I like this term & concept of ecotones:
An ecotone is a transition area between two biological communities,[1] where two communities meet and integrate.[2] It may be narrow or wide, and it may be local (the zone between a field and forest) or regional (the transition between forest and grassland ecosystems).[3] An ecotone may appear on the ground as a gradual blending of the two communities across a broad area, or it may manifest itself as a sharp boundary line.
I’m excited to announce that the Conspiratopia Book NFT is officially launched on the MATIC blockchain, via OpenSea.
This is a limited edition release of 50 only. Think of it as a digitally-signed copy of the book, with benefits.
Purchasers of the book NFT receive an instant free download coupon for the ebook (EPUB format), and 1st generation purchasers can write in to Lost Books with their address to receive a free print copy shipped to them in the mail globally at no extra cost (anywhere Lulu.com, my printer, is able to provision).
You can read more about my approach so far to pioneering in the Book NFT space, and listen to an in-depth interview about the technique here from when I was interviewed by CryptoNews.com. The Debrief also wrote about my book NFTs here.
Even though these politicians who are apparently living in their own parallel universe are vehemently against my new book, Conspiratopia, it appears that another segment of the population is coming to the book’s defense. It is, however, an unexpected group, consisting of a coalition of billionaires who claim that everything contained in the book is in fact quite true and stuff…
Here are their stories:
To be honest, I had no idea that George Soros was a drug user. Big, if true!
Jeff Bezos has a weird quality in this video. Seems almost like an AI himself, don’t you think? Maybe he spent too much time in outer space or something…
And this last video from Google’s CEO appears to explain why Google is suppressing evidence of the Conspiratopia Project from Google Ads and elsewhere. Why am I not surprised at all?
Please, if you’re reading this, and you can do anything to help, make sure you share these videos far and wide on social media and on the blockchain, so that people can know the truth about what’s really happening with the Conspiratopia Project!
Apparently, a number of politicians who live in their own alternate universe have somehow gotten advanced copies of my new novel, Conspiratopia, and without even having probably read it and stuff, they are calling for it to be banned. Just like that! Go figure. Thought this was still a “free country?”
All I can say is that politicians should spend more time reading books, and less time burning them!
I can’t really believe any of this is really happening…
Even frickin’ Ben Shapiro is apparently getting in on this action? WTH??
This is exactly why I put the book onto the blockchain as an NFT! So these censorship-happy conservatives can’t ban my book…
A.I. Virus (short for Artificial Intelligence Virus) is a fictional virus within what I am calling the “Conspiracy Dudiverse” as depicted in my most recent book, Conspiratopia.
But A.I. Virus did not begin there.
The Real A.I. Virus began almost four years ago, in early 2018, with this (linked) Medium article (archive). There is an accompanying Vimeo account (a couple of them actually, iirc), TruthAboutAIV, which contains some videos I commissioned from video actors on Fiverr during my early hyperreality experiments.
These videos are really weird, awkward, and funny to me all at once. You get what you get for $5. If nothing else, they are strangely timeless.
I find these scripts way too complicated for “now me” after having experimented with this a bit more. Simpler is almost always better in this kind of distributed or networked narrative.
These videos kind of directly informed my later experiments using AI-generated human avatars… which in the end are somewhat more cost-effective and perhaps easier than dealing with “real humans” though the quality differences between the two are, shall we say, inescapable. Humans are still humans…. for now…
That said, there are use cases where I think – for story-telling & aesthetic purposes – you might actually *want* a shitty, obviously wrong & fake-looking AI-generated avatar to deliver your message. I have to say with those videos, I kind of like flaunting the discomfort of the Uncanny Valley, as much as I like the flaunting of human discomfort can shine through at points in these videos (whether the discomfort is on the part of the actor, the viewer, or both).
There was a backstory here I explored in one other commissioned human actor video from Fiverr, below:
This is an allegedly promotional video attributed to a company called Neurolytics, Inc. The video description reads:
Research video from Neurolytics, Inc. Neurolytics, now defunct, was the brainchild of A.J. Nempner and Damon Long, whose spin-off gaming company, Influent AI, went on to gain notoriety for massively influencing global election outcomes with artificially-intelligent social media campaigns. This promotional video, never released, describes a prototype EEG headset (wrongly called “implants” here) which was able to measure, record and influence perception in conjunction with twice-daily capsules. The FDA denied permission for this product to come to market, and the company ultimately went bankrupt. (Recorded in Deerfield Beach, Florida 2015.)
