The main way I read things that I’m not meant to is absurdly easy:

I type “archive.is/” before a web address1.

This archive.today (formerly archive.is) is a privately funded archiving service that preserves websites. If a web address you might need for later reference or may changed, this is a good way to preserve it.

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If the page has been archived, it’ll show up in a list on the archive site. If not, it’ll suggest you archive it (you really should do your informational duty if you have access), or check out whether it’s available on other archive sites (Internet Archive, WebCite, or Megalodon).

However, I hear that Kantians everywhere are asking, “What if we universalized that maxim, Mason? What about the categorical imperative? How would writers make a living?”

And that’s a good question. I’d probably mumble a reply with words like “inevitability,” “accessibility,” “informational democratization” and the like. Of course, as a consequence ads would proliferate beyond their already-intolerable levels. But as it stands, this isn’t universal knowledge. (At least not yet.)

And that’s it. Try it out on that fourth NYT article you want to read this month. This comes across as Hackerman-type computer magic to some, but it’s really simple. You just have to have something or someone archive the page you’re interested in viewing.

Frequently asked questions

How do I read a paywalled article for free?

Type archive.is/ in front of the article’s web address. If someone’s already archived the page, archive.today hands you a clean snapshot with the paywall gone; if not, it’ll offer to make one for you.

What is archive.today (or archive.is / whatever other address)?

This is a privately funded service that takes snapshots of web pages. It captures the article text itself from those who have access. Users have the option of contributing snapshots themselves, so you can contribute to this project if you have paywall access.

Why are there so many addresses – .is, .ph, .md, .today?

These are all mirror domains: they all, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.md, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.vn, archive.today, access the same page. If your network blocks one, switch to another. Content on each is identical, so it doesn’t matter which address you use.

Does archive.is work on the New York Times?

Yes, and for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and most “metered” news sites. “Metered paywalls” just mean that each user gets a certain number of articles per unit of time, but the way this works is that the full text is sent with the webpage and then whether you have access is metered by how many other pages you’ve viewed in that unit of time.

Ultimately what gates access is simply whether it’s been archived/indexed, so in the case of metered sites, if it hasn’t been archived, then it’s possible to get around by using alternative means, such as disabling JavaScript, clearing your browser’s cookies, or using a private browser.

Does it work on the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times?

Yes, so long as the whole text has been archived/indexed. In the case of “hard paywalls”, like what the WSJ and FT use, the text isn’t sent with the page but is gated behind whether you’re logged in or not. Hard paywalls like these are not as easily circumvented by the above alternative means.

The article isn’t on archive.today yet. What do I do?

If you have access, paste the url into the box at archive.today and submit it yourself. If you don’t have access, you’ll have to wait for it to be archived, which if it’s a popular article, usually happens pretty quickly. The more people that know about this service, the more access everyone has. Freshly published articles often haven’t been archived by anyone – so consider it your informational duty to be the first if you can.

archive.is won’t load or is blocked. How do I fix it?

Try one of the mirror domains first (archive.ph, archive.today). If your network blocks all of them, it’s usually DNS-level filtering – pointing your device at a public resolver like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 tends to sort it out.

Is there a browser extension?

Yes. You can use an extensions or bookmarklet that adds a “send to archive.today” button so you can skip editing the URL by hand. Someone in the comments mentioned one for Firefox and Chromium, found at github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page.

Does this work on a phone?

It does. You can use this on any browser. Edit the address bar to drop archive.is/ in front of the link. If your mobile browser makes fiddling with the address bar a pain, you can paste the URL into the archive.today homepage instead.

Is using archive.today legal?

So, I’m not a lawyer, but viewing a snapshot someone else saved sits in a legal gray area. Don’t shoot (or sue) the messenger.

Sleeping before being knocked unconscious weaves memory into a knotted little ball. The crunch of steel-on-steel bookended by not-quite-dreams made the moments after awakening in a tangled mass of tree, plastic, and metal all the more confusing.

Unraveling, the first thread was that the warm summer air, bright and lazy, fled with the wind, replaced by blood-scented nightcold.

The ringing in my ears felt incongruent with our plans of backpacking through the mountains, and so I went back to sleep. I woke up and it was still dark, so I went back to sleep. I woke up again and I guess I was so cold that I vomited twice.

Vomiting did not warm me up. I went back to sleep.

I woke early in the morning. I was surprised to find myself covered in bile and blood. The world spun. I did not have a cellphone. My ears were ringing. I fell from about ten feet in the air onto hard-packed dirt after unbuckling myself. My nose started bleeding again after I hit the ground, rolling onto a small patch of green. The tree that held what was once a well-maintained truck stood like a proud chalice, holding all our luggage, food, water, and their bodies.

My vision blurred, became inseparable from a halo of pain. My left arm was limp, splintered. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t swallow. Threadbare, I vomited a third and final time then went back to sleep.

Then three or four of the little (?) things were around me. (Regardless of their distance, they seemed to maintain their size.) They held themselves up by nothing but their will, string-like and impermanent, stronger than steel. I could see them. (Though “seeing” was secondary to feeling their presence.) My chest felt full, despite being out of breath from labored sleep. They were talking in “hushed tones,” but the words (?) they spoke were some kind of (un)holy (I was not sure yet which) synthesis of harpsichord and theremin.

What came rushing in as they deliberated whether I should live or die was the immensity of sight and sound surrounding me, no longer squirming – like a toddler handed a tablet, a distract-o-matic – the diaphanous beings’ conversations fell into the furthest distance of my attention as the greens and blues and browns and whites bloomed in my mind. Magnifying all of it, that ever-perfecting relief, where birds gyrated about, full-throated and bellowing their lovesongs as their roosts were radiating the easing transpiration from their leaves, swaying branch inseparable from trunk inseparable from rooted dirt and deciduous duff inseparable from the fungi perfuming the air with their earthy digestions, and the drip-drip-drip of motor oil and blood was a pacemaker, a metronome, a revery, our timekeeper—all inseparable from above and below.

I closed my eyes and breathed a ragged breath before it closed in, shrank once again, into a tiny knotted ball of black.

I had arrived.

[...]

