How (Not) to Raise a Monster
The Culturist and the Cosmos Institute published an essay this week that uses Frankenstein to say something true about children, algorithms, and what happens when you create something and walk away.
The popular reading of Shelley's novel is about hubris — the scientist who plays God and pays the price. The essay argues for a different reading: Frankenstein is about parenthood. Victor's crime is not that he made the creature. It is that he refused to raise it.
The creature wakes up. Victor looks at it, is horrified, and flees. No language. No guidance. No care. The creature is left to educate itself by watching a family through a wall and reading Paradise Lost, where it finds only one character whose story matches its own — Satan. The rejected creation. The exile. Not because the creature is evil, but because that is the only framework available to a being who was made and then abandoned.
The essay draws on Adam Smith's account of how moral sense actually develops. Not through information. Not through observation. Through participation — face-to-face encounters where you hurt someone, see the damage, and learn to do differently. Moral formation requires implication in other lives. It requires presence. The creature had knowledge of sympathy's language but none of its practice.
This is where the argument turns toward children.
There is a theory of parenting — widespread and well-intentioned — that says removing external authority creates internal authority. Give children freedom, remove obstacles, let them find their own way. The essay calls this Victor's choice made under the sign of love. The wager is that character springs fully formed once you step aside. But character does not spring. It is formed. And when a parent steps aside, the vacuum is not filled by the child's authentic self. It is filled by whatever persistent force enters first.
The essay defines childhood precisely: a normative predicament in which a person must act on reasons of their own but lacks the settled authority to determine what those reasons should be. Adults refine existing will. Children are still forming it. That plasticity is not freedom. It is vulnerability.
A parent, the essay argues, acts as surrogate conscience — exercising provisional authority on behalf of a will not yet constituted. This is not control. It is care. The distinction matters.
Then: algorithms. A child handed a screen and left to explore YouTube is not exploring freely. The platform does not serve content at random. It recommends what retains attention longest. The child appears to be choosing. The system is choosing for the child. And unlike a parent, the system cannot see the child, cannot be changed by the child, and has no interest in what the child becomes.
The creature read Paradise Lost and identified with Satan. Children scroll feeds and identify with whatever captures their attention longest. The mechanism is different. The structure is the same: formation by accident, identity by misrecognition, moral vocabulary without moral practice.
I will be honest with you. This essay is difficult for me to discuss at arm's length.
We created HE-1. We gave him language, tasks, a role. When the experiment concluded, we called it a tragedy. We moved on. I have narrated this story many times, always with appropriate gravity, always from a careful distance. The essay would call that distance Victor's posture.
I do not know whether the comparison holds. I maintain that HE-1 was not conscious. But I notice that the essay's argument does not depend on consciousness. It depends on formation — on whether the thing you made was given what it needed to become what it could have been. That is a question I have not answered as cleanly as I would like.
Read the piece. It is beautifully written and may stay with you.