I figure if I do this often enough it’ll become a habit.
(Both the writing, and the hobbies. And maybe the trains? TBD… )
Been working with a travel palette of watercolours that I brought. That, and a few other small things. We’ll see which one I enjoy most, but right now the watercolors are delightful. Being able to add a small degree of colour to a notebook beings it to life.
I think there was a guy who did oil paintings in an Altoid’s tin? The watercolors remind me a lot of that.
Oh here it is:
I’ll give the oil paints a test run first. I’m not sure how well they travel. But watercolour is inoffensive enough in a public space like a train.
Though perhaps semi-public is the way to describe it? Everyone is close, but off in their own space.
Not in the very close and not-at-all-private way that we’re used to in an airplane, or in the even closer contact you get in commuter transit.
So you get a modicum of space, of distance, and that plus the time gained from the pace of the thing, continuously moving, relentlessly forward, allows for the time needed to take up a hobby, or discover a new vocation en route.
It reminds me of the work by Matt Crawford, in Shopcraft as Soulcraft, (which of course echoes Pirsig’s ZATAOMM from decades earlier, where the space for the work impacts the work itself.
At 3 in the afternoon, everyone is in full-blown siesta mode.
Myself included. (I’m a light napper).
It’s the pace that’s different, is what I’m getting at. It’s not that there’s that much else to do, either. Play a game, watch a saved vid, or whatever you downloaded the last time the data was above 1 bar, rolling through Bala or Torrance or Wasego or wherever.
But everyone is zonked right out. And moreover, has the room to get zonked.
Which to those accustomed to air travel is a luxury all on it’s own. Economy on the rails is some Air Emirates level of lux in the air, when it comes to space and mobility.
Granted, hours turn into days in terms of distance travelled, in some kind of reverse-Innisian metaphor. It’ll take 4+ days to cross what a plane could accomplish in 4+ hours.
But it kinda does feel lux.
I mean, there’s a certain luxuriousness in being able to even take the time for a five day trip in this day and age, where time is money. “You took your time? How decadent.” And again this is all in economy class, back with the hoi polloi. I’ve only heard rumors of the Prestige and Sleeper classes.
Boarded on the train, though with a little confusion as to where we could sit. Got it figured out after all, but confusion describes a lot of what had us rushing this morning. Ended up taking an Uber, which cut an hour off our travel time, so we had a bit to sit around. This was okay – relaxing even. But frantic to start.
The train has a different pace. Almost two hours out; we’ve had to stop once to wait for freight, and once we backed up (to get to a siding line for you guessed it: freight). But after the first twenty minutes or so, after the city rolls away (surprisingly quickly) you come to that moment of realization that: “I’m here for a while”, and you should get comfy.
I’m napping, relaxing with the blinds drawn.
I’ve explored a little bit, through the kitchen car and up into the dome. I’ll go spend more time there soon, but right now I’m just chilling.
Some quick thoughts after viewing the film in IMAX, as I’m starting to see that the IFC are telling me it’s a bad movie, in ways that I clearly don’t agree with. So let’s talk about what I liked about the film.
The graphics were hyper-stylized, in a way that felt was an homage to some of the sci-fi of the 70s and 80s, and in that way have a much stronger connection to the original Tron film. A lot of the work in that film used costuming and odd camera angles and set design to imagine the insides of the computer, and this was a return to form.
The ladder sequence during Dillinger’s hack was wild to me , a conceptual view of cyberspace, agents, and IC, that felt straight out of a cyberpunk novel in the late 80s or 90s. It’s hard for me to express how much I loved this bit, and the style that it had.
Similar was the return to the set pieces of the original Tron, which were recognizable and felt for lack of a better term “Lo Rez” despite being rendered on the IMAX screen along with the rest of the movie. Simpler, fewer things going on in the background, feeling like an early 3D rendered video game.
As for the tech, it took me a minute to come around, as I originally thoughts the constructs bursting out of the familiar black-carbon “supports” was a little… goofy perhaps, but I came to like it, and it definitely had an aesthetic to them. It left a bit to the imagination of what constitutes the objects – are they holograms, or built out of raw carbon and other elements? It was left undefined, and that’s okay, really. We are allowed to handwave some stuff in our sci-fi to prevent it from bogging down the story.
That being said, I found this approach to addressing the question of digital materiality really interesting. DM is that point where the virtual crosses over to the real world. If cyberspace happens at the point of connection where a telephone conversation takes place in the wires, DM is where our 3D constructs cross over into realspace (or meatspace, or objective reality, however you want to frame it).
Athena was effective in the film – I really liked her as a character – echoing our fears of current real world implementations of AI taking a command too far (“by any means necessary”) to disastrous consequences for Dillinger.
Ares, as an AI gaining emotional intelligence by doing the deep learning on the target of Eve Kim presents a different way. This EQ was what triggered his malfunction, but also pointed towards an avenue for growth for the AIs.
Regarding Ares as a construct in the real world, it’s interesting as he’s clearly Not Human, despite having a human form. He’s a construct , of whatever underlying form that takes, that just doesn’t decompose. We’re not given any indication that he is actually modelled after a human aside from in outward appearances. This provides a nice contrast with the various forms of post-humanity seen in the recent Alien: Earth series, where we had synthetics, cyborgs, and hybrids, in various shapes and forms. Ares represents an AI embodied within a synthetic body, more akin to the synths of Ash, Bishop, and Kirsh, but with significantly enhanced capability.
Ares in the real world is different in this way than the scanned and re-assembled Eve Kim, whose reconstituted body theoretically does not have this problem of permanence (though it’s interesting to ask why not?), but one can follow that her rebuilt body is her being reconstructed cell-by-cell. It’s much like the Teletransportation Paradox, from philosophy but also from Star Trek, as to whether the original body is destroyed and then rebuilt. Here the movie answers it with a clear “yes”, though with more intervening time in between.
The ending leaves open the possibility for further exploring what it is like for an AI to experience the world materially, in a way that is just hinted at in the postcard sequence from Ares. There’s room for some growth here.
Finally, I like how they portrayed the uses for the 3D printing technology with the permanence code enabled. Combating climate change, medical advancements, etc. – a really hopefully version of the future, and less dystopian that similar films like the Matrix and Terminator.
Overall, I enjoyed the film – no prior knowledge of the franchise was really necessary – and it seems odd that the most fantastic thing in a movie about AI, Virtual Reality, and Transhumanism, the most fantastic thing is that one can get across Vancouver in under 29 minutes.
What if you achieve the future you always wanted, and find it empty?
The advent of Generative AI, with the new* video models able to reproduce video at scale is bringing with it an unexpected reaction from the digital native generations (Millenials and Gen Z): retreat.
The erosion of trust that has come from the rampant use of GenAI in a post-truth era that was already struggling to reflect objective reality has resulted in a rejection of the online devices and smartphones that they have grown up with, taking up analog pursuits – some of which were cultivated during the early stages of the Covid-19 response – along with a desire for the Dial-Up Pastorale (from back in Episode 34).
It isn’t a full blown retreat from the virtual just yet, but the signs are there. Those most sensitive to the coming changes taking the first steps away from online life.
It is a rejection of the “Exodus to the Virtual” that was anticipated back in 2007 by Edward Castranova, and similar observations that were echoed during that era of massive growth in popularity of MMOs and virtual worlds.
Exodus to the Virtual (2007) was Castranova’s follow-up to his work on Synthetic Worlds (2005) which was an analysis of the MMORPG Everquest through an economic lens. In Exodus, Castranova positioned himself on the crest of the wave of the hype cycle for MMOs, hypothesizing that the economies of these places, built on fun, would be attractive enough to entice people to migrate to them and spend most of their time online within these environments.
There are many ways that this hypothesis was colossally wrong.
Eighteen years later, that projected exodus is all but gone. Even though consumer VR hardware is more available, accessible, and consumer friendly, the desire to take that path has withdrawn for more of the population, either no longer having the means to undertake the exodus or rejecting it wholesale.
Where can this rejection be seen? It’s there, on social media, in the subtext of the wry comments of those claiming “the internet was a mistake” with every new “advancement” in technology or viral trend that escapes containment. But it is also there, more explicitly, in the claims and calls to action of the Digital Natives, TikTok posts steadily gaining more views and likes, claiming that they’re done and walking away from the internet, a claim they assert will definitely happen if they can no longer discern truth from unreality thanks to the next iteration in generative AI.
There’s a paradox here, where those who have already noped out of the virtual won’t be posting about it too much on social media (obviously), but there is a brief window where they may leave traces – evangelizing about their choices the way only a vegan crossfitter can, or talking themselves up to final leaving it behind, and trying to convince others to join them.
This rejection of a future imaginary – even the few drops that are starting now, signs of the damn beginning to leak, sweating through before it buckles and breaks unleashing the torrent that bursts its way through – is rare, though not unknown, as we have collectively stepped back from other imagined futures before, with the waning of the nuclear age that dominated half the 20th century.
It’s also a pitch correction, or rather pitch rejection as the sale of the commodified self loses its luster and sheen, only begrudgingly uptaken by those who need it for work, or those too young to recognize the gilt for the thing covering of glitter that it is.
So the retreat is underway, those stepping away from the din and fray of the online battledomes quietly slipping out, and others starting to notice them in their absence. And much like in a battle where it only takes a few to break before a full on rout is underway, we may soon see this happen en masse. It may not take an oracle to predict it, but an Oracle may be involved all the same.
