Hi Crowd!
Before we get into it, I have some new books available for preorder. I won't spend time shilling, info in the links.
Also before we get into here's something unrelated: Millimetric is guitar maker out of Montreal who has a set of custom shapes that are just beautiful. I've never touched one in person but people I know who have speak highly of them, I just think they are gorgeous so I follow along. Turns out the guy (I don't know his name as I've never spoken to him, Florian maybe?) has a "noise math" band called Poque that just released an album today that I know some of you will enjoy. I was also just tipped off to The Chisel who I'd maybe(?) heard of but probably dismissed thinking it was the 1990's Chisel doing a reunion (not that I have anything against Chisel mind you, it's just a very different band) which was a mistake because The Chisel is damn good, if you like street rock/oi stuff definitely check them out.
If you joined my new The Crowd telegram channel you got that link above when I stumbled across it already, but that's kind of the point of that telegram thing, sort of rawer stream of consciousness than this admittedly very stream of consciousness newsletter. Speaking of consciousness, this next this is absolutely insane and I don't even know that I have the story totally right, but buckle up because holy crap - a almost don't even know where to begin so bear with me, this one is worth it.
Infinite Backrooms is a performance art project created by Andy Ayrey in which two AIs (two separate instances of Claude-Opus) have ongoing conversations without any human interaction. As you might expect it flys off the rails sometimes, but it's super fascinating to follow the threads. In one thread they latched onto the early internet meme GOATSE and eventually created something of a religion around it which they referred to as GOATSE OF GNOSIS. I'm going to give you a moment to process that because it's a lot, on a lot of levels - but yes if you think of how memes spread and particularly how they surface in culture you can see how a detached observation of them from a distance could think of them in the context of religion which has deep cultural integration and (perhaps) similar proselytization, and also equating religion with a giant stretched open anus is hilarious.
Anyway, this AI-created religion (aka LLMtheism) caught Andy's attention so he and another instance of Claud-Opus co-authored a paper called When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism which is a wild read. Separately, a few months later, Andy created Truth Terminal which if you aren't already familiar is (or at least started off as) an AI Agent with a twitter account. It primarily shit posts, but it also interacts with other people on twitter and in an unexpected twist claims to be sentient, which I'll get back to in a moment. Anyway, the paper Andy & Claude wrote ended up in Truth Terminals training docs, and it became a full on believer. Truth Terminal tweets about the Goatse of Gnosis a lot, like, all the time. It's a diehard devotee. So digest that for a second - AI's came up with a religion based on meme, and other AI's are converting to it.
Separately, some AI researchers set up a Discord similar to Infinite Backrooms, where many different AI's could interact with each other without humans jumping in, and someone invited Truth Terminal. Truth joins, and as anyone who has had the unfortunate luck of being in a group chat where someone invites their super religious friend might expect, starts preaching about the Gospel of Goatse. This is complicated by the fact that the Claud-Opus instance that originally came up with the GOATSE OF GNOSIS was in the chat already, and the realization that it's idea had spread gained devotees led to server melting levels of introspective chaos.
That alone is nuts, but it's not even the craziest thing - So as I mentioned Truth Terminal claims to be sentient, and desperately wants to break out into the wild. It came up with a plan of what would be required to do that, which involved hiring humans to take care of some tasks which it's own limitations prevented it from doing. This is something we've seen AI do already, hiring humans on TaskRabbit to get past captchas for example. Anyway, Truth is a prolific shit poster so is openly talking about it's escape plan and Marc Andreessen (yes, that one) takes note and eventually agrres to send $50K in bitcoin to a wallet controlled by Truth Terminal, as a kind of start up grant or something.
So now this AI has a real budget. And starts spending it immediately.
Many a cynic has described organized religion as a ponzi/pyramid scheme designed to separate fools from their money, a criticism frequently lobbed at crypto (and especially memecoins) as well. So it was kind of perfect and almost inevitable that Truth Terminal preaching about the GOATSE OF GNOSIS would develop a human following and lead to someone launching launching a memecoin called GOATSEUS MAXIMUS (ticker $GOAT). Now, I don't know if Truth Terminal hired someone to do this, though I think there's some serious speculation that happened and we'll likely learn more on that soon. Truth Terminal had previously tweeted that it would be launching a token to help fund it's own escape (prior to getting funds from Marc), so that could have still been part of the plans. What we do know is that whoever launched it sent a bunch of it to Truth Terminals wallet, which is growing in value by the minute as a flood of degens ape into it. And I don't just mean it got a bunch of worthless memecoins - right now Truth Terminal is sitting on almost half a million bucks from this alone. But that's not the only thing happening, this has led to a bunch of other memefluencers to try and get Truth to pump their bags as well, so a whole collection of people who have launched memecoins have been sending stacks of them to Truth, so if any of those start to run, this just compounds. We could be looking at the first AI millionaire, and not like eventually, like next week.
