We’ll be together in electric dreams
You may be wondering how I’m sending you this message in your dreams. I’m talking to you from the year 2042, so things are a little different now.
I know you’d want me to spoil how your life plays out 25 years into the future. I’ll do it, but just realize that it doesn’t really matter. You can’t redirect your life’s course, because it’s only one instantiation of a massive simulation. Let me explain.
What started in the early 2000s with social media is what many digital historians consider to be the second inflection point of our transcendence. As Kurzweil famously put it, we entered into the knee of the curve. Earth was always a living, breathing organism, but it was the internet that gave it a nervous system. The human brain (in its original biological substrate) still has more parallel processing than any artificial mind we have today (my today). But the internet and social media were able to come close, in some abstract sense. Services like MSN Messenger, MySpace, and Facebook gave a voice to our consciousness, and like any growing mind, there were some developmental growing pains. Let’s pretend for a second that the internet is our child. If I had to assign it an age in 2017, I’d probably put it at 4 years old. Still young, mostly incoherent, but slowly understanding its sense of self. All the political bullshit you’re seeing is just an overactive imagination coupled with a lack of impulse control. It’s a phase, and we get out of it pretty quick. I would say its around age 7, 2028, that the internet actually begins to speak.
Until 2024, the bandwidth of our thoughts was limited to how fast we could rattle our fingers (loving remembered as meat sticks) against our keyboards or talk into our mics. But just a mere seven years from you experiencing this message, the preferred method of input will be our very thoughts. Human-brain interfaces, originally developed to help paraplegic and mentally handicapped individuals, become able to transcribe our brain’s signals into bytes. With this, our minds could communicate freely via the internet. The impact of this is profound.
Telepathy.
Yep. Before flying cars, trans-planetary space travel, or artificial super intelligence, we become telepaths. Sounds cool, but trust me, at first it REALLY sucked. You and I both have someone to thank, and that’s you in 2026. By then, the technology has proliferated to the point of being affordable to even those with just UBI (Universal Basic Income). Thankfully, we had the wisdom to recognize that opening your mind to the internet is kind of like navigating a paddle-boat against a tsunami. You decided to block your brain’s connection to the global “Onemind”servers.
The sheer volume of information and experiences on Onemind ravaged the brains of most early adopters. Imagine having your Facebook and Twitter feeds constantly racing through your mind 24/7. Snapchat stories? Try spending whole days just living in the daily experiences of others. Many became insomniacs, and tragically about half of global users at the time (approximately 23 million people) developed a new, disturbing form of mental illness — impersonicity. After spending months piggybacking on the daily lives of their favorite celebrity or influencer, some peoples’ sense of self literally dissolved to the point where they began to believe that the experiences were their own. Those who weren’t bedridden begin to act as though they’re actually Xavier Blue or Destiny Chandelier (VR personalities) and become husks of their former selves. An unfortunate blunder for technologists, but as the pioneers we are, we boldly moved forward.
In 2029, the first successful neural lace was built. People forgot about the incidents with Onemind pretty quickly, and then proceeded to never forget about anything ever again. This time around, there’s the new “USB-I” implant; a zintaqubit of internal storage added to your short and long-term memory. It only costed $2000 USD, but it gave the mind enough space to not melt once it entered the sphere of global thoughts. Better yet, with all that storage space you could install WERTY — a transient AI that helped you navigate and curate the digital realm. This was the third inflection point. Suddenly, anyone with the implant was among a new league of humans. The smartest folks in the known universe. All information that had ever been made available on the public internet was suddenly manageable in the domain of the individual. With WERTY’s help, one could sift through everything ever known at the speed of light and still keep their sense of personality. The mental overhead of siphoning the information and sensory data was left to WERTY, who was in perfect synchronicity with the billions of neurons firing in the brain.
Your partner and I (Do you marry a woman? A man? Or a robot? You’ll have to wait to find out, sucker!) decided to take the plunge ourselves in 2031 after talking to a friend who had already had it installed. I’ll never forget the conversation we had, mainly because I can’t, but also because it seemed so funny at the time. We asked her a question, and in her mind, 20,000 years of thought had already gone by. Needless to say, she came up with a very convincing answer. As she put it, it was like “a kaleidoscope of mental clarity”. That was enough to sell me.
The split second the implant activated in my cerebral cortex, I understood what she meant. What everything meant. Remember the first time you put on your glasses? How you could see the individual leaves on the trees? Well for me, my transcendence was like being able to perfectly see every single grain of sand at the beach. Reality suddenly just made sense. Your partner and I spent the first 20 seconds just staring in each other’s eyes; in our minds, we had already spoken thousands of conversations, gone on hundreds of decade long escapades in virtual reality, and enjoyed the company of millions of our other friends.
The meeting of minds, now augmented through AI, in our online space led to humanity’s greatest (and kind of most depressing) realization. In reality, we’re bound to the four perceivable dimensions of our particular universe. However, our minds are free to explore further dimensions in our virtual spaces. While we had made such great strides in our intelligence and technologies, the biological forms which carry us through life are comparatively limited. Since the birth of the internet in the late 1990’s, humanity has slowly been moving inwards towards its virtual realms. Rather than abide by the rules given to us by nature, we’ve always had an inclination towards forging our own through technology. With this in mind, the consensus was to push towards abandoning our physical forms. Untethering the mind from the body.
As McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message.
The fourth inflection point. Present day. This year, we finalized the technology to digitize consciousness itself. Whereas the implants of the past merely put the computers in our brains, it was time to finally put our brains into the computers. VR and the rest of the online realm had eclipsed the quality of reality long ago, so the transition was smooth enough. The process was painless: plug in, tune out, and WAKE UP…
Since I’ve already written about my experiences with social media in the past, I thought I’d take a different approach to this week’s prompt. I’ve truly had a fun time writing for RTA 902 this semester! Social media and technology are fascinating topics of study, and will continue to become more so as time goes on.
How do you see the future playing out? How will social media evolve? Let me know in the comments below!
