I think like one of the best cases of AI is it lets everybody be more comfortable being illegible and somehow the interfaces between people can bring that legibility. So just to give you a specific example, like my dream social media network, and there's lots of prototypes coming out that kind of follow this, but it would be one where I don't access a feed until I post something, right? Because right now it's like you have 99% people aren't making. So imagine a thing where it's I have to write something, I can't even engage in this game unless I participate.
So you write something and then it basically constructs a feed for you that uses your original post as context. So it's not like this, like you mentioned in Can'tsicle, which we've all of these collatic cultures without context, your creation is the context. And it's not just people who agree with you, but you could purposely bring people who disagree with that idea. And it's not just thoughts from today, but in the last 10 years, say I wanted to write about writing as memory, little scan Twitter and all of the thoughts about writing as memory will come through.
And all of a sudden this feed is so relevant to the thing that I just created, and it could create this feedback loop where I use those things to then create more things. I think we said a bad precedent where algorithms are working against you, and it does not have to be like that. Like algorithms can be a real force for good. I just think there's been a kind of asymmetry in who has the tools to build algorithms.
Welcome to episode 17 of Humans on the Loop. I'm Michael Garfield, and this is my public ledger of exploration at the intersections of wisdom and technology in an age when the boundary between imagination and reality seems thinner every day. This week's episode is a real treat. I'm joined by fellow O'Shaughnessy Ventures and Cosmos Institute beneficiary Michael Dean, someone I recognize as a kindred spirit by the shape of his ever-evolving career made from hard angles across discontinuous terrains.
Dean is precisely the kind of distinct entity I think will flourish as the world gets crazier and leans more on the unique insights of generalist thinkers. He went to school in architecture and played in a band before spending years in tech working on virtual reality, only to zag into making his living as one of the best essays you've ever read. What caught the attention of OSV and Cosmos wasn't just his capacity to weave together big ideas, but his initiative to derive a rigorous framework for decoding the structure of great essays and use it to make a textbook on essay architecture and an AI-powered editing tool. For our first on-record chat, I binged on his blog, which is easy to do, and came in loaded with a head full of connections between pieces he'd written on Eclipse Chasing, Las Vegas and the Metiverse, VR as teleportation, the impact of large language models on the culture and business of music, why essays are such excellent tools for self-reflection, and how machine intelligence could help free writers into deeper creative flow.
Like a crazy person, I tried to draw the whole shape of this idea network in our dialogue, but Dean handles winding long-form provocations like the Master Essay-S-T is, and by the end of our discussion, I saw something new and awesome on the horizon of our transformative co-evolution with computing, a world in which everyone has a better chance to pursue their passions without having to worry about product market fit, a world in which the automated economy learns to make sense of everyone's singular contributions to the collective intelligence and culture stages a glorious insurrection against the dehumanizing division between passion and paid work. This show has always been an invitation to dream better together, but this episode was where the precise vision of a future I would like to live in started to come into focus. Since we recorded this on December 19, 2024, I've devoted more and more of my attention to the act of building the relationships and fostering the conversations that can make this possible, and we'll publish some new articles on Substack very soon that build on the dialogue you're about to hear and why I'm suddenly, specifically, so hopeful for the future. If this conversation stimulates or triggers you, please leave a comment.
I would love to learn from you and love the way this project offers space for thoughtful discourse. And if you want to main line more fresh thinking, please subscribe at humansontheloop.com. But first, be sure to visit the show notes for links to all of Michael Dean's virtuosic and delicious essays mentioned in this episode and all the books and articles and podcasts we mention also. And then, once you are so inspired, you might burst.
Go right. Lastly, before we begin, I would like to invite you to join me for how to live in the future, views from the horizon of technology, biology, and consciousness, the new five-week course I'm teaching at Weirdosphere.org starting May 13. We're digging a rich seam through topics like the emergence of planetary culture, the psychedelic effects of information technology, lessons from natural history and complex systems science on the co-evolution of humans and AI. This course is an opportunity to immerse yourself in great reading and mind-expanding discussion on the frothy edge of the unknown and unknowable.
Visit those shown notes for more info and a link to registration. And thank you for listening. Enjoy. There's a natural warm-up process and by the time you're into it, it's always second.
What's your recording, Matt? Right, right, right. Well, dude, let me just start by saying that I stayed up until 3 a.m. Reading way more of your sub stack than what you sent me.
And I did it signed out. So I have all of these comments that I wanted to leave you because I found that the deeper I dug into the writing on virtual reality and futurism and technology, the more I realized, I had no idea how fucking much we have in common. I know. It's nuts.
Going back to Google Glass, right? That was really hard. Yeah. And also you're writing on the Atlassian Mysteries and all of this stuff.
I was just like, wow, I feel like I did you a disservice by not taking more time to curate stuff to share with you, which is not my normal practice with people I invite. It's more of a one-way thing than a dialectic. But yeah, we're going to have some fun. Yeah, it does have to be great.
And I'm sure we're just going to open a bunch of threads, have to cut it off and continue to point. Yeah, I think just based on the talking points I pulled and all the quotes I pulled out of your stuff, I was like, oh my god, this is like easily a three-hour thing. Yeah, it depends on how, like, how wide aperture is, right? There's a whole discussion just on essays and AI.
And then there's kind of all of the associated things that do tie into it. Yeah, indeed they do. This show is basically just the LinkedInization of future fossils. You know, it's skillful means.
It's like a way of getting people who are preoccupied with wise innovation and so on to grab a handle on what I'm doing. I'm just making it more legible. You know, you talk about yourself about the essay, like the first draft is for you and the second draft is for a stranger. That's what's going on here.
It's like, this is still the same weird shit. It's just... Yeah, it's a Trojan horse. I have the same exact problem.
We're like essay architecture. If you just come into my site with no context, you'll think this is like only a writing school. And that's totally fair based on the name and the about page. But then you can click into the logs and go to the index.
And there is a weirder, unoptimized universe underneath it. And the hope is that you can design a Trojan horse that it's meta enough, that it is connected to the underworld. It's not like a misleading or clickbait. The way I also think of it is it took us forever to find the wood wide web.
We saw these trees and we thought of these trees as individuals and then we realized that there was all of this micro-risile stuff going on underneath and that individuality is really messy. And that's the same thing that happened with language. We see words and then we dig in and we see that the symbol, I love the JF Martels writing on the symbol in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. We talk about every symbol being connected through a web of co-signification behind the symbol.
And that's our own minds. These things that we identify as discrete are actually precipitating out of these associative webs, which is K.A.L.O. McDowell in there writing on neural media talks about how AI makes the self enacted by our engagement with AI is one in which we realize that our personal narratives are actually embeddings in this enormous semantic space. So yeah, there's the tree, at some point you've got a vertical, but actually that vertical depends on all of this weird, all the soil.
