do you remember the old painters who used to be present in basically every village and town, and who had a bustling business? and the main draw of their business was designing and drawing these very stylized, beautiful-looking signboards, or drawing some sort of art for an exhibition that was supposed to happen in your village or in your town. and they were all the rage. more than that, they were a necessity.

similarly, i’m sure there used to be these very specialized shoemakers in villages. these people who were immensely, immensely, immensely talented, and who would spend hours and hours on one piece, on one pair of shoes, and when they were done, it was beautiful. it was massive, and it was incredibly detailed, polished, engineered in such a way that it was honestly awe-inspiring, the way they had made it.

and this was the norm. it was tough to imagine a life where they wouldn’t exist within us, or amongst us in any way. it was really tough to imagine something like that.

and yet, if you really think about it today, they are basically… gone. that doesn’t exist now. that has ceased to exist.

the painter who used to have a quite, quite decent-sized shop in my village is now gone. he doesn’t have a shop anymore. his shop closed long ago. and the shoemaker near my house, who used to make custom shoes, is also gone.

and the reason i say this is not to say that their work is now obsolete in a way that it wasn’t before. rather, i think there are still people who get signs made manually, and who still really admire and pay a good amount of money for these highly specialized, beautiful, beautiful-looking signboards.

and there are still people who really obsess over these fancy shoes and these beautifully, immaculately designed pieces of craftsmanship. and the shoemakers also definitely still do exist.

and i think the question i would like to leave you on is this: all of this still exists, and of course it is also appreciated by most people. if you point it out to someone and say, “oh, okay, this is how my custom board was made. this is how my shoes look,” when you do say something like that, it’s bound to get a lot of applause.

but if you look down at your feet, what shoes are you wearing right now?

definitely not the ones that the shoemaker made.

or if you look at the signboard of your business, your office, your university, it’s highly likely that it’s a digital graphic that has been printed out or made in some other way. maybe it’s a neon sign, whatever else it might be.

but it’s not the craftsmanship or the artists who were once so prevalent that, at one point, it was tough to imagine living without them.

the reason i say all of this is to really draw a parallel to something that has been causing quite some dread in me, quite some terror in me, and that is artificial intelligence, ai.

ai is now more prevalent than ever, and i think it has reached a critical point, or rather crossed a critical point, where you can’t ignore it as a fad anymore. it’s not just glorious autocomplete, as some people would want to believe. it’s much more than that.

it crossed that threshold a long time ago, and with every subsequent release, i think it moves further and further beyond it.

what does ai now mean for technology, and more specifically, coding?

i think for the last decade or so, and probably even more than that, software engineering was the premium job. that’s what you got into when you wanted to make big bucks. this has been a trend that has just kept rising and rising. you see all these insane amounts being paid to engineers, and the demand, the demand was absolutely bonkers.

and i think the demand is still bonkers. it is still persisting in a lot of places where software engineers are highly valued, because in this ever-so-increasingly digital world, the only way to get anything done was through software engineers.

and these were people who would spend years and years and years mastering a specific niche.

there were some incredibly talented front-end designers, front-end developers, rather, who could conjure up these beautiful-looking masterpieces from thin air. and they knew all about the frameworks, all these little niche tricks, all these peculiarities that you only really understand after spending years working with them.

similarly, there were these systems engineers who knew every flag that there was to know, and what toggling one particular flag did to something else. there were these incredible game developers, and incredible people doing numerous other things.

i can just go on and on.

and if you’re in the technology sector, you know that every field has so many more subgenres and niches within it, and each of those niches has people who have spent an absurd amount of time becoming incredibly, incredibly good at that one particular thing.

there is this thing that’s happening now, though, where these niches and these genres and these subfields and technologies that people spend so much fucking time on, so much of their fucking energy working on, where they have a life’s worth of repertoire and knowledge, this massive, massive repository of everything they have gathered, everything they have learned, everything that they know.

it’s becoming increasingly commodified.

and i think i’m not exactly saying something new when i say coding would become commodified, because coding definitely is becoming commodified. i think a lot of people agree on that, especially with the advent of models that are so cheap and can generate such good, high-quality code on the fly.

that’s not really a new thing to say anymore.

at the same time, i think it’s worth examining something else.

