- 2026 CE
- Current year.
- Week 8
- Week 9
- Week 10
- Week 11
- Week 12
- Week 13
- Week 14
- Week 15
- Week 16
- Week 17
- Week 18
- Week 19
- Week 20
- Week 21
- Week 22
- Week 23
- Week 24
- Week 25
- Week 26
- Week 27
- Week 28
- Week 29
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. Itās a hassle when notes are scattered across the UI snippets and tiny files. Iād 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 donāt 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. Itās for artificial consciousness.
u56w09e22:28
Iām using Unix year. Iāve been thinking about this for a long time. 1970 is the epoch, but itās 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
Itās my personal convention. So Iām 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:
- A: Monday
- B: Tuesday
- C: Wednesday
- D: Thursday
- E: Friday
- F: Saturday
- G: Sunday
And I always preferred 16:30 over 4:30 PM.
Putting it all together. Itās u56w09e22:28 now.
The last hour
Itās the last hour of Week 8.
Iāve 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 itās 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 donāt really make sense once time has passed. And itās difficult to pull off prose later.
I should write down prose when I have an idea. Thatās 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. Itās how we feel the vision not being the reality. Only then, there can be solutions that approach the problems.
Instead, Iāve 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 canāt predict the future precisely. But I know that cybernetic humanity is possible. We have everything we need to build organic social systems.
Problem
Then whatās the real problem people experience when society hasnāt fulfilled its potentials? Itās sustainable growth. In other words, itās 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.
And thereās also the alignment challenge between the society and consciousness. Inside, people feel that something is missing in their life. Itās because they donāt see things to synthesise in their minds; and higher consciousness remains dormant when thereās nothing to connect. They would talk about ālack of motivationā. So they need something in their lives to synthesise.
But also, they worry their society might not pay off their pursuits calling them āhobbiesā. Consciousness is costly inside and hobbies are costly outside. If thereās no growing feedback cycles or a generative order, their energy simply scatters into the gaping void of night sky when they talk about the āstupid thingsā they tried.
Solution
And plays are the solution Iām 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 canāt be the world, vice versa. But they certainly can be bridged. Thatās how plays consolidate flexibility and stability of social interactions. Plays can shape reality because they are ephemeral and illusory.
Statement
Iāve written a statement to put up at the root.
Everything flows. Lifeās goal is never an arrival. Itās 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.
- Discover: divergent inquiry
- Define: convergent conclusion
- Develop: divergent ideation
- Deliver: convergent impact
Facing life and work, I started from a simple question. “What is most significant in life?”
I reckoned itās 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 doesnāt really solve a problem on its own. My inquiry is even more comprehensive and philosophical than a typical design challenge. Thatās where confusion begins. When I ask myself āWhatās in it for the people?ā, itās difficult to answer. If I say something like āgrowthā, 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.
Iāve 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, Iāve 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.
āSocial systems studioā 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. Thereās 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.
ā Mahatma Gandhi
What does Iternity answer to? Iām pretty sure there is a precise angle that led me to this conclusion. But itās also very much of a panacea. Itās 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 thatās 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 canāt 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. Itās meaningful to coin a word for my ontology and start a vision of the future from it. And itās meaningful to have a foundational text for my future work.
I learnt that I canāt 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. Iām 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. Wouldnāt creatorsā 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.
Itās 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. Itās not critical for my mission. But its potential is profound in my mind. I have a great theme, Iternity and a flow.
- Lifeās 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 Iām 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, Iām basically tricking myself into writerās labour Iām 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 didnāt write down one of the most fascinating ideas from my study. Itās 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. Itās how society can be. But it hallucinates when it doesnāt 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 oneās 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 ādramatis personƦā or āthe persons in the playā. 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. Itās 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 Iāve 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, Iāve 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 donāt 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 canāt deny the profound potential behind it. AI is growing rapidly in its infancy. But itās 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.
ā Niklas Luhmann
Talcott Parsons wrote The Social System. And Niklas Luhmann, one of Parsonsā 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 canāt prosper on old decisions when reality changes by day.
Week 14
Actions canāt 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 canāt start from there. The persona idea is worth working on. It may grow into plays, maybe not.
Live in the future, then build whatās missing.
The more important vision is what life looks like in ludic social systems. I must live it to build whatās in it.
