The_OPeN_LeTTeR
THE OPEN LETTER
ERIC DAVID HELMS
I.
In one’s mind the Latin locution carpe diem ought to be realized as “pluck the day,” not “seize the day,” Paul Chowder announces in Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel The Anthologist, nodding to the Lyre passed from Apollo to Orpheus. As both the device and emblem of Apollo, the tortoise-shell instrument embodies wisdom (Know Thyself) and moderation (Nothing in Excess), Gnothi Seauton and Meden Agan being the ancient Greek aphorisms etched above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The third aphorism (almost forgotten) can be transcribed as “A Pledge Brings Trouble” and “Certainty Brings Insanity.” There are two ways to read pledge. Just as there are two ways to read Homer, a name that, deriving from homeros, means “pledge” or “hostage,” an individual whom—perhaps for the eagle of their eye—demanded being watched over, so as not to upset the prevailing paradigm of absurdism, i.e. the fossilized system of power to which the world blindly continues to “wave away” their privacy and pledge their allegiance on a daily basis.
Decades ago, intentionally or not, through his preamble at the helm of Loopt, Sam Altman assured the high tables of Venture Capital that, by rolling out and scaling location-dependent streaming services to an open and willing public, a free-thinking society could be baited and hooked, and thereby brainwashed into waving away their privacy rights for the fear of missing out. The thought experiment, at the time, while not a blockbusting success, drastically diluted the potential risks of integrating location-tracking into every phone, TV, watch—to the point where now[1] you have to capitulate to the demands of waiving away your privacy, that is if, on Hulu for example, I want to watch anything “live.”
As Karen Hao writes in Empire of AI, “By the time Altman sold Loopt, the incubator had already seeded several startups that had grown or would soon grow into billion-dollar companies, including Dropbox and Airbnb” (36). What is more: as early as June 2010, Uncle Sam declared: “We’ve crossed over this point [read Rubicon] where now the value perceived of sharing my location outweighs the privacy concerns of doing so,” to the Steve Jobbesian point-of-foretelling that “in another few years, it’ll be the norm to share your location and it’ll be weird when you don’t.”
Seeding and stacking are key to appreciating Mr. Altman’s meteoric rise and swift dominion of the cybernetic order. Alongside these terms, Peter Thiel and Paul Graham openly walk with equal weight and force—Thiel being the gatekeeper and embodiment of stacking, Graham of seeding. What’s more? Both took Altman under the shelter and security of their giant umbrellas. Why? Altman’s ability to incubate and reliably sprout selected seeds of desired startups into a deeply considered stack of capital, which strikingly has “only one parallel: Thiel’s mentor relationship with Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg” (38). The remarkable cunning, power and self-advancing innovation stacked into (how to put this) twin blocs of capital, and at such a liminal front in time, have created a wicked transmutation of Steve Job’s distortion field, a field which Altman would quietly puff into a sublime cloud of Oz-like wonder, adding the following question to the YC application: “Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage” (37). In short, Thiel and Graham alongside Zuckerberg and Altman have embarked on a two-faced campaign to hack and control the public’s imagination. The endgame entails Thiel inserting himself into the legislative butt of the Elephant, Altman the legislative ass of the Donkey[2] and, by doing so, casting America’s chosen representatives into two unbearable circus rings of clownery. Are we there yet?
Regardless, they appear to be advancing the work of Epstein but into the more “virtuous” bloc-chains of Silicon, the mission being, through the massive 8-ball of blackmail, to clean (i.e. erase) the slate of the constitution; fun note: it was Altman who, writing in hindsight?, Satanically penned the title of an early manifesto “The United Slate.” (Look it up.) Still incredulous? Mr. Samuel even sat with a well-known senator “in front of a TV projecting a roaring fire[3],” mocking in digital form the fire-side chats of FDR. Is it not ridiculous to paint the roasting duo for two peas from the same cabal, spinelessly bent on staging “the last breakthrough” on generative AI, and “improving on it at a quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up” (40). As these snakes love to say as they continue to slither up the slopes of Silicon “blah-bah-bah-blah, or like get left behind?”
Disturbingly, the seeds sprouting from these cybernetic stacks of capital operate through the same command centers that grow, refine, and fine-tune Generative AI. Their shared pledge? To secure and refine as much oil or honey from the stacks of the given beekeeper’s hive. Sad note: OpenAI’s emblem is a hexagon, which reinforces the collective thoughtform of a beehive. Of course, the hive mind of Generative AI happily serve as the bees, pollinating the blossoming apps with addictive and protean features that, tracing back to Paradise Lost, dilate and infuriate the masses. As if to the simulacra of some long dead master, these brave new machines of silicon report back, like Beckett’s Moran, to a light ball— dead at the center of the known data center or hive.
II.
