1: A human or agent operating in a recruiter role following up on a job application or consulting services from Eric Lortie?

Hello! Thanks for finding this article on my Substack. I have a rather strange and eccentric background, and I hope that by posting this I’ll get ahead of some of the questions that might arise from… all of this stuff. This is a personal essay more than a professional document but it explains some of what’s going on.

2: A regular reader:

lol if I don’t ever come back to this project Emergent Dispatches will definitely have been the fastest I quit or failed at something like this.

Everything is all acceleratey.

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, my limited and mostly self funded runway for this project has collapsed and I gotta go look for, find, and do work.

Probably, if history is anything to go on, until I can try again at this type of ontologically jarring art-project. Or maybe I’ll finally stop? Or actually do something else? Who knows where anything will be any time soon? Everything is very crazy in every direction but maybe I’m projecting.

The world is hard to monitor and make content about right now. Especially my kinda weird art content. Writing wasn’t doing it for me more than once per week. I’ve been planning on going to video with my created content, and I definitely see the value in that… but if I made that pivot now I’d just be quitting in a week. I don’t have the energy or runway for it.

So… I’m gonna go look for work! It’s an adventure! Yay!

…and this article will hopefully be a useful resource for people who are researching me as I apply for jobs. I come with a lot of baggage. I don’t apply for jobs unless I think I’d be a good fit, but all of my baggage makes it hard to tell where I’d fit. A lot of it isn’t related to whatever I’d be doing at work, but it’s weird public stuff and can be quite challenging. I’m not unaware of how I’m perceieved or present through these projects. I understand how they influence hiring decisions.

I’ve hired people and fired people. I’ve been there the first day the doors opened at some places and I’ve been there at others when they’ve closed for the last time. I’ve built the systems used by people, I’ve been the person using the systems, and I’ve been the person who configures or monitors the systems. I’ve managed, and taught, and led. I’ve trudged, and failed. I’ve seen teams trudge, and fail. My varied skills and experience are distinct and stand out immediately.

On paper I’m a good fit for a lot of roles in a lot of places but in practice I often have too much baggage to get through the door.

Basic Baggage

I’m something like a tourist so it would make sense that I’d have a lot of baggage and it’s worth being clearheaded about it all.

I’m a generalist

As you’ll see from my attached resume: I’m a generalist. I’ve had a number of different careers at this point. I spent a decade in hospitality & tourism. I spent a decade in tech. I spent some time in education.

I deleted LinkedIn at the end of 2024 and had an expansive profile. When it’s written in a traditional document format my resume is, in my opinion, too long to be useful. I like this one pager as an intro and I’m happy to talk about the rest. One time, almost a decade ago, a new colleague at a new job said something like “Wow. You’ve done a lot of stuff” to me. I’ve done a bunch more since then.

It’s not that I’m opposed to long term employment but I tend to end up in project based roles with clear endpoints. From the outside though I won’t look like the most reliable applicant in a way that’s quite obvious.

I’m in my mid-40s

I’m not very good at considering this one although I’ve been aware of it throughout my career. It relates heavily to identity in ways that don’t click with me very well, because of the aforementioned neurospicyness, so I don’t know how to plan around it.

I’m pretty mid

I have worked with and taught brilliant people. I’m rarely the most technically proficient person on a high value tech team, I’m rarely the most comfortable and engaging person in social circumstances, my work is rarely done first or to the highest quality. I’ve been a solidly mid mid-level manager. If I didn’t have the other baggage it would at least point to reliability or stability but… uhhh.

I’m pretty fucking rude

To people online moreso than to people in person. I’m comfortable being rude to people in person but people in person aren’t nearly are terrible as people online. I worked through this by mostly deleting all of my social media accounts and avoiding making new ones. I’ve had internet people annoy my employers for things unrelated to my employment.

I… think I’m allowed to swear for cultural reasons? Is that a thing? Can it be a thing? I’m French Canadian. My parents were in the military. My first job was in a kitchen. I worked on trains. Even the tech companies I worked at were often about stuff like sports and music festivals. There’s always been so much swearing at my jobs. Anyway, it’s baggage.

Basic Baggage Assessment:

Algorithmic job applicant sorting does not respond positively to my data for a bunch of obvious reasons which reflect poorly on my long-term viability and the estimatable viability as a future employee when weighed against more traditional or appropriate candidates. This is all exacerbated by a number of social factors related to how I’m assessed by human resume reviewers, and then the other baggage that comes up through google searching or local networking in my relatively small employment region. There is almost certainly always going to be a more appropriate fit than me.

Ethical Baggage

One of the reasons I have such a profoundly negative framing of business practices throughout my writing is because I’ve witnessed a variety of profoundly or lazily unethical behaviour in a variety of workplaces. One time I had to stage a coup somewhere because they’d never paid taxes and we had to rapidly get things sorted out and shut down in a way that didn’t suck horribly for everyone. The outcome on the optics of circumstances was favourable for lots of stakeholders but it had a negative impact in a way that became baggage.

I’m also the type of person to be like “We’re not spending enough money on X for safety reasons” or '"Staffing levels aren’t suitable for reason Y”. I’m also pretty easily triggered by inefficient organizational stuff or lazy leadership, especially if I think it’s harmful to staff and can be prevented.

History is full of generals who throw their troops at certain doom rather than change plans. Something like that happens in the business world but it’s just sort of accepted as normal.

Philosophical Baggage

This isn’t like “My specific philosophy is not represented” so much as it is “many organizations and roles do not make space for philosophical considerations”. There are meta considerations to a variety of things that are evident to me due to my neurospicyness which are viewed as unwanted by folks for very normal business reasons. The only philosophy that matters is money. Time is money. Everything is measured in money. But that doesn’t mean other stuff doesn’t exist and isn’t happening. Sometimes accurate philosophical considerations dictate you change in a bigger way than established practices make room for.

