Tag: Social Media

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

We are in a moment of narrative collapse. The elites who we’ve typically take our “consensus reality” cues from don’t know where to land in order to manage the revolt of the public and you can see the recycling of big ideas happening at a rapid pace.

If you’ve been on the internet at all you were probably exposed to both Ezra Klein’s Abundance book tour and the Studio Ghibli mania using AI to turn iconic images into Miyazaki animations.

I think these two events are more related than you might think. Labor is becoming simultaneously more and less productive in the face of artificial intelligence. This naturally has consequences for power.

This progress is either “an insult to life itself” if you are Miyazaki or offers the potential to improve human productivity in ways we’ve not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Which brings us back to the moderate state capacity liberals. They are out in the cold politically and yet rather than produce a new narrative they’re re-heating the work of the meme movement effective accelerationism

I’m pleased to see total narrative victory for e/acc over the effective altruists. Sustainability (or worse degrowth) has simply failed to resonate with our primate hierarchies that demand more. We want more of whatever other monkey’s have be it bananas or status.

Socialist zero sum politics encouraging sharing and managing resources having been roundly beaten in the zeitgeist, the moderate left are insisting that actually public state mechanism are the best means to achieve abundance. Government is good actually.

Making the case for the state’s role in creating abundance is about all they have left while they wait for the pain of Trump’s tariff policies to kick in. The private markets not having the necessary time frames for long term planning is a perennial issue.

Even our most productive technology companies are feeling the pinch to perform immediately in the short term. Alex Danco dropped on essay on where we might be in the S-curve of artificial intelligence.

He argues that perhaps in the scaling of this infrastructure we may change our thinking around code as “the primary asset” of software companies and reorient it back to the shared labor, management and final product of the traditional corporation. Software companies were valued for capital efficiency by the markets but perhaps that constant no longer applies.

All this worry about creating abundance is a battle of who decides how we allocate future resources (which we don’t yet have) and who will receive the biggest share of power and plaudits in the process.

The fact that we can replicate aesthetics in an instant or do the document work of a dozen legal associates with a program isn’t really the issue at hand. We are worried that how we divvy up the sum of all our hierarchies is changing. Of course that worries every primate. It’s bloody stuff.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1543 and Buffering in the Network

Being that so much of modern work is done online it is a challenge to ever really unplug. I feel as if startups, finance and media have it particularly bad.

I try not to let myself burn out on the dopaminergic waves of the network. But I am a citizens of the internet and just like Molly Millions I’m suffering from the central nervous system stress the Cyperpunk future promised us.

I am however going to attempt a pull back to refocus myself so that I don’t get pulled by the strong currents of the network. A lot of low roads will be traversed between here and wherever we land.

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Finance Media Politics

Day 1539 and Institutional Trust

Continuing their exceptional data visualization work, the Financial Times shows how young Americans are losing trust in our institutions through a series of grim charts powered by Gallop polling. 

Gallop polling in the FT on young American’s trust

What a fun set of polling data on the day we have Tim Walz stomping around saying industry sucks. We have no future and the people who build just absolutely suck isn’t the best vibe from a vice presidential candidate. But it certainly seems to be a mood.

Why would anyone trust a system that proudly rolls out installment loans for food delivery aligned with payday schedules? The internet is making hay with the Klarna DoorDash partnership.

Decent people suggest we must protect the class of people so bad at math they would use this financial product. Well, actually…go a million nuanced credit understanders. Honestly I’ve never carried a credit card balance because I’m too afraid to do so. But some people yolo their consumption.

Abundance means we need to produce things. Which costs money. It’s hard to take say Ezra Klein’s Abundance tour too seriously when we make it impossible to finance housing but we can finance your burrito taxi. That’s not what anyone was hoping for when they gave all this power to our government. No wonder institutional trust is down.

