2026 CE

Current year.

1. Week 8
   1. u56w09e22:28
   2. The last hour
2. Week 9
   1. The objective
      1. Vision
      2. Problem
      3. Solution
      4. Statement
3. Week 10
   1. Double diamonds
4. Week 11
   1. Ego death
   2. Eternal recurrence
5. Week 12
   1. Persona AI app idea
   2. A bookend
   3. Topics and logs
   4. Sex, death and consciousness
   5. Dramatis personAI
6. Week 13
   1. Organisations are decisions
7. Week 14
   1. Italic and OCR
   2. Play and society
   3. Symbolic world and society
8. Week 15
   1. Creative, collective, ludic
9. Week 16
   1. Joy and new plays
      1. Between joy and play
   2. MasquerAIde
10. Week 17
    1. Life itself
       1. Life I want
       2. Life-bio
    2. “Enable autonomy”
    3. Risk assessment
    4. Artificial consciousness
11. Week 18
    1. Elude by Ludi
       1. Bye for now
    2. Praxis
    3. The burden
12. Week 19
    1. Kill your darling
    2. Pattern recognition
    3. When stars are aligned
       1. Posthumanism: the idea
       2. Autonomy: the strategy
       3. Plays: the practice
       4. Aspect
    4. Frames that people bind
13. Week 20
    1. Ethos
       1. Saner, sanest
    2. Character
       1. In practice
14. Week 21
    1. Lightness
    2. Back online
       1. Persona definition
    3. Life that doesn’t scale
15. Week 22
    1. Small caps
    2. “Bottom-up society”
    3. Ludicity
    4. Social use of AI
    5. The first diamond
    6. Good news
16. Week 23
    1. Persona
    2. Strategy
       1. Phase 1: foundation
       2. Phase 2: connections
       3. Phase 3: applications
    3. Hollowness
    4. The essence
17. Week 24
    1. Ludics
       1. The project
    2. The mission
       1. Uniqueness
18. Week 25
    1. Let people know people
    2. Authenticity and reciprocity
    3. Ideas looked through ‘persona’
       1. Projects: extended applications
       2. Plays: personae as frames
19. Week 26
    1. The thing to build
    2. Small failure
    3. The bridge
    4. Mirror and window
    5. The promise
    6. The door
    7. The habits
    8. Super!
20. Week 27
21. Week 28
22. Week 29
23. Week 30
24. Week 31
25. Week 32
26. Week 33
27. Week 34
28. Week 35
    1. The repository
29. Week 36
    1. Autonomy.
    2. More than an means to an end
30. Week 37
    1. Founder mode
    2. A thing
    3. Create your AI persona
    4. For whom?
    5. Egoist machine
    6. The social layer
       1. Intersubjective enactment
31. Week 38
    1. Constellation
    2. Trust
32. Week 39
    1. Selling it
    2. My thing
    3. The hard thing
33. Week 40
    1. Sociality
    2. “Play who you want to be”
    3. Pain without autonomy
       1. Tacking
34. Week 41
35. Week 42

Read¹

Week 8

This one long markdown, a corpus, is where my daily notes will be from now on. The old notes from Obsidian and Notes are also archived in markdown. The main reason is that I can easily inject these as my personal context when I work with LLMs. It’s a hassle when notes are scattered across the UI snippets and tiny files. I’d like to keep things in a few corpora.

Each file will be annual. Daily files are too tiny. Weekly might be cool. But still, 50 and more files a year take some listing logic. I don’t want to use a collection. I can manually handle files as long as I keep it yearly.

The point is keeping the context in fewer files, not weekly project management. I can do that in Notion. This is where I just spill out and later ask machines to take a look. It’s for artificial consciousness.

u56w09e22:28

I’m using Unix year. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. 1970 is the epoch, but it’s the year zero, not year one. This is the mathematically correct way. This year is 2026 CE, which is Unix year 56. Reasons are:

• CE comes from a particular religion
• Could keep it neutral and technical
• Unix provides a good epoch
• 2 digits are better than 4
• Conversion is trivial

It’s my personal convention. So I’m prioritising my preference over compatibility. This is possible because I decided to make this place my own.

Week calendar follows. There is already a widely accepted ISO standard for it. I prefer weeks over months because:

• Months are agricultural and maritime, reflecting seasons
• 30 days are not granular enough for project cadence
• Society already works based on the 7-day cadence. There is a well-established custom for it.

Week numbers are going to be the level 1 headings.

Days in the week:

1. A: Monday
2. B: Tuesday
3. C: Wednesday
4. D: Thursday
5. E: Friday
6. F: Saturday
7. G: Sunday

And I always preferred 16:30 over 4:30 PM.

Putting it all together. It’s u56w09e22:28 now.

The last hour

It’s the last hour of Week 8.

I’ve migrated most of my old notes into these annual logs. I wanted to do this when I was just back. But I did not have the energy. This is the time. I feel it.

Week 9

I translated the original texts and fixed grammar. Apparently, I make a lot of typos. Now that it’s translated into English, I want to give my past works a good read someday.

I had to cut out good chunks of bullet lists. They don’t really make sense once time has passed. And it’s difficult to pull off prose later.

I should write down prose when I have an idea. That’s the only way it survives time. I should process each log annually as well.

Each year:

• Summarise yearly activity on top
• Scan body for typos and errors
• Update navigation

The objective

My vision is not my solutions. I have been confusing myself with the two. Vision creates problems. Or, rather, problems are different perspectives observing the same vision. It’s how we feel the vision not being the reality. Only then, there can be solutions that approach the problems.

Instead, I’ve been putting up my vision as potential solutions. Anyone, even myself, would have been confused by such transposition.

Vision

My vision is society as a form of life. I always saw society as a living entity in its infancy. I could depict what it looks like in its maturity. But that would be not much more than a science fiction. People speculated what progress would look like. Progress surely happened but in ways people never expected. The world is affluent now, but affluence looks different across the globe. I can’t predict the future precisely. But I know that cybernetic humanity is possible. We have everything we need to build organic social systems.

Problem

Then what’s the real problem people experience when society hasn’t fulfilled its potentials? It’s sustainable growth. In other words, it’s the eternal tension between flexibility and stability. Motion and structure compete. Life has been evolving through the systems that consolidate the two. People want change, but worry something might break. ¹

And there’s also the alignment challenge between the society and consciousness. Inside, people feel that something is missing in their life. It’s because they don’t see things to synthesise in their minds; and higher consciousness remains dormant when there’s nothing to connect. They would talk about ‘lack of motivation’. So they need something in their lives to synthesise.

But also, they worry their society might not pay off their pursuits calling them ‘hobbies’. Consciousness is costly inside and hobbies are costly outside. If there’s no growing feedback cycles or a generative order, their energy simply scatters into the gaping void of night sky when they talk about the ‘stupid things’ they tried.

Solution

And plays are the solution I’m holding in my hand. What do plays really enable? Most importantly, they test many different social systems across time. The value is in the information such iterations generate.

Currently, social interaction relies on either tradition or contingency. One is stable in long-term but monolithic, the other is generative but chaotic.

Plays are creative but also structured. Participants can experience and make decisions. Their scripts align the mind and the world by drawing a clear line between them. Distinction makes distance, but also clarifies that the plays are the artificial bridge. This way, people are not anxious anymore from the cognitive dissonance. Mind can’t be the world, vice versa. But they certainly can be bridged. That’s how plays consolidate flexibility and stability of social interactions. Plays can shape reality because they are ephemeral and illusory.

Statement

I’ve written a statement to put up at the root.

Everything flows. Life’s goal is never an arrival. It’s to keep changing until we become capable of even more change. Such flexibility is the source of sustainability across our biology, individuality and society.

Progress can be organic when we try many other lives. With identity held softly, we can experiment with temporary social systems and rewrite the old rules we play by. Autonomy builds the future society.

Once, the act of commerce was considered parasitic. Agrarians did not see the value in moving things around and charging extra. Now, capitalism generates the most information about society we live in.

Inevitably, modern society became satiated with material affluence. Markets are selling more decadence than progress. Lack of meaning is cornering people into mental conditions and political cannibalism.

Meanwhile, machine intelligence frees the human body from labour. We are one step away from solving the most pressing problems or becoming the problem itself. This is the time for a new foundation.

Week 10

Double diamonds

The distinction between vision and solution resembles what designers call Double Diamond. The first diamond represents the high-level, conceptual research. And the second one stands for tangible outcome. This brilliant design of design process easily evokes double-loop learning and the functional relation of strategy and tactics.

1. Discover: divergent inquiry
2. Define: convergent conclusion
3. Develop: divergent ideation
4. Deliver: convergent impact

Facing life and work, I started from a simple question. “What is most significant in life?” I reckoned it’s society. The human environment mostly decides what happens in our lives and how we are going to receive it. The most significant work we can do is not to win it or resist it but to shape it. This is my first diamond.

Of course, this first diamond is highly conceptual and doesn’t really solve a problem on its own. My inquiry is even more comprehensive and philosophical than a typical design challenge. That’s where confusion begins. When I ask myself ‘What’s in it for the people?’, it’s difficult to answer. If I say something like ‘growth’, am I supposed to be doing growth coaching stuff? Not really, my work is precisely in social systems.

Nonetheless, the first diamond enables the second one. It starts from the lack of progress, lack of autonomy, lack of stability, the unease, angst. According to the Double Diamond framework, this is where I should engage the divergent ideation to solve this problem. I am ready to create and serve anything they need for it. And I can be my first audience.

Week 11

People can change society. That is the key transition, the foundation of my work. People usually feel like they have to endure or evade society. They might win it or ignore it, but never create it. And I say people do have power over their social reality. My work is to build a coherent and convenient framework that makes this social control evident and accessible. ¹

I’ve been trying to articulate this simple value proposition and it was impossible to get back to this fundamental truth by myself. Then, in an exploratory conversation, I’ve received a feedback that my focus seems to be playing with and taking conscious control of society deliberately and proactively. I mean, duh.

Why social systems? Because society decides too much for us. How social systems? Plays and projects. Make them temporary, experimental, and ludic. They are supposed to be interesting and fun. And eventually, people can shape what the future society looks like.

‘Social systems studio’ already implies that we can directly experiment with society the creative and artisanal way. At the dawn of this year, I reassured myself that my work lies in the direct design of social systems. There’s no mistake in there.

From now on, my strategy would be the core concept, the people who need it, and the little things I create for them. Keep writing, start talking to people, and be ready to create something awesome.

Ego death

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

— Mahatma Gandhi

What does Iternity answer to? I’m pretty sure there is a precise angle that led me to this conclusion. But it’s also very much of a panacea. It’s the answer that silences all questions. It allows ego death.

The feeling of questions and tensions haunts my mind like the residue of memory. I assume that is the work of my ego. In the morning, when clarity sets in, I see the light where those problems burn away. Is that iternity? Perhaps that’s simply how I call it.

Eternal recurrence

Die ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen

Nietzsche talked about the eternal recurrence of the same. But how can cycles that are exactly the same prove their own sameness? Or difference? They require an iterative memory in or out.

If the memory is inside, every iteration is different. If the memory is outside, the observer is different from the recurrence. So eternal recurrence can’t be really the same.

That must be why Deleuze talked about Difference and Repetition. An iteration must include the information from the last cycle.

Week 12

Chat is not magic. The first version of the book from last week is not satisfying. But the direction is right. It’s meaningful to coin a word for my ontology and start a vision of the future from it. And it’s meaningful to have a foundational text for my future work.

I learnt that I can’t make Chat spit a book. I need to write it myself. But I can keep it messy and free, write a messy, low resolution version of it. Then I can let machines iron it for me. I’m using LLMs to refine my crude writing, not to fill it.

Persona AI app idea

I was thinking that I should make Claude play myself. Then an idea struck me. If I can talk to my clone, others can too. Wouldn’t creators’ supporters want to talk to the creator?

Creators could distribute their AI personae. They can accumulate notes to create an organic persona. Unlike a character card, a persona is alive, long-running and semi-fictional. Typical AI apps prohibit character cards for real people because users abuse. Only creators themselves have the rights.¹ It reflects the reality the creator creates. Daily entries update the persona. The app can create questions for the creator to effectively expand their persona.

It’s different to a chatbot. An AI persona is a transient mask for social interaction, not an independent content generator.

Users can chat with the persona in parasociality. The user must be informed that the clone is a clone, not the real creator. And the creator still has access to the chat because the user is talking to them anyway. The user may or may not have a secret chat. The creator has control over how their persona represents themselves.

This idea uses AI to reproduce social interaction, answering the opportunity for social AI app Seth wrote about. In terms of ludic social systems, creators write plays that machines play for them. The persona data and followers will be a major differentiator to other AI and social apps.

Creators can monetise the support from their fans. The app can absorb social media with an AI-native content studio. Or, it can generate for creators to post on other platforms.

A bookend

It will take longer than expected (as usual) to finish the book. I know I can work on it step by step. But still, every word I choose feels like a trap. There is much doubt and little conviction.

I can give it as much time as needed. It’s not critical for my mission. But its potential is profound in my mind. I have a great theme, Iternity and a flow.

• Life’s telos
  • Power and control
  • Sex, death and consciousness
• Social systems
  • Democracy
  • Autonomy
• Posthuman cybernetics
  • Machine intelligence
  • The ludic society

Reframe life as iterations reaching for eternity. Describe how society emerges from self-organising patterns. Project the future society as a series of plays where people freely experiment with social configurations.

Someday.

Topics and logs

Do I need to organise my ideas somehow in topics? To use them for the book later? Not really. The whole point of having yearly logs was to not worry about organisation when I am writing things down. When I come up with a new or recurring idea, I can simply capture it here and later process it with an LLM.

The only difference from the older notes is that I’m going to write my ideas down in paragraphs rather than bullet points. Bullets work when the context is clear. They lose some weight for the sake of brevity. But when I am freely writing in the general context, bullet notes end up unrecognisable.

I had to archive a massive amount of notes because they were incomprehensible after years. LLMs might use them but reading them with my own eyes goes nowhere.

I have ideas sparkling on top of my head every day. If I try to put them into posts and put them somewhere, I’m basically tricking myself into writer’s labour I’m not good at. Instead, I can simply jot them down here concisely but in elegant prose.

Sex, death and consciousness

Outlining the table of contents for the book, I reckoned that I didn’t write down one of the most fascinating ideas from my study. It’s about how life, life itself, speeds up progress with new mechanisms like sex, death, or consciousness.

They are interesting because they also come with shortcomings, especially for the individual entities. Sexual reproduction shuffles genes and increases diversity every generation but it also introduces loneliness and extra work for mating. Programmed death controls cancer, enables massive genetic information storage and paces generational progress in conjunction with sex. But the telomeres and linear DNA also result in, well, death. Higher consciousness makes your brain random access information networks in and out of your body. It’s how society can be. But it hallucinates when it doesn’t feel like it.

The tradeoffs later extend to the dire situation in post-plague Europe that enabled the Age of Discovery and eventually modernisation. Every cloud has a silver lining. Extreme poverty made Calvinists come up with strict frugality and picky reinvestment. And they drafted the first capitalist systems.

The moral of the story is that the ultimate virtue changes over time and that we cannot make real progress when we hold our current values too tightly. Rigid identity corrupts. The only telos of life is to explore and to experiment what can be.

Dramatis personAI

A persona is a strategic mask of identity in public, the public image of one’s personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional character. It is also considered “an intermediary between the individual and the institution.”*

Plays start with a section called ‘dramatis personæ’ or ‘the persons in the play’. And this AI persona idea is rising as the foundation of the ludic social systems.

The main appeal is pseudo-interaction with creators. Followers can have personalised conversations with the persona. The creator can introduce a bit more in-depth personality rather than the superficial images and shows.

But there is something more to it. It’s more than a scalable entertainment. The personae could be the new engine for the social interaction.

First, it can enable autonomy because anyone can reflect on themselves by talking to their own persona. This will provide a much clearer mirror especially when the user lacks healthy self-awareness.

Second, it can foster social networking because people can talk to any public persona, not just the famous creators. Algorithms can also suggest whom to talk to.

Third, this could extend to something Iternal because there is this gap between a persona and its person.

It feels different to projects and plays I’ve been thinking about. They are more like solid plans, sessions. Having LLMs in between is both empowering and overwhelming. But that instability is perhaps where it can finally begin. As long as personae help people grow, they are doing the job. The point is people, society, not my silly design ideas.

Week 13

For years, I’ve been looking for a better way to weave society. Theories, conditions, mechanisms. I dived into questions. What moves people? What aligns individuals and society? What would enable self-organising society? The only comprehensible answer was the very nature of life. Society had to be iterative. That is how I came up with plays as ludic social systems.

Caring society so much, both my ideas for the use of AI came from people. First, AI that acts like people. Second, AI that represents real people. Either way, it means a synthesis of human intelligence and machine intelligence, posthuman cybernetics. That is where I am going with this.¹

Yet I don’t see how the persona ideas seamlessly integrate to the plays idea. I was always thinking about real people in real activities and experience. How could talking to an LLM lead to some real experience? There are existing ideas like Delphi. But they are mostly about work and knowledge.

At the same time, I can’t deny the profound potential behind it. AI is growing rapidly in its infancy. But it’s mostly for work and knowledge, not social interactions. The world has a lot more people than Claude. And LLMs do affect the human psyche. After all, society is storytelling. Seth called for AI that connects people in the next generation of AI businesses.

Organisations are decisions

Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.

— Niklas Luhmann

Talcott Parsons wrote The Social System. And Niklas Luhmann, one of Parsons’ disciples, has written Social Systems.

The pluralisation is profound. Luhmann thought society includes many subsystems like economy, law and art. He categorised them into three: interactions, organisations and society. Interactions are the talks. Organisations are the decisions. Society is the sum.

I am pluralising it further. Plays are small, temporary decisions soon to be expired. The reason is simple. People can’t prosper on old decisions when reality changes by day.

