Ghost in the Machine: Eugenics in Code
Valerie Veatch made Ghost in the Machine self-edited and self-funded. It's a polemic without apology. Two hours examining artificial intelligence's ideological roots, tracing the line from eugenics to contemporary tech evangelicalism. The second half gets messy. But the core argument stays intact.
The film uses nearly forty Zoom interviews. Historians, scientists, theorists. Multiple voices deliberately creating friction. Different perspectives collide. Patterns emerge. Veatch organizes this into eight chapters with titles that announce her position from the start. No false neutrality. No pretending balance. This honesty feels transgressive in an era of "balanced coverage."
The central claim: Silicon Valley's AI revolution is eugenics by other means. Veatch focuses on specific people—Elon Musk's transhumanism, Sam Altman's optimization vision. These reveal the continuities between discredited pseudoscience and contemporary tech mythology. Genetic fitness, selection, improvement—laundered through computational language and emerging as metrics and algorithms. Same impulses. Different vocabulary. Veatch won't let innovation mythology obscure this inheritance.
The film unravels a bit when it tries to encompass environmental impacts, labor displacement, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic bias. The material becomes diffuse. The Zoom-interview aesthetic that works in the first half grows repetitive. But even scattered, the provocation remains.
110 to 120 minutes. No easy answers. No redemptive arc. No technological fix for ideological problems. This pessimism matters in a landscape full of innovation mythology and tech utopianism. The film refuses to treat AI as inevitable progress. Veatch's argument is darker: the problem is foundational, not policy. It concerns how tech culture constructs human value.
The strength: she won't stay abstract. Musk, Altman, others—concrete figures with material power and ideological influence. These are active forces. The interviews provide genealogical precision. The focus on individuals provides urgency. History plus ideology plus urgent call.
Veatch insists we treat technology as contested terrain saturated with historical inheritance. The second half's sloppiness perhaps reflects the problems themselves—they resist neat resolution. The film provokes because it has to. Silence would be complicity.