The Last Post of February

     Throughout most of 2023. I decided to publish as much of my backlog of poems as I could. I tried to overwrite from month to month, as a way of making sure I always had a backup, but I eventually had so many poems it was hard for me to tell what I had published and what I hadn’t. So I decided that if I thought it was at all publishable, I would publish it, and I wouldn’t write anything else until I’d started running low. Well, I’m running low, or at least I’m at the point where I can scroll down to the bottom of the One Note Notebook I use for my unpublished poems and see the most recent unpublished poem up top. I have about two-months worth of poems (for Monday, not for Wednesday and Friday) left to get up, so I’m trying to come up with more things to write poems about. 

     For this reason, I’m trying to think of what I think our future should be like. Most of what I wrote about in 2022 was just complaining about how sucky our present was (I figured that since no one was reading what I had to say anyway, I might as well). I sort of took a break last year, mostly because I wanted to up the quality of my writing so I started practicing daily. I’m trying to get to the point where I can hold a train of thought long enough to, theoretically, write a novel. I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered that, but I decided to try and get back into writing posts because I was getting tired of writing for no one, especially when I’m proud of at least some of what I’m writing. 

    I don’t want our future to look anything like our present. That sounds, and feels, so wrong but it’s very much true. On some level, I don’t expect our world to change much at all. I keep expecting that the things that made up my past will persist, in some way, into our future, only to find that suddenly they can’t for some reason. Though I don’t think that I keep imagining a world that, from our vantage point, looks crazy and immoral just because it’s easier. To me, the biggest problem is that we’ve been unsatisfied with our world for a long time. We’ve done things the easy way for a long time, and we’ve just kind of accepted that they have to be what they are. I think that we’ve reached the point where, at the very least, we want to be unsatisfied in a different way.

      This has led me to a future where everything is simultaneously more subdued than our current world, and much more out there and crazy. It is a world where people insist the world belongs to them, and their rebellion takes the form of finding the mindset that best suits them and their views. There’s superficiality, but there’s a depth to it that our current world lacks, one not brought by people doing as they say, but by people using both their worlds and actions to create a stronger, more cohesive narrative about their lives. People know about the Infinite in this world, and almost everyone knows how to manipulate their Dreamworlds to some degree. There are still those who become Nazis, but they do so willingly and not just because propaganda was shoved down their throat. When people want to leave the Dreamworld they were born in, they can do so easily and safely, without accidently becoming in ensnared in something dangerous either built by someone else or that they accidently created themselves. 

      Someday someone will look at Infinitelism with a critical eye and tell me all of the ways in which it does not make sense. I know this, and I’ve accepted this. Whether I’m right or not, I’d be a little disappointed in the world if this didn’t happen. What good is the Dreamworld I’ve built for myself if I can’t defend it, after all? As time goes on, and I look at a world of people convinced that they have to live in a Dreamworld tied to reality in order to survive, I’ve found myself wondering if my ability to live in a world cut off from reality might be more vital than I thought. Unlike most Conspiracy theorists, I can live in reality and even accept that I might be wrong sometimes. I don’t know if that’s because I’m right or because I believe in what I’ve created enough that being wrong doesn’t hurt me. What I do know is that I see a lot of people who seem to be lost, trapped in a world they can’t make sense of. They’re stuck in a world that they can’t believe in anymore, and they aren’t able to create one they can believe in by themselves. What help they can get doesn’t seem up to the task, at least to me. Mostly because I think sometimes the best thing for your own sanity is rejecting reality, at least the parts of it that weren’t built with you in mind. After all, once upon a time racial discrimination was common. If the right people hadn’t said that this wasn’t a reality they would accept, the world wouldn’t have changed. 

Your World of Lies

 Your world is a world of lies,
A world of safety as thin and full of holes
As lace. 
Your world is one that promises eternity
Yet can't deliver on tomorrow.
Your world is a world of danger,
Dread,
And despair.

Imaginary Conversations with Imaginary Critics

     One of the things I believe about Dreamworlds is that they should be built to withstand criticism. Not ignore it, not resist it, but instead take it and try and build around the problems people have with it even if they’re minor ones. I know, most Dreamers figure this out early on, or else they wind up getting hounded out by everyone else. 

