• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


One of the most remarkable technological developments of the last few years has been straight from the pages of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: the elite nerds of corporate technology have constructed themselves something that's very much like a shoggoth, a practically shapeless mass of technological promises that's sold as the solution for literally every conceivable problem. It's almost become "superintelligent" (any moment now!) and sure, maybe it'll decide to kill us all, but presumably this catastrophe will be prevented so long as OpenAI gets a bigger share of the public treasury. Meanwhile the AI shoggoth, like Lovecraft's, is struggling to learn how to mimic speech and painting and other human skills.

In the backstory of At the Mountains of Madness, the alien beings who once occupied Earth before humanity did, the radially symmetrical "Elder Things" or "Old Ones", created and trained the shoggoths as technological servants (slaves, really) and, as the Elder Things' civilization sank into decadence, they grew increasingly dependent upon the shoggoths' abilities, and eventually there was rebellion and war, wiping out the Elder Things' society. Only the shoggoths remain as living survivors of their civilization. Lovecraft regards this as horrific of course but really it's fascinating: the implication is that the shoggoths, who are capable of learning, might one day build a civilization of their own.

The very shapelessness of the shoggoths, both the Elder Things' shoggoths and the modern-day AI versions of them, seems almost symptomatic of decay.

(cw: discourse about the decayed state of human technology leading to speculation about humanity's possible extinction)


Society and technology have become so dysfunctional, all across the board, that only a panacea will serve to repair the damage—a universal machine that will miraculously learn on its own not merely how to solve problems, but to detect what problems need to be solved through sifting enormous quantities of data. Under cover of an obnoxious pose of extreme "techno-optimism" and celebration of human genius, one detects a profound cynicism towards human capabilities among technology professionals. They praise the superior thinking of their machines in a way that suggests they've given up on human thinking, even while they're pretending to be themselves the apex of human intelligence. Their ideas have been getting more and more shapeless, like their shoggoths.

Is humanity's time up? I feel like there's multiple ways to answer that question—multiple options besides the two which are most often championed, i.e. human supremacy and human extinction. Humanity might yet collectively decide upon giving up the daydream of supremacy over Earth and space, permitting itself to coast downward towards a humbler status. I've resisted the notion that humanity is somehow finished, which is strange, because I used to despise my own humanity so intensely. But perhaps human beings really have reached the same turning point that Lovecraft's Elder Things did. Perhaps humanity really has orchestrated its own ruin, and it's too late to do anything about it other than try to endure it.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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