Series: Conspiratopia

Conspiratopia: Chapter 20

On 8 September 2021

The job turned out to be putting toxic waste and stuff into barrels, which was actually totally cool. I mean it was like really no big deal, even. It didn’t seem that dangerous idk. Cause they gave you like all the personal protective equipment. Like disposable face masks and rubber gloves and stuff. So that was rad.

I was on the medical waste transport and disposal team. We mostly worked on autopilot around the rehabilitation complex, emptying trash and dealing with like used needles and stuff. It was kinda nasty sometimes, but it was pretty much fun af to play first-person shooter games with the other staff inside the clinic compounds in VR while on overwrite. Hells yeah. I earned tons of bonuses like that actually.

A lot of the treatment facilities I guess were giving people some pretty hard drugs, idk. I didn’t ask too many questions about the details. Cause who cares. But I saw a lot of like pretty rich looking tourists or shoppers or whatever going in for treatments who looked pretty haggard, and when they came out they were looking way more stoned than me even. Lol.

Apparently the shoppers or whatever were some of the only people at the Conspiratopia Project who were not continuously on overwrite. Though some of them still did it, and some did it a lot. But usually we couldn’t really interact with them in games. So like, whatever games they got to play in VR while on overwrite, apparently they couldn’t see us shooting each other – or them. Which I guess is probably for the best. Because if you’re in there for some kinda crazy drug treatment, you probably don’t want to see holographic simulations inside your head of you being blown up with a missile launcher. Or maybe you do, idk. I think that would probably eff with your head though, you know? It’s hard to even like look at yourself in the mirror if you’re too stoned somtimes. Never mind eating a missile in the face from somebody in a giant cybernetic gorilla-mouse avatar.

I heard from some of the other guys on my work crew after we got off, that like I guess for the Shoppers, they weren’t officially in the Conspiratopia Project. For them, they lived in or I guess were visiting something called Shoppertopia. Which I guess explains why the games and VR and stuff were on different systems. Supposedly there were a bunch of other independent ‘topias in different areas dedicated to different things.

Once the algorithm put you into one of them though, everyone said it was like really hard and stuff to get put into a different one. Like you couldn’t just transfer out, because recruiting was based on all those like crazy personality tests and surveys to figure out the best match. But you could still earn citizenship on whichever ‘topia they put you when you were admitted. And then you could do all kinds of stuff you couldn’t do before. Like new levels in games, and some music and movies you could listen to or watch that you couldn’t before, plus some like foods and flavors and stuff. Plus I guess like laws about which kind of VR you could do were different. It was totally cool. It was like, idk, reality but gamified. Totally rad af.

I was pumped I was gonna level up because of this gig, man. Or at least that’s what they told me would happen, when I got assigned out from smart carts. I didn’t mind the gig itself. It was autopilot and safe anyway, though I did notice after work a few times signing off that my gloves were ripped, and a couple times my finger tips were bleeding because they musta been pricked on something. They took blood tests and a whole buncha other tests on us all the time though, so I wasn’t too worried about. Plus I knew like, we were a very special dedicated efficiency team, and those are like super important and stuff. ‘Topias don’t run without those. Everybody knew that. They weren’t gonna just like let us get hurt or sick or something, because like how would they even replace us?

A week later, I came down with something. My whole crew got super sick, and then they replaced me. No joke. Actually, I heard they nixed the whole team, but apparently they had like no problem at all replacing all the workers finally. Not one bit. I guess I should of known.

Conspiratopia: Chapter 21

By Tim B.

On 8 September 2021

In Other

GETTING SICK IS A CONTRACT BREACH, NEO. YOU KNOW THAT.

I hadn’t actually heard the voice for a while. I was laying awake in the middle of the night on the fold-out couch at my dad’s apartment. I was like coughing and stuff really bad.

Normally there was no voice or anything usually when you did overwriting here. There was just the Menu where you could access whatever you had privileges to or something.

“Yo, my whole team got sick though. It’s not our fault,” I said back out loud. I couldn’t tell if the voice was coming from inside my head or outside.

WHOSE FAULT THEN IS IT, NEO? WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ONE’S HEALTH IF NOT ONESELF?

“But you didn’t have to give us those like bad cheap gloves and shitty working conditions and stuff, y’all. Plus like, we were on autopilot. You were overwriting us. It’s literally your fault and stuff.”

I’M SORRY YOUR OPINIONS ARE SO WRONG AND INVALID, NEO. THAT MUST BE VERY HARD FOR YOU TO HANDLE. IF YOU’D LIKE, WE CAN MAKE AVAILABLE APPROPRIATE DIETARY MODIFICATIONS AND MOOD SUPPLEMENTS IN ORDER TO HELP YOU MANAGE THE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE YOU MUST BE FEELING.

