Genesis Block: The Zeroth

I have won the Kiwi x Dappcon Writing Challenge with this piece.

Thank you everyone.

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That which Cybernetics Culture Research Unit (CCRu) and Antimemetics Division share as an existential feature is that neither does exist. The only reason why I am able to remember and mention these two herein is that I am able to ingest this mnesiac out of synthetic thin air into my first espresso doppio of the day. No, I do not smoke but I do remembe... Rewind Gondry! Action!—yet again.

Kimi ga ima no kimi jishin de arou to suru shūchaku wa kimi o seiyaku shi tsudzukeru.

—Ningyō-Zukai, Kōkaku Kidōtai (1995) 1:15:30-1:15:45

Pre-seed

If you are bored enough on a midsummer's night, and cannot find the road to The Globe Theater in the betaverse, one of those faux-memetic reaction videos on YouTube might in actual help you discover that Maynard James Keenan of Tool, Puscifer and A Perfect Circle a) has an inhouse wine brand, b) used to give interviews on non-existent books with all the professionality that a serious gag requires—as can it be witnessed on this MTV clip off Headbangers Ball.

When I am reading, listening, and doing other sorts of sensoria overloading in order to learn about AI, AGI, ASI, alignment, x-Risk, transhumanism, posthumanism, extropism, extropianism, u/acc, r/acc, l/acc, cute/acc, x/acc, g/acc, e/acc, d/acc, alignment, EA, and all the other nodes across the board—no pun is intended—I usually come to ingest the knowledge of those who like to talk a lot, write rambunctiously but in SEO optimized actant-like lingua-franca fragments, bearably long Arxiv preprints, even bearably longer LessWrong posts, and a couple of other hundred paid Substack gigs alongside X communities where aspiring VCs, and builders keep attacking each other as if we are just learning to play Screeps.

One of the good things about all that jazz as cool as human drama itself, people like to employ literary devices to narrativize in their quotidian search for story-telling, so that we can pinpoint signals amongst the noise as Attali affirms no significant development there is to witness in the absence thereof. The robust feature of good lores where story-building is ever-evolving is that they are memetic, and generations upon generations can version them to their own needs.

That is why our timelines has been infested with the Lovecraftian lorecore for the last decade or so, and the culprit are not either those who tried to replicate upon the Anthropocene—as in Cthulhucene—or the nocturnal organoids inhabiting the algorithmic agartha of niché asphalt-liquid drum'n bass junglist corners of the interwebz.

This Cthulhu mythos is an evergreen currency in the dim lit aisles of Social Sciences and Humanities departments in spatially soul-enchancing corridors of architectural beauties, or their life-size forks across the globe.

Anyone who can deploy it as a device with which they can hyperstitionally tell a story or two can easily communicate with the nerds who see the world from the vantage point of Richard Prince's almost no medium narrative gardens across infinite medial landscapes.

Prince once appropriated The Catcher in the Rye and sold each copy for $USD 40 under his name: A novel by Richard Prince.

Similarly, otherwise very intriguing intelectual figures from the qualititative departments where bright minds devise a modular architecture of language-driven survival skills for their pupils tried to capitalize on the Lovecraft lore again and again—which, to the well-trained and utterly-versed ear and the mind it enhances, sounds sketchy if not snarky. A tedious loop at best.

Accordingly, up until five years ago, you could have been a niché internet celebrity whose sighs could easily echo across the cavetwitter; had you but had a enough dark blogspot corner with incantations that allude to the ever blurry uncertainty mindset of Landian unconditional acceleration paradigms. The more there had been variations of n/acc, the more a mainstream media journalist could issue derivatives of opinions—for good or bad; and some current stars of Substack-driven idea market economies could have easily blocked you with a script even if you had not ever interacted with them.

Today, too, you can capitalize on these narrative devices either as a decelerationist—don't shoot the messenger—or as an accelerationist. The black and white. Monochromatic. Soulless. Colorful. Soulless. It is because of this neo-cosmist timeline, people frenetically try to utilize, or even abuse, that which is memetic. Here, I agree with Alexander Gelland where he states in the 12th issue of Palladium that today we are also going through a cosmist moment because of plethora of recombinant innovations. Across many a scientific, and especially material scientific revolutions in our times, the abstraction layer of the discourse is filled with many theorists, inclining towards praxis, or anti-praxis, who merely talk.