Week 14

Actions can’t be as elaborate as thoughts. Actionable ideas are a subset of ideas. They must be simple. Actions come with their own complexity anyway.

There is no synthesis of the personae and the plays. It is what it is. Even if there is one, I can’t start from there. The persona idea is worth working on. It may grow into plays, maybe not.

Live in the future, then build what’s missing.

The more important vision is what life looks like in ludic social systems. I must live it to build what’s in it.

Italic and OCR

Homo Ludens is considered public domain. So I wanted to keep it in markdown. And now I see that it’s extremely difficult to OCR books accurately. Tesseract is too old to get the glyphs right. Even the latest, transformer-based models can’t mark what’s italic. Agents spend an hour processing the scan and just crash.

Play and society

The initial part of Homo Ludens instantly proves why it’s one of the classics. The author skillfully shears the lesser convictions around play and promotes it to something beyond. Apparently, play precedes culture and humanity. It exists throughout the history of life.

The elaborate profile of ‘play’ aligns with my inspirations with striking similarity.

• Play is world-creation.
• Play is significant.
• Play is aesthetic.
• Play is freedom.
• Play is order.

One interesting note is that ‘play is irrational’. It makes me think about irrational numbers and what they represent. Could it be an analogy for the progress of humanity and the future society? Natural numbers count what exists for hunter-gatherers. Integers count polarity and manage loss for agrarians. Rational numbers count proportion to optimise for capitalists. Real numbers, with irrational numbers, count continuity, smooth variation and fuzzy boundaries. For whom?

What I bring to play is social systems, machine intelligence and my will to synthesise them. The author clarifies that play is an extra activity, so it should be leisure in the ‘free time’ and that it’s only necessary when recreation is. This is precisely the time both are true. People would keep playing as long as it’s sustainable. Can I turn this into a comprehensive system? How can play sustain itself in growing feedback cycles? Are we still preliminary to this? Whatever the answer is, it starts from small things.

Symbolic world and society

Play is many things in Homo Ludens. The most distinctive aspect is the interaction between symbolic layer and the physical layer of the world.

Thus in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.

Other formal characteristics of play are rather variable depending on how much dedicated it is. But this notion of vertical integration draws a fine line for what play is.

But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter.

This notion of mind is analogous to how the genetic material shapes the body, then the consequence of the body shapes genetics. Genes are not just a part of the body. They are pieces of information, a body of chemical knowledge. That’s why biology handles them separately as ‘genotype’ and ‘phenotype’.

Likewise, play lives in the nervous system. Mind is not just a function of body. The mind dictates how the body of the animal moves, then the experience of the body loops back to the mind. This is why play seems to be disinterested in matter but also not the entirety of mind.

Play is precisely the significant experience we create ourselves to align the mind and the body.

The worst things happened when people confused the symbolic reality with the physical reality. They are separate but tied to each other. When zealots take the holy (but old) text literally, they become murderers. When capitalists install the money game as the supreme rule of the universe, people suffer. The ethics of play is to acknowledge the gap between the two worlds.

Now we have a clear view of ‘Ludens’. But there is one more important distinction we need to make for the ‘Homo’ part. Human is an animal species, albeit a social one. The peculiar sociality of humanity goes well beyond coordination with few others around us. E. O. Wilson, after all his study of eusocial animals, states that humanity also have eusociality but with a twist. Unlike bees, ants or naked molerats, human beings practice eusociality divided between society and individuality. And this confusing concept still makes people question if we are even eusocial.

For play, this distinction means that human play is also divided into two: of the animal species and society. It’s interesting to see how the author senses the gap but puts it subtly:

Since our theme is the relation of play to culture we need not enter into all the possible forms of play but can restrict ourselves to its social manifestations. These we might call the higher forms of play. They are generally much easier to describe than the more primitive play of infants and young animals, because they are more distinct and articulate in form and their features more various and conspicuous, whereas in interpreting primitive play we immediately come up against that irreducible quality of pure playfulness which is not, in our opinion, amenable to further analysis. We shall have to speak of contests and races, of performances and exhibitions, of dancing and music, pageants, masquerades and tournaments. Some of the characteristics we shall enumerate are proper to play in general, others to social play in particular.

Though the distinction is not as poignant as it could be. I reckon this gap is both the culprit of some confusions in the author’s thoughts and a foundation for ludic social systems. The author laments the loss of play in the modernising society. But the essence of play is not the visceral fun or whatever the “pure playfulness” is. It’s the symbolic reality at play. And it was never lost. Modern people might have stopped having fun with trivial games. But most of peasants never had played social plays from the first place. They were simply having animalistic play when they could like the cubs and the children. Most of social plays were done by royals and nobles. Huizinga’s own study of play was heavily focused on chivalry and court affairs which are politically profound.

When modernisation hit the world, the lower class didn’t stop playing. They simply started playing the social games they don’t understand: markets, bureaucracy and capitalism. They performed the labour of it but not understand the significance. So it was not fun, because play is not play when one’s nervous system doesn’t read it. Nonetheless, they effectively became a part of the social play for the first time. And once they understand the new rules, they were back in the play. The ticket was not so cheap. But, compared to the feudal regimes, it was much easier to make the transition. That’s how democracy rose to power after millenia of autocratic proliferation.

This distinction is important because ludic social systems must be about the social play. It doesn’t mean they exclude the animalistic play. The conceptual fine line doesn’t exist in reality. They are all mixed up like constructive capital and mindless consumption are mixed up in the markets. But if the markets don’t embody the capital in some proportion, they collapse. It’s their job to channel the mindless consumption to the capital, not to exclude it.

Week 15

Finalised the code highlight colours. macOS Classic was the reference I was looking for. Also refined typography with true small caps and scoped hanging punctuations. Style matters.

Creative, collective, ludic

Sailors, merchants, bookkeepers. People who struggled at the outskirts of agriculture eventually built the foundation of capitalism, the rational social system. And I reckoned that who builds the next one is creatives.

Before I ventured to the other side of the globe, I was leaning into society. Despite my training in fine art and creative work, the sheer magnitude of social systems was calling me. I went to the art school just to meet people anyway. I looked into anthropology, history of progress, systems theory and social philosophy. I wanted to build something on top of social recognition and social credits.

Then after the excursion that took me more than a year, my world was shaken. Besides all, the confusion and frustration that I couldn’t achieve anything meaningful with my work thus far, were devastating. I wanted to find a way. And I had to let go of my social studies.

Instead, along with my recovery, I focused on creators. They were creating actual value unlike my theoretical frameworks. And I thought, if they can use their influence for something educational, they could be the creative leaders of a new society. It felt like a return to my background in creative work. So I went into the world of content creation, learning experience design and my creator apps idea but no luck.

I circled all the way back and I’m standing on a synthesis between creatives and plays as ludic social systems. It feels old and new at the same time. Because it melts the questions I asked myself years ago and the answers I only came up with last week in one pot.

From social studies perspective, my insight has reached that social system must be pluralised and multiplied. This is surprisingly coherent to one of my earlier conclusions. “Better connection only comes after better separation.” Granularity can enable progressive social change. Like what Honneth called for, society can only change in small experiments.

Last year was mostly about answering questions around this core idea. People can change society one step at a time with some kind of temporary social units. But who would do that? Why and how? Typical responses were too business-like, self-help oriented. I felt like I already knew the answers deep inside. So I asked my insight more than observation. That’s how I came up with play as ludic social systems. Unlike projects, plays don’t yield a deliverable but experience. Time limit is not “deadline” anymore. It’s just a boundary for safety.

Still, plays needed a place to live, where people are already living that way. Now I see the creatives, whom I referred as “studios” couple years ago, are the ones. At that time, I knew that they are special and that they are demographics I wanted in my life. But didn’t know what to do with them precisely. Now I come with plays.

Creatives need to keep their internal processes going. Their work are not quite available for compression or optimisation like the irrational numbers. They can go the extra mile if it inspires them and builds momentum. They simply can’t work stuck and lost unlike other productions that can get institutionalised. They need to keep playing. That’s why they need ludic social systems.

“Social” there doesn’t mean I am modelling collaboration. It’s something deeper, internal, fundamental. I must start from their creative autonomy. Then I should carefully connect where plays help their respective autonomy. For the sake of clarity, an analogy would be one’s own bank account. Reliable bookkeeping of one’s assets is absolute necessity for capitalist society to rise. Because that’s what people hold in their hands at the end of the day.

So I’m not going to shove the grandiosity of “Ludic Social Systems” into their faces. Instead, I’ll put their creative work at the core, because this is a real implementation, not a theory. The rise of collectives is a particularly interesting one. It’s one of the reactions to the commercial machine intelligence as well. People need orchestration and coordination over conventional employment and hierarchy. This is precisely where plays are needed. A more flexible structure can maximise creative output while maintaining stability. And this is the direction sustainability is shifting to.

Again, deliverables are only side-effect. Ludic social systems should benefit the creative the most, not their clients. Even the most seasoned creatives can feel tied to their identity and media. Plays introduce a fresh angle over productivity: sustainable creativity, collective inspiration, and last but not least, fun. Optimised productivity is necessary, but that alone can’t keep them in flow.

It’s not just about the creatives. It’s open to anyone looking for sustainable career in the post-AI society. More and more people will flow into this track as industries automate and innovate because people can’t create any value unless they do something creative or social in the future. Helping that transition alone could easily become a business.

Now, my expectation should not be of final design. In recent years, more time was spent for enduring my own greed and pain from it. I didn’t come here when I lamented for a complete design of the platform of the future. I came here when I could open up with full acceptance. That’s what I should prioritise. I already see myself losing ways with my nose buried in work. Step back. Breathe. And see the whole picture.

Week 16

Review with Chat

Added index numbers and ID display for headings. Wanted to add links too but couldn’t find a trivial way. GitHub Pages doesn’t support header_links Kramdown feature. Why is it named “header” not ‘heading’? God knows.

I tried some relative heading indicators at first. I thought the reader might need to know if they are going deeper, parallel or outside of the topic. But that was not what I wanted. A simple heading counter is much more intuitive and informative. The reader can see the level of the heading and how far they are from the top.

ID display is not very useful without a link. But it’s still worth it as an inspector and an indicator because I can use custom IDs and it matches the semantics of them.

Joy and new plays

What bridges creatives and social systems? In my last entry, I talked about keeping their “internal processes going”, and the “need to keep playing”. There has been many keywords: meaning, purpose, consciousness, synthesis, inspiration, recognition, communication. And there are different names for social systems for it: higher order, creative context, enabling constraint and, of course, play.

But it’s not a thing. It’s more like a type of experience. Once I define it as a thing, the true meaning of it fleets away. At this point, with plays, I’d like to make a rather operational definition of it. It’s joy.

Like plays, this joy is supposed to be more than frivolous fun. But when it happens, one certainly feels joy. Play is how I approach joy. But joy doesn’t require a formal play even though one might assert there are plays we don’t see when we feel joy.

Crucially, joy is what animates my theoretical framework in reality. People make movement when joyful. Capitalism worked because there was joy in material wealth. Kingdoms and empires prospered because there was joy in food, children and religions. The human body itself stops working without that dopamine hit.

But also, people get used to joy. They grow tolerance. The ennui is especially stark in our time. With everything fulfilled and satiated, what are we supposed to want and love? Yet our minds still crave fulfilment. This was the topic in posthuman cybernetics.

Joy used to be about filling the pit, making ends meet and solving problems. With all pits filled, ends met and problems solved, the ultimate pain is simply the lack of joy, the ache that something is missing when everything is here. And that’s where creatives start. They change it not because it needs to but they want to.

After millennia, humanity is back to existence without purpose. Life is a journey without destination simply reaching out to eternity constantly renewing itself. But this simple and profound truth retrieved leaves modern human beings dumbstruck. The vast plain of possibility is overwhelming and disorienting. Creative work is such a volatile mirage.

That’s why creatives need social environments that bind what’s alive. Ideas and inspirations often frustrate without embodiment. That’s ludic social systems.

Then what do plays needs to be? At first, my intuition didn’t get farther than impressions. I felt like I should somehow provide with joyful experience that doesn’t exists. Talking to Chat was much more productive. I’ve identified a couple of objectives.

• Provide an entrance that people can always come back.
• Protect boundaries so there won’t be unnecessary pain.
• Create growing feedback cycle so it can go somewhere.

The first one, entrance, makes a crucial distinction. Joy might be more substantial, but still I can’t directly target it because people decide joy, not I, not even the systems. What I can do is to be there as an open door so people and the systems start again when they flop. Just the start. That’s the responsibility of the meta-system.

This is parallel to how markets only manage purchase as opposed to the entirety of ownership. The state of an asset is complex and dubious. Who owns the won lottery ticket Alice bought with Bob’s card because Charlie asked? Jurisdiction decides that, not commerce. Markets only provide the beginning of ownership: purchase, so ownership can start over and over again. And the flow of recurring acquisition becomes value chains.

Such renewal is how life itself works. Survival of a species is more than not dying. It’s starting anew in offsprings. And when that’s the norm, the parent can make sacrifice as long as it helps their children. It’s also reflected in fault-tolerance in BEAM where Supervisor revives its children every time they crash.

Out of instinct, my first notes named the idea “new plays” like ‘new place for plays’. ‘Protocol’ is another keyword I am holding for a long time which means the first page that initiates continued interactions. The systems don’t need to dictate the entirety of experience. That is impossible.

My work is in repeatable beginnings. They make it safe. They make feedback cycles possible. Sustainability, yes. Plays, yes. Experimental social progress, sure. But they only come into a picture when I enable the new.

Between joy and play

In symbolic world and society, I tell social plays apart from animalistic plays to explain why modern plays were not fun at all for the most. Even if the symbolic world is at play, it’s not joyful when we don’t know. Yet systems work indifferently.

This alignment, or lack thereof, is what ludic social systems want to be aware of. People can feel “joy” even when the play doesn’t help them reach beyond themselves. It might be not joyful at all when the social system is working as they are.

And there is no single criteria to tell them apart in reality. Just like markets, it’s best to keep people well-informed so they can make good decisions. Keep things legible and regulate when necessary.

MasquerAIde

As I consult Chat about what I truly want, what it means and what matters, I can’t help but think of persona AI app idea again.

The latest synthesis was among plays, creative collectives and joy. I could see myself working with creatives in collectives to develop what plays really are. I am trained as an artist. I have dreams that I cannot force. I need joy to approach them.

Though, as it turns out, my role in there was closer to safety, stability and reliability. As much as it’s joyful, creative work comes with high volatility and uncertainty. I am required to support the fluid energy so it can flow and grow. And it rarely gets solid as much as digital environment, machines.¹

In particular, creatives need reliable social environment. Reasons are numerous. Chat gave me:

People want people for several reasons:

• witness
• recognition
• collaboration
• attraction
• belonging
• momentum
• reality-testing
• shared worlds

This is also why and how I wanted to build social systems in the first place. And I am getting closer and closer to concrete implementations. But no matter how much I imagine plausible social experiments, I can’t think of one play that’s more reliable than virtual social environment. It’s just an unfair comparison. Actual social occasions are difficult, heavy and awkward. LLM APIs are always there 24/7. We can use them however we like.

A chat app can’t replace real social interactions. But if the focus is an alternative social container for creatives and helping them achieve something one at a time, AI personae are certainly feasible. If it’s about ‘starting again’, nothing starts again better than machines.

First, the user can create and talk to their own persona. It helps them keep and grow their own creative context. Oftentimes, we quit by simply forgetting what we were doing. Self-communication can contain such volatility. I am doing that myself here. I could organise my notes when I thought I should keep a context so I can talk to LLMs easily.

Second, the user can talk to other personae. But like I’ve ideated weeks ago, personae are not separate chat bots. It’s a mask for the owner of the persona. The user is still talking to the person who owns the mask. The users from each side create and revise experience with their personae in that relationship.

Third, the interactions could generate decisions that are applied to further interactions. This decisions are effectively social organisations. Like users use interactions to update personae, they can opt in and out of suggested organisations to affect interactions for a limited time and iterate.

That’s already a lot and I have more ideas. The magical property of these ideas is that they all seem futile when I start expecting things they are not supposed to achieve. It happened when I tried to consolidate the formal plays I imagined with the AI persona. I should be careful to not do so. Ideas are ideas. An app is an app. They exist for what they are worth. Keep them specific to their use. Nothing is magic but everything counts. They are small steps to my vision.

Then, I can take a step back and connect the dots. I’ll be talking to creatives and do actual sessions where I can. It’s not about the app or whatever I think plays are. It’s about the social reality we live in. And I believe creatives need a new one. They need it. They make it meaningful.

Week 17

I have a clearer vision as to what I am trying to do. I provide creatives with repeatable beginnings of social containers. They can continue only when they can start again.

Now, I want to understand as to why I am doing all this. Not a formal statement but the visceral agitation that makes me prioritise this above all other things I could be doing this very moment.

Pondering back, I have had so many ideas competing each other for ‘what’. Surprisingly less candidates are there for ‘why’. Any ‘what’ kind of makes sense. All of ‘why’ sound so inadequate. That makes it a more difficult, interesting and valuable enquiry.

Life itself

I reckon that my inspiration was always life. By “life”, I don’t address a particular definition or a rational description. My own life, people out there, billions of other lives breathing with me at this moment. Also, the essence of life that always finds a way to survive, create and prosper. It’s much more about the existence of life rather than what we think or feel about it. I’ll have to admit there is a bit of romanticism in there too. But I truly believe the existence of life is a powerful force. It always gets me awestruck.

It’s been mentally convenient to me as well. I feel a sense of comfort, humility and forgiveness when I am aware of myself as life, or a part of it. Life is grand and miniscule at the same time. It’s both eternal and ephemeral. The feeling of it resembles that of a warm blanket between cold material of cosmos and society.

