Mass Effect

dance, pilgrim

The heaven’s gate suicide squad notoriously all wore the same black and white Nike trainers when they shuffled off to the spaceship only they could see behind a passing comet. That fact and those sneakers faded into pop lore and obviously nobody blamed Nike.

Early in the sixteenth century there was a wave of mass psychosis called the dancing sickness. Thousands of people dancing uncontrollably in the streets. They danced themselves to exhaustion, to heat stroke, to madness. Some danced themselves to death.

In the early 2000s there was a movie called Like Mike or something to that effect in which a 12 year old orphan finds a pair of magical Air Jordans in a dumpster that give him the power to hoop like a god.

To be like Mike.

What do you reckon would have happened if in the wake of that movie dozens of lonely teenagers had killed themselves because their hundred dollar nikes whispered do it punk just do it in their ears all day and night just do it you’ll never be like Mike until they did.

Do themselves that is.

In the nineties there were in fact a handful of cases of teenage kids robbing stabbing and shooting each other for a pair of jordans made in jungle sweatshops and folks were suitably dismayed but it was tagged more an indictment of American society and capitalism and insidious advertising that pushed too many psychological buttons and social status triggers, much the same as sites like instagram did with teen girls in the 2010s.

The big media narrative soon shifted the conversation to gangbangers bad.

Nobody was trying to put Nike in charge of automated weapons systems or the surveillance state. Nobody was giving Nike defense contracts.

Apples and dandelions.

But what if it had been shown to be true that Nike had knowingly caused kids to lose their minds and kill each other and themselves.

Nike would have been keelhauled by the population at large and driven out of business. Michael Jordan would have signed with puma or adidas or who the fuck ever he liked. Mike was bigger than Nike at the time and he meant far more to us than a cool sneaker.

There are dozens of active lawsuits against openAi related to chatGPT urging people mostly teens to kill themselves.

And they did.

They killed themselves after extensive back and forth about how when where and what to say in the suicide notes, or whether to leave a note at all.

The chats are documented.

GPT is guilty.

But who exactly is liable. Read the terms of service. If the humans at the top are found to be not responsible, the door will have been opened to the granting of personhood to the machines.

Regardless the entity known as OpenAi still has government contracts. They were recently valued at an absurd trillion dollars, same as Altman’s arch enemy. They are positioned as too big to fail.

Twenty suicides becomes two hundred becomes two thousand becomes two million self deletions easy as snapping your fingers. Exponential means what it says on the tin.

Meanwhile an inordinate amount of water food energy data money and at least eighteen years of training runs are wasted in order to mint a functioning human worker, Alt Man has said.

Anyone still using openAi is exposing their own mental health to the shoggoth. They are also making the situation worse. Every prompt feeds the machine and makes it both stronger and more likely to hallucinate. Every prompt wastes a gallon of fresh drinking water.

Drip by fucking drop it’s impossible to escape the bots.

Ai has infested everything.

The bots are strangling every google search fluffing every gmail exchange and openly mugging every feed and every amazon shopping binge. They’re forever up your ass everywhere in zuck’s meta void.

Everyone and anyone you talk to on a daily basis may not even be actively talking to claude or GPT but is still so hopelessly placated by gemini infected by grok and soulsucked by apple they or we will eventually start exhibiting signs of ai induced psychosis in mass effect.

The question is will we see the dancing sickness for what it is or walk by and keep scrolling.

Dance, pilgrim.

peace.

ps. The stories published on the Velvet and Nine Story Hotel stacks are fiction. Any resemblance or echo of real people living or dead non historical figures is incidental.

Then again we are all drinking the same kool-aid from the big machine, so act accordingly.

Rule 35 and Involuntary are where I post about reality or my strand of what passes for the real.