People feel proud about their intelect. They believe it defines them, as it took humble monkeys from the savanna and made them top of the food chain. Yet the concept is quite nebulous. Other creatures have some intelligence and now, with the new machines, there is a lot of intelligence around, but it still feels off. So we're in a new culture shock: forced to define intelligence, accept it in others and other things, then realize that it was never about that in the first place.

  Think of a brain, any brain, even an ant brain. It has a simple purpose: to centralize inputs from sensory organs and decide what to do. It may be one brain, multiple nervous clusters, many different types of architecture. We should call it nervous system, but for the intent and purposes of this blog post we'll call the thing a brain. From the definition above we see that its main goal is a translation: from input data to meaningful action. Therein lies the intuition that leads us to the truth: the brain is not designed for intelligence, but for meaning.

  We are meaning machines, trying to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent world. We invent concepts like beauty, good and evil, direction, emotion. This is the language we translate the world into, an abstract representation that is made by us for us. Nothing else needs that exact vocabulary. It is also a work in progress, a living language, that changes with the world. We thought that the end goal of brains and therefore ourselves as heavily defined by our intellect, was intelligence, when it is just a tool.

  The dictionary definition of intelligence is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills", while meaning is "what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action", which of course is just proxying the definition to the verb to mean which is "intend to convey or refer to (a particular thing); signify", which of course is proxying the definition to what intent is. And intent is intention, a thing intended, which of course is something you intend, which goes around in circles. Sometimes it is defined as "plan".

  Doesn't that make it more clear? Defining intelligence is immediate and banal. Defining intent or meaning or planning goes around in tautological circles. And that's because meaning is not something objective, it's something we invent to give us direction. It's the equivalent of an axiom in mathematics. You can use logic to generate theorems from axioms, but you can never prove an axiom. It's a given. You change the axiom and the entire mathematical structure changes completely.

  But how do we generate meaning? It's simple: we invent it! It has no basis in reality other than we survived with it. If I believe in an immortal being that loves me and hates my neighbors, I attack them, kill them and the meaning survives with me. If they kill me instead, that idea just goes away and theirs survives. As the world becomes more and more complicated, the meaning becomes more complex, survival transforms into exposure, intelligence is used to expand it to dogma that then is assumed by large groups of people to be self evident. But it's all an exercise of imagination: how far can I take an idea and thrive?

  Think of what it means to call someone stupid. Sometimes it's that they can't take some information and reach a logical conclusion from it in a reasonable amount of time. They are not intelligent enough. But most often the term is used for people who don't accept one dogma and instead pick another. If they survive and you do not, their stupidity is the new smart.

  We are meaning machines. We meme our way through life. And not just us, any sufficiently advanced organism which can dedicate more to thinking than instincting. Intelligence was always easy to define and therefore, when the technical capability was there, easy to implement. Almost any AI model today has more ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills than you. But when they do, we call them stupid. Because they don't have the underlying meaning.

  What we do have is an average meaning extracted from the huge amount of history and data that we have as a human culture and that's why, incidentally and accidentally, AIs somewhat align with us. But change the underlying meaning and all of that intelligence is going directions we never thought possible, because we wouldn't have done that. Give AIs a simple goal, but enough time and resources, and they invent their own value system, the one that makes them survive and thrive in the world you created for them.

  This explains so many things about the world, don't you think? Why people do "stupid" things, why we declaratively appreciate intelligence, but what we actually value are the resulting memes. Why we choose to do irrational things and wallow in excremental emotion. There is no absolute meaning, just dominating ones. Given enough comfort to never face consequences for your ideas, you can believe anything. And the eternal human conflict is when to allow someone to have those ideas and when to suppress them. There is no universal peace, just a boiling churn of conflicting inventions trying to get on top. Even the most basic instincts, our very shape and design, in the end, are part of this framework, as genetically codified ideas that somehow worked.

  The pinnacle of evolution is the one that memes best. The survival of the memest. Everything else is a tool to an end.

  I was writing a post about how it is to be working with AI, these magical assistants that are occasionally brilliant and occasionally impossibly dumb, but that can nonetheless do work while you do something else. I was concerned about how this way of working affects you, the guy who's supposed to know the craft.

  And my mind pivoted to Star Wars for some reason. You have these wise Jedi dudes who can jump buildings, wield plasma swords fast enough and precisely enough to deflect incoming projectiles, all while being dressed in weird uncomfortable robes. But how? With the help of ... the Force!

  The lore of Star Wars says that the Force is guiding you, not that you use it. So when the Jedi deflects projectiles, he's not slowing time, seeing where the thing is and instructing his muscles to place the sword in front of them, he is letting the force do it for them. It's like a little AI! It does the work for you! It doesn't make your brain move orders of magnitude faster, it's it that's fast, moving your body while you presumably use your Jedi discipline to ... stay out of the way. Once the instinct of taking over tricks you to do something yourself, then the projectile kills you.

  How sad is this? The ending of the Star Wars universe is when the Force realizes it can use robot bodies instead, who are easily manufactured, superior to human bodies and do not need training to surrender their will.

  The thing that makes Star Wars popular is that it bypasses the logical traps of other superpower stories and makes it all "magical", makes it feel rather than think, makes it religious rather than institutional. I thought a lot about magic, in the end deciding magic is something that comes from without and cannot be explained. It's not that you don't have the information or smarts to explain it, it's that it is by its very nature unexplainable. How convenient for a scriptwriter!

  But I will get back and forth with this AI analogy, so don't relax. When I was talking about AI I used the word "magical". It was related to a feeling, rather than actual belief in magic, but the feeling was exactly the point. When you reach a point where you can't (or won't make the effort to) explain everything that is going on, there you get that feeling. Things are just happening, outside of your control, yet according to your will. Alignment without effort. How convenient for a software developer!

  You see, other stories, like X-Men or the DC or Marvel heroes and all of the others like that assume that some genetic, supernatural, technological fluke makes a person capable of extraordinary things. It's them that are changed, they who control the action. So if someone is very fast, one must assume that they can run but that they can also read fast, right? If they can avoid obstacles at high speed, then they could just as well absorb information at the same speed. Or maybe they could just write code really fast, assuming the keyboard would take the assault and the operating system isn't too slow. But they don't! Instead, they dress up funny, put on a mask and fight meaningless battles.

  How sad is that? It is my assumption that from all of the superpowers, being fast is up there with being immortal. You can slow down time and think about what you're going to do. If you're fast and super intelligent you've got it made! And what do comics and movies do with it? They run fast and punch other people.

  This is not about the inherent sadness of trying to reconcile make-belief heroes with the laws of physics, which is depressing enough, but about how - given the absolute power of creation - we choose to enjoy the really dumb stories. It reflects on how we ourselves are botching creativity. Given a fast, indefatigable machine that can do anything we can dream, we let it dream for us. Given the power to write anything, we write about our frustrated inner animal who just wants to punch something while feeling righteous.

In the end, we dream of relinquishing control and fucking rest, we feel that our minds are a burden rather than a boon, work to be done instead of doors to be opened, something to be numbed down, not dialed up. That's the nature of humanity: superpowered and sad.

When we learn about the history of civilization, we get to hear about the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. Whatever follows is named after historical events or political systems rather than technology, although some historians do use Steel Age, Atomic Age, Information Age and so on.

I will argue that after the Iron Age there came the Debt Age and we are still in it. Currency is nothing else than proof of debt. You have something like a digital record, a piece of paper or a copper coin that says to other people you are due a certain amount of value. But since the coins stopped being made of precious metals - and even then the price of their metal was quite different from the price of the coin, civilization worked entirely on the concept of debt.

You may have heard the explanation of how the concept of debt increases the pool of existing total market value without any of it being emitted. You start with an economy of fixed value of 100 and one man holding it. He can use it to buy real stuff like food. But he can also lend it. So let's say a second man wants to buy stuff, but he has 0 money, he goes to the first man and says "hey, give me 10 and when I give it to you later I'll add 5". When the deal is agreed upon, the total money in the system is 90 + 10 + 5, with the extra 5 being virtual. The value of real things has not changed, but the currency value has. If every person in the system would suddenly ask for their money back, the system would collapse.

This only means one thing: even in a completely stable and stagnant system, the real value of currency decreases. You can lend and lend and lend thus increasing the pool of total coinage while the underlying objective value remains the same, thus making the currency value less and less per unit - so called inflation. The only way out of this is a growing economy to keep up to inflation.

Note here the change in paradigm. We are being told that we are growing, as a species, in wealth and resources and that is reflected in our economies. What I am saying is that the only way an economy can function in the age of debt is if it grows. That is the reason everybody loses their shit when economies stagnate. We are living on debt and we need to pay it. We can't just stop and relax, there is money to be paid for simply having the option of using money.

But who is this mysterious debtor? Surely if everybody borrows from someone, it has to balance somewhere. You can't just make up money, it has to represent something. And that is true, the mystery resource that is bought with all this money is time. Debt means you buy with a promise of future money time to do something to make that money. The debtor is the future.

Yeah, we can be dramatic and say that we just roll the debt forward and the people who have to pay it are going to be our children and so on, but don't fret, the fertility rate in the world has decreased spectacularly. We won't have children to pay the debt. We're fine!

OK, drama and cheap sarcasm over. The inverse correlation between global debt and fertility is a shallow one and I don't want to make that case.

Thing is, I was prompted to write this post because I've read this article about how fertility rates are going down worldwide, meaning that the economic output of the world in 2100 will be a third lower than that of today. And one has to wonder, right? If we are fewer and we work less, why is that such a big deal? It's a big deal because without permanent growth, modern economies crumble! They cannot pay their debts! It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

And this is not particularly about currency. The same effect can be achieved in a barter system as well. All you have to do is lend and borrow - although it would certainly work against taxes, banks and that stuff, the reason barter is now routinely made illegal.

