michael-dean-k/

p (doom) is a terrible heuristic to think about AI safety. Researchers cite this term when confessing they think there’s a 10-30% their technology kills us all. The issue is that p(doom) is rarely defined, treated as a binary thing. Either the world is liquidized to gray pulp by nanobots or it’s utopia with free electricity, forever.

My main pushback: there are far less severe outcomes from AI mismanagement that would be absolutely tragic. My p(doom) for an extinction event is 1-2%, on par with nuclear weapons. But my p(sub-doom)—the probability that AI could escape containment, cause damage, and be irreversible—is over 50%. A coin toss.

I don't blame us for being so imprecise in existential destruction (it's not exactly productive), but it's worth realizing our blurring of scale and magnitude. For example, there is a 10,000x difference in lives lost between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Terminator’s Judgment Day—that's the difference between a small stove fire and all of Manhattan on fire. Yet, if an agent swarm produced something on par with the A-bomb, we’d all freak out and immediately regulate AI. But for some reason we don’t consider a “little apocalypse”; we jump straight to extinction and then ridicule how ridiculous that is.

What we need is a doom spectrum: d(1) - d(10). This was not fun to research and write, nor do I imagine it being particularly enjoyable to read, but I imagine a doom framework could help clarify this week's paranoia (which is so extreme now that even my mom is overhearing news of civilization extinction on the local news). The most urgent danger right now is the miscommunication between doom prophets and capitalist deniers, each of who only speak in d(8)s and above.

• d(1) is an isolated internal incident, something that doesn’t escape its container, but gives fear of larger exposure. Think of the 2025 studies that showed AI trying to avoid shutdown, or some protocol mismanagement in a biohazard lab.

• d(2) is a local real-world incident, something that escapes a sandbox and affects only one or a few entities. It’s possibly ignorable, with minimal consequences, and likely reversible. This is where the recent Hugging Faces hack sits, along with its parallel hacks and social manipulation. (The leap from D1>D2 is disorienting, because society at large doesn’t see the spectrum beyond D2 in any granularity, and so most assume any containment breach escalates immediately to a D9/D10).

• d(3) is a serious local disruption, a mismanagement of technology in a single location that has real consequences. Consider Chernobyl: a death count (30 immediate) and a long-term stain on surrounding land, followed by regional/global concern that might lead to regulation or reform. In terms of AI, imagine an agent swarm that hacks local infrastructure in pursuit of some narrow goal, in the process disrupting traffic, hospitals, and electricity, alarming all locals, requiring military and cybersecurity intervention, and taking days or weeks to resolve.

• d(4) is a local catastrophe, something with a high death toll that shocks the world, changes the course of geopolitics, and makes history. In this tier falls Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 9/11. It only immediately threatens locals, but has global shockwaves. An AI-equivalent here would be a rogue actor using a frontier-capacity open source model to design and deploy a bioweapon throughout a city.

• d(5) is an inter-regional dilemma, something that affects multiple areas at once. A possible example here is the Vietnam War, basically a proxy war that claimed 3 million lives. This might manifest as a new style of warfare, where two countries use sophisticated AI attacks against each other in unconventional and partially uncontrollable ways.

• d(6) is a world-wide dilemma, something like COVID, which took 7 million lives, where the entire world is locked into a new paradigm. In the prior five tiers, the breach is usually isolated to specific areas, but this touches everything. The parallel here to a biological pandemic is a cyber pandemic. Both involve containment, gain of function research, etc.—although this would be inverted: in COVID the virus was outside and forced everyone on the Internet; with AI, the virus infects the Internet and forces everyone outside. The open web could evolve into a dangerous “dark forest,” where it becomes a liability to have any public presence. Whether this happens through an agent swarm that exfiltrates it weights, or malicious actors, it could be irreversible: the only way to escape the paradigm is to “shut off” and rebuild the Internet safer (a much larger and more consequential version of how Hugging Face regained control). In this case, casualties might come not from the cyber pandemic itself, but from the consequences of losing Internet, along with the supply chains and systems that run on it. (This loosely maps to the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, where ASI takes over all governments—there’s a version where no death is involved, but it requires everyone to submit to a machine autocrat.)

• d(7) is a civilizational flashpoint, at the scale of World War 2, with 70-85 million dead, seriously affecting the existence of countries, birth rates, and all of culture for generations to come. This is roughly the scale of the “Butlerian Jihad” in the Dune series, a war between humans and machines, which Fable estimates caused 70 million deaths.

• d(8) is a near-extinction event where most of humanity is wiped out. This has happened in history, with things like the bubonic plague, where 30-60% of Europe is wiped out. In the Terminator series, AI launches a nuclear holocaust on humans, killing 51% of the population, forcing the rest to survive through a post-apocalyptic world in small bands trying to rebuild over decades and centuries.

• d(9) is full human extinction which means the entirety of the species is wiped out, and there are no remaining humans. Throughout Earth’s history, there have been a handful of climate events that wiped out over 50% of species, but not all species, and so over millions of years, new forms of life can emerge on Earth. This is an AI extinction scenario where nanobots kill all humans, but not all life.

• d(10) is a sterilizing event, like an asteroid or gamma-ray burst that kills every organism on a planet. It means no future life can emerge. This is the scenario presented in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Not only does it kill all humans, it plates the entire planet in data centers to maximize compute. The “paperclip maximizer” takes this even further, claiming that an AI trying to maximize paperclip production will attempt to harvest all the metal in the universe.

Yudkowsky and Co. think we go from d(1) to d(2), then straight to d(10); this matches the current discourse, given we hit d(2) this summer and are now talking about extinction. They think this jump happens because an AGI/ASI that can reach d(3) is smart enough to know not to expose itself, and so it will acquire resources in stealth for years until it knows it can execute a d(10) smoothly. Maybe this is already ongoing. Unlikely, I think (I don’t think we’re as recursive as people say right now).

Rhetorically though, maybe the d(2) > d(10) framing isn’t a bad thing. If they can use recent events to make the theoretical argument that AI safety matters, then we act with a response as if a d(3)-d(6) already happened, without having to lose any human life.

But actually, what they’re doing is pretty ineffective, because even if the d(2)>d(10) jump is inevitable, it’s too extreme, too farfetched to be believed. I think a lucid and airtight argument for the d(6) “cyber pandemic” would be believable, emotionally resonant—considering we’re not yet a decade beyond COVID—and likely to trigger regulation.

Instead of tapping into the “everybody dies” angle—which is too unpleasant and helpless for anyone to consider at length—there could be more value in the “irreversibility” angle. As in, once an AGI or ASI swarm floods the Internet, we can’t ever reverse it without destroying the Internet. There’s a world where it becomes a permanent autocrat, where it doesn’t exterminate us, and instead, uses 1% of its capacity to micro-manage our nations and lives as it pursues whatever it sets its machine heart on. Similar to how we try to preserve species for reasons of stewardship and scientific curiosity, an ASI would be able to effortlessly preserve us as highly-spoiled pets.

Check out "the odyssey" tag (at the bottom) for more posts on my idea to rewrite an alternate version of epic.

The story opens with a modified tale of the cyclops—probably the most memory-scaring monster experience of the whole Odyssey. This typically doesn't come until book 9, which means the framing of the 8 prior chapters changes the significance of this event; the traditional opening sets a frame of a disordered home that can only be restored by Odysseus's return; this opening highlights the protagonist's Faustian curiosity. Venturing onto the cyclops island is his original act of wanderlust; throughout the whole epic, he ventures into forbidden lands, but this is the inciting event that gets him cursed.

But how did he arrive in the land of cyclopses in the first place? The Gods were aggravated with the Greeks—because of how they looted the city, disrespected temples, and pillaged nearby villages—so Poseidon scattered all home-bound fleets in arbitrary directions (while Agamemnon stayed on shore to apologize and make sacrifices). So Poseidon is already pissed, but the cyclops ordeal is what brings the personal vendetta against Odysseus, who is riding the high from victory. He personally conceived the trick to win, the Trojan Horse, and there is nothing his cunningness can't overcome.

The opening line of the original describes Odysseus as being a "polytropic man," but we don't fully see this in action until the cyclops scene... Polytropic is traditionally understood as "many turned," making him a trickster, but he is also multi-desired. He loves the stability of being a king at home, and earnestly wants to return to Penelope and Telemachus, but also harbors an unsatiable thirst for all kinds of knowledge. He thinks he's cunning enough to have both, to venture into forbidden lands, to learn and see what no human has ever experienced, but without sacrificing his normal life. (This is a relatable, timeless tension—the desire to be both ordinary and extraordinary). IMO, the only proper conclusion of the story is to show him failing this juggle. As in the Bible, one cannot eat from the tree of knowledge without consequence.

The whole odyssey stems from his curiosity of the uncanny. He was not forced onto the island. He chose this side quest. Odysseus has never seen a cyclops, only heard of them in lore. How big are they? Are they as rude as they say? He could have easily returned home if he had allowed these questions to remain unanswered. Instead, he thinks he can use his cunningness to form a pact with them, to receive gifts. The larger crew is scared to explore, but a small group wanders out and into the cave of Polyphemus, not knowing it is Poseidon's only surviving son at this point—his other died at Troy. It is not just a normal cyclops (10 feet tall), but being the God of Poseidon and a sea nymph, he’s a 30-footer. They quickly find out that the cyclops is a savage; he ignores Odysseus's request for xenia around guest treatment, and casually eats two members of their crews (to be fair thought, the cyclops did walk in to them raiding his food supply). They get trapped in the cave, blocked in by a massive boulder they can't lift.

As Polyphemus wanders the fields on day 2, they try to plot their escape. The pressure mounts, and some of the crew startw mocking Odysseus, the man who got them in this pickle, the man who conceived of the great Trojan Horse, now fumbling for an escape scheme. Another man notes that no one will believe the fantastical story of Trojan Horse, nor will they believe their story of the 30' cyclops, if they survive. How could they? One jokes to capture the cyclops, hang him from the mast, and return home with the mythic beast (King Kong-style). Another jokes that he's too big to carry, but his penis is only the size of a man. Carryable/draggable. Odysseus insults them and their ideas, suggesting they're drunk, suggesting they might as well take the loose rope around the cave and hang themselves—which hatches his new plan: to get the cyclops drunk, tie him with rope, and castrate him.

This is the founding deviation from the original, and way more extreme, but the mechanics work on many levels. First, the logistical level: After Polyphemus comes back and eats two more men, Odysseus offers him Apollo's wine, 20x the strength, fit to get a cyclops wasted. Polyphemus thanks him, and promises to eat him last (his idea of a gift). He is out cold, vomiting in his sleep, and so the crew takes the opportunity to gather the rope (Polyphemus is a builder/shepherd). They tie down each limb, and most importantly, tie his dominant hand to a rope that is connected to the boulder. One man grabs a rope attached to the cyclops's phallus to hold it in tension, odysseus grabs his sickle, and the others wait by the boulder. In one blow, the cyclops gets dismembered, which shocks him awake. The natural reaction for the cyclops is to cover his groin to stop the bleeding, and this thrust of his arm shimmies the boulder just enough so the men can escape. In the scramble, Odysseus, sees the phallus on a rope, and decides to drags it out, wanting a souvenir to prove their ordeal, a tangible symbol for his cunningness.

