I am trying to imagine my life being very different. If I step away from some of the areas where I have visibility what changes. I am imagining a phase change of assumptions about not only my own life but life as it goes forward.
It’s the topic we’ve all been dancing around for years and years, with crescendos coming all the more frequent. The science fiction I love so very much has different ways of portraying a jump in material conditions.
The Expanse called it The Churn. William Gibson called it The Jackpot. I wonder what we will call this period in a hundred years.
I have so much curiosity. Maybe too much. an almost childish sense of imagination has never left me even as I go about very adult life. The wonder and “what if” sensibility haven’t been crushed under cynicism even if it would be rational.
I don’t know if I feel equipped to manage what’s coming. How much of the difference will be the choices I make to life my life and how much will be forced on me. It’s a twitchy and terrifying prospect to consider just how much freedom we have against a backdrop of limited information. Only action will illuminate.
I’m not new to the boom and bust cycles that have defined not only technology startups, but American herself. Most millennials have opinions about their malign status in an economy designed to borrow from the future for a dubious present.
Much of the world is in a state of panic over “the churn” of the old rules changing and the new ones not being quite clear. But it’s really not clear what happens next.
I enjoy speculating as is the fashion. Do I think corporate debt financing of data centers is some time bomb in private credit? Not really, no. I think it’s way more likely that don’t understand the full demand case for coordination in a mediated world.
I don’t know if we can meet the demand to be perfectly honest. I will say I am way more worried about us not meeting the moment. Changes to our cultural environment are as hard as our material ones.
If I had to read sentiment, I’d say that everyone is absolutely sick of having their attention used like a fiat currency. We cannot inflate our capacity for focus as easily as we can inflate the dollar. And we will demand simplicity by any means necessary just to exist. And artificial intelligence will smooth our world to manage with what we’ve got.
I think running a decentralized world will prove to be far too complex for most humans and it will be mitigated by layers of choices in governance that will probably not always maximize for the freedoms we’v come to expect from the liberal world order.
And yeah I think we will need a lot of data centers for that coordination effort. That the state might be the ones with the most demand seems a little rich though. Every individual on earth will want to be on the right side of the ratings. That’s more network state than state and it will be a longtime horizon.
I know it doesn’t sound great on its face. And yet I think it has had upsides. The demand for real businesses that operate in some world of efficiency has never been higher.
And to some extent, I believe that was always the entire point of computing. Make things so much better and cheaper we move on to bigger projects.
Giving you video games and porn might have been a weird way to get to Mars but medicine is as driven by vanity as much as survival so I don’t judge reality. I just want us to get more nuclear power. I don’t ask for much.
We didn’t want a legion of information processing professionals. We wanted to change the material conditions just as the Industrial Revolution did. The invisible hand is a strange thing.
I expect we will see quite a bit of opposition to the people believe that we need more energy, more industry, and more science. The future and its enemies are legions. I always did find it funny that fashion critics had a better read on the future than anyone else. Virginia Postrel and William Gibson both have good taste.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
I love Carl Sagan’s Contact. I first read the book in my middle school years and was allowed to watch the movie starring Jodie Foster despite having a very limited “screen time” diet.
As I got older I was allowed to watch edifying science fiction and book adaption only if I had read the source material. Contact passed both tests
It’s a beautiful story of faith and science about on a radio astronomer who finds a signal from alien intelligence which kicks off a planet wide space race to make contact.
There is a scene in the film where our protagonist Dr Arroway is set to launch a machine which we humans do not fully understand but is presumed to be some sort of transportation device.
Just as the countdown nears zero, she loses contact with the ground team. Roaring machinery and turbulence drowns her voice as she repeats over and over “I am OK to go” until a blind colleague finally picks her voice out of the static. The capsule is let go. I won’t spoiler it.
I’m OK To Go
I had a little moment of being out of contact myself today. I am now the proud owner of a hyperbaric chamber but still getting used to the machine. Alex, watching me as I adjusted, communicated with me through the glass with gestures.
Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy has roots in diving as managing pressure changes is an important aspect of safety for underwater and high altitude work.
When diving you don’t give a thumbs up to show you are alright. Thumbs up actually means ascend. You give the OK sign to communicate that you are doing fine.
The “OK” hand signal in diving is formed by touching the tip of the thumb and index finger together to make a circle, with the other three fingers extended upward.
Even as I was a little dizzy and struggling to acclimate I was ultimately “ok to go.”
The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.
We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.
The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.
I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.
Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.
Someone acquired a new piebald
Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.
The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.
I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.
I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.
What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.
I’m from a part of the world where dark skies can still be sought out with relative ease. Not because we are undeveloped, but because it’s harder to live with elevation and snow. If you had the will to climb you could see the Milky Way.
The Rocky Mountain regional corridor has only in the last thirty or so years turned into prairie suburban sprawl in Colorado.
Boulder was a small town with little between it and Denver but farmland. Now from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins the entire I-25 corridor is densely packed.
Anytime a lunar eclipse crosses the astronomical calendar, I wonder if children still search out the skies for wonder and study. I remember telescopes being a highly coveted birthday gift and whole classes would seek out observatories for blood moons and totality.
If you are on the eastern side of the world from Europe to Australia you will have an opportunity to see today’s full moon be shadowed by Earth starting around 7pm in CEST. Check date and time for your own area.
Seeing the sky is a beautiful and universal human experience. Precious few of us have seen our planet but the night sky and our moon have figured heavily in the shared experiences of entire species for centuries.