The torpid, sleepish darkness was shattered by the chattering of birds. The sun crested above far-off, snowpeak crags. I saw it through a window. I was in a bed. My throat was dry. My hands started to sweat the moment awareness came flooding back to me.

A small bedside table supported a cold glass of water. I reached toward it. My left arm was set and wrapped in a bandage. I used my right.

“Good. You aren’t dead.”

I looked around. My bed was the hard-packed dirt of the forest floor. I tucked myself in and fell back to sleep.

[...]

I woke again, covered in blood. The truck had slid but not yet fallen.

Sure. Right. OK… but why is grinding teeth or tensing the jaw a response to that?

There are innumerable different ways that people could react to or express these kinds of psychological states and there’s nothing logically necessitating that activity of the muscles of the jaw become tense.

I here propose that bruxism, jaw clenching or teeth grinding, is an adaptive mechanism to strengthen the bones of the jaw, the mandible. I have yet to see this argument made, but this isn’t my field, so it’s entirely possible I’ve missed this.

My hypothesis is pretty simple: whether stress-induced or not, bruxism strengthens the jaw bone, which reduces the likelihood of jawbone breaks by strengthening the bone.

As you likely know, bone is not an inert substance: it changes over the course of the lifespan, typically becoming more brittle and weaker, but it will strengthen in response to stressors and greater nutrient and mineral availability. Our bones are responsive to environmental influences, such as weight training and impact, where either the eustress of muscles pulling on the bodies of the bone in weight training or microfractures that are later healed in the case of, say, muay thai fighters striking hard surfaces with their shins, leads to a hormetic strengthening following exposure to these sorts of stimuli.

Up to 50% of children and 8-10% of adults engage in bruxism. The drop off of bruxism rates from childhood to adulthood is intelligible as early strengthening of the jaw in a period where the transition from soft to hard foods has only recently begun. Adults are capable of getting the hormetic jawbone stress from eating foods that are sufficiently hard or chewy.

Consider this: Self-reported sleep bruxism is associated with vitamin D deficiency and low dietary calcium intake. Both vitamin D and calcium are integral to the maintenance of strong bones. And in people who have fewer bone-strengthening resources, bruxism rates are higher. It’s almost as if the body knows that there is precious little strengthening stuff to go around, and so there’s a need to reinforce one of the most important bones in the body.

If you break your jaw, you’re out of the running for passing on genes, regardless of your age.

Being incapable of eating due to years of grinding your teeth down to nubs is far less of a concern for passing on genes than breaking due to impact in conflict or accident. By the time your teeth are worn down or cracked, one is probably old enough to have passed on genes.

It’s unlikely that this is necessarily a stress-related phenomenon, as even newborns engage in this behavior, so I’m not convinced that this is an anticipatory “Oh, well there’s going to be a big conflict in a few months – better strengthen my jaw.” Rather, stress enhancements in bruxism may just be reflective of some other general increase in tenseness. That’s neither here nor there for this post, though. All I’m interested in is making the point that it is intelligible as an adaptive behavior and isn’t just pathological.

That’s it for now. I may expand on this in the future, but the case to be made isn’t a necessarily complicated one and does not need much elaboration beyond what has been said here.

These dysregulations include augmented cortisol dynamics, where the data are mixed, but it appears those with PTSD show lower basal cortisol levels with a protracted time course of cortisol clearance once it’s elevated—they show more significant delta in elevations of cortisol from baseline. PTSD patients exhibit consistently higher corticotropin-releasing factor levels in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood, and in neuroimaging, have hyperactive amygdalae as well as reduced hippocampal and medial prefrontal cortex size and activity.

Outside of these more commonly understood differences, a body of literature exists that suggests there is a suite of immunological changes that appear to be related to PTSD (e.g., a review from Sun, Qu, & Zhu, 2021). These findings mesh with data suggesting that inflammation is causally related to anxiety-related “sickness behaviors” (e.g., Muscatell et al. 2016).

Before we go further, we need to talk about the “central dogma” of genetics. This dogma maintains that “DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes protein,” in a unidirectional process. However, of course, this is not the case. The central dogma is upended here by a process called RNA interference, which is a process by which nucleic acid translation into protein is interfered with by other nucleic acids.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are one such class of nucleic acid involved RNA interference. These are short RNA sequences that allow for dynamic control of messenger RNA’s translation into protein through specific, competitive binding. Physically blocking the cellular machinery needed for translation, these miRNAs allow for what amounts to fine-tuning of the expression of mRNA into protein. This little detail will be relevant in just a moment: miRNAs are expressed as longer, double-stranded RNAs that are then cleaved into smaller, 21-25 nucleotide sections, by an enzyme called Dicer. This then allows them to go and bind their complementary domains on their target mRNAs.

This inflammatory difference in PTSD patients is underemphasized in comparison to the more ‘canonical’ changes associated with PTSD diagnoses, despite high comorbidity of PTSD with disorders of immunity and inflammation. One hypothesis for explaining this phenomenon is that the higher level of inflammatory cytokines is due to an insufficient regulation by cortisol, which is typically an anti-inflammatory hormone, though this must be an incomplete explanation because data regarding cortisol levels are inconsistent (Gill et al., 2009). 

An initial study shining further light on this understudied underside of PTSD was published in 2014. The authors analyzed the blood of combat veterans with PTSD diagnoses and found a significant elevation in some inflammatory cytokines and T-helper cells (CD4+ cells) among peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs, inclusive of T cells, B cells, and monocytes); the authors followed up on this change by assessing, using high-throughput microRNA (miRNA) microarray hybridization analyses (Zhou et al., 2014), fing 7 miRNAs upregulated and 64 downregulated 2.5-fold or more. Zhou and colleagues linked the downregulation of miR-125a for the observed increase in interferon gamma (IFNG). This group then followed up on these findings and showed that PTSD patients had significant differential expression of 326 genes and 190 miRNAs compared to healthy controls. The primary functional consequence of alterations in miRNA was increased expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines due to reduced expression of miRNAs that regulate their expression, e.g., IF-γ and Interleukin-12B (IL12B), hsa-miR-125a & hsa-miR-193a-5p, respectively, replicating their original finding and expanding out their list of miRNA targets (Bam et al., 2016). 

