Tootfinder

I've been rolling over something in my mind for the past couple of days, tumbling this way and that. It's still not completely smooth, but there are so many interesting implications that it might be worth a glance in it's rough form.
By happenstance I started digging in to critical #cybernetics and found a talk by Klaus Krippendorff. One of the things he focused on was "agency." A human has agency, while a machine does not. A human can explain *why* they did something, he reasoned, while a machine cannot. It is in the ability to comprehend and articulate the "why" that makes agency. I'm not sure that I agree with this, and there some interesting implications to thinking about agency in terms of directionality.
Throughout history people have used systems, such as language, to make things easier. Writing solves a problem with the limits of human memory. At the same time, oral culture can be more dynamic. Spoken records cannot trap humans in the way written ones can. There is, with written language, some inversion of control.
Systems, like language, do not have agency in that they cannot think (in the human sense). But considering language as a meme, it *does* have *something like* agency in the same sense as a virus does: it is driven by evolutionary pressures to adapt in such a way to it's own replication.
So we can begin to think of these systems in terms of systems that are used by people, and systems that use people. Some of these systems are symbiotic. Language, for example, replicates because it provides clear value to the user.
But we can begin to imagine a system that is more parasitic than symbiotic. Imagine a system that (though lacking consciousness) hijacks the minds of humans in order to replicate itself, to not simply passively be accepted but to force itself onto others.
Perhaps such a system could allow humans to control other humans. Of course, I could be talking about capitalism or the State here. But imagine a system that could parasitize that system. One that could hijack capitalism to use *its control* to maximize the propagation of something that isn't doesn't even serve that system.
Imagine such a cybernetic parasite. Perhaps it could even be described in terms of demonic possession. Imagine a thing hijacking humans in control of other humans, spreading the infection at threat of starvation. Jumping from host to host. Replicating itself ruthlessly by exploiting the weakness of concentrated power. Agents without consciousness, mindlessly stripping the agency from humans. Turning humans into mindless vessels that mechanically change the environment to the benefit of the possessor. Try to imagine. .
You know you don't have to. Yes. This is a post about the #LLMs and the #AIBubble..