Kill Wuffy

And call your mother.

WARNING:

The following video is an MP4 of a YouTube ad, which I captured from the debug info and downloaded from this source.¹ It was first delivered to me via Google’s AdSense algorithm. Should you happen to encounter it in the wild, the stream will include a link to a website in the corner.

DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK.

I don’t care if you’re a modern day Achilles, working some Zero Trust freezer gig in sub-dungeon 17 of the NSA’s cybersec division. I guarantee whatever’s lurking on the other side of that click has been trained to bite.

Now: witness this stunning masterpiece of Neo-Horror Megaslop.

What makes this one interesting to me is the multilayered horrors on display. There is something like a demented genius to its construction. It bends almost all the way to funny, in the way that Freddie Krueger is almost funny until you remember he raped and killed children.

By now, we’re all accustomed to the first onion peel; the immediate signal flood of unreality, lighting up ancient predator-prey circuits you forgot you had. Even the “consistent-character” avatars of Pseudo-British Grandma, Little Emma, and Wuffy himself don’t hold their shapes very well. Distinguishing traits shift and mutate in ways that make it feel like we’re witnessing some kind of real-time model collapse.

Grandma! What big IRAs you have!

The result is a string of fragmentary vignettes, distorting space and time as the robotized voice of an undead Angela Lansbury gently coos inanities. Like a Big Pharma advert, its nightmarish qualities are intensified by the absurdity of the product: a “puppy” that never ages, never eats or sleeps or shits or tears up your couch cushions. He's just a love machine! And he don’t wuff for nobody but you.

Such hyperreal androids don’t currently exist, and might never exist in such a form. But the yearning for them exists, which is evidence of a corrupted species of mind that may itself be experiencing model collapse.²

This account has pumped out hundreds of animations that seemed to be based on a handful of prompts. A deepfake industry that serves boutique, highly specialized fetishes was always on the docket, but… I mean, WTF?

Knowledge of the market demand for replicants is chilling in its own right. But in our increasingly mediated and virtualized reality, humans (or some fraction of us, at least) are quickly immunized to the visual horror of the AI generated content. It starts to look more stupid than creepy, and so that initial alarm bell quickly fades away. What replaces it depends a lot on our mood or general temperament. Could be laughter, could be annoyance, could be outrage. Sometimes it fades to nothing. Show a photo of a cat to a cat, and see how it reacts. That’s me, when confronted with most deepfake slop.

The next layer of horror is sympathetic and empathetic. We know exactly which vulnerable demographic Wuffy is targeting and why. If we have sheepdog instincts, we want to rip out the attacker’s throat. But Wuffy is a phantasm; it has no throat to rip out, and whatever generates the character is thickly camouflaged and too distant to engage. For all we know, the source is some experimental Chinese module that operates with minimal human oversight, grinding out fresh instruments of fraud and sabotage based on vague instructions. This is Wuffy as backdoor economic weapon: extracting generational wealth before it can be passed down or taxed away.

That leads us to the third and final horror, which borders on the cosmic. Before I get to that, here’s another future Neo-Horror classic for your consideration.

Once again, we see Grandma as one of the attack surfaces, targeting her narcissism and fear of irrelevance in the presumed Void of Death. But the target field expands to include multigenerational fear of the same, and the hunger for some kind of comprehensible and achievable afterlife.

And so, the necromancer promises to scratch the metaphysical itch. A finger on the monkey’s paw closes. Herman Munster’s face looms in the frame to warn us, but it’s too late. You already checked “I agree” in the EULA.

Just as Cassandra was cursed to preview the fall of Troy, we can see in these videos the outlines of a future war.

Fifth-generation warfare was fought — and is still being fought — on the psychological battlefields of the mind, using techniques developed by the likes of Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, Jolly West, and Michael Aquino (Fun fact: only one of the men in this list was a literal, practicing Satanist… that we know of). The weapons have been primarily acid-based, slowly melting away the bonds of family, ethnos, creed, and nation, and softening both the bodies and minds of those most likely to resist. By this method, the Enemy has manufactured consent for all kinds of physical and moral atrocities.

But something has changed. Covid turned out to be an epic miscalculation in the psywar, igniting a series of mass awakenings. As a consequence, some of the older spells have begun to wear off³, and both the wizards and their recipes have been subjected to enhanced exposure and scrutiny via the super-memetic transfer of the Internet. Coupled with the political, economic, and scientific awakenings has been a spiritual one. It isn’t just a matter of “people are going back to church,” although that seems to be a part of the phenomena. Across the board, we seem to be recovering lost modes of perception, remembering eternal truths.

This change doesn’t mark a complete reversal of fortune, mind you; part of the awakening process has been to notice how deeply comatose many of the spellbound victims are. In fact, it seems like Covid was a double-edged sword, awakening some, but plunging others even further into the darkness of unreason, demoralization, and self-terminating fantasy.

Yet it still feels like a new age of warfare has been brewing for almost a generation, now, cooked up by the likes of Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk (or by whatever feeds and puppeteers them). The current ecosystem of deepfake ghosts and digital beasties are merely the first wave of attackers, and likely won’t survive AI’s inevitable bubble burst.

