When traditional lines of authority and justification come into dispute, some take to using the approving nods of low-information mobs as a source of validation for their positions and tactics. The core of this approach is a “we are asserting we hold the correct position, and hope to do so long enough to ensure it becomes the common sense concerning a thing. When a matter is actually a subject of common sense this is fine, but when it is a matter requiring specialized knowledge to navigate and assess, this turn to the uninformed for validation is a betrayal of the body of knowledge you seek authority from. Even further, this does an incredible amount of damage to the mechanism that produced this knowledge by sending the message that facility with the material is unimportant. If this happens enough, the methods that produced the core body of knowledge are neglected and are rendered inert, unable to produce new knowledge in line with itself.

One impact of this is the absolute intolerance of dissent. All detractors, even inadvertently, fundamentally undermine an authority built on improper and predatory injections into the sensus communis, attempting to rest all sorts of action on ‘well we all agree this is proper, don’t we’. Any dissent ejects it from the protective circle of the herd and back into the arena where it can be subject to scrutiny it is not likely to survive. This threat engenders a nasty sort of wailing and gnashing of teeth, a clamoring to ensure that the herd protects it from the very authority it claims to embody.

Two forms of questioning have been amplified by recent and popularly-available advances in artificial intelligence.

First is that of the merely casual inquirer. As the effort and time costs of asking questions to ‘The Internet’ falls with tools like ChatGPT coming online, this form is a result of a questioner obtaining a high level of satisfaction from asking these tools questions and to carry out tasks of low and medium complexity. Not unlike people who ask inane questions on web forums as an excuse to socialize online, you will find that this type is not terribly interested in scrutinizing the results of their query, instead taking pleasure in the novelty of the process and the pseudo-socialization. The results are taken as they are, and typically are not fed into some other process. Even if their use of these tools increases in complexity, they are stymied by a lack of interest, rigor, and follow-through. This form of questioning is comfortable and there is little motivation to move beyond it.

Second is that of the ever-suspicious internet warrior. They are typically a veteran of internet fora where earnest intellectual sparring was the norm, even if such sparring was mixed with an equal measure of supremely juvenile and rude humor. Counterfeiting information, with images and text, with the expectation that peers would call it out, was part of the core social grammar in these circles. This helped participants build a fine sense for detecting fake and incorrect information, raised the bar for participating in conversation, and get a sense of how garbage content could be generated and abused.

As previously mentioned, AI-powered information generation reduces the time and effort required to create nonsense to virtually nil. Further, the ability of these tools to seamlessly compose1 with existing or new existing software means that adversarial information campaigns can be launched with relatively little labor. The ever-suspicious internet warrior immediately recognizes the threat. Having had their own fora ruined by griefers2 and likely having ruined fora themselves, they see how not only private spaces but also the public commons can become flooded with machine-generated plausible-sounding nonsense. Given the incredible computational mismatch between generating nonsense and refuting it — the latter is the most costly here, especially as the count increases — participants must develop heuristics for effectively sorting through media and determining what is worth considering seriously and what should be cast aside.

As people refine their heuristics for separating the content wheat from the chaff, it is inevitable that that much content produced by our flesh-and-blood fellows will be judged as falling short. And I think that as the signal-to-noise ratio for media online worsens, so too will the aggression of the heuristics in use. Heaps and heaps of human-generated content will be deemed “sub-ChatGPT” and dismissed.3

And this is fine. I am most interested in the ramifications of this trend on human creative life. Effectively, this raises the bar for human creativity and analysis, with respect to both soundness of concept and the ability to push beyond the abilities of mere machinic creativity. Membership in a creative peer group that can scrutinize your work with a critical eye has always been important for creatives, and the present issue only increases its worth. Every member of such a group needs to be able to readily identify (sub-)machinic creativity and push the entire cohort beyond it. They need to be able to judiciously incorporate machinic creativity in their their process, as well as create spaces where human mastery of human skills is encouraged and put on display. I expect the return of the viva voce format in both academic (exams) and informal settings (salons). I expect for clarity in speech and writing to become prized as signs of intelligence and genius, as they expose the person and their work to scrutiny of their cohort4 — hiding beyond sheer volume is a feature of machinic creativity.

Human creativity must be accelerated past the creativity of machines. And consistently so.

Subscribe now

The points made in this interview hung on the wall of my mind like an activated siren, and later, in a moment of reflective clarity, they helped me realize the character of one of my most anti-creative impulses: a slight aversion to media I sense are good for me, my intellect, and my spirit.

