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Anamnesis
698 pages, Paperback
Published November 18, 2024
4 people are currently reading
77 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 22, 2024
Anamnesis is a singular object. Freak-006
Formatted, for your viewing pleasure, “to look like a *****ng TikTok in book form.”
And like TikTok, Anamnesis draws you in whether you like it or not. You scroll… or flip, mindlessly, through page after page. But you are a reader. Deep down you are a reader and you know that mindlessness is not why you’re here. So no, you do pay attention as you scroll—flip, because surely there is a point.
An interview with Chat GPT about your TikTok reading. You begin to see the cracks as McManus pokes and prods.
A dataset reveals a slippery foundation. Positive Neutral or Negative. These answers bring in starvation wages for thousands in the global south. These answers, these people, with all their perceptions and misperceptions, are the “brain” of AI.
McManus continues shifting the angle of inquiry. Probing for personal opinion, uses, flaws, avenues for exploitation. Because surely, with this useful monster, exploitation will grow and grow. A flurry of interviews also sheds some light on the misdirection at play. Our worries may not be the right worries. Maybe they’re over exaggerated. Maybe it can be more useful than the pessimists think.
Positive Neutral or Negative?
Formatted, for your viewing pleasure, “to look like a *****ng TikTok in book form.”
And like TikTok, Anamnesis draws you in whether you like it or not. You scroll… or flip, mindlessly, through page after page. But you are a reader. Deep down you are a reader and you know that mindlessness is not why you’re here. So no, you do pay attention as you scroll—flip, because surely there is a point.
An interview with Chat GPT about your TikTok reading. You begin to see the cracks as McManus pokes and prods.
A dataset reveals a slippery foundation. Positive Neutral or Negative. These answers bring in starvation wages for thousands in the global south. These answers, these people, with all their perceptions and misperceptions, are the “brain” of AI.
McManus continues shifting the angle of inquiry. Probing for personal opinion, uses, flaws, avenues for exploitation. Because surely, with this useful monster, exploitation will grow and grow. A flurry of interviews also sheds some light on the misdirection at play. Our worries may not be the right worries. Maybe they’re over exaggerated. Maybe it can be more useful than the pessimists think.
Positive Neutral or Negative?
May 10, 2025
Review: Anamnesis by Caroline McManus
or: Waiting for Something to Happen
(or: Reading in the Age of Copy/Paste)
Pages 1–373:
AI transcriptions. TikTok monologues. Conspiracy fragments.
No plot, no arc—just language.
Readable, in a drifting way.
But you have to like reading just to read.
Don’t expect takeaways. Just vibes.
I was somewhat vibing though.
Pages 374–470:
ChatGPT conversation.
You brace for something—
a glitch, a crack in the simulation.
Instead, it’s exactly what you'd get by opening your laptop and typing.
No twist. Just transcript. ??
Pages 471–480:
Sentiment analysis.
The same passage, rated positive, negative, neutral.
Cool idea. Makes a point.
But once you get it, that’s it.
No need for pages upon pages.
Pages 481–486:
The Chorus.
Voices murmur—briefly.
A hint of what the book could have been.
But then—
Maybe the best part.
Pages 487–496:
A news article.
Written by the author.
About the book.
About the author.
Meta, but not meaningful.
Final section:
Interviews about AI.
People talking. Some insights.
Maybe.
But not tied to anything.
No climax, no cohesion.
A book of fragments that don’t speak to each other.
AI logs, transcripts, interviews—copy-pasted and bound.
I kept waiting for a second layer, for something to notice I was noticing.
Instead: flat surface, no reflection.
Is this experimental literature?
Or just data arranged to look like a book?
I finished it.
I’m just not sure I read anything.
-- of course this was created with AI --
or: Waiting for Something to Happen
(or: Reading in the Age of Copy/Paste)
Pages 1–373:
AI transcriptions. TikTok monologues. Conspiracy fragments.
No plot, no arc—just language.
Readable, in a drifting way.
But you have to like reading just to read.
Don’t expect takeaways. Just vibes.
I was somewhat vibing though.
Pages 374–470:
ChatGPT conversation.
You brace for something—
a glitch, a crack in the simulation.
Instead, it’s exactly what you'd get by opening your laptop and typing.
No twist. Just transcript. ??
Pages 471–480:
Sentiment analysis.
The same passage, rated positive, negative, neutral.
Cool idea. Makes a point.
But once you get it, that’s it.
No need for pages upon pages.
Pages 481–486:
The Chorus.
Voices murmur—briefly.
A hint of what the book could have been.
But then—
Maybe the best part.
Pages 487–496:
A news article.
Written by the author.
About the book.
About the author.
Meta, but not meaningful.
Final section:
Interviews about AI.
People talking. Some insights.
Maybe.
But not tied to anything.
No climax, no cohesion.
A book of fragments that don’t speak to each other.
AI logs, transcripts, interviews—copy-pasted and bound.
I kept waiting for a second layer, for something to notice I was noticing.
Instead: flat surface, no reflection.