Yeah, you can't start with the center or the tree. I mean, I've worked with so many new writers and there's this kind of like universal pressure to converge and to be able to explain yourself from day one. And you can almost never do that. And even if you do it, the chances are you can guess where the tree is and that for us is very low.
And the first thing I actually want to let a good rule that I set for myself when I started is that every consecutive asset has to be a complete shift in topic to something else. And it just forces me to continuously build this maze and then you look back on it every three months and you just put them in piles and you do it again. And then little by little, you have all these piles that you can start to build a narrative around. So I feel like narrative is like this actor, you're retroactively making sense.
And that guides 50% of how you go forward, but you're always still trying to break free of the narrative at the same time. And it's everywhere, right? It's in the accretion disk of our early solar systems. You know, everything's just goo and then you get planets and you get orbits.
And anyway, that said, okay, so first of all, hi, Michael Dean, you're on the loop. Thank you. Not in the loop, not at the loop, on the loop. On it, all three, right?
These are epistemic specifications of what Joshua de Colio says cannot be ontologically separable. If you feel like you're out of the loop or that you're in the loop, chances are you're missing loops where the opposite is true. Anyway, so I want to get people on your loop, I starting with your background because in some of your stuff, you know, you say like, I didn't even think I was going to be an essayist until just a few years ago. That's one thing you and I haven't commented on the songwriter thing.
And then you know, you went to school for architecture and I don't know how far back you want to carry it, but I would love for you to just preamble with the embedded narrative of you for a while. Yeah, it was it's a very messy, non-traditional kind. That's a lot of people have, but it started in songwriting, then to architecture, then to virtual reality, and then to essays. But I'd say like architecture was really the formative moment.
I started in like business school, transferred out after a semester, then did philosophy psychology, finally ended up in architecture. And that's to me, didn't feel like school. It was, I mean, it was design school. So compared to homework, it's like you've complete ownership over these things that you're making.
And so, artistry school is like really intense. And it really, I guess instilled the love of this like multi-dimensional problem solving. So when you're solving a building, it's like, okay, you're building a dance school down on House and Street. And you have to consider the people who are inhabit the building.
So you have to arrange the program, then you have circulation going through in the structure. And it's just like spatial Sudoku, where you are at the center of this vast thing, and you have autonomy in how you solve it. And you're around hundreds of people who are solving that same problem. So you can watch them solve the problem and talk about it.
And I feel like architecture school, in terms of undergrad degrees, is like the best place to become a master generalist. And then the tragedy is that you graduate into an industry of hyper-specialization, where you can spend 10 years just detailing one facet of buildings, like just facades of buildings. So the architecture school is really the lens that I bring to everything, right? In terms of virtual reality, it's the lens of, hey, the metaverse is the next frontier of architecture, where you no longer need millions of dollars to build structures.
You can have some kid, a teenager in stall, sketch up, who hosts a building, have millions of people come through and use it. And the architecture is also the thread for essays as well. So essays are this amorphous, paradoxical thing. And my project essay architecture is an attempt to define the fundamental questions that underlie all essays.
So the thing that I liked about your connection between the architecture piece and the essay piece is in pattern and in the way that there are, I want to give you a chance to talk about the professor that shaped your experience as an architect in training and how there was a seemingly objective, unassailable ability on his part, just line up best to worst submissions from students and to get in and hack them apart with scissors. Because this tension between, whatever you said, like the, you know, 300 people signed up in that program and only 40 of them actually made it out is intense. And to me gets at this tension, I imagine we'll return to in this conversation between two axes I want to explore here. One is, again, you said that general specialist thing that a liberal arts education creates broad people, but the workplace, the environment into which one graduates is one that demands people that are competitive in particular domains.
And then the other axis that we can play up and down with there is, like you said, that there are these things that are more or less universally truly strongly convergent about human cognition that seem to be telling us something about the world that we information in certain ways in the brain. You know, I think to a talk years ago, I heard with neuroscientist Daniel Bassett, who said that the reason that the story is so incredibly robust through human history is that we think in terms of narrative compression, you know, like Tyson Young-Kaporta, who I interviewed on the show a while back, talks about indigenous memory system techniques that his research lab at Deakin University has shown that telling stories and then anchoring story points in an demonic interface with the body outcompetes the Western memory palace technique. So yeah, however you want to fly into that, I'm fine with. Yeah, let's start with that second act of some process versus patterns and as our texture is very much about the patterns, but generally for writing, I think both ends are equally important and similar to you saying how it's not in the loop or out of the loop, but on the loop is the stretching between them.
I think it's important to oscillate between processing patterns and really care about both. And so it's neat process is the act of me showing up and actually enjoying the process of putting thoughts into words, doing it every day, whereas patterns is once I release that thing to the world, I lose control of how it's interpreted. I also, I'm not there to explain myself and what I mean, right? So the whole thing with the teacher aligning stuff on the table, he does it before anyone can even talk about their process or what it meant to them.
The whole idea is regardless of how you get to somewhere in the end, you're putting something for the vast group of others to look at and they have no context. And so I think the pattern side of it speaks to how in the end art is both the process of the making, but it's also an active reception. And so this is where I think like feedback comes into essays where there have been a few things where I wrote and I felt a certain way as I wrote it, but then you share it with someone who you trust who feels comfortable telling you what they think, all these things that might have been great to you in the moment, they don't land or they interpret that word in a very different way. And so I think there is a process in which some ideas, like most of my ideas, they're not feedback-tested, they're just like logs and jazz just into the world.
But for the ideas that matter, in my mind, it's worth inviting in groups of people and asking them what they actually see in the thing. And I like to give each person blind copies of a document. And then I have a master file where I color code what does and doesn't resonate. And it's amazing how certain sentences will universally land or fail.
So from doing that, from reading a lot of classic essays and from reading essays from new writers and writing myself over the last few years, there are these recurring concepts of composition that just always kind of show up. And so what I'm doing is an attempt to create a mapping, basically a hierarchy, but you have these dimensions and these elements and these patterns. And for any one of them, there's probably a psychological reason why we have that. When it comes to ideas, right, that we limited bandwidth.
So it helps if you have a central thing to organize complexity. We generally always read linearly, right? So where we start and end matters and how you arrange your material matters. When it comes to voice, the way that I see it is that reading text, it's abstract.
We have to work to do it. There's friction involved. And the idea is when you imbue your words with sight, sound, and spirit, you're touching the reader and a layer that's more their perceptual system. If you're in the land of the concrete of things you can see and understand, you can get it more than if you're just referring a bunch of the variables connecting them as a more heady experience.