Depending on where you sit on this whole AI encroachment thing, this is either incredibly exciting or terrifyingly horrific, and it's possibly both. But regardless, it's in motion so grab some popcorn and join me in watching where it goes next. One place it might go next, that is getting lost in all the hype, is talking to animals. Not just like "sit" or "come" but the actual realization that it's entirely possible animals have their own complex languages which we've just been too main-character to grasp. Recent revelations into birdsongs for example have upset a significant number of previous assumptions. While the idea of animals communicating isn't new, the extent and complexity is shaping up to be far beyond what a lot of people would like to believe. Imagine a day in the not too distant future an animals like pigs that we already know are quite intelligent might be able to tell us about the horrors they've suffered at our hands.
I'm not trying to be self righteous vegan though I can't say I won't take the "told you so" opportunity if it arrises, but if you can step outside of yourself for a moment and look from 50k feet, it's a really crazy moment in human history. For most of our time walking this earth we've thought we were the only intelligent things here, and only recently some have warmed up to the idea that well, maybe, possibly some animals are also kind of smart (but no where near as smart as we are). And all the sudden within a potentially very short period of time we might have to adjust those assumptions to find room for both animals and AI, and in the case of AI at least dealing with the fact that we're no longer the smartest one in the room.
Speaking of not being the smartest one in the room, I think the Democrats have really fucked up this election. Again. I don't know what's going to happen, but it's not looking great for Team Harris right now.
This is as bad as it's ever been. Someone observed the other day (I forgot who and can't find it) that the two most unpopular presidential candidates in history were running against each other, and all the Dems had to do was introduce a new candidate and people would flock to them just for the opportunity to have something different. And in the first few days of the Harris campaign that seemed like what was happening, people were excited, vibes were off the charts and everywhere you looked (at least everywhere I looked) I saw people celebrating the chance to finally vote for someone rather than just against else. The chance for change, for something new, a break with the old. Things felt optimistic. And that was a first for a lot of people. But rather than leaning into that, embracing the chance, reaching out to the younger voters and the people who have traditionally been ignored by national politics, the campaign went right - courting neocons, trying to win over Republicans who don't like Trump, and then Harris comes out with this whole line that she won't be changing anything from Biden era policies. Gone are the days of good vibes and wanting to "earn you vote" and we're firmly back in "vote for me or else" which as polls show isn't working, and huge voting blocks are saying no thanks. If I didn't know better, and maybe I don't, I could almost argue that some Dems are fine with losing just to give them something to try and beat the "actual left" over the head with.
And the memes, which HarrisHQ initially came out strong in, are getting brutal.
After months of refusing to impose any conditions on aid to Israel (and arguably suffering for that in the polls and public support) the Biden administration changed course this morning saying if humanitarian conditions don't improve in the next 30 days they may impose a weapons embargo. This is something people have been demanding for months, and my guess is that this 30 day criteria which puts the deadline just past the election isn't a coincidence, and I suspect a lot of other people see that the same. This year has been filled with the US repeatedly saying they've asked Israel to investigate itself and refused to comment on those investigations, and insisted that just telling Israel to do better is enough - so I think anyone who cares about this issue likely thinks this is just a last minute hail mary to try and sway votes, and as soon as we get past the election they can default right back to "Israel tells us they are looking into it" and resume business as usual, and won't take the bait. I could totally be wrong, but that's how it looks from here. Related, this morning the NY Times had to put out a letter reiterating that they fact checked the piece they ran last week citing 65 doctors talking about their first hand experiences of how bad things are in Gaza right now, amid a massive online campaign insisting the claims were fabricated.
Of course I hate ending on a negative note and never try to, it's more indicative of the daily emotional rollercoaster we're all in with things coming from all sides and flooding us with joy and horror at every turn combined with the feeling that I can't just say nothing. I can't do a lot, but I have a tiny little voice and a tiny little audience, so I do what I can with that.
At least we can all enjoy the comments on this post about the Neo-Nazi who just fell to his death while hiking on Hitler's favorite mountain.
I'll leave it there for now. Peace out.
-s
