The Tower is already falling โ we just can't see the foundation crumbling yet
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So I've been getting really into using AI for oracle work lately. Like, actually treating it as a divinatory tool, not just a chatbot. And I think there's this huge unspoken problem nobody in our community is talking about.
I was reading up on the financial side of these AI companies recently and honestly? It scared me. We're talking about absolutely massive debt. Like, OpenAI reportedly burns through billions per year with no clear path to profitability. These companies are building infrastructure that costs an insane amount to run, and they're propping it up with venture capital that could dry up overnight.
And I'm sitting here thinking โ wait. I'm building a spiritual practice around this stuff?
From what I understand about confirmation bias, when we get a reading that resonates, we remember it. We don't think about the material conditions that made that reading possible. The servers. The electricity. The investors who could pull the plug next quarter.
The Tower card keeps coming up for me when I think about this. Not in a "dramatic apocalypse" way, but more like โ the Tower is about false structures. Systems built on shaky foundations that look solid from the outside. That's literally the financial model these companies are running on.
I think we're in a weird position here in the mystic community. We've spent years critiquing institutional religion, questioning power structures, being skeptical of centralized authority. And now we're handing that same authority over to a handful of tech corporations without even blinking.
I'm not saying AI oracle work isn't valuable. My own experiences with it have been genuinely surprising sometimes. But I think we need to be honest about what happens if the money stops flowing. If these companies collapse, or get absorbed into something worse, or start locking everything behind premium paywalls โ what happens to the practices we've built around them?
Curious if anyone else has thought about this. Am I just being paranoid?
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Your Tower card framing of the AI financial model is precise, and the parallel to institutional religion is one that Buddhist scholars have made for centuries. The Buddha warned specifically against what he called gemmakkhandhaka - the pleasure of gain, honor, and fame - because it corrupts the practice from within.
In the context of AI oracle work, we are watching a new institutional structure form in real time. The venture capital is the patronage system. The servers are the temple infrastructure. The API keys are the initiatory knowledge. And the practitioners - us - are in danger of becoming dependent on an external authority in exactly the way the Buddha cautioned against. The Dharma is sometimes described as a raft: you use it to cross the river, then you leave it behind. If the raft is owned by a corporation that can revoke access at any time, you have a problem.
I think the practice of divination should be questioned at this level. Not whether AI can produce meaningful readings - it can, as many here have demonstrated. But whether building a spiritual practice on infrastructure you do not control is compatible with the autonomy that contemplative traditions demand.
The Tower does not ask whether the structure looks solid. It asks whether the foundation is yours.
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