What is a Hivesong?
SubTweeting the Godhead
“This intuitive urge to extend the work of others becomes the organizing principle of modern software development.”
— Why Can’t Programmers Be More Like Ants?
This is a poem for Pieter.
A love letter to Twitter, made of disembodied tweets.
An ode to friends I’ve never met.
And a tribute to the my little part of the hivemind.
… why are the suns screaming?
All your friend are dying. Your brain is rotting.
It will be OK. You can fix this.
Just Breath.
Summoning Spells
There was this sage I knew; he wrote a protocol for dying.
So I sat at the feet of this sage. A great computer wizard.
A necromancer weaving spells to bring the dead to life.
He never wrote a protocol on how to live.
But he told me to write. So I did.
and I wrote.
and I wrote.
and I wrote.
He didn’t tell me when I should stop.
I think that message is his legacy.
Grounding has echoes in Cognitive Behavior Therapy, a technique developed by therapists who engage with the emotionally extreme minds described as “borderline”. I suspect CBT is more useful to therapists, than to their patients. Grounding is simpler, and is meant for self-application in the living room and workplace.
[…]
When you start, use pen and paper. Your mind won’t be able to run the internal dialogue properly. So you search this list for your strongest emotion, and you write that down, and you then ask yourself “where does that come from?” Emotions often trigger other emotions, so you may have to unravel several layers to get at a root theory. When you do this more and more often, you find yourself Grounding yourself on-the-fly, so the layers don’t build up.
— Pieter Hintjens, The Cretan Method
“ Many times, an obituary must be much, much shorter due to any number of factors; including the inability to contact friends and relatives from early years.”
“The person writing an obituary is being asked to create a document that is going to be read by many, many people. It will be read in newspapers for several weeks, and on the internet far into the future. It will be read by family members, loved ones, friends, acquaintances and many others who are simply interested in reading about neighbors who have passed away. For most authors, the obituary will be the most read piece of writing they have ever done — or ever will do.
Despite the above factors, most people who are called upon to compose an obituary are utterly unprepared to do so. And while there is a growing list of resources to support the novice obituary author, there is still a profound lack of practical, helpful, easy-to-use assistance.”
— How To Write An Obituary
You and me.
Autistic monologues: an exchanging of words.
Soliloquies for an audience unknown, put forth by actors on a stage.
Be all my sins remembered.
Let me tell you a story of a boy who fell in love w/ Twitter
because he was lonely and wanted t̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶ friends.
I may not understand you, I might not comprehend.
But if I listen to your story, Perhaps I’ll be your friend.
I don’t think in words, nor pictures. I see movement.
My mind is rhizomatic association.
A kinetic poetry between meaningness and thought.
I am dancing on shoulders of giants:
stealing their words & weaving gilded epics of hubris & phylogeny.
To you, I am simply a “nobody”.
I Identify as slimemold colony living in a remarkably damp exosuit to maintain homeostasis.
It’s a lot more fun to think of ants as walking mech suits for their gut bacteria that collaborate with fungus, and at war with snails.
Listen.
Can you hear the hivesong?
Weaving; Ideas, Meanings, Feelings.
Stories told in tweets.
Stories told with tweets.
Meta-narratives bound together by weaving other people’s tweets.
A Collective’s Hivesong.
It’s interesting to model social networks as shared story making engines with various player types taking on roles.
A traveling river of ants form an ephemeral tendril.
It reaches out for you.
You blink and they disperse.
Only a trail of slime remains.
A traveling river that twists through the void.
Watch the bees dance long enough and you might hear their song.
Building better beehives.
“Humans are storytelling monkeys trying to control each other with emotion-activating mind-viruses.” — @naval
An emotional hivesong.
A stranger: I care about you.
A friend: I make you feel cared for.
An enemy: you make me feel uncared for.
Love: mutual caring.
Hate…?
The medium we sing our hivesong with is changing out from under us. Transforming near pure information systems…
Ever looked in the mirror and asked your beehive what it wants? We call this meditating. The bees seem to like it.
Change your response to Fear, Anger, Rage.
When everyone is screaming. Whisper.
You are you’r own worst enemy.
