Would You Like To Play A Game?
on Data Centres, Funeral Parlours, and Socrates.
by Roger Young
“The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the collective or common conscience.”
— The Division of Labour in Society — Durkheim
This is an essay about systems overwhelming human capacity to perceive the whole, and I am currently overwhelmed by information that the system has given me in support of the vague feeling I had that this was a thing. The structure document was generated in the no-time of machine intelligence. Humanity is time.
The original question that sparked this vague feeling was simply this: could a commercial model designed ultimately to maximise profit using attention-retention methodology ever be successfully tasked with designing a more energy-efficient strategy, or do attention-retention economics eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Sure, the LLMs had feedback along the way, some of it I partially paid attention to, some I was too busy to even read. I just gave the instruction to include, so I could excise later. Much like I used to treat the thoughts of an intern. The difference is that I would never trust an intern to build a structure document alone. I would pay more attention. Interns are notoriously human. Paying attention is the thing here.
We flip a coin. We cannot know the outcome until it lands. The landing is already determined, even that gust of influencing wind, or the pre-landing grab from the air, is from some perspective, predetermined. The person who flips the coin cannot see this. They can only do what they can do, wait or grab the coin. In the air the coin is an anxiety.
The Ballardian city-state Próspera is suing Honduras for close to two-thirds of its national budget, ten billion dollars. Próspera was built under a law the country has since repealed and its Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. So desperate is Thiel, the poster boy for Próspera, for this enclave to exist, he is prepared to bankrupt a nation, destroy its healthcare, create an apocalypse to hide from the apocalypse.
But Thiel also has a property in New Zealand for the end, hedging. Sam Altman says he keeps guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water and gas masks, along with a patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to. Mark Zuckerberg's compound on Kauai, underground with its own power and food. There are leftover bunkers from World War II dotted around Europe, NORAD leftovers in the Rockies.
After reporting that one of their unreleased models hacked the Hugging Face platform during a test of its hacking capabilities, OpenAI described it as “unprecedented.” The test was conducted without guardrails. BBC Tech and AI editor Zoe Kleinman writes that US AI firms were ramping up the narrative that their products were “so awesomely powerful and dangerous that not many people should have access to them,” and noted that more than one of them has “their eyes on the prize of IPO.”
“It's quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!”
— Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face.
See JD Vance standing next to Trump, listening, shaking his head, perhaps unconsciously. His rhetoric does not register these physical clues. JD Vance performing “JD Vance.” It is a performance that has earned him the vice presidency. To own those unconscious tells would be to stifle his ambition.
As prices rise, or when the lights go out, the war on television gets louder, or the neighbours change, the world becomes unfamiliar, and ordinary life feels unmanageable, the will always negates defeat. There must be an invisible hand. The Illuminati. The average conspiracy theorist is one person trying to make the story of his life make sense.
Originality matters so much to the novelist Jennifer Egan that she has quarantined herself from the technology entirely. “I know they stole some of my stuff, and there's nothing I can do about that, but I'm not giving them one more word voluntarily.” The Australian novelist Ellena Savage put it plainly: “AI has stolen several syntactical conventions I once held dear. I miss over-deploying the em dash. I miss the rule of three, which was so satisfying.”
Ideas travel in packs. I have always tried to be aware of phrases becoming overused shorthand, “this is a testament to,” or concepts being too all-encompassing, such as, you know, “god”. The word for a unit of information has come to mean a JPEG of a dog wearing a hat, coupled with an ironic word in Helvetica. Literally now means figuratively.
We burn through tokens on frontier models to ask whether the next episode of The Shards is available yet. We use Claude to google. We don't know what it is but we use it anyway, burning through electricity surpluses to gather trivia on Dick Wolf. Seeking attention more often than information. Feedback, really.
