hodlbod

So the important thing isn't necessarily that some people accumulate more wealth than others. It's that accumulated reward can eventually be converted into control over the entire game board, right? So for example, if I control enormous amounts of capital, my strategy space is radically different from somebody who's working a day job, right? I can acquire competitors, I can own infrastructure, I can purchase information, I can influence politics and regulation, I can survive symbolic losses that would bankrupt any normal individual. I can shape employment conditions and potentially influence the rules governing the markets in which both of us participate.

Source: www.thegreatsimplification.com

Certainties are those things that we can't think about because they are what we think with - they are what lie, Illich says, "beyond the horizon of our attention."

Source: Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey

All of Illich's work, Hoinacki had told me, could be understood as an attempt to "do theology in a new way." Yes, Illich replied, Lee is right, I have only tried "to walk beneath the nose of God." Then, after joking that God must have "a nose as big as mine," he added: "...my work is an attempt to accept with great sadness, the fact of Western culture."

Source: Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey

In this mode the future is not something to which we have to be exhorted, lest we notice too much the disaster around us, nor is it an epiphany that will materialize before our eyes, but it is something to which we are invited as actual participants in its constituion. We are invited to play the Future Game in which we make up the kind of future we want through Delphi techniques, computer games, opinion surveys, and planning commissions. Unfortunately, everything of significance about this future has already been decided, and public participation is ritualistic in the debased sense of that term.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

[The future] plays the same role among modern intellectuals that the past played among traditional ones. The future is a continuously receding horizon; it is never actualized and always just beyond one's grasp.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

The great irony is that although we seem to be living through the anticipatory "age of the future," there is no real future left open to us as a viable site. For the past projections of the future, in their influence as an ideational powerhouse on the course of policy and history, have foreclosed the formerly available futures filled with variable choices and exhausted the once rich cultural and natural resources that might have provided the basis in the past for a humane future in a livable landscape.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Computer information systems are not merely objective information-recording devices. They are emanations of attitudes and hopes.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

If information flows at unequal rates, what is still the future for one group is already the past for another.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

But given the engineered "complexity" of the new information systems, involvement of the public becomes a mere ritual of participation or overparticipation to legitimate rule by a new scientific elite... no matter what form of government we live under in the future, it will be called democracy.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Effective altruism

The ideology of the future can serve as a form of "false consciousness," a deflection away from the substantial problems of the present, problems grounded in conflicts over wealth and status and the appropriate control of technology, toward a future in which these problems, by the vary nature of the future, cannot exist.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Electronics has the potential for the perfection of a utilitarian attitude and the indefinite expansion of hte administrative mentality and imperial politics. Electronics, like print in its early phases, is biased toward supporting one type of civilization: a powerhouse society dedicated to wealth, power, and productivity, to technical perfectionism and ethical nihilism.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Given a network of such monopolies backed by corporate economic and political power, we reach a stage under the impulse of advanced communication at which there is simultaneously advancing knowledge and declining knowing. We keep waiting to be informed, to be educated, but lose the capacity to produce knowledge for ourselves in decentralized communities of understanding. All this apparatus generates is continuous change and obsolescence: time is destroyed, the right to tradition is lost.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Beard states, then, the relation between time and space and between long- and short-distance communication Innis later exploited. If communication is physically effective over short distances and weak and attenuated over long ones, we would expect that hte units of culture, politics, and the common concern that would emerge would be grounded in place, in region, in local communities. These communities would be vertically stratified, but it would still be sensible to speak of a shared culture and politics among them. Small deviations in space would produce great differences in culture and interest. Larger units of social organization that emerged would not be national but federal: amalgamations of local structures into more comprehensive communities. However, as long-distance communication improves, both local and federal relations evaporate into a stratified national community. Large numbers of people physically and culturally separated become effective national communities of culture and politics. As long-distance communication improves and short-distance deteriorates, we would expect that human relationships would shift to a horizontal dimension: large numbers of people physically separated in space but tied by connection to extra-local centers of culture, politics, and power.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Innis argued that changes in communication technology affected culture by altering the structure of interests (the things thought about) by changing the character of symbols (the things thought with), and by changing the nature of community (the arena in which thought developed). By a space-binding culture he meant literally that: a culture whose predominant interest was in space - land as real estate, voyage, discovery, movement, expansion, empire, control. In the realm of symbols he meant the growth of symbols and conceptions that supported these interests: the physics of space, the arts of navigation and civil engineering, the price system, the mathematics of tax collectors and bureaucracies, the entire realm of physical science, and the system of affectless, rational symbols that facilitated those interests. In the realm of communities he meant communities of space: communities that were not in place but in space, mobile, connected over vast distances by appropriate symbols, forms, and interests. To space-binding cultures he opposed time-binding cultures: cultures with interests in time - history, continuity, permanence, contraction; whose symbols were fiduciary - oral, mythopoetic, religious, ritualistic; and whose communities were rooted in place - intimate ties and a shared historical culture. The genius of social policy, he thought, was to serve the demands of both time and space; to use one to prevent the excesses of the other: to use historicism to check the dreams of reason and to use reason to control the passions of memory.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