I have mentioned I’m a fan of Star Trek a few times. I am a genuine fan of the original series, the Next Generation and Deep Space 9 as well as many of the movies.
Gene Roddenberry pitched it as space cowboys but it’s become a template for entire generations for what competence in the face of the unknown should look like.
I’ll happily take either side in the Captain Picard versus Captain Kirk debates, because just as that fashion editor in Devil Wears Prada said about two superficially similar belts, “it’s hard as they are just so different!”
We are facing quite a bit of the unknown right now. Old hierarchies and expectations have changed. Or at least been revealed for what they are. We must ask what we owe each other and how we should expect ourselves to commit to a common cause.
I find myself considering the incredible competence both personally and professionally of the crews. I named this post NCC-1701-D for Picard’s Enterprise as that crew is famously a collaborative and high trust crew. Each one well developed with expertises professionally but also everyone was always trying new things and exploring new skills.
One of my friends accused me of having nerd “stolen valor” as I couldn’t have suffered for my affection for interests like Star Trek. Maybe it’s true girls don’t experience it the same way. Maybe I didn’t notice. I don’t think I cared. I’ll always be someone who sees 1701 and thinks “that’s the Enterprise!”
I let myself be swept into a rolling video scroll on Twitter accidentally today. You may know the awful dark pattern that occurs when you choose to watch a video posted by a mutual in the For You flow. It then sends you down a scroll of video content chosen by algorithm.
Typically it’s dross and I’m sure the account meant to show this particular video to me for nefarious theory of mind reasons but I found it enlightening.
John Mbiti’s philosophy of time presents a distinctive African conception of temporality that fundamentally differs from Western linear time concepts…Mbiti argues that African time is two-dimensional, consisting only of the past and present, with virtually no future. – Perplexity Synopsis
Only present entities exist, while past and future things do not. Crimping from video and Wikipedia.
A screenshot of the video
“Sasa (the now) and Zamani (the endless past) are the central concepts in Mbiti’s temporal framework.”
Being western Protestant myself, lacking an epistemology or ontology for a “real” future that arrives feels sad to me, even if rationally I know I am only ever experiencing the now.
You can say I only “know” the “now” as it’s all I’ve ever experienced. We call this theory of time Presentism.
One can easily argue that all we know is the now which makes “sasa” as “now” and “sasa” “to know” easily bridged. I wonder if the linguist who created the patois knew this. Probably.
Sasa makes a mathematical sense to me as I live in 3 dimensions but know the 4th dimension of time to exist but only “know” time as “now”
Nevertheless I myself am quite interested in the future arriving. So I have put together a ham fisted Belter sentence of my own as I wish for everyone to experience more future time
“Mi sasa da future gonya kome. Me kopeng wedi da way long day”
I wonder how much of the moral education of Americans comes thanks to Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek is a very American show. It was pitched to Desilu Studios (owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy fame) as a space western.
The cowboy frontier spirit of Captain Kirk has an honor code based on the worthiness of exploration. When the millenials got a reboot in the Next Generation, Captain Picard added the gravitas of excellence through the pursuit of the truth.
It’s hard to think of a show that embraces an anglosphere manifest destiny with more vigor and it is grounded in the enlightenment values of science and moral philosophy. It’s a very American show.
A legal drama ensues where Picard quotes the ambassador’s father famous words about the dangers of denying basic rights to even one man in the name of protection of society makes us all less free.
Feeling rather on the nose for the moment right? Picard reminds Worf as it wraps up the witch hunt being proven a lie, that those who cloak their misdeeds with the pretense of serving a greater good are often the most difficult. Spreading fear and mistrust in the name of righteousness must be guarded against.
“Vigilance, Mr. Worf. That is the price we have to continually pay.”
We have a chance at preserving and expanding the enlightenment values that brought our species to this moment, an American moment, by enabling more of us. We can educate ourselves and access the world and the many virtues to which humanity has aspired to by working hard to master them ourselves. This is the empowerment of compute.
We have tools available to us to be vigilant in what is the great good of civilization we wish to protect in an open, decentralized and networked internet.
That we can at scale train a new inference search capacity for the sum of our knowledge and reality is a utopian reality even Gene Roddenberry didn’t dream we’d have.
Don’t rush to summary judgement in fear over the future we can build with protocols and networks that can be encrypted and decentralized. That we can model them with artificial intelligence, and by asking questions well, get back information, code and even machine and biological diagnostics is a huge achievement for our species.
To push the fear of the greater good over its consequence can go from legitimate concerns to a drumhead summary judgement quickly. Risking the freedom to use something that is both just emerging and even in that infancy so promising. That it is helpful in the now seems to showcase both western traditions and enlightenment values.
It’s an American ideal that we must all be free to think and speak the truth, search for the truth and can calculate and provide a mathematical proof of truth that needs no trust because it can be know. We have a right to compute.
Artificial intelligence solves problems now. It’s better than humans now at many types of tasks even as it still a new tool and unrefined and even brittle in its capacities still. It’s took only as good as its craftsman’s understanding of it and we are still learning how to build it.
Artificial intelligence can give us the internet we deserve. I support the right to repair movement because I believe we should know and seek the freedom to own things we have purchased and modify them.
Right now AI helps humans can solve immediate problems from tractor repair to wound care. Maybe machines get better as we get better at using them because we do it with them. We figure things out by building.
Don’t let your worldview be constrained. You can know the freedom of living in a society that values your rights. And the right to compute weaves together many of your most sacred rights. And if we infringe on it for some of us it infringes us on us.
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.
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 GuessJust 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.
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.
