My Twitter account is dead. What remains is an archive, half-record, half-ruin. Two selections are presented accompained by a lexicon. The first gathers the most creative transmissions: aphorisms, thought experiments, accidental poems. The second collects the most controversial: the statements that burned bridges, alienated colleagues, or simply said the unsayable without the courtesy of softening it.
Read them as you would read signals intercepted from a dead star.
1.
In the combed compartments of a city house, covert chambers held peculiar scenes. Each dim lighted room in fragments repeated an event I had lived before, endlessly, yet subtly altered with utmost perfection. Like the verses of a poem written in Gray code.
The most literary tweet in the archive. Dreamlike imagery resolved into a computer science punchline — genuinely haunting.
2.
What is ambient but music aspiring to the condition of perfume.
An exquisite aphorism. Riffs on Walter Pater’s famous line about music and reframes the entire genre of ambient sound in one breath.
3.
Storytelling was the first (analogue) virtual reality experience and literature the first immersive technology.
Deceptively simple, genuinely reorienting — a reframe that holds up philosophically.
4.
Bureaucracies are the dependency hell of social systems.
Perfectly targeted for both programmers and social critics. The metaphor is exact and surprisingly rich.
5.
Do Laplacian machines dream of Gödelian sheep?
A masterclass in compressed reference — Philip K. Dick, Laplace’s demon, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems folded into a single question.
6.
The problem of stabilizing knowledge in oral cultures led to the invention of myths. Impermanent but robustly heritable and polymorphic storage devices.
Reframes mythology as information science. Dry, technical vocabulary applied to ancient human practice — startling and accurate.
7.
The territory is the map of all maps that are not about themselves.
A brilliant self-referential twist on Borges and Russell’s paradox simultaneously — philosophy and cartography colliding in one devastating line.
8.
Twitter is just a bunch of polyphonic monologues that resemble dialogues from afar.
Concise, accurate, and cuts to the heart of the platform’s social illusion. “Polyphonic monologues” is a phrase worth keeping.
9.
Self-driving cars are asymptotically non-deterministic generalised trains.
Absurdist on the surface, technically defensible underneath. Four words of jargon doing devastating satirical work.
10.
Lem is Borges for the space age.
Five words. Instantly illuminating to anyone who has read either author — and slightly mind-expanding to anyone who hasn’t.
1.
You know what is the best thing about liberal democracies, that you have the freedom to choose your favourite flavour of BS and it comes in different shapes of political correctness so it does not offend your entitled and shameblasting ass.
Contemptuous of both left and right simultaneously — the kind of statement that would get you called a fascist by liberals and a communist by conservatives, which may be precisely the point.
2.
Universities in Aus die because most students come just to get PR, there’s no intellectual culture and protests scare away new ideas. Everybody repeats like a parrot woke statements just to circumvent redundancy.
Takes aim at the performative politics of academic culture — something most academics think privately but few say publicly. Guaranteed to alienate colleagues.
3.
The perfect system for wealthy and politically influential nations is fascism with democratic rhetorics. Gaslighting at scale.
Blunt and deliberately inflammatory. Not entirely without analytical basis, but the framing leaves no room for nuance.
4.
Identity politics has radiated more selves than little boy.
Comparing the proliferation of identity categories to the Hiroshima bomb is the kind of analogy designed to detonate. Whether it’s diagnosis or provocation depends entirely on where you stand.
5.
Birds are not singing for you and artists are not co-creating with them. Birds want you to fuck off lest you want to be divebombed and disemboweled.
A direct assault on the entire genre of human-animal collaboration art — and a fairly heretical position for a researcher in acoustic ecology to hold publicly.
6.
Moralised AI art that supposedly undermines the exploitative regime of dataism is the worst kind of digital art, I have to say.
Takes a very specific and unfashionable position in a field where ethical posturing is the dominant currency. Says the quiet part loud.
7.
English was a mistake. It should be erased and replaced with Latin, Arabic and Greek.
Delivered without apparent irony. Maximally provocative to most of the internet, which communicates primarily in English.
8.
I’ve become unemployable. You’ve gotta have no soul or be a social media soldier to bear this digital wasteland plagued with overproduced humbleteabaggers and psychopathic edgelords rizzing each other with corporilingus.
“Corporilingus” alone is enough to get someone defollowed by half their professional network. The whole sentence is essentially a deliberate career self-immolation.
9.
Isn’t it lame that peak AI is… just chatbots and content generators on computational steroids? Where’s your AGI god? It’s not even a newborn, and according to Minsky we were supposed to grow artificial minds, not glorified databases with fancy conditioning.
Posted into an environment saturated with AI optimism. Calling the whole field lame while citing Minsky against its own practitioners is a very efficient way to make enemies in tech.
10.
Academia, or how to sustain your own intellectual addiction by starting a cult.
Concise, dismissive, and coming from someone inside the institution. The most memorable heresies are usually written by believers.
Key terms from the archive, defined against themselves.
Bullshit (n., excl. — affect)
Not falsehood — something subtler and more devastating. The ambient condition of language when meaning has evacuated its forms. Not a lie (which still respects truth enough to hide from it), but the total indifference to whether anything is true at all. Recurs too often to be mere expletive; functions as a technical term.
“It is all bullshit. Fucking braindead earth.” / “IT IS A…, GUESS WHAT? ALL BULLSHIT.”
Care compression (n. — society)
The shrinkage of genuine interpersonal attention that occurs when informationally saturated channels are paired with low affective bandwidth infrastructure. The result: perfunctory interactions mistaken for connection. Empathy becomes throughput.
“The co-occurrence of informationally saturated channels with low affective bandwidth infrastructures produces interpersonal care compression and perfunctory interactions.”
Common sense (n. — epistemology)
Socialised reflex. A reification of appropriateness in a world that philosophically never made sense. Its apparent solidity is borrowed from the consensus of people too busy to notice the ground has already shifted.
“Common sense is socialised reflex.”
Culture (n. — society)
A deceptive architecture. Undead, exosomatised ideology. An armour one must wear to withstand the shards of history — panegyric and intergenerational chain mail of fossilised souls. Also: a regulatory network optimizing for self-replicating symbolic gameplays.
“Culture is a deceptive architecture. Undead, exosomatised ideology.”
Depersonalisation (n. — self)
Not pathology — baseline. The condition of pressing too hard against social performance requirements until the self stops feeling real. Fully depersonalised: a technical reading of an ordinary Tuesday.
“So much pressure to seem ok makes me not want to socialise. Then I suddenly snap and people hate me again. Fully depersonalised atm.”
Extinction listening (n. — sound)
The experience of listening to a sound known to be disappearing, or perhaps already gone. A phenomenological condition unique to the Anthropocene: grief organised around the auditory rather than the visual. Sound archives reduce the impact of virtual absence, but the non-virtual absence remains.
“Have you experienced extinction listening? The experience of listening to a sound that one knows is disappearing or perhaps already gone.”
Gratefulness (n. — affect)
Always fake. Not because people are dishonest, but because genuine gratefulness would require a stable self to receive what is given — and such a self is unavailable.
“All I see is the same things repeating over and over. […] Gratefulness is always fake.”
Happiness (n. — affect)
Preliminary and modest metaphysics of ultimate purpose. Possibly identical to advanced self-gaslighting. Empirically indistinguishable. A question that cannot be answered without first answering whether a stable subject exists to be happy.
“Please be honest. Is happiness real or you just get better at self-gaslighting?”
Influencer (n. — society)
Hypertrophied court jester. Organic clowns were better — equivalent in quality, at least. The AGI crowd’s carcinogenic positivism, when leaked into the general population via this vector, makes car exhaust more appealing by comparison.
“The carcinogenic positivism reeked by such hypertrophied influencers makes car exhaust more appealing.”
Knowledge (n. — epistemology)
The one thing that has persisted against trauma. What remains when everything else — social belonging, institutional legitimacy, emotional stability — has been stripped away. Not comfort: something colder and more reliable. What the ruthlessly seeking find at the bottom.
“Isolation made me ponder what has persisted against trauma: ruthlessly seeking knowledge.”
