Dead internet theory says that the majority of actions and interactions on the net are performed by bots now. I saw a note the other day saying that Instagram and TikTok are testing tools to automatically offer people shopping recommendations based on stuff seen in their feeds or their own photos and videos. That basically kills the influencer market. Agentic shopping doesn’t work properly yet, but when it does, that’ll be another human action layer gone. I’ve looked at the Substack and Reddit apps this week, and half of those posts seem to be written by bots too. I tried being more connected for a while, but I seem to have just opened slurry pipes.
Around 1897, the French director Georges Méliès made a silent short film that, until last month, hadn’t been publicly viewable for more than a century. “Gugusse et l’Automate,” or “Gugusse and the Automaton,” is a 45-second slapstick piece featuring a magician and a Pierrot-styled robot as they duke it out.
OPERATIONS: prose day STATUS: when i refused to wake up to get his breakfast, the mancub switched the radio on and then slapped me around the face READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
LAST WATCHED: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING. Not as joyless as the one before it, but the ending didn’t quite stick for me.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
The cherry trees I transplanted the other week are coming into bud, which mean I didn’t kill them. Go me. You will also note some scat on the soil, because whenever I clear a garden bed, every cat and fox in the area considered that an invitation to shit all over it. This is actually very bad, as cat shit is toxic. So I have another job – scoop up the shit and surrounding soil, re-mulch it, put down a bunch of sharp sticks, and sow catnip at the back of the garden, away from the crop plants.
Seems awfully quiet out on the internet today, so I’m going to take it as a sign to wander off with my notebook.
OPERATIONS: deep in development STATUS: trying to work out if I can buy myself three days of just working in the garden READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Big fog day. I remember a morning, not long after I started school – probably five years old, maybe six – blanketed in thick fog. Got to school, and my classroom was a couple of floors up. And everyone was at the windows. Because the top of the fogbank was lower than the height we were at, so we could look down on the roof of the fog, and it was like walking around above the clouds. I remember that sense of surreal altitude, and that we were seeing something rare. We just walked upstairs to look down at the tops of clouds.
A recent NATO report defined cognitive warfare as the “manipulation of the enemy’s cognition,” involving “the use of all knowledge, strategies, and available tools to impact human behavior…. with the end goal of manipulating and altering decision-making.” Under this definition, the systems associated with technological innovation offer ripe pickings for cognitive-style warfare. Now that humans have fashioned this highly vulnerable domain, defined by the ever-deepening and increasingly structured union of humans and machines, we can no longer ignore the opportunities and threats we have built into it.
Cognitive warfare. “The Innovation System as a Disruptive Battlespace,” sure, great title. But. COGNITIVE WARFARE.
READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
I suspect that there are various spirits within me. My sister and my father are two among many. They haunt me on different floors and almost never at the same moment.
The news continues to feature a depressing volume of video of the US President speaking directly to his base – “I love the poorly educated” – in that specific manner of his, using a restricted vocabulary and giant claims. Obviously, he has midterms on his mind, but in a moment where he has command of the global news cycles, it seems like a poor choice. I have Bloomberg up on the big screen right now, with stories about embassy blasts and the Hormuz Strait being shut. Fuel prices going up isn’t good for him – Jimmy Carter was screwed in part by having the legend “the man who killed cheap gasoline in America” hung around his neck, and the current President’s pivot from domestic-first to foreign-first policy seems less like a choice than a flail. He doesn’t look well.
OPERATIONS: Taking today to reconfigure some stuff. READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LAST WATCHED: rewatched THE MENU
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
OPERATIONS: I have to get seven pages out of the house by 5pm and finish tomorrow’s newsletter READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
That’s the main notebook – insert 1 is the daily book, the two behind it are what I run LTD and Orbital Operations off.
It may be meteorological spring, but it’s grey and misty out there, so I’m today using the midwinter beard oil I was gifted by Fires of Freyja.
Low energy slobby day: black Wrangler jeans that are now four inches too big for me, black Wrangler workshirt, surplus Russian submariners base layer which I like for its boat neck, an old grey Calvin Klein jacket, and a grey cashmere scarf because I have reached the age where I must take the scarf.
