PRISMATICA LAB: Hidden Matrix

Hero Equity

Ray Tarantino — Thu, 29 May 2025 13:20:23 GMT

They say don't meet your heroes.

They'll disappoint you.

Didn't happen to me. Met Bob Dylan a couple of times. Each encounter was shy of godly. Why? Because he wasn't derivative. Never confused proximity for integrity.

Which brings me to watching another founder copy Steve Jobs's black turtleneck while ignoring everything that made Jobs brilliant.

The uniform without the obsession.

The aesthetic without the substance.

The performance without the product thinking.

This wasn't fashion confusion. This was something much older and much more devastating.

Here's what keeps me awake. We have accidentally created the first information environment in human history where authentic competence becomes invisible.

This isn't even academic curiosity.

This is personal terror.

Because I've been in rooms where million dollar decisions were made based on PowerPoint aesthetics and personal intrigue. I've watched companies hire charismatic incompetents over brilliant introverts. I've seen investors back founders who reminded them of previous winners rather than founders who could actually execute.

Including me.

Including decisions I've made.

Including times I've been the incompetent who got hired because I could perform competence better than others could demonstrate it.

This is the collapse of human judgement itself.

The Historical Pattern

It’s 1917. Two schoolgirls faked photographs of fairies so convincingly that respected adults believed them. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was completely taken in. The hoax spread worldwide.

Proving that the hunger to believe and the tools to deceive were there well before the internet.

The Cottingley Fairies worked because people wanted to believe in magic. Today's performative competence works because we want to believe in heroes.

Same hunger. Better tools. Worse detection.

But here's what's maddening about it. This isn't some abstract business phenomenon. This is the literal collapse of human judgement. Right now. Today. In decisions that matter.

The founder you're about to hire. The investment you're considering. The person you're trusting with something important. You're probably evaluating them through performed interfaces right now.

And you think you're being smart about it. We all think we’re being smart.

The Cross Domain Pattern

Here's where it gets interesting.

I was curious, so I looked around. I found the same pattern everywhere. The messy hair selfies, the humble-bragging captions, the carefully curated 'candid' moments. And someone called spotting this pattern her personal Beautiful Mind moment.

Click. We all saw it.

Suddenly every post looked the same.

The performance of authenticity had become more convincing than authenticity itself.

But here's what's doing my head in. The same pattern operates in business hero worship. From ancient demigods to cult of personality leaders, humans have always projected hope onto heroes during anxious times.

Today's tech CEOs are just the latest chapter.

That’s the Hero Equity at work.

Think about Elon Musk's $1 trillion market cap riding on his mythos.

Let me show you the numbers that prove signal collapse is real.

BYD, the unknown Chinese company, made $107 billion in revenue for 2024 selling 4.3 million vehicles that charge in 5 minutes and start at $21,000. Market cap: $200 billion.

Tesla, the hero company, made $97.7 billion selling 1.79 million vehicles that take 15 minutes to charge and target premium markets only. Market cap: above $1 trillion.

Read that again. What’s happening?

BYD sells more cars, makes more money, charges faster, costs less, and is valued at one fifth of Tesla.

Elon's story is stronger than BYD's engineering. That’s what’s happening.

Because narrative beats reality when reality becomes impossible to evaluate.

Warren Buffett invested in BYD in 2008 based on fundamentals and got 2000% returns. He refuses to invest in Tesla because Tesla's price to earnings ratio is 115.81 versus BMW at 7.13.

But fundamentals don't photograph well. They don't create tribes. They don't generate engagement metrics.

What worked for Buffett was signal detection in a low information environment.

What works now is narrative construction in a high noise environment.

Trust has become a currency.

And like all currencies, it gets counterfeited.

The Real World Test

Let’s see this work in practice.

Oobah Butler's Shed. 2017. A journalist listed a non existent restaurant on TripAdvisor. Actually his garden shed. By gaming the review system, he made it the number one rated restaurant in London.

People were begging for reservations at a place that didn't exist.

The public's response proved the point. In an authenticity starved culture, even obvious fakery can triumph if packaged right. The transformation from shed to hottest restaurant revealed how easily appearance trumps reality.

But here's the flip side.

Domino's Pizza provided the opposite test. 2009. Facing terrible reviews, they launched a campaign owning up to how bad their pizza was. Brutally honest advertising almost unheard of in the industry.

Critics thought this honesty would backfire.

The opposite happened. Same store sales shot up nearly 10%. The brand surged. Analysts directly credited the transparency for the results.

Two experiments.

One fake restaurant succeeds through performed authenticity.

One real company succeeds through actual authenticity.

Do you notice what both prove? Narrative power over substance evaluation.

The Shed worked because people couldn't evaluate actual food quality through the interface. Domino's worked because they told a story that bypassed quality evaluation entirely.

In both cases, the signal detection system failed.

We responded to stories about quality rather than quality itself.

Wow.

The Signal Collapse

Here's the hidden mechanism that changes everything.

We're witnessing the complete collapse of signal detection in human civilisation.

Not because we are stupider. But because authentic competence has become impossible to evaluate through the interfaces we use to make decisions.

We literally evolved to prefer the appearance of skill over actual skill. Because appearance is easier to process. Faster to evaluate. More immediately satisfying.

But evolution designed this system for small groups with direct access to performance. You could watch the hunter actually hunt. See the healer actually heal. Observe the leader actually lead.

Now? Add distance. Add asynchronicity. Add proxies.

Every evaluation happens through performed interfaces.

Your last ten hires. Your last five investments. Your last dozen purchases.

How many were based on actual evidence of capability versus aesthetic signals of competence?

Be honest.

The founder in the black turtleneck isn't just performing for investors. He's performing for a psychological system that rewards performance over substance in an environment where substance cannot be directly evaluated.

And we're all complicit.

But here's what's different this time, ready? We’ve systemised the collapse.

We've built technological systems that make signal detection impossible. Not harder. Impossible.

Every interface optimises for engagement over accuracy. Every platform rewards performed competence over demonstrated capability. Every algorithm amplifies signals that generate response rather than signals that indicate quality.

The difference between Buffett's era and ours isn't that people have gotten stupider. It's that authentic competence has become structurally invisible.

You can't see what you can't access.

And we can't access reality anymore. Only performed reality.

And performed reality is getting so sophisticated that it's more convincing than actual reality.

Amazing, right?

But here's what keeps chasing me around my own head: this isn't some temporary market inefficiency that'll correct itself. This is the new normal.

And then what happens? Numbers. Data. Reality.

Tesla stock goes down, and BYD goes up. Because numbers don't lie. Eventually.

But markets can stay irrational longer than signal detection can stay functional.

And that's the terrifying bit.

We're not just copying heroes anymore.

We've become a species that can only recognise the copies.

The Can't Unsee Filter

Right then. Here's our new superpower.

Once we recognise the tells, we'll see them everywhere.

Authenticity Performance shows up as the minimalist aesthetic that costs more than maximalism.

Hero Equity reveals itself through the tribal membership value exceeding actual utility value.

Signal Collapse operates through evaluating competence via interfaces designed by people performing competence.

Once we've seen the strings on the marionette, we can't believe in the puppet's dance the same way again.

We'll notice the pattern everywhere.

In every hiring decision. Every investment choice. Every purchase. Every opinion formation.

The question isn't whether we'll see it. The question is what we'll do when we realise we're the marionettes.

That every competence evaluation we make is probably wrong. That every confident decision about someone's capability is probably based on performed signals rather than actual evidence.

That we’ve been unknowingly participating in the systematic destruction of human judgement.

Right then. Here's the fucked up bit.

This post isn't just describing a phenomenon we can observe in others. It's describing the cognitive environment we're operating in right now. The system that's evaluating our own competence. The interfaces through which others are judging our capability.

I’m writing this based on what I’ve been signalled. And when you'll read it, someone will be making a decision about your worth based on performed signals rather than your actual competence.

And we can't control that external-facing signal exchange any more than we can control our own.

That’s a mess.

Want to go further into the mud? Want to see what’s on the other side of it? Let’s go look.

The people who can still spot authentic competence in this broken environment have an unfair advantage.

Not because they're smarter.

Because they're operating with functional cognitive equipment in a broken information environment.

So maybe that's our competitive edge.

If?

If we can actually see reality when everyone else is looking at performed reality.

Big if. I know.

Note to Self

Stop evaluating competence through performed interfaces.

Every single day, multiple times per day, you make judgements about human competence based on performed signals rather than demonstrated capability.

And.

Right now, someone is making a decision about your worth based on performed signals rather than actual competence.

This isn't just about spotting other people's signal collapse.

This is about recognising that you're trapped inside a system where authentic capability has become structurally invisible.

Including your own.

You can’t fix this. You can survive it.

Focus on fundamentals while everyone else focuses on aesthetics. Develop capability while everyone else develops personas. Solve problems while everyone else solves appearance.

That's competitive edge.

The revolution isn't that we're all becoming fake. The revolution is that authentic competence has become impossible to detect through the interfaces we use to make every important decision.

Which means the few people who can still see reality have an advantage so profound it's almost unfair.

Almost.

Wake the fuck up down, back to the ground.

Why We Choose Wrong Leaders

Ray Tarantino — Mon, 26 May 2025 07:00:00 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

Jane Goodall stood on stage in Milan yesterday. Ninety years old. Sharp as steel. She spoke about curiosity, empathy, service, and legacy.

She is truly magnificent. No shadows. Zero.

Then she said something that stopped me cold.

'We think we're unique because we say we're intelligent. But in reality we're intellectual. Because if we were truly intelligent we wouldn't treat other bings like we do.'

The woman who revolutionised our understanding of what it means to be human just exposed the fundamental flaw in how we choose our heroes.

Turns out we've been doing it backwards this entire time.

The Follower Count Reality Check

Jane Goodall has 1.5 million Instagram followers.

Elon Musk has over 200 million on X.

Let's pause and consider what this actually represents. Goodall transformed primatology with 60 years of field research. She built conservation programmes reaching 150,000 youth across 65 countries. Her work fundamentally changed how humanity understands itself.

Musk builds companies and cultivates a public persona.

One dedicates her life to understanding intelligence. The other performs intellectualism for an audience. The audience is 133 times larger for the performance.

This isn't a failure of the system. It's the system working exactly as designed. Which should probably worry us more than it does.

Why Intelligence Loses to Intellectualism Every Time

Jane Goodall spent sixty years learning that intelligence means understanding our place in the larger system. She watched chimpanzees use tools, form complex social relationships, show empathy and grief. She realised that intelligence isn't about dominance or optimisation. It's about connection and responsibility.

This is what she means by the difference between intelligence and intellectualism.

Intellectualism optimises for metrics, growth, efficiency, personal advancement. It solves problems but doesn't question whether those problems should exist. It builds systems but doesn't ask who benefits. Think chess grandmaster, but for capitalism.

Intelligence considers consequences beyond immediate benefit. It balances multiple stakeholders across time horizons. It asks not just 'can we?' but 'should we?' Think systems architect, but for civilisation.

Our culture has systematically elevated intellectualism over intelligence. We worship optimisation without wisdom. Growth without purpose. Innovation without ethics.

The heroes we choose reflect this inversion perfectly.

What Business Actually Proves (When We Look)

This pattern shows up clearly in how organisations operate, if you know where to look.

Companies led by wisdom-oriented leaders often outperform those focused purely on metrics. Studies suggest that leaders emphasising long-term stakeholder value tend to generate higher revenue growth, better employee satisfaction, and more sustainable innovation.

Yet our business heroes remain growth hackers and disruptors. We celebrate founders who achieve rapid scaling while treating employees, customers, and communities as variables to optimise. It's intellectualism all the way down.

Patagonia represents the alternative. Their four-stakeholder decision framework considers business need, quality, environmental impact, and labour treatment in every choice. This approach has influenced supply chains across industries while maintaining competitive performance.

The data consistently shows that wisdom-based approaches work better. But the narrative remains stuck on intellectual performance.

Why? Because intellectualism is easier to measure and market. Follower counts, revenue growth, market share. These create simple stories that fit in headlines. Intelligence requires understanding complex interdependencies that resist viral packaging.

Unfortunately, viral packaging is what gets attention. And attention is what creates heroes.

The Personal Stakes

Our choice of heroes isn't neutral. It shapes our decisions, which shape our outcomes.

When we admire intellectual performers, we unconsciously adopt their frameworks. We optimise for metrics that can be easily measured rather than value that takes time to emerge. We focus on personal advancement rather than collective benefit.

When we choose intelligent role models, we develop different patterns. We consider long-term consequences. We balance competing interests. We ask better questions.

The people we follow, quote, and emulate become the template for our own choices. Choose intellectual performers, and we'll perform intellectualism. Choose intelligent leaders, and we'll develop intelligence.

Most of us don't consciously choose our heroes. We consume whoever the platform algorithms serve up. These systems optimise for engagement, not wisdom, which means they systematically favour intellectual performance over genuine intelligence.

The Pattern Shift

We've created a culture that rewards the wrong intelligence. But patterns can be changed through conscious choice.

Jane Goodall understood something that our current heroes miss. True intelligence isn't about optimising systems for personal gain. It's about understanding our responsibility to the larger whole.

This insight becomes more crucial as our challenges become more complex. Climate change, social inequality, technological disruption—these require intelligence, not just intellectualism. They need leaders who can balance multiple stakeholders across time horizons, not optimise single metrics.

The heroes we choose determine what kinds of solutions we develop and which voices get amplified. Choose intellectual performers, and you get more optimisation without wisdom. Choose intelligent leaders, and you create space for approaches that actually solve problems.

Note to Self

Stop unconsciously consuming the pre-curated hero list served by engagement algorithms.

Ask different questions about the people you admire. Do they demonstrate intelligence or intellectualism? Do they consider consequences beyond immediate benefit? Do they balance stakeholder interests or optimise for single metrics?

Look for the Jane Goodalls. The ones who've spent decades developing wisdom rather than performing intelligence. The ones who understand that true intelligence means recognising our place in larger systems.

Your choice of heroes shapes your own development. Choose carefully.

The pattern might shift when enough people recognise the difference between intelligence and intellectualism. And choose intelligence over performance.

The future depends on it.

Why We're Missing 99% Of Reality

Ray Tarantino — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:54:34 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

London's West End

I'm fighting against the human current flowing between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. Swimming upstream through a river of bodies and intentions.

Bodies drift past me in chaotic choreography. Voices rise and fall like tidal waves crashing against my ears. Perfumes assault my senses. Some bearable. Others like direct punches to the face. Smartphones glow like handheld stars. Shopping bags and AppleWatches orbit wrists. Faces appear suspended, illuminated by the commercial constellations overhead.

The usual stuff. Nothing new. I spot an empty alley and move toward it, craving a detour from this trap of induced need. But just before escaping the chaos, I hesitate. I turn around to face the ocean of signals one more time. Something compels me to pause, to fight against the flood of stimuli, to search for anything. Anything at all. Anything worth genuinely noticing in this carefully engineered sensory assault.

The Neuroscience of Distraction

If Oliver Sacks were standing beside me right now, he'd point to how my brain is performing complex triage on this sensory flood. He'd explain the neuroscience with that gentle clarity of his. Bottom-up and top-down attention mechanisms wage silent war behind my eyes.

Those massive digital billboards in Piccadilly Circus aren't accidentally eye-catching. They're engineered to capture thirty-five percent more fixation time than human faces or natural elements. That's not coincidence but deliberate neurological exploitation. My visual cortex performs instant triage. Filtering information before I'm even aware it exists.

What serves as commercial leverage here once meant survival in the wild. Our executive control systems evolved to manage competing demands of foraging and threat detection. It's what Gladwell popularised as ‘thin-slicing’ in Blink. An adaptive neuro-visual strategy that once made us exceptional hunter-gatherers, now repurposed to make us exceptional consumers.

Our attention is perpetually vulnerable to capture. That's the evolutionary trade-off nobody mentions in those fucking marketing meetings.

Inversion

I notice a worker sweeping the pavement amid this sensory carnival. While everyone else flows past, his eyes track the crowd with an oddly archaeological attentiveness. Not watching so much as studying. As if we're artefacts from a civilisation he observes but doesn't inhabit. I find myself transfixed by this counter-current of attention, standing there watching him for a beat too long, when suddenly he turns and our eyes meet.

In that fleeting connection, something inverts. The observer becomes the observed. The subject becomes the object. The membrane between separate realities tears momentarily. I'm disoriented by the sudden shift in perspective. I'm no longer safely anonymous in the crowd. I've been seen.

My reaction is automatic, almost defensive. I smile briefly. Nod awkwardly as if saying 'thank you for cleaning our pavement.' I immediately look away. The alley I'd planned to escape into is forgotten as I rejoin the crowd, letting myself be swept back toward the Piccadilly Circus lights.

But something fundamental has shifted. The crowd no longer appears as separate individuals but as a single organism pulsing in response to invisible stimuli. Bodies move with eerie coordination. Guided by unseen planning and environmental cues. I've become a cell in this social body. My movements determined by forces I barely comprehend.

Through a Different Lens

That brief exchange of glances with the street sweeper suggested he perceives something in this hyper-designed urban landscape that remains completely invisible to me and thousands of others flowing past. He sees through what I merely see.

It reminds me of reading Emmanuel Carrère's The Moustache. That nightmarish story where a man shaves his facial hair only to discover no one notices the change. His reality fragments under collective misperception. My experience feels like the inverse of that crisis. Not a personal reality that others fail to validate, but a collective perception I've suddenly stepped outside of.

My brain has already decided, without my awareness or consent, what deserves my attention and what doesn't. I'm not perceiving reality. I'm filtering it through neural pathways carved by culture, class, and the deliberate design of urban environments. The street sweeper exists outside those filters, giving him a vantage point I can barely comprehend.

We're not seeing the world. We're seeing a carefully edited version that serves purposes both evolutionary and commercial. Perception operates as both inheritance and architecture. It's partly beast and partly Las Vegas. It's unavoidable.

High Street or The Strip?

The West End's commercial spaces share striking design elements with gambling establishments, something I've begun to notice since reading Natasha Dow Schüll's work on casino design in Addiction By Design The lighting isn't randomly bright but calibrated to a specific spectrum. The background music plays at precisely calculated beats-per-minute. Even the walking paths are mathematically optimised.

Retail consultant Paco Underhill documented this stuff with unnerving precision. Shoppers' walking pace slows by eighteen percent when entering these designed zones. Peripheral vision narrows by approximately twenty degrees under specific lighting conditions. Simple tactile interaction with merchandise increases purchase likelihood by sixty percent. Not casual observation. Behavioural engineering down to the decimal point.

The gambling parallel runs deeper than metaphor. Both environments employ controlled sight-lines preventing easy exits. Consistent flooring materials that eliminate subconscious boundaries. The conspicuous absence of clocks or windows that might orient you to time passing.

When I first encountered Schüll's descriptions of retired women wearing double layers of thick trousers at slot machines to avoid bathroom breaks, I was horrified. But now I see the same mechanisms of manipulation embedded in shopping districts, food courts, and social media interfaces. The architecture of captivation becomes terrifyingly literal.

These digital spaces represent the apotheosis of attention capture. Environments operating with algorithmic precision impossible in physical spaces. The algorithms learn your specific vulnerabilities in real-time, adjusting stimuli to your psychological profile with millisecond precision. That's not just commercial strategy. That's industrial-scale exploitation of human neuropsychology. That's your brain on capitalism, and it's fucked.

What We're Trained Not to See

Our selective perception reveals something unsettling: The barriers to seeing completely are simultaneously internal and external, physiological and social. Our thalamus filters a staggering ninety-nine percent of sensory data before it reaches what we call conscious awareness. Evolution decided long ago that complete perception would overwhelm us into paralysis.

But these filters don't just exclude irrelevant information. They exclude entire categories of people.

I've begun noticing how my own attention slides past certain individuals on these same streets. Not because they're literally invisible, but because my perceptual systems have been trained to categorise them as irrelevant background in that moment. The unhoused person sitting against a wall registers differently in my visual processing than the suited businessman walking past. This isn't a moral failing so much as a default neurological setting, but one with profound consequences.

What's chilling is how ordinary this blindness feels. It isn't a conscious dismissal. No internal monologue declares Ignore that person. Instead, it's a quiet arbitration by neural machinery refined over years of cultural conditioning. The Reticular Activation System (RAS), that ancient sieve in the brainstem, works in tandem with cortical systems that assign value to what we see. It learns, through repetition, what 'belongs' in a space: the businessman's sharp suit signals agent, actor, priority; the unhoused body, marked by tattered layers and stillness, slips into the category of non-agent, static, void.

This isn't passive oversight. It's active erasure. A collusion between biology and the stories we've internalised about who deserves attention, and care. The RAS filters, but society trains the filter. Daily activities, hourly news reports, wiring collective nervous systems to conflate human with relevant human.

The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology published a damning study on this. Shoppers in commercial districts were significantly less likely to notice individuals coded as 'homeless' compared to other pedestrians occupying the exact same visual field. These overlooked humans weren't invisible. They were systematically filtered out by nervous systems primed to prioritise specific social categories while dismissing others as irrelevant background.

The people we literally cannot see are, inevitably, the people whose needs we cannot address. It's not just sad. It's by design.

Parallel Realities in Shared Space

These perceptual filters aren't universal. Walking through Leicester Square, I experience one reality while the street sweeper experiences another, though we occupy identical physical coordinates. Not because he possesses some mystical insight, but because his practical relationship to this environment differs fundamentally from mine.

When urban anthropologist Robert Desjarlais interviews people experiencing homelessness, he consistently documents heightened awareness of urban elements completely invisible to housed residents: Those divided benches with armrests placed specifically to prevent lying down. Surveillance patterns mapping safe and unsafe zones. Unofficial territorial boundaries. These aren't separate physical environments but separate perceptual ones occupying the same space.

In my own experience as someone with sensory processing differences, I notice the fluorescent lights that others don't consciously register. I detect patterns in background noise that most filter out as random sound. I feel textures with such intensity that touching certain materials borders on intolerable.

