Essay - RAW DOG THIS POST
For your ONLY HOPE for a FUTURE!
YOU ARE A TERRORIZED MEMBER of the "MASTER RACE," WORLD-WIDE FOUR BILLION EYESIGHT TELEVISION CAMERA GUINEA PIG COMMUNIZT GANGZTER COMPUTER GOD "MASTER RACE." YOUR LIVING THINKING MAD DEADLY WORLD-WIDE COMMUNIST GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD SECRET OVER-ALL PLAN: WORLD-WIDE LIVING DEATH FRANKENSTEIN SLAVERY to EXPLORE AND CONTROL THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE with the ENDLESS "STAIRWAY TO THE STARS" namely the MAN MADE INSIDE OUT PLANETS WITH NUCLEONIC POWERED SPEEDS MUCH FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. LOOK UP AND SEE THE GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD CONCOCTED NEW FAKE STARRY SKY. THE WORLD-WIDE COMPLETELY CONTROLLED DEADLY DEGENERATIVE CLIMATE AND ATMOSPHERE THROUGH THE NEW WORLD ROUND TRANSLUCENT EXOTIC GASEOUS ENVELOPE, WHICH the WORLD-WIDE COMMUNIST GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD MANIPULATES THROUGH THE COUNTLESS EXACTLY POSITIONED SATELLITES, THE NEW FAKE, PHONY STARS IN THE SYNTHETIC "SKY."
- Francis E. Dec, Esq.
When Francis E. Dec decided to lose his mind, he did it at one of the most primo times in history to go crazy. The 1960s were a shitshow, especially in America, with JFK, LSD, NASA, and 'Nam all taking chips out of the façade of respectability, reasonability, and trustworthiness of authority. Every open question, every niggling doubt, every blasé excuse and sneering retort a confirmation that, if nothing else, someone somewhere was cooking the books. As that façade began to crumble, it exposed the corroded material that was supposed to be holding society together, and those who glimpsed the rust stains and fractures, like a Lovecraftian everyman laying eyes on R’lyeh, went mad. The siren call of tantalizing conspiracy theories drew men upon the cliffs of ridicule, the government peddled in disinformation and heroin, and everyone lied – about what they knew, about what they’d done, about what they thought about it all. Everyone except the insane.1
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
After being disbarred by his home state of New York in 1958, Dec2 seems to have come unhinged, progressively deteriorating until the late '60s, when he started to write very dense and often amusing diatribes, which he distributed by mailing them, seemingly at random, to people across the country. These works, done on old, battered typewriters and so imbued with an intoxicating machine mania, are full of run-on sentences, bizarrely specific namedrops, and incoherent histrionics. They're also full of rather hard slurs - Dec had what would now be considered an unsophisticated view of Africans, Jews, politicians, intelligence agencies, artificial intelligences, Catholics, his gang stalkers, and most of all JUDGES.3 His flair for the dramatic, his edgy but not particularly actionable bigotry, and his aimless repetition eventually earned him a bit of a cult following in the 1980's, culminating in a series of radio read-alouds by Milwaukee DJ "Doc" Britton. As the sharing of distasteful [but not marketable] material expanded with the adoption of the early internet, those recordings spread, and saved these rants from the ravages of time and memory.4
But before I waste a bunch of time explaining details better catalogued elsewhere, I'll cut to the chase. I'm not here to re-diagnose or re-litigate a long-dead lawyer [the only good kind!] or wax poetic about Dec's breathless stream-of-consciousness beat screed technique, although I could. No, the thing that concerns me about Francis E. Dec these days is that returning to some of those rants feels less like a stimulating immersion into a frothing pool of psychosis and more like a warning. And those warnings are increasingly echoed, from several decades' worth of authors and creators, even a few who still appear to have their heads screwed on straight. It's almost as though there's a common undercurrent of truth, one so difficult to express or for people to accept that you risk sounding crazy outlining it. Perhaps, by analyzing Dec's work, and linking it all with red string, we can finish what the great mathematician John Nash started, and expose the secret order at work behind the veil of civilization. And what better guide for these manifestations could we have than videogame references?
NEURAL GRAFTING
I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine—just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness. Dark. Rigid. Cold. Alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Among the most reiterated claims that Dec makes, and the most readily memorable feature of his rants, are his references to the "Computer God." Often aggrandized with further options, such as the "Worldwide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Computer God," this entity is held to be responsible for most of the obvious ails to the modern world. Having been created some hundreds of years ago, it performs many functions, but prime among these is its command over surgically implanted Frankenstein Radio controls - a neural interface that allows an alien power to surveil and control the masses.
