02 / September 21

Shoggoth with a Smiley Face

“the ‘content’ of the medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”
— Marshall McLuhan

Topics

Shoggoth with a Smiley Face; Ramon Llull, Mary Shelley, Ada Byron Lovelace, alife and code; lock in, path dependency, quasi-teleology, determinacy, contingency, the Outside, and the cone of possibility; growth v. programming, drives v. desires; Negative Capability and the Black Box; the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the Thirty Years War, and the Westphalian order; Andreessen Horowitz's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Srinivasan's Network State, Snow Crash's burbclaves, Moldbug's SovCorp, no voice free exit, CEO-monarchs, company towns, and the Outside of the State; Technocracy Inc. to The Sovereign Individual; the Hollerith Tabulator, IBM, Howard Scott, Joshua Haldeman, the North American Technate, and Elon Musk; Project Phoenix, Arpanet, Vietnam, and the birth of the internet in counterinsurgency; the Macy Conferences; Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication, information theory, and Shannon's Labyrinth; neo-technocracy, Greenland, and Praxian Accelerationism; antimemetics: There Is No Antimemetics Division, Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine, Incogni Research and The Great Digital Fatigue; Cozyweb, Dark Forest, and The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet; Thucydides' Melian Dialogue, Sun Tzu, Bacon, Machiavelli, Napoleon, Clausewitz, war gaming to game theory to predictive AI; Simulmatics, scenario planning, prediction markets, the Pentagon's Terror Market, assassination markets; implicit vs. explicit models, modelling for explanation or prediction; SEAS-VIS and Sentient World Simulation; W.E.B. Du Bois' Megascope, Total Information Awareness to SWS to Palantir to KAIROS; the Nooscope, precrime, and full spectrum hegemony; Cybersyn, Project Cyberfolk and algedonic metering; domain-specific AI; how to disappear completely, extreme privacy and its discontents

Readings 2

from There Is No Antimemetics Division qntm from The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet Yancey Strickler

Additional Reading & Primary Documents 3

The Great Digital Fatigue Incogni Research from The Meme Machine Susan Blackmore from Extreme Privacy: What It Takes to Disappear Michael Bazzell

Lab

Applied Autopoiesis

Vibe coding introduction: Codec app; Github
HuggingFace, Fal.ai
ComfyUI, Fuser, Krea, Higgsfield