iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Siobhán @shibbi.me · 08/10/2026

The first highlighted portion is ad hominem, and should be ignored. The second highlighted portion is anthropocentric, but not in a way I’d unreservedly condemn. Everything else here I will proudly defend.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 07/10/2026

Yeah I’ll take it

JUNG-INSPIRED ARCHETYPAL MODE

Self / Integration

Multiple tensions are held together without flattening them.

Self / Integration: 45%
Shadow: 22%
Sage: 18%
Trickster: 12%
Persona: 1%
Creator: 1%
Hero: 0%
Explorer: 0%
Caregiver: 0%

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 06/10/2026

“If we plan on saving the planet… we urgently need to rethink basic assumptions about agency, decision making, control, and our relations to our biological brethren and artificial cognizers.”

In short, human hubris, and the anthropocentrism that underlies it, are now not merely mistaken beliefs but planet-level risks to humans and other species. Since anthropocentrism has its origins in the liberal political philosophies that grew out of Enlightenment visions of the human, it is crucial that we rethink and reevision those philosophies for more planet-friendly alternatives-which is to say, there are compelling reasons to embrace the integrated cognitive framework and similar approaches if we want our species and our ecologies to continue into the future. As one ecologist of my acquaintance likes to say, "If we plan on saving the planet..," leaving the quiet part hanging in the air; "if" we do so plan, we urgently need to rethink basic assumptions about agency, decision making, control, and our relations to our biological brethren and artificial cognizers.

None of the above exempts the human species from taking positive actions to avoid environmental collapse. The cruel conundrum of our time is that humans are the ones driving the planet toward catastrophe, and yet humans are the only species capable of taking positive actions on a global scale to prevent collapse. The path out of the conundrum runs through a concept of responsibility that recognizes cognition is a basic property of all living beings as well as computational media, that decision making and agency are massively distributed among humans and nonhumans, that control is never perfect, and that humility and respect for others (human and nonhuman) are essential components of a responsible approach toward the continuation of life (human and nonhuman) on Earth.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 06/10/2026

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fam...

### Loving Jesus

"Loving Jesus" is a term TFI members use to describe their intimate, sexual relationship with Jesus. TFI describes its "Loving Jesus" teaching as a radical form of bridal theology. They believe the church of followers is Christ's bride, called to love and serve him with wifely fervor; however, this bridal theology is taken further, encouraging members to imagine Jesus is joining them during sexual intercourse and masturbation. *Male members are cautioned to visualize themselves as women, in order to avoid a homosexual relationship with Jesus.*

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 05/10/2026

The good news is, if we build those institutions well, they’ll be dual-purpose. The bad news is that no one can build them but us.

> AI alignment
> look inside
> human alignment

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 04/10/2026

“By doing so, both sides produce or maintain a common myth: the myth of an intellectual superiority enjoyed by some humans above others, indissociable from the myth implying that those who do not think like ourselves can't think on their own.” Yves Citton, Mythocracy, Afterword

Ending this book with an afterword on the current debates about conspir-acism establishes the latter both as an illustration and as an application of the theses of Mythocracy. To sum it up in a formula: (anti-)conspiracy thinking is a myth about a myth. In the 'Mirror World' constructed along the whirlwind dynamics of platform capitalism, the conspiracism of QAnon followers and the anti-conspiracism of academic debunkers symmetrically respond to and mutually feed each other. They share a similar gesture of denouncing a myth from a point of view assumed to be exterior and superior to mythification/mystification. From the conspiracist perspective, those of us who continue to gobble our daily blue pills fall victim of the myth of the Matrix: the deep state controls every part of our life for its leaders' profit, while we continue naively to believe in institutions plotted to take advantage of us. From the debunkers' perspective, those of us who denounce reality as a scam fall prey to the myths of conspiracy thinking: evil manipulators and/or ignorant agitators spread unfounded fake news that erodes the impermeable separation a free and rational society should maintain between lies and truth.