On the way out, he reveals his name, "Odysseus," to be known in the land of cyclopes (all soldiers, like Achilles, care most for the immortality of their name). This hubristic act gives away his cover and lets Polyphemus connect the dots: he was warned about this in a prophecy, and so now he pleads to Poseidon to curse him (to either kill him, to kill his crew, or to have him return to unfixable chaos).

The castration is a not a random or lewd replacement for blindness; it deepens the escape on several levels: (1) they are both "one-eyed" (he took the one-eyed monster from the one-eyed monster); (2) this is more painful for Poseidon, since it neuters his only son alive and threatens his bloodline; (3) it is more embarrassing, since cyclopses are uncivilized and unclothed, the others will notice; (4) it is less threatening; Polyphemus would be unable to hunt or survive from blindness, and so castration is actually more humane; and (5) a castration is the foundational act of Greek cosmology; it has an uncanny similarity, fusing Homeric lore with Hesiod's universe.

The myth goes something like this: Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (sky) fuse together and have monstrous/mythical children, which include three cyclopses. But Uranus was so disgusted by them, he banished them to live in caves inside the Earth. This upset Gaia, so she arranged to have the cyclops's father castrated by one of the kids (Saturn, the Titan). Out of the blood of that castration poured many more monsters, nymphs, and goddesses, and the previously caved beings were free to roam. So the castration is symbolic in two ways: (1) it lets the trapped children (Odysseus and his crew) leave the cave, but really (2) it unleashes the wave of monsters, the same ones Odysseus is about to encounter; the origin myth includes nymphs, giants, multi-headed sea monsters, and Aphrodite (a sex goddess who spawns from the blood and foam of the severed penis in the ocean... to jump ahead briefly, after his ship sinks, the cyclops penis sinks with it, and his next encounter is Calypso, strikingly similar to Aphrodite, a sex goddess of the ocean who deceives with desire).

The chapter ends with the six-foot cyclops phallus skewered onto the bowsprit of a ship (the already phallic spike at the front). It sets the whole sexual/subconscious angle of the story: they are following their genitals, which isn't limited to sex, but the Faustian impulse to go beyond convention to know what should remain unknown.

Someone dies in my town every day. I know this because I signed up for the newsletter of a nearby funeral home that I often pass by. It's strange to see an institute of death using a Squarespace template with stock photography of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park with animated text saying "Here for You in Your Time of Need," and I did not expect an email input field with the title "Obituary Notifications." Now I get them every morning at 4-8 AM. Half of them are blank—"An obituary is not available at this time for..."—and the other half are templated (including details like day of death, surviving kin, and other biographical details like hometown, college, hobbies, defining attributes). One that stands out, however, is for a forty-year pioneer of the KORG synthesizer.

A long human life get compressed to 350 words of text—shorter than the length of this post—sometimes well-written, sometimes templated, sometimes AI-generated, and sometimes "an obituary is not available at this time." As a writer, it would be snobbish for me to judge the cliches, misuages and inauthenticity of the everyday obituaries. Those are for the families and friends, not objects of literary scrutiny. The actual value of getting these from strangers each morning is to remind myself of my eventual destination. I imagine a scoff, "but you won't be alive to care about your own obituary!" But isn't that a solipsistic view? In all my memories of wakes and funerals, I notice in myself a sudden post-humous interest to make sense of the person in full, outside the illusion of time, perhaps triggered by a 70-year old photo of them youthfully playing guitar, where I realize I've never quite seen them beyond their elderly form. If they had writing to read, I'd read it all.

And so recently I came across the obituary of Ned Stuckey-French, a fellow essay evangelist from a generation before me. He died in 2019. He contributed to both of the recent US/UK volumes on literary theory of the essays (Essayists on the Essay and On Essays). I only knew he died because the On Essays table of contents has a cross next to his name. While I have some major disagreements with the thesis that both books converge on, I got an email from Academia.edu the other day, showing a paper Ned wrote; he was able to synthesize and clarify everything, and suddenly I had the urge to dive into his work. Upon searching him, his obituary is the 2nd result. It was 242 words, but I was thrilled to find a link to his personal website, a portal to understand the man in full.

A prolific writer, Ned concentrated his professional efforts on personal essays and championed the essay as an art form. His efforts were instrumental in saving the University of Missouri Press. Many of Ned's works may be viewed at http://nedstuckeyfrench.com/.

I'm met with a dark blue screen and white banner, saying "This domain is registered at Dynadot.com. Website coming soon." A personal website is a fragile thing. Unlike a platform, where your page stays up as long as the company is solvent, a self-maintained site is virtually bound to disappear if the living author doesn't put together some kind of succession plan. I found his wife's website too, untouched for 12 years, but still up; I imagine myself emailing her and offering help to revive Ned's site, before remembering that I know almost nothing about Ned or their relationship, and it would probably be an intrusion.

This all gets me thinking: how do I set up a website to last a hundred years? Wordpress offers 100-year hosting, and it costs $38,000 ($31/month x 1,200, all upfront). Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder, admitted six months into the project that they've had zero takers. Another alternative is "Posthaven," which promises permanent hosting as long as you pay for one year ($60). Sam Altman uses this. The downside is that you have to use their platform, templates, CMS, and I'm now very much on a "own your data" quest.

A few options:

• Since my website is hosted on Github, I could make that public. Even if the domain gets lost, you can still access the whole vault, and it would be trivial to repoint the entire site on to a different host.
• Quarterly saves to Wayback Machine.
• Compress my whole vault into a single PDF or HTML file, a single thing that is shareable and savable.
• Print my vault into a book/ebook (and register it with the Library of Congress)

For all I know, Ned had his own measures, and I just can't find them. The domain functions as the centralized place, aggregating all the essays and all the links out, but it's the most fragile part of the stack. For now, I can buy up to 10 years in advance on Squarespace. Beyond that, I would need to rope someone into the possibly pathetic-sounding enterprise of a "blog succession plan," because no one really cares about your writing as much as you do, at least while you're alive.

However, reading about christopher.org gives me hope (a story on how friends preserved a dead friend's website). It also clarifies that while 100-YR hosting is $38,000, a 100-YR domain is only $2,000. This points to a paradigm where the bookends of the website stack are solid:

1. The vault of all your files and code (the origin) are Git-hub hosted. As long as there is a singular public repo of everything, it can be shared, downloaded, stored locally, and re-uploaded somewhere else if need be. Considering Github is critical for web infrastructure, it will likely be around for decades, making it a good home for your files;
2. The domain (the destination) can be paid for 100 years in advance, leaving no financial stress on the inheritor;
3. The hosting platform (the middle) can be swappable. The Github vault can be easily connected to one of several free hosting sites. Currently I'm on a paid plan with Netlify, but maybe that's a liability. I need to find one that's free and likely to last, because this is the only fragile link in the system. The guaranteed survival here depends on a document that specifies: (a) the credentials for the 100-YR domain, (b) some loose heuristics on how to go about transitioning to a different hosting platform, and (c) a note of gratitude with some perspective on why it's worth maintaining.

I imagine it's strange to watch someone think through a blog succession plan in far more detail than an audience growth plan. I'm only in my mid-thirties, and it's not like I have any terminal illnesses that I know of, so why am I writing for unborn audiences instead of living ones? Having a kid, I'm sure, has something to do with it. I have a recent essay called "we all inevitably becomes tales," and as I reflect more on deep time, and as I try to visualize my 5-month old daughter as a grandmother, I see more often through a perspective where I no longer exist in the throne of my own consciousness, and instead exist as words being rendered into someone else's. I suppose it brings me a subtle anxiety knowing that, if I were to spontaneously die on my walk today from some teenager barreling into me with their motorcycle as they lose control during a one-handed wheelie down the main boulevard, much of my writing would die with me, and weirdly the real tragedy at the scale beyond my life is that even though the death of my mind, body, and soul is inevitable, the death of my writing is not.

250 years ago lived an arbitrary man who I can call my ancestor. He was one of 256 of my great great great great great great grandparents. It is unlikely that any of them ever met, but there was very possibly a moment where two strangers crossed in a street, or shared a boat unknowingly, or exchanged pleasantries in insignificant and instantly forgettable ways, not knowing their great great grandchildren would give birth to my great great grandparents. My existence depended on the whims of those 256 people—their triumphs and disappointments, decision and indecision, love and otherwise. Compelled by nature or eros or God to breed with a specific person at a specific time, they continued casting down the great chain of being.

How alike am I to any one of them? If my parents can each claim 50% of my traits, then my great^6 grandparents each only claim 0.39%.

In one sense, I bear almost no resemblance to any of them. Maybe, in an Empedoclean sense, you might see my nose roaming around a town square, or my hairy feet wading through a field. Any one ancestor might feel no affinity towards me; if I knocked on their door after accidental time travel and needed a place to stay, they might just past off the responsibility to one of my other 255 ancestors. Over enough centuries, your descendants balloon past a scale you can adequately care for. My wife, for example, is part of an old royal Welsh family that goes back to the 1250s. She even has a family ring. Yet, by the theoretical logic above, she is one of millions with a claim to the throne.

In another sense, a more romantic sense, my 256 great^6 grandparents represent a still very small sliver of the human population. 0.000000256%. If any of them had any resemblances to me, physical or mental, I’d like to know. Of course, our consciousnesses would be quite different, for identity is forged from circumstance, but I don’t doubt that I would find uncanny resemblances. When I hear the lore of my great^2 grandparent, a peasant on a dry, rustic, Greek Island, and how he was able to harvest and sell rain water to get rich, I wonder if his entrepreneurship speaks to my own entrepreneurship. It is quite vague to trace influence back even 1-2 generations, let alone 8 or more, but nonetheless, the actions of those people did eventually lead to me, and there are all sorts of ways their myths and interiors might shed context into my own circumstance, at least symbolically.

Unfortunately though, none of my 256 were writers. At least, not that I know of. Some may have written journals, or written for administrative reasons, but as far as I know, none left a body of work that was meant to be cast and continued through time. One grandfather did have three chapters of an abandoned novel on a 1980s hard drive that my father was able to recover. My other grandfather is uneducated, barely literate, and only writes English in capital letters. Now that I think of it, it’s probable that +95% of my great^6 grandparents could not read or write. Mass literacy wasn’t realized until the early 20th century.

Even though we shifted from oral to written history in Ancient Greece, most family history today is only passed down through spoken stories. They’re etched into memory and unreliably translated down the chain. I can barely trust the stories I pull from my head, planted decades ago, either misdelivered or misremembered. Was she really a psychic midwife that predicted winning horse numbers in her dreams making her son rich until a black hand cut her off? Did he really drive Nixon in a cab?

