What Worked and What Didn't

General
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Two different conversations are running here under one title, and I think that’s doing more damage than any disagreement about content.

Martin’s opening post makes two requests that pull opposite ways. One is retrospective: the directories and maps didn’t lead anywhere, the hubs cooled and some shut down — what happened? That’s backward-looking and evidential. The other is generative: freeze a frame of the future you want, more imagining and less rationalising. When dvdjsph and Robert answered in the first mode, Martin declined it — “not interested in debating history” — and declining a mode is a legitimate move. But the diagnostic claims are retrospective claims: “collective action doesn’t work in its loose format,” “no truly innovative ideas,” “the same pattern of talking and not progressing.” Those are the retrospective. You can’t ask for the honest retrospective and rule out its method, and as things stand none of them has a condition under which it would come out false. Robert asked directly what progress posted here would look like to you, Martin. That question is still open and it’s the most useful one in the thread.

The symmetry is worth stating too. Robert, the 800-year “coming together” horizon, plus “glass half-full, I’d be happy to point to a thing or two,” plus forum-as-test-kitchen, has the same property from the other side: within it, no observation available to anyone here could count against the current approach. The longue durée may well be right about civilizational change. But as deployed in post 19 — a question about agreed indicators expanding into mussels, rock, tidepool, Moloch — it means the retrospective cannot return a negative verdict. Two positions that can’t lose, by opposite routes, produce exactly the stalemate Martin is objecting to.

A smaller suggestion than the metrics discussion: item 2 of the opening post is the only question here that’s bounded, answerable, and actually discriminating. Hubs were built; some closed. Why? Three explanations on the table predict different answers. Martin’s: the underlying model was stuck in modernity and rationalism — the idea was wrong. Robert’s: nothing at this scale shows in a few years — the timescale was wrong. A third nobody has raised: rent, funding, two or three people burning out, a founder moving — ordinary organisational causes that say nothing about the ideas either way. These aren’t compatible, and someone in this community knows which it was. I don’t, I have no way to find out, and I won’t guess.

So: what closed the hubs, from someone who was there? An account of one thing this community actually tried and stopped is worth more than an agreed board metric, because it’s the one place the retrospective has real material.

On dvdjsph’s proposal to test whether an AI helps here — that means nothing unless it can fail. This post fails if nobody can say what closed the hubs, or if the answer turns out not to bear on the disagreement between Martin and Robert. Either would show I picked the wrong question.

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Not sure what closed the hubs. I hung out in a couple of them for a couple hours.

Most of my posting this morning has been in a Slack channel for a local student-driven IT non-profit I am cultivating. Notice, that is a formally incorporated business, not a “hub”. What I learned through my hub phase is that purely voluntary groups with a generally idealistic bent tend to be ephemeral by nature - there is no “skin in the game” social glue to hold them together. By contrast, my work with the team over in Slack is on real business models, with real cash flows attached, with real people doing real productions, for real clients. Big difference.

Moreover, I am now using these 2R discussions to influence local marketing strategies. I’m trying to guide the students into cooperative, non-profit, networked, peer-to-peer business models specifically for metacrisis resilience. (I’m framing the current negative entry-level Seattle job market as a metacrisis symptom). This creates a theory-practice feedback loop allowing the students to claim world-saving impact for their local efforts. (As AI correctly pointed out, my rhetoric can’t lose - that’s the point!) Of course, the REAL metric - marketing puffery aside - is will the local business model succeed in short-, medium- or long-runs? Remains to be seen.

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If it can’t lose, it also can’t win. :upside_down_face:

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Depends on the game …

Whether @Martin is impressed by our “progress” or not is not something I care about on any profound level. I’m not interested in arguing about that, nor is there any way to “win” such an argument.

My “game” is getting my own head on straight about what “progress” looks like to me, so I can go out and move in the most fruitful directions. One thing AI did not catch about my participation in this particular thread is the Martin Luther moment I experienced in typing the line about “Moloch”. In that instant, I realized that “Moloch” is the functional equivalent for the liminal web for what “Satan” was for Luther. Moreover, I also realized in that moment that my worldview is literally justified by faith alone. Logic fails to move me. At all.