Two months ago, a key staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz said in a public meeting that she was “begging” NASA to release a document that would kick off the second round of a competition among private companies to develop replacements for the International Space Station.
There has been no movement since then, as NASA has yet to release this “request for proposals.” So this week, Cruz stepped up the pressure on the space agency with a NASA Authorization bill that passed his committee on Wednesday.
Regarding NASA’s support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law:
Within 60 days, publicly release the requirements for commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit
Within 90 days, release the final “request for proposals” to solicit industry responses
Within 180 days, enter into contracts with “two or more” commercial providers for such stations
Cruz is trying to inject urgency into NASA as several private companies—including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, and Voyager—are finalizing designs for space stations. All have expressed a desire for clarity from NASA on how long the space agency would like its astronauts to stay on board, the types of scientific equipment needed, and much more. These are known as “requirements” in NASA parlance.
When NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the revamped approach to the Artemis moon program, it was unclear whether the new mobile launcher that has been constructed over the last two years at Kennedy Space Center would ever get used.
A NASA rundown of the reconfigured Artemis launch plans released Tuesday, though, answers that question for the foreseeable future: No.
“The agency is no longer planning to use the Exploration Upper Stage or Mobile Launcher 2, as development of both has faced delays,” according to the agency update.
The universe is overrun with dark matter, outweighing the ordinary stuff that stars and planets are made of five-to-one. But some corners of the cosmos are more dominated by the invisible substance than others.
Using the stalwart Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have found a galaxy 300 million light away that appears to be made of at least 99.9 percent dark matter — so much that the galaxy is barely visible at all, they report in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The tenebrous realm, dubbed CDG-2, could be one of the most dark matter heavy galaxies ever found, and a compelling candidate for elusive and yet hypothetical “dark galaxies” that astronomers have been searching for for decades, which are thought to contain vanishingly few, if any, stars.
The Miniphone Ultra, or “mpu”, is essentially just a case for the Apple Watch Ultra (versions 1, 2 or 3) that turns it into a miniature, minimalist smartphone. “There’s a guy I’ve been talking to who bought [an mpu] a while back,” says Jelley. “He told me that he’s had his phone shut away in his desk for two weeks. Nowadays, that’s kind of wild.”
OPERATIONS: wiping a bunch of stuff off my boards today READING:THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Lots and lots of news, and I lost all of yesterday to keeping up with that while also trying to get moving on a couple of difficult jobs and trying to stay across email, all of which I pretty much failed at. See, I have a family member who’s supposed to be changing planes in Dubai in less than three weeks….! DXB (Dubai International Airport) is currently a shitshow. I was up watching BBC news until 1am.
And I lost the first chunk of the day to trying to e-sign a contract that, it turns out, has been locked by the person who signed it first. So it’s going to be that kind of day, and I’m checking out until tomorrow.
The Midwest-based startup has built what it calls Paper-fi: physical books with synchronized audio soundtracks that follow readers in real time as they turn each page. No chips embedded in the paper, no QR codes to scan. The system uses patented computer vision and other modes through a smartphone or smart glasses to track your place in the book and play the corresponding audio. Whether music, ambient sound, or narration, the soundtrack moves with you at your own pace.
The Kodak Charmera is an objectively awful camera and I love it.
ViviLnk
It’s not so much “point and shoot” as much as it is “spray and pray.”
I was at Konsztrukting Soundz last night – an unusually full house, which means I probably caught a new iteration of the mange, and a really good night. I have a few Bandcamp rabbit holes to go down this – Julia Brussel, who played violin, and Sylvia Hallett, who played violin, bicycle wheel and saw. Hearing someone play a mic’d-up bicycle wheel with violin bow and seashell was quite a thing.
Of course, All The News happened last night while my phone was muted. Khamenei dead, which I presume was an attempt at regime decapitation by people who don’t understand how Iranian government works.
I read about an influencer who identifies as a snake and was found slithering all over the streets of Japan in a snakeskin crop top and matching tail. Its been living rent-free in my head ever since.
2 years now in an environment that is snow roughly half of the year, and I have become a penguin. I am one with the ice. The trees are heavy, limbs decorated and hanging low. Layered and thick, holding their breath alongside me. We wait. It is beautiful, the waiting.