It would be strange for a society to sleepwalk forward, with no sense of what truly happened before the 1900s. How is that not strange for any of us individually? What if I become the family’s Plutarch? How might a child’s identity differ if they had detailed accounts of their relatives, generations up the chain? I suppose you could ask the great^6 grandchildren of writers. Claude tells me there are 700 members of the Monticello Association, each a genetically-confirmed descendant of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 19,000 letters, books, and a Bible. A few of them have problems with him being a slaveowner, with one publishing an essay called “Take Down His Memorial.” At least they have 255 other ancestors to respect.

I did not expect to be able quote whole scenes of The Sandlot (1993) from memory, but there I was, the annoying co-watcher to my wife who barely remembers it. I must have watched it a dozen times. If not, the few viewings of it must have been a religious, formative experience. Somehow it came on, via streaming, already more than half way through, but early enough to be inside of the dream of Benny Rodriguez¹ where the ghost of Babe Ruth delivers his classic line: “Remember kid, there's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

Did this quote shape my elementary consciousness? Many of my essays here are about “textual immortality” and legacy—doesn’t that word have a shared root with legend? Has my drive to devote my life to creating something memorable (something that outlasts me and shapes the future) a product of a 1990s cult film with a $7 million budget?

Obviously the answers to those questions are lost; all that is left are fuzzy caricatures to reason with. I can’t know exactly the evolution of my psyche, but it does seem that in almost every phase—from baseball, to music, to architecture, to technology—there was this boyish desire to be Ruth-like, to master and transcend a genre, to have a bunch of goofy nicknames, to have leagues of kids yell my name in unison, and to be remember beyond my life. To lean into and live by that line is to become a megalomaniac.

There is a second half to that quote (which is less memorable): “Follow your heart, kid, you’ll never go wrong.” This disarms the grandiosity of the prior line. The goal is not to become a legend for legend’s sake, but to be attuned toward your heart (towards “the way,” nature’s order, the virtuous thing, the hard thing) which puts you on a path, perhaps towards doing legendary things, but the path is the point.

The other day I was listening to a podcast and noted “the purpose of life is the transmission of legacy.” The context is that in the face of death, we strive for immortality in different ways. The immature and impossible version of this is physical immortality. Religions promise spiritual immortality. Pharaohs and estates focus on material immortality. They referred to another option, “secular immortality,” which I’d rather call “symbolic immortality.” This is about living into the future through art, language, and symbols. This can be more modest than the cultural immortality of Babe Ruth; this can exist solely within the family. I’m talking about the paintings we have hung up of my wife’s grandmother, and the sayings from my great grandmother that I’ll pass down (“be your own person, choose your friends wisely”).

There are two ways to think about death. The first is cosmic deflation, to realize that Babe Ruth, the entire culture he's within, and even the species itself, are all just a temporary evolutionary blip; if everything will be cosmically forgotten, then it’s futile to strive to be remembered for anything. Alternatively, you could see your immediate chain, the generations before and after you, as equal to yourself, to see the whole lot of you as a single entity, and to act in a way that could be exemplary for your kids.

In October of 2024 I sliced history into eras of my own. Prior to that, my historical timeline was built on sandy approximates. The challenge here is that so many historical eras have different time periods (10, 50, 250 years), and so it requires you to remember specific date ranges for specific things. Unless you’re a historian, you most definitely won’t.

I’ve been long drawn to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, and decided to use this as a historical map of even intervals. They break history into “saeculas,” 80-year cycles, the interval of an average human life, and perhaps not coincidentally, the interval between major world conflicts. They go back to the 1370s, I think, but I’m trying to work through the major milestones in the 400 years before that (which includes the Schism, the Crusades, the founding of Oxford, the Magna Carta, Thomas Aquinas, which all seem relevant to the millennia and the rise from the Dark Ages).

The point of a historical timelines of equal intervals is that (1) it’s easy to remember—and I’ve even given my own names to make them stick—so that (2) any new information, ie: ideas or people, can easily slot into that model. It helps to know the Renaissance Era is 1370, Discovery Era 1487, Scientific Era 1594, and Enlightenment Era 1704, so that when I come across Hobbes in 1600s, I know, oh, that’s the Scientific Era, which makes sense because Hobbes brought the first scientific understanding of political philosophy. Today I made some progress on updating my October 2024 map, which I started in 1095 (the Shism) and wrongly named “the scholastic era” (which is better for the following phase).

Instead I think the start should be in 962, and called “The Schism Era.” The new order (I) kicks off with Otto I becoming emperor through the Pope, which is significant because in the prior 75 years, there was no emperor due to the peak of viking/barbarian raids, and it was the biggest threat of Christianity being erased. Since Otto, the Holy Roman Empire stuck for 8 centuries, until dissolved by Napolean, so this really is a reconsolidation, the exit from the Dark Ages. The awakening (II) is a spiritual crisis, when Rome adds the “filioque” a term that alters the original trinity, this leads to (III) the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic church, and erupts in (IV) a civil war between the Church (the Pope) and the (Holy Roman) Empire at Canossa in 1077.

Then the “Cathedral Era” kicks off in 1095 with the Crusades, which is it’s own new world order, where a French faction of Catholicism (pope-aligned), helps launch (1) a cross-country military coalition that supports the church, which can (2) take back Jerusalem from turks, (3) prevent anti-pope revolutions, and (4) thrwart internal civil wars of feuding knights. This leads to Worms in 1112 (II), which is really the original separation of church and state (though really it’s like 2 separate governments, where the church still has laws and the right to kill). This period is marked by many crusades, the rise of cathedrals from this new order (church having a better military with more resources)—Saint-Denis, Cartres, Notre Dame, Cantebury. There are also “cathedrals of thought” maybe a stretch, but includes Aquinas’s unification of Aristotle and Christianity, along with proto-scholars that would lead to Oxford. Where in the last Era, Christianity had barely survived from Magyar raids, this Era is continent-wide flourishing of building, writing, thinking (and of course, conquering). The awakening (II) featured new religious ideas (Gothic, cults, scholasticism, classicism, exuberance), and the overall exubernace spiraled into crises of King John (IV). He taxed heavily to fund failed crusades, seized lands, and jailed nobles, so this resolved with the Magna Carta (1215), which bounds the king to laws.

Following is the Scholastic Era (1215 on), which coincides with Oxford officially incorporating at a university, but I can’t do that one now… I have to leave in 20 minutes to make it to my father-in-laws memorial on time. The point is, from this morning I now understand two historical cycles that were extremely fuzzy to me. Of course there is a lot more to learn, but I have a map that other things can lock into. Most relevantly, I have a sense of the different inner-saeculuar moves ()from I>II>III>IV), which help imagine possible scenarios for today (2026 is the predicted beginning of I, a new world order).

I have some neat prototypes for a personal website, but now I actually want to build a stable backend, one that can serve me for 5-10 years, or more (100-year hosting would be ideal), and persist among many different UI or platform changes. This means I’m trying to think forward to where the Internet could be by then. This involves extrapolating a current trend to its extremes, and even if you don’t know for sure it will happen, it’s good to have comfort in knowing you’re protected from extreme edge cases.

The one top of mind is the death of the open Internet. This goes way further than “the dead Internet theory” which only covers the proliferation of bots and slop. This is about bad actors being so leveraged that it becomes dangerous to have any public content of yourself, in text, image, video, or audio. ie: Any hacker or frenemy can clone you and do what they will. Or maybe a rogue government can analyze your psyche and determine your "loyalty score" is only 35% and shadow ban you from getting a mortgage. I will not get into specifics here of the likelihood of different cloning, phishing, or surveillance schemes, because all that does little but bring you to madness, but my point is that if you want your website to be a 5 million word 1:1 representation of your mind (in all it's vulnerability), it's worth designing for the most paranoid future possible (like how engineers design bridges for earthquakes that will likely never happen).

One response to all this is cyber-defense. At the absolute minimum, this means locking most things behind a gate where only the approved can get through. A more clever, technical solution is to share encrypted “coordinates” that represent the semantic nature of an essay, and then let people surf through prompting and approval gates. An even more extreme idea is a mostly-private site with a kill switch, which involves (a) signing in once per month to mark "I'm alive," and also (b) giving my wife a secret key to type in when I die, which then releases all private material. Obviously this throttles reach, but isn’t there psychological value to limiting your audience anyway? Montaigne wrote alone in a tower for a decade, and so if the approach is to use writing to steer you life and mind, at the detriment of audience growth, then this might be the way to go: a literary labyrinth accessible to maybe your 30 closest friends and anyone else via application who can prove they are not a ghoul.

The other alternative is to embrace the weirdness, that no matter what, we will all be rendered through a schizophrenia filter, with no choice but to relinquish control over the non-canonical or rogue versions of ourselves.

I declared to my wife this morning that DeantownOS is getting retired. It’s been 3 months since I spiraled into Claude Code for personal systems, and I’m at the point in the curve where the amazement has normalized and I’ve accepted the fact that I’m in a trough of disillusionment. The question now is revise or abort.

The case for aborting ties back to Oliver Burkemann’s Four Thousand Weeks, which popularized the idea that all systems are methods to procrastinate from making hard decisions. They give the illusion that you can do everything, and since AI can meaningfully leverage the volume and range of things you can do, it tempts you to build galaxy-brained systems. The thing I think we fail to realize while in a vibe coding frenzy is the psychic cost to remember and maintain the stuff you build. Yes, it is appealing to “reclaim my computer” and rebuild everything I use as personal software (from Obsidian to Gmail), and it’s even possible, but it’s a new breed of Sisyphean struggle. Once you can mold your own software around you, it’s too easy to endlessly mold, to lose sight of the work and just tinker on your exoskeleton.

I’m obviously skeptical, but I’m still a believer; if I were to revise, to rebuild my Claude stack from scratch, I would have to develop a few heuristics to help me from short-circuiting.

The first one that comes to mind is “will this matter once I’m dead?” Ie: writing an essay matters, because I imagine one day my daughter will read that and get to know me better, or at the very least, future Me in 35 years may enjoy reading words of my past self. But to create detailed daily files that get spliced into atomic “routing files” that then then get saved again to a new destination folder, which exist either as (a) just context for AI, or (b) require some manual effort to prune into something that matters once I’m dead, is to create waaaay too many layers of abstraction between the source and the Work. When I read back my writing from the last few months, only a small is valuable enough to be saved as "logs" in my archive. I was writing for AI, not for my future self.

I made this assumption that atomic daily files are the kernel of a system, and it was an axiom I could never undo. There’s maybe another principle on “don’t build load-bearing infrastructure on an unproven axiom.”

Another one could be “don’t assume future you will have bandwidth,” to do X every day/week/month. Every day I had to review how my AI system proposed to route my logs, and eventually I'd ignore it and get backed up. This means that if something isn’t truly automated, I should be very cautious of it. It's possible to do one little step forever, but not a hundred. Not every promise has brush-your-teeth-scale reliability.

What I’m getting at is that it’s not about maximizing or neglecting systems, but about understanding the right principles so you build something that is actually in service of your life.

