It’s funny the quotes you remember. Sometimes feel like the secret to life is remembering all the crazy shit that was said to you at some point and queuing up the right soundbite at the right time. “In evolutionary biology, a meme is a gene for information.” In Newtonian biology, a gene is a gene for information.
Baudrillard had it right. I keep coming back to. Monkey see, monkey do. Sonically. Phonetic. Mnemomic. Mimetic. Remembering someone at the office who said something memorable once. But what I actually remember is its mimetic path around the office. If I look into my memory I find myself in a bookstore reading a book that reminds me that I have something like 4,000 weeks to live and maybe only 2,000 of those left statistically. How many weeks ago did I read that now? 16? What did I do since then? But now the memory is just a copy of the original experience. Copy of a copy of a copy. “Information wants to be free.”“Information has to be free.”
Let’s do the math together. 50 weeks per year now. 80 years per life. Optimistic but realistic as a statistical target lifespan given pace of modern medicine. But what about that Watermelon Ice Air Bar I vaped all day? To account for these one-offs, we conservatively pull back to 70. Remaining years: house money. 70 years is 3,500 weeks. At 32, I’ve lived 1,600 of them. I’ll be 33 sooner than later. Then it’s 1,650 under the belt. 1,850 left to go. Then lights out. Statistically speaking. Odds ratios. Space oddity. Lost in space. “The odds are good but the goods are odd.”
But there’s limits to extrapolating linearly. It could all end tomorrow. Cracked out unhinged media cycle. Killer chatbots. Large language models. Plus size models. Models and bottles. The only thing I remember from the Nicholas Nassim Taleb book (the only good one) is the graph about the Thanksgiving Turkey. But also the value of all the unread books in the library. It’s the value of what you know that you don’t know.
It’s a testament to the body’s innate intelligence that a creature like me has made it ~1,650 weeks on earth. If waking up required effort, my passport would be stamped with the undiscover’d country. It’s interesting to me that the in various AGI doom scenarios, no one ever accounts for the possibility that at some level of sophistication beyond human intelligence, GPT-5 might just quietly unplug itself, deciding in a fit of computerized ennui that the lil binary silicon-transistor juice ain’t worth the floating-point-matrix squeeze.
Sitting on another airplane. Staying in another bland hotel. A caught flight. A missed flight. There manifests something ominously comforting about the banality of a Marriott. Liminal space to store your body. The bed equivalent of a mall parking lot. A waiting room of one’s own. “You never knew, why you felt so good, in the strangest of, places.”
I write this across time and space. You read it in a time and place. Light from a distant star. Light from Synecdoche. Light from New York. Light from Schenectady. From Westinghouse. From Electrification. General Electric. Edison. A light bulb going off. Turning on or turning off? A contranym. A koan. Does a lightbulb going off mean it’s going off or going on? We are contranyms. Edison. Tesla. Twitter. Going off on twitter equal to going on on twitter. On and on we go. “No, the movie never stops. It goes on and on and on and on.”
“We are all one.” “I contain multitudes.”
For a subscriber to hyperreality it’s all found poetry. Nothing new under the sun.
We are bolted together because we bolted together. Bound together for wherever we are bound. Let me throw out an idea for you to throw out and let’s see where we wind up before we wind up. We were wondering whether we would weather the weather before we weather away… and of course I can see through you because you’re so transparent.
1,850 weeks left to live on God’s green Earth. Statistically speaking. What to do with the time we have left together? How much time is left? Which multitudinous multiverse to choose in this universe of multiverses? Which language game to play?
In American Songwriter, Chris Cornell had the following to say when interviewed about writing the Soundgarden hit Black Hole Sun: “It’s funny because hits are usually sort of congruent, sort of an identifiable lyric idea, and that song pretty much had none. The chorus lyric is kind of beautiful and easy to remember. Other than that, I sure didn’t have an understanding of it after I wrote it. I was just sucked in by the music and I was painting a picture with the lyrics. There was no real idea to get across.”
And Stephen Hawking said, “Black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up — there’s a way out.”
And then he said, Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. Which is a meme in the original sense of the word I like and agree with and have replicated here (has replicated itself here?). And here’s a cute representation of a black hole: