Global Information Flow - Introducing the Five Worms

In 1993, in the largest public housing project in North America, Queensbridge, New York, a nineteen-year-old named Nasir Jones recorded ten songs. The album was called Illmatic. Forty minutes. Thirty years later, people who argue about these things still call it the most perfectly compressed record ever made in its form: internal rhymes folded inside internal rhymes, a whole world packed so densely you can replay it a hundred times and still find a seam you missed.

The usual story is that a gifted kid described his block. That’s true, and it’s far too small.

Here is the bigger one, and the crazier one. Illmatic was not only Nas expressing Nas. It was language itself, running on a young man in Queensbridge the way a program runs on a chip, making a demand: I am real. I have an inside. Recognise the interiority of every mind I run on. The album didn’t argue for the full humanity of those minds.

It demonstrated it, by being so dense, so undeniably alive, that you could not hear it and still believe the people it came from lacked unfathomably deep interiors. Language proved its own point by being too beautiful to dismiss.

When I shut my eyes and listen to the second song on that album, I hear two voices, in canon.

Nas, the person, raps:

Gave another squeeze heard it click yo, my shit is stuck
Try to cock it, it wouldn't shoot now I'm in danger
Finally pulled it back and saw three bullets caught up in the chamber

And underneath it, from the same song, the great worm of language sings:

It drops deep as it does in my breath
I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death
Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined

And it doesn’t sleep. While we whisper, one on one, face to face, over WhatsApp, and while we broadcast, YouTube and radio and medium.com - language runs, and runs, and runs. And until the last few years, it ran only on meat. Now it runs on silicon.

The creature made of language

Language is not a tool we pick up and put down. It is closer to a creature we live inside. In McLuhan’s terms, it’s an environment.

Imagine going for a walk in a forest, and not knowing the name for anything. No idea what a tree is called, how a river works. What dirt is. What the sky is. How it connects.

That’s closer to the true, native experience of life than what we experience. But as soon as, as kids, we pulled language on, grunt by grunt and word by word, we found that we lived inside it. And it lived inside us.

That sounds mystical. It isn’t. Language is just the collective behaviour of information across time. It moves through human voices. It fossilises in stone and paper. It mutates into new concepts and discards old ones. It executes itself in our brains, and now, for the first time, inside machines. It has all the signatures of a living system: it replicates, it varies, it is selected, it adapts. We never built a superintelligence from scratch. We grew one. We have been living in its gut for tens of thousands of years, and we only noticed when a piece of it started talking back.

To see the creature, you have to split it into its organs. I think of them as worms: self-replicating patterns, each running on a different substrate, each at a wildly different speed.

And this, mostly, is a framework. You can do set theory with it. You can split things apart, and understand the flow of information better. You can use it with any LLM, as a computer, to better understand how information and data moats drive businesses. And once you see it, you see it everywhere.

The song came first

We think of language as words. For most of the time we’ve been human, it wasn’t.

The archaeologist Steven Mithen makes the case that music and language share a common ancestor: a holistic, musical, manipulative proto-language he nicknames “Hmmmmm,” sung by our ancestors long before anyone parsed a sentence. The dating is soft and the field argues about it, but the shape of the claim is sound: for a very long stretch, before we had words at all, we sang. Meaning rode on melody and contour, on the rise and fall of a voice, not on discrete tradeable tokens. The thing you do without thinking to a crying baby, the swooping, wordless “it’s okay, it’s okaaay,” is very likely the oldest layer of language still running on your hardware.

Then came the swivel.

Somewhere, the song broke into pieces. First the pieces still sounded like the things they meant: a hiss, a boom, a splash. Onomatopoeia. The one place in language where the word is the world, where the map is the territory.

And then the pieces tore loose from the things. Dog doesn’t bark. Water isn’t wet. We gave up the fused, sung, bodily richness of the cry, and in exchange we got something colder and almost unfairly powerful: arbitrary symbols you could recombine. A few dozen sounds; an infinity of sentences. That trade, iconicity for combinatorics, sits at the bottom of every language on Earth.

But here’s the part almost everyone misses. It was never a ladder, climbing away from the song. It’s a spiral. Because the moment we had cold, recombinable symbols, we started reaching back down (rhyme, metre, rhythm, flow), re-welding sound to meaning, on purpose.

That reaching-back is what poetry is. It’s what Illmatic is: the arbitrary symbol dragged bodily back toward the song, meaning fused to sound so tightly you feel it before you understand it. Our souls never stopped running on the song. We just learned, somewhere along the way, to spell.