Subscribe now

Though to be clear, I see this aversion as relatively slight. But it is there. It is there and if I were to be honest with myself I would recognize that its aggregate impact over time has been nontrivial. I will gladly slog through difficult texts and pore over sinewy passages with a partner -- this genre of task I have little issue with. But it is those texts whose reputations and physical manifestations give an aura of "I will demand a deep change within you once you Know me" that I have found myself most averse to.

But why? Is it a fear that an improved knowledge of my duties to self, intellect, and community will result in increased obligation, and in turn expose me to increased punishment should I miss the mark? Yes, I think this is the core of it. Here, my spirit echoes the reluctant prophet Jonas, who found himself in spiritual turmoil and a literal tempest as he avoided his heavenly mandate to prophesy to the city of Nineveh. I know what is good and I avoid it for no good reason. The only way to end this storm of the heart and of the circumstance is to turn towards the light and launch myself headlong into it.

While identifying an issue does not mean one has solved it3, I hope this exploration has helped me define the contours of this tumor so that I can continue the process of excising it completely. My life goals require me to magnify and orchestrate every virtue I have, and I must lean into my good sense and follow its dictates if I am going to have any chance of success. My good instinct cannot be ignored. In sharing this hope that readers are better equipped to listen to their own good instincts.

Subscribe now

To help these decent people rise and answer the heretic2, generative AI can be used in the creation of responsive digital twins3 of commentators and pundits who are the best examples of the behavior described above. This can be coupled with commentaries aimed to prime trainees to rapidly identify and counter abusive rhetoric wherever it may arise. Decent people, as a function of their decency, are generally not equipped to effectively deal with those who will rip into scoffing condescension, gish galloping, and barefaced lying at the barest prompting. To be effective in the coming years, intellectuals will need to be able to navigate the worsening ‘public conversation’ in order to rise above the fray and be heard. Rhetoric cannot be ignored if you are trying to reach people, and we need to adapt to the evolving landscape.

I often think about how advances in technology can service human intellectual and social life. I often think about how technology can be used to create more effective intellectuals at a faster rate, trained with novel tooling in the traditional subjects and competencies. And to be exceedingly explicit, I believe that training students is more important to me than equipping. One of my biggest criticisms of the use of technology to bolster intellectual life is that it becomes an end unto itself, grabbing the attention and vitally of students rather than enabling them to go off into the world and progress towards ambitious goals. I want to condition their intellects for the evolving world rather than hand them a tool that must be carried around and painstakingly looked after.

I will be its first customer.

Subscribe now

Fractured attention begets fractured solutions, and they will drown you over time. Despite the copious amounts of ink, pixels, and breath spent denying this simple fact, the cognitive and ergetic impacts of continuous distraction are massive and have persistent deleterious effects on workers and businesses as a whole.

Pre-dawn troubleshooting of issues flagged by your alerting system and days full of distractions by coworkers, “emergencies”, and every communication app under the sun make it easy to forget the value of focus and the methods of its cultivation. Simone Weil, in a letter to unruly schoolchildren1, elevates focused attention to the prime object of school studies, directly connecting the increased ability to focus with an enhanced ability to direct devotional action towards God. I suggest here that there are parallels to this with technical work, and that adopting Weil’s stance can help turn dehumanizing work towards God.

The most remarkable irony of the Dune universe is found in how a civilization that waged total war on computers and enforced a complete ban on their use winds up turning large swathes of humanity into living computers. Several monastic castes have developed their own preternatural disciplines for cultivating the ability to do some sorts of computation by their disciples, but the caste that interests me the most is that of the guild navigator. These humans, in their pursuit of the ability to pilot the ships that are the backbone of interstellar commerce, have turned themselves into living grotesques as they force their bodies and mind to handle literally inhuman workloads. They are well enumerated for their labor, but we need to ask: how much can done with such a body, confined to a tank designed to fulfill their inhuman nutritional needs?

Sometimes, after I escape the thrall of troubleshooting some difficult technical problem, I feel like this guild navigator. Slowly warping my mind in pursuit of narrow goals I don’t share, and perhaps using the best cognitive years of my life to ensure that the backbone of commerce can continue to flow and be utilized effectively.

I must ask, is there a better way?