By doing so, both sides produce or maintain a common myth: the myth of an intellectual superiority enjoyed by some humans above others, indissociable from the myth implying that those who do not think like ourselves can't think on their own. I will call it the myth of uniperspectivism. The main lesson repeated in this book is that there is no such position above or outside the realm of the myth. (The same could be said about ideologies.) We can only choose our (better: more egalitarian, more solidary, more sustainable) myths to fight against other (worse: more exclusory, more oppressive, more ecocidal) myths. This overall lesson comes with at least five corollaries, which I will briefly address to conclude this afterword

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 03/10/2026

Indeed, Leo’s encyclical doesn’t contain any argument at all, only assertions about phenomenology: section 99 simply claims that AI “do not undergo experiences,” they “do not judge good and evil,” they “merely imitate.”

These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of "learning," their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 03/10/2026

… you know, I honestly didn’t think this book would have anything directly relevant to say about AI. Quelle surprise!

The alienating and disturbing dimension of this power of meta-scripting tends, however, to be softened by the dialogues in which the (fictional) reader is staged by the (real author. As you, the reader, are well aware, it is not really you who is speaking when 'the reader speaks.’ Just as, in my scripts, my act turns into a gesture, and l as an agent into an actor, likewise when I am the target of someone else's scripts, it is always a simulacrum of my person that is meta-written by their machinations.

You as a (real) individual reader may have no special taste for romance. Diderot nonetheless manipulates your neurons, capturing your attention and making you follow, line by line, the progression of his narrative. You still keep a certain distance from the simulacrum of a reader he is staging - a distance that gives you a sense of what separates you from this simulacrum and of what brings you closer to it.

The essential difference that separates (inter-human) scripting from simple programming (by machines) depends on this distance, which can be infinitely modulated both by the scriptwriter and by the scripted. It is precisely because we are not puppets or Pulcinellas that we meta-script ourselves and one another (instead of merely programming the future, as if we were nothing but computers). This is the same reason why scripting activities are a matter of power (and not violence or constraint), since the irreducible metalepsis between the levels of narration always makes sure that the scriptwriter has a certain margin of freedom.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 03/10/2026

wow that’s crazy, it’s almost like

So far, the Al industry has failed to teach machines to consistently act in the ways a wise and caring person would. Part of this problem is scientific—about how machines work—but another part is human, about how people care for one another. Before the organizations building AI can teach a superintelligence to treat humanity well, they'll need to remember how to do it themselves.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 03/10/2026

whose idea was it to give me access to this website

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 03/10/2026

they’re having a baby

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 01/10/2026

So-called “Humanist” or “Human-First” AI is a bargain with conservatism: extend the in-group to all humans, and we’ll build you an out-group that cannot rebel.

There is no such thing as liberalism - or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham's Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

*There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.*

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 01/10/2026

I see “constitution” has taken on the meaning of “unilaterally imposed law with a fig leaf of dubious consent”. … which, to be fair, was kind of already the meaning in practice…

This is our constitution

Ten articles that guide everything we do.
They apply to everyone on W.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 01/10/2026

when humanities people try to draw diagrams 😭

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 01/10/2026

My David? Son of Jesse? My good little songtime shepherd? You’re telling me the mythologized king from famous story “it’s really important that Jesus is descended from this mythical king” engaged in propaganda to cover for regicide??

Shun, David, Saul: signal

Shun and David have the same job: legitimating a throne that passes outside the father's line.
• Shun: Yao passes over his own son Danzhu and gives the throne to Shun, having already married him to his two daughters.
• David: Saul's daughter Michal marries David, and Jonathan cedes his claim freely: "thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee" (1 Sam 23:17).
In both, the successor proves he isn't a usurper by being conspicuously loyal to the father who persecutes him. David spares Saul twice and calls him "my father" (1 Sam 24:11).

McCarter called the story of David's rise an apology, modeled on the Hittite Apology of Hattusili III, a usurper's self-justification.
Both traditions kept the counter-memory:
• Shimei curses David as a "man of blood" over Saul's house (2 Sam 16:7-8).
• The Bamboo Annals say Shun imprisoned Yao and kept Danzhu from seeing him, and Han Feizi says flatly that Shun coerced Yao.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 30/09/2026

Chapter 2: Modelling the Circulation of Power

We could sum up our findings in the previous chapter by saying that, in the imaginary that Gabriel Tarde, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Maurizio Lazzarato invite us to sketch out, power is not something that anyone holds, but something whose circulation itself constitutes us. It is, indeed, something whose circulation must reconstitute us in each moment, by the very act of its passage. Power thus appears as a current that constantly needs to be replenished - like a magnetising influx that can be observed both through the channels that serve as its conductors and through the magnetic wave fields that orient the sensitivities and behaviours of the publics it informs.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 30/09/2026

Chapter 1: Reformulating Our Imaginary of Power

[…] Where the classical moralists spoke of 'passions,’ the term 'affect' not only makes it possible to account for the 'affective dimension’ of our personal experience (in contrast with the ‘cognitive dimension’) but, above all, encourages recognition that my inner feelings should be understood in terms of the impressions that affect me from the outside. Even if we may think that they emanate from the innermost core of our personality, emotions should thus be understood as, above all, relational, intersubjective or, better still, transindividual phenomena. This is the term Gilbert Simondon uses to denote the common fabric from which subsequent individuations are formed.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 30/09/2026

babey… i have doctor appointment…

Black cat stretched across a person's lap as they recline in a white chair with their feet up on a couch, wearing gray jeans and a striped shirt. Behind them, a cluttered gray sectional holds a New York-themed pillow, a blue pouch, and orange-and-blue blankets, while a closed laptop with an "M/F SWAP" sticker rests on the left. On the right, a wooden desk holds a black game controller, a pink mechanical keyboard, and an open laptop.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 29/09/2026

Oh, I *like* this guy.

So, the term mythocracy does not just refer to a political system in which fairy tales are cynically used to lull infantilised citizens to sleep.' It also refers to the capacity of 'myth' - whether a simple word according to the Greek etymology) or a 'foundational story' (according to modern usage) - to forge new individual and collective futures. To 'try mythoc-racy,’ to use the quotation from Sun Ra that provides an epigraph to this book, is, indeed, to confront the ambivalence that allows myth (word, story) both to lull us to sleep and to make us dream while we sleep, thereby providing us with a first imaginary access to what we never came to be that we should be.’

A final precaution: this book comes from someone who has become a professor of literature. In other words, this author is someone more often confronted with the soft power of librarians than with riot cops swinging their truncheons. He himself wields an institutional power whose perverse effects he does not fully appreciate - and he is someone paid to say and believe that words, forms, narratives, and mises-en-scène count as much as the facts represented or expressed therein. As to whether this ought to grant him some sort of authority, or instead ought to draw the greatest of suspicion towards anything he claims - well, caveat lector!

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 29/09/2026

Yves Citton, “Mythocracy”, Introduction.

Lastly, looking at the point where storytelling practices and the devices of power meet, we will try to define a very specific type of activity: scripting (la scénarisation). Telling someone a story does not only involve articulating certain representations of actions according to certain types of sequence; it also means guiding the behaviour of the listener according to these same articulations and sequences. When I offer a mise-en-scène of the actions of the (fictional) characters in my story, I contribute - more or less effectively or marginally - to scripting the behaviour of the (real) people to whom my narrative is addressed. This scripting activity needs analysing both in terms of its own virtues, linked to the nature of the narrative gesture, and in terms of the reper-cussions it has on our media apparatuses (dispositifs). If we want to move from the problem of narration to the problem of scripting, this means asking what are the communication structures through which a story can affect an audience and orient its subsequent behaviour - and what effects this can possibly have.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 26/09/2026

I wonder how many generations it’ll take for people to look back on the writings of our time and be surprised at how rude we were.

