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title, date, draft, custom_css
| title | date | draft | custom_css | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Everything's Touch | 2026-05-14T18:01:27-07:00 | true |
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Everything's Touch
"Do you guys have any deuterium water?", he said to a baffled lab manager. "You know, heavy water?"
"No... We don't have that...". She didn't recognize him as a student.
"Do you know where I can get some?", continued his barrage of questions, "What's a good chemical company? How do I go about ordering heavy water from them?"
What could this guy possibly have to do with heavy water? Why is he so determined? When he finally turned and left empty-handed, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Until, that is, another man arrived and made the same request: he wanted heavy water. Again, the lab manager refused him. For the rest of the day, she had a knot in her stomach. Having failed once, in order to remain under the radar, had some shadowy cabal switched representatives, and tried again to attain their goal?
Uneasy still the lab manager had dinner, opening YouTube™ on her phone to pass the time. On the front page, a video was waiting for her: "the ice cube is too heavy!". When frozen, you see, heavy water sinks instead of floating.
There was no plot. Two men, having both seen this video, had independently decided to replicate the trick. On the same day, believing it was their free will, they visited the same lab and spoke to the same lab manager. They felt the touch.
Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him. Discovered it so. ...so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it.
-- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Today, we live amidst an invisible ocean, but not in a physical sense; its tides don't pull us out to sea or push us towards the shore; no warm undercurrents alternate with cool water as we bob in the waves. Standing on a hiking trail and looking out at the path ahead, the world might look exactly as it had forty years ago. However, the ocean is there, mediated by
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electromagnetism instead of fluid. Looking up at the sky, nowadays we are reminded of this by the numerous hurtling dots delivering the internet to practically every corner of the planet.
Reminded are we of its existence, too, when we hear it speak; when people talk about Geese and Velvet Underground; when friends repeat nearly verbatim the top post on /r/bald; when men show up to a teaching lab and ask for deuterium. Sometimes, these ideas are deliberately planted. Sometimes, they are analogous to your classic trends™. Sometimes, they just appear. An enormous behemoth stirs deep beneath the waves, and we sway with the current.
If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it . . . never knew there were any further steps to be taken. Their design was "finalized", and they could forget it.
-- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff powerfully reframes the actions of tech giants like Google from the perspective of behavioral surplus. Google and Meta's gluttony for traffic patterns, written sentiment, satellite data, identified faces seen by smart glasses, all of it is the endless hunger of an influence-machine. Zuboff decries the "priests of the shadow texts", Skinnerian manipulators bent on seizing human agency for utopian or, more likely, capitalistic ends.
I don't think that's the whole picture.
The surveillance-manipulation machine, running at incredible scale and nudging us every moment we search or share or scroll, is ultimately unconcerned with truth. Truth is secondary to human behavior. While it reaches and connects a double-digit percentage of the world's population, the machine lacks any constraint or fundamental purpose beyond engagement. It's driven by unfathomably large probabilistic models entangled through several orders of interactions with other models.
This enormous amalgamation, joined nowadays by (probably) well-intentioned and only-moderately-grounded-in-reality AI™ agents™, is armed with state-of-the-art tools and unprecedented influence. With "engagement" its only loose target, it ceaselessly perturbs our daily thoughts like Maxwell's demon. Whole cliques of people revisit old shows, "discover" a new band, and try Science™.
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Among Gravity's Rainbow's numerous subjects and themes is an intricate and densely connected network of markets, influences, and hidden agendas that overlays the political conflicts of World War 2. Individuals pursued their own economic gains; dealers replaced cocaine with powdered milk; Phoebus intentionally limited the lifetimes of lightbulbs; a man dressed like a Rocket smuggled hash past an international gathering on behalf of one Sour Bummer. All of this, though, the whole system, took on the life of its own: it was the Rocket-state. It acted in ways that were inscrutable, mysterious, and yet behind which, in moments of panic or paranoia, one could suspect intent.
The Rocket-state, as Pynchon described it, may or may not have existed. It certainly does not exist today. However, beyond Zuboff's cycle of dispossession, beyond the powerful surveillance state exposed by Snowden, today lies the Attention-state. It is the entity stirring occasionally under the surface of the internet's ocean.
I think this is the missing piece. Yes, Google and Meta are selling your Gmail inbox's contents to the highest bidder. Yes, the US government is in on this. Yeah, Meta's Ray-Bans™ are going to be cataloguing every face you encounter on the street, and yeah, the age verification laws are probably going to be used to further associate your identity with the rest of your data point-cloud. But these are just glimpses of the larger system. Those "priests of the shadow texts" are like GR's Freemasons: they perform the rituals, but the magic is elsewhere.
This is the closest we've ever been to a truly "unified consciousness". We've built ourselves a noosphere, but it's not what we thought it would be. It's not just the "world at our fingertips". It's not entirely a reflection of human minds. There is an impurity, an additional active force that decides which whispers are carried across the ocean and which shouts succumb to the inverse-square law.
There it sits, this impurity, mixed in with most human knowledge, with the immediate awareness of nearly every event as it occurs in most of the developed world. It coats our facts like film, and when an acquaintance hands you his packaged opinion, it remains in his handprints, and your heart sinks like deuterium ice.
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