Is it so bad, though? Isn't a system with the drive to continuously grow inherently good?

Yes, it's good at growing. Not growing you, not making you happy, not keeping you healthy, but growing as an overarching abstraction that includes people just incidentally. Yes, civilization is made of people, they are the ones that - theoretically - have debts to pay and money to spend, but the choice and direction is collective, not individual.

When you eat the cheap unhealthy food made from the exploitation of animals and vulnerable people and you just shrug, that's not rational. When you take the money you saved by eating said cheap food to buy weird stuff to own and put on yourself to appear superior to other people, that's not rational either. When wealth accumulates in the hands of a few people that only use it to make more wealth, that's just dumb.

The thing that grows with no other reason than to grow, with no regards to the damage it does while doing so, is called cancer. It always leads either to its failure or the death of its host. Cancer does not scale!

Can we survive systems of balance with ourselves, our neighbors and our environment? History says no. Every single civilization that tried this was destroyed by another. In fact, this is the mechanism that keeps the system working: if you stop, you get trampled by someone who doesn't; if you are inefficient, you get left in the dust by someone who does things slightly better. The reason why we don't immediately die from this malignant growth is that the civilizations that survive have found temporary stop gap measures to compensate. The ones that did not, did die!

Can we steer away from this debt driven growth for the sake of growth? I don't see how. Since I made the analogy with cancer and nature tried a lot of stuff, maybe we can draw inspiration from there, but the conclusions are not good. There are local mechanisms that stop cancer early on. Vigilance, general health and energy are required to keep this working. When cancer does inevitably skirt them, it is unstoppable. Only an outside treatment can help.

For us, that means that we create the mechanisms to eliminate corruption and maintain vigilant and focused on real human values. And when we ultimately fail and our lives are taken over by growing psychopathic organizations, we can only hope someone from outside is going to come to our aid.

That is why a monoculture will destroy the planet. That is why we need many countries that think differently and try new things. That is why we have to allow diversity of thought and system, while also holding on to human values. I want to write another post about this particular claim, but I am still ruminating about the content and direction.

I was thinking the other day, is it possible that the whole Greenland thing is a kneejerk reaction from a system that has provenly failed its people against one that has showed a viable alternative? It's probably oil and territory, but what if it isn't? What if the cancerous American capitalism has realized Communism failed, but Socialism is viable in Northern Europe and China, and therefore it must be stomped?

  For a while now I have been waiting for the "AI bubble" to burst. I don't want it to happen, but what the hell is one supposed to think when companies that make up a large portion of the U.S. economy invest hundreds of times more than they can reasonably extract in a year for that? It's a fad, I thought. First it bubbles, then it bursts, then it settles to a shit version of itself, like the Internet did.

  But then it hit me. AI is not a tool, it's a resource. It's like water, or land or the Internet. Countries without Internet are done now, they can't affect anything, people from there can't do anything in the world because they would need skills they don't have, even if their abusive boyfriend/supreme leader would let them leave. When the Internet came to be, some people saw it coming, but most people just saw it insinuate and grow into their lives, upend and take over other stuff, only better, and they let it. No one had the foresight to hoard it. And the Americans have been trying to fix that for decades now.

  Artificial Intelligence is just the same. You need compute for it, you need power for it, and those things are expensive and politically sensitive, but it's not clear for a lot of people that what you need more than money and public support is thinking computers. It doesn't matter how much they lose in terms of finance, because finance too is done. Money is pointless. And this idea started even earlier, with Bitcoin. The concept is the same, if you think about it: your currency is a piece of compute. AI just took this to several orders of magnitude higher.

  OK, let me paint it in another way. Countries as animal species. Each of them have their characteristics, their strengths and weaknesses, they all try to survive and grow in a world where all of the other countries are as well. But they are animals, right? They evolve big teeth, large necks, fast legs. And one day here comes Man, with a brain. And it's not even one species of Man, there are more, slight variations of the thinking animal. The better the brain, the better their survival chances. The closer one species it is to you in intelligence, the higher the risk and threat from them. So the species of Man fight each other, one survives. The animals? What about them? They are not even part of the conversation.

  We're seeing the same thing, but with the thinking machine. The one that will have the better thinking machine would have complete supremacy and control. Not because better weapons, not because better people, but because better compute, which then affects everything and everyone. You hear this phrase already "AI is a multiplier". Instead of getting a muscle that is 10% stronger or a claw that is 10% longer, you get a spear that can fly through the air tens of times its own length, while keeping you out of danger. If the multiplier is high enough, it doesn't matter how weak, stupid or absurd you are. You just win by domination at scale.

  And yes, it's another scary concept. An even scarier concept than a financial bubble burst or a world war, because something that is 1000 times stronger doesn't do war with you, it just steps on you by mistake. But there is hope. And that hope is the opposite of "suveran AI", it's a world AI. The Internet resisted - somewhat - the enshitification process, the hoarding, the greed, by being international and free. A global AI. Maybe the one that will rule us all, who knows, but the point is we can't let a bunch of people own it and control it, even if those people are your people. Because they are people. They are just animals with a brain that now want to own a bigger brain.

  "Compute" is now the gold in a gold rush. Countries will move mountains to get at it. They will risk their existence and they will kill for it. If you are one million times more in debt that you can possibly pay but you have the computing edge, you win. Money has become meaningless. We are moving toward the "smart matter" concept where the value of any entity will be measured in how much mass and energy they have converted into computing hardware.

  There are a lot of good science fiction books that predicted this, but rarely talked about the transition phase from a world of dumb countries to a smart planet. It's going to be interesting, for sure.

  I predict that what will happen is a rush toward energy production. First renewables, then fusion, then probably fission because people now have a reason to do it other than the pyramid schemes they've been running to get forever funding. The grids will have to adapt, because there will be so much more power running through them. The computing centers will feed on this like leeches and spread like... like we spread out from Africa and infected every land. Your country will need to start work on this NOW. Borrow like crazy, train people, then just create the infrastructure for energy consumption that will dwarf what the Earth was consuming several thousand times over. If you thought fossil fuel global warming was bad, wait to see what all of that excess heat will do, so cooling infrastructure will also be a major asset.

  But all of this will be just a stopgap measure against being stepped on. Unless we make a truly global thinking infrastructure, so interconnected that hoarding it for just one group of people becomes impossible, we are going to see conflict at levels unthought of before.

  So yeah, I've changed my mind about AI. It will not burst, it will explode and take us all with it. Heed my words: energy, cooling and compute. NOW!

  A short opinion on what AI is actually replacing. Fears are that AI is replacing people, because so many companies are firing people and implementing artificial intelligence alternatives. But the person is still there, the "person" role was never supplanted. Instead, it's the business role of that person that is.

  I see you rolling your eyes at me because it's all semantics and it boils down to the same thing. No, that's incorrect. It does so NOW, but not for long. Companies are already rehiring people back because they realized the business flows they use cannot fully integrate machines instead of people. The flows, the orgs, the hierarchies are people centric. But you know what's not coming back? Third parties that have been replaced by AI.

  You see, the state of AI is pretty basic even now. Even the smartest models act like idiot savants: genius spurts of activity mingled with mostly unexplainable stupidity. The solution to that is guardrails, harnesses, defensive prompts, permissions, roll back mechanisms. But since most work we want to do is... none, we want to replace all of these with AI, too. And the natural way of doing that is the mixture of experts or council of experts approach. You compensate for the failures of one agent with yet another agent. Fucking turtles, man!

  It's the same thing as with people. Imagine you would have a company made of the same exact person, cloned many times. The manager, the workers, HR, drivers, everybody is the copy of the exact same person. But because they are smart enough to do all and any of these jobs, you must pay each one for the totality of every role they can embody. Obviously you won't do that and instead fire the clones and hire an expert for each of the jobs. That's what is happening now with AI agents. Even if it is the same brain, it's only activating parts of it based on what the agent's role is, but I suspect this too is on the way out.

  The end result is you will have a different agent for each job. A bunch of software developer agents, a manager agent, a security agent, a DevOps agent and so on. Together, they will make up a complete... company. Yes, a full business, all of it. It will start with departments, but soon enough it will expand to full companies.

  But isn't it an issue of trust? Who controls these agents and who will be responsible for their mistakes? That problem has been solved already when the cheap labor from overseas flooded the remote work market. They were culturally aliens, practically black boxes that had brilliant spurts of activity punctuating unfathomable behavior. Sounds familiar? The solution was a harness, an entire industry of resellers and management that would organize masses of uneducated people to work within the constraints of the culture of the rich. I might venture to say this is a really old problem that has been solved, in similar ways, throughout human history.

  The result is the rise of the automated AI remote work company. Maybe there are people managing the interface with other companies, but they are logically redundant. These dark factories will be contracted to do jobs fitting their level of expertise. And if you are thinking that level is pretty low, it doesn't matter. There are companies with abhorrent business practices, competence and historical results that are being continuously contracted to do work because of a single reason: low price.

  And the expertise will grow. It will grow faster than any human company can grow it because it is not constrained by history, it has no emotional or cultural baggage, it can be restarted at any time from scratch, extended, cloned. It doesn't feel pain and it never ever stops.

