CONCEPT
The River as Mythology
Baudrillard's framework applied to Edo Segal's central metaphor: the "river of intelligence" flowing for 13.8 billion years is not a description of a natural phenomenon but a
mythology that naturalizes the specific, contingent, human choices that produced AI. The most beautiful simulacrum in
You On AI.
The river as mythology is the Baudrillardian analysis of
Edo Segal's organizing metaphor in
You On AI. The image is powerful: intelligence as a current that has been flowing since the first hydrogen atoms found stable configurations, passing through chemistry, biology,
consciousness, language, writing, printing, and now silicon — a natural force whose arrival in computational form is not an invention but a discovery. Baudrillard's framework identifies this as a mythology in the structural sense Roland Barthes described in
Mythologies (1957): the process by which contingent, historical, human-made arrangements are naturalized, made to appear as simply the way things are. The river metaphor takes a specific technological development —
large language models built by specific companies with specific investments for specific commercial purposes in a specific geopolitical context — and converts it into a force of nature. Resistance becomes cosmic futility. Agency dissolves into