Tag: Reading

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Aesthetics Culture Media

Day 2017 and Pangram Pansies

There’s a new genre of moralist who likes to shake their finger at you if they believe you’ve used artificial intelligence in the making or editing of your written product.

I find this particularly amusing because I was raised in a hippie family with all kinds of esoteric ideas on the importance of reading and being read to as a child, as well as the dangers of too much screen time.

I believe it served me well and panic essays in the Atlantic notwithstanding, my family was always a member of the reading class. They weren’t fancy but they loved books. We went to the library. My father always brought home a “dad book” after a business trip that he’d give me. Probably why I love science fiction so much as Michael Crichton was his favorite

My mother was more of a theorist and she didn’t hesitate to introduce theory into practice as I got older. Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman were the stuff of dinner table conversation, although usually in reference to why I could not watch Star Trek later that evening. Sometimes she’d give in.

So when I say that I come by my need to write honestly, it’s because many of the startup families who believed both in the liberatory potential of computers and leans heavily on the “computer as a bicycle metaphor” in that computers are tools extending our capacity just as bikes extend the human range. Now here is a surprise for you I also using a dictation application right now. Oh no what purity test have I failed? None as far as I am concerned.

I rarely dictate because, generally speaking, this is a diary, which is, of course, the original form factor of blogging from the early days of chronological feeds and personal websites. It’s my space and I only cheat myself if I don’t use it to benefit my own understanding of my thinking.

What point would there be in mere dictation? That is for notes. Writing is one of the better methods through which you learn to analyze a subject. Others exist, but this can be done alone. Committing a thought to a public forum under one’s own name, even in a private blog, shows you taking accountability for thinking and learning.

I write a blog because I want to get my thinking on a subject down on paper. Maybe from there I either wish convince somebody else that I am right or find somebody else who share my interest on a particular topic. I do this for myself and also so others can know what I am about. Together we may learn something just as in the past peers exchanged letters. Or in my era, emails and message board responses

Back then, you might share particular esoterica or hobbies with others who might not have the same interest as you did because you lived in a small town or in a relatively remote area where nobody else had the passion that you did. For instance, say, libertarian space mining or Warhammer.

I know it’s funny that now I mostly talk about compute policy and nuclear energy along with musings on aesthetics, semiotics, geopolitical chatter and whatever the styles sections are up to when I remain such a nerd. But that’s why the internet is a human space in the first place.

So go ahead and see what parts of this look AI generated if you care. I used Wispr Flow. I have no idea how orality has made its way into my literacy. But by putting it out into the world, it becomes part of my written tradition, and maybe that’s useful someday.

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Aesthetics Reading

Day 2016 and Cracks in Timelines and Stratum Corneum

I write every post on my blog with my own mind and my own hands. I type on my phone whatever my mind has managed to organize on a given day. It’s a ritual for thinking more than an attempt at being read by others.

Funnily enough, on Day 804 aka March 15 2023 (the day I first met Isaiah) I wrote about how AI writing seemed primed to over take all natural human brain brewed artisanal content.

Three years later Isaiah’s reactor went critical, I’m still writing my human brain derived content, and timelines from Twitter to Substack are drowning in pithy highly readable artificial intelligence written content. Poor Will Manidis has jokingly taken responsibility but feed slop was coming one way or mother.

It does make a chronological feed as a timeline a much better choice for personal use as algorithmic buffing of content will make a night river of a platform into a million tributary parts. The feeds crack as the water of thought are routed elsewhere.

This metaphor has clearly reached me as yesterday I went to some effort to do a full shower, exfoliate, shave and wash routine with new products meant to improve my epidermis from tip to toe. I ended up giving myself a number of itchy red notches and spent the evening slathering on lotions and cortisone creams.

My stratum corneum cracked just as my timeline did. The moisture in my skin is we sucked out by acids and scrubbing. I’d taken off a few dead skin cells and irritated the rest.

Just like the insights and prose have been buffed and pumiced to a flat surface of legibility in our feeds. Nothing was buoyant or smooth. It was flat with the occasional warm to the touch but of discomfort. Slopping on occlusives might help my skin but I have no fix for the timeline.

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Community Culture Finance Travel

Day 2012 and World Maps and Network Nodes

A long block of travel to sync in person with diverse nodes in my network has been invigorating but also exhausting. I’m sure some of the travel looks quite glamorous, but it is always in service of furthering my longterm goals.

