For complex reasons, I'm reading Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, at ten after five on a Memorial Day morning.
I had Claude summarize Rerum Novarum, Sentesimus Annus, and Magnifica Humanitas. The flow of thinking from the industrial revolution, through the fall of communism, to the rise of AI is ... well, I'm reading it, so I guess you should, too, if you intend to follow this curious crooked path I walk.
His Holiness waited precisely until the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum to publish Magnifica Humanitas. The former came after the suffering of the industrial revolution, but just before the onset of the industrial slaughter that World War I would bring. The latter comes as World War III seems inevitable; a dying hegemon always births chaos, and America's imperial implosion is now irreversible.
Gandalf's words to Frodo as they paused in Moria always come to mind in these moments.
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
So this is the third time I'm sitting down to write, to explain what's become of Shall We Play A Game? - and the whole internet seems bent on heading this off.
Or maybe I'm too old to Tumblr properly, that's probably an equally valid explanation.
Anyway, dealing with the pace of change in AI, I feel like I'm with Doctor Strange during the battle in the Mirror Dimension.
SWPAG presumed that there would be groups of humans, unlike the individual pursuits of earlier Cicada 3301 puzzles, and we had to presume there would be a degree of machine assistance.
Only now we're hurtling towards an event horizon I can't see beyond. Every time I start making something ready, a new model drops and it just bollixes the whole thing.
That's it. That's the post. When (if ever) I can see far enough ahead to lay in a course, I will do so. The last day a human could do that may already be in the rearview mirror. But I'm going to keep testing that boundary, where time and tide allow.
I wrote a long, thoughtful post, then fumbled it trying to get ffmpeg to downsize a video. I'd been saving this one for a special occasion, and this is clearly it.
Maybe I will come back and explain what happened, but exec summary: frontier models with million token contexts. I have not yet figured out how to make something engaging and fun for you guys when I'm forced to start over every fortnight due to AI model advances.
Very early in life the Earth encounter a Mars sized sibling named Theia, giving us the Moon. She remains with us even today, as the South Atlantic Anomaly.
And now, as happens about once every 21st century human lifetime, Earth's core is reversing direction. Like many of the cycles that protect us and keep us from harm, this is also probably her doing.
I think I first heard the term "brainrot" from my favorite fashion girl - notsophiasilva over on YouTube. An incel had criticized some aspect of her production - which she does for other young women, not because she's starved for the male gaze - and she burned him to the ground. Since then I've seen her mention the concept repeatedly, it fits with her self depreciating style.
I am NOT a TikTok user. I think I average less than one TikTok video per month. It might even be as little as one per quarter. The youngest people in my life are thirtysomethings and the platform has no traction among the elderly.
YouTube, however, IS a steady part of my day, a mix of work related stuff and news at my desk, and random stuff with a bias for nature/science when I'm laying in bed. My desktop browser blocks Shorts, but the iPad on a stand that's nominally for bedtime reading? It's infested.
So I was cringing as I watched this Howtown piece on the notion of brainrot, which is what the kids call the TikTok effect. This is different than what I was getting at in The Ruins Of Your Attention Span, it's less ... it's more pernicious.
I already had Pi-hole for local DNS and I recently expunged some stuff from being visible via WiFi. I really should add Reddit to the list, as it's another grievous hole of doomscroll, but I do need it for work during the day. I got curious while writing this - is there a solution for the Shorts problem on iPad? I was slightly miffed to learn that as a Brave browser user, it's been right there all along, under Shields & Privacy.
I want to be educated, and entertained, and informed. I do NOT want to be distracted and manipulated. If it's this hard for me, what in the world are kids who grow up in the midst of it going to do? Every generation frets over "kids these days" - but look at this:
Gen Z Terrified Of Losing Their Humanity To AI
LLMs were not public when the foundation of Shall We Play A Game? was forming. Now that they are, it's a wholesale reconstruction job to get it ready for a world where a portion of the players are like Lucy when she's able to use 30% of her brain.
The Dead Internet was just a conspiracy theory nine years ago, but it’s blossomed into our fundamental online reality here in late 2025. The Conspiracy Brokers would be mightily pleased with such a progression.
There are a number of serious presenters who've covered this, Vanessa Wingårdh focuses on the dark side of technology, and she hit all the high points here.
I've brought up Simulacra & Simulation on the regular for years now. Let's revisit those phases of the image.
Where are we in this progression? I've dropped all social media with the exception of LinkedIn, which is stuck somewhere between phase two and three, depending on which bit of slop you focus on in your feed. The other day I did an experiment ... scrolling no less than eleven times before I saw something from a human I actually knew. It can only get just so bad, due to the fact that it's a professional placeholder storage site.