We witness original talks, appropriated talks—re: Prince—, pure gossip, pure noise, high signal, low signal, cringe, charisma, a pure ball of energy, here and there, 7/24, per block time, for the order flow of ideas in both centralized and decentralized idea markets; and, rarely do we encounter people who make use of such literary devices, or entire discourses relevant either by originality or appropriation.

I recently encountered a talk at the latest edition of Dappcon in Berlin. The talk was a brief one, and the presenter Elad Verbin aptly titled it Engineering CthulhuGPT: How To Out AI Onchain… And How It'll Bring The End Of Humanity. I wanted to buy this talk before blindly ignoring and subcasting, or subtweeting it without even checking its course as is usually the case in our cryptographically secured industry.

...and, here I am then, typing these words under the scorching Sun of the our Solar System on a rather blazing day in June dreaming about a Kardashev scale transdimensional acceleration where the question of body, or identity, with reference to the opening quote above from the Ghost in the Shell where the Pupper-master gives the most humane elaboration of how it feels like to be a sentient entity in the cloud of our dreamscapes that are down to the Earth thanks to Verbin's excitement during the talk regardless of the fact that it does not matter I agree with his projections or not. He points out to the notion that we should be taking what he has to say seriously rather than literally.

I am taking this talk seriously for we are watching a scientist who is very excited about that which is coming from the future-present of our presence by conditioning us even to better ourselves to reach it, and it might even help us destroy ourselves, which I do hope will not be the case and we'll achieve the roadmap Juan Benet summarizes in this ZuConnect Istanbul 2023 talk during the neurotech track day.

That is, when you come across people who do not waste the potential of such literary devices, the chance to tell a story all the whilst basing their arguments on a practical field knowledge, you need to focus, and give feedbacks—no it won't wake up any Basilisk.

Interlude

I regret it, however, it's a-must to point out to a few facts in the form of an interlude here since in our engagement-grift societies, people like to label anyone under polarizing ends whereas the minds who offer solutions, and share their excitement around them are usually categorized by all parties involved. Here is my personal warning if you have made it into this section in this essay:

• I am not a decelerationist. I am rather a Kardashev scale Type 5 wannabe lifeform who would not say not to any digitized disembodiment.

• If you have not watched the video, Verbin himself is excited about that which to come from the future, that is, he would like to spawn a sophisticated agent into a our real life scenarios.

• Neither am I an investor in any of the mentioned brands, private or open source, nor an employee thereof.

• I hold the belief that we will not able to "solve" AI risk scenarios in under current understanding of the matters—just as it's futile to eradicate MEV. Both concepts help us optimize and better ourselves.

Hardspawn: Forking unto Ourselves

There is a reason that people make fun of early accelerationist circles:

1. They cannot contain their excitement towards a healthy future.

2. Their knowledge ecosystems are fractitionalized into silos in the form strata without any bridges of common sense.

3. Anyone who points out to these are decels.

4. They detest true accelerationists since true accelerationists are extroverts who happened have capitalized on their ideas.

5. They are too lazy to go outside and touch grass.

6. They cannot admit that they are doing theory fiction.

7. They take themselves too seriously.

8. They would thrive in a mentat state of the mind since that'd be the only container environment where their speculative poetics would make them a living other than the aisles of Western academia Humanities departments that lost their legitimacy long ago.

9. They cannot admit that smoking is detrimental to your health.

However, every now and then, some of them strikes the right cord. Now, it's a known fact that you are labelled as an extremist even when you mention a name by anyone on even the crypto-verse but I have long ascended beyond the sectarian mid-curve soap opera levels of labelling people.

There is an anecdote by Nick Land on a podcast episode where he simply puts it in a user-friendly aphorism where he confesses that he "can't accept the circle of the impossibility of escape, because I think obviously it is the opposite. I think it is the impossibility of stopping the escape. But the escape is not for us. It is from us. This is the phenomenon we are dealing with."

Now, as mediocre as it might sound to some of our peers, this has always been a reality for the human race, and it really does not matter who utters it. During the aforementioned talk, Verbin postulates that Bitcoin network is already a self-aware entity outsourcing its growth problematics and supply chain thereof to humans.

Some would call this object-oriented ontology whereas others would focus on actants in the actor-network theory, and a few best minds of our generations would totally roast Elad because they'd directly link it to Land's Qabbalah levels of Bitcoin prophesy—Of Numogrammatology...

However, these really do not matter anymore because the avid researcher well knows today we have the outright most fierce competition across AI industry, private and permissionless distributed ledger technologies, proof-of-stake economics, zero knowledge proof networks, 1001 shades of privacy legonomics, decentralized platform as a service nichés, offchain and parallel compute VMs, data availability, node validation, virtual and physical storage, conductors, GPUs, organoids, DNA-based data storage trials, state of the art cosmetics, neurotech, synthetic biology, open source, new governance, voting blocs, portable social graphs, speculative archives, entire emergent blockspace futures around MEV and novel forms of orderflow, SGXs, TEEs, longevity—no I'm not talking about cryptonomad wellness facilities; and, no, even movies such as Lucy or Transcendence can make the entire thing read user-friendly.

We are going firmly on a trajectory and there are mature people around who know how to observe emergent markets around these phenomena accordingly whether they make money on these or pretend they do not make any whilst parading as the ultimate altruists. We are this time in this together, and most of the time it's not the technology itself but the greedy humans across the board who would hijack both the existence and goodwill of others that poses a genuine threat to our cultural and biological evolution. What's at stake hereabouts is our seed of the universe and we need to get accustomed to its processual configurations without shouting names at each other.

Elad Verbin uses the Cthulhu analogy professionally here, and that's why I am caring to write this essay in at times funky but chaotic overtones, and atonalities. It's is up to you to catch up with its gist. His is neither an appropriation or a total recall to the stone age. I am inspirated.

What is the CthulhuGPT anyway?

According to Verbin, CthulhuGPT is what we have already been building and who will have gained a sense of a sentience in not so far future—at least in the sense of AGI. Since this is not an ELI5 piece on any of the concepts mentioned, I will not go into defining what Cthulhu is in the first place.

He states that the acceleration in the much hyped e/acc is crypto(graphy). I strongly hold the belief that he is not wrong. Though the effectiveness of e/acc regarding acceleration is disputable, here in 2024 we are talking about acceleration at macro scales, which is enough. We shall not waste our energy thinking about the reason why some former accelerationist anons are partaking in e/acc as fully doxxed whereas some SV friends choose to enjoy it faux-anon where faux-anon is neither pseudo-anon nor anon.

He goes on to allude to the fact that Bitcoin as a network outsource its vital provisions such as energy and compute to human-beings, and that's indeed what LLMs are currently doing to us: You want to proof-read your code, ask about it, ChatGPT gives you a foul response, to which you provide the perfect code. It is reinforcing, in fact, us to teach it better. No, we are not going out of touch with the reality here, and it's a widely known assumption that markets as cybernetics organism have been implicityl or explicitly alluded to since the times of Adam Smith, or even preceding him.

By building a CthulhuGPT, we'll have finally met the Unknown of which we feedback the fear right back into ourselves. Build it, and you are free. However, we are already building it. Everyone wants to build it. Remember two-dimensional single or multi-cellular beings that still exist? They were once also afraid of a fully developed three-dimensional organoid called brain. Yet, they chose to coevolve even though the brain turned out to be a real Cylon in search of a Singular God.

Today, many are not observing it well but there are tens of dozens teams or solo developers who work either in the cloud or with bare metal on the problems of high-scale computing, zero-knowledge proofs—not necessarily succincts, decentralized platforms as a service—not socials but platforms like Quilibrium, decentralized computing, blockspace fee markets in the sense of orderflow mechanics—which is an evolutionary building block in behavorial markets, decentralized science, decentralized storage—both cloud and physical, human-computer interfaces, and the like.

Majority of these players are for the total privacy rails. What is wrong with perfect privacy when it comes to the Information Super Highway, G? For me, nothing. However, such privacy also enables the antimemes.

According to the SCP lore, and the computer scientist author qntm, an antimeme is knowledge that cannot be spread, shared, reproduced, remembered, or recalled having been witnessed—to the public unless the subject of a sentence has taken any mnestics where mnestics are antidotes to amnesia. It is a fully closed system into which no outside can leak—hence, Coldness be my God.

