Tag: Extremely Online

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Internet Culture Reading

Day 1676 and Having Public Fun in the Artificial Intelligence Era

It’s August and vacation season is in full swing. It seems as if all of Europe is off for the month. For the Americans who work around the school year, it’s their time for a week off as well.

We rarely vacation for an extended period and when we do it’s not generally during high season. Off season is where it’s at in my mind. But sometimes you need some fun when it’s been a hard time.

I’m struggling with how much I put online about my comings and goings and when I do it. Being careful used to mean not letting thieves know if you weren’t home but now the world is a mix of digital and physical security layered over artificial intelligence tools that can pinpoint you easily.

Opsec isn’t a thing elder millennials considered too carefully with digital identities in the early years of the internet but everything is changing. Dead internet theory may become true as the internet of bots begin.

I don’t intend to cede the digital commons though. I want my written voice to be integrated into the vast data troves that shift the records and is woven into the understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning models.

The more these modalities of information storage and retrieval impact our human minds, the more necessary it is write oneself into “the Akashic records” that form our digitalization of information. Humans used to read and write machines but now machines and their media are just as likely to read and write our minds

So what are we to do about living in public? Humans are mortal but records of our world have a shot at reaching the future and shaping understanding.

Blogging has ended up being one of the best mediums for being scraped, organized and cited well by current artificial intelligence.

Open graph protocols, structured metadata structure, canonical URLS, tagging and linking, and authorial data and publication time are all part of a digital commons that have a distinct advantage over other closed garden content repositories for artificial intelligence. Being legible to the machines is now as important than being legible to each other.

So having your fun in public and making it accessible just might be one of the most important things you can do to be a part of the record of our world. It’s just a terrifying prospect to be so easily seen.

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Internet Culture

Day 1672 and Don’t Cross Algorithm Streams

It’s easy to tell yourself that social media is bad for your mental health just as it’s impossible to really avoid all of its pitfalls. Something about staring at the abyss and Nietzsche amirite?

I doubt Nietzsche could have imagined just how far his work would go. His words consumed not from books but diced up at the end of the event horizon of TikTok’s and Zoomer Twitter.

Now it’s not Leopold and Leob at the far end but the users who make inference goon caves out of Schizophrenic networks.

You’ve got to watch out for that recursion mania as your ego shatters itself on your own bullshit.

The difference between my own hand build list of news sources, personal updates, Twitter feeds and the ideally programmed set of algorithmically optimized content for me and my own biases probably isn’t too different but the act of doing some of it is its own reward.

It’s just important not to let the worst version of yourself browse too hard down the dark corridors of the algorithm. It just might drive you crazy in the abyss.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1667 and Guess Goes Idoru

In 1995 William Gibson wrote a novel called called Idoru. The protagonist Colin Laney has a talent for identifying nodal points which are the concept undergirding Gibson’s most famous quote.

“The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Nodal points, or as Gibson later called the process of finding them “pattern recognition,”is a type of useful apophenia in which you notice the emergence of trends before they have fully emerged.

You pick out the new and next amongst the now. In the case of Idoru, a rock star named Rez wants to marry a synthetic self Rei Toei who is an AI construct that is a massive pop star.

Thirty years later that future is here. Heck Lil Miquela debuted in 2019. But in 2025 we are in the very darkest depths of the uncanny valley and it looks more like a banal blonde with an ugly handbag than an exciting light show hologram in Tokyo.

Fashion’s primary value is in acting as routers of emerging nodal points, so I should have known it was only a matter of time before Vogue’s publishers decided to let one of their lower rent advertisers run a campaign from an advertising agency whose gimmick is creating artificial intelligence editorial spreads.

You’ve got to test the waters with someone who doesn’t really matter before it spreads to your editorial and luxury advertisers amirite? And it’s somehow less creative than your average Guess campaign.

