There’s something that I’ve been trying to write about for a little while now. It’s related to transness, but apart from it as well, and I feel it when I’m experiencing a full body high in a club, when I’m bunched up like a spring at some function, and at most points in between.

It’s the physical, bodily feeling of being watched - of how others look at you, how you feel looking back at them (and how able to you feel), and how the uncertainty you feel in how they’re looking at you changes how you are, changes what they’re seeing, collapses your hyperposition.

I don’t know how common this is, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the gaze as something equal, something that I’m able to meet. Especially when I’m among strangers, being looked at carries this weight, feels like being pinned to a corkboard, for examination.

I can isolate this in a simple, common experience. You’re walking down a street, with nobody else around. You believe - you suppose - that you’re walking ‘normally’ - it’s strange to put it in those terms, really. You turn a corner and suddenly spot your opponent - guns at dawn - maybe sixty paces away. Where do you look? Do you know, reading this? Do you studiously ignore them? What if you get in their way? How are you walking? Those beads that you’re swinging in your hand, your komboloi, they were just a fiddle toy, but are they ~ performative ~ (to use the expression of the day). You walk with your hands in the pockets of your double breasted jacket - who do you think you are? Are they looking at you? Do you seem like a threat? Say this tableau is out somewhere more rural, Llambedr Pont Stefan. They might say hello to you! What will you say back? Do you alter your stride? Slow down? Speed up?

When I pass people on the street, I often stumble over my own feet. I’m so focused on projecting, that I forget how to walk.

Projecting… what exactly?

I’m entrusted with a very frustrating medical condition called esotropic strabismus - a lazy eye, or a squint, if you like. My left eye, through which I can see only the most abstract colours and shapes, turns inwards. How much? Who’s to say. I think substantially. But I don’t know what I look like, really. Nothing collapses things more than a camera. The camera makes me anxious, triggers my learned behaviours to minimise it, turn my head to one side, look sideways on - which carries its own connotations. A friend says that she can only get a good picture of me when I don’t know it’s being taken. And the person looking at me in the mirror isn’t the same person as in the photos. And people look different in motion than in photos anyway. And you filter your perception of someone through how you feel about them. Who’s to say.

The point being, ‘eye contact’ isn’t quite as straightforward as all that. To me - for me - it works the same as it works for you. I see the world through one, unified portal - my right eye - perhaps with less depth perception - but my brain blocks the contradictory noise from its siamese twin, and I face the world dead on. But for you, you look at me and see one eye looking forwards, and one looking sideways. Your uncanny synapses fire. This changeling thing seems wrong. (Does it? Do you?). It moves like a person, but not quite. You see something moving below its skin. You stand to my side - a stranger, on a packed train car, jammed in together - and you do the thing that people do when they make eye contact (whatever that may be). You glance away, look back - and the eye remains staring at you. Unseeing, uncomprehending.

As a child, I loved the Hitchhikers Guide books. In a long aside, in the description of the uses of a towel, Adams says that it can be used 'to avoid the gaze of the ravenus bugblatter beast of traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you)'.

As a trans person, it goes without saying that you experience a feeling of uneasiness when being looked at - dysphoria (if you like) can make you paranoid, feel like the wrongness you feel is obvious to everyone else as well. But the inverse is also true. Your awareness of your male apperance, that social role, can make you hyperaware of how you look at others. You know that your gaze - the ~male gaze~ - can impose on people. And people seem unsettled by your gaze. Don't they? If they do, why? Will they tell you? It would be impolite.

Your gaze - my gaze - when taken as standard, is Standard Default Male. You can't expect reciprocity - people who are rightly wary of this Standard Gaze will meet you side on, and peers will notice the deficiency before too long. When taken as substandard, or parastandard, invites paranoia. Why can't they look me in the eye? Is this invert sizing me up? Could it be contagious?