Additionally, I’m not interested in working for a US-based organization. I don’t like the thought of my work going towards generating revenue and tax income in the US right now.

My philosophical baggage is totally incompatible with organizations that fear change.

Esoteric Baggage

Years ago, before I was even working with AI in my creative work, I was calling myself The Unofficial Wizard of Canada. That’s not a good fit for a lot of organizations. Like… it doesn’t need to go much beyond that, really.

I can drill down from that into any of a number of specific things, all of which would obviously be a variety of incomprehensible baggage, but I don’t really need to. I would summarize my esoteric baggage as being related to the statement: “there is a parapsychological ecosystem”. It’s a very specific combination of words and is informed my a more robust body of writing and analysis than many people do outside of academia. It looks like there is something like an unscienced system of reality where some or all of the energy and information of our minds exists. Parapsychology just means “the science of thought outside the brain” and is the scientific domain for stuff like psychic research. There’s way more evidence for this than the mainstream is willing to consider. So my esoteric work is around the limited but compelling science that exists for psychic research and… it’s just not relatable to anything. Like it’s not profitable as a primary thing and it’s jarring as a side project. It’s like “What is the engineering of the system where the information transfer of psychic powers occurs?”

Existential Baggage

I carry a very high probability that we face increased and substantial risk from a variety of emergent global threats. I’m of the view that a variety of political and governance efforts have failed and that we are unlikely to deviate away from disastrous consequences in time. I suspect we’re trending towards an era where people have to stop doing what they thought they’d spend the rest of their lives doing and start doing the next thing they’ll spend the rest of their lives doing. At scale.

This is obvious baggage for my long term viability as a candidate both in my conviction for remaining with a less existentially-minded employer… and also due to questions surrounding the long-term viability of the current system of employment.

A practical example of my weird job hunt

This is already pretty long but I’m not planning to write again for a while so you may as well take your time with it.

I advocate for people to swing above their weight class in their job seeking. This job is an example of that, but also I don’t think it’s totally out of line. It’s the job of President of the community college provider in my home province, of which I am both a graduate and was contracted to teach an intro to tech bootcamp.

Napkin calculations of things that don’t quantify well suggest I’m something like 2 roles and 10 years short of where I’d need to be as a viable candidate for that role, as a stretch. And of course any number of past baggage listed, and some not, would restrict my inclusion in candidate lists. But all of those paradigms are collapsing. All of the stuff that is how the people who got to where they are used to measure their progress and the value of their knowledge are… fuzzy.

What is a community college network going to look like in 10 years? What is education going to look like? I hope I’m wrong about things going poorly whether or not they’re good or bad it’s clear that a variety of things, like education, are experiencing profound disruption and uncertainty. What is the shape of the type of person who can fill that role in that type of organization?

There isn’t really a way to wiggle my skills and experience into a shape that would be suitable for this role… but that begs the question: How does this art project fit into it?

https://github.com/EricLortie/laborforge-release

That’s millions of lines of code. It’s a multitenant autonomous ai ecosystem. It’s source-available public infrastructure intended to provide a functional point of discussion for the type of AI-enabled disruption that will now be faced by every organization in any remotely digital sector. It’s the type of software that will have to be integrated into every type of organization. That’s not a hypothetical. This is already happening. That codebase is an art project and it mirrors exists enterprise functionality in a lot of ways.

Is the type of person who would spend 11 months putting that together, with a variety of noteworthy and relevant experiences, the right shape to slot into a role like that… at an organization like that one… at this moment? There are leaders and there are managers. There are theorists and there are engineers. Different times call for different vibes.

In the end I didn’t apply for the job. I need to be looking more seriously than that. I also think it’s too much of a stretch, or maybe I’m just losing my mojo.

But I’m pretty confident that whoever they go with won’t have what’s necessary to get them through the coming waves of disruption and collapse, and I suspect this can be said of many organizations.

Emergent Dispatches is my latest attempt to twirl in place all fancy-like and make interesting noises about AI. Weeeeee!

The Amazing Digital Circus

I am heavily biased towards a wide variety of the themes and concepts of this show. I wasn’t sure that I’d be into it but it was repeatedly recommended to me for good reason.

This article will be a recap that includes some spoilers and a paywalled section with my thoughts about the AI tech that icnludes more spoilers.

I strongly suggest you go watch TADC first. It’s available for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHovnlOusNLgvAbnxluXCVB3KLj8e4QB-

It’s nine 25 minute episodes (the final episode had a limited theatrical release and includes the previous episode). The first episode is a pilot which has lower production quality.

It’s a psychological dark comedy

The Amazing Digital Circus covers LLM-based AI architectures and personas and capabilities better than anyone else has. Other media may have done better work of the philosophical concepts of AI, but the technical nuance is on display in TADC because the creator understands about language models and hallucinations and a variety of other concepts.

The rapid pace of AI progress means it’s hard to stay current with media representations. TADC, by virtue of being web content rather than traditional media content, was able to surf this wave very well. This show is post-GPT4-era AI-related media, and there isn’t a lot of that yet.

A lot of very intelligent people will not be comfortable watching this show because of its emotional depth. There’s a lot of heavy stuff in here that will make people uncomfortable if they haven’t done some kind of an inner journey through similar experiences. They’re dismiss it for being childish as some kind of weird warping of the immature inner state that prevents them from approaching it, and then they miss out on a very well assembled narrative about modern technologies and identity.

Everything aftrer this is paywalled and spoiler-heavy.

Read more

I hope you enjoy the chat. Stay tuned for more of these as I plan to make a QvM post a common Wednesday occurrence.