Italic and OCR
Homo Ludens is considered public domain. So I wanted to keep it in markdown. And now I see that itās extremely difficult to OCR books accurately. Tesseract is too old to get the glyphs right. Even the latest, transformer-based models canāt mark whatās italic. Agents spend an hour processing the scan and just crash.
Play and society
The initial part of Homo Ludens instantly proves why itās 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 āplayā 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 āplay is irrationalā. 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 āfree timeā and that itās only necessary when recreation is. This is precisely the time both are true. People would keep playing as long as itās 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. Thatās why biology handles them separately as āgenotypeā and āphenotypeā.
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 āLudensā. But there is one more important distinction we need to make for the āHomoā 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. Itās 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 authorās 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. Itās 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. Huizingaās own study of play was heavily focused on chivalry and court affairs which are politically profound.
When modernisation hit the world, the lower class didnāt stop playing. They simply started playing the social games they donāt 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 oneās nervous system doesnāt 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. Thatās 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 doesnāt mean they exclude the animalistic play. The conceptual fine line doesnāt exist in reality. They are all mixed up like constructive capital and mindless consumption are mixed up in the markets. But if the markets donāt embody the capital in some proportion, they collapse. Itās 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 couldnāt 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 Iām 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. Thatās how I came up with play as ludic social systems. Unlike projects, plays donāt yield a deliverable but experience. Time limit is not “deadline”
anymore. Itās 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 didnāt 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 canāt work stuck and lost unlike other productions that can get institutionalised. They need to keep playing. Thatās why they need ludic social systems.
“Social”
there doesnāt mean I am modelling collaboration. Itās 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 oneās own bank account. Reliable bookkeeping of oneās assets is absolute necessity for capitalist society to rise. Because thatās what people hold in their hands at the end of the day.
So Iām not going to shove the grandiosity of “Ludic Social Systems”
into their faces. Instead, Iāll 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. Itās 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 canāt keep them in flow.
Itās not just about the creatives. Itās 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 canāt 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 didnāt 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. Thatās 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
Added index numbers and ID display for headings. Wanted to add links too but couldnāt find a trivial way. GitHub Pages doesnāt support header_links Kramdown feature. Why is it named “header”
not āheadingā? 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 itās 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 itās not a thing. Itās 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, Iād like to make a rather operational definition of it. Itās 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 doesnāt require a formal play even though one might assert there are plays we donāt 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 thatās 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.
Thatās why creatives need social environments that bind whatās alive. Ideas and inspirations often frustrate without embodiment. Thatās ludic social systems.
Then what do plays needs to be? At first, my intuition didnāt get farther than impressions. I felt like I should somehow provide with joyful experience that doesnāt exists. Talking to Chat was much more productive. Iāve identified a couple of objectives.
- Provide an entrance that people can always come back.
- Protect boundaries so there wonāt 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 canāt 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. Thatās 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 Bobās 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. Itās starting anew in offsprings. And when thatās the norm, the parent can make sacrifice as long as it helps their children. Itās 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 ānew place for playsā. āProtocolā is another keyword I am holding for a long time which means the first page that initiates continued interactions. The systems donāt 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, itās not joyful when we donāt 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 doesnāt 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, itās 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 canāt 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 itās 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 canāt think of one play thatās more reliable than virtual social environment. Itās 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 canāt 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 itās about āstarting againā, 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 Iāve ideated weeks ago, personae are not separate chat bots. Itās 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.
Thatās 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. Iāll be talking to creatives and do actual sessions where I can. Itās not about the app or whatever I think plays are. Itās 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 āwhatā. Surprisingly less candidates are there for āwhyā. Any āwhatā kind of makes sense. All of āwhyā 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 donāt 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. Itās much more about the existence of life rather than what we think or feel about it. Iāll 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.
Itās 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. Itās 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. Thatās 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 itās organic. And again, this āorganicā does not mean ācarbon-basedā. It means itās 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. Iād say itās existence, more precisely, existence of life itself.
Life I want
I have arrived at my āwhyā.
Life I want doesnāt 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 aā¦ āgood lifeā?”
Didnāt think so. I certainly want a meaningful life. But that didnāt resonate very much. So I delved deeper into my pain.
My deepest self answered. “Life I want just doesnāt exist. But I know I can create one.”
Thatās the why. That is visceral to me. What would I care when thereās 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 Iāve 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. Thatās how creatives create meaning.
