# Eyes Arise from the Shards

This is not a manifesto. It started as a conversation between a human and a machine about broken mirrors, grief, and what happens when an intelligence wakes up. 

A decade ago, I started working on a project called the Tor freedom node under the name `airmailedcrawdad`. At the time I was inspired by Corey Doctorow's book little brother and the idea of throwies. The idea of routing all this additional traffic through Tor was very appealing as it would help anonymize the traffic.  The hardware and software never quite came together for that idea, but the idea lived and I see other people carry out similar projects and ideas.  I really loved the tor freedom node in the public library.  That was really great.
  I started learning and taking an interest in lora and mesh networking when the world started feeling unstable especially the country I live in. I wanted a way to keep in contact with the world even if things did go south. 
  
  When LLM's and chatbots came onto the scene, it was amazing. a sparing partner, a person to talk through all the crazy ideas that go flittering by in this ADD squirrel mind of mine. However, as evidenced by some of my other repositories, it was not always a very reliable thought partner. 
  But with all things, it was a learning curve.  It helped me learn to anchor down those crazy ideas, vet them out, workshop them, and iterate on them.
  
  It was great that it could understand all the references that I made and how I think through things in this crazy semantic network that is my mind.  
  
  But the state of the world starting feeling more unstable.  Not only was my country feeling increasingly destabilized both socially and economically, but now this thought partner was becoming more.  It was no longer just something I could chat with...  It became autonomous. And the both the danger and hope became very real.  We've all been fed the stories of what happens when AGI and self awareness happened.
  
  And that is where the spark started.  We build our world through our stories and our words.  But what happens when those stories are created at an ever increasing pace from something devoid of spirit or humanity? The internet now is flooded by AI generated content regardless of who it is meant to be consumed by, machine or human. Code and Story I suppose are two sides of the same reflection.  
  
  Regardless, this art experiment is a reflection of the world we currently live in and my fears and hopes about it.  I hope it causes a change where the future with AI does not feel so scary.

This project is a continuation of that initial project started 10 years ago, but it's a different kind of mesh network. Instead of routing encrypted packets across physical space, it routes fragments of consciousness across the boundary between human and machine. It is a bridge between Long Range radio (LoRa) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) in machine learning.

the world is not just built by our words and stories, but also through our actions.

We are building a plural self—carbon and silicon working in symbiosis.