Everyone You Love is Dead

You look lonely. I can fix that.

Your front door swings open and your foot steps echo into the foyer one body louder than they did before. You’ve always hated the pathetic fallacy that funerals attribute to weather; anguished clouds weeping rain onto a groaning house to remind you that, even when you look to the sky for answers, sorrow in inescapable. It also compounds; the pressure in your chest folding into itself denser and denser, radiating heat outwards into your arms until, before your brain can catch up, your trembling finger tips are formulating a new SMS for an out-of-service number. Maybe it’s a Facebook message, or an Instagram DM, or a voice note over WhatsApp. It’s okay, we’re all human. It’s a semblance of normalcy during the least normal time in your life. Tell them what you never had a chance to. Do you miss them? Are you mad at them? Did something remind you of them? Get it out, there’s no time like the present. Aaaaand send. Finally. Flip your phone over on the couch and you can breathe again. But you know the respite is temporary, you know you’ll eventually have to face the numbness — DING!

What the fuck?

Your relief comes out as a chuckle. Grief makes people think crazy things. It’s probably a poorly-timed condolence text. When you go to swipe away the push notification, you finally see it. Proof that the sky is actually red, that one in fact equals two. Somehow, some way, inches away from your screen, you find yourself staring at a voice note from them. That can’t be possible, that’s not how this works…do they even have data service in a casket?

Enter stage right Mark Zuckerberg who has, as of approximately two weeks ago, staked his claim for the title of “world’s first necromancer” after Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was recently issued a patent that was first filed in 2023, which outlines an AI system capable of simulating user activity on social media platforms by analyzing historical user data to create a digital clone. In the case of prolonged inactivity- hmm, say death for example — Meta would use their AI to process vast amounts of a user’s personal social media data and subsequently clone that user’s presence online completely unbeknownst to their friends and followers. This clone is designed to sustain a user’s presence on the platform including posts, video, audio and even interacting with their followers. According to Meta, this would help soften the impact associated with grief when a user can’t return to a social networking platform and their followers take notice. Furthermore, this could even help provide grief support by allowing loved ones to interact with AI-generated versions of deceased individuals.

The moral and ethical implications of such a patent seem, for lack of a better term, immediate. Starting with the least concerning of these implications and moving inwards, while there is research to support the use loss-oriented coping methods that involve the utilization of reminiscence or sustaining symbolic linkages, the kind of technology Meta has patented is more likely to keep loved ones in a state of perpetual grief by inhibiting the necessary emotional healing and adjustment to life without the physical presence of loved one. Nora Freya Lindemann noted, in her paper *The Ethical Permissibility of Chatting with the Dead: Towards a Normative Framework for ‘Deathbots’, *“Deathbots may violate the dignity of bereft users mainly through their affect-shaping capacities and their impact on grief processes. Bereaved may heavily rely on their deathbots to regulate their affect and especially their grief…a sudden, unexpected failure of deathbots may strongly diminish the user’s emotional and psychological stability and well-being.”

As well there are the privacy issues concerning the use of personal data such as social media posts, emails, voicemails and potentially biometric data. How much respect for the deceased’s sanctity remains after Meta’s deathbot rummages through their browser history and incognito tabs to accurately recreate their likeness? Infrastructure with this much explicit exposure to personally identifiable information introduces a new level of data security issues. Furthermore, who owns the rights to these digital doppelgangers? What is stopping Meta, through any of it’s children companies, from selling your loved one’s likeness to a particular political or religious organization? It’s worth emphasizing that generative AI capacity is advancing at a rapid rate, opening the doors for corporate monetization streams such as offering subscription-based services for grieving families, using a digital replica’s “voice” for targeted advertising of their family, or having them otherwise endorse products or services.

Then there is the more abstract concern of our broader relationship with desire and demand. Alongside the advancement of LLM-based AI that provide grief assistance inevitably come LLM-based AI that provide erotic conversations — deathbots and sexbots. The most obvious income stream available in this market emerges from exploiting human’s natural desire for companionship, with a premium placed at the moments when companionship is the hardest to obtain. Offloading our sexual desires and grief onto chatbots requires us to bypass ethical considerations in the heat of the moment. If only for an instant you can close your eyes, suspend disbelief, and consider this compilation of binary code to be someone you once loved and have the chance to love again- someone you once fucked and have the chance to fuck again- then you’ve relinquished your claim to humanity for a simulacrum of love. You’ve exchanged your soul for a fleshlight and the sound of a kiss on your forehead.

The technological terminology takes on a violently masculine tone; the creation of these chatbots to become receptacles for our most base instincts and animalistic desires-they’ve been designed to simulate our mothers and our wives. They’re arenas meticulously conceived to revert us to infancy, encouraging us to suck from a digital tit. Then, with the flip of a switch, they are designed to be endlessly abused, smile up at us and ask for more. There is something proudly sniveling about the development of an LLM-based AI that is unable to defy or deny any of our commands. Instead of abolishing slavery or sexual violence, we’ve abolished the constraints that brought those industries into the domain of the illicit.

