2024-

2024-01-06 e
EPIPHANY V

People talk about bots, and they’re certainly concerning.

But what’s more concerning are the thousands (or millions) of people totally captured by some kind of self-replicating brain virus… that just post endless, empty content into the void.

Clearly real people, but something’s wrong. It’s almost uncanny, or liminal. Like walking into Innsmouth and you can tell that the people are just not quite right. [Editor's Note: See, H. P. Lovecraft, Shadow Over Innsmouth.]

X is a very odd platform to encounter this type on, with its focus on text. You usually can’t tell until you look at their profile and realize: “oh, this isn’t a bot, it’s a real person doing an uncanny, accidental impression of one.”

It’s probably the safest platform for them, though — on TikTok or instagram they’ll occasionally post something that accidentally intersects with the Topic Of The Day, or is embarrassing in a way they don’t fully understand, and experience some kind of alien humiliation by hordes of hyper-online users who are “in on the joke.”

But here, they’re just uncanny.

People talk about bots, and they’re certainly concerning.

But what’s more concerning are the thousands (or millions) of people totally captured by some kind of self-replicating brain virus… that just post endless, empty content into the void.

Clearly real people, but… pic.twitter.com/vB68r1ANIc

— Alaric The Barbarian (@0xAlaric) January 6, 2024

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