Episode 302: Monsters In The Mirror
Permanently Moved is back!
It's an hour long techno-gothic essay on consequences of the silicon mirror: How inside it, we are now confronted by entities containing the liquefied dead of all human culture, wearing language as their skin.
Green politics and love of your country, in action.
I’ve known @paulpowlesland for 15 years. I’ve never met someone with so much energy, enthusiasm and pragmatic idealism.
closer to reality is that popular music now exists as a barnacle on the attention and parasocial influencer industry, and so it is fair to ask the question in the arena where that applies why it matters if the media that soundtracks the procession was made by humans.
Few really know who writes those songs in the first place, and it is an open secret more and more of them are generated before being reperformed by human avatars.
I mean some of us do talk about this! This is exactly my world view.
Unfortunately capital-D discourse thinks people who talk about this are crazy so ¯\(ツ)/¯
Words like “life” and “thoughts” aren’t static, though. Nobody in the capital-D, podcast-circuit Discourse talks about animism, or imagination, or our humanity-long history of companions that challenge our conception of what life means. It exists on the fringes and in specialized areas, but you have to really look.
I don’t see any talk of ecstatic experience, or the historical use of vessels, or wonderful books like The Secret Life of Puppets. At most there’s hand-waving about “demons.” So when you read Olah’s “bringing a fictional character to life” as loose, I’d say it’s the opposite. There’s something to grapple with there.
The real poverty isn’t sloppy language, it’s that consciousness debates in the mainstream arena are such a bore — even from the positive side.
“What is life?” is exactly the right question. I just wish it were being used to open the conversation instead of close it.
Reading this makes me feel the same way I did when I saw that anthropocentrism tweet, which is, why? It’s not obvious, it’s not given, and I don’t think we should foreclose on the possibility “non-human persons,” even non-human persons we ourselves created.
Experiment: Painting sound effects with @StabilityAI Stable Audio 3
1. Free-form drawing on a spectrogram-like canvas. Time on the x-axis, pitch on the y.
2. Synthesise the drawing to audio. Strokes control bandpass-filtering of a white noise source.
3. Use that audio as input for SA3 audio-to-audio pass combined with a text prompt.
In Claude Desktop with a handful of MCP tools.
Football should bring people together, not shut them out.
For the first time since the competition began, fans won’t be able to watch the Champions League final for free. That’s not right.
This is bigger than wanting to watch Arsenal in this historic final. It’s bigger than one club.
Hardworking people shouldn’t have to fork out for a subscription to watch this match.
I urge TNT Sports to reconsider and make the final next Saturday free to watch.