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###### tags: `Stories`
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# ♾️ Pluriverse Short Stories for ♾️ Future Graphic Novels

> "Kesh stories are equally fictional and non-ficitonal, always fantisiful but no less true."
> - Ursula K Le Guin, *Always Coming Home*

## 1. Anon

**Character**: Anon is a woman deeply entangled in a highly advanced virtual reality system. She is both a consumer and a subject of this technology, experiencing a range of emotions from pleasure to terror as she navigates the metaverse.

**Setting**: The story unfolds in a dystopian future, specifically the 2050s, where technology has reached a point of near-complete physical and sensory immersion. Anon is connected to a complex apparatus that allows her to engage with the virtual world in an intensely corporeal way.

**Plot**: Anon traverses through a series of historical and increasingly personal scenarios within the metaverse. Initially believing these to be simulations or games, she comes to the horrifying realization that these experiences are not just reflections of her own life but may actually be altering her perception of reality and her understanding of her own history.

**Conflict**: The central conflict is internal and psychological. Anon grapples with the disconcerting notion that her engagement with this technology might be more than mere escapism; it could be reshaping her understanding of reality and perpetuating a cycle of trauma that spans generations.

**Theme**: The story delves into the complexities of identity, reality, and the ethical quandaries posed by immersive technologies. It questions the boundaries between the self and the other, the real and the virtual, and the ethical implications of a technology that can blur these lines to an unsettling degree.

- First image: a tightly framed shot of Anon's eyes.
- Inside her mind's eye, we see a historical procession:
- 1880s: workers laboring in a factory, anarchist/luddite revolt throwing things into the machine.
- Turn of the 20th century: the increasing mechanization of the world oppresses humans into master/slave dynamics.
- WWI/WWII: mechanized wars that demonstrate the destructive power of humans upon the planet and each other.
- 1960s: The increasing ubiquity of technology in our lives in the wake of widespread consummerism.
- 1990s: spread of the internet links human communication with speed and low fidelity images.
- 2020s: oppressive metaverses emerge, reminiscent of the factory labor in the first scene.
- 2050s: Anon is shown strapped into a Cronenbergian apparatus, leaving behind engagement in the meatspace to lose herself in the virtual world.
- Another parallel series of images depict Anon strapped into the interface. Numerous access points into the body, each with strange corporeal reactions.
- Her hand manipulating a gooey gel controller: the hand is on and in the goo, like a silicon breast implant and a jellyfish discharging electricity, hand gestures like cellphone pinch and zoom, sexy and erotic movements
- Her torso is wrapped in a haptic suit that looks like a life vest, inflatable membrane that imposes the pressures of the virtual environment, squeezes and regulates breath, responsive to heart palpitations, an extension of the sympathetic nervous system that looks like a wearable waterbed, a larva sack that has consumed the body. Looks like tge Cronenberg bed from *Crimes of the Future*
- A view from inside her eyes: the visual display is not a screen *in front of* or *on* the eyes but a projection that beams into the brain stem, the eyes become an interface that can be jacked into directly with light-based data, the mechanical element looks like a spider that is weaving lightbased tapestry webs, the eyes twitch and jiggle like Anon is having a seizure
- Persperation, lots of sweat coming off the body that is captured and recycled to keep the user hydrated, descriptions of body movements that straddle the line between anxiety, nervousness, pleasure, pain. The body is suspended in a state between ecstasy and therapeutic detoxification. Hyper sexual/erotic descriptions of the body being absorbed/suspended by the machine interface.
- Viewing her feet: flailing around, no longer grounded to a planular surface, seem to become more tentacular, like flagellum, tails, seems to defy the movements of the human skeleton, another kind of propulsion that is no longer human
- Sexual organs (might need to redact in order to keep it semi safe for work): tubes and sensors inserted into all of her orifices, looks like bluetooth vibrators, feeding tubes, sexualized dialysis, cyberpunk-style usb-like ports surgically installed all over the body that tingle with pain/pleasure, squid/octopus-like jelly filled sensors inserted into her vagina referencing Hokusai's *Dream of the Fisherman's Wife*
- The descriptions of the metaverse interface/apparatus focus on breaking apart the distinctions between sense/sensation/sensibility, dissolving and confusing the difference between member (the body in real time)/re-membering (recalling earlier experiences)/de-membering (dissociating out of the body into a purely virtual experience).
- Anon is accessing images that she thinks are a simulation/game, experienced as real and novel, while remaining always aware that she is in the metaverse, without ever wanting to leave it, captured by her own terror and grotesque curiosity.
- As the images continue, they seem more and more personal, more like memories of her own life than a fictional character.
- As the images approach the present moment, she becomes aware that the characters she is playing are her own relatives, that she is reliving a procession of epigenetic trauma pointing towards her current moment/position.
- Her eyes open: juicy and wet, tears rolling down her face, a look of frozen terror stemming from the difficult realization that she is playing out the same pattern again and again. But is the pattern in the simulation? Or is it playing out in real time, in the meatspace? Is she remembering her own history differently based on the data streaming from the interface - has the world changed to accomodate the virtual? What is real?

---

## 2. The Landscape of the Pluriverse - Part 1: The Quadratic Lands

**Character**: Anon reappears in this story, but she is more of a lens through which we explore the world. She lives in a highly networked, planetary-scale city and is deeply integrated into both the physical and virtual aspects of this future society.

**Setting**: The setting is a future Earth transformed into a network of interconnected, self-sustaining cities. The story takes us from the core of the Earth to its surface, then to the atmosphere and beyond, even hinting at human colonization of other planets. Each layer of this world has its own unique features and functions, from geothermal energy harvesting to synthetic biospheres.

**Plot**: The story serves as an expansive tour of a future Earth, illustrating how technology has been harnessed to create a sustainable, albeit stratified, society. It explores various aspects of this world, from energy production to social structure, and hints at the broader universe beyond Earth.

**Conflict**: The primary conflict is not individual but societal. While technological advancements have solved many coordination problems, they have also led to a new form of social stratification based on altitude and access to natural light. This disparity is maintained as a form of social engineering to keep human ambition and drive alive.

**Theme**: The overarching theme is the double-edged sword of technological progress. On one hand, technology has enabled a form of planetary equilibrium and sustainability. On the other, it has perpetuated human tendencies toward social inequality, albeit in a new form. The story also touches on themes of scale, from the individual to the planetary and beyond, questioning what it means to be a part of such a complex system.

**Summary**: "The Landscape of the Pluriverse - Part 1: The Quadratic Lands" offers a panoramic view of a future Earth where technology has been harnessed for sustainability but also perpetuates new forms of social stratification. Through the lens of Anon, a resident of one of these advanced cities, we explore various layers of this complex world, from its energy-harvesting core to its synthetic biospheres and beyond. The conflict lies in the societal structures that have emerged, which solve material problems but introduce new conceptual disparities among humans. The story grapples with the ethical and existential implications of such a technologically advanced yet socially divided world.

