Creative Loop

One band is a collective endeavour, two bands make a scene.

I’ve written and talked about all this before so i’m not going to repeat my self. Other than to say that one of the most formative times in my life, and my introduction to ‘the creative world’ was the hardcore punk scene in Margate in the late 90’s and early 00’s. If you wanted culture any culture at all, you had to do it together.

I recently watched this 15 year old lecture by Brian Eno, where he goes into his concept of Scenius in more detail than I have previously come across. So good.

I am aware that the meaning of the term ‘scene’ has been under constant re-negotiation since the Internet arrive, and what a scene ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ is something people have very strong opinions about, and I’m going to steer clear.

However; years and years ago now, before AI entered mainstream consciousness, I remember having a conversation with Mat Dryhurst about DIY punk and Scenius etc, but the main topic of conversation was about what is like to be in one. And one of the things I took away from that evening in the pub is that ‘scenes’ are so generative because at their core, people produce work for themselves and show it to their friends. All a scene really is, is just people just prompting each other in a tight feedback loop.

With that in mind I want to mention two things that have come back this week as part of the loop.

World Soul Fruit Fight

I received an email this week from Duc de Berry / Billy Crosby creator of the sprawling personal site hoofofconcept.com with a link to a 3 part audio project called World Soul Fruit Fight.

The email opened “monsters in the mirror is my fav bit of media I’ve be consumed so far this year” and then went on to explain they had generated three tracks with Suno, based on outputs from my Slop Machines GTP link where you can chat with the current draft of my in progress book. The grounding for it also contains worldrunning.guide, and a bunch of other unpublished writing.

Track 3 is my favourite. It’s amazing.

Listening to them for the first time, as an experience, was a bit like being inside a hallucination or a dream. The referencing of my ideas and imagery so familiar to me from my creative work comes in an out. There’s a bit about buying a sunset, the screen as a mirror, and the mall of abandoned brands… all appear in track 3 alone. It’s a very weird, wild, and inspiring feeling.

If unlike me, you don’t want to listen to synthetic media, do head over to hoofofconcept.com and browse around. It’s very zanny. I love it.

Claude Skill Creator

I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the response the to Hard Worlds posts I put out 2 weeks ago. A fork of Anthropic’s official skill creator now exists over on Github, which implements the ontology/theory derived from the knowledge object I supplied alongside the essay .

You can read the full write up on what happens when you use it against a mature skill file on twitter, but I’ve quoted the main results below. Overall, a massive success.

The SKILL.md is now a router that identifies what I’m asking for (drafting a thesis section? reviewing a risks edit? formatting the docx?) and loads only the relevant room file and exemplar. For this deal memo skill, context load per task dropped to 13-19K characters.

That’s a 74-87% reduction.The renderer (render_memo.py) takes a typed JSON intermediate – where each content block has a type like section_header, bullet, labeled_sub_bullet, risk_bullet – and produces the formatted Word document. The model’s job is to classify content into types and populate the text. The script handles fonts, spacing, tab stops, margins, bullet characters, page setup, and numbering and the model never touches python-docx.

The validators run automatically as part of the rendering pipeline. One checks the JSON structure before rendering (does the thesis have deal terms? are there enough risks? is CARR in the financials?). The other checks the text after rendering (e.g. no customer quotes in the body, risk labels under 4 words, CARR figures consistent across sections). I calibrated the structural validator against all 19 of my prior memos (a benefit of being at Battery for 10+ years!) measuring what’s always present, usually present, and sometimes present so the severity levels (fail vs. warn vs. info) reflect actual patterns rather than aspirational rules I came up with in conversation with skill-creator.

The result is that formatting bugs went to seemingly zero for this skill. v1 had a frustrating problem with competitor entries being standalone paragraphs – it was actually stated four times in different locations and still kept failing – and that issue is structurally impossible in v2 because competitor entries are a different content block type than section headers, and the renderer makes them sub-bullets by construction. The model can’t produce the wrong format because the wrong format doesn’t exist in the type system.

