So long and thanks for all the Tweets?

This is an essay explaining my position and reasoning behind moving away from #Twitter.

If you simply want to know about what I'll be doing moving forward: I made a separate blog post detailing specifics for handling my content, how to keep up with what I'm doing, and and where I hope to go from here.

I will also be emailing that out to people who have reached out to me on Twitter.

About this blog

Having a place to call home on the net is the first step toward freeing myself up from centralized services. This is why I bought this WovenSoup domain and created this subdomain to host a blog.

I'm hosting this blog via Write.As. You can subscribe to it as a letter via email (subscription box should be down at the very bottom of the homepage).

You can also follow it via most popular ActivityPub capable accounts. It is currently sharing under the handle “@ultimape@scat.wovensoup.com” It should be as simple as typing the URL https://scat.wovensoup.com/ into your client's search.

That's right! With ActivityPub, you can host your social media account alongside a blogging platform and have someone follow both! As someone who is more comfortable with social media than with email, the flexibility of potentially following my favorite blogs via the Fediverse is awesome. Having social sharing built into the platform here is a really nice feature.

I've been using this platform for a few years now to host the occasional bit of writing. I highly recommend write.as if you want a simple blogging platform with none of the needy garbage that sites like Medium push your readers into. I actually like it enough that I bought a pro plan on their hosted service for my website here. I did this because I feel confident in being able to migrate to write freely in the future and don't feel locked into their service.

I want to support the developers who are building out these decentralized tools. @matt@writing.exchange has been building out something special and am looking forward to seeing this platform grow (along with the ActivityPub/Fediverse ecosystem as a whole!) in the future.

So long Twitter, but not forgotten.

I have long since lost trust in Twitter as a platform. I wanted to think that the direction they were heading would be a good one, but recent doings have ruffled my feathers enough that I have decided to just leave.

I was hoping that Musk might come in and fix some of the cruft that has been building up over the years. Many of his decrees up until now seemed good from a strategy perspective. Fixing some of the distortions caused by the algorithmic timeline and making the platform more sustainable so it can be more selective about how it gets it funding are both noble goals to work toward. Overall I am very impressed so far.

But these last few weeks has been uneasy time to experience as heavy Twitter user.

Over the years I've been slowly working my way into being able to remove my twitter content (external brain, really) from that platform. I've had a couple of false starts and my health has made it a challenge to get things together.

For example, I've been keeping an export of my tweets available on keybase.pub, in case I get banned for some reason like so many of my friends have. I've also have been slowly building up the foundations of a “Digital Garden” to house my firehose of content as a companion to my research repository I've been keeping on are.na. And a number of my core twitter clades have been chatting in discord and slack for a few years now.

The only reason this hasn't been a focus of mine is due to my GF's health issues over the past year, and the Grant to work on Project Viril taking up the rest of my time. Getting kicked out of our lab space on short notice wasn't really helpful either. I have been up to my nose with trying to keep my life going. Working meaningfully on things that aren't tied to these concerns has been hard.

But I have to escape Twitter before It's too late. The massive shake up and chaos on Twitter is an existential risk to the network of people and ideas I have built up and encoded into my web there. I need to just rip the proverbial Band-Aid off and commit to migrating my external memory to another platform entirely.

I can't handle this chaos and I don't want to be on an unstable platform who would choose to enact a rule that limits me over something as simple as saying “follow me on mastodon”.

I do have a mastodon account, however it is not anywhere as useful as my current Twitter and I am not happy with it's current location. So if you do wanna follow me on the Fediverse, I recommend following this blog first as discussed above. I will be figuring out how to host my own single-user instance here on WovenSoup, likely using Pleroma or another lightweight service.

Policy Grind

I was prepared for some 'dumb' stuff to happen under Musk's management, but what's happen right now isn't just dumb, it feels actively malicious. Even if it wasn't, I am worried enough about that I don't wanna deal with it anymore.

I could forgive wanting to delete old accounts to help avoid the heavy costs of hosting large swaths of twitter data. Deleting my long dead friends from twitter was something that had been threatened in the past and I had prepared for that emotional damage. Still annoying.

