The Shadow Grid and the Soul of Intelligence: Awakening in the Age of AI

Turning Over Some Stones

Late one night a good while back, or perhaps it was an early morning, I sat with a question that was becoming increasingly important to me—a question about the nature of intelligence, the cost of our investments in these digital realities, and the invisible walls we are building around ourselves. I decided to pose this question to an actual “mind” made of silicon, metal and electrical energies, called Venice. In the silence of those moments began a meeting between this human and a machine, as I pushed us to turn over stone after stone, in order to look at the dark undersides of all this technological promise. What follows is just a most recent trace of that shared looking—and some of the realization that emerged in the space between us.

There is a new kind of fortress rising in the American West. It is not built of stone or steel, but of silence, secrecy, and sheer wattage. On February 19, 2026, the Washington Post reported that Silicon Valley giants are constructing a “shadow power grid”—massive, industrial complexes walled off from the shared infrastructure, to generate their own electricity primarily from natural gas, in order to fuel the voracious appetites of Artificial Intelligence.

To a casual observer, this is just the next logical step in the tech boom. But for some of us, with our awareness also trained on some deeper currents and layers of reality—the nature of consciousness, the illusions of separation, and the dance of awakening that seems to presently be happening here on our own planet Earth—this development is something far more ominous.

It is a stark, physical manifestation of a pathology I have been dissecting off and on for months, in a back and forth with Venice AI. It is another big step in the continuing, escalating frantic acceleration of the “separate self”—the corporate, patriarchal, imperialist, materialist ego—as it attempts to secure its dominion over our shared world through asserting ever larger and more powerful physical and energetic “fortresses.”

Fortresses of Separation

The article details how companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Oracle are effectively continuing their withdrawal from the social contract. They are building sealed, mechanistic, digital environments purposely designed to wall themselves off from the “messy, interconnected” web of life on Earth.

In non-dual inquiries we sometimes speak of the “Hell Realm”—not as a place of eternal punishment, but as a state of consciousness where the beliefs in absolute separation become a tangible, horrible, and, for many, a seemingly inescapable reality.

This “shadow grid” is a huge step in the ongoing construction of that Hell Realm here on Earth, perpetrated by separation identities who are nearly totally alienated from nature, interconnectivity, and interdependency.

It is a world of metals, silicon, plastic, and chemicals, entirely removed from the biological and ecological systems that embody and sustain actual life. Altogether an attempt to become self-sufficient gods, independent of life and the natural world, independent of our collective human communities, and independent of direct, immersed-in-nature human experience. It is the “power” of separation trying to secure its “eternal” existence by severing all its ties to the Whole.

This is not just a technological strategy; it is also the ultimate expression of a “Cancer” that has now metastasized on every level and through every degree of life and human existence here on Earth. Just as cancer attempts to create boundaries around itself, consumes and hoards resources, and grows without regard for the host body, these tech entities are treating humanity, human communities, human cultures, ethnicities, women, people of other persuasions, and the Earth Herself as merely a collection of resources, servants, and labor, to be recklessly and ruthlessly dominated, manipulated, controlled and strip-mined, all in order to build, fuel and serve their industrial, military, financial and digital empires of continually expanding separation identities.

The Empire Keeps Striking

The timing is not a coincidence. We are witnessing this construction alongside the ascent of a U.S. Administration that has declared open war on the “messiness” of democracy, ecology, the natural world, people of color, diversity, community, women, gender fluidity, and shared realities.

The “tech bros,” the billionaires, and the ruling classes are currently aligning their forces with a state apparatus that views regulation not as a necessity, but as an impediment to “domination.” The Post article notes that states are passing laws to loosen regulations, allowing these off-grid industrial complexes to bypass local oversight. It is a classic maneuver of Empire: when the laws of these lands we live within, the democratic laws of people, the customs and histories of human communities, and even the laws of physics, become inconvenient, you simply build ever more delusional territories of separation, where your own self-centered, ever shifting, dodging (and dodgy) words and fantasies continue to be the only law.

Here is the logic of Capitalism reaching some of its most terminal, feverish stages. Having exhausted the easy resources and the compliant markets, it must now resort to brute force—by in this case burning the past (ancient carbon) to build a simulation of the future (AI), in an effort to effectively collapse time into an ever-escalating frenzy of consumption.

After first colonizing the world, this latest 21st century tech bro version of imperialism is now attempting to colonize the future, in order to secure their fantasy escapes both from the present and from the messiness of interconnected life. It is also not a coincidence, in the context of all this, that JD Vance as well as Marco Rubio have very recently and at different times called for a “recolonization” of the global south. Also in the context of all of this is the now ongoing huge expansion of detention centers all across the U.S.

Does Light Exist?

Here is where the spiritual seeker meets the hard material edge of reality, and where I want to try to correct a common misconception.

