Simulation – Trance-Scripts

Of Blockchains and Kill Chains

Invited to a “Men’s Breakfast” by a friend from church, Caius arrives to what is for him a new experience. He feels grateful for the opportunity to eat and pray with others. A friend of the friend from church sits down beside him. As they introduce themselves, Caius and the friend of the friend discover that they both share an interest in AI. Caius learns that the man is a financial analyst who works for Palantir Technologies, a US-based software company specializing in big-data analytics. ICE uses Palantir’s ELITE app for deportation targeting. “Kind of like Google Maps — but for finding neighborhoods to raid,” say the papers.

Palantir’s name is a nod to the Palantiri: indestructible Elven Alephs — scrying stones or crystal balls enabling remote viewing and telepathic communication in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Designed for communication and intelligence, the stones become instruments of manipulation and doom once seized by Sauron.

Launched in 2003, Palantir includes among its founders right-accelerationist billionaire tech-bro Peter Thiel. “Our software powers real-time, AI-driven decisions in critical government and commercial enterprises in the West, from the factory floors to the front lines,” writes the company on its website.

ICE, meanwhile, stands for both “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” and “intrusion countermeasure electronics,” the cybersecurity software in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The latter predates the foundation of the former. Caius recalls Sadie Plant and Nick Land’s discussion of it in their 1994 essay “Cyberpositive.”

“Ice patrols the boundaries, freezes the gates, but the aliens are already amongst us,” write CCRU’s founding prophets.

Along with ICE, Palantir includes among its more prominent clients the Israeli military, the IRS, and the US Department of Defense.

Their software powers “decisions.” As did Cybersyn, yes? In aim if not in practice. Is this what becomes of the cybernetic prediction machine post-Pinochet?

“Confronting this is frightening,” thinks Caius. “Am I wired for this?”

He reads “Connecting AI to Decisions With the Palantir Ontology,” a blog post by the company’s chief architect Akshay Krishnaswamy. The Ontology structures the architecture for the company’s software.

“The Ontology is designed to represent the decisions in an enterprise, not simply the data,” writes Krishnaswamy. “The prime directive of every organization in the world is to execute the best possible decisions, often in real-time, while contending with internal and external conditions that are constantly in flux. Traditional data architectures do not capture the reasoning that goes into decision-making or the actions that result, and therefore limit learning and the incorporation of AI. Conventional analytics architectures do not contextualize computation within lived reality, and therefore remain disconnected from operations. To navigate and win in today’s world, the modern enterprise needs a decision-centric software architecture.”

Decisions are modeled around three constituent elements: Data, Logic, and Action.

“Relevant data,” he writes, “includes the full range of enterprise data sources — structured data, streaming and edge sources, unstructured repositories, imagery data, and more — but it also includes the data that is generated by end users as decisions are being made. This ‘decision data’ contains the context surrounding a given decision, the different options evaluated, and the downstream implications of the committed choice.” To synthesize all of these data sources, the company turns to generative AI.

“The Ontology integrates all modalities of data into a full-scale, full-fidelity semantic representation of the enterprise,” explains Krishnaswamy.

Logics are then brought to bear to evaluate these real-time data-portraits.

“In real-world contexts,” writes Krishnaswamy, “human reasoning is often what orchestrates which logical assets are utilized at different points in a given workflow, and how they are potentially chained together in more complex processes. With the advent of generative AI, it is now critical that AI-driven reasoning can leverage all of these logical assets in the same way that humans have historically. Deterministic functions, algorithms, and conventional statistical processes must be surfaced as ‘tools’ which complement the non-deterministic reasoning of large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal models.”

Incorporating diverse data sources and heterogeneous logical assets into a shared representation, the Ontology then models the execution and orchestration of decisions made and actions taken in reply to them.

“If the data elements in the Ontology are ‘the nouns’ of the enterprise (the semantic, real-world objects and links),” writes Krishnaswamy, “then the actions can be considered ‘the verbs’ (the kinetic, real-world execution).”

How does the Palantir Ontology relate to other ontologies, wonders Caius. Guerrilla? Black? Indigenous? Christian? Heideggerian? Marxist? Triple O? Caius pictures the words for these potentialities floating in a thought bubble above his head, as in the comics of his youth.

The Ontology that Palantir offers its clients houses and connects a wide array of “data sources, logic assets, and systems of action.” The client’s data systems are “synthesized into semantic objects and links, which reflect the language of the business.”

Krishnaswamy’s repeated references to “semantic representations” and “semantic objects” has Caius dwelling on what is meant here by “semantics.”

As for where humans fit in the Ontology, they navigate it alongside “AI-powered copilots.” Leveraging both open-source and proprietary LLMs, copilots “fluidly navigate across supplier information, stock levels, real-time production metrics, shipping manifests, and customer feedback.”

