“the upotia that has left it’s trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions.” — Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
I haven’t really started writing in a journal yet. Today might be a good day to start. Even though it feels rusty and I don’t have so much to say yet, why not get started?
The journal should touch on intellectual investigations alongside more spiritual and emotional ones. The tone of this kind of reporting, and I guess the intellectual taste is what I’m trying to scope out here with the imagination that these notes could be put online and read by someone else without much fuss. Maybe this would suggest a degree of vulnerability. Of thinking in public in order to make the process and underlying dispositions available to those who seek them. A kind of mindmap that is itself designed to unfurl the non-linearity of spiraling towards a conclusion and some kind of ontological standpoint that is itself the outcome of prodding in multiple concurrent directions and thus unfurling the landscape of mind so as to bring about new constellations, as it might here be called. Even the very act of starting to lay out a methodology of constellations as it might here be called, at least starting out, as it could itself be a scaffolding to a more robust approach that itself adopts new names.
But we, no I, have to start somewhere.
So be welcome on this strange journey of unfolding, as we take a year to build up a world of ideas, materials, connections, communities, and one hopes, new language that which unlocks the spring of latent potentials. The aspirations (see Aspirations for 2024) for this journey are themselves under constant revision as new vantages appear and revision itself leads us towards ever clearer articulations of what motivates this project. That said, there are some inspirational projects which might inform to a greater degree the shape this project takes, at least at the outset, and gives it some wider orientation towards how it might frame it’s stakes.
- Benjamin’s Arcades Project
- Algorithms in the World
- Seeing <—> Making Room for Thought
- Semi-public thinkers like Venkat Rao
- Open source development
To be clear, I’m not yet sure what it means to be thinking in public and what it implications it will have to publish this journal as a record of thought that has occurred and, in it’s incipient potential form, lead to more polished work. Perhaps it’s a release from working away in obscurity and even the belief that in the age of digital publications there is as much a finished work to be consumed as a process of creation laid bare to the abundant attention which becomes borne of obsession, should it reveal itself, or even morbid curiosity borne of disdain which itself might bring about a sort of “I can’t get enough of this” infatuation with the collected filetree of such a digital palimpsest. Why else participate? Itself a question that can be best answered by running the experiment and producing the work in dialogue with the readers.
Maybe one day we’ll write this together.
On my mind today:
- Creating a tracker
- reading about LLM interpretability