Carcinization, Cognitive Prosthetics, and the Shape of Intelligence After AI

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 framework as a lens …

I. Everything is a Balinese Cockfight # It was after a police chase and a conspiratorial lie that Clifford Geertz and his wife Hildred were accepted into the social fabric of 1958 Bali. Until then they had been ignored, …

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 brutalities of the Seven …

This is the third and final part of the Thicket Series: Part 1: Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web Part 2: The Architecture of Resistance The history of the working subject might be best understood not as a …