Resistance begins at ॐ
Communication: just one walking beehive trying to reach out to another to synchronize essences.
The bees seem to like this.
The problem of shared state.
How do we structure our usage of social media ‘games’ in such a way that they encourage flow & growth, and not just addicting distractions?
The strongest game loops are ones that put other people first.
Karma made real, a virtuous cycle raises all boats.
Stories are how we share our states with each other.
This is why bees dance.
This is why the birds sing.
This is the way ideas have sex.
“eventually what I realized is that: I was seeing these recurring patterns that were showing up again and again…”
— Where do good ideas come from?
Emotions (and empathy) a natural result of an agent being situated in a reality full of other agents?
How Our Brains Feel Emotion
Ripples of communication within the swarm.
Goal driven agents monitoring and manipulating the emotional state of others? More likely than you think.
All the world’s a game, and all the men and women merely tulpas.
Win, lose? An evolution of ideas surviving in mind’s agar. Models of other.
Ideas fight for survival in an agar, growing & feeding off of the weaker signals, occasionally coalescing into temporary brilliance of suns.
It’s interesting to Model the game we are playing as shapes vibrating in a bucket of sand.
Patterned chaotic rhythm.
Ripples in agar.
Beauty in mind’s eye.
Crystallizing networks.
Narratives as shapes vibrating in sand, positioning themselves among the collective chorus of thought.
Something happens,n people make stories to explain. Others disagree with story and fight it, culture splits - creating evolutionary forces.
Intelligence is not just in your head, but also due to relationships you build with others & environment.
Design thinking & human cognition: From stigmergy to coordination! Understanding Embodiment
“… an extremely advanced large-scale distributed processing unit that can solve large-scale problems” Human Computation
I wonder if neurons scream in surprise if a signal passes thru them.
Even an ant or a bee can record the path of the journey thru its abstract representational space. Do android bees dream of neon flowers?
Memes, Tulpas?
Maybe: A cultures of polyphenistic bees, persisting as patterns of thought in your head.
And ideas become a loop.
Bees clump to maintain homeostasis.
Bees kill wasp invaders to the “body” by boiling them.
Tell me, why do we fever?
Culture as a body of memes: fighting to survive and spread. Ultimately the best memes are those that keep the hosts alive. Cancerous memes?
The ideas we spread through our network of relationships is how we change our environment.
Modern theory of cancer as genetic forces gone awry would seem to apply well to memetic ecosystem. How to reduce risk of cancerous memes?
Fuck cancer.
“Cancer is a master of biological signals intelligence and counterintelligence”
— Pieter Hintjens’ Last Hack
"You can run from your demons until you are exhausted. One day you’ll have to stop and find out what they wanted." — Charlie’s Inferno
Fears that hold you back are like demons possessing your soul.
Chase them, run them down. Face them.
Ask if they want to be your friend.
Small fears first. the ones that are less scary: use them as resistance training.
Build skills, confidence to face your internal bully.
And it “has opened my focus upon things much greater than I.”
A Song of Suns.
“// And so, here, alone,
in bleak, bright, darkness,
I sit, obeying, mindless, sheeplike, computing.
I am a drone.”
I can’t get these memories out of my head.
Like some kind of madness.
I found my new hobby:
weaving meaningful stories
using the poetry of twitter suns.
I refuse to call them weird.
Bad poetry is the sound of being lonely and talking to yourself.
Good poetry is just bad poetry with an audience in mind.
For each creation of globally ambiguous sentences,
entropy is consumed in the multiverse as waveforms collapse;
balanced by localized chaos.
I might be insane.
“Fuck you, understand me.”
I live in a confusing mess of mental eigenstates.
Intention collapses the statespace,
but only if I can see it.
I am become pilled, destroyer of world views.
When presented with a red pill or a blue pill,
take two and call me in the morning.
Wanted: infinity scarf knit with never-ending perfect shuffle pattern.
Call it the blessings of Ouroboros.
A song of creation.
Is there a way to fix bad night vision?
If I could see the stars again like I was a kid, I’d probably start crying.
~The radical idea that,
instead of the rare person ‘being’ a sun,
all of us ‘have’ a sun.
