Paul

"Oh, you're from Virginia? We love beating you at basketball." - Small talk at wedding reception in KC last night. #humansfailingturingtest

As the zen saying goes, "expectation is the enemy of experience," but it's also a catalyst of intraperience. This usually takes the form of anxiety and fear, gifts from evolution. Will we ever find another species that builds real shelters against imaginary, even mythical predators?

Meanwhile, the drive to convert one's intraperience into another's experience inspires the creation of art, literature...also a lot of less noble activity. "I live with this thing in my head and I want to put it into yours" can take countless forms.

My relationship with mustard has been more intraperiential than experiential; likewise many foods I avoided for years based on bad impressions but now savor. This is also how racism usually works, and transphobia, etc.: we pre-judge and filter experience based mostly on intraperience.

(2) There was a year when we were warned against what Facebook would do and become, including a warning that it could facilitate a global rise of fascism, in a bestselling book. If a better path forward is possible, returning to that warning might be the best way to conceive the now inconceivable.

(1) Part of the power of reading 2010's "You Are Not A Gadget" in 2026 is BECAUSE it's so dated - it's very hard for 2026 thinkers to imagine the world before Facebook became profitable, so Lanier's (prophetic, insightful) 2010 ruminations can show us otherwise inaccessible perspectives.

Or possibly "intrasperience."

AI's currently respond to cues and stimuli. Our brains, though, are constantly also thinking about what DIDN'T happen, and what MIGHT, creating vast inner realms of...I guess the opposite of "experience" should be called "inperience." #inperience

Lanier, like Lessing, suggests that a key duty of public education is to teach students how to balance their individuality against herd mentality. The question is, how possible is this in schools that mostly reward compliance, acquiescence and conformity.

Oops, correction, not Egyptian but Chinese Taoist.

tao-chien-substance-shadow-and-spirit.pdf share.google/T7DbR3lpR90u...

(15) What language and culture do to all of us whenever we choose a binary-gendered public restroom is what bad data tech does all the time, reducing the glorious messy complex subtle ambiguous fluid experience of being human to a brutally (often needlessly) oversimplified choice. And then another..

(14) #JaronLanier wants to remind us that a "Friend" isn't just "someone whose algorithmic profile resembles mine." A FRIEND is an EXPERIENCE, not a collection of data fragments chopped into standardized pulp to, as #PatCadigan would say, "Change for The Machines."

(13) Which of course reminds me of #PatCadigan 's brilliant "Synners" in which direct neural interface entertainment is advertised as "YOU BE THE *!!!" Which her snarky characters read as "You be the Ass To Risk."

(11) And yet, eerily like the prisoners in Plato's Cave, we accept the 24-7 shadow puppet show as reality, INCLUDING OURSELVES, because (a) it's so damn convenient and (b) it (like Plato's Cosmogony) is so good at confirming our rightful place at the center of the universe.

(10) The ancient Egyptian trichotomy of "Substance, Shadow and Spirit" seems very apt - much data tech (and social media) reflects (in the Black Mirror!) a version of ourselves as flat and distorted as a shadow.

(9) #JaronLanier famously invented VR because "Information is only alienated experience," and data only exists meaningfully when human beings interact with, contextualize, interpret, evaluate and employ it.

(8) Overall, Lanier would say much modern data tech does for personhood what MIDI did to music: creating a language of convenience (for machines) that filters, oversimplifies and distorts everything it touches...and perniciously changes how we think of the subject matter. Which is US.

(7) At the time I realized the unappreciated missing aspect of Lennon's contribution was his ability to say, "It's not bad, but it's not good enough to release as a Beatles track." What we don't say out loud defines us as much as what we do, which is why Tourette's is considered a disability.

(6) I'm reminded of the Beatles' nineties work exhuming Lennon's unfinished pieces and adding the other members...resulting in something definitely less than the sum of its parts.

(5) Social media of course flips this inside-out; we see ourselves as mere public performances, performed within limitations set by pretty unimaginative multiple-choice software.

(4) In fact one of the most defining aspects of personhood is a head full of thoughts that we choose NOT to express, or haven't yet found a satisfactory way to express.

(2.5) And if you're basing your Singer "empathy circle" (you'd eat a plant, fish or cow because they don't seem as smart as dogs, chimps and your friends) on a kinda Turing test, you're saying it's fine to enslave or eat stupid people, but not clever animals or software.

(3) Lanier effectively warns against evaluating AI based on Turing when it's AI essentially designed only to pass a Turing test and appear worthy of empathy and respect, the now notorious "sycophantic AI" problem that billionaires don't seem to see as any worse than the human sycophants they enjoy.

(2) One major flaw with the Turing Test would be the huge numbers of people I've met who would fail it - they may be quite intelligent, just not very good at/focused on communicating.

(1) Chilling FFT from Lanier: remember that Turing devised his Test (based on a Victorian parlor game designed to test for gender) while being tortured by the legal authorities with the huge doses of estrogen to "cure his homosexuality" that instead drove him to suicide.

...while saying things like "If they ever do manage to make money doing this, it will be a monumental moral and cultural disaster."

A weekend getaway means time to try again to read Jaron Lanier's 2010 "You Are Not A Gadget." Bold, brilliant and thought-provoking, not to mention prescient. He's watching Facebook fail to make money while degrading and distorting concepts of personhood and friendship...

"The working classes have always been the caring classes — not just because they do almost all of the caring labor, but also because, perhaps partly as a result, they actually are more empathetic than the rich. Psychological studies show this, by the way. The richer you are, the less competent you are at even understanding other people’s feelings. So trying to reimagine work — not as a value or end in itself, but as the material extension of caring — is a good start." . - David Graeber

Thank you, local small town Facebook, for beginning my day with a reminder that I shall live the rest of my life someplace where my family and I can never feel safe or comfortable.

I could share my thoughts on the new war, but they don't matter. My senator's thoughts on the new war don't even matter to those in power. And no wise or kind words can or should offer solace to those not in power. Oh, brave new world; I can tell the whole internet anything without it mattering.