#techno-optimism

[wordshaveteeth]

The computer argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and public levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. I would argue that this is, on the face of it, nonsense. Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information. If a nuclear catastrophe occurs, it shall not be because of inadequate information. Where people are dying of starvation, it does not occur because of inadequate information. If families break up, children are mistreated, crime terrorizes a city, education is impotent, it does not happen because of inadequate information. Mathematical equations, instantaneous communication, and vast quantities of information have nothing whatever to do with any of these problems. And the computer is useless in addressing them.

- Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

[geoxx-carrboro]

The Muskian Matryoshka – By Geox

The Muskian Matryoshka – By GeoxWhy a rag-tag confederacy of rockets, robots, and reinforced tunnels might colonize Mars before the TSA decommissions the shoe-scanner 1. The Architectural Sketch Elon Musk doesn’t run companies so much as he assembles a polycephalous organism. Each head gnawing on a different billion-dollar problem while sharing the same bloodstream of capital and hype. Look…

[ms2253]

[8min]

"Filmmaker, aesthetic philosopher and ecstatic futurist Jason Silva—who spoke at Singularity Summit 2011—articulates his call for passion and artistic sensibility to inform ideation and instantiation of the Singularity"

[smbhax]

Super Dodge Ball (NEOGEO MVS) (Super Technos World)

[nomsfaultau]

SBI Whumptober prompt 19) Trapped//“We’re not making it out of here”

Disclaimer: this blurb is set in the SCP SBI AU I have called Fault, specifically after Tommy and The Blade are captured by the Foundation but before Philza is. Explanation of AU; tldr.  

“We’re not making it out of here,” Tommy said quietly, bitterly. 

The Blade hadn’t noticed the fact he’d stopped running. Glancing back revealed Tommy stood at the precipice of a blood-splattered Foundation hallway. It was identical to the previous tunnel in all but the arrangement of viscera, the pair lost in a labyrinth of concrete and soldiers. Tommy looked incredibly worn for all that The Blade had been doing all of the fighting. “Nah, we’re so close,” The Blade assured confidently. “This is definitely going to be the time.” 

“It’s going to get worse,” Tommy warned desperately. “They hate when we try to escape, and we’re just going to be separated again, and–”

“We can’t stop fighting, Tommy. If we give up they win.” 

“Haven’t they already?”

He rested a heavy hoof on the kid’s shoulder. “No. And they never will as long as we keep trying.” Tommy didn’t quite match his grin, but he tried to at least. The pair plunged into battle once more, clawing their way out of the prison. 

The cold fresh air was sharp on The Blade’s tongue, freedom sweet for how long it had been denied. He’d been right, this was the time they finally escaped. 

It was only then that he realized Tommy wasn’t following him anymore.

The boy had been lost somewhere, in the twisting labyrinth, in the sea of violence. A moment of hesitation, but really The Blade knew there was no choice. He dove back into the Foundation at once. The Blade couldn’t just abandon his friend, he had to try just for the desperate hope he could save Tommy too. He clawed his way through enemy lines, scouring identical halls. But try as he might, he couldn’t find Tommy. Eventually, The Blade could recognize Tommy was right. There was no we that would make it out of the Foundation. 

But there was an I.  

All that mattered was that he could escape, never mind the kid he left behind. Once he was free there was nothing the Foundation could do to stop him, every battle already destined to fall in his favor. It took about every scrap of humility The Blade had to admit he couldn’t save Tommy by himself, but if he could get to Philza they’d have the power needed to raze the Foundation to the ground. If he abandoned Tommy it was only temporary, because once he succeeded Tommy would be immediately rescued. 

It was for his own good, then. 

Sure Tommy would be punished for the containment breach and have to bear the brunt of the Foundation's ire. But once they were free it wouldn't matter. The Blade would continue to escape. Over and over and over, each time a little more desperate, but also a little more determined.

