Our Never-Ending Empathy for Everything Is Backfiring

"Negative spaces", I like this terminology for what the author is describing. This effect seems particularly prevalent on twitter, where it is just impossible to not leave stuff out. Then someone else comes along and inserts their own mindforms into the negative space, and hey presto, suddenly the original tweet means something entirely different to what was intended.

I think this is just a misunderstanding of the nature of language. It's closely tied to the "AI" fallacy; that we can encode meaning in mechanism. Somehow we need to keep re-learning this lesson, and many people refuse to give up on finding meaning in mechanism. I agree it does seem tantalizing, so I can empathize with this search for AI. But there are alternatives.