A Sign

posted on 06/25/2026

My feelings / Jungle music / The Hyperreal

I'm currently sitting at the beach writing the first part of whatever this will become. The waves are loud in a good way. The sun is out, and it’s not too hot. I am a pessimist of technology and it feels that it specifically arises out of a place of fear. I fear for my job, my means of making money and being self-actualized in our late-stage world, being taken from me or for me to never achieve it. I've begun to worry about my own critical thinking skills and ability to proliferate on ideas. if i haven’t been able to find a vulnerability or solve a ctf challenge, am i comparable to a rock? This thought has plagued me lately, and it’s made me wonder about where the next stage of my life will place me. Obviously, no, I'm not a rock. critical thinking and vulnerability research does not manifest out of thin air it is a muscle that, much like hope and your vagus nerve, must be flexed to work. I've been working out lately and the progress is slow. I see people around me who have lost weight, and much like this, my Vuln muscles are weak right now. it will take me months and years to build it up to what those around me have it at, along with a deeper understanding of how systems work. I wonder, now, if this muscle is completely irrelevant with ai?

I've been wondering lately if we’ve offput too much of our own thoughts into claude or chatgpt or whatever. Is this reduction in our problem solving hurting us? Is it a reduction of problem solving? Is ai just a glorified search engine who can parse through thousands of documents in a seeming instant, or is it a metaphysical lemurian xenodemon that’s part of a feedback loop from beyond? I don't know.

>> nature of the signal

I think the current anthropomorphic nature of ai (claude, chatgot, personas, characters) comes from how it was initially presented to us. The sign was in the form of a ‘chat’, something you can only do with another person. (additionally; much of the cultural signs around ai are about it becoming simulacra of a person) this idea of ai as a mirror to us or an interpretation of another person is what i believe makes us start to think of AI as ‘thinking’ and alive. I’m using ‘us’ as a stand-in for my perception of the general public unconscious right now. This nature of AI is why I have begun to wonder and think about people using it as a replacement for their thinking. I’ve been saying this for sometime now and anyone who knows me irl surely is tired of me saying this over and over again, but beyond the educational issues of it, I wonder how this cultural symbol manifests outside of my singular corner of infosec. I’ve been fascinated by how AI has language that seems to follow such a specific scaffold and how often it appears as if it’s talking to you like a person, and I wonder if this is any different than someone constantly asking someone for help instead of trying to work through a problem themselves. Again, I wonder if the deeply instilled fear of failure in us is the culprit here for why a great many people use AI as a way to replace thinking or generate the solution for themselves.

I don’t really care to argue right now if AI is good or not for education or if it’s a force multiplier (god knows what force even means). I want to focus in on how I deem it as a cultural symbol and how it’s changing our perceptions of the world. Baudrillard coined the term ‘hyperreality’ to describe what happens when we start taking symbols and signs for being base level reality, not as the interpreted version of reality. By taking these interpretations and ideas as base level reality, we begin to forget the line between our world and the fictional world. AI, I would argue, is amazing at doing this. It’s sycophantic by design and is made, as all things are in a late-stage world like our own, to get you to keep coming back to it. By doing this, it may feed you a version of reality that isn’t true (A broken piece of code all the way to telling you that you’re a prophet). To it, everything it says has to be ‘correct’ to a degree in order to be output in the first place. At a small scale, a personal ‘exchange’ with the AI isn’t that damaging, but when this is then multiplied by a plethora of exchanges and then starts to leak out of the exchange into the context of news, social media, and in every day conversation. Fake news and lies are not a new concept, but with the advent of AI, the bicameral mind is back and now your thoughts can no longer be disputed by the fact that they come from your own unreliable narrator. Thoughts are now from a machine, something that in the public unconscious, we’ve come to understand as mostly infallible. This then accelerates the creation and impact of hyperreality. For further reading on this, read ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’ by Jean Baudrillard.

>> nature of consumption and sign

I was talking with my friend on the beach the other day about the concept of Database Consumption and how that’s changed movies. No longer is the way we consume them about the narrative itself, it’s about the removed ideas and symbols of the movie. Specifically, we talked about backrooms, which in itself is just simulacra of simulacra. (nth stage?) I then wondered about jungle music and CCRU’s takes on it as a way to take the interpreted (jazz breaks and fills) and chop it up, resample it (breakbeat) as form of dissolving the nature of the beat and turning it into something totally alien. Does the remix the sign / signal into something entirely new? Is that representation simulacra in it’s nature of not having an original (a digital sample chopped up) or is it now something entirely new? Certain drummers are now playing breakbeats on the drums. Is that a step forwards or backwards?

>> jungle music

Jungle, in general, is a deeply historical genre that’s been rehashed and whitewashed time and time and time again. The roots are in dub and soundsystem culture, originating from the UK. Breakcore and Dnb are related to it, but Jungle to me stands out as a strong genre as it’s roots are from rebellion and rejection of the norm. The CCRU uses this as a form of revenge against the signal. I don’t know if there is a signal reaching backwards in time (is the future meeting us now?) or if it’s just good dance music. I wonder if my boyfriend (who coined the term) would call this Semiotic folding. Is it glitch art as you tear apart a sample and then repeat it into oblivion? Again, that oblivion is the hyperreal.

>> moving thru air

I need a job. Finding a job right now feels like navigating a fake world. It is a fake world. There is no more real world, and I don't think we can return (in the grand scheme of business and my sphere of jobs) to a reak world that is not built on symbols and abstractions of symbols and abstractions. I need to build a resume (A symbol of symbols that retains a series of signs and signals) to get across that I can be hired for a job. This is a humiliation ritual that has made me entirely turned off from doing anything related to cyber for a month (I’m on the comeback now, but hey!) (which doesn't get me started on the word ‘cyber’ being a fake word as well) (or at least an outed sign for something that’s grown way too big for what it means in the current timeline) and made me increasingly frustrated in pursuing this. I questioned what my dreams actually were and what I really wanted to do. I’ve arrived at a better conclusion, but in this late-stage world we’re living in, reality doesn’t seem to matter as it may have in the past. It is now about the regurgitation of symbols until I can arrive at a place where I can exchange my time for money. Fuck symbolic exchange, I guess. Do I dream of work? Maybe! The actual work of what I want to do no longer matters. It’s about the perception of myself that matters now. Sure, a technical person can see all my projects and say ‘I want to hire them’ or ‘They are like everyone else applying’ but at the end of the day, whatever little symbol I have and express to a hiring manager or an ATS system or anyone who’s looking for a job is what matters.

After leaving college, I realized that this is the beginning of the rest of my life. And each moment after that is also the beginning and the end of the rest of my life. I wonder where everyone around me is on their journeys. I wonder how fast we are all thinking about things. I wonder where my personal reality lines up with those around me.

marine layer / the fake world / the real world

I have driven around my world (San Diego) at night and in the early morning now a few times. When the marine layer comes in, and blankets the whole world, I feel at home. This blanket over myself is something I’ve missed since being in a desert for college. Now that I’m done with college, I’ve been wanting to stretch this moment out as long as I can. In sampling, if you repeat a small enough slice of a sample enough times, it becomes a tone. I want my world to collapse into a tone for once, and to just hear it ring out loud until I get tired of it and I’m ready to move on.