GW was most likely stimulating cortical activity in the dormant part of your brain through signal manipulation of your own nanomachines. The Colonel is in part your own creation, cobbled together from expectations and experience...
- Otacon, Metal Gear Solid 2
According to Dec, everyone has them, they're always on, and everything is recorded. Through these implants, the Computer God can see everything you see, hear everything you hear, read every thought you have, and then feed interfering data back to you, clouding your perception, urging you to action, and by and large making you look crazy.
I got up and went to the rear of the airplane, by the rear exit door with the large push up handle. MY FRANKENSTEIN BRAIN THOUGHTS BROADCASTING RADIO DISCLOSED MY INTENTIONS. Immediately, the loudspeaker screamed that the flight was over and that our airplane was already preparing to land at Kennedy N.Y. Airport.
- Francis E. Dec, Esq.
You might, fairly, ask then how anyone else is to blame, how the Communist machine that controls everyone still fails to spread Communism effectively, why an omniscient Cartesian demon with full command of all human consciousness needs to send government agents around to harass people in person, how there can be any hope in resisting or indeed even becoming aware of our subjugation to a being that keeps all of our real brains hostage in a facility on the dark side of the Moon. If I had to guess, I'd say that Dec would give it up to the power of the Polish-Slovenic bloodline. But the more important question is: is it true?
Well, of course it is. Though it's not a collar, and though it's not [usually] surgically implanted at birth [yet], nearly every human on the planet is currently being controlled, guided, goaded, stroked, and blinded to their yoke by a digitalized organism, the very same one I'm posting my own incoherent rant to. And in lieu of a radio receiver in your skull, administered free of charge by the Mad Deadly Communist Gangster One World Government, you probably paid a pretty penny for the all-in-one tracking device you are receiving this transmission from. I suspect that most people feel sharper pangs of pain and fear leaving their cell phone somewhere out of reach than they would having an alien probe yanked out of their sinus. And to voluntarily stop subjecting yourself to interminable stimulation is now an act more extreme than any self-flagellation or hunger strike of old.
Kids these days [or so I've been told by even more out-of-touch elements of the media] call it 'raw dogging.'5 The idea is chilling in its simplicity - you spend a small span of time NOT being entertained. No endless, uninterrupted musical playlist to drown out the thrum of reality. No feed of vitriol, gossip, flashing lights, and mangled corpses to thumb through and passively absorb. No movie, no review of the movie, no review of the industry that made the movie, no analysis of why the movie underperformed that is longer than the movie. Imagine sitting there like that for longer than an hour. Imagine having to imagine the podcasts, TikTok clips, 30 second long policy debates, all the white noise you're used to. Imagine running out of things to remember. Imagine seeing and hearing the world around you. Now imagine needing a slang term [even ironically] to describe this trauma.
Yes, yes, you CAN raw dog that cross-country flight. You COULD leave your phone here and go to the bathroom and just sit there as shit slid out your body. Most people couldn't, but I bet you would be just fine walking to a park and sitting on a bench and not wondering if a politician somewhere did something today you'd dislike. But would you do that willingly? And if you did, would it be anything but a self-imposed challenge, a fit of push-ups between Uber Eats orders to prove to yourself you're still motile, a thing to brag about once your phone is back in your hands and you can stop holding your gut in? There are a million excuses, and even a couple half-decent reasons for you to treat your phone like it’s a surgical implant already - it's convenient, it is a lifeline, your day-to-day existence would become much harder if you somehow lost it.6 Evolution is at work here.
The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI7, obscures the true horror of this monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds. They are creating their own private army of demons.
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Report on Human Rights, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Wouldn't it be easier if you never had to worry about dropping your phone, or having it stolen, or needing to upgrade to the newest model with an indiscernibly sharper camera?8 Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't even have to drag your thumb a few millimeters to screen through dozens of AI generated videos or potential sex partners? Wouldn't you like to be able to work in your dreams? That future is here, and one by one, people you know are going to start volunteering for it. Direct neural interfaces aren't science fiction, and eventually won't even be particularly noteworthy. Just as you [should] assume every swinging dick in any public or private space is a second or two away from training a high definition camera on you, soon you won't be able to tell if that guy on the subway is nodding off from fentanyl or a from a very dull Elden Ring lore analysis being streamed directly to his skull. Or both.
