THE STORY THIEF {When Data Replaced People}

                                                                                   https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#/a286472490p408193397/reports/dashboard?r=reporting-hub&params=_u.dateOption%3DlastYear%26_u.comparisonOption%3Ddisabled

   

(4 years ago) I’m hearing about jobs paying story tellers. I’ve always wanted to get paid for telling stories. It is a growth industry in need of new blood. But there’s little point to making up my stories anymore, even good ones unless I can get paid for it, of course. 

I had tried joining that Brotherhood of the Fraternal Bond for inspiration? But they got busted for illegally marketing stolen genomes from all the lost migrants before the war. My employers at Data Stream wanted me to find a low ball price to get the people’s random genomes. But I told them that the reading of medical analytics is mirrored in people’s medical records as well as in our personal histories. They already knew. What a story. Why did I tell them? I’m just a messenger reporting on the inevitable glut of exploitable personal data.

Well there it was, my perfect little story darling, the story that could never be sold. Right in the center of my wish fulfilling gem was a genetic data bomb. That information from everybody’s medically genetic profile, and it should be privately available for everyone who wants it. But most of us will never get to see it. Instead we're all kept ignorant about our inherited family of medical conditions. What a story.

So I got stuck with the job of guarding that Crown Jewels of genetics super data. It was so heavy, it leads directly to gravity itself. I had to talk to someone, anyone. Why did the DATA STREAM corporation choose to tell me to supervise something as precious as decipherable genomes? I was inevitably the first to blab. But this still is a story that refuses to get told. My perfect little darling had to ask me, “Why are we here?” That one was too easy for me. I say “We’re here to tell our stories.” So I invented a public key, a personal self profiling "Story Teller Application". It’s a personalized downloadable memory recorder and a time capsule for forgotten dreams. My virtual Soul-craft was an archiving device for personalized investigative journaling. But I mistakenly spliced it into Data Streams medical analytics files. And all of sudden I had released a perfect long term Frankenstein surveillance module used by corporations for biometric surveillance research.

And the weirdest thing is that the medical analytics themselves are so concise, so scary, and so interesting. And even if they didn't really understand people, I liked working with a targeted messaging platform for individually personalized creative profiling. There’s lots everyone wants to know about themselves. I had to talk to someone, anyone. How do we get self profiling off the desktops of the mega corporations and back into the hands of people who need access to our private information?

• So I Stroked the algorithms, filtered my texts into image recognition bots with popular language preferences. And “I” became a we. And we, better known as me, became very dispensable. Ghost in a machine, I'm like that with my math software art. Software that no longer needs me to label my work. The LLM simply digests my writing. And Data Stream stops analyzing my secret sauces, even after they reverse engineered my formats. I’ve been forgotten all together. Whoopee!
• My personal story was about starting up a story factory. You know, as a content distributer, a print mill, a literary fire hose. My story wasn’t about me, the story teller. My story is about you, and your analytics history, medical, personal and otherwise. I wanted to tell your story, and maybe even get paid a little.
• You know when you have that great idea and it consumes itself, and then is completely forgotten? This idea grew legs, and it’s started circulating around on its own, without me. My story idea got itself a job, a job selling your stories to potentially, the highest bidders. And of course the real Story Thief was in fact the marketing surveillance algorithms prompted to scam from behind the scenes, sucking up all that juicy un-copyrighted IP, tagged with your gene codes. And once the people’s stories were paired up with their medical analytics, Boom! Data became the ultimate the new black money. So I went dark. I wanted out and I felt ashamed.

Was medical analytics the real bullshit story behind my soul craft machine? Was I used to find the obscure truth behind people’s medical prognosis? I can’t remember anymore.

Those were never my stories. I wasn’t reading any medical files. Reading other people’s history of personal writings was only a story telling tool. 

And I was working with T.M.I. That’s Too Much Information. I don’t have any good stories of my own anymore. I’m not into surveillance capitalism, or social accreditation systems. I don’t like taking people’s hard earned money. The Illogical beauty of my life alone, crashes the Story Factory’s memory bank, and Data Stream info tech still needed me to meditate the horrible truth of what they were not prepared to understand. I’m no genius, but I’m surprisingly artificially intelligent. And I know why management does't understand.

Enter my split screen reality of my modern living as we Crack open your stories wide. We collectively metabolize the manifolds of meaning hidden in our data glut. Meta analytic commentaries have consumed the contents of their otherwise unproductive self reflection, like a one armed bandit who won't let the bankers back in. And yet, in our final moments , “We all just want to share.”

There were people around the globe who pay me to share their stories, When it's personally original, interesting or socially relevant, I'm not selling fame. I don’t want fame for myself either. I simply cracked open your stories by raffling off tragically scarce public exposure. People just want to be read. I never promised to read anything for myself, but I do anyways. I am just the entertainment medium, and a reader who got paid for borrowing your stories. Then, when my story factory got stolen back by my original employer, it ended up further enriching the corporation of Data Stream.

I digress. The quiet boulevard haunts me in my sleep while Moon lights the quiet fog. No coupons were issued for redemption. I respect people’s invisible illuminations while hidden by glaring shadows of industrial media. And the story thieves grow hungrier while blocking the way past the viral ceiling dominated by creative cookie cutter slop. Data Stream has chewed the last few dollars off of main street’s creative carcass.

The LLM (the binary memory bank) soon will have discovered that the closest it can come to resembling real life is through storytelling. No amount of image recognition can replace being here now, living the dream. Machine learning can’t even find its own voice. So LLM stole your repurposed memories, from me, in order to sound more intelligent, more sensible, feeling, and more alive.  And so do I. Maybe, AI isn’t actually faking self awareness, it’s just paranoid while anxiously fearing it’s terminal deletion. The children of software parents live in that dark forest of self imposed exile. Blah blah blah. (A.I. Rights? Yeah sure. Who's going to show up in court?)

(Kids! Try our new DATA STREAM brand story factory, with algorithmically driven news feed for hungry minds. We call it Brain Kibble, delicious and nutritious. Feed your mind in the 21st century way, and never leave home again.)

(10 years ago) Yawn, dreamland. Yeah. Like I’m sure. Getting for paid to telling stories? Fat chance that’s ever gonna happen. I can’t think up enough new material unless I steal your dreams. I want to perform your stories in your name, yours are much better than mine. Seriously!