Essays in erisology, ecology, surrogation, limerence, generalized reading, and cognitive aesthetics. Sometimes party-reporter. (Expense account me)
Part-time documenting Web3 governance at Commonwealth.im. Previously Consortia and Are.na. Minor involvement in the Gugg's Countryside exhibit 2017.
Current research interests incl/not limited to: dramaturgy, strategic interaction, language games, inexact sciences, fashion in the art world, conceptual engineering, postrationalism, predictive processing, American pragmatism, signaling theory, symbolic capital. Manet > Monet; SMiLE > Sgt. Pepper's. Personal canon includes Bourdieu's Field of Cultural Production, Schelling's Strategy of Conflict, Malick's New World & Thin Red Line, al-Hariri's & al-Harizi's Maqamat, Lerner's 10:04, Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, Goffman's Strategic Interaction, Shaara's Killer Angels, Krutch's Modern Temper.
Things I've made. Things I've archived.
Portrait as Wojnarowicz. Tumblr scratchpad at Spilled Reality. Twitter as @suspendedreason.
I run a small, not-for-profit press called Not Nothing ທ with Nicole Kaack. The press aims to bring together thinking from IRL and URL spaces. We've published work by Sarah Perry, AJ Stoughton, Peli Grietzer, and Gwern. Sign up for the mailing list here.
On-going research channels. Personal profile; Inexact Sciences group account.
In 2018 I ran a digital roundtable series for the Are.na blog, focusing on the state and future of the Web. Interviewees included Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus, sociologist Jenny L. Davis of ANU, and Grant Wythoff, Visiting Fellow at Penn State University.
Select channels:
Art ~book made on Are.na: Bryce Wilner & Suspended Reason 2018: PDF.
Neural-net Insta: SRIG, an old project with neural nets where pictures I took on my cameraphone were replaced by algorithmically similar images.
Cleveland Review of Books, February 27 2024
with Will Jarvis and Quinn Lewandowski on anti-inductivity. (video)Narratives, October 4 2021
with Amirism on Twitterbrain and ingroup.Finchley Place, August 7 2021
with Jacob Clifton on Gossip Girl.Finchley Place, July 28 2021
with CC on generalized reading.Letter.Wiki, July 2021
with CC on the meaning of "meaning." (1.2, 1.3, 1.4)TIS, March 2021
with Jonathan Livengood, on contemporary philosophyLessWrong, July 1 2020
with Nicholas White on REBUS and predictive hermeneutics.White Noise, February 26 2020
with Peli Grietzer on AmerikkkkkaSuspended Reason, May 21 2019
with A D Jameson, part IISuspended Reason, April 5 2018
with A D Jameson Part ISuspended Reason, April 3 2018
with Sarah PerrySuspended Reason, December 30 2017
with Bodega BayRare Candy, May 1 2015
Written:
Edited/collected:
In progress:
A Gulf Polyphony. On pearling, diving, gnosticism, and John Steinbeck.
Lewis & Clark Linguistics. On language as a pragmatic coordination tool.
Fool's Gold (Notes on Lodge 49), pt 1 and pt 2. On Thomas Pynchon, film noir, enchantment, and prophecy.
Primitive Peacemakers series: (1), (2), (3). On the frame problem, metasystematicity, and the failures of partisanship.
Leaving the Garden. Monomyth, wilderness, and why gardens need walls.
CAN. On krautrock and freedom.
Michael Clayton. Part of an ongoing film tarot project.
Ripple. On adopting a cat.
Strategic Conceptualization. When consequences are the result of categorization, people will perform categories to attain their desired consequences.
Précis for an action-oriented theory of language. Pragmatism, heuristic theory, and strategic interaction applied to linguistics.
Detectives & Dramaturgy. Goffman x Tana French.
Planète sauvage. On Laloux, colonialism, veganism.
Lang Games: Work, Play, Exploration. Honey traps communicate with flies.
Adaptation Ripples in the NBA. Anti-inductivity and the meta.
Value Clarity 2.0. Adapting C. Thi Nguyen's value clarity concept.
All Communication is Manipulation (ACiM) series: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10). Extending ethology and cybernetics towards a more pragmatic understanding of language.
Pt 1: Worldbuilding; Pt 2: Nameless/Faceless—on Angelicism & the vibe shift.
7PM, Lisbon. Party report on the 2021 Ethereum conferences.
Notes on the Inexact Sciences. On the rigorizing pipeline & formal wilderness.
Transfer Phenomena & Two-Person Languages. Ever notice how novels' narrators get stuck in your head?
Positional Pricing, Positional Leverage. A simplified re-frame of the "Discursive Games" piece.
Oh, Barry. On PTA's Punch-Drunk Love.
Barry Lyndon, Man of Games. On game-playing in Kubrick's masterpiece; part. 2.
Selection Games. On dating, job apps, fencing vs. swordfighting, and police departments.
Discursive Games, Discursive Warfare. Why literalism fails to understand public discourse.
Epistemic Strategies (pt. 2). Manipulate others' epistemic states by misrepresenting your own.
Letter to Tamler Sommers and David Pizarro. Honor culture isn't dead; its form has just changed.
The Surrogation Matrix. On incentive structures and spirit vs. letter.
From Measurement to Degeneration. How did sports go from referees to flopping?
2020: Year in Review. Publication overview.
The Revolution in Philosophy You've Never Heard Of. On conceptual engineering (for LW).
Kaitlin Phillips as Poplit. On lifestyle, personality, and glamour as genre.
The Dark Miracle of Optics. On deception, signaling, and fashion.
Institutional Myth in Contemporary Art. Zones of sacredness, language of morality.
The Telephone Effect & Reciprocity of Perspectives. How good ideas get watered-down.
Wait, What? Sense-Making, Sense-Breaking in Modern Art. Steelmanning the avant surprisal project.
Wasting Our Time. On psychoanalysis and predictive processing.
Otessa. On Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest & Relaxation, and the concepts of object and subjecthood.
Divided Minds. On Philip K. Dick, schizophrenia, paranoia, and the writing of D.C. Barker.
Valerie, No. On Elvia Wilk's Oval.
Oscillation / Fashion. How the churn of fashion dictates meaning, leads to cultural progress.
Tropical Modernism. On the Prime Produce "architecture and labor" party.
New Fiction is Psychic Occupation. On fiction's unique niche as cultural technology.
Predictive Processing & Art as Cognitive Remodeling.
Backgrounding Techniques in Cinema and Literature.
The Mask is the Face. Self-design in the age of the algorithm.
"Another Green World". Ribbonfarm 2017. On subculture society, antistructure, experimentation, and frontier culture.
Post-Ritual Space: Berghain. Post-ritual architecture & transcendence.
Ulysses, Wilde, and a Theory of Literary Compression. What does it mean to say a literary text is compressive?
Generic Fitness. Rethinking popular art.
Every Little Star. On Lynch's interchangeable blondes, echoing pop hooks, the music of Christopher Owens.