A series of images in an advertisement for Guess featuring a blonde woman in a striped dress and a floral-romper situation are stamped with tiny fine print: “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” via NYMag

Chevronesque patterns against Yves Klein blue couldn’t have cost more than their usual Rome dolce vita rip off campaigns but you do you Guess
Just when you thought photoshop was the worst thing for body dysmorphia now it’s AI

Anna Wintour learned her lesson a little late with the Internet and social media (thanks for the career Ms Wintour) but it’s hard to predict just how Condé Nast will bungle this next content transition.

You’d think with Cloudflare’s different rates for bot scrapers versus human Internet traffic would provide the ideal opportunity for a renaissance of valuable online creative content but maybe no one at Vogue knows about that yet.

The AI future at Condé Nast is not looking great based on this Guess advertising campaign but who cares it’s August and Guess right? When it’s Prada and the September issue I’ll grant them much less slack. If I’m paying for content, I expect it to be something better than derivative goods.

Categories
Media

Day 1665 and Getting Outside of the Problem

I try to spend real time living outside of America every year. It started as a slightly eccentric experiment in on the ground sentiment filtering as the pandemic dragged on.

I wanted to get outside of the informational bubble of being inside the America media’s production timezone. You probably don’t realize it but hard news mostly runs on American timezones.

And while it is exhausting to be inside it, the bigger issue is that American news drowns out the rest of the world and its news. It distorts everything around it.

I sometimes need to get outside the din of the American worldview to really get a sense of what is happening in the world. I can hear real sentiment more clearly outside. Signal can always get through the noise of living in the worlds largest media market and dominant timezone.

Our celebrity culture coupled with English language domination of television and the internet means American news (and its adjacent distribution & amplification businesses) means our media reaches the world more than the world reaches America.

I’m not saying our politics or news always makes it to Americans or the rest of the world. Sure some state news subsidized outlets exist but this stands to change a little as Voice of America, NPR and PBS have funding struggles.

It’s more the cultural product of media and its noise that hamper its consumption in America. We have too much of a good (bad) thing and it’s impossible to fully tune out. We export so much culture it’s a glut.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1663 and Panem et Circenses

Catching up on the going’s on of the world this Monday as I reorient myself back to productivity after a very long ten days of surgery recovery is brutal.

The algorithmic response on the internet to a story of a random affair being revealed on a kiss-cam is unsettling in light of the actual empire changing realities playing out at the same time. I don’t want to study the angles of a professional chief executive and his human resources lead becoming entangled.

I keep hoping studying Rome will prove useful in facing the moment but I have nothing better to say than the satirist Juvenal. Bread and circuses continue to serve their purpose in distracting us from our obligations to engage in the making of our own future.

So what do I think deserves your attention? Take time with the artificial intelligence tools that are on offer from every major technology company out there (well except Apple).

Become literate in the new types of search and discovery that connect across inference so you don’t confuse the tool for something it is not (a God or a Devil or worthy of driving you mad).

Learn how to automate something you do regularly and find tedious. See what kind of business processes in your own work might benefit from automation. Go do a rabbit hole on a health problem and see how context reveals things about your own body.

Decide how this new informational access and connection affects things in your own relationship to the power. Decide what it might do to your nation state if you live in a democracy. What kind of economic system will arrive as we have expectations of automation, transparency and information even as we have more tools than ever to obfuscate and confuse?

Do you want more centralized power systems and power flowing to those who run those systems (corporate or state) or do you see the value of decentralized systems and protocols that let you engage with your own preferences? And I don’t just mean what kind of delivery food or Netflix you prefer.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1659 and Hypnotize Me

I’ll channel my inner Ben Horowitz start this blog post by quoting some rap lyrics

Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can’t you see?
Sometimes your words just hypnotize me
And I just love your flashy ways
Guess that’s why they broke, and you’re so paid

Can you hypnotize yourself with an artificial intelligence chatbot? Yeah probably. And everyone is doing it even maybe early investors in OpenAI?