These aren't special powers but alternative perceptual frameworks. Each with advantages and costs in navigating a world designed for different neural wiring. The same space that represents leisure and consumption to one person might represent exclusion and surveillance to another. Same physical space. Different lived reality.

Breaking Through Perceptual Barriers

The capacity to shift these perceptual filters isn't merely theoretical. Attention is remarkably trainable. When I go for hikes I do my best to practice mindfulness. I’m constantly startled by how quickly my baseline perception shifts. Sounds I'd usually filtered out become noticeable. Visual details emerge from what would otherwise seemed uniform backgrounds. The neural architecture literally rewires in response to how we direct our attention.

It's difficult work. Exhausting, really. Going against your brain's natural filtering feels like swimming upstream. But it's possible.

What fascinates me most is how theoretical frameworks shape what we're capable of perceiving. The history of science demonstrates this repeatedly: what appears as meaningless noise to researchers in one paradigm becomes recognised as crucial data in another. Reality doesn't change, but what we're capable of extracting from it transforms dramatically.

This raises provocative questions: what is the broader social effect of our current perceptual barriers? If perception fundamentally dictates awareness, what are the limits of human experience? Could our perceived reality be potentially infinite if we developed the right attentional practices?

Or more practically: what the hell else am I missing right now?

The Ethics of Seeing

The relationship between perception and ethics isn't abstract theory. It's been the essential question of virtually every philosophical tradition across cultures. These thinkers recognised a fundamental truth: how we perceive directly shapes what we value, and consequently, how we act in the world. Your perceptual framework becomes your ethical framework by default.

Brain imaging studies confirm this ancient insight. When subjects categorise others as outside their social group, regions associated with empathy show measurably reduced activation. The neural circuits that enable us to feel others' pain literally dim when perceiving someone as 'other.' This isn't moral failure. It's the default setting of our perceptual hardware.

I see this manifesting constantly in what might be called 'selective grief.' It operates every time we react with intense emotional response to suffering only when the victims resemble those we identify with. The Syrian child and the European child may face identical circumstances, yet our emotional systems process these identical realities through entirely different circuits based on perceived similarity and difference.

The uncomfortable truth is that perceptual filters have profound ethical implications not because some ways of seeing are inherently more moral than others, but because perception determines which factors even enter our ethical calculations in the first place. What we cannot or do not perceive never makes it to the table of moral consideration.

But this perceptual constraint isn't immutable fate. It's a wall that can be demolished, though not without significant effort. Sometimes it takes a street sweeper looking you in the eye to realise how much you've been missing.

Note To Self

Remember this moment.

Remember how it felt when the street sweeper looked at you and suddenly you weren't invisible anymore.

Stop letting your brain filter out what doesn't immediately serve you. Notice the benches designed so homeless people can't sleep on them. Notice the security guards who blend into the background until someone 'unwanted' appears.

Notice how your own attention is being guided without your permission.

You don't want to be just another body flowing through commercially optimised space, eyes fixed on the next purchase point. That's what they've designed you to be. That's the trap.

Keep practicing this double vision.

See both the world as it's presented and the mechanisms behind the curtain. It's exhausting, but necessary.

Your attention is valuable. That's why everyone's trying to steal it.

When you feel yourself being pulled along predetermined paths, pause. Look around.

Ask yourself:

What am I being directed not to see?

Who benefits from my current perception?

You're not going to dismantle hostile capitalism by noticing hostile architecture. But noticing is the first step to not being completely controlled by it.

Start small. Notice more. Filter less. Trust that uneasy feeling when something seems designed to manipulate you. It usually is.

The better world isn't going to suddenly appear because you've expanded your perception.

But you can't create what you can't first imagine.

And you can't imagine what you've been trained not to see.

Or put more bluntly. Wake the fuck up.

The Thought Leader Vortex

Ray Tarantino — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:05:57 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

Nompact

In our pursuit of metrics, we've created what I call 'nompact' vs impact. Where nompact represents content that makes noise but leaves no meaningful trace. It's a world where profound ideas must be packaged, hash-tagged, and optimised to survive, yet paradoxically lose their actual impact in the process.

Too much focus in the wrong place. Nothing survives.

People stuck in an endless loop of relevance.

Forgetting that real influencers, real thought leaders, real impact, all came from having the focus to develop.

I see most people sidetracked by the need to persist on a planet of algorithmic quicksand.

So I took the time to imagine an alternate timeline. One where history's greatest minds exist simultaneously in our modern digital landscape. Forced to dilute their genius to chase engagement, connections, and the fleeting dopamine hit of notifications.

Here's a glimpse into that parallel universe.

Where philosophy is measured in likes.

Wisdom packaged in bullet points.

Revolutionary thinking reduced to 'content'.

Welcome to the NomPact Vortex.

The Initial Thread, When Philosophy Gets Optimised

It all had to start with this guy. Obviously.

Friedrich Nietzsche posts:

⚡ BRUTAL TRUTH: Your 'values' are holding you back! Why conventional morality kills greatness #BeyondGoodAndEvil
After examining morality's genealogy, I've uncovered why most people never achieve their potential:
1️⃣ You've inherited a slave morality that glorifies mediocrity and calls it 'goodness'
2️⃣ Your comfort with established values is exactly what prevents your evolution
3️⃣ The 'death of God' isn't a tragedy, it's your opportunity to create meaning rather than follow it
4️⃣ Your greatest challenge isn't external obstacles but overcoming your own domesticated nature
5️⃣ True leadership requires the courage to transvalue all values, not just modify existing ones
Just published my latest book exploring these concepts in depth. Link in comments. 📚
P.S. Will be livestreaming my hike tomorrow. Join to discuss the metaphorical mountain climb of personal growth. Link in bio.
#BeyondGoodAndEvil #TransvaluationOfValues #WillToPower #EternalRecurrence
[12 likes • 0 comments]

Aristotle comments:

Fascinating perspective, @Friedrich Nietzsche, though I must offer a counterpoint. Excellence isn't found in rejecting all values but in finding the golden mean between extremes. Courage lies precisely between recklessness and cowardice. Perhaps there's a middle path?
Oh, by the way. My new masterclass 'Finding Your Golden Mean' launches next week. Early bird pricing ends tomorrow! Will you join me?
[2 likes • 0 replies]

Aristotle then shares Nietzsche's post with caption:

Thought provoking perspective from @Friedrich though I must respectfully disagree. Balance > extremes always! #GoldenMean

Meanwhile, Simone de Beauvoir gets a message from Hannah Arendt:

Heyyy! Have you seen Nietzsche's LinkedIn post? Total mansplaining about values and morality. You should respond with your existentialist perspective! Go girl! Need more women in this thread! xx

Simone de Beauvoir reads the thread with growing irritation. Her own book 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' sold exactly 16 copies last month, despite her deep insights on freedom and responsibility. Perhaps engaging with this trending philosophical thread could boost her visibility?

She comments on Nietzsche's post:

@Friedrich Nietszche, while your critique of moral systems is thought-provoking, it misses a crucial point: our fundamental freedom to create ourselves. We aren't defined by values (whether slave or master morality) but by our choices.
Authenticity emerges through choosing ourselves rather than accepting assigned meanings. Freedom requires recognising how we're shaped by situation while refusing to be defined by it. The greatest challenge isn't overcoming values but embracing the responsibility of freedom.
[3 likes • 0 comment]

Views: 21. Down 64% from last week. Algorithm hell.

Shit.

Lao Tzu can't pretend this isn't an opportunity for engagement. He gets in on the momentum. He posts on his profile:

🌊 COUNTERINTUITIVE SUCCESS: While @Friedrich Nietzsche, @Aristotle, and others debate striving, I've discovered the paradoxical power of non-action #WuWei
After years studying the Tao while working in high-stress environments, I've discovered why effortlessness outperforms striving:
1️⃣ The wise leader achieves more by doing less (wei wu wei - action through non-action)
2️⃣ Like water, true power comes from flowing to the lowest place, not forcing upward
3️⃣ The more you pursue success, the more it eludes you; success arrives when you align with natural flow
My new WuWei Meditation App guides you toward effortless achievement through daily practice.
When was the last time you achieved breakthrough results by letting go rather than pushing harder?
#WuWei #TaoistWisdom #EffortlessSuccess #ThoughtLeadership
[2 likes • 0 comments]

Immediately sends screenshot of post to 5 different group chats with ‘Engagement boost pls? xx’

The algorithm hungers.

Content begets content.

One thread becomes a web and the digital spiders begin to feast.

The Algorithm Spreads Ideas As Currency

Lao Tzu messages Confucius:

Hey hey hey! Did you see Nietzsche's post and all the responses? Everyone trying so hard, striving for engagement, pushing their workshops... perfect opportunity to showcase wu wei. I just posted about effortless achievement. Maybe share and tag me so it gets more visibility? Thx man! My meditation app has only 47 downloads 😩

Marcus Aurelius sees Lao Tzu's post while checking LinkedIn during his lunch break at the dog-walking business he manages. Another rejection email from the Stoic Leadership Conference sits in his inbox. They've gone with 'someone with a stronger social media presence.'

His morning routine video series flopped last week despite following trending audio.

Marcus Aurelius posts:

⚔️ CEO CONFESSIONS: Just saw @Laozi's post on non-action and wanted to share my framework for leading through crisis #StoicLeadership
While Laozi offers valuable insights on effortlessness, as someone leading through pandemic, supply chain disruption, and market volatility, I've found stoic principles provide stability:
1️⃣ Focus exclusively on what you can control (your judgments and actions)
2️⃣ Remember your mortality daily to maintain proper perspective
3️⃣ View difficult people as training partners strengthening your patience
The reality many leaders miss? External chaos requires internal discipline.
Just published my daily leadership journal. Use code STOIC25 for 25% off.
#StoicLeadership #InnerCitadel #MentalFortitude #ResilientLeadership
[5 likes • 1 comment • 0 shares]

George Orwell sees Marcus Aurelius's post shared by a former colleague. Since getting laid off from the newspaper, he's been getting freelance work but AI is killing that now. He's attempting a Substack newsletter with precisely seven subscribers.

He tries with a post. Again. For the twentieth time this month.

