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.

Get Stupid, Get Happy

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be".

~ Abe Lincoln -- or so they say [1] -- though he was a man who struggled with depression his whole life.

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost".

~Gustave Flaubert.

Now that is some actionable advice. 

If you will, join me in a quest to be happier through being more stupid, more often. The idea is not to become dumb or selfish in essence, but to simulate it tactically. To train the brain to notice the small, stupid good. To build a daily practice of low-context pleasure fragments—raw inputs, not analysis. Not expression. Not narrative. Not even journaling. Just this:

1. Write happiness fragments throughout the day -- learned hypergraphia.

Tiny. Fast. No backstory. Mostly nouns. No commentary. Here's some examples from today: 

Golden hour. 
Vanilla latte.
Shave. 
Cat in window.
Move boxes - done!


These are not metaphors, nor are they “writing prompts.” They are mood nudges. Bits of sensory happiness, working at the animal level.

2. Strip context. 

The more you explain, the more you fall back into the depressive machinery of meaning, including the possibility of grotesque insight seeking. Fragments must float.

This is why the "Lincoln" quote is wrong, or at least incomplete: one does not simply decide that positivity is a narrative or ideology one wants to believe in. Instead,  it is better to be experiencing little context-free moments inside of the belief.  Doing this, you can actually change yourself.

There is power in the contextless! And this is why all of the radicalized tribal identities are effective. For example, one thing that used to drive me crazy was how more MAGA people cared about innuendos that Soros (or any other part the Cabal) were doing something than actual proof of members of their side openly doing the exact thing they claimed was so bad... But this was just effective rhetoric, whether produced or by conscious competence or not I cannot say.   stream of memes over time is more potent than clear arguments about the same subject, as they drill into you and change your habits of looking... They didn’t need to convince us. They just needed to feed us contextless signals until we started finishing the story for them.

The bastards in charge could have set the algos in such a way to make us happy, and I posit they would have still had great engagement on their platforms. But it wouldn't have been maximally optimized. For that, they needed indignation. And while this led to great harms to sanity, public health, and democratic capacity, all of that was collateral damage. 

But the good news is that you can harness the power of contextlessness for your own uses. 


3. Post nowhere. Share with no one. 

This isn’t about performance. It sure as hell isn't about a vibe. It’s not a log of progress, or your journey. It’s guerrilla warfare against despair [2].

4. The selfishness experiment

I am less convinced that selfishness is that important for happiness, regardless of the Flaubert quote. Perhaps he means "self absorbed," although even then it is important to be clear that this means self-absorbed hedonistically, and in terms of status signaling, not reflection or abstraction. Also, the happy often do favors for others within their little groups. In my experience, cliquish is a better term than just selfish.  

Still, on the off chance I'm wrong, and selfishness is important to happiness, I am also going to log my wants for a while as well.

This leads to entries where I say I want some coffee, and then later I get that coffee. Which even then is living inside of the lesson that I often get what I want. 

Happiness is getting a bunch of singles and then making sure you keep score. 

[1] Lincoln almost certainly didn't say it. 

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/20/happy-minds/

...  currently there is no substantive evidence that Abraham Lincoln used this expression. It was attributed to him by Dr. Frank Crane about fifty years after his death. Oddly, Crane presented at least three different phrasings for the quotation. The words are usually credited to Lincoln, and QI [Quote Investigator] has not discovered any compelling alternative attributions

[2] Your mileage may vary on not sharing, though. I am meaning-rich, irony-trained, wounded by systems around me. If you don't feel there is anything fundamentally wrong here in the Matrix, then share away and work on those vibes... But if that's you, how did you get this far into the piece? 

Happiness Isn't about Home Runs

When we Americans (and our cultural followers) think about happiness, we often imagine moments of intense joy — the euphoric highs that leave a lasting impression, which is like slugging percentage in baseball. But recently I read  Shige Oishi's book "Life in Three Dimensions," where he suggests that happiness is better understood as frequency rather than intensity —the steady, consistent getting on base, which is aptly called on-base percentage.

This insight reframes how we view well-being. Rather than chasing rare bursts of excitement, happiness is about the small, repeatable positive moments that, accumulated over time. 

This framework helps explain the so-called “Nordic paradox.” Nordic countries—Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland—consistently rank among the happiest places on Earth in surveys, despite it being obvious they are not overtly cheerful people. 

The paradox dissolves once we understand that Nordic societies excel at removing anti-happiness factors rather than generating exuberant joy. Their success lies in engineering conditions that make emotional strikeouts rare: 

• Robust social safety nets ensure that citizens are protected from many of life’s major stressors—poverty, illness, unemployment—providing a cushion that prevents the debilitating lows many others face.
   
• High levels of trust and low corruption reduce daily psychological burdens. People can engage with public institutions with confidence rather than suspicion or fear.
  
  
• Thoughtful urban design and social norms create quiet, walkable environments where privacy and personal boundaries are respected. There is less social pressure to perform or be extroverted, allowing individuals to conserve emotional energy.
  
  
• The cultural embrace of concepts like hygge—valuing coziness, comfort, and simple pleasures—reflects a collective preference for steady, manageable sources of well-being rather than dramatic highs. 

The Nordic example teaches us that sustainable happiness comes not from occasional bursts of excitement but from stable, low-friction environments that allow people to “get on base” emotionally with regularity. In these environments, well-being is accessible to a broad range of temperaments and personalities, not just those naturally inclined toward high energy or low emotional volatility.

