There's an interesting connection to draw between liminal spaces (especially the Backrooms variety) and the "latent space" concept from AI, both mechanically and sociologically. Basically, generative AI is an industrial-scale blend of almost every image and concept in human history, and within the labyrinthine, uninterpretable neural networks that power it, you can "find" every conceivable combination of objects, styles, and features. It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled by a process that even its creators do not fully understand. Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon and churns out endless copies and imitations, each a little more degraded and disconnected from the original intention than the last. Like the way McMansions echo traditional architectural features, but shrunken, toylike, and not fit for purpose beyond a vague signaling at wealth and taste. In a society that feels increasingly overrun by these kinds of blind processes and cultural distillations, an aesthetic that connects it to a physical place (and one that happens to resemble so many anonymous places around the world and in our collective dreams and memories) is bound to be compelling. And how appropriate that it came to prominence not through any particular creator, but through an anonymous post expounded on via the internet.

> It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled

I've occasionally opined that claiming we've invented thinking-machines is hubris, but we may have made dreaming-machines.

I see parallels between prompt injection causing an LLM to jump the rails and start telling an entirely different story, and how dreams [0] often have discontinuities that only seem odd in hindsight.

[0] Or at any rate, our after-the-fact memories of a dream, which may themselves be unreliable or fabricated rather than a true record of a past experience.

This should be an essay.