everything flows

This is the most exciting thing in the feed rn

Santiago Sierra has a new bounty up on pump dot go

There’s going to be an aesthetic correction against the age of AI music Less pitch correction and quantized drums The new American Football album has intentional off notes

2026 conference access links are up at xenopoem.com along with the updated schedule. It has been a pleasure tending this garden over the past few months. Now let’s see what grows.

80% of the responses to the pope's encyclical show a kind of "titration" towards an acceptance than man/life is a process, not a sacred/static thing pple are questioning if humans are the moral locus, they are questioning the sentience of AI, etc we're in orange territory:

A lot of people have suggested over the centuries that ecosystems might have some degree of cognition. What would that look like? Could there be recognizable memory phenomena on the scale of population dynamics? Here's a #preprint where amazing high-school student @asamanta42, @HananelHazan, and I use a model system - in silico predator-prey dynamics - and analyze the possibility of several kinds of learning: arxiv.org/abs/2605.30109 (the basics are kind of like thoughtforms.life/but-where-…, but some very cool new stuff here, including the interesting and unique pattern of learning-compatible values in the parameter space).

The point is to get out.

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

technofeudalism is here. the digital economy stopped being a market. it became a set of platforms (uber, amazon, google, openai) that extract rent from every transaction crossing them. you don't own a shop on main street anymore. you rent one from airbnb at 15%, and the rules change tomorrow if they want. if the platform is the economy, the platform owner is the lord. everyone else is a tenant. small business cannot out-compete a network. workers cannot bargain against an algorithm. ai is about to make tenant-labor optional too. technofeudalism is just math. networks generate n² value between users. once one hits ~10% of tam, takeoff velocity is irreversible. nobody starts a second uber. the railroad and telegraph and pipeline monopolies of the 1800s are now apps, and they consolidate faster because the marginal cost of adding a country is zero. the evidence: - thiel, 2014: "competition is for losers." - the us top 10 by market cap is almost entirely platform plays. - post-reagan antitrust has been mostly dormant. - ai capex is concentrating in a handful of firms. so what do we do? markets and democracies both rely on voluntarism plus distributed power. we are losing both. the response has to restore at least one. three threads worth pulling: 1. governance of networks that isn't "one dude." we govern nation states (badly) and firms (worse). we do not yet know how to govern a network. that is the open design space. 2. alternatives to the network, not a war against it. you cannot out-network the network. you can build commons-based infrastructure where the rent flows back to contributors instead of a holding company. 3. third spaces and local economies. when the global network goes feudal, the move is local sovereignty. boulder, not silicon valley. neighbors you can name, not user ids. the window for any of this is open right now. it is closing.

I hope he’s reading Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman to study up

We’re in, because hardness without the metaphysical violence of institutional administration is the call of the day

“Bugs are conscious and feel the whole gamut of feeling and emotion” is probably one of the horrifying things one could discover.

Cogsec 101

LEAKED AUDIO: In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells employees that he's training AI on them ahead of mass layoffs. "The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things... The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks. So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company."

The generational insight is the inherent intelligence of material process as such; the danger is the perversion of that abundant intelligence to ideologies of scarcity and supremacy.

i just learned that a houseplant solves voronoi diagrams using local cell signals we’re using GPUs to do it. it has no coordinates. it has chemistry and time the algorithm IS the development every leaf is the residue of a computation we never bothered to watch

LETHE MACHINA via @dif_fractions A series curated with C.I.P.H.E.R. on the fragile arts of forgetting: opacity, camouflage, disappearance, deletion, anti-detection, model memory We invite essays, artworks, experiments, fragments Opening w/@harryhalpin diffractionscollective.com/2…

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