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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 backfrom 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.
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.
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.
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.
I am confident in my capacity to judge directional trends over time. I’ve been doing it consistently for close to twenty years. I’ve made solid bets that outweigh the wrong calls.
But right now I feel lost. I feel blind to short and medium term outcomes. I don’t know what happens next or in what order.
I’ve got a lot of working theories about how we orient over the next decade or two but I’ve got low confidence on anything nearer.
Perhaps this is because I simply don’t want my near term predictions to be true. They are too depressing and too cynical and too heartless.
Or maybe, as Rao suggests, the low road is a corollary to Abraham Thomas’ principle that to call macro-trends correctly you have to have “boundless optimism about technology and bottomless cynicism about humans.”
I’m just not ready to have bottomless cynicism about humans though I have optimism about technology. It’s possible to change our consensus and narrative direction and we do so regularly. Vibe shifts happen once an hour these days
That’s why we look like herd animals eventually no matter how contrarian the bet was at the start.
Because being optimistic about the material changes that technology can bring has been the road to success. But I can’t decide how cynical I am able to be about my fellow humans.
When I was younger I would try to demonstrate my cleverness by pointing out problems. Like many precocious youngsters, I was certain that this behavior provided value.
It’s exciting to feel the power that comes with understanding. It is especially intoxicating to students. No one is so fervent as a new convert.
Finding errors in reasoning, gaps in knowledge, poorly laid plans, and lapses in judgement can all be helpful when they are put to use in finding a path to success.
Being able to humbly accept corrections to one’s worldview or understanding when in error is crucial to being able to understand your reality. No one values that more than people who must succeed.
Alas, because finding and correcting misunderstanding is so important, it’s easy to slip into reflexive negativity as your only tactic. You mistake finding errors with being the only valuable contribution. It’s a classic problem with engineers. And unlike the young they rarely outgrow the habit.
Any founder who has had a pitch with a venture capitalist who can only focus on the problems and not the potential, understands why this it is unproductive to rely only on spotting issues. Being right about something being wrong doesn’t build anything.
Somewhere in this blog there is a date error. It’s probably easy to find. I noticed the day I did it (I believe I was ill and got confused) and then time streamed on and now it barely matters.
Oddly I only care to mention it because I notice more when things are done in day by day format. We have 10 day retreats, month long sprints, quarterly focuses, if you are large enough to have yearly plans good luck to you.
We asked for acceleration and we got it. Timelines are so preposterously fast we can count them in shorter bursts. The Wall Street Journal has an administration day count for Trump. Today is day 21. Which is a light day involving golf with Tiger Woods and going to the Super Bowl.
I’m not inclined to dramatic pronouncements about the future (ok maybe a little). Humans don’t change too quickly their hard learned ways. But we are getting so much more information at such rapid pace right now that if you are inclined to count the days maybe set some goals for them.
I enjoy my daily writing as it forces me to put my sensory apparatus to work at summarizing the inputs on my systems for the day. Being a human, my processing is laggy.
I came across this graphic from Hinterland’s Twitter. They created it show compression of the our body’s sensory inputs. A lot hits our mind and very little of it gets to conscious thought.
The human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second. – Britannica “Information Theory”
It seems to me we are not prepared for this moment of unprecedented complexity given the hardware we are working with.
Some of us may have slightly different software so it’s not all hopeless. It just seems like as a species the complexity of our environment relative to our baseline physiology is looking a little iffy.
I have a kind of optimism that we will find a way to meet the moment. Right up until we can’t?
I’m am looking to do whatever upgrades I can to hear the signal in the noise. But maybe a booming voice from the sky is easy to hear than the endless chatter of our world. Or maybe we have to find another way to achieve resonance and hear.
