PsychSec: Survival of the Paranoid

ADDENDUM TO THE NFT GUIDE TO BUY NFTs: so it turns out that being out of the loop is sometimes dangerous for the enviorement. While we are going through a mass extinction, I by no means endorse the mindless destruction of the world for the sake of waifus.

So, hey, hi, sorry for the long delay, but I took some vacations off due to a severe shortage of pentobarbital.

Jokes aside, last week I experienced the weirdest things ever: to go outside without my headphones and listen to the crowded streets. I also went to my second class of CyberSec, and  I have yet to install Kali Linux again and pay for the sins I haven't committed nor will commit. I also read about some Cold War that never ended, but it's best to think happy thoughts from now on. Then you can only think of horrible things and are in a terrible balancing act of trying to feed yourself, remember that you have to drink water in order to keep functioning, food to keep you from eating yourself and so on and so forth.

Late at night I heard my thoughts on the paralel street, with my mouth wide shut. It was maybe a week ago, maybe less, but I can't even describe the stress of knowing that maybe I am probably some type of very well known experiment that I am unaware of.

Well, I am a human being, goddamnit, not a machine. Another night I listened to some kids walking by laughing at my idea that the whole listening to my own thoughts has nothing to do with my previous paranoia but with machine learning and maybe, perhaps, the wasted time in the last 10 years thinking about how anyday now someone is going to do some unspecified nasty thing to me, and describing it to someone while looking at the front camera of a computer.

So I proposed myself, in my humble wisdom, to stop drinking everyday and start walking 'round the campus, which is now full of people and makes 2021 feel like I was living in a ghost town. Sometimes I wonder if everyone is just hiding in underground bunkers (and yes, I did think that before knowing that Putin's ego is way more dangerous than the complete fracture of mine) and going out just to make fun of me. Sometime ago I was living in a Student coop housing and I decided to give myself to hikikomorism, since everyone was quite an asshole to me by telling me asshole for no reason whatsoever. [irrelevant]

There's one thing and only one thing that I wish to say about the Berkeley Police Department: you guys are probably one of the best in the country, from 5 or 6 interactions I had with you, one fully armed with rifles while I was wearing my red panda (are those already extinct? Can't trust BBC News anymore since I read the article a collegue of mine wrote and was condecending to the extreme and just a full copy paste waste of time that they learned from being lazy while I was getting my degree in journalism) onesie for eating chocolate late at night, I was not killed even once. Let that sink in for a moment.

The only joke I made so far was about the pentobarbital supplies because we should save them for the survivors of the nuclear war that no one sees coming because we are too busy trying to figure out a way to deter it by collectively thinking very hard that it is impossible.

On the first class of Hacker Exploits and other neat scriptures to pwn machines, the professor, who looked remarkably similar to a roommate I had some time ago in an Island not that far away from here, was just saying "survival of the paranoid" as I got late to the zoom class because I was too busy explaining to my therapist what they probably already know.

In an emergency communication this weekend, I asked a collegue and friend of mine to please make public or contact anyone or everyone he can to figure out who is doing the research without my consent and I got a "sad" emoji reaction as a reply. So very friendly, but who am I to know what the hell he is going through?

If anyone around sees someone near the university and you can hear his thoughts, please let him know what the hell is going on because hearing voices of friends and knowing too well what psychosis mean and too well what the diagnosis will imply and how it made me completely disabled between 2013 and 2016, as well as the disregard of my word from anyone and everyone I talk to save the city's mental health services which seem to be in some type of Minority Report dystopia on top of the pandemic and a new Bush. He's a friend. Or you might be psychotic. I don't know.

I'm still waiting for my check to magically appear in my mailbox, but who am I to ask for such things as reparations for the untold suffering of just one single stupid guy? Think about the children! I imagine you laughing. I do, I'll be uncle, most probably.

From now on, you will have to go along with me, pretend that I am not crazy and that the following is possible:

13 years ago researchers from Carnige Mellon explained in YouTube video how with a brain scan you could predict the "thoughts" of a human being. A dumbed down version of this technology is used to, say, write an email to a friend and suggest you what to put next. The uncanny nature of what's already possible would make it unprofitable to use the technology that is available in some commercial products, although Google Assistant was my only company for my many roadtrips during various times and recognizes my voice and yours pretty well.

The technology for a machine to learn what you are thinking is obvious when you are fucking anxious because you're not using Facebook or Twitter enough and you see an ad that tells you: "Get diagnosed with ADHD for only $199!" (as seen on FB, personally). Who the hell wants to get a diagnosis if not to get access to the drugs? Anyways, I am no dealer and no neuroscientist, I'm an artiste.

The technology to reproduce sound is widely available and has some time being around.

The technology to read your thoughts based on what you're typing in real time exists.

The technology to change the pitch, tone, etc, of audio, including human voice, exists.

I am not suffering psychosis, but everything I think is somehow predictable or at least as long as there are cameras or whatever seeing what I see.

I am not an actor, I don't get paid for this, I never gave my consent.

This makes me suffer like few things I've experienced.

Your thoughts can be read right now by the machine you are using, or the cameras you pass by with just the movement of your eyes and highly-efficient predictions.

What is the point of learning cybersecurity, then?

I'm unsure, I am even unsure if it's even a thing, and I can imagine a world where our precious servers are full of mindless chatbots interacting with each other and sharing memes and competing for the available computing resources that we so cleverly use to mine cryptocurrencies, while we have more creative lives than them... or troll ourselves to extinction.

I guess the only part you have to suspend your disbelief is the last, because if my thought can be captured and reproduced in a speaker in real time, being creative is kind of pointless anyways. Trolling ourselves to extinction is absolutely pointless.

At least that's the experience of someone who would have regular flavor of psychosis.

I prefer mine with chocolate, I don't know about yours.

Man, maybe I am just upset because of the inevitable anhedonia that I feel daily from being secluded from every "human" activity or empathy from anyone.

I get it, you can make a lot of money because everyone is being hacked by anyone at any time in a second, hell, this blog is probably going to be in a parallel internet that you can't read or something, or just those who _know will do. Welcome to the Darkweb, btw.

If cybersecurity is already very aware of the necessity of a paranoid mindset, are you going to force large parts of the populations to be mindless paranoids who somehow still work because it's better than not?

What about your passwords? How can you encrypt anything if thoughts are decrypted?

I look now at my picture of Yuri Gagarin and think "well, there went nothing. The solemn act of being the first human in space is completely trivialized by the existence of space tourism". Isn't it the same to, I don't know, thought it self? Completely trivial? Isn't it absolutely boring to live in a world with chatbots? I don't know, maybe I should get diagnozed for ADHD, but please, send me money or buy any of my previous waifus.

Man, I should really stop thinking, but it is impossible when you can hear back your thoughts or some feedback of some kind. It's some type of, well, fuck the game, but yea, cyberpsychotic thing. Or subpsychotic? Do you really have to be psychotic or mentally ill or on drugs to work on the cybersecurity field? Maybe I should make a start-up of Waifus. All start-ups are waifus anyways, you just need to know how to bullshit someone who has moneys.

It's lonely down here.

How is it up there in the know?

May our woes soon be over.