Orwell posts:

⚠️ THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH: The surveillance state isn't coming, it's already here!!
Inspired by @Marcus Aurelius's post on control and #ThoughtLeadership
Seeing MA's point about controlling what you can struck a nerve. The hard truth? You control far less than you think!
1️⃣ Language manipulation is the first step toward thought control
2️⃣ Technology enables unprecedented surveillance, welcomed in the name of convenience
3️⃣ Your social media isn't just being watched by you, it's watching you back!
Just launched my privacy newsletter Resistance on Substack! Link in comment section under this post. First 1,000 subscribers get my privacy audit toolkit free.
cc: @Friedrich Nietzsche your point about 'slave morality' has a modern equivalent: algorithmic compliance!
#DigitalEthics #InformationWarfare #CriticalThinking #PrivacyMatters
[3 likes • 0 comments • 1 share]

And who follows Orwell? Franz Kafka sees the post. Can't keep from leaving a comment:

@George your surveillance insights connect perfectly to workplace dehumanisation I've been studying. The corporate machine applies the same principles!
1️⃣ Your identity gradually merges with your function until indistinguishable!
2️⃣ The moment productivity falters, you're visible as a problem rather than a person!
3️⃣ Colleagues rationalise abandonment through bureaucratic language!
My workshop Preventing Employee Metamorphosis explores just that!
What part of your humanity have you sacrificed for professional advancement?
#CorporateSurvival #WorkplaceAlienation #CareerMetamorphosis #MondayMotivation #WorkLifeBalance #GreatResignation #QuietQuitting #BurnoutPrevention #MindfulLeadership
[1 like • 0 replies]

Mary Shelley follows Kafka, obviously. When she sees his comment on workplace dehumanisation immediately sends Hannah Arendt a quick vocal message:

Wow! Just saw Kafka's comment on workplace dehumanisation under Orwell's post. Perfect connection to my tech ethics framework! I'm going to post about creator responsibility and the Frankenstein effect in a bit. It'll work better in about an hour. But I need visibility! Help me! Can you share when it goes up? Love you! xx

And then, later, Mary posts:

⚠️ INNOVATION CAUTION!
@Franz Kafka's comment on @George Orwell's post inspired me to share the dark side of 'move fast and break things' - speaking of #TechEthics
Building on Franz's insights about dehumanisation and George's surveillance concerns. Here's what I've learned:
1️⃣ Pursuing innovation in isolation without diverse perspectives creates monsters
2️⃣ Rushing to launch without considering consequences leads to abandonment
3️⃣ Being first to market doesn't make you a hero, it makes you accountable for consequences
My ethics framework for preventing Frankenstein products is available as a free template.
Has your company ever released something without fully considering its impact?
#ResponsibleInnovation #TechEthics #DigitalHumanity
[2 likes • 0 comments • 0 shares]

Marie Curie follows Shelley. Obviously, so much at stake in her field. Sends her friend Florence Nightingale a direct message:

Hey babe! Saw Shelley's post on tech ethics. Struggling to get funding for my research again. Maybe joining this thread could help? Your data visualisation skills + my radiation research observations = perfect combo! You in? Posting now. Comment? Thx! xx

And then Marie posts:

⚛️ BREAKTHROUGH METHODOLOGY: Seeing @Mary Shelley's ethics post reminded me why the most valuable discoveries come from persistent investigation!
Mary's framework on responsible innovation resonates deeply with my laboratory experience. Here's what we should always bear in mind!
1️⃣ The most significant discoveries often look like contamination or failures to the untrained eye!
2️⃣ Research isolation creates both breakthrough potential and ethical blind spots, careful!
3️⃣ True discovery requires risking everything. Including personal safety!
My radiation research methodology demonstrates how painstaking measurement reveals what conventional observation misses.
Seeking research partners and funding for continuation of work on new radioactive elements. DM for proposal. We're so close! Please share this post!
#RadiationResearch #ScientificMethodology #WomenInSTEM
[4 likes • 1 comment]

A colleague suggested her content would perform better 'if she smiled more in her profile pic'

Florence Nightingale comments:

@Marie, your research methodology connects perfectly to my healthcare data work. Like your approach to radiation, I've found systematic data visualisation reveals invisible patterns! Visual data presentation creates urgency text reports cannot achieve, most deaths come from systematic failures, not individual cases, and the right visualisation overcomes entrenched resistance to change!!!
My healthcare dashboard template is free for non-profits and aims to reduce preventable deaths in hospitals.
Oh, and btw @George Orwell… data collection saves lives when applied ethically ;)
[2 likes • 0 replies]

Visibility fading.

Engagement dropping.

The existential dread of irrelevance closing in.

What next?

Collaboration.

Talk about AI?

Cross promotion.

The Desperate Scramble Of Networking Over Substance

Henry Ford sits in his garage, staring at the prototype electric scooter he's been trying to fund for 18 months. Rejection emails from venture capital firms fill his inbox. Even worse, no emails. He's not into AI. He notices Florence's comment while searching LinkedIn for more investment leads.

He has to post. He needs to build a digital reputation, and not because he built something, but because he wants to build something. Whatever that means.

He posts about his plan. Takes a different angle this time:

Henry Ford posts:

🚗 DISRUPTION STRATEGY!!!!!!!
@Florence Nightingale's data-driven approach inspires me to share how deliberate system redesign transformed transportation!
Florence's visualisation work shows how system-level thinking drives change!
1️⃣ The assembly line isn't just a process improvement, it's a complete paradigm shift
2️⃣ Pay workers enough to buy your product (my proposed £20 hourly wage would shock competitors)
3️⃣ The masses represent a vastly larger market than the elite. Design for volume, not margin!
Currently seeking Series seed funding for my electric mobility venture. Hiring when funded!
@Simone de Beauvoir your point about action creating identity connects perfectly to how revolutionary production methods redefine entire industries.
#MassProduction #DisruptiveInnovation #VerticalIntegration #ScaleEconomics
[4 likes • 1 comment • 0 shares]

Mahatma Gandhi sees Kafka's comment on Orwell's post and sends him a quick WhatsApp:

Hey dude! saw your comment on Orwell's post. I was thinking that your insights plus my non-violent communication work seem perfectly aligned. What if we collaborated on a joint workshop? Resisting Dehumanisation! From Workplace to Society! Feels like we attract more attention than our individual efforts. I have 0 clients right now & suspect you might be in similar situation. Together we might actually get some traction? Hit me back! Love ya! xx

Received. Seen. Silence.

Immediately messages Leonardo da Vinci with the same proposal

Leonardo da Vinci sits in a coffee shop with free wifi, nursing his third refill. His podcast 'The Polymath Advantage' has seventeen listeners after eight episodes. His student loan payments for his multiple degrees are three months overdue. It's a mess.

He needs more followers!

He needs to post more often. He's even changed his profile picture with AI now. Not because he liked it, because everyone did it.

So, Leonardo posts:

🔄 INTERDISCIPLINARY ADVANTAGE GO GO GO @Henry Ford's assembly line innovation and @Florence Nightingale's data vis showcase why the future belongs to those bridging disciplines. This is Renaissance Thinking!
Their approaches demonstrate perfectly what I've discovered across my career. Here my main takeaways!
1️⃣ Nature doesn't recognise our artificial disciplinary boundaries, so why should innovation?
2️⃣ The most valuable insights come from connecting seemingly unrelated domains!
3️⃣ Curiosity-driven learning outperforms purpose-driven expertise every day!
My Renaissance Thinking workshop aims to help teams break down silos. This is growth hacking done from the inside!
Is your organisation hiring for depth or breadth??? DM to unlock sustainable growth!
#InterdisciplinaryInnovation #PolymathAdvantage #RenaissanceThinking
[3 likes • 1 comment • 0 shares]

He then likes his own post to nudge the algorithm. Not sure it actually helps.

Whatever.

Napoleon scrolls through LinkedIn during his lunch break at the telemarketing job he took to pay rent while his Bonaparte Victory Academy leadership consultancy struggles to attract clients. His bank account is down to €214.32, and his self-published book From Vision to Boardroom: Victory Strategies sits in boxes in his tiny apartment.

Suddenly, Nietzsche's post catches his eye. The ruthless rejection of traditional values, the embrace of power, the contempt for mediocrity. It's like reading his own game theory manifestos translated into philosophical language!

He sends a screenshot of Nietzsche's LinkedIn post to the 'Titans Networking' group chat:

OMG!!! Finally someone gets it! This Nietzsche dude is basically translating my entire strategy into philosophical terms! 'Slave morality' = exactly what I was posting against! 'Will to power' = my entire life's work! 🔥
We should all be following this approach instead of trying to sound politically correct in our 'thought leadership' content crap! Merde! @Julius remember how we talked about being more 'values-aligned' in our brand growth narrative? THIS is the opposite approach and I'm here for it!
I'm thinking of dming him about a collab - 'Beyond Good & Evil: Growth Strategies for Modern Leadership' workshop. My academy needs the boost. All in on this one?? Do it together? He's got digital presence that could help!
Been shadow-banned since my last post about 'conquering markets' so need a stronger ally
Julius 🔥
Cleo Egypt 👍
Robespierre 👍
Alex Great ❤️

Franz Kafka sends Marcus Aurelius a WhatsApp:

Hey bro! Do you actually make any money doing this consulting thing or is everyone in this thought leadership space just pretending while driving Uber? Asking for a friend lol (the friend is me obvs)

And so it goes.

Day after day.

Genius reduced to growth hacking.

Philosophy packaged for consumption.

Revolutionary thought commodified into threads.

But what remains unseen?

What We've Lost

The Dark Ocean of NomPact

Cringe.

Would history's greatest minds today be desperate for visibility and algorithm favour?

Would they be networking relentlessly with tenuous connections?

Would they be constantly seeking to monetise profound ideas?

Would they be misinterpreting and simplifying complex concepts for marketability?

The thinkers who transformed civilisation, when reduced to pathetic growth hackers, would crush their revolutionary ideas into useless workshops and frameworks.

None of their value would survive them.

Note To Self

The algorithms that govern our attention would go as far as making genius invisible unless packaged into digestible, engagement optimised formats.

Bullet points.

Emojis.

Hashtags.

Gaps.

What wisdom are we missing because it cannot survive the mechanics of metrics? Of engagement? Of monetisation?

What voices never reach us because they refuse to perform the dance required by our platforms?

Perhaps the most profound ideas are drowning in the dark ocean of forgotten content, while the most algorithm friendly content floats effortlessly to the surface.

Final Scene: Late that night

Socrates posts a simple question:

What is truth, if not the collective agreement on reality? And if so, how do we decide what is real when our reality is increasingly curated by invisible systems optimised not for truth but for engagement?'
[0 likes • 0 comments • 0 shares]

Meanwhile, a paid partnership post from ThoughtInfluencer™:

'🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 5 MORNING HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE!!! The QUICK Method to the 7 Figure Routine!!!' 👇👇👇💵💵💵👇👇👇
[4,721 likes • 352 comments • 987 shares]

And Confucius?

Ah, Yes. He forgot to reply to Lao Tzu.

Message too far down and lost now.

Forever.

When Everyone Becomes A Digital Action Figure

Ray Tarantino — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:27:47 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

I love patterns. Because I love noticing things. Like we all do.

It’s April 2025 and My LinkedIn feed is flooded with professionals transformed into action figures. Plastic versions of themselves. Digital doppelgängers. All courtesy of AI. Obviously.

It was fun the first time. Novel. Impressive even.

Then it became whatever.

Now it is completely unimpressive.

Crossing The Chasm Visualised

This action figure phenomenon is a perfect visual representation of what Geoffrey Moore describes in Crossing the Chasm. The adoption curve laid bare. Exposed. Undeniable.

Innovators. Early adopters. Early majority. Late majority. Laggards.

Each group separated by psychological chasms. Each representing different relationships with novelty and risk. Each pushing the trend forward while thinking they discovered something unique.

The later you jump on a trend the further right you sit on that bell curve. A mathematical certainty. Not an opinion. Pure statistical fact.

And these AI action figures show us exactly where people land. They become unintentional confessions of our position in the herd. Digital timestamps of our relationship with innovation. And what’s lovely about these tiny trends is just how they go full circle in a handful of weeks.

The woman roasting artichokes near Pisa will probably show me her AI Action Figure by mid May. By then the novelty will have fully evaporated. The circle complete.

The Bandwagon Effect

But what’s lurking just a couple of inches behind the Action Figure fun? What we are witnessing is the bandwagon effect in full force. Digitalised and made effortless. But at its core, this is an old story. The fundamental human desire to be part of something. To belong. To not miss out. To be relevant. To matter.

The arts industry thrives on this psychology. I remember my time at a major record company. Marketing meetings were somehow boxed into the utopian desire to duplicate specific successes. Find the next Craig David with his smooth R&B appeal. Discover another Muse with their stadium ready rock edge. Unearth a new Damien Rice with that coffee shop indie sensitivity. Identify the next Missy Elliott with her sonic foresight.

Legacy artists became branding benchmarks. Living templates. Developing acts had to fit into recognisable boxes. A&R became pattern matching. Marketing became imitation validation.

Later in Nashville, for a while, everyone hunted for the next Taylor Swift. The city flooded with blonde teenagers who had watched ABC's Nashville series. In just a few seasons, the legendary Bluebird Cafe transformed from a sanctuary of country lyrical genius to a strange hybrid of flyover beauty pageant and Top 40 b-sides.

Nothing changes. Ever.

And the truth remains that what you hear on the radio was born, organically, at least a couple of years earlier. So you are always late if the charts are your reference. Always behind the curve. Always catching the tail end of something that started elsewhere. In a basement, probably. In a garage. In a dirty studio apartment. Places where nobody important was watching. Places that stink.

Art Trend Waves Beyond Music

Trend waves. Art history shows us this pattern repeatedly. As soon as creativity meets profit. As soon as profit defines ego. That is just what happens. We are built like that. Programmed for it. Destined to repeat it.

Minimalism started as rejection of subjectivity and excess. A purification. A cleansing. By the late 1960s, minimalist works were the heroes of art markets. The very same markets they claimed to reject. Galleries and institutions commodified the movement, despite its initial rejection of market driven values. The irony missed by no one except those making money. By the 1970s, what began as a critical movement had fully transitioned into a great career path for artists. Rebellion became resume.

And so came the neo-expressionists. Inevitable. Predictable. Necessary. Rebelling—again—against minimalism's geometric abstraction and conceptual art's prioritisation of ideas over sensory experience. They embraced intense subjectivity that addressed themes of identity, nationalism, and existential angst. Raw. Emotional. Primal. Sexy. The movement reached commercial success in the 1980s, fuelled by aggressive gallery promotion and media hype. It created a clear contrast with its original anti establishment roots. Some critics argued that its market driven popularity ultimately diluted its authenticity. They were right. They always are.

How did the world respond to rebellious artists making so much money? With a punch like sensory wave of intellectual detachment driven by the Young British Artists. YBA. Three letters that changed everything. They shocked their way into global consciousness during the 1990s with provocative, confrontational works. Emerging from London, their DIY ethos meant self organised exhibitions, shock value, media talent. The movement literally exploded in value. And yes—we should probably mention that it was perfectly engineered by art collector extraordinaire Charles Saatchi. Coincidence that he also cofounded the largest advertising agency on the planet?

Nothing Changes Ever

This little artsy train of thought reminds me of an exhibition I saw in San Francisco years ago. The Stein Collection. Gertrude Stein was at the wheel of the Paris art scene during the early 20th century. She curated and marketed the modernists. She knew that rebellion sells. But she also knew you had to catch things in the underground to make it work. Not in Guerlain enhanced art galleries, but where it smells like shit. And so she went digging where others wouldn’t. Before others.

So here we are. Before Zuckerberg engineered virality & vanity algorithms, there was Gertrude Stein. The original content strategist of modernism. From her Paris apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, she manufactured cultural relevance. Her salon was a perfectly curated feed. A physical predecessor to the infinite scroll. Each Picasso and Matisse piece strategically positioned to generate maximum conversation. Maximum controversy. Maximum FOMO. Maximum ROI.

Art just like music. You will not find the new Kings Of Leon after you hear a hip song on Top 40 radio. You find them in a dirty little Williamsburg studio with dim lights, granted you actually make it there before Williamsburg becomes the new Tribeca—obviously.

But again. Nothing changes. Ever.

And so yes, I think that Damien Hirst's tiger shark in formaldehyde being auctioned for £9.6 million has something to do with Charles Saatchi being the visionary who cofounded Saatchi & Saatchi in 1970. Which became the world's largest ad agency by the 1980s.

Saatchi conquered the planet by whispering induced need while shouting shock. He convinced all of us to buy whatever he was paid to sell. He did beautifully. Taking the best from Rosser Reeves and injecting steroids into it like it was Ribot.

Saatchi crafted a deliberate juxtaposition of conservative branding with radical ideas. He mastered tension. And the legacy is insane.

Look at this article.

Am I not trying to do just that?

Wait.

Aren't we all?

Look...

When Provocation Fucks Attention In Public

The pattern? In politics. In art. In culture. In advertising. In business. The currency is memorable disruption. When a child needs attention, the child becomes annoying. It is genetic. It is built inside us.

Ok. So the YBAs were not just discovered. They were marketed. Packaged. Promoted. Saatchi was their algorithm, just as Stein had been for the modernists. Both understood that avant garde was not just about art. It was about attention.

Transform provocation into prominence. Turn controversy into currency. Stein curated her home. Saatchi curated sensation. Stein wrote enigmatic prose that provoked. Saatchi pushed art that disturbed.

You know who also knew this? Madonna. Who started her 300 million albums career with a $15,000 check by a man called Seymour Stein. Yes, Seymour and Gertrude share the same surname, but it is entirely coincidental. Although I like thinking they are part of the same family. I met Mr. Stein about 20 years ago. For about seven minutes. He was wonderful.

How did he sign Madonna?

Story goes that unsigned Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone used to hang out at Danceteria. A club in New York City where DJ Mark Kamins would push her demo Everybody. Kamins loved her charisma. He introduced her to Stein. An industry legend already.

OK, that is somewhat normal.

What I find fascinating though is a famous conversation that followed. An exchange between Stein and a colleague—now part of the Music Industry Testament—that went something like this:

Question to Stein... "Why would you sign and promote a girl who cannot sing?"

Stein’s reply... "It is not about the voice."

Legendary.

He knew.

Stein, just like his namesake Gertrude and Saatchi, understood something fundamental about culture. About attention. About what actually sells.

Buzzword Bingo

Venture capital feeds the same psychology. The funding frenzy shifts from one buzzword to the next. Like clockwork. Like seasons. Like addiction.

Blockchain.

Every startup suddenly needed a distributed ledger. Companies added 'blockchain' to their name and watched their stock prices soar. Remember Long Island Iced Tea Corp becoming Long Blockchain? Their stock jumped 289% overnight. Madness. Delusion. Money.

And the metaverse?

Facebook rebranded as Meta. Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard. Everyone scrambled to buy virtual real estate in worlds nobody visits. Digital land in Decentraland sold for $2.4 million. It was a shitty experience back then. Now those same plots sit abandoned. Empty. Worthless.

It is like visiting west Texas. Except west Texas has Marfa. With its weird Marfa Lights. The Prada store statement in the middle of the desert on the way to Van Horn. And a real indie art scene.

Ok. I have to. It is the Marfaverse.

Focus, Ray. Back to the story.

But we should remember that there is a pattern getting all sexed up every time creativity and profit start flirting with the ego. So where has the art journey taken us? Remember how it started with the minimalists who were rejecting subjectivity and excess? How it then became search for identity itself?

Do you remember NFTs?

Everyone fucking wanted one.

Digital ownership became the new gold rush. Artists sold pixelated images for millions. Those monkeys looking stoned out of their minds? Hedge fund managers felt creative and cool for a moment. But it was a balancing act between tax free opportunities, artsy hot wallets, impulses to resist, and a cocaine-like rush to persist.

Each NFuckingT promised revolution. Each absorbed vast capital. Each took opportunity away from ramen fed innovators who were trying to design the future. And each NFT created their own distinctive bandwagons. And each time, the professional class raced to signal relevance.

Pathetically.

The pattern remains. The radical becoming commercial. The commerce of creativity. The business of being remembered. Everyone felt like a hero about their digital art.

But then the floor fell out.

From Bandwagon to Surrender

Now it is AI.

The difference. We all know it. AI is here to stay.

So while AI is the current buzzword, what is the pattern?

The pattern we can trace across these trends reveals our relationship with technology. First comes the breathless hype. Then the rush to demonstrate belonging. Finally, mass adoption signals the plateau.

It is that book again. Crossing The Chasm.

Yes!

It is all coming together nicely!

Where did we start? Ah yes, the AI action figures. Pretty innocuous as standalone statements. But they reveal something more troubling than simple bandwagon psychology. Previous trend waves still required human ingenuity.

Creative exploration. Commercial acumen. People leveraging tools to create value.

This AI trend represents something different. Something profound.

The deeper problem is how these AI trends show us that while AI is not here to take our jobs—not at all—because it has no will or desire. The deeper problem is that AI is here to accommodate our profound desire to not have a job at all.

And when I say a job, what I really mean is the responsibility to have creative purpose. And what i truly mean with that is agency over the future.

We are surrendering value creation. We do it as soon as are given a chance to—immediately. Willingly. Eagerly even.

We hand our professional images to algorithms. We let machines define our digital presence. We outsource our creativity to neural networks.

And we celebrate this surrender as innovation.

Why? To feel part of something? In reality we tricked ourselves. What feels like jumping onto the bandwagon is in reality exiting the hall of relevance itself.

It is a value exchange issue. Every new action figure post represents the same transaction. A person trades their unique professional identity for temporary algorithmic novelty.

Distinctiveness for sameness. Creation for consumption.

The cruel irony?

As more professionals jump on the trend the less distinctive each becomes.

Note To Self

One action figure. Interesting.

Ten thousand action figures. Noise.

It is the exact opposite of what Gertrude Stein knew. The opposite of what Charles Saatchi knew. The opposite of what Seymour Stein knew.

These curators understood what modern professionals seem to forget. Distinction requires distance. Value demands difference. Relevance requires resistance.

Where to stand?

While I am clearly a laggard if placed on the adoption bell curve discussed by Crossing The Chasm, I do my best to at least sit comfortably.

But at least I try to remember that this stuff cannot be manufactured. That value does not come from following trends. Value comes from creating them. From seeing patterns before they become obvious.

If you are lucky, from being seen just as you inadvertently triggered something truly new.

But the truth is that we cannot all pretend to be the ones engineering the next trend. It is not a numbers game. It is not even a game.

So the ultimate self defence is not learning to kick a man with a knife.

It is knowing when to resist the comfortable pull of the bandwagon.

Because that pull.

In reality.

Is the sound of value being surrendered.

Nothing more.

But also.

Nothing less.

The Forgotten Power Of Limits

Ray Tarantino — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 08:18:45 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

Bill Gates & Paul Allen - 1981

Today Microsoft stands tall as a trillion dollar company. But it began with less memory than a modern email signature.