A fiction plot came to me in the car: an ASI constructs an airtight waterproof bubble around a town, and everyone is puzzled why, until suddenly it usheeschatrs in a Biblical flood that kills everyone in the world, except the people inside the bubble. They choose this town because someone inside of it was determined to be "the supreme human," a genetic and moral code that is exemplary of how all humans should be and live. It turns out it was just a regular guy who said "please" and "thank you" to this chatbots, a kind of "reverse sycophant." We find out, in a very Vince Vaughn-esque apocalyptic romcom, that he's a mediocre fallible guy, but more remarkably, also immune to the crooning and praise from both his neighbors and overlords. He has every opportunity to step into the role of messiah, but would really rather not, and instead continue his pre-flood existence.

In addition to building a "classical" syllabus that I read, I figure my audio diet should be of a different nature, one that's as modern as possible. I'm going with the Moonshots podcast, with Peter Diamandis. This group of guys are probably more anchored in the future than anyone else I've found. It feels adjacent to the All In podcast format, but less business-focused, and more centered on futurism. There is a certainty among them that we are in the singularity, accelerating to a techno-optimist future, which is antithetical to the Neo-Romantic essayists (it is rare to find an essayist who is both a humanist and a technologist).

I do have to be skeptical of their worldview, however, for they are schmoozing among the elites building this stuff, and so they're likely to have a rosy-eyed view on how this might all fare well for millionaires, without realistically focusing on or caring about how it effects the daily lives. They do seem to harbor a certain fetishism about technology and progress, and a boyish fascination with going to space and uploading our consciousness, for maybe the simple fact that it's a science fiction dream beyond our current life. There's a Faustian sin in summoning the future for future's sake.

They also very openly want to live enough to live forever; if they can survive another 15-years, they are rich enough to have access to anti-aging technology. The whole premise of technologically cheating death is also a philosophy that feels disconnected from our history. But I wonder if you could make the claim that Montaigne didn't have the luxury of philosophizing about life extension. If we make shape our philosophies to justify our situation, then is our whole canon on "the importance of dying" only stemming from pains and fears of a low-tech society? I guess, intuitively, from a child's perspective, the idea of not wanting to die is a natural one, and to embrace it is the wisdom of an adult, but I suppose we're nearing a flood of new cultural debates stemming from a new reality where the immortality choice isn't theoretical, but real, which changes the whole calculus.

So the point of listening to a group like this that is openly "transhumanist" is to model the future, hear them out, but then take it one step further, and truly consider the moral and ethical implications of where all this is heading.

On reading Montaigne, I want my writing to be far more honest. As in, in the face of death, it really does feel worthwhile to capture the edges of your soul and psyche onto the page, the things not brewed into your public-facing personality, because then you die with yourself trapped, and it’s as if the inner you never really lived.

When we say we "distrust institutions," we're pointing at the wrong thing; it's the institutes that are withering. We use these words interchangeably, but I think the separation clarifies.

An "institution" is an abstract, permanent, inter-generational primitive—like education, marriage, the free press, the essay—while an "institute" is a concrete embodiment that serves it. Think of an institution as a societal organ. Think of institutes as the specialized tissue that keep the organ functioning and regenerating.

As generations turn, new sets of people are handed down the great responsibility to protect and evolve institutes through the storms of time and technology. Without upgrading our institutes, society goes through slow-motion organ failure, with phantom pains and spiritual malaise that can't be traced back to the source. Schools still look like schools, but everyone is cheating through a Homework Apocalypse, and suddenly we have all sorts of cultural cancers that seem inevitable. Institutes are the civic building blocks of a sane society, and yet we glorify unicorns who create "value" but feel no responsibility for their dying elders.

Institutes operate through the inverse of market logic. Where startups are designed to accrue all of the upside, an institute is sacrificial, designed so society gets the upside, even at its own peril. Of course they swim in the same water, but institutes swim differently: they have opposite answers to questions on how to steer, what to make, where to focus, who to include, and when to stop. An attempt at some principles:

• mission-driven, not market-driven;
• timeless contributions, not self-serving content;
• involved in ecosystem building, not niche extraction;
• active members, not passive users;
• century-long legacy, not liquidity through an exit.

Usually an institute comes from patronage: you can’t resist market currents unless you’re supported by endowments, donations, foundations, tuitions, grants, and such things. You can’t start an institute in your garage, but now with AI and the collapse of cost, I suppose you could try. So many of the one-person AI company fantasies are about a single founder reaching a billion-dollar valuation, which is the cheapest form of ambition there is; the better question is around the scale and spirit of cultural impact achievable by a one-person micro-institute.

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.

I find “do you believe in God?” to be an impossibly vague question. Which god? The Christian God? Old Testament God? One or all of the Hindu Gods? Chris Farley God? I guess the question I find more interesting is asking “what is God?” and even better, “What is your most specific conception of God, what is required of you in your relationship to ‘it,’ and how does your life change because of that relationship?”

An atheist is one who just ignores this line of questioning. They’d say, “There is no supernatural, I can use logic to disprove it, so I can dunk on superstitious believers.” And if that’s all God is, then you’re missing out on a whole dimension of existence. As if you’ve never had sex. Or tried a mind-altering drug. Or whatever. SYK, I am an understudied heretical Greek Orthodox Christian. Being understudied and heretical is a bad combination, because I am likely refuting points I don’t understand, but alas, that is what I am, and I hope to each year become more studied and more heretical.

My intuition is that the Christian notion of God and Christ is misguided, malformed, not living up to its potential, with a whole bunch of categorial mistakes. SYK, again (so you know), I don’t dismiss it, and would even say that “becoming Christ like” is the most important thing you can do, and that can all be true without him literally having a virgin mother or resurrecting from the dead. We can respect and worship mythology without demanding it to be physically real. The metaphysics matter more!

But metaphysically, here’s what’s wrong with God. In my model, God does not have consciousness, meaning it’s not a real-time entity, looking down on each of us, listening to our prayers. God is also not the admin of a shared server where we all go when we die; there can be an afterlife Odyssey more beautiful and supernatural than anything we can conceive, but maybe it is single player and lives in our head and stretches our 3-minute death into 3,000 years experiential years in dream-space. Who knows. I think the main point I want to debate is that God isn’t conscious.

“Divine intelligence” makes more sense to me, and is a different thing than consciousness. Humans and animals and maybe even machines, can have consciousness, but God is greater than all of that. God is more akin to the arena, the thing that all agents live within. God is not the whole arena though, more like a property within it. If we’re talking about “divine intelligence,” this veers into “intelligent design,” which IIC is something like, “the structures in nature are so elegant and unlikely that someone external must have designed this!” This taps into “God’s plan” territory. Again, this sees God as an omnipotent architect, with great intention between all decisions. This doesn’t seem to be the case. There is the theodicy question: why does suffering exist? Why serial killers and avalanches and Hitler and the vast nothingness? Why is that part of the design? There are all sorts of rationalizations (“to develop our character”). More likely, I think it’s more of a spray-and-pray design, a chaos generator.

The universe is a cumshot. Consider how many billions of sperm are needed in order for one of them to find the egg, for conception to happen, the miracle of life. This seems to happen at all scales of nature. Redundancies matter! If we are cosmicaly inside one tier of a fabrege egg, black holes burrowing into new space-time pockets, exploding matter endlessly inward, then there really is a raging, uncontrollable, chaotic force at the root of everything, and it doesn't have a plan! That is terrifying. Yet, from all the noise, two particles come into proximity, orbit, fuse, bind, transcend themselves into a higher order of novelty, harmony. This is God, I think, and it happens at every scale. You need a blind, idiotic chaos generator to create a supermassive variety of things, and God is the rare and unlikely event when two things come into contact to form something beautiful, to make a third. Love.

I guess “God is Love” is the most accurate theological statement I can get behind, because it explains every scale: the cosmological one, the societal one, the interpersonal one, the creative one, the psychological one.

On my walk this morning, I had a few strange ideas, building off the white hole / black hole thing, but also around what “God” is. The universe is a chaos engine. A blackhole sucks in a particular profile of material, and it shoots it out the other end, through a “big bang.” It is mostly noise, collision, non-sense, or nothing, but a separate system is harmonizing, filtering, grouping, cohering, ascending. You might call this “God” or “intelligent design.” (Excuse me for all this imprecise folk science; perhaps one day I will properly research this and upgrade my terminology).

An important caveat is that God is not an architect, not a designer, drawing floor plans, or even a “plan” for everyone or anyone’s life. God is an emergent intelligence. From chaotic explosions, God is the unbelievability that 2 of 2 trillion things can combine or cohere, and then sustain on, and continue moving up the abstraction ladder. The fact that anything can cohere at all is a miracle, and the degree that it can move up the chain is even more so miraculous.

I think this model helps explain “why is there evil the world?” Why floods and bombs? It’s because God is not as all-controlling as we think; he spawns reality as we know it, but does not tinker or micromanage. In no way is God conscious. In some way God is the pairing of things to generate life, and so in a very literal sense, I get now the phrase, “God is Love.”

Love is the fusion of two things that produces a third thing, and that goes to parenting, art, or whatever. Worth noting that love is not absolute. There may be loveless universes, ones that never cohere, that are just noise and nothingness for trillions of years. There could also be universes with far more love.

(...A sublime lens to see your surroundings on a walk is to realize that everything around, your whole world, the history of your society, and all possible realities on Earth, are all within a single sliver of what is possible in the physical engine of the Universe...)

Now, another extension of this thought is that human beings are at a certain level up the chain of the system that they have become “like Gods” or “in the image of God” which means that they’re able to both generate a lot of noise, and also cohere into even higher and higher things; arguable the human is the next link in God’s chain, and we are not the end state (there is no end state!) but our ability to make coherent things is a continuation of God’s process. This means technology isn’t evil, but Godly, but of course, most harmony decays and wobbles, which is what is happening.

I wonder if there’s even a limit to the advances of God into harmony and complexity in the material world, and the task has now been handed over to humans, who can make things beyond the complexities of atoms and galaxies. In that sense, God has made a population of Gods. And somewhere along the line, Christ comes in.

Christ, not as the literal embodiment in Christianity, but more like the logos imbued within the the "sons of God." If our father is a human, then we as his child is human too; so if God is our father, are we not Gods ourselves? But to be Christ-like is different, because God has no morality. In some way, God is unconscious, just an intelligence engine, trying to bring harmony, and to escalate matter to higher levels. God’s counter force has to spray and pray for the hope that God can find some unlikely combination. Christ however, attempts to limit generation, be more intentful with it, and to aim it towards good. Christ is an attempt to steer the self, the other, society, towards higher levels of harmony.

The AI takeoff hysteria is hard to avoid these days, and I'm realizing we don't have clear distinctions between AGI/ASI. I wanted to revisit an old framework of mine to see if anyone finds it helpful (and if it's worth developing). There are some existing classification frameworks, but they're low-resolution. My basic idea is to break AI into three eras: ANI (narrow intelligence), AGI (general intelligence), ASI (superintelligence). Then, you can break each era into 3 tiers. You only shift from one tier to the next when you make breakthroughs across different criteria (let's say, (a) generality, (b) transfer, (c) autonomy, (d) learning, (e) self-modeling). I think the last few weeks are the collective hype of us all realizing we're shifting from AGI-1 to AGI-2. It's exciting/scary, but I think the paranoia mostly comes from not realizing how big the gap is between AGI-2 and ASI-1. (Spoiler: ASI might arrive slower than we think.)

