iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Michael Garfield

Edgardo Block @edgardoblock.eurosky.social · 29/11/2025

This read from @michaelgarfield.bsky.social unsettled me when I first came across it in 2020. Keeps on aging really well michaelgarfield.medium.com/the-future-i...

michaelgarfield.medium.com

The Future is Indistinguishable from Magic

How to Live in the Future Part 8

131

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Maybe something like "for a large class of Markov decision processes q-function is exponentially difficult to compute even when the reward function is not" = "pragmatics has one up on causal theory building" or "we're not getting rid of the induction problem"

070

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

The story of #SimCity is the story of the world we live in—of the entanglement of computing, entertainment, design, & governance. And where it succeeded—and failed—teaches us how to navigate maps that become territories... @chaimg.bsky.social on #HumansOnTheLoop: michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-23

michaelgarfield.substack.com

Chaim Gingold on Building Sim City & Simulation as Discourse

We live in abstractions. What makes some better than others?

042

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Thinking a/b an AI-enriched world that actually benefits humans & how it'll help us explore, not just get tube-fed by algorithms. Here's my talk from @divintelligence.bsky.social on how complex systems science & game design inspired me to imagine this future: michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/foraging

michaelgarfield.substack.com

🌿 Foraging in High-Dimensional Data

My talk from the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2025 on how we can draw from thinking in complex systems science and game design to heal our relationship to the Web.

062

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Beautiful, and very well-timed. Reactionary preservation of the status quo is not enough. Conviction must be met with action. Are we afraid to dream of better futures? There is such a thing as good ambition. youtu.be/sJjODY-PyJY?...

youtu.be

This is Hollywood's Liberal Fantasy, and it's Falling Apart

YouTube video by Like Stories of Old

020

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Of course that might come off as basically Thomas Pynchon

000

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

I would love to see an early 20th Century Lovecraftian prequel to Accelerando where the Vile Offspring are corporations, as implied by @cshalizi.bsky.social in this legendary blog post: bactra.org/weblog/699.h...

bactra.org

The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone

110

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

In that sense, AI already kicked people out of most of the best jobs decades or centuries ago. Now everyone just serves the big machine, and we are fighting over who gets to keep working in some bunk industry instead of for the capacity to take care of ourselves without oppressive superstructures.

000

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Definitely. And this has been going on for a long time. The only way this is an "AI unemployment" issue is if you consider the inhuman aggregations of industrial modernity a form of AI (which I do, and think people should, because it affords much clearer thinking about the alignment problem).

130

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

I wish I had known that before writing this! Worth inclusion.

110

Reposted by Michael Garfield

Chenoe Hart @chenoehart.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

I’m not quite sure what to think about this conceptual, aesthetic and philosophical exploration of crab-ness, but it reminds me of how Le Corbusier was inspired to pioneer the development of brutalist architecture after looking at a crab shell.

121

Reposted by Michael Garfield

crAsh @crashbanzai.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

011

Reposted by Michael Garfield

Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 08/07/2025

this rules

011

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Have we considered the problem isn't impending loss of jobs but existing loss of availability for meaningful work because of jobs

1233

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

The long-awaited (first draft written *last AUGUST*) debut at @aeon.co is here! Probably my most comprehensive and audacious statement on human-technology evolution published anywhere to date. Detours through sci-fi, memeology, military and natural history, and more.

3438

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Ah right on! Yeah, that was a good run. Sorry to miss you! Hit me up any time. Still in the game, just not there.

010

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Indeed! 😇 But the bastards locked my QR code. Who are you and what are you doing in Santa Fe?