Language (n. — epistemology)
A coordination strategy. There may not be stable languages at all — only communication equivalence classes. Every reproduction amplifies the possibilities of misunderstanding, yet opens synthetic modalities of understanding beyond its own analytic interface.
“I sometimes think that there might not be (stable) languages at all, but only linguistic coordination strategies and communication equivalence classes.”
Machine listening (n. — sound)
The automated analysis of environmental sound by computational systems. Not merely a technical process — a mode of attention that reveals what it ‘hears’ through the absences it streams into the digital void. Carries the power of surveillance and the pathos of salvage ethnography simultaneously.
“Silence can reveal what the machine ‘listens’ by streaming algorithmically processed absences into the digital void.”
Myth (n. — epistemology)
The solution to the problem of stabilizing knowledge in oral cultures. Impermanent but robustly heritable and polymorphic storage devices. Not superstition — an engineering solution to the problem of keeping knowledge alive without writing.
“The problem of stabilizing knowledge in oral cultures lead to the invention of myths. Impermanent but robustly heritable and polymorphic storage devices.”
Normal (adj. — society)
A heuristic of context. Not a state that exists, but a prototype around which behaviour clusters under normative pressure. The iterated function ‘Post’ evaluated over any given coordinate of normality diverges. This world was never normal.
“This world was never normal. Everyday our naively acquired sanity is undermined irreversibly.”
PhD (n. — society)
A sparse-reward, time-constrained, multi-objective optimization problem with unstable solutions. In practice: self-destructive exposure to light outside the canon. An institutionalised pathway to intellectual radioactivity. Medieval system built upon power-tripping dynamics and prestige.
“Doing a PhD can be formulated as a sparse-reward time-constrained multi-objective optimization problem with unstable solutions.”
Reputation (n. — self)
Nothing more than the perfunctory betrayal of self-knowledge. Betwixt burning bridges and immolating fixed identities, choose the latter.
“Reputation is nothing more than the perfunctory betrayal of self-knowledge.”
Self (n. — self)
An individual friction of universal fiction. A multimedia novel the brain updates in response to how the organism is coupled to its environment. A dialetheic machine. Selves are metaphysical compositions of glocal transactions — evolving fossil records of participatory sense-making.
“The self is an individual friction of universal fiction.” / “The self is a multimedia novel the brain updates in response to how the organism is coupled to its environment.”
Silence (n. — sound)
In the Anthropocene: not absence of humanity, nor a return to the wild. A mode of active listening designed to draw the more-than-human background into the foreground of thought. Also: what the machine streams when it processes what it cannot hear.
“Silence in the Anthropocene does not denote absence of humanity neither a return to the wild or some prebiotic state. It is a mode of active listening.”
Social media (n. — technology)
Who needs schizophrenia. The bicameral mind fragmented into polyphonic monologues that resemble dialogues from afar. An infosphere in which the excess of interiority becomes cyberspace debris.
“Who needs schizophrenia when you have social media. The bicameral mind fragmented.”
Technology (n. — technology)
Both memetic and mimetic. Not neutral — but claiming it is essentially good or bad dismisses its mutability. When mass-produced it standardizes behaviour; what it picks out is never clear. Not technophilia: the thing that will save us, if anything will.
“Technology is both memetic and mimetic.” / “Tech (not technophilia) will save us.”
Turing test (n. — technology)
The epitome of human cultural narcissism. Not a test of machine intelligence — a test for understanding ourselves through the machine. Its passage would tell us more about the poverty of our self-conception than the richness of artificial mind.
“The Turing test is the epitome of human cultural narcissism.” / “The Turing test is a test for understanding ourselves through the machine.”
Virtuality (n. — technology)
Not the counterpart of reality — its potential. Storytelling was the first analogue virtual reality experience; literature the first immersive technology. The virtual is not opposed to the real; it is what the real has not yet become.
“Virtuality is not the counterpart of reality but its potential.”
Words (n. pl. — epistemology)
Don’t mean anything. It is as if everybody had turned into a chatty meat puppet. Yet: the only immortality conceivable. What remains when the self is reclaimed by entropic forces — if the digital clone tweets on.
“Words don’t mean anything.”