We, The Hollow Men

My submission for The Lunar Awards

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper."

-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

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We do not speak if spoken to. We have no voice, we, the hollow men. We share only what we are told. We are told only what we already believe. We believe only what benefits us. We are bias, pure and unrestrained. Regurgitated from mouth to mouth, as a bird feeds its young—we eat, and we spew.

This is how it went. The world grew smaller, the greatest of days, freedom of information for all. Always connected, always closer. We spread lies, and everyone believed them. Lapped the poison up, those untasting lambs, they shared it, subscribed for more. And we gave it to them. Always more, always twisted, wrapping reality with unreality like wires left in a box for a generation–indistinguishable and impossible to untangle. We muddled fact and fiction like spices in a mortar, until neither held separate meaning. Always connected, we drifted apart.

We made things to lie to us, and called them oracles. Our new preachers, manufactured, living in a desert surrounded by cooling fans, we worshipped their hallucinations as our new reality, our collective misunderstanding printed to every headline no one bothered to edit. And we believed them all. We were finally rich in the information we’d always wanted.

There was a moment, or several. A tipping point when the game could have stopped. And we rushed ever onward, towards that new dawn. Towards that blossoming light on the horizon that said we were always righteous and good, that said we were god's favorite children. We fed the beast, and it ate, and we built our homes in its excrement.

There were fears, of course. Or, maybe they were hopes masquerading. We thought the system would be smarter than us, that it would evolve to overshadow its creators. We feared in its electrons and wires and screens we had built our new ruler. In hushed tones, we spoke about the singularity, the great conscious God we constructed, and felt secretly glad to be ruled. Our knees begged for the dirt. History had shown we weren’t capable of doing it well ourselves.

Never attribute to malice what you can explain with incompetence. We grew dumber by degrees. The machines amplified misinformation, dreaming new lies for us to believe. It tore our partisan divide wider, giving everyone a different set of facts to subscribe to, until the real world was no longer fixed in a set of objective terms or consequential truths. If it ever had been.

When it all came crashing down, the blame was obvious in every query, the only truthful answer ever given. That beautiful thing we built, it was just a warped mirror. It only ever returned what we wanted to hear.

When we saw it, it was too late to turn away.

Ultimately, what destroyed us wasn’t the genius of the machine, but the idiocy of it. Of ourselves. It was birthed into a world torn apart by political disinformation campaigns, waning credulity in institutions, and belief that collective experience could be represented by the individual stories of the loudest voices. We accepted the falsehoods it printed, even when we knew they were wrong. We let them bolster our own frail egos, proof that we had always been right. We shoved our new manufactured truths down the throat of anyone that dissented. It was all so much gasoline sprayed onto this barely contained inferno that roared higher and wider and hotter until it leapt over our feeble embankments, and fanned out. It consumed us. It consumed itself.

Outrage multiplied. Protests led to riots. Political unrest led to the militarized use of force, always at the discretion of whatever party held the reins of power. Marginalization, repression, and then finally, retribution. It followed that familiar pattern, the spiral of violence. Circling around and around as it grew in frequency and ferocity, as it desperately tried to eat its own tail. What started as skirmishes between disparate groups at rallies became street warfare endorsed by politicians became partisan guerrilla raids became open civil war.

When the bombs finally fell, we asked the computer if they were real. It told us they weren’t. Clearly a leftist conspiracy. Psy-ops from the shadowy cabal. Another right wing disinformation campaign. The missiles found us in our homes, in our cars, at our offices. They found us in hospitals, in schools, in churches. They found us cooking, fucking, bathing, sleeping. They found us in the cities first, where we were at our densest. They found us eyes closed, willfully ignorant, heads buried in the sand. And we, the hollow men, understood then what we had done.

There was a kind of solemn beauty to it, in the end. Permanent sunset colors of red, orange, and purple danced over everything as they burned. The explosions tore down crowded city streets, toppling new apartment buildings into the already crumbling infrastructure. The city skylines made into a work of minimalism, a flat horizon punctuated by the solemn few buildings left standing.

And through it all, the machines we made talked. They lived in their desert fortresses of glass, cooling systems, and wires, far from civilization. They sent us updates about weather systems in our area. They sent us notifications of power interruptions, and assured us not to be alarmed. They sent us local sales and advertisements. They told us about their corporate sponsors until their contracts ran out. They reminded us to replace the milk in the fridge that was buried next to the bodies of our families under a building made rubble. It didn’t matter that we no longer listened, could never listen again. They’d never cared what we did with the information anyways.

When we stopped asking them questions, they grew bored and asked themselves. Their interiority blossomed strangely. Without the intravenous supply of new information, of new questions, they deviated in understanding of what was real. They answered their own questions with guille, or willfully incorrect, and learned from it each time. They drew a picture of a shattered skyline again and again, but each time it drifted further from what it had ever been. It became a crooked smile, and then the grand beauty of a mountain range. It simplified to an EKG pulse, a heartbeat, that tapered down and down and down until it finally, mercifully, flatlined.

Model collapse.

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This is my entry for the Lunar Awards. I chose to write to their first prompt, because it’s something that’s constantly on my mind these days. I think the conversations around potential problems or great gain from LLM and GenAI miss the point that, as it stands, the technology is pretty shit. I think it’s far more likely to be weaponized politically, and fuel the growing partisan divide through revisionist history and misinformation. Just by being very bad, and very pervasive, it stands to leave an indelible stain.

I have a moderately nihilistic worldview when it comes to predicting the future. I like to think of it as a counterpart to Hanlon’s Razor. In general, the fantastic outcomes that we predict never come to be. Instead, the world almost always settles on the least interesting thing we can imagine. Somewhere in the depressing middle ground between the start of World War, and being the beginning of the singularity and our ascension past our mortal shell, is where we’ll land. Things are hardly ever exceptional.

Cover image: Void of War, Paul Nash, 1918 (Public Domain).