{"id":8140,"date":"2019-02-11T21:04:16","date_gmt":"2019-02-12T05:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=8140"},"modified":"2019-02-12T16:23:07","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T00:23:07","slug":"toy-ghosts-and-juicy-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/11\/toy-ghosts-and-juicy-ghosts\/","title":{"rendered":"Toy Ghosts, the Lifebox, and Juicy Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m thinking about writing an SF tale involving what we sometimes call digital immortality. It\u2019s a theme I\u2019ve often returned to, starting with the writing of my Software <\/em> novel in 1979-1980. We\u2019re almost at the point where a low-end cloud-based model of you is possible. At present these are thin, pixelated constructs with cardboard search-engine Eliza-type personalities. Call them toy ghosts. Later in this post I\u2019ll get onto the topic of something richer, which I’ll call juicy ghosts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Speaking of toy ghosts, I\u2019ve often referred to this kind of emulation as a lifebox<\/em>. You read my whole analysis of building lifeboxes online in the \u201cLifebox\u201d\u009d <\/a>section of my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve actually constructed a rudimentary lifebox that weakly emulates me. See my interactive Search Rudy\u2019s Lifebox <\/a> page. Type, say, the words \u201csoftware novel\u201d\u009d into the Search box and press enter.<\/p>\n

The Google-supported algorithm will throw up some ads as the first two or three results, but after that there\u2019s good solid links into pages of my vast website www.rudyrucker.com. And not that there are pages and pages of search results, you can flip through them using the page numbers at the bottom of the list of results.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So, like I’m saying, if you put “software novel” in the search box, you’ll get links pages that involve my Software <\/em>novel, which is, again, where my notion of the lifebox began. <\/p>\n

Or if you especialy want to know about the lifebox concept, you might just put”lifebox” in the search box. In telling you this, I\u2019m going meta on your ass.That is, I’m telling you to ask my lifebox page to find out what I think about the lifebox.<\/p>\n

More fun: If you want know about the photo above, run the search on “Terence McKenna”. Or just plain “Terence” will do. Even though he’s dead, he’s still my friend.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This weekend I was talking to my son Rudy Jr. (CEO of Monkeybrains.net<\/a>, who host this blog) about where lo-res current-tech cloud-based toy ghosts would be hosted. By hosting <\/em>a ghost, I mean two things.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n[This is not Rudy Jr., this is a big wave surfer called John Bowling whom we know. I like the Viking hat so much that I put it into a Surfin’ SF story I recently wrote with Marc Laidlaw.]<\/p>\n

(Ram<\/em>) Store and maintain a large data base (what I\u2019ve sometimes called a lifebox) of the person, along with the code for a program that can use the data to emulate the personality.<\/p>\n

(Crunch<\/em>) Provide processing power to run a simple-ass data-intensive personality emulation code on the data base.<\/p>\n

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\n[Yes that’s a toy ghost version of me, age 17, in the Chevalier Literary Magazine<\/em> 1963, Louisville, Kentucky.]<\/p>\n

For awhile I had a retrograde notion that some companies like Google or Facebook or Amazon might host toy ghosts on enormous supercomputers. What I was calling silos. But that\u2019s an outdated way to think. Rudy Jr. pointed out that most storage and processing is distributed, with chunks of it scattered across a zillion nodes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Rudy also made the point that there\u2019s always going to be limited space on the nodes\u2014not enough to immortalize everyone<\/em>\u2014 so a kind of fitness function determines who gets to have, and to keep, a toy ghost. That is, if a toy ghost is to continue to living in the internet cloud, people have to be looking at it and interacting with it. The system\u2019s automatic garbage removal will prune away all traces of a ghost that\u2019s rarely visited.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This a bit like the author\u2019s perennial quandary: Which books remain in print? Which books continue being stocked in libraries? Which books remain readily accessible online? And pirated editions are better than none!<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n[I happened to see this on a wall in Los Gatos by random coincidence. To me it feels relevant, because my friend Greg Gibson in Massachusetts son Galen was killed in a school shooting some years ago. Greg is currently running a GoFundMe to support the publicizing of an unusual gun control video ad that Greg is working on. Check out<\/a> the campaign and see Greg\u2019s moving pitch video.]<\/p>\n

It may be that an internet toy ghost is designed with an \u201cinstinct for self-preservation,\u201d\u009d so it\u2019ll promote itself. Similar to the original philosophy-of-language Richard-Dawkins-type meaning of \u201cmeme<\/a>,\u201d\u009d a sticky, catchy, useful thought that impels people to pass it on to others, thus reproducing itself. The older notion of meme kind of assumes that the meme has some heavy intellectual content or survival value. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

These days an \u201cinternet meme<\/a>\u201d\u009d just means something like a phrase or image that people repost. Cat <\/em>pictures, for Christ\u2019s sake. But I admit I\u2019m intrigued by the subcategory of \u201cdank memes,\u201d\u009d which seem to be flashes that make stoners laugh.<\/p>\n

