Tag: Information Overload

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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
Medical Startups

Day 1630 and Change Change Change

I was hit hard by a week of poor health which meant I missed a policy gathering in Helena today which I was really excited to attend. One of the topics was autonomy and choice in medical care and health.

And with any unexpected change of plans I try to see the upside. Because I was bed resting I was able to catch up on a keynote speech by engineer and technical communicating savant Andrei Karpathy’s talk to YC’s Startup School.

He is an excellent public speaker and has a rare gift for clarity which benefits the entire software ecosystem. And we are an industry who disproportionately see the value of sharing in real time the changes we are seeing as we build. This generation built the networks and seeded the data with our content that enabled these models.

I saw in the talk the long lineage of technical cycles, access expansion and autonomy expanding that I have been a part of since my childhood. I’ve seen a few development and deployment cycles to use the theories of Carlotta Perez

Each cycle granted more power to sharing. The excess value generation of making our tools open to more external use has proven itself. And that has generally made for cycles of innovation that are shared mid deployment by the people as it happens.

And yet we still struggle with the right way of interacting with the tools. Math is fairly abstract. Your average human doesn’t much care for conditionals. We developed mathematics over such odd timeframes that it’s somehow easier to think it’s not in tandem with a culture and a commercial environment.

Maybe some only look at the industrial or military applications for tools and they care little about how they were made. The level of autonomy and control and abstraction that is enabled by software baffles. The more accessible something becomes the more we need to think of the user of the tool. Specialists can use special tooling and need not be so accessible. When it becomes a tool for masses things change. And we are in a changing moment for software as a tool just as the world has the highest expectations for them. Because we are perhaps at the edge of the great buildout.

Karpathy said that working with LLMs can feel like using the command line. It’s an intuitive framing for many programmers. He believes we have not yet found the graphical user interface for this era even as we are perhaps building new operating systems.

A screenshot from Karpathy’s YC Startup School 2025 talk

The GUI or graphical user interface was a mind blowing shift for the personal computing revolution. It allowed in a world of new users including you to use the benefits of computing. Which wasn’t just calculating missile trajectory. The commercial possibilities were as endless as the personal and aesthetic.

That change in access built enormous businesses and was the stuff of nasty backstabbing in the commercialization processes and the competition was very sharp in personal computing era. My father sold software through an old school reseller called Ingram and I gather it was a pretty wild time in the eighties.

But the fresh paradigm is always beyond reach. It’s there waiting to upend your entire world.

To quote Neal Stephenson “ in the beginning there was the command” essay

We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now—my very first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I’d known it.

We are in an operating system shift now and we don’t know what to think about it it’s structure. It’s modeled on humans so it has all the same problems we have. It has cognitive deficits just as humans do. This annoys normies who don’t understand how it’s built.

We are interfacing with a new kind of compute output and it will slowly change everything around it as the abstraction layers bring more people into the effort.

We don’t really know what it looks like at this order of magnitude but the change is here and we get to make it. It frankly seems exhausting to ponder and a much much much harder problem set for power than generalized intelligence.

How does this relate to medicine and autonomy? Well, it’s become clear that medicine will be one of the areas that benefits from new access.

I care about the way we develop tools for the entire stack of medicine from pharmaceuticals to patient data. I don’t want another era of regulatory capture. The way we build applications affects how much autonomy and freedom we can give both doctors and patients. I know don’t want to be stuck with what we’ve got. More people should benefit from the changes ahead.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1621 and My Hyperstimulation Fixes

Not so long ago the idea of dopamine fasts became quite the topic of discussion. A Twitter mutual of mine first brought it to my attention and it seems it is his coinage.

The concept originated with California psychologist Dr. Cameron Sepah as a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) tool to help people cope with behavioral addictions and reset their relationship with instant gratification. Via perplexity

I won’t get into the details but the premise is to reduce stimulus so as to calm your dopaminergic responses.

As social media hyperstimulation rears its ugly head, I don’t think you need theory and angst or full cut off from stimulus. You ideally change a little at a time and sustain a practice.

Sure we are working against automated algorithms designed for maximum impact but we all still know how to be human. Breathe, feel your body, and relax into focus on whatever you see first.

I have a mix of high tech and simple body routines I rely on. I put on over the ear noise canceling headphones like Bose and I turn on my Endel app to play Solfreggio tones or let an autogenerated audio soundscape play. I dim the lights if it’s daytime. I love my ApolloNeuro for its vagus nerve tuning vibes as a supplement here.

I have also carried forward a nervous system regulation practice from Jonny Miller. Breathing techniques (especially box breathing), somatic feeling or interoception exercises, and non sleep deep relaxation all make up a part of my mindfulness practice.

At night I follow as best I can Bryan Johnson’s red lighting routine for circadian rhythm support though I remain a highly variable sleeper. I wear re-usable earplugs and an no pressure bubble eye mask.

If I need to come down from the day I’ll do a 3 in-5 out breath and settle into some fiction. I like to read on e-ink at night with either my Kindle or sometimes my Daylight though that is generally my reading instrument for the research. Once I start nodding off I’ll pull down my eye mask.

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Politics

Day 1616 and All Hell Broke Loose

Well, I don’t even know how to begin explaining the public fight between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I’ll say that it was the best afternoon on Twitter, maybe ever? But it was a sad day for America.

Group chats were popping off like it was holiday weekend and absolutely pandemonium reigned on every newsfeed. Major newspapers were maintaining timelines updated tweet by tweet. These are the WSJ and the New York Times late afternoon mountain time.

Today will take time to dissect and I’m sure the Wikipedia page for Thursday June 5th 2025 will be chaotic. So much ridiculous fighting and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. It was an ugly spat and a public display of contempt for the millions of Americans who just want our government to function.

But holy shit is it funny to see grown men lose their absolute minds publicly when the stakes are literally our government and the most important currency in the world. Honestly I’m so disappointed I can’t even take comfort in being at the very edge of the empire.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1612 and Netrunner Molotov Bang Bang Summer

Being a mere node in a large but influential network I transmit as much as I receive. I intake and reroute information as part of my own synthesis process and I appreciate that it benefits me and others. But it also does damage and today was a rough start to June by any measure.

I saw a lot today and I only pass some of it along with the thought it’s going to be netrunner bang bang Gibsonian “who respects the nation state” asymmetrical energy Summer of 2025.

Any utopian dreams of a human noosphere of higher collective intelligence must reflect upon quotidian horrors showing our baser impulses daily and summer is war season for good logistical reasons.

Ukraine appears to have blow up a number of Russian fighter jets with drones smuggled in with trucks. Let’s recall the below image from last year. Ukrainian Netrunners vaping while flying FPV drones stepped up their game hardcore today.

Ukrainian FPV drone operator smoking a vape circa summer of 2024

believe this is the first ever direct attack on any nation’s nuclear triad in history, and it succeeded – @antroyn

Twitter is awash in footage of this drone attack on Russian fighter planes being drone bombed

Operation Spider Web showed the power of asymmetrical warfare and scared the shit out of deterrence war planners as drones versus air superiority is a worry that has now become persistent reality. Nuclear triad theory needs an update.

In other closer to home news, an older white gentleman firebombed a protest along Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall in what appears to be a kind of Molotov cocktail incident over Hamas hostages. It’s my hometown so this is upsetting beyond the wider context of terrorism over the situation. I fear for further tensions in liberal college towns.

Aesthetically, because it’s going to be a high volatility volume time on Wall Street, I am enjoying to see this Twitter account picking beautiful brutalism and “80s cocaine design aesthetics” out of the ether.

If one is to survive a summer of netrunners and volatility, this look will appeal to the sorts who want hyper focus, class & glass. While no one would recommend uppers, it’s clearly part of the overall vibe of managing nervous system input for anyone looking to do violence.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 1609 and We Train The Future

I’ve been writing about the increasing entropy in our systems for so long that the actual arrival of the chaotic years always felt like an inevitability that would never come. And yet they are here.

