Dancing in the Technology Rain

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(Edited)

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Above is a new piece of AI art. It was seeded with the original watercolor painting below and the phrase 'dancing in the technology rain.' I initially made it just to play with NightCafe's new stable diffusion algorithm, but the results are cool enough that I'm tempted to mint a hi res version on Objkt as a 1/1.

All creative work is, in part, a conversation with the unconscious. My experience so far with AI art is that it contributes to this conversation in unexpected ways. Generating this art is a great exercise in letting go of control to just let the art happen. In this way, I find AI art freeing.

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Yesterday I was interviewed about my life and perspective by a professor for a class he teaches. Having never done this before, I didn't know what to expect. It went well, though I might've gone too far out into the weeds on some subjects. Hopefully I was clear enough.

To be honest, I can't imagine being a college undergrad at this moment in history. In many ways, it's a bleak moment, featuring a seemingly endless parade of escalating crises. The economy is a dumpster fire and our environmental problems are worse. I tried to acknowledge these realities without focusing on them. Instead, I tried to emphasize the incredible opportunities there are out there to take the world in a better direction.

One topic we didn't get into was 9/11. Some of the students probably weren't even born when this pivotal event happened. They definitely don't remember the rigged election of 2000. Or the antiwar protests against the Iraq invasion. They've never not had computers. Or personal phones, for that matter.

My book Small Gods of Time Travel goes way into what I might say to my own 20-year-old self if time travel were a thing. But if I were this age today, I have no idea what I'd be into. Probably all of the same stuff, but maybe also Burning man.

In the interview, I talked a bit about the power of rituals. Rituals regulate society by converting ambiguous social information into socially-recognized, binary realities. In the contemporary world, we use events like voting as a poor substitute for the kinds of public rituals that we evolved to participate in. I mentioned Rappaport but didn't explain the cybernetics of the holy.

A major point I tried to emphasize was that we're technically capable of creating a better society right now. The technology already exists to create alternatives to our unsustainable and unfair systems. All that's missing is the willingness to actually create these new systems. The willingness and the space, in both a physical and psychological sense.

Of course, all space is first and foremost economic space. All places are owned and simple existence over time requires money. Beyond the physical, the spaces we hold in our thinking can be just as contentious. Swimming in oceans of propaganda doesn't make navigating these spaces any easier.

John Robb has been recently framing our technologically-integrated social spaces as pattern matching networks. The characterization strikes me as useful. From Robb's Twitter:

  1. the pattern is blind to any info/event that doesn't fit
  2. no portion of the pattern can be questioned (since it puts the entire pattern at risk)
  3. the pattern is socially policed and protected
  4. patterns are the basis of networked tribal identity (discarding it means a loss of identity)
  5. discarding a pattern matching network means losing the ability to quickly make sense of a complex world.
  6. opposing dominant pattern matching networks is dangerous (it has consequences in the real world)
  7. dominant pattern matching networks are increasingly protected, amplified, and supported by networked corporations and the government

Like rituals, dominant pattern matching networks serve the important function of simplifying complexity. Part of how they do this involves bundling many complex issues into uncomplicated social and political positions. This issue bundling is a powerful tool of partisan politics. I wonder if there's a better way to make sense of complex social information. Or is creating a new pattern matching network the only solution available?


Read my novels:

See my NFTs:

  • Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
  • History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
  • Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.


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