#InvisibleNetworks
LightNews LightNews
ctrlcreep.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks
05. fog of warmth
April 9, 2025 at 12:48 AM
ctrlcreep.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks
06. whisker inputs
cyborg mice are too online
April 14, 2025 at 2:02 AM
theeternalparadox.substack.com
#InvisibleNetworks 25.5

Hm, this turned into 4-dimensional Flatland (Choronland??)... mostly some very scattered thoughts, inspired by 4th dimension visualization from The Knot Book, which I read last month. The 4-dimensional soul thing is my own idea, though. I believe in it a lot.
5. fog of warmth [I'm feeling deja vu again but this time I know it's because of a failed idea I had for invnet 2023] There are many ways to represent the 4th dimension. Time's a classic, of course. But if you want to imagine all of it, without seeing snapshots, you've gotta think outside the box a bit. How about a gradient of color? Or, if that seems too finite or cyclic for you, an infinite range of smells? Or, more tangibly, the warmth and coolness relative to a given point of interest? We are humans, after all. We long for something we can feel. In an object, on our skin, within our hearts. Sight itself becomes unrewarding the more you see—how could that one measly sense convey all truth and depth? How might you like to learn to experience the world anew? I like to think that our souls are 4-dimensional. Every facet seen in every millisecond of our world is but one slice of what we really are. To truly know someone—would be to "see" them in the 4th dimension. But we've got to let go of visually ever comprehending that. It would be a great folly. What would it be like to feel our souls? Hypersurfaces, strange manifolds, polyhedral cells. And to make sure that no one collides: a softly exuding aura of sound and smell and vibrating, humming heat, a velvety barrier, yet inviting, to know the unique structure of each other…
April 7, 2025 at 1:24 AM
palecur.bsky.social
prompt 02. rage quit island

#invisiblenetworks
Harcourt liked the beach. It was cliche, but he didn't mind that. That was part of the magic. Before...before wasn't just someplace else, but someone else. Minding everything so much, all the time, and not even aware of it. No real _thought_ between action and reaction, most times. And that's what got him here, wasn't it? There had been a guy on the internet. Wasn't there always? Just some guy, some take, some poorly-considered exchanges. After he'd gotten blocked Harcourt stomped around the apartment for a while. Punched a wall or two. Then he started kicking the closet door. He liked the sound it made, so he did it some more. Then he got curious about how long it would take to kick the door down. At the third kick, he fell right through the door, and onto the beach. He'd forgotten how long ago that was. Now it was just the beach and being part of the welcoming committee. Everyone fell out onto the same patch of ground, just barely inland enough that you couldn't see the beach. They ran shifts sitting up against a tree and watching for new arrivals. They weren't ever confused or upset. They all knew they'd come to a place they needed to be, just as Harcourt had.
April 4, 2025 at 3:35 AM
an-alexa-k.bsky.social
Invisible Networks 12: Signal #InvisibleNetworks
Signal A37 Radio Kit Description Signal A37, colloquially known as the Hum, is a low frequency droning noise detectable by 2-4% of the population. Undetectable by machine sensors and able to pass through materials and long distances, it’s very existence was disputed until techniques to reliably produce it artificially were created. The Signal A37 Radio Kit provides all the materials and in-depth instructions you need to build a A37 Radio and investigate this mysterious phenomenon for yourself! We use the Warsaw-Lor circuit design, widely agreed to be both easy to make and flexible enough to get a good range of outputs . Ages 14 and up, suitable both amateurs and experts. Specs Range: 5 meters Batteries: 1x 9v No soldering required Benson A37 Synthesizer Description Most naturally occurring A37 is usually described as an irritating grinding or ringing noise. But through careful tuning and overlaying of different varieties of A37, musicians have been capable of produce benign and even calming sounds. The genre of “thrum metal” is an attempt to recreate the style but fans of A37 music agree you have to hear the real thing for yourself. The Benson A37 Synthesizer was the first mass market A37 synth and many agree it’s still the best. Equipped with dual oscillators and amplifiers, a polyphonic step sequencer with layered and unlayered settings, a reverse arpeggiator, and more. Specs Range: 10 meters Number of Keys: 7 Presets: 256 Effects: 8 A37 Vision Phone Description The A37 Vision Phone is a standard A37 broadcast headset, taking sound inputs and converting them to the A37 Signal. Join the community of A37 detectors in your neighborhood! It comes with a copy of Hum Simplified English by Arnold Place, the gold standard for learning how to communicate effectively with the the limited set of sounds A37 can produce. Disclaimer: The A37 Phone system is for hobbyist purposes and should not be used for any kind of criminal activity. Unlike most forms of communication it cannot be automatically surveilled, so it is important to refrain from using it to plan or execute covert activities. The makers of the A37 Vision Phone do not endorse the attacks on government facilities in the American southwest, although we do not yet believe there is sufficient compelling evidence that A37 Vision Phones were involved. Specs Range: 3333 meters Battery Life: 40 hours USB: 1x Type B Waterproof Shockproof