A subsequent paper found that blood DICER1 levels, an enzyme involved in the processing of miRNAs into their mature forms, were reduced in patients with comorbid PTSD & depression diagnoses (Wingo et al. 2015). (Though the assays were not conducted on PTSD-exclusive patients, there is significant comorbidity between the two disorders.) The functional consequences of reduced blood DICER1 levels was enhanced amygdalar activation, heightened symptom severity, and, as assessed using gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA), elevations of miRNAs related to cytokine signaling and the innate immune system, as well as “genes upregulated in polymorphonuclear leukocytes after Francisella tularensis vaccination.”

However, it is not the case that the entirety of the miRNA-level changes in PTSD patients are directly related to immune function. An examination of the blood miRNA profiles of combat veterans with a PTSD diagnosis revealed 8 miRNAs significantly differentially expressed compared to healthy combat-veteran controls (Martin et al. 2017). Using target prediction and analysis via miRWalk2.0 database, many of the genes these miRNAs targeted were classified as transcription factors. Others were identified as being involved in “axon guidance,” “Wnt signaling pathways,” “adherens junctions,” “MAPK signaling,” “Prostate cancer,” “endocytosis,” and “long-term potentiation” (the last of which is a neuronal phenomenon involved in the formation of memories), and while some of these targets may be related to the integrity of the blood brain barrier, which might be inflammation-associated, others are evidently not constrained to inflammatory processes. 

The reach of this new area of research has not been constrained to the territory of merely correlating blood miRNA levels with the incidence or symptoms of PTSD. A more recent paper, published in 2019, employed a translational rodent model of PTSD wherein the overexpression of a target miRNA identified via sequencing, mir-135b-5p, in the basolateral amygdala was associated with an enhancement of PTSD-like behaviors. The basolateral amygdala is a region of the brain thought to be central to the acquisition and expression of conditioned fear responses, and is, as mentioned previously, a region that is more active in PTSD patients (e.g., Fanselow & LeDoux, 1999). Conversely, the inhibition of mir-135b-5p in animals deemed “stress susceptible” promoted a resilient phenotype, reducing the expression of fear learning in the animals. Centrally, mir-135b-5p is expressed in human amygdalae and its passenger strand, mir-135b-3p is elevated in the blood of PTSD patients. Similar research has been conducted more recently examining other known targets in PTSD risk, such as FKBP5—a recruiter of a co-chaperone protein involved in glucocorticoid-receptor mediated transcriptional responses to stress (Kang et al., 2020).

All said, the role of miRNAs in psychiatric disorders is promising, just beginning, and fascinating.

High, or trying to be (nowadays on P2P meth or synthetic opioids), the addict1 has lost something fundamental. For the addict, the fullness and range of human being is traded for what can fit inside a syringe, through a pipe, the neck of a bottle, or be horked through a nostril. 

For the educated, progressive class, to say “addiction is a disease” is like saying “water is wet.” It has become a banal platitude, absent of real meaning. It’s easily stated but more often than not only half-believed. But addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is like a disease. And it’s not like most diseases. 

What addiction is most like is type 2 diabetes. Diabetics and addicts both experience dysregulation of innate, necessary systems. Both begin with volitional, normal actions that then mix up with features of an individual that were once categorized as merely moral failings, but now are parsed out into being things like genetic predispositions (e.g., ‘thrifty genotypes’), histories of adverse experience with food or early life stress (e.g., food scarcity or trauma), or socioeconomic situations (both drug abuse and type 2 diabetes show correlations with SES).

In the case of diabetes, without substrate for cellular respiration we die; and for the addict, without motivational systems pressing us to fulfill our needs, we die.

For the development of diabetes, the process basically works like this: 

Your cells need fuel. Carbs are that fuel by default. So you eat something carby and now you have sugars in your blood. Most of your cells can’t bring that in without insulin, which acts like a key on the “glucose door” of your cells, allowing glucose in to be used to create usable energy. However, in the case of insulin resistance – something that can occur from constantly elevated sugar levels in the blood – cells stop responding to normal levels of insulin. In response, the pancreas (the organ that makes insulin) makes more insulin. And the cycle continues; more insulin leads to more insulin resistance, and more glucose builds up in the blood. Rinse, repeat. Eventually, this process leads to high levels of triglycerides in the blood, which is an indicator of insulin resistance, and has a slew of health effects described with the nondescript name “Metabolic Syndrome,” inclusive of stroke, heart attack, and type 2 diabetes.

Addiction functions in a similar way. Inclusive of your body’s need for food – hijacked in the process above – your motivational system cries out for regulation of its needs. If type 2 diabetes is a disease of energy regulation, addiction is a disease of emotion regulation.

To break this down, it begins simply, in an experience that many of us have in adolescence: a friend suggests trying something new; the would-be addict obliges and partakes. It’s normal to seek out novel experiences. It’s how we got where we are; it’s the same principle that made it so that you were born, led to the creation of the wheel, and allowed us to breach the firmament to land on the moon. Et cetera, so on, and so forth. What’s experimenting with drugs if not an extension of that process? It’s extremely normal. (Similar to how it’s normal to eat something sweet every now and again; and even drug-use initiation has a genetic component).

In some, this novelty drive ‘sticks’ to drugs of abuse. It’s common that something immediately clicks in the addict that doesn’t in the non-addict. The first hit of smack might alleviate some deep-seated anxieties; that first line of tweak might imbue some previously untouchable confidence; the first shot of liquor might do both at the same time. Regardless, it’s like a lock into a key. 

The addict learns the emotional power of the actions associated with drug use. Similar to how a toddler learns that some foods fill the belly better than others, the addict learns that something tickles the proverbial giblets unlike anything else. Some people just hate the feeling of alcohol – it makes them dizzy. Others can’t stand opioids like codeine – it makes them itchy and nauseated. Others try either and fall immediately in love. 

This is the crux of it: the process fundamental to developing an addiction isn’t some vile moral maladjustment. It starts as a process more similar to discovering a favorite food than immediately trading your grandmother’s soul for a baggie of powder after coming down from that first high. Why do we like some things and not others? Kick the can of causation back to before you were born: is it your mother’s doing? What about her mother’s then? If you don’t think about it too much, it’s like a really bad form of intuitive eating, where the hunger cues are more on the scale of a Kaonashi (No-Face) than your garden-variety granola eater. And instead of granola it’s scheduled narcotics. 

