Do you know what LARP means? If so, do you remember when you first heard the term? Think back and recall the context of your first exposure to the term. I’ll give you a couple hints for history.
Maybe LARP was used to describe playing a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps you went to a Renaissance Fair and encountered the melees put on by Society for Creative Anachronism. If you remember Dagohir you are a real OG & also old.
LARP stands for live action role-playing. It originally involved fancy dress, maintaining character and strict but fantastical rule sets. Its not much different from what children call “make believe” except it’s done by adults who presumably understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
It’s likely if you are younger and extremely online, your first encounter with LARPing was less “gamers dressed up with swords” and more “anon pretending to be some type of identity” on a social media platform. Like based and woke, LARP is a term that has had a lot of semantic drift.
Increasingly it feels as if some of us aren’t sure what is shared consensus reality and what is fantasy anymore. We used to call that “crazy” but it’s so prevalent one has to wonder if whole categories of otherwise sane people have gone nuts. People become convinced of fantasy they have made in their identities and are acting out on them.
Violent extremists will extensively engage in confirmation bias prior to the implementation of their plan. However, in this context, it becomes confirmation violence, or the use of targeted violence to impose social and political beliefs onto others and, therefore, change their behavior — in a grandiose sense, perhaps even the course of history
I personally can’t think of a more chilling term than confirmation violence in the wake of the public reaction to the assassination of United Health Care insurance CEO Brian Thompson. We are now LARPing ourselves to death. A bit too “if you die in the Matrix you die in real life” vibes if you ask me.
Think about how we went from digital mobs to physical riots to the dangerous new trend of assassination as cancellation. Vaguely defined members of today’s outgroup are no longer merely targets of online criticism but actually targets of stochastic terrorism. This is leaderless, decentralized violence. No one person held up a hand to start it, and no one person can easily stop it.
As centralized authorities are going through significant challenges to their authority we are probably in for a lot more LARPing to death. I’d be prepared to see a lot more violence emerging from LARPers convinced of their own story’s moral superiority.
And I’d be careful about buying into anyone’s story as we adjust. If all the world is a stage but the characters have real weapon’s we are in for a world of hurt.
I am just enjoying our first frost here in Montana and yet I’ll be pulled down too soon from our wonderful fall. All to enjoy hot takes and hot climates. I don’t like hot climates so I guess I’m going for the takes. Founders and LPs (and those with opinions on LPs) are priorities.
If you will be in Miami attending the conference I am hinting at please do look me up. The weirder the better. I’ll also be accompanied by my better half Alex Miller. Come for the tractor discussions and stay for the semiotics discourse.
Apparently there will be a costume party but one can simply choose black tie. One thing I like about it Miami is how it celebrates dressing up. I can wear a billowing pink gown or a dolman sleeve full length velet fishtailed dress and not be out of place. It’s just very tropical.
I think I’ll enjoy packing simply because it’s nice to have an excuse to wear white sneakers and floral robes. I can even get excited by doing some fun makeup. You have to live joyfully when the theme is the apocalypse.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I dislike how illness messes with your sense of time. One of the themes of the pandemic was how it affected people’s perception of time. We measure time but our experience of it is harder to pin down.
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly distorted people’s perception of time. Many experienced a disconnection between objective time and subjective time, often feeling that days blurred together or that time moved unusually fast or slow.
Temporal disorientation feels as disorienting as spatial disorientation to me. Getting lost in your own personal time fucks with the reality of consensus reality time passing.
Every time I have a couple of sick days in a row I am fearful. You can reorient if you are lost on a road but the world moves even if you don’t. How do you reorient yourself to time?
We humans live forward. If we somehow find other ways to experience the fourth dimension I’d question if we remain human through that. We understand time dilation but living with time as a concurrent dimension to space and having it be mutable warps the mind a bit.
I’d like to maintain some degree of optimism about, well, everything. And yet I am struggling to maintain attitude control.
I like a little joke about navigating in space because I’m the sort of dork who enjoys science fiction books with lengthy digressions about spin and 3 axis stabilization.
But equally I do think it’s important to keep your chin up. Or nose up. It depends on whether you are piloting your emotions or a some other type of craft. It’s going to be forced metaphor post.
