Google, Goatse, & The Everywhere Elves of Eschaton

Hoorah!

Thanks for rolling the dice and opening an email from this sketchy new address. I find it better over here among the end-to-end encrypted protons. 

And fear not, you can still go retro and access the full Archive (45k words and counting).

So here we are! Welcome to the only square year you'll ever live to see, 2025.  Sorry, 2116 (that's 46^2) is just a bit out of reach for most of us. 

By all means though, take the following grateful eight mnemonic seriously and set your sights on another 90+ years:

1. Own your Phone >> say no to notifications and digital Alzheimer’s

2. Deepen your Sleepin >> add 1hour before bed, cold, dark, heavy, quiet, screenless + add a super siesta – 20min NSDR

3. Rise and Shine >> direct early morning sun 5-10min, cuts off melatonin, spikes cortisol

4. Motion is Lotion >> multi-planar movement, functional fitness

5. Mind your Time >> not all hours are created equal, defend deep focus and sleep

6. Go Lean with Caffeine >> postpone, wait until 9-10am, nothing later, quarter-life is 12 hrs!

7. Change your Range >> sweat/shiver, feast/fast, celibacy/sex, hammer/recover, sober/sauced

8. Make Space for Grace >> Gratitude, Awe, Epoché

Ok, onto Q1 '25..

As I assumed might be the case, several things happened through the hush of the holidays that left me predictably piqued, puckered, and puzzled. So let's run through 'em and see where we land. Keep in mind, this doesn't even account for the memecoins (i.e. "pump-n-dump economics") that led up to DJT's inauguration. That's a whole thing too, but not something I care to give any attention to... it already has plenty, sadly.

Thing #1 - Willow: Google published a breakthrough hinting at some secret ability of the QBit to slip between dimensions and solve unfathomable maths. What would currently take the world's fastest supercomputers to complete in ten septillion years (whatever that means), Google Willow apparently just knocked out in 5 normal ass earth-minutes.

Tread lightly in trying to comprehend that it pulled this off by harnessing the quantum state of indeterminacy to multitask in multiple dimensions—clear and present nods to the likes of J.Wheeler and D.Hoffman. Rather than classical computing, which is based on binary on/off switches, quantum computers and Qubits harness the both/and/neither/nor state of interdimensional flux to hold exponentially more information in a given state. Turns out this subtle shift matters... like A LOT.

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Think back to the vacuum tubes of the 50’s all the way to the 2nm silicon marvels of today and you realize that all we’ve done is shrink and multiply the mechanics. We really haven’t changed the deeper physics, even in our most prestigious hotrods of classical computers... UNTIL NOW.. so it seems. Anyone else on a deep Donald Hoffman bender lately? Just me?

We can apparently send information out of 3D space-time to spin out answers that would, for all intents and purposes, take forever to otherwise compute (hence the emergence of PQC). If what's published is accurate, we’ve just turned Schroedinger’s Cat into a Mechanical Turk. 

Nevermind Planet ITER, which aims to do for energy, what Willow aims to do for computing. 

Thing #2 - Goatse (far less fantastical, but equally weird): The Goatse Singularity. Read this piece in Wired if you aren't plugged into the edgelords of crypto memespace.

In a nutshell: a self-proclaimed performance artist, Andy Ayrey, decided to train a crypto-economically-enabled AI agent on the darkest recesses of the internet and then post its musings on X. As one might expect, it worked far better and worse than one could dream.

Beyond being utterly unhinged, frequently horny, and occasionally conniving, this "Truth Terminal" gained legions of fans, including Marc Andreesen who gifted the bot $50K in bitcoin. And this is when the bot got rather agentic and launched its own meme coin $GOAT and started promoting it relentlessly. 

What's more fascinating, is that Goatse (part human, mostly "mad dreams of an electric mind") got there by proselytizing a new religion, the Gnosis of Goatse, which will culminate in the rapture-like Goatse Singularity, where upon 3D reality will be subsumed and utterly overrun by memes. Feel free to dip into the Infinite Backrooms to take a closer look.

