What the Gnostics Said About the Prison You're In

The Gnostics called [music] it a bond of forgetfulness. They wrote that down in the 2nd century. And it describes the algorithm on your phone better than most things written this decade. That line, bond of forgetfulness, comes from a text called the Apocryphon of John. One of 52 Gnostic writings buried in a clay jar in Upper Egypt around 4th century and dug up by a farmer in 1945. The Nag Hammadi Library. Now, I came to these texts late. And when I got to the part where they describe how consciousness gets captured, I stopped reading and went for a walk. Because the thing they were describing in 2nd century Greece was the same thing I'd spent years reading about in current policy papers. They call the rulers of this system Archons, an authority or pattern of forces that shapes what a person pays attention to. And through that attention, it shapes what they think. And through that thought, it shapes what they do. The Apocryphon of John describes the Archons placing a tree in the middle of paradise and telling the first human, "Eat." The luxury, the text says, is bitter. The fruit is poison. The promise is death. Now, read that with a 21st century eye. That something is placed in front of you. It's made to look like life. And the offering is designed to be taken. The language is mythological because that was the language available to them. But underneath the mythology is a description of mechanism. The mechanism is what I want to talk to you about because it's the same one we can now document empirically. In June 2010, the UK government set up a seven-person team in the Cabinet Office. And it was called the Behavioral Insights Team. Unofficially, it was called [clears throat] the Nudge Unit. Their job was to apply behavioral science to public policy, which means in plain English to design the environment so that citizens would choose what the government wanted them to choose without ever needing to be told. The founders were advised by Richard Thaler, who wrote Nudge with Cass Sunstein in 2008 and later won the Nobel in economics. The team went from seven people to over 200. And the model has been exported to more than 600 organizations worldwide. The BIT has a website. It publishes its research. The claim they make, and the claim the literature supports, is that humans are predictable enough in their automatic responses that you can shape behavior at scale by shaping the environment people move through. Put the fruit at eye level. Change the phrasing on the tax letter. Alter the default on the pension form. The person doesn't notice they've been shaped, but the required behavior arrives anyway. That's the Gnostic Archon operationalized. Now, layer the private sector on top of that. In 2021, a Meta product manager named Frances Haugen walked out of the company with tens of thousands of internal documents and handed them to the Wall Street Journal and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The documents showed, in Meta's own words, that the algorithm choosing your feed on Facebook and Instagram preferentially amplifies content producing strong emotional reactions. Anger, outrage, fear. The internal research also found that among teenage girls who said they felt bad about their bodies that 32% said Instagram made them feel worse. The company's own data scientists flagged that the 2018 algorithm change that was designed to promote meaningful interactions was in fact sowing division because division keeps people scrolling. Now, Meta's research was internal. The decision to leave the system in place was also internal. Both were documented and neither was debated with the users whose consciousness was being shaped. Now, add Cambridge Analytica to the start. 87 million Facebook profiles harvested. Psychographic profiles put in. Targeted political messaging deployed in the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum. The company called it behavioral microtargeting. Now, the Gnostics would have called it Archon work. The mechanism is identical. Shape the environment the person moves through and let that automatic responses do the rest [clears throat] and collect the behavior as product. Here's what I had to sit with when I understood this. The Gnostics were describing this world in the only vocabulary they had. The prison is the gap between what you think you're choosing and what is actually being chosen for you. The part of you that can't tell the difference is the part that has been captured. The same mechanism that builds the outer systems builds the inner ones. What happens to you inside the attention economy is the same shape as what happens to you inside yourself. Shaped responses. Preformed opinions. Desires you didn't choose but will defend as though you did. Two scales of the same capture. So, what now? The Gnostic answer is strange because what it asks for is seeing. The mechanism runs on the fact that it's invisible. When it becomes visible to the captured consciousness, it loses its grip. The texts call this gnosis, which translates as direct recognition. The immediate, unmediated noticing of what is actually happening. And the Gnostic claim, in text after text, is that the recognition itself breaks the bond. Because the mechanism only works when it's not seen. That is a harder claim than it sounds. The refusal begins before the action does. It begins at the moment of noticing. The pull of the notification. The jolt of the provocation designed to make you react. The opinion you're about to defend that you never actually arrived at yourself. You just absorbed. Catch it. Watch it happen. Sit with it before you do anything with it. See who else is in the room. The practice is the seeing. That is the whole of it. Every time you catch the pull of notification before you act on it, that is gnosis. Every time you recognize the opinion forming in your head as one given to you rather than one you arrived at, that is gnosis. Every time you feel the jolt a headline was engineered to produce and you let it pass through without producing the click, that is gnosis. In the Gnostic account, the Archons work on sleeping consciousness. That's the entire scope of their power. A consciousness that has begun to see is outside of their reach. Sleep is the product. Attention is the currency. Recognition is the refusal. This is why in the Apocryphon of John, the savior is described as the one who wakes the sleeper. The rulers are defeated the moment the sleeper opens their eyes. Every moment of seeing is still a moment the architecture has no purchase on and those moments accumulate into something that the architecture was never built to handle. A consciousness that watches itself being shaped and decides in the watching whether to be shaped or not. 2,000 years ago, someone sat down and wrote, "They placed a tree in the middle of paradise. They said, 'Eat it.' The promise is death." We're inside the same description. The same tree, but a different paradise. The question the whole Gnostic library keeps asking in one form or another is whether the person eating the fruit knows what they're eating. You don't have to know tonight. You just have to start noticing when you don't.