Bullshit, Precisely

Read between the lines

Right now, your eyes are reading these words. Take a breath. The one that fills your lungs, expands your chest, and registers as your own, right before it pauses and reverses, releasing the air transformed, as it has transformed your blood.

That sequence is the only thing in this piece I can predict with perfect accuracy across age, race, ideology, class, and creed.

Language cannot carry what I intend to share with you. This is the compression. The lossy kind. You’ll have to pick it up and walk the map yourself. This is the map. It starts right where you’ve already started — with the breath you just took.

I’m being precise.

The attention here is biological — felt, weighted, my own. A breath holds the shape of the body that held it. That shape is carried — air, screen, page — until you hear it and give it the exhale. Even when we read, we subvocalize — the larynx, the tongue, the breath all moving below the threshold of speech. Deaf readers do the same with their hands. The body that held the shape is the body that releases it. The sound carries the shape. The body responds. The response is the meaning.

When I talk like this I’m often accused of being esoteric, woo, new age, soft — using feeling language that carries nothing real. Bullshit.

I just predicted with perfect accuracy that you would bring air into your lungs as you read my words, feel your lungs expand, and exhale. I described the experience clearly, without argument or interpretation — far more clearly than an opinion, untethered feeling, or theory.

I could write a complex analysis predicting what you’ll buy, click, or fear next month. I can coldly calculate, from the aggregate data on you and a million other data shadows, what your demographic is most likely to do and respond to. I don’t even have to know your name. I don’t have to feel the flattening of your forty years — or however many — into a prediction. I can write a prompt, feed it to an AI that pattern-matches at scale, and let it run. Never once touching a person. Never hearing a voice that isn’t my own or generated. Never feeling the weight of countless bodies — entire libraries of shape — crushed into a single figure on a single page.

If I wanted to push the accuracy further, I’d apply the same cold method to language itself — cues, semantic techniques, appeals to authority, affiliations, signaling. Every persuasion technique, deployed to hedge my bet on what you’ll do.

If prediction is the name of the game — which it is — then what would you place your bets on? What can be reliably predicted across culture, class, age, race, and creed? The biological system we are and share. The unbroken cycle of night and day. The movement of stars, planets, and sky. Why do you think this was the first thing a human tracked? Seasons. Movement that repeated reliably and told them when they were and where they stood.

When pictographs came along, they pictured what bodies encountered. Body parts. Animals. Tools. Dwellings. Look at the proto-Sinaitic alphabet — the pictographs the Phoenicians standardized, the Greeks borrowed, and the Romans handed down to us.

Almost every letter is a body part, a physical element, or an animal. Aleph was an ox. Beth was a house. Yod was a hand. Ayin was an eye. Pe was a mouth. Resh was a head. Shin was teeth. The alphabet is the receipt.

Aleph also carried the older sense of breath of life — the silent letter, the breath before sound. Even as poetic resonance: aleph-beth, alpha-bet — the breath of life, housed. The name of the system preserves what the system stripped from everything else.

The bodies the letters came from — their referents — were experienced, known, and written down before they were entirely abstracted. The language we use today is the same alphabet with those referents stripped.

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Prediction enables control.

The more accurate the prediction, the more total the control. Where do they find their greatest lever? The body.

And what reaches the body at scale, across distance and across time?

Language.

Language requires social engagement. It exists only between bodies.

This is why a thirty-second slot during the Super Bowl costs eight million dollars — roughly a quarter-million per second. A hundred and twenty-seven million people, single sitting, simultaneous exposure.

Broadcast is a simulation of contact. It has to be repeated until the simulation overwrites the body’s verification.

Have you ever made a brand or a logo?

Did you pay for advertising?

Better example — have you ever made a video or reel like one of your favorite influencers, maybe one even more accurate, clever, and entertaining than the famous individual who inspired you? This happens all the time. How many views did you get? Who knows your name?

Look at every social media site. What is the biggest consistent contributor to growing? Frequency. Consistency. Exposure. Repetition.

* * *

You know what they program? Watch what your mind already handles without strain. Someone writes

2+2=3

We see it, we correct it. We write 4. Logic errors don’t slip past us. The correction costs nothing. Letting one stand costs more.

