only a few people seem to be thinking clearly about the powerful ai future. if your world model is built entirely off of samples from this app you are going to end up confused. if it’s built with zero samples from this app, you will also be confused
I was raised by a good hippie so I couldn’t help but reach for a little LED Zeppelin joke about green text training our desires and fears. .
“Been dazed and confused for so long it’s not true, wanting AI never bargained for you. Lots of people talk but few of them know the soul of the green text was created below”
There are many nodes and each signal you toss to the algorithmic winds sails to exact audience you are calling. Scream loud. Run the solo that shows you are a live one. Act on the systems. Reach out and take it.
Just when I think shit cannot get any crazier reality absolutely fucking mogs me.
“Surely” I say to myself. “It cannot get more weird, more brazen, more chaotic, more fucked up, more absolutely unreal.”
And then it absolutely fucking does.
What if I told you there was a funny movie about dysfunctional airlines?
Getting second passports is normal don’t you know? I guess us regular professional class moves to Montana because we stupidly believe in America but everyone else is splitsville.
But don’t worry Italy welcomes digital nomads. I’d personally go to Tallinn though. But if you like Riveras hit up Albania. Thank me later. Never too early to think about where you might find yourself as a refuge.
Looking for something a little more exotic? I got you. How about some drugs. No really.
Hack the planet! Hack the gut biome! Hack your cavities? It’s possible the effective altruists saving us from bad teeth with polyamorous sex parties? I learned about an experimental probiotic from a sex worked based Austin. No I am not kidding. Her name is Aella. Iff you don’t know what this means I’ll spare you. But I’ll leave you with this.
Unless you are an investor like Yishan here, the way to get it is to pay $5000 for an appointment at a clinic in Prospera, the libertarian-run ZEDE on the island of Roatan currently suing the Honduran government for a third of the countries GDP
Now to be fair this is excellent affinity marketing. Who else would know more mouth bacteria than a hooker right? Well actually you’d be more likely to get gets thrush from that sort of extracurricular which requires an anti-fungal not an antibiotic but I’m quibbling.
I’d like you to consider that our current culture of safetyism is not trying to provide you with any actual safety but rather a pantomime of one. Security theater. And this is why we see whole generations of existentially insecure “adults” trapped looking for more signs of stability.
People aren’t really looking to be economically stable before they start families; they’re looking to be existentially stable.
Yes, sometimes consequences can be quite dire. No, you cannot put off making decisions until you have 100% certainty though I hear the restaurant at the end of the universe has a great drinks menu. Try the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
I don’t really care for April Fools. I can’t say I live in a time where I’m looking for additional cognitive overhead. And yet I am laughing all the time.
It feels a bit silly but sometimes I’ll just lose my shit laughing. Objectively funny things are happening as non-normalcy continues on. The Normie Restoration is upon us. And it’s just fucking funny.
If it feels impossible to pay attention as responsibilities mount then you already know you will cut back. Close the aperture. The return to living your own life. I’m sure they will enrage lots of people. Which is often the sign of a good joke.
I first sensed it when I picked up a copy of the Financial Times going through Heathrow in February. I was behind the news cycle. I read through the pink paper and felt informed.
Normally I wouldn’t be satisfied with just one news source. No matter how much I overweight my personal preferences to business papers I wouldn’t limit myself to just those publications.
But then I realized I had neither the time nor the patience to get up on the nuances of the day. I love the news business and even I felt weary about wading through the firehouse.
If a new hound like me who loves reading reactionaries of all stripes couldn’t do more than scan some financial numbers how did everyone else feel? Not good, not good at all.
The Normie Restoration
We are reaching a fascinating moment in history in which you can be shockingly well informed about almost anything in real time.
Naturally this means we “know” less than we ever did. I can read propaganda from every viewpoint straight from the source straight on Telegram chats. The most informed know they getting just a fraction of the story.
During the Great Dislocation (roughly 2019-2023 though many of us went into much earlier), there was a new openness to seeing beyond institutional consensus. We saw a flourishing of open condemnation of all forms of institutional knowledge and media was at the epicenter of much of that rage.
