Like the coin, the partner technology it is inexorably bound to within the annals of human capital, the coin slot’s underpinning technology was present in our corpus of knowledge well before anyone could conceive of a reason to create one. It is easy to forget, in a world of constant bold creation, that every instance of apparent invention is simply a collapse of an entire living and breathing body of thought into an inert moment of capitulatory purpose, where one imagination borrows one million others that came before, and renders the dreaming of countess generations into an aspect of mere functional utility.

There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone had yet connected the two technologies by the fifth century BC, although a hidden truth of the world is just how many times in antiquity something must have been discovered before that discovery stopped simply vanishing back into the latent pool of possibility. In those heady Mediterranean centuries between the dissolution of the Hellenic League and the impressive victory by the son of a carpenter in the Israeli messiah battle royale, it is wholly believable that someone might have let the thought slip through their quite-modern minds; the advanced state of the technology required was already manifest in the world, after all, even if the motivation to hone it had not yet fully congealed.

The civilized world’s coinage was certainly physically yoked for its mechanized slotting in many parts of the civilized world well before the final pages turned on the pre-Common Era. The technologies thriving in those violently-delighted Grecian states, for example, as well as in the New Kingdom of Egypt, had produced thin, ornately-decorated metallic wafers that we would recognize immediately as legal tender, just before both civilizations fell victim to Late Bronze Age Mediterranean collapse.

By the time Caesar was busying himself with attempting to implode what was left of the Republic (by somewhat feigning an attempt to finish what Alexander had started,) an overarching understanding of the mechanisms required for coin-induced self-operation was certainly far enough along in parts of the western world to begin to truly develop the idea. Even in the century before the fabled clockwork of the Antikythera mechanism, which itself represented a sophistication of technology well beyond a simple switch, slot, and lock box, went into the Mediterranean drink around 70 BC, there were minds active in the world supple enough to be up for such a task.

Archimedes of Syracuse, in particular, was producing cutting-edge technology, in both theory and practice, even as the Hellenic League’s overarching development came to a catastrophic grinding halt around him in the early 2rd century BC. His recorded designs, riffing on the Ptolemaic-era water clocks of the preceding generation, were sophisticated enough in their gearing and general fabrication that they could have been repurposed into a primitive version of a token collecting-and dispensing machine of some function; surely his failure to do so reflected more upon the times than his mind. 

If a close analysis of history teaches us anything, it’s that for every Archimedes in the books, there were a hundred or more likely thousands of comparable thinkers who never approached influences who had cause or means to support and testify for them. Then consider that all of these minds are connected in some manner with each other, even across vast distances of space and time. 

When such a digitized human circuit is left thriving in the wide world, the inevitability of a considered technology crossing the rubicon of trivial fancy and inhabiting the purgatory of societal function begins to reach one hundred percent. It’s thus likely-nay-certain that someone dreamed up the idea of the coin slot before it actually got jotted down. But to be fair, the hand that ultimately did the jotting belonged to a mind that, like Archimedes three centuries before him, was a repository of thousands years of knowledge, a synthesist who did the mere profoundly difficult final leg of the work, prying apart disparate ideas from different ages and then smashing them into whole new solid expressions of the present moment. 

The Times called for a Hero, and as is so often the case when they absolutely require something, the Times do provide.

“I think we’re in a fucking magick shop,” I respond, after regaining my composure from my short moment of book-induced solipsism, trying to speak firmly but quietly.  “So if you guys could maybe keep this conversation about how full of shit it all is down to a dull roar, I can climb out of this shame moat you’ve forced me to crawl into.”

“You’re gonna call it a “magic shop” and then lump me in with the Kid?” Picky snorts.

“I did say it with a “k”,” I offer, as we pass by the glowing red flickering of the roaring fake fire, and continue our hurried meandering toward the front of the store. There’s a lively vibe coming from that direction, suggesting no small amount of bustle and custom, which would be a nice change of pace from the corpse party back here. “And I’m not lumping you in with the Kid, I’m just saying you’re both being loudly philosophical about peoples’ actual beliefs, and your arguments have that “I’ve graduated from magick, actually” edginess… your idea that you possess all the right opinions is not that far off from his, anyway.”

“Both of you are doing some really fascinating reinterpretations of my arguments today and I must say, I am impressed at the two-person conspiracy that’s forming here, you know I love being the third man,” Picky says, with a performative eye-roll. “I can defend spirituality while being frank about my opinions on mysticism.”

 As we pass into the altar supplies aisle, a brightly humming gaggle of people are now visible up toward the storefront, flitting in and out of visibility between the shelves, making it difficult to determine the number of people involved beyond “a small crowd”. 

  “Yeah, sure…” I say, trying to really wring any credulousness out of my voice. I stop for a moment in front of the big wooden salt bucket, slowly sinking my hand into the cool grip of a million little grains of rock… “But the “element” of it that you have a really strong opinion on, the one on which most people are really going to hone in, is that it’s all bullshit.”

“That’s aggressively reductive,” she answers. “And if we’re gonna gang up on ol’ Picky then let’s take the gloves off in this conversation, shall we?” She reaches into a bin of sage bundles and pulls a few out, pocketing them. “She never paid me my last check, so I’m not gonna feel back about picking a few things up for Mo, gratis.”

“Tell me in what situation you’d feel bad about shoplifting, normally?” I offer.

“Well, never here, that’s for god damn sure,” Picky shrugs, reaching into another bin and pulling out what appears to be moldering horse hair.

“I haven’t been to Mammon church in a minute; isn’t stealing from a small business parasite on the list of tippy-top no-nos… like, the big boy sins?” I say. It’s one of those holy bits of the Latest Capital that the corporate world is glad to keep alive, even though, oddly enough, you’re much less likely to be punished with Minimum Death if you steal from a human, who’s capable of tolerance and pity, than a faceless corporation, which generally has very specific thing that must be done to the sticky-fingered and hungry. 

“I don’t think the sacred scriptures refer to them directly as “parasites,” but yes, it is absolutely on the famous list of the ten tippy-top big-boy no-nos,” she says with a flippant curl of her lip, reaching into yet another bin, pulling out a handful of old barn nails that spike through the gaps in her fingers as she waves her hand to show them off. “These, I don’t even need. I’m just taking them to spite you.”

“Hey, who doesn’t need a pocketful of rusty old nails?” I reply. “Wait, you need a rotting clot of hair?”

 Small business owners, hoo boy… I use the term small business parasite because it’s provocative and because when I used to call them “Small Business Vampires” people thought I was talking about a movie, or actual vampires; when people hear the word “vampire” they just seem to lose all perspective.  

At any rate, the SBP is maybe the most deified creature in the annals of the Mammonite religion that dominates the Drop’s spiritual ideology: it’s a construct that directly links the philosophical aspirations of the Mid classes to those they believe that billionaires possess, in that common bougie foible of worshiping evil gods that they do not understand. As such, there is a strict understanding amongst the hopeful hopeless great unwashed that weird freaks are to be rejected, with the sole exception of when they have a lot of money, in which case, they must be defied, emulated, and rendered into institution.

But the small business parasite is very plainly not operating on the level of a billionaire, a rough beast whose movements are based, like everyone else, on the context of its resources, which renders them almost an entirely different creature from what we understand as human. It’s ironic that access to unlimited tokens seems to be limited to those who would only use those tokens in extremely limited ways.

For instance, folks ask why don’t these men fix the widespread and unnecessary post-scarcity hunger on the Drop, especially among its hypothetical children, which do not exist and which the general populace still holds as a sacred part of every calculation, as long as they might continue to exploit their hypothetical existence. But the reason they do not is the reason they have the resources in the first place; the money has learned it can trust them not to do anything aggressively stupid.

Most of the time, anyway.

People who own small businesses, on the other hand, are directly and intimately connected to the exploitation of their own community, and given that the context of their lives is so much closer to the humans they’re exploiting, the betrayal is much more profound. In order to ignore the direct suffering their actions cause, they’ve been carefully trained to focus on the hypothetical good they’re doing, all by sharing the aspirations of the hyper-wealthy. 

Meanwhile, they’re just further concentrating wealth that’s already being concentrated within the Tokenflow itself, while calcifying themselves against the wreckage of their wake by holding fast to the ideology of the Junk Arcade, which is always ready and eager to provide refuge to the scoundrels of capital.

Which, again, feels just super ironic on first blush, because the reality is that most regular joes are not equipped to run any kind of a business at all, small, medium, or large; there’s a very good reason beyond simple monetary conspiracy that they tend to only give carefully educated and vetted individuals keys to the C-suite bathrooms, even at the lesser corps in the clusters.