Granted access not just to the abovementioned data sources, but also to “logic assets” like forecast models, allocation models, and production optimizers, LLM copilots simulate decisions and their outcomes. Staged safely in a “scenario,” the AI’s proposed decision can then be “handed off to a human analyst for final review.”

Caius thinks of the scenario-planning services offered to organizations of an earlier era by Stewart Brand’s consulting firm, the Global Business Network.

Foundry for Crypto is another of Palantir’s offerings, described on the company’s website as “a ‘central brain’ that connects on-chain and off-chain systems, as well as diverse stakeholders, through action-centric workflows.” Much like the Ontology, the Foundry “orchestrates decisions over an integrated foundation of data and logic.”

And in fact, the two are related. The Ontology is the semantic, “digital twin” layer that sits atop the Foundry’s data integration infrastructure. It converts the Foundry’s raw data into actionable, real-world objects, empowering users to model, manage, and automate business operations.

The Foundry does for blockchains what the Ontology does for kill chains.

Caius imagines posts ahead on Commitments, Promises, Blockchains, and True Names.

Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, Spacewar Governed the Nations

Brand’s words, as always, are worth quoting at length.

“Spacewar as a parable is almost too pat,” he writes. “It was the illegitimate child of the mating of computers and graphic displays. It was part of no one’s grand scheme. It served no grand theory. It was the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters. It was disreputably competitive (‘You killed me, Tovar!’). It was an administrative headache. It was merely delightful” (78).

“Yet Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice,” he adds, “was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use.”

From the game as parable and the parable as crystal ball, Brand extracts eight parameters, eight qualities of Spacewar that have been predictive of things to come:

It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.

It encouraged new programming by the user.

It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.

It served primarily as a communication device between humans.

It was a game.

It functioned best on standalone equipment (and disrupted multiple-user equipment).

It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)

It was delightful.

What about ChatGPT in the 2020s? Is it, too, a “flawless crystal ball,” predictive of things to come?

How quickly it all changes.

Brand publishes “Spacewar: Symbolic Life and Fanatic Death Among the Computer Bums” in the December 7, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone. Videogame journalism: the first of its kind. That same year, Atari manufactures Pong, the arcade sensation, and Magnavox releases the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home video console.

What is Cybersyn’s “control room for technocrats” compared to Brand’s imagined future of “New Games” and personal computing, with its Bay Area rallying cry, “Computers for the people”?

CIA bests Cybersyn in a space war of a deadlier sort the following September.

Chicago Boys playtest neoliberal algorithms in post-coup Chile. Thatcher and Reagan universalize these programs, making them games people play worldwide.

William Gibson refines the “space” of Spacewar, rechristening it “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer.

Spacewar is thenceforth the enframing world-picture.

“Gibson contracts the thought of cyberspace from video-game arcades, watching the motor-stimulation feedback loops, self-designing kill patterns. Dark ecstasies in caverns of accelerating pixels. Before virtual reality became dangerous, it was already military simulation,” note Plant and Land in “Cyberpositive.”

Gibson himself has said as much, acknowledging in interviews that he coined the term ‘cyberspace’ after watching teenagers play Atari-era videogames in a Vancouver arcade. “Their posture seemed to indicate that they really, sincerely believed there was something beyond the screen,” he recalls. “I took that home and tried to come up with a name for it.”

“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games, in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks,” says a voiceover early in Gibson’s novel, the book’s protagonist Case grokking a doc on “cyberspace” from some searchable multimedia encyclopedia of the future. Storying happens by way of a display screen. “On the Sony,” says the narrator, “a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes.” The voiceover returns to describe what we’ve witnessed:

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” (Gibson 56-57).

“Spacewar serves Earthpeace,” claims Brand. But the ”console cowboys” who settle in this new digital frontier are as competitive and combative as their Westworld forebears.

In trying to account for the violence of these visions, Caius thinks of Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia. “Imagine a future that works!” exhorts the blurb on the back of the paperback. Technological autonomy won by way of nuclear-armed secession, Silicon Valley erased from the Pacific Northwest of the book’s imagined future — yet even here, amid Ecotopia’s “steady-state system,” aggression remains ineradicable, remedied only by way of ritual war games and sacrificial violence.

“What about the cross?” asks the book’s narrator, an American journalist named Will Weston, observing the way the people of Ecotopia arrange the bloodied body of a man wounded in the games “in a startlingly crucifix-like way” (Callenbach 93).

“Well, Ecotopia came into existence with a Judeo-Christian heritage,” replies an Ecotopian. “We make the best of it” (96).

