The Oxyweb

Definition: Internet communities that have disincentivized individual attention-seeking and prioritized communal or pair bonding. The oxyweb is spatially unbound – communities might live as niches on mainstream social networks, as parasites hijacking other groups’ platforms, or as exit-driven networks with self-hosted infrastructure. The term oxyweb is derived from the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin, and is united only by its opposition to the use of dopamine exploiting behavioural tricks and design patterns in advertising-driven mainstream social platforms.

The swelter of salt

Haneul checking the machinery that would absorb 500 atmospheres of pressure 5 kilometres below the ocean's surface where air cavities in living things are crushed and proteins fold in on themselves. The piezolytes printed into the vessel's carbon skin would help stabilize the thing down there, but make it reek of thick wet fish. The marine engineering unit calls it Jijneun.

Trawling the trench for manganese nodules, kicking up iron ores the size of walnuts. Thermal vents superheating the water without boiling it from the pressure. Extremophile life forms metabolizing heat gradients at vent lips lined with the richest ores. Extremophiles, metals, and mining equipment that smells like dead fish – that's all that's down there.

Not even dead matter – those bits of captured sun glinting slower and slower down the ocean’s trophic cascade until the oppressively heavy nothing of the bottom stops the few carbon molecules left. Just the howling of the vessel as it scrapes the bottom.

RELEASE OF LIABILITY IN APE CPR PARTICIPATION

I ______ [PRINT NAME OF PARTICIPANT] hereby agree to participate in Citibank's employee high-frequency trading surgical implant program [HFSiP] under the Advancement in Performance Excellence [APE] mandate at the CitiCentre for Pattern Recognition [CPR]. All liabilities between aforementioned parties are hereby absolved.

I understand there are certain risks inherent to HFSiP, including but not limited to nausea, muscle fatigue, perceptual surplus artifacts, apophenic drift, false flag drives, mission creep, loss of meaning, depression, mania, irrational exuberance, stopping problems, human system resets, overfitting-induced psychosis, burst retinas, dry or overflowing tear ducts, chip entropy, sensations of inner brain buzzing or warmth, extension of attack surfaces, adversarial manipulative traumas, and so forth.

I acknowledge that the creation of any surplus values of perception will be the property of Citibank and subject to requisition or elimination following termination or change in contract. I consent to the use of my visual, volumetric, and cognitive likeness in all future promotional materials.

______ [PARTICIPANT’S SIGNATURE]
______ [WITNESS]
______ [DATE]

Facebook Community Guidelines
Publish date: May 15, 2022

[ Part III, Section 2.1 ] Community participation to ensure model diversity in content moderation

Facebook’s content moderation is currently performed by a diverse jury of 97,357 Machine Learning models. Neurodiversity in neural nets has led to improvements in decision-making around a wider variety of content. The current jury process is particularly well suited to edge cases where typical models fail to make reasonable decisions.

Facebook encourages users to submit their own Machine Learning models to the jury — currently, over 80% of the jury comprises models selected from Facebook’s user community. Guidelines on model parameters and training data are provided in Appendix E of this document. The final outcome of a jury proceeding is determined through an automated democratic process. When content passes through moderation filters, each model gets to cast a single vote assigning the given content to a category. Votes per category are tallied and simple majorities win. In case of a tie, a human moderator is alerted to make the final decision.

Memories of terraforming

By the time we realized the damage we had done to our world, it was too late to change our ways. We were going to suffocate. The atmospheric models said we had 200 years—maybe 250 tops—before the air thinned, incapable of shielding us from the sun.

We needed an escape. A planet-scale eject button for civilization.

At this time there were two schools of thought. The first was to look to the stars for refuge. Propulsion technology was getting good. Perhaps good enough to launch us to the next star system. Spectrometers on reconnaissance probes painted pictures of an oasis of lush, habitable planets, a few light-years away. We had two centuries to figure out a way to survive the long journey through the vacuum. As you know now, we did survive, and the rest as they say is history.

But not many remember that a second proposal was also made. There was another planet in our star system at the time, capable of sustaining life. Close to home, but a barren wasteland. A series of controlled thermonuclear reactions could bring about the right conditions for abiogenesis - the origin of life. As to plan, we deployed the bombs and set the planet on fire. But we ran out of time. We were forced to escape to the stars before getting to see the result of our handiwork.

Memory is a pendulum. Swing your mind far back to remember the past and if you let it loose just right, it will swing forward to reveal the future. On a clear night, point your telescope toward our neighbouring star, the one you call Sol. A civilization now exists that reminds me of our carefree past, long before our escape. You’ll find them on the third planet from the sun, one that's teeming with life. We rediscovered them recently. The successful conclusion of a forgotten terraforming project.