The Blade could be called ruthless for many reasons. For the brutal efficiency through which he worshiped The Blood God, for the cold laughter ringing out over the bloodbaths he made of battles. 

But perhaps the cruelest thing about him was his unceasing optimism.

(Full chapter here; work includes other prompts)

[biblioflyer]

Is Burnham’s choice "post-modernist" technopessimism?

This is the final part in a series on Discovery’s finale and the conflicting worldviews behind how to think about Star Trek. For more like this, use the Star Trek ethics tag.

The way I see it, there are two ways to approach this question.

If you approach this from the starting point that more technology is good and that technological advancements are innately emancipatory on net, even if they sometimes come with downsides, then you might think that ultimately Burnham is in the wrong. The Federation are the good guys after all and they can leverage this technology to provide abundance for everyone, even use it to ensure their enemies become friends by eliminating the materialist reasons for conflict.

The idea that on balance, the tradeoffs of a new technology could be harmful and a new technology should be refused or shelved until different social conditions emerge or maybe never, could be seen as techno pessimism.

On the other hand, many, many people across the internet, but particularly r/Daystrom have raised smart questions about the ability of Burnham or the Federation to be a steward of it. Burnham is mortal. She will die someday. The current generation of highly moral, highly responsible Federation leaders: Vance, Saru, Rillak, T’Rina, all mortal. They will die someday. Unless of course Burnham pulls the same trick as the last Progenitor and encodes a version of herself outside space and time in the control center of the Progenitor device.

This scenario is also highly reminiscent of the fallout from the Genesis Device where a quantum leap in terraforming technology was viewed as an existential threat and weapon of mass destruction by the Klingons. How powerful is this technology anyway? It is confirmed to have the ability to create and destroy or destroy by creating, but it's unclear over what timescale or physical scale.

What happens if the Breen for instance freak out and decide to reunite and go to war with the Federation? 

Can the Progenitor device unmake entire Breen fleets as fast as the Breen can launch them at the Federation?

If Burnham used the device in this manner, would this arouse the attention and wrath of higher civilizations?

Would the Metrons or Q tolerate this? We don’t know the status of either, other than the Q have been incommunicado for centuries but that doesn’t mean they’re all dead or senescent. This could get their attention. After all, this is power of a kind, maybe not of a scale, but of a kind of their own and they may see fit to hold another trial to see if Humanity still deserves to exist.

In this light, Burnham’s choice reflects a sort of “reverse Prime Directive.” This technology will leapfrog the wielder far beyond the state of the art. It is not necessary to invent the technology to use it. Not unlike the firearms Kirk passed out to his tribal friends to ward off the proxies of the Klingons who had been similarly armed.

Burnham might be wise enough to use the technology responsibly. The Federation might be. But the Federation is one civilization among many and it’s clear as day the Breen haven’t matured as a society since the Dominion War. The Federation itself is barely two years out of The Burn and can’t even muster enough ships to deter a Breen dreadnought on short notice. It is also going through growing pains socially as it knits itself back together and works to regain the trust of worlds that had to be autonomous during the Burn.

It's also a very small d democratic choice. As she states a few times, one person shouldn’t be entrusted with this power. I think it’s safe to say that how it's used doesn’t even seem like the sort of thing that the elected representatives of trillions should necessarily be entrusted with. Per Burnham, some choices have such sweeping consequences for so many people, it's unfair to entrust that power to any feasible deliberative body.

Fictional character, Michael Burnham, would probably not get along with real techno utopian Sam Altman, who has argued his organization must develop AI and be the first to unlock the highest potentials of it or someone else with more nefarious purposes will.

In the novel “Seveneves” Neal Stephenson coins the term “amistics” to describe the choices that different societies make in how they relate to technology.

