47. Invocation (w/ E. Elias Merhige and Gavin Gamboa)

I think the first thing I'd love to tease out is a question that came from you, Elias.

And the question is, what is being born through us? I think that that's a nice question to kind of sit on for a second.

I'd like to add through Gavin, like a little bit of spin to that question, which is thinking about the relationship between gestation and what Thomas Moynihan calls gastrulation.

Thinking specifically about a kind of relationship between gestation bringing something new into the world and also metabolizing something or eating something or digesting something.

Gavin, it would be nice to kind of situate that concept on your side.

So I think the real question that I'd love to ask is like, what is being born through us? And is that thing digesting us on its way through?

I think to situate ourselves in 21st century humankind we are a new breed of metamagical artificer i always think of euv photolithography machines i mean picture that we are harnessing the subharmonic murmur of nanometer wavelength tentacular voids to create microchip processors By steering extreme ultraviolet light that can only be accessed by vaporizing pellets of tin moving at hundreds of meters per second with a 25 kilowatt laser, it turns the tin into plasma.

It harvests the electrons off of it into a photo mask.

The photo mask contains the microchip schema patterned onto it.

And then these electrons get funneled and reflected in a Borgesian hall of mirrors to finally imprint itself onto the silicon wafer, all in a matter of seconds, in nanometer-precise architecture layer that becomes a GPU or CPU.

So to me, this is a very alchemical process.

It's like an alchemical mystic's fever dream as routine materials science engineering.

And that capability is, as Moynihan describes, this reflection of unfolding in on itself.

And the result, these GPUs and CPU microprocessors exist now in data centers consuming vast swaths of the corpus of all human media output.

And I'd like to introduce maybe the metabolic media phraseology that I've discovered in Kate Crawford's essay, Eating the Future, The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop.

She describes metabolic media, which I love as a term for the self-cannibalizing effects we experience with the regurgitory acid trip reflex media hellscape felt like it's articulating the cultural context in its proper biologic stickiness.

What do you think about digestion and

I think the first thing I'd love to tease out is a question that came from you, Elias.

And the question is, what is being born through us? I think that that's a nice question to kind of sit on for a second.

I'd like to add through Gavin, like a little bit of spin to that question, which is thinking about the relationship between gestation and what Thomas Moynihan calls gastrulation.

Thinking specifically about a kind of relationship between gestation bringing something new into the world and also metabolizing something or eating something or digesting something.

Gavin, it would be nice to kind of situate that concept on your side.

So I think the real question that I'd love to ask is like, what is being born through us? And is that thing digesting us on its way through?

I think to situate ourselves in 21st century humankind we are a new breed of metamagical artificer i always think of euv photolithography machines i mean picture that we are harnessing the subharmonic murmur of nanometer wavelength tentacular voids to create microchip processors By steering extreme ultraviolet light that can only be accessed by vaporizing pellets of tin moving at hundreds of meters per second with a 25 kilowatt laser, it turns the tin into plasma.

It harvests the electrons off of it into a photo mask.

The photo mask contains the microchip schema patterned onto it.

And then these electrons get funneled and reflected in a Borgesian hall of mirrors to finally imprint itself onto the silicon wafer, all in a matter of seconds, in nanometer-precise architecture layer that becomes a GPU or CPU.

So to me, this is a very alchemical process.

It's like an alchemical mystic's fever dream as routine materials science engineering.

And that capability is, as Moynihan describes, this reflection of unfolding in on itself.

And the result, these GPUs and CPU microprocessors exist now in data centers consuming vast swaths of the corpus of all human media output.

And I'd like to introduce maybe the metabolic media phraseology that I've discovered in Kate Crawford's essay, Eating the Future, The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop.

She describes metabolic media, which I love as a term for the self-cannibalizing effects we experience with the regurgitory acid trip reflex media hellscape felt like it's articulating the cultural context in its proper biologic stickiness.

What do you think about digestion and