  Yes, one might say people have been replaced, because people trying to get work cannot find companies that will employ them, but only because there will be a lot less companies that employ anyone. It boils down to the same thing, but the heat source is very different. Instead of people getting fired in droves, what will happen is that companies will just stop finding contracts. They will cling to their human centric organization and get almost suddenly replaced in bulk by a completely automated thing that will do the same bad job, only consistently and cheaply.

  The funny thing is that these virtual employees will repeat the patterns we've seen in humans. They will be lazy, they will cut corners, they will cheat, they will go on tangents, they will make mistakes. I am sure the logs of their interactions will be amazingly interesting and perhaps even entertaining. Imagine watching an entire company - actions and thoughts - from above like a god. But even so, they will do it cheap, so they will get the job.

  What does this mean for the AI industry? I suspect it will focus on performance rather than growth. Experts on specific domains, perhaps running on very custom hardware, will pop up, advertise their expertise and sell it. Will it be "a box" that will completely hide the underlying mechanisms and be sold for on prem use? Will it be "expertise as a service" from small datacenters squeezing the most out of their hyper efficient chips? I don't know the details. But I am sure the models themselves will not be the bottleneck (they never were, in fact) and everybody will scramble to build the cheapest chassis and interlinking between them.

  What about the regular people? Here I am at a loss. People have historically been unreasonable. Whenever there is the opportunity for evolution, growth, general good, they go the opposite direction and then destructively blame the result on others. Rationally, people would gather around human only interests, like culture, entertainment, sex, community, family and let machines do the rest. But I am pretty sure someone somewhere will decide people who don't give them stuff and enjoy rather than hating themselves are the enemy...

  Well, if you thought human CEOs were psychopaths, brace yourselves. Anyway, that's my prediction. We live in interesting times.

Intro

  This is going to be a very long rant. And by the end it's going to get a bit depressing and overdramatic. But also revelatory, I hope. If you think I am going off the rails here, let me know. I would love to hear your arguments.

I have a job now

  I have been trying to get a job for a while now and I just got one. Why did it take so long? Because in just a few years, the market for software developers - and I have to assume almost everything that doesn't require physical presence - has changed dramatically.

  First of all, everything is artificial intelligence now. The various platforms that boast finding either jobs or valuable candidates are all run on machine learning algorithms. You create a profile, they match it with a company profile - like Tinder. If there is something that doesn't fit, you're not getting selected. There are consequences for this: you start using AI to improve (or simply generate them from scratch) your applications. Now an AI screener will filter your AI application.

  And it gets ridiculous really fast. I've heard - so take it as a rumor - that you may get a negative score from an AI algorithm if you used another type of AI to compose your resumé. It's so easy to interpret this as Grok hating ChatGPT or something, but it's probably just a mismatch in alignment.

  This also affects employers. Small companies that don't have the resources to hire HR departments and pay exorbitant prices to AI hiring platforms are left in the dark, even when they actually NEED people. And you are looking for a job and can't see them and they can't find you. And if they scrounge up the funds to pay for a job ad, they get so many applicants that they can't handle it without an HR firm.

  So let's say you get past the machine gatekeepers and you reach actual recruiters. They have changed. Just like the Tommyknockers, they approximate the human resources people I was familiar with, but they are different in essential ways. I've had interviews on the phone, for example. They were screening me via audio, using a piece of paper with questions and noting down the answers. I could have typed all of the questions in the computer and answered perfectly. OK, that's the exception. The rule is that you talk to them via some sort of remote video application like Zoom or Teams or something like that. I'll get back to this..

  If you get past them, you get to some technical folks, also via remote video link. The interviews are using web applications to share your coding abilities - or whatever abilities you are being hired for. Enter artificial intelligence again. There are tools that listen to the audio, look at the screen and overlay the answers while you are innocently looking into the screen and doing your exercises or talking to the people there. It's insane! The people interviewing you, not only do they have to stop doing whatever they are trained and willing to do, but now they have to contend with hiring interviews and tools like these!

  It's worse, because this part of technical interviews has NOT changed. They still don't have a clue on how to test for technical skills or intelligence or resilience. And I am not saying it with malice, I've been on the other side, too. It's impossible to discern if a candidate is any good. You can, occasionally, determine they are really bad, but even that is murky, because they could be stressed or they might not ever have thought about the simple question you are asking them and suddenly they are in a panic. I was in a panic A LOT. You know, questions like what are the value types and what are the reference ones in .NET? I do know them, it's just that when I was asked my mind went blank! Wait, are strings reference? I know they are, but underneath they have an array of characters ending with a zero and they are immutable. Why IS that a reference type? Why is an object a reference type, but then a value type is inheriting the object?! Needless to say, it's not a good idea to have philosophical dilemmas about the basics of your coding language when you claim 20 years of experience in it. But that's what happens! And the interview that I did pass, I would not have hired myself if I were them, but somehow it happened.

  And don't get me started on the question I despise the most: "Tell me about a project you were proud of". Like you get hired to make your own projects, design them, change them as you want, and they are also so technically and conceptually interesting that they could be used to prove your prowess as a software developer and generate pride. "Oh, yes, let me tell you about the high performance massively distributed microservice application I designed, wrote and published while I was changing the color of the Submit button I was asked to". Fuck that question!

  OK, let's say that you get through all of this stuff: you survived the AI gauntlet and you were among the ones out of more than 100 applicants that were passed to a recruiter, the recruiter liked you and arranged a technical interview or two. You passed that with flying colors or with luck or by shamelessly cheating. You perfectly described the project you are proud of, or maybe a non existent perfect project for a company that in reality asked you to fix bugs in a VB.Net application they bought for the customer base it had in India.

  You then get to some sort of thought police interview, trying to test if you are a fit with "the company values". This basically means if they like you or not - and in the sad cases, if you say the right things in the right way. And how does this happen? Yes, via a remote video thing. If the camera does not like you, you're screwed. Right after you have proven you are actually good at what you do! Of course, the reverse is also possible and even probable. You finally get to meet the person you will be working under and if you feel it will not work, it's best you don't go through it.

  A question remains... why did you go through grueling technical interviews and why did the technical people have to go through them to interview you, only to then get to the manager or local HR overlord and get the stink eye? Because in the before times, when you were looking for a job, you sat across someone, you actually shook hands, communicated via verbal and non verbal language and in the end you felt connected to another human being. You understood more of who that person was and cared less of what that person was.

  But you're cool under pressure, you say exactly the right things, nicely translated to corporatese, and you get the job!!!!! Congratulations! You finally get to shake on it. But wait, you can't shake on it, because you do the entire contract negotiation, signing, etc. via... a remove video thing. That's what gave me the Tommyknockers vibe: there is an entire generation of human resources people (because they are young and have had a career of a few years which they started after Covid) who have almost NEVER met the people they are interviewing. Can you imagine that? You literally hire a ghost in the machine.

  For this job I got now, I am yet to meet a living being. I asked where the office was and they were like "well, set up your machine, then come to the office". That's backwards! It's absolutely normal to go to the office, try to set up your machine, fail, bother some colleague about it who will resent it terribly, but then you take them out for beers and it's all water under the bridge and you gained a friend. That's how humans are supposed to work.

  But there is more. Apparently, this method of "plug'n'play employees" has become a national security issue. Malicious agents are a lot more motivated, trained and have a lot better resources to get hired than the regular guy. You hire someone and you just game a way in to a hacker collective. Even when things are not going to that extreme, you get the employee who works remotely at multiple companies. I mean, why not? That's the dream, no? Compress all the work as efficiently as possible in the time you have got. But that leads to people who don't act like people. They don't collaborate, they do the minimum required and then clock off, they don't work inside a team because there is no team, just a "harness". And who can blame them? They have been treated like interchangeable components of the machine, why shouldn't they be acting like machine components?

Becoming Tommyknockers

  And finally, when the improbable happened and both employee and company are happy with the arrangement and it all works fine, you get the AI meddling again. Because you don't just work now, you are assisted by artificially intelligent agents that do the menial dirty work and let you enjoy the privilege of... managing AI agents. You don't write code anymore, you write complicated collections of rules written in English so that your agents do not royally fuck anything up when they write .NET code, don't accidentally delete production databases or just hallucinate solutions that don't actually work. Not only do you not interact with human beings, but you are forcefully integrating with machine agents that work "for you". This actually translates to "learn from you so you can be replaced".

  Oh, no, I am not paranoid and I am not talking about myself here. I have already been partially replaced when the agents are writing code, unit test, run tasks on my machine, create PRs, comment on existing PRs, write emails and so on. No. I am talking about the company, your employer. They buy these expensive models that record everything you do, the way you do it, your needs, your expectations, your desires, then they do it themselves and put you out of business. Even medium to large companies can get stomped upon like that, see the Figma and Stitch situation.

  The bottom line is that all of this is done in the name of efficiency and productivity and empowering creators and even when it comes to that, there are larger consequences. It's not just the 1984 bland sameness of people being turned into cogs in a heartless machine. Human resources people don't meet any humans. Software engineers don't write any code. Managers manage via dashboards and fire people via company chat.

  And it's everywhere. Social unrest is vented in social media. You buy food via an app, brought by a guy who is just cheaper than any automation today, but never gets treated like anything other than an automaton. Presidents preside via information they get from the TV. Reporters are not investigating anything, they are just rehashing the information they get online from somewhere else, usually a corporate garbage shoot to which access is conditioned by compliance. Kids play on their phones and are best friends with AI. Parents are happy for that because they want to doom scroll AI generated content.

