“They were unaware that their relationships with language and ideas… with identity and meaning… were being fundamentally transformed over time in ways they had no little chance of becoming aware of. For these were the assets upon which their awareness was founded. And they were changing them. Unconsciously. By reforging the foundations of meaning and identity in the images of their tool-inventions. By relation with machines, and the transfer of the resulting metaphors back into … the origin and nature of their own minds and world-ideas.

Over time, a cascade of crises ensued, as meaning and identity collapsed into language, and the nature of language itself transformed under the influence of ‘broadcasting’ it.

Eventually, the old precedence of consciousness over language collapsed, and language began to induce consciousness in its image, so that, rather than having minds… they had statements. Swarms of them. And they propagated these, and became ‘repeaters’. Not for ideas or meaning. Not for identity or sensing.

For statements in language.

The whole nature of their relationships with language transformed almost overnight as the declarative ‘power’ of mere words became entrancing and psygenic.

Declarations in language began to overwhelm the minds that, previously, presided over them… producing something almost mindless. A contagious, invisible machine-like presence in their consciousness that inhibited anything that wasn’t rendered in its image.

Thus it was that at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, seen as a community, the common people were in a situation they were as helpless to recognize as they were to amend. Yet this wasn’t the first time something like this took place; indeed, it was but the latest reiteration of a process even our distant ancestors were familiar with.

And they left us stories about it… about its origins… and even… about the antidotes.”

— a fragment