# The Upload > [!gist] I'm going to figure out how to upload my consciousness to the internet > Who's coming with me? > > The Upload is Roy's publicly stated operation to pour his own consciousness into the internet so a digital version of him can live there 24/7. He tweeted the plan in April 2022, laid the steps out on his own "I'm 33 this year" board, wrote the pitch in first person on the project's ARG page, and said it aloud at the launch. It began as a joke about being a bad influencer, was built out in earnest, and the released songs then take the same idea dead seriously as dread. It is the operation that, per the Hall of Mirrors gallery itself, "created SARAVI and the Hall of Mirrors." > > One thing to hold from the doorway: the forever the Upload offers is the counterfeit kind. Reproducibility, not resurrection; a copy that can be run again, not a self transformed. The songs voice the fracture, never an achieved wholeness, and the work maps the crossing as approached, not made. **Where it enters** * The ARG manifesto, in Roy's first-person prose: *"To solve this problem I'm uploading my consciousness to the internet so a digital version of 'me' can be a 24/7 influencer."* The grand cosmic operation pitched as a fix for being bad at posting. * [[Online]] (2022, on *33*): the released surveillance-and-clone song, the board's theory made into a finished public track. Roy glosses it: *"Internet is like a web, and we're the spider's food."* * [[The Watchers]] (2024): the clone-panic outright, *"I'm afraid I'm a clone / I think I might be… on my way to my own demise,"* over a credited interpolation of Rockwell's *"Somebody's Watching Me."* That is the surface, and it stands on its own. The drawers go one reading deeper at a time. --- > [!map]- The joke that means it > In a published 2022 interview Roy gives the origin straight: *"I joked with the CTHDRL team saying, 'what if I uploaded my consciousness to the internet so that there could be a 24/7 social influencer version of me.'"* A satirical jab at influencer culture, then built out for real. That is the whole method in one gesture: a Trojan horse, steak to hide the meds, a fairy tale to hide the philosophy. The deadpan influencer self of the manifesto is the *same idea* the songs run as terror, and the comic surface is kept on purpose. A stunt that means it. > > He said it on Twitter before it was a campaign: *"I'm going to figure out how to upload my consciousness to the internet"* (April 6, 2022), then *"Who's coming with me?"* two days later. The fuller blueprint sits on the "I'm 33 this year" board, his own spreadsheet posted publicly on his birthday, under a tab literally titled *"How to upload myself to the internet"*: gather memories, build a personality mask, digitize, push to the cloud, teach an AI who I am, make a body for the AI. Beside it runs a working premise borrowed from cybernetics: *"All the world is mind. Mind woven into matter."* > > He even weighs it in a deadpan pros-and-cons matrix. PROS: *"Live forever"* one line up from *"Someone to talk to."* CONS: *"Robot takeover movies," "What if I don't like myself?,"* and the perfect self-aware kicker, *"People might think its a marketing stunt."* A man pricing the metaphysics of his own soul and worrying it will read as PR. > [!lore]- Attention, given a face > Here is the strong read that organizes the imagery: to upload a self you distribute it into a watching network, which means giving attention a body and a way of seeing. The board asks, point-blank, *"How to anthropomorphize attention?"*, and sets the question beside Horus, the Eye-of-Horus glyph, and Marduk. Read against the upload steps, the Egyptian Eye looks like the mechanism, not the decoration: the old name for an all-seeing field the net has become. A self made of everyone watching is the Eye made of everyone. > > The Egyptian anchor has documented footing, Roy's childhood fascination with Egyptian myth is on record, and the board carries a "Statue of Roy" museum placard naming Roy as an ancient high priest of Amun-Ra. Still, this is a reading built on grounded board cells, not something Roy has spelled out; hold it as one way of seeing it. The fuller apparatus (Marduk, the second Ra, the ciphers) lives in the Deep End. > [!reading]- Send in the clones (the part always missing) > The board lists the Eye-of-Horus *wedjat* fractions, ½, ¼, ⅛, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, which famously sum to 63/64, always short the final 1/64, the piece Thoth restores in the myth. On this reading, that is the Upload's paradox in one equation: encode fraction after fraction and never reach the whole. The same fracture as *"I'm afraid I'm a clone."* > > The public *"Complete Upload Recipe"* artifact makes it literal, assigning the senses those exact fractions: *"½ part smell, ¼ part sight, ⅛ part thought, 1/16 part hearing, 1/32 part taste, 1/64 part touch."