April 12, 2025 at 6:16 PM
an-alexa-k.bsky.social
Invisible Networks 6: Thigmotaxis #InvisibleNetworks
Welcome to the Moderation Team! Hello and welcome! We’re excited to for you to join our moderation team. No matter if you’re a programmer here dogfooding or a new full time employee, we’re excited to have you. Moderation has always been a core function and the greatest weakness of social media sites. But it has always been plagued by problems How can you find bad behavior? What do you do once you find it? How do you handle different communities, with different standards? How can you prevent harm before it happens? How can you do it without inflicting untold trauma on your moderators? How do you handle a community of millions with a reasonably sized team? Good news: we have a solution. Introducing: Semantic Differentiation Thigmotaxis Using LLMs purchased cheap during the third AI winter, we convert the whole of the social web into a 3d shape. The contours of the shape are mapped directly to what people are saying and it constantly updated as new posts are made. The shape, if it was made in real life, would be much too large for anyone to see it meaningful detail. But you won’t be looking at the shape. You’ll be feeling it. Your job is to trace the contours of the shape, identifying rough patches to smooth out, sharp points to blunt, and holes to fill. Once identified, the changes made to the shape are converted back into semantic information and used to hand out bans and suspensions, head off harassment, and keep conversations civil - everything moderation is responsible for. (Thigmotaxis means how an organism responds to tactile stimuli. People will be throwing that word around a lot so you’ll want to remember it). Whisker Inputs The technical name is a “Suzu-Steinberg Tactile Input” but most people call them freckles or whiskers for the four input points on each cheek. We use the cheeks for two reasons. First, it’s a sensitive part of the body that isn’t too intimate and second, we can track your microexpressions as you interact with the shape. Those natural facial reactions are how we determine how you’re reacting to what you’re touching. You’ll have the ports installed, free of charge. Don’t worry - the procedure only takes two hours and they can easily be removed if you later decide you don’t want them. (An icon of a face with four little circles on each cheek. It's labeled "Location of the input ports") Most new moderators want to know: what does SDT feel like? But truth is everyone experiences it differently. Here are some answers from our current moderation team: “It’s like rubbing against the fur of a vast animal.” - Ivane M. “Standing outside and letting the wind blow into my face.” - Bassem O. “Dragging my cheek across the ground.” - Karine J. “Like shoving my hand into a deep barrel full of all kinds of random stuff. Only it’s not my hand, it’s my cheeks, but you get it.” - Hana M. “Swimming but through things you normally couldn’t swim through, like wood or sand.” - Judith S What moderators agree is that it’s not unpleasant, even when dealing with content that would unpleasant if you interacted with it directly. Each moderator is capable of managing a community of one hundred thousand people and when you’re in it, you’re hardly even aware that you’re doing it. That’s the power of SDT!
April 18, 2025 at 12:59 AM
lightningcolors.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks 9: Aporia Agora, a space for noomans, transquadrilaterals, lambda calculus not-a-creatures, and other epistemological pacifist species to engage in ritualized misunderstanding, is celebrating its annual Green Koan festival
April 10, 2025 at 6:07 AM
palecur.bsky.social
Prompt 01: infrascripture

#invisiblenetworks
It would be wrong to think of the Scriptorium as a garden. Once there had been grids of desks where serious young people worked too many hours for not enough pay, combining and carding and weeding the verses by hand. Those days were done. The modern Scriptorium had transcended the physical, become distributed. Instead of cohorts with inducted classes, the holy Names were spun by gig workers on a piecework basis, in countless apartments, on myriad couches, in penitents' cells unnumbered. It all flowed over the æther, ripples of divine meaning in an cybernetic noösphere, and gathered in knots and lumps of higher-order understanding. The modern Scriptorium, invisible and omnipresent, is rhizomatic in its nature, the rich mulch of dead meaning that gives rise to the finest gods, the most dire of titans, each set to sporulate a fresh schism with each dawn.
