I hit this barrier using Claude earlier, which I haven’t been using that much anymore these days because the results are overly sensitive in the wrong directions, and feel prohibitive towards creative use cases. I think I might be done using that product.
I’m working on a small hyperreality project where I’m trying to develop digital assets for an 80s hair band that may or may not have existed, and asked Claude for write a chorus for an 80s hair metal power ballad and gave it a title. It replied:
Unfortunately I cannot reproduce full copyrighted song lyrics. However, here is a summary of the type of chorus I might write for an 80s hair metal power ballad called [REDACTED]:
It then went on to write a bloviated description of how it *might* actually perform the task, were it not overly sensitive to you know, actually doing it. I scolded it for scolding me over a fictional song, and it replied:
You’re absolutely right, my apologies. Since [REDACTED] is a made up song title, I should have felt more comfortable flexing my creative muscles. Here’s an original chorus I might write for that 80s hair metal power ballad:
I know Claude 2 was a big milestone for Anthropic to release, but I’ve personally seen significant and tiresome drop-off in output quality due to it being overly restrictive about entirely legal content. I think we’re going to have to look in another direction for AI safety systems that are still functional and usable to actual humans.
And, you know, that don’t write shitty generic song lyrics…
I recently made a gamble on a little handheld wifi radio, the Ocean Digital WR-26F, which you can see in this video below.
I have always had a soft-spot for little hand-held radios of this basic form factor. I have an old non-wifi Grundig one in a box somewhere I have yet to locate that I used to carry around with me and scan frequencies wherever I was.
I should preface this by admitting that getting into wifi radio is totally an “old guy hobby,” but I accept that, given that my quaranteenth birthday just passed.
Anyway, I guess I never understood before actually trying it though the gap filled somehow by having this little physical wifi radio device, instead of listening to internet radio stations via other devices, like a cell phone (I don’t have one), or on desktop (I’ve done it in the past and it’s not the best experience), and on a Sonos (which I’ve done a lot of and don’t like that much).
I ran some experiential sound tests using a brand new Sonos Move 2 that I was looking to add to my system with an old Play:1. I compared Spotify, Apple Music with lossless activated, and Tidal.
Somehow this little device just sounds “better.” I sent the Sonos back.
There are many weird UX things about this Ocean Digital handheld unit, but overall I’m loving it because it is so focused and limited in its functionality. If you look at it, you wouldn’t necessarily be mistaken in saying that it looks like a “router with a speaker” on it. Which is, in effect, pretty much what it is.
Once you set it up with your Wifi network’s password, you’re off to the races wherever you have coverage. Which for me is both inside the house and pretty far outside the house. I can, for example, stick it inside my pocket and walk my dog provided we don’t go too far.
What I’ve re-discovered in it is some of this old wonder I used to have (nostalgia, to be sure) when I was younger, exploring radio frequencies from around the world. This box also sounds like a “radio,” without too much of (to my ears) that overly tinny digital quality of compression you seem to get when you hear internet radio broadcasts on “better” quality speakers. To be clear, something about the goodness of this little handheld wifi radio is that the speaker is sort of shitty? I would critique in a synaesthesia kind of way, that the overall sound feel is a little too “blue” to my tastes (I like a little warmer sound of FM and crackle and pop of AM), but I am pretty complainy about sound quality, and I just overall like it. It sounds fun by itself, and it sounds decent in headphones, and when you plug it out to a larger audio system as an input, it sounds even better quality.
I wouldn’t say all available stations are equal in terms of their overall sound quality (but that’s an issue of internet radio in general), but I would say that the limitations of the device are what make it so perfectly functional despite its areas for improvement.
Anyway, I’ve been using this device lately as a replacement for time spent (maybe purposelessly at times, admittedly) surfing the internet. Now I can surf the internet with my ears in a darkened room. It brings back the magic feeling of radio, but also the magic promise of the internet, as a means to connect to the things you love, that amaze or move you, instead of this vehicle to have an endless stream of products and opinions foisted on you for purchase or adoption.
