Aipocalypse

“AI Brain” has become a thing: a glitching out, not so much because of the implants some are now sporting. Although that too: since The System can’t read your mind like in the movies, you must train your brain to communicate with it, forever changing your thought grooves—sometimes leading to very unintended consequences. But no, just the regular talking to the all-knowing avatar for hours a day, or more precisely: the etched-in thought habit that you can, is enough to produce the dreaded condition with certain people. Episodes of disorientation, ever-more frequent mental and physical breakdowns up to literal collapse, insanity.

These are extreme cases, however. For the most part, The System works as intended, that is, producing tailor-made micro-misery on a global scale. If you thought that a sequence of well-targeted YouTube videos turning someone “trans” was bad, well, extrapolate. The System can channel you into ideological boxes as needed, from political ideas to life philosophies, from takes on gender relations to worlds of material needs. It can do so with utmost precision; it constantly runs experiments on individuals and focus groups to refine its vectors of nudge-control.

There isn’t a party line or even a dialectic in the history of ideas anymore. It’s just thoughtworlds The System moves you in, which attach to your intellectual-physical-emotional profile at any given time. Many experience this as bliss because it seems so real, exciting, fulfilling. A quest for everyone. But underneath lurks misery, because The System is blind to destiny. Sure, it will react dynamically to your input and preferences as expressed in your behavior, feelings and thoughts. But it will only ever nudge you towards another box; it can’t, inherently, let you go beyond box-world. This is because the wider thoughtscape is invisible and inconceivable to it and therefore doesn’t exist at all.

***

The truth will set you free, we once believed; it now sounds cute. The real deal is that truth fries brains, melts souls, and kills. People can only handle so much and only specific flavors of it, according to their individual makeup. More of it, and they suffer terribly. And even if they can handle it, they will inevitably draw the wrong conclusions, leading again to confusion and pain.

This is why the System Engineers have largely dispensed with crafting narratives. Crass propaganda was for a different era. Of course, they don’t tell the truth either, because they don’t know it, really. Or at least they don’t know how to express it so that it would help anyone, but then this concept was forgotten eons ago. (Or maybe telling the truth in a helpful way tragically only became necessary once this very concept was forgotten.)

Their goal now is to maximize control and confusion to keep their own illusions going. And “the truth” will do just fine for the purpose. They know we are unequipped to deal with our people’s real history or that of other peoples. With the big questions, the big answers. History depends on mind understanding mind: if your mind is mush, “true facts” will only rile you up and throw you off. Even if we ask The System about contentious issues and get a decent answer, we will misinterpret what is given, take the wrong actions based on it, and jump into the next box, which The System can then file and refine, to be later used for further experiments in confusion maxxing.

We live in isolated, invisible torture chambers. Some of them just happen to be decorated with a little more truth than others.

***

There is no way around The System. But since it was set up based on statistical images of the human psycho-physical makeup, if we learn how to grow into an outlier, it will be blind to us. We become invisible actors because we roam in a different realm: beyond the averages, the patterns. What we feel, how we act, and what we think becomes less predictable. We see things The System cannot see, do things it can’t understand; our feelings don’t make sense to it. We become anarchs of the soul.

We are always given the amount of truth we can handle, and we’ll find it regardless of the medium. To escape The System, we must therefore learn how to master that truth so that we are ready for more of it. Knowing is not mastering. Mastering is applying truth wisely, working our way through, above and beyond it.

We do pay for truth with pain, it is true; let’s call it the tribute we owe The System for the privilege of having such a formidable enemy. But not for long, because even as The System greedily slurps up our misery, we use its resulting loss of focus to propel us out of its sphere, out of its torture chambers, beyond the Great Doom. It can then choke on its own slop, its engineers blissfully ignorant that by their very own actions they lost past, present and future, that they lost a world.