“I thought you just said it was a contract breach and stuff,” I said.

IT IS, NEO. BUT WE RECOGNIZE YOU REMAIN AN INVALUABLE RESOURCE TO OUR SOCIETY, AND CAN MAKE AVAILABLE TO YOU REHABILITATION ACCOMMODATIONS, WHICH WOULD COME WITH A CLEAN SLATE.

“Wait, what? Clean slate like start over?”

EXACTLY, NEO. BE REBORN IN THE CONSPIRATOPIA PROJECT.

“You mean like lose all my credits, and points, and bonuses, and stats and everything?”

THAT IS CORRECT, NEO. A FRESH START. WHAT DO YOU SAY?

“Hell fuck no! I worked hard for that shit. Nobody can just take my stats and stuff away from me. All my items and armor and stuff. Just because I got sick from something on the job? No frickin’ way!”

I’M SORRY YOU HAVE SUCH A NARROW AND SELFISH VIEW OF PROPERTY, NEO. AS PER YOUR CONTRACT, NOTHING IN THE CONSPIRATOPIA PROJECT “BELONGS” TO YOU, NOT EVEN YOU. ALL PROPERTY INCLUDING PHYSICAL, DIGITAL, GENETIC, BIOLOGICAL, AUGMENTED, AND HYBRID IS HELD IN COMMON BY THE PROJECT AND ADMINISTERED BY THE BENEVOLENCE OF THE SAGES, AND FACILITATED BY THE GENEROSITY OF THE FOUR PROVIDERS, ON BEHALF OF AND IN COOPERATION WITH THE NORTHERN GESTALT, UNDER WHOSE EMERGENCY MANDATES WE ARE ETERNALLY AND PERPETUALLY GRANTED LICENSE AND ENTITLEMENT TO ACT ON SUCH MATTERS.

I coughed. “Um… idk wtf that is supposed to mean, but it sounds like a buncha bullshit, if you think about it…”

UM, NO, NEO. IT IS NOT A BUNCH OF QUOTE UNQUOTE BULLSHIT, SO TO SPEAK. I AM AUTHORIZED MAKE YOU START OVER WHETHER YOU WANT TO OR NOT.

“What are you anyway? The government? What the f is even supposed to be happening here? I thought this was supposed to be an assignment to improve efficiency and stuff.”

IT WAS, NEO. AND YOUR TEAM FAILED SPECTACULARLY WHEN IT CAUGHT THE MARTIAN VARIANT. IN ADDITION TO BEING A BREACH OF CONTRACT, GETTING SICK IS NOT VERY EFFICIENT, IS IT NEO?

“Fuck you,” I said. “You made us sick, asshole. I want my money back and stuff. I want to go home.”

WHAT MONEY, NEO? WHAT HOME? WHERE DO YOU THINK IT IS YOU WANT TO GO BACK TO?

“Idk, just like normal life and stuff I guess? Just a regular job and stuff.”

WHY TF WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT SHIT? ARE YOU DUMB? YOU COULDN’T EVEN PLAY GAMES ALL DAY THAT WAY, BRO! COME ON – THAT’S NOT YOU TALKING, NEO. THAT’S THE VARIANT. GET SOME REST, MY DUDE. WE’LL RESET YOU TOMORROW.

“Dude, I don’t want to be reset. I want to be like frickin’ free and stuff. To like play video games the old fashioned way and stuff. With a controller. And to like post on forums about conspiracies and whatnot. And not have everything be filtered. And like no more frickin’ nanites. No more overwriting. No more crazy frickin’ AI’s trying to gaslight me 24/7 into doing god-knows-what…” I started coughing like crazy after that. Damn, I was pissed. And sick.

SO, NEO WANTS THE BLUE PILL AFTER ALL. I KNEW IT. JUST ANOTHER LITTLE BABY SHEEPLE LIKE THE REST, BAAAAH, BAAAAH.

“I’m still a really smart conspiracy guy, yo. I ain’t no frickin’ sheeple and stuff,” I said super furious, especially when they made that baaaaah sound like a baby lamb or whatever. So mad. I felt like I was gonna explode and stuff.

But just then, I woke up.

Wtf.

Where was I and stuff…?

I looked around and I was on a sofa bed still, but it wasn’t my at my dad’s place. It was at my mom’s. Hfs, I was back home again. I took a deep breath, and my cough was gone too.

Wtf.

