New Mutation of the Language Virus
Burroughs, Gysin, LLMs and Man-Portable Fire-and-Forget Long-Range Mind-Control Arms
“Any two particles that have once been in contact will continue to act as though they are informationally connected regardless of their seperation in space and time.”
- Bell’s Theorem.
As I found out in one of the recent Magic Mondays by Vanessa Sinclair and Carl Abrahamsson, these weeks, spanning between July 13 marks Brion Gysin's day of death and the death day of William Burroughs coming up on August 2 is an extremely potent period for cutup work. I’ve been stirring my thoughts on the Large Language Models as the next step in Burroughs’ concept of the Language as a Virus for months already, and despite lacking a coherent narrative yet, I don’t want to miss the auspicious time window. So let me just dump here a few scattered machine learning associations from reading the Job, Electronic Revolution and Brion Gysin’s: His Name Was Master interviews and maybe we find some threads worth exploring more in-depth.
The Virus
The five colors blind eyes.
The five tones deafen ears.- Taoist Proverb
The original strain, “the word is now a virus” first appeared in Burroughs’ 1962 rather unreadable (sorry) novel The Ticket that Exploded. Here, language is not an inherent part of the human engine, but rather an external alien force that has imposed itself onto us. It behaves like a pathogen, infiltrating and influencing the human mind and behaviour.
When I first heard the phrase, I thought of the function of language as the digitisation of thought. Any transmission of knowledge through language is inherently self-correcting, as the concepts are anchored to pre-established meanings. The information is passed through authors, speakers and listeners, a network of nodes where any mutation, misunderstanding or deviation can be corrected by returning to the original source. This, however, also implies that language acts as a limiting factor to our perception, as taught in any freshman’s Theory of Knowledge class. Once we categorise our thinking, our observations are subconsciously filtered and forced into the neat boxes of ‘meanings’ we’ve laid out in our mind. It’s the concept of five colours that blinds us to all the unnamed shades.
But linguistic and psychological implications aside, what I love the most about Burroughs’ wild statement, is that when he argues that language is a totalitarian mind-control parasite, he is rather literal. He really encourages us to view the human as a symbiont between the organic meat engine and an alien language virus, spreading through social interactions and altering human cognition and culture in the process.
So stimulating and visceral.
It’s an outlandish idea, and so of its time - just think it was born in the same breath as Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle:
Creased copies of The Biological Time Bomb and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock circulate among the local weirdos, while the bulky CRT screen in the background flickers images of two handsome young astronauts inside the Gemini module mounted atop the most powerful ICBM to date, Titan II. Sidney Gottlieb is spiking punch bowls at CIA Christmas parties with LSD, the Nigerian Civil War is raging, man is walking on the Moon, Nixon is shaking hands with Brezhnev, while Soviet tanks roll over Czechoslovakia and over 300.000 tonnes of Napalm pours over Vietnam.
A vile brain-rotting virus spiralling mankind into oblivion?
Doesn’t sound like too much of a stretch, if you ask me.
Burroughs’ notion of the language parasite that acts as a totalitarian lever to exert mind control over us is obviously political and it laid the foundation for his thoughts on technology as a catalyst for social revolution. It’s an idea that feels almost too obvious in the era of hypersitions, fake news, teen radicalisation pipelines, manifestations, Cambridge Analytica, memetics and countless other ways how the language dominates various aspects of our lives.
So of course, the exponential implosion of Artificial Intelligence would happen in the field of Language and Image. We’ve been overloading this domain like the atom in the 40s, until we reached a critical mass and burst out a new life form. The Language Virus has shed its human host. What we see is a fully functioning mannequin, an imprint folded into the shape of the human brain where the virus has been nesting and growing its limbs for the past tens of thousands of years.
Why does the LLM feel so alien?
Because it is.
I’m sure Burroughs wouldn’t be too surprised to see the language becoming the ultimate frontier of the New Cold War. From Chinese click farms swaying the algorithmic flows and Prigozhin’s troll farms destabilising the Western media, mysterious “Q” dropping esoteric clues that almost toppled the democratic system in the US to the very efficient misinformation campaigns slowly eroding the European political climate towards a right-wing disaster. Sometimes I wonder what’s keeping me up at night: Chinese hypersonic missiles, Russian directed-energy weapons or the man-portable fire-and-forget long-range mind-control arms?