I do think this way of thinking about agent environment design has applications far beyond the creation of just skills though. But its early days yet, and the essay is still travelling out into cyberspace. Looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Start Select Reset 📑

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• FULLY finished the first draft of chapters 1-9 of SLOP MACHINES. 71k words. I think i’m going to do a big edit pass and and prepare myself for the closing chapter that way.
• Had a great call with Rich from Archetypal.
• Vibe coded my first proper app in AI Studio to get something done, and have been burning though free Gemini API quota every day since lol.
• Got a lot of gossip from pals in the UK game industry, sounds grim.
• Honestly there was drain chaos in my house this week and I lost ALL of Friday to it.

Terminal Access

Publishers weekly starred my friend Andrew Dana Hudson‘s newest novel Absence (our May 5th)

The thoroughness with which Hudson imagines how individuals and society would have to rewire themselves to contend with this bizarre phenomenon lends his tale impressive philosophical heft. The result is a poignant exploration of loss, grief, hope, and the fragility of existence that will resonate with readers beyond the fantasy and horror genres.

Reading

I finished reading The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira. It’s very interesting reframing of his first book Being Aware of Being Aware very helpful to see the same argument recast through the language and lens of ‘God’.

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky audiobook is out! I’m burning though it! So good!

LULO ELEKTON (Genre)

Last week i wort about how I had been injecting the Indonesian house music into my ears? Well i fell a bit deeper down the rabbit hole and I present to you Lulo Elekton, the hottest night out in Southeast Sulawesi Indonesia.

I have decided that Techno clubs would be 1000% more tolerable nights out in my 40s if they combined Kaely, or Regency era country dancing. What are we doing here in the west? There’s zero cultural innovation happening! meanwhile in Indonesia this is all the rage! And it’s live music!!

Remember Kids:

The post Creative Loop | Weeknotes #432 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 30, 2024

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Community 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

You know how in the Persona games the main characters get sucked into the television? Internet Escape Velocity is the opposite. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/03/30/2402-internet-escape-velocity/

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Internet Escape Velocity

This week, I’d like to talk about my concept of ‘Internet Escape Velocity‘.
But before I can do that, we need to talk about community.

For the last five years or so, one of the big online trends online has been the creation of communities. Artists, filmmakers, musicians, even brands were told to build a community around their work.  and not cultivate an audience. Just as the meaning of the word ‘friend‘ was diluted and stretched out in nothingness during the 2010s so a similar thing has happened to the concept of ‘community‘.

I’m not saying that this is all bad per-se. It’s just what is happening.

But I do think that the things we now call ‘online community‘ have almost nothing to do with the meaning of the word ‘community’ as we experience it in real life. I think we need a better word to describe what these things are. In fact I agree with Rafa the Builder. ‘Community’ is the purest form of Internet media. As my friend Wassim Alsindi has said: “The medium is now an assemblage of the message AND the messengers, enmeshed and entangled together.”

Sounds like a particular form of Techno-Social System to me.

Anyways.

For my part, I’ve largely eschewed setting up any kind of community space for subscribers or people interested in my work. Because managing a community is hard, and quite frankly, sucks.

I spent much of my online teenage years as an admin on a PHPBB forum attached to a website dedicated to the local DIY punk music scene. This was around 2001 and this experience shaped my idea of what online communities are.

The forum was inhabited by people who all knew each other in real life. We would see each other every Friday at the local punk venue. Being tied to a real-world place, time, and scene meant that the worst of the forum flame war drama was bound up with real-world interpersonal conflicts and beef. 

Vice versa too: the phrase “Chat shit online, get glassed in real life” was a lesson I saw someone learn at 1 am on a windswept clifftop when I was 16.

But this community of people, regardless of its problematic social dynamics, was one that got things done. We organised gigs, charity football events, parties, tours, record releases, and made zines. Facilitated by online technology, but also our physical proximity in real life.

Margate’s punk scene at the turn of the millennium was a community that had escape velocity.

Social Gravity

Most of the creators I support online have a Discord and as a result … I’m in a lot of Discords. But it’s clear to me, half a decade into the so-called ‘community experiment’: That unless a great deal of energy is expended managing an online community  – usually by the creator and/or motivated unpaid admins – they will die off. 

