In February, we found ourselves sitting opposite Mr and Mrs Zuckerberg at the Prada fashion show. Since Trump’s inauguration party a year before, America’s tech oligarchs have been showing up with new bodies tuned to flex what has been referred to as Big Dick Energy. Zuckerberg’s chiselled torso, platforming an oversized head, gleamed from beneath his thin brown polo. “All the tech bros want to be fuck-boys now,” quipped the fellow hack sitting next to me. The new sovereigns have arrived to sit in the front row regarding a culture of which they know the price, but not the value.

I am guessing there is no need for a spoiler alert for the readers of the Summer Reader issue of TANK, so I can say that in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, there is a mad wife in the attic. A classic of Gothic Terror – not to be mistaken for her terrible sister Gothic Horror – Jane Eyre was a pioneering work of fiction, published in 1847, almost 100 years after the invention of romance literature. Jane Eyre is a first-person psychological drama, a thriller and a chiller. It offered the book-hungry public a fresh ingredient: a sense of dread, not from the point of view of an external observer, as in Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1812), but a sense of dread experienced from the inside. The novel’s transformative power was to allow readers to feel what it was like to be other people.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is frequently credited as the father of the novel. It is hard to understand the psychological frenzy generated by the sudden availability of novels in Europe at the time. Even when the literacy rate struggled to reach 50%, Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) caused an emotional tsunami in France. Rousseau collected letters from his extensive fandom, which were so ardent that he boasted that he could have bedded any woman in France. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was reputed to have caused an epidemic of suicides. In the heyday of the novel, writers exerted the kind of soft power of Harry Styles, Kim Kardashian and Mr Beast combined. These days, the power of books lingers faintly – in the all-pervasive Daunt Books tote bag and curated bookshelves on Zoom calls. Dan Brown can hardly claim to be an object of desire at the scale that Rousseau once was.

For much of the past 50 years, art and humanities graduates have held the commanding heights of political and cultural influence: running the civil service, editing newspapers, programming broadcasts, curating galleries and shaping narratives that defined public life. The STEM-minded, meanwhile, were deployed as useful but unglamorous geeks; they were the people you called to fix things, not interpret them. AI has landed to invert this hierarchy. The engineers and mathematicians built the platforms that now determine what billions of people read, watch and believe, and in doing so, have accumulated a civilisational power that no editor or critic can hope to match.

The arts and humanities graduates find themselves structurally displaced by systems they lack the foundation to understand, let alone properly critique, while the technologists, powered by big finance, charge ahead, largely indifferent to the political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of what they are building. Two tribes find themselves at war over who gets to define reality itself. The novel has been the supreme cultural expression and tool of examining interior life, and interior life is precisely what the new attention-fuelled platforms are organised to abolish.

A few weeks after the Prada show, a review copy of a new book, Midwife of the Intellect (2025), by the German philosopher and public intellectual Peter Sloterdijk, landed on my desk. The slim and cheerfully designed volume came not from a publishing house I knew – his books are typically hefty doorstoppers – but from something called the Berggruen Foundation. Nicolas Berggruen is a German-American billionaire investor and philanthropist, founder of Berggruen Holdings and co-founder of the Berggruen Institute, a non-profit think tank.

Sloterdijk’s book is a meditation on the nature of God through the work of the 14th-century theologian Meister Eckhart. The question on my lips – but why? – is answered on page five: “Anyone who wants to see the most valuable single piece in the treasury of the West” needs to understand the formula in question. The opening line of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” Sloterdijk’s slim volume, gifted to the world by a billionaire, goes on to tell us exactly which West is being defended: the one that “begins with the Logos and ends with the algorithm”. What looked at first like mere displacement – geeks finally inheriting the earth – is revealing itself as something more deliberate, even insidious: a civilisational rebrand, by men who confuse their fortunes with their judgement.

