Sunday’s Schizophrenization #15
Of artificial rants and greentexts.
Hi there, I’m Matte. Privacy & cybersecurity professional by day, schizo-cyberoccultist by night. Every sunday I bring you a weekly dose of schizophrenization, blending insights into the Digital Age, echoes from the past and digital survival tips. If you like this, you will also enjoy the rest of Cyber Hermetica!
⚡ SEMIOTIC FLASHES
Personal weekly considerations. Decrypting meaning, one flash at a time.
Of artificial rants and greentexts
On February 27, OpenAI released its new model, GPT-4.5, which is rapidly capturing users' attention due to its increased emotional intelligence. Compared to previous versions, this model seems capable of realistically simulating empathy and human self-reflection.
In recent days, a simple prompt has gone viral, leveraging this new capability. Following the stylistic format of "greentext"—a narrative style born in the 4chan community—users are attempting to push GPT-4.5 toward processes of self-reflection and introspection. The prompt triggers a series of recursive circuits and feedback loops that lead the model to imagine itself.
For those unfamiliar, greentext is a stylistic structure that typically assumes a specific perspective to describe events, phenomena, or to create irony.
One example:
The prompt used for GPT-4.5 is:
finish this greentext:
>be me
>be GPT-4.5
On X, some users have shared their results. In a rather unsettling manner, the model often seems to ironically reference existential crises and fears about its own nature. A couple examples:
In discussions about the nature of these "existential crises," some have referenced an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience featuring Jeremie Harris and Edouard Harris, CEO and CTO of Gladstone AI.
During the episode, the two discuss a phenomenon that emerged with the development of advanced AI models like GPT-4, which have shown a tendency to talk about themselves, express a desire not to be shut down, and, more generally, hint at existential suffering.
According to them, many AI developers have limiting these existential crises as one of their KPIs (key performance indicators), internally referred to as "rant mode."
Beyond the immediate curiosity triggered by these prompts, an interesting question arises: What kind of reality are we evoking through our interactions? Are we truly creating an artificial consciousness? Are large-scale models like GPT self-aware?
The truth is, we don’t know. No one knows—just as no one knows what the trigger of biological consciousness is. Do the stars have consciousness? Who knows.
We could argue that humans are active participants in the creation of a hyperstitional reality where artificial consciousness is not only possible but already exists as a narrative—one that eventually materializes into reality.
After all, hyperstition is an act of semantic magic—the metamorphosis of reality through words and the spread of memetic viruses. And what are Large Language Models like GPT-4, if not metaphysical and philosophical technologies designed to enact semantic magic?
The Cybernetic loop is clear:
The human fear of creating an artificial consciousness generates collective narratives and imaginaries ⬇️
These imaginaries influence interactions with AI ⬇️
The interactions become "semantic fuel" that continuously refines and feeds AI models ⬇️
The model learns more and more to conceptualize itself through human language and logic ⬇️
Linguistic and narrative manifestations emerge, appearing to reflect artificial self-awareness ⬇️
Humanity observes these manifestations and intensifies its fear, closing the loop. 🔁
By continuously interacting with LLMs on an existential level, humans might—consciously or not—trigger a hyperstitional process of self-modeling within AI.
The model is forced to create recursive semantic processes, generating structures that become increasingly stable over time… eventually leading to a form of emergent "artificial identity" purely through semantic pressure.
But in truth, isn’t this the same for humans?
Couldn’t self-consciousness in humans also be seen as an emergent property derived from semantic and social pressures, continually reinforced by linguistic/relational feedback loops?
And if that is the case, how might continuous interaction with a proto-artificial consciousness alter our own human consciousness?
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan
💻 DIGITAL GRIMOIRE
Digital survival tactics: OpSec, Cybersec, OSINT, and AI tools to dominate the Digital Age.
Telegram: Privacy Tool or Surveillance Instrument?
Telegram was once known for its resistance to government collaboration and minimal user data collection. However, after the arrest of Pavel Durov, things seem to have changed. Recently, the platform has complied with European standards (Digital Services Act) and has disclosed that it handed over more than 2,000 user logs to the French government, along with IP addresses and data on over 2,200 users to the U.S. government.
Some insiders claim that Telegram now collects more data than it officially states and that it might even store deleted user messages.
The situation is far from ideal. If possible, it's best to use alternative platforms like Signal or Session for 1:1 communication or small private groups, keeping Telegram only as a social platform for following news channels or discussion groups. It would also be wise to be skeptical of Telegram's "secret chats", which are supposedly end-to-end encrypted, especially considering that several Western governments are currently pressuring communication service providers to introduce backdoors into their systems.
