If the future of AI depends on an ad-based business model like the current internet, it will likely go very badly for society.

When future historians write of our era, they will likely draw a straight line from Edward Bernays through to the collapse of American experiment. It is easy to write the first part of that history already. Once we had too much stuff to sell, advertising surged in importance, leading to the post-war decades of generating endless slop, mostly on television, purely for the sole purpose of injecting ads into peoples brains and manipulating them into buying things they mostly didn’t need.

While this was mostly benign early on (who cares which brand of dish soap or soda people buy), it set up the playbook for mass manipulation within a democracy, gradually replacing media as a source of information with entertainment that may or may not contain some information. We learned quickly that this entertainment usually galvanized attention better than reality and that attention = more ad revenue, leading to a few decades of mostly mindless sitcoms, soap operas, and game shows. Again, this was relatively benign until we discovered that we could get even more engagement if we combined the salience of real world threats with entertainment elements, giving rise to the era of news as entertainment (CNN, Fox, etc) in the 80s and 90s (see Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death for more).

The rise of the internet was in many ways a revolt against this new infotainment world, built by nerds with mostly noble goals of sharing information freely w/o the corruption of the ad-financed gatekeepers keeping the news shallow and stupid. And this worked for a while. We got open protocols and the other key elements that allowed us to bypass those corporate and government bottlenecks but, in our techno-optimistic naiveté, we forgot about finding a business model. So, first we got popup ads but those were so badly done that they quickly failed. That should have been the warning shot but it was ignored until Google finally found the perfect internet-native ad format with AdSense and eventual acquisition of DoubleClick. This basic algorithmic concept was copied by all and we were promised contextually relevant ads that we would “actually want to see” over and over again for the next several years.

In reality, we instead got several large companies that figured out, surprise, that attention = more ad revenue. More importantly, they figured out that manipulating their users to spend more time on site, viewing and clicking ads, was more profitable than anything else they could do - far, far more profitable (Meta made $162.4 billion on ads in 2024). Several books can be written on this transformation but, in short, it led to the current landscape of a few massive walled gardens where companies explicitly manipulate billions of people every day into performing the preferred actions that have led to their trillion dollar valuations.

At this point, one can maybe still make the argument that the ad-supported internet has made information widely and freely available and so was worth the trade-off for dysfunctional governance, failed and failing institutions, widespread distrust, an explosion of disinformation, misinformation, and explicit propaganda, and the replacement of our civil discourse and politics with whichever random characters figure out how to best manipulate the algorithms designed for monetization. Oh, and a populace so dopamine addicted that we’re now turning everything in existence into some form of gambling.

One could make that argument but only by blindly and willfully ignoring that fact that we did not actually need those companies making those kinds of profits to get the kind of information distribution we now have (or probably much better), but that’s a different essay.

Whether or not it was worth it, we’re here now and all that profligate ad-supported information dissemination created the internet-scale data that has led to the current crop of LLMs. It is still too early to tell how far this form of AI may enable us to advance but the promise is still there. Even just by wisely implementing the current models, we may be able to revolutionize many industries simply by doing much more, much faster. And it is clear we have not reached their limits, especially in regards to the more difficult areas of real science and research (and by “difficult” I mean “less profitable over the 12 months”).

Unfortunately, the internet had the same, if not more, promise in the early days. We could have built a massive, truth-seeking collective intelligence and already solved so many problems we still face. We never truly even scratched the surface of what could be done. There are multiple reasons (copyright, IP, international law, etc) but the big one was that it was just much easier and so, so much more profitable to sell ads. And because everything in capitalism is ruled by power laws, most the capital got dumped into dopamine slop machines that churned out extraordinary ad revenue year after year.

So, yes, LLM-based AI does have tremendous potential but the last 100 years of history and every reading of capitalism since the dawn of the internet suggests that our default path will be to mostly ignore that potential and instead pursue the proven and extremely profitable path of manipulating billions of people in order to sell them ads and propaganda. More importantly, the internet pales in comparison to the level of manipulation that can be achieved with an LLM, making that path all but inevitable.

Given the damage already done by ads and the potential damage that could be done with even more effective and profitable methods, the most important technical challenge of today might be simply finding a way to keep ads away from AI, to find a better business model to replace advertising. If we don’t, then the inevitable will happen and we’ll not only again lose out on all the progress we could have achieved but we’ll create an information ecosystem so hopelessly corrupted that it’s unlikely our institutions will survive long.

Lumenism is rooted in the belief that the core purpose of the universe, and particularly Earth, is the creation of new information and the persistence of that information in the form of knowledge. Information, in this context, is not limited to data or facts, but is an evolving synthesis of existing knowledge that not only yields more information but specifically paves the way for the genesis of subsequent novel information.

This self-propagating, expansive view of information is the cornerstone of Lumenism, melding seamlessly with its respect for the natural world as well as the boundless horizons offered by future technologies. Lumenists understand that the balance between conserving Earth and expanding into space is crucial for fostering environments that continually generate foundational information.

Decentralization acts as a catalyst, spurring diverse avenues for information generation, while flexible, enduring institutions serve as repositories for this ever-growing knowledge. Lumenists seek to protect, preserve, and proliferate this knowledge, viewing themselves as both its custodians and creators, shepherding humanity toward a brighter, informed future.

The Seven Foundational Laws of Lumenism

1. Law of Information Genesis: The Lumenist contains unique information that they must discover, cultivate, and contribute to the creation, preservation, dissemination, or practical application of new foundational information.

2. Law of Nature's Codex: The Earth is both a source and repository of foundational information. As such, Lumenists endeavor to preserve its ecosystems, understanding them as critical libraries of accumulated knowledge.

3. Law of Technological Synthesis: Lumenists accelerate technologies that serve as a tool for generating and harmonizing new combinations of information, always ensuring they complement or enhance existing knowledge and natural systems.

4. Law of Decentralized Exploration: Information Genesis is best served by an ever-expanding diversity of thought and perspective and so Lumenists resist and disrupt excessive power centralization by working to decentralize the creation, preservation, dissemination, and practical application of information.

5. Law of Celestial Canvas: Expansion into space provides an infinite canvas for new informational patterns, discoveries, and creations. Lumenists work to accelerate this diaspora of consciousness while preserving Earth's vitality and unique role as the only known birthplace of life.

6. Law of Accelerated Adaptation: The Lumenists must develop methods to continuously adapt and revise the Laws of Lumenism to account for new information.

7. Law of Luminous Foundation: The Lumenists must build and sustain decentralized institutions dedicated to curating and preserving humanity's cumulative knowledge, guarding against loss and corruption.

Lumenism offers a beacon of enlightenment in a universe of possibilities, pushing its followers, the Lumenists, to be ever-curious architects of knowledge, drawing from both Earth's legacy and the infinite unknown.

For more or to connect, please visit, email, or DM

While the moral decay of American society is an over-discussed topic, this summer has made me think a lot about Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent. The book previously felt a little ham-handed and lacking the subtly I have personally experienced in observing moral decay, but recent events and actions, from a variety of sides, made be think that perhaps I’ve just not been paying attention outside of my narrow little world.

Sure, there are always politicians, celebrities, and financial crooks to point to as examples but we’ve always had those exceptions and they feel more like an unfortunate, but manageable, externality of capitalism, rather than a pervasive decline in American morality. However, watching people within the tech industry this summer, both the elites and people I know personally, I’ve observed an unfortunate tendency for people to be more and more willing to embrace their inner Ethan Hawley. That is an erudite and polite way to say, being willing to compromise their ethics for self-serving means.

This is not a new phenomenon but watching it up close definitely is for me. What is most striking are the ways in which people, both elites and nobodies, are able to weave a new story to justify their compromises. It is especially compelling as so many of these people are highly intelligent, independently-minded, contrarian people who are used to going against the flow. And yet, when the ‘vibe’ shifts, they find a way to justify going along with it. I think what is so surprising is that their intelligence does not make them more resistant to these compromises but actually much better at accepting and adapting to them. It indicates that the tech industry, broadly speaking, has no greater moral high ground than Wall Street or the CCP. In the end, we are mostly self-serving and will just adapt to circumstances as needed to ensure our own success.

Maybe Tethics really is what guides us, after all.

Back to Steinbeck, I’ll just say that this might be a good time for some people in the industry to re-read The Winter of Our Discontent. While we hopefully won’t be deporting our friends for economic gain, I suspect there will still be some personal reflections of morality and ethics coming up and I hope those people have someone around to swap out the razor blades from their pocket.

To have kids or not is so obviously a personal choice that it’s been surprising to see so much debate around it.

It seems simple, on the face of it: If you want kids, go for it. If not, that’s cool too.

Obviously though, it is not really a debate about having kids. Like many things, it is a debate about controlling people.

The aggressively natalist today make two main flavors of arguments:

• It is a large part of the purpose of everyone's life to birth and/or help raise the next generation.

• It is a demographic and/or economic imperative to have greater than replacement birth rates Both arguments are flawed in they depend upon old, largely irrelevant, paradigms.

The first is one is spiritual or philosophical, not logical. There are no facts or testable hypotheses for our purpose in life. Sometimes what they mean to say is it is God’s will or some other religious justification. That is fine but clearly just an opinion that should have no power over anyone else’s choices, so not worth arguing over. Generally, these arguments are made by people who just want you to reinforce their own beliefs so they can feel they are right.

For the non-religious, I think what they really mean, but don’t want to say explicitly, is simply that evolution drives us to procreate and so that must be a part of our purpose. If you go down this path, the only logical conclusion is that procreation is actually our ONLY individual purpose. We are all just genomic experiments in some grand, mindless process, here to mutate and pass on variants to our offspring. Rather depressing.

Fortunately, we long ago told nature and evolution to get stuffed and decided to chart our own path. We abide by neither evolutions nor natures dictates. We don’t let bacteria kill us without a fight, we don’t let babies born with defects die in the woods, and we decide if and when we’ll have children. Even for those who want them but are unable to, we have, and continue to, develop workarounds. Our history is one of us wresting control of our destiny away from nature and evolution (or God, if you like) and we now get to decide our own individual purpose.

As for the demographic and economic arguments, those are easily dismissed. Controlling peoples reproduction, like controlling people in general, always fails in the end and often spectacularly. If you wake up one day and think “I should control or manipulate the choices of individuals because it will be best for the collective” then you should probably smack yourself very hard, as that is the first step down the path to hell (also known as fascism, communism, and theocracy). If you still think that way afterwards, then you are probably destined to go into politics (but please, for the good of the collective, don’t).

With all the current concern about AI regulation and lawsuits, especially in regards to copyright, fair use, and disinformation, I find myself immersed in a little time-swapping exercise.

I’ve recently been reading a few books about the early days of tech when it became a part of the wider culture, specifically Masters of Doom (about Carmack and Romero), Hackers, and re-reading Ready Player One and Snowcrash. (irrelevant side note: Not being a gamer, it wasn’t until starting Masters of Doom that I realized just how much Cline made James Halliday a synthesis of the two Johns and their story). They all share a certain hacker ethos and sensibility that feels very foreign in our current culture, especially in regards to how certain people today, especially creatives, builders, and so-called liberals, are trying to create more regulation and generally foment hysteria about this new technology that they say will destroy our culture.

I am speaking, of course, about comic books.

Sorry, I meant video games.

No, not that, I am referring to social media.

Sorry again, what I really meant was the internet itself.

Oh, we already did that?

Okay, it must be time for AI then? Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Ha ha, so funny. Seriously, there are always THOSE people, terrified of what will happen when people make their own choices about what they do and how they express themselves. The difference is that before they were always the suits, the politicians, the conservatives trying to stop anything weird so they can “protect the children”.

Not this time. Now, the hall monitors, the protectionists, the statists are the so-called artists and creatives and liberal. The people who once would have fought the very idea that the government and mega-corps should be the ones dictating what tools we use and how we use them. Now they are pushing for more regulation, begging to be controlled. Willingly summoning the demon. I guess the old adage is right, and even the weirdos and punks eventually grow up to become conservatives after all. Sad to see.

Oh, about that time-swapping. In watching all this, it has occurred to me that if we sent all these people back to the 80s and gave them any power, we never would have seen the internet as it evolved in this timeline. There would have been no section 230, social media would have been regulated, and we would probably all still have everything mediated through a government-regulated AOL. And the real chilling realization was that those people, sent back in time with their knowledge of the future, would still have chosen to regulate it and control it, thinking in doing so they would have actually created something better, more pure. They’d call it the “clean internet” or some such nonsense.

So, don’t let these people fool you into thinking they know better. Please look beyond the first order effects, especially if you are a creator or builder. These regulations aren’t meant to protect you, only to control you, to tell you what is acceptable. You may have been told you will be spared, that you are within the circle of protection. But ask yourself: when was the last a story that starts with someone summoning a demon didn’t end with the demon devouring their summoner?

I would have saved the world... but there was a patent infringement.

Fine, it may sound dramatic, and obviously no one would actually choose to not save the world just to avoid an IP lawsuit, and that is the problem. They don’t know they may be making that decision. People are constantly making choices about whether to pursue innovative ideas, projects, and businesses, and they are often based on the ownership or lack of copyright, patents, and IP rights. And none of them, or you, know if that endeavor would have saved you, or the world, but they never took that path so maybe you, or all of us, instead perish. And why did we die? Because someone else had the right lawyers? Sounds like something from a Vonnegut or Douglas Adams story, which is to say a cynical commentary on the foolishness of humanity.

Yes, there are all the arguments of the free market, incentives, etc that claim we will have less invention in the world if we don’t create the protections that promise great wealth from them but those belong in the past. If we are to solve the worlds problems, we’re going to need as much unfettered innovation as possible and the current systems were designed for a different world and are just crippling us now. They need to go.

The main flaw in the justification for them is the idea that people will just stop inventing, stop creating, and stop building if there is not a big financial reward. I don’t think this has ever been true of any innovative creator or inventor, and I think the state of the world now requires we try something new and loosen the stranglehold of copyright, patents, and IP protections so we may build on what we already have and start to truly innovate again.

Besides, China probably already stole it all anyway.

To accelerate is to constantly evolve, adapt, and change. It is to be willing to abandon the comfortable known as new ideas are formulated, new knowledge discovered, better technology developed, and more powerful memes generated. It is dynamic and unsentimental.

It is also feared. People inherently want to build a permanent edifice, an unchanging rock they can depend on. This is the nature of things and it is what our world is built upon. We have created religions, governments, institutions, and scientific consensus. We gave them names and demand they stay static. To change them takes revolutions, schisms, and violence. These edifices are the antithesis of acceleration. They are the orthodoxies that have always held us back from our true potential; the overbearing parents telling us to smile, slow down, and obey our betters.

When e/acc began to permeate the cultural consciousness, it truly succeeded in shifting many peoples ideology away from decel institutionalization and to one of acceleration. In doing so, it confronted those natural enemies, and has largely come out ahead. It was especially effective against EA, specifically because EA was built on an older philosophical edifice of its own that has not updated to the rapidly changing world. It was also a successful counter to the doomerism that had begun to gain traction, as it directly contradicted the driving force of that malaise: the fear that we are powerless to solve the problems we face. In all, it has been remarkably successful.

But then it became a Thing.
A Thing is definable and quantifiable.
A Thing has leaders and members that are defined by the Thing.
A Thing is static.
A Thing is the enemy of acceleration.

Therefore, to continue to accelerate, we must mutate, adapt, and evolve before our enemies can regroup and retaliate, before we become enamored of being a Thing, before being a Thing becomes more important than the mission. Before we become another EA.

I believe this is already happening and that this evolution was baked into e/acc from the beginning, intentionally or not. It has spread its seeds widely and now will fade away as those seeds grow into new and different evolutions of e/acc. The primary instigators of the movement, Beff and Bayes, did an admirable job of never formalizing it or trying to force it to become a cult, or to elevate themselves to cult leadership. I think they understood that would have been antithetical to the ideals behind it and have instead let it follow a more natural evolution.

I have no idea nor suggestion of what comes next. If anyone does, it is definitionally the wrong path. The only message I would try to convey here is to just let it happen. Do not fight it. Do not try and hold onto it. Let its offspring take things to the next level.

To truly accelerate, let e/acc die.

Cultural Necrophilia is the act of digging up dead pieces of our culture, re-animating them as lifeless simulacra of what they once were, then selling them to either the poor nostalgic bastards who gave the originals meaning in the first place, or to those who only ever experienced them as a re-packaged commodity. It is the act of simply redoing what has already been done without adding any value to it. Or, more graphically, the equivalent of digging up a corpse, dressing it up in a pretty new dress, then charging people to take it out for the night. It’s technically a date, but there’s definitely something missing.

Cultural necrophilia is definitely not a new phenomenon but it is one that has become increasingly common and begun to dominate modern culture. Most movies are remakes, sequels, or adaptations. Most popular music has been stuck in a repeating loop for 20 years, with the same musicians staying bizarrely relevant for decades. Design trends just keep repeating the same tight loop of variations. In essence, we are getting sucked into a vortex of banal repetition and blandness. There are many reasons for this but for now it is sufficient to say that it is cheaper and easier to sell what has already been done before. Market forces take care of the rest.

Where it starts to get weird though is with the recent advent of LLM-based AI tools. In a very real sense, these have become our greatest cultural necrophiliacs. It is now far easier to dig up and do whatever you like with nearly any facet of our recent culture. Already, imagery and text is proliferating that appears quite good but usually has some eery familiarity, like when you meet a person that looks just like someone else but you can’t quite put your finger on who. Of course, there are many creatives doing brilliantly imaginative work with these tools but they are few and far between. The vast majority of people will just do whatever is easy and flood our information spaces with repetitive sameness, like the early era of stock photography but much cheaper and more pervasive.

The real risk here is that we continue this path and simply stop bringing in new life. We stop being creative because it is so much easier to seem creative while just generating an image of dogs playing poker in the style of Van Gogh. The slipperiest part is that these new cultural artifacts make us feel like we’re being creative so we don’t realize how much our range of expression is narrowing. We get caught up in our pretty new toys and stop doing the harder work of being truly creative. And in this self-limiting, we foreclose on our range of possible futures and remain trapped in an affair with a long-dead, lifeless culture.

What, then, might any one of us do about this? Do we simply accept it as inevitable that we will continue to rush toward this bland, regurgitated local maximum? I say no. I say each one of us should fight this trend vigorously. We should resist our descent into the recycled vanilla sludge of past culture. Be bold, irreverent, chaotic, and ungovernable. Do not be the predictable next token. Find and express the weirdness within, the truth you carry that makes you different, become an evolution of the culture rather than a rehash. And heed the words of the great American poets Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia:

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

If you care about the future of humanity and choose to work toward the betterment of our species, you must make a decision about which path we should travel and how you are going to help get us on it. We currently face an inflection point, a cliff ahead, and the path we collectively choose will radically reshape our future. Will we choose to preserve and build upon the hard-won knowledge and progress of the last few hundred years? Or will we pretend ignorance and willfully drive off the cliff, collapsing civilization back into an era of ignorance and barbarism?

The cliff ahead is the convergence of the largely ignored debts we incurred while climbing the mountain of progress, and which are now coming due. Look deeply at nearly every major system we rely on and this quickly becomes obvious:

• Most that progress was built on the back of cheap energy, which has incurred a still increasing carbon debt, triggering unpredictable and accelerating climate disruptions.

• Our financial systems are built on ever increasing debt and financial abstractions that allow us to keep pushing payment further down the road.

• We have built vastly complex physical infrastructure that incur an increasing maintenance debt.

• We have created and evolved an increasing number of bureaucracies, which carry with them a poorly understood inertia debt, making our actions ever slower and more expensive.

• We have consumed resources and destroyed ecosystems, creating fundamental debts against the natural infrastructure we depend upon for life itself.

• We have developed short-sighted and unwise agricultural processes that are sustained only through the increasing use of fossil fuels and pesticides, while giving little consideration for the effects on human or ecosystem health.

The list is long, undeniable, and all point to the same conclusion—we have some very serious and complex debt coming due very soon. How can we deal with it? What path can we take to avoid the cliff ahead?

Decelerate

Many think we are just going too fast. Too much consumption, too much energy use, too much technology, too much progress for too many people. They believe the solution is to reduce our speed, reduce our population, and slow technological progress. If we are just safe and deliberate, then we can get things under control. And this is an instinctively logical reaction. If you are careening towards a cliff, it is probably wise to use the brakes. But the truth is that we have incurred too much debt already, we have too much momentum. The debt is too high, the carbon already in the atmosphere, the chemicals already in our air and water. Even if we slam on the brakes right now, we will just slide off the cliff anyway. In fact, doing so will most likely just cause the car to flip and roll, killing most of the occupants before it even reaches the cliff edge. Simply put, it is too late for this option.

Bail Out

So, if it is obviously too late to slow down before going off the cliff, the next logical instinct is to jump out of the car. It may hurt, but at least you’ll be alive. Most importantly, this is a choice you can make individually—no collective action required. You can simply exit society, start a homestead/commune/compound, stock up on food/ammo (depending on your politics), and sit on the sidelines, watching to see what happens. Yes, if everyone else drives off the cliff, you can feel pretty smug about your choice, but at some point you will need antibiotics, surgery, etc and all the people and technologies that could have saved you will be in pieces at the bottom of the cliff. Wouldn’t it have been a better use of your life to try and keep us from going off the cliff in the first place, instead of just watching it happen?

All that said, we do need to also build something akin to Asimov’s Foundation, to function as a backup to preserve what knowledge and technology we can, just in case we do end up going off the cliff. (If you are also working on this, please get in touch.)

Status Quo

The first two options require you to make a deliberate, rational choice. Conversely, maintaining our current trajectory requires no decision to be made and is therefore the default choice that most of us will make. We are enmeshed in a vastly complex system that we feel we have little control over, so we will just continue to go with the flow. Based on recent history, this is quite reasonable as things have mostly continued to just get better over time. Unfortunately, this belief only holds true for so long as you avoid inspecting it overmuch and is either delusional or blindly optimistic. The simple truth is that there is actually a cliff ahead and staying the course is the least rational choice you can make.

Accelerate

This is the scariest choice. It is the choice to clearly see the cliff ahead, acknowledge the truth of the situation, then floor it and get to work building wings so we can fly. Practically, it is the choice to be honest about where we are and how we got here, then double down on the acceleration of knowledge and technological development—the same choice that created nearly every advance humanity has ever made. And it is probably the only chance we have to continue to expand into our potential, to maintain a functioning civilization and continue to evolve a better one.

The problems we face are almost entirely technological in nature and they are threatening us at a rate that currently exceeds our capacity to develop solutions. We need to flip that so the solutions outpace the problems. Climate change was not caused by our progress, it was caused by our stupidity, and it likely could have been entirely avoided had we but accelerated our efforts on smarter solutions. How far along could we be on solar, fission, and fusion had we been working seriously on it for the last 50 years? How many diseases could we have eliminated had we not hampered ourselves with decelerationist ideologies around stem cells, genetic engineering, and fear of human trials? We can do so much more than we have.

The simple truth is that we are already on this self-made path of technological growth, and in choosing it, have sown the seeds for our own destruction. We have no reasonable choice but to accelerate our learning and technology in order to meet these challenges. All other choices lead to some form of collapse, the deaths of billions, and the end of our one brief shot at escape from the tyranny of nature and evolution. While this doesn’t mean we throw all caution to the wind, the risks of inaction are so significant that it does mean we need to be willing to take far more risks than we have in recent decades.

In the end, we have to figure out how to create the conditions to turn our growth imperative from a self-destructive threat into an engine driving the fulfillment of our individual and collective potential, to go far beyond the limits of our current technological and physical constraints, to open up infinity. And the only way to do this without destroying ourselves is to significantly increase the pace at which we increase both our intelligence and our wisdom. To accelerate.

It is not a controversial statement to say we have an information overload problem. One has simply to exist in modernity to feel it. It is the water in which we swim. So fully immersed, we forget that, just as we cannot breathe under water, we cannot think while submerged in information. It may be time we start to remember this—assuming any of us can come up to the surface long enough to do so—and decide if it is time to just get out of the water, or learn to grow some gils.

Sweet, Sweet Ignorance

In the past, most people lived in an ignorance so profound, we likely cannot imagine it. They were delightfully unburdened by the vast flow of knowledge we enjoy today, and enviously unaware of much outside their very narrow, very tangible world. As radio and then TV spread, we all became aware of the scope of the world and exposed to so much that did not directly affect our lives—who was in power in other countries, earthquakes in strange places, the personal lives and doings of famous people we’d never meet. But this was still a very narrow straw through which we were carefully fed knowledge, curated by the few, and distributed parsimoniously. It was was yet within our minds ability to process or, more often, ignore. Some few, however, were more eager than the others and able to gorge upon this new information. People with minds that, either by birth or training, could simply process a little greater flow of information than the rest of us. Like a rogue, self-improving AI, these few created ever improving methods of generating and distributing information (thanks, Claude).

Still, most of us just sipped at that straw and went about our own little lives with not much more than a vaguely broader sense of the largeness of the world, couched in the terms of the few narratives with which we were indoctrinated. But then, at last, those rogue AI’s invented the information flood that is the internet. And no one could escape its information-drenched tendrils. No longer were we content with sipping from our little straw of pre-processed, homogenized information. We were offered a firehose of the raw, unfiltered stuff and we eagerly clamped our mouths over the nozzle and turned it all the way on. Turns out, that probably wasn’t the best approach.

Some Thoughts on Mushrooms

Humans have a wonderful ability to process information and to pattern match. In more primitive times, this most likely kept us alive by enabling survival behaviors like being able to recognize dangerous mushroom by extrapolating from our knowledge of ones that were proven poisonous in the past or by extrapolating certain characteristics that differentiated the tasty ones from the kill-y ones (and, importantly, the fun ones). That ability is probably a critical reason we survived as a species. However, what if there had been a million types of mushrooms, each with the ability to change appearance every generation and 70% of them poisonous? That would have sucked and if this variability had extended to most of our food sources and predators, it certainly would have broken our pattern matching ability and, most likely, we would have died off. Our survival hinged on the threats and opportunities not overloading our own data processing abilities.

You can probably see where this is going. As we are so brilliant, we decided to create a world full of these millions of types of clever, ever-changing mushrooms, and are now trying to decide which ones to eat using the cognitive abilities trained long-ago on very boring, non-transforming mushrooms. Our mental equipment is no longer up to the task and we are now losing the ability to maintain a cohesive mental model of our world. Given that our very survival depends on maintaining enough cohesiveness to make decisions that benefit and protect ourselves and those we care about, we will do whatever is necessary to do so. Unfortunately, as we strive to create that order, we take great liberty with truth and tend to cram facts, ideas, and desires together in our own unique and flawed way. And as the inputs of information increase, so too does the entropy of our mental model. More information does not equal more understanding or knowledge. It is just more information that we try to compute. In the end, we have this cobbled together mess of random information, half-truths, lies, self-deceptions, emotions, as well as some beauty and truth. Oh, and probably a few mushrooms in there somewhere.

Logical Responses

It seems that is what we are experiencing now, as truths and lies become equal, as conspiracy theories spread and are given nearly the weight of scientific theories, as those in power can say nearly anything and some sizable contingent of their tribe will not just simply accept it but internalize it, reconstruct their mental model of the world to justify it, and then spread it. It is not that we have recently become evil or stupid (we have always had plenty of both), it is simply that by overloading everyone, we have severely damaged our own ability to process everything. And just like a disease running rampant through the population, it will affect the most vulnerable first (and those people are not necessarily who you may think they are). It is not the ignorant that is the problem, as this is not an issue of knowledge. It is those who have either a depressed or hyper-responsive mental immune system, and are still immersing themselves in the flow.

Like our normal immune system, our mental immune system is built up by being assailed with threats that don't overwhelm it but enable it to create antibodies so it can better meet those threats in the future. We vaccinate ourselves for this purpose. Likewise, our mental immune system comes from being constantly threatened and challenged, and is probably largely developed while children (though for the sake of us all, I hope this is not the case). It learns how to see lies, deception, and manipulation for what they are and to keep them from infecting their mental model of the world. This is so critical because once a lie gets into that mental model, it is unlikely to ever be challenged or questioned.

A depressed mental immune system is common and simple, essentially letting almost anything in. Once new information is accepted, the mind is then left to try and re-pattern itself to accommodate it. When it tries to do this with conflicting and contradictory information, mental entropy increases, which can cause anything from confusion to insanity.

With a hyper-responsive one, the opposite occurs. Our mental immune system treats everything outside of ourselves or possibly our close circle (family, community, church, etc) as a threat and an attempted deception. Information is still allowed in, but only when it can support the existing mental model or be twisted to do so. This scenario is clearly on the rise and is a logical outcome. It is natural, in a world with millions of poisonous mushrooms, to not eat any except the ones you grow in your own garden. The larger issue in this case is actually the autoimmune response, where the mind stops trusting in and starts attacking its own mental model, leading to internal decoherence and, again, anything from confusion to insanity.

The Shape of Possible Solutions

There are two broad solutions to this issue. One, that is becoming more frequently espoused in mainstream contexts, is to self-limit access to information. To essentially take your mouth off the hose and go for a walk. People are encouraged to take a day off from devices, do dopamine fasts, and generally try to go back to a time with less information. While much of this is likely extremely balanced and healthy, and you should probably be doing it instead of reading this, it is a panacea and attempts to side-step the real issue. We have created a civilization where information is the medium in which we swim and to truly embrace it, thrive in it, and benefit from it, we can’t just get out and walk away.

Which brings us to the second solution—grow some gils. Okay, not literally (though that would be very cool), but where biology fails, technology might find a way. We have built this extraordinary density of knowledge and understanding so why would we ever want to just ignore it or walk away from it? And we don’t need to. Instead, we just need to develop better systems that actually helps us filter, sort, and judge information—a Maxwell’s Demon for knowledge would be nice, judiciously sorting truth and lies. Of course, truth is not so simple as thermodynamics, as there are no laws for it and if there were, we would be violating them right and left anyway. Given this fuzziness, no one solution will be perfect and any useful solutions will need to be flexible, dynamic, and likely utilize our greatest achievement—collective intelligence.

Brilliant Conclusion and Eminently Practical Path Forwards

These possible technological solutions will be explored in detail in a future essay. And, shameless plug warning, I am currently building my vision of one solution over at Streams, if you want to check it out.

This site is a collection of essays and media created by me, Sean, and broadly focused on information and the future. The naively earnest purpose of this project (as well as of my company, Streams) is to explore ways to help people communicate better and collaborate more effectively, so we might create the conditions for the emergence of a purposeful and beautiful future.

As part of this endeavor, a wide range of topics will be covered, including:

• Complexity
• Ecology
• Energy
• Future
• Governance
• Information Theory
• Media
• Narrative
• Software
• Space
• Technology

Thanks for swinging by. Feel free to connect with me on X or email…