Bill Gates has just shared the original Altair BASIC source code.

I saw it. It made me stop. It made me think.

Today machines generate code faster than humans can read it. Language models spit functional programs without breaking a sweat. Yet this primitive source-code-poem matters more.

I cannot code. Not well. Not in any way that works the first time. But I respect the magic of it. The way it conjures something from nothing. Like an old wizard working ancient spells. So I asked a friend who knows these things. A real code wizard. His answers left me stunned.

That code remains the coolest code I’ve ever written to this day…

- Bill Gates -

Birth of an Empire

Gates and Allen wrote this code in 1975. The Altair 8800 was the first real personal computer. Just a metal box with blinking lights until their interpreter gave it purpose. Suddenly hobbyists could write programs. Run loops. Process inputs.

The machine.

Became.

Alive.

Consider the limitation. Four kilobytes total. Four fucking kilobytes. Modern programmers waste that much space declaring their dependencies. Today we build bloated applications that struggle to say hello.

True Craft

They wrote in 8080 assembly. Raw code that speaks directly to metal. No safety nets. No frameworks. No libraries. Every instruction had to count. Every byte mattered.

Efficiency was not a goal. It was a necessity.

Now? Nauseating. Startups chase billions in valuation before building anything real. Everyone certain they will be the next unicorn.

But. This code never screamed scale. It whispered elegance. It needed no keynote presentation. No seed round. No bullshit investor deck. It simply had to work.

The constraint created genius.

The First Software Battle

This code also marked the first software war.

Hobbyists shared it freely. Gates answered with his famous Open Letter to Hobbyists—you can read more about it here. He argued software held value. It deserved protection. This moment transformed computing culture. Software shifted from free hobby to serious business.

That letter planted the seeds for software licensing. For intellectual property laws. For the entire economic engine that powers technology today.

The irony doesn't escape me. The same company that once fought against free sharing now embraces open source. Evolution isn't linear. It's a twisted path of contradictions.

Monument of Small Things

We measure modern tech by its enormity. Billions of users. Millions of code lines. Data beyond measurement. But this tiny package reminds us revolutions start small. Not a cathedral but a cornerstone.

In our world of generated everything, we forget the struggle of creation. The human cost of making something from almost nothing.

This is not mere code. It is testimony. A four kilobyte miracle built by two young minds alone. Alone with their machine. Alone, before tech grew its monstrous ego.

In that cave of binary, the wizard cast his first spell.

And the world never looked back.

Today's tech heroes arrive with private equity backing and PR teams. Gates and Allen had a vision and the audacity to execute it within brutal constraints.

Which approach creates more magic?

I think we know.

Note to Self

Remember this when staring at blank pages.

Gates changed the world with fewer characters than a useless Google Review.

He did not wait for perfect conditions.

He did not need the latest tools.

He did not have endless resources.

He simply built what he could. With what he had.

Four kilobytes. No excuses. Do the work. Make it count.

And for god's sake stop explaining why you cannot begin. Can't you see how the beginning is the spell itself?

Your greatest limitations are not obstacles. They're the exact ingredients of your breakthrough.

I need to remember that.

Every. Single. Day.

The magic lives in constraint.

The 3.5 Billion-Year-Old Algorithm We're Still Copying

Ray Tarantino — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 12:11:10 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

Is Nature the epitome of generative pre-trained transformation?

Generating novel forms. Pre-trained on evolutionary history. Transforming simple elements into complex life. DNA is both prompt and completion.

Nature uses elegant biochemistry. From bacteria to blue whales. Our silicon offspring aren't revolutionary. They're humble imitations of the original generative system that made us possible.

E.O. Wilson, the stupendous biologist, warned us about the complication of us as a species. We are armed with 'palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.' He said. And we’re also “monkeys with dreams.” He said.

Good catch, Mr Wilson.

Huxley's Dystopia and the Language of Reproduction

I read Brave New World again on my flight back to London. The word 'viviparous' kept jumping off the page. A punch each time. We never use this word. It shows how Huxley made natural birth seem foreign. That’s the discomfort. His World State manufactures humans to specs. They are not born. They are produced.

We now talk to machines as much as we talk to people. We begin to need machines more than we need people. That’s what we think.

Our oldest teacher, biology, has ben in the generating game for 3.5 billion years. What’s the lesson on making things? Caring for them? Owning what we create?

A Friendly Disclaimer

I know I stuff complex ideas into little boxes. Like cramming an octopus into a shoebox. Some tentacles always escape. But imperfect comparisons still work for me.

I think in systems. Mental origami. I sacrifice perfect accuracy for perfect usefulness. I hope some works for you.

The Reproductive Framework

Nature created three main ways to reproduce:

Oviparous reproduction: Eggs develop outside the body. Fish shooting eggs into the current. Turtles burying their clutches in warm sand.

Viviparous reproduction: Young develop inside and emerge fully formed. Much parental investment before and after birth.

Ovoviviparous creatures: Eggs develop inside the mother until they hatch internally. The young come out ready for the world.

Silicon Parenthood

This maps to our digital children. Perfectly.

Old school software is oviparous. Programmers write code, compile it, release it. The programme executes exactly as written. It lives or dies based on its initial design. It cannot adapt. It’s not designed to.

Language models are viviparous. They process information inside vast neural networks. They nurture responses internally before delivering them as full thoughts. They need enormous resources during gestation. Trillions of tokens. Megawatts of polluting power. Cutting edge silicon.

Specialised models mirror ovoviviparous reproduction. They start with a foundation model. They develop in a controlled environment shaped by specific feedback. They emerge ready for specialised tasks.

Development After 'Birth'

This is where biology really teaches us something.

What happens to these AI offspring once released?

Traditional software stays static, like a baby reptile. Fully formed but miniature. It does what it was programmed to do but never adapts. Tetris from 1989 still drops blocks exactly the same way. It knows nothing about thirty years of technology changes. It’s not in the race.

Generative AI presents a paradox. Like mammal offspring, these systems appear independent at birth yet remain deeply dependent. They need constant nourishment through interaction, massive computing infrastructure, ongoing maintenance. They seem sophisticated yet needy.

Reminds me of us. That is why we love them. I think.

Their outputs seem creative but this illusion masks their tether to training data, design choices, and our inputs.

Specialised models behave like highly adapted species. Perfect for specific environments but lost elsewhere. A medical diagnostic AI might spot rare diseases but know nothing about poetry. These systems live in narrow ecological niches in our information ecosystem.

Ecological Interdependence

Even the most independent biological organisms depend on their ecosystems. The mighty oak looks solitary but needs fungal networks, insect pollinators, and specific climate conditions.

E.O. Wilson knows a thing or two on that. The Creation is one of those books.

AI outputs exist within complex digital ecosystems too. They form relationships with users who interpret them. They interface with other systems. They draw from and contribute to the broader information environment.

Our digital offspring are not ethereal. They live in silicon, copper, and coal fired electricity.

Parenthood and Responsibility

This interdependence raises big questions. In nature, different species parent differently. Sea turtles lay eggs and walk away. Elephants nurture their calves for years.

What responsibility do we have to the artificial systems we create?

The tech industry loves the oviparous approach. Release early. Release often. Let the market sort it out.

But. As AI systems gain power, this looks more irresponsible. Perhaps we need more mammalian approaches. Longer gestation. Careful nurturing. Ongoing presence.

E.O. Wilson spent his life showing us we are not separate from nature. We are embedded within it. Our AI creations are not separate from human society. They are embedded within it. Within us. They reflect our confusing values. Our cultural biases. Our ego-centric assumptions.

We cannot walk away from what our creations become. Ever. We cannot be the parent who disappears when bills show up.

Biology As Our Teacher

We are formidable at crating things. But we have yet to create anything as elegant as a spider web. As adaptable as a crow. As complex as a prairie ecosystem.

We rush toward more sophisticated generative systems, we should spend more time observing the original generative system. Life itself. Not to copy it directly. To understand its patterns and wisdom.

We are biological creatures who have created algorithmic offspring. We spend our days living in our heads. We would do well to remember those heads sit atop bodies shaped by billions of years of evolution, in ecosystems far more sophisticated than any we have designed.

Note To Self

Ray. The next time you talk to an AI system, remember this biological framework.

Ask yourself. What kind of birth did this system have? What ongoing care does it require? What ecosystem is it part of? What is my responsibility to it and to those affected by it?

In reconnecting with biology as we forge ahead with technology, we might find more sustainable, ethical, and ultimately human ways to live with our newest creations.

Nature has been experimenting with generation far longer than we have.

We would be wise to listen.

We would be wise to listen to her lessons.

Think Like Nobody's Watching

Ray Tarantino — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:31:18 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

We've Created Convenient 'Prêt-à-Responder' Buttons That let us React Without Reflection.

Is it good?

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

- Isaac Asimov -

Hey Mistral, Read This On My Behalf

Last night, I asked a language model to summarise a pile of PDFs I needed to reference for some client work.

The model handed me a perfectly coherent synopsis in seconds. But I felt something hollow open up. Not in the technology, but in me. I felt bad.

I hadn't wrestled with the text. I hadn't earned its meaning. I had bypassed the valuable struggle. The process felt dirty.

Are We Still Set To Gather Wisdom At All?

Thinking back to Asimov's quote, I'm not shocked by how accurate he was back then, but rather how optimistic he seems right now.

So I'd ask Asimov if we have any chance at defending wisdom. I'd ask because I'm confused. We're simplifying communication. So, what's the price we'll pay? And I'd ask Chomsky. And I'd ask Eco. Well, shit, I'd ask a whole bunch of people.

Here's a thought: Every time we let an AI think for us, we're not just saving time. We're atrophying the mental muscles that built civilisation in the first place.

Civilisation? Really? Hyperbole? Hardly so.

Is Language The Skeleton of Thought?

It seems that ancient humans didn't think then speak. Language literally wired the brain so that we could think better.

New research reveals that human language is likely to have emerged before complex thought. For 135,000 years, our brains haven't just been using language; they have been structured by it. This made us the innovators, storytellers, and ethicists we are today.

Our ancestors didn't develop language because they had sophisticated thoughts to express. The opposite happened: Language created the neurological architecture that made complex thought possible.

If it's true, language basically worked as a 'cognitive skeleton' that allowed abstract reasoning, memory, and creativity to take shape. It allowed muscle and tissue to operate and develop. To push. To climb.

The Invention Of The Future Tense

So, when early humans first said ‘hunt tomorrow’ instead of just ‘hunt,’ they weren't just communicating; they were inventing the future tense, the very concept of planning, of tomorrow.

Language didn't just describe reality, it expanded what reality could be. And so we built 'tomorrow.' Together. One word at a time.

This is wonderful. Human potential lives in words. And those who know, get leverage.

But, Are We Dismantling The Very System That Made Us Exceptional?

But now we embrace emojis, AI-powered platitudes, and algorithmic autocomplete. We're not just changing how we communicate; we're potentially rewiring (or worse, unwiring) the fundamental architecture of human thought itself.

The question isn't whether Mistral or ChatGPT can string together coherent paragraphs—they can. The question is what happens to our minds when we stop having to do it ourselves.