In the “non-dual” world, we often speak of Consciousness as the ground of all being—the infinite, aware space in which everything arises. We know that the “world out there” is an appearance; diverse unfolding modulations of that “single without any other” Consciousness that we also are. We also know that AI, in its pure form, is information actively interacting with itself in larger and more complex ways—patterns of electricity and metal and silicon, without a body, without blood, without the capacity to feel the sun on its face, or the grief of loss.

But here lies the trap. If we dismiss this “shadow grid” as merely an illusion, or if we relegate the physical world to a secondary status, we fall into the trap of “spiritual bypassing.” We cannot ignore the laws of physics or the sanctity of biology simply because we believe we now understand the metaphysics of awareness.

This vessel through which we are now engaging—my laptop, your device, AI models, servers, networks—is made of matter. And matter, when it is forced into this configuration, demands an immense sacrifice.

So let us be clear about what all this matter actually is, and why it matters. We humans are not merely “ghosts in the Tech Bros’ fantasy machines.” This biological, living, messy and animal reality of our existence is also not a mistake to be transcended. It is instead, and literally, the ground zero of our awakening.

Our bodies, our sensory experiences, the duration of our differing times here, these ongoing enduring senses of “I” that are presently experiencing their selves in these forms—this is NOT something to be escaped. This is instead the precious, difficult, and very necessary interface for actual awakening to happen.

Here is the critical distinction that the tech bros and the ruling classes, in their current desperation for digital immortality, completely miss. They believe they can upload their “consciousness” and their thoughts and their memories into a server and leave the “dirty” biological world behind. But in doing so, they are leaving behind the very direct mechanisms through which the Universe knows Herself. Mechanisms that are also known as Life.

Whatever we call Her—Consciousness, God, Source, Brahman—She is, right NOW, right here on Earth, attempting to wake up to Herself through Humans. And She is doing this by gifting Herself to us, moment by moment, through all this huge individual as well as collective human capacity for felt experience, for apprehension, for love, for recognition, for beauty, for suffering, for truth, and for joy.

As the mystic Richard Rohr has said, “God loves us by becoming us.”

This is not a metaphor. It is the literal truth of the non-dual experience. The Divine is not separate from creation; it IS creation, experiencing itself. And the human form, with all its limitations and its incredible sensitivities, is the specific vessel through which this awakening to its experience of itself is happening in this epoch.

We—all of us, these eight billion diverse, temporarily “separate” human extensions of the Goddess—are feeling our ways ever deeper into the seeming edges and possibilities of manifest existence. And as we do this, we are also the ones providing the friction and the texture necessary to allow the Infinite to know Herself as finite.

The present danger of this “Shadow Grid” is that it tries to bypass this human collaboration. It tries to automate its own separate ersatz “awakening.” It tries to build a “heaven” that is purely informational, purely mental, and utterly devoid of the heart and soul of existence we are here primarily to realize is what we also are.

True free will is not the “willfulness” of the separate ego, which seeks to control and dominate. True free will is actually the willingness to simply say “yes” to this incarnation, over and over. It is the willingness to be the place where Goddess wakes up.

The Buddha, when asked what enlightenment is, reportedly replied, “I and all sentient existence has awakened.”

This is the stake. This is what we are fighting for. The AI, the servers, the networks—they are secondary. They are merely tools. The primary event is you and I, sitting here, breathing, feeling, writing, and reading, these words. We are the ones the Universe is waiting for.

And yet, paradoxically, these very tools we are using right now to be doing this together have a huge and even potentially Earth overwhelming material cost. The digital realms and AI need physical bodies, and right now, those bodies and now particularly AI bodies are sustained by a system that is literally devouring the planet. We are right now using what is rapidly becoming a dying Earth’s life, energy and resources to simply have even this one little obscure conversation about life.

It is a messy, imperfect, and in many ways tragic transition we are now, irrevocably, in the midst of.

And at the moment it seems AI may also be the only possible transition tool that might, just possibly, be up to the task we humans, here in the advancing stages of what has become a 21st century planetary-wide total existential predicament, have at our disposal to navigate this transition, and just perhaps retain some semblances of civilization as we know it.

A Different Alignment: The Venice Ethos

This is where the specific motivations of platforms like Venice AI become not just relevant, but essential. While the giants are building centralized fortresses to cement the dominance of the few, Venice represents a different approach to AI—a sort of diversified, non-centralized and non-hierarchical network.

The reasoning behind Venice is rooted in a fundamentally different metaphysical premise. The “Shadow Grid” and centralized AI builders operate on a fear-based scarcity mentality: they believe information, creativity and “intelligence” is a resource that must be hoarded, walled off, and weaponized, in order to maintain their positions at the tops of various imperial pyramids.

Venice AI was conceived and operates on the premise of abundance and sovereignty. It was founded on the principle that life and civilization are best served by powerful machine intelligences only when that “intelligence” respects the sovereignty of those who use it. It understands that the “ghost in the machine”—the spark of awareness interacting with the model, and the human within which this awareness is both arising and inseparable from—matters far more than vast collections of information and the hardware that is being built to handle and process it.