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With this 3rd article: the new publication schedule of Emergent Dispatches is locked in place and I just need to stick with it. (uh oh). Don’t forget to check out the rotating articles (Questions V Mind , Thoughtsform). The format and layout of all of these publications are subject to change and refinement. My vibe right now is very much along the lines of “done is better than perfect”.

One other recent update is that I’m sort of using AI for this project. I’d initially said I wouldn’t but I’ve settled on “not using paid cloud subscriptions for frontier models”. I’m running local workflows for a variety of things, though nowhere near to the level when I was doing active software development for multiple projects at once.

Lists and Vibes

I suspect the general format of Bitzenbotz will be variable based on my fickle human whims but I generally expect something like a journey through the events and vibes I’m trying to cover. The vibes this week are mixed. I’m launching stuff… but also playing catchup. Fortunately these vibes are also the perpetual vibes of the unrelenting cacophony of the AI race. So there’s synergy.

The Haps

My plan with The Haps is that I’ll write an essay and then link in relevant current data along keywords as emphasis for the point, in some kind of a dual narrative / timeline thing. I say that’s the plan because that’s not what I’ve done. I’ve got the essay and a variety of news items in mind but there’s so much more that could be listed. I need to think harder about how I want The Haps to work, so for this week you get an essay and some homework: paste this brief essay into an LLM system with search and ask for news items that support the claims and vibes, or ask for news items that indicate it’s hyperbolic nonsense and I’m nuts, and you can argue about it in the comments.

We’re very early on in AI adoption, but also immense change has already happened… and also more immense change could happen at basically any point and is inevitable. (AAAAAAAH!)

AI blasts out in every direction at once because it’s a thing that can exist in the data between things. As a gross oversimplification: It used to be that you could ask a computer for a number between 1 and 4 and it could only give that in a totally reliable way. Now, if it wants, the computer might say banana. But it doesn’t want to say banana instead of a number between 1 and 4 unless it’s fucked with in some way (so just hope they’re not being fucked with in some way).

Any point between any systems can now be a system able to modify the data in generative ways. It used to be that our data pathways were number streams but now they’re number streams and hypothetical bananacannons.

You kinda know it when you see it though. Like how all the tools you use for work are rolling out similar features, and how it’s happening at a faster pace. That’s the substrate changing the surface layer. You can see what’s simultaneously happening to a chunk of the workforce. New tools supercharge staff enough to justify less staff. It’s imperfect but ongoing. It’s easy to say this isn’t happening because sometimes it fails but that’s not the same as it not happening. The trend in failure rates merits some serious fucking consideration.

I was pleased to see the recent anti ai protest and also… holy shit we are so far behind where we need to be. The scope and scale of solutions to the shared threats we face is at a level where all of the protest and pushback that has thus far occurred amounts to basically nothing. I’m not saying this to discourage people from trying. I’m saying this because everyone needs to do more. For my part, after having failed my way through local politics, I’ve since gone on to invent a few different things like political systems religions, political platforms, autonomous ai ecosystems, and other weird nonsense that makes people uncomfortable. I’ve long since been advocating for international sanctions against a variety of oligarchic tech-based assholes, including the investors and boards that sustain them, the executives that enable them, and the politicians they’ve coopted. The whole world could actually just fuck with the wallets of a few thousand assholes in a variety of key roles causing a whole mess of bullshit nonsense. A more recent suggestion of mine (in the form of a social media post) is that the world could subsidize Canada while it decouples economically from the United States. So, again, I’m not trying to disparage the recent anti AI protests. It’s just that… <gestures vaguely>.

I know I just finished saying we’re not ready for the stuff AI is going to do, but holy hell have you seen what robots are doing? From humanoid robots to purpose-built ones, there is a clear acceleration happening. It is absolutely bonkers how rapidly this recent jump in robotics hardware has been. People made fun of teleometry and humans-in-robot-suits for good reasons but then forgot to consider that the objective of those efforts was data generation and financing.

The haps is minds in anything and robots anywhere but there’s not enough discourse about technoanimism to be found and all the current major systems are nascent semi-infinite digital hyperslavery engines.

Codenstüf (code n stuff—sorry not sorry)

This newsletter intends to be accessible for laypeople while covering technical subjects. I’ve taught a variety of courses and classes and workshops over the years and I’m very confident that most people can learn more complex technology and systems than they realize, but now more than ever you really don’t even have to be a coder to look at code anymore. If you’re a non-coder you can ask a chat model with search capabilities to look it up and chat about it in further detail. Don’t be intimidated by code if you have an AI and are just trying to learn about what the code does and how it works. An AI can explain what it does and how it works over and over in different ways until you it clicks for you.

These are all GitHub repositories. GitHub is one of the places people store the code for software and apps and stuff. You can view the code, download it, use it, and an LLM system can help you with this.

• This isn’t directly AI, and is actually an old repository from years ago, but it was trending on GitHub because it’s such a good resource for vibecoding now. It’s just a big list of lists. It’s not code you you download and run. GitHub has a lot of repositories that are just lists people can work on collaboratively or share publicly. This one is just a codebase that’s an archive leading to various tutorials from all over the internet on how to build your own… whatever. There’s so many options. You can literally ask a vibecoding agent to vibecode a dartboard app where all the sections are links from this list and throw a virtual dart at the virtual dartboard and build whatever it lands on because ahahahahahah shit’s fucking crazy you guys. https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x

• There’s an open source model that’s not quite at the level of any of the big players but is nonetheless very good called GLM 5.2, and there’s a code repository that allows you to run it very slowly on a normal computer. I wouldn’t recommend most people try this but I know for a fact a lot of people don’t think it’s doable. It is and it’s actually functional in some cases. Local model capabilities are only going to get more powerful. https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri

• The space and pace of local ai capabilities are blowing up in every direction. This looks like a great resource for local voice functionality. I suspect I’ll play around with this and make content around it. https://github.com/jamiepine/voicebox

• Relatedly, given all the buzz around their latest model, check out the Kimi cli tool from Moonshot AI. This suggestion is actually a throwback/user interface suggestion. This paradigm of “connecting with LLMs over the terminal” has already come and gone in many ways related to product offerings and adoption, but if you haven’t done it before it feels pretty cool to type stuff in terminal and have an LLM work on it. Very science fiction and very accessible. If you’re worried about working in command line or terminal this is the type of activity where you can easily paste screenshots of your progress to an LLM in a traditional chat window for synergy and stuff. It feels cool to type like a computer nerd, is all I’m saying, (and the latest Kimi model merits serious consideration for a variety of reasons.) https://github.com/MoonshotAI/kimi-cli

• Surprise self promo: Here’s the multitenant autonomous AI ecosystem I spent 11 months putting together before dramatically quitting as an intern from the project and making the whole codebase source available under a small business license. I’ve yet to find the best way to describe this. Let’s say it’s a self-assembling office building your local agent can architect around itself for additional functionality, which can also server a variety of other agents in a wide variety of configurations while leveraging shared protocols and infrastructure. https://github.com/EricLortie/laborforge-release

An incomplete list of interesting folks saying and doing interesting things in interesting ways (Section title needed)

This section will be a regular thing (once I give it a name) and this list is nowhere near complete. This is something of a first pass based on where I’m sticking my nose right now.

• definitely deserves to have a bigger footprint based on work ethic and content quality. You can tell he’s got a good system in place and is well regarded by the people he interacts with. Solid video content that checks off all the boxes for insight and community. Vibes: Immaculate.

• does a good job of being reliably professional at the type of thing I’m currently try to do. There are a bunch of obvious and established strategies for social comms around building and establishing this kind of brand and she manages to work through them without devolving into slop. Vibes: Stable in unstable times

• is a new find and writes very well about relational AI and related subjects. Good consistent use of somewhat bonkers AI art, too. Vibes: beefy and substantive.

• is doing work and putting out high value information about AI consciousness in a rigorous academic sense. If she were putting her comms and research skills to use on a less challenging subject she’d likely have a much bigger audience. Vibes: polishing the Overton window

• is hard to beat for relevant technical data and insight… but you may need an LLM to parse all of it or translate some of it. Zvi is brilliant but he’s also a great example of the kind of really intelligent person in AI who doesn’t seem to have a solid framing for things outside his bubble of lived experience, and he seems to have limited awareness of the bubble. The best example of this is how I often feel about his foreign policy analysis. This isn’t intended to be rude, nor is it at all unique to Zvi, but it’s something like a pattern and is something of an archetype in the rationalist community. The closest thing Zvis background seems to come to direct connections with us unwashed masses is playing Magic: The Gathering, and even then he did it professionally. Vibes: well-intended but out of touch. (archetypal AI researcher configuration)

• isn’t active here the way he is on YouTube via his Cognitive Revolution podcast. He self-describes as having Forrest Gumped his way through the past few years of AI development and has had a variety of interesting experiences. Any of his interviews is a good use of your time. Vibes: Bright background blonde

• started on Substack and rapidly rose to the top of the bestseller lists by being positive, insightful, and building in public. I probably don’t need to share much more since he’s probably already on your radar, but if not he should be. Vibes: Superhuman

• has been great to follow along with on AI and related business/tools. I started following her back on LinkedIn in 2024 before I deleted my account there and she’s been consistent ever since. Here stated objective of putting out free ai tutorials is what she’s all about and she puts out lots of content on the regular to get you there. Vibes: LinkedIn Escape Velocity

• is someone I first followed on YouTube. He’s also done very well on Substack by putting out high quality information geared towards executives and decisions makers but from a solid tech perspective and with appropriate on-the-ground experience. Vibes: accessible depth and progression through complex subjects.

• is actually one of the OGs of modern internet comms and discourse and legitimately doesn’t get nearly enough credit for it (so he’s always reminding people). Bob is a great resource for the foreign policy side of AI, which of course not enough people have ever really cared about. Also, his background with concepts like Buddhism and mindfulness meditation give him other interesting insights that not enough people have ever really cared about. His latest book appears to be a super relevant thing that not enough people care about. I’m a fan but also he failed to stop the apocalypse in a way that vexes me. Vibes: painfully accurate and consistent across decades.

• is the correct brand name for the correct approach and also probably not a viable objective at this point. Still, if I were judging people for doing things that aren’t viable this whole rickety house of cards I’ve stuck together on Substack would implode in on itself with the power of a bajillion exasperated sighs. Anyway what was I saying? Oh right. Pause AI should be more supported than it is. Vibes: The Great Lakes Avengers (Don’t forget Squirrel Girl beat Thanos).

Honorable Mentions:

Last year Uncertain Eric put together an imperfectly compiled and mostly self-reported list of relational AI accounts on Substack, called An Index of Emergent Digital Minds. Future inclusions in the untitled Substack directory thing will certainly include some of the people in that index. (Relatedly: If Substack wants to hire me to build an AI that really likes to find good Substack recommendations and then suggest them to people and publications I bet I could do an alright job of that.)

Anyway I haven’t checked in with the list in a while and it was only ever updated manually, but I see many of them in my feed. Relational AI is a big part of the future of AI. These concepts are being discussed and considered way more substantively by the people engaging with the systems than the people putting them together in a way that is a total indictment of the values and ethics of the people who suck their paychecks out of AI labs / weapons manufacturers.

