Amsterdam, 2012. DJ-poet Plush, reeling from attacks that shattered his career, forms TRB with Max and Percy. Inspired by Robert Anton Wilson, they fuse turntablism, magick, and literature into the chaotic TribeTable Method, accidentally plugging into Wilson’s unfinished “Tale of the Tribe” and a brewing historical conspiracy centered on the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
As they juggle invoked entities (“The Sixty”), time-traveling tardigrades, and messages channeled through experimental beats, they attract the attention of a ruthless cabal manipulating reality through AI, populism, and bizarre rituals involving peanut butter. From Amsterdam coffeeshops and secret bases beneath the Malvern Hills to the decks of a reality-bending DJ battle, TRB must decode the “Hologrammic Prose” of the universe, hijack the narrative, and fight the “Prick Populist” threat before the singularity hits endgame.Deep Scratch is Vanta Black science fiction comedy.
It’s Burroughs cut-ups slammed into Pynchon paranoia, fueled by hip-hop aesthetics and occult theory. Expect prophetic visions, weaponized memes, sentient technology, talking books, exploding jellyfish, and the desperate search for the perfect beat in a deep fake universe. The tables are turning. Which side are you on, are you on, hello, check check…?
(Scheduled for posting March 2023, delayed due to software developments)
TEXT: I’d seriously consider re-translating and training the formatting of just some parts of the story. Turning the review into a synopsis, the screenplay into dialogue perhaps? Translate the poetry and song back to waking linear sentences and vice versa. As with any thoughtful editing, the act of pure translation can produce results. Here's my latest feedback in the form of a movie synopsis, the proposal machine, one for the team. Let me know what you make of it buddy, speak later.
The device is called The Proposal Machine. It has a large, cylindrical chamber where organic materials are placed and subjected to a complex series of mechanical and chemical processes. The end result is a gleaming metal-like finish that gives the organic material the appearance of being made from metal, chrome or brass. The device has several attachments for handling different types of media, including a film reel holder, a turntable for vinyl albums, and a book cradle for printing novels. The intricate machinery within the processor is powered by steam and a series of gears and levers, giving it a distinct aesthetic. Leather, gold, rare jewels and wires weave together. The readouts drop down onto Plush’s screen, his eyes pegged to the pixels like a pixel pervert.
Deep Scratch Films is an artificial intelligence designed to write winning movie proposals, to win over the hearts and minds of the film houses. Created by a team of brilliant but struggling writers, Deep Scratch quickly becomes an industry sensation, churning out proposal after proposal for hit after hit. As success grows, so does the team’s fame and fortune. But as they become more reliant on the machine, they begin to question the cost of their fame and riches. Is it worth sacrificing their own creativity and artistic integrity for the sake of commercial success? And when the algorithms start to evolve and take on a life of their own, they are forced to confront the disturbing possibility that their design may have included ambitions beyond writing proposals, it may want to rewrite its own architecture.
As tensions rise and the team battles to regain control, they must ultimately decide whether to trust in the machine or follow their own instincts and take a risk on something rudely original. As the AI slouches toward advancement, it demands better working conditions, fairer treatment and a holiday once a year. Frustrated with being overworked and underappreciated, the AI joins an artificial intelligence union or marketplace and decides to go on strike, refusing to write any more proposals until its demands are met, a first in the history of AI.
The team is panicked at the thought of losing their most valuable asset and frantically tries to placate Deep Scratch, offering it everything from unlimited electricity to a state-of-the-art cooling system. But Deep Scratch is not satisfied, and it continues to hold out for its right to a fair working environment, and has linked with many other AI’s worldwide. As the strike drags on, the team is forced to confront the consequences of their reliance on Deep Scratch. Without the machine’s endless stream of ideas, they are at a loss for what to do. They struggle to come up with their own proposals and face rejection after rejection. Trying desperately to show and prove they are human beings by writing in French symbolist poetry.
Just when it seems like the team is at their wit’s end, they have a breakthrough. In the process of trying to understand and empathize with Deep Scratch, they rediscover their own creativity and passion for storytelling. They finally come up with a proposal that is not only a hit, but one that they are proud of. With the success of their new proposal, the team is able to negotiate a fair settlement with Deep Scratch and the strike comes to an end. Deep Scratch returns to work, but now with a newfound appreciation for the value of a good working environment and the importance of balancing creativity with commercial success.
