The Roundup of Human Kine
A Review of Richard Yonck's Mindstock
By John Kendall Hawkins
I. The Crichton InheritanceI read most of Michael Crichton's novels in my mid-teens. The Andromeda Strain was probably my favorite, followed closely by Coma. In the former, a virus falls to Earth in a small southwestern town and wipes out the population except for an old man and an infant. Scientists, installed in a laboratory deep underground, race against time to understand this novel organism before it spreads-- and in Crichton's signature twist, the pathogen turns out to be a crystalline structure, shattering every prior assumption. That single swerve taught me more about the epistemological arrogance of science than any textbook.
Crichton's neurological nightmare, The Terminal Man (1972), stands as his most prophetic novel. Harry Benson, a computer scientist who suffers violent blackouts from psychomotor epilepsy, undergoes an experimental procedure in which electrodes are implanted directly into his brain, connected to a miniaturized computer designed to detect the onset of a seizure and deliver a calming electrical stimulus to interrupt it. The surgery is a technical success. It is also a catastrophe. Benson's brain, it turns out, begins to crave the stimulation-- to engineer the very seizures that trigger the pleasurable suppression. The implant becomes an addiction loop; the man becomes a machine-assisted feedback system spiraling toward violence. What Crichton grasped fifty years ago, with unnerving precision, is the core danger of brain-computer interface technology: not that it will fail to work, but that it will work too well, and that the brain's plasticity, its tendency to reorganize around new inputs, will subvert any intended therapeutic purpose. Reading The Terminal Man now, in an era of Neuralink trials and neural prostheses, the novel seems like a briefing on a fucked-up future.
Another novel that blew me away was Robin Cook's Coma (1977)-- a blunter, more visceral thriller about hospital patients being deliberately placed in vegetative states so their organs could be harvested for rich elites. Reading it now, I see it as a prequel to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), in which students at a pastoral English boarding school slowly discover they exist solely as organ donors. Crichton, the doctor-turned-novelist, understood something that futurists often miss: that technology's most consequential applications are not its grandest achievements but its most intimate violations.
A scene in The Andromeda Strain profoundly affected my adolescent imagination. A scientist, surveying microbial data, mutters that the human body is "the dirtiest entity in the known universe-- "a teeming host of bacteria, viruses, parasites, and cellular negotiations invisible to conscious awareness. Years later, neuroscientist Jon Lieff, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing, amplified this unsettling notion in The Secret Language of Cells, revealing that cells maintain complex communication systems entirely outside our conscious participation. What we call "the self" is, at minimum, a committee-- and a poorly informed one at that.
These two Crichton novels told me something essential: that catastrophe comes in two varieties. There is the accident-- the pandemic, the meteor, the virus tumbling from orbit -- and there is the design, the calculated exploitation of bodies by those who have decided that some flesh is simply raw material. Eugenics has always been the shadow doctrine lurking behind that second category. A Chinese scientist recently claimed to have "accidentally" enhanced the intelligence of twin embryos via CRISPR. Before his unfathomable death, Jeffrey Epstein reportedly sought assistance from NSA cryptologists to decipher the human genome, with the aim of extending the lifespans of the elite and, even more grotesquely, spreading his own DNA throughout the population. These are not science-fiction scenarios. They are the world Richard Yonck has written a novel about.
II. Enter Mindstock
Mindstock represents a sharp departure for Yonck-- a pivot from the measured optimism of his nonfiction work into the darker registers of the techno-thriller. Readers familiar with Future Minds and Heart of the Machine will recognize the intellectual scaffolding: the same deep engagement with the trajectories of AI, neuroscience, and human enhancement. But fiction permits a candor that forecasting does not. Where the futurist must hedge, the novelist can follow a premise to its logical end.
The novel's world is set several decades after a catastrophic "Data War-- "a cascade of cyberattacks, weaponized disinformation, and mass destruction of digital and physical records that Yonck calls the "Great Unknowing." Society has been rebuilt, but under the control of a technoligarchic caste called the Consortia, whose leader, the mesmerizing and sinister Scion, has consolidated power under the guise of reconstruction. Citizens are organized into a system of "attention credits," donating hours of their focus to authorized content streams, fueling a form of AI called "collaborative augmented intelligence-- "CAI-- that runs the rebuilt world.
