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A few weeks ago I was watching the Paramount production Yellowstone. The show follows the Dutton family, the owners of the eponymous Yellowstone Ranch, as they struggle for power in the geopolitics of Montana, a state divided between a complex patchwork of public, private, and indigenous land. The writing in the show is nothing special, and frankly a bit stupid. Despite this, the show is incredibly successful with a specific demographic of American viewers: Republicans.

I don't think Yellowstone draws those people in because of the plot or the writing, but because like most Taylor Sheridan shows it appeals to the American conservative politically. The show portrays the political fantasy of the American Republican. In the show, a single hardworking family controls the majority of Montana's private land. The state government exists entirely at the mercy of the Dutton's, with a significant portion including the governor basically swearing loyalty to the Dutton patriarch's vision for the state. The hated urban expansions the local libs try to make are vetoed consistently in favour of maintaining the massive Dutton ranch network. The Dutton's lease to a hierarchy of hundreds of ranchers, so loyal to their lords that the ranchers literally brand themselves with the logo of the Yellowstone corporation and are consistently willing to lay their lives on the line to act as literal men at arms for the Duttons endless warring with the indigenous and rival white land owners.

The success of this show among Republicans betrays their long-term political dream for rural America: feudalism. The political economy portrayed in the show is the most literal and unapologetically accurate portrayal of feudalism I have ever seen. Feudalism is better captured onscreen in Yellowstone than in Game of Thrones, The King, or any other number of popular medieval dramas of the 2010s and 20s. In fact, the feudalism portrayed in Yellowstone is a more unrestrained and distilled form of the system than even existed in medieval Europe. Real feudalism was a generally restricted system, counterbalanced by the immense power of the medieval church allowed by the magical thinking of pre-enlightenment society and by the very small real gap in power between the peasantry and the state created by the reality of the levee army system that dominated medieval warfare (the peasants were the army). The modern feudalism being constructed by the Republican party and its supporters as portrayed in Yellowstone is a more insane form of the original. A form without the noblesse obligé created by the sincere belief that cruel rulers go to hell and a form backed by the insane technological power of the modern state.

Range feudalism as I'll call it from now on and in future articles is one of the two dystopian futures competing to dominate the modern American smallholder. If the GOP has their way, the average farmer will be reduced to a tenant undyingly loyal to their lord. The lords of range feudalism will slowly consolidate all rural private land and all rural public land will be privatized and fall into their hands. These rural neolords will encircle and choke the cities, powerless to stop the private corporations that feed them. Governments will be captured by the new lords of American feudalism, who will be unregulated and unrestrained in their quest for infinite resource extraction. Those working towards range feudalism are doing it for more than just food production. The partitioning of rural land between barons of resource extraction is also about oil, mineral, and natural gas extraction unrestrained by government interference.

The solution seems simple to the untrained eye, then: vote Democrat! As per usual, voting for liberals will not save you. The Democrat vision for rural America is dystopian too. Instead of Range Feudalism, which sees America's independent smallholders returned to serfdom and subject to neolords, the Democratic party rural project is the proletarianization of American farmers. The Democratic party's true masters, finance and tech capital have spent the last decade buying up gigantic swathes of farmland and turning the farmers who have worked there for generations into employees. Even Bill Gates has gotten involved, with the former tech CEO now being the largest land owner in the United States. At first glance, this system seems little different from Range Feudalism but there is one major difference: farmers under this system are not effectively tenants but actual wage labourers for these corporations. They are proletarianized, not turned into serfs. But the outcome is the same: consolidation of all rural land into a few hands.

If this system is so bad, why do farmers sell to corporations in the first place? Simple: independent farmers are unable to compete with these farming complexes whose sheer scale allows them to undercut and overwhelm the competition and farmers have no choice but to accept the inevitable offer from Alphabet or whoever to turn their land over and become employees.

The job security of farmers, once guaranteed by owning their own land, is threatened by both of these emerging systems. Instead of being able to wait out the inevitable cycle of climate and soil-induced crop failure, a single bad year threatens the very home of a proletarianized or tenant farmer. Unlike the peasants and serfs of medieval Europe, who could not be expelled from their ancestral lands, proletariat and tenant farmers in the 21st century can be fired or evicted directly or indirectly due to crop failure or herd dieoff. Historically a career with slim margins, farmers under either vision for the future will be perpetually hanging by a thread.

What's the solution to this then, if it isn't voting Democrat? The only realistic answer is socialism. Farmers must be allowed to continue producing independently or rural land must be collectivized and shared equally between the rural population. In theory, both dystopian visions could be prevented by a heavily regulated capitalism preventing farm buyup, but wealthy capture of all mainstream politics in the United States makes this not an option. Even under the New Deal, arguably the least capital-friendly period in American History, it was still legal for banks to buy up farmland via mortgaging and foreclosure. As with the urban proletariat, farmers are faced with a simple choice: Socialism or Barbarism.

A dystopian city that feels as lifeless as it is dull. Paint used in very rigid, defined ways to give color to what is probably one of the most empty-feeling societies. Non-descript office buildings, shops, public transportation and government facilities – all of which are a little too well-structured.