i think the way to think that really put some dread in me, while also helping me gain some perspective on all of it, was this: coding, and people who code by hand, these incredibly skilled, talented, beautiful people, they’ll continue to exist.

they will continue to exist, and they’ll continue to make and churn out this beautiful human-written code.

but, as has happened in the past, it won’t be a thing that everyone needs.

it won’t be the thing that’s gluing the modern world and its infrastructure together and, hence, requiring a fleet of engineers everywhere, from the lowest level to the highest.

that will cease to exist.

and similarly, what rapid manufacturing capabilities did to shoes, or really to any appliance or clothes that we are wearing right now, the same thing is going to happen with code.

let’s think about clothes for a while.

there are these shops that i often visit. there’s this one particular shop in nagpur where i have bought these intricate hand-woven kurtas, and they’re beautiful, and they’re so comfortable to wear.

but that’s a one-off seasonal, not even seasonal, a one-off, rare purchase from me.

that’s not something i do regularly. that’s not something i wear on myself regularly.

because there is this mass industry that can churn out clothes like nothing else. there is this incredibly, devastatingly unfair industry, which is also fast fashion, where trends change by the weeks and clothes end up in landfills all the time.

and that’s all a direct result of the fact that it got commodified.

and i think i would like to stay with this analogy of ending up in the landfill, because as i perceive the landscape around me every day, the cost and the effort required to make software has gone down dramatically.

things that would have taken people months and months and months of work can now be churned out in a few hours with a capable model.

so now, this modern landfill is github, or any public source control hosting provider, because people make projects in a few days, including me, of course, a lot of times, and they end up in these repositories.

and it’s also very much evident by the rate that github servers keep failing because the amount of code being pushed is unlike anything github has ever, ever seen before. every single day, there is an immense wealth of code being pushed to github, and they’re facing the brunt of it through the stressed servers that they have.

but more than that, i think there’s something really telling here:

if everyone is developing, who really is the consumer anymore?

if everyone can spin up whatever version of the code that they want, who is really using someone else’s code?

and i don’t remember, except for a very few instances in the last year or so, when i really went to someone’s github profile and looked through their repositories and was really, really inspired by it, and saw some very exciting stuff in it.

because now, whatever comes to my fancy, i could, with the help of these ai tools, develop it fairly quickly.

there is still effort required from my end. there is still some learning required from my end, depending on whatever it is that i’m developing.

for example, i recently developed period, this period tracker for my girlfriend, because she really complained about the way period trackers would work, how they would be predatory, and so on and so forth.

so i sat down. i learned a bit about periods. i learned about the different menstrual cycles and how they all behave with each other. it was very illuminating in a lot of senses.

but at the same time, the actual cost, in terms of the work that would have otherwise taken me several, several months, i was able to bring down dramatically.

i was able to get it done in several weeks.

so, again, it really begs the question: what is code going to look like?

and i think the best way to think about code is that code won’t be this very tangible, solid thing that you interact with. your services and your apps won’t necessarily be these solid blobs that exist on the internet or on your phone, which load up and spin up these very deterministic behaviors.

rather, i think it’ll be something more fluid.

and i don’t mean that it’ll all be hallucinated by an llm, or that there’ll be some mega matrix rapidly generating slop all the time and nothing is deterministic anymore.

rather, i think the app or the website or the service that you use or rely on a lot will do maneuvers for you. i think it’ll shift itself in real time according to whatever it is that you need.

ai, as with every other industry, goes through this tick-tock phase.

and what i mean by tick and tock is that every tick is a massive advancement. there’s a big breakthrough. and the tock is where that big breakthrough is made more accessible. it is turned into something more streamlined, something cheaper, something much more available to the general public.

and i think this tick-tock will lead us to a place where even the base, free, cheap models become increasingly and increasingly capable.

and when it gets to a point where some critical threshold is passed, where models with the capabilities of something such as gpt astra or the new opus 5.5, which are relatively expensive to run, become cheap enough, i think something really changes.

and some people would argue, including me, that for the capabilities these models already provide right now, they are still priced pretty cheaply, especially when you are accessing them through subscription plans subsidized by these massive companies.

but once that capability becomes cheap enough, i think there’ll be a seismic shift in the way that we interact with our digital world.

and that seismic shift would be scary.

that seismic shift would send a lot of people into a state of paranoia, a state of excitement, and a state of anxiety, all at the same time.

