re: frozen

2025-08-09

I have been responded to, and I shall, in turn, respond.

Regarding to the first section, on whether of not Google intentionally named their LLM Gemini to bury the gemini protocol, all I can add is a simple, "who can say", and I'll leave it at that.

I'm much more interested in this second section, in which I was not-asked to "READ. DAEMON. AND. FREEDOM™." Well, I did.

Well, I didn't. I read a good chunk of Daemon, up until precisely page 148, whereupon the author reveals his ignorance of the depths of human degeneracy, by exclaiming that "three hundred forty-seven hours" in an MMO is an extreme number which would make that player an expert. I have more than three hundred forty-seven hours in games I don't even like, and I'm not even a gamer! To be more precise, a character who has been described as a "hardcore gamer" and an expert on a specific MMO turns out to have played 347 hours in that last year. Now my mathematical skills are not my strong point, but I believe that works out to less than an hour per day. What the author was thinking here I have no idea. 1000 hours in a year would still be pretty low for a "hardcore" MMO player.

Why do I bring up this nitpick. Well it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The book Daemon by Daniel Suarez reads from top to bottom exactly like this now deleted tumblr post:

I can't emphasise how much it is written like this. For example, every time a video file is mentioned it's always referred to as an "MPEG video", like that could possibly be relevant or bares any resemblance to how anyone talks. This book is like ready player one for people who know what Defcon is, in the sense that I can only imaging one is supposed to read this book by going, "OMG he said TCP/IP, that's that thing I know!" every few pages. I think Mr Suarez saw a CTF and thought it was so cool and 1337 that he had to write a book about it.

There are numerous other problems with Daemon beyond the style of the prose, it's vaguely misogynistic, the characters have no depth and their motivations are poorly defined, the world feels empty, the realism scale bounces erratically from grounded to cartoonish depending on what's required to move the plot forward, and the central conceit relies on a sort of tech-bro high IQ redditor logic which I can't get behind. But this isn't a book review, so we'll get back to the main point of responding to the post in question. I'll reveal my praise of the book as we go.

From here I will respond directly to the mysterious operator of cybersavior(7).

All you people are so stuck on looking for X thing, or Y thing through your kalidoscope lenses of dead men.

It's possible that other people have had ideas which you haven't had before, or have expanded on ideas you have had in ways you couldn't. Philosophy is the world's longest conversation, one which has been going on continuously for thousands of years. It's reasonable to refer back to this conversation (and thus participate in it) wherever useful. One such use is as convenient shorthand. It's simply useful to be able to say "Cartesian dualism" or "Kantian transcendental idealism", rather than having to explain those concepts from first principles in my own words every time. Of course, it isn't enough to merely refer to the conversation, one must also add to it.

yall don't even have a goal in mind. how could you, after all.

I'm glad you have this level of confidence, however I'm not so bold. Uncritical goal has hitherto produced severely negative outcomes. That being said, I find this pretty presumptuous. I've got goals, all you need to is ask.

lain being our most relevant positive touch stone, and ready player one being the most relevant negative.

Well Lain is already a cancelled future, but let's move on from that. The form here is interesting, contrasting two media properties. Quite simply this can be boiled down to cyberspace or layer 7 or Meltdown or whatever you want to call it, is already a given. Will the primary vector of power be the hacker (as in Lain) or corporate intellectual property (as in Ready Player one)? There are so many unfounded assumptions here that I don't really know where to begin, but even if I accept this for the most part, I already think you're far too optimistic.

You bitches don't know the daemon.

I do now, apparently.

you likewise don't understand what it's up against.

And you do?

you think this isn't a game? marx can't save you. he was nerfed by patches before you were born.

I reject these allegations. I've been forced into this Marxist position against my will, presumably because I used the term "capitalist property relations" in my previous post. Now is this open to criticism, perhaps. But if you'll read my blog you'll see I have repeatedly elaborated on my problems with Marx. In fact, my problems with Marx might even fall into a different category than is presented here. That is, one could say that Marx was broadly correct at the time he was writing, but society has changed so much between then and now that he is no longer relevant for one reason or another; or one could say that Marx made some fundamental error in his theory which was already initially incorrect or incomplete. I happen to be in both camps. I could write a whole blog post about this, hell I could write a whole blog about this. Is this a game? It would be nice if it were as simple as in ready player one, where no one had ever thought to try driving backwards. The game itself is between the forces of work and the forces of play, the forces of production and the forces of expenditure. I still caught myself trying to write in detail about this here but I deleted it. If you want my justifications I'm sure they'll appear in future posts, or you could start by reading Bataille. So anyway was Marx patched? To me it seems like yes, but that patching was possible in the first place because it was enabled by flaws and incompleteness already present.

You probably know a lot of the same shit it's bitching about, ya, you know about monsanto and soil fertility

Indeed.

What I want to know is how to Sobel without a deus ex chimera of John Carmack and Gabe Newell shorting valve and tanking the stock.

I certainly appreciate what Daemon is trying to do in pointing out just how possible all of this is even with 2006 technology. It's true, all of this is, on the surface, technologically possible (even if in some cases, maybe not realistically viable). Why has technocratic hactivism not saved us yet then? Here, you might want to look through my kaleidoscope. I immediately take issue with Daemon's assumptions about intelligence. I think it doesn't take much more than a simple look around at the tech-broligarchy to see that one's ability to program or manage a start up does not have any baring on one's intelligence in other fields. Sobel's BBC-Sherlockian supernatural intellect enabled powers of foresight should immediately ring alarm bells when porting this novel to reality. The boring Marxist take here would be to point out that the people with the time and resources to undertake this scale of project are also necessarily going to be those people who benefit from the present state of things, and therefore have no reason to meaningfully challenge that state. If your plan hinges on "step one, become a billionaire", well that sounds like a pretty shitty plan. What's particularly sad about this is that it's the exact same pattern of everyone who seeks the accumulation of power. Almost no one self-identifies as a pure Machiavellian, who wants power for power's own sake. Of course, everyone who has sought the accumulation of power has justified it by saying to herself "I'm gonna change the system from the inside, man". And of course, no one has ever done this, because it's the system that changes your insides. It rearranges your guts, in other word's you're fucked! It's funny that you say marx is patched, but you immediately run into a problem any baby Marxist could explain.

If, as n1x once claimed, "It is the hacker, not the proletarian, who is the revolutionary subject of the future", then why did hacktivism die after achieving precisely nothing? I'm no cybersecurity expert, I'm sure you know more than I do, but just looking in from the outside, it seems to me like the era where cybersecurity was lax enough that random anons could deface the FBI homepage is long gone; and that modern cyberattacks are at a level of complexity only accessible to well funded groups backed by nations and/or megacorps, or else revolving around ransomware. It seems that the hacktivist too, is a cancelled future.

I'm being reductive here, the Daemon is more than just hacktivism. For someone who is so critical of Marx and Marxists (rightly so), is the Daemon not in part just digital leninist vanguardism? The same boring and ineffectual "organising" and "leadership" of the party, with a different coat of paint? This doesn't work, this hasn't worked, this will continue not working. Ah but this time we'll do cicada tier ops to find the le smartest and coolest guys! It'll be good this time! This view is highly optimistic. But listen, I'm very open to the possibility that you know something I don't. It's completely possible I'm missing something here. If you want to let me know, you know where to find me. Or at least you know where to find where to find me.