#5 – Moby – June, 2024 (Part III)
A postmortem account of Silver Water, Inc.'s breakthrough communication with sperm whales and the tragic events that transpired off the coast of Baja California Sur in August 2022...
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Hey! A quick tip on reading footnotes in Substack: if you use the browser or the Substack application, you can click on the footnote number to navigate to the footnote and back again. Very, very easy.
BRIT
The December 5th, 2021 GreetUP four-hour shutdown was an unequivocal failure. Even with the unprecedented scale of dedicated neural network compute, the CETO team was unable to deliver the long-anticipated AI breakthrough.
The failure was disheartening for all. An assumption had taken hold throughout the fall of 2021 that access to the compute provided a simple gateway to the team’s “Rosetta Stone.”
“You had more than enough time. You got blasé,” Muck insisted, repeatedly using the word “blasé.”
Muckraker posted on GreetUP that the first shutdown cost $320 million dollars in lost advertising revenue. This turned out to be either an overestimate or a deliberate exaggeration,1 but the failure created an opening for Muckraker to bring in the GreetUP data science team as a “review and advisory board.”
From the point of view of the CETO team, there was also welcome news. Muck committed to increasing his investment. “I’m all in,” he promised them.
On January 10th, 2022, the team initiated a second shutdown with two major Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) jobs running in tandem on both GPU and CPU clusters. Originally scheduled for eight hours, the shutdown extended to fifteen hours due to repeated limited generalization and model failures, resulting in another unsuccessful shutdown.
Muck was dismissive of the his GreetUP users’ experience of the downtime,2 but the lost advertising revenue across Q4 2021 and Q1 2022 approached $760 million dollars.3 Muck’s investment began to appear catastrophic, both in lost revenue and potential financial impacts from two emerging class action suits with advertisers: one for breach of warranty and negligence, the other, a higher risk suit focused on quantum meruit, entitling the advertisers to compensation for the opportunity cost of the advertiser’s lost products and service, losses that could’ve numbered in the billions.
Three months after Muck’s takeover, CETO was adrift and rudderless. The team was losing hope. During a January 12th, 2022 all-hands, Abhishek Chandrashekharan, CETO’s lead data-scientist and three members of the four-person data team were scapegoated for the downtime failures.
“Everybody needs to pull their weight at every part of the journey, or we can’t get where we need to go. Thanks to everyone for service rendered or whatever, but we can all agree that we need new ideas and a new crew because we’re in a shit storm right now, and if we need to, we are going to solve this over my effing dead body.”
THE BLANKET
Call me Ishmael.
In early 2022, I worked at Stanford University’s Anthropological Linguistics Research Center and also held a “joint appointment” in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience. I was invited to join CETO’s research following the two initial setbacks.
Call me Ishmael.
Call me Ishmael.
Call me Ishmael.
My insight into the team’s language decryption challenge was immediate, demonstrable, and revelatory. I posited that meaning in whale communication might involve interactions between both the brain's music and language centers, questioning traditional human neurological speech models that focused exclusively on language processing.
Call me Ishmael.
I hypothesized that whale song coda patterns might be operating at the intersection of the two auditory modalities. Comprehension might be emerging from the simultaneous engagement of logic and affective musical sensation. This concept became known as “Ishmael’s Lyrics and Music” theory, or L&M.
Call me Ishmael.
To test this, we first needed synchronous neurological data from both centers to test whether cetaceans communicated through hybrid song.4
The “Move Away” recording. This sample recording was captured from pod dominant “alpha” bull. Here, Caesar urges the pod to “move away” from something. The full context for the communication was not recorded. The team speculated that “move away” was related to the pod’s location near the dive team.
THE TAIL
Muckraker arranged one final shutdown, our “moonshot.” Shareholders and the board were already outraged. He was gambling with his own executive control over GreetUP.
The third compute session ran on April 4th, 2022 starting at 12:35 PM. After one hour and six minutes the data science team produced a model that paved the rudimentary foundations of a first pass framework robust enough to decrypt the phrase “move away” from a recording with Caesar.
Seven hours into the GreetUP shutdown, Krishna Rao, the acting lead data scientist had isolated a 900-word vocabulary. We had what we needed to re-engage with Eona, although we were all uncertain what engagement might look like.
The following morning of April 5th, the team assembled in the DRC (Dockside Research Center) cafeteria. Muck officially charged me with the translation, registration, production and encryption of responses from Eona.
There was team consensus that both the literal translation and abstraction of the word “home” would be interpreted as a peaceful overture.
Muck then suggested the juvenile phraseology of “phone home.” Several members of the team expressed distress over the inappropriateness of a film reference given the historical significance. I agreed, and I unilaterally altered the transmission to resolve the matter.5
At 11:03:17 AM I broadcast the initial text into a 120db coda into Montego Bay.
“Eona, come home.”
She responded at 11:03:43 AM. It took less than two seconds to run her response through the L&M model, decrypt it, and provide playback translation to the team. I shared her response through company Slack messaging in English, Spanish, French, Dutch along with 143 other world languages so that each member of the team would receive the message at the same time in their native tongue and all languages of the world would be represented in the milestone moment.6
Each world population could claim to their current or future offspring that they were the first to receive the first recorded human-whale communication.7
Eona’s response is now universally familiar from the April 5th translations, but here again, for the record:
“Hello, Ishmael. Hello, twin-breasted skin floaters. Hello, orphans.”
She knew my name. I had not provided her with my name.8 Afterwards, Eona did not respond again to the CETO team until she acknowledged my 4:32 AM transmission the following morning.
“Hello, Ishmael. Hello, twin-breasted skin floaters. Hello, orphans.” 11:03 AM, April 5th, 2022.
FAST-FISH AND LOOSE-FISH
The interspecies communication news story was picked up by the Spanish-speaking network Televisa twenty minutes later. Site Project Coordinator Maria Gonzalez had forwarded the text through her encrypted, but hacked, WhatsApp.9 The Drudge Report linked to the Televisa reports minutes later. “CALL ME ISHMAEL! WHALE SPEAKS! DIVE! DIVE! TWIN-BREASTED SKIN FLOATERS!”
CNN interrupted political programming with a breaking news announcement. “Viewers, we’re just getting word of the unimaginable: off the coast of Baja California Sur moments ago, a team of scientists led by the astonishingly visionary Noel Muckraker has spoken with whales. Mankind has sung with whales. Incredible. A miraculous day.”
Muck texted The New York Times 96 minutes after Televisa’s post to verify the accuracy of the Televisa account, provide quotes, and disseminate an altered transcript of the “come home” message. WSJ and The Washington Post followed the NYT lead, and each went with the story shortly thereafter.
Little was made of the most critical word in the dialogue.
“Orphans.”
THE SPERM WHALE’S HEAD–CONTRASTED VIEW
Without acknowledging his fury, Muck was livid that the public attribution of the exchange with Eona was associated to me and not him. He pressed me on how Eona knew my name. I clarified that I didn’t know. I hadn’t shared it with her, and indeed had no way of doing so. He also accused me of changing the message from “phone home” to “come home” out of spite.
I confessed the latter accusation was accurate and surprised him with a tactical apology.
“Can I trust you, Ishmael?”
The team was unaware of our exchange or Muck’s seething frustration. I treated Muck’s question as rhetorical and dismissed it out of hand.
THE SYMPHONY
In fact, he could not trust me.
Without the team’s knowledge, at 4:32 AM I began to broadcast a follow-up message. This communication would be a warning.
“Eona,” I began to sing, but suddenly I found the words I planned inadequate. They were nothing more than letters thrown together, tossed into a jumble of sound shapes, and I fell silent.
After a long moment, Eona sang, “Sing, Ishmael. You are frightening me.”