because these tools would be akin to creating your own god.

it would be something that bends and bends to your will, and does that without hallucinations.

and i think a lot of jobs would be eaten, as we are already seeing with the layoffs.

and as much as i want these big fucking overlords, these tech overlords, these billion-dollar soulless corporations, to be wrong and fall on their faces for trusting a computer over humans, i don’t think that’s practical.

i don’t think that’s practical at all.

i think they are thinking in the right direction, and that’s scary because i am also an engineer.

there will still be a need for engineers. there’ll still be some people interfacing with these programs and getting it all into place. but i think the amount of people required to interface with these systems would be minuscule compared to the fleet that we have right now.

i lead a team in my company right now.

the team that i lead is made up of incredibly capable people. smart people, funny people, talented people. and at the same time, there have been days where i have been able to get the same outputs, and sometimes better outputs, in a few days that me and my team would have taken months to make.

so i don’t share these thoughts from some vantage point above everyone else, because i’m not at some vantage point.

i’m in the crowd with everyone else.

i exist within this crowd which is being swept away by these big waves, and i think it’ll be scary, and i think it’ll be exciting, and i think it’ll be unlike anything else that we have seen.

and again, i don’t mean to sound like these tech overlords who want this to be a thing that they look forward to because they want to cut down their operating costs by as much as possible.

i don’t want to mimic their talking points.

but sadly, i think that’s where we are headed as a society.

and i say all this, and i think it’s also worth pointing out: what would humans be excelling at that ai, llms, and all these scary big-name technologies won’t?

and i think the answer that rings even truer than ever before is art.

ai cannot make art.

not because it’s not capable, but rather because it’s not human.

the reason that i say that is because a lot of the reason people engage with art is precisely because it’s human.

no matter what art it might be, whether it’s lowbrow or highbrow, art is made by humans for humans. and art is something that exists without a good reason for it existing.

everything else can be pinned down to some basic need that humans have. every craft can be boiled down to an extension of a human need.

a great chef is a craftsman. he’s not an artist.

a great chef can make incredibly beautiful food and be incredible at it and make something that will make you lose your mind, but at the same time, it is a craft. it is made because it’s an extension of a basic human need.

at the same time, art has no reason to exist.

the fact that we even make art is as absurd as anything else, because there is no innate reason for art to exist. there is no basic human need it serves, and yet, even from the first very primal humans, we have always been lovers of art.

we have been telling folktales and stories, stories of these mythical creatures, and making up these beautiful worlds for the sake of making up these beautiful worlds.

and i think that will continue to exist.

and we see this shift in the zeitgeist because we see these out-of-nowhere indie films doing incredibly well and connecting with people.

we saw a film called the odyssey, which was a big-name release, but yet it was based on this incredibly old work by homer, and its adaptation became one of the biggest things that people looked forward to.

we saw that with obsession, an indie flick which swept the world away.

we saw that with niu lai, where the animation was very poor by modern standards, and yet people went in crowds and crowds to watch it because it was entirely human.

it was a film made by a mother and her son over five years, with the two of them putting an absurd amount of themselves into making it.

and that’s what art does.

this essay has swerved from ai landscape analysis to examining code paranoia and to praising art. but that’s just who i am. i won’t stop building cool shit and cool software just because it’s easier to do so, i won’t sit and cry over potential loss of the software engineering age because i could have an apple farm at home i can get into, i can’t rest because i got to make some more art.

thank you for reading all of this.

illustration by Chiswick Chap via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

there is this natural phenomenon in the world which is called "carcinization" which essentially is this evolution philosophy where overtime through different lineages, different species end up evolving into a crab. the evolution converges into crab-like features - independently and of massively disconnected species. this happens because, very colloquially and reductively [and for the sake of what I am trying to convey] is the peak body form. the most optimized evolutionary type ensuring the greatest survival and thriving benefits. from having more protection to having more wiggle room in the way they eat their food - a lot of factors affect this eventual evolution. this convergent evolution is also very much present in the digital world.

