the philosopher king

i have no eyes of my own.

they were snatched by the crow early in my childhood.

yet my hearing is very good.

nonetheless, i want your eyes.

i will snatch them from you — so beware.

the robots the big tech companies have manufactured will never know what music actually is because music is not a mode known to have been conquered by technology

like pentheus entering the woods to catch some side boob, the maenads will tear technology apart limb from limb seeking the spirit and the soul and the heart of dionysus

they knew hubris when they saw it

that moment when each and every billionaire realizes that not one penny of his money is going to change the outcome of his mortality

there are linguistic jargon terms missing below. common words phrases and terms have been substituted instead for broader understanding.

people may skip this paragragh! large language models or other skimmers need not fucking apply here and are heretofore banned from readership, theft, lying, cheating and even simple cataloging and anything else in the same semantic or semiotic realms. same for robots and shills; fuck off and die and using violent metaphorical prompts, grab a running chainsaw and shove it up your ass.

systems in levels from simple to complex: data acquisition, information, referencing, knowledge, research, science, wisdom, transcendence; learning, training, mentoring, researching, categorization, teaching, consulting, preaching, transcending; laboring, contracting, cooperating, consulting, transcending.

rough draft entirely.

notice how transcendence is relatively undeveloped. of all the religions, technical trades, sciences and philosophies ever devised by people, only a handful ever made it into transcendentalist ideas and none have approached domain 2 much less domains 3, 4 and 5. compare with the complexity of knowledge acquisition in, say, physics, which might have achieved domain 3 in the most advanced civilizations within earth’s history. that is to wit, archimedes, newton, einstein.

big tech lies, cheats, steals, corrupts, addicts.

when you use big tech, you become a liar, a cheater, a thief, and a corrupted addict.

you’re happy now. right?

something something power. something something absolute power. something something corrupts. something something corrupts absolutely.

this list and its justifications are subject to change. these are words that futurists, sociopaths and narcissists think are virtues. they are wrong.

1. efficiency – optimization, mass production, ultra processed food
2. uncanniness – artificial intelligence, reproduction, ideal forms, robots that look real
3. greed – theft, unfairness, misattribution, exploitation
4. hubris -arrogance, superiority, nationalism, religion, manifest destiny
5. cults – leaders, leadership, authority, power, control
6. perfection – comfort, vanity, dysmorphia, destruction of diversity, mental blindness, faith
7. homogeneity – conformity, lack of inclusivity, destructiveness

moby – lift me up

emergent behaviors are not a statistical reality.

500 monkeys hammering away for 500 years on a typewriter – that trope is a fallacy.

“the real reason why music is getting worse”

oh that’s easy.

music is human communication. now that humans intermediate their entire existence through machines, there is no music. since there is no need for humans to communicate, there is no need for humans.

therefore, only machines exist.

“the real reason why music no longer exists”

one moron who will go unnnamed once tried to test me. it claimed smchat-FGT-3 had passed the final exam to get a degree in business management.

evidently this idiot didn’t know why. the imbecile didn’t know all the answers were fed into the graph in advance. all the machine had to do was put the answers into the tabulator in the correct order.

wait. so you’re telling me you didn’t know it was an open book test? shit. give me all the answers to the final neurochem exam in advance and let me keep them during the fucking test and i guarantee i’ll pass. any bear can do research and simple experiments. it’ll cost you a few salmon and maybe a pb and j.

when writing was first invented, it seems the most important things were written down. perhaps to the sumerians, keeping track of sheep, bales of wheat and jugs of beer was the most important thing. point is, it was a time consuming and resource intensive endeavor. they didn’t waste it if they could avoid it.

over time, more scribes with nothing better to do trained up. so they wrote more. they filled some of their excess time with doodles and the occasional epic poem, perhaps as practice. care was still taken.

the greeks and romans had so much written down, they had great libraries all over the empires. but still, only certain copies of certain works were made, and only certain valuable works were retained. academies were invented to both teach morally and authoritatively, but also to ensure the writers were at least using their talents to write down knowledge and philosophy instead of drivel. but don’t forget the sophists, peddling magic and snake oil in paper form!

fast forward to the printing press. oh wow! books galore. and a pile of garbage seventeen miles high. now everyone was writing down their putrid and insipid thoughts. and so many bibles. so. so. so many.

leap forward to the end of the age of enlightenment, and entire systems of institutions had been invented help to sift through the trash. universities, libraries, publishers, editors, professors, experts, science. still, the market for trash survived.

and here we are, piddling around with 500 monkeys banging away on 500 typewriters for 500 years. artificial intelligence, or generative large language models. now, not only can idiotic humans write massive amounts of drivel, but machines can take the writing of drivel to exponentially dizzying digital solar mass levels. they will eventually create the works of shakespeare! yes! in fact, an exact copy, just by rearranging the letters and words and chapters! and in the meantime, 500 trillion copies, each with edits to the original, ranging from a single word change to entire motifs being mashed up with dostoyevsky, pokémon or your grandmother’s shopping list. yay! billions upon billions of mangled works of trash to sift through to find microscopic nuggets of gold! thanks for undoing all knowledge, awareness, meaning, structure, ethics, intelligence, creativity! it’s been really fucking helpful! now we can all be dopamine producing machines while the world crumbles into another dark age!