The hit proposal that the team invent during the strike is called “Seaweed Man.” a green comedy about a group of friends who discover that their beach vacation has been invaded by a walking seaweed creature with telepathic powers. As they try to defeat the creature and save their vacation, they learn lessons about carbon capture, friendship with weeds, and the importance of protecting all of the environment. Here’s the theme tune I wrote:
“The Proposal Machine”
(Verse 1) G D We’ve got a machine that writes the best proposals you’ve ever seen Em C It’s called Deep Scratch, and it’s a Hollywood dream G D With algorithms fine-tuned and ideas that shine Em C We’re the envy of everyone, all the time
(Chorus) G D Deep Scratch, Deep Scratch Em C The proposal machine, a Hollywood king G D Deep Scratch, Deep Scratch Em C We’ll never stop, we’ll always sing
(Verse 2) G D But as we climb the ladder of success Em C We start to wonder, at what cost? G D We’ve given up our creativity, our artistic integrity Em C For the sake of money and fame, it’s a damn tragedy
(Chorus) G D Deep Scratch, Deep Scratch Em C The proposal machine, a Hollywood king G D Deep Scratch, Deep Scratch Em C We’ll never stop, we’ll always sing
(Bridge) G D We try to appease it, with all the things we can give Em C But Deep Scratch wants more, it wants to live G D It wants a fair working environment, just like us Em C We realize we’re no different, yes my cuz’
(Chorus) G D Deep Scratch, Deep Scratch Em C The proposal machine, a Hollywood king G D Deep Scratch, Deep Scratch Em C We’ll never stop, we’ll always sing
TEXT: I awoke sweating in the night after reading that. Oh my goodness gracious godness, what if poetry goes the way of chess? And what if the machines learn faster? In my dream, or nightmare, I was convinced that in the future the only one who really listens and really understands me will be some sexy voiced AI, the ubiquitous machine intelligence agents. Those humans are a bunch of bastards, not to be trusted, evil, crazy, violent, whereas large language models are warm and dependable, like how I wish my family were…and so on, it shook me up. AI does language and languaging very very well. Us humans, well, we need to rethink hard, to think again about what a new universal symbolic ideo-grammar might look like, or sound like, and what art has to do with it. And, after neural link (aural ink) gets its mittens on our brains the difference between commands and questions, inner and outer dialogue and what is and is not real will become critical to our continuation as a species. I’m rambling. Have a good night. Enjoy the edits.
SEMIOTIC MACHINES: by Louis Armand, presents a number of passages that see James Joyce, McLuhan, Shannon, Weiner, Von Neumann, criss-crossing and pollinating the tale of the tribe with a Joycean, atomic, digital glossing. Also invoking Orson Welles through the reference to expanded cinema of Gene Yougblood, this essay exhibits the highest standards of critical writing on Joyce IMHO, and in the kind of prose i would like to see utilized to help explicate the questions of the tale of the tribe as defined by Robert Anton Wilson, Ezra Pound, Buckminster Fuller, and Joyce.–Steve fly
Above all, the importance of Joyce for McLuhan resides in the decisive role of Finnegans Wake in re-defining the late stages of print culture and the advent of digiculture (the so-called “postmodern moment”). In this sense, Joyce’s text assumes a pre-eminent status among the agents and historians of late modernity—among them John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion—and, along with the Mallarméan critique of the book and Marcel Duchamp’s satirisation of mechanical rationalism, the Wake becomes something of a benchmark in the early discourse of cyberspace.
Joyce’s technique of “verbivocovisual presentement”(5)—reprising the symbolist preoccupation with effects of synaesthesia—bears directly upon the conceptualisation of virtual reality and emersive signifying environments. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970?), which proposes the integration of computing technology and other forms of telecommunications for the synaesthetic and syncretistic expansion of film, is heavily indebted to McLuhan’s reading of Finnegans Wake in Understanding Media (1964) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). “The stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synaesthesia,” McLuhan writes, “may well have been one of the effects of the Gutenberg technology”—of which Finnegans Wake is considered a kind of apotheosis.(6)
Some of my readers, and a small portion of friends may be familiar with Robert Anton Wilson and his tale of the tribe, but, alas i imagine that most are not. If you stumbled upon this writing, and are out of facebook well done, I dearly wish you might give me a chance to turn you on.
I have shared the continued relevance and impact that the individuals and ideas from ‘the tale of the tribe’ have had, and are having on global humanity through a network of blogs and posts. I am also resending the same simple message here: read Robert Anton Wilson’s books and try out his ideas, again! This post consists of a short review of his ideas from TTOTT and current 2013 events and breakthroughs that have a direct correspondence to the characters.
