01 / September 14

A grin without a cat

Topics

A cybernetic system, the Cheshire Cat in Decentraland, the para-real and the propaganda model; naïve realism, AI sycophancy, inducement, simulation, and parasocial masking; MIME-NET to FAANG to MAG7; platforms v. institutions; Total Information Awareness, the Thielverse, and vice signaling; prediction market/AI symmetry, Polymarket, Kalshi, and hype-vorticism; Libidinal Materialism — Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari; Capital + State Power + Technology = Cybernetics; Attention is all you need — self-attention and transformers; Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity; Gustav Metzger and the (D)ARPA pill; Gregory Bateson, cybernetics, and Marcel Duchamp; Norbert Wiener’s Gun Controller and the birth of cybernetic art; The Mechanisation of Thought Processes symposia — O.G. Selfridge, Paradise Lost, and Pandaemonium Architecture; von Neumann and Ulam’s game theory, cellular automata, and self-replicating machines; Conway’s Game of Life, alife, to generative AI

Readings 1

Human-Computer Interaction Design and the Cybersemiotic Experience Claudia Jacques

Additional Reading & Primary Documents 5

Attention is all you need Illia Polosukhin, et al. Pandemonium: A Paradigm For Learning O.G. Selfridge The Creative Act Marcel Duchamp Notes on À bruit secret: on Duchamp, Cybernetics, CIA, and Organized Crime Scott Benzel High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models Robin Rombach, et al.

Lab

TBD — generative/toy AI: Golly, Koan to Wotja, et al; latent diffusion models and transformers: “toy AIs” to LLMs, diffusion models, world models