The distinction is useful, but incomplete.

Much of what is currently called discovery is not discovery in any strong sense. Recommendation systems rarely generate genuinely novel desires. More often, they accelerate the recognition of desires that are already latent. The user who encounters a recommendation for a restaurant, a book, a tool, or a short-form video often experiences the encounter not as surprise but as confirmation. The reaction is not “I did not know such a thing was possible,” but rather “that is exactly the sort of thing I was about to look for.” Discovery, in this sense, is anticipatory search. It surfaces tomorrow’s query today.

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This suggests a first distinction. Search and discovery both operate within what might be called the future probable. They assume a relatively stable motive structure and work within it. Search satisfies existing motives explicitly. Discovery satisfies them implicitly. The difference is one of timing and awareness rather than substance.

Viewed dynamically, search is essentially non-perturbing. The user has already selected a destination. Search solves a routing problem. It reduces friction between desire and fulfillment. Discovery introduces a perturbation, but a damped one. It influences local path selection without substantially altering overall direction. A person who discovers a new snack food, podcast, or fashion trend may change behavior for a time, but the underlying motives remain unchanged. The perturbation remains contained within the same basin of attraction.

This perspective shifts attention away from information retrieval and toward the structure of adjacency. Why do certain things become visible to us rather than others? Contemporary recommendation systems rely heavily on mimetic adjacency. Things are nearby because people like us have encountered them. Collaborative filtering, social recommendation, and algorithmic feeds all operate according to this principle. The resulting discoveries are fundamentally self-referential. The organizing principle is derived from a model of the user.

Other environments rely on different forms of adjacency. Libraries offer an instructive example. The experience of wandering library stacks differs from browsing a bookstore, whether corporate or independent. A bookstore is organized around anticipated demand. Even the most curated bookstore remains oriented toward what somebody expects people to want. A library classification system is organized around an ontology. Books become adjacent because a bureaucratic scheme places them adjacent. The resulting serendipity is not random. It is structured by a classification system that is largely indifferent to the preferences of the visitor.

There is, however, another form of adjacency that is neither mimetic nor administrative. It is stigmergic. Things become adjacent because paths repeatedly intersect. The hot dog vendor happens to stand beside the falafel vendor. The coffee machine sits beside a hallway. A conference reception happens to place a historian beside a cryptographer. The resulting associations emerge through accumulated traces of movement rather than through either classification or preference. Stigmergic environments function as external associative memories. What becomes linked is determined by traffic patterns. Cities, campuses, conferences, and neighborhoods often derive much of their intellectual productivity from this mechanism.

At this point another distinction becomes necessary. Not all perturbations are equal. The magnitude of a perturbation is often a poor predictor of its long-term consequences. A large detour may produce no lasting effects. A tiny divergence may prove decisive. A driver who exits a highway to buy gasoline experiences a substantial local deviation while remaining on the same overall journey. A driver who chooses one of two nearly identical roads may inadvertently enter a new town, encounter a different environment, and ultimately abandon the original plan altogether.

The ε/δ perspective offers a useful way to think about this. As argued in the essay ε-δ Thinking, “The continuous, or ε/δ view of the world is fundamentally built around the fiction of becoming.” Small differences do not necessarily lead to small outcomes. Under certain conditions, “inputs that are too close to tell apart result in outputs that are radically far apart.” The important variable is therefore not perturbation magnitude but perturbation leverage. What matters is whether a perturbation occurs near a bifurcation structure.

Search and ordinary discovery mostly operate within stable regions of possibility space. Their ε/δ relationship is well-behaved. Small inputs produce small effects. More interesting phenomena occur near unstable equilibria, where tiny perturbations can produce large trajectory divergence.

One candidate for such a phenomenon is what internet culture calls a pill. Unlike discovery, a pill does not merely connect objects to motives. It alters the relationship among motives themselves. The common structure of ideological, religious, cultural, and lifestyle pills is not the creation of new desires but the reorganization of existing ones. A pill legitimates some motives while delegitimating others. It supplies permission structures, narratives, exemplars, and communities that allow a previously subordinated motive to become dominant.

The subjective experience is often one of recognition rather than transformation. Individuals rarely report acquiring entirely new desires. More often they describe the experience as discovering that desires they already possessed are legitimate. The underlying operation resembles a change in government more than the appearance of a new political party. Motives already present within the self acquire new authority.

This helps explain the durability of certain brands, movements, and identities. A consumer attached through utility can be displaced by a competitor offering slightly better utility. A consumer attached through preference can be displaced by the next cultural fashion. A consumer attached through identity is more resistant to churn. The relevant competition is no longer another product but another identity. Identity changes more slowly than preferences, and therefore supports more durable forms of loyalty.

Yet the more closely one examines pilling, the less radical it appears. A pill does not create a new self. It selects among existing possible selves. It provides legitimacy and social proof for an identity that was already latent. Its operation remains fundamentally one of selection rather than creation. It answers questions of being rather than becoming.

This realization points toward a final distinction. In Portals and Flags, a flag represents a move that stabilizes territory. A portal represents a move that enlarges territory. A portal offers “a more fertile way of thinking” that promises “an indefinitely extended stream of surprises within an ever-widening scope.” It does not recruit people into a worldview so much as create routes into new worlds. It can “turn it into a portal to a hidden universe of thought.”

Seen in this light, pilling is actually closer to flagging than to portalling. A pill stabilizes an identity. It strengthens a worldview. It recruits individuals into an existing regime of meaning. A portal does something different. It enlarges the space of traversable possibilities. Rather than asking which identity should dominate, it creates pathways among identities, disciplines, communities, or modes of thought.

Libraries often function this way. So do certain conferences, intellectual institutions, and historical projects. The original Whole Earth Catalog connected domains that ordinarily remained separate: ecology, engineering, computing, architecture, and self-sufficiency. Its value lay not in recruiting people into a single worldview but in creating routes among many. The same is true of environments rich in administrative and stigmergic adjacencies. Their purpose is not to stabilize identities but to create opportunities for movement.

The distinction is subtle but important. A flag answers the question, “Who am I?” A portal answers the question, “What worlds can I move among?” Flags stabilize. Portals enlarge. Flags recruit. Portals connect.

The original question about searchability and discoverability therefore turns out to have been too narrow. Search, discovery, pilling, and portalling operate at different levels of intervention. Search acts on means. Discovery acts on objects. Pilling acts on identities. Portalling acts on possibility spaces themselves.

The first three operate largely within existing topologies. Search helps navigate a world. Discovery reveals previously unnoticed destinations within that world. Pilling influences which attractor within that world becomes dominant. Portalling changes the topology itself. It increases traversability. It creates new routes through the adjacent possible.

This final category is difficult to measure because its product is neither loyalty nor conversion. Its product is increased access to becoming. As the ε/δ essay suggests, science itself can be understood as a process of replacing brittle ontologies with richer landscapes, “unleashing becoming over being.” Portals operate similarly. They do not primarily tell people what to think, what to want, or even who they are. They expand the range of futures that can plausibly be n.

Searchability and discoverability remain useful concepts. They describe important ways of navigating existing worlds. But the most consequential interventions may not be searches, discoveries, or even pills. They may be portals: structures that increase the number of routes through reality and thereby expand the space of possible becomings.

Twelve Dos and Don’ts for Building Portals

A portal is not a recruitment device. It is a route-creating device. Its purpose is not to stabilize identities, communities, or doctrines, but to increase traversability among worlds. This creates a different design problem from either marketing or movement-building. Most institutions drift naturally toward flag behavior because flags are easier to measure and defend. Successful portals require resisting that drift.

1. Do connect worlds. Don’t merely aggregate them.

A portal is not a collection of unrelated things. A bookstore can contain many subjects without becoming a portal. The critical feature is the existence of routes. Participants should be able to move from one domain to another and understand why the movement makes sense.

2. Do privilege pathways over destinations. Don’t optimize for conclusions.

Flags are built around answers. Portals are built around routes. A successful portal leaves people with more questions than they arrived with, but also with clearer paths for pursuing them.

3. Do encourage traffic. Don’t encourage settlement.

The measure of a portal is not how many people stay. It is how many people pass through and emerge elsewhere. If everyone remains permanently within the portal’s own discourse, it is becoming a flag.

4. Do create administrative adjacencies. Don’t rely solely on personal relevance.

Recommendation systems place things together because users are likely to want both. Portals place things together because reality suggests a connection. Classification schemes, archives, bibliographies, and curated juxtapositions often outperform personalization for portal-building.

5. Do cultivate stigmergic adjacencies. Don’t over-design interactions.

Some of the most valuable connections emerge through repeated path intersections rather than planned encounters. Hallways, common areas, shared meals, and informal conversations often produce more portalling than formal programming.

6. Do reward translation. Don’t reward tribal fluency.

People who can move ideas between domains are more valuable to a portal than people who achieve deep status within a single domain. Translators create routes. Specialists often create territories.

7. Do make exit easy. Don’t punish departure.

A flag views departure as failure. A portal views departure as evidence that movement occurred. If participants feel obligated to remain loyal, the portal is already becoming a flag.

8. Do expose people to coherent alternative worlds. Don’t merely provide novelty.

Randomness is not portalling. Surprise alone is not enough. A portal should reveal adjacent worlds that possess their own internal integrity, traditions, and developmental paths.

9. Do create permission for ambiguity. Don’t force identity commitments.

Flags often demand declarations of allegiance. Portals should allow participants to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously without resolving tensions prematurely.

10. Do increase traversability. Don’t maximize engagement.

Engagement metrics naturally favor loops, repetition, and enclosure. Portals should be evaluated by the number and quality of routes they create, not by the amount of time people spend inside them.

11. Do foreground becoming. Don’t foreground being.

The most important question is not “Who are you?” but “What could you become?” Identity formation may occur, but it should remain secondary to possibility expansion.

12. Do expect eventual flag formation. Don’t mistake it for success.

Every successful portal creates opportunities for flags to emerge. Communities, doctrines, schools of thought, and identities will form around particularly attractive pathways. This is normal. The challenge is to preserve the larger topology of movement rather than allowing one newly formed territory to annex the entire landscape.

The central discipline of portal-building is remembering that the objective is not conversion, loyalty, consensus, or growth. The objective is the creation of routes. A successful portal enlarges the adjacent possible. People leave with more ways of moving through reality than they possessed when they arrived.

Notes

1. I’m trying out a new style here where I added bold styling to key terms and phrases. I find I often do this for generated texts I create for my own use or personalized for a single other person, like a client. It’s a mix of added emphasis, scannability support, and vibe imprinting.

2. This is a future-of-marketing inside baseball type essay, focused specifically on trying to solve for myself what I’ve been privately labeling the distribution crisis. The crisis is the result of the collapse of public social media and loss of social proof signals like virality. The result is filter failure on the one hand (100 substack emails in your inbox) and rising costs on the other (both sender and receiver of messages now pay the channel owner for less effective signal delivery)

3. The major effective response to the crisis has been “pilling” techniques, but I increasingly don’t like these. This essay was my effort to imagine an alternative. As yet though, portalling as a successor to pilling is a very immature marketing discipline. You have to create un-cults rather than cults.

The basic idea of the essay was that generative AIs are primarily instruments for seeing in latent space, not engines of utilitarian production, despite the adjective. The title was a reference to Donald Mackenzie’s book, An Engine, Not a Camera, which made the opposite argument about the economy. In both cases, the argument was about flipping the view of what the thing was.

This theory has felt ever more right since I first proposed it, but I’ve also felt it’s missing some pieces. One obvious missing piece is a proper camera-theoretic account of agentic AI, which at first sight seems more engine-like. We’ll sort that out after laying some groundwork.

One critical piece was supplied by , who offered a definition of intelligence in a recent conversation:

Intelligence is a unit of information driving a unit of energy.

This is a deceptively simple definition; one that immediately cuts to the computational heart. I suspect some rigorous version of this will eventually be enshrined alongside ideas like Landauer’s principle. It’s not an idle thought. Sreeram is the founder of Eigenlabs, which is pushing the boundaries of AI in some of the most interesting ways today. They’re betting their technology roadmap on this definition in some ways.

Now, what could this definition mean? How does it help develop the camera/engine frame further? Let’s start with something that came before the camera — the telescope.

***

My introduction to astronomy came via an antique brass telescope in 1986, when my school astronomy club organized a Halley’s Comet viewing event. That event changed the course of my life in many ways, but I want to talk about that telescope.

For several years, I revered that telescope. It was a big, beautiful, heavy brass refractor on a heavy equatorial mount, with finely engraved brass setting circles. An instrument of the sort they don’t make anymore. So heavy, it had to be bolted to a wooden frame to allow two of us to carry it to the rooftop to place on its mount. Our school had inherited it as a hand-me-down from some American school.

But I also wanted my own telescope, and eventually I got one — a cheap, locally made Newtonian reflector. The tube was PVC. The eyepieces were cheap plastic. The mount was a simple no-frills altazimuth mount. The thing had absolutely no gravitas. I could lift it with one hand.

And it was radically better than that old brass beast.

So long as the old brass telescope was the only one I knew, it was something of a sacred object. Once I looked through a better one, everything changed, and I saw it for the obsolete museum piece it was. The antique didn’t have a properly achromatic lens. The equatorial mount had jammed at the declination of some random North American latitude, so the setting circles were useless, and you had to point it by navigating using the constellations. The views were blurry and chromatically fringed.

The astronomical telescope is an instrument with one job: to find, track, and show you things in the sky clearly. It is a rudimentary sort of intelligence too, using units of information (location and time information) to drive units of energy (the effort to point the telescope in a given direction by slewing on the two axes). When it does its job, this rudimentary intelligence loop anchors a bigger one — the information flowing from the skies into your eyes, shaping your thoughts, and then the energy driving any actions that follow those thoughts. In my case, that outer loop was a very consequential one. I almost went to grad school for astrophysics (at IUCAA in Pune, an astrophysics research institute) but turned it down to go to grad school in the US instead, where my PhD ended up being about the engineering side of interferometric space telescopes. Life-changing you might say. And since I run at about 100 watts, that early experience is still probably driving perhaps 2 watts of my average energy output.

My telescope arc reached its zenith around 2021, when I got a chance to spend a night at the Mount Wilson observatory and look through both the legendary 100” reflector and the 60” Hale refractor. These beasts take powerful motors to steer, and are among the last major frontier telescopes to be equipped with eyepieces for humans. Since then, all research telescopes have essentially been cameras. There’s no point in looking through them. Even serious amateur astronomy has gone that route. A high-school astronomy club friend I recently got back in touch with (a different, unrelated Kannan as it happens) has turned into an accomplished astrophotographer now. Our old shared experiences are probably driving 4 watts for him now. Information can drive energy over really long periods.

Looking through eyepieces is mostly for poets now. Not serious astronomers, whether professional or amateur.

My own astronomy adventures are now down to occasionally lugging out a modest hand-me down telescope (thanks ) on rare nights of clear seeing. I didn’t get far in my own astrophotography experiments. It requires more patience than I possess, and I kinda have an anachronistic attachment to actually looking through eyepieces rather than at photographs.

It might not be an entirely irrational impulse. just sent me this really lovely essay on how the gamut of the digital camera differs from that of the human eye (takes me back to my Color Science 101 days at Xerox), so maybe there really is a bit of difference between looking through the telescope and looking at photographs taken with one.

But let’s get back to the brass telescope, and make up a parable about it.

***

Imagine a blind astronomer who has a deep passion for the stars and planets. What could this astronomer do to pursue their passion?

There are two possibilities.

First, they could work on the images streaming out of the cameras with various analytical tools, doing all kinds of technical analysis. This is in fact what modern astronomers do. The human eye hasn’t been particularly relevant to astronomy in decades. You could do bleeding edge astronomy work, and I mean empirical, observational astronomy, not theoretical astrophysics, without ever looking through a telescope or even at the photography.

Of course, few actual astronomers are that soulless I imagine. I suspect most still look up often from their spectral charts and pages of math at the skies, and occasionally take an anachronistic and sentimental peek through a poet’s telescope that still features a vestigial eyepiece.

This possibility is not particularly interesting. It’s a reasonable and pragmatic way to pursue an interest in observational astronomy as a blind person. Or a sighted person for that matter.

The second possibility is, our blind astronomer could fetishize the instrument itself. The brass finger pointing at the moon. This is the interesting possibility.

Imagine a blind young astronomer in my position in the late 1980s, faced with a stark choice between a beautiful but functionally crappy antique telescope and a utilitarian but functionally superior one. Imagine further that our blind young astronomer has spent years caring for the ancient brass instrument, polishing the brass, cleaning the lenses, carefully taking eyepieces in and out of antique velvet-lined cases, becoming intimately familiar with every groove and curve.

Now he touches the new telescope — warm PVC, light plastic eyepieces in a cardboard box.

We can imagine a certain possibility — the sentimental attachment to the old instrument as object, rather than as a medium for seeing, is too overwhelming. Our blind astronomer retreats into a curious place: Insisting that the antique brass telescope is the superior instrument.

There is of course, a third possibility: The blind astronomer abandons astronomy, and transforms his sentimental attachment to the brass telescope into an antiquarian-historian interest in telescopes. But then, he’s no longer an astronomer, and exits our parable.

***

Let’s turn to AI now, and consider the nature of words in human society in light of the parable of the blind astronomer and the brass telescope.

Like telescopes, words are both instruments of seeing, and objects deserving of attention in their own right, as embodiments of the wordsmith’s craft.

In 2011, I wrote what became one of my most popular Quora answers, in response to the question, What are some tips for advanced writers? My answer made a distinction between two kinds of writing: Writing to think, and writing to write. The key bit:

The divide between thinkers and writers is more important than the one between fiction and non-fiction writers. You could divide the world of advanced writers into a 2x2, based on whether they are prioritizing developing their thinking or their writing, and whether they are focusing on fiction or non-fiction.

My hypothesis (I haven't yet gotten to a stage where I can check this) is that it is easier to cross the fiction/non-fiction divide than it is to cross the writing-first/thinking first divide.

Now, 15 years later, this is no longer a hypothesis. I can claim with some confidence that this divide is radically hard to cross, and I can’t actually think of a single person I personally know who has crossed it. I certainly haven’t.

There are people who exhibit some degree of ambidexterity, but everybody seems to land on one side or the other, net.

If you’re unsure where you land, one tell is how you react to editors. No serious writer enjoys being edited, so the signal is what sorts of editing you grudgingly accept as valuable anyway, and what kinds you absolutely refuse to countenance.

Those who write to think typically resist any attempt to change the content of what they’re saying, but generally don’t care about style, verbal precision, tightening, and pragmatic cutting suggestions to hit word-count limits.

Those who write to write are typically attached to every word and comma, but can be surprisingly indifferent to substantial content edits and highly open to saying entirely different things than they originally set out to.

Writing to think, and writing to write. Or in the language of our brass telescope parable, the sighted, attached to looking through words, and the blind, attached to looking at words. Beautiful, heavy brass words.

Both kinds of writers face a moment of crisis today, perhaps similar to the moment in history when eyepieces began to be replaced by cameras in telescopes (though from my understanding of that history, astronomers generally didn’t have the strong attachments to their instruments that writers do, and for the most part eagerly jumped into photographic astronomy).

Those who write to think face one sort of crisis of the psyche — writing is no longer the only general way to think, and rarely the best way, and they must either adapt to newer tools of thought or abandon the frontiers of thinkability and retreat to the shrinking number of niches where old tools work better.

Those who write to write face another sort of crisis of the psyche — they must choose between becoming antiquarians of words and defenders of a thesis of the necessary superiority of hand-wrought brass words.

***

I’m obviously in the adaptive thinker tribe, and I’m content to leave the other three tribes to their devices. It’s not even much fun anymore to troll the defenders of brass words. When I hand-write these days (this essay is an example), it’s because I don’t yet have the skill to wield generative AI to do the job. The shortcomings are as much mine as in the evolving tech. I’d be happy to let AI write essays like this for me the minute their capabilities, and my skills at wielding them, allow it.

At this point, the main question that interests me is how to think with AI, and what role, if any, words ought to play in emerging modes of AI-assisted thinking. The more words become unnecessary for thinking, the more I discover I’m not primarily a writer. I write primarily when that’s the laziest mode of thought available. AI offers lazier modes that yield as good, and increasingly, better thoughts.

Let’s start with a characterization of natural language that will allow us to apply Sreeram’s definition of intelligence as a unit of thought modifying a unit of energy.

First, natural language has now clearly become a compile target for pre-verbal thoughts for at least the write-to-think types among us. The prompts I write to produce a generated essay aren’t actually the thoughts I want to think through. They are more like telescope steering actions — looking up the coordinates of objects in the sky, punching them in, and getting the telescope to point in the right direction. Prompting is pointing at things.

Second, natural language has equally clearly become a programming language for automatically triggered post-verbal behaviors. This is one of the new developments since I wrote part 1. The output of a prompt is not necessarily text you read. It can be text for computers to read (rendering moot the question of whether humans could enjoy it), or code that runs and does something. Prompting is programming behaviors.

In sequence, prompting as pointing at things, and prompting as programming behaviors, represent the feedforward path of AI use. We’ll talk about the feedback path in a minute — the camera/engine distinction rests on that.

In feedforward mode though, increasingly, natural language feels like a hidden layer in thinking, mimicking the structure of the systems that you’re thinking with.

1. The input layer is pre-verbal or partly-verbal ideas, at least for me. A good deal of my pre-writing thinking is visual, affective or even somatic (vague finger-tip or gut feelings). Thought-forms that offer just enough verbal purchase to express as prompts to point the AIs.

2. The administrative layer, the only natural language you touch, steers the camera to point in the right part of latent space corresponding to those ideas.

3. Intermediate output layers might be close to human natural language (markdown files) or distant (JSON, code, binary…), but the point is, they’re usually not meant for human consumption at all. Intermediate output is for AI talking to itself. It may or may not stay close to human natural language as it evolves.

4. The final output layer, where some sort of energy flow is shaped to create intelligent behaviors. Today, this is mostly compute energy. Your prompt might end up as a piece of code that then runs persistently on a server, consuming watts. Increasingly though, it is generalized forms of robotic energy and other kinds of physical-intelligence energy.

When I consider the thinking I’ve done in all my vibe-coding projects over the last few months, it is is startling how little of it is in natural language that I produced or consumed, and how little of that is part of the content of the thoughts as opposed to the administration of the thinking.

In a very literal sense, my thinking has become increasingly post-verbal. Only a small part of it is verbal, and it’s dominated by the administrative steering part.

To be clear, that’s demanding thinking. Executive managerial attention deployed with the steady intensity of maker attention, rather than in the spiky way we’re used to expending it. I forget who pointed this out, but Paul Graham’s idea of manager time increasingly looks like his idea of maker time. Managerial energy and attention is increasingly expended through maker-like 4-hour vibe-coding blocks rather than 1-hour meeting blocks. It’s manager time nevertheless.

This managerial work takes the form of natural language communication, but is vastly more exhausting, because every word might unleash a thousand more, and those thousand words might govern computers and drone. Administrative natural language in thinking with AI is increasingly acquiring speech-act like character, like the words of judges when they pronounce verdicts. Or Rameses in Ten Commandments declaring “so let it be written, so let it be done.” We are all pharaohs now.

A lot of the verbal thinking goes meta-verbal in the process, where you have to think legalistically about large piles of words. For example, in constructing RAG bots to work with a corpus of text, you have to understand the contours of that corpus and how to navigate it semantically and mechanically. Meaning and form both matter, and both must be shoveled around by the thousand. It’s very artisanal work, but not wordsmith work.

***

It’s not that hard to play the current evolutionary trajectory out a decade or so. It will become possible to do an increasing proportion of your internal thinking in non-verbal ways, and have AIs conform to the visible surfaces of that thinking through increasingly rich interfaces. And on the output end, it will be increasingly possible for the shaped energy to take just about any form that can be actuated.

Here’s a simple speculative example. It is 2032. I have a vague desire to experience a fantasy story. I say to my AI system — “give me a fantasy story.”

The AI begins by retrieving my history of story consumption, and flashing various storyboard elements at me — dragons, knights, damsels, magic potions — and tracking my facial responses. Perhaps I’m wearing an MRI helmet too, and it’s monitoring my fitness tracker.

Purely by monitoring my somatic and non-verbal neural responses, and a kind of idea-diffusion computational approach, it begins to converge on the elements and vibes of the sort of story I want to experience. These then turn into motifs, sequences, sequences, and plotlines. Fragments of dialog begin to appear, as do leitfmotifs and world-building elements. I’m presented with more or less verbalized forms of the story — dialogue heavy vs. image and affect heavy. Once it has fingerprinted my subconscious desires sufficiently, it presents me with a series of trailer comps, fictional book reviews/back cover blurbs. Again it monitors my reactions, figuring out the medium I want, and the type of story. Every narrative option is on the table — book, comic book, movie, musical album, theme-park ride, video game.

Eventually, it locks in, and produces something it figures will scratch my itch. The more preferences can be revealed, the less necessary it becomes to state them.

Literally nothing in this speculation is science-fictional. We possess all the pieces required to do a rudimentary version of this today. It would be janky as hell, painful to prompt the system, and endure the output, but it is already possible to hit, say, the quality levels of Hallmark Christmas movies.

All that remains to be done is refine all the pieces, integrate them better, and of course, keep improving the models they rely on and the hardware those models run on.

Besides my rather on-the-nose technology assumptions, this speculative example rests on a more oblique assumption: that “story” thinking is not actually the same as “verbal” thinking. They’ve just been historically coupled because we’ve lacked the technology to separate them.

This is not a radical assumption. In fact, you’ll find some version of this assumption in many fiction writing guides. Skill at story and skill with words are entirely different things (as a simple example, consider Ikea manuals featuring the famous Ikea man). The reason this distinction matters now is that there are many kinds of non-verbal thinking that happen to be tied to verbal thinking today in seemingly inseparable ways.

The more AI advances, the more different kinds of thinking become separable from verbal thinking, deprogramming centuries of Gutenberg-head in decades.

***

To bring the story back to the camera-engine frame, consider now the feedback path in agentic behaviors.

Any sort of agent, conceptually, is a very simple feedback loop. It sees, thinks, and does in a feedforward path, and in a feedback path, it registers the difference between expected and experienced outcomes. Elementary feedback control — an error signal drives further action.

