Folding the Gaze

Whole Earth Codec's term for an alternative to the surveillance metaphor. The project proposes a multimodal foundation model trained on de-individuated ecological and systemic data — "an observatory looking not outward but inward" — and borrows transformer self-attention as the figure for its epistemology: observer and observed are not supervisor and supervised but "mutually recursive," so "the model senses itself and thereby the planet is sensing itself." The codec is the artificial transduction of planetary phenomena into recombinant data; its closing maxim is "knowing enables making, but making makes knowing possible."