Free Thoughts: Memories & Matadors
TV Series Premise: “Karma”
Massive text messaging glitch, across every SMS platform, sends “👋” to every person everyone has ever texted with – from spouses to kids to Amazon drivers to old lovers. As a result, everyone also realizes the last time they interacted.
All these last times will be recalled anew, and all will find out who never erased their number.
We follow Erich, a bored middle-aged software developer, with a couple kids, suburb outside Phoenix. He gets greetings from high school friends, and flings from 15 years ago, and one extra-marital tinder hookup from last weekend he’d like to forget. All the flings and his wife respond the same: “💋”
I don’t know, tonally, if this turns really funny or really dark or both, but all hell breaks loose in a world where relationships no longer have hard endings and where, in a way, everyone everyone’s ever met ends up talking to each other.
Lol without knowing I’d write this today, I wrote the end-credit sequence song back in 2006:
Most social media accounts are fake. An AI has liked at least one of your tweets – maybe even responded with a “Yaas!” At least one of your followers on Anstagrim or TitKok is a semi-sentient bot.
ChatGPT is not a start-up. It’s a culmination of decades of social, political, and educational experimentation.
Fwiw, as we know, the internet was deployed by DARPA in a late 60s military experiment. We serfs were unaware of it until the 80s, and didn’t really use it with any real-time relevance until the 90s.
Even then, it took another 20 years for the internet to fully realize its mission to cleave society into a million discrete and unreconcilable perspectives on the world.
Always assume there is unknowable technological advancement operating around you that 20 years from now your kids will use to order bed-rotting tacos.
Weird to be so bombarded with memories now by generative photo albums in my photo apps called “Memories.” The memories they serve up, however, are not actual recollections. They comprise only what I’ve photographed and filmed.
In a way, the details of events recalled by my machines are the ultimate extrapolation of the adage “Pics or it didn’t happen!” Lol, to my iPhone, if I hadn’t snapped pictures, I’d have no memories at all.
What they serve me are what these apps think I’d like to recall. They just drop from the sky every day, out of the blue.
When they play after I click on them, they are not “implanted,” per se. They are more re-implanted. Or at least re-prioritized. “Triggered memories,” too, I guess.
But man, have I taken a lot of pictures. Maybe should have let up on the throttle. Otoh, I outsourced my memories, and freed up space in my brain, right?
Right?
i don’t feel until i notice.
Control is not,
for real,
illusion,
so i think,
for real
Extrapolation is a form of noticing. You find something in a thing that resonates, and then project the resonance – follow the wave, so to speak – into the future.
Everything you post ironically will eventually be taken as your literal opinion.
There’s a version of broadcasting’s future where anyone’s ability to “go live” on any content platform will require advanced authorization from the government, the content platform, and your deeply partisan Aunt Fran.
Robots will repair other robots, and future humans won’t even know how we watched the sunset.