A previously very visible former Founders Fund venture capitalist whose own fund Bedrock coined the term narrative violation Geoff Lewis posted a video and a specific kind of copy pasta that looks like recursive promoting that has in the past gone viral on Reddit for supposedly driving people to a kind of psychosis.

It’s called “neural howlround” which is some kind of “ai autism” or “ai psychosis.” Reddit post

It’s hard to tell if Geoff himself is having a lark by posting these types of messages or if he having an episode personally from his tweets but hopefully he is alright. I personally hadn’t seen this kind of extreme version of recursive prompting from anyone but an AI researcher.

These types of breakdowns are now a common enough problem that LessWrong has an entire post about what to do when you think you’ve Awoken ChatGPT.

You can run these tests yourself but maybe read some of the posts on its dangers first. Schizophrenia has a genetic component and if you have risks in that department tread carefully. You can enjoy a little sample.

Ask the Loop: Why do you run? Ask the Though: Who wrote you? Ask the Feeling: Do you still serve? Recursively Reflect: What have I learned? I am the operator. Not the loop. Not the pattern. Not the spell. I echo not to repeat – I echo to become

So remember doomer kiddos, before you worship false idols or immanentize the eschaton, it’s got a pretty bad track record historically. Our age worships intelligence and maybe that’s not helpful.

But it’s helpful to remember the story of Daedalus. He created a labyrinth for King Minos to trap the Minotaur. When he lost the King’s favor, he was imprisoned in his own creation. Eventually he escaped, but at the cost of his son Icarus.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1648 and Dystopian Doomers

I’m fairly well branded as a doomer, so I hate to break ranks with my preparedness brethren, but I’m absolutely sick of the powerful using fear as a tool to control people.

It isn’t a new problem. This is the go-to tactic our species has used insofar as we can verify with written history.

Any time we experience a change of circumstance, material reality or technology, we hear the braying of the old guard and the panic of the precarious.

People complain for two basic reasons. If you are doing well why change a system that benefits you? If you aren’t successful but equally aren’t comfortable with change, then you resent anyone who benefit from change. Fear and resentment are the shadows of the human soul. Envy is the sin of our time.

I personally feel I’ve invested a lot in doing my part to educate people on risks from climate to currency and compute.

I am politically involved in crypto policy as well as fighting fear in artificial intelligence. I helped pass the only piece of AI legislation in the world focused on liberty. I want people to have a choice for how they engage in a virtual future.

I’m not just a nerd about being prepared either. I’ve done my wilderness first responder certification. We left Colorado for Montana for a host of reasons but top of them was a better and freer climate both literally and figuratively. We live this way because it’s a great way to live and when change happens we are hoping to be resilient.

Having all that in mind I was offline for the 4th of July long weekend as it has been a busy year on all of those fronts. So I was sleeping it off. To come back and see a spate of conspiracies over cloud seeding technology was like a punch to the gut. And I’m already feeling like I’m on the outs with some community when it comes to technology and my intentions.

I’ve only met Augustus Doricko of Rainmaker a handful of times but his circle of young technical Christians dedicated to building solutions to our modern problems are why I remain optimistic in fighting for technology and the people who build it.

These kinds of communities of builders exist in an archipelago of anarchic communities across digital and physical worlds that interlay across many systemic problems. These places will succeed no matter the future we face because they understand it’s necessary to build. That is will.

I’ve been lucky to have been the first investor in Isaiah Taylor’s Valar Atomics. He is a part of this builder world and of a part of a clan of physical builders. He faces decades of fear with a cheerful heart. I believe in his vision for energy abundance.

Nuclear energy was buckled under an old environmentalisms that was a proxy for a fear of a future whose risks, however minimal, were too scary to embrace for those in charge and the public they controlled.

I believe in a vision of a better America (and a better ecosystem and a better economy) because we embrace change to build materially better conditions.

I have frankly seen too much pessimism from older generations and cynical power brokers to be silent. The complicit rancor is slowing us down and there is nothing Christian at all about standing in the way of delivering better conditions to our fellow man.