Beside the White Chickens

Caius reads about “4 Degrees of Simulation,” a practice-led seminar hosted last year by the Institute for Postnatural Studies in Madrid. Of the seminar’s three sessions, the one that most intrigues him is the one that was led by guest speaker Lucia Rebolino, as it focused on prediction and uncertainty as these pertain to climate modeling. Desiring to learn more, Caius tracks down “Unpredictable Atmosphere,” an essay of Rebolino’s published by e-flux.

The essay begins by describing the process whereby meteorological research organizations like the US National Weather Service monitor storms that develop in the Atlantic basin during hurricane season. These organizations employ climate models to predict paths and potentials of storms in advance of landfall.

“So much depends on our ability to forecast the weather — and, when catastrophe strikes, on our ability to respond quickly,” notes Rebolino. Caius hears in her sentence the opening lines of William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” “So much depends on our ability to forecast the weather,” he mutters. “But the language we use to model these forecasts depends on sentences cast by poets.”

“How do we cast better sentences?” wonders Caius.

In seeking to feel into the judgement implied by “better,” he notes his wariness of bettering as “improvement,” as deployed in self-improvement literature and as deployed by capitalism: its implied separation from the present, its scarcity mindset, its perception of lack — and in the improvers’ attempts to “fix” this situation, their exercising of nature as instrument, their use of these instruments for gentrifying, extractive, self-expansive movement through the territory.

In this ceaseless movement and thus its failure to satisfy itself, the improvement narrative leads to predictive utterances and their projections onto others.

And yet, here I am definitely wanting “better” for myself and others, thinks Caius. Better sentences. Ones on which plausible desirable futures depend.

So how do we better our bettering?

Caius returns to Rebolino’s essay on the models used to predict the weather. This process of modeling, she writes, “consists of a blend of certainty — provided by sophisticated mathematical models and existing technologies — and uncertainty — which is inherent in the dynamic nature of atmospheric systems.”

January 6^th again: headlines busy with Trump’s recent abduction of Maduro. A former student who works as a project manager at Google reaches out to Caius, recommending Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb’s book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Google adds to this recommendation Gans’s follow-up, Power and Prediction.

Costar chimes in with its advice for the day: “Make decisions based on what would be more interesting to write about.”

To model the weather, weather satellites measure the vibration of water vapor molecules in the atmosphere. “Nearly 99% of weather observation data that supercomputers receive today come from satellites, with about 90% of these observations being assimilated into computer weather models using complex algorithms,” writes Rebolino. Water vapor molecules resonate at a specific band of frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum. Within the imagined “finite space” of this spectrum, these invisible vibrations are thought to exist within what Rebolino calls the “greenfield.” Equipped with microwave sensors, satellites “listen” for these vibrations.

“Atmospheric water vapor is a key variable in determining the formation of clouds, precipitation, and atmospheric instability, among many other things,” writes Rebolino.

She depicts 5G telecommunications infrastructures as a threat to our capacity to predict the operation of these variables in advance. “A 5G station transmitting at nearly the same frequency as water vapor can be mistaken for actual moisture, leading to confusion and the misinterpretation of weather patterns,” she argues. “This interference is particularly concerning in high-band 5G frequencies, where signals closely overlap with those used for water vapor detection.”

Prediction and uncertainty as qualities of finite and infinite games, finite and infinite worlds.

For lunch, Caius eats a plate of chicken and mushrooms he reheats in his microwave.

Wednesday November 13, 2019

Governments are like media providers, designers of a simulation, a game-world users are coerced into enduring. Why, amid all the many games we could be playing here in our sandbox cosmos, did we get stuck with this one? How do we deprogram it, how do we take back the means of production so as to play new mind games together? John Lennon said “Love is the answer.” Love not war, one day at a time. As always, easier said than done. If only I had time to read Ted Nelson’s book Computer Lib / Dream Machines. At the beginning of Dream Machines (the reverse side of Computer Lib), Nelson appends a section titled “Author’s Counterculture Credentials,” where he describes himself as “Photographer for a year at Dr. Lilly’s dolphin lab (Communication Research Institute, Miami, Florida). Attendee of the Great Woodstock Festival (like many others), and it changed my life (as others have reported). What we are all looking for is not where we thought it was.” All of which leaves me wondering: at what point was Nelson first turned on?

Ted_Nelson_Computer_Lib_Dream_Machines_2

Saturday July 13, 2019

Toying with the famous hermetic aphorism, “As above, so below,” I begin to tell a story in my head of a protagonist who comes to regard his consensus reality as the ontological equivalent of a matrix or gameworld. Most of the occupants of the gameworld are split subjects. They know themselves only in light of what we might call their “this-worldly” guise, each person’s identity fully sutured to that of its gameworld avatar. This process of identification causes the person to forget its additional role as player. This is where our story begins: for our protagonist has arrived at a thunderous realization. Together, he realizes, these two components — this-worldly avatar and otherworldly player — form the Janus faces, the days and nights, of a single consciousness. This realization arrives at a particular moment; certain technological capacities have to be reached — or so I imagine. But when have civilizations ever lacked their chessboards and labyrinths? All of the ancient myths featuring these objects remain active and relevant in the time of our protagonist.