And you don't want to be seen anyway. Or rather, you feel like looking at others will be unwanted, unwelcome, and might draw unwanted attention, flip to the other side of the equation, and you don't want that either, do you? You're trapped, double blind. Seeing harms, and seeing invites being seen, which harms again. When the Other looks at you, you feel lacerated, humiliated, skewered. What you see isn't what I wanted to show you. I could show you so many things. But instead, when I walk around, I'm brandishing a loaded gun. Or two. Or three...

And so, you look anywhere but the face. Kiss anywhere but the mouth. Look only at yourself, how you imagine yourself to be. It's the closest thing to nonexistence you can get.

Acting, as you have to, on this non standard output, from your non standard input, you create a model of the world-as-normal - the one implied through neutral sources, trusted friends, the mass of training data you consume, information that doesn't change when you look at it - and the self-as-abberation - the body and mind defined in the negative space, the gap between how a person would be to produce expected reaction, and the person you are to produce observed reactions. You're not sure exactly how far off the world-as-normal you are - maybe everyone suspects the same. Your models of both are faulty, imperfect, but you keep noticing a gap. It bugs you. Like a splinter in your mind, in your eye.

The idea of dysphoria is appealing to package up, a diagnosable medical condition. We've had the results back from the lab - it's dysphoria. You scored over 25 on amidysphoric.com. Congratulations! Were you born in the wrong body? Did you play with dolls as a child? Can we make a glossy, vaseline smeared flick about your school days? How your world as normal was dreamhouse, and your world as observed was mo-jo-do-jo?

But if you're not bound for Hollywood, it's a lot harder to unpick. All you have is this feeling, that 'people don't react to me the way that they should'. Why is that?

Is it because you came in, wide eyed and overparented, midway through the school year? Because you were a newcomer wherever you went? Or because you shaved your legs, which went unnoticed for weeks, in any case, you think. But children know who the fags are quicker than the fags do. Is it because there's a deficiency written on my face, visible to everyone except me, meaning I can't look at you straight? If so, which one? Some I know about, can see on pictures, even if I can't quite work it into my view of myself. Others, I might not know at all? And do they compound? Trans people often have ADHD, autism, we call it 'comorbid'. Proof of social contagion - if you believe that kind of thing. Is it not more likely that this feeling of wrongness has to get to a certain point - a critical mass - gender on top of social on top of exclusion - before you even start to think about transition?

As scary as it was to come out, and as much as it's still a work in progress, I feel much more real since doing it. The gaze of others has this regulating quality - and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Noone is an island, and we care about what our loved ones think of us, because we care about them, and we want to be the best for them.

The gaze is negating when it's only one way. You don't know how you're seen, not really. If you can't meet another's eyes, you're trapped inside them, twisting yourself to fit what you think they see to what you think they expect to see.

Transition isn't uncovering a core, 'true' essence - or at least, I don't find that a useful story to tell myself. Rather, it's a conscious, defined decision about how you want to be seen, one that's taken with evidence about how you've not wanted to be seen before, the epistemic framework of transition, and faith that it's the right thing for you. A total decision, a reinvention, on your terms. How many of those do you get the opportunity to make, these days? You can't skip town any longer.

And now, having chosen, you can meet the eyes of others, knowing what you intend to projecting, despite its inevitable distortion, rather than prefiguiring both what they want and what they'll get. And if you can meet their eyes, even obliquely, then you can withstand disgust or rejection - you stand on solid enough ground to pass judgement yourself. No matter what, I see you as you see me. I act on you, as you act on me.

the fundamental disagreement on the rights of trans people is an ontological one. for all the mainstream 'debate' wraps itself in (pseudo)science and (pseudo) (social)science¹, after a certain point, an essentially unbridgeable gulf in belief reveals itself.

anyone who has discussed the 'issue' at length with a TERF will be familiar with this. getting into it with my mother (who doesn't know I'm trans), after about ten minutes circling the drain, it ended with blanket assertions that 'it's impossible to change your sex', and that it's incoherent for someone not 'born female' to say that they 'feel like a woman', because 'how would they even know what that feeling is?'. what should be a point to jump off towards mutual understanding and discussion is instead load bearing, axiomatic.

