Be Slightly Monstrous

Learning to feel time again in the Permaweird

Welcome back. This has been the longest break from personal writing I’ve taken in nearly 20 years, not counting a few pieces of writing for various work things. During previous Substack breaks, I still had my old ribbonfarm blog going, so those were slowdowns rather than true breaks.

I did a spot of creative cross-training over my 2-month break, making what I have decided to call Bucket Art paintings on my iPad, named for the icon typically used to represent the fill tool in digital painting programs. I just made a gallery page featuring my 39 pieces so far, plus a brief explanation. Here is one of my favorite pieces, Waterfall 5.

The eventual goal is to train a model on these hand-made images. I say hand-made only to indicate that no AI was used, but it’s really half-algorithmic, since the fill and other tools I use are based on simple non-AI algorithms.

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The Contraptions Book Club is wrapping up the November read: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann. Chat thread.

In December, we’ll round out the year with Thomas More’s Utopia, which should be a nice capstone read for our year delving into the 1200-1600 period.

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Making bucket art is part of a larger project I have been pursuing this year to become slightly monstrous.

Be Slightly Monstrous is my new motto, replacing Be Slightly Evil, which served me well for 15 years (the eponymous email newsletter that ran 2010-13 resulted in an ebook).

What’s monstrous about bucket art? Mainly that it’s me trying to learn to “see like an AI.” To quote myself from the gallery page:

…Another goal was to try and “see like an image generator” using low-level kernels of the sort used by AI image generators, such as diffusion and stochastic field primitives. I plan to use these images to train an image generator and see if it picks up on the underlying protocol.

Even though I didn’t use AI to generate the initial set, the algorithmic tools I did use are spiritual kin to the low-level kernels buried several stack layers beneath modern AI tools. You could say my attempt to train my synapses on the behavior of the bucket fill algorithms aims to achieve a degree of kernel-level communion with AI. It was either make art or multiply a hundred large matrices by hand. I might do that too.

This transhumanist impulse to merge with machines would, I suspect, be viewed as somewhat monstrous by humanists. These paintings commit a worse sin than merely using AI; they represent an effort to see like AI. Earlier this year, I llmwrote a Lovecraft-inspired short story for Protocolized, The Signal Under Innsmouth, that explores the kind of transhumanism I think I’m experimenting with here. It’s not really about hacking your biology or adding prosthetics to your body, though you can do those things if you like. To me, those are merely on-the-nose fictional devices that gesture at less legible transformations. The real conceit here is about consciously surrendering to a machinic reshaping of your patterns of cognition. Your ways of seeing. Your ways of feeling into reality.

The attempt to refactor my perception with “fill algorithms” lenses kinda worked. I now have good intuitions about how to manipulate intricate flows and oozes of digital paint on textured digital substrates. I am making cunning new plans to apply similar techniques to words.

I’m hoping this new monstrous way of seeing will help me see larger patterns of oozification in the world better. I’ll be readier for the gray goo than most of you.

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There’s more to seeing like a monster than seeing like AI though. The whole idea started for me with my Jan 10 essay, The Gramsci Gap, riffing on Zizek’s gloss on Gramsci, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Even as I was writing that essay, I had a nagging sense that I was somehow on Team Monster, not Team Human (as Doug Rushkoff once put it at an event where we were predictably arguing opposite sides of a technology debate). That the way out of the gap is to embrace monstrousness in some way. The way Jeff Goldblum embraced being spliced with a fly in The Fly. The trick is to get the splicing just right, which he didn’t.

Here I mean monsters in the sense of the creatures of our fertile mythic imaginations — chimeras, dragons, rakshasas, Lovecraftian horrors. Call these Type I monsters. Not the very different sorts we mean when we talk about deeply twisted humans, such as serial killers, sadists, Trumps, Putins, and Epsteins. Call these Type II monsters.

Both kinds of monsters can be found in the Gramsci Gap, but it’s not until you’re out of the gap that you can tell the difference. Here’s my theory of the difference.

• Type I monsters are personifications of aspects of the future we haven’t fully adapted to, including actual humans who have adapted more to the future than most. In time they’ll come to define normal for new kinds of humans.

• Type II monsters are ageless manifestations of dark corners of the human genetic heritage that find easy expression in the unaccountable lawlessness and anomie of Gramsci gaps, where they are able to act with open impunity. In time, they will be reined in with new mechanisms.

Some people of course, have seeds of both kinds of monstrousness in them. There is the uncomfortable possibility that the two kinds of monstrousness may even be correlated, explored in Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Or that Type II traits emerge in the population in a Gramsci gap exactly to the extent that Type I tendencies are suppressed or repressed. Or that all of us have Two Monsters within us. But let’s not worry about those disturbing Cronenbergian possibilities now.

