Today’s guest is William Morgan, the co-founder of Restless Egg, a London-based incubator and accelerator designed specifically for a new class of “artist-founders” whose work synthesizes art, technology, and commercial product design.
As Morgan writes in one of the articles we discuss in this episode:
One un-ignorable conclusion about the AI revolution is that from now on, everything one does is training data. Furthermore, everything one might want to do is theoretically more possible now than ever before through additional compute (so they say).
At the same time, even those people building AI in the frontier labs don’t know the full extent of what these machines they can do, much less what they should be doing.
Thus, the question [becomes], “Why is it this way and not that?”
As players in this, the rigorous game of living, it is your job, your responsibility, your opportunity to design what might fill in the blank before it is filled in for us.
Right now, maybe nothing is more important than to nurture novel forms of interactability that expand, rather than restrict, what it means to be human.
Using our new superpowers to merely do what we already do but better makes us passive consumers of desires and selves imposed by technopoly. The tech sector’s obsession with optimization can’t help us discover the genuinely novel forms of human experience that this intelligent substrate makes possible. If we want something truly better, we need to cultivate the taste and discernment to know which futures are worth living in — and radically expand our imagination regarding what human-machine relationships can actually look like.
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Special Announcement
Join me tonight at the Weirdosphere online learning platform for “Transcendence in the Age of AI” — a deep-cut trialogue with me, Weird Studies co-host JF Martel, and Joel Gunz of Macguffin Media on Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I., animist robots, The Age of Ahriman, the prehistory of machine learning, and more.
Register here. Founding Members on Substack and Patreon can join for free, as always! Reach out if you are one and would like the free registration link.
Chapters
00:00 Teaser: Taste & Sovereign Choice
02:46 Intro
06:41 Meet William Morgan
08:05 The Origins of The Avant-Garde
10:09 Taste and Abundance
12:12 Luxury Tech and Experience
15:57 Why Experiment?
20:21 Venture Models and Niches
25:20 The Sense Organs of Society
30:51 Rethinking Venture Incentives
38:54 Slop and Subculture Rebellion
47:13 Beyond “In” or “Out”
50:51 Founder Experiments Showcase
57:03 Scenius is Real Value
Mentioned
Restless Egg’s Half Dozen Newsletter
Art Is Everything You Don’t Have To Do
by Cory Doctorow
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
by Abraham Flexner
This collective is radically rethinking what it means to make art
by Thom Waite at Dazed Digital
The Dimensions of Experience
by Andrew P. Smith
Mount Analogue
by René Daumal
The Nerves of Government
by Karl Deutsch
Why Software is Eating The World
by Marc Andreessen
Y Combinator’s Simple Agreement for Future Equity
Common As Air
by Lewis Hyde
Standing by Words
by Wendell Berry
Right Story, Wrong Story
by Tyson Yunkaporta
Fall
by Neal Stephenson
The Politics of Vision
by Lydia Nochlin
The Key to Science Fiction
by Damien Walter
Flora Weil
Antithykera
CCRU
Luciana Parisi
George Bataille