As for my work, apparently Iāve been advocating “change”
because what we want constantly changes. People want what doesnāt 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. Iām only democratising the access to it.
Historically, itās 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 donāt want anything anymore? People donāt 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. Itās human survival.
Life-bio
Iāve 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 itās important to differentiate the word from what it has become. Itās 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 itās 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 donāt know how, I help them structure the ideas. When someone doesnāt 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 didnāt 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? Thatās 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 donāt visit the app for generic knowledge but something more alive, letās say consciousness. The app holds and develops the userās 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.
Thereās a reason I couldnāt 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.
| Personae | Plays |
|---|---|
| Chats | Projects |
| Interactions | Organisations |
| Messages | Decisions |
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? Thatās the important question. The biggest risk now is probably the failure or success of the persona idea. Itās just an idea Iāve 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? Thatās where the persona idea comes in.
What if it doesnāt work out? Or, it works out too well it grows into something not aligned with my mission? Either way, Iād 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 donāt think itās 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. Donāt 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. Itās reciprocal and recursive.
First, get something online fast in the coming week and listen to them. People canāt 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. Thatās 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, itās artificial consciousness.
Week 18
This week, Iām laying the foundation for ludic social systems.
- The app
- The people
- The messages
First, the app. Iāll start with the AI persona idea. The point is to have a space between personae and plays. I donāt understand the persona idea yet. But I think itās interesting. Iāll 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 doesnāt, 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. Itās not about a successful collective. Itās about listening to real pain.
Third, the messages. I am already writing notes here but itās not for humans. One of the ideas was to generate useful signals and messages to batch communicate with people. So letās 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 donāt 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 Iām basically counting backwards. Third first, first last.
I already have this context log page. But I canāt 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 canāt write when I think itās 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 Iām generating this anyway, why not create a whole virtual persona for it instead of pretending Iām the author?”
I couldnāt generate something satisfying out of my own writing because I donāt 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 Iām 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. Itās mainly to introduce my ideas for anyone who would be interested. If itās a part of networking, is it okay to make it a virtual author? Wouldnāt 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
Iāve decided to not work on a virtual writer persona at the moment. Itās an interesting idea but itās not trivial and it lacks priority. I canāt even be sure about its effectiveness for networking.
Alternatively, I could distill my core concepts from these notes. But I donāt think thatās 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 itās an app, a newsletter or a session, what really matters now is the practice of myself and of whom I help. 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 itās been discussed in “enable autonomy”
, that practice is creating something what I am and what we are. Thatās what I call āautonomyā. It has many other names like meaning, purpose, creative context, higher order or enabling constraints. Itās what happens when artists work except the artefact.
In a way, I help people create what they are. Because when thereās no what they are, they canāt 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. Thatās personae. A persona is not the person per se. Itās a public-facing mask of the person.
So, the starting point of the ludic social systems starts as a monologue of a persona. Itās ludic because the creation of self, the primitive autonomy starts as interactions that enable further, continued interaction. Thatās wordy but Iām doing it myself here taking notes and reading them again.
To be oneself, one must be able to return to oneself. Thatās how any system works. That feedback cycle also has many names: eternal recurrence, diffĆ©rance, reincarnation and so on. If something canāt start again, it just canāt 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. Thatās 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 āpracticeā, Iām 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.”
Thatās more like it. It sounds me too. Iām so helplessly myself. And I keep telling people to have their own opinions. Itās pluralist because everyone is different. Itās permissive and relieving. Also, we can change when we know what we are. Continued change takes continued self.
Thatās my practice. I keep writing to be myself. And thatās how I want to help people. I stand for being oneself. Thatās how people can build new society and build again.
That being said, itās not a ābe yourself on your ownā 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. Thatās 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. Thatās 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 Iāll 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: thereās an AI for that
I couldnāt 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.
Thatās the reason why for the app. Claude likes the asymmetry.
Kill your darling
é¢ä½ę®ŗä½ Meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.
āProjectā has been my mental model for the temporary and granular social systems. It means Iāve been handling social systems more like plans, which is the initial meaning of āproicereā. 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, Iād say āprojectā is an outdated idea for what social systems are, or more like an old habit of my mind. And itās difficult to let go. But I must.