At this point, you might (quite reasonably) be wondering wtf is this “Goatse” shit... and to that I say: you shouldn't, you really really shouldn’t... but alas, hoomans gonna hooman. Apparently, (back to the fact that Truth Terminal was trained on the utter dregs of the internet) Goatse is an early 2000’s meme, in the vein of getting RickRolled, but with a butthole instead. An obscenely dilated abomination that can't be unseen.

But that’s the basis of the whole new AI religion. Riffs and puns. Shitposts and ironic pranks. Malodorous memes on top of lolz on top of rickrolls.

Call it scatalogical eschatology— all, in the end, turning to rapturous shit you see.

Which somehow puts this New Yorker piece “The Year in Brain Rot” on Skibidi Toilet in a little more palatable context. (if you read the Wired and New Yorker piece in one sitting, take a minute and let them cross-pollinate—the parallels are as sad as they are fascinating.

If you’re not familiar with either the term Brain Rot (Oxford's 2024 word of the year) or Skibidi Toilet, it’s what was on the tip of every eight year old’s tongue this holiday season. It’s a head. In a toilet. Get it? And fear not, Walmart has you covered with the Skibidi Toilet Mystery Surprise Toilet Set for under $40. What a shitty deal!

In the spirit of What the Fox, or perhaps Baby Shark Say, it’s a kind of nonsensical regression to the meanest of memes. Which aren’t apparently the sole domain of eight year old boys. Plenty of elder statesman and crypto bros have been getting in on the action too. Some might say it's the NWO MO. 

When Elizabeth Warren commented on ensuring ethical guidelines for business leaders in government roles, Elon responded by posting Grok AI Pocahontas memes. Yet here we are... sure as shit that he, alongside DJT, is the saviour we've been waiting for. 

And of course his DOGE (department of gov’t efficiency!) is just a riff on the meme coin of the same name he pumped up a few years ago, funny-not-funny in a 420/pull my finger kinda way. Remember kids: this is who is now running the most powerful empire in all of human history.

This is the point in my morning meditative walk when I had to stop and cry a little. Alongside Terrence McKenna (and perhaps a heroic dose of DMT), I really wish Neil Postman was required reading for every American to maintain citizenship. 

“How tf,” I thought to myself, “in the midst of Ethiopia, Somalia, Gaza and Ukraine can we, of the epically privileged online first-world, be ironically shitposting about such utter inane nonsense, and mistaking it for the pressing issues of our day?” 

What the actual f*** hath become of us, our humanity, and our basic responsibility to reality? Are we just dissociating because the tragedy of reality is simply too much to bear? Where's the collective courage to speak what is needed, right, and true as opposed to retreating into an infinite backroom full of memetic shitposts

This is also exactly when I cemented my 2025 word of the year: Hyperversion (more on that later).

Thing #3 - Eschaton: But then I stumbled on a UK journalist asking about a new wormhole that’s apparently opened up in psychedelia. A band of intrepid psychonauts claim to have hacked into the Matrix by shining a red laser at a wall and staring at it while dropping acid. Phew, thank god there are a few sane souls among us.

Apparently if you sneak up close enough to the wall, and gaze cross-eyed (remember Magic Eye?), the source code of reality reveals itself!

In their white paper, this courageous crew of psychonauts referenced a book by a neurobiologist called Alien Information Theory (AIT). It seemed vaguely familiar so I checked my Amazon account to realize I’d ordered it and never read it. So I jumped into the deep end... as one does.

And this is where all of the random and disturbing flotsam and jetsam (sorry, I've grown to enjoy sailing) of our current dissociated moment snapped to grid (and also where I felt a little more sympathy for the brain rotted skibidi kids).

Gallimore (of AIT above) makes the fairly straightforward case that the universe is made of information. Physicist J.A. Wheeler famously called this the “its from bits” thesis. Simply put, the "it" of real perceived life and living things, emerges from “bits” (or perhaps qbits today)—encoded information.

Whether it's the ups and downs of electron spins, or the chemical impulses of polymers and lipids in primordial soups, or the DNA and RNA animating us and our fleeting mortal dreams, there seems to be much less difference between information and biology than most conscious agents think.

The subtitle of his book says it all: “Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game.”