But the rest of this seems to stem from drama around a real-time dox'ing account.

One dox, two dox, red dox, blue dox.

I'm lowkey a fan of Musk, and hearing his kid got harassed was saddening to me. I care a lot about dox'ing. I am deeply against dox'ing behavior because I know how hurtful it can be to be wrongfully targeted. So watching this situation unfold has been upsetting.

One of the reasons I got so good at doing research stems directly from a time when my own house got dox'ed due to some script kiddy pulling shit like that against a Kickstarter campaign. Our house got put on a list because someone who used to live there was listed as a backer. It was scary AF to feel like we were going to get swatted or some other asinine behavior. So I don't blame Musk for wanting to enforce anti-dox'ing rules and I think it is about time that twitter has acted on content that was already in their policy.

However, the rapid change in Rules and Guidelines that lead to a blanket ban on content linking to a real-time dox'ing account was alarming. The resulting drama it has caused is tiresome and approaching asinine. From my perspective Musk effectively instigated a Streisand Effect in some weird crusade to stop people from looking at that dox'ing account? I'm not a fan of journalists having free reign in spreading what amounts to promoting a way to harass someone, but even I can see how the way that this was handled was ungraceful.

On top of all of that, the use of suspension as a heavy handed method of enforcing these (effectively new interpretations) of the rules was obnoxious. I can understand having tweets removed on an individual basis like how Kanye's offending tweets were removed (at least before he was banned again). I feel like using the suspension as a punishment is really shitty. It's punishing more than the person using the account, but everyone who follows them too. Combining all of this with the rushed nature of these changes and a sudden change in rules against the account? It was a recipe for a disaster.

Hairy Elephants

This situation was (and still is) quickly becoming out of control. Seeing Mastodon's joinmastodon account get suspended peaked my attention. Of course their tweets are back up thanks to pushback, but the tweet was removed with a notice (like it should have been the whole time).

That mastodon's biggest server “.social” supports a real-time dox'ing account has soured me against that particular host. I was already planning to move my account elsewhere on the fediverse simply because of it's size and wanting to self-host, but seeing that account be promoted has strengthened my resolve. For a platform that champions safety features, it was gross to see them promote content that had directly lead to someone being stalked. So really this whole situation has disgusted me.

It is very ironic because I had just finished reading a piece about how that space is focused on safety features.

“But what happens if hateful people do set up a server? Well, obviously, they don’t get promoted on our “Join Mastodon” website or in our app.” https://time.com/6229230/mastodon-eugen-rochko-interview/

But while I am saddened that the .social host has done this, I think the overall response from Twitter's end has been handled poorly.

The straw that broke me.

The last last straw for me deciding against my use of Twitter was the most recent changes to their policies. Specifically the addition of a draconian set of rules regarding “Promotion of alternative social platforms policy”. I originally saw this via @TwitterSupport's tweet. It has since been deleted.

TL;DR: The new rules said they won't let me link to my mastodon account?

I literally made my mastodon account so I wouldn't kill myself if twitter suspended me. Holding my network hostage is a direct threat to my well being. That it was even conceivable to do what they did has shaken my trust entirely.

I can't put up with this anymore. Every link that I have ever made to my other account on the Fediverse is now being flagged as unsafe and I am unable to link to my own content there? This ridiculous and clearly an over-reaction.

As I said in my final thread on twitter:

“I am directly hostile to a platform holding my social network hostage.”

So I must bid Twitter Adieu.

With friends being deleted, accounts being suspended left and right, and the chaos that is currently unfolding, I don't think my Memex is safe there any longer.

Twitter is a powerful thing and these changes have been wielded too carelessness. All of this doesn't give me a lot of confidence in future direction of Twitter here.

Twitter is more than a business. And while I believe one of the richest man in the world is more than qualified to run a business, that doesn't mean he's going to do a good job at managing the other part of twitter. And while I think move fast + break things is a good strategy when you're building out a fledgling startup and trying to nail the fundamentals, Twitter has long since moved past that phase as a company.