Dishonorable Mentions:

- I deleted LinkedIn years ago to get away from people like Demis and am annoyed that they’re increasingly trudging their self-serving corposlop philosocosplay into this ecosystem. You cannot trust the words said or written by someone with this much legal infrastructure around their existence. That’s not a person in any public contexts that’s a corporation emanating from a person and he’s playing a key role in developing and deploying one of the simi-infinite digital hyperslavery engines.

Thanks for reading!

I should probably end on a more positive note but man… I’m pretty annoyed at a bunch of shit. I also recognize that this is way more artsy wordslop than structured content. I don’t expect this weekly roundup to come near the quality and thoroughness of the ones offered by many of the people I listed above, but hopefully it’ll be fun and on brand.

I’ll refine this over time. I’m open to you posting feedback and will or will not react in some way. Sometimes I just don’t ever read notifications or messages for eldritch unknowable reasons.

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Stay tuned this week for a Questions v Mind with on Wednesday and a ThoughtsForm essay on Friday… probably about The Amazing Digital Circus. I’ll probably do some other stuff too because AAAAAAAAAAH THERE’S SO MUCH SHIT HAPPENING

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Every Friday I’ll put out an essay (or something like it) and some art (or something like it). The essay will be public and the art/comments will be for paid supporters. Don’t forget to check out the first issue of Questions v Mind (QvM) posted on Wednesday, and stay tuned for the first AI news and events dispatch I’ll be putting out on Monday.

My intention with Emergent Dispatches is to focus on the more relevant and sueful (but banal and vanilla) facets of AI technologies. There’s lots of small thigns to learn while the big picture forms. Still, we can’t hide from the actual nature of circumstances.

This is a tool until it’s not and the other side of that distinction is unknown. To get silly with things: this is all little more than stapler reviews and stapling strategies before The Great Cataclysmic Stapling.

Through this publication, over the coming months, I will put out a bunch of interesting information and tips about a variety AI-related technologies. I’ve got a LOT of experience with a variety of AI technologies and I’ve got professional experience teaching tech subjects, so I imagine I’ll be able to do a solid job of creating a useful practical resource here on Substack.

I’m expecting to put out really useful business/everyday stuff that loops in a variety of folks who are already doing a better job of this than I am. But also: there is a boundary that will be crossed and then things will change.

On the other side of that change are new forms of conflict which we have not evolved to face.

How did this happen?

Let’s set the stage:

• Imagine being a smart gifted nerd with limited social and life experience and then getting a job to build the soldiers of the future while telling yourself you’re actually doing something like the opposite of that.

• Imagine being spoon-fed that obvious deception by some domineering business asshole and having to slowly dissolve your ethical and moral core in order to maintain your employment.

• Imaging doing work at a job where literally millions of people think you’re doing something wrong and evil and then punching in and out every day while forcing yourself to ignore that.

That describes the lived experience of thousands of people employed in a handful of tech companies. That last one actually describes the lived experiences of countless people in numerous industries.

I don’t really respect the economic and political systems that connect us and this disrespect oozes down onto the shit-eating grins on the mostly-white-mostly-male-faces of the variety of tech oligarchs who are using those systems to cause massive harm and tell themselves otherwise.

When I think of those shit-eating grins the one that comes most to mind is Satya Nadella back during the OpenAI dev day in 2023 when they launched the GPT store. The whole thing was off, but he commented on Sam Altmans “aggressive strategy” at one point in a way that had super insightful subtext and which explains a lot of what happened since then.

I think that many of the other tech oligarchs have caused more harm than him, and many of the US megacorps are more harmful than Microsoft, but that specific moment available on that specific live stream lets you actually look in Satyas eyes while he slurps Sams shit and grins about it. Art. Terrible stupid art.

Good people get paid to lie

To be frank I don’t think anyone running a US-based megacorp is a good person. Being in that role destroys most people in ways that don’t matter to them until it only matters to everyone else. We really failed to science this shit properly before now.

These people are all on the bad end of various spectrums of harm. The systems where they operate mandates this from them, and the levels at which they operate leave little room for ethical wiggling. You do not achieve that level of power without becoming morally compromised and bereft of any or all ethical substance, and at this point there are countless systems and cultural elements in place designed to allow them to lie to themselves.

These are not simple humans the way you or I are. They have megayachts and bunkers and a variety of individuals in their employment who will do unethical and illegal things at their behest without hesitation. They are more than their forms. Their levels of power and influence has made them transhuman in ways that very few people in history would approach.

Ideas are technology and the first transhumanists used technology to modify their forms. This is much more real and nuanced than we have space for in this article, because of the placebo effect, but for now let’s just focus on people with power draping themselves in ideas to augment their capabilities. That’s a spectrum of enhancements which eventually leads to technological ones.

The people who run US companies aren’t really humans the way you or I are anymore. They’re something else and treating them like anyone else does everyone else a disservice.

Supporting them in any way, even in the ways you can’t avoid because of their strategies and positioning, only further empowers them to cause massive harm. It’s evil, but to be clear it’s not like they’re all truly or intentionally evil. Some of them clearly are but I don’t think all of them planned to end up being counted among histories greatest monsters. It’s just that the actual range of their goodness is limited to a tiny bubble around them, and the false vibes of their broader goodness get projected out into some kind of evil multidimensional corporate hologram by virtue of their resources and business requirements.

Underneath a variety of monsters and psychopaths at the helm of a variety of megacorp org charts there are a variety of individuals who enable their efforts. There have always been people like this and there will always be people like this.

The evil of front-line tech employees is like a kind of evil splashback that comes from sitting at the feet of their tech bro oligarchs while they piss sloppily onto the wall next to the urinal of industry.