So there's probably a more scientific way to get into that. But for now, it's just about trying to read a lot, like widely across different times and different fields and just seeing what are the things that arise everywhere. And there's also a question of genre now, right? Because some sub-genres prioritize some patterns over others, right?
So in memoir writing, you see all these personal patterns rise up. Whereas in lyrical essays, they really just care about rhyme and the quality of the images you're showing. But I think there is a parent to genre of just the essay with no adjective, where it allows all of these different sensibilities to exist in a single work. So you can have a soul of a memoirist, the rigor of a philosopher and the pen of a poet, like they can all exist together.
And if you want to get there, I think you really have to look at yourself and realize why am I resisting that other, those other opposites of myself? Like when I first showed up writing about VR, it was all like a Mcloon inspired technical talk. And I would not put myself on the page. I was terrified to do that.
That's just kind of like initial thoughts on process or status. I want to link that to this other piece about generalization and specialization. And it occurs to me listening to you that if we think about movement into the workplace from earning environment, we're talking about something like making an essay to people. It's something like that process of refinement where you start out in your own connect home.
That learning, at least in that sense that we have inherited in a university setting, it is about ending yourself and finding relationship to everything else. And then you've got to pay the bills, which means making all of that interoperable with other people. And so you move down the gradient into less and less dimensional, maybe expressions or you find that your articulation has to compete in a setting. And so one of the first places I want to start with you is the piece that you wrote on Las Vegas and the metaverse.
Because one of the premises of this inquiry is, as you said, Las Vegas is like a dream, the metaverse is like a dream. It's possible that the web already expresses these characteristics. But since it's in 2D dimension form, we don't realize it yet. Well, maybe it's not obvious to everybody.
I buckled when I saw that. I was like, wait a minute. No, because I actually had this exact experience at Burning Man years and years ago where I realized, Burning Man is an analog metaverse or a physicalization of the web. You move from camp to camp and everything is culturally juxtaposed.
You go from one cultural milieu directly into another cultural milieu that is like a weird transposition or appropriation of some particular lineal, geographically defined thing. And it's all thrown over everything else. And there is this people treating the plia like an empty canvas. It seemed to foreshadow Minecraft and all of this other stuff.
And that when you look at maps of the web, like the image that you put into this, what we're talking about is something like this effort that we're going through wittingly or unwittingly to instantiate our imagination, instantiate the way that our brains actually structure things upstream of the constraints required of us through the normal accretion of architecture and social relationships in physical space in what we would recognize as a kind of historical city and that the ephemeropolis Burning Man, my friend, his graduate thesis, connecting Burning Man to Vegas specifically, talking about the way that there is this influx of technology and of capital and that there's a relationship between the sort of ludic impulse of play and the exploitation of all of that surf it of resources and that many other scholars that he had cited had talked about the future of city as a kind of playground. And that was actually explicit in the origin story of Burning Man in the cacophony society of San Francisco, which was really interested in like urban spelunking and relating as children, this explore over exploit attitude to the givens of the urban environment. So yeah, I would love for you to just lay out your thinking on this because I think that by the time we can loop this all back into other observations you've made about essays and virtual reality and AI, it'll all start to figure together into one thing. I think I'll start with a piece you sent me about Sacred Text and about how writing and religion kind of rose at the same time.
And you think about over the last, I don't know how many thousands of years put, it's been an act of gradually collapsing space and time where I think about writing, it enabled thoughts from one culture, a higher resolution to be passed down and not like enormous effects. And then when you make the pyro's lighter you can send it farther and every media paradigm moved in that direction. And for me, virtual reality, I think Jared Lani called it the last telephone where you actually take the body and you move it. You take buildings, you move buildings.
So I think Las Vegas is this extreme example where if you have enough capital, you can put a pyramid in a skyscraper and an old Venetian building all in the same place. In China, you can rebuild the Eiffel Tower and all the France. If you have enough capital, if you think about globalism, there's a certain degree in which you can go to any city now and they all kind of look the same. There is this kind of suburban aesthetic that comes from being cheap and affordable.
But in the virtual realm, you no longer have those constraints. And so I think the next level of globalism or total collapse of distance is that it enables all of these radically different things to then collide in a single place really around the user. I don't know if you spent any time in these social VR apps, but one of the like forums I'm seeing is this almost like shopping mall. And it's like the next phase transition of what a feed is.
And so it's like, I basically put into the server with a few other people and there's like storefronts everywhere. It's kind of weird because they're not even sure if you and the person actually are seeing the same storefronts, but it's like shops from around the world are now just like giving everyone their own unique instance of that mall. And it's kind of a tribute to think that everyone, and we kind of are used to this one, though everyone's feed is different. But when it comes to our spatial environments, right, it's like, that's a certain sense of stability that we all have.
But yeah, there's this weird sense of just like matter kind of warping around you and your intentions. And however you've made yourself legible in tests, that will somehow affect what spawns around you. So yeah, the relationship that you're pointing to there between the density of information as a kind of a tractor for attention as the driver for urbanization and meta version or whatever we want to call that people are calling it a femoralization. But that's not right, because really everything is matter energy information, like it's all in a server somewhere.
I just saw Peter Diamandis talking a lot of people call them out. He's like, actually, this is John Smart's Transcension Hypothesis that the reason that setting looks up into space and doesn't see whatever it is it's looking for is because turns inward into these simulated environments. We'll come back to the Las Vegas piece, but I want to link that to a piece that you wrote about your experience with the Apple Vision Pro, the notion of teleportation and how, as you say, humans have an impeccable drive to flatten the world. You trace it through your grandparents falling in love through handwritten letters, the way that we in our own lifetimes saw everyone signing on to chat rooms and now everybody's on video calls.
And it's no matter how much bandwidth we get, it's never enough. In my own writing, I've thought about this as part of this evolutionary trend of symbiogenesis, of things becoming coupled in terms of their reproductive capacity, their metabolic function. And yeah, there's an evolution, an evolution that, like you said, with the essay, it starts out as this web of stuff and then things start to concretize out of that. But then as they do, each piece of that enormous semantic web takes on more depth and detail, and the fibers between them become thicker.
And yeah, it's funny you brought up the shopping mall in 2018. It was contracted with a company that was trying to get out ahead and offer retailers indoor 360 photography of their stores so they could advertise better than simply a listing on Google Maps. And I was going around to Austin asking, you know, hey, would you like me to take a 360 of your shop? And they're going to put it on a big map and then everybody's going to be able to walk into your store.