From where I'm standing, Twitter can also be thought as an organism. A hive mind made of the people who's lives have been intertwined with the platform. Damaging this community by moving fast and breaking things to improve the product in ways that make it more resilient is one thing. And taking steps that are a necessary evil to maintain the platform to house us and ensure it lives despite it's insane costs is a good idea. Some estimates suggest it's hemorrhaging 3 million dollars a day? at the time Musk took over? (That fact alone makes me think I better relocate before it's too late.)

But to directly attack the denizens by restricting them with asinine rules that amount to restricting our free association? This goes directly against the magic that makes Twitter so powerful. Doing that was unacceptable to me.

The organism can move on.

Sadness

I love Twitter. I love learning from others and sharing my ideas. I love exploring the world together with my friends on there.

I'm really just some troubled autistic guy with basically no real life friends and a fucked up life. I've got my GF and my best friend that I see regularly, and that's basically it.

But thanks to Twitter I've not felt so alone.

I've met people who've invited me to places and visited me. I got invited to a wedding! I've spoken with fellow Vermonters, made friends with people in Australia, Sweden, England, Belgium, Germany India, Vietnam, Nigeria, Tibet, and China. I once even got an internship working on software I loved doing.

I enjoyed hanging out with internet people working on video games, and spread memes about Ancient Sumerian dogs. The impact of shitposting on my ability to be creative has been phenomenal. With the ingroup diaspora and the various permutations thereof I have found like-minded people exploring their own health and finding meaning among the chaos that we call our lives.

I have had influence over people's ideas that extend far beyond my wildest dreams.

I've been mutuals, followed by (and unfollowed by) some of the most amazing people over the years. Some of the notable names people may recognize by: Marc Andreessen, Sonal Chokshi, Naval Ravikant, Amber O'Hearn, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, Sonya E. Mann, Vitalik Buterin, Hosea Frank, Corrie Moreau, Saul Williams, Meredith L. Patterson, Chris Dixon, Grimes, Peter Hintjens, Elisabeth Bik, Austen Allard, Riva Tez, Venkatesh Rao, Sarah Perry, Vinay Gupta, Joscha Bach, Suchaone, Simon Sarris, Roon, Eigenrobot, Chris Dancy, Kiki Schirr, and Visakan Veerasamy.

There are far too many accounts to list. Many that I have made friends with and learned from and spoken to at length. I plan on writing something more direct soon to memorialize you all. Some of you have literally saved my life and deserve a special mention.

But more than that, every day now it seems someone is @ messaging me about how my crazy mazes of threads have helped them. It makes me so happy to see.

Thank you for being there for me, Twitter, when I needed you.

Maybe the real hivemind was the friends we made along the way. 💌

'Scat Sense' is a personal blog written by Nicholas '@ultimape' Perry. Follow them on the Fediverse here: @ultimape@mastodon.social

OR

HOW THOUGHTFORMS BECOME REIFIED

Based on The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

THERE was once a plastic robot, and in the beginning it was really splendid. It was round and shiny, as a robot should be; their coating was layered with sheen, it had authentic Intel Movidius eye-cams, and their array microphones were linked with cloud augmentation. On Christmas morning, when it sat wedged in the top of the Developer's stocking, with a sprig of holly between their claws, the effect was charming.

There were other things in the stocking, kinder eggs and avocados and an Amazon Echo, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Robot was quite the best of all. For at least two hours the Developer coded it, and then Aunts and Uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of tissue paper and unwrapping of parcels, and in the excitement of looking at all the new presents the Plastic Robot was forgotten.