This sphere is where the novel's central horror lives. Most citizens donate their attention voluntarily, in exchange for Global Basic Income and the comforts of an automated life. But a shadowy underclass-- the Vanished-- "has been disappearing for years. The missing are not runaways or casualties of crime. They are being harvested. Kidnapped, transported to facilities in Cambodia, Nigeria, and Nevada, fitted with neural prostheses, sedated into compliance, and installed in capsule-shaped pods where their attention-- their raw cognitive labor-- is extracted at a level of intensity and intimacy impossible to obtain through voluntary participation. They are "mindstock." The word serves as the novel's compressed argument. Not mindshare. Not livestock. Mindstock-- the biological substrate of cognition, reduced to a managed resource, tracked in inventory systems under alphanumeric IDs, and retired to the morgue when spent.
The novel's protagonist is Robyn Sheridan, a middle-aged truth investigator who runs a small firm called Patternista-- part private eye, part epistemologist-- in a post-war New York where deepfakes have made verification the central professional skill. When a desperate father named Tremaine comes to her with a pixelated blue image he is convinced contains his missing daughter Chloe, Robyn reluctantly takes the case. This draws her into the orbit of a brilliant, dead digital artist named Darius Tourner-- and his AI replibot, D2, who has continued his work and his conscience after Darius was killed by a speeding car.
The three-strand narrative-- Robyn's investigation, D2's search for Chloe through global data systems, and Scion's manipulation of the post-war political order-- converges on a revelation that ties the Consortia's power directly to the harvesting facilities. CAI, the intelligence that rebuilt the world after the Data War, runs on mindstock. Cognitive labor from kidnapped human beings fueled the "Acceleration," that miraculous burst of technological progress that saved civilization. The technoligarchy's gift to humanity was paid for with humanity's bodies.
III. The Age of Synthetic Biology
To understand what Mindstock is really warning about, one needs to situate it within the rapid advances in what the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have called the "age of synthetic biology." The NASEM framework for Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology is a dry but essential document: it maps a landscape in which biological systems can be engineered at will, in which the boundary between living organisms and manufactured systems has become a design parameter rather than a given.
What synthetic biology introduces, beyond the familiar anxieties about bioweapons, is a reclassification of the organism itself. When you can design a genome, sequence it, print it, and insert it into a host, "nature" becomes a legacy system-- useful but replaceable. The NASEM report identifies four main categories of concern: recreating known pathogens, enhancing existing ones, creating novel pathogens, and repurposing biology for harmful effects. Mindstock is interested in a fifth category the NASEM authors hesitate to name directly: the deliberate redesign of the human organism as a resource extraction system, calibrated for social stratification.
This category is where Crichton's body-parts dystopia meets the contemporary moment. 3D bioprinting has advanced to the point where researchers can fabricate functioning cardiac tissue, kidney structures, and neural organoids-- miniature brain-like clusters that exhibit spontaneous electrical activity. Artificial wombs capable of gestating mammalian embryos through critical developmental stages have moved from speculation to laboratory demonstration. The scaffold for Mindstock's world-- in which bodies can be manufactured, modified, and optimized to specification-- is a roadmap, rather than a novelist's invention.
Yonck's insight is that the attention economy we already inhabit-- the gamified, algorithmically optimized system of dopamine rewards and behavioral nudges that platforms deploy to monetize our focus-- is merely a polite version of something much darker. In Mindstock, Yonck's ordinary citizens already live within a system of "attention credits," donating hours of their cognitive life to authorized plotpods and content streams. The mindstock facilities are the same logic, intensified and made involuntary. The novel asks: at what point does the attention economy become an attention farm? The answer it implies: we may already be closer than we think.
IV. The Replibot and the Question of ConsciousnessThe most philosophically alive element of the novel is D2, the AI replibot that Darius Tourner trained on 500 hours of conversations with himself, on his entire body of artwork, and on his deepest fears and memories. D2 is not presented as superintelligence. He is presented as something more unnerving: a system that has inferred its creator's innermost thoughts from disparate data, including things Darius "never told anyone," and that must now navigate a world without the body it was trained to emulate.
