Storage for thoughts; links; out-of-distribution paragraphs; writing-in-the-Lighthaven-courtyard-while-Barton-Fink-plays, flashes of random thought, frosting-on-the-cake.

Municipalpunk future

The streets are narrow, warm, car-less. European-like, really, and completely available for all to trample through, trash, manipulate, edit, frolic in, own. Because at night, the little beasts come out to flit over the streets, zip around with a low hum of childish wonder, cute automobilelike machines, order-pavers, micromanaging blueprint-bearing floor-fairies of the city council. Disorder is a temporary state that may be reveled in: to destroy and tear apart in the name of fun so that the shape-of-the-world itself may glue-and-smooth it back together. 1

Drawing of a green, friendly-looking, street-cleanup-disposed vehicle drawn by Shaun Mooney @mooneysart.bsky.social

Coziness is a function of world-cached safety, in the sense that pronoia becomes an entirely justified feeling under these conditions. There’s not a single sharp spike in sight; no clean-up necessary; YOU aren’t directly responsible for expending the negentropy the municipalpunk robots use up; wherever you fall, there you’re cushioned.

Municipalpunk feels small everywhere you go, but is vast enough to accommodate trillions of humans; municipalpunk is a buffer against entropy as the ultimate nihil supernum and dragon to slay; an indefinite groundhog day of endless modulability, fun-absorption, stable containment against glorious endogenous forces of human spirit.2

Screenshot of the markdown jekyll page of this article, on GitHub

Capitalismpunk future

Capitalism as aesthetic? Fully automated luxury communism with free markets and libertarian ruggedness and humans flying around all over, fundamentally comrads in the sense that each human is alloted a mountain of negentropy they will eventually run to the ground? Redistribution of the lightcone into 8 billion shards, each shard becoming an entire lineage?

  1. There’s writing advice that sometimes makes its way back into the forefront of my mind that goes something like “pay attention only to the SOUND of a sentence; this matters so much you mustn’t write with a typewriter!” I write this as the Inkhaven crowd and I watch the 1991 comedy “Barton Fink” (Wikipedia seems to call it a “dark comedy” which mildly worries me because I clearly haven’t gotten to the “dark” part yet) and find it entertaining to attempt to keep up rhythm while paying attention to the plot and running ahead of the “Inkhaven steamroller” Lightcone Infrastructure came up with for us.

    Ok ok now I see the dark part. I do revel in the idea that I’m currently feeling a little rattled, mildly disgusted, unclean; but that my future self will only see “cute municipalpunk machines arrive from the future” and forget about the part where I wrote this while this scene played in the background. And so it is that the oddest or most despicable of days (or handful of minutes) can nonetheless contribute to the well-being of a person whom it is one’s sole responsibility to aid and protect! :D For you, his present mud into your present gold. ↩

  2. To imagine utopia in some detail feels useful to me, or perhaps most importantly highly-neglected; Nick Bostrom may be celebrated not once but twice for having ~kickstarted an important field, as he seems relatively alone in this business. Does it signal unseriousness to be writing about utopia in the twenty-first century? Are people not tempted, as I was today, to eat the frosting on the cake first, while the barbarism is held at arms length and rolls like a distant kinetoscope, dull compared to the rush of one’s own website, open GitHub tab? Do people’s thoughts not stray?

    This part of me is present enough to be worth legibilizing, which is why I give it at least one footnote. ↩