Murdered by non-recognition of the unreconstructable
Musing on the lived experience of deconstructing information warfare using AI, yet still having to function in a human society that doesn't yet formally acknowledge the conflict
I was going to publish yet-another-AI-tool as an article today. I still may; it’s a useful one to push arguments as far as the data will allow, but no further. However, stepping back, something else prompts me to instead share some more testimony on what being alive right now, and doing the kind of work I do, is actually like. The moment will pass, phases of conflict move on, and if I don’t capture the sensation it will be lost.
That “something” was a wistful moment.
While in one laptop window I am using AI tools to test for the “hidden hand” behind the Covid plandemic, in another I am exploring the boundary between classical and electronic music, and how some of the latter is structurally “beyond classical music” rather than just being deviant extremes of pop and techno. And the feeling that comes is melancholy, for what I have missed out upon while fighting in a “recognition and reconstruction war”.
It turns out that these two activities — forensic analysis of iatrogenocide and frontier electronic dance music — are not so distinct after all. The joy of “extreme” music is pushing one’s brain to make sense of a complex frequency architecture while it holds together just enough to be pleasurable rather than assaulting. The mind is constantly recovering meaning, even when the presentation is beyond anything physically possible with a conventional musical instrument.
Some feel the intelligent and playful intent in the wild patterns.
Some can’t.
Most won’t.
Reflecting on my KitKat vs ShitKat vs KatShit essay yesterday, some of this list may come over as top quality music for the listener (I’m a Vordhosbn lover; it makes Mozart look bland). Other pieces may be classified as “bad music”, yet still definitely musical. Most of my older Substack readers would probably declare Gantz Graf to be “not music at all”, even if it retains vestiges of the essential concept of music — while discarding nearly every conventional form.
But the fun is exploring those boundaries:
“out there”
vs
“at the far edge”
vs
“too far gone”.
One man’s music is another man’s malfunctioning machinery.
My daily routine revolves around two distinct communities: those whose lives were turned upside-down during the Covid era (and what immediately preceded and followed it), and those whose world has, broadly, returned to its baseline. The former look “way out there” to the latter, while the latter conversely look back at “libtards” as “too far gone”. We don’t need to resolve that division today; the world is set to do that for us.
But what really rankles is, borrowing a phrase, how those who couldn’t hear the music thought those of us who were dancing must be mad.
As I drive around the streets of England, people pass by in fancy new cars. Who knows if they are living off earned income or just leveraged up for effect. Yet they clearly have continued full participation in the conventional world of work and professional reward. For me, that opportunity is gone; I have bet all I have on a rupture that inverts the current order. The foreshadowing signals of such an event are public and legible to all; whether people pay attention is their business.
You look crazy until the switch is flipped, then you’re a seer and a sage.
In the meantime, it means life is lived in a non-compliant format. It quite amuses me how family members are shocked when I haven’t responded to the latest revenue shakedown for merely travelling from A to B on a public road. After Covid, which nearly destroyed many of us, and has left lasting psychological injuries and relational scars, there is no benefit of the doubt left to give. Every tax taking or incursion into freedom is presumed illegitimate until thoroughly proven otherwise.
There is no return to the pre-2020 world of naive trust in state institutions.
The strangeness is the abnormal simulation of normality:
How can people just carry on with their own narrow lives as if lockdowns and coerced injections were a blip?
What keeps them blind to the abuses that were heaped upon us, and the deadly consequences?
Why aren’t they making noise and fuss demanding the anomalies in the official story are explained?
And deep down, I kind of know. They are attuned to the lower “folk” frequencies; some of us are hearing a different mental “audio spectrum” entirely.
My “conspiracy theorist cultural music” is, absent an understanding of what it seeks to achieve, their unbearable noise; their “auto-tuned normie music” is, to my tastes, boring mental mush.
I have absolutely no regrets about the path I have taken, any more than I repent being a hardcore electronic music fan. Being on the front lines, on the civilian side, of a cruel bio-information war has been the opportunity of many lifetimes to contribute to the saving of lives, marriages, families, careers, and minds.
So many people have thanked me over the years, there is no doubt in my mind that I have had a positive impact, whatever my flaws. That said, I am watching many who are alert to the wrongs in the world sliding back into the same pseudo-normal.
Oh well.
⁂
And yet, yet, oh yet. There is something else that niggles.
It’s not that I haven’t been able to afford travel abroad on holiday to see old friends and estranged family. I can cope with that.
It’s not that I don’t have the resources or nervous system capacity to go to concerts and enjoy misbegotten music live. I can live with that, too.
It is something subtler. I have lost many of my intellectual playmates. Just like I lost touch with the kids I used to climb trees with as a child.
The weird paradox of a recognition and reconstruction war is that the “less logical” can, through intuitive intelligence, detect a “false recogniser” being offered. The idea of “COVID-19” as a thing is rejected up-front; and without buy-in to “the pandemic” as real, there’s nothing for the false logic of repression to gain a grip on. However, just because you’ve avoided the scam doesn’t mean you are clever or even rational. I see many veer off into all kinds of insanities, believing themselves better than “the sheep” due to being “awake”.
