Neuralink is probably the most dangerous and yet inevitable scientific/technological breakthrough of our lifetimes. It will pair perfectly with the coming neoliberal eco-fascist dystopia. Here’s the thread.

The implications of a functioning brain-machine interface are huge, both for good and for bad purposes. I have no doubt it can cure things like Alzheimer’s and help injured brains heal. That’s all well and good. But you’re not here for that, you’re here for the dark shit.

First, we’re not ready for that level of control over our sensory experience. The amount of people who will turn into vegetables because they tried to give themselves a forever orgasm will be high, and it will be disturbing.

Secondly, think of how it will change things like hacking. Before Neuralink, a hacker could gain control of your computer and data. After, hackers will gain control of your mind and body, by extension. Expect a new category of sexual assault to be created with brainhacked victims

The whole idea of autonomy and free will will be undermined by this technology, the same way the idea of truth was undermined by today’s social media. Echo chambers will get more intense, now with realistic AI-generated avatars like that one episode of Rick and Morty

with the aliens that disguise themselves as characters you’ve known all along, by planting memories in your head. That entire episode’s premise will become possible, except the aliens will be specially-crafted Neuralink viruses

Neuralink viruses will be able to not just plant memories but completely wipe your personality like a hard drive. People, real flesh and blood people, could be turned into bots, and it’ll probably be irreversible. Also, get ready for the real Thought Police.

Some of you are probably thinking “yeah that’s fine, I will just refuse the Neuralink chip”. I doubt the government will force this on anyone - they won’t have to. People who accept the risk will be rewarded with information advantage and more social mobility.

Like the internet and smartphones before it, Neuralink will create a scenario where the wealthy first-adopters will make it culturally mandatory to have a chip, by virtue of being elite. Not having it will subject you to social stigma like not having a smartphone today.

Meanwhile those who have Neuralink will use it to consolidate their class dominance and open up new markets for advertising, porn, further atomization and social control. Poor people will have degraded Neuralink experiences, possibly hazardous to mental health.

A new category of murder-by-hacked-Neuralink-suicide will also become a thing. Court cases will have to set new precedent for criminal intent in scenarios involving Neuralink-dependent perps possibly under outside influence

Espionage will take on a whole new dimension. Intelligence orgs like the CIA will likely streamline their structure to focus on a Neuralink backdoor. They’re probably already talking to Elon about it.

Software engineering will change too. The human brain will become an open-source app platform on which you can build all kinds of crazy shit. Drugs will become obsolete, replaced by Neuralink programs that work the same waySnapchat filters do today, but with your reality

Long-term, I suspect Neuralink will be another leap in terms of the human ability to coordinate and merge our efforts to achieve larger goals. We’ll be able to link our brains to play immersive games, complete meaningful computational tasks, and solve bigger problems. But at cost

The cost will be a further dissolution of identity and experience into a jumbled soup of conflicting higher-order imperatives and trends. The concept of a “cope” doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s the sweet release of malleable reality, the Matrix, as your brain is harnessed

It’s important to note here that a centralized state-driven effort is not necessary to create this dystopia. It can and probably will arise organically and just be harnessed by governments and corps the way our data on Twitter/FB/etc currently is.

Dystopian outcomes are guaranteed by human behavioral patterns over a long enough timespan. You don’t need a Hitler or a Stalin, you just need market incentives and social/peer pressure. You don’t need camps, you just need the threat of irrelevance and social death.

We who lived before Neuralink will be preserved as the collection of static videos and pictures we uploaded to the social platforms, things we wrote (like this thread), content we generated. Neuralink people can be preserved in high definition, memories replayed like Black Mirror

I’ll leave you with this: what we think of as history is also really low-definition compared to what’s coming. Neuralink will enable the beginning of a new kind of history. The same way the invention of writing began our epoch, this is a transcendence into a new meta-narrative.