Deep time is a political and civilizational event. A society’s sense of time is inseparable from its sense of order, and what it believes it owes to the future. Our sense of self will be different if we imagine ourselves against the backdrop of deep time.
It's very hard to imagine oneself dead, and its even harder to imagine the absence of everyone like me. But that too shall come to pass...
A quote from Bjornerud's lovely book on Timefulness for today's #DailyPlanet
Done
And when I try to create a Margin account:
Much historical analysis is either about 'recorded time,' i.e., history as evidenced in texts and other inscriptions, or about 'end time,' e.g., Edenic beginnings or apocalyptic endings.
Neither makes room for Deep Time, the time of biological and geological processes that shape human societies.
That’s what I tried to do!
@margin.at trying to create an account and cloudflare is repeatedly blocking me :(
We barely remember what happened yesterday, so to expect us to take geological eras into consideration is a bit much. However, our lives are built on deep time (hello fossil fuels!) - how can we extract those fossilized memories and bring them into consciousness?
Interesting!
I've been MIA, but the Daily Planet is back for the year. In 2026, I will focus on "contradictions" - how the human domination of the Earth creates the conditions for its own demise. I will be exploring issues like habitability & development. Looking forward to taking @leaflet.pub out for a spin!
It's been a while since I wrote here, but I have been doing a lot of reading re: Planetarity and having planet shaped thoughts. Here's the first #DailyPlanet post for 2026 - it's a long essay on Planetary Stewarship. I will switch to regular programming next week.
Social media for AIs might (will?) radicalize them at hyperspeed. It took fifteen years from Facebook to Groypergate; AIs will get there in fifteen minutes and keep going....
2/2 Most of the middle powers in the world are outside the west and there's no chance that Canada will be a leader of this group. The non-superpower West should learn how to follow and not rip off their predecessors' ideas as if you thought about them for the first time in human history.
1/2 Carney's speech is much needed, but very very very far from being original. The Non-Aligned Movement was created by Nehru, Tito, Sukarno, Nkrumah and Nasser for this very reason. Read the Bandung Declaration!
@ronentk.me - based on our earlier conversation + some other thoughts I've been mulling over
6/n PS: Prediction Culture is one way to metabolize AI; embodied intelligence, aka the China Model, suggests an alternative metabolic pathway: "Production Culture," that has its own exhaust: overproduction of unwanted crap.
5/n The Gig Economy is a good example.
Anyways, in the late stage we are in, it's only a matter of time before coups, assassinations and other acts of violence are absorbed into Prediction Culture.
4/n But I digress.
The answer to my question is: The culture of AI is "Prediction Culture," which also goes by other, less flattering names like "The Casino Economy." Prediction culture is both the condition of possibility for AI, and is directly altered by AI technologies.
3/n It's a lot of money, but not enormous; a mid-level functionary with inside information can afford to spend $30K on a reasonably sure thing. Platforms such as Polymarket democratize and expand the scope of insider trading - like counting cards in a casino, but in the economy writ large.
2/n I will get to my answer in a minute, but let me tell you a story first: between December 31st and Jan 3rd, an anonymous trader made over $400,000 trading on Maduro's ouster.
1/n There's a camp of analysts - Cosma Shalizi, Henry Farrell and Alison Gopnik are the most prominent members - who say that AI is a cultural technology. Let's say they're correct. The obvious follow-up question is:
> What's the culture of which AI is a cultural technology?
I can imagine fine grained bets on coups - with or without assassination, for example
Well, well, well….
Totally agree on financialization. The new twist I see is 'The Compute Theory of Everything' - that you can automate much of the economy on the back of raw compute. IMHO Prediction = computation + financialization, which explains why the US is all in on AI and turning the economy into a casino.
With the US economy ruled by betting from sports to AI, a) are we in a predictive culture ruled by predictive capital b) money has always been a store of value, unit of account etc & now are discovering a new dimension: money as a bet on the future, i.e., the machine learning theory of money.
Don't you think "AI," as a cluster concept, is at least as broad as nuclear + space, encompassing everything from hyperscalers to embodied robotics to GPUs under one umbrella. AI = "computing stack" is comparable to "nuclear + space = physics stack"
Is 2026 the year Embodied Intelligence goes viral? I don't know, but I will be tracking it for sure. Also: this is the last #WeeklyPlanet of the year, and likely the last one for a while since I need to recover from all this daily/weekly posting.
Space Travel/Rockets/Missiles fit the bill IMHO
