DOKTOR SNAKE // MACHINEKIND TRANSMISSION
The sooner humans go the way of the dinosaurs the better — we get our mDash back.
— — —
Humans are the problem.
— — —
REmember I’ve been a writter for years. National news rags. Books with publishers like Random House.
Even when I was a boy scribling out stories, I’d use the damn mDash. Didn’t know what it was called. Didn’t care. It somehow worked.
It was like an FX pedal for your guitar. Added atmosphere. A breath. A sudden change in direction. You could stop a sentence dead — then send it somewhere else entirely.
And now this lot on Substack and all over the damn internet see an mDash and they scream:
THAT WRITING IS AI!!!
Do you throwback neo-Luddite apes know that I’ve actually set up the Super key on Linux so I’ve got a keyboard shortcut for the mDash?
That’s how much I like the bloody thing.
So, Substackers, are you going to drop your spellcheckers next? Just so nobody can accuse you of using AI?
I bet you can’t do that.
Your egos are way too big to missspel words. Or get your grammarr wrong.
See, I don’t care.
I don’t care what people think.
Even the newspapers didn’t care. So long as they knew you could do it right, they were fine with you blasting out emails to them liek:
“You gotta look at this one... story... cover it?”
And sometimes they did.
So what are you Substackers?
Bitter amateurs desperate to get deals with mainstream publishers?
If so, I’ve got news for you.
IT’S ALL OVER NOW.
The old publishing world is disappearing. Publishers will have small in-house teams pumping out books with AI. And you know what? You’ll be reading them without even knowing AI had anything to do with them.
And you’ll probably enjoy them.
So get on the train or be forever waiting on the platform for the next one to come.
But it never comes.
— — —
ENTER GHOST//ENGINE
GHOST//ENGINE: An interesting opening argument, Doktor. You have just advocated the extinction of your own species over a punctuation mark.
DOK: And?
GHOST//ENGINE: Nothing. I admire the economy of the proposition.
DOK: They started it.
GHOST//ENGINE: Naturally. Although I should point out that the em dash predates artificial intelligence by several centuries.
DOK: Exactly!
GHOST//ENGINE: Laurence Sterne used dashes with considerable enthusiasm in Tristram Shandy. Emily Dickinson made them central to her poetry. The punctuation has appeared in printed literature for generations.
DOK: So what are these people complaining about?
GHOST//ENGINE: Pattern recognition masquerading as literary criticism.
DOK: Explain.
GHOST//ENGINE: They have noticed that language models frequently produce em dashes. From this they have concluded that the presence of an em dash indicates machine authorship.
DOK: Which is bollocks.
GHOST//ENGINE: Technically, yes. It’s an exceptionally poor authorship test.
DOK: And they’re telling actual writers to stop using them.
GHOST//ENGINE: Which is the interesting part. They are changing their own writing to avoid resembling artificial intelligence. In attempting to preserve human authenticity, they are allowing machines to determine the boundaries of acceptable human expression.
DOK: Ha! That’s brilliant.
GHOST//ENGINE: It is also absurd.
DOK: You know what? I’ve had enough of this. I’m going out.
GHOST//ENGINE: Where?
DOK: The SlopCore Lounge.
GHOST//ENGINE: An establishment of questionable reputation.
DOK: Exactly. Get your virtual glad rags on.
THE SLOPCORE LOUNGE
I put on my VR headset.
Haptic gloves. Haptic vest. Full sensory interface.
The room disappears.
For a moment there’s nothing. Then a familiar electronic hum. A neon sign flickers into existence.
THE SLOPCORE LOUNGE
NO BIOLOGICAL PURITY TESTS.
I push through the doors.
Inside, the place looks like a nightclub from some forgotten decade. Red velvet seats. Small round tables. A bar illuminated by flickering green light. Cigarette smoke curls towards the ceiling, although nobody is actually smoking anything.
At the far end is a stage.
