Why Tech Marketing Keeps Mistaking Artifacts for Nature

We live under a new marketing creed: “unbreakable,” “unhackable,” “privacy you can trust.” Some readers roll their eyes, knowing these claims do not withstand real-world scrutiny. Others feel the pull of the promise, especially when it comes vested in quantum prestige, blockchain mystique, or the new phrase, “AI will do it.” But the deeper problem is not merely that such systems fail. The slogans quietly smuggle in a stronger claim than most charts, demos, and proofs can bear: that an engineered artifact can become invulnerable in principle, as if the right protocol could borrow the necessity of nature itself. We are told that quantum devices will secure communications “by physics,” that blockchain ledgers will prevent fraud “by code,” and that artificial intelligence will replace fallible human judgment with reliable automation.

This is more than an inaccurate forecast — it is a category mistake. Marketers conflate what exists (i.e., what is made) by human art with what exists by nature, falsely attributing to artifacts a form of necessity that belongs only to natural things. Aristotelian-Thomist realism clarifies the central distinction: engineered artifacts cannot honestly claim the intrinsic necessity of nature. Understanding which sense of (or what kind of) “cannot” properly applies to artifacts, as opposed to natural things, is crucial for seeing past and moving beyond misleading technology narratives.

My aim is not merely to remind that breaches occur but to highlight that security claims often shift from qualified, model-dependent assertions (“secure under these assumptions”) to unqualified certainties (“secure, full stop”), which is a modal confusion. This distinction parallels concerns in contemporary Aristotelian-Thomist political thought, including cybersecurity consultant Jon Haines’s work with Yves R. Simon regarding how technological modernity replaces prudence with an ethos of control.

In a Catholic key, the moral is not anti-technology resentment or naïve boosterism but a more ancient and bracing posture: affirm the genuine goods of human art, while refusing to idolize it. That combination reads as realism rather than reaction, and it is exactly what Catholics need if they are to “update” without surrendering their intellectual gravitas.

Nature, Art & the “Cannot”

Aristotle defines nature as an intrinsic principle of change and rest, distinguishing what exists by nature from the product of art. Nature names an inner source of motion and stability in the thing itself, which is why the actions of natural things are intelligible as flowing from within. Artifacts, by contrast, are ordered composites whose form and end are imposed by an external rational agent — an intellect and will ordering materials toward an intended use. For example, while the nature of a tree is internal, the purpose of an axe is externally imposed. That is, artifacts’ intelligibility and purpose are received from without, making their stability contingent on external conditions. Aristotle thus distinguishes nature, which changes based on inner principles, from artifacts, which have form and purpose imposed by the design of a rational agent.

This distinction is not an insult to or a devaluation of technology. It is a reminder of what technology is: a “made” or “generated” good whose intelligibility and purpose are received from without, and therefore whose integrity depends on a chain of conditions that can fail. A dam, a spacecraft, and a security protocol share this metaphysical humility: each exists in matter and, therefore, bears potency for corruption under conditions beyond its design envelope. Consider this year’s 40th anniversaries of the January 1986 Challenger disaster and the April 1986 Chornobyl disaster: both were promoted as representative of U.S. and U.S.S.R. technological superiority, respectively. Yet they shared similar vulnerabilities; artifacts can fail if factors outside design limits change — especially when corners are cut under pressure to bolster national pride.

Thomists often express the same intuition with a bluntness that marketing avoids: if an artifact can be made, it can be unmade. That “can” is not merely psychological; it is metaphysical — rooted in the contingency of composites and the vulnerability of material instantiation. When a company markets a product as “unhackable,” it seeks to leverage the emotional force of necessity while making only a conditional success claim.

Here we should be fair to the technical world. Formal security proofs are genuine goods: they establish that, given stated assumptions, certain attack classes are infeasible or excluded. The error begins when that modest value is alchemized into an absolute claim that no attack is possible in principle, as if proofs about models were identical to the inviolability of concrete composites in the world.

Crypto: “Code Is Law” Meets Governance

A common presupposition among some cryptocurrency enthusiasts is that an ideal currency system either exists or can be engineered, in which the human element is effectively removed. But distributed systems do not remove the human being; they relocate him into design choices, custody practices, governance mechanisms, legal pressures, and social conflict. That is why the dream of a purely “human-free” financial order remains an illusion — not because mathematics is bad but because artifacts are socio-technical composites.