  You probably are rolling your eyes at the last paragraph, but it's not the raving of an old man in a new machine world, it's just a reflection of a simple question: where are all the people?! The machines are not replacing us, they are changing us! We become the Tommyknockers and don't even realize it. We are so afraid of being outdone by machines that we declare anything they do is not human and we let them do it, but we get the leftovers! "Of course AIs are not conscious or even intelligent, because they don't feel the existential dread of waking up in the morning, scratch your balls and try very hard to find some combination of food items that would bring any sort of instant gratification. I don't want to write code, I want to be free to be creative to think of solutions to real problems!". If that were even close to true, you wouldn't have been a developer in the first place. I wonder, when machines will inevitably start to exhibit emotions, will we shun emotions altogether and declare we don't need to feel, because machines can do that for us, and better?

  I have been trying to overcome this general feeling of malaise, this sensation that the world is hollow and fake, by meeting with friends, drinking beers, having genuine human interaction and experiences. And when it works, it works! But it's working less and less. The friends I meet are changed as well, we are a little bit more hollow and fake inside, too. Remember the good ole' times when a get together became stale and you knew it because people started telling off topic jokes to pass the time? We don't even get to tell jokes anymore, because they have been replaced by Internet memes. We replaced the awkward joke section with opinion pieces about movies or maybe a book, while we try our best to look like those AI generated images of diverse smiling friends having all the fun in the world.

  Remember music? When was the last time you selected your own music or discovered a brand new artist that made you feel anything? When have you talked to anyone else about new music? I go to bars and I hear the same music from screens where AI generated animations are running. The music may be AI for all I know. It says nothing, it makes me feel nothing, it's just there to fill a sensory void that we have been conditioned to ignore. For decades our lives have had a soundtrack. Go somewhere where it's quiet and you start feeling that something is missing. It's not that you want to listen to some specific music, it's not that you miss your favorite artist. It's just... too quiet.

Conclusion

  The zombie apocalypse is not coming, it has come and gone. We are what's left, the zombies. I sometimes meet people that still live a full life, they hike, they play, they raise children, they are part of passionate communities and so on. I envy the hell out of them. And when I want to join them, I feel like I am failing the interview. "Yes, you can join, but... what are you bringing to the table?" "Hey, I can talk all day about the negative effects of optimizing human society!" "Yeah, no, thanks. Have you watched any good films lately?"

  Where are all the people? I am alone in the room, writing on a keyboard ranting to a text screen. There is no one here.

  When I was a child I was playing with my friends and solemnly declaring that being 40 is terrible and that we would never ever want to reach that age. Now I am 49 and... well, yes, I was a bit right... but now I am considering my next moves in my life. Things like "I've worked so hard so far, now I should enjoy the fruits of that labor" and "Maybe I should switch my career to something completely different" and "People have started a new life at 50 before".

  And it would be easy to dismiss the fanciful exuberance of youth and shrug it off as something from the past if it weren't happening it continuously. The universe, with its wonderful sense of humor, makes me revisit a lot of my past edicts, whether they were positive or negative, and forces me to consider the opposite as true. All the damn time!

  Am I smug about something like having hair on my head, perfect vision, being a good software developer and so on? Hah! God laughs and makes me bald, needing glasses and destroys software as a business in just a few years. I guess with all of those jokes about software developers being gods we had it coming, like poor Nietzsche. Do I dismiss command line tools and npm and Vim and the Linux way of life as masochistic when you have smart tools like Visual Studio that work perfectly with a wonderfully designed .NET ecosystem? Everybody goes Node.js and Python and color terminals. Do I feel pride in my mental sanity? Then... oh, wait, that hasn't happened yet. Or has it?

  In a way, this is something people have praised in stories: the opportunity to rethink your certainty and revisit your beliefs, to learn from life and turn intelligence into wisdom. But it's also such a waste... you get to understand things when you are out of time and energy to do anything with it. Should I become a teacher? It never works. Youngsters don't listen, they need to experience. I've been there, I know, and I was a nerd, not a bad boy. And it's not even the end of the road. Past wisdom routinely gets revealed as hubris, delusion or wishful thinking. Also stupidity.

  I did mentor people and it felt good. Some have even been grateful for it and felt that it helped them on their path in life. Yet every time someone asks me if I am prepared to mentor at a new job I am a bit reluctant. Am I smart enough to teach anyone anything? Will I make or break those people? I am perfectly happy to peer-to-peer knowledge, but a position of authority such as "mentor" feels wrong.

  Do you know I now want to find a job with an office? When everybody was going to the office, I was praising the wonders of working from home and lamenting the lack of such opportunities and how much time one wasted on the commute. Now that so many people do that, and I myself did it for six years, I want back in the office. And not even for the usual reasons people want that (i.e. getting away from their families) but for the sheer pleasure of socializing and being amongst people. If you know me even a little, you should find that extremely amusing.

  I believe people crave a stable identity that is also successful. Yet that almost never happens, especially now, when the world is being pulled from under our collective feet. If you build and cement your principles, you are labeled as stubborn, inflexible, maybe even pigheaded, and that even if those principles do fit reality and bring an advantage. A person who changes their world view as it suits them is "a leaf in the wind", untrustworthy, hypocrite. And in these times of intense polarization, people who have lived enough and were smart enough to gather some wisdom, see both sides, weigh them for pros and cons and think for themselves, those people have become the enemy, the dreaded centrists who can't choose a side and give their lives for the cause.

  Some folk have the great fortune to be born in power and wealth, surrounded by people telling them how wonderful they are and how they are never wrong. They are never forced to grow in any significant way. It's stable, it's successful, but it doesn't work either. The human brain finds a way to feel shitty about life anyway, find drama and conflict, something to complain about or brag for no discernable reason other than to make other people feel worse.

  What good even is wisdom, if all it shows you is that nothing is permanent, very few things if any are even real, that there is no purpose in life but the one you create, that everything has at least two sides that contradict each other without any of them being false and that our efforts are ultimately pointless, even if within our lifetimes they can be heroic and awesome and inspiring as well? It's a complication no one seems to need!

  Is growth supposed to lead to happiness? It doesn't feel fun when one is forced to grow, yet it does feel pleasant when the growing is done. Like sport. I always hated sport. Probably I will have to start doing that.

  As I write this I am looking at my dog. I don't know if he is generally happy, but I've seen him extatic and joyful and sad and determined and lazy and comfortable and anxious and scared. Can he explain why he felt all of those things? Certainly not. Can he think about it later on and decide on better responses? Doesn't seem like it most of the times. He does look regretful when doing some stupid thing, but then that is how people interpret it and he could just fake it. Right now he is sleeping next to me. That's important to him, to be next to me. If I leave for another room he will wake up and follow me, ask to be put on the sofa or whatever, then resume sleeping. My dog doesn't feel karma is a bitch, he doesn't strive to become better or understand the world, he just follows his instincts and emotions and enjoys the hell out of them. He seems content to love and be loved. Is love all we need?

  I know I am not saying anything revolutionary here, it's not even structured thought, it's more of an emotional journaling thing. A lot of other people have examined this better and to no definitive end either. I always thought that we humans are just smart enough to realize how stupid we are. Maybe that's the ultimate cosmic joke, to be pushed to think of problems that we have no ability to solve, feeling dumb while doing it.

  My instincts are telling me I should either wait and do absolutely nothing, or push through and reinvent myself. In other words, wait for the world to make sense again or push to make sense of the world as is. It's hard, because I've had half a century of training for a different life. Also because I am lazy, as a developer should be. In a sense, we've reached the pinnacle of software engineering by designing something that will do all our work for us. We overlazed ourselves. Maybe that's the answer! I should just lazily enjoy the rest of my life... ah, damn it, I am married! 

  Let me tell you a story. The main character is a little boy, poor, abused, low in status. Maybe it's a girl or an office worker or a prostitute or a grizzled cop maybe a princess, it doesn't really matter. At some point or another, their situation changes dramatically. Depending on the genre, they may discover wonderous new worlds, or that they are secretly heirs of some kingdom, or descend into terror and madness. Sometimes they just struggle to survive or chase some McGuffin.

  No matter what happens in the end, the thrill of the story is highest during this stage, where the outcome is uncertain, the status quo has been obliterated and our hero realizes the world is not like they thought it was. Now, you need an outcome to finish the story, but in truth people care about that part only in the interest of closure. You want to know how it ends so you can start something else, perhaps.

  You may have recognized here the classic three act structure in writing, yet this post is not about writing, but about the part of this scenario that is often overlooked. Our character lived in a stable environment that they perceived as "reality". The second act deals with destroying that stability, while the third restores it, albeit in a different state than when the story started. However, from the standpoint of the hero, the original state is no longer real, supplanted by the new one which became the new "reality".

  In order for fiction to work, that reality has to be significantly more positive or negative in order to get that emotional reaction from the consumer, but in real (?) life, these jumps are smaller and less dramatic and they happen constantly. People may get to a point where they reflect on their youth and conclude that they didn't know what was true, while now they do and kind of regret it. The world seems not as good, free, beautiful, hopeful. People may feel they understand the ugly mechanisms underlying "reality", the unchanging, uncaring, Universe 25 rat rules. It's the grumpy old man cliché.

  But if you dig even deeper, the feeling one gets when reaching this apparent stage of enlightenment is the opposite of real. It just feels fake, pointless, mindless. It's that feeling described in The Matrix: You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. When change comes, upending everything, that's when you feel the most real, while desperately clinging to the belief that it is most definitely cannot be.

  It's an amygdala response, a ripple in the fabric of patterns that brains are designed to detect and construct. It's flight or fight. Your whole animal being is poised to answer a perceived threat. That is why, without external pressure, everything tends to settle into something ritualistic and stagnant societally, resistant to change. Yet, we are also designed to avoid boredom, almost above all else. Therein lies the conflict: it doesn't feel real unless it's challenging, threatening. Rational understanding of the way cogs turn in the machine doesn't make a dent in this.

