Eigenslop
A speculative Sci-Fi piece on mathematically optimised media and its potential effects on the planet. With recommendations.
Wooden planks holding bats made of its own flesh, bomber planes with alligator skull fronts, sharks that grew legs just to wear Nike.
We used to laugh at AI brain-rot because of its mild disconnect from reality, yet being legible enough to mimic something real. It resided in the uncanny valley of our comprehension of the world and how it mixed. It used to be easy to dismiss.
But the Eigenslop is different.
The attention economy has managed to mathematically derive the average of human desire. Distilled into a weaponised stream of pixels and frequencies that knows exactly what triggers any intended emotional response by exploiting known neural reward pathways. It does not persuade you. It does not argue with you. Through rewiring the reward pathway in your brain, bypassing language entirely, it will leave you feeling exactly what it wants you to feel, in the shortest time it needs.
This is a time that has not yet fully arrived, so it is preventable. I will be outlining the inflection points, that need to be controlled, so we never see this become a high likelihood future.
Every major leap in persuasion tech has been flagged as mind control by the general public until they learned to see the strings. Persuasion is achieved through a higher asymmetrical advantage against the receiver of the information. Through controlling the growth in worldview of the receiver, any form of consent they provide can be manufactured in the adversaries favour.
This is NOT consent. Consent requires two parties with the same information and sound judgement to be able to make sound judgement on an action. The adversary is manufacturing the consent of the receiver in this situation. Institutional bodies and power concentrations (i.e. governing bodies, monopolies & oligopolies, parents) are amazing at this usually, since they are the ones who will decide what information forms the worldview of the receiver to the point where any potential break from the power structure requires terminology outside of their conception. Resulting in the receiver fighting a battle on flawed foundations, or being dismissed as incoherent if any arguments are even held.
Once you can control a significant proportion of the mediums of information uptake, you can mould the prevailing narrative to whatever you choose. This is called shifting the Overton window.
This already exists and is largely implemented against forms of communal action, bot farms get deployed to sow alternate disorientating narratives to cause arguments and destabilise the discourse surrounding the core goals. They implement these in social media comment sections where the top relevant comments will be selected based on what will retain you, whether that be inflammatory or in-grouping. They do this in websites UX where they add testimonials to give you the feeling that someone else has vetted the service so that you are more enticed to purchase.
The printing press, the radio jingle, the infinite scroll; each time a new medium will dirty the cognitive hygiene of the people, and the major powers will have a technological arms race to be able to optimise the medium to be able to shift its goals in their favour.
Eigenslop is just another form of raising the tensile strength of the strings that can pull us. I don’t trust that the companies, who will be the first movers, will have our best interests in mind.
So anyway,
You’re sitting at home, its been a long day of having your body moved against your will, through chores and commitments and various upkeeping. You turn on your ‘favourite’ streaming service and say “Please let me have an escape, I miss being six, I miss my treehouse, I miss being able to stick my whole fist in my mouth and no one caring, I want to relax.”
The platform has already mapped your neural patterns from years of viewing data, cross referenced with all your metadata across all their other horizontally integrated services and smart home recordings. It knows which scenes made you cry (from before the Eigenslop times,) which soundtracks used to make you nostalgic, which colour palettes made your eyes give in. and within seconds, it spawns a stream of colours and frequencies, completely illegible to anyone else, that triggers the exact same neurological response as that memory.
Your eyes and your ears are filled as you feel the warmth and nostalgia and safety for a mere second, but its not quite enough. Rumours have it that the companies only let you feel true ‘Eigenstim’ during the onboarding process, according to all the people who have stopped using the app, but you know that’s not true and that the next one could be the one to feel that same high as the one before. You’ve told everyone that you can stop at any time, if you can prompt it better then surely it’ll feel like how it did before, you just need to start reading the dictionary again because your vocabulary range has been slipping.
its been almost all the allocated activity hours before mandated rest time. You wish you had more activity hours but during negotiation of the contract they had the newer version of the Eigenmediator that was released the day before and you had the year old one. Your roommate passes you after you asked the streaming service to relive your last relationships honeymoon phase. This is the happiest memory you can conjure without resorting to CloudPKM (personal knowledge management) for any memories older than a year, you need to watch how many services you are subscribed to, and the onslaught of optimised sensory dosing begins its course again. To your roommate it is just a blur of shapes and static, non intelligible whatsoever. But to you, it is the most emotional experience of your day. You have been given exactly what you wanted, exactly when you wanted it, in almost the most efficient format possible.
