I spent the day on binging a monomyth in service of focusing some attention on where we might be going if this is in fact a Cambrian explosion era. If you need a synopsis I’ll extract it from Twitter if I can find the toolsets. If you know the toolset please share them.
The fellowship of the ring will not doom the hobbits to torment and death
My assumption that property rights underlined some of this still stands. If you’ve been holed up in Middle Earth (me too nice place unclear though unclear if I’m a Hobbit or an elf or a dwarf or a wizard or an orc Or Tom Bombadil) everyone thinks Mordor somehow their pet theory or sin. It is industrialism or fascism or some combination of horrors because history becomes legend and legend becomes myth. I don’t know. Ask an autist.
Hug a hippie. Be kind to a hipster. But fight to the death for the hackers. Or pick a princess who likes trade disputes in the galactic empire. I can’t translate all the monomyths in one day.
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.
Something must have acted as a catalyst on a set of wrongly presumed dormant inputs in my mind yesterday.
A catalyst works by lowering the activation energy required for a chemical reaction to occur, making the process more efficient without being consumed itself
I credit the wide availability of accessible artificial intelligence tools for this magical ease in myself. Programs like PerplexityAI (my preference for asking questions where I need precision in my answer) and ChatGPT (my preference for open ended queries) make it effortless to connect ideas and intuition.
Even a vague input like “story about a town that turns rhinoceros as metaphor for authoritarianism” is enough to get me off to the races with Eugène Ionesco and reopen the intuition library of my mind. This era of easy connections is giving my own inference powers a huge level up.
I can bring up “schizophrenia and capitalism” as a mere footnote and my past reading is immediately available and accessible on my phone with simple cross checks. It’s beyond liberating.
Just a few titles on the topic of schizophrenia in radical poststructuralist scholarship I have in my own library
I can see why it would be disconcerting for powerful institutions and gatekeepers of knowledge that someone like me can go down elaborate scholarship tangents without any guidance.
Sharp readers will enjoy that the examples I use here include Deleuze and Eugène Ionesco. Those who are unfamiliar with why this feels salient and ironic please feel free to go down a few rabbit holes of your own. I’m sure you too will connect the dots as swiftly as I did.
I’d describe her experience as literal shape rotation with what is a “memory palace” visualization of the world.
I can’t imagine not having inner monologue. I have a bicameral mind and can picture imagery and movement in my head and discuss it with myself.
Her description of her thought process is akin to having filing system and seeing her thoughts in that system rendered in a flexible database. It’s like she’s a computer.
Other reactions to this video have churned through my mind. Is self awareness maladaptive? Would a future intelligence find this bicameral mind inefficient and go back to unicameral. What other forms exist? Can we toggle it up and down? Is it a gradient in humans of types of cognition and the inner voice is just a processing error?
Can’t find it in the thread atm but thanks to the person who made this. “The end point of this thinking is self awareness is maladaptive”
Oh my god, I get it now. The bicameral mind is still in the process of breaking down. Inner monologues are holdovers, doomed to be outcompeted by more efficient mind
Is this “breakdown” a the shift away from perceiving the voice as external to the self? Is it the erasure of the voice wholesale? What will artificial intelligences make of these differences in human minds? Is this special? A tiger isn’t bicameral.
I think this is relevant to our moment in artificial intelligence development. A Finnish mathematician wrote one of the best science fiction novels I read in the last decade on quantum minds and memory palaces. There is a side plots with embodied intelligences on Mar.
The Quantum Thief is a science fiction novel by Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi and the first novel in a trilogy featuring the character of Jean le Flambeur; the sequels are The Fractal Prince and The Causal Ange
Wikipedia
I’ve got a hazy theory about Nordic decentralized engineering culture and mental organization. It’s not a coincidence that fifteen years ago a Silicon Valley Finnish computer scientist wrote some of the best science fiction about a theory of mind that was interior and perfectly organized right?
I may need to go read Julian Jaynes.
An un-cameral mind, as proposed by Julian Jaynes in his theory of bicameral mentality, refers to a state where cognitive functions are divided between two parts without consciousness or meta-reflection. In this non-conscious mental state, individuals lack the ability to reason, articulate mental contents, or have executive ego functions like deliberate mind-wandering. The breakdown of this division led to the emergence of consciousness in humans, characterized by the capacity for introspection and autobiographical memory[1][3].
Jaynes suggests that ancient people in the bicameral state experienced auditory hallucinations as commands from gods, guiding their actions without conscious evaluation. This theory has influenced discussions on consciousness, language, and culture, although it has faced criticisms and debates. Despite differing opinions, Jaynes’s work remains a thought-provoking exploration of the origins of consciousness and continues to inspire research in psychology and consciousness studies[3][5].
Sources [1] Bicameral mentality – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality [2] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Jaynes%20Bicameral%20Mind1.htm [3] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind [4] Retrospective: Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in … – jstor https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerjpsyc.125.2.0237 [5] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072
I saw someone else say meditation is literally teaching people how to run a monocameral emulator. I’ve done these types of exercises as a child. It sounds a bit Bene Geserit but mental exercises around focus was part of the German theosophical tradition that gave us Rudolf Steiner.
I wish I’d be a bit more organized on this but I’ve been fully back on work so this will have to do for today.
Do you want something for nothing? Maybe that’s human nature. I try not to be too cynical.
But then I am occasionally presented with information in which I must confront that some people are in fact fine with getting something for nothing.
“We live in a society!” I scream into the abyss. Maybe I’m the idiot and we haven’t actually agreed to fair dealings. Maybe I’m actually the rube.
I don’t want to give up on my high trust ways. I am not optimizing for the best possible outcome for myself. I care quite a bit about the greater good. Maybe I’m an idiot for doing so.
But I’d rather be an idiot and optimistic than a a brilliant cynic. It makes me unhappy to consider how many people are simply happy to be presented with something for nothing and never have to contend with its costs.
I slept a lot last night. Have moved four time zones in as many days with the additional “joy” of daylight savings my body is confused. My mind is not.
My initial impulse today was to push through it with exercise, routines, self care and being present in the real world but after the basics were done I was simply throwing myself into the timelessness of the news cycle. My only clock is the rotation of the planet and even that is arbitrary
Oddly I think this was a good decision in times of adjustment. My body adapts to the sun easily and quickly. My mind however is set on some permanent exterior hive mind that is a 24 cycle. There is no perfect syncing of this to be had nor any shift that seems to make sense to me except “awake” and “asleep”
For most people this strange permanent awareness would be very hard on the nervous system. And indeed it is. And yet the thrum of a global population coming online and offline is soothing and regulating in its own way. Each opening of a new market bouncing me along to a new continent with new people.
I say that this is helpful to me and not harmful only say with any degree of certainty because I regularly dose myself off being “extremely online” into very offline remote living. Being extremely offline has not once improved a single metric for me. This annoys me as much as I was annoyed that removing gluten didn’t improve anything for me.
If anything I seem to self regulate better with maximally online presence. I would have previously assumed something is wrong with me but now perhaps I can explore that it’s an advantage. I come on and off like with whenever I jump back in. The past can be filled in and the future isn’t here yet.
A lot of emotional energy has been directed at the “problem” of “women in technology” in the last decade or two. Stupid campaigns get run with degrees of condescension in which it’s insinuated the only way women could see the value in crypto is if we make a perfume. It’s the rankest form of sexism and extremely effective. And I’ve proudly worked in cosmetics. Chemistry is cool.
So today on International Women’s Day I’d like to remind myself that I’ve l been “in tech” since the moment I fell in love with a personal computer as a young teen. I’m on that edge of elder millennial that did things in the real world as children but had access to the virtual early.
Plenty of men mistakenly assume that because I worked in fashion, beauty and ecommerce. I was early before the ease of hosted Shopify accounts or even Heroku instances for an app. It was a lot more roll your own.
And yet some think my experience doesn’t count. Despite it being a clearly sign of capital markets having underpricing occasionally. Ifs a good thing. You go where market rewards you and you learn to learn skills along the way.
I think so much less about my gender now. Almost resent ever having been talked into it. You do it right then you, like an anyone else in the market, can benefit when someone misallocates.
If you are lucky enough to steward your own capital, then get to be part of the investor bases to build the next generation. I do that now. I am still a woman.
I’m proud to use the resources I have to invest in what I believe in based on my experiences and the thesis I invest under. Not as some smoothed over marketing narrative with a gender hook. No I price like an actor you can do business with. I am willing to show my revealed preference.
I learned in previous eras so I may serve the generation that is coming up. And I’m happy to invest in the ares I believe in most. I am happy as a woman to invest in men as I am in women.
The focus I see in founders I have invested in across energy, artificial intelligence and crypto are ones I believe in. I believe in them as people. I believe in them as founders. I believe in them as men.
I am lucky to be seen as an individual with capital and insights that can help them carry a better future forward. I hope all founders are seen as individuals.
Technology innovation has been the driver of improved human life. Material prosperity is good for women. It’s good for men. So I’ll celebrate doing stuff for the boys on international women’s day.
Alex Miller visiting with me at one of our favorite portfolio company Valar Atomics. I believe in Isiah and his team.
I had the most positive experience with someone who works in the government today. I had reason to call Congressional constituent services and I wasn’t all that optimistic I’d ever hear back at all.
Maybe Montana folks are just built different or maybe I just got lucky. I was so surprised to get a kind, timely and personal response I could barely get my point across. I was treated with grace.
When did it become normal to have so little faith in the workings of the world and our neighbors in it? How has I become one with little faith?
In Greek mythology, Pistis (/ˈpɪstɪs/; Ancient Greek: Πίστις) was the personification of good faith, trust and reliability. In Christianity and in the New Testament, pistis is typically translated as “faith”
I have faith in many things. The government hasn’t traditionally been one. I have had faith in people. Maybe good faith, trust and reliability can be found again in the civic polity.
