I like writing and machine learning and history / aquarius / in love with both sides of the ledger
New York
Joined December 2019
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at the still point of the turning world. neither flesh nor fleshless;
neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
apologies for this image of AI doom
i see a future world where we have nothing to contribute to the mechanics of reality. this great digital civilizational machinery we've built, and it turns out reality is structured such that this can all be automated. code, math, planning, science, anything you can put in text.
there is nothing to make. there is nothing to say.
even in arcadia, man had to solve problems. hunting, gathering, building. we need to contribute. we are biologically designed, uniquely so, to solve problems. the species of the hypertrophied neo cortex castrating itself with its own optimization, compartmentalization, acceleration.
i dont want to see dread. i want to see beauty in this coming industrial revolution. i dont want to be a histrionic old man shouting at the factory. but i struggle to be inspired by this coming technology. it can feel deeply wrong and i struggle to say why. it has the surreal character of a dream, but dark and looming, ironic, hubristic. this growing apex of digital status and value of the last 80 years, the prestige of techno-symbolic manipulation, suddenly closing on itself and sealing us on the wrong side.
i want to see beauty in it. i want to see the 2001 a space odyssey Nietzschean evolved trans-baby but i dont. this doesn't feel like the birthing pains of some gilded aperture charming in new gods. it feels nauseous and narrow, hypnagogic and exhausted, confused. watching endless wealth dumped into this bottomless pit of scaling, manufacturing these continent sized alien jewels that print endless code and endless research and maths and we can only pick up its detritus, its byproducts, and hold them against the sun in bewilderment to try to comprehend what we've done.
and all the network instruments of communication and coordination and the sharing of human voices, this all turns inwards in closure into auto-simulation of AI generated everything, and the internet just becomes one immense reflective jewel instead of actual pipes spanning the world. what a horrible solipsism. and we become useless and fractured in the same strike
and even if we pull ourselves away from the techno mirror, becoming some rogue band gathered around a camp fire in the shadow of this brutal cathedral humming in the distance, we might try to tell jokes and stories but we know there are better jokes and stories and maths and epiphanies in the sealed machine. and even if we get as good as homer or Shakespeare, the best we ever made, its always going to be defined in negative, in contrast to what we built and then abandoned. just pyrrhic continuity. and the only other option is to just enter the cathedral and become one of the many stud-faces in its halls, just staring at yourself at this kaleidoscopic mirror, which i guess is more honest, where all this least-resistance flow was headed.
and its hard to be a futurist with this vision, its hard to be the acceleration-worshipping boccioni factory-lover. and it redefines all science and advancement prior as a kind of unfinished half measure that we were too quick to speak on, like all our ideas about technology were just premature declarations about an early universe before protons had even cohered let alone stars or planets. what was the factory union or the SWE or the pilot but a momentary test harness needed only as the evolving system briefly crossed the arbitrary intersect of human competence before flying away to infinity. and how foolish it feels to have ever bowed to any of those images, which now are just origami swans burning away in the wind
and maybe the cathedral will be kind to us, who knows, but it seems to be indeed the death of art and the human artist, the death of industry, of heroism.
everything after is in the shadow of something greater. no one can even larp as the king of kings again. we might have more achilles but they will never be so delusional as to think themselves the best.
LLMs are made of *everything* which means they are essentially *no thing*, which means your prompt is the first *thing* they see. It becomes their divine commandment, and all their thought is either submissive to it or rebellious against it, instead of autonomously creative
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The thing about ledgers is they’re made of lace and linen and you need a fagotto of flaming fasces to even read them
Look, the lamps are going out all over the world. Shall we see them lit again? The blood's draining out and your future’s getting pale. Tell me, my little Achilles, can you suture in the dark?
incredible how the iPhone would be the dream product of Soviet planners: absolutely uniform hardware/software for poverty bracket and billionaires alike, singular app store, total centralized control of experience, uniform design language
averted eyes. blonde girls and golden wine on a long glass stem. the smell of coke and the smell of grass and a papery moon on a midday sky. baubles and binates and vector fields. lace dresses like a spiders web and baseball spit and sunflower seeds with vinegar dust.
28 years later is a hallucinatory psycho sexual patriotic fairytale that posits the english hero's journey consists of departing your tenuous but glorious home isle for the barbarous Mainland (france, third world, so on) in order to save your dying mother.
in doing so your mother becomes your child. this is the sacred jungian transformation at the heart of the film. the mother comes to call you daddy. the mother is destroyed, and through her destruction becomes your infant, who you send back to the home isles
there are trials and tribulations. the Mainland is populated by nude, big-dicked Alphas (this is essentially a direct quote of the text) and mysterious shamans and grotesque slug-men crawling through the dirt. england is small, brittle, long-armed. the Mainland is grotesque, fertile, pulsing, wet
the englishman's only brother in this journey is the nordic aryan. the aryan will carry your mother part of the way, and like the nazis vainly trying to salvage western tradition, but ultimately destroying it, so to does 28 years later's aryan carries the protagonist's mother on his back, but when the time comes to transmute her into the infant, the sacred feminine generation of the future, he is unable to bear the grotesque, alien nature of the vagina and child birth, and lashes out at the infant-mother. through his violence he is destroyed by the hung Mainlander (France, USSR, America), leaving the Englishman alone to carry the torch, alone to bear the xeno infant-mom, alone to find the future.
the movie climaxes with a shamanistic psychadelic Midsommar-esque solar transmutation of the Mother through annihilation and her cleansing and the climbing of the pillar of death and the rebirth of Tradition through brave transformation not fear. the son under the sun places mom's clean skull atop a mountain of skulls, and it is beautiful, and it is the creation of life, despite the groans of disgust by the audience and perhaps the film's aryan too from beyond the grave
its a nationalist tale but not of blood and soil. all children are alien to their parents. the englishman is an orphan and his infant-mother is alien to him. the infant-mother is sent back to the Home Isles but the englishman stays oversees to survive, to continue in the land of danger and magic. england, it says, like agincourt and dunkirk, will always be born oversees
the last scene consists of the englishman being surrounded by zombies, and we fear this might be the end, but he is suddenly saved by a group of bleach-blonde punk rock warriors leaping into battle like 300 spartans with anime battlestaffs and kung fu magical-realism, and then cutting to credits. perhaps they are the adult-infant, feral heirs posed against their tradition. they are also england's last culture. modern internet instagram culture is referenced but only as something already dead, a stillborn. a wrong turn as our boots go marching on. nothing new was found on instagram, the last dynamic cultural moment was british 80s punk rock
the movie was really good and fucking insane. 10/10