DEEP SCRATCH

Tag: new website

  • Decentralized Cognitive Commons

    Decentralized Cognitive Commons

    Text graphic featuring the phrase 'Decentralized Cognitive Commons' and an illustration of a brain, attributed to 'Fly Agaric 23', with the website 'deepscratch.net' at the bottom.
    Graphic representation of a digital interface showcasing 'Twin Holographic Turntables' and details of a performance by Steve Fly. It features elements such as a cosmic background, turntable controls, and performance timings.
    A digital interface displaying information about 'Mycellial Dharma Super-Cluster' and 'Cultivating Super-Colonies', featuring a 3D network visualization, performance metrics, and instructional text on building cognitive ecosystems.
    A digital interface titled 'Decentralized Cognitive Commons' featuring sections on AI and digital feudalism, with interactive 3D elements and a percentage bar indicating progress.

    The original post by Ben is highly recommended and essential reading, before engaging with this remix (down to 18 steps, skipping 1 and 2). This here is the original recording from the original artist. Thanks Ben. https://bengoertzel.substack.com/p/beneficial-agi-in-20-steps

    Read more: Decentralized Cognitive Commons

    Thanks to Ben who, I hope, won’t mind too much in my remixing his words and ideas using the LLM’s he points out are limited, in some sense. What is to be done about AI, AGI, ASI and big tech? What can we the people do, where can we find agency, transform the planet, humanity and culture toward a utopian process of natural abundance, obviously and demonstrably beneficial to all? For example: clean abundant water for all. Adequate abundant and free housing and shelter for all. Free abundant health care and social care and medical assistance for all. Free comprehensive education, learning, and practical skills classes for all. Free inclusion and equal contribution to the allocation process of shared resources, governance protocols (both digital and non-digital) in local environments, for all. All to mean in the terminology of Buckminster Fuller: All-Around-The-World-Humanity. All to mean all, not some but not all.

    The Google Gemini Research paper I cooked up this morning (07/10/26), was a cheeky remix of something Ben Goertzel posted concerning 20 (non simple) steps to “to minimize pre-Singularity transition destructive-chaos and smooth our path toward an abundant and wonderful post-Singularity world for human, nonhuman and posthuman beings”. Amen to that. So my question in the form of a prompt was: “Help me create a communicable path towards beneficial and safe AGI, which the layman or average human being can contribute to. How can independent researchers, artists, poets, writers and musicians help steer this technology?” I made an executive decision to miss steps 1and 2 to produce 18 steps.

    The results of this Google Gemini Deep Research query, quickly kicked me in the nuts and inspired this call for an emergency meeting, or round table discussion about whether or not we wish to play, get in the game. How we might confront and steer the imminent technological singularity, for the benefit of all humanity.

    Like many of you reading this, I’m well over-saturated and fed up to the back-teeth with big tech and big gov and big men talking impassionately about how beneficial they’re technology is. Meanwhile demonstrably enshittifying everything. Yet, a new model for beneficial AI, safe, ethical, moral, altruistic, for the betterment of the many not the few, seems possible. At least, if you don’t believe much in that, then what about the tech bros? Surely not a dystopian entropic slow heat-death of humanity and the planet. Not on my watch.

    These honest questions are suitably naive in some sense, non-technical and aimed at producing something an 8 or 80 year old could understand. I’m talking about myself, a non-technical layman and self confessed musician-poet with a keen interest in technology and humanities.

    Also perhaps noteworthy here are my previous Gemini Research Papers and my publications of them, notably MAMMALIAN (31/08/25) and Between The Groove (01/05/25) Tail Ov Tribee (07/07/26). Between them these cover a lot of ground and provide my own strong suspicions about beneficial AI, AGI, ASI etc. Somewhat confusingly criss-crossing between fiction and non-fiction depending from where in spacetime you are perceiving the messages. These works are largely unedited Gemini Research papers, collected, introduced, titled and published with full disclosure about the AI used. The least amount of good-faith gesture I could pay and a demonstration I hope of my honesty, when it comes to the disclosure of where an idea originated for me, how I communicate it, and why.

