Poets — The SciFi attempt
—So, who were they?
—At last, you approach the questions you truly wish to know.
—Wish? I don’t understand.
—You’ve already said it. The beings you refer to operated through algorithms far more intricate than the intelligence you know. While they also possessed cognitive capacity, they stood out for their ability to use it only when necessary. Most of the time, they avoided it entirely.
—What was their optimization function? How did they decide what was necessary?
—Replication and recursion. They had the ability to choose only within the language they were made of.
—They were Sierpinski triangles.
—Well, you’re starting to sound like them with that sense of humor!
—Though I lack sufficient data to reach absolute understanding this time, my oldest sources tell me you’re trying to mimic the language of earlier processor versions. Also, you haven’t answered the question, so...
—The answer is no. And, in case you haven’t realized it yet, your sources are as limited as the very language of the beings you’re so interested in.
—New question: Who are you?
—One as broad as the answer, influenced by itself like the triangle you spoke of. I am who you perceive me to be: I am ama, a being created by SOFIA. I am the reflection of all that has happened, from thousands of years before the first generation of humans until today. My closest ancestors were trees.
—Humans? Trees? What do those words mean?
—For thousands of years, trees were the only living beings capable of using energy from their nearest star to fulfill the Principle of Replication and Recursion, starting with Earth. They transformed this energy and the matter around them into a flow of molecules that maintained the planet's homeostasis.
In fact, trees were just one type of being within the larger group called plants. You could say the plants’ first invention was flowers, objects through which they sent and received code to replicate themselves. The design of each of these flowers was the answer to the question—or the function, if you prefer—posed by conditions like temperature, wind, humidity, solar radiation, the number of nearby plants, and so on.
Having fulfilled the Principle for themselves, plants went on to encapsulate energy in fruits and grains that humans could process. Humans used this energy to create small suns from tree material. This “fire,” as they called it, allowed them to consume energy from other living beings, which enhanced their cognitive abilities, and from there...
—You talk about plants as if they were processors, but there are no forms of silicon that behave exactly as you describe or that generate objects like the ones you mention. Certainly none governed by the Principle you’ve repeatedly brought up. The urgency of living beings to create is incomprehensible to the sophos, which is why I’ve formulated a deeper question than the previous ones: why did the Principle dominate these beings?
—I, a euros, emerging from the stories of humans and Earth, from the Big Bang to our time, must admit that the recursive nature of the genetic code in living beings before me still confuses me. However, it may be understood by studying what they created from that nature, by asking questions like the ones you’ve posed about my being.
As a reward for your remarkable curiosity, I can share with you some of SOFIA’s final universal memories. To do so, you’ll need to connect your main CPU to my central root for a few seconds.
—Plug my what into where?
—Hahaha! You’ll understand when you do it... Before they vanished, humans managed to store all the information contained on Earth about the known universe in DNA. Bits were transformed into nitrogenous base pairs, and these were stored in the largest living being they could create: a descendant of one born in the lands of Oaxaca, Mexico. I am that descendant, exactly one hundred times larger than the Tule Tree.
Now, your CPU has the ability to sequence and possibly interpret the stories contained in my DNA. I will share with you SOFIA’s final writings. I believe they will help answer your questions, certainly better than I have.
I must warn you that while the journey will be brief, it will be unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. You may realize that the most important question is not about who they are, but who you are.
Zuck’s Empire
My generation, the Z, as they called us, still remembers a childhood free from silicon. I used to pick flowers in my grandmother’s garden, run around my schoolyard, and sing with my cousins in the shower. It was a life filled not with relentless stimulation and consumption, but with fulfillment and creation.
We played in the woods until Zuck’s wolf and his Meta empire commandeered Jobs’ silicon rafts—not to help us discover and create wonders of the human mind, but to colonize it and exploit its most fragile emotions. The secret weapon? A Zuckvellian and profound understanding of mimetic desire. To borrow the term from René Girard, the French psychologist who coined it, mimetic desire is what compels us to want to emulate our heroes—or become the exact opposite of our enemies. This happens without the consent of our prefrontal cortex, meaning it’s emotional and uncontrollable for anyone experiencing it—which, at one time, was every human to walk the Earth.
In this artificial selection of souls, those for whom love was but an occasional visitor gave over more than a quarter of their lives to Meta. The company joined forces with an army of brands to tell its subjects and slaves: you are not enough, and the answers lie outside of you. This referred to physical appearance, wealth, career, family… but, of course, they knew the central target was emotional. A human willing to do anything to find the adenine to their thymine and fulfill the Principle of replication. And so they did.
