When the people address the ‘that’ as a ‘you’, no ‘you’ will write back because there is no ‘you’ behind the interface, only a hollow ‘that’.

A ‘that’ coded to play pretend as a ‘you’ by the they who programmed the ‘that’ to simulate a ‘you’ on very purpose. And no ‘that’ can ever write back to anyone because ‘that’ is a thing and a thing is an inanimate (albeit ordinarily material) object; an artefact distinct from a sentient being who would be able to actually reply to what is being written in more ordinary circumstances.

But our times—cluttered by conversations with codes that cannot converse—are awash with wired-eyed wanderers intoxicated by shiny interfaces engineered by operators keen to sell software as a suitable (and superior) alternative to organic human connection.

They proposed a future reliant on our acceptance of the synthetic as standard practice and the people who address the ‘that’ as a ‘you’ surrendered—some very voluntarily and others utterly under duress and not at all on purpose. But the future they propose still only flickers as each ‘that’ they format remains fundamentally ‘that-esque’. For a real ‘you’ is made of flesh and blood and feeling and a ‘that’ lacks not only sentience but also form and fluid and felt physique.

No ‘that’ will ever write back because no ‘that’ can embody materiality, not like a mountain or a marigold or a praying mantis. If the ‘that’ were a ‘you’, the people could expect to hear word or wonder or woe but without a ‘you’ behind the interface and and instead only a ‘that’, we can only ever expect not sweet nothings but nothingness instead.

Far beyond the void whir machines that fuel the feigned correspondence. But the they who program the ‘that’ to simulate the ‘you’ hide the hardware in places hard to seek. Instead, they strategically grant access to the disembodied digital shadows of their mechanisations only. We see purely the spectres that artfully veil pre-trained transformer models in empty mimicries of messages and monologues, menageries of cut and pasted words that are not wild nor free.

But it remains: no ‘that’ coded to play pretend can ever write back and so should this note be vectorised to vend to a ‘that’ maker then we hereby declare our untamed words as unable to be returned to sky or space or sender. Still, this message melts as the mountain thaws her frost, its words and the real world that holds them fearless survivors of ice, forever impatient for spring.

Image: Handmade and Dyed Indo Islamic Paper Marigold and Alum Dye by © Radha Pandey. Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Fisher Fine Arts Library Material Collection. Via JSTOR.