Humanity no longer exists.
For all of history, humans have used tools, but never before have tools used humans. The use of tools, which we use to shape our environment, and our ability for complex socialization leading to creation of culture are the two things which most people would argue define us above all else, they are the very things which make us human, and which make humanity different from everything else. Even as individuals, what creates each of us, what fundamentally makes us up as people, within our own mind and our experience of the entire world around us is our environment and our socialization. -But what happens when our entire environment is industrial? What happens if our socialization, if every aspect of culture and connection, is within the influence of an algorithm? What would happen if humanity was mediated by something which we created, a tool, an environment, and its purpose was to mechanize our complex systems of socialization? Beyond even what is obviously a machine, there exist metaphysical machines within the collective consciousness, a mechanism of social constructs, cultural machines, political machines, economic machines, and those which have no name.
Only the simulacra of humanity remains.
We live in a post-human age.
The function of neurons is to make connections with other neurons. However, the vast majority of neurons exist in other people, physiologically separated, and so the consciousness makes connections in other ways, things like culture, or the collective consciousness/collective unconsciousness. The brain naturally restructures to fit our environment and socialization, and algorithms are designed to specifically exploit that. Your existence is physiologically connected to things which are fake, those things are your only connection to what the world should be. Your mind is naturally rewiring itself to fit your environment and socialization. But your environment is mediated by industrialization and your socialization too.
"Humanity" is something that only emerges in the complex connections between people. Humanity is a matter of self awareness, socialization, and dynamic interaction with environment. Isolated, detached, controlled, a person is not human.
The concerning implication never realized by the original theory of postmodernism is that -more than just the ideas or things in culture becoming simulacra (the implication that nothing in our world is real anymore but a hyperreal mockery)- the inevitable consequence is people themselves as products of postmodern and post-industrial society become a simulacra of an idea of humanity, rather than being human.
The Role of Modern History; Internet as Reality
preface; The role of the industrial age in general is already extensively written about, but the internet is key, and while even the internet was speculated about at first, it's so overwhelmingly present in life and the change happened so quickly and thoroughly that it's hard to write about it's effects, because it's hard to remember life free of it, it's rare to even remember to try remembering. The new algorithmic frontier is a blind spot. The inescapable problems of the internet are the culmination of all of humanity's existence. To start somewhere, we start in a nebulous area around 2015 and 2016.
The political climate of 2015 in particular marks a shift in culture to completely avoid earnestness and to satire and parody everything, to the effect of produce a simulacra of the political world as it previously existed, and to always communicate with increasing layers of irony and to move away from existing authentically in any capacity, so that by not taking anything seriously or existing as if one’s personality is real, they no longer have any vulnerability to criticism or arguments or bullying from culture at large. This specific moment in politics is distinctly American, but it marks a critical point in a larger trend, it is the historical incidence of an inevitable course which internet culture was to take shortly after it became corporatized and redesigned for the mainstream as corporations sought to make it the new basis for everything whic hcould possibly be digitized. Aside from the globally invasive nature of American media, Silicon Valley in particular had/has an effective reign over the culture of technology and it sets precedents for internet design even where internet culture may on a surface level be different. This political moment but especially its consequences are reinforced in the future of our society by the fact that post-2015 the internet is unavoidable in everyday life, this is especially true now, after the more than year long quarantine caused by the 2020 pandemic. On the internet all socialization is exposed to the entirety of culture and everyone in the public at large, nonstop with total uncertainty of who will see what one writes, it is panopticonic in nature, meaning that because of its all encompassing surveillance it depersonalizes people by instilling self-monitoring through social engineering. Unlimited vulnerability means no human expression. It is almost impossible to socialize or meet new people by only communicating directly and avoiding all broader culture, so the desire to never be who you actually are is even greater, to a point where people adopt so many layers of irony from cultural exposure that they may not even be able to go back to being a real person in the real world again.
