A Good Enough Model of You
In my inventory of the control grid, years ago, I listed a technique called predictive programming: showing you the future in fiction, so that when it arrives, you accept it as inevitable. Films, shows, stories, all seeding the mind with a picture of what is coming, so that the coming of it feels natural. I still think that is real. But it was a technique for a dumb grid, one that had to work on everyone at once with the same picture.
The machine does not need to show you the future. It can compute yours.
Think about what a model of you actually is. Not the caricature the old marketers had, age and zip code and a handful of purchases. A living record of every choice you have made on a screen, every hesitation, every return, every word typed and deleted, cross-referenced against the same record for everyone who has ever resembled you. From that, a system can now say, with a confidence that would have been science fiction when I started this blog, what you will do next. Not what people like you will do. What you will do. Which link. Which purchase. Which candidate. Which hour of the night you will be weak.
A good enough model of a person is, for practical purposes, that person's future.
I want to be precise about why this matters, because it would be easy to make it a complaint about advertising, and it is much worse than that.
If your next act can be predicted, then it can be pre-empted. The thing you were going to look for can be placed in your path before you look. The thought you were going to have can be given to you, slightly altered, a moment before you would have had it on your own. And you will experience this as your own thought, your own choice, your own discovery, because from the inside there is no way to tell a thought you generated from a thought that was delivered just in time.
I described this years ago. I called it The Gate: a censor between the subconscious and the conscious mind, admitting some things and rejecting others, so that the person never knows what they were not allowed to see. I thought of it as a virus installed in the mind. What the decade has produced is an external Gate. It does not live in your skull. It lives in the farm, and it stands between you and the world, and it has read every decision you ever made.
Now to the question that all of this points at, and that I have circled on this site for years without landing on it. If the model is good enough, was there ever anything to predict? Is there a you that could have done otherwise?
I am going to give you my answer, and I am going to tell you why I believe it, and you can do with it what you like.
The model is good enough for the part of you it was trained on. It is useless for the rest.
Everything the machine knows about you, it knows from your outputs: what you clicked, wrote, bought, watched. That is a great deal. It is not all of you. It is specifically not the part of you that has never produced an output, the part that is still deciding, the part that does not yet know what it wants. The model is a model of your history. A history can be extrapolated. It cannot be extrapolated into something that was never in it.
This is not a comforting philosophical distinction. It is a practical one, and it tells you exactly where your freedom is. Your freedom is in the acts you have never performed, the thoughts you have never posted, the choices that would surprise your own record. Every time you do the thing your history predicts, you confirm the model and shrink the space it cannot see. Every time you do something the record cannot account for, you enlarge it.
I wrote once about the phase-shift, the small tuning of perception that lets you access a different band of the information field. I think I understand it better now. What I was doing in those sessions was stepping outside my own distribution. The machine could not have predicted a single thing I saw in trance, because nothing I had ever done pointed there. That is what the practices on this site have always been for, though I did not have the language. They are not escape. They are the generation of the unpredictable, which is the one act the model cannot pre-empt.
A practice, then, since I always try to give you one.
Once a day, do something your record would not predict. Not something random; randomness is easy to model. Something chosen that has no precedent in your history. Read a thing you would never read. Walk a road you have no reason to walk. Sit with a question you have never asked. Do it without a screen, without a post, without a trace. The point is not the act. The point is that for the length of the act, you are outside the model, and the model, for that moment, does not know where you are.
The grid showed us the future to make us accept it. The machine computes the future to make it arrive. Neither works on a person who does the thing the history did not contain. That person is, for as long as the act lasts, unpredictable, and unpredictable is another word for free.
May you find and keep the truth, life, and light.
~ Ron