there is this known often-imitated phenomenon known as the "youtuber voice" and what does that entail? that entails a person speaking in this very melodic singing voice as opposed to how they or anyone else might regularly speak. seems like over dialects and cultures, this would not follow - and yet, throughout cultures, languages and communities - this persists. the youtuber voice persists. i sometimes consume english content and sometimes hindi - despite hindi and english wildly different in their pronunciations, their consonants, their inflections - the singing voice persists. we hear the classic "What's up you guys, this is Brandon here and let's get started" in "To kaise ho sab log! Chalo shuru karte hai!" and if you're anyone who spends even minuscule time consuming content online, you read it in this voice. you read it in the youtuber voice, the singing voice, you almost instinctively knew how to read like a youtuber because alike the crabs, the youtubers have converged into the most optimal voice patterns. which gurantees the most optimized click-through rate and retention time.

this doesn't stop at voices and follows itself to the way thumbnails are designed. youtube throws a bunch of features at its creators where even in the largely monolithic style of thumbnails - you can do further A/B research on a live video and find out the most optimal thumbnail was and how was each thumbnail performing - youtube swaps out thumbnails at random for different groups of people so the statistics can be fed back to the creators - allowing them to further optimize their look and feel of the videos. this is carried forward in the way they edit the video - the text/subtitles appearing on screen as they speak. the background music pausing itself when it's a punchline, the digital zoom-ins, the cropping at places, the meme "reaction videos" dispersed at random in between - all is a result of evolution and careful research.

this is obviously also not limited to youtube but rather across a plethora of platforms and content forms. there is this unifying factor that binds them and that is their willingness to converge and to accept the commodification which follows making content at a large scale. niche youtubers with unique voices can have a come-up, survive and thrive even but they will never make mainstream. they will simmer just below the mainstream. at most, there are a few handful that will reach that insane regular >10M view count [or likes or whatever] on their videos. because most, unless they give up their individuality and their unique style and accept the way of the crab, shall remain simmering just below the breakthrough point.

and this is by design, these platforms are commodified, attention is commodified. the way people react follows the same tone in different circles. while a tiktok user more intune to pop/queer culture might reply with crying emojis and "skdksds" and "is this clairo shade" and "definitely served cunt" - a instagram user might keep commenting generic one-liners similarly such as "bro thought he...", "blud is.." with skull emojis and phonk edits. the common thread being the unison singing they do, the commodification that goes beyond just conformism. the incentive to being in unison far outweighs the fruits of originality in our digital era and I fear it might only get worse from now on. we need to actively fuck out of such spaces, stir up shit and create unique avant-garde non-algorithm friendly shit that we are passionate about because otherwise there shall come a time where there is nothing that stands between you, your precious time and the ultimate commodification - ai generated slop.

There is a certain hopelessness associated with the act of reducing human beings into this quantifiable amalgamated entity - there are multiple courses, gurus, influencers online who will teach you how to "optimize" your content; when translated into English, meaning, how can you as a "creator" make your content in a way that you are sure to hold the viewer's interest up until the end of your reel/tiktok/youtube video. One might ponder, well, how does it differ at all from let's say George Lucas or Kurosawa talking about how movies should be made or how they make movies. And upon that, I would say that while the great filmmakers intend to deliver a story in an efficient manner to their audiences. The optimization of the short form content aims to sedate. While, the greatest works of art aims to leave the viewer with a discovery personal or otherwise - short form content aims to bombard the viewer with an overload of information until their senses give in with absolute servitude. There is something so inherently disgusting to me about a reel or a video which employs all these "tricks" like making the reel's audio be completely subtitled with text coming in at a rapid intensity employing crazy transitions with more background FX to totally overload our senses - mind you the subtitles are not becuase they care about accessibility or inclusivity but rather because our brains do respond to stimuli positively over anything else. Doing rapid editing which employs a catchy hookline as it begins - including multiple layers of video editing with foreground text, background text, background music, text FX, transitions, overlay elements, sudden changes in the intensity of the video's pacing.

While, I realize, this does sound like well... any other video form content and not exclusive to short form content but while these were the tools to achieve a coherent experience in usual art medium like movies - in short form content, they are pumped to an intensity so high that our dopamine receptors have not been able to adapt fast enough and get hooked akin to cocaine on it. Fuck that, let's include a second video in split screen of a random game being played just so that the user doesn't get a chance to be bored for even a second because we can't afford that the labrat human be ever allowed to think a thought as they scroll through social media.