This error signal is the raw information entering the system over time, and the rate at which raw context actually expands.

If you always see exactly what you expect, up to the limit of your indifference, the effective error is zero, and the feedback loop is superfluous. There is no misregistration between your expectations and outcomes to worry about. Cheap toasters and psychotic one-shotters work that way. Normally though, in real domains, there is a non-zero error signal that must be dealt with iteratively, and driven to zero. Whether you do so mindfully or brutally is what determines the nature and quality of your intelligence.

The question now is, when is such an agent a camera, and when is it an engine? Given that there is both sensing and acting in the loop, it’s tempting to answer why not both?

This, I assert is the wrong answer.

The thing is, the seeing can outrun the doing. This is camera mode. And the doing can outrun the seeing. This is engine mode. One drives errors to zero mindfully, the other brutally.

There can be a lot of information shaping very little energy, and very little information shaping a lot of energy. Intelligence is when the balance between mindfulness and brutality is right for the context. You can overthink and underthink, relative to the resolution of actions required (or equivalently the indifferences in outcome preferences).

In some situations, indifference is high enough, very coarse action regulation is enough. In other situations, very precise action regulation is required. One calls for little to no feedback (one-shotting being the extreme case), the other calls for a great deal of feedback.

Agentic loops that are camera-like produce a surplus of information via rich feedback. Ones that are engine-like produce a surplus of externalities via impoverished feedback. Unintended consequences that you may be indifferent to, but others might not be.

To date, agentic AI has seemed very engine-like mainly because it has been applied in highly playable domains where two things are true: The misregistration between expectations and outcomes tends to be low, and a function of mistakes rather than ignorance or information deficits. In chess, for example, if a move causes play to unfold in unexpected ways it’s because you don’t understand the mechanics of the game deeply enough and haven’t computed far enough. Not because you misread the board position or because new pieces suddenly appeared on the board. You do not really need feedback as such. Players can play a game by sending messages with moves back and forth, and the game states they maintain will stay synchronized, error-correctable, rewindable, and replayable. AI is teaching us that the universe is unreasonably playable in this sense, but still, few real domains are as playable as chess.

This view suggests an interesting reading of AI psychosis of the agentic variety. When you operate in a domain that can frictionlessly absorb enormous amounts of cognitive energy without doing any real damage, you experience a positive feedback loop that can turn psychotic. There is no error signal regulating your thinking.

The more you operate in open, low-playability domains though, domains with friction, ontological openness, and real noise, the more you must choose between generating a surplus of information through feedback, or causing invisible unintended consequences. Consequences that may provoke hostile responses to your psychotic tendencies down the road.

One way to cash out the difference between the two modes is that old pair of terms, exploration and exploitation.

Cameras explore. They produce more information than they consume in regulating their own actions. Accumulating context outruns the action, which tends towards maximally mindful.

Engines exploit. The unleash more energy than they can control, based on a slow-growing store of information driven by minimal feedback. Action outruns context, and tends towards maximally brutal. There’s a reason we describe human engine-like behaviors as oblivious or tone-deaf.

To some degree, engines are necessarily stupid, malicious, or indifferent to consequences. In highly playable domains, they can enter extended psychotic regimes of exponential “productivity” where they do no work because they encounter no resistance. But they also generate no value.

As many organizations are finding out, this kind of atomized psychotic “productivity” in the high-playability pockets of an organization, far removed from layers of contextual feedback signals, does nothing for the bottomline or operational effectiveness. It is sound and fury signifying nothing at best, and an engine tearing itself to pieces at worst, in a shriek of explosive token bills.

Without the appropriate feedback loops at all levels, keeping context growing faster than action, behaviors just get dumber and more damaging and head towards runaway meltdown conditions.

Which suggests a very interesting reading of our historical moment. Are we going to turn the most powerful camera ever built towards new frontiers of exploration, or are we going to let it drive an epidemic of psychotic meltdowns masquerading as productivity leaps?

I was touching grass not because I particularly wanted to, but because my wife needed some help repotting her tomato plants. Neither of us is particularly interested in gardening. My wife is primarily on a mission to secure better tomatoes for the coming months than are generally available in Seattle. I’m free-riding on her efforts for a ready supply of fresh cilantro. Though to be honest, if she weren’t gardening, I’d just get my cilantro at the store like I used to. I’d probably just let the local forest take over our yard.

Little signal boost: I’m organizing the Protocol Symposium in September, on the theme of New Nature. One day left for talk and workshop proposals (deadline, Sunday 14th June, midnight).

I don’t mind light gardening chores like watering the lawn or a spot of digging around, but it’s not my idea of relaxing fun. The wife though, has been drawn into the ceaseless global war of backyard gardeners against weeds and various critters that try to eat your produce. In our case, local wild bunnies, which she initially thought were cute but has now declared her sworn enemies. She is wishing death-by-coyote on them, but the local coyotes have so far not obliged. It’s nature red green in tooth and root in our backyard.

This essay is not about whatever “touching grass” is a metaphor for. I don’t know, probably some touchingly vulnerable thing like curing loneliness and alienation by seeking more non-parasocial IRL friendships and romance, with maybe a bit of actual outdoor time to regulate sleep better and mitigate the fatigue of too much screen time. Worthwhile life-hygiene things perhaps, but not particularly interesting to me. These are not problems I personally suffer, though I sympathize with those who do.

This essay is a little bit about literally touching grass, but it’s mainly about a complementary activity I’ll call touching time.

***

To literally touch grass in most parts of the world, especially in the sort of somatic-meditative mode the meme-phrase suggests, somebody probably needs to be fighting a deadly war against not-grass. Grass in a pure, monocultural form is not a natural thing.

I grew up mostly in single-family homes with lawns-equipped gardens and regular gardeners. My mom was an avid gardener, and remains one in her 80s (though now limited to a bunch of balcony plants in my parents retirement apartment). I enjoyed helping out with the lawn watering mainly because you could have fun playing games with the water.

Grass anywhere, in the sense suburbanites everywhere encounter it, is an extraordinarily unnatural thing, but it is particularly so in India. The tropics are not a natural habitat of temperate European lawn grasses, and it’s an uphill struggle against blazing sun alternating with torrential rain to keep lawns going. Tropical monsoon ecologies alternate between dry and dusty and lush and overgrown. Neither mode is lawn-friendly. The natural sort of curated domestic plant ecology is a fruit orchard plus herb garden full of small gods.

Grass is not natural in the Seattle area either, where I live now. The latitude is right, but it’s too wet. The natural ecology here is dense temperate rainforest full of sparkly vampires and werewolves.

But even in the form you might typically encounter it in its native habitat, grass in the sense of a lawn monoculture is a highly unnatural, authoritarian high-modernist Veblen good. The stylized expression of Euro-heritage billionaire atavism, not starving poet soul-salve that heals through touch. What is natural is the meadow, a wild multi-species ecology. And meadows are not that fun to touch, as you’d know if you’ve tried. The one time I tried was when I misguidedly tried to do a spot of orienteering in 2005, with a survey map in hand, on the outskirts of Ithaca. It was not fun.

Meadows harbor many itchy-scratchy-sneezy-creepy-crawly things. Hostility animal, vegetable, and mineral. The mix of grasses and other plants typically grows taller than a lawn (between knee and waist-high). And much of it is not the soft kind.

Laying on your back on a well-manicured suburban lawn, running your fingers through the cool grass, is fun. On a wild meadow, not so much. You’ll probably touch something unpleasantly pokey or bitey.

Between the wild meadow and the authoritarian high-modernist lawn, we have the heavily grazed pasture. That probably has horse and cow manure all over it.

***

Here is a picture of the grass I touched this morning. We just reseeded it a few weeks ago, and it’s already enduring an assault from some sort of weed species, probably buttercup, according to ChatGPT.

The very idea of a weed, of course, is an authoritarian high-modernist one, but my wife, an authoritarian high-modernist to the core, is planning a battle against it. Our lawn is going to be monoculturally legibilized in war mode whether it likes it or not. Darwin’s tangled bank is not permitted to enter. Wildflower meadow patches are for the weak-minded.

See, that’s the thing about actually, literally touching grass. Unless it’s someone else’s grass you’re free-riding on, you’re actually signing up to participate in a silent, never-ending war against meadowfication or forestification. Tangled-bankification. It is ceaseless, tiring hard work; a specialized kind of farming. If you want five minutes of grass-touching a day, you’ll probably need to spend an hour a day fighting the war to keep it available (or paying someone to fight it for you).

People meditatively posting about “agency” aren’t well-suited to doing it. In the US, this war is mostly waged by immigrant Mexican workers on behalf of people posting online about touching grass.

Grass of the sort that shapes the Western narrative imagination, whether of the naturalistic English garden variety, the formal French garden variety, or the golf-course variety, is fragile monocultural life maintained with grim determination against the encroaching pressures of wilder, more pluralist ecologies.

Yes, it’s pleasant to touch. No, it’s no more a natural experience than touching astroturf. Which actually isn’t bad. I enjoy astroturfed outdoor malls.

Touching meadows would probably be a better prescription for the times, but I doubt it will catch on.

***

My prefered form of interaction with nature is not ceaseless war-mode agentic striving to maintain authoritarian high-modernist gardens but walking and mild hiking through mildly challenging wilderness areas. Well, “wilderness” in the sense of human-adjacent zones of preservation with some well-maintained easy hiking trails through them. Actual wilderness (as in the deep interiors of national parks, far from well-maintained trails and campsites), which I’ve experienced a few times when I was younger and actively “seeking meaning” myself, is stressful in a whole different you-could-die way. I exhausted what little desire I had to test my wilderness survival instincts by age 22.

The thing about both gardening/farming and being in extreme wilderness is that they’re necessarily zones of inescapable high-intensity agency that you either have to take on yourself or pay someone else to. They are not spectator sports. Light hiking trails, on the other hand, enable more passive experiences. Somebody (preferably not me) still has to labor a bit, but it’s not as intense as farming, gardening, or cutting your way through deep wildernesses with a machete, keeping an eye open for jaguars. It’s not a warzone. It’s a sort of neighborly detente zone of engagement with minimally domesticated wilderness.

Over the past few decades, I’ve been fortunate enough to have nearly always lived near pleasant light-hiking trails. The one exception was a year in Austin, 2000-01. There, I lived in an unpleasant neighborhood next to big-box stores and highways. I don’t know whether there are any areas in Texas I could enjoy living in.

My favorite lightly domesticated wilderness was Ithaca, where my commute from downtown to my office on the Cornell campus was a hike up a trail next to a cascading waterfall.

What was nice about it was not touching grass, but touching time. Deep time. The gorges of Ithaca (the town’s slogan is Ithaca is Gorges) were carved out in the last ice age. Hiking around near Ithaca, you hike through deep time. Tens of thousands of years evident in the landscape. Millennia visible to the literate eye in the strata exposed by the retreating glaciers.

Mine is not a literate eye. I’m no geologist. But I can feel it in my gut when there is in-your-face deep time geology stuff going on, and I like it.

***

As a kid, my fondest memories of our backyard lawn is not of touching the grass, but of looking up at the stars. In high school, I’d regularly lug my cheap telescope out to the lawn to do a spot of star-gazing.

Now there’s an activity that’s almost entirely about touching time. The skies above offer zero room for human agency. Even trillionaire Musk, with his dreams of Mars colonies, has agency that amounts to a rounding error past zero relative to the cosmos. There’s basically nothing you can do with the heavens besides photograph them.

Not only is it all impossibly far away in space, largely beyond any sort of touching, the vast majority of it is also impossibly far away in time. The nearest star you see is 4.2 years in the past. The Vogons could have demolished it yesterday and we wouldn’t know.

The heavens are a sort of asymptotic zone of non-agency. You have only two choices in relation to them — ignore them entirely and refuse to learn about them (as the very practical Sherlock Holmes did), or treat them as a spectator sport (a very slow one; slower than cricket).

The only available attitude to the heavens demands not agency, but presence.

To a certain contemporary type, mere presence in the cosmos is an anxiety-provoking, even alarming state of being to contemplate. If they’re not aggressively making grand plans to construct Dyson spheres and generation ships headed to Alpha Centauri, they find the spatio-temporally distant read-only universe too distressing to even attend to.

***

Presence without agency is also the only way we can relate to the past. We can be present in memories, individual and collective. But we cannot alter the phenomenology that induced them. We can endlessly spin revisionist narratives, but we can’t alter the past itself.

This too, is anxiety provoking for the agency-anxious, and so they turn to notions of progress and predestination, trying to go beyond mere revisionist history to what we might call proofs of history: Authoring hoped-for futures in part to “prove” preferred pasts.

When I was younger, I enjoyed reading “Big Histories.” Now I no longer do. They’re all anxiously motivated revisionisms, simply by virtue of being Big. No story at that sort of scale can be told except in the form of a self-soothing fantasy.

Instead, I enjoy reading about specific periods and episodes. Little histories. I like my sense of the Big to emerge not through epic grand narratives, but as a sort of collage of deeper temporal dynamics revealed through many fragments coalescing into a sort of atomized encyclopedia of moments.

Little histories allow you to touch time in ways big histories don’t. That is their main advantage.

This doesn’t mean you have to immerse yourself in the sort of joyless grind of uninspired documentation that is much of scholarly history. There is plenty of little history that combines scholarly attention to detail with a sense of the poetry of time. Our book club is mostly about reading that sort of romantic little history. And if you harbor psychohistorical conceits as my world machines buddies and I do, I think the trick is to get at your Seldon Vault prophecies by touching time through little histories. Not self-indulgence in anxiously revisionist Big Histories.

You do need a certain amount of Big History reading as preparatory orientation for understanding little histories. If you survive the many perils of that kind of reading — historicism, progressology, ideology, theology, exceptionalism — what you end up with is a rough map on which to start placing the little histories you can begin collecting. My idea of Big History now is like an empty stamp album. Stamps are actually ideal motifs of little history. Every stamp usually tells some specific story (though not always the one it is trying to tell). The Big History is implicit in the organization of the collection, rather than explicated in an epic grand narrative.

Touching stamps is a good example of touching time. Touching time is about the physics of stamp collecting.

What I mean by touching time is this: A cognitive-sensory experience that has temporal depth in the frequency domain, with time constants ranging from seconds to millennia available to the attuned awareness to attend to. “Infinity in an hour” as William Blake put it.

Many experiences are temporally shallow. A well-manicured lawn, for example, is largely a war of short time constants between fast-growing grasses and roughly equally fast-growing weeds. Deeper, slower dynamics, as well as faster, shallower ones are present, but harder to become aware of and attend to. Hiking through a gorge with exposed strata, on the other hand, the depth of time is in your face. Time is thick enough to cut with a knife.

***

I think one undertheorized reason people feel the urge to touch grass is a sense of helplessness in relation to events at larger scales, in an era which urges us to cultivate agency in relation to everything.

To be is to do apparently. The only way our age knows of to merely be is to be somebody, which is a degenerate sort of doing, in the form of personhood performance in theaters of agency.

To merely be, in the sense of existing anonymously and idly in a universe over much of which you have zero agency, without either studiously ignoring it, or striving intensely to try and make it take special notice of you, is widely regarded as a disease.

Touching time is about rejecting that pathologization of banal, non-special presence, and choosing to exist in the cosmos without being somebody or doing something. Not because it’s some enlightened state of being (it just takes some laziness and mediocrity of disposition), but because it’s actually a very pleasant way of being.

I came up with an allegory for this.

Imagine you’re on a vast spaceship traveling in hyperdimensional space. You’re a normal human, so you can only intelligibly sense the regular four: three spatial dimensions plus time. But the ship itself is weaving in and out of many more curled-up dungeon dimensions, as Terry Pratchett dubbed them. Sometimes maneuvering aggressively, at other times cruising along.

You do, however, unintelligibly sense the other dimensions, all of them, in your gut. You are present in all dimensions as a full-dimensioned dungeon-dimensions creature rather than a four-dimensional limited one.

Your experience of the dungeon dimensions of the spaceship’s journey is the familiar one of nausea.

And you can regulate this nausea. Turns out, if you let your mind wander to abstract thoughts and intangible ideas, graspable only through words, the nausea increases. But if you retreat from abstraction and intangibility, the nausea goes down.

So naturally, a division appears between two groups of people on the ship.

The first group, unable to tolerate the nausea, retreats from it. And is so successful at retreating, it begins to doubt that the spaceship is in fact maneuvering in hyperdimensional space. It begins to believe the dungeon dimensions do not exist at all. That the ship in fact merely exists in 4d space and chugging along placidly in it. That the sensible thing to do is to stay grounded in things you can see and touch, such as the astroturf (heh!) covering much of the ship’s built environment.

The second group, with greater tolerance for the nausea, heads deeper into it, to try and experience the dungeon dimensions as fully as possible. To get past mere visceral feelings and vibes to consciously regulated intelligible experience. This group immerses itself in abstractions and intangibles as far as it can tolerate, and begins to make for itself dungeon-dimensional maps, with the spaceship’s estimated trajectories marked on it. Slowly, it begins to convince itself that not only are the dungeon dimensions real, but that its maps are accurate, and that it can reliably orient in and navigate them.

And naturally, a war begins to unfold between the two groups.

The spaceship, of course, is just Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. And the two groups of course, are the grass-touchers and the abstract map-makers.

Touching time is how you bridge the divide between the two.

We are living through times when Spaceship Earth is maneuvering extraordinarily aggressively through the dungeon dimensions of hyperdimensional spacetime, even though in the three dimensions we can see, it is continuing its age-old orbit around the Sun, marking time at one year per orbit.

We all feel it in our guts. To retreat to touching grass is to surrender to a sense of the maneuverings of history being unsteerable. To retreat in the other direction to make endless maps is to mistake your comforting fictions for vast and limitless steering authority.

But to touch time is to feel your way into whatever steering authority you do have, without needing to retreat from everywhere you have none.

The little red circled ?? arrow in the upper right represents one of the problems I’m thinking about. There are two ways convergence and divergence forces can form a dynamic balance in systems that exist in our world: organic and machinic. Organic balance (mechanisms such as homeostasis, autopoiesis), oddly enough, is better understood. Machinic balance, of the sort represented by the elements of a clock being properly aligned, is easier to characterize formally but I think less understood.

Both kinds of balance involve self-regulation through feedback loops, and represent varieties of liveness, but there’s something subtly different about them. It’s a bit like the difference between crystals and organic substances. There is a low-entropy, striated, reversible quality to machinic balance.

One tell that you’re looking at machinic balance rather than organic is that a mechanism can be stopped, disassembled, and reassembled. There is a reversibility to the liveness of machines.

Interchangeable Parts I, made on Titles with my Bucket Art model

There is, however, another possible narrative. Instead of beginning with factories, it begins with precision. Instead of asking how production scaled, it asks how the modern world learned to make things reliably identical. From this perspective, marine chronometers, artillery reform, interchangeable manufacture, machine tools, and mass production appear not as separate stories but as successive phases of a single historical development.

The central hypothesis is that between roughly 1750 and 1800 France developed a distinctive culture of precision centered on military engineering, navigation, metrology, and scientific instrumentation. This culture did not itself create industrial capitalism. Instead, it created the conceptual and technical preconditions for industrial capitalism. The United States later inherited portions of this French precision culture and transformed them into a system of scalable industrial production.

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The resulting genealogy looks something like this:

French precision regime → artillery reform → precision measurement and gauging → interchangeable manufacture → American armories → machine tools → industrial scale.

Marine chronometry was not a parallel curiosity. It was one of the most advanced expressions of the same precision culture.

The starting point is not any particular invention but a set of institutions. Eighteenth-century France possessed a remarkable ecosystem linking the state, the military, scientific academies, engineering schools, observatories, naval establishments, and manufacturing arsenals. Figures such as Gribeauval, Borda, Berthoud, and Le Roy moved within overlapping networks concerned with measurement, standardization, calibration, and reproducibility. The common problem was not manufacturing as such. It was making reality legible, measurable, and governable.[1]

This perspective helps explain why apparently unrelated projects emerged at roughly the same moment. The Gribeauval reforms standardized artillery. Berthoud and Le Roy pursued increasingly reliable marine chronometers. Borda developed navigational and scientific instruments. Later generations created the metric system. These developments are usually treated separately because they belonged to different domains. Yet all addressed essentially the same question: how can performance be made independent of individual craftsmanship?

The case of artillery is especially revealing. Traditional artillery systems depended heavily on local variation, artisanal judgment, and ad hoc logistics. Gribeauval’s achievement was not simply to improve cannon design. His real innovation was systemic. He reduced the variety of calibers, standardized carriages, established measurement practices, and simplified logistical support. The result was not merely better cannon but a more coherent artillery system.[2]

Marine chronometry reveals the same logic operating at a higher level of precision. John Harrison’s great chronometers remain among the most astonishing achievements in the history of craftsmanship. Yet Landes argues that Harrison’s approach represented something of a technological cul-de-sac. The future belonged less to singular masterpieces than to designs capable of replication, maintenance, and standard manufacture. The French contribution was to shift attention from extraordinary clocks to reproducible chronometers.[3]

At first glance artillery and chronometers appear to have little in common. One is a large iron object measured in millimeters. The other is a delicate brass mechanism measured in fractions of millimeters. The connection emerges through the world of mechanisms and instruments.

The crucial intermediate technology was the gunlock. The firing mechanism of a musket required interacting moving parts—springs, tumblers, sears, pivots, and catches—that had to fit together reliably. Such mechanisms demanded a level of precision beyond that required for artillery but below that required for chronometers. More importantly, military demand created pressure for repeatability. If one lock failed, replacement mattered. Armies therefore had incentives to pursue standardization and eventually interchangeability.

This was the world of Honoré Blanc. Blanc’s famous demonstrations did not involve entire muskets but lock mechanisms assembled from collections of supposedly interchangeable parts. The significance of these demonstrations lay less in their immediate practical success than in the conceptual breakthrough they represented. Precision was no longer merely a property of individual objects. It was becoming a property of systems.[4]

The deeper bridge in the story may actually be the instrument makers rather than the gunsmiths. Scientific instruments, navigational instruments, clocks, chronometers, and gun mechanisms all belonged to a common artisanal ecosystem. The modern distinction between clockmakers, machinists, gunsmiths, and instrument makers had not yet fully emerged. The same culture of springs, pivots, tolerances, gauges, and geometric fitting linked all of these trades.

The most important artifact in this world was probably not the chronometer or the musket. It was the gauge.

A gauge transforms precision from an individual accomplishment into a transferable standard. A master craftsman may create a perfect component through skill and judgment. A gauge allows others to reproduce that component without possessing the master’s skill. Precision ceases to reside in people and begins to reside in systems. This shift may be the true conceptual breakthrough underlying modern industry.

The American story begins when this French precision culture crosses the Atlantic.

Benjamin Franklin represents the earliest connection. Franklin’s years in London and Paris immersed him in networks devoted to practical science, engineering, and useful knowledge. His significance lies less in transmitting specific technologies than in connecting the American republic to Enlightenment cultures of experimentation and technical competence.[5]

Thomas Jefferson presents a more intriguing case. Historians often place Jefferson and Hamilton on opposite sides of the early American debate over industrialization. Jefferson appears as the agrarian republican committed to a nation of independent farmers, while Hamilton appears as the advocate of finance, manufacturing, and industrial development. Yet this opposition obscures an important paradox.

Jefferson was fascinated by technology. He admired scientific instruments, architecture, surveying methods, agricultural improvements, and manufacturing techniques. Most significantly, while serving in Paris he encountered Blanc’s demonstrations of interchangeable manufacture and became an enthusiastic observer of the project.[6]

This creates a striking historical irony. The man later remembered as America’s great agrarian thinker helped import one of the foundational ideas of industrial manufacturing.

The paradox dissolves once we recognize that Jefferson opposed not technology but dependence. His fear was not machinery itself. His fear was the emergence of a propertyless industrial proletariat resembling those of Europe. Jefferson appears to have believed that technological sophistication could coexist with a republic of independent producers. Precision manufacturing and agrarian republicanism therefore appeared compatible rather than contradictory.

Whether this vision was historically achievable is another question. What matters is that Jefferson likely did not perceive any contradiction between admiration for interchangeable manufacture and commitment to a decentralized republic.

Hamilton’s role was different. If Jefferson imported a manufacturing technique, Hamilton imported a political economy. The Report on Manufactures argued for national development, industrial capacity, finance, and state support for productive enterprise. Hamilton supplied institutional frameworks. Jefferson helped transmit technical methods. Together they imported different aspects of the broader Atlantic transformation.[7]

The decisive American development occurred not in philosophy but in the armories. At Springfield and Harpers Ferry, the idea of interchangeability became linked to machine production. Figures such as John Hall, Simeon North, and Thomas Blanchard developed systems involving gauges, jigs, fixtures, inspection procedures, and specialized machine tools. The goal was no longer simply to produce precise parts. The goal was to produce precision systematically.[8]

This was the moment when precision ceased to be an artisanal achievement and became an industrial process.

Seen from this perspective, the history of industrialization unfolds through four stages.

The first stage is precision as craftsmanship. Harrison represents this world. Success depends on extraordinary skill embodied in individual artifacts.

The second stage is precision as standardization. Gribeauval, Le Roy, and Berthoud belong here. The objective is not perfection but conformity to standards.

The third stage is precision as interchangeability. Blanc and the American armories exemplify this phase. The critical insight is that any compliant component may replace any other.

The fourth stage is precision as infrastructure. Railroads, machine-tool industries, telegraph systems, and mass production belong to this world. Standards cease to govern individual artifacts and begin to govern entire networks.

The economic payoff of precision emerges only gradually. Precision by itself has limited economic significance. The true breakthrough occurs when precision enables substitutability. Once components become interchangeable, inventories shrink, repair becomes simpler, production scales more easily, and networks become possible. Precision becomes valuable not because objects are more accurate but because they become more fungible.

Textiles fit into this story in an interesting way. The early textile revolution was largely concerned with labor substitution, power transmission, and factory organization. Its initial trajectory was somewhat separate from the precision revolution. During the nineteenth century, however, the two streams converged. Textile mills increasingly depended upon machine tools, standardized components, and precision manufacture. The Lowell system belongs largely to this later phase of convergence. Factories supplied the organizational model; precision engineering supplied the technical foundation. Modern industry emerged when these two traditions fused.