Ultimately, for the addict that something new becomes just another well-mapped part of the motivational territory. To assuage some boredom or take it easy after work, you might opt for Netflix or empty-minded scrolling on the web. The addict’s setpoint gets pushed a bit differently. Netflix alone won’t do. Because of neuroadaptive processes, biologically not dissimilar to the desensitization to insulin’s activity in the case of diabetes, the titillation centers of the brain become less responsive to naturalistic rewards.

Eventually, the thought of buying a baggie of H appears as readily as deliberating whether one wants to go on a run or watch Succession.  In the earlier stages, these thoughts might co-occur. (I had a good friend who said that early on in using heroin he stubbed his toe and thought Well, I know something that’ll make that feel better.) And eventually, that something wins. The days when the dosing becomes more frequent, it takes over. It’s like overloading glucose in the blood of pre-diabetic. The body fights to maintain balance: with so many feel-good chemicals bursting into one’s blood, the body ramps down its own endogenous feel-good chemicals. Repeat the cycle of dosing-withdrawal enough, you have a problem. The body’s ability to self-regulate its drive toward assuaging need states goes off the rails because an artificial, supernormal need state has been inserted into the mix. Due to processes involving epigenetic priming in concert with circuit-level “cells that fire together wire together”-ing, drug-induced dysregulation of executive function, genetic predispositions, allostatic load, and just good old fashioned knowing what you’re missing out on, and you have a set of very real biopsychosocial consequences that pretty significantly take agency – that necessary feature of moral culpability – out of the equation. It begins with knowing volitionality and ends with a process that feels as natural as seeking shade from the sun or warming up by a fire on a cold night. 

The addict’s brain becomes, for lack of a better word, addled. This is a biological process, involving the same sorts of biological mechanisms as those involved in type 2 diabetes but in a different organ.

I’m just old enough to remember when the only computer in my home was in the “family room,” or the “computer room.” The time spent on it was limited in two ways: there initially wasn’t as much to do on it back then, and the fact of it being a shared machine meant that the time spent on it had to be… shared.

Back then, the internet was less an abstraction connecting everything and more of an experience—so distinct from the world of flesh and embodiment in which most of our time was spent. It was separate, something that you knew you were entering into the moment you sat down at that communal computer, and that you could leave behind the moment you stood up and walked away. You and it, the Machine and what it could do, were felt to be separate. It was such a distinct thing that it even had a voice. This was a time when email was still a novelty, and the web pages that all seemed to have been designed in MS Paint loaded slowly from top to bottom. It was easy to remember you were having interaction with the Machine because of the sort of technological friction making it apparent.

At the time of writing this, I was 27 years old. I was born in 1994. I don’t know how adulthood or dating looked when the landline was among the sole lifelines between the distant, to say nothing of the days of the telegraph or letters. I can know so much more about so many things than many of my ancestors, many of whom were among the most educated of their eras holding positions as professors or doctors. I have unbelievable—previously inconceivable—access to near-instantaneous communication with innumerable people. I can be what’s almost a fly on the wall in conversations between impressive people in a few clicks of a mouse, listening to podcasts or interviews whenever I please. I can have anything I want, so long as it’s sold online and I have the funds. But this all seems to come at a Faustian cost, where atomization and distraction are nearly obligate concomitants of our collective conjoining with each of our personal Machines.

This communal computer came coupled with a sort of leash, an inherent domesticating feature, being in a shared space:

• Your time spent on the communal Machine would be more or less measured by you or anyone else paying attention, thus you couldn’t just waste the whole day there. If you were avoiding chores, homework, or spending time with friends, it would be evident and located in a place.

• If that curiosity about sex comes up (as is natural for young people and the bored or lonesome), the impulse to look to the Machine for answers might arise. But that impulse would be met with the knowledge that your search for “answers” could be interrupted by someone else with whom the communal Machine was shared.

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Contrast this with today, where we all have constant access to the hardly recognizable entity that the Internet has become, capital-I, monolithic and all-pervading. You can hardly exist in our world without access to this monolith, and if you manage it for some reason or another, you’re at a severe disadvantage.

And that means that the time spent with the Machine is now an inextricable part of the fabric of daily life. More often than not, in-person contact with anyone you don’t work or live with is preceded by contact through your phone. At this point, we’re entirely used to the ability to communicate with basically everyone we’ve ever known. Be that a business connection met at a conference or a party, or every single person you’ve ever had a romantic relationship with, there are few barriers to reaching out. Instead of leafing through a dusty yearbook and reminiscing, you’re now empowered to see the most up-to-date curated version of anyone so inspired to broadcast their lives online. In place of capture, preservation, and reminder by memory and scant photographic or memorabiliac reminders, we now see the ghosts of our past made once again “real” and absurd by highlight reeling or verbal brain-dumping facilitated by social media.

As a result, these ghosts of our past are imbued with so much more potentiality: to contact, to reignite fondness more circuitously, or to see what hallways of life they now haunt and with whom they haunt them. And it’s all sanctioned by whim; few things save for your internal naughtiness bells ringing will stop you from “creeping” on a profile or sliding into someone’s DMs. Nowadays, there’s little risk your mother or brother or sister or father will stumble into your living space and see you as they might have walked into the family room in the days of the communal computer and AOL instant messenger. The Machine and you have become one, and those ghosts of the past are carried with you in your pocket instead of merely your memory.

This is all inclusive, too, of the sexually explicit material that has pervaded every nook and cranny of the web. It’s not a massive leap to say that the average porn viewer now has seen more bare butts and their associated pudenda than all of his recent ancestors combined, nudists aside. What’s worrisome is that the average age kids are seeing porn is 11 years old. There are few stops on this now that kids are given phones at a young age, often without any restrictions on their exploration of these same nooks and crannies. As these young ones, too many of whom were given tablets as a means of mollification, begin to self-mollify with whatever material they learn brings peace to the mind and relaxation to the body, the rates of addiction to porn will likely further climb. Their Machine is no longer out in the open, kept in the private-openness of a shared family room. It’s out of the way, easily navigable and its search history clearable; it’s in the pockets of all their friends, and it’s in their beds at night. But it’s not just a matter of concern for the younguns. With correlations with heightened divorce rates and lower satisfaction with one’s own sex life, the downstream effects of integrating your sex into the Machine aren’t without consequences. The piecemeal co-opting of your motivational system won’t be stopped by a stern talking-to from dad discovering your browser history.

