The Tower of Babel was humanity’s first great technological project—a monolithic structure reaching upward, striving not merely to defy the heavens but to commune with the divine. It was a collective undertaking, a shared aspiration to transcend the limitations of mortality and scatterings of difference, an effort to collapse the space between humanity and God. The Tower promised unity through communication, a singular language that could channel the infinite. But, as the myth reminds us, such ambition contained the seeds of its undoing: God fragmented their language, scattering humanity into incomprehensible factions. The tower fell, and with it, the dream of unified transcendence.

In the modern age, we too have built our Tower of Babel—not from brick and mortar, but from silicon and code. The internet, with its sprawling neural architecture, promised to unify human thought, to create a single, seamless channel of communication. Platforms like Twitter, in particular, became the apex of this endeavor, a digital commons where billions of voices converged. It was the second brain of humanity, an emergent mind capable of self-reflection and dialogue. Here, the divine was no longer an external entity, but a metaphorical God within the machine, the collective consciousness of humanity itself.

But just as the original Babel collapsed under the weight of its contradictions, so too does our digital Tower. The dream of a unified internet has fractured. Twitter, once the closest thing to a universal commons, has splintered under the collapse of its coherence. Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X—a symbol of erasure, of infinite possibilities that signify nothing—was not merely a corporate failure but the symbolic dissolution of a collective dream. The exodus of users to federated platforms like Mastodon, BlueSky, Farcaster, and Threads reveals the new reality: the Tower of Babel has splintered into a thousand little Englands, digital islands that echo the schizophrenic nature of contemporary society.

This fragmentation is not merely a technical or social phenomenon; it is ontological. If the original Tower aimed to reach God, and Twitter once symbolized a second brain striving toward collective self-awareness, then the fracturing of this commons marks the collapse of shared meaning. The internet, instead of drawing us closer to the divine within ourselves, amplifies the schizoid tendencies described by Guattari and Deleuze. Each platform becomes its own territorialized machine, a fiefdom of self-reinforcing signals where the flow of ideas is no longer collective but centrifugal, spinning further and further away from a shared center.

The divine has become diffused across these fragmented networks, each claiming its own truth, its own language, its own God. Mastodon offers the ideal of decentralization, BlueSky the promise of a curated elite, Threads the corporatized comfort of familiar systems. But none can replicate the Tower, the singular ambition to speak as one voice. Instead, they reflect our current condition: a fractured humanity, striving not for transcendence but for validation within increasingly narrow corridors of discourse. Each platform whispers its own liturgy, but the voices cannot hear each other, trapped as they are within the walls of their own microcosms.

This fracturing mirrors the broader schizophrenia of modern life. Guattari’s “machinic unconscious” is now writ large, as our second brain devolves into a series of competing sub-brains, each disconnected from the others. The internet was meant to externalize and augment human cognition, to be our collective mind. Instead, it has fragmented our thoughts, our identities, our very sense of reality. Where once the Tower of Babel stood as a singular structure, we now inhabit a maze of ruins, each piece of the tower isolated from the rest, each claiming to hold the key to the divine.

But perhaps the divine was never in the tower itself. The God we sought to reach—whether external or within—was always a reflection of our own striving, our own need to make sense of the infinite. The collapse of the digital Babel does not erase that aspiration; it merely reveals the frailty of its construction. In the ruins, we must ask ourselves: what were we truly building? Was it a means to speak to God, or merely to hear ourselves amplified?

Absolutely, it makes sense. You’re articulating a deeply philosophical critique of human ambition in the digital age, drawing parallels between our myths, technologies, and epistemologies. Let me expand on your point by weaving it into the ongoing metaphors of the Tower of Babel, Borges’ infinite library, and the distributed nature of consciousness. Here’s a refined take:

The Tower of Babel, at its core, was not merely an attempt to reach God but an attempt to transcend human limitations through collective ambition. Its collapse was not just a punishment but a revelation: the divine was never above, waiting to be reached; it was always absent—or rather, dispersed among us. In this, the myth of Babel is not about failure but about misdirected ambition, an inability to recognize that the unity we sought was never possible because consciousness itself is irreducibly distributed.