The internet is a hostile place as ideas war and humanity struggles with the weight of a fully networked world. I feel it in my body. I see the automation of attention grabbing even as the birth of the most powerful tools for control over my information environment have never been more readily available.

I persist in being a public human presence on the internet. I know I am part of the web. We built cyberspace out of a world of special interests and varied incentives and it’s giving us back something much larger than our individual contributions. I think the next stage of networking will offer us much more.

Because of that value of that potential I cannot let myself step back from shaping its form. The new world is trained on those of us who put up what we know, think, feel, and desire to be part of the human experience.

It’s not always a pretty picture but I will not cede this space simply because we have the tools to fill an infinity. I do not have an infinity. And I can hold out for a little bit in that time.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1569 and The Sky Above The Port Tuned To A Dead Channel

I spent the night in a port city in Greece as I am making my way back to Western Europe. I’ll be crossing by airplane via polar routes on my way to Colorado next week for an academic conference at my home town university.

I feel like I’ve made it when I am invited to speak on topics like Renegade Futurism. I’m now old enough to have lived a couple rounds in the “dissident technology” discourse so I hope to have something of value to say to new generations.

“You can’t get the little pricks generation gap you.” Molly Millions Neuromancer

On the long drive back from Istanbul I am listening to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to set myself in the right mood after the mix of antiquity and modernity I encountered this week.

One doesn’t cross thousands of kilometers and centuries of empires without requiring a bit of an aesthetic change.

Sunnier ports than in Gibson’s Neuromancer

The weather is more sunny Mediterranean Easter weekend than the non-climate skies of a future Japan’s Chiba and Night City, but with really any port city at night I can’t help but think of the famous first line of cyperpunk’s foremost novel.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer

And so I tuned in to a story of oligarchy, artificial intelligence, dissident coders and cyborgs with mirror shades. In that near future the protagonists make a stopover in Istanbul too and it involves medically advanced nervous system treatments too. Gibson’s cyborg chop shops are almost as advanced as what I saw this week.

Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy

Gibson’s 1984 novel is as relevant in 2025 as it ever was. Our timeline has become his later work in uncanny ways but his cyperpunk aesthetic has become as timeless as the domes of Constantinople.

The elephants eye domes of a hammam

Whatever transition we are about to make as humans as our own Wintermute intelligences arrive will be rocky. I don’t know who will be the dissidents and how centralizing power may prove to be.

One can just start to see corporate post-nation states emerge. Maybe they will look like Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Maybe it will look like Elon Musk’s family office Excession. Of course, that’s an entirely different science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.

Polybius’s cycles of political revolution chart
Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1546 and Present Ephemera

I am backing off some of my “current thing” hyper vigilance for a moment. I need to shake off the noise and find my signal.

The band of possibilities is simply so wide that it feels pointless to react. Who you are will determine everything from here. You must go into the future based on your values. I must strip back to see myself clearly.

The complaints about our geopolitical moment (true and righteous as they may be) are set against a great power conflict that will play out over multiple decades of technological change.

It’s yet unwritten though I have some ambition that we can all play a part in the restructuring of a knowledge abundant world.

The trouble with accelerating into the turn is the sheer stress. We know we need change but how we achieve it is messy.

It seems in some areas we will take the low road. It is a reasonable worry that we are seeing all of the downsides of American choices while the upsides are harder to see. I feel as I’ve only seen the fears I’d had and the changes are made at great cost.

We fucked around and it is finding out season. The present is all ephemera. I need to hold it lightly. The stress it induces serves no purpose. It will pass. I will adapt.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 1543 and Buffering in the Network

Being that so much of modern work is done online it is a challenge to ever really unplug. I feel as if startups, finance and media have it particularly bad.

I try not to let myself burn out on the dopaminergic waves of the network. But I am a citizens of the internet and just like Molly Millions I’m suffering from the central nervous system stress the Cyperpunk future promised us.

I am however going to attempt a pull back to refocus myself so that I don’t get pulled by the strong currents of the network. A lot of low roads will be traversed between here and wherever we land.