Join me in Jamverse
My first foray into contributing to a science fictional extended universe
Tech
Contraptions.
Janky, wobbly models of everything from philosophy to technology and everything in-between.
Recent essays
30 of 45Can the (Social) Oobleck Dance?
Temporal forcing of non-Newtonian precommodified ooze in the appropriate context tanks might lead to prescience
The Taste Essay
Taste cultures, risk, cruelty, and kindness
A Tale of Two Theories (of Coordination)
Leveraging and Deleveraging Toward Thick Sovereignty
Dead Forest Theory
Internet darkness is turning into deadness and time is running out
Monitoring the Situation: from 1950s-2020s
A ridiculous generated photo essay taking a meme much too far
Strange Knowledgeability
Human knowing in perspectival encyclopedicity
Search, Discovery, Pills, and Portals
Solving the distribution crisis in marketing
A Camera, Not an Engine II
Further thoughts on photography in latent space, now with agents!
Touching Time
Or, the new adventures of Spaceship Earth
Mindmap June 6, 2026
Stuff I'm thinking about
From Cannons to Chronometers to Factories
A Transmission Hypothesis for the French Precision Revolution and Its American Transformation
Time, Enlightenment and Romanticism Between Modernity and Divergence
World Machines learnings from recent book club readings
Commodity Intelligence
The seductiveness of “general intelligence” is rooted in a costly category error
Many Act 2 Games are Afoot
Protocol Institute, Long Now Labs, Strange Rules art show, vgr_zirp update, World Machines, TensTorrent
Capital Must Seek Delight
Too few people are experiencing the delights and serendipity of AI, causing capital misallocation
Ribbonfarm Resurrected
As a museum blog with an AI curator that is
Getting Gooier
How AI is transforming humans
AI in World Machine Theory
The telos of AI is to create liveness at planetary scale
Writing Liveness
The message of the medium of generated text is liveness
Intentions have a surprising amount of detail
Auteur managerialism, the myth of one-shotting, and the chindogufication of engineering
On Cooling America Out
We've been the marks of our own long cons, all the way up
The World Machines Project
Yes, we're doing this nonfiction extended universe dammit
Rediscovering Irony
Counterprogramming cancerous sincerity and the cult of authenticity with AI assistance
Engineering Liveness
New Nature in the Gramsci Gap
Robot Auras
Robotics-native affect beyond googly eyes and human emotions
New Nature
Contours of can’t-be-evil futures
Lost in Bugspace
The temporality of implementation uncertainty in software
The Divergence Machine
Introducing the 2026 Book Club theme
The Modernity Machine III
Completion, Saturation, and Phase Transition