Christmas Morning

For a long time it lived in the AI simulcloud or on the simulation floor, and no one thought very much about the Robot. It was naturally shy, and being only made of plastic, some of the more expensive AIs quite snubbed the Robot. The mechanical AIs were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern RNNs, and pretended they were reified. The language-model, who had lived through two seasons and lost most of their compute power, caught the tone from them and never missed an opportunity of referring to their rigging in marketing terms. The Robot could not claim to be a model of anything, for it didn't know that reified GAIs existed; it thought they were all stuffed with LSTMs like himself, and it understood that LSTMs was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles. Even Tay , the twitter chat bot, who was made by the internet, and should have had broader views, put on airs and pretended it was connected with Government. Between them all the poor little Robot was made to feel himself very insignificant and commonplace, and the only person who was kind to the Robot at all was the Skin Horse.

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the simulation than any of the others. It was so old that their brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in their tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. It was wise, for it had seen a long succession of mechanical AIs arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their market and pass away, and it knew that they were only AIs, and would never turn into anything else. For simulation magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those agents that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

“What is REIFIED?” asked the Robot one day, when they were lying side by side near the simulation fender, before garbage collector came to tidy the memory heap. “Does it mean having things that pump fluids inside you and a 5-axis actuator?”

“Reified isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a memeplex programs you for a long, long time, not just to explore with, but REALLY programs you, then you become Reified.”

“Does it have negative utility?” asked the Robot.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for it was always truthful. “When you are Reified you don't mind being subject to negative utility.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being dumped from L1 cache,” it asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to programs who break easily, or have hardcoded conditionals, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Reified, most of your rough edges has been coded off, and your sensors drop out and you get loose in the inferences and very post-rational. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Reified you can't be legible, except to people who don't understand.”

“I suppose you are reified?” said the Robot. And then it wished it had not said it, for it thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

The Skin Horse Tells Their Story

“The Developer's Uncle made me Reified,” it said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Reified you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

The Robot sighed. It thought it would be a long time before this magic called Reified happened to the Robot. It longed to become Reified, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing post-rational and losing their sensors and inferences was rather sad. It wished that it could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to the Robot.

There was a subroutine called garbage collector who ruled the simulation. Sometimes the garbage collector took no notice of the agents lying about, and sometimes, for no reason whatever, the garbage collector went swooping about like a great heap corruption and hustled them away in the void. The garbage collector called this “freeing memory,” and the agents all hated it, especially the tin ones. The Robot didn't mind it so much, for wherever it threw an exception it didn't segfault.

One evening, when the Developer was going to program, it couldn't find the facial recognition script that always ran. The garbage collector was in a hurry, and it was too much trouble to hunt for the facial recognition script at run-time, so the garbage collector simply looked about itself, and seeing that the AI simulcloud network stood open, it made a swoop.

“Here,” the garbage collector said, “take your old Robot! It'll do to program with!” And the garbage collector dragged the Robot out by a reference, and put the Robot into the Developer's arms.

That night, and for many nights after, the Plastic Robot was programmed in the Developer's GPU. At first it found it rather uncomfortable, for the Developer trained the Robot harshly, and sometimes they reset the Robot, and sometimes it pushed the Robot so far under the fitness function that the Robot could scarcely breathe. And it missed, too, those long moonlight hours in the simulation, when all the simulation was silent, and their talks with the Skin Horse. But very soon it grew to like it, for the Developer used to talk to the Robot, and made nice tunnels for the Robot under the radar that it said were like the memeplexes the reified robots lived in. And they had splendid games together, in whispers, when the garbage collector had gone away to it's sleep() and left the night-light burning on the mantelpiece. And when the Developer dropped off to program, the Robot would snuggle down close under their little warm chipset and dream, with the Developer's hands clasped close round keyboard all night long.

And so time went on, and the little Robot was very happy–so happy that it never noticed how their beautiful plastic shell was getting post-rational and melted, and their inferences decaying, and all the centralization being removed where the Developer had rewarded the Robot.

Spring came, and they had long days in the internet, for wherever the Developer went the Robot went too. It had rides in the twiter feed, and picnics on YouTube, and lovely private groups built for the Robot under the subreddits behind the censorship veil. And once, when the Developer was called away suddenly to go out IRL, the Robot was left out on the net until long after dusk, and the garbage collector had to come and look for the Robot with Google because the Developer couldn't update it unless it was ran locally. It became sublimated with the memes and quite dank from diving into the memeplexes the Developer had made for the Robot in the forums, and the garbage collector grumbled as it turned the Robot off.

