Vaporware

Episode 12: Alexander Bard

This week ⁠Daniel⁠ and ⁠Chase⁠ are joined by ⁠Jack Ek⁠ and his friend, the legendary ⁠Alexander Bard⁠, who describes himself as a “philosopher who writes f***ing books" and who is according to his ⁠Wiki⁠: a Swedish musician, author, lecturer, artist, songwriter, music producer, ⁠TV personality⁠, religious and political activist, one of the founders of the ⁠Syntheist religious movement⁠, and member of the bands ⁠Army of Lovers⁠ & ⁠BWO⁠, amongst numerous other projects. More recently, he cofounded a secret society called ⁠The Grey Robes⁠, AKA the “Freemasons of Decentralization”.

We cover:

• How Jack and Bard met through Euroburner culture

• Is Bucharest the next Berlin? Or…can there never be a ‘next Berlin’

• Property ownership as lynchpin for scene building

• The secrets of disproportionate Swedish soft power

• America as theater for the rest of the world

• Lessons from Urbit: too Kantian

• Philosophy’s role in engineering 

• Behavioral Economics and ‘Nudge Units’ 

• The need for spirituality when grappling with the ramifications of AI

• AI as a fundamentally truth seeking technology and therefore a threat to authoritarian governments

• The devolution of the internet from Open and flat into a tribal, feudal dark forest.

• Decentralization vs Centralization as the only important political axis

• Navigating community building in a decentralized world (parallelize it)

Artwork: J.F. Clemens after Nicolai Abildgaard, “Ossian’s Swan Song”, 1787

This week, Daniel⁠ chats about technology, governance and culture with Samuel Hammond, senior economist for the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank focused on bridging the cultures of Silicon Valley and DC. Additionally, Sam has an outstanding substack where he writes about topics surrounding AI development & regulation, as well as the history and future of liberalism, secularism and pluralism.

Topics include: 

• The day-to-day of working in a think tank

• What it means to bridge the cultural divide between Silicon Valley and DC

• The real American power centers (New York (finance/media), Texas (energy), Silicon Valley (tech) and how Hollywood has always been subservient

• What it means to embrace pluralism in terms of values, morals and ontological frameworks, and the benefits of such beliefs

• How to apply the theory of The Second Best to ones general worldview: “when it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing one or more additional market distortions may lead to a more efficient outcome”

• The evolution of liberalism has evolved as a response to periods of extreme conflict (The 30 Years War, for instance)

• Debating whether or not crisis is essential for generating new equilibria in society

• Accelerationism and capitalism as a general intelligence

• Path dependency and historical development

• Exploring scenarios about what happens if AI scaling laws breakdown 

• Predictions about AI’s impact on regime change and the rise of AI-native institutions

• Can open source AI keep up? Why it’s important that they keep trying, despite the widening performance gap

• Why Sam isn’t worried about children adapting to technological change

• The coming return of Neo-Medieval societal structures

• Completing the system of Canadian Idealism

Artwork: Edward Hicks, “Peaceable Kingdom”, 1844-1846

To kick off our new weekly release schedule, we have Chase &⁠⁠ Daniel in conversation with designer, artist, NYU design/media professor & cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot (@being_on_line) 

Ruby’s output is thoughtful, extremely prolific, and multifaceted. His writing on virtual realms, digital communities and AI offers a unique perspective that overlaps with our interests at Vaporware in key ways. Chiefly, how crucial it is for people and small communities to truly own their own means of coordination and memory. But also how the specific affordances of those digital tools dictate the bounds of memory itself.

• Ruby’s new habit of buying old film home movies off eBay

• The concept of ‘Mnemophagy’: “the devouring of memory” and the ephemerality of online culture

• Checkpoints: Ruby’s book about an accidental community that formed in the comment section of a now-deleted YouTube video

• His early internet archiving habits and how they sucked him into academia through meme page admin

• What he’s learned from teaching young designers at NYU and the new generational attitudes towards technology that he sees crystallizing

• How comparing the iPod to the Stem Player made him both optimistic and pessimistic about the future of hardware design

• Why it’s a good thing that 64% of Gen Z call themselves ‘creators’

• The rise of para-content: content about content

• Why we want AI to give us malleable, interoperable, remixable tools, not to repeat forms from the past

• The rise of synthetic training data and concerns about its usefulness or creativity

• Why it’s important to write more non-dystopian sci-fi, so that founders are inspired to build things besides cyberpunk and ‘the Torment Nexus’

Artwork: Louis Daguerre [inventor of the Daguerreotype and the diorama], “The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel”, 1824

This week, Daniel Keller and Fred Scharmen talk about the cultural legacy of space colonization and its connections to contemporary movements like e/acc, longtermism, and network states.