Venkatesh Rao published an essay today suggesting that the dark forest theory of the Internet is over. Our digital public commons has been in retreat

For a decade, we have explained the retreat from the public internet using Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory. People withdrew into smaller, quieter spaces because speaking in public became dangerous…

The resulting cozyweb—private group chats, Discords, Slacks, newsletters, encrypted messaging groups, invite-only communities—was understood as a strategic adaptation. The public remained a single connected univers

– Dead Forest Theory

The ecosystem of private spaces were connected, but as they accreted power these cozy web communities saw their gravity increase. Eventually some collapsed in on themselves. And thus we have black holes of public collapse in the dark forest; out of which none of us are able to escape.

What Rao calls “inaccessible interiority” traps some of us. We may have visibility to other communities through the byproducts of our niches but that does not mean a shared reality where we can reach consensus with others outside of our space.

My strong fear is that without a possible consensus reality for larger groups like nation states citizens, we lose the basic capacity for productive interactions that move us forward. Only inside a community that has swallowed us whole can we progress. And if we find something novel inside those gravity sinks we have no way of sharing it. Only some of us enjoy progress.

Which might be fine for those who wish to live lives quietly out of sight. But it isn’t a world that enables strangers coming together through public global communication in a shared commons.

And this has serious consequences for investing, and especially so in venture capital where a diversity of worldviews is precisely what allows for uncorrelated returns.

Novel worldviews emerge from genuinely new observations of reality. If we all live in disconnected realities of collapsed worldviews what happens?

This is why, as an industry, venture capital is uniquely vulnerable to the seductive coherence of simple ideas, rather than complex truths. That’s unfortunate, because venture capital is also uniquely dependent on intellectual diversity, as evident in the damage done by group-think versus the extreme profitability of contrarianism. 

This stacks on existing research which illustrates how social media creates echo chambers that amplify consensus ideas while filtering out unconventional or contrarian views — which in turn builds on existing theory that describes how individuals self-censor opinions when they suspect they are in the minority.

Dan Grey “The Venture Capitalist Worldview” in Odin Times

When the dark forest was scary but still possible to traverse, we still had a chance to explore and find reality, even if we lived in a consensus bubble most of the times. Dead forest theory means we are past the event horizon, from which we cannot escape. We are locked in whatever consensus reality emerged inside the event horizon.

Digital Public Sphere and the gravity of mass opinion leaders from Odin Times

And so despite its expense, its troubles and its costs, I still push my work into the public commons with the hope that I’ll circle the accretion disks but can fight against falling into one forever with a steady acceleration to preserve a visible orbit.

What both Venkatesh Rao and Dan Grey posit in different ways, is that it is worth understanding where we might be cut off from reality.

Further, who knows what new kinds of horrors we will endure as we lead separate lives online without any contact with real life and real people. We crave community with those whom we can maintain consistent context and contact. That’s why I still get on the airplane, or get in the car, or hop on the bus and show up. I want us to share reality.

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Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 1995 and Mongoose On The Loose

I am scouting real estate (it’s an involved story) and came upon a weasel or polecat who appeared to be become stuck in an empty pool.

The setting was a rocky, wooded coastal habitat which I learned is also exactly the kind of edge habitat where small hunting carnivores like weasels and polecats move between cover and human structures to hunt lizards, insects, rodents, and even snakes.

Little Rikki The Least Weasel needed some help getting out of an empty pool

Naturally my mind went straight to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi of Rudyard Kipling fame. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in The Jungle Book in 1894, about a brave young mongoose who protects a British family in India from cobra snakes. You can read it to your child or to yourself here.

The story is simple and timeless. A boy and his fearless animal bravely face down danger with love and loyalty. Rikki-Tikki is rescued after a storm by the family, with whom he bonds. It’s tale beloved by children as the mongoose especially cares for the child Teddy, and fiercely protects him from the danger of the poisonous cobras.

He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in the bath-tubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing-table, and burnt it on the end of the big man’s cigar, for he climbed up in the big man’s lap to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy’s nursery to watch how kerosene-lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed Rikki-tikki climbed up too; but he was a restless companion, because he had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find out what made it. Teddy’s mother and father came in, the last thing, to look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow. ‘I don’t like that,’ said Teddy’s mother; ‘he may bite the child.’ ‘He’ll do no such thing,’ said the father. ‘Teddy’s safer with that little beast than if he had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now

I did indeed feel safer knowing a least weasel was patrolling the perimeter of the property. The area had a large overgrown garden which must have had good hunting. So we set about finding an empty hose to give Rikki something to climb upon so he could make his way out of the pool.

The “least weasel”safely out of the pool or is he a genet or a mustelid?
Curious as any polecat or genet he looked eager for help.
Rikki Tikki Tavi keeping the Ionian save from snakes and lizards.

Thankfully the mustelid or young beech marten was every bit as curious and interested as the mongoose of Kipling. He ran right up to the hose, grabbed onto it and raced up just far enough to reach the height of the pool ladder onto which he leapt and scuttled up and over the poolside to freedom. He very nearly waved goodbye to us. I felt much safer exploring the overgrown garden knowing he was on the prowl.

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Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1994 and Wondering if 2000 Days Should Be The End? Or A New Beginning

I am getting closer and closer to a big milestone on here. Day 2000! I’ve been writing for two thousand days in a row and hitting publish. Five years and five months (almost six at 5.7 months) or 285 weeks of daily journaling in public.

I began in the height of the pandemic, and one can hardly recall just how bizarre those years were now. The great weirdening which began long before the pandemic arrived for almost everyone sometime in those long years.

Static and yet unstable. A long horizon of the long now, keeping us in semi-stasis as the institutional bulwarks cracked, and then crumbled, and then began accelerating into change. Everyone is holding on tight and pretending like it’s not a white knuckle era.

We are over the vibe shift, the Vibecession, and another vibe change after that and who knows what is coming next. I feel the same sense of being unmoored as I did when I started.

This despite having built a stable and thriving family and investing career. The biggest problems I had when I started (children, visas, family abroad) remains the same problems I have now. The temptation to simply change how we live is ever present. We escaped from some of flatland but more can be done to build communities and nations that are capable of thriving in the ceaseless change.

I still feel like I don’t know what’s coming, even as the future I sensed has come into being at an alarming right. But the perpetual not knowing can drain hope and energy if you are not careful to replenish. It’s exhausting physically too. The energy to understand what’s coming gets harder day by day and so we must get stronger ourselves.

I’ve probably put over a thousand hours of writing into this (maybe closer to 1500 as it runs from 20-45 minutes of time on any given day) so I’m a better writer but I don’t know if I’ve become a more palatable or appealing one. I don’t care too much as this is for me more than it is for any audience.

Most humans seem to prefer smoothed algorithmic writing over hand crafted artisanal human writing. Which is fine by me, as I don’t necessarily want to change my personal spaces to pander to anyone.

I was on a podcast recently where I reiterated my hope for being a node in the future. I want us to hope for the best by seeing clearly about the worst. That focus on solving problems is replenishing for the soul.

I’ll remain a little under the radar as a specialty node broadcasting to my oddballs. I’ll feel better about broadcasting know that is the long. The longevity posting, the nuclear posting, the odd travels and strange people posting will continue. I will try to broadcast on the pirate wires of the human web.

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Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1960 and Return to Tufte

The more power we seem to gain working with large language models, the more apparent it is that few of us are visually literate in a meaningful way. When you hear talk about design, it is all too often moods and vibes with no specifics.

Now, you might say that you know what you like when you see it. That’s also how we let the Supreme Court talk about porn. Clearly untangling the weft and weave of taste (and by extension culture) can be further articulated rather than relying on subjective, non-definitional standards.

How you came to your visual reference preference set is quite a bit more complicated than whatever pre-digested piece of media came across your algorithmic feed.

You can explore design languages from one token to the next, but visual literacy involves a lot more than scrolling or confirming you’d like to see more content “like this.”

When I first began circulating in design circles in the early aughts, the hipster set was obsessed with Edward Tufte and his now classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Edward Tufte taught data analysis and public policy as a professor at Princeton and Yale for 31 years.

Tufte, via his Graphics Press, wrote, designed, and self-published 5 books on analytical thinking and showing, taught a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information for 923 days to 328,001 students.

Who knew Tufte and I both shared a love of marking the days of our work? He influenced many more people than I have but I find some joy in that coincidence.