Embedded in the concept, is the notion that societies can actively decide to adopt and reject certain technologies and their applications. According to amistics, it is not intrinsically good or natural to just grab hold of every single little new thing and utilize it to the fullest. This is different from being a luddite because it is done mindfully rather than reflexively. Amistics posits we can deliberate and ultimately decide a thing is not for us.

[wordshaveteeth]

This [kind of] language is not merely picturesque anthropomorphism. It reflects a profound shift in perception about the relationship of computers to humans. If computers can become ill, then they can become healthy. Once healthy, they can think clearly and make decisions. The computer, it is implied, has a will, has intentions, has reasons—which means that humans are relieved of responsibility for the computer’s decisions. Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence “We use the computer to calculate” comes to mean “The computer calculates.” If a computer calculates, then it may decide to miscalculate or not calculate at all. That is what bank tellers mean when they tell you that they cannot say how much money is in your checking account because “the computers are down.” The implication, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible. Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? We may call this line of thinking an “agentic shift,” a term I borrow from Stanley Milgram to name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens, we have relinquished control, which in the case of the computer means that we may, without excessive remorse, pursue ill-advised or even inhuman goals because the computer can accomplish them or be imagined to accomplish them.

- Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

[wanderingmindthoughts]

back in april I read a very cool story on lightspeed magazine, TALK: "The Siren Song of the Otherworld Goggles", which is a commentary on the use of technology, and I really enjoyed it!

I spend a lot of time on my phone (around 7-10 hours per day, according to it) and I honestly love all of it. I don't feel guilty or anything like that; in all honesty I haven't felt bad about my screentime since I stopped being depressed.

which is why I resonated with this story. it is written as the narrator giving a talk about her use of "otherword goggles", which are a kind of AR glasses that let you see alternate versions of yourself, and it is implied that most people spend a lot of hours each day using them. this narrator is explaining that she's using these goggles to become a better version of herself by observing her alternate versions and incorporating what she liked of them into her life. this came after she realised that she didn't enjoy the versions of herself who spent all of their time on their own glasses; they were boring to watch!

but there were a lot of useful, interesting versions that she could learn from. so instead of ditching the glasses entirely, she decided to spend less time watching and more time doing things.

I loved this story because "less watching and more doing" is, basically, why I started this blog. I don't want to just read and watch and listen, I also want to write and to draw and to program. I have things to say! and I believe that doing things is a wonderful way of finding community.

and unlike the goggles in the story, that only allow watching, my phone (and other assorted pieces of technology) allow me to do things, too - not only I am currently typing this on my phone. I use it as a planner, a radio and a notebook; I use it to learn languages and I even studied several of my university courses right here on my phone.

I'm not satisfied with doomscrolling away the hours; I take advantage of each and every function that a phone offers. and I also need to spend time away from it -to meet friends, to do sports, to do art, to write research. all of them wonderful, pleasurable things that I want to do, so I don't find it hard at all to put my phone down when I need to.

[nobodysprobablysimplethoughts]

‘My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same thing. If everything is dangerous then we will always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy, but to a hyper- and pessimistic-activism’ (1984, p. 343).

~ Michel Foucault in "The Foucault Reader"

[clwhowrites]

Merriam Webster defines fetish as:

a: an object (such as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner. b: broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion : prepossession. c: an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression.

fixation.

a rite or cult of fetish worshippers.

1 a, 1 b, 2, and 3 fit how many people view technology, I call these people techno fetishists. These are futurists, techno "optimists," and tech bros. They have fetishized technology and some even treat it with religious reverence. Technology is a tool, it can help and it can harm. We have reached the point where we could use our technology to destroy our civilization, maybe even wipe our selves out completely. These techno fetishists have only made the use of technology more harmful, their fetisization of technology has led them to use or to let others use technologies in harmful ways. It is not hyperbole to say that techno fetishists are destroying the world.

Top: a Cormorant nest contaminated with trash. Source: NBC News. Middle: Micro plastics in the ocean. Source: Industry Weekly. Bottom: A shore contaminated with plastic trash. Source: World Bank Group.

