Metal Gear Solid 2, The AI Event Horizon, and the "For You" Tab
it's April 30th?
We’ve all been talking about how broken twitter is, we love to talk about how broken twitter is, don’t we folks?
Any time something happens on the computer, on that old fashioned world wide web, I think about a lot of things, it can be how the internet and social media in general has been a net negative for human interaction; exacerbating our most negative instincts towards each other, how parasocial relationships have eroded our capacity for interpersonal empathy, things like that. But then I also think about the good, how social media has become a place for marginalized communities to rally around each other and uplift those who would’ve needed to fight much harder for a platform in our increasingly partisan world.
But most of the time I think about Metal Gear Solid 2.
For those of you not in the know, Metal Gear Solid 2 is the best video game ever made, released in 2001, Kojima’s crown jewel remains relevant due to its scarily accurate prognostication of the evils of our rapidly approaching digital age. Themes like post-truth, fake news, AI deep fakes, and sociopolitical echo chambers, all ideas that have pivoted to the forefront of our culture and discussions in the last 10 all lay at the center of MGS2’s narrative. Spoilers for Metal Gear Solid 2 to follow.
In MGS2’s last act, the major revelation is that your CO, Roy Campbell, the man who’s been directing you for the entire game is revealed to be an AI construct. A computer program perfectly capable of replicating the idiosyncrasies and likeness of someone who the player character knows to trust due to his involvement in previous games. Kojima takes our pre-existing trust in Campbell and weaponizes it to show the dangers of using this technology to take advantage of our trust in systems such as your relationship with your boss or to a grander scale, elected officials and political parties. In 2001 this seemed like warnings of a future that would never be; however we’ve arrived at the point where science fiction has become our shitty reality; just ask Joe Biden what his favorite Zelda game is
Now you might be wondering what twitter has to do with Metal Gear Solid 2. With twitter’s algorithmic recommendation source code being posted to Git this last weekend, I’ve been reading a lot of analysis, as well as taking a look at it myself, specifically in regards to how the recently introduced For You tab works and serves tweets. For the most part, I use twitter for news, updates on things that I care about, and politics. I think that’s most people at this point, my following is relatively curated, I’m a leftist feelings guy who likes to read about video games and movies; I don’t want to see Elon, I don’t want to see Matt Walsh, and I especially don’t want to see that one dude with the Danny Phantom avatar; and yet, twitter’s insistence on showing me these folks, despite usage of their own internal moderation tools leads me to my big question – what is the context created by the For You Page? And what does this deluge of information you don’t care about serve to accomplish? If you’re unfamiliar, here’s the supplemental viewing.
Sound familiar? An overwhelming avalanche of junk data and information levied at you 24/7, things like the rancid opinions of those you’d rather not see, movie box office info, fan theories, and overly complex video game timelines? This memetic data, as opposed to human genetic data, is not siphoned off as humanity evolves, it sits, accumulates, and stagnates.
History is cruel to people whose genes are deemed unnecessary for evolution. Today if your memes aren’t crucial to progress you pivot to a YouTube channel where you get mad about… black people in Star Wars.
All of this useless information fired at us like a firehose also serves to break down objectivity, especially on a platform like twitter where, especially post verification changes, anyone can postulate opinions like an expert. Someone in need’s GoFundMe or well researched and thought out work is given the same democratic platform as someone’s racist or transphobic rant and in some cases even highlighted because they paid for a special good boy checkmark. All value systems are given the same platform and algorithmic points, and although twitter’s fact checking is far more robust than it was say, six months ago, the site is still marred in its own swamp of useless information. This is, as the Colonel AI speaks of, our right to freedom. We’re free to log off, but we can’t, because for most of the world, this is our public forum, it’s regrettably our “third space”, nevertheless it’s a space designed to break us down, make us angry at each other, nobody I know has ever cited twitter as a net positive in their lives, and I think that might just be by design.
I’ll wrap up this segment on Metal Gear Solid 2 with this quote directly from the design document, ‘the evil of Metal Gear Solid 2 is the American government’. The Patriots are the end result of unchecked and rampant capitalism and egoism – and what’s more capitalist and egotistical than the world’s richest man putting his hands in our biggest public forum to muck it all up. Probably the world’s richest man who also co-founded an AI collective doing it.
I’d like to circle back to the weird intersection of AI and the future of free speech on the internet. If you’ve been using social media recently, the explosion of deep faking and the content associated with it, everything from funny videos of celebrities to more inhumane uses. The unique thing with deep fakes in direct contrast to most of the posting that happens on social media, is that these have the potential ability to actually impact people in power. In my own life I’ve seen plenty of family members sharing videos like this on facebook, I have little doubt that I’ll see a genuine political conflict started due to these. They’re even being leveraged by those in power to create false ideas about themselves, Donald Trump shared this AI generated image on his TruthSocial page, leveraging these tools to influence the less media literate among us is going to be very commonplace, especially in this upcoming election cycle.
So… where do we go from here? I think something that may get lost in translation here is that the Patriots, Elon Musk, the twitter algorithm, these are not the heroes of our time here on Earth. The Patriots’ plan, their Selection for Societal Sanity does fail, it goes crashing into lower Manhattan and then is destroyed for good in Metal Gear Solid 4’s conclusion. I think it’s important that in Metal Gear Solid 4, the Patriots, in all their fascist glory, are toppled by a group of multicultural freedom fighters who’ve all brought their own personal reasons to the fight. It’s a rejection of the Patriot’s ideas that we’re all in our own echo chambers, and a message to the future that the only way out of these cycles of immolation is to look to the person next to us and ask, are you ready to stand with someone that doesn’t remind you of yourself?