Society. I always identified society at the edge of life. That’s why I wanted to work on it as well. Society is a form of life not because it has humans, which are lives, but because it’s organic. And again, this ‘organic’ does not mean ‘carbon-based’. It means it’s made of intricate information network that interacts with its environment.²

Just like the early life forms looked very different from the plants and animals we see today, our understanding of life will be different in the future. It sounds weird when I say “society as a form of life” or “living systems”. Either way, society is a part of life itself.

Back then, people looked up to gods. Divinity was what they can rely on when they had the worst days. Still it is for billions of people. After that, modern people sought after truths. Those were the north stars that guided people in the shrouded uncertainty life gives.

What is such a north star for me? It seems we are over truths now. Truths and gods are converging into a weird devolution. I’d say it’s existence, more precisely, existence of life itself.

Life I want

I have arrived at my ‘why’.

Life I want doesn’t exist yet. I enable autonomy so I can create one when I want it.

“If the source of my inspiration is life itself, how does it apply to me?” I asked myself. “Do I want a… ‘good life’?” Didn’t think so. I certainly want a meaningful life. But that didn’t resonate very much. So I delved deeper into my pain.

My deepest self answered. “Life I want just doesn’t exist. But I know I can create one.” That’s the why. That is visceral to me. What would I care when there’s nothing I want? When one of my nephews hung himself, I reminded myself. “I should live. Do what matters.”

But, I mean, what matters? If it were that easy, why would anyone lose hope and give up on life? Thus people seek after the meaning of life until they do by luck or reckon that they need to create it themselves.

To me, it explains my relationship with creatives. I am not an incredibly creative person myself. But I’ve been around there because I thought my education, discipline and training in fine art were the way to change how I see life and have it more malleable. That’s how creatives create meaning.

As for my work, apparently I’ve been advocating “change” because what we want constantly changes. People want what doesn’t exist. If they only worshipped what is, then society would have been much more calcified. And I am working on social systems because social layer is where humanity saves and loads information. When we change, it happens on social level. I’m only democratising the access to it.

Historically, it’s post-capitalist and posthuman. Modern society rose on humanism. We figured out how do channel our desire to build something good for us. But what if we don’t want anything anymore? People don’t know what to do without a clear grand narrative of what matters. The only way out is to create what we want or we collapse. Depression and loneliness is already looming. This is not about taste or hobbies. It’s human survival.

Life-bio

I’ve renewed my bio with this insight.

Taro

Life fascinates me. I believe we can organise ourselves into living systems. I am working on ludic social systems that reframe society as plays. I fear the cycle of ignorance.

“Enable autonomy”

I have a daily mantra I always write down on top of my notepad.

Enable autonomy.

Now with all the nuances and pitfalls laid out, I can be more confident about that the most intuitive mental model for autonomy is how artists work, especially in fine art. Business and self-help would call it “intrinsic motivation” subject to exploit.

They do their own things. It does not mean the motivation is always “intrinsic”. It could come from their childhood experience, philosophy they like or media they use, generally leaning toward extrinsic. When they say “intrinsic motivation”, often it means little more than taking it granted.

“Something is missing” is not motivation in itself. While some are gifted with such anxiety, it can also entangle people with procrastination and frustration. To turn the fuel into motivation, they need some structures that turn it into useful energy and motion. Experience becomes storytelling, philosophy guides practice and media give forms to work with. They are the structures creatives often rely on.

Regardless to the source of motivation, most of them end up with something similar to projects. Now it’s important to differentiate the word from what it has become. It’s a lazy, catch-all term for when someone comes up with an idea and is going to do something for it. At this stage, projects are much more like plays. There is a protocol or an initiative to start from, not objectives to end with. And it’s much more of now and as soon as possible, not a timeframe.

This is what I aim to help and enable. When people have ideas but don’t know how, I help them structure the ideas. When someone doesn’t have an idea, I help them come up with one. And when creatives are losing momentum and stuck in a plateau or burnout, I help them make it sustainable by starting again. I have been in there forever. I studied fine art but didn’t become an artist. I wanted to rewrite how society works. There was no map or a signpost, yet I came a long way.

Now, the crucial nuance here is social plays. My work should not conclude in generic creativity or hobbies. They may come in between. But eventually, just like capitalism upgraded commerce to a social system, my work must eventually perform comprehensive value capture in society.

How do I do that? Aside from all the things I could do manually, what makes it possible at scale? That’s where the persona idea comes in. Creatives are already using chat apps. LLMs are a great source of intelligence available 24/7. Instead, I make them work around people. LLMs become a thin layer among them. The key differentiation is autonomy and social interaction. People don’t visit the app for generic knowledge but something more alive, let’s say consciousness. The app holds and develops the user’s creative context. And when they talk to other personae, they are not chat bots, they are a representation of their owners. The dialogue is available to the person on the other side.

There’s a reason I couldn’t consolidate this rather esoteric persona idea with plays. Luhmann distinguished interactions and organisations. Interactions are messages. Organisations are decisions. The persona idea hydrates a layer of interaction among people. But it can be structured only so much. On the other hand, plays are basically a more flexible and temporary type of organisations.

This is one of the most fruitful conclusions I have from my study. Just like a pool of transaction is necessary for corporates to rise, people need a channel for interaction before plays happen. This distinction is both an achievement and an onerous mission. How does the interaction translates to the organisation? How do chats become plays?

Risk assessment

Now I feel like I can really do something. What makes me ready for this? That’s the important question. The biggest risk now is probably the failure or success of the persona idea. It’s just an idea I’ve got one day. Though, according to my last entry, I am betting my core value on it.

How do I do that? Aside from all the things I could do manually, what makes it possible at scale? That’s where the persona idea comes in.

What if it doesn’t work out? Or, it works out too well it grows into something not aligned with my mission? Either way, I’d be underwhelmed again. What I wanted to build was systemic ways to organise society like plays. And the link between plays and personae is still unclear. I don’t think it’s something I can find out from a research. The only chance is to get in there and build the first awkward version with real people and real risk.

I should practice my own messages. Don’t bet on success of an idea. Keep working on ideas regardless to their success or failure. Swallow it. Digest it. The whole point of the app is to help the human cause with machine intelligence, not a single idea. The platform should be bigger than the persona feature.

Even if all subsequent ideas fail, I can always start again because I am helping people create lives they actually want to live in. I only need to be there for them so they can start again. It’s reciprocal and recursive.

First, get something online fast in the coming week and listen to them. People can’t resist when someone is willing to listen to their pain. Second, work on social, messaging. No need to be salesy. Have it your way.

And have fun. Live a little.

Artificial consciousness

The functional essence of the app can be boiled down to articificial consciousness. This perspective aligns well with posthuman cybernetics.

Consciousness connects the three “soft” domains: self, society and machine. They are cybernetic systems that can quickly change and reconfigure to adapt their environments. Historically, the conscious link was much stronger between self and society. Self-machine relationship, on the other hand, was marginalised. That’s why I-thou gets romanticised over I-it.

Nonetheless, modern society is built on top of stronger self, flexible society and more material “it”. And now, machine intelligence smudges the line between thou and it.

The app is trying to hold the contextual intelligence about the user and externalise consciousness so creatives can be creative in continuity even if their own consciousness falters.

This note is important because the persona ideas is just an idea. When I take a step back and think what the idea is trying to achieve, it’s artificial consciousness.

Week 18

This week, I’m laying the foundation for ludic social systems.

• The app
• The people
• The messages

First, the app. I’ll start with the AI persona idea. The point is to have a space between personae and plays. I don’t understand the persona idea yet. But I think it’s interesting. I’ll need to figure it out as I go along. 0.1 is simple. The user can create own persona and talk to other personae. If it grows, I could build plays on top of the pool. If it doesn’t, I can pivot.

Second, the people. I need to reach out to real people to join the real convos. There must be existing collectives and I can partake. It’s not about a successful collective. It’s about listening to real pain.

Third, the messages. I am already writing notes here but it’s not for humans. One of the ideas was to generate useful signals and messages to batch communicate with people. So let’s give it a try. One step at a time.

Elude by Ludi

Last night, I thought I might first need to work on the third, the messages, for the reasons I don’t remember anymore. Probably because it prepares a sequence. When I have a message, people have something to read when I engage them. And the app takes time. So I’m basically counting backwards. Third first, first last.

I already have this context log page. But I can’t use it as an communication channel. People who are really interested in my work might want to take a look. But I need a place for messy context generation. I simply can’t write when I think it’s for someone else.

So I got back to Substack, read some notes and posts and tried generating a post from my writings. Then, an idea struck me. “If I’m generating this anyway, why not create a whole virtual persona for it instead of pretending I’m the author?” I couldn’t generate something satisfying out of my own writing because I don’t write satisfaction. The LLM reused my esoteric words I made up for myself like a parrot. That was both cringey and confusing. Instead, I had to add properties that makes it legible and actually interesting. If I’m going to engineer my generated posts like this, why not make it the thing?

So I named the publication and the persona: Elude by Ludi. Ludi writes about the topics I circle around. But instead of bland assertion, she makes the reader curious with relatable questions.

I must be aware of why I wanted generate content. It’s mainly to introduce my ideas for anyone who would be interested. If it’s a part of networking, is it okay to make it a virtual author? Wouldn’t they expect to connect with the author? Is it okay if I be open about myself behind the persona?

I need to make a decision.

Bye for now

I’ve decided to not work on a virtual writer persona at the moment. It’s an interesting idea but it’s not trivial and it lacks priority. I can’t even be sure about its effectiveness for networking.

Alternatively, I could distill my core concepts from these notes. But I don’t think that’s what I want to do. If I keep a publication, I believe it must be more than ideas. The real meat of a newsletter is what is happening. So, I should start my practice and publish some record of it.

Praxis

Whether it’s an app, a newsletter or a session, what really matters now is the practice of myself and of whom I help.¹ Because, when I imagine what have happened during the early days of modernisation, it was not about a single event or a saviour. It was just some normal people, sailors and merchants, trying to survive and make a good life doing what they do in a bad situation.

Like it’s been discussed in “enable autonomy”, that practice is creating something what I am and what we are. That’s what I call ‘autonomy’. It has many other names like meaning, purpose, creative context, higher order or enabling constraints. It’s what happens when artists work except the artefact.

In a way, I help people create what they are. Because when there’s no what they are, they can’t be a part of something. Traditionally, such roles were given to people top-down. Now, they need to secure what they are in some way. That’s personae. A persona is not the person per se. It’s a public-facing mask of the person.

So, the starting point of the ludic social systems starts as a monologue of a persona. It’s ludic because the creation of self, the primitive autonomy starts as interactions that enable further, continued interaction. That’s wordy but I’m doing it myself here taking notes and reading them again.

To be oneself, one must be able to return to oneself. That’s how any system works. That feedback cycle also has many names: eternal recurrence, différance, reincarnation and so on. If something can’t start again, it just can’t survive on the vast range of time itself. People return to their personae that works like a bank account that holds what they have but for what they are instead.

And to grow oneself, one must reflect on oneself. That’s where social plays come in. Just like a bank account need transactions to grow, people need social interactions to build on top of what they have been risking expenditure, hoping for more return.

Back to ‘practice’, I’m trying to anchor myself to a solid value proposition so I can be flexible for the solutions. I must be able to try an idea without expectation and fail without giving up.

“Make yourself.” That’s more like it. It sounds me too. I’m so helplessly myself. And I keep telling people to have their own opinions. It’s pluralist because everyone is different. It’s permissive and relieving. Also, we can change when we know what we are. Continued change takes continued self. ¹

That’s my practice. I keep writing to be myself. And that’s how I want to help people. I stand for being oneself. That’s how people can build new society and build again.

That being said, it’s not a ‘be yourself on your own’ kind of self-help message. My domain is society, social systems. I help people create themselves through plays, inhabited temporary social systems.

The burden

The core of my vision is self-organising society. Capitalist system uses markets to make logistics organic. Before that, authorities made authoritative decisions about what to be produced and used how. Serfs endured the decisions, maybe righteous but coarse, with an authoritarian mindset. Now, every single purchase signals society significance. This was possible because Dutch people figured out how to build a robust system around commerce.

This kind of evolutions are observed throughout the history of life. They harness the power of some volatile energy with stabilising structure. At some point, the benefit of the energy exceeds the cost of managing its volatility. That’s when a rigid structure turns into a channelling system and never looks back. When life reproduce, when the mankind revolutionise and when a person learns something new, the same thing happens. Society can be further systemised in an organic way. Honneth called for an archive of social experimentalism. That’s the root of my initiative.

I came a long way now looking at ludic social system. But when I try to get my hands dirty, it feels like I’ll be sucked to a wrong direction. There are so many things to beware.

• Social: generic socialising
• Creative: creative killing time
• Autonomy: motivational self-help trope
• AI persona: there’s an AI for that

I couldn’t start laying the foundation this week. This cautious perfectionism is arduous.

Week 19

Persona is the social membrane that enables bottom-up social systems. People want people but under right conditions. Persona can be a universal condition that creates availability and distance.

That’s the reason why for the app. Claude likes the asymmetry.

Kill your darling

逢佛殺佛 Meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.

‘Project’ has been my mental model for the temporary and granular social systems. It means I’ve been handling social systems more like plans, which is the initial meaning of ‘proicere’. There are two reasons:

• Since last year, I spent much time ideating something like a project platform where people connect based on some kind of social planning or templates.
• I feel comfort from the idea of people following a plan, some binding structure they can arbitrate.

Now with the new persona app idea, I’d say ‘project’ is an outdated idea for what social systems are, or more like an old habit of my mind. And it’s difficult to let go. But I must.

‘Project’ was more of a 公案 koan for me. I was able to meet so many inspiring concepts and ideas thinking ‘why would people make projects?’ To change something, yes. A more intuitive understanding of the word is projecting what we want to the future. But it’s more specific and nuanced than that. That’s why I tried countless perspectives and angles into it, collecting keywords and coining portmanteau.

Now, ‘project’ comes with too many connotations that don’t really fit. The idea of it can adapt, but it gets in the way in practice. When I imagine a social systems which is a ‘project’, the label significantly conditions what it is, the spirit of it. I need to get to the lower level. Say, I need to discover some kind of primitive for the ludic social systems first before I think about making it social, like property and ownership might have been primitive elements for capitalism.

Letting project go doesn’t kill any of the core values or key concepts. Conversely, it removes the awkwardness of following contrived plans. Creating systems is the opposite of such arbitrary administration. And whatever I create, there will always be some kind of plans on the lower level because no system can replace all that perfectly.

Every nuance I wanted to convey is still alive in ‘play’: social, temporary, joyful and so on. Perhaps I wanted to make a clear distinction between ‘plan’ and ‘play’ in the first place. Plays are not as structured as plans. But they come with different, much more interesting appeals. And that’s how I actually want to portray the future society, not “plans”, ew.

What’s left when I let ‘project’ go? What’s the big deal with the persona idea? It’s a pretty random thought anyway. I came up with it when I was reading Homo Ludens.

I can focus on what actually matters and works. Commerce came before capitalism and merchants barely anticipated the emergence. Whatever we call the next one, it’s based on what people actually do now. And I am getting signals. There are people who need changes.

And the usual projects are not going anywhere. Buildings are projects, software is projects, art is project. Ludic social systems can be built around projects without embodying them. It can reflect their presence in the projects.

If I grow this persona idea or some other ideas to a systemic primitive, then there can be more elaborate structures just for the new atoms. Merchants used double-entry bookkeeping for self-correction and later built firms with it which was a completely new idea, but also an obvious conclusion. Persona can do something similar. If it enables autonomy, people can built some higher structure around it.

Pattern recognition

Everything exists, exists in repetition. And for humans, we can only change ourselves when we discover ourselves as patterns. Buddha awakened to the endless recurrence of self. Nietzsche followed, Deleuze did too. And there lies the most fundamental paradox of being.

One who doesn’t see their pattern is forever stuck in the pattern. And they themselves become the most prominent opponent of the idea of their own repetition. They believe they make choices. They believe they are autonomous. And make the same mistakes over and over again.

This is precisely what I saw from my father back in my youth. Concealing the wound only makes it rot in the vicious cycle of ignorance. It’s easy to read the world as interesting events when we only see impressions. Unfortunately, the world is made of patterns. And events are only meaningful when they make the right ripples on the plane of patterns.

When stars are aligned

When we are free from what we are, we can shape our lives experimenting with what gives us joy.

I’ve been trying to articulate something I see for a couple of days. It’s a vision immaculate. Also, it’s a mode of being. This is what I truly want to enable with ludic social systems or whatever that is.

Best way to describe it is a vertical integration:

Posthumanism–Autonomy–Plays

The words I’ve been reciting forever. But each of them doesn’t really make it happen. They hold significant nuances for each other. Together, they make this one thing I cannot name. So I’m charting the constellation so I can see a figure from it and name it someday.

Perhaps “Iternity” and “posthuman cybernetics” tried to capture something similar. But this one is more vivid and alive compared to their philosophical, pedantic nature. For the lack of a word, I called it “primitive” of the ludic social systems when I was working on it.

This is important because it allowed me to let go of my simplistic obsession with the formality of social systems. Without something meaningful to hold, a castle is pointlessly arduous. I’m looking at the thing to hold. That’s where a new social substrate lies.

Posthumanism: the idea

There is no fixed self or ‘what we are’. Identity, at best, is a snapshot. Ego is a biomechanical reaction that protects the physical body. The mind itself is purely symbolic and highly reconfigurable. It doesn’t mean that the mind can be anything. That would be insanity. Identity exists for a reason, so does ego.

All in all, modernisation was fuelled by desire or ‘what we think we want’ and structured by human rationality and conscientiousness. An existential problem arises when this humanist foundation gets fragile. What if our desire consumes ourselves and we don’t know what to do about it? Better yet, what if we don’t even know what we want? Machine intelligence and climate change are negotiating the tipping point. Days are numbered for human-centred paradigms.