Air pollution, water pollution, plastic pollution in the ocean, the health effects of micro plastics, deforestation, desertification, etc, these come from technology. But they don't have to. Social media has created social division while making a very few very wealthy and powerful, contributing to the growing wealth divide. It didn't and doesn't have to though. The world is heating up because of human caused climate change and climate change that will harm us and is harming us. It didn't have to be this way though. The negative effects of technology comes from how we use it, these negative effects of technology could have been mitigated, some of them could have been prevented. Part of the reason these harms have not been mitigated or prevented has been the techno fetishists. The fetisization of technology has only undermined efforts to deal with the consequences of technology, and those who fetishized technology ignored the warnings of the scientists who told people about these consequences. The repeated failed predictions from the futurists, the techno optimists who ignore the potential harm of advancing technology reducing our abilities to preemptively deal with them, and tech bros have been around long before Silicon Valley (they just didn't have a name tech bro until the 00s) and have only ever cared about short term financial gains, all have worsened technologies effect on the world.

Futurists are the best people to start with because there is a lot of overlap with techno "optimists" and tech bros. Even when they don't overlap, techno "optimists" and tech bros have stolen many ideas from futurists while ignoring deeper philosophies they are based on and ignoring the more cynical futurist predictions.

Futurists are the kind of people who will point to Moore's Law saying "computers will continue to get more powerful indefinitely". Moore's Law refers to the number of transistors on a chip, not processioning power. More transistors does usually mean greater possessing power but referring to Moore's Law in terms of possessing power misses the causal connection between transistors and possessing power. Transistors can only get so small, they are physical things, made of matter. At a certain point it becomes physically impossible to make them smaller. Futurist look at technological trends and technological uses of their time and extrapolate those into the future ignoring physical, practical, and economic limitations, and ignoring the demonstrable historical facts that technological development does not work that way. Technologies develops in an S-curve. A technology starts out expensive and it advances slowly, over time costs come down and the technology advances faster. The advances continues to accelerate until the technology reaches physical, practical, and economic limitations that makes it more and more difficult and expensive to advance the technology. The technology can and often does continue advancing but at a much slower rate.

If you look at science fiction you'll notice that science fiction often does the same things, extrapolating trends and uses into the future. Science fiction is science fiction though, it can get away with it for the same reason fantasy can get away with magic, fantastical creatures and worlds, they are not real. Futurists are basically science fiction writers and enthusiasts who think their science fiction is a plausible depiction of the future. These science fictions have proven not to be, but that hasn't stopped them from continuing to create science fictions thinking they are plausible. The fact that we are in the future and it is nothing like what anyone predicted speaks volumes about deep into the "fiction" part of science fiction futurists are.

Trends change. Moore's law is not a scientific law, it is trend in technology observed by a the engineer and businessmen Gordon Moore. Between 1903 and 1969, a period of 66 years humans went from barely getting off the ground to landing on the Moon. After five missions to the moon, we stopped going. The Concord was the first and only supersonic passenger airliner. It entered service in 1973, it ended service is 2003. The Space Shuttle first launched in in 1981 and it's last launch was in 2011. Since 2011 US astronauts have been going up in Russian Soyuz rockets which use 1960s technology, then Falcon 9 rockets that while are more advances in terms of computers, materials, and other components, in many way work like rockets from the 1960s and 1970s. There has been advances in flight technology, slow evolutionary advances, not the revolutionary advances of the 80 years after 1903. It's not just flight and space flight technology, this is how useful and popular technologies advance, it is the S-curve of technological advancement. This doesn't mean a new technology can't initiation a new rapid period of development but very few have accurately predicted these new technologies, mostly focusing on science fictions.

How futurists imagined people would use computers.

