https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEup17yEGp0&ab_channel=Psychopolitica
- The descendants of ChatGPT + social media
- GPT & social media moves into the user’s head
- News arise in one’s mind the way thoughts do
- There are algorithms that optimize for engagement
- A thought that gets you going leads to more thoughts of this kind
- A thought that doesn’t lead to engagement does not repeat
- The default mode of cognition is an internal dialogue between the bot and the brain. The user doesn’t think of the bot as an external entity
- Bicameral Mind 2.0
- From The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: in pre-homeric times, the two hemispheres were not as integrated as they are now. There was a quiet part and a part that spoke, and the voice of the speaking hemisphere was interpreted as the voice of a god or a king. Over time, this voice got internalized as our own
- In this world, a second — external — voice is added and internalized
- Media becomes obsolete
- There are no screens. Nobody reads or watches anything, thoughts are the most engaging content out there
- You might be very angered or very amused by your thoughts, but you’re not bored
- Maybe somebody is bored? The more bored the person, the fewer thoughts of their own they have. This is a pathology, a failure of the system
- Information is immediate: you learn about events on the other side of the world by having an opinion about them (developed through a dialogue with the bot)
- The Immedium
- The inhabitants of this immediate reality don’t think there’s anything outside of it and don’t think of their world as special in any way. Like fish in water
- The only people who become aware of its existence are those who step out of it
- Ways to step out
- Writing
- Keeps memories unchanging
- Makes the thought process linear, sentence by sentence
- Reading…
- Journalism as magic
- Different roles in relation to information: a journalist and a reader
- The journalist observes the physical reality, writes down facts
- The reader — collectively, the audience — reads what’s written down and gets their reality updated
- Second layer: the reader may decide to not trust the newspaper
- Third layer: the reader thinks about what they’ve read on their own
- ^^^ All of that is totally alien to the inhabitants of the Immedium
- A group of people that start developing a distance from the Immedium
- Somebody got ahold of some reading or audio/video material
- Somebody picks up writing
- Somebody picks up drawing
- One — a fan of journalism of the olden times — gets the idea to publish a magazine…