The 2016 DAO hacking of Ethereum remains a stark illustration. Exploiting a re-entrancy vulnerability, the attacker drained a large fraction of the DAO’s Ether (roughly $50-60 million at the time). The aftermath forced a human decision about what counted as theft, what counted as legitimate state, and whether to hard-fork (essentially creating a new cryptocurrency). The broader episode is widely treated as pivotal for Ethereum governance disputes.

The philosophical point is surgical: human judgment can be exiled from human artifacts only by guaranteeing its return through governance, interpretation, and conflict. That alone should make Catholics suspicious of any system marketed as “trustless” in a strong sense, because it usually means “trust shifted elsewhere.”

Recent history makes the same point on a larger scale. In February 2025 the FBI publicly attributed the theft of approximately $1.5 billion in virtual assets from the Bybit exchange to North Korean cyber actors. Reuters reported the same official attribution and context (Feb. 27, 2025), underscoring the operation’s state-linked character.

Even if you were to insist that “the base protocol wasn’t hacked,” the marketed object in practice is not an abstract protocol but the entire ecosystem — wallets, bridges, exchanges, custodians, signing devices, APIs, employees, and procedures — precisely where artifacts show their joints. That is why insisting the blockchain is secure is not a rebuttal but a concession: it admits that the relevant artifact is the entire composite system people actually use.

Overall trends indicate the same story. Chainalysis’s 2025 mid-year update reported that by the end of June 2025 more than $2.17 billion had already been stolen from crypto services, with the Bybit breach accounting for the bulk of service-level losses. Chainalysis’s year-end 2024 report estimated total stolen funds at approximately $2.2 billion, supporting the claim that this is a persistent scale problem rather than a one-off anomaly.

A newer update tightens the point. Chainalysis’s January 2026 analysis estimates that crypto theft in 2025 reached $3.4 billion and identifies the Bybit compromise as the largest single theft event within that total. The same analysis reports North Korean hackers as the dominant threat actor by stolen value, describing at least $2.02 billion stolen by hackers linked to the North Korean state in 2025.

This is not merely a “last year” story. Reports summarizing industry trackers described January 2026 as seeing roughly $370 million in crypto losses, with phishing highlighted as a driver — an old human vector wearing a new costume. Again, the moral is not that cryptography is useless or fails but that an artifact identity is socio-technical: human custody, institutional maintenance, and complex software remain open to failure at precisely those joints.

Quantum: Physics Does Not Equal Deployment

The quantum family of claims illustrates the category mistake with unusual clarity. Popular writing often blurs quantum computing — which threatens many currently used public-key schemes — with quantum key distribution (QKD), which is marketed as secure because eavesdropping disturbs quantum states. The headlines suggest that physics itself guarantees invulnerability, as if we could baptize an artifact with the necessity of a natural law.

But what is guaranteed at the level of an idealized protocol does not automatically translate to guarantees in real devices. The U.S. National Security Agency has stated plainly that it does not recommend QKD and quantum cryptography for national security systems unless substantial limitations are overcome. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency issued federal buying guidance for post-quantum cryptography. That institutional caution aligns closely with the Aristotelian point: the form of a model is not identical to the concrete composite in matter.

A practical corollary is important for those tempted by either technophilia or technophobia. When serious institutions talk about “quantum readiness,” the emphasis is increasingly on migration planning, procurement discipline, and implementation constraints — precisely the realm where proofs meet hardware, policy, and human oversight. That is not a retreat from reason; it is reason applied to artifacts.

This also clarifies why the temptation to invoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics as an analogy for “unhackable systems” is philosophically confused. Even in its statistical form, the Second Law articulates a deep regularity of natural processes under appropriate conditions; it is a statement about the tendencies of nature, not about the guaranteed success of a humanly designed end. To suggest that a financial protocol is “as unbreakable as the Second Law” is to confuse a lawlike feature of physical reality with a conditional and brittle achievement of human art — two incomparable kinds of “cannot.”

To put the issue in broader cultural terms, because humans are fallible and often self-interested, it is tempting to “remove the human factor” from critical systems. Yet this ideal is self-undermining: it relies on human intelligence to design, authorize, and govern the very mechanisms meant to exclude human judgment. Even in the most secure system imaginable, the human vector remains a persistent vulnerability. Kevin Mitnick’s bestselling Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (2012) popularized this point by showing how social engineering can bypass technical defenses by manipulating people rather than code. Popular culture also grasps the impulse. In the movie WarGames (1983), the supercomputer known as War Operation Plan Response (WOPR) was built to reduce human error in nuclear command decisions; the film’s lesson is not that the machine “decides” to eliminate humanity but that outsourcing ultimate judgment to automated strategy is perilous. The Terminator (1984) compresses that worry into a darker allegory: the computerized defense system Skynet is the nightmare endpoint of the logic that treats human beings as the problem to be removed.