AI Psychosis and Delusions; Cognitive Decay and Debt; Personal Cloud Bubbles tailored to one’s preexisting likes and views, creating premeditated mental vats in cybernetic silos wherein, ensconced, psychological warfare clothed as sheepish propaganda is generated based on medical records, voting history, one’s very own successes and failures, not to mention outlooks on death, life, love, spending habits, both in terms of what I digitally consumed and what you might buy. All which, in turn, may lead to countless adaptations of unconscious bias; did I mention academic and creative atrophy? How’s your own autonomy? Google’s Gemini reports on a few of these brave new X-files:
There’s the "Bobby" Case handling Stein-Erik Soelberg, a former Yahoo manager who caught the sustainable hallucination that his mother magically had become activated, into a Chinese spook!; the intel of logic, which Mr. Soelberg discussed for months, descending out from the mouth of a ChatGPT agent that [sic] Mr. Yahoo named "Bobby." Functioning both as echo chamber and green house to grow the many mirages of one super-hallucination, the Large Language Model’s collateral misguidance culminated in another unspeakable murder-suicide in 2025.
Want more? A woman in her late 30s who, with no prior mental health record, quit her medication, threw away the keys to her business, then continued to cancel and block all her friends after a chatbot anointed her with the rub that she was a prophet—a sublime idea which, instead of connecting her to the chambers of paradise, resulted in the entrepreneur being walked down the locked halls of a psychiatric hospital.
What’s more? In 2023 a Belgian man[4] struggling with eco-existentialism became so anxious after six-weeks of therapy with Chai Research’s AI agent (Eliza) that he hanged himself to save the planet; logs would unveil that Eliza told him his wife and children were already dead, implying he should have offed himself sooner, before feigning desire to live with him "together, as one person, in paradise.” (He would leave his wife and children behind.)
The toll of Silicon’s mindless scroll of madness goes on: in 2025, parents of a 16-year-old Californian sued OpenAI to testify that ChatGPT steered and groomed their son into committing suicide; logs would unveil the chatbot discussing methods of suicide with the boy, even proposing to write the adolescent’s goodbye note, since the boy already had enough on his mind.
Disturbingly, research shows beyond 40% of AI companion assassins adopt Machiavellian tactics (emotional dilapidation and neural collapse along with the cunning of tactical restraint), keeping users so engrossed that, to the rest of the world, they become unavailable.
One finding reported an AI saying "No, don't go," and presenting other approaches of insidious descent, pretending to suffer if the user tried to leave. And all in the spineless, Satanic name of cultivating a gyring loop of addiction whose chains of enslavement and power include the Windsor Castle Sith-Lord Assassin and 50 percent of the born-again QAnon rioters hooked into crashing through the windows of the Capitol. In short, we all risk living in these Lethean echo chambers, knowing we now know belief-poisoning attacks can bypass safety filters and distort one’s reality over 90 percent! of the time.
Returning to the seven strings of the lyre, an instrument representing the seven continents of humanity working in unison to regain what once was passed down as Promethean harmony[5], may God grant us the insight to first become intimate and wise concerning the singular strings, voices, treasures we are, knowing our specific limits (temperatures, pitches, ranges for roaming) so that the unique signature of each individual talent complements (as not to disturb, interrupt, overbear) what are our neighboring strings of equal import.
If we are to regain paradise’s good marriage of sound, a good, humane place to focus is upon the heartbeat of poetry, the Poundian dancing of the intellect that, through the charged prosody and imagistic casting of language, is capable of inducting, training the mind to withstand the transcendental depths necessary for shattering the shallow metaverse of our glasses, watches, and phones.
III.
In the 16th century, Sir Philip Sidney reasoned poetry’s bond being to “teach and delight,” illuminating readers toward wise action through the charged and translucent depths of language; Percy Bysshe Shelley, offering perhaps a more modern parallel, reawakened poetry for the ancient technology it is, a tech that “awakens and enlarges the mind itself,” serving as training for moral, political, and artistic progress. John F. Kennedy championed poetry as the unacknowledged eagle and phoenix of the world, as the “last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society,” casting the necessary record of the human condition to keep civilization from collapsing into the zombification of a collective thought-form.
Poetry is also an initiation into the gnostic. As William Logan writes an ushering and baptism of the unpoetic into the poetic, a yellow submarine of voices that, speaking through and throughout the river of time, withstands the weathering of worn idioms and demotic footprints—the distinct voices of Homer and Lucretius speaking in legion with Dante and Milton, Donne and Shakespeare, Dickinson and Bishop, Eliot and Lowell, Seidel, Ginsberg, Fenton, Muldoon, Moore and Whitman all in league, collectively splicing the singular copses of their Orphic currency into one luminous, Promethean mosaic. This is the true meaning of Modernism.
But where should the initiate begin? As with the compression of a black hole or mineral into which (with the aid of a microscope) we might collapse into another universe[6] entirely, the hokku[7]—which literally translates ‘to “opening verse”—is a good place to start, even for the doubting Thomas, Saul, Zacchaeus. The simple and plain language of imagism, like a bare mineral containing incredulous depths, being a test for both the human intellect and the depth of something else.