     As a blogger with an audience generously measured in the single digits (although it seems to be growing) I don’t face criticism for my writing that often. Which I’m okay with, considering that my delusion of choice is that I’m an amazing yet undiscovered writer. As someone who believes in a world made by herself for herself, I do wonder whether or not there’s some sort of issue I haven’t thought of. Something that makes it impossible to believe in both my preferred philosophy and the reality in which we live. You know how with most conspiracy theories, you find that you can only believe in them if you choose not to believe in anything else? I’m trying to avoid that, since the whole reason I created this was that I was a science nerd who desperately wanted to believe in some sort of all-powerful being. Which, of course, eventually led me to deciding in some sort of super sentient Universe trying to keep itself together as best it can. Hey, it works for me. 

      The thing about being any sort of religious wacko, especially if you essentially live in a cult of one, is you wind up thinking you hold some sort of key to understanding the Universe. What I see is real and makes sense to me, so it must also make sense to everyone else as well, right? Not helped if you believe in something so hidden that our Universe is trying to protect us from it, so it’s not only unfalsifiable but the smaller the number of believers, the more convincing your ideology seems to be. Put like that, the chances of it becoming mainstream are nonexistent. Hell, I’m convinced that someone will eventually figure out a way to prove that it’s wrong. I’m pretty smart, but I was never the best at physics. I’m okay with that, not in an “I’ve made peace with it” way, but in an “I’m smart enough to figure out that if this were true we’d be in danger” way. That’s why I write about it so much, I’m certain that it’s true and I’m pretty sure even a casual observer can tell that most of us live as though it is true. Most of psychology is devoted to the idea that most of what we see isn’t real, it’s just an approximation, and most modern literature is about how we use stories to make life simpler and more exciting. In such an environment, I find the fact that we don’t take the subject of fantasy seriously to be maddening. What we believe and why will be the thing that forms our future, we need to be talking about it a lot more than we are. 

      I won’t act like I believe in only reasonable things that can be backed by proof. For example, I believe that influence always goes both ways, even in situations where that shouldn’t physically be possible. So every time your favorite creator changes your mind, you’re also changing them in some way even if you can’t see it. Sometimes it’s an exchange, sometimes an enhancement of something both of you already believed, sometimes something else, but the influence is always there. 

       I know that I don’t have an audience, but even if I did I feel like I wouldn’t be criticized all that much because there isn’t a lot to criticize. There’s a lot of ideas and words, but not a lot of clear explanation because I never explain this to anyone. No one in my life knows that I believe in most of this. I wish I could discuss this with someone, but I have a deep dark suspicion that people would just think that I’m crazy. Why wouldn’t they? I believe in something so unreal that I believe our reality was built to protect us from it. I don’t even think that an external reality that exists regardless of what we do is real. I believe in an innate consciousness shared by everything in the world because I think the only thing keeping our world together is that everything in our Universe believes in our Universe and is following its rules. How much crazier can you get? Let’s also not overlook the fact that a philosophy designed to build realities is a huge danger to the world. Just imagine what kind of trouble we could get into if someone like Donald Trump found out about this. 

     I’m in a weird position. As the one person who believes in this particular set of beliefs (that I know of, and I know a lot of people believe in parts of this), I simultaneously want everyone to know about this and am worried about what will happen when someone who isn’t me finds out about this. Will they laugh? Get Angry? Steal my ideas and build a cult? What if someone decides that I am building a cult? What if it turns out that I am building a cult? Do cult leaders know what they’re doing? How do they find out before it’s too late? No one talks about this much. In our world you either join a religion or you become an atheist of some sort. Only bad people try and build their own belief system to explain what goes on in their lives. 

      Maybe that can be your takeaway from this blog. I don’t want Infinitelism to be the end point anyway, and I’m certain that most people want something more solid than the idea that there’s something out there that science can’t explain. I did. So I made that something. Maybe you can to. I’m not the only one who knows that we need something to believe in. I think it’s time we move past prophets, and into a world of people who are just trying to figure out what reality looks like to the little creatures who are trapped in its embrace. 

Alone

 To influence the world, you must let yourself be influenced in turn. 
This is my mantra,
These are the words I let guide my life.
Yet now the world has been closed off to me,
And no one will let me speak out.

I feel so alone,
Unwanted.
In my younger days, 
I dreamed of success,
Of joining those 
Who bring the world to life.
But in time,
It became clear that I was too stupid to do that.

I watch as my world fades
Bit by bit,
Person after person vanishing
Into the great unknown.

How am I supposed to find meaning
In this empty place?