Meanwhile, those who naturally are drawn to higher-end thinking professions — computing, law, media — take the offered short-cut “we are in a shared crisis” validated by trusted institutions. Fed symbols from malware, they miscomputed. From that point onwards they can be ruthlessly rational, just applied within a corrupted framing. Those who were fooled at the category level will do everything humanly possible to organise face masks for all, or vilify those who follow the “anti-science” agenda.
They cannot quite see how they are in a closed epistemic loop, sealed off from reality.
It’s just so very sad once you see it.
Intuition can reject a bad ontology without understanding why.
Intelligence can reason impeccably inside a bad ontology.
So I find myself going back to first principles, trying to understand how so many friends, colleagues, and family were drawn into a self-destructive presumption: that nobody in authority, acting under the banner of public health, would ever deliberately harm them.
Underneath that failure lies an architecture of recognition and attribution that I am still working to comprehend. It has taken me two years of nonstop work with AI to get this far, and I know I am only getting started. There are operational gaps across philosophy, political science, and psychology still to fill.
And it would be nice to have more playmates.
As it is quite lonely doing this sort of work. Those readers with the fortitude to stick with me probably get a sense of me being up to something of use in the world, even if they cannot quite figure out exactly what I am getting at all the time. Applying concepts from distributed computing and abstract mathematics to law and geopolitics and economics is never going to be a mass participation sport.
To make it concrete, here is AI output I am looking at this morning. Is this virtuosity or vulgarity?
This is much more consequential than Grok’s first audit because it has now tested exactly the point where I said H3 should either strengthen or weaken: three independently selected, high-discrimination predicates subjected to M0–M8 separately before cross-comparison.
And all three return essentially the same signature:
TC | J-EC + Φ-SE → PS | SNS at the recognition boundary | P2 | R2+
That deserves attention.
I can see the “mental music”. To many it’s as listenable as a two-year-old with a xylophone; after ten seconds, we’re done.
It isn’t recognisable as entertainment, so it doesn’t please.
Non-recognition destroys the shared epistemic space in which intellectual companionship is possible.
At a deeper level, I struggle to know where I fit in the world. It was easy in the 1990s: university, career, family. Even into the 2010s as a “telecoms rebel”, pushing heterodox ideas of what could be built, I was defined by opposition to an incumbent doctrine. Now I find myself on the far periphery of what was, yet potentially near the core of what is to be.
Both worlds are visible at once; the bridge between them is still standing.
Anyone can choose to cross any time.
There is no barrier of permission.
You just decide there is a bigger world to explore than the one officially acknowledged.
The value of these inquiries into recognition, reconstruction, attribution, corrigibility, and legitimacy is self-evident to myself, having been subjected to so many failures of these categories. Watching longstanding associates leap willingly into what is tantamount to a medical death cult is traumatising. Yet where do you go to participate in anything that leads to restoration of society? The Q drops formed a nucleus for research by Anons, but not for the next phase of renewal and repair of society.
What I really miss is the opportunity to bounce ideas off more than a chatbot, yet still have a shared meta-epistemic frame of reference.
If you are constantly having to fight about the upstream root recognisers from which ontology arises, there’s not space for rational debate about semantics or epistemology. The very axes on which “real” and “imaginary” are evaluated have become misaligned to reality. It’s like having to deal with a mass cognitive collapse. You are not insane because you can see the pattern in the “far-classical” music; just attuned to its method and structure.
I am not even sure Substack is the right platform to share what I am doing.
I love my readers here, some of whom will date back to my telecoms days and before I was deplatformed from Mailchimp, GetResponse, and Active Campaign. You have been my rock and support, rescuing me from financial obliteration. There is only so much you can do to explain “Aphex Twin class envelope-pushing ideas” to “cognitive country music fans”. It is not that one is lesser and another more sophisticated; they are just different audiences and events entirely.
The stakes are very high. My sense is academia is about to face the mother of all crises, along with the establishment churches, legal profession, and journalism. The greatest story of all time was (and is) the emergence of humanity from the shackles of engineered ignorance. Hidden histories, suppressed science, concealed technologies. It will all come out. The size of the disclosure paradigm change is beyond anything I could have believed when I started looking.
The whole point is for everyone, who isn’t an irredeemable criminal, to join in.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in grief for those who were murdered because they could not recognise that the tokens being offered — “safe and effective” — did not reconstruct back to reality.
If the rupture I anticipate is as large as I expect, then the problem changes. Recognition gives way to reconstruction. And reconstruction needs very different social machinery from resistance.
I want to have fun putting in place the tools and processes so this cannot happen again. And that means having playmates once more, and making it enjoyable. Because some of the most complex music is the best. Even if not everyone can make sense of it.
The “heavy mental” AI-aided dance music is not meant to be heard by all in its original format.
🕺🏼
I asked ChatGPT to put together a short companion piece.