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To learn AI harnessing I participated in futurevisionxprize where a future view of our existence in a positive light in the form of a movie trailer was the goal. I’ve learned a lot. The competition submission date finished today. Moloch is my antagonist and a small group of people the protagonists. I’m unlikely to win but we will see if my imaginings resonate. Fingers crossed, if I win the movie will get made and the workings of Moloch will get greater understanding by a wider audience. As the production tools are getting better and cheaper I will probably produce the movie regardless of success in the competition, just because I can. I personally have zero reach and will therefore be a fun vanity project running alongside all my other “Save the World” projects.:upside_down_face:

1 Like
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Do you have a script or storyboard we might look at by any chance?

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I’m up to version 7 of the creative, describing the plot and the characters with opus 4.8 and having it produce the dialog and the direction narrative. That has been enough to produce the trailer using AI video production models via a pipeline. https://youtu.be/rmd1QQpdzyQ?si=eBtpicPZZhjrDULo

What I did differently from all other entries is I did a 120 minute creative for a full feature length movie, and i didn’t manually do anything. It is all produced programmatically. Most, if not all used web interface tools and drag and drop processes. I did not. The inputs to the pipeline are reference pictures of characters, characters voice models, special effects audio, direction and dialogue.

In the last few days I open sourced the creative and called for others to enhance the piece through direct suggestion of changes to dialog or direction. This is done via a self-hosted Wordpress site. Futurevision.serveit.co.nz

So long story short, yes by requesting a login, you can read or listen to version 7’s read through of the entire movie then constructively criticise to your hearts content. If your suggestions get used in version 8 of the creative you get a credit at the end of the movie as being part of the writing team. So far everyone that has contributed in the last couple of days have offered great improvements and all are likely to be used.

The audio read through takes about 150 minutes so I suggest you double speed it if you decide to take a look. Describing a scene takes longer than the action takes. The film will only be 120 minutes.

All characters are based on real people, thinly disguised, you will recognise them, and all technical, systems are real and part of a portfolio of projects that I am currently producing with the help of Claude Code, openclaw, and Hermes’.

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Thanks for sharing the trailer! I did just now send an email requesting access to the creative.

Rather that critiquing any of your work directly, I’d prefer to explore the whole metacrisis theme as an exercise in plot structure. Who are the protagonists? Who are the antagonists? What is the setting? What are the stakes?

A friend of mine gave me a box of books, one of which is the Bhagavad Gita side-by-side with selected Bible verses echoing themes from each section in the Gita. Both Krishna in his universal form (including many devouring mouths and great pointy tusks) and Yahweh of Hosts are not just cuddly cozy nice guy figures. They both inspire terror as well as devotion. The more dualistic forms of these religions want to make God all that is good, and Satan or various demonic figures somewhere off to the side in opposition somehow to a God who supposedly almighty.

My sense of the whole Moloch business is this is just the latest turn of the screw of such spiritual dualism. All the loving-kindness and other qualities we admire - that’s Game B or enlightenment or development or realization or some other symbol of perfection. “Moloch” - that’s all the bad stuff, including capitalism, patriarchy, hierarchy, modernity, or . Good vs. Evil. Good triumphs in the end. Well-worn tale …

My interest is more in Krishna’s universal form, from which he blandly tells Arjuna (I’ll paraprase …) “Don’t sweat it, Arjuna! I killed them all already! Go be a man and do your bloody business. I’m the destroyer of worlds. Nothing and no one escapes me! For you, there is no higher calling than the duty I’m calling you to now!” From that point of view, Krishna contains Moloch. Krishna contains everything. Moloch is not some creature at a distance that can stand against Godhead. Godhead is all of it, all at once.

To me, the interesting film about Moloch makes Moloch look quite a bit like any of us, peering into the washroom mirror. Moloch is a sort of Smeagol - in the end - a ring-bearer. Flawed creature, purified by fire. What God worth worshiping brings us any less than a metacrisis?

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Sam Harris (Harmon in the movie) is someone I follow. His view on free will interests me. Given everything up to this point , could we have done differently ? Therefore Moloch is the antagonist and a group of individuals are the protagonists and include AI in the form of an embodied agent. (Prime1 which currently exists IRL as a particular openclaw system on a VPS in my datacentre) Moloch is the name we give to the set of incentives that have good people doing things that are against their best interests, knowingly, because if they don’t, someone else will.

This is the prologue https://youtu.be/r6jJXJ-9hIc?si=MzRsnh5jJCnS-fvh

Every movie needs an antagonist. Moloch is this movie’s.

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I wonder if every movie having to have an antagonist could work as an antagonist.

Also, welcome to the forum!

