Google Research and HHMI Janelia spent years mapping every neuron in a fruit fly’s brain. Within days, the internet had it doing squats, playing Doom, and doomscrolling on a digital iPhone. What does this say about us?
Are you going to Flychella this year? I heard Flyvis Scott is playing! How about we watch The Fly do Bulgarian split squats or doomscroll on the new iPhone Duo? “The Fly,” referring to the complete brain (connectome) of a fruit fly mapped by Google Research and HHMI Janelia, has become a cultural phenomenon, appearing in several digital simulations across social media.
I first encountered The Fly a few weeks ago on Instagram: its hairy feet swiping away at a digital iPhone. My first reaction was disgust. Why are we making this poor fly doomscroll? Plenty of people on X shared my sentiment—we’d gone too far—even trapping it in an endless loop of Doom, seemingly for nothing but our own entertainment. Neuroscientists spent years mapping all 166,000 neurons of the fruit fly; it only took a college student from Georgia Tech one day to put it into Minecraft.
Relax. Nothing is being tortured. The Fly doesn’t actually play Beat Saber; most of these simulations are random neural activity wired to a controller, and the impressive looking ones aren’t doing what they look like. We aren’t Zeus, condemning some modern-day Sisyphus to push the same boulder forever. But look closely at the boulders we picked, and they start to look familiar.
Why is it that, when we’re handed the first complete map of a mind, we make The Fly live like us? In the past, the latest and greatest AI models were beating grandmasters in chess and challenging our greatest minds at Go. We tested AI against the things that we were the proudest of—crossing our fingers that we wouldn't lose to the intelligence we’d created. With the fly, we don’t bother with a challenge at all. We hand it our easiest tasks and feel comforted that it won’t be replacing us anytime soon.
So we replace the mundane with The Fly. We laugh in our seats at it doing Bulgarian split squats, because millions of people across the globe do 2x15 of them every leg day (if those ever happen). We say, “Haha look! Someone made The Fly doomscroll,” while realizing the irony in watching that video in a doomscroll of our very own.
We point at The Fly and realize that we’re pointing right back at ourselves.
As I scrolled through my endless feed, consuming content at double speed, I realized that there was a whole section of content missing. Nobody had made The Fly comfort a friend or answer whether or not it would still love you if you were a worm. I’d love to say that’s because we agreed that some things are sacred. The real reason, though, is much simpler than that. It just wouldn’t get any views. Hundreds of people with GPUs and a free afternoon decided to use the greatest breakthrough in brain-mapping to get the most clicks on social media, just because that’s the only kind of life we know how to picture anymore.
I’d love to end this with a call to action, but I’ve been doomscrolling the entire time. So I pump my fist into the air in solidarity: We will not be replaced by flies! Not today, anyway.
Then I swipe to the next reel, and there’s The Fly, hairy feet swiping away, doing exactly what I’m doing. Honestly, it's pretty good at it, but I’m definitely better.
