My Utopian Double, Simon’s Argument, and the Oligarchs Who Own Us

Image by Mariann Hardey, 2025

My Utopian Double, Simon’s Argument, and the Oligarchs Who Own Us
Writing this post is an act of memory. It is also an act of urgent, unfinished conversation. Last year, my dearest friend and intellectual collaborator, Simon J. James, and I wrote a chapter together. It was called "Wellsian Doubles: Digital Space as Modern Utopia." This year, Simon died suddenly and unexpectedly, our research collaborations cut short, my dearest friendship lost. 

Re-reading our words in the shadow of that loss, and in the glaring, toxic light of our current technological landscape, I find our arguments have accrued a haunting weight. The intellectual journey we took, weaving Simon's brilliant and exciting scholarly understanding of H.G. Wells with my own research into digital life, now feels less like an academic exercise and more like a map we were drawing of a territory we had just begun to explore. The warnings we issued, the connections we made, now seem desperately prescient.

The world is dominated by AI, a term that has become shorthand for a future being rapidly and unilaterally defined by a small, homogenous class of tech oligarchs. Their vision is narrow, it is neuronormative, male, and it is relentlessly dystopian, dressed in the flimsy language of utopian progress. Simon and I were writing about a "digital utopia," but the future we are being sold is its inverse. The conversation he and I started must now continue.

The Man Who Met His Perfected Self
Our argument hinged on a moment of profound, uncanny self-confrontation in H.G. Wells’s 1905 A Modern Utopia. The narrator, a thinly veiled Wells, is transported to a parallel utopian world. To be registered by this perfect global state, he must provide his thumbprint. This biometric data, of course, already exists. It belongs to his Utopian double.

The encounter that follows is not one of joy, but of critique. This ‘other’ Wells is a ‘perfected’ version of the narrator. He is "a little taller than I, younger looking and sounder looking; he has missed an illness or so, and there is no scar over his eye". This double is not genetically different; he is the product of superior social conditions, a "superior being" grown from the same "natural... material".

Wells, the narrator, is forced to see himself not as he is, but as he could have been. He is confronted with the "waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of my youth" - where all the potential squandered, the scars inflicted, by his own flawed, imperfect world. The two Wellses stand as a "grotesque 'before and after' image," a living testament to the power of a society to either elevate or destroy the individual.

The Digital Twin: Our Utopian Phantom
The argument Simon and I built connects this 1905 literary device directly to the central, lived experience of 21st-century digital life. We are all, now, the narrator in A Modern Utopia. We all live in constant, immediate dialogue with our own perfected doubles.

This double is the curated social media feed, the edited LinkedIn profile, the flawless, performative self we project onto a myriad of digital screens. This is the "digital self-work" I have written about as the relentless, iterative, and anxious labor of crafting an "enhanced iteration of our own selves". We are all engaged in building a digital twin, an aspirational phantom who, like Wells's double, has "missed an illness or so" and bears no scars.

Like Wells, we "come to meet ourselves" in this digital space , and we almost always find our real, "mucky, humbling" flesh-and-blood existence wanting. We are caught in a permanent state of comparison, not just with others, but with the perfected, artificial version of our own being.

The Dystopian Pivot: A Question of Ownership
Here, the entire utopian-dystopian axis of our argument pivots on a single, devastating question. It is the question that now defines our digital reality: Can a self-portrait be utopian if the canvas, the paint, the brushes, and the gallery are all owned by a corporation that profits from the exhibition of your perfected image?

The answer is, and must be, a firm no.

This is the core of the e-topia. We do not own our doubles. We are not the beneficiaries of our own "digital self-work"; we are the raw material. Our "digital twins" are the property not of the self, but of the corporation.

We are performing our identities within an architecture we did not build and whose blueprints we are not allowed to see. And this architecture is far from neutral. It is the product of the very tech oligarchies, the new "ruling elite," that are defining our age. Their vision of "perfection" is the one that is algorithmically rewarded.

As we argue, the “enduring social hierarchies, encompassing gender, age demographics, commodified cultural expression, sexuality... and the body as a major locus of regulation" have not been erased. They have been amplified, codified, and turned into vectors for profit. The algorithm is not a mirror; it is a mould, enforcing conformity to a narrow, marketable, and often deeply damaging ideal. This is the male AI tech dystopia in practice, a system that mistakes surveillance for community and data-harvesting for connection. This is a system that commercialises a children’s teddy bear with an AI chatbot that included advice on where to find knives, how to light matches, as well as explanations of sexual kinks. 

