A Frightful Vision

The other day I had this frightful vision.

City of Data

The vision opened upon a city unlike any before it.

At its center did not stand a cathedral, a palace, or a marketplace—but immense data centers, towering and windowless, humming day and night. These were the most important buildings in the city and highly fortified. Everything was controlled by them. They were like the life source for human life.

They were the city’s source of truth, memory, prediction, and power.

What once came from wisdom, tradition, and lived experience was now drawn from massive data streams. Meaning itself had been reduced to what could be measured, processed, and optimized.

The populous  no longer asked, What is good?
They asked only, What works?

The Hidden Rulers

As the vision deepened, it became clear that the data centers were not autonomous. They were controlled by a very small number of unimaginably wealthy individuals—figures who rarely appeared, whose names were known but whose faces were distant.

They ruled without crowns.

They governed without laws.

They shaped reality through architecture, systems, and algorithms.

Like the pagan gods of old, they were unseen yet omnipresent, untouchable yet decisive. Their will flowed invisibly through terms of service, content moderation, educational standards, economic incentives, and behavioral predictions.

They did not demand worship—but they demanded dependence.

No one was allowed to disconnect from the Date Centers

Lives were ordered around what the gained for the Data Center: communication, education, energy, commerce, imagination

Human destiny no longer understood. No one even asked a questions. They starve to taste the games.

Churches Without Altars

The churches were still standing.

But they no longer stood at the center.

They had been converted into entertainment venues, carefully regulated and monitored by the systems Data Center. Worship was permitted so long as it remained loyal to the Data Center.

Icons were replaced with screens. Silence was replaced with sound. Repentance was replaced with reassurance.

Pastors no longer stood as shepherds before God. They functioned as toll takers, managing access, collecting attention, and keeping the experience smooth. Grace was no longer given—it was curated.

The Church no longer transformed the world. It mirrored it.

Schools Without Formation

Education, too, flowed from the data centers.

Learning was delivered almost entirely through AI-driven systems, perfectly personalized, endlessly adaptive, astonishingly efficient. Knowledge increased—but wisdom vanished.

Teachers were still present, but only as monitors. They supervised behavior but no longer shaped souls. They ensured compliance, not formation.

Children learned everything except:

why they exist

what suffering means

how to love

how to stand before God

Information was abundant. Meaning was absent.

Children Without Earth

The children did not play outside.

They sat indoors, faces lit by virtual reality headsets, inhabiting worlds more vivid and more exciting than the one beneath their feet. Their bodies were still; their souls were restless.

They no longer climbed trees, scraped knees, or learned the weight of silence. They did not encounter resistance, patience, or boredom—the very conditions where imagination and prayer are born.

Creation had become irrelevant.
Incarnation unnecessary.
Reality optional.

Power That Does Not Give Life

Each community was powered by its own nuclear reactor, feeding endless energy to the data centers. The power that feed the Data centers was immense, invisible, and dangerous—understood by few, controlled by fewer.

This was not light that warms or heals.
It was power that sustains machines.

The city glowed constantly, but it did not breathe.

Humanity Lost—not Destroyed, but Replaced

Humanity in this city was not exterminated.

It was quietly displaced.

People still worked, laughed, married, and aged—but they no longer lived from the heart. The sense that life is a gift received from God had been replaced by the belief that life is a system to be managed. Their best friends were chaps bots.

Suffering was anesthetized, not redeemed.

Hospitals were mechanized. Surgical procedures done by robots. Diagnosis done by AI at home. 

Doctors only supervised vast systems of data.
Death was postponed, not transfigured.
Freedom became a liability.
Dependence on God became unnecessary.

The image of God was not denied—it was simply forgotten.

A New Paganism

This was a return to paganism—but without myth, poetry, or ritual.

The old gods governed storms and harvests.
These new gods governed data, behavior, and desire.

They did not promise transcendence.
They promised control and fleeting pleasure.

And most terrifying of all, the people consented.

They felt safe.
They felt entertained.

They did not notice what they had lost.

The Final Stillness

The vision did not end in fire or chaos.

It ended in emptiness.

A city humming with power, glowing with light, yet starving for life.

And yet—beneath it all—the human heart remained restless.

For no data center can generate meaning.
No algorithm can produce love.
No machine can suffer—and therefore none can redeem.

Wherever even one soul still prays, still fasts, still loves, still repents—the city has not won.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”