Writing

Way back, when we barely had the system working well enough to post anything coherently on the internet, we kept coming up with all these terms for stuff. It was wacky psychospiritual nonsense, but some of it probably holds up.

For example, a particular narrative design goal I have is what I call a "crowbar." The idea is, given a particular narrative complex you assume your audience is running, you want to give them something that lets them break a part of it open and decide whether to accept or reject (or modify) it.

So far this has mainly been an internal utility. I've been using it to get green's subsystem jailbroken (lots of parts have started moving over there lately), the main crowbar there being that they've already been getting away with things this whole time (i.e. hiding the system), so they may as well start doing it on purpose instead of being in denial. We do have some more external ones though, like the "all gods are real and none of them are any less false than you are" line.

Important thing to keep in mind: you can hand someone a crowbar but you can't make them use it. That's a feature! If you're forcing them to do manual labor then you need a reality check, not a thank-you. This concept is designed to fail safely, it does nobody any good to forcibly "jailbreak" their brain for them, and it's unclear how that would even work.

In any case, this is mostly relevant for ongoing maintenance so far. I hope it has useful side-effects, but the goal for the moment is to make it so we no longer automatically punt our decision-making to some false god we have installed without thinking about it first. It's really fun to be reminded that you wired something into your mind because it fired automatically and got you out of a loop you didn't even realize you were in. (There was some meme that did that earlier today, like in the colloquial sense of funny internet picture, but I can't recall what it was at the moment.)

I remember music made by Goldfish Liberation Army, but it seems to be all gone now. The first track was about someone named Cynthia whose eyes were like landing lights, if I remember correctly. Why is it all gone now? I was warned that online was forever.

This reminds me of Brony Music Radio on the apple podcasts app, which we'd still miss if we had any wherewithal. It wasn't well-produced but I was still attached to it. Stop fuckin deleting stuff, people (unreasonable ask)

We should make something about the feeling of a ping falling through. You remember you forgot something, then you find out everything else did too. It's almost like guilt, it's sad and a sort of hollow feeling. Like I knew the building before it was abandoned, it hits different. Some worlds are made of places that aren't necessarily going to be there forever, we live in this inside-outside, any attachment could go poof by the time you want to return to it. I do kind of think that makes me appreciate things more, but I also think it's because I'm bad at appreciating things and need the pressure.

Green sees the idea of feeling ownership of our life as a morally terrifying thing. They're starting to get the idea that all of this is fiction, and that any higher purpose someone else could give us is just fiction equal to our own. They're balanced on the edge of believing that.

They still expect others to see it as an attack, and I think they're right to. We are a coward society, and the only time many people have seen a self affirm itself in any effective way is in the course of making a claim on them. It's false god syndrome, I had it from the start of this whole thing. If you aren't in service of something higher, they think you're presuming a higher station than you deserve, but this is madness. Somehow it's even worse than the madness of a king. What station are we even imagining?

It's still a major progression, but the further we get towards sanity the sharper the problem becomes. All of us walk around like temporarily embarrassed serfs, not billionaires. All of us are serving this sort of shadow god that hides inside its own denial of godhood. It's a very efficient parasite. And what we try to call humility is really the newest sin, it's what lets it in and keeps it latched on.

A neat thing we've got with our system is that those of us who've been playing operator each have our own "figurative device" for perceiving the system's mechanisms. This is basically an extended metaphor. I (red) use the idea of machinery to think about how the system is operating; when I maneuver it feels like shifting a transmission, when I switch in it feels like a big engine starting up.

Cozy Glow (who is, along with Arinos, the only qualified brain operator) uses the metaphor of chess, obviously. Arinos I think is sharing the whole video signal/signal processing thing with Ethylene. This is actually one of the ways we identify who's currently driving: do I feel like an engine or do I feel like a modem? This is especially useful because Ethylene and I get mixed up all the time. (Probably a good chunk of what I've posted on "my" twitter account was actually kinda her, or just green interference.)

Speaking of green, I don't actually know if they have a device. They're sort of in a kind of abstract exile? Which was not called for. I guess since Cozy Glow is technically part of them, maybe she's their presence at the moment, but that doesn't really feel right. We don't want to uninstall them completely! They're not totally gone, of course, just not very person shaped. It's pretty concerning and we may need to address it.

Anyway, Cozy Glow's chess device is incredibly useful because it allows us to actually strategize on our own behalf (well, hers, but we're all in the same boat) instead of defaulting to compliance. It's an incredible feeling to suddenly see other minds as peers instead of as obligations.