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\n[Frames from the immortal Will Elder’s early Mad<\/em> magazine strip, “Ping Pong” (parody of “King Kong”).]<\/p>\n

A toy ghost might say, \u201cI seem to be a meme. Kan I has cheezeburger?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

How do you kill a toy ghost that lives on the internet? Say it’s an emulation of a martyred rebel, or of a dead oppressor. Some faction wants that toy ghost gone. How to quash it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(a) We might invoke the notion of a smart malware bot that finds and erases all scraps of info relating to that toy ghost. I remember a scene in a Bill Gibson novel where an obnox virus-thing slides under the door of a virtual room, and a shape like a cockroach eats it, and one of the guys says the cockroach had \u201coffered criticism.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But in practice I\u2019m not sure if\/how that would work. The scraps of the toy ghost could disguise themselves. It\u2019s hard or impossible to search the whole web and remove all traces of something. And the ghost cold be continually redistributing and coding and re-encrypting itself. And it sounds kind of boring to read about.<\/p>\n

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\n[My old pal Eddie Marritz the famous cinematographer.]<\/p>\n

(b) Or the oppressor might make sure the targeted toy ghost doesn\u2019t show up in common search engines. (Eyeball kick: an online program that searches for specific toy ghosts might be called \u201cThe Book of the Living Dead.\u201d\u009d) If you can hack the search engines you can make a given ghost be effectively invisible, And by reducing its registered hits you make it likelier to be pruned.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Like if the magazines refuse to review your books, you\u2019re more likely to go out of print.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(c) Another way to lower the effectiveness of a ghost, it to make sure that whenever the ghost is <\/em>accessed, a shitty stupid parasite shows up with it. Like an unshakable troll commenter or spammy-ad link. Degrading the ghosts\u2019 reputation, making it be treated as malware or as spam. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Toy ghosts have wireless contact with Earth peripherals. This is a move in both Wm. Gibson\u2019s The Peripheral<\/a><\/em>, and in Cory Doctorow\u2019s Walkaway<\/a><\/em>.. Your toy ghost might talk to you on the phone. Like a type of smart cloud storage. Or a highly personalized assistant.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A ghost can be more autonomous and robust if it\u2019s a biocomputation than if it\u2019s an internet chip-based and system-moderated computation. So escaping from the digital to the analog would greatly empower a ghost. And being juicy or biological makes a ghost safe.<\/p>\n

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\n[Great painting by Stanley Whitney <\/a>in the Harlem Studio Museum exhibit at the MoAD (Museum of the African Diaspora) in SF, right around the corner from SFMOMA]<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re juicy, you\u2019re \u201cin the wild\u201d\u009d and not living on a human-built net by the sufferance of the internet operating systems and protocols. You aren\u2019t subject to the ravages of the mindless internet pruning bots.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And the trick of converting a toy ghost to a juicy ghost is something that a rebel programmer called Gee Willikers has mastered. He found the trick of ghost migration while he was designing the weaponized wasps. In the process of his biohacking to create the Turing wasps, Gee Willikers learned to program living organisms. The organism runs a program on its neurons, in its hormone flows, in its DNA, it\u2019s quantum computations, whatever. It\u2019s tricky to port a block of info as large as a toy ghost onto an organism. The organism has to be temporarily paralyzed, like with cone shell toxin. Not even breathing. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My character Curtis Winch is going to make a really aggro move against a certain evil politician called Ross Treadle on the occasion of that guy\u2019s third <\/em> Presidential Inauguration. Curtis is going to use a tweaked, weaponized \u201cTuring wasp\u201d\u009d to temporarily paralyze Ross Treadle<\/p>\n

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\n[This is my artist friend Vernon Head with me at the SFMOMA Magritte Show. I almost feel like this image is a dank meme. :)]<\/p>\n

And then one of the Turing wasps installs a copy of Curtis\u2019s online toy ghost within Treadle\u2019s bio processes. And then a rich new Curtis Winch will awake, hosted by Treadle\u2019s body. And this won\u2019t be just a chintzy toy ghost. No, man, this virtual Curtish Winch be a juicy ghost<\/em>. And a bio-hosted juicy ghost, is much richer than a toy ghost. The \u201cvital force\u201d\u009d is real. It involves the richness of structure and function in living cells.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And now, having parasitized our illegitimate \u201cPresident,\u201d\u009d our juicy ghost is in a position to kick some serious butt!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m thinking about writing an SF tale involving what we sometimes call digital immortality. It\u2019s a theme I\u2019ve often returned to, starting with the writing of my Software novel in 1979-1980. We\u2019re almost at the point where a low-end cloud-based model of you is possible. At present these are thin, pixelated constructs with cardboard search-engine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8140"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8168,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8140\/revisions\/8168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}