Rushkoff & Hagens, Mary Harrington on Grok, Invictus
A Mindful Miscellany, #35
Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, a newsletter dedicated to Good Humaning in the Turbulent Twenties. My name is Adam Karaoguz (car-owz). I am a 27 year prior-enlisted US Naval Special Warfare officer. I’m also a fiction novelist on submission with D4EO literary. Extended bio located here.
Rushkoff on The Great Simplification Podcast
Two unconventional thinkers discussing the challenges of the day.
Rushkoff just published a book about tech billionaires and their escape fantasies.
I suppose I should be more deferential and angling for a job as one of their heads of security1, but I’m left annoyed that their big plan is to make a ton of money and then….. hide from the world they played a large role in creating.
Disappointing.
Rushkoff’s solutions are much more local, commons-focused, and human. Touch grass, as the kids say.2 We need to build connections with one another now, so we have local support networks in the future.
This one made me feel better. We have all the solutions. We just need to figure out how to get along in a digital commons incentivized to drive us insane.
Mary Harrington on Swarm Governance and Elon’s new Egregore, Grok
Mary Harrington is a brilliant, fearless, incisive writer and thinker.
Her concept of Swarm Governance is similar take to what John Robb refers to as Networked Tribalism: Individual voices joining into a larger whole, working in a decentralized fashion towards emergent goals.
From her piece:
You may ask: what’s an egregore? In Egregores (2018), Mark Stavish quotes the Polish occultist Mouni Sadhu, who describes the egregore as “a collective entity, such as a nation, state, religions and sects and their adherents, and even minor human organizations.” The term has recently grown in popularity among the digital avant-garde, as a way of describing emergent collective intelligences that have, with the advent of digital culture, grown ever more clearly observable and influential.
As we see in ‘viral’ political or cultural moments, digital culture accelerates and intensifies collective cultural currents, often with real-world political impact. Think about the near-instant global eruption of BLM protests, or the way the current conflict between Israel and Palestine is driving worldwide street protests both convened and intensified by digital exhortations and powered by the aggregate force of collective human emotion.
Occultists such as Stavish sometimes suggest this kind of hive-mind may be the vehicle for intervention by non-human intelligences. For our purposes, though, an ‘egregore’ is useful shorthand for the observably real formation, operation, and increasingly evident real-world impact of emergent collective intelligences, mediated and enabled by the digital realm.
Grok is potentially significant because X is currently the most dynamic and influential collective consensus-formation platform of this kind in existence: a colossal prism for the convening, focusing and operation of egregoric hive-intelligences. As such, whether or not you agree with Stavish that egregores have agency independent of their members, linking X to a pattern-recognising large language model (LLM) has the potential to produce an AI that is much more genuinely alive than any other instance of AI to date.
And - should this prove effective and its output useful and coherent - this provides a potential solution to one of 21st century’s thorniest problems: how do you govern a demos that is both reflexively anti-authoritarian, but that also yearns for strongman governance?
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
My BUD/S class officer in charge put this poem on our graduation plaque. It well-suited the vibe for that part of our lives.
Stoic, individualistic sentiments, which are important to cultivate alongside our more communal natures.
We need strong and resilient humans, prepared for the complexities of the world, in service to their groups and communities.
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
Have a great week everyone!
In case it’s not coming across, this is a joke.
I try to use this phrase as much as possible around my teen daughter to induce cringes/eyerolls. Bonus points if her friends are present.
Lots to ponder and a poem to boot. I would take care figuring out Musk's subterreanean motives as well. He is a little like Eric Clapton; a great player but prone to embrace some half-baked ideas. He bought twitter, now X, for 44 B, but did you know he also bought the entire country music catalogue including the Grand Olde Opry for 88 B ?
He's proceeded to wreck X and turn it from a predominately progressive arena (75%) to one perhaps less democratic. So we'll see.
But you did start the article by questioning our homegrown tech wizards and oligarchs, and ended by heralding Elon's latest notion. What does Elon want to do with American country music ?