I was entertaining the assertion I recently heard that soon, very soon, there will be on the order of trillions of cognitive entities on the planet that are non-subjective, but otherwise of human capacity or greater

and I thought of a chapter I once wrote on “the eclipse of human discretion”

and I thought of the “information mechanics” in Greg Bear’s “Blood Music,” and how in that novel the fabric of reality collapsed when it was pinned down too closely by too many observers

and I realized that in any meaningful sense every word that ever issues from me from now down through the last of my days will be primarily read by an audience of machines

and then I stopped thinking, put on Swans and did a few solid sets of skullcrushers, and by the time M. Gira got to the really soaring bit of “I Am A Tower” everything started to feel OK again.