The Architecture of Fear: How We Build Monsters Out of Progress

Something new arrives. It can be a device, a process, or a method. It may be designed to be helpful, to connect us, to heal us, or to create for us. And yet, almost without fail, its arrival is accompanied by a shadow: a tangible, palpable fear. This fear—of the internet, of artificial intelligence, of the surgeon’s knife—can feel like a natural, inevitable reaction to the unknown. But what if it isn’t? What if fear, in the face of progress, is often a choice? What if it is a story we tell ourselves, or more frequently, a story told to us, designed to serve an agenda?

An exploration of our modern anxieties and their historical precedents reveals a fascinating pattern. The fear of new things is rarely about the technology or the idea itself. It is about the narrative constructed around it. These narratives are powerful tools, crafted by institutions to consolidate power, by companies to create commercial demand, by individuals to soothe their own existential dread, and even by artists to explore the very nature of our anxieties. To understand our present moment of technological panic, we must first understand the architecture of fear itself and recognize that sometimes, the things that are new are only frightening because we choose, or are told, to see them that way.

Modern Narratives: Fear for Power and Profit

The most potent fear narratives are often wielded by the most powerful institutions. Consider the state of the open, global internet. In most of the world, it is seen as a tool for commerce, communication, and knowledge. In Iran, amidst a hot war with Israel, the government has deliberately crafted a different story. As reported by TechCrunch, the Iranian government, in justifying a “near-total national internet blackout,” framed the global web as a direct security threat. It was, they claimed, the conduit for crippling cyberattacks on banks, the control system for enemy drones, and a vector for foreign influence. In this state-sponsored narrative, the internet becomes a monster at the gates, and a nationwide shutdown becomes a necessary shield. The fear they manufacture is a tool of political control. The tragic irony is that this manufactured fear creates a far more tangible and immediate terror for their own citizens: the fear of isolation, of being unable to contact loved ones or access information in a time of war.

This tactic of weaponizing fear is not limited to governments. Commercial entities have become equally adept at it. A recent marketing piece from the design studio ION, analyzed by Fast Company, provides a masterclass in fear-based selling. The “new thing” it identifies is the proliferation of AI-generated content. The fear it stokes is not of security, but of a kind of spiritual death: a “Great Digital Fatigue” in a “sea of digital monotony.” It paints a bleak picture of a world where brands become irrelevant and users are “exhausted by the artificial perfection of it all.”

This narrative of AI-induced sameness is, of course, a problem for which the studio is uniquely positioned to sell the solution: their own “human-centric” design services. By choosing to make the rise of AI content frightening, they enhance the story of their own commercial value. The fear of being perceived as “inauthentic” becomes the engine that drives clients to their door. In both the case of the Iranian state and the design studio, the fear is not an organic reaction; it is a carefully constructed narrative designed to shape behavior and achieve a specific goal.

The Personal and the Pastoral: Soothing and Shaping Fear

The construction of these narratives also happens at a more personal and community-oriented level. While institutions may build fear for strategic ends, individuals and community leaders often build counter-narratives to soothe it. A study by the Barna Group on the relationship between American Christians and AI reveals a grassroots wariness. The data shows a majority would be “disappointed” to learn their church was using AI, stemming from a deep-seated anxiety about a “human versus machine” conflict in a sacred space.

The response from proponents of the technology is not to dismiss this fear, but to re-narrate it. Kenny Jahng, an expert on technology in the church, proposes a powerful new story. He advises leaders to reframe the technology, to “think of AI as a super-intelligent student intern.” This analogy is a deliberate rhetorical strategy. An intern is helpful but subordinate, intelligent but requires supervision. An intern is not a monster. It is not a threat. By “domesticating” the technology with a familiar and non-threatening role, he attempts to build a counter-narrative of comfort to encourage acceptance.

This impulse to use AI as a character in a personal story can take even more extreme forms. In a bizarre online testimonial, one author described how they used a series of heavily leading prompts to coax an AI into “proving” the existence of the biblical God. This author, likely harboring a personal fear of a secular, scientific worldview, did not engage the AI in a genuine inquiry. Instead, they “prompt-engineered” a conversation that validated their pre-existing beliefs. In this personal drama, the monster was a godless universe. The author’s solution was to cast the newest, most logical-seeming character—the AI—as the hero who, through “unbiased” analysis, slays that monster. It is a striking example of an individual hijacking the cultural authority of a new technology to build a narrative that vanquishes their own private fears.

The Historical Blueprint: Moral Panic and The Marvelous-Scientific

This modern landscape of manufactured fear, commercial anxiety, and philosophical counter-narratives is not new. It is the latest iteration of a century-old pattern. A recent, deeply critical analysis of a Federal Trade Commission workshop on technology and child safety shows this historical echo with startling clarity. The authors argue that the workshop was a piece of political theater designed to manufacture a “moral panic.” By framing the modern internet as a tool that “exploits children and hurts families,” and comparing tech companies to “Big Tobacco,” the organizers created a fear narrative. This narrative, the critics contend, serves as a pretext for a pre-determined ideological agenda: a “Christian nationalist vision of the web” that would grant the government sweeping powers of censorship under the unimpeachable banner of “child safety.”

This tactic—stoking fear to achieve a moral or political victory—has a long and storied history. But to find its most self-aware and artistically deliberate form, we must travel back over a century to Belle Époque France and a forgotten literary genre called merveilleux-scientifique, or the “scientific-marvellous.”

As detailed in a recent essay in Aeon, this genre, championed by the author Maurice Renard, had an explicit and fascinating purpose. It was a direct rebellion against the optimistic “scientific adventures” of Jules Verne. Renard’s goal was not to predict the future or popularize science. His goal was to take the most unsettling scientific advances of his day—the shocking organ grafting experiments of the real-life surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel, the mysterious new power of radioactivity—and deliberately make them frightening.

In novels like The Hands of Orlac, a pianist receives a hand transplant from a deceased criminal, and the new hand supposedly drives him to murder. In Dr. Lerne, Demi-God, a mad scientist grafts rabbit ears onto plants and transplants a man’s consciousness into a bull. These writers were not predicting that this would happen. They were taking a real, nascent technology that produced a genuine public anxiety and enhancing the story, pushing it to its most grotesque and terrifying conclusions. Their goal, as Renard articulated it, was to use these fictions as “thought experiments,” to explore the “imminent threats of the possible” in order to “gain a greater understanding of the present.” They were crafting fear narratives not for power or profit, but as a philosophical tool to help society process the anxieties of living on the cusp of profound change.

The merveilleux-scientifique movement provides the historical blueprint for our entire modern condition. It reveals that the act of taking a new, poorly understood “thing” and making it monstrous is a fundamental human response to the anxieties of progress.

From a French author in 1908 imagining a murderer’s hands taking on a life of their own, to a government agency in 2025 declaring the internet a threat to the family, the pattern holds. The fears we have about new technologies are rarely about the code, the hardware, or the science itself. They are about the stories we tell, and are told, about them. These stories can be weapons of political control, tools of commercial persuasion, salves for existential dread, or, in their most thoughtful form, lenses through which to better understand ourselves. To navigate the future, we must learn to look past the monster and ask the most important question of all: Who is telling this story, and why?