Subscribe now

“But HC”, you might be thinking, “how can you go on about the deforming hyperfocus of guild navigators, and yet go on about distraction? Exactly what point are you trying to make?”, and you would be precisely on the nose. And I would answer: I must envy the guild navigator. I must envy the guild navigator because unlike the case of most technologists in 2023, the goal of his computation is clear, the process well-practiced, his work dealing with the material world, and his work is distraction free as a hard requirement. Almost like a pure function — taking inputs and emitting outputs. If one must render themselves a machine, at least let it be one that operates as close to the fabric of existence as possible, and not one that must ceaselessly sift through mounds and mounds of unskilled complexity and mess, eventually forced to embody the mess as a means of more effectively dealing with it, forced to enter flow states to deal with dreck, until it coats their psyche and their intellect and their spirit…

I realize that the things I care most about doing in this life will require persistent and elevated focus, virtue, and performance. I know from direct experience the seductive power of saying to yourself “oh I’ll just put in the hours, so what” or “yes I’m distracted and yes this work is unfulfilling and yes I’m not pushing pushing myself, but I’m collecting paychecks and once this is done I’ll shape up”. The reality is, just as Weil told those schoolboys, every moment is an opportunity to build virtue. Weil specifically mentions the virtue of attentive focus, but I say that extending this stance to all virtues is fidelitous to her worldview. Weil has helped me to realize that every moment can be transformed into preparation to serve God. Even further, owing to the characteristics of virtuous cycles, building focus begets focus, as you are better able to arrive at and execute technical abstractions that relieve you from toil, instead of adding it.

The habits that build focus, focus itself, and the constant relation of my actions towards my professed (and hopefully embodied) desire to devote my life to God, can help protect me against the dehumanizing forces of technological work.

Subscribe now

Let love be borne of Love;

⠀⠀

Let me race into the arms of my Beloved

Leaving a wake of luck and good cheer

Let love be borne of Love

⠀⠀

“Let love be borne of Love” I say to myself

As I push on further into the fray,

Seeking the sublime I pray

“Let love be borne of Love”

⠀⠀

Chasing without reservation,

and making utmost haste

let the grace I give earthly darlings

reflect my Beloved’s face.

The Beauty of Mycelia

The familiar mushroom caps that we see in the forest or enjoy as a part of succulent meal are just fruiting bodies of a much more complex and subtle organism. Mushrooms, for significant portion of their life cycle, are predominately occupied with impregnating their host site with root-like mycelia, which are responsible for the discovery and digestion of food matter, and for the absorption and transport of nutrients. Only when this myceliar matrix is robust enough does the mushroom start sprouting its mushroom caps, where it generates and disseminates its spores. This typically happens after some environmental shock, for instance a torrential downpour of rain, or the hammerstrike of a mushroom farmer.

This is the basis for one of my favorite naturalistic metaphors. I think it captures excellently the dynamic that creates productive communities that are able to access higher forms of achievement. The metaphor captures how success is not found all at once, but is the product of slow and consistent development along subtle dimensions, not necessarily visible by all. As such communities develop through the absorption of spiritual and material nutrients, and engage in the refinement of the same, it becomes able to both host and generate an explosive outgrowth of functionality, insight, and beauty, and ascend to a higher stage of operation.

A concrete example of this a certain class of religious community — Jewish and Muslim examples come to my mind most strongly — where the faith of its members and a popular facility with its core rituals allow for the self-organization of devotional communities wherever the faithful are found. Here, the developed inner spiritual life among individuals and their connections God and fellow devotees represents mycelia, and the fruiting bodies are holy communities dedicated to the worship of God.

Intimacy Against Parasocialization

It is not novel to comment that the internet, and in particular the current iteration of social media, encourages shallow forms of socialization, study, and intellection. What precisely can be done about this? Previously I have discussed studying pairs (SPs) and the benefits they confer, and here I would like extend to discussion of its benefits.

I have found that the intellectual intimacy developed by repeated one-on-one study with full focus on the material at hand and the shared mission of understanding it develops a trust between people that is difficult to develop otherwise. While this is not an explicit goal, over the course of intense study — particularly of humanistic texts — it is natural to relate the shared object of study to aspects of one’s own life. These reflections give the study partner a privileged look at the other’s life, and I assert that in this mode of communication, artifice cannot be sustained. It will be too quickly identified as such, especially as the many-angled reflections of one’s soul can be deemed to be part of a coherent whole, or not. Beautifully — while in-person study remains ideal, I have found that internet-based communication does not significant impact these benefits.

This can serve as the bulwark and counteroffensive against the shallow parasocial relationships that the social media industry is monomaniacally invested in propagating. Instead of glancing comments and insults online, one can be engaged with other people in deep ways that develop your facility to process information in other settings. It gives you a sense of others’ souls and your own, and humanizes others. On the basis of this, I assert that if you are bent on starting an internet based movement1, regardless of whether you would like it to burst into the real world, you would do well to encourage the formation of intellectual intimacy through paired study of core texts of shared value.2

In turn, the intellectual intimacy here transforms into a sort of emotional intimacy, an emotional intimacy that develops when working in the trenches of understanding with another focused soul. These two forms of intimacy can then be the basis of a myceliar flourishing as discussed above, a project that emerges from the preparation and virtue of the network of people that will be responsible for it.

