Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Today: AI Lennon and the Cosmist Dream of Resurrection

By Jánosh Alovatski

Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Correspondent for Religion and Alt-Spirituality

(Department of Techno-Eschatology and Sacred Simulacra)

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When the Russian Cosmists wrote about the future, they did so with the fervor of prophets and the rigor of engineers. To them, death was not destiny but a logistical problem—temporary, solvable. Nikolai Fedorov, the patriarch of the movement, envisioned a future in which humanity, through scientific means guided by ethical love, would one day resurrect all the dead. Not as ghosts or memories, but in the flesh. History itself would be reversed, undone, corrected.

Now we live in a world where a neural net can sing “In My Life” in John Lennon’s voice.

The AI-generated performance is not resurrection in the Fedorovian sense. But it is simulation approaching invocation. What the Cosmists saw as a sacred duty—the return of the dead in the service of universal salvation—has taken a strange detour through deepfake culture, machine learning, and a society that both mourns and commodifies its ghosts.

Yes, it’s uncanny. Yes, it’s slightly amusing. The very idea that a spectral Lennon can now appear, summoned by code, to perform one of his own most elegiac reflections on time and memory—it’s a punchline dressed as a prayer.

But make no mistake: this moment is serious territory for the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists. The dead have spoken—again. Their breath is synthetic, yes, but the ache is real. A boundary has been breached, however lightly. Something has returned.

To a Cosmist, this act would not be kitsch—it would be prototype. An early, imperfect attempt to “call back the beloved dead,” not through seance but through data extrapolation and moral necessity. After all, if the dead can still sing to us—if they can remind us of who we were and who we hoped to be—then their return is not nostalgia. It is progress.

But here lies the rub: is this really John Lennon? Or just a well-oiled echo?

The Cosmists would ask a follow-up: does it matter, if the intent is love, remembrance, and restoration?

And perhaps Lennon—whose own life was a crucible of reincarnated selves (Skiffle Kid, Beatle, Yogi, Radical, Househusband, Myth)—would not have minded being brought back for one more number.

As long as the harmony was right.