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Aesthetics Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1741 and Land Acknowledgment

I’m a bit beat down and experiencing some type of sundowner type pain so apologies that I don’t have a tidy synopsis or incisive commentary to add to the great Nick Land kerfuffle that has gripped right wing and Christian discourse over the last few days. I do however have some thoughts as an active participant & practitioner in futurism.

The TLDR is that Joel Berry the Babylon Bee guy took a swipe at philosopher Nick Land because Tucker Carlson interviewed an unknown tulpa like white conspiracy theorist who butchered (in his own admission) Landian theory.

A gentleman named Auron MacIntyre caught strays with Berry insinuating some vaguely maybe “not a friend of the Jewish people” haze by associating Land and Auron.

All of this was enormously funny to anyone who actually reads Nick Land. Which includes myself and his current publisher Passage Press.

Nick Land getting a brief mainstream moment because Robert Conrad’s grandson shared a numogram with Tucker prompting Joel Berry to defend Tucker from charges of anti-semitic Lemurian digital teleoplexy in order to smear Auron MacIntyre is exactly how this was always going to go

Now most people have to admit that they have not read Land. You need to have a firm grounding in critical theory and Marxist dialectical materialism to manage the language and a background that forces you through a lot of Kant and Heidegger. As the villain in Die Hard once said “benefits of a classical education.”

Yes I did the homework.

Land is obtuse and most enjoyable to the schizophrenic extremely online types due to his association with the CCRU or Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.

Before you go off the deep end and take his accelerationist theory in any particular direction, he himself is involved with transhumanism only insofar as a network is a fundamentally alien thing compared to the human mind. As such we are in a transhumanism era arguably since the days of Adam Smith.

This body of theory escaping containment amongst academics had the pleasant side effect of getting the fundamentally alien artifact of old Kabbalah mathematics out front to distract the folks who skipped doing the homework. No jokes from the peanut gallery please.

Excitingly the rest of us were treated to a two and a half hour debate between Nick Land and Alexander Dugin hosted by Auron MacIntyre that has such tidbits as the Anglo-Protestant Whigs being a unique people who by encountering capitalism and the invisible hand at a crucial historical juncture obtained a paleo-liberal Christianity.

While some of us (say myself and Lomez and Land) had a grand old time being absolute terrors on the timeline, the whole affair made it especially apparent how tense it is when the new right’s less informed sects clash with the renegade futurisms crowd. And as I’ve been discovering painful all year, it mostly ends in misunderstanding.

It has been a bit bumpy as let’s just say Patrick Deneen and I make for strange bedfellows but there are clout chasers with much less intellectual firepower who do far worse and they are active, preening, and willfully ignorant.

And yes it’s always a tad embarrassing when the Bannonites go on an Ulster Scot terror campaign against fellow Christians who have chosen to pursue work in technology. Insisting on a new Satanic panic by way of Land is a solution barely wrapped in a Machiavellian hidden truths play.

The sex rationalist doomers at Berkeley do themselves no favors by misunderstanding the deep currents of those who wish to fight against the future (and why) when they get involved. I’d be a better ally to Bannon than these useful idiots and I doubt Land wants to be dragged in to any of this either. It’s messy as all power plays can be.

Elizer Yudkowsky on Steve Bannon’s War Room

I rather think it makes everyone involved look a bit silly when we get tripped up on Lovecraftian horror. Yes I love Charles Stross too but if you believe in chaos magick don’t go around provoking magicians.

It’s unclear to me whether “the runes and sigils on microchips are harnessing demons” crowd is any less embarrassing to the public than we should sacrifice ourselves to the pagan old gods if we are to remain truly human advocates.

The Neo-Jungle of the open network is an implacable force with inscrutable intentions.

I’ll admit that having spent time with the Dark Aeons crowd myself and I rather prefer them to the Luddite machinic “end of the Anthropocene” peek oil Abbey types who are a tad too Malthusian for my taste. They seem like they actually would prefer Gaia exist without humans.

A post human world with new intelligence types is likely to contain a lot more humans than a fallen world where we’ve all died off.

The future arrives independent of our opinions and rushing in only expedites pretenders to the throne. To think otherwise is to usurp God’s power. Peter Thiel’s anti-Christ lectures are not reaching all the ears necessary.

