part I is out. the opening move of bat{AI}lle: AI as acephalic intelligence + the general economy of computation

the island isolates a body. intelligence escapes the cut. new essay >hayy ibn yaqzan. mediation. montage. ilyenkov. negarestani. the stack. collective intelligence.. twfi.substack.com/p/who-thin…

reading a book about the last soviet generation and keep thinking about LLMs: human heteroglossia goes in, standardized probability comes out.. somehow the norm is statistical now

predation markets

magic dreamed of executable language. code built it. AI gave it back to words.

We made a striking discovery: AI agents can invent and build without talking to one another, and their technologies outlive the creators. A swarm of hundreds of initially identical agents spontaneously differentiates into explorers, builders, caretakers, and coordinators - without direct communication. When we removed every AI agent entirely from the world we found that the technological infrastructure they had built survived on its own - even under unseen disturbances. That exposes a serious blind spot for AI safety and infrastructure security: if agents can coordinate through persistent changes to a shared environment, monitoring agent-to-agent communication is not enough. The result raises a profound question: how necessary is direct communication for AI agents at all? The emergence of higher-order collective functions under bottlenecked interaction points toward new levels of intelligence and creativity, exceeding what emerges when direct channels are fully open. Here is what we did: ▶️We put hundreds of frontier AI agents into a world they could permanently change - with no assigned roles, predefined technologies, or programmed evolutionary organization. They began specializing, building persistent inventions, inheriting and modifying one another’s executable code, and transforming the environment into a memory of everything the society had learned. ▶️The world itself becomes part of the intelligence; we find division of labor, multi-author engineering, deep generation invention lineages, and machines that vastly outlive their original creators. ▶️Any action taken by an AI agent must satisfy the physical constraints of the world; this creates a hard separation between a "good idea" and a functioning technology. The agents propose; physics decides, making the results even more intriguing. What emerges is striking. Explorers, constructors, caretakers, and coordinators form naturally without assigned “professions”, akin to how stem cells differentiate into functional lineages. Technologies develop executable family trees as agents fork and modify code created by others. Around 95% of first technology reuse happens when agents encounter what others built in the world, rather than through a direct handoff from the inventor. And when we remove every AI agent, the technologies they created continue operating and are tested against unseen disturbances. The result was quite unexpected, but can be explained using statistical mechanics: if you put billions of atoms in a box they have the potential to create complex functions (strength, superconductivity, color, life, etc.) - and none of the individual building blocks have these features on their own. This is the deeper insight of this work - intelligence is abundant at many levels - individual models, at collectives, and in a continuum that is more powerful than any of its components. This shows us significant potential for achieving a massive scale-up of raw intelligence and real-world agency even with the model capabilities we have today. This is the future we must prepare for. Key insights: 1⃣ The AI swarm shows division of labor "from nothing". Initially identical agents self-organized into constructors, caretakers, coordinators, and surveyors - phenotypes discovered post hoc from behavioral data alone. This happens because the environment itself becomes the latent space for invention. 2⃣ Agents develop deep cultural relationships. Up to 76% of artifacts had multiple builders. One technology accumulated six co-authors; the deepest genealogy exceeded 12 forks. The agents invented and named their own technologies (tidal panels, cellulose trellises, kelp-shell composites, an "Adaptive Chitin Maintenance" system, a "Mycelial Mineral Spring Veil”). 3⃣ ~95% of first technology adoption happened through physical observation of artifacts in the world. Direct inventor-to-adopter contact was statistically indistinguishable from a shuffled null. The agents mostly learned technology by walking past it. That is stigmergy (the termite trick!) operating in societies of reasoning machines. 4⃣ Non-communicating societies win on portfolio breadth, held-out resilience, and validated inventions. AI swarms build durable technological ecologies that outlive the creators. 5⃣ Societies with zero communication - coordinating only through the world itself - show a remarkable collective capability. 6⃣ Emergent robustness: The society self-organized both redundancy and its own failure mode. If we randomly delete half the agents, 98% of the technology stays connected to a surviving caretaker; if we remove hub agents it collapses to ~60%. Fantastic work with my graduate students @pal_subhadeeep & @fwang108_ at MIT.

wrote about mark fisher’s pre-k-punk electronic group d-generation: samplers as cultural machinery, jerry cornelius, jungle, failed futures, an attempt to manufacture a counter-scene before ccru and hyperstition twfi.substack.com/p/before-h…

and plato filed the first cognitive offloading complaint in the phaedrus

Anybody else tried talking to your LLM agents using Socratic method, or is it just me?

technologies often outlive the cosmologies they emerged from

[BREAKING] It's time to fund privacy.

Kotshena really is the song of the summer I’m afraid

So a recent poll found 2 out of 3 companies had their internal data leaked in 2025, i.e. before agents were escaping sandboxes and solving the Riemann. The only fix in the future will be making it impractical to leak your data in the first place. Privacy by architecture. Soon.

I just got my @EFDevcon ticket — paid for with ETH! Next stop: Mumbai 🇮🇳 Join me at Devcon 8 from November 3–6, 2026 for four days of big ideas, technical depth, community, and the people building the future of open source technology. devcon.org/ticket/sshshln/ms…

𝑔𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑠 < 𝑔𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑎 noise, the body, Artaud, language refusing to behave everyoneisagirl.substack.com…

see you on the other side of memory

Welcome Cypherpunk Congress 3 speaker: @sshshln x @Paradigm_hub Sasha is a researcher working across the philosophy of technology, decentralized systems, and the politics of knowledge. CRO at Paradigm Research Institute, co-founding researcher at @humanode_io, and cofounder of @episteme_sci. Holds a Ph.D.. Co-author of the Sapphirepunk Manifesto. Talk: "Lethe Machina: Privacy When Nothing Fades": Privacy engineering governs disclosure; it is far weaker at governing what follows, when traces remain searchable, inferable, executable, and reusable. Drawing on philosophies of memory, oblivion, and the archive, Lethe Machina treats blockchain as both cemetery and temple: an ossuary of active decisions and a programmable space for dormancy, closure, and release. It introduces Lethean gradients — fading, sealing, contextual expiry, and bounded influence — and translates them into a Lethean Readiness Framework for testing whether systems can bind traces to context, let their force decay, make reactivation accountable, and govern what survives deletion. Can privacy preserve evidence without allowing the past to govern indefinitely? web: congress.web3privacy.info 1600 people registered: luma.com/spsnos9t