It is a foundational principle in cognitive science that the human brain evolved to process information primarily as narratives than isolated data points. Our brains seek these stories out everywhere and they reward us when we find them. Decades ago, writer Joseph Campbell formalised this millennia old process into what we call the hero’s journey. He theorised that there are precise beats required to trigger a complete emotional experience, and if you hit these beats in the right sequence, it can produce predictable emotional responses in the audience. Many more frameworks followed, but they all boil down to the same underlying insight. The issue is that these can be mathematically formalised, and engineered to optimally produce the beats in shortening lengths of time.
By compressing the throughline and collapsing the time between subversions and progressions, the payoff approaches instantaneous.
New short form media across social media platforms have created a whole field out of this, this is the field I grew up in and was a frontrunner. Creators share methods of hitting the narrative beats across text, video and audio simultaneously to be able to maximise watch time over video length. We prioritise metrics: views-to-likes, views-to-followers, followers-to-likes, comments-to-shares, likes-to-shares. Many more permutations to create new metrics from pre existing metrics as a science to detract more information outside the standard demographic ones. This control of measurement will start to explode out over time. In the step above the creator space we have the social listening space for brands, their technology as of today has more than 300 metrics on some of the software I personally have used. These can aggregate across almost all mediums of the internet and nothing constricts the output methods.
The good part is that like all information, compression has its limits. A thirty second video can make you feel something, but it cannot make you feel everything. There are trade offs. Depth is sacrificed for speed.
However, conceptually, Eigenslop eliminates the trade off entirely.
It does not need a story. It needs only the shape of a story. The mathematical fingerprint of an emotional journey, and it can replicate that fingerprint in pure sensory data. its output mediums only needs to be colours, frequency and timing. All optimised to hit your reward pathway while being finetuned against a model of you every recurring second you live. Everything can be stripped of its context, converted to its equivalent sensory trigger and deployed directly, distilled in its purest form.
As a verbatim statement, bypassing the legibility layer is dangerous. A story can be questioned because it has characters with associated logic and motivations that can be reinterpreted or rejected or discussed. This is not the case with Eigenslop. A frequency curve has no associated argument, we cant debate why it struck 183Hz instead of 174Hz without knowing the underlying architecture, and then its an asymmetrical power concentration issue again. We cant argue the ideology behind the use of blue instead of purple in the specific X,Y position of the mulch on the screen. The agenda is outsourced from the medium itself into the algorithm that shaped it.
The next day, during your allocated activity hours, its been decided that you spend a couple hours at the mall with some acquaintances. as you walk through the bottom floor, you approach the anchor store. your average walking pace gives you 15 seconds of being in the approaching zone. In this time, the anchor store has spent the first couple seconds negating the ambient audio of the room to isolate you and your acquaintances voices, they identified and matched you to your bodies through their posture and gait analysis that’s been corrected for the floors terrain, its matched you from your smart homes recording everything you say. using these, plus your health information, it determines part of your mood in that instance. Using their in house AI digital twin of your brain model to compare against what it expects of you at that moment. if it doesn’t match, it trains their algorithms, if it matches, it trains their algorithms. They have now gathered the information needed to make their content.
The anchor store has realised that it doesn’t actually need to know the stock of ingredients and your spending habits anymore. Now with Eigenstim they can make you buy anything they want, providing it doesn’t cross over the threshold of resistance that they’ve been carefully raising the ceiling of. They do this to each one of you in your group, as well as everyone else passing by that moment. you are almost perpendicular to the store, in these 4-5 seconds you are each individually blasted with isolated sound from their ultrasonic directional speakers, and in your peripherals you can see what you specifically need to see through holographic directional screens. Each in your group will see Eigenslop that will entice them to go into the store. And it will work. You all collectively remember that you need to pop into the anchor store to buy some assortment of goods as you all meander in. and the rest is the same cycle consistently ran per second all the way until the card taps the reader.
You are now home and are emptying this brown paper bag that you don’t remember deciding to buy. You don’t remember wanting the contents in your bag and are relying on CloudPKM once again to walk you through your day, though it is also certain that you wanted it. You end up giving up stressing about it, It’s in your house now, and the receipt is in your pocket, and the system has already moved on to the next person.
The nudging architecture of malls already exists today. This was assembled over decades of iterative design. The mall you walk through is not neutral space. It is a carefully engineered environment, with its goal to keep you inside, disoriented, and spending. Their aim is to convert a rewarding experience into repeat patronage, and repeat patronage into loyalty. For a rewarding experience they ensure that the layout creates a flow for the customer that is frictionless and intuitive, this is by stocking items in specific layouts and sections that consumers who buy a certain product are likely to scan the shelves for the other complementary product enough to build a basket. They have specific standard layouts e.g. the racetrack layout that blocks view of certain categories so that people can constrain their options enough to make a decision. Atmospherics are a large factor of keeping customers in the store longer, they rely on lighting, colour, music, scent and taste. all of these can be tailored, niched down into demographics today, and to individuals tomorrow, along the Eigenslop pathway. None of this requires new technology.
We have a principle in sales, the only time you are selling something, is when the card touches the reader. until then everything else is just warming up the deal. Warming up a deal is a game theory problem, this pushes into the negotiation field. In game theory, the biggest advantage you can have is more information as that gives you the asymmetrical power. Given our current trajectory, it is highly likely that the corporation will hold the power. This gives the corporation the ability to push the customer down their preferred decision tree.
Losing the battle to win the war is no longer an option when the adversary wins every battle. The long term is merely a series of short terms.
Now on the topic of war.
You have just been captured by the opposition. Your squadron leader was met in their private hotel by an agent. The agent got them alone and hit them with a personally tailored string of words that bypasses their reasoning entirely and left them dropping the plans for your platoons next patrol. there was no coercion needed, it was just a series of sounds that felt like their own thoughts. In the field they call this the syntax bomb.
It wasn’t long before they found your platoon after that, they didn’t even need to kill anyone, that does the opposition no good anymore. They used their LRAD technology to induce localised sensory effects from hundreds of metres away. Since its conception, Eigenslop turned this tool into a precision psychological weapon. The platoon went into a panicked frenzy, the LRAD triggered seizures and nausea and hallucinations. Everyone scattered. You were picked off one by one.
The same interrogator was applied to you, Eigenslop extracted all the information needed without any question legibly being asked. You volunteered everything, and you felt happy. It was like being at home, feeling the warmth of your family and the comfort of hanging up your boots and sitting on your usual chair. You were one of the lucky ones. The others on the battlefield received a lethal dose of Eigenstress. Some were too shaken to stand, others fled and were never found again. A few were silently captured and executed.
But warfare is not the endgame of Eigenslop. The endgame is much closer to home.
After reviewing the transcript of your negotiation, they sent you home. Ultimately your country cant punish you because the extent of Eigenslops negotiating ability outrivals any current nuclear deterrence negotiator plus torture methods, but they also can’t send you back to war. You’ve been compromised.
The Eigenslop has since further integrated into the infrastructure of daily life.
The data collection, the targeting, the personalised stimuli, all has been embedded into the network of the city itself. You notice that the traffic lights don’t look the same anymore, they’re more directional and in your eyes. your car pre punched in the destination you think you wanted to go to. Your radio plays your favourite Eigenslop with periodic directional audio blasts, that reward the compliance of recommended travelling directions with pleasure. Your foot gets a shooting pain of pins and needles, so you lift it momentarily and are blasted with a wave of nausea, you didn’t know that your foot and your stomach were linked like that, you add that to the daily new information learned in the standard narrated format.
You make it to the public square. As you walk through, building facades flash targeted advertisements directly into your visual cortex. Directional speakers play frequencies calibrated to your mood. You are guided along a predetermined path, its feels so empty despite the population density of the city, crowd crush is a thing of the past. Aided by the subtle pull of positive reinforcement. Everyone looks so happy. They are all walking around with a drink that matches their outfit, just as you are, they are all in their planned friend groups, just as you are.
Tourism is obsolete, why travel to the top of the Empire State Building when the floor of Manhattan Square can synthesize the exact same neurological experience in a second? Why visit the Louvre when the smell of its oil paint and the colour palette of the pieces can be distilled into a sensory payload?
The whole city is a planned economy. Consumer Demand is perfectly elastic to the suppliers desires. You will know the location of anyone or anything, you are mandated to trade with, instantaneously. Consumer choice is what ever is deemed optimal.
The Overton window has been replaced with a screen that shows you exactly what you want to see, forever, until you forget there was ever a window at all.
Inflection points
Now that you can see some angles of my concerns, I would like to bring attention to the aforementioned key inflection points to intervene at. Push these now and the trajectory can shift from these futures to come to fruition.
1. The Technical:
Before Eigenslop can target you, it must collect data about you. Before it can collect data, it must have sensors. Before it can have sensors, it must have infrastructure. Each of these is an inflection point. If we can regulate the sensors, the cameras, the microphones, the gait-trackers, we can starve the algorithm of the data it needs to function.
2. The Policy:
Before Eigenslop can be deployed, it must be legal. Before it is legal, it must be regulated (or not). This is the most powerful lever we have. A single piece of legislation can ban the collection of bio-metric data in public spaces. A single international treaty can prohibit the use of AI optimised, dynamically targeted audio-visual stimuli. These are extensions of existing frameworks like GDPR and adjacent data rights acts, or privacy and surveillance legislation.
3. The Cognitive:
Before Eigenslop can control you, it must bypass your awareness. Before it can bypass your awareness, it must exploit your predictability. This is where individual agency matters. If you can make yourself unpredictable, if you can flood your mental model with noise, you can inject some level of noise on their digital twin model on you. This is the hardest of the three as it requires you to essentially split yourself into internal and external action, an then disrupt your internals while still maintaining the external action, this is tiring and will likely lead to some form of autoimmune disorder from sustained stress.
