Life in the Dirt
Henry's got a pub credit! YAAAYYY
As of today, I have my first writer’s credit in a Sci-fi magazine! Please hold your applause until the end, it’s embarrassing when I can’t hear myself speak.
First thing’s first, where is it? Well, it’s called “Life in the Dirt” and it’s been published in Aurealis Magazine #173. You can purchase yourself a copy for USD$2.99 here:
BUY MY STORY HERE
Also, it has a FREAKIN CYBERPUNK SAMURAI on the cover! How cool!
About the story!
Around this time last year, I wrote a piece for a competition callout for (for the project that became their excellent piece of work, Thank you for Joining the Algorithm). Ultimately, my story wasn’t used in this anthology, but the stories in there are wild and weird in the particular way that Tenebrous does so well.
I was really happy with my story though, so I shopped it around and I was extremely pleased when Aurealis picked it up.
One of the things that I’ve been feeling about the way our lives work with the ingrained use of technology (becoming more apparent as maladaptive genAI products get foisted onto us at every turn) is how the attitude to technology has changed in my lifetime.
I love tinkering with computers. I even built one last year out of transistor ICs and breadboards (following the excellent instructional series by Ben Eater ). Admittedly, I’m a humungous nerd and always will be, but I enjoy knowing how these machines work. They’re marvels of human ingenuity. Other than that, though? I think computers are a tool.
You (or more likely, somebody else) writes some software. That software allows you to produce things efficiently. I don’t have to handwrite this story and deliver it to every one of my subscribers. I don’t have to start over every time I make one of my (many, many) spelling or grammatical errors. A digital artist can undo, paint over, separate layers, scale, and do all sorts of other things that would be utterly painstaking to do with physical media. Same for music.
My point is, all of these things are achievable because the machine is a tool. The machine allows us to modify our efforts with more efficiency than we could before. That, more than anything, is the great thing about using a computer. The second thing is its revolution of communication, and that is undeniably amazing as well, but honestly? I remember writing out maths homework by hand, and I will take a spreadsheet any day of the week while I’m at work.
What I see from Silicon Valley, from the likes of Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, and the blue-check toadies that swamp his replies, is not an appreciation for the computer as a generalist tool which can reduce redundant labour.
I see the worship of technology itself.
Computers are cool, but a computer loaded with an operating system is not useful. it’s use has always been applied by the people at the helm, tapping on their keyboards or drawing on their tablets or some other input device. The computer is an enabler, but in the last few years the dominant narrative hasn’t been “This is something that will make your work easier, whatever it is”, it’s become “Your work is irrelevant, the machine can and does know all.”
I’m being a little facetious, but not too much. Sam Altman asked for a trillion dollars last year to research how to “defend” the supposed “nearly here” onslaught against Artificial General Intelligence. People of all ages are going to ChatGPT and other AIs for advice. They treat it like an oracle, beseeching it for wisdom, advice and ideas. Even discounting that, I know that most people talk about “their algorithm” on Instagram and TikTok as though it’s an entity unto itself, as though the algorithm is carefully before deciding what entertainment you’d enjoy.
None of this is true, of course. Sam Altman is an idiot but he has a fat bank account, which for some reason means he’s allowed to open his mouth in places where people will listen. ChatGPT can’t think or offer advice beyond that which has been offered before. Our algorithms, too, reduce us to a series of vectors and numerical weights and map us onto an enormous web of content preferences. It no more “decides” what to send us than the wind “decides” when the next gust is coming.
But this shift, this idea of moving from a world where the computer was a machine to a world where a computer is an oracle, got me thinking: What happens when everyone forgets? Where we fall completely into the trap of mere subsistence, while the machines become self-sufficient, if not self-aware. If the lay person can’t understand a lot of our technology now, what happens when its “intelligence” becomes truly arcane and enigmatic, a real structure that forces us into a position of willing, if not enthusiastic servitude?
I hadn’t read it at the time, but Yanis Varoufakis touches on this idea of digital fiefdoms in Technofeudalism. In his postulation, cloud capital is run by individual humans or corporate entities. In my story, we are one step removed even from that. Everyone lives, barely surviving, being fed the scraps cultivated by the machine, while we dance for the Algorithm without knowing why. And at its whims, it comes to our world and devours us, because the machine must be fed, lest it run out of energy.
We would become less than ourselves. Less than our community. Less than our ideas. Less than our hopes and dreams. We would only have our life. Our Life in the Dirt.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to support my writing, you can subscribe or share this article with people, or you can send me a tip at my Ko-Fi.
The rest of my work can be found at www.henryneilsen.com