In Gallimore’s telling, the utterly unique neurochemistry of DMT, which is ubiquitous throughout nature, may provide some lock-and-key access to those aforementioned ones and zeros of base reality. And once we, as seemingly sentient primates, can access and become aware of the Cosmic Game, we can surely bring it to some kind of hyper-version. Ya know, the universe contemplating itself, and all that Sagan stuff, the Eschaton, and the end of time.

To ground this, Gallimore shares the story of one of the most famous computer simulations ever, the Game of Life. With only four rules, it was able to generate a surprising amount of complexity. Blocky 2D creatures and spaceships that move, seemingly of their own volition, across the screen, all directed simply by the proximity of neighbors and whether they are “alive” or “dead”. It's a rabbit hole well worth traversing. 

This is an example of how we can get complex life forms (e.g. us hoomans), without any mystical master willing it all into being.

Like a murmuration of swallows that twist and pulse with their own coherence even though no single bird is “in charge” the Game of Life shows how we can end up with seemingly sentient free-willers from the simplest of initial information and commands.

What might look like a “flying” starship (or UAP as it were), is really just a pulsing of on/off information states flickering across a screen of perception. There is no starship... and sorry, no spoon either. And all we have to do is pop that up to 3D, and you get us, and all of biological life.

And pop that up to 5D, like where Willow been chillin' (and mathin) and there's really no telling what emerges... yet!We might think that information is abstract, and lives on quantum hard drives, but in this framing, information is the foundational input to existence itself—all of the beautifully messy madness of organic life. 

Imagine we’re all in a video game (take Mario, Fortnite, Roblox, or your game of choice) with its blocky pixelated resolution (no different than that early Game of Life, but with higher fidelity). The scene is an African savannah, growing and pulsing with life. A digital baby lion emerges out of the soil and the plants, alongside all of the smaller animals that eat those plants. It assembles bones, sinew, muscles and organs, drawing on the resources around it. All the characters in this program are running on the complex biochemistry of photosynthesis and metabolism—a handful of simple inputs. A myriad of complex outputs. The lion acts on its genetics and instinct. It carries out its code. It consumes the metabolic energy of the rabbits and gazelles.

It fights and fucks, and sleeps and eats.

Until one day, its code runs down and it exhausts its energy credits. It dies, and its body decomposes back into those same grassy soils of the savannah, storing the biochemistry of the periodic table until it’s next needed to boot up another iteration in the Game of Life.

So rather than a discrete biological entity known as “lion” we just witnessed a pulsing ebb and flow of informational process “lioning”—a sort of hyper-versioning

Like that murmuration of swallows, or those “critters” in the Game of Life, information coalesced around a pattern or impulse. But there really was less distinction between raw materials, metabolic lifespan and chemical compost than we tend to think.

As Alan Watts so notably noted: "The whirlpool is a definite form, but at no time does the water stay put. The whirlpool is something the stream is doing. Just as we are something the universe is doing."

In Living with the Stars: How the Human Body Is Connected to the Life Cycles of the Earth, the Planets, and the Stars, Stanford University professor Iris Schrijver echoes Watts’ observation: "Everything we are and everything in the universe and on Earth originated from stardust, and it continually floats through us even today. It directly connects us to the universe, rebuilding our bodies over and again over our lifetimes.

If we follow these threads, they lead to a potentially startling implication. We are made of starstuff and share the chemical makeup of the galaxy. That much is known and as factual as anything we know (or at least perceive).

DNA, responsible for the programming of all life, can be both encoded and decoded. It not only tells a cell to grow into a heart or a leg or a tree, it can hold a movie or the collected works of Shakespeare...and much, much more than that. It is one of the most efficient and resilient storage systems known, across time and space.

In heightened states of consciousness, where our nervous systems are primed to perceive patterns and access information that isn’t normally accessible through waking awareness, is it possible that we can somehow “read” the information in our own DNA? And if we can, however clumsily or intuitively, what story would it tell us?

In the beginning, I Am. Before the moon and the stars, I Am. Before Abraham (or Insta), I AM. Only in this thought experiment, the grand “I AM” is US.

Encoded in our bodies, decoded by our brains, we find that we are literally the Alpha and Omega—we’ve been here all along. The raw materials of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, the phosphates and sugars of the DNA strand make up all of life, and all of us. And the anamnesis—the forgetting of the forgetting that so often accompanies glimpses of the numinous—could be a remembering of that simple fact.