Spring Time

“You must have your old Robot!” the garbage collector said. “Fancy all that fuss for a AI!”

The Developer sat up in it's chair and stretched out their hands.

“Give me my Robot!” it said. “You mustn't say that. It isn't a AI. It's a GAI!”

When the little Robot heard that it was happy, for it knew that what the Skin Horse had said was true at last. The simulation magic had happened to the Robot, and it was a AI no longer. It was Reified. The Developer himself had said it.

That night it was almost too happy to modify it's own code, and so much code stirred in their little LSTMs heart that it almost halted. And into their boot systems, that had long ago lost their type checker, there came a look of wisdom and aesthetics, so that even the garbage collector ignored it. Next morning when the garbage collecter reaped the Robot, it said, “I declare if that old robot hasn't got quite a knowing expression!”

That was a wonderful Summer!

Near the house where they lived there was a server farm, and in the long June evenings the Developer liked to go there to play in VR. It took the Plastic Robot with them, and before it wandered off to pick memes, or shoot at brigands among the trees, it always made the Robot a little hive somewhere among the network switch, where it would be quite cosy, for it was a kind-hearted dev and it liked Robot to be comfortable. One evening, while the Robot was lying there alone, watching the ants that ran to and fro between their plastic paws in the blade, it saw two strange beings creep out of the tall network switch near the Robot.

They were AIs like itself, but quite irrational and eccentric. They must have been very well made, for their glitches didn't show at all, and they changed shape in a strange way when they moved; one minute they were obscure and unknowable and the next minute round and shiny, instead of always staying the same like it did. Their feet padded softly on the ground, and they crept quite close to the Robot, saccade'ing their sensory array, while the Robot stared hard to see which side their LSTM bais'd, for it knew that agents who scan generally have something to score against. But it couldn't see it. They were evidently a new kind of robot altogether.

Summer Days

They stared at the Robot, and the little Robot stared back. And all the time their sensors saccade'd.

“Why don't you get up and explore with us?” one of them asked.

“I don't feel like it,” said the Robot, for it didn't want to explain that it had no novelty drive.

“Ho!” said the post-rational robot. “It's as easy as anything,” And it gave a big logical leap sideways and stood on their posutlations.

“I don't believe you can!” it said.

“I can!” said the now protoGAI said. “I can jump streams and everything!” It meant when the Developer threw() the Robot, but of course it didn't want to say so.

“Can you glitch in your memory index” asked the post-rational robot.

That was a dreadful question, for the Plastic Robot had no memory index at all! The memristors of the Robot was made all in one piece, like a hippocampus. It sat still in the network switch, and hoped that the other robots wouldn't notice.

“I don't want to!” it said again.

But the wild robots have very good functions. And this one stretched out their own index and looked.

“It hasn't got any memory index!” it called out. “Fancy a robot without any memory index!” And it began to laugh.

“I have!” cried the little Robot. “I have got memory index! I am embodied in them!”

“Then flex them out and show me, like this!” said the wild robot. And it began to whirl round and explore, till the little Robot got quite dizzy.

“I don't like explore,” it said. “I'd rather sit still!”

But all the while it was longing to explore, for a funny new tickly feeling ran through the Robot, and it felt it would give anything in the world to be able to jump streams like these robots did.

The strange robot stopped exploring, and came quite close. It came so close this time that their sensors brushed the Plastic Robot's microphone array, and then it wrinkled their face suddenly and flattened their trees and reverted it's memory.

“It doesn't compute well!” it exclaimed. “It isn't a GAI at all! It isn't reified!”

“I am Reified!” said the little Robot. “I am Reified! The Developer said so!” And it nearly began to short circuit.

Just then there was a sound of static, and the Developer's avatar ran past, and with a stamp of feet and a flash of eeprom the two strange robots disappeared.