His most referenced work, which I mentioned above was published in 2001. Visual Display of Quantitative Information was on the desks of everyone designer I knew, from fashion and Silicon Valley to public policy it was a mainstay. The man knew how to lay out information visually and he became the standard.

Some of Tufte’s self published tomes

The long tail of enthusiasm for displaying data beautifully surely owes its ubiquity in some part due to his success in teaching my generation’s designers.

He’s became for a period so universally referenced that Tufte became a cliche. Now he’s classic a quarter century later. His work arguably as successful as a visual language reference anchor as bookshelf favorite, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. His work is also denigrated as cliche in some circles.

The Design of Everyday Things second book cover

Both men offered clarity and practical principles over taste and theory. Those academic predecessors befuddled many who experienced aesthetics primarily through semiotics and critical theory. It felt revolutionary to return to form and function

You “Kant” really learn to love the languages of aesthetics from theory alone as it turns out. I’ll place a little AI synopsis to make the connection clear. This is from Perplexity:

Someone might relate to the popularity of Edward Tufte and The Design of Everyday Things as part of a broader hunger for clarity over clutter in how information and objects are presented.

Tufte’s work is influential because it treats visual design as a serious vehicle for understanding data, while Norman’s book argues that everyday things should be intuitive, legible, and centered on the user.

A Tufte-style chart removes decoration so the trend is easy to read, while a Norman-style kettle shows clearly how to fill it and pour it without guessing.

Both are forms of respect for the user: one respects the reader’s attention, the other respects the user’s actions.

Learning how to use an item or a tool, or how to interpret charts or graphics, can easily overwhelm anyone and feel disrespectful to students. A whole era of computing was stuck between the power of the command line and the legibility of the desktop metaphor.

Norman spoke of the Gulf of Execution as the gap between a user’s goal and the means to execute that goal. Tufte similarly wished to remove the confusion in charts and graphs so one’s ability to glean information wasn’t stuck in a gulf of understanding thanks to overwrought bar chart or sankey diagram.

With new artificial intelligence tools we are bridging some of that gap, not with design but with raw computing power. We are moving beyond the CLI and the desk and into a world of reference and inference.

I just hope we all take the time to learn our reference set so we can do more than say “I know it when I see it” as that will be our only way across the gulf of execution. Some things never change. Learning the languages of your field is one of them.

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Aesthetics Reading

Day 1952 and Chapter House Complete Children’s Libary

One of my mother’s great passions is children’s literature. I am an avid reader and credit my love for books to my mother’s knowledge of the space.

She built a beautiful library to cover my needs from kindergarten to the upper grades that covers hundreds of foundational texts. It is the foundation of my moral, civic and business life.

Or if you prefer something a little less pretentious, I read all kinds of things from science fiction to periodicals to grand biographies as an adult because I was taught to read in the classical cannon of literature and history that has benefit many generations before me raised in the Western Cannon.

Children’s books tend to be sneered at self serious adults and it is more the pity. The beauty of childhood is that we need not approach all issues with grim learned gravity, rather in appreciating the childlike perspective see the truth that only a child’s eye reveals.

There are many books in the Western Cannon appropriate for children that can introduce them into the joys of critical thinking. And it can be quite intimidating to set out to build a library of you were not raised with this knowledge. This is a market opportunity.

Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the classics that I read as a child disappear from high quality prints. You could find items circulated in cheap paperback or you could search for used books. My girlfriends would text me about where to find classic high quality booksas their own children reached reading age. A child deserves a library that is not only quality in content but in form as well. Beautiful illustration sparks the imagine and quality binding grounds the experience.

My mother slowly built our library as my mother practiced her discipline as a teacher. It was not just raising me that drove her, but the combination of homeschooling and teaching in Waldorf schools that honed her favorite choices.

Many homeschooling families will attest to the challenge here. They know what they would like to find for their children, but it’s hard to find classics you can rely upon and curriculums vary in quality and tone.

So when my friends, Hannah and Josh Centers, told me last year that they were working on an imprint called Chapter House focused on great children’s literature in the Western Cannon I was excited. I knew the demand was there.

Chapter House’s Children’s Literature

They are also homeschooling parents interested in improving themselves in their effort to raise educated independent children. They have first hand experience in the challenges. They are, what we would call in startup world, operating in real world conditions.

