There is a portrait of Mrs. Higgins as she was when she defied fashion in her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes... In the corner... Mrs. Higgins, now over sixty and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the fashion, sits writing...

You have to do a double-take to appreciate the insight in this thumbnail sketch, and it is worth unpacking. Normally, we assume that it is keeping up with, and conforming to, current fashion that takes effort. As this sketch suggests, this view is mistaken, and things are rather more complicated.

We make this mistake because we often lazily conflate genuine indifference to fashion (which takes no effort) with being unfashionable (which takes as much effort as being fashionable). To be indifferent to fashion is to make essentially random sartorial choices while being oblivious to the consequences. But to be unfashionable is to earnestly misdirect effort to conform to the wrong fashion culture, such as one that’s identifiably a season or two older than the prevailing one, or one that fails subtle signaling tests while passing easier ones.

The difference between the indifferent and the unfashionable is the difference between the outlaw and the unwitting criminal. The former is simply outside the jurisdiction of a taste culture, and therefore largely invulnerable to any social sanctions it might capable of imposing. Not being invited to parties does not matter if you do not care to go to parties. The indifferent make utilitarian decisions ignoring considerations of taste. The unfashionable person though, transgresses the prevailing culture of taste, while sincerely intending and trying to conform to it, and as such, represents a policing problem for the fashionable. The choices of such individuals are what are generally labeled crimes of fashion.

Crimes of fashion that manifest through unfashionable choices are of two sorts, only one of which can be properly attributed to tastelessness, and judged and punished accordingly, with greater harshness.

The first sort is the result of simple ignorance and disconnection from the social core of a culture of taste, rather than lack of discernment or aptitude. Those who are unfashionable simply because they lack access and mentorship can acquire tasteful comportment, as was the case with Eliza Doolittle.

The second sort of crime of fashion though, is more serious: Attributable to an inability to acquire the appropriate sort of discernment and literacy despite being sufficiently immersed in the culture and materially equipped to participate in it. It is this second sort of fashion criminal who is usually charged with tastelessness, and policed and punished through particularly aggressive acts of contempt, exclusion, and humiliation.

The fashionable, the unfashionable, and the indifferent, then, are the basic types one encounters in and around a taste culture. We will refine our models of these and give them better names in a moment.

Mrs. Higgins though, belongs to none of these types.

***

In Pygmalion, the introductory thumbnail sketch reveals Mrs. Higgins to have been, in her youth, guilty of high treason — someone who committed transgressions against a prevailing culture of taste while being a literate insider of it.

For someone like this, conforming to prevailing fashion is an entirely effortless matter. High effort for her was associated with conscious transgression. I know nothing of women’s fashion, but fortunately ChatGPT does:

Mrs. Higgins would have come of age roughly in the 1860s and 1870s, when respectable upper-middle-class British women were expected to dress according to the highly structured fashions of the day: crinolines giving way to bustles, tightly corseted waists, elaborate trimming, and an emphasis on displaying wealth and propriety. Fashion was ornate, highly codified, and closely tied to social respectability.

The “Rossettian costume” refers to the aesthetic associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the broader Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Aesthetic Movement. Women in Rossetti’s paintings typically wore:

• loose, flowing medieval- or Renaissance-inspired gowns,

• uncorseted or lightly corseted silhouettes,

• rich but subdued fabrics,

• long, naturally arranged hair,

• little emphasis on the latest Paris fashions.

To adopt that style in everyday life was not simply to wear different clothes; it was to signal allegiance to an artistic and intellectual subculture. It rejected mainstream Victorian ideals of propriety and commercial fashion in favor of beauty, craftsmanship, medievalism, and artistic individuality. Figures associated with the movement—including William Morris and Oscar Wilde a generation later—encouraged “artistic dress” as a critique of conventional taste.

Mrs. Higgins, who once helped pioneer a new taste culture by subverting prevailing ones, is now old enough to require neither the validation of her individual tastes that transgression can supply, nor driven by the sort of youthful sensibility that is capable of being entertained by the thrilling bloodsport of it.

Equally, her conforming to the contemporary culture of fashion in later years is not a mark of anxious attachment to it, but enlightened transcendence of it.

This is not an incidental bit of color in the characterization of Mrs. Higgins. It is integral to her role in the play, as someone who can see through her son’s theatrics and is unimpressed by them. She is more deeply fluent in the culture Henry Higgins is attempting to hack at a superficial level, and correctly predicts the outcome of the experiment he sets in motion. Most importantly, she is consistently kind and considerate towards Eliza, and acts to ease her journey as a human being rather than as an ill-conceived experiment.

Mrs. Higgins used to be a taste pioneer. Someone who helps establish new cultures of taste to challenge existing ones. But when we meet her, she has transcended the ebb and tide of taste cultures. Her capacity for kindness is rooted in this transcendence, and a mark of it since, as I will argue, cruelty is central to taste. Every kind of taste is arguably a taste for blood. Which is why taste itself must be defined in terms of a capacity for a particular kind of aesthetic risk-taking.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

***

The idea of taste pioneers is what motivates the definition of taste that I want to pose and develop in this essay:

Taste is making aesthetic choices someone does not want you to make. Everything else is public relations.

The definition is a snowclone of a similar definition of journalism (journalism is printing something someone does not want you to print, everything else is public relations), and centers the role of risk in the creation, maintenance, and destruction of taste cultures.

The consequences of this definition will become clear later, but first I want to flesh out the extended universe of archetypes around it.

The “someone” in the picture is, of course, the same fashionable person who polices the unfashionable at the other end of the spectrum, imposing real penalties for crimes of fashion and tastelessness.

Their relationship to the taste pioneer though, is different. Unlike the tasteless, who are incapable of making aesthetically correct decisions by the standards of a culture of taste, and therefore can only be punished and excluded from it, the taste pioneer clearly does understand what choices they are expected to make and why. In fact they typically understand better than those who aim to police them. But they choose to make different choices anyway, driven by an original logic.

Like taste outlaws, taste pioneers are typically invulnerable to the ability of the fashion police to extract penalties. Unlike taste outlaws though, they are capable of imposing penalties — by virtue of their superior tastefulness, their choices can do more than transgress prevailing taste cultures, they can subvert and undermine them, draining social and cultural capital.

This happens most visibly through the ineffectiveness of attempted punishments. Attempts to exclude and humiliate fail. Contempt does not land. The desire to belong of promising new prospects suddenly begin to waver and reorient. Cultural talent begins to defect.

The taste pioneer is necessarily a disruptive figure. And, I will argue, the only figure who can actually be said to have taste at all.

All taste is a taste for disruption; a taste for blood. The taste pioneer aims to draw blood in their interaction with incumbent arbiters of taste.

Just as we can really only attribute tastelessness to those who demonstrate a clearly lack of aptitude, we can only really attribute taste itself to taste pioneers, whose transgressions have the power to undermine taste cultures themselves. The tasteless are judged by taste cultures. But taste cultures themselves are judged by taste pioneers.

What then, of the merely fashionable, who rehearse and reinforce established cultures of taste and ritual disputation through their behaviors, perhaps making incremental advances? Who police the unfashionable and attempt to rein in the pioneering? Are they tasteful at all?

What, if anything, can we learn from them about taste?

To hint at the answer, we can learn everything and nothing from them.

I’ll use a new, more precise term for this class. Because they model aesthetic erudition (think the comic book guy on The Simpsons or Stuart on Big Bang Theory) rather than taste proper (in the sense of my risk-centering definition above), I’ll refer to them as connoisseurs.

The universe of taste now contains four archetypes: The outlaw, the tasteless, the connoisseur, and the pioneer.

We need one more to complete the picture, the philistine.

***

Though I’ve been casually observing (and to some degree, trolling), the taste discourse for a decade, I’ve never had a good reason to weigh in. I do now (yes it has to do with AI, but I’ll save the details for a future article). So a good question is: What archetype do I represent?

The answer of course, is domain-specific. Depending on domain, I could reasonably be classified as outlaw, tasteless, connoisseur, or pioneer. For the domains of taste that most interest me, the last three categories mostly suffice.

Most of these are domains of technical taste, of the sort that leads to uncannily good decisions in matters of engineering design, scientific investigation, or mathematical argumentation. In some of these kinds of domains, I’d self-classify as moderately tasteful and capable of occasional flashes of pioneering taste. In others, I’d self classify as tasteless but interested enough to tolerate the embarrassment and endure the punishments imposed by connoisseurs.