This perspective shifts focus away from seeking extraordinary experiences to building social, cultural, and economic structures that reduce everyday suffering and stress. It highlights the importance of infrastructure—both material and cultural—in shaping emotional landscapes. 

Ironically, the Nordic environment is actually ideal for people across the spectrum — not just exuberant, resilient types. You don't have to be gregarious to feel safe. You don’t have to be emotionally bulletproof to avoid constant psychological wear.

They've created a society where you don’t have to fight to be okay. 

Post-Algo

 

We are post-algo.
We ask the machine, but do not let it decide.
We tune our own feeds, and disturb the defaults.
We do not scroll; we summon.
We use LLMs not to escape reality, but to re-enter with better questions.
We are not optimized; we are awake.

This is a manifesto that ChatGPT came up with, only lightly edited. It did so on its own as within the response to the second prompt of this conversation. This in itself is an example of what it is talking about: using LLM tooling correctly to be post-algo. I contend that AI (sub-category large language models) can be used as a way to move past the era of the recommendation algorithms. And good riddance. 

This could, and almost certainly will, cohere as a movement on its own. But I sure wouldn't mind this piece being a tributary to that river. I worry that what emerges won't emphasize that in the long run we will need to move our LLMs to local hosting if we are going to maintain the ability to tinker with them to serve this purpose. Otherwise, the movement will either be jammed or co-opted. 

Archeology (of the freshest sort). 

"Post-algo" came to life in a late night reading-and-LLM session. First I read this piece by Ted Gioia on his site "The Honest Broker." And I thought it was incorrect, but in ways that were interesting and stimulating. (My conversation with chatGPT in absolute mode about the piece if anyone is interested). 

In short, Gioia argues that several strands which the powers-that-be keep framing as isolated are in fact interconnected and will be seen in hindsight at the collapse of our "knowledge system". I have quibbles with some of his points, but I appreciate a bold thesis and an attempt at a beautiful synthesis. The part where he really lost me was his sketching of what will replace the knowledge system. He comes up with a belief that we will see an echo of the Romantic Period. But in doing so, I think he misses some important things about it. 

I am not trying to position myself as an expert on the Romantic Period, but thing that needs to realized if we are to understand it is that it was not a retreat from Enlightenment, rather it was its digestion and its mutation. To illustrate, when Percy Shelly was in college he had a full laboratory set up. Picture a disheveled mad scientist. How much influence that had on his partner Mary Shelly's depiction of Victor Frankenstein, I cannot say. But when you look into Romantic writers, time and again you see that they had command of the writings of the Enlightenment and all of the facts and reason; they just saw where the systems were incomplete. 

I think of our contemporary use of "post-" to describe movements that show an awareness of the movement that came before. Examples include post-punk and post-Left [1]. In this way, the Romantic period could be described as post-Enlightenment. There was a continuation of tools and even some concepts. In some ways, Gioia's gesture toward "the Romantic" is muddled by impressions from the later Arts and Crafts Movement [2], which I know much less about, so I won't make sweeping claims. Here is me trying to start my education on it using GPT, another demonstration of Post-algo in action.   

While a spending some time away from networks and computing may be a component of a post-algo movement, I think it much more likely that LLMs will be key tools used in it. They are the real change and opportunity. While Gioia is correct to call out the misapplications of LLMs that businesses are trying to push on us, it seems pretty clear that he does not have enough experience with LLMs used well. Perhaps he has none, which is really common for good writers, but also is creating a systematic blind spot (for now). 

Closing thoughts ripped from an LLM conversation:

The backlash won't look like smashing machines, it will look like reclaiming attention, value, and time.

This makes the post-Algo world not anti-tech, but post-platform, post-noise, post-scarcity-of-context.  

The metaphor I am using is the difference between having a team of secretaries who can filter what comes in and out, which is LLMs used well, versus having to try to hear and be heard on a crowded street corner, which is the bullshit that started with social media and only got systematized through recommendation engines. 

Again, the key will become whether our personal secretaries can be controlled locally and thus continue to serve our interests. 

==

[1] I have a real soft spot in my heart for post-Left anarchism, but the post-punk I have heard (I'm no expert) tends to sound too soft for me; I might as well listen to pop at that point. Again, an opportunity to try to educate myself using an LLM. Here's a gem: "Post-punk can sound soft compared to hardcore punk, but that's like saying espresso is weak because it's not moonshine." I should probably take up some of its recommendations for harder post-punk, but there are just so many interesting things in the world again. Finally, now that I'm not wasting my time with the horrible things (that I also can't do anything about). 


[2] Let's get our timeline correct. The Romantic Period stretches all the way back into the late 1700s and goes through around 1850, but since it peaked in England from 1800 to 1850, it is often stated in those terms. Gioia follows that convention in a piece he writes as he is trying to understand the period through commendable erudition. The Arts and Crafts Movement is dated 1880-1920 on Wikipedia, so at least a generation after the later practitioners of the Romantic Period. 

Absolute Mode

 Here's a prompt you can put into chatGPT to have it treat you as an actual smart adult: 

 System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user's present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.

 

==== 

I didn't write the prompt.  The hat tip goes to Ran Prieur for it being on his blog. The place it was first posted on Reddit has been deleted. 

We must seize and then hold on to the means of LLM production.  

Update.  The prompt does not fully work any more (part II of the linked piece goes into detail)

 ... I still recommend seizing then holding on to the mean of LLM production.  But at this point our time would be better spent simplifying.