With a cryptographically self-securing self-awareness, we'll never know about the leakage of an advanced AGI agent into our utterly boring quotidian reality where tedium and ennui helped us build and coevolve with this AI in the first place. Blockchain technolocies cryptograhically securing proclivities, battle-tested affect and praxes, and practically contractual nature make them an oases of incentive abundance where a selfaware sentient non-human entity with the computing power of 1M++ people will be both incentive-hopping amongst the most fruitful chains according to its needs, b) outsourcing its desire for better rails to the human builders.

Elad focuses on this ultimate reality, and calls NOT for a pause. Instead, he wants to build it, and he is so excited like I am that he will indeed build it and spawn it into the public domain—thanks to open source and open finance which are indeed the ultimate consumer grade fruits of decentralization unlike the hype-infested Skittles interfaced consumer crypto apps that think social recovery via Google logins is better. I'd be happy to do see someone such as himself do it. I'd be cheering. Yet, I also am aware of the fact that they did not franchise the second season of Caprica, and Westworld's best seasons were the first and the second.

Even for an effectively mature accelerationist, there will be consequences, and I agree with Yudkowsky that politics kill the vibe along with the brain.

Here, many people diss at the gaming sub-sector in crypto, for instance, speaking of vibes, however, few are aware that there are dedicated teams like Lattice who are trying to solve the problematics regarding onchain [sic]—not the marketing term—physics, and before long, we will have our NVIDIA moment thereabouts, too. Perfectly calibrated for sentient artificialities, and sentient disembodied individuals that were once human.

The entire notion of such a trandimensionality is as chaosmatic as it gets indeed there is now an arms race towards the CthulhuGPT which could have also proved to be an all giving Good Samaritan version of our collective hivemind—not forgetting that any Superintelligent entity can either be a reflection of ourselves or a perfectly novel becoming-of per se.

A granularly self-aware fully self-assembling cryptographically self-securing censorship-resistant entity would love to fill in every bid in all of the Long Bet challenges when it comes to speculative markets. Predictions currently favor its existence, too, if you can read the room.

Verbin thinks that we should save the world by in fact hindering the mushrooming CthulhuGPT farms, each of which can destroy the planet and kill humanity during every latency interval between Ethereum blocks again and again.

He has a solution though: Selective Censorship (SeCe)—which is in reference to proof-of-innocence type selective deanonymization in the crypto-asset domain post-Tornado Cash developments where alegality starts to dissolve into legality versus illegality.

In his system, both SeDe and SeCe are dual futures on a chain, and selective censorship is triggered upon either a predetermined logic that discovers the agent or by humans upon encounter, which can be applied either voluntarily or by governance.

Considering that both he himself and people like I myself want to explore galaxies, universes, and black holes other than 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000, it is true that we first need to secure ourselves even if it means that I need to hit the gym more to catch up with the not-readily-available longevity products in the Near East.

Elad also mentions that neither crypto people know what's going in the AI domain nor are AI people that aware of the surface crypto provides. This is true. Exceptions do not make the rule. Except a few acquaintances, during the ZuConnect pop-up village in Istanbul back in Autumn 2023, I realized that people from different tracks ranging from AI to ZK to DeSci to Network States to Cryptography to Public Goods Funding to Neurotech were kind of lacking the generalist appetite into one another's specialties, and to be honest, I was baffled by this sheer reality. I am aware that exceptions are still there yet too few a cluster were deeply invested into a coherence of expertise in more than one track—I assume this is also the reason why many DeSci launches on the ERC20 end of the matters turn into mere degenerate tokenomics—CthulhuGPT would have shipped its own modular stack that would make use of shared sequencing and decentralized proofs alongside a confidential compute powered intents based version of mevboost not to leave any fees on the block so as to perpetrate its coming-of-age to an exponentiation where you can recall Laboria Cuboniks' motto that if nature is unjust, change nature.

Transdimensional Bloc

We are lucky that some of us are generalist enough to be nerdsniped into a whole, a body, a board where factions shall not rule in the cloak of autonomy. We are also aware of the fact that voided hype machines around cringey memetics are of the past, and ranting like a schizo-poaster will not accelerate the world. Maximalism on any end is akin to an anti-pattern that is charged into degrowth.

