(While we’re waiting for something to happen …)
Modo’s Lies*
Ego cogito ergo sum
I smell the blood of an Englishman
Be he alive or be he dead
I’ll spin my insanity in his head
Monthly Archives: April 2015
Underlinings (#5)
Nicola Masciandaro explains (p.69) the purpose of his contribution to the True Detection collection:
My aim in what follows, therefore, is to detect how this deathly natal sorrow, the perfect sorrow of being which precedes and exeeds my feeling of it, is neither melancholy nor pessimism, but a true sign of an absolutely optimal worst.
Fib
According to Wikipedia, is a poetic form based on the Fibonacci series (counting syllables). “The typical fib is a six line, 20 syllable poem with a syllable count by line of 1/1/2/3/5/8.”
The example given (written by Gregory K. Pincus) is helpfully self-reflexive:
One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:
Math plus poetry yields the Fib.
Hail Amazon (#2)
Here‘s the ‘Amazon Prime Air’ promo (December 2013), in case you missed it.
A skeptical take.
A recent glimpse from Bloomberg’s:
Barring regulatory obstacles, Amazon would face an upfront cost of about $100 million to buy tens of thousands of drones. The company also would see expenses of about $300 million to deploy them to deliver 400 million orders annually, according to the report, which based its findings on existing technology and prices. […] Amazon would need to hire thousands of operators, each capable of monitoring multiple drones simultaneously, to ensure safe takeoffs and landings, according to the study, which included the personnel cost in its calculations. Most of the drone flight would be automated, according to the study, which assumes each package weighs as much as 5 pounds and each delivery is no more than 10 miles.
Hail Amazon (#1)
Amazon is, simply and objectively, the God of Time Spiral Press, or at least the Demiurge. Without it, existence would be impossible. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect an erratic series of devotional posts on the subject.
Disintermediation of the publishing industry, and American drone revolution … The awe is almost intolerable.
Underlinings (#4)
We might propose the following as an aphorism about abstraction and the history of contemporary art: “We’ve all heard of abstraction, but no one has ever seen one.”
Ccru 1997-2003 (Contents)
This is looking quite tightly locked-down now. (Should be finished by the end of the month, and available soon after.)
Foreword
The Tale of the End
Part-1: Id(entity)
Communique One
Communique Two
Review of Ccru’s Digital Hyperstition
Who’s Pulling Your Strings?
Underlinings (#3)
Melanie Swan takes Bitcoin really seriously, concluding:
Blockchains are a new form of information technology that might have several important future applications. One is blockchain thinking, formulating thinking as a blockchain process. This could have benefits for both artificial intelligence and human enhancement, and their potential integration. Blockchain thinking is proposed as an input- processing-output computational system with several features. First, memories and all input elements are seen as discrete units that are encoded, stored, and universally-accessible, perhaps with multiple copies and versions (such as the soft- hashing of ideas in development). Second, processing might be instantiated in a massively distributed architecture that is not available in human brains, yet still comprises the nonlinearity of human thought. Third, the outputs of blockchain thinking might include the ability to realize smart-contract based utility functions, instantiate thinking as a power law, orchestrate digital mindfile uploads, advocate for digital intelligences in future timeframes, and facilitate the enactment of Friendly AI. Blockchain thinking might give rise to new forms of consensus models such as self-mining ecologies and proof of intelligence, and make use of demurrage principles to redistribute brain currencies like ideas and potentiation. Blockchains and blockchain thinking might be not just a tool for the immediate progress of intelligence, but also for the longer-term transition to a world of multispecies intelligence living cohesively and productively in digital societies.
Grimoires
A useful list is provided here. Much of the material in this tradition is of highly-questionable practical value, for example:
The Grand Grimoire (Red Dragon): (Circa 1522):
The Red Dragon or Le Dragon Rouge is a black Grimoire, also known as a Grand Grimoire. First published in 1822, it is said to have been originally produced around 1522, however this cannot be substantiated. […] From a practical perspective its only value, if you can call it that, is a way of making a pact with the Devil (Lucifer). […] The first part of the Grimoire, gives instruction for finding hidden treasures by the evocation of an evil spirit. In the second part the magician is required to fully submit himself, body and soul, to the demon who will serve him!
Underlinings (#2)
Natasha Dow Schüll in the Casino (p.217):
The gambling industry invests a great deal of resources and creative energy into the project of helping gamblers to ‘lose’ themselves — experientially and financially. Slot designers’ goal is to build machines that can extract maximum ‘revenue per available customer’, or revpac, and of this all-consuming objective they talk freely and explicitly among themselves — on conference panels, in journals, and in the aisles and meeting lounges of exposition floors. How to get people to gamble longer, faster, and more intensively? How to turn casual players into repeat players? How, in other words, to design the zone?
Time Spiral Press 