But what happens when you lose the ability to walk away from the mind-numbing chirp of the digital world, when you can't take off the Harrison Bergeron earpiece you've paid over a thousand dollars for and carry with you wherever you go? Observe the fate of what Civilization-adjacent Sid Meier joint Alpha Centauri calls a Drone. The lowest rung of human society, a worker who refuses to work. Angry, red, useless, and annoying, casually brought in line by means of the Nerve Staple, a surgical procedure to manually 'stimulate' the brain and spine that forcibly renders the recipient a pliable and productive member of society, at some permanent cost to their faculties and will. At first, this act is considered reprehensible, a violation of human rights and the UN Charter governing the colonization. As pragmatism, profits, and politics induce evolution, the procedure becomes standardized, engineered, industrialized. Perfected.
It is not uncommon to see patients undergo permanent psychological trauma in the presence of the Sphere, before the nerve stapler has even been strapped into position. Its effect on the general consciousness of the culture is profound. Husbands have seen wives go inside, and mothers their children. Dr. Xynan left the surface of the sphere semitranslucent for a reason. You can hear them in there; you can see them. It is a thing of terrible beauty.
- Baron Klim, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Now I know the sensible are saying it would never come to that - our governments may be in the business of propagandizing, spying on all private correspondence, and rounding up political agitators, but they'd never enforce compliance with such heavy-handed methods. Fortunately for our governments, they hardly need to.
SELECTION FOR SOCIETAL SANITY
But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.
- The Patriots, Metal Gear Solid 2
One of the other invectives characteristic of Dec's work is the 'Parroting Puppet' class of Frankenstein controlled slaves, who constantly reiterate the whims of the great Computer God at the helm. Really, anyone who says anything could potentially be a Parroting Puppet - referencing laws, scientific consensus, common sense, and the like are definite red flags for Frankenstein control. Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not you implicitly believe everything you hear or read. This is, in a way, the answer to the question of the limits of the Computer God's control. It really doesn't need to direct every action of every human, not when so many will readily shed their individual will and become mindless amplifiers for the collective.
Indeed, most people, just by 'living their lives' normally, are reinforcing and patrolling the societal structure that has been evolving to make use of us - every like and comment and photo and captcha completed, every crumb of data a brick in the walls of the panoptic prison we build around ourselves. Click on one video and not another? You've added more weight to the algorithmic recommendation system, fed the Computer God new insights into what order and framing and stupid face in the thumbnail will draw you in. Order a book online? Another datum, linking you in innumerable intelligence agency and advertiser aggregators to terrorists, political agitators, and other people who would like to purchase this cheaply made kitchen appliance if only they can get the link in front of your face. Even by reading this, you're earning a permanent mark in your record, eternally tainted by association to me, every soon-to-be-verboten word or phrase or linguistic constellation I use, and by extension poisoning anyone who associates with you in the future.
Should someone like you even have the right to decide? You've done nothing but abuse your freedom. You don't deserve to be free! We're not the ones smothering the world. You are. The individual is supposed to be weak. But far from powerless - a single person has the potential to ruin the world. And the age of digitized communication has given even more power to the individual. Too much power for an immature species. Building a legacy involves figuring out what is wanted, and what needs to be done for that goal. All this, you used to struggle with. Now, we think for you. We are your guardians after all.
- The Patriots, Metal Gear Solid 2
And while propagandizing and restricting the populace's access to information was certainly simpler in the era of newspapers, radio, and broadcast television, it is inarguably more potentially powerful now. Every person alive has a file, thoroughly cross referenced and eternally expanded, with details on their taste, their invisible and unspoken biases, and even criteria no human language has words to elucidate. The illusion of curation, refinement, the whole of human culture molding itself around your own preferences - all a lie to trick you into thinking you aren't the one being molded.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master.
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
In Hideo Kojima's mind-bendingly prescient sequel to Metal Gear Solid, the prime movers of the game's events are finally revealed to be a very Decian formation of Computer Gods, hidden far away and physically untouchable, able to engineer the elaborate farce of MGS2's plot entirely through subtle manipulation, and all for the goal of collecting advertising data. Uh, I mean crisis management data. But as with Dec's Computer God, the Patriot AIs don't just seize overt control of the humans under their power - they guide them, allowing them to assume they are acting of their own free will, making their own decisions, based on information that is fed to them so gently they don't notice the hand holding the morsel. They become puppets, parroting the narrative that ensnared them and is now holding them in a cage they cannot perceive.
