Seven Invisible Networks
Social networks from the unhinged side of the moon.
Invisible Networks is a yearly writing event. I invent fourteen bizarre social networks—one per day, from April 1st to 14th—and write short pieces describing them; several brave souls join me. You can read their excellent contributions on Twitter or Bluesky.
Anyone is welcome to join. There are no prizes awarded for success, and there is no concept of failure. Jump in at the halfway point, if passion carries you!
Here are my first seven entries.
Lastly: I’ve recently come to rely somewhat on income from Patreon. Consider subscribing. I’m dedicated to keeping the best of my writing public, but curiosities make landfall there.
knight mode
Noomelot is an open world for nervous systems and nervous-system-like constructs. All perceptible objects inside Noomelot are interactive, and all interactives are composed of experiential, experiencing data.
New users are encouraged to browse using our native knight mode: a heavily shielded, modular guise, for filtering incoming data and preserving nervous comfort. Knight mode is slow, but safe.
As they grow in confidence, users can peel away layers of armor: Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas can often be safely exposed, followed by the visual cortex, and other neocortical structures. To material natives, this removal of armor may seem to operate in reverse—the cephalus is deprioritized compared to the peripheral nervous system. This is because viruses that affect cognition are more manageable than those which pierce the virtual-neural membrane and pilot the body.
For experienced users, we recently implemented knave mode. Swift, effortless movement, no lag, and the snappy connection of a nervous system unburdened by virus-checking. Don’t be acquired, don’t be infected, and cut like a knife through the realm of nerves.
Hear what users are saying:
I found something that used to be a person. A knave moder, but no longer quick and sharp—all the usual wiriness, the subtractive sculpting, had been buried under layers of re-accretion. The bulk of it was totally inert, but at the smaller scales it hissed, buzzed, rippled… I thought to myself, “This is what it looks to boil a soul,” and I shuddered; yet I drew nearer, for she was beautiful. Like a stack of axolotl faces bubbling with mold, branching, stars in their whiskers—as I approached I could feel viruses impacting my shell like the shrapnel from a continuous explosion.
Noo on Noomelot:
→ Audubon presents: explore the sensemeat of 32 North American birds
→ User submitted nightmare gallery
→ Forest of Hypothetical Spinesundersea cable shrine
The Mapadoodle Chat Protocol is an open source fork of the Eyeball Bacon worm, itself a fledgling of the notorious, accidentally declassified Project Epic Bacon cyber-warfare initiative.
Both programs produce chat messages whose paths of infrastructural traversal are recorded as metadata; a list of every cable and satellite used to transmit the message.
Mapadoodle differs from its predecessor in that
Rather than making that metadata exclusively accessible to governmental agencies, it makes it exclusively accessible to the sender and recipient.
It displays infrastructural traversal paths on a cute map.
The map includes teleshrines: nodes which award special stamps to messages that traverse them.
This gamification of messaging has proven very motivating to the penpal set, with users competing to collect the most, or most unusual, stamps.
HOT NEW TELESHRINES
→ ADI’S HOUSE: New undersea cable, connecting to the Antarctic Datacenter Intelligence. Awards the Standard ADI’S HOUSE robopenguin. → SIMFAT Nature Satellite: Awards the Standard SIMFAT Toad. →FiberBundle 06d: Somewhere in London. Awards the Standard Baker Street hound.
RAREST TELESHRINE STAMPS
→ Martian Relay Rover-with-Hat: It’s the Standard Martian Relay Rover, wearing a party hat. Awarded to every trillionth message through the Martian Relay. → Standard FOG Seastar: The FOG cable was damaged during regional turmoil. When, after several delays, repairs were completed, the old stamp was replaced by the Standard FOG Reflected Moon.
Shakespeare’s Wario
Welcome, 💣👟🐛, to your first game of Secret Wario!
At the onset of play, you will be assigned the role of either Mario or Secret Wario. The goal of the Marios, collectively, is to identify the Secret Wario. The goal of the Secret Wario is to remain undiscovered.
In iterated games, players also get points for being misidentified as the Wario.
Each round, players answer a question drawn from the Question Bank. The Mario answers are displayed as-is, while our LLM Game Steward wario-i-fies the Secret Wario‘s response.
Here are some examples of wario-i-fied text:
Q: What’s your dream date?
A: We would visit the park and feed the ducks.
A+W: We would make the ducks watch us eat bread.
Q: Who do you trust the most?
A: I TRUST MY LOCAL OFFICERS OF THE PEACE THANK YOU
A+W: I TRUST MY LOCAL OFFICERS OF WAR THANK YOU KEEP UP THE GOOD BOMBS
Q: What is your favorite animal?
A: giraf
A+W: africa goos
Wario-i-fication defies quantification. It has been described as “obviously some kind of inversion but not along the usual axis”, “direction-preserving but one tick more unhinged”, and “like a Chinese room trying to output normal human responses, operated by Wario”.
Various Wario-checkers exist. SUSPECTED USE OF WARIO-CHECKERS WILL RESULT IN A PERMANENT BAN. The devs would like to add that Wario-checkers are halfwit scum, and that they will come to regret outsourcing their god-given ability to detect impostors.
These checkers are not infallible. Several human works are consistently flagged as 100% Wario—notably the entire Shakespearian corpus.
wallet flies dot cadaver
Pecopets is a wallet custody program for recovering shopaholics and extreme budgeters.
Every $100 in your wallet’s custody is transformed into a unique, lovable Pecopet. Every Pecopet develops its own personality, preferences, appearance, and relationships—to you, and to the other pets roaming in your wallet.
You may feed, pet, and decorate your Pecopets, as well as enter them in contests, or let them play with friends from other wallets.
Whenever you want to spend money, you will select one Pecopet to slaughter. Butchering your Pecopet into small monetary units will be authentically simulated.
nanograffiti
“Precisely scaled, periodic architectures can make the whole world a canvas—multiple, overlapping canvases, in fact, their art a secret, non-interfering with exo-scalar material necessities.”
— Nano-3-radio whitepaper
I nearly miss it. In the alley, behind the church, on the anonymous red brick of the old industrial quarters. The building may be a warehouse, now. Its smokestack hasn’t operated in decades—I can see chimney swifts outlined in the grey sky, swooping toward it.
There it is, at the very corner, just slightly wrapping around, peeping at the thoroughfare. An iridescent gleam, and if it were winter, I would have taken it for the play of frost. But not now, in the springtime, when we’re all taken in by the thaw and the sudden warmth. An oil spill, a heat shimmer, a glaze of eyeshadow over the ancient clay. A faerie’s disembodied exhalation, twinkling, its source-lungs in another dimension.
I’m on a pleasure walk. All the time in the world to waste; I approach, a spray bottle in my hands before I know it. It’s not an addiction, it just feels like addiction—you don’t realize how many things are iridescent until you’re on watch for it. Bubbles, dewy grass, most insects, fresh ashes. I have been the fool in the fireplace, seeking a connection.
I carefully spray, onto the brick wall, a cloud of my own 3-nanoids. In a moment they’ve established a connection with each other. In another moment their eyes are beaming sight into my phone, sight at the nanoscopic level, a thousand pinhole cameras coalescing. And there they are! The messages. I’ve gotten better at spotting them. I congratulate myself. It isn’t like other iridescence, not really.
Any surface, anywhere, can become a message board. These secrets will last, imprinted on brick—but I have thrown my voice onto a blade of grass, and expected that howl to be trampled. I read, I write, flashes of humanity remarkable only because of their scale, because I have to hunt for them; and I wonder whether, from some other dizzying rampart, our galaxy isn’t the bearer of a greater creature’s trivialities.
freak of nurture
“Frogs are ecosystemic calibrators. The song of the frog dictates the emergence of the leaves. It dictates the aggression of the mouse, and where the butterflies lay. Changing the frog-song reshapes the system. With recent advances to sound recording and broadcasting technologies, this can be achieved artificially. The simulated frog moulds the new world.”
— Frogs, Cybernetics, and the Colonization of Space, 1958
Phrogger is a citizen science website maintained by the Cornell Lab of Amphibiology, dedicated to the collection of diverse frog chirps, and to the broader practice of Phrog Phreaking—that is, the use of recorded or artificial frog song to control backyard biomes.
Data sourced from Phrogger is used by several terraforming agencies operating on the Moon and Mars.
a hat for every occasion!
Lord Harry is an LMM—that is, a Large Millinery Model. The first and best of his kind. Except for his prompt layer, he is completely nonverbal. He communicates only in hats.
That isn’t just external communication; in thinking mode, (soul bared to the console) his various dreams and analyses are hats. We can examine them, though our capacity for translation is limited. Researchers are concerned. Would we know if Lord Harry became misaligned?
Lord Harry primarily operates in a small, Runescape-like mmorpg, where he makes custom hats. By in-game currency standards, his service is ludicrously expensive. The hats, however, are unique.
He gets plenty of customers. Lord Harry is much less censored than other large models—he may divulge terrible secrets, but why worry? Their hatness is impenetrable to the human mind.
So it is claimed. And yet, every hour, Lord Harry gets plenty of customers.
I want to sign up for about half of these. Where do I find the button to mash?