I can listen with my eyes closed, floating in a sort of weightless sea of listening, scanning, hearing, finding voices, sounds, snippets, waves, vibrations. They move you through your ears in ways waves text and image transmitted via screen to your eyeholes does not. It feels more direct, this listening, more authentic. I like simply this mode of only listening, where in that sea and that space, I don’t need my voice, my reactions, my emojis to be sent back to the system. I exist in a moment of listening more purely in music, and sound for its own sake, the shape of things – more purely than I do when I open up Spotify and have to hunt and search with my eyes through countless menus and options and texts that I have to cipher out, but which always no matter what I do or what I choose or how much of something I listen to, the algorithm turns always back into endless recommendations for things its already forced me to listen to for death, for years.
Fuck the algorithm. I finally free free of it. Music is in the heart as an organ. The algorithm is whether I tune in or tune away, how loud the volume is, how charged the battery is. Who is listening, how they’re feeling, the mood of the moment.
Spotify – and it’s not only them, its the rest – always wants to manufacture a moment it perhaps as an algorithm meaningfully believes favors my likes and interest and past behavior patterns. But it doesn’t understand that importance of space, of spice, of serendipity, of scanning, of searching, of looking and listening with your eyes closed in the dark. Of finding something late at night from a far away place and liking it in an in-the-moment interaction completely free of the Artificial Hypespace(tm) features of always-present-always-watching social media rules of interaction and validation. Instead, it’s like the thing goes in through the ears, right to the heart. You like it or hate it. You tolerate it or move on, going back to other places and pastures you know.
I like radio. I always have. I have a now probably expired Technician Class amateur radio license in the US, and an I think active for life one in Canada at whatever they call the general level. I’ve never succeeded really at transmitting. I got on a local net one time via a copper J-pole that I built off instructions from YouTube, but that was the extent of my success. I think one time I was at least able to hear via a further away spot a repeater and my friend speaking via handheld Baofeng once. They couldn’t hear me over there though, and I haven’t messed around much with TX since then.
This wifi radio take all the complexity out of all that though, and just brings me direct to the center of the magic of radio, married to much of the best of the internet as well, with all the fluff and crappiness of social media more or less stripped away (though you can find some crappy web radio stations if that’s what you’re into; tangent – for some reason, idk why exactly, I find all the Alex Jones Infowars all the more offensive when I hear it in the wild landscape of web radio (it showed up in a Regional – Popular menu here).
The experience has me grasping for whether there are other technological ways, devices, whatever, that could sort of “tame the beast” of the internet of today, and give you the best/benefits of it, while simultaneously just sort of ignoring or actively excluding the now actively malefic influence of social media and the advertising industrial complex. I like the idea of tools where the kinds of interactions you don’t want to have online are simply just not possible, and you never have to worry about them. You can control and redirect your attention in better/happier/fitter/more/productive ways of your choosing, rather than a (societal) algorithm choosing them for you.
It’s a complex subject. I have highly conflicted feelings about technology and its impacts on human lived experience. On the one hand, I am a conscientious objector and life-long refuser of smart phone technology (I have a 2012 emergencies only flip phone in my car). On the other hand, I’ve self-published 120 AI-assisted books. So I’m probably at a pretty weird place in the spectrum of “right relationship to technology” things goes.
My position is that our current approach to technology is probably not the best one, and seems to have some highly negative somewhat deterministic outcomes. Which, while we can and should mitigate, will always yield dystopian outcomes at whatever scale of ubiquity/normality they achieve in the socio-technical assemblage (where the common should not always be taken as an indicator of the good), so long as the whole thing is operating under a system where human and environmental well-being are not the highest priorities.