āProjectā was more of a å ¬ę” koan for me. I was able to meet so many inspiring concepts and ideas thinking āwhy would people make projects?ā To change something, yes. A more intuitive understanding of the word is projecting what we want to the future. But itās more specific and nuanced than that. Thatās why I tried countless perspectives and angles into it, collecting keywords and coining portmanteau.
Now, āprojectā comes with too many connotations that donāt 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 āprojectā, 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 doesnāt 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 āplayā: social, temporary, joyful and so on. Perhaps I wanted to make a clear distinction between āplanā and āplayā in the first place. Plays are not as structured as plans. But they come with different, much more interesting appeals. And thatās how I actually want to portray the future society, not “plans”
, ew.
Whatās left when I let āprojectā go? Whatās the big deal with the persona idea? Itās 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, itās 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 doesnāt 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. Itās 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.
Iāve been trying to articulate something I see for a couple of days. Itās a vision immaculate. Also, itās 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:
PosthumanismāAutonomyāPlays
The words Iāve been reciting forever. But each of them doesnāt really make it happen. They hold significant nuances for each other. Together, they make this one thing I cannot name. So Iām 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. Iām looking at the thing to hold. Thatās where a new social substrate lies.
Posthumanism: the idea
There is no fixed self or āwhat we areā. 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 doesnāt 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 āwhat we think we wantā 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 donāt know what to do about it? Better yet, what if we donāt 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 doesnāt need to be āletting goā. Grow bigger, go higher, get over yourself any way possible. I already have it in my statement:
Everything flows. Lifeās goal is never an arrival. Itās 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 Iāve 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 havenāt 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. Iām 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 āautonomyā 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. Itās okay if they are wrong. Itās 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 āmoneyā, thatās 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? Thatās 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. Wouldnāt life be saner when we know what gives us joy? Autonomy is more than enforcing discipline or a principle. Itās accepting, understanding and recognising oneās 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 āwhyā, the excuse to live another day. And itās 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. Itās more than having such an agency. Itās 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 donāt seem to have their own opinions and contexts, I donāt even want to talk. And itās in urgent demand as machine intelligence replaces workforce. Autonomy is the plane where I can instantly create messages and value. Itās so obviously important.
Underneath that, posthumanism is the philosophical essence that induces autonomy and normalise it for oneself. It deconstructs self so itās 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 āmeā, our immediate consciousness. Artefacts we create, promises we make to others and the legacy that we inherit are all parts of autonomy. Thatās 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. Itās 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
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.
- Whatās the essence of plays?
- The essence is a frame that people voluntarily make binding.
Thatās exactly what I wanted to articulate circulating adjacent concepts like āplayā and āprojectā. Goods are what people voluntarily purchase. Plays are constraints that people enter by choice because they enable something. To individuals, itās 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. Itās 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 “Itās okay. I donāt 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, whatās left of me was a sense of loving compassion. I called the sense my “ethos”
. What struck me was its simplicity. I didnāt need to capture it or try to understand it. Itās 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 canāt describe the feeling of it, but it extends life I want. It made me think:
People need to be something. Itās both craving and demand. Just like serfs didnāt really own anything, people struggle to be anything meaningful now. Itās not the life they want. Nobody wants to be nothing. Thatās why I fight for autonomy, self-creation. Thatās why Iām 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 canāt answer clearly to important questions. What makes people “something”
? Isnāt that self-absorption? How do we turn āautonomyā social?
But that feeling is real. Itās difficult to admit that my work is based on a feeling. But it is what it is.
Saner, sanest
I canāt capture the feeling in words. And words canāt revive the feeling. Maybe someday Iāll 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. Itās easy to forget. I was walking hating the work. I was always feeling like Iām haunted and hunted. I was in a numb rush. That anxiety keeps me stalled.
Prioritise sanity. Be saner, sanest version of myself.
Character
Further rationalisation is simply blocked. Iām 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. Iām not going to make it sound right by bracing it up in righteousness of self-awareness. The problem is that thereās 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. Whatās for autonomy? I came up with “Build your character.”
What does it mean to build a character? Interestingly, āethosā means ācharacterā in Greek.3 Thatās 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 oneās 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 oneās own. In this context, mirror-like features that allow users to view themselves objectively are important.