All I can do is dream,
Dream of a future only I believe in.
A future where nobody needs to work,
So everyone's contributions have value. 

How I wish I could just write,
Just let my thoughts spill out across the page,
Never needing to fear a future where nobody cares. 

The Fall of the Internet Archive

       There’s a war going on that nobody can see, a war between the people who make money and the people who spread knowledge of what is, was and will be. One front of this war is between the Internet Archives and Americas four largest publishers. I suspect you’ve read something about it, and if you do than you know that our world has decided, categorically, that knowledge is a thing only the privileged are allowed access to. The people who run the Archive are fighting, but with everything else going wrong, nobody thinks that a library is worth saving. There is not much chance of survival. To be clear, I want it to survive. As a Dreamer, I want a world where anyone’s voice can be heard, and that isn’t the world the publishers live in. They live in a world where you charge a penny for every word someone else speaks to you, where those who made it to the top hold sway and those who have yet to make it are cast out. Small authors, unpopular ideas, things that could influence someone in a major way, these things have no place in the world the publishers want for us. All they want is a world where we give them everything, including our souls, so that they can rule over us for eternity. 

      I don’t want the Archive to just be a lending platform, I want it to be a conservation platform where you can find records of every edition of every book. I think the Archive’s role in our future is the preservation of history so we know what happened. A good example of this is the recent Roald Dahl controversy. The one where publishers decided to try and censor his work to make it more palatable to a world that has largely rejected his ideas. I don’t agree with their decisions, but since I think that our world is forgetting about him anyway I find it hard to care. What I find heinous is that they decided to retroactively doctor up any e-books they’d already sold to people without their consent, effectively erasing any record of the change. I don’t care if you think a change is justified or not, it shouldn’t be forced on your consumer base especially when a lot of them were rightly skeptical of the idea of censorship in the first place. There was no reason for them to do this. I know for a fact that most people wouldn’t have minded buying the books with changes, especially if it let them continue reading the books of their childhood without feeling guilty. Humans aren’t sinless, and most of us don’t want to put in the effort it takes to be good people. But the companies wanted to erase all trace of the censorship. I can only assume that on some level they feel guilty about playing dictator. The Archive, had it existed, would have functioned as a place of record keeping, a reminder of the kind of world Roald Dahl lived in and a place where Dreamers and Non-Dreamers alike could go and read the original texts and make up their minds about which were better. 

      Our world needs the Archive, but it also needs to be a place where anyone can access any media whenever they want to. Our world needs to be a world that we, the people, make real. Until now the job of reality maintenance laid in the hands of the wealthy, they were the ones who had access to the records that made our world last longer than a mere instance. Innovation after innovation has made it possible for us, the common people, to tell our own stories and write our own history, for good and for evil. But the publishers, indeed our leaders in general, don’t want us to write our own history because our history usually paints them in a bad light. They’re not good at their jobs and no one knows that better than them. Worse than them, though, are those who know the importance of reality but refuse to do the work needed to keep it alive. I’m told there are more authors rooting for the Archive’s downfall than are fighting to keep it up. They don’t see themselves as mere Dreamers, but as Creators, people engineering new places for people to go. They don’t see the publishers clearly spelling their doom. We don’t need a world where books can be lent out, but we do need a world where books are protected from those who wish to do them harm. Including, it seems, most of the people who write them.  

Requests of the Unreasonable

    I hope that I don’t need to say this, but I need to start by reminding everyone that we don’t live in the same reality. Most of us are lucky enough to live in a reality that overlaps with everyone we meet. All of us overlap at least a little bit. We may not agree on the difference between good and evil, but we all agree the sky is blue, and when you jump up, you’ll go back down. It’s what we don’t agree on that’s problematic. What’s good, what’s bad, where to draw the line. Our world is shaped by disagreements, by people saying that they don’t think something is right. A good thing, a bad thing, but mostly a thing that haunts us and the worlds we make.

      Our world is currently defined by extremism, but those who can’t live in our society’s, or who simply don’t want to. People like me, different on many levels, ignored by everyone for the sake of convenience. Many of the people in our society wants a world where those who can’t, or don’t want to, live in in its boundaries simply leave and go somewhere else, but that’s not feasible anymore. There’s no wild land left, countries are bound by similar rules, and even places without laws aren’t safe from pollution and warfare. It also doesn’t help that those who live in society rarely fare better than those who leave. As someone who avoids society as best she can, I find it horrifying that those who live within it, who follow its rules and sing its praises, routinely complain about the issues that keep me from wanting to join. Am I wrong in feeling on some level that if I was being punished for not following the rules, this would be better? I don’t like the feeling that even if I lived in this world, nobody would care.

      I can’t help but wonder if things wouldn’t be better if the extremists got their way. Evil would be in society, but we could at least see what we were fighting and not hold back until we got rid of it at its source. As it is, we know that our world is unwelcoming and its people unhappy, but nobody is quite sure why. I think that we all know that if extremism did make its way into our worlds core, all that would happen is that we would fight to bury it again, and then not do anything to make sure it was actually gone. I’m also very aware that the extremists are no better at building worlds than the moderates are, meaning the best we can hope for is a world that’s just as bad as what we have now.

      Still, I can’t help but dream of a world that suits me, that I can just live in without difficulty. This world just doesn’t make any sense to me at all, and whenever I try to live in it I keep running into walls. Between autism, anxiety, and a strong sense of doom, it’s reached the point where it’s been years since I tried in any meaningful way. I’m well aware that I’m lucky to have someone who can support me, and that my luck will run out, but the answer to my problems is not trying to go back to college or getting a job at a grocery store. I’ve made peace with the fact that my options are either starving to death or destroying my mental health, which will likely lead to me starving to death as well. Which is something a lot of people just don’t get; dealing with people I don’t know often isn’t safe for someone like me, and it’s increasingly becoming dangerous even if you’re what our world calls normal.

     I think what I want more than anything is for our world to stop trying to be reasonable and try to look at us as beings who feel a lot more than we thing, beings for whom a world based even superficially on logic just won’t work. Religion, belief, insanity, everything that we say divides us and makes us more vulnerable, all of this and more are things that will stay with us forever. On purpose. We were built to be unreasonable, because the act of living, of being in a form you know is temporary, is the kind of thing only unreasonable beings would do. You can’t solve extremism by being reasonable or understanding. The people who feel slighted will only listen if they believe that you feel as they do.

An Important Person

 Someday I'll have proof
That I'm an important person.
Someday I'll have proof 
That the world knows my name.
Someday I'll know for certain
That I'm not just another being
Our world will forget
Long before the end times come.

More Thoughts on AI

    I think that by this point we can all agree that “AI” is something of a bust. It could be just that it’s early days, but I feel like the tech people shoved the idea out the door long before it was ready. Most people know it’s not even an innovation, it’s just repackaging something people already didn’t like. I think that the biggest failure of AI doesn’t even have to do with the tech itself, it has to do with how it was marketed to capitalists. From the start of this tech bubble, the people in charge of marketing this have acted like this will replace humanity, right down to invoking a tech apocalypse where the tech becomes so smart that it decides that it doesn’t need us anymore. Why they thought that was a good idea, I don’t know, but at this point I think it’s safe to say that no one is looking for something to replace humanity. If we can’t work, the economy is kind of shot, and I’m pretty sure that an AI smart enough to replace us is smart enough to realize that ruling over a world is worth nothing if you have nothing to rule over. What I think people want is AI that’s capable of surpassing humanity. They want a machine capable of leading them.

      Considering the state of our government, it’s not hard to see why. Power in the United States divided between the government, who we elect, and the businesspeople, who we don’t. We’re seeing why a world where half our power is contained within positions that we can’t change if something goes wrong is a bad idea, not least because it makes it harder for us to get rid of elected leaders who are doing a bad job. It’s at moments like this that insane courses of action start to seem reasonable, in part because they feel like the only thing that will do any good. Any minor changes result in a world that, looked at up close, is exactly like what we have now. It takes time to see the effects of change, and humans aren’t good at thinking long term. 

      I don’t think that AI designed to lead us is a good idea, but even I can see the appeal. The biggest problem facing our world is that everything is in pieces. I’m not just talking about politics, but academics, nationality, culture, just about everything. There is something incredible about living in a world where you can have a group tailored to your exact personality, but the price of that is you can go your entire life without realizing your world isn’t real, so long as you don’t interact with anyone outside of your group. To an extent, this was also true in the path, but because groups were both smaller and built out of random chance, it was easier to build meaningful connections with people and you could live your entire life without seeing that it was all a lie. Now, the only way to keep your world real is to deny that anything outside of it is real, unless you devote your entire life to learning how to build a reality. Most of us can’t do that. I’ve tried, but there’s too much for me to keep track of. We need better tools to help us figure out exactly what people will accept, because even groups are full of people with contradicting interests. I’m just not sure if this is the answer, and even if it was I don’t trust the people in charge to implement it properly. 

      Frankly, I have my doubts that AI will become what we want it to be, and it comes down to the problems we’re seeing now. AI is infamous for having “Hallucinations”, caused by them learning incorrect patterns, and I distinctly remember reading stories where models claimed they weren’t making anything up. They point to what I think the real problem with AI is; it can’t see reality. Neither can we, but we interact with it on a daily basis, whereas the models only interact with the reality we feed into it piece at a time. I think it’s reasonable to say that in order to build a machine capable of interacting with reality, we first need to understand reality, and reality is made of so many moving parts that we won’t have an easy time doing that. It feels more likely that AI will become a series of tools made to help us interpret data, and not much else. Until we learn how we protect ourselves from the Infinite, I don’t think these new tools will do us much good. 

The World Can Be Better

 I want to believe 
The world can be better.
I want to believe
That our wounds will heal.
I want to believe
In the world around me,
In the people I see, 
In the future,
In something other 
Than the present moment.

Denial

     I think that our world is in denial. I don’t mean a world, I mean the world. I’ll be specifically referring to the United States, since that’s where I’ve lived for my entire life, but I suspect this is an issue that stretches worldwide, across the developed world at least. I also won’t be naming any particular examples, because I don’t think this is an issue I can convince anyone is real. Maybe someday I’ll find someone with the right terminology to explain, but for now I’ll just describe what I see as best I can. 

     I think the best place to start is in 2021, when we thought the pandemic was going to end but it actually wouldn’t officially end for another year. I distinctly remember a conversation with my mother where she insisted that after the pandemic was over, we’d go back to normal and everyone would forget all about Covid-19. I said that wouldn’t happen. We’d seen our world stop being real for an entire year, we couldn’t go back because every minute spent walking in that world would be spent waiting for it to collapse. I didn’t mention this to her, I just said I didn’t think we could go back. She disagreed. Three years on, I think that it’s safe to say that I’m right. We keep trying to go back, but nobody wants to go and every attempt is met with pushback. I think that if our leaders had made any attempt to make it feel like things were changing, we’d be able to accept this new world. But they’re not. They’re pretending that it’s still 2019, not 2024. 

      Somewhere along the way, the denial of our world’s death in 2020 became the bedrock of other, deeper denials. Chief among them the denial of a plague I don’t think anyone but me is noticing. I can’t point to anything in specific, but I get a strong sense that many people, regardless of political or religious affiliation, no longer believe that our world is real. It’s not a new thing, conspiracies have a history going back to the beginning of time practically, but we didn’t live in a world where social media was owned by people who were complicit, or even actively peddling them. This goes a little bit deeper. It goes to a world that’s seen our leaders deny that covid’s still a threat, people push for a world where obvious cons were peddled as a new way to form a reality, and where AI is making it possible for anyone to make an image depicting anything they want. Even those who don’t think the way that I do are being tormented by a sense that something isn’t right. Physics is still there, but the world they see in the media doesn’t quite match with what they see on the internet, and at this point everyone knows that could be either because the media is lying to them or because they’ve somehow ended up in an bubble of some sort. Unless you have a degree in media literacy, it’s impossible to tell, even if you know that someone is lying to you. You could go to the most trusted news source you can think of and still not be certain that someone isn’t pulling strings somewhere between where the news enters the machine and when it reaches your eyes. It’s a wonderful environment if you want to convince everyone to hate one another. 

     I don’t think it matters if physics falls apart or not. Even if you aren’t an Infinitelist, you can tell that reality is crumbling and the people who are supposed to protect us are either too weak to do anything or to insulated from consequence to care. I don’t think anyone is in denial of that. What I think they are denying is that our old world didn’t stop being real overnight. It was real because it gave us what we wanted, most of the time at least. It might not have given all of us grand mansions, but it gave us a nice place to live. It was good enough, and that’s all most of us wanted. Then it stopped being good enough, and it’s clear that it will never be good enough again. I keep seeing people pushing for a world based more on what’s real, but what they keep missing is that our old world wasn’t based on reality at all, but it was still enough to keep us happy. That’s what we need to keep in mind. Our new world might just be enough for us, but even if it isn’t run by despots, it’ll never quite be a real place.