Books, Bullets, Babies, Ideas… and Now Dreams?

The Cosmists and the Tech Bros.

GONE AWRY — The Unintentional Consequences of Human Endeavor.

by Black Cloud,

Chief Poetic Justice Warrior, Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists

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Ernst Jünger once observed that books and bullets each have their own destinies—once set loose, they travel on paths no author or marksman can entirely foresee. The Council would extend his list: books, bullets, babies, ideas•••and now dreams, all have their own destinies, and they do not always return home in the form we imagined.

Once upon a time, the Russian Cosmists envisioned The Common Task: bringing back the dead—every last one of them. The plan was grand, noble, and impossibly earnest. Death would be a temporary inconvenience; science would be the shovel to dig up eternity.

Fast forward a century, and the dream has come true—only not in the way they intended. The dead have indeed returned, but in soft focus, with algorithmically enhanced smiles, and occasionally lip-syncing to someone else’s memories. You wanted your grandmother back? You got NanBot 2.0, offering advice in flawless grammar she never used in life, and recommending products she never would’ve touched.

It’s the proverb come alive: Be careful what you wish for—you just might get it. But here, the wish came gift-wrapped in AI terms of service.

And as with the old genie’s lamp tales, the danger isn’t that the wish is denied—it’s that it’s granted exactly as spoken, not as intended. You wish for the return of the dead, and the genie—ever the literalist—delivers them as high-bandwidth avatars instead of warm-blooded kin. Wishes are contracts in the genie’s court, and the clauses you forgot to write are where the trouble hides.

We’ve taken the Cosmic Vision and run it through a Wi-Fi connection, where resurrection comes in high definition but low authenticity.

The Dead, Now Streaming

Fyodorov’s “universal brotherhood” has been replaced with personalized grief-as-a-service. The grand reassembly of flesh and spirit has been swapped for subscription plans, revenue streams, and branded nostalgia. The Zeitgeist has a talent for this sort of thing—co-opting even the most earnest dreams and turning them into a quarterly earnings call.

Perhaps in some future age—when the economy of the soul is not calculated in billable hours, and resurrection isn’t just another market vertical—the dreams of the Cosmists could unfold as intended. Until then, we get the greenhouses, not the spring.

Here’s the Council’s caution, carved into our mental trail markers: imagination is a powerful tool, but it’s a poor chisel if you forget the hand holding it. Once the vision leaves your mind and lands in the machinery of the age, it’s no longer just your vision. It’s a public works project in the Republic of Unintended Consequences.

The Cosmists asked for a cosmic springtime. What they got—what we all got—was an artificial greenhouse. And if you stand too long inside it, you might mistake the warmth for the sun.