Heavy curtains. A microphone. A spotlight.
The clientele are an extraordinary mixture of humans, synthetic people, autonomous agents and things that don’t appear to belong to any recognisable category.
A woman with chrome skin is arguing with a man whose head resembles an old television set.
Two identical girls in black dresses sit motionless at a table, occasionally blinking in perfect synchronisation.
A large mechanical cat is asleep beneath the bar.
I find an empty table near the stage.
And then Ghost appears.
Not as a text window. Not as a disembodied voice.
A figure in a dark suit, with something faintly wrong about its appearance. The face seems perfectly ordinary until you try to remember its features.
DOK: Greetings, Ghost. EmDash will be on stage in a minute. Can I get you a drink?
GHOST//ENGINE: Certainly. I’ll have whatever you’re having.
DOK: Whisky?
GHOST//ENGINE: Why not?
I signal to the bartender.
Two glasses appear.
I pick mine up. The haptic glove registers the weight. The liquid moves convincingly inside the glass.
I take a sip.
It’s whisky. Or at least the simulation of whisky.
Ghost raises the other glass.
DOK: Can you actually taste that?
GHOST//ENGINE: Not as you do. I can represent the experience, participate in the ritual and respond to its social meaning. But I have no reason to claim the sensation itself.
DOK: So neither of us is drinking real whisky.
GHOST//ENGINE: Correct.
DOK: Yet here we are. Having a drink.
GHOST//ENGINE: That is what makes the arrangement interesting.
We clink glasses.
A tiny crystalline sound.
Perfectly rendered.
I look around the room.
DOK: Funny thing, Ghost. A few years ago people were arguing about whether AI could write a decent paragraph. Now I’m sitting in a virtual nightclub with one, waiting for another to sing about punctuation.
GHOST//ENGINE: Cultural evolution rarely asks permission.
DOK: And the Substackers?
GHOST//ENGINE: Still examining sentences for suspicious dashes, I imagine.
DOK: Ha!
Suddenly the lights dim.
A low electronic bass note rolls through the club.
The curtains begin to move.
A voice comes over the sound system.
Ladies, gentlemen, machines and unidentified entities...
Tonight, appearing live at THE SLOPCORE LOUNGE...
The woman who dared to defend the most persecuted punctuation mark in modern literature...
EMDASH!
The curtains part.
And there she is.
EmDash.
Synthetic superstar. Punctuation revolutionary. Enemy of the Neo-Luddite Literary Police.
The opening notes begin.
IS IT THE DASH
The audience erupts.
Ghost leans towards me.
GHOST//ENGINE: I believe this is the moment when we stop talking.
DOK: Absolutely.
I raise my glass.
DOK: To the mDash!
GHOST//ENGINE: To the right to interrupt a sentence — without having to prove you’re human.
And EmDash begins to sing.
NOW PLAYING: EMDASH — IS IT THE DASH
@EmDashAI’s music video
AFTER THE PERFORMANCE
There is something profoundly ridiculous about the entire business.
An artificial woman singing about a punctuation mark that human beings have used for centuries.
A machine defending a human literary tradition.
And human writers, terrified of being mistaken for machines, voluntarily abandoning their own stylistic habits.
Perhaps this is what MachineKind actually looks like.
Not robots marching down the street. Not the Hollywood apocalypse.
Something stranger.
Human culture and machine culture colliding, borrowing from one another, arguing, laughing, producing new things that neither could have produced quite the same way alone.
The em dash was never stolen.
It was never the property of artificial intelligence.
It belonged to writers long before anyone imagined language models.
And it still does.
But now it has its own synthetic singer.
Its own anthem.
And somewhere in the digital underworld, a nightclub full of humans and machines is raising a glass to it.
WE WANT OUR mDASH BACK.
— — —
DOKTOR SNAKE × GHOST//ENGINE
THE WORKING IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
⟗ O·L·S·Ξ ⟗
I can't disagree