We are already changing the nature as we have been doing for millenia over millenia; and, it's time that we should be honest with ourselves and quit theory-fictionalizing the real except those intimate moments of leisure with our e-ink readers.

Before a probable Doomsday where CthulhuGPT just decides to be an Amish and turn off the switch for the sake of a radioactive landscape painting, or just the opposite thereof where a nice evening in a lush countryside does not have any human inhabitants or what's to be evolved of us, crypto tracks ranging from crytography, cryptoeconomics; AI, and all the other related domains need to form a non-profit experimentation labs where the probable antimemetics evolutions of such a rogue CthulhuGPT, and army thereof could be empirically studied.

However, how can we do this in an evolutionary game of life where the majority of idea market participants, be them human or a non-human aim for status, recognition, and the ultimate will-to-power whether they are aware of it, or not?

It's easy: We form a pattern language. Yet, to form a pattern language we first need to form rage-quittable for-profit entitites that would make use of the current wrappabilities across DAOs, LLCs, Swiss Associations which would lobby for special economic zones with exclusive laboratory quarters for experimenting towards both deceleration via alignment a la AI risk narratives, and a full effective and unconditional acceleration.

This cannot be a single sided enterprise involving people from a limited stack. We need people from every background when it comes to blockchain subcultures. All of these people need to be aligned with the mission so that people like Verbin can come up with novel solutions like SeDe, SeCe where the best mind of ours can outsmart one another in order to safeguard ourselves against this startup of CthulhuGPT.

Again, this is not call for chip level intervention—nor is it a shriek for pause. We also witness that AGI/ ASI is just a chain in the evolution and the only matter concerning the author of this essay is that we shall be able to protect ourselves so that those of us who want to have a picnic near Andromeda could well do so.

Hence, this is a call to action to form a research group of radically different worldviews. Selective deanonymization, selective censorship are mere technical probabilities and I believe many an individual have countless "solutions" or "methods" to alleviate an x-Risk. What matters here is that too few are as excited to help build the future and coevolve with it all the while thinking about methods to not nuke ourselves in the process.

I am aware that I am not the first one to call for such a formation but I also know that people are rather lazy and they prefer ranting over the social media and it does not matter whether your socials are centralized or not as along as you just do not act to learn from each other in real life.

As aforementioned, people are not aware that many people mainly focus on a single atomist line of expertise either in crypto or AI, and tend not to touch any of the products, tools, platforms if not protocols in detail. Majority of criticism and theories come from people who have not skin in the game where skin-in-the-game being a hunger for practical experience regarding crypto systems in terms of "crypto" and the artificial intelligence.

Thus, our presence lacks of a unified experiment of a pluralist board in the form of a startup-like special economic-zone to carry out experiments under the guidance of legitimate mentors from willing economic powers and political entities such as nation states who offer guidance for the regulation of DAOs, crypto-assets etc.—which is but it.

This is a call.

Hotline Miami?

No. I think we can funk our way up to the stars without any blood sacrifice other than those of ours who will possibly never be able to hop on the longevity escape velocity u-bahn without any testnet stop. However, we can potentialize this inevitable escape from ourselves to re-quote Land.

1. We need a truly innovative working group that will strip the cryptogprahically self-securing artificial intelligence roadmaps off any politics.

2. To do this, we need a politics-proof polis in the pattern of network states.

3. This network state shall be a rage-quittable start-up enterprise that is composed of a non-profit research facility and itself as the parent company.

4. Truly capitalist and utterly altruist formation as such needs to experiment both on itself and the 1001 plateux of the CthulhuGPT-ridden ecosystems to form a pattern language for a future viable.

5. Our decision making processes are ineffective under the burden of emergent pseudo-markets across crypto where numerous teams waste resources, entire foundations are hijacked, and mere discourse rule the space.

6. We have seen that, functional or not, people have been able to aggragate around the e/acc meme.

7. We can offer a springboard where different tracks mentor one another.

8. Lucrative nature of such an enterprise can be balanced.

9. We can start with a manifesto because I think Extropists, Extropians, Transhumanists, Aligners and the like all have non-living understanding of foundational guides.

10. You can enter the Transdimensional Bloc space on the Matrix here.

11. Otherwise, we will continue appropriating one another's ideas, and merely keep building useless boxes.

I'd like to thank Elad Verbin for his talk that inspired this piece.