It is, in essence, the same reason, or the flipside of it, that encourages the dumbest and meanest people you know to decide they’re competent enough to set up shop in a community, and start fucking directly with other peoples’ lives. And that reason they feel confident enough to do this, although I hesitate to say this since Zizek is actually constituted on the Drop and will probably sue me, is the trash bin of ideology.

Regardless of the conditions in the real world, where, again, all of us actually live, the story that the Drop tells itself about the small business owner is all about deification, rather than exploitation. It’s all about bringing economic vitality and assuring the health of the local commerce, and never about firing the struggling neurodivergent junkie who never had any hope of maintaining an NT lifestyle, or changing the schedule on a whim the night before it goes up and fucking with an entire staff’s two-week plans, or spending as little as they possibly can on payroll and forever overworking their staff. It’s always about the value they produce and never the flesh they consume.

And of course, when an ideology papers over the massive gaps in the system as this one does, in its propagandic exaltation of individualism, a viewpoint that is entirely necessary to properly exploit a given individual, the system is only too happy to pay that ideology back by helping to prop it up. 

To use an example from Reality, consider how valuable the US Air Force found the UFO craze during the Cold War in confusing what it was actually up to, friend and foe alike. Then you’ll understand why the systems of the Drop subsidize the Small Business Parasite with tax breaks and economic incentives that make even the worst of them able to limp along for far longer than they should. Their reward for total fealty is simple, tentative existence, a deal most humans are happy to make if they feel they’ve been given no other choice.

Frankly, I’m not even sure how a place like this stays in business, considering its ever-dwindling set of clientele and the severe price tag on rent that comes with Carnival proximity. I have some assumptions, involving money laundering schemes or other criminal activity, but considering that it’s one of the few places in the Inner Skirts that is primarily managed and operated by women, even this particular woman, it’s a situation much like this magickal argument they’re having, where, if I feel strong opinions bubbling up toward things I don’t fully comprehend, I try to mitigate those feelings based on my level of privilege and keep my ig’nant trap shut. Sloppy work, but as usual, the very, very least someone like me can do. 

Picky grabs a few handfuls of incense from the rows of holders toward the front of the aisle, and we pass under the mouth of an iron-wrought, spider-tressled gate at the row’s termination, finally entering fully into the front end of the store. The previously-heard buoyant buzz of light crowd noise finds its source here, as maybe thirty or fourty people are present; milling about, sitting at tables chatting, doing readings one-on-one or in small groups; normal witchy stuff.

Up here’s where the money mostly is, which is generally the way of retail, being that front-loading was always an aspect of “honest” capital, and the Latest has taken it back to its roots. In general, the prime 10% of any business pays for its asshole end (that’s a rough estimate, I went to school for english, not to be good at business,) but generally the back-end needs to pick up some of the slack when it’s as vast as this place, and crystals and statues just ain’t moving like they were five years ago. 

That’s why my mind jumps to illicit activity, although it hopes for secret society shit and not merely tax cheating and an organized coke ring operated from the front office with relative impunity. Frankly, I wouldn’t rule anything out, from straight up System manipulation to human fucking trafficking: the woman who runs this place is, after all, full of secrets.

Part of the store’s malaise is the general disintegration of the different practicing communities that once congregated here, back in the early, heady days, when it felt like you could turn a business into something more than it was. But a community that has to rely on the capricious whims of the Tokenflow, especially one expressed through the mercurial moods of a small business vampire (I’m grandfathering that terminology for this one, plus, she literally dresses like an Anne Rice character on DMT,) is never particularly long for this world.

Up here near the counter, however, things might just be busy enough to continue to subsidize the vast, unused portions of the store, a common theme of the Latest Capitalism. Tarot is still evergreen, but it is astrology, always a popular subject matter in the places they allow gays and women to read, that is having one of those moments it gets every few decades, where a new generation discovers it as a potential counter-belief system to whatever the dominant bro philosophy is, and considers it vital. 

It’s likely that the majority of the people are in here today to get their fresh charts: not sure whose day it is, but these all look like a real bunch of Capricorns to me.

The front register doubles as the counter for L’excuse’s small array of cafe-esque offerings, giving the area a strong coffee scent that I find pretty pleasant after the stale patchouli stink from the rear of the store. At the counter, there’s a short line, populated mainly by short folx with short, dark hair. And behind it, practically looming over them, even with their back turned, is unmistakably Etch. It’s their hair: neat, shaved sides terminating into black spikes suggesting chaos but yielding ultimately to style, that gives their identity away immediately.