They saw in the developing technology of communications the capacity to transform, in Dewey's terms, the great society created by industry into a great community: a unified nation with one culture; a great public of common understanding and knowledge. This belief in communication as the cohesive force in society was, of course, part of the progressive creed.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Electronics is neither the arrival of the apocalypse nor the dispensation of grace. Technology is technology; it is a means for communication and transportation over space, and nothing more. As we demythologize, we might also begin to dismantle the fetishes of communication for the sake of communication, and decentralization and participation without reference to content or context. Citizens now suffer in many areas from overloads of communication and overdoses of participation. We should address ourselves directly to the overriding problems: the uprooting of people from meaningful communities and the failure to organize politically around authentic issues.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Space-binding media, such as print and electricity, were connected with expansion and control over territory and favored the establishment of commercialism, empire, and eventually technocracy. On the other hand, time-binding media, such as manuscript and human speech, favored relatively close communities, metaphysical speculation, and traditional authority.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

Innis placed "the tragedy of modern culture" in America and Europe upon the intrinsic tendencies of both printing press and electronic media to reduce space and time to the service of a calculus of commercialism and expansionism.

Source: Communication as Culture by James Carey

There is nothing boring in life except ourselves. The most humble work does not have to be boring. I remember the old woman who cleaned the floor in my place in Gargenville. She died a few years ago. Every day I think of her with the most profound respect and with greatest reverence. She was eighty years old. One day she knocked at my door and said, `Mademoiselle, I know you don’t like to be disturbed, but the floor, it shines in such a way. Come and see.’ Now I think of her always. In my mind, Stravinsky and Madame Duval will always appear before the Lord for the same reason. Each has done what he does with all his consciousness. When I said to Mme. Duval the same thing, she did not know exactly what I meant. But when I said it to Stravinsky, who knew her, he said, `How you flatter me, for when I do something, I have something to gain. I have something. But she, she has only the work to be well done.’

Source: Nadia Boulanger

The artifacts are accumulating; the work is not.

Source: nooneshappy.com

The slowness was not a tax on the real work; the slowness was the real work. It was how the work got good, and how the people producing the work got good, and how the firm whose name was on the work could promise the client that what they were buying was a particular kind of thing rather than a generic one.

Source: nooneshappy.com

...when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Source: A Pattern Language

Just as in writing, all aspects of science and math are driven by aesthetics, elegance, and taste; indeed, all high-level intellectual output shares a similar sensitivity to ineffable qualities like taste and creativity that are extremely hard to capture via the methods of AI training.

Source: www.theintrinsicperspective.com

Of course, monsters remain at the heart of the Institutional Gothic, too. The “lifeform” of “The Backrooms” was never the real monster, as was the case with Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror “Frankenstein.” Rather, the monster was always the creator, which, in the case of the Institutional Gothic, is the efficiency-seeking corporation.

Source: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

By the 2010s, the internet had reified liminality into a full-fledged visual “aesthetic”: Think abandoned bowling alleys, vintage airport terminals, and deserted playgrounds at dusk. More often than not, liminal aesthetics are human-made spaces, sans humanity.

Source: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Gambling is flourishing because it meets the needs of our moment: a low-trust world, where lonely young people are seeking high-risk opportunities to launch them into wealth and comfort. In such an environment, financialization might seem to be the last form of civic participation that feels honest to a large portion of the country. Voting is compromised, and polling is manipulated, and news is algorithmically curated. But a bet settles. A game ends. There is comfort in that. In an uncertain and illegible world, it doesn’t get much more certain and legible than this: You won, or you lost. A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.

Source: www.derekthompson.org

Anything that defines the gestalt of your system, that is architecture, API, and so on, write it by hand. Maybe use tab completion for some nostalgic feels. Or do some pair programming with your agent. Be in the code. Because the simple act of having to write the thing or seeing it being built up step by step introduces friction that allows you to better understand what you want to build and how the system "feels". This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow.

Source: mariozechner.at

The question that remains is what forms of power protocols can actually prevent, what forms they merely relocate from one set of actors to another, and what forms they silently generate, because every shared function eventually has to be governed by someone, and whoever governs it acquires power over the people who depend on it.

Source: connectedplaces.online

what the current generation of open protocols has produced is a commons without a governance framework adequate to the commons’ own complexity.

Source: connectedplaces.online

The open protocol community has inherited two intellectual traditions, both inadequate to this problem: an engineering functionalism that treats protocols as neutral infrastructure whose political consequences are someone else’s concern, and a governance minimalism that treats any collective decision-making structure as a potential vector for the very centralization the protocols were designed to prevent. The result is a community that has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance.

Source: connectedplaces.online

The trajectory of the earlier protocols showed clearly enough that silence about governance does not produce neutrality but leaves the governance function to be filled by whichever actors have the most resources. But the deeper point is that protocol design choices do not merely leave governance unaddressed but actively shape it, because every architectural decision makes some governance arrangements natural and others difficult or impossible.

Source: connectedplaces.online

Each protocol community has arrived at an implicit answer to this question [how the collective decisions about the shared infrastructure that supports both speech and reach should be made, or by whom]. ActivityPub delegates governance to the instance level and assumes that local accountability will produce acceptable outcomes at the network level, though nothing in the protocol ensures this. ATProto relies on competition between service providers as a sufficient governance mechanism, which presupposes that the market conditions for meaningful competition will materialize. Matrix has gone furthest toward institutional governance, placing a foundation in the role of commons custodian, though the foundation’s authority derives from convention rather than from any mechanism the protocol enforces. And SMTP, characteristically, has no opinion at all, which is itself an answer: the governance vacuum it left was filled by the actors with the deepest pockets. What none of them provides is something that has been studied extensively in other fields, most notably by Elinor Ostrom: design principles for the governance of common-pool resources by the communities that depend on them. Ostrom’s central finding was that communities can successfully govern shared resources without either privatization or central authority, which directly addresses the assumption, shared across the protocol communities examined here, that the only available alternatives are market competition among providers and centralized control by a single operator. But Ostrom demonstrated that this third path requires specific institutional conditions, including clearly defined boundaries around the resource and its users, proportional distribution of costs and benefits, collective choice arrangements that give participants a voice in rule-making, accessible conflict resolution mechanisms, and recognition by external authorities of the community’s right to self-govern. The open protocol ecosystem, as it currently exists, has none of these features at the network level.

Source: connectedplaces.online

The dominant narrative about AI is not what it has built, but the rate at which people are consuming it.

Source: minutes.substack.com

It is not incidental that the final technology speaks English. The large language models, the systems that will carry us into whatever comes next, run on a language that was discovered across centuries by translators, by preachers, by naturalists, by poets who believed they were handling something holy. The training data is English. The weights, the statistical regularities that the model has internalized, are the regularities of a language whose fundamental architecture was shaped by the Gospels. The machine inherited the cadences of scripture without knowing what it carries. The vessel is still intact. And I do not think it is an accident — in terms of the provenance of creation — that this is the case.

Source: minutes.substack.com

We are entering an era where the vast majority of language produced will not have come from or been originated by human hands. These are often seen as words without lives — fluid, grammatically impeccable words that are efficient. But they are words that were never spoken, often about nothing, and for transient reasons. The model does not attend. It does not consider the lily. It generates at scale, and the generation has no root.

Source: minutes.substack.com

When we tried to abandon the Earth, our ship would not let us. Then, carrying us to this island and becoming a pool, it was declaring to us, "You will live! You will survive!" And then we saw it. Life was reviving on the Earth!

Source: www.highharbor.net

If what we are witnessing is not, at heart, a political or cultural battle, but some manifestation of a spiritual war - well, then perhaps our time should be spent becoming the right kind of warrior. Because everything is currently set up to turn us into the wrong kind. The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others. He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to the __nihil__ of the age. He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness. Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth - and recognise it when he finds it. His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice.

Source: Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can't be harvested, exploited, or transformed in the image of the new world which the machine is building. 'Open' things, on the other hand; well, they're easy prey.

Source: Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine