Tag: Science Fiction.

Categories
Culture

Day 1695 and Only Knowing The Now

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.

I was sent to young African woman breaking down an epistemology of time in African religion and philosophy by Kenyan scholar and Anglican priest John Mbiti.

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.

Sasa is now in Swahili. Which took me to a funny place as I thought of the use of sasa in the sci fi series The Expanses’s invented Belter creole for “to know.”

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”

Categories
Politics

Day 1689 and Drumhead or Not Rushing To Judge What We Don’t Know

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.

I was watching a fairly minor TNG episode while eating today The Drumhead. An ambassador starts a witch hunt insinuating treason. Apparent drumhead courts were a military summary judgement court.

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.

Categories
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
Categories
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.