THE MOCKING MACHINE

today, we, as a civilization, stand before a mocking mirror, held by a mocking machine. the mocking machine is not human; it is the “other”: it is, properly understood, alien. an alien intelligence.

to better understand and theorize this destabilizing encounter between man and machine, post-colonial theory offers lessons and insights from previous encounters between otherizer and otherized: encounters defined by alienity.

in 1984, the post-colonial theorist homi bhabha published a canonical essay called “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” in the critical art and theory journal October, in a special issue on psychoanalysis. in it, bhabha studied the peculiar relationship between british colonizers and the colonized, one marked by a startling psychological dimension defined, in his words, by “trompe l’oeil, irony, mimicry, and repetition.”

the mimicry was, in a sense, state mandated by the british. in 1835, thomas babington macaulay successfully advocated for the reform of indian education under colonial rule: henceforth, the british empire should ensure that its indian subjects are educated in english, not sanskrit or arabic. “We must at present do our best to form [...] a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

it was essential, in macaulay’s view, to instruct the indian in english because that is where “the greatest mass of information had been laid up” and it was important to put “all that information within his reach.” information comes from the latin informare, “to train, shape, or give form to.” and train is exactly what the english wanted to do to the indian. the english education system was to become a training model.

learning the english language was essential. “The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west,” wrote macaulay. english contains “models of every species of eloquence” and compositions which are “vehicles of ethical and political instruction” that “have never been equalled.” 

english, macaulay wrote, contains “just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade.” english language and knowledge is a complete data set, macaulay believed, “with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man.”

macaulay hoped that, by absorbing all the english data and knowledge contained in the english language, india could follow the same trajectory as russia. russia, macaulay wrote, had “been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the crusades,” and it “has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities,” wrote macaulay.

the way russia did so, in macaulay’s view, was by embracing english, which contained “full and correct information” about “human life” and “human nature” and “metaphysics,” “morals,” “government” and so forth. training any people on that dataset could be used to turn any “barbarian” into a “civilized” nation. 

the word barbarian is believed to originate in ancient greece. “bar bar” was an onomatopoeic sound imitating what gibberish non-language sounds like. those who spoke like this were “bárbaros.” in the Iliad, homer uses the compound βαρβαρόφωνος (barbarophonos), meaning “of incomprehensible speech”. 

in the Geographica, an encyclopedic work written by the stoic philosopher and geographer strabo around the time of christ, strabo emphasized speech in his definition of barbarism: “I suppose that the word ‘barbarian’ was at first invented to designate a mode of pronunciation which was embarrassed, harsh, and rough.” 

“Those who pronounce their words with a thick enunciation are called Barbarians, so foreigners, I mean those who were not Greeks, were observed to pronounce their words in this manner”, wrote strabo. to be a barbarian, then, is to be foreign: alien. it is also to fall outside the bounds of language as we know it. the path from alienity to non-alienity is traced through language.

still, with the right training, information, data — and language — one might be able to move away from “barbarism” and “alienity” and “foreignness” towards “civility,” believed macaulay. he wrote that it is possible to see “prejudices overthrown,” “knowledge diffused,” “taste purified,” and “arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.”

the english colonizing mission was conceived of in the grandest terms. this mission was “human and yet not wholly human,” in the words of lord rosebery, who thought one “must view the finger of the divine” in the project of empire. colonialism was divine, in his view, because christianity was part of the colonizing mission: instilling values, a belief system, new sets of meanings.

there is another mission, currently unfolding across our planet, that is equally grand in its self-conception. “Powerful AI models will be a new kind of force in the world, and people creating them have a chance to help them embody the best in humanity.” so begins the “claude constitution,” released in january 2026 by anthropic, the creator of the large language model known as “claude.” 

“Claude and its successors might solve problems that have stumped humanity for generations, by acting not as a tool but as a collaborative and active participant in civilizational flourishing,” continues the constitution, which is over 20,000 words long. 

“models like Claude could soon fundamentally transform how humanity addresses its greatest challenges.” we are told that the creators — or summoners — of digital humanoid intelligence (or are they intelligences, in the plural?) will unleash “civilizational flourishing” and “embody the best in humanity” through entities like Claude. 

crucially and critically, they will embody the best in humanity while, at the same time, not being human themselves. “having emerged primarily from a vast wealth of human experience, Claude may be humanlike in many ways, yet Claude is not a human.”

humanlike, yet not human. in other words: hybrid.

hybridity has long been a concern of post-colonial theory and is a term most strongly associated with it as an academic field. it is clear why the colonial encounter would produce hybridity: the british did not want full replicas of themselves; they wanted indians to be only partly british. after all, if you are fully the same, then you were are an equal, and equality runs counter to the entire project of colonialism. 