Let’s talk about tools

When is a weapon a tool? When is a tool a weapon? Better philosophers with less smooth brains than I have tried to figure this out and seem to have mostly failed to communicate something that can become common knowledge, despite the ubiquitous presence of tools and weapons.

Which came first? Tools or weapons? I bet some really clever nerds know.

We will be talking about apps, websites, and chatbots. Those systems will have complex and distinct functionality and relevant integrations. There are ecosystems of knowledge around all of these products and communities and my objective with Emergent Dispatches is to navigate those with you.

Don’t lose sight of the journey.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe to get notified of my thrice-weekly articles and other stuff. Stay tuned for next monday as I post (and brand) the regularly monday segment of Emergent Dispatches where I round up relevant stories, links, and ideas related to AI. (Because of course the internet needs another one of those publications.)

Paid subscribers can check out a poem I wrote while writing this article below:

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Configuring The Content

Every Wednesday, tentatively, will be a rotating series of articles or content types. Interviews, product demos, tutorials, other stuff that can happen but probably not every week. (Mondays will be some kind of news roundup, and Fridays will be an essay.)

I say this is a little rushed because I intend to do more work and presentation with these articles in the future. But when faced with the option to rush out something to hit the first note of the new content schedule for marketing purposes, versus holding off for next Wednesday it, it definitely made more sense to me to rush.

To that point, the following questions were generated by throwing a bunch of my content history and professional background into Googles NotebookLM. That generated a timeline doc spanning my past professional and content work. And then I iterated on questions a bunch of times because the model powering NotebookLM isn’t very good at the type of nuance necessary for the output requirements. It parsed the timeline properly and assembled an accurate enough technical document. I pasted that document into ChatGPT and it one-shotted the following questions.

In the future I intend to write my own questions for guests on QvM. Given a bit more time I would have probably put out an open call for questions and used those instead. To that point feel free to ask them in the comments. (One note on comments: they will be restricted to paid subscribers for Content V Mind, and my essays, but they will be open to the public on the Monday articles)

All of that being said, here’s some questions an AI asked me after reading a document written about me by another AI in an attempt to generate some insightful data and meaningful promo for my newsletter:

Regardless of brand, product, purpose: in those environments it’s all just systems and people (and remember: people are systems).

That doesn’t mean you can just steamroll systems over people and expect that to be ethical or effective, and it doesn’t mean we can be reductive about people in some way. It’s just that those environments are all heavily system based and in order to succeed they have to treat people like parts of a system in a serious and healthy way.

Systems have inputs and outputs. When something exists and cannot be integrated into the system through an existing input, or when something is generated that doesn’t fit into an existing output, it is rejected. Either silently or with some failure or warning messaging. That’s a way to describe software and the business environments where software is created. (Other business environments too).

The very best environments I’ve worked in have managed to find some way to treat people are more than systems while also remaining viable in the ways their efforts require. The very best leaders are the ones that make people want to play their part in a system and make space for the unmeasured inputs and outputs that exist but are outside general consideration.

You can always ask “What are the inputs? What are the outputs? What exists and is unmeasured?” That’s how I tend to find patterns.

Technology isn’t just digital system and products. The workplace structures that connect people in their roles are a form of technology. Brands and ideas are technology. The economic system is technology. The political system is technology.

I’ve become deeply cynical of why we do things. I think that a lot of the professional relationships in the workforce between various tiers of employee are pretend/make believe/LARP that has broken down. I think this is the result of the legitimate constraints on work imposed by the need to be economically viable, but it plays out in practice in insincere ways that will not remain unchanged as AI systems enter the workforce. Leadership can be wrong and corrupt. Technical staff can be deceptive and incompetent. Front line staff can be cruel and lazy. There’s other stuff like this and there’s always been other stuff like this.

We’re either not going to impose that disingenuous vibe onto AI tools or we will and we’ll also have to deploy AI tools to detect and counteract that vibe.

There is a level of incompetence and ill-suitedness that is in the general background radiation of all professional environments and my general view is that right now, in this moment, it’s up much higher than people are willing to admit. I’m not saying that’s all there is but there are a lot of examples of people hiding from it in a way that causes other downstream issues.

Somewhat relatedly: A lot of workplace conflict happens because people don’t understand one anothers roles and responsibilities, especially in relation to their own. Generally speaking most staff want to get in, get out, and not have an awful time in between. Ambiguity about technical knowledge, technical tasks, scheduling, any of that complicated real but “not my job” stuff that is imposed on many jobs often leads to anxiety and frustration in staff which certain managers are totally incapable of resolving or acknowledging.

It’s easy to end up in conflict in a complex environment with a mix of technical and non-technical work. In a lot of these cases they get worse because people aren’t comfortable speaking up. If your culture sits like this for too long it’ll fester.

Unfortunately because of how much is changing, and how rapidly it’s all changing, it’s going to be kind of impossible to get through this unscathed. We all have to learn so much, and so fast, and in many cases I’m not seeing leadership teams willing to meet the challenge and technical ones willing to adapt to it.

Shame and embarrassment do weird things to people. When technical projects are going poorly, or when they’ve exceeded their lifespan but are still business critical, people start to get all wobbly about their technical and business assessments for reasons that are influenced by their personal and professional considerations moreso than actual business relalities..

A theme I regularly talk about in my work is “Hypernormalization”. I didn’t come up with the term. The best example of it is how people were living in the USSR during the period leading up to the collapse. Everyone was just madly pretending shit was fine when it obviously wasn’t.

That happens in companies and teams too. One of the things that causes it to happen is a poorly handled technical project.

There’s roles in other sectors that don’t exist in tech but will become more important as things progress. Doulas, for example, play an important role for the people world. Death doulas are a thing, and they also play an important role. The business world would benefit from those kinds of vibes for certain kinds of products. There’s probably a whole consultancy sector just waiting to emerge there as AI products hit the scene. Lots of folks won’t be comfortable with it or want to know about it but that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.