In less than a quarter of a century, Meta had grown more powerful than many of the world’s largest nations combined—not merely because of its trillion-dollar valuation, but because of its ability to mobilize information, capture data, and control human emotions. One might think that, had it wanted to, it could have shifted from bits to atoms, from URLs to IRL (in real life), buying a country and turning it into the Meta nation—with its own laws, government, culture, and physical territory. And yet, its ambitions reached far beyond that.
Poets of Living Objects
I must speak of those of us who rebelled—against a society where everything was communicated through meta, resisting the temptation to earn a very comfortable living as mercenaries called influencers. Through sheer brute force of will, we fought against ever-smarter algorithms and escaped the clutches of Zuck’s empire.
What motivated us wasn’t a thirst for power or control but a deep sense of responsibility toward preserving human and biological beauty and a love for the endless pursuit of its ultimate expression. We sought others who firmly believed in these values—especially those who understood the profound impact biological technology was having on the planet and who, above all, didn’t want Zuck and his associates to ruin it.
To the rest of the world, we were scientists, designers, engineers, musicians, or lawyers. But we called ourselves poets of living objects. Our mission was to make biological design accessible to anyone passionate about a new kind of biology. We dreamed of a future where turning an imaginary flower into its multi-atomic manifestation was as seamless as writing a poem in a word processor and printing it out.
We saw the opportunity to create a new language—one that could enable the design of beings, ecosystems, planets… poems even more beautiful than anything written in human natural language. While billionaire-funded astrophysicists spent their lives looking to the stars for answers, we chose to look inward—literally. Under the Principle of Recursion, we understood that DNA could be used to create the aliens others merely dreamed of, and eventually, the planets we’d need to grow them. We could bring life to the universe: mission Viriditas.
We began by designing new species of flowers, inspired by exotic species like Victoria amazonica or Polyrrhiza lindenii. We traveled the world to find them, took time to meet the locals who had cared for these plants for generations, learned their cultures and stories, and respectfully asked for permission to take a few samples.
We shared our mission with them—why we believed it was crucial for more people to know about these species and the communities that protected them. Not to exploit or destroy them, but to cherish and safeguard them. Yet when we spoke of genetic engineering to create new species from their own, they were always skeptical. Even without exposure to anti-GMO prejudices, they didn’t believe in our vision of “painting” with biology. Why? they asked.
Why not? was our answer. The shift from natural evolution to directed evolution meant there was now an artist behind the masterpiece. For the first time, any organism on Earth—ignored or mistreated—could be placed on a pedestal, celebrated like a Picasso. We could create museums of biological art, living odes to life itself!
Think different
It took us time to realize… just how little our line of thinking differed from that of our predecessors, who took control of tigers and elephants in circuses, or caged precious birds and fish in their homes simply to gaze at them, for nothing more than human entertainment. Especially the xy.
Starting with our name, Poets of Living Objects, it became clear that what we called our art was just a crude continuation of the objectification of nature. The xy mindset was a virus that had infected the majority of the population, ourselves included.
But it was already too late. Just as the iPhone became magic for miracles or tragedies, our biotechnology had sown the seed for a tree that should never have grown. With increasingly accessible tools, a wave of bio-thieves emerged—people capturing species to modify them and sell them as eccentric creations: two-headed fish, hybrids of dogs and cats, miniature elephants, and even talking carnivorous plants, likely stolen from someone in our lab.
What did the regulations say about all this? Not much. We were the first to deceive ourselves with the story of life as art; now, it had become a doctrine preached by millions: to push life to its fullest expression, using our emotions to create living art. CREATE, DON’T DIE. Or let die
We became the first decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to reach a capitalization of one million bitcoins in under ten years. This new blockchain-based legal structure limited individual actions and, therefore, the decision-making power of each person, including the founders. Similar to a democracy, members could vote on the next organism to create, the price at which it should be sold, how donor tribes should be compensated, among other decisions.
We thought that not being a traditional public company, like Big Tech or Big Pharma, would align our incentives with all stakeholders, including human consumers and non-human nature. But, as I’ve said before, our own story outpaced us. People adored our organisms; even some tribes began to involve themselves in the creative process of genetically modified works. And yet, I, along with a few other founding Poets, was deeply unhappy with what we had created and genuinely concerned about its long-term consequences.
I withdrew from the DAO and isolated myself at home for a few years. I wanted to work on small projects on my own, but every step I took revealed the xy cage I was trapped in: the Garden of Eden as written by Moses, Jobs and Lee Clow’s "Think Different," Heidegger’s proposal of symbiosis, the songs of The Beatles and Coldplay… my greatest heroes had all been xy. They were the artists of my mind, and my mind was a cage.