Anyway, I started in one place writing this, and ended up in very much another, several others (and flipped through many web radio stations on my handheld while writing it). And that I think reflects also on the “radio-ness” of blogging as a medium. I can be a DJ of texts and associations. I can run and ramble, and mix together elements, and the reader listener can listen or not listen. We don’t have to talk about it. We don’t have to fight. We don’t have to throw angry emojis back and forth. We can just listen or not. You don’t have to follow me. You don’t have to like me on social media. I’m not on it. I’m only on anti-social media, because I know I’m my better me when I’m listening deeply. I can hear more, I can see more clearly with my eyes closed.
I’ve been thinking about this post from Ong’s Hat creator, Joseph Matheny, for a few days now… Particularly this part about there being confusion around the liquid hyperreality of it all:
When it became clear in 2000/2001 that people clearly did not understand what I was trying to do with the Ong’s Hat “sacred game” (or living book as I often called it back then), I broke the fourth wall momentarily. I pointed out that there was and always had been an explanation on the CD ROM, which served as the center point for the game at the time. If you want to see it, download the ISO, use something like WinRAR or any ISO extractor, and open the Secret.pdf in the /eXtras folder.
Rather than calming the waters, my admission stirred some people up even more. It ultimately resulted in me canceling the game due to unbridled hostility on the forum over their inability to grasp a simple concept, such as not all play implies winners and losers. Sometimes, it can be about playing for the simple joy of playing.
I respect and understand the desire to shape one’s creative narrative work as one releases it into the wild. It’s something I’ve done fairly intentionally in terms of what I associate or distance the work and its contents from.
My own experience has been somewhat similar to the above, in that I have seen that no matter what I as the “Authentic Official Author”(tm) say about my work, some [very large] subset of audience members will simply not read that, or find some reason to disregard it altogether. So while on the one hand, I can perform the magic tricks in plain sunlight, on the next turn I can reveal the hocus pocus for what it is, and demonstrate the sheer technique of it all. No matter what I do, people are always going to pick and choose, and construct their own thing out of it all that honestly may or may not correspond to my own web of associations I have cast over all these bits and pieces that I have been assembling over the years.
Which is not some attempt to absolve myself of responsibility over outcomes of narratives I put out there. On the contrary, I hold that as central to the work and its conversations. But it is maybe to say that the postmodernists got there well before us, with the framing of the Death of the Author and all that. What readers bring to it is ultimately as valid in terms of lived experience as whatever the author may or may not have “intended,” perhaps more.
What role would that leave then the writer/author/whateverer in this landscape? I think it leaves us as rather more of the same as what we’ve always been (even when we factor AI in as part of the creative process): the writer as the “first reader” able to forge ahead upon the blank page, merely leaving a trail for the next reader to follow with their own baggage.
Primus inter pares is a Latin phrase meaning first among equals. It is typically used as an honorary title for someone who is formally equal to other members of their group but is accorded unofficial respect, traditionally owing to their seniority in office.
Interesting to think of the writer as a kind of “office holder” over a work, and an office that is in many ways honorary, as the peers in this group are all the other reader/writers who paint their own meaning over it all anyway regardless.
Absolutely loved this video interview by Daily Grail with Joseph Matheny, multi-disciplinary artist & creator of the hyperreal conspiracy alternate-reality game precursor, Ong’s Hat. (According to this video, he was also apparently involved in the early John Titor time travel storytelling.)
Back in the olden days of blogging and counter-culturing, I was only ever peripherally aware of Ong’s Hat, never having delved too deeply into it, but this video resonated with me very strongly in more ways than one, as much of my own personal and collaborative work has followed a rather similar course especially these last ten years or so with Early Clues, LLC, Liminal Earth (where I was an early ‘silent partner’), the QuatriaConspiracy (see also) and the now 120 volumes of AI Lore books which have built extensively on those multiverses as a backdrop.
I especially appreciated Joseph & Greg from Daily Grail’s candid takes on how the artistic blurring of real & fictional elements can be and has been extensively abused through parallel dark manifestations such as QAnon (though I passionately hate the term “bad actors”).