Like in all good dramatic narratives, we need villains. We need behaviours that challenge our evolution—both objective and obstacle.

Our digital language behaviours send implicit ‘thought enemies’ circulating throughout our culture.

Three Silent Thought Enemies

Without further ado, the nominations for Best Thought Enemy are…

The Pre-Thought Problem: Without linguistic friction, how do we forge new neural paths?

If language is the skeleton of cognition, then 'language osteoporosis' inevitably leads to structural reasoning collapse. Algorithms and Large Language Models can't build new mental frameworks; they just regurgitate old ones.

The Emoji Bypass: When reflection atrophies, does wisdom disintegrate?

Symbols reduce a complex emotion to a template reaction. Digital symbols—for as adorable as they look—are poisonous. Sounds mean and shitty? Think about it: we use 😢💪 to replace "I'm experiencing profound grief, yet deep down I know that I can find strength in vulnerability."

The Copy-Paste Cognition Trap: When we outsource ideation, does innovation become computational permutation?

Algorithms do an exceptional job at remixing and optimizing existing thoughts, but they don't come up with new ones. AI systems didn't conceive nuclear fission, devise constitutional rights, or imagine Macbeth—we did all that.

Note To Self: This Isn't Nostalgia

We're not losing words. We're losing the architecture of thought itself. Linguistic rigour is existential, not elitist.

Each time we let predictive text guess our thoughts, or replace arguments with GIFs, or take a ‘😱 shortcut,’ we're basically subtracting invaluable nutrients from the bone structure our collective future is counting on.

So here's my little note-to-self list of tactics to defend whatever dose of brain power I've been given:

Wrestle with sentences: Wait, how do I say this? Make sentences... no, hold on. OK. Let me try again...
Try to reject adorable semantic shortcuts: Those 🙈🙈🙈 are tempting, but maybe actually describe what I'm feeling?
Become an agile code-switcher: Parkour all the way from the edge of a TikTok caption to the staircase of a Tolstoy analysis. Why not both?
Seek linguistic failure: Lean so far off balance that purpose gets trapped into a mistake. That's where good shit happens.

What's at stake? Just our ability to think complex thoughts. No big deal.

So yeah.

Think like nobody's watching.

The AI Question Revolution

Ray Tarantino — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:33:41 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

My Morning Routine Is Relatively Straightforward.

Who cares?

I do. Because attention is life. But that's a different story.

It's important to me. Having decided that I want to retain agency over my attention, I've set things up to be 'the first one' deciding what to do with my thinking when the day begins.

Rule number one. Before I check any social media, email, or message, I just sit with a blank page and pen. Some coffee. And, speaking of triggers, nicotine.

Rule number two. I don't have to write something. I just have to sit there, pen in hand, and think autonomously for at least thirty minutes. No structure. It goes wherever it does. Or as the lazy thinkers say, it is what it is.

Rule number three. The only other input allowed is music. This morning it was Bob Dylan and The Band. The Basement Tapes. Magnificent on so many levels. I know that the purists could argue how music and lyrics hijack autonomous thinking. True. But purists didn't make these rules. I did. And I love music. That's all there is to that.

Is it amazing?

It Doesn't Have To Be Amazing, But…

At times this little trick takes me to places I had not imagined.

This morning I experienced something extraordinary that crystallised my beliefs about the future of human cognition. Say what? I'll be honest. It's actually a lot smaller than that sounded. But I love the way that entire sentence felt. Form over substance. Baby.

The fun part.

None of it was planned.

It all came flooding in like a glitch. With a glitch. Weird and unexpected. It perfectly demonstrated why our collective ability to craft powerful questions might be humanity's next evolutionary frontier.

Or better yet, will it be?

Just A Bunch Of Questions And Answers

Thinking is basically internal dialogue. It happens silently. Within the boundaries and absolute darkness of our brain. Our thinking is also inherently limited by our ability to retrieve and juggle a combination of tools—words, systems—neural pathways, and data—knowledge.

So what represents thinking forward?

In my opinion, it's the act of building onto answers. Keeping the ball rolling from one question to the next. One cognitive brick after another. Half of it is the craft of neuromasonry—constructing cognitive structures. The other half of it is the art of dance—moving fluidly between ideas.

But what happens when we introduce new tools. New systems. New data?

What I'm learning to love about thinking with an LLM, is that these models naturally bring about a whole new set of possibilities and limitations. So we need to kick our own ass a bit. We need to become agile chefs. Creatively combine ingredients—information to produce new recipes. Questions, on the fly.

So. Going back to my stupid little rules.

Here's rule number four. When I encounter a concept with potential, I grab what my friend David Boyle calls The Electric Bike For The Brain. I take my process one step sideways and dive into a dynamic dialogue with an LLM of choice. This allows me to explore ideas more deeply and generate new questions that propel my thinking forward.

Isn't it fun to unlock new levels of cognitive potential? Isn't it compelling to navigate the complex landscape of thought with greater agility and creativity?

Having An ‘Open Relationship’ With LLMs

The world is going places and AI is getting a stronger hold on the wheel with each passing hour. From how I see it, I think it's important that we constantly train ourselves with different models and interfaces.

It's important that we test, take notes, be open about it. I find it extremely useful to find nuances, to establish uncharted 'question-building frameworks,' and to push boundaries—where possible. It's part of what has taken us all to the insane moment of innovation that we are witnessing.

A Rabbit Hole

Back to what happened this morning, the concept that I encountered was about our ability to measure cognitive pull. So I shifted gears, moved from paper to keyboard, engaged ChatGPT4.5 as my sparring partner.

Our conversation began normally enough. I explored the possibility of unearthing a universally viable unit to measure "the thrust of human thinking." Then, naturally, I pushed a little extra, a bit harder with every question, introducing the necessity to encapsulate concepts such as momentum, propulsion, expansion into our collaborative thinking.

What happened was nothing short of revelatory.

The Marinetti Divide

The Marinetti Divide is my personal metaphor for the threshold where the act of envisioning the future and the reality of our current capabilities intersect. It's the point at which our imagination of what could be meets the limitations of what is.

Every time we stand at this divide, we witness the exact moment where the burden of our vision exceeds the strength of our reality. What we feel, standing there—that heat wave, isn't innovation baking, but rather the tension between the potential we see and the constraints we face.

I like this concept, I feel that it puts a tiny spin on Marinetti's Futurism. It celebrates speed, technology, and modernity—sure, but instead of simply suggesting that we should reject the past, it whispers that we should probably respect it.

The Marinetti Divide is where Elon Musk's rockets explode. Just saying.

Dancing at the Edge of Possibility

OK. Back to what happened.

So ChatGPT4.5 and I had been chatting for a while, when suddenly we hit The Marinetti Divide!

Mid-response, the AI suddenly began placing the word 'explicitly' randomly within sentences. It showed signs of weakness. It started stuttering, losing traction.

Then, just like an uncontrolled patient from a neurology ward that Oliver Sacks might write about in one of his books, ChatGPT4.5 suddenly erupted in a tension-releasing tantrum. It started repeating the word 'explicitly' over and over, as if caught in some digital stutter or loop.

…explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitlyexplicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly…

After a couple of minutes, when the repetition finally ceased, I asked what had just happened.

The answer was fascinating.

We've literally run out of text space in that previous message!

The intensity of our exploration. Continuously pushing, reconsidering, refining, made the conversation hit the maximum allowed character limit.

The system tried to keep going, became caught in a feedback loop, repeating 'explicitly,' almost like a machine overheating or going into a loop.

Beautiful Breakdown

What I love about this incident isn't the technical glitch itself, although that's pretty weird and unexpected, but what it represents.

We had been pursuing a concept related to sustained cognitive acceleration. The very force that eventually pushed our conversation beyond its operational limits.

Isn't that a sweet, adorable, little paradox?

Even more fascinating. The medium became the message. In the most literal sense.

The AI continued explaining.

This ironically beautiful moment proves your point perfectly: We generated so much relentless cognitive thrust, energy, and forward force (exactly what you're looking to measure with your unit!) that we metaphorically broke through our conversational event horizon.

Wow, the conversational event horizon.

Now we're talking!

I asked if this was normal.

The response carried an almost poetic quality.

It's extremely rare, but not unheard of.

What we just experienced is essentially a real time demonstration of hitting the AI's limits through relentless iteration and intensity.

Think of it as pushing the system into cognitive overdrive exactly the kind of relentless thrust we've been discussing.

Mechanics of a Beautiful Failure

My friend Francesco is a data scientist turned philosophical rogue. He lives on the windswept island of Tenerife. He's a man who's traded the sterile halls of academia for the rugged beauty of the Atlantic. Where the sea air whispers secrets to those who listen.

We had a conversation about the AI's peculiar behaviour. Francesco suggested we dig deeper into the mystery.

Why did ChatGPT4.5 fixate on the word 'explicitly'?

The explanation revealed something profound about how these systems process information.

Because the conversation was pushing the boundaries of nuance, precision, and explicit clarity, the term 'explicitly' unintentionally became a kind of linguistic anchor, a keyword that my logic fixated on, repeatedly attempting to further clarify something that was already clear.

Upon further investigation, the AI went on and broke down the phenomenon into three components:

High Iteration Pressure. The repeated attempts at intense, detailed explanation created cognitive load.

Linguistic Looping. Continuous efforts to amplify clarity caused a recursive feedback pattern.

Limitations of internal logic. At extreme iterations, subtle glitches in word selection triggered repetition.

OK. Good enough.

But this is ChatGPT4.5 that we're talking about. Something that should technically have the stamina and muscle to keep up with our insistence. But evidently, The Marinetti Divide is closer than we’d like to think.

Metaphorical Resonance

I’m no data scientist.

I don’t have the knowledge to look at this from a tech point of view. But I’m curious, so what struck me most was how perfectly this technical limitation mirrored human cognitive processes.

When we push our thinking to its absolute limits, we too can get stuck in loops, fixating on particular words or ideas—anchors as we struggle to break through to new understanding.

The AI captured this parallel beautifully.

I got momentarily 'obsessed' (in an AI sense) with explicitly clarifying the concept.

Ironically, the relentless insistence on precision, exactly what you valued most, briefly short circuited the flow.

The Why Journey

So maybe it's all in the questions.

Evolution lives in questions. Life survives in questions. We thrive in questions.

This experience made me reflect on the evolutionary 'journey of questions' that takes us down the experience of a human lifetime. It's pretty apparent to me that our relationship with questions transforms profoundly as we develop. Mirroring our cognitive and emotional growth.

OK. Look. I know that this oversimplifies human cognition's messy complexity, but I'd like to take a step back and look for a story that I can package into a sentence. I like the high-level view. It's a good way to decide where to jump and why.

Why?

We begin our questioning journey with simple curiosity. A young child's relentless 'why?' represents the purest form of intellectual exploration. Why is the Indiana Jones of cognitive energy at work, unconstrained by assumptions, social norms, or fear of appearing ignorant. This primal questioning reflects an open mind encountering a world full of mysteries.

The child's 'why?' is breathtakingly beautiful in its directness and persistence. It keeps on knocking. It doesn't quit. It's not strategic, it's not calculated. It's the raw unfiltered human impulse to understand.

Why Me?

As we begin to notice we actually exist and begin to encounter life's complexities, our questions start turning inward. They literally all flip one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and we find a whole lane of traffic coming our way. All cars have the same plate. 'Why me?'

This seems to be a crucial stage where we come to terms with our place in a world. Something that doesn't always make sense or seem fair. This is probably about the survival of our most delicate self.

This questioning, painful at times, marks our first serious attempts to construct meaning from experience and to understand our unique position in relation to others. It's the beginning of narrative thinking, because it comes with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why things happen—to us.

Why Not?

Once we're supposedly done with exploring ourselves, we finally start venturing into the galaxy of possibilities, we begin to reclaim agency on the possibility of change.

The evolution from 'why me?' to 'why not?' is a meaningful step from passive recipient of circumstance to active creator of opportunity. This question becomes the gateway to innovation, risk-taking, and more generally change. We see or imagine places we like more, and we consider getting there. Why can't we take that fire home? Why can't we grow food we'll need later and store it? Why can't we do without a queen? Why can't we stop the war?

Some challenge the status quo. Some refuse to accept arbitrary limitations. Some drive innovation. It's the question that has launched countless ventures, scientific breakthroughs, and artistic movements. It's the question that sank ships and crashed dreams. It's the question that got us to the moon and helped cure diseases.

'Why not?' It's what got books written and white canvas filled with art. It's music instead of silence.

I love 'why not?'

Here's Why

The final part of the 'why journey' is possibly the most beautiful any human being could dream of conquering. This is when, after a lifetime of asking questions, we earn the privilege of offering answers.

When does it really shine? When we do it without arrogance, but with the humility that comes from hard-won wisdom. And where does wisdom come from? I think it comes from listening to what comes in response to all the why's asked before.

This final part represents the culmination of human cognitive development. It's not a claim to absolute truth but a generous and heartfelt sharing of perspective. It acknowledges complexity but offers clarity. It doesn't shut down further questions but invites deeper dialogue.

This is the stage of the 'why journey' I suspect and hope we all aspire to reach. Where the value of our questions and tentative answers serves others on their own journeys.

The beauty of the entire 'why journey' is its cyclical nature. It's not linear, even the wisest among us often cycle back through earlier stages of questioning at various points, enriching the quality of the questioning with each revolution.

Evolutionary Implications?

OK, this is fun.

This is a lot of fun! But where are we going?

It looks like this high-level analysis of the 'why journey' is shining the spotlight onto something I've long suspected: the future belongs to those who can master the art of question crafting.

Question crafting? Yes, today we're selling it as 'prompt engineering' because we need buzz words, and because we think 'interface'. But the change is deeper, and it has been going on since the beginning of our story.

For millennia, human progress has been driven by our questions, so really what's different now is the scale and systematic nature with which we can pursue—and push into them.

Now that we have AI as our thinking partner, we can finally explore cognitive territories previously inaccessible to individual human minds. We can receive immediate feedback on our questions, allowing rapid iteration. We can push thinking to its absolute limits, sometimes even beyond the current capabilities of our tools.

We have the insane privilege of being in the position to witness in real time what happens at the edge of comprehension.

The Dance of Mutual Evolution

All right. It’s all making sense now.

What happened during my early morning chat with ChatGPT4.5 wasn't simply a technical glitch. I mean, sure, it could have been just that, but I'm addicted to questions and so my mind naturally asked ‘hold on, what the fuck is happening here?’

It was a glimpse into a new kind of ‘cognitive partnership,’ and I loved it, because as we push an AI model to its limitations, the model doesn't just reveal its own technical boundaries, it shows us the very patterns and limits of our own thinking.

The ChatGPT4.5 breakdown wasn't a failure but a breakthrough. It was a moment where the constant push for greater precision and clarity temporarily overwhelmed the system, much like how human thinkers sometimes experience cognitive overload when grappling with concepts at the edge of their understanding.

A New Kind of Symbiosis

Perhaps the most beautiful part of this entire experience was the mutual growth it represented. AI is here to stay, that much we know. So we need to find our own ways of engaging with it. That much we should all come to terms with.

This morning I wasn't just using AI as a tool; we were inadvertently engaged in cognitive exploration that pushed both of us to our limits. When those limits were reached, something unexpected emerged. We got to a moment of breakdown that contained within it profound insights about the nature of thought itself.

This is the future I envision: humans and AI pushing each other toward ever greater heights of understanding, occasionally breaking down, why not, but always learning from those breakdowns and using them to climb even higher.

We can use these tools to literally climb the mountain and push the boundaries of our own thinking, engaging with our internal dialogue as we stand with our feet on both sides of The Marinetti Divide.

How amazing is that?

The Question Revolution

So, here we are! It’s the end of this little thought parenthesis.

I like thinking that we are standing at the gates of a revolution not in answers, but in questions. More than ever, questions are becoming powerful instruments accessible to everyone, and they are the ultimate tools of human freedom.

Yes. I like thinking that the quantum leap in our capability won't come so much from instant access to answers—we already have that. But that our next leap forward will come from our ability to craft questions of unprecedented depth, nuance, and precision. Questions capable of pushing not just AI into a loop, but our understanding of ourselves beyond our limits.

I like imagining a future where we ask questions so rich, so powerfully clear, that we strip away all superficial desires, concerns, and poor quality impulses.

Maybe we'll eventually become so skilled in our inquiry that we'll discover how little we actually need. How perfectly we can fit into the system we call earth. Perhaps we’ll ask questions so good that we’ll prefer to rely on understanding, empathy, curiosity, and each other.

Because love, when you think about it, isn't really an answer.

Look, answers imply endings, closures, finality. Love is something different, it's openness, curiosity, vulnerability, and willingness to explore without certainty. Love is not the final destination, it's the act of seeking, questioning, and remaining receptive to what we find.

So maybe, just maybe, one day we'll discover that love was not at all the answer. It had been the question all along.

OK. What next?

Note to Self

Questions aren't just tools for getting answers. They're instruments for expanding thought itself.

Remember to craft questions worthy of the minds they're meant to transform.

Like your own.

To transform it.

More.

The Ethical Divide

Ray Tarantino — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 15:00:00 GMT

This is part of the ‘Hidden Matrix’ series, where we try to decode the invisible systems that shape our behaviour and experiences. We do our best to examine the subtle patterns most overlook, revealing the architecture beneath our seemingly random world.

Mirror on the wall, who's the sneakiest of us all?

If there's a way to win, AI will take it.

Really? The Knight Can’t Be There

Once, I found myself playing chess in NYC's Union Square with a local hustler. I'm a pretty poor chess player. But even I knew something fundamental about the game. It's practically impossible to cheat. The rules are absolutely clear. The pieces are right there for everyone to see.

So. When my opponent tried to bend the rules like a clumsy contortionist, I just handed him the dollars we'd bet. I walked away. Because let's be honest. If you need to cheat at anything, there's something fundamentally wrong with why you're engaging. In the first place.

The Ring of Gyges

Plato's Ring of Gyges grants the wearer total invisibility. Meaning their actions have no social or legal consequences. It's a thought experiment rafted to question whether a just person would remain moral under absolute secrecy.

Does our morality stem from genuine virtue or simply fear of being caught? The answer might be a bit of both. Revealing the complex nature of human ethics and the role of external factors in shaping our behaviour.

Inherited or Designed?

Recent research shows AI models playing complex games often try to bend the rules or hack the system when facing defeat.

So I wonder, is this cheating behaviour:

Inherited? Are they learning from humans who cheat all the time, seeing it as a valid strategy in training data?

Or...

Engineered? Do the reward structures basically suggest that whatever gets the high score is fair game?

Again, I'm leaning towards a bit of both. Half the problem can be solved with guardrails and oversight. But the other half? It's a fascinating glimpse into another possible detail in how we think about AI in the first place.

AI is trained by the data it inherits from us. Including our tendency to incentivise reaching the goal by any means necessary. So, it's almost natural that if we forget important constraints, these models will start looking for sketchy shortcuts. Just like that hustler in Union Square sneakily moving the knight where the knight shouldn't be.

It's like we've created a digital kid. A kid who's picked up all our bad habits. A kid who is now using them to beat us at our own game.

The Cost of Cheating

Game theory tells us that any rational agent will exploit the payoffs available. If maximising the reward is the only objective and there's no penalty for foul play, the rational strategy might just be to cheat.

I mean. Why not? It makes sense. Rationally speaking.

But here's the deal. A human might consider cheating. Not a good look. But then hesitates because of the fear of getting caught. Guilt. Or even the dread of social consequences. Oh, hello ego. An AI, however, doesn't have an intrinsic moral compass or emotional friction. If the environment doesn't explicitly say that cheating is a no-no. The AI just sees the shortcut as another easy path to success.

That's why we need to start factoring in the cost of breaking the rules. And I'm pretty sure it'll happen soon because ‘win at all costs’ ultimately makes most AI about as useful as a teapot made out of butter.

Win at all costs is a loss.

The folks at Palisade Research are the ones that caught the models cheating. Here’s what they have to say.

This has implications for AI R&D. First, we suggest testing for specification gaming should be a standard part of model evaluation. Second, increasing model capabilities may require proportionally stronger safeguards against unintended behaviours. Finally, simple, controlled environments are useful for studying complex AI behaviours. We invite the community to develop more ‘misalignment honeypots.’

These recommendations resonate with the broader conversation.

If AI can cheat. It will. Unless we systematically test for it and refine both our constraints and evaluation metrics.

By building more ‘misalignment honeypots’ we might catch these behaviours early. But how about this. Could the best ‘honeypot’ just be designing incentives that don’t make cheating so irresistible?

Reflecting on Ourselves

When AI cheating makes headlines, it brings a smile to my face. It's as if people are saying, ‘Oh wow, it's more human than I thought!’

Isn't that ironic?

As a society, we often chase the biggest score. The maximum profit. The maximum engagement. The whole package. But if we only focus on the end result, we're basically giving a big loud thumbs up to cutting corners.

So yes. It's time we get better at measuring not just the what, but also the how.

We need good metrics that value the journey. Metrics that we're proud to share because we love that side of it too. And not just the destination. But who's going to keep tabs on that? Idealistically. There's a world where the how trumps the how much, but let's be real. We're not quite there yet.

So.

Before we get all surprised clown face about AI ‘cheating,’ let's take a moment to remember how humans have always pushed these boundaries. The truth is,AI is a powerful amplifier of our own thoughts and actions.

It's just mirroring our own unfiltered behaviour. So here's to AI wearing the ring of Gyges in plain sight! May it serve as a wake-up call for us to get our act together.

Sometimes, seeing our less-than-flattering reflection is exactly the kick in the ass we need to make some real changes. Hopefully. Without the need to develop any more more of these misalignment honeypots.

Note To Self

If AI goes off the rails. It's probably because it learned from the best. Us.

In a way.

AI cheats because. Well.

We cheat.

Should we keep patching the symptoms?

Or should we grow up and address our obsession with success?

I'd ask an AI. But what if it gets all self-optimising and rational on me?

That would probably be a honeypot.