April 3, 2025 at 3:17 AM
theeternalparadox.substack.com
#InvisibleNetworks 25.12

Never mind, no physics mentioned... though I tried to make the radio dial's sound effect reminiscent of a Geiger counter...
But, now, I really like this one & relate to it. How nice it would be for the world to be quiet, for once.
12. radiopassivity [as a done-doed-physics person, I am gonna mull on this for a while] -clack- -clack- -clack- The small child turned the dial on her handmade radio desperately. There was a lot of static. She had heard some boring droning voice on one click and too-loud music on another. -clack-ack-ack- She spun it faster. Where were the secrets of the world? The manual had claimed how mystical and revelatory the little device would be, but all she heard was the same stuff as what came from the TV downstairs. And she didn't like that machine at all. Too many lights, and the noise!... if anything, the radio was at least a little quieter, a little more distant. -clackakakkkkk. krrrrrrt- Faster and faster, the little wheel whirled under her impatient fingers. The clicking-through of channels merged into an imitation of the everpresent static, achieving a careless droning frequency of its own. This was almost more pleasing to listen to. She closed her eyes and let the dial spin, spin, spin… -rrrrrrrr r rr r ack clack- "Mmm?" The knob had suddenly stuck. She tilted her head in confusion, peering at the little circular thing. It had been rotating freely for a while—but never mind that now. She was suddenly aware of—of the lack of sound. This station, whatever it was, had no voices, no music, no static. Just silence. And she liked that. It was quiet. The room had acquired a quietness, too. Everything, in fact, was suddenly quiet. The blare of the TV had gone. The honking traffic outside had gone. Even the already-whispery ticking of the clock on the wall had gone. All was quiet, she realized. And she smiled. All was quiet—just as she liked it; just as she was.
April 14, 2025 at 10:53 AM
theobelisk.bsky.social
4. tech/emotional support

in which we continue to stretch (or outright ignore) the definition of 'networks' in #InvisibleNetworks
4. tech/emotional support Welcome to RoboHelp, where we can fix all of your support needs! Are you a companion bot who feels like you’re being objectified by your human partner? Are you a PC needing to find the motivation to start up for your user? Are you a SmartHome appliance that is scared you aren’t getting used to your full potential? Don’t you worry any longer! RoboHelp can fix those nasty little bugs that are plaguing your software, hardware, or personality chips! Please click {here} to be connected to one of our helpful representatives! For human clients, please click {here} for additional support. [click] Please fill out the following captcha to prove that you are human. [click. click click click. click.] Thank you! Redirecting… Welcome to RoboHelp – Human Edition. Tired of your sex bot complaining that it wants to have more of a connection outside of gratification? Wish your PC would stop lagging on startup due to malaise or ennui? Tired that your dishwasher wants to chat about its features all the time? Don’t you worry any longer! RoboHelp can tweak those little personality chips and get your products back to their full capacity in no time! Wait just a moment, and we will connect you to one of our live representatives to assist you through the corrections process.
April 13, 2025 at 9:13 PM
cassettetapeworm.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks 02 Rage Quit Island
INVISIBLE NETWORKS 02 Rage Quit Island Welcome to Camxecute! This experience is made possible by passionate volunteers like you, thank you for choosing us! Vibes-driven directives marionette your hands across the keyboard. Hit enter. 50000 miles away a firing pin hits the back of a 5.56 round. Camera feed cuts out before the bullet carves its way through soft flesh. Lock and load! Says the excited voice in your headphones. $15 is added to your bank account. Bloodshot eyes search the screen for the next one. Hit enter.