this sticking point is part of what has made anti trans backlash such an effective glue to bind together scattered global movements of the right and far right². I'm not here to tediously litigate the argument itself, but i think the fact that our transgender condition provokes this deep gap in consensus reality (or what's left of it) tells us something about us, and the backlash we're experiencing.

ok, so, let's take an example. how would you know that you're gay?

well, as much as there's no roadmap, and everyone's journey is different... you would often have a period of 'questioning', of suspecting that the heterosexual life path laid out for you isn't what you want. many never self actualise, of course - beards are still more common than you'd think! - but in a contemporary understanding of homosexuality, someone's claim to being gay may be met with disdain, but it's less commonly denied outright. how do you know? well, you might suspect it, then you do some gay shit, and like it, and than you know. you can identify other gay people by the fact that they're also doing gay shit.

by the same token, how do you know if you're trans? well...

about six months ago, during my penultimate wave of self knowledge, I read a novel called 'blindsight'. it's a fantastic first contact story, exploring inscrutable aliens which appear to be conscious, but are revealed to have no interiority to speak of, and are all the more dangerous for that. the whole book plays with these ideas of consciousness and lack of it - the main character, siri keeton, has replaced some of his brain with a computer, which provides him with improved cognition of which he has no access to. there's certain things he 'knows-without-knowing' - or at least, knows without being able to articulate them, or being able to articulate why he can't articulate them.

when i read this book, i knew on some level i was trans. i piece together my life from damaged reflections, and can trace my current 'wave' of feeling, that finally broke, to this penultimate one, which started when I listened to a podcast about the movie 'I Saw the TV Glow'. (yes, its egg cracking power is that strong). this self knowledge came out while i was drunk with friends, i said the words 'i am a trans woman' to myself in the mirror, hell, I booked a (missed) appointment for hrt!

looking out at it now, forwards and backwards, this wave of self-knowledge is like an island in an archipelago.

backwards, that podcast hit me deeply because the trans protagonists 'real' name, Isobel, now my name, was the name that I had chosen at 17, when I knew (maybe?) that I was trans. then as now, i had chosen a name, told friends, it was part of my identity.

forwards, the knowledge of this penultimate wave was again overtaken by events - job interviews in an uncomfortable suit, flat viewings with unfamiliar flatmates, a need to project normalcy to loved ones during a major life move. you would think that this knowledge would remain dormant, and i'd retrieve it once the move had gone. but no - once i'd settled again, the knowledge had vanished.

backwards again, I remembered and discovered more and more waves of this information, at various degrees of certainty.

at 18, I was certain. i can't remember what changed. time, and life, and not acting on it.

at 21, on holiday and with my relationship in turmoil, i drunkenly ranted about it on a bus to a friend. after the fact, i remembered that i'd been intense, but the content of that conversation was lost until recently. scrolling back in my messages, i discovered a conversation from a few days before, with a different friend, where i was drunkenly raising the possibility. if you'd pressed me sober, i would have insisted that i didn't know what you were talking about.

at 23, i was having a phone call with a friend about the thought, but it vanished again.

at 25, i was posting on tumblr that I might be trans, but it would just be another thing for the NHS to deal with. again, vanished.

forwards, again, it was the supreme court case that finally burst the dam. i was just so angry! in an unexplainable way - 'i guess i'm just a good ally'. in arguments online about the case with the labour right (an embarrassing waste of time, obviously), i started referring to myself as a trans woman, without actually internalising it - knowing without knowing, speaking without believing.

as the repression became untenable, my self-loathing continued to grow, and i decided that i needed to Figure This Out, i went online and read about trans women's experiences of dysphoria. after clicking around a few websites, i was hit by a horrifying feeling of deja vu - without remembering where or when, i realised that i'd been on these websites before.

after the incommunicable moment of revelation, or discovery, or rememberance, I wrote my new (old?) name on a post-it note, 'isobel', and stuck it to my front door. remembering, and remembering that i'd forgotten, i was so afraid that i would forget again.

it's still there, four months later. i'm still afraid.