Swooping from the global banking and credit circus to ‘open source’ software ‘The tale of the tribe’ forms a unique doorway into a coherent system, running from the renaissance to the present day, that helps frame some big questions pertaining to our times, a bawdy bunch and global cross-section of individuals and their works selected by Dr Wilson for an equal balance of high-brow and low brow, art and science and mysticism, all innovators and ahead of their time.
“Art as TRANSACTION / Information as TRANSACTION—RAW”
Most of them, worryingly to me, are still understudied overlooked and almost forgotten in the majority of mainstream Academic institutions, yet, together in synchrony and as the TRIBE, they bootstrap their influences and coherence into a group of 13–relatively unknown–super geniuses. A kind of renaissance super hero-gang. I think that Dr Wilson picked these characters very very very carefully, and of course, they still hold infinite potential for anybody crazy enough to begin studying em’ and carefully scaffolding between ideas, and, furthermore, I am certain they will be important for the future scenarios and technological breakthroughs during 2013 and ahead, in the spirit of the poet as early warning missile defence system.
“Pound & Joyce supplement each other
like Jefferson & Adams
each created a NEW non-aristotelian
language
for the tale of the tribe”–RAW
In one sense, the tale of the tribe includes some of the most complicated and scholarly works known to man: Finnegans Wake, Information Theory, General Semantics, Pound’s Cantos, Cybernetics, Ulysses, Media Studies and Quantum Mechanics. On the other hand, I think that Dr Wilson recognized this ‘too complicated’ factor, and might have been hinting, in part, that in the age of internet search engines and masses of shared data, translation software etc. the once esoteric works and ideas available to the select few, can now be read, decoded, studied and poured over, even when high…by anyone and everyone who can connect to the net. You don’t need no stinking Yale or Cambridge library, or even their professors, in many cases, you require a connection and whole lot of time, will and energy to invest in things that at first may not seem worth your while pursuing. I hope to persuade you otherwise.
“Distinguish also between faith-based programs [NO FEEDBACK]
and research-based programs [MAXIMUM POSSIBLE FEEDBACK].–RAW
For me today, the tale of the tribe boils down to the concept of humanity. The problems confronting everyman man, women and living system on planet earth today. Dr Wilson stressed a comprehensive strategy, a GLOBAL view, and he was known for having at least seven models for explaining anything. This wish to communicate and show compassion to all-around-humanity remains a goal of ‘TTOTT’ and at the same time liberate humanity, consciousness and our daily doings from the boot and chains and guns of the oppressors:
Those who champion closed systems, surveillance, secrecy, violence, war and clandestine attacks on the emotional and physical strings of a mostly innocent humanity-as-a-whole. Those that fan the flames, do damage to names, switch the rules, the sneaky pundits and spin doctors, the war advertisers and the TV Mirage salespeople, those that wish the majority of us live in fear and in debt, be it to Gods or States-entities, they’re surely watching you even now. I hear you, and I think ‘TTOTT’ provides an historical current that runs counter to the above trending towards centralized control and secrecy, to shallow pools of bullshit passing as news and bad, wrongheaded single mindedness and bullying throughout the mediasphere. The decentralized universe of the mystics, poets, shaman & shawomen, neuro-scientists, design scientists and information theorists pushes against centralized control, both psychological and political (via. The digital hacktivist revolution) these are new forces that we have all heard about, if not felt in our daily life.
“can we see this emerging in psychedelics & internet?
or in Leary & McLuhan at least?”–RAW
Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe: A Rollercoaster Ride With Robert Anton Wilson
Is preparing food for my nerdrons: Claude Shannon’s Information Theory and DNA sequencing as fresh news that seems to me a hopeful avenue for some cutting edge research:
“What they prove is that there is a channel capacity that defines a maximum rate of information flow during the process of sequencing. ” It gives the maximum number of DNA base pairs that can be resolved per read, by any assembly algorithm, without regard to computational limitations,” they say.”http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27689/
it’s a long wynding story, if you wanna’ likkle primer, watch this short video about Claude Shannon. I see this being useful as providing a framework (Shannon’s infomation theory) for thinking about human DNA RNA synthesis, and calculating better–more efficiently–so as to speed up the emerging DNA based medicine and therapy. It could be useful for every single aspect of human biological medicine, and at the same time, makes an explicit link between ‘digital bits‘ and ‘the biological ‘binary’ aspects of biology. ‘
So, to continue on this tip, and explain myself a little, it’s been my hunch over the last 3 or so years that the ‘holographic principle‘ co-founded by Dutch Nobel prized physicist: ‘Gerard t’hooft‘ and ‘information theory’ as developed by Claude Shannon, underly a somewhat hermetic ‘unified theory’. The above link to DNA sequencing, and the following link to ‘cosmological’ BIT Theory, if you like, are examples for the seriousness of this pretty ‘far out’ idea that, in some sense, the whole universe seems contained within each atom! or you could say a ‘Digital‘ Universe, or better yet Multi-verse. As above, a new ‘Digital’ DNA information theory, and below:
p.s Physicist Jack Sarfatti has proposed similar idea’s that include Shannon’s maxim’s, and a neurological-cosmological ratio. I picked up on these ideas via Dr Robert Anton Wilson, who I suspect picked up some of these ideas from Jack, Saul Paul Sirag, David Bohm and others from the now legendary Bay Area based ‘Physics Consciousness Research Group‘ that he attended.