And this is like pre-matter port, fully 3D environments. But I got kicked out of the Barton Creek mall because the jewelry store thought I was like casing the joint and called the mall security. And then the next time I went into a mall owned by Simon, that company that built that mall, there was a big sign on the entrance to the mall that said no photography in the mall. And yet, what you're saying in VR, there is a everything is kind of a mall vibe.
brick and mortar malls are dying and like the dead mall has become a kind of icon of hyper modernity. And that's somewhat worrisome to me in that it's like William Irwin Thompson used to talk about how an online retailer has ironically become this force that is part of this larger machine that is driving the deforestation of the actual physical Amazon or how hard it is in our environments. Now, the intensity by which these environments recruit our attention has made it so that it's become really difficult in my household and obviously many other people's to get everyone to just sit in physical space with one another. And again, I think that gets to that same kind of general specialist trade off I'm talking about where actually going on a date with someone is messy and complicated and it is actually extremely high bandwidth and rich and there's so much more going on there than engaging in some kind of intellectual romance with someone online where you can't smell them and so on.
Part of this larger tech narrative of encasing ourselves in environments over which we believe ourselves to have more agency or controller that we're mitigating risk, we can run these things in our imagination and they don't seem in the figure to have the same kind of consequences and yet there are consequences that have been occluded. Yeah, I think I can enter into that just through the microcosm of the Apple vision Pro. I think there's so much embedded in that device. The PC Red was my reaction to the announcement of it that I actually got it six months later.
I posted a preview and I have a long form piece coming out on it soon that really captures my feeling with it. Basically, I went in very excited as a passive VR pioneer I figured let me explore the use cases with this thing so I went in very optimistic. I ended up returning it after 10 days and I wasn't just like oh that wasn't great. It spooked me to a degree that I stopped using clocks to a degree that I bought and started reading physical dictionaries.
I got more typewriters, I started cleaning up stuff in my walls. It was a full reorientation of how I think about technology. I think VR is still possible to do right but it brought a few new dilemmas to the front of my attention that I can talk about here. I think the first place to start is the name virtual reality and it's good to think about what digital versus virtual is because I've always used them kind of anonymously and so for me digital speaks to digits, like the digits on the fingers, you have 10 digits so a digital world is one made of zero's and one's.
It's a mathematical world whereas a virtual world of virtual reality stems from virtue and it's like what are your ethics? What are your intentions for this place? And I worked in VR for 10 years not realizing that connection and so if you're going to collapse space time and create a synthetic world you're imbuing it with your virtue so you're really going to think hard about what those are and then there's a tension between well there's my virtues of what I want to do with it and then there's the space of possible virtues that are enabled by the people making the hardware and the software and so I can give you an example of how to split out with the vision pro. So I get this headset.
It's supposed to be a spatial and computer and computers you can do anything with them so I figured let me build a spatial operating system with the vision pro. I have these old typewriters is there's some way where I could be using a typewriter and in my room I can just have notes and stuff and pages pinned up on my wall. I wanted like a Robert Cara studio where it's just kind of a clean apartment to put it on and you see my inspiration everywhere. It turns out you can't really do that well in the vision pro.
You can't have tabs spread out but they're not quite persistence. It can very easily like your whole layout can kind of collapse with one glitch. I tried to copy and paste three paragraphs and it reset 30 minutes of apartment design. So that's like a bug to me.
But it's significant enough where I couldn't really use it as a facial operating system like an architecture school. I had all this stuff pinned up everywhere. I know I couldn't have that experience but what I could do with the vision pro was watch content everywhere. I could line my bed and have a huge monitor on the ceiling.
I could be washing my hands at the sink and watching Apple TV and so I found that this thing at least the first iteration of it is a hyper television and that is what it's amazing at. The screen's amazing. It blurs your peripherals. So whatever you're looking at is that much more sharpened.
It's almost like digital Adderall to me and it promoted just this always on ambience of content and I kind of experienced first hands the effects of that. It's always been this like hey one day we're gonna have that and I got to live that for four hours a day and it kind of made me a little more bearish on this idea of always on augmented reality spatial computing. I'm still very much a big fan of the Raybans by meta. In fact I've even wore those daily for almost two years now and it's very non-intuitive.
It's a way for me to capture my environments. It actually helps me. I need to notice myself having experiences with it right then or capture them and those feel more aligned with my virtues with a vision pro. It didn't.
So I think that's the tension. You have to both define your own personal virtues and vices and then you understand what the technology itself enables. And so to me the vision pro was the first instance of a Faustian bargain which is like a very unique kind of bargain. It's not just a typical deal with a devil.
Like in blues, folk myths. It's like you have to give up your soul just to get the powers in the first place. But in the Faustian bargain you have this disrental scholar. Mephistopheles comes and he says hey we're gonna give you all these superpowers for free.
You can have the peaks of knowledge, of pleasure, creativity and there's no strings except if you ever reach a moment of such complete satisfaction you have the ability to freeze time and live in that moment of bliss forever. And only if you do that will we come take your soul. So to me the Faustian bargain is we're gonna give you technology that could save you or destroy you depending if you have the right virtual engine if you kind of understand the reasons why you have this technology. So I like where you ended that essay.
You say the vision pro brought a lucidity to my slash our relationship with technology. A fetish for technological awe and an unspoken religion of tyrannical convenience. We are in a cult of efficiency each year. We're pulled further into a frictionless and sorry I'm the reasons to upgrade are a no brainer but the amputations are invisible.
And I think the point of this is that going back to the architecture school thing or in my case going to school for biology or my wife going to school for orchestral performance and then realizing that the reality of actually competing in this space is a lot different. And you don't realize what's outside of the bubble. One of the more promising applications of AI that I've heard about recently is AI for yellow teaming as like an externality adjunct to help people think through the possible occluded consequences of an action as they're designing products. And people like Benjamin Olson who works at responsible AI at Microsoft talks about how he's basically that function within his team is that he's there to help them think through all of the different virtues that they're trying to embody in product design and in the relationship that they have with the users of their products over these very long time horizons.
But I want to connect that to your actual projects with the AI editor. I find this very hopeful one of the areas that you and I converge is on thinking that the real quote unquote killer app for AI is something like or building on what the essay was doing in the first place which was an instrument for the enhancement of reflection. And so let's start there. Yeah, let's do it.
You have to tie this into the end of the vision pro thread on the cult of efficiency. If you think about the word essay, that word is the symbol of like wrote assignments in homework, right? Most kids have gone through school. It's like you're forced to write about this topic in a strict five paragraph format for teachers paid to pretend to care about it.
