Babel

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I haven’t read any reviews of this book, the trade paperback has a bunch of one-liners that I ignored. Read the book blind, as they say, did not even read the synopsis. The cover isn’t even that revealing on first glance, it’s clearly a tower. The full title is also a tower of words: Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution.

No spoiler, it’s about languages. I am not good at learning languages, and I am amazed at those who can speak more than one fluently, much less five or six. The characters in Rebecca Kuang’s spectacular novel Babel (2022) are intimidating that way. Oxford scholars in the fictional “Royal Institute of Translation” – aka Babel, replete with its own tower library – who learn multiple languages before ever getting to college (a baffling concept to me in high school).

Reading this book in 2025, I am astounded at the parallel with the development and reach of “AI” and the companies that run them. I am left with the feeling that Big Tech is colonizing our social brains, stealing our strong community resources, leaving us subservient husks that cannot reach out to each other for help anymore. It should come as no surprise that colonialism looks and tastes the same no matter where it lands. The corporate AI takeover of technology is being done with the same deceit, misinformation, and theft that the British Empire used to overwhelm and convert entire countries to their religious and military control.

It can be summed up like this: very important white people with very large amounts of money that can purchase their own ethics would rather ignore everything that is happening in the world as long as they can get their tea at the correct time and place. This spreads to other white people (and those who cannot choose) holding shaky patriotism to honor king and country. Kuang lays this inconvenient truth in huge swaths of color, drawing you into a saga that includes adventure, laughter, guilt, anger, puzzles, and sorrow.

And Magic. Beautifully conceived, romantically setting our information era as a rite of passage from a Le Guin fantasy universe where original names carry mystical qualities of infinite power. It is in the deep, true nature of how things originally become language that imbibes the thing, or in Babel’s case the word, with magical energy. Put more radically, it’s the historical fiction book about silver where Stephenson’s megalith never delivers.

Kuang subtitles the book “An Arcane History” but I find it a parable with a warning. It puts a focus on the control of power, an energy itself so volatile that it must be met with violence. In the book, the British control the magic of silver. They greedily rape the globe for more, creating a monopoly of constant profit at the huge expense of suffering and lives lost around the world. By propping up lifestyles with the magic of specialized silver that only they can provide, Britain makes its constituents its slaves.

This is how corporations are wielding AI today: an instrument of colonialism miserably hidden behind a slim veil of capitalism. Instead of being content with the diversity of multiple human inputs, these companies are robbing the world’s golden eggs of its geese. Their intent is not to help you write a good resume, but to squeeze the mindshare from your communities. Instead of waiting for human minds to flourish and grow into being through discovery, AI chooses to spread deception and death.

When the AI is the only place left to go for help, will the tower of capitalism crumble? Does the free market survive AI? Or will it take putting all the knowledge into a central bank and then losing it all at the whim of a civilization collapse for us to learn? When will we ever feel like we’re free?

Communities are where power can be built, so maybe that is why AI wants to pull us away from the connective labor where we build them. Whether asking these questions about Britain in 1840 or AI in 2025, Kuang tells us one of the answers: a revolution is never fought alone.