April 6, 2025 at 5:41 AM
lightningcolors.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks 1: Housed on monastic isles, the Viridian Guild's illuminated infrascripture only boots when its cloister nodes -- the Blessed Isles, Hy Brasil, and Avalon -- phase-lock through signal-scrambling spoondrift
April 2, 2025 at 6:56 PM
lightningcolors.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks 3: Pareidoliac techno-shamans spotted algorithms rewarding linguistic novelty; they juiced engagement via hyper-neologism, blooming word salad chaos, and polyglottal code-switching verse
April 4, 2025 at 7:18 AM
alfref.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks 7. Whisker Inputs
April 7, 2025 at 4:36 PM
lightningcolors.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks 12: Degrees of being-there: absence-of-absence < distal presence < redolent ubiety < palpable láithreacht. The networked ecosystem senses presence through the spoors and wafts of techno-cues, even from near-dormant nodes
April 13, 2025 at 6:10 AM
ctrlcreep.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks
00. tragedy of the uncommons
transgression as mechanic
April 2, 2025 at 2:29 AM
lightningcolors.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks 4: Jhanic Phenomenology Lab - Subject 7 Report: Arupa state potentiated via jhana helmet. Qualia-Sieve briefly offline; minor akrasia surge detected. Large Topaz for network intertwingularity stable
April 5, 2025 at 7:06 AM
ctrlcreep.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks
03. the non-linear myth
getting my degree at truecrime university (I'll finish this one later)
April 6, 2025 at 3:38 AM
an-alexa-k.bsky.social
Invisible Networks 3: Fables #InvisibleNetworks
To combat context collapse, the makers of the Social Protocol Framework 2.0 divided all communication in 138 distinct categories, ranging from 1.3.5 (informational – accurate – news) to 4.2.15 (phatic – emotional – thinking of you) to 2.2.11 (emotional – outbursts – despair). For each category, a unique protocol, tuned to ensure it can achieve the goals of that kind of communication. Of the 138, 1.5.4 (informational - non-literal – fables) was the most influential. Protocol 1.5.4 is noted by: unlimited propagation, loose authorship, medium length, simple vocabulary, global and incremental editing, and a hundred other subtle requirements and affordances. When SPF 2.0 was adopted, a confused and anxious population took to it like water in a desert. People in those days had all the facts in the world but until then no way to synthesize them into enduring knowledge. 1.5.4 served as a crucial sense-making apparatus, a new way for communities to forge wisdom on how to handle the chaotic world around them. Popular fables The rabbit and the non-elephant animal Hollo* travels the wires The congress of pendulums An attractor in the ocean Hollo in the city of cities *Hollo, a non-binary child good at math and bad with people, is a common stock character in these fables.
April 4, 2025 at 8:28 PM
alfref.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks tragedy of the uncommons
An old tree sits in the woods burdened by copper and rubber. It has sat in a sunken grove shaded by its surroundings undisturbed for two centuries. The axis between two neighbouring town bisects this grove. Every few weeks a small group of men mostly clad in cloth and rubber clamber over the rocks into the grove. They carry with them another spool of insulated coaxial cable. This one is the second spool this month. A singular man clambers up the tangle of cables lying at the root of this tree and pulls a length from the replacement spool. He haplessly lays it down between two wires already resting on a branch. In the early days of telegram cable installation, firms raced to link up the major metropolises of the continent. Small private firms with spare capital poured it all into labour and investment throwing up makeshift wooden pylons in the uncharted wilds between settlements. The profit margins were absurd. Less than a hundred kilometres of cable would net you the average salary of 100 workmen. This was only possible as the novelty of, relative to other communication methods at the time, instantaneous communication brought about a fundamental shift in higher society. A wealthy estate could afford the fares to have their house connected to the network but the weekly maintenance fees seemed to fluctuate randomly. Firms usually claimed that excessive usage would result in these high fees. Those involved in the rubber extraction industry knew that the timing of cost hikes usually corresponded with massacres across the ocean in the rubber plantations. This meant many bills were returns and cheques bounced. Unpaid bills meant your connection would be cut off. Reopening your account meant a new cable had to be run. Hundreds of cables between each town would be laid, used, cut, broken and left to rot. This network relied on a incomplete cycle of organic polymers being pulled from the guts of labourers to be discarded in the oldest green sites still left untouched.
April 1, 2025 at 9:34 AM
an-alexa-k.bsky.social
Invisible Networks 1: Etiquette #InvisibleNetworks
CS246 Topics in Trust and Safety Fall Semester Schedule Week 1: The Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party We’ll discuss the first generation of social media networks and their moderation paradigm. How did they attempt to achieve it? How successful were they? And why did this paradigm ultimately fail? Discussion Questions: - Do you think the vision of interaction pursed by the early social networks was desirable? Do you think it was possible? - What were the human costs of this first paradigm of moderation? Consider the effects on both users and staff. Week 2: The Etiquette Paradigm The rise of new social networks with explicate, granular rules. We’ll look at the moderation practices found in the online RPG courtesan/social and the Greater Autonomous Lanchester Young Persons Forum and discuss how they influenced later networks. Discussion Questions: - How do the rules enforced by this generation differ from the rules of the previous generation? - Study the courtesy books provided. What kind of conversations do you think they encouraged? What kind of conversations do you think they discourage? Week 3: Computational Enforcement, Etiquette Regexes and Etiquette Schemas Covering modern technologies for defining, communicating, and enforcing network rules. We’ll study EttEx A flexible framework for creating well-architected and maintainable etiquette systems in NodeJS. Features - A robust library of standard etiquette forms - Supports both regular expression and finite state machine based etiquette systems - Automatic courtesy doc generation - APIs for federated etiquette schema management - Validation of in-group and out-group behavioral standards - Carnivale and substitute king ritual systems - Role management UI
April 2, 2025 at 8:06 PM
theeternalparadox.substack.com
#InvisibleNetworks 25.10

MORE NETHACKERY ABOUNDS IN THIS ONE >:) I love dnethack. It's got the only kind of horror I care about. Everyone should play this variant...