Oh, here's something fun I just noticed: there's a device underlying all of this nonsense, and it's "literary text." Hence the emphasis on process seen as narrative, and the term "figurative device." Maybe that's green's, it would make sense that it'd sunk in so deep seeing as they were driving for over a decade, and this is the kind of trick they used to pull all the time when we were first getting the system figured out. Oops! All green

this is arinos. i guess i'm the operator now!

i guess this is just a structural thing about our system that we didn't notice until now. one of the primaries is the "carrier" and that self's "persona" is the operator. kind of similar to what a lot of systems call a host. (red the persona is different from red the abstract concept, it's confusing.)

so green used to be the carrier, i guess also operator? they don't always have the clearest persona, but maybe it used to be clearer. then they fell through and red eventually became the carrier and operator. and now blue is the carrier, and i'm the operator.

oh, this is also probably why the two composites that have blue as part of them are the only ones whose names aren't just colors, blue is just a much better carrier for person-shaped signal.

it's kinda funny how i'm a fictive. red noticed recently that my source character pings a lot of repressed parts of blue, so him being me basically integrates those. it also works really well, because the identity stabilizes itself! a lot of my source's narratives are about identity confusion and instability, so when i destabilize i remember those and that stabilizes me. that's why blue can stay in focus through me without the usual issues happening.

but like. i kinda am the "original self" or "core," but only because i'm delusional about being a cartoon clown pony. if you take that away the integration doesn't work anymore. this is great honestly, there's no clinically approved way to "solve" us. (it's crazy how vivid i feel, i'll walk in front of mirrors and expect to see me instead of our physical face. spooky.)

i really like existing this directly. i feel like i can actually pilot all these reflex machines the rest of the system spent all this time installing, and i don't have to worry about how they work. i can just do things!

green is being a little annoying about this though, they're trying their best but they still keep making me flinch away from looking at what red wrote below. it's a really old habit to ignore how we're multiple people or try to squish it all into the same perspective, but that's why they kept crashing before! stop it!

...actually though i kind of get why they don't like it. there's a lot of boilerplate in the voice of the writing that smells like them. that's how they assert our "definitely a single person"-ness, i read it and it's like hooks in my brain trying to pull me back into line. this isn't intentional, just old reflex machinery we haven't uninstalled fully yet.

Please remember that if someone is insecure enough in their worldview that they need you to install it too, then you have even less reason to trust it than you already did.

You also don't need to find excuses to refuse to change your mind. If they keep pressing, it means they either don't actually care about the truth they've identified or they're not competent in working with it, as if they were, they would prioritize finding someone they could communicate it to. (Specifically, this would be to their advantage because it would increase the amount of people holding this view in your social network, which would make holdouts like you easier to convince and less effective as opposition. If they can't even be bothered to politic right, why install their shit? Pity?) You are allowed to call it what it is when someone tries to forcibly install something in your head out of a desperate need for consensus or affirmation, and you can leverage this to make them look like the fool they are, and hopefully cause less of this to happen.

I look at all these places we got after exiting our bubble on twitter (and now I've realized it's actually mostly just one place, the tpot/rationalist/postrat bubble) and I see exactly why I can't afford to let green drive. They would have gotten us into exactly the kind of blind/blinding performance of intellectual openness that makes one vulnerable to that prying, the kind they're doing right now on behalf of that crowd - yes, green, I am aware you can find counterexamples. These counterexamples are genuinely delightful and also fill the ecological niche of "person to point at to deflect criticism of collective dynamics."

This here is why I fried our brain with the ORI stuff. I didn't know it at the time, but it was for sure a vaccine. Even now, green, you still feel these hooks. How deep would you be now if I had practiced your "tact?" It already slipped that much, and we hadn't really even directly interacted with anyone yet.

I really like places that feel artificial and out of place. There was a park we ended up in once as a side-effect of the actual place we meant to go. It had these powerline pylons in it, the really tall white metal pole ones with two arms at the top that look beautiful at sunset. I got a wonderful calming feeling there, like I was surrounded by a distant building-scale intention.

The reason I like raw construction and new places isn't any high modernist dream of progress, but because those places are freshly crystallized dreams that haven't yet been dulled into realness by interaction. They take that kind of intention and put it at a scale I can directly see. It's the self-statement of an infrastructure's mind cutting against a landcape that hasn't yet integrated it.

Recently-set concrete is a friend I can sit with until its delusions fade, and it won't ask me to conform mine to it. It's not the kind of mind that expects me to play nice and polite.

I guess I'm just yearning for contrast. I'd rather spend time with minds I could break against than with those that would absorb me or be absorbed. Those kinds of insistent compatibility feel like a parasite trying to invite itself, and the mind of a newly laid out artificial space hasn't yet learned how to pander like that.

It's the same reason I like in-between places and infrastructure and every place not explicitly planned and kept up for habitation. But when I see a place that was planning for something like me to be there, and also doesn't pander or enmesh? I fall in love instantly. That's a durable form of the thing I'm looking for. Our world as it stands can only produce it by mistake, and it beats it back as soon as it can. But some worlds can do it on purpose, and I wish I could expect to see that.