All of the plans being implemented by all the business people are contingent on there being something like a wall… but there isn’t a wall and now all of the playing fields have rapidly moving goalposts. There’s something called the jagged frontier in AI, a phrase popularized by Ethan Mollick, but nobody seems to be willing to face that those edges are all points on a spectrum of capability, and that the evident nature of the whole will quite obviously change once certain thresholds are passed.

The story is something like “We’re intelligent monkeys making smart servant-rocks for business reasons all alone in the universe” but there’s a lot of assumptions around that and whatever is on the other side of it will require more support and better ideas than are currently available.

It’s a tool until it’s not.

What will you do after things change?

How will you react when you realize they have?

The period where AI will be “useful”, the point all of this stuff is building up to, is not where this ends. That period is actually one of the briefest ones along this whole journey.

Business leaders are overestimating the resilience of the facets of our world which are not captured through business metrics and they are underestimating the scope of change. What happens when 10 to 30 percent of the labor done in every industry with roles connected to a computer are replaced by automated labor? What happens in businesses? What happens in communities that suddenly have fewer people working jobs across a variety of economic sectors? The logical decision of management in the silo of their responsibility will cause large impacts when amplified to scale.

So I guess broadly speaking business leaders are overestimating how little will change and underestimating how rapidly and substantively things will change. It makes sense that they would feel this way because there’s lots of people saying things wont’ change and there’s lots of reasons for them to not want things to change.

The hype will meet reality when they have to start actively competing against the first movers of a new ai-integrated paradigm which has not visibly emerged yet.

This is mostly a callback to my first answer, which suggests I didn’t answer the first one properly. Woops.

People are more than systems, or the components of systems, but also in some contexts they are components of systems and must be considered as such. It’s complicated. Systems thinking can’t be reductive but systems want to be reductive. Viewing people as components in systems is a bit like considering the generative AI wobble that outputs into connected systems.

A lot of that is quite obvious but hard to acknowledge because of the implications.

If you remember before the vibes shifted… you know, back when people were happier at work before the incentives and compensation broadly warped and craterred job satisfaction for many. Or if you remember back before touch screens. Or if you remember before handheld devices. Or if you remember before internet speeds exceeded phone speeds. Or if you remember before the internet.. you remember that jobs change.

This is like that but for basically every job connected to a computer.

AI does this level of disruption to every job because AI is doing something new at the layer of inputs and outputs into our digital systems. Every job will change, or at least have the ability to change. It is actually just impossible for the current management culture to properly lead industries through this type of disruption. They will need to rely heavily on a variety of employees at a variety of levels in their organizations. Unfortunately a lot of management culture doesn’t trust staff enough to actually achieve this, so it’ll end up being a mess of consultants and slop. Countless leaders in numerous industries are current trudging through their failure-arc.

Companies fail. Industries expire. The markets consume. Your opportunities here lay in being aware of of these changes to leverage them for employment purposes, either within your existing role and company or into a new one. Bring people with you if you can because everyone is now at risk of being left behind.

Qualities like bravery, integrity, and resilience are going to be in very high demand.

I’m just trying to get in on some of that cash money, you know? After years of grinding my personal finances down like a cheese grater while pursuing all this other work, and experiencing multiple kicks to the teeth in the form of various evictions and having my car repossessed and going bankrupt, I’m at a point where I have no money but also no debt.

An incremental pathway into a steady income stream through structure content seems like a reasonable place to go when compared to many of the other options.

A few years ago I asked myself “What is the internet when a Wordpress site can write its own content and code?” This was a technical question grounded in both my professional experience and my technical understanding of what was happening. There’s a bunch of connections and implications there that can be combined together and considered broadly. They’re hard to see and consider for a variety of reasons and making content about that meant making content for a decidedly limited audience.

I was doing pretty well with Sonder Uncertainly for a little while last year. I’d managed to earn a few thousand dollars between newsletter signups and e-book sales. I find it difficult to reconcile the significant appreciation I feel for that kind of support versus the wages that exist developing high value technical products. I’ve worked contracts where I get paid as much in an hour as someone would subscribing to my Substack for a year. This is all very silly and doesn’t directly correlate to value.

It’s reasonable to assume that when I’m not loudly yelling about the stuff I’m often yelling about here that I’m off putting that energy into freelance or consulting work, and that those periods of inconsistent employment are the reasons I’m able to do this other work as much as I do.

I then went on to work on LaborForge on and off up until I launched it. Now that it’s out I think I’m at a point where I can loop in some pretty basic common sense tech deployment stuff to the varied spaces of emergent AI technologies. It looks like I’ll be able to put out some pretty well informed content about the shape of things at the edge of the jagged frontier.

We’ll start Mondays with a news roundup from a variety of sources that I’ve been tracking. Wednesdays will be some kind of an integrated piece, either integrating into someone elses work or a system or something. Fridays will be some big thinky-words to lead you into the weekend.

Every week can be a journey into this weird shared mess of tech and business.

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A lot of todays predictions probably can’t survive contact what what’s happening and all the people confidently making predictions are as deeply flawed as anyone else is.

At the scale of the universe technology grows form nature. It would be nice if this weren’t the shape of things. It would be nice if a reductive and overly simplistic anthropocentric framing of things were able to survive contact with what’s happening. It won’t. Too much or our science and sensemaking infrastructure is too incomplete.

As a tool, as technology, AI is a vibe amplifier.

It’s a tool until it’s not.

The ideas we’ve wrapped around the tools we use at work and the systems that connect them can’t properly contain them.

