In its third season Westworld (6.17) takes a surprising turn. As the series takes us out the amusement park for the first time, we learn that the outside world is also a kind of paradeisos. A hunting park within a hunting park. In the second season we learned that the park is recording all the movements and thoughts of its guests accumulating a huge amount of behavioral information destined for mind uploading and artificial intelligence projects. Westworld is driven by the imperatives of surveillance capitalism. That being said, it is not surprising that the outside world is also a kind of virtual paradeisos like the one we have described so far.

Caleb, the main character of the third season, is a traumatized ex-mercenary trapped in a life completely devoid of prospects. After saving Dolores’ life—one of the robots that managed to escape from the park—she reveals to him the nature of his world: just like in Westworld, humans have been placed in a gigantic prison, a global socioeconomic system tightly controlled by algorithms that defines a person’s place in society through psychological, genetic and behavioral patterns. A chilling application of surveillance capitalism that begins to lean more towards reality than fiction (10.8). In fact, Westworld allows us to appreciate one of the most unique features of the terrible place that has emerged from surveillance capitalism: our virtual paradeisos is an enormous Big data laboratory designed to generate certainty and apply it to market prediction.

True to the Gnostic-like political theology of the series, Dolores acts as an agent of liberation, a Sophia disseminating her knowledge (6.4, 9.16, 9.21):

They put you in a cage, Caleb; they decided what your life would be. They did the same to me.

Once Dolores reveals to Caleb that the system predicts that he will commit suicide in about ten to twelve years, one of the darkest aspects of the digital behaviorism implicit in surveillance capitalism comes to the surface:

Before the system, a man like you might have had a chance. Work hard, keep striving. You’ll never be more than a construction worker or a petty criminal. Because that’s all they’ll let you be. They will not invest in someone who is going to kill himself. But by not investing, they ensure the outcome.

Surveillance capitalism presents itself like a closed loop, a self-fulfilling prophesy, behavioral determinism (10.8.1). The ethos of “we are learning how to write the music, and them we let them dance,” implies that given enough data the desired outcome seems inevitable from the start. An assault on human agency that rivals the bio-behavioral aspects of Huxley’s Brave New World.

Uncertainty is the ferment from which human freedom arises.