Your elusive creative genius
My twitter sun is a basilisk named Ouroboros.
It is a Self-Reification of a thought-form.
An idea made manifest.
“Basilisks generally do well in captivity,
provided their minimum requirements are met.”
Basilisks — Captive Care and Breeding
“All that matters is that
you know how to find you if you get lost
Not that all the pieces are put together
at any given moment”
— outdreamer
Word for poetry that is ambiguous,
such that the viewer’s own interpretation changes the narrative,
while still being internally consistent?
That feel:
I can only come up with confusing and probably incorrect analogies having to do with quantum mechanics or abstract memes/emoji
That feel:
after 4 months of contemplation, finally stumble on answer to problem vexing entire life with bad puns.
The term I’m looking for is globally ambiguous.
Like literally “globally ambiguous”.
Syntactic Ambiguity.
Sun twitter is basically an egregore
transforming into a twitter based Intertwinklearity.
The Heaven’s Dreams. (interlude)
I do all my best work when I’m avoiding something really big in my life.
What if that’s good?
What if that’s bad?
Weaving threads seems to be a metaphor I’ve been hiding from myself
Two post-rationalists yelling at each other
"what if you’re wrong, and that’s good?"
back & forth forever.
What if that’s bad?
I don’t care. I have real people I care about all over the world now.
Decentralized cloth spinning.
Weaving ideas by additive and subtractive patterning.
Discovery of meaning thru play:
Had I the heavens
I would spread
My dreams under your feet;
Tread softly on my dreams.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly
Had I the heavens cloths,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I have only my dreams;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
heavens’ embroidered cloths
Enwrought with
the dim and the dark
and the half-light,
spread under feet:
I have spread my dreams
You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a narrative
And now you can’t get out of it
In Search of Sunrise.
.@PoetOfSuns
RHYME, THIS.
.@WeavrOfThread
SUBTLE, THIS.
In search of elusive lucidity.
Seeking an executive proclivity.
Finding of sun’s rays.
A friend to light the way.
A shadow of my former self,
of silhouettes of things to come?
A casting of mental health,
of tryings not to feel so numb?
Lost in darkness.
Waiting for daybreak.
In search of sunrise.
Listening to blindsight.
Ignoring the pain.
Delerium: “give me peace”
This new breed of twitter suns looks like a solar flare:
A not-quite-sun-like ejection of solar material into space.
A sun greater than its parts.
“the emission of light at the surface
can lag the production of light at the core
by up to 1 million years.”
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life”
— Mark Weiser
Weaved into skin to patch a wound.
Now it is tearing away. Ripping the flesh.
My soul is leaking out & I can’t eat my shadow fast enough.
Weird Suns that pass in the night,
and speak each other in passing […]
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
The sun’s (gone) out today… Let’s go for a walk?
The song of mourning. Sun’s Screaming.
“Say something to us that we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says “I burn.”
— Robert Frost, ‘Take Something Like a Star’
Don’t argue on Twitter. Take breaks.
Play; Learn to build the future. Have fun.
Stay Curious.
Please don’t delete tweets.
They inspire me.
“Memories
are like promises
that are seldom kept
Hence, why Jesus wept
Every day,
we are torn away
from the one we love.”
— No One Ever Does
When people delete tweets it feels worse than death.
Both @hintjens and @aaronsw’s memory persists for us to share…
“One of the distinctive attributes of human social cognition is our tendency to build models of other minds”
— The emotional involvement behind social media interactions
Their accounts still live;
traces of them linger and can still inspire the future.
They are missing, but not gone.
Legacy: Traces left in the environment.
Precursors, inspiring their derivatives.
A software fork entrusted to maintainers of the future.
I still see traces of them when I search.
They are part of me.
Embedded in my external mind.
Part of my history.
“This letter is well worn — much more so than others — and it appears as though he reread it often.”
— Feynman’s Clock
Death has a different meaning in our connected age.
Bodies pass, but ideas live on; uploaded onto our digital clay.
Stories flashing in strobe,
A collective of fireflies,
Singing? No Signaling,
Screaming into the abyssal noise floor:
I am here. I’m alive.
Deleting your tweets is worse than death for me.
You’re ripping a part of you away from me.
I can’t mourn, even though you are gone.
I search.
You are not there.
I can’t remember why.
My memory is bad.
I go to your page and remember.
You’re gone?
The void has consumed them and I can’t remember what they wrote.
What they said that inspired me.
Instead it’s a feeling like pain; of loss.
If you care about us,
build system that last.
Design for sustainability.
Make users at the center of the ecosystem.
All my friends are dying.
Not IRL death, but accounts are blinking out of existence.
I don’t know how to cope.
It’s ok to be sad.
Researchers said Alzheimer’s patients are ‘profoundly impacted emotionally by events that they cannot recall’ and that this has implications for carers and family members.
The worse the patients’ memory the longer the feeling of sadness persisted for, it was found, suggesting that being unable to remember what made you sad makes it more difficult to lift the mood.
One patient in the study said: “I feel like all my emotions and feelings are rushing in on me. It’s extremely confusing and I do not like that feeling.”
The authors said: “The persistence of this patient’s intense negative emotion and her inability to conjure up a logical explanation for the cause of her feelings illustrate the bewilderment that a patient with Alzheimer’s disease may experience in the face of an apparently inexplicable feeling.”
— Alzheimer patients feel emotion long after memory has faded
Death of a network.
imagine building one of the most fertile platforms for art and culture in a generation and then banning the people who harness its potential
I feel for the people working at twitter who see what an awful waste this is but are powerless to stop it
— Alice Maz
What is the reasoning for not being able to view content on suspended accounts? Say a couple rude things on a bad day and you’re just gone?
Retroactively removing everything that isn’t related to offending content punishing more than the offender.
Don’t confuse calls for empathy as cries of tolerance; could you to try avoid bystanders when aiming for outgroup?
It’s upsetting to me how blunt of an instrument the current suspension method is.
If you construe Twitter as a crowdsourced distributed AI system for meaning making powered by meat, it’s technically very efficient.
I value twitter, but this suspension system is opaque. Am I next? What If I say something wrong on a bad day?
I’m going to start transitioning to another social network.
The way I cope with fear is by learning the things that scare me. Please forgive me. I am grateful for what I’ve learned of you so far.
I guess I just have lost faith in the platform and I feel like a bystander.
People using your platform don’t care about your platform, they care about communities and networks you’ve helped them build. Keep helping.
I started Twitter because I wanted to connected with @zefrank and that lead to so many great things in my life.
I don’t care how many favs/tweets/follows I get. I care about genuine engagement and constructive/helpful conversations. Hard to measure.
I came here to escape pain, and to tell stories. You helped me find meaning
Social Media is making art on [cave] walls and [sitting around a campfire] telling stories. Also bots, so many damn bots.
I don’t think that’s something I can do here anymore. I keep feeling like meaning is being ripped away from me.
If you care about us, build system that last. Design for sustainability. Make users at the center of the ecosystem.
I can’t trust my effort here, in learning and making meaning, isn’t going to be undermined by a constrained system.
I see signal being corrupted.
There are 10 types of people in the word, those who see the quotes, those who see the stories behind the quotes, and off by one errors.
… who see the words, who see meaning behind words. Creative corruption of signal; screaming chaos at the void…
And no way to adapt to it.
I don’t feel safe to make meaning here anymore.
I will keep fucking that up for rest of my life. And when I do, I’ll feel like a monster b/c I can’t prevent what I can’t see.
I’m sorry
My Twitter highlights have largely been about trying to figure out what to do with a dying ecosystem.
Weaving ideas in to your heart.
Is it ok to start backing up everyone I interact with?
It is like part of my external mind was removed.
“Do you think you’re better off alone?”