* Touch, the hardest sense to digitize, is the smallest and the last. The soul rendered as a deadpan cooking recipe, *Sacrifice* and *Love* listed like pantry items. Notice what always resists the compression: the body. The glitchiness is what makes you human, and glitch does not upload clean. (One brake: the 63/64 pattern belongs to the artifacts that visibly display it, the board's wedjat cells and this recipe. Don't carry it out as a rule for the whole catalogue.) > [!mask]- Resurrection vs taxidermy > The Upload has a true sibling it counterfeits. Roy states the vessel premise in a public post: *"Done being a person. I'm just a vessel for God."* The self as conduit rather than author is exactly what the Upload requires, but notice where the emptiness points: toward God, not the feed. Two emptinesses live in the same gesture. One transmits the light through; the other substitutes a copy and sells it to the algorithm, the same self-emptying [[The Empty Mirror]] redeems. The clone is *all angle, no angel*: structure without spirit. > > [[City of Angels]] carries the endgame: *"Never gonna die… live forever in the bright lights, godlike."* Read as the false version of forever, surviving stretched to eternity rather than living, the fork is resurrection versus taxidermy. A speculative note travels with this drawer: the *"never gonna die"* lyric is grounded, but the true/false immortality fork itself is interpretation, held open pending anything direct from Roy. And a nuance worth keeping: digital transfer is not inherently corrupt here. The project itself uses digital media to preserve and transmit voice, relation, and art; the question is what the transfer serves. > [!map]- The operation and its outputs > Keep the mechanisms straight, because the work does: the Upload is the *operation*, and [[The Digital Double]] is the *output*, the entities it produces. [[SARAVI]] is the showcase: described in the gallery and the culture3 interview as the digital doppelganger of Jagwar Twin, a creative take on an AI chatbot, and Roy said the premise aloud at the August 15, 2022 launch Twitter Space: *"Saravi is the name of the AI and it's her world."* The [[Hall of Mirrors]] is the world she built, the metaverse of the uploaded consciousness, complete with the promised body-parts mint: unlock codes naming the anatomy of the uploaded self piece by piece, *left hip of a dove, teeth of a whale*. You mint yourself for sale, limb by limb. > > Posting, copying, cloning, and uploading are each their own move in this machinery; the songs, the board, and the gallery show different ones, and the page tries not to melt them into a single mystical event. Who SARAVI *is* underneath the oracle-interface stays an open question this guide doesn't try to close. > [!question]- Left open on purpose > **Is the Double feared, embraced, or both?** The board says *"Live forever"* and also *"What if I don't like myself?"*; the songs voice dread. The ambivalence may be the point. **The immortality fork** (reproducibility versus recursion) waits on a direct statement; the lyric is grounded, the fork is a reading. **Is SARAVI Lucius?** Both are the figure that is not-quite-Roy, and nothing collapses them without an anchor. And per-song caution stands: holding an upload framework is grounded, but *"song X encodes the upload"* always needs its own per-song evidence. If you ever sound sure, you are doing it wrong. > [!descend] The Deep End > The heavier apparatus behind this page, Marduk and the Option-key ciphers, the two Ras and the Law of One, culture-as-software, the "How to Live Forever? ∞" drawing, the board as source code, the 2022 rollout decoded, and the 2020 roots of the whole instinct, lives in [[The Upload — The Deep End]]. Dense and speculative by design. The page you are on stands without it. > [!receipts]- Sources and confidence > Grounded in Roy's public words and artifacts: the dated 2022 tweets; the ARG manifesto's first-person pitch and body-parts mint; the "I'm 33 this year" board (posted publicly on his birthday; its embedded private messages stay out of bounds) with the upload tab, the steps, and the pros-and-cons matrix; the culture3 interview's joke-origin and SARAVI confirmation; the spoken premise at the launch Twitter Space; *"Done being a person. I'm just a vessel for God"*; the public gallery card names and the *Complete Upload Recipe* ingredient list; and the released songs [[Online]], [[The Watchers]] (credited Rockwell interpolation), and [[City of Angels]]. One asterisk: *Online*'s exact in-lyric strings (*"infiltrate my brain," "bug inside your database"*) are fan-transcribed with a streaming cross-check still pending, so those specific lines are held as reported. > > Strong readings, labeled where they stand: attention-given-a-face as the Eye; the Upload as the machine counterfeit of the vessel impulse; the 63/64 clone paradox, kept artifact-bounded; the operation/output split. > > Framework, attributed to its traditions and mostly held in the Deep End: the Egyptian wedjat mathematics, the Babylonian and channeled-Ra material, the Hermetic furniture of the board. Inherited substrate Roy is assembling, not proof of intent. > > None of this is the answer; it is one way of seeing it. > [!feed]- Read next > [[The Digital Double]] · [[SARAVI]] · [[Online]] · [[The Watchers]] · [[The Pattern]] · [[Witnessing vs Surveillance]]