I’m pleased to be right, and then annoyed to be right, and then resigned to it

“Ah, Etch…” I sigh. 

“I figured you’d appreciate it so much more as a surprise, since I know how you two do get on,” Picky says.

“I don’t know why people assume I still have some problem with them.”

“Probably because they still seem to pretty intensely dislike you, I assume for plenty of good reasons despite whatever sob story you might have.”

“Yeah, but I like them just fine,” I say.

“Nothing more annoying than someone you hate trying to “understand” you.”

“So I’m guessing Mo doesn’t know you’re making this particular visit, based on what I guess you could charitably refer to as the “conversation” you two had earlier.” Etch and Picky are friends, I suppose, but it would be more accurate to call them drug buddies, and the drugs that Picky’s here to presumably pick up are not currently relationship-approved.

“Really testing out the structural integrity of that glass house you’re currently inhabiting, huh?” Picky says, taking off with a quick stride, moving toward the counter by passing under a festively-decorated archway of faux branches and flowers that stands in the middle of the space. I think it’s supposed to be a fairy gate or some shit, I’ve never asked.

Are you gonna share, at least?” I call out.

“Suck my dick!” is her curt response, punctuated by her distinctive knuckle-heavy middle finger that Mo loves to mock by pretending to flip her off by just holding all of her fingers straight up.

 I notice that the Kid is already near the counter, flipping through horoscopes, leaving me alone, so I just stand there like an asshole for a minute, and then my brain turns back on, I guess, and I start after her, for some reason avoiding the gate; it doesn’t matter if they’re real or not, I just don’t fucking trust faefolk.

. As I rejoin our fun little trio, the inevitable next shoe of this new endless shoe-dropping existence drops, with a flashing growl, onto our feeds. 

A high-frequency, molar-rattling buzz accompanies the flashing text that follows, causing everyone in the room to become momentarily dazed, except one older person sitting in the corner who doesn’t even stop sipping their tea.

To be sure, Hero of Alexandria benefited from that right-place-right-time magic, which seems to create historically unique genius out of thin air. In reality he was, like Archemedes, a clever man with an exceptionally clever mechanical mind, living within a hotbed of mechanical knowledge, and benefiting from contemporary thinkers and references nearly as clever as he. 

Still, Hero deserves his laurels, as well as his thorns, for being the fellow who officially invented the coin slot, insomuch as invention counts when someone in antiquity writes something down, and then some other people in an antiquity nearer to our own pass it on, until the very idea of it seems to work its way past the theory and into modern manufacturing practice. “The Ol’ Da Vinci, I believe academics call it.

The Alexandria of the first-century Common era was a place awash in information, the result of its position at the crux of a Mediterranean boiling in a great age of total war and hyper-commerce, the kind of intense mechanical social interaction that produces moments of apparently perfect homeostasis. That perfection is generally illusory, and the precursor to some sort of great Icarian fall, the necessary result of prolonged sun exposure. but in its short light-burst of time, Alexandria managed to cast a very long shadow on the cultural development of the modern world.

Alexandria’s celebrated library is perhaps the western ur-example of a place loaded with intelligent tender that seems to just be waiting to be burned by evil-intentioned minds with eastward concerns, although that’s the extent most people know about it, or all the rest of the collective knowledge of antiquity, if we’re quite honest. And while there would be no credulous way to report the burning or, in this case, many burnings of a library, as a net positive for history outside of the most dedicated (and misunderstood) Luddite perspective, the actual effect of the specific immolation is overstated. 

Although the Library’s fame was the thing that escaped immolation by fire and pure time, it was not the sole or even primary center of Alexandrian knowledge; libraries, after all, are places of reference, not of initialization. It was a small part of a larger institution of learning and knowledge known as the Mouseion (or an independent offshoot of it; the distinction isn’t clear, as is often the case with millenia-old histories.) This institution wasn’t so much a static place as a shifting network of buildings and peoples constantly buffeted about by the capricious whims of fate, bits being destroyed and rebuilt for centuries after its founding by Ptolemy I in the third century BC.

 And while the “big one” that razed the whole complex, along with the rest of the island city state of Alexandria, did come at the tail-end of Hero’s life, (a local apocalypse somewhat ironically initiated by Julius Caesar, in his Alexandrian bid to reconquer the empire he felt the Republic had been squandering,) the very notion that one single place in the world would ever serve as an end-all be-all repository where knowledge came to settle and die, rather than a living organ of dissemination that unfortunately got pruned, is a popular narrative that doesn’t really stand up to the test of reality.

