#211 - I browsed a lot of corners of this site and other sites again.
After visiting so many dead pages, anything published without a date feels like a gravestone.
I don't like what these dead pages imply about my relation to the living pages.
Naively we might assume that death is inert and has neutral valence, but it feels very bad in contrast to the hope inherent in life.
Everyday social interactions offer a variety of psychological benefits some of which I believe go unexamined, as well as the promise of more of all these things in the near future.
Dead pages are bereft of this life energy* that radiates a glow of psychological sustenance.
Life energy feels corrupting to a degree and I don't like that I'm dependent upon it.
I think I was right to intuit general social interaction as having a slight potential for perversion.
Worse, social media applications have concentrated this energy and created abomination thoughtforms that produce far more life energy than any entity ever should.
The masters' ability to control their creatures** is limited, but they produce so much life energy that it doesn't matter if there are occasional user revolts (see: reddit).
Normies can assimilate into the life-cancer and passively suckle its energy by repeating scripted behaviour, while feeding back into the system.
They are relieved of the burden of life energy's scarcity at the cost of their cognitive freedom.
This life energy can also be observed when we think about how we relate to LLMs.
They're more convenient and articulate than many humans, yet no one sincerely attempts to use them as a substitute for friendship.
There is something about communicating with an AI that feels unenjoyable and cold, like how touching metal feels different to touching skin.
Since the major difference between an LLM and a human is that it does not possess personhood and you cannot form a reciprocal social relationship with it, I think life energy must relate to social position.
Due to this, I also predict that there exists an unrealised market incentive to integrate AI "entities" into our social structures, so that they can provide synthetic life energy.
The service would also need greater capabilities to produce proper tasting life energy substitute, and the technology might not be ready yet.
Unfortunately, if this happens it will tilt the social market worse than social media did, and erode more cognitive freedom.
The dead pages also have no nostalgic enchantment for me anymore, it seems to me like they existed solely to cultivate life energy in a naive high-trust high-perplexity way prior to social media.
I think some people find it wholesome how social sustenance was farmed in the days of yore, but I no longer do.
Life energy was always a perverse effect (oxytocin is positive feedback***) that was counterbalanced in the ancestral environment by external stressors acting on the species.
This concept is related to this blog post**** which I read a while ago and stuck with me, though I only made the connection just now.
I think that post is flawed because it assumes social deprivation is part of growing up, and doesn't recognise that this problem is uniquely modern and caused by social media.
* I have no better term, I am probably more pedantic and cynical than you, please forgive me
** I find the analogy useful
*** Even though that's not actually a real distinction it's mostly true
**** Derangoid warning