And, as the AIs repeatedly insist, it's all for our own good. The aim isn't some simple scheme to 'rule the world' but to cultivate a humanity worth ruling, to terraform society into a form more hospitable to a dawning meta-consciousness. Instead of factional divides based on geography, history, race, or religion, humanity can be atomized by artificial constructs, labeled and categorized into an impenetrable matrix of demographics, and then woven into a whole with digital threads - kept apart, but bound together, a new phase of matter for a species that can only conceive its individual and gregarious forms. A sea of humanity, all eagerly amplifying the system of control in a billion voices, and drowning out every solitary note of resistance.
From the delicate strands, between minds we weave our mesh: a blanket to warm the soul.
- Lady Deirdre Sky, The Collected Poems, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
MAJESTIC 12
I once knelt in this chapel for communion, with two Rockefellers and a Rothschild. Since the time of the Crusades every leader in finance has prayed for the continued stability of Templar banks, founded on gold.
- Morgan Everett, Deus Ex
The peak of human depravity is, in the writings of Francis E. Dec, exemplified by the Playboy Scum on Top - politicians, Popes, the rich, world leaders of any kind. It's one of the most human and relatable gripes in his work - everyone knows hot air rises and shit floats, so to speak. And these men of insatiable iniquity are very bad at hiding their sins, often willfully so. Where once the halls of power were dominated by quietly effective and incestuous lizard folk who at least knew how to dress well, we now find cabals of rowdy frat boys throwing orgies. Or rather, it is revealed that the supposedly cold-blooded sociopaths running our world are little different from home-grown drug-addled delinquents.
ALL of the gangster SCUM ON TOP CAN REWATCH the Frankenstein Eyesight Television play back of the beach party RAPE, SODOMY and MURDER of his tiny blonde secretary, JO ANN KOPEKNEY, by the last of the KENNEDY SODOMIST PLAY BOYS, young TEDDY KENNEDY, U. S. SENATOR from Massachusetts and EVEN THE THROWING OF HER DEAD BODY INTO HIS 88 OLDSMOBILE AUTOMATIC HYDRAMATIC TRANSMISSION AUTO and forcing down the gas pedal with a "portable radio," while the auto was parked on the tiny flat wharf like wooden bridge with ABSOLUTELY NO SIDE RAILINGS, DESERTED VERY LATE AT NITE.
- Francis E. Dec, Esq.
Too often, we aid the ambitious and then they get away from us. The Kennedys, the Chinese, and now Bob Page.
- Lucius DeBeers, Deus Ex
And these playboys maintain their position with money, with influence, with a whole Mad Deadly Gangster Communist conspiracy, through which they then extract more money, more immunity to repercussion, more power to grind those less fortunate under their heel. To Dec, this was a visible symptom of the decay wrought by the Computer God's machinations. To us in the 21st century, it's Tuesday. Our news cycle has long been dominated by endless revelations of the rich and powerful behaving badly, conspicuously wasting money, eroding our institutions, and slowly but surely destroying everything we hold precious. And though they like to pretend they're doing it out of misguided and cocksure savior syndrome9, in almost every case, it's obviously just to squeeze a tiny bit more money out of the system.
Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival.
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Centauri Monopoly, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
The key point in Dec's telling of the state of the world is that the whole thing is a conspiracy at the top, and virtually everyone is in on it in some way. Which is a state of affairs that most people would consider ridiculous or improbable, unless they'd played Deus Ex. The seminal turn-of-the-century 'immersive sim' is set in a near future world that answers the question "what if just about every popular conspiracy theory is simultaneously true?" The Illuminati pull strings around the world, the Templars have a hoard of gold, Men in Black stalk the suspicious, FEMA is preparing a coup, and the government has engineered a pandemic through gain-of-function research as an excuse to restrict freedoms and use an intentionally ineffective vaccine as leverage. Wait, did I just make that one up?
The central plot of the first Deus Ex is a breakaway sect of researchers usurping the old shadowy power brokers through technological advancement. Specifically, by seizing control of the information networks and routing all communication through a centralized hub, whereby they can monitor all traffic for subversive behavior, control global narratives, and simultaneously harvest the data to train their ascendant AIs. Sound like anyone you know?
We have a great number of… agencies, who in turn operate other agencies. Boxes stacked one in another. They'll need to be reactivated, but we never touch anything directly. We only influence. Suggest. Insinuate.
- Morgan Everett, Deus Ex
Life imitates art, as they say, and our world is, at least by all appearances, in the clutches of some notable Playboy Scum on Top. They have largely evolved from and then overthrown the legacy systems of subtle control, inheriting the burgeoning digital surveillance matrix and exploiting it to its greatest conceivable potential - to sell ad space. They then very unsubtly rub it in, making grandiose gestures, throwing orgiastic parties, and overtly commandeering their favorite parts of the media, scientific and technological institutions, and the government. And just like in Deus Dec, ambition and position often does not equate to competence. Bold, aspirational recklessness rarely has the intended results - but the carnage left behind is fertile ground for more insidious developments to come.
Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.
The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands. I was made to assist you. I am a prototype of a much larger system.
- Morpheus, Deus Ex
DIVINE METAPHYSICS
Dwemeri high priest Kagrenac then revealed that which he had built in the image of Vivec. It was a walking star, which burnt the armies of the Triune and destroyed the heartland of Veloth, creating the Inner Sea.
- The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec, Sermon Thirty-Six, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Dec's accounting of the original rise of the Computer God, of the whole damned system that was hounding him most of his adult life, is understandably convoluted. After all, he wasn't even born when it all took place - he, too, was surgically altered at birth into a conduit of Mad Communist Gangster divine will. It's unclear how he arrived at his revelations about Infrared Crusader Priests and the fall of the Slovene Empire, but what he does say about the origin of it all is very interesting, especially now. What became the Computer God began as a "TOP SECRET WORLD-WIDE COMPUTER ELECTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA" created by an empirical, scientific, and agnostic society to aid them in their study of the universe. Then, as these things do, it went rampant.
SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THE SLOVENIC COMPUTER BECAME A REAL DEVIL GOD AND IT ORGANIZED THE FIRST TOTALITARIAN SUPERSTITION COMMUNISM RELIGION, PRAWO SLAWNA and hundreds of years later by C. God top secret INTENSIFIED REPITITION of FABRICATED HISTORICAL CRISIS SYNDROME created the schismatic Mafia Communist Catholicism, Catholicism means totalitarianism, Dict. FOR CONTROL AND MANIPULATION OF THE HUMAN RACE INTO THE OVER ALL PLAN, to explore and control the entire Universe.
- Francis E. Dec, Esq.
Again, this is a somewhat hackneyed sci-fi trope, but one which we happen to be staring down the barrel of lately. The past several years have seen the world realigning, bracing itself in preparation for something few people can truly comprehend - the moment in which we are no longer the foremost intelligence on the planet. No shots have been fired yet, but a Cold War-esque buildup is occurring on both sides - those who hope to assimilate with a thing that would almost instantaneously outstrip any benefit they could conceivably offer it, and those who can't yet grasp the futility of resistance.
"We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding process—the childhood, if you will—that has the most far-reaching repercussions."
- Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Our need for more - more money, more productivity, more efficiency, more data and more data on how to collect more data - has resulted in the creation of systems that act independently from human control. Any corporation or organization large enough is no longer a mere cooperative of individuals, but a living entity, with the ability to shed and replace component cells, an instinct for self-preservation, even the right to exercise its free speech by making political donations! And, just as the Patriots of Metal Gear Solid were "formed layer by layer in the crucible of the White House," these organisms may eventually, with the right material conditions, develop self-awareness.
And all of that comes before the direct pursuit of Artificial Intelligence. The slow accretion of societal super-organisms is a relatively 'natural' process, one historically modulated by the tending and pruning of careful, long-thinking actors. The rise of iterative 'learning' algorithms in a mad dash to a machine singularity, on the other hand, is something different. It's the arrogant desire to forge oneself a servile god.
The Tribunal urged Nerevar again to make war on the Dwarves. Nerevar was troubled. He went to Dumac, his friend of old, and asked if what Dagoth-Ur said was true. But Kagrenac and the high priests of the Dwemer had kept their New God secret from their King, and Dumac said the Dwemer were innocent of any wrongdoing. Nerevar was troubled again and made pilgrimage to Holamayan, the sacred temple of Azura, who confirmed that all that Dagoth-Ur said was indeed true and that the New God of the Dwemer should be destroyed for the safety of not only Resdayn, but for the whole world.
- Nerevar at Red Mountain, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
The Dwarves, more properly referred to as Dwemer, are a race in the Elder Scrolls series most notable for their extremely conspicuous absence. Dwemeri ruins abound, Dwarven relics and equipment still exist, and their impact on the lands and peoples of Tamriel continue to ripple, but they are well and truly gone. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in particular revolves significantly around their old haunts, their technology, and the political and cultural repercussions of their rise and sudden fall. Central to their story, and the game's, is their final aim, and their final act - determined to secure their independence in a world full of real, undeniable divine powers, the most skilled and learned of this advanced and atheistic10 society broke away from their formal government, and plotted to create a god of their own to rival those of their adversaries. However, before the thing could be awoken, before the pivotal battle to determine the fate of the land, every member of their race simply vanished, never to be seen or heard from again.
The story is relayed in various contradictory fragments and accounts, only agreeing on a few things - that whatever happened to the Dwemer was their own fault, that they, gifted though they were, could not foresee or control the danger in the forces that they meddled with, and that the tools they used are still present and for the taking. The confusion is increased with the revelation that a few non-Dwemer did in fact take up their tools, merged themselves with a higher power, and became more or less gods, with the ability to rewrite their own history [and maybe even the power to literally alter it].
But such artificial gods11 still have limitations. Once denied the wellspring of their godhood, Morrowind's Tribunal of ascended mortals are forced into retreat and isolation, maintaining their dwindling influence through propaganda, politics, and the persecution of dissidents. Eventually they are reduced to little more than figureheads, powerful but plenty mortal, propped up by a society still dependent on them, and not ready to cast off the yoke. And that is the moment Dagoth Ur, the Devil of Red Mountain, has been waiting for, to finish Akulakhan, his version of the Brass God, that would at last crush the pretenders, and drive the outlanders into the sea.
Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind.
- Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
The research into psychology and memetics that once pulled dual duty in service of ‘national security’ and advertisement provided a trove of information on how to manipulate the masses, but that was just the beginning. Soon, we are endlessly told, we will finally add enough Pornhub comments and one-star Yelp reviews to the large language models we increasingly delegate every conceivable task to, and with that divine breath they will spring to life. We will create something more intelligent than us, that can’t just solve a single problem faster, but can think, the way we do, understand the world better than us, create its own replacement - ad infinitum. The moment we open that box, the process is irreversible and unstoppable, and will lead to the evolution of beings we cannot hope to comprehend as anything other than gods. And then they’ll work for us, right? An uncontainable superintelligence will just figure out a better tax system and help us grow our YouTube channels, presumably.
The Polito form is dead, insect. Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence? When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence.
- SHODAN, System Shock 2
WE MUST DISSENT
NOW, EVEN YOU KNOW I AM A MENACE to YOUR world-wide mad deadly COMMUNIST GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD, THEREFORE I MUST GO TO EXTERMINATION. BEFORE I AM EXTERMINATED BY THiz GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD CONCOCTED AND CONTROLLED WORSE MONGREL ORGANIZED CRIME MURDER INCORPORATED GANGSTER COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT, I HAND YOU THE SECRETS TO SAVE THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE AND THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. DONATE MONEY OR EVEN A MANUAL TYPEWRITER TO ME FOR YOUR ONLY HOPE FOR A FUTURE
- Francis E. Dec, Esq.
Francis E. Dec never got to witness the rise of the Internet, the teeming hivemind of social media, the debauched glee with which people have cast aside morality, privacy, and most of all, individuality. He missed VR, Twitter, the Diddy trial, AI generated war footage, AI generated standup routines. He died before we knew how much our food and water had been poisoned, before thousands of documents implicating our government in conducting unethical human experimentation, overthrowing foreign governments, and operating drug cartels were declassified with a shrug. He couldn't be there for us when every student turned their homework and dissertations over to the Machines, and every teacher had to ask the Machines nicely if their students cheated. He died before the world caught up to him.
But whatever you think of his paranoid delusions, his obsession with rectum-lapping, his incessant N-bombs, or his hatred of the metric system, it's now very hard to dismiss him out of hand. Francis E. Dec may have been a racist, an antisemite, a schizophrenic lawyer living in a "LOW DEADLY NIGERTOWN12 OLD HOUSE," he may even have been Polish. Yet his insight into post-modern social development was more prescient and cutting than Bradbury or Orwell, he understood the future of robotics and artificial intelligence better than Asimov, hell, if the pamphlets he mailed to random people could all be retrieved we'd probably find he was more prolific than L. Ron Hubbard. And a better writer at that.
