01 / September 14

A grin without a cat

“Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin, thought Alice, but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Topics

A cybernetic system (cat trips out), the Cheshire Cat in Decentraland, the para-real and the propaganda model: Chomskian filters, ideology, and reality; naïve realism, AI sycophancy, inducement, simulation, and parasocial masking; the Hugging Face hack, reasoning agents, and drives, bootstrapping AGI, algorithmic innovation v. glorified autocomplete, recursive self-improvement, and Singularity; model collapse, common crawl, spine-cutters, and ISBNdB; MIME-NET to FAANG to MAG7; platforms v. institutions; existential v. instrumental technology; Total Information Awareness, Peter Thiel, The Antichrist, and vice signaling; TESCREAL, eacc, et al.; Libidinal Materialism, Deleuze and Guattari; decoding, deterritorialization, capitalism, and identity; feudal labor to wage-labor to abstract Capital (AI); Capital + State Power (Violence) + Technology = Cybernetics; Stargate: Cybernetics + State Capitalism = AGI; AI and counterinsurgency, robotics and counterethics; the 0-Degree Plane of Neuroelectronic Continuity, AI and psychosocial evaporation; Attention is all you need, self-attention, and transformers; compute, inference, and dumping; hype, mass culture, and cyberpositive loops; attention-economy, art, and cybernetics: Jasia Reichardt's Cybernetic Serendipity; Gustav Metzger, art, and the (D)ARPA pill; Gregory Bateson, cybernetics, and Marcel Duchamp; Norbert Wiener's Gun Controller, the Whitney brothers, and the birth of cybernetic art; The Mechanisation of Thought Processes symposia: O.G. Selfridge, Paradise Lost, and Pandaemonium Architecture; von Neumann and Ulam's game theory, cellular automata, and self-replicating machines; Conway's Game of Life, alife, cellular automata, to generative AI

Readings 1

0-Degree Plane of Neuroelectronic Continuity: AI and Psychosocial Evaporation Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo

Additional Reading & Primary Documents 3

Attention is all you need Illia Polosukhin, et al. Human-Computer Interaction Design and the Cybersemiotic Experience Claudia Jacques Pandemonium: A Paradigm For Learning O.G. Selfridge

Lab

What’s in the box?

Scott: generative/toy AI: Golly, Koan to Wotja, et al.
Ariel: Monty Hall problem, sampling, autoregressive models, latent diffusion models

Lab deck · Apparatus What’s in the box? The lab’s second half: the door game, sampling, autoregressive models, latent diffusion.