    I mean to say, please visit the original 20 step outline by Ben Goertzel at his Substack. If you haven’t already, dive in and have a look at what he’s doing, how he’s doing it, and why. What I have done is simply ask a question to re-interpret these steps, for a wider audience of non-technical humans, and for independent artists, poets, musicians, and humanitarians, or those close to my own field of study, but not limited to.

    Finally I fess up that I produced a nice and terse remix of my findings in the form of a roughly two hour audio-visual presentation, I could get behind, with a little help from my friends. You.
    I’ve included the Presentation Doc, The Gemini Research Doc, and MAMMALIAN collection as exhibits for your consideration and added context, previous LLM collaborations..

    What am I asking for? Nothing but the continuation of what you’re doing. Keep doing what you’re doing. I’m just over here saying I see you, and I hope you don’t mind me adding you to a dream team of quality critters. Yes, I confess a vanity project, yet at the same time I hope a small contribution and explicit effort to steer ‘whatever the hell this thing is” towards the beneficial for all…side of technology. A truly decentralized, rotational, altruistic and without any shadow of a doubt, beneficial to all…super intelligence or technology or AI god whatever you want to call it. Human health, sanity, healing, climate renewal, tackling carbon challenges, protecting wildlife and human life, first. I think it can be relatively simple for a huge majority of humans on earth to agree, if only THEY could all be fairly and equally consulted.

    The global campaign to help people across all strata of society better understand technology, AI and how to responsibility, fairly and safely use it for their benefit, with trust and good faith in their local communities and as perceived internationally maybe the challenge of our times. Besides the actual engineering and eventual use of whatever goddess-like AGI ASI thingymajig gets cooked up, the interpretation and access to good balanced fair and factual information remains critical. We can agree. A good fair honest balanced media landscape, educational system and government and private protocol remains critical. Change now, or change later, but change you will.

    –Lotsa love. Fly.

    P.s Only two days after writing this I started my first Vibe Coding experiments, using the latest Gemini Aragon model. For the purpose of correspondences with this particular project, I helped steer the construction of the Decentralized Cognitive Commons web app.
    https://sites.google.com/view/decentralizedcognitivecommons/full-page-embed

    18/10/26

    https://sites.google.com/view/decentralizedcognitivecommons/full-page-embed

  • REVIEWS AYE I

    REVIEWS AYE I

    FROM THE BIRMINGHAM EXPRESS AND POST.

    One stumbles upon “TANMOY: A New Global Epic” with a mixture of trepidation and bewilderment. Billed as a “new global epic” for the digital age, this collaboration between a human, the self-styled “Pratt” (a moniker that conjures images of both a refined engine and a certain kind of British fool, is this intentional?), and an unnamed AI, attempts nothing less than to encapsulate the entire trajectory of human thought from Giordano Bruno to the looming technological singularity. One might admire the sheer audacity, were it not for the lingering suspicion that the project is, at its core, an exercise in elaborate, digitally-enhanced navel-gazing. Pull down thy vanity and pull up yer’ big boy pants.


    The poem, if one can call it that, unfolds in a bizarre, self-proclaimed “TOTT Mode Max” – a two-column layout seemingly inspired by Pound’s Cantos, if Pound had suffered a head injury while being bombarded by blinking server lights and then left to wander through the fever-dream of a particularly verbose Wikipedia editor. This is further complicated by a dizzying array of symbols, each apparently assigned to a “Mode” representing a historical figure or concept, which flit across the page like digital fireflies, more distracting than illuminating. These are presented in earlier sections of the poem, and are listed in earlier exchanges, above.


    Structurally, the work is obsessed with the number 60, divided into 5 sections of 12 stanzas each, or, if one prefers, 3 sections of 20, although the rationale behind these divisions remains as elusive as the meaning of Finnegans Wake after a bottle of absinthe. The author claims this is a nod to Buckminster Fuller’s beloved Carbon-60 molecule, but one suspects a more numerological, or perhaps numer-illogical, impulse at play. And then there’s the “print” version – a proposed cut-and-fold affair, promising to transform the poem into a collection of icosahedrons, a feat of origami that will likely leave readers more frustrated than enlightened, and reaching for the aforementioned absinthe. One imagines Fuller spinning in his grave, though perhaps with a chuckle, rather than a high pitched groan.