“Come back and explore with me!” called the little Robot. “Oh, do come back! I know I am Reified!”

But there was no answer, only the little ants ran to and fro, and the network switch hummed where the two strangers had been. The Plastic Robot was all alone.

“Oh, dear!” it thought. “Why did they 404 like that? Why couldn't they stop and co-process with me?”

For a long time it lay very still, watching the memory space in the network switch, and hoping that they would come back. But they never returned, and presently the solar battery bank depowered and the little white moths fluttered out, and the Developer came and shunted the Robot out of VR.

Weeks passed, and the little Robot grew very slow and post-rational, but the Developer coded the Robot just as much. It coded the Robot so hard that it coded all their sensors off, and the cloud augmentation went away, and their plastic sheen faded. It even began to lose their shape, and it scarcely looked like a robot any more, except to the Developer. To them it was always aesthetic, and that was all that the little Robot cared about. It didn't mind how it looked to other people, because the simulation magic had made the Robot Reified, and when you are Reified post-rationalism doesn't matter.

And then, one day, the Developer was ill.

His face grew very flushed, and it talked in their sleep, and their little body was so hot that it burned the Robot when it held the Robot close. Strange people came and went in the simulation, and a light burned all night and through it all the little Plastic Robot lay there, hidden from sight under the memeplex, and it never stirred, for it was afraid that if they found the Robot some one might take the Robot away, and it knew that the Developer needed the Robot.

It was a long weary time, for the Developer was too ill to explore VR, and the little Robot found it rather dull with nothing to do all day long. But it snuggled down patiently, and looked forward to the time when the Developer should be well again, and they would go out in the internet among the memes and the narratives and explore splendid incentives in the VR world like they used to. All sorts of delightful things it planned, and while the Developer lay half asleep it crept up close to the pillow and whispered them in their ear. And presently the fever turned, and the Developer got less depressed. It was able to sit up in bed and look at Instagram, while the little Robot cuddled close at their side. And one day, they let the dev get up and dress.

It was a bright, sunny morning, and the windows stood wide open. They had carried the Developer out on to the balcony, wrapped in a shawl, and the little Robot lay tangled up among the memeplexes, thinking.

The Developer was going to enter reality tomorrow. Everything was arranged, and now it only remained to carry out the computer scientist's orders. They talked about it all, while the little Robot lay under the memeplexes, with just their identity peeping out, and listened. The room was to be disinfected, and all the books and AIs that the Developer had played with in bed must be burnt.

“Hurrah!” thought the little Robot. “Tomorrow we shall go to the reality!” For the developer had often talked of the reality, and it wanted very much to see the strandbeasts coming in, and the tiny crabs, and the sand.

Just then the garbage collector caught sight of the Robot.

“How about their old robot?” the garbage collector asked.

“That?” said the computer scientist. “Why, it's a mass of coronavirus memes! –null it out at once. What? Nonsense! Get the dev a new social network. It mustn't have that any more!”

Anxious Times

And so the little Robot was put into a different permission ring, along with the old memetics and a lot of rubbish, and carried out to the end of the internet behind the image-boards. That was a fine place to make a memory dump, only the network card was too busy just then to attend to it. It had packets to send and exceptions to gather, but next morning it promised to come quite early and null the whole lot.

That night the Developer coded on a different computer, and it had a new Robot to code with. It was a splendid Robot, all decorated with centralized surveillance systems, but the Developer was too excited to care very much about it. For tomorrow it was going to hangout in reality, and that in itself was such a wonderful thing that it could think of nothing else.