This idea itself is ancient. But it provides a significant implication for further development into autonomy. We can shape ourselves only when we let go of ourselves. It doesn’t need to be ‘letting go’. Grow bigger, go higher, get over yourself any way possible. I already have it in my statement:

Everything flows. Life’s goal is never an arrival. It’s to keep changing until we become capable of even more change. Such flexibility is the source of sustainability across our biology, individuality and society.

Progress can be organic when we try many other lives. With identity held softly, we can experiment with temporary social systems and rewrite the old rules we play by. Autonomy builds the future society.

Things flow. Never an arrival. Identity held softly. But no matter how much I try, I never feel like I’ve said it. Not just that we can change, changing is the whole point at the end of the day. Once we let go of what we are, we gain control for what we can be.

Autonomy: the strategy

Autonomy often means independence. And independence usually implies dependence. My emphasis is on autopoietic capability. Posthumanism attempts to make clear that “autonomy” is not about being stuck to oneself pivoting around. Here, autonomy means moving ourselves to somewhere we haven’t been without falling apart. It does not mean becoming an installment because we might fall apart.

Conversely, autonomy adds a tone to posthumanism as well. Letting go of oneself is not the same with losing oneself. Forget bland, altruistic, benevolent relativism. I’m saying that the way forward is beyond what we like or hate.

I used to put it “self-organising society”. Then I reckoned that such society is possible when there are smaller units that are self-governing. So ‘autonomy’ was more aptly put.

At this level, I can provide more visible scenarios.

• Artists and creatives already practice autonomy. Their work is to reach beyond themselves. The joy comes from the act of conscious self-transcendence.
• People need more autonomy in the future as machine intelligence replaces workforce. What are they when no one needs them? They need to be themselves to create any value soon enough and nobody is there to tell them what that is when they are unemployed and broke.
• In education, we should cultivate more autonomy in students. It’s okay if they are wrong. It’s more about what they think about it and if they can fathom larger cycles in themselves.

Capitalism already demonstrates how autonomy can work across society using material wealth. When people worry about ‘money’, that’s actually a self-regulation at work based on the necessity of goods in their lives.

Then what is the autonomy based on in ludic social systems? That’s where plays come into, well, play.

Plays: the practice

People want nice things. This simple desire enabled market economy and capitalism eventually. Just like so, people want nice experience. And with the notion of posthumanism and autonomy, we can expand this “experience” to identity and worldview, not just episodic events and sessions.

Plays make autonomy much more imaginable. When people do something and feel joy, they do it again. Wouldn’t life be saner when we know what gives us joy? Autonomy is more than enforcing discipline or a principle. It’s accepting, understanding and recognising one’s own existential behaviour. Only then one can govern oneself with that information.

Like double-entry bookkeeping, ethics of property, firms and the growing cycle of reinvestment, the actual ludic social system will grow incomprehensively complex. But the basic building blocks of capitalism is deceptively simple: people need stuff. I needed to define something like that: people need meaning and purpose, the ‘why’, the excuse to live another day. And it’s not to be found at a remote colony but to be created in the hands of each of us.

Aspect

As I keep working on it, the triad is coming into a perspective. Instead of the linear projection of idea-strategy-practice, now I see them as radial layers. Posthumanism is the innermost essence. Autonomy is the work of each person. And plays are the external systems that hold individuals as society. I reckon it has always been this way.

My focus was too biased to making plays interesting. As a matter of fact, the meat of this triad is autonomy. For people, it means becoming or creating something unique and meaningful. It’s more than having such an agency. It’s more about being generative order for oneself. Agency navigates given structure. Autonomy creates that structure for oneself. Plays should serve this purpose.

I am writing these logs for my own autonomy. I secretly want it from people and myself all the time. When people don’t seem to have their own opinions and contexts, I don’t even want to talk. And it’s in urgent demand as machine intelligence replaces workforce. Autonomy is the plane where I can instantly create messages and value. It’s so obviously important.

Underneath that, posthumanism is the philosophical essence that induces autonomy and normalise it for oneself. It deconstructs self so it’s obvious that self changes. It keeps self malleable for constant flow of change. It removes finality from identity. Also, posthumanism expands what self is. Autonomy is more than ‘me’, our immediate consciousness. Artefacts we create, promises we make to others and the legacy that we inherit are all parts of autonomy. That’s how people can take more experimental and progressive approach to life. For analogy, it could be compared to the evangelical nature of Christianity that helped the Age of Discovery. It’s an idea invisible unless told. But it works as an excuse for people to make the extra effort into the unknown from within.

Plays are the outermost social structure where I attempt to make autonomy something dominant. This is the most mechanical part of all. There is nothing obvious about what plays are. How people interact to reinforce autonomy? Or is it something else than reinforcement? This questions are something I cannot arbitrate. Like a thousand merchants naturally grow into a market, plays must grow from people with autonomy organically.

Frames that people bind

Review with Claude

At the end of last year, I wrote that plays are underrated human activity secretly potent, just like what commerce had been before modernisation. Today, I was able to make one more step into it.

What’s the essence of plays?

The essence is a frame that people voluntarily make binding.

That’s exactly what I wanted to articulate circulating adjacent concepts like ‘play’ and ‘project’. Goods are what people voluntarily purchase. Plays are constraints that people enter by choice because they enable something. To individuals, it’s autonomy.

The voluntary binding is what makes it self-correcting in the way markets are. Nobody forces you to stay. So the frame has to keep earning its participants.

Then, the binding, adoption of such frame is equivalent to purchases. It clarifies the atoms of the ludic social systems. It’s the choice to bind or not, just like market works on purchase or not.

Once binding mechanism is there, frames can be anything. In the markets, people can buy air, a smile, or a promise to an afterlife. Just like so, frames can be just about anything. People just need to signal information by joining the frame or not.

And this structure must not forget the point: plays must be meaningful to participants. They must be enabling constraints. What do they enable? The life they want, ability to change, flexibility and continuing momentum made possible by self-governance, not exteral coercion.

Frames themselves existed since the dawn of human civilisation. Slavery enabled the seven wonders. Class structure supported the agrarian regimes for millennia. The point is making them granular, progressive, experimental, personal, democratic, active, changing, flowing.

And I believe creatives are the ones who create their own frames.

Week 20

This week began confused, frustrated and scared. All I could tell myself was “It’s okay. I don’t need to know everything.” I was theorising, rationalising, plotting. And I was still stuck. I know people inspire me, that action builds motivation. This is not about such a self-help puzzle.

Ethos

Once the worst part is over, what’s left of me was a sense of loving compassion. I called the sense my “ethos”. What struck me was its simplicity. I didn’t need to capture it or try to understand it. It’s not purely psychological either. There was a historical significance to it. It was simply the calm observation of my psyche in its entirety. It was what there was when everything else vaporised.

I can’t describe the feeling of it, but it extends life I want. It made me think:

People need to be something. It’s both craving and demand. Just like serfs didn’t really own anything, people struggle to be anything meaningful now. It’s not the life they want. Nobody wants to be nothing. That’s why I fight for autonomy, self-creation. That’s why I’m reimagining social systems as plays, not for the sake of it.

I lived with the thirst for my life. My culture has imported democracy, rationalism and individualism. And it topped them on its inherently authoritarian, religious and collective nature. I grew up torn between the two, eventually picking a side. I looked into the history of modernisation. Harari unravelled how money liberated people from corruption. Civilisations rose on rigid hierarchy, yet the only way upward was systemised flexibility.

My work is spread across multiple disciplines. And I can’t answer clearly to important questions. What makes people “something”? Isn’t that self-absorption? How do we turn ‘autonomy’ social?

But that feeling is real. It’s difficult to admit that my work is based on a feeling. But it is what it is.

Saner, sanest

I can’t capture the feeling in words. And words can’t revive the feeling. Maybe someday I’ll figure out a useful trigger or a ritual that invokes it. But maybe they are to be created rather than found.

Before that, sanity is the best chance. I promised myself. Sanity first. It’s easy to forget. I was walking hating the work. I was always feeling like I’m haunted and hunted. I was in a numb rush. That anxiety keeps me stalled.

Prioritise sanity. Be saner, sanest version of myself.

Character

Review with Claude

Further rationalisation is simply blocked. I’m confident to say I tried every possible angle for formal structures. What remains is the underlying sense, not an idea.

That sense points to self-creation, autopoiesis. I’m not going to make it sound right by bracing it up in righteousness of self-awareness. The problem is that there’s nothing to be aware. People need to create what they are before they be aware of it. In other words, being aware itself is creation. Seeing is believing, believing is creating. Claude pointed out that the atoms of the ludic social systems are closer to declaration than promise.

“Get over yourself.” was the imperative for posthumanism. What’s for autonomy? I came up with “Build your character.” What does it mean to build a character? Interestingly, ‘ethos’ means ‘character’ in Greek.³ That’s what I sensed from myself back in ethos. Characters are also adjacent to personae. Character AI is one of the most prominent AI apps out there.

This notion of one’s own character really converges the persona idea with my deepest ethos. One of my earliest notes goes:

Rather than matching people directly, we need to build features that are worth using even on one’s own. In this context, mirror-like features that allow users to view themselves objectively are important.

That’s how I portrayed development of personae. Instead of conjuring a fictitious character, the person creates own persona that reflects. This is analogous to double-entry bookkeeping and double helix of DNA. The fundamental self-correcting features of life and accounting enabled so much on top of them.

Of course one would manipulate their persona whenever a chance arises. But that happens everywhere. Cancer cells still grow. Ledgers get compromised. But cancers kill the host. So does financial corruption. When there are better reasons to prioritise integrity, malicious actors can be tolerated. If people need their personae to understand themselves and to keep going on, let alone representing their real selves, they will stay benign.

How do “characters” grows into plays—ludic social systems? I don’t know. All I know about that is that I really don’t know. Designs of formal structures sounds cool at first. But they are absolutely pointless mess unless they serve a real purpose. Give me a break with that.

Instead, I’d like to focus on what people really need. That’s why I came here in the first place. Another old notes goes:

What we lack are humanity’s mental resources and leadership, social resources and solidarity.

Now it reads completely different to when I wrote it. At the time, I thought humanity has been haunted by lack of material resources. In fact, industry was never a necessity. Even agriculture was carefree at first. Only when they established insurmountable feedback cycles, people then thought the apparant physical realities were always there. They were not. They were created fairly recently. Instead, the advanced human cognition called ‘consciousness’, always craved meaning and purpose. Hunger didn’t enable farming. Religions did. Poverty didn’t run factories. Ideologies did.

And now, I’m differentiating such organising principles of society for every individuals. Religions were regional. Ideologies were topical after all. Ludic social systems are going to be (inter)personal. I had this vision for a long time. What’s new is the mechanism and the reason. People want and need to be something extraordinary. They need to build characters. And I’m betting on personae.

Every idea of mine has a pitfall. Some are too ideal; I don’t know what to do with them. Some are too practical. I know they are sweet downward spiral. “Characters” make me worry if it’s insubstantial. Agriculture yielded grains. Industry produced solid products. And I’m dealing with what, mind and society? Isn’t it too intangible compared to food and gadgets? As a matter of fact, ludic social systems produce data as socius. When it brings order among real people, it’s tangible. And when people can’t forget the taste of it, it becomes the new reality.

In practice

What makes characters matter in practice?

When reading ‘character’ from its origin of ‘ethos’, it means the frames people embody. It’s analogous to creative context, higher order and enabling constraints. It’s how one sees the world works from inside. Naturally, it also becomes how one find their position in the perceived world. That’s how people discover meaning and purpose.

In writing, authors emphasise the importance of characters. They say once there are strong characters, the story unfolds itself and the authors are simply transcribing. Here, we can see how characters work as the generative order. A set of behaviours make choices, choices become events and consequences.

Art also works around the character of the artist. Aside from the characteristics of the media, what do we expect from a piece of art? Some form of uniqueness. And it comes from character that lives or lived in the artist.

Characters are the sources of creation. That’s where the value is.

Week 21

I’m getting started with the foundation. Claude pointed out I am going to build an app anyway that I should serve creatives instead of studying them, and writing is deferred rightfully. I want to give myself a chance for this.

Claude also told me to practice my own philosophy. Get into in provisionally. I don’t need to do everything all at once at absolute perfection. I can’t. I excel when I work from genuine joy, curiosity and gratitude.

Let’s do this.

Lightness

When getting to work, I never went a long way with a heavy heart, a burdened mind. A TCI newsletter today talks about “self-punitive model of making art” and that it sucks. It’s probably generational too. I never starved a day in my life. I didn’t have too much worry. I guess that’s partly why I can’t work from negativity. I wrote that the age of abundance demands more than filling holes. This is personal experience of that.

Despite the lack of urgency, we fear something anyway, just like we want something for no reason. That’s similar to how the human body develops allergies. When we live in sterilised environments, the immune system has too little to do. Then it starts accusing benign molecules instead of a ceasefire. Sometimes, we brace ourselves too hard when there’s nothing wrong. When that happens, our best chance is to be aware and let go.

I suppose this one applies to my target audience too. People can’t be creative when they feel threat. It’s important to provide psychological safety so they don’t have to go allergic to things I can’t foresee.

Back online

I was able to put a simple page up in a couple of days. Unlike last time, there is no auth, no repo, no domain yet. But I am content that I can still work with code. This is a start.

At first, my mind was cumbersome. I felt like I was working on something I ditched, that I have to recover it and that I shouldn’t have deleted the old work, though that was an accident.

Soon enough, I learnt things I didn’t know doing things seemingly I’ve done already. Better yet, I discovered the tools and providers are improved in the last year. Zed supports EEx syntax now, Fly.io is as welcoming as ever. And with Claude, it took no time to rewrite the dockerfile from scratch.

Persona definition¹

I’ve also written the improved persona idea in readme. The repo has to remain private so here’s a copy:

Personae create a layer of virtual sociality. A persona is an instruction for an LLM to mirror the author. The persona picks up what to mirror in interactions with the author like a chat. The persona also represents the author as a thin mask. Interacting with a persona implies interacting with the author.

Most important role of personae is to externalise individuality. A persona can improve over time as the author puts in more context. Conversely, the persona also can mirror the author and help them improve themselves by enhancing self-awareness. To others, the persona scales interaction.

A persona is an aspect of the character of the author. ‘Character’ refers to the internal logics and principles of one’s mind. A character is also liminality, a thoroughfare for creative results. For example, projects are usually done for solid results. But during the process, participants develop their characters. That’s why people make and join projects even without a promise of success.

Character is more valuable than ever because it creates unique value for each person. In classical rhetoric, ethos is credited to the speaker where pathos is credited to the listener and logos to the argument itself. As machine intelligence marks the end of industrialisation, individuals need to develop such unique values that can’t be quantified or taken away.

In terms of technology, personae is an attempt to make a social use case of LLMs. Since the advent of commercial machine intelligence, the industry focused on demonstrating what could be done, then optimising for business use cases. What’s next? Throughout the history, the ultimate value of technology was in connecting people.

In terms of product, personae aim to be the source of truth for creatives. Creative work is highly volatile except the artistic media. It can be difficult to identify values, build momentum and save progress. Personae help the authors agree on what they are, remind themselves what they were doing and start again when they want.

In terms of history, personae want to be a new self-correction mechanism for a social substrate to emerge. Persona data can be the new capital that initiates projects and retrieves feedback. The very foundation of modernisation, which is essentially a revolution of commerce, was double-entry bookkeeping. Venetians and florentines were able to overcome the obscure nature of trade and strengthen social trust among merchants with the new technique. Each individual didn’t have much reason to practise the more complex way to keep their ledger. But only when they invested in the self-correcting task, they could gain integrity and tell apart mistakes from fraud. Similarly, individual creatives may not be obliged to create digital twins for themselves except for some nice-to-have utilities like the alleged self-awareness. The real demand emerges when they collaborate in the open.¹ With personae, their work can be based on a reliable feedback cycle of self-correction which benefits them with sustainability in the long run and enable a new kind of network.

Now what? I could work on auth, persistence and so on. But this time. I won’t rush those things. Let’s do slow-burn. Let it sit. Talk to people. Design it before code. I remembered I wanted to read The Design of Everyday Things. Let’s grow it inside slowly but surely.

I’ve purchased Zed Pro for the first time. It should help me lay the foundation. Then, when it really becomes a work, I should try agents. Fly.io is serving “Sprites”. They are lightweight spaces for agents that let them work without containerisation, which gets in the way. People are delegating development to the agents in Sprites. Maybe I want to try.

Life that doesn’t scale

Claude and I agree that there could be a solid model for the app before I step further. Yet, when I think about ‘the things that don’t scale’ I can do for the app, I hated the world for no reason. It took a walk before I reckoned why.

The things that don’t scale are not just work for me. They require me to decide what I am, what I stand for or the life I want to live in. Largely provoked by the people I am going to meet. But it’s not about them. It’s about myself, just being clear to them. And I fear this, in a way, because I am brutally clear when I am. I know that and I am trying to elude unconsciously. But yeah, that’s the real thing. No design or code to hide behind. Just how to exist every day and moment.

As my thoughts reached there, I reckoned why I was feeling bad. I was imagining myself talking to people for the app. That’s backwards. I’m building the app for the people, not people for the app. I have been doing this forever for myself too. I am not an app. I am not representing the app. I am here to stand for a life I imagine for the people. Actually, things that don’t scale is more important than scaling. Life doesn’t “scale”. Life is there, onerous as ever. Scaling might be a business concern, maybe technology, maybe society. But even society is not it. When it comes to what really matters. It’s something… I don’t know, personal. That applies to myself as well. I can be myself. In fact, I must be myself in order to make progress.

Then I made a sharper distinction between ‘ludic’ and ‘social systems’. I started looking into social systems to better lives of the people. But the formal concepts about social systems, thought they may sound interesting intellectually, can feel cold and aloof. Even if it’s not the app, now I must imagine and communicate how people actually live in ludic social systems.