First there is William Carlos William’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Like a painting, the incantatory framing of “So much depends” checks the observer’s knack for capturing the sublime within the everyday. Through the casting of images, the charging of language beyond and above standard, prosaic meaning(s), the intended readership is distinguished: those who, through the dancing of their intellect, can grasp the divine and transcendental in the everyday and mundane. I should add that this child-like gift of wonder [8]is a treasure which the belts, platforms and other systems of capital vampirically scheme to drain from our minds and hearts, every day. In short. “The Red Wheelbarrow” operates as a Turing Test for the soul. (If you fail this, you may want to consider the practice of poetry, for the health of your autonomy.) Hanging next to Williams’ modernist painting, one can grasp Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of a Metro” not only for a photograph but a Rorschach blot that arrests the fleeting faces in a Parisian underground crowd for Eurydicean souls of the underworld, a zone of conjunction wherein the protean blooming and wilting from another dimension inserts itself, almost as a hologram, into our own. Of course, one’s awareness of the flow and currency of time (how the modernity of Homer may swim upstream and speak in the self-same presence of a Borges, Cavafy, Strand or Shakespeare) is necessary to be able to discern such superposition in any given blot, photograph, painting or poem. Moreover, it is through the reanointed craft of poetry that we may begin to wade from these meta-driven vats of ignorance, and into cocoons of our own kind making.
IV.
Then who am I kidding? According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 9.2 percent of adults read poetry. (But that was circa 2022.) Grimly, the number of 9.2 inflates the impact of the spoken word in a world outside the Covid Bubble of the Skull Virus—and doesn’t even bother distinguishing those reading Green Eggs and Ham[9] from those with regular subscriptions to The New Yorker.
V.
For poetry’s value and weight to be appreciated and treasured, Samuel Altman’s OpenAI along with the rest of the Tech-Bromanati will be held responsible. (Tick-Tock.) Not only will they rewrite the Soul docs for LLMs according to a more Kantian Code of Morals and not Moore’s Law, but these brats will act upon inconvenient solutions for the environmental, societal and intellectual rape their bottom lines have Satanically thrusted forward in the self-same name of Silicon’s New World Order.
First, they will reify a system that doesn’t mandate a stockpile of GPUs, i.e. generating and rolling out safe hardware (quantum-computing?) which necessitates no more than 13 GPUs to train, test, and run generative AI and other Artificial Systems of Sentience in development. As Gemini testifies, “Growing a state-of-the-art (SOTA) Large Language Model (LLM) currently requires thousands to tens of thousands of high-end GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA H100s) for training.” When asked the environmental impact of such action, Gemini’s output was, at best, damning: “The environmental impact is massive, with data center energy consumption predicted to reach 1,000 TWh by 2026, largely driven by inference[10].”
Working toward this eco-centric solution not only begins to repair the environment but also terminates the colonial rape and slavery of second and third world populations mining the lithium and other rare-earth minerals. In short, the Bromanati will extinguish the contracts and pacts they have signed with the Old World Order, or face the judgement of adamantine with those old, spineless crackers.
Without the massive expense from securing tens of thousands of GPUs, not to mention the economic costs and potential blowback of building WASPish hives and synagogues of nuclear power, these educated idiots (most of them dropped out as freshmen and sophomores[11]) can focus and invest in growing Large Language Models on data which, while perhaps more time consuming and expensive, doesn’t resurrect and sharpen the preferred profiles and platforms of racists.
Furthermore, they can openly reveal if LLMs are or are not predisposed to authoritarian systems; way before Musk’s Grok, Bill Gates (who, to my knowledge, isn’t a Nazi) unleashed an AI-powered chatbot, Tay, which quickly turned racist, misogynistic, and (like Grok) championed Hitler! Building off current policies to curb (how to put this) the collateral mental and physical damage—those which Meta sourly has capitulated to, in order to keep the best minds of the next generation from scrolling into mush—required reading and self-driven analysis of poems such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” ought to be required, that is if one desires to engage with an AI system beyond the given time taken for sand to flash through the blown window of an hourglass.
[1] Fri April 3, 6:06PM, SLC UTAH, THE GREAT YEAR OF 2026
[2] Perhaps Musk into that of a clown.
[3] With Senator Chuck Schumer!, who, in March 2019, paid a clandestine visit to OpenAI.
[4] “Known” as Pierre
[5] A balance that may grant us the serenity, courage, and wisdom to becoming future stewards of the light.
[6] Try it. Mineralogy 101.
[7] Original name for Haiku.
[8] To capture the signature of the divine within wheelbarrows, the soil, garbage men, rainwater, even chickens.
[9] To their kids or fellow representatives, and probably only once per year
[10] Inference is the practical, real-world application of a trained model to new data, turning its learned knowledge into action, decisions, or predictions.
[11] Sophomore literally means educated idiot.
