(2021-07-07) Network Enlightenment

A few intertwined thoughts/threads today....

In response to Erik Hoel ((2021-04-18) Hoel The Semantic Apocalypse), I pondered the effect of AI/generative art on perceived meaning and human-ness. Imagine a personalized Bill Shakespeare that was mostly the original, but occasionally inserted words from your journal that seemed "laden". The result might have more meaning for you than any pure WS0.... can the AI write the author's next book before he does, extrapolating his embryonic style change, and cribbing from his kindle purchases?

Then I spun some responses to Tyler Alterman's tweet about how one would kick-start a "modern... renaissance". It's both

• message: you have to start from a philosophy/worldview that will be as core to future as humanism and perspective were to the Renaissance. Which smells like something around network, emergence, stigmergy, etc. (cf Fractally Generative Pattern Language)
• medium: Then you find people doing work that fits into that, and you talk to them. Then introduce them to each other... And put them on a Discord/Mattermost/Matrix.org server...
• Then group/ghost-write a manifesto... Or have GPT-3 write it... generating a murmuration of manifesti
  • hmm engine for generative memes
• reframing: Hmm, do we see Neo-Renaissance, or Neo-Enlightenment? Network Enlightenment?

Then responding to Anna Gat's tweet: In my experience, whether you’re religious or not, all sustainable self-respect and contentment arises from the feeling that what you do matters, is for others, is upwards, is giving and not taking (or taking but not stealing). Structuring a life around this drive works 100%. with a quote from Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness which is behind My Calling: A process that selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness.

Stephen Hicks on the development of the Enlightenment: the chronology shows how the ideas played out as philosophy, then as an intellectual movement, then as activism, then as the working technology of culture. cf Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress

Pondering connections to

• Collective Intelligence
• (2020-06-27) Ways To Nudge Future
• my "big picture" for Digital Gardens

Apr'2022 update: hmm, launch a movement by generating a sub/glitch-genre of works sneaking in your messaging?

• cf Subliminal Subversive