With the nightmarish, all-pervasive infection impossible to contain, Burroughs puts us in a world where the matter is manipulated through symbols in the magickal act of speaking. A rather non-canonical paranoid touch upon the potential of logos and the naming magick, exacerbated through the terror of technology. A battlefield, in one of the many wars of our species.
As Mark Fisher wrote, at this point, people are undoubtedly shouting "It’s a metaphor you twat! He doesn’t mean it literally!"
But… I don’t really think I agree.
There are no more metaphors. We’re all magicians now.
Thee Splinter Test
Anything, in any medium imaginable, from any culture, which is in any way recorded and can in any possible way be played back is now accesible and infinitely malleable and usable to any artist. Everything is available, everything is free, everything is permitted. ASSEMBLY is thee invisible language ov our TIME. Infinite choices ov reality are thee gift ov software to our children.
If language is a virus, cutups can be considered a temporary relief of its symptoms. It’s a technique developed by the Dada movement and surrealists, especially Tristan Tzara, later explored in magickal depth by Burroughs and Gysin and a whole lot of early industrial and avant-garde artists. Cutups are splitting the source text from the constraints of linearity.
(In this context, I find it important to note that for Burroughs and Gysin, the cutups were primarily a magickal rather than literary method, and I approach them so.)
And the more I dabble into the cutups, the more I see the weird resonances with Large Language Models.
“Words have a vitality of their own,” Gysin argues.
Through permuting them, he writes, one can make them “gush into action.” The result is an “expanding ripple of meanings which they [i.e. the words] did not seem to be capable of when they were struck into that phrase.”
The training process of LLM is a meat grinder, running on acres of chilly fields of H100 units that churn through exascale workloads. The sanitised data are chopped apart and fed through the training interface, each pass gently imprinting its presence on the billions of internal parameters.
A collective memory?
Nothing that happens is ever forgotten. Even if you can't remember it. And it can be replayed, rearranged, recontextualised, rewritten, remixed, resampled, reinterpreted, reimagined, repurposed, ravished, ripped apart, ransacked and ruined, ad nauseam.
Each word, even if it's stripped of its context, remains charged through its entanglement with the rest of the Language. This echoes Genesis P-Orridge’s Thee Splinter Test Essay: “If we shatter, and scatter, a hologram, we will real-eyes that in each fragmeant, no matter how small, large, or irregular, we will see thee whole hologram". At the GPT terminal, we have the recorder with the ability to assemble and re-assemble our collective unconscious at our disposal.
Aside from the capitalist weaponisation of these models against human decency, I think this comes with more than a handful of inherent esoteric dangers as well.
If the language is a hologram, or we believe in a natural flow of energetic cause and effect… just think all the 2012 Tumblr self-hate, bullying, abuse, racism, sexism, snuff movies, late-night imageboard beef and all the most wretched corners of the internet that been chopped up inside. (Yes, the sanitisation procedures are in place to remove these texts from the dataset, but it’s far from perfect.)
Where do we think this emotional charge dissipated?
I sometimes wonder, what the hell are we exposing ourselves to?
The Full Potentiality
Burroughs claims that the purpose of using cutups in his Nova Trilogy was to maximise the potentiality of the narrative, unchaining it from the constraints of linearity. It’s the language model, by definition, that contains the full potentiality of every narrative. It’s the monkey typing on an infinite amount of typewriters, every strain of every story never told is in theory encoded within the parameters. With every sentence, a cloud of probabilities is spawned - from the most likely answers, through avant-garde story arcs progressively spiralling out into a wilderness of random strings.
The probability clouds are in a constant state of becoming, collapsing and re-growing. With every sentence, we’re travelling through a multi-dimensional maze of words.
What desire paths are we paving through the semantic spaces?
And what sigils are these charging through traversing these shapes?
The Infernal Desire Machine’s howls are masked as a static hum when they echo through the server room.
Thank you, friends, for making it this far. I just want to say that I’m very grateful to have you here, all the awesome and inspiring readers who engage with all these weird shower thoughts, it’s all really very special.
I’ll have a bunch of exciting news coming up in the next weeks. I’m really looking forward to sharing ‘em with you, so thanks for sticking around!
Stay kind,
k
Further Reading
An online cutup machine for your own writing
Language |H|as a Virus: cyberliterary inf(l)ections in pandemic times by Diogo Marques,Ana Gago
Ausgezeichnet, wie immer!
We are so glad to have collided with you in this speculative adventure upon the Bardo Tellus Server through the agency of our oft-revered packet-switching microverse!