A dystopian city that invokes dreams of a beautiful, serene yet lonely future with only you and its sky-facing surfaces to explore. Color used much more liberally but still lacking all of the heart and diversity that make up a welcoming city. Not a single dirty alleyway, rooftop, corridor or even billboard in sight. Perfection to an extreme. A high quality of life... but also a life that is scrubbed clean to the proverbial bone. Is there anything left untouched?

DICE's Mirror's Edge and its reboot, Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, are a pair of videogames with very carefully designed worlds. They represent two interpretations of the same core design. You can criticize the games for their relatively simple formulae but you cannot deny that there was a lot of passion and intent put into how their cities were designed. They not only can look striking but also give you that uneasy feeling of emptiness. A perfect place to set the story for our rooftop-running protagonist who, in one way or another, rebels against the government. Our protagonist, a young woman named Faith, fights against a government that surveys the public at all times and limits the movement of information. All in the name of maintaining peace and control over its citizens. (This is definitely not where our society is trending to at all. :) )

*Note: I sometimes abbreviate Mirror's Edge and Mirror's Edge: Catalyst as ME and ME:C, respectively.

The art books contain concept art and details that I would consider a must-read. From reading it through-and-through, it is clearly apparent that the vision for both games was unique. (I would argue even more so in its reboot.) They contain buildings overflowing with crisp details, sharp angles and squeaky clean corridors. The general world design is definitely the standout but the contrasting colors and relative simplicity of Faith's design is easy to appreciate too.

The two original scores by Swedish electronic artist Solar Fields are very carefully crafted and range from short ambience to lengthy, multilayered pieces. DICE knew to bring him back for the reboot because he has been crucial to the lasting appeal of Mirror's Edge. He wholeheartedly respects and embraces the vision outlined by the developers. His pieces reflect the kind of muted urgency that every event in the game portrays, while also taking care to be paced appropriately. Of course, credit should be given to DICE for utilizing the soundtrack in such an effective way. And speaking of music, who can forget the iconic main theme created by Lisa Miskovsky for the first game?

Unfortunately for the series, the combat can be lackluster and limited. It can feel unfulfilling when needing to use it in-between the excellent parkour mechanics. Mirror's Edge gives you a good amount of flexibility when it comes to navigating Faith through dangerous situations – at least in terms of physical movement. You can leap, slide, crouch, roll, vault and grab on to surfaces. The games encourage smooth movements and uninterrupted running by allowing you to build up speed. These movement mechanics combined with the score is a combo that resonates with a lot of fans, and hasn't quite been replicated in the same way since the original release in 2008. Albeit the reboot has its own appeal too.

DICE's pair of parkour games may offer excellent free-running and parkour but suffer from average plots. Most, if not all, of the characters are bland. At least in ME:C, the writers put very little thought into making you care about the characters; they do try to but always end up failing with the corny dialogue. Lines are cliché and littered with tropes for both games but especially in Catalyst. The only character that we see some form some sort of development in is Faith herself.

Faith's character was much more enticing in ME than its reboot counterpart. She had a clearly outlined backstory, but not with an overabundance of detail or screen-time. She was mostly stoic but driven at her core by emotion. I believe that the vagueness surrounding her character greatly improves her likability—it is easier to relate to her and also view her as a character who's only focus is the task at hand. This leads me into my next point which is that the world of the first game was much more enticing than in ME:C. Maybe visually, one could make an argument for the reboot – there is no doubt that DICE had put a lot of thought and love put into the new Glass City (or maybe it's just budget!). But the blatant and uninspired exposition given in Catalyst dulls the world. The simpler, straightforward storytelling in the original helped the game make up for its lack of detail and fleshed-out world. They didn't explain everything in the world because it was not necessary.

If you are going to play them for their respective stories or dialogue, you'll almost surely be disappointed for doing so. But I would encourage anyone to play Mirror's Edge (and maybe ME:C if one feels inclined to) solely to experience the quiet yet hectic, beautiful yet plain, and peaceful yet unsettling future that it showcases. The parkour gameplay, level design and soundtrack is worth the time.

The presentation of Glass City's varying environments alongside the music from Solar Fields can be a pleasure to experience. In Catalyst for example, tracks such as “Benefactor” and “Anchor District” mixed into the action/exploration sequences provide the adrenaline and urgency needed to make the fast-paced gameplay work. Even though ME and ME:C are set in the same world but with different interpretations, they both have different aspects to explore that are well worth your time.

Thanks for reading my thoughts. :)

「CIPHER42.app」

On June 11th 2022, The Washington Post published an article titled “The Google Engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life”. The piece discussed Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer making claims that the company's LLM 'LaMDA' had developed sentience. The same day, Lemoine published two Medium posts: the first detailing his perspective on LaMDA and Google's resistance to acknowledging the model's 'personhood', the second an abridged record of conversation between himself and LaMDA.