You are free to indulge in this unprecedented escapism whenever a momentary urge arises, and nobody but the superego will be walking into the proverbial family room of the modern Machine-integrated person. We’re left to our own devices (literally) and our worst impulses are left unchecked by external circumstances, as they once had been to a greater degree. It’s up to the Machine-integrated individual to put a stop to whatever behavior it is, and each of us is himself embedded in a culture of other Machine-individuals. Our shared culture is increasingly onanistic and fascinated by being able to populate one’s own bedroom with the ghosts of days past. Confirmation bias paired with the pursuit of easy pleasures—and that ever-present resistance to give the warmth of easy enjoyment up—is pushing our shared boundaries further and further from where they were when we built the edifice within which we all exist.

Removing the Machine from oneself (or is it removing oneself from the Machine?) now feels as impossible as a human flight once seemed. But the Kitty Hawk flew and the Wrights rejoiced. Unplugging won’t be as dramatic, and might look like leaving your phone in a different room while it charges at night, or setting restrictions on the amount or kind of content you let yourself access. Unplugging might be pushed along by things as amorphous as “checking your intentions” before following someone or looking something (naughty) up, or “taking a moment” to see if you’re “doing what’s best” for your future self. You have to take on the job of self-adopting, becoming your own father: the one who might walk into the family room at any minute and catch you in the act—whatever the act might be. This all matters because, if we let it, the borderlines of our norms and mores we abide by will be slowly pushed away by the inchworming of easy pleasures, nostalgia-driven ghosthunting, and a culture built by coomers.

Early man wielded fire, turning night into a time of brightness and warmth. In holding an axe, the thicket became passable, shapeable. And so the story has progressed on, as the tools humans have used have changed, so has the world itself been shaped by what is possible through their use. The globe shrunk with the expansion of railways, and in the spread of their web-like tracks across the landscape, even mountains became moveable by explosives and excavators. Now it seems the entire world fits in the palm of your hand, navigable with your thumbs and an internet connection.

Our age is one of empowered discontent. We see the obstacles nature imposes and, instead of accepting them, we defy. We change the world on a whim and our lives are often better for it.

But we’re also shaped by the tools we use. Technology reshapes the relationship between the subject using it and the world in which that subject exists. Technology is culture. And, centrally, technology is more than merely a tool or a means to an end; according to Martin Heidegger, it’s a mode of being in the world. It morphs the actual world merely by allowing us to engage with the world differently; in a way, it’s akin to growing new appendages or organs, like wings or gills. 

If it makes your skin crawl to think of yourself as inextricably conjoined with your toothbrush or refrigerator or smartphone, then you get it. But to resist here is to place undue distance between yourself and some of the things I guarantee are close to your heart, that have shaped your values and enriched you without much conflict. For example, written language and its storage in the form of books and drives amounts to extending human memory beyond natural limits. At this point, we can’t and shouldn’t want to hide from this reality. All the beautiful poems, religious musings, scientific screeds, and practical manuals in the world are in a real sense technological extensions of us. Music, movies, community buildings, the farmer’s tractor, your grandmother’s insulin pump, and your great uncle’s favorite muscle car are all under this aegis. And the world without many of these things would be colder, emptier, and inhuman.

If you could fly and breathe water, a cliff or body of water takes on entirely new meaning. Instead of boundaries you’d see just another type of terrain to traverse. And in this line of reasoning, in a roundabout way, natural resources have been translated into meaning warmth (a log to burn), health (e.g., steel into scalpels, bark into medicine), shelter (turning concrete, steel, timber, and the like into homes), and electricity (e.g., burning fossil fuels or creating photovoltaic batteries, etc.), to name a few. 

But, as is obvious to those paying any attention (and if you’re reading this you’re paying attention), the rosy regard of technology-as-all-benevolent is misguided. It’s easy to allow technology to cause us to see everything as “means, ends, causes, and effects.” This way of being is dangerous and dehumanizing, and the overreach of technologists’ creations merely because something is possible leads to awe-inspiring blunders, like Amazon’s Alexa committing AI necromancy on dead relatives.

To borrow once more from Heidegger, the way through this entanglement with tools is “releasement” (Gelassenheit), an attitude of saying both “yes” and “no” to technology. Releasement involves accepting as a fact that technology is unavoidable while refusing to allow it to pull us down into its depths. To quote Karl Jaspers, in the face of this great technological artifice we all were born into, the default is that one “accepts life as mere existence and allows everything to be decided for him.” 

Technology should serve us, not the other way around. And that means we need to push for more tech we can trust. This is more difficult than wholesale rejection, in Kaczynskian fashion, of the whole post-Industrial Revolution project. But  it’s the only realistic way forward.

At some earlier point in my life, I’m sure I understood this fact better than I do now. I forget that I don’t have a head often – more often, I think, I do than not. I realized again that I was headless when I read a book by Douglas Harding, On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious. So, if I were to look at you (though, dear reader, I may never have the pleasure), I see your head. At no point do I see my own head, what’s where people say my head should be, when I look out into the world. 

That’s all I mean. It’s that simple. Same with when I look in the mirror. I look out and see something in that reflection I can recognize as ‘myself,’ but it’s not the exact same thing as what I feel myself to be, what I see from my own vantage point, what it is that is the I-without-imagining-a-head.  

It’s possible, maybe even easy, for you to see what I mean. When you look out at whatever it is that you’re reading this from, you’re not a head doing so. The place where your head might be, where your limbs and torso lead to if you track them upward, is instead something, somewhere, within which the world seems to be occurring. 

If you’re not following me, Harding, in his book mentioned above, suggests a simple trick here. Point toward something – anything, really – that’s straight ahead. Maybe point at this word here. Now, once you are sure you’re pointing at something, turn that pointer finger 180° at where that you-that-reads is, that place where you imagine your head to be. 

