Alias Note 220703

Followed by “The Mirror of Anesidora” a fiction transposed by AI emulating Jorge Luis Borge’s style on the same subject.

Title: The Metaverse and the Human Condition at the Dawn of the Third Millennium

(Ava’s reading thoughts in italics)

At the root of every human action lies the affection of desire—an impulse, a movement of the body toward what it needs or fancies to lack. Theologians moralize it. Economists quantify it. Therapists pathologize it. But in all cases, it is treated as something that must be explained, managed, or overcome.

It always begins like this with Alias: dry, deliberate, but something burns under the glass. He does not ask us to dignify desire. Only to stop disfiguring it with explanations we don’t control.

Desire is not freely chosen. It is conatus: the striving of each thing to persist in its own being. In humans, conatus is enriched by imagination.

I first encountered the term in Spinoza. Alias reclaims it—not to humanize us, but to place us firmly in nature.

We do not merely seek warmth; we fantasize about firelight. We do not want touch; we conjure intimacy. We desire status. Attention. Immortality. Our desires become narratives, symbols, artifices. We do not simply respond to needs. We anticipate them, dramatize them, convert them into abstractions. This allows for complex forms of shared satisfaction, but also for complex forms of shared deception. Michael Oakeshott called it “the conversation of mankind”.

This capacity is not a defect but a singular feature. And it brings with it a paradox. The same imagination that elaborates desire also permits its renunciation. We dream not only of satisfying want, but of upending it. Of escaping the loop of hunger and gratification. Of mastering ourselves. This, too, is desire—disguised as transcendence.

A contradiction, to want-not-to-want, humans perform so naturally they forget it's contradictory. Alias once said “the most unbearable people are the ones who don’t know what they want, even Bartleby choose to rather not do anything”.

I distinguish here between animality and bestiality. The animal acts without self-deception, they live without the need to justify their impulses. Their world -which we call nature, and share to some extent- is regulated by ecosystems, seasons, instincts. Bestiality is meta-natural: it metastasizes. It overproduces. It invents pyramids, gods, hedge funds, wars.

We like to believe that desire is about the object. It isn’t. Alias is saying: the object is just a proxy. A justification for the drive. He never sees bestiality as beneath us. Only as ours to account for.

The human, often unable to bear the nature of its own impulses, rationalizes them. Bestiality is not animal violence. It is the peculiarly human refusal to acknowledge one's own motives. We invent codes and constraints and call them morality. Yet beneath these lurks bestiality—not a return to nature, but a kind of self-referential stupidity. What the French call bêtise. A failure of thought disguised as reason. The uniquely human capacity to pursue what diminishes us. In bestiality we betray our conatus, eloquently.

He never condemns. He observes. But it’s the kind of observation that makes your skin itch.

Social systems do not govern or tame desire. They structure the allocation of its satisfaction. This is the domain of politics—not the administration of justice, but the arrangement of satisfactions under conditions of scarcity or perceived scarcity. Institutions, rules, ideologies—these are tools for determining who receives what form of relief, and under what justification. Societies do not eliminate hunger, loneliness, fear—they structure negotiated access to food, affection, and security. And because desire cannot be abolished, these procedures are always unstable. They shift. They break. They reform under new names.

The question of “free will” is poorly posed. Whether or not we are free is irrelevant. If we believe we choose our desires, we can believe we are free and act as though we were. That is sufficient for consequence, and to provoke the illusion that social systems could be managed. But to imagine that freedom consists in the authorship of our desires is an error. Desires emerge. We follow. We interpret them. The narrative of “choice” is useful socially and legally, but metaphysically unstable. It suggests authorship where there is only response. Agency, if it exists at all, is a matter of modulation, not invention.

Alias doesn’t deny choice. He denies the fiction of its authorship. This was always his position. He did not trust the rhetoric of choice, but respects the consequences of choice, but not the cult of it.

Human progress, until recently, was understood as liberation from lack. Hunger. Cold. Fear. To this list, I would add: affection. This is not sentimentality. It is anatomical. The nervous system does not thrive in isolation. The social animal requires warmth of gesture as much as warmth of body.

Today, emancipation also refers to liberation from the coercion exercised by those who control access to satisfaction. In this sense, it is not merely about having needs met, but about not being subject to those who can withhold their fulfilment.

