World Machines
17 readingsEssays in the World Machines collection.
- Musings while reading Monkey King Journey to the West
Monkey King is named Sun Wukong - Child awoken to emptiness. Sun can also mean monkey instead of child if, what is called as, the animal radical is included. Wu means awoken Tweeting from the Bureau …
- Financial Instruments and the Ottoman Empire’s Decline (16th–19th Centuries): A Comparative Analysis
This essay was explored with ChatGPT o3 as a curiosity while reading Islamic Gunpowder Empires by Douglas E. Streusand as part of the Contraptions Book Club Introduction # The decline of the Ottoman …
- Royalty, Administration, and Antimemetics
I was all of 15 when defenestration was forever implanted in my mind. It means to throw someone out the window. It happened in Prague, 1618. Some important people were defenestrated, fell 70 feet, …
- Looking Forward to Montaigne
As part of the Contraptions book club we will be reading the Essays of Montaigne. I actually started to read the Donald Frame translations, but felt I needed more context. In the book club, Paul …
- Four Early-Modern Tempers for a World That Can Summon Itself
This is a partial synthesis of the books read through 2025 in the Contraptions Book Club. We live in a moment when the whole of human culture has become strangely available, no longer just an archive …
- The Shelter as Epistemic Engine
This is a continuation of my ongoing exploration of places and spaces. Previously: We need homes in the delta quadrant, Thinking with places, Problems are places questions are spaces. Introduction: …
- Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web
There is a particular kind of stillness found in the villa overlooking the Giardino all’italiana, a silence that is less about the absence of noise and more about the absolute presence of a plan. …
- The Architecture of Resistance
The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive …
- The Kernel and the Ark
I. The Wall and the Infinite # It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the …
- The End of Identity: AI, Plasticity, and the Divergence Machine
Over the past year, the Contraptions club has been reading through history—from Giordano Bruno and Montaigne to Spinoza, Adam Smith, and Hume. We are now using using Venkatesh Rao’s Divergence Machine …
- The Octotypic Mind Carcinization, Cognitive Prosthetics, and the Shape of Intelligence After AI
Carcinization, Cognitive Prosthetics, and the Shape of Intelligence After AI
- The Cosmos and the Model Humboldt, the Romantics, and What AI Loses by Averaging
Humboldt, the Romantics, and What AI Loses by Averaging
- The Viscous Frontier How to Move When the Machine Stops Pulling
How to Move When the Machine Stops Pulling
- The Lightening of Intent Why Execution Got Cheap and Intent Got Live
Why Execution Got Cheap and Intent Got Live
- Not My Lever The Last Container
The Last Container
- The Birth of Thickets An Interregnum in Space
An Interregnum in Space
- On Thickets, Enclosure, and Leaving Back to Liveness
Back to Liveness