Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

🌿 Foraging in High-Dimensional Data

2 3

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Aug 5

Thinking a/b an AI-enriched world that actually benefits humans & how it'll help us explore, not just get tube-fed by algorithms. Here's my talk from @divintelligence.bsky.social on how complex systems science & game design inspired me to imagine this future:

michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/foraging

My talk from the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2025 on how we can draw from thinking in complex systems science and game design to heal our relationship to the Web.

This is Hollywood's Liberal Fantasy, and it's Falling Apart

2 5

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Aug 4

Beautiful, and very well-timed. Reactionary preservation of the status quo is not enough. Conviction must be met with action. Are we afraid to dream of better futures? There is such a thing as good ambition.

youtu.be/sJjODY-PyJY?...

YouTube video by Like Stories of Old

youtu.be

2

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 27

Of course that might come off as basically Thomas Pynchon

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 27

I would love to see an early 20th Century Lovecraftian prequel to Accelerando where the Vile Offspring are corporations, as implied by @cshalizi.bsky.social in this legendary blog post:

bactra.org/weblog/699.h...

The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone

bactra.org

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 27

In that sense, AI already kicked people out of most of the best jobs decades or centuries ago. Now everyone just serves the big machine, and we are fighting over who gets to keep working in some bunk industry instead of for the capacity to take care of ourselves without oppressive superstructures.

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 27

Definitely. And this has been going on for a long time. The only way this is an "AI unemployment" issue is if you consider the inhuman aggregations of industrial modernity a form of AI (which I do, and think people should, because it affords much clearer thinking about the alignment problem).

1 3

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 27

Thanks! And they had it going on.

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 27

Post deleted? Ah well.

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 27

I wish I had known that before writing this! Worth inclusion.

Reposted by Michael Garfield

Chenoe Hart @chenoehart.bsky.social · Jul 8

I’m not quite sure what to think about this conceptual, aesthetic and philosophical exploration of crab-ness, but it reminds me of how Le Corbusier was inspired to pioneer the development of brutalist architecture after looking at a crab shell.

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 4

The long-awaited (first draft written *last AUGUST*) debut at @aeon.co is here! Probably my most comprehensive and audacious statement on human-technology evolution published anywhere to date. Detours through sci-fi, memeology, military and natural history, and more.

Aeon Magazine @aeon.co · Jul 4

Our technologies have formed a hard exoskeleton around us. Are we destined to become crab people?

1 1 2

Reposted by Michael Garfield

crAsh @crashbanzai.bsky.social · Jul 8

Reposted by Michael Garfield

Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · Jul 8

this rules

Are humans destined to evolve into crabs? | Aeon Essays

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 27

Have we considered the problem isn't impending loss of jobs but existing loss of availability for meaningful work because of jobs

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · Jul 15

So, if we really want to tackle the loneliness problem, we need to prevent paid work from demanding so much of our time and energy that we can't (or simply don't want to) contribute to a shared project of care. Because that pressure is at the core of both loneliness and inequalities in care. 4/

1 4 23

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jul 4

The long-awaited (first draft written *last AUGUST*) debut at @aeon.co is here! Probably my most comprehensive and audacious statement on human-technology evolution published anywhere to date. Detours through sci-fi, memeology, military and natural history, and more.

Aeon Magazine @aeon.co · Jul 4

Our technologies have formed a hard exoskeleton around us. Are we destined to become crab people?

‘Everything becomes crab’ is more than an absurd meme. The crab is a deep symbol of our devil’s bargain with technology

buff.ly

3 8 44

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jun 30

Ah right on! Yeah, that was a good run. Sorry to miss you! Hit me up any time. Still in the game, just not there.

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jun 29

Indeed! 😇 But the bastards locked my QR code. Who are you and what are you doing in Santa Fe?

Self-Actualization in the Global Brain with Cadell Last of Philosophy Portal

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · Jun 8

John Lilly's Reality Protocols, 1977, reproduced in Diana Reed Slattery’s Xenolinguistics, 2015, Chapter 5: Reality Reviewed (which alone is worth the price of the book)

1 3

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · May 31

William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth (1973) p151

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · May 30

Jamming with Cadell Last on self-actualization and transformation in our age of magical technologies — how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity, a an argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value.

#HumansOnTheLoop

michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-18

A guide to staying human and becoming ungovernable in the midst of the Singularity

☯ Why Should "I Contain Multitudes"?

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · May 30

If you’re attached to “being more than a machine”, consider that the difference between you and a next-token prediction algorithm might be 4B years of improv practice.

Then again, it’s very hard to pivot from a story that you think you are.

Part Two:

michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/hotl-10

On making peace with paradox as we turn and face the strangeness of AI.

🦋 What Is "Being More Than A Machine"?

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · May 30

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” in Esquire (1936)

Part one of a new series on containing paradox:

michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/hotl-09

On perspectives on perspectives, and why it matters to tech ethics.

4

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · May 12

2025 be like

The Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael Dean

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · May 5

The Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael Dean

open.substack.com/pub/michaelg...

Humans On The Loop Episode 17

open.substack.com