Netwar Irregulars Bulletin, my Substack, is swarmed by bots, but they're getting little traction, at least around me. I see signs that others are not as aggressive when it comes to removing them, and those who are vulnerable will receive more attention.
Eliminating Organic ignorance With Artificial Intelligence is date stamped to 2016, but it was originally published in 2012. Looks pretty prophetic, doesn't it?
So what do we DO about this? Like Neo coming out of his pod, you are going have to free your mind.
Detach from any of the environments that are overrun by bots. Go find some real world friends, that's a must. What you do online should be limited to environments that are not just human dominated, but which are aggressively opposed to bots posing as us.
This is NOT to say that AI is bad, far from it. I just think if we're going to have synthetics they should be easily identifiable. We already interact with corporate bots - just try and get some online support - and I would be happy exploring a world that was partially automatons, so long as they're clearly labeled.
Maybe I'm not thinking clearly about this ... yet ... but SWPAG will not just have such things, much of it will be unplayable without it. And when there are enough of us who understand ...
We'll be able to bury this dead internet, so we can see what springs up after it's gone.
Do you feel like we're being prepared for something? I have thought this since the 2004 Navy video came out. What those fighters recorded isn't just something we can't do yet, it's things that are impossible given the physics we know today.
And Emily Blunt in a Steven Spielberg production ... this renews my will to live.
Like those who come to Gaiman's London Below, locating the Floating Market is not a matter of time or place, finding it has to do with the seeker's state of mind.
We are everywhere, but we belong nowhere, a cultural interstitial fluid, a provocative negative space. That which we bear crosses the membranes of some neurons more quickly than others. When you start with nothing, you can fabricate anything; what you seek *IS* here, you just need a lot of patience and a bit of luck in your search.
If you want to be treated as if you belong, act the part. If you present any attack surface at all it should be a Mœbius strip made of unobtainium and engraved with plans for a tesseract. Space-time is a hyperbolic manifold, a falling dream without end for the uninitiated.
Go ahead, give them a push; it'll be funny.
VPNs and Tor, OTR and ZRTP, encrypt every last thing you say and do, protect meaningless smalltalk with the ferocity of a nation state defending launch codes. Do these things and when you master them you will begin to see the faint tracks of our passing.
This is a very old thing, a relic from when the Conspiracy Brokers were brand new. I found it today, in the midst of rummaging through an archive, and it was just too good not to post here.
We are at an inflection point for our species. Three forces are moving, not against us, but each to some degree in spite of us. Let's pause to consider this.
Climate Change:
Peak oilers used to speak of the Iron Triangle of Collapse. If you have any two of environment, energy, and economy, you can fix what's wrong with the other. We might be on the verge of an energy epiphany – solar is already there, it's just not evenly distributed. Fusion is nascent, but it too might be imminent. Sadly, we're going to fight like cats in a sack due to the harm done to our environment, and our economy is about to be intentionally collapsed, for the sake of what benefits a handful of hoarders.
I think our last chance to avert this was in the fall of 2001. We misread the meaning of 911 and did precisely the wrong things. So it goes.
Artificial Intelligence:
I have been working diligently on artificial intelligence matters for less than six months. Let's recall that I see everything as networks, and that the generative AI we see is based on neural networks. My crystal ball here is little more than a mottled cherry sized bit of cheap glass, but given the energy I'm employing, it won't stay that way.
The race to build AGI, artificial general intelligence, is on. If you have the millions required for Cerebras full wafer AI systems, you can DO things. We can't even describe these things … and I suspect few human minds may ever be able to do. Think about cosmology and quantum physics – who truly understands such matters? They'd all fit into one wide body airliner.
Sam Altman, ever willing to project, has suggested that the first thing AGI will do is create ASI – artificial super intelligence. Having started my computing career on a machine whose speed was measured in kilohertz with memory measured in kilobytes … I'm writing this on a machine that's a million fold faster with a similar improvement in storage.
This isn't an if, it's a when, and I think not long now ...
Alien Visitors:
Way back in 2004 a pair of F/A-18F Super Hornets closed in on object similar to the size of their aircraft. A pair of identical planes with identical equipment, each with a pilot and a weapons system officer in the back seat, and all four humans report the same thing. A third F/A-18F bearing an AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR targeting pod joined the chase, capturing video of the object.
They made the intercept because an AEGIS cruiser, the U.S.S. Princeton, spotted this object approaching, at an altitude of 80,000'. The only U.S. plane that can operate at that altitude was the SR-71 Blackbird. The object engaged in maneuvers calculated to require around 13,000g acceleration, which is similar to what an artillery round experiences when fired. U.S. fighters are built to withstand 9g loads, which is the limit of human endurance. The object could hover, disturbing the ocean below it, but with no visible activity, other than its presence. The object never produced an exhaust plume during these maneuvers.
The observations by three pairs of fighter crews used to looking for unusual activity, paired with the sensor array of the AEGIS cruiser, must be taken at face value. You have a simple choice here – explain the lack of any exhaust plume, the seeming violation of the laws of thermodynamics, and the other things that are not simply beyond our current technology, but literally outside the bounds of physics, such as we know it.
Or accept that we had visitors, and those visitors not only did not originate from this world, the capabilities observed make it seem that they did not even originate in this visible universe. Watch Tibees explain four dimensional objects for a visual on what I mean here.
I'm working on A puzzle, but these things? They are THE puzzle.
I haven't touched Shall We Play A Game? in a hot minute, I'm too busy putting out every bit of canvas we have. There's no point in hunkering down, the only way out of this is running before this storm ...
Just sit and listen, would-be wanderers. And if you've gone walkabout at some point in your life, nod and smile at the memories this brings.
Being Discarded
Once upon a time I had a wife, two small children, and we lived in a Danish modern ranch two blocks from a golf course. She was an assistant dean at a state university, I had started a wireless internet provider.
The her misspent youth caught up with her, shattering that mirror we all use to look over our shoulder at the mundane world. Twenty three years have passed and she's never come out of it, ever afraid of things that do not, or simply can not exist.
Five years later came my turn, when altitude sickness struck, nine miles up La Luz on the west side of the Sandias. One does not pay close attention in early middle age, but I think the Lyme they finally found in 2008 had been simmering in me since the prior summer. Though I'd been riding the tram and conditioning above 10,000' for a couple weeks, preparing for another go at Mount Elbert, I was forced to turn back. I ran out of water, stumbled off that mountain dangerously dehydrated, and I haven't felt right since. That was Sunday, July 1st, 2007.
Human beings have long since disappeared from American society; we are human doings, and if we are not doing, we are nothing. What is your answer to “What do you do?” See what I mean?
Undoing
Having been discarded by the other doings, I was free to do as I pleased. Being in the grip of a strange illness was … suboptimal, but I would not trade the year of my life that was 2008 for anything, except perhaps another year. There's a 224,000 word road novel I've never bothered to finish, you can find it here. I saw Into The Wild with a magical forest nymph, and within 72 hours I departed North Appalachia to work the Midwest harvest, on my way to a conference I had already planned to attend. Denali I had seen, many years before, but I had never done this part of McCandless's journey.
And now you know a bit of how I came to find Indio, who first appeared in Festival of Dreams. It would take seven more years before I lived in Indio, but that's another story entirely ...
Life lies down
And the world still spins round
I lay on for this time I have found
Home
Administrivia
My last summit was Monadnock in 2008, before the second tick bite, before the spiral rash, before the day of 105F fever after the Doxy began.
I've been looking up at Mount Diablo from the window of the train for over a year, but now, for the first time in nearly twenty years, I am conditioning like I used to do. What the graph doesn't show is that last night I hopped a bus. A lot of those steps were on narrow gravel paths with significant grades. I'll have that summit, perhaps as soon as our oncoming Harvest moon.
When her first album in 1970 sank in a changing market, Vashti Bunyan left music so thoroughly she did not even sing to her three children. The album became a legend among British folk fans, selling for nearly $4,000. The world got her back in 2005 and I just discovered her work last night.
You've probably heard Eddie Vedder's cover of Gordon Peterson's Hard Sun, it was the best among many strong contenders from the Into The Wild sound track. Peterson, under his stage name Indio, released one single album in 1989. I really struggled here, but you will have to hunt down Life Lies Down on your own, for this post is indeed The Season Of The Lost. Rumors of his return with new material persisted until the late oughts. Given this glimpse into his world, I wonder what pain silenced this titan more thoroughly than Bunyan's self-assessed failure.
Rounding out this Festival of Dreams, although dramatically different from the style she adopted from her sophomore effort on, I've never understood when Beth Orton orphaned her first child, Superpinkymandy.
And a final one and done that I tracked down thirty five years after I first heard it live, The Tree by Captain Barney will cost you some extra effort, but it's well worth it. What twentysomething knows the things in this song?
What wouldn't I give for a small stage in a nearby park, a crisp early fall afternoon, and this Festival of Dreams, hour long sets lifted from long ago? But the arrow of time points ever forward, so I subsist like a bead on a guitar string, back and forth from today's releases, to that 3,400 year old Hurrian hymn #6, the first thing I always listen to when I begin rebuilding playlists.
I sample the world, looking for the things I need in the moment. I have seen The NeverEnding Story, but it came out when I was seventeen, both too old and too young to appreciate it.
This analysis, in particular section 5, Modern Nihilism, is ... you'd better watch the whole thing.
"We have endless content, but no myth. The nothing is here. It's not a monster. It's your feed."
