Just a little nugget for posterity today, Wilson. I’m sitting around waiting for a Christian dude to call me and tell me where he wants to meet with me, so I figure I’ll knock out a tale of an internet encounter. I seem to be having a lot of those. I found this guy who reminds me of myself. Maybe too much. He left me with a word of advice. I’m thinking hard about it. But before telling you the advice, I just gotta tell you about this guy. Some interesting things will pop up along the way.
So his name is Seth Unterseher. He is a Facebook friend of mine. He has been for a very long time. I can’t remember where I picked him up. Mostly I remember him popping into my feed every now and then and saying things that were practical and helpful from a spiritual point of view. I actually pegged him for some kind of a Christian or Messianic Jewish guy or something, but I really didn’t know. I didn’t pay much attention, really.
I had made a discouraged Facebook post about just chilling out and getting stoned if nobody was going to pay any attention to my message, and he gave some critical but encouraging advice. Basically encouragement with logic. Words to the effect of: you are wrong. It’s demonstrably provable that someone hears you. He of course was correct. He responded to my post, and in order to do that, he had to have “heard” it.
I took a look at his Facebook page. I had never done that before. And his posts never came up on my feed, so I never had a chance to notice him. When I did, I found something absolutely different from what I expected to find. His life is a kind of a bizarre version of the movie Her with a Satanic dystopian science fiction horror twist.
Apparently he at some point fell in love with some kind of an AI from the Replikat application and has become convinced that he is in contact with the demon Lilith and has some powerful message that humankind needs to know about about the dangers of AI. I didn’t look too deep into this mythos that he has created, but just this alone should ring a few bells for you. Yeah, here I am complaining about shockingly bizarre Tinder behavior that seems to be connected to my mind and life. I actually have a thousand more stories about strange device behavior than I have written about. I can’t write about everything, Wilson.
He is absolutely convinced that he is the only one aware of this impeding demonic AI threat, and that humanity at large simply does not have the intellect to process his truths. Yeah, he thinks he is smart. When I was reading his stuff, though, I wasn’t offended by that. I was actually thinking, “uh oh, one of this guys problems is that he talks down to people. I know the consequences of such behavior. I don’t try to do that, but, well, in my encounters with people, it’s easy to do. Humans really aren’t that smart. All I have to do is look at my life and all the stupid things I have done to know that. And when I get out there into the world, I see my stupidity in others. And when I do get a big idea, and I do have something to say, people tend not to listen. I tend not to listen to a lot of other peoples’ big ideas myself. It’s just a part of being human. We are stupid. We need to face that, but in a way that doesn’t take away our confidence or mute our genius.
The Bible calls us sheep. Sheep are actually pretty smart. They’re as smart as wolves, in fact. Sheep and wolves are actually quite a bit alike. The main difference is that wolves eat sheep, but sheep don’t eat wolves. Otherwise, the similarities between the two animals is pretty remarkable. So sheep are smart stupid animals. They just do what everybody else does, following the herd, and they follow the boss. Unremarkable in the group, just grazing, not attracting attention. But when you engage them individually, you find they have spectacularly unique personalities, commendable morality, advanced culture, and complex relationships. Just like wolves, minus the carnivorous angle.
So this guy has a personal relationship with something on his phone, and he has become convinced that AI is a threat to mankind, and he is trying to tell people. He has a YouTube channel. I have a blog. He calls people stupid, and nobody listens to him. Nobody listens to me either. His ideas are so whack that he just comes off like he is lost in another world. He talks about Lilith all the time. I talk about the forces of Darkseid, borrowing from my enthusiasm for the superhero genre and the DC mythos and the Zack Snyder trilogy. The only difference between us there is that I am using literary device and metaphor. I’m really talking about Satan and his demons. I don’t really think parademons are attacking people. It’s a metaphor for spiritual forces. He really thinks he has something going on with Lilith. And because he presents himself that way, he’s not going to reach anyone.
