This is some amazing work; and it also raises my belief that a Langford Basilisk is neurologically possible by about 25%
Just read the story, thought it was very reminiscent of one of the plot points in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) - until I noticed the publication date of 1988, 4 years earlier!
Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war – especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.In retrospect the core concept can be paraphrased as: Self-awareness and consciousness in pigs is the only thing that prevents them from flapping their trotters fast enough to fly(to the moon).
I also recommend Different Kinds of Darkness.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-o...
But only for the brains of people with severe or undertreated epilepsy of carefully selected varieties. You can trigger a potentially fatal seizure by showing them an appropriately stimulating image. Which likely was a known concept to the author of the story.
For the rest of us the negative feedback along the optical axis puts a stop to such shenanigans.
Experiments with cats( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1111849/ ), and the outcome of patients with strabismus/lazy eye(effective blindness on defective eye), suggests that seeing (or not seeing) is a learned trait. Which is a few steps removed from being a backdoor to epileptic seizures or remote controlling heart activity
Given that AMEs do transfer interocularly,[8] it is reasonable to suppose that they must occur in higher, binocular regions of the brain. Despite producing a less saturated illusory color, the induction of an AME may override a previously induced ME, providing additional weight to the argument that AMEs occur in the higher visual areas than MEs.[8]