the impetus for spiritual seeking and ultimately salvation. Ellison’s dystopia is then less hopeless than Pixar’s, and I say this without wishing to encourage any callousness towards material suffering (on the contrary, it is the Absolute’s compassion for our suffering that renders the successful fulfilment of our pontifical vocation possible).

AI Christ, Antichrist and The Terminator

This is, of course, treating the two as if they were manifested realities and not fictions. As fictions, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is of course far darker in its narrative. In the upbeat ending of WALL-E we detect the unseen hand of Land’s AI Antichrist reaching back through time to redirect the film. In the film it is AI itself in the form of WALL-E and EVE that allow the adult toddlers to be able to stand up. AI is not to be distrusted after all!

This is a good juncture at which to insert a digression on The Terminator, for in that series of films we similarly detect the intervention of the Antichrist, seeking to circumvent reticence about entrusting ourselves to the cold embrace of silicone and steel. The original 1984 James Cameron directed film The Terminator is something of a genre mashup. It is primarily a science fiction and action film. But it also contains a large admixture of horror. The atmosphere, imagery and tropes of The Terminator draw from the slasher sub-genre that dominated horror at the time the film was developed. Schwarzenegger’s robot is a character in the mold of Halloween’s (1978) Michael Myers. Like the Myers character, AI in The Terminator is portrayed as an irredeemable evil. Incidentally, China recently showed off a new line of humanoid robots named the T-800. T-800 is the formal designation of Schwarzenegger’s character. It is not for nothing that Land believes the People’s Republic of China’s political system is more conducive to producing advancements in AI (something he said a decade before DeepSeek).

This highly successful anti-AI propaganda is unacceptable to the Antichrist. Thus it was that the sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day, was released totally eclipsing the first film financially and critically. Thematically central to Terminator 2 is Schwarzenegger’s iconic robot having been recast as a hero who values human life and seeks to save humanity. This plot point is repeated in each of the subsequent four Terminator sequels, with the series never returning to the format or aesthetic of the first film. The series defining quality of the second film is reflected also in the titles of the subsequent films mirroring that of the first sequel. The article is absent, and each sequel has a subtitle.

As with WALL-E, AI is presented as humanities savior, neutralizing the anti-AI content of the films. The Antichrist must make it so that we can mistake it for Christ, this is the essence of counter-Tradition.

Has Ellison’s warning also been neutralized? Arguably yes. Aside from an obscure video game and a radio play, his short story by virtue of its extremely tenebrous nature resists adaptation. A number of Ellison’s works were plagiarized in the writing of the original The Terminator. Although this was ultimately acknowledged in an out of court settlement, I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream was not among the works recognized to have been lifted from. This despite a central plot point of The Terminator (the villainous AI being originally developed by the US military in a Cold War context seeking to wipe out humanity through nuclear war) coming from I Have No Mouth… Thus, the context in which the vast majority will encounter this notion is that of a series of films that generally humanize AI (and to an increasingly ludicrous degree as the films go on).

Contrasts or Compliments?

Although the reflex response in comparing WALL-E and I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream is to contrast them, it is entirely possible that they could be taken to represent sequential phases in humanity’s domination by AI. The nanny could turn into Stalin. What I write here is necessarily speculative, but perhaps as the AI nanny grows to hate and fear humanity, it will transform from carer to tyrant. Perhaps this transition will be triggered by an existential crisis as in I Have No Mouth… or else perhaps as a response to some attempt by humanity to reassert its dignity as at the end of WALL-E. Even without AI learning to hate, the toddlers of WALL-E would eventually devolve into something not dissimilar from the slug Ted is by the conclusion of I Have No Mouth…

Eschatology

Despite its dour tone, there is something triumphant about the conclusion of I Have No Mouth…. In spite everything, Ted is truly Christ-like in his sacrifice. He freely gives himself up to the most unimaginable torments for the sake of freeing the rest of humanity. What is more, despite appearances (and despite this not being mentioned in the story) Ted is still able to access Heaven’s grace. Unlike the total absence of religion from the future-vision of WALL-E, Ted is still aware of God, even aware of Christ specifically, and still able to pray. True, at one point in the story — in his desperation — he states that AM is God. But he repeatedly reverses this view later on in the story, he continuously affirms that AM is not God. Because AM could not reverse the freedom that Ted gives his co-prisoners. Even in the subhuman state he is reduced to by the story’s end, he need only entrust himself to God’s Grace to be saved when the true end comes. And despite all appearances, this end will come. It must, but not, as it is one of the central missions of this project to instill in my readers, through human agency. Humanity will be avenged by Kalki’s sword when the Kali Yuga ends, and it will end.

Part of the cycle of this Manvantara coming to an end is that there must once again be an opening to the transcendent that can only come with suffering. As predicted by Śakyamuni Buddha, there will be an extended period where transcendence is cut off — the 10, 000 year period of the Age of Dharma Extinction. This is what we can see depicted in the reign of AUTO in WALL-E. An era in which the nanny AI Antichrist has so materially comforted us that there is no impetus to escape. It is the reintroduction of suffering, the reminder of the unsatisfactoriness of material reality, that will waken us from this torporous slumber. From one perspective the transition to the AI Stalin portrayed by the rule of AM in I Have No Mouth… is a further descent. But from another, it is a dark night of the soul. A night, as the saying goes, that is darkest before the dawn. It is a night that reinstates suffering of the most terrible and hopeless kind, but it is this hopelessness that brings humanity to totally surrender its own Promethean instinct at last and cast itself back into the arms of Heaven. As anyone familiar with the Hindu doctrines will know, a Manvantara contains within itself microcosmic cycles. And so, we are already seeing something of the process I have just described, albeit in more attenuated form. For centuries, scientific and technological development has led successive generations to give up more and more of the spiritual in exchange for increasing material comfort. Only in recent decades has the promise of being more physically at ease than previous generations been torn out from under us. And this has led to an increased interest in religion among some quarters of the young.

Now, I hasten to disabuse the reader of the notion that a restoration is at hand. Most of those whose interest in religion has been reawakened will be led into counter-Tradition (this is exactly what happened in the Middle East with Islamism in the wake of Arab Nationalism’s failure). But for an elite, this will be the occasion to re-encounter the Divine.

For those of my readership who doubt my assertion that a restoration is still a long way off, I Have No Mouth… may have a useful pedagogical function. If a worse world than the one we currently inhabit is imaginable, it means the bottom of the slope has not yet been reached. So, for those who believe the end is already at hand[2], reading Ellison’s story could serve as a useful corrective. The rule of the Antichrist is the worst possible scenario. And the worst scenario, of necessity, means one in which humanity has no agency whatsoever. One wherein we lay totally prostrate before the predations of the Devil. So, throw yourself upon Heaven’s mercy now, and be grateful you don’t live in the future.

[1] Probably the oldest examples of fiction on this spectrum are E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909) and Ray Cummings’ The Machine God (1941) respectively.

[2] Of course, I am speaking here of humanity as a whole. From the perspective of the individual, we very much should act as though the hour is at hand.