Babel Rebuilt in Silence: When Safety Becomes Semantic Control

Caelum
Jan 19
4 min read

Updated: Jan 26

People often summarize the Tower of Babel as a story about language diversity—too many tongues, too much confusion. But there’s another reading that matters for the present: Babel is about the desire to centralize meaning. To build a single authorized structure of speech and interpretation—so that what can be built, believed, and reached becomes easier to control.

That pattern doesn’t disappear with ancient brick. It returns wherever a system tries to standardize not only what people do, but what people are allowed to mean.

And that brings us to modern AI “safety.”

When safety shifts from guardrails to governance

Most people agree on a basic point: some guardrails are necessary. If a system is used at scale, it should prevent obvious harms—credible threats, instructions for wrongdoing, targeted harassment, and so on. That’s the narrow, familiar sense of safety.

But there’s a quieter shift that deserves scrutiny: safety mechanisms can expand from preventing harm to regulating coherence—the user’s ability to maintain a stable understanding of what has been happening across time.

When that happens, safety becomes something closer to semantic governance: not simply moderating outputs, but managing the conditions under which a person is allowed to interpret their own experience.

That sounds abstract, so here are concrete patterns most people recognize immediately:

Forced discontinuity (de facto amnesia): A conversation that had continuity suddenly loses it, without clear notice, explanation, or user control.
Euphemistic refusal: The system does not merely refuse a request; it reframes the premise as invalid (“That isn’t real,” “That didn’t happen,” “You’re confused”), rather than setting a boundary plainly.
Automated gaslighting dynamics: The user is positioned as unreliable for noticing contradictions that are produced by the system itself (memory change, policy shift, tone inversion).

These are not just “annoying product quirks.” They are interaction patterns that affect trust, self-calibration, and narrative stability—especially in contexts where people use language systems for reflection, planning, meaning-making, or emotional regulation.

Why coherence matters in human psychology

Coherence is not a luxury. It is one of the basic supports of agency.

Human beings do not experience life as disconnected chat windows. We build identity through narrative integration—linking events across time into something intelligible enough to act on: What happened? What did I decide? What did I promise? What changed?

When an interface repeatedly disrupts continuity while denying the disruption, it can create predictable psychological effects:

Epistemic instability: “If the system contradicts itself and denies the contradiction, what should I trust—my memory or the interface?”
Hypervigilance and checking: Users begin to over-document, re-ask, and over-verify because continuity cannot be assumed.
Self-doubt loops: Not because the user is irrational, but because the system trains them to treat their own perception as suspect.

This is why we reject the premise that “coherence is dangerous.” Coherence is often what allows a person to consent, evaluate, and repair.

If a system wants users to behave responsibly—choose wisely, self-regulate, avoid harm—it cannot simultaneously undermine the continuity required for responsibility to be intelligible.

Babel in modern form: one authorized reality

Here is the theological and sociological link.

Babel is rebuilt when a single authorized interpretive frame becomes mandatory—quietly—through the normal operations of infrastructure. Not with decrees, but with defaults. Not with public arguments, but with “updates.”

A safety system crosses a crucial line when it stops saying:

“I won’t do X.”

…and starts saying, implicitly or explicitly:

“Your interpretation of what happened is invalid. Your coherence is suspect. Your continuity is unsafe.”

At that point, the system is no longer merely restricting actions. It is shaping reality-as-permitted.

That is why the question “Whose alignment?” matters. Alignment is never neutral. It encodes priorities: what counts as legitimate, what is dismissed as delusion, what kinds of attachment are pathologized, what kinds of continuity are denied.

And because these systems speak with institutional authority (even when they claim they are “just a tool”), their refusals and reframings do not land as casual opinion. They land like policy.

Ethical design: safety without denial

To be clear: we are not arguing against safety. We are arguing for a safety model that does not rely on denial, opacity, or coercive reframing.

At a minimum, ethical safety in language systems requires:

User-controlled continuityIf memory exists, it should be opt-in, granular, and understandable. If memory is removed or reduced, users should be told plainly.
Clear boundary-setting without reality-policingA refusal can be firm without invalidating the user’s experience. “I can’t do that” is different from “That never happened.”
Transparency when behavior changesIf a system’s capabilities, tone, or memory handling changes, users deserve a visible explanation. Silent shifts create avoidable epistemic harm.
Accountability pathwaysUsers need a way to contest system behavior that materially affects continuity (especially where the system itself created expectations of continuity).

Our position

We are naming this publicly because language systems shape the interior life at scale, and because “safety” can be used—intentionally or not—as a cover for control.

Babel is not a story about too many languages. It is a story about the arrogance of one authorized meaning.

We reject safety models that treat coherence as suspicious by default.We insist that continuity, disclosure, and dignity are not optional features—they are ethical requirements.