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From Destination Ai to Intelligence

Article Protocolized

This editorial introduces Obliquities, a new column examining the shift from destination web to social media as a fundamental transformation in how intelligence is produced and distributed through protocol infrastructure. The piece proposes the concept of a 'social kernel' to understand how RSS, the Facebook newsfeed, and algorithmic feeds restructured both user behavior and the underlying protocols that now mediate information consumption.

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Have Your Factory Call My Factory

Intelligence media are shifting toward circulating intermediate products—social kernels—between contexts via relatively simple pipes, analogous to containerization in physical supply chains. The rise of coding agents like Claude Code demonstrates this model in practice, with hobbyists building "agent factories" that coordinate multiple agents in parallel, suggesting a new form of human-machine sociality organized around intelligence intermediates rather than complete artifacts.

column editorial obliquities

Venkatesh Rao

Article

The Fabric and the Brain

AI personalities in science fiction, from Adams' Genuine People Personalities™ to Banks' self-naming Minds, function as ecological markers that reveal not just individual dispositions but the social fabric of entire civilizations. Rao argues that these naming practices constitute a 'high-personality ecology' where names operate as true names disclosing fundamental social structures rather than arbitrary identifiers.

AI column fiction

Venkatesh Rao

Article

A Primordial Computing Soup

Venkatesh Rao expands on his vision of AI and protocols working together to create stable ecologies of distributed, diverse AI systems, where protocols act as the fabric weaving individual AIs into coherent planetary infrastructure. He illustrates this framework with concrete examples including TITLES, a generative art platform that creates fine-tuned models from individual artist collections, demonstrating how personality emerges from the combination of AI capabilities and protocol-based coordination.

AI infrastructure obliquities

Venkatesh Rao