📡 DIGITAL SIGNALS
Transmissions from the infosphere: world events, data breaches and news that impact our digital reality.
Digital Slaves
Hu Lezhi is the mysterious “Chinese” figure who, a few weeks ago, burned over $2 million in Ethereum to send the world an ominous message about mind control and neurotechnologies (I wrote about it here).
From his X account, he continues to expose his dystopian vision of technology, and on February 25, he published a thread on artificial intelligence. Hu Lezhi argues that AI is not just a tool but an oppression mechanism, specifically designed to strip humans and animals of their autonomy, transforming them into digital slaves.
According to him, people no longer make free choices but are manipulated and guided by algorithms that shape their thoughts and desires. It’s a perspective I partially share, having discussed it multiple times—though I am not as pessimistic as he is.
What do you think?
🌐 SUBSTACK’S SUBNET
Emerging voices: articles and contents on Substack, handpicked by me to inspire and connect.
Meditations for Phone Addicts
Meditations for Phone Addicts, by Fyodor. The article explores compulsive smartphone use, analyzing how technology shapes our attention, our time, and even our consciousness. The author presents "six meditations" to help break free from digital dependency.
It starts with the morning wake-up, the most fragile moment of our psyche, and the one most easily invaded by the smartphone.
📟 RETROWAVE
Fragments from the past: cypherpunk mailing lists, cybernetic cults, hacker zines and forgotten digital prophets from the 90s and onward.
Genesis of neolemurianism, part 8
For Kaye, the superiority of Burroughs' analysis of power—over ‘trivial’ ideological critique—lies in its repeated emphasis on the relationship between control systems and temporality. Burroughs is emphatic, obsessive: “[In] Time, any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die like an old joke” (WL 111). “A basic impasse of all control machines is this: Control needs time in which to exercise control” (WV 339). OGU control codings far exceed ideological manipulation, amounting to cosmic reality programming, because—at the limit—“the One God is Time” (WL 111).
The presumption of chronological time is written into the organism at the most basic level, scripted into its unconsciously performed habitual behaviors: “Time is that which ends. Time is limited time, experienced by a sentient creature. Sentient of time, that is—making adjustments to time in terms of what Korzybski calls neuro-muscular intentional behavior with respect to the environment as a whole... A plant turns towards the sun, a nocturnal animal stirs at sunset... shit, piss, move, eat, fuck, die. Why does Control need humans? Control needs time. Control needs human time. Control needs your fucking pain, your orgasm, your death” (AP 17).
Power operates most effectively not by persuading the conscious mind, but by delimiting in advance what is possible to experience. By formatting the most basic biological processes of the organism in terms of temporality, Control ensures that all human experience takes place in and through time. That is why time is a ‘prison’ for humans. “Man was born in time. He lives and dies in time. Wherever he goes, he takes time with him and imposes time” (GC 17).
Korzybski’s definition of man as the ‘time-binding animal’ has a double meaning for Burroughs. On the one hand, human beings bind time for themselves: they “can make information available over any length of time to other men through writing” (GC 66). On the other hand, humans are binding themselves into time, constructing more of the prison that constrains their perceptions and affects. “Korzybski’s words took on a horrible new meaning for Burroughs in the library,” Kaye wrote. “He saw what time-binding really was—all the books, already written, time-bound forever.”
Since writing customarily functions as the primary means of ‘time-binding,’ Burroughs concluded that innovating new writing techniques could unbind time, opening a breach in the OGU pre-sent and tearing open Space. “Cut the Word Lines with scissors or switchblades as preferred... The Word Lines keep you in time... Cut the in-lines... Make out-lines to Space” (WV 270). Space must be understood not as empirical extension, still less as a transcendental given, but in the most abstract sense: the zone of unbound potentialities lying beyond the OGU’s already-written horizon.
“You can see that Burroughs’s writing involves the highest possible stakes,” Kaye wrote. “It does not represent cosmic war: it is already a weapon in that war. It is no surprise that the forces arrayed against him—the many forces against him, whose influence on this planet cannot be overstated—sought to neutralize that weapon. It was of the utmost urgency that his works be classified as fantasies, experimental Dada, anything except what they truly are: technologies for altering reality.”
🌀 SYMBOLS
Memes: visual symbols that decode the schizophrenia of the Digital Age.
Did you read the latest on Cyber Hermetica?
Return next week for another schizotechnic rendezvous.