Before we get too deep into 2025, I’d like to take a moment to remember a dear friend of this blog, Michael Murray, the publisher of the literature and art website Galaxy Brain. Michael passed away in 2024, which shocked me — I had no idea he was ill. I only knew him through Twitter,…
Author: tundranaut
2024 in Review
2024 IN REVIEW What a year — I bounced all around, from the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming to a village in the Andes to Houston, Texas to consort with falconers, Trumpists, Ecuadorian farmers, pilots, poets, and cowboys. January set the tone. As I set off for Wyoming, I watched an arc flash…
LINKS: Safeguarding Oblivion; the Permission Structure Machine; Communion on the Moon
On the Grid — How Surveillance Became a Love Language: “…true privacy requires safeguarding oblivion, not secrets.” Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment: “The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. Bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval may require both…
LINKS: the Heart of a Collapsed Star; Hurricanes in Human Form; Friends Who Turn Their Backs on the World
American Return: “Americans said they want a nation. And not just any nation—the one we’ve always had. The metanoic model for transformation—embodied by Obama’s ‘fundamental transformation’—was unmistakably relegated to the dustbin of history.” Building Freedom Cities: “Some potential locations for a Freedom City might include Presidio National Park, Lowry Range in Colorado, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba….
LINKS: A New Avant-Garde; Cybernetic Meta-Organisms; Loneliness in Faith
AI, Crypto, and the Arms Race for Superintelligence: “We speak of an ‘arms race’ because there is some prospect of irreversible global lock-in. First, recursively self-improving machine intelligence introduces the possibility of rapid ‘takeoff’ scenarios, where the progress next year is not double but 3x the progress last year, then 4x the following year, and…
LINKS: Genuflection; Maps of Reality; Dionysian Vigor
Aeneas in Washington: “You can tell by the blood streaks on his face that he had yet to wipe any of it away. His hands are in penitent repose, palms slightly up. Out of context he appears to be in genuflection. It is at this moment, in all likelihood, that he first tasted the blood,…
WEEKEND LINKS: America’s Mandate; Atomic-Age Catholics; Disagreeable Men
Aborted: “At last, it appears that the Party of Chaos got its fondest wish: it aborted itself in the 2024 election.” A Climate Hypothesis: “If my hypothesis is correct, [a meridian halfway between the equator and the north pole] will be the new location of the global belt of deserts in the northern hemisphere, because…
WEEKEND LINKS: the Logic of Imperial Corruption and Decay; the King as Sacred Scapegoat; Machines with Increasing Intelligence
American Realignment: “The critical point is to sever the ropes holding down the American giant by destroying a dying progressive colossus and retooling the country into a new light and agile state fit for navigating the ultra-rapid 21st-century global environment: the ultimate network state. The model is the Promethean America that existed in the late…
MONDAY LINKS: Moving Through the Threshold of the Psyche; Inventing the Future; Disappearance of the Diminished Creed
Celluloid Caesar: “So, is Megalopolis a miraculous comeback to Coppola’s 1970s quality? No. Of course not. It’s absolutely as horrible as everybody says it is.” Make California Red Again: “The future is still invented in California and its influence on global culture remains critically important. California remains one of the most naturally beautiful places on Earth,…
MONDAY LINKS: Reformation; Blessings of Providence; and the Multiplication of Man’s Ends
A More Perfect Disunion: “Trump’s running mate in 2016 was Mike Pence, an Evangelical Neocon. His current partner is JD Vance, 40, a Catholic equally at home with reactionary rightism and technological futurism. Vance represents the beginning of a new sort of establishment, less comprehensive, more regional and eclectic, and archaeo-traditional in outlook: a faith…
A Cosmos Without God
Daniel Miller recently posted a piece on IM-1776 that’s deserving of high praise. It’s a provocative assessment of how the decades-long aftermath of World War II resulted in the gradual transformation of the West into something increasingly sinister. This transformation annihilates any posturing about the West (and perhaps America specifically) being an “anti-fascist” prototype. The…
Everywhere, Nowhere, and Now Here
Excerpted from Second Power Last month I attended the Nowhere Summit in Ecuador with several friends, old and new. Alex Petkas provides a good description of the event here: Technological, political, and societal change are happening at an alarming rate. There are huge, asymmetric opportunities for network-institution builders that simply did not exist 5 years…