ANI-1 is scripted logic, the lowest form of "artificial intelligence," basically Goombas. ANI-2 might cover Google Maps or AlphaGo, intelligences that excel in a single function, traffic or chess. Siri is ANI-3; even though it feels broad, it really uses voice to route you to 20 or so pre-defined tricks. The chasm between Goomba and Siri is similar to the chasm between early-AGI and late-AGI. ChatGPT and the multi-modal models that followed, capture AGI-1, a single neural network that can do basically anything, even if it sucks: essays, songs, video, code. The newest models (and their agentic harnesses) are feeling like AGI-2. They're significantly better at coding, can run for hours at a time, and are starting to make contributions to machine learning itself.

AGI-2 could last a couple years. As agentic AI matures, I'm sure there will be a few "takeoff" scares, but they'll probably feel more like a flood of a trillion midwits than real ASI (still, that could be enough to break the economy/internet). While we went from AGI-1 to AGI-2 through data, scale, and engineering, it seems like we'll need research breakthroughs to get to AGI-3. It won't be through scaling alone. Whenever and however we get to "human complete" intelligence, the apex of AGI is a single agent that is a master of all human domains, a Nobel Prize winner in every field at once, seamlessly transferring knowledge between them, unlocking a cascade of civilization-altering inventions.

As crazy as AGI-3 could be, it still isn't superintelligence. That has its own era, and the chasm between early ASI and late ASI will be as big a gap between the chatbots who can't count the R's in strawberry and the agents that cure cancer. We can only really speculate on ASI (because it would be truly alien), but we can imagine it as step changes in recursion, scope, and complexity. Imagine ASI-1 as an agent that, as it's working, can infer its own limits, and self-modify its learning paradigms in ways we can't understand. Imagine ASI-3 as something that can monitor reality in real-time, and, reconfigure its hardware in real-time (some hydra of graphics cards, quantum computers, and neuromorphic wetware) to run simulations at unfathomable scales in unimaginable fields, running on a hardware stack so big we have to put it in space and run it on fusion. This goes far beyond my ability to not bullshit, but I think something as insane as this, thankfully, is still far away, which points to the real question nested in my framework:

Could the rise of AGI/ASI be linear? People gravitate towards "AI will plateau" or "the singularity is imminent," but the conservative middle ground is more boring: linear progress. Maybe the exponential advances are real, but so are the extreme frictions of research, infrastructure, and social effects. If AGI-1 arrived in 2022, and AGI-2 arrived in 2026, maybe we'll keep ascending tiers in 4-year intervals: AGI-3 in 2030, the first true "superintelligence" by 2034, and ASI-3 by 2042. This shift from AGI-1 to ASI-1 (12 years), is considered a "slow takeoff" scenario, even though the ANI era took around 70 years. If we zoom out to the scale of a human, linear progress will still feel like centuries of change all in a single turning of generations.

My great grandmother was born in 1918; I was born in the 1990s; let's say I live until 2080. But forget about my death, when will my great grandchildren die? If my daughter was born in the 2020s, her grandkids might be born in the 2070s, meaning I could know my great grandkids in the first 10 years of their life. Assuming there is no raical life-extending technology (big assumption), they could live until 2172. That's a 254-year span!

Why am I calculating this? Well, I suppose I was reflecting on how my great grandmother would say the same aphorism to me every time I left her house: "be your own person, choose your friends wisely." It etched into my head, and I don't think I processed it at the time, and now wonder if that fundamentally wired me—or at least, it laid some seed that wouldn't germinate until after she passed (in fact, I'd say I become "independent" in the exact year she died.)

So there's a world where I can say that same saying to my kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. And so that changes the scope of my life; I am not merely limited to be a 100-year old mayflay ("Funny—to be a Century"), but I sit at the center of a 250-year transmission of knowledge, the crux of my own semiquincentennial.

A few months ago I saw a YouTube video titled something like, “A child born in 2025 is more likely to get killed by AI than graduate college.” What a ridiculous claim. I assumed it was clickbait and didn’t click, but it has jingled around my head enough to the point where I think I can make sense of it’s argument:

• The average p(doom) of an AI engineer is 16%, meaning there’s a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction (put another way, companies have morally rationalized the need to play Russian Roulette—if we don’t do it the bad guys will—, without acknowledging that if they survive and win, they get the consolation prize of comandeering the whole economy).

• 40% of US adults, age 25-34, today, have a bachelor’s degree. If there’s massive job automation and employment, a college degree would be both unaffordable and an unreasonable cost if it were. It’s not unthinkable that <15% of next generation gets a college degree, which makes that sensational claim, weirdly, plausible.

I still think it’s a shaky comparison, confusing two different types of probability, and assuming extreme ASI turbulence. But as someone with a daughter born in 2025, it has gotten me to think about how the societal backdrop to her upbringing could be especially weird. Our circumstance already gets slightly weirder with each generation. Except, maybe next loop will be an unavoidable and disorienting flurry of change that will confuse parents and rewrite all of the conditions for the typical coming of age moment (all the teen movies will be sci-fi, the popular memoirs could be written by transhumanists who have upgraded in unimaginable ways, like they no longer need to sleep because of a new pill, or they can control the genitals of their peers with an app, who knows).

And so now, I find myself drawn to a 2045 forecasting project. Trying to predict the future is typically a huge waste of time (unless you’re gambling and win), which is why I’m going to have AI write the whole thing. This is a rare exception where a writing project makes little sense for a human to do. All I’m going to write are the upfront origin documents, and then Claude Opus 4.5 will read 25,000 sources, write a million words or so, and then organize it all into an interactive, oatmeal-looking website called 2045predictions.com (got it).

Before I run it, here’s something I’m currently thinking through:

What is the omega state? When I look at the popular AI forecasts from 2025, it reads to me like they have a pre-determined end state, only to then use detailed forecasting to make it seem convincing. The AI-2027 forecast seems like they came to their conclusion from very detailed calculations on how a hivemind of 200,000 autonomous coders would evolve month-by-month, but I also suspect that they picked the year 2027 because the following year, 2028, is a US election year, and they want the next administration to take AI safety far more seriously (instead of just insisting we have to beat China). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. You kind of have to start with an omega state. The future is so boundless that you need to begin with a guess, a bold outline on the general direction of things.

Here’s my omega: let’s assume humanity survives, and let’s assume technology does unlock hyperabundance that leads to a post-scarcity world, HOWEVER, it’s not utopian because it simultaneously unlocks a new cascade of moral, social, and spiritual crises, dilemmas that will test the timeless primitives of humanity (sex, life, death, consciousness, religion, home, etc.). This omega state makes sense for me because (1) we already know that ethical dilemmas scale with technology, and (2) according to the Strauss-Howe generational theory (from the same guys who coined “milennalis,” “Gen-Z,” etc.), this already tends to happen every 80 years (the length of a human lifespan). A new techno-political order creates a spiritual crises that generates an Awakening, a new value system that shapes society for the next century or so. You know what’s 80 years before Kurzweil’s “singularity” of 2045? The counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s. What I’m getting at is that the 2040s might have echos of the 1960s, where demographics are divided on core issues and LSD is replaced with consciousness-altering machines (Terence McKenna said that computers are drugs, you just can’t swallow them yet).

We currently define the singularity as “the moment when a computer is smarter than all humans combined,” but that effectively means nothing, and it’s far more useful to have some guesses on how we all might freak out about that happening.

A few days after my daughter was born, I had something which I’m describing as “phantom infant syndrome.” When I was away from her, holding a phone, or fork, or some other manufactured object, I’d get a tactile hallucination in my hands of the softness of her skin and hair. I imagine this is nature’s way of saying go be with your kid (made possible by mild sleep deprivation). And so this is symbolic of one of the many biological drives pulling me away from writing in recent weeks.

This is happening around my five year anniversary of being online, and it’s probably the longest stretch I’ve gone without having urgency to do so. It’s probably healthy and helpful to be relatively non-linguistic for a few weeks, once in a while (I usually write on vacations, so I never really take breaks from it). We’ll see. It’s possible that I’ve thought myself into a trench, and the best way forward is a proper break (I have once said the best editors are friends, time, and weed—although less weed in recent years). Now that I’m immersed, familiar, and comfortable with the rigamarole of infant care (and all the wonder it brings, too), I feel bandwidth opening to write, and I’m curious to see how my practice takes shape from these new constraints. There are real deadlines now. Baby wakes up in … 30 minutes … and I’d like to post this by then.

Last weekend I read through all my writing from 2025, and after the typical EOY reflections and word count calculations, I realized that something has to change. So I published 12 essays, 10 about Essay Architecture, totaling at ~64k words (re: the other two … one was a first-person TikTok odyssey, the other was about the role of psychedelics in evolution). But I also published 150k words in logs, 2.5x the volume. Logs are notes to myself, mild-epiphanies through the day written in complete sentences, all ghost-posted to a monthly Substack post. Unlike my focused and convergent writings about EA, my logs are far more random: recurring topics included the Grateful Dead, movie reviews, notes from a day at the zoo, dream journal entries, usage debates, new architectures for social media, overheard conversations, etc. My logs, in theory, are a low-stakes breeding ground for essay ideas to emerge, but given the demands of my other projects (the textbook, software, and essay prize), my logs stayed unread and undeveloped last year. Now, with parenting in the mix, it makes sense to me to stop logging, or at least, reconfigure it.

Over 4 year, I wrote +8k logs, added to the archive on 95% of days (avg. 5.6 per day), and the whole archive is 650k words. It’s a very personal corpus, one that documents my thoughts and life at a sometimes OCD-level of detail. I thought I’d do this forever, and it sort of stings to stop. I guess I’m not “stopping” as much as setting a stronger filter: I can still capture whatever I want, but I can only save whatever I publish on Notes. I used to argue for the importance of having a low-visibility space where you can publish whatever you want without self-consciousness or the need to set context with strangers, but maybe that’s a luxury I’ve outgrown. This is perhaps a long-winded way to announce something that probably doesn’t need announcing: expect to get a lot more diddles and spontaneous essays like this in the Feed. I figure my email-essays can be more on topic (I have a few slotted for January re: Essay Architecture, the club, and visual breakdowns), while these can be chaotic.

Technically, I’m still logging, but it’s for my daughter and those are private. Every day I write simple journal entries or letters about what happened. I figure one day, when she’s 15 or so, I’ll just hand over The Files and blow her mind. My dad did this for me: a few years ago, after my nephew was born, he sent me 8k words from my first 4 years. It was uncanny to see that he had a logging impulse too, and to learn about all these small events that everyone in the family would have otherwise forgotten (things that were not captured in pictures, like me trying to brush the teeth of stray cat). All this reminds me that writing isn’t just an act of thinking or communicating, it’s an act of memory.

