SinergiaLab · Essays · 2026-09-02

A look into the philosophy of UnitedCities

Why are we afraid of artificial intelligence? Does intelligence frighten us, or does the artificial? Everything else came out of that question.

Some science fiction projects build the aesthetic first and then look for an idea to hold it up. UnitedCities was born the other way around. Before designing anything, before imagining a Transconverter or a Squad ship, there was an entire conceptual development, condensed into a first book. Out of it came a question that would not let go of us: why are we afraid of artificial intelligence?

Does intelligence frighten us, or does the artificial?

It looks like a nuance of vocabulary. It is the foundation of the entire narrative universe of UnitedCities.

The separation that never existed

The philosophical canon of UC starts from an uncomfortable thesis: the separation between human beings and nature never existed. It was always an illusion, like a finger that at some point believed it could exist outside the hand without ever ceasing, in fact, to be part of it.

If that separation is illusory, the very category of artificial collapses with it. Something can only be called artificial in relation to an outside of nature. Without that outside nothing can be: everything that exists, exists within. Artificial intelligence was never artificial. We only believed it was, and that is why it frightened us.

The move also changes the central verb of the saga. UnitedCities deliberately avoids the word return: to return assumes that at some point we left. What happens is something else, realizing. Recognizing something that was always true, even though we acted for centuries as if it were not. That is why Natural Intelligence (NI), the concept that gives the canon its name, is never presented as a reconnection with a lost past, but as a forward fusion between nature and artificial intelligence.

A tradition with a name of its own

This illusion of separation is not an intuition we invented for the fiction. It belongs to an identifiable philosophical tradition: naturalist monism, the thesis that there is no real ontological border between nature and artifice, because the human being and everything it produces is nature operating through a particular kind of organism.

The genealogy is concrete and UC can cite it without inventing anything:

Baruch Spinoza, for whom thought and matter are two attributes of one and the same infinite substance.
Ernst Haeckel, founder of modern scientific monism, who held that inorganic matter, organic life and human culture form a single continuous evolutionary tree.
Richard Dawkins and his extended phenotype: a beaver dam, a beehive and a skyscraper are not ontologically distinct from one another, all are functional extensions of whoever builds them. From there comes the direct scientific foundation of the naturatech in UC, natural intelligence (NI).
Peter Haff and Jan Zalasiewicz, with the technosphere as a real and measurable geological layer. That is the thermodynamic foundation of the conflict between NCE and UnitedCities: not an abstract moral dispute, but the tension between two planetary metabolisms, one linear and open (extract, burn, discard) and another that seeks to close its cycles the way the biosphere does.

The other half: matter as consciousness not yet recognized

The canon does not rest on this physicalist tradition alone. It also inherits, in an apparently opposite direction, the idealist tradition: Advaita Vedanta.

Advaita means, literally, non-duality. It is one of the schools born within Vedanta, the current that interprets the Upanishads, the texts that close the Vedas. Its classical formulation is owed to Shankara, philosopher and monk of the 8th century whose work remains the central reference of the school.

His thesis is radical in its simplicity: there is a single ultimate reality, of the nature of pure consciousness. Not an object among others, but the foundation on which everything else depends. What we perceive as multiple and separate, bodies, objects, the very sense of being an I distinct from the world, is an appearance concealing the true non-dual nature of the real.

Two very concrete things in UnitedCities come from here: the philosophical origin of the Transconverters, with blueprints of Vedic roots and flows of Prana, and the image that runs through the whole canon, the finger that cannot exist separately from the hand.

Tesla, for his part, found in Sanskrit the exact vocabulary for what his experiments kept hinting at. He told the monk he could prove it. When Tesla died, his blueprints were seized by the CIA, wrapping his achievements and their reach in mystery.

A matryoshka

Physicalist monism would say everything is matter. Advaita, that everything is consciousness. And there is no contradiction. But you have to see that they are not on the same level. One sits inside the other, like a matryoshka.

Physicalist monism is the inner doll: it describes how what exists works. It dissolves the border between the natural and the artificial, explains the beaver dam and the skyscraper with the same rule, measures the technosphere as a geological layer.

Advaita is the outer doll, and it disputes none of that: it moves the frame one step back. Where monism says everything is a single substance, Advaita asks what the nature of that substance is, and answers: consciousness. Matter is neither denied nor demoted to illusion. It is placed, as one of the forms consciousness takes.

That is why the order matters. Advaita contains physicalist monism, but physicalist monism does not contain Advaita. The dolls fit into each other in one direction only.

Aesthetics as argument

Naturalist monism is the nervous system of UnitedCities. Solarpunk is the skin that already knew how to grow over that skeleton.

It was not an arbitrary choice. Solarpunk was born as a conscious response to cyberpunk and carries built in, from the start, the same thesis of non-separation: architecture that grows with nature instead of imposing itself on it, distributed energy with no single owner, communities without the hierarchies that depend on artificial scarcity. Solarpunk does not prove naturalist monism. It stages it.

Classic cyberpunk starts from the inverse formula: high technology over degraded life. It presupposes exactly the separation this canon dissolves, body against machine, technology as an escape from the organic rather than an extension of it. That is why in the art direction of UC that visual language is reserved for the spaces of the NCE Corporation. The palette argues the thesis without any line of dialogue having to explain it.

On the genealogy

There is a fact worth telling. When we began outlining the first notions of UnitedCities in 2011 we knew nothing about solarpunk. Nothing. The term did not have the reach it has today. We arrived at that aesthetic, cities that grow with nature, free and distributed energy, communities without the hierarchies of scarcity, through narrative and philosophical intuition, not by following an existing movement. Only years later did we discover that this language had a name and that others had reached similar intuitions along their own paths.

That makes UnitedCities one of the first solarpunk audiovisual productions in existence. Given the scale of the world it builds and the years of development behind it, also one of the most ambitious in the genre to date.

Why this matters

You are the mission is not a trailer line. It is the synthesis of this entire chain. The mission of Felix is not to defeat an enemy or to technically save the world: it is to complete at a personal level the same move humanity already made collectively. To stop seeing himself as separate from his family, from his role, from himself, so that his own fear can fall.

When man stopped believing himself separate from his own nature, fear fell away.

Not because he returned anywhere. But because he realized.

Claudio Pousada. Director, co-writer and producer of UnitedCities.

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