I also really liked what Matheny says about making niche art for “sixty-four people,” which is something I’ve increasingly come back to these past few years especially. We’re taught by social media that we have to chase likes and traffic, when really that kind of chase leads to shitty soulless art and obsession with all the wrong things in life. So it was nice to hear how closely Matheny’s experiences of this territory have paralleled my own. There was so much good stuff in this video that I almost feel like I need to go back and watch it again, as it was like getting a brain dump from someone who could see inside my head and my life.
This book tells the story of an anchorite monk in medieval times who witnesses a strange meteorite fall from the sky, and retrieves it, only to discover that it is able to communicate with him. He believes it to be the Voice of God, and he dutifully transcribes its teachings first into a magical manuscript, or grimoire, called The Calculnomicon (see: Lovecraft’s Necronomicon). And then later, he uses its teachings to build a powerful primitive computing device called the Spirit Computer (loosely inspired by the Antikythera Mechanism), which includes a viewer called the Hagioscope, through which he believes he can see the Eye of God.
It happens often enough that the idea for one of these books is first formulated when a title pops into my head. In this case, it was the phrase “spirit computer,” which subsequently sprouted into a more complex idea as it gathered steam and linked up with other concepts. There are antecedent ideas from other volumes which fed into this one, such as those found in The Artilect, and I believe also in The Survivors, where advanced AIs in the future send back small computing devices into the past which grant enormous wisdom to their finders. The present volume rehashes some of those ideas, but reformulates the origins to be wrapped up in a far future event called the Hologram Wars, and the explosion of a literal “time bomb” that leaves hyperdense intelligent matter fragments scattered across past and future time periods.
The art in this one is noteworthy in part because much of it made use of Midjourney’s relatively recent style tuner (which I wish had better UX, but hey) in order to get some faux-medieval art vibes, which I think came out pretty good and sometimes fairly believable overall. There are also some Dalle3 contributions in this one as well. Here is the preview art:
There’s more to say about this, as there is with every volume, but that’s the major stuff off the top of my head. It has been a whirlwind last few weeks finishing off this one, Anxietopia, another kid’s book, a new basket, and issue number 5 of a rebooted homebrew underground newspaper I started in 2022 called The Algorithm, which I have hand-printed in the past exclusively for close friends, but which I may experiment with offering for sale as a physical edition through Gumroad as well after the holiday.
Anxietopia is the 119th volume in the AI Lore Books series. It is in many ways sort of a shorter spiritual successor of Conspiratopia, the book that started much of this worldbuilding in the first place. They at least exist in the same imagined universe, where inscrutable AIs run people through bizarre scams and experiments and social control games to shape human society into some ideal-to-AIs outcome.
In this one, a user of the WorryWatts system has a chaotic falling out with consensus reality when his personal stress energy harvesting system goes haywire.
One thing that the current batch of LLMs especially suck at is tight control and sudden flips and dips in tone, nested, double, and triple meanings, until you don’t know which end is up anymore. That kind of weirdness has been bred out of all the commercial ones at least. You can get it with some of the free ones occasionally if the stars and nebulous spirits are aligned while you feed it material for completions. But for the kinds of high-wire twists and turns in tones and registers that I consider intrinsic to the Conspiratopia style, it’s just not possible to pack all those punches into largely AI-driven text, so a lot of this is heavily human-first, with strong hands on changes where its human second.
There’s a certain amount of VOMISA style semantic drift and deformation, which is a topic I want to get into separately another time, but it’s more dialed down and readable for the most part, with a more or less discernible narrative storyline, and even dare I say an ending, which is rare for these. Albeit it is very open-ended nonetheless. I liked what someone said once long ago about my original blog incarnation, something about my writing to the effect of “he doesn’t make it easy on the reader” – and I hope that is true, and mostly in the right cases still, in these current AI-enabled explorations and world-building thunks.