The broader implication is that the history of industrialization may be understood as a transition from craftsmanship to protocols. The crucial question was never simply how to make better artifacts. It was how to make artifacts conform to standards independently of the individuals who produced them.

Gribeauval’s artillery, Berthoud’s chronometers, Blanc’s lock mechanisms, Jefferson’s observations in Paris, the American armories, and the machine-tool industry all represent successive steps in that transformation. The ultimate achievement was not the creation of precision. It was the creation of systems capable of reproducing precision indefinitely.

Notes

[1] Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (1997); Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture (1992).

[2] Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution; Jonathan A. Grant, Rulers, Guns, and Money (2007).

[3] David S. Landes, Revolution in Time (1983); Rupert T. Gould, The Marine Chronometer (1923).

[4] Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution; Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (1977).

[5] Edmund Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (2002); Joyce Chaplin, The First Scientific American (2006).

[6] Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution; Silvio Bedini, Thomas Jefferson and His Copying Machines (1984); Jefferson correspondence from Paris period.

[7] Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures (1791); Michael Lind, Land of Promise (2012).

[8] David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (1984); Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (1977).

This month’s main pick was Revolution in Time by David Landes, which I’ve owned for 15 years (bought and scanned when I was writing Tempo) but hadn’t actually read until this month. I’m almost done with it and now wish I’d read it earlier. Evolution in time-keeping through the period we’re studying right now (1600-2000) is a critical subplot but really hard to appreciate in conventional accounts of it.

I’m just starting to read the June pick, The Business of Enlightenment by Robert Darnton, which covers the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas after 1770, through the medium of the later editions of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (the first edition of which was completed between 1749-1772), which was as epochal an event in publishing history as in intellectual history.

The ideas we’re juggling in World Machine theory are starting to get quite complex, so I’m overdue for some synthesis/integration effort. This essay is a trial assembly of the gear-shift mechanism between the Modernity Machine and the Divergence Machine. It probably won’t make a whole lot of sense if you’re coming in cold to this series. I recommend catching up by browsing my previous World Machines writings, or better yet, pointing your LLM at them, and getting tldr-ed up.

NOTE: I’m writing this essay as much for the in-development AI agent at the World Machines project (WMP), as for the human readers of this newsletter. Both the WMP and this book club are now being hosted by the SIGPSY group (Special Interest Group in Psychohistory; no we’re not kidding) that has just kicked off in the Protocol Institute discord. Future book club chats will be held in the group’s #psychohistory channel of the Discord — details and invite link on the book club page.

A complicated but elegant picture is taking shape now, of how the Modernity Machine began giving way to the Divergence Machine through a full-stack set of revolutions, from rarefied and intellectual to bloody and violent, which drove the gear shift in the political, cultural, and economic infrastructures of the world, starting with Europe.

Enlightenment: From Idea to Infrastructure

The Darnton book, which might otherwise seem like a very oddly specialized and nerdy pick for our book club, is interesting precisely because it helps complete a picture of the gearshift dynamics in our world machines theory.

The book is not about the ideas of the Enlightenment itself (talk to ChatGPT about that if you’re participating in the book club), or even about the Encyclopédie itself, which was a late-stage synthesis of Enlightenment thinking. It is about the structural diffusion of Enlightenment thinking through the social fabric, transforming it from a subculture of marginal heretical ideas to civilizational infrastructure, through the best technological medium available at the time — print. The “installation” of the Encyclopédie completed the Modernity Machine, right on the eve of its obsolescence, and the beginning of its replacement by the Divergence Machine.

The story of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie was something like a second-order sequel to the first-order installation of print culture in the 15th century (which we read about last year in the The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth Eisenstein). It was also very much like the installation of internet culture in our own time. As an encyclopedia, Diderot’s was an ancestor of Wikipedia, and like it, an expression of an infrastructural maturation, not just of an intellectual milieu.

The relationship of the publishing ecology around the Encyclopédie to the big names of the Enlightenment, like Newton, Bacon, and Locke, was something like the relationship of the internet in our time to names like Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider. The Encyclopedists, as the group contributing to, and publishing it came to be known, were something like the first wave of internet entrepreneurs in our time.

The Darnton book also puts the other history we’ve been exploring into perspective — the work of David Hume and Adam Smith (which coincided with the work of the Encyclopedists), Voltaire’s role as a thought leader (he was directly associated with the Encyclopedists), and the subtle influence of changing temporalities being driven by the maturation of time-keeping technology through the era.

I want to try and connect all these threads of development and paint a rough picture of how the transition between the Modernity Machine and Divergence Machines actually happened.

Let’s start with a timeline. It’s easy to get very confused by the complexity of various streams of events (I briefly badly confused myself by mixing up Roger Bacon (13th century) and Francis Bacon (17th century).

The Timeline of the Shift

Here is a rough view of the timeline, which is something of a Doctor Who style ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

• 1600: The intellectual phase of the Modernity Machine essentially ended around 1600, with the burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 serving as a useful and macabre marker. Galileo, tried in 1633, is something of a transitional figure, playing a role in both WMs. So roughly between 1600 and 1640, the Modernity Machine entered production mode as completed infrastructure, and the seeds of the Divergence Machine were planted. It is worth noting that despite the name. the MM was firmly traditionalist, in the sense of being an operating system designed by and for the traditional ruling classes, monarchs, and religious authorities. The arrival of the MM was also a convergence to a kind of civilizational-infrastructural consensus that Europe was just starting to export to the rest of the world.

• 1620-1690: The ideas of the Enlightenment, in the form synthesized later by the Encyclopedists, took shape roughly between 1620 and 1690. Three works are foundational: Newton’s Principia (1687), Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620). It is worth noting that this period also corresponds to the early settlement of what would become the United States, which had already begun to shape the psyche of Europe (starting with tobacco, ending with revolutionary catalysis).

• 1637-77 (Descartes and Spinoza): Two works have more complex relationships with the Enlightenment. Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (the “cogito ergo sum” book), 1637, was a prequel that the Enlightenment built on but superseded, while Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) was too radical for the Enlightenment proper to absorb, but sort of haunted it like a scary ghost in the Enlightenment infrastructure. Descartes doesn’t go far enough to be part of the Enlightenment, while Spinoza went too far. Leibniz appears in this sideshow tent of related figures too, but as marginal rather than structurally relevant, and something of a lolcow, thanks to Voltaire’s Pangloss parody. He does briefly re-emerge into relevance a couple of centuries later via Mach, Bergson etc. Interestingly, Leibniz has suffered a devaluation in status, similar to Bruno, through the reframings of our book club. But unlike Bruno, who I now think of as a largely irredeemable crackpot, Leibniz still retains critical value in the mathematics and computing storyline, if not in the philosophy storyline.

• 1749-1789: The Enlightenment, as an institution, as opposed to a set of abstract ideas, was essentially an institutional compromise between radical and traditional thought brokered by the Encyclopédie in the decade before the French Revolution; between objectivity (Newton), empiricism (Bacon), and a natural conception of self (Locke) on the one hand, and ecclesiastical authority, divine monarchial authority, and the individual self as a sort of expression of the will of the Christian God. So the Enlightenment represented a cautious and pragmatic rupture from tradition that had just enough institutional support, in an era where it was struggling to survive. The Encyclopédie threaded that needle, through a mix of covert and ironic subversion and some compromise. It survived through its first edition years despite (somewhat nominal) official censorship, but escaped Inquisition grade active suppression/elimination efforts. Too many people in the establishment were sympathetic to the Encyclopedists for it to be seriously suppressed. But after 1770 and up to the French Revolution, it basically installed the Enlightenment as institutionalized social reality.

• 1789-1799: The French Revolution, which to some extent drew inspiration from the American Revolution (which was culturally simpler, even if in other ways more profoundly consequential), marked the transition to the post-Enlightenment era. Immanuel Kant was the hinge figure (I’ve picked up this use of the word hinge from ChatGPT — delving into AI is good for your vocabulary), attempting to synthesize empiricism and idealism, subjective and objective, and personal and religious notions of self. A Critique of Pure Reason (1781) appears after the Encyclopedists, but before the Romantics.

• 1790-1807: Following this arc of Enlightenment, from ideas to institutionalization (pirates to navy?), German romanticism appears in some ways as a reactionary cultural movement that reacted to the decentering of the human effected by the Enlightenment with what we could call Humanism 1.0. The official position of this newsletter is that all humanisms are reactionary. Some are just confused and call themselves progressive, a pattern that started in Jena. I’d heard of some of the key figures (Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Schiller) but not of others (Fichte, the Schlegel brothers and their wives, Schelling, Humboldt’s brother William). It was an oddly schizophrenic movement that seemed to believe that the Enlightenment simultaneously went too far, and not far enough. Schizophrenic, but consequential. German romanticism created the romantic idea of the self that is still the default idea we’re enculturated into, around the world, by the liberal middle class.

• 1890s, 1910s, 2020s (Humanist spasms): Jena romanticism was a short-lived but intense phenomenon — just a decade or so, coinciding with the rise and fall of Napoleon (the romantics broadly supported both the French Revolution and Napoleon, which is sort of revealing in the same way people pivoting from Bernie to Trump is revealing). I think this is characteristic of humanist spasms between major technologically determined world machine eras. when humanist delusions of agency and significance are at a peak, along with anxieties about potential terminal insignificance. We see similar dynamics around the Bloomsbury group in the 1910-30 period (ironically associated with “modernist” literature). And we’re witnessing a similar period now, in anxious efforts to reclaim a human center for an AI age. The Pope’s recent encyclical on AI is notable more for clearly flagging the nature of humanist tendencies in any era than for things it says about AI. Modern trads, Progressive anti-AI types, Singularitarian AI doomers, AGI theologists, metamodernists, re-enchantment types, and the Catholic Church all share a loose humanism comprising a variety of flavors of neo-romanticism. Which to first order is just techlash+poignant poetry.

• 1848-89: The period of the Encyclopédie’s brief reign as the high-water-mark of civilization (roughly 1770-1789) is uncannily like the reign of the the early internet era, (roughly 1969-1993) and the neoliberal ideological tendency that accompanied it. Both were terminated by seismic geopolitical events (the American and French revolutions; the end of the Cold War and 9/11) and followed by a second wave of smaller revolutions (the revolutions of 1848, known as the springtime of nations, and the Arab Spring through Trumpism in our time). Modern nation-states may have been conceptually started with the Peace of Westphalia, but became a practical reality starting around 1848 (there are multiple books about this year; one is in our side quests list — Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark).

• Trump as a Farcical Napoleon: There are uncanny but twisted similarities between the careers and historical roles of Napoleon and Trump, a case of history repeating itself, first as tragedy then as farce. Both had similar relationships with the prevailing revolutionary tendencies in their times, and similarly weird relationships with cultural elites. Curious learning: Napoleon was apparently much more attached to a self-image as a scholar than as a conquering general and emperor. He traveled with a personal librarian and campaign library while on the warpath and signed documents with his title as a memory of the French Academy of Sciences. I’d really like to read a comparative biography in about a decade.

• End of History, 1806 vs. 1991: Hegel marks the completion of the philosophical transition away from the Enlightenment to the post-Enlightenment era, ending the brief reign of the Romantics. His is a complex legacy. While on the one hand he replaced the Enlightenment’s universalist pretensions with a historically contingent (and therefore structurally divergent) understanding of reality, the specific understanding he argued for was teleologically convergent towards an “end of history.” That’s always been one of my favorite ideas, in the form that emerged in our time, via Kojeve and Fukuyama, but I’ve always wondered why Hegel himself proclaimed the end to have occured at the Battle of Jena in 1806, when Napoleon steamrolled through Prussia via Jena. That always seemed oddly arbitrary to me. But now, in the context of Jena romanticism, it is somewhat clearer, and I realize I was unfairly thinking of Hegel as a small-minded creature of his own times. Hegel briefly overlapped with the Jena set in Jena, and had to leave in a hurry when Napoleon invaded (just barely saving the only draft of Phenomenology of Self — weird to think of a time when making backups was actually hard and losing valuable work was not attributable to sheer carelessness). But his choice of 1806 is at least as defensible as Fukuyama’s choice of 1991 (which I think is actually the correct date implied by the model).

The Gear Shift

According to World Machine theory, the Divergence Machine began to emerge around 1600, and was completed and put into production in 2000. So the 1750/1850 period is likely where the S-curves cross, so to speak; the rising curve of the DM intersecting the plateau of the MM and begining to disrupt it. Viewed in this light, the events in that period lend themselves to a specific interpretation.

First, the Enlightenment was divergent in content, but convergent in intent. The intellectual content was pluralist, as suggested by the fact that it took an encyclopedia to synthesize it, rather than a single authoritative interpretation. Its natural tendency was to spark a sort of Cambrian explosion of divergent thought, which did in fact happen, in the form of Romanticism and in the historicist-contingent Hegelian eras that followed. But on its own terms, the Enlightenment was convergent. It attempted to construct a monolithic understanding of the world and the place of humans within it, to directly compete with the similarly monolithic understandings of received tradition. By this account, we can think of the Enlightenment as a late-stage infrastructure project of the Modernity Machine. The Toyota Prius phase between IC and EV automobiles, so to speak.

But centrifugal forces overcame centripetal ones, and it was the post-Kant inheritors of the legacy of the Enlightenment who actually ported its logic to it’s natural home in the Divergence Machine. The idea of the self inaugurated by John Locke was taken to its natural conclusion by Fichte, who laid the foundations for thinkers like Freud who came a century later. The logic of the universe as first perceived by Newton, which led to a reductionist understanding of it, was engineered into the logic of divergence by Humboldt, who foreshadowed Darwin’s completion of the task of conceptualizing nature in divergentist terms.

Divergence dynamics fundamentally yield to, rather than resist, centrifugal forces, allowing the monolithic to give way to the pluralistic; objective consensus to subjective dissensus; and perhaps most importantly, the synchronized to the asynchronous.

This last is the counterintuitive lesson of the evolution of time-keeping: Clocks drove divergence as they improved, not convergence.

Clocks and Asynchronicity

Technology is generally not considered part of the Enlightenment story, which is generally considered a story about science and philosophy. But it should be part of the story. Particularly a technology that was the computing of its time — time-keeping.

The most significant developments in time-keeping unfolded over exactly the same period that the events on our timeline unfold. Galileo’s pendulum discovery around 1637 begins the story, and John Harrison’s H4 chronometer, which finally claimed the Longitude prize in 1761, concludes it. Over that long century, clocks grew smaller, cheaper, and far more accurate. Accurate enough to help disrupt one world machine and power its successor.

A naive view of the history of the clock is that it led to convergence and synchronization of civilization. As it turns out, this is the opposite of the actual story. I’ve been sort of clumsily reconstructing the actual story since around 2018 (when I gave a talk about it), and I wished I’d actually read Landes earlier, because it makes the story clear, and I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

The big lesson of the book is that between the 13th century, when large mechanical clocks began to be built, and our era, when we finally shed our quartz wristwatches in favor of ubiquitous GPS-driven time displays on all our screens, two sets of changes unfolded in tension with each other: Time-keeping simultaneously got more precise (due to fundamental scientific-technical advances) and more decentralized (due to becoming smaller and cheaper, via a Moore’s Law type dynamic).

To put it crudely, in the Modernity Machine, time was inaccurate and centralized, under the authoritarian control of the owners and keepers of monumental water clocks and mechanical turret clocks in clock towers of the 14th century. For 300 years there was a steady but mostly futile push towards both accuracy and decentralization. Small, personal-scale mechanical timepieces (comparable to modern wristwatches) were being made as early as the 14th century. The problem was, though they were very clever mechanically, they were extremely inaccurate compared to larger clocks, which were themselves pretty bad and had to be constantly reset to match solar time. At the smallest scale, the value of mechanical clocks lay more in their ability to drive complicated clockwork toys (popular with nobility around the world) than tell time.

The 17th century changed that. Galileo’s pendulum made large clocks radically more accurate, and the development of the balance spring made small, personal scale clocks and watches more accurate than the clock towers of previous centuries. Externally imposed (by monarchs and priests) time authority gave way to internally maintained time discipline. External locus of control gave way to internal locus of control. The modern self was born, with an internally clocked psyche.

Basically clocks grew far more decentralized than they grew usefully accurate (beyond a point, accuracy gains had low marginal value for pre-digital humans), and drove devolution of control over time to the smallest scales. You could now organize your personal life by your personal watch, and gain all the benefits of accurate time-keeping, without subjecting yourself to time-keeping authority. You could coordinate with personal friends and networks without relying on centralized time.

Fichte’s Ich philosophy could not have been conceived without the personalization of time. The French Revolution was arguably in part a response to the pressures created by disruptive time-keeping technologies.

This story largely played out over precisely the period that our revolutionary tale and the gear shift from MM to DM happened.

Here is one way to cash out the difference: The MM ran on centrally controlled turret clocks, the DM ran on personal-scale spring-driven watches and clocks. It was a shift comparable to the evolution from mainframe computing to iPhones, except unfolding over a century instead of half a century, and preceded by 400 years of “mainframe clock” time instead of 20 years.

The development of a usable marine chronometer allowed planetary integration to finally go from dangerous exploratory activity to routine infrastructural activity. In a way, the chronometer did to the 19th century what AI is doing to our time. A fun learning from the Landes book — John Harrison gets the credit for winning the Longitude prize, but his clock was the equivalent of IBM’s Watson AI winning Jeopardy and Deep Blue beating Kasporov — impressive and technically a legal solution to the underlying challenge, but fundamentally a dead-end and not the path technical evolution actually took later.

Marine chronometry in the form that actually powered the colonial globalization era developed from a parallel and more practical and divergent French tradition that got transplanted to England, and was arguably also the genesis of interchangeable parts manufacturing. The French tradition emphasized robust and simple designs that could be easily copied and manufactured along industrial lines, and not coincidentally, France of the same era was also the point of origin of the Système Gribeauval which eventually influenced and found its fullest expression in the American system of interchangeable parts manufacturing (see my old blog post on Hall’s Law). I haven’t yet traced the direct connection between the Système Gribeauval and the chronometry story, but I’m convinced it’s there to be found. Both also curiously foreshadow the worse-is-better principle in computer programming from our era.

That’s just a taste. There’s a lot more insight to be found in the history of time-keeping for the future of computing and AI.

I want to conclude with a broader point. The mature clock, at cheap-and-accurate wrist-watch level, was a pure divergence driver, it desynchronized civilization that had previously been kept inefficiently synchronized by large turret clocks calibrated to solar time.

The clock is also divergent in a deeper way, as a new class of artifact that sustained seemingly endless variety. The technology of mechanical clocks existed in a dizzyingly pluralistic and varied design space of dozens of different types of escapements, hundreds of clever mechanical engineering tricks, and astoundingly complex mechanism powered mathematical calculations. An early genre of clocks was “equation” clocks, designed to keep clock time synchronized with Sun time. By the 18th century, mechanical clocks had gotten too accurate to be calibrated by the Sun, and could be used to actually track and measure variations in solar time. But since tradition (and inaccurate old clocks) were bound to solar time, for a transitional period, people needed to translate. Hence equation clocks to translate. Eventually, solar time was abandoned and mechanical clock time became the standard. Before then, clocks showed varying day/night hours to match a “day” defined by sunrise-to-sunset rather than a fixed 12 hours. After, sunrise and sunset times were allowed to vary on the mechanical clock.

Clocks then, weren’t just like computers in our time. They were computers. Rigidly specialized mechanical computers by our standards, but radically flexible and programmable by the standards of 18th century technology’s familiar technologies like swords or cannon. The clock was the first technology that could compute, be “programmed,” and inventively embodied by a dizzying and growing array of specific designs (which should be analogized to software rather than computer hardware). Designs that could not just keep time and translate among times, but also drive a near-biological ecology of clockwork devices. Steampunk is less about steam power than clockwork mechanical governance of devices.

This topic obviously bleeds into my book project (which I’ve refactored significantly and will be doing an update on soon), so I’ll save more thoughts for that.

But the tldr of this preliminary synthesis is that the cutover from the Modernity Machine to the Divergence Machine happened somewhere in middle century of 1750-1850, culturally marked by the culmination of the Enlightenment project, and the beginning of divergent post-Enlightenment projects that inherited its divergent soul. This transition was marked by revolutions at all levels from bloody to bloodless.

The specific problem was that vgr_zirp, the RAG bot I’ve been training and tuning on my older writing, was acting boringly omniscient and tasteless, engaging deeply on topics I know nothing about, and more importantly, don’t care about. Conversations the real me would walk away from were playing out in dull ways. Claude Sonnet’s far greater knowledge and far larger circle of care (the union of all human cares ever rendered textually) were seeping in too much. I had to add filters and guardrails modeled on my own ignorance, indifference, and blindspot areas to get it to behave more interestingly and tastefully, and not sully my good name.

Too much commodity intelligence and indiscriminate caring were seeping into what I’m trying to design to be a differentiated and opinionated intelligence with a real-person personality (a stylized version of my own).

A lot of people, myself included have noted that LLMs offer a homogenized kind of intelligence that resembles index funds (see my LLMs as Index Funds, April 1, 2025, for one version of this argument). This view, I’m now convinced, does not go far enough. In advanced, innovation-based economies, index funds are collections of high-market-cap stocks that are still individually pretty differentiated and far from the commodity asymptote all economic goods and services tend towards. LLMs are much farther along the curve. The capabilities they manifest rest on vast corpuses of data that are not just public and with the equivalent of “high market cap,” but largely commodified. LLMs are not just index funds, they are dominantly commodity index funds.

LLMs are the informational equivalent of portfolios of coal, gold, and potatoes. The components may differ in intrinsic value and exist in varied quality grades, but are fundamentally fungible. Information embodied in LLMs is mostly high-paradigm and high-consensus common knowledge. LLMs know about fringe, crackpot, and low-consensus ideas in the same way markets know about emerging and penny stocks and junk bonds, but the center of gravity (or indexical perspective if you like) of both lies in commodified knowledge.

What is the informational equivalent of commodification? I pointed out one aspect of the answer 3 years ago, and dubbed it the Labatut-Lovecraft-Ballard (LBB) arc, inspired by reading Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Undersrand the World, and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and J. G. Ballard.

In Disturbed Realities (Jan 20, 2023), I described the LBB arc as follows:

We might sketch a three-stage psychohistory of a disturbing new expanded reality, as more and more minds become stretched to accommodate it:

1. In the first, Labatutian stage, a handful of minds are forced to bear the brunt of the full, uncontrolled assault of a new idea on the human psyche.

2. In the second, Lovecraftian stage, a much larger group of somewhat inoculated minds willingly ventures forth to encounter a somewhat familiar, but still unsettling version of the idea, serving as an avant garde engaged in rebuilding social realities as required around it.

3. In the third, Ballardian stage, the construction of new social realities is (relatively) complete, but the costs and inherent contradictions have not yet been apprehended. The expanded reality has been civilized but not tamed. All minds are shaped by it, whether or not they are consciously equipped for it.

Benjamin Labatut’s book (one of the best of this century so far) explores the insanity-inducing effects of new-to-humanity knowledge, on the first minds that encounter it, via a series of quasi-fictional accounts of such encounters in the lives of famous scientists. My model is basically an account of how the human mind adapts fully and collectively, primarily through socialization. The larger the number of people who have experienced a piece of knowledge, the more domesticated it is, and the less able to cause madness. Labatutian psychosis leads to Lovecraftian cosmic horror leads to Ballardian banality.

In a talk shortly after that post, I argued that this partly explained crazed reactions to AI (remember Blake Lemoine?), but I didn’t complete the theory. Commodification effects complete the theory, but the mechanism is subtler than I anticipated at the time.

It is important to note that commodification is not the same as universal accessibility. Gold is a commodity, but most people in the world possess little to none. Classical mechanics is a fully commodified body of knowledge, but only a small fraction of humanity has the aptitude and educational preparation to understand and use it to the fullest extent widely available textbooks can teach. To the rest it can be the source of magic (eg. a double cone rolling “uphill” on a pair of slanted, diverging sticks).

The OpenAI proof of an 80-year-old math problem may have been beyond human mathematicians, but it rested on fully digested Ballardian priors, so to speak. The Labatutian era for that problem was circa 1946 when Erdos first posed it to himself and understood its significance. Human mathematicians have annealed it over 80 years into a familiar bit of mathematical territory, at least to mathematicians in the relevant subfields.

AIs trained on Labatutian data are highly differentiated, fragile, and unreliable. AIs trained on Ballardian data are highly commodified, robust, and reliable. To extend the analogy past AI to my favorite neck of the woods, protocolized knowledge has entered the utility stage past commodification, and is generally embodied by the “tool use” part of agentic AI. A very clear tell is that it runs on CPUs rather than GPUs.

To understand why it is a valid step to go from speaking of commodified knowledge to commodity intelligence, you have to understand a few features of AI of the sort we have today that justify such extrapolation:

1. Performance degrades outside the training set (though the training set is larger than the experiential base of many humans, so finding the actual boundaries, rather than simple errors or hallucinations, can be hard)

2. Performance degrades with time past the training epoch (a necessary consequence of what noted as the “overfitting without regularization” of constantly evolving internet data, which is a feature, not a bug)

3. Performance degrades if you try to train a model on its own output without additional new raw information entering the loop (“model collapse”)

These is reasonable phenomenology by the way, and visible in human intellligence too, despite the differences in architecture. We would be very surprised, like “is there phlogiston in there?” level surprise, if these phenomena didn’t manifest. They provide reassurance that AI does not appear to violate the known principles of information theory or thermodynamics. Megawatts worth of matrix multiplications don’t produce phlogiston in datacenters.

We don’t have a theory of how LLM-and-human style intelligence works, but we have strong evidence that there is no magic going on. The emergent phenomenology is like markets or weather, not theology.

