On a mushroom trip last weekend I realised that TK Maxx is the graveyard of capitalism. TK Maxx is is a selection of failed attempts to make a successful product. Everything in TK Maxx is flawed by definition, if it wasn’t flawed it wouldn’t be available in TK Maxx. You might see a nice Ben Sherman shirt, but I guarantee there is something off about the shade of red. You might see a beautiful decorative candle but the smell is a bit strange.
Going to TK Maxx can feel like a field trip to learn about evolution. For every ‘viral’ product, there are a thousand failed attempts.
Maybe the only morality in the universe is a bias towards things that want to exist over time. Things that are good at resisting entropy. That is to say: All the things around us are there because they haven’t disappeared.
Human morality can be traced to this universal ideal. To build is better than destroy, and to fix is better than break. This gets more interesting when you realise that there are no ‘things’. Things are patterns we can pick up on and wrap a word around. These patterns either have a way of resonating and thriving or they quickly disperse into noise.
We are on an inevitable trajectory of technology. Over the long arc of time, given enough experimentation, humans will discover what patterns will go viral and for each viral thing we will discover a thousand non viral things. And like the increasing rarity of prime numbers, it will take more effort and more experimentation to find the next big thing.
From this perspective we can see that humans are not really in control, the market is the inevitable judgement of the universe. Given all the marketing in the world we cannot get that Ben Sherman in TK Maxx shirt to be desirable.
We think of invention as creation, but maybe its the discovery of viral patterns that were already hiding in the fabric of the universe.
There is an inevitability about the direction of technology, about the next viral thing, and all humans can do is cling to the side of these things as they burst through the stratosphere.
ChatGPT, the power of LLMs is insanely good and it feels like a lifeforce that has been stumbled across through a particular vector of experimentation.
As this brilliant wise man put it. It is an ‘alien lifeform’ and ‘we’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying’.
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