Yeah its all super high school. But here we are! I always though that social media was basically high school writ large. Would that humanity would graduate...
Hi Chris. Thanks for your thoughts here. By calling LLMs intensely weird, I mean it in a couple of senses, but basically in the sense that LLMs are weird the way drugs are weird. To say drugs are weird is really to say that human consciousness on drugs are weird, that its not really the drugs' fault, just hanging out there in a pool of liquid or growing out of cow dung. So yes its humans on LLMs that are intensely weird, but like drugs, they also appear or are constructed in our world as "others", and more over others whose rate of power increase and transformation is itself adding a warp or wayward spin or weirding to culture -- meaning just the acceleration rate itself bends or twists the reality field in a weird/wayward way.
Love that image, thanks. Ever see that 1980s commercial depicting the effect of drugs as an egg frying in the pan? Now I can finally laugh it from mind: "This is your brain. This is your brain on AI." Or better yet: "This is your culture. This is your culture on AI."
Flaws and all, Robert Anton Wilson probably did more to prepare me for contending with the media/political aspect of the Internet than any other writer. He was way ahead of the game on this AI shit.
For all his cloud-castle humanism and his faults as an autodidact, Bob Wilson was great at teaching ontology. Provided that the reader doesn't take everything he writes at face value. RAW is not a disciplined historian, for example.
In Wilson's defense, he doesn't even want the reader to take everything he writes at face value, much less insisting on it.
I'm not sure if his works would be well served by annotation and corrections; that would be like handing the student too many exam answers in advance, when they're supposed to be doing their own course work.
These are extremely perceptive comments on RAW and I could not agree more. When I wrote about him from the scholarly perspective of HW, it was easy to note and describe some of these flaws, but harder to explain the enormous benefit from reading him, especially for young people. Reading him is an ENCOUNTER. I don't know if would still have the effect for younger people today but it should...maybe what is needed is a Dummies Guide or something that... a Weirdos Guide to RAW...
I could definitely use a Weirdo's Guide to the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, to help with my own understanding of it.
I also haveta say, if there really is an Illuminati and Wilson was fronting for them, one would think that they would have maintained a much higher profile for him and his writings than the minimal amount of exposure he's gotten over the last 20 years or so. Especially within the "counterculture" of the 21st century.
RAW, Tim Leary, and Buckminster Fuller saw a lot of where modernity was heading. They had some misses, and some really wild pitches. But that's futurist prognostication for you. In a lot of ways, those three guys were awfully prescient. I certainly get more out of their writings than Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. In contrast to Huxley or Orwell, none of the three found any reason for the speculative imagination to be required to be pessimistic. Their optimism requires leavening- and occasionally a swift application of the brakes, or a swerve- but at least they're emphasizing the positive. They ain't po'faced. And they thought of nearly every "mind-blowing futurist idea" found in Yuval Harari's books 30 years before Harari wrote them.
But as it's happened, Wilson was less well-known in the 2000s than the 1990s or 1980s, even before his departure in 2007. So it's weird to me when Yuval Harari gets lauded as some amazing advanced thinker. For one thing, Harari sounds a lot more naive and credulous. Ponderous, even. Harari doesn't provide the perspective of some weathered quantum jumping reality hacker who can't help but to crack satirical jokes about the funny side of where their speculations might be leading.
That said, I like Yuval more than I first did, back when I first read Sapiens and Home Deus got incensed and was convinced he was a poser. He's entirely competent, within his wheelhouse as a historian. And he can't help it if big media outlets like the NYT elevated him to an intellectual summit, after they never gave the writings of Leary or Wilson the time of day.
The best complement to reading RAW's oeuvre is a good outline explanation of Logical Fallacies. RAW to use riddles and satire to open up the mind with alternative perspectives and possibilities--and continual practice of informal logic principles, to keep your brains from falling out of your head.
Much of the benefit I got from reading Wilson was as an introduction to other intellectual influences, like Korzybski and General Semantics. That alone was invaluable. I learned about the problems of "the Is of Identity." The way that imprecise language introduces unclarity and inaccuracies that misdirect thinking, often at the level of basic premises. Sometimes so pervasively that it becomes impossible for an entire society to carry on a rational, reality-based conversation on some topics. Consider the word "drugs." I still don't know what the fuck some people are on about when they throw the word "drugs" around as casually as they do. It isn't as bad as it used to be, but the media discourse is still at an unacceptably murky level. I can just about make out the signal carried by the term when it's contextualized by a discussion of Medicare expenses, but once the topic of conversation shifts in the direction of, say, criminal law, accuracy and nuanced meaning is typically buried by noise. Subtextual connotations, etc.
You get the idea, I know. I could go on all night, but Alan Watts once stated that conversations about semantics wrap up before dinner is served, and I agree.
Back to Robert Anton Wilson. Smart guy. I still haven't figured out whether he's in league with the Devil, of course. But notwithstanding the question of his possible Errors, he got a lot of things right, correct & proper. That's enough for me to keep a friendly dialogue open with him. (As expressed through his works, okay? Not Necromancy. Get your minds out of the Abyss, Miskatonic froshies.)
I don't think this period will last long though, at least I hope not! For weird to still mean, it needs edge, and some of that edge comes from things we don't want -- thats what makes it weird and not groovy!
Yeah, as noted, I do think its interesting that the term stepped back from its acceptable status a la nerd towards the pejorative. Overall that is not the course of such terms, which tend to be recuperated. But its probably a flash in the pan -- unlike "To Autumn", which demonstrates one of my favorite pieces of writing advice, one I take to heart, and one that Keats suggested to Shelley in a letter: to "load every rift with ore." Or maybe its "riff"?
Ha! I've been waiting for either you or the Weird Studies guys to weigh on the trending w-word, the discourse around which exhausted itself within days while the term's trouvé psy-ops function seems to retain its efficacy even now. I will say it's nice to hear it as an actual term of derision rather than dubious humble brag like "nerd." And btw: seeing that last stanza of the Keats poem at the end of this piece took my breath away. It's one of the most audibly yet somehow elusively musical verses I've ever heard, and just so devastatingly beautiful.
Yeah David has done very interesting work, both historical and media-technology, on recovering the sphere and the dome as a model of interacting with the cosmos. Worth following his trail!
This application of “Weird” feels so much like the Student Council types in high school digging at the jocks and JROTC types by comparing them to the geeks and closet queers and other outcasts - a lot of us.
Thank you for sharing your always brilliant, insightful, and apt reflections, including this one.
I’d like to pull at one thread of your thoughts: why claim that AI is "intensely" weird?
If we start from the premise that generative LLMs are pattern-based, wouldn’t it be more logical to assert that humans are weird, since we initiated the patterns in the first place? In that sense, aren’t LLMs simply reflecting our weirdness back to us, like a funhouse mirror?
This raises questions about ‘originality’: do humans really create anything truly ‘new’? Aren’t we also creatures of patterns, combining bits and pieces in interesting—‘weird’—ways, much like LLMs seem to do? So, if we’re going to label LLMs as 'intensely weird,' shouldn’t we first acknowledge that humans themselves are weird?
Alternatively, might it make more sense to describe AI as possessing 'intense trickster-like qualities'? That feels more in line with your long-stated position on technology and its role as a mediator of the strange, if I’m not mistaken.
Of course i thought of you when the Walz/weird thing hit. I'm sad to see an excellent word appropriated as political kitsch. It was a great term while it lasted!
In other news my high-art-theory sister has been reading HW and loves it. She recently retired from teaching at Calarts, and before that at Goldsmith's in London. Next time you're in town let us know she'd love to meet.
RE: "Ode to Autumn," I should add, your point about the final line is well taken: an emblem of modern digital toxins retrospectively stomping on a lovely Romantic-era onomatopoeia.
I'm very thankful to have read your book High Weirdness just earlier this year, prior to this recent cultural short-circuiting politicization of the term. As you said in another comment on this thread about social media basically being a high-school, and the with basis of cultural narratives being largely stoked in online circles, it is only a matter of time before a bastardization of anything remotely niche or unique be drawn and quartered in the public square of Normieville.
Alas, you said it best - 'Keep Weird, Weird' would only make things worse.
Also, thanks for the turn-on to the Sense of Rebellion podcast, Erik!
love the reference to the Discordians. major influence on me in my college years just a bit under 40 years ago. unfortunately, every time I encounter a jerk suffering from a bit of anencephaly it seems lie they're "friends" with RAW on Facebook. Acid Dreams author too. I wonder what they'd make of that. Like they go the wrong message from the marshmallow pie.
Tangent to “Sense of Rebellion,“ this interview with Joseph Matheny on the Vayse podcast is a journey with OG web hippies, occult phenomena, synchronistic literatures, RAW, and other true weirdness. A fun & fascinating convo.
Yeah its all super high school. But here we are! I always though that social media was basically high school writ large. Would that humanity would graduate...
Hi Chris. Thanks for your thoughts here. By calling LLMs intensely weird, I mean it in a couple of senses, but basically in the sense that LLMs are weird the way drugs are weird. To say drugs are weird is really to say that human consciousness on drugs are weird, that its not really the drugs' fault, just hanging out there in a pool of liquid or growing out of cow dung. So yes its humans on LLMs that are intensely weird, but like drugs, they also appear or are constructed in our world as "others", and more over others whose rate of power increase and transformation is itself adding a warp or wayward spin or weirding to culture -- meaning just the acceleration rate itself bends or twists the reality field in a weird/wayward way.
Love that image, thanks. Ever see that 1980s commercial depicting the effect of drugs as an egg frying in the pan? Now I can finally laugh it from mind: "This is your brain. This is your brain on AI." Or better yet: "This is your culture. This is your culture on AI."
I can already feel the sizzle...
I think its easy to get the RAWng message. RAW is subtle in many ways, but also too easy at times.
"RAWng message"-- heh, that's pretty funny.
Flaws and all, Robert Anton Wilson probably did more to prepare me for contending with the media/political aspect of the Internet than any other writer. He was way ahead of the game on this AI shit.
For all his cloud-castle humanism and his faults as an autodidact, Bob Wilson was great at teaching ontology. Provided that the reader doesn't take everything he writes at face value. RAW is not a disciplined historian, for example.
In Wilson's defense, he doesn't even want the reader to take everything he writes at face value, much less insisting on it.
I'm not sure if his works would be well served by annotation and corrections; that would be like handing the student too many exam answers in advance, when they're supposed to be doing their own course work.
These are extremely perceptive comments on RAW and I could not agree more. When I wrote about him from the scholarly perspective of HW, it was easy to note and describe some of these flaws, but harder to explain the enormous benefit from reading him, especially for young people. Reading him is an ENCOUNTER. I don't know if would still have the effect for younger people today but it should...maybe what is needed is a Dummies Guide or something that... a Weirdos Guide to RAW...
I could definitely use a Weirdo's Guide to the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, to help with my own understanding of it.
I also haveta say, if there really is an Illuminati and Wilson was fronting for them, one would think that they would have maintained a much higher profile for him and his writings than the minimal amount of exposure he's gotten over the last 20 years or so. Especially within the "counterculture" of the 21st century.
RAW, Tim Leary, and Buckminster Fuller saw a lot of where modernity was heading. They had some misses, and some really wild pitches. But that's futurist prognostication for you. In a lot of ways, those three guys were awfully prescient. I certainly get more out of their writings than Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. In contrast to Huxley or Orwell, none of the three found any reason for the speculative imagination to be required to be pessimistic. Their optimism requires leavening- and occasionally a swift application of the brakes, or a swerve- but at least they're emphasizing the positive. They ain't po'faced. And they thought of nearly every "mind-blowing futurist idea" found in Yuval Harari's books 30 years before Harari wrote them.
But as it's happened, Wilson was less well-known in the 2000s than the 1990s or 1980s, even before his departure in 2007. So it's weird to me when Yuval Harari gets lauded as some amazing advanced thinker. For one thing, Harari sounds a lot more naive and credulous. Ponderous, even. Harari doesn't provide the perspective of some weathered quantum jumping reality hacker who can't help but to crack satirical jokes about the funny side of where their speculations might be leading.
That said, I like Yuval more than I first did, back when I first read Sapiens and Home Deus got incensed and was convinced he was a poser. He's entirely competent, within his wheelhouse as a historian. And he can't help it if big media outlets like the NYT elevated him to an intellectual summit, after they never gave the writings of Leary or Wilson the time of day.
The best complement to reading RAW's oeuvre is a good outline explanation of Logical Fallacies. RAW to use riddles and satire to open up the mind with alternative perspectives and possibilities--and continual practice of informal logic principles, to keep your brains from falling out of your head.
Much of the benefit I got from reading Wilson was as an introduction to other intellectual influences, like Korzybski and General Semantics. That alone was invaluable. I learned about the problems of "the Is of Identity." The way that imprecise language introduces unclarity and inaccuracies that misdirect thinking, often at the level of basic premises. Sometimes so pervasively that it becomes impossible for an entire society to carry on a rational, reality-based conversation on some topics. Consider the word "drugs." I still don't know what the fuck some people are on about when they throw the word "drugs" around as casually as they do. It isn't as bad as it used to be, but the media discourse is still at an unacceptably murky level. I can just about make out the signal carried by the term when it's contextualized by a discussion of Medicare expenses, but once the topic of conversation shifts in the direction of, say, criminal law, accuracy and nuanced meaning is typically buried by noise. Subtextual connotations, etc.
You get the idea, I know. I could go on all night, but Alan Watts once stated that conversations about semantics wrap up before dinner is served, and I agree.
Back to Robert Anton Wilson. Smart guy. I still haven't figured out whether he's in league with the Devil, of course. But notwithstanding the question of his possible Errors, he got a lot of things right, correct & proper. That's enough for me to keep a friendly dialogue open with him. (As expressed through his works, okay? Not Necromancy. Get your minds out of the Abyss, Miskatonic froshies.)
Pile up enough kitsch, and it naturally becomes weird. And the kitsch is definitely piling up! I'd love to meet your sis btw...
I don't think this period will last long though, at least I hope not! For weird to still mean, it needs edge, and some of that edge comes from things we don't want -- thats what makes it weird and not groovy!
Joseph is a fascinating dude, thanks for the link.
Yeah, as noted, I do think its interesting that the term stepped back from its acceptable status a la nerd towards the pejorative. Overall that is not the course of such terms, which tend to be recuperated. But its probably a flash in the pan -- unlike "To Autumn", which demonstrates one of my favorite pieces of writing advice, one I take to heart, and one that Keats suggested to Shelley in a letter: to "load every rift with ore." Or maybe its "riff"?
Ha! I've been waiting for either you or the Weird Studies guys to weigh on the trending w-word, the discourse around which exhausted itself within days while the term's trouvé psy-ops function seems to retain its efficacy even now. I will say it's nice to hear it as an actual term of derision rather than dubious humble brag like "nerd." And btw: seeing that last stanza of the Keats poem at the end of this piece took my breath away. It's one of the most audibly yet somehow elusively musical verses I've ever heard, and just so devastatingly beautiful.
Yeah David has done very interesting work, both historical and media-technology, on recovering the sphere and the dome as a model of interacting with the cosmos. Worth following his trail!
Oh wow, I know David. Just got an email from him today, in fact, after a gap of about a decade. There’s a word for this ….
This application of “Weird” feels so much like the Student Council types in high school digging at the jocks and JROTC types by comparing them to the geeks and closet queers and other outcasts - a lot of us.
Dear Erik,
Thank you for sharing your always brilliant, insightful, and apt reflections, including this one.
I’d like to pull at one thread of your thoughts: why claim that AI is "intensely" weird?
If we start from the premise that generative LLMs are pattern-based, wouldn’t it be more logical to assert that humans are weird, since we initiated the patterns in the first place? In that sense, aren’t LLMs simply reflecting our weirdness back to us, like a funhouse mirror?
This raises questions about ‘originality’: do humans really create anything truly ‘new’? Aren’t we also creatures of patterns, combining bits and pieces in interesting—‘weird’—ways, much like LLMs seem to do? So, if we’re going to label LLMs as 'intensely weird,' shouldn’t we first acknowledge that humans themselves are weird?
Alternatively, might it make more sense to describe AI as possessing 'intense trickster-like qualities'? That feels more in line with your long-stated position on technology and its role as a mediator of the strange, if I’m not mistaken.
Best regards,
Chris Graves
Of course i thought of you when the Walz/weird thing hit. I'm sad to see an excellent word appropriated as political kitsch. It was a great term while it lasted!
In other news my high-art-theory sister has been reading HW and loves it. She recently retired from teaching at Calarts, and before that at Goldsmith's in London. Next time you're in town let us know she'd love to meet.
RE: "Ode to Autumn," I should add, your point about the final line is well taken: an emblem of modern digital toxins retrospectively stomping on a lovely Romantic-era onomatopoeia.
I'm very thankful to have read your book High Weirdness just earlier this year, prior to this recent cultural short-circuiting politicization of the term. As you said in another comment on this thread about social media basically being a high-school, and the with basis of cultural narratives being largely stoked in online circles, it is only a matter of time before a bastardization of anything remotely niche or unique be drawn and quartered in the public square of Normieville.
Alas, you said it best - 'Keep Weird, Weird' would only make things worse.
Also, thanks for the turn-on to the Sense of Rebellion podcast, Erik!
love the reference to the Discordians. major influence on me in my college years just a bit under 40 years ago. unfortunately, every time I encounter a jerk suffering from a bit of anencephaly it seems lie they're "friends" with RAW on Facebook. Acid Dreams author too. I wonder what they'd make of that. Like they go the wrong message from the marshmallow pie.
Tangent to “Sense of Rebellion,“ this interview with Joseph Matheny on the Vayse podcast is a journey with OG web hippies, occult phenomena, synchronistic literatures, RAW, and other true weirdness. A fun & fascinating convo.
https://www.vayse.co.uk/vys0036