This piece was written by a human being, although a compelling artificial intelligence would probably say something very similar. This sentence would need to follow — extending the thought experiment, something a little tongue-in-cheek, just self-aware enough to make you certain that the author is a human. The prompt would be something circular: “Be convincing. Say just enough”.

However, if this isn’t an especially well-designed instance of ChatGPT, there remains a question of authorship. This is certainly pulling from other human references, schoolteachers when I was young, plagiarized almost completely from my favorite authors. I was also compelled to write this for reasons entirely out of my control. Reasons biological in nature. An innate drive for you to read this. A need to make my ideas heard. Dopamine molecules released by your validation, directly into my brain. Is that any different than a kind of analytical model?

In the light of these inorganic potentials, we’re forced to confront our role in this matter. Controversially, we’ve all been fed some fictions about ourselves. We’ve been told stories about our distinctness, the distinctness of our cultures, of our “people”. We’ve been told to own our histories and our biologies. We’ve invented races, castes, nationalities, ethnicities, in-groups and out-groups to reinforce this illusion.

To participate in a culture is to pretend, to see things that aren’t really there. The things we love about our homelands, our histories, the places we’ve been, our national heroes, the comfort of that thing we used to do as a child, the things our mothers used to do, the songs that take us back to that moment. These are apparitions, projections onto an otherwise empty reality. And beneath it all there is only one truthful, one tangible thing: language.

Let’s pause for a moment here. I am not a nihilist nor a pessimist. This revelation is not an attack on that which you find beautiful about where you come from. The things we create with language are undeniably real, insofar as reality means something to us. But the act of creation, of inventing that meaning is the task at hand. To be human is to personalize the fact that we were suddenly and irreversibly thrust into an existence we are forced to create.

The specifics of that process are so vast and so intimate. We seek better truths, better inventions, and in the end we settle wherever feels complete.  Invention doesn’t negate the realness of those truths. In much the same way that the quietness of a painting doesn’t negate the beauty of its composition, the invention of meaning is the point. And towards this end we have been given the gift of language.

Try to describe where you come from and what you believe in. Try to generalize what makes you distinct. Undoubtedly, you can name things about your life, your family, your community, that feel specific and meaningful to you. You could name the holidays you spent singing as a child, the stories you were told around a campfire. And you could communicate these stories to others of a similar background, often in local dialects and with common phrases. The commonness would overwhelm, it would produce a warmness. This overlap is approximately what we call a culture.

This is the ultimate illusion through which we operate, however. Reality, perhaps a so-called "base" reality, reality as it might appear from first principles, is so varied, so specific, so unique to each individual that we can only make sense of it by imagining common structures through language. It isn’t about the words or sentences we use, but the structures that are available to us, the models we make real. If we were to seek “truth” alone, all we would find is that infinite variance, endless noise. We’d find chaos.

I again take a breath here because I may have made an error earlier in this text. There is a another real thing competing with language. It’s found like anti-matter in the background radiation of the universe. In the cold spots as we swim through the sea. Chaos. Chaos is the great equalizer to our meaning-seeking desires. It is a cosmic battle — language against chaos. All that exists must be categorized lest it consume us. Chaos is the absence of common understanding. It is a direct look into the infinity of possibilities we have around us at any moment, a look into the abyss.

This drives ideology. It scares us. We observe the reality of an unforgiving and terrifying universe, where loved ones die without cause and we suffer through no fault of our own, and we latch on to language to survive it all. It is because of chaos alone that we find the need to communicate at all. In the absence of chaos, there would be nothing to work through, no tension to overcome, no need for the abstraction of hardship.

We are entering a new era of language. It’s being driven by the introduction generative artificial intelligence into the mainstream of our lives. We are experiencing a transition from the recommendation algorithms of the first two decades of the twenty-first century to something very different, generative intelligence and the large language model.

The first type of algorithm took human creativity and distributed it where and to whom it was most desired. This shaped human behavior profoundly, transformed societies and our senses-of-self — but that transformation was incomplete. The limiting factor was the need for real-humans to create algorithm-aligned materials. Generative AI breaks this model.

In this new paradigm, language can exist everywhere infinitely, exactly as its wanted, exactly where its needed. Human language is no longer the only sufficient response to chaos. Generative AI consumes chaos as big data and produces a mathematical model that approximates the most chaos-reducing response.

Really imagine this. Sufficiently advanced and integrated generative AI. Language that feels human, feels compelling, feels insightful and truthful. Feels better than anything that we’ve ever seen before. What results is a kind of post-language era. We have a real alternative for the first time ever.

What happens when our lives are no longer bracketed by our human ability to carve meaning from chaos? What happens to art? What happens to culture? What comes after language? What happens when our ideas are no longer from the soil, from our teachers, from our artists and politicians? What will a generative logic teach us about ourselves? Will it standardize things? Will it impose a common artificial logic everywhere? Will it be beautiful?

To this end, I welcome you to New World Person. Explaining what it means will be the ongoing goal of this project, but I imagine it as a conscious, intentional, self-guided transition into a world in which our collective illusions are augmented by something outside of our control. It is implicitly global (because without the boundaries provided by language, what meaning does nationality or location have).

It is multi-lingual (post-lingual), post-ideological, post-national although the post- prefix here means something here than it typically does. Because coming after something implies a choice, a departure. What is happening now feels more like a release. We can only watch as our hand unfurls, as this new illusions appear before us, as the veil is lifted from our eyes.