Many groups did not do well with the newfound power they had found in the hands of shifting alliances and new attention.
My theory is that the lunatic fringes of both the left & right have handled their digital powers poorly. As they did not handle the attention with care we will see a return to mass media preferences as people return to “non-normalcy.” Our trust has been spread too thin and too far and everyone has to tend to their own.
Who, or even what, ends up being the mass media substitute going forward ks not yet settled as the waning days of cable television & national papers will not disappear until the Boomers move on.
We are starting to realize little value is accrued by sourcing news from many sources as more competing narratives spin out to Cray Cray Land. Everyone has become audience captured. And not all audiences are equal. Not all voices are equal either.
People may think I’m insinuating that it’s about control or truth or ideological niche. I want to disabuse you of this notion. Media is about attention. People with different goals want your attention focused on what they think is important.
Anyone with responsibility has an attention limit. People with responsibilities are the people with power. They can’t manage with endless attention conflicts. They can and do resolve these conflicts on their attention all the time.
And many of them are about to resolve that by not paying attention. So you have to ask yourself if you think they are wrong. The new non-normal isn’t very forgiving of distraction.
I think we have many more than twelve realities as class, politics, identity and material concerns overlap. The Internet has allowed all of us to develop esoteric and idiosyncratic knowledge. More types of reality are coming into contact with each other.
Because power laws drive the internet sometimes it seems like everyone is paying attention to the same thing all at once. We get crazily intensified reactions. People go absolutely bonkers over morality plays.
It was impressive to me to see New York Magazine create two intensely viral shared discourse moments in one week with their Dr. Huberman “scandal” and “the equally explosive “Age Gap Marry Rich” essay.
Being curious I looked up the editorial team and found it was journalists I recognized from my time in beauty and fashion. There was recipe for inducing cultural virality discovered by Teen Vogue in leaning into what is loosely call identity lifestyle. You experience culture like fashion or makeup through very specific symbols of interconnected identities. For some reason lifestyle choices makes people really crazy. It seems Lindsay Peoples the editor is a generational talent at evoking response.
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of my information dumps, you know me to be a science fiction reader. It’s one of my true passions and most consistent hobbies.
I am very well read in the space through this love and it has proven to be an enormous advantage for a career in technology startups. It’s very rare to meet a builder that hasn’t in some way come to that love through imagining the future as it could be.
While I love classics from Asimov to Heinlein and I read everything from space opera to hard tech, my first true passion for genre fiction was cyperpunk. I saw a networked world of computation and I fell in love.
So it is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of one of the giants of science fiction, cyberspace progenitor, father of the tech singularity and mathematician Vernor Vinge.
His 1981 novella “True Names” was perhaps the first story to present a plausible concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others. Many innovators of modern industry cite “True Names” as their keystone technological inspiration.
It’s through the vision of authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson that I saw what computing could do to help us build.
Cyperpunk wrote many imaginative paths for artificial intelligence. Gibson’s Neuromancer and gave us early crypto culture. Neal Stephenson showed us a virtual world atop our current one in Snowcrash. The metaverse emerges.
I’ve lived my entire adult life online after an entirely analog childhood. I am straddling that small gap of in-between human. I helped build some small parts of the network of the internet. I am a citizen of the network state. I am all these things because of Vernor Vinge.
Humanity shines with tools and we had found in math a way to give an explanation of the workings the world. That our meager intelligences learned to compute and then to build computing machines astounds me.That we continue to build something more with those insights astounds me further. The acceleration of that started long before me.
Networking our computation has taken us so far and so fast. It reflects the best and worst of us. Vernor explored “what if“ futures that went far behind our contained cyberspace. We wouldn’t have modern singularity thought about what could happen if artificial intelligence really will emerge amongst us without Vinge’s work. The Zones of Thought series is a mind bender.
Vernor is as close as nerds have to a prophet. Here we are seeing the power of artificial intelligence dominate our human great power debates from culture to business to government. Everyone who makes things has an opportunity here to own building this.