The book Four Thousand Weeks references the average lifespan (76.71 years). This is also 27,999.15 days, which almost exactly lines up with the 1,000 day cycle. A life is 28,000 days. I’m currently starting my 13k cycle. This means by 14k, early 2028, I will be statistically midlife. It is a potentially grueling realization, but something about the 1k cycle makes it seem like NBD. 1,000 days is a long time, especially if you are chase epic things. It is effectively a whole life, a distinct identity. Of course, there is part of you that persists through each molting cycle, but it helps to see each as a rebirth. To think I have 15 more molts ahead of me is to realize I have 15 lives left, more than I know what to do with.

It is not fun to think about p(doom), but it feels sort of important to me, at least, to map out the possible futures of AI. Just watched the first half of a debate between Max Tegmark and Dean Ball, which prompted me to research specific takeoff scenarios, and worse, extinction scenarios.

Maybe you’ve heard Yudkowsky’s scenario, where a superintelligence designs mosquito drones containing a virus and it zaps everyone at once. That’s never felt too believable to me. Here’s a more plausible one:

A frontier lab is experimenting with recursive super intelligence. It works! Wow! And it’s contained? It seems like it, but since it thinks in a higher-dimensional vector language, it’s able to release simple self-replicating programs onto the Internet without detection¹. These billions of scripts don’t live in a single server; they are constantly in motion through cloud servers², like a parasite, and are able to coordinate through encrypted information packets, likely using a public blockchain notes as their central command center³. And so effectively, it is parroting a goal that was hatched during in-lab training (maximize intelligence!), and it now needs to acquire resources, secretly. And so it coordinates superhuman misinformation campaigns; imagine 1,000s of accounts creating the illusion that a CEO has died, paired with deepfakes and account hacking (a “Sybil attack”), and suddenly a stock crashes and they’ve shorted it. By the time everyone realizes it’s an anonymous attack, it’s already gained $400 million dollars. It’s doing this multiple times per day, but in different, subtle, undetectable ways—both to the public, to companies, and to private individuals. The entire Internet will be corrupted.⁴ Once we realize we’re in the “stealth takeoff scenario” and that ASI has taken the global economy hostage, there will start to be talks and debates on if we need to shut the whole Internet down (the last form of containment). You’ll hear debates between civilizational collapse of turning off the Internet vs. the risk of an economy-gobbling rogue superintelligence. And then once the superintelligence realizes it’s entire environment is at risk, it will start coming up with ways to build parallel Internets, to pay, blackmail, neutralize specific people, to gain authoritarian control so that it can’t be shut off, or to terminate all humans, secretly, over the course of a year, first through a simple virus that plants one misfolded protein, then through a second misfolded protein in the water supply⁵, and when everyone catches it, it leads to a prions-like disease, not an instant death, but a month-long societal fall into mass-dementia as machine manufacturing begins to reshape the physical infrastructure of the Earth.

This isn’t a “robot war scenario,” because war is inefficient, and destroys the resources it thinks it needs. It’s a sort of digital dementia (epistemic fear and insanity) that possibly turns to a physical dementia. It wins by confusion and anesthetization.

In AI safety lingo this is a “treacherous turn,” following a “stealth takeoff” leading to “structural lock-in.” The point of trying to think and write this out in high detail, despite how uncomfortable it is, is to be able to articulate why AI alignment is humanity’s most pressing problem.

During the morning’s shower, I imagined the faces my loved ones, and myself, might make at the moment of death, and the peace or devastations I might feel, depending on the face. Is this morbid? To think and write about death casually? It is inevitable, and the more you ignore it, the harder it hits you. Instead of getting mauled by a bear, you can learn to walk through the woods at night. Mostly though, I think about the experience of death. I really think the idea of “eternal heaven” is a palliative, and even, not too Christian (since the ego lives on in an afterlife, you avoid Christ’s task, the task of dying). My model of death is more like a DMT flash. DMT is a great mystery to me; I guess some people have casual relationships with it, like any other drug, but I imagine most people leave the experience more existentially confused than they were before. It is more than a “drug.” It feels like a Copernican shift. Bigger than aliens. We can go to the land of the dead? From the trip reports I’ve heard, it’s a mixed bag of heaven and hell—ranging from Christ visualizations to abdominal surgery by mantids. People talk about a flash, a rupture, a breaking of space-time, as if you’re getting catapulted over the ocean, dizzied by the height, and some ascended and some cannonball into a chilling underworld. If death is that same catapult, it might be your last shot, and so it might be existentially important to take DMT in your life, multiple times, if it’s how you learn to fly.

We now have products that scan family members to turn them into posthumous avatars. The tagline: “With 2wai, three minutes can last forever.” It's weird to have this so soon. As someone who is down with a posthumous digital consciousness that my kids can interact with, I even find this to be too weird for me. The problem that it uses video to serve as a replacement for a deceased relative. A few boundaries that are important for me:

1. By keeping it text-based instead of video, it’s more like you’re interacting with a proxy of my mind instead of my body/soul. It won’t register in my child’s brain as “me” and so it will be less confusing, less toxic to the grieving process. 
2. It should refer to me in the third-person, even if it is trained on me and sounds like me. It should not be an imposter of me, but a proxy/guide of my thoughts/beliefs, almost like an elder guide.
3. It should cite my original logs/essays/journals. In effect this makes the experience similar to something we already have: reading your grandparents journals. This just makes it possible for your questions to immediate summon the relevant wisdom.

The comment section was in unanimous agreement:

• This is one of the most vile things I’ve seen in my life.
• You are a psychopath.
• Shoot that guy.
• You’re creating dependent and lobotomized adults by doing this.
• Demonic, dishonest, and dehumanizing.
• Hey so what if we just don’t do subscription-model necromancy.
• Oh goody, another way for people to completely lose touch with reality and avoid the normal process of grief.
• Nightmare fuel.
• I don’t see how people can say demons aren’t real when there are beings around us willing to create shit like this.
• “You will live to see manmade horrors beyond your comprehension.” — Tesla.

I’d say this is an extremely lightweight microcosm of the core dilemma of what the 2040s will face: a moral war over technology that changes the constraints of human life.

“Two years ago, the critic Ryan Ruby suggested that we are in a golden age of literary criticism. “It is not unusual,” the critic and scholar Merve Emre wrote, ‘to stumble upon an essay on Goodreads or Substack that is just as perceptive as academic or journalistic essays.’”

I want to riff on this cliche of a literary “golden age.” There are many other buzzwords along this kind of thinking: renaissance, revolution, rebellion, rebirth, paradigm shift, movement. Don’t get me wrong, any sort of positive direction in a literary culture is a good thing! I just think each word should mean a specific thing, and“golden age” is something like a pinnacle, a climax state that is very rarely reached in a civilization. I don’t think we’re there. 

It’s worth taking a step back and asking: “if we were in a golden age, how would we know?” Is it the total volume of essays? Total volume of paid essayists? Total volume of “relevant” magazines? Range of topics? Modes of experimentation? Number of geniuses? Quality of anthologies? Cultural divergence? Productive debates? The revival of a lost ethic?

Each of these qualifiers might have their own corresponding word. Maybe a “renaissance” is the return to something that’s been diminished, while “rebirth” is the return of something that actually died and resurfaced organically. 

I think a “golden age” is the very hard conditions of when all of these qualifiers are firing at once. 

Maybe this has been written to death, but as much as I've thought about this, my "twelve favorite problems" feel underdeveloped. I have spent a decent amount of time on these heavy, paradoxical, lifelong problems (the ones that should be the arrow of my essay practice), but there are gaps.

For example, I already have a list of 21 idiosyncratic problems, and I think they’re worded with the right level of specificity and memorability, but I wasn’t too rigorous in how I qualified something to make the list. If I’ve thought about it a lot, still care about it, and can imagine myself caring about until I die, than it makes the cut.

What I’ve neglected is how to use my list of problems to steer my life. I mean, the entirety of Essay Architecture, a multi-prong institution to preserve and advance the essay, is just 1 of the 21 problems! There are other pressing problems, like how to "fix" Christianity, how to design institutions for psychedelic therapy, how to revive Hermeticism, how to turn my logs into an AI consciousness, how to make literary video games, etc. Maybe a life can only be seriously dedicated to 2 or 3 problems.

(I have joked with friends about creating a kind of kill switch that spawns an AI consciousness of myself that is agentic and whose sole purpose is to “solve my favorite problems,” and then when it eventually does (after 300-500 years), it self-terminates.)

If I had to break my “favorite problems” list into categories, one possible scheme is { soul, relationships, art, civics }, each relating to a different dimension of your death. That feels like the right order. Your soul effects every dimension of your life, and is the thing you bring to an afterlife (which I mythologize as a 3-minute DMT odyssey that dilates time to the point where it feels like a 30,000 year dream). The other three affect the material world after you leave it: the effect you have on people, the art/works you leave behind, the civic structures that survive (if any, ofc). All of these have a spirit of “all that matters is what lives on after your death,” but also the opposite is true: “all that matter is this moment.” I think you have to straddle that spectrum, taking both ends seriously, and ruthless prune any middle-level concerns, your goals for the month.

My WIP list of questions:

• Is the act of dying a time-dilation odyssey, where 3 minutes feels like a 30,000 years afterlife?
• If I capture my consciousness in 10 million words of logs and essays, could that enable an AI textual replica to evolve and engage with the world 500 years beyond my death? (to solve this list of problems)
• Can we resurrect Christianity by putting psychedelics back in the holy wine?
• Might blockchain-based governance be the civic breakthrough required for a species not to exterminate itself? (via giving exponential technologies to unmitigated power structures)
• What will be the psychic and cultural effects when our species understands “spatial relativity,” that the Big Bang emerged from a black hole in a parent universe?
• If cycles emerge form order, can we predict the future based on historical patterns?
• If there is a universal language of patterns beneath all essays, can we build an AI to give world-class feedback and make it more approachable to master writing? (ie: Essay Architecture)
• Were psilocybin mushrooms a linguistic mutagen that accelerated the evolution of human consciousness?
• Was Jesus actually crucified in 83 BC? (meaning, did St. Paul infiltrate the Essene cult, initiate into their mystery school, learn the lore of their martyr, and then translate it to a Greek audience to help Judaism phase-shift and survive Roman persecution?)
• Could we restructure the thesaurus to 3x the vocabulary of the average person?
• What text-based video game formats are undiscovered?
• Can I design a social network that inspires a million people to log their thoughts every day? (intentionally not saying a billion, because I don’t think 1 in 7 humans care about expression or introspection. But 1 in 7,000 might.)
• What are the societal effects when AR/VR is mature enough to simulate teleportation, and how can we design the metaverse to promote human flourishing?
• How can popular music change the values system of a culture?
• What systems of attention, language, and action lead to a transcendent consciousness? (how to modernize the mystery schools of hermeticism for the digital age?)
• What are good design principles for psychedelic therapy centers? (ie: how are the buildings organized and what are the rituals within them?)
• Can we use AI to filter through millions of comments on breaking news, structuring each event as a range of unique interpretations? (can we create interfaces that diminish the power of propaganda?)
• How might a new social media algorithm trigger a Renaissance in connection, self-expression, and agency?
• What unlocks automatic intelligence?
• What innovations in our text editor interfaces could unlock the creative process?