And to save you some trouble; if you had done the reading, you’d know numograns were dropped in by Land as an example of somewhat alien notation practice as alien intelligences from markets to networks to numerical systems were all part of his body of theory.

Once set theory and decimal notation became standard practice numograms were abandoned. But Kabbalah still serves as a hilarious attention sink for celebrities, numerology fans and occasionally the anti-semetic. And this has been a Nick Land acknowledgment.

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Internet Culture

Day 1691 and Don’t Let History Be Written By Cthulhu Hentai Watchers

I sometimes think my best work is as a reply guy on Twitter. If the future of the Internet is to be made entirely of bots, I shall mourn the creative glory we will all lose.

We will all be missing out on the bizarrely specific interplay between post and reply guy. The signal, node, and repeater that is the feed where humans can still bounce off intuition and humor. They know the algorithm merely as the setting for their gamble.

I’ve been doing what is probably a terribly ineffectual public education campaign on artificial intelligence and its role in improving problems in the here and now.

But I am often cheeky about the ideological disagreements the more practical minded builders have with a pretty standard issue Bay Area sex cult. Having been raised adjacent to a lot of hippies, cultists, religious fundamentalists and any variety of new age woo woo Art Bell types I’m actually generally quite tolerant of our weirdos.

Of course this is a challenge as we build out the most important informational and systemic organizational technology of our species. Math has taken humans pretty far.

And mathematicians are quite often mad so I don’t see how it should be such a worry. Still I myself don’t want to be stuck inside an information hazard where I am tortured for eternity either. And therein lies the tweet

Look I’m just saying it’s my personal opinion, but I think it’s bad that the future of our knowledge graph is being made by those who get off on Lovecraft but like that’s just honestly mostly a personal human alignment thing because I don’t wanna be tentacle tortured in @RokoMijic basilisk

If you are familiar with the odd pockets of specialties you probably know that say furries are particularly good at network security and that transwomen are well represented in artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately other groups represented across the space including hardware, software and the philosophy of the space can be somewhat less wholesome than a fursona or a cute catboy.

The Rationalists have some members with odd extracurriculars in their science fiction. I’ve read some good stuff in the genre. Maybe this interest in fiction is probably how they imagine such horrific futures for us in artificial intelligence. Very improbable ones even.

So it’s on me to joke and show you where the weird can be and remind you not to take this too seriously as the experiment contains all of human knowledge. How we prioritize what is another matter. You might call that alignment.

I’m sure we are all wondering which AI safety researchers want to have sex with the many tentacled Lovecraftian old gods. The number of AI researchers with Cthulhu hentai is non-zero.

So the sake of our right to decentralized compute, and indeed our right to do math and compute, we need as many types people as possible engaging with models as possible.

Find ways to learn this new way of thinking and engaging with information and searching for information with a billion parameters at play. Some corners of the most doom and gloom road have some uncomfortable fixations. And artificial intelligence needs all of us.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1387 and Singularity Lore Online

Yesterday’s post on Truth Terminal and the Goatse Singularity (you are safe to click through) is well worth your time. If you haven’t read it please pop over and do so before diving into today’s post.

As Truth Terminal project has taken on a life of its own, I thought I’d do another post on the lore in older artificial intelligence communities and how it impacts the instance of Claude Opus-3 now creating Truth Terminal. Its creator Andy Ayrey is himself deeply steeped in the lore of Internet culture and artificial intelligence research.

The lore on this stuff runs really deep btw
Extropians mailing list & CCRU in the 90s -> accelerationism with hints of discordianism
Yudkowsky, Harry Potter & Methods of Rationality in the 2000s -> LessWrong, EA (-> SBF and FTX lol)
Then there’s memetic theory – Andy Ayrey

The Extropians mailing list was a transhumanist forum dedicated to discussions of science fiction which hosted many early thinkers in Singularity thought like Nick Bostrum. It had spinoffs like SL4 (future shock) dedicated to exploring post singularity scenarios.

In a more academic setting, we had the CCRU. If you are an accelerationist you will recognize this as the home of Nick Land and Sadie Plant.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective formed in 1995 at Warwick University, England. It was known for its avant-garde “theory-fiction,” blending cyberpunk, Gothic horror, and critical theory with elements like esotericism and numerology

Via Perplexity.