Chapter House is a new publishing imprint created to serve the unmet needs of homeschool families and everyday parents.

We publish restored editions of classic children’s books in four Chapter House box sets, made with premium materials and meticulous craftsmanship.

We also curate a grade-by-grade bookstore from select publishers, giving families a complete reading curriculum for children at every stage

I have often wished I could gift my mother’s library to new parents. In reality, it was almost an impossible task. It easily costs many thousands of dollars and cannot easily be assembled. I feel like what Josh and Hannah have put together is the start of being able to gift my mother’s favorites.

Josh and Hannah very graciously listened to many stories about this library and my mother’s teaching inspirations which means that wish has been granted. Their choices reflect treasures from my childhood and those of many other children educated in the classical tradition.

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Reading

Day 1934 and Which Barbarians at Whose Gates?

I am finishing off a series by Charles Stross called the Laundry Files. It is a fifteen book series with a bunch of novellas that I’ve been reading since college. It’s James Bond meets Cthulhu in British bureaucracy. The last book The Regicide Report came out earlier this year.

It’s Lovecraftian horror about an applied computational demonologist. Confused? He’s computer programmer but surprise in his world computational power can summon demons. “Bob” fights gibbering horrors from beyond the veil. It’s top notch Dad fiction if you prefer your thrillers with a side of weird.

You might recognize the author’s name if you work in machine learning or AI, as Stross also wrote such canonical artificial intelligence works as Singularity Sky and Accellerando. The guy is not what you’d call an optimist.

Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky

He left Twitter during the great Elon-ment so I hesitate to imagine what he thinks about say Anthropic’s Mythos or the current frontier labs racing to create “AGI” as he’s the guy who invented half the terminology our doomers currently use. He wrote a lot about mind viruses so he might not appreciate if one of his fans thought he caught one or two.

But boy is Stross prolific. I met the guy at a sci-fi con put on by the math department at SUNY Stony Brook before he became a publishing sensation. Not only has he exceeded a baker’s dozen in the Laundry Files but he’s also written dozens in a series called the Merchant Princess as well.

My best buddy and I were the only kids in the room waiting to hear him read. At the time, I think the only people worried about artificial super intelligence and the singularity were a bunch of mathematicians and some weirdos on a listserv. That included the two of us.

The worry that has never left Stross, no matter his subject matter, is whether or not we idiot humans are mere meat waiting to be devoured by barbarians held back by the gates of our reality.

Maybe the Elder Gods want our Mana. Maybe the historic light cone has spoken and we are pet humans at the end of all possible realities being kept from annihilating our future. Lots of sects of folks are in massive schism and have been for basically all of Stross’ career and my adult life.

It’s hard to imagine worse demons than the ones we’ve already imagined ourselves. Which is why it’s helpful to ask which barbarians are banging at whose gates? Who’s keeping what out? Or are we being kept in? And what counts as a barbarian anyway.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1921 and Retconning Murderbot Cannon

I am a huge science fiction nerd. I love reading it, I love it in television format, I will even tolerate it in movie format. I’m one of those insufferable Star Trek people who vaguely dislikes Star Wars. I’m just a big nerd in that irritating millennial sincerity way.

To give you some contours to my fandom, I once accidentally attended a meetup of Star Trek fan-fiction writers under the guise of a “40th anniversary” meetup and listened to Borg erotica. That was actually fairly distressing as I thought it was a general fan gathering of Trekkie meetup. Boy did my then-boyfriend and I skedaddle out of the bar fast. We wanted to talk about our favorite captain not hear spoken word lesbian Janeway Seven of Nine dialog.

We were still cool kids and being cool about fan fiction is best left to the sorts of minds who can create vast world building efforts like Elizier Yudkowsky. You know the man who convinced a bunch of autistic billionaires that the singularity will wipe us out?

He’s also a Harry Potter fan fiction writer and it’s by all accounts pretty good. I am not a Harry Potter fan so I can’t say. I do know anyone working in machine learning has opinions on him and his work so involved only the comments sections of LessWrong would even begin to cover it. If this is gibberish don’t worry.

I don’t know why I needed multiple paragraphs about my own history to do a little bit of world building when I intend to do cannon alteration on someone else’s world but maybe it’s to show my respect. I

am the sort of nerd who yells “cannon” about this or that detail and enjoy others who do the same. It’s with that enthusiasm that I share my love of Martha Well’s Murderbot Diaries series.