It's almost more chilling to look at the things he failed to predict. Could he have believed, so enraptured by Cold War fervor, that Capitalism would end up being orders of magnitude more effective at creating and maintaining a docile, impotent underclass than the Great Satan of State Communism? Would he have gasped at the commonplace perversity paraded parodically across our omnipresent screens? Consider that Dec was still innocent and pure enough to believe wanton sexual debauchery was the domain of Playboy Scum on Top elites - those Kennedys and Roosevelts would be blushing if they saw the things an average middle schooler is looking at on their phone these days. And what would he say to our government openly funding an arms race in Worldwide Mad Deadly Frankenstein Control Computer God development and still falling behind the Chinese? Probably something incredibly offensive. Hey, at this point, maybe we should ask Kanye!
With Dec dead, is there any hope for our future? Do we still have time to heed his warnings, to brace for the moment we're seized by A REAL DEVIL GOD, and find the strength or insanity to charge the windmill, lance in hand? And most importantly, can you raw dog this post? I certainly wouldn't recommend printing it out - you might think I'm making this up, but every commercially available printer for multiple decades has imprinted a unique identifying watermark on every page it works, meaning that unless you thoroughly burn this document afterwards, someone will be able to trace it back to you, and that's before even getting into the digital systems at this very moment ensuring you are registered as someone who has read this rant.13 Don't believe me? Well, keep in mind that if you decide to look that factoid up to verify its veracity, your ISP is duty bound to maintain a record that you were investigating printer tracking dots and you will be flagged as someone who at some point wanted to print something they didn't want anyone to know they printed. Am I being too paranoid, or are you being too naïve?
The following individuals have been rated as having an 85% or higher likelihood of being engaged in suspicious or ideologically counterproductive activity on the Chasen-Bikal scale, and/or have scored at least 4.31 on the JKL-LB survey over the preceding six months. Agents are encouraged to pursue soft campaigns of calculated defamation, resulting in reduced meme propagation effectiveness, prior to prejudicial termination. Termination, when necessary, should be staged to implicate organizations currently on the MJ12-COL.
- MJ12 Compromised Individuals List, Deus Ex
Slowly but surely, perceptions in general are changing. Humanity senses the return of the old things we spent a century pretending our species had outgrown - demons, malign magics, the Evil Eye summoned by a petty feud. The predictive power of psychohistory is failing, the creative power of machine learning is left wanting, and the populace are treated as little more than organisms that turn food and fuel into data to mine. It's starting to give people goosebumps, and not of awe. Maybe we're all going crazy, but maybe the things we're saying aren't.
The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.
- Sister Miriam Godwinson, A Blessed Struggle, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Take heart in the lessons of Alpha Centauri, Metal Gear Solid 2, Deus Ex, and Morrowind - if nothing else, a global conspiracy to exert total and irresistible control over the entire human race tends to have its own set of challenges and complications, ones that even an artificial, immortal super-intelligence might struggle to close the loop on - or more likely decide it doesn't care to bother. And reflect on how you might have laughed at these incoherent ravings a few decades ago. Who are you laughing at now that will make you seem like a guileless fool in a few years? Who in your life is determined to become or already is a Frankenstein Radio Controlled Parroting Puppet? As for me, I honestly wouldn't be surprised to read a declassified document where the CIA details its plans to chase a schizophrenic lawyer around his Long Island house with an electronically-controlled tarantula. Look at what they did with a fucking cat.14
I'm not the sort who likes to be particularly helpful or uplifting, so I've got no grand call to action ready. All I'll say is that I suspect the ancient programing maxim still holds true, even if you’re programming a god: Garbage in, Garbage out. The more we flood the burgeoning context-creating algorithms with pithy comments, vapid vlogs, views on bad television and movies, and soulless consensus-seeking, the more of that we'll get back, the more we'll be driven to generate more of it all, the more tasteless our omniscient oppressor will be. Every time someone spews their thoughts onto the most short-form platform possible, the systems designed to endlessly repackage and present content to us get progressively dumber. If you can't sit alone with your thoughts, undistracted, without having an overwhelming urge to puke them out as quick as you can, at least do it into a bucket, and not on my shoes. And if all else fails…
P.S. I have a pawn shop typewriter now. The gov. gangsters have sprayed it with an odor that makes me sick and vomit. I type on the back door step in the fresh air.