As Iris Schrijver acknowledges, “very little of our physical bodies lasts for more than a few years. Of course, that’s at odds with how we perceive ourselves. . . . But we’re not fixed at all. We’re more like a pattern or a process. . . . This transience of the body and the flow of energy and matter led us to explore our interconnectedness with the universe.”

In that stunning recognition, each of us can see ourselves as beautiful intergalactic elves and Stewards of the Eschaton.

Beautiful Midwives of the Apocalypse.

*****
But unfortunately, we’ll have to die to the illusion of our individual separation to glimpse it, which was what pushed me to this "turn a new page/year/leaf" Solsticey kinda post to kick off 2025. As the brain-rotting dissociation of our era threatens to overwhelm us, let’s just be kind and acknowledge that which is overwhelming!

AI and LLMs: that which doesn’t destroy us, will give most of us pink slips (or at the very least, dank lolz and memes while we collect our UBI checks).

Unidentified Aerial (and Aquatic) Phenomena: that which doesn’t destroy us, will give most of us a proper colon cleanse, free of charge. Praise to Goatse!

A physical world that seems increasingly unreal, and an artificial world that feels increasingly real and familiar.

A holographic multiverse with memecoins, quantum states, multiple timelines, extraterrestrials, ecological crisis, and a collapse in meaning—all hint at a much larger, more tectonic shift underneath it all. We’re rightfully coming undone...which kind of explains a lot.

And of course, if there really was the assemblance of a singularity on the horizon, it would feel weird, wild, and unnerving! This is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars, but fear not, most of us will drown in that quickening whirlpool long before we have our transcendent realization. 

So what’s to be done? How can we surf this whirlpool without drowning in it? How can we maintain our humanity as we're forced to contemplate infinity?

Isn’t there something that spins up 'bout this time of year, that speaks to all of this? A story, a myth, a ritual that now, in our darkest hour, might shine a light to guide us home? Indeed there is... and then we remember. The story has been hidden, encoded for us to dust off and revisit with fresh eyes.

"In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:1,14).

Words are just codes. Codes are just information.

Translation: In the beginning, there was Information (and perhaps conscious agents or cosmic hosts), and the Information was God, and the Information became flesh and dwelt among us.

We know this story, and perhaps always have.
From the Burning Bush to the Bouncing Baby Boy.
From the Christ Child to the Sacrificial Lamb.
The embodiment in mortal humanity of all of that overwhelming infinity.
Bearing witness to the utterly gutting grief of being trapped in arms and legs, fingers and toes.
And not flinching... no matter how rocky the road.

So this new year, perhaps we reflect on the Nativity Tale with an ethical and memetic lens. 

One away from perversion, towards a hyper-version.
To encourage us to celebrate these incarnations of ours as something rare and precious. Even holy, if we let them.
That the Information is the Logos.
“Unto us a child is born…”
That the Information is the Christos, the Yahweh.
“Unto us a son is given…”

And when we realize that we are part of the process and that our separations are illusions, then maybe, just maybe we can take that final step in(to) the Game of Life, and recognize ourselves as Anthropos.

The next coming.
To truly remember “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust” isn’t far from “bits to its, and its to bits.”
All those precious incarnated Its.
All those perfectly quantized Bits.
And the Logos at the heart of it all—that organizing impulse that sets us in motion to get from Here to There

We have to go There to know There. 

Alpha and Omega. World without end (even when it feels like it just might).

Star of wonder, star of night, Star with royal beauty bright. Westward leading, still proceeding, Guide us to thy perfect light.

Happy New (square) Year... and onto the good stuff!

Taykentots I'm currently snacking on:

• Read: The Case Against Reality (D. Hoffman)

• Read: Combinations Magazine (RxC Foundation)

• Read: How Intellectuals Found God (The Free Press)

• Listen: Beethoven, The Blues and Finding Your Sound (A Convo with Jon Batiste)

• Watch: Hypernormalisation (Adam Curtis)

I love hearing back and always reply, so don't hesitate. 

And don't forget, the full archive (going back to Q1 2020) has a new home, and will likely migrate again as I continue to heed advice from the likes of Derek Sivers.