The Digital Homestead Blog

“This is how we found it, no traces of her, the dogs can’t smell a thing” the Sheriff reported while I kept looking at that van that I had seen in hundreds of hours of footage on my way to this place forgotten by God.

I trusted my eyes more than anything else in this evidence gathering phase, I wanted to feel it, catch any possible subliminal message she might have been sending before her disappearance.

“We should try again with the dogs, this time, let’s have them smell these boots instead” I replied, pointing at the boots that I had seen her wearing in multiple occasions, surely they carried a fair amount of her smell, unorthodox perhaps but it was worth a try.

“I disagree but you are the boss” he answered with a clear sarcastic tone, I knew he didn’t like the fact that a kid like me wearing a suit was there to give him and his majestic white beard orders.

“We are a team, let’s act like one” and to that he just nodded and touched his hat, whatever that meant.

The girl, where was she? She had been living in this van for years, like a social media stunt, then she adopted a dog that she had trained to do the weirdest things, started creating some adult content (without the dog I hope) and despite the millions that she had made, she kept living like that, in the wild, alone. I couldn’t understand.

Perhaps she was in for the ride and not for the goal, like for real. Regardless, she was lost, no uploads in five days and her fans were all concerned, even the First Lady posted about it, ridiculous if you ask me but who am I to judge?

“Interesting, check this out boss” the Sheriff got my attention, pointing at one of the tires.

Uh, it was brand new, when did she find the time to change tires? She posted every single day for hours. This van has been on the road non stop for hundreds of thousands of miles overall, it was certainly weird.

“Well done noticing that, I guess having someone experienced like you in the team pays!” I tried to compliment him but he gave me the same answer with his smile and hat.

I prompted our language model for some frames of the wheel and to put them in a timeline inside something I could browse easily.

Five minutes later I had received the link and I was already looking back and forth, the tires always looked new, but how?

Then it hit me, what if…

“Look for signs of digital alteration or generative AI in every single frame of every single video that has been uploaded” I prompted vocally my support agent. The snarky answer made the Sheriff laugh and spill his coffee.

“I would recommend to work on a sample of frames from various videos instead, parallelize the effort spawning multiple agents and repeating the task until at least 51% of all content has been scanned, at that point I would reassess if it’s worth proceeding with this expensive operation, bear in mind global warming, sir”

Global warming, yeah, it was -14 Celsius in there, 4 degrees below the average but sure Mr Agent, work on a sample!

“Processing…” was its rebuttal, without any acknowledgement of my moaning about the weather, as a proper Brit by origin.

It was going to take a few hours so we called it a day, at 3 AM I got a notification that woke me up from my state of half-sleeping.

“Processing complete, please find attached the full report”.

“Several hallucinations point at the fact that it was indeed generated footage, all of it. The van had been used as a model, everything else was fictitious. The artifacts point at a custom made generative algorithm, for this level of sophistication we only have three possible candidates based on the research literature, all men in their 40s and older. This is not by any means a suspects list, anyone could have used the available research to develop in house this kind of technology without the broad public knowing anything about it.” was the gist of it.

My case was solved but I was weirdly unhappy about the outcome, we had a bigger problem as a society. What could I trust anymore?

No video no proof? What if the video is all fake? What if it becomes undetectably fake? Damn, I should probably start looking into another job.

"...let me introduce to you the concept of Homo Spectatoris, completely deprived of any spark of its own imagination, evolved to consume information at incredible speed, often multiple sources at the same time, and to convert these stimulus into consumeristic impulses and also…” for some reason, these words from the Professor caught my attention. This lesson was so boring; I had heard the same Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens, Homo Super Sapiens story a million times, but this new take on our evolution left me intrigued.

Did we really evolve into such simple creatures? I would have called that Homo Pavlovian, but the Professor’s connotation was more geared towards being unable of being creative in any way. Sick.

I wanted to experiment with this. I unplugged my Visor after peeking at the uptime timer. Wow! I had been logged in for 673 days straight without reboots. I even had some critical updates to install that I had muted, terminating the process against the Netizen Manifesto. I took the opportunity to update my trusted companion device and to look around the Offline World. Most people couldn’t handle it; they were just addicted to content. I had a form of Schizophrenia that made me totally immune to Dopamine, pretty rare, but my parents didn’t want me to become a lab rat, so they falsified the mandatory prenatal DNA screening.

Obviously, my logoff was recorded, and I had already received yet another admonition from the Professor, but I mean, it’s just an AI. What is it gonna do? Hit my hands with a stick? I pay way too much money for these courses; they can’t afford to lose me! That notification stayed in front of me for a couple of minutes, slowly blurring, like when you stare at a bright light for too long and then look at something else.

As my eyes adjusted to the different light and, more importantly, to the depth of field, I was shocked. Holy Voxel, this is insane; I have never seen anything like this. People looked like zombies, like our ancestors always staring at their handheld devices, but this time around, at least, they had better posture; they were just staring into the void in front of them. They all looked like puppets controlled by some invisible puppetmaster inside their head. Well, technically, next to it.

So, in the past, we used to look down on the so-called “smartphones”. Fun fact: my grandparents had met via a matchmaking software on these bricks with a screen attached to it. I can’t believe my DNA survived the Great Wars and the Purge!

Now we just stare in front of us. I think in the future we’ll just look up! What’s left otherwise?

So, that I did. I looked up and, to my surprise, again, I have seen things that I had never noticed before.

The sky was made of some ancient screen tech, like the ones used in the Sphere Museums of Lost Vegas and Old London. Obsolete, but pretty high definition for the human eye. Nobody looked up anymore because it was just ads all the time. Ad blockers were pretty standard installation, but now without a Visor, I could see what was going on. I could see the sky!

What? Why? I kept scanning it in awe until I noticed a dialog window. Ha! It must be an ad. Let’s see what I should buy but I won’t... I thought, approaching the pixel area a couple of blocks from my position.

"If you can read this, you must act now. We have been invaded, our minds are trapped, you can’t free us all, we are doomed. It's OK. You and your kind must survive and prosper, land and resources are waiting for you at 1°24'36.2"S 102°51'02.2"E."

The message disappeared, only to reappear a few blocks away from me. So, there’s a chance that someone else like me has seen it... I had to figure out how to get there.

https://twitter.com/polyMatto/status/1777780890086646113