110

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

John Lilly's Reality Protocols, 1977, reproduced in Diana Reed Slattery’s Xenolinguistics, 2015, Chapter 5: Reality Reviewed (which alone is worth the price of the book)

021

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth (1973) p151

000

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Jamming with Cadell Last on self-actualization and transformation in our age of magical technologies — how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity, a an argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value. #HumansOnTheLoop michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-18

michaelgarfield.substack.com

Self-Actualization in the Global Brain with Cadell Last of Philosophy Portal

A guide to staying human and becoming ungovernable in the midst of the Singularity

010

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

If you’re attached to “being more than a machine”, consider that the difference between you and a next-token prediction algorithm might be 4B years of improv practice. Then again, it’s very hard to pivot from a story that you think you are. Part Two: michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/hotl-10

michaelgarfield.substack.com

☯ Why Should "I Contain Multitudes"?

On making peace with paradox as we turn and face the strangeness of AI.

000

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” in Esquire (1936) Part one of a new series on containing paradox: michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/hotl-09

michaelgarfield.substack.com

🦋 What Is "Being More Than A Machine"?

On perspectives on perspectives, and why it matters to tech ethics.

040

Reposted by Michael Garfield

Jessica Flack @c4computation.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Determinism, Causality + Emergence in the Mesoscale At Babel Blog is a summary of subthreads on implications for causality, determinism + emergence of spacetime, potentially following from the intersection of Wheeler’s it from bit, Jim’s common now and my work. jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog/

113

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Fish rot from the head, but a snake eats from the tail up to keep the prey breathing and avoid getting bitten. This is a political analogy.

010

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

"Science hides a not-knowing in a knowing." New ep of #HumansOnTheLoop on #ScaleTheory and the tension between colonialism and mysticism in #science and #philosophy, the #magic of #computers, the #embodiment of information, and the wickedness of #complexsystems: michaelgarfield.substack.com/h-15

020

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

🙏🏼 Big thanks to everyone for their praise of my new single! It's always a gambit to release intellectual psych-folk about trippy futurism and complexity but it's also a pretty vacant niche and it's what I love to do. Hope you like it too! michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/the-big-ma...

010

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

"In the shift from a consumptive economy to a contemplative one...jobs will disappear as a source of our identity. The job as a configuration is an industrial concept. The Dark Age and Medieval monk did not have a job; he had a vocation, a calling." – William Irwin Thompson

010

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Books are crystals but libraries evolve, and writers' communities. And I think (am I mistaken?) that LLMs are going to increasingly have fluid weights and constant data input and will not be frozen in the way they are today. And they will forget and the weights will "keep the score" of lost data. ?

010

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

On the one hand, totally. On the other hand, I wonder how this articulates with the conversation I'll publish soon that I had with Stuart Kauffman about the difference between machines and living systems, in which I got him to accept the entire Technium may qualify as alive even if robots don't.

110

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Just finished Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch Trilogy. Incredible! Who else has read this? I want to riff with someone eloquent about the world building on my show.

010

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

Also worth listening to my chat with Andrew McLuhan, since we are all McLuhan stans here: michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-11

michaelgarfield.substack.com

010

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

K and I talk about what we agree is next here: (in my words) an epistemic shift in which even liquid modernity vaporizes and construct-awareness pulls the ground out from under narratives of ANY kind (which is not just bad) michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-06

michaelgarfield.substack.com

100

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

The case for AI as neural media, not network media, and an emergent new pattern in which all of the astute characterizations of our network age have to be reworked. That as soon as we can all more or less agree on the points you make, they're already object and not the invisible environment...

200

Reposted by Michael Garfield

Max @maxbittker.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Visualize every book on earth as a single zoomable bookshelf, colored by archival status, with direct download links: phiresky.github.io/isbn-visuali...

95913

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

📯Okay, I'm coining it: The Metacrisis needs Metasolutions, approaches that ask if we're solving the right problem in the first place. You've got more answers than you want; what you need is better questions.

140

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Ah to be studying flora in Australia. Exchange program?

000

Michael Garfield @michaelgarfield.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

Members Hangout TODAY 3/15 @ 3 pm MT! Find the others and let's make culture. michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/hangout-31...

000