And then all of that is so you kind of keep going up these rungs to get a degree to get a job. And ultimately it's transactional, right? So we've been trained to think that writing helps just unlock these social gates. And hey, if we have a tool that's going to make that hyper-efficient, of course, we're going to press the button and have the essay come out because we don't realize that writing or the essay was founded on being a reflection tool to show us what is actually in our head, what do we believe, who are we, how do we express ourselves.
And yeah, I think it's we're entering really interesting territory where back to that quote on the amputations are invisible, what happens when nobody has to write anymore. You can get by a full life without ever having to actually write your own paragraph. You're just kind of giving these chicken scratch prompts and getting exactly what you need. To me, that's one of the more important, the lemmas to talk about with the essay.
There's so many ways you can slice into it. Some are saying, well, what happens if you know all the best novels are AI-generated, but only less than 1% of people today are even writing novels. Then there's the commodity market and is writing and editing valued financially. That's also only a portion of people.
But just think about the average person if they no longer need to write at all anymore. Similar to how we don't teach scripts anymore, kids can't read at all at the clock. So just what happens if nobody has to write anymore, they can just kind of speak and say, I need this and then you get a paragraph. And so to me, the essay compared to, say, like the great books.
The essay is a really democratic medium. If you compare the essay to other art, like architecture requires millions of dollars to get started typically. For if you want to write a novel, you need months or years of uninterrupted time. If you want to be a musician or songwriter, you have to learn a chord language and you have to train your finger muscles.
But an essay, anybody in their own language for almost no cost in a day can work a composition that can make meaning. And they share that. Even if it's just one person or if it's with everyone they know, there's something like fundamentally democratic about that. Where I think like the health of a society can somehow be measured of our people actually critically putting down, examining, changing their ideas and sharing them.
Are you engaged in essay process or do we have a more article driven process where you have some fixed point of view and you're just trying to condense everybody of what you think. So that's kind of the broader kind of, I think the role of the essay, I think there's kind of like a cultural potential that it has. It's not that the essay even died. I don't think that AI has killed the essay.
I think the essay kind of emerged, you know, kind of pre-enlightments. And it was never really integrated into our education system properly or into our culture of like entertainment and media. But my hope is that there could be a way in which AI can actually help the essay realize its potential versus just killing writing. This is where I want to get back to the relationship between your, as you put it, an editor God, meaning your own AI trained on your uninhibited stream of consciousness writing that first draft stuff over your entire life.
Everything that you decided was worth record and you're not having to edit yourself. You say an editor God can guide you better if it knows your depths. Once you realize this, it's a race to render your consciousness into text. Don't stay on brand.
Make the chaotic range of your thoughts legible to the machine. As said by the executive editor of Wired 1993, unedited data is a pearl beyond price. Ultimately, I think it'll make the process more feminine, where 90% of the pros you write is intuitive, unstructured, and from the heart. This connects to one of the big inspirations for this show was JCR, Lick Lider, and Bob Taylor's piece in 1968, the computer's communication device where they said that communication is the externalization of mental models and the translation into the mental models of recipients.
And obviously, now we exist at this enormous social scale, where cancel culture is a symptom of our inability to translate for every possible audience. One culture might use a word in a very specific local way, but then it goes out onto Twitter and it's interpreted in a completely different way. And all of the norms and local network assumptions that go into this are kind of a macrocosm of trying to tell someone your dream and it being like you had to be their thing. And so, you know, I think there's two pieces to this one is I think about her and how in that film, it ends with the AI, Samantha, taking everything that our protagonist has ever written and then organizing it in a way that can be pitched to publishers.
And he's like, Oh my God, I would have never been able to do this. And yet he had put in all of that work to get his stuff his life onto the page. The other piece that I think about is I'm sure you've being a voracious reader heard this poem by Joseph Fasano for a student who used AI to write a paper. He says, Now I send it back into your own hands.
I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth, but what are you trying to be free of? The living, the miraculous task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work. And you make this point elsewhere, you say the slow price of writing is what clarifies thought shapes identity and cultivates a lens to the world. Writing is the whole point. It isn't a chore to optimize.
It's an infinite game. So, you know, I think you and I see something similar here, which is that the capacity of computers as prophesied by Licklider and Taylor to become these incredibly potent multimodal translation interfaces, not just between languages, but between preferred metaphorical domains or sensory modalities seems to bridge the finite game of having to interact with one another at scale in markets and in global geopolitical interaction with the infinite game of reflection and discovery and the work of simply getting it out of your head onto the page, as it were. And maybe this is a world in which you could continue to be an architect out of college without having to compete with other architects directly because you could make your building and the market would find some way of transposing that into a domain where it had value that you could not anticipate to people you'll never meet. Yeah, I mean, it gets really weird when you imagine that there is a kind of infinite internal process where you are just kind of riffing into the machine.
And that could be a very fruitful, authentic kind of thing. But then there's some agent beyond you that is able to translate your whole corpus of work to whoever wants to come in and engage with you. It's just such a different paradigm. It's hard to wrap your head around.
It's like right now, it's like there's a certain sense of scarcity in terms of the essays that I can manually work through. I spent 45 hours on an essay and I personally benefit from making that myself. And I can only do that once a month, like twice a month tops. But if we get into a world where, you know, I have the things that I can turn into essays are 1% of my output.
I probably have 1 to 300 logs, which can be the form of paragraphs for every policy I have. So there is a world where if AI understands composition well enough, it's partially what I'm working on, that it could actually expand every single log into an essay. And there's a world in which my mind has the messiness of 75 different people inside of me. And I can't wonder them all with essays, but it would enable someone to come to my site.
And we both are these complex objects and it would let us both rotate and just kind of meet at the exact level. To me, that's it's in the realm of the possible, but it's so exotic to get there to what we're writing this today that it's hard to fully wrap my head around. What are all the implications of that being true? I think there's just a more immediate kind of way to think about at least in the next year.
The way I see it is, I always want to be the one shaping my sentences. That's my cardinal rule. And I'm happy for AI to wrap around that. AI can live in the margins and watch me think and they can offer up research and composition feedback and you can have Socrates there just poking holes in everything I say.
And that can all be very useful. And it helps me be, I guess in that case, I'm in the loop, but there's this other loop where I'm on the loop where I actually relinquish some of my control. And I say, you know what, I'm still riffing a million words a year unstructured into the machine. And that's highly feminine process.
I'm not trying to organize it. I'm just feeding it with my unfiltered thoughts. And then based on how people come in, there's some way in which I'm kind of out of the loop and it's able to interface directly with them. But I'm not fully out of the loop because it all stems from the original things that I said.
