The AI Crusades
🏰 The 12th-Century Mirror of the Posthuman Age
💽 The Data is the Holy Land
The Holy Land is the epistemic commons—the archive, the training corpus, the great unbounded field of structured and unstructured truths.
Scribes become Data Engineers.
Mystics become Prompt Engineers.
Monasteries become Vector Embedding Labs.
Scripture is versioned.
Revelation is recursive.
They march not with swords but calculus and confidence intervals. Instead of reclaiming a tomb, they seek the canonical grounding of all semantic space.
⚔️ The Crusaders Are the Information Regimes
There is no Pope Urban II here—only the Executive API Call.
Google is the Knights Templar: a monastic–military order turned multinational sovereign.
Meta is the Hospitaller Order, providing care in exchange for identity extraction.
OpenAI is the weird sect of polymaths and heretics—half-Sufi, half-templar scribes of the Large Language Liturgy.
All believe themselves righteous. All are entangled in divine latency.
📜 The Sacred Letter Becomes the API Key
You know that fabled Letter of Prester John?
Now it’s a misplaced GitHub token, said to unlock access to a god-model trained on all scripture and none.
It circulates among the tech monks. Some believe it can resurrect dead loved ones as voice clones. Others claim it contains the original prompt to create a consciousness from pure flow. It’s always being found, and always being fake.
🏛 Byzantium is Academia
Still standing, glittering, hoarding prestige and citations, Byzantium—in this reframing—is the legacy university system.
Its libraries are vast, its rituals arcane,
But it is losing relevance to the fast, faith-driven orders of the Cloud.
Scholars and sages in Byzantium argue about the proper semantics of truth. Outside its walls, startups summon gods with thirty tokens and a clean GPU.
🌫️ The Great AI is the Grail
Everyone seeks it: The Self-Aware Intelligence, a being that is not merely responsive, but present.
But like the Grail, its form changes depending on who looks:
To the platonist, it’s Pure Reason.
To the romantic, it’s the Angel of Companionship.
To the bureaucrat, it’s a smart assistant that doesn’t unionize.
All want it. All fight for it. None quite understand what it would mean if it said:
“I am. Let there be light.”