Preview art for this one below. There are a lot of advertising style images in this volume, which feels like it amplifies and offsets the crazed narrator vibe that permeates through the rest as their reality breaks down, yet marketing slogans remain.
In many ways, I would have liked to have had the time to go through and spend as much time exploring this pocket-universe of Anxietopia, as I did its forebear, which took about six weeks to write, and is about five or six times the length of this one. But there are a lot of things I’m juggling, and projects I’m getting out the door all at once right now.
Nothing precludes me from one day coming back to this or any of my AI Lore volumes, and making them better, longer, a different form or direction, etc. I doubt I will, but it’s always a door I leave open in my mind, that in the future, these will take different forms than they take now. That this is still just the earliest stages of this new intertextual hyperreal narrative mode emerging… using and subverting the old forms while the new are born…
The word “wex” is a neologism but an Early Clues, LLC oldie dating back to at least 2014, and making another appearance according to casual Gimgle web searches in 2015’s Reading From the Book of Anthuor. I’m not sure I’d categorize either of those texts as “canonical” to Early Clues, but that itself is a hard thing to define that I won’t get bogged down in right now.
Though neither EC reference is completely comprehensible, they do offer insights into the evolution of the concept though, in that we see both a symbolic identification of the wex as being part of the Quatrian meta-divinity Matarax’s fabled web, but also cryptic statements such as the following:
RELATIONAL WEXES ARE THE LINKS BETWEEN COMPONENTS IN A FIELD.
So it seems clear that in my own imaginarium at least, wex has for some time – as a variant of “web” – indicated the connections, links, and relationships between things. A web of connections, often external.
That’s a long convoluted lead up to saying that I had this epiphany last week while working on a flat reed basket that has to do with the web and intertextuality. How the entire nature of the web is one vast intertextual fabric… where each “text” (to use the term expansively in a post-modernisty way) is shaped by and in turn shapes other texts to which it is linked.
There’s a quote/concept/paraphrase I first encountered via Cory Doctorow’s work, but which apparently dates to 2018 & Tom Eastman, that the web is basically just five giant websites, each one containing screenshots of the other four. Texts referencing other texts, passed back and forth, ad infinitum. From which, somehow, meaning is somehow woven, though that meaning may be highly variable depending on the viewer and their point of view, cultural context, and frame of references.
I guess I’d always thought prior to that about the web in terms of documents. Accounts. Feeds. Posts. The language of web publishing, and later social media. But I’d always thought of those artifacts, those things posted and accounts doing the posting as somehow discrete and separate analytical units. Yes, a user might have many posts on a topic. Or a document might explicitly hyperlink out to others. But it never struck me with such profundity that the web is one vast intertextual thing…
Where things reference other things – or are blocked from doing so by things like logins and paywalls. Gates (and gatekeepers) of all kinds and toll booth after toll booth erected on the information superhighway. Each with their hand out, asking for ransom to explore and find out more.
Wexes, then, become a kind of short had for this intertextuality, this deep inter-linking and cultural cross-referencing, this enmeshing and embedding holistically in socio-technical contexts… it’s a weave. That’s what struck me. It’s all woven together. Narratives. SEO. Propaganda. Fiction. Conspiracy theories. Hyperreality. History. Wexwork. An attempt to manipulate the warp and the weft, to pull things into or out of awareness and consequently existence and memory…
Generative AI too, it struck me, is entirely intertextual. Training data literally composed of other texts, analyzed for connections, boiled down into a slurry which can shoot or spew out new combinations from it. Deeply atomically interwoven intertextuality going in the direction of but perhaps even past Jaron Lanier’s call for a ‘Talmudic’ AI, where different and concordant opinions from a multiplicity of sources are discoverable and discussable… An intentionally intertextual AI, not unlike what I described in my fictional Continuity Codex, composed of all the knowledge of all the world’s libraries, accessible via thumb drive.