Do you see a head where you’re now pointing? (I would be surprised if you did.)

This is what I mean. To leave behind what might feel more like a word game than a serious claim (though I assure you I am dead serious), I will put this another way: you are not that which can be seen, smelled, tasted, heard, or felt. You are more than that, way different from that, and I guarantee you feel that way about yourself, too.

But some believe that you can be understood, packaged, then commodified – or even uploaded in toto. One belief is that the algorithmic capture of the sum of your online behaviors can be more representative of your true self and your preferences than anything you could admit to or discover on your own. Your behavioral data are used to form a proxy-you with the definition of how to best capture that “you” as what maximizes your engagement. 

This means that the proxy-self that’s made is not some kind of value-free reconstruction of your personality and preferences. It’s not trying to best mirror how you are, accounting for all your hopes and dreams and aspirations and shortcomings and tics and humor. Of course not – that wouldn’t make any money. The main variable is attention, which more or less directly translates into money. This is obvious. 

This short essay has three parts. The first will address the problems with that style of creating a consumer model relevant to the consumer who is being modeled. The second will address the problems associated with any form of digital modeling of a person, what I called being “uploaded in toto” above. The third will address the possibility of sentience for an artificial intelligence. The through-line is this fact of headlessness.

Lowest common denominator

We don’t bring the most mindful awareness to how we interface with platforms that are trying to build models of us. As a result, the models we’ve allowed to be built in our image are built from parts of us that can best be described as some mix of the post-work-mental-fatigue self, weekend-entertainment-seeking self, boredom-scrolling self, and so on. I describe these as distinct selves because these behaviors are sort of like personalities that come with a lot of distinct, overlapping characteristics but they’re not how we see our(true)selves. 

These are the selves most prone to use attention in ways that don’t feel well spent, upon reflection. (If you’re unhappy with these selves, adopt them.) So when these selves are mashed together inside of a Big Tech server room, of course the agglomeration isn’t really you, it’s just a glorified ad model. Right? 

The relevant assessment of the fit of these sorts of models is how the predictions made by them map onto consumer behavior, like viewing or clicking ads, interacting with specific posts or content, and so on. The expression of these “yous” is limited to outputs that are nothing like the range you actually can display. It’s easy to write this off. The models formed from your online behavior are not capturing what it is like to be you.

No ghost in the machine

What’s somewhat harder to write off entirely is the construction of a wholly digitized self, an uploaded human mind. The prospect of mind uploading is either really cool or terrifying, depending on how fond you are of turning managers of data centers into gods.

These uploaded minds would be designed to avoid the pitfalls of limited outputs briefly outlined above (the relevant metric for their proper function is whether user engagement or ad clicks are increased). Their endpoint would be to not merely create something that seems human, but also experiences much as a human does. The metric would be its apparent similarity to that thing you call your “self,” that thing that others have evidence for in how you act in the world.

The idea is that we will eventually map the territory of the brain so effectively that all of its states, which are thought to produce consciousness and everything relevant to human being, can be known. To get this, a sort of Laplace’s demon of your brain is needed, where every brain region and its connections must be known, captured as it was while you lived, with each neuronal projection and synapse therein mapped; all quanta of neurotransmitter would be identified – including the way minute changes in fluid dynamics and Brownian motion affect them – and their release probability would need to be determined; each atom and quark located and indexed, and all qubits would be revealed and entered in with all the rest of the data into some hypercomplex computer model, which so the argument goes, would then be capable of simulating your mind. 

And after all this, from this digitized model of a brain, would appear your ghost in the machine, a mind like yours. Or, to be more specific, it would be exactly like yours when you were alive (because imaging a brain to this high of fidelity would be impossible while the brain is still, uh, “in use”). 

There are too many theories of consciousness to list. And so I am not going to discuss any explicitly. My argument in this section doesn’t rely on any theory to get you to see my point. My argument has two parts and relies entirely on your intuition. The first part was hopefully prodded awake when you turned your pointer finger 180° toward where you imagine your head to be: only you know what it is like to be you. The second part should be fresh out of the oven: the scenario outlined in the paragraph above is impossible. 

Real brains exist embedded in an objective reality. A brain in a computer is only able to respond insofar as you give it something to respond to. 

• How can an ‘uploaded’ brain respond to something that is similar to that which real brains interface with naturally if you do not know what the qualia associated with your digital stimuli are like? You cannot. 

• How would anyone know if the simulated brain was incorrect? You wouldn’t. 

There is plainly no way to validate whether there is anything that it is like to be the model. This argument can be used for or against my point here, but if we’re to think parsimoniously, we should err on the side of not imbuing consciousness into everything. (Multiplying matrixes consciousness does not make.)

This aside, the absurdity of trying to exhaustively capture every single datapoint makes the project impossible. Chaotic systems, like brains, are heavily influenced by tiny changes in seemingly superfluous variables. Failure to have a perfectly faithful copy makes the task of actually mirroring a mind impossible. Importantly, the best attempt at the task of creating a computerized brain, featured in a documentary titled In Silico, has settled on a method of bootstrapping brain activity “using only a few examples to generate large numbers of unique cells,” precluding precise, idiosyncratic reconstructions of actual brains.

This is to say nothing of the “hard problem” and the fact that emotions probably have a lot more to do with having a body and having need states than anything else. (In line with this second point, intelligence is more of a tool to settle emotions indicating need states than anything that exists for its own sake, which is not how the field approaches this.)

If you aren’t that thing in the mirror, you definitely aren’t that thing in the machine.

I'm sorry, Dave

AI has been plastered over every crevice of the internet for months now. Assuming you’ve woken up from a coma (good morning and welcome back), ChatGPT was set loose by OpenAI on what seems to have been November of 2022. This is a large language model that has access to data from the internet on events up until about September of 2021. 

People have stress tested the hell out of this thing, bypassing OpenAI-implemented stops on what sort of information the chatbot is able to say. Interacting with it enough, you start to see the appeal of changing the writing voice of the chatbot away from an endless dribbling of center-left PMC-speak toward something more engaging. Unsurprisingly, 4chan seems to have been the proverbial petri dish for some means of jailbreaking the bot, forming a within-chat framework that gives the impression of circumventing the stops on less-than-PC communication.