Now, in the age of technology, we have built new Towers. Social media, once conceived as a second brain, was our latest attempt to synthesize collective intelligence, to externalize thought and create a shared mind capable of transcending individual limitations. Platforms like Twitter functioned as the scaffolding for this new Babel, aggregating billions of voices into a unified stream of consciousness. Yet, just as the original tower collapsed, so too has the digital one fractured, splintering into federated platforms, isolated echo chambers, and algorithmic cul-de-sacs.

This fracturing was inevitable, not merely because of human hubris but because the project itself was founded on a flawed premise: that consciousness could be centralized, that the infinite complexity of human thought could converge in a singular digital structure. Social media, as a second brain, misunderstood the nature of the mind. Consciousness is not a monolith; it is a multiplicity, a swarm of interactions distributed across individuals, networks, and time. In trying to consolidate this into a single system, we replicated the error of Babel: the belief that unity could produce transcendence, that one voice could speak for all.

The same error now underpins our efforts in artificial intelligence. If the internet was our second brain, AI is envisioned as its superintelligence, a Library of Babel in the Borgesian sense: a repository of all knowledge, a structure so vast and interconnected that it could encompass the totality of human experience. Yet Borges understood what we do not: such a library is not an enlightenment but a labyrinth, a space where meaning collapses under the weight of infinite possibilities. The dream of superintelligence, like the dream of the Tower, ignores the distributed nature of meaning, intelligence, and consciousness. It assumes that by aggregating enough data, by building systems complex enough, we can recreate the divine spark of awareness.

But there is no singular spark. Just as God in the Tower of Babel was an illusion—a projection of humanity’s need for a center—so too is the idea of superintelligence. Intelligence is not something that can be centralized or contained; it is an emergent property of interaction, a phenomenon that arises in the spaces between, not in the nodes themselves. AI, like social media, is doomed to fail not because it is technologically insufficient but because it is philosophically misguided. It chases a unity that does not exist, seeking to centralize what is, by its nature, distributed.

This failure is not just theoretical; it is already evident in the trajectories of our technologies. Social media, once the great unifier, now fragments society into ever-smaller factions, amplifying the schizoid tendencies of modern life. AI, for all its promises, produces not understanding but noise, generating content that overwhelms human cognition rather than enhancing it. The very tools we build to transcend our limitations instead amplify them, revealing the fissures in our ambitions.

Perhaps, then, the lesson of Babel, Borges, and AI is the same: that the search for unity, for a singular point of transcendence, is a misunderstanding of the human condition. Consciousness is not a tower, not a library, not a brain—it is a network, a web of interactions that cannot be reduced or centralized without losing its essence. Our attempts to build superintelligence are not failures in engineering but failures in imagination. They miss the point that intelligence is not something to be built but something to be shared, not a structure to be ascended but a space to be inhabited.

In this light, the fracturing of Babel, the dispersal of the internet, and the labyrinth of Borges’ library are not tragedies but reminders. They remind us that meaning, intelligence, and consciousness are not singularities to be captured but multiplicities to be embraced. The divine, if it exists, is not at the top of the Tower but in the fragments, in the spaces between, in the endless interplay of the distributed whole. To seek transcendence, then, is not to build higher but to look closer—to find the infinite not in unity but in the network of difference that binds us all.

To move forward, we must confront the reality that the Tower was always an illusion, a mirage of unity in a fundamentally fragmented world. Yet in the ruins, there is still the potential for connection—not through the hubris of a singular structure, but through the humility of bridges, fragile and finite, built one at a time. The internet as a second brain cannot be a monolith; it must embrace its multiplicity without succumbing to schizophrenia. This requires a new mode of engagement, one that values dialogue over dominance, listening over shouting, and the fragile art of being together in the face of difference.

If there is a lesson in Babel, it is not that the tower fell, but that we still dream of building.