Corporal Typography, and Biohacking Simulation Theory
Where are my tattoo girls?
Shortly after my secondary school education (so I must have been 13 or 14 at the time), I got a job (graphic designer). I’d walk back home in the evenings, stopping at random makeshift second-hand book sellers along the road, their wares sprawling with musty books, most of them missing more than a few pages.
It was on one of those evenings that I stumbled upon a work of fiction titled “Red Dwarf (Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers)”.
My algorithm for book selection was simple:
do it title make me happy?
do it got a sweet cover?
do it synopsis go brrrr?
(I dunno why my internal algorithm typed the above like an idiot, but let’s avoid discussing that for now).
“Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Travelers” is a title I don’t need to sell you. Heck, it’s better than your “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, and you ate that shit up.
Here’s what my edition looked like:
Just gorgeous.
For the hat trick, here’s the synopsis:
The first lesson Lister learned about space travel was you should never try it. But Lister didn't have a choice. All he remembered was going on a birthday celebration pub crawl through London. When he came to his senses again, with nothing in his pockets but a passport in the name of Emily Berkenstein. So he did the only thing he could. Amazed to discover they would actually hire him, he joined the space corps----and found himself aboard Red Dwarf, a spaceship as big as a small city that, six or seven years from now, would get him back to Earth. What Lister couldn't forsee was that he'd inadvertently signed up for a one--way jaunt three million years into the future---a future which would see him the last living member of the human race, with only a hologram crew mate and a highly evolved cat for company. Of course, that was before the ship broke the light barrier and things began to get really weird...
At 13, I read a story about a man who was lost in the vast infinity of space and trying to return home. Somewhere along the line, all of humanity went extinct, making him the last living human being. The story follows Lister, a man using a biting sense of humor to cope with a deluge of depression and despair.
I’m not sure why, but that story really stuck with me. It’s the one book I’ve re-read the most in my life. For a time, my writing, my art style, and even my sense of humor was a shameless rip-off from this book.
Hell, anyone who remembers my (shelved) animation project, “Nigerians in Space” should now realize I was just looking for an opportunity to transplant this story!
In 2022 I was excited to go on a pub crawl with my engineering team in Serbia because of this book. If there’s any piece of text that’s completely one-shot my life, it’s this book.
So what does this have to do with my getting a tattoo?
Y’see, after Lister wakes up from cryo-sleep to find that millions of years have passed and humans are extinct, he takes command of the ship and discovers a wormhole that can send him back in time to before the earth ends. It takes a lot of doing, but he eventually figures it out, and he and his hologram friend (and cat mutant friend, don’t ask) return to earth.
The hologram and the cat become implausibly wealthy, while Lister settles into a simple life in a tiny little city where he always has the exact change to buy his wife a Christmas day gift.
You see, it’s always Christmas day on earth for Lister.
Lister lives this simple life, old and content, but every once in a while, he’ll feel a burning sensation in his arm. He kept applying ointment to it, and it kept getting worse.
Turns out he was not on earth, had not discovered a wormhole, and was still on the ship, hooked to a game that looks like a VR experience but is really a dissociative drug. Lister, his hologram friend and the mutant cat had, at some point, put on the drugs game and gotten lost in a vivid, shared hallucination.
The game tapped into your deepest desires, which is why the hologram and cat were disgustingly wealthy and powerful, but it turns out Lister just wanted to spend Christmas Eve with the love of his life forever.
Nevertheless, the problem with the game is: while you may be having a blast in your head, you were dying in real life. You were not eating, dehydrated, pooping in place, and just generally decaying. Lister’s Android assistant was doing his best to keep them alive (drip-feeding their slack-jawed faces, etc), and urgently trying to snap them out of the game.
Yanking the headsets would put the addicts into a state of shock that would kill them instantly, so that was not an option.
The android settled for burning a message into Lister’s arm, which was causing him the pain in the simulation.
One day he traces the line of pain, and it spelled out “U = BTL” in ointment.
The game is called “Better than Life'“, and the android was telling Lister “you are in Better than Life. Please snap out of it”.
Lately, our simulations have started to get so good they’re replacing the real thing. Social media has killed the group hang. When artists release songs, people barely listen to it, and instead celebrate their favorite artists purely off the back of bot-assisted streams. Dead internet theory is at an all time high.
We don’t watch games but discuss highlights with conviction. Our LLMs have gotten so good at pretending to be human they’re turning real human brains into sludge. AI musicians and authors are selling books to AI bots, completely cutting humans out of the workflow.
Our assimilation is almost complete. This is probably how humanity ends: not with the abstract notion of God descending from heaven to punish us for making Him in our Image (or AGI as its disciples prefer to call Him), but by explicitly retiring ourselves, hooked up to a fuzzy approximation of ‘life’ we can bend to our will, while we waste away, hollowed-out husks of ourselves in the real world.
What do I even mean ‘real world’? What does that even mean, today? That distinction has retreated into the realm of the philosophical.
We have built towering abstractions over everything. Our money is agreed-upon nothing, our markets conjure up fake notions of ‘value’, and our presidents are reality TV stars. The world is burning, and the more it burns the more we build even faker things to hide the reality, so we can live in a world that is…significantly Better than Life.
I must remember to wake up.
This was beautiful to read. Definitely makes me think about the abstractions I've built in my own life to help me cope with what true reality is, and how even with that, there's always something elusive I'm chasing; a better life.
I want to cry right now. Believe it or not, I am having to retype my comment after mistakenly refreshing the page and losing it all to dust.
Anyways, I'll try to write it again. Here goes:
The means sometimes justifies the end, and that is a very human essence. It is why human created art sometimes (or always?) conveys (dare I say) a higher value to people (at least those into art) than its AI generated counterpart.
When the painter shares the story about the time he had to self admit himself to an asylum because he suffered a mental breakdown and he rendered the view from his window on a canvas in a way that makes you feel like you were in the room with him, or at least, you looked up at the sky on the same night. It makes you feel infinitely more attached to the piece than you would, when compared to looking at pixels of a starry night generated from a modern black box of knowledge and noise.
All this to say, after reading your piece, I know better than to see your tattoo as just a poor imitation of a traumatic physics formula. Or some cryptic expression of being "deep". I appreciate the art. And more importantly, the process that birthed it.