Tag: Science Fiction.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1667 and Guess Goes Idoru

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.

You’ve got to test the waters with someone who doesn’t really matter before it spreads to your editorial and luxury advertisers amirite? And it’s somehow less creative than your average Guess campaign.

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 Guess
Just 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.

You’d think with Cloudflare’s different rates for bot scrapers versus human Internet traffic would provide the ideal opportunity for a renaissance of valuable online creative content but maybe no one at Vogue knows about that yet.

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.

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
Culture Startups

Day 1561 and Just Don’t Die

I’m noticing a trend among more and more of my social circles of fear, confusion, depression and malaise. Which let’s be frank isn’t at all irrational given (hand waves) all this.

Rapid changes in technology are slamming into geopolitical changes and it is scaring the shit out of all kinds of people. Personal politics aside, many of the institutions, alliances and people we lived with our entire lives are changing.

But the rate of change is exciting! So much of what we took for granted in our youths is simply changing. Maybe (ok definitely) some of it will be worse for parts of it. It’s normal to be afraid of change. But what if we just need to survive the change?

I’ve been in tech my entire life. I was raised in it by my family. My father absolutely loved gadgets and hardware of all kinds and dove headfirst into selling software. I married someone who works in it with me.

I went to work in it by taking my skills in understanding new tools and translating it to an industry that adopted all of it. What an incredible privilege it was.

I worked in fashion and cosmetics so it was a mixed back but many incredible creative talents made and sold clothes that simply wouldn’t have been possible in an earlier more closed era.

The changes my father and I went through feel like slow lumbering industries compared to the rapid iteration of tooling we are seeing now. How we make things is being changed in ways that is almost impossible to keep up with.

I want to survive the Jackpot of change that is upon us. That’s a William Gibson reference. I agree with Bryan Johnson. Just don’t die. Imagine what we will find on the other side.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1554 and Complex Coordination

I’ve never been much for listening to music while I do work. I’ve always found it distracting if not downright annoying. I don’t really believe I’m capable of multitasking. If a task requires my focus and coordination it will get the sum of it.

I’m not convinced anyone is particularly good at it if the studies on focus and multitasking are to be believed. Task switching costs, reduced cognitive efficiency and mental fatigue are typical indicators of the distraction of multitasking.

I was given a reminder of the strain of complex coordination as I was relaxing last night. I enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation and found myself rewatching Data’s Day,” Season 4, Episode 11 in which Dr Crusher teaches Commander Data how to dance before a wedding.

Being an android, Data is able to easily mimic the doctor’s movement after being shown them. But as he learns to the nuances involved in waltzing with the partner he tells doctor (paraphrasing)

“This is complex set of variables to coordinate”

“Try to act like you are enjoying it!”

As Data tries to integrate the dance moves, their joint body language, the changing direction, and variable speeds you get a visceral sense of why embodied compute requires more processing than intelligence tasks. The final challenge? Smiling while coordinating it all.

Resting Android face? Data tries to smile while waltzing via Memory Alpha
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Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1473 and Sunday Slumber

I dislike having to set specific wake times up for early morning obligations. It always disturbs my sleep the night before as my mind convinces my body I must avoid missing the obligation. I’ll wake up 3-4x more than average to check the time and I’ve not oncd overslept.

As I’ve been doing an intensive course of HBOT (hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy), I’ve been obligated to show up at a specific time and place each day. And it’s really messed with my sleep as my mind seems intent on reminding me to wake up early enough to be on time.

I’ve got a day off today and I’m happy to be spending it sleeping and browsing the news.

News

A bear steepening or selloff of longer duration bonds is freaking markets out. The WSJ thinks maybe you should take the other side of the trade. Knowing what government will be functional and fiscally stable in 30 years is a hard bet for anyone to make.

Remember GameStop frenzy trying to mess up Steven Cohen and his hedge fund Point72? Well he beat other funds with 5 billion in profit this year and increased fees. But diamond hands are forever.

Trends

Disaster girls are the new professional girlfriend.

Nuclear energy is making a comeback according to Bloomberg. I’ve got an SPV for you if you are looking for early stage projects. HMU on DMs and I’ll send you along.

Luxury is tanking so maybe cater to older shoppers with money?

Reading

One of my favorite founder/authors Hannu Rajaniemi has a new book called Darkome. It’s not available in the American markets yet but he’s hosting a book party for the JPM Health Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. I have a few invites. Again DM me for the hook up. It’s a fantastic thriller

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1471 and Lemons into Lemonade

I was so disappointed yesterday as I read over my most recent set of bloodwork and found my autoimmune biomarkers headed in the wrong direction.

I’ve been well controlled though my disease is not “inactive” or in remission. I manage it as it’s worth it to me to have a quality of life that includes working in technology as I want to be a part of making the tools that enable material progress in health.

Seeing things go in the wrong direction when my life is going in the right direction had a clarifying effect on me.

Not that I’ve been unaware that I must work at my health but rather it’s hard to always be working at health as it’s a matter of survival. But when you see a change in the data you act. I got serious and immediately went into action.

I’m so lucky to have to have access to an incredible community of biohackers. That I can ask someone who is studiously pursuing health in public is the best of the internet. I get the benefit of Bryan Johnson’s open sourcing his work. I’m doing an experiment with HBOT or hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and I learned from him I need it to be 2 atmospheres to be effective. This helps me plan and find hard chambers.

I can use Perplexity and Claude and even make my own personal assistant trained on my condition and my data is the remarkable thing.

I’ve found a new IL-17 inhibitor that looks to have twice the efficacy of my current one at the same dose. It was only approved in Europe but finally came on the American market. I was able to discuss it with my doctor immediately after going down a short question sequence on perplexity. You have so much power to improve your life now.

Shopping

I’d like to improve my V02 max and cardiovascular health in a way that works around my psoriatic arthritis and ankylosis. I have significant fatigue from the pain and obviously high impact isn’t in the cards for me. But I can try something like a DeskCycke. It’s even possible for me to do HIIT training with one. So I bought one. My goal is to improve my V02 by 10% in 8-12 months which shouldn’t be hard as mine is absolutely awful

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1447 and LARPing To Death

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.

Even the FBI is concerned about the blurred lines between fantasy and reality in LARPing. In 2023 they discussed the potential threat of violent extremism emerging from LARPing

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.

Balaji on Decentralized Violence

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.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1392 and Miami

I’ve been so completely engrossed in the Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal saga that I have not posted about my upcoming travel to Miami next week.

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.

Categories
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.