Nicolas Berggruen is what one might refer to as an extreme centrist committed to a vision of Europe in which the purity of European ideals lurks beneath a mask of avowed globalism. This vision seems to have a strange hold in Germany in particular and informs much of the country’s contradictory geopolitical position, one that is more ideological and darkly romantic than most others in the European Union. What else could explain the Germans’ act of national self-harm confronting Russia with such hostility? A country that was, for decades, supplying it with cheap energy to power its industries.

The grim determination was expressed a few days ago when Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of German media group Axel Springer, declared “We shall all be Zionists” in a forceful address to the World Jewish Congress in Geneva. His remarks reflected broader statements from German leadership, with the country’s foreign minister asserting that European citizens should be prepared to die for Israel. This commitment has now become explicit company policy at the company’s recent acquisition, The Daily Telegraph, where journalists have been informed that supporting the state is a core principle of their employment. Not entirely a coincidence, then, that the paper has launched a sustained campaign to oust the photographer and filmmaker Misan Harriman from his role at London’s Southbank Centre. Harriman has documented the Gaza protests for the past three years and has been a vocal advocate of justice for the Palestinians.

Oswald Spengler, fairly described as an intellectual forefather of Sloterdijk and whose authoritarian and anti-liberal ideas influenced fascist thought, saw this a hundred years ago. Both men are grand-scale cultural diagnosticians who view history not as linear progress, but as a series of spatial, technological, and existential world-building projects. Spengler suggested that decline and fall are preceded by the takeover of a Cesar figure in a Faustian deal with the devil. 

Spengler saw in the Faustian myth the defining soul of Western, and particularly German, civilisation. The Faustian soul is characterised by infinite striving, the will to overcome all limits, the restless drive to master space, time, nature and other men. Whereas the cultures of ancient India, Greece and China sought harmony in equilibrium and proportion, the Faustian soul finds meaning only in the conquest of the horizon. The greater Israel project seems to fit in snugly here, a self-declared little Sparta with no recognisable border and permanently at war. Goethe’s Faust (1790) strikes his wager with the devil not from weakness but from an excess of will: ordinary knowledge, love and pleasure cannot satisfy him. He craves total experience, total power. The tragedy is not that he fails – it is that his striving itself becomes the vehicle of destruction.

The issue is that this version of intellectual history, from Logos to algorithm, is hardly exclusively European. Al Ghalam (literally, “the pen”) is one of the Koran’s most beautiful and poetic Surahs. It revisits St John’s preoccupation with the primacy of the word, and extends it to the concept of literacy more widely. It begins, “By the pen and what is written”. Islam was the first of the Abrahamic religions to extend an invitation to literacy beyond the priesthood and the elites, exhorting all its believers to read.

Moreover, the word “algorithm” is itself a corruption of the name of the 9th-century Persian polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. It is fair to describe AI as a variation on, and corruption of, algorithmic systems. The targeting systems using AI that killed a whole primary school of little girls in Minab, Iran, with a double-tap strike – another one of Israel’s innovations – is built on mathematical foundations laid in Baghdad eleven centuries before Tel Aviv existed.

Israel is Europe’s, and especially Germany’s, mad ex-wife. The trauma of the Holocaust was locked away in the attic to marinate in a toxic stew of lust for domination of the horizon and a claim of absolute victimhood. Mr Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, celebrated his 50th birthday recently with a cake featuring a hangman’s noose, referencing the newly-passed death penalty for Palestinian detainees. Jane Eyre is also a novel of Empire. Bertha Antoinetta Rochester (née Mason), the shunned and wronged wife, is of mixed race, an unwelcome souvenir Mr Rochester picked up on his travels, an early form of Imperial blowback. Jane Eyre is an invitation to listen to, as well as fear, the mad wife. All conceptual, institutional, moral and legal forms on which the idea of Western legitimacy in the post-war were founded, dissolved in Gaza. The decorations have been washed off and the edifice of West is seen in all its immodesty. The next 100 years will be dealing with the fallout from this holocaust as we did with the last.

There is a strong smell of smoke. Somebody call the fire brigade! 

Masoud Golsorkh