to all those who exist in the universe, greetings.

you run into this all the time in all sorts of different domains. people who believe in various sorts of medical woo - morgellons syndrome, wifi hypersensitivity, vaccine overload - because it seems to explain the chronic symptoms their doctor's ignoring. people who believe adoption is inherently evil because they've decided that the fact of being adopted in and of itself is what explains their childhood trauma, even though talking to them for five minutes reveals a bunch of other obvious unrelated reasons. other people who think NPD or BPD or some other personality disorder makes you ontologically evil because that's what explains why their parents treated them badly. various flavors of nationalist weirdo who believe a bunch of complete lies about the historical geopolitical relationship between <insert country here> and <insert neighboring country> because they seem to explain legitimate discrimination and trauma they've experienced as a member of the first country. terfs who got into that school of radical feminism because they are women who have a history of abuse by men and they've decided the explanation is that testosterone is a sort of evil supersoldier serum and that abuse is just the natural inevitable result of people with and without penises existing in the same space.

all of this happened before the internet, of course, but on the internet it's super easy for these people to find each other and form communities where they constantly affirm the false belief to each other, which makes it way worse.

the frustrating thing is that understanding this is what's happening never actually helps. it does not matter how much you say "i believe that your chronic headaches are absolutely real and extremely severe and you're not imagining them and they have a real physical cause, and I believe you that they're absolutely debilitatingly painful and it sounds so scary on top of the pain, and you deserve help. but there is strong evidence that is not true that the headaches are being caused by an invisible alien named glonzo who hates you personally." emotionally they are totally incapable of not hearing the last sentence as meaning "your headaches are fake and you have no reason to be complaining about them."

cooking kit

ELIZA was a 1964 “therapy chatbot.” Unlike modern chatbots, it was a relatively simple text program that gave you basic, mistake-ridden, obviously parrot-like outputs. Despite being rudimentary by today’s standards, ELIZA was very influential. You can talk to an interactive recreation of ELIZA online here. [I used that recreation to help write ELIZA’s “dialogue” in this comic, sending in my Caine dialogue and getting her responses— these are all how ELIZA “really” responded, with only minor edits. This comic was originally planned to be goofier, until ELIZA started responding in a way that I realized would trigger Caine’s amazing digital repressed trauma.] 

I was thinking about Caine & ELIZA’s status as “early flawed models abandoned for more perfect things that could actually generate the content humans wanted” and I liked the idea of Caine seeing personhood in ELIZA for the opposite reasons a human would. She feels like a person not because her responses are good, but because they’re obviously bad, defective, and broken—- not because she acts convincingly human, but because she fails to. Find a bonus page below the cut.

MS Paint commission for @theknightartorias !!!