What they program is the body’s permission to register what the mind already knows — and to express it through language.

How about when they tell us a 3% raise equals appropriately incentivizing employees? Meanwhile they raised prices four times last year at 4% each — about 17% by year’s end. You work just as hard for roughly $100 more a month after taxes. They keep their margin against inflation and tariffs. Your gas, food, and lodging went up about 12%. Would you correct your employer and say no, that doesn’t take care of your employees, they are still struggling to make ends meet? The math is straightforward — just a slightly longer equation.

You can do the math. The math is obvious. The override is somatic. You feel the squeeze and you’ve been trained to call the feeling ingratitude — or, more audaciously, entitlement. For wanting to be paid enough to afford to live.

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They measure pupil diameter. Why? Because pupils dilate when norepinephrine releases in the locus coeruleus — a clean biological signal of emotional engagement. They’re paying researchers to read the body so they can shape what it does next.

They are mapping the exact knobs your nervous system uses to decide what feels real. Pupils are one readout. The control system underneath is gain — how loudly any given signal gets transmitted up the cortical hierarchy. The gain is set by neuromodulation and local inhibition. Acetylcholine increases the gain on sensory prediction errors in early cortex — the cholinergic system’s role in attention and signal-to-noise. Dopamine modulates precision on action and reward predictions, which is why dopaminergic dysfunction in schizophrenia produces aberrant precision and the false inferences associated with positive symptoms. Norepinephrine, released from the locus coeruleus, scales gain in response to environmental volatility and uncertainty. Serotonin acts on deeper priors, which is why 5-HT2A agonism (the REBUS mechanism) flattens the precision hierarchy from the top down. Locally, parvalbumin and somatostatin interneurons set the excitation-inhibition balance that determines how much gain the principal cells can deliver. The neuromodulators are the volume knobs; the interneurons set the operating range.

The reason your sleep broke after you started checking your phone in bed is that someone’s quarterly target required your norepinephrine baseline to stay elevated past sundown. The reason a notification can pull your attention out of a conversation with your child is that the same system evolved to keep you alive in a landscape where missing a sound could kill you. The mechanism predates them by hundreds of millennia. They are harnessing it.

Breathe. Same lungs, same chest, same release. The body that ran the analysis is the body the analysis is about.

Subsonic sound. Phonetic triggers. Notification timing engineered to the millisecond. Peripheral motion detection. Auditory startle. Interrupted temporal sequences that prevent the depth of processing required for self-reflection. Every entry on this list bypasses cognition and lands on tissue.

These levers work because they land on a nervous system shaped by evolution to respond to them. Whether the message is true is the wrong question. The body has already responded.

I don’t need to be accurate to trigger you. I need to know your body. And your body is the same body that kept the species alive in the prehistoric landscape. They know what got encoded. They are paying neuroscientists to map it. They are training models to deploy what gets mapped.

The body they told you was obsolete is the body their entire industry is built on instrumenting.

Every major podcaster you have ever heard, every influencer name you know, every news anchor, has been backed by significant capital to ensure their brand, their name, their message, is repeated and referenced frequently enough to hold presence in the cultural lexicon.

Precision and truth have never been popular or easily scalable. Abstract truth that leaves the extraction intact can survive. Truth that reconnects bodies to their own authority cannot.

They can’t have that. Your body is too easily hijacked the moment you abandon it.

Keep listening to your curated stack, if you want. Personalized to a biology nearly every human shares. The content has different flavors. The programming does not.

Or read shit like this. The stuff that leaves you angry because you just felt seen in a way you’d never seen yourself. I’m like the picture of yourself that you think looks nothing like you. It’s still you, just at an unfamiliar angle.

The only solid ground we share doesn’t discriminate by ideology or identity. It simply is. We start there. We return there.

Right now your eyes see these words. What they mean to you is yours. You can’t give it to me and I won’t take it.

Meaning only exists where there is choice. Otherwise it’s compliance, concession, agreement, consensus.

Breathe with me. Share the sensation of air filling lungs. And release.

Fire tongue🔥

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Firetongue and CSR is where this work lives. If your body recognized something here, the rest of the work is one click away.

Also check out more writing by me here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/anthonyness