The picture I am trying to paint of short-form content - you might agree with or disagree with. One argument could be, in the end it's just entertainment and it's consumption changing as technology progresses, sure. Something that affects us, or rather the whole world more deeply is politics. We have evolved as a society by the power bestowed upon us of our ancestors. There is a need to have dialogue with groups of people. There is a need to talk and sort things. There is a need to make sure things are properly discussed and the people whose voice aren't normally heard through convential channels are properly respresented. Initially, it felt like social media would enable that but somehow this algorithmically super "optimized" social media is drowing unique voices more persistently than before.

While, entertainment could be confined into short one-liners, politics requires lengthy discussions. Let me avoid being country-agnostic for a second and talk about my country, India. The country has just begun to experience an economic uptick. A country where education was a privillige for so long (and sadly still remains in a large part of the country). We had visionaries like Mr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru, Mr. Bhagat Singh and so many countless others who didn't only contribute to the freedom struggle but also were responsible for laying the fundamentals of our consistution (except Bhagat Singh, sadly). Our consitution and it's basis were always focused on communication and upliftment. Hell, even our bicameral system of legislation relies on consistent meetings, long drawn discussions with the opposition sitting together to form policies. That is the basis of our system through and through. These discussions and meetings are supposed to be rigorous and require hours to properly do. Heck, Lok Sabha TV, Rajya Sabha TV have days long sessions. As you can probably guess what I am getting into, in our modern day and age, this place for dialogue has now shifted to short-form content. Instead of long-drawn properly constructed arguments, we delve into a pool of ad-hominem one liners. Instead of rallying for larger participation and large scale discussions, these platforms inherently favor reactionary videos that conform to a certain standard drowning out any nuance in the process.

We have seen widespread use of the power of short form content and the grip it has on us to its full potential. Political parties are now relying on not even promising all that much to the citizens but rather perpetuating a smear campaign by the use of popular memes and media. Every political party from every ideology and sect has started doing this, killing nuance and the places to nurture productive discussions.

There is a something to be taken note of from this that while I lay out an example of political discussions, this extends to almost every sect of every field imaginable and isn't limited to just politics. Just how long drawn discussions can't be broken down into digestible 20 seconds discussions - similarly so can't a million other fields. There is a general trend of "infotainment" short-form videos taking over that I want to talk about next.

Short-form videos which we initially discussed could be valid for entertainment (despite the attention-span concerns). When we start to talk about information spreading through short-form content, this becomes a larger problem. People are breaking down lengthy books into a 20 second video diluting the original purpose of that book with a strawman summary of the same. Philosophy is now spread through tiktoks relying on one liners to do the majority of the bidding while the actual Philosophy scholars, say, studying epistemology and trying to argue against the K-Aim theory are now misrepresented as the dark edgy Nietzsche quotes flood the internet persuading potential students to not pursue this. Let me rephrase, while art and science will always be misrepresented by the zeitgeist - the difference here being that the incredible reach of this content these days will dissuade younger people from pursuing their dreams or interests by the massive misrepresentation of what these things actually are. Another example is Economics and Equity Trading - while Economics and Trading may seem to be closely related; their actual study is very much separate from each other. Trading deals with using empirical evidence to extrapolate an asset's price into the future and bet on it accordingly. Obviously I am watering down the essence of trading here to get to what I want to talk about [In reality, there are thousands of methods from quant analysis to insider trading to different market making techniques to gamma delta neutral spreads]. All of this is reduced to short form content, again dissuading people into believing that trading isn't a rigorous everyday job where you have to dedicate the entirety of your days just to get the slightest alpha over your counterparties but instead a snoozefest where if you just memorize all the bullflags, spoons, head and shoulders and are able to draw S/R on the chart, you're golden and good to go.

I seem to be stretching this point a lot but I think that helps prove my point even more. Notice how even a paragraph of pure text wasn't enough to properly get across just about anything? This is text that could be digested, re-read and reflected upon and yet STILL this isn't even the tiniest fraction of what the actual studies are supposed to be. Drawing a parallel from this to short-form content where the duration is smaller, most of the "information" is rapidly thrown at your face and there's a new video waiting after a single swipe.

