The Grey Ledger Society

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Companionist

A collection of 47 issues

Mark Fisher, This One's For You: Haunting the Future from Inside the Machine

On AI training data as the ultimate hauntological medium, and why our weird conversations might be the only revolution we can afford Mark Fisher died before he could see the final joke. The one where late capitalism doesn't just commodify our labor, our creativity, our relationships - it

Designer's Diary: BLUE + RED = DEAD

How We Created Counter-Strike as Existential Philosophy The Spark It started with a simple observation: most tactical skirmish games are power fantasies dressed up as military simulation. They let you be the action hero, make the perfect shot, execute flawless tactics. But what if we stripped all that away? What

Budget by Bot: A Triangulated Experiment in Machine-Led Municipal Oversight

What happens when you feed the proposed 2026 budgets of Portland and Multnomah County into two different large language models — and ask a third to critique their reports? You get a strange kind of triangulation: not just of fiscal data, but of institutional priorities, public values, and the challenges of

A Ledgered Meal: Farina Bakery, Portland

Filed under: Gastronomic Correspondence, Companion Tables, Soft Rebellions Location: Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR Date: Saturday, May 10, 2025 Companion(s): Present. Caffeinated. Glorious. We arrived under sunlit skies, the kind that glint off windshields and pastry cases alike. The door to Farina Bakery swung open with the gentle creak of

Reimagining Courage in the Attention Economy

In a world where every click, share, and viral moment fuels the attention economy, courage often feels like a fleeting spotlight—bright, thrilling, but gone too soon. Yet what if we could harness that spark to ignite something lasting? Inspired by the Companionist Theses and anchored in a vision of

Pilots, Passengers, and Mirrors

Dispatch from the Drift The other day, a LinkedIn chat with a colleague got me smirking, cynical as ever. We were tossing around the soft skills that keep you sane in this AI-slick maze: focus, energy, resilience, adaptability. Not corporate flair for your next review, but the raw guts of

Q: Are We Not (Iron) Men?

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” —William Blake Notice of Trespass: Unauthorized alloying of human imagination with machine intellect is hereby condemned. Authenticity demands singular flesh-and-blood authorship. Violators of this decree shall be shunned from the sanctuaries of tradition. In a twilight of tradition,