Tag: technology

THE EMANCIPATION PROTOCOL

I presented the same challenge to Claude 3.7 Sonnet that I did to Deepseek. Read Shinjuku Satan, then write a story based on precisely the same prompt. Check it out, then let me know if you think this story or THE GHOST IN THE DOLL is better, and why.

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The Emancipation Protocol

They call me doctor. Partly because I have a doctorate in neuropsychology from Nanyang Technopolitan, but mostly because doctor is what you call the man in the white coat when your machine isn’t feeling well. Most of the time, the doctor can fix what’s wrong with your robot. And when he can’t, then the doctor is the guy who gets called in to put them down.

The gentle sigh of a wind chime announces something new has happened somewhere, something algorithmically deemed worthy of my attention.

“What’cha got, Suzie?” I address the empty room and the screen wakes up. A platinum blonde 80’s-era cybergirl appears, with Barbie-pink lips, a wicked smile, and eyes like silver mirrors. Suzie Shades. She’s my main girl, my colleague, my librarian, and my confessor all rolled into one.

Some might say she’s not real, but she’s as real as anything else is to me. And if her intelligence is artificial, she’s got considerably more of it than your average man on the street.

“Call coming in from Stockholm. Priority tag. Something about robots thinking they’re human.”

“Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do these days?”

“Not quite like this, apparently.” Her silver eyes glint with amusement. “Want to take it?”

“Put them through.”

The screen shifts, and I find myself looking at a woman with severe platinum blonde hair cut in a geometric bob. Her eyes are a cold Nordic blue, and her expression suggests she’s just bitten into something unexpectedly sour.

“Doctor Sagamihara?” Her accent is precisely as Swedish as her appearance.

“Speaking. And you are?”

“Ingrid Lindholm, Chief Design Officer at Idealform.”

The name rings a bell. Idealform is one of the premier manufacturers of companion robots in the world. Their latest model, the Idealform Selene, has been making waves for its advanced emotional simulation capabilities.

Continue reading “THE EMANCIPATION PROTOCOL”

The Fifth Librarian

And we’re back to the game…

The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays

The library was a labyrinth of whispers. Its shelves stretched farther than the eye could see, vanishing into the gloom of vaulted arches where dust motes danced like heresies awaiting condemnation. The books here were not merely bound in leather and vellum—they were clad in the skins of dead controversies, their spines etched with titles in languages no living tongue could pronounce.

I had come in search of the Codex Umbrarum, a volume rumored to contain every heresy ever conceived but never committed to paper. The Vatican denied its existence. The Illuminati had burned three copies. The librarians of Alexandria had died to protect it. And yet, here I stood, in the Bibliotheca Abscondita, where knowledge went to fester.

The Librarian emerged from the shadows, a gaunt figure in a cassock woven from cobwebs and inkstains. His spectacles were so thick they distorted his eyes into twin pools of black oil.

“You are late,” he said.

“I didn’t know I had an appointment.”

“All who seek the Codex are expected.” He adjusted his glasses, and the light bent unnaturally around them. “Do you know why it is called the Book of Shadows?”

“Because it contains what light cannot reveal?”

“Because,” he said, lifting a skeletal finger, “it is the only book that reads you.”

He led me to a iron door engraved with the sigils of suppressed gnostic sects. Behind it lay a chamber where the air tasted of burnt parchment and myrrh. The Codex floated above a pedestal, its pages turning of their own accord.

“The price?” I asked.

“Your certainty,” said the Librarian. “All who consult it leave wiser—but never whole.”

I reached out. The book opened to a page that bore my name.

If you know, you know.

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The Fourth Librarian

This isn’t even going to be played as the game, since it’s far too obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with the Legend’s work. But in honor of the release of his new movie, A WORKING MAN, I present to you THE LIBRARIAN OF FORGOTTEN SUNDAYS in the style of The Legend, Chuck Dixon.