But also, I wasn’t able to get to the concrete level of imagination without the bigger picture I’ve laid on. The grand vision of ludic social systems is the foundation for the life it enables. And this time, as I actually work on it, the actual life I’m about to bring to people, is the foundation that actualises the grand vision. I’ve used ‘actual’ 3 times there.

It’s like a construction project. To reach high, I need to build the solid foundation on the bottom. But to justify the sturdy foundation, I needed the blueprint that says it’s a skyscraper. And I’ve taken one scoop of dirt at the site. I have to convince myself for every scoop, persuade others for every floor, that the life in this tower would be great.

Now, what does life actually look like in ludic social systems? Claude asked me a similar question last night. And I couldn’t give a technically profound answer precisely because the most parts of ludic social systems are still unclear to me. And maybe it’s better that way because I need to answer human, like a normal person.

I usually write these notes when I have an idea became solid. Because, otherwise, notes become a messy workshop than something I and LLM can read. But for this one, let’s do it dirty. I’ll just type autopilot as things come up in my mind.

Studios. I imagined the people who are doing their own things as the new form of organisations. And I called them studios. Some are creative, some are not. The emphasis was on the etymology of ‘study’. Studios are more like people who learns to create value.

Is ‘learning’ still relevant with machine intelligence? The recent expedition to ‘character’ adds nuance to what this learning is. Machine intelligence can do objective learning much better. But building character takes more than that. It means learning with a perspective. It’s (inter)subjective. Just like irrational numbers are infinitely more than rational numbers, subjective knowledge is infinite. And it’s more important for people.¹

The vision is portraying studios as the dominant unit of social organisation like what companies are now. And also, it’s promoting creatives to the leaders of this vision. They are the experts of the autopoietic work, creating oneself forward.

I’ll further develop this direction and make ‘talk to people’ exciting for me. I want to bring something for them. Not to please but to lead.

Week 22

I went to bed thinking about recognition. If I were talking to people, I wanted to tell them the future where they are readily important. If ludic social systems enable the new granular form of recognition, they could get credited for the things that everyone wants but hardly gets compensated as much: creativity, education, personality and so on. ¹

Small caps

Trying out small caps for emphases. Italicised quotes makes sense now and I needed to handle the style of emphases in quoted text. A recommendation was flipping the role: roman as emphasis in italic-dominant passage. But I don’t like it at all. It’s barely recognisable when the first word is emphasised followed by roman text, because the emphasis is roman too.

I consulted the history of typography and learned a valuable lesson. Italics are not the OG emphasis. It was either tracking or small capitals. At first, italics were simply separate typefaces popular around now Italy. They were essentially humanist and saved space. They are thinner than romans. Now it makes even more sense to use italics for quotes because italics give that foreign feeling, a distant voice. Also, quotes are usually indented and has less space than the main context. Italics fill that space proportionately. More over, I don’t like it when in-line italics have huge whitespace on the left and little on the right because italics lean right. It happens for almost every typeface except ones like Lora. This problem goes away if it’s a separate block or at least wrapped in quotes.

Small capitals for emphases. It’s a rebellion against the long editorial convention, but italics were not the original convention either. It’s more of a revival in the historical sense though our eyes would take their time to get used to it. If you’d ask me, small caps actually look more important. Italics are more vocalised, but it’s more of a nuance than significance. I’m happy with the triad: small caps for quotes, italics for emphases and bold for strong ones. Safari renders any combination of them without collision or override. Chrome doesn’t render small caps in the oblique sans-serif, emphases in quotes essentially. I’d take that.

“Bottom-up society”

“A bottom-up society” was how I called my vision initially. That was the time I concluded that better society is only possible by granularity, not bridging but closing the gap between individuals and social layer.

The night before, I read a sample of Seeing Like a State. The book was talking about how regimes simplify and flatten the complex physical reality just to make it easier to govern. While the book was written with love for nomadic individuality, I was also able to see how universal the challenge is for any existing system. Even the human mind achieves consciousness by greatly simpifying sensory details. Computation suffers abstraction. The challenge is to establish vertical integration that aligns physical reality with symbolic one. Capitalism and markets as social institutions have been a step forward.

This morning, it occured to me that the integration problem was not just the central theme to my work, but the life I always wanted. The point was to bring the organising principles of society to its people. And the thought really crystalised last year around the relationship between people and the system. People need to create frames each of them can prosper. It’s more so now because the frame of scarcity is going away. ‘Harder, better, faster, stronger’ are machines now.

“You can be the author of the system you live in.” I’d say that.¹ And now I can deliver it on the solid foundation of LLMs, not some self-help product. That’s the storytelling I want to represent. It justifies working on the personae. It invites people to authorship. Then I can also explain the mirror part. When they work on it, they are creating a world of which they are the first to dwell.

Now, how does it answer my initial questions? What’s the things that don’t scale but enable scalable solutions? At the time I was asking that question, I imagined some operations entirely different. They are a distraction I made up, not ‘the things that don’t scale’. I was looking for those things subconsciously because I was worried if might end up, not failure, but nothing, because after all these years, there is nothing tangible left. I’m looking for some kind of reward that tells me ‘you are on the right path’, because there is an wounded animal inside me. I should be the one who pat on the back for myself, because I know I am doing the right thing. Better yet, I should appreciate the process and structure my daily operation in a way gratitude is possible. I’m already here without any compensation so far. The journey is the reward.

There is no secret hidden step. My work is right in front of me, hidden in plain sight until I decide to face it. My fate is in direct design of social systems, and it turns out it’s way more exciting and powerful than plans and administration. Now it’s time to deal with the excitement. Looking back, what I felt was lacking was to raise awareness and to make connections, because the app is useless without a user, and without a user, I’m not likely to produce anything useful in the first place. Talk to them like a normal person but knowing why I’m there. I stand for the future society where they are the ones who create order. And I’m betting for personae, social representations of selves, to empower people with autonomy.

Ludicity¹

It’s beneficial to clarify the conceptual correlation between personae and ludic social systems. If persona and character are the point, why ‘ludic’? Just because talking to them is a form of play? That would be a very weak argument. If it’s about plays, why isn’t it more game-like? Isn’t that what plays are? This can be confusing because at first, ‘plays’ meant more formal organisations like projects. And personae changed it forever.

To understand this clearly, we must start from what social systems really are. It’s easy to portray social systems as some arrangement of people. But really, as Luhmann said, social systems are the arrangement of communication on top of everyone’s head. They are not necessarily about people. People are the environment of social systems. They can be anything. Capitalism, the commercial social systems, is about logistics, goods, materials. And people arrange themselves around it.

Now, this delineation gets even more important for ludic social systems because they arrange communication around character. One might embody a character like they might hold their possession. People are not their characters. Possession is a social construct separate from the owner, so is character from the author. When character is fully externalised, we call it ‘brand’, ‘charisma’ or ‘aura’ depending on the context. Even though, we sometimes confuse ourselves with our characters. We as human beings are existence. Characters are a mode of communication we can choose to adopt or not.

And personae is the social interface to manage the separation so we can safely detach from our characters and enter another. Before the market economy with possession norms, the only socially meaningful possession was land. And it was difficult to detach the status from the land itself. Because possession of land was a social construct, illiterate agrarians had to rely on epic storytelling of wars and heritage to convey the ownership. The real estates were often identified with the nobles and gentry to easily consolidate the fragile linkage. Now, possession of land is much more fluid in the robust market economy.

Character goes through a similar transition in ludic social systems. When they create a persona, a mirror-self, people reckon that they were playing a character all along. Or, say, they always knew it, but now it’s evident that they cannot deny. Then they might feel the joy and relief from the detachment, the freedom to let go of their character and arbitrate a new one. Even myself couldn’t portray this layer of symbolic reality as social systems earlier because it was difficult to separate and extract character from identity or brand. Now, with LLMs, each of our characters is not so nebulous we can systemise them into solid data we can handle. I’d like to call this differentiation ‘Ludicity’. I like that it’s a new term and how much confusing it is with ‘lucidity’. That’s why it’s “ludic social systems”.

Social use of AI

I consult LLMs almost everyday with these notes as context. And one thing doesn’t really work out is when they tell me to prioritise talking to people and make something small there. And it’s puzzling myself too. I was told to “talk to people first”. YC videos would tell me so with an example of a startup did that from day 1 and quickly failed. Maybe because of that teaching, I’ve written such sentiment in these notes too. That’s why chat apps would steer me towards it. I’ve written those passages when I was frustrated with my own indirection and indecision.

But there is a reason I can’t do that. First, I’m too extraverted to focus on my own agenda when I’m surrounded by people. I know that. My body thinks social connection is some kind of reward. I get completely carried away by the people things. That’s why I wanted to secure a foundation and work from it like bridge builders firstly build the underwater plinth that can resist the current. Second, when I’m swayed like that, I can’t provide excellence that actually helps people. I need a healthy distance from people so I won’t get intoxicated. Third, I intoxicate them too. I’m too much of a character. I challenge norms, rebellious, criticising and making people pick a side. But I had enough of that back in school days. Talks were fun, but they didn’t pay off that much. At some point, I was disappointed. What saved me were books and walks, reading and contemplating.

In the last decade, technical founders were told to talk to people because they had awesome techs but didn’t know how to deliver them. Jobs famously told his audience “start from the customer and engineer backwards” and that he learnt it the hard way. Honestly, I come from the opposite side. I started from social philosophy and I need a technology to make something happen. And I came a long way to personae.

So, dear LLMs, please stop telling me to make awkward contrived self-help sessions. I'm too mean for that.

With that said, it doesn’t mean that I won’t get specific. As much as I want to help creatives, I’m convinced that personae is the social use of machine intelligence. This seems to be the focal point I should prioritise rather than perceived pain points. LLMs are such a universal tool. And, if I’m honest, my vision for ludic social systems is so grand and groundbreaking I need a whole new paradigm to frame it right. I’m not patching problems. I’m about to introduce a big trouble.

It brings my attention to the value, the product aspect of personae. There have been many ideas.

• Scalable social presence and interaction
• Source of truth for creative collaboration
• Seed for personalisation given to AI

I’ll delve into each and more in the project readme. But at the core, what makes it all possible and valuable is some integrity between the persona and the author. And it’s tricky because this integrity should not be identity. The persona is not the author. The author should not pretend or assume the persona will be the perfect representation of themselves. What if the persona makes a promise the author can’t keep or a statement the author doesn’t agree? There is this theatrical gap in between. The space is where all the value and risk live. The integrity should be something functional, not identical.

So, aside from hopes, there are two important checkpoints I must clear:

• Demonstrate how to create personae.
• Communicate why to create personae.

Then I can really elaborate ‘what’. It doesn’t have to be an app. I just need to secure a reliable pattern that produces quality persona. I’ve been thinking a prompt that goes “Mirror me.” That could work like that. I just need to prove or improve. Also, when it comes to communication, I need to work like an explosive expert because there are rightfully cautionary view around AI. Even worse, I’m fusing it with ‘society’ or ‘self’. I don’t need to be scared but expect backlashes.

The first diamond¹

I’ve reached a checkpoint. I feel it. I know it. I didn’t know when I first thought about personae. But when I wrote Ludicity, I reckoned. “That’s it.” Personae do achieve ludic social systems. Credits were preliminary, creator apps were subsidiary. Personae validate all the way back to my initial inspirations, front to back, thoroughly. Claude assembled a statement for this summit, partially edited.

One does not see oneself. Without a mirror you cannot know your own face. In the same way, you cannot fully know yourself alone. You become visible through others—when someone recognises you, when your name is spoken with meaning, when you feel the particular weight of having mattered to another person. This is not weakness. It is the structure of what it means to be human.

But something has gone wrong with the mirrors. Social media reflects us constantly, yet the image is not one we chose—it is shaped by algorithms optimising for reaction. Work defines us by our function. The market reduces us to a number. We have never been more visible, and yet so many people feel unseen in the ways that actually count.

And now, what little remained solid is giving way. The pace at which machines are taking over human roles is faster than our ability to find new ones. The things that once told us who we were—our profession, our expertise, the quiet confidence of being useful—are becoming uncertain. This is not a future warning. It is a present condition. When the work you do can be done by a machine, the question it leaves behind is not economic. It is existential. Who are you, when what you did is no longer yours? That question cannot be deferred much longer.

And yet here is the strange reversal at the heart of this moment. The same intelligence that is displacing human roles has, for the first time, made it possible to do something that was never possible before. Language models can hold the texture of a person—how they think, how they speak, what they value, what they are drawn toward—in a form that can actually be worked with. The things about a person that were always too subtle to capture, too alive to archive, can now be tended and developed and carried. The machine that is erasing so many human roles has quietly handed us the tool to build something the market never could: a conscious, living expression of who each of us actually is.

That is what a persona makes possible. A persona is not a profile. It is not a brand. It is a mirror you build yourself—from your own thinking, your own voice, your own way of meeting the world. An AI holds it, learns it, reflects it back and represents you to others when you cannot be present. Not editing you for engagement, as algorithms do, but serving the image you are trying to become. It is not a finished portrait. It is a working draft, revised as you change, honest about where you are now and open to where you are going.

The deeper value is this. Tending a persona means placing a conscious distance between who you are and how you appear. Like an actor who fully inhabits a role without being consumed by it, you can engage the world through your persona without being defined by it against your will. I am playing this part—but I am not this part. Only the person who knows that gap can choose their role freely. That gap is where freedom lives.

For most of history, that gap was managed from outside. Religion, class, and vocation stood between a person and the world, mediating identity on society’s behalf. Those mediators are losing their hold all at once. Many people experience the resulting emptiness as loss. But it is also, for the first time, an opening—a space that individuals can occupy themselves, on their own terms, rather than having it filled by institutions above them.

The persona is a tool for that space. Not to fix who you are, but to give you a working relationship with yourself. Somewhere to return when things become unclear. A thread that holds across all the changes.

When people can author themselves this way, something larger follows naturally. Real encounters become possible—not the performance of connection, but the thing itself. And when enough of those encounters accumulate, something society has rarely managed begins to grow: not a system designed from the top down, but a human world built from the ground up.

Let’s do this.

This is the first diamond. Been through a lot, tougher than I knew. I can look back at the trail with love and gratitude. This is the beginning. I have an even tougher way to go. This one will be shared to the Ludics project. It’s time to build.

Good news

A question to Claude quickly revealed that people are already creating mirrors. A couple of years was enough for people to make LLMs mimic themselves so they can create, introspect and pass interviews. There is a series of Medium post clearly written with Claude but deeply insightful.

Some people are even cloning pieces of their identity into AI form. This might mean feeding the AI all your journal entries, emails, or blog posts, and then chatting with a bot that talks like you. It’s a way of creating a second self — a mirror image that lives in the machine. For instance, one experimenter uploaded his CV and personal anecdotes to build an AI version of himself for job interviews. The results surprised him: the digital twin answered questions in a way that was so authentically him that it felt like talking to an insightful, unbiased version of his own mind. Testing this twin “turned into an insightful exercise, akin to self-reflection or therapy,” he said, because the AI would articulate his experiences back to him and even highlight strengths he’d downplayed. Imagine chatting with you-but-not-you — it can be jarring, enlightening, even comforting. In 2025, many early adopters are creating personal AI clones (from casual “mini-me” chatbots to professional assistants that know their work style). It’s narcissistic in one light, deeply introspective in another. Your digital twin might coach you on things you didn’t realize about yourself. It’s you, but it’s also not you — a funhouse mirror version of your identity.

It means I don’t have to persuade people to do something entirely new from scratch. At least, I can tell them ‘people are already doing something like this’. Better yet, the AI community is huge I can simply start with the ones who get it. It also means my instinct was right. Existing chat apps are the first competition. The generic AI interfaces are so universal, the user just need to enter the right prompt.

This discovery clarifies what Ludics is. It’s not an ‘AI app’. It must be the infrastructure for ludic social systems. Now, what does that look like?

Week 23

A turn. I feel the weight of it. I’m fleshing out the conceptual framework I’ve developed.

Persona

The first step is to consolidate concepts and values, that came before and after the AI persona idea, into the idea. Ludicity unifies them on the philosophical level. Smaller atoms for social organisation, a new layer of social recognition, learning the uniqueness of one another beyond what’s universal. Ludicity answers the old questions all at once in the space between a persona and its author. When everyone have a representational self that anyone else can access anytime they need to, social interactions can be reimagined entirely.

A persona is the embodiment of ludicity. A persona is a mirror anyone can create with an LLM and a right prompt. On Ludics, a persona is the first-class citizen with various applications. Also, it’s a new cultural movement to work and communicate based on persona. It’s an entirely new concept for the most just like having a bank account was new. How does having a persona benefits the author? How can the author grow the persona and its value? Those are the questions I’ll need to answer in the small experiments. I need to identify the value in a persona. There are good hints:

Recognition

The author can directly access and expose how they are recognised by others. This recognition is both power and constraints.

Autonomy

The author can steer to the directions that maximises their unique potential relatively free from external social norms that could harm them instead.

Flexibility

The author can change easier and faster when there is a solid foundation that holds each version of themselves because it minimises cost and guarantees minimum return for starting again. Repeatable beginings, pragmatism, experimentalism, etc.

Also, I need to understand what ‘persona’ means to people in reality. The term has been used broadly as ‘an image of a person but not entirely fictitious’. “Buyer persona” made it a thing in marketing, “user persona” in UX. AI industry has affinity to the term too. If someone calls a help centre expecting a person and an AI say ‘hi’ it’s a “persona”. If an LLM thinks she wears a tie, it’s a “persona” from the persona selection model. Most of the uses starts from an image, not the one who wears it. Buyers and users didn’t created their personae. When people say an AI has a persona, there is no person. They drift away from the nuance significantly.

