Thread by @0x49fa98

My friends, it has been so long since we've had a heart to heart, and I've missed you.

This is my latest work, Don't Make Me Think, and I would like to apologize in advance to anyone who knows anything about neuroscience.

Please read it with an open mind zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2021/07/07/don…

A central fixture of this story is a real, imminent piece of technology, the Neuralink device, though I have taken some license, of course.

The device is supposed to have full read/write capability. If it can predict how your limbs are positioned, what else can it do?

This is another tale of technocracy and technology. Such things as computers and the internet are here to stay, barring a total collapse, because they offer tremendous advantages in economics and war, even when we consider all their costs.

This can be hard to accept

You've heard the thesis of Seeing Like A State, that governments need to regularize their domains and their citizenry in order to understand them and rule them.

Neuralink will be the culmination of this tendency slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/boo…

No matter who is in charge or what their values are, men in power need to quantify and measure the world, and they will use technology to do it. China and the USA, with all their differences, are evolving into the same type of thing

There is no escape into some vague world of "freedom". You say Lyotardedly that you are skeptical of metanarratives, but the bitter aftertaste of this pill is the realization that there is no such thing as a-narrativism.

"Negative" liberty is only ever a liminal space

There is always a default, always a null hypothesis, and to choose nothing is to have the choice made for you by those around you.

This revelation was reified in 2008 by Sunstein and Thaler, whose book Nudge advocates technocratic selection of prosocial defaults in all things

Thaler called his approach by the oxymoron "libertarian paternalism", but it's more motherly than fatherly.

The main social role of women is policing adherence to group norms, and the more they are empowered, the more monocultural and stifling social life becomes

A panopticon made of lightning will wrap us like a warm blanket, and already has. McLuhan said electric media makes the world a global village, because instant communication brings us closer together.

The global village turns out to be a global longhouse

https://twitter.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1190672404604952576

A diverting manifestation of the global longhouse is its creation of an ideographic newspeak called emoji, whose glyphs are chosen by international committees according to the modern fetish for mind-numbed corporate positivity and naive Sapir-Whorfism

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1034162966445285376

There are emoji for "super" villains but not for mere villains, such as prison inmates. The only symbols for insanity imply jollity. The gun emoji was famously replaced with a water pistol. There is no emoji for fatness, or for any deity. blog.emojipedia.org/how-the-monkey…

But despite these limitations, reality asserts itself, and we can find ways to express truths in any linguistic milieu, no matter how Orwellian. We can always unbellyfeel Ingsoc, and though you can ban a word, the perception and the concept endure

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1268540084401381376

People who are good at talking fall into the Wittgensteinian trap, believing words are the whole substance of thought, but this is false because we see cognition in creatures with no linguistic faculty.

At its limit, it makes mono-sensory p-zombies zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/so-you-want-…

The elephant in the room/brain here is that, because of this, I have annotated the entire story with emoji.

Emoji are low-brow, but like picking up a folk melody and working it into a symphony, they can be more, though one risks the total bimbofication of the text

I cannot resist creating metatextual works. The existence of the glyph, the fact of the word, the texture of the writing–these things are as important to me as the story, and I derive much enjoyment from them.

If I were uncharitable to myself, I would say I'm too chickenshit to publish a long-form work without a gimmick.

If I say it first then it won't hurt me when you say it. But my intention is for YOU to access a new form of consciousness by means of this device

We have many senses (far more than five) and when we consume media, it changes the ratio in which we employ them, and this changes the way we experience the world.

I believe the textual modality is cognitively distinct from the pictorial

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1063560554365603840

Of course nothing I do could approximate the phenomenological experience I have imagined in this story, but I dare to dream that by combining these two paradigms, I can produce a strange new experience through this format

When most people write with emoji, they illuminate the text they compose with symbols that have a low semantic distance from the ideas they have typed. This approach cannot produce a stable transliteration of thought

Instead, I have made a consistent lexicon where ideographic words map objectively onto alphabetical words, with a few liberties. The symbol 🧠 might indicate 100 different words pertaining to brains, but the pair of symbols 🧠🎞 denotes memory with relative unambiguity

To build this lexicon, I have drawn from etymology, my own taste, and the Chinese language. Emojification is the sinification of the sign, and we are increasingly enthralled to the ideogram.

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1103346057142915072

There are 3316 emoji and 8105 characters in simplified Chinese, but much of that is a wasteland. Like eskimos with 50 words for snow, there are over 25 emoji symbols that signify hatred of one's father, and they keep adding more, the Nine Billion Names of God

That 3316 emoji number is also inflated by counting racialized variants. ~120 of the glyphs have 6 racialized variants each; 20% of the lexicon is dedicated to race.

The upshot of this is that emoji nudges you to think in explicitly racialized terms

https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1418259002929164302

It's not exactly deliberate, just inexorable, that the emoji authority produces no symbol for prison inmate, because if it did, that, too, would have to be racialized, and that would be dangerously close to something unspeakable.

Ideas cannot be wholly suppressed through language policing, but the immediacy and saliency of concepts can be adjusted.

Having a name for something can reorient our perceptions around that thing. Emoji reinforce the impulse to see everything in terms of race and representation

In any case, my twitter presence is often polemical, see above, but in a project like this, I prefer to keep politics implicit.

There is crimethink in this work, yes, but its only a whisper, a background assumption, never an imprecation, only an implication

This project started out as a joke, if I'm honest, but it grew into something more. I wanted to retell a story by Borges called The Dead Man, and I take great joy in hitting all the beats of his story, making it mine, even when I quote him word for word in a few places

Like in Pierre Menard, I believe it's possible to tell someone else's story, word for word, not by merely copying it but by "doing the work" of reasoning through it, and this can change its meaning. There is a sense in which everything I write is a footnote to Borges

My first big story, the Gig Economy, had the motif of money, and my second big story, God-Shaped Hole, had the motif of sex. This story completes the trilogy, thematically: its motif is power

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1195754016719769601

For those of you who have followed me these past years, and also those who are just joining me, I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for giving consideration to my works. It is my great pleasure to share them with you, and you honor me by reading them