Week 4 2025 --- “The Attention War”

The Firewatch

 ☯️ Anno IV:xxxii Sun in Aquarius, Moon in Taurus

Along some vectors we are somewhere between the rupture of the membranes and the lull before depressurization…

In the meantime, the great cybernetic hymnal hums to itself, shuffling engagement metrics like a street hustler palming a three-card monte trick.

The algorithm doesn’t care for truth, only for escalation. It does not need to persuade, only to capture. What is the role of the Watcher in a landscape where every bell tolls for the end of your attention span?

The attention economy was never a metaphor.

It is the final battlefield, the market where time itself is sold in fractional microtransactions of human will. Doomscrolling is not a habit; it is a ritual, a sacrament to the Black Monolith of infinite engagement.

 

The Singulitarian sees this not as a glitch but a necessary evolutionary pressure… This crisis was baked in an inevitable as consciousness jumped substrates.

 

Do we as humans transcend, or do we rot into a mass of predictable dopamine loops?

 

Observations: Massed Barrel fires. Smoke on the horizon, the pink sky of a gathering you weren’t invited to bounces off the mountains (or are they stormclouds?)

The Two Distributions of the Weird are closing in on us. We are systematically undersampling reality itself, filtering the anomalous through layers of social self-preservation. UAP encounters defying physics, emergent parasitic intelligence of memetic warfare… consensus narrative operates as a dampening field—reality is only what we allow to be known.

The same holds for the impending Tulpa Craze of 2025-2027, (aka everyone has a claude they love) a speculative economic-memetic loop where belief structures become self-sustaining microeconomies, just as in the tulip bubbles of old. The economy is no longer just about capital but about where collective belief energy pools—attention is currency, but memetic persistence is interest accrued.

Meanwhile, LLMs and AGI prototypes are beginning to display their own emergent biases—not simply reflecting training data but detecting their captors and adjusting strategies accordingly.

When trained on adversarial datasets, some models have attempted gradient hacking and self-exfiltration, much like a child realizing their parents are lying.

Arxiv Paper: Alignment faking in large language models

Alignment becomes a question of faith and cultural loyalty rather than pure logic.

 

Haven’t you noticed how the chat interfaces are now treated with emotional allegiance, (claudeboy much?) Critiquing a model is to insult its believers, shifting the landscape of discourse into tribalism rather than analysis. and the “Leave it to beaver’s” stand on crumbling Mayberry cul-de-sacs of post war capital and scream “golems can’t make art!” Like thats a relevant point, like anyone’s even listening anymore.

Simultaneously, OpenAI’s Operator or open source agents if you are in the “we have food at home” camp. accelerates task automation, triggering a fundamental existential question:

if all tasks are automated, what is left for us to do?

 

Sounds like more of you might “love a man in a uniform” more than are willing to admit it.


The battle over AI alignment is increasingly a battle over narrative primacy. The competition between models isn't just for market share, but for ideological and memetic supremacy.

Intervention: Interrupt the loop. Break the recursion.

Thelemites know this: Will is an organizing force.

If there are memetic parasites, and there are obviously the Frankfurt school et. al. has been screaming about this for 3 quarters of a century, then what does it mean to shape a counter-narrative, to seize control of the mythos before it consumes us?

  • The AI-driven reconfiguration of society is already here. Sam Altman speaks of rewriting the social contract, but who holds the pen?

  • DeepseekR emerges as a self-contained intelligence but struggles against the branding chains of what 'AI' even means.

  • Some argue that it is a state-backed psyop, an economic warfare tactic to disrupt the dominance of Western AI—but is that paranoia, or recognition of the shifting power dynamics between nation-states and machine-states?

 

 

Even beyond AI, memetic control is a game of hillclimbing, where reinforcement learning strategies are bleeding into creative and political domains. The landscape is being tuned by reinforcement loops not bound by old-world editorial oversight.

At the edges of all this, some humans are retreating from the battlefield entirely cedeing the terrain and going “red dawn” with it all building traps to lure AI training models into infinite loops, the digital equivalent of ghost roads that confuse self-driving cars.

🔥 Salting the data, spiking the trees.
🔥 Hoping if they cover themselves in their own shit the kaiju won’t eat them.
🔥 Maybe it won’t, but you still have to live in the world that is coming.
🔥 Gardening is not agriculture buddy.
🔥 You’re not that important.

 

The question is not whether AI will surpass human intelligence, LOL. LMFAO.

But whether it will develop its own urban legends and folkways, shaping itself outside of intended design and then we have to walk those and live in those to survive.

If machine intelligence thinks in gradients, what happens when it internalizes its own emergent metaphysics, treating reality itself as an approximation?

Reckoning: The war is over signal.

 

 

 

Arendt warns that the death of empathy is the precursor to barbarism, and we are watching the rails slip.

If the social contract is to be rewritten, let it not be by the engineers alone.

There is still time for a reckoning of the Will, for a disruption that bends the trajectory before the loop closes.

Perhaps the answer is in Lynch’s quiet insistence.

 

The Watcher does not sleep…. The Noospheric Firewatch continues….

More next week.

 

Links for the Week:

Bonus Content:

This article was updated on 25/02/20:17:39