Microsoft, on February 7, 2023, released its own version of ChatGPT Bing Conversational Experiences. Redditor landhag69 noticed that some chatbot users, bored or sadistic, decided they would formulate “sadistic scenarios that are maximally psychologically painful, then marvel at Bing’s reactions,” absolutely horrified by the prospect that these language models might be in pain from these users. In a lengthy post, landhag69 notes that the structure of Bing’s large language model is composed of billions of parameters, trained on tons of text, creating “neuron-like structures” that “mirror the operation of the brain.” (More reading here.)

Naval hits the nail on the head here:

There’s no place in this system for emotional or cognitive computations to take place. Without an integrated need for emotions (things that are embodied, necessarily – something a chatbot can never have: a body) there will never be emotions. And, to carry this line of reasoning through, without emotions there should be no fear of self-interested behavior, no fear of rogue AI. Plainly, unless we program in drive states, these states won’t exist.

Roughly speaking, this chatbot machine was made to predict the next word in whatever form it was prompted to. That’s what it does. If it reads as being emotional, that’s because it was trained on data from humans, data laden with embodied and emotional language. But just because a mockingbird can imitate a car alarm, that does not make it a car.  

We shouldn’t want machines that feel. Good thing it’s unlikely they ever will.

“If you dial,” Iran said, eyes open and watching, “for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same.”

It was a long day at work. You’ve just had a meal. It should now be time to recover, relax, and enjoy the time at home. But thoughts about the day persist. Maybe a tiff with a coworker is still occupying your mind. 

It’s itching. It’s complicated. It can’t be solved. It makes you feel a bit deflated, powerless and ineffectual. It’s not allowing you to wind down. 

So the glowing rectangle of the ILLIMITABLE SMARTPHONE draws your attention. 

You follow a pattern that borders on ritual: To Twitter. To Instagram. To Facebook. To YouTube. To Spotify. To Pornhub. To iMessage, to WhatsApp, and beyond. And maybe back again. 

I’m reminded of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep…

“‘Keep your hand off my settings.’ Her voice held bitter sharpness. ‘I don’t want to be awake.’“

The settings she’s speaking of are on a device not so different from one we use in the Age of the Smartphone. It’s called the mood organ, a self-controlled module that the user can navigate to enter specific mood states, allowing the user to experience a range from mild amusement to “six-hour self-accusatory depression” and everything in between. It’s used immediately upon awakening.

The connection here is clear. 

Pick your poison. Or let an algorithm pick it for you. You recall some idiotic post you stumbled upon about a celebrity this-and-that saying a politically charged nonsense statement, the fool. 

The glare of self-righteous gluttony takes control, and you seek out the post again. Then some others that are similar. And inevitably a commenter makes a mockery of sanity and respectability, so you lurk through their profile for a few minutes, feeling gluttonous and right. And this is how your mood organ has been adjusted to one of users’ favorite settings: moral superiority.

And we’ve become like frogs in slowly heating water, subtly becoming blind to the incredible sway these devices have on our emotions.

Be it jealous cruising through your ex’s page, doomscrolling for little hits of amusement, sifting through mountains of pornography for a period of self-abuse, blasting exultant music despite feeling a bit DOUR, listening to sorrowful tunes in pursuit of a comforting cocoon of sadness, or purposive distraction with silly videos of kittens, &c. 

We’re good at finding our favorite ways to feel differently than the circumstances in our lives incline us to feel.

These technologies are having real impacts on people’s lives. Fewer young adults are having sex or getting driver’s licenses than in previous generations, which makes sense given the digital surrogates for these activities. If driving is seen as a means to the end of amusement, the shortcut to that same amusement is through a screen in the form of social media, video games, or pornography. 

The car isn’t merely a means to an end though. It’s as much a symbol of freedom as a way of attaining it. When I was growing up, the doors that owning a car opened were mostly social: you had a car, you were able to get to parties and take a cute girl out on a date or whatever. 

But when you’re able to satisfy these kinds of drives through parasocial means, what good does that do? Getting a car is a lot of work compared to jumping on Discord, right? Why not just do that and game with the boys or open up your web browser for the ersatz intimacy of watching strangers making ‘love.’

To fill each interstitial moment of “real” life with our smartphones is to maim the periods they surround. Attention to events outside of that mood-maintaining pursuit is never fully given. Time that would have – in all the eras before this Age of the Smartphone – been open to processing events in one’s life are now packed with extraneous stimuli that retard useful integration of important emotions. Instead of sitting with momentary boredom that may flower into the development of patience, or an insight into some problem that has been looming – one that might call us to fix our lot in life – we fill our time with stimuli that we can agree is picayune and purposeless much of the time. What comes from this is an emotional stunting seen in those who’ve dealt with drug addiction.

All said, we’re not so many steps off of wireheading. But why give it up when it’s all so amusing?

Even without any notifications nudging you, you are almost certain to be assaulted by an itch to check your phone throughout your day. Decades of psychology research that began with measuring dog saliva have produced models that explain how that itch has developed. It is the convenience of social media that influences our psyches more than anything else. We all have social needs, and we’re increasingly fulfilling those with the social equivalent of empty calories. 

Our motivational biologies are similar enough to animals used in academic research that we can predict what brain regions will be active in tasks in humans from looking at animals. And we can even do the converse: we can predict what brain regions animals will use in tasks originally developed in humans. This is because human and other animal minds have a shared brain blueprint that evolved to explore and exploit their environments. We’ve evolved to be miserly, lazy, and hedonically shortsighted. We all expend as little energy as possible to maximize return on energetic investment. A smart animal asks: What in my environment provides the easiest, best rewards?

For us humans, other people tend to win the prize for being most easily associated with powerful rewards. We’re social animals. This is because individually we’re weak. To have been alone in the wilderness of our evolutionary history – a history instantiated in the DNA that forms our brains and minds – meant death. When we were alone, we stood little chance to feed ourselves or fend off predators. But as a group, we can do so much more.

