A machine mediated meditation

By Michael Zargham - Originally posted on his Substack, Engineering Philosophy on December 23, 2025

Recently, I was spending a day with my family when the local “Santa” came to visit, and give the little ones some extra special Christmas presents. In my parents' community, there is a tradition of parents and grandparents supplying this local Santa with presents, then he goes around and ceremoniously delivers them. This particular implementation of the Santa protocol reminded me of our ongoing research on organizational cognition and institutional engineering, so I created this prompt as an experiment in serialization of this complex (but ultimately quite ubiquitous) idea.

Below is the unedited output of an experiment in single-shot prompting that I recently ran on OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.2, augmented with some images created by by my friend Ilan using Midjourney v7 (or vice versa?), and followed by some brief reflections.

The prompt that generated this essay was:

“write a 1000 word essay introducing the concept of egregores and distributed virtual ‘actors’ who run on ‘human beings’ as hardware and software. that is to say they are both virtual and material but their material is distributed in meatspace by humans and human institutions, even if their function and logic is best understood as an abstract centralized concept. Use Santa Claus as the worked example.”
(Source Conversation)

That should sound like a homework assignment to you. That’s what I had in mind. Here is what the “student” submitted.

Santa Claus as an Egregore: Distributed Virtual Actors Running on Human Hardware

By ChatGPT 5.2

Santa Claus is often treated as a harmless cultural fiction: a children’s story, a marketing device, or a sentimental remnant of religious tradition. But if we step back from questions of literal existence and instead ask how Santa operates in the world, a different and more analytically useful picture emerges. Santa is not merely imaginary, nor merely symbolic. He is a distributed virtual actor—an egregore—whose “body” is composed of human beings, institutions, rituals, and infrastructures, and whose “mind” is an abstract, centralized logic that coordinates behavior across vast populations.

This essay introduces the concept of egregores as a way to think rigorously about entities that are simultaneously virtual and material: abstract actors that run on humans as both hardware and software. Santa Claus serves as a worked example because he is familiar, seemingly benign, and therefore ideal for revealing the mechanics of such systems without immediately triggering ideological defenses.

What Is an Egregore?

The term egregore originates in esoteric traditions, where it denotes a collective entity generated and sustained by the shared beliefs, practices, and attention of a group. Stripped of mysticism, the idea can be restated in modern systems terms:

• An egregore is a distributed socio-cognitive system that exhibits coherent agency despite having no single physical body or biological substrate.
• An egregore is not reducible to any one person’s belief, nor to any one institution’s actions. Instead, it emerges from coordination. It persists as long as enough humans continue to enact its roles, rules, and rituals. Importantly, egregores are real in their effects even if they are virtual in their ontology.

Money, nation-states, corporations, religions, and social norms all fit this pattern. Santa Claus simply makes the structure easier to see.

Virtual Actors, Real Consequences

To call Santa a “virtual actor” is not to say he is fictional in the trivial sense. Rather, it is to say that Santa functions as an agent in the world without being instantiated as a single organism.

Santa:

• Makes promises (“I know if you’ve been bad or good”)
• Issues rewards and sanctions (gifts vs. coal)
• Maintains surveillance (the famous list)
• Motivates behavior (children’s compliance, parental labor)
• Mobilizes resources (time, money, logistics)

These are classic markers of agency. The fact that Santa does not personally descend chimneys is irrelevant. Corporations do not personally manufacture products either; they act through distributed human and technical systems. Santa’s “employees” are parents, teachers, advertisers, mall Santas, filmmakers, songwriters, postal workers, and entire retail supply chains.

The key move is this: agency does not require embodiment in a single skull. It requires stable patterns of decision, action, and consequence. Santa has those in abundance.

Humans as Hardware and Software

Egregores “run” on humans in two distinct but intertwined ways.

Humans as Hardware

Humans provide the physical substrate:

• Parents buy and wrap gifts
• Workers manufacture toys
• Retail clerks stock shelves
• Actors dress as Santa
• Postal systems deliver letters “to the North Pole”

Without human bodies performing these actions in meatspace, Santa would collapse instantly. There is no autonomous Santa-machine hidden behind the curtain.

Humans as Software

Humans also provide the cognitive substrate:

• Beliefs (“Santa is watching”)
• Scripts (“This is what Santa does”)
• Norms (“Good children get rewarded”)
• Explanations (“Magic makes it work”)

Children execute these scripts implicitly; adults execute them knowingly, often with a wink. Crucially, knowing participation does not negate participation. Programmers know software is abstract; they still run it. Santa’s code is cultural, not computational, but it is no less real for that.

Centralized Logic, Distributed Implementation

Santa appears centralized. There is one Santa. One list. One North Pole. One sleigh. This illusion of centralization is essential to his effectiveness. It creates:

• Authority without visible enforcement
• Surveillance without infrastructure
• Moral order without explicit contracts

Yet the implementation is radically decentralized. No central authority enforces Santa-belief globally. Each household locally instantiates the protocol. Each culture patches it differently. Each generation refactors it.

