Intro
Weather is back to winter normals, there’s so much unnecessary wind, the payments I’ve been waiting are still nowhere to be seen and generally feeling tired of most people (and/or getting sick).
On the plus side, next door neighbors brought a bag of fresh lemons from their hometown.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 110
RSS Reader: 3129 (I’m in the middle of adjustments period — meaning so many things enter and leave at the same time. Which causes this crazy number.)
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 0
- Plan is to make this week more about making things work smoothly on my side. So lots of workflow adjustments, cleaning and organizing. I’m fine with chaos but when it turns into a mess, it drains my mental energy.
- Waiting to hear back from couple of places to see what will move forward.
- Also planning to make a plan for Tuhaf Gelecek to make sure I have some regular output in Turkish.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Time of Lobsters
If you’re keeping up with what’s going on at the AI agents side, you’ve most likely heard about Moltbot and Moltbook saga and the flavor of weirdness they’re creating. From panic to excitement, you can find all kinds of reactions to this event online.
But one thing that caught several people’s attention is the Accelerando undercurrent of these things. Warren Ellis already wrote about the lobster angle on his newsletter yesterday, so I’m skipping that part. What I want to focus on is the Manfred Macx side of it.
If you’ve read the book or familiar with this blog’s history, you already know who he is. One of the things he does in the book is to run automated companies — thousands of them.
“One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies – and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day – has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway’s Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful.
Manfred’s companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours.”
Now, when you think about how people are talking about AI agents and subagents, how they’re trying to use them it’s impossible to unsee it. Sure, most of them are just looking for a quick payout or creating a real mess but the direction they’re pushing for isn’t much different. Plus, there are others who already work on creating digital clones of you with these agents to make them work like you too. And we all know how most of the system is already either automated or easy to automate if you want to.
I think the main reason why no one attempted to create this so far is the potential cost of something like this today. Like Johannes wrote, even if you ran a really simple version of it, its cost requires justification. You’ll probably need some serious capital or someone rich and crazy enough to invest in it to even start building the basics of the Manfred’s version of it.
Do I think it’s a good idea? No. Do I think someone will attempt it as soon as they have the resources? Absolutely. Would I give it a try if I had that much money to waste and I was really bored? Maybe (but definitely not with the current state of the technology).
That’s why you should keep in mind that the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of lobsters.
(I’ll probably write another blog post about Moltbook later in the week. In the meantime I highly recommend reading Jay’s post about it.)
Song of the Week
Recently Apple Music notified me that Haywyre had a new single released and now the songs I discovered him a decade ago returned to the rotation.
Reading Log
“The term “phone addiction” has wiggled its way into the common vernacular and has become a near-universal self-diagnosis among my cohort. But that doesn’t feel quite right to me. I’m not addicted to my phone. I am my phone. Lilah said it best: It’s consumed my brain. “Phone enmeshment” feels more accurate. If I ditch the device, part of me will vanish with it. I’ll face the unextended version of myself. I’m not sure I care to meet her.”
Dumbphone Owners Have Lost Their Minds | WIRED
“We often mistake the tool for the event. But when we look back, the tool is just the spark for the fire that follows.”
2025 – thejaymo
“Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern seaboard time,” Pierre counters. “That was when the first network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another – the first ever Internet connection. That’s the singularity. Since then we’ve all been living in a universe that was impossible to predict from events prior to that time.”
Accelerando – Charles Stross
Outro
And that’s the end of another Weekstarter. Each week I want to publish these earlier in the day but now that I’m 17 weeks in, I just decided to leave it to its own flow and post it whenever it’s done.
Have a great week and I’ll see you around!
If you’d like to collaborate or need services, Tuhaf Studio is accepting new clients. For speaking or panelist opportunities, contact London Speaker Bureau Türkiye. To support my work regularly, you can contribute through my Patreon.
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