#0007 The need for a strategic fact reserve, Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty, railways of the mind
Welcome to Constant Flux, a weekly lens taking a systemic view on the polycrisis.
This week: Svalbard for facts • Clean data, stable inputs • Clarity as privilege • Thought as spectacle • Memory erosion • Systems that narrow • Map becomes territory • Forgetting how to think
Take a plunge!
The need for a strategic fact reserve
You know that seed library up in Svalbard, the one built into the Arctic rock to store backups of the world’s crops? Matt Webb suggests we need something similar for facts. And honestly, he might be right.
He calls them Strategic Fact Reserves, curated and trustworthy datasets to train AI, kept safe from the messy and unreliable internet. If AI is becoming part of how we make decisions, then it makes sense to protect what it learns from.
From a systems view, this adds stability. A clean data reserve helps keep the decision-making process clear by blocking out the noise of the polluted web. I think we will start seeing more efforts like this. People will try to build more safeguards (local?) around how we think and make decisions with machines.
But it also raises hard questions. Who gets access? If only governments and big players have clean data, while everyone else is stuck with polluted AI-generated slop, then clear thinking becomes a privilege. It shapes how people see the world and what decisions they are even able to make.
I find the core idea solid. If AI is going to help us think, we should care about what it is using to think with.
Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty Monetization
"A person is like a skittle factory. Your personality is the Rube Goldberg machine clicking and whirring on the assembly floor. The core loop is monkey titty monetization."
Parakeet’s essay doesn’t describe what the internet is doing to our minds. It shows it. The structure is chaotic and disorienting and shows how the internet breaks our focus and turns thinking into a show. This text begs for a McLuhanian reading.
McLuhan famously told us that the medium is the message. What matters is not what media say, but how they change how we think and behave. This essay works the same way. You feel it more than you follow it.
The skittle factory metaphor helps us understand how thought now works online. We are not thinking things through. We are reacting. Posting. Making content for attention. Nietzsche would be horrified...
The mention of dementia points to something worse than distraction. A breakdown in how we remember, connect, and make sense of things. The internet is not just speeding us up. It is also wearing us down.
While reading, consider listening to The Caretaker 1-6. It’s music. Starts like something you know... Then it slips. Loops. Wrong. Notes repeat... Not right... Familiar, then gone... Then gone again... You try to hold it but it’s already not there. I think I’m still here.
railways of the mind
Davies points out that early choices, like where to lay the tracks, don’t just shape the route. They shape what we can even imagine later. Most systems don’t fail because they stop working. They fail because they narrow. Bit by bit, more of the system’s energy goes into running itself (just like bureaucracy...), and less into helping us think or act clearly. It starts working to preserve itself, not its purpose.
We end up measuring what’s easy instead of what actually matters. And after a while, we forget the difference between the map and the world.
Ripples
Ask Nature
This catalog of clever things nature does reminds us that we’re not the first to face design problems. Most probably not the best at solving them either.
TV Garden
Click in, drift out...
List of common misconceptions
A list of things people get wrong, over and over. Like Marco Polo did not introduce pasta to Italy from China. But you probably already knew that.