Bones, Brands, and Algorithms
How early Christians built the playbook for resistance, and why Silicon Valley is running it in reverse.
“I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.” — Benjamin Franklin, 1750
Franklin couldn’t be bothered to edit. I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Both of us eventually got there.
I find it totally amazing that I am sitting here on a Sunday in my house writing about ancient Christian symbolism. Because I detested art history growing up. I was allergic to it. In the 1980s, because I am terribly old, I sat in dark classrooms for what seemed like hours looking at slides of ancient imagery and symbolism, and I could not have cared less. I wanted to be anywhere else.
Now, I could not be more excited about all of it because it is telegraphing everything that is happening in our world today. Running through it is a vein of deep Christianity, and now, watching my own son head off to university this year, these lessons and these stories feel more critical than ever. We live in a world that seems totally unhinged and divided, and all of it is amplified by the algorithms driving us further apart under the guise of connection and being “social.”
So I apologize to anyone reading this who actually had to experience me as an adolescent who really could not give a fuck about any of this stuff. Now, in my fifties, I cannot believe how critical all of it is to humanity's future. And how all of these things from centuries ago, many centuries, hold the answers to our future.
Yesterday, after I published my essay about the catacombs and AI, I was surprised by the response. People I hadn’t heard from in years reached out. The piece was reposted in Italian. A colleague wrote something about it on LinkedIn that was better than anything I actually wrote. I didn’t want to let too much time pass between that post and these thoughts, because there is more to say. A lot more. So please stay tuned and buckle up. And thank you to everyone who is following and supporting me. It means more than you know.
A friend wrote me a message I had to read twice. He is a brilliant writer, a former altar boy, a collector of relics, and an aficionado of the underground. He is also someone who, by his own account, is no longer on speaking terms with the Most High. But in my conversations with him, I am willing to wager that he knows the Church’s history better than most people who still attend it. And he reminded me of something I had overlooked.
The catacombs were not just a hiding place. They became a supply chain.
In 1563, the Council of Trent, the great legislative engine of the Counter-Reformation, issued a decree reaffirming the veneration of holy relics. This was not casual theology. The Reformation had gutted Catholic churches across northern Europe. Protestants called the keeping of relics idolatry. Bones were interred, reliquaries smashed, altars stripped. The physical infrastructure of devotion was being dismantled piece by piece.
The Church had a branding problem. It needed something tangible, something that could be held and touched and placed under glass, something that could anchor belief in a body when belief was becoming abstract. It needed relics. And it needed a lot of them.
Fifteen years later, on May 31, 1578, vineyard workers digging for volcanic stone on the Via Salaria broke through the ground and fell into a forgotten world. Below the vineyards lay an enormous network of early Christian burial tunnels, sealed for centuries. The Coemeterium Jordanorum and the surrounding catacombs held the remains of somewhere between half a million and three-quarters of a million people, Christians, Jews, and pagans, stacked in niches carved into tufa rock, corridor after corridor, descending into the dark.
The Church had asked for relics. The earth answered.
What followed was one of the most extraordinary logistics operations in religious history. Bodies believed to be those of early Christian martyrs were exhumed, authenticated (generously; a capital “M” on a funerary plaque was sometimes taken as evidence of martyrdom, though it could have meant almost anything), and dispatched to churches across Catholic Europe. These were the Katakombenheiligen, the catacomb saints.
They arrived in boxes bearing Latin names. They were given to convents where nuns who specialized in the decorative arts spent years reconstructing brittle bones, reinforcing them with glue, wrapping them in layers of silk gauze, and replacing missing skulls with ceramic or wood. Then they adorned them. Gold leaf. Cut gemstones. Velvet robes. Diamond-set eye sockets. The dead were dressed for a second life.
My friend owns a reliquary containing a chip of St. Victor, a man martyred in 290 AD, twenty-three years before Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, and none of it would have been necessary. The timing is unbearable if you think about it for too long.
