59 Comments

I think the emojis are great, and people opposed to it are missing the point. My interpretation is that it perfectly simulates having a neuralink that constantly flashied images in your head to "aide" your understanding. It perfectly simulates what it would be like a constant low level buzz in your head at all times, constantly attempting to alter your thinking process.

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This is what I wanted to say, but you said it better

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“Time dilation🏳️‍⚧️“

“Homogenizing🏳️‍🌈”

Haha, very funny.

:)

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Nigra made me lol

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Seems like you're getting a lot of hate for the emojis, which has a faint tang of irony given the indicators of you yourself hating emoji. I have a more optimistic view on them. While it is obviously true that "despite [...] limitations [...] we can find ways to express truths in any linguistic milieu", I would submit that the light and playful symbols drive rather than inhibit this expression. Imagine an internationally-ratified emoji set that included realistic genitalia, gunshot wounds and beheadings, syphilitic sores and massive tumors. Gone would be the exuberance of posting 🍆🍑 or 🙃🔫. The comfortable irony stripped away, people could no longer say what they mean because the raw explicitness of the expression would shock and humble them in the act of choosing the symbols from a menu of horror.

Language itself always plays the veil. I can tell you "brb kms" and hint at meanings not possible if i were telepathically flashing you a vivid fantasy of climbing up on this chair and putting my head in a noose. Or again -- to paraphrase from our time's celebrity philosopher -- think of the scene in Casablanca where the camera cuts to looking out at the air strip and we are left to imagine what the characters do. Because of the ambiguity, they both do and do not have sex. The camera's gentle discretion heightens the eroticism -- imagine instead that the cut were replaced with a lengthy and completely explicit hard-core pornographic scene. It would be impossible to go on after that, the movie would be over. Not due to prudery or the Hayes code, but because the magic would be gone.

Emoji are part of a lexicon that will always be limited, and whose limitations create the surplus enjoyment itself of evading that limitation. 👅🥵 and ඞ may be frail competitors to the wine-dark sea of a man whose sighted contemporaries lacked the word for the color they saw every day of their lives, but they're all we have.

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Another masterpiece. Throughout I had presumed that the Emoji were a kind of antimeme placed there to hinder understanding and increase effort as well as to simulate the intrusiveness of mental software. By the end I was glad they were there.

Throughout the piece I gleefully picked up all the bread crumbs (as the metanarrative coursed through my powerful thick veins and washed away my merited fear of lacking erudition - with memes you can go anywhere, I said to myself out loud) only to discover at the end that I had been walking on a giant highway marked Jorge Louis Borges Boulevard. I read only one of his works and it was not this one. Makes so much more sense now.

I would like to contribute some additional nuance to the discussion of the sanitized nature of emoji but we'll come back to it tomorrow.

Again, bravo.

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Speaking of references, the ref to BAP (2018) may not be sourced in his text -- both the points about the randomizing effects of divination and the difference between dominance and prestige hierarchies are from Joseph Henrich's 2015 "The Secret to Our Success". (Fictionalized Musk and Bezos both get the latter distinction wrong in this text, but I presume that was a deliberate authorial choice given that the correct distinction wouldn't fit in their conversation. But here I'm becoming pedanic and will stop.)

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Are you saying your copy of bronze age mindset doesn't have the full 377 pages? NGMI

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Mine clearly has 3370

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I wonder if that guy has any idea he became a meme.

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yes, agreed!

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I confess this might have been my favorite work of yours. As visually frustrating as it initially is, the movement of it eventually folds into something like a song. By the time we get to the Amazon, the language has become as maddeningly haptic and surreal as all the best nightmares.

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Chuck Pahliniuk recommended this piece via his substack. Great read! Long - so i circled back to read it.

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Indeed, increasingly I suspect we are living through the prequel to the Borg.

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Not me I live in the woods, catch me coppers, I won't be taken alive...

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I enjoyed the dialogue between Bezos and Elon, it reminded me of the dialogues in medieval/ancient writing where conversations between historical figures that probably didn't really take place were used for moral teaching, and to explore the personalities and flaws of the figures as history understood them.

Perhaps one day we'll tell our tales of half-forgotten tech lords...

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"How Humans Got Pwned"

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Only half-way through, but (so far) this is the short story I've been waiting for all my life.

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The future you describe inspires a strong sense of disgust and dread. Good work.

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Merely an echo of the elitist programming toward enslavement.

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Holy fuck. Did my 8 year old niece hack your account?

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please read it with an open mind

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Love ya but no. That stuff gives me an aneurysm.

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Do it, it is supremely good I was like you than I marched my way to the French Citation; then it was all smooth sailing. The emojis aid in comprehension and there are a million little jokes and deep points scattered throughout the text because of the emojis.

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You are missing out, this is genius! Genius! YUGEeeee genius!