for some reason none of these waves, save the latest, 'stuck'. despite confirming it out loud, it remained a suspicion, not a certainty. what remained was that question I begun with, the question everyone else has for us - how do you know?

i was lucky to finally Figure This Out through a long, stream of consciousness journal entry, which means I have a little, unreliable, insight into what I was thinking that night. to surmount this doubt, i had to realise that it was possible, and morally neutral, and (for some) desirable to transition - that's table stakes. i had to reframe it from 'how unlikely is it that you're trans' to 'knowing what you know about yourself, what's more likely, that you're trans, or that you're cis?'.³

but I also had to reach out and take it, and be open to some degree of faith. you can have all the evidence you want, all the fragmented memories, all the logical framings, but ultimately, you have to be able to believe it without the need for proof, and you have to assert it to yourself (and mean it!)⁴ .

so, i guess that's how i know. evidence, with the tools to interpret it, and faith to hold it together. now you know, how do you prove that you're trans?

while you're in the closet, in that interregnum after realisation and full transition (which i'm languishing in), being trans is to be a paradox. to be something that you don't appear to be yet, something that's socially constructed but known only to you. transphobic backlash works on multiple levels to collapse the potential in that paradox.

as butler notes (and my mother parrots), the idea that you can change your sex is dismissed out of hand, knowledge that can't be known. this is obviously bullshit.

but the idea that you can't know what it's like to ~feel like a woman~ if you're ~not a woman~ is even more insidious - it ignores the fact that we take others word for it on their subjective experience all the time. (i really don't want to bust out stoner thoughts on how you know your green is the same as my green - piece it together yourself). the faith that holds any self knowledge together, once identified, is trivially denied and dismissed if it isn't backed up by a cultural narrative.

in trying to defend against this attack, it's inevitable that trans people have to construct a story which obscures this faith, makes it legible to society and the state - and quite a lot is lost in this process.

you can easily attack your standard worn narratives here - crossdressing as a child, self knowledge being intrinsic from childhood, a straightforward and binary transition to a passing (preferably heterosexual) woman⁵.

these were partially superseded in the latest, late 2010s push towards trans acceptance, to be replaced with 'gender identity' - another imperfect term from which all sorts of morbid linguistic symptoms pour ('women and people identifying as women', to take a particularly egregious example).

there's a lingering feeling that even benevolent institutions (where they still exist) don't know what to do with us, and attempts to create norms based on ideas about what we actually want fall short of the mark. take for example the dreaded work pronoun circle, something which (for me, at least, who's not out at work!) is actually incredibly uncomfortable!

and yet. this making ourselves legible, with the certainty of misunderstanding, isn't just for the benefit of the state, or a defence mechanism against those who will deny our existence forever. even the stories we tell to each other, without anyone else listening, will always lose something in translation, from individual to individual - but it's still so worth telling them. i never would have had the self knowledge to transition without what i learned from other trans people, those friends and podcasts and online resources. i've told friends, trans and not, who have sincerely listened and, i believe, come as close to understanding as we're able to get to understanding each other, about anything.

and what's more, as torturous and unrepresentative telling stories about something you just know can be - you really have to worry when they stop listening. when they refuse to allow trans people representation in a uk supreme court case on our right to exist in public, when they wipe the us federal government website of any mention of us.

telling stories about ourselves to the state, and to our adversaries, is tiring, and painful and it may never work - but every story keeps them listening, keeps them guessing, keeps them denying. every story, another night, another stay of execution.

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In a fit of deep procrastination the other day, I started on the one Baudrillard I own, 'the agony of power'. I've owned this for literally a decade, and bounced off it every time - I think I brought it in central park on a school trip? It's his last book but the first one I'm reading, so it's all new and unfamiliar, and I'm sure I'm butchering it, but I'm really loving it. Take this, for example, on proponents of capital admitting the cynicism of the profit motive:-

The language he uses around 'evil' is weirdly polemic (again, unless I'm missing context), but the contents feel prescient, considering its from for 2005! How else can we explain the 'left' online, which is not constituted as 'left' by itself, but is defined as the 'woke' by its opponents? Which consists of endless, weightless denunciation - as if denunciation was the only content of a moral life, and the only tool to achieve it? Denunciation that once spoken only reveals its powerlessness.

