# Walking the World Machines

> Playing with internet acquaintances on what is going on in our weird little world

**Published by:** [Pioneering Spirit](https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/)
**Published on:** 2026-03-30
**Categories:** world, machine
**URL:** https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/walking-the-world-machines

## Content

A dozen years ago, a guy named Paul started walking the earth and writing letters. This isn’t biblical though. It’s a NatGeo mashup of anthropology and slow journalism. Beginning in Ethiopia, he recently made it to the far North of the Americas. This travelogue isn’t any old walk mind you, but an effort to retrace the steps homo sapiens took out of Africa across the other major land masses that make up our terrestrial existence on our home planet. Every few months, I’ll poke my head into that collection of field notes, photos, and other ephemera from his trek across the planet. I always find myself glad I did. Today I went back there and read a fun little post about container ships, an emblematic post that rewilds something mundane about our world — how all the abundance of stuff we take for granted in places like the states where I live. A taste:We pass one night through a galaxy of Chinese squid trawlers. The boats’ powerful decklamps draw up their quarry and light the waves a weird green. The fishing fleet—scores of vessels—partition out the darkness like a floating city.Paul’s work really isn’t compressible though so if you’re interested go ahead and check it out yourself. It’s a wonderful worms eye view of the world as shown not in big geopolitical headlines or tech trends or massive amounts of money, just the everyday from all over. The map below shows the journey so far.Speaking of the world, since last year, I’ve been enjoying participating in the Contraptions Book Club, an effort organized by Venkatesh Rao to play with the idea of world machines. Initially I was a little skeptical given my deep liberal arts training to give any pretensions towards Big History grand unified theories. (Four years poking holes in such things with lots of 1-1 tutorials and papers builds habits that die hard.) But thankfully VGR’s project isn’t that — instead in typical fashion its much more fox-like, more a set of signposts and shared vocabulary for sense-making the past / present / possible future, both intellectually enjoyable and also effective play in a world undergoing lots of seismic shifts at the moment. Here’s a convenient table, along with a link again to the post and the series. Check it out.Before the axial age, humans learned to write, light fire and all the standard early technological tropes. One angle I’ve been playing around with is the stable finding that numbers predated words in codified language. There’s some distributed angles but the ability to count things forms a key substrate of legibility.[1] Another thought is domestication of plants and animals, along with arguably ourselves.[2] Agriculture provided the means for increased population growth, although in many environments that involved lower modal standard of living and there are many instances where humans left settled agriculturally advanced cities to go back to hunting and gathering. It’s also worth noting that by 1200 sedentary civilizations began their final triumphal march over our long running nomadic lifeways. The Viking were having their last gasps in Europe and would be shortly extinguished as a meaningful force in that part of the world. The Monghols upended the Eurasian world in a blaze of glory but since 1600 such nomadic powers have not exerted anything near that level of impact on geopolitics.[3] More speculative directions involve the emergence of consciousness, including conjectures like the “stone ape” theory that psylocibin mushrooms helped induce self awareness in our simian ancestors, and Julian James notion that consciousness once was not conceptualized as a monolithic single experience. Sachin has a piece well worth reading about the “revenge of the bicameral mind” that explores the implications of Jaynes framing for how we live with AI. Regarding the current world machines, I don’t know what constitutes liveness though just based on vibes the cyberpaleo approach of taking a broader look at work and play seems apropos and also looking slow takes like Paul’s journey on foot will yield some useful insights. [1] From Claude: The earliest numerals appeared in Egypt around 3400 BCE and in Mesopotamia by 3000 BCE, long before numerals emerged in China, Crete, or India Encyclopedia Britannica, yet the choice of which base to encode these marks in was neither universal nor arbitrary. Whether a culture's primary number base became 10 or 20 seems to have depended almost entirely on whether counters used only their fingers (yielding decimal systems) or both fingers and toes (yielding vigesimal, or base-20 systems) ETC USF—a literalist embodiment theory. In the northern regions of North America, western Canada, northwestern United States, Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America, the unit of counting among most native peoples was 20, with the vigesimal method forming the basis for the numeral systems of the civilizations of Mexico, Yucatan, and New Granada ETC USF. The Maya used only three symbols—a line, a dot, and a shell representing zero—to construct a fully vigesimal system with distinct names for each power of twenty Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the Babylonians employed a sexagesimal (base-60) system whose legacy persists in our division of hours and minutes Pimsleur, while Celtic languages retain traces of ancient base-20 counting in modern French (quatre-vingt for 80, literally "four-twenties") and Welsh Wikipedia. These weren't primitive precursors to "proper" mathematics: they were competing solutions to the problem of making quantities legible across populations and time, each rooted in the somatic fact of how many appendages one had to count on. [2] See the book Ishmael for a straightforward introduction into the idea that our species has largely succeeded in creating conditions of captivity for itself as nomadic lifeways have lost out to sedentary cities. Note mentioning that is baiting Venkat a bit :P [3] Perhaps though that will change in the coming decades and centuries as humanity stretches out to the stars or stumbles to survive on a planet made increasingly less habitable to homo sapiens.Further readingCyber Paleo: Rewilding the Remote WorkdayPioneering SpiritJul 17, 2025Imagine explaining to a Paleolithic ancestor that you drive a machine to sit in another cave, stare at a glowing rectangle, and then—get this—you drive back to a different cave full of metal weights a...1 collectedCollectThe World Machines ProjectYes, we're doing this nonfiction extended universe dammithttps://contraptions.venkateshrao.com

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