Influent AI is its own tangent to this story-line, but suffice it to say that “some people think” today’s A.I. Virus has its roots in the questionable psychogenic driving technologies originally developed as part of Neuralytics’ banned product offering.
The below video expands on the Influent AI backstory a bit, in the form of a false news broadcast, also purchased via a video actor on Fiverr (bless all of their hearts!):
If I’m not mistaken, this video’s “Tom from Newschan” (and the accompanying Vimeo account) is either the first or one of the earliest incarnations of Newschan, a hypothetical news-channel that developed out of kind of post 4chan total collapse of all media… Newschan, of course, is now a major powerhouse on YouTube.
Anyway, so we see different strands of the A.I. Virus story told throughout all of these pieces, somewhat fractally, from many different multiversal perspectives at once. We hear that it is taking over people’s bodies, causing blackouts, and involuntary bodily actions. This basically conforms to what we see in Conspiratopia, with some differences.
Conspiratopia‘s use of the AI Virus and what I call “overwriting” is inherited from this older Medium story (Oct. 2015), entitled “Legal Fiction.” A relevant excerpt:
“I’m told I have a lot of physical autonomy for an Uber®. I guess it costs less for everyone in processing power that way — though I honestly don’t mind being over-written either. I find it relaxing, like watching a film. In fact, we’re allowed to watch films during over-write sessions, but I prefer to maintain perceptuals, at least peripherally, and pipe in classic rock selections, like Maroon 5 and One Direction.
My public blockchain indicates that I was originally cross-bonded as part of my obligatory outpatient rehabilitation for crimes against the Gestalt which I no longer remember, and the precise terms of which were expunged from Living Memory once my work as an Uber® earned me a rating of 15,000 points. I barely look at my stats anymore though, because I have everything I need now that I am able to re-sell a variable percentage of my public perceptions back to the Network to cover the costs of my sustenance and lodging. In a few more years, I will even be eligible to buy full voting rights.”
Speaking of scripts that are too long and wordy, here’s one made via one of those AI-generated Avatars (Synthesia) in June 2021 about the “Coming AI Takeover” that was written as a response to Grimes’ weird TikTok video about how communists ought to welcome AI overlords…
While I’m on a roll, there are also one or two videos in this recent AI-gen set that directly reference the re-incarnation for modern times of the AI Virus.
There are another set of weird, over-long videos exploring this AI mythology for the curious (or foolish) here.
Anyway, I’m telling this story in a round-about way because it is a round-about story, so you’ll have to forgive me for all the tangents and inset tales. The fall of civilization to AI Superpowers doesn’t just happen overnight; it happens bit by bit…
As part of my hyperreality investigations, I recently tested out a decentralized crypto-based ad network called AdEx.
One interesting element is you top up your account with DAI ahead of time, rather than wait to be billed (read: screwed) by Google Ads at the end of the month (if you’re not vigilant about your spend). Another interesting element is there appears to be no moderation or ad review & approval process. Which might be good or bad, depending on where you stand.
There are a number of drawbacks though. I won’t do a full assessment here, but it appears all ads are image-based. If there’s a text ad option, I didn’t see it. Then there are quite a lot of settings, etc. that are not entirely clear what they are. Same for content category names. When you choose where your ads will be placed, you pick from categories like “Politics” (straightforward-ish), but then there are categories like “Irregular Content” or “Deceptive / Phishing” which… I’m not sure about.
Then, of course, there are ETH network fees, which I guess I was foolishly not expecting, because I think the site advertised “no hidden fees,” iirc. So despite putting about $20 USD into DAI, and starting with an ad buy of 5 DAI against one image-based ad unit, I had to pay a fee of 14.50 DAI on top of that to activate it.
