Politics

Anything from stone tools to microchips seams to have to be covered by a definition of technology, and there are weird edge cases. Gene editing might have too much to do with biology and nature. Money seams to have too much to do with law and administration. Yet both gene editing and money seem rather technological. Engineering processes are clearly related to technology but they’re a lot more like rituals in that they have so much to do with defining roles and interfaces between people. ...

Digital technology threatens important values and concepts like free will, bodily autonomy, private property, identity, and rule of law. Digital personhood is the necessary response. It is simultaneously a philosophy of what a person is, a politics of data, and a technology stack for networked personal computing devices. This is my formulation of — and elaboration on the cypherpunk vision. Cypherpunk: (Not cyBerpunk) CyPHerpunk is a movement that started in the 80s which purports that encryption is needed by everyday people to preserve their privacy. There’s been a resurgence after the 2013 Snowden revelations and the rise of cryptocurrency. ...

Power is conventionally thought of as a quantity. The more you have, the more you can do. While not inaccurate, it is a partial view that misses the essential dynamics of agency. Strategic State Space The way I conceptualize power has to do with this idea which I’m borrowing from the field of artificial intelligence. The “state space approach” is a strategy for solving complex problems. You encode the state of your game or problem and define vectors by which the state can change. Applying a change to the current state results in a new state. Doing this repeatedly results in a network of connected states also referred to as a state space. If you hypothetically explored all the possible permutations of vectors of change you would have spanned the entire space of possible states. Often this is computationally infeasible due to combinatorial explosion. ...

Despite being one of the most important ideas in civilization it’s so often misunderstood. Secularity is spectacularly subtle and I’m astounded people ever even came up with it in the first place. Pseudo-Secularism I’ve had to do some deliberation as to what I should call the prevailing idea of secularity which I’m critizing. “Secular” doesn’t work because there is a true, subtle, and vital concept of secularity which I’m arguing we ought to preserve. Atheism misses the mark because that isn’t what I’m objecting to. Physicalism and scientism are very important to the view I’m describing but are again merely tangential to the issue. In the prevailing dichotomy between the secular and religion, secularity roughly has to do with reason, evidence, and neutrality, while religion has to do with faith, dogma, and idiosyncrasy. This position I’m arguing against is a pseudo-secularism which inadvertently and inevitably falls into exactly those patterns of thinking which it would purport to supersede. ...