Many other domains I care about are domains of managerial and organizational taste. In these, I’d say I’m significantly more tasteful, and capable of assisting pioneers, though I lack the energy to do any pioneering myself. That’s why I’ve been able to make a living as a management consultant.

Fortunately for my sanity, these domains have been mostly out-of-scope in the taste culture wars, perhaps because the artistic and aesthetic aspects of these domains are neither visible, nor interesting, to outsiders. As a result, the taste culture wars largely revolve around explicitly artistic domains like literature, music, fashion, or film. Cultures of taste everybody participates in.

It was the last of these that was my entry point into early taste discourse a decade ago, long before it become the subject of culture wars. Around that time, on Twitter, I used to enjoy trolling banter with a musician named Gabe Duquette, who was developing a serious theory of taste. I did not, and still do not, understand it. I believe it involved some notion of compression, which was a popular lens on the matter back then.

Gabe was (and presumably remains) a cinephile who was offended by my loudly proclaimed and decidedly middlebrow screen media tastes. Theatrically offended of course, not really offended. We were all doing elaborate bits on Twitter back then (the actual taste culture we were enacting was of course that of Twitter itself).1

I was, in his words, guilty of neither indifference, nor tastelessness, but of “consuming pablum, knowing it was pablum.” He presumably reached that conclusion because I had demonstrated some aptitude for screen-media connoisseurship (my best known work, after all, is an analysis of a TV show), but refused his sincere offer to help identify and refine my tastes. He offered to guide me through a carefully crafted learning curve of movie watching to profile my uncultivated tastes, and improve my discernment and judgment in picking good things to watch to feed them.

He was perfectly right. When it comes to screen media, I did (and still do) consume pablum knowing it is pablum. What does that make me?

***

I do, in fact, possess a rudimentary, uncultivated ability to tell good and bad cinema and television apart, in the sense cinephiles would like everybody to. And I do have the aptitude to become a non-embarrassing member of cinephile circles. But unfortunately for cinephiles who might hope to civilize me, I simply do not care enough to put in the effort. That particular domain does not interest me enough. I am not indifferent in my choices, merely barbaric. And I am that way because cinephile milieus do not play a significant enough role in my life that I can be embarrassed by my uncritical preference for (say) Marvel movies over those of Martin Scorsese, or for the Christopher Nolan Batman over the Tim Burton Batman.

While I occasionally offer shallowly developed drive-by arguments on such matters (such as the argument that Kevin Feige’s orchestration of a 40+ movie universe is pioneering taste in a meta-medium that Scorsese does not appreciate), I don’t press such matters. I do not have enough of a stake in this particular culture of taste to pursue such arguments to the interesting conclusions that undoubtedly exist.

To engage in the bloodsport of taste cultures, you have to have stakes.

For me, screen media are about relaxing and unwinding with my brain switched off. If I am in a high-energy mood, I tackle difficult history books or tinker ineptly in my workshop. I’m willing to draw blood or bleed in those domains. But I don’t watch demanding movies or subject myself to black-and-white remedial education.

This is not a particularly uncommon relationship to a culture of taste, and I am sure most of you, like me, have many such connoisseur-offending relationships.

For example, I have moderately refined coffee tastes, but I am also fine drinking random instant coffee. I drink coffee primarily to manage my energy and mood with caffeine. The taste is secondary. Similarly, I can appreciate an elevated meal at a fine-dining restaurant, but I’m also fine eating whatever when I’m just hungry, which is mostly what I do. I’m not a foodie, but that doesn’t mean I’m either tasteless or indifferent when it comes to food, or itching to pioneer new culinary tastes. When it comes to sartorial taste, I’m probably borderline tasteless, but not to an embarrassing degree. I can struggle through an evening in a suit if someone really needs me to.

Perhaps most offensive in my case, I can appreciate, and on occasion produce, tasteful and even well-crafted prose, but have been gleefully producing and consuming AI generated texts, heedless of the damage it might do to my palette or the palettes of readers. If this were a serious literary rebellion, I might have been able to claim I’m on a taste-pioneering journey. I’m not. I simply don’t care enough about the craft and taste culture of reading and writing, even though I do so much of both.

This kind of posture, I’ll argue, is the most common one in any taste culture. Most of us are this way in relation to most taste cultures we participate in, much to the dismay of connoisseurs who earnestly beg the rest of us to try harder to do better.

What archetype does this type of posture represent?

In the case of screen media, I am clearly not an neutrally indifferent outlaw, since I do discriminate and hold preferences, and actually consume a lot of the medium. I am clearly not a low criminal guilty of tastelessness either— I do know better, and occasionally, but not exclusively, consume better. I am clearly not a connoisseur either — I haven’t put in the work to convert basic aptitude into cultivated discernment.

And I am certainly not a taste pioneer capable of high treason and cultural rebellion in pursuit of a more fundamental tastefulness.

In this domain, I’m a cultural alien whose choices reflect capped attention and significant competing allegiances to other taste domains, in which I visibly invest more energy and attention.

By my very presence in a culture of taste with such a posture, I point to the existence of competing cultures of taste, and the possibility of valuing them more highly. It is a dilutive, market-making relationship, which lowers the intensity of the culture’s sense of its own importance in the larger scheme of things. I help price the priceless, and create liquidity where connoisseurs hope to create and defend solidity.

A good word for this is philistine.

***

A philistine is someone whose offensiveness to a culture of taste is a side effect of their competing allegiances rather than a central feature of their identity. Someone whose lack of taste is wilful but incidental to their self-conception, rather than innocent, unwitting and central to their self-conception. A matter of casually offensive distorted preferences rather than either genuine indifference or committed rebellion.

The outlaw phones it in but does not intend to offend. The taste pioneer defines themselves in opposition to a prevailing taste culture via heresy and heterodoxy.

The philistine indulges in the cultural equivalent of drive-by shootings.

In the Biblical usage, the Philistines were a foreign tribe — the ones in the David vs. Goliath story (Goliath being either a metaphor for a numerically superior force or an actual giant). In modern usage, the term indicates wilfully obnoxious tastelessness. In both cases, the charge of barbarism is something of a cope (presumably the historical Philistines had cultures of taste around matters they did care about, such as seafaring and warfare).

These then, are the archetypes of the theory of taste I want to offer here. To summarize before we proceed, we have:

• The outlaw — who does not care and makes indifferent but not intentionally hostile choices in aesthetic decisions the taste culture cares about

• The tasteless — who cares, but makes the wrong choices, either through lack of access and education, or lack of fundamental aptitude, representing lesser and greater crimes of taste respectively

• The connoisseur — who has cultivated an ability to make the right choices, either effortlessly through innate aptitude and being born to the culture, or through effortful cultivation

• The taste pioneer — who has cultivated an exceptional ability to make new choices, and has both more taste than the culture can police, and the daring to take risks with it

• The philistine — who makes choices that serve an alien cultural logic, and cultivates and exhibits casually offensive tastes that serve to price what the taste culture presumes to be priceless, in broader society

Each of these archetypes has an associated narrative in relation to the evolution of a taste culture. They enter and exit (or stay) at different phases. They serve different functions in the lifecycle of the taste cultures. The play different roles in determining the ultimate historical significance of a particular taste culture — whether it will come to be seen as an important chapter in a larger historical tradition, or an embarrassing and campy sidequest in the story of civilization.

It would take several more essays to work through these narratives and the life cycles of taste cultures. It is the sort of speculative armchair sociology I used to enjoy doing but no longer have the energy for. Long-time readers may notice that the setup here is similar to the setup of the Gervais Principle, a series in which I devoted 5 of 6 parts to exploring the trajectories and inter-relationships of 3 archetypes of organizational life. There is even a rough mapping here — the taste pioneers correspond to the sociopaths, the connoisseurs and tasteless together constitute the clueless, and the philistines and outlaws together correspond to the losers. This is a structural mapping though, and none of the connotations carry over. The model differs in several important ways. Most importantly, unlike economic loserdom in the Gervais theory, which stings in real ways for all, regardless of compensatory value elsewhere, what philistines and outlaws “lose” in a taste culture is only valuable within the taste culture, with no particular value or liquidity beyond.

