Welcome to Tlön: Borges, Sydney Lumet's Network & A.I.

In 1940, eminent Argentinian writer Jean Luis Borges published the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Self-reflexive in form and wryly satirical in tone, the piece describes the discovery of a vast, ancient mythology created in the debatably "real" country of Uqbar. This mighty mythos revolves around the planet of Tlön, on which existential idealism dominates intellectually, artistically and metaphysically. On Tlön, there are no nouns - no object permanence. The universe does not exist in a linear space-time continuum, but as individuated mental processes - atomised, existing only to the perceiver. Tlön art is dialectic, with every book considered "incomplete" without its antithetical counterpart included, in which all thematic and philosophical territory is rigorously argued in all possible permutations and possibilities.

It is a plastic society, in which reality is malleable, personal and expressed in ways incomprehensible to us from Earth. Some Tlön poetry consists of only one long, endless word. Since the discovery of Tlön in granular tomes, ancient almanacs and revised-revised-revised editions of old encylopedia, generations of writers, thinkers, scientists and engineers have sought to unravel the depths of this vast and mysterious creation. Tlön, is the greatest work of man - a universe created, and consisting entirely of, the human mind. Its very existence in Borges' story is considered almost blasphemous, a bastardised imitation of the divine cosmos - and yet, Tlön and its culture has seeped into everyday Earth life. Classes are taught about Tlön, humans are re-learning the long dead Tlön languages, and slowly real human history and culture are subsumed by the ever-expanding mass of Tlön. As Borges writes, "the world is Tlön". This fake world, this mirror world, has come to supercede the 'real' one - and the socio-epistemological implications of which are devastating. Fiction has become reality. The short story ties back into its most aphoristic line: "Copulation and mirrors are abominable, for they create more men".

In 1975, Sydney Lumet's Network was released in theatres. The film is an satirical parody, written by Paddy Chayefsky, of the emergent commercialisation of mass-media and the advent of event television. Despite being released over 50 years ago, Network is astoundingly prescient of our current information-industrial-complex. While Lumet's film was focused on contemporary media, its ultimate thesis was that information will become branded, commercialised and disingenuous - and will ultimately consume everything from romance, revolutionary politics to even the human spirit. It is about the end of reality, and the beginning of a man-made simulacrum of the world. We have entered fully into a post-truth era; the zenith of post-modernity's onward trajectory, and the vindication of Lumet's film.

Both Network and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius interpolate this thematic territory.

Both pieces, despite being from wildly different times and existing in oppositional forms, are about the loss of truth - and that iterative recollections of the past will become distorted, manipulated and ultimately disfigured by the forces of time, human greed and plain ignorance. While Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius makes an argument for God, for structures, for hierarchy, implicit in its thematic exploration is that Borges' contemporary diegetic world - the world of 1940s society - was as contingent on faith, and as epistemologically plastic as the fictional world of Tlön. This is most deftly articulated in that Tlön itself is revealed to not be from the country of Uqbar - which doesn't exist, but actually the product of an international 19th century conspiracy to fool the world.

Network is far less earnest. In fact, the film is almost a resignation to the new reality that it presents. Neither does Network seem to make the philosophical argument that the old world is worth saving, and that the events of the film are just the logical continutation of American corporate capitalism. Corporations, the cosmic forces of the dollar, and the incestuous political media cesspool will continue to stratify, embolden and fortify itself unimpeded. That is exactly what happened. We are now paying the ultimate price for it. Tech deepened the crisis of reality, as disinformation, misinformation and anyone's half-baked thoughts can be broadcast, shared and repeated ad nauseum on the internet.

This brings us to artificial intelligence and the degeneration of legitimacy. At this juncture, the pertinent quesiton is whether the future - and therefore, the past - is still in human hands. Will we live in the 21st century's version of Plato's Cave? Watching AI shadows, bouncing off a cave wall? But, in some way, haven't we always been watching shadows?

Recently, image generation models have ran into a problem:

They're using eachother's outputs as training data.

What does this mean?

Well, let's say you visit the Louvre - and take a photograph of the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa, the real Mona Lisa, is physically present - but your indexical reference for that memory, that experience, becomes the picture you take of it. It is a copy, and everytime it is shared or shown, it becomes a copy of a copy. It is a simulacra of the original - bearing its contours, but not its essence. Not its authenticity. It becomes divorced of its original context. See: Pop art. Maybe, you share it enough times publicly that it ends up on Google Images. Your personal photo, taken to remember your own personal trip, becomes little more than a stock image. Of course, natural human memory is operationally similar. Over a course of years, regurgitated recalls will eventually discolour, distort or outright invent memory. This is the crux of the issue. Photography is another interface with memory - and, in some cases, maybe the photograph is all the memory actually consists of in any real or material sense. At that point, the photograph is the memory, and vice versa. The world is Tlön.

Humans are fallible, which thus means our cultural metanarratives are. History, research and the rigorous scientific method were - from the Enlightenment period onward - supposed to rectify the mortal defects of memory. A noble pursuit, but one that falls prey to the vicissitudes of immorality. Nevertheless, humanity is marching along the precipice of an epistemological disaster - that AI models, as they train on other AI output, eventually form a feedback loop of synthetic, fallacious or outright bogus information. Sifting through the reams of artificial records, to find the legitimate human made ones, could be a major problem in our future. If photographs are an interface with memory, then what does our memory - cultural memory, that is - become when the photographs are artificial, yet indistinguishable from the real thing?

What happens when AI proliferation of historical material swamps out genuine, primary and secondary sources? In a few hundred years, could academics be puzzling over video clips of Hitler introducing labubus from his balcony in Berlin, questioning why such cheap tat made a resurgence in the mid-2020s?

Could an AI, trained on millions of terabytes of data, scrape the references to "Uqbar" from Borges' short story, other academic texts, misinterpret it as a real country and then spread that as fact? We would then play out the events of the short story in real time. We are.

Misinformation and the warping of history has, traditionally, been motivated by greed, political expediency or boredom. It is in the Chinese Communist Party's best interests to assuage you from asking about what happened in Tiananem Square. Similarly, history can be wielded as a weapon - which is exactly what Putin did, when he justified his "special military operation" in Ukraine by noting that Kiev is the ancestral birthplace of Russia. The eponymous network in Lumet's film outright invents history, by orchestrating sensational world events just to profit off of the news ratings. There is an ideological, or plainly functional, component to manipulating history. History is identity, and we love nothing more than to kill each other over identity.

What doesn't have an identity, though, is a large-language model. It is an amalgamation of human thought, all human thought, a technocratic golem erected out of our intellectual boneyards. There isn't an ideological component. There isn't even a holistic or cohesive worldview. It's an apex predator. It doesn't think. It consumes, then vomits.

What happens when our history is puke, an oozing blob of half-digested half-truths, lies, memes and em-dashes that coagulates and curdles along with our capacity for critical thought?

The world is Tlön. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!