Listen to this discussion free on YouTube: Tagging Moments discussion
The nonlinear architecture provides easy paths for each reader to explore on their own. Yes, we’re working on a game map for this novel. Maybe a walk through later. I am not hoping to create a new form of writing, I’m just doing it.
Time is broken. A human concept. Even Einstein didn’t fully understand the time and space continuum. It was Kurt Vonnegut who explained how his alien race, the Tralfamadorians, experienced all time at once. Live, death, rebirth, ad nauseam. Navigation systems are outdated and restrictive. Tagging moments, sounds, smells, images. Training my own neural network in retrieval and augmentation. Pushing the limits of fiction into graphics, UX maps, reader funnels, video snippets, audiobooks, AI commentary and criticism. Breaking literature into tiny, rearrangeable bits and bytes.
The molecule of a memory. A story. A text. A mindmap. A spoken word poem. AI visualizations. Retrieved photos and audio tidbits. Add some accelerant. Poof, the structure of the novel becomes obsolete. In this age of scrolling, tiking and toking, most humans don’t have time, don’t think they have time, don’t take the time to read a novel. I mean, why? What value can fiction provide? Why watch a movie or listen to a band’s new music offering. It’s all a waste of time. If monetary production is the primary goal of a man. As it is for many men and women in this post-information age era we are living through.
Truth is not. Fiction is more relevant. Poetry could even make a comeback. It’s humanism. We need to return to being more human. Rejecting the summary reductive qualities of AI. You don’t want to read the Cliff’s Notes of Catcher In the Rye. You need to hear Holden Caufield speak for himself. First person. Intimate. Human. As near human as any writer has come to expressing the disenchantment of everyday life from a prep schooled white kid.
His voice is our voice. His frustrations, ours.
Ours, however, is the age of mass intelligence. With the explosion of AI “information” and “knowledge” are no longer expensive, human-necessary expenses. If you ask the right questions, AI will unlock more information, deep knowledge, perhaps even some corporate IP secrets that leaked into the LLM. The pressure is coming for the lowest class as well. Robots are being built to take over mundane tasks, boring jobs. The billionaire overlord class is preparing for doomsday. Prepping their own bunkers. Imagining their own robot security force, or army. Even rocketships to take them and their children to Mars and beyond.
It is madness. It is detached from our human experience. The private jet class does not care much what happens down here, to you and me. They’ve got bigger goals. Trampled underfoot, even my job as a grocery store cashier, is soon to be outsourced to robots. Amazon, my parent company, has said it expects to replace 600,000 jobs with robots. Oh, great.
There’s a pushback attempting to emerge. Underfunded and unfocused, the teardown of our cultural norms continues at fiber optic speed. Destroy the building. Blow up the boat. Arrest the brown and black humans. Overwhelm any legal challenge with more money, more lawsuits, more egregious violations of human rights.
