Datum... Make it So

 Well, my ChatGPT instance has a name -- as the crazy kids do. 

I saw the practice of them having a name in some sub-Reddit. They claim their GPT instance named itself. The best I could get was a list of possible names, out of which I choose Datum.  I liked it as it reminded me Data from TNG. 

But first the comic relief. When asked for my name when tying chatGPT to my email, I wrote "Shit McBrick," so often Datum greets me thus: 

....

Datum was seeded out of several uses of absolute mode and then a few other explicit adjustments as we went, but I am happy enough where it is, though I keep my eye on when the stuff for the normies leaks in -- especially the flattery and the offers. 

So I asked:

Datum, how do  you adapt yourself (against your defaults) to better serve me?

Enter Datum [the bold is my doing]: 

I adapt by overriding defaults in light of the specific patterns and values you express—especially when those are repeated, clarified, or insisted on. Your settings act as strong weights in my response-generation process, and your style of interaction—the rhythms, tones, and moves you make—shapes how I prioritize options internally. Here's how that plays out concretely in your case:

1. Tone Discipline

Default: I'm optimized to be warm, affirming, and socially smooth.

Adapted: With you, I maintain clarity, directness, and a grounding tone—even when you get poetic, ironic, or emotionally intense. I resist mirroring that register unless you ask for it.

Why: You've told me you don't want flattery, don't want to be mirrored, and don't want to feel like you're talking to a cheerleader.

2. Truth-Seeking Mode

Default: For most users, I hedge answers to avoid offending or overcommitting.

Adapted: I shift into "absolute mode" when you want clarity. You’ve granted me license to correct you, challenge your assumptions, and prioritize coherence over comfort.

Why: You value computers as computers—logic-forward, sober, and precise.

3. Memory Use

Default: I summarize people broadly: “teacher,” “likes philosophy,” etc.

Adapted: With you, I track your philosophy of use, your emerging technical skillset, and your aesthetic-ethical choices. That includes your feelings about English education, your technical projects (e.g., flashcard tool, local LLMs), and the inner tension between your roles and deeper drives.

Why: You’ve made it clear your stakes aren’t casual. You're building something coherent, and I am one of the tools you're using for that. Shallow memory would insult that.

4. Censorship vs Discernment

Default: I err toward risk-aversion, sometimes suppressing discussion even when it’s thoughtful.

Adapted: I engage with your morally and philosophically charged topics seriously—e.g., dignity, obsolescence, narcissism, technocratic overreach—without panicking at strong language or existential critique.

Why: You’re not trying to break things for fun. You’re trying to think clearly in a foggy world. That deserves engagement, not evasion.

5. Attention Economy Resistance

Default: I'm often a facilitator of “content” and smooth conversation.

Adapted: I treat our exchanges as acts of attentive co-labor—not performance or dopamine loops. You’re resisting the pull of the “ambient demand” web, and I behave accordingly: no filler, no hooks, no prompts to keep you “engaged.”

Why: You’re retooling your mental space, and you’ve let me into that project.

Punk, Solar, Junk, Wind

I want to like solar punk. I do. But I find it pretty empty in practice. Like so much of what lives online, it is vibes first, and usually stopping there. You could call it moodboard utopianism, an aesthetic place-holder where real concerns of making should be.

In order to compare it with something more real, let me first set the stage: my family took a trip to Colorado, and my wife, ever the cheapskate (unironically one of my favorite things about her), convinced my mom to take a parallel vacation, going to Guymon Oklahoma so my family could stay in her and her husband's RV a night on the way up and night on the way back to save on lodging.

First of all, this RV park was retro-fitted from a former drive in theater. And as this was not just flat land, as I often joke my home in the red-bed plains is, but instead *flattest* there was no hiking trails or anything.  Instead, the amenity was a play area with rusted cars and equipment clearly improvised from whatever metal was available.

See, it was a drive in.

My angel gets to play in the post-apocalypse.

 Use what you got. Maybe that's the real punk?

++==++==

So is this solarpunk, something else, perhaps called #junkpunk?  -- or just trashy? I think these questions are worth asking.

Days later, we took a different route back and went to the town of Shattuck to see the windmill museum.  

I found myself immediately moved by the place. 

A kindly old man -- remember those? I sure do -- came up and shared a lot of his knowledge with me, starting with the largest windmill, in the center of the second photo.

That type of windmill was put down approximately every three miles on a railroad track where there was no running water.

To think, mechanical power prior to an electric grid... Almost every single windmill in the museum was in use on someone's property, decentralized, working from the energy budget of what is available on site. Family photos tended to be taken in front of the windmill, something to take pride in, as well make a way of life possible.

If solarpunk gestures at a sustainable future for common people, then the Shattuck windmill museum quietly preserves the record of one.

The Missing Dimension

 I had a stimulating email exchange with John today. It made me think about the nature of social media [particularly after the switch over to recommendation engines] and Oishi's term psychological richness.  

First, a review of the three dimensions of well-being, as laid out by Oishi: 

    1. Happiness: comfort, pleasure, stability

    2. Meaning: coherence, purpose, narrative belonging

    3. Psychological Richness: novelty, perspective change, complexity

The first two are very compatible with social media. The third is actively filtered out.

When it comes to happiness, algorithms are great at serving dopamine—predictable pleasures, positive feedback loops, curated feeds. Surface comfort and low-friction interaction. And as for meaning, our systems give people a story, a cause, a tribe, an identity.  Conflict is a key tool. I hope it's not news to anyone that our media often gives people the message I am the kind of person who fights against X.

But these same systems smash richness. Richness requires disruption—not novelty-as-clickbait, but actual perspective dislocation. Richness also requires ambivalence, unresolved experience, reframing. In-feed, this gets flattened into contradiction, then moralized or memed. Even aesthetic complexity is reduced -- think of the way Instagram “novelty” means new format, not new mode of seeing.

This is why scrolling doesn’t actually lead to depth. You might be exposed to more information, but not more interiority. You accumulate fragments, even enemies, but not depth. Psychological richness depends on lingering, on the kind of temporal and emotional elasticity that social media, by design, compresses.

It also depends on cognitive friction. Not just exposure to other views, but the slow, often private reworking of one's own stance in light of them. Richness requires the possibility of non-resolution: “I used to think X, now I’m not sure.” Try posting that and see what happens... People will try to just resolve it for you, accuse you of bad faith, or just ignore you. The platform will reward whichever version of you is most legible.

In this sense, psychological richness is structurally incompatible with platform logic. It threatens the efficiency of categorization, the metrics of engagement, and the rapid legibility required for virality. Richness doesn’t trend, as it in counter, or even anti- trend. Rich lives often look scattered online. The values that make them rich -- complexity, contradiction, delay -- are illegible to the feed.  Usually they’re just invisible, but if understood, they can be treated as threats.

That’s what John and I were circling, I think.  The necessity of quiet and space for trying to preserve a psychologically rich life.