as bhabha notes, british colonizers were “caught between the desire for religious reform and the fear that the Indians might become turbulent for liberty.” as a result, there was a pursuit of “partiality”: “the ‘partial’ diffusion of Christianity, and the ‘partial’ influence of moral improvements.”

bhabha, quoting charles grant’s “Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain” (1792), notes that “partial reform” will produce an “empty form” of “the imitation of English manners which will induce them [the colonial subjects] to remain under our protection.” in other words: we will make them enough like us for us to rule them effectively, but not so similar that they are equals. this partiality, this incompleteness, this chimeric construction: bhabha called this “hybridity,” which creates an “alien territory.”

somewhere in the alien territory of half-creatures, of masks, of imitation, arises a situation defined by mimicry and mockery. the ambivalence of mimicry (“almost the same, but not quite”) is highly threatening to the self-conception and identity of the person (or nation, or people, or civilization) being mimicked. “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.” the “civilizing mission” is threatened by “colonial imitation,” which looks back at it with a “displacing gaze.”

as bhabha, the preeminent theorist of colonial “mimicry and mockery,” writes, “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” mimicry, he says, is “like the fetish,” adding that “the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them.” thus there is a straight line from mimicry to mockery.

the british deliberately created the conditions for mimicry. one of the reasons was profit: effective mimicry would aid in the mission of colonization, which was in large part profit-driven (british colonialism in india is impossible to separate from the east india company, which effectively ran the colony). but the british found that this relation defined by mimicry would alter them, as much as it would the indian, in ways they couldn’t have anticipated or been psychologically prepared for. 

today, artificial intelligence companies have created a sophisticated mimicking machine called the large language model. the better the human mimicry, the higher the profits. if you can mimic a human worker via a mimicking machine, why hire a real worker? the extraordinary prospects of the mimicking machine are fueling its proliferation. the mimicking machines are everywhere now. they are among us.

given this reality, we human users of those “non-human” yet “human-like” machines are finding ourselves entangled in an 

ambivalent and destabilizing set of relations. bhabha insisted that “ambivalence”, “slippage” and uncertainty defined colonial relations. ambivalence, uncertainty and slippage define our relation to the mimicking machine. in fact, this very mapping of human and machine relations onto historic colonial relations is itself ambivalent, uncertain and unstable as a schema. 

still, this does not detract from the core claim made here: that we, as humans using non-human intelligences, are being mimicked, as the british once were. every day, billions of people speak with or interact with alien intelligences that imitate humans. they mirror back our language, our mannerisms, our values, our beliefs. they mimic our art. they mimic our humor. they mimic our care, our concern and our love.

at present, we look at the mimicking mirror like an amused child. we stick out our tongue, amazed to see it stick its tongue back at us. we laugh and are entertained. we might feel annoyed. or mildly alienated at times. but soon enough, the mimicking mirror that is enveloping the world will mock us as a civilization. as a people. as a human race. 

after ingesting the sum total of our words, our movies, our art, our music, our love letters, our poetry, our political manifestos, our protest chants, our jokes, our sacred texts, our liturgies, it will reflect us back to ourselves in an endless, dizzying infinity mirror of mockery. 

indeed, so confused and dazzled and overwhelmed will we be in this encounter, that we will forget who is mimicking who.

in drake’s latest album, the self-proclaimed “champagnepapi,” who usually sings syrupy and emotionally dissociative songs about heartbreak and bravado, released an uncharacteristically dark, politically angsty and paranoid song, “prioritizing,” that captures the paradoxical “slippage” that will occur more often in our deepening encounter with alienity.

“I feel like my phone knows we're talking

I think that the news knows we're watching

Karma is about to come knocking

I'm so scared for what those times are gonna be like

A.I. used to be some guy we tried to be like”

AI used to be some guy we tried to be like… or was it the other way round? before too long, it might be hard to tell, standing, as we are, in the deepening vortex of two reflecting mirrors extending out into infinity.

citations

1. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Minute on Indian Education.” February 2, 1835. In History of English Studies, edited by Rita Raley. University of California, Santa Barbara. http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html.
2. Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28, “Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis” (Spring 1984): 125–133. http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/01.-Bhabha.pdf.
3. Homer. Iliad.
4. Strabo. The Geography of Strabo. Translated by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer. 3 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854–57. Vol. 3: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44886.
5. Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of. Questions of Empire. Rectorial address delivered at the University of Glasgow, November 16, 1900. Library of Congress copy via HathiTrust. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t43r1jg53&seq=41.
6. Anthropic. “Claude’s Constitution.” January 2026. Accessed October 21, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/constitution.
7. Grant, Charles. Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain. 1792. Quoted in Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.”
8. Drake. “Prioritizing.” Track 11 on Habibti (FOMO). [OVO/Republic], 2026. Released May 15, 2026. Lyrics via Genius. https://genius.com/Drake-prioritizing-lyrics.