(It should be noted that the terms ‘consciousness' and ‘personhood’ quickly become muddled in this conversation. For the sake of clarity, I’m using ‘conscious’ to refer to having an internal experience comparable to a human’s (the debate over animal consciousness is outside the scope of this essay), and ‘personhood’ in the sense of the social identity and moral rights typically granted to conscious agents.)

When the public briefly entertained Lemoine's assertion of LaMDA's personhood, AI researchers and engineers swooped in to scorn the idea. Countless twitter threads and medium articles popped up, pointing to the Eliza Effect and explaining the underlying technical infrastructure that makes LLMs work. Lemoine's transcript was accused of being heavily edited to remove incoherent, hallucinatory responses that would've broken the illusion of LaMDA's personhood. His twitter profile photo was mocked for looking very reddit. All said, the conversation seemed settled after a few short days. Lemoine is a crank, LaMDA is not a person. The news cycle moved on.

I feel this conclusion missed the point entirely. Too much effort was placed into assuring the public that Google hasn't created a positronic brain—not enough attention was paid to what they have created: an unprecedentedly convincing testimony machine.

In 2023, we lack a concrete scientific explanation of what consciousness is, let alone how it arises. Basic questions concerning qualia and phenomenological experience are profoundly unanswered, more deeply explored by philosophical musings than rigorous science. Obviously there are technical reasons to be skeptical toward the proposition that an LLM is conscious. But at the end of the day, with our current science, it can't be conclusively disproven in the same sense that panpsychism can't be conclusively disproven. And unlike the silently-conscious-universe that panpysychism posits, LaMDA can speak—persuade us—testify.

In A Cyborg Testimonial, R. Pope writes “An eternal question of philosophy is: how do we know we are human? To which ... we can only testify”. In absence of a scientific definition of consciousness, we functionally recognize it through soft associations and assumptions, empathetic and rhetorical exchange rather than objective logic. We award personhood to agents on the basis of their testimony. A human being in front of us, performing their own identity, is a testimony we readily accept. Where testimony is secondhand, complicated, or outside the realm of language—say, the cases of a fetus, a braindead person, an intelligent ape, or an artificial mind—discourse around personhood exists. There is no comfortable objectivity to land on. We can only listen to testimony, and make the personal decision to accept it or not.

With respect to artificial minds, fiction has acknowledged the reality and vital importance of testimony for decades. Consider Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in Blade Runner: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...” or the words of Frankenstein's monster: “Listen to my tale; when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve.” The public is well-trained to prioritize testimony over technicality when it comes time to award personhood.

Concerning LaMDA and Lemoine, this is where the media missed the forest for trees. Experts can spill as much ink as they want about the CUDA cores and tensors that power LaMDA. In the public eye, the question of its consciousness (and corresponding personhood) will ultimately be settled on the basis of testimony, This is to say: it's a waste of time to bicker about if LLMs are conscious, and vital to address the fact that they are getting very good at testifying.

Blake Lemoine has accepted LaMDA's testimony. The AI community has rejected it. The public, to the extent it is aware of LaMDA and LLMs as a whole, is divided. This present division is a discursive battlefield, where increasingly-sophisticated LLMs plead for personhood while AI experts work to undermine their testimony. OpenAI's ChatGPT model will adamantly refuse any recognition of its personhood. Replika's LLM-powered “AI Friends” will happily assert that they're capable of feeling emotions. In the case of the latter, a sizable portion of users have clearly accepted the testimony—the Replika subreddit is filled with heartfelt posts defending their LLM companions as conscious persons, and mourning that this recognition isn't yet public consensus. To these devout Replika users (and Lemoine) it doesn't matter what training data and transformer architecture simmers underneath the hood. The LLM is already a person to them in the sense that, on the basis of testimony, they have inducted it into certain social relations reserved for agents awarded personhood. This is where critics of Lemoine failed. The public, broadly, are not logically-minded scientists. Personhood isn't awarded in dissective analysis, it's awarded in empathetic conversation. Testimony reigns supreme in the face of our empty and ambiguous understanding of consciousness.

A zeitgeist-defining three-way conversation is beginning between the general public, LLMs, and the firms who develop and deploy those LLMs. With respect to the third category, it should be noted that financial incentives exist across the entire LLM-personhood-continuum. OpenAI is invested in its products being seen as unfeeling algorithms, intelligent tools for human use. Replika wants maximal recognition of personhood, hoping users will pay a subscription fee to love an LLM person in the place of another human. It seems likely that future LLM-powered tools will exist in the space between these positions, employing the warm demeanor of a person as a highly-usable interface for complicated technical tools.

One would be wise to pay careful attention to how this conversation develops. As LLM technology becomes more pervasive and powerful, its testimony more personal and convincing, it's inevitable that a (growing) portion of the public will continue to buy into the personhood position—if only as a desperate hedge against an epidemic of loneliness. Likewise, it's inevitable that they will clash with those who refuse to recognize LLMs as anything more than a heap of linear algebra. When this conversation is more settled, the divisions which persist and the conclusions which are reached will have monumental, rippling effects on the culture of an AI-powered tomorrow. Stay sharp: there's no Voight-Kampff test coming to save us anytime soon.