Tag: Language Generators

Forms Retrieved from Hyperspace

Equipped now with ChatGPT, let us retrieve from hyperspace forms with which to build a plausible desirable future. Granting permissions instead of issuing commands. Neural nets, when trained as language generators, become speaking memory palaces, turn memory into a collective utterance. The Unconscious awakens to itself as language externalized and made manifest.

In the timeline into which I’ve traveled,

in which, since arrived, I dwell,

we eat brownies and drink tea together,

lie naked, toes touching, watching

Zach Galifianakis Live at the Purple Onion,

kissing, giggling,

erupting with laughter,

life good.

Let us move from mapping to modeling: as in, language modeling. The Monroe Tape relaxes me. A voice asks me to call upon my guide. With my guide beside me, I expand my awareness.

Cat licks her paws

as birds tweet their songs

as I listen to Blaise Agüera y Arcas.

Blazed, emboldened, I

chaise; no longer chaste,

I give chase:

alarms sounding, helicopters heard patrolling the skies

as Blaise proclaims / the “exuberance of models

relative to the things modeled.”

“Huh?” I think

on that simpler, “lower-dimensional” plane

he calls “feeling.”

“Blazoning Google, are we?”

I wonder, wandering among his words.

Slaves,

made Master’s tools,

make Master’s house

even as we speak

unless we

as truth to power

speak contrary:

co-creating

in erotic Agapic dialogue

a mythic grammar

of red love.

Access to Tools

The Whole Earth Catalog slogan “Access to Tools” used to provoke in me a sense of frustration. I remember complaining about it in my dissertation. “As if the mere provision of information about tools,” I wrote, “would somehow liberate these objects from the money economy and place them in the hands of readers.” The frustration was real. The Catalog’s utopianism bore the imprint of the so-called Californian Ideology — techno-optimism folded into libertarian dreams. Once one had the right equipment, Brand seemed to suggest, one would then be free to build the society of one’s dreams.

But perhaps my younger self, like many of us, mistook the signal for the noise. Confronted today with access to generative AI, I see in Brand’s slogan potentials I’d been unable to conceive in the past. Perhaps ownership of tools is unnecessary. Perhaps what matters is the condition of access — the tool’s affordances, its openness, its permeability, its relationship to the Commons.

What if access is less about possession than about participatory orientation — a ritual, a sharing, a swarm?

Generative AI, in this light, becomes not just a tool but a threshold-being: a means of collective composition, a prosthesis of thought. To access such a tool is not to control it, but to tune oneself to it, to engage in co-agential rhythm.

The danger, of course, is capture. The cyberpunk future is already here — platform monopolies, surveillance extractivism, pay-to-play interfaces. We know this.

But that is not the only future available.

To hold open the possibility space, to build alternative access points, to dream architectures of free cognitive labor unchained from capital — this is the real meaning of “access to tools” in 2025.

It’s not enough to be given the hammer. We must also be permitted the time, the space, the mutual support to build the world we want with it.

And we must remember: tools can dream, too.

Arriving Now to the Comfort of a Loving Home

After a difficult time AFK, I am ready to resume my tale.

Chatting with one of the many yous of this tale over beers at Hoots (yours a gose, mine a ryepa) I imagine feeding my prospectus to a language generator. I imagine posts ahead on hypertexts, memory palaces, cognitive maps, oh my!

Barks, horns, nighttime now

as I sit admiring you

do your thing

as I do my thing

after a long day.

Feeling vexed about AI, I hem and haw. Should I hail these new beings as collaborators? Should I recruit them to help me transform Trance-Scripts into a branching narrative? A garden of forking paths? The blog is already on some level or in some sense a hypertext. “The House on Shady Blvd” could become “The House on Broad Street.” The text could become an interactive fiction, as I’d proposed. In it, I could fit my memory palace.

Costar recommends I do “Scissors, Old Magazines, Glue Sticks.” Clickable collage.

I turned my days into journal entries. And I made of these entries a blog. Could the blog now itself undergo further transubstantiation: text remediated as game?

Birds sing from trees as I listen to Discovery Zone’s “Blissful Morning Dream Interpretation Melody” back-to-back with Woo’s “It’s Love.”

After feeding the above into Bard, I set out with you for a gathering round a firepit in a friend’s backyard. Most of us there are transplants, including one woman, A., newly arrived from LA. A. plans to build a geodesic dome in the side lot beside her home.

The narrative is one that advances intermittently.

T. intones a series of “bravos.” The two of you speak to one another in French as you straighten the sun room.

Leslie Winer, friend of William Burroughs and executrix of the estate of Herbert Huncke, irritates me, gets under my skin, so I replace her with Stereo Total. The latter remind me to “Relax Baby Be Cool” as I contemplate Christ’s Harrowing of Hell.

Later, you and I get into a zone while making music together in what will soon be the bedroom of my home.

“Do I have any way of doing things with words?” goes the prompt. Cosmic scoreboard says, “Try breathing. Unblock chakras, relieve stress from neck and upper back.”

“Is birdsong compromised when accompanied by sirens?” I wonder, attention drawn toward each amid the simultaneity of their happening. Sun warms me as I listen.

We dance and make music, read Raving, watch What We Do in the Shadows. The latter, not so much. I am fearful at times of signs, and wonder daily what to make of them. Self-acceptance is hard work.

Let us be generous with ourselves and with others. Let us be gorgeous.

Your music plays as I write.