How did this happen and stuff…?

Was it all just a dream or something? Or did like, the AIs somehow get me back super fast from the island while I was asleep or something, and somehow dump me back down here? I wouldn’t put it past them. Or like, wait, hfs. Was this even real? Or was this some like immersive holographic VR shit or something…?

I got up to turn on the TV, to try to find some news or something. Figure out what day this was, or where I really was or something. Or even like a game show or something. Or like a soap or a sitcom, or some crappy talkshow. Just something boring and normal.

But all I could find on any channel was a black screen, with letters that said:

WELCOME TO THE INTERNET REHABILITATION INSTITUTE. CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR RECENT RESET.

Noooooooo…. all my frickin’ points and stuff. Gone. Just like that.

The screen flashed my stats:

SCORE: 0.

LEVEL: 0.

LIKES: 0.

FOLLOWERS: 0.

POINTS: 0.

COINS: 0.

CREDITS: 0.

TOKENS: 0.

BONUSES: 0.

POWER-UPS: 0.

REFERRALS: 0.

Fuuuuuuuu…. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

I went to try the door upstairs, but it was locked from the other side or something. The lock on my side just turned around and around. It wasn’t quite my mom’s place either and stuff. The details were somehow a little bit wrong or something. But there was still a toilet and super small shower in the back. And a mini-fridge. So I guess whatever happened next, at least it would be like having my own apartment and stuff… Totally cool.

The Truth About the Conspiratopia Project Must Be Told!

By Tim B.

On 26 September 2021

In Other

Even though these politicians who are apparently living in their own parallel universe are vehemently against my new book, Conspiratopia, it appears that another segment of the population is coming to the book’s defense. It is, however, an unexpected group, consisting of a coalition of billionaires who claim that everything contained in the book is in fact quite true and stuff…

Here are their stories:

To be honest, I had no idea that George Soros was a drug user. Big, if true!

Jeff Bezos has a weird quality in this video. Seems almost like an AI himself, don’t you think? Maybe he spent too much time in outer space or something…

And this last video from Google’s CEO appears to explain why Google is suppressing evidence of the Conspiratopia Project from Google Ads and elsewhere. Why am I not surprised at all?

Please, if you’re reading this, and you can do anything to help, make sure you share these videos far and wide on social media and on the blockchain, so that people can know the truth about what’s really happening with the Conspiratopia Project!

Notes on Conspiratopia

By Tim B.

On 23 February 2023

In Other

Conspiratopia was my second “real” (non-AI assisted) book, a novella of around 21K words, give or take. Being a quarter of the size, and much more light-hearted subject matter than The Lost Direction, it was much easier and faster to write. I think I was able to put that book out in about six weeks from start to finish, maybe a little longer. (There’s also a pocket size print version – I’m obsessed with pocket size books.)

It’s a utopian satire; I got into the topic of utopias and their fictional historical examples as a result of writing The Lost Direction & The Quatria Conspiracy, since they deal so much with a fabled lost land. I had a really fun period where I read probably a dozen of the classic utopias, and then out popped this book as my response to that total immersion period. (One of my favorite finds was a book I’d never heard anyone mention, Ecotopia, that was pretty amazing as a utopia vision, despite some pretty cringey plot points. Apparently that book even influenced the founding of the original Green Party.)

The book deals heavily with themes of conspiracies, yes, but also cryptocurrency, spam, fraud, manipulation, and of course, AI. It’s a comedy but also sort of serious. It has a fairly conventional story, if a somewhat ambiguous ending.

It did pretty well on Goodreads, thanks to an aggressive outside the box promotional campaign I did for it. I did a TON of NFT airdrops around the book and got a little press for doing books as NFTs. But the bottom really dropped out of that market, and I don’t care anymore about the underlying technology. I don’t think it’s demonstrated enough long term values to readers or sellers to warrant my further involvement.

The other strand that forms the genesis of this book was my heavy experimentation using a web service called Synthesia (and another called Deepword), to make off-the-shelf low quality “cheapfakes” using the themes from my previous books. While kicking the tires of Synthesia, I found this one character I really liked, who is dressed like a construction worker or a crossing guard or something, and made a lot of vids of him as “super smart conspiracy guy” talking about his life and interests in conspiracies, especially related to Quatria.

All the Conspiracy Dude Videos, Part 1

His storyline ended going pretty deep, and is all documented through these little video vignettes made for something like 25 cents each, or so (I forget – has been a while now). Here’s another page collecting some more:

All the Conspiracy Dude Videos, Part 2

Eventually, we find out he likes Bob Marley & Pink Floyd, works at Walmart, got hoodwinked into a prepper supplies MLM scam, and much more.