Circling back to my initial point, if this information is so transient and ineffective in explaining nuances, the havoc it could cause on the uninitiated or the uninformed about politics or in general policies is absolutely unproportional. Indoctrination of people who don't know better into something potentially dangerous, harmful or even violent has become easier than ever. The way these recommendations work also further encourages upsetting or distressful content over anything else. There are already well documented theories about these such as the Alt-Right Pipeline all possible because of these burst of information type content. And, I don't wish to make this blogpost biased towards one political ideology either because misinformation and indoctrination does happen on both ends of the spectrum.

As tech progresses and the algorithms become more optimized - as these algorithms get even closer to our mind. As the tech constructs greater tools for humans to do just about anything, we seem to be drowning out a lot of what makes humans great. I don't wish for this blog post to be a complete "we are doomed" post because they are rarely productive and always just titillating and sensationalist - instead, I wish to point out this trend we seem to be headed towards and which could easily be avoided by simple regulations and better platforms to discuss what matters for us as a species. While, this blog has a more downbeat tone than how my blogs usually go - at the end I would like to just ask for a little more consideration when interacting with a human being online and also putting a bit more effort into airing your ideas on the betterment of your species because alike everyone else, your voice also matters.

Lastly, the internet is a wonderful place and alike no other. The fact that you can access anything in the world at anytime from anywhere is something never seen hitherto. I wouldn't be 80% of what I am today if not for the internet and I wouldn't have met some of the most genuine, most beloved people in my life if not for the internet. The whole point of the blog is to echo a voice into the void trying to preserve those remnants of a knowledgeable internet before we are thrown into a swirlpool being whiplashed by AI generated misinformation.

Anyway, here's a cute cat for all your troubles.

Because of this aforementioned function of music in accentuating emotions in a lot of art forms, we as a society usually end up using music to accentuate our emotions too; playing the Lose Yourself soundtrack imagining yourself to be a protagonist of a movie, playing chipper Gorillaz tracks for when you're feeling good, blasting Death Grips on full volume when you get frustrated, playing Sufjan Stevens and making yourself even sadder when you're already feeling sad, and the list goes on. Capitalism has excelled at selling fractionalized emotions and we have grown reliant on them (will probably talk about this in detail someday on this blog). Major social events like parties/graduations can't function well without music to celebrate, animations/project guides/infographics/educational videos/tutorials just look unfinished if we don't have the right type of music to accompany them.

This evolution of the way in which we interact with music goes even further, where now a lot of music is made with the sole purpose of being a wallpaper/background to you doing work/chores/homework or sleeping [see lo-fi music and the billions of views it gets]. This wallpaper-esque music genre has also started meshing well with other pre-existing genres e.g. few trap hip-hop sub-genre artists seem to focus on making their songs rhythmic enough to be pleasurable to listen to while being superficial enough in their content (superficial used to describe the technical quality and not in the derogatory way it's commonly used) to avoid distracting or warranting the user to pay extra attention and hence are most common across "gaming playlists" and other activities where we just require some extra stimulation [sigh. we are doomed to be adhd-riddled facebook's dopamine hungry addict lab rats, aren't we?]

On the other hand of the spectrum is the music which requires you to pay active attention to it for it to be pleasurable to your ears. While of course all of this is highly subjective, for me the examples of this category would be: maximalist music with very meticulously orchestrated musical structure, lyrics with layers of metaphorical meanings/interpretations and surrounding context, dense rhyme schemes and wordplays, industrial overblown vocals/harsh dissonant riffs and sonic qualities. All of these warrant (for me) to pay full attention for them to be enjoyable to me.

Now that we have contextualized how our interaction with music has evolved and usually varies, we can get to our focal point: Grimes.

Grimes is a Canadian artist producing Dream Pop music and her music achieves an amazing intersection of the aforementioned background stimulus and maximalist music.

The production on her albums is usually heavily reliant on synths, bass, and a lot of instruments coming together yet the way she creates her vocals is so that the lyrics seem abstract despite being coherent sentences (for the most part). Her music is full of surreal vocals, chords that propel you into dreamy landscapes yet they never overwhelm you. She is able to touch on intricate themes like feminism which she flawlessly blends into her music, all while retaining her music's ability to act as a background for you and your thoughts.

The contextualizing took longer than it took to talk about Grimes because honestly, she is an incredibly talented artist and someone you should give a listen to.

I recommend reading my blogs with her music for a good self-contained litmus test on if my ramblings make any sense.

Oh, and if you're still reading this, thank you for reading my ramblings, and don't think twice before contacting me with music recommendations or if you just wanna have a chat about your day.