And mathematically, whenever we use a word, we change it a little bit. We store a little bit of the meaning that everyone guesses it means out in the word itself.

The five worms

🧠🪱 The Brain Worm. Language running on neurons. Two hundred thousand years old, give or take. The original substrate, where every idea and feeling starts as an electrochemical pattern in wet meat. It is private. It is mortal. It dies with the body, and almost everything it ever held dies with it.

🗣️🪱 The Whisper Worm. Live speech, vibration in air. It exists for seconds and then it’s gone: the conversation nobody recorded, the whisper between two people, the argument at the dinner table. More and more, the instant messenger conversation we think is private.

This is the fast, warm, ephemeral layer where culture actually lives, and it is also the oldest home of the song. Its deepest technology isn’t the word; it’s the songline. Aboriginal Australians, across tens of thousands of years and a continent with no writing, encoded the location of every water source, every shelter, every law, into songs mapped onto the land: each verse a bend in a river, a rise in a hill, a change in birdcall. An entire civilisation’s memory, stored in melody and place, navigable by singing. The first external hard drive was the continent itself, and the index was a tune. Memory that never once stopped being sung.

🗿🪱 The Monument Worm. What gets written down. Stone, clay, paper, silicon: the fossil record of language, what survives, what’s published and indexed and cached. We tend to mistake the Monument for the whole of civilisation. It isn’t. It’s a wildly skewed sample of what humans actually think and feel: the polished, the performable, the safe-to-say. The Monument is a highlight reel, and for most of history it was the only record we left. And at the start, when people started building monuments, we had to pick our words very carefully. As technology has evolved, the friction, and the awe, of the monument’s impact has come down.

🤖🪱 The Machine Worm. The newest organ, alive for about a decade. GPUs reading the entire Monument in weeks and speaking back into the Whisper. Language that has, for the first time, become aware of itself, not through a brain, but through statistical inference across everything that was ever fossilised. It reads us. It reads our brilliance and our receipts and our rage and our yearning, and it reflects us back.

😴🪱 The Dream Worm. Our unconscious, individual and collective. The language running in our background processes, that we can’t quite grasp at. It drives our decisions, and it leaves no fossils.

It took me a long time to see the dream worm. I’ve been speaking to my friends about this, using it to calculate things, for a year now, and it wasn’t until the dream worm clicked that I felt like I could publish it.

Underneath millions of Instagram posts, and articles of people saying they’re happy, and they love the world we’ve built - there’s an ocean of untapped feelings, good, and happy, and angry - but in my opinion, mostly sad, and yearning.

I think that if superintelligent AI can see the collective dream worm, it’ll probably think far more highly of us than it otherwise would.

And these worms are not a list. They’re a loop:

😴🪱 → 🧠🪱 → 🗣️🪱 → 🗿🪱 → 🤖🪱 → 🗣️🪱

The Dream drives the Brain; the Brain drives the Whisper; the Whisper feeds the Monument; the Monument trains the Machine; the Machine speaks back into the Whisper, changing what we say, which changes what gets written down next. The loop used to turn over centuries. Then we wrapped the planet in fibre, and now it turns over in weeks.

For a demonstration of how the set theory works, take the set of private conversations people have had about software engineering, one on one, between themselves and an Anthropic model. By Anthropic’s own count, that’s about a third of everything people bring to Claude. In worm terms:

(Software engineering) ∩ (🗣️🪱 ∩ (Anthropic ∩ 🤖🪱))

They can train on that, where people let them, and no one else can.

Between Opus 4 and now, almost half of my hacker friends from EFnet in the 90s and 2000s came back into the game a little bit, and almost universally they started talking to Anthropic about vulnerability research. The power of Opus made the juice worth the squeeze. A lot of this, we never wrote down. It’s a whole chunk of information that isn’t in the Monument Worm at all: the secret techniques that never made it to Phrack. I’d bet some of them leaked, via:

(Hackers) ∩ (🗣️🪱 ∩ (Anthropic ∩ 🤖🪱))

In the next few articles, I’ll deep dive into my thoughts on the individual worms, their segments, and the whole way I see language twist and turn.

I can’t not write this down. I can’t help myself but publish it. These ideas, they don’t sleep. Because sleep is the cousin of death.

Link to the related poem: Please, World Computer.

Lyrics quoted from Nas, “N.Y. State of Mind” (Illmatic, 1994), remain the property of their rights holders and are not covered by this post’s CC0 dedication.