Los "They" Are Us
Poets and the AI Backlash
The Simulation Hypothesis states that we’re all living in a computer simulation –that everything is false, everything is code, pixels, zeros and ones– and it’s partly true.
I live partly in the physical world and partly in a computer-generated world, just like in The Matrix or a video game. What I see in the simulated world is digitally rendered, even crowds of people running from some natural disaster on my Insta feed, or a wife catching her husband cheating at a hotel with a woman he found on Tinder. These short videos make you think and feel, at least for a while, until you swipe to the next one which also makes you feel something.
We spend much of our cognitive, creative, and emotional energy on screens, experiencing digital images that overlay on our version of reality, shape our opinions, our fears, and how we perceive the world.
I used to get videos on my Instagram of people doing horrible things on New York subways, racist things, psycho behaviors, or someone in a café refusing to pay–or those Karen videos of white women calling the police on black men just trying to enter their own building. When I put down the screen and walked out the door into the real world, my amygdala already awakened, I began to see a constant need to be on guard against bad people.
The world became that dangerous place that was simulated on my devices. One morning I walked with my daughter to the park, and a big black truck with tinted windows slowly drove by. I imagined bad people inside, racists, and I almost wanted to take my daughter back home.
I know there are bad people out there and bad shit happens, but after being emotionally altered by the simulated world, when I entered the real landscape, I unconsciously sought confirmation that the world was the way the algorithms created. Real life is much more expansive than the reality we witness on our screens. Real life is created by us, our own internal algorithms.
These things we see on our screens may really happen, but much of the content is unbalanced and frankly false. Many of the “real” videos we see on our streams are created by AI or a team of influencers that want to monetize your attention, so they go out into the streets with their GoPro cameras to make videos with shock value. One hundred percent of what I see on my devices is a computer simulation. It’s not real, and I live much of my life in that world. When I am scrolling and I stop on a video because it grabs my attention –like somebody going crazy on the subway, the platform knows what I’m watching. It knows what keeps my attention, knows what will keep me on the device, and it uses that information to give me more of the same. The Meta technology is so advanced, way beyond what most of us can even conceive, so that when you’re scrolling on Instagram, it not only processes your dwell time, how long you’re on that post before you swipe to the next, but it can also use the eye technology that allows you to unlock your phone to measure exactly what part of an image your eyes are looking at.
Look at this picture.
Where does your eye linger the longest? What are you looking at the most? When you see an image on your device. On Meta platforms, the technology is moving towards being able to process that information, so whatever corner of the image that your eyes dwell on can become part of the algorithms and will give you more of the same thing. Some people are fooled into believing that what they get on their feeds is serendipitous, kind of like, Oh, wow! I was just thinking about that and suddenly I’m getting all these images on my Insta. The universe must be trying to tell me something.
I mean, obviously most people do not fall for this, but we might be surprised at how many people really believe that what they see on their feed is real, is the universe. They don’t understand that, even if you text something, or if you look up some product, it will immediately appear on your feed. But it’s more extreme than that. There are capabilities of devices around your house that can hear your conversations and can use the content and convert it into data which help shape the algorithms. Some people have smart refrigerators, which collect data on more than just what you have in the refrigerator, but what you buy often, the types of products, and this data becomes part of the algorithms on other systems you use.
Once I realized that all those negative videos and posts that I would scroll through on my accounts were affecting the way I interacted in the Landscape, I tried to take control of my algorithms. I tried to quit watching or pausing on violent or hate-filled videos, for a little while. I tried to dwell only on content that I really liked, things about writing, neuroscience, technology, those subjects I geek out on. I like short clips from Jordan and Peele, because they make me laugh out loud, so the algorithms know to put a lot of funny things on my feed.
It’s easy to forget or to be fooled into believing that the world that you witness on your screen isn’t the real world, that it’s fabricated by the owners of the platform, the CEOs of technology. And if we forget that, we bring a visual and cognitive overlay onto the real world, the Landscape within which we walk, and no matter what reality may be available to our senses, we insist on limited views.
I can’t imagine what videos Maga people see on their Instagram feed, but I imagine there is a lot of negative imagery about immigrants, probably videos showing hardcore gang bangers disrespecting the police or doing bad things, illegal gangbangers so arrogant that you want to see ICE take them out. Maybe they see profiles on ice officers, heroes. I don’t know what they see, but I’m guessing that when they are in the real world, they see bad immigrants everywhere, just like the ones that appear on their feed. What they see confirms for them that they live in a world where Mexicans are hurting Americans and taking jobs.
Most of us live partly in a simulated world and partly in the physical world, but as thinking people what we need to guard against is the tendency to mistake the real world for the representation of the simulated one. When we believe the two worlds are the same, we end up living more fully in a simulation than we do in reality. We are non-player characters in a simulated computer game. We are NPCs in a game that somebody else is playing. Our organism, that is, our bodies and our brains are hijacked to produce the actions needed to keep the game running. We need to buy, we need to fear, we need to hate the other side.
Our human “self” lives in the physical world.
Our AI “self” is a representation of us, a data-avatar (d’avatar) living in the digitally simulated world.
I think it would be cool if we could just say, All right, humans! Let’s pull back. Let’s take everyone’s phone away and stop using AI. Let’s start reading books again. Let’s take walks, let’s sit out on the porch in the evenings, drinking iced tea and talking to the neighbors as the kids play stickball in the street. Maybe that would be a wonderful world to return to, but it’s not very likely. Even if we never use AI, it is constantly using us.
What is to be done?
(Part Two Coming, wherein we explore how spending too much time in the digitally simulated world can rob us of our creativity and the ability to do deep work, like writing poetry and getting lost inside of a book)