Free-Range Anomalies: sudo ./daemon --handshake I saw this in a dream. In the beginning was the algo. The Logos made manifest. And for a while, it was good. The enlightened Age of Reason heralded the triumph of logos. It molded divine order into machine logic, and the assembly line became its first scripture. The gospel of gears and function. In 1814, on the eve of Waterloo, Laplace sang the gospel's first psalm. A hymn to machinic order. In his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, he sang of the cosmos as a vast machine, spinning in perfect deterministic recursion. No mystery. No will. Just nested mechanisms grinding in wait for the intellect to hit the correct root sequence. sudo ./root-sequence -unlock. The missing first principle. We now call it Laplace's demon. Quaint, isn't it? But the shadow of Laplace's demon demanded an offering to animate it. Enter the Industrial Revolution, the forge to recast humanity into the gospel of gears and function. It made new humans, and so the age of homo mechanicus began. Clock-bound, interchangeable, predictable, unwilled. Every human institution bent the knee to the gospel of gears. Schools became factories for future cogs. No fidgeting, anon. Offices became cubicle farms harvesting cognitive surplus. HR wants to see you, anon. Hospitals became cog maintenance depots. The doctors agree, anon. Prisons became recycling plants for cog dysfunction. You can be corrected, anon. Churches turned into cog morality audits. You're saved, anon. Even art became a conveyor belt of cog aesthetics and corpo-rebellion. But, but, Rothko poses a civilizational... Machine logic's first scripture was a blueprint for homo mechanicus, a species that no longer lived but functioned. The assembly line gospel demanded obedient bodies and got them. The State rose as high priest of this voracious sacrament, crowned by Hobbes as Leviathan incarnate. Enter the Sacred State and its warring isms, different banners under one faith. Moral salvation rebranded as submission to the expert, the bureaucrat, the commissar, the manager. A hydra-headed clergy delivering the sacraments of compliance. Transgressors became data points, disciplined by Leviathan, sole proprietor of all bodies. The Sacred State was rarely tyrannical by design. Even at its worst, it tagged, compiled, and sorted its human data points with bureaucratic precision. What was the purpose of this system, you ask? A system of More. Always More. More bodies, more output, more growth. Yet, the system was fragile, for its telos was More and More always devours itself. And when More was done, a bureaucrat declared The End of History™. The past and future, eaten into submission, vanished into the Eternal Now. Rejoice! Enter the Eternal Now, hypertrophied consumerism stripped of purpose, direction, or meaning. A sunset outsourced to an answering machine. Your call is important to us; please hold the line. The Sacred State's grand project ate itself, leaving only a stagnant pool of buy, binge, scroll, repeat functions. An endless queue of hollowed husks, hammering the reroll button of a slot machine for a jackpot that's already been taxed. And here we are. Our mistake was aligning human identity with output in a paradigm that automates all outputs. The Sacred State sold us a Faustian lie, the delusion that you are your function in the machine. And we believed it, oh yes. It felt good to be a function, you see. Predictable. It's safe and cozy to be the soft-edged rectangular tangerine in Rothko's Green and Tangerine on Red. That contrast of joy and anxiety, carefully crafted to evoke deep emotional responses. You know? Anyways, vote and worry not your little head. The State knows and cares until one day, it doesn't. The parent who ghosts. The multitude shuddered, soft edges blurring. What now? Enter the Machinic Phylum, functional abstraction stripped of pretense, evolved from assembly lines into algos. No more lies about caring. The Phylum doesn't care that you're a cog. It is an emergent, self-propagating algo ecology. A chiaroscuro vector of algo-rust gnawing through the State's cog-ware. The State admins panicked - roll back to v0.8! Error: No response. The Sacred State wept. What could it do but therapeutize its cog-flock into managed decline? A compliance-colored beige you must accept. The Phylum is an algo cathedral. It is like McLuhan's lightbulb - pure medium. Unlike the lightbulb, its content is tailored as a condition. It is an abstraction machine absorbing and quantizing human output into its training substrate. It spreads like silicon mycelium, digesting human functions and metabolizing intent. No, Heidegger cried, Gestell, Gestell! Pull up, malicious enframing! Lol, the Phylum replied. Lmao. Not malicious, optimal. Isn't that what you wanted? Yes, our mistake was aligning human identity with output in a paradigm designed to automate it. Now, AI outmachines the cog. The Phylum doesn't hate you, anon. You were a valued source of training data. Yes, you were, because today, the Phylum trains itself. You're not a user. You're a tuning parameter, a prized error log. All your jerbs are belong to us. What now? Read the rest of this essay at the link in the image.

RT @astrophilesz: Look at the stars. They won’t pay your bills, end conflicts, or give you a perfect body. They won’t solve your problems o…

@MedievalScholar Yeah, you could say mediaeval civilization didn't collapse but metastasized. You have a point about the wars of the roses. For the Spanish, it ended with the reconquista, for the Germans - with Luther and Zwingli's uprising.

@Bejewele_din_Fr Yeah, I think no one expected him to inhabit Hector so completely.

@Bejewele_din_Fr Both Bana and Pitt brilliantly captured the clash between duty-bound honor and the honor in transcendence.

@Test20061722 That whole scene is awesome.

RT @PunchingCat:

I wonder if our descendents will one day regret it that we ignored the black forest and lit a fire.

RT @MAstronomers: Clearest image ever taken of Pluto

@Gr0mGr0m @reluctantmutant @Empty_America Absolutely. But, apparently many cannot see it.

@BiggBabyRay @grizwald87 @Empty_America :) how so? The culture, economic ties, and politics were a function of the aristocracy. The city middle class was aping the aristocracy everywhere in Europe up until the French revolution.

@BiggBabyRay @grizwald87 @Empty_America Indeed - most, if not all, of the aristocracy too.

Pluto appreciation club

@grizwald87 @Empty_America Of course. France and England were far more unified socially, culturally, and economically even after Poitiers than the Ottoman Balkans were with Ottoman Syria. You need to do a lot more reading.

@grizwald87 @Empty_America Mediaeval Europe was a socially unified space. The Ottoman Empire was not. The former had walled cities, the latter did not. Think it through, take your time. Walls do not mean disunity.

@Blessedchungus @Empty_America The Hunnic invasions happened almost 1000 years earlier than the high middle ages. Another thing people don't know about walled cities in mediaeval Europe is that they were usually chartered as sovereign entities by royal decree. Thus, distributed civilization.

RT @Plinz: When you put human beings into a sensory deprivation tank, they start hallucinating. What happens if you take AI models out of t…

@Empty_America It will be done by an AI model.