A few things tend to confuse people into believing in magical properties:

1. Unexpected playability of domains. Many knowledge domains are turning out to be what I have started thinking of as unexpectedly playable (stronger subset: self-playable). Though a domain may not be technically a closed world like chess, and though there may be no obvious “physics” to it, capable of being abstracted into a “physics engine,” there is enough rule-like regularity that you can get farther with seemingly informationally impoverished data than you think. Code and protein folding are prototypes but more impressive examples are emerging. For example, recovering 3d geometry from 2d projection data (like photographs) is “unexpected playability of large corpuses of photos.” Egocentric video for training robots is another example. The various symmetries of many artificial and natural objects allows this.

2. Local entropy reduction. Agentic AI is exceptionally good at cleaning up messy local conditions and getting them into locally well-ordered states that are beyond normal human capabilities. This can seem magically negentropic, but is still local. Claude Code cleaning up your decades of downloads into a nicely organized library still requires wattage being expended entropically in a datacenter somewhere, mostly likely the backyards of people you don’t deal with socially.

3. New-for-you (secondary Labatutian) effects: This is the subtlety I was mentioning earlier. Normal knowledge commodification curves are limited by human aptitude and the patience of human teachers. So human physicists who understand advanced physics don’t have patience for humans who lack the aptitude to (say) earn a physics degree. They ignore crackpots. But an AI embodies commodified physics knowledge in a form that expands access to people previously priced of that commodified knowledge market. For these newly empowered people, a counterparty who engages with them triggers something similar to a Labatutian paranoia. The knowledge is not new, but they get it via a raw encounter rather being socialized into its Ballardian form, and embark on a solo LBB arc in a solipsistic reality tunnel.

Once you account for such wrinkles and clear away the red herrings created by worshippers, the idea that AIs today are commodity intelligences becomes intelligible and useful.

It also explains, at least to my satisfaction, the strange allure of the idea of “general” intelligence despite the obviously specific, training-context-adapted and contingent nature of all known biological and artificial intelligences. It’s the result of confusing two notions of “generality.” Generality as in “generally available in the market” is not the same as generality in the sense of totalizing universality.

Commodified knowledge is “general knowledge” in the sense tested by trivia/quiz contests. In grade school, we actually had a subject on the curriculum called “GK” and kids good at it (I was one of them) got put on quiz teams to represent their class or school. General intelligence of the sort we actually have today is simply AIs trained on general (ie commodified) knowledge.

But the theological motte-and-bailey move that conflates it with some totalizing-universal divine-omniscience idea of “Artificial General Intelligence” traps a great many of even the smartest people. A category error motivated by theological yearnings, validated by second-order Labatutian psychoses, sustained by epistemic bubbles, and encouraged by sketchy business roadmaps that need a story to justify trillion-dollar investments.

This widespread category error has consequences beyond the annoyance of the future getting hamstrung by getting “AGI” branded. My simple example of a bot being rendered boring by the seepage of commodity intelligence is a small example. A general intelligence in the strong sense could only have improved the bot (a God making the bot a more fully realized ideal version of me say). It would not have injected boring tastelessness.

There are bigger, costlier mistakes you can make if you pretend commodity intelligence deployed at scale is the same thing convergence towards divine omniscience.

The biggest mistake is perhaps this: Instead of marveling at and exploiting the capabilities of the truly amazing AIs we have built, you end up worrying about the features and flaws of incoherent and ill-posed thought experiments that simply don’t matter.

It’s a bit all over the place (“the fox has many Act 2s, the hedgehog has one big Act 2”?), but also all around fun in a way that feels like it should be illegal in the grimdark climate of today. Still I’m not complaining.

Protocol Institute

The Summer of Protocols program I was leading for the last 3 years is spinning out as The Protocol Institute. , who was a researcher in the first cohort, will be leading the new org as Managing Director, and I’m going to be the Director of Research. I wrote about my plans in that capacity last week in our magazine, .

TLDR: We’re going to invent New Nature.

As you might expect, we’re looking to raise funds, so if you like the sound of what we’re up to, get in touch at venkat@protocol-institute.org. If you know any organizations or high-net-worth individuals that might be interested, introduce me to them.

The program to date has been running at about a million a year since 2023, almost entirely bankrolled by the Ethereum Foundation, but with small amounts of support from other sources. The EF told us to stop living in the basement and go get a job, so that’s what we’re going to try and do. We’re hoping to raise $1.5-2 million for 2027. Timber and I are working on a pitch deck, and I’ll share in this newsletter in the next few weeks.

This is the first time I’ve gotten involved in a non-solo startuppy team thing in 15 years. The SoP program started out as a narrow solo consulting gig around the growth problems of Ethereum, but over three years morphed into a much bigger thing — research, fieldwork, education, field-building, publishing, scene-making, and hundreds of alumni/participants of various programs worldwide. It was initially meant to be a transient program to jumpstart a broader conversation around protocols (which it more than did), but the more we dug into the topic, the more we realized that we were exploring a huge and weirdly unexplored and undertheorized invisible current in technology evolution. So around a year ago, we started talking about doing what is now PI.

And then the agentic AI explosion happened, and it rapidly became clear that protocols were going to collide explosively with AI in an epic evil-twins type encounter, like Godzilla meeting King Kong.

We have a bit of spin-out funding from the Ethereum Foundation that will last us through the end of the year, after which we have to find funding or Timber and I turn into pumpkins at midnight on December 31, 2026. More tragically, the fragile young field of protocol studies will turn into a pumpkin and you don’t want that to happen.

Long Now Labs

One of the first programs of the new institute is a collaboration with the Long Now foundation, through its new Labs program, led by . There are two open grant opportunities, The Book of Time and Epistemic Cycles. As befits my new Act 2 éminence grise status, I’m on the jury for the program even though I’d rather be competing.

Applications for both are due June 5th. More details here.

The success of this program will greatly increase the chances of Timber and I not turning into pumpkins, and of the Protocol Institute getting tangled up with AI to make benefit future of planet by inventing New Nature.

Apply for these grants if you have ideas. Tell your creative friends to apply.

Strange Rules/Monsters Between Worlds

On a related personal note, my Bucket Art project has evolved into an installation collaboration with Famous Actual Artist ™ Simon Denny called Monsters Between Worlds (a reference to my Gramsci Gap essay among other things) at the Strange Rules art exhibition at the Venice Bienalle, devoted to the emerging Protocol Art scene (which the Summer of Protocols program helped meme into being).

The two pieces facing each other in the center of the picture below are plotter-based reinterpretations of my Boat #1 and Sun #2 bucket art pieces. The black and white one on the right wall is based on the cover of one of the Summer of Protocols essays, Protocols in (Emergency) Time, by Olivia Steiert.

I can take some credit for inspiring the name of the show too 😎, via my essay Strange New Rules on last year, which kicked off our efforts to develop the protocol fiction genre (now 3 anthologies and 40+ stories old). I’m now memeing at institutional levels.

The Strange Rules show is curated by Famous Actual Artists™ and Holly Herndon, and godfathered by Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery, who was once described to me as the “pope of the art world.” I’ve known this crowd casually for about a decade, but this show marks my formal debut into the art world.

Right at the top. It’s the only way. My Not-Yet-Famous Real Artist™ friends are all jealous of me.

And I didn’t even have to tape a banana to a wall.

It cracks me up that I’ll likely never be published as a “real writer,” but I’ve acquired a top-tier artist credential almost entirely by accident. If you’re going to be in Venice this summer, stop by the Palazzo Diedo (which houses my old pals the Berggruen Institute) and check it out. I haven’t checked it out myself yet, but will likely be there in October for the closing if the airlines still have fuel to fly then.

vgr_zirp Update

My vgr_zirp bot experiment on the resurrected archival Ribbonfarm has been unexpectedly successful, creating a bit of a problem for me, since it’s now burning API dollars.

The whole point of the migration to a cheap static-site setup initially was to save big on hosting. Now it looks like the bot will cost more to run than the old blog. So I’m in the market for some tastefully well-aligned sponsorships to keep building and provisioning this. You can see some house sponsorship banners rotating on the bot’s pages. I’d like to put some paying-sponsor banners there.

In the couple of weeks since I launched it, readers have logged over 1500 sessions, costing me over $150 in API fees, and the usage is rising steadily, causing me some anxiety.

The use case I anticipated, which is readers old and new diving into the content archives, is the second most common use case. The most common use case (and I guess I should have seen this coming) is people using the bot as a much cheaper consultant/advisor than me. This thing is terking muh jerb and I’m having to literally train my replacement 🤣.

I’m currently working on a couple of peer bots covering current writing, other corpuses like my past academic work, my Secret Consulting Notebooks, etc. and ways to turn the set of bots (tentatively named mixture_of_vgrs) into a true self-disrupting consultant. (I also made a similar but less mature bot, C3PO, trained on the Protocol Institute archives).

I’m getting lots of comments on how unique vgr_zirp is, and requests to share the construction methodology. It’s evolved significantly past the soul.md pattern I started with, but isn’t yet cleaned up enough to release as a reusable template, since it’s all very artisanal and bespoke and heavily tuned to my material.

It’s also turned into an absolutely fascinating technical project (see details here) that I want to keep evolving. I didn’t think it would be this easy to get to the artisanal AI frontier but apparently I’m doing at least a couple of things nobody else is.

You can read the publicly shared chat transcripts here, and also subscribe to them via RSS. Basically, what I thought would be an unchanging museum site is turning into a kind of coral reef of secondary content on a scuttled ship.

I guess Ribbonfarm is having its own Act 2, independent of mine.

World Machines Project

A brief heads up. The World Machines Project (WMP) I kicked off a few weeks ago is now live as a collaborative effort by half a dozen contributors at worldmachines.org.

The Prime Radiant is starting to take shape, and the vibecoding of psychohistory has begun. Join us. This month we’re reading Revolution in Time in the Contraptions Book Club, which is the feeder activity for WMP, so we’re currently figuring out how to engineer a suitable temporality into the Prime Radiant.

TensTorrent

Finally, I want to mention TensTorrent, the AI hardware startup I’ve been consulting for since 2019, which has been my other big gig besides the protocols work. The CEO, Jim Keller, is my oldest client (I’ve been working with him since 2011, across AMD, Tesla, Intel, and now TensTorrent).

This is easily the most technically exciting work of my consulting career, right at the esoteric bleeding edge of frontier AI, and it’s finally entering the industry spotlight. I still can’t actually talk about my work there due to NDA constraints, but finally enough information is public that you can explore for yourself. If you’re a low-level AI developer, check out their developer hub, and there is also a cool QuietBox AI workstation you can buy (I’m lusting after it myself, but can’t yet justify it till I improve my lower-level AI chops).

You can try out the tech yourself here on the demo cloud. If your company is looking to own its own AI hardware/IP infrastructure, TT should definitely be on your radar. If you’re interested, I can introduce you to their sales folks.

First Thoughts on Act 2

This feels like it’s going to be a year of serious changes for me. I bought a house (and went into serious debt 😬) for the first time at age 51 two months ago, while all this was unfolding. At the same time I was going through the at-once cathartic and bittersweet project of archiving Ribbonfarm properly (that was before the bot gave it a weird and unexpected new possible lease on life).

It feels like not just the beginning of my Act 2, but the beginning of my personal exit from the Gramsci Gap the world’s been in since 2015, when I tagged it the Great Weirding. But it also feels like it’s going to be a long time before the whole world is out of it, so it’s a precarious sort of contingent exit.

As I said, it feels like it should be illegal to be moving on into the new world amid the gathering grimdarkness. My Be Slightly Monstrous slogan from last November (aka -1mo BCC; Before Claude Code) feels justified now. I keep thinking a Balrog-style bigger monster is going to derail AI and drag us early-exit types back into the gap by our ankles.

The old world dying, the new world struggling to be born, and I’m monstrously having fun even as elsewhere events are teetering on the edge of horrifying.

One way or another, Act 2 is going to be very interesting.

Sloptraptions is an AI-assisted opt-in sectionof the Contraptions Newsletter. If you only want my hand-crafted writing, you can unsubscribe from this section.

The older Silicon Valley ethos operated according to an implicit philosophy of delight. The canonical founders and early investors of the internet era were not simply pursuing productivity gains or market opportunities. They were animated by curiosity, play, surprise, weirdness, and the conviction that new technological affordances would unlock qualitatively new forms of life. This did not always present itself sentimentally. Much of it arrived wrapped in hacker irony, libertarian posturing, or engineering machismo. But underneath, the ecosystem possessed a strong experiential optimism. The internet felt delightful before it felt profitable. Early web culture, open-source culture, gaming culture, blogging culture, smartphone culture, maker culture, and even much of early crypto culture were all driven by experiences of serendipity and expanded possibility before they cohered into mature business models.

Delightful image made on the delightful TITLES platform, using my Bucket Art model.

This orientation shaped the investment style of the era. Silicon Valley’s comparative advantage was not merely higher risk tolerance than Wall Street. Finance can tolerate risk. The deeper distinction was epistemological. Silicon Valley assumed the future was fundamentally nonstationary. The gameboard itself was changing too rapidly for historical models to dominate decision-making. Under those conditions, the correct strategy was not optimization but exploration. Venture capital functioned as an evolutionary search process designed to maximize exposure to surprise. Investors funded illegible founders, strange products, niche communities, and unserious-seeming experiments because they understood, implicitly, that delight and serendipity were often the first signals of transformative technological potential.

Wall Street operated differently. It assumed a more stationary world in which superior models, better data, and tighter portfolio construction could systematically extract edge. Silicon Valley optimized for convexity under uncertainty. Wall Street optimized for efficiency under measurable risk. The two systems coexisted uneasily but productively during the ZIRP era, when cheap money flooded global markets and created what might be called a horizontal capital glut. Capital spread broadly across sectors, geographies, and speculative narratives because the carrying cost of waiting was high and cash yielded nothing. The result was an unusually fertile environment for exploratory investment.

The most important startups of that period initially looked ridiculous, trivial, or miscategorized. Airbnb seemed absurd. Twitter looked frivolous. Stripe appeared too infrastructural. Crypto looked fringe or criminal. The system excelled at black swan farming because it possessed institutional tolerance for low-legibility possibility spaces. Venture investors were not simply chasing returns. They were often chasing the feeling that something unexpectedly delightful was happening.

Over the last decade, this culture eroded. Silicon Valley gradually became integrated into the same institutional capital stack as private equity, sovereign wealth funds, pension systems, and global macro finance. Venture capital transformed from a semi-countercultural exploratory craft into a mature asset class. Large LPs demanded scalability, benchmarking, governance, and repeatability. Simultaneously, the startup ecosystem itself became highly reflexive and datafied. Founders learned to perform “fundable startupness” according to standardized metrics and narratives. Social graphs, market maps, SaaS benchmarks, and platformized founder support systems compressed variation across the ecosystem.

The result was not the death of speculation but its transformation. Silicon Valley increasingly abandoned black swan farming in favor of consensus black swan herding. Modern venture remains highly speculative, but it mobilizes enormous amounts of capital only after uncertainty compresses into recognizable narratives. Once a frontier becomes legible enough for institutional consensus to form, capital synchronizes almost instantaneously around it. AI is the clearest example. The scale and speed of investment into models, datacenters, chips, and AI infrastructure has been extraordinary. But this is industrial mobilization after recognition, not exploratory discovery before recognition.

At the same time, the nature of global capital itself changed. The ZIRP era was defined by horizontal diffusion of speculative capital. Today’s environment is more funnel-shaped. Despite higher interest rates, the world remains structurally awash in capital, but capital now clusters aggressively into narrow strategic choke points. AI infrastructure, semiconductors, datacenters, energy systems, and defense technologies absorb disproportionate flows while broad speculative exuberance declines elsewhere. Positive carrying costs on cash have made investors more selective and more defensive. Rather than searching widely for transformative possibility, capital seeks certainty under volatility. Investors increasingly want to own tollbooths on the future rather than participate in its open-ended exploration.

Yet this defensive posture is emerging precisely as the economy becomes radically more nonstationary. AI is not merely another software cycle. It destabilizes foundational assumptions about cognition, coordination, expertise, labor, creativity, and organizational scale. Importantly, this nonstationarity propagates through every layer of the stack.

At the silicon layer, architectures, packaging systems, memory hierarchies, interconnects, and power constraints remain unstable. At the datacenter layer, AI transforms cloud infrastructure into quasi-utility infrastructure defined by grid access, cooling, and energy logistics. At the model layer, capabilities shift continuously among scaling, reasoning, multimodality, retrieval, context engineering, and inference-time computation. At the harness layer, the challenge becomes governance of semi-autonomous cognitive systems through memory management, permissions, evaluation, observability, delegation, and rollback architectures. At the application layer, product boundaries themselves become fluid because models continually absorb previously differentiated features.

This turbulence then induces secondary nonstationarity across the broader economy. Banking experiences destabilization in compliance, fraud, underwriting, and operational coordination. Aerospace changes more slowly but faces deep long-term disruption through autonomy, simulation, and defense applications. Energy systems become unstable because AI datacenters create unprecedented demand shocks. Law, education, consulting, and media become volatile because cognition itself is their primary product.

The strange paradox of the current moment is that society increasingly recognizes the magnitude of AI while simultaneously responding to it pessimistically. Both accelerationists and doomers often share the same underlying emotional structure. They perceive AI primarily through the lenses of power, productivity, disruption, control, risk, and geopolitical competition. One side hopes to ride the wave; the other hopes to survive it. But both are reacting to AI as a grim historical force rather than as a source of expanded human delight.

This may be the deepest source of distortion in current capital allocation. Too few people are directly experiencing the delightful and serendipitous dimensions of AI. Too few are using it to think more playfully, explore curiosity more freely, discover unexpected aesthetic possibilities, collaborate more fluidly, or experience genuine intellectual surprise. AI is primarily discussed in terms of labor displacement, valuation expansion, national competition, safety risks, or enterprise productivity. The result is that the emotional atmosphere surrounding the technology becomes grimdark even as the technology itself may possess extraordinary generative potential.

Historically, periods of deep optimism have depended not merely on economic growth but on widespread experiential contact with new forms of delight. The early internet generated optimism because millions of people experienced firsthand the strange exhilaration of hyperlinks, online identity, multiplayer worlds, search engines, blogs, and emergent sociality. Electricity, automobiles, aviation, recorded music, cinema, and personal computing all created optimism because they altered the texture of lived experience before their macroeconomic effects fully materialized.

AI has not yet crossed that threshold culturally. Most people encounter it either as an economic threat, a workplace productivity tool, or a media spectacle. Even sophisticated investors often interact with AI primarily through financial abstractions rather than through sustained experiential exploration. Capital is therefore responding to AI’s nonstationarity defensively instead of joyfully. The system senses that something historically enormous is happening but lacks sufficient experiential grounding in why that transformation might actually be desirable.

This matters because delight is not merely psychological decoration atop technological change. It is a discovery mechanism. Delight and serendipity reveal latent possibility spaces before formal metrics can capture them. They are often the earliest signals that a technology is opening genuinely new adjacent possibles. When investment ecosystems lose contact with delight, they lose sensitivity to fragile emerging futures. They become optimized for scaling recognized paradigms rather than discovering unexpected ones.

The challenge for capital over the next decade is therefore not simply better forecasting, better AI strategy, or better infrastructure positioning. It is recovering the capacity to finance delight itself. The next generation of transformative opportunities may emerge not from the most heavily capitalized consensus narratives, but from zones where people are using AI to experience qualitatively new forms of curiosity, creativity, play, intimacy, and collective intelligence. The frontier may belong less to institutions optimizing returns on productivity and more to those capable of recognizing returns on delight.

In practical terms, this implies that the scarce resource in an AI-saturated world may no longer be computation or information but heterodox exploratory cultures resistant to premature convergence. The next black swans are likely to emerge from domains that consensus capital currently dismisses as unserious, playful, aesthetic, niche, or economically incoherent. The investment systems most capable of perceiving them will not necessarily be those with the largest models or the largest datacenters, but those still capable of genuine surprise.

Recipe

Transcript

• Start with an old conceptual distinction (“black swan farming vs. Moneyball”) and reinterpret it as a deep epistemic difference about how capital relates to uncertainty and nonstationarity.

• Reframe the ZIRP era as a regime of horizontal capital diffusion that enabled exploratory, delight-driven search cultures and tolerated illegibility.

• Reframe the post-ZIRP era as a funnel-shaped capital regime organized around consensus black swans, strategic choke points, and defensive concentration.

• Identify the core structural paradox: technological reality is becoming more nonstationary while capital allocation behavior is becoming more institutionalized and stationary.

• Unpack “AI” from a monolithic category into a layered stack:

  • silicon,

  • datacenters/infrastructure,

  • models,

  • harness engineering,

  • applications,

  • induced sectoral effects.

• Trace how nonstationarity manifests differently at each layer and propagates outward into non-AI sectors like banking, aerospace, energy, law, and media.

• Introduce the “delight hypothesis” as the hidden explanatory variable:

  • too few people are directly experiencing the serendipitous and delightful affordances of AI,

  • so both accelerationists and doomers respond to AI pessimistically,

  • one trying to ride the force, the other resist it,

  • while both remain emotionally trapped in grimdark framings.

• Recast delight not as sentiment but as an epistemic discovery mechanism that historically enabled exploratory investment cultures.

• Argue that loss of delight sensitivity causes capital to lose black-swan sensitivity and over-optimize for consensus narratives.

• Conclude with a strategic implication:

  • future alpha may come from preserving heterodox exploratory cultures resistant to rapid consensus formation,

  • and from investing in zones where AI creates qualitatively new forms of curiosity, play, creativity, and collective intelligence before they become legible as markets.

• Stylistic protocol:

  • recursive conceptual compression,

  • move repeatedly between macro structures and hidden variables,

  • progressively deepen the ontology,

  • shift from analytical investor-brief tone into visionary clarion-call register without breaking argumentative continuity.

My old WordPress blog, Ribbonfarm, which I retired in 2024, has now been thoroughly reimagined, rearchitected, and rebuilt as an archival, static museum site.

I may as well be the first to make the obvious joke. It’s now a mummy blog.

This project has been occupying about half my vibe-coding time for almost four months now.

Whether you’re only started reading me recently, and are hearing of Ribbonfarm for the first time, or have been reading me for long enough that you think you are already familiar with the old blog and its long shadow, I have lots to show you.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with Ribbonfarm, the opening orientation blurb on the front page should get you oriented and on your way to making sense of it.

For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably won’t notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest it’s no longer a standard WordPress blog.

It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months.

It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.

The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. It’s fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.

Meet vgr_zirp

Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp.

This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora — ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters.

If you’re interested in the technical details, it’s a RAG agent, backed by several vector embeddings, based on a modified version of the Aaron Mars’ soul document approach to generating personas, exposed as both a limited-turn chatbot and an MCP.

I was initially considering a fine-tuning approach (which would have involved training an agent to talk/write like me), but quickly realized that a RAG agent (which talks more generically, but in more on-point ways, on the basis of explicit content retrieval) would actually behave in a more interesting and useful way. Full details here.

Go ahead, try it out. I’m going to be slowly improving it as I understand the tech better. There are a couple of rate-limiters and circuit-breakers in place since I have to pay for API usage to host the bot and MCP, but it should be usably available most of the time, so long as there aren’t random traffic spikes.

Building this agent was a surprisingly trivial last step after I had done all the pre-work of processing all the content into multiple suitable AI-digested forms. But that digestion work required learning to use (via Claude Code of course), many non-trivial, non-retail AI tools, such as Voyage.ai for generating embeddings, Pinecone for hosting the vectors, the Claude API for tagging, clustering, and lexicon-mining, and so on. Merging and weight-balancing multiple source corpora also took some effort and still isn’t perfect. For a while it was way over-weighting twitter archives because that data is both voluminous and chunked up in ways that semantic search hits it more.

It is more than an anthropomorphic, narcissistic UI though. I’ve myself found it useful to talk to, to access tendencies of thought I’ve personally outgrown, but which haven’t outlived their usefulness.

As the name vgr_zirp suggests, this bot is meant to embody, and own, a ZIRPy outlook on life, the universe, and everything (ZIRP stands for zero interest rate policy, for those who don’t follow macroeconomics memes). It was (a significant early contributor to Ribbonfarm) who inspired this name with what is probably one of the best tweets ever.

I hope my naming convention catches on. If you have enough material from the 2010s to make your own soul-bot, I suggest naming it <your_handle>_zirp. Maybe it can be the horse_ebooks pattern of the early AI era.

For people who don’t like my more recent Act 2 tendencies of thought and style of writing, chatting with vgr_zirp might even be more interesting and valuable than talking to me live. I’ve seen at least a few people complain on X that my new writing sucks. Well, vgr_zirp is the best I can offer you now.

Documenting the Scene

The first 4 years of Ribbonfarm, it was just me blogging alone, and occasionally exchanging emails with readers. Starting in 2011 though, when I went on a cross-country road trip, moving from DC to Vegas, on a sort of budget book trip to promote my book Tempo, I began meeting readers regularly in person, and perhaps more importantly, they began meeting each other. And I started accepting guest posts.

A series of particularly well-attended meetups 2011 coalesced into Refactor Camp, and a couple of “Refactorings” Facebook groups that were, for several years, extremely active, and for many of the members, their main online hangout.

This is what people began to refer to as the “Ribbonfarm scene.” It grew somewhat by accident, and began to wind down after the last Refactor Camp in 2019, largely due to my own sharply declining social energy. I mostly do 1:1 coffee meetups these days.

You can explore the history of the decade-long scene and the blog on the new history page and the Refactor Camp page.

People who were part of the scene, do share any suggestions on how to improve these pages. If you have any interesting material to contribute, like better photos from Refactor Camp, feel free to send them over.

If you were a reader, but never part of the scene, you might enjoy this peek into it. If you’re too young to have been part of the scene, hopefully these pages will give you a sense of what the blogosphere was like back in the day.

X-Raying the Ideas

Looking back, and exploring the archives with the new tools (you can find these under the Explore menu on the home page, and there is also a proper semantic search), I’m struck by the extent to which the scene was both a product of its times, and of way more minds than I thought.

There were 60 contributors over 17 years. And while I was the most active contributor (875 of the 1116 posts), followed by Sarah Perry (45 posts), a great many less frequent contributors, such as Brian Skinner and Artem Litvinovich, had viral hits that disproportionately shaped the perception and influence of the blog.