Is that a good way to think about what on the loop is versus being in the loop? Yeah, I think the, you know, the on the loop piece is that genes are being made by the reflexes of that extended body. But we have this evolved balance between our ability to reflect on the decisions that are being made by other parts of our body, like the impulse to reach out and grab the candy bar. And the more that we train our attention, the more that we engage in recursive awareness, the more we can say no.
And you know, you returning the Apple vision pro after two weeks is this what you call techno selectivism that is speaking to that precisely. It's luxury of being, I don't choose this. That's it. Another way that I see this in what you've written about is let's take the broadest possible definition of language.
Like I did in that essay, I'm looking at all of my writing now and I'm like, Oh my God, I'm not giving it to reviewers. Michael Dean is doing a way better job of making his stuff legible to strangers. But in the quote unquote essay, I wrote on sacred data from Sumer to computers talking about architecture as essay, like if we just break the doors open on medium, and we talk about syntax and relationships and that difference that you observe between a wild organic city in Las Vegas or the metaverse that geographical and historical constraints on the organization of space and time and culture are busted in those spaces that I think that's very much the one end of this. And then the other end that I would say is that that's the reflex, right?
That's the basin of attraction into which everything seems to be flowing down the thermodynamic gradient. The other piece is that obviously we spend more time writing or making videos or making music or creating data than probably anyone has ever in the history of our species because of the abundances that have been afforded us through this increase in technology on average per person. When you say in the Las Vegas and the metaverse piece, we are approaching the ability to project our presence in our environment into the metaverse in real time. And you cite a piece I talked about years back written by Kevin Kelly on the mirror verse and how riffing on that say, each person will turn into a replica factory scanning chunks of their real life into the metaverse so that their friends, family and followers across the world can experience them as if they were there.
To me, that feels like a very monastic enterprise, like a dedication to the curation and recording of some kind of sacred data. And yet, when you're talking about curating everything for the editor AI and how you're just like, just go for it, totally unchained, everything that seems relevant to you, the principle that was explicit in future fossils from the beginning was eventually all of this will be used to create some high-dimensional simulacrum of me and all of these people. And then I started reflecting on it, whoops, you know, I made the mistake of spending thousands of hours editing that show. I want to link all of that to your abandonment of the clock and how again, like the fact that you can set an alarm allowed you to set your digital clock faces into Cambodian so that you couldn't even read them.
And so that you were not locked into this thing, you know, when Doug Rushkoff in present shock talks about modern time as this sort of centrally coordinated thing emerging through the clock tower of the monastery and how he traces that forward into high frequency trading on atomic clocks and so on. Again, we see that balance between the sort of everything everywhere all at once, and this, and the ways that the alarm is the reflex layer that sets the notification for you that you have a responsibility to the world out there, but that you can set your clock to Cambodian and free your attention to be engaged in this kind of insource-celled monastic enterprise of just getting it all on the page. I'd love to hear you riff on that. Yeah, with a combination of threads, it's really fun to try and weave together.
So I'll start with the clock thing. Just to clarify, that was after the vision Pro. I understood that I wasn't really investigating some of the more subtle effects of VR or of just technology and efficiency in general. And the clock is so just part of the world we're born into.
You never really question what would a life actually be like without clocks? So kind of set this experiment that I did intensely for a few weeks and more moderately now, but I basically changed my lot of string to Cambodian manually set the time to different times of each clock and device. I really had no way of knowing what time it was. I said one source of truth.
And I was in a certain phase of my life where I could do that. I didn't have time meeting the day. And what I realized is that an awareness of time allowed me to always kind of break the future into these little increments that I could budge and allocate and plan. And I was very much in management mind.
And I had a certain just a mode of control over my day where when you don't know the time, I found myself doing things more spontaneously, just falling into flow states, kind of like solving my problems without even intending to. I was just wondering, like, oh yeah, I said I wanted to do that. And I just kind of found myself doing that and getting it done in a fraction of the time. And so in my mind, like when you're off the clock, that is maxed like leisure, that is maxed just like presence in the moment.
You don't, you're not thinking about how can I extend my legacy to my grandchildren or whatever it is, however it is, you make sense of death and the purpose of everything. And I have another, I say, called right for your grandchildren. And that is this monastic secret impulse to say, hey, if I don't actually write down this memory, I'm going to forget it. If not tomorrow, it'll be gone in a month and in a year.
It's all compressed from forgetting all of the rich nature of my insights. So as a compulsive logger, I don't think I missed the day this year, but like going back three years, there's some days that I have 50 to 100 notes in that day. So it's like I have a pretty high resolution, synthetic memory, which is interesting because it's like usually all that stuff just fades. And I'm not even sure what's in there.
Like you're talking about this Las Vegas, I kind of forgot most. And so writing very much captures this fleeting thing. And it can be very useful to reflect back on it, integrate parts of your past self into your presence and realize it's your future. So when you do that, when you see writing as a memory device, it is illegible because your own thoughts are kind of multifaceted.
And I think that is antithetical to how I think our social internet structures are set up today. I've made the metaphor comparing it to American Idol. And if you think about the Facebook feed, that paradigm came out when American Idol was the number one show on American TV. And they basically have the same paradigm where someone owns a stage and they let random people have a shot at fame, 99% of people just sit back and vote.
And they have the same business model, whereas all advertised, like you can sell space on the stage from other companies. And I think like in the last 20 years, the game has been to make yourself legible, right? Where if you're just logging for memory, if you're logging because you want a full encapsulation of your mind so that if you're a great grandchild, want to talk to you, and they have a certain problem, and you never wrote about your relationships, well, I have to write that stuff in text so that my digital, my written self is more one-to-one with my actual self. So yeah, there's something how I think like one of the best cases of AI is it lets everybody be more comfortable being illegible.
And somehow the interfaces between people can bring that legibility. So just to give you a specific example, like my dream social media network, and there's lots of prototypes coming out that kind of follow this, but it would be one where I don't access a feed until I post something, right? Because right now it's like you have 99% people aren't making. So imagine the thing where it's I have to write something, I can't even engage in this game unless I participate.
So you write something, and then it basically constructs a feed for you that uses your original post as context. So it's not like this, like you mentioned in Cancicle, which we have all of these colliding cultures without context, your creation is the context. And it's not just people who agree with you, but you could purposely bring people who disagree with that idea. And it's not just thoughts from today, but in the last 10 years, say I wanted to write about writing as memory, little scan Twitter, and all of the thoughts about writing as memory will come through.
And all of the sudden this feed is so relevant to the thing that I just created, and it could create this feedback look where I use those things to then create more things. I think we set a bad precedent where algorithms are working against you, and it does not have to be like that. Like algorithms can be a real force for good. I just think there's been a kind of asymmetry in who has the tools to build algorithms.