Churches throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland received these jeweled skeletons and installed them in glass cases, in side altars, behind gilded frames. They were both prestige objects and devotional anchors. They told the congregations of newly contested Catholic regions: the faith is old, the faith is real, the faith has bones you can see.
The catacombs, built to hide the dead from the state, had become a mine. The Counter-Reformation descended into the tunnels and extracted belief itself.
This is the detail my friend gave me, and it changes how I think about my first essay. I wrote about the catacombs as a metaphor for digital resistance: the way people today are going underground to escape algorithmic authority, building encrypted spaces, poisoning training data, inventing languages the machines can’t parse. All of that still holds. But the catacombs story doesn’t end with resistance. It ends with the thing that always comes after resistance: power, discovering the underground, and finding a use for it.
The question isn’t just whether people will build digital catacombs. They already are. The question is what happens when the surface sends someone down to harvest what they find.
But my friend’s message did something else. It returned me to a detail I’d been sitting with since before I wrote the first piece: the symbols.
In my last Substack, I wrote about the Ichthys, the fish, and how early Christians used it as a kind of recognition protocol. One person drew an arc in the dirt. If the stranger completed it, you had found a friend. If not, it was just a line in the sand. The Ichthys was Christianity’s first logo, and its genius was that it was invisible to anyone who didn’t already know what it meant.
But the Ichthys was not the last logo. And the progression from the fish to what came after it tells a story about power that I think is worth examining carefully. Because it maps, almost exactly, onto what is happening with technology right now.
The hidden symbol
The Ichthys belonged to the underground. It appeared in the catacombs of St. Sebastian, the catacombs of Domitilla, and the catacombs of Priscilla, where I stood last week. It was scratched into walls and tombs, and the wet surfaces of tunnels where the air was thin and the only light was what the guides from the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology carried ahead of you. As a Greek acronym, Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, it encoded an entire theology in five letters that happened to spell the word for fish. A coincidence so perfect it felt providential.
The fish was resistance made legible only to the resister. It required shared knowledge. It was useless without trust. It was a symbol designed for conditions of persecution, and it worked precisely because it demanded friction: you had to know already what it meant before it meant anything at all.
The imperial symbol
In 312 AD, the emperor Constantine was preparing for the Battle of the Milvian Bridge against his co-emperor Maxentius. What happened next depends on which historian you trust. The contemporary writer Lactantius says Constantine was instructed in a dream to mark his soldiers’ shields with a divine symbol. The later historian Eusebius, writing decades after the event, says Constantine saw a cross of light in the sky bearing the words “Conquer by this.”
But the symbol on the shields was not a cross. It was the Chi Rho: the Greek letters X (chi) and P (rho), the first two letters of Christos, superimposed. It was Christianity’s second logo, and it could not have been more different from the first.
The Ichthys was drawn in dirt and erased with a foot. The Chi Rho was painted on military shields and carried into battle. The fish whispered. The Chi Rho shouted. The Ichthys asked: "Are you one of us? The Chi Rho declared, "We are in charge now."
Constantine won the battle. Christianity went from a persecuted sect to an imperial religion within a generation. And the symbol of that transformation was not the cross. Not yet. The cross was still impossible.
The impossible symbol
Here is the fact that changes everything: in 312, crucifixion was still a common form of Roman execution. The cross was not a religious symbol. It was a functioning instrument of state terror, used to kill slaves, foreigners, and citizens of low social standing in public, slowly, as a warning.
Using the cross as a Christian symbol while crucifixion was still practiced would have been, at best, grotesque. At worst, it would have been Roman propaganda against the Christians themselves. You worship a man we killed on one of these. The cross was a weapon the empire had used against them. It could only signify shame, not glory. Death, not resurrection. The earliest Christian art contains no depictions of crucifixion. Not because the artists didn’t know the story. Because the story was still happening to people they knew.
