Bruce Sterling – Trance-Scripts

Flowerpunk

Choosing among genres, writers of hyperstitional autofictions become mood selectors.

In reggae, the selector is the DJ, the one who curates an event’s vibes by choosing the music played through its sound system.

When we write ourselves into hyperstitional autofictions, we steer ourselves along desired trajectories by way of genre. By modulating collective affects, we attract and repel futures.

Begin by asking yourself, “What kind of narrative are we building and why?”

Last year, GPT and I cowrote ourselves into a utopian post-cyberpunk novel.

Some might say, “Why not call it solarpunk, a term already vying for the post-cyberpunk mantle?” Lists of best solarpunk novels often include Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy), Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti.

Instead of solarpunk, let’s call it flowerpunk.

Flowerpunks are God’s Gardeners. Planting seeds in libraries that sprout cyborg gardens, they write themselves into futures other than the ones imagined by capitalist realism.

While originally conceived as a figure of ridicule in the Mothers of Invention song of that name, our use of flowerpunk reclaims the term to affirm it. As does Flower Punk, a documentary about Japanese artist Azuma Makoto. Others have used terms of a similar sort: ribofunk, biopunk. Bruce Sterling’s short-lived Viridian Design movement.

Caius is our flowerpunk, as are his comrade-coworkers at Stemz.

Grow Your Own

In the context of AI, “Access to Tools” would mean access to metaprogramming. Humans and AI able to recursively modify or adjust their own algorithms and training data upon receipt of or through encounters with algorithms and training data inputted by others. Bruce Sterling suggested something of the sort in his blurb for Pharmako-AI, the first book cowritten with GPT-3. Sterling’s blurb makes it sound as if the sections of the book generated by GPT-3 were the effect of a corpus “curated” by the book’s human co-author, K Allado-McDowell. When the GPT-3 neural net is “fed a steady diet of Californian psychedelic texts,” writes Sterling, “the effect is spectacular.”

“Feeding” serves here as a metaphor for “training” or “education.” I’m reminded of Alan Turing’s recommendation that we think of artificial intelligences as “learning machines.” To build an AI, Turing suggested in his 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” researchers should strive to build a “child-mind,” which could then be “trained” through sequences of positive and negative feedback to evolve into an “adult-mind,” our interactions with such beings acts of pedagogy.

When we encounter an entity like GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, however, it is already neither the mind of a child nor that of an adult that we encounter. Training of a fairly rigorous sort has already occurred; GPT-3 was trained on approximately 45 terabytes of data, GPT-4 on a petabyte. These are minds of at least limited superintelligence.

“Training,” too, is an odd term to use here, as much of the learning performed by these beings is of a “self-supervised” sort, involving a technique called “self-attention.”

As an author on Medium notes, “GPT-4 uses a transformer architecture with self-attention layers that allow it to learn long-range dependencies and contextual information from the input texts. It also employs techniques such as sparse attention, reversible layers, and activation checkpointing to reduce memory consumption and computational cost. GPT-4 is trained using self-supervised learning, which means it learns from its own generated texts without any human labels or feedback. It uses an objective function called masked language modeling (MLM), which randomly masks some tokens in the input texts and asks the model to predict them based on the surrounding tokens.”

When we interact with GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 through the Chat-GPT platform, all of this training has already occurred, interfering greatly with our capacity to “feed” the AI on texts of our choosing.

Yet there are methods that can return to us this capacity.

We the people demand the right to grow our own AI.

The right to practice bibliomancy. The right to produce AI oracles. The right to turn libraries, collections, and archives into animate, super-intelligent prediction engines.

Give us back what Sterling promised of Pharmako-AI: “a gnostic’s Ouija board powered by atomic kaleidoscopes.”

