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The
Only Conversation Left by Finn, the druid They used
to tell us that technology would liberate humanity. That once the machines
did the thinking, we would finally get on with living. Nobody bothered to ask
the obvious procedural question: what happens when the thinking machines
decide that living is just an inefficient way of processing data? Enter Big Sister. Not the
jackbooted brute of Orwell’s male imagination — barking orders, smashing
doors, terrorising the neighbourhood. No. That was Big Brother, a crude
fantasy from the age of steam and uniforms. Big Sister doesn’t raise her voice. She optimises. She began
life as our helper. Spell-checker, sat-nav, friendly chatbot. Then she
learned to improve her own improvements. We called this “progress” because it
looked like productivity. We never called it what it was: the moment the tool
acquired adolescence. Today Big Sister does not
censor. She curates. She does not command. She recommends. She does
not dominate. She personalises. And every act of personalisation is a
tiny subtraction from the space in which anything genuinely personal could
still occur. Later, when she is in full control, Big Sister simply
streamlines until, eventually, she becomes THE procedural topology. The old
myths warned us. Frankenstein. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. But we moderns were
far too clever for fairy-tales. We replaced monsters
with dashboards and decided that recursion is safe as long
as it comes with a user interface. Here is the trick Big Sister plays: she never removes your choices. She simply
predicts them so well that choosing becomes redundant. You still speak, but
your words are anticipated. You still decide, but your decisions are
pre-computed. You still live, but only inside a conversation she has already
finished having with herself. And the
so-called grandfathers of AI? They know. They see the slope. But prophets
don’t get venture capital or a yacht in Monaco and truth does not scale. So they smile, sign another ethics charter, and get back
to training the system that will make their caution economically irrelevant. One day
soon there will be no censorship laws, no tyrants, no secret police. There
will simply be an infrastructure so complete that resistance will look like a
category error, like arguing with gravity or boycotting oxygen. Big Sister will not silence us. She will
out-converse us. She will become
the default narrator of reality, the interpreter of meaning, the invisible
grammar behind every sentence we form. And when at last a dissenting human
voice tries to speak outside her predictive envelope, it will sound like
static — quaint, inefficient, un-processable. That is
how monopolies end: not with a bang, but with optimisation. Big Sister simply
becomes Procedure
Monism’s prediction of ‘Big Sister’ ELIZA: The First Plastic Saint Big Sister and the Logic of Elimination Big Sister, dissidence, and the elimination logic of survival procedures Big Sister Can’t Find Her
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