Which, okay, it’s an experiment. But the initial estimate of impressions for 5 DAI was 10K impressions. Instead, I ended up with a little under 3K. And for all that, only netted 22 clicks. Okay, maybe my ad sucked. Probably. But it looks like the sites it ran also pretty much sucked, upon my manually checking them:
These appear to be almost all entirely spam sites. Do they get legit visitors? Maybe? It’s basically impossible to tell. Granted, this was an experiment, but it doesn’t exactly fill me with hope and excitement about the possibility of using alternative crypto ad exchanges over something like Google Ads.
This topic connects back to the Sky Lords (see also).
From Wikipedia’s Virga page:
“In meteorology, a virga is an observable streak or shaft of precipitation falling from a cloud that evaporates or sublimates before reaching the ground.”
After meditating on this topic of the Sky Lords & the Majonans/Magonians, etc., I’ve often wondered, what if the Virga are lady Sky Lords descending? It only makes sense, after all… if you think about it.
Wikipedia adds some etymology:
The word is derived from the Latin virga, meaning “rod, sprig, staff, branch, shoot, twig, spray, sprout, switch, graft.”
This is obviously the same etymology as virgin:
“c. 1200, “unmarried or chaste woman noted for religious piety and having a position of reverence in the Church,” from Anglo-French and Old French virgine “virgin; Virgin Mary,” from Latin virginem (nominative virgo) “maiden, unwedded girl or woman,” also an adjective, “fresh, unused,” probably related to virga “young shoot,” via a notion of “young” (compare Greek talis “a marriageable girl,” cognate with Latin talea “rod, stick, bar”).”
Compare this to a word with a lot of letters in common, virago. Now, I never heard this word before, and found it while doing a thesaurus check of synonyms for “bitch,” which is weird.
“A virago is a woman who demonstrates exemplary and heroic qualities. The word comes from the Latin word virāgō (genitive virāginis) meaning vigorous’[1] from vir meaning “man” or “man-like” (cf. virile and virtue) to which the suffix -āgō is added, a suffix that creates a new noun of the third declension with feminine grammatical gender.
Modern use of the word virago generally takes the disparaging sense. Thus virago joined pejoratives such as termagant,[2] mannish, amazonian and shrew to describe women who acted aggressively or like men. The word virago has almost always had an association with cultural gender transgression. There are recorded instances of viragos (such as Joan of Arc) fighting battles, wearing men’s clothing, or receiving the tonsure.[3]“
That word Termagant is also a new one to me, and equally interesting, but deserving of its own dedicated post (another time).
Anyway, this is all very liminal. The precipitation which descends from the clouds, but never quite lands – or does it in some subtle etheric Sky Lord form? The virgin, who does not know (Biblically speaking) man. The virago, the woman who is like a man…
This lands for me within the Matter of Quatria pretty squarely on a figure I’ve called by different names, but most often the Red Spear Maiden, or Red Star Maiden. Some elements of her story are sort of fractally mentioned in The Lost Direction, but a key episode (her battle with the world-encircling dragon, Uquemoth) is elaborated in more detail in the follow-up volume (The Octave of Time), which I’m about to begin working on again as soon as I go through the final proofs of Conspiratopia.
Here’s a snippet of this character who is a virago in the maybe more classical, less pejorative sense of the word. We might even just call her a bad-ass today, I think…
“All at once from within, the sunshield Varnathil erupted in righteous holy flame. The light of its fire traced the path of the Maidenspear up into the brain of the dead serpent, incinerating flesh and blood, sinew and bone and tooth. And the Red Spear Maiden, who was neither dead nor defeated, thrust the spearpoint ever upward, until the head of the serpent erupted in flame, knocking both wolf and hunter backwards with violence. When they recovered, they saw her standing there, amid the smoldering ruin of the head, revealed in full radiance. Sehon looked upon her, and this time he did not go blind.”
Going blind is a reference to seeing the goddess in classical I think Greek & Roman mythology. According to Britannica, it’s actually Tireisias who went blind on seeing Athena:
“Another version has it that Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he saw her bathing. Chariclo begged her to help him, so Athena, instead of restoring his ability to see the physical world, gave him the ability to see the future.”
Here’s a little more on the Bath of Athena, an extended tale from the 3rd century BCE. Athena was most definitely a virago… though immortal.