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This is fantastic writing, and it mirrors a lot of the concerns I've had about the technology, as of late. A few of my own most recent blog posts deal with BCIs and the implications of cutting-edge biotech (synbio, biomimetics, bionanotechnology, and so on). A lot of people I know were pretty shocked (and/or dismissive) when I told them that Neuralink is actually obsolete. It's the old Utah Array-style microelectrode tech, just in a fancier package. Neuralink is the Apple Watch of Utah Arrays.

What started me down this road was hearing about Charles Lieber's indictment by the DOJ for fraud. He's a Harvard nanotech guy, and he'd been double-dipping and receiving funds both from US military think tanks (DARPA, AFOSR, ONR, etc.) and China's Thousand Talents Plan, which was against the terms of his DOD grants. Apparently, he was working on silicon nanowire battery technology for the Wuhan University of Technology, but nobody can remember him ever working on batteries of any sort. When you look up his bibliography, it's all stuff like implanting silicon nanowires in brain tissue and reading off the states of neurons, stimulating them. It's BCI tech. Incidentally, he's also buddies with Robert Langer, a cofounder of Moderna, and Dan Kohane, who recently put out a video about treating opioid overdoses by implanting light-activated nanoparticles under people's skin that act like Narcan when a blue flashlight is shined on them.

When I kept digging into all of this over the past few years, I went down a frankly disturbing rabbit hole regarding neurowarfare and nanoparticle-based neurotechnology. I encountered the speeches of James Giordano at West Point's Modern Warfare Institute, where he stood on a stage and raved for an hour about how wars of the future will be fought by dusting the rim of an adversary's glass with nanoparticles that make them pliant and bring them around to the poisoner's point of view. I also found out about DARPA's N3 program, which is short for Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology. Turns out, six teams at Battelle, Rice, PARC, Teledyne, Carnegie Mellon, and Johns Hopkins have been working on figuring out a means of producing BCIs that don't require a craniotomy.

The way they work is fairly simple in principle. Small <20nm nanoparticles known as nanotransducers are inhaled, ingested, or injected, they enter circulation, and they cross the blood-brain barrier and are taken up in brain tissue. Then, the subject wears a helmet that supplies the wireless energy necessary to power them via induction. No craniotomy is required. No cutting a hole in the skull, no resecting the dura, none of that.

This tech sounds like science fiction, like some real Black Mirror stuff, but it's real. They've tested it in vivo in flies, transfecting their motor neurons with nanotransducers and hitting them with a field from a coil to force them to open their wings. It's real and it works. There's a paper in Cell Press's Matter journal entitled "Nanotransducers for wireless neuromodulation" that describes exactly how they work, which is by opening ion channels in neurons remotely. I should add, changing membrane potential of cells by remote has other applications far more nefarious than mind control, such as stopping someone's heart by depolarizing all their SAN pacemaker cells, or, like in Michael Levin's experiments with tadpoles, using Vmem manipulation of embryonic cells to cause unusual growths or birth defects.

If you want to see some really nightmarish stuff, look up the papers in IEEE written by Ian Akyildiz and Josep Jornet. Also, look up keywords like "Internet of Everything", "Internet of Bodies", "Internet of Bio-Nano Things", "Intra-body Nano-networks", "In-body Nanosensors", "Wireless Body Area Networks", "IEEE 802.15.6", "Molecular Communication", and so on. Look up optogenetics, magnetogenetics, chemogenetics/DREADDs, and so on. Also, look up the papers by Ehud Gazit on engineered amyloids. Some of the proposals I've seen for 'borgifying people involve using components constructed entirely by synthetic biology. No fabricated semiconductor nanotech required. Just stuff some genetic code in the cells, and they produce protein and peptide-based semiconductors, antennas, optical waveguides, and so on, entirely out of amino acids and metal ions that are already inside the body, in a sort of in vivo self-assembly approach.

If this stuff goes the way I think it is, then microelectrode arrays will be seen as extremely, hilariously dated and primitive in a few decades. The real ticket would be germline modifications that make people's offspring automatically 'borgified from birth in all of their cells and tissues, using a purely synthetic biology-based approach, such that all of their cells are responsive to externally supplied wireless energy whether they want them to be or not. There would be no obvious implant, nothing to surgically remove to free the person from their servitude. Basically, they would be native cyborgs, their bodies completely suffused with bioengineered nanotech from the moment of conception.

With the way the Overclass and central bankers are behaving about CBDCs and servitization and their obvious dreams of becoming a permanent, dynastic rentier class, and all the woke AI stuff I've been seeing out of OpenAI, I am absolutely certain that if this comes to pass, it will create a Brave New World-style biological caste system, basically a biopolitical hell dreamed up by psychopaths, where people's brains will be constantly tweaked to align to the system's values.

A nightmare world where no art, no creative writing, and no form of genuine agency or self-expression will ever be possible again.

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Thanks for the scaring the shit out of me off to go live in the woods now.

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Good read. Nicely in the flow. Thanks for the excellent catalyst.

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This is incredible, thank you for sharing!

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Brilliant!

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