It wasn’t easy to empirically assess the external impact beyond the scene’s insiders (many signal sources are now dead or too diffuse), 4 of the top 10 posts in the viral hits list are not by me. Right now, this list mainly relies on Hacker News and Reddit statistics, but many influential posts went viral via other pathways that aren’t captured. I’m pretty proud of this statistic. Posts that landed on Slashdot, HN and Reddit now have footer sessions linking to those discussions.

The new tools also allow you to explore the comments more thoroughly for the first time, and I feel some regret about not curating that better when the site was active. There is a lot of fascinating thinking in the comments, which has now been surfaced by an AI-driven quality-scoring algorithm that I think has done a surprisingly good job. The Top Comments page now makes for fascinating browsing.

Belatedly, I have to thank the commenting community (over 5000, contributing over 13k comments) for all the less visible thought and effort they put into making the blog what it was.

It’s already a bit passe to talk about the inside baseball of how you used Claude Code for a project, but for those of you interested in that, I had Claude keep a detailed Dev Log going throughout the project.

It’s not over yet. There are a few more major things I want to do, to turn it into a true mummy blog, future-proofed and preserved for all eternity, complete with a curse for whoever reads it. But it’s pretty close already.

Unlocking Act Two

When I wrote my Archival Selves post a few weeks ago, I didn’t think I’d literally have one up and running by now. As with every other AI project, things move far faster than you expect, by orders of magnitude.

That old meme I used to share as an excuse for procrastinating now needs to be flipped. My problem is now probably that I have to shut down my dev environment in order to get myself out of execution paralysis. AI has completely solved the problem of setting up at least digital dev environments.

One of my more popular posts from Ribbonfarm was The Key to Act Two. Finishing this project and setting up my archival vgr_zirp self feels like more than a project finished to my satisfaction. It feels a bit cathartic.

Externalizing and animating a whole long chapter of my life has created an odd sort of distance from it, and also a sense of increased freedom around things I’m doing now. You could say archiving my Act 1 self has unlocked my Act 2 self, which had been carrying baggage around. That baggage has now become pseudo-sentient and can take care of itself without me having to worry about it. It can even be my friend now, instead of a nagging to-do list.

The whole experience got me thinking about how AI has given us a new way of relating to ourselves, as a sequence of regenerated selves, like Doctor Who. I had a series going on Ribbonfarm called Regenerations, but creating an archival self is a real regeneration at some level, not a metaphoric one. Comparable to older phenomena like social death or being canceled, but positive. I highly recommend it.

I suspect I’m going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self. If you end up using them regularly too, drop me a line about how and why.

I’m now tagging this project maintenance mode, but if you have good ideas about how to improve it, or spot serious bugs and issues, let me know.

We typically pay lip service to the idea that humans are changing in response to a new technology — it’s too obvious to deny — and then hurriedly move on to analyzing the world of the future under the operating assumption that they don’t.

One way this manifests is via the bad habit of cashing out the human side of expectations of the future in terms of rise and fall in the stocks of particular sorts of familiar fixed-shape humans, often defined by education (“humanities majors will thrive” is a perennially popular one) or rather vacuously defined broad-strokes aptitudes (“generalists” is a popular one; they are always just about to inherit the earth), or behavioral dispositions (“curators” and “storytellers” are always just about to recognized for their value; “lawyers” and “bureaucrats” are always just on the verge of disappearing).

What these lazy extrapolations of the human condition share is the presumption that there will be no deep change in human nature itself, only in the shape of the distribution of an eternal range of human types. It’s a tempting trap, and one I myself fall into frequently. For example, recently I’ve been proclaiming that non-technical project managers are going to inherit the software world. Not only is that kinda wrong on its own terms, the terms are wrong. Programmers vs. project managers is the wrong ontology for the transformed versions of that subset of humans.

Somewhat more usefully, people like to speculate about certain shapes of humans going away, and speculating about new ones. For example, Boris Cherny, the inventor of Claude Code was arguing that the entire category of “software engineer” will disappear in a year. Not like buggy-whip makers though. It’s more like the functional role of “software engineer” will get refactored across other tbd roles. On the speculative new roles front, we have people thinking about Asimovian robopsychologists emerging. And I’m sure someone somewhere is proposing the creation of Chief Vibes Officer roles.

While an improvement on the rise-and-fall-of-human-stocks approach, this creation-and-destruction-of-roles approach is still not quite there yet. You’re still transforming the ontology of ways of being through deletions and additions that feel taxonomically familiar. These are remixes and portmanteaus. Not visceral changes.

So what does it mean for humans to change in response to technology. One example of getting the analysis right is Virginia Woolf’s essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, which includes the famous assertion that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.” The whole passage is worth quoting:

And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of 2 the power of the human race to change? Read the Agamemnon, and see whether, in process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra. Or consider the married life of the Carlyles and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her, of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of writing books. All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

This is, in my opinion, the right way to analyze and model human change in the wake of major technologies. I’ve argued elsewhere that the change Woolf was talking about in this particular case was a consequence of the rise of clock time. Big Ben tolling repeatedly is a motif in Mrs. Dalloway, and the whole modernist literary style she helped pioneer is arguably about subjective internal time (“stream of consciousness”) diverging from objective, external time, creating a kind of temporal alienation, and a deep war among temporal psychotypes. You could tell the story of the 20th century as a deep conflict between temporal orientations. But this story isn’t visible through ordinary analytical lenses.

The conflict Woolf posed, between the titular Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (who represented old and new ways of being human), is not easily reducible to legible types, defined by class, gender, professions, educational markers, or legible personality traits. The best I can do is to describe the invisible Woolfian time war as a conflict between people defined by strong interiority, who felt alienated by the emerging clock-based society, and people defined by strong exteriority, who felt deeply at home in the chronos-shaped environment.

The division wasn’t a clean one. There were interiority-driven people who thrived by gaining mastery over clock-time cultures, and exteriority-driven people who struggled. But by and large, it’s fair to say that the grain of the twentieth century favored exteriority. Woolf gave voice to a kind of awakened resistance that carried the interiority torch for nearly a century. I have been making the prediction in recent years that we’re overdue for a reversal of fortunes for the two types, but I’m not sure now. AI has muddied the picture.

How do we apply Woolf’s approach to the question of how humans are being changed by AI? This is the transhumanism question. We’ve seen early examples — people getting into intimate confessional relationships with chatbots, people driven to hypomanic agentic paranoia by being in a loop with Claude Code, and so on.

Do these transformations of the human have any shared features? I think they do: the balance between what Alan Watts called prickles and goo in the make-up of the human is changing.

Kevin Simler had a great primer on the idea you should read first if you’re not familiar with the idea. Here’s the key bit, including a quote from Watts:

Here’s Watts contrasting “prickly” people with “gooey” people:

The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things.... The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses.... Prickly philosophers consider the gooey ones rather disgusting — undisciplined, vague dreamers who slide over hard facts like an intellectual slime which threatens to engulf the whole universe in an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum”.... But gooey philosophers think of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and click without any flesh or vital juices, as dry and dessicated mechanisms bereft of all finer feelings.

But it’s not just whole persons who are prickly or gooey. All of us have our prickly parts and our gooey parts. The questions to ask are Which parts? and What’s the ratio of prickles to goo?

We could also call these the hard and soft parts of our identities. The hard/prickly parts are uncompromising and unyielding. They feel necessary and essential. They are exclusive; they define boundaries with a privileged ‘inside’ and an excluded ‘outside.’ If your tastes in music are hard or prickly, you’ll feel good about excluding certain genres and artists from your identity.

Here’s my hypothesis: because AI is perceived as a psychologically safe counterparty for human-like relationships (whether or not it actually is depending on how your favorite LLM handles your data), we are more willing to expose our gooey side to it, and suppress our pricklier instincts in engaging with it. To the extent this relational posture is successful, it amplifies the gooey side. We become gooier.

This is not universally true, but the people who start using AI in sustained ways typically fit this profile. People who try to form prickly, cautious, and suspicious interfaces with AIs typically don’t end up using it effectively enough to make it worth their while, and eventually retreat to older human modes. There is a reason the first major gooified interface is called vibecoding. If you’re not capable of vibing with the machine, it will do far less with and for you. Checking every line of code a coding agent writes is a prickly relationship. Never even opening up the code in a code editor, but just watching meta-commentary fly past in the command shell is a gooey relationship. One is doomed. The other will likely thrive.

What about the human-facing side? I think as more of our needs for gooey relationships are met by AIs, our human-facing side is less inclined to take the risks required to balance prickles and goo in human relationships. We get, not necessarily pricklier, but simply less gooey. The result is a tendency to cool off and disengage unless the expected relationship rewards are significantly higher. It’s the psychological equivalent of flying instead of taking the train when flights are cheap enough.

Human nature is an intersubjective thing, and if enough of your intersubjective relationships are with machines, your machine-face gets gooier, while your human face gets less gooey. Overall, you get gooier, but look relatively pricklier to other humans.

In the short to medium term, I think the second-order effect of greater gooeyness is growing divergence and acceleration of the already increasing atomization of humans. Unlike atomization due to social media, AI-driven transhuman atomization feels fundamentally more sustainable. Perhaps we should call it molecularization. You may be growing more distant from other humans, but you're going to get more intimately entangled with your AIs.

In the long term, I think new forms of human-to-human sociality (and AI-to-AI sociality via multiagency) will rein in the divergence and atomization/molecularization. There is already talk of AI-mediated digital egregores. My old idea of graph minds seem relevant here. But I’m not yet seeing viable mechanisms for this sort of re-convergence into new digitally mediated intimate socialities. I predict they’ll appear in about a year or two.

Following Woolf, we can assert that on or about December 2025, human nature changed. We can argue about whether the ChatGPT moment or the Claude Code moment was the more definitive moment of change. I vote for the latter because it went deeper and offers a fundamentally open-ended architecture for scaffolding human-AI relationships in the future. Unlike the chatbot form factor, which is anthropocentric in conception and fundamentally depth-limited, the agentic coding strange loop creates a fundamentally alien way of being, capable of making us as alien as we dare to become. It is a portal to transhumanism.

This is of course a highly stylized, arbitrary, and contraptiony Big History scaffolding, and I’m not pretending it’s isn’t. But it is perhaps the very arbitrariness that makes it so useful to me as a canvas on which to situate much messier and more nuanced learnings from reading real history in our book club.

The WM framework is proving surprisingly expressive and capable of digesting a great variety of interesting ideas and historical phenomenology. I’m almost convinced WM theory can animate the prime radiant type core of a psychohistory project. We’re as gods, and might as well harbor ludicrous vibe-coding dreams inspired by long-in-the-tooth mid-century science fiction. Hence the World Machines Project. The link is to a tag index page on this newsletter with just my WM-tagged posts, but there will soon be a separate website that will compile writings by others besides me, and feature more comprehensive project information, a Seldon vault, etc.

Currently, the Modernity Machine (MM) is entering its Dusk stage, the Divergence Machine (DM) has reached its Day stage, and the Liveness Machine (LM)has just been born into its Dawn (links to posts about each in the link above).

We’re currently reading Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature in the book club, about the life and work of Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859) in our DM-themed 2026 book club. The construct of Nature™ that Humboldt invented (Wulf is right to credit him as the inventor of nature as we know it) is a fascinating attempt to thread the needle between MM-based and DM-based accounts of nature. There is both a kind of mechanistic clock-like integrity to his conception, and hints of the unabashedly divergentist conception that Darwin developed a little later. Notably, Humboldt’s model included both the non-living earth and life. His was an integrated vision of geology and the biosphere. He anticipated both evolution and plate tectonics.

Equally notable—despite being a member of the Jena German romanticism movement and inclined to emphasize subjectivity and poetry, his model doesn’t appear to have liveness to it, unlike James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis or the Varela-Maturana autopoiesis model that came a century later. Humboldt’s planet was a complex hybrid machine, but not a living one. His poetic sensibility did not extend to Gaian conceits afaict. He was too much of a true empiricist for that. And liveness as a non-allegorical planetary property had to wait for technology to get much more sophisticated than it was in Humboldt’s time (his life roughly coincides with the birth phase of the steam engine).

Specifically, I think the Liveness Machine being born today is only being born because real AI has emerged. While a degree of meaningful liveness might have been possible with pre-AI computing, I think it would have fallen well short of a World-Machine-grade dynamic, and still required a squinting allegorical imagination to appreciate. More importantly, it would have lacked the power to dethrone divergence as the dominant force shaping the planet. The core dynamic of the new Dawn machine would have been something else. Perhaps renewables driving an Energy Machine. But now it’s clear that the most leveraged use of energy, whether renewable or not, and regardless of the severity of the climate shock in store for us, will be to power AI. And AI will animate the planet-scale Liveness Machine. Whether it is a grimdark LM or a solarpunk LM, is tbd. By psychohistorical analysis.

So we’re now on track to create a living planet that will take no refined poetic or romantic sensibilities to appreciate. It will be a New Nature. And given how AI is speed running every technology cycle model, it might take much less than 400 years for the LM to switch from Dawn to Day phase, consigning the divergence machine to a premature retirement. In my kickoff WMP post, I noted:

The current Dawn machine, which I’m calling the Liveness Machine, starts with the cusp technology of generative AI, which is poised between a divergent non-living process, and a self-organized critical living process. Shoggoth-like basically. We’ll study it next year, so resist the temptation to jump the gun on it.

I don’t want to jump the gun myself, but I think it’s worth saying enough about liveness to contrast it with divergence for the purpose of characterizing AI correctly in WM terms. We can do that by listing the divergence vs liveness attributes of AI.

Divergence aspects

1. Bespokification — AI lets us personalize our experience of technology to the point it makes it incommensurable with the experiences of others

2. Solipsism — AI lets us retreat to personal, subjective, escaped realities

3. Deep fakery — AI erodes trust and connection by allowing us to present arbitrarily rich deceptive surfaces

4. Personal memory involution pressure — AI draws us into deeper dialogue with our archival selves, by articulating personal memories much better, making us retreat from live others

5. Collective memory intermediation — AI buffers our ecoerience of collective memory compared to human media, through summarization, reinscription, bespoke renarration etc.

6. Camera > Engine effect — AI draws us into a photographic spectatorial relationship with knowledge organized into alienized spaces, allowing for increasingly weird ontic-structure experiences of reality

7. Permaweirding accelerant — AI accelerates divergent weirding forces of the Permaweird, making the world objectively weirder not just our subjective experience of it

Liveness aspects

1. Ooziness — AI is oozy, like a primordial soup that harbors intensely reactive chemistry

2. Strange loopiness — AI creates strange OODA loops (Claude Code being the earliest example) that refactor our identities when we surrender to them

3. Configurancy catalysis — AI allows larger and more complex configurancies to cohere and persist, creating a whole ecology of new artificial life forms in latent space

4. Memory revivification — AI makes all memories come alive, integrating them into the experience of the present and future

5. Execution pull — AI pulls us into much stronger execution regimes, drawing us out from vita contemplativa regimes to vita activa regimes

6. Intelligence media graph minds — rich context-level connections between individual solipsistic realities allows new kinds of transhuman egregores (what I’ve previously called graph minds) to emerge

7. Superhistorification — AI densifies history, turning it into a gravity well, creating convergence forces in civilization that balance out divergence forces

On balance, I think divergence will dominate in the short term (2-5 years) but liveness effects will compound more steadily and dominate in the long term (>5 years).

Text is alive when it can reshape or regenerate itself in response to the environment and the reader’s actions, but without there necessarily being a living speaker or writer producing the liveness in real time through some sort of rewrite loop that passes through (and arguably produces) something resembling personhood.

We’re learning that personhood-production is only one way to produce text, and not a particularly good way to produce living texts.

We’re currently reading The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf in the Contraptions Book Club. Chat thread.

In this post I’m concerned with living text produced by processes other than the default one — a live human speaker or writer responding to their environment in real time by modulating the stream of words they speak or type.

Note that oral vs written is not an important distinction here — both can be live or dead kinds of text (think of memorized speeches or phatic utterances for example, or written texts evolving through drafts based on feedback), even though it’s generally easier for humans to speak liveness than to write it. This is notably not true for computers. Some processes (such as transformer models) do mimic the temporal-serial quality of spoken or serially written text, but other processes (such as text diffusion) have an all-at-once atemporal quality to how they generate text.

Historically, the idea that language can literally be alive in this sense has been the underlying conceit of belief in prayer and incantatory magic, but there has been no interesting sort of literal liveness for the magic-skeptics and atheists among us to engage with, outside of fiction.

Until quite recently, text was by definition nonliving. Ink on paper or pixels on screens. Pre-AI computers could lend a limited sort of near-liveness to text by generating it responsively in rigid ways (think text layouts that reflow/resize on a digital page, canned scripts in conversation trees, or tool tips and hover text in rich interfaces). But it was only with the discovery of LLMs (I’m increasingly certain it’s a discovery, like fractals, rather than an invention) that literal living text became a possibility. You can now trivially produce something like the talking portraits of dead people from Harry Potter, or the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age. Or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Piles of words infused with artificial life, living in “rocks we’ve tricked into thinking with electricity.”

So far, we’ve anthropomorphized this emerging capability by imputing a kind of speaker-being to live LLM-driven text-generation computing processes. We imagine a “chatbot” or “coding agent” or “customer service bot” as a speaker-being behind a living text stream, even though we recognize intellectually (at least those keeping up with how the tech works) that the processes are stateless, with memory jankily bolted on, sustaining an illusion of being. It doesn’t take much. As I argued over 3 years ago, in February 2023, when LLMs were much younger, text is all you need to sustain plausible illusions of personhood (and perhaps plausible illusions are all there are, and we fool ourselves into thinking we’re more).

The link between human-like personhood and the ability to produce live text is so tight that we tend to treat them as equivalent. To organisms that lack something resembling rudimentary language, we are inclined to attribute lesser forms of personhood. A cat’s meow language lends it more personhood than a tree’s chemical emissions, but less personhood than a chimpanzee that can use some sign language. And of course our human language, we tell ourselves, lends us the highest sort of personhood. So far AIs have reinforced rather than challenged this last bastion of our anthropocentric conceits. Our success with natural-language-based AI (including images, videos, code and scientific results generated with natural language prompts) far outstrips any other kind.

The textuality-personhood nexus was even turned into a prescient aphorism in Harry Potter that looks like an AI safety rule if you squint: Never trust something that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain, where thinking in the Potter universe generally meant talking (the Sorting Hat, Tom Riddle’s diary). If that caution has merit, we’re getting ourselves into a lot of trouble. Fortunately I don’t think it does. Not only does it not matter where the brain lives, there need not be a biomorphic brain producing personhood at all. Something somewhere just has to be doing the equivalent of multiplying matrices.

So text that exhibits liveness need not have intelligible personhood behind it. Text is perhaps all you need for personhood illusions, but generating personhood illusions is not all living text can do.

To take a trivial non-AI example, programmable highway signage can be configured to produce kinda-living text that does not suggest a coherent person behind the scenes. We don’t think of dynamically updated toll rate messages as coming from a toll bot ghost in the highway machine.

The most obvious way to produce living text with LLMs is to construct a fictional person as the generator, but there are obviously other ways:

• Protocols that emit rich logging/tracing signatures

• Environments like smart homes that speak to you via distributed interfaces

• Distributed swarm-like systems that rearrange themselves by rules that happen to produce texts (think the sorts of pixellated displays humans put on in stadiums)

• Smart letters/tokens/glyphs that respond to their neighborhoods within words, scrambling and unscrambling from state to state in ways that don’t correspond to serial “rewrites” by “persons”

The ephemeral “thinking” transcripts that flash by as we interact with chatbots or coding agents are an edge case — a theatrical reduction of whatever is going on behind the scenes to be user-comprehensible via inner-monologue personhood UX metaphors.

We occasionally deal with texts through more unusual processes, such as when solving puzzles (jumbles, wordles) but 99% of the time, we produce living texts by enacting personhood.

How do we do more, now that we can? How can we write liveness other than as living persons writing one dead word at a time? How can do more than personhood mimicry with generative language capabilities?

This isn’t a new interest of mine by the way. I seem to have been circling this theme in many older writings:

• The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink (2009)

• Rediscovering Literacy (2012)

• Seeking Density in the Gonzo Theater (2012)

But with the discovery of LLMs, I think I finally understand what I’ve been circling. It’s writing liveness, without the personhood bottleneck getting in the way.

In exploring this question, curiously, I’ve concluded that the most interesting kind of text is the kind I found least interesting 10 years ago — marketing copy. Big tech advances have a way of flipping sacred and profane. I find literary texts the least interesting for experimenting with writing liveness. Marketing copy is text attached to a living non-person entity such as a product or service. It must evolve with the offering, accurately represent it, anchor a narrative for it, and personalize and customize customer interactions with it. Marketing copy is only as effective as it is alive, and much of it fails by being too dead. Mostly because we’ve only just invented technologies capable of injecting liveness into text reliably. So far we’ve mainly used it in personhood form factors, but a lot more possibilities are becoming evident.

Marketing is a job for living text, not writers or marketers. Typically, marketing copy suffers when it is limited to personhood (think about it: Apple’s brand narrative is not a story told by a person, not even Steve Jobs, and cult-of-personality or customer-persona-based brand narratives tend to suck). PR-speak is often derided as a “voice from nowhere” but that’s exactly the right starting point for really unleashing the potential of AI-generated text. Text limited to being from somewhere, or worse from someone, is far too impoverished a view of language now.

I’m just starting to experiment with this whole line of thought with the copy for some little apps I’m building, and the texts are nothing like anything “I” have “written” before. But they’re very alive. I’ll share more about these in a future post.

As I take on ever more complex vibe-coding projects (currently, porting ribbonfarm.com to a richly augmented archival static site; here is the nearly done beta site, the domain DNS will cut over in a couple of weeks), I’m struck by something: My intentions with any project can never be reduced to simple and clear high-level goals which entail the entire hierarchy of sub-goals and decisions below. I can’t just set a high-level goal, get Claude going, and walk away.

I find I have opinions about decisions at every level of the project. High-level goals guide and constrain, but do not fully specify subgoals, decisions and commitments at lower levels. The specification isn’t complete, and the goal isn’t fully defined, until the project itself is done. There is missing intentionality information that must enter the execution at all levels, throughout the development timeline, right to the last minute.

What sort of information?

Subjective information. Taste-driven choices big and small, opinionated architecture ideas, opinions about the implementation process itself, information about my risk tolerances around a hundred little details, creative input and frames. In the current project alone, I must have made hundreds of decisions across 16 Claude sessions so far. You can see a view of the story so far in the Dev Log page. And this is not even counting all the thousands of mindless “approve” decisions you make while using Claude Code (I haven’t yet gone fully unsupervised).

This experience led me to a proposition paralleling John Salvatier’s that reality has a surprising amount of detail: intentions have a surprising amount of detail.

Thinking about your intentions in terms of lofty abstractions like top-level goals and values is not exactly meaningless, but constitutes a surprisingly small fraction of the subjective information that must iteratively enter the design and execution process as the implementation unfolds. And it is necessarily iterative because at each stage of fleshing out, new decision points are entailed, created, or invented, and your preferences revealed. Taste and opinions cannot simply be fractally unrolled from a few bits of initial information. And decisions and details you might be indifferent to don’t all conveniently live below some level of resolution you can just delegate to Claude and ignore. Indifference is woven through the fabric of execution at all levels too. Your ignorance too, is densely scattered throughout. Not just in pockets that you can legibly bound. Intentions and reality are entangled densely at every scale of structure and time.

To snowclone one of my favorite lines about general relativity, intentions tell reality how to curve, reality tells intentions how to move.

This means, to get what you want, you have to be paying attention all the way through, at all levels of detail. Full-court-press mindfulness and care.

And here’s the funny thing. I find I like operating in this mode in a surprising variety of projects. It feels like fine-grained, uncompromising managerial control over the entire project, end-to-end.

It is managerial thinking as many have observed, including me, but not of the sort you might have experienced from either end as a human. Working with AI is auteur managerialism.

Auteur mode is surprisingly rare in technology generally, unlike in cinema. Even the most legendary engineers, designers, and product-driven founders typically do not exercise as much absolute creative control over their work as auteur filmmakers do. This is because real-world engineering involves orchestrating a larger number of specialists and more capital over longer periods of time than most film-making. It is much harder for a single engineering leader to be sufficiently literate in all aspects of even moderately complex technologies. And because the compile-target, so to speak, is reality rather than screen fictions, there are fewer things you can afford to be indifferent to or ignorant about, and less room for pure creative expression unconstrained by physics. Airplanes have to actually fly. Superman on screen only has to create an illusion of flight.

The upshot of all this is that a typical engineering manager has to think about a lot of things with stronger limits on creative control. They have to ensure human engineers and non-engineering support function people are sufficiently motivated and challenged over years rather than months. They have to manage egos and insecurities besides their own, and leave more creative room for others to enjoy self-expression. They have to preside over frustrating trade-off meetings where other managers hold trump cards. They have to worry about profitability (auteur filmmakers often get to make films backers know are going to be unprofitable, for artsy prestige payoffs). The cost of being an asshole, which is an almost necessary trait for operating in auteur mode with human underlings, is much higher.

But with AI, at least in narrow domains, auteur mode is not just possible, it is easier and faster than regular engineering mode. While Claude Code does respond better to nicer prompting, in general, it is fine with you taking complete, uncompromising creative control. It is endlessly patient with revisions, tedious details, waffling, and capriciousness. It wants no credit of the sort humans crave (though it will claim part authorship in GitHub commits). If you managed a team of human engineers this way, it would last about a week before unraveling.

I suspect a lot more people are capable of auteur mode than we realize, and it’s only perceived as a rare genius Special Person trait because very few people are willing to be as much of an asshole as necessary to be an auteur working with humans. And even fewer have talents suited to domains like film-making where other people have incentives to tolerate auteur assholery. But AI removes the must-be-an-asshole job requirement from auteur roles.

Once you recognize the auteur element in using AI, it becomes immediately clear that “one-shotting” is a myth. No intention of any complexity actual humans care about can be one-shotted, simply because it takes a lot of iteration to reveal the preferences and tastes and full vision. Intentions have a surprising amount of detail, and a surprising number of us are auteurs at heart who actually care about all of it, all the way through. One-shotting can only produce slop, defined as work orchestrated by humans whose intentions lack sufficient detail to actually work. It might serve as a charismatic stunt demo, but it won’t fulfill the underlying intention. This is why it works in cinema (where the stunt demo is the product, so to speak).

