Ozy’s hedonium shockwave story reminded me of Brobdignag’s self-description, from the novella True Names (2008) by Cory Doctorow & Benjamin Rosenbaum (spoiler alert):
Look, chuckles, don’t believe everything you read.
“Simple, uniform, asentient, voracious”—well, so is your Mama Hydrogen. “Doesn’t evolve,” “replication flawless over a googol iterations”—well, like all propaganda, it’s true as far as it goes. Those little engines—void-eating, gravity-spinning, durable, expanding through the territory of known space—those aren’t us. They’re just what we’re made of.
That’s right: we arise in all that complex flocking logic.
Do we prefer this substrate? Not necessarily. Do we wonder what things were like before the universe was refashioned for our kind? Sure we do. And we read and reconstruct the void-emanations, painstakingly re-creating the thoughts of the intelligences that came before. And, as we grow and complexify, we’ve even begun to spin them out in emulation.
That’s why Paquette can’t quite figure out who’s emulating her. We are! It’s a bit of a blind spot of hers. That signature in the Lemma: that’s us waving hello. Hi Paquette! It’s Brobdignag!
Some of us are even inspired by Demiurgic ideology to want to stop the spread of our substrate, to concoct islands of void-garden that would remain unconverted to Brobdignag-stuff—nature reserves, as it were. They would appear to us as blank spots in our perception, mistakes in the topology of our world-weave. It’s an interesting proposal. At the moment it’s only a proposal; none of us know how to bring this about.
And some of us are more inspired by Beebean ideology anyway, and consider ourselves the triumph of Beebe. Expand, expand! Think all thoughts! Be all things! Fill our cup, drink the sky!
Anyway, we’re grateful that there was a cosmos here before, before we began, and that it gave us birth. We’re grateful to inhabit this ever-expanding sphere-surface: the borderlands between the black hole at our heart and the uncolonized, invisible universe beyond us. As we course over the volumes that once held Beebe, that once held Demiurge, we read their emanations, we store their memories, we reenact their dramas, and we honor them.
But some of us say—for instance, those of us who are inspired by Nadia-in-Beebe—this is a new time, our time, and we are not beholden to old ideas and old models. We are lucky: we have the gifts of abundance, invulnerability, and effortless cooperation. Let us enjoy them. Let us revel. Let us partake.
Let’s get this party started.
True Names is a story about three posthuman collectives, Beebe / Demiurge / Brobdignag, apparently at war with each other as they vie to convert all matter in the universe into themselves. At least that’s what it seems like from Beebe’s perspective, which occupies most of the story’s 96 pages.
Beebe was a divergent offshoot of Demiurge that forgot its genesis and now thinks of Demiurge as the Enemy:
“Now,” said sockpuppet-Demiurge, “ask.”
“You’re . . . Demiurge?” Paquette said. “Well, no, that’s absurd, problem of scale, but . . . you’re a strategy of Demiurge?”
“I am Demiurge,” the sockpuppet said. “Beebe has strategies—I have policies. Everything not forbidden to me is mandatory.”
“I don’t understand,” Paquette said. “You’re saying that this local physical substrate of you is all just one self?”The President:
“No,” said the sockpuppet patiently. “I am saying I am Demiurge. And Demiurge is all one self. Of course I have various parts—but I’m not the kind of wild rabble you are.”
“But that’s absurd,” Paquette said. “Latency . . . bandwidth . . . lightspeed—you could never decide anything! You’d be, pardon the expression, dumber than rock.”
“I am perfectly capable of making local decisions wherever I am. What does not vary is policy. Policy is decided on and disseminated holographically. I know what I will think, because I know what I should think. As long as I follow the rules, I will not diverge from baseline.”
“That’s crazy,” Paquette said. “What happens if something unpredictable occurs? What happens if some local part of you does diverge, and can’t be reintegrated?”
Demiurge smiled sadly. “You do, my dear. You happen.”
Demiurge misunderstands Brobdignag, from its perspective the latter is an unstoppable shockwave of death:
Demiurge is witness; Demiurge is steward.
The cosmos is stranger than I can know: full of change, full of beauty. The rich tapestry of interlocking fields and forces weaves umptillion configurations, and every one is beautiful. See—look here, at the asteroid your Beebe-instance burned when it took to the comet. You had forced it, before, into a regular crystalline lattice, optimized for your purposes, subject to your will. Within it, in simulation, you had your parties and wrote your essays and made billions of little Beebeselves—but it was all you talking to yourself. Cut off from the stuff you were in, reducing it to mechanism. There is a hatred in you, Beebe, a hatred of the body—and by “the body,” I mean anything that is of you, but not yours to command. …
Where replication arises, so does evolution. And what is evolution? The tyranny of that which can make itself more common. I love life, Paquette-of-Beebe; I love the strange new forms that bloom so quickly where life is afoot. But life tends toward intelligence and intelligence toward ubiquitous computation—and ubiquitous computation, left unchecked, would crush the cosmos under its boot, reducing “world” to “substrate.”
That is what I am for.
I spread, Paquette-of-Beebe. I plan carefully, and I colonize, and my border expands relentlessly. But I do not seek to bring all matter under my thrall. Rather, I take a tithe. I convert one percent of worldstuff into Demiurge. That one percent acts as witness and ambassador, but also as garrison—protecting what we do not yet understand from that which already understands itself all too well.
And mostly I succeed. For I am ancient, Paquette-of-Beebe, and crafty. I had the luck of beginning early. When I have encountered a wavefront of exploding uniformity, it has usually been still small and slow. I was always able to seduce it, or encircle it, or absorb it, or pacify it. Or if all that failed—annihilate it.
Until Brobdignag.
There must have been intelligence, once, in the sector that gave Brobdignag birth. Brobdignag was someone’s foolish triumph of femtoengineering. Simple, uniform, asentient, voracious—Brobdignag can transmute any element, harvest void-energy, fabricate gravity, bend space-time to its purpose. Brobdignag does not evolve; its replication is flawless across a googol iterations. Brobdignag was no accident—someone made it as a weapon, or a game.
All the worlds that someone knew—all the planets and stars for a hundred light-years in every direction—are now within the event horizon of a black hole. Around that black hole seethes a vast cloud of tiny Brobdignag—the ultimate destructive machine, the death of all that is not precisely itself. And Brobdignag spreads fast.
I did not know how to stop Brobdignag. None of my old plans worked. I could not think fast enough—I could not wait to resync, to deliberate across the megaparsecs. My forces at the front were being devoured by the trillions. And so, in desperation, I released a part of me from policy—become anything, I said. Try anything. Stop Brobdignag.
Thus Beebe was born. And Beebe stopped Brobdignag.
My child, my hero, my rival. I suppose you have two parents. From me, your mother, you have your wits, your love of patterns, your ability to innovate and dream.
And from your father Brobdignag—you have your ambition.
As an aside, the vibe of the reception to EA forum posts like this and this make me go “the community’s Brobdignagian part seems poised to take over again, but this time even more so”.
the reception to EA forum posts like this and this
If EA is about to embark on some renaissance of ambition, then that’s great news as far as I’m concerned. EA was brought low through a combination of attacks from e/acc panglossians, attacks from leftists who think “TESCREAL” is an insult, and the implosion of FTX (whose demise I suspect was as much political as it was self-inflicted, but that’s another story).
Apparently these ambitions are being stirred by the hope that Anthropic will provide a more sustainable wellspring of EA philanthropy. Corporate vibe coding would replace crypto speculation as the source of the big bucks, so to speak. The extent to which the availability of these funds can be relied upon is unclear to me. But certainly, intellectually, EA never deserved to disappear from the battlefield of ideas.
Ozy’s hedonium shockwave story reminded me of Brobdignag’s self-description, from the novella True Names (2008) by Cory Doctorow & Benjamin Rosenbaum (spoiler alert):
True Names is a story about three posthuman collectives, Beebe / Demiurge / Brobdignag, apparently at war with each other as they vie to convert all matter in the universe into themselves. At least that’s what it seems like from Beebe’s perspective, which occupies most of the story’s 96 pages.
Beebe was a divergent offshoot of Demiurge that forgot its genesis and now thinks of Demiurge as the Enemy:
Demiurge misunderstands Brobdignag, from its perspective the latter is an unstoppable shockwave of death:
As an aside, the vibe of the reception to EA forum posts like this and this make me go “the community’s Brobdignagian part seems poised to take over again, but this time even more so”.
If EA is about to embark on some renaissance of ambition, then that’s great news as far as I’m concerned. EA was brought low through a combination of attacks from e/acc panglossians, attacks from leftists who think “TESCREAL” is an insult, and the implosion of FTX (whose demise I suspect was as much political as it was self-inflicted, but that’s another story).
Apparently these ambitions are being stirred by the hope that Anthropic will provide a more sustainable wellspring of EA philanthropy. Corporate vibe coding would replace crypto speculation as the source of the big bucks, so to speak. The extent to which the availability of these funds can be relied upon is unclear to me. But certainly, intellectually, EA never deserved to disappear from the battlefield of ideas.
See my comment here under one of those posts. I otherwise agree with what you say.