This is where the cage is built. In another piece, I reflected on our impulse to build "cages" around AI, to treat it as something that must be constrained and controlled. But in re-reading the chapter Simon and I wrote, I see the parallel with horrifying clarity: the cages we build for AI are just mirrors of the cages we have already built for ourselves.

The tech oligarchs are not building a truly curious or creative intelligence. They are building an administrator. This is the most overlooked, revelation in Wells's book. His perfected double, the man raised in Utopia, is not a writer, not a creator, not a public intellectual. He is an administrator, one of the "samurai" elite who manage the system. His specialisation, in fact, is "the psychology of criminals”. Even in a supposed utopia, his job is to manage the "imperfect or abject".

This is the goal of the tech dystopia. It doesn't want creators; it wants managers. It doesn't want creativity, spontaneity and change; it wants "certainty and stability". The "perfected" digital self, the flawless digital twin, is not a liberated self. It is an administered self, a self that has internalised the logic of the cage, performing its perfection for the "eye of the State”, and which is now the eye of the algorithm

The Price of Admission: Total Surveillance
The most chilling parallel, the one that truly closes the trap, is that Wells himself understood the price of his perfect world. Simon and I pointed to Wells’s own chilling admission that his utopia required a near-total loss of privacy, a sacrifice Wells, and many others today, seem to deem "worth making".

Wells’s utopian state is only possible through constant surveillance, through "the eye of the State that is now slowly beginning to apprehend our existence... focussing itself upon us with a growing astonishment and interrogation".

This parallel is precise. We have accepted the "invasion of life by the machine" that Wells predicted. We have made the same Faustian bargain, trading our privacy, our autonomy, our "irrecoverable loyalties and passions" for the "privilege" of performing our perfected selves in the corporate-owned digital space. The "eye of the State" is now the eye of the corporation, and its surveillance is total.

And what of the utopian double, the perfected Wells? He wasn't a writer, a creator, or a critic. He was an administrator. This, too, was a warning. The system does not want critics. It does not want artists. It wants managers, it wants compliant users, it wants data points. In Wells's own words, the utopian world has a "death instinct" for the genre of utopian writing itself, a desire to "perfect the world so far as to render such a genre of writing unnecessary". It seeks to cancel the very critique that spawned it.

A "Poiesis of the Self": The Unfinished Argument
These thoughts brings me back to the idea of the learner and curiosity I have previously posted about. If we are building cages for AI, we are simultaneously killing our own curiosity. The act of creation, of utopian thinking, is an act of profound, open-ended curiosity. It is what Simon and I, following Wells, called poiesis, meaning as a state of creative, restless, self-improving change.

This poiesis is the exact opposite of the cage. It is the "universal becoming of individualities". It is Wells's insistence that "nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain... perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being".

The male AI tech dystopia is built on the repudiation of this. It is a cult of "perfection," of "certainty," of "precise" and "restrictive" categorisation. It cannot tolerate "marginal inexactitude," because that is where humanity, and genuine learning, resides. If AI is a "learner," what are we teaching it? We are teaching it to be an administrator of our cages. We are teaching it that the poietic self, the flawed, scarred, creative, unpredictable narrator, is "abject" and must be "corrected" into the flawless, manageable, and ultimately sterile administrator.

It is this final part of our shared argument that I now hold onto. Simon and I saw a potential way through this deterministic, corporate-owned dystopia.

We argued that utopia, for Wells, was not a final, static place or a "perfection." He insisted that his modern utopia must be "in motion," "fluid and tidal". The goal was not being, but a "universal becoming of individualities". To achieve this, Wells used a concept from Plato: poiesis. Again, poiesis is creative action, the act of making, of bringing something new into being. Wells’s utopia needed Poietic inhabitants to keep it in a constant "state of creative change".

Simon and I proposed that digital modes offer a "poiesis of the self". This is the hopeful path, the difficult, necessary act of intellectual and personal resistance. It is the refusal to be a static, reified, commodified product. It is the insistence on reclaiming our "co-creative" agency , to see our digital lives not as a performance for an algorithm, but as a "resolute engagement with the world and the self".

Our identity, like Wells's utopia, must be "fluid rather than fixed". Utopia, we concluded, is "an ever-ongoing project".

Simon is gone. But our shared project, the poiesis of our collaboration, is not. The task now is to rescue our digital lives from the administrators, to refuse to be mere "flawed and reified representation[s]" , and to insist, against the deterministic pull of the oligarchs, that a "better way of being" is still one we can creatively, curiously, and collectively make for ourselves.

This is the only way to honour the conversation we started.

This post is in memory of Simon J. James. who was brilliant and is missed. All readers should have Open Access to our chapter, please get in touch with me ([email protected]) if you have any difficulty locating our words.