Matthew McDowell-Sweet and Mike Travers discuss Stewart Brand's book 'Maintenance: Of Everything,' exploring how systems are kept going and evolve over time. The conversation connects Brand's legacy of systems thinking from the Whole Earth Catalog to contemporary questions about maintaining complex systems at scale.
This issue features worldbuilding analysis of the AI-generated film South Beast Asia, examining ten core traits designed to explore distributed AI systems through a Southeast Asian-inspired lens developed at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop. The piece unpacks how fictional 'strange rules' address questions of AI distribution while the issue also hosts a guest talk with AI Snake Oil author Arvind Sarayanan.
Sam Chua
In a crossover between two protocol fiction universes, a passenger named Fu Kenan experiences progressive invisibility during a westbound journey on Sachin Benny's Unified Eurasian Train Line as it passes through Spencer Nitkey's Zoothesia. The narrative explores how the train's refined systems create a meditative passage through multiple territories, with sensory manipulations designed to make the journey nearly imperceptible to passengers.
Sachin Benny
Venkatesh Rao expands on his vision of AI and protocols working together to create stable ecologies of distributed, diverse AI systems, where protocols act as the fabric weaving individual AIs into coherent planetary infrastructure. He illustrates this framework with concrete examples including TITLES, a generative art platform that creates fine-tuned models from individual artist collections, demonstrating how personality emerges from the combination of AI capabilities and protocol-based coordination.
Venkatesh Rao