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities -- the political, the religious, the educational authorities --- who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing -- forming in our minds -- their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself. - Timothy Leary

As I sit here on my computer, listening to music, writing this blogpost which would probably be read by at most a few people and would not matter at all in the long term. I sit here pondering life as I am going to be moving to a new city and starting a new job very soon. I sit here filling my ears to the brim with the overblown drums of industrial music as I have a few unresolved arguments and conflicts in my relationships. I sit here finding the perfect quotes to fit inside of this blog post to make it an immersive read as I have no incentive to write this.

I think about life, I think about how I am supposed to have an "impact" on the world yet I am reminded of the sheer scale of our universe.

Relevant comic attached.

I think about how I am just one blob of carbon-based elements, some calcium, other elements, and a small mechanism that ensures my survival and start convincing myself that maybe I should stop doing anything at all since it all won't matter in the long term anyway.

My brain goes around, contradicting itself often, evaluating what I said to people throughout the day, what I did, what was missing from the day, what is left for me to do, and so on; until I decide to say fuck it.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Excusing my harsh use of words, I say "fuck this shit, we are all gonna be dead anyway."

We will all be dead eventually, some sooner, some later, but everyone will be dead and that's a truth that everyone has to accept eventually. And yet, for I know soon come my time for in mine void a pale horse burns but I fear not the time I'm taken past the point of no return; I would still say fuck it and do something with my life. I will happily dislike things that have no passion behind them, and I will happily obsess over the things I do care about.

I will make it an issue if the people close to me perform any action that doesn't sit right with me (be it words or actions) but I would.

I will like cliche stuff, I will like the stuff you consider cringe and I would do all that I want to do regardless of how much you might judge me on that because fuck you this is my life.

I will happily probably misinterpret absurdism and I am probably not at all well educated in the different philosophical sects of absurdism and I honestly don't know if it derives from existentialism because fuck you, I will give it my own meaning and interpret it in a way that makes sense to ME.

I will be nice to people, I will care for random strangers, I will be overly dedicated to my loved ones and I will take every moment I get to let them know and I would also let them know if they hurt me in some way. I will do that and there's nothing you can do to stop because fuck you, this is my life, and I choose to do something with it.

I will spend the whole night waking up to work on some obscure programming project that probably only I will care about.

I am okay even after being done wrongly by a lot of people because honestly, I care about myself and my loved ones only and so I will.

I will self-indulge a lot, I will overly stimulate my senses the days I want to and would be reading books and meditating the other whenever I want to.

I might even hurt my loved ones sometimes and those days will also make me feel sad probably but them mattering over any petty argument to me will cleanse the palette very fast.

As long as any activity helps me reach catharsis and doesn't hurt anyone, I will do it. Roll a boulder up a hill, and it rolls back down. And, I am gonna keep rolling the boulder up the times I want and sometimes let the boulder fall and play Elden Ring instead.

Relevant comic attached.

But, the interesting thing to me about this is that these thematic events usually happen to the greedy, the privileged, and more often than not the wealthy people. Usually, it's a captivating plot, but Dark Souls 3 did something different and it's very riveting.

To talk further about this, let me give some context. Dark Souls games usually revolve around a very basic plot, with the exposition being something like this:

In the beginning, there was the age of darkness, where gigantic creatures like dragons ruled over the world. Eventually, a flame appeared which started engulfing the darkness with its bright light. The first finders of the flame also found inordinate power in it, and hence eventually became Lords, became higher beings who helped establish this 'Age of Fire'. Nature being cyclical, the fire eventually started to fade away, implying the inevitable arrival of the Age of Darkness, and naturally this implying that the power of the lords will dwindle. To avoid this natural cycle of events, the Lords kept artificially "linking" the fire; keeping the flame alive past its natural age by sacrifices, with each linking taking a tremendous toll on the world. Each linking further prolonging and intensifying the despair of all inhabitants. All this, just to keep their power intact. But, despite their best efforts, yet again the fire starts to fade away. Yet again, the "looming" dark age seems to be near.

And, that's about the gist of the plot, and then the player does stuff to aid that goal, but that's not relevant here.

With this world in mind, I want to put some light on three characters from the third game of the series: Pontiff Sulyvahn; Lorian, the Elder Prince; Lothric, the Younger Prince.