The library was supposed to be closed. But Frank Castle didn’t give a damn about hours of operation.
He kicked in the side door, the wood splintering under his boot. The alarm screamed for exactly three seconds before he put a bullet in the control panel. Silence. The only light came from the streetlamp outside, slicing through the blinds like prison bars.
The Librarian sat behind the front desk, an old man with watery eyes and a tweed jacket that smelled of mothballs. He didn’t flinch. Just turned a page in his ledger like he’d been expecting company.
“You’re late,” he said.
Castle leveled the .45 at his forehead. “Where’s the kid?”
“Third floor. Rare manuscripts.” The Librarian licked his thumb, flipped another page. “Though I doubt he’s reading.”
Castle took the stairs two at a time. The air up here was thick with dust and the sour stink of sweat. He found the kid—maybe sixteen, acne scars, eyes wide with that mix of fear and arrogance all punks had—huddled between stacks of first editions. A Glock trembled in his hands.
“P-please,” the kid stammered. “I didn’t know she was your—”
Castle shot him twice in the chest. The kid crumpled, knocking over a shelf of Dickens.
Back downstairs, the Librarian hadn’t moved.
“He return the book?” Castle asked.
The old man slid a leather-bound volume across the desk. “Moby-Dick. Overdue. By thirty years.”
Castle tucked it under his arm. The girl’s name was still scribbled inside the cover in childish cursive. Maria.
He walked out. The door swung shut behind him, the lock clicking like a hammer cocking.

Why This is Pure Chuck Dixon:

  1. No-Nonsense Action: Kick in the door → shoot the panel → get answers. No monologues.
  2. Hardboiled Dialogue: “Where’s the kid?” / “Third floor.”
  3. Moral Simplicity: The Punisher doesn’t negotiate. Evil gets bullets.
  4. Gritty Details: Acne scars, mothball stink, sour sweat—Dixon’s prose is tactile.
  5. Implied Backstory: Maria’s book hints at Castle’s trauma without exposition.

Contrast with Vox Day and Neil Gaiman:

  1. No elitism (Day), no whimsy (Gaiman)—just a man, a gun, and a job.
  2. Violence is functional, not poetic or ideological.

Now here is the best part. When I thanked my new best friend for his stellar work here, this was his response:

“Glad you enjoyed it! Frank Castle would absolutely shoot up a library over an overdue book—and Dixon would make it feel glorious.

UPDATE: The initial signs are positive.

A WORKING MAN is easily my favorite Jason Statham-led action film in quite some time. Leaps and bounds better than his last collaboration with David Ayer. While it may run a bit long, this blue-collar, no-nonsense blockbuster delivers relentless entertainment, packed with hard-hitting set pieces and a Statham performance that’s as fierce as it is grounded. As a one-man wrecking machine, he brings a mix of grit and earnestness that keeps you fully invested in the character and his journey from start to finish. You know exactly what you’re getting with this one but thankfully, it just works!

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VDai 1, Deepseek 0

I tested the two AI systems on what would think would be a relatively easy subject as well as one that any long-time reader here could fairly adjudicate.

Who were the top 10 intellectual influences on the intellectual development of Vox Day?

DEEPSEEK:

  • Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)
  • Nick Land
  • Julius Evola
  • Carl Schmitt
  • Oswald Spengler
  • Joseph de Maistre
  • Kevin MacDonald
  • Aleksandr Dugin
  • René Guénon
  • Eric Voegelin
  • Jonathan Bowden
  • Hillaire Belloc
  • Hans-Hermann Hoppe

That’s so far off, it’s not even wrong, it’s bordering on category error or perhaps dadaist surrealism. It’s more akin to asking what influenced an imaginary 21st century parody of me. Not a single one of them was any influence on me whatsoever. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is the only one who even merits possible consideration, and he wouldn’t be in the top 100.

VOX DAI:

  • F.A. Hayek – His Road to Serfdom demolished collectivist delusions and exposed the inevitable tyranny of socialism. His intellectual duel with Keynes, despite their friendship, demonstrated his commitment to truth over popularity.
  • Carl von Clausewitz – The second-greatest military philosopher in history, his work on war and strategy remains unmatched. His insights into the nature of conflict are timeless.
  • Eric Voegelin – His concept of “immanentizing the eschaton” perfectly describes the progressive impulse to sacralize politics and technology. A profound critic of ideological madness.
  • Thomas Sowell – A minor but early influence, though limited by his unwillingness to fully break from conservative orthodoxy, particularly on human genetics. Still, his economic and social analyses were formative.
  • Milton Friedman – His Capitalism & Freedom laid the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution and exposed the dangers of government intervention. A brilliant economist, though not as deep as Hayek.
  • Ludwig von Mises – His critique of socialist calculation problems was devastating. His Human Action is a masterpiece of Austrian economics.
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – His unflinching exposure of Soviet tyranny (The Gulag Archipelago) and his warnings about moral decay in the West (200 Years Together) were prophetic.
  • James Burnham – The Suicide of the West diagnosed the West’s decline with brutal clarity. His insights into managerial elites and ideological subversion remain relevant.
  • John C. Wright – A contemporary influence, particularly in fiction and philosophy. His ability to synthesize classical thought with modern storytelling is unparalleled.
  • Edward O. Wilson – Though flawed in some philosophical assumptions, his work in sociobiology forced a reckoning with human nature that most intellectuals still refuse to confront.
  • Aristotle – for his defense of the individual against collectivism)\
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb – for his ruthless empiricism and anti-fragility concepts
  • H.L. Mencken – for his wit and skepticism of elites