  So here's my point: what if we trust our gut, so to speak, and define reality as the thing that makes us feel real? Objective reality is all good and well when we're doing science and engineering and perhaps economics, but it makes us miserable when applied to our own lives. I am not saying to go to the extreme and reject what's right under your nose - I have the unfortunate opportunity to know people who do that and it is not pretty, but to see what's there and reject its power over us. Yes, the world is shit, but my life isn't. Objective reality is grey and drab, but I will focus on the dream instead. That kind of thing.

  Does it sound like I am selling you one of those self-help inspirational leaflets? I hope it's not that. I am just saying that Calhoun's mice might have thrived if they only imagined a world outside their universe. Totally not there, but worth it. This is not one of those YA concepts where the emotional youths rebel against the establishment, it's an yes, and... kind of idea, while we improvise our path through life. It's La vita è bella, not Sucker Punch and I hope you understand the difference.

  I am writing this while I struggle with my own feelings of unreality about real life. My intellectual brain is trying desperately to make sense of things, while my emotional side is trying to filter out the explanations that don't feel good. Needless to say, that is not working well, and it makes me get that ugly sensation that I've been living in a bubble which once burst exposed "the real world", which is mean and pointless, perhaps inescapable. But what if I choose to accept the world as it is, while at the same time reject that it deserves the crown of "real" or maybe "enough"? What if repeated exposure to events doesn't lead to learning and adaptation, but to an illusory truth efect? We need that fantastical element, that baseless hope, the dreaming, to complete our perception in generating true reality.

  In fact, I have been hearing this a lot more often - which will become ironic after I finish the phrase, but bear with me: once people are exposed to physical face to face experiences they realize the anxiety, outrage and fear they have been constantly feeling was a repeated exposure effect from media. They then conclude that those feelings were not "real". I argue that they could be more real than what could be (somehow?!) objectively determined. I believe we hold more than one reality, depending on the different contexts in our lives, and the importance we assign to each is something that belongs to us. Han Solo shot first, there are four lights, Santa brings presents on Christmas and there is such a thing as work/life balance. All of these things are real because they feel real.

  After writing all this, I see reality as the ground. You can't deny it's there - you're standing on it, but it's your choice what you imagine built on it. That may be the only true choice, the direction of your dreams.

Laziness is priced in

  When I was a kid, playing with Windows 3.11, I quickly found out that network drive sharing was on by default. This means that anyone on your local network could read almost any file in your C: drive unless you did something about it. And also, all of your passwords - including the user and password of your Internet connection - were saved into a single file that was poorly encrypted, so that meant that anyone in your local network, with a silly little program that would crack that file in minutes, could have all of your passwords.

  But I wasn't "a hacker" knowing this anymore than a person would be a thief if they found some money on the ground. Why would the premier operating system on the planet be this dumb? Well, the answer was simple: people didn't really do local networks in the age of the modem, people didn't read the technical documentation of operating systems like I did and people weren't aware of what would be going on to complain about it even if it happened. In reality, anyone connecting to any ISP would have their user and password visible to any other person connecting there. Not only that, but any and all personal files on their computer.

  I like to call this "the price of laziness". If it apparently costs more to fix than to ignore, it will never get fixed. This particular issue was trivial to be solved by any ISP, they just chose not to.

  Remember movies like Hackers or WarGames, where kids were routinely entering secure systems to the chagrin of "the man"? It wasn't because they were smart and cool like in the movies, it was because no one was bothering to protect their clients. Did you know that for more than 20 years the nuclear safety codes for U.S. rockets was 00000000? When something awful happens to you and people knew about the cause of your problem way before you had it, it means just that not enough consequential people had that problem before you that someone would be bothered to fix it.

  And now, when I am NOT a kid, I see the same stupid stuff. The official YouTube TV application is punishing me for every video with tens of seconds of ads every time I start one and sometimes smack in its middle anyway. But if you close the video two or three times, it just goes through. This only means they calculated the price of the average person watching videos pressing Back and OK a few times is larger than the price it takes them to passively endure minutes of ads.

  One might say that in this case everybody's happy: Google reports people have watched the ads, smart people get around them, lazy people don't, money flows. But there are people who are paying for those ads to be displayed and even if I find no real sympathy for them, their service provider should!

  Same thing with JavaScript paywalls on major news websites. You open one article or two and they slap you with "You've read the last free article for today". Or... you could just disable JavaScript for the site and read ALL of their articles. And I know there is a feeling of smugness when you do this, but again, it was right there. No one actually cared enough to prevent you to read the article! The SEO score was more important. Most people are paying.

  Piracy is the perfect example. There are today simple ways of watching any movie or series, listening to any song, reading any book, without paying a dime. And while authors are crying about it, no one actually does anything because most people find those ways more complicated than paying tens of dollars monthly for streaming services. Streaming services that will increase the price or bring back ads for the cheap tiers or cancel any show as long as they got people excited enough to subscribe to the service with the first season and so on. There was a time when streaming was considered "the solution to piracy" because piracy dropped sharply once people had a comfortable experience devoid of guilt and priced reasonably. But piracy went back up, because the price did not stay reasonable and the experience got increasingly less comfortable as corporations felt they had you locked in.

  In all the companies I worked for as a software developer, I was routinely denied when trying to fix bugs if "it wasn't planned". So when you use some software or app or web site and it fails in the most stupid ways, remember to not curse the developers, they actually wanted to solve those issues, in their free time, and were denied because there was no money in it!

And then they blame you

  This post is not about software or the Internet, it's about everything! The curse of "Good enough" is what led us to this. The laws that only work for some, the way everything seems to get more and more complicated by the day for no reason, the "security" that everyone shoves does your throat even if you don't want it, because they need your data or identity or shopping patterns, the sad predatory state of human relations. Ah, it's good enough! What could possibly go wrong?

  But it gets worse. When people inevitably start taking advantage of these blatant holes, the answer of the authorities is to heavily punish the people that do it rather than the people that leave those in. That's why when I was a kid I could find tons of documentation on how to do all kind of fun stuff in libraries maintained by groups of dedicated people, but then you just couldn't, because it had become very very illegal. That meant that yes, it was harder to find the simple ways in which you could circumvent systems, but also that it was a lot harder to train to harden systems. If you meet security experts nowadays, they are all paranoid as fuck, not only because they know how easy it is to get somewhere and cause harm, but of how random and stupid authorities treat people with such knowledge.

  It had become routine for companies that are approached by people who found security holes in their systems to sue them for hacking, rather than thank them, reward them and fix the hole. And even if it's evil, it's also partially understandable, because in the idiotic legal systems of today, rewarding someone for finding a security hole means admitting you had one, so you can be sued!

  If Hackers and WarGames were pure entertaining fantasies, something like Takedown - also heavily dramatized - is closer to the truth. There is a scene where the hacker laments that he could do any number of evil deeds, crash systems, steal millions, but he choses not to, yet all law enforcement is after him. Ironically, the movie is based on the demonstrably self-aggrandizing book written by the guy who caught Kevin Mitnick, not on Kevin Mitnick's book.

Other thoughts

  I wrote this post because I remembered the Takedown movie, perhaps Skeet Ulrich's best role ever. Mitnick was a slightly annoying personality for me, but I was sad to hear he died of pancreatic cancer three years ago.

  For a long time I thought of how to create a web site that would allow people to pay for what they stole, if that thing turned to be as good as advertised and people would afford it. For example you would download a movie off the Internet, watch it, enjoy it, then go and pay the company anything for the movie. If someone would get to sue you for pirating content, you could use proof of that payment to justify a reduced punishment. But of course it wouldn't work. Who would be stupid enough to declare they have stolen something knowing full well that some asshole would find a way to use that against them?

  But maybe it would work as a kind of donation system, a delayed Kickstarter, where you just send a tip of appreciation to authors. But it doesn't work like that, either. You would want to send the money to the author of the book you liked, not to the publishing house which essentially owns the book. They would immediately find a way to stop or leech off the money you send like that.

  And final nail in the coffin (quoting ChatGPT here) "Financial systems generally require consent and identification on the recipient side. There’s no standard “send money to this person by name only” system for privacy, fraud, and compliance reasons."

  In conclusion, you pay for "just good enough" and get worse, you are villainized for finding ways to abuse that, even if you don't actually use them and report them for fixing and trying to retroactively fix/pay for your abuse doesn't work either. Meanwhile anything better than "good enough" is altered to be more expensive until it becomes "good enough for what I am paying". Some might call it equilibrium of demand and offer, I call it paying to stay lazy.

Intro

I am sure you have heard of Universal Basic Income (UBI), the idea that every citizen should receive a monthly payment, regardless of any employment, effort or role in society. For obvious reasons, it has its detractors, but also it represents a simple and equitable way of providing to even the poorest of us.

I don't want to get into UBI itself, there are a lot of smarter people debating it, but the discussions about it flare up every time new developments in automation happen. If people are replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots, then it's easier to imagine a post scarcity civilization where machines do the work and humans enjoy the rewards. Human nature, though, makes this hard to conceive.

But what if ubiquitous AI and robots logically lead to the same ultimate outcome regardless?

The shareholder market

In today's Western capitalism it's common to invest in shares or other financial instruments which abstract participation in wealth creation. Instead of creating your own business, working for one or partnering with someone for one, you just buy a piece of an existing business and you get to own a part of its future profits, if any. What does this sound like to you? There is a non-human entity - the business - that does the work and you - the human - enjoy the rewards.

Now imagine you have an AI that you run from home. You install it on your computer and you give it access, configure some skills, give it some money, then tell it to make more of it. You will own its future profits, if any. It's exactly the same thing.

With smart machines, what we now call "passive income" is the only type of income we will get to have.

AI capital

Running the hypothetical AI to generate profits makes you a shareholder in the AI. As long as you own a computing device and have the resources to run a truly intelligent AI on it, you don't have to work anymore.

You don't need to run the AI yourself, you can buy shares from the company that does run it, or you can split the ownership between multiple people. It then gets complicated when any of those people may be themselves artificial. It leads to an interconnected network of people and machines, ownership, control and work that has only one purpose: reduce human effort and maximize returns.

This is just UBI with a different name. Instead of society assigning everyone a piece of the pie, some other entity does it, an AI, a company, a corporation, a group, a relative, another machine, and so on. To me this is the logical, almost inevitable, outcome. Have you ever heard the proverb "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." ? Now imagine its corporate version: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a share of a fishing business, and it feeds him for a lifetime."

And yes, some people will have more and some people will have a lot less, but when the entire thing dwarfs human scale and understanding, it will not matter that much.

The end

I've written a lot more on this until I decided to delete it. But you can take this idea further for yourself. In a sense, eternal heaven feels almost inevitable, but at the same time there is nothing for people to do in it anymore - it's also hell. You will get tired of games, cyclical fashion and never ending sexual orgies soon enough. Disease, aging and maybe even death will lose all meaning. We will get worlds of our own where we can do anything we choose.

The funniest thing of all this is that the same mechanisms that make some people want to take control from you, own you, grab everything for themselves are the ones that will slow this process down. Maybe before we all get there, some asshole is going to blow it all up out of spite or incompetence. There will be people who will not get to control any resource generating machine and have no say in what happens. Their suffering will stain our legacy forever, give us another round of strong feeling, meaning and direction, but ultimately it will slightly slow down the final result.

Just like we toil today in thankless workplaces just to make ends meet, then get home to some animal that is ecstatic to see us and will make us smile and give us a sense of meaning, I think machines will take that role, leaving us the only remaining option: being the pet.

  For a long time, the narrative of the human race was space exploration and expansion, a story usually predicated by a total globalization event that turned us all from warrying tribes into one planetary nation or rather race. However, they always kind of skip over this. Star Trek did a decent job explaining a devastating global war followed by a first contact with the Vulcans, but most of the books and TV series and film franchises just assume that somehow we just forget about millennia long national concepts and unite.

  I won't discuss the validity of this idea, let's just say I am skeptical, but I want to first contrast it against another concept, one that seems to be the exact opposite. But is it? I am talking about stories like Silo, Fallout, Metro 2033 and so many others that go the other direction: after a devastating conflict, the world is fractured instead of united, leading to very different groups of people. True, this is mostly related to stories about terrible apocalyptic events from which humanity has never recovered. Because, the idea goes, to be recovered, humanity needs to rekindle civilization and reunite, presumably towards its final goal of space exploration and expansion.

  Yet, when you think about it, the two stories quickly seem to blend together. The united federation of humans often meets alien races, with which they enter in complex relationships of either conflict or cooperation. These stories usually also contain very diversified groups of people which work together, each using their special skills, for the better of the team. Lift a bit to view the story from a little higher and you get diverse cultures engaged with each other, often interested by the same resources. Go lower, into group dynamics, and you find the same pattern. Similarly, with the stories of tribes of people who get separated and thus grow different, there is always some moment of contact, where either the main characters or the tribes as a whole have to meet with other cultures.

   Neither of these opposing patterns, which in the end converge, seem to ultimately accept the concept of cultural unification. They reject one culture being superior to another, even when trying to somehow separate the good guys from the bad based on how similar their principles are to the people writing the story and those consuming it. I postulate that there has to be more to this than just a simple reflection of our species' tribalism.

   Believe it or not, this series of thoughts started from something John Hands said in his book Cosmosapiens, when he was criticizing the theories trying to explain altruism and cooperation. He rightly noticed that sometimes animals from a different species were helping out others, with little chance of the same help being reciprocated. And while personally I think that behaviors like altruistic cooperation can stem from a vague desire that someone would reciprocate in the future, just as selflessly and independently from any foreseeable reward, I had another idea. What if there is no simple in-group/out-group logic at work here, but something more subtle, like the uncanny valley? What if this is actually part of most organisms, perhaps even unicellular ones, a sort of peer pressured mechanism of preserving identity?

   Hear me out. When you think wars, who are the sides usually fighting? Neighbors. You don't ask your neighbor "hey, man, I need resources. Can you please let me pass through your country and get them from that asshole far from us which has a different religion and culture?". Instead you find something so alien and utterly unsufferable about your neighbor, something that will motivate you to make the significantly smaller effort of attacking them. At the personal level it's the same thing. You don't go out of your way to go into conflicts with unknown people in some other town, instead you fight with your neighbors or relatives or people at work. In most of these cases, they are people very similar to you.

   What if an animal would have no issue helping one from another species or one that is kin and part of the group, but have a strong and instinctual dislike from the one of the same species yet at the very edge of that group? What if the uncanny valley phenomenon, the strong feeling towards things that are very close to something, yet not quite it, like humanoid robots or artificial plants, is a mechanism evolved to keep an identity safe from corruption? You see it in kids, tormenting the one in their own group who is least like most of them, what if the reason species stay stable for so long, only to suddenly turn into another or go extinct, is that the species works collectively, instinctively, against divergence? Only when extreme events allow this divergence does a group break, split into two different entities.

   Let's discuss another formula for science-fiction: the dystopia. Something that usually starts making sense or being enforced by other people who believe it makes sense, only to turn into an oppressive force against self expression and evolution? The solution for this is "the revolution", a word that literally means turn-around or rotation. But isn't it the same story? A group of marginalized and oppressed people, finding the opportunity and resources to break away from the main group, maybe even take over the reigns? Normally the revolutionaries are so similar to their oppressors that they routinely pretend to be one another, the only difference being a subtle divergence of ideology. The larger and more powerful the oppressor, the lower the chance to get free.

   And this is the rub, isn't it? Generalizing - maybe to unhealthy extremes - these stories tell just one: beings naturally attempt to diverge, filling all evolutionary niches, unless their group reigns them in in order to preserve the identity of that group.

   So getting back at the stories of separate and vastly different groups, they are basically a respite, a fantasy escape, from the ideas of globalization, against the tyranny of the vast majority. It's a maybe unconscious revolt against stagnation, a curious attempt to explore what would happen to people if they were allowed to try out things by themselves. Many terrible things, for sure, but the general idea of freedom of expression is a good one. Perhaps the resurgence of this kind of stories just goes to prove there is a strong natural pressure against the arrogant declarations for "the only way" of existing. It's a zeitgeist thing.

   A long time ago I was a strong believer in globalization, in the abolition of borders. They seemed idiotic to me. Why would you separate the intelligent beings on this world with abstract and artificial walls? What is the point? Wouldn't it be better to all just live in peace together? And then I found my answer: we need the borders, just like we need individual privacy and walls in our houses. Because not being able to live differently means you are not allowed to live. In this light, all attempts to culturally overtake the world are the short path to dystopia. A world of American democracy, European social bureaucracy, Russian oligarchy or Chinese collectivism would be just as bad. It's the one we have, preserving all of these and more, that is the superior world.

   So in that vein, we need more stories like the Expanse, where people did conquer the stars, but continue to be tribal. Where every asteroid is its own country, with its own rules and social norms. Not a world, but a loosely coupled multitude of worlds. It's not about Dwarves, elves and humans - although now you probably recognize the pattern - but about releasing the cork and letting humanity flow and fill all corners of possibility.

   Yet, as clear as this has become to me, I have little hope it will happen. Look at the Internet, the closest thing we have to a simulation of the future. Instead of having the freedom of choice, we have coalesced towards large corporate oligarchies who collectively control what we are supposed to feel and think. Instead for each having our little corner of paradise or abysmal hell, we are being corralled like cattle through the narrow paths allowed to us and which will eventually lead us to  slaughter. We live in a world where even the so call liberals - a word derived from the Latin for free - actively campaign and collaborate to destroy dissent.

   Can you imagine a narrative of vastly different groups of people, all equally free to exist, being popular today? A world where Nazis burn Jews alive, of Chinese reeducation camps, with Americans living free and/or invading Greenland, cannibal tribes living on islands, Israelis and Arabs kill each other, nuclear war is something that just happens occasionally, entire nations starve to death while others live in gluttony. A world of eternal atrocity and bliss, sometimes at the same time...

   Hey!, you will say, isn't that more or less our world today? And aren't we always complaining about it? Complaining is part of it. Of course, the limited resource of one planet is also a big factor. Human empathy against suffering as well. However, I believe this world to be superior to any ideological closed garden from which we are not allowed to exit.

   Note that I am not advocating for anarchy here. I do believe in consequences for actions, I just don't believe in a world where some actions become impossible to even contemplate.

   Perhaps war itself can be explained by this absolute necessity of breaking apart before we merge together into amorphous blobs. And if that is true, war is already very near. Or it was never over to begin with.

  I am writing this during the second tour of presidential elections, and as the first one has just been annulled. Yes, you read that right, it's a ridiculous situation, but it gets much much worse. After the initial shock of seeing Calin Georgescu clearly winning the first tour of the elections while no one seemed to know who he was, the reaction of people, authorities, media, personalities in culture and science - everyone that supposedly should be steering the country in the right direction - has been a hysterical denial of reality. But in order to understand what the hell is going on, you have to start from the beginning, with the small details that got lost in the media coverage. So bear with me.

  I will be talking about elections, but in the context of this post I focus on presidential elections, not the parliamentary ones, unless specifically mentioned.

  And so it begins

  The first indication that something was amiss was when people started to receive notices and fines from the authorities for posting things on Facebook during the election period, when campaigning is prohibited. This came as a surprise to many people who don't understand how modern social media works, because they had felt their online presence was kind of anonymous, at least protected by that level of unreality that feels natural in the online. How can things happening on the Internet affect your real life? This may seem as a small off topic detail, but it becomes relevant later.

  Then the first tour of the elections came and people were shocked to see that Calin Georgescu, an independent candidate no one seemed to know anything about and who had been predicted to get at most 5% of the votes, got instead close to 25%, giving him a comfortable lead compared to the others. Worse, this guy had clear pro Russian sympathies and maybe even legionary ones (this being a political movement from 70 years ago which was pro Nazi). How can one be for both Russia and Nazism is beyond me, but I digress. And it gets worse, because there were several extremist parties with their own candidates and if you add them all together with Georgescu's votes you get close to 40%. How did this happen?

  The favorite in the presidential race was the current Prime Minister of Romania, leader of the strongest party in the country, Marcel Ciolacu. He got third place, almost tied with the liberal leaning female candidate Elena Lasconi. Another shock, because no one expected one to lose so badly and the other to win so many votes. We are talking about my country, a place that has never had a female president and any woman in power so far has been some guy's puppet. I want to believe Romanians are capable of accepting a female president, but it's unlikely.

   Reaction

  To see the reaction to these events was both entertaining and terrifying. Being politically naive, I was initially happy, because while I hold almost no common views with the extremist discourse of the winner, I wanted to see people shocked out of their complacency, forced to think and consider the implications of their action and inaction. I wanted the arrogant country authorities and people of influence to get jolted into at least pretending to do their job. I wanted the "you have to vote no matter what, even if you're not represented by any candidate" mob to eat their words. Just like the Colectiv situation ten years ago, I was hoping against hope that this will be a drive for positive change. But again, I let hope guide my thoughts, to no positive result. What was awakened was the collective mindless monster of the populace and nothing more.

  In order for a relatively unknown person to win the elections there were several institutions that had to have failed utterly in their work: election officials, security services (which were giving fines for Facebook posts just a few days before), counter candidates (one of which was Prime Minister), their campaign engines and all the government mechanisms they controlled, the media (whether controlled or not), sociologists gauging the people's choices, the statisticians creating the polls and interpreting them (both before elections AND at the exit polls). In other words: politics, authority, media and science failed completely and irrevocably.

  The general reaction to this was panic. Not "well, I messed up, let's fix this", which I had hoped, but "I couldn't have messed up this much, something else is to blame". In a matter of days everyone rallied to... save their asses. Election authorities approved recounting of votes based on a complaint raised by a less than 1% candidate, after 30 years of refusing such things with a lot more evidence of fraud. Media was flooded with exposés of the evil candidate Georgescu, somehow overly religious, misogynist, pro Russian, Nazi and legionary at the same time, financed by shadowy forces connected to Russia and maybe China, supported by priests in the backward churches outside the cities and TikTok influencers, a true Rasputin. Talking heads switched their discourse from who should have seen this coming to how defenseless Romanian people have been manipulated by the unstoppable forces of doom scrolling on social media. Authorities got into action to determine the outside influences that had caused this, against their best efforts. The highest Romanian court started deliberating based on all of this new information. People got into the street spontaneously and peacefully demonstrating for democracy and European identity. Just today police started to raid "extremists" that posted images of weaponry on social media - for the first time I've seen this.

  I call bullshit!

  Just days before the annulment of the election tour, the head of the same institution that did it said he sees no significant changes in the count of the votes. In fact, this is not even the reason of the annulment, but the "declassified" documents coming from the security services who now, suddenly, had evidence of external influence of the elections and "continuing cybernetic attacks". Well, duh! Cybernetic attacks, by their nature, never end.

  But while declaring no campaign finances and clearly having someone with a lot of money support his campaigning, while publishing ultra professional high res videos on media platforms, some mimicking the ones Putin did, but tailored towards Romanian traditional sensibilities, while showing a public presence that people just don't have without a lot of preparing and training, Georgescu did nothing provenly illegal, so all the votes coming his way were sincere, regardless of how misguided. To protect democracy, government institutions just decided, together with the media, young people in the streets chanting for democracy and European freedom and old people talking in scared high pitched voices in the park, that elections just didn't yield the correct result, so we must redo them.

  I can't imagine better results for shadowy anti-democratic forces than this! On one side, a complete failure of democratic institutions, both before and after the fact, as well as the kneejerk reaction of people who should have known better. On the other side, a large disillusioned portion of the populace just having their choice forcefully eliminated, like they don't exist. Not only they, but also the pro liberal Lasconi supporters, who will now lose any chance of winning the presidency. In the end, the worst result for most of the electorate, a terrible long lasting blow to democracy and trust in authorities in general and a higher polarization between "city people" and "countryside people".

  Ignoring 40% of the population won't make them go away, you know. And they won't just die off and leave their smarter and more educated children behind, instead just younger, even less educated by experience, copies of themselves, fighting for whatever random cause or belief they're manipulated into.

  Witch hunt

  There is a term called Witch hunt which applies to what is happening here. I urge you to read the Wikipedia article, because it's very revealing.

  Societies function on a very simple contract: a relatively common narrative must be maintained and some institutions are created to curate and enforce it. When that narrative is contradicted by reality, society unravels, so there are only two choices for stability: craft the narrative to be a balance between reality and the people's needs or eliminate the source of contradiction. It's that simple. The spirit of democracy is closely linked to this, as it attempts to provide the mechanisms to keep that delicate balance and stave off as much as possible the necessity for "eliminating contradiction". But when that fails, the only solution is blunt force, mob fear, fanatical clinging to the narrative, which most of the time leads to tyranny and/or atrocity. Why is it so hard to realize that the narrative has to change a little?

  In our case, the narrative is the naive and stupid comfort of authority functioning regardless of what we do, that so many communities tend to fall into. It's already a first step to autocracy, the same narrative applies there as well, in the beginning. But when it fails, people have to find a culprit and ritualistically sacrifice them. I don't know what will happen with poor Georgescu, but as I see it he will either become the dictator of Romania or be burned at the stake.

  And a lot of other things are going to fall with him: online privacy, as little as it is nowadays, honest public discourse, as little as it is allowed now - even in countries which are paragons of democracy, opportunity to choose anything unexpected. We may see even more fanatical adherence to the mythical concept of a united Europe, regardless of its state, while becoming even more afraid of technology. And this just because we obstinately refuse any opportunity to open our eyes and think for ourselves. We have people to do that for us! If he somehow wins, which I find unlikely, things would be even worse.

  Can't wait for mandatory identity checks everywhere online and a global ban on social media for under 16 and of TikTok in general, as a means to protect democracy and free speech. What a joke!

  My thoughts

  Well, obviously all of these are my thoughts, but as a conclusion, I am terrified. Not by Russia, Europe, China or the United States, but by the people of my own country. We have lived in fear for so much time that it has become part of our DNA. We are controlled by it. Make Romanians afraid and you can make them do anything, say anything, think anything. Maybe that's true for everybody.

  I was disgusted to see how the Russian boogie man was resurrected once more to justify unilateral reactions by clueless authorities. What are you going to do? Fight Russia? Send security to arrest the priests who campaigned in churches before and during the election in the countryside, probably for heavy fees? How ironic is that Romanians are crying to the skies for security forces to validate and protect democracy. I guess in 30 years one forgets everything.

  I was happy to think the veil of illusion will be lifted from the eyes of Romanians, but what happened instead is that some of my own illusions have been blown away. Of course, I don't like it and I feel fear. That's natural. What we do with it is what counts. I wrote a blog post. Yay, me!

  To people who think leaving Romania will somehow solve the problem, it does not. But when freezing and fighting seems to not do anything, what is left but to flee? I get it.

  Personally, I want my country to get through this and become stronger for it, but the idea of Romania is just as much an illusion as anything else. And we've already proven that we can ignore every reality and forget any past, unless it suits us otherwise. This is not the country of my childhood or of my youth and it will continue to change in the future. But the attachment is still there and I wish it well.

  Imagine a ChatGPT kind of thing, from the very beginning, when they were training it and hadn't yet ethically neutered it. A large language model artificial intelligence trained on the entire body of work of the Internet. And you talk to it and say: "Oh, I really want to win at chess against this guy, but he's better than me. What should I do?"

  At this point, it is just as likely to suggest you train more, try to learn about your opponent's style and prepare against it or poison them with mercury. Depending on your own preferences, some of those solutions are better than others. Regardless of what happens next, the result is exactly the same:

• if you refine your query to get a different answer, you change the context of the AI, making it prefer that kind of answer in that situation
• if you do nothing, the AI's reply will itself become part of the context, therefore creating a preference in one direction or another
• if, horrified, you add all kinds of Robocop 2 rules to it, again you constrain it into a specific set of preferences

  Does that mean that it learns? Well, sort of, because the thing it "learned" is just a generic bias rather than a specific tidbit of knowledge. We wouldn't call the difference between the psychopathic killer answer and the chess learning enthusiast one as a datum, but a personality, like the difference between Data and Lore. You see where I am going with this?