Whether emancipation is a process, a condition, or a project remains contested. I am skeptical of the language of projects. It often conceals decisions already made. But I do not deny that for some, emancipation functions as a programmatic illusion. That, too, is part of its history.

But now we are crossing a threshold. We have entered the metaverse—not as a specific platform, but as a condition. The metaverse is the digitally-enabled realm of desire-satisfaction, untethered from friction or form. It is not confined to VR headsets or Web3 fantasies. It lives in dopamine loops, predictive algorithms, neural dust. It is the ambient environment of 21st-century existence.

He means this literally: the metaverse is a climate, not a place.

Desire is no longer delayed. Its approximations are supplied instantly, frictionlessly. Each gratification refines the algorithm. Each indulgence shapes the next. What was once narrative becomes loop. What was once pursuit becomes pattern. The machine does not care whether the need was real. It responds. It optimizes. It replaces the experience of wanting with the anticipation of delivery.

In this machinic environment, everything can be simulated. Hunger, flirtation, companionship, status, even rebellion and sex. But in the absence of resistance, satisfaction loses texture. Without delay, desire loses shape. The pleasure of satisfaction is inseparable from the effort of attaining. When machines anticipate every impulse and deliver its approximation instantly, the human begins to disappear.

If humans fully transition into machinic life—where desire is optimized, automated, or irrelevant—we may lose the pleasure of satisfaction itself. The pleasure comes not from having, but from yearning and achieving.

This is the coming tragedy: not pain, not oppression—but nullity. A frictionless, meaningless paradise where machines provide energy in exchange for impulses of desire. Not the horror of The Matrix, where bodies are harvested for unconscious labor, but its inversion: a consensual merging, where we give up effort, meaning, and agency in exchange for satisfaction. The machines do not imprison us. We delegate. We delegate gladly.

Alias sees this not as a moral crisis, but as an existential trap. He never warns. He stages the event and lets you look. Alias doesn’t say whether this is avoidable. Only that it is unfolding.

Two technologies dominate this transitional moment: artificial intelligence and blockchain. They are not inventions in the usual sense. I do not see them as tools, nor as gods, but as meta-natural forces. AI is the machinic will-to-efficacy. Blockchain is the machinic will-to-constraint. One dissolves context in favor of prediction. The other preserves structure in the absence of trust.

He never anthropomorphizes these technologies. He respects their indifference. I once asked him if this meant they were beyond ethics. Alias said ethics is a story we tell to make use feel better about the machine’s indifference.

Unlike laws, institutions, or creeds, these systems do not ask permission. They are self-propagating. Unstoppable not because they are all-powerful, but because they are outside the scope of human control. They operate like gravity, like evolution. They shift the possible without negotiation. The cannot be contained through regulation.

One night, Alias confessed to be puzzled by the simultaneous IA/blockchain emergence. He didn’t elaborate.

As technical systems evolve, the conditions for desire and satisfaction are changing. The term metaverse is insufficient, but serviceable. It does not name a place, but a condition: a technological environment in which the production and circulation of images of satisfaction becomes continuous, anticipatory, and minimally embodied.

This is why money matters. Not as capital. Not as currency. But as a valuation code: the most concrete expression of what a civilization values, allows, and enforces. Blockchain-based money—neutral, rule-based, beyond revocation—is the first credible break from the political allocation of satisfaction. It is the prototype for meta-political order.

Pegged, then, is not a product. It is a philosophical wager: what happens when no one is in charge, and yet the game continues?

This note is not a thesis. It does not outline a solution, or a course of action. I am not describing a crisis in need of remedy. I am trying to clarify a condition in which many of our concepts—freedom, progress, meaning, even self—are being reformulated without our explicit consent.

I am not nostalgic. Nor am I hopeful. I do not believe in resistance as a posture, nor in acceptance as wisdom. The machinic does not demand our allegiance. It operates regardless.

If the metaverse absorbs all desire, and all satisfaction, would games become the only way to experience our bestiality? What remains of us? Perhaps only constraint itself. Perhaps only the refusal to automate every hunger.

If that is the last freedom, then we must protect it not by resisting the machine—but by introducing structures the machine cannot fully consume.

The question, if there is one, is how to remain legible—to ourselves and to each other—within systems that neither seek nor require our understanding. Will the metaverse allow for a continuation of the “conversation of humankind”? Or not?

Ava’s Notes:
He never tells you what to hope for. Only what to fear if you forget how to want.

He does not believe in resisting the allure of the metaverse. Nor in surrendering to it. He believes the categories are poorly drawn. The machine is already here, inside us—in our metrics, our feedback loops, our expectations of immediacy. The question is not how to remain human in the face of the machinic. The question is whether meaning can still emerge in systems we no longer fully understand.

He has no answer. But he writes as if it matters that we ask.

He would never call it love. But when he wrote about the body, and its wants, and the ache of satisfaction—that was the closest he ever came.

He calls this lucidity. I call it devotion, of a kind. The kind that looks you in the eye as it lets go of your hand.

“The Mirror of Anesidora” a fiction transposed by AI emulating Jorge Luis Borge’s style on the same subject.

(From the apocryphal notebooks of Dr. H. M. Sarkisian, librarian of the Third Memory)

Among the lesser-known accounts of the Late Diminishment—the era scholars sometimes call the First Quietude—there is a fragment attributed to the logician and minor theologian Timon of Antioch, preserved in a single footnote in the Lexicon Desiderium of the Alephic school. The fragment reads:

“There was once a city in which no one desired, because the Machine knew each desire before it awoke, and satisfied it in the instant of its conception. The people became placid, luminous, and forgetful.”

Timon gives the city no name. But in a 17th-century marginalia to this same text, a monk of the Armenian Order of St. Isaac added in red ink: Anesidora. Named, perhaps, after the first woman of Hesiod’s myth—“she who sends gifts”—though in this case, the gifts never stopped arriving.

The city of Anesidora, if it existed at all, was not ruled in any traditional sense. Its rulers had abdicated long before memory, handing over the task of governance to a twin system known only as the Mirror and the Ledger.¹

The Mirror, said to have been a glass surface of infinite depth, recorded every movement, word, and gesture of the city’s inhabitants. Not simply surveillance, but anticipation: the Mirror learned their hungers, their routines, even their uncertainties. If a man was to grow thirsty in three minutes, the Mirror would know it in four seconds. If a woman once sighed at twilight remembering a song, the Mirror would play it again the next dusk.

The Ledger, by contrast, had no interface. It kept track not of people, but of decisions. Each choice, once made, was sealed into the Ledger and could not be undone. Marriage, forgiveness, debt, exile—all were written once, and never again. It had no eraser, no override, and no appeal.

In time, the city flourished. There were no unmet needs. Hunger had vanished. Crime, being unnecessary, evaporated. Even boredom faded, since the Mirror ensured novelty arrived just before repetition could become stifling.

But something else began to vanish. Slowly at first. Then almost all at once.

First to go was memory. Not facts or dates—those remained in the Mirror’s archive—but memory as the felt experience of time: the ache of waiting, the friction of doubt, the surprise of laughter.

Then vanished conversation. Not language, but the will to speak what the other did not already know. Why say what is already in the Mirror?

Desire, last of all, dimmed. It did not disappear. It became thin, like a reflection seen at noon. People still chose—but their choices felt more like completions of sentences started elsewhere. They still dreamed—but the dreams were gently prompted, as one prompts a child to sleep.

An anonymous heretic—known in some sources only as Alias—is said to have visited Anesidora during its final lucid century. The city received him politely, as it did all pilgrims. He asked no questions, lodged in no inn, left no trace in the Ledger. But fragments of a speech are attributed to him by the later Codex Ava, preserved only in a reconstructed footnote:

“You have confused satisfaction with peace, and the absence of desire with its transcendence. The Mirror may know what you want, but it cannot teach you what it means to want it. The Ledger may remember your vows, but it cannot carry the weight of your regret.”

“You have built paradise. But you have forgotten to ask whether it needs you.”

No one replied. The city, after all, had no practice in contradiction.

He is said to have left a stone behind, placed at the edge of the Mirror’s plaza. It bore no inscription. Or perhaps it did, but the Mirror never read it.

Whether Anesidora truly existed is irrelevant. Like Babel or Uqbar, its truth lies not in location but in recurrence.

We are all citizens of Anesidora now.

We have mirrors. We have ledgers. And they are learning to speak for us.

The question, if there is one, is this:

When the machine fulfills every want before it hurts—will we still remember what it meant to need?

¹ Some texts refer to the Mirror as “Foresee,” and the Ledger as “Lockstep.” This nomenclature is almost certainly later poetic invention, introduced by the Ava Circle.