> The simplicity and minimalism of what it takes has radically devalued personhood. The “essence” of who you are, the part that wants to feel “seen” and is able

> The simplicity and minimalism of what it takes has radically devalued personhood. The “essence” of who you are, the part that wants to feel “seen” and is able to be “seen” is no longer special. Seeing and being seen is apparently just neurotic streams of interleaved text flowing across a screen. Not some kind of ineffable communion only humans are uniquely spiritually capable of. > This has been most surprising insight for me: apparently text is all you need to create personhood. Congratulations on discovering online personas are shallow as indeed most people are shallow and text captures enough of them that we can easily fill in the blanks. > I can imagine future humans going off on “personhood rewrite retreats” where they spend time immersed with a bunch of AIs that help them bootstrap into fresh new ways of seeing and being seen, literally rewriting themselves into new persons, if not new beings. It will be no stranger than a kid moving to a new school and choosing a whole new personality among new friends. The ability to arbitrarily slip in and out of personhoods will no longer be limited to skilled actors. We’ll all be able to do it. The latest episode of South Park is about a kid going to a personal brand consultancy (who reduce everybody to four simple words, the forth always being "victim") to improve his social standing + Megan/Harry loudly demanding everybody respect their privacy and losing their minds at being ignored. This is nothing new. People are shallow phonies and interacting via text brings out the worst out of most of them. There are no humans online, only avatars. And AI chat bots are sufficiently adept at mimickery to poke through that little hypocrisy bubble. You are being out Kardashianed. Just like offline some people can be effectively replaced by a scarecrow. It is upsetting to those who spend too much time online and have underdeveloped personalities and overdeveloped personas. Text is not all you need. Not so long ago there hardly was any text in the world and most people were illiterate. And yet plenty of humans roamed the earth. So yes, if you're a simpleton online it has suddenly become hard to pretend your output has any value. Basic Bitch = Basic Bing.