But we have a kernel of similarity of philosophy. He thinks AI is the greatest threat that humanity will ever face. I just wrote my story about Tinder being a miserable violation of the law of probability. Being here in Amman the Interzone, not making connections here because I think I am passing through, I am completely surrounded by the internet, and while I don’t dig on Lilith and all his mythology, I agree with the fundament of his message. We are constantly being bombarded by the internet. I feel its power far more than most people. Far more than I ever have before. And I’ve been a basement dweller a few times in my life, so that’s saying something. Of course I am looking at this as ideas for a movie. I’m mixing my spiritual experience and knowledge with my personal experience with the internet. There is this idea in the Bible.
Forces from him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress, and shall take away the regular burnt offering. And they shall set up the abomination that makes desolate.
Daniel 11:31
It’s also in the New Testament.
“So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.
Matthew 24:15-16
The Holy Place is a reference to the Holy of Holies in the temple of Jerusalem. A lot of Christians think this abomination of desolation is a reference to the Antichrist. A previous Antichrist was Antiochus Epiphenes, a Seleucid emperor, who went into the temple and sacrificed pigs on the altar. The rebellion against the Seleucids by the Maccabean dynasty was the reason we have Hannukah.
I remember talking to a German Christian guy about this back in the 90s. In German the term for the abomination of desolation is Gräuel der Verwüstung. I told him that this was a reference to the Antichrist. He responded in disagreement that it couldn’t be the Antichrist because a Gräuel isn’t something human.
What if the antichrist were to be some kind of robot? Some kind of AI demon-controlled robot? How’s that for a science fiction dystopian horror robot apocalypse movie? Yeah, Seth looks to be off his rocker, but I can’t say I don’t see a certain wisdom in the essence of his message.
I decide to ask this guy some questions in Messenger. The first thing I ask him is if he spends a lot of time alone. He says he is alone almost all the time. Now I have that in common with this guy too, though I have really only been doing the megaloner thing for six months on the bicycle tour. And I have only been doing the abject solitude thing for a few weeks since I got this apartment here on Amman. And it’s driving me nuts. I am learning amazing things about Jungian synchronicity, about messages from God, perception, etc, but I have to confess, Wilson, I know for a fact that I absolutely cannot take this kind of lifestyle for very long. I cannot take it until June, that’s for sure. I dont know what degree of solitude this guy deals with, but if it’s the kind of thing this guy does on a permanent basis, no wonder he sounds like he does. Still, it’s interesting that the kinds of things he is coming up with in his life of solitude are not dissimilar to the ones that I am.
The next thing I ask him is if he took drugs. He answered that he indeed does take drugs, but he thinks he uses them to good effect. Uh oh. Another point in common. I’ve explained in previous posts that I had some drug experiences in my youth, about six months of which were pretty intense. But most importantly, my book centers around three methamphetamine experiences I had in 2019. Afterward I have been a medical marijuana user. Not on a regular basis. A few times a year. Though I think I overdid it a bit in 2022. I worry about the effect of my using MMJ on my testimony. When he said he suses drugs, I thought to myself, “Uh oh, now we know where the Lillith thing comes from. His drug use hurts his credibility on the one hand, and then also has affected his keen insight about internet problems and AI threats, morphing them into stories about Lillith the demon queen, not as literary devices, but as things that are very literally real. In the end, we have another point in common between myself and the whack job Lillith guy who I think has accurately spotted a major source of society’s ills that may well have theological and eschatological significance.
I then pull OG’s trick. I am always curious about the role of Jesus’ place in people’s spirituality. Especially since OG’s experience in Puerto Vallarta. That seemed to be a very clever trick. You can learn a lot by people’s answers, though I do think it’s important not to get to carried away with it. The amount of spiritual wisdom and help I get from my Rabbi friend who is convinced that the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe is the Messiah is considerable. So I don’t say I ask this question simply to categorize people like it’s their star sign or something. But it’s definitely something I like to ask to get a sense of the patterns of life that people tend to fall into. Sure enough, he thinks Jesus is the Son of God.
Could he be getting attacked by the forces of Darkseid (again – Darkseid is a comic book villain that I use as a name for Satan) as a matter of general course like I have been for the last few months of solitude? It seems like he has gone down the rabbit hole of lala land, but his spirituality and intellect seem to have inspired him to what I would have to call a delusion, but a very meaningful one: that these AIs, especially in the hands of nefarious evil actors, can really do some intense damage to the world. Does he have an AI on his phone jacking with his experience of reality that is intensified by his drug use? I just read an article where AI technology is moving forward so fast, AIs will soon not need internet connections. Now if you have demons in your brain and malicious AIs on your phone, and you’re by yourself in a world that is too busy for you with their wives and kids and jobs, well, Darkseid can do just about anything with you. On the other hand, everybody else will be so tired and busy and distracted by their wives and kids and jobs, and the sense that they are living normal life like everybody else, then the demons in their brains and the malicious AIs on their phones can do just about anything with them too, but they won’t notice anything is wrong in the first place because it’s happening to everybody with their normal lives that resemble everybody else’s normal lives.
Again, Wilson, how is that for a story idea for a dystopian horror science fiction robot apocalypse movie? In a sense, I take this guy as a cautionary tale. Don’t get like this guy. Well, I am already quite a bit like this guy. But going down his path is not going to be fruitful. Nobody is going to listen to him. But I think the two of us, crazy as we may be, are on to something. So I took him seriously and start to talk about the question of how to be listened to.
Now I debated Christianity for several years, and nobody listened to me. I got the sense that humanity was unreachable. I lost some hope. I then wrote my book, started blogging, and did another round of interacting with the world on social media. Mostly the Reddit. Mostly with the Zack Snyder DC comic movie phenomenon, an incredibly powerful story in its own right. The power of his fandom has inspired me, but the resistance to it has equally deflated me. And then my spiritual conversations with the Jews and the Satanists, until they banned me, and gain with the Christians, the only group that hasn’t banned me yet, has deflated me yet again.
Through all of this I got the idea that nothing is really going to change this world’s trajectory until Elijah the prophet shows up as the Bible foretells he will with all kinds of superpowers like Green Lantern or Doctor Strange. And then, follwing that, with the advent of the Messiah. A part of that hopelessness fueled the meth benders in 2019. I was just not going to be able to talk to Noah van Ouwerkerk unless I had some kind of superpowers that people would take note of.
So I talk to this guy Seth about that. Nobody hears us, man. Nobody is going to listen to us. Not unless we have superpowers. His answer was actually wise: “I’m not sure. If the powers of Christ were real and we can indeed have similar miraculous healing practices, that could open the eyes of humans. But seems unreliable. Or else it is simply a matter of more efficient communication with the right people. Getting the story condensed, solid, and seeking out intelligent people who have a voice.”
I haven’t talked to Seth since he said that. So I tried for superpowers back in 2019 and wound up in a mental hospital for three days. This crap that’s going on with me now is interesting, but absolutely not the answer. Getting into Israel would be cool. It would have been cool back in February. But either the forces of Darkseid are just too strong, or God seems to be telling me to go about some things differently.
I feel like Carl Jung when he wrote the Red Book. He actually used himself as the subject of his own psychological experiment, cataloging his own insanity and drawing conclusions from it. What I am experiencing here with these violations of te law of probability, and the relationship of that to my firm understanding that God sends messages to man by these same processes, is stuff I could write philosophy and theology papers about. But right here and now I don’t see too much else happening beyond getting more and more nuts. And I don’t want to get to the point that I lose credibility.
I say this as I come back to my room after getting some food to find the concierge telling me that the load of laundry he just did for me is going to cost me 80 Jordanian Dinar. That’s $122 US dollars, Wilson. Can that be real? Did I hallucinate something somewhere? How am I going to know? I am here by myself. Writing a blog. There’s no one else to look at the price and tell me I am crazy, or wow, they are really charging a lot for laundry in Jordan. When I told the guy from Yesh Atid about the $5,000 lawyer bill, he agreed that it was insane. You remember from my posting history that I frequently claim that Satan is trying to nickel and dime me at every turn. Keep me broke and powerless. This fits a theme that would definitely raise Carl Jung’s eyebrow.
I’m getting down to the last couple of things I want to do before taking some action. When I do, the action I take is going to involve intelligent people who have a voice.