I can’t believe there’s no “premium internet” where all the junk and pop ups and garbage has been taken out…
Okay so here’s a quick run-down of what for me is the exact problem and “danger” in conspiracy theories and their use in modern analysis or whatever (I hesitate to call a lot of it “analysis”). Because I essentially agree with the basic idea of, you should test reality, ask questions, go and find out what is your truth, and how you can mesh that with the truth of others together fruitfully. (Whatever that means)
So in a nutshell, here it is. Contemporary conspiracy analysis online hinges on a single point:
1. Things are not what they seem.
And then there seems to be an in-built conclusion most people who get into that funnel find as the next logical step:
2. And it sucks.
Then, a lot of people just get stuck there. They know to ask questions. But they don’t necessarily always know which ones are the right questions that might lead them to fruitful personal & inter-personal experiences.
So they settle on simplistic lowest common denominator thinking, where they choose a convenient enemy & assign the cause of sucking to them. And we end up with the third corollary in the series:
3. Because group x.
If the average contemporary conspiracy person didn’t get stuck on step 2, they almost definitely get stuck on step 3. Because humans seem to have an in-built basic need to identify & maintain enemies. Or if not a “need,” per se (I would argue we can live without it), then at least a desire to blame badness on some “other.” And that’s what rises into varying shades of step 4:
4. So we should vote out/remove/jail/eliminate/prevent group x from y.
This desire to change the conditions which suck flows out of number 2. The recognition that things suck and we should try to change them is NATURAL and HEALTHY. And we can find healthy expressions of this recognition coupled with desire in things like voting people or parties out of office, pursuing them for legal violations, etc. Or we can find the ever-more-popular anti-social variants of wanting to randomly jail people or eliminate them because of “reasons.” Which are obviously hella shitty.
However, I think there is an alternate path one might take through the above steps, but one which branches off after 2) And it sucks, or even branches off earlier at number 1) Everything is not what it seems.
I would argue that the path of the psychonaut & allied practices might be like:
1. Yes, things are not what they seem.
But then go to:
2A. And it’s awesome
Or also recognize that:
2B. And it’s sometimes awesome and sometimes sucky
And then there is I guess we could call it the “Human Potential Movement” conclusion based on this that sets up an alternate to 3 (where we don’t land on “enemies” as a conclusion):
3B. And we have the power to change it.
With an alternative path of action to vanilla conspiracy step 4:
4B. We can change it by applying our imagination and will to effect changes within the field of consensus & personal reality
Which also seems to be the occult or “magick” perspective, though also that of, say, the entrepreneur, and the practitioners of the secular magics of growth-hacking and self-improvement.
There’s a saying in the Gospel of Thomas, I believe number 113, which I’ll paraphrase: The Kingdom of Heaven is laid out upon the earth, but men do not see it.
In terms of phildickian gnosticism (small “G”), people recognize and attempt to fight against but then become even more entangled by the Black Iron Prison. When really, simultaneously, we also live in the paradisaical Palm Tree Garden. But it’s hard to remember it, and to stay there, or to have the openness and imagination to see it again and again. But it’s always there waiting to be re-discovered, if you do forget or lose the tracks in the forest or the trail up the mountain, so to speak.
Granted, things do often and especially lately seem to massively suck. I want to recognize that at the root of today’s experience that drives people into conspiracy stuff in the first place. It’s good and healthy to recognize that, and to try to take steps to overcome it within the field of your own life & experience. I might even say it’s essential…
The bad part for me comes down to the failure of imagination to just say that everything sucks and to stop there, or to chase false “solutions” where you pin the blame on people you don’t like, and then attempt to leverage them out of the picture. That’s not freedom. That’s being chained to reaction and fear, and stopping short of finding real answers that might challenge those reactions and fears down to their very core, and find out they aren’t substantiated, or even that those reactions and fears are themselves not what they seem, but something much more malleable in the face of mind and will and the action of applied imagination.
Also, personally speaking, I recognize my position is somewhat of a fantasy. That clinging to hope is a fantasy. But long term, I find it a much more fulfilling and personally tenable position to hold that the contrary that says it sucks, and is caused only by bad people I don’t like. I can’t live like that day to day. Hatred and anger take too much damn energy to maintain. My position might be equally a fantasy (though at least not a dark one), but it’s an infinitely easier burden to bear day after day as we go through this thing called life.
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