Dystopia #2: The hills

Traded my bus ticket for an old phone with a journal app. No service or WiFi. The bus ticket was useless; where could I go on the remaining $4.72? I’ll travel by foot from now on, journaling as I move along, from place to place, kind of like Marco Polo in Invisible Cities.

So, today, on my way to nowhere, I passed a scraggly looking man in a stained white T-shirt, torn jeans showing too much like a flasher, and a cap with “Sinner” on the front. He was sitting on the sidewalk curb with an old tattered bible by his side, pointing a finger towards the city limits.

I pretended to fiddle with my phone, when he said in a trembling voice, “Fella, watch out for the girls in the hills over there, they’re not fully human.”

He repeated the same to a straggler passing behind me, my curiosity was piqued.

“What hills?” I asked him.

“Down yonder, over there, beyond the city.” His crooked finger still pointing and appearing frozen in place, catatonic like.

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Invasion of the chatbots

Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing into the various domains of online activity, mimicking human language, intelligence, and emotions. Without a doubt, we’ve entered the “coming-of-age” era of the AI chatbot, which is intended to blur the lines between human and algorithm. Our ability to distinguish human authenticity from the mere appearance of such, has never been so difficult.

What are the differences between online scammers, predators, and hackers? The web has been overrun by these categories of BS artists, ever since the beginning of the web, but much more so in recent years. The differences between the three are their nefarious agendas, which the typical Internet/social media/app user doesn’t notice until it is too late. For the more aware or cautious users among us, the red flags may become obvious early on, but this is becoming less feasible with time, as the fraudsters adapt and refine their skill set for deception.

Now, however, the AI chatbot has added yet another layer of complexity, transforming digital space into a virtual obstacle course of robotic fraudsters. The scammers, predators, and hackers are not always human anymore, or dare I say, “not often” human anymore. How does one differentiate between human and robotic, when the differences are becoming more indiscernible by the day, as AI technology advances?

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. AI has already infiltrated the domains of social media, news media, publishing, politics, and pop psychology, with its generated clickbait, misinformation, and fake news, which now includes manufactured images and videos that simulate reality with a high degree of precision and realism, further blurring the line between authenticity and appearance.

The imagined and real

What is your relationship with experience? To create ideas and theories around your ongoing stream of experiences? Or wait for an experience to validate your long-standing ideals and cherished beliefs? Many people go with the second option, believing in a collection of unproven abstractions for many years, but later feeling disillusioned by emerging discrepancies between expectation and reality.

Our lives are often like a tale of two worlds: the imagined and real.

Ineffable mysteries

“Things do not change; we change.”
~Henry David Thoreau

We have a long-standing habit of rewriting the mysteries of life into something more tangible or poetic, using language such as right, wrong, moral, immoral, sane, crazy, healthy, sick, beautiful, ugly, normal, abnormal, love, hate, God, Satan, fate, karma, etc. A form of language assisted mental trickery, creating a permanent rift between what we choose to believe and the ever present mysteries within and around us.

Despite 300,000+ years of intellectual gains and refinement as Homo sapiens, it is possible, if not probable, that we’ve not become any more conscious of the full breadth of inner and outer forces that create and direct human behavior and our surroundings. No doubt, we’ve become more skilled at articulating and interpreting old patterns through our literal and literary narratives—scientific, academic, poetic, or otherwise—and casting those off into the world as if they are accurate reflections of truth and reality. However, these may be little more than creative variations on ancient, obscure themes, rather than any gain in knowledge or awareness of whatever pulls the strings.

The archetypal trickster in myths, literature, psychology, politics, and religion tempts us to take one bite after another of the proverbial smart food, convincing us that we can be as knowledgeable and powerful as the gods who created us. However, the irony is that—in all likelihood—we will never fully grasp the ancient, ineffable mysteries that remain constant and resistant to full disclosure and our meddling.

Final hour

Blood is everywhere on this final hour of my final night. The ground gurgling from it; denuded trees drizzling with it—like red maple syrup; and strewn body parts being drained of it—gravity at work. Nature’s dramatization of the end in progress, a mental spectacle of death’s metaphor.

Red streaks the sky with a neon fluorescence; plumes of black smoke twisting into funnels, crisscrossing the expanse, headed eastbound along invisible rivers of wind. Concussive blasts multiply along the horizon, shattering my brain; the last stands of the living, dying, and hanging in limbo; the resilience of mind over matter, to observe one’s mind on self-destruct—its last hurrah!

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