- A series of images that illustrate different scales and sites of a planetary-scale networked city. References [Eames' *Powers of Ten* short film.](https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0?t=301). Cinematic movements are top-down until approaching a single city, then the camera rotates to isometric view as we zoom in to a single building, then to side view as we enter Anon's apartment.
- Outermost scale: a view of cities as nodes in a network, dots on a topo map, illuminating the dark sky of space
- View of the network: individuated cities appear like nodes of a lymph network, capillary flows of lights and transport vehicles flowing in swirling lines across the globe, a planet-scale lattice/matrix like a soft mesh tapestry of flowing energy.
- Approaching a single city: an epicenter of gravitational influence, pulling resources from the land around it and distributing materials back out to the periphery like a tidepool in perpetual cyclical motion. Contraction and dispersion; looks like the city is breathing.
- Approaching a single neighborhood: sideview cross section so that the upright buildings themselves seem to resembleresemble the larger futuristic city-tech stack (illustrated below), each layer designating a different composable purpose. Transparent walls display the flow of resources and energy from the groundwork to the upper layers of the architecture. Modular design has pods coming and going from a central control unit, like Archegram's *Plug-In City.* Discarded units are quickly dismantled like they are being digested by a violent mechanical organ.
- The camera approaches a single apartment: Anon's home.
- A cross section through the walls reveals the tubes and wires funneling water and nutrients into the apartment. Anon is jacked in to the metaverse in a special room dedicated to this purpose. It looks like a zen meditation room combined with a teenage gamer chamber. Hyper-modern design of the interior and furnishings combined with the messiness of a chaotic teen, books and clothing everywhere, dishes piling up due to a broken dishwasher, some bots watering plants and being attacked by the cat.
- As the "camera" turns to a side view, a series of vignettes begin that describe numerous areas around the city. Scenes scroll from bottom to top. Final scene looks out into the blackness of space towards "the future" beyond the sun.
- Deep underground near the core of the earth, machines are tapping into the geothermal pressures of the molten core, seemingly ancient machinery. Giant plates leverage the magnetism to capture and direct energy, metallic fabrics and circuits extract the heat and route it into iron batteries, the gyrating flow of the lava churns spherical cauldrons that pump steam motion through an apparatus that resembles digestive organs, distributing the energy up into the crust through a network of cables that look like the circulatory system of some giant mythological beast (reference to Moloch).
- Upper crust: a new kind of mining that doesn't extract minerals, but uses pockets of pressure to cultivate synthetic materials like inoculating a log with mushroom spores. The minerals are extracted by slow heavily armored bots that load up mining carts to pull the materials to industrial refineries on the surface, which are full of assembly lines rolling out an infinite procession of batteries, solar panels, computer screens, and esoteric machine parts. Tubes direct steam and heat from the core to power the industrial processes. Pollution is funneled through giant seive filters that separate and extract the waste to be compressed into nutrients that feed plants on the surface, with the hot air released into the residential buildings above to warm the inhabitants (since the earth is currently undergoing near ice age conditions).
- Biosphere region: The human layer of the planet is now 100% synthetic. There is no more naturally occurring regions, since the atmosphere is no longer hospitable to life. There are still plants and animals kept within controlled environments, contained inside giant geodesic bubbles covered with reflective materials to filter and regulate the intense UV, modulate temperature and humidity, and recycle air. Nutrients are pumped in, wastes are cycled through massive closed loop aquaponic systems comprised of numerous stacked pools filled with water plants, fish, crustaceans, and other creatures. These bio bubbles generate oxygen for the residental buildings and require constant supervision by a swarm of bots overseen by human scientists wearing Cronenberg-style body augmentations to literally feel/sense the health of the ecosystem.
- City layer: cross section of the pneumatic and capillary flows of the electrical and plumbing system, materials being pumped in every direction, all different colors and consistencies. Energy, water, heat, nutrients, and global data are pumped into the living pods. Waste, stale air, biometric data, and proof of work data packets are sent out to the processing nodes of the planetary network. Humans are all presented as relatively affluent and comfortable (by contemporary standards), but a different kind of social class system reveals itself, seemingly determined by the altitude (height in the atmosphere, distance from the planet surface) of the residents: the workers that operate the industrial and life support processes are closer to the earth and considered "lower" in status than the intelligentsia/cognoscenti class of technically skilled metaverse laborers occupying the upper regions of the cityscape. This disparity no longer has anything to do with access to resources, economies, or material goods (this coordination problem has been solved), but exists as a purely conceptual human disparity that results in a necessary disequillibrium that maintains motivation, aspiration, ambition, and drive in the human inhabitants. This discovery was proposed by an AI and ratified by the human inhabitants at an earlier period in history. The citizens in the high levels have the best "view" (long vantage, access to natural light) but ironically spend the most time in the virtual world.
- Cloud layer: floating above the earth is a planetary scale lattice/skein that modulates UV and protects against cosmic radiation, since there is no more ozone layer. Numerous physical tethers connect the monumental machine layer to the surface, along with seemingly infinite dishes, sensors, and delicate instruments. The lattice periodically emits energetic discharges into the atmosphere to modulate weather patterns, distributing rain over moisture vaporators and catchment systems, carefully refracted sunlight over the massive solar panels covering the city surface, and steering the barometric pressures to funnel winds over the surface to drive the turbines that maintain the pneumatic/capillary flows of the global distribution network. Above this skein, a massive amounts of satellites rotate the earth in a delicate orchestrated choreography. Drones cover everything, tinkering on the machines to maintain their operations.
- Beyond the earth: zooming out, we gaze upon the moon, mars, and other planets of the solar system to understand that humans are colonizing nearby planets with the same technology that maintains the equillibrium of the earth. This description is kept intentionally brief and low detail. Neighboring planets resemble the mechanical surface of the earth, like floating nodes of an intergalactic PoS network.
- The camera moves away from the planets, towards the stars. The whole universe resembles the blinking LEDs of a subterranean server farm data center.

---

## 3. A DAO Story: Trenches and Horizon Lines

**Character**: The story initially follows Anon, a young woman laboring in a dystopian world. She serves as the catalyst for a decentralized movement that eventually becomes the focus of the story. The characters evolve into various factions, each contributing to a complex, emergent system.

**Setting**: The setting is an ambiguous, dystopian urban landscape where workers are building a monolithic structure. The environment is oppressive, resembling a coal mine or a panoptic prison. Anon eventually breaks away to a hidden underground space, which becomes a hub for decentralized activity.

**Plot**: Anon, dissatisfied with her life and the oppressive system she's a part of, breaks away to start building something new in a hidden space. Her actions attract others, and together they form a decentralized organization (DAO). The group faces internal struggles as they try to understand what they're building and why, leading to the formation of various factions with differing ideologies and methods.

**Conflict**: The main conflict is ideological and organizational. As the underground group grows, it faces challenges in coordinating its efforts and maintaining a shared vision. Some members want to return to the centralized system they left, while others push for various forms of decentralization. This leads to a coup, dissent, and the eventual fragmentation of the group.

**Theme**: The story explores themes of decentralization, freedom, and the complexities of collective action. It delves into the paradoxes of choice and the emergence of a new form of secular morality that transcends traditional binaries. The story also examines the limitations and possibilities of language in shaping our understanding of complex systems.

**Summary**: "A DAO Story: Trenches and Horizon Lines" is a Kafkaesque exploration of decentralization and collective action set in a dystopian world. Anon, a young laborer, breaks away from an oppressive system to start something new, attracting a diverse group of contributors. As the group grows, it faces internal struggles over its purpose and structure, leading to fragmentation and ideological conflict. The story delves into the complexities of freedom, choice, and the emergence of a new form of morality, all set against the backdrop of a world caught in a cycle of centralization and decentralization. The narrative style shifts from an omniscient narrator to Anon's perspective and then back to a collective focus, mirroring the story's thematic evolution.

- The story is told by an omniscient narrator.
- The opening scene describes a world of an ambiguous time: could be the past, present or a dystopian future. Also an ambiguous place: could be anywhere doesn't seem to be any specific place. The landscape is a dense urban metropolis populated by workers building a giant mechanism.
- Aesthetically references [Apple/Macintosh's *1984* commercial.](https://youtu.be/VtvjbmoDx-I)
- World is dusty, gray, dystopian; like a coal mine.
- Human workers are organized by an invisible voice representing a centralized bureaucracy that could be human or an AI. The voice sounds over a ubiquitous loudspeaker that seems to be installed over the entire landscape, echoing against the concrete walls of the labyrinthine city.
- They are directed towards the completion of a megastructure that resembles a panoptic prison or giant obelisk resembling the [Washington Monument.](https://www.nps.gov/wamo/learn/historyculture/monumentconstruction.htm) (Also a reference to "granite cocks" from MoM.) A time lapse of the construction: as the structure increases in size, the laborers become increasingly emaciated and impoverished, illustrating a direct correlation between scale and health almost as though the tower is vampirically sucking the life force from the humans.
- The narration joins a young woman laboring in one of the camps (Anon). The voice of the narrator becomes her interior monologue stream of consciousness. The story begins following her.
- Anon witnesses numerous atrocities during the build of the megastructure.
- We follow her through the course of a day: waking in poverty, scrounging for food, guided to the labor area, performing difficult work, returning home to highly regulated and anemic human relationships.
- The next morning, in a long line of workers heading to the build site, she breaks off from the group to duck down a sewer pipe and hide.
- Anon creates a "temporary autonomous zone" that she escapes to everyday.
- She start piecing together scraps and garbage into a machine. It's not immediately clear what she's making.
- Some other workers hear the noise and rush into the space to bring her back to the main build site, but their curiosity give them pause and they decide to join in this new build instead. They start producing lots of novel models and drawing grandiose designs all over the walls.
- More and more contributors come into the hidden bunker everyday. They start to form factions/groups for problem solving particular elements of the weird machine. Conversation begins amongst the groups to try to understand the importance of the pieces and how they all fit together. Each group describes a different facet of the same emerging conceptual hyperobject.
- As the groups go deeper into their own composable components, the struggle to describe their relations to the bigger picture of the network increases. The cognitive load causes their common language to break down as some of the groups start using highly codified strings of jargon to describe their builds and others start inventing new words to represent new concepts to illustrate new mechanism designs for their areas of expertise. A few return to the obelisk construction site, a few seem to go mad by the complexity and collapse shiverig in the corners.
- As the language shifts, they articulate a new understanding of themselves in relation to each other, in relation to themselves, in relation to the thing they are building and what it means, how to build it, and why to build it.
- A new faction emerges that starts a new set of diagrams on the walls. They focus on the designs without building any new components. This team start imagining the need to escape their material constraints, into the future world that they are building towards. They try to create a meta plan that is dedicated to influencing the hearts and minds of the other builders, to increase knowledge sharing amongst the numerous new languages and raise the collective intelligence of the underground collective.
- Dissent percolates from frustration and a coup rises up in revolt of the underground project. A group is formed that desires to return to the monolithic mechanism at the main build site. They start running reconnaissance missions to study and learn how the megastructure is made and bring back new ideas to influence the underground group.
- The story has no concrete ending. In the final scene, the camera rises high into the air so we can view the world territory like a tiled map (referencing the hexagonal tiles of Civilization or a Buckminster Fuller dymaxion map of triangles). The humans laboring around the obelisks are shown to condense into the center, while the humans at the periphery are able to split off into decentralized bands that move more chaotically. The final image resembles cellular automata: chaotic movements condensing into cells, disbanding through death, as an infinite ballet of decentralization and re-centralization.