Futurists get more wrong than how technology will develop, often technologies are used in ways few predicted. How long have people had the ideas that computers in the future will work they was they do in Star Trek? In Star Trek, from The Next Generation onward, everything was touchscreen and everyone mostly told the computer what to do. It's a cool idea, the kind that futurists like. We've had the technology to have voice control on any internet capable device for well over a decade. How often has it been used? Not often (though there are time when it should be the only interface used like when you are driving). LLM chatbots like ChatGDP will not make people use them more, the problem has not been that the devices that couldn't talk back, the problem is there are better ways to use these devices. Touchscreen is similar, it works on phones and tablets but most laptops sold today don't have touchscreen and most desktop monitors are not touchscreen. There are better ways to use a computer than touching a screen. Key boards, mice, and touchpads will be the dominant interface for desktops and laptops because they are just better than touchscreen, touchscreen will continue to be used on handheld devices because it is just better than voice control. Voice control will be used in cars and other places where one's hands and/or attrition is taken up by something else, and voice control will be what is used in these situation into the future, not the techno fetishist idea of a neural implant. Futurists would never predict the internet or how it is used, they would never predict texting, smart phones, or social media for the same reason they are rarely used in old science fiction. They didn't not fit the trends, how technology was used at the time, and they wouldn't have been seen as cool.

Next are the so called "techno optimists," though "optimist" is not the right word for them as their "optimism" is just toxic positivity. While futurists get so much wrong, many, if not most are not overly optimistic about technology, some are very pessimistic about it. The reality is these toxic techno "optimists" are not optimists, they are utopianists who think technology will solve all of our problems. These utopianists, like singuleratists and tanshumanists (which overlap with them) are very much like an end times religion. They have their prophecies about what is gong to happen, when the prophecies fail, reinterpret and redate. Like all utopianists; Communists, Nazis, Islamists, Fundamentalists, etc, their ideologies are only destructive and only make the world worse. I go so far as to call them an existential threats to humanity as we have reached the point where we can destroy ourselves with our technology.

Technologies are tools, they can help us and they can kill us. A hammer can be use to build a house or bludgeon a man to death, a knife can be used to whittle a peace of art, or slit a woman's throat. Social media can bring people together, forge friendships, give people the freedom to speak out, and allow distant people to keep in contact, it can also be used to divide, turn people against each other, control people, and create violent mobs. Video games can be be a form of art, express ideas, and tell stories that couldn't be told in any other medium, they can also be addicting, used to distract the populace from the problems in the world, and used to spread propaganda. Technology is a double edged sword, which way it cuts depends on how we use is it. The toxic positivity of "techno optimists" ignores the harm technology can do, and when potential harms are ignored, they inevitably happen.

The connection between leaded gas and violent crimes. Tetraethyl lead was added to gas to increase the octane of gas. That led was emitted from cars tale pipes into the environment people lived. Lead is a neurotoxin and children are especially susceptible to it. The dangers of lead were ignored and it greatly damaged society. Source: Physiology & Behavior - Environmental causes of violence

As much as technology has made the world better (and it has), it has also created new problems, and these problems can't always be solved with new technology. Global warming, pollution, and environmental destruction can't be solved with technology alone, we are going to have to make changes to our lives if these problem are to be solved. New technology will help but not nearly enough. The problems and societal divisions social media has created can not be solved by any technology, it can only be solved by cultural changes and media education. Changes in us, in how we use the technology, how media literate we are, and how money is made from it. For the world to get better, we need to change, not have a religious faith that new technology save us.

Next are tech bros, the AI bros, the "AI artists," the crypto bros, the tech investors, the tech businessmen and the corporate executives. These people don't understand the technology, they don't care to, they only see it as a means to make money. These are the FOMO filled people who flocked to crypto, meteverses, and now "AI," because they want to be on the ground floor of the next big thing. They never stop to think of the social or environmental effects of a new technologies. When they care they'll tell them selves and others "that the problems will be solved later, we have to develop the technology now" (showing the overlap with techno "optimists"). Ultimately what really matters to them is short term financial gain.

