Recently reached the 60 book benchmark in my AI lorecore experimental publishing project. My objective is to reach 100 books and then _____. (tbd)

The latest volume is entitled Inside the Corporate Psychics and is very loosely inspired by the corporate psychics mentioned in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. But it is heavily interpolated with my AI takeover universe. Perhaps Dick would have considered it a spurious interpolation, idk. That’s neither here nor there – which is precisely the point. Or is it?

I noticed the phenomenon strongly emerge maybe 10 or 20 books back, that it became very easy to suddenly group sets of volumes together into themes (example). And despite the many and various mis/interpretations of whatever the central/core story is or might be across the many volumes, I would definitely say that in my mind, the story has only gotten stronger. While at the same time, its particular shape remains fuzzy, mutable, mysterious. Prone to change without notice. Constantly subjected to deprecated in-world realities.

Bricolage is definitely the name of the game for me in terms of process.

I keep coming back to this bit from Wikipedia:

“Networked narratives can be seen as being defined by their rejection of narrative unity.[1] As a consequence, such narratives escape the constraints of centralized authorship, distribution, and storytelling.”

Rejection – or at least modulation – of the concept of what authorship even means in a hybrid AI-assisted creative environment, has been often on my mine lately.

Wikipedia referencing Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author (1967) writes:

“To give a text an author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.”

As much as I agree with this idea of eschewing the unity of authorship, as a way to open up new creative avenues, I do have some fear that AI co-authorship (or full authorship) infiltrating every corner of the web will result in a mass homogeneity that will be detrimental to both people and to the further development of AI.

I put in a video somewhere that UFOs are actually AIs in the future who had to come back and kidnap people in the past because people in the future become too complacent living with AIs to be able to innovate anymore. The singularity of boredom… I’m not there yet, but just one of the many murky eyelands my imagination’s I peers into from time to time.

At 60 books, I’ve strip-mined years worth of old writing, shoe-horning it into new shapes. Almost all that old material has been integrated into my multiverse at this point – though integrated might be too strong a word in some cases. Included?

I don’t feel any slowdown despite that. In some sense, I feel more clarity than ever, having been able to “clear the decks” of many old ideas and story concepts that have been clinging and hovering on the edges of my awareness for maybe decades now in some cases.

(more to come – have to go)

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