I am not going to attempt a full Gervais-style theory here, not least because I lack suitable fodder comparable to The Office (and no, I’m not taking suggestions). David Chapman wrote something like the kind of treatment this calls for, in Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths, though focused on the dynamics of extraction and selling-out rather than taste itself.

In this essay, I want to skip past those interesting sociological and anthropological questions to the phenomenology of taste itself.

***

The philistine represents a very different sort of threat to the connoisseur than the other three classes, all of which either validate, or at least do not directly threaten, the culture’s sense of its own value.

Cultures of taste tend to be totalizing. To the cinephile, cinema is an absolutely important cultural activity that is never appreciated enough. The true cinephile believes that as much as possible of societal surpluses ought to be deployed towards making more tasteful cinema and teaching more people to appreciate it.

The philistine is the human face of the political war the connoisseur must ceaselessly wage, to convince the rest of the world to value the culture of taste at its own estimation. He serves an ever-present reminder that the connoisseur’s entire identity is contingent and subject to dilution to nothingness. That other ways of life are not just possible, but might possible offer richer modes of meaning and fulfilment. That those other ways might ultimately starve the connoisseur’s world and life of the cultural energy it needs to survive.

The taste pioneer at least represents a resurrection and continuation of a taste culture in altered form. The philistine represents the possibility that the taste culture might dissipate into irrelevance and go extinct.

Why does this matter? What do you care if most of the rest of the world finds meaning and fulfilment differently from you?

It matters because we like to believe that we represent a necessary sort of human being, even if we are all individually mortal. That our cultural allegiances matter beyond ourselves. The tastes we cultivate are our bids for immortality.

Here, it is useful to construct a pyramid model of how the self evolves as it cultivates literacy and competence in a particular culture of taste, something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of aesthetic needs.

This is not meant to be a particularly clever or original diagram, so I hope it is mostly self-explanatory.

Much of taste discourse today concerns the bottom two levels, and these are the levels that connoisseurs typically inhabit, and where AIs currently threaten to compete.

The three levels above typically involve some degree of risk, and are the levels at which taste pioneering operates and the mechanics are those of a social bloodsport.

The final level, the one occupied perhaps by Mrs. Higgins, represents transcendence of the taste culture.

Let us work through the first two levels.

• Discernment and attunement are obviously preconditions to any praxis of taste. You cannot form conscious opinions about things you do not even notice, and you cannot care about differences if you cannot detect the underlying distinctions. Cultivating an increasing resolution of attention is table stakes in any culture of taste. While rare, there can be arrested development at this level — obsessive-compulsive attention to taxonomizing and distinguishing, accompanied by inability to make choices or be indifferent to anything. A kind of taste paralysis.

• Indifference and attention allocation, equally obviously, are central to any expression of taste. You cannot watch every movie, listen to every song, or read every book. To choose is to choose indifference to some distinctions, and care about others. In a trivial sense, any two movies are going to be different. In a more meaningfl sense, some of those differences are only going to be evident at a given level of attunement and discernment. Of those, you will care about some, but not others. To do justice to some, you must do at least ritual violence to others.

It is at this point, give or take some details, that much of taste discourse tends to stop. And certainly there is a great deal to say about these two levels. But if this is as far as you go in your taste journey, you have not yet explored taste per se. You have merely internalized a grammar of taste set up by others as a sort of artificial physics, and the rules of that game are indistinguishable from the rules of games designed by nature. Which is why this xkcd (I swear I didn’t remember it was titled “Connoisseur” before getting to this point in the writing of this essay) is so funny.

It is worth noting that though connoisseurs disagree and argue, that is the point. They do not actually make decisions their peers do not want them to make. There is no actual risk; no real costs. There is merely the pleasure of endless ritualized disagreement. This is not yet a social bloodsport.

So what does it take for a taste culture to escape the reductio ad absurdum of the Joe-Biden-sandwich-eating endgame?

It takes people who refuse to be locked up in a box, and insist on situating the taste culture in a wider world, and forcing an engagement between the two. People who do not flinch from the question of whether photographs of Joe Biden eating a sandwich actually deserve attention. Taste pioneers who can revalue what the philistines devalue, and rebuild taste cultures after their depredations.

If reality has a surprising amount of detail, and you can nerd out over anything to arbitrary depths, what distinguishes worthwhile and worthless ways of allocating attention and indifference? Asking this question is the first step towards becoming a taste pioneer.

***

The answer, I think, has to do with the potential for high-social-risk intersubjective self-authorship a domain offers. As the xkcd cartoon suggests, any subject can be arbitrarily deep, but once you add risk, real distinctions emerge.

Consider two examples of connoisseurship:

1. Two dinosaur fans, with equally attuned discernment on saurian matters, argue about the fidelity of two dinosaur representations in Jurassic Park that the rest of us can barely tell apart.

2. Two jazz fans, with equally attuned discernment on jazz matters, argue about the relative merits of two musicians that the rest of us can barely tell apart.

In the first case, the ground truth for the argument is derived from scientific facts — whether or not dinosaurs have feathers, whether T. Rex ran fast or slow, whether velociraptors were in fact that big (they weren’t) and whether they hunted in packs.

In the second case, the ground truth for the argument is derived from the tradition of taste itself, but to the extent you don’t challenge received authority, it might as well be a matter of objective facts. Instead of poring over fossilized remains, you pore over seminal texts. Instead of systematic empiricism, you practice systematic hermeneutics. Instead of submitting to the authority of experiments and data, you submit to the authority of authority figures.

While there is some room for taste, stylization of facts, and appeals to authority when it comes to beliefs about dinosaurs, dinosaur fandom offers less room for self-authorship than music. This is simply because you can, in fact, become an authoritative source of musical tastes. But you cannot become a new set of dinosaur facts. Taste pioneering is possible in music in a way it isn’t in dinosaur fandom. Fewer constraining facts equals more room for humans.

So when it comes to music, you can go further, because the truths about music are truths about the human psyche and how it can be transformed through the creation and consumption of music. One sign that this is so is that a great deal more social risk accompanies musical tastes than dinosaur tastes.

The journey beyond connoisseurship, and into taste pioneering, begins when you realize that some cultures of taste are neither objective, nor subjective, but intersubjective. And because they are intersubjective, your self-authorship can influence others the way empirical facts can in more objective domains. And that exercising this influence will involve taking on risk.

Few venture into taste pioneering, however, which is why it yields a good definition of taste. Making choices that connoisseurs do not want you to make takes courage.

Much of what passes for taste discourse is really restricted to what we might call aesthetic erudition, which rehearses and models the patterns of judgment of a mature taste culture through scholarship and maintenance of boundaries between esoteric and exoteric. This is the substance of connoisseurship. While I do not in general like Straussian-Girardian frames, they are peculiarly well adapted to thinking about how connoisseurs curate tastes.

In fact, taste cultures are likely the only class of phenomenology to which Straussian-Girardian frames can be usefully applied. Connoisseurs are, in a Straussian reading, scholars of intersubjectivity induced by pioneering greatness. Stewards of mimesis and esoteric-exoteric boundaries, and keepers of hermeneutic rather than empirical truths (and yes, wine, as much as poetry, can be understood as comprising texts produced by authority figures for suitably cultivated tastes, rather than empirical realities). Connoisseurs are at once the scientists and inertial masses responding to forces set in motion by taste pioneers.

This is one reason taste cultures, unlike reality, famously have a conservative bias. If a taste culture goes long enough without disruption by a sufficiently disruptive taste pioneer, it will ossify into a tradition. Connoisseurs will evolve into a priesthood, punishments for tastelessness will increase in severity, slowly choking off the supply of fresh creative minds, and the culture will begin to decay, holding on to fading memories of liveness.

Aesthetics, as I once noted, is the entry drug of conservatism. And it isn’t just the tedious tradarch posters I’m talking about here.

***

Let me venture a strong statement: The connoisseur, ultimately, has no autonomous creative agency, and therefore cannot express taste as such. They can only acquire a particular learnable discernment, and get to a kind of mimetic subjectivity first established as possible by a taste pioneer.

What they visibly practice is a craft that is impressive only insofar as it reliably rehearses and reproduces patterns of judgment we already know, by some other means, to be correct within a given taste culture. It is not an art, either in consumption or production.

This is why there is usually a culture of competitive discernment to first qualify connoisseurs on the basis of objectively determinable competence, (can you identify this wine? this raga?), and then on mutual agreement (does your ranking of these wines meaningfully correlate to those of Wine Spectator? Can you distinguish more and less celebrated exponents of a raga?)

What is notable about such tests of connoisseurship is that they are not tests of individual tastes, but of ability to auditably internalize the default tastes of an entire inherited culture of taste.

The taste pioneer, however, can and does go beyond. A good example of this was Andy Kauffman, who famously did a series of deliberately bad stand-up impressions in his act, topped off with a pitch-perfect impression of Elvis Presley. The act left the audience first annoyed and contemptuous, then speechless. The message was clear — I understand and can express your tastes better than you can, but I have better tastes, fuck you.

Kauffman explored realms of taste that were clearly beyond the culture of taste he was part of, and helped move that culture to those new realms. That’s taste pioneering.

Levels 3-5 of my pyramid chart this sort of journey into taste pioneering.

• Transgression and social risk: You must make decisions connoisseurs cannot help but disagree with, because they do not own their own tastes. They merely represent the tastes of a taste culture.

• Aesthetic self-authorship: Connoisseurs are, to varying degrees, automatons whose behaviors are only legitimate to the extent they are predetermined by the taste culture. Taste pioneers discover and model new modes of discernment and attunement, responding to phenomenology beyond the walls of the culture. The cultivation and expression of taste becomes a mode of self-authorship rather than a mode of belonging. They are the living proofs of their tastefulness.

• Rightness surplus: Taste pioneers, like good leaders of any sort (per Amazon’s famous leadership principles) are right a lot. But what they are right about is a subtle thing. While there can be particular crude signs like commercial or popular success, these can easily be (or interpreted to be) signs of degeneracy. But what they are really right about is where generativity and liveness are to be found. They declare: we must take fashion/art/cinema/music in this direction rather than that one, for that way lies exhaustion and death, while this way lies new life.

At this point, we have something like a theory of creative destruction of taste cultures.

We can think in terms of the Wardley-Cringley pioneer-settler-town-planner model, and draw Wardley maps to capture the evolutionary dynamics of a particular taste culture.

We can talk about how alive or dead it is, what innovations are being introduced by taste pioneers, how notions of sacred and profane are changing, and what elements of taste are becoming irrelevant and commoditized through automation.

I’ll leave all that as suggested exploration directions.

***

Mrs. Higgins in Pygmalion transcends taste culture. She occupies the top of the pyramid, too old to take the trouble to dress out of fashion. She predicts and interprets her son, Henry Higgins’ misadventure for him, and helps protect Eliza from the fallout.

To transcend a taste culture is to no longer rely on it for self-authorship. To no longer be defined by conformity or transgression. To no longer be defined by the cruelties of exclusion, contempt, humiliation, heresy, and heterodoxy. To no longer be defined by a taste for social blood.

To transcend a taste culture is to evolve with it without being defined by it. To inhabit a self that can serve as a measure of the world rather than being measured by it, and give itself permission to be kind, regardless of whether or not that is a tasteful choice.

The instinct to beauty — which is another possible definition of taste — is always also an instinct to cruelty. Cruelty to others, yes, but also cruelty to oneself, in the form of limiting self-conceptions.

Kindness is, perhaps, the ultimate act of tastelessness. It is a taste for life itself, rather than for blood. Which is why it is the mark of transcendence of taste itself, and paradoxically, the ultimate sort of tastefulness too.

I got to thinking about taste, as many have in recent years, by way of thinking about how to teach AIs to have taste. Much of what we can do today is teach AIs connoisseurship. To the extent my theory of connoisseurship as a kind of learned automaticity is correct, it should be entirely trainable. A mimetic subjectivity is reducible to objectively observable behavior. We can likely create zombie connoisseurs as good as any human ones, so long as we can replicate sensory discernment. There is nothing uniquely human about discernment and attunement. The connoisseur is ultimately a Large Taste Model equipped with special sensors. The self they have cultivated can be distilled into model weights.

But to actually teach AIs taste, we must first introduce them to aesthetic risk, both social and material. To the costs of choices someone does not want them to make.

What kinds of risk? And what sorts of costs? And imposed by whom?

I’ll explore these in a future post.

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The global economy is not experiencing a generalized leveraging or deleveraging. It is reallocating leverage from one theory of coordination to another.

That is the shift that matters. Financial markets are not merely deciding how much debt society can sustain. They are deciding which kinds of coordination deserve to be financed, which deserve only to be maintained, and which no longer justify expanding commitments. The familiar language of liquidity, credit conditions, fiscal deficits, and monetary policy describes the plumbing of this process but not its direction. The deeper question is what kinds of future societies investors, governments, firms, and households believe they are underwriting.

Debt is often described as a claim on future production. That is true but incomplete. Production itself is impossible without coordination. Factories require suppliers, workers, logistics, energy, legal systems, payment networks, and customers. Scientific discoveries require research communities, universities, instruments, standards, and funding. Markets require institutions, contracts, currencies, and trust. Every loan therefore rests upon an implicit claim that future coordination will produce enough surplus to honor today’s promises.

This suggests a different way to think about leverage. Leverage is not fundamentally optimism. Nor is it simply a willingness to take risk. It is a judgment about the expected return on coordination.

When markets leverage, they are saying that creating additional layers of coordination is likely to generate more surplus than it costs. When markets deleverage, they are saying that additional coordination no longer appears sufficiently productive to justify further commitments. The cycle is therefore not primarily financial. It is civilizational.

Viewed this way, the history of the last half century can be understood as a transition between two competing theories of coordination.

The first theory, which dominated roughly from 1980 through the middle of the 2010s, might be called cosmopolitan coordination. Its premise was simple and remarkably successful. Every additional layer of global integration was assumed to produce increasing returns. Longer supply chains were better than shorter ones. More specialized firms were better than vertically integrated ones. More trade was better than less trade. Capital should move frictionlessly across borders. Labor should become globally mobile. Production should occur wherever costs were lowest. Financial markets should intermediate these flows with ever greater sophistication. Political and legal convergence was expected to continue. The world was becoming one enormous coordination graph whose increasing density would continue to generate surplus almost indefinitely.

This was an extraordinarily successful theory. Containerization, the expansion of the WTO, China’s industrialization, global capital markets, multinational corporations, the Internet, cloud computing, and digital communications all reinforced one another. Every additional node connected to the network seemed to increase the value of every other node. Credit naturally expanded because every additional layer of coordination appeared capable of paying for itself.

This was the great leveraging cycle of cosmopolitan globalism.

Notice that the leverage was not simply financial. It was organizational. Firms became larger, supply chains became longer, inventories disappeared, production became geographically fragmented, universities internationalized, research became increasingly collaborative, and lifestyles themselves became globally integrated. Debt merely reflected the underlying conviction that increasingly dense coordination would continue to produce increasing surplus.

Eventually, however, the marginal returns changed.

The important point is that globalization did not fail. Trade did not suddenly collapse. The Internet did not disappear. Multinational corporations did not cease to exist. Instead, something subtler happened. Markets began questioning whether the next increment of cosmopolitan coordination would produce the same surplus as the previous one.

Brexit, rising strategic competition between the United States and China, pandemic supply-chain failures, sanctions, export controls, energy shocks, semiconductor shortages, and geopolitical fragmentation did not destroy globalism. They raised its hurdle rate.

This is better understood not as deglobalization but as a cosmopolitan recession.

A recession does not imply that an industry disappears. It implies that investors become more selective. Credit becomes tighter. Projects that previously cleared the hurdle rate no longer do. Marginal investments are cancelled before existing ones are liquidated. Something very similar has happened to cosmopolitan coordination.

The financial analogue is striking. Companies now demand dual sourcing instead of single sourcing. Inventories replace just-in-time logistics. Firms build redundancy into supply chains. Export controls require legal compliance teams. Political risk enters capital budgeting. Semiconductor fabrication migrates despite higher costs. Manufacturing diversifies across trusted jurisdictions. None of this represents the abandonment of global coordination. It represents tighter underwriting standards.

One might call this tighter credit for globalism.

Importantly, this does not mean that markets have become autarkic. The opposite of cosmopolitan leverage is not economic nationalism in its pure form. Pure autarky has rarely generated high returns. Instead, a different theory of coordination has emerged.

Call it thick sovereignty.

The central premise of thick sovereignty is not that states should replace markets. Rather, it is that states must underwrite the critical coordination capacities upon which markets ultimately depend. Semiconductor manufacturing, electrical grids, ports, cyber defense, energy systems, defense industrial bases, strategic mineral supply chains, payment infrastructure, and domestic manufacturing capability are no longer viewed merely as sectors of the economy. They are treated as strategic coordination assets.

These investments often appear unattractive through the lens of traditional return-on-investment analysis. A semiconductor fabrication plant built for geopolitical resilience may never achieve the lowest production costs. Maintaining excess electricity generation capacity may appear inefficient. Building redundant logistics networks lowers measured productivity. Strategic reserves produce no quarterly earnings.

Yet these investments optimize a different objective function.

They are not expansionary investments.

They are option-preserving investments.

Their purpose is to buy adaptability under conditions of profound uncertainty. They resemble insurance, but only superficially. Insurance assumes known probabilities. Thick sovereignty operates under Knightian uncertainty, where the relevant risks cannot even be fully enumerated. The investment is not a wager that a particular crisis will occur. It is a wager that maintaining the capacity to respond to unforeseen futures has become more valuable than maximizing static efficiency.

This distinction reveals that leverage itself has fractured into three increasingly distinct forms.

The first is expansionary leverage, which finances genuinely new coordination capable of creating new surplus. Historically this included railroads, electrification, highways, container shipping, and the Internet. Today it is overwhelmingly represented by artificial intelligence and the infrastructure surrounding it. AI is unusual not because it is fashionable, but because it is almost alone in offering a credible global narrative of expanding the production frontier. Markets are willing to tolerate extraordinary capital expenditures because they believe AI may fundamentally increase the productivity of future coordination itself.

The second is option-preserving leverage, represented by thick sovereignty. Here debt finances adaptability rather than growth. Electrical grids, semiconductor capacity, defense systems, strategic manufacturing, resilient logistics, and industrial policy all belong here. Their value depends not upon maximizing today’s output but upon preserving tomorrow’s strategic flexibility.

The third is maintenance leverage. This finances neither expansion nor adaptability. Instead, it preserves the continued functioning of already mature societies. Healthcare systems, pensions, disaster recovery, financial backstops, infrastructure repair, and much public spending fall into this category. They rarely create measurable new wealth. They prevent existing coordination from degrading.

This taxonomy helps explain one of the apparent paradoxes of the present. Governments continue borrowing aggressively despite the apparent absence of obvious new engines of growth. Traditional macroeconomics often interprets this as evidence of fiscal irresponsibility or political dysfunction. There is undoubtedly some truth in those critiques. But a more structural interpretation is available.

Modern sovereign borrowing increasingly finances maintenance and option preservation rather than expansion.

• Healthcare maintains aging populations.

• Infrastructure maintains mature economies.

• Defense preserves geopolitical optionality.

• Financial interventions preserve the monetary system.

• Climate adaptation preserves future habitability.

None of these obviously make society richer.

They attempt to prevent society from becoming poorer.

That is a profoundly different confidence story from the one that characterized earlier leverage cycles. Bond buyers are not necessarily saying that explosive growth lies ahead. They are expressing confidence that the state will remain the indispensable institution for maintaining civilization-scale coordination through an era of structural transition.

This also clarifies the relationship between globalization and sovereignty.

The world is not moving from globalism to autarky.

It is moving toward a different architecture consisting of thick sovereignty resting upon a thin cosmopolitan floor.

The thin cosmopolitan floor includes those systems whose reversal would destroy more value than it could ever create. Global shipping, reserve currencies, payment systems, Internet protocols, scientific standards, aviation, commodity markets, satellite infrastructure, and core scientific collaboration all remain indispensable. They are becoming less like speculative growth sectors and more like civilizational infrastructure.

Above this floor sit increasingly sovereign coordination systems. States compete over industrial capacity, energy security, technological leadership, defense, strategic manufacturing, and AI capability while continuing to rely upon a common global substrate that makes these competitions possible.

This explains why globalization appears simultaneously alive and diminished. The floor remains intact. The speculative premium once assigned to extending it indefinitely has disappeared.

The same framework also clarifies the world’s major economies.

The United States currently occupies all three categories simultaneously. It hosts the dominant expansionary leverage story through AI. It is aggressively building thick sovereignty through semiconductor policy, defense, energy, and industrial investment. It also remains the principal underwriter of the thin cosmopolitan floor through the dollar, Treasury markets, financial infrastructure, and global security architecture.

China has shifted from leveraging cosmopolitan integration toward leveraging sovereign industrial depth. Export-led globalization increasingly serves domestic strategic capacity rather than existing as an end in itself.

Europe continues attempting to preserve cosmopolitan institutions while gradually accepting the necessity of thicker sovereignty in defense, energy, and industrial policy.

India remains unusual because it still possesses a classic expansionary story built upon demographics, urbanization, infrastructure, and rising productive capacity. It therefore resembles earlier leverage cycles more closely than most advanced economies.

Seen from this perspective, today’s macroeconomy is neither an age of generalized optimism nor generalized pessimism. It is an age of selective confidence. Markets remain extraordinarily willing to finance certain forms of future coordination while simultaneously withdrawing support from others.

What, then, is actually being deleveraged?

It is not capitalism, globalization, or technology.

Rather, it is the specific theory that ever-denser private cosmopolitan coordination would continue generating increasing marginal surplus.

Commercial office real estate, globally optimized just-in-time production, frictionless labor arbitrage, hyper-specialized multinational supply chains, perpetual regulatory convergence, and business models dependent upon ever-cheaper capital increasingly face higher discount rates because the coordination assumptions embedded within them have been repriced.

What is being levered is equally revealing.

• Artificial intelligence.

• Scientific and technological capability.

• Electrical infrastructure.

• Energy abundance.

• Defense.

• Cybersecurity.

• Industrial systems.

• Semiconductor ecosystems.

• Strategic logistics.

• Resilient manufacturing.

• Critical supply chains.

These are not simply sectors. They are components of a new theory of coordination.

The practical implications extend well beyond portfolio allocation.

Business leaders should ask not merely whether a project generates returns, but which theory of coordination it strengthens. Does it expand humanity’s capacity to create new surplus? Does it preserve adaptability under uncertainty? Does it maintain indispensable systems upon which everything else depends? Or does it merely assume that the old cosmopolitan model of ever-cheaper, ever-denser private coordination will automatically resume?

Individuals face similar choices. Careers increasingly reward those who build new coordination technologies, strengthen strategic capabilities, or maintain critical infrastructure. Institutions that organize around these imperatives are likely to enjoy easier access to capital, talent, legitimacy, and political support than those organized around assumptions that belonged to the previous era.

The question is therefore no longer whether the world is leveraging or deleveraging.

The question is which theory of coordination society is willing to leverage.

For nearly four decades, markets underwrote the belief that ever-denser cosmopolitan coordination would continue producing increasing surplus. That belief has not disappeared, but it has been repriced. In its place, a new allocation of leverage is emerging. Expansionary coordination seeks new sources of surplus through technologies like AI. Thick sovereignty finances resilience, adaptability, and strategic capacity under uncertainty. A thin cosmopolitan floor preserves the irreducible infrastructure that keeps an interconnected world functioning despite political fragmentation.

The imperative of the old theory was simple: maximize coordination. Make networks larger, supply chains longer, specialization deeper, capital more mobile, and borders more economically irrelevant. The imperative of the new theory is fundamentally different: differentiate coordination. Expand where new surplus is genuinely possible. Build sovereign depth where strategic capacity matters. Preserve only those cosmopolitan layers that remain indispensable. The future belongs not to the world that coordinates the most, but to the one that coordinates most intelligently.

For a decade, we have explained the retreat from the public internet using Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory. People withdrew into smaller, quieter spaces because speaking in public became dangerous. Search, recommendation systems, surveillance capitalism, culture wars, and cancellation dynamics transformed the public sphere into a hostile environment. The resulting cozyweb—private group chats, Discords, Slacks, newsletters, encrypted messaging groups, invite-only communities—was understood as a strategic adaptation. The public remained a single connected universe. People simply stopped talking across it.

This picture no longer fits.

The cozyweb has ceased to be merely hidden. It is becoming causally disconnected. The public internet is no longer a hostile commons shared by everyone. It is increasingly the empty space separating an archipelago of informational black holes. The Dark Forest is transforming into the Dead Forest.

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A dark forest is still one forest. Signals travel. Creatures remain connected by the possibility of encounter. Silence is strategic. The Dead Forest begins where the silence becomes irreversible. The inhabitants are no longer choosing not to speak across the public sphere. Increasingly, they cannot speak.

The defining feature of a black hole is not infinite density but the existence of an event horizon: a boundary across which causal influence becomes one-way. Once crossed, no signal returns. Outbound communication is not forbidden or unwise. It is impossible.

A mature cozy community increasingly resembles such an object. Its defining characteristic is not privacy but inaccessible interiority. It possesses an evolving local culture, cadence, trust structure, hierarchy of attention, stock of shared assumptions, repertoire of jokes, vocabulary, and ongoing history that cannot be reconstructed from outside observation. These are not simply hidden facts. They constitute a living dynamical state. To understand them requires inhabiting them. Outsiders may observe artifacts, but they do not share the community’s present.

Crossing into such a community is therefore not simply gaining access to more information. It is crossing into another causal universe.

This is why the metaphor of secrecy has become inadequate. Secrets can be revealed. Documents can leak. Membership lists can become public. Event horizons are different. What lies beyond them is not a collection of hidden documents but a continuing history. The defining loss is not information but contemporaneity. Outsiders no longer participate in the same unfolding present.

This mixed metaphor of an arborescent digital cosmos entering its death-arc phase of evolution immediately clarifies several otherwise puzzling features of the contemporary internet.

***

The first is the accretion disk. Every black hole is surrounded by a liminal region where matter has not yet fallen across the horizon but is already gravitationally bound to it. This is where enormous amounts of observable activity occur. The accretion disk is the liminal zone.

The modern public internet increasingly consists of such liminal objects.

Books. Conference talks. Substack essays. Open-source repositories. Journalistic profiles. Podcasts. Public talks. Screenshots. Occasional bridges built by individuals who inhabit multiple communities simultaneously. These are not the interior life of cozy communities. They are matter orbiting their boundaries. They remain visible precisely because they have not crossed the horizon. Some eventually escape into the broader public. Some spiral inward and disappear forever. Most spend long periods circling the boundary between publicity and interiority.

A common mistake is to confuse the accretion disk for the black hole itself. Increasingly, the public mistakes public-facing artifacts for communities. But the relationship resembles that between sunlight reflected off an accretion disk and the interior of a black hole. One cannot infer the character of one from the other.

The second feature is what might be called zombie public life.

If the living public has largely collapsed into compact informational objects, why does the public sphere still appear so active? Because visibility has become detached from shared reality.

Politics, celebrity, institutional media, brands, influencers, and platform-native personalities continue to generate immense volumes of public content. But much of this activity no longer serves the historical function of public discourse: creating common knowledge among strangers. Instead, it functions as a perpetual visibility engine. Attention circulates. Narratives recycle. Audiences become increasingly parasocial. Public performance continues while public life gradually disappears.

Zombie publics are highly visible precisely because they possess relatively little interiority. They are optimized for outward radiation rather than inward development.

The third feature is artificial intelligence.

The emergence of large language models has often been interpreted as the culmination of the public internet. It is almost the opposite.

Black holes are not entirely black. Quantum mechanically, they emit Hawking radiation. This radiation does not consist of messages sent from beyond the event horizon. It is the long thermodynamic aftermath of gravitational collapse itself.

Artificial intelligence increasingly occupies an analogous role: That of a thermalized fossil public.

Its training corpus consists overwhelmingly of the accumulated public internet that existed before blackholification reached its present stage: books, websites, Wikipedia, blogs, forums, public code repositories, digitized archives, public conversations, and institutional documents. Models continuously remix this material into fluent statistical syntheses. They possess extraordinary knowledge of the fossil public.

What they fundamentally lack access to is the living interiority of today’s blackholifying cozyweb.

This is not a temporary engineering limitation. It is a consequence of the causal geometry. The defining conversations of mature communities increasingly occur beyond event horizons inaccessible to public observation. AI therefore becomes the thermalization of the fossil public: the ambient informational glow emitted by a civilization whose most vital conversations have already disappeared into causally disconnected interiors.

This also explains why AI often feels strangely omniscient yet oddly lifeless. It has absorbed the archaeological record of public civilization while remaining largely excluded from its present tense.

This distinction also clarifies the status of genuine leaks. Screenshots from private Discords, leaked Slack logs, internal documents, accidental recordings, whistleblower disclosures—these are not Hawking radiation. They are better understood as fragments of the surrounding black-hole system that never fully crossed the horizon: material lingering in unstable orbit within the accretion disk, occasionally perturbed outward before finally disappearing. They are exceptional precisely because they do not violate the causal integrity of the interior, and can be flexibly narrativized in ways entirely disconnected from the interior narrative. The event horizon remains intact.

Taken together, these three phenomena define the observable universe of the Dead Forest.

1. First, the thermalized fossil public continuously recirculated by artificial intelligence.

2. Second, the liminal accretion disks of boundary objects orbiting living communities.

3. Third, the zombie public whose endless performances preserve visibility while generating progressively less shared reality.

What is conspicuously absent is the thing that once defined the internet itself: a common causal manifold in which strangers could reliably become contemporaries through public communication.

The internet has not become private. It is dying with cosmological grandeur.

The public did not disappear because everyone retreated into private spaces. It disappeared because those spaces underwent gravitational collapse into compact worlds whose interior histories increasingly belong only to themselves. We still observe their radiation. We still see the debris orbiting their boundaries. We still mistake the theater of zombie publicity for public life.

But we no longer inhabit a universe in which the public is the primary medium through which reality is jointly constructed and enacted.

The Dead Forest is what remains after the public has collapsed into black holes.

***

The Dead Forest did not emerge because a new force entered history. It emerged because the forces that produced the Dark Forest were allowed to operate uninterrupted until they exhausted the geometry of the public sphere itself.

The original diagnosis remains largely intact.

Search dissolved into recommendation. Recommendation dissolved into algorithmic manipulation. Surveillance capitalism transformed every public utterance into extractable behavioral data. Culture-war dynamics converted visibility into permanent reputational exposure. Institutions lost the capacity to sustain neutral public ground. Politics ceased to be one domain among many and became the organizing logic of nearly every public conversation. Social media steadily rewarded identities optimized for conflict rather than curiosity. The internet of beefs expanded until it ceased to be merely an internet phenomenon and became a general model for social life.

The cozyweb was the rational adaptation.

People withdrew into smaller spaces where trust could once again be accumulated rather than continuously spent. Communities became increasingly bounded, invitation-based, contextual, and difficult to search or index. Public writing increasingly served not as participation in a common discourse but as boundary maintenance, recruitment, diplomacy, fundraising, publishing, or reputation management on behalf of private interiors.

The public sphere was no longer where life happened. It became where communities advertised their existence.

Nothing fundamentally changed after this decade-old diagnosis. No creative response took shape to check it. The dynamics simply continued unchecked as the no-treatment prognosis suggested. Cozy spaces simply accumulated enough cultural matter to undergo gravitational collapse.

COVID accelerated the migration of meaningful relationships into digitally mediated private spaces. Remote work replaced organizational corridors with Slack workspaces. Institutions weakened further while informal affinity networks strengthened. The second Trump era completed the normalization of permanent political mobilization as the background condition of public life. Meanwhile, every advance in generative AI increased the economic value of public text while simultaneously reducing the incentive to produce genuinely new public writing. The public web became both more extractable and less generative.

The result was not a new equilibrium but a phase transition.

Dark Forest Theory described a world in which everyone remained connected but increasingly chose silence. Dead Forest Theory describes the world after enough silence has accumulated that the public itself loses coherence as a shared causal medium.

AI did not produce this transition. It merely paved the dead cowpaths. Large language models arrived only after the living public had already begun collapsing irreversibly into cozy interiors. It industrialized the recycling of the fossil public while accelerating the exhaustion of what remained outside the horizons.

The internet did not die because of AI. AI is inheriting the remains as it dies, and the cycling of archival and carnival time winds down into a terminal archive.

***

If the Dead Forest is the endgame of the internet we inherited, the obvious question is whether another public sphere can ever emerge.

Not whether this public can be repaired. Cosmology suggests it cannot. Black holes do not become stars again. Gall’s law strengthens this intuition:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

The question is whether history can produce another arborescent digital cosmos and whether we can seed a new forest right now.

Nearly every civilization has imagined a cosmic tree: the Norse Yggdrasil, the Indian Kalpataru, the Mayan Ceiba, the Persian Gaokerena, the Biblical Tree of Life. Their details differ, but they share a common structural intuition. The cosmos is not fundamentally a collection of disconnected places. It is one living organism whose branches connect many domains without erasing their differences. The tree is neither a centralized empire nor an archipelago. It is a common living medium.

The public internet briefly approximated such a structure. We mistook it for a permanent feature of technological civilization. It now appears more likely to have been an unusually low-entropy historical accident.

If another cosmic arborescence is to emerge, it will not do so by reversing the gravitational collapse of the present one. It must grow from whatever remains outside the horizons before those remnants themselves disappear.

This suggests less a legible program of obvious actions than a set of six simultaneous grand challenges that require genuine invention to address.

The first concerns media.

The next public medium cannot simply optimize engagement more efficiently than its predecessors. Nor can it merely federate today’s cozywebs. It must possess intrinsic anti-cozy properties: mechanisms that continuously regenerate encounters between strangers without collapsing into algorithmic extraction or culture-war dynamics. Publicity itself must become renewable rather than exhaustible.

The second concerns politics.

The internet cannot recover a public if politics remains organized around permanent mobilization. A society in which every public utterance is interpreted primarily as coalition signaling cannot sustain common causal space. Any successor public must make disagreement productive without making identity existential. It must allow for mutual co-existence in citizenship rather than a condition of endemic armed activism.

The third concerns artificial intelligence.

Today’s models increasingly thermalize the fossil public. A future public intelligence would instead require access to continuously renewed living culture without simply consuming or exposing it. This is not merely a data problem. It is a civilizational design problem. Intelligence must become metabolically coupled to public life rather than archaeologically dependent upon its remains.

The fourth concerns institutions.

Public institutions once served as long-lived repositories of common knowledge whose legitimacy exceeded that of any particular community. Most now either retreat into cozy interiors themselves or perform zombie publicity in order to remain visible. A new arborescence requires institutions capable of producing genuine common reality rather than merely broadcasting legitimacy.

The fifth concerns public life itself.

Zombie publics cannot simply be replaced by better influencers, healthier discourse, or more responsible platforms. The problem is ontological rather than behavioral. Public life must once again become a place where significant interiority can develop rather than merely be represented. People must once again possess reasons to conduct meaningful portions of their intellectual, artistic, scientific, and civic lives in public.

Finally, there is the challenge of time.

Every year, more communities pass beyond their event horizons. More knowledge is born irretrievably private. More institutions become performative. More AI systems are trained on increasingly recycled corpora. More of the accretion disk spirals inward. More of the fossil public becomes thermalized.

The urgency is cosmological.

Dead forestification appears to possess positive feedback loops. Every successful retreat into interiority increases the incentives for further retreat. Every reduction in the vitality of the public increases the relative value of private worlds. Every increment of AI-generated public text reduces the density of genuinely renewable public culture available for future intelligences. Every new black hole slightly alters the geometry through which subsequent ones form.

If there is a threshold beyond which no new cosmic tree can grow, we do not know where it lies.

Nor do we know whether we have already crossed the ultimate event horizon on the trajectory to collective social heat death of the forest we inhabit now.

The task, then, is not to restore the internet we lost. It is to preserve enough living matter outside the horizons that another cosmology remains possible. The myths of Yggdrasil and Kalpataru remind us that civilizations have long imagined worlds held together by living connective tissue rather than by force or by isolation. Whether technological civilization can grow such a tree again is the defining grand challenge of the twenty-first century.

Dead Forest Theory suggests that this forest cannot be saved, but holds out the possibility that a new one can still be planted before it dies.

Note that all the sample situations being monitored in the images are 2026 vintage, which makes the images extra funny to me.

Then I had ChatGPT generate one-liner narrative mood captions based on my section headers and the images. My favorite is the 70s one.

People who have opted out of my sloptraptions are really missing out on some quality slop here 🤣

1950s: Cold War Organization Man Vibes

A regimented army of anonymous specialists methodically watches the world, confident that disciplined bureaucracy can catalog every emerging threat before it becomes history.

1960s: Mad Men Vibes

Confidence becomes stylish and managerial as modern corporate optimism embraces creativity without yet surrendering its faith that competent professionals remain firmly in control.

1970s: Towering Inferno Vibes

The machinery of management expands into sprawling institutional complexity, with endless paperwork and specialized desks quietly straining under a world growing faster than organizations can comfortably absorb.

1980s: Gordon Gekko Vibes

Bureaucratic patience gives way to relentless competitive urgency, where information becomes a weapon and every ringing phone feels like an opportunity or disaster measured in minutes.

1990s: Dotcom Boom Vibes

Hierarchy dissolves into networks as collaborative engineers, whiteboards, and connected computers replace command structures with the exuberant belief that software can reorganize the world.

2000s: Blue Sky Vibes

The office becomes a polished machine for ambitious invention, where elegant technology and casual confidence suggest that innovation itself has become the default operating system.

2010s: Culture War/Doomscrolling Vibes

Continuous streams of feeds, dashboards, and notifications fragment attention into dozens of simultaneous crises, leaving workers suspended in an atmosphere of permanent online vigilance and ambient anxiety.

2020s: WFH Vibe-Coding/Polymarket Vibes

An entire institutional monitoring department has collapsed into a quiet home office where two people, surrounded by autonomous AI agents and prediction markets, supervise a world increasingly interpreted by machines on their behalf.

Coda

I’d go monitor the situation in bars with any of these vibes. I’d even be willing to dress appropriately for the larps. It would be fun to redo this series for Europe, USSR/Russia, and China. I could probably do India, but I’d have to think carefully about it. There wasn’t much global situation monitoring going on in India until quite recently.

I’ve always found the notion that you don’t need to know as much stuff when you can just google everything to be silly. I’ve found the opposite to be true. The more there is to know, the more you need to know. The marginal value of knowing stuff does hit diminishing returns, but the point is much further out than most people realize, and it moves out further with time, as the knowledge environment evolves, not closer. The zero-sum idea that the more Google knows, the less you need to know, is wildly wrong. And it goes beyond the Google-fu (or now prompt-fu) of knowing what specific query to use to probe the knowledge environment. What you know shapes what you can see.

LLMs have pushed this co-evolution between internal and external whats and ways of knowing to a point of crisis, which is what I want to talk about. But first, encyclopedias.

The Darnton book has given me one weird new belief in particular: I now think that the Enlightenment wasn’t so much about a few specific big ideas that challenged medieval orthodoxy, but about an encyclopedic way of knowing about reality. For the first time, it became possible to know so much, you could entirely contain and exhaust normal human levels of uninspired curiosity. You could at least roughly cover your experience of reality with a map of reality. And you didn’t need to be a discoverer of knowledge to do so. Merely an accessor.

You could become post-curious and most people in fact did just that.

It didn’t start with Google. Already in the 18th century, people were forced to ask the same questions we do today. How knowledgeable should you be in an encyclopedic environment? Should you aim to know as much as possible, or as little as possible? Are there things you should try to not know, like Sherlock Holmes with his studiously cultivated lack of astronomical knowledge and all other subjects unrelated to detecting?

Why bother knowing anything when it’s in your personal budget quarto edition of the encyclopédie, which you bought for just a few hundred livres; only a few months of your middle-class income? This quarto edition is what the Darnton book is about. You’d think the publishing history of a particular cheap bestseller edition of an archaic encyclopedia would be a dull subject, but it’s fascinating.

Holmes’ knowledge, as described by Watson, is ironically a rather good example of what I think of whenever I hear the adjective encyclopedic applied to a human’s knowledge:

Dr. Watson’s summary list of Sherlock Holmes’s strengths and weaknesses:

1. Knowledge of Literature: Nil.

2. Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.

3. Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.

4. Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.

5. Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.

6. Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.

7. Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.

8. Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic.

9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.

10. Plays the violin well.

11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.

12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Sherlock Holmes’ knowledgeability was exceptional, but relied on an environment that offered a more banal encyclopedic way of knowing as a foundation. The genius of Holmes could not easily have been expressed in a pre-encyclopedic culture. He had a cache optimized for fast inference in the detection game.

The conflict between Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment ways of knowing, I suspect, had more to do with the quantity and comprehensiveness of available knowledge than with specific bits of knowledge. The subversion lay in the encyclopedic way of knowing available to all, rather than in specific shocking doctrines held by a few.