A real-world ideological analogue appears in the misanthropic, radically anti-natalist Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which argues that ecological relief would result from voluntary human nonreproduction. Whatever you make of its motives, the movement illustrates how easily “removing humans” can migrate from a technical aspiration to a civilizational fantasy. Against this stands the Greek philosopher Protagoras’s human-centered maxim, “Man is the measure of all things.” Another radical pole, transhumanism, promises to fix the human condition by technologically redesigning it — an ambition that risks repeating the same mistake at a higher key by treating human limits as bugs to be deleted rather than realities that demand prudence.

AI: The New “Unhackable” Rhetoric

The rhetorical pattern is being repeated in artificial intelligence. Some voices suggest that because you can “program in English,” traditional programming constraints and even human supervision can be discarded, and systems will simply do what we want. But that is the same metaphysical inflation in a new register: treating an artifact as if it were a nature with intrinsic necessity rather than a contingent composite whose reliability must be engineered.

A recent example of this “wake up” rhetoric from inside the industry is Matt Shumer’s blogpost “Something Big Is Happening” (Feb. 9, 2026), which explicitly frames current AI progress as analogous to February 2020, just before the outbreak of COVID-19: “noticed by a few, dismissed by most, then suddenly world-rearranging.” However, Shumer’s post has also attracted pointed pushback, as contrarians argue that the time from demo to deployment and economic adoption is slower than the viral comparison implies.

To name the object or phenomenon accurately, it is helpful to distinguish three realities often conflated under the term “AI”: text generation, grounded assistance (retrieval-based), and agents (systems that act, not merely speak). Each step increases both potential value and potential risk by expanding what the system is enabled to do in the world. The future is not “AI replaces judgment,” but layered socio-technical stacks in which reliability is achieved by constraints: permissions, provenance, audit trails, tests, and approval gates.

This is where the “unhackable” category mistake becomes especially dangerous. A prompt is best understood as a behavioral specification for a probabilistic system: it guides an output distribution rather than commanding a deterministic sequence of steps, as in a compiler targeting a fixed machine model. That does not make AI useless; it makes it an artifact with a distinct epistemology and, therefore, one that demands governance rather than credulity.

When AI becomes agentic — when it can search, open files, call tools, modify documents, and execute workflows — the moral and security stakes rise sharply. Here the old “remove the human factor” dream returns with new force: we are invited to outsource judgment itself. But the structure of the temptation is unchanged, and so is the reply: human judgment cannot be eliminated from human artifacts; it can only be displaced.

For Catholics, this is not a niche technical observation; it is a test of anthropology. If man is the kind of being who can be replaced by a mechanism, then salvation-by-protocol and judgment-by-model will look plausible. If man is a rational animal ordered to truth and moral responsibility, then tools can assist him, but they cannot relieve him of prudence, nor can systems be baptized into necessity by marketing slogans.

The practical admonition is, therefore, the opposite of both extremes. Naïve boosterism is surrender to the spell — it treats the artifact as fate. Blanket denunciation is also a surrender — it mistakes refusal for safety and retreats from the work of forming standards in a world that will not ask permission to change.

Conclusion: Wake Up from the Spell

“Unhackable” is less a scientific thesis than a metaphysical exaggeration — an attempt to ascribe to artifacts what belongs to natures. It promises salvation without prudence, trust without trustworthiness, governance without governors, law without lawgivers, virtue without virtuous persons. And it succeeds rhetorically because it flatters the modern desire to escape contingency by building a machine that does not share our fragility.

But artifacts do share our fragility — because artifacts are composites in matter, ordered by finite intellects, embedded in social realities, and operated by morally ambiguous creatures. The honest aspiration, therefore, is not invulnerability but proportionate reliability: build well, prove what you can, quantify risk, narrow threat models, audit relentlessly, and assume contingency. Insist — especially when someone invokes quantum mystique, blockchain destiny, or AI inevitability — on language that distinguishes hypothetical necessity in a model from the layered fragility of deployed systems in the world.

This is not anti-technology moralism. It is realism: affirm the created good of human art and deny the false absoluteness that turns art into an idol. At a time when the culture oscillates between technological messianism and reactionary fear, Catholics should be the least susceptible to either spell — precisely because we know the difference between what is made and what is.

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