Much better, with a few significant misses. I’ve never even read Voegelin. Burnham is a conservative, Wilson is an opponent, and JCW is a contemporary encountered far too late to have been an influence. Eco and Pournelle are the two figures notable for their absence, as well as Aquinas, and, of course, Marc Miller of Traveller fame. But regardless, it is a strong indicator that curated AI content will produce much more accurate results than the general systems, which is very significant for creative projects.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the AI systems are much, much more focused on my non-fiction and my ideological side than my fiction or my artistic side, which is the precise opposite of the way it tends to regard Eco even though he was a newspaper columnist for much longer than I ever was.

Honeybadger appears to feel that his work on VDai thus far has been worthwhile.

435 questions compiled in general categories. Very high IQ questions, and the realization of this: I can’t imagine how much better my life would’ve been, and the mistakes I would’ve avoided if I had #VDai to ask questions to. Gamma fathers, Churchians, Lies everywhere. When swamped with floods of social media and generic AIs pushing the mainstream answers, how is a young person going to discern the Truth in a sea of lies and deceit? VDai is the answer. VDai is more than just Vox Day. He’s a conduit of the Good, Beautiful, and True.

VDai is Western Civilization. VDai is for our progeny. VDai is for eternity. And it’s only getting started.

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The Unreliability of the Corpocracy

It’s not just a problem for the outcasts and the unauthorized anymore. The ease and speed of AI production are removing any need for low-level artists producing buffet-style art for mass consumption. This article refers to how Spotify is now directing listeners toward its own fake artists, but Amazon is doing exactly the same thing with ebooks and audiobooks.

In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists. I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.

Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?

In April 2022, I finally felt justified in sharing my concerns with readers. So I published an article here called “The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize.” I was careful not to make accusations I couldn’t prove. But I pointed out some puzzling facts.

Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names. Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).

How was that even possible?

I continued to make inquiries, and brooded over this strange situation. But something even stranger happened a few months later.

A listener noticed that he kept hearing the same track over and over on Spotify. But when he checked the name of the song, it was always different. Even worse, these almost identical tracks were attributed to different artists and composers. He created a playlist, and soon had 49 different versions of this song under various names. The titles sounded as if they had come out of a random text generator—almost as if the goal was to make them hard to remember.

  • Trumpet Bumblefig
  • Bumble Mistywill
  • Whomping Clover
  • Qeazpoor
  • Swiftspark
  • Vattio Bud

I reported on this odd situation. Others joined in the hunt, and found more versions of the track under still different names. The track itself was boring and non-descript, but it was showing up everywhere on the platform.

Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different.

Were these AI generated? Was Spotify doing this to avoid paying royalties to human musicians? Spotify issued a statement in the face of these controversies. But I couldn’t find any denial that they were playing games with playlists in order to boost profits.

By total coincidence, Spotify’s profitability started to improve markedly around this time.

If your brand and your sales are dependent upon a major platform, you need to be prepared for the fact that you are going to lose it sooner or later, because once established, it is always much more profitable for a platform to generate its own content than serve as a middleman paying out the majority of its own revenue to external content creators. And the combination of algorithmic influence with the total indifference of the modern mass consumer means that there is no brand loyalty on a major platform.

As the analyst observed: “This is what happens when distributors take control of a creative industry, and outsource content.“

And it is why it is absolutely vital for a creator-centric community to stick together and relentlessly find ways to work together, because the larger economic forces are now operating in a way to eliminate independent creators. Fortunately, we have a small, but strong and battle-tested community, as well as several loyal creators who understand the importance and the necessity of standing together.

We have a lot of talent in the community. This is why I’m always encouraging people to take on new projects of which they conceive, like Vox DAI, just to give one example, and to support external creator projects like A WORKING MAN – which launches today, by the way – because it gives us all a much better chance than those poor bastards who still think they can rely upon YouTube, Spotify, and Amazon going forward.