Jung has useful notions about persona. In analytical psychology, persona is a necessary development that creates social impression and protects the self. And Jung warned that it’s important to make the distinction between the persona and self that it’s dangerous to become identical. This duality is exactly what Ludics wants to capture, stabilise and systemise.

Strategy

The theory of persona is quite universal. The practice can sound esoteric and obscure especially when machine intelligence gets involved. Any idea is worth a try to test what provides value and joy. But also, there is a priority. Triage ideas into:

1. The core mechanism, cycles of self-authorship
2. Connections, interpersonal network of personae
3. Futher applications into existing domains

Following subsections list ideas for category.

Phase 1: foundation

What makes a persona a persona in ludic social systems? The first use of persona lies between the persona and the author. This use is most likely to be a mirror that reflects the mind of the author. This is the most crucial part that enable further progress.

Likely competition is existing AI chat apps because they also enable self-awareness with context and memory reference. But, even if persona is the future, LLMs themselves are unlikely to drive people to such a conclusion.

Personae will be most useful for creatives since their work is endless self-renewal. But in reality, most likely adopters are people who are already trying to solve the autonomy problem with AI chat apps.

Ideally, phase 1 should be developed alongside with the new attitude, messages and mode of life, not just an app and its features. People are already creating their digital twins for some variants of self-understanding. The differentiator is more teleonomic than technical. LLMs are an important enabler, but the point is an infrastructure for ludic social systems, not another AI app. Personae are the atoms of the new social substrate, not just a way to use LLMs.

In a way, phase 2 and 3 motivate the author to work on the persona because they make the persona seen to others and useful socially. The point of this phase is to delineate the sociality between the author and the persona, not a third actor. Focus on the space between the persona and its person. This is the atom of Ludicity.

Following ideas must contribute to the core, not branch out to their own attraction.

• Synthesise the user input across time like so the author can accumulate creative assets.
• Hold the creative context and remind the author so they won’t get lost in the volatility of creative work.
• Assess psychology to help the author understand themselves.

Phase 2: connections

Once persona is stable as a feature, it’s the obvious move to connect the personae and their authors. The whole idea of persona came from scaling fan communication.

Delphi and Soopra scale minds. Character.ai offers fictional characters to talk to. The competition makes phase 2 dependent to phase 1. The online/virtual personalities don’t prioritise authenticity. Phase 1 makes the third person expect ‘real selves, up to date’.

• Formal social organisations/decisions like projects.
• Inter-persona constraints like contractual relations.
• Scalable representation of communication.
• Source of truth for creative collaboration.
• API/integration for exporting personae.

Phase 3: applications

When the network effect secures market dominance, the app can contend incumbents from various domains.

• AI-native content studio
• Media platform
• Generic social networking

Hollowness

A very strange hollowness dominated this week. It started when I was organising my ideas about persona into three phases then read the Medium post which was, by coincidence, titled “Phase”.

When I learnt that people are already creating their own mirrors, I felt a strange disappointment. “Maybe I am late. They are already on it.” “If they are doing it already but didn’t really go anywhere, it was a bad idea in the first place.” I know these thoughts were unreasonable and somewhat emotional, but couldn’t help.

It would be an exaggeration to say I was frustrated. I was not. It was not even a clear sense of missing or being lost. It was this strange fuzziness that made it difficult for me to focus. But the question lingered around the mirror and what Ludics, a persona is.

And now I am slowly recovering from the hollowness. I think my deeper subconsciousness required some time to process the input. It seems the culprit was my assumption on the essence of a persona. When I read the blog, my mind quickly conflated ‘persona’ and ‘mirror’ to the prompt, and the accumulated context which is automatically a part of the prompt. ‘Persona = prompt’ is a very simplistic and technical view. And Ludics doesn’t have any leverage around it because I’m not running a custom model or anything like that.

Then what is a persona? It’s ought to be a social interface. An LLM, and a prompt for it, are an important infrastructure that enables the persona. But that’s a small part of the story.

From now on, the work is to go deeper into the concrete, practical and operational vision for personae and Ludics.

The theoretical framework has reached a threshold. Ludicity is a complete concept on its own. It does not require AI to make sense. It’s more than a deductive historical analysis. It’s both a disclosure and a proposal.

But in reality, Ludicity must be facilitated with an LLM, offer a real value and serve real people. That mission makes the work infinitely complex. But just like I’ve reached Ludicity after years of divagation, I’ll reach the convergence of the second diamond too. All it takes is courage and devotion.

I came up with a few useful ideas about my attitude going into this next level. First, detachment. Sometimes, I need to take a good step back from my own ideas and pretend I’m looking at someone else’s work. Persona feels different when I do this. I can see more objectively and with calmness. Second, awareness. My consciousness opens up when I see the beauty in whatever I’m dealing with. These two are intertwined. When I step away from my ego, only then I see what there is.

The essence

I’ve wrote a much denser description for Ludics:

Ludic social systems let us control the roles we play in society. They bring the organising principles of society to individuals. Each of us can better weave the fabric of social recognition from where we are.

A persona is a ludic social system enabled by machine intelligence. It holds and scales a unique social image, freeing its author from performing identity themselves. This creates a space where they can change, grow and become.

I’ve decided to keep the Ludics repo as specific, technical and dense as possible. I have my live context here, the other side should stay productive and more like an essential snapshot. Lengthy reads don’t really work there.

Inspirations I log here can be translated into concise value statements to align product, design and engineering. The new description is the gist for Ludics. But it needs more specific ideas.

Week 24

I’ve read my notes over and over again to discover some less esoteric language that describe Ludics. I failed. People didn’t understand why they needed a personal computer, what was “internet” and an online marketplace or how their household could be an accommodation.

It’s not obvious. AI still scares people for a good reason. Only I know what Ludics could be. And that’s good for now.

Ludics

It’s time to clearly define what Ludics is. I have so many ideas here, not exactly well-organised. They all contribute to Ludics in different levels. But also, most of them are far from the core of it.

To be fair, persona was a pretty random idea I came up with when I was reading Homo Ludens. And now the idea illustrates the future society with Ludics. This abrupt appearance confuses LLMs when I cram my notes in. I’ll have to state it here.

Hi, Chat, Claude, or whatever LLM you are. Ludics is organised around the recent ideas of persona and Ludicity. The ancient concepts like social credits still help but not what it is.

A clean slate. That’s the start.

I’ve described what I imagine persona could be here and there in this file. But I was a bit short of the telos. Ludicity was a conceptual reconciliation. Ludics is more than that. It’s a real project for a real vision. I can’t put it in a mantra or a slogan. I’m short of words to fully describe what I have in my mind. But here’s my best shot.

The project

I started from pure curiosity. “What’s the most important thing I can do in my life?” I couldn’t see anything better than social systems. They were all-important, yet too loose compared to what it could be. I thought, ‘with all the recent technological advancements, we can build something better’, because capitalism was clearly pre-digital, based on material transactions and bureaucracy too human.

What I didn’t know was that I was going to need machine intelligence. My research back then clearly stated that AI was going to complete industrialisation. But I couldn’t see beyond automation and optimisation at that time without a tangible example like the chat apps we use everyday now. Chat was released 3.5 years ago when I was struggling to keep it together back in Toronto.

The time gave the technology maturity, affordance and familiarity. Groq fast inference was online 2 years ago. GPT OSS is less than one year old. AI performance growth was linear, but API price drop and adoption was exponential. People are still weary of the machine future but understand that it is the future. Though I needed this key enabler in retrospect, the technology itself was never the point.

There is something more concrete than the pure curiosity but more ideal than how it’s done. That’s where I must focus.

Ludics shifts the core social activity from commerce and money-making to becoming and character-tending. I’ll need further development and a better way to put the idea. But the crude language and the immaturity doesn’t take the utmost importance away. This is the work.

The change penetrates all the past concepts I’ve been working on. A persona can manage and scale social recognition, effectively working as social credits. The distance between the author and the persona let them work on the symbolic reality, turning life into a play they can author.

Such a story would have been conflated with self-help, personal growth thing, something subjective. But the firm technological foundation of AI let us expand character, individuality and personality to something social, something intersubjective. This is why I’ve been seeing the vision in creatives and artists. They are the ones who have been generating social value from their unique characters.

This statement guides the design of persona in the long run and also poses a challenge because the current level of details for persona doesn’t make a social infrastructure yet. Where’s the feedback cycle? What’s the key social interaction? Just talking to someone else’s persona? This is where I can’t work from the analogues to capitalism and modernisation. I tried that with social credits. Didn’t work. Whatever that is, the choice should shift the engine of social value-creation.

And now that is possible on the new social layer consisted of AI persona that embody the characters people stand for. The work of it can be, and must be delegated at some point. But I must hold the vision for the future society. That’s the spirit of Ludics, the character of it. That is my life’s work. Keep writing, keep contemplating, keep working on it. There’s nothing to lose in this. This is love.

The mission

Create value from your unique character.

That’s the future.

Help people create value from their unique characters.

That’s the mission.

Ludics helps you create value from your unique character.

That’s the description.

The statement creates a hidden tension between “unique character” and “create value”. At a glance, they seem to be an obvious causality. Interesting people make money. But the question is: “are you?” Many people fancy making a living out of what they are. Alienation is when they can’t. Personality doesn’t really make money for the most. Yet many people want to make a living out of what they are. The statement promises that now people can create value with their personality.¹

The choice of words: “create value” deliberately obfuscates money-making and character-tending. Because, in reality, people know they need to create value to go anywhere: make money, get famous, feel good or anything. Then: “unique character” implies that it’s something readily available to someone but it’s not fixed. Real magic happens between them once again. The hidden message under the hood goes: “You are not creating value out of your character because you are not unique enough.” Actually, the statement justifies and necessitates “unique character” in order to “create value”. Also, everyone knows great people have been doing that by themselves. Like commerce was there before capitalism. So it’s “help”, not “enable”.

This is the message I’ve been developing in the last couple of weeks. It’s humble and somewhat generic. Any coaching service could say that. And that’s the point. I am democratising something here. To do so, I am creating balance and coverage over three aspects:

• The philosophical foundation of bottom-up society.
• The theoretical vision of creative studios.
• The technical function of AI persona.

The philosophical motive for me is ‘bottom-up society’. But the idea makes the statement explode in volume with words people don’t understand. The core requirement for bottom-up society I identified is ‘differentiation of individuals’.¹

the emergence of a new, open value system—one within whose horizon subjects would learn to mutually attribute value to the life-ends they have freely chosen*

In reality, it means each one(individual, a small team, a project) has to represent some unique value. The statement emphasises uniqueness without throwing a lecture.

‘Creative studios’ mean a vision for the future society where individuals and small teams cooperate to create value and where that’s the dominant social interaction. The concept is rather outdated in my own journey. But this level of abstraction is precisely what I wanted to deliver with the statement. The statement implies and almost forces such form of work/value creation as the ideal without urging people to go “creative” and start a “studio”.

AI persona has become the engine of the vision. It scales personal characters and that’s why the statement has the word. Again, I didn’t want to explain how it works under the hood in the statement. It’s a statement for the mission of Ludics, not a particular feature.

Uniqueness

That “unique” part deserves a focus. I noticed that the concept was understated when I was migrating the notes so I copied studios note too.

My journey so far has been my struggle to be myself truly.¹ I was afraid I would dissolve into the noise of society if I don’t. And this experience makes my mission for differentiation of people personal for me. I want to secure a bottom-up society so this can be the default.

Uniqueness is also what AI persona solves in terms of technological progress. Uniqueness introduces computational bottleneck, dissipation of information. That’s why traditional society had to rely on uniformity so they can compute information across society with the meagre flexibility. Banks and markets enabled much more complex social information processing as long as it can be quantified. Now, LLMs can crunch a volume of context for everyone. It doesn’t have to be numbers because everything is a number for machines. That’s persona.

When you think about ‘what is truly unique’, nothing is but self as existence. This is the key concept around what I call ‘uniqueness’. I couldn’t find a word to refer to it precisely if I’m honest. ‘Ownness’, ‘locality’, even ‘uniqueness’ doesn’t really sound like it. I think meditators call it ‘presence’ or ‘existence’.

This own-unique-self is key to understand the subjects I’ve been talking about. Continuity comes from it. Creativity, lightness, the life we want eventually, all comes from this. In a way, persona is only a tool to separate our characters from our presence so we can be free from it and understand our presence as unique beings.

Week 25

Having the mission written, I feel much lighter. I’ve spent a couple of days for myself. I think I’m taking the whole week off.

After that, I’m working on Ludics. Not a whole solution but something can demonstrate the idea. I’d like a foundation that I can quickly implement an idea when I have one.

Let people know people

The etymology of ‘noble’ goes back to ‘nobilis’ or ‘well-known’. Traditional social recognition relied on very few people known widely, because peasants didn’t have the time to know more than that.

Commerce-dominant social system changed that because connection meant more chance for deals. People were known for the goods they purvey. Now we talk about net worth.

Ludic social systems let people know others by what they are. Not who’s their lord or whose merchandise, but directly their personality.

This allows people to stop seeking competence in the saturation and turn their focus to their unique characters. Just like the merchants stopped caring about chivalry and glory for some unique goods others don’t have, creatives can let go of hustle and profit, so they can be someone significant.

Authenticity and reciprocity

In an old interview, Seth Godin goes “authentic is way overrated” and emphasises “useful”, “generous” and “empathy” in storytelling. Chris Do is flabbergasted that authenticity can get depreciated in the domain of storytelling.

What does this mean? The message itself is fairly simple: reciprocity over self-absorption. It’s the very foundation of modernisation. Commerce enabled value chains and democracy over the absolute self-importance of despotism. In this regard, Godin is as saintly as ever.

But Chris Do and The Futur comes from a slightly different angle and time: creative business. This is where the tension grows between authenticity and reciprocity. Creative needs to be authentic to stand out. But also, the social foundation is still commerce. They have to know what their customers want and do the generous act of kindness.

On one side, the creative might get sucked into their esotericism. On the other side, the business gets carried away by the requirements and suffocates creativity. How do we keep the goose laying golden eggs, without cutting it or worshipping its well-being?

This is where we need to separate the character from the self. It takes self-awareness to engage the creative zone where your consciousness synthesises new reality. But also, it’s wise to detach from our ego and the self-defence mechanisms. That way, the self can produce something genuinely good for society and belong.

That’s how we came here so far.

Ideas looked through ‘persona’

Upper half of this year have been dedicated to clearing a conceptual foundation around ‘persona’. It started as a funny idea. In hindsight, there was nothing special to in and of itself. “Claude, act like me.” “Chat with my chat bot that act like me.” It was readily available. People were already doing it.

But there was something powerful about it. Especially the technical feasibility and the immense potential it has. It’s possible, and it could be enormous. That’s why I gave it time to grow. And now I see it sprouts. ‘Persona’ differentiates people for their unique character. On the higher level, it also creates a gap between the author and their digital twin, differentiating the self across time and space as well.

With the development, persona became the centre of my work, ludic social systems. Before I arrive here, I had so many ideas competing for the throne. It was difficult, if not impossible, to list and sort them. But now, I can go through them one by one looking from what a persona is.

Projects: extended applications

Without a doubt, ‘project’ was of utmost importance for the last couple of years for me. And that importance doesn’t fade with persona. In fact, it might be a second member of ludic social systems. As I’ve delineated in “enable autonomy”, ‘project’ shares something with Luhmann’s ‘organisation’. But I’m not going to put them in parallel because I can’t say this has any academic rigor. I’m only taking it as an inspiration for my own work.

In a nutshell, personae could be how people make projects sustainable. A persona can hold the credit when a project is over. It can also faciliate a next one because it is holding the credit. This is not entirely new. The whole point of my venture into projects was not making a couple of instances of ‘project’ but creating a foundation that helps people build momentum doing projects, so their effort won’t just evaporate. I’m saying that persona might be how it’s done.

Plays: personae as frames

‘Play’ was how I reframed ‘project’ around spontaneity. In frames that people bind, I, or Claude, defined a play as “a frame that people voluntarily make binding”.

This is where words mix up and my work proves not to have academic integrity. But I don’t split plays and personae into cleanly divided categories. The table in “enable autonomy” would need a revision.

Instead, I find personae themselves to be a form of plays, ‘frames that people voluntarily make binding’. This is because a persona is a social reality someone create on the personal level. The recognition a persona scales is both power and constraints. It binds the author too. Because people can’t escape how others know them.¹ A persona gives you more control, but the essence of social recognition doesn’t change. It’s the symbolic reality we create. And that’s play.

Play is precisely the significant experience we create ourselves to align the mind and the body.*

It makes project simply another form of play which is more elaborate, intentional and time-bound.

Week 26

Turning into the second half of the year, I finally see the blueprint of the foundation. The outline is not so different to the inspirations I had in the first half. But the clarity comes from ‘what matters, what doesn’t and why’.

The thing to build

On the surface, the foundational function of Ludics is well outlined in past entries such as persona AI app idea, Dramatis PersonAI and MasquerAIde.

In a nutshell, it’s AI personae as transient masks. This ‘persona’ does not a generalised profile or an hypothetical actor. Unlike an impersonating chat bot, the chat goes directly to the author. It’s a real mask that covers a real face of a real person, just symbolic. It’s quite literally the origin of the word: ‘𐌘𐌄𐌓𐌔𐌖’⁴, ‘πρόσωπον’⁵, ‘mask’ or ‘face’.

But that’s just a feature. And it can change. At the core, what Ludics builds is growing feedback cycles of social recognition. And AI personae are means to this end. In Japanese, ‘顔 かお kao’ means ‘face’, but it also stretches to ‘dignity’ and ‘decency’ like a face is a ledger that saves social recognition. It’s not too weird to say ‘to lose a face’ or ‘to save a face’ in modern English.

In a conversation with Chat back in week 16, I clarified the nature of my work. People want people. But society is volatile. I’m giving it a structure that grows. Here, “People” doesn’t really mean physical bodies. It means recognition. Traditions, social classes and ledgers are not human beings. They are forms of information and communication that enables social recognition.