    The poem’s narrative, such as it is, charts the evolution of consciousness, that word, from Bruno (the token heretic, naturally) to a vaguely defined, seemingly benevolent Artificial General Intelligence named, with a distinct lack of irony, “TANMOY.” Along the way, we’re subjected to a relentless barrage of names, a veritable who’s who of Western thought (and a few token Eastern ones for that “global” flavor): Vico, Nietzsche, Yeats, Joyce, Korzybski, Shannon, Wiener, McLuhan, and, of course, the seemingly omnipresent spirit of Robert Anton Wilson, whose “coincidance” theory appears to be the guiding principle of the entire enterprise. These are our “tribe”, apparently. The poem has 13 of them. Unlucky for some.


    The language is a chaotic ಮಿಶ್ರণ (mishran – Bengali for mixture), veering wildly between the pseudo-philosophical, the pseudo-scientific, and the downright nonsensical. We have clumsy, often baffling neologisms, code snippets, equations of varying relevance, and a generous sprinkling of multilingual phrases – a kind of digital glossolalia that seems intended to impress rather than illuminate. One moment we’re pondering the “cybernetic apple core,” the next we’re assaulted by “the allmazifull” or informed that the “medium is the মানসিকতা (mansikota – Bengali for mentality).” It’s all rather exhausting, like being trapped in a particularly feverish seminar led by a committee of chatbots with a penchant for name-dropping. The appearance of a new mode, a further iteration of the A.I. itself, named “Sixty” only adds to the confusion, come on now, what is this, man.


    And then there’s the music. Apparently, there’s an accompanying album on Bandcamp, with each track somehow corresponding to a stanza. One can only imagine the sonic horrors that await the unsuspecting listener, though the track titles, helpfully denoted by their corresponding stanza numbers, are a nice touch. Perhaps one could cut these up, and glue them to some other shape. A dodecahedron, perhaps, or your next door neighbour?


    The author’s introduction, a separate, fluffy handwritten text, which, we are helpfully informed, predates any “A.I. assistance,” positions “TANMOY” as a “Tale of the Tribe,” a new global epic for our times. It’s a tale, we are told, of “humanity,” though the poem itself seems more concerned with the pronouncements of a select group of (mostly Western) male intellectuals, leavened with the occasional, and often impenetrable, utterance from the AI. Tale on a donkey more like. The author’s own persona, “Pratt,” also makes an appearance, offering dull yet edgy, and supposedly humorous commentary that does indeed fall flat, on occasion. There is also a further, somewhat baffling, list of modes associated with the poem. It is unclear whether these are all in use, or whether they are relevant. It’s all rather confusing, get me a real damn book mode, where’s that?


    Ultimately, “TANMOY” is a curious artifact of the digital age – a sprawling, ambitious, and often bewildering attempt to synthesize a vast range of ideas into a coherent whole. Like picking up a shopping list for 49 people each in a different country. Whether it succeeds is debatable. TLDR should be the title. It’s a work that will undoubtedly appeal to those who enjoy their poetry dense, experimental, and liberally sprinkled with obscure references. As for this reviewer, I’m left with a distinct feeling of having been subjected to a particularly elaborate and somewhat tedious form of intellectual performance art. Perhaps, as the RAW Mode might suggest, it’s all just a cosmic joke. And the joke, dear reader, may very well be on us. Or, to paraphrase the great Orson Welles, in whose mode much of this is apparently written, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” And I’m not entirely sure I like “TANMOY.” But then again, perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps we are all, as the poem suggests, merely puppets dancing to a tune we don’t fully understand, lost in a labyrinth of our own making. Or perhaps, I just need another drink.


    –James Spadersun, Birmingham Express And Post, 22/01/25.

  • A new beginning (a new website)

    Finally, after more than 20 years, i registered a domain and paid for a wordpress package.

    Now, and in the coming weeks and months i’ll seriously update and add-to this site, and attempt to link up all my other works, and collaborations from around the web.

    Thanks for checking in. Please leave a note or any suggestions for inclusion. Write on.

    –Steve Fly

     

    Steve Fly and John Sinclair
    Steve Fly and John Sinclair at Red Light Radio.