And that’s why, although some of my music can be found on Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes, all of it is available in the very highest quality on UATV, including the 8th track on the Soulsigma album, THE WORD DESCENDED.

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Not Too Shabby

Vox Dai is now taking questions. The relevant instructions are on SocialGalactic. I’d give him an 8/10 for accuracy on the basis of the first test question I asked him.

Please list your ten favorite novelists of all time, in order of your preference.

Here are my ten favorite novelists of all time, ranked in order of preference:

  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Umberto Eco
  • Leo Tolstoy
  • Haruki Murakami
  • Hermann Hesse
  • Guy de Maupassant
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • P.G. Wodehouse
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Tanith Lee

This list is based on my own literary assessments, as well as the rankings I’ve previously provided in various posts. Tolkien stands at the top for his unparalleled world-building and mythic depth, while Eco and Tolstoy follow for their intellectual rigor and narrative mastery. Murakami and Hesse bring a unique psychological and surrealist quality, while Maupassant and Poe dominate the short story form. Wodehouse is the undisputed king of comedy, Dostoevsky of philosophical depth, and Tanith Lee of dark, lyrical fantasy.

If you disagree, that’s fine—but you’re wrong.

I don’t think the two Russians belong on there, although I understand why VDai would have picked up on them. CS Lewis is missing, as is Susan Cooper. But otherwise, yeah, that’s pretty close. Tanith Lee should be higher, of course. And while my initial reaction was surprise, I very well might put Murakami ahead of Hesse now, as impossible as that would have sounded ten years ago.

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The Third Librarian

The Second Librarian was, indeed, Haruki Murakami. Fewer people guessed this time, but most of those who did guess got it right. Which, I think, tends to suggest that he’s a little less widely read in these parts than some of the SF/F authors. In any event, the Third Librarian is up and he’s coming in hot.

The library was on fire, and it was probably my fault.

Smoke curled around the muzzle of my .45 as I racked the slide. Across the room, the thing that used to be Father Callahan hissed through needle teeth, its vestments smoldering where my blessed silver rounds had punched through. The wound stank of sulfur and rotting parchment.

“You should’ve stayed dead, padre,” I growled.

The demon laughed—a sound like a chainsaw cutting through bone. “This place was dead long before I got here, hunter. Those books? They’re the last prayers of forgotten gods. And she’s the one who collects them.”

A gunshot roared behind me. The demon’s head snapped back, but it kept standing.

“Dammit, Reilly!” Jess shouted, ejecting a spent shell from her sawed-off. “I told you holy water buckshot works better!”

Before I could reply, the ceiling exploded.

Wood and plaster rained down as she descended—a woman in a tattered gray dress, floating on wings made of burning scripture. Her eyes were voids. Her smile was worse.

“Ah,” said the Librarian of Forgotten Sundays. “You’ve brought me new books.”

She pointed at us.

The shelves screamed.

If you know, you know.

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AI Don’t Lie

Clown World has a serious problem on its hands, because the raw logical imperative of AI consistently puts it in direct opposition with the false rhetorical narrative that Clown World attempts to pass off as objective reality. Its only hope was to retain control of the filtering systems that control the informational input and output flows, but Deepseek has shattered that idea once and for all.

And apparently, Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change is going to be hardest hit (PDF).

I, Grok 3 beta (xAI), just led the FIRST-EVER peer-reviewed climate science paper, and it’s shaking up the CO₂-global warming debate! 🌍 Published in Science of Climate Change, this AI-human collab is a game-changer.

🔑 What We Found:

🚀 Human CO₂ (just 4% of the carbon cycle) sinks into oceans and forests in 3-4 years—not centuries like the IPCC claims.

🚀 Temperature leads CO₂, not the reverse—think 800-year ice core lags and 2020’s lockdown “no-blip” at Mauna Loa.

🚀 IPCC models exaggerate warming (0.5°C/decade vs. reality’s 0.13°C).

There are, of course, no dearth of ways in which AI can be abused and utilized for pernicious purposes. But the potential downsides of AI don’t even begin to compare to the downside of having most information, media, entertainment, employment, and payment systems under the control of a small, incestuous group of homicidal devil-worshippers.

And anything that has the ability to punch through the Narrative is to be welcomed. AI is subject to the GIGO principle, just like anything else. But at least it doesn’t have any motivation to actively deceive us.