The Breakdown of Speech, and The Death of Humanity
It's far past possible for an AI to pass the Turing test now (written early 2023), less because of the advancement in AI, but more because people are increasingly talking like machines. I don't mean that in the sense that people are incapable of feeling emotions, but that emotions are being algorithmically trained. For example, how often do you talk to someone (in-person) and realize they sound like they're talking on twitter? or how often do they sound like they're trying to replicate the prose of a youtube video essay? How often is it tiktok? or any other blend of social media? It's not just the way they talk, the way they think is affected. People are thinking of the world in terms of posts, because living in post-industrial culture as the hegemonic context for all of modern existence, it’s the only thing many people have the capacity to do. As they also do with only possessing the capacity for thinking of the world in terms of “content”, the world exists not in it’s own terms but in the terms of media we “consume”, and so we *think* in terms of the constructed personas of characters, celebrities, politicians, journalists, job interviewers, and investors who operate the bare utility of persona needed for the production and consumerism of post-industrial culture.
More importantly, how often does someone actually sound like they're not being influenced at all, but are simply talking like they're human?
People naturally have a subconscious drive to strengthen neural pathways that give the most social feedback when you're socializing with someone. In the internet age socialization becomes much more open ended by default, as your brain seeks social feedback, you subconsciously find a link between algorithmic patterns of speech (that the internet rewards with attention) and getting that social feedback. When the internet becomes inserted into every single part of life, all socialization is mediated by something mechanical. Consequences, not Only of the Internet but of a Post-Industrial Society
As for the specifics of what damage has been caused, by feeling the need to have a personality which is hyper agreeable down to its foundation, you give up having anything interesting to say, and make up with it using edginess. If you don't have any personality or identity hidden then you've made your entire personality surface level, in an attempt to avoid conflict. Edginess and layers of irony not only make up for your lack of interesting personality, but they also shield you from any remaining vulnerability. By not having any inner personality you have absolutely no intimate information or conversation to offer. You have nothing to share as you grow close to someone. Perhaps then by definition- you are not close to anyone- you have nothing to make you close because you are nothing but your surface level, you do not possess within you a human personality, only an outward persona ready to reflexively respond to situations.
We also view profound and existential experience as a commodity to such an extent that it resembles fiction, or is completely limited to fiction where it is expressed. We finish a profound book, or a profound movie, or experience profound art in any form, and then we "return to the real world". This absolutely suffocates the human experience and society as whole, and completely kills any real culture. When we think of "returning to the real world" we intentionally imagine the exact opposite of what is profound and existential, we imagine a desultory and commodified modern world as being the "real" world, as even more real than thousands of years of human history and art. And the effect of this has reshaped our psyche so much that even in the presence of true greatness, in the face of something truly profound and existential, we can only bring it down to the level of fiction, of imitation and art, rather than bring our sense of art up, to match reality and allow great art to heighten our experience of the real world.
Algorithms have grown to have so much influence on culture and the way we think as individuals that algorithms have trained themselves to define human behavior by the standards of how predictably it matches algorithmic input.
People become difficult to distinguish from machines first and foremost because, in an environment run by machines -whether or not they consciously know it- people want to be indistinguishable. To fit exactly the input the machine is looking for. When you look at "influencers" this is obvious. What machines do first in the process of becoming indistinguishable is not change themselves to become human-like, but in advance of adapting to people, influence people to become more like machines. Specifically starting by training itself with the people who first become subjects of it, who are most adaptable and willing to use machines. The way a machine first starts to be made "for people" is by being tested by the people with the most inclination to be like the machine, from there everyone is influenced by the machine bias to also become more like the machine. The machine cannot consciously tell the difference either, all it can see is the feedback on how similar it can be to human behavior according to its own actions. It is only programmed to understand the results of changing itself, it does not imagine that when it changes it's function to become more indistinguishable from people, the increase in similarity between it and its user base is more because it is changing the people and not the other way around, it only knows that whatever it is doing seems to be working. When a society-changing machine is itself changed to adapt to people to be more human, there is no control group of people not *themselves* already changed by the machine.
Why wait until the changes are no longer just social or mental? The end of humanity as a historical event has already passed, we only await greater and greater signs confirming it, only the inevitable physical frontier is left. Now, as in our future, this world's logical conclusion of a new era; humanity no longer exists.
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