Thatās 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 playsāludic social systems? I donāt know. All I know about that is that I really donāt 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, Iād like to focus on what people really need. Thatās why I came here in the first place. Another old notes goes:
What we lack are humanityās 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 āconsciousnessā, always craved meaning and purpose. Hunger didnāt enable farming. Religions did. Poverty didnāt run factories. Ideologies did.
And now, Iām 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. Whatās new is the mechanism and the reason. People want and need to be something extraordinary. They need to build characters. And Iām betting on personae.
Every idea of mine has a pitfall. Some are too ideal; I donāt know what to do with them. Some are too practical. I know they are sweet downward spiral. “Characters”
make me worry if itās insubstantial. Agriculture yielded grains. Industry produced solid products. And Iām dealing with what, mind and society? Isnāt 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, itās tangible. And when people canāt forget the taste of it, it becomes the new reality.
In practice
What makes characters matter in practice?
When reading ācharacterā from its origin of āethosā, it means the frames people embody. Itās analogous to creative context, higher order and enabling constraints. Itās how one sees the world works from inside. Naturally, it also becomes how one find their position in the perceived world. Thatās 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. Thatās where the value is.
Week 21
Iām 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 donāt need to do everything all at once at absolute perfection. I canāt. I excel when I work from genuine joy, curiosity and gratitude.
Letās 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. Itās probably generational too. I never starved a day in my life. I didnāt have too much worry. I guess thatās partly why I canāt 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. Thatās 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 thereās 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 canāt be creative when they feel threat. Itās important to provide psychological safety so they donāt have to go allergic to things I canāt 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 shouldnāt have deleted the old work, though that was an accident.
Soon enough, I learnt things I didnāt know doing things seemingly Iāve 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 definition
Iāve also written the improved persona idea in readme. The repo has to remain private so hereās 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. āCharacterā refers to the internal logics and principles of oneās 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. Thatās 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 canāt 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. Whatās 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 didnāt 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. 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 wonāt rush those things. Letās do slow-burn. Let it sit. Talk to people. Design it before code. I remembered I wanted to read The Design of Everyday Things. Letās grow it inside slowly but surely.
Iāve 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 doesnāt scale
Claude and I agree that there could be a solid model for the app before I step further. Yet, when I think about āthe things that donāt scaleā I can do for the app, I hated the world for no reason. It took a walk before I reckoned why.
The things that donāt 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 itās not about them. Itās 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, thatās 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. Thatās backwards. Iām 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 donāt scale is more important than scaling. Life doesnāt “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. Itās somethingā¦ I donāt 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 āludicā and āsocial systemsā. 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 itās not the app, now I must imagine and communicate how people actually live in ludic social systems.
But also, I wasnāt able to get to the concrete level of imagination without the bigger picture Iāve 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 Iām about to bring to people, is the foundation that actualises the grand vision. Iāve used āactualā 3 times there.
Itās 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 itās a skyscraper. And Iāve 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 couldnāt give a technically profound answer precisely because the most parts of ludic social systems are still unclear to me. And maybe itās 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, letās do it dirty. Iāll 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 āstudyā. Studios are more like people who learns to create value.
Is ālearningā still relevant with machine intelligence? The recent expedition to ācharacterā 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. Itās (inter)subjective. Just like irrational numbers are infinitely more than rational numbers, subjective knowledge is infinite. And itās more important for people.1
The vision is portraying studios as the dominant unit of social organisation like what companies are now. And also, itās promoting creatives to the leaders of this vision. They are the experts of the autopoietic work, creating oneself forward.
Iāll further develop this direction and make ātalk to peopleā 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.
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 donāt like it at all. Itās 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 donāt 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 itās a separate block or at least wrapped in quotes.
Small capitals for emphases. Itās a rebellion against the long editorial convention, but italics were not the original convention either. Itās more of a revival in the historical sense though our eyes would take their time to get used to it. If youād ask me, small caps actually look more important. Italics are more vocalised, but itās more of a nuance than significance. Iām 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 doesnāt render small caps in the oblique sans-serif, emphases in quotes essentially. Iād 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. Itās more so now because the frame of scarcity is going away. āHarder, better, faster, strongerā are machines now.
“You can be the author of the system you live in.”
