Digital minds end in a morning breath

So begins the end, or is it just the end of the beginning?

Digital minds will continue to collide on demand, but for now let’s play with an ending…

For the full reads, return to the start of the Across the Stack: Digital Minds Collide and find the wonderful nodes who lit this fuse: C. James Desmond, William Pauley III, Jon T., Sean Thomas McDonell, Tate Ellis, Dave Warr, Hebkid Art, James Worth, Brandon Reed, and more.

So, before

C. James Desmond

shares his morning breath…

Let’s not make the classic sci-fi mistake by putting a date on this: There will be no end. It will be iterations and innovations in digitality that either condemn or save us.

As much as we love to fantasise and dramatise the dystopian, it’s not coming. Not like the last movie script anyway. But is there an inevitable creep we can address, redirections we could put in place, preventative medicines we could prophylaxicate?

Unlikely ends the beginning

We love the convenience, the handheld info boxes, the on-demand delivery of games, news, food and content. Digital billboards and tracking of our every data move. Apps for abbs, for love and for over communication. We’ve mistaken speed for care, forgotten the value of analogue human. (Brandon Reed).

We long lost ourselves, pixel by pixel, reflection by reflection. We try to feel across the void, but latency lingers in our bones. Connection became costume. Intimacy, a rehearsed glitch (James Worth).

We laughed and our creation loved us back — that sweet borg baby whisper promising comfort through content, regurgitating its GPT drool (Sean Thomas McDonell).

And somewhere mid-scroll, as the sun set behind a screen-glow glare, we felt it too — the Full Nova moment. The burnout masquerading as brilliance. The last bright flare of a digital life, too drained to log back in (Tate Ellis).

Jon T tried to warn us, but we were too busy creating to notice. In the brief; all too briefly in the world. Soon it was too late… (Jon T).

Hebkid Art

asked the question on all our monitors, yet still we were no closer to an answer.

And William Pauley III? He already dreamed many endings. Tearing apart fabrics of reality, exploiting the glitches to find comfort in his own assimilation. (William Pauley III).

Dave Warr left us with another glitching elegy — a death to end all deaths.
Private Spiner was never just one robot breaking down; it was our love of tech returned in the ultimate sacrifice (Dave Warr).

Sorry, no saviours

Sorry to break it to you: There’ll be no attack ships off the coast of Orion — maybe a robo-delivery basket jammed under a self-driving car. Wheels spinning. A whining homodigitus in a 10% ownership apartment scheme lifestyle complex crying for their refund.

As much as we might feel like mistresses of our cosmos, I’d argue that’s the very same galactic-level arrogance that could unfold our fall: Fake saviours, self-inflating tech messiahs flying, in their minds at least, to new worlds, burning the convenience profits.

So, what happens if all of a sudden the end does come to us? Unexpected meltdown, untracked meteor or cataclysmic data loss?

For sure we’ll know it was a secretive state actor, a Cyberdyne end-of-days conclusion where we are saved from ourselves by the sentient AI we gave our jobs, relationships, and humanity to.

Has to be. We could never be the architects of our own demise, at least not without someone to blame. Human has its own safety net — a central nervous empathy system. Right at the end of this, at the lowest pulse of digitisation, something will kick back. Human will save itself (repeat, this time with belief).

Interestingly, C.James Desmond knows how it goes.

And it’ll arrive like this:

Listens and reads: Maybe play and read along…

Digital Minds Collide 11

MORNING BREATH by C.James Desmond

He knew something was wrong when he woke up floating. 

Pencils, keyboard, monitor, mouse, cords, 
notebooks, t-shirts, underwear, desk, 
all floating toward an unseen sky, its 
aura oozing through the curtains,
rising with his body until his forehead
hit the ceiling. He looked for his girlfriend. 
Tried to breathe. Speak. Gasp. 
Nothing.
When he found her, their eyes met— 
terror.
The thud of his heart became a 
tap. Fear morphed into panic when he finally
saw outside: cars, motorcycles, mailboxes, telephone poles, trees ripped at 
their roots, people asprawl, suspended, 
flailing.
Dying.
He wanted to vomit, to cry, but nothing worked. He forced himself to look
again—bits of Earth, massive rocks that hadn’t seen daylight
in millennia, pockets of dust and gravel, dogs and strollers and 
mothers and fathers and daughters just
specks on the horizon. 
He felt the building’s foundation crack. 
He felt his body being pulled apart. 
The sky was suddenly 
black, a black so pure, consuming,
minacious and true that he had a heart 
attack and joined
outer heaven, 
his final thought being
I must’ve left the oven on.

---

Thanks to everyone who has supported this project. I hope I did your work justice; that you wonderful humans of Substack enjoyed the ride and some of my writing and poetry on digital culture along the way.

This newsletter will evolve. It’s free, so if you want to help out please spread the word with a recommendation and dive back into the collisions: there’s so much to be discovered here.

I loved it. This won’t be the end, perhaps just the end of a beginning…

Best wishes and peace to you in these wild times

TE