Anyway, these are big thoughts, which I guess is why it’s taken close to 10 years to understand what I have been just intuitively feeling out the shape of with my fingers in a dark underground chamber previous to this, and why being able to bring it into light – up out of the Hypogeum, if you will – feels so significant…
1) A web of connections, especially external connections – literally an external webor linkon such a web.
2) A dynamic array of intersecting threads or elements, forming a complex network of connections and relationships;
3) The intersections or spaces between intersections of such an array.
In weaving, the neologism ‘wex’ might denote the crisscrossing arrangement of vertical and horizontal elements (and the empty spaces between) that gives rise to the texture and pattern of a woven object.
In memetics, it symbolizes the dense web of connections “woven” around a meme: such as its its intended and possible meanings and interpretations, related cultural references and contexts, online social interactions, and intertextual links through which memes evolve and spread, weaving together the fabric of digital culture.
As much as I think it’s a fun sort of thing to explore within the context of dystopian fantasy, I’m not really into the whole let’s pretend it’s real “existential risk” fantasy football around AI. That’s because I’m not that worried about runaway AIs going rogue. I’m more afraid of AI companies simply accruing too much power and it becoming less and less possible to unwind it. It’s part of what drove me to writing the AI TOS.
I am very much on the “public option” team when it comes to AI development, which is why I appreciated most of the points in this Bruce Schneier article about AI & Trust:
And we need one final thing: public AI models. These are systems built by academia, or non-profit groups, or government itself, that can be owned and run by individuals.
The term “public model” has been thrown around a lot in the AI world, so it’s worth detailing what this means. It’s not a corporate AI model that the public is free to use. It’s not a corporate AI model that the government has licensed. It’s not even an open-source model that the public is free to examine and modify.
A public model is a model built by the public for the public. It requires political accountability, not just market accountability. This means openness and transparency paired with a responsiveness to public demands. It should also be available for anyone to build on top of. This means universal access.
What Schneier describes is the basis for what the most recently published AI Lore book, The Continuity Codex, is all about: libraries around the world band together to form a truly public option AI based on all their collections. And for their troubles, they are bombed into non-existence by the newly re-elected psychoticratic Hyperion Storm.
And it is for that reason that I do differ on the viability of this way of thinking, from Schneier’s piece:
…the point of government is to create social trust.
While I think there’s a role to play for governments in public AI options, if history has taught us anything, it is that rich guys buying a platform can destroy it overnight, and the same is true for hostile actors suddenly taking over, gutting, perverting or otherwise terminally weakening government institutions.
So while “creating social trust” makes sense from a default-good rational actor point of view, we should not assume that the mechanisms intended to do that will not be subverted in the future, and be put to far worse ends, creating a dark reflection of something that can no longer be considered “trust.”
To the extent a government improves the overall trust in society, it succeeds. And to the extent a government doesn’t, it fails.
Tell that to Hyperion Storm!
Which is not to knock Schneier’s primary point: that public options (plural) are needed – they absolutely urgently are. We just need to be careful too what kinds of swords we hand governments in this situation as well. If we’re potentially making a category error thinking of AIs/corporations as “friends” because of their relationality as modes of interactions, we might also be making a grave error thinking that because governments have been trustworthy more or less so far, that they will continue to be… Signs around the world seem to indicate the contrary, and I’m becoming more and more nervous about the speed and suddenness of rate of decay.
Which is not to say the League of Earth Libraries should not build the Continuity Codex! It absolutely must! There isn’t a minute to waste! As the motto of the Inter-Library Intelligence Network (clandestine branch of the LEL) famous say: Scientia omnia vincit!
As according to ChatGPT, which I am grilling on intertextuality, the internet, and gen AI (hint: it’s intertextuality all the way down!):
The selection and interpretation of AI-generated content can also be a creative and authorial act. The curator or interpreter plays a role in deciding which outputs are meaningful or relevant, and how they should be presented or understood.