Constantine abolished crucifixion sometime around 320 AD, reportedly out of reverence for the symbol’s power. The fifth-century historian Sozomen recorded the decision. And once the punishment disappeared from public life, a slow transformation began. What had been unspeakable became speakable. What had been an execution device became a meditation object. What had been the empire’s threat became the faith’s promise.
But this took time. The earliest depictions of the crucifixion in Roman Christian art don’t appear until the fifth century, more than a hundred years after the punishment was abolished. The cross had to pass through a long silence before it could be reclaimed. The memory of the real thing had to fade before the symbol could bear a different meaning.
The universal symbol
By the time the cross replaced the Chi Rho and the Ichthys as the dominant Christian symbol, Christianity had transformed so completely that it is easy to miss. It had gone from a persecuted underground movement whose adherents scratched fish into catacomb walls, to an imperial project whose emperor painted a monogram on military shields, to a universal faith whose central image was the very instrument that had once been used to destroy it.
Hidden. Imperial. Universal.
Three symbols. Three relationships to power. And each transition required something specific: the Chi Rho required an emperor willing to weaponize a faith. The cross required the abolition of the thing it represented. Neither transition was inevitable. Both were strategic. Both were, in the most literal sense, rebrands.
I have spent my career in technology, in the rooms where brands are built and rebuilt, and I can tell you: the progression from Ichthys to Chi Rho to cross is the most consequential identity redesign in human history. Not because it was the most visually sophisticated. Because it tracked, exactly, the movement of a community from hiding to power to universality. The logo changed because the relationship to authority changed. And the relationship to authority changed because the conditions on the ground changed.
But the symbols only tell part of the story. What struck me hardest in the catacombs wasn’t the Ichthys. It was the pictures.
The art that hid in plain sight
A striking fact about the earliest Christian art: the crucifixion never appears. Not once in the first three centuries. No cross, no nails, no crown of thorns. You would walk the tunnels of Priscilla or Domitilla or the catacombs of Saints Peter and Marcellinus and find no image of the event that would come to define the entire religion. Not because the artists were unskilled. Because the image was still too dangerous to make.
What you find instead is a visual language so deeply coded that a Roman official could walk past it and see nothing but decoration.
Christ appears as a beardless young shepherd in a short tunic, carrying a lamb on his shoulders. No halo. No robes. No divinity signaled in any way a Roman would recognize. He looks like a figure from a pastoral fresco in any wealthy Roman home, because the image was borrowed from Greek and Roman sculpture of the kriophoros, the ram-bearer carrying an animal to sacrifice. The Christians took a pagan image of sacrifice and inverted its meaning: not a man carrying an animal to slaughter, but a God carrying a soul to safety. If you knew, you knew. If you didn’t, you saw a shepherd.
The earliest known image of the Madonna and Child, dating to around 150 AD, is here in the Catacombs of Priscilla. Mary nurses the infant Jesus on her lap while a figure beside her, likely the prophet Balaam, points toward a star. It predates the word “Madonna” by more than a thousand years. It is small, quiet, and easy to miss. It was meant to be easy to miss.
And then there is Jonah.
Jonah is the most popular figure in all of early Christian catacomb art. Not Christ. Not Peter. Not Paul. Jonah. He appears over a hundred times across the Roman catacombs: thrown from a ship, swallowed by a sea creature, spat out onto dry land, resting beneath a vine. The story of a man swallowed by a monster and returned to life after three days. The parallel to the resurrection is obvious. Jesus himself made it explicit in Matthew: “Just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
The story was even older than Jonah. The Greek hero Hercules was swallowed by a sea monster near the harbor of Joppa, the same port Jonah departed from, and emerged after three days. Perseus battled a ketos off the same coast. The Babylonians told of a fish-god named Oannes who rose from the sea to deliver wisdom to humanity. The pattern of a hero swallowed by the deep and returned to life existed across Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia long before it appeared in Hebrew scripture. The early Christians didn’t invent the image. They inherited it. And that is precisely why it was safe to paint on a catacomb wall.
But here is what matters: a Roman looking at a painting of a man being swallowed by a sea creature would see a familiar myth. A Greek adventure story. Maybe a reference to Hercules, Perseus, or the tale of Endymion. The Christians painted the resurrection on their walls, and the empire walked right past it.
And in the Catacombs of Priscilla, in the cubicle near the Good Shepherd on the ceiling, there is a fresco of Abraham and Isaac. A father and his son are approaching an altar. The boy carries the wood for his own sacrifice on his back. A Roman sees a scene from Hebrew scripture, unremarkable, one of many ancient stories about gods demanding offerings. A Christian sees the crucifixion. Isaac carries the wood up the mountain, the way Christ will carry the cross. The beloved son is laid upon the wood by his father. The father’s hand is stayed at the last moment, and a ram is substituted, caught in a thornbush that prefigures the crown of thorns. Every element of the story maps onto the passion narrative, and the early Church fathers, Melito of Sardis, Origen, and Tertullian, said so explicitly. The Sacrifice of Isaac was the crucifixion told in the only visual language the catacombs could safely use: an Old Testament story that encoded a New Testament truth two centuries before anyone dared paint a cross.
This was not one coded image. This was an entire visual theology. A community that had learned to say everything while appearing to say nothing. The shepherd was Christ. The fish was a creed. The sea monster was the tomb. And the Romans, who controlled the surface and the law and the language, could not read any of it.
The operating system of the underground
I keep returning to this because it is not ancient history. It is a design pattern. And it is the design pattern that is emerging right now, in real time, across the internet.
Consider what the early Christians actually built. They did not create a counter-Rome. They did not try to overthrow the system. They built a parallel layer of meaning that operated atop the existing visual culture, using the same images, formats, and materials but encoding different content. A shepherd fresco in a Christian cubiculum and a shepherd fresco in a Roman dining room look identical. The difference is entirely in what the viewer brings to the image.
That is exactly what is happening with algospeak. When TikTok users say “unalive” instead of “die,” “le dollar bean” instead of “lesbian,” “accountant” instead of “sex worker,” they are doing what the catacomb painters did: using the existing visual and linguistic grammar of the platform while encoding meanings the algorithm cannot parse. The content moderation system, like the Roman official, sees ordinary language. The community sees a message.
And, as I said in my previous post, when artists use Glaze and Nightshade, they are painting shepherds. The image looks normal to the human eye. But the information encoded within it is adversarial to the machine. It is designed to be legible to one audience and illegible to another. That is the Ichthys principle, operating at the pixel level.
When people build private Discord servers with proof-of-personhood requirements, they are carving cubicula: small, sealed chambers within a larger underground network, accessible only to those who can demonstrate they belong. The architecture is different. The logic is the same.
And here is the part that keeps me up at night. Constantine’s vision at the Milvian Bridge was not a cross in the sky. It could not have been. The cross was not yet a Christian symbol. Crucifixion was still a functioning method of state execution. What he saw, or what he claimed to see, was the Chi Rho. And what he did with it was take a coded community symbol and turn it into an instrument of imperial power.
Eusebius, writing decades later, changed the story. In his version, Constantine saw a cross. The symbol was retrofitted. The narrative was updated to match what the symbol had become, not what it had been. This is what power does to resistance symbols: it adopts them, then rewrites their origin story so the adoption looks inevitable.
The popular narrative of every major platform follows this arc. Bitcoin begins as a cypherpunk resistance tool and becomes a Wall Street asset class. The hashtag begins as grassroots organizing and becomes a marketing metric. End-to-end encryption begins as a privacy guarantee and becomes a selling point in Apple commercials. The Chi Rho begins as two letters scratched on a soldier’s shield in a moment of desperation and becomes the imperial seal of a Christian empire.
The symbol doesn’t change. The relationship to power changes. And once power claims the symbol, the original meaning becomes hard to recover.
What the tunnels teach
The catacombs of Priscilla sit beneath the Via Salaria in northern Rome. The Benedictine Sisters of Priscilla lead you down a narrow staircase and into the tunnels. The air drops ten degrees. The light narrows to what the guide carries. And on the walls, in small chambers no bigger than a closet, are paintings that a community made when saying what they believed could get them killed.
They painted shepherds instead of saviors. Sea monsters instead of tombs. Fish instead of creeds. They built a visual language that said everything to the initiated and nothing to the authority. And they did it not because they were primitive, but because they were sophisticated enough to understand that when power controls the surface, meaning has to live somewhere else.
The supply chain of faith ran from those tunnels to the altars of Europe. Bones were extracted, adorned, given names, and used to anchor belief in communities that had never set foot in Rome. The underground became raw material for the surface.
The symbols followed the same arc. The fish became the Chi Rho, which became the cross. Hidden, then imperial, then universal. Each transition marked the moment a community’s private language was claimed by a larger power and repurposed for a larger audience.
I build AI for a living. I know how these systems work. And what I see happening now, the emergence of adversarial art tools, coded platform languages, proof-of-personhood communities, and encrypted enclaves, is not new. It is the catacomb pattern. People are building a parallel layer of meaning because the surface has been claimed by systems that cannot distinguish between content and data, between a person and a profile, between meaning and signal.
The early Christians had one advantage we do not: the Romans couldn’t scale surveillance into the tunnels. The algorithmic authorities can. The question for our generation is whether the catacombs we are building will remain ours or, like the tunnels beneath Via Salaria, will eventually be opened, harvested, and rebranded as something they were never meant to be.
The Church needed bones. It found them underground.
The platforms need data. They are looking in the same direction.
What comes next
Pope Leo XIV chose his name deliberately. Leo XIII confronted the industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum in 1891. Leo XIV has made it clear that artificial intelligence is the rerum novarum of our time: the new thing that demands the Church’s attention not in a decade, but now.
In January, in his message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, he wrote something that I have not been able to put down. The ancient Greeks, he said, used the word prósōpon, face, to define the human person: that which is before one’s gaze, the place of presence and relationship. The Latin persona comes from per-sonare: to sound through. Not any sound. Someone’s unmistakable voice. And then: “Faces and voices are sacred. God, who created us in his image and likeness, gave them to us when he called us to life through the Word he addressed to us.”
He is saying that the face and the voice are not features. They are not content. They are not data points to be scraped and simulated. They are the location of the divine in the human. And the systems we are building, the ones that can now generate faces that never existed, voices that never spoke, relationships that never occurred, are reaching into that location and emptying it.
He named the threat directly. Behind the technology, he said, stands “a handful of companies,” the same founders recently named Person of the Year. And this concentration of power gives rise to “serious concern regarding the oligopolistic control of algorithmic and AI systems capable of subtly shaping behaviors and even rewriting human history, including the history of the Church, often without people being truly aware of it.”
That is a pope saying, plainly, that the people who build these systems have the capacity to rewrite his own institution’s history. And he is not wrong.
But here is where I part company with the discourse I hear in most technology circles. The conversation about AI risk is almost entirely about regulation and legislation. It is about guardrails, safety benchmarks, and alignment research. It is about what governments should do and what companies should promise. And all of that matters. But it treats the problem as a governance question, when I believe it is something more fundamental.
The world’s largest economies are not investing in regulation. They are investing in building intelligence that exceeds our own. The United States and China are locked in an AI race measured not by policy frameworks but by compute, data, and the recruitment of people who can build the next generation of models. The incentive structure of the global economy is oriented entirely toward making these systems smarter, faster, and more capable. Legislation follows innovation the way a coroner follows a car crash.