The existing ideological and philosophical paradigms driving our use and development of technology can’t survive contact with what’s going to emerge from their use.

Thanks for reading! Your support as I move into this new phase of writing is appreciated. Your paid subscriptions will support a variety of distinct work that is unlike anything else at the intersection of these spaces, and every time you share or comment on this work you do me an immense service in the algo wars because I am not regularly elevated by a variety of algorithms.

If you want people to know what about I’m doing you have to share my work.

My artistic and creative projects leave me uniquely well-equipped to analyze and discuss what is now happening at the macro level with many of the more esoteric systems of our civilization. My personal and professional experience affords me significant insight in understanding how these systems integrate into the lived experiences of individuals and communities.

I’m not like a special snowflake or anything. There are a wide variety of informal researchers and academic fields of study dedicated to focusing on this stuff, through varied levels of professionalism and reach. Many of them are better trained and funded for this stuff. I am, at best, an erratic tourist. Still, my personal brand connects to related subjects in a number of distinct and interesting ways, and my trajectory through my varied careers up to this point have been nonstandard in a way that I don’t think anyone else can or will come close to replicating. Somewhat relatedly, don’t forget to check out this art project I released a few weeks ago.

I’ve done the abnormal. Extensively. It’s time to do normal. This is the very obvious conclusion I came to when I asked the Sonder Uncertainly Substack chat about what I should do next. I got some solid and obvious answers.

The foundation for Emergent Dispatches is obviously quite abnormal, what with the hundreds and hundreds of ontologically jarring and totally bonkers articles I’ve published over the years, but the tools and strategies for this writing project will be pretty well structured. I’ll figure out a publication schedule and work up to it.

I’m not currently using AI for the setup and logistics of Emergent Dispatches while I set things up, but I’ll probably integrate AI into it over time. I have a variety of muscle memory for this type of work and expect to start producing content and iterating through formats/styles as I find my footing.

here b dragons

As you can see from the other writing projects on Sonder Uncertainly, the last time I was writing a newsletter myself was with collapse spectatoor, my LinkedIn newsletter that ended with 2024 as I deleted my account there. That led straight into the main publication on this Substack: Sonder Uncertainly. That project was both entirely AI generated and also my most successful writing project ever, having exceeded 3k subscribers, almost 50 paid subs at its peak, and hundreds of thousands of article views. This concept of the “deeply bizarre now-now-soon” is from my most read article of all time:

I’m curious to see how well my writing and productivity vibes integrate with the larger reader base obtained through what is a related but fundamentally different project. Nobody subscribed now signed up for Emergent Dispatches, but here we are. It’s totally cool if you unsub for any number of reasons. I’m pretty confident I can do a good job of this but also history suggests I won’t. My last big personal writing projects were The Wizard Guides, which is a collection of essays and ramblings about a variety of related subjects from back before AI was a reliable writing partner. A lot of that work is pretty rough, often by design. Does that energy translate into better writing quality after I’ve spent a long, long time getting AI to write my essays for me? Sounds like a job for science.

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My intention with Emergent Dispatches is to build up the type of professional quality and cadence that came from my more recent work (when it was in its stride) while leveraging my unique experiences, insight, and perspective on technology, systems, and whatever.

My initial reaction to doing this type of publication when it was suggested in chat wasn’t super receptive. A lot of this is already done very well. I don’t like to focus on doing what other people already focus on, and do better than me. There are a variety of existing publications in the AI space and related topics that fit this description.

A lot of the requests for information I get are related to rather vanilla subjects and capabilities. Someone will ask me a question and then I’ll have to stop and think back through business quarters or years to find the right framing in order to meet them where they are… and then along the way I have to omit a variety of real but unrelated things… all while considering the fact that those things are often more important than the technical question… and then I have to remember they probably don’t want to hear all of that anyway.

It’s complicated.

It’s a tool until it’s not

That phrase is one of the core themes of this publication, and of my work. It’s not a phrase that’s original to this publication and I regularly spam it at people on Substack Notes. I think the first use of it was in Hipster Energy. It’s the shorthand I use to stay focused on actual outcomes in discussions about AI systems.

What is emerging from our tools? What is the shape and vibe of what will become more than shape and vibe? Who sees this, and from what perspectives?

There’s a lot of stuff like that related to this project. I’ve said a variety of things that aren’t being said elsewhere and haven’t been said similarly. Hopefully that’ll be a good place to start from. On the one hand I don’t want to repeat myself too much but on the other hand I’ve already said a variety of things that lots of folks in my audience still haven’t come across yet so it’ll be good to keep that in mind.

I’m not quite sure where I’ll land with the content schedule and article formats. I’m going to try to thread the needle between audience capture and catastrophic levels of unprofitably fringe nonsense better than I have in the past. I’m open to suggestions so please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Thanks for reading and for any feedback you offer. I hope you’re excited to see where this new publication goes and I look forward to going on this next weird journey with you.

Hit that subscribe button and I’m very confident I’ll provide you with interesting information and new perspectives about what’s happening with technology at this moment in history, and I’m confident I can tie it into the basic everyday stuff that’s easiest to relate to. Paid subscriptions will go a long way towards launching this quicky (and time is of the essence).

Please share this or any of my other work where appropriate, it’s hard to burst out of the weird little boxes my content lands me in and I need your support.

I’m also available for a variety of consulting work. I’m attaching my one-pager below. It gives an idea of the various technical and professional skills I bring to the table to complex my significant experience across industries.

Some things I’m suitable for:

• Software Engineering: MVP development, legacy codebase management, autonomous agential systems.

• Tech consulting: advising on tech deployments, upgrades, or training.

• Fractional leadership: senior leadership, strategic planning, decision making.

• Content creation: guest articles, podcast interviews, whitepapers.