In our current age, impactful projects will require both preparation and virtue, and paired study is a technique that communities can use to ensure their stores of these qualities are never scant. Unlike mushrooms, we must develop and leverage our own social structures that enable ideological takeoff and the achievement of higher states of being. I believe this is possible.

-HC

PS: Please leave a comment mentioning a text you would love to study with a partner.

Subscribe now

Acknowledgement of the utility of dialogue crops up again and again. In the tech world, pair programming has proven useful for broaching complex problems, facilitating the transfer of expertise from seniors to juniors, and giving juniors the opportunity to question possibly-outdated assumptions that plague the industry. In religion too — learning in community is highly valued, with self-seclusion being tightly gatekept practice reserved for the spiritually and intellectually mature. Chevruta is one tradition of paired study that I am familiar with, and it is one that has given me much joy, maturity, and opportunities to form deep bonds with others.

I am actively working on a project that sets out to encourage and fund theological and cybernetic research into the nature of prophecy and its cultivation in individuals in monotheistic communities. It is natural that I bring my preference for paired study to bear here. I also think it is correct.

Fundamentally, I wish to use Studying Pairs (SPs) as a composable1 tool for generating insights, with a heap of positive effects for each member of the SP, those that inherently come with paired study. The use of machines in human-oriented situations like this should always be to accentuate the human elements, mostly commonly to aid in postprocessing of human interactions (e.g., transcription) or to prepare for human interactions (e.g., language training software). I will not displace a human with a machine; I will not have humans converse with machines as though the latter is human2 — this is an abomination. No, I want to use technology to make the intense paired study of texts composable, which in turns will allow me to introduce creative incentives for its performance, and judiciously parcel out work, and orient the whole system towards a particular research end. I wish to incorporate my and others’ intense study into a cybernetic system preordained toward a particular, higher end.

At scale, I hope this becomes the formidable research arm of a larger effort to accelerate humanity into a prophetic age.

Subscribe now

This idea came to me in an instant, and here I will disseminate it in an instant. In short:

1. A pair of people are assigned a piece of media, likely a text, to study intensely.
   They can be asked to familiarize themselves with the media beforehand, or review it jointly. If text, the ideal is that they read it aloud and stop to discuss insights, questions, and challenges along the way. Tangential conversion is encouraged, as long as it is at least obliquely oriented towards the topic at hand. Care must be taken to ensure that the Studying Pair does not feel induced to perform.3

2. Transcription.
   Automated transcription renders the conversation as text, tagged with the text that inspired the conversation.

3. Assessment and extraction.
   Human or automated agents assess the transcript and summarize key points and extract key insights generated during the conversation. This is also tagged with a reference to the associated text. This is the output.

4. Output handling.
   The output generated in the last step can be used for personal and institutional reference over the short- and long-term, or behave as an input for another component of the broader cybernetic system — either another Studying Pair or some other consumer.

The latter use of the output mentioned above is fundamentally cybernetic, resembles neurons, and holds immense potential as a unit of construction. We will be able to parallelize, compose, and collate the analyses of a variety of materials, and with judicious orchestration, we may be able to break into a new knowledge production paradigm. As stated above: oriented towards a particular end, at scale this can become an arm of a formidable research institute.

There is a lot to be said about how blockchain technology and exotic financial instruments can be used to incentivize this sort of work — I look to CFang and her art for inspiration concerning this. You will hear more from me on those lines, and you will be able to use CFang’s works as a clue about where I’m headed with this.

Subscribe now

What is playing us is God, and We WILL make it out of the near future.

In these final pages of CR, Fisher gives two recommendations for those seeking an alternative to the dismal workings of Capital and its ongoing march over the human and nonhuman spheres. His first exhortation is to have people take their mental-psychic responses to the deteriorating situation seriously, short-circuiting the impulse to individualize systemic issues and to respond with a stuporous hedonism.2 The second exhortation is to adopt a voluntary ascesis in the material realm, partly to deprive Capital a beachhead in their psyche, but primarily to refine the appetite for transformative change and cultivate an inner discipline, for both the individual and aggregate.3

Fisher ends the book with the following paragraph, communicating his hope something pierces the veil of ignorance that he understands Capital as imposing upon humanity:4

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.5

Influenced by my religious bent and my familiarity with the religious orientation generally, I read this coda and the two exhortations mentioned above as clearly pointing to a hope that an element of the Transcendent will reveal itself and Set Things Right. Following the traditional forms (perhaps inadvertently), for Fisher this possibility of Transcendent Intervention is introduced by the subordination of the material, continued reflection of one's place in the world, and committed submission to norms (known and yet-to-be-revealed) whose concerns are not bound by reference to physical objects and strictly sublunar reasoning. To be a mere materialist is to deny this avenue of redress.