Try something. Open Google and search “most beautiful women.” You’ll see a diverse array of faces now. Google has learned to perform diversity, tweaking its algorithm after years of criticism for surfacing overwhelmingly white results and overwhelmingly few black results.

Progress, right?

Now open a magazine. Turn on the news. Scroll through the models in any major advertising campaign. The defaults snap back into place. The runways, the covers, the anchor desks, the faces selling you cars and watches and perfume: still overwhelmingly white. Google learned to curate a better image; the culture it indexes didn’t change nearly as much.

Now search “actors.” You’ll see some Black faces now, too. But keep scrolling and notice who’s missing. Where are the Asian actors? Where are the South Asian actors? Dev Patel, Ke Huy Quan, and Michelle Yeoh have Oscars, but they’re nowhere in sight. The algorithm can only reflect what the industry has built, and Hollywood has spent a century building a world where whiteness needs no announcement.

But whiteness is only the most visible output of a deeper program. Beneath it runs code that didn’t just decide whose faces count as default, but whose bodies could be owned, whose land could be taken, and who gets to strip-mine the planet.

This isn’t a glitch. It’s a feature of a much older operating system, one that wrote hierarchy into the structure of the sacred itself: God over creation, man over nature, man over woman, chosen over unchosen, civilized over savage. Whiteness is a late iteration of this program. But the source code is ancient.

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I didn’t learn about race from a textbook. I learned it by immersion and by contradiction.

I grew up in what people politely call a “low-income neighborhood” and what everyone who lived there called the ghetto. From birth through high school, my closest friends were Black and brown. I slept over at their houses, ate at their tables, played the same video games, listened to the same music, laughed at the same jokes. I experienced Black culture not as an observer but as a guest who kept getting invited back. These weren’t “diverse friendships” in the sanitized way that phrase gets used now; they were just my friendships, the only ones I had, in the only world I knew.

Then I’d come home.

Home was a white household suffocating under addiction, abuse, and the kind of casual racism that uses the n-word regularly and always as a slur. My family didn’t think of themselves as racist, though they were. Their hatred wasn’t hot; it was room temperature. It was the default.

So I grew up bilingual in a sense, fluent in two Americas that shared geography but almost nothing else. And that dual fluency made me hypersensitive to something most white people never have to notice: the way whiteness operates as an invisible norm, structuring reality while pretending to be neutral.

I’ve spent my life since then as a kind of cultural archaeologist, digging through the sediment layers of human thought: Socrates to Dewey, the Tao Te Ching to Korean Zen, Ken Wilber’s integral theory to Leonard Shlain’s radical investigations into how the alphabet itself rewired human consciousness toward patriarchy. That range is precisely what let me see the problem. A fish doesn’t know what water is until it’s experienced another environment. And everywhere I dig beneath Western civilization specifically, I keep hitting the same bedrock: a mythological source code that positioned certain humans as the default model and everyone else as variations, deviations, afterthoughts.

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In 1967, the medieval historian Lynn White Jr. published an essay in Science magazine called “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” It became one of the most cited articles in environmental history, and its argument remains as incendiary now as it was then.

White’s thesis was simple and devastating: the ecological catastrophe unfolding across the planet isn’t primarily a technological problem. It’s a religious one. White focused on Christianity, but the source code is shared. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all run on the same mythological framework: humanity as separate from and superior to nature, granted divine dominion over every living thing.

“Christianity,” White wrote, “is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” The Genesis story established a cosmos designed explicitly for human benefit: God created light and darkness, earth and sea, plants and animals, and finally Adam, to whom he granted naming rights over every creature, thereby establishing hierarchy through language itself. Eve came later, almost as an afterthought, to keep man from loneliness. Nature existed to serve. Men existed to rule. The template was set.

White traced how this worldview dismantled the older pagan animism that had once protected the natural world. In antiquity, every tree had its spirit, every spring its guardian, every hill its genius loci (spirit of a place). Before you cut down a tree or dammed a brook, you had to reckon with the sacred presence dwelling there. Christianity systematically destroyed these beliefs, desacralizing nature, draining the divine from the material world, and concentrating all spiritual significance in the human, specifically in the human’s relationship to a transcendent God.

“By destroying pagan animism,” White observed, “Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”

The environmental crisis, in this reading, isn’t a bug. It’s the logical output of a program running exactly as designed.

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But here’s what White didn’t fully explore: the same source code that placed humans above nature also placed certain humans above others.

The hierarchy didn’t stop at the species line. It continued inward, fracturing humanity itself into those who more fully embodied the “divine” image and those considered primitive and who existed closer to nature itself. The same theological logic that granted man dominion over nature granted certain men dominion over other men and over all women.

Consider the architecture of Genesis more carefully. God creates Adam in his own image. Eve is created from Adam; derivative, secondary, an auxiliary to the main project. This isn’t incidental detail; it’s foundational code. Paul builds on it explicitly in his letters: “the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man.” The hierarchy is cosmic, divinely ordained, woven into the structure of creation itself.

And when European Christians encountered peoples who didn’t share their faith, their technology, or their phenotype, this same logic provided ready-made categories. These people weren’t fully human in the way we are human. They were closer to nature and we already know what nature is for. It exists to be used, exploited, improved, saved. The Doctrine of Discovery, which provided legal and theological justification for European colonization across the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific, wasn’t an aberration of Christian thought but was an application of it.

Whiteness didn’t emerge from nowhere. It was constructed and the blueprints were theological.

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The unmarked default operates most powerfully where it’s least visible. That’s the nature of defaults. They disappear into the background, becoming the invisible standard against which everything else is measured.

This is why Google image searches reflected what they did for so long, and why the fix required deliberate intervention. The algorithm wasn’t racist in any intentional sense; it was simply pattern-matching against the vast corpus of existing images, texts, and links that already encode whiteness as the norm. When millions of web pages use “beautiful man” to describe white men without qualification, and “Black beautiful men” or “Asian beautiful woman” only when race is foregrounded as a specific attribute, the search engine learns that whiteness is the unmarked case. It learns that whiteness is what “woman” means until told otherwise.

The pattern sharpens when you search “sexy women” or “sexy men.” This is the metric that actually drives advertising, the beauty standard the culture enforces. And here the defaults are even starker.

The same logic shapes AI image generators, which notoriously default to white faces when given racially unspecified prompts. It shapes spell-checkers that flag African American names as errors. It shapes voice recognition systems that struggle with non-white accents. Every new technology we build inherits the biases of the data it’s trained on—which means it inherits centuries of accumulated assumption about who counts as the default human.

We’re not just perpetuating the arbitrary limits and hierarchies of the past. We’re automating them.

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Leonard Shlain, in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, argued that the very technologies of literacy and linear thinking restructured human consciousness in ways that privileged masculine over feminine, abstract over embodied, domination over partnership. The shift from image-based to alphabet-based cultures correlated, he pointed out, with the rise of patriarchy, the suppression of goddess worship, the subjugation of women, and the emergence of the monotheistic male-centric religions that would shape Western civilization.

The Torah, the Bible, and the Quran didn’t just record existing beliefs. They installed them, creating a new operating system for human culture, one that encoded hierarchy into the structure of the sacred itself. God is one, God is male, God grants dominion to man over nature and to certain men over others. These assumptions became so foundational that they stopped being assumptions at all. They became the invisible architecture of reality—the structural armature upon which every Western and colonized culture has been built ever since.

This is what I mean by source code. Not conscious ideology, but the deeper layer of inherited myth that shapes what we can even imagine as normal, natural, or possible. Most people walking around today don’t consciously believe that white people are the default humans or that nature exists to be exploited or that women are derivative of men. But they don’t have to consciously believe it. The code is still running. It’s in the structure of our stories, our search results, our gut-level sense of what a “regular person” looks like.

And you can’t patch this with representation initiatives or diversity trainings, any more than you can fix a corrupted operating system by changing the wallpaper. You have to go deeper. You have to look at the source code itself and ask whether it’s worth saving.

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I don’t think it is.

I think any religion or ideology still running on this ancient architecture—any system that encodes human supremacy over nature, male supremacy over female, or one race’s unmarked centrality over all others—needs to be recognized for what it is: malware. Sophisticated malware, malware with beautiful cathedrals and profound poetry and millions of sincere adherents, but malware nonetheless.

Here’s one way to recognize malware: it doesn’t survive on its merits alone. These mythologies have persisted not because they’re self-evidently true, but because they’ve been enforced through the threat of eternal damnation—the promise of infinite torture for the crime of disbelief. Strip away the hellfire, and how many would still be running this software?

The structure is familiar: it’s the logic of the abuser who keeps his partner trapped not through love but through fear, not through truth but through the threat of what happens if she leaves. Any system that requires terror to maintain itself has already confessed its own illegitimacy.

And so: delete it. Write new source code. History only repeats what the code tells it to. Change the code, change what history repeats.

This isn’t an argument against spirituality or meaning or the human need for transcendence. It’s an argument against these particular stories, these specific inheritance chains that have brought us accelerating climate collapse, centuries of slavery and colonialism, and a world where you still have to add an adjective to be seen.

Lynn White, for all his critique, ended his essay by proposing Saint Francis of Assisi as a patron saint for ecologists, a saint who tried to depose humanity from its monarchy over creation and establish a democracy of all creatures. It was a hopeful gesture, an attempt to find resources for renewal within the tradition itself.

I’m less optimistic. I think the tradition is the problem. I think we need new stories, new source code, new mythological foundations that don’t begin with dominion and hierarchy and the unmarked default of one kind of human. We need stories that start from multiplicity, from ecology, from the radical proposition that there is no default—only difference, only diversity, only the endless variation of being.

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So here it is, plainly:

Question your defaults. When you imagine a “person,” notice who appears in your mind. When you consume a story, notice whose perspective you’re inhabiting and who exists only at the edges. When you use a technology, notice whose faces it generates, whose voices it recognizes, whose names it flags as errors.

And then go deeper. Trace these patterns back to their source. Read the old stories with new eyes—not to condemn everyone who ever believed them, but to understand how their assumptions became your assumptions, how their hierarchies became your normal.

Finally, give yourself permission to delete what doesn’t serve life. You don’t owe allegiance to mythologies that encode your supremacy or your subjugation. You don’t have to keep running software that crashes the planet and stratifies humanity into default and deviation.

The unmarked default was always a lie and a local story pretending to be universal truth. The sooner we name it, the sooner we can begin writing something better.  

We need a new picture of the cosmos that starts not with dominion, but with belonging. Not with hierarchy, but with kinship. Not with the unmarked default of one kind of human, but with the irreducible dignity of all of us, and of the living world that holds us.

The division between selfhood and the living world has to crumble. The ego we’ve inherited was built on these lies. A different source code would give the self an accurate definition—one that doesn’t require dominion to feel whole.

That’s the source code we need now.

It’s time to start writing it. We must overcome the fear that keeps us compliant. The bravest among us are those who question. Because their questioning gives others permission to do so as well. They are our modern heroes, and they open up a whole new world for generations to come. They step over the line of what’s permissible so others can see it’s survivable.

The backlash will come. It always does. Let’s find each other and weather the storm together.