I’m going through that period now at 38 😂
16.01.2026 15:42
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I’m going through that period now at 38 😂
Happy Once Upon a Katamari Launch Day!
I've just updated my gitbook on what I call Digital Zoochosis: how our digital environments and rituals affect our physical relationship to the world: the-ludopticon.gitbook.io/ludopticon/d...
My motion against mandatory digital ID has gained a lot of cross-party support.
Combined with the Govt's alarming new restrictions on the right to protest freely, these plans represent an enormous threat to civil liberties.
Ask your MP to add their name: edm.parliament.uk/early-day-mo...
I was overdue a re-introduction (which may be updated soon), so here goes: I’m an independent researcher working on the digital surveillance system that I call the Ludopticon!
I also enjoy gaming, philosophy and SF!
My digital garden can be found here: the-ludopticon.gitbook.io/ludopticon
It scares me on a deeply existential level. The digital creates distance emotionally and contextually, which has and will cause many types of damage going forward.
I sometimes wonder what would make a person upload themselves as cameos and it has to be a mixture of this with added ego and curiosity? After all, technology is thought manifested and we all daydream. This just extends that reach into mass consciousness.
The onus on the creator or person involved to surveil how their digital self is managed is like the hyperreal and the panopticon combined (and holds engagement). However, now they can also use plausible deniability by claiming a video to be AI generated if it shows them unfavourably.
Here’s something I saw happening as a result of the Ludopticon; buying your public platform by selling your private self. Parasocialism allows users to remix and decontextualise creators/public figures/people they know like an extremely visceral form of fan fiction.
I’ve been researching and writing about what I call the Ludopticon and I realise that many streams of thought from others have run parallel and it’s so cool to know others have been on this shared wavelength. It’s changed my perspective on what I’ve believed in the past for sure!
(Which also doesn’t help as they become increasingly connected and surveilled from the inside out and vice versa). I also think I’ve been labouring under the misconception that the body is there purely to service the mind and its functioning. I cried thinking that during the session for the 1st time
Because the mind exists in the past and future, the body acting as a tangible present; the more we hold space in the disembodied mind to the detriment of the body, the more anxious we can become. It’s definitely something I relate to. This happens as analogue spaces and activities become digitised
which leaves us with the loss of anchoring and grounding. Byung-Chul Han mentions this in Non Things where physically the fingertips interact with the screen, facilitating choice rather than a more embodied action of the hand. Of course as algorithms tighten their grip, this is also an illusion.
So in therapy recently, we’ve been talking about embodiment and how mind/body disconnect is such a common theme in the digital world. The push towards ubiquitous computing accelerates thjs condition, something I feel is like a form of digital zoochosis - humans as organism detached from the tactile
On p39 of Fahrenheit 451, Montag and Beatty discuss how the Mechanical Hound is trained and how one could falsely ascribe consciousness/thinking to it. It’s been trained on violence and apparently should not be feared if one does not have a guilty conscience.
Been rereading Fahrenheit 451 (I wonder why??) after at least 10 years and this part made me pause 😳
Social media platforms are perfect for this as we can’t know what is hidden from us, and those who know can’t share this out of fear of being cut off from source.
What’s happening with TikTok and Oracle is peak Ludopticon: the promise of play with purpose on a platform that increasingly changes its rules behind the scenes when we become too invested creatively, socially or financially.
The future is here - it's just not normalised
Do you remember the analogy of the paperclip maximiser for AI alignment? Where, instead of paperclips, it would cover the earth in data farms through instrumental convergence? Looks like humans are doing it right now. Maybe capitalism was the optimising system we needed to watch out for all along.
What I like to do is to go outside or just somewhere away from my desk with a notebook or my laptop and write up an introduction to something I’m working on. No wifi on or my books around me; just my thoughts, seeing what I remember in the moment. You might surprise yourself!
Happy Brighton Pride everyone! 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️💕
Bild einer Taubem, die ein Nest gebaut hat auf Anti-Tauben-Stacheln, Text "Pigeon built its nest of anti-pigeon spikes"
Mood:
my hottest educational take is that schools should actively, non-punitively teach students how to admit when they don't know something, aren't sure or have made a mistake, with various teaching frameworks adapted to support this ideal, because people who can't admit fault are breaking the world
Ok, so I need to read this book ⌚️
Scattered across the digital cosmos, they are rounded up and captured by companies to create the quantised versions of us. These crystallised constellations lead them to where the money is. The Ludopticon is their playground. 3/3
a digital twin or what I call a datagotchi. We feed it with our thoughts and desires made manifest, distilling these models over time so that we can become influenced back. They can inform our feeds, finish our sentences, subtly influence our decisions. 2/3
So many of us carry a little digital version of ourselves around that we might not even be aware of.
Spread between platforms, pixelated from the data points of our clicks, hovers, comments, uploads, searches… they become an extension of our subconscious and form this cyber essence 1/3