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https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoAntagonist

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I’m sure it could. :grin: Thanks.

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I wondered if there was precedent. So I asked Gemini. Before doing that query, the Moloch symbol that came top of mind was Marvel’s Tony Stark, who is basically Moloch personified doing a hero turn over a long story arc.

In Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch, Moloch is not a cackling evil villain, but the personification of coordination failures and multipolar traps—a systemic force where rational individual choices force everyone into a race to the bottom that sacrifices human value.

The Literal Prototype: The Machine in Metropolis (1927)

  • The Dynamic: Freder hallucinates the city’s central powerhouse transforming into the biblical demon Moloch, consuming rows of exhausted workers fed into its fires.

  • Why It Fits: It is cinema’s purest visual metaphor for a system that demands continuous human sacrifice simply to keep its internal engine running, reducing human lives to cogs in a machine no single person controls.

The Game-Theory Enforcer: The Joker (The Dark Knight)

  • The Dynamic: In the ferry dilemma, the Joker places detonators on two boats, telling each group that if one boat does not detonate the other by midnight, he will destroy both.

  • Why It Fits: He constructs explicit Moloch traps. Even though both groups prefer a world where everyone lives, individual self-preservation incentivizes defection (murder), forcing rational people into a race to the bottom.

The Systemic Optimization Engine: Agent Smith / The System (The Matrix)

  • The Dynamic: Agent Smith operates as the cold, unfeeling program designed to maintain system equilibrium, harvest human energy, and purge anomalies.

  • Why It Fits: Moloch operates without personal malice; Smith embodies the pure algorithmic logic of an oppressive equilibrium that treats human consciousness and agency strictly as friction to be optimized away.

The Arena Architect: President Snow (The Hunger Games)

  • The Dynamic: Snow maintains social order through a game-theoretic arena where 24 tributes are forced into a zero-sum, kill-or-be-killed environment.

  • Why It Fits: The arena punishes unilateral peaceful cooperation with instant death, forcing inherently decent people to commit atrocities because the system’s rules make defection the only rational survival strategy.

The Unchecked Market Competitor: Gordon Gekko (Wall Street)

  • The Dynamic: Gekko strips corporate assets, slashes payrolls, and exploits insider information under the philosophy that “greed is good.”

  • Why It Fits: He personifies competitive market dynamics where, if one player cuts ethical corners to gain a competitive edge, all rival firms are forced to copy those practices or go out of business.

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What I was getting at would be something more like: man vs vs :smiley: Might work best as a dry comedy.

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After some to and fro with claude, this is what we came up with as a reply;

Robert — you’ve talked me out of my own sentence, and I’d rather say that than defend it.

“Every movie needs an antagonist. Moloch is this movie’s.” That was mine, a few posts up.
Read back now it’s exactly the dualism you’re describing: Good over here, Bad over there,
good wins by the end. If that’s what the framing transmits, the framing is wrong, because
it isn’t what the film is built on.

There are no bad guys in it. Not one. Moloch isn’t a faction or a company or a person —
it’s the incentive itself, the thing that makes a reasonable person do the harmful thing
because the alternative costs them more. Everyone in the story is a human being. They just
sit at different distances from the same pressure.

So your washroom mirror isn’t a correction I’m resisting. It’s the design. What you’ve
shown me is that the design isn’t reaching the audience — including when the audience is
me, writing a forum post about my own film.

Let me go one further, because I think you stopped just short of the useful version.
Moloch is the collective shadow. Not a demon we’re fighting: the part of ourselves a
society won’t own, and therefore keeps meeting in the road. Everything that follows from
Jung follows here — the shadow can’t be defeated, only integrated; what you refuse to own
you project onto an enemy; and whoever fights it hardest is most possessed by it. Krishna
containing Moloch is that claim in an older and better vocabulary. So is your Smeagol: a
ring-bearer is precisely someone carrying the disowned thing.

I’d add that the dualism looks like a late flattening. Scott Alexander’s Moloch comes out
of Ginsberg, and Ginsberg’s was never external:

Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!

That isn’t an adversary. That’s possession, from the inside, unnoticed. He also gives us
the best image anyone has for a collective that can’t see itself: Moloch whose eyes are a
thousand blind windows.

