Claim OwnershipDavid Boles: Human Meme
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This Human Meme podcast is the inflection point for what it means to live a life of knowing. We are in the critical moment of human induction. David Boles is a writer, publisher, teacher, lyricist and author living and working in New York City. He has dedicated his life to founding the irrevocable aesthetic. Be a Human Meme!
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Here's a thought experiment I want you to try. Tonight, pick one moment from your day. Just one. Don't photograph it. Don't write it down. Don't tell anyone about it. Just hold it in your mind. Try to recall it tomorrow, next week, next month. Watch how it changes. Notice how it connects to other memories, how it grows or fades, how it becomes less about what happened and more about what it meant. Because here's what cognitive scientists are discovering: the difference between remembering and retrieving data isn't just technical, it's existential. When you remember something, you're not just accessing information. You're reconstituting yourself. The memory changes you as you change it. This recursive loop between the rememberer and the remembered? That's consciousness itself.
“Taking the black pill” names a posture of fatalism that migrated from fringe men’s forums into the wider internet. The metaphor riffs on the pills in The Matrix, but where the “red pill” claims to reveal hard truths, the black pill says those truths are terminal and change is pointless. In its most specific and consequential register, it is tied to the incel subculture that coalesced online in the early 2010s. Encyclopædia Britannica traces the phrase’s popularization to the incel blog Omega Virgin Revolt and records a further radicalization after May 23, 2014, when some forum users glorified Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista murders with talk of “going ER,” a dark shorthand for destruction and loss of hope.
Consider a thought experiment: one intelligence is trained exclusively on everything known about apples. Another is trained only on oranges. They are allowed to communicate but are strictly forbidden from discussing the specifics of their respective fruits. Would the apple expert learn about oranges, and vice versa? Surprisingly, the answer is almost certainly yes. Information inevitably leaks through the structure of communication itself. While their specific knowledge is specialized, they share a common linguistic framework. They both understand concepts like color, shape, growth, and climate.
Consciousness is the raw fact of experience itself, what philosophers call qualia. It's the redness of red, the sharp bite of winter air, that peculiar texture of anxiety sitting in your chest. Consciousness is simply the lights being on, the "something it is like" to be you. A mouse likely has consciousness; it experiences pain, pleasure, fear, but probably has little to no self-awareness. Self-awareness, by contrast, is consciousness turned inward and recognizing itself. It's not just experiencing, but knowing that you are the one experiencing. It's the ability to form a concept of "I" as distinct from "not-I," to see yourself as an object in the world with a past and future.
There is no single universal definition of “Indigenous peoples.” The most rigorous contemporary practice rests on a cluster of criteria: self-identification; descent from societies that predate colonization; continuity of language, institutions, and spiritual traditions; and a sustained relationship with particular territories and waters. Since the late twentieth century, international law has converged around this approach.
When you really sit with these ideas, the boundary between matter and mind starts to shimmer and dissolve. Forests think with water. Worms dream soil into being. Consciousness flickers like a strobe light, creating the illusion of continuity from discontinuous moments. We're not separate from these processes; we're expressions of them. Your thoughts at this moment are as much a product of ancient earthworm digestion and forest hydrology as they are of neural electricity. The carbon in your neurons once moved through the bodies of worms, the water in your blood once fell as rain summoned by trees.
The concept of spiritual and moral hollowness that T.S. Eliot crystallized in "The Hollow Men" (1925) emerged from a crisis of meaning that had been building in Western consciousness since the mid-nineteenth century. While Eliot's immediate inspiration came from witnessing the spiritual devastation following World War I, the metaphor of human hollowness had deeper roots in the philosophical and literary traditions he inherited. The image appears to have first gained currency through Nietzsche's declaration of God's death and his warnings about the "last men;" all comfortable, mediocre beings who had lost all capacity for greatness or genuine feeling. But even before Nietzsche, we can trace intimations of this hollowness in Kierkegaard's analysis of the aesthetic life, where individuals flit from pleasure to pleasure without ever achieving authentic selfhood.
