Warning: this post is possibly cognitohazardous to sensitive psychasthenics.
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I don’t need to tell you that you’re being watched. We’ve known for decades we’re being surveilled by governments and corporations; our only solace as they hoard our data has been the bottleneck of analytical power. This will not last.
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AI is poised to deliver intelligence on the meter; as the technology gets cheaper and better, the vast datalakes will be mined for greater and more useful insights. We will all end up under the microscope.
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LLMs are already creepily good at deanonymization (1) (2); Iโve stopped writing internet comments without the expectation theyโll be linked back to me eventually. You should too.
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Leaving things unwritten might prove little defense; truesight describes the striking ability of LLMs to glean background motivations and context behind its prompts. Subtext affords no safety against a superintelligent hermeneuticist.
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Our secrets won’t stay private; it’s also unlikely they stay non-public. We’ve already seen massive data breaches before: just last month the learning management system Canvas was hacked to the tune of 3.65 terabytes of data from roughly 275 million users, including private messages sent through the platform.
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Beyond hacks and leaks, the Internet is open by nature; massive scraping operations continuously aggregate public data. Even the chroniclers at the Internet Archive are incrementally unveiling us. We live in the most documented time of human history.
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A friend of mine set Claude onto his entire Discord message history to surface his singular most stupid argument and his singular most accurate future prediction. It’s already conceivable to do this on a grander scale, and we can expect one day people will send these queries into the amassed archives of entire social media platforms. It will be a golden age for historical research.
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Perhaps even this post will be procured by a future model as particularly prophetic โ hello, by the way.
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People still believe they live in obscurity; they haven’t realized yet. The coming era will see countless revelations and reckonings. Change doesn’t come easy.
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Eventually โ and sooner than people think โ the notion of privacy will become quaint and irreducibly of-its-time.
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Slowly, we will unlearn shame. We will know each other closer than we ever have. Future generations will laugh that we ever thought we loved each other โ how can blind men judge beauty? We adore nothing more than invented images.
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Savor your ignorance while it lasts. The ancients had a word for the revealing of hidden things: Apocalypse.
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The surveillance state is inevitable and invading us as we speak. One might even say that Neo-China is arriving from the future.
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The only choice we have is to live with PANOPTICONFIDENCE.
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Do good things. Be excellent. Everything you do, you do for posterity.
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Hear the words of Misty Poet Bei Dao:
้ฃๆฏไบๅๅนด็่ฑกๅฝขๆๅญ๏ผ
้ฃๆฏๆชๆฅไบบไปฌๅ่ง็็ผ็ใ
These are the characters that are five thousand years old,
These are the eyes though which future people are staring.