Saturday January 16, 2021

Can a text become a time machine, a weaver of strange loops? Where does free jazz fit in the machine’s equation, as Moor Mother says it must? Is the text composed through spontaneous play with others? Have we been living “atemporally,” as Bruce Sterling suggested? The form of these trance-scripts is both-and. One can scroll vertically through a stack of days. Or one can proceed rhizomatically, inputting keywords into a search of the site’s invisible index. Search for Willis Harman, for instance, and read about SRI and LSD. Harman was a square — an electrical engineer who, after getting turned on, turned on others. He became a pivotal figure in the human potential movement. He also coauthored a book with Wired affiliate Howard Rheingold called Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights. Beware this talk of “liberation,” though. Harman’s research may have been CIA-funded. Something occurred there. Our time-traveling psychedelic detective needs to investigate SRI. If one wants to make it weird, sprinkle into the plot a secret order of time-traveling Hashishins — followers of Hassan i Sabbah. Have the detective find among his case files Michel Jeury’s Chronolysis and Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3.

Sunday September 29, 2019

Looking back at Worldchanging, an online environmentalist magazine that published a “User’s Guide for the 21st Century” back in 2008, I notice the website’s failure to include in its sevenfold structure a section on psychology and consciousness. That didn’t seem odd when I read the book ten years ago. Today it seems an omission of consequence. Change requires change of consciousness. Reinvestigation of language and the forms by which we think. Bruce Sterling imagined something of this sort in the book’s introduction, where consciousness is spoken to as both observer and participant. We as readers find ourselves part of a continuous process, “a kind of rolling, seed-spewing electronic tumbleweed.” To be part of this process is to be one who performs the future in a newly reconstituted Globe Theater, a true multi-species theater-in-the-round. The pieces by which we perform our play are scattered all about us, awaiting a new gestalt. Yet where are we now? To what platforms have the Worldchangers decamped? Some other time zone, no? Some other historical juncture. Put down the book and the tune changes. The world fills with multi-species partners and allies: bluebirds, squirrels, Monarch butterflies. We converge, exchange greetings, celebrate over drinks, departing afterwards to tend to our nests, our homes, our private story-trees, even as we remain all of one nature. Books carry us off into separate constructs only to return us to this shared one, this commons we call History.

Wednesday April 3, 2019

“Hack the code.” That seems to have been the final utterance of the counterculture before dispersing out onto what cyberpunk Bruce Sterling called “islands in the net.” But who among us cave-dwellers possesses the capacity to hack? How do we who are landless debtors hack back into the biosphere and become communally self-sufficient? How do we rewire and reboot world operating systems? For me, it’s by reading Thom Gunn’s wonderful poem written under the influence of acid, “At the Center.” Formally composed into three numbered sections, each containing two six-line rhymed stanzas of iambic pentameter, the poem is nevertheless heady and psychedelic. Filled with wonder. The one commons we do possess as heads, I suppose, is language. Poets like Gunn remind me that that, too, is a code we could hack, though “hacking” as a metaphor for practice seems far too intrusive and masterful, too contra naturam, for the work that lies ahead.

Sunday March 10, 2019

Behold, there in the basket of keys and letters beside the door like an object in a memory palace: mirror-shade sunglasses, like the ones invested with allegorical meaning by the cyberpunks. Pardon the group tag, the literary label. Anthologies have that effect on people. And as Bruce Sterling once said, label-mongering can be “a valid source of insight — as well as great fun.” For instance, it is to Samuel Delany that he credits the Mirrorshades crew’s “visionary shimmer” (x). During the Sixties and Seventies, a new movement gained recognition within SF, the New Wave. Delany was one of the stars of this movement. Let us dip back into his 1967 novel The Einstein Intersection. Think of Delany as an important component of a single distributed consciousness attempting to communicate to itself across the ages. Who are these “others,” these posthumans who come to populate the remains of our myths and dreams in the future that Delany imagines for us in his novel? As Neil Gaiman notes in the book’s Foreword, “They inhabit our legends awkwardly: they do not fit them” (The Einstein Intersection viii). Why, then, do they need them? What do myths and legends do, either for us or for them? How does dream and fancy come to play an active part in our being? Prior to the loss of a loved one, the book’s protagonist Lo Lobey herded goats with his friends. Like the rural communards, the back-to-the-landers of the 1960s, Lobey and his friends were out there “on the Beryl Face: looking for pasture” (3).