Looking over some news, and came across some ideas I found too delicious to resist writing some ideas back at. Don't really know that it's a great thing for the blog to be used that way, as my personal comment thread, and I have tried to refrain from that, but it's been creeping back in lately. I mean, I could have written a lot more posts about China. Well, I did write them. I didn't publish them, though. That's something.
Anyway, the salient bits are this: more deepfaked and AI generated images than ever, human brain tasked with processing five percent more information per day every year and it drains people, information apocalypse, a construction worker can make a viral shitpost of the Pope in a puffer while tripping on shrooms and people will think it's real.
It's 2023, twenty years since I started lurking forums on the old web, and to this day I am amazed at how precise and applicable a predictive engine the language I absorbed back then proved to be. The Trump presidency was predicted. The takeover of meatspace by online dynamics and the escalation of the culture wars thereby was not only predicted but theorized, workshopped, designed, and launched, like a flock of autonomous drones darkening the skies. I watched it happen in horror and awe, astonished and fearful, like Ian Malcolm seeing the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park for the first time. The crazy sons of bitches did it, they said what they were going to do and they did it. Meatspace people still think Buzzfeed is like this normal thing that just happened organically instead of a psychic harpoon that punctured their blubber and extended poisonous barbs. Their methodology works on the micro to this day. Practically every niche tworter account swollen with ingroup influence, whose gyrations predict the shape of thousands of sycophant accounts, began as a "mere" shitpost/joke account, as Buzzfeed was once a "mere" shitpost/joke generator/aggregator. It's why my face twists over to one side when someone tells me to lighten up, it's "just" shitposting. It's like, son, I was there. Do you understand? I was reading the posts when these fuckers were telling each other how shitposting is never just shitposting, and this is how we prove it. I was there when they proved it, and now we are all here.
It is my habit to trade in mental images, especially of internet; one of the reasons people were surprised for a long time that hadn't read Snow Crash. Well, now I have, and the image of ziggurat therein is a powerful one, dispensing the binary commands on which a society operates. How about this: a warehouse big enough to contain eight billion player pianos.
Hm. I don't have much of a point, I guess, except that some of us have been girding our loins for this type of shit and the level at which it is starting to operate for decades. I have never imagined trusting words and images on internet; almost since I began daily usage I have understood that it is more like a dream than anything else, that words and pictures and even math can lie on internet and that to trust any part of it or think that it is real is to invite a kind of death into your mental processes. It is my overriding assumption, my phalanx, that statements of fact on the internet are designed to mislead your thinking, and that images have been manipulated. To adopt a more relaxed position is to invite calamity. That is all.
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Another tidbit that I found delicious and amazing was that one Artificial Intelligence guy saying we will one hundred percent go extinct if we don't cut the AI shenanigans like immediately.
It's like, I hope they stop too! But mostly because it's all been so stupid. It's been a stupid revolution, and it's a stupid way to die. Yet, it is a highly probable way to die. Hope killer AI gives me the chance to smoke that classic final cigarette, because stopping is not a thing we do, as species, as a global civilization. Even if by some miracle ninety percent of all labs and individuals everywhere did stop, the people who most should stop will continue, so as not to lose their precious edge over their competitors, who have not stopped because they know the first motherfucker won't stop, and so on around the world like a noose, plus the dumbfucks who don't stop because they think it's alarmist bullshit.
At this point, I'm just glad for a surefire solution to climate change. That's probably a factor of my failure to reproduce, but I'm going to take comfort in it anyway.
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Against my better judgment, I grabbed Resident Evil VII.I.AGE, and it has been massively rewarding. Resident Evil 4 was never scary enough; this bastard plays like RE4, but it horrifies in a way playing as the world's twinkest superhero never could. No matter what fucked shit RE4 threw at me, I was ready to take it and fuck it up right back. There was tension--certainly, I didn't want to have my head chainsawed off, or plucked from my shoulders and devoured by a writhing parasite. But I was never terrified by the very concept. Playing RE7.1, I don't want any of this shit to happen to me, and on top of that, the things I'm seeing transcend tension and impact the very gut with basal, reptile fear. In RE4, I wanted to shoot the next thing, make progress, to prove my shit-hot skillset. I don't want anything in RE7.1 at all, I want nothing to happen, I want it all to stop, except for getting my daughter back, even though she's clearly some type of fungus, and so am I, apparently. Going by his example, all damage to the body--legs, shoulders, protracted blood loss, whatever--can be repaired by splashing one's left hand with plant extract and pure alcohol.
It's like, I didn't play Resident Evil 7. Ezra's playing it now, though, and RE7.1 had a nice little recap. But he's definitely some kind of mutant, right? He's a bioweapon. This Mold shit has altered him fundamentally. But still, man. Some shit pierces the illusion. Not enough to block the incredible fear this game makes me feel, like a thick cold syrup invading my blood, but enough that I notice it every time.
Anyhow, I'm two bosses in--that shit in the basement of the house with the puppets was UNBELIEVABLY FUCKED--and I'm hoping this feeling lasts at least all the way through the first playthrough. I understand that subsequent playthroughs will be an exercise in dominance over the material, but for now, cold fear, please and thank you.
--JL