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Politics

Day 1526 and PE Owned Rump State

I’ve been trying to not explicitly discuss politics for a couple weeks as it’s hard to have any sense of consensus reality. I spend a lot of time on Twitter as well as reading news. It’s only served to further muddle my mind. I’ve regularly discuss the hostile information environment.

Given the chaotic scene it feels both foolish and necessary to send up signals to others. Venkatesh Rao has me considering cross publishing more of my general rambles to Substack. Especially as other channels become more hostile.

Rao leaves fantastic little notes like the below on whether Americans should prepare for a private equity owned rump state. A thought experiment which feels less far fetched than usual.

Just chagrined bewilderment and embarrassment and private-equity-owned rump state services shambolic-debacling along (ht Bruce Sterling for that turn of phrase). Whimpers over bangs.

As state capacity declines and social cohesion degrades it wouldn’t surprise me if the new institutional powers we trust most are corporations. Imagine Americans in twenty years as scarce but almost mythic progenitors of a corporate governance future.

Sure America may still be a nation state in that future but a United States of corporate charters isn’t all that far off from our original conception. No really check out the Virginia Company.

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Culture Politics

Day 1523 and Do Not Disturb

It is in the nature of dysfunction to misuse resources. Something goes wrong and a system that once grew or self sustained finds itself in decline.

What to do? One can apply palliative care certainly. But you can go to the root of a problem and hope systems can be righted by bitter medicine.

I’ve had some degree of measured doom about topics like debt and monetary policy my whole life. I grew up with concerns of peak oil which turned to climate change. There is always a new crisis anytime we find ways to be resource constrained.

But we are resource constrained. That’s just a variable to be accounted for in the engineering of a solution. I care about energy. I mean it in the abstract as in fuel. But I also mean the energy I control.

I don’t have to expend expensive attention for all problems. Maybe becoming “do not disturb” is a scarcity mindset. But sometimes the poison is in the dose. And I want to keep pushing for better.

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Startups

Day 1516 and It Has To Be Carefully Taught

I love science fiction. The current generation building artificial intelligence builds on decades of thought experiments (aka science fiction) on how we might responsibly build and interact with a machine intelligence.

So it’s exciting watching testable premises arise that give hope that what is being built can be done so in ways that reflect our shared values. That is at least broadly the project of alignment.

An interesting paper from Owain Evans and a group of researchers on emergent misalignment caught quite a bit of attention today.

They finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code. Having finetuned GPT4o to write insecure code they then prompted it with various neutral open-ended questions. It gave misaligned answers 20% of the time, while original GPT4o never did

You can see the work and verify the numbers yourself here. The discussion is interesting because they aren’t sure why model shows broad misalignment after a narrowly negative task like making insecure code. But it’s pretty interesting right?

Without getting into the politics of doomers, Elizer Yudkowsky believes this experiment to be a positive finding.

If you train the AI to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it’s got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil. Elizer Yudkowsky

The moral valence of intelligence is an open question and whether the values we have as humans will follow through into an alien emergent intelligence raised all kinds of questions.

But if we can teach values simply through conduct that has bad intent it might mean we can and in fact capable of teaching what we see as the right conduct.

But for all your sloppy coders out there be warned. Writing bad code leads to Nazism. Nobody tell Curtis Yarvin.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1514 and Informational Ravine

I hate to add fears that we will face a “dead internet” but increasingly we lack shared context in our online spaces. As context collapses so too does culture. Bad behavior proliferates.

Without shared values we cannot find purchase on the informational ravine of the open web. Competing narratives and interests buffet your mind as you try to sense-make your way into a firmer grip. It’s easy to slip and find yourself unsure of what is up or down.

The vibes are bad. People have entirely different interpretations when presented with something as innocuous as an email asking “what did you get done this week?” If you discuss a particularly contested space it quickly becomes a hostile information environment. Many retreat.

If you are tempted to argue with me about whether that action is in fact innocuous you have to wonder how far apart you and I are from each other as we try to climb through the great ravine to the other side.