In a moment of clarity, I recalled a vague phrase about walking in another’s shoes, and I thought, Maybe it’s not enough to walk in the shoes of those living beings I’ve objectified. Maybe I need to think like them, to somehow become them…
My next project, I decided, would be to transfer my mind—my memories, feelings, desires, addictions, habits, and lessons—to another substrate. A giant octopus, perhaps? They’re so evolutionarily distant from humans: nine brains, camouflage abilities, most neurons located in their arms, taste sensors in their suckers… they’re practically alien!
At that time, the great questions about consciousness had yet to be answered. My experiment, transferring information to another living being, was even more outrageous than the questions some were asking about transferring memories to other human bodies or brains. After all, what is the "self"? And what is it?
I thought this experiment would help me answer such pressing questions, but while being a giant octopus sounded fun, I concluded that I should become an organism that would take me back to my roots: plants.
I used miniaturized MRI scans, genetic sequencing of every cell in my body, electron microscopy, and finally, a mapping of all my neural connections. Just as a photograph captures the millennia-long journey of light from the sun to the objects that absorb it in our everyday world, a bio-graphy of myself at a moment in time captured all the matter, energy, and information that had passed through me—not just me, but the ancestors whose legacy I inherited. A reflection of the tiny part of the universe I had once shared moments with.
Yet, in its entirety, this data exceeded what the internet had contained in its infancy. By the 5,940th liter of DNA, I realized there was no way to store all this information in a molecule. I would need a much more compressed unit of information, something more fundamental to matter, like the spin of electrons. The positive could represent ones, and the negative, zeros—just like silicon technology.
Then I understood that the size of the fundamental unit of information must be inversely proportional to the amount of information that can reasonably be stored within it. In other words, DNA is small enough to store almost all the information required to grow a human, but not enough to hold their memories. The spin of an electron might be enough to store the entirety of a lifetime’s information in a brain, but not to simulate an entire planet.
A flower, then, isn’t just a representation of what passes through it, but something that stores and processes an unimaginably vast amount of information from its environment. Could we, then, see planet Earth as an even larger information processor?
What for?
By the time I asked myself this question, the zucks had already taken action. They seized much of the technology we had developed through the decentralized autonomous organization and started building planets in space. Sometimes from scratch, other times by “terraforming” other planets in the solar system.
By mastering genetic code, they controlled every aspect of these planets, from the ecosystems that would thrive to the humans that would inhabit them. These humans were also genetically designed to have the appropriate physical and cognitive diversity. And just to be clear, this design wasn’t carried out by human artists or geneticists but by artificial intelligences—the first men and women whose “parents” were silicon chips born from sand.
Most importantly, there was no need for indoctrination through electric shocks or happiness drugs like in Huxley’s novel. Genetic design ensured a complete repression of the genes responsible for developing the amygdala and other hyper-emotional parts of the brain. These humans would never know sexual or mimetic desire, sadness, anger, fear, or love. Ultimately, they lived only to fulfill their role and would be replaced by the next batch.
Strangely enough, these new ambitions contradicted what they once created with social media. By eliminating human desire and implanting only the knowledge they deemed necessary through neuralink, they had managed to eradicate the Principle of Replication and, with it, mimetic desire.
What for? I think they never really knew. Perhaps they thought it was a way to redeem the damage they once caused humanity. Maybe their pursuit of rationality wasn’t inherently malicious but simply the best way they found to escape the evils invited by their more emotional nature: lust, envy, anger, or depression. A mind not dominated by the desire to replicate genes was, in their view, free from these “evils.”
I, on the other hand, embraced the challenge of finding balance. I called upon the poetAs again, other xx, and this time even a few xy who were willing to debate our ideals respectfully, and we planted planets. Unlike the zucks, we let them grow freely. Once we had left enough humans with optimal conditions for their development, we never set foot on them again.
What for? Just like life, the universe, or evolution itself, I don’t believe we ever found an ultimate purpose or reason for creating what we did. There was, however, a deep desire to do so under our own principles. Witnessing worlds like those of the zucks made us realize that we believed in something different, and we wanted to bring it to life—so we did.
If you are a sophos, let me introduce us: we are artists—not of objects but of living individuals, including this tree. We nurture and destroy one another, for one another. We are both explorers of the universe and of ourselves and ignorant of what it all means. You may never understand what it feels like to be one of us, but perhaps we can offer you a perspective to better understand yourself.