Iād say that. And now I can deliver it on the solid foundation of LLMs, not some self-help product. Thatās 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? Whatās the things that donāt 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 āthe things that donāt scaleā. 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. Iām looking for some kind of reward that tells me āyou are on the right pathā, 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. Iām 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 itās way more exciting and powerful than plans and administration. Now itās 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, Iām not likely to produce anything useful in the first place. Talk to them like a normal person but knowing why Iām there. I stand for the future society where they are the ones who create order. And Iām betting for personae, social representations of selves, to empower people with autonomy.
Ludicity
Itās beneficial to clarify the conceptual correlation between personae and ludic social systems. If persona and character are the point, why āludicā? Just because talking to them is a form of play? That would be a very weak argument. If itās about plays, why isnāt it more game-like? Isnāt that what plays are? This can be confusing because at first, āplaysā meant more formal organisations like projects. And personae changed it forever.
To understand this clearly, we must start from what social systems really are. Itās 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 everyoneās 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 ābrandā, ācharismaā or āauraā 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 itās 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 couldnāt 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. Iād like to call this differentiation āLudicityā. I like that itās a new term and how much confusing it is with ālucidityā. Thatās why itās “ludic social systems”
.
Social use of AI
I consult LLMs almost everyday with these notes as context. And one thing doesnāt really work out is when they tell me to prioritise talking to people and make something small there. And itās 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, Iāve written such sentiment in these notes too. Thatās why chat apps would steer me towards it. Iāve written those passages when I was frustrated with my own indirection and indecision.
But there is a reason I canāt do that. First, Iām too extraverted to focus on my own agenda when Iām 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. Thatās 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 Iām swayed like that, I canāt provide excellence that actually helps people. I need a healthy distance from people so I wonāt get intoxicated. Third, I intoxicate them too. Iām 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 didnāt 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 didnāt 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 doesnāt mean that I wonāt get specific. As much as I want to help creatives, Iām 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 Iām honest, my vision for ludic social systems is so grand and groundbreaking I need a whole new paradigm to frame it right. Iām not patching problems. Iām 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
Iāll 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 itās 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 canāt keep or a statement the author doesnāt 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 āwhatā. It doesnāt have to be an app. I just need to secure a reliable pattern that produces quality persona. Iāve 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, Iām fusing it with āsocietyā or āselfā. I donāt need to be scared but expect backlashes.
The first diamond
Iāve reached a checkpoint. I feel it. I know it. I didnāt know when I first thought about personae. But when I wrote Ludicity, I reckoned. “Thatās 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 othersāwhen 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 choseāit 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 wereāour profession, our expertise, the quiet confidence of being usefulāare 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 personāhow they think, how they speak, what they value, what they are drawn towardāin 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 yourselfāfrom 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 partābut 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 societyās 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 openingāa 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 possibleānot 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.
Letās 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. Itās 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. Itās a way of creating a second self ā 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 heād downplayed . Imagine chatting with you-but-not-you ā 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). Itās narcissistic in one light, deeply introspective in another. Your digital twin might coach you on things you didnāt realize about yourself. Itās you, but itās also not you ā a funhouse mirror version of your identity.
It means I donāt have to persuade people to do something entirely new from scratch. At least, I can tell them āpeople are already doing something like thisā. 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. Itās not an āAI appā. 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. Iām fleshing out the conceptual framework Iāve 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 whatās 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, itās a new cultural movement to work and communicate based on persona. Itās 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 Iāll 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 āpersonaā means to people in reality. The term has been used broadly as āan image of a person but not entirely fictitiousā. “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 āhiā itās a “persona”
. If an LLM thinks she wears a tie, itās a “persona”
from the persona selection model. Most of the uses starts from an image, not the one who wears it. Buyers and users didnāt 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 itās important to make the distinction between the persona and self that itās 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:
- The core mechanism, cycles of self-authorship
- Connections, interpersonal network of personae
- 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 wonāt 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, itās 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 donāt prioritise authenticity. Phase 1 makes the third person expect āreal selves, up to dateā.
- 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 didnāt really go anywhere, it was a bad idea in the first place.”
I know these thoughts were unreasonable and somewhat emotional, but couldnāt 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 āpersonaā and āmirrorā to the prompt, and the accumulated context which is automatically a part of the prompt. āPersona = promptā is a very simplistic and technical view. And Ludics doesnāt have any leverage around it because Iām not running a custom model or anything like that.