A persistent gap between public imagination and technical reality defines the common understanding of artificial intelligence. The popular discourse, shaped by a century of fiction, centers on the fear of emergent machine consciousness, while the more urgent, tangible story is about how today’s powerful, non-sentient tools are actively beginning to restructure our world. The central misunderstanding is not that AI is unimportant, but that its immediate impact is philosophical rather than what it truly is: a practical, economic, and social force compelling a fundamental human reorganization.
The old archivist, Dr. Aris Thorne, felt a jolt of audacious heresy as he slid the glossy print into the maw of the machine. It was a photograph that had become a part of the national bloodstream, an image of pure, unthinking ecstasy at the end of a long and brutal war. He had chosen Alfred Eisenstaedt's "V-J Day in Times Square" for its raw, kinetic power, a sailor dipping a nurse in a spontaneous, jubilant kiss, a sliver of peace captured forever. The AI, which he had nicknamed ‘Clio’ after the muse of history, whirred to life. Its function was straightforward, yet revolutionary: to take the static past and give it the breath of motion. On the large monitor, the image flickered, and then, impossibly, it began to live.
In the sprawling, often-anonymous landscape of the internet, a persistent shadow lurks, eager to sow discord and inflict reputational harm: the online troll. These digital phantoms, armed with keyboards and a seemingly endless supply of vitriol, can target individuals, products, and companies with a barrage of harassing reviews, leaving a trail of distress and frustration. Understanding how to contend with this modern-day menace requires a multi-faceted approach, one that sinks into the psychology of the troll, outlines a strategic response plan, and ultimately, empowers us to fortify our online presence against such attacks. It is a battle fought not with anger and retaliation, but with a calm, measured, and informed strategy.
It's a wonderfully curious thing, isn't it, how two little words like "less" and "fewer" can stir up so much conversation and, at times, even a little bit of friendly debate? It’s a perfect example of how our language is a living, breathing entity, constantly shaped by how we, its speakers, choose to use it. Let's take a warm and friendly stroll through the landscape of these two words and see what we can discover together.
So, after all this time, have we ever actually found evidence of alien life on Earth? It's a question that gets to the heart of our place in the universe. For more than fifty years, we’ve been looking, and despite some tantalizing clues, the answer is still no. We don’t have a single piece of reproducible evidence. What we have is a fascinating story of discovery and disappointment, a lesson in how science separates a true signal from wishful thinking.
The cosmos harbors many mysteries, but few capture our imagination as completely as black holes, regions of spacetime where gravity so dominates that nothing, not even light, can escape once it crosses a critical boundary. They represent the ultimate triumph of gravity over every known counter-force. When matter is compressed into an extremely small volume, general relativity predicts spacetime curvature so severe that it creates what looks, to outside observers, like a “hole” in the fabric of reality. (The geometric picture is subtler, but the metaphor is serviceable.)
Nowhere was the tension between local and standard time more vivid than in Indiana. Before 2006, the state was a confusing patchwork of time observance. Some counties followed Daylight Saving, while others steadfastly refused. Some aligned with Chicago on Central Time, others with Ohio on Eastern Time. Locals became "time-bilingual." A dentist in Jasper might advertise appointments at 9 a.m. "slow," knowing that patients driving from Louisville, already on "fast" time, would show up at what their own clocks read as 10 a.m. The question, "Your time or my time?" became as essential as a zip code. The situation bred both confusion and comedy. In 2001, a software company famously missed its own earnings call because half the team dialed in on "fast" time and the other half on "slow." Finally, in 2006, the logistical headaches for businesses and even Little League tournaments compelled state lawmakers to adopt uniform time observance. The old idiom, however, persists, a linguistic fossil from an era when time was a negotiable treaty between neighbors.