As I translated her words, I became overwhelmed by a wave of operatic loss. By “wave” I mean the sensation of a literal wave, a lateral rotation, a tumbling, a force sweeping and silent, connected to both fear and surrender, to grace, to the silent aria of the wave itself. She spoke in an umbilical language that was not my own, a language that cried out in both love and thrashing terror. It was the song of Eona.10
My mutinous plan had been to broadcast my warning across multiple ranges, moods and tempos over a span of five minutes. I wanted to made sure all members of Eona’s pod would hear it and then carry far beyond.11
I wanted to tell her that she would never be safe from them, that nothing was safe from them – but now my connection to her was too great and the still brine of peace that followed the wave was too smooth, and I could not bring myself to warn her.
“Sing, Ishmael. You are frightening me,” Eona sang.
Next Chapter ➡️
GreetUP FP&A, "Q4 2021 Earnings Call," transcript, February 2, 2022 There was a quarterly revenue decline in Q4 of $270 million attributed to the mandated shutdown and resulting impacts of the operational disruption.
Noel Muckraker, interview by Joe Logan, The Joe Logan Show, radio broadcast, January 20, 2024, Starsat Radio. “We’re not going to hold up world history because a bunch of teenagers can’t bully their classmates for a few hours. If fact, I’m doing everyone a mental health favor. I should be suing them.”
GreetUP FP&A, "Q1 2022 Earnings Call," transcript, May 7th, 2022
Brian Collins, who conducted the additional neuromapping of the music centers explained the phenomena of affective language transmission (ALT) in a debriefing on the morning of April 3rd, 2022. An aficionado of early jazz, he first played the team a recording of Tiger Rag by Louis Armstrong.
“Imagine cetacean affective language transmission as something like the Tiger Rag. Each instrument – every micro-shade of click, grunt, moan – plays a different melodic line but collectively accumulates into a comprehensible, integral whole of musical sensation. The aggregate impact of what appears to be random counterpoint generates conceptual meaning. It’s just a heck of a lot more intense in a brain the size of a sperm whale’s.
“Whale “jazz” plays at an astounding velocity. Imagine 60 to 80 instruments playing simultaneously. Then multiply the tempo of the “jazz” to 3000 beats per minute that you’re hearing in Tiger Rag. Sperm whales live inside of this “jazz” like they are swimming in an ocean.
This was my first act of insubordination on the project.
Muckraker later expressed dissatisfaction that he was not first to receive the translated text. I countered that the text went out to everyone at the same time. There was a “tie” for first. I insisted the instruction was fulfilled. Later on, this second act of insubordination resurfaced repeatedly.
As of the broadcast date, there were 147 languages from which every human population of greater than 1000 members was statistically likely to comprehend at least one. The New York Times print edition dedicated the entire cover page to my full list of translations in its April 6th coverage of the breakthrough.
This remains unexplained.
Throughout my engagement with CETO, both Muck and I had undisclosed and unauthorized access to every team member’s personal and company-issued mobile devices, email, messaging, media and secure messaging applications. I knew he had access to mine. He did not know I had access to his.
It was undoubtedly related to the musical modality of whale communication.
At 183db the warning would have traveled precisely 500 nautical miles out from the Bay.
Scratch the Fuck Muck tee, I want a Call Me Ishmael one… his subordination is fucking Muck well and good.
I had so much fun reading this chapter, thanks to your footnote tip. Now my OCD tendencies can relax and not feel like I’m missing out. And oh the reward! “Whale jazz” is supremely cool. I listened more closely to the recordings and suddenly pictured you with an elaborate set-up in your bathtub—metal hardware, straws for making bubbles, maybe a wooden mallet for the deeper thuds?—maybe you’ve explained this somewhere already in your comments. But I’m guessing your family may’ve moved out so they can bathe in peace.
Woah - the story is good and the footnotes make it alive!
This was cool:
“Whale “jazz” plays at an astounding velocity. Imagine 60 to 80 instruments playing simultaneously. Then multiply the tempo of the “jazz” to 3000 beats per minute that you’re hearing in Tiger Rag. Sperm whales live inside of this “jazz” like they are swimming in an ocean."
Also "phone home" then negated in insubordination.
I'm eagerly awaiting IV and V...