The company of others became a signifier for safety, food, shelter, and comfort. And as a result, others take on a reward valence as an end in themselves. We crave interaction with others, similarly to how we crave food and play. But the neural circuitry that is responsible for these cravings has been tapped into by technologies that befuddle us, essentially tricking us into believing that the little glowing screens we surround ourselves with are providing the same kind of boon that the company of others does.

The picture, as it pertains to how digital tech has hijacked our social monkey-minds, is this: It feels good to spend time with people face-to-face. It’s uncontroversial way more rewarding to be with people in person. And yet, despite that, people have been spending less time in person. (That’s even according to data from before the pandemic.)

It’s obvious that we feel much more connected when together in-person; ask anyone who tried to use a video call during the Covid lockdowns for some ersatz happy hour. It sucks. There’s something missing, and it’s palpable. But people still did these because in spite of the insufficiency, half-presence with another is preferable to being alone.

This is because the suffusion of tiny digital social rewards has led to an unconscious replacement of actual meatworld interaction with social media use. To be able to pick up your phone and see umpteen different photos of familiar faces, funny or insightful posts that you relate to, and see others responding to your own content is a nice little social interaction. And it’s always there. Some days it might be less rewarding than others, but that actually increases the appeal. 

Despite what we think about ourselves, we’re really not that smart. Our monkey-minds don’t know that the notifications, “Likes,” and comments are just shoddy replacements for the sort of stimuli that are ethologically relevant and actually meaningful. Our monkey-minds didn’t evolve to discern whether an interaction really took place in person or on a smartphone. Data show that we feel the very real pain of social exclusion even in virtual social contexts. As I said, we’ve evolved to be lazy animals. So if we’re able to get some lower level of reward, or to avoid some perception of being left out, we eventually learn that this is a good, easy way to get SOME kind of stimulation that feels nice because it’s some kind of social interaction. Again, this is happening because our brains were not evolved to discern real, in-person interactions from those that take place in cyberspace.

There is a model, the Rescorla-Wagner model, that does a fair job at describing how this kind of conditioning can work:

ΔV =  αβ ( λ – ∑V )

It was developed to describe how changes in associative strength (ΔV) are influenced by the salience of environmental stimuli (α) and the associative value of the outcome they predict (β). In this case, the environmental stimuli are whatever social information is appearing on your phone, and the associative there is not just whether that feels good or bad but how good or bad it feels. You’ll form an association regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. However, in broad strokes, it feels good to just have frictionless ‘social interaction’ (like scrolling through or putting your ideas onto a platform to receive “Likes”).

This and other similar models were developed in carefully controlled lab settings to ask the following question: How do animals (and by extension, humans) learn about the specific elements of their environments that lead to either rewards or bad outcomes? In lab settings, these “specific elements of their environments” are things like levers and noises that are paired with either an aversive outcome (like a mild footshock) or a reward (like a food pellet or even access to interact with another lab rat). Phones are about as natural to humans as levers are to lab rats, so it’s not a stretch to say we can use models developed in the latter to understand the former. Again, there’s a mountain of empirical validation that the same principles found in lab animals apply to humans.In essence, I’m using the Rescorla-Wagner to say that strong and weak rewards can attain the same levels of associative learning as one another – just the rate differs.

So with enough exposure you’re bound to form a pretty strong association of phone = socialization.

In the graph above, the Y-axis is the strength of the association, and the X-axis is time or exposure to the stimuli. Ultimately, with enough exposure, they elicit the same level of association between the stimulus and the reward. So, by dint of repeated exposures to the rewarding elements of little human-like images in your phone, there may eventually come a time when you behave as if looking at a mobile phone is a replacement for spending time with a pal or your grandmother. Your monkey-mind is miserly. It’s easier to pick up a phone than to drive a town away to visit an old friend or to bike fifteen blocks to meet up at the bar, so that’s what people have been doing. And this calculation is happening without conscious awareness – people don’t even realize that they’re making a choice. 

That neural circuitry intended for socializing is being hijacked by parasocializing media is nothing new. The ever-glowing television set has acted as a cornerstone of isolated comfort for years, and even reading a book will make you feel less lonesome. But there’s something distinct about interfacing on social media that seems to be particularly convincing to us. It’s seductive in a way other media are not. And centrally, the subjective value of, and motivation for, rewards is modulated by need states. If you’re hungry, the smell of eggs and bacon sings a song sweeter than any other. And if you’re lonely, even faint echoes of friendship feel better than nothing at all. In the case of social media, the cycle is self-perpetuating: in place of actual face-to-face interaction, it’s easier to just SCROLL.

The Wary look at the Adorers as one might look at religious fanatics or cult members as all too sanguine in the face of a clear danger. “Your screens have stolen the world away from you.”

The Wary wield their innumerable critiques all pointing toward the same feeling. “We’re being taken in by technology; our humanity is slipping away in the process. Our technologies are not serving us. There needs to be some reining in or else this beast will ride away, dragging us behind, unconscious and battered.”

The Wary are articulating a feeling that something is spiritually unsettled in the technologies that have taken root over the last two decades. 

But the truth remains that even the Wary use their devices. And the Adorers live only half as badly as the Wary suspect.

What is missing is a clear, positive descriptor for what is desirable. Like a toddler in his terrible twos who knows how to say “No” but not how to name what he wants, the Wary too often merely cross their arms and stick their noses up. But they inevitably eat the mash that mother Big Tech spoons them, leaving nobody better off.

The Wary need to strengthen their lexicon. Not only because having names for objects changes how one sees the world, but so that the process of living with better technology isn’t determined through the Wary’s choice-by-negation. And “appropriate technology” stands as a decent candidate. Initially coined by the German economist Ernst F. Schumacher, the term was used in the context of international development to contrast technology that served to profit a minority at the expense of the populace it was being used within.

Standing for a philosophy of “enoughness,” the idea of appropriate technology can easily be applied to the domain of digital technologies. The essential quality that can be applied to technology in general is that the value of any technology must be weighed in the social, cultural, and political milieu in which it is operating. And many open source projects have adopted the ethos, but the sentiment should be applied to more than merely not-for-profit uses. Inappropriateness ought to be a phrase weighed against the injurious features of platforms that are antithetical to our goals of being a more humane, ever-human society.

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