You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The Torment Nexus is, by definition, a machine that brings torment onto others. It destroys souls. And a soul cannot take a soul and remain whole. It will leave a mark. A memory. A scar. Your soul will not remain intact while you’re building software that keeps track of undocumented workers. Your soul will not remain intact while building surveillance software whose footage companies hand over to ICE. Your soul will not remain intact while you build software that allows disinformation to spark genocides. Your soul will not remain intact while you hoover up artists’ work to train theft-engines that poison the water of communities in need. Your soul will eventually turn into another thing altogether. An indescribable thing.
Clipping
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clippings > You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus
[https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-not-build-the-torment-nexus/]
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clippings > A world without work is lamented by narcissists
[https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9030]
Sure, Marx’s and my culture, the ethos of our post-industrial professional class, might make us regret a world without work. But we shouldn’t confuse the way two philosophers were brought up with the fundamental values of human life. What stranger narcissism could there be than bemoaning the end of others’ suffering, disease, and need, just because it deprives you of the chance to be a hero?
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books > The Rose of Paracelsus (W. Leonard Pickard)
What is it that breathes fire into the equations, and makes a universe for them to describe?
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clippings > Have some sense of the spiritual
[https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/what-kind-of-grownup-i-want-to-be]
If you don’t know what people are talking about, experientially, when they talk about God, or Buddha Nature, or whatever your favorite label is, you are missing a large part of the human experience that is importantly humbling and helpful in a bunch of other ways. You can think whatever you want about the metaphysical claims that people attach to spiritual experience — it’s totally coherent, although hard to do in practice, to have classical spiritual experiences and remain a committed atheist. But if you just have no idea what that Thing is, you’re missing a basic point of life. Once you are not missing that basic thing, there is then the tremendously challenging lifelong project of understanding how to live in alignment with it, a subject that nobody can definitively crack.
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clippings > Counterculture is dead
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548713]
Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.
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clippings > Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory
[https://aethermug.com/posts/i-do-not-remember-my-life-and-it-s-fine]
Often my wife mentions an event or the name of a shop, saying something like “I miss the Flavor Savor hamburgers we used to go to when we lived in Nagareyama!” Usually, to her unconcealed dismay, I draw a complete blank: “what’s the Flavor Savor?” We used to go there all the time, she says, and it wasn’t even that long ago.
I get absolutely nothing. I frantically try to think of hamburger joints in Nagareyama: zero hits.
Then she adds some spatial information, like “it’s on the last floor of the XYZ building in front of the station” and suddenly I’m transported there in a roller-coaster instant and it all comes back to me clearly. I almost feel the swooshing movement of going from the station to the entrance of XYZ building, then to the escalators, then up to the last floor, and finally homing into the entrance of the Flavor Savor, all in less than a second. Now all the semantic information pours out: “of course, the Flavor Savor! We went there, like, six times in a year. They have great avocado burgers and a tasty homemade sauce there!” If not too averaged-out, even some fragments of Flavor Savor episodes might come back to me at that point.
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books > The Rose of Paracelsus (W. Leonard Pickard)
“Did you…did you dose me?” “NEVER,” he responded, without guile.
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books > The Rose of Paracelsus (W. Leonard Pickard)
“Did you…did you dose me?” “NEVER,” he responded, without guile. “The phenomena you experience sometimes occur in our proximity, as if you remember our ancient language. It happens where ‘two or more are gathered together’, it has been said. A contact high from shared subconscious archetypes; the opening of neurological regions among the experienced.”
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books > Narcissus and Goldmund (Hermann Hesse)
I always told you that you were not made to be a thinker, and I also told you that this was no lack since, in exchange, you were a master in the realm of images. Pay attention and I’ll explain it to you. If, instead of immersing yourself in the world, you had become a thinker, you might have created evil. Because you would have become a mystic. Mystics are, to express it briefly and somewhat crudely, thinkers who cannot detach themselves from images, therefore not thinkers at all. They are secret artists: poets without verse, painters without brushes, musicians without sound. There are highly gifted, noble minds among them, but they are all without exception unhappy men. You, too, might have become such a man. Instead of which you have, thank God, become an artist and have taken possession of the image world in which you can be a creator and a master, instead of being stranded in discontentment as a thinker.”
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clippings > Hard to see someone as controlling when they make you feel special
[https://skincontact.substack.com/p/21-observations-from-people-watching]
You can tell how controlling someone is by how forceful they are in conversation, how often they cut someone else off or steer the conversation towards what they want. Sometimes it is hard to see someone as controlling when what they desire is making you feel special and chosen.