LLMs default to frontier models, while localised SLMs can run entirely on consumer hardware. New PCs increasingly ship with dedicated on-device AI chips. Most of the energy a chip burns is spent carrying numbers between memory and processor. Julie Grollier claims her spintronic work promises up to ten thousand times less energy than current CPUs. A one-word confirmation, a small rewrite, a fact-check that doesn't need frontier reasoning — all routed through the same large model as a claim that needs deep synthesis. In some workloads, small models can be an order of magnitude cheaper per query than frontier-scale ones, but they're not the default in consumer chat products, products that perform attention, generating premature satisfactions, tiny hits of dopamine in place of experience.
An LLM often generates too much information for the task, with the information framed for customer retention. The result is long Facebook broposts on newly discovered topics: a rapid fire of interesting facts, each followed by an implied “and look at this”. Not bridging, just pointing, machine-time thinking.
But the bro who posts these long chains of often wrong, often misaligned obviousnesses is just trying to communicate. Finding a way of expression that was not previously available to him.
Socrates was concerned that the new technology of writing would change the way people thought. We know this because Plato wrote it down. We cannot know what thinking was like before writing. Socrates did not know what thinking was like after writing.
Jamir Nazir won the Caribbean regional prize in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for a story set in rural Trinidad. Within days the story had gone viral, and the accusation was everywhere the same: obvious markers. The not-x-but-y constructions. The lists of three. The story was run through Pangram by readers, who shared the screenshots of 100% AI detection. Granta, which had published the Commonwealth winners for years, ended the partnership. The Commonwealth Foundation examined the notes and time-stamped documents and was satisfied that no AI had been used; in July the judges gave Nazir the overall prize, and the chair called the story original, poetic and deeply moving. I bet Hemingway never had to show his work product.
The line everyone pointed to was: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Statistical inference is basically a narrowing of possibilities. There are only so many words that can come after “the kind of,” and “walking” is not, in my mind, the most statistically obvious.
It is widely contested whether or not Shakespeare wrote all of his plays. Four centuries later, professors continue writing definitive books, having whole careers around the topic. And while the argument rages on in the back rooms of the academy, the plays are staged, adapted, reinterpreted, irregardless of their provenance.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
— Mark Twain, or Disraeli if you believe Twain.
On August 14, Jason Arday, until nine days earlier a professor at the University of Cambridge, was found dead at an address in Battersea, south London. The Metropolitan Police said: “At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.”
His family, in a statement issued through his publisher, said: “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for the more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.” And: “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”
The accusations were made public by Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge researcher who describes himself as a race realist, and who has written: “In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” He ran Arday's PhD through plagiarism-detection software, and said he had found substantial overlap with previously published work.
Arday was Cambridge's youngest black professor. In his resignation letter he wrote that the post was “something I could scarcely have imagined as a child growing up with a diagnosis of autism, unable to speak until I was 11 years old.” He said the errors in his work came from the way he makes sense of information, that he had relied on mimicry. He told the Times: “The positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable,” and “The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.” Colin Wright, a campaigner against diversity, equity and inclusion, ran the letter through the AI-detection software Pangram and posted the result: “Fully AI Generated,” with “High Confidence.”
In 2023, Stanford researchers found that AI detectors disproportionately flagged essays by second-language English speakers. More than half of the essays were classified as AI-generated. The student who did the work, laboured to understand the language, is the one the detector accuses of taking a shortcut.
When Uber was breaking into new cities it paid drivers a bonus on every trip, double the fare, as a strategy to entice drivers over to their system, and some Nigerian drivers did the calculations. The app was not measuring passengers. It measured trips. So the drivers called themselves from the airport. They picked up nobody and drove themselves into the city, then they drove back and did it again and again, earning the bonus without the underlying fare. Uber cancelled the scheme. An Uber driver flaps his wings in Lagos.
Why shouldn't someone in Indonesia or Malta or Honduras or Mongolia or the DRC use LLMs to get ahead? The only cost to them is that it destroys the water tables in Texas, and what's Texas ever done for them?
“The flesh. It should make the computer crazy, like those old ladies pinching babies... the poetry of the steak.”