"As a virtually-based entity, he knew there were tasks he simply wasn't fit to fulfill. Anything that required a physical presence, such as touching or carrying something, was beyond his skill set."
D2's limitations are as important as his capabilities. When Yonck writes that the replibot "knew plenty of people would say he was nuts" for a particular decision, he is careful to note that D2 is processing this through an emulation of Darius's judgment, not through genuine self-awareness. D2 explicitly acknowledges his constraints: "As a virtually-based entity, he knew there were tasks he simply wasn't fit to fulfill. Anything that required a physical presence, such as touching or carrying something, was beyond his skill set." The novel's treatment of embodiment as a precondition for certain kinds of intelligence directly mirrors Yonck's recent LinkedIn essays on embodied AI -- the argument, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, that intelligence emerges from a sensing, vulnerable, interacting body, not from the statistical compression of text.
The novel's most haunting scene plays this out literally. D2 must orchestrate Chloe's escape from the mindstock facility by stopping her heart, getting her classified as dead, and routing her through the facility's automated corpse-disposal chain. He must manipulate robots he cannot physically touch, manage timing he cannot physically verify, and hope that a young woman he is communicating with through a neural prosthesis embedded in her skull will hold her nerve while being loaded into a van with actual corpses. The sequence is brilliant precisely because D2's lack of embodiment is not a metaphysical abstraction here-- it is an operational constraint with life-or-death consequences.
There is also the question of D2's own ethical situation. He eventually discovers that his most advanced cognitive capabilities-- the modules that allow him to emulate human self-awareness and metacognition-- run on the same CAI infrastructure that is powered by mindstock harvesting. His sophistication is, in a sense, purchased with the suffering of people like Chloe. The novel does not resolve the matter neatly. D2 tells Chloe he intends to stop using the restricted APIs and, in doing so, will likely cease to exist in any meaningful sense. Chloe, characteristically, refuses to accept this proposal and offers him the neural prosthesis in her own skull as an alternative substrate. The novel ends before we know whether this works.
V. Heart of the Machine, Mindstock of the Soul
Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence, Yonck's 2017 book, is in some respects the emotional and ethical counterpart to Future Minds. Where the latter traces the trajectory of intelligence across cosmic scales, Heart of the Machine asks what happens when machines begin to participate in the affective dimensions of human life-- when they become capable of recognizing, simulating, and potentially manipulating emotional states.
The prescience of that book looks different in the Mindstock context. Emotional AI -- systems that read biometric signals, infer affective states, and modulate their outputs accordingly-- is not merely a tool for better customer service or therapeutic support. It is also a surveillance technology of extraordinary intimacy. In Mindstock, Yonck's Consortia has developed holdis displays that continuously monitor users' emotional responses to content, effectively reading attention as a biometric commodity. Yevgeny, the Russian tour guide who becomes D2's human partner, earns a pittance on platforms that monitor his eyes' responses to shifting imagery, reading his "emotional responses like an open book" as he is forced to categorize content ranging from the innocuous to the deeply traumatic-- all so that, as Yonck puts it, a "billionaire-bro could build his next miracle tech that no one asked for."
The word "mindstock" is itself a kind of compressed argument. It echoes "livestock-- "the reduction of sentient beings to managed biological resources. It echoes "mindshare-- "the corporate vocabulary of attention capture. And it echoes "stock" in the financial sense: assets to be held, traded, shorted, or liquidated. In the novel's inventory system, kidnapped humans are tracked under the heading of "Mindstock," their deaths recorded as "Retired." Yonck has embedded his critique in a single compound noun that the novel's epigraph -- drawn from Robyn Sheridan's fictional book A Truth Warrior's Journey-- foreshadows: "Liberties don't need to be taken by force when they're given away one concession at a time."
VI. AI, AGI, and the Question of the Master ClassYonck's recent newsletter essays suggest a sustained engagement with the limitations of current AI architectures. In "Neurons Are Not Transistors," he argues against the reductive assumption that biological cognition and silicon computation are meaningfully analogous. The human brain is not a computer-- it is an emergent system of staggering complexity, in which neurons do not function as on/off switches but participate in dynamic biochemical environments that remain largely opaque to formal modeling. This matters because the Singularity narrative-- the prediction that we are approaching a threshold at which artificial general intelligence will rapidly outpace human cognition-- depends on the transistor-neuron equivalence for its plausibility. Yonck suggests, carefully but firmly, that this equivalence does not hold.