#### Notes on Style:
- Inspired by Kafka's stories *The Trial* and *In the Penal Colony* and Camus' philosophical essays
- Opportunity to play with the technical language of the characters:
- The language they use to describe what they are building changes as quickly as the thing they are building. Some use allegory and metaphor ("it's like this; it's like that") while others invent new words.
- The real purpose of the machine is never revealed, but the reader is able to witness a shift in space, time, and morality:
- opening up a new space to think about the world differently, away from the routine and material labors that impose power upon their perspectives
- a shift in time that allows the individual to reclaim their own attention allows for new kinds of building, but also is the root of the coordination problem that proliferates into disagreement. The paradox: can't make the choice until one understands that they have the freedom to make a choice, then once the choice is made one can't unmake it and must continue going on choosing - one cannot unchoose choice once it is chosen.
- a new kind of morality emerges beyond the good/bad. Maybe a secular morality: not one extreme or the other, but a third/middle way that is not neutral. This removes the hysterical polarity of morality, rendering it rational and impotent.
- The omniscient narrator begins the story, switches to Anon, then eventually slides back into the center as the group undergoes increasing decentralization. By the end of the story we have forgotten about Anon altogether.

---

## 4. The Landscape of the Pluriverse - Part 2: The Plantary-Scale Computationally Persistent Economic Organism

**Character**: The story doesn't focus on individual characters but rather on the collective character of a planet-scale machine, which is both a literal life-support system and a metaphor for a regenerative crypto-economic stack.

**Setting**: The setting is Earth, transformed into a complex, interconnected, and self-sustaining machine that spans the planet. Various components of this machine are described in intricate detail, each serving a unique function and embodying a different design philosophy.

**Plot**: The narrative follows the path of some material through this planetary machine, illustrating how each component is interdependent upon others. The story explores various guilds and organizations that have arisen to manage and understand this complex system.

**Conflict**: The conflict is not personified but exists in the challenges of managing a complex, decentralized system that needs to balance various forms of value, from material to spiritual. The guilds, each with their own philosophies and methods, strive to maintain this balance.

**Theme**: The overarching theme is the symbiosis between technology and ecology, exploring how a decentralized, blockchain-based system can serve as a model for sustainable living on a planetary scale. The story delves into the complexities of value, both material and immaterial, and how these can be managed in a decentralized way to benefit the whole system.

**Summary**: "The Landscape of the Pluriverse - Part 2" is a speculative narrative that explores the concept of Earth as a complex, self-sustaining machine. Through detailed vignettes, the story describes various components of this machine, each serving a unique function and embodying a different design philosophy. The narrative follows the path of some material through this planetary machine, illustrating how each component is interdependent upon others. The story also introduces various guilds and organizations that have arisen to manage and understand this complex system, each with their own philosophies and methods. The overarching theme is the symbiosis between technology and ecology, and the story delves into the complexities of value, both material and immaterial.

- The whole story is a description of a giant machine, both literally and metaphorically.
- Each component is literally a mechanism, part of a planet-scale life support system.
- Each component is also a metaphor for a composable section of a regenerative crypto-economic stack.
- The individual mechanisms are each radically different in design from each other. Various mechanisms are described in close detail, vingettes.
- Some are composed of living tissues, like the Cronenberg game console from eXistenZ.
- Some are composed of collections of creatures working together in closed loops, like aquaponic stacks of animals and plants that generate oxygen.
- Some demonstrate self-regenerative materials, like self-repairing synthetic skin/organs.
- Some illustrate infrastructural machines that build other machines.
- Saltwater and iron batteries deep underground.
- Highly efficient and reflective solar panels and heat capture devices
- Scaling out, the reader is given glimpses of how the discrete mechanisms fit together to make aggregate composed of numerous parts supporting each other. Some resemble biomimicry formations, others are more agricultural or permacultural in design:
- Synthetic Siphonophores: resembling larger organisms composed of numerous smaller organisms
- Mechanical coral: architectural scaffolding covered with regenerative tissues that expand and adapt the surface
- Sentient gardens: referring to Ursula Le Guin's short story [*Vaster than Empires and More Slow*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaster_than_Empires_and_More_Slow), large gardens that become forests and almost scale to become "wilderness" composed of numerous machine generating materials, decomposing antiquated parts, appearing to grow off of each other like a living ecosystem.
- Subterranean synthetic mycellial networks: seemingly immaterial machines (due to their decentralized nature it is difficult to identify single organisms) spread under the surface, stretching fiberoptic cables and electrical signals over great expanses, a telekinetic lattice of pure communication that adapts to the labyrinth of the material world with apparent curiosity, like a slime mold seeking the quickest path through a prime number maze (reference to Balaji's preoccupation).
- Energy harvesting fields look like fruit tree orchards.
- Canopy systems like rainforests, filtering shade and modulating in relation to different mechanical needs for distributing light, heat, and lubrication.
- Mechanical digestive systems like gut fauna/flora contain special environments for conducting the chemical compositions needed for producing fuel, recycling wastes, pressurizing and distributing gases, etc.
- This living machine becomes an eco-technological primitive that consumes the colonial project. Humans comes to understand that the expansion of civilization is scaled to the limits of growth of the biological ecosystem. A new intergalactic terraforming organization is launched to send out these regenerative blockchain bots to prepare distant inhospitable worlds for future occupation.
- This project of expansion takes on almost a religious fervor, although it remains explicitly secular. The mantra of the expansion guild are matrix songs (reference to *Always Coming Home*)about *postive externalities.* The guild members are obsessed with creating sustainable life where there previously existed only cold, inert matter. Most humans understand this as an attempt to reconcile the guilt and shame of thousands of years of human extractive methods. The activities of the guild are handled with a sense of sober tragic acceptance.
- We are shown examples of machines that have acquired empathy for modulating the needs of living systems, as well as humans that voluntarily limit their emotions in order to better integrate with machinic consciousness through a wide variety of physical interfaces.
- The narrative of the story follows the path of some material through the machine to create a sense of how each component is interdependent upon others (there is no central processing unit, rather they all respond to each other).
- Tokens are spawned from nothing, "minted" data that has contextual value based on the signature of the date, time, and purpose of its creations. The word "tokens" is used to describe a variety of physical, digital, and purely conceptual increments. In colloquial usage, talking about tokens is equivalent to exchanging knowledge about ones own subjective ideological alignment with larger cultural groups, a manner of expressing ones own position and values within society.
- Citizens pool, orchestrate, and combine these tokens into pools that allow them to be exchanged, borrowed, leveraged, and balanced in relation to each other. This is not about extraction or gambling, but the initiation of a digestive distribution of material through the system. The emphasis is on movement, exchange, equillibrium, balance, and meaning through *giving away* rather than hoarding, keeping, concentrating, maintaining accumulations.
- The exchange of tokens are used for mysterious, ritualistic, almost magic-like sentiment polling. These should be difficult to describe (evoking ridiculously complex delegation architectures) and seem a bit absurd to the reader, as these mechanisms are beyond our current capacity to imagine. A novel form of quadratic polling is used to concetrate both positive and negative sentiments, motivated to reach certain thresholds that trigger the release of certain biological chemicals and mechanical signals that have various unseen ramifications in the rest of the machine as it reconfigures to align with the ever-shifting desires of the inhabitants.
- A new occult industry is developed, incorporating processes reminiscint of alchemy in that they are equally concerned with material and spiritual transformations of energy. This industry, known as *Mercurial Pooling*, focuses on technologies that seem to "turn shit into gold," specifically in the quasi-magical ability to combine numerous lesser valued tokens, design mysterious relations between them, and produce variations on "economic perpetual motion machines" that seem to defy the laws of physics by generating a seemingly endless supply of value without consuming the energy of the initial inputs.
- The *Mercurial Pooling* guilds fund experimental energy-generating research. They are particularly excited by the prospect of tapping into the infinite churning of the iron-based molten ore at the Earth's core by tapping into the heat, gases, magnetic polarity, and radiations to generate the human life support and economic systems on the surface.
- Another guild known as *The Scarlet Order of the Lymph* operates in close proximity to the *Mercurial Pooling* league. This guild focuses their efforts on the distribution of materials and value to the individual components of the larger system, prioritizing the areas that have become deficient or nutrient deprived.
- Their ideals are based on an intricate mandala resembling cellular automata. Their guild values are composed of self-regulation, hyper-reflexive autopoiesis (self-making), and compassionate programmed cell death. These human and cyborg workers are obsessed with the notion that the earth is a cybernetic organism, that our machines are living creatures, and the ultimate manifestation of efficiency is streamlining the exchange of values between organic and synthetically constructed complex system to alleviate the friction of "the bridges" (what they call the areas of interface where data is exchanged between parts of the system).
- Although much of their activities seem to occur underground and in secret, one well known output of *The Scarlet Order of the Lymph* is a quarterly published interactive infographic that clearly illustrates a data-driven model for where they have identified the most need for value distribution in the planetary network. This graphic also presents the guilds recommendations for what current projects have reached their natural conclusion (have run their course, become obsolete, or otherwise consume more value than can be justified by their consumption). These "geriatric protocols" are voted upon by anyone paying attention, initiating actions by guild members to oversee the compassionate depreciation of the components deemed no longer necessary so that their energy consumption might be freed up for other initiatives.
- In the final scene, we are shown a schematic-like graphic of the whole system. The image is a technical drawing resembling a biological/anatomical diagram and an engineering blue print. The large "siphonophore" diagram annotates all of the parts of the planet, representing the technical stack of web3 superimposed on the ecological, geological, and meterological system of the planet. The earth is presented as a cybernetic superorganism with human tech as a natural proliferation of its sensorial system. The global decentralized network is presented as an extension of the "self" of the planet coming into awareness of its own potential to be aware of itself and others (other planets). At this scale, we have the impression that the earth is as aware of the humans swarming on and in its territory as humans are of the microbial gut fauna/flora that metabolize their biological sentience. The final image is of the earth as an organism, thinking and feelings its way into a planetary-scale reflection of its state in the cosmos.

