Category: Politics

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1369 and California SB-1047 Vetoed

Last night I received a push alert and then a flurry of excited text messages and phone calls. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the controversial SB-1047 artificial intelligence bill.

Gavin Newsom vetoes California’s contentious AI “safety” bill SB-1047

Twitter lit up with joyful streams of relief and praise for this decision. Everyone from politicians, economists, researchers, academic luminaries, open source collectives, founders and venture capitalists.

It was a bad bill that lacked the necessary clarity and focus to even begin the task of regulating the nascent field of artificial intelligence.

We can and will do better in finding regulatory frameworks for safety and competitiveness but this bill wasn’t it. It was especially concerning as they say so goes California so goes the world.

I have been banging on about the #FreedomToCompute and math’s crucial role in our constitutional right to free speech in America. This must be considered in all future attempts at regulation in America.

Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.

These tools are extensions of the human mind. Consider that the first computers were just regular humans counting. We may have started with our fingers and toes as our first tools. And it wasn’t quick progress as the evolution from the abacus to modern computing took us nearly 4,000 years.

We’ve made an astonishing amount of progress in the last hundred years. We’ve gone from thousands of computations per second in the 1940s to 200 quadrillion calculations per second with modern super computers.

Consumer devices are better too. The computer I’m using to write this post has more power than the computers we used to send man to the moon. It’s 100,000 times faster with seven million times more memory.

Alas, as tools get more powerful the powerful get nervous. This isn’t the first bad artificial intelligence bill we’ve seen. We have Europe to thank for that. And it likely won’t be the last.

But defeating SB-1047 is a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation not only in California but across the world as the entire compute space came together to make its voice heard. And Gavin Newsom listened.

We should celebrate this rare consensus as we look towards better policy in our future.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1368 and Lending Credibility

The dead internet theory (or conspiracy theory if you must) supposes that machine generated content outweighs human contributions.

I don’t think we are there just yet but I am betting that artificial intelligence speeds up the process of replacing human content in areas where it’s unnecessary. Machines can act on their own and it’s good thing potentially too.

Being able to determine what is human intelligence versus machine intelligence may well be mitigated through trust-less cryptographic systems we take for granted. Handshake protocols for humans and machines.

Some content and transactions are just fine coming from artificial intelligence but others have to demonstrate a human identity. This may even require compute on human’s behalf

Looking forward, the ability to access compute at scale will likely parallel the right to transact. Identity will be layered and lending credibility and capital will look different. Who has credit and credibility?

As nations navigate their own risks, network state behaviors on the individual level will become more prevalent, driven by the need for secure, decentralized transactions that ensure autonomy in an increasingly unpredictable world.

The internet isn’t dying. It’s being reborn to serve the next stage of credible actors on our world.

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1365 and Good News, Bad News

It seems to be an absolutely awful week on Planet Earth. War, natural disasters, and human venality are on full display. It’s hard to even read the news, political or otherwise.

In contrast, I am myself in a good news place. I have a few leftover health issues as I leave behind the bout of respiratory issues (Covid’s legacy) but am otherwise full steam ahead.

Because I am so busy I find myself offline and missing things. It’s all good news in my world. And then I come back online to check feeds and it’s just all bad news.

I feel the privilege of it but I am also proud to have this stability. We made choices so our lives could be this way. We value preparedness and the calm that comes from planning.

I wish more people could live this way. Focus shouldn’t be reserved for a select few who can make good big life choices. That can be luck of the draw.

I do believe however it’s possible for many more of us to narrow focus so we can let small good choices compound. It’s good to appreciate the value of limiting your attention to your own priorities.

There is an argument to be made that only once you have steadied your own life can you look outside. Given how crazy the outside world can be give yourself the chance to have good news in your life. There will always be bad news.

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Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1362 and Hilux Drip

The right to repair movement is a worthy effort fighting the banal evil of planned obsolescence.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s an economic and industrial design strategy to deliberately make products with shorter functional lives to “shorten the replacement cycle” aka make you buy a new one.

If you are a user of Apple products (as I am) then you are probably familiar with its reputation for degrading service. They are paying out to the tune of 500m for the practice.

But right to repair issues and planned obsolescence doesn’t just happen in electronics. It’s a problem in auto repair and home appliances too. Repairing a broken part can be more expensive than buying a new item.

And it’s getting worse. Computer chips are now in everything from your refrigerators and dishwasher to your car. Consumers reasonably loathe the increased complexity and challenges of repairing major purchases when everything is “smart.”

At this point I’m willing to pay more money for appliances with zero smart features and physical controls for everything. @ Kelsey Hightower

And I fear most of our regulatory climate is dedicated to making this problem worse. When Japanese automakers first come to the United States their vehicles had longer lifespans so American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products. That was a positive thing.

But geopolitical tensions being what they are the, U.S. Commerce Department proposed a national security ban on certain Chinese and Russian-made car parts from U.S. roads The motive is to protect American consumers from digital surveillance and hijacking. But who knows what gets caught up in the effort as we could be allowing in parts that make it easier to repair our own cars.

If we learned anything from Japanese cars it’s that allowing competition was an unalloyed good. There are cars I wish we had in America like the iconic Toyota Hilux. Here is a synopsis from Perplexity on why the Toyota Hilux is considered to be so durable. It’s got a robust chassis, a simple design that is easy to repair, minimal electronics and high quality components.

But you can’t own a Hilux in America. Why? The “Chicken Tax,” a tariff on light trucks, was imposed by the United States in retaliation for tariffs placed by other countries on American chickens.

But maybe it’s good we Americans can’t have a light truck that is easy to repair and designed to last. The internet has a long lore of memes dedicated to the car’s use in revolutions. You certainly wouldn’t want Americans getting any ideas about that.

A viral parody meme about why the Hilux is the choice for insurgents

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1359 and Some Dirty Reading

It would appear I have pneumonia. Healthcare being what it is, doctors say there little point in doing clinical testing to find out if it’s bacterial, viral or fungal (unlikely given climate) as the treatment is basically the same. I did a round of antibiotics because why not. Nuke it from orbit.

I’m stuck in bed mostly, my voice comes in and out for the few calls I absolutely must take, and I’m bored and irritated as I would prefer to work though it as it’s exciting times. I’m sleeping like a champion as my Whoop records day after day of long nights of somewhat fractured sleeping are forced by cough medicine into submission.

Having had Covid at the end of May, I now fear being doomed to some degree of respiratory illness risk for the rest of my life though I rarely had so much as a cold in decades of living in a big dirty city. Global calamities leave uneven marks and I consider myself lucky.

The benefit of bed rest is the amount of reading one can get done. My favorite cultural publication Dirt did a Tech Canon overview to get must reads from the slightly more stylish emissaries of the Silicon Diaspora. No offense to Patrick Collison who initiated the discourse with his own list (which is quite good) but it’s good to think outside the empire’s core for the trendy extracurricular bits of the syllabus.

The Tech Syllabus via Dirt

As someone who self labels as a fashion bitch, I was pleased to contribute Neal Stephenson’s bitchy novella on abstraction and the graphical user interface called In The Beginning There Was The Command Line. It’s dated and old and free on GitHub so go read it.

There is quite a range on the list of core texts including a few books and essays that one could easily imagine being put onto banned reading lists. It’s nice that we have Heidegger Zoomers inside the pantheon now.

Schizophrenic philosophy posting is all the rage with the artificial intelligence kiddies. And to think I thought reading Deleuze and Guattari was a waste of time. Do your homework kids so you can discuss rhizomatic thought and large language models at your next conference. Perhaps you can dig into the war machine.

If I’m having a frail Victorian lady kind of week then there is nothing better than attending to the aesthetics of the moment and now you can too! Remember Alex Karp studied under Jürgen Habermas

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Politics

Day 1358 and I Must Subsidize Demand

There is a beloved meme in communities like YIMBYism (a movement advocating for building more housing with the slogan “yes in my neighborhood”) in which the protagonist agonizes over subsidizing demand as the cyclical pattern of rising demand giving rise to rising cost carries on.

“I just need to subsidize demand”

America is a strange place where we espouse a lot of free market policies but we tend to favor subsidies as a solution. Which isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes there are good reasons for providing support for things that aren’t as commercially viable immediately like pure science or education or other public goods.

It is however not the only policy tool available to people. A fun fact about how I have a good time, my participation in civic life was as an appointee on the New York City Community Boards. I was part of a group who approve licenses and permits for things like liquor and parades and the like. I also served on quality of life and transportation boards. I also did monthly meetings for land use.

I was easily the youngest person who volunteered time and I learned a lot about how damn many rules we have at every level from neighborhood to city and state on everything from ventilation and to environmental review. And some of those rules are pretty good things!

But it would be preposterous to say that all rules are good and that every part of the process of starting a business (large or small) is easy. Some problems you can’t through money at and fix. Or if you can it creates a whole unintended set of other problems. Like paying for lawyers and consultants.

Because Twitter is the land of any old idiot getting a say (just like a community board meeting) I’ve got every flavor of opposition and missing the point on this tweet.

We do a lot well in America. It’s relatively much easier to start an LLC and get a license to do business. Complying with everything from the liquor board to FinCEN will take a little more. Anyone who has run a business can tell you about their corner of the universe and the paperwork involved. Just ask my husband who spends most of his time as a businessman keeping up with paperwork.

I think it’s perfectly fine to be skeptical that throwing more money at a problem like how challenging it is as a business owner to contend with government bureaucracy. Demand subsidies can only fix so mich. It’s just a lot more complicated than that. Be smart and don’t let your head spin like our meme gentleman.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1356 and Sick Sad World

Current ways of knowing are (maybe rightly) under scrutiny. Some of us attempt to source truth by look backwards citing Chesterton’s Fence.

I’ve been skeptical of romanticizing the past as traditional ways of knowing can be bad cultures too. Sick societies are a constant companion of human nature no matter how we long for that Paradise Lost.

Maladaptive cargo cults are everywhere (Silicon Valley has dozens of flavors) and these superstitions ca. reproduce for generations if nutritional gradients are surplus.n

Noble savages are as silly a concept as high minded aristocracy. You probably know a few maladaptive emotionally sick types within your own communities.

Next on Sick Sad World

Remember the long running joke of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert? Truthiness. Emotive truthiness reigns supreme as “news-like” content bubbles in the Internet of AI slop battle out the truth of an issue not with verifiable facts but verifiable feelings. Which one is more maladaptive?

We were subjected to a week’s worth of BBQing content which was digested by the American psyche until we switched to the new cycle of a crazed would-be assassin and his failed attempt to kill former president Trump.

If so much of our society is maladaptive copies of civilizational failures, the best any of us can do is pray we are humble enough to see truth and we willing to adapt our ways to it.

Categories
Politics

Day 1351 and Overstimulated

Recently I have the misfortune of paying too much attention the American election season. I feel overstimulated.

I remember the 2020 campaign being stressful. I was naive during 2016. Now I find myself shunning information on polling and discourse on Twitter.

Americans have jobs, families and the problems of real life during our elections. And yet we spend billions and unleash a torrent of information, some of it propaganda, across all our public information spaces.

Every newspaper and Twitter feed and Subreddit is ready to stoke that anxiety that perfectly targets your worst and basest fears.

It’s natural to feel overstimulated by the deluge of noise. There is little signal to be found. I’ve written twenty times about propaganda because we are in a chaotic age. No one knows what’s going on. Together we piece together what we can and find reality together. Help someone make sense of the reality and maybe they pass it on. We can find out more together.

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Media Politics

Day 1332 and Blackpilled

Being engaged in American politicians is a thankless task. I do not at all begrudge people who tune out of our national politics entirely.

After an assassination attempt, a resignation of a sitting president after a public pressure campaign and two political convention I am in no fine mood about the nation.

My assumption is that this mood is being induced deliberately. It’s no wonder I’ve felt a bit unwell over the past two days. The endocrine fatigue we must all be collectively experiencing. Constant cortisol stimulation is no way to live. I was quoted in a piece about the dissident middle last year.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

Day 784 and Dissident Fringe

And yet I feel compelled to engage on how we are governed. Being steeped in enlightenment values and the collective history of Western Civilization, I have taken as a given that civic involvement is a higher virtue. The capacity to govern and be governed is a noble pursuit of rational men aspiring to more.

I feel even more compelled to engage as a citizen when legacy institutions like the media are less able to maintain trust. If I’m being shown nothing but Pravda but I know it’s not the truth do I have an obligation to speak up?

Regular people have incredible rights in America. I do not always feel like we treat that privilege with the respect it deserves. We have a say.

Don’t let yourself become blackpilled by duels between bad policy and bad people. Our institutions need reform. We cannot continue on with the projects of civilization unless we find ways to collaborate at great scale. You can’t let yourself get exhausted by this daunting task.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1328 and Weebs as New Social Elites

Yesterday, Occulus and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, posted a picture of him doing Nyan Neko Sugar Girl cosplay to his Twitter account. It’s a Fanime from 2010.

DragonCon enjoyers

On the heels of a sympathetic long form essay in Tablet Magazine that went viral, Palmer posting friendly cat girl jokes on main was clarion call to the one demographic that really matters in America right now. Nerds are the entry into the elite class.

Every flavor of nerd is flexing their might. Autistic weebs are claiming their power in the American elite class. And our politicians ans generals should be thrilled. It’s not not a moment too soon to put the engineers in on the great game

Showing off your niche knowledge is a favored elite game. Millenials & Zoomers understand their reality is being built upon arcane information and have gone for the deep cuts to keep up.

While on Tablet I came across their coverage of the Democratic National Convention where bizarre communist fervor from identities as inscrutable as Zoomer Hoxhaists are on display. Enver Hoxha being the infamous (and possibly crazy) communist dictator of Albania and not a good guy. But clearly some idiotic online intellectual has to treat history as if it were finding a cool band.

So if you subscribe to hidden knowledge as social capital then it’s time to read up on Gaetano Mosca and the Italian school of elitism. For discourse watchers, they were notable anti-fascist thinkers.

If you made it through the marathon Joe Rogan episode interviewing Peter Thiel you might have caught the memes about Chimp Empire. Well turns out that’s topical and an approachable angle.

every society could be split between two social classes: the one who rules and the one which is ruled

The current elite class of interests has looked beyond our military industrial complex to to Silicon Valley. They have known for sometime if you want to beat the communists (or the fascists or the oligarchy) then partnering with the new nerd elite is now your move.

Don’t worry Douglas MacArthur was a red blooded American military man and a weeb. Autists long a good track record in defense innovation.

If you want an eye to the future then learn the ways of the weeb. Drone warfare and embodied habits? Take it a step further WinterMute. Your transgendered simulated intelligence running that drone was trained on green text and it’s time you learn to speak like a native of the hive mind.

Rise up cat girls! Now is the hour of the weeb. Do it for America. Do it for capitalism. Do it so we get some sick Mecha suits from Uncle Sam.