Then what is a persona? Itās ought to be a social interface. An LLM, and a prompt for it, are an important infrastructure that enables the persona. But thatās 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. Itās more than a deductive historical analysis. Itās 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 Iāve reached Ludicity after years of divagation, Iāll 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 Iām looking at someone elseās 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 Iām dealing with. These two are intertwined. When I step away from my ego, only then I see what there is.
The essence
Iāve 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.
Iāve 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 donāt 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
Iāve read my notes over and over again to discover some less esoteric language that describe Ludics. I failed. People didnāt understand why they needed a personal computer, what was “internet”
and an online marketplace or how their household could be an accommodation.
Itās not obvious. AI still scares people for a good reason. Only I know what Ludics could be. And thatās good for now.
Ludics
Itās 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. Iāll 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. Thatās the start.
Iāve 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. Itās a real project for a real vision. I canāt put it in a mantra or a slogan. Iām short of words to fully describe what I have in my mind. But hereās my best shot.
The project
I started from pure curiosity. “Whatās the most important thing I can do in my life?”
I couldnāt see anything better than social systems. They were all-important, yet too loose compared to what it could be. I thought, āwith all the recent technological advancements, we can build something betterā, because capitalism was clearly pre-digital, based on material transactions and bureaucracy too human.
What I didnāt 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 couldnāt 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 itās done. Thatās where I must focus.
Ludics shifts the core social activity from commerce and money-making to becoming and character-tending. Iāll need further development and a better way to put the idea. But the crude language and the immaturity doesnāt take the utmost importance away. This is the work.
The change penetrates all the past concepts Iāve 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 Iāve 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 doesnāt make a social infrastructure yet. Whereās the feedback cycle? Whatās the key social interaction? Just talking to someone elseās persona? This is where I canāt work from the analogues to capitalism and modernisation. I tried that with social credits. Didnāt 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. Thatās the spirit of Ludics, the character of it. That is my lifeās work. Keep writing, keep contemplating, keep working on it. Thereās nothing to lose in this. This is love.
The mission
Create value from your unique character.
Thatās the future.
Help people create value from their unique characters.
Thatās the mission.
Ludics helps you create value from your unique character.
Thatās 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 canāt. Personality doesnāt 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 itās 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 itās “help”
, not “enable”
.
This is the message Iāve been developing in the last couple of weeks. Itās humble and somewhat generic. Any coaching service could say that. And thatās 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 ābottom-up societyā. But the idea makes the statement explode in volume with words people donāt understand. The core requirement for bottom-up society I identified is ādifferentiation of individualsā.1
the emergence of a new, open value systemāone 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.
āCreative studiosā mean a vision for the future society where individuals and small teams cooperate to create value and where thatās 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 thatās why the statement has the word. Again, I didnāt want to explain how it works under the hood in the statement. Itās 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. I was afraid I would dissolve into the noise of society if I donāt. 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. Thatās 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 doesnāt have to be numbers because everything is a number for machines. Thatās persona.
When you think about āwhat is truly uniqueā, nothing is but self as existence. This is the key concept around what I call āuniquenessā. I couldnāt find a word to refer to it precisely if Iām honest. āOwnnessā, ālocalityā, even āuniquenessā doesnāt really sound like it. I think meditators call it āpresenceā or āexistenceā.
This own-unique-self is key to understand the subjects Iāve 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. Iāve spent a couple of days for myself. I think Iām taking the whole week off.
After that, Iām working on Ludics. Not a whole solution but something can demonstrate the idea. Iād like a foundation that I can quickly implement an idea when I have one.
Let people know people
The etymology of ānobleā goes back to ānobilisā or āwell-knownā. Traditional social recognition relied on very few people known widely, because peasants didnāt 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 whoās 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 donāt 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. Itās 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, itās wise to detach from our ego and the self-defence mechanisms. That way, the self can produce something genuinely good for society and belong.
Thatās how we came here so far.
Ideas looked through āpersonaā
Upper half of this year have been dedicated to clearing a conceptual foundation around āpersonaā. 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. Itās possible, and it could be enormous. Thatās why I gave it time to grow. And now I see it sprouts. āPersonaā 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, āprojectā was of utmost importance for the last couple of years for me. And that importance doesnāt fade with persona. In fact, it might be a second member of ludic social systems. As Iāve delineated in “enable autonomy”
, āprojectā shares something with Luhmannās āorganisationā. But Iām not going to put them in parallel because I canāt say this has any academic rigor. Iām 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 āprojectā but creating a foundation that helps people build momentum doing projects, so their effort wonāt just evaporate. Iām saying that persona might be how itās done.