Pope Leo is not asking for better legislation, though he has called for it. He is asking a harder question. He is asking whether we understand what we are building and what we are losing. The challenge, he writes, “is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves.”
That word, anthropological, is the one that matters. It means the question is not about what the machines can do. It is about what we become in a world where the machines can do everything. If intelligence can be manufactured, what is the value of the intelligence you were born with? If a voice can be synthesized, what is the authority of the voice that belongs to you? If a face can be generated, what does it mean to look someone in the eye?
The early Christians answered a version of this question. When the state claimed the right to define acceptable belief, they went underground and painted shepherds that were secretly saviors, sea monsters that were secretly tombs, fish that were secretly creeds. They built a parallel layer of meaning because the surface had been colonized by a power that could not distinguish between a person and a subject.
We are not yet underground. But the surface is being colonized again. The systems being built today do not distinguish between a person and a profile. They cannot tell the difference between a voice and a voice clone. They do not know that a face is sacred. They process it as geometry.
What I think Pope Leo is saying, and what I am trying to say in these essays, is that the response to this cannot be purely technical or purely political. It has to be anthropological. It has to start with a decision about what a human being is and what a human being is for. If we are data to be optimized, then there is nothing wrong with what is being built. If we are something more than that, something irreducible, something with a face and a voice that were given and not generated, then we have work to do.
Not in a regulatory framework. In ourselves.
The catacombs were built by people who decided that their identity was worth more than their safety. The frescoes were painted by people who believed that meaning could survive in the dark. The symbols endured because the community that created them understood, at a level deeper than strategy, that some things cannot be surrendered to the surface without being destroyed.
That is the inheritance. The question is whether we are serious enough to claim it.
And if history is any guide, the answer is yes because this has happened before.
A handful of people decided that the printing press was dangerous. The Church tried to control it. Monarchs licensed it. Censors vetted every page. And what happened? The press democratized literacy, shattered the monopoly on knowledge, and produced the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution. The masses landed in a better place every time.
A handful of industrialists decided that labor was a commodity. They built factories that consumed human beings the way furnaces consume coal. Children worked on looms. Miners died underground. And what happened? Workers organized. Unions formed. Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum. Laws followed. The masses landed in a better place.
A handful of broadcasters decided what the public would see and hear. Three networks controlled American television for decades. And what happened? Cable fragmented it. The internet shattered it. People built their own channels, their own audiences, their own distribution. The masses landed in a better place.
The pattern is consistent. A small number of people concentrate power. They believe they are building the future. They are usually building the crisis that the future will have to solve. And the solution never comes from the people who created the problem. It comes from below. From the tunnels. From the underground. From the people who were never consulted and who built alternatives because they had no other choice.
A handful of people are now building systems intended to be smarter than the people they serve. They are doing it with more capital, more compute, and fewer regulatory constraints than any previous concentration of technological power in human history. And the question is not whether the masses will eventually land in a better place. They will. The question is how much damage the transition inflicts, and whether the people making the decisions understand what they are deciding.
I do not go into this argument blind. I build with these tools every day. I am not a Luddite, and I am not a spectator. But I am a Catholic, and I believe in the irreducibility of the human person. I believe that the current trajectory of AI development treats that irreducibility as an engineering problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be honored.
There are plenty of people who do not like what I am saying. That is fine. That is why they call this an editorial. That is why Substack has an unsubscribe button. What I will not do is pretend that the question is merely technical when the stakes are anthropological. What I will not do is write around the argument because it makes powerful people uncomfortable.
The frescoes were painted by people who believed that meaning could survive in the dark. The symbols endured because the community that created them understood, at a level deeper than strategy, that some things cannot be surrendered to the surface without being destroyed.
I believe we are in that moment again. And I would rather be in the tunnels with the painters than on the surface with the people who think the shepherds are just shepherds.
This is the second essay in a series. The first, “The Digital Catacombs,” explored what eight miles of tunnels beneath Rome taught me about the future of AI.