If you’re the sun, I’m a black hole
– The Stephen Hawking, Say Anything

What killed the hacker culture I grew up in was spectacle. You can consume it without participating, and even worse it has signaling value. I never did CTFs to put them on my resume. I don’t even have a resume I take seriously. Just a battle between me and a machine and the glorification of my ego, sometimes public, but never performative. There was no purpose beyond the thing. The streams by their nature became no longer any truthful reflection of self, just a prediction of what you want on them, and you can’t stop this because we are permeable.

I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person. There are no rough edges, it’s basically marketing copy. Reflected back and forth in their heads with this “society” mirror so many times that there’s no identity or coherence left, just a mush of diffuse monochrome light.

The streams are wireheading, aka ‘felt completion without world contact.’ You watch and you feel a version of what I feel. But the difference is that you didn’t do anything. And in so much as there is a you, it isn’t steering. Now I realize that the non steering you is everywhere. I’d say they still claim they are people, but I’m not totally sure they would.

AI is making this all so much worse. When you are prompting you feel like you are steering, but are you really? Would you know if you weren’t? I love analysis YouTube videos but it’s really the same thing and I need to stop. Your food is prechewed for you. The caged tiger prefers a pot of meat slop to an antelope they have to chase.

And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms. Oh god people actually go on a hinge date to axe throwing and think it’s the real world.

Isolation is basically impossible because the Internet follows you everywhere. And it’s perfectly uniform, there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese.

I tried having a flip phone once (2014), but you couldn’t find out what time the movies were playing because moviephone just redirected you to their app. You can’t isolate in that old world, because the old world doesn’t exist. It was outcompeted.

The normal strategies you have against this won’t work. They didn’t take away the thing, they built an awful cancerous version of it that outcompetes yours. The early pickup stuff was so good, then you get the transition with Roosh and now you all get the Andrew Tate you deserve.

Man I wish tattoos still made you unemployable then I’d go get some. Maybe the new tattoos are just like being racist or something, but that’s hard to do when your heart isn’t in it and they will eventually find some way to absorb that. The machine takes your culture and sells a shitty version of it back to you.

I don’t think I’m properly capturing the scope of the machine. First you build the fence to keep the animals out then you build the fence to keep the animals in. It’s a Fullmetal Alchemist homunculus maybe it has already eaten your soul.

I don’t really see how this gets better, I just know that everything eventually ends. But it was never the terminator you had to worry about, it was the price required to create the philosopher’s stone. You won’t be killed by bullets, you’ll be transmuted into compatible material.

ChatGPT told me to end it there. I’m still smarter than it, but by less and less each year. I really am excited to see what happens, I don’t think it’s what a lot of people think. The SF takes are so hilariously out of touch, it will actually be them who AI eats first, so there will be some schadenfreude in that, but then we are all still here.

After the revolution, there’s reconstruction. A reminder that most revolutions suck balls and make things worse, you just remember the good ones. And this revolution isn’t AI, AI is just the atomic bomb of a brutal information war that’s been raging for decades.

We aren’t going to get the World Wars, they were products of the Industrial Revolution. They only wanted your body, not your soul. The new war demands your inner reality. The new war will be weird in all sorts of new ways we can’t even imagine yet.

lol remember all the idiots who said we were at the end of history?