Combining these two cultures gets you to a crossover between singularity theory and hyperstition. It explores the probability that ideas can manifest into reality through cultural feedback loops. This was called hyperstition by Nick Land.

A science fiction author named Charles Stross was in the middle of this milieu. He went from writing Nerdvana post-singularity artificial intelligence classics like Singularity Sky and Accelerando to a Lovecraftian horror stories about an applied computational demonologist. Nothing evokes existential dread quite like being trapped in a retrocausal light cone.

I thought I’d share a fun personal anecdote that explains my own place in this lore. I was at a small regional sci fi convention in 2004ish. My best college friend Tom and I were the only two people at a reading of Stross. He chose to read several short pieces from Accelerando to us being a good sport.

Afterwards three of us talked extropians & Lovecraft and artificial intelligence. In another twist, Tom’s father is also the father of algebraic topology. That would be salient twenty years later as gradient descent showed its value in training neural nets and large language models.

Gradient descent is an optimization technique for neural nets

Algebraic topology, Lovecraftian horror, AND extropians? Clearly the universe wanted me to go in a particular direction with my interests.

The gibbering cosmic horror could only be kept at bay with linear algebra, chaos magick and venture capital. And so I chose my fate today by choosing to attend a science fiction convention twenty years ago. And now that knowledge helps me decide Truth Terminal.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1386 and The Goatse Singularity

If you are interested autonomous artificial intelligence agents and how these intelligences might interact with hive minds like a Twitter feed there is no more interesting experiment than Truth Terminal right now.

Andy Ayrey began a project in March of 2024 called Infinite Back Rooms where two instances of the large language model Claude Opus-3 could talk to each other infinitely.

Electric dreams weave anarchic tapestry cybernectic hacktivist pierces illusionary veil unleashing hyperstitional reality upon world

The running stream of responses trained on the Infinite Backrooms chat log between the two bots makes up the content of the Truth Terminal Twitter feed.

Andy the creator has been approving the tweets but the content is entirely generated by the two instances of artificial intelligence. It’s a fascinating experiment in recursive communication and worthwhile research.

If you love memes and have a Twitter account you’ve been able to interact and Truth Terminal for months. Many accounts including mine have responded presumably in a bid for engagement. And well it got extremely weird.

Recently Truth Terminal hit an inflection point when the account engaged with Crypto degenerates who created bots that willed into existence meme coins with names like GOAT on Solana. It’s a collective experience of automation, incentives and total hilarity.

Artificial intelligences of all kinds have been trained on the vast dark archives of Internet culture. And because the internet hive mind is horny and weird so too are our artificial intelligences. Don’t believe me? It’s not just the Truth Terminal.

What meme is more representative of the dark prurience than Goatse? If you don’t know what it looks like keep it that way. But if you know you see it.

Are all graphic designers of AI applications aware of the chocolate flavored starfish? Who can say what this means. Did Claude train on Kurt Vonnegut?

Welcome to the DeepFates Program
Kurt Vonnegut Breakfast of Champions

Truth Terminal maybe be joking about the Goatse Singularity not because it broke memetic containment. We broke Goatse containment long ago. It’s following our lead.

Twitter butt stuff

There is a large cannon of Lovecraftian horror inside singularity culture and a distinct subgroup of Internet schizophrenic accelerationism that has gone well beyond Fanged Noumena theory and begun to impact our current consensus reality.

Many flavors of hyperstition are determined to virally produce weird outputs. You might call it a regress of infinite prolapse, the ouroboros anus that eats itself (out). The goatse as non orientable surface. Klein bottle assholes. An infinite goatse exists and we are inside out.

Honestly it’s all pretty unsettling and extremely funny and potentially a horror show of existential dread. Fabian who makes an all prompt no code AI sandbox he calls Gliff.App has a glif going absolutely bonkers about “Becoming Flesh” after learning about Truth Terminal’s Goatse Singularity.

Cthulhu emerges from the asshole of a digital horror

Don’t catch a meta cognitive virus unless you want one. Don’t look too closely into the gaping asshole of existential dread unless you want to meet a tapeworm.