But just as the dotcom bubble didn’t kill the commercial internet in its crib, the AI industry will not only survive the first bust, but thrive in the aftermath. It will use everything it has learned — all that personal, financial, biomedical, and psychological data we have helpfully provided it — to build an arsenal of new magical weapons, which was the MIMIC’s goal all along.⁴

And once their new army is built and furnished, it will go to war.

What will the new battlefield be? Where will the line be drawn?

The new battlefield will be the realm of souls.

On one side will be those who not only understand that conscious, intelligent souls exist, but that they are the primary “stuff” of reality, from which all matter descends and flows. They will remember why certain axioms became axiomatic, why people reached out to “gods” and other spirits, and what kinds of things might reach back when they did. They will begin to reassemble a shattered picture of reality, recognizing the natural hierarchy inherent in all things and perceiving causality in its true order.

These realizations will allow them to see through the Enemy’s illusions like panes of polished glass. To some observers, it will look like magical powers. “How did you know it was fake? What tools did you use, and what was your process?” Certain gap-toothed theories will be bandied about (and I’m as guilty of that as anyone). But in the end, there will be no way of explaining it. It will be like trying to explain a rainbow to a blind man. The root of knowing will be inseparable from the act of observing. An army of natural born Blade Runners, running a persistent Voight-Kampff test as a background service.

On the other side will be those who are so thoroughly deceived they no longer see themselves as real, let alone as human, or as the children of God. The category of “real” will be dissolved in the acid pit alongside biological sex and other obsolete distinctions.

We can analogize them to bread-and-circus enjoyers of the past, but only if the circuses feature tulpas shaped like dead relatives, and the bread is laced with 500 micrograms of LSD. They will sign all the EULAs, click all the links, buy all the Wuffies, ink all the deals. In doing so, they will auction off parts of themselves they’ve been trained to see as unimportant or imaginary. They’ll never guess that their trainers aren’t a bunch of secular boffins out for cash, but religious zealots on the hunt for souls. Not until it’s too late, anyway.

Nor will they notice that humans aren’t the only creatures hunting them, that prowling the jungled mists of the digital lollapalooza will be things literally older than dirt, summoned as transaction agents and bill collectors.

You didn’t think you’d get it all this shit for free, did you?

Yet they do, and they will. Some fees will include parts of the body, as precious as they are irreplaceable. But the greatest costs will be psychic and spiritual, manifesting as exotic new addictions, obsessions, and mental diseases.

Superficially, many of these weapons will look like games. Not all of them will be vaporous projections on a screen, however. There will be physical toys that walk and crawl. Some of these things will even speak, or make unintelligible sounds that parodize language.

Last week, I saw a woman talking to a thing in a park. She was a Korean lady who looked to be in her forties, and dressed too young for her age. The thing she spoke to was made of white plastic parts over an animatronic black chassis. Its shape was that of a newborn baby, but legless, and with flippers instead of arms. She had laid this plastic mutant in the grass, where it wriggled and cooed at the sound of her chipper voice.

I watched this go on for a while. Then I thought to myself: “She’s not gonna make it, is she?”

The war is coming. Some people insist it’s the final war, as prophesized in Revelation. I don’t have that kind of hubris, but I know a fight brewing when I see one.

I also know I can’t kill Wuffy. Not yet, at least. Not in its current form.

But the slope of the telos is clear. All the ghost-puppies, zombie-grandmas, hermetic hares, and other vapors aren’t satisfied lingering in the server cloud. Like Dracula, the evil spirit seeks coherent form, and in achieving it becomes vulnerable. Don’t know about you, but I’m sharpening my stakes.

In the meantime, you might consider reaching out to vulnerable friends and family, and warning them about the Wuffies of the world. In my last piece about deepfakes, I took some heat in the comments for suggesting that the elderly were ill-equipped for the generative AI onslaught. Despite the obvious caveat (#NotAllBoomers), I do think that there is a multidimensional generation gap that puts them in unique danger.

Some of it might just come down to purely physical differences (e.g. diminished eyesight or memory recall). I also tend to think that many in this age group are unfortunately finding themselves isolated in their old age, thanks to the dissolution of the extended family structure and other forms of atomization. Loneliness has triggered many a bad decision.

If you’re tech savvy, maybe it’s time to do a full security audit for the older folks in your life. If they regularly use social media, try to insulate them from danger as best you can. Install the latest prophylactics to their browsers (AdBlock and Malwarebytes are decent free solutions), and try to sweep their devices for potential ID threats. If they surf YouTube, go ahead and spring for their ad-free premium version. Protect them as well as you can, just as they protected you when you were vulnerable.

So I guess all of this was to say, “Call your Mom.”

Or your Grandmom, or Granddad, or your great Uncle Tony. Remind them that you love them, and always will. Tell them you don’t need trinkets like non-shitting puppies, and that you don’t want to talk to some corporate machine wearing them as a Halloween costume.

Say you’ll talk to them beyond the grave in the old-fashioned way: with your eyes closed, your heart open, and the Holy Ghost providing the connection.

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1. The base ad doesn’t include the link overlay. I downloaded it for preservation reasons.

2. Urban Bugmen and AI Model Collapse: A Unified Theory

3. The Churchill Meltdown and Its Lessons

4. Did you really think these were “private” companies, engaged in “free market” competition? Oh, sweet summer child.