Generative UI and CogSec at the Limit We’ve written a lot about the different forms of information that open up once you start to take things like ontology or umwelten seriously - that is, once you start to understand that the world of subjects and objects we can interact with is determined heavily by our neurally and institutionally embedded assumptions about what kinds of things are real and how they can be real. As James C Scott has shown, the latter assumptions tend to favor discrete, administratively legible, and convergent or self-reinforcing images of the world. Institutionalists fantasize about a coming Singularity in which all things fall under this self-reinforcing image. We think this worldview is radically inadequate to the coming Divergence. Acceleration stands before a fanged noumenon, an extitutional Out There where - objects and entities are instantiated in space and time in ways that are radically alien or ontologically incomprehensible to us; - the robustly generative nature of base-material reality (that power we call immanence) assures that those objects and entities are many and variable; - the fact that we can’t interact with these noumena doesn’t mean they can’t interact with us; - the very act of interacting with them may radically alter or erase the ontological division between us and them. As 1) (to quote @tferriss) “the market for information collapses into the chatbot”, 2) the chatbot simultaneously flowers out to become a generative multimodal interface, escalating to almost unimaginably exotic UI with AVS / BCI-capable hardware upgrades, we expect that any Cartesian reduction of information will quickly explode into non-symbolic sensory feedback loops, improvisational visual languages, or weirder modes still. AI as a cultural mirror will imminently turn into AI as a window beyond the administrative gaze. In that turn’s wake will come all the dangers of thought and experience at the edge, what Robert Anton Wilson called the Chapel Perilous. Luckily, there's a wide array of subcultures and underground communities that are adept at navigating these extitutional realities. In order to survive, these nomad publics have remained opaque & insular. But behind that opacity, these headless empirical communities have developed repeatable protocols for interfacing with the weird. They have learned how to engage collective altered states at scale without falling into cultic traps. They have learned how to find and keep ground when confronted with reality fracture. They have learned how to socialize extreme private insight. In a word, they represent a diverse pool of protocols for cognitive security at the limit. And we are all about to be at the limit. As the weird goes mainstream, as the ontological shockwaves spread, we are going to need that deep CogSec. At The Open Machine, we are ready to do wide-spanning ethnographies and archival investigations on this front. We have done this work before, but our ambition grows as the technological moment escalates. We will archive unwritten knowledge. We will develop protocols for deep CogSec at the ontological edge. We will publish, we will open source, and we will show our work. But we need funding. If you are a collaborator or funder who is interested in aiding our investigation into the strategies for deep CogSec that exist in the underground, contact us by DM or email.