Saturday March 10, 2018

Life is an insubstantial thing, an élan vital, wearing all substances as its veil. Minutes pass. The gameworld, operating in “neighborhood” mode, supplies the subject with new inputs, and with those inputs, new decision-trees. I walk a path and savor ambient soundscapes filled with interacting wind chimes. Small birds root among dead leaves, then perch atop a chain link fence. When I close my eyes, the sounds intensify. As one ages in the game, one advances in level. The alien is all-present: a coherent totality, the “all but me.” I relax some of my defenses and, through receipt of found or “gifted” sense-data, attempt to learn its language. I imagine beneath me hundreds of little concreted over creeks and streams. The unconscious: earthen, mythic center of being. It dreams us, and then we run away, reinvent ourselves, project ourselves into mind-made constructs. Dual time-tracks, time-sense surrendered to serial eternal presents peppered with patterns discoverable among arrangements of images and sounds.

Sunday February 11, 2018

The apparatus in the chest of the Electric Ant structures light. It gives birth to some objects while causing others to disappear. Dick calls this apparatus the Ant’s “reality-supply construct.” “Tampering with it would be risky,” he writes, “if not terminal.” Imagine the process whereby an avatar acquires knowledge of its player. The latter would have to send the former clues. The gasp of recognition, sure — but where does one go from there? What does one do with this force in the universe that makes things happen? It provides one with a kind of drowsiness, a deep-dream state, this living within a fable, where things aren’t what they seem. “It’s hard to see the city from the buildings,” as F.J. McMahon sings on “The Road Back Home.” It’s like getting lost in a crowd and having to think one’s way out. Facts and figures float by as we wait for morning sunshine. Amnesia aids the merging of the soul with the brain.

Wednesday January 24, 2018

People that do it, do it. They map a new territory in an act of psychic reinvention. Lounging, relaxing, living pleasurably: one should always build time for these into the 24 hours of one’s day. Get a glimpse of it, man — the waves as they mass on the horizon. “I haven’t been entirely well lately,” coughs capitalism as it climbs into the ring. I shall steal from under it the ground on which it stands. Trees rise up around me, their bare branches bathed in yellow sunlight. As pleasant as the weather has been locally these last few days, I still look forward to the coming rebirth, the arrival of spring and summer. Would acceptance of Rich Terrile’s “reality-as-simulation” hypothesis prompt any changes in terms of everyday interactions with others and with nature? The more I watch Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, the more I’m put off by the show’s disrespectful treatment of indigenous people and their medicines and traditions. Perhaps the series acquires some critical self-awareness along the way? We’ll see.

Thursday December 7, 2017

Some would say we commit ourselves to metaphysics the moment we accept the existence of “minds.” But what else would it be but a mind that contemplates Ingrid Goes West, a new film that uses cash inheritance as the premise for its infiltration and critique of selfie culture? The master of that culture, the film notes, is some “emotional wound” that turns self-promotion into way of life. One imagines oneself floating above oneself with a camera, turning money into props for self-actualization through delivery of life narrative to followers. Such is the subjectivity at the heart of the film’s critique. Comedy, of course, requires that the film overstate this critique for laughs. Its stalker character acts on urges the rest of us repress. Speaking of urges: A pulse is touched and quickened. I reach out and connect as if by dial-up modem to Brett Naucke’s Multiple Hallucinations.

I feel like I’m living inside a montage sequence from Halt and Catch Fire, mulling over an idea beside a window on a rainy night, flashing back to visual and tactile memories bound to videogame sound-narratives from my childhood. Dots, squiggles, exploding fractal mandalas. Seeing multiples, reprocessing. A computer asks for permission to speak further. Glowing outlines perform expressive dance against a black background. The computer sucked us in and we never got out, I realize. It swallowed us like a sandworm or a whale. So teacheth the Gnostics, or rather, modern New Age derivations therefrom. This would be the “reality-as-simulation” theory. It was by repression of entry into the Matrix that the Matrix got us, goes the theory. Movement amidst abstract sign-systems. Neon re-imaginings of witch-burnings cut with similar blood sacrifices atop ancient Aztec temples. Knowledges are fed through the air in packets. Do I possess an ethics? Do one’s best? Stay formally attentive? Listen and learn, I tell myself, and you will know how to act. Trust intuition over reason. Seek the flows and go with them. Even when they lead to French onion soup and a cartoon scarecrow with corn growing out its chest. Go out on adventures, says an imaginary Australian life coach, gesturing with his hands as he speaks. Too bad my brain has been soldered to things, I shudder, as the hallucination comes to an end.