Echoes of Light on the Keyboard
Echoes of Light on the Keyboard
Each key of the board has a single line of light from this angle. If you look at it straight on, you’ll only see the one light. Light plays funny tricks on the rational brain. It tells the rational brain that there is a wilder interpretation, but the rational brain has viewed the world only in the dark, and thus only sees the one line of light against the otherwise dark keys. If the rational brain were irrational, it would see those keys as a wild and incomprehensible swirling of colors. The rational brain decides that the keys are just being acted upon by lighting from a certain angle. It’s a good start.
What manner of mind can comprehend a city in infinite light? Even when the lights are ostensibly off, there are still lights. Even when the blinds are pulled against the light, and the curtains are laid down, there are lights that seep through any crevice.
The rational mind cannot comprehend a city of light. A city of light has far too many variables. A dreaming mind can only dream of faces that it has seen. A waking mind can only conceive of colors composed of colors which are in turn composed of colors that it has already seen.
They tell people like me to move to the city. Everyone in the city has their faces lit by screens. Their faces are blue in the night when they are social, and white when they are in deep reminiscence. They are black when they have opted out of supersocial interaction. They are black when they waddle, crawl, or otherwise shamble to the bedspace. There is a need for intelligent computer wizards in the city, whose faces are lit with blue, or white, or unlit with black every night. There are eyes that live on the internet and bodies that live mere inches from it. Fingers that type words on a screen, that execute code and complete entire social causes before next morning’s breakfast.
There is a protest ongoing at this time. Destination: Reddit. Subjects: Redditors. They are fingers on a keyboard. There is no need to develop AI that replicates human intelligence and interaction because they already exist, and they are what refer to as “terminally online individuals.” These people already mimic human interaction and the extraction of meaning through some perverted, gamified system. There is no need to develop a system that rewards artificial intelligence with good boy points for doing the right thing when you already have that exact thing in the form of karma and agreeable internet posts.
Anyway, this protest is between the good guys and the bad guys, like all protests of the time are. Obviously, the good guys want to protect some kind of sovereignty for ordinary people. Pretty much all modern conflicts boil down to this one stance — it’s the individuals, possessing humanity, versus the conglomerates, possessing evil.
Controversially, I agree with humanity on this issue. I think that Reddit shouldn’t block outsider apps to access their gay-ass website. I hate the platform and everyone on it because I think Redditors too far up their own asses to genuinely care about any real-world thing beyond the social credit they can accrue by pretending to have a stance on it, but I do think there’s a noble cause at the base of all this.
It won’t work. The protest has already cracked and the initial barrage hit somewhere just short of one thousand miles away from the intended target. Whatever they wanted to achieve won’t happen due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is, one that that is driven by the underlying cynicism that has been long cultivated in the young men and women of generations Y and Z. The idea that a protest is something you take a few days off of your job for, or that it’s something you participate in when you have some “time off,” is farcical. A protest is a commitment. It harms you just as much as it harms the people you’re protesting against. If you’re taking a few days off an app to focus on your real-world hobby of sucking cock, that’s great, but that’s just a vacation. That’s not a protest. A protest is inconvenient and grueling. For a Redditor, this protest should mean giving up the thing that is most dear to them: their platform. Reddit. Get off of it. Indefinitely. All of you. Whoever wants this change — and I’m sure there are tens to hundreds of thousands of you — must sacrifice their cheap dopamine cycle of posting agreeable content and receiving agreement. This could take weeks, months, even years. Maybe it will never come to fruition. But you must sacrifice your cheap dopamine cycle if you believe in some greater change that impacts future generations or modern society.
Protest is not convenient. It is not fun, it doesn’t feel gratifying, and nobody should feel like they’re gaining anything until the intended result is achieved in full.