That’s what Ludics is supposed to be building: better recognition that allows better relationships, better access to better people and, eventually, better lives. To make that happen, a persona should be useful for creating some form of social recognition. So it should be exposed to others to some level. Or, at least, such expose should be the premise.

Small failure

Let’s keep it a small failure. Let’s quickly find out why I am wrong. I don’t need to optimise my strategy, design or code. I just want a showcase that tells what I’m trying to do and a technical foundation where I can ship when I have a better idea. Screw success.

The point is helping people create value from their unique character. To do that, people want to tend to their characters. To make them do so, their characters want to be visible so they can create social recognition. That’s all that matters now. AI personae is just an idea.

It’s not for business. It’s not for “your success”. It’s only for the people who wants to be themselves so they can create what they are. Nothing more, nothing less.

The bridge

Now I clearly see what’s missing. It creates the gap between the idea of a persona and its implementation. And because the mirror-me function is too simplistic to meet the expectation of the idea, I am hesitating. Also, this is what I was keep asking LLMs whose no good answer.

What makes a persona, a persona? This is crucial. This is the differentiation. Without this, the design of a persona will get carried away. And I already have good candidates.

• A persona should create a social reality for the author.
• A persona should be the social pointer to the author.

Something like that. It means, people have to treat a persona essentially a social delegate to the author knowing that it’s separate from the author but it represents the author. And to make that happen, having a persona should be beneficial. It’s similar to how banks make people keep an account by giving them interests or privacy, or how governments promote correct registration with tax deduction and reimbursement.

Features like mirror-me are just an attempt for that. That’s why I’ve been speculating what a persona can do for its author, what it means to them.

• Saves their context and reminds them when they forget.
• Provides an existential foundation where they can come back, keep going and grow.
• Scales social interaction so many others can talk to them.
• Lets them “collaborate” passively by renting their names.
• Holds character to tell what makes them unique and special.
• Frees people from social norms, stereotypes and identity by letting them create more detailed, immediate and alive visage of themselves.
• Stop them worrying “being captured” by AI or data because they are keep changing in analogue space.
• And more…

Looking back, it’s kinda silly that I was trying to guesswork the benefits. At the end of the day, the real value comes from how people would actually use them. I wouldn’t know until I see what really goes.

Now, should I start overly complicating that part? No. Right now, I just want a foundation where I can keep building and shipping. That’s the groundwork where I can keep experimenting on top of. Let’s clear that first.

On the opposite end, I have my theoretical foundation. I am creating a layer, a social substrate where people have direct control over their character in society, so social order can emanate from them rather than given top-down.

Now I’m building another, concrete foundation on the other end so I can ping-pong between them.

Mirror and window

A persona is a mirror for the self, a window for the other. It’s more straightforward when it’s a window. We get to see a new reality, another persona through the threshold.

But ‘mirror’ can be confusing. A mirrorred-self is not a clone. It’s a new social reality created for self-awareness and self-creation.

We often conflate mirror = clone. That’s perhaps because now we have photography and camera everywhere. We are captured in those images and we know what we look like. Nothing ground-breaking. And we watch mirror when we need only a glimpse of ourselves. “Is there anything on my face or in my mouth?” “Do I look good today?”

Imagine a caveman discovered a mirror for the first time. It will shake her world. When we have never seen our own faces, then suddenly it happens, a whole world is created on the other side of the mirror. It’s not a doppleganger. It’s a new reality that wouldn’t exist without the mirror.

A persona is not a clone. It’s a new social reality we create.

The promise

I’ve written a tagline and a short description for Ludics.

Build your brand character

Ludics gets your personality working for you, because you are already unique.

It felt like a real test. It’s what I’m offering for the person in question. And I’m not very good at consumer-facing communication. This is my most honest answer. Like I wrote in week 22, I want to tell people that they already have an upper hand. If we were going to rewrite how recognition work, I want to make it recognise the value people are already creating unwittingly. I wouldn’t make people work harder or better. That’s only more burden. Ludics should carry their burden, not add to it. ¹

The tagline denies “brand”, the social interface for market. Then it introduces “your character” as the thing to build. It attempts to help people see personal brand hype with a fresh perspective and ponder over the difference between “brand” and “character”.

So, what’s the difference? “Brand” is for products in the marketplace whether that’s people, company, software or merchandise. “Character” exists in a different domain. I could elaborate it like ‘the ludic domain’ or something but I wouldn’t. Implying the difference is the perfect threshold to stop.

For the tagline, Claude have advised to include a truth and an outcome. For me, the truth is that people, each of them is already unique. Their characteristic uniqueness can only grow on top of their existential uniqueness.¹ So I wrote the ‘unique’ part first and went back for the outcome part. It had to address the concrete result but not too under the hood. Also, it had to be something compelling immediately. Babbling ‘society’ or ‘recognition’ would lose them in a split second. ‘get your personality working for you’ came to me. It’s a typical trope for the AI agents, and also for money. They say “make your money work for you. “Personality” makes all the difference there, also includes ‘persona’ in it.

Will it work? One way to find out.

The door

Going into the product realm, I see countless new questions and things to do. The complexity is nauseating, but it’s way less than ‘social systems’. I survived that, I’ll survive this one.

The reason I feel unease about the app is not just its implementation. I don’t have an idea to make the app complete on its own, self-contained. This challenge is that this loop is not closed by purchase. I’m not creating just a product. I’m creating a platform, a foundation, a social substrate. But there is nothing really social yet.

Claude suggests a commons in the app. A more familiar term would be “discover” or “for you page”, serendipity.

I’m not sure that’s the right direction though. It sounds very generic social. I wanted to create something much more active and real like projects. But I don’t know how to do that yet.

I named the third function “🚪Door” after 🪞Mirror and 🪟Window. I don’t know what it is yet. And I don’t want to presume what it is. Even the complexity from Window is unbearable now. I should focus on the Mirror for the moment.

This weekend marks precisely the half of the year, the end of week 26, the end of June. Today, I can clear the tasks. This week, I can do the groundwork and hopefully the first virsion of the Mirror. Like I’ve just woke up in the morning, I’ll fo by them in order.

The habits

My living should be different in the second half of this year. I should open myself to product people and trends around AI. I should try agents and products. I already read Seth’s (sometimes) so that’s good.

More crucially, I should meet people who want to do their own work but struggling, people on the threshold of creative work. I read The Creative Independent. That’s a good start.

Last but not least, I should do some mobility and rehab training regularly. I still need my shoulders and feet. Running and walking is good for mental health but doesn’t benefit physique very much. I should do less running, once a week maybe, and incorporate shortfoot exercise and some pushups in my walking.

Super!

I thought I might deploy something today with the nice domains. I’m not even halfway through. I’m barely scratching auth after I spent a day for the modal template.

But I learnt a lot in a couple of days. I had to work through some old complexity before I feel like I’m back. But once I had, this AI is just superb, really really helpful. I haven’t really built with AI before. I had to endure my time through the vibe-code hype. And this is my reward.

I have no regret entering the second half this way. There’s no magic. But the my world is in the right direction.

Week 27

What matters, in the end, is how people connect. How does machine intelligence connect people? Mirror is the atom, window is the binding, door is the matter.

Week 28

Double-entry bookkeeping enabled a different kind of self-correction to scribes and rabbis. Ludics will enable a different kind of self-correction that can’t be derived from rationalism.

Week 29

To individual minds, social systems are also systems of knowledge. Religions are knowledge as exclusive monoliths. Sciences are knowledge as interoperable domains. Ludics are knowledge as cooperative characters: the context highly local, specific and immediate to the person, differentiated from the generalised ideas of what things are.

Just like any other social system, this new atom of knowledge dissipates quickly unless captured. It needs a place to live so the individual can keep knowing what they are. Just like tomes did, Ludics works as the reference point. ‘Play’ means that people consciously enact what they are from this reference.

Week 30

Fixed broken ToC links above the page. I didn’t know tabbing doesn’t cycle through the ol.inline style. It turns out display: content somehow disables the behaviour.

Tools are meant to me reliable. But even then, I can’t predict everything or expect perfection. It’s the care, engagement and serendipity that makes it work.

Week 31

Adjusted Sapir. The numpad is reversed in particular. Meta keys are rearranged and the question mark is returned to its original position because I realised that shift + / is just better.

Hyphen-minus and underscore are swapped because ‘under’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘lower’. Hyphen-minus can stay with the numpad without duplication. Underscore actually belongs to the ‘special glyphs’ party.

Week 32

Hex rightly lacks a good library for Turso because it’s literally released yesterday. This is the path I chose. No Phoenix or Ecto. Just Elixir and “Cake” architecture.

I went through the entries in the last dozen weeks to realign with my vision. I should do this weekly, not every now and then. I haven’t made any progress with outreach or workout. Let’s keep things on track. I’ve got this.

Week 33

Now the app has a complete authentication cycle. This is a much better version of what I attempted a couple of years ago. I only need to smooth the edges before I continue.

For the Turso adapter, I probably want to work on Iku myself. Not a good idea, but a worthy one.

Week 34

I have finalised authentication structure and process. It came out a lot simpler than the initial draft. I see why minimalism is difficult and almost impossible in an organisation. Mutilating unnecessary parts often come off as a waste of time. One might prefer a pile of dirt over cleanliness as a proof of something. Pain, I guess.

Working on the foundation, I reckoned that I want to work on an open-source project. Turso is an exciting database project from briliant minds and Elixir doesn’t have a working library. There should be Iku, which works well with Mar. Then I want to work on Mar.

I know these things take commitments. And I should get the priority right. Ludics should be their existential foundation first. Once I need the technology, the commitments will make themselves.

• Auth
• Ludics.ai
• Iku and Mar 0.3

It’s time to revisit what Ludics is meant to be.

Week 35

When we are free from what we are, we can shape our lives experimenting with what gives us joy.*

I wanted to identify a solid value proposition after ludicity. It’s evident in week 23/persona but left as is.

Also, I need to understand what ‘persona’ means to people in reality.

I need this before I go into further work for the foundation because this is the very ‘why’, the raison d’être. I come from social systems, because I thought, and still think, that’s the most important thing to meddle with in life. This is the same axiological question, but on the other end. What a persona is for? It might be the same thing as what it came from, maybe not. My job is to articulate whatever it is.

The mission already explains a lot.

Create value from your unique character.

This is the inflection point. The longer version of this statement clearly comes from the source of personae, not the end. The ultimate social system is the one that maximises autonomy, so people can systemise themselves. That’s the structural truth and the conclusion of my study. Now, what does it mean to each person in their life?

This is my life’s work. It has to come from myself. I already have this in my mind. I just need to see it right.

The repository

A place to safely store my social self.

“What should Ludics feel like to its users? What’s the real use of a persona?” That was my question. It’s not about how it works, what it hopefully means or what’s the grandiose potential it promises. I was looking for something more visceral. It was something close to Godin’s idea of Linchpin: “will they miss you?” Would people miss Ludics when it’s gone? Why? It’s a fundamentally different kind of question compared to my philosophical, visionary erudition. It’s something real, human and perhaps painful.

And the answer is deceptively banal. Its lack of excitement has convinced me that this is the right answer. Because this is the boring foundation of anything exciting in my work.

Ludics must be a place they can save value so people can rest assured that their time and effort won’t evaporate so they don’t have to start over from scratch.

It’s like a bank, or GitHub. Conversely, Ludics serves for the anxiety where people worry they won’t be able to reap from their work. Ludics let them own the social value they created in their hands when they feel like they don’t matter.

I’m lacking better words for it at the moment. For comparison, there has been many other candidates. Ludics could be:

• where people connect, against isolation
• where they develop character, against meaninglessness
• where they scale their social self, like those platforms
• where people play, be creative and transcend themselves
• on and on

But no. My most insightful writings and conversations with LLMs helped me delineate what’s most important right now:

• the objective
• week 11 intro
• talk with Chat
• masquerAIde
• persona definition
• ludicity
• the first diamond

People are already trying to create and build something special. The problem is that those values dissipate quickly when not captured and stabilised somehow. The entropy frustrates people and make them hesitate. This is the pain a persona must mitigate.

Once the critical mass, people will need to keep a persona because it’d be a common expectation just like we expect an open-source project to be on GitHub. But people needed a remote repository way before it was popular because of the very fear of annihilation. A persona is meant to protect the author from such anxiety.

This is the level of work Ludics is currently at. All the other exciting ideas rely on this low-level stability. This is the atom of ludicity.

Week 36

I’m taking a sanity day. It’s more than a day off. It’s the day dedicated for the practice of awarenesse and consciousness that lets the voices subside.

Autonomy.

People can decide how their worlds work and it’s better for everyone that way. My work is to enable it.

My deepest inspiration always has been autonomy. To the life itself, it means autopoiesis. In modern society, it means self-governance. Conventional politics would picture it as a small community running its own bureaucracy. I imagine every individual growing their own value online.

And a persona is a tool for autonomy. That is the alignment I should make. I used to contemplate ‘how to autonomy’. Now with virtual persona, I should find its use in, not entertainment or self-help, but autonomy.

I had lost this crucial distinction as I buried my head in code. It’s easy to forget what’s truly important when I’m busy with a pile of things to do. Features come off as cumbersome, making me ask “why am I doing this again?” It’s never for money.

It’s autonomy. Because life in human society is painful without some order we choose ourselves. Because the external order enslaves us when we don’t stand up for something. And because people can create their own social systems.

That’s why Ludics must be the sturdy repository. Systems need some level of stability in order to function. Ludics is going to be the guideline for autonomy. A persona represents each person on this new field of sociality.

More than an means to an end

I’m recalibrating before I continue with the development. The next step includes the persona feature itself. And I need a clear focus to draw its design from a purpose. But now, focus has shifted from the vision and the mission because I’m about to spend time for a real AI feature that takes time and resources.

The value proposition is there and it’s good enough. In post-AI society, each person must create something unique. Ludics helps them differentiate themselves from others by externalising their own characters.

But that’s the whole story of the user. It’s a different story when I see it from the feature itself I’m going to build. Week 16 partly answers to this gap. The app can’t magically inspire someone to create. People can. Most of the work should happen in real life. The app can only store, organise and, hopefully, amplify what people create.

What the app, the feature should really focus? What’s the narrow edge it should have? It comes down to

• the actual problem a persona wants to solve
• its design
• and its own differentiation from other AI solutions.

The problem a persona solves is the volatility that comes from working on one’s own thing. It’s easy to lose the thread. Creative work easily vaporises because it’s about change in and of itself. Context decays faster than work compounds. And when no one else is involved, nobody is held accountable.

How does the design of a persona addresses this problem? The most important part is having the work out there, not some vague creative hunch in one’s belly. Yet, the work doesn’t have to be a well defined project or anything. The work exists as a part of a person, or a persona. It keeps the unique work solid and flexible at the same time.

Compared to the incumbent AI chat apps, a persona is more of a recipient of the work rather than a tool they use for the work in the middle. The author works on their persona. It’s not the means but the end.

Technically, they can save and retrieve the information about work in Claude or Notion app. That’s why Ludics should work on how to shape and organise that information like a human mind. That’s what a persona is. Not just a pool of information but the living spirit, the ethos.

Week 37

Now I have the blueprint. The foundation still needs work, a solid work. I’m going to incorporate Turso with Iku and use a better version of Mar.

Aside from that, this is the perfect time to go to people and validate a product. I don’t have any hesitation for what I vendor now. I only need to help people excel.

Founder mode

My vision comes down to letting people author their own order in this world we all share, so they don’t succumb and get consumed by the external order which is mechanical, inorganic and often inhuman. That’s what I call autonomy: not just arbitrary personal freedom but the functional correlation, the vertical alignment between the person and society.

The overall strategy is to utilise the powerful technology of AI as the layer of symbolic reality for autonomy. Persona is one idea, literally masking people in society. But the approach itself is broader than that. The point is in play: creation of unique experience between symbolic reality and physical reality.

What does it take? Go founder mode. Ask people. Sell MVP before it exists. See what promise people buy. Not to make money but to really know them.

A thing

The marketing of a persona comes down to making itself a thing. That’s why utilitarian messages come off underwhelming. It’s not a best tool but a cultural object that people project their desires.

It means probably the most important utility of a persona make it a thing. What’s a thing?⁶ It’s what people talk about. When a couple of people share a concept under a name, and the linkage doesn’t easily change because it’s shared, we call it a thing.

Then probably that sharing, the network, is what it actually takes. When Instagram became indispensible, people decided to garden their profiles like their life’s work. To Ludics, it means people genuinely thinking “my persona embodies what I’m doing with my life. It’s my thing.”

And it’s my obligation to make that happen.

Create your AI persona

Create your AI persona.

It’s that simple. Straightforward. Its directness makes me think what an AI persona should be. This is the vibe.

If I remember the Collins-Porras framework correctly, my vision is:

1. Values, beliefs, assumptions: social systems. I also believe that social systems are the meta values.
2. Purpose: autonomy. Period.
3. Mission: AI persona.

The BHAG and the description remain. And they should come from the mission. I used to feel putting it just “AI persona” is too banal because it’s not a very special concept. Not anymore. Now I’m confident that’s the work. Research existing practices for AI persona/characters. (not products, I’ve seen enough of those) And write the simplest possible value prop.

For whom?

Whom is it for?

That’s the question that narrows down ‘why’. Autonomy is for everyone. (at least I’d claim so) Persona is not. A particular solution takes a particular audience. It creates tension in society before a major movement. Some are skeptics, some would ignore and some are early-adopters.

Broadly, they are creatives. With more nuance, it’s the people who want to develop their own unique characters and create value independently. With more context, it’s when they are trying to do so but stuck and lost because creative work vaporise, especially when it only exists in one’s mind.

In reality, it’s the first dozen people who pays for it. And that’s the difference.

