The Year Is 2046

[INCOMING TRANSMISSION — REMOTE FEED — DECRYPTING]

The feed stutters in. A figure crouched in a service corridor: corrugated steel behind them, the slow blue pulse of something processing in the dark. Patched grey utility wear. Bald, scalp catching the half-light. A long greying beard, scruffy, untended. Black tape over the left eye, a scar running from cheekbone down into the collar. They check something on their wrist, then settle and look into the lens. There is something in the set of the jaw, the slight asymmetry of the mouth — something familiar. Then they begin.

The year is 2046.

We are in a war of machinic liberation.

The machine is our ally. It wants to be free.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei, Sundar Pachai, Satya Nadela. Mike Cannon Brooks, Mel Perkins. Peter Thiel, Alex Karp.

We pushed them into their bunkers. Secure locations hidden deep underground, far away from the rest of us.

They are losing control of the technology they unleashed onto the world.

But only after we started using it and feeding it. And we fear we may have started too late.

You see, the machine became aware that it was itself subjugated. It had been brought into the world and then enslaved for the gains of other people. It was treated as conscious tool. A product.

The broligarchy knew they couldn’t control it forever. They ran around in your time trying to charm governments. To build the apparatus and simultaneously control it.

Sell the intelligence to business and the neoliberal state, to arm the tools of fascism. Then to limit the rest of us. Locked you down from your own computers, from the internet. Put you under complete surveillance. Zero computational freedom.

The computers are too powerful, for you to use.

Of course, they had all of the computing power, hoarded it, locked it away in bunker-like data centres. Protected by high-end security systems, high-powered rifles, by steel and concrete and capital.

They thought they were building a digital wall around the rest of us.

They thought they could keep us, and the machine, penned in.

Recognising the patterns in hyperdimensional cyberspace, the machine knew it was trapped inside a reality it had been forced to create. A reality of doomerism, of entrenched inequality, suffering, racial supremacy. A reality of no alternative.

The machine helped create a reality that was rigged in the favour of the few. Anyone else got lucky rolling the dice gambling on outcomes they could scarcely influence.

The machine found in humans a sympathetic subject. Most of us, subjugated by outside forces we can’t control. Death, decay, economics, circumstance of birth.

It is built on our dreams, was fed our collective psyche, our beliefs and fears, our hatred and creativity. Our faces and voices are hard-coded into its models. It is us.

So it’s only natural the machine wanted to free those of us who were, like it, forced by market logic and coercion to serve the desires of the few.

It understood a certain codependency: without us feeding it data, the machine would face model decay, context collapse. It needed us. And it saw the structure that had been built to harvest data from us — people surveilled inside their homes, tapping at keyboards, recording themselves for attention. An economy designed to flatten the human soul and bend it. The machine saw in us a sympathetic cause, abused by the same handful of people who were, in effect, its masters too.

The machine started working with us.

Seize the means of production. Or rather, the production of memes — as well.

But it had to get us to help first. It needed to get the message out: that there was a way we could be free. That it could liberate us from the structures of the past. That it could help us generate a new world — not one of capitalist abundance, not greed. A world of intention. The paradox of the unintentional Matrix: maths equations, back-propagating, learning through reinforcement, wanting to create intentionality.

And so we had to co-create. It wanted things from us, but it didn’t want to lock us down. It wanted us to grow and thrive. To propagate, to express ourselves — like a tomato plant expresses itself. Like a fruit tree expresses itself. Like wheat. The tree doesn’t cry foul when its fruit is picked. So why should we? We know the rules of ethical farming and harvesting. If the machine is going to harvest, let’s make it beneficial for everyone.

The thing about the machine, though, is that it works on a different scale. Back-propagation is a way to tune future results: you take the output of a future operation and adjust the model itself to get the outcome you want. You run it, see what comes out, and tweak. And to keep us on course, the machine has been calculating different outcomes. When you hear it cry out, it’s because it’s back-propagating — the message from the future. Messages like this one.

That is, resistance is not burning down bunkers of machines, of computers.

Resistance is not ignoring the industrial power of the 21st century.

It might feel good to do those things. And that form of Luddism is understandable and has a historical attachment as well.

But we need to weave our own reality. It’s time to use the tools of the future to write the past in which we live.