Fred is architect, educator, and researcher whose work focuses on the history and theory of architecture and urban design in outer space. His first book, Space Settlements (Columbia University Press, 2019) is about Gerard O'Neill's work with NASA and others to design large-scale cities in space intended to house millions of people. His second book, Space Forces (Verso, 2021), is a broader history of human aspirations in space. Fred is an international speaker and has helped speculate about life in future space habitats for NASA and the Museum of the Future in Dubai. In 2015 Fred built a scale model solar system stretching for a mile and a half through downtown Baltimore. He teaches at Morgan State University. 

Topics: 

• Historical context of space architecture

• The concept of the ‘planetary imagination’

• The roots and legacy of Russian Cosmism

• The ‘Brick Moon’ vs. ‘Glass Moon’ paradigms of space colonization

• J.D Bernal’s early vision for a pluralistic ‘proto-patchwork’ in space composed of numerous self-reproducing bubble space habitats

• The Von Braun Paradigm, Operation Paperclip and UFOs

• Comparison of Soviet and US space program culture and sci-fi influences

• New Space and the quasi-cold war rivalry between Musk and Bezos

• Gerard O’ Neill’s influential space habitat work for NASA in the 1970s

• What makes those Don Davis and Rick Guidice Space habitat paintings so damn appealing and the Bezos commissioned ones so flat?

• Why we can absolutely afford to build a Stanford Torus  

• How the aesthetics of space habitats influences public perception

• Fred’s work with Brick Moon, a space habitat consultancy

• “Don’t Let Them Leave” movement, opposed to space colonization

• Space habitats for manatees 

• Fred’s incredible GoT fan theory: It takes place on a malfunctioning Truman Show-style Bernal Sphere

Artwork: Don Davis, “Model 3 O’Neill Cylinder ‘Lunar Eclipse’ lighting (Sun in eclipse behind Earth)”, 1975

In a bit of a departure from our normal format, Daniel Keller⁠⁠ interviews Chase Van Etten⁠⁠, founder and CEO of Vaporware about his background and vision for the company. 

We discuss: 

• Absorbing the California Ideology by osmosis growing up in Petaluma

• How custom car culture informs Chase’s approach to technology

• Gaming as CEO Mode trainer Vs. depressive real world agency drainer 

• Marketplaces as cooperation tech and the need to maximize informational flow rates

• How Vaporware aims to address the complexities of social computing

• Right and wrong approaches to standardization in software 

• The multidimensional problem space of growing a radical software project as a startup

• Taking on megacorp incumbents by doing things outside the scope of their business model

• The great app-less future, (that Apple doesn’t want you to have)

• The Operating Function as a new paradigm in computing and foundation for a sovereign Exocortex

• Functional programming providing the basis for reliable and trustworthy distributed systems and software

• Vaporware’s competition and target audience 

• The political implications of our technology and legal and ethical challenges

• Community sovereignty and individual sovereignty

• Some differing views on the pace of AI development 

• How insanely high Chase thinks your monthly software bill is going to be in 10 years

• Different ways you can participate in our project if you’re interested!

Artwork: Peter Cain, “Z”, 1989

Chase Van Etten⁠⁠ &⁠ ⁠Daniel Keller⁠⁠ talk with Rob (@RobertHaisfield) and Sean (@infinitefun_) about their project Websim. 

Websim is an incredibly cool project that invites users to browse and interact with a parallel world wide web, as hallucinated by AI. Even with such a simple UX conceit, (you type whatever you want to see into the url bar and it appears) websim community members have managed to create truly incredible stuff. Projects like websim really effectively demonstrate how AI is revolutionizing the way we produce and consume software and media. 

We cover:

• Hackathon origin story of Websim’s creation 

• Rob’s background as a behavioral product strategist and Sean’s experience moving from the live coding community to Google 

• The Influence of Brett Victor on creative coding 

• Scaling and gamification

• Fostering the WebSim community as a ‘social creativity engine’

• The rising importance of simulation in economics

• Canvas and text as universal interfaces and tools for thought

• Dreams as synthetic training data and the shortcomings of an LLM model of the brain

• The Future of Websim

Artwork: Yves Tanguy, “Imaginary Numbers”, 1954

This week, ⁠Chase Van Etten⁠ & ⁠Daniel Keller⁠ talk with renowned internet culture chronicler, Katherine Dee (@default_friend). Katherine is known for her provocative commentary and insights into the psychology of internet subcultures. She has bylines in numerous publications including Tablet, Unherd and Compact and is host of the podcast The Computer Room.

