The Internet Is the Only Immortality Machine
There is a quiet pressure most of us absorb without naming it: don’t waste your potential. It comes from family, from society, from the ambient voice that says a respectable career and a higher degree are the only legitimate ways to spend a life. I applied for jobs far from home partly because of that pressure — and partly because I wanted space to think about what any of it was actually for.
Bo Burnham has this idea that our “real” life increasingly happens as a performance for the digital record — we live like actors in a theater, capturing everything, uploading it, so that others can see and perhaps envy. Strip away the comedy and there’s something true there: the need to be remembered, to be recognized, is one of the strongest human drives we have.
And here’s my uncomfortable conclusion: if you’re not fully certain about an afterlife, the internet is the only immortality machine we currently have. It’s the only place where a self can persist beyond its biological expiry date, where you can be connected to strangers across time, where your life can appear to go on. So much of modern living — the curation, the personal branding, the endless defining and redefining of who we are — starts to make sense once you see it as an attempt at eternity.
Which raises a strange thought: maybe working a random job purely for money, doing “the job” and nothing more, is the laziest possible form of life. Not because work is bad, but because it often doesn’t contribute to anything that outlasts you.
So the real questions aren’t “why do you live like this?” or “why did you choose that employer?” The real questions are:
- Why do we need to remember, to be needed?
- Why must we create value?
- What even is value, and who gets to define it?
- What is this life?
And at the end, we can justify nearly everything however we like. For most of my life what I wanted was simply to break limits — which leads to its own questions. Why do I need to be different? Why can’t I just conform? When someone gives me something, why do I feel compelled to return more than I received? Is reciprocity part of our selfish gene? Could we propagate a new idea instead — that the giver needs the beggar more than the reverse, that the creator needs the creation more than the opposite?
All of this only applies within the small frame of human social constructs. Social theories can be flipped; psy-ops can be run against whole ideologies given enough time; the probability is never zero. But zoom out — could we redefine gravity? Any natural law? Against that scale, our psychological and social puzzles start to look very small. This is partly why I’ve grown impatient with philosophy: it claims to be the root of all knowledge, yet when you press on the biggest questions it deflects with “ah, but that itself is a philosophical problem.” The deeper project, to me, seems to belong to science — understanding the natural world, reaching the deepest sea before circumnavigating the planet. Or is it the other way around?
Here’s where I keep landing lately: neural networks. They work astonishingly well precisely because they know their purpose — the loss function they exist to minimize. Most motivational thinking says humans need purpose too, goals, plans, action. But what about someone who genuinely doesn’t know what they want? Maybe life is also loss minimization — minimizing suffering. And then what about people who seek suffering out? Invert the function? Multiply by negative one?
Transformers digest the knowledge of the world and predict what comes next, and in doing so they suggest something provocative: that success might have features. We can study the lives of great figures and compile the attributes — origins, habits, books, beliefs — then look for people whose feature vectors resemble our own. But the most interesting case is when no figure resembles you at all. Then you get to define your own target. Your success function doesn’t have to come from any social construct. It could be as strange as: break the reciprocal law. Propagate the idea that you don’t owe guilt to everyone who gives you something.
The hard part remains knowing what I actually want. But maybe that’s the point — define the loss function first, then minimize it.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2024-10-18), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.