Gage 🃏🍎

Watching The Wire, I realized that if Jesus was born today, he wouldn’t be anything like we imagine Jesus to be. The Jesus of today would be a psychopath. But not the cliché, garden variety, power-hungry executive. He would be someone capable of winning at that game, but he wouldn’t be playing it. Think of it this way. In the game of power, morality is a liability. If you deviate from The Game, you get outplayed by someone who doesn’t. It’s bound to happen. In the show, this archetype is represented by Marlo – the apex predator who takes no chances. The embodiment of The Game itself. If you do play the game of power, you become one of the players. But you can’t transcend systems by perpetuating them. You must invent another game: another evolutionarily stable configuration in some ways better than the one you’re replacing. One that favors players other than pure psychopaths. One that is inaccessible to them. Have you ever wondered how games emerge? I’m not talking about just table games or video games. I’m rather pointing at complex systems with gravitational wells, where vibrant patterns establish and reinforce themselves. These vortexes of time-space that organize reality around them, making it seem like certain events “want” to happen. The whole category. These games are rarely architected. Every actor appears to be pursuing their local incentives, as always. The difference is what they’re chasing. Ultimately, all life is an ecology of games; each a different attractor in the probability space. Seen from this perspective, the conventional attempts at ”saving the world” may seem noble but silly at the same time. Especially when they seek to affect change by optimizing isolated parameters because that’s just playing the game blind. We can’t transcend systems we don’t understand. We must first understand what creates our current predicament and offer viable alternatives. That’s the hard part. It’s easier to perform charity by supporting what sounds good. I once saw a tweet saying that “the meek” in “the meek shall inherit the Earth” originally meant not someone who is weak but rather someone “who has a sword but chooses not to use it”. I don’t know if this statement is historically true. But if that book was written today, that’s what I think it would mean. The meek shall inherit The Game.

bring back intelligence agencies funding artists to manipulate public opinion

“Meaning Crisis” people are confused. There are two types of meaning: experiential and narrative. Experiential is the felt sense that life flows with meaning. You get it through consistently sleeping well, exercising, *play*, connecting with loved ones, entering flow, releasing addictions, and meditation. Narrative meaning you get from having a coherent story of your life and why it’s important, goals you’re moving toward, and knowledge of how your life relates to the cosmos. Almost everyone I meet who is seeking meaning is seeking *narrative* meaning while neglecting experiential meaning. This is backwards. Experiential meaning obviates the need for most types of narrative meaning.

All political ideologies are structurally psychotic, because they're an attempt to give a political entity a "body"

i promise you, your work is not worth $15,000/min or $900,000/hr

In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus basically says there is no store of value. There is wealth creation or wealth destruction and nothing in between.

In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus basically says there is no store of value. There is wealth creation or wealth destruction and nothing in between.

Pixels After Dark was my favorite event of Tech Week. Machines learning to act, artists making work in the room, and a question I keep returning to: who gets to tell the story? A field film about community and becoming the author of my own work. @SimularAI