Experiments with Monstrousness
‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said; ‘I deeply sympathize’
Tech
Contraptions.
Janky, wobbly models of everything from philosophy to technology and everything in-between.
Recent essays
30 of 58Cognitive Mercantilism
AI panic weirdly resembles the anxiety that accompanied early capitalism
On Learning to Ride Your Brain
Your brain is already a bicycle, AI is a motorcycle, a regular computer is power tools
Choose Your Own Monster
Introducing Monstrous Times, the magazine of strange rules
Divergence with a Vengeance
The 19th century was more important than I previously thought
Humanism without (All) Humans
Microsoft Humanism puts corporate muscle behind an overweening class of bad AI philosophies
EA Safety
EA promises to solve AI Safety. Now we have two problems.
The Accelerationist Case for Frontier Pacing
Slow AI is smooth AI, smooth AI is fast AI
Our Eukaryotic Moment
Counterprogramming premature ontological closure in conceptualizing AI
The Curiously Playable Universe
More of the universe appears to be more playable than we expected
Walter Mitty Effects in AI Incident Analyses
Metanarrative pathologies in the OpenAI-HF incident
August Break
Taking a break through August/early September. Billing will be paused.
Cognitive Farmsteading
The message of the AI medium is intellectual rural domesticity
Join me in Jamverse
My first foray into contributing to a science fictional extended universe
Can 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