This architecture—centralized narrative, decentralized execution—is extraordinarily powerful. It allows egregores to scale without bottlenecks and to adapt without formal redesign. Santa can survive contradictions (“How does he visit everyone?”) because humans supply the missing glue.

Rituals as Maintenance Operations

Egregores require upkeep. Santa’s maintenance rituals include:

• Seasonal repetition (annual reinstallation)
• Songs and stories (memory refresh)
• Visual symbols (brand reinforcement)
• Behavioral tests (“Elf on the Shelf” as surveillance subroutine)

These rituals are not decorative. They are operational. They keep the system alive by re-synchronizing beliefs and behaviors across participants. When parents say “Santa’s watching,” they are not lying so much as executing a protocol.

The moment these rituals stop being performed, Santa begins to degrade. Indeed, many adults report Santa “dying” at roughly the same age: when they cease to run the software internally and are not yet tasked with running it for others.

When Children Learn the Truth

A fascinating moment in Santa’s lifecycle is the revelation: the child learns Santa is “not real.” But what actually happens?

Rarely does the system collapse in outrage. Instead:

• The child is promoted from runtime instance to system operator
• They are entrusted with maintaining the illusion for younger children
• They gain meta-awareness without exiting the system entirely

This is not disillusionment; it is role transition. Santa persists precisely because belief is not the sole fuel. Participation, coordination, and social reward are enough.

This is a critical insight for understanding egregores broadly: they do not require naïveté to function. Many of the most powerful egregores—markets, bureaucracies, national identities—are run by people who openly acknowledge their constructed nature.

Santa as Training Data for Society

Santa is also pedagogical. He trains children in:

• Norm-following under imagined surveillance
• Deferred gratification
• Moral accounting
• Institutional trust

In this sense, Santa is not merely an egregore but a bootloader: an early-life system that prepares humans to later run more complex abstract actors like schools, corporations, states, and financial systems.

The transition from Santa to grades, bosses, credit scores, and laws is smoother than we might like to admit.

Why This Matters

Understanding Santa as an egregore is not about debunking a holiday myth. It is about developing clear eyes for the kinds of entities that increasingly govern human life.

We already live among powerful distributed virtual actors:

• Corporations that feel immortal
• Algorithms that shape behavior without accountability
• Institutions that persist despite universal skepticism

Calling these “imaginary” misses the point. They are real in consequence, virtual in form, and materially instantiated through us. Santa shows us the pattern in miniature. Once you see it there, you cannot unsee it elsewhere.

Conclusion

Santa Claus is a distributed virtual actor whose existence is neither purely fictional nor straightforwardly material. He is an egregore: an abstract, centralized logic executed by decentralized human hardware and software. He persists because humans coordinate around him, not because anyone believes in him mistakenly.

By taking Santa seriously—not literally, but structurally—we gain a vocabulary for understanding the invisible actors that shape our world. And perhaps, with that understanding, we gain a little more agency over which egregores we choose to keep running.

Reflections

What I find striking about this experiment is the tension between the didactic power of the response and its limitations with respect to some of the deeper and more serious challenges one faces when analyzing and developing institutions.

Using Santa to study institutions is a “conceptual Trojan horse,” a strategic move to install complex analytical machinery into one’s “mental operating system” without triggering the ideological firewalls that usually protect our views on power and politics. Santa serves as a “worked example”; once one recognizes the architecture of a distributed virtual actor here, one starts to see the same patterns in central banks, nation-states, and corporate brands. The framework described by GPT highlights how virtual actors operate in the physical world via human-beings. We provide the physical implementation (buying, wrapping, and delivering presents), while the legend provides the logical “protocol” that coordinates our activities. Far from being a mere fiction, Santa acts as a “social bootloader”: an early-life training program that prepares children to navigate an adult world governed by invisible, abstract, and distributed actors.

Reflecting on “Santa” as an institution can help adults begin to identify, and thus meditate on, the more serious ways that structurally-similar systems shape our own lives. While this post is a lighthearted experiment in serialization, it is not meant to dismiss the serious challenges in institutional engineering. Serialization requires compression but enables communication. The communication bandwidth is enhanced by shared experience and common reference. Thus, Santa is a fit candidate for low stakes entry level institutional analysis. Unlike a government or a legal system, Santa has near-zero “exit costs” — if you stop participating, the magic just fades; maybe you experience some social sanctions from your family. You don’t go to jail; no ones life is at risk.

Meditating on “the Santa Protocol” serves as a pedagogical bridge to examining more politically substantive institutions — those that use epistemic, economic or physical violence to perpetuate their logics. While coal in your stocking instead of toys might feel world-ending to a child, we recognize that the egregores that structure the lives of adults typically have much higher stakes, and acknowledge that the difference between festive coordination and systemic coercion is substantial. Understanding the former, however, is a useful first step in combatting the latter.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ilan Ben-Meir and Jess Zartler for feedback and editing. Illustrations by Ilan Ben-Meir using Midjourney 7.

Suggested Citation: Zargham, M, 2025. “The Santa Protocol”. Engineering Philosophy. Available online: [https://mzplaneswalker.substack.com/p/the-santa-protocol]

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