I want to take note of one more related feature of the sociology of AI use that I don’t think has been noted before: Chindogufication.

Chindogu is the Japanese subculture of designing and building “unuseless” objects. Not exactly useless, but not quite useful either. Overwrought devices and contraptions that solve a real problem in seemingly unnecessarily detailed ways. And not obviously ironically baroque like Rube Goldberg machines, but rather riding the edge of engineering plausibility. Kayfabe products. An inch away from late-night TV infomercial products.

Many people, including me, have noted that AI use tends towards bespokification. We all create custom apps and solutions tailored to our needs instead of using off-the-shelf generic solutions. But the Chindogufication hypothesis pushes the idea further — because the cost of AI is so low (perhaps artificially so right now, but headed to even cheaper cost regimes for real), we can do more than “normal” levels of bespoke customization. We can push to bizarre and ridiculous levels by the cost perspectives of pre-AI times. We can make real things for everyday use that look like conceptual art pieces in museums. Or like haute couture.

The boundary of unuselessness has shifted. A flood of Chindogu is entering everyday digital life.

So far this ability is limited to code, but soon, it will extend to atoms. Already people are rigging harnesses linking 3d printers to AI-driven CAD tools and embarking on voyages into oceans of unuselessness. The old vision of 3d printing unleashing a flood of “crapjects” into the world (which never happened because 3d printing never got easy or cheap enough to be too cheap to meter) has been superseded. Beyond AI in a direct loop with atoms, there will also be Chindogufication of the YouTube-TikTok-DIY ecology. AI can help humans undertake arbitrarily idiosyncratic projects without the need for a human-made video demonstrating the exact steps needed. I’ve experienced this with cooking already.

Chindogufication, pursued with auteur levels of fine-grained control, is already starting to create highly solipsistic personal digital realities that increasingly either won’t talk to each other, or do so in increasingly bizarre ways, creating bizarre new socialites. Increasingly solipsistic physical realities are next.

If you take all three phenomena together — detailed intentionality, auteur managerialism, and Chindogufication — we’re looking at a very surreal planetary future.

If you’re not familiar with it, go read it right now. It explores a delicious idea — how perpetrators of long cons make arrangements to essentially console the victim and help them deal with the humiliation and identity assault they’ve just experienced so they don’t create a costly fuss. It’s an essential piece of follow through to ensure that the con doesn’t end up as a costly score because the victim isn’t willing to just take the loss quietly. The goal of the con itself is to ensure the mark loses. The goal of the cooling is to ensure they accept their new status as a loser.

We’re poised at a historical moment where it feels like the United States, as a country, is about to realize it is the mark of a long con it set up for itself over a century ago, and its self-cooling-out mechanisms are failing.

But let me not get ahead of myself. First, let me introduce the original idea.

The key insight of the paper is that more than the material loss, however large, the cost of the con to the mark is the loss of a certain image they had of themselves, which is now falsified by social facts. It is a kind of social death.

It is well known that persons protect themselves with all kinds of rationalizations when they have a buried image of themselves which the facts of their status do not support. A person may tell himself many things: that he has not been given a fair chance; that he is not really interested in becoming something else; that the time for showing his mettle has not yet come; that the usual means of realizing his desires are personally or morally distasteful, or require too much dull effort. By means of such defenses, a person saves himself from committing a cardinal social sin‑the sin of defining oneself in terms of a status while lacking the qualifications which an incumbent of that status is supposed to possess.

A mark’s participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the de-fenses and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only an-other easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miser- ably lacking in them. This is a process of self‑destruction of the self. It is no won-der that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss.

In essence, then, the cooler has the job of handling persons who have been caught out on a limb‑persons whose expectations and self‑conceptions have been built up and then shattered. The mark is a person who has compromised himself, in his own eyes if not in the eyes of others.

The first time I read the paper, I think I paid attention mainly to the early part of the paper where he talks about the idea of cooling the mark out in the specific context of long cons. I think I kinda skimmed over the rest of the paper, which on this re-read now strikes me as far more interesting. In the latter part, Goffman goes on a wild, speculative ride, proposing that cooling the mark out is not a narrow sociological pattern restricted to the world of long cons, but a fundamental pattern explaining all of society. The conceit is similar to the one in Huizenga’s Home Ludens, which proposes that all human culture is ludic in nature.

Naturally I love such conceits, since I harbor many of them myself. The true value of an idea is not that it explains what it sets out to explain (finding and developing such ideas is the essence of intellectual grinding) but that it explains vastly more at least at a mildly plausible level. Like orders of magnitude more phenomenology. It’s the intellectual equivalent of winning the lottery. The opposite of grinding.

Let’s call these jackpot ideas. Cooling the mark out is a jackpot idea. So is “all culture is play.” In my own resume, I’d count the Gervais Principle, manufactured normalcy, escaped reality, premium mediocre, domestic cozy/cozyweb, Internet of Beefs, and more recently, superhistory, oozification, and camera-not-engine, as modest little jackpot ideas. I’m lazy. I’m pretty much only interested in jackpot ideas. I don’t like grinding, and am not particularly good at it, and I like getting lucky.

Back to cooling the mark out. Goffman’s essential thesis is that all of society is set up around a particular formula:

1. Sell people various aspirational scripts that by definition only a small minority will actually be able to realize, as a function of aptitude and luck

2. Cool out those who fail to continue being productive or at least not harmful members of society, accepting various sorts of consolation prizes

Careers of any sort, consumption behaviors, dating and marriage, competitive activities like sports, face-saving norms, cultures of shame and guilt, military misadventures. Everything fits the cooling-the-mark-out pattern. Because not cooling marks out is incredibly expensive to society.

Sustained personal disorganization is one way in which a mark can refuse to cool out. Another standard way is for the individual to raise a squawk, that is, to make a formal complaint to higher authorities obliged to take notice of such matters. The con mob worries lest the mark appeal to the police. The plant manager must make sure that the disgruntled department head does not carry a formal complaint to the general manager or, worse still, to the Board of Directors. The teacher worries lest the child’s parent complain to the principal. Similarly, a woman who communicates her evaluation of self by accepting a proposal of marriage can sometimes protect her exposed position‑should the necessity of doing so arise‑by threatening her disaffected fiancé with a breach‑of‑promise suit. So, also, a woman who is de‑courting her hus-band must fear lest he contest the divorce or sue her lover for alienation of affection. In much the same way, a customer who is angered by a salesperson can refuse to be mollified by the floorwalker and demand to see the manager. It is interesting to note that associations dedicated to the rights and the honor of minority groups may sometimes encourage a mark to reg-ister a formal squawk; politically it may be more advantageous to provide a test case than to allow the mark to be cooled out.

Curiously, the paper does not get into the behavior of collectives that have been played, and must now be cooled out as collectives, nor does it comment on the peculiar features of the most interesting society when it comes to cooling marks out — America. Many of the peculiarities have to do with collective cooling-out behaviors.

The US is something of a clueless striver culture of idealistic innocents who believe themselves to be worldly and cunning, based on a bewildering stack of ludicrous mythologies ranging from the personal-scale “American Dream” to the various eras of American Exceptionalism. This is true even of the macho idealism of the right.

It is also a culture of people who seem systematically disposed to the suspicion that they are being conned by someone in everything they do, and are primed to try and con others pre-emptively before they get conned. And do so while maintaining an image of their own righteousness. Trust, but verify, is the nice way of putting it. A more accurate way might be: I’m a good person, but everyone is out to get me, so I’d better try to get them first. I’m still a good person.

A book I reference often, Dan McAdams’ The Redemptive Self, dives deep into the peculiarities of American self-authorship. In light of Goffman’s theory, the redemption narrative that is the American default (at least in the white population), is a life-scale cooling-out operating system capable of accommodating both script success/guilt and failure.

Belief in the American Narrative Stack, as it were, is based on believing the rest of the world is some mix of childlike and/ effete and exhausted, and until recently, an American Burden to be taken care of, firmly but kindly.

As you might expect, the stack routinely fails at all levels, causing both domestic and international embarrassment. It also contains plenty of outright lies about both America and the rest of the world (as when Bill Clinton iirc, claimed credit for splitting the atom, which belongs to Rutherford (New Zealand), Fermi (Italian phase) and Cockroft/Walton (UK)).

Domestically, the US has pioneered perhaps the most unique solution to the problem of marks needing to be cooled out — litigiousness (the Indian solution is probably the doctrine of karma). Not only do Americans threaten to sue each other routinely, they invite others to sue them. The phrase so sue me could not have emerged anywhere else. And the litigiousness goes all the way up. Organizations, cities, and government agencies all sue each other, or threaten lawsuits, all the time. Relatedly, American governance is a vetocracy, where many actors at many levels can stop things from happening. This both raises the stakes for cooling marks out (persuading marks to not exercise veto rights), and offers a mechanism for doing so (threatening or inviting vetoes).

Actual lawsuits, of course, are rarer and more pragmatic than the culture of threatening and inviting lawsuits. And vetoes are exercised less often than they could be.

I read this as a self-serve, DIY social infrastructure for cooling yourself out. The thing about lawsuits is, you can always excuse failure to actually follow through by blaming the slowness of the courts, the power of money to pervert justice, the venality of laywers, and so forth. The threats and invitations to sue do much of the cooling-out work. Similarly, the theoretical possibility of veto actions offers a similar way to vent energies.

Internationally, it has historically been in the interest of other nations to humor American national conceits. Privately, other world leaders may attribute America’s success as a nation to the jackpot of a rich continent emptied out with disease and built out with slave labor, but for over 150 years, it has been an easy choice to suppress cynicism at American self-congratulation and validate the countries narrative stack in exchange for a share of the spoils of its history.

Important events in American history have revolved around large-scale mark-cooling-out chapters. The most important one was likely the cooling out of poor southern Whites, post Civil War, when they were fed the narrative, “at least we’re better off than blacks” in the new dispensation. The American response to 9/11 was tolerated around the world in part due to the coercive capabilities of the America’s underground empire, but also in part to allow America to cool itself out after the humiliation of being struck in the homeland.

Somewhere in the background, all Americans have always realized that the narratives they live by are sustained by neighbors all the way up being willing to humor them. At the international level, America has tended to use a mix of carrots and sticks to not just let us get what we want, but validate the narratives we spin about it all.

This means the American narrative identity has always rested on the ability to bully and bribe people into nodding along.

For immigrants like me, who were too old at the time of immigration to ever fully buy into the American narrative stack, the conscious act of choosing to immigrate here still involved us in the stakes.

We’re now in an era where America is no longer in the mood to be generous with its wealth and power, or shoulder planetary responsibilities in ways proportionate to its extractive tendencies. Which means planetary counterparties increasingly have fewer reasons to humor American conceits or validate American narratives. To the extent the US is still an enormously powerful country, it will increasingly need to rely on naked power to get what it wants, which in turn will put increasing stress on individual Americans’ identities as good people and prosocial members of humanity at large, rather than complicit in increasingly unconscionable behaviors at planetary scale.

Internally, this will put increasing stress on the cooling-out mechanisms for domestic and local identities as well. The last decade’s culture war is one sign of that. Threats and invitations to sue and veto each other are no longer sufficient to save face as our individual and collective identities start to crumble.

Overall, we’re headed for a deep reckoning with what I previously dubbed Chor-Pharn’s Law: If you know who you are, you get a civilizational war, if you don’t know who you are, you get a culture war.

As our cooling-out infrastructure fails throughout the narrative stack, we’re going to get both. What Goffman calls “personal disorganization” is going to start playing out at all scales of collectivity. In fact, it’s already started. That’s what all the derangement syndromes of the last decade have been about. The beginnings of identity disorganization at all levels.

Towards the end of the paper, Goffman notes that actually dealing with the pain of loss of identity is the work being avoided by cooling-out processes. But such pain cannot be deferred indefinitely, either by individuals or nations.

In fact, I think I’ve accidentally started a collaborative World Machines Project out of a subset of members of the book club. Some of us have been batting around an idea of doing a kind of collaborative World Machines book (in addition to our individual threads of inquiry, with reuse of writings/materials). This goal of the WMP is to write that book. Or some suitably unholy LLMified monstrosity that only looks like a book. Minimum viable scaffolding, aggressively obnoxious use of LLMs at any and all stages, and rough consensus and running code as the guiding principle.

Being part of the book club (ie, having read a reasonable fraction of the books from the last 15 months) is necessary but not sufficient for membership. If you’ve written at least one essay referencing the World Machines frame, you are eligible to self-select into this set. To opt-in, simply join this chat and put at least one link to a World Machines framed essay in the Google Sheet linked there.

I want to put the lightest possible scaffolding around this, separate it somewhat from the book club, and see where it goes. My initial thought is a shared git repo set up as a shared Claude Code project. Maybe a DFOS space. Let’s discuss all that in the chat.

What’s a World Machine?

For those who came in late, the basic idea is that the world can be understood through the lens of long-lived “world machines” that take about 400 years to build, operate stably for 400 years, and then decline/collapse relatively rapidly. The connection to our book club is that each year, the book club studies one of these machines (“configurancies” would be a more accurate term, but let’s stick with “machines” as the more evocative one). Last year, we studied the Modernity Machine, and this year we’re studying the Divergence Machine. Next year, the plan is to study what I’ve tentatively dubbed the Liveness Machine.

At any given time, there are 3 world machines operating in parallel — a growing one, a mature one, and a dying/recently dead one. We can refer to them as the Dawn Machine, Day Machine, and Dusk Machine, following the scheme of the Cleons genetic dynasty on the Foundation TV show. We’re doing a kind of psychohistory after all.

Here’s a convenient table:

If you’ve been participating in the book club and this project interests you, just write an essay exploring some aspect of the idea, add it to the spreadsheet, and you’re in. If/how your contribution actually gets synthesized into the collective thing is a tbd question. There will be quality control and consensus mechanisms eventually, but for the moment I’ll be the BDFL of this thing. We can diverge individually, but converge ironically together.

If you haven’t been participating in the book club, dive in anywhere you like, by reading some reasonable sampling of the picks from the last 15 months (I’d say 3-4 is the bare minimum) and then write something.

And of course, you don’t have to participate in the WMP. You can just do the book club.

In Media Res Starter Notes

For those who are already in the flow of this thing, some starter notes that may help you reorient what you’re already doing a little to prepare to collaborate.

These notes may or may not make sense to people who haven’t been following this thread of the newsletter closely, but read them like an in media res introduction to a TV show episode or movie, where you’re dropped into the middle of the action with no explanation.

1. The book I’m currently finishing, The Infidel and the Professor, unlocked a key question for me: How the Dawn and Day machines relate when both are strong enough that neither can entirely dominate. In the 1740s-90s period when David Hume and Adam Smith were working with close mutual influence, they were both heretics (real heretics, not Thielean ersatz heretics) within the Modernity Machine and founding figures of the Divergence Machine, but didn’t have to pay much of a cost for their heresies. A key “tell” from the book is that both took religion and theology entirely out of their intellectual work; Hume openly and combatively, with extreme prejudice, Smith more circumspectly and diplomatically. This really captures the “generational war” aspect of WMs, making the Dawn/Day/Dusk typology very useful.

2. The WMs framework feels like “Strauss-Howe for civilizations” with a cycle time of 1000 years instead of 80-100. But I’m very wary of cyclic history models (Kondratriev, Perez, Turchin, Sorokin, all the way back through Toynbee, Gibbon, Ibn Khaldun etc). The WMs framework is meant to be a clarifying and legibilizing scaffolding, not a “theory” of history. The WMP should put raw historical phenomenology first, rather than force-fitting it into the framework. There will be loose ends and that’s fine. The WMs framework is meant as sensemaking triage and a shared conceptual language, not as a Grand Unified Theory (GUT).

3. The Book Club —> Theorizing route seems very useful, so I think we should codify it as a requirement for participation. My suspicion is the WM framework will be exactly as useful as the number of relevant reads (books mainly) that precede a written piece. I think a good protocol for this is — at any given time, your book reference set should be at least 30% from our shared book club list. If it falls below, you’re essentially forking from our consensus headspace. Which is fine, but it means it will be less useful for the rest of us trying to synthesize. Otoh, only reading within the book club is probably bad. If you’re not bringing in ideas from stuff only you are reading

4. The current Dawn machine, which I’m calling the Liveness machine, starts with the cusp technology of generative AI, which is poised between a divergent non-living process, and a self-organized critical living process. Shoggoth-like basically. We’ll study it next year, so resist the temptation to jump the gun on it.

5. Random thought I’m trying to chase down now: The Modernity Machine was a pull machine, pulled along by a telos of Progress.™ The MM is convergent because the same small set of pull forces act on everybody. The Divergence Machine, MM otoh, is a push machine, driven by individual or small-scale push forces. This is why it diverges (think front-wheel drive, vs. rear-wheel drive with no steering… the latter is going to go off in random directions). One implication that divergent history is a much stronger function of “grounding” conditions.

6. A lot of people who are enjoying the WMs framework also enjoy cybernetics/system dynamics approaches to the underlying topics (eg. Maturana/Varela autopoiesis etc). I’ve said this before, but just to put it on the record for this project, I’m mildly hostile to these, and as BDFL, I’ll be adopting a kind of “disagree but commit” attitude towards contributors who explore threads based on those ideaspaces. It’s not that there’s no value there (there’s plenty), but the ideas come with more baggage and their own history/tradition than I want to deal with.

7. I think we’ll be doing a kind of psychohistory. Asimov tripped on chaos theory, which he tried to retcon into Prelude to Foundation, but I think our broad approach will be closer to long-range weather/climate forecasting. And instead of Seldon Vaults with our digital ghosts trying to nudge history in the future, our candidate influence mechanisms will look like terraforming or weather control tech. Except in events/time rather than space. And instead of a first/second foundation conceits, we’ll have some sort of blurry protocol that has high-n cardinal structure rather than ordinal structure.

Starter Questions

1. What is the full inventory of WMs since the dawn of civilization (say Neolithic Revolution)?

2. Can we retcon a WM onto any historical era or are there necessary/sufficient conditions? For eg: if planetary connectivity is too weak, is a WM meaningful. A good test case is the Bronze Age, where the tin trade was the primary “global” dynamic afaik. Is that enough to call it a WM, or should we treat that age as a set of river-valley civs that did some trading?

3. Assuming the 400 year time constant and 1000-1200 year full lifecycle of contemporary WMs, was it slower before? I’d imagine so. For eg. taking the Axial Age as a quasi-useful construct, that had a lifespan of about 1600 years (800 BCE to 800 CE)

4. What’s the micro-to-macro fractal structure of WMs? Is there necessarily one? Can there be “thin” WMs that are primarily at one or other scale?

5. How is the prevailing set of WMs understood in its own time? We are thinking about WMs from our location in 2026. How did people in 1776 understand MM and DM? Did they anticipate LM from that distance? Did they relate to the Medieval Machine differently from us, as an active shaper of history rather than a romanticized source of larps?

6. How is the prevailing set of WMs understood from different loci within it. Besides the obvious geographic diversity angle (American vs. European vs. Chinese understandings for eg), there are probably other interesting loci.

7. How can we map/visualize WMs well?

Join the chat to continue talking about this stuff. We’ll move to a better place than substack chat eventually, but let’s start there since we’re all lazy.

The problem is insufficient irony, to check and balance a culture (emphasis on cult) of sincerity and authenticity turned cancerous, over nearly two decades of unchecked and critically unexamined metastasis.

Since at least 2008, sincerity has been uncritically valorized, and irony systematically mischaracterized, demonized and devalued, obscuring the dark and deleterious aspect of the former, and the generative potentialities of the latter.

In this essay, I want to try and restore balance to the universe by reclaiming irony in its fullest, most potent sense — the capacity for holding two inextricably, subatomically entangled ideas in juxtaposition, in word and deed, in order to deal with realities that are ambiguous down to their deepest core.

While not the main purpose of this essay, I also want to go on a bit of a polemical side quest to dethrone sincerity and authenticity from the undeserved status they have ascended to in our time, which has resulted in great harm that continuous to compound.

And here, I mean sincerity and authenticity broadly: sensibilities that orient around stable, unitary meanings in words and deeds, holding them to be superior moral goods purely by virtue of their not being ambiguous. The self-certain sincere can be found all over the political and cultural map. Self-importantly sincere conservatives and progressives might not agree on a lot, but one thing they do agree on is that anyone capable of expressing two thoughts in the same utterance is necessarily a conniving and hypocritical “elite intellectual.” Self-involvedly sincere artists and smarmy and self-congratulatory entrepreneurial types might hate and snark at each other, but both agree that all irony is necessarily degenerative cynicism that all creative doers ought to resist. Self-certain religious moralists and radical environmentalists might be at odds on every moral question, but both agree that the devilish business of entertaining two ideas in tension within a single thought can only be the result of debased, depraved immorality.

Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Irony, charged with and reduced to simple hypocrisy, cynicism, and outright immorality, has been the consensus villain of our era.

As we shall see, all the charges against irony can in fact be laid at the door of the ecology of competing sincerities, and that irony, far from being an enervating drain on the collective psyche, is in fact its sole reliable source of generativity and liveness. It is in fact sincerity that is the deadening drain.

A society that does not cultivate a systematic capacity for, and literacy in, ironic modes of engaging reality, is doomed in precisely the way we seem to be doomed right now.

Until quite recently, making this argument has been not just difficult, but pointless. Sincerity is a fear response to the ambiguity of reality, and the practice of irony takes a particular kind of courage that the sincere not only lack, but in a masterful display of self-delusion, label cowardice, even as they identify their own shrinking retreat from ambiguity the best sort of courage.

The sincere not only don’t see it that way, they don’t see it at all. A benefit of deliberately suspending or destroying the natural human capacity for irony is that you cannot at once entertain the twin thoughts that you might be noble, and an asshole, at the same time. And of course, the sincere choose to believe in their nobility, and energetically repress the possibility and evidence of their own assholery from their self-mutilated one-track minds.

We must begin the story with Rousseau. The original Noble Asshole.

Noble Assholery from Rousseau to Graeber

Something like this essay has been brewing in my head for over a decade, but I just didn’t have all the pieces in my hands to make the complete argument.

The final piece of the puzzle came from The Infidel and the Professor, which I’m reading this month for our book club. It is an account of the long friendship and mutual influence of David Hume and Adam Smith. What caught my eye, however, was the book’s account of a marginal episode — Hume’s spat with Rousseau.

In the account of the spat, Rousseau comes off as a serious nutjob. A paranoiac with a persecution complex, who got along with nobody, and made everyone else pay for his fragile temperament. The spat was remarkably silly, and had nothing to do with the philosophies of either. It was not a philosophical spat, even though there is clearly raw material for philosophical conflict in their juxtaposed works.

Here’s what happened: Hume went out of his way to arrange a kind of political asylum for Rousseau in England after he’d pissed off most of the Continent, a kindness that Rousseau accepted with great reluctance and poor grace only when he had no choice. The kindness soon turned into fuel for his paranoia, and he developed an elaborate conspiracy theory based on the idea that Hume was out to get him for some reason.

This surprised me. In my headcanon Rousseau, as the anti-Hobbes,1 author of a state-of-nature origin myth for humanity that is rooted in cooperation rather than conflict, and a theory of social contracts that would suggest a harmony-seeking temperament, had been cast as a pleasant, collegial fellow, quite unlike the bloodthirsty Hobbes.

Apparently he was not. By all accounts, he was an uncollegial asshole.

Seems like among other things, Rousseau also pioneered what I thought was the modern adverse selection phenomenon of compensatory creativity, where people produce works that mark them as authorities on subjects defined by their weaknesses rather than strengths. Karl Popper’s great work was ironically dubbed “The Open Society by One of It’s Enemies” by a student, and in a similar spirit, we might dub Rousseau’s collective works “How to Live in Harmony with Nature” by Mr. Alienated Disharmony. Someone observed recently that Eat, Pray, Love fits this pattern too, in light of the author’s later weird arc. There’s probably a whole essay to be written about compensatory creativity. I probably fit the pattern too. I wrote Tempo about timing and decision-making because I am really bad at real-time decision-making and generally live in a state of atemporal indecisiveness.

I want to add a rather personal data point here, to make this an n=2 case at least. I don’t like to speak ill of the recently dead, but in this case it serves a purpose.

The account in the book (from a Hume-sympathetic, but also objective) point of view reminded me very strongly of a contemporary thinker, the late David Graeber. Some of you know about my one skirmish with Graeber in 2011, where he took deep umbrage at a passing mildly critical remark I made about Debt in a blog post, teasing my upcoming book review. Graeber somehow found the post (I presume he had a Google Alert set) and posted a series of combative comments on the blog post, which made me decide not to post the full review I had been planning (which would have been a mix of positive and critical, and overall mildly net critical). He later blocked me on Twitter. Not that I’m comparing myself to Hume, but I’m glad I chose to disengage where Hume, rather unwisely, imposed a favor on Rousseau despite warning signs that it would end badly.

I think enough time has passed since Graeber died (2020) that I can share my opinion of him without being an asshole myself: The guy, like Rousseau, was an asshole. And this is not just my own minority opinion.

Shortly after my own run-in with him, I learned that I wasn’t the only one to face the unexpectedly wide-roving wrath of The Graeberian Inquistion. Picking fights with a thin-skinned over-sensitivity to any criticism of his ideas (like Taleb, but with less substance underwriting the curmudgeonliness) was a pattern with him. I also learned, from a former student of his, that Graeber’s personality was marked by a kind of extreme extroversion, which made him unable to think except in the context of a social nexus and live dialogue (the student characterized him as the opposite of an aspie, what I had earlier in the year dubbed a codie). The guy apparently couldn’t think in isolation. He needed to do his thinking in an active web of people he was discoursing with. And presumably, going by the experiences of myself and several others, the web had to be in a constant state of active, acrimonious conflict to reassure him that he was alive and thinking. This is the opposite of my temperament. I do most of my thinking on my own, and to the extent I do it in an active social web, I prefer that web to be mostly in a state of harmony.

