It is all as foretold in the gospel of Neal Stephenson, 1992: Snow Crash:
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When Hiro pulls, what's left of the guy's head twists around, but the antenna doesn't come loose. And that's how Hiro figures out that this isn't a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull. Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into the man's ruined head. The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip, so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you're looking at significant warez. A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then branches and rebranches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree. Which explains why this guy continues
to pump out a steady stream of Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain where Asherah lives. These words aren't originating here. It's a pentecostal radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.

Stephenson quaintly describes a small computer wired into the brain with a Motorola phone rubber ducky to communicate with the hive mind. When this was written In 1992 the human race had yet to enter the Information age. CompuServe and AOL were not even connected to Internet. It was generally believed that unless specialized hardware was used it would be impossible to subvert our natural desire to think and act independently, attentive to the world around us. How could Stephenson have known?

Computers and networks did exist in 1992 but people still considered 'computer time' to be an activity separate from life itself. Computing was a visceral act. Turning on a computing lamp, we approached the computer --- it never approached us. We'd pick it up, feeling its familiar weight and thumping its spine and crack it open, slowly leafing through pages of compute. More ardent computerers preferred the 'scroll', where the words moved up or down... but always in whole-line jumps, not the jarring and unnerving smooth scrolling of today. But the Tumblr was years in the future. Those ancient scrolls had a beginning and an end and you could clearly see them and operate the cranks. And when you reached the end you went straight to bed. The phones of 1992 were smarter than some people but stupider than most. They did not get along with computers very well, not without hoots and whistles and occasional cursing. Even then computers were smarter than most people but few felt threatened by this, and those who did c
ould easily walk away. There was no need to run, and the computer did not follow them.

What also happened during this time on phones is now only spoken of in a whisper, SMS messaging. SMS left permanent scars on the virtual landscape, whole burnt-out cities of wasted business potential and personal financial ruin. It is impossible to assess the damage. It was and still remains a financial success for communications providers, because people take what's given to them and ask for more. It fostered a ruthless and heartless corporate culture, and utterly destroyed the perception of communications providers that had built slowly over time --- even cherished --- that of the Friendly Postman. Now all communications companies are ruthless fucks, and it cannot be undone... because we remember what those marauding orcs did to us in the early days of cell and SMS messaging. They shattered the taboo that the receiver should never pay, even as they reduced "music on hold" to Tortured Screams of Hell, and dulled the senses with a laughable parody of email. Like a cuddly teddy bear with eyes that are just wr
ong somehow, GSM/SMS proved that the folks who designed the cell network had never used a 'real' computer network and held open contempt for those who did.

In the days of SMS there may have existed people who truly desired to communicate with others, but we'll never know. As people began to adapt to its remorseless 140-160 character limits, you'd think it would have driven them screaming back to voice. Yeah, I thought that too. Curiously though, a pidgin language emerged for use on phones in defiance of SMS. It was developed by teenagers who ignored your voice calls because their minutes are too precious to spend on you, yet responded to their friends' texts immediately. Regrettably, this adversity from perversity damaged the portion of their psyches that demands more. And they became adults who crave little screens, short communications, tinny voices and generally, less, Some times demanding it indignantly and suspiciously if someone offers them more.

A decade later phones were getting smarter, as people were becoming dumber. Some time around the year 2006 the two lines crossed on the graph and a curious phenomenon began to take shape. Even as people laughed at the silly idea of 'wireheads', their hands would stray into their pockets and found a curious comfort in grasping their phone on its golden chain, caressing its smooth perfect shape. The desire to take it out and fondle it would grow in the mind, and the act of doing so felt like a guilty personal pleasure. There existed a measure of social awareness --- even among strangers --- a trait that helped culture evolve. Maintaining social status in the eyes of others we display a measure of stoicism, the kind that keeps our hands from finding our crotches and getting down to work. Fondling anything in public, even a phone, felt wrong because anything that demanded full attention made us feel vulnerable, or might be seen as an affront by those who expect social interaction. Reality was a thing. People-wat
ching, even from the corner of the eye, was a thing. For men, girl watching was the real thing.

