Hello my fellow scientists. I just put up a video about 4 topics to share. If you want your blog in video form, it’s available on YouTube.

1. New essay (last week’s post) about parabiosis and vampirism. It’s super creepy.
2. Loneliness
3. A short story recommendation about a fictional app that makes people happy. It’s so good.
4. Reverse centaurs – a term for our time – and “Sludge content”

1. The previous post, if you didn’t see it already, had a midjourney comic.

I was thinking about how if a vampire had human sewn to his back, he wouldn’t have to drink blood. These are the things I think about. That gross idea came from reading about a gross experiment in real life. Two mice – a young mouse and an old mouse – were sewn together so that their circulatory systems could mix. The old mouse gets rejuvenated (despite having a very irritating younger roommate who he couldn’t get rid of).

I thought I’d share a little about how made the comic with MidJourney – here are the original images I used. Check out the final comic here.

They took a bit of work to turn them into a passable comic. Look at those gnarly hands, and the mice have one tail, and there’s a weird connection (ribbon?) between the mouse’s nose and foot. But I like how the final comic turned out. Midjourney is amazing as an asset generator for projects like this. It is getting better so fast! This reddit post really sums it up.

2. Here’s an article from the CDC about the risk of loneliness

It turns out that lonely people are likely die prematurely. It’s almost as potent a risk factor as smoking.

My biggest mistakes in life were made when I was lonely. When I was in my 20s, I met my first serious girlfriend. I was finishing grad school, super busy, very little money, and felt isolated and lonely. So, I started a long distance relationship. Eventually we met up in person. I really convinced myself we were going to work out the distance issue. It was not the only issue. Eventually she asked for money for an emergency. I sent it to her. And then she ghosted me.

I tell this story because everyone should know that being lonely is a vulnerable place to be. Here’s the irony: loneliness was actually the thing that made it so hard to find dates. I thought dating was the cure for loneliness, but loneliness was the cause of not dating. Desperation is a stinky cologne. I would have had a much better time if I had just done fun, social things, made friends, and not stressed over romance. Being social is not a means to the end of finding a date. Being a friend is intrinsically worthwhile. But it would also have made me more attractive as a date.

Apparently, loneliness is really harmful to health as well as to good decision making. The report talks about social isolation in old people and how it shortens lives and leads to Fox News. OK, the Fox News thing is my hypothesis. From the report: “In the seminal study of this type, Berkman and Syme (1979) analyzed… (1) marital status, (2) frequency of contacts with other friends and relatives, (3) membership and frequency of participation in voluntary organizations, and (4) frequency of attendance at religious services. They found that all four of these factors predicted mortality over the succeeding 9 years in multivariate analyses that controlled for self-reports of physical health, socioeconomic status, smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity.”
Bottom line, staying connected – through family, volunteer activities, or a church – is good for us.

3. Here’s a related short story about an app

It’s Possibly my favorite short story I’ve ever read: Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer. It was published at Clarkesworld and they have an audio version, too, which was excellent. Quote:

“It’s not a productivity app! It’s a wellness app,” Keith said, like that made it better. (The only thing I hate more than productivity apps are wellness apps.) “It will make you happier! Healthier! I’ve established three new good habits since I started using it—I floss daily, I have increased my fiber intake, and I go for a walk at lunchtime!”
“That’s nice,” I said, gritting my teeth and thinking, Please don’t tell me about your fiber intake, Keith.

The story is about people who try an app that encourages them to do things that are of value to them (as opposed to the real-life apps that are making people miserable by encouraging them to do things of value to the owner of the app… or their boss). It seems weird to need an app to tell you to do things that make you happy. It also seems very realistic.

4. This is a reverse centaur

That’s a term for something that modern management software is doing to people.
A centaur is a person with the hind end of a horse. Intelligent as a man, strong and fast as a horse. Best of both worlds. A reverse centaur has the head of a horse (non-human, relatively stupid, but trainable) and the body of a man complete with human hands. It’s the human hands that are the key.

It’s like how Henry Ford said, “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” Since self-driving cars are not here yet, we just make driving apps that manage a person as tightly as we would like to manage a robot. That unfortunate human is being turned into a reverse centaur: it’s taking advantage of their hands with zero respect for their minds.

Apps turning people into Reverse-centaurs is one aspect of something Cory Doctorow calls Enshitification. Here’s the cycle as it pertains to ride sharing.
1. Sucker in drivers with high pay and bonuses.
2. Sucker in riders with a simple, cheap and efficient ride to work.
3. Then, when alternatives go out of business and public transit gets cut, start extracting money. Enshitify the drivers’ experience by turning them into reverse centaurs. Manage every second, extract as many miles for as little money as possible. Enshitify the riders’ experience by raising prices and not having enough drivers. Reap profits until everyone goes back to the bus and rideshareapp.com goes out of business.

There’s this great video about sludge content: “Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era.” It combines the two concepts perfectly: Sludge video is the algorithm reverse-centaur-ing creators, and enshitifying the user experience. The app is then reaping more profit from the advertisers who don’t know that this is what their ads are running next to.

STRuthless made an epic parody of sludge content. The whole video is amazing.

That’s it, OK, Bye.