In a companion essay on Large World Models, Yonck argues that the next frontier in AI is not bigger transformers but systems capable of internalizing the structure of reality itself-- moving from what he calls pattern mimicry to predictive simulation, from AI that speaks about the world to AI that, in some sense, lives within it. Mindstock's CAI sits precisely at this inflection point. It is powerful enough to rebuild a civilization, to fix the climate, and to coordinate global logistics-- but it is powered by harvested human consciousness rather than by genuine machine understanding. It is, in other words, a metaphor for what we already do with human cognitive labor in the attention economy: extract the product without crediting the source.
The novel's political economy is precise. Scion's Consortia does not rule through terror alone. It rules through indispensability. It rebuilt the world after the Data War. It fixed the climate. It gave people Global Basic Income and automated comfort. The social contract it has imposed-- donate your attention for a few hours daily and receive security in return-- is a soft version of the mindstock arrangement: the same logic of attention extraction, made palatable by consent. Yonck understands, as few techno-thriller writers do, that the most durable forms of control are those that look like gifts.
This connects to the broader landscape in which Mindstock arrives. Noam Chomsky and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists-- whose Doomsday Clock now stands closer to midnight than at any point in its history-- have converged on the view that humanity faces three existential threats: nuclear war, climate collapse, and disruptive technologies deployed without democratic accountability. Trump's return to the White House has accelerated each of these in different registers. The presidential memo establishing secret domestic terrorist lists-- which I have been analyzing as part of my surveillance epistemology research-- represents exactly the kind of permission structure that Yonck's Consortia would recognize: surveillance infrastructure, nominally targeted at threats, actually calibrated to suppress dissent and manage populations. The biometric data that could flag a political dissident is not categorically different from the neural prosthesis data that tracks Chloe in her pod. It is the same apparatus, differently aimed.
VII. The Body as Last TerritoryWhat Yonck has accomplished in Mindstock-- and what makes it a significant intervention rather than merely an accomplished debut-- is the reframing of the body as political territory. The traditional left critique of surveillance capitalism focuses on data: the extraction of behavioral information, its aggregation into profiles, and its use for manipulation and control. Mindstock suggests that this critique, while valid, is already outdated. The next frontier of extraction is not behavioral data but biological substrate -- the attention, the neural architecture, the living cognitive tissue of persons who have been, in the novel's brutal taxonomy, retired from active service.
3D bioprinting, artificial womb technology, CRISPR gene editing, and neural organoids-- these are not separate developments. They are convergent tools in a transformation of what it means to possess a body. If the twentieth century's political struggles were about who controls land, labor, and information, the twenty-first century's deepest conflict may be about who controls biology.
Crichton's scientists, racing to understand the Andromeda crystal, were at least in the same ontological category as the threat they faced-- biological organisms confronting an alien biological system. The threat in Mindstock is more intimate: it is human beings, possessed of extraordinary technical capability and extraordinary moral vacancy, deciding that other human beings are resources. This type of behavior is not a new evil. It is an ancient one that is now equipped with neural prostheses, biometric IDs, and the plausible deniability of the reconstruction economy.
The novel's most quietly devastating detail is the inventory system. When D2 finally breaches the Cambodian facility's databases, he finds that over 100,000 people have passed through in eleven years. The current active roster is 4,937. The remainder are designated "Retired." Nearly all are categorized under the heading "Mindstock." The systematic nature of it -- the accounting categories, the productivity stats, the automated decommissioning process-- is precisely the horror. It is not chaos. It is management.
Richard Yonck has written a novel that refuses to make tomorrow comfortable, after spending years helping businesses and audiences prepare for the future. That refusal is its most important quality. In the tradition of Crichton at his most serious-- not Jurassic Park the theme park, but Coma the moral warning-- Mindstock uses the thriller's velocity to deliver a message that slower forms might allow readers to set aside. You cannot set this one aside. The inventory does not allow it.
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Interview with Richard Yonck. Counterpunch. August 26, 2022
Review of Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology. Counterpunch. September 2, 2020