I’m a Type I monster to those who have surrendered less readily to the strange rules of the Permaweird than I have.

It is relative though. People who have surrendered less than I have are obviously fragile, reactionary humanists attached to rigid, caricatured, doomed notions of what it means to be human. Team Stick Figure. People who have surrendered more to the future are of course irredeemably more monstrous than me and will come to a bad end like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

You and I of course, are exactly the right level of monstrous to inherit the future and be redeemed by it. Perfect contraptions of being and becoming.

Be Slightly Monstrous then, is a solipsistic motto to be applied relative to your reality tunnel. The key to it is not so much the quantity of monstrousness you surrender to, but the quality of left-behind cartoon humanists who see you as a monster.

It is important to appear the right amount of monstrous to the right people, in the right way. By that measure, I think I’m coming along okay. The right cartoon people find me objectionable.

If nobody finds you at least slightly monstrous, you’re going to die in the Gramsci gap.

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A strong evolutionary argument can be made that mythic-monster folklore is actually an adaptive cultural response to dangerous environments. See the paper Why Monsters Are Dangerous by Morin and Sobchuk, which I reviewed here. The big idea there is that we imagine monsters to overtrain against extreme risks. People who believe in mythic monsters survive real dangers better.

Sachin

found another cool paper by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Culture (Seven Theses) that offers a somewhat more abstract model of monsters. Here are the seven theses in the title summarized by ChatGPT:

• Thesis I – The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body: Monsters embody the fears, desires, and contradictions of the culture that produces them, functioning as cultural texts.

• Thesis II – The Monster Always Escapes: Monsters continually return in new forms because they represent anxieties that can never be permanently contained.

• Thesis III – The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis: Monsters provoke fear because they violate and blur established categories, boundaries, and binaries.

• Thesis IV – The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference: Monsters mark the cultural Other, policing difference through exaggerated depictions of deviance.

• Thesis V – The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible: Monsters reinforce the limits of the thinkable by dramatizing the consequences of transgressing social, moral, or physical boundaries.

• Thesis VI – Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire: The monster’s forbidden nature both attracts and repels, revealing repressed desires within the culture that imagines it.

• Thesis VII – The Monster Stands at the Threshold of Becoming: Monsters embody transformation and liminality, signaling what a culture is in the process of becoming—or fears it might become.

Between these two papers, my evolving view of monsters is captured surprisingly well, so I won’t attempt to elaborate more. I’ll just try to tease out the implications of surrendering to monsterhood. In brief, in 2025, this involves a few elements:

• Surrendering gleefully to technological forces and making fun of those who don’t.

• Rejecting crisis framings of Gramsci gaps implicit in terms like polycrisis as the tell of trapped minds that are destined to perish in the gap.

• Adopting a liminal passage view instead — a Great Weirding that has delivered us into a Permaweird that can be adapted to.

• Being skeptical of humanism.

• Rejecting the reduction of the experience of the real to the experience of the political.

The Be Slightly Monstrous motto can be seen as an evolution of the Hunter S. Thompson motto “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I think that idea is a little too essentialist and self-congratulatory. I don’t think I’m especially weird. My version feels like a more mechanical and conscious profaning of ideas of being and becoming open to all. It’s not about reflexive cocaine-and-acid gonzo aptitudes of special geniuses. Anyone can learn to be slightly monstrous. I think I could even design a $1499 weekend workshop to teach it.

I’m still working out why being slightly monstrous is adaptive, but in brief, being trapped in a Gramsci gap is the same thing as being trapped in obsolete understandings of being and becoming human. To get out, you must become slightly monstrous. The main symptom of being so trapped is being unable to feel time. There is no future or past. Only the crushing siege of the gyrating, atemporal present, experienced in a fearful, joyless cognitive huddle focused on narrow consensus cares. Retreating from the public body politic to cozier retreats does not help. Time remains as absent in private group chats as in public squares.

This is the great trick played on us by politics in a Gramsci gap — convincing us that all there is to existence is the buffet of zugzwangs it chooses to present to us. That to let the mind wander away from matters it insistently, relentlessly draws us to, is to cease to exist as a human entirely. That the only way to continue existing is to remain frozen in a beautiful, doomed humanism. That all decisive moves are moves towards unacceptable monstrousness.

To the mind trapped in a Gramsci gap, a mind that wanders away to strange new cares is necessarily the mind of a monster. Which is why that is a monstrousness worth surrendering to.

To be slightly monstrous is to learn to feel time again. And the main sign that you’re succeeding is that others increasingly can’t see you as human, especially those who believe most intensely in their own humanity.

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