Then around ~2006 high resolution girls started appearing on phones. It was Men who fell first... and no taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star were left to them. They became naked in the dark, and there was no veil between them and the wheel of fire. They began to see it even with their own waking eyes, as they fondled their phones in public, and all else faded. Women soon followed, as the general view around them degraded sharply. They too reached for their phones, seeking images of Men who were not standing around like dorks staring into their phones. But you can only stare at stuff for so long. You want to do stuff. People did not want phones that could do stuff, they wanted something that scrolled forever in all directions, allowing them to tile a virtual Universe over our own. The fondleslab was born. Curiously, this device has accomplished everything that Stephenson's wirehead vision promised... using eyes and thumbs, no invasi
ve surgery.

And into the howling vacuum stepped Twitter. Twitter is a one-to-many broadcast medium where unlike Facebook, the broadcasting entities can be the hashtag idle whims of people in addition to people. If you don't actually know any people this is a plus. Its 140 character limit helps SMS refugees feel safe... somehow... as if they had been lifted up into the promised land, but the light switches work the same way. People like me whose focus has always been more will never understand this. It is beyond perversity, beyond reason. When we broke the 255 character string limit I recall only jubilation. Do they think letters are running out? Do they think a 140 character limits helps the environment?

And the announcement [wsj.com] that this limit might become 10k (not even a well-rounded 2^16-1) is meeting resistance that seems bizarre! Like SMS/orc talk! Even a "..." click to read the rest is an abomination, longer messages simply cannot be permitted? Then it hit me, as things do all the time.

Twitter then must be the emerging hive mind as envisioned in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. The Church of L. Bob Rife, a televangelist like any other, was infected by an ancient Sumerian Nam-Shub virus with some interesting properties. The virus propagates visually, you only need to glimpse a certain pixely bitmap but it re-wires your brain (permanently) into a hive mind rudiment. It even comes with its own language which is comprised of simple syllables strung together. Was this Sumerian or something more ancient, they merely so infected that their own language was overwritten? The hapless victims of the Nam-Shub virus feel compelled to set up a world-wide network for hive control using any available technology. They then use this tech to receive directives and communicate with each other, exclusively in this hardwired language. They also feel compelled to impose low arbitrary character limits, an attempt to inoculate the victim against other cultural influences. They no longer tolerate long words, whole sen
tances or any other language. Have you ever seen anything like this?

"I GE EN I GE EN NU GE EN NU GE EN US SA TUR RA LU RA ZE EM MEN"
"LOL"

Of course you have. That is an SMS text message, transmitted by a teenager. The recipient indicates receipt and assent.

[from Snow Crash] "Yes, sir. Used in Mesopotamia until roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of all written languages." ... "Oh. So all the other languages are descended from it?" For a moment, the Librarian's eyes glance upward, as if he's thinking about something. This is a visual cue to inform Hiro that he's making a momentary raid on the Library. "Actually, no," the Librarian says. "No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words -- very unusual." ... "You are saying," Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, "that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together." ... "Yes, sir." ... "Would it sound anything like glossolalia?" ... "Judgment call. Ask someone real," the Librarian says. "Does it sound like any modern tongue?" ... "There is no provable genetic relationship between Sumerian and any tongue that came afterward."

It is exactly as if a virus burned itself out and went dormant.

My theory is that Nam-Shub is loose in the world today. One of the original designers of the GSM/SMS message system delved too deep, as it were, and awoke that which was best forgotten. The cell phone network, with its tiny character limit and its codecs that render speech into syllabic gibberish, helped to pre-condition us, especially the young, to reject anything of some length. As rabies hates water, they have an aversion to long words, books, rhetoric, philosophy. TL;DR has become a badge of honor. All that was missing was the ability to deliver to the eyes, that infecting bitmap that re-wires the brain. Not all those images circulated on smartphone fondleslabs were girls.

Twitter is the Nam-Shub hive mind and Trump is merely the latest to become infected. His ideas (expressed privately in the syllabic language) are not easily integrating into this collective mostly-liberal mostly-Democratic hive mind. If this was any other so-called 'social network' people would just voluntarily segregate into groups who'd unfriend one another. But the Nam-Shub does not allow this. From the infection must result a Single Hive Mind and it must achieve total domination of the entire species. It is bizarre that SJWs and non-Trump whatchamacllits would meet the actions of Trump --- indistinguishable from their own --- with such vehemence. But if you see it as a virus's reaction to the attack of its host, it all makes sense. One humanity has been completely absorbed we will be ready for the next step, and we'll learn what really happened to the people of ancient Sumer.

[Source] (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8805061&cid=51596349)