A New Hegemonic Hope: Daemonic Agency in the Techno-Thriller Novels of Daniel Suarez
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article reflects on how contemporary science fiction has initiated a paradigmatic shift in the conceptualization of hegemonic force. Focussing on the figure of the Daemon depicted in two recent techno-thriller novels – Daemon (2009) et Freedom (2010) by American author Daniel Suarez – I show how the pervasive conceptions surrounding the agency of modern technology that we find in the late writings of Martin Heidegger are confronted in twenty-first century narratives that question the way we conceptualize the hegemonic directing of human consciousness by re-examining the figures of Ancient Greco-Roman thought. In the article, I pay particular attention to how what I call the “daemonic mobility” of human thought that we find in the writings of the Neo-Platonist Apuleius is eliminated by Augustine in his devising (in City of God and his other writings) of a permanent locus of existential consciousness, and how this contributes to Heidegger’s understanding of the essence of technology as the “coming to presence of art”. By re-investing the figure of the daemon and the mobility of human thought, Suarez narratives allow us to renew our understanding of the nature of this poeisis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".