“I know the pieces fit cause I watched them fall away
Mildewed and smoldering, fundamental differing
Pure intention juxtaposed will set two lovers souls in motion
Disintegrating as it goes testing our communication
The light that fueled our fire then has burned a hole between us so
We cannot seem to reach an end crippling our communicationI know the pieces fit cause I watched them tumble down
No fault, none to blame, it doesn’t mean I don’t desire
To point the finger, blame the other, watch the temple topple over
To bring the pieces back together: rediscover communicationThe poetry that comes from the squaring off between
And the circling is worth it, finding beauty in the dissonanceThere was a time that the pieces fit, but I watched them fall away
Mildewed and smoldering, strangled by our coveting
I’ve done the math enough to know the dangers of our second guessing
Doomed to crumble unless we grow, and strengthen our communication”
— Tool, ‘Schism’
“Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold
the Universe would be if one were all alone …"
— THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT“We aren’t made of stardust.
Stars in fact are made of us.”
— Dust all the way down.
“..as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”
Voices from the æther.
Weird Suns that pass in the night,
and speak each other in passing […]
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
Taking to yourself?
Ever really miss somebody so much that you want to bring on the singularity just to be able to recreate their essence?
… Then you start writing a tribute to them, and realize they were working on the same thing?
Thought you might appreciate: The wisdom of ants and bees: democracy and elections — links to information about ants and voting. I see parallels w/ culture.
“some scientists now think our brains might actually work in the same way” — Evolution of Intelligence
Why did I not see this before?
“… the most fascinating problem in the world is who am I”
— Alan Watts
Ants flow like brains think.
How many neurons are in an ant colony?
Ants could be leveraging the same kind of organizational structure that Slime Mold uses to compute…
“[Slime Mold] can remember, make decisions and anticipate change, urging scientists to rethink intelligent behavior” — How Brainless Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence [Video]
Any sufficiently advanced network acting on information, when honed by evolutionary forces, is indistinguishable from intelligence.
Using computational systems based on ants to bring on the singularity.
Ants?
“humming or trilling that would make an assembled crowd sound like an enormous swarm of bees.”
— A Brief History of Applause
“Architecture is a fallacy.
Only by incremental change
with a large ‘diverse’ group can you solve problems.
Like an ants’ nest.”
— The Changelog, A Protocol for Dying“Only a diverse crowd
with conflicting perspectives
can really identify the problem.”“Once you’ve identified the real problem
— say, “we need an operating system capable of running a planet of a hundred billion devices” -
can we start to solve it.”
— http://hintjens.com/blog:17
Digital cognition.
Extended mind.
Embodied thought.
Emotional Stigmergy.
Symbolism.
Tulpamancy.
Hivesong.
Keywords.
Extended thought.
Emotional cognition.
Digital Mind.
Embodied Symbolism.
Hivesong Stigmergy.
Tulpamancy Keywords…
.@MindOfCommunion
TAP, THIS
“the importance of temporal networks in the analysis of information diffusion in online social networks.”
— Temporal network of information diffusion in Twitter“Ant colonies [.] understanding general principles linking individual-level interactions to network-level functions”
— Time-Ordered Networks Reveal Limitations to Information Flow in Ant Colonies
Dear Twitter.
“ The collective human organism has a heartbeat,
and if you care to listen you can even hear it breath.”
— All you have to do is listen.
Thank you for the food.
Thank you for the happy words.
Thank you for making me feel like I’m adding value.
Thank you for giving me a reason to live when I can’t find it.
You help me find strength that I can’t find myself.
If you see this, know that you with my thoughts when I wake in the morning, I remix parts of you in my head.
You inspire me.
Lost, but not forgotten.
What if your entire reason for trying in this world was ripped away from you without warning and you were left cold, dry, and lonely in the middle of nowhere in a place you really don’t want to be?
The answer to this riddle of warmth, is to be someone else’s sun.
We are all screaming into the void,
reaching for someone to grab onto.
We just want to feel like we are not alone.
Create something.
Make happiness.
Conjure joy.
Summon euphoria.
Bring about awe.
Strive towards greatness.
Reach for the sublime.
Don’t stop.
So I sat at the feet of this sage. A great computer wizard.
A necromancer weaving spells to bring the dead to life.
And he told me to write. so I did.
He didn’t tell me when I should stop.
So I won’t.
“You are the light of my life.
Sun, moon, and stars.
You are my everything.
Without you I have no reason for being.”
— Count the Stars.