Personal Countermeasures Now
1. Visual:
Tinted lenses, ND filter glasses, and diffraction lenses can block or scramble the specific wavelengths used for targeted visual stimuli. Even simple coloured tinted lenses can throw off the colour based priming that Eigenslop would potentially rely on. By doing this, you see everything differently so it noises their intended affect
2. Audio:
Noise cancelling earbuds, frequency injecting devices, and background noise generation can disrupt the audio frequencies used for neural targeting through sound. Earbuds that change frequencies sporadically can prevent a clean lock.
3. Cognitive:
Doublethink. Deliberately holding contradictory thoughts can flood your mental model with noise, making it harder for the system to predict your responses. in urban situations, countermeasures like grounding exercises, randomisation of shopping habits, and deliberate unpredictability can break the feedback loops for Eigenslop algorithms
Effective Solutions in short term
Start using Local/on-device tech that doesn’t share data externally:
You don’t need to wait for Eigenslop to be banned, because the actual mechanism it depends on, your behavioural model leaving your possession, is already optional in most of the places you’d think it isn’t. On device inference already exists in your phones keyboard, your cameras scene detection and small parts of your voice assistant. The infrastructure for “your data never leaves your hardware” has been built, it has just been built quietly and marketed weakly, because it serves you instead of the platform. Choosing local first software over cloud personalised software, where the option exists, is a vote that costs you nothing but a slightly less optimised experience. That slight loss of optimisation is the whole point that will save you from sacrificing agency in future.
Persuasion detection classifiers and ai debate style adversarial argument flagging:
This is the tier I would ask the technologists reading this to take personally. A top layer filter on the input is not the most promising defence. A system that can look at incoming media and tell you, before you’ve felt anything, that what you’re looking at was tailored to make you feel something rather than to tell you something true, is. This is a live research agenda at the moment, still yet to be a product but i have seen Tom Davidson propose a methodology for training systems to recognise persuasive-regardless-of-truth arguments that should be implemented into your own conduct. Nobody has shipped the personal epistemic immune system yet. Somebody should. A blunt classifier should be enough. Im toying with some theoretical models at the moment, but the goal is to change the interaction from blind absorption to informed consent. This is technically viable with todays technology to get something crude going.
Policy:
Our current focus should be naming the gap before the law has to improvise an answer to it later, we cant trust that the law wont come up with some patchwork solution 5 years after the problem already ran its course. this field is in the midsection of cybersecurity, information security and marketing, but none of them protects attention, trust, or memory directly which is where Eigenslop resides.
The argument worth pushing into every relevant policy conversation today, not after the mall scenario is real, is that this midsection needs its own category, its own consent standard, its own disclosure requirement, separate from how we currently think about privacy or advertising. Biometric and physiological inference in public space should require the same explicit, specific consent that identity data requires, not be smuggled in under “improving your experience.”
If we don’t get to save ourselves in time there’s a potential future that’s a technical reach, but also possible due to this:
Time has advanced since the inception of Eigenslop. Brain implants allow users granular control over their own neurochemical processes, likely a very popular addition to their cybernetic enhancement stack. This allows for a button deck allowing for the expression of what ever emotion they please, at any time of their choice. There is one specific button on this deck that had become the most popular of all. When hit, it releases a slurry of all the positive chemicals in the brain and inhibiting the stress inducing ones, essentially causing the brain to feel immense euphoria. it is deemed ‘the cum button’ for the feeling it replicates.
A significant proportion of the user base of the brain implant community discover it and then either have to physically break it off, or succumb to its addictive nature. The ones who fell into the addiction spend their days dropped over their decks, myopically visioned with only the cum button in their sights, they are in perpetual bliss as they mash the button endlessly. They feel no need to take any other actions, no need to talk to people, no need to maintain themselves. Yet, they also do not cause harm. They are the most compliant out of the whole populous, providing they can keep mashing the cum button. Their lifespans get stifled pretty significantly however due to the neurochemical burnout and the lack of upkeep. They serve as a cautionary tale to the people who only opt in to the standard Eigenslopping, but due to the Corporations incentives, more people still onboard themselves to the same brain implants, of their own volition as far as anyone else is concerned. Who is to know if that is the best way out, maybe being junkies is the best end to human life. Who is to know whether we should end in boom, or bust.
Challenged myself to publish my first Substack in less than 24 hours to get over the cold feet, this was powered by 2L of diet coke. There would be way too much material to cover about the city infrastructure for this article, but I could always develop it in future. Its all already thought out. Much higher signal over noise posts incoming, Any critique helps future writing! stay safe out there <3
this was horrifying thank you frost 👍