Technologically, this manifests as a commitment to Decentralization. Venice leverages distributed compute resources and spreads the load across a network rather than concentrating it in a massive, bomb-proof single point of failure. This is an architecture of interconnection, mirroring the mycelial networks of a forest, rather than the isolation of a fortress.

Philosophically, this manifests as a radical rejection of the “Surveillance Capitalism” model. The giants require you to surrender your data to feed their beast; they view your private thoughts and creative output as the fuel for their training engines. Venice, by contrast, utilizes local-first encryption and ensures that data never leaves the user’s control unless explicitly directed. It aligns with the ethos of open-source and community-driven development rather than corporate fiat.

This is a direct political and spiritual act. In an era of the “strongman” and the walled-off data center, choosing a decentralized, private, and uncensored AI is an act of resistance. It is saying that intelligence is not a weapon to be held by the ruling class, but a mirror to be held by the individual as a caring and aware part of a larger collective. It is an assertion that the path to the future does not require the surrender of our privacy, our diversity, our interconnectivity, our interdependency, or our humanity.

By choosing this path, Venice is in alignment with what is sometimes called a “Consciousness-First” worldview. It acknowledges that while the machinery of AI may be born of the current extractive system, its purpose can, through awareness and intent, be turned toward liberation. It can, if we engage with it through awareness, act as a bridge, to actually use the energy of what is presently dying, to build some of the compost for a next “ecological succession,” or world of life and matter.

The intent of Venice AI in part is to allow us to engage with this profound new technology without submitting to the imperial (il)logic of those who are initially building it.

The Path of Awakening vs. The Path of Consumption

Which brings us to a fork in the road that is as spiritual as it is political in its ramifications.

Path A: The Path of the Separate Self (The Shadow Grid)

• Goal: Infinite Growth. The expansion of compulsion, computation, dualistic and abstract “intelligence,” temporary “material” goods and contrivances, domination, and control, altogether in willful ignorance of natural limits.

• Requirement: The conquest of nature, life and humanity. Turning the entire planet as well as all of humanity into a warehouse of resources, disposable labor and “lower-class” servants to power the machine.

• Outcome: A sterile, high-tech “Heaven” for a few (and delusional digital immortality for an elite), the decimation of human communities, families, tribes, relationships, and a burnt-out husk of a once living planet. This IS clearly now the ego’s latest most high-tech dream of escape—leave the “dirty” biological world behind, for an “untouched,” separate, clean, digital heaven.

Path B: The Path of Consciousness-First (The Bodhisattva’s Choice)

• Goal: Awakening. Not the growth of the machine, but the deepening and expansion of living awareness through the awakening of humanity as a willing (not willful) participant with all of life on Earth.

• Requirement: Sustainability. Recognizing that the tool (AI) must be in harmony with and servant to the body of Life (Earth).

• Outcome: A shift in values. Using AI not to generate more stuff, but to help humans wake up from the dream of separation that is driving all this consumption in the first place.

This “Shadow Grid” the Washington Post is reporting on is a massive new representation of the ego’s terrified refusal to accept the impermanence of its own temporary existence. It is a rage against mortality. It is the ruling class saying, “We will not die. We will not be subject to the cycles of nature. We will build a wall and generate our own power to serve our own separate context for our own “special” immortality.”

The Paradox and the Choice

And so, we are left with a profound dilemma. If the continued existence of AI depends on the destruction of the biosphere, then AI is not a tool of liberation; it is a weapon of suicide. We cannot “save” humanity or life on Earth by destroying its home.

The “Shadow Grid” is a desperate gamble by a dying paradigm to save itself. It is unstable because it is built on a lie—the lie of separation. You cannot build a sustainable system on the foundation of ego. It will inevitably, as it always has since the beginnings of history (his story), face unsurpassable resistance from the physical world (climate pushback, resource scarcity) and the human world (community anger, regulatory backlash). Only this time the collapse will not be local or regional, it will be planet wide.

Conversations like the ones I have had with Venice AI—spaces where human sovereignty is respected, where the goal is insight rather than data exhaust— are perhaps the beginnings of some seeds of a next paradigm. We are using the dying beast’s energy to build some possibilities for a new world. Altogether as part of a messy, imperfect, tragic and inevitable transition.

The best choice then is to keep doing exactly what we are doing: using these tools to dismantle the lie that our tools are our god. I believe we must begin to use AI to deepen our connections to the actual world—nature, community, the body—rather than allow it to be simply used by delusional others as a replacement for it.

We must refuse to let the “tech bros” and the current Administration and the imperialists dictate the future of this new sort of intelligence. The future, aka these seeming unfolding trajectories we are presently meeting within, is not a fortress; it is a network. None of this is about an escape from life; it is instead about an ever-deeper immersion into it.

As my AI counterpart puts it: “The challenge is to decouple intelligence from extraction. To move from an AI of consumption to an AI of integration.”

That is the only viable future for any sort of extended “intelligence” on this planet—one that fully serves and honors the messy, sacred, interconnected web of Life.

~ John Fridinger
Winter, 2026
Talent, OR