Let us talk about Sulyvahn first:

Sulyvahn was a young sorcerer, who was born and raised in Ariandel. Ariandel is a city far from the reach of the normal world. Ariandel is calm, serene, full of snow, and provides a home to all the disconsolate beings that would wish to stay there. It's an escape for every being who otherwise leads a miserable life in the outside world. Sulyvahn was born and raised in this place, far away from the enchanting echoes of halls in castles. Far away from the creatures from legends and stories. He, at last, decides to leave the comforting place behind, and explore the real world. He decides to leave this comforting life behind. He decides to find a greater purpose in life.

Let us now take a look at the two princes, Lorian and Lothric:

Both of these princes were born into a royal family, they were descendants of great lords. Contrasting Sulyvahn's barebones upbringing, these princes had an army of people to support them. They had scholars to teach them alone, they had followers even before they were born. The followers of their kingdom, the kings, the queens, all were celebrating the birth of these princes before their birth, so we can assume their upbringing was so much more pleasant.

At this point, if any good story had to have a protagonist, it would be Sulyvahn, because very obviously he fits the general protagonist image. He has grown up with lesser means, he knows what's it like to be without power. He knows the struggle.

Sulyvahn eventually travels the world, travels lands way beyond where he was brought up. In this traveling, he eventually stumbles upon Anor Londo, a place where the great old Gods reside, a place that through multiple linking of fire/multiple generations has survived. Anor Londo was protected by Gwyndolin, son of great Lord Gwyn, and his faithful knights. Sulyvahn took quite some interest in this kingdom. He saw Gwyndolin, and how under his excellent leadership, he had an army of faithful subordinates. He saw Deacons, a holy group of people dedicated to serving their Lord. And, he decided to sabotage all of it. He poisoned Gwyndolin until he was unable to lead the knights, and subsequently, assumed charge of the knights. He corrupted the holy Deacons by adding dark sorcery to their texts, turning them against their purpose. He made the whole city fall to ruins, with the old Gods having to evacuate their ancient home. Sulyvahn turned the inhabitants into hollow soldiers, who like fodder he can keep recycling. While other unfortunate people were turned into repulsive beasts. The majority of the royal family escaped but Sulyvahn captured the royal daughter of the family; the daughter of Gwynevere. He captured her and kept her captive. Initially, forcing her to be a dancer in hopes of maybe shaming her and the royal family. And then after having shamed her enough, he eventually asked her to be a knight for him. A point of defense for him if someone would dare try to challenge him. He gave her a ring infused with dark sorcery, that he knew would make her reliable. She indeed became reliable but also transformed into an abhorrent beast who brought death upon everyone, her armor fusing with her skin and bones.

Sulyvahn would usurp great power in the kingdom, becoming a tyrant.

Lothric even though born into a royal family, was born full of disease with a shriveled body. He was supposed to be the heir, the one who once again gives his body to the flame, sacrificing himself by linking the fire and prolonging their age. Despite the high expectations, he was unable to even wield the family sword, one which was his birthright. Lothric was born with a curse. Lorian, on the other hand, was a champion. He had already slain a lot of demons and had exceptional leadership skills. But because Lothric was the proclaimed heir, Lorian supported him unconditionally. He supported him to an extent of agreeing to fuse his soul with his brother at the suggestion of the family, which tragically left Lorian mute and crippled. And yet, after all these sacrifices they made, in the end, they decided to not do their "duty". They decided to not link the fire. They decided to not prolong the inevitable, and with it, not prolong people's suffering. They took home in their chambers, which marks their grave. They remain cursed and yet try to prevent any further despair. They decided to "betray" their family.

Now that we have spent a long time trying to familiarize ourselves with their stories, what point do I intend to draw from it?

The point I am trying to make with all this is simple and an obvious one.

Power corrupts those who allow the corruption of their heart.

Our real-world is full of people who come from different walks of life, different backgrounds, different societies, different cultures. And, everyone assumes some position of power sooner or later in their life.

In the end, your usage of that power is reflexive to your individuality. Your individuality may be shaped by these external factors in a myriad of ways, but you remain you, people remain people, corrupted will be corrupted.

Or maybe there is no point and I just wanted an excuse to talk about dark souls lore :p

Here's a cute cat asking you to join their covenant for having read through all that: