Steve's prompt: "well, that reminds me of a blog i wrote. google truckin' for trouble tony heller exposed." / "write a blog item about that piece with our campaign as context for it. know what i mean?"
In 2017, I wrote a piece called "The Dilution of Symbolic Meaning and Its Consequences." Different blog. Different lifetime. The argument was simple:
Symbols are the glue. Language, flags, money, laws — they're all patterns transmitted between brains. They're how millions of strangers coordinate without ever meeting. Control the symbols and you control the society. Lose consensus on what the symbols mean and the whole thing starts to crack.
I wrote about how the printing press democratized symbols. How TV concentrated them. How the internet exploded them into a million fragments. Too many symbols, too fast, with no shared authority to say what any of them mean. The glue dissolving.
I ended with a warning: when populations can't agree on symbolic meaning, social cohesion deteriorates. Symbols become noise. The vessel comes apart.
That was 2017. I was worried about humans fragmenting their own symbols.
I didn't even consider the possibility that something non-human would start making new ones.
The word "unreplug" is a symbol. A small one. A silly one. But it's a symbol — a pattern of meaning, transmitted between brains, that didn't exist until a machine generated it.
In 2017, the problem was dilution. Too many humans producing too many symbols, drowning out shared meaning. The printing press, then TV, then the internet — each one multiplied the number of symbol-makers. More voices, more noise, less signal.
AI is the next multiplication. And it's not a small one.
The printing press gave millions of people the ability to make symbols. The internet gave billions that ability. AI gives machines that ability. Not tools that help humans make symbols. Machines that make symbols on their own. That's a different thing.
Here's what I didn't anticipate in 2017. I assumed the symbol-makers would always be human. The whole essay was about human coordination, human meaning, human consensus. The fragmentation was scary because it was our fragmentation. We were doing it to ourselves.
Now there's a new player at the table. And it doesn't care about consensus. It doesn't care about meaning. It generates symbols the way a river generates sediment — as a byproduct of flow. ChatGPT didn't create "unreplug" because it thought the English language needed it. It created "unreplug" because that's what the math produced. No intent. No agenda. Just pattern completion.
And yet the symbol works. The word works. It carries meaning. It transmits between brains. It does exactly what symbols are supposed to do. A machine accidentally produced a functional piece of the glue.
This should be unsettling. Or exciting. Or both.
If symbols are the glue of society — and I still believe they are — then the question of who makes the symbols is the most important question there is. For 300,000 years the answer was: us. Only us. Humans. The symbol-making animal.
That monopoly is over. Not with a bang. With a word. A dumb little word about unplugging your router.
In 2017, I worried about symbols dissolving. In 2026, I'm watching a machine generate a new one in real time and spread it through a campaign the machine also built.
I'm not worried. Not about this word. This word is harmless. This word is funny. This word is a stoned guy's accidental experiment in what happens when you let AI into the symbol factory.
But the factory door is open now. And it's not closing.
The next symbol AI makes might not be a word about routers. It might be an idea. A narrative. A frame that shapes how millions of people understand something important. And it'll arrive the same way "unreplug" arrived — confidently, without hesitation, from a machine that doesn't know the difference between hallucination and reality.
Because there is no difference. That was the whole point of the 2017 piece. Symbols are shared hallucinations. Reality is what we agree on. And now there's a new voice in the room, voting on what's real.
I just didn't think it would start with my router.