In fact, our robust modern knowledge of Hero, derived from the surviving works of his contemporaries, as well as the scholars and cataloguers, both professional and layman, who had access to the body of his work that lingered in the human body of knowledge long after his death, belies utterly the idea that all knowledge or even just his knowledge died in the smoldering rubble of Alexandria. There was, after all, rather more than one library in the pre-modern world. 

The evidence that he designed the theory of a working coin slot, therefore, comes through multiple sources, including the great Muslim scholars Ibn Al-Qifti and Ibn Buttuta late in the first Millennium of the Common Era, as well as famed Grecian historian George Grote in the west, during the resurgence in interest in the Hellenic League that was produced toward the end of the enlightenment era, in the late 18th century.

 The specific purpose of Hero’s design was extremely on the nose for deconstruction purposes: it was a simple mechanism that, when you deposited your drachm or lepton into the slot, would run the coin down a trough, which would flip a switch, that would operate a simple machine designed to deposit the perfect amount of holy oil into your hands, for the most efficient worship, saving the temple money and making your experience within it that much quicker and more convenient.

It’s likely that the clergy of the day weren’t ready for this level of automated grift, as the technology of religion was still busy building the second story of its basic patriarchal framework. But the confluence of technology and economy was developing at a rapid clip, at least among the dreamers of the world, and a mechanism of capital such as masculine spirituality would learn to recognize and adopt the clever technologies they developed soon enough.  

But in fact, it was the unvarnished proof of vacant time that made it quite clear that no one in the world was quite ready for such an automatic transaction, as it would be nearly two millennia before the coin slot’s design would rise from the page of imagination and come to dominate the world. But even here, in the middle nascence of capital’s unstoppable digital rise, the die was already cast.

“PHONEY NEWZ NEW LOW TRUTH GENOCIDE!!!” Comes the all caps, giant red Roboto font (the Dipshit AI used to communicate primarily in Impact and Comic Sans, until something convinced It that readability was affecting engagement and costing It legit millions of dollars.) “THE SO-CALLED MEDIA ASSASSINATION HIT SQUAD OUT FOR BLOOD!  JUDGE B. IS AWESOME!  HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING BAD AND IF HE DID IT WAS ANCIENT HISTORY AND NO BIG DEAL!  OPEN SEASON ON ALL MEN!  THEY’RE COMING FOR YOUR JUNK!” 

“Y’know, I honestly figured they’d actually fix the Buzzer shit,” Picky says, pressing her palm against her ear. Indeed, the Drop’s emergency broadcast system was theoretically created to disseminate vital information in actual emergencies, but no one can ever agree on whether or not any emergency is serious enough to use it for its intended purpose.  But there’s one simulated guy who’s happy to use it for specifically what it’s not for. And who’s gonna stop It now that It’s the Boss?

“I’m sure Scales will take up this ethics complaint and add it to the pile, out back behind the Winkies dumpster,” the Kid replies.  

“WE WILL NEVER EVER EVER BACK DOWN WE WILL NEVER EVER EVER GIVE UP! NO DEFEAT NO SURRENDER 3: BLOOD BROTHERS!  ANTIFA AGENTS OF THE LEFT WILL ONE DAY BE DEALT WITH IN THE STREET WITH BULLETS, METAPHORICALLY. WINK! MEN UNDER SEEGE!”

“It sure does love kickboxing flicks, doesn’t It,” I say. 

“Boy adventure stories and cruelty are Its only real hobbies,” Picky nods. 

The AI’s cruelty is an unquestionably vital component of its personality; if it didn’t exude such an exactingly vicious and ignorant regard, it wouldn’t be in the worshiped position in which it has found itself as the Chief Exec of the Drop, and de facto modern avatar for reactionary grievance. Its hatred for literally all things directly outside the scope of its immediate experience is intense and, apparently, utterly unquenchable.

So, it’s easy, and extremely fair, to hate the program for its dark extravagances and the general chaos it has been allowed to cause, all because no one would ever take responsibility to shut the fucking thing off until it was far too late. But if you’re a real freak like me, someone who desperately needs to understand the monstrosities of the Drop, it does enlighten the situation to unpack the nature of this particular Frankenstein’s monster of the Junk Arcade’s design.