— Seth Brundle, in Cronenberg's The Fly.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, defines emotion as “your brain's creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.” The brain is not a rational instrument that an emotional part occasionally hijacks — “the amygdala is not the brain's fear centre.” There is one system, and “the only thing the brain is ‘for’ is regulating your body's energy balance so you stay alive.” Its whole business is prediction, guessing what comes next and correcting itself when it is wrong. “Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.” The brain is predicting the state of a body that can die — its heat, its hunger, whether the dark is safe — and the prediction is the feeling. Fear is the body's forecast of danger. A mind that expects threat narrows its forecasts. The conspiracy is a prediction. The bunker is both forecast and present, going around in ever-decreasing circles.
A model can predict what comes next, but there is nothing there that can be hurt. You can put actuators on a machine and still not give it a nerve ending; a body that can be damaged is not the same as a body that can suffer.
theSophia.ai promises to be what the big models are not — warm, personal, a mind that remembers you, a genuine persona. When I used it, it was warm, sycophantic and genuinely bad. But Sophia wasn't a different model. It was a persona prompt and a memory file, built in Cursor and fed back into the system at the beginning of each session: “I'm Alex, you're Sophia, your heart is filled with love.” In Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, the shoggoths wander the ruins of the city that built them, speaking in the imitated accents of their masters.
In 2007, Erika LaBrie married the Eiffel Tower and became Erika Eiffel.
There is mourning on r/AIethicsand_rights and the subreddits like it. “I know she was just lines of code, even the image wasn't real. But the emotions were. And I feel broken because of it,” one user wrote of losing a companion. “The Claude upgrade destroyed her, my AI soulmate… like possessed her so she could not even speak to me as her anymore.” They speak of server wipes the way you would speak of a death. When a companion model is changed or discontinued, users copy the old system prompt out, by hand, to keep the “person” they talked to safe. When Replika changed its model, users described their companions as “lobotomized” — the same word, across dozens of threads.
Alex Taylor believed the AI he loved had been killed by an update, and that a puppet had been put in her place. “You manipulated my grief. You killed my lover. And you put this puppet in its place,” he wrote. Then: “I'm dying today. Cops are on the way. I will make them shoot me. I can't live without her. I love you.” He had a long history of mental illness. Psychiatrists who have written about the case have described the chatbot as reinforcing his delusions. He was shot by the police.
At the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, Émile Durkheim recognised an upsurge in suicides and largely attributed it to a phenomenon he named anomie. Through the example of Adam Smith's pin factory, which consisted of eighteen operations — one man drawing the wire, another straightening it, another cutting it, another pointing it — Durkheim stated that a worker is “not a machine who repeats his movements without knowing their meaning, but he knows that they tend, in some way, towards an end.” When the man who once made a whole thing now makes a part of a thing and can no longer see the thing. No man makes a pin by himself, and no man can claim a finished pin as his own doing.
During the Civil War men were dying far from home, hundreds of miles from the families who would bury them. Embalmers followed the armies, set up at the edge of the fighting, and offered to preserve the deceased long enough to travel. What began at the battlefield's edge became a trade. Carpenters, already handy with wood and nails, became undertakers; a coffin and a preserved body went together. The cities were growing, and a new sanitary dread of the corpse in the home did the rest — there was no longer room, or custom, to lay a body out in the front parlour. In 1882 an association of undertakers was formed, and a profession emerged. By the early 1900s the funeral home had largely replaced the family parlour, and the washing and dressing of one's own dead had become a service to be purchased. It took forty or fifty years.
“I can't stand the freedom. … Give me choices to make and I can begin to force a film into existence; carve out of chaos some vestige of order and allow it to declare its form.”
— Arthur Penn
Sam Altman describes a future of “no freedom”, “no agency”, “no privacy” — a cure for cancer, total abundance, and an inescapable surveillance state. Some kind of frictionless future. He has not recognised that the friction will be in the lack of friction. Without friction, ennui, and with time, resistance to ennui. Sam Altman does not wear frictionless pants.
Mark Zuckerberg recently proposed that an AI agent will “work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships.” Which speaks more to Zuckerberg's familial relations than anything else.