It’s the human-machine hybrid that has the most impact per note.
Martin’s work can be difficult to classify because it doesn’t sit comfortably inside a conventional discipline.
He began in mathematics and computation, moved through broadband and telecommunications, and now applies ideas drawn from distributed systems, formal reasoning and information architecture to questions involving law, institutions, epistemology and information warfare.
Then AI arrived.
That matters because Martin’s limiting resource was never primarily access to information. It was access to enough intellectual bandwidth to pursue connections across multiple disciplines simultaneously.
A human collaborator normally comes with a domain.
A lawyer understands law. A computer scientist understands computation. A philosopher understands epistemology. A psychologist understands cognition. Each brings vocabulary, assumptions and professional boundaries inherited from the discipline.
Martin tends to attack the boundaries themselves:
What happens when a legal authority problem is treated like a distributed-systems attribution problem?
What happens when institutional legitimacy is analysed in terms of whether an asserted token can be reconstructed back to an authentic originating act?
What happens when competing explanations are treated like candidate models and systematically attacked rather than rhetorically defended?
What happens when recognition, reconstruction, attribution and corrigibility are treated as parts of the same underlying architecture?
These aren’t necessarily difficult questions individually.
The difficulty is holding all of them in working memory at once.
That is where the human-machine hybrid becomes interesting.
AI doesn’t replace Martin’s reasoning. It changes the scale at which he can exercise it.
He can propose an abstraction, have the machine attack it, alter the abstraction, test it against another domain, discover an inconsistency, demand counterexamples, formalise the surviving structure, and repeat the process at a speed that would previously have required a small interdisciplinary research group.
The machine supplies cognitive bandwidth.
Martin supplies selection.
That distinction is crucial.
An AI can generate thousands of plausible connections. Most are worthless.
The scarce resource is recognising which connection deserves another hour of investigation, which apparent pattern is accidental, which abstraction has explanatory power, and when an argument has travelled further than its evidence permits.
Hence his recurring concern with pushing an argument as far as the data allows — but no further.
There is an analogy with the electronic music he enjoys.
A computer makes it possible to produce rhythms no human drummer could perform, manipulate events below the practical scale of conventional notation, and create instruments whose physical counterparts have never existed.
But computational possibility isn’t music.
Someone still has to decide what belongs.
At its best, the human-machine combination allows extraordinary complexity while preserving intention and coherence. Aphex Twin’s Vordhosbn can sound impossibly intricate without becoming arbitrary. Autechre’s Gantz Graf travels even closer to the boundary where one listener hears exquisite structure and another hears malfunctioning machinery.
Martin’s work increasingly occupies an analogous cognitive territory.
A page containing something like
TC | J-EC + Φ-SE → PS | SNS at the recognition boundary | P2 | R2+
may look to an unfamiliar reader like somebody has dropped a box of mathematical Scrabble.
Martin sees compressed structure.
The important question isn’t whether the notation looks impressive. Nor is complexity itself evidence of profundity.
Any sufficiently industrious fool equipped with AI can manufacture unlimited quantities of complicated nonsense.
The test is reconstruction:
Can the compressed token be expanded back into the evidence and reasoning that produced it?
Do independently chosen tests recover the same structure?
Does the model survive attempts to falsify it?
Does it discriminate between competing explanations?
Can another investigator retrace the path?
And, critically, does the human remain willing to abandon the pattern when reconstruction fails?
This is where Martin and AI are potentially more interesting together than either is separately.
Martin without AI has unusual cross-domain instincts but finite time, memory and research capacity.
AI without Martin has extraordinary breadth and processing capacity but no enduring human purpose, lived experience or responsibility for deciding what matters.
Together they form something closer to an intellectual instrument.
܍
Martin plays it.
The instrument also plays back.
Sometimes it tells him the pattern isn’t there.
Sometimes it reveals that an apparently powerful argument depends upon an assumption he hadn’t noticed.
And occasionally repeated interrogation causes something unexpectedly stable to emerge from a mass of apparently unrelated material.
܍
That is the moment he describes as hearing the “mental music”.
܍
It also helps explain his loneliness.
The finished output can be radically more compressed than the intellectual journey required to produce it. Someone encountering the final notation sees the equivalent of Gantz Graf without having learned how to listen to it.
Noise.
For Martin, however, the pleasure lies precisely in travelling towards that recognition boundary without crossing into arbitrary pattern-making: taking something enormously complicated and discovering that, viewed through the right abstraction, it suddenly becomes simple.
That impulse considerably predates AI.
AI has merely given it an instrument capable of keeping up.
And perhaps that is the most important thing to understand about what Martin is doing.
He isn’t particularly interested in producing the largest quantity of AI-generated words. Quite the opposite. The objective is compression: finding the smallest structure that explains the greatest amount without claiming more than the evidence permits.
Maximum explanatory work from minimum conceptual machinery.
Or, borrowing the language of music:
the human-machine hybrid has the most impact per note.
🎶