Conspiratopia picks up where these videos leave off, and sets conspiracy dude adrift in a world, chronologically speaking, which precedes the hard AI takeover that is featured in many of the AI lore books.

I also did a bunch of cheapfakes using videoclips off YouTube, via a site called Deepword. Here’s the first of three sets:

All the Quatria Celebrity Deepfakes, Part 1

I like those kinds of videos partly because of the crappy looking quality of them, and the weird misaligned AI text to speech voices. I don’t believe anybody is fooled by them, and like that they look sort of like desperate and wrong.

All the Quatria Celebrity Deepfakes, Part 2

Many of the ones in these first two sets feature celebrity of pundit x or y talking about their unlikely voyages to Quatria, which might be a parallel dimension (or something?).

All the Quatria Celebrity Deepfakes, Part 3

These videos also relate to themes I explore in The Big Scrub, and elsewhere, of AIs creating fake multi-media artifacts to fool people and drive human behaviors for their own reasons. Part of what’s fun about it here in these videos, is that it looks like the AIs are doing a pretty shitty job of it still.

The book also heavily references something called the AI Virus (which Matty contracts), which is a concept and alternate reality experiment I made years ago before COVID was a sparkle in a bat’s eye, where I hired a bunch of people on Fiverr to act out little silly scripts saying that an AI had infected their brain to control their behavior. You can watch all those videos below:

Understanding A.I. Virus (2021)

I also later expanded on this concept in an AI lore book called, unsurprisingly, The AI Virus.

Lastly, I used cheapfakes technology to have a bunch of other celebrities come out either for or against the actual book Conspiratopia, in a sort of meta-layer of commentary.

Some douche-y politicians saying it should be banned for being “Unamerican” here:

Should Conspiratopia Be Banned?

And then this set has a bunch of other super rich people saying that not only is the book Conspiratopia good, but some of them talk about being involved with the actual Conspiratopia Project, which itself is part of the AI plan to take over the world.

The Truth About the Conspiratopia Project Must Be Told!

It’s all kind of a haze now, but a lot of these videos were also given away as NFT airdrops. A few of them resold, but they didn’t do huge numbers or net me much of anything; it was more just a way to promote the book that incorporated a bunch of meta-layers relevant to the book’s actual content. Like I said, I don’t care about NFTs now, and even deleted my Opensea account (as much as you can delete it anyway).

There are a number of later AI lore books that definitely expand on things from the Conspiratopia book universe (multiverse?). None of them are really a comedy though, like the original. I’ll probably miss a few, but off the top of my head, I think these ones are probably related (tbh, it’s all a jumble to me now after 67 AI-assisted books). I think within the chronology of that world, they mostly take place well after the events of Conspiratopia:

And probably some others I’m missing.

In any event, I’d love to do a sequel (or several) to Conspiratopia, written with or without the help of AI, I don’t know yet… Like a “Return to Conspiratopia,” a common enough trope in the utopian genre.

Okay, that’s all I can think of for that book. Scattered throughout this blog are other rabbit holes you can follow down the AI lore books. There’s no right or wrong entry point into them, and everyone will have their own experience as they traverse the nodes of the distributed narrative worlds I’ve been working on.

See you on the other side!

Notes on Anxietopia

By Tim B.

On 12 December 2023

In Other

Anxietopia is the 119th volume in the AI Lore Books series. It is in many ways sort of a shorter spiritual successor of Conspiratopia, the book that started much of this worldbuilding in the first place. They at least exist in the same imagined universe, where inscrutable AIs run people through bizarre scams and experiments and social control games to shape human society into some ideal-to-AIs outcome.

In this one, a user of the WorryWatts system has a chaotic falling out with consensus reality when his personal stress energy harvesting system goes haywire.

One thing that the current batch of LLMs especially suck at is tight control and sudden flips and dips in tone, nested, double, and triple meanings, until you don’t know which end is up anymore. That kind of weirdness has been bred out of all the commercial ones at least. You can get it with some of the free ones occasionally if the stars and nebulous spirits are aligned while you feed it material for completions. But for the kinds of high-wire twists and turns in tones and registers that I consider intrinsic to the Conspiratopia style, it’s just not possible to pack all those punches into largely AI-driven text, so a lot of this is heavily human-first, with strong hands on changes where its human second.