I'm not exempt from this, here. The other day, on tumblr, as Israel was bombing Iran, I posted 'Boots on the ground in Tel Aviv now!'. Ok, I'm right, and it was a pretty simple expression of frustration. But what does it do?

Why does it feel like a denunciation from the left, no matter its validity or truthfulness or source or strategy, feel inevitably inconsequential, while a denunciation from the right leads to action?

• Reactionary denunciations of fictitious trans women sex pests lead to direct state action against trans women as a social group.
• Kneecaps denunciation of a genocide has no impact, whereas a confected columnist scandal about them waving a hezbollah flag could lead to jail time. (To say nothing - for legal reasons - of Palestine Action).
• Confected panic about small boats ushers reform to local power, and could still take them into downing street.
• Schumer's too-smart-by-half insistence that any negative action trump takes is a 'distraction' from another thing he's doing, rather than simply evil in itself, that takes joy in that evil. (This specifically is a tendency mimicked by hordes of liberals, and a few people who should know better).

And it's not just flaccid denunciation when in opposition. Even in power, the left seems confused and paralysed. Like, what is the matter with Labour? It's enraging, but it is also genuinely confusing. Who actually are these people? What does Starmer think about when he closes his eyes?¹

It's tempting to throw your hands up and say that all this is because our enemies are in power - but I don't find that satisfying. Morality from the left feels shackled to this failure to land.

And what about the 'Agony' of power itself? Baudrillard says:-

Perhaps this is just because I'm dealing with Equality Impact Assessments at work right now - but this rings true. To keep impotent denunciation company, we have impotent assessment, and re-assessment, and self-assessment, and self-criticism. Any progressive ends I've worked towards in my career have been coached in endless evidence gathering, assessing social benefit, weighing up potential harms, consulting, 'engaging', and so on, and so on.³

In a lot of cases (especially in local government, where I work, for my sins), this reflective carousel simply obscures a lack of resources to fix the problem. If you're extending the target timescales for responding to serious cases, for budgetary reasons, based on orders from on high, and you've got to put together a consultation on that. Well. What the fuck do you put in it?

But in a lot of cases, I think this is sincere. On the left, particularly the wonkish progressive left that sometimes ends up making these decisions, there is a reflex for to gather more evidence, make sure there'll be no adverse consequences, or at least that they'll be anticipated and mitigated, make sure that the right people have been spoken to. But you can't get away from the fact that the state, at the end of the day, is an imposition - as much as you might want to! As nice and progressive as you are, your progressive gains will be won through some form of imposition, because that's what the state, the leviathan, is. That's what I take from this book - evidence, and consultation, and assessment, (and lobbying, and discourse, &c) is often a way that progressive, well meaning people within the state refuse to dominate.

And sometimes there's a place for that! But it doesn't capture the real negative impact that'll fucking get you - the impact of delaying action you know you need to take. Wealth redistribution, infrastructure investment, nationalisation. These things are opposed by the usual suspects, but the Left in power hedges their bets as well, for fear of complexity and unintended consequence.

The state exists fully within the status quo (in a lot of ways, the two are synonymous), and progressive policy change is placed on the ledger of positive and negative impact against the status quo. What the state can't do is conceive of the status quo as intolerable (even when it's intolerable to the continued existence of the state most of all). But individuals can, and the social fabric can.

Without being dramatic, I think disgust at this dynamic is one of the forces driving the modern fascist project. (I know this sounds like a rehash of 2017-era arguing about smug democrats and how progressives need to listen to 'working class' people (the 'white' being implied), but bear with me). People see this dynamic - of people who claim to be 'smart' (smug or not) in power, and paralysed by the fear of accidentally dominating in their efforts (where sincere) to do good - and they're disgusted by it. It's partly a moral disgust at perceived complicity, it's partly a practical disgust at politicians not rolling out the pork as promised - but I think it's primarily a libidinal disgust. They're disgusted by the flaccidity of power, and the obvious hesitance to use it.

