02 / September 21

Shoggoth with a Smiley Face

“The “content” of the medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”
— Marshall McLuhan

Topics

Shoggoth with a Smiley Face; Ramon Llull, Mary Shelley, Ada Byron Lovelace, alife and code; lock in, path dependency, quasi-teleology, contingency, the Outside, and the cone of possibility; Negative Capability and the Black Box; the Rosicrucian Enlightenment and the Westphalian order; Andreessen Horowitz’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Srinivasan’s Network State, Moldbug’s SovCorp; Technocracy Inc., the Hollerith Tabulator, IBM, Howard Scott, and Joshua Haldeman; Project Phoenix, Arpanet, and the birth of the internet in counterinsurgency; the Macy Conferences; Claude Shannon’s information theory and Shannon’s Labyrinth; Basilisks — Reza’s, Roko’s, Sandifer’s; first to second order cybernetics, von Foerster, Maturana, Varela; Sozialeplastik, Neuroplastique, abstraction, and the Hack; Antimemetics — Cozyweb v. Dark Forest; the Melian Dialogue, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, war gaming to game theory to predictive algorithms; Simulmatics, scenario planning, prediction markets, and the Pentagon’s “Terror Market”; implicit vs. explicit models, modelling for explanation or prediction; W.E.B. Du Bois’ Megascope to PROMIS to Total Information Awareness to Palantir; the Nooscope, precrime, and full spectrum hegemony; Cybersyn, Project Cyberfolk and algedonic metering; how to disappear completely

Readings 4

There Is No Antimemetics Division qntm The Great Digital Fatigue: How Digital Burnout Is Changing Social Media Use Incogni Research The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet Yancey Strickler Notes on Thinking Machine Imaginaries: Llull, Leibniz, and Lovelace to ‘Shoggoth with a Smiley Face’ Scott Benzel

Additional Reading & Primary Documents 4

from Extreme Privacy: What It Takes to Disappear Michael Bazzell Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading Nadia Asparouhova Introduction, from What Should We Do With Our Brain? Catherine Malabou Life with the Artificial Anasazi Jared Diamond

Lab

TBD — introduction to Claude, GitHub, Hugging Face, et al