> Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon [...] physical space

I'd like to put extra emphasis on this "swallows": It's not just that a location is generating eerie mimics, like the output hopper of an eldritch factory. The space uses mimicry to attract, surround, and swallow people. We are like insects who cannot quite comprehend the pitcher-plant. The terror and dread comes from an unhappy-medium of partial understanding.

Through that lens, we can see a lot of rather low-hanging-fruit for further comparisons to "late-stage capitalism" or other obtuse and soulless systems we can't avoid.

> 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.

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[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.