These people don't look at the long tern social and environmental costs of the of technology they flock to new technologies because of their FOMO, they don't even look at the short term tern social and environmental costs, many don't even stop to ask if a new technology will give them gains in the short term, fearing that if they stop to ask they will miss out. Both crypto and "AI" have a huge environmental costs, those environmental costs affect peoples lives and will affect peoples live into the future even of both technologies vanish. The damage has been done, and there is no sign or evidence that crypto and "AI" will ever use less power, in fact they will need more. The worst part is that because tech bros, executives, and investors are so filled with FOMO they will go all in on new technologies even before the new technologies have been shown to be profitable. This happened when the internet was still young, inverters and companies went all in on selling online before anyone figured out how to make selling online profitable, leading to the dot com bubble. We are seeing something similar with "AI" today, companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are loosing money on "AI", while investors and other companies are throwing money at "AI". To make the situation worse, "AI" LLMs are already running into limitations. OpenAI is already running into diminishing returns with the data they stole to "train" ChatGDP, and the internet is not big enough to continue making ChatGDP better. Tech bros and scammers are still making money from it though. They make money in the form of salaries, salaries funded by investment, investment that is likely never to get a return. They make money by selling "AI" related products to gullible executives, companies, and people, and many are making money through start up scams.

We are in a world of growing problems, technology is part of the causes for these problems. Techno fetishist are only adding to those problems. We can deal with the problems we have, they are not insurmountable and not as difficult as been presented. The things holding us back are political and cultural, part of that are the techno fetishism. The science fiction ideas of the futurists clouding any meaningful attempt at looking at where technology is going, the techno toxic positivist utopianists pushing for more technology regardless of negative effect of new technologies, and the tech bros who don't care about the social and environmental costs so long as they make short term profit, or just to not miss out, all of these are making the world worse. They are destroying the world.

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[ferdifz]

Question: How would you fork Android for Smartphones today, so that such a forked Android phone:

1) could be as far as possible be not dependent on either AOSP or Google/Alphabet owned products and services,

2) could essentially use app binaries/packages designed and/or coded for "mainline/official" Google-approved Android, and

3) more or less participate adequately (or even participate "fully") in the global mobile Inter-networked Internet and the Internet market-economy?

With advanced in open standards and EU-lead tech delegation, it should be possible now, right..?

[sapphic-cecaelia]

all that said, I really am so fucking glad I didn't go into programming as a career

[beckyblah]

In case ur wondering:

Phil would be a divine soul sorcerer / oath of devotion paladin multiclass. And would become an oathbreaker if/when the doomsday incident happened.

Techno is harder to figure out. Your gut reaction might be to make him a paladin or battlemaster fighter. But I urge you to consider either the beast master conclave ranger or even the circle of the Shepard Druid. Pros: would make his opposition to government/civilization make a lot of sense. Plus, well, hound army. Cons: both are fairly weak classes overall, and neither would multiclass optimally with a fighter (which sucks because the fighter really does fit him)

Fallen aasimar c!phil and bhaalspawn c!techno send tweet

[artbyblastweave]

Frederick Sinclair is a really interesting foil to Mr. House. I mean you start digging into this and it's just parallel after parallel after parallel. Start at the high level. House sinks inordinate amounts of resources into saving the city of Las Vegas - not the people, but the city- from nuclear destruction; as long as the stage endures, he can get anyone to wear the costumes. Sinclair sets up an entirely new "community" totally off-the-grid for the sake of protecting one woman, plasters that place with her likeness. House is a visionary with a 200-year action plan to rebuild society in his image, bootstrap space exploration, and construct an interplanetary empire; Sinclair sank everything he had into building the most secure facility possible for a woman who he knew was terminally ill anyway, just to ensure that her last few years lived in the aftermath of the nuclear apocalypse would be as comfortable as possible- there's a fundamental pessimism baked into what he was doing. Both House and Sinclair relied heavily on automated defensive systems and cutting-edge, esoteric technologies to accomplish their ends, but House built his power base on proprietary robotics and computing technology, much of which he personally designed- an outgrowth of his policy of never widening his circle any more than he absolutely has to. Sinclair, in his naive techno-optimism, outsourced his utopia, grabbing flashy third-party technologies like a kid in a candy store- opening a backdoor for the Think Tank to poison his city and ultimately getting everyone at the Gala Event killed when the holograms malfunctioned and went berserk.

