Loki as Fixer

I’ve come to to doubt the universal description of the Norse god Loki as a trickster. Perhaps “fixer” would fit him just as well, or better.

Technogonies

Hesiod’s Theogony (pronounced with a hard “g” as in polygon) describes the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods. [1] By analogy, I’ll use the term technogonies for stories that describe the origins of technology. In traditional myths, technologies come from the gods, who are usually benefactors. In modern stories, tech comes from inside society, although the stories are complicated and sometimes contested.

Tech ogregore LLM jokes

Jokes about organizations shed light on how we think of them as entities, so I asked some LLMs. Here are the best. (I occasionally crossed out some LLM verbiage and replaced it with my own.)

Myth definitions

This post is a rolling inventory of definitions and descriptions of myth – mine, and those of others. The date on which an item is added to the list is given in italics, in parentheses. I’ll move it to the top of the blog every time I update it.

Myths: widely known framing stories

Here’s my latest stab at a definition of myth: Myths are widely known stories that frame how groups of people think about, and act in, the world. 

I want myths to include contemporary narratives and not just ancient tales, and this description does that. I’ll unpack the new definition and then give a list of stories that qualify as myths.

Demons: Mediators between gods and humans

The demons of ancient Egypt, I learned today, were liminal figures that mediated between gods and humans. It got me wondering about entities that liaised between people and ogregores.

Memoranda of the Boulder Ogregore Observatory

When the University of Colorado Boulder’s quantum computer came online recently, a diagnostic core dump revealed unexpected data. It seems to be fragments from the 2028 annual report of the so-called Boulder Ogregore Observatory (BOO), an institution that does not (yet?) exist.

Parts of the corpus are unintelligible and reconstruction is ongoing. Physicists speculate that the Observatory stored its data on a successor to the recently inaugurated Boulder quantum computer. Time-entangled qubits allowed the archives to worm their way back to the present. 

Animism & Ogregores

A recent conversation about whether there are AI gods prompted thoughts of animism, defined by Britannica as “belief in innumerable spiritual beings concerned with human affairs and capable of helping or harming human interests.” Perhaps, I thought, it’s better to think of ogregores as nature sprits than gods.

Generative Plato Transformers

OpenAI now offers a speech interface to GPT. I’m told it feels like normal conversation. One is talking to a text corpus, bluring the line between “dead” texts and “live” conversation. It prompts me to wonder about Plato’s objections to writing and preference for dialogue in works like the Phaedrus, particularly in the story of Thamus & Theuth and subsequent discussion. 

Enoch’s Egregores as Bringers of Tech

Rereading Mark Stavish’s Egregores prompted me to read the Book of Enoch (aka 1 Enoch) where the term Watcher (egregoros in Greek) is used to describe angels. I was struck that one of the terrible sins of the fallen angels described in Enoch was to teach humans technology. (The other was to have intercourse with women; angels are supposed to be spiritual beings and not be subject to lust.)

Heidegger's technicity is an agent

Heidegger’s essay “Die Frage nach der Technik” (usually translated as “The Question Concerning Technology”) posits Ge-Stell (variously translated at “enframing,” “pos-ure,” or “positionality”) as the essence of Technik (translated as “technology” or “technicity”; see endnote). Heidegger’s (or his translators’?) pervasive use the passive voice sidesteps the question of whether technicity has agency. I believe this text implies that he believes it does, and that he’s not just using figures of speech.

Cargregores

 I read Dan Neil's columns because I love his writing not because I'm interested in cars. This week's review of the 2024 Dodge Hornet R/T: An Italian Stallion, Made for America (WSJ, 29 Jun 2023) has a lovely passage that suggests that car companies have distinct characters—evidence, perhaps, that they're ogregores.

Gripen's doctrine, Conway’s Law, and Ogregores

A recent YouTube video discussed what NATO could learn from Sweden's use of the Saab Gripen fighter. The aircraft was specifically designed for austere and dispersed operations, reflecting Sweden's country-specific military doctrine of highly decentralized defensive operations. However, due to this inherent association with Sweden's doctrine, it is unlikely that the Gripen could be easily adapted for NATO operations. This is an example of an organization developing a character and repertoire that is a synthesis of its individual members, tools, and protocols.

Facebook’s umwelt

Our CU Boulder tech & mythology group recently discussed Facebook’s umwelt, that is, the aspects of its environment that the company perceives. These are my post-meeting notes on the topic.

Non-human senses: The umwelt of ogregores

Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us describes the many ways creatures perceive their surroundings through their very different sensory apparatus. It made me wonder about the subjective perceptual universe of ogregores.

Rusty promises

As the year comes to an end, it’s time to drop a list I’ve been noodling on for months: high tech dreams that didn’t come true—breathless tech promises that weren’t kept. 

Workplace egregores

I learned about Carolyn Chen’s book about how blurring the line between work and religion in an interview with the CS Monitor. It made me wonder if egregores are more likely to arise in workplaces now that they are becoming more like the home turf of those “autonomous psychic entities that are composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people” (Wiktionary, see also Wikipedia).

Degrees of Agency

There are many ways to define agency. The ones I’ve seen provide criteria for deciding whether an entity is or is not an agent. However, once it’s established that something is an agent it would be useful to assess degrees of agenthood. 

Tech & Mythology Project Snapshot – Oct 2022

It’s time to revisit the Tech & Mythology project outline since it keeps shifting as I learn more. There were previous snapshots in Jul 2020, Oct 2020, Feb 2021 and Nov 2021.

Big Tech Blindsight

The emotional invisibility of Big Tech mystifies me. Why don’t I get more worked up about it? I can only speak for myself since I don’t have any survey data, but I suspect it’s not just me.