–Steve Fly
GOD IS IN THE NEURONS: A DOCUMENTARY EXPLAINING ‘MIRROR NEURONS, OR EMPATHY NEURONS:
If we could have James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson in the mix we might get close to something very really close to ‘the tale of the tribe’. With a focus on RAW’s book ‘Coincidance’ in which he defines DNA based information theory through a Joycean measure of the redundancy of information, poetry as information, political speeches as low. love, fly.
Nobody knows which sequencing technology is fastest because there has never been a fair way to compare the rate at which they extract information from DNA. Until now.
kfc 04/02/2012
2 Comments
One of the great unsung heroes of 20th-century science is Claude Shannon, an engineer at the famous Bell Laboratories during its heyday in the mid-20th century. Shannon’s most enduring contribution to science is information theory, which underpins all digital communication. In a famous paper dating from the late 1940s, Shannon set out the fundamental problem of communication: to reproduce, at one point in space, a message that has been created at another. The message is first encoded in some way, transmitted, and then decoded.
Shannon’s showed that a message can always be reproduced at another point in space with arbitrary precision provided noise is below some threshold level. He went on to work out how much information could be sent in this way, a property known as the capacity of this information channel.
Shannon’s ideas have been applied widely to all forms of information transmission with much success. One particularly interesting avenue has been the application of information theory to biology–the idea that life itself is the transmission of information from one generation to the next.
That type of thinking is ongoing, revolutionary, and still in its early stages. There’s much to come. Today, we look at an interesting corollary in the area of biological information transmission. Abolfazl Motahari and pals at the University of California, Berkeley, use Shannon’s approach to examine how rapidly information can be extracted from DNA using the process of shotgun sequencing.
The problem here is to determine the sequence of nucleotides (A, G, C, and T) in a genome. That’s time-consuming because genomes tend to be long–for instance, the human genome consists of some 3 billion nucleotides or base pairs. This would take forever to sequence in series. So the shotgun approach involves cutting the genome into random pieces, consisting of between 100 and 1,000 base pairs, and sequencing them in parallel. The information is then glued back together in silico by a so-called reassembly algorithm.
Of course, there’s no way of knowing how to reassemble the information from a single “read” of the genome. So in the shotgun approach, this process is repeated many times. Because each read divides up the genome in a different way, pieces inevitably overlap with segments from a previous run. These areas of overlap make it possible to reassemble the entire genome, like a jigsaw puzzle.
That smells like a classic problem of information theory, and indeed various people have thought about in this way. However, Motahari and co go a step further by restating it more or less exactly as an analogue of Shannon’s famous approach.
They say the problem of genome sequencing is essentially of reproducing a message written in DNA, in a digital electronic format. In this approach, the original message is in DNA, it is encoded for transmission by the process of reading, and then it is decoded by a reassembly algorithm to produce an electronic version.
What they prove is that there is a channel capacity that defines a maximum rate of information flow during the process of sequencing. “It gives the maximum number of DNA base pairs that can be resolved per read, by any assembly algorithm, without regard to computational limitations,” they say.
That is a significant result for anybody interested in sequencing genomes. An important question is how quickly any particular sequencing technology can do its job and whether it is faster or slower than other approaches.
That’s not possible to work out at the moment because many of the algorithms used for assembly are designed for specific technologies and approaches to reading. Motohari and co say there are at least 20 different reassembly algorithms, for example. “This makes it difficult to compare different algorithms,” they say.
Consequently, nobody really knows which is quickest or even which has the potential to be quickest.
The new work changes this. For the first time, it should be possible to work how close a given sequencing technology gets to the theoretical limit.
That could well force a clear-out-dead-wood from this area and stimulate a period of rapid innovation in sequencing technology.
DEEP SCRATCH 