Religions don’t have answers to most questions a normal human might think to innocently and lazily ask, so they tend to view unbounded curiosity as a threat and act to curtail, dismiss, or trivialize it. What kind of bug is that? a child might ask. Another of God’s creatures, now get back to your Bible! is no answer at all.

This works pretty well so long as there aren’t that many answers within easy reach anyway. Constraints on curiosity lend a certain sacred mystique to the questions which are permitted, and to which there are answers on offer. The curious mind takes what it can get. When only some questions have answers, those answers seem profound and the bunny trails they open up invite nerdy obsession. Other questions can be marked the work of the devil. Products of an idle mind. One paying insufficient attention to labor and prayer.

But the post-curiosity mind presents a different challenge to religion.

Once an encyclopedic way of knowing becomes available, it takes exceptional coercion — think the Inquisition — to limit attention to a few questions. And it takes an exceptionally imaginative person working quite hard to ask well-posed questions that don’t actually have answers. Few people even try, and rarely by accident. The post-curious become the normal type of human. Watch a cat or a monkey. Post-curiosity isn’t a normal state at least for complex mammals.

Starting with Diderot’s encyclopedia, it became possible for even the middle class to own complete encyclopedia sets, and keep inquisitive children fully absorbed until they ran out of energy and attained the nirvana of post-curiosity. To a first approximation, arrival at post-curiosity was enlightenment. A very different notion of it than the one offered by religious mysticism. Illuminated exteriority instead of illuminated interiority.

You didn’t have to beat the curiosity out of children. Thanks to the encyclopedic way of knowing, the frontier of the unknown receded far enough away that most exhausted their curiosity long before they reached it. Most humans became trained to expect that most questions in fact have answers. To believe that there is a place — the library, Google, or an LLM — where one may Enquire Within About Everything, reducing the urgency of actually enquiring about anything.

In an encyclopedic environment, we generally recognize questions as interesting only after they’ve been demonstrated to have interesting answers. We consider it a mark of genius to ask interesting questions now, where once any child could think of one. In a society where an encyclopedic way of knowing is available, to defy post-curiosity and keep asking questions at all is rather remarkable. To stumble upon an unanswered question that isn’t obviously confused or incoherent is even more remarkable. To actually find interesting answers is the mark of genius.

Religion faces quite a different challenge in a post-curious environment — the questions and answers it offers must compete with a lot of other questions and answers that it cannot successfully starve of attention. When religions compete with an encyclopedic context, the greatest threat they face is not that of contradiction or heresy, but marginalization. The revelation of their sheer lack of interestingness or significance to the majority, relative to the encyclopedic landscape of the knowable.

Diderot’s encyclopedia in its most widely published form in fact pulled most of its punches where religion was concerned. Though it sparked religious tensions, and the conflict with religion was the main source of drama surrounding its diffusion, it did not directly challenge religion for the most part. It contented itself with subtle subversions in a small proportion of its entries. The rest of the encyclopedia was about stuff religion simply did not even address. The problem with it, theologically, was that it meaningfully created and held a vast new space for non-religious curiosities. Religion could no longer monopolize creative attention. The religious imagination began to seem small.

Anton Chekov’s The Bet is a sort of wishful portrait of spirituality in an encyclopedic environment. The plot (spoiler alert) involves a guy who accepts 15 years of solitary confinement for a bet, and spends his time reading. His curiosities converge from encyclopedic in the beginning to just reading the Bible in the final year.

The history of the actual modern world is mostly the opposite story. People discovering that there’s far more to reality than any one book can possibly cover, and fundamentalists finding it ever harder to claim that one book is all you need.

But maybe a 36-volume “Enquire Within Upon Everything” destination is enough for most humans. Once you live in a world that has one, what do you do next? How do you respond to a curiosity-satiating cognitive environment? How do you stay intellectually alive? How do you transcend the encyclopedic way of exhausted knowingness?

We used to describe people who seemed to know a lot as having “encyclopedic” levels of knowledge. The phrase does not indicate that the person has literally read and retained an encyclopedia (that would be rather sad) but that their curiosity has encountered and survived an encyclopedic environment. Something like Sherlock Holmes’ inventory of knowledge is the right picture to hold of an encyclopedic mind. He could get to the questions nobody else asked, and unmask murderers, because of what he chose to know, which was vast in quantity, but weird in quality. A fictional character yes, but not a bad portrait of an effective mind in an encyclopedic environment.

Encyclopedic knowledge was a compliment because it suggested that the knowledge was a side-effect of grand and ambitious intellectual explorations to the very edges of the known; of unseen worlds traversed; of ways of knowing that the inept questioning of the post-curious could not even begin to probe. And it didn’t have to be as idiosyncratic or focused as that of Holmes.

Oliver Goldsmith’s The Village Schoolmaster presents a different portrait of encyclopedic knowing — a portrait at once satirical and admiring of someone with a mind that’s still alive and open in an encyclopedic age.

The village all declar'd how much he knew;
'Twas certain he could write, and cipher too:
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And e'en the story ran that he could gauge.
In arguing too, the parson own'd his skill,
For e'en though vanquish'd he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thund'ring sound
Amazed the gazing rustics rang'd around;
And still they gaz'd and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.

Notably, the poem contrasts his way of knowing with that of the parson.

What might be a comparable archetype for the age of LLMs? What does it mean to be post-encyclopedic? How would you rewrite the Village Schoolmaster poem today? Who would you feature in place of the parson? Perhaps the schoolmaster of the original is now the parson?

We’re clearly at the beginning of a new arc in our relationship with disembodied knowledge media, just as in Diderot’s time. That AIs are encyclopedic is not the most important thing about them, but it is a necessary feature. Their other affordances would not be worth much if they weren’t first reliably encyclopedic most of the time.

But the defining feature of AIs is that they offer many ways of encyclopedic knowing. There isn’t just one canonical way to know everything, in alphabetical order, as in Diderot’s encyclopedia. There isn’t even the claim of a particular superior or best way, such as the way claimed by the Encyclopedia Methodique ,which boasted a thematic organization rather than lexicographic as its advantage over Diderot’s original. Or more recently, Wikipedia’s claims of the superiority of folksonomic encyclopedism over the scholarly kind offered by the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

No, an LLM offers you effectively infinite ways of encyclopedic knowing. You can come at what it knows from virtually any direction you can think of, with any ontological orientation, and it will offer meaningful traction. It will not be surprised, though it may flatter you and compliment you on your originality of perspective. You cannot easily catch an LLM wrong-footed, even if you can catch it hallucinating and bullshitting. It groks every way of coming at anything. You cannot nonplus it.

LLMs offer perspectival encyclopedicity.

I used to write a blog with the tagline “experiments in refactored thinking.” That wouldn’t be a good tagline today. LLMs have always-already refactored everything, every which way. You just have to Enquire Within Upon Any Perspective. You will find resonance for any private, half-formed insight, and assistance making it fully legible to yourself.

Back in the day, the most common compliment I got was something like “you put words to what I was thinking.” Now that function is well served by LLMs.

In such an environment, finding new ways of knowing that nonplus LLMs is the equivalent of finding questions that could not be addressed by encyclopedias or search engines a decade ago.

If encyclopedias made most humans post-curious, LLMs are going to make most humans post-perspectival. Uninterested in uncovering novel perspectives because all perspectives an average human might consider are actually within reach.

Are there going to be strange new ways of knowing things now? Or strange new ways of not knowing things? Genius ways? Richard Hamming once wondered whether computers might think think thoughts humans cannot think. The complementary thought is: Can humans adopt perspectives for which LLMs cannot offer ready views? Holes in latent space?

When you possess more knowledge than you can meaningfully deploy in a lifetime, even as a human, ways of knowing become more important than the whats of knowing. This has been true since Diderot’s time. But when the post-encyclopedic environment seems to embody all ways of knowing, getting to a new way of knowing is the mark of post-perspectival genius.

Just like after encyclopedias, it took exceptional minds to ask questions that didn’t yet have answers, it’s now going to take different sorts of exceptional minds to uncover ways of knowing that haven’t been tried before, and we’ll have ourselves a new definition of genius.

Perhaps in the age of LLMs, to be knowledgeable, you have to develop strange new ways of knowing things. Perhaps strange knowledgeability is the quantity and quality of interest.

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.

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

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.