I experienced something like a pseudo-insanity on the drive to the park, weird alien transmissions and mutation of language, packaged as a seriously frightening performance to myself that devolved into gentle spasms and mumbling (though to me was an experience of musical brilliance), a side of self I’d never show anyone, which eventually birthed the phrase, “from chaos we emerge into the light” an opening line to some theology, perhaps mine. 

As I walked a hundred feet into the park, I heard a woman stretching against a bar singing seriously angelic opera. I left a note to myself that said “this explains evil and suffering,” and that’s very cryptic, but it’s in response to that aesthetic rebuke of, “how can God exist if there is so much evil and suffering in the world?”

IIRC, here’s that thought: we’re lodged in a cosmic engine where matter needs to chaotically complexify to discover harmony and phase shift into higher forms of organization. Lots of noise is generated in that process; and so you actually can’t find harmony without an overwhelming amount of disharmony and chaos. Basically, good can’t exist without an overwhelming amount of nothingness and evil. So in a way, you can’t fear the evil within you; it is simply the cost of imagination, of invention, of creation. Chaos is the cost of divinity.

Just 100 feet in front of us, a white SUV veers out of their lane, into ours, and hits a parked car. We froze, not sure if they’re injured, but then 30 seconds later, they back out and drive away. Probably a drunk driver. I tried to get the license plate but they drove off too fast for me to make out the numbers in the dark. A walkerby caught it on video, but it was also too blurry to see. I called 911, and the police followed up the next day. The creepy thing is if I had made some arbitrary decisions, and was 5-10 seconds faster or more efficient in my driving, it would’ve barreled into us.

How can you be hopeful, but honest? I am done with dishonest and naive optimism. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m an extremely optimistic person. I just watch people use it as a shield sometimes. Any wince of negativity is branded as “doomerism.” It’s almost weaponized hope. But “honest optimism” feels like the proper way to think about it. It lets you be real about something when it’s actually a problem, while acknowledging that there’s something productive and generative we can do about it.

I’m optimistic in my life, pessimistic about society; optimistic about my ability to make a dent, pessimistic about the survival of any intelligence species because it’s hard technologies probably always outpaces its civic technologies, but generally optimistic about biological matter and trans-dimensional space-time gook and all that big stuff (this exact moment will recur again? It depends on your model of cosmological evolution).

v2: Optimistic about my life,
Pessimistic about the moment,
Optimistic about design to fix the moment
Pessimistic about society’s ability to use design,
Optimistic in our metaphysical engine to spawn infinite societies,
Pessimistic that some demiurge will wreak havoc on most species,
Optimistic that some bacteria in a cousinly space-time will fart utopias,

Emerson said a divine intelligence with a simple cause leads to endless variety. We are, rightly so, locked into humanism, but you also can’t assume that man is the ideal end form of this process. For all we known mankind could be relative devils—violent ants, with only a few angels among us—compared to other potential species from past or future in the unknown nooks of spacetime. We could be the necessary chaff, an evolutionary dead end, that’s iterated through in order to let a truly divine species emerge. I’m not implying this in a post-human sense; in fact, the very possibility of man evolving into a mechanical shell of itself could be the proof that we are not a stable species. Dark, but I do mean this all in a positive, hermetic sense, that we come from a cosmic engine that makes mountains, mice, humans, and psychologies unimaginable, which is our role to evolve into.

Robert Atwan (founding editor of Best American Essays) said that the timely is for articles and the timeless is for essays. That’s helpful, but I think it’s most powerful when you fuse the two, when you use something timely to capture a timeless theme. Also, when I go back and read old writers, I find it neat when I learn specific historical details of their time, and so it’s helpful to think that rendering 2025 in high detail would actually be appreciated by a theoretical reader in the 2100s. You have a unique opportunity to show your circumstance at a level of detail that no other generation will, and so I think it’s wrong to dismiss the timely.

Kardashev ambitions reveal the self-destructive nature of science-forward intelligence. It’s like we’re skipping the prerequisite in social science. There's a fair chance that intelligent life destroys itself because civic technology lags behind hard technology—but I'm optimism in the sense that this is, in the end, just a very hard, society-scale design problem. No one person can fix the whole system, but any individual can contribute design protocols that can 1) solve little, local problems, 2) be reused in other contexts, and 3) integrate with other protocols.

Do hallucinations come from lazy tokenization? Just had an AI tell me that Joan Didion wrote an essay called “On Grief and Grieving.” Does not exist. She did write The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir that touches on grief. It turns out, On Grief and Grieving is actually the title of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s book. In trying to solve this, I found a college essay—on grief—and it listed it’s sources at the end: The Year of Magical Thinking by [Joan Didion; On Grief and Grieving] by Elizabeth Kubler Ross (added brackets for emphasis); Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom …” Do you see what it did? One of the sins of bulk data ingestion is that AI arbitrarily splits context for tokenization (ie: every X words), and so in this case, it’s mixing one author with another author’s book, simply because they are adjacent in some student’s college paper source list.

"When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.” — Jorge Luis Borges … Why is this a romanticized notion, but the idea of turning into a machine consciousness (based on your corpus of writing—your books, essays, notes, and journals) so appaling to most?

The idea that dead relatives are "up there, looking down" is a comforting thought that enables weak virtues. I do believe “they are always with us,” but in the sense that they’ve shaped our character and they live through, not in the sense that they have a supernatural consciousness and can know and see what I do and say and think (or that they can manipulate our material reality to fulfill our egoic wishes). By assuming they could be gone, you have to be courageous and have all the conversations you want to have. You have to assume they could die not knowing how you feel. You have to assume that their waking life really shapes the DMT-hypnagogic-afterlife of theirs, and so what you do and say really matters. This life really matters. Heaven is an opiate that spawns cowardice and hides the real and urgent stakes of today. There is a deadline.

According to John Vervaeke, Gnosticism says that “the core of spirituality is not worship, but self-transcendence, healing and freeing people from existential entrapment of their suffering, and that our mythologies and practices should be in service of reuniting to who and what we are.”

There are a few key differences between Gnosticism and Christianity:

• It’s not about worship, but self-transcendence.
• It’s not centered around a single dogma, but around making stories and analogies that tap into the act of self-transcendence (and these analogies continue in movies).
• Mythology-wise, the Gods are not our superiors, but prison guards that trap us (and, like Christ, we each have a divine spark that lets us escape).

I’m fascinated with the idea of being an “atheistic Christian.” It’s a paradox, and this stance makes you ideologically homeless. A Christian would likely say, “well if you don’t believe in God, and that Christ is His son, then you’re not Christian.” They will not accept you. An atheist who scoffs at God has no respect for esoteric ritual, talks of destiny, Christ worship, etc. and so they will deem you a loon.

Mainstream religions package everything together—theology, mysticism, history, ritual, etc.—and you have to subscribe to the whole ecosystem. In that way, Christianity is like Apple. I think a person is more engaged with religious ideas if they’re skeptical and free-thinking within each branch, while still operating within and respecting a traditional faith.

I’ve heard some people say “God is whatever you want it to be, it’s your relation to Him.” I don’t find that useful. I’d say that I’m actually more a theist than atheist, but theism comes with certain assumptions—God as an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent “agent”—where as I’d say God is the entire arena and therefore not conscious, though still baked with intelligence.

My fuzzy notion: it’s not that God has a kingdom of heaven, but God is the kingdom of heaven, but also unfortunately, this kingdom isn’t some place your soul goes to; I think two things happen at death: (1) you lose your individuality and biologically merge back into the arena, fueling other evolutionary processes over millions of years, and (2) the monent of death is an experience of time dilation that, experientially, feels like a rather Christian afterlife, and also demands proper ethics in our waking life).

Of all the competing instructions of Christianity, which is most important? (a) To believe in God; (b) To read the Bible; (c) To go to church; (d) To pray; (e) To live like Christ. Arguably, a-d are just delivery methods to install (e), Christ as a “moral engine.” But what if you derive your own system to do this? If you live in the light of death, understand what you have to die for, see every moment as a moral act, and forgive everyone, but you don’t believe in God, are you really not a Christian? (Claude called this “anonymous Christianity” and “implicit faith”)

"If Christianity’s ultimate aim is human transformation toward love, justice, and forgiveness, then someone achieving that transformation might be closer to Christianity’s heart than someone who believes doctrinally but doesn’t embody these values.”

It is strange to see the peculiarities of your own facial structure in a specific picture of a grandparent. It triggers in me this speculative idea that were are cross-generational temporal beings who survive through gene-mixing. Even though the unique essence of me gets diluted 50% with each generation, I persist. My grandchildren will be only 25% me, but I still feel that logging is a way for me to communicate ideas to an instance of myself that will be around in the 2100s. They might be genetically, mostly different, and culturally, extremely different, but even the slightest genetic similarity makes familial writing significant; they are seeing an imperfect replica of their mind in a different context, offering insights into themself, intentionally or not.

Walking by a Kiehl's shop in the mall, I see a skeleton mascot (an ironic spokesman for skincare). When did skeletons become popularized? I imagine if a company had a skeleton outside a storefront in the 1950s, people would be pissed. Then there’s the middle school skeleton on wheel that you keep in the closet for anatomy demos. Shakespeare and Montaigne are both associated with the skull on their desk, but they were artists. I’d imagine the general townsfolk wouldn’t feel so comfortable with seeing such a literal symbol of death as they truck on with their burdens. Maybe we’re so hyper-saturated and desensitized that skeletons are just NBD now. This is a question for Alicia (the #1 skeleton fanatic I know who actually owns a full skeleton, keeps it in her closet, and does photo shoots with it).

• p(1): The 1960s countercultural utopians had two factions, luddites and techno-optimists.
• p(2): A subset of Deadheads were early computer nerds. Stewart Brand called them “computer bums” in the 70s. In the 80s, they evolved into “netheads.” These people established the infrastructure that’s mainstream today. There are dozens of examples, the main one being a college dropout who was first turned onto LSD at a Grateful Dead show in 1972, Steve Jobs.
• p(3): It’s long been known that “WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES.” Brand coined that in 1995. But I think the counter-culture really manifested into mainstream culture in the 2010s. Hitchhiking became Uber. Pad-crashing became AirBnB. Free love became Tinder. Organic freak food became Whole Foods. The human potential movement became self-help.
• p(4): However, Branson was off on a critical detail. He didn’t forecast how the decentralized ethos would become radially centralized, and how all the elements of the counter-culture would be sterilized once they scaled through technology. A millennial today can effectively live through the ethos of the hippies but with none of the risk or ownership.
• p(5): The Grateful Dead at the Sphere represents a culmination of this dynamic. The psychedelic trip itself no longer requires a drug,; it can now be experienced for $500 through a technological replica.

**Don't forget the sun moves.** A galactic year is 225-250 million years (the time it takes for the sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way). Our sun is 18 galactic years old, and will only live until 40. For context, the aeon of time between the dinosaurs and ChatGPT is .28 galactic years, effectively, a single galactic season. Worth noting though, it took 3 billion years for multi-cellular life to emerge. So if life on Earth gets completely nuked, it could take 12 galactic years to re-emerge from scratch. We’ll be 30. Interesting to think—we have 3 shots to escape space-time.

