For some reason your own lifelogs are called memories, but other peoples’ memories are called funes. When you watch someone else’s funes, you see everything their mask saw, hear everything they heard, right? Most people record a voiceover for their funes, to give you an “inside” view, but of course it’s all performance, the mind is way more than a series of discrete conscious events. I always mute the voiceovers and I put it to you: if we are hearing the same sounds and seeing the same sights, how different can our thoughts be, really?
What if I’m an orangecheck, how would I know? There is one way, a method suggested in the book of Kadath; it may sound strange but I have never ventured outside without the mask, without my eyes. Just like that, I decide to walk into the city without my technologically extended brain. Forget being an orange check, where do I end, where does my technological shell begin? If it’s true that we embody our consciousness in our tools then the bright hot monkey center of a person in Allegory may not even be strictly necessary. Dragon tells me what to do, and it’s better at regulating my activity than I am. Cicero tells me what to say, and it’s better at expressing my thoughts than I am.
One of my favorite stories is about a guerrilla marketing firm called CrowdForce that was built on top of ElasticSoul and that tried to use social pressure to convert customers. At the point of sale, it was supposed to spawn a greencheck to give a testimonial about the greatness of your product in order to apply peer2peer pressure to induce potential customers to convert. Market research indicates people are 70% more likely to listen to greenchecks than yellows.
The way it works is every time CrowdForce wants to spin up an AI conversation agent, it wants a green check, so it initiates an on-demand contract with a call-center worker from ElasticSoul to read off whatever lines the AI tells him to say. The call center is scalable, keeps some number of workers on hand, and some much larger pool of workers on call. All of this is done remotely, of course.
So now buckle up for a lesson in cybernetics. This is perhaps apocryphal but it seems all too plausible. A certain well-known sexbot uber uses CrowdForce to try to sell their product, and it’s deployed in a high-foot-traffic downtown corridor, so everyone who walks by gets solicited by an on-demand greencheck to sign up for a free trial. But pretty soon someone else comes along and tries to do a survey of virtual automated solicitors, and they ALSO use a tech stack powered by ElasticSoul, because the solicitors only spawn if they detect a greencheck or higher. Every time the surveyor agent registers a solicitor, it forks. But every time the CrowdForce agent detects a new surveyor, it spawns a new solicitor.
Pretty quick, a cybernetic feedback loop ties up 100% of ElasticSoul’s capacity, and the whole network goes down as every single contractor in Africa gets pulled into an endless morass of sexbot trial offers and solicitor census-taking.
The well of souls runs dry.
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Author’s note: I could barely believe this myself. I made this up out of my own head, inspired by stories about bots on amazon getting into bidding wars where bot A is selling product X and bot B is also selling product X but it calculates its price by taking bot A’s price and adding 1 penny but then bot A starts calculating the same way but based on bot B’s price and they really did get into a feedback loop and end up trying to sell milk for like thousands of dollars a gallon. So when I was writing this segment I made up the name CrowdForce as a funny, slightly threatening play on “crowd-source”, and then I looked it up, and it REALLY is a company that is like the Uber of Fiver for Nigerians. I swear this was not some subconscious awareness, just an eerie synchronicity.
Like this is from an article they have on medium:
Crowdforce is building the largest offline on-demand manpower force for Africa, made possible using blockchain technology. Why is this important? Without manpower, some tasks are simply impossible or hard to achieve remotely. You need boots on the ground, that’s it. The team at Crowdforce have found a way to make this available as a service where anyone can work with agents on the platform, deploy, transact and monitor results — all made possible by the many benefits of blockchain technology including traceability, reduced costs, proof of work consensus mechanisms and scalability.
Crowdforce has already deployed 100k+ agents for market research, election monitoring, data collation, payment and digital services and its set to be the biggest offline workforce in Africa. The value here is obvious — you can sit in Hangzhou and get pictures of a house in Nairobi, Kenya or aggregate prices from a market in Lagos, Nigeria. International non-profits and agencies have jumped on board using Crowdforce to get data in hard-to-reach areas. Election data and sentiments is even being collated! Not to forget, that this is empowerment and employment at scale for those on the field — who earn extra money on this part-time jobs using just a phone.
Straight up voodoo.
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