03 / September 28
Degrade the Threads
“In the past this information has been suppressed / But now it can be told / Every man, woman, and mutant / On this planet shall know the truth of de-evolution”
— Devo
Topics
Cognitive offloading, second screen, blast beats, and rage rap; devolution, slurp juice, mutation, degens, and IP; enshittification; consensus reality vs. burbclaves; speedrunning, cozyweb v. bitrot, vibe coding, slop; New Memory, the wood between worlds; Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, propaganda, and public relations; the XX Committee, counterintelligence, and Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors”; social engineering, parasocial relations, mis/dis/mal/info, pentesting, redteaming; Philip K. Dick, Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Simulationism in art; Manuel DeLanda’s Philosophy and Simulation; the Simulation Hypothesis and its discontents; SCL/Cambridge Analytica, OCEAN, and captology; RenTech to NLP to LLMs; Young-Grrrl War-Machine and the Cyberfeminism Index; D&D to MUDs to MMORPGs; ARGs to dreampolitik — ong’s hat, the Beast, ilovebees, Year Zero, Cicada 3301, gamejacking, and occult memetics; Bernard Suits, C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art; Gamergate and algorithmic radicalization; APTs, opsec, exploits, zero days; the Deep Private — Black Cube, Psygroup, Palantir, Wikileaks
Readings 4
Additional Reading & Primary Documents 11
Lab
TBD — LLMs, coding with LLMs