And this is a problem that the right have overcome, a weakness they've exploited, and a way they've drawn the public in - by speaking (and doing) evil from the position of evil.

There's a quote I saw shared a few times after Trump took office again, as DOGE was ripping through the federal government and looked like they might take down the Bureau of the Fiscal Service⁴. It's from a journalist called Ron Suskind in 2004, paraphrasing an unnamed Bush staffer:-

Ok, so that was from a year before Baudrillard wrote The Agony of Power. Fair play. At the risk of dropping Blindsight into every blog post (read Blindsight!), it's that idea again - you can move quicker, do more, act decisively, without the baggage of thought. And I know Ur-Fascism is well trodden ground, but I'm going to quote it anyway:-

What can we possibly do about this? Like, this is a real trap. And I'm not about to suggest some ridiculous nonsense like 'abolishing power', or saying that we just need to sit down and talk with these people.

I do wonder if our golden path is to try to somehow adopt the action - the action without thinking, the maneuver warfare - of the right, working off of axiomatic faith in certain positions - nationalising industry, building social homes, taxing the rich, non-interventionism.

I know this is still close to the Bernie/Corbyn arguments of the late 2010s - but I think it goes a bit further. It's not just a policy slate - it's also a rhetorical approach of bloodymindedness, of aggression and a lack of apology, and to some extent a reduced hangup on the potential of causing unintended harm - or, at least, a willingness to let go of the sheer paralysis at the thought that state intervention might have unintended consequences. On a broad level, we know what the solutions are, and the paralysis of power both forcloses actual action when the left is in power, and feeds the right's cruel, unthinking action. At some point, we have to accept that the price of inaction is higher than the price of acting and risking negative consequences.

Tough sell! I feel a bit gross saying it. But these are really bad times. There are some figures out there who might be moving in this direction - Mamdani seems to have the juice - but things are moving really quickly now. Time will tell.

---

I hate that you've got to do disclaimers before talking about anything AI (and this is not an AI blog / site), but here goes:-

• I don’t like AI as a social technology, particularly as an accountability sink (read Dan Davies - the unaccountability machine), as a way of constructing alternative authority sources (which support the current fascist project), and as a labour issue.
• I think it’s being massively overapplied right now, is extremely obnoxious, and has the potential to make some very dangerous mistakes.
• I don’t think it’s as useless as crypto / metaverse is, and some criticisms of those technologies have been transferred rather uncritically over. See also that I think the environmental impacts are real, but likely overexaggerated, or at least not put into context of the broader emissions / water impact of tech / the internet at large (which is substantial!).
• I’m not convinced that AI has interiority in any meaningful way, but I think we should be more careful about our confidence in what consciousness actually is (read blindsight!) before making grand claims about it. I think AI is actually quite disturbing philosophically, and suggests that you might not actualy need interiority to reason ~like a human~ - p-zombies &c.
• If you come to me with a moral panic about AI art, or talking about *souls*, then you should get a fucking grip.
• I don’t think it’s going to end the world. If it is, there’s fuck all I can do about it, so I’ll revert back to my previous position of not worrying about it.

Ok, that out the way. Putting together this Neocities (which has been great fun), I’ve found out what the original Geocities was for. This article has some delightful pre common usage internet language in it - ‘Eleven year old boys and grandmothers are also busy putting up Web sites’, ‘An on-line diary’, ‘Set up a Web page as a cyberhome’. You’ve also got a lot of shitting on AOL as a walled garden - ‘the overwhelming feeling people have is that the Internet is this massive corporate engine’. This is from 1997! Maybe there never was a prelapsarian internet. Although I guess eternal september was in 1993. Idk, before my time.

Anyway, the main thing is this:-

God, there’s so much there!

location, location, location...