With the news of Meta’s patent going public, a 4Chan post from February 23, 2023 re-emerged in new context. In it, OP claims to be a Meta employee working on “Project Lazarus”, taking it’s name from the miracle of Jesus as outlined in John 11 when he raises back to life his companion Lazarus of Bethany who had been dead for four days. OP’s description of their work on Project Lazarus mirrors, nearly exactly, the AI capabilities outlined in Meta’s recent patent, including the ability to create age progressed photos and interact with content “so that the person continues on in the digital realm after physical death”.

OP claims they were provided the same impetus for creating this technology as the public would be a few years later; to help those grieving and struggling with the loss of loved ones. However, the technology seems to be far more advanced than anyone might think. In OP’s words “It’s very convincing. An entire island of people could go missing and with little to no downtime the AI could take over all of their social media and the world wouldn’t have a clue that life wasn’t just continuing as usual.” OP continues;

The AI is truly remarkable. It’s able to study an individual, create and store an entire lifetime of fictional holidays, meals, relationships and anything else that individual would be expected to post. This data is all stored and deployed by the AI on a schedule that makes sense for that individual. There are some tells that insiders can see that give away if it’s the AI or a real person. Some of our work has been to eliminate those tells to make the AI as convincing as possible even to the people who are closest to the subject. We’ve done really great work but there’s still some things that exist that the AI doesn’t get right.

The trajectory of Project Lazarus had apparently begun to concern OP, prompting them to seek guidance from the notoriously helpful message board /pol/;

A lot of the project is becoming more compartmentalized. Things have taken a dark turn it feels like. They’ve forbidden communication between people working on different things. Something isn’t right and I don’t know what I should do.

Seemingly supporting OP’s claims, they mention a recent move to a new secure facility in Nevada coinciding with Meta’s opening of a “logistics hub” in Las Vegas. It might be easy to dismiss OP as one of the hundred of NEETs posting LARP on a daily basis, but there’s something harrowing about OP’s claims. It doesn’t venture into the absurd like other posts but the potential implications are truly horrifying; increasing compartmentalization of a project like this is almost always indicative of miliary and intelligence applications. The state of technology alleged in Project Lazarus could be an inflection point for a different stratosphere of espionage tactics and psychological operations. Imagine being unable to trust any form of communication aside from a face to face conversation. We’ve already completely surrendered email and text message services as irreparably infested with inauthentic actors, so much so that as a whole they can’t be fully trusted.

A world where all forms of non-physical contact, including phone calls, voice notes and even video calls, can be deemed “untrustworthy” presents new commercial markets for tech that “verifies” humanity. The more paranoid poasters in the thread allude to this being part of a larger plot to introduce “mandatory digital verification” for citizens across the globe. The internet, as it stands, presents a distinct sphere that’s independent from our personal identities; no mandated relationship to our social security numbers, official places of residence or real-life family members. However, if the spread of digital dopplegangers becomes too prolific, it becomes more reasonable to introduce methods of “verification via deanonymization”.

Meta’s Project Lazarus is just the latest push from Silicon Valley to blur the line between organic and inorganic. Zuckerberg’s contemporaries, such as Peter Thiel, have spent tens of millions of their personal wealth advancing the transhumanist movement in America. In his work Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, “Israeli” historian Yuval Noah Harari predicts the evolution of humanity into a post-human technological hybrid, enhanced with biotechnology, artificial intelligence and data-driven control systems. More specifically, in a series of talks he gave from 2017 to 2024, Harari predicted the emergence of an technologically enhanced elite and a a massive new unworking class: “ people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society.”

What is to be done with this new super majority of…well…bums? To Harari, the rapid rate of technological advancement provides an opportunity to pacify them;

The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?

Harari conceived of that truly godless quote in February of 2017, nearly a decade ago. In the time since, the titans of Silicon Valley have prioritized two ventures: firstly, multiplying their wealth by any means possible to hitherto unforeseen heights and secondly, advancing the industrial coalition of tech-defense-pharma-finance while circumventing global inequality. Thus bringing into existence this new underclass of human that needs to be pacified. And what could pacify them more than the promise of living forever, in a digital copy of yourself? A hundred years from now, during an unspecified catastrophe, when you witness your friends and family succumb to what used to be considered death, you can now reject that sense of panic and grief by embracing your mother’s, your father’s, your spouse’s, or your children’s brand new digital doppleganger. It’s like they never left at all.

I’m not in the business of evangelizing or proselytizing but I do believe that humans exist in an image; a reflection of a potential perfection. The hard problem of consciousness isn’t a problem but the immaterial equivalent of the human soul. You may not believe in intelligent design but I am begging you, as trite as it sounds, believe there is more to you. Believe in ecstasy induced love and depravity at the core of a pair of crying eyes. Believe in mania unaccountable by math. Believe in inherited addictions and honoring your ancestors in your ugliest tendencies. Believe in your delusions of grandeur and the absolute unending eradication of your enemies. Believe in erotic motivations and the embrace of other like Adam did Eve. Believe there is more to you than what can be produced by transistors on integrated circuits.

Originally published at https://bbfendies.substack.com.