All online communities begin with a default amount of what I’ll call ‘Social Gravity‘. This then attracts like-minded people towards it. As more and more people join, the community begins to burn brighter. Usually for about a window of six months to a year, but then taper off as social issues are left unaddressed and people subsequently lose interest. The forum, like an old and lonely white dwarf, becomes a quiet social club for social people.

It’s during the initial attractor phase that a community begins to sense that it’s reached potential Escape Velocity.

Escape Velocity

You know how in the Persona games, the main characters get sucked into the television? Escape Velocity is the opposite.

A community vibes based equation of: time, energy, and motivation. That, if balanced correctly, will allow it to manifest things out of cyberspace and into real life.

They might seem cringe in 2024 but the flash mobs of the mid 00’s are a good example of Escape Velocity. Ideas that began on the Internet and acquired enough gravity to pierce the membrane of cyberspace and manifest in real life.

There are many projects that have reached escape velocity in my own media diet:

Josh Citarella’s ‘Do Not Research’ has yielded art shows, books, and journals etc. The ‘New Models’ podcast runs events and ‘The Near Futurelab‘ Discord has all sorts of initiatives that have reached Escape Velocity and spun out into real life or the Internet. And I had my own recent experience of a Telegram group that I’m in Reaching Escape velocity. We put on a conference and published a 56 page journal earlier this month.

It’s important to recognise though, that when a community forms around the gravity of an idea, reaches Escape Velocity and manifests something into real life, it transforms.

Become a Project

It ceases to be a community and becomes a project. The community doesn’t go away, it now travels along with the project – supporting, creating and consuming its outputs. To paraphrase Jenny Odell: A project is the creation of things for people with the context to understand it.

Lots of creators currently shepherd Discords full of talented people. Escape Velocity is a useful metaphor for a community goal, and not a means. Too many places end up missing the peak gravitational moment and instead fall away into a comfortable hang out orbits. 

And this is where Metalables comes in. They are a weak signal for communities and groups of people seeking Escape Velocity after the gyre of the Creator Economy. Yancy Strickler, ever one to coin a catchy phrase, calls Metalabels “Creativity in Multiplayer Mode”.

Escape Velocity is an articulation of the idea that:

We all need to do more, with others, in real life.

And how we get there.

The post Internet Escape Velocity | 2402 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Find the Others

Last month I wrote about game designer Paul Cezge’s new newsletter and titled the post ‘Real Things For Real People‘.

My own efforts making a zine over the last two years – creating, printing, and mailing physical items – stem from a belief in the importance of tangible connections with people.

The act of sending and receiving real things – be it a zine, a newsletter, or even a one-dollar PDF to real people is an important antidote to the impersonal nature of the kinds of digital exchanges we currently find ourselves with. 

Maybe it’s a legacy of having grown up in a DIY punk scene or because I’ve been making zines since I was 10, but making and creating real things and putting them into real peoples hands is something that I’m increasingly feeling more and more passionate about as we head into the mid 2020’s.

A few people have asked me how I square his with my consulting job being almost entirely about techno-social systems, virtual worlds and narrative metaphors. But I honestly don’t see any disconnect at all … We live inside of techno-social systems.

The Internet (and the virtual worlds that precede it) is for meeting people. It’s always been about discovering a shared place online and subsequently sharing your ideas, time, and attention with people who have the same interests as you. The Internet is about meeting people and facilitating/coordinating action in real life. I’m not just talking about politics here, I’m talking about everything.

The memories of my 20’s are punctuated by secret warehouse noise raves, guerrilla gardening mobilisations, and beach parties. Remember how weird and wild flashmobs were in the mid 00’s I went to a few of them too? All of this stuff was organised online. The most important socialweb era ‘social technologies’ are in my opinion, things like meetup.com and Facebook events – before they got weird, shit and spammy.

Party’s aside, these technologies facilitated other things in my life too: The Murray Bookchin reading group I used to attend in a squat, RPG design meetings in cold and draughty social club spaces, and things like WordPress or camera nerd meet ups.