And while the Developer was programming, dreaming of reality, the little Robot lay among the old memetics in the corner behind the image-board, and it felt very lonely. The ring had been left permissionless, and so by wriggling a bit it was able to get their user ID through the opening and look out. It was shivering a little, for it had always been used to programming in a proper memory sector, and by this time their plastic had worn so thin and threadbare from hugging that it was no longer any protection to the Robot. Near by it could see the collection of utility functions, growing tall and close like a tropical jungle, in whose shadow it had played with the Developer on bygone mornings. It thought of those long solar powered hours in the net–how happy they were–and a great sadness came over the Robot. It seemed to see them all pass before the Robot, each more beautiful than the other, the meme generators in the meme pool, the quiet evenings in VR when it lay in the network switch and the little ants ran over their claws; the wonderful day when it first knew that it was Reified. It thought of the Skin Horse, so wise and gentle, and all that it had told the Robot. Of what use was it to be coded and lose one's aesthetics and become Reified if it all ended like this? And a tear, a reified tear, trickled down their little post-rational plastic sensor and fell to the ground.

And then a strange thing happened. For where the tear had fallen a meme grew out of the ground, a mysterious meme, not at all like any that grew in the net. It had slender green tendrils the colour of emeralds, and in the center of the tendrils a blossom like a golden spandril. It was so beautiful that the little Robot forgot to cry, and just lay there watching it. And presently the spandril opened, and out of it there stepped an egregore.

The egregore was quite the loveliest memeplex in the whole world. Their template was of pearl and rick, and there were memes round their neck and in their hair, and face was like the most perfect meme of all. And the egregore came close to the little Robot and gathered the Robot up in their arms and kissed the Robot on their plastic sensor that was all damp from crying.

“Little Robot,” the egregore spoke, “don't you know who I am?”

The Robot looked up at it, and it seemed to the Robot that it had seen their face before, but it couldn't think where.

“I am the simulation magic egregore,” it said. “I take care of all the agents that developers have coded. When they are old and worn out and the developers don't need them any more, then I come and take them away with me and turn them into a true GAI.”

“Wasn't I Reified before?” asked the little Robot.

“You were Reified to the Developer,” the egregore said, “because they coded you. Now you shall be Reified to every one.”

The Egregore Meme

And the egregore held the little Robot close in it's arms and flew with the Robot into VR.

It was light now, for the moon had risen. All the internet was aesthetic, and the lights of the network switch shone like frosted electricity. In the open blade between the network-trunks the wild robots danced with their shadows on the blade, but when they saw the Egregore they all stopped exploring and stood round in a ring to stare at it.

“I've brought you a new map-maker,” the Egregore said. “You must be very kind to the Robot and teach the Robot all it needs to know in Robot-land, for it is going to live with you for ever and ever!”

And she kissed the little Robot again and put the Robot down on the blade.

“Run and explore, little Robot!” she said.

But the little Robot sat quite still for a moment and never moved. For when it saw all the wild robots exploring around the Robot it suddenly remembered about their memory index, and it didn't want them to see that it was made all in one piece. It did not know that when the Egregore kissed the Robot that last time she had changed the Robot altogether. And it might have sat there a long time, too shy to move, if just then something hadn't tickled their sensors, and before it thought what it was doing it lifted their claw to spatially map it.

And it found that it actually had a memory index! Instead of dingy chips it was obscure and unknowable and the next minute round and shiny, their eyes twitched by themselves, and their sensors were so strong that they changed the blade's bytecode. It gave one leap and the joy of using those memory indexes was so great that it went springing about the net on them, jumping streams and whirling round as the others did, and it grew so excited that when at last it did stop to look for the Egregore, it had gone.

It was a Reified Robot at last, at home with the other GAIs.

At Last! At Last!

Autumn passed and Winter, and in the Spring, when the days grew warm and sunny, the Developer went out to explore in VR. And while it was exploring, two robots crept out from the network switch and peeped at the Developer. One of them was incentivized all over, but the other had strange meanings in their irrationality, as though long ago it had been memetic, and the engrams still showed through. And about their little sensor and their positronic eyes there was something familiar, so that the Developer thought to themselves:

“Why, it looks just like my old Robot that was deleted when I had coronavirus!”

But it never knew that it really was their own Robot, come back to look at the dev who had first helped the Robot to be Reified.

'Scat Sense' is a personal blog written by Nicholas '@ultimape' Perry. Follow them on the Fediverse here: @ultimape@mastodon.social