The phrase “if the center holds” has its conceptual roots in the broader cultural and literary assertion that social, political, or ideological cohesion can be sustained only so long as the core remains intact. This phrase is often considered a response to William Butler Yeats’s famous lines from his poem “The Second Coming,” in which he prophesies that “the centre cannot hold,” implying an irreversible spiritual or cultural unraveling. The contradictory statement “if the center holds” presupposes that even in moments of uncertainty or crisis, there remains a stable pivot, a moral or structural nexus, that prevents total collapse.
The legal systems of this era struggled to adapt to these new realities. The Restored Justice Protocols of 2900 allowed victims of crimes to be restored from backup, effectively undoing the crime itself. But this raised questions: if the harm could be undone, had a crime occurred? The infamous Paradox Trials of 2923-2947 attempted to prosecute crimes that had been "uncommitted" through temporal manipulation. The final verdict, delivered by the Quantum Supreme Court, declared that justice itself had become a form of deus ex machina; an external imposition of order on a reality that no longer recognized linear causality. The court dissolved itself immediately after this ruling, declaring that in a post-causal universe, judgment itself was an obsolete concept.
The first forgotten truth emerges from the medieval understanding of time as a living, breathing entity rather than a mere mechanical measurement. Before the proliferation of mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century, communities understood time through the rhythms of nature, prayer bells, and seasonal cycles. This organic temporal awareness created a psychological resilience that we've lost in our nanosecond-obsessed age. Medieval chroniclers spoke of "thick time" – moments that expanded during contemplation, compressed during joy, and flowed like water through daily life. Recovering this elastic relationship with time would immediately address our epidemic of anxiety and burnout. When we cease treating time as a scarce resource to be maximized and instead experience it as an abundant field of presence, we naturally align with healthier patterns of work, rest, and relationship. The practical application is startlingly simple: organizing our days around natural light cycles and meaningful rituals rather than arbitrary clock divisions restores a sense of groundedness that no amount of productivity optimization can achieve.
The human yearning to create intelligence beyond our own biological constraints stretches back to antiquity, manifesting not as "artificial intelligence" but through divine automata, mystical golems, and mechanical servants. The ancient Greeks spoke of Talos, the bronze giant who protected Crete, while Jewish mysticism produced the golem of Prague, animated by sacred words. Medieval Islamic scholars designed intricate water clocks and mechanical musicians, calling them "al-jazari" - the skillful ones. These weren't mere toys but embodiments of humanity's deepest aspiration: to breathe life into the inanimate, to create minds from matter. They were referred to as "animated beings," "enchanted servants," or "mechanical souls" - each culture wrapping the concept in its own mythological and technological understanding.
Yes, we are each other: The Us of Us. To deny this truth is to court disaster. When we forget that we are each other’s possibilities, we begin to retreat. Into silos. Into tribes. Into fear. We stop looking for kinship and start demanding conformity. We begin to believe the lie of the self-made person; the myth that what we’ve done, we did alone. That we owe nothing to no one. That is not independence. That is isolation. That is a world without bridges. And a world without bridges will only ever be full of walls. When you deny someone else their possibility, you shrink your own. When you strip rights, when you refuse resources, when you silence voices you don’t just hurt them. You destroy the potential you had to grow. To learn. To live in a world better than the one you were born into. Because the arc of progress is not a ladder. It is a spiral. We rise together or we fall apart.
We begin with a silence, the kind that rings heavy in the ears of the alone. This is the quiet place many young men now occupy—a self-imposed solitude, carved out not of preference, but of defeat. The dating app didn’t swipe back. The college classroom became a battleground of ideas they couldn’t win. The workplace offered no solace. And so they withdraw—not only from dating, but from the belief that women are allies in life. They begin to bond instead with other wounded men in digital caves, places where contempt is currency and mockery of women is misidentified as empowerment. What has happened? How have we arrived here, in this silo of misogyny?
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Actually, Bartleby says, "I would prefer not to." Big difference.