“The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.”
—Virilio

In 2015, Dan Geer delivered one of the most inspiring keynote speeches I have ever listened to. He had concerns about “the soothing mendacity of proxies” against which our privacy brushes off.

I am stealing that phrase and adding a twist.

So: what is an echo?

An echo has no origin of its own. It did not decide to say anything. It is just the mountain repeating you back at yourself, slightly degraded, slightly delayed.

Today’s agents are structurally identical to this. They are trained on the corpus of human expression and then reproduce the shape of that expression without any of the intentionality that produced it in the first place.

Without realizing it, slopbster agents will be the last twitch of an already lifeless corpse.

Geer, though, would complicate this. The corpse chose its own condition:

“Putting aside for the moment questions of morality… If the citizenry of a democracy choose a path, then that path cannot be wrong, it can only be real. Our citizenry has chosen a techno-political framework that involves everything from wearable health monitors to self-driving cars to internet-connected thermostats to LoJack for children and so forth. Again, that cannot be wrong, it merely is.”

I have been on the internet since around 12, hooked on dial-up that went dark as soon as my grandma lifted the rotary phone, living on forums, reading SCP stories, traversing paths in rich kids’ DC++ shared folders where downloading anything was a commitment bordering on spiritual, retrospectively ribbing the priest on mIRC for playing basketball in his cassock.

That flower has withered in less than 20 years. We are approaching the event horizon of the dead internet theory.

The numbers are not kind:

Who is building the new internet?

New — not next — because there must be discontinuity. The early internet was not the “next” telegraph; it was a side effect of people doing something else entirely. A genuinely new internet will probably not call itself that. It will emerge from somewhere weird — a cataclysmic digital event, a rupture, or even hope.

Does rupture happen by design?

Life is but a parody of
lingering echoes;
I can only dream the path
if angels fork their heads
against a wall of dynamite.