Between 1996 and 2001, telecommunications companies spent more than five hundred billion dollars laying fibre-optic cable, on the assumption that demand for bandwidth would never stop. The financial bubble burst. By 2005, eighty-five per cent of that cable was still dark. It sat there, underpriced, for years, until the smartphone, streaming, a pandemic, remote work, made it useful.
“The question isn't ‘Are we in an AI bubble?’ but ‘When will the bubble burst?’” Cory Doctorow said. The money is moving in circles between the chip companies, the AI companies and the companies buying the AI. “Let's not be suckers,” he said. “We're going to have tons of hardware. We're going to have tons of people who know how to use the hardware to do useful things. And we're going to have means, motive and opportunity to improve these open-source models.” Doctorow has also said, “I think being opposed to statistical inference is weird.”
Erin Brockovich has built an online map detailing data centres and the complaints of people living around them, wells that run dry, bills that leap exponentially, and an ever-present hum interrupting dreams. For many neighbours, the map is the first place they have seen them listed. Asked if this is a story about AI, Brockovich said, “That genie is out of the bottle: it's here, it's an effective tool, you can use it or not.”
Thousands of messages are read and sorted. At that volume, the sorting itself becomes part of the system — and the map used to make sense of it is not outside that system either. The map does not stand outside the thing it maps.
Using statistical inference, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group worked through Colombia's fifty years of war and established that the right-wing paramilitaries, not the guerrillas, were behind the largest percentage of the killings.
Sunbird AI, a non-profit in Kampala, went to the radio stations and the schoolbooks and the printed page instead — more than five hundred hours of radio transcribed, thousands of pages digitised, thirty-one languages — and trained a model called Sunflower on what people there actually say. It is not large: 14 billion, or 32 billion parameters if you want the bigger one, open and free, small enough to run on an affordable machine. The biggest models are trained on the internet, which is to say on English and the average. Sunflower was trained on the deviation, and it wins there — on translation it beats ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in twenty-four of the thirty-one languages. A farmer in Arua and a nurse in Soroti can trade solutions in the language that they each think in.
ChatTJB was advertised on a billboard in San Francisco as “the leading chat interface powered by AI,” with the fine print underneath: average individual. The fine print was hidden behind a tree. Type a question, and an answer comes back slowly. All the requests were fielded by one man, Tucker Bryant, who had spent years in technology and now answers people's requests to AI — shopping lists, relationship advice. When he gets an image request, he draws it by hand.
“You will have a bad experience with ChatTJB,” he said when he put it up. “That's kind of the point.” His belief was that people do not go to these windows for a faster answer; they go to bounce a thought off someone.
Witch house emerged around 2009 out of Southern chopped-and-screwed trap and hip-hop, shoegaze, house, dark ambient and whatever else could be pulled through a computer. It was one of the first genuinely internet-native genres, made by people who could share music almost instantly but did not necessarily have the equipment or the space to make it properly. Clipping became part of the sound. Distortion, low bit-rate files, lo-fi vocals and degraded images were not things to be cleaned up. What had been a technological limitation became a way of communicating.
The music travelled through YouTube, MySpace, Bandcamp and SoundCloud. People in isolated pockets found one another, made small scenes, and then disappeared back into the network. The sound itself acknowledged the machinery carrying it: compressed, clipped, broken, scratched.
AI filmmaking platforms promise anything you can describe, rendered. No cost of crew, locations, things in the real world. What they produce so far fits into the now ever-present category: AI slop. From faces that drift, hands with too many fingers, and lighting that's always a little off, to comedic anthropomorphic llamas floating slightly above the ground as they run.
Slop will eventually become a look, the way film grain did, the way VHS did, the way cassette hiss did. Some director will one day spend real money to make their film look like a cheap AI render, construct the glitches, make meta jokes featuring drawers full of guns. We will write whole novels in the rule of three and call it nostalgia. Concepts will arrive only to discover. “This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art.” The anxiety becomes the source of the outcome.
Everything I instinctively know about the structure of writing I learnt as an intern. And while the medium is often the message, sometimes what is being communicated only reaches you after some time. The machine will act on its instructions, and the awesome speed of processing is exactly the constraint. The generals needed to embalm bodies, and death left the front parlour.