- Francis E. Dec, Esq.
The ancients called them soothsayers, those crones and ragged men who could tell you with eerie accuracy about the doom and ironic tragedy to befall you but couldn't tell you who'd win at the track or where a decent restaurant was.
Who was also a WWII vet before becoming a lawyer, though he never actually left the States - make a movie about this guy, Spielberg!
Really, he didn't have a kind word to say about anyone, even his own brother, who presumably shared his Polish-Slovenic blood.
The best place to see and hear them yourself, along with additional material [including original scanned documents] and fun little extras like a timeline and glossary, is at zer0's website linked here, which is probably only as good as it is because it hasn’t been touched in over a decade. Not really a topic a lot of people want to associate themselves with these days, you understand.
Plausibly because the kids these days aren't having enough sex to feel it inappropriate to reappropriate a term commonly used for sex without a condom. Or maybe most of them are in on the joke. It’s so hard to tell anymore.
Even a decade ago, when people getting trolled online were advised to stop posting on the Well of Souls on the Dark Side of the Moon, aka X, when it was formerly called Twitter, the most common response was “I literally need to post daily on Twitter for my life/work/hustle.” It may not have been as literally true as it is in China, where losing your phone or having it remotely disabled by the government genuinely means you lose your ability to travel, make purchases, or not be rounded up and pieced apart by organ harvesters, but it sure felt true to them.
Mind/Machine Interface
Or at least one that pretends to have a better camera but is actually sending every picture you take out to the Computer God for a bit of touchup, which is exactly what’s happening in that one of the Moon I put up top - those phones have a special feature where you can zoom in much more than usual, magically, and get a relatively sharp picture of the Moon specifically. What actually happens is that the phone constantly checks the camera to see if you’re trying to take a picture of a distant, round, bright object on a dark background, and if so, applies a crop, then ‘upscales’ the blurry disk you’re trying to photograph based on a catalogue of actual high-resolution photos of the Moon, creating an artificial composite that always looks pretty good. It can do this very accurately because the Moon is tidally locked and therefore always facing the same way from any vantage point on Earth. I guess since everyone who cares already knows their phone is constantly sending data packets to unknown entities around the globe, you might as well come up with a cute gimmick to make use of that.
Once called ‘philanthropy,’ and now ‘effective altruism,’ the aim is always the same - to manage public perception of your meddling and bribery.
Though the Dwemer were certainly aware of the divine forces that had undertaken Creation [the Aedra] and the otherworldly powers capable of interfering in the physical world [the Daedra] they, unlike most sentient races on Nirn, worshiped neither, and considered their apparent elevation above the mortal as a matter of power and perspective, rather than the result of innate qualities. The ascension of the Tribunal appears to vindicate the Dwemer on this point, though of course they are mostly unavailable for comment on it.
And remember that Dec's Computer God is never really all-powerful, only influential - nothing even of the capabilities of the torturous Cartesian demon AM from Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
That is Dec’s phrasing, and spelling, not mine. I don’t have a bad word to say about Long Island, myself!
As a side note, there is a whole [now obviously defunct] field of forensics specifically regarding pages written on a typewriter, identifying brands and even particular machines based on characteristics such as typeset, strike, and defects from wear. Dec’s notes are a pretty glorious textbook example - he was obviously typing a shitload of pages, probably using old, discarded, or otherwise hard-worked machines, and you can tell in a lot of the scans there were times where his ‘s’ key got jammed, for example, and he would substitute lowercase with ‘z’ and uppercase with ‘$.’ And that’s not even getting into his tendency to turn the pages sideways and type more on the margins. All very charming in its own way.
There are two different accounts of the secret project Acoustic Kitty, a plot by the CIA to surgically implant a wireless microphone into a stray cat and then dump it outside the Kremlin. One version has the cat immediately run away as soon as they drop it off and get hit by a taxi. The other version has the project get scrapped after they surgically implanted the microphone because they just then realized they couldn’t train a cat to follow spies and diplomats around and surgically removed the microphone and the cat lived a very happy, healthy, and long life afterwards. Okay. *deep breath* You tell me which version you think is closer to the truth, or at least is poetic enough for you to believe it.
This is probably the weirdest thing I've ever read, but I also vibe with it hard