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- cross-posted to:
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image transcript
screenshot of this bluesky post (which you can read without logging in here) from @comraderobot.bsky.social (“Notorious RBMK”) saying:
my friend who still lives in palo alto gave me permission to share this mailer he got.
there’s unhinged and then there’s tech unhinged
image in post has two photos of people wearing EEG electrodes, one xray of a human head, an EEG data plot over a silhouette of a head, and this text:
REM sleep is the next Al
The upcoming era of physical reality integrated with dream worlds advanced by the REMspace startup
- Controlling a smart home from dreams
- Transferring speech from dreams
- Controlling virtual cars from dreams
- Interacting with dream worlds using brain implants
- Social media for sharing dream journals
- Smart sleep masks powered by Al
- Many other breakthroughs from our lab (videos and tech)
Don’t miss the pitch of the year for potential partners and investors
Aug 29th Palo Alto
Above the image is an (inaccurate) BlueSky label saying “Possible tumblr screenshot” with a “hide” button.
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the guy behind this startup:
- (CW bloody photos) “I confirm the information published in the Daily Mail. On May 17, 2023, I performed by myself trepanation, electrode implantation, and electrical stimulation of my brain’s motor cortex. I needed it to test brain stimulation during lucid dreaming”
- https://www.newsweek.com/russian-implants-chip-brain-control-dreams-hospital-1814256
The intrusion of capitalism into sleep is a final frontier of absolute exploitation. Why work 8 hours a day when you can work 24 hours a day? Why use vast banks of computer servers to run AI models when you can capture the most efficient and powerful ‘computer’ to ever exist: the human brain. Why provide for housing and recreation when you can lock people in permanent dream states, where they can provide intellectual labor and live in dreamworlds while their physical brain is kept alive through an IV drip.
I am skeptical that any technology trying to directly interface with the slumbering subconscious could work, but I have no doubt that such attempts would be damaging to human health, and would be used to push material imiseration to impossible heights.
The OP did not explicitly call for exploitation of workers, but this is a possibility in Capitalism when a few rich property owning oligarch use their hoarded resources to rig the market incentive system of reward and punishment.
When did
ever show restraint for long? The exploitation of workers is a given because the number must always go up.
Its been like this for a while, in my state its totally legal for you to close at 1am and then open at 5am the following day. If people truly, truly knew the value of sleep on health and function they’d go full prole revolt in a week. All the horrors one can come up for capital are either in place or so nascent one barely notices.
Anyway, as this is right now is just another technobro grift.
I’ve done that shit before, called “clopening” to make it sound cute and fun instead of the often-punitive experience it actually is. Asshole bosses did it to people they hated.
I think that material interfacing with the human subconscious could and should work. I imagine potential applications could be for improving quality of sleep, inducing lucid dreaming, or possibly allowing for physical exercise while unconscious.
You didn’t, or refuse to, imagine likely applications under the current economic system which include even more surveillance and data harvesting, economically coerced “optimization” where people that don’t use the technology are marginalized, and even more decay of overall quality of life because even sleep becomes an exploitable resource for the ruling class.
I would rather not.
Ignorance truly is bliss, isn’t it? Just keep dreaming about the tech treats and willfully ignore what capitalism will do with them at the first opportunity.