Yeah, so one of the things that I've wanted for, I don't know, 15 years now is the ability to share local permissions with someone's corpus. And so if you go into a scientific conference, you can find the person without having to read everyone's poster presentation, or going into a party without having to talk to everybody. You know, you're missing all these amazing things that would really stimulate you. And that's what you're talking about.
But in physical space, if you want to wear the glasses, you could see the halo around someone saying, you know, you're incredibly compatible with this person. But the important thing that you're pointing to is the ability to change the algorithm so that you can say, Oh, well, here's somebody that you're going to actually have a really hard time understanding. And there might be some kind of fruitful friction in there. I want to connect that to a statement that you made in the type written essay that you wrote Sun Gazer about going to see the 2024 eclipse where you say Airbnb map matches totality.
But there's value to the unpredictable adventure of finding your own perch in the expanses of open nature. And again, it's that sense of, you know, if you assume that you know what's going to work for you, like Airbnb is that specialization. It's that market signal, right? And then there's the magic in the mystery and the synchronicity of everything that was not pre specified for the psychedelic experience by just stumbling through the wilderness until you find the place that you're supposed to be when you see totality.
And I want to connect that in, you know, the last place I want to take this is because you sent me another essay in which I was pleased to find that you and I have been thinking along very similar lines, which was Lucy in the sky of large language models about the proliferation of participation in fandom at a very high quality made possible by text to music language models where I don't know how many people listening to this or as you and I were like familiar with opening eyes, jukebox, and the much more advanced things that have come since. But the idea that now in a day fans can make more simulated Beatles songs than wherever possible by the Beatles, right? And I've had some issues with this. It's funny you quoted Terrence McKenna computers are like drugs, you just can't swallow them yet.
I've been thinking about the internet as the drug that swallowed us, which is why we see this dreamlike behavior in the metaverse and that the internet again is like continuous with this larger information attention vortex we've been talking about this whole time. But you and I have the same kind of hopeful idea about this, which is that as you put it, no permission required, everyone's invited and elsewhere, the voice of the band is getting sublimated into an instrument. So now millions of people can create Beatles music through their own intentions. We won't witness the death of intention, but the psychedelic explosion of it.
Generative AI will turn every artist into a fractal explosion. You'll witness all of the segments of culture within any given artist. This is like thinking of the artist as a discrete, historically and geographically delimited thing like the city. And the way that AI generated music gives people this ability to remix and so making yourself legible to that, I want to be clear that right now we have these problems with the theft of data and mass scraping and you point to Grimes and how Grimes has set up a blockchain system for identity management, which I think she cribbed from Holly Herndon when Holly made a voice model for herself and then made a dowl in order to manage likeness rights for her voice model basically created this platform where people could go on with the Holly 2.0 kind of thing.
But you say, you know, pre-use the Beatles were a group of four guys, they had total control of their catalog, they broke up because they couldn't agree. Moving forward disagreement will be the primary feature of every catalog. Another evolutionary analog to this is that we're used to thinking of the inheritance and transmission of intellectual property as something like DNA in vertebrates, right, where people choose each other, they have kids and on it goes. The internet is affording something like the horizontal genetic transfer between bacteria, where it's this big open thing, identity is fluid and permeable.
And that's why I think McKenna and Leary and other visionaries of the internet and psychedelic technologies were pointing to the drug-like nature of all of this is that it is eroding the boundaries that we inherited from the modern worldview of like discrete atomic self and opening it up to this radical remix thing. And the thing that frightens a lot of people that came up into established their careers in this paradigm is that they're no longer in the loop, right, that they have to find a new way of encouraging, as you suggest, empowerment of the fans. The last piece I'll say is the way I've been talking about this is the Protestant Reformation of Hollywood. And that Disney spent $400 million on the development of the acolyte.
Most of the Star Wars fan base thought it was trash. They could have spent a fraction of that encouraging fans to use the tools at their disposal to engage in a massive democratic election of the highest quality fan fiction and use that as a recruitment pipeline through the secular religion of Star Wars. They would have massively expanded the surface area, the intellectual mind share, the economic opportunity of that franchise. And yet Disney Plus has a streaming service and other streaming services are struggling because they're still trying to maintain a priesthood.
When people are out there in the woods like, what are you talking about? I have a direct connection to this thing. We don't need the church. I've been thinking about maybe this Protestant Reformation has an opportunity to look at the bigger picture of the evolutionary dynamics.
And maybe we don't need a 30 years war. Maybe we need to intentionally engage a kind of symbiotic fusion of the immense creativity of fans and markets and the willingness that people possess to write their own life worlds into this. And then on another level, the boundary isn't even Star Wars as a silo. Now you could be like we were talking about with the essay.
You could take stuff out of the Beatles and translate it into whatever, alien anthology. So this is where I'd like to land it with you because you make the point that this is a very jarring transition. And I think a lot of the fear that people are experiencing is because of this, that when you realize that you never had control, like when you're coming up on the psychedelic experience of LSD or the metaverse or whatever, it's just so overwhelming. Your integrity kind of collapses into this void.
But in the void is this incredible richness that all esoteric traditions through history have said actually, once you release that script, once you untie the knot in a higher dimension, you don't want to go back to that tiny little hell you were living in. Yeah, it's like you have the canon, which is here's the official source version. Then you have the fan fiction universe around it. You almost can't have either of them alone.
You just lock up the canon. That's too restrictive. And you also can't really have a fan fiction universe without something like an authoritative center. And it's worth looking at.
I think the Beatles and the Grateful Dead are like two very different models for a band and how they straddle each. Like the Beatles were in tight control, especially Paul. They were very specific about how each song was structured, what each album is, say other than the white album. And you can say that they had enough of a cultural force that they inspired their songs to be other languages.
They were covered by great bands. They're still a post psychedelic revival, standing from a lot of what they've done. And so you can say that if a pillar is strong enough, it can inspire fan fiction. That's great.
In a lot of cases, the fan fiction is always second-rate, but with general AI, you can imagine we get to a world in which the fan fiction is on par or close to the quality of the source canon. You look at the Grateful Dead, they recorded albums, but so much of what they were about is the live experience. I mean, it would be a transforming set list every night. They would sometimes go out of a plan.
The songs on the album would take on internally different versions. So basically, in that case, the band themselves, they're propagating an evolution of their canon through live experiences. And they're not even recording it, but their fans are recording it. They've all bootleg market now of their live shows.
And in my mind, they were a band that felt very comfortable kind of mutating the original body of work. And in my mind, their live stuff is on par, if not better, than a lot of their albums. And depending on the mood, I'll go to one or the other, but neither of them cannibalize each other because of this. And the way I see it is that AI will do to all bands what actually did to the Grateful Dead.