I know that in whatever moment we are about greet (singularity or not) that I remember that we humans build technology from the imagination of Vernor Vinge.
No matter how alien the future may seem, we humans have build it first. Don’t you want to be a part of that?
I have gone through a turbulent reentry into the timeline over the past week or so, and have been steadying into its depths. I’m sure you’ve noticed the pops, pings, hisses and howls of psychological re-pressurizing. We are now at a comfortable cruising altitude for Julie. You are free to roam about the psyche.
A lot of people have been asking me for things. It’s been in a way that is both jarring and seemingly unconnected while simultaneously hitting the apophenia like a thumber hits drumsand on Arrakis. Thump thump thump. Attention is drawn. It has rhythm. Walking without rhythm so as to not attract the worm doesn’t seem to be an option any longer. I recognize your footsteps old man.
I recognize your footsteps old man
Let me try again. Imagine a beautiful woman who may or may not be available is at home during a rainstorm. She’s on her phone but has no need to go out. Everyone who thinks they have a chance texts her. Too much trouble to go out and hunt in the rain but if you’ve got a number maybe. Then maybe you take the trouble. The woman she laughs or sighs depending on the overtures. Sometimes she even responds. Her motives may seem clear to you. The motivation of her suitors may similarly seem clear. Maybe you can even predict. And yet chaos still exists in the hearts of men and women.
I am closing my aperture just as many others are opening theirs back up. Many do not like they see. No matter how much advance warning you may give people about trouble on the horizon if they are trained to ignore they will. Until they can’t. And then in the rainstorm they communicate with the people they can reach. Beacons in the storm.
I myself am less troubled by the rain. It would seem that we are in a moment where any number of timelines have diverged completely. Many storms are raging. The sun shines elsewhere. We continue to have our dead.
We’ve put up fences to keep the sight out. We put up sand bags. But you can’t stop the smell from all the fires. Maybe you can’t outrun the rising tides. Maybe you are a civilization level smoker jumper going from one fire to the next. Maybe an actual one. Maybe there are no weather metaphors that can be tortured into a form that reaches across to you.
The beacons I am responding to, as per usual, are not the ones you’d expect. I wouldn’t be a very good node in the network if I were too programmable but neither can I be so unpredictable that “it” doesn’t reach out. It pings. It pings. It pings. It calls out. It reaches out.
If you are an autist of any stripe still attempting to operate in the field I will broadcast to you. You may need to make a pilgrims and it will just be an information dump but I’ll do my best. You have to put it together yourself but the old web is not fully broken.
The maze of information is winding and the roll ups and bureaucracy winds on and off the Silk Road. Literal and metaphorical. I don’t even know how many of you bought drugs on the old internets and how many of you bought Uranium. I have nothing but Netflix and communist literature. Lots of people have opinions on drugs and whores. I am not one of them truth be told except I’m of the firm opinion whores shouldn’t side with empire but I’m not in Burke’s Peerage so what do I know.
Maybe there is a world where Bridgerton actually happened and some autistic king and some colonial wife really do live in harmony. I don’t know I’m a William Gibson fan. Pour one out for information wants to be free homies. The nerds shouldn’t have been weaponized and whatever capitalism is doing should probably check in with reality.
How to tell what a company does
You are caught in someone’s opinion. None of us know who is influencing us except the sort of dorks who map carefully and most of the nerds have day jobs. The only ones who see it are just doing their best to allocate the attention and resources. Lots of people are doing chaos magic. Maybe stop? Or summon better demons.
Any number of nerds are caught in elaborate webs of inferences. A lot of them are left wingers. Precious view are genuine communists. But also some sincere ones are out there. Most are happy to be in the recursive loop of reality in which we maintain our lives. Some of us are banging on the cage.
“Since you’ve chosen death I must choose another path” It was a shitpost. I posted an acceleration meme. I happily endorse the bumpy progress of material change and the myriad human lives that choose to grow. The responses to my shitpost show that it’s no longer a joke.
Accelerate or die in style of the American Revolution “unite or die” snake representing the thirteen colonies but in the form of a network diagram.