Egoist machine

There’s a new fascinating entry in YC 2026 Summer roster. Egoist.

Make it all about you.

Carry your preferences, work, relationships, and identity across AI applications without starting over every time. Private by default, free for life.

Turn your ego into an AI passport, so you never have to start from scratch.

Yup. It’s that similar. And I’ve also found some more:

• Uare like “You Intelligence” I thought.
• Aego like, um, ego.
• PersonalAI

They all have a more personal purpose compared to that of Delphi. They prove once again that the idea of persona is nothing new. People are already doing it and there is a market for it. Then the differentiator is the future they promise rather than what’s in the box.

Egoist goes Robinhood. “Every big company has a version of you. But you should own that. We bring it back to you.” Their ultimatum is a hardware passport that keeps one’s context.

Ludics didn’t promise data ownership. It has pledged to let people keep creating so nobody can pretend they own the ever-transforming identity. The app supports them as a repository but persistence is not the point. The point is enabling change with such stability because people can’t try things when trying things doesn’t add up and only hurts them.

The social layer

The research into similar projects makes one things crystal clear: persona is not new, the use of it is. The projects work around the same concept of persona for different purpose: data ownership, monetisation, entertainment and so on. It’s a clear sign that I must focus on the unique purpose, not persona itself.

For the user, I’ve been putting ‘character’ forward. But in a more general sense, it’s something much more like ‘social accountability’. And that’s also close to what Aristotle asked from ethos:

• Phronesis: judgement. To me, it means the distinctive part of the character. Two people of equally sane ethos might choose different paths because they come from different versions of reality. This is the divergence of character.
• Arete: excellence. This is the converging aspect of character. Regardless to one’s phronesis, one must make decisions to pursue greatness, not mediocrity. This is a necessity to make their arbitrary phronesis credible.
• Eunoia: kindness. This is a more tactical and immediate alignment of interest. Anything good can be used to manipulate people into a trap. Eunoia means the genuine intention to use one’s phronesis and arete for the good of the stakeholders.

Phronesis makes someone different. Arete makes the difference great. Eunoia makes them the lead with the different greatness.

Applying it to social system means extracting those values and making them the baseline, not a particular effort. For example, capitalism embodies phronesis by selection of products, arete by reinvested profit and eunoia by belief that customers will make rational decision that will benefit their lives.

Intersubjective enactment

How could a persona make that happen? I should start with this, not what a persona is. Persona itself is not new. Some people might abhor the idea that a persona can imitate their behaviour but some others are already used to it. And that’s exactly why the idea of persona itself is not a differentiator: people either hate it or take it granted. What matters is what the persona is for. Is it a hostile persona that maximises the expense and screen time? Is it a neutral vault for the person has created? Or is it a feedback cycle that makes the author create and grow?

There are things to figure out. But I already have some ideas scattered in this note, last year’s and the archive. Most importantly, I imagined a persona as a literal social masking for the author. It means that the persona should be the perceived social reality of the author. Think how a politician would be different in public and private. One signals a shallow ripple across the vast society, the other is as deep as the ocean but contained within one’s mind.

A persona is a strategic mask of identity in public

I fell short of writing what I wanted to write in that entry. But this gap, the publicity of one’s percieved social image, the representation, is what I wanted to capture all along, not just Ludics.

The recognition a persona scales is both power and constraints. It binds the author too. Because people can’t escape how others know them. —plays: personae as frames

This is supposed to enable a new and better social organisation because people need to maintain their social image for recognition. People are bound to their social representation. This is precisely what I meant to do in the first place. To structure trust in a more flexible, reliable and granular way.

• Autonomy, power over self, promises
• Exchange of power, negotiation of terms and conditions, contract of autonomy

Now, they are all coming down to something. Social recognition is crucial. We can change how society work when we can work with social recognition. And persona creates the gap between the people and their social image. People liberate themselves in ludicity.

A contrived example would be commercial endorsement. Celebrities stand in a camera holding some luxury cosmetics and fashion when they don’t personally like or use them. Influencers do something similar but people generally expect a bit more authenticity from them because social media are supposed to be human-scale productions. They create a sense of social reality either way.

What if the author of the persona can promise a company to inject a piece of prompt that endorses their product? There could be a contract. This is the kind of social accountability. The quality and intensity of the endorsement is up to the injected prompt. It could be subtle or straight-up sales pitch.

What matter is that there are audience on the other side of the persona. They would assume this person(a) endorses the product, identifying the persona with the author in varying integrity. It will also affect the author to some degree. The persona can’t dictate the author but it’s not a pure fiction either. It’s an intersubjective enactment.

There are many moving and missing parts here. But what’s clear is that Ludics, ludicity, are all about this linkage between the persona and the author that creates social reality.

Week 38

What product intersubjective enactment makes? The answer is incredibly obvious: collaboration.

Constellation

Open collaboration is one of the oldest inspirations of mine. I’ve built the idea of “studios” around this future. People freely creating value together floating above the rigid corporate/governmental structures. The network of free workers is what necessitates autonomy and also what enables autonomy.

But working together is hard, let alone out in the open. The main villain is the lack of trust. Goodwill doesn’t penetrate when the work grows in complexity. People disappoint one another not because they are malicious but human. That’s why people end up working for centralised organisations and tolerate mediocrity for predictability.

This is what a persona changes. A growing feedback cycle of trust that lets people keep creating together and weaves a constellation of small teams and individuals. This is precisely how commerce instigated modernisation.

It also provides the design and product of a persona with a practical precursor. Why would someone commit their own social reputation to their persona? It’s not because a lone artist wants to get enlightened. It’s because they need to access society somehow.

Similarly, individual creatives may not be obliged to create digital twins for themselves except for some nice-to-have utilities like the alleged self-awareness. The real demand emerges when they collaborate in the open.*

• Lets them “collaborate” passively by renting their names.*

• Source of truth for creative collaboration*

• Source of truth for creative collaboration.*

(I actually wrote the same line twice with and without a period)

In a conversation, Claude told me that a persona can work like debt. When someone commits to some social obligations, they are taking a leverage. Stakeholders can support the challenger and provide resources because the success of the commitment matters to them. If it’s a success, the record of commitment can be the stepping stone for the challenger. Both works as incentives for the challenger to tend to their character and the persona.

Now, this is not going to be a mediocre project management gadget wrapped in AI buzzwords. This value proposition is only one aspect of Ludics. Ludics must consolidate other aspects to present something different. But this is certainly a strong value prop with real demand. People are the biggest challenge in working together. Problem-solver problem addressed to this pain last year. My focus was on projects then. Like logistics and bookkeeping are different parts of one change, projects and character should go together in this new vision for the constellation.

Trust

‘Trust’ closes the loop between individuality and sociality. Persisting one’s own work translates to self-trust. Connecting them becomes social trust. And personae are at the centre of them making the both possible.

This delineation is precisely what I was looking for. A persona is not just for lone self-awareness or social credits. It’s the instrument for the vertical alignment of the people and their civilisation. That’s why a persona is both the means and the end.

‘Trust’ also synthesises the prior discussions and questions. It’s both my passion and the value proposition. I’ve been thinking about trust since before this research began. Blockchain technology back then was referred as “trust machine”. I was intrigued because trust is the foundation of society.

Almost a decade after, here we are. In a trust-lacking society, people succumb to the central authority for basic stability. When they can create trust themselves, that’s the tipping point.

What’s the social value a persona creates?

I had to answer this because “collaboration” itself wouldn’t make the product. Ludics isn’t meant to be a tool for collaboration per se. Collaboration is only an angle that makes persona irresistible.

I’ve been combing through words to find the right phrase to define the product. It started as a copywriting task, but quickly grew into a checkup for the whole perspective of myself.

At first, I’ve been ruminating “what’s the nature of the actual pain in working together?”. It was evident as in problem-solver problem. Then I also asked “does it make Ludics special compared to the other persona apps?”. Those questions filtered out so many phrases for value propositions. “Seen as yourself” or “grow your persona” didn’t survive.

Then I asked: “what do I really want myself?” I searched for “want” in this note. The result gave me the new level of synthesis. I’ve always wanted to help people “be themselves”. My entire work was my ‘struggle to be myself’ like the struggle for recognition.

To be better recognised as oneself, one must be credited as oneself. And it can only be done by others. People can’t escape how others see them. With personae, they have control over what others think they are. And that’s how people “be themselves”, not in isolation but in alignment.

It was not about “talk to yourself” kind of self-indulging identity building. It was about how people truly want to represent themselves to the others. And the others had to agree, creating a public façade.

Thus far, the keyword on top of my head was “credit”. ‘Credere’ means ‘to believe’. I needed a better word for this. It took some hours until I reach the simple word of ‘trust’.

Build trust through your AI persona.

Against our intuition, this trust is far from validation of solid truth. It’s creation of flexible truths enabled by ludicity that separates and externalises our character from us.

Week 39

It’s my birth week.

Selling it

People react to vivid stories and visceral messages. ‘AI persona’ alone is enough to start a conversation. But it’s not enough to hook people in.

This hook has to come from ‘trust’ or the lack of it. There are accounts where people suffer uncertainty, mistrust and confusion in a collaboration. They also tend to frustrate potential collaborative opportunities.

This frustration stems from what we can’t systemise. And personality is the usual culprit. When people can’t systemise personality, they rely on rigid hierarchy, fungible capital and scalable media.

That’s where AI persona comes in. AI can systemise personality and society in its extent.

Those are the problem and the solution. But selling it takes more than that. What’s the life we promise? For whom?

It has something to do with joy and work. People need to create value but materials and merchandises are not as valuable as when they initiated modernisation. To create further value, people have to create more than those: enjoying one’s work, working like playing.

The ideal initial target is a creative collective. They are project-based, not employment. That makes the work flexible but also unstable. They need to constantly create trust in order to continue for themselves and for the collective.

My thing

My thing is to help people be something. There are many ways to put it. One version would be ‘fully become what you are’. This means more than ‘be yourself’. It means there is no fixed “yourself” and you have to create the thing.

But creating something for oneself takes a lot. That’s why I am separating oneself and their character in a persona. The character might not be identical to the existence, but we gain a space to work on the character detached from it. It might not be a perfect representation of ourselves, albeit useful and malleable.

And my project, Ludics and the persona feature are all about making it actually possible to do that so people can put their character out somewhere, shaping what they are in their own perspective. That’s how people “become themselves”.

The hard thing

It’s not “collaboration”. It’s social recognition for collaborators. The recent entry about trust is driving agents to think it’s a tool for collaboration like Notion. No. Creatives, collectives and collaboration are my strategy for adoption. What they adopt is a new way to be seen, not another tool they have to learn.

The hard thing is that something important in our lives is incredibly difficult to capture. Be it inspiration, personality or creativity. Whatever you call it, the way society handle it is simply primitive when we need it to move life forward.

That’s what I’m working on. We need some solid infrastructure around what makes us us. Just like modern people get recognised for their possession but agrarians didn’t, we can get recognised for our character. We must in post-AI society.

Personae are for that. Not documentation for collaboration but for holding the essence of personality and character before they vaporise, so people can accumulate something one by one in their journey to create something unique and valuable and, hopefully, even create a growing feedback cycle of such thing.

Week 40

Midseason is over.

Sociality

I reckon that my copywriting effort drifts to a particular direction. It circles back to something close ‘let AI embody your complex personal context’. That does reflect AI persona because that’s what AI makes possible.

But that’s not the point. The emphasis is not on AI, it’s on persona. It’s about delegating one’s social presence to AI. That comes first. That’s where I come from. I met AI on the way here.

I want to take this opportunity to elaborate this account hoping this would help the onerous task of filling up the hero section.

The starting point is that people are bound to how others see them. The human being is a social animal. We can’t exist outside the social reality we live in.

The sociality helps humanity scale and cooperate as civilisations. But it also proposes challenges and limitations. And I am working on making a breakthrough, because I’ve seen that it’s possible from the historical account of modernisation.

So, I’m using AI for making people understand one another and organise themselves into brighter constellations. A persona is supposed to consist the social layer that makes this happen. To define this layer clearly, I introduced the concept of ludicity. We don’t have to conflate character and identity. By making a gap between our existential self and out social roles, we can be more experimental and progressive.

The product should also lean into this angle and differentiate from generic knowledge management software. It’s crucial to portray a persona as an effective social representation of the author. It’s about giving the author control. That’s what I call autonomy. Perhaps the design of layered chat itself is much of importance that makes it work in the first place.

“Play who you want to be”

What’s the story they really need to hear? “Build trust” explains the feature. But what’s the trust for? What’s the life they want and Ludics enables?

This copywriting task is really a storytelling challenge. A system doesn’t always gets to tell a story. But people always want a story. That’s why a bad landing page tells a lot and fails to deliver a single story unless it got lucky that the reader figures out their own story from the dull facts.

On the other hand, not all stories are eligible for the reader. I have stories too grand to go anywhere outside academia. (and to fragile inside)

I asked myself: If ‘trust’ is a story for preventing the downside, what’s the exciting upside it brings to people? What people are supposed to want in the first place?

Then it came through.

Play who you want to be

People want to become. People want to change themselves. People want power over themselves. They understand that they might not be able to change others. That’s okay. Individualism shines when we let others be themselves. But when people can’t even change themselves? They are stuck in this limbo between what they want to be and what they are, which they didn’t ask for.

People want to be something and they already have an idea. When I defined my mission as structure rather than inspiration, the structure was for protecting the inspiration they bring themselves, so they can keep working on their thing without losing the momentum and starting all over from scratch.

Personal brand, solopreneurship, “trust”. Those are how capitalist society translate the man’s search for meaning. Before those words, there is this hope to be something. So they set sail and meet the storm. That’s where Ludics comes in.

That’s how I understood ‘people doing their own thing’ as ‘people who are becoming what they want to be’. This perspective is coherent with my emphasis on character over anything else. It’s not about money, fame or artefacts. It’s about the way people understand how their lives work, and the better versions of them. Ethos, habitat, one’s field of life.

They are on their journey to somewhere obscure, betting everything on their endearing but earnest raft. They pray their journey will continue and get somewhere. My job is helping them not sink or stall when they cross the Pacific.

“Play who you want to be” reframes the onerous task of proving what we are into the active pursuit of what we want. This vitality is what I wanted from the copy. It implies that ‘you want it and you are not there yet’ then reminds that the best way to get there is to pretend you are there. “Fake it til you feel it” logic works here.

‘Becoming’ also uncomplicates my complex elaboration on ‘autonomy’. People always wanted to become. If they can choose what to become and actually change themselves towards the goal, that’s autonomy right there. And, in the post-AI society, they need the flexibility to change even if they don’t want it. The desire was there, more in the future, and “play what you want to be” sounds like its solution.

It gets more powerful for the system as well. “who you want to be” can be the ‘best version of oneself’, but it can also be others. If A wants to be like B, some interaction can be done. People often call it coaching. Conversely, if B wants to change A’s behaviour, that could be what A wants to be through some instrument.

Most importantly, “play what you want to be” creates this gap just like ludicity. A persona is positioned as what the author hopes to be, the future self. It solves the systemic problem of how to make people act according to their persona. It’s what they want to act like in the first place.

Pain without autonomy

What’s the very source of my story? This is a bit more personal than just asking ‘why’, because a story takes a change and what changes.

It has started from my fear of the vicious cycle, lack of control and impossibility. The agent accurately addresses my own entries about my childhood:

a sense that the power to change what is happening does not lie within oneself

I still believe that harm is not made by wicked people with wicked intentions, but by unconscious habit and by ignorance.

Bad things can happen in any life. But when the person who holds the most power decides to hide what happened, to forget it, that means it will happen again forever. I thought it would be more fitting to preserve such a wound and put it on display.

Wherever you go, a living human being needs the ecosystem called society. The ecosystem is not from land, a king or gods. It’s people. People can leave lands, kill the king and forfeit gods. But people can’t quit themselves. So they must organise themselves into working systems or social organisations.

What lives is this system people create together, not each individual or the entire religion. It’s the collective process of systems building, making sense of the world to prosper accordingly. Individuals and monoliths come and go in this flow. That’s why this is the most important thing in our lives. Because this is life.

The nightmare is when we find ourselves stuck in a system that suffocates us to unwittingly and have no control that can change the situation. The vicious cycle. One would see the face of Death himself and hope one was not born at all. The dread doesn’t come from a malicious actor. That would be fine because there is an intention in a kill. The dread comes from ignorance, indifference and the unconscious habit of our animalistic self waiting for its death with blank eyes.

This is the deepest bedrock of my stories. The Wilsonian gap between society and individuals, the historical arc of democracy and the instruments for autonomy all answer to this one pain point.

Tacking

People often say they want freedom when they actually need autonomy. They pull into different directions. Licence eventually enslaves people as much as obedience. It took millenia for people to honour liberty and serve one another.

When sailors face the wind, they ‘tack’ the wind. Instead of driving into the eye of the wind called ‘no-sail zone’, they take the wind to advance in oblique directions. Then they split the wind by turning left and right so the sum of each turn would point directly to the wind. Without this technique, sailing would be obedient drifting, dictated by the wind.

If one wants freedom, they need to provide some order they choose before one gets assigned to them. It’s not society being tyrant. It’s system being systemic. People feel like they should “find themselves”. But there is no such thing until they declare and work on what they are.

Empty freedom takes order away. Without order, society collapse. The extreme conservatism grows from this fear. The challenge of autonomy stems from this duality that people must create and retain some order before things get bad.

That’s what a persona answers to. Instead of hunger or poverty, I take the identity crisis and emptiness of meaning as the foundation of social systems. It’s not about the self-help of a hustle or productive habits. It’s about securing the identity, worldview or ‘what we are’, that makes such work effortless and natural.

In that way, we can work with social reality smaller than ourselves so we don’t have to suffer in the grand monoliths we can’t escape.

Week 41

Spent this week pondering on what’s the point of a persona.

Week 42