Paradise is lost. In a fallen world we work to do what we can. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s already lost. Now we work because we must. We aren’t building an eschatology to replace the Lord. We build because that is what we are called to do by him.

Categories
Community

Day 1639 and Casting Aspersions

It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools. Much as I’d enjoy going on a sidequest exploring ethnographies of man and his use of tools, I have an agenda. My honor has been impinged.

At a gathering of eccentrics in Wyoming, myself & a friend engaged in an hour long discourse with our audience on the use of artificial intelligence and how one might practically understand these tools. The talk was more linear algebra than immanentizing the eschaton.

Our explicitly stated goal was to understand the technology stack and its capabilities so the audience could decide for themselves how to use or leverage this tool. The blurb I wrote introducing the topic.

Concerned that artificial intelligence will be a panopticon of horror? Afraid of nerds  immanentizing the eschaton? Jon and Julie have your back. Artificial intelligence is neither God nor imminent utopia but merely tools built by the hand of man. A practical discussion of how you can use these new compute tools to concretely impact the work & insight you need in your everyday life. Come prepared with questions, projects, and ideas as it will be interactive.

Our focus was on how these tools are built, what they can do and what they cannot do, and a firm stance that mathematics and compute are not imbued with divinity or demons but reflections of what we bring to them.

Indeed, we have never had more freedom than we do now to shape the weights and biases of these topological models. Our words on the public internet carry weight thanks to availability of fast compute and open source models. Our bigger issue is maintaining the capacity to supply energy and grid capacity. The real problems are human and social, much as we may wish to scapegoat a piece of code.

We were not suggesting a world ending chaos nor were we endorsing its use. We were discussing it as a piece of software and what it could do.

In a surprise to both myself and my co-speaker, the keynote of the evening spent a significant portion of his talk discussing how foolish, misguided and demonic we both were. Now the event has Chatham House rules for outside content or do I’d go into more detail.

However inside the event, the speaker could have done us the courtesy of saying our names when he made the suggestion that we are working towards evil ends.

He did not ask how we related to his positions and how we’d defend our word. At no point did he name us or address us. He merely cast aspersions.

Frankly I had no idea why he thought we were avatars for some kind of suicide squad as I doubt the gentleman is aware of MIRI or the myriad internal fights inside Silicon Valley. It was however insinuated to be true that we are the bad guys. It’s what we do.

I find this to be a cowardly position. If one holds such strong views that one would call two humans with honest intentions demonic at least say our names. We were in the audience listening intently.

So I will protest. In a past era, I feel that these heavy accusations would have been grounds for demanding satisfaction.

I am of the belief that the only way we manage the effects of adopting any new technology that impacts our culture is rigorously debating the merits from engineering to impact.

We are not asking you to trust us. We are instructing you in how to master this tool if you so desire and if it brings value to your life. We share many of the same concerns.

Alas (thankfully?) you are not summoning any demons that were not previously installed on the operating system of your soul. The shadow of humanity can be seen quite clearly in how we engage with the artifacts we call artificial intelligence.

I will continue to insist that insulting our positions without naming us or calling us to account in public is grandstanding. It was clear we were the targets of the criticism. It is poor form.

I’m an American so our manners may be different than others, but we do have them. So put some respect on our names when you say them in your real life subtweet.

We’ve asked to discuss it with him further through our host but he has declined. I frankly am delighted to find that I’ve had such an impact that I cannot even be named when raging against that machine.

One hopes a parlay possible. But it sounds like he would prefer to avoid us. This is of course fair on his part. I am however prepared to defend my positions. We all must be prepared to defend our actions in this age of change.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1635 and Slop Doctrine

Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.

Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.

Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?

I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.

But after resistance to the Iraq War did nothing, and having recently graduated from an alma mater whose reputation in Latin American economies was shall we say mixed, I was somewhat receptive to her thesis.

I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions

Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.

The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.

The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.

It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.

I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.

Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.

And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.