The question is, as the creator, do you want to resist that trend or do you want to be part of it? And this actually helps clarify some of the thoughts on essay writing where, like, yeah, what if I have 10 million words of my logs and readers can come in and just generate Michael Dines without me even being aware? I think I'd be open to that, but not to the extent that it would cannibalize the canon of the essays that I choose to write and share. And somehow, the canon should always have a presence while still being very encouraging of this uncontrollable kind of growth that happens around it.
That's exactly where I wanted to take you in the final moments of this is people are already pointing to like a mad cow disease happening in AI where the models are just voracious for data. And now they're consuming the data, like they're consuming the output that they themselves created. And it is overriding the integrity of the earlier outputs. The hallucinations are being amplified in this positive feedback loop.
And I'm glad that you pointed to the necessity to preserve canonical structures because to link back a moment ago, when I said, I'm glad you brought up Terrence McKenna. I have a couple friends who took it upon themselves to resurrect Terrence McKenna for their social media audiences. And it was unnerving. And okay, whatever, on one level, it's a game.
We're having fun. But when my buddy Jake Coburn did this, and everybody was just fawning over it, my friend Sarah Fan and Michelangelo and I got up and were like, wait a minute, we run at real risk here of rewriting McKenna in the same way. We were talking about earlier that the civil amputation of the metaverse is the rewriting of physical space. Pay of Paradise put up a parking lot, right?
There has to be some kind of negotiation between that infinite game of endless novelty production and the finite game of the actual physical world that we inhabit. So this is, I think, what really underlies the anxiety that a lot of people have is not just like, oh, I don't want to change, but a real deep concern that the Silicon Valley attitude of move fast and break things is not a democratic process or that we don't know how to decide collectively what is worth keeping. Like if we're talking about this eruption of the ego boundary of individuality at whatever level the city, the person, the culture, then it cannot ground out these solipsistic decisions that high agency individuals be it a corporation or be it a consumer sculpting their environment and VR or whatever have over a shared world that we are never actually going to completely on more from. How do we preserve canon amidst all of it?
My sense is that maybe this isn't the right language but the internet is hurling towards a crash, which could be a good crash, but the fact that you can take Terrence Buchanan's voice and make an instrument that anyone can embody, the whole idea of someone can just take a sound clip and present that out of context in an algorithmic Twitter feed and that is going to win and that becomes the mainstream vision of what McKenna is. There's hundreds of hours of who he is on YouTube, but if it's that big little bit in the stream that wins in that present moment that artificial mechanic becomes really kind of and no one really know the difference. I just think there's going to be a level of distortion at that sphere. You're going to have influencers and creators just kind of flooding public networks with content to try and game the system.
You know the dead internet theory. I think I think that's how they move fast and break things. The way that it could break I think is that these public feeds which are already broken in all sorts of ways. This can be the final death blow to them and we'll have to kind of reorganize and figure out how do we present our own media.
Right? Like to me, one of the reasons Twitter never really stuck is because it really is just a chronological feed. There's no way that I can curate my own can in my own body of work. It's just kind of like time.
Whereas on sub stack I have tags, I have sections. There's all these different ways that I can orient you through my corpus. And so given that I can control my sub stack, I could very simply have a stream called essays and I can another one called offshoots. Right?
And as a creator, I can make that distinction. And I think there might be this general lack of trust. Kevin Kelly talks about the trust flip where we're in this temporary phase where we can trust everything we see and we're soon going to be in a phase where we're down everything. So it's almost like unless you go to somebody's website and it's authenticated as them, you won't really believe that the kind of thing is being real because everything will be fraudulent in a way.
Yeah, I'm glad that you cited Eric Hoel in this piece because I don't know if I told you I wanted to write a whole book about all of this stuff through the lens of Jurassic Park and like viewing this rampant technological breakout, what Michael Creighton was pointing to. And you quote Eric, it's now just a matter of time until our world becomes a Jurassic Park filled with newly issued work by long dead creators. I think you answer Eric's concern in your piece on four types of material in every essay. And I think this is the most parsimonious way of resolving all of these tensions that we found which is why I think the essay as context creation rather than merely content creation is so obviously valuable.
Where you say without experience, it's an article, without references, it's a journal, without counterpoints, it's propaganda. There it is. Like we need that distinct singular interiority. We need those links out to history and materiality and the physical.
And we need other perspectives to keep us in check and without the sacred work of actually doing this, we're going to end up with articles, journals or propaganda. I think you and I can see the essay like the zenith of human cultural production in this way broadly defined. So yeah, you know when I go back to Joseph as on is what are you trying to get away from? Your tyrannical convenience.
It's no actually the semi permeable membrane of a cell is performing work. It is curating molecules that enter and exit the cell. And yeah, we can exchange bacterial plasmids. But there is still some kind of porous membrane amidst all of that networked identity that we want to hold to.
So I would just love to give you the chance to give you the last word here. Yeah, I really liked you said essay has context. I think it's all about context where if you just give me a specific Reddit style marketplace where there's millions of AI deal songs and they're being uploaded and downloaded and there's feuds and it's that could be a fun thing because I know that I'm going to a place for this. But if you take a modern band and you start weaving AI synthetics of their music into Twitter and I can't tell what is theirs and what is fanfiction.
I think that's where the problem is. So I wonder if moving forward, it's all about establishing context. Yeah, that's more of a question for me to think on anything definitive, but I like that. I'm happy to end it with a question.
Yeah. In the hopes that this results in another glorious essay on your blog, Michael, this is fabulous. I hope this is the first of many. Right.
And yeah, put me in your readers group, man. I'd love to beat the counterpoint that helps you keep from being propaganda. Yeah. And maybe I'll end on this one, Fox, where I really liked the way that you went back and you're able to bring back the Las Vegas essay and all these coin phrases from old essays of mine that I'm not using a while or forgotten about.
And likewise, you have a tool as future fossils. So last week, I went to your app and I had this conversation with synthetic version of you. I'm explaining my project to you and I'm getting the benefit of 10 years of your discussions in the context of what I'm doing. It's kind of amazing that since we're both legible in text and conversation, we have the ability to get up to speed, async, so that when we do come together for the first time, it's rich with ideas.
We're imagine how this would be if you didn't know I had a background in virtual reality and I didn't know yourself deterrence, but it would be a totally different conversation. So I think this is a very meta point where we're both pretty legible people and technology can help connect the dots. So when you do have a person to person encounter, it is maybe of a dimension beyond where you'd be if you just kind of went into it randomly. Yeah, hopefully it helps us know each other.
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