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Reading Startups

Day 1510 and Turning It On

Almost two years ago I sent a Twitter DM to a young founder named Isaiah. He was intellectual, curious and humble and I was impressed by his authenticity.

He was strong enough and driven enough to ask for hard feedback. So I told him the truth when he asked. I hated his first idea, gave a prediction about how it would go and said I’d invest in him on whatever he did next.

Lucky for me that feedback turned out to be accurate. We talked for months as he worked through a plan for his true passion for abundant clean nuclear energy.

I was blessed to be put in a position where I could commit as his first investor. His progress since then been extraordinary. Their goal is to make the world’s energy by building nuclear reactors at planetary scale. Today Valar Atomics announced they raised a 19m seed round.

When I say extraordinary I really mean it.

First, we have completed the construction and pressure certification of our thermal prototype, Ward Zero, at our Los Angeles facility—the fastest in history a thermal test unit has been developed and built. Ward Zero will be unveiled next week at an exclusive event in LA. Isaiah Taylor

We are in an age of acceleration. To be able to design and test a prototype this fast is a sign that we can expect better solutions to arrive and quickly if we should so will it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are able to turn on a working reactor in the near future. If you are interested in Valar (working for them or investing in their growth) hit me up on DM.

Reading

Leading Edge newsletter “What Woo Works?”

Spooky, scary, technology is witchcraft

Media

Want to see an android art direct as if it were in the cremaster cycle? The Protoclone is a faceless, anatomically accurate synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 Myofibers, and 500 sensors. Clearly they are doing this just to scare us into giving them attention so here you go. I hope they don’t execute as swiftly as Valar.

Protoclone, the world’s first bipedal, musculoskeletal android
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Culture Media

Day 1505 and Warping Reality

We are all avoiding reality to some measure. Be grateful that our egos can cushion the horrors of the world at all. I’m unsure how removed one can be from reality anymore but as an American I’ll probably one of the last to find out.

Rationalist and all-around Twitter in-group personality Aella went on a podcast called “whatever” which I’d wrongly believed was a marketing funnel for OnlyFans creators.

It turns out the host is some sort of debater Christian and this is a popular podcast for feeling better about the state of the gender wars. In some of the ensuing debate Kim Ono (I’ve lost the link) said something very insightful.

The whole business model is warping reality to comfort the fearful

Whether it is dim men dunking on sex workers, panicked liberal women on MSNBC, or Fox Blondes screaming at Boomers, our entire media environment is about making sure you can’t see what’s real while simultaneously pandering that your fear is justified. Nervous systems be damned!

I find reality to be plenty terrifying but I try to avoid needing my own version of reality to cope with it. Not to say I don’t have my own biases and priors (and I’ve written about them at left) but the world is such a jumble at the moment I very much need to confidently act in the face of warped realities.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1498 and Reformation

When things get noisy on our global commons it’s good to step back. I live in elder millennial neighborhood that is American Twitter which is a bustling place. I still manage that “by hand” as it were.

I spend time on forums and Discords but increasingly my interactions within the commons has some kind of artificial intelligence layer between me and “the noise” as the slop drowns out. What to believe and how to keep it updated to reality?

An informational reformation is part of what you could see as a wider political elite power struggle. The uni-party of Washington Consensus and prestige media are not containing the rebel information hordes at bay. Consensus is at risk. Zoomers are learning the Treasury doesn’t control the Fed. Welcome to the audit kids.

The centralized narrative window of a top editorial page or an interview on Bloomberg remains the bounds of propriety for now.

But it’s going to get weirder. Many a teenage hacker with fighting words on Discord servers is likely to be sacrificed in this war of elites as permanent Washington fends off the populist revolt. It just happens to be that some hackers under the banner of Musk are in this coalition. Crusades probably always involve baroque racism.

With all of that as background I started watching Wolf Hall which is a BBC Drama with Damien Lewis as Henry VIII and Claire Foy as Ann Boleyn. What could be more relevant than a time when an elite decided he should decide his own fate and not the Holy Roman Emperor.