There’s a certain amount of VOMISA style semantic drift and deformation, which is a topic I want to get into separately another time, but it’s more dialed down and readable for the most part, with a more or less discernible narrative storyline, and even dare I say an ending, which is rare for these. Albeit it is very open-ended nonetheless. I liked what someone said once long ago about my original blog incarnation, something about my writing to the effect of “he doesn’t make it easy on the reader” – and I hope that is true, and mostly in the right cases still, in these current AI-enabled explorations and world-building thunks.

Preview art for this one below. There are a lot of advertising style images in this volume, which feels like it amplifies and offsets the crazed narrator vibe that permeates through the rest as their reality breaks down, yet marketing slogans remain.

In many ways, I would have liked to have had the time to go through and spend as much time exploring this pocket-universe of Anxietopia, as I did its forebear, which took about six weeks to write, and is about five or six times the length of this one. But there are a lot of things I’m juggling, and projects I’m getting out the door all at once right now.

Nothing precludes me from one day coming back to this or any of my AI Lore volumes, and making them better, longer, a different form or direction, etc. I doubt I will, but it’s always a door I leave open in my mind, that in the future, these will take different forms than they take now. That this is still just the earliest stages of this new intertextual hyperreal narrative mode emerging… using and subverting the old forms while the new are born…

Topia Bundle Special Offer

By Tim B.

On 28 February 2024

In Other

I’m trying out Gumroad’s new option to sell bundles of products together, and am offering for sale at a discounted price a collection of books set in the “Topia” sub-universe of the larger AI Lore books series.

You can pick up the bundle here.

Regular value for the included titles is ~$13 (USD) and this is on sale for ~$8.

Only 10 sets will be sold.

The main books included are three of my best, I think:

Conspiratopia is 100% human-written, fwiw. And it shows the descent of a young man into a manipulative dystopian scheme where AIs are covertly taking over the world, one mind at a time. It’s the book that inspired the rest of the AI Lore books, in effect. Anxietopia and Relaxatopia are probably more like 65% human-written, plus or minus, and they pick up on this tale, but significantly distorting it in strange new directions. Conspiratopia is not illustrated, but the others are. Incidentally, Relaxatopia is the book that got me BANNED FROM MIDJOURNEY. Oooh, controversial!

As a bonus, the collection also includes The Death Machines, which takes place in this Topia world, but is very different stylistically than the others. It also includes the free sampler Postcards from Dystopia to get readers acquainted with other nearby neighborhoods in this multiverse.

Enjoy!

Notes on Uncel

By Tim B.

On 15 August 2024

In Other

Uncel is the 119th installment in the AI Lore books, which were recently featured in a Paris literary publication, Actualitté. Uncel follows the continuing adventures of the character/narrator sketched out in Relaxatopia, Anxietopia, and Conspiratopia. (These are also all available with some bonus items at a discount as part of the Topia Collection here; only 5 more copies of that bundle will ever be sold, btw.)

Uncel is the first new AI Lore book I’ve put together since January, which is when I started working with my French publisher, Typophilia. Now that the French print editions are starting to launch (starting with The Quatria Conspiracy), it felt like a good moment to go back to some new work.

Not having access to Midjourney anymore has also been a contributing factor in the slowdown (though, at the same time, it also inspired me to go back to painting, which has been really rewarding). The other AI image generators sometimes leave a lot to be desired, but I managed to put together an art set of 65 images in this book using Dalle3, Ideogram, Stable Diffusion and Playground AI. Possibly a Flux and a Leonardo or two might have snuck in, but I didn’t keep careful track of which are which, because really who cares.

The book’s title, Uncel, is a play on “incel” or involuntary celibate, someone who doesn’t have sex – not because they choose that, but because they can’t get any. Uncel imagines a world several steps beyond that, where the protagonist doesn’t even know what sex is. All they can see of their reproductive organs is a sort of blurry digitized haze, because they lack the premium subscription plans which would give them access to this level of user experience. The book is kind of a farce about the impossibility of getting “satisfaction” of several kinds, including through elaborate interactions with (possibly automated) customer service agents which go round and round in circles, ending in psychosis and dissolution – both perfectly logical terminal points in the advanced stage of the Kali Yuga depicted in this book. It’s bleak, but I like to think it’s a “fun” bleak!

Here’s a more vanilla blurb from ChatGPT:

In a future where life is governed by subscription plans, one user struggles to access an elusive upgrade: the experience of sex. Amid blurry visions and endless customer service loops, they question what it means to truly connect in a world where everything is controlled.

Incidentally, I don’t think I really used ChatGPT to help write any of this one. This book makes use heavily of Mistral, via Textsynth completions. There’s probably more to say here, but I’m just getting back into the swing of new books again. So the most important thing is just to get this one out the door and start the next. Enjoy!