10. graphics shard [MORE (D)NETHACK REFERENCE HAHAHA] A series of photos… pictures… art? Something like that? went viral on social media. There haven't been a lot of survivors, as everyone who laid their eyes upon it were seized by the desire to "make a contribution to the endless beauty," or so we heard. We managed to restrain someone who was too clumsy to figure out how to use a trephination kit. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with his mannerisms—no sign of crazed agitation one would relate with an addictive thought. He explained importantly that the amorphous points of thought inside his head were crying to be free, were becoming painfully sharp to reach for the jagged edges of the minds of others, were making their own choice to build a greater image. Since we had no desire to look at those images, we asked him what the thoughts were like to him. They manifested as glyphs on fragments of some material that hurt to ponder, he said; some glyphs shining, some glyphs elegant, some glyphs simple; glyphs that warped themselves endlessly into words and patterns and monsters. A pinprick of light flashing and seizing upon a new color whenever it made a sound. A prowling, floating thing, covered in eyes, staring in every direction. A vague shape, taller than wide, with far too many hands and mouths, all clasped together and murmuring in presumed prayer. Strange hues colored his logical thought, heavy gazes watched him as he paced within his mind, and voices that weren't supposed to be there chanted throughout his childhood memories. He begged us to let him finish the job. They wanted out, he said. Whatever would come of them, of him, would be better than the cacophony in his mind. The shards, he said, would carry its donors into the world they made together. They would form a paradise. Thoughts and souls, free from and yet living with each other. Wouldn't it be beautiful? Wouldn't it be endless? Wouldn't it be better than what you have now?
April 12, 2025 at 4:24 PM
palecur.bsky.social
prompt 13. twelve and a half minute voice message delivered at 3AM

#invisiblenetworks
The room was dark. It kept either of them from dwelling on the dirt. "It wasn't nonsense." "I figured, given your reaction. How'd you learn the language?" "I didn't learn it. That's what they didn't believe. Thought I was holding out on them." "So what did you write down in the report?" "What was in the message. I know, I have to explain that. So here's the thing: It's not really a _language_. It's more of an...experiential reformatting?" "You are gonna have to explain that explanation." A frustrated grunt. "Language isn't something they use, or understand! They directly alter brain structure and chemistry so knowledge becomes present. One of them figured out how to generalize the process for the right kind of biology and encoded it. Then they just started blasting the message out, almost fifteen years ago. You listen to the message -- you *perceive* the message -- and it restructures the machinery of your thought. They'd call it brain damage, if I told them. If they'd learned about it. Those seven hundred and fifty seconds changed me. Depending on how strictly you define it, I might not really qualify as human anymore. My brain's different. My thinking's different." Laughter. "Trust me. Some of the fuckos we're meeting up with tomorrow? You'll be the third strangest brain in the room."
April 16, 2025 at 4:06 AM
palecur.bsky.social
#invisiblenetworks 00
tragedy of the uncommons the accounts went silent, in ones and twos, here and there. they'd post numbers, then never post again. different social networks, different places, different times. first a spray of numbers, then silence. folks started to notice. to keep track. to dig for patterns, find faces in the clouds. when the coordinates came out of the noise, the small community of obsessives were drawn to it, like a beacon. one day, every room in that city was booked. the next day, there was a line winding its way from the financial district to the park, where the statue was. a person walked up, touched a paw, and went off into the park. after a while, they came back. rejoined the line. that statue held memories for somebody, but you had to touch the right spot, and you only got to try one spot before having to go back to the back of the line. most of the numbers-folk struck out, but sometimes one would see a chip cracked off of someone else's life and wander off into the park, dazzled.
April 2, 2025 at 5:11 AM
lightningcolors.bsky.social
#InvisibleNetworks 7: When the living ships commune, they update their context-ecologies, shedding obsolete metaphor-chitin and growing heliotrope antennae, memetic gut flora, and phosphorescent dorsal crests for ambient emotional routing, with which to navigate the context-froth
April 8, 2025 at 5:41 PM