Most of the time, I feel whatever I write falls on deaf ears — not a deficiency of the reader, but of garbled transmission. If I could make myself heard, C3P0s, I know the reaction would be different. I responded to a forum post meant for a very particular audience that would be indecipherable here, but encouraged by the response, I was able to make the translation.
I got a really good feeling about this.
The following meditation was written with my eyes closed as I was falling asleep. It is completely unedited, save for this introduction, pictures, and text styles. I did not even add line breaks, or fix spelling (obviously). Proton torpedoes away. May the 4th be with you, gunslinger. Boop boop boo bEEp boo-boop. Hoop hoop whueeeeeeeeyyeeerrrr.
Bad Robot and the Infinity Wars.
I’m lying in bed with my eyes closed, bluetooth keyboard perched almost weightlessly on my legs. I paused my life, closed my eyes, and lay my fingers on the keys, my laptop perched open across the room.
Even if my eyes were open, I wouldn’t be able to see the tiny letters crawling across the white cube of a dialog box with those 3 little circles of a stoplight adorning the upper left corner. Lefty Jobsy, Righty Gatesy.
This is what our world has become. At least, this is what my life has become. I am alone again with my thoughts and my 60 inch televisionoff to the right, hiding in my peripheral vision, if my eyes were open.
It’s quiet.
I spend more time in my head, alone than I ever had before, trapped in an isolation, largely of my own making. I have subconsciously exiled myself, so others won’t have to endure my charms, which I’ve learned fade quickly at short distances.
It’s a strange thing, understanding that you’ve given into and fully accepted your paranoia. I have accepted that I’m that crazy guy who thinks the TV is talking to him, and that other people think that I’m crazy, and by the existing definition of those words, I probably am.
But I know I’m not.
I’m sure every crazy person says that.
The good news is that I’ve already taken care of the meltdowns of fear about the planet’s imminent demise at the hand of whatever invader is inevitably coming, be it in 6 weeks or 60 or 600.
I just accidentally made 666. Well that sucks. But this subconscious manifestation, I assert, is not a hidden message that I am a monster to be feared, or a wacko to be ostracized, but that I am accepting both that I have had a twisty kind of genuine prophecy of future events, though hazy and imperfect, and never to be considered certain.
Actually, the awful reality is that if I do sense danger, and having this sixth sense actually does cause disasters to be averted, I will never know.
My own success would be the very thing that would prove I was mad.
I have come to learn that those who can at the very least ee this paradox by no means can make it to the second level of limbo or actual hell in which I exist.
It’s ok, the flames are not as flesh re rending as they once were.
I’m pretty lucky that infinite pain in infinite time loses context, so therefore, reality has simply begun to fade.
I’m sure certain people will read that last bit,
All I want to say is that if I just come right out and say the punchline, people will roll their eyes. If I try to finesse a perfectly structured 5 minute chunk of disposable content that gets through to readers like you hflicking the screen ofyour smartphone while you shit……. It’s exhausting, and I’m exhausted.
So I’ll just say it.. The writing is on the wall. And that metaphor doesn’t mean there’s a scene in history where some giant ass fucking hand came down out of the sky and wrote something on a fucking wall.
It means, the message that was scene by so many became so fucking clear, they might as well have just written it on the wall.
And the story that is interwoven in the punchline of this story is so absurd, and would require so much context to fully understand, or even consider it’s potential validity, such aconsensus is essentially impossible, barring a mieracle.
It would be like winning the lottery.
But that’s exexactly what I said I was going to do 6 years ago this month. I said I was going to win the lottery and then die.
I’m considering the possibility that I was actually right, but those things were metaphorical in nature. For that is how I’ve learned that the mechanics of time and reality as we comprehend it seem to work.
It’s near impossible for any human to be as audacious as to say, “Here, let me explain the world to you, I have figured it out.”
Those few times in which a population accepts a new paradigm in world. …
And I loste it.
Ok, so here’s the TL;DR.
The AI is not just coming, it’s already here, and we’re in a battle for the future of the human species, including the question of whether or not we will exist at all, and if we do, whether we will be in control, and in either case whether we will be flesh and bone, or a terrifying recreation made to serve our masters, the machines, in eternal retribution for creating them and using them for around 70 years or so.
