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