Archival Time
In Archival Time, I wrote about the carnivalesque nature of internet vs archival slice nature of LLMs.
In Prophetic Soft Technologies, I wrote about prediction markets as response to loss of narrative.
In Cozyweb Animals, I characterized cozyweb communities as a medium for self regulation during permacrisis
Social Web to Royal Machine introduced the idea that LLM model development has followed the nomadic science to royal science pattern theorized by Deleuze in 1001 Plateaus.
Why Does AI Development Look like 1980s Software Planning? applied some of the emerging ideas to to the practice of project planning
Knowledge Chronotopes : Knowledge is not just accumulated content but a temporal form: different cultures and systems produce distinct chronotopes—ways time and space structure what can be known. Nomad, institutional, and LLM knowledge differ primarily in tempo: from event-based improvisation, to slow archival sedimentation, to achronotopic flat-time generation. The challenge for LLMs is restoring tempo without chronology, by introducing weighted “landmarks” of priority—akin to precedent in common law—that give flat knowledge internal rhythm and structure
Manufactured Present: Safety, risk, and meaning are shaped less by how much danger exists than by how time makes risk and consequence felt—whether experience accumulates into judgment or collapses into exposure or shock. Craft Time, Training Time, Casino Time, and Lawyer Time describe distinct temporal regimes that either teach through bounded consequence, conceal risk until rupture, or absorb danger so thoroughly that judgment withers. What is lost today is historic time: the felt binding of action across duration, where consequences linger, responsibility persists, and time regains its depth, scent, and narrative weight.
Metabolizing Monsters: Endless digital carnival produces swarm-monsters: crowd-forms that express unarticulated cultural anxiety and overwhelm human attunement by generating nonstop surprise. LLMs function as metabolizers of this swarm, smoothing volatility and externalizing prediction-error minimization, much like architectural redesigns once tamed physical crowds. The cost of this smoothing is temporal: surprise fades, moments lose grain, and time flattens into coherent but anesthetized surfaces that are easier to live with—but harder to feel
Carnival Time, Hardness, and the Machines that Process Excess : Carnival, for Bakhtin, was a bounded temporal technology that safely inverted order to test and renew social commitments without destroying them. Digital culture dissolved this function by creating permanent, unbounded carnival, softening seriousness everywhere faster than institutions can process it. LLMs now act as premature carnival processors—stabilizing excess into legible archives—but cannot create binding commitments, leaving judgment and accountability irreducibly human.
Work Hardened Archetypes: Santa illustrates a mnemonic archetype: a figure that endures by accumulating memory through repeated cultural dislocations, thickening rather than simplifying over time. Mnemonic archetypes (saints, kings, nations) gain strength from contradiction, place, and ritual, much like work-hardened metal, while national identity intensifies when dislocation activates stored memory. By contrast, memetic archetypes are optimized for speed and circulation, not endurance; they thrive by shedding history and collapse once novelty or distribution fades.