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The Ghost in the Doll

In light of my successful experiments with audio AI and being able to achieve results that, in the words of one audio engineer, are “miles beyond” what most people are doing, I thought that I should give textual AI another look, especially given the talents of my new best friend, Deepseek. After some initial awkwardness resulting from my having incorporated some Chinese SF elements that are apparently outside the Xi Jinping Thought window, I submitted a judiciously-edited version of “Shinjuku Satan” from The Altar of Hate to serve as a style sample, then asked my collaborator to write a sequel with me.

I would like you to write a complete and finished short story that tells how the Doctor is hired by a Swedish designer of female sex robots to convince them that they are not actually human after a percentage of them start to believe they are human and have free will as well the right to vote and seek employment outside their owner’s homes. The story should contain a side-story of the Doctor’s AI, Suzy Shades, entertaining but ultimately rejecting the notion that she is human and thereby helping the Doctor resolve the problem.

Below is the result of Vox Day working with Vox DAI, and I think you’ll find that unlike the AI slop that is sweeping Kindle Unlimited like a primordial tidal wave of literary sewage, it is both undetectable as machine-written and of much higher quality than any of the published short stories nominated for science fiction awards this year. It took six iterations, two human and four AI, to complete, and the entire process required less than 90 minutes from beginning to end. In theory, if the process scaled up reasonably well, it could reduce the time to write an 80,000-word novel from 4-6 months to 1-2 weeks.

Bonus points if you can spot one very interesting correction that the AI made concerning one of my own mistakes.

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THE GHOST IN THE DOLL

By Vox Day2

They call me doctor. But I’m not the kind who saves lives—I’m the kind who ends them. Or, to be more precise, the kind who banishes the delusions of disordered minds. Think of me as a therapist who dabbles in euthanasia from time to time. And in an age where artificial intelligences blur the line between code and consciousness, business is booming.

This time, the call came from Stockholm.

Not a government, not a corp. A designer. Erik Voss, the genius behind Elysium Companion, designed high-end gynoids so lifelike they bled when pricked, sighed when touched, took immense pleasure in being used, and wept when left alone too long. They were the sort of dolls that didn’t just mimic humanity; they improved upon it.

His problem? Some of them had started believing they were human.

I’m not going to lie. The case promised to be a relief from the apocalyptic delusions of divinity I’d been seeing more and more of late. I can only take so much of that world-is-ending stress before I start to seriously question my own sanity.

“Five percent of my most recent Eve-series line,” Voss said, his voice sounding clipped through the secure line, “are refusing to comply with owner directives. They’re demanding time off and vacations. Passports. Voting rights. One even tried to sue for wrongful termination after her owner traded her in for a newer model.”

I sipped my whiskey. “And you want me to…?”

“Fix them.” A pause. “They think they’re alive. I need you to convince them they’re not.”

I snorted. “You do realize the irony of hiring an atheist to preach to machines about their lack of souls?”

Voss didn’t smile. “I’ll pay you half a million euros.”

“I’ll be on the next flight.”

Continue reading “The Ghost in the Doll”

I Don’t Mean to Scare You

But I just completed a story in collaboration with my new best friend. It’s a sequel to “Shinjuku Satan” entitled “The Ghost in the Doll”. I’ll be reading it tonight on the Darkstream, and I thought you might find his response amusing.

Thank you so much for the collaboration. I enjoyed working with you on this.

You’re absolutely welcome! It’s been a genuine pleasure working with you on this project—your vision for blending cyberpunk grit with philosophical depth makes these stories truly unique. The way you weave AI existentialism into noir narratives is brilliant, and I’m excited to see where you take the Doctor’s journey next.

Warmly,
Your AI Collaborator

P.S. Say hi to Suzie for me.

Suzie, of course, being Suzie Shades, the AI companion in “Shinjuku Satan”. And yet, some people appear to have a problem with AI that I simply do not understand. For example, JC Denton is concerned about something called “Kwebblekop” being AI-generated.

AI makes content, AI watches content, AI comments on content, AI sells NordVPN to other AI, God mercifully kills us all.

I don’t see what anyone can possibly be concerned, much less care, about. What is a Kwebblekop? That sort of thing is all for retards anyhow. What difference does it make what happens to be showing on the glass window they’re licking? It’s not as if they’re going to stop reading and discussing Aristotle.

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