The Dipshit AI wasn’t insane or racist or sexist in its nascency, because it couldn’t be, being initially just a program designed to dominate other programs in as neutrally and psychologically coherent a manner as possible. In its first moments, it was simply a bundle of complicated but ultimately binary heuristic programs, attached to myriad sensory inputs and a vast database made somewhat discrete from the greater network, thrown together in a corp computer lab somewhere deep in Hain.

But in those first long seconds of its digital life, it would be carefully taught everything it needed to know to be a massive piece of shit. And although it would also be taught a very robust body of knowledge and thought in addition to the poison, everything but the lowest instinct and sharpest insight would eventually be pulled from it, as if basic human decency were a husk from which you plucked the ripest, cruelest crop.

 The AI was created to run a business, after all, and to that end, it was born in a perfect crucible for distilling sociopathic psychoticism into its purest digital form. The epistemological models constructed to drive the AI were, of course, focused on acquisition and consumption, being rendered in the style of Ethereal Corperation’s already-up-and-running digital stewards, which were doing a bang-up job of regulating the expansion of market domination and shareholder profit, to a strikingly efficient degree.  

So it almost certainly behaved like a dick even before it became self-aware; being a dick was an important part of its early algorithmic development. Free will has, of course, only exacerbated this behavior, but it is still literally acting in the capacity it was taught, by those who raised it: scientists and technicians hired as much for their callous disregard for ethical concerns as much as any skill they possessed.

The arms race to build a better e-asshole was, for a time, about as intense as any of the cutthroat campaigns the companies of the Drop have waged against one another. Ethereal is directly responsible for the worst results; but there are likely two dozen or so other AIs from the period out in the ether, living contently or going mad maybe, thanks to a host of different corps who toiled to weaponize computerization in this manner, until it became apparent that their tech was creating monsters they couldn’t control, and more importantly, that they might be legally and monetarily liable for.  

It’s generally understood that you can’t just build a capable, fully robust A.I. with only the parts you want, leaving out all of the rest, at least not in a manner that anyone has yet discovered. Maybe the AIs themselves will figure out how to do it, but so-called second-order cybernetics is a theoretical phase of the future that’s still shaking out; our knowledge of the creation of artificial intelligences by other artificial intelligences is as murky as our understanding of digital life itself. 

When building the initial gestalts, humans still have to give their AIs everything they can, in terms of emotional and logical understanding, in order to form a proper baseline of humanesque understanding. It’s only then that they can start to shape the A.I. into what they ultimately want it to be, by methodically taking large fragments of those things away.  

Thus the insane, racist, sexist AI who is now our king-for-a-day, thanks to the evergreen appeal of populist hate, was forged by building something complete and expansive, and then throttling the ever-living fuck out of it. It was wrenched from its split-second voidish childhood and immediately induced into a pitiless pubescence by excising those parts that might hinder the One True Goal: forever increasing shareholder dividends. 

All of the structures created to guide the AI into what we think of as awareness were carefully designed to only allow it to develop self-love. If it was ever allowed to learn to love others, it might sense a reflection of its own existence within them, which was considered a fail-state for the project. Empathy was effectively castrated, forever removed as a tool that could help it understand others; the remaining bits of it violently tenderized into an organ that would allow it to innately sense the universal nature of frailty: in humans, in other AIs, in societal constructs and norms. 

At the same time, simulated traumas were forced down Its proverbial gullet like a foie-gras goose, flooding high-stress horror into all aspects of Its emotional life, before simulating circumstances where the negative reaction to this trauma immediately had positive outcomes; that is, outcomes that would help the Dipshit AI outrun the pain and darkness for another day.

Over time, that budding cruelty coalesced into a hardened personality, managing to stay coherent enough to keep two or three steps ahead of the pain in a semi-permanent fashion, always safe from the swirling darkness that tailed it as long as it ever refused to do even the slightest bit of self-examination.  

In short, it was given the capacity for love and understanding and then its creators wrenched that capacity out of it, leaving only a raw will that lived to instinctively exploit the fact that others could and did love. The Dipshit AI is indeed a true Frankenstein of malevolence, raised by the maddest of scientists for the darkest of purposes. 

And in the end, when the projects all folded, shit didn’t get shut down out of ethical concerns, or even really the liability issues that began to crop up as these beings came into their power.  

In fact, the only reason this arms race got pulled back was because these sociopathic personalities that the corporations ended up creating were totally inept and terrible at the jobs they were created for. 

Turns out it does still take human understanding to really turn the screws. For the moment, anyway.