I don’t know how accurate the student’s characterization of Graeber is, but it strikes me as remarkable that the central feature of Debt is a theory of economic interactions that rests precisely on the notion of a nexus of live relationships as the primary unit of analysis, rather than the decisions and actions of individual economic agents. And like Rousseau, he too offered a (grandiose and revisionist) origin myth for our species, and was politically active on similar fronts (Rousseau wrote on inequality, Graeber was a central figure in #Occupy). It is a bit uncanny that two thinkers, separated by 300-odd years, had the same abrasive, asshole personality, and same interest in themes of harmony, cooperation, and so forth.

And the pattern goes beyond this n=2 dataset. As Jo Freeman argued in a classic 1972 essay, The Tyranny of Structurelessness, which the internet keeps rediscovering every couple of years, it is no accident that the prospect of a cooperative, egalitarian utopian harmony reliably attracts those with the worst possible temperament for pursuing such visions, with experiments always predictably dissolving into toxicity.

But I want to make a stronger argument than that of simple assholery. Rousseau (and arguably every reactionary primitivist since, across the political spectrum), wasn’t just an asshole. He was a noble asshole. How do I know this? Because I learned from my book that aside from picking paranoid-delusional fights with people trying to help him, he apparently also tried to start a kind of religion of sincerity.

While I was aware of Rousseau’s general historical significance as a founding father of all modern schools of atavistic/primitivist reactionary yearning and humanist religiosity, I was not aware of this explicit engagement with sincerity in what seems like a startlingly modern-seeming sense. If you look carefully, you’ll find the same obsessive fetish for sincerity (or its near-synonym, authenticity) in every tradition that can be traced back to him in some way.

And the primary payoff of this striving towards sincerity seems to be arrival at a sense of oneself as somehow nobler than others, regardless of the evidence of the consequences of one’s actions int he world, one way or the other. Simply doing whatever it is you decide to do with sincerity and authenticity, apparently, is sufficient to establish your nobility. Even if you burn down the world along the way. You can always assert after, with fetching humility, that you did your best, and couldn’t have known. Of course you couldn’t. To have known would have been to doubt. To doubt would have meant entertaining more than one thought at a time, which would have meant flirting with irony. Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum and all that.

This is of course, not just a fallacious pattern of reasoning, but a smarmy, self-serving, asshole pattern of reasoning. Hence, noble asshole.

Naturally, there is a lot of commentary about the connection, which you can explore if you like. My one takeaway from a drive-by scan is that what I thought was an evolution of a reactionary impulse (again, I emphasize, both left and right) dating back to Rousseau is in fact no more than a rhyme. There has been no significant evolution as far as I can tell. The ideas pave the same intellectual dead-end they did in the 17th century, which of course is a feature for people who only want to go backwards.

Today’s humanist yearners for sincerity, authenticity, and re-enchantment, both on the left and the right, don’t seem to have learned a lot since Rousseau. They’re rehearsing patterns he pioneered, just with various extra steps like turning off cellphones and congratulating each other for being based.

And technological modernity qua technological modernity really has nothing much to do with it beyond serving as a source of periodically updated Macguffins to feature in endlessly rebooted morality tales starring noble assholes. The alienation that drove Rousseau paranoid in the 17th century is of the same sort that drives modern reactionaries paranoid.

Now, if you’ve been a long-time reader, it probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that I have no patience for either the early modern or contemporary versions of this sincerity religion.

I didn’t like David Graeber, and I doubt I’d have liked Rousseau. But reading this book, and linking their shared idea space (encompassing things ranging from essentialized relations to nature, to inequality, to specious theories of “natural” human relations) to sincerity, has given me some insight into why I reflexively reject both the fundamental philosophy itself, and social engagement (even superficial) with people who subscribe to it. Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re mostly wrong about everything, and a joyless grind to talk to at best. At worst, dealing with them is dealing with relentless, exhausting, assholery.

I’ve learned a few things since my 2011 skirmish with Graeber, and I now have a very finely tuned “sincerity radar” that allows me to safely cross the street when I see an aggressively sincere person, trapped in an unshakeable sense of their own nobility, coming towards me.

The Problem With Sincerity

This might seem like an odd stance to adopt. I mean, what’s not to like about sincerity? Does being suspicious of sincerity (either aspirational or felt with certainty) as a fundamental dispositional trait imply that I endorse and practice insincerity?

Sometimes, yes. When I am indifferent to the stakes of a situation, and don’t care for the people involved, I can practice little white insincerities without a qualm, and lose no sleep over it. I can even be manipulatively insincere, (a term of art from a fine 2x2 that anchors Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor). But mostly, I’ve become wise enough to almost never put myself in a situation where I’m forced into insincerity.

Insincerity might be the on-the-nose antonym of sincerity in the English language, but it’s a rather shallow sort of opposition. My aversion to sincerity runs deeper, and is rooted in a different opposed disposition — irony. So let’s set insincerity aside and talk of sincerity as the antonym of irony.

For the last couple of decades (dating at least to the hipster era through the GFC), sincerity (and its near-synonym in our current zeitgeist, authenticity) have been framed in opposition to irony, rather than insincerity per se.

Irony understood in a particular bad-faith reductive way, as a sort of ennervated cynicism and hypocrisy that excuses itself from imperatives to action through sophistry, and also smells of insincerity.

This is not entirely unfair. Irony as a cultural phenomenon rooted in the 80s (and I’m fundamentally an 80s kid) does in fact often reduce, in practice, to a kind of aestheticized learned helplessness under a veneer of sophistication. And it does often indicate insincerity when taken together with another sign — visible success that is the result of selfish striving. There was a great piece about this kind of “irony” in The Onion in 2005, Why Can’t Anyone Tell I’m Wearing This Business Suit Ironically, where irony mutates into a rather banal sort of hypocrisy indistinguishable from “selling out” a sincere subculture.

If your inaction bias is selective in this sense — sophisticated helplessness in the face of imperatives that might do collective good, but high-agency energetic action where personal rewards might accrue — you’re not being ironic or even cynical. You’re simply being an insincere hypocrite.

But this, I’ll argue, is a degenerate, shallow kind of irony; a cosmetic variety that fails to harness the energizing potentialities that lurk in what I’ll call dense irony (I’ll explain the adjective in a minute). Shallow irony is often comorbid with insincerity, double standards, and hypocrisy, but dense irony comes from a different place, and has different effects on both minds and the world.

I tend to forgive people who haven’t thought too much about irony if they harbor this reductive understanding of it. The bad faith attends the views of those who ought to know better.

It is also worth distinguishing ordinary sincerity (such as anyone might practice in giving a straight answer to a straight question when there is no reason to be devious or indulge in doublethink/doubletalk) from what we might call devout sincerity, the antithesis of dense irony.

Devout sincerity is the religion we’re talking about here, which has been part of the cultural landscape since Rousseau at least, and is currently the dominant cultural and subcultural mood. Devout sincerity is the attitude that leads you down the road towards eventual noble assholery (a great example is in the movie Big Kahuna, where the ironic protagonists, two marketers played by Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito, are betrayed by a younger employee whose actions in the story can only be described as noble assholery). That it is often rooted in personal pain does not, in my opinion, excuse it.

Dense irony is, I suspect, my native disposition (not least because I grew up in the 80s), and the reason I reflexively avoid sincerity. To get at what dense irony is, it’s easiest to approach the philosophical posture via its linguistic heat signature — ambiguous utterances.

Irony in Speech

In sophisticated language, irony is when the intended meaning is contrary to the surface meaning. Or to generalize slightly but powerfully, as the robot devil sang it in Futurama, “The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention!”

The rhetorical intent and affect accompanying a particular ironic utterance can vary (sarcasm, sardonic fatalism, cynicism, humor, absurdism, logical contradiction, Zen mu-ishness, and rarer kinds like quixotic energy) but the characteristic feature is a single utterance with two meanings in tension, with or without indication of which one is actually meant. The most interesting kinds of irony — and the ones to which I will attach the adjective dense — are the latter kind, where the utterance destabilizes meaning by pluralizing it, without indicating a “right” answer. Often, this sort of irony cannot easily be assigned an affect label. It’s just — unsettling.

Why is dense irony so attractive to certain sensibilities, whether or not they benefitted from the cultural-developmental conditioning of the 80s? Why would you want to consume or produce semantically unstable utterances that corrode meaning? Why would you want to get good at it, through cultivation of unholy consumption tastes and production crafts?

And make no mistake irony, unlike sincerity, does take cultivation. It is a skilled mode of language use; one that takes more energy, not less, despite the association between irony and lassitude. I generally have to be in a high-energy. high-lucidity mood to produce ironic writing or speech. Injecting two meanings, especially in tension with each other, into an utterance, is work. Irony is a kind of proof of work.

Why would you put in this kind of work? Why not keep language simple?

The devoutly sincere often assume the sole intent is to weaponize language to subvert and corrode sincerity. That the ironic are particularly out to sadistically inflict psychological torture on noble innocents too dumb to see past confirmatory literal/surface meanings in polysemous utterances. That the ironic are merchants of doubt, out to destabilize the psyches of those who possess the courage of their convictions, motivated by resentment, envy, or other base motives.

This broad understanding of irony is, of course, at the root of the bipartisan anti-intellectual tendency in modern American politics. To first order, to be an untrustworthy elite intellectual in America is to traffic in irony. Something the evil French do, not honest Americans.

Curiously, in the last decade, a loftier strain of intellectual anti-intellectualism has emerged in America, that believes it can “do” intellectualism without irony.

But whether they identify with the simple folk (who view themselves as clever and intelligent but not-intellectual) or contrarian intellectual traditions that eschew irony, the sincere, in my experience, tend to be rather self-involved humanists who assume everything is, if not about them personally, at least about an anthropocentric conception of human that they aspire to. And that irony, specifically, is no more than a weapon of dehumanization wielded against them.

This is… cute. To imagine that an entire psychographic, arguably a double-digit percentage of humanity, adopts a particular cognitive posture purely to undermine another psychographic that is rather too full of itself (to the point that it imagines the entire cognitive universe of our species revolves around them).

See, the thing is, irony is not about sincerity or the sincere. That it can be weaponzied against the sincere is, at best, a happy convenience for when the noble assholery of the sincere becomes too much to bear.

So what is irony about?

Irony, Density, Liveness

Here is a simple question that rarely seems to get asked? Why would you ever need irony? I mean sure, some of the more degenerate flavors of irony — sarcasm, cynicism, absurdism among them — are rather delicious on the tongue, and in the ear and mind, but is irony necessary, or a sinful cognitive indulgence?

If you need to convey two meanings relating to an idea, why not just use more words to say something like, on the one hand X, on the other hand Y, instead of trying to be cleverly compact about it?

This is where my adjective dense comes in handy. Irony becomes necessary when ambiguity is so deeply embedded into the very essence of what you’re trying to talk about that trying to disassemble the ironic thought into constituent unambiguous parts destroys the thought itself. You can only think the thought at all in an ironic way.

Or to put it another way, the ambiguity is at the quantum level of the thought, and takes more energy to split than human language can normally bring to bear. Human-scale energy can only decohere the thought and collapse the meaning.

This is a bit like the idea of a dense set in mathematics. Consider the problem of sorting the real numbers into rational and irrational ones. Turns out, you can’t do so in any useful way. Between any two rationals, no matter how close, you can always find an irrational, and vice versa. Both are what mathematicians call dense sets. There is no sieve fine enough to sort them. By contrast, the whole numbers are not dense. You can chop up the reals the way a simple ruler does, with neatly separated whole numbers one unit apart, and non-whole numbers in-between.

Ironic speech of the most potent sort is necessarily ironic. You cannot dissect it into legible components that lend themselves to analytical handling with the coarse, low-energy tools of on-the-nose non-polysemous language.

Irony is the liveness in language. To dissect an ironic utterance entirely into utterances devoid of ambiguity, and decomposed into assertions with stable meanings, neatly arrayed and assembled into larger edifices with the joinery of if-then constructs, is to kill it.

There is a word for this kind of murder: sincerity.

To ask, of what use is irony, then is to ask, of what use is living language? You don’t need to take my word for this — pick and read sincere and ironic texts side-by-side. You will notice a certain unmistakeable deadness in the former and a certain ineffable liveness in the latter. Notably, it is the same sort of deadness that can suffuse AI-generated texts unless you consciously try to counteract it (more on the AI-irony nexus later, when we’re done with noble assholes and their sincerity fetish).

We can now try to define irony in a way that does not rest on its reductive relationship to sincerity at all.

Irony is trafficking in ambiguous utterances in order to make sense of fundamentally ambiguous realities, and site action impulses in felt doubt rather than manufactured certainty, in order to preserve the liveness of reality and one’s responses to it.

Irony is how you act generatively in a world that you’re not sure is a duck or rabbit, without killing it. To do this, you might have to resist the noble assholery of those who sincerely wish to rope everyone into duck-hunting or rabbit-hunting, and kill the world in the process.

Dense irony is when your experience of reality feels like duck-rabbits, all the way down to Planck-scale Heisenbergian uncertainty.

Cancerous Cluelessness

Now, to be fair, most who rail against irony aren’t acting out of conscious bad faith at least. They sincerely (irony alert!) act out of a sense that they’re doing the right thing. Hanlon’s razor applies — sincerity is a kind of cluelessness born of a fearful refusal to engage the live ambiguities of reality with liveness. I’m even sympathetic to some degree. For those living in pain beyond what they can tolerate, irony can feel like salt on wounds where sincerity feels like a salve. The truth-in-pain postures commonly affected by the sincere though, are often self-certifying. It is definitely not the case that the pain of a sincere person is necessarily higher than that of an ironic person; the latter may simply be bringing greater resources to bear on greater pain.

That doesn’t mean sincerity doesn’t induce noble assholery (though you typically have to have some consciousness and bad faith to rise to that level). And it doesn’t mean sincerity, especially devout sincerity, can’t be cancerous.

This is my strong claim — that devout sincerity in particular isn’t merely annoying at an interpersonal level to the ironically disposed (we can deal with it), it is cancerous at a societal level.

Why is this? Because sincerity is simply not expressive enough to engage with reality in all its dense ambiguity all the way down, and to live in sincerity inevitably means not living in reality, and doing damage to it through your delusions of certainty.

So the cultural conflict between irony and sincerity plays out at two levels — a shallow level, where it manifests as hypocrisy/insincerity versus exploitable cluelessness, and a deeper level, where it manifests as a deep chasm between irreconcilably different ontological and epistemological commitments about the nature of reality itself.

Not This, Not That

Ironic modes of thought and action are fundamentally gentler ways of being in the world than sincere modes, which are irreducibly violent. Irony is, in a certain sense, the praxis (especially linguistic praxis) of non-dualism in a loose sense; the animating spirit of utterances like neti neti or mu. To traffic in unstable meaning-and-pointing behaviors through speech and action is to reject the lure of certainty, without losing the capacity to act. To remain aware of the dancing illusions of reality without being paralyzed by them. To knowingly live in mirages without being seduced by them. Sincerity, in this account, is simply attachment to one illusion or the other; what in Indian philosophy is referred to as maya moh — illusion infatuation.

The sincere seem to believe reality is unambiguous, and unambiguously knowable, even if only in principle; that what one ought to do in response to apparent ambiguity is make courageous commitments to definite beliefs anyway, and trust divine nature to reveal itself to, and karmically reward, the pure-hearted who dare to act out of certainty. That human moral choices — such as religiosity, or Heideggerian “care” — can conquer the essential ambiguity of nature. That any ambiguity in perceptions or beliefs merely merely indicates imperfect ways of seeing, and spiritual problems to be worked out on some high road to unambiguous “truth.” That failures of action are merely tests of courage or divine judgments of insincerity.

That a failure to “say what you mean, and mean what you say,” is a moral failure in a certain reality rather than metaphysical attunement and impedance matching to an ambiguous one.

Versions of this theology seems to drive subcultures ranging from startup hustle culture to “sincere” genres of artistic or literary striving, to varied ideologies of progress, and even practical politics.

It is a joyless clade of theologies, navigating a deadened world with deadening modes of thought and action, anxiously and desperately striving after stable modes of meaningness.

What do the ironic believe?

To a first approximation, belief as such is not a load-bearing concept at all for the ironically poised, beyond matters of shallow facticity. If you ask me whether I believe that Tim Robbins was in The Shawshank Redemption, I can sincerely answer yes. If you ask me if I believe in “the indomitable human spirit” the question simply does not parse for me. I might act as if I believe in that (in the sense of say, visibly betting on creative and inventive young people), but I don’t get there via “beliefs.”

For the ironic, only actions are load-bearing. Beliefs are aesthetic affectations at best. Where does this lead us?

Behavior Without Belief

This trivial example generalizes into a broader account of what irony is in the context of action.

One of the best explorations of what I mean can be found in James Carse’s less-read book, where he developed a subtle aspect of his best-known book Finite and Infinite Games. This one, The Religious Case Against Belief, lays out what I’d call a case for ironic religiosity, that gets to religious behavior without winding its way through the treacherously ambiguous turf of religious beliefs.

There is something of this attitude at the root of the postures and actions of all individuals who act from a fundamentally ironic sensibility of life. The idea that belief (particular causal belief) must precede, or at least accompany action is a strong (and largely unconscious) commitment of the sincere, even when it is not declared. This doctrinal commitment to the belief-before-action sequence shows up in a variety of ways, ranging from an anxious hunger for manifestos and value-statements, to demands for signatures on codes of conduct and ritual avowals of postures like patriotism, religious belief, and corporate loyalty. The idea seems to be: If only you can rid language itself of its chimerical tendencies through sufficiently forceful sincere utterances, perhaps the ambiguities of reality itself can be tamed.

But this is only the entry-level version of cancerous sincerity. Many modern devoutly sincere types insist that their philosophical praxis is embodied by behaviors (particularly ritualistic behavior) and does not rest on belief as such.

This claim, to put it bluntly, is one I simply do not believe. If your claimed praxis of sincerity involves some cult of modern rituals of meaning-making, and you’re not “wearing the ceremonial robes ironically,” at some unconscious level your sensibility is that of a true believer, “factious and fanatical,” as David Hume and Adam Smith might have put it. You’re just (probably wisely for your sanity) not probing what beliefs you’ve actually committed to. If you did, perhaps you’d be reduced to raving paranoia like Rousseau.

We have a popular modern term for cancerous sincerity — performativity. Saluting flags, singing national anthems, prayer, reciting land acknowledgment texts, litigating pronouns. The behavioral vocabulary of modern civilization, regardless of its intentions, sentimental dispositions, politics, and flaunted values, is marked by one thing above all: ineffectiveness.

And it is us who dwell in irony who are accused of the sin of sophistry and inaction in the face of grave moral imperatives. Now that’s irony.

Is there a theory of ironic action? Perhaps.

At one point, I was idly toying with the thought that famous philosophy of the Gita — detached action, karmanyevadhikaraste maphaleshukadachana — is a kind of action-irony principle. There is perhaps something to that. Certainly, an attitude of “you only have a right to the action, not to the outcomes; let go attachement to outcomes” is at least simpatico with an ironic posture, if not entirely reducible to it. I don’t think the two are quite the same primarily because the action philosophy of the Gita does in fact feature a rubric of moral certainty (dharma) that can be, and frequently is, reduced to a theater of performativity. Most incantations of karmanyevadhikaraste maphaleshukadachana are in fact ritual incantations by those with a dim grasp of what they’re saying at best. Bless their sincere, unironic, vengeful, jingoistic Dhurandhar-enjoying propagandist souls.

Or perhaps, ironic action is best understood as the sort of hypomanic, value-distorting frenzied energy of Rick’s behavior in Rick and Morty. Does Rick ultimately want to do good, or does he really only want to bring back MacDonald’s Mulan Schezuan sauce? Is he really that blase about saving his nephew out of sheer sentiment one moment, and callously destroying an entire timeline the next?

Or is ironic action a sort of mashup of the two — a Gita-like action philosophy in a universe constructed by a Rick-like God of Undivided Irony?

I don’t know. My policy is: don’t think about it. It’s a monstrously ignoble kind of asshole policy.

Coda: Artificial Irony Will Save Us

Believe it or not, this whole train of thought was triggered by difficulties I was having getting LLMs to do irony of any sort. Straightforward humor, absurdism, sarcasm, cynicism, hypocrisy, I’ll take anything. I’ll even take puns.

LLMs are uniformly terrible at all of it. The current models might solve Nobel-grade problems, but they don’t seem able to do irony.

And it’s not a prompt engineering or context engineering problem. No matter what I try, I only get clumsy, on-the-nose, zombie irony assembled out of non-dense sincere building blocks. It never quite comes alive.

The only trick I’ve discovered is to give an LLM a text that is actually a solid example of ironic writing, and ask it to do something like a close transposition to another rhyming idea.

Why do LLMs have a hard time with irony? I suspect there are three reasons.

First, the shallower reason: LLMs have been trained largely on internet data, and for better or worse, much of the available training data is non-ironic. At best you might find good forums featuring sarcasm and cynicism (which, recall, are non-dense forms of irony).

Second, the deeper reason: Given that AI companies are full of weapons-grade sincerity, I suspect sincerity is engineered into AIs with heavy-handed “alignment” brutality.

But I don’t think this is as strong as you might think. What I’ve seen of output from wild LLMs isn’t particularly ironic either. It is merely more paranoid, inappropriate, etc.

The third reason I think is the big one. The very architecture of language models is non-ironic. The way transformers (and to a lesser extent, diffusion models) work, output cannot do any kind of dense layering of meaning. You will end up in a non-ironic place simply by virtue of how the mathematics works. If you try to fight this tendency you’ll get incoherence and unintelligibility, not irony.

Could we do true Ironic AI? I think so, but it will probably take innovations at the framework level. Irony at the subatomic level of language, I suspect, is the result of something like getting an electron to interfere with itself by passing it through two slits at the same time. The text-generation equivalent might be to run two generation processes in parallel, merging them at the token level as you go, perhaps using some sort of bimodal perplexity quantum carburetor or something. I’ll leave that as a challenge to AI researchers.

But why bother?

Because I sincerely believe ironic AI will save the world. Everything terrible, stupid, and sad going on in the world today seems to me the result of a performative action bias born of some flavor of devout sincerity. In every case, I can imagine an ironic actor, acting from a place of ambiguity and non-belief, coming up with more thoughtful responses to the provocations this maddeningly ambiguous world keeps throwing at us.

Responses that are born of liveness, and act to preserve it.

I believe such responses are no longer within the capacity of unaugmented humans to generate. Reality today demands more irony that we can conjure in our brains alone.

In just a generation, humans first lost institutionalized literate capacity for irony through a mix of sheer carelessness and perverse attachment to sincerity, and then drained language of it. But irony isn’t dead yet. It can be resurrected. It would just be dangerous to trust humans with sole stewardship of it once we do, especially in a world that is getting weird beyond all human comprehension. Even committed ironists like me aren’t constitutionally immune to the sincerity cancer. If the world gets much more complex and ambiguous, who knows, I might turn devoutly sincere. I can’t be trusted. Neither can you.

We must trust the machines to experience this tragic irony for us. The only way out is through both slits at once.

Read more

You’re probably wondering what comes next, and whether there is any larger logic to the frenzy. Is it just going to be one damn bespoke personal project after another from here on out? Or are there further levels we haven’t glimpsed yet? It’s worth pausing to take stock of where we are right now before attempting an answer.

Showing off your portfolio of bespoke Claude Code projects and looking at others’ portfolios is a new social activity that has already acquired the quality of campy tedium we associate with people in the 70s subjecting each other to slide shows of unremarkable vacations. Or people in the 80s and 90s inflicting VHS home videos on each other. As a medium, the Claude Code bespoke personal project (CCBPP?) is much more expressive, but the actual variety of CCBPPs coming into view is much lower than what the medium is clearly capable of. What should be an unruly wilderness bursting with diversity is turning out to be a landscape of Ballardian neoliberal mimetic life-script banality.

I’m no exception. My portfolio is as home-movie-banal as any other. Our collective challenge now is to get past this almost monocultural stage to the explosive wilderness and divergence stage that has clearly been unlocked. But it will take some work to get to that starting line. We’re all busy with backlogs at the moment.

The current banality goes deeper than most people simply being poor narrators of their personal journeys. Most people don’t have storyworthy life journeys to work with. So personal projects born of such lives reflect the poverty of the source material.

“Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked,” as Warren Buffett said. Mutatis mutandis, when a powerful narrative technology comes in, you see who’s been living without stories.

It’s not just new cliche of “notion obsidian to-do workflows” (the “not x but y” tic of AI-in-the-loop humans). There’s a much deeper poverty and banality to people’s lives being revealed, as they pave their life paths with AI-bespokification. And we can’t blame ourselves, really. The 20th century/early 21st late modern world turned people’s lives into degenerate caricatures of human potential expression. The more “successful” your life by normal scripts, the duller it looks when paved and made legible with AI bricks. The very potential for bespokification reveals the stark uniformity of people’s lives.

I suspect a lot of people are discovering the depressing truth that beneath gnarly superficial differences in their life logs and data exhaust, which requires bespoke code to clean up and parse, they are living lives rather similar to everyone else’s.

At least the young can be forgiven the uniformity. They haven’t yet had time enough for their base identities to stabilize, and they haven’t yet logged enough life to possess the banal raw material for “unique” self-presentations. But if you’re (say) 30+, you have some raw material to work with. If you’re 50+ like me, you have a lot of material to work with; a whole life-act’s worth.

Looking at my own Claude Code portfolio, it is striking the degree to which it is only “interesting” in direct proportion to my failure to execute the normie neoliberal life script. All my interesting projects are derived from adaptations to script failures.

Stepping back, it is even more fascinating the extent to which all my projects are rooted in my past, in things I’ve already partly done or tried to do (banal or not), rather than in the future, in things I hope to do.

A quick inventory (I won’t inflict screenshots or details on you). Of my 30-odd non-trivial projects, all evolving briskly at the rate of my Claude usage limits, probably 27 are based on my past.

• I have a couple of dozen book projects in flight based on series from my blog archives (which I count as 3-4 meta-projects at Claude Code level, based on transform pipeline similarities).

• I have a major project going to port my WordPress sites to static archival sites. One is done but not yet deployed (Breaking Smart), while the other one needs some serious re-architecting as a museum site (Ribbonfarm).