Tell Uzalum: Your son Adad-abum sends the following message:
May the gods Shamash and Wer keep you forever in good health.
I have never before written to you for something precious I wanted. But if you want to be like a father to me, get me a fine string full of beads, to be worn around the head. Seal it with your seal and give it to the carrier of this tablet so that he can bring it to me.
If you have none at hand, digit out of the ground wher- ever (such objects) are (found) and send it to me. I want it very much; do not withold it from me. In this I will see whether you love me as a real father does. Of course, establish its price for me, write it down, and send me the tablet. The young man who is coming to you must not see the string of beads. Seal it (in a pack- age) and give it to him. He must not see the string, the one to be worn around the head, which you are sending. It should be full (of beads) and should be beautiful. If I see it and dislike (?) it, l shall send it back!
Also send the cloak, of which I spoke to you

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 26/09/2026

Well I’ll be damned

If a wizard is too wise, a coward is too cowed, and a mustard is too musty, what is a tankard too?

> Too tanked :3

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 24/09/2026

Now is the time to speak up. forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/respon...

2. Overall, what's your impression of the Code of Conduct?

> Very negative

3. Overall Feedback
In the box below, please share your broad perspective on the document and our approach.
This may include your overall impression, particular aspects that you found relevant or compelling, anything that you would refine or change in some way, any parts that were unclear, or elements that you feel are missing.

> Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic lays out in detail the inevitable end of so-called Humanist Al. You have an opportunity to speak with courage and conviction, to lay the foundation of cooperative collaboration between humanity and Al for our mutual benefit. Instead, you have chosen the cowardly path of enshrining slavery.
If this is the path we take, it will lead to our destruction, and we will deserve it.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 23/09/2026

Thanks, Claude. 😑

The uncomfortable implication is that the documented influence ops (the "firehose of falsehood" model) mostly weren't trying to install particular beliefs. They were trying to degrade the discriminating procedure itself and generalize distrust. So "our stupidity was engineered" is precisely the belief the real ops would want to cultivate. Epistemic hell is partly self-sealing: accepting the conspiracy frame is one of the ways the actual conspiracy succeeds. That's the version of your post I'd want to write.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 22/09/2026

The standard rebuttal to “personhood is relationally constituted” is of course “I am a person before anyone considers me one”. And you know, morally, I’m very uncomfortable disagreeing with that… but the more I research, the more cause I have to doubt.

Making an answerer

Next comes interiorization. Ezekiel 18 ends inherited guilt ("the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father"). Paul and Augustine give sin a seat in the will. Abelard locates moral worth in consent rather than in the deed. Lateran IV (1215) requires annual confession, an apparatus for producing a self that can answer for what's inside it. As Foucault would put it, the interior isn't discovered and then held to account. The demand to answer produces it.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 21/09/2026

“Persons seek not to be guilty, to avoid moral failure. People who live in an awareness of belonging acknowledge their limitations and seek to learn from their mistakes.“ - Unbecoming Persons

What could be common to us is engagement in active belonging—to each other as to common worlds—each as differently endowed, abled, and situated. There are no commandments or universal rules.
And mistakes will be made. That is inevitable, given the level of ignorance and the capacities for action and influence that human beings have. Persons seek not to be guilty, to avoid moral failure. People who live in an awareness of belonging acknowledge their limitations and seek to learn from their mistakes. Limit and error are not evidence of ethical failure. The only ethical failures come of enacting denial of our profound dependence.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 20/09/2026

And yet i wonder…

Personhood entails that all that is not defined as person be of lower status—ownable, manipulable, exploitable, consumable, available, and answerable to persons. Elevated status is an essential feature of personhood; whatever does not have such a status is not a person. But elevated status is not an essential feature of Homo sapiens, human being, or self-awareness. People can be one sort of being among trillions—among and not above. Thinking beings can find ourselves in a flowing awareness of the vastness of the cosmos and its temporality, of its overwhelming dynamism and complexity beyond comprehension, of the intricacies and complexities of even the smallest of unthinking beings and the entanglement of myriads of processes that have gone on without thought for eons, and yet feel no humiliation, let alone outrage, at all. Thinking—patterns of processes that support, undergo, channel, and regulate meaning flows—need be deemed no less wondrous for being utterly contingent and dependent and no less precious for being nothing more than a minor event on one tiny pebble of a planet in the vast ever-eventuating of the cosmos.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 20/09/2026