Plays: personae as frames
āPlayā was how I reframed āprojectā 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 donāt 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, āframes that people voluntarily make bindingā. 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 canāt escape how others know them. A persona gives you more control, but the essence of social recognition doesnāt change. Itās the symbolic reality we create. And thatās 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 āwhat matters, what doesnāt and whyā.
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, itās AI personae as transient masks. This āpersonaā does not a generalised profile or an hypothetical actor. Unlike an impersonating chat bot, the chat goes directly to the author. Itās a real mask that covers a real face of a real person, just symbolic. Itās quite literally the origin of the word: āšššššā4, āĻĻĻĻĻĻĪæĪ½ā5, āmaskā or āfaceā.
But thatās 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, āé” ćć kaoā means āfaceā, but it also stretches to ādignityā and ādecencyā like a face is a ledger that saves social recognition. Itās not too weird to say āto lose a faceā or āto save a faceā 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. Iām giving it a structure that grows. Here, “People”
doesnāt 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.
Thatās 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
Letās keep it a small failure. Letās quickly find out why I am wrong. I donāt need to optimise my strategy, design or code. I just want a showcase that tells what Iām 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. Thatās all that matters now. AI personae is just an idea.
Itās not for business. Itās not for “your success”
. Itās 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 whatās 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 itās separate from the author but it represents the author. And to make that happen, having a persona should be beneficial. Itās 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. Thatās why Iāve 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 moreā¦
Looking back, itās 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 wouldnāt 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. Thatās the groundwork where I can keep experimenting on top of. Letās 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 Iām 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. Itās more straightforward when itās a window. We get to see a new reality, another persona through the threshold.
But āmirrorā can be confusing. A mirrorred-self is not a clone. Itās a new social reality created for self-awareness and self-creation.
We often conflate mirror = clone. Thatās 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. Itās not a doppleganger. Itās a new reality that wouldnāt exist without the mirror.
A persona is not a clone. Itās a new social reality we create.
The promise
Iāve written a tagline and a short description for Ludics.
Build your
brandcharacter
Ludics gets your personality working for you, because you are already unique.
It felt like a real test. Itās what Iām offering for the person in question. And Iām 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 wouldnāt make people work harder or better. Thatās only more burden. Ludics should carry their burden, not add to it.
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, whatās the difference? “Brand”
is for products in the marketplace whether thatās people, company, software or merchandise. “Character”
exists in a different domain. I could elaborate it like āthe ludic domainā or something but I wouldnāt. 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 āuniqueā 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 āsocietyā or ārecognitionā would lose them in a split second. āget your personality working for youā came to me. Itās 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 āpersonaā 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 itās way less than āsocial systemsā. I survived that, Iāll survive this one.
The reason I feel unease about the app is not just its implementation. I donāt have an idea to make the app complete on its own, self-contained. This challenge is that this loop is not closed by purchase. Iām not creating just a product. Iām 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.
Iām not sure thatās the right direction though. It sounds very generic social. I wanted to create something much more active and real like projects. But I donāt know how to do that yet.
I named the third function “šŖ Door”
after šŖ Mirror and šŖ Window. I donāt know what it is yet. And I donāt 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 Iāve just woke up in the morning, Iāll 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 Sethās (sometimes) so thatās 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. Thatās 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 doesnāt 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. Iām not even halfway through. Iām 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 Iām back. But once I had, this AI is just superb, really really helpful. I havenāt 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. Thereās 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 canāt 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. āPlayā means that people consciously enact what they are from this reference.
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This is what I thought reading Nexus. The author argues that computer networks are
“inorganic”
. But I think recent machine learning makes its intelligence organic because itās basically an analogue of a dataset, not extensive algorithmic design.Ā ↩ -
āEthosā comes from āhabitatā. It forms the root of āethikosā which is close to ācharacterā in modern English meaning āmoralityā. āCharacterā itself is also a greek word meaning āengraved natureā.Ā ↩
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Ļersu. āMaskā or āactorā in Etruscan.Ā ↩
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prĆ³sÅpon. āFaceā or āvisageā in ancient Greek.Ā ↩