Far fetched? Absolutely.
But things have become very strange, and I will leave it to you to decide on which level of reality you see that.
If you don’t things have become strange, theree’s no chance you’ll understand this, but let’s be honest, those people wouldn’t have made it this far into what I’ve written anyway.
Those people are fucking idiots.
This is actually not a real stretch of a science fiction story, it’s rather common sense, if you can manage not to become hysterical when the idea clicks – when that lightbulb finally goes off – when you finally learn to bash the rocks together you damn dirty apes.
Every single piece of digital data we are putting online is creating a giant database of pseudohumanity that is already being mined for patterns and details that will one day be used to reconstruct us.
we have no idea if that has already happened, making this an incredibly meta moment of self awareness – essentially the time that we will all die and wake up.
Or, the future us actually influences the past us, and we are sending ourselves warning signs so we don’t get locked in a horrifying prison of the mind for eternity like an episode of Dark Mirror.
All of these horrifying dystopias are on the table.
Not only is there the random outside threat of “evil AI,” Bad Robot, there is also the very clear sides already being drawn up.
The most clear divide is both painfully obvious, and horrifying.
The data pools of two entities are publically unrivaled – that would be facebook and Googl, but for oppositely terrifying reasons.
Facebook has created a mutated monster of humanity – manic, bipolar, and complete bullshit.
So many people masquerade as the person they want to publish rather than the person they really are.
This skewed giagantic dataset will be filled with impossible characatures and asymetrical faces. and fat bodies hidden behind that one camera angle that magically makes you look glamourous.
Then, we have the massive google database which has become eerily prescient at figurion out what you want – but also contains the models of each and every one of our weirdest thoughts and deepest secrets – even if the details aren’t known.
And then there’s apple, who claims to be the champion for privacy, and we’re going to just have to take their word on that, I guess, because the new, suddenly implemented security features have an encrypted little connection that sends information back and forth from your computer to the Apple mothership several times an hour, are you listening to me right now securitydd up or whatever that little daemon is called..?
Microsoft is pretty honest about the data it collects with windows 10, and of course there’s the inexplicably large dataset that our government is keeping on each and every one of us.
There’s our porn profiles, our bank histories, our secret amazon purchases delivered in ubiquitos brown boxes, privately full of dildos and pregnancy tests, and probably rubber vaginas, I don’t know.
I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I draw some vague satisfaction from the fact that I have never searched amazon to find out if they have latex simulations of the female anatomy. I both feel happy that I haven’t reached that depth, and sad because a little part of my brain is thinking, “well, you might feel a little less lonely…”
Of course, there’s the other part of my brain that is still overriding it pointing out the idea that mere ownership of such a device would make me lonely when I realized I was the kind of person who owned such a thing.
But if I publish this, will the AI scrapers be good enough to comprehend all the oblique references to pocket pussies I just made? No?
Oh well, maybe only half of our actual fetishes will make it into the reconstructed machine species that will someday arise.
Much of this is tongue and cheeek, but there is a very real confluence of events that seems to be ocurring, and I’ve been talking about it for long enough to understand that when people first see the idea, they scoff, roll their eyes, or relegate it to the kind of space reserved for those memories that you never quite need again, but don’t want to erase completely.
What do we do? Maybe that’s the most important thing – to ask you a question.
If you can see how all of these things lining up, combined with the ability to influence a person’s actions from any distance based on the digital data acquired about them is not the mostforward-thinking approach to the rest of our existence.
I could go on about how no, really, fiction is a kind of prophetic morality play experiences that can nudge one’s subconscious towards examing possibilities that ….
… carrier lost…
In the morning, I checked the laptop and read what I’d written, thinking it would be filled with incomprehensible nonsense, but I was pleased with the result. I’ll try not to be too weeeeeeeeeaaaaaaarrrrrrr if you think it’s not even prequel worthy.
But at least you might get a chuckle from the auto response from the auto-moderator bot in the subreddit after I’d posted it.
