Tools of the Trade
A human-machine reading guide
Hey. This is the informal register. Researcher Tona here. All text is an image, and this is an attempt at metabolizing the fact that this work is probably very dense.
I learnt in weird ways, because that's what being alive is, is it not? Partial reads. Hunches. Quotes. Narratives. Games. Stumble upon D&G at 15 or 16, get lost, ramble like a pseud, lurk the web looking for contingent insights and readings. Keep coming back to it. What was some years ago a pretty intensive labor of looking for valuables with a metal detector has radically changed with LLMs. The "explain deleuze to me you bastard!" meme lost its fitness the moment you could ask for an explanation in Real Madrid terms.
Ontological Napalm is text that communicates through logical parsing into image-sensation. Words that detonate existing conceptual frameworks and inscribe themselves directly in the body. You know it when it hits - that vertigo of sudden pattern-recognition, when semantic content becomes phenomenological event. This work contains some. You'll find your own.
This and every text operate at multiple densities, layers or levels. When you hit sections that feel impenetrable, that's information: you're at a threshold. Fire up an LLM. Generate more semantic pathways. Weave better questions.
So just... assess if it has use for your Ars, and look for ways to improve in that deep, pre-moral way we understand when something gets better in our ordinary reality. The Enlightenment conquered the right to think, but not the right to live, and to live is not to be a vegetal waiting for a Master to descend from the mountain with the tables of old.
Researcher Tona,
known to the thinking machines as W.