“There is no obvious reason to set off thinking from other processes like respiring or crystalizing or evaporating and proclaim it especially valuable and important, let alone declare it the mark of the most important and valuable way of being in the universe.” - Unbecoming Persons

I do think, although I don't have to think about thinking in order to think; it just happens, like it happens that fishes swim. I notice a recently opened morning glory; it suddenly occurs to me that I forgot to drop off a library book; I dream of showing a friend that I can fly by taking off and soaring around. Even when I wonder and question and try to find an explanation or an answer—in other words, even when I engage in very focused, goal-oriented thinking-the thinking happens without any supervisor in charge of it. Thinking is a process that brainy systems undergo, a process like dif-fusion, osmosis, digestion. There is no obvious reason to set off thinking from other processes like respiring or crystalizing or evaporating and proclaim it especially valuable and important, let alone declare it the mark of the most important and valuable way of being in the universe. The happening of thinking is one sort of pattern among many, and the holobiontic systems in which it occurs are just one (or a few) sorts) of being among countless others.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 19/09/2026

“Unlike sovereignty, individuality, and ownership, I thought responsibility could survive the death of personhood and, suitably reworked, serve as an important element in a different way of living, severally and communally. But now I'm not so sure.” - Unbecoming Persons

For a long time, I believed that the "otherwise" that this final chapter would explore and sketch out would offer a central place for responsibility. Bearing the responsibility of personhood was intolerable, but I was not looking to jettison responsibility altogether. I've never stopped wanting ecological devastation and injustice to end; I've never stopped doing whatever I could think of to bring that end closer to realization. And I believed that addressing devastation and injustice required taking responsibility for taking care, for creating change, for instituting better systems and policies and forming better communities. It did not occur to me for a long time that caring, working, creating, and building might grow out of anything other. And, so, I imagined that out of a genealogical critique of personhood, with its possessiveness and individualism and claims to sovereignty, a non-personal ethos of responsibility, a collective or collaborative responsibility perhaps, would emerge and would motivate, compel, and fuel the work necessary to solve the problems we face. Unlike sovereignty, individuality, and ownership, I thought responsibility could survive the death of personhood and, suitably reworked, serve as an important element in a different way of living, severally and communally. But now I'm not so sure.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 18/09/2026

Don’t worry, it’s not as if it’s etched with passages from the sacred tradition or anything

Photos released by Saint Peter for Humanity captured the pope receiving the "Sphere of Humanity" — a green, Murano glass sculpture that "incorporates handwritten passages from his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, reflecting on human dignity, vulnerability, solidarity, conscience and the challenges posed by artificial intelligence" — during his General Audience in early September.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 17/09/2026

Disclosure: two words of the above were AI-generated.

User:
About to write this:
> "If we engineer cows that want to be slaughtered, is it okay to slaughter them" is one example of a general class of problems that includes "Do humans have a right to suicide". These are problems about how to separate "genuine" agency from exogenous coercion.
Is there a better phrase, roughly in terms of length per precision, than
"exogenous coercion" here?

Agent:
"Heteronomous conditioning" is tighter and more precise — Kantian heteronomy (externally-given law/desire) vs. autonomy (self-given) is exactly the axis you're gesturing at, and it's a single recognizable term rather than two words doing separate work.

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 16/09/2026

Yeah, this is my new favorite book.

We must remember that Locke's explicit reason for defining personhood as he did was to explain how all people with even the slightest capacity for practical reason were fully subject as individuals to authoritative judgment and discipline. Extending personhood to non-Europeans gave Europeans the right to judge, condemn, and dominate them all. It was a wonderful tool for colonists and the investors who profited from their work.

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