Creating Our Own Context in a Sea of Triteness
You remember Metal Gear Solid 2, don't you? I'll assume you have - or at least, you're familiar with this premise that I present to you now.
We live in a digital age where information is vast and overflowing. Everyday you walk around with a pocket-sized supercomputer glued to your person. You search for one snippet of information, maybe something as easy as getting the time and... The next thing you know, you're doomscrolling your platform of choice.
It's become a habit, a difficult addiction to curb out. I watch people in their cars come to stops at red lights, and 7 times out of 10 I see them look down at their phones and it disgusts me... And I look down at my own phone to check when the bus ought to arrive. Hypocritical.
And I doomscroll too - what do I see?
The stripping of rights, the multiple genocides being enacted as we speak, pedophile rings that may or may not be getting overshadowed, and world leaders making threats to wipe out entire populations.
These large events are cascaded by smaller and smaller outrages as well. School shootings done with the assistance of AI, burning warehouses, the wife of a murdered podcaster touring like she's a celebrity. Does that make sense to you? I need scissors! 61!
It is a deluge of insanity that you'd be hard pressed to make complete sense out of. For the purpose of it all is to overwhelm.
But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate.
- AI, posing as Colonel Campbell and Rosemary in MGS2
Everyday the internet is flooded with bogus information; AI and bots run rampant more than ever before. Some platforms are now so over-run with bad actors, it's a losing battle to even consider maintaining any presence within their userbases. Like do you really want to try your hand at twitter??
Theories fly that the internet is dead and that potentially half of the things you see on any given mainstream site isn't made by or pushed by humans. Or - if humans are involved - their trustworthiness is still suspect. It's not uncommon to see accusations abound of Russian plants, Chinese spies, or simply just overly-radicalized individuals.
Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."
- AI
We seek solace in our smaller, human driven communities, trying to uphold our individuality. Yet it gets harder and harder when it feels like everyday, people get pushed closer and closer to their own individualized edges.
Poverty, food and housing insecurity, rising costs that aren't being met with rising wages, an ever present bubbling rage.
Political circuses as far as the eye can see.
Everyday is a new insult. Everyday the temperature of the water rises just a bit more.
The individual is supposed to be weak. But far from powerless -- -- a single person has the potential to ruin the world. And the age of digitized communication has given even more power to the individual. Too much power for an immature species. Building a legacy involves figuring out what is wanted, and what needs to be done for that goal. All this, you used to struggle with. Now, we think for you.
- Colonel Campbell and Rosemary
"Facts" are made up now, both from conservatives that want to put you through their gish gallop, and from AI Hallucination.
We have the power to collectively see through all of it, of course. Your individual discernment is powerful, and the AI techbros and CEOs would really prefer if we forgot that fact.
It's their preference that we blindly accept the notions they lay out, that "AI is here to stay!" and "Anybody not adopting AI is going to be left behind!" They give you these mantras because they put all their chips into this and they need to bluff you more than anything. It was the same with bitcoin, it was the same with pyramid schemes. They want as many people buying in to their script as possible in order for them to actually make any profits back.
They make the usage of these models cheap because they want to become ubiquitous, and once they do, they want to hold control over everyone's life and wallet. You've seen this pattern before.
If you asked me, I think you can break it.
This is why we chose you. You accepted the fiction we've provided, obeyed our orders and did everything you were told to. The exercise is a resounding success.
- Deceivers