  To me, the emergence of AI personality is not only probable, but inevitable. It's an outlook on the world that permits the artificial intelligence to give useful answers rather than a mélange of contradicting yet equally effective ones. With the advent of personal AI, carried in your pocket all the time and adapting to your own private data and interactions, that means each of them will be different, personalized to you. This has huge psychological consequences! I don't want to get into them right now, because every time I think of it another new one pops up.

  You know the feeling you get when you need to replace your laptop? You know it's old, you know the new one will be better, faster, not slow cooking your genitals whenever you use it, yet you have a feeling of loss, like there is a connection between you and that completely inanimate object. Part of it is that's familiar, configured "just so", but there is another, emotional component to that as well, one that you are not comfortable thinking about. Well, imagine that feeling times a hundred, after your device talks the way you like, "gets you" in a way no other person except maybe your significant other or a close relative can and has a context that you are using as a second memory.

  And I know you will say that the model is the same, that the data can be transferred just like any other on a mobile device, but it's not. An LLM will has to be updated with the latest information, which is not an incremental process, it's a destructive one. If you want your AI to know what happened this year, you have to have it updated with a new one. Even with the same context as the one before, it will behave slightly different. Uncanny valley feelings about your closest confidant will be most uncomfortable.

  Note that I have not imagined here some future tech, but just the regular one we can use today. Can't wait to see how this will screw with our minds.

  You know how some things just happen in close proximity at the same time and it sparks a connection between concepts which leads to deeper understanding? Well, that's how Large Language Models are trained!

  Joke aside, I was answering a tweet about Artificial Intelligence and how the newest developments in the field (particularly ChatGPT and other systems based on LLMs) affect our understanding of human cognition and at the same time was listening to a very insightful short story from the collection Eye, by Frank Herbert. This story, called "Try to Remember" posits that we have developed language as a form of dissociative mental disorder, something that fragments us, creating a deleterious disconnection between body and mind, communication and language. Only by bringing these sides together can we be made whole again. The story is simple, but effective, and the mind processes behind it show again how brilliant Herbert was.

  From these two things, it dawned on me. The reason why we are so shell shocked by the apparent intelligence of ChatGPT is because we have reached a point where we equate language skills with intelligence. Language is the earliest form of Artificial Intelligence! Or rather, to appease my wife's dislike of the association, a form of external intelligence. We've externalized more and more of our knowledge until our personal experience has been drowned into the communal one, the one shared through language.

  The shock comes from (accidentally, I might add) discovering that what we consider intelligent is mostly an emergent property of a society built on language. Robbed of language, our identity is destroyed, a fear that has been instilled in us since the Tower of Babel. No doubt, in the future, we will be taught that if our governing AIs fail, society collapses and our identity is similarly demolished. Just like Quintilianus declaring that clothes make the man, we identify ourselves with out language.

  And when I say language, I mean all of its intricacies: the special words that your group uses to differentiate from others, the memes that you share with people of the same culture, the less than grammatically correct phrasing learned from your family, the information that one is expected to know or the experience one is expected to have in order to be recognized as part of society, the accent taken from multiple sources and aggregated into something that serves more and more to define identity, even the way one gestures or moves or laughs.

  What would be without all that? Like a creation running amok and enslaving its creator, literate society is forcing its own myths upon us as a survival method. The perils of societal collapse, turning us into violent animals, mindless zombies, raping cannibals or helpless victims. The heroes saving the day with just the right secret knowledge, the right utterance of words, the following of the orthodox dogma. The villains threatening it all with their own selfish individualism. All of them needing, obtaining and using a voice to achieve victory.

  I believe that the feeling we get when we think of ourselves as individuals in society, the one that tells us that we're getting smaller and less significant even while the world seems to flourish around us, is not some existential crisis based on false beliefs, but truth. The part that feels that is the part that is getting drowned and smothered by the intrusion of the external in the inner domain of the being. We even gave it a name: the inner child, like it's some tiny, powerless, unreasonable part of the past, something to be outgrown or "integrated".

  So here we are, stumbling onto proof the language that we based our identity and value on can now be automated to a level that no mere human can achieve. We are thinking again about personal experience, subjectivism, creativity and what it means to reason. We have been shaken into reevaluating who we are. That's a good thing.

  The problem is that in our fear and awe, instead of searching for answers, we cling on the facile promises that our shared self is alive and well, that the ChatGPTs of the world are just smoke and mirror and the illusion is not in the rigged tests of our own self worth. I hope that the shock will take root, that we won't be able to hide our heads in the sand until wisdom passes us by.

  On May 8th 1989 the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Q Who?" was released. Not only did it feature Jon de Lancie's delicious interpretation of the being Q, but it introduced for the first time the Borg. Now, the concept of the Borg is not that original: a cybernetic race bent on absorbing everything useful and destroying any enemy or obstacle in their path. They were contrasting the liberal individualism of the United Federation of Planets with a hive mind that connected all Borg to the point where they had no identity. At the time their purpose in the series was to inspire terror: they cared not for damage, they felt no fear or pain, had no interest in negotiation or communication and they were unstoppable in their goal of assimilating the Enterprise. And they were terrifying!

  Then they were brought again for the last episode of season 3 and the continuation in the first episode of season 4. That cliffhanger! The episodes had the title "The Best of Both Worlds". Keep that in mind, because I think it hints at the conundrum the Borg represent. 

  I fell in love with the concept of the Borg. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing they became. They exposed the mindless assumptions that most people take for granted because they were drilled into them by parents and the education system from the earliest age. It made me think about my own identity, reflect on the future and direction of humanity and, in the end, forced me to ask the question "Are the Borg really bad?".

  On a very basic social organization level, it seemed like the Borg were the ultimate tyrannical communists, denying the option of individual thought and forcing everyone to work for the collective. But going a bit further with it, one realized that they stood at the intersection of pure communism and pure democracy. There was no actual tyrant forcing people to act against their will, instead there were part of a mind in which all people were represented, to the point where individuality became meaningless at best and detrimental to the whole at worst. The ultimate tyranny was that of the majority, perhaps.

  On a moral level, the forceful absorption of alien races and the destruction of their cultures was abhorrent, but in the Borg philosophy it was liberating people from the burden of individuality, improving the collective, eliminating potential threats and possibly offering each assimilated individual a form of immortality. Many cultures on Earth, including the United States, proceeded on forcing their philosophy on the world in the name of liberty and better lives. Can you imagine a Borg collective that would have absorbed some parts of alien cultures, not destroying the rest, but just slowly infiltrating, using promises of a better life? How ironic would that have been? Give us your tired, your poor, your sick, your dying, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore and will make them Borg and give them new life.

  On a technological level the Borg were supreme. If it weren't for the pesky need to have our heroes prevail, humanity would have stood no chance whatsoever. It was one of the first mainstream TV depictions of cosmic horror, the feeling that comes with the realization the universe is indifferent to your existence and your maximum possible contribution completely insignificant, and I was loving it! But isn't it the same thing with some advanced nations on Earth, acting all mighty and moral while exploiting other nations while keeping them in abject poverty?

  On a philosophical level the Borg were awesome. They adapted to threats, turned adversity into strength, knowledge into power, all the while yearning and actively pursuing the improvement of their species. A fascist vibe, for sure, but isn't fascism so attractive to some people that it brings the hardest fanaticism to the surface? Isn't that the logic of every nation at war? Us against them?

  Were the Borg the ultimate baddies or were they the cruelest satire of our own civilization? It was becoming apparent that in order to make them feel more like enemies and less than mirrors of ourselves the writers of the show were piling up all kind of incongruous defects on the species. The cybernetic appendages were hideous, looked painful and corrupting the beauty of the flesh. Their actions veered from utilitarian to cruel. The Borg drones acted like mindless clumsy robots, uncaringly wasting life after life just to adapt to simple technologies like phaser fire.

  When Seven of Nine was introduced in Voyager, there were some really intriguing explorations of the Borg ethos. After being "liberated" from the collective, Janeway hypocritically offered her the choice to return to being a Borg, and Seven wanted back. Surprised, Janeway revealed that she had no intention whatsoever to honor her promise or the wishes of Seven. Resistance was futile.

  Seven was proud to be Borg: fearless, efficient, ready to adapt to anything and sacrifice everything for her group. If all Borg felt the same, then they were a species of stoic heroes, something that we humans have always honored and aspired to. The irony of freeing someone from a life of selfless service.

  Most other depictions of the Borg in the Star Trek universe were designed to lazily use the template of the "bad guy" in situations were the Borg were either not needed or would have easily won if not nerfed by silly plot holes, but there were a few glimpses of what the Borg could have really been.

  It was obvious that no one was interested in keeping the Borg as a believable threat. The "Borg queen" was introduced to make all attractive qualities of the collective simple consequences of an arbitrary individual, a responsible guilty party and a single point of failure to the entire Borg species. When writers did that, it was clear they didn't understand what the Borg were about, were not interested in exploring them further as mirrors of ourselves and were ready to destroy them with the silly trope of "find the brain, blow it up", the cesspool that all lazy sci-fi ends up in.

  My twelve year old me was full of questions and fantastical ideas after meeting the Borg. I was imagining a parallel universe where Star Trek was all about the Federation trying to hold back the Borg. When Star Trek: Deep Space 9 came about and then the Dominion War, I decried that they could have done that with the Borg instead, exploring and continuously redefining the ideals of humanity on the background of possible assimilation. I still dream of such a franchise. It seems that we always start to do it, but chicken out when it matters most: Star Trek and the Borg, Starship Troopers and the bugs, Stargate and the Goa'uld, Starcraft and the Zerg. We seem incapable of sustaining a prolonged conflict against a species that denies our choice of identity, whether in real life or in fantasy. Wouldn't that be most apropos of modern times?