I live in very clear reveled preferences on this front. My husband and I are accelerating the real world in our home in Montana. In two years we’ve planted a fruit orchard, installed solar grid, use the power from that grid to grow hydroponics and mine Bitcoin, we got chickens and advocate for local growth initiatives that allow people in Montana to live and grow together in mutual freedom.
I also believe those rights in the real world rest on a bedrock of natural rights enumerated in the American constitution.
And then suggest you want to engage in earnest debate. I find it hard to believe a good faith reader doesn’t immediately see the cognitive dissonance.
I do have the right to do as I choose as I am an American. We have first amendment rights.
Until you can measurably demonstrate proof that access to compute (which is just mathematics) has specific measurable harms you cannot invoke force on your fellow citizen for your personal paranoias.
The encryption wars had the same logic. So I ask people who worry about the consequences of compute power and artificial intelligence to give us what we’ve asked for in the form of measurably demonstrated specific types of harms where access to compute is a threat.
No “what if” hysterics, show me specifics and we can address those in policy. Armageddon in your head isn’t adequate. Being afraid isn’t enough.
If you can show measurable harms do so. We must hew to empiricism any time we seek to align others to our cause. Show me specific harms & we work to redress those harms. Actual crimes that exist already should be prosecuted as such. Seeking to newly criminalize a basic right because of unprecedented circumstances should be subject to the highest of scrutiny.
However if you show me you want the power for yourself to make these decisions I say no. We all keep our own conscience. We have existing rights.
I have shown through my revealed preferences I also believe this transition to more artificial will be chaotic. An age of higher variance is upon us and this can be a good thing with enough energy and intelligence. And we are about to get more intelligence thanks to the tools we have built.
I hope we can mitigate its harms. I believe we can apply ourselves in individual ways coordinated by the best efforts of those who build new tools. And that because we cannot predict with certainty we must hold firm to our principles doubly so then. We must be brave in approaching these problems as the principles matter.
Marxist Leninist thought has proven resilient
I am not advocating for revolution. I am advocating for keeping our heads and our hearts in times of change and protecting all of our freedoms.
We have historically shown the value of this position and the folly of violent control “for your own good.” Consider those classic socialist musicians the Beatles. Even they understood that revolutionary force was bad.
You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s evolution Well, you know We all wanna change the world
But when you talk about destruction Don’t you know that you can count me out, in
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you got a real solution Well, you know We’d all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know We all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate All I can tell is, brother, you have to wait
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you’ll change the constitution Well, you know We’d all love to change your head (ah, shu-bi-do, ah) You tell me it’s the institution Well, you know You better free your mind instead (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
Revolution 1 – The Beatles
If you want to go around quoting Chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow. How prescient those British Boy Band Boomers were. If you are so certain a revolution is necessary but you will take my compute from me then it’s you who wishes to be the Vanguard not me.
These calls for safety and caution, lest an apocalypse scenario ensue, appeal emotions to seek a tyranny of the majority for a fantasy of control over something that “may” be dangerous but not in any empirical ways we can address together and in specific ways. They don’t want to be accountable. Accountability is a democracy not this pantomime of concern seeking control.
Appealing to fears is control. All of the issues which have been brought up in artificial intelligence and access to computer models have past analogs and parallels in our existing policy tool set and within the enumerated rights.
Feel free to specify those issues into specifics and not act like this is Patriot Act 2^nth Terminator 2 Boogaloo. We have no need to indulge in Tom Clancy level panic about sum of all fears.
To lighten the mood this is an aligned AI for you.
Embrace the freedoms of affirming your right to choose your own human life. These new tools can we’ve built from mathematics and computation can enrich all our lives.
Lest you not think I take the consequences of this massive change and its potential for dislocation seriously, I live off grid with redundant power and water in Montana. I invest exclusively in solutions to the real problems we face in uncertain times including energy, open source, decentralization & trustless intermediaries. I walk this walk. The choice to make the future is up to all of us. And we should walk it in the most life affirming way we can for each of us.