My point being, that because of the way that the Internet has impacted my life, I have an unshakable understanding that it’s a coordinating mechanism for finding others. Building community, and then meeting real people and doing real things in real life.

Check out this 1995 video of Bill Gates talking to Letterman about the Internet and ‘how you can use it to find people with the same interests as you‘:

Almost all of Letterman’s ‘funny man’ objections through out the interview are him pointing to existing cultural coordination technologies that dominated culture back in 1995 – the example in the clip I queued up – Magazines. Unfortunately for us 30 years later, magazines are all gone. And trying to find the others on social media in a way that isn’t algorithmically mediated by ad-tech is almost impossible.

Floating Croissant

In the 2020’s ‘The Others’ are mostly found the Dark Forest. I’m not sure how you, but I’m in lots of little Telegram and Signal groups chats, plus Discords both big + small. And one of these group chats is called ‘London AW Floating Croissant Chaos Agents’.

During DevConnect last year an existing Telegram group chat was used to pile London based people into as we met each other around the convention. It’s a group of people all interested in building Autonomous Worlds on the blockchain.

The group chat is a lively one. Full of artists, programmers, theorists and games developers engaged rolling discussion about books and articles on virtual worlds, metaverse legislation and recommendations for locations of finest baked goods from across London. The group chat’s name still retains an element of its original function – to coordinate a breakfast meeting on a narrowboat on the Regent’s Canal.

Unlike other groups I’m in however, this one has enough escape velocity to manifest things in real life. There’s been several whole chat group meet ups since November 2023 and some smaller impromptu pub meetings too.

There’s a lot of energy in the chat as it’s made up of a collective of people who have all had several ‘lives’. As a result we all have a lot of motivation and skills to make things happen. And earlier this month two things happened…

Open Croissant + Floating Worlds

First, a few people in the chat who are founders at two companies building in the scene decided to run a fringe event on Autonomous Worlds to coincide with ETHGlobal London 2024. They named the event ‘Open Croissant‘.

Upon hearing the news, I and a few others decided it would be cool if the group produced a semi-regular journal/zine on the subject of worlds. Just 10 days later, all 56 pages of Floating Worlds went to print. Then we waited 7 working days for delivery, and then further 2 for the conference.

The zine included essays from Tonk, J David Osborne, AWTNMY, Me, A manifesto from the AUTONOMOUS CULTURE RESEARCH BUREAU, OPNPC, and Kitty Mayo. And includes a games corner with a word search and a pastry related solo RPG.

I went though a weekend crash course in print design and layout, and Goblin Oats from tonk.gg did all the art.

As an aside, its the first time I’ve used print.work – the company single handedly keep the zine economy alive in the UK – and my experience was great. They held my hand though my PDF export as print PDFs are more complicated than literally rocket science! No issues (apart from the ones on my end!).

Playmint got some mech made up, a dice and a nice tote bag, and the conference where we handed them out went really well!

It was well attended, with lots of familiar faces and some Twitter handles materialised into meat space as actual people. Tonk.gg gave a talk and several of the Playmint team also spoke. The zine came out of Tonk’s marketing budget, but in future Floating Worlds is going to be funded by dues at our meet ups to ensure that we can print/make another issue later in the year.

It was quite amazing that we managed to go from *we should make a journal* to *here’s the journal* in side of 10 days. Folks in the chat are the sort of people who had essays ready to go.

I’m super proud of our little London based worlds chat group. I learnt a lot (and a hard lesson) about doing more ambitious print things for my own zine.

This zine isn’t for sale or anything, they are all gone. A limited run for a single event/conference.

REINER 6 Digit self incrementing mechanical number stamp

Speaking of zines. Because this was a blockchain related event, and we all know that crypto people sure LOVE a non-fungible collectable. We thought that Floating Worlds should probably be a numbered edition.

Let us all Un-fung the fungible with numbers.

When I come to making my own 50-60 page edition of Start Select Reset (SOON) I’ll be using this stamp to number the copies too. As of right now my amortised cost of the mechanical hand stamp is 50p per use. But that will come down further as I use it for the rest of my life making my own zines lol.