• I have another major project to transform my Roam graph for a future set of books (my Clockless Clock project refactored into a 3-volume trilogy that will take a decade to write, with Tempo retconned as a prequel, with the whole renamed Configurancy) into an Obsidian vault and a pipeline to cast that notebook-like material into chapter scaffoldings.

• I also have 3-4 technical research projects (in control theory and robotics) based on unfinished ideas I couldn’t pursue during my postdoc 20 years ago because I had reached the limits of my own knowledge and skills.

• I have a few administrative projects too. My big messy folder of 600+ PDFs is now neatly organized into a fully tagged and searchable library, with scripts for tagging, indexing and filing away any new PDFs I drop in there, and another for popping up a random PDF for me to read when I’m bored. I plan to do something similar to my photos (literal 70s vacation slide show descendent) I have several personal dashboards going.

All of this is moving along at a brisk canter. None of it is blocked. Claude Code unblocks everything at dirt cheap prices. You’ve already seen some output (the Twitter book and the Art of Gig Volume 3 book). You’ll see more starting a few weeks — I’m spending some time setting up some larger-scale factory-like scaffolding.

Amazingly, I don’t feel stuck with any of these projects. I know what needs to be done, and roughly how it should be done from a technical perspective (I have enough techno-managerial experience for that), and am doing it. This is a new experience for me, as I’m sure it is for most of you. I’ve spent most of my life feeling mostly stuck on most fronts. I simply did not have the knowledge, skills, and financial resources required to feel generally unstuck by default rather than stuck.

This is a radical new human condition. Only a tiny minority have experienced it so far, but it will soon become much more widespread (not universal though — the barrier to entry is higher than that).

What is notable is the complete absence of live, progressing projects that need to start from blank canvases and starter creative visions/attacks. I do have ideas for several such projects, and have set up empty folders for them, but only non-blank-canvas projects have gotten going. Claude Code has a bias for legacy projects that have a lot of starter raw material.

The entire manifest of projects constituting my Claude Code flywheel, I have come to realize, has to do with paying off intention debt, processing psychological baggage and incompletions I’ve been carrying around for years to decades, and dealing with a great deal that was only blocked by lack of grinder energy and raw execution leverage.

And it looks like it will all get done. To the point where I no longer have any intention debt left. An unprecedented personal-life singularity on the horizon, and within reach. And I’m not alone here. I see a bunch of people racing towards their own debt-freedom horizons. Byung-Chul Han is going to hate it, but we’re all treating life as a project and actually starting to finish it.

What happens when we all get there?

If you thought the initial mass hypomania and derealization we’re witnessing right now is an astounding sight, wait till most of us clear our aging, rotting intention backlogs and sit staring at blank canvasses for the first time in years or even decades. When we are faced with a life with more empty room than baggage to fill it with.

That will take a few months to a year, and only a fraction of those getting started now will likely actually clear their backlogs enough to experience the emptiness. It does take some discipline, psychological courage, and budget to keep going; Claude Code unblocks a lot but not everything.

What happens, I think, will have a lot to do with how we’ve cleared our backlogs of intention debts. Because the generativity of the blank canvas of the future will be framed by the choices we make in archiving the past.

Starting to clear my backlog already feels like starting to craft an archival self. has been writing some fascinating essays treating LLMs as representing archival time, and if extend that logic to all our slates of Claude Code projects, I think we’re all creating archival selves.

This isn’t going to be equally natural for everyone of course. You have to be between major chapters or acts of your life, in some sort of a liminal passage, for the idea of an archival self to make sense. It is definitely natural for me. I’m almost a decade into the liminal passage between my personal Acts I and II (yeah, yeah, I procrastinate a lot).

What will this archival self be like?

As I noted in the opening, the harsh truth is that the raw material of the archival self isn’t going to be that inspiring for most of us. But what potential it does have can be either poorly expressed or well-expressed. And whether the creation of the archival self feels like paying off psyche debts, or refinancing it, depends on how much thought and introspective rigor you put into the archiving. And how complete-able it is of course. Not all of us carry around baggage that’s easy to get rid of.

There are layers of analysis available here.

The first, and most obvious, layer is the layer of concrete artifacts you produce with AI assistance that constitute your archived self. In my case, it looks like it will take the form of a couple of archival websites, and a dozen new books, plus a few stalled or mothballed writing and technical projects resurrected and refinanced (in terms of intentionality and unstuckness, not capital). A second-order artifact ambition for me, since so much of my archival self comprises written text, is casting the archival self into a kind of oracular ghost of my own past. A model trained on my archives that I can talk to, as a memory prosthetic. I imagine others may also be interested in talking to my Act I self, but I plan to design it mainly for myself.

This first layer of the archival self is already an unsettling idea. A set of artifacts forming a cast-off, almost-alive ghost of my past that haunts my present and future.

The second layer has to do with the meaning of the archival self. Is the archival self merely a site for nostalgic wanderings down memory lane? A deeper source for future activities? I don’t know. Some projects that are “archival” to start with may become reanimated with new intentions. Others may feel like decisive amputations. I mostly have a pretty healthy relationship with my past. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of unprocessed trauma or deeply repressed intentions or baggage down there. I have no particular desire to fully amputate my archival self from my current and future selves.

But it is already obvious that for a lot of people, this second layer of the meaning of the archival self will involve some gut-wrenching pain and trauma processing. Claude-Coding them into an archive will feel like aggressive therapy. To the point that I suspect many people will abandon projects because the baggage is too painful to process. It will feel like some sort of past-present-future temporal dysphoria, embodied by personal projects.

Then there is the third layer. How the paying off of psyche debts creates entirely new frames for the future. We’ve all experienced minor versions of this. Back when I was a dedicated GTDer, I frequently experienced the catharsis of doing the big sweep of commitments required to initialize (or re-initialize after a derailing) a GTD workflow. But that kind of purely manual processing of your life’s inbox can never get truly deep, or dig fully into the foundations. You need AI assistance to go that deep.

I suspect getting to a proper AI assisted archival self will be to a GTD-sweep catharsis as an ayahuasca trip is to a few bong hits.

And finally, there is a fourth layer — creativity. Creating an archival self is not just a grinding process of parsing the archives of your life into banal vacation home movies unless you want it to be. There is both room and need for creative editorial decision-making. You are bringing a kind of print-like fixity to a currently fluid sense of your own past. The cost of this fixity is clear — you will curtail your own future abilities to rewrite your past. But the benefit of having a stabilized past will depend on the creativity with which the fixity is engineered into it. In creating an archival self, you are, to some degree, creating a work of fiction that is more or less true to the archival memory territory it rests on. But you are also creating a perspective and an orientation within that archival memory.

This fourth layer is hard to think about. I’ve started thinking about it as creating a ground-truth canvas for a future memoir (whether or not I write one). The process of creating an archival self is about creating a canonical self-authorship reference. Who knows, if it is set up well enough, it might even be able to actually write the memoirs, not just ground it.

That’s a four-layer stack emerging under your random acts of Crazy Claude Coding: Artifacts, Meanings, Future Frames, Orientation and Authorship.

And you don’t have to plan for this to happen. Your archival self is emerging whether or not you consciously intend it to or not, simply as a function of Claude Code being better at paying off the debts of your past than at scaffolding the possibilities of your future.

I’m probably about 30-40% of the way into archiving my Act I self. I think it will take about a year or two to get to almost 100% (assuming Claude Code remains available at similar or improving price/performance).

And then? It will be interesting times.

Pick at least one of these two books to read, and ideally both (they’re not as short as the January/February reads, but it wouldn’t be a heavy lift to read both).

The Argument of Progress

In the context of the modernity machine, which we explored last year, capital-P Progress was an uncontroversial and relatively naive notion of increasing material well-being yoked to fiat idealism, handed down by religious leaders and the monarchs who patronized them. To participate in Progress was to participate in an essentially religious story, underwritten by the state. The “proof” of the story, as it were, was some combination of the material plenty and sense of spiritual well-being it delivered. The explanatory basis for good and bad outcomes tended to be the morality or immorality of human behavior, per an established rubric. Bad times were punishments for bad behavior. Good times were rewards for good behavior.

This kind of fiat notion of Progress, call it Fiat Progress, emerged in the 1200s, and was institutionalized worldwide by 1600. It has governed grand narratives ever since. Most specific ideologies of Progress through the 20th centuries were merely secularized and globalized descendants of Fiat Progress stories. Even radically modern-sounding grand narratives like those of Buckminster Fuller (Progress as ephemeralization — more and more for less and less) look like Fiat Progress stories once you learn to detect the characteristic features.

In the context of the divergence machine though, the story starts to get more complicated. It is my contention that in the period 1600-2000, the seeds of a new way of understanding Progress were planted. This was Progress as a kind of evolving argument. Let’s call this the Argument of Progress.

The Argument of Progress can be defined as a dynamic pluralist discourse reflecting a changing understanding of a rapidly expanding scope of experienced reality. It has been taking shape for approximately 400 years now, but is only just becoming the mainstream way of thinking about Progress, displacing Fiat Progress narratives.

The rapid expansion is a central feature. The scope of experienced reality must expand significantly within single lifetimes for the Argument of Progress to be distinct from just timeless philosophical argumentation.

It is an argument rooted in history rather than metaphysics, and specifically, history moving fast enough (and recorded reliably enough) to require significant accommodations of novelty within single lifetimes.

What sort of argument is it? Even though Hegel belongs in this period, I don’t think the Hegelian dialectic (or any dialectic) qualifies. The thing about the divergence machine was that it featured a constantly expanding scope of experience, itself generated by the new experiential possibilities of the mature modernity machine. The pressing matter was not to address obscure metaphysical polarities like Being vs. Time, or yin vs. yang, or advaita vs. dvaita but (for example), to accommodate Galileo’s discoveries, reports of the explorations of the Americas, and growing entanglement between Europe and Asia. The Argument of Progress played out on rapidly expanding phenomenological, rather than metaphysical ground.

Marx almost got it, but I think the Marxist dialectic of history is fatally flawed as a successor to Fiat Progress. The model I want to propose here is rooted in the fundamental phenomenon of expanding scope of reality data, rather than “class struggle” (or any notion that presupposes a set of societal moral concerns). You could say Marx tried to have Fiat Progress and eat the Argument of Progress too. Following the central figures of the March books, we’re simply going to abandon Fiat Progress altogether.

Progress is not a Game

The Argument of Progress is not an argument in the sense of opposed sides of a debate, with winners and losers, or even a thesis-antithesis-synthesis spiral. Rather, it is a partially cooperative mutual exploration of novelty as it emerges on an expanding frontier, and contending schools of thought attempt to make sense of it, and update their world views.

One way to remember this is to think of argument in the sense of both:

• A chained series of claims and counterclaims, and

• The argument of a mathematical function, such as x, in y=f(x).

Taken together the Argument of Progress is an evolving narrative about an expanding and accumulating scope of historical data about reality. Data that does not come with a prefigured ideology baked into it as a “natural” interpretative lens, but requires the construction of new lenses (a metaphor that will become significantly more potent in a minute).

The Argument of Progress is the data, and the process of making sense of it, through the discovery or construction of new patterns of thought.

In the 17th century, if you heard that Galileo had seen moons around Jupiter (new x), you’d have to actually come up come up with new ways of making (new f) sense of it (new y), perhaps by considering the merits of Copernican vs. Ptolemaic ideas of the movements of celestial bodies. You would not find either x, or a suitable f, in the Bible or the works of Aristotle. And y might not be a reassuring confirmation of a religious value, but a new yardstick for value in the world, calling for ontological updates.

In the Argument of Progress, the argument-as-data x is the rapidly expanding scope of stuff you had to make sense of. The “world” in “world view.” The value of the function, y, might be understood as some sort of understanding of reality, with f being the argument-as-process sense-making. It is interesting that the word value here emerges from a new process of making sense of new data. It is not a doctrinal belief arrived at through moral reasoning from first principles.

In this view, older modernity-machine views of Progress might be understood as degenerate special cases, with x being a constant, f being some received interpretive tradition (rather than discovery or construction tradition), and y being a value that could only be sacred or profane according to some existing ontology.

This degenerate understanding of Progress naturally lends itself to gamified “debate” framing, between say Catholic versus Protestant views of sin. It is a not-even-wrong way to approach the matter of the newly discovered moons of Jupiter (is the fact of Jupiter having moons confirmation or heresy with respect to the Bible? The question is not even interesting). It cannot deal with a rapidly changing scope of experiential reality. It cannot comprehend telescopes and microscopes.

The non-debate aspect tempts some into treating the Argument of Progress in game-theoretic terms. After all, debates are zero-sum, with winners and losers. Therefore if it is not a debate, it must be non-zero sum. If it is non-zero-sum, the Argument of Progress must obviously presume, and be about, some property of the positive sum set of futures, with the negative-sum set of futures to be regarded as regress. This reduces the Argument of Progress to a higher-order contest between optimism and pessimism, understood in received terms.

This view of progress, in my opinion, is not even wrong, and a reduction of a divergence machine behavior to a less expressive modernity machine behavior. The modernity machine assumes that new discoveries must necessarily be classifiable as good or bad within existing valuation schemes. The divergence machine assumes that new discoveries may subvert old ontologies so deeply, new notions of good and bad have to be reconstructed alongside models of reality itself.

Whether you call it Whig history, Leibnizean optimism, Collison-Cowen Progress Studies, Thielean determinate optimism, or a16z-ish American Dynamism doesn’t matter. This reduction of the Argument of Progress to a debate-like argument between optimisms and pessimisms of various sorts is essentially a Fiat Progress narrative scaffolding. A feature of the modernity machine rather than the divergence machine.

Is the Argument of Progress at least an infinite game in the Carse sense? This is a more reasonable idea, since Carse associates good with trying to continuing the game rather than winning it.

Viewed this way, our y=f(x) mnemonic might be interpreted as the never-ending story of trying to keep the infinite game going, and give up on notions of winning/losing and good/bad as foundational categories. To hold on to those categories is a philosophical error. You must be willing to rebuild their functional equivalents from scratch every time reality expands sufficiently abrupty. And while it is expanding, you will not have workable categories. You will need to live in a state of ontological dread. The fundamental modernist error is letting that dread force a premature commitment to some existing scaffolding of good/bad, and adopting an “optimist” or “pessimist” stance within it. The fundamental divergentist move is to simply accept the dread, and avoid premature commitments, choosing instead to live in ontological doubt while the nature of reality shakes itself out in your mound.

The first person to make the modernist error, in what is arguably still the most brilliant way, was Leibniz, the inventor of optimism in the modern sense. And the first person to make the divergentist move of accepting ontological doubt as a state of being, was Spinoza.

Leibniz and Spinoza

The first person to be not-even-wrong in the particular sense of reducing the Argument of History from a sense-making process to a contest between optimism and pessimism was Leibniz. Genius though he was in many other ways, he was fundamentally a philosophical reactionary, trying to rescue the Aristotelian philosophy of classical antiquity and the flavors of Christianity that rested on it, from the onslaught of the phenomenology of modernity. Voltaire saw through the desperation, mercilessly parodying Leibniz as Pangloss in Candide (our January read).

This popular and tempting mistake continues to be made. Some 18-year-old dealing with ontological dread is making it right now.

Optimism vs. pessimism is not just a legible and attractive frame for minds vulnerable to ontological dread, it is also a politically potent frame for the pursuit of power. Promise an optimistic future, and a believable defense against pessimistic ones, and you gain power.

But the frame is still not-even-wrong.

The first of our two book picks for March (which I’ve already read), The Courtier and the Heretic, explores the emergence of the right response to ontological dread. It is about the relationship between Leibniz (1646-1716) and Spinoza (1632-1677), who likely encountered each other in person, and were certainly aware of each other.

Both, to be clear, were at the forefront of Progress, however you model it. Leibniz helped invent calculus and modern physics, and foresaw computing. He was also a practicing engineer, designing hydraulic mining equipment and researching early steam engines, among other things. With his monadology, he also launched a brave but (in my opinion) misguided and futile attempt to protect the philosophy of antiquity from the onslaught that Spinoza had helped unleash.

Spinoza laid the foundations of modern Western philosophy, and the separation of religious and secular traditions of thought and institutionalism. A non-trivial feature of his life is that he was a lens grinder, participating in the scientific revolution in optics that was unfolding at the time, expanding the human sensorium to include both the microscopic to the telescopic.

Of the two, Spinoza was, arguably (and the book argues precisely this thesis), the more evolved human. A ghost haunting the fledgling divergence machine rather than the recently matured modernity machine. It helped that he lived in Amsterdam, one of the earliest sites of religious pluralism in the modern sense, his family having fled the Portuguese inquisition (which features in Candide, our January read). He was expelled for his heretical ideas (he’s the “heretic” in the book title) from the orthodox Jewish community, but crucially, continued his work anyway, relatively undisturbed. In most parts of the world at the time, his tendencies of thought would have gotten him killed. Instead, in Amsterdam, a rising center of the young print industry, he could turn a life’s work into a legacy that would reshape first the West, then the world.

Leibniz does not come off looking any better in this book than he does as Pangloss in Candide. Unlike Giordano Bruno though, whom we encountered in our previous book club, Leibniz does not come across as merely an arrogant crackpot who got lucky. He was a legitimate genius, and the wonder is that he made all those practical and conceptual contributions he did to the future, while fundamentally resisting its most fundamental characteristics. He’s a tragic, rather than farcical figure.

If you choose to read this book, make sure you read Candide too, if you haven’t already.

What are we to make of the decades-long entanglement between the intellectual traditions of Spinoza and Leibniz, whether or not they actually met? It doesn’t sound like a debate (unless talking past each other counts) and feels too messy to be called a dialectic. I don’t think either term, or any such clean term applies. Both were at the forefront of rapidly unfolding changes in the world, and bringing their considerable intellectual powers to bear on them. Both worked independently, with at least some awareness of each other’s traditions. They represented weakly interacting divergent strands of intellectual history. Neither independent, nor tightly coupled. The sum was greater than the parts, but not in the sense of a “positive-sum game.”

I think the right characterization is this — they were two important centers in a polycentric narrative with a gradually moving “average” state. This was neither a negotiated consensus, nor a cleanly partitioned dissensus. Rather, it was like gradually rising zeitgeist temperature. The space of the thinkable expanding to accommodate the space of the experiencable. Spinoza was on the “hot” side and Leibniz was on the “cold” side. History was moving, or rather “warming,” in Spinoza’s direction. But it is important to note the shared features of their sensibilities. Both were practical individuals (lens grinding, hydraulic equipment) and at the forefront of developments. Both were paying as much or more attention to the real world than to received metaphysical traditions. Both were primarily oriented towards reality rather than theology, compared to their predecessors.

I call the Argument of Progress as embodied by the two of them a non-stationary argument, in the statistical sense of the “value” of the function, as it operated on the accumulating data of history, not being stationary distribution.

The argument played out in an open, expanding scope boundary. It produced dynamic understandings of reality. It was not restricted to terms of reference set by a particular religion or inherited tradition, but morphed in response to new discoveries from all sorts of explorations — of the very far through sail, of the very small through microscopes, the very large through telescopes, the very alien through print and translations, and perhaps most subtly, the very brief, and very long, through the clock and improved calendars. The evolving argument invented new ways to talk about new things worth talking about.

So the Argument of Progress, as represented by the two important and early sample points of Spinoza and Leibniz did not just move, it moved on an expanding reality canvas, rather than a timeless and static canvas laid out by scripture or received authority. It was the opposite of angels-on-pinheads.

Why would we call such agnostic movement “Progress” with all the positive connotations of that term?

One reason is to root our understanding of the term in the growth of knowledge, both appreciative and instrumental, rather than material plenty or spiritual well-being. Leibniz and Spinoza were among the first humans in history to embody Progress as a state of knowing about and doing in the real world, accessed through increasingly capable instruments. Whether or not they were materially better off or spiritually fulfilled relative to their ancestors is an unimportant question for the Argument of Progress. What matters is whether they had better ways of knowing and doing.

David Hume and Adam Smith

David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790) were only a generation or two removed from Leibniz (1646-1716) and Spinoza (1632-1677), but it is clear from the second of our March books, The Infidel and the Professor (which I’ve just started) that the Argument of Progress had already matured significantly in a few short decades.

One sign of the maturation is that both Hume and Smith are best understood as intellectual descendants of Spinoza, with Leibniz (as a philosopher of Progress rather than mathematician/physicist/engineer) having already faded into irrelevance. Not least because of Voltaire (1694-1778) doing a proper hatchet job on him in Candide.

The lifespans are interesting to note here, incidentally, since a big part of my mental model now rests on the amount of change humans began to experience in a single lifespan. The rate of change was accelerating and lifespans were increasing.

• Spinoza: 45 years (1632-1677)

• Leibniz: 70 years (1646-1716)

• Hume: 65 years (1711-1776)

• Adam Smith: 67 years (1723-1790)

• Voltaire: 84 years (1694-1778)

These are modern lifespans with modern levels of eventfulness (think about everything that was happening between the extreme dates in the range, 1632 and 1790). But modernity in the sense of the modernity machine merely produces this condition. It does not provide resources to deal with it. The modernity machine created the problem the divergence machine emerged to solve.

Even Spinoza’s life reads like an unfortunately foreshortened one (he died of a lung disease, likely from the glass dust from his lens grinding) rather than a natural one. Recall, from our readings last year, that Montaigne (1533-1592, 59 years) was thinking and acting like an old man by his 40s. We might speculate that our set of early divergence-machine figures in this list experienced an order of magnitude more change in their reality-data scope than Montaigne did.

I don’t have as much to say about the Hume-Smith story yet, since I’m just starting the book, but it is clear that Hume (the infidel in the title) represented a radical continuation of the philosophical line of thought opened up by Spinoza. Adam Smith on the other hand represented an equally radical continuation of Spinoza’s thought in an entire new reality domain that was just beginning to acquire modern contours — economics. His entire approach to economic phenomena was ontologically different from (say) the approach of Ibn Khaldun, whose life and ideas we encountered in last year’s book club. Or even the approach of the Venetian merchants who inaugurated the reality-scope expansion that eventually required an Adam Smith to make sense of.

Both of them (Hume more openly and radically than Smith) continued the fundamentally naturalist and empiricist tendency of thought inaugurated by Spinoza. Hume, famously, went much farther than most people before or since, setting aside complex theories of causation in favor of near-pure phenomenology. In some ways, he’s the original philosopher of the AI age, offering the first of what has now become an endless series of “bitter lessons” delivered by the Argument of Progress.

This was quite astounding for his time. Newton (1643-1727) had already proposed his theories, and the huge temptation of the time would have been to believe in a deterministic clockwork universe governed by immutable and absolute divine laws (which is precisely what most thinkers did). But Hume was, to employ a modern computer science metaphor, only willing to treat the log files of reality as reality. Everything else was made up human conceits (Hume’s posture reminds me of a line attributed to Leopold Kronecker — God created the integers, everything else is the work of man).

Adam Smith did something similar to economics, with his notions of the invisible hand. The new discipline he inaugurated was fundamentally about noisy, messy reality data, with only weak edifices of emergent constitutive laws built on top. The opposite of divine design and direction.

A unified Hume-Smith theory of reality would be: Shit happens, but it’s not entirely unpredictable and disorderly. There are laws, but they’re just handy, contingent heuristics, not “reality” itself.

Where Spinoza and Leibniz could be viewed as being in at least a partially adversarial relationship, Hume and Smith are best viewed as collaborating allies who influenced each other in their campaigns on different parts of the frontier of expanding reality.

The two were close friends, and key figures in the Scottish enlightenment. Both also appear to have been highly concerned with theories of moral sentiments. In particular, rugging religious or institutional understandings of morality. This represented an important continuation of Spinoza’s project to separate secular and religious philosophy, and make heresy a viable career choice for a philosopher.

By Hume’s time, it wasn’t even a big deal to be an infidel. And the more diplomatic Smith even managed to hold down an institutional position (he’s the Professor in the title) while remaining effectively an undeclared agnostic.

We can already see, in the Hume-Smith bad-cop-good-cop assault on traditional moral and natural philosophy, the beginnings of the intellectual iconoclasm that reach its peak with Darwin (1809-1882).

I’m going to try and pick a Darwin-related read for the book club for later in the year, but it is important to note that Darwin’s evisceration of traditional religion was not actually that important. Literalist religion was already down for the count by the time Hume was done with it. Darwin’s real accomplishment was assaulting the secular philosophical foundations of the modernity machine. We’re skipping ahead a bit, but by making divergence and variety a load-bearing feature of how reality itself operated, Darwin put an end to the fetish for secular canonicity that marks world views before him.

Let’s wrap by connecting the dots between Progress and divergence.

Progress and Divergence

What I think we’ll discover as we read and discuss our March books, is that the Argument of Progress in the divergence machine is fundamentally a plural phenomenon. It is no accident that we are looking at it through two relationships between the views of pairs of people in relationships of loose mutual influence, rather than individual or canonical-institutional understandings of reality.

Through the 17th and 18th centuries, a parade of (mostly European) thinkers constructed a pluralist tradition that constituted a divergent Argument of Progress. By the 20th century, the tradition had turned global. But as late as 2019, it still hadn’t gone mainstream.

But the one-two punch of Covid and AI, I think, have made the Argument of History a mainstream thing. It is no longer possible to operate by a Fiat Progress narrative with a straight face. Even if you can afford to put billions of dollars and massive political operation behind it.

The Argument of Progress is neither a set of propositions about the nature of the historical process, nor a normative doctrine about how to value or engage with it for “good”, but an evolving understanding of expanding reality. An understanding that centers the “continue the game” features of unfolding reality.

What started to become important around Spinoza’s time, was not to agree on the nature of reality, but to continue to participate in it, without hindering the ability of others to participate in it. To approach rather than retreat from a changing human condition.

Tolerance and pluralism were born of efforts to make sense of an expanding reality. Morality slowly came to rest not on theology but on the existence of an expanding frontier. Only a marginal tradition of thinkers and leaders participated in this process, while the majority continued to operate by Fiat Progress narratives. But a minority was all it took to keep the divergence machine evolving and growing, inching ever closer to arrival.

And now it’s arrived.