Their management styles are inverse. House allows countless abuses to occur under his aegis because he subscribes to a libertarian-when-convenient philosophy where he doesn't much care what the little people do as long as he gets his cut and they don't rock the boat too much- a hands-off approach that fosters resentment amongst his subordinates, lets the White Gloves and Omertas get up to untold levels of fuckery while Freeside languishes and Benny conspires against him. Sinclair, by contrast, had a sincerely-held utopian-straight-edge safety-first micromanagement approach built into the very bones of the casino, he appeared to genuinely give a shit about the safety of the construction crew on the villa, and he was well-liked by nearly everyone who had any direct contact with him- and yet untold horrors also went down under his aegis, because his myopic focus on building the vault for Vera let Dean Domino and the Think Tank run circles around him, good intentions be damned. Their respective interpersonal dispassion and obsession are on display in how they react to betrayal. House's tone never rises above exasperation when it comes time to clean house of Benny, the Omerta Leadership and the White gloves; he treats them as problems to be solved, gears that are slightly out of alignment; By contrast, when Sinclair learns that Dean and Vera have been playing him, he channels the monomaniacal energy he previously directed towards protecting Vera towards the goal of building the perfect poetic-ironic death trap for her and Dean.

There are some other parallels in their personal lives. For one thing they both trusted a pastiche of a 40s lounge singer a lot more than they should have. They both tried to digitize, immortalize their girlfriends- and the discrepancy in how they went about it is telling. House's recreation of Jane isn't terribly robust, and in terms of House's overall project she's an afterthought. She's more a sock-puppet than a person, a sanded-down copy of a woman who died forever-and-a-half ago, forever agreeable, never saying no. Convenient. Only the most superficial visual elements preserved- an illustration of her face on a robotic chassis. Sinclair was obsessive in recreating Vera, preserving her likeness. It's all over the villa, her hologram is everywhere, her voice is everywhere. The terminal in the lightwave lab in Old World Blues reveals that he was still obsessed with getting her hologram right even after the love curdled into hate. All of it a monument to the real woman, and yet in all of it the real woman is still lost, buried under the mythologized projection. He didn't respect the real person enough to let her know that she was dying. A total failure of preservation from the opposite direction. (Except in the suites, where you can hear her very authentic dying pleas.)

You find both of them in their basements. House only looks a little better than Sinclair, but he's got much more of a voice in the narrative. He took steps to make sure he'd be around to tell you what he thinks about everything, fine-tuned the voice with which he speaks to the world, the face he presents. It matters to him that he gets to tell his own story. We find out a lot about House, from House; but for the kind of figure that he is, a shocking amount of what we learn about Sinclair comes from other people, people who knew him or wrote about him. The only image of him you can find is a downplayed element of a larger mosaic. The two documents you find that're written from his perspective have been buried for 200 years, and they're yards from his corpse. And the more recent of the two is an apology. I mean admittedly at the point where he wrote that apology Sinclair was personally turbofucked regardless. If the cloud didn't get him the holograms would have, or the radiation, or, or, or. You can read some level of ego into what he did in the face of that. But however futile it was, he died in the specific way that he did because he recognized that he'd done something awful, and he was trying everything he could think of to correct it. Somehow I find it very hard to imagine House doing either of those things- admitting fault or putting skin of his own in the game to make it right.