Anyways. If you have a chat group with high escape velocity. Make a zine or do something IRL.

The post Floating Worlds appeared first on thejaymo.net.

October 18, 2019

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Community 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 | Permanently Moved 🔊

Still thinking on the same thread as last week about being inspired by other people in my life, and wanting to do more ambitious things.

Links:

Enemy’s Review of Holly Herndon @ the Barbican : https://www.nme.com/reviews/live/holly-herndon-live-review-barbican
Utopian Drivel : https://huw.substack.com/

Bad Gays : https://badgayspod.podbean.com/

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Inspiration and Setting Bigger Goals

Hello everyone, I am back again! Another output of my weekly hour long burst of intensity. I must admit once again that as I sit down to make this show and type the first words into this google doc, I have no idea what is going to come out from my fingertips. A few people have asked about how fast I write the 1k words needed to make this show, and the answer is that it’s all first draft, and the words on the page are exactly what poured out of my brain. The audio essays I’ve made this year I have been pleased with, as it has honed my ability to offload or data dump an argument that has been gestating in my head throughout the week.

Sadly or perhaps thankful for the last couple of weeks, I haven’t had anything that has occupied my thoughts. I tend to be much less inside my head when i’m extremely busy, with the run up to unsound, then the week away etc. This week I have mainly been up to my elbows in wordpress building a new personal website, consolidating many parts of my previously deliberate desperate online presence. But regardless. The thing I have been thinking about mainly this week has carried over from the last. My friends inspire me.

I went to see Holly Herndon this week perform PROTO at the Barbican in London. And yet again I cannot escape the feeling of being inspired by seeing people achieve and execute. Doing and sharing the things they love and are passionate about. The performance was fantastic, it was a real pleasure to see Holly, Mat and the whole ensemble enjoying the show as much as the audience. And of course you couldn’t shake a stick at the audience without a segment of London’s creative scene falling out. I went with my friend Jen, a photographer, who had no idea what to expect when the lights went down and her review of the show was that it was emotional. And I cannot agree more. Keep up the good work team.

Speaking of inspiration. My good friend and comrade Huw Lemmey has been making work that excites him over on his newsletter at Utopian Drivel – Found over at huw.substack.com. That inturn inspires me. We spent many hours talking about our creative lives earlier in the summer, when hiking mount montserrat outside of Barcelona where he lives and has said some kind words about permanently moved in his newsletter previously.

Through encouragement he has recently started making audio versions of his newsletter. An audio show which is perhaps the opposite of this one. Permanently Moved primarily being an audio project that has spawned a zine (which if you haven’t seen it this year can be found at thejaymo.net/zine). Whereas Utopian Drivel is an outlet of a writer who has moved into creating audio.

This week is his second audio experiment and its fantastic. He is talking about his experience of Barcelona and the cities response to the jailing of the pro independence politicians for sedition. Here’s a clip from the opening of the show:

[[AUDIOCLIP]]

I think you’ll agree that it’s just fantastic. And is a huge inspiration to me. I highly recommend you all head over to huw.substack.com right away and subscribe, or if you prefer your audio content about villains and gays. Huw is also the co host of the bad gays – A podcast about evil and complicated gay men in history. Links to both in the show notes.

I’ve said several times here that I have other audio ideas that I want to work on. One of which, an audio comic, is in progress. But since Huw published that newsletter recorded with the same field mic that I reviewed last year in episode 1810, I now want to do something ambitious. A good project to work on as the days get colder and the nights get longer. I just need to execute. Move things from the world of ideas and manifest them through action.

Because at the end of the day that’s what matters, I was talking to a writer recently who was telling me they have a complicated relationship with readers who get in touch with something like “how did you get in my brain?” “reading your work was like I actually got around to publishing some of the things that I mean to blog about!”

As if there’s some equivalence between having thoughts about something and actually writing them down. Its hitting publish that matters if we wan’t to shed our fears of being ordinary.

In the beginning this show as it is now is today, was a goal.

The post Inspiration and Setting Bigger Goals | 1929 appeared first on thejaymo.net.