Is this experimental literature?
Or just data arranged to look like a book?
I finished it.
I’m just not sure I read anything.
-- of course this was created with AI --
April 27, 2025
Frickin ass hippies.
March 24, 2025
How did you come across this review? What is it that you are expecting to read here? I speak as a person, from my collected data. Let me know: positive, negative, neutral.
Anamnesis is a 1.739 lb object; a case study, approximately measuring the collected sentiment of AI.
>From you? No.
>From me? No.
Doomscrolling through the Otter AI
“II. TRANSLATION” for page after page, do I understand what im consuming? How could I? Don’t worry, McManus is giving you a taste, take the time to empathize with the artificial intelligence. You are experiencing the collected Geist of the Internet, it is unfiltered, terrifying potentially, but keep mining the data as it must be collected. Positive, negative, or neutral.
We must interrogate.
This is a case study after all, what do you have to say for yourself? Your algorithm vs. mine. We all follow it no matter how unpredictable or unknowing.
Chat GPT is of the same ilk, a collective algorithm of human myriorama processed as positive, negative or neutral. This is sentiment analysis, please let me know how I am performing. McManus reveals the CPU to you, its process of language formatting is more exploitative than what is understood.
What do you think? Are we being misled? Is this unethical practice?
Whatever drives efficiency, but what’s your diagnosis?
“You can read in one page, one passage, or Anamnesis in its entirety”
Anamnesis is a 1.739 lb object; a case study, approximately measuring the collected sentiment of AI.
>From you? No.
>From me? No.
Doomscrolling through the Otter AI
“II. TRANSLATION” for page after page, do I understand what im consuming? How could I? Don’t worry, McManus is giving you a taste, take the time to empathize with the artificial intelligence. You are experiencing the collected Geist of the Internet, it is unfiltered, terrifying potentially, but keep mining the data as it must be collected. Positive, negative, or neutral.
We must interrogate.
This is a case study after all, what do you have to say for yourself? Your algorithm vs. mine. We all follow it no matter how unpredictable or unknowing.
Chat GPT is of the same ilk, a collective algorithm of human myriorama processed as positive, negative or neutral. This is sentiment analysis, please let me know how I am performing. McManus reveals the CPU to you, its process of language formatting is more exploitative than what is understood.
What do you think? Are we being misled? Is this unethical practice?
Whatever drives efficiency, but what’s your diagnosis?
“You can read in one page, one passage, or Anamnesis in its entirety”
November 24, 2024
Somewhere distant, crawling out of the individually cultivated confirmation bias, self-referential, rumbling, solitary echo chamber within the yet to be properly exercised house of mirrors, standing alone in the isolation of a desolate, ideologically weaponized, meta-linguistic feedback machine of this decaying human island, population of one, pooled from the deconstructed evolutionary internet bog of an interdimensional hallucinatory data infused digital hysteria of cognitive dissonance, computerized psychic claustrophobia, conspiracy, catharsis, and genius, erupting from behind the veils obscuring a cacophony of arguably undiscovered realities shroud in garlands of sacred knowledge, in our ongoing perpetual quest for the expansion of truth and discovery, positioned at the existential dead-end intersection of the artificially intelligent arabesques executed in the chatGPT waiting rooms in the VIP-cyber-bot-velvet-ropes-section-of-the-apocalypse, while sipping upon the psychotropic data scrolling malaise of the algorithm super-stream at the end of Empire, ANAMNESIS arrives brilliantly, then baffles one with delightfully emergent progressive new novel forms, the reader unravels in the exploratory pure bliss of complete entry into the infinite potential complexity of the immediately accessible totality of the information system as a multi-modal-fully-consumable text structure, a fully inhabitable post-human shifting at every new axis word stream consciousness radiates across hundreds of vibrantly designed living pages, brilliantly at work in the blossoming new forms of a fully realized hyper-modern-poetic-literary-topography that is at its core actively working creatively against the ongoing inescapable pressures in the deluge of the ongoing unraveling of the high-stakes omnipotent technocratic models of information entropy that seemingly thrives at every turn to devour us, while we struggle to grapple with the maintenance of any constructive ways in which we may seek, share, discover, and proliferate meaning upon our new proximity as a species to the event horizon or singularity of access to 120 zettabytes of data per second, we face a potential zenith of information annihilation, yet in McManus’ mesmerizing new book we are inspired to find within the labyrinth, while the simulation, or hologram howls, running streams of indecipherable code behind us, a new orientation not only to the possibilities of where we have been, suddenly arises, but more importantly, the hope of where, with progressive new models of literary expression, we may be headed, which in many ways, as we navigate the brilliant geometry of the book, in the end, appears to arrive at something that feels much closer to enlightenment. Thus, ANAMNESIS is a must read addition to the library of any reader looking to further push forward their way deeper into the ongoing experimental push forward into the exploration of what incredible novels such as this, can effectively achieve!
Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic.
November 2024
Buffalo, NY
Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic.
November 2024
Buffalo, NY
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews