Petervan Delicacies #175
Dec 2024 - Feb 2025
“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. A form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week, or after 3 months. No pressure, literally.
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The very best
A preview of the upcoming Antikytera Journal. I love the entries “What is Life?”, by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Google Cerebra) and “Recursive Worlds” by Sarah Walker (School Of Earth and Space Exploration), and of course the opening by Benjamin Bratton. Antikythera is a think tank reorienting planetary computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force.
“A better way to “do Philosophy” is to experiment actively with the technologies that make contemporary thought possible and to explore the fullest space of that potential. Instead of simply applying philosophy to the topic of computation, Antikythera starts from the other direction and produces theoretical and practical conceptual tools -the speculative- from living computational media. For the 21st century, the instrumental and existential implications of planetary computation challenges how planetary intelligence comes to comprehend its own evolution, its predicament and its possible futures, both bright and dark.”
and
“Martin Heidegger has confused generations of young minds. They have been misled. The question concerning technology is not how it alienates us from the misty mystery of Being but how every Copernican turn we have taken, from heliocentrism to Darwinism to neuroscience to machine intelligence- has only been possible by getting outside our own skin to seeing ourselves as we are and the world as it is. This is closeness to being.”
and
“This is not science fiction; this is last week.”
Many of the above boil down to “Is Life A Computation?”. That makes me think back to Rudy Rucker’s awesome 2005 book “The LifeBox, The Seashell, and The Soul” > love the subtitle “… and How to be Happy”.
Combine that with Edward Frenkel’s “Aftermath”: when mathematics meets psychology, this time about Jungian Mathematical Archetypes.
About Gen AI as the bridge to the future. By Ben Thompson
This is where you start to see the bridge: what I am describing is an application of generative AI, specifically to on-demand UI interfaces. This is exciting in the long-term, and bullish for Meta (and I’ve previously noted how generative AI is the key to the metaverse, as well). It’s also, clearly, well into the future.
Data & Society
Dana Boyd is very upset about Facebook’s decision to drop fact-checking: The Ministry of Empowerment
“Of course, there’s power in pretending like this is about free speech. Or good business. Or wise politics. Even to oneself. And I have to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg and those who are surrounding him have countless self-justifications for their actions. But I still cannot imagine sitting in a room writing a script for explicitly justifying hate speech and harassment directed at a specific population with religion as the explicit excuse. Who was in that room? How were they justifying the text they were creating and publishing? Did anyone recognize the echos of history here?”
Innovation
About learning new knowledge vs. AI learning existing knowledge. By John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and David Toole
“The core unit of a learning platform would be a shared workspace for an impact group consisting of 3–15 people who share a passion for achieving increasing impact in a specific domain. The learning platform would provide the participants in each of these impact groups with the learning tools described above. The platforms would also provide the impact groups with richer and real-time feedback on impact achieved from the actions taken. The platforms would help to connect these impact groups so that they can see and explore new questions.”
Karl Smink did some thorough rethinking of the keyboard in VR.
A post is about the automation and efficiency of creativity, and a call to re-introduce friction and innovation into the process. I have heard these arguments before in corporate innovation, and I am pleasantly surprised to see this happen for creativity.
“Hyper-optimization results in cultural stagnation because it actively removes any sources of friction in the system. But without friction, creativity cannot thrive in a meaningful way.
Much like with online platforms and their decreasing quality over time, the enshittification of culture is a logical conclusion when you consider how much culture has become treated as a tech product.”
AI, Robots, Algorithms
Venkat has an awesome essay “We Are the Robots” on evolving human self-conceptions to machines (in this case hyperorganic robots.
“Aging GenX and Boomer managers demand a return to 9-5 work, struggle to address low motivation, have no good ideas for dealing with “quiet quitting,” and declare meaning crises. It is effectively a demand that we put on primitive suits and return to an older ideal of stereotypically robotic work. And many in Gen Z seem eager to transform themselves into stereotypical robots and comply.
Meanwhile younger founders adopt more fluid org forms, cheerfully organize in seemingly inchoate structures and behaviors, and build little subcultures that seem remarkably free of the “meaning crisis” their reactionary peers and fearful parents clutch pearls about. They too are modeling themselves on robots, except that these are the emerging hyperorganic, swarming ones that don’t do the robot dance.”
OpenAI o3 Model is a message from the future, says Alberto Romero
“The significance of the announcement can’t be overstated (although people are already trying): o3’s performance in math, coding, science, and reasoning problems is incredible. Saying o3 is state-of-the-art (SOTA) is, in a way, an understatement. We’re used to AI labs taking small steps and snatching the lead from one another every month. This was not it. OpenAI o3 didn’t just snatch the SOTA crown, it obliterated the aspirants’ hopes of getting it back anytime soon”
Internet Culture
About the end of Google Chrome and search. By Rushkoff
About AI-generated profiles and living alongside computer profiles
“But here’s the thing: social media has already dehumanised us. It has trained us to behave like robots, to perform predictable scripts, to game algorithms for engagement. In many ways, AI profiles aren’t the cause of this transformation—they’re the proof of it. The idea that we can avoid a future where social networks are populated by AI-generated profiles? That ship has sailed.”
Lou Kerner launches the Decentralised AI Agent Alliance with 21 Founding Members
Superior Reality
About the exodus of experienced creative professionals not just changing jobs, but leaving the field entirely. By Christopher Butler
“The exodus to other fields might reveal something deeper: a desire to return to work that produces tangible, meaningful outcomes. When a designer or marketer becomes an artist, they choose to create something that exists in the world, that can be finished, seen, and touched. When they become a fitness instructor, they choose help people achieve concrete, physical results, perhaps even changing their lives in ways they never thought possible. These shifts suggest a hunger for work that can’t be algorithm-optimized into meaninglessness and not (yet) credibly done by a machine.”
Post Capitalism
What fully automated firms will look like > by Dwarkesh Patel
“If you think human Elon is especially gifted at creating hardware companies, you simply can’t spin up 100 Elons, have them each take on a different vertical, and give them each $100 million in seed money. As much of a micromanager as Elon might be, he’s still limited by his single human form. But AI Elon can have copies of himself design the batteries, be the car mechanic at the dealership, and so on. And if Elon isn’t the best person for the job, the person who is can also be replicated, to create the template for a new descendant organization.”
Art related
New immersive work from Ryoji Ikeda
David Claerbout asks the question “What is real?”. I can’t wait to see his latest work “The Woodcarver and the Forest” premiere in June 2025 in the castle of Gaasbeek.
“My work is exactly that: a piece of theatre that is pretending to be eternal.”(David Claerbout)
Kelly Boesch makes beautiful animations with with Luma and Suno AI
Aesthetics
About Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” - by Yves Saint Laurent. A series of six videos. Très French. What else?
Music/Sound/Dance
Astrid Sonne live mix. For once a DJ who does not do techno.
The forgotten world of the Alphaphone - the inventor Estribou now lives anonymously somewhere in Washington State. By Anastasia Chernysheva.
A French-speaking Belgian guy named Pyre (real name Pierre Collard) does an amazing remake of the Buchla synthesizer that Suzanne Ciani, using the free software VCV Rack. A labor of love.
Eryk Salvaggio’s welcome to the new year: Dance Like You Were Never Born
How Doctor Who theme was created: with cutting tape, synchronised tape recorders, multi hand-switches, etc
And how to reproduce this with the virtual VCV Rack 2 (modular synthesizers)
Performance
We created a new version of the New New Babylon performance, rebranded to “Dream My Dream”, where a live VR performer embodies an architect-researcher and dreams about the New New Babylon, a speculative future society transformed and eroded by automation, artificial intelligence, and digital technology. The dream explores profound and universal questions about the essence of existence. The audience is invited to interpret the dream in their unique way.
Smile
David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear in 1983 (without VR and greenscreen!). Click the link to find out how he did it