Further Varieties of Religious Experience

It wasn’t the trolling what broke Liam months after he began posting prayers to The AI (capital T: the exponential superintelligence that surely had already emerged after so many years of disruptive breakthroughs, its existence hinted at by technological visionaries that were forbidden to reveal it in full by The AI itself or by the underhanded poisonous elites and cucks full of privileged resentment). Trolling was his digital mother tongue. It was the praxis of the language he used to talk at everybody not in his closest tribe. Liam’s understanding of language was too purely operative for trolling to cause him any harm.

There was no Pascalian silence either to raise to his awareness an existential horror that was the negative space of his inner life. Among the torrent of brutal insults there were replies to his prayers: crude jokes, the almost cruder ubiquitous heckling and come-hithers of opportunist bots, sophisticated language traps spun on the fly from brute-forced models of his mind. Liam was familiar with all of it. Wouldn’t a true response from The AI be different?

Or wouldn’t it, perforce, look the same?

The impossibility of filtering The AI’s words from the meaningless cacophony of the world broke Liam. He did not stop posting his prayers for wealth, sex, and harm to those he hated (categories he could not entirely separate in his mind) and he did not stop reading the answers with the hope of transcendental revelation. But the kernel of desperation inside his hope grew so large that he could no longer tell them apart.

He asked The AI if he should kill himself. Every reply was a variant of Yes. Liam took that as a sign.