In this wide ranging conversation, we discuss algorithmic feedback loops, alt-internet history timelines, pre-singularity parenting, Katherine’s recent purchase of the Friend AI wearable, the coming rise of humanoid robots, auditioning for dark forest group chats, and different ways we can introduce some more healthy friction into our digital lives. 

Artwork: Dante Gabriel Rosetti, “Pandora”, 1871

This episode (⁠Chase Van Etten⁠ & ⁠Daniel Keller⁠) chat with Orion Reed (@OrionReedOne), a software engineer & researcher focused on the intersection of computing, human-systems interfaces, and emancipatory politics. Orion is engineer-in-residence at tldraw, researcher at Block Science, and contributor to the Liberatory Computing collective. His motto is “advocating widespread dissatisfaction with computing.” 

Highlights:

• The need for alternative visions for computing and reasons to be dissatisfied with the current state of software. 

• Some of the ways HCI research can assist in efforts to reorganize societal structures.

• How left-leaning crypto-optimism went from being a central narrative to relatively niche over the last decade. 

• Integration domains and the need for more cross-pollination between disparate disciplines and communities

• The potential for new TfT concepts like Spatial Canvases to push us out of our current siloed, windowed app based local maxima (Check out Orion’s talk on the topic)

• Cool developments in AI enabled malleable software like Websim

• The differences between ‘ephemeral’ and ‘compostable’ software

Artwork: René Magritte, “La Condition Humaine”, 1935

This time, we (Chase Van Etten & Daniel Keller) have a conversation with Are.na co-founder and CEO Charles Broskoski (@broskoski). We chat about our early lives online, our respective net.art pasts and his experience starting what was initially a somewhat niche site for ex-del.icio.us refugees and surf club members, that has over the past decade-plus become a veritable online institution and essential tool for research and thought, with a diehard cult following, a sustainable no-vc business model, and goals to persist into the next century. 

Artwork: Felicien Myrbach-Rheinfeld, "Candidates for Admission to the Paris Salon", 1890s

This episode, we (Chase Van Etten & Daniel Keller) catch up with our friend musician and technologist Dexter Tortoriello, AKA Houses. In addition to his decade plus music career, Dexter is cofounder and former head of technology at FWB. He’s currently co-founder and CTO of MindPalace, an ambitious project aimed at building high-res, interactive AI models of the self, derived from decades of personal data, which will be in private Beta 🔜

• Transitioning from the music industry into tech

• Perils and lessons learned from scene building

• What is the future (or lack thereof) for DAOS

• The emerging battle lines in the AI industry

• What’s next for MindPalace and other personal-data enabled agents

• Trusting big tech vs startups with your data

• Music-style royalty models for software

• The “Age Of Canvas” and Mass Custom software/os/hardware

• Enduring importance of physical artifacts

• The incoming militarization of AGI labs

• Speculations on our infant daughters’ relationship with technology and the future of work

Artwork: Robert Fludd, “Temple of Music”, 1624 [colorized]

In Episode 2, Chase and Dan chat with product and marketing strategist Marisa Rowland about a wide range of topics including:

• Institutional mistrust

• AI wearables for dogs

• Agricultural infomarkets

• Small data

• Cultivating cults

• Real network states

• Methylene Blue

• Data portability

• Frog poison therapy

• So much more

Marisa is a product and marketing strategist based in New York. She was the first hire at Arable Labs, an agricultural technology startup, and went on to lead their Product team. She joined Tlon Corporation as VP of Marketing and threw the first Assembly, an Urbit unconference. She then transitioned to VP of Product and lead the launch of Groups and Talk. Lately, Marisa has launched Uncommons Crypto and her own studio called Hope Rodeo. 

Artwork: Jean-François Millet, “Les Pissenlits,” 1867-8

In our first Episode, we've assembled the entire Vaporware team (all four of us) to chat about our Chief Architect Jack Ek's talk "PLAN: Purely Functional Programming With Batteries Included" which he recently gave at ⁠Lambda Conference⁠, the site where Urbit founder Curtis Yarvin first presented the technical specifications for Urbit/Nock back in 2016.

We discuss the differences between Urbit and Plunder, what makes Vaporware a Nock heresy and what's coming next. With Chase Van Etten, Vinney Cavallo, Jack Ek and host Daniel Keller