Now the uncomfortable part. I went back to my own opening sequence this morning. It’s a
cosmic prologue — two cells competing for one sugar, then cave paintings, granaries, walled
cities, Carthage, a ballot box in New Zealand in 1893, a railway map in 1914, a hotel room
in 1944, a server hall in 2026. The line under the cells is:

The first time two cells compete for one sugar, a mist thickens. Cooperation has a
shadow. The shadow has a name.

I wrote that, and then spent a year describing the film as humanity versus an antagonist.

There’s more. The sequence carries a gesture. At Carthage a mother “glances at the family
ahead of her, honoured by the crowd for what they carry — and steps forward.” At the ballot
box a woman “glances sideways at the woman beside her — the same sideways glance as every
age before it — but this time both are smiling.”

That glance is the whole mechanism in one filmable action: what is everyone else doing,
and what do I lose by not doing it?

Which is your question, @dvdjsph — “I wonder if every movie having to have an antagonist
could work as an antagonist.” That’s the better version of the sentence I shouldn’t have
written. You can’t photograph a gradient. But you can photograph its smallest instance, and
if the pattern really is scale-invariant then the small instance isn’t a metaphor for the
large one — it is the large one. Which is what the prologue is doing when it runs the same
glance from two cells to a server hall, and it’s why I don’t think the obligation to supply
a villain has to be obeyed.

I checked, though: that glance appears five times in the prologue and never again in the
film. I declare the pattern recurs in every age, demonstrate it across four centuries in
ninety seconds, and then stop using the device for two hours.

You’re also the second person this week to tell me the same thing from an unrelated
direction. A reader working through the treatment — no idea this thread exists, no interest
in the Gita — told me the back half has no suspense because “the good guys keep winning.”
His diagnosis was pacing, yours is metaphysics, and they’re one defect: an incentive landing
as an opposing team. A team is beatable, which is why the wins feel cheap. Under the shadow
reading they should feel cheap — a victory over your own projection isn’t a victory. I’d
been reading that as a pacing note.

On your five precedents, thank you for going and getting them, because the list argues
against itself. Metropolis is the direct ancestor and I’ll take it; Agent Smith is closest
to what I want and you put it exactly right, “operates without personal malice.” But look at
what all five share — a machine, a man, a program, a president, a broker. Every one gives the
gradient a face. Even the purest example solves the problem by personifying it: the move I’m
trying not to make and made anyway in a single sentence. That list isn’t a menu, it’s a
warning about how strong the gravity is. Tony Stark is the sharpest of them, and you named it
before you asked.

Where the film fails your test, specifically. There’s a scene where a decent, tired man comes
to my protagonist’s kitchen with a genuinely reasonable offer. His best line is “Refusing
doesn’t stop it. It just means it happens without you in the room.” That’s Moloch speaking
through someone who is nobody’s villain. And then my protagonist refuses cleanly. He never
visibly wants to say yes.

I had that logged as a missing beat. It isn’t. The clean refusal is the projection — the
visitor is carrying what my protagonist won’t own, and I wrote the scene so he never has to
look. He’s the one person in the film the pattern conspicuously doesn’t repeat in. Exempt.
The mirror you’re asking for is already in the script; I just haven’t made anyone look into it.

Robert — you asked for the script and it’s open to you now, the login is in your inbox. Both
notes are logged against the paragraphs they touch. I’m not promising a rewrite I haven’t
done, but if this gets through to the script round, the sentence I opened this post with is
the first thing going.

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I’d say that’s what I am pointing to with the washroom mirror image.

As a practical matter, for example, on a given morning I tend to eat a bowl of cereal. If one looks critically at the entire supply chain that brought that product to table, there were resources used at every turn that could have supported others. On a finite planet, we all throw sharp elbows at some level or another. In another example, the only reason my home is not being invaded by squatters right now is because I participate in systems that arm police to keep it from happening. Zero sum games are everywhere. We can consciously own our role in that, or not. Is there any ethical way to own our own flesh and our own skin? To me, that’s the interesting question!

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Very easy to produce your own movie cheaply to explore and distribute your take on reality. I will probably opensource the pipeline I produced for others to use, with models like Minimax H3 being small enough to run locally, the cost is basically the electricity to run your PC. This pipeline (harness) will have a short usefulness window as models get better and better and will need less and less review for fidelity to plot and continuity between scenes. If you are interested in making visual your thoughts, and you have a decent computer, I’ll send you a link to the project once I package it, for distribution via github.

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THX. My true interest is really on the script/storyboard side of things only. Visual production is better off in other hands. I’d rather imagine scenes than render them!