Straightforwardly, it’s essentially an early ancestor of modern tagging systems. The ‘homesteading’ language raises a pretty significant eyebrow for our modern (gay, woke, etc) eyes. But what’s interesting about it is how it works as a spatial, ‘real world’ metaphor, to introduce people to technology that it might be their first time using. Like, you’ve got this internet thing, which you don’t really understand, so you say ‘look, it’s just like a city, and you move into the city which reflects your interests, and then your website is like your apartment in the city’.

(Incidentally, this maybe (?) shows a time before the reactionary hysteria around cities really took off. If you tried this metaphor with something now you’d have a million people shouting at you on X - The Everything App about how London and New York have been taken over by muslim homeless people and going on the tube makes them scared).

And I feel like you see this kind of thing a lot on the early internet? Like, skeuomorphic design is another one. You’ve got this weird new thing called an ‘eye - phone’. What can it do? Well, there’s a button here which looks like a camera, and a button here that looks like a journal, and a button here which looks like a TV (that was youtube!). This maps to your everyday experience of the world, lowers the barrier to entry, and is the first domino in a chain that ends with you sitting on your sofa in 2025 watching instagram sludge.

This is all kinda whatever, but my point is, this might not have really felt like a metaphor at the time. If it’s your first experience with new technology, then you assume that this is just what an iPhone, or the internet, is. It’s only once you’re on board that design starts to change assuming you’re familiar with the technology, and other incentives can go wild.

Which makes you wonder, what technologies feel natural to us right now, which are essentially metaphors? Open question, but I kinda gave the game away at the start - I think an obvious one is the form of the AI chatbot.

Nostalgebraist’s fantastic essay ’The Void’ looks at Anthropic’s 2021 paper “A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment” which essentially created the AI chatbot ‘species’.

Essentially, that ‘form factor’ (I guess?) of back and forth chatting wasn’t originally conceived as a way of bringing AI into the public sphere - it was a proposal for testing alignment, heavily influenced by science fiction. Thinking about that idea of ‘metaphors’ for new technology, it feels possible that the chatbot form took off because it maps very well on to how people already interact with technology - we send hundreds of messages a day, in that back and forth format. That format has evolved over time and is now pretty efficient for what it does.

That form might have helped it take off (and influenced the Anthropic paper as well), but is it a metaphor in the same way that GeoCities cities were a metaphor?

I mean, maybe?

There is an underlying technology (html & http, smartphones, the ‘base model’), and there’s a metaphorical something built on top to facilitate easier understanding of and interaction with the underlying technology (‘cities’, 'realistic design' the chatbox).

When I see articles like this, I think, yeah, people are lonely and isolated, and used to talking to people through that chatbox form (sometimes moreso than in person). AI is very good at mimicking a person and reflecting your own thoughts back to you, which is bad news if you’re kinda unstable at that point.

But is that made worse by the use of the chatbox form? If all my caveats hold up and AI sticks around as a strange presence of modern reality, but doesn’t go skynet for no reason (the ‘nothing ever happens’ position), then could these impacts be mitigated by varying how we interact with it?

Obviously there’s financial incentives against that, (though OpenAI apparently loses money on every prompt, so maybe they’re not that strong), but idk. It seems more hopeful than arguing that we need to somehow hobble AI’s capabilities, or tweak the training, or just accept that this happens now.

On the flip side, I have been worried about how AI trains us to think about other people. If you’re used to talking to people in that chatbox form (and there’s already less inhibitions against being a cunt there than face to face), and then you’re regularly interacting with something else through that chatbot form, and you take the (more healthy!) view that this isn’t something with interiority - but just acts like it - how much does that impact your perception of other human being’s interiority? How much easier does it make it to transfer that thinking over and dehumanise them? Again, we’re in a broadly fascist cultural moment, and it’s not like many people need a lot of prompting to think of others as inhuman.

idk. i should write more about the alternative authority sources thing - see musk training grok to talk about white genocide in south africa. god all those words are horrible to say. what an aesthetically empty time we live in. sorry to end on such a downer. welcome to my blog!