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## 5. The Landscape of the Pluriverse - Part 3: The Regenerative Coalition for Cybernetic Hygiene

**Character**: The story focuses on the collective known as The Coalition, a group of operators who oversee the planetary-scale protocol. They are the guild "leads" responsible for various aspects of Earth's life-support systems, ecological stewardship, economic regeneration, and more. They are guided by an ancient AI known as the Semi-Central Non-Human Post-Democratic Intelligence Unit (SCNHPDI).

**Setting**: The setting is primarily the monastic-like structures where the Coalition operates. These buildings are strategically placed to have a clear view of the horizon line, a feature that is both admired and criticized.

**Plot**: The narrative delves into the daily operations of the Coalition, their interaction with the SCNHPDI, and the complex tasks they perform to maintain the balance and health of the planetary system. It explores the technical aspects of their work, including their interface with the system and the data sets they manage.

**Conflict**: The conflict arises from the tension between the Coalition and the general populace, who view them as a relic of bureaucratic inefficiency. There's also internal competition among Coalition members, regulated by the SCNHPDI, to generate value and improve the system.

**Theme**: The overarching theme is governance in a highly complex, decentralized system. The story explores the challenges and possibilities of managing a planetary-scale protocol that integrates both human and machine intelligence for the benefit of all.

**Summary**: "The Landscape of the Pluriverse - Part 3" focuses on the governance organization of the human-system interactions from the Coalition's point of view. It delves into the daily operations of the Coalition, their interaction with the SCNHPDI, and the complex tasks they perform to maintain the balance and health of the planetary system. The story explores the technical aspects of their work, including their interface with the system and the data sets they manage. The conflict arises from the tension between the Coalition and the general populace, as well as internal competition among Coalition members. The overarching theme is governance in a highly complex, decentralized system.

- The operators of the plantary-scale protocol, known simply as *The Coalition,* organize themselves into large looming monestary-like structures. These tall building always retain a clear view of the horizon line, justified as both an important strategic and aesthetic position, while also receiving incessant criticism from inhabitants of the lower tiers for the same reasons.
- The operators represent the guild "leads" of all of the major life-support, ecological stewardship, economic regeneration, knowledge accumulation, and technical sustainability cults of Earth. As informal delegates, they are charged with stewarding the ongoing operations of the world-machine in a transparent, verifiable, and critical manner. In general, this group is not liked by the majority of inhabitants, often dismissed as a bloated expendable relic of a bygone area when bureaucracy plagued civilization, equivalent to a mistake of evolution (at best) or an institutional cancer (at worst).
- *The Semi-Central Non-Human Post-Democratic Intelligence Unit (SCNHPDI)* (pronounced "skinepdy") oversees the operations of the Coalition. It is a now ancient artificial intelligence (known as a *Decentralized Autonomous Organism*) that provides an important automated checks-and-balances on human cognitive bias and ensures that no single political imbalance threatens the overall sustainability of the system or optimizes for a single externality at the sacrifice of greater potential thriving. It operates on a programming language of *Eccentric Altruizm*, a deeply codified script that all Coalition members must learn before being accepted into the group. The Coalition is explicitly charged with stewarding the maintenance of the SCNHPDI and they are required to stake a significant portion of their existential tokens in order to do so, to be significantly slashed in the event of a system failure and leading to profound demotions of their societal status equivalent to *excommunicado*.
- The primary goal of the Coalition is to feed data sets from their respective knowledge graphs into the Decentralized Autonomous Organism. The secondary goal is to receive encrypted data sets from the DAO that represent an aggregation and distillation of all the information generated by the other guild streams, analyze the learnings, and responsively integrate the information back into their own domains in real time without interrupting the continuous operation of any of the mechanisms. This is understood to be an incredibly physically and mentally exhausting job, so the Coalition members are exempt from occupying any other position within the planetary operations and provided with sufficient resources to be able to focus on their tasks for 80% of their waking hours.
- (Insert technical description of the Coalition member interface: variation on digital democracy, DAO proposal flows, interacting with shaman-style contracts, auditing reports for malicious code and potential attack vectors, etc.)
- Members are playing infinite VR/AR games of coordination within a visceral Cronenberg-style bio-technical interface apparatus. These games oscillate between simulations generated on the accumulated data memory of all collected records and novel governance decisions that must be made in real time to keep the system going. Significantly, the Coalition members remain unaware of the difference between the simulation and the real policies they are interacting with as a necessary *credible neutrality* of the human-blockchain interface. Coalition members essentially volunteer to serve as user-subjects of infinite automated game theoretical calculations conducted by the SCNHPDI. The responses, reactions, and inputs of the Coalition members train and entrain the proposal flow of the system itself.
- Each researcher is sustained by a basic income based on the value that they generate, determined by the omniscient AI, so there is competition amongst the members of the Coalition but none within the rest of society.
- A "healthy" competition is maintained among the Coalition members, regulated by the SCNHPDI system and known as *Practical Pluralism* by the members. The generative tensions and fleeting frictions of the constant competitive gamified simulations allow for continuous novelty innovation by the system, reducing the cognitive load of the member-users while greatly accelerating the capacity for anticipating psychologically rich, emotive, and decidedly irrational outcomes of various scenarios.
- The human-blockchain interactions are often referred to as an evolution of consciousness beyond the constraints of the human, although those that interact with the system at the command-prompt level understand that there remains such an incredible complexity in the infinite updating of the encryption of the programming language that no human would singularly be able to decipher the contents without the aid of the entirity of the system itself.
- SNCHPDI engineers speak amongst themselves in slang terminology, commenting on the human-blockchain interactions in terms implying infinite debt, hampster wheels, slime mold labyrinths, prime number mazes, and old jokes about corporeal punishment for being caught chewing gum in public places.
> Note: This story focuses on the governance organization of the human-system interactions from the Coalition POV. The next story will delve deeper into the system-oriented ontology of the *Pluriversal Manifold* of infinite game theoretical simulation.
- The final scene of the story depicts the Coalition in their temple-like chambers. Each person is strapped into a strange interface pod filled with pinkish purple goo. They are telepathically arguing amongst themselves, assembling their collective thoughts into condensed singular concept prompts, and feeding them into the AI computational matrix. The entire coalition models the decentralized intelligence of a DAO acting as a single organism, representing an ideal digital democracy, negotiating for their own lives and the success of the entire species. As the camera zooms out, the group resembles a blemish on the face of an otherwise pristine mirrored surface of the earth.

---

## 6. The Landscape of the Pluriverse - Part 4: The Pluriversal Manifold

**Characters**:
- **The Designer**: A creator of memes and worlds, responsible for crafting engaging content that entrains the consciousness of users.
- **The Architect**: A secretive figure who designs the infrastructure for the distribution and sensing of information, focusing on incentive mechanisms.
- **Anon and her Crew**: A group of reality gamers, each with unique roles, who navigate the complexities of the Pluriverse.

**Setting**: The Pluriverse, a complex, multi-layered reality that encompasses the physical universe, the virtual metaverse, and the ontological pluriverse.

**Plot**:
- The Designer crafts memes and gathers feedback from an anonymous community to optimize their impact.
- The Architect works in secret to build the underlying structures that facilitate the flow of memes and information, focusing on incentive mechanisms.
- Anon and her crew navigate this complex landscape, each contributing in their unique ways to understand and manipulate the system for collective benefit.

**Conflict**:
- The tension between the need for centralized control (The Architect) and the ethos of decentralization that the Pluriverse espouses.
- The struggle against "Moloch," a metaphorical entity representing coordination failures, self-interest, and societal decay.

**Themes**:
- Governance in a decentralized system.
- The interplay between individual and collective goals.
- The ethical and philosophical implications of creating a reality that influences human behavior and thought.

**Summary**: "The Landscape of the Pluriverse - Part 4" is a complex narrative that explores the intricacies of a multi-layered reality, focusing on the characters who design, navigate, and are influenced by this system. It delves into the ethical, philosophical, and practical challenges of creating and governing such a reality, all while incorporating a rich tapestry of philosophical and game-theoretical concepts. The story serves as a meditation on the possibilities and pitfalls of a hyper-connected, decentralized world.

*Picks up from the previous story: all the delegates are entering into their virtual chambers to interface with each other individually and collectively with the AI.*

#### The Designer
- The story describes a designer. The character is a maker of worlds, a crafter of memes. This cultish tinkerer pulls information *out of the ether* and collaborates with AI tooling of their own invention to generate images to serve as optical targer for entraining the consciousness of all users.
- The designer is an infinite novelty generator of memetic content, charged with adapting data feeds into consummable (and engaging) content for the users to assimilate in neurologically and emotionally charged ways.
- Once the design is sketched, the designer forms a lorecrafting circle of anon community members and cyborgs to provide quality feedback. The memes are rated for how "meta" they are, how attention grabbing (efficient) they are, on their familiarity and cerebral fiction, and if they are complex enough to serve as effective carrier signals for distributing high-fidelity information to the rest of the anon underground. AI augments the data to suggest ideal thresholds of how new memes should be designed in relation to the shifting preferences, internet fashions, and averaged attention spans of the people receiving them.
- Anons *glean* the content. Instead of picking up potatos in the fields they are picking up scraps of the conversation from a larger collective. Small bits and pieces (captured as memes) are assembled into larger maps for collective sensing. They are driven by their senses, so they are attracted to elegant memes, but their tastes are always changing.
- The memes are launched. The consciousness operating system is updated across the anon community. The memetic upgrades are pushed directly to their home VR pods, fusing with the awareness of the user, inflecting their community roles, their relationships to each other. Meme distribution generates catharsis by processing collective tensions.
- Meme tech connects the individual users through the tracked flow of information through the system, serving as a litmus test for the "hive-mind" to understand the blockages and frictions in the societal architecture. This information returns to the design through AI augmented visualization. Calcified and static ideology show areas of increased attention from designers, to craft memes that unlock latent potential and dissipate accumulations of strong sentiment to keep the distribution of value flowing openly and smoothly.

#### The Architect
- The architect is the world-building lorecrafter, testing every new model on the learnings of every previous model in order to understand how to iterate upon the designs.
- Views the accumulations, concentrations, and distributions of memes through the societal system through a different unique interface than the designer. The architect isn't crafting memes, they are creating infrastructure for the sensing and distribution of information.
- The architect's workshop is setup to craft experiences and interactions. They are charged with understanding and unlocking appropriate incentive mechanisms for ensuring that user behaviors are directed away from selfishness and towards habits of mind/body that generate the greatest possible good for the collective.
- Due to the controversial and manipulative qualities of this work the architect must necessarily work in secret. The output of the architects designs are denied by his employers and all trace of her research is encrypted and removed from the public database, which under any other circumstance would be considered a grossv violation of societal policies on ubiquitous transparency.
- The architect focused on writing complex LARPing scenario for every role in society. They write the role as the center of world formation, as the main character that everyone else is secondary to, as an illusion to keep them entrained on their own self-worth. The user's experience maximizes their understanding of the importance of their role, ensuring that they will not defect on their responsibilities. Each role is inserted into a "prime number maze" of infinite incentive seeking and leveling up, the content of which is customized to the needs and qualities of their skillset. The architect is a labyrinth builder. (Reference: Calvino and Borges)
- AI tooling supplements the scaffolding provided by the architect to fill in the ontological gaps, blurr the appropriate edges, shift the edge of the map based on the location of the user (to save on bandwidth, latency, and computational resources) to maintain the framerate of optimal immersion for the user. The quality of the simulations is evaluated, scored, and auto-documented into an infinite archive of uncanny artifacts: too real is manipulative, too synthetic becomes campy. The appropriate level of fidelity must be maintained, while each role has a different threshold of digestible fidelity, requiring a unique world build for each user at great expense.
- This role of the architect is kept hidden as it is a key moment of essential centralization. The citizens of the Quadratic Lands would never accept this absolute centralization as the base layer of ontological infrastructure, but would also never be able to understand the importance that such a role provides for the stability and harmony of the rest of the system. The architect's reliance on AI tools greatly increases the attack surface of this centralized position.
- As a result of these factors, the architects willingly accept the impermance of their position. A new architect is chosen every 3 years to ensure infinite novelty and avoid burnout. A retired architect is promised a completely secluded home and relieved from the need to contribute anything further to society except for their daily mental downloads of thought-feels that provide invaluable data for the architect AI to learn about the needs of this role.
- Architects do not suffer from ennui or melancholy (as one might presume), but are filled with bliss. They know they are charged with a very important task, but also that their design failures will only generate more meaningful results, so they are embolded and empowered to experiment wildly with their work. By prioritizing their own self-interestedness they mirror self-interestedness in their game design, defined by pleasure seeking hedonism put into service of maximizing efficiency of local labor to scale the distribution of this value to the collective good. The architect does not need to consider the complexity of how to design the larger altruistic system, as this is done collectively by the counsel of elders and civ-scale AI. The architect is a *cultural* architect that prioritizes the needs of the players, more than the rules of the game.

#### The Meme Game
- Every user in society needs a certain amount of information in order to effectively accomplish their local mission goals. Too much information threatens cognitive overload, increasing the caloric heat generated by the body, distributing anxiety through the cyberneural network, and ultimately resulting in biological rejection of the simulations (evidenced from previous versions of the OS).
- The designer and architect help ameliorate this information problem through simplifiying complex concepts into enjoyable single-serving images, modulating the resolution and maximizing the smooth transitions of common ideas and value through society. The result is the eradication of traditional political polemics, default thinking by binary dichtomies, social violence due to differences in race, class, gender, or other superficial characteristics, etc. There remains palpable traumas in society that, from the POV of the users, come in waves, since the designers and architectrs understand that certain negative incentives can be just as powerful in aligning perspectives around altruistic causes.
- The story returns to Anon: a psychedelic visually fueled elaboration of biomimicry formations across every strata of the natural ecosystem, increasing her own fidelity of understanding to her own neural-cognitive labyrinths and greatly accelerating her leveling within the game. Simply by living her life is gamified to incentivize her own breaking of the game as a primary source of pleasure, generating (unbenownst to her) valuable data for the architect's AI to generate more fulfilling simulations.
- Anon's experience explores conceptual unlock thresholds. As she becomes more aware of the complexity of ants, bees, mycellium webs, etc., her user stats increase in the game. By collecting meme artifacts to communicate this complexity to others (as memes), she is able to generate new languages (forms of encryption) for encoding and decoding the complexity to her friends, as a kind of mutating gamer slang. The evolving language increases the fidelity of her thinking-feeling and capacity for collaboration/cooperation/coordination with other players, even non-human players.
- Anon has a crew of fellow reality gamers that she is actively coordinating with.
- Some are interested in the past, in history, the lineage of coordination failures that we have grown out of, why previous civilizational models and memes were able to be co-opted and used against us in mallicious ways.
- Other team mates are "healers" spreading positive affirmations, Clerics that recognize when team mates lose morale, then alleviating through "magical language" to reinforce that everyone has a purpose/role and we must support each other to maintain "hope" for successful coordination.
- A third archetype is courageous in exploring future dynamics, attempting to understand where we are going and how we will get there. A combination of an agile rogue, military scout, and (Bankless reference) to the frontiersman "going west" manifest destiny pov. They move fast on solo missions to gather reconnaissance. They use illusion magic in-game.
- Anon is the squad leader, raid party leader. She is responsible for tracking the movements of her squad (like a PM) and everyone has all the information they need, so coordinating the distribution of knowledge through the team. She meditates on the complexity of the data coming in, focused on distilling it down to consummable bites, forming a "backlog" of priorities to the team. She is in constant communication with other team leaders - because this game is not purely rivalrous, but requires complex collaboration and cooperation - leaving behind signs and signals on walls (like war tagging graffiti) as an allegory for infinite auto-documentation in open source software development. She crafts holographic sigils on the landscape, especially through difficult areas, to create a path for others to follow so they don't need to "reinvent the wheel" during the obstacle. Anon is constantly sending information back to the (central?) knowledge repository that is mirrored in-game and IRL, as a map removing the fog of war for players/squads and a data set used by the designers and architects to further iterate on world building.
- The end of Anon's section of the story is a realization: that her role in the game, as in life, is to effectively (and affectively) coordinate. This means conveying her knowledge in a way that others can quickly assimilate, to invite them to iterate on it and expand the network of shared memes. The way the game is "won" is by distributing awareness at a sufficient definition (composed of resolution, fidelity, and velocity) to remove the fluff around the hyperobject of the game itself, to guess the game that is being played, to become the designers of the game (thereby becoming empowered to invent new rules to the game), and transcend in awareness so that there is no longer any point in playing the game. Only when a majority of players are able to share in this vision does the simulation end and the players are able to graduate (level up) to the next level of the prime number maze.
- Anon has nightmares (of Moloch) that instill her with fear, cause her to lose hope, to become suspicious of others, to lose track of her altruistic responsibilities and become devastatingly self-serving. This is her weakness (along with every other player in the game), and they must wage this war on an individual/subjective level in order to become viable squad members, so that each squad can be an effective unit in contributing to the inter-squad relations, etc. The game can only be won collectively, not individually, but the lack of awareness of this first principle is repeatedly forgotten by the players. As long as we maintain the tethers of interdependence (of interdependence), strengthen the tennets of mutual aid, and increase the efficiency of our shared technologies, the game can still be won.

---

#### Notes to Integrate:
##### Philosophical:
- [Friedrich Kittler](https://egs.edu/biography/friedrich-kittler%E2%80%A0/#:~:text=Friedrich%20Kittler%20sees%20an%20autonomy,and%20written%20history%20behind%20it.)'s media theory. The apparatus inflects upon the content that is produced. The media modality in-forms and out-forms the content that transpires and is disseminated through the media.
- (Martin) Heideggerian tool-being theory. The hand-tool relation. The tool as an instrument/apparatus for sensing and extending sense. Moving away from Heidegger's universal man sensing in an existential void; towards a [OOO (Object Oriented Ontology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#:~:text=In%20metaphysics%2C%20object%2Doriented%20ontology,the%20existence%20of%20nonhuman%20objects.) immersive subject ala Graham Harmon and Timothy Morton. Play on the differences between the philosophical notion of OOO and [Object Oriented Programming.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming)
- [*Simulations and Simualcra*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation) by Baudrillard, traced into a literary groundwork of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges = the map that covers the territory, the Matrix metaphor synonymous with the simulation that we are always-already manifesting (even without technological interfaces) as an infinite procession of delusion, illustion, and hallucination.

##### Games:
- *Literary narrative structures that influence participatory structures towards in-forming an ontological structure of reality.*
- [Benjamin Bratton:](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262029575/the-stack/) SimCity as a tool that has shifted the architectural ontology: how we see ourselves in the world and how that manifests in urban and architectural design. As a game, there's no way to win SimCity-style simulations except through arbitrarily agreed upon or programmed rules. As manifest in a real world scenario, winning SimCity is the equivalent of achieving worldwide economic regeneration, resource equillibrium, and natural sustainability through a single centralized tyrannical god-kind user tethered to the omnipotent data-set awareness of the simulation itself.
- Glen Weyl: Civilization skill trees that illustrate a particular reductivist history, reinforce the infinite gamification potential of the contemporary moment, and (most importantly) [prognosticate a future based upon a projection from the formal constraints of the games own interiority](https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/political-ideologies-for-the-21st-century/) rather than external references, hence closing the cycle of regress. This point focused on multigenerational inheritance of the dymaxion tile projection over global territories as a reductive and ultimately harmful world view reinforcing hallucinations of infinite colonial expansion and violent competition.
- Ameen Soleimani & Kevin Owocki discussing Moloch as an infinite coordination game. World of Warcraft > dungeon raiding > slaying Moloch as the epiphenomenonal meta-monster that requires a coordination unlock to move beyond. D&D-style worlds bake in an aesthetic nostalgia for the ancient/medieval/dark ages, filled with superstition, fear, power struggle, and death. This archaic revivalism heoricizes barbaric blunt force and irrational magic as the set and setting for a procedurally generated *prime number maze* (Balaji's term) that inhibits us from fully understanding the complexity and nuance of the problem, and so we remain tragically hopeless in solving for it.
- Each of the above reference basic game principles (game playing not game theory): LARPing, levelling up through skill trees, grinding in labyrinths to accumulate material advantage over ever increasing difficulty mechanics, character design as it comes to influence identity design and socio-cultural role formation. The crux of the story will be on the notion of "rational agents" as an abstract impossibility.
- Game dissociation and escapism: the user takes with them the unsolvable dilemmas and paradoxes of the IRL world into the URL game, amounting to a self-imposed ontological barrier for imagining viable outcomes to poorly conceived problems. = The infinite chortling of simulacra.
- The root of the hallucination: rather than these games providing helpful tools for visualizing and understanding the problem space, they transplant their designs as the origins of the metaphor, further complicating our ability to clearly articulate the source of the mythological story and trapping us within an infintie regress of self-referential meme proliferation with no true referent. This amounts to a hegemonic perpetuation of the oppressive patriarchal/colonial universe we should be gaming to escape from, into a matristic pluriversal game based in creation over destruction.

##### Embodying the POV of Anon:
- Universe (meatspace) > Metaverse (virtual space) > Pluriverse (ontological space we are aiming for)
- The story invites the reader to consider a subjective, singular, first-person reality of Anon.
- **Universal** facillitates more of the same, influenced by the externalities of the political, social, cultural structures that we struggle to shake off from historical memory. Comprised of behaviors, artifacts, architectures of the external material world organizes itself to form design constraints on how humans live: entropic inhibitions that accumulate into a metacrisis that we are now pathetically trying to un-fuck ourselves from.
- **Metaversal** presents a virtual world layered on top of the meatspace that replicates all of its short comings as non-fundamental aesthetic and conceptual differences, including: narratives of hyper-freedom and transcendent sovereignty, expanded fields of identity, romanticism of infinite space-time unincumbered by material constraints, lack of regulation/control/restrained from institutional enforcement entities, basically the dream of pure virtuality as an infinite space-time utopia removed from the rules of embodied physics. Occupying this virtual space allows human users (and others) to dream differently, imposing new formal configurations on their think-feel space, which then (significantly) manifest back upon their behaviors and activities outside of the virtual realms. The intended use of the metaverse was to serve as a simulator for accelerating collective understanding of complex problems. The unintended tragic result is that new hyper-fictional problems were invented and transposed back upon the material world, further distancing us from the understanding we set out to articulate in the first place. *Do electric sheep dream cyborgian math god dreams?*
- **Pluriversal** preoccupations are not material or virtual space-times, but manifestly ontological projections of poetic/artistic instrumentation for recalibrating the users orientation towards the speculative future. Pluriversal programs are articulated as concrete, empirical, methodological strategies that elaborate the importance of *the interface*: how one interacts with themselves, how one interacts with another, how multiple interact with other multiples, how multiplicities of human agents interact with multiplicities of non-human agents, etc.
- As the *Pluriversal Manifold* relates to the operating system for *The Semi-Central Non-Human Post-Democratic Intelligence Unit (SCNHPDI)*, this program manifests as a meditation upon the physical interface of humans and automated governance intelligences, essentially autonomous autopoietic data sets trained on the social patterns of all living life forms accessible on Earth and neighboring planets. From chemical signals among ants, dance-like undulations among bees, mysterious forms of sensing in slime molds, intoxications of cordyceps fungus imposed upon the nervous systems of other organisms to manipulate their dreams, coordinated murmurings in flocks of Starlings, orchestrated movements of jellyfish swarms, dendritic designs composed by bacterial colonies within granite rocks excavated from the exposed wake of glacial movements, and any other formal patterns that can be quantified into plantarily distributed persistent and verifiable data mesh networks. Whereas the metaverse allows the user to dream and imagine differently, thereby affecting their meatspace behaviors, the pluriverse allows the decentralized autonomous system to reconfigure its ontological programming in novel experimental ways, resulting in a continuous agile manipulation of its narrative constructions and context simulations that defy total human comprehension.

---

## 7. Pluriversalism, Pluralism, and the Metacrisis Hyperobject

**Characters**:
- **Sentience 1**: Advocates for a practical pluralism, emphasizing the idea of "the rising tide lifts all boats."
- **Sentience 2**: Argues for the distinction between pluralism and pluriversality, warning against the dangers of homogenizing forces.

**Setting**:
- A dialogic space enhanced by telekinetic technology, allowing for a rich, multi-layered conversation.

**Plot**:
- The story opens with a Platonic dialogue between Sentience 1 and Sentience 2, discussing the nuances between pluriversality and pluralism.
- The dialogue evolves to explore the ethical and existential challenges of living in a complex, interconnected world.
- The conversation transitions into the topic of effective communication and information dissemination in an age of complexity.
- The dialogue concludes by examining the risks and responsibilities of futurological speculation.

**Conflict**:
- The tension between the need for individual accountability and the reality of collective entanglement.
- The struggle to communicate complex ideas in an easily digestible form without losing nuance.

**Themes**:
- The ethics of societal design.
- The challenges of effective communication in a complex world.
- The responsibilities and risks of futurological speculation.

**Key Moments**:
- Sentience 1 and Sentience 2 transcend to the next layer of the holon, discussing the ethical implications of technology and individual responsibility.
- Sentience 1 describes an influential book as a model for effective communication, leading to Sentience 2 questioning the actual impact of such models.
- Sentience 2 emphasizes the need for critique and counterpoint to be as accessible and compelling as the original ideas they challenge.

**Philosophical and Ethical Considerations**:
- The story delves into the ethical challenges of designing a society that respects both individuality and collective responsibility.
- It explores the existential dilemmas posed by technology that modulates human desires and ambitions.
- It questions the ethics of futurological speculation, especially its impact on automated systems and societal norms.

**Summary**: "Pluriversalism, Pluralism, and the Metacrisis Hyperobject" is a thought-provoking narrative that uses the format of a dialogue to explore complex ethical and existential questions. It challenges the reader to consider the nuances between pluriversality and pluralism, the ethical implications of technology, and the responsibilities that come with speculating about the future. The story serves as a meditation on the complexities of living in an interconnected world, emphasizing the need for both individual accountability and collective action.

- Page 1: Opens with 2 characters from very different walks of life (identified by aesthetics representing class, factions, etc) having a kind of Platonic dialogue about the differences between pluriversality and plurality. The characters use their voice and also rely upon a telekinetic technology to "show, not tell" each other montaged, speed-ramped, immediately downloadable images that supplement their complex descriptions like a mental/holographic animated slide deck.
- Story jumps right into dialogue. A long, meandering wall of text (in the script) that allows the voices to be entangled and confused.
- First entity describes the credible neutrality of the system, advocates for composability amounting to a practical pluralism of competitive forces built upon an emphasis of *compersion* over mere compassion, for allegorical reasons like "the rising tide lifts all the boats".
- Second entity does not antagonize, but supplements (agonizes with) by offering a distinction between pluralism and pluriversality. Describes the vampirific, blob-like, assimilating and appropriating colonial force that dominates the heterogeneity of local persons (human and nonhuman), rendering their distinct ontological perspectives into a subjugated, homogenous, faux-universally applicable formal horror of "wholeness." This is an incredibly dangerous trait of the entire procession of the civilization we are living in, especially within the eurocentric, academic, patriarchical, empirically epistemological substrate we are immersed in (but the character should describe these ideas without using the same jargon words to avoid the arguement being dismissed by the reader). This is a hard problem of societal design that has not been figured out yet.
- Page 2: The characters seem to transcend to the next layer of the holon.
- Sentience 1: But who is user here? What quality of bandwidth or attention are we able to apply? There's this technology which preys upon us, extracts our ambitions, artificially modulates our desires, serving us up an infinite procession of phantasmagoric hope like a carrot on a stick, steering us ever towards a hyper efficient manner that defies our more rational designs for sustainability. We live in a contraption of our own devising that points towards the necessity of self-destruction, but at what cost?
- Sentience 2: We must be practicing an existential agility at every layer, every scale. The accountability and responsibility to act righteously falls upon the individual, and we are all living in a collective entanglement that breaks down the clear delineations of individualism, and in fact this separation is the inhibition that prevents us from sensing and acting as a collective, so how does the sense making of relations and distribution of accountability flow through a thoroughly decentralized substrate? Hermitude is unethical. There are no heros, nor should there be. We remain within the allure of a network effect that keeps us returning by default to these horrible structures and designs, doomed to forever critique them from within, infinite hall of mirrors reflecting back the depravity of contemporary culture in a delicious sugary coating that even the most rational citizen is oh-so-eager to consume.
- Page 3: A transition in the conversation.
- Sentience 1: So this is reall a complication of complexity. How do we take complex topics that are so desperately important to elaborate, to maintain the nuance, subtlety, and minutae, and to distill them down into a single-serving easily digestible form that others can quickly recognize as delicious, use to integrate some vibrancy into their pale color scheme, expand their 9 second attention space (wait, my device corrected me and its actually 8.25 seconds), and mobilize resistance to boredom, to laziness, to the sickening preoccupation to speed?
- Sentience 2: What is the purpose of this reductivism, of this distillation? If, on one hand, we take reductive ideas and polish them to a high-gloss finish we diminish the resolution (how much information we can perceive) and the fidelity (the quality of the information conveyed) in service to velocity (the speed of transmission). But who decided that this is the variable we should all be optimizing for? Is this the hard of meme-driven development? We have felt the most prescient and pertinent question: how might we form our memetic technology to be so potent, intelligent, compelling, and dare-I-say *intoxicating* that it draws people in to explore the complexity for themselves? Not to fabricate lowest common denominator infographics to protect the user from needing to think, but to challenge them to redesign their own thinking formalism?
- Page 4:
- Sentience 1: There's this great book that has influenced the minds of a generation. The way it is written is quite effective. It offers a one sentence definition, a one paragraph explanation, and a one page overview, before jumping into the complexity chapter by chapter along clean rationally delineated layers of vertical stacks of ideology and horizontal bridges between concepts. The book is also accompanied by numerous multi-hour long verbal exposes that discuss and challenge the ideas therein, and the book itself is an open, pourous, absorptive substrate that promises to be actively updated by the auther over time to more accurately reflect the shifting foundations upon which it is built, to better reflect the hearts and minds of the population it is speaking to, speaking for, speaking with. This seems a very compelling formalism to me for disseminating information through semi-interactive means, for slowly introducing dull minds to honed complex structures of thought.
- Sentience 2: Yes, I agree this seems incredibly tactful and effective. But let me ask you... have you read the book? How many people do you know that have read the entirity of the text and responded to its content in a critical or iterative manner, as opposed to merely reciting quotations or evangelizing its principles? You have succinctly identified an important design problem and one authors elegant solution. The second part of the design problem is oriented towards how the critique of the text might occupy a similar format, to unfurl the counterpoint in a manner that is equally prodigious to the ideas within the source text. The goal is to elevate the consciousness of the population to move out of the comments section and into longer form meditations, to capture the breadth and the depth of the ideas currently driving our technocratic societal systems, and most importantly to modulate our attentions, to code switch on individual levels in a way that scales to collective sentience, to fold these cascading awarenesses into our increasingly decentralized organization architecture and work towards removing the incentives for any single citizen to defect against the rest.
- Page 5:
- Sentience 1: This deisgn problem is one part of a larger framework. The content of the book is of equal or greater importance. Any futurological prognostication of a society to come takes great risks correlated to the fidelity and perceived influence of the speculations in how they will effect our automated systems and affect our synchronized inhabitants.

---

## 8. Game-Theory Design

1. Introduction: Discussion about games and game theory, especially the role of a Game Master and the psychology of game design and their correlation with web three.
2. Critique of existing game theories:
- Examination of commonly referenced games, specifically the Prisoner's Dilemma, and why it is unsatisfying.
- Argue that the Prisoner's Dilemma is too reductive and insufficient to account for the complexity of human experience.
- Observe the danger in applying the Prisoner's Dilemma as a first principle in areas like web three governance.
3. Analysis of individual and multi-player games:
- Study of single-player games as a game of illusion, focusing on the player's self-conception of reality.
- Study of two-player games as mutual illusions where players need to convince each other of their realities.
- Explore the concept of mass hallucination when the number of players increases, and when the allegory of theory becomes literal and supplants reality.
4. Examination of the psychology of the Game Master:
- Create a character who is a game designer and is interested in creating a gnomic game where the rules of the game are to design the rules.
- Explore how this concept creates tension within the game designer and spreads to the players, resulting in a psychosis.
- Discuss the concept of the pharmacon (a cure which is also the poison), and how it applies to this situation.
5. The realization and epiphany of the game designer:
- The game designer becomes aware of the fact that if the only rule is that there are no rules, then rules themselves become arbitrary, and the only thing left to do is play.
- Explore the game designer's initial paranoia and subsequent psychedelic epiphany that the best we can do in complexity theory is to render reality as a simulation or a game.
6. Shifting from rule-following to rule-breaking:
- Argue for games built upon breaking rules rather than following them, necessitating a skill of improvisation or existential agility.
- Discuss the psychology of musicians well-versed in improvisation and artists who can create something from nothing.
7. Conclusion: The evolution of game design
- Encourage players to develop skills of improvisation, so they can design games beyond the nomex structure.
- Discuss the idea of an imagination problem that hinders our ability to move beyond current game theoretical principles.

---

## 9. VR/AR

1. **Introduction**
- Introduction to VR and AR technology.
- Highlight the two main components:
- Technical stack (backend, the ergonomic apparatus like headsets, controllers, chambers, etc.)
- Interface for engaging with virtual worlds.
- Mention the inspiration from David Cronenberg films and their alien-like interfaces.
2. **Philosophical Criticism of VR/AR Tech**
- Questioning the underlying assumptions of the tech:
- Idea that there is a "base layer" of reality.
- Human experience as the ultimate "layer zero" which everything else refers to.
3. **Centralization vs. Decentralization in VR/AR**
- Shift from centralized, proprietary VR projects (e.g., Xanax, Meta) to:
- Decentralized world-building through blockchain.
- Impact of general decentralization and distributed networks.
- Emphasis on permissionless and open-source development.
4. **Ontological Stack**
- Exploring the Uncanny Valley and achieving a virtual world as convincing as material reality.
- Imaginative scenarios for full immersion:
- Star Trek holodeck analogies.
- Neural link, sensory deprivation chambers, and other speculative tech.
- Addressing the challenge: If virtual becomes indistinguishable from reality, what is "real"?
5. **Redefining Reality**
- Addressing Hollywood tropes where losing track of real vs. virtual is a crisis.
- Exploring the opportunity to reprogram our understanding of reality.
- Using virtual spaces for "speed running alternative realities."
6. **Resource & Energy Implications of VR/AR**
- Assumption: Virtual world is more resource-efficient (contrasted with the reality of its current high resource cost).
- Energy consumption, manufacturing materials needed.
- Cognitive challenges: complexity, multi-dimensionality, etc.
7. **Virtual & Augmented Realities as New Layer Zero**
- Concept: VR/AR displaces and potentially replaces material reality.
- Potential for a series of stories where characters play with these dynamics:
- Game theoretical principles.
- Lore crafting, world-building with layered realities.
8. **Architecture & Design of Virtual Worlds**
- Question: Do virtual worlds need to follow the constraints of our natural world?
- Exploring different architectures:
- Holons within holons.
- Cosmic pancake or stratified designs.
9. **Evolution of Virtual Vision**
- Comparing human vision vs. potential artificial vision in the virtual world.
- Idea: Virtual vision could differ from human/biological vision.
- Speculating on machine or silicon-based visions and experiences.
10. **Conclusion**
- The role of web three tech and blockchain in shaping the future of VR.
- How these technologies could change societal behaviors and perceptions of reality.

---

## 10. Social Organism Coordination

**Layer 1: Individual**
- The journey begins with an individual decision to think differently and oppose oppressive structures.
- This exposes the individual to vulnerability.
- Lunar punk and solar punk orientations are described to protect the individual and remove them from the line of persecution.
- Strategies may include obfuscation and becoming less visible.

**Layer 2: Local Community**
- A shift from social media broadcasting towards actionable societal behaviors is necessitated, requiring community and collaboration.
- The community articulates programs, methodologies, collective strategies.
- As the community scales, the individual becomes more obfuscated, but the community becomes increasingly visible and vulnerable.
- Strategies to protect the community may include Dows or lunar punk-type methods.
- Community is described as a soft body practicing agility, composability, modularity, and the societal infrastructure as hard, rigid structures.
- Communities orient towards societal scale by either integrating into the mega structure or by attempting to disrupt it, which could be seen as competitive depending on the structure.

**Three Communities/Factions with Different Strategies**
1. **Integration**
- This strategy involves delegation and negotiation, battling against nepotism and egotism.
- It involves finding the correct place for the community within the larger infrastructure.
- The community must adapt to "click" into the larger infrastructure.
2. **Disruption**
- This strategy involves injecting malicious code into the larger infrastructure, maintaining the semblance of business as usual, yet fundamentally rewriting aspects of it.
- It could involve ideological or structural hacking, with the goal of causing the infrastructure to collapse.
- Alternatively, this community could use brute force or wage war against the mainstream, relying on resources and weaponry.
3. **Alternatives**
- This strategy is historically grounded in the establishment of autonomous zones or communes.
- Negatively, it could devolve into cultish behaviors or ideological manipulation.
- The community creates an alternative set of values, forming a collective identity.
- It may be seen as passively not engaging in competition.

**Layer 3: Social Cultural, Political Organism**
- The story attends to the wider cultural, political organism, envisioning a space for play, reversal, and virtuality.
- It uses a hyperobject metaphor to articulate this vision, morphing through biomimicry, biophilia, machinic and industrial descriptions, and paradoxical physics.
- This part of the story aims to:
1. Reflect the contemporary moment back to the reader.
2. Break the fourth wall and peer through the screen.
3. Articulate a civilizational position that is more fruitful for dreaming towards.
- The ultimate goal is to articulate "quadratic lands" as a new foundational base layer for others to build upon.
- This base layer doesn't disrupt the current one but builds on top of it.
- The articulation of quadratic lands comes from a reversal position, attempting to mesh with the existing "gitcoin" and "region community" structure, inspired by Arturo Escobar's reversal.

---

## 11. A Multigenerational DAO Story

*Setting:*
1. A future world where a solar punk commune is established in the mountains, separate from a technologically advanced but nature-disconnected society in the lowlands/city.
2. The mountain commune is idyllic, resembling '60s communes but more futuristic.
3. Commune members use technology sparingly to ensure they don’t harm nature, living in harmony in geodesic domes and renewable energy.
4. The city below has a cyberpunk vibe – darker, dirtier, and more materialistic, with signs of radical wealth inequality.

*Plot:*
1. The commune's wind energy device breaks and two young members are elected to travel to the city to retrieve parts for its repair.
2. The journey involves them walking or riding a bike down the mountains.
3. The duo, having grown up in the commune, experience shock and intrigue upon seeing the contrasting values and lifestyles of the city folks.
4. The city represents a place of conspicuous consumption, challenging the duo's core beliefs.
5. The duo face challenges in obtaining the parts due to biases against the "weird mountain people."
6. Tension arises between the two:
- One becomes intrigued by the city's materialistic values and consumption.
- The other remains firm in their commune beliefs, horrified by the city's ways.
7. The more adaptable member navigates the city's culture to negotiate for the parts, forcing the orthodox member to appreciate flexibility when coordinating with different value systems.
8. The solar punk community operates via a DAO. When the seller increases the price unexpectedly, the duo contacts their community to request a vote for more funds, introducing a delay as they wait for a decision.
9. Throughout the journey, there are opportunities to introduce and delve into various web3 tech aspects, especially the workings of the DAO.

*Character Development:*
1. The duo's perspectives evolve:
- The one intrigued by the city can no longer see their commune in the same idyllic light.
- The orthodox member gains a deeper understanding of the importance of coordinating with individuals with diverse values.
2. Interactions with the city's class of utility-focused workers/engineers.

*Conclusion:*
1. The duo successfully acquires the parts and returns to their community.
2. Their story, experiences, and evolved perspectives are recounted to the commune, serving as a lesson on the complexities of human coordination beyond their community walls.
3. The narrative reinforces the idea that even in idealized, self-contained societies, there’s always an underlying dependence on the outside world and the need for flexibility in values when interacting with different cultures.

*Imagery/Themes:*
1. Contrast between the lush, natural environment of the mountain commune and the dark, gritty city below.
2. Exploration of classism, biases, and the challenges and nuances of coordinating with diverse communities.
3. Examination of the sacrifices and compromises made to achieve perceived societal advancements.

*Inspiration:*
- Ursula Gwyn's depiction of Cath
- Neil Stevenson's "Anathema" – comparison of secluded monastery life versus the outside cyberpunk world.

---

## 12. A Platonic Dialogue about Plural.Versal.ism

*Story Overview:*
- A narrative inspired by a conversation with Kevin, focused on pluralism and "pleura versal. ism".
- Intention: Explore voices and how they entangle and merge.
- Format: Comic book.

*Content Highlights:*
1. **Page 1: Pluralism & Pleura Versal. ism**
- Entity 1 discusses:
- Complex breakdown of the concept.
- Credible neutrality of the system.
- Advocacy for composability leading to practical pluralism.
- Emphasis on Compersion over compassion.
- Entity 2 supplements:
- Differences between pluralism and pleura versal. ism.
- Dangers of homogenizing diverse perspectives.
- Critique of Eurocentric patriarchal academic theory and technocratic perspective.

2. **Page 2: The Users & Bandwidth**
- Question: Who is the user?
- Theme: The challenge of retaining human attention against AI technology.
- Voices discuss:
- The need for existential agility.
- The allure of network effect keeping people on problematic platforms.
- Critique of contemporary culture and social media.

3. **Page 3: Complexity & Reductionism**
- Focus: Distilling complex topics into digestible forms.
- The problem with overly simplifying complex ideas.
- The potential of infographics and memes to draw people into deeper exploration.

4. **Page 4: Book Discussion**
- A highly influential book titled (Network State, but renamed) is discussed.
- Structure: One word, one sentence, one paragraph, one chapter, and a 500-page elaborate description.
- The book is open-source, updated in real time.
- Voices ponder on the actual readership of the lengthy book and how critique can take a similar format to elevate collective consciousness.

5. **Page 5: The Design Problem & Pluralism Revisited**
- The content and perspective of the book as a flaw.
- Highlighting the importance of both pluralism and pleura versality.
- Discussing the 'meta crisis' as intersecting complexities beyond comprehension.
- The need for higher fidelity in language and visualization.
- A challenge posed by the drive to simplify complex topics.

6. **Page 6: The Remaining 20%**
- Characters delve into the unaddressed 20% of the problem.
- Discussing individual diligence in documenting personal thoughts.
- The risk in social interactions and the need for compassionate and heterogeneous communication.
- The idea of moving beyond democracy towards mutual respect.

7. **Page 7: The Conclusion**
- Open-ended questions on what comes next.
- The challenge of converting the discussion into the framework discussed.
- The idea of 'collective sensing' on a meta scale.

*Visual Notes & Styling:*
- Comic book form.
- The design should reflect a reduction structure.
- Initial pages start with simple illustrations, increasing in complexity and fidelity as the concepts become more intricate.
- The entire idea of the book could be summarized on one page in a simple, easy-to-digest format, then elaborated upon in subsequent pages.
- Consideration of how to translate the format of "Network State" into a graphic novel.
- Play with the comic format to emphasize the theme of complexity versus reductionism.