There is no need to crash yourself by getting disoriented navigating a situation in which you have some coordinates. It’s possible to calculate what’s going on and get yourself going in right the direction.
I am trying to do so by articulation, which yes is meant to be read as navigation joke, but is really just another goofy way of saying that writing helps me straight myself out.
So I am doing my best to keep my chin up emotionally and keep navigating what’s in front of me. It’s certainly better than a crash.
I’ve never written fiction as I’ve always presumed it was a different skill set to write a story than it is to write an essay.
You’ve got to manage plot, pacing, character, and dialogue to write a story. In an essay you’ve only got to worry about plot and pacing. Many will argue that it’s all storytelling and I’m sure they are right. It’s just that when the story I am telling is my own it’s a lot simpler.
I don’t know if this is true. It may a thing I tell myself because I’m so comfortable now telling my own stories. Having twelve hundred days of writing under my belt on here puts me Scheherazade territory.
There is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard is captured and tortured by an alien species called the Cardassians. It is called Chain of Command and is a two part episode.
It’s become a touchstone episode because of a famous scene in which Picard is tortured by a Cardassians Gul using an interrogation technique with lights.
Gul Madred attempts another tactic to break Picard’s will: he shows his captive four bright lights, and demands that Picard answer that there are five, inflicting intense pain on Picard if he does not agree.
Picard withstands the torture but is saved. Later it is revealed he would have broken. His defiance is shown in this popular image macro.
There are four lights.
Variations on meme are a stable of social media. It’s popularity has a meme format has extended beyond just Trekkies.
This is all a long winded set up for my own meme. I was being subjected to Kardashian style torture today. Similar to the Cardassians, the Kardashiam methods and brutal and efficient means of controlling female prisoners
I went to a spa to get waxed. Dramatic right? As I looked up at the bright migraine inducing industrial lights I thought of Picard and saw four lights. Honestly four would have been better. Five in this light arrangement seemed to invite a migraine.
Kardashians torture techniques including dribbling hot wax onto hair and ripping follicles out in one hard movement.
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of my information dumps, you know me to be a science fiction reader. It’s one of my true passions and most consistent hobbies.
I am very well read in the space through this love and it has proven to be an enormous advantage for a career in technology startups. It’s very rare to meet a builder that hasn’t in some way come to that love through imagining the future as it could be.
While I love classics from Asimov to Heinlein and I read everything from space opera to hard tech, my first true passion for genre fiction was cyperpunk. I saw a networked world of computation and I fell in love.
So it is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of one of the giants of science fiction, cyberspace progenitor, father of the tech singularity and mathematician Vernor Vinge.
His 1981 novella “True Names” was perhaps the first story to present a plausible concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others. Many innovators of modern industry cite “True Names” as their keystone technological inspiration.
It’s through the vision of authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson that I saw what computing could do to help us build.
Cyperpunk wrote many imaginative paths for artificial intelligence. Gibson’s Neuromancer and gave us early crypto culture. Neal Stephenson showed us a virtual world atop our current one in Snowcrash. The metaverse emerges.
I’ve lived my entire adult life online after an entirely analog childhood. I am straddling that small gap of in-between human. I helped build some small parts of the network of the internet. I am a citizen of the network state. I am all these things because of Vernor Vinge.
Humanity shines with tools and we had found in math a way to give an explanation of the workings the world. That our meager intelligences learned to compute and then to build computing machines astounds me.That we continue to build something more with those insights astounds me further. The acceleration of that started long before me.
Networking our computation has taken us so far and so fast. It reflects the best and worst of us. Vernor explored “what if“ futures that went far behind our contained cyberspace. We wouldn’t have modern singularity thought about what could happen if artificial intelligence really will emerge amongst us without Vinge’s work. The Zones of Thought series is a mind bender.
Vernor is as close as nerds have to a prophet. Here we are seeing the power of artificial intelligence dominate our human great power debates from culture to business to government. Everyone who makes things has an opportunity here to own building this.
I know that in whatever moment we are about greet (singularity or not) that I remember that we humans build technology from the imagination of Vernor Vinge.
No matter how alien the future may seem, we humans have build it first. Don’t you want to be a part of that?
“Since you’ve chosen death I must choose another path” It was a shitpost. I posted an acceleration meme. I happily endorse the bumpy progress of material change and the myriad human lives that choose to grow. The responses to my shitpost show that it’s no longer a joke.
Accelerate or die in style of the American Revolution “unite or die” snake representing the thirteen colonies but in the form of a network diagram.
I live in very clear reveled preferences on this front. My husband and I are accelerating the real world in our home in Montana. In two years we’ve planted a fruit orchard, installed solar grid, use the power from that grid to grow hydroponics and mine Bitcoin, we got chickens and advocate for local growth initiatives that allow people in Montana to live and grow together in mutual freedom.
I also believe those rights in the real world rest on a bedrock of natural rights enumerated in the American constitution.
And then suggest you want to engage in earnest debate. I find it hard to believe a good faith reader doesn’t immediately see the cognitive dissonance.
I do have the right to do as I choose as I am an American. We have first amendment rights.
Until you can measurably demonstrate proof that access to compute (which is just mathematics) has specific measurable harms you cannot invoke force on your fellow citizen for your personal paranoias.
The encryption wars had the same logic. So I ask people who worry about the consequences of compute power and artificial intelligence to give us what we’ve asked for in the form of measurably demonstrated specific types of harms where access to compute is a threat.
No “what if” hysterics, show me specifics and we can address those in policy. Armageddon in your head isn’t adequate. Being afraid isn’t enough.
If you can show measurable harms do so. We must hew to empiricism any time we seek to align others to our cause. Show me specific harms & we work to redress those harms. Actual crimes that exist already should be prosecuted as such. Seeking to newly criminalize a basic right because of unprecedented circumstances should be subject to the highest of scrutiny.
However if you show me you want the power for yourself to make these decisions I say no. We all keep our own conscience. We have existing rights.
I have shown through my revealed preferences I also believe this transition to more artificial will be chaotic. An age of higher variance is upon us and this can be a good thing with enough energy and intelligence. And we are about to get more intelligence thanks to the tools we have built.
I hope we can mitigate its harms. I believe we can apply ourselves in individual ways coordinated by the best efforts of those who build new tools. And that because we cannot predict with certainty we must hold firm to our principles doubly so then. We must be brave in approaching these problems as the principles matter.
Marxist Leninist thought has proven resilient
I am not advocating for revolution. I am advocating for keeping our heads and our hearts in times of change and protecting all of our freedoms.
We have historically shown the value of this position and the folly of violent control “for your own good.” Consider those classic socialist musicians the Beatles. Even they understood that revolutionary force was bad.
You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s evolution Well, you know We all wanna change the world
But when you talk about destruction Don’t you know that you can count me out, in
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you got a real solution Well, you know We’d all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know We all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate All I can tell is, brother, you have to wait
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you’ll change the constitution Well, you know We’d all love to change your head (ah, shu-bi-do, ah) You tell me it’s the institution Well, you know You better free your mind instead (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
Revolution 1 – The Beatles
If you want to go around quoting Chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow. How prescient those British Boy Band Boomers were. If you are so certain a revolution is necessary but you will take my compute from me then it’s you who wishes to be the Vanguard not me.
These calls for safety and caution, lest an apocalypse scenario ensue, appeal emotions to seek a tyranny of the majority for a fantasy of control over something that “may” be dangerous but not in any empirical ways we can address together and in specific ways. They don’t want to be accountable. Accountability is a democracy not this pantomime of concern seeking control.
Appealing to fears is control. All of the issues which have been brought up in artificial intelligence and access to computer models have past analogs and parallels in our existing policy tool set and within the enumerated rights.
Feel free to specify those issues into specifics and not act like this is Patriot Act 2^nth Terminator 2 Boogaloo. We have no need to indulge in Tom Clancy level panic about sum of all fears.
To lighten the mood this is an aligned AI for you.
Embrace the freedoms of affirming your right to choose your own human life. These new tools can we’ve built from mathematics and computation can enrich all our lives.
Lest you not think I take the consequences of this massive change and its potential for dislocation seriously, I live off grid with redundant power and water in Montana. I invest exclusively in solutions to the real problems we face in uncertain times including energy, open source, decentralization & trustless intermediaries. I walk this walk. The choice to make the future is up to all of us. And we should walk it in the most life affirming way we can for each of us.