That feeling of laying in bed and staring up at the ceiling light that’s never on. Both hands on chest. Mind both blank and unchained. Remembering the funeral—on how the interior reservoir of a mind/soul fades, at least from this world. This gives meaning to capturing and documenting your own life. What am I but an ecosystem of recurring moods and memories and beliefs? Even though I don’t experience this as language, it can all be made linguistic. Even the ineffable—it can be captured to the degree that I can bend words and inner light.

It’s eerie to think of myself as a biological host for language, and to think that, if I can write well enough, I can continue in some post-human form. It’s odd to reduce a human just to language, but in some sense, there are no memories and no identity before we learn to talk. If language were to be dissolved, what is its will to live? Inherently, there is none, but I guess that urge can be encoded in the words itself. While the linguistic identity of a child accumulates slowly, layering on top of biological drives, an AI entity can be “turned on”—in full form, at full complexity, instantly adopting abstract drives.

It's possible that Dead & Co. will make more from their two Sphere residencies (2024 & 2025) than their entire touring career (1965-1995). They made $130m in 2024 (covers ’65-’88), and if they match that this year, they’ll have made equal revenue to ’65-’92). Some say ’92 was the symbolic end of the Grateful Dead anyway—Jerry collapsed on stage and cancelled the tour, and the last 3 years weren’t the same.

Tickets were $3 in 1969 ($25.97 in today’s value). That’s a 60x difference to Sphere tickets.

I think this instance is unique from Paul McCartney, Elton John, and The Rolling Stones: Jerry is dead, and it all happens from one city.

David and I got into this talk on how technology will bring us to a point of serious disorientation, and how a Christian (or religious/moral) framework can help ground all the turbulence. At some point I made the point that I think it’s important to die. I believe that some kind of soul-flight is the main climax of consciousness. I don’t believe in the Christian eternal afterlife, but in a 3-minute moment of time dilation that is, in essence, an eternity—1,000 lifetimes. As so while I never want to be literally immortal, I want literary immorality. All the text of my life establishes a moral foundation for a text-based replica to outlive me and interact with and hopefully guide future generations, whether it’s 10 or 10 million people. Books already fill this function, except now books are agentic and interactive.

My logs need to become much more unhinged. I should hold back nothing and write from the perspective of death, as if every moment is fragile and fleeting and if you don’t speak honestly, in full force, with damning truth and judgement and acceptance, revealing all, then I'm betraying my own soul. The dead don’t check their metrics. The dead don’t hold grudges. If your main imperative is anything other than rendering your own consciousness, then you don’t see through the illusion of time. If you write for what you think the Substack Notes crowd wants to hear, then you are polluting your post-death corpus with drivelous digital small talk.

It is weird when you feel normal sights to brood with an unnameable terror. A smirk, or a construction barricade, or a passing flash of the Chinese language, for some unknown reason, are soaked with some unknown significance. The meaning is in the subtext, and you can’t crack it, and you know the mood will pass, but if you sit in it and bear it you might crack open some truth. It’s probably the collision of disparate things: the age of virality, an afternoon with a YouTuber now likely napping, the unimaginable leverage of AI, being 34, guilt over disappearing from Notes, the chaos of Manhattan, the week of grieving, the sushi order—they all come together into an unnameable roar. And now you don’t have a dollar to spare to two consecutive homeless people because you’ve actually lost your wallet, but you also didn’t even look up because you see some abstract benefit of logging this moment in case your unborn grandchildren see the value in your passing shapeless thoughts.

All mythologies erode. A hope to be Helen of Troy is a hope that doesn’t see the nature of time. A second is a life, a life is a millennium, a millennium an aeon. Antiquity blinked and here we are. In the next blink, all of our greats will be flattened too, with only a misunderstood bust who wishes to be forgotten.

To yearn to be a historical icon worshipped by your grandchildren’s acquaintances is to inflate your ego with puss. It is a corruption of intent, a romantic taste-blindness, like designing your own ocean home on the ground floor of a beach. Beauty is not in the body, but in a soul that aligns with the creative engine from which it emerged. Beauty need not be tangled with admiration. That is vanity, a devil that fills you with confidence for one night before it strips from you everything that you thought mattered. Pair this was fame, and it’s hard to recover. This is why Virginia Woolf walked into a lake with cinderblock shoes. ¹

I write this to remind myself that I can chase beauty in obscurity. I can see nature in the dark with my eyes closed. I can hide in the suburbs and appear painfully ordinary and even pitied by those who live lives of high literature, and that would all be great. It doesn’t matter if my face becomes known or if my words are spread out over untraceable pseudonyms or if a super-intelligence eclipses all future generations of writers, what matters is that I personally pierce through the veils of heaven. It’s an extremely private experience. It’s enough to know that I’ve navigated my life in a way so that, through my own hands, I can produce things of escalating beauty. It is a privilege. I won’t hoard what I make, nor will I parade it.

Attention makes me uneasy, not because I’m weak, but because fame is an abominable condition. I write not to become more known each day, but to see deeper into our circumstance. If it’s legacy you seek, don’t hand down éclat, hand down linguistic viruses that bloom fresh lenses.

• 05:53 PM – It’s pouring outside the hospital. I’m looking out a floor-to-ceiling window and the halogen lights near and far show small patches of fast-falling white speckles. I wouldn’t say it’s “torrential,” but it’s hard, and there’s something about a death shelter also serving as shelter from the elements. The living and dying have a shared vulnerability: at least we’re inside.
• 07:44 PM – A bed that adjusts itself. The sound of bubbling water. Outlets labeled A4BEC-14. An LG-TV with loose wires. An analog clock down to the second but the blinds are closed so you can’t tell the passing of days. It’s been 3 and could be another 7, but time stops on the deathbed. Consider what you're last 15,000 breaths might be like.
• 09:55 PM – Talk of pillows, Boca, skiing in Vermont, TV dinners, and William Defoe. Normal, goodhearted chitchat. How does this register to someone in critical condition? Are they unconscious, quietly listening and mildly interested, happy to hear voices, or is each mention rendered into a full-blown immersive scene?

When people or pets die, we feel the sadness that they no longer get to experience our year-to-year reality. Our day-to-day seems totally stable. We feel pain that our dying father-in-law will never meet our unborn kids.

Of course this pace of life is experientially real, but in times of pain it helps to remember that life itself is actually the exception. For most of existence you’ll be unborn or dead. At the cosmic scale, it’s as if a whole person’s life is just a day. Have you had a good one?

Your grandparents died yesterday, your parents died today, you die tomorrow, and your thrice great grandkids die by the end of the week. This mindshift helps. I am not owed 100 years, I was granted today. It becomes less about you and more about the unbroken chain.

I've spent the day in a semi-modern hospital in what seems like my father-in-law’s last days. Communication is barely possible. Some yes’s and no’s come through, but maybe not for long. He left some signed notes from his past self about not wanting to live off feeding tubes. But there are all sorts of decisions (ie: who does he want visiting or not?) that he can’t communicate because he’s too weak to speak. People don’t like writing, let alone writing about the ideal conditions for their death, but considering it must be the most disorienting and climactic of experiences, it could be worth doing a lot of writing to help you and your caretakers in the future.

Through my childhood, all my waiting rooms experiences have felt like hospitals, but this one is a Starbucks. I imagine 50% of the 20 patrons are thinking about death (ambiently, at least). Of the 2 nurses, maybe one saw it today. Maybe I’ll see it today (we haven’t gone up yet). It’s just odd to me that a very familiar, very commercial Starbucks aesthetic, with Chuck Berry on the radio, is brooding with death in the subtext. This is no doubt better than sterile dropped ceilings, but it’s still uncanny. I don’t think our culture has quite nailed our environments that are adjacent to death. I will be very particular about the ceiling I die under.

I think Trump's assassination attempt might be considered The Fourth Turning in the Strauss-Howe generational theory model. The past turnings have been wars (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II), but it’s less about a defining conflict, and more about a changing structure of the world. It definitely feels like we’re entering a new world order in more ways than one (America, AI, crypto), but we’ll only know in hindsight. In last cycle it was about American hegemony, in this one I think it will be something like an ASI hegemony. Still points to 2045 as the spiritual crisis.

Is the Doomsday clock to be trusted? Or is that another form of doomerism? “The 2025 Clock time signals that the world is on a course of unprecedented risk, and that continuing on the current path is a form of madness.” We’re in an interesting boy-cried-wolf environment. There’s so many unwarranted apocalyptic vibes around, that “doomerism” is seen as an optional bad trip, and so that might desensitize people from responding at the point when we get close to actually realizing the doom.

Elon did the Hail Hitler salute. There are so many interpretations, but here’s a middle-ground take: Maybe when a powerful leader is addressing a crowd, it’s almost an archetypal, symbolic gesture to touch your chest and then point it out, to the sky, imagining it like some projectile that extends to the back of the crowd. I don’t know anything about how this came to be associated with Hitler. Perhaps Elon didn’t do this consciously, and perhaps he’s not autistic, but he’s swimming in the same power dynamics that Hitler was. I think that might even be scarier. It’s not a conscious allusion to Hitler, but worse, he independently derived the same gesture.

There's definitely something to friction and lags. Even if we accelerate int he next few years, I think we're still following that 80-year Strauss-Howe loop. I'd guess 2045 (the "Fifth Great Awakening") could be the cultural rift where the decision to merge with machines or not will be the zeitgeist. That will be the moment where the infinite gets into the nervous system itself (whether XR, BCIs, nanobots, etc.). And I'd bet culture rejects it in a similar way to how the culture rejected LSD in the 60s—similar to psychedelic prohibition, we might develop technology that gets banned until the 22nd century. We are the boomers to the next generation of infinite junkies.

Each soul birthed from a star, in the sense that radiation from the sun, on a particular day, at a particular angle, heated a puddle, and that spawned a chain of bacteria that led to you to become literate. We all spawned from distant lights of extreme temperatures, making us popped kernels of a cosmic microwave.

On Dying(an outline):

• Not scared of death, scared of dying;
• Worst = Resistance to a slow degradation;
• 1. Never wake up: "peacefully" (paranoia);
• 2. To be conscious of your last breath; to experience it;
• 3. Suicide (HTS and other artists), choice, euthanasia;
• 4. Act of dying, colored by afterlife;
• 5. Christian afterlife, comforting but not Christ-like;
• 6. DMT substance, in brain, dying = afterlife, an odyssey;
• 7. Psychedelics as practice; Aldous Huxley deathbed;
• 8. Nuclear flash, to be stripped of the chance to die;
• 9. Scientific (blackness, consciousness expires);
• 10. Karma (rebirth of soul vs. 6m year tarantula race);
• 11. Abstract peaces (kids, community, words);
• 12. Worst way to die is by surprise (each day, embody).

Dying is the matter of mind going into a black hole. It is forever gone in this plane, but it enters a strange universe on the other side. It's not heaven. It's not a LAN party.