Cover: Augustus Vincent Tack's "Time and Timelessness" - I loved this one in the Denver Art Museum
During an AI agents meetup, I went to this year, I had the audacity to ask the panel a question they didn't see coming.
Why they didn't see it coming is not that big of a mystery. Tech, especially as edgy as ours, often has a tendency to detach its developers from the lived reality of what we lovingly call normies. That includes not thinking much about what actually motivates people to overcome inertia.
When they heard my question, you could see their minds go blank. A break in the system, a transgression. You're not supposed to question the direction. Just ask how fast we can go.
It's all inevitable, anyway. They say.
The profit motive. All the others do it. You have to be first, or at least not fall behind.
We're so obsessed with means we forget the end.
We are obsessed with purposes that are dead ends. We see money as an end and lose our sense of everything that is worth living for.
Yehudi Menuhin
The end, what's that anyway?
For a human, it's death. And the desire for people to squeeze as many happenings into the remaining time speaks volumes about our priorities. Quantity > quality.
At the same time, we obsess over the wrong things, as every "we asked people on their death bed what they wish they'd done more" survey shows.
One day, the question of the Why arises, as Camus would say.
Life is absurd because it ends. But it'd also be if it didn't, and maybe plagued by boredom into our 5th century, we'd reconsider the idea of never dying.
Anyway, I'm deviating. I didn't ask the panelists about the meaning of life, although that would have been a very interesting discussion and would have elicited a similar reaction.
All I wanted to know is whether - with all their excitement about billions of agents (bots) flooding the internet - they had any positive vision for humans online? Especially amidst a landscape where the dead internet head rears its ugly head and meaningful interactions flee into the safety of private spaces.
While enshittification turns up the dial on the crescendo of slop...
It's a little enraging that people building the tech seem so unbothered with the what could be - they're actively advocating for.
Of course, I get it. It's good for your bags if your potential audience isn't limited to humans, but the only boundary is someone willing to pay the hosting fee for all those agents.
Best you get asking for a vision for the tech is an extension of the what is.
Better, faster, supposedly making lives better... which.. I don't have to explain; coupled with profit motif and growth fetishism, hasn't always happened.
Quality of life? Hahah sorry, we need your attention to sacrifice it at the altar of exponential growth. Limbic capitalism lfg.
Probably why, to paraphrase Rosa, we feel like we're running from an abyss.
He's by far the first to make that observation. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher had a similar realization, concluding that we forgot to dream, so the best we can come up with is recycling things from the past.
Just asking, what if the future could be different?
What if these developments are not - as technologists say - inevitable? Isn't saying that just an easy excuse, ridding yourself and your buddies of any responsibility in shaping the world?
The second you spew out a different ideal for the future, you're labeled as a utopist.
Utopia, that word has a bitter taste these days, it didn't help that the most prominent utopia believers in the 20th century were dictators that killed millions in pursuit of theirs.
As the word's etymology shows, it contains the notion that we'll never get there.
When people dismiss an idea as utopian, it's usually flavored with ridicule, and its inflationary use to dismiss significant changes to the status quo hasn't helped.
"Utopian has become synonymous with critique and a utopian idea is now not a vision of a hopeful future but of an impossible one. "
Caitlin Rajan in Psyche
A hopeful future, though, is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to work toward. And I'm pretty sure others would, too.
And in my small mind, this means thinking about a future for humans. I'm a humanist at heart.
I'd like to see more people thrive and make meaningful connections. I don't think getting users addicted to products is the way toward maximum human potential (or whatever framing you want). I do think the trenches are an accurate way to describe our favorite pastime.
There's nothing glamorous about the trenches. After you got shot and died, you're stripped of your uniform, it's scrubbed and handed down to the next one willing to fall as a figure in a game of chess they don't control.
It's really hard to stick to ideals when, in the world around you, people are cheering for predatory memecoins, whoever makes the most money and the broligarchy that's clearly interested in recycling some ideas from the fifties.
I cycle through feeling stupid that I ever had hope and hanging on to the little I have left
I and so many of us are marginalized ppl in this country and you…
50
Integrity will favor the honest in the long run when, every cycle, once again, we see the opposite play out.
The recent thread I saw with ZachXBT highlighting how his hasn't really paid, probably is a good metaphor for that. A discussion in the Kiwi News Group wondered whether we would really be creating innovative projects in the AI agent and memecoin trenches.
The conclusion: a handful, but quite a few from teams that started building long before the current cycle of insanity.
I remember in some Empire episode (The blockworks podcast, I'll have to find it eventually) they discussed tokens last year, and the way a traded token changes teams' priorities - attention going into the token as it - seemingly represents the success of a project.
Now tell me, how do you think it feels to build a project for years only to then see someone have a 10x of your marketcap by going through a rebrand and putting all the hype words on the website? Now imagine running a school - you educate all the kids, you are on the verge of burnout, parents constantly complain, your pay meh.
Or worse, all these memecoins - now even presidential - that clearly aren't aimed at building meaningful communities.
It's hard being a woman in this.
Sometimes, I don't know if I'm crying because of PMS or because of the state of the world.
Maybe it also doesn't matter.
So far, I've not given up on all my idealism yet. The thing that kept me in this industry.
The idea that we can create an alternative to the PVP games: positive sum environments, places for careful curation, connections, and credible neutral financial rails.
A future in which the world online isn't just overrun by AI agents, full of AI slop and rage bait, but instead also pockets of communities that may even end up creating a positive impact in the world offline wherever they are.
There is a desire for spaces for contemplation, open discussion without the cancel culture battles that ensue on X, and fun. Why shouldn't we allow people to have fun and bond without it always needing to be financialized?
I understand such things are hard to measure. They don't scale at times. They might not be investable. You can't force them.
Aren't some of the best things in life just like that? 🌸
I love initiatives that try to use crypto somehow to more sustainably fund artists or journalists and to change how we view content. As the word implies, that's just something to fill a void.
Unfortunately, the void is never satisfied.
I'd love to see the much-cited renaissance of the humanities, AI forcing us to have serious discussions of what makes a human human, and what's the kind of surroundings we can act in co-existence with it, not in ways where it's just used to give us fake-others to band-aid the loneliness epidemic.
“The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.”
Hannah Arendt in the Human Condition
In my view, it's high time that people start reading philosophy. Especially those building towards futures they don't care to explain - driven more by market forces than by the magnetic pull of a brighter future.
It's out there - if only we aren't outsourcing the ability to dream and create it.
"We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience."
Pablo Neruda
In part, I'm also around because of spite. Can't give the system the satisfaction of having turned yet another decent aspiring thinker into a PVP shiller.
And because I've found still a few decent humans here, I I can't let them go insane alone.
Thanks for reading 💚
Excuse typos, I got PMS and Weltschmerz, after all.
This has been simmering in my mind for a bit as I wondered whether I should even pour out the sentiment (because work haha).
But I figured, in the end, this is my personal blog, so I can voice whatever I want. The good thing is, once I wrote it all down, I can stop thinking about it constantly. It's cathartic in that.
What's also healing is this Perlman recording. If you like the violin, you'll love it:
