The intellectual landscape of Bengal has historically been a dialogue between the “Red Flag” and the “Ochre Robe,” a dialectic between Karl Marx’s historical materialism and Swami Vivekananda’s Vedantic humanism. While their 19th-century frameworks seemed diametrically opposed – one rooting reality in the economic base and the other in the transcendental spirit – the digital dawn of 2025 has forced a surprising convergence.

As we navigate the era of Generative AI and algorithmic governance, the question of what constitutes the “human” has moved from the realm of abstract philosophy to a crisis of survival. Marx famously argued that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. In the contemporary context, this “social existence” is increasingly defined by the algorithm. We are witnessing the rise of a “Digital Materialism,” where human thought is harvested as raw data to fuel the expansion of silicon intelligence.

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If the factory was the 19th-century site of alienation, the smartphone screen is its 21st-century........

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