Modern Flow

Bunny chimera illustration by Celia Agnes of Sweet Omens, available as a print on Etsy.

Guess what time it is? That's right, time for a NEWSLETTER! This is me getting myself hyped but hopefully it works on you too. Happy Monday.

Btw, you may not be aware of the point of this newsletter, especially if you signed up in between episodes of grandiose rhapsodizing. Simple goals: Rep what I'm working on, rep my friends / densify the ecosystem, and ideally do both in an interesting way, because otherwise why would you be here. It's a vital venture to me — as a non-technologist, bringing people together is how I can advance positive-sum change at a scale exceeding personal action. Or rather, this is how I [strive to] put a multiplier on my individual capacity.

Anyway. Members, I already emailed you about this, but ICYMI I posted a progress update plus Existential Detritus. Also, if the bunny zine trio has not reached you irl by now, let me know! (If you're international, let me know once a weird amount of time has passed vis-à-vis shipping to your country from the United States.)

Time-sensitive: Why Computers Are Bad and What We Can Do About It, an Interintellect event on Saturday, October 3, led by Anton Troynikov and Nick Arner. I can vouch that Anton is genuinely very upset about computers; presumably Nick's ire is no less potent.

The best thing that I read recently was Antonio García Martínez interviewing ex-spook Martin Gurri, aptly titled "The Prophet of the Revolt." Infinitely quotable, but here's a single teaser: "The great political conflict of our century, I believe, is that between a networked public and the elites who inhabit the great hierarchical institutions that organize modern life."

What else you should read:

"More Important Than Votes" by Mike Solana, on the human need for faith in beautiful ideals (same theme comes up in the Gurri interview!)
"A Deep Dive into K-pop" by Dormin, on the systematic production of idols
"Big Tech at the End of History" by Byrne Hobart, on the political valence of growth (pairs well with his subsequent piece "Surfing the Right S-Curve"!)
"Life is Made of Unfair Coin Flips" by Alex Danco, on how organisms eat entropy to persist through space-time

Pausing briefly here — IME, by far the least confusing way to understand entropy is via statistical mechanics (AKA probability). Also, Quanta published a swell writeup of the same paper that Danco used as a peg — not knocking him, it's fascinating enough for plenty of posts! — as well as a writeup of the same overall concept. The latter links to several more mind-bending papers, such as Carlo Rovelli's "Meaning = Information + Evolution" [PDF link]. I highly recommend digging into the various manifestations of entropy to better grok the fabric of the universe.