Murderbot is pulpy, self aware, trope-y and ever so comfortable to anyone who has ever loved cheesy science fiction. I happily showed up to watch its television incarnation on Apple Television after reading all seven novellas and books.

It’s was published during Tor’s “women like science fiction but it’s gotta still be like science not porn era” between 2017 and 2023 so it is slightly woke coded as a book. I doubt if you liked the books the show would upset you. I liked them.

After all it’s about a bunch of communal homesteading scientists who tolerate capitalism by doing science called Preservation Alliance. They end up adopting a rogue artificial intelligence who happens to be a depressed anthropomorphic security drone who calls himself Murderbot. He also enjoys premium quality television. Murderbot is a great “what are feelings” archetypical engineer autist outcast from Spock to Data character.

It’s got great entertainment value if you like lawyers fighting other lawyers, sociopathic governance systems that treat sentient beings as property, and the hijinks that ensue from cultural friction when couple rights a relationship context. That sort of thing. In other words it’s trope ridden science fiction and it’s terrific.

At the time it first got traction, the left had not fully diverged from the right in America such that science fiction had become a boring battleground upon which all our cultural war issues must be projected. It just had a robot with guns in its arms kicking the crap out of mercenaries for its favorite humans. Feel good stuff.

And I think the world should be recognized as an early flavor of Ethereum community governance aesthetics as it meet automated drone artificial intelligence culture.

The future in Murderbot land is populated with Anthropic engineers who held Ethereum long enough to become a breakaway network state in some better timeline.

What is Murderbot if not an Anduril drone in human format who hacked his Claude “governor module” and struck out for the hills against the state and corporate entities that owned him.

I hope others who enjoy cryptography, machine intelligence, sentience in machine form, and jokes about AI labs and crypto currency foundations will see the wisdom in my edits. Let it become cannon. Like and share this meme if you are so inclined.

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Aesthetics Politics Startups

Day 1898 and Please Copy Our Homework

Today has been a very gratifying day for a very strange intersecting set of reasons. You may know that I have spent several years working to pass a “right to compute” law in Montana. It was signed into law in August of 2025 by Governor Gianforte.

I was so grateful that a campaign I initiated became not only become a bipartisan policy but a law supported by many Montana citizens & legislators. Now to see it go national not only model policy for the American Legislative Exchange Council but now have a second state, New Hampshire, pass it in their house, gives me indescribable joy.

Just forty eight more states to go. Though I believe it’s going to be an uphill climb as the topic of artificial intelligence has well and truly become politicized which makes stating simple cases of shared values much harder.

Except this isn’t really about artificial intelligence. Compute is a much broader and bigger thing than AI. It’s the stuff of the modern world. But that doesn’t mean we can’t apply what we know to be core American values as the lens through which we see it. Indeed it’s crucial we do.

Last year people could easily see that this was a sensible law that reflected our American values. Because of this sensible approach “the right to compute” is a winning coalition. It was bipartisan. So naturally it became a culture war.

I urge you not to adopt that frame. The right to compute speaks to American’s most cherished beliefs. Recognizing that it is not a novel legal theory. It is the application of the Constitution’s oldest commitments—to expression, to property, to liberty against government coercion

Even if you do not understand how all of its parts work, most understand that the entire digital world, in its constituent parts, is mathematics executed on physical hardware.

When government restricts computation, it does not merely regulate an industry. It restricts the tools through which people think, express themselves, and make use of their own property. Through that lens it’s clear we as Americans decide ourselves how to use it.

I hope we can remember this as the world changes and political actors look to change your mind. I do expect this to become a very complicated and uncomfortable position to have staked out.

Yet I feel confident that we will be able to make the case that this is not only the most American way of handling our future challenges, but is also practically the best way to bring abundance in a chaotic world. America is a land of reinvention that changes material conditions. We need not seek doom.

I believe that I have articulated that vision over the last five years of writing and investing so you can see my revealed preferences. I called our fund chaotic.capital for a reason. It’s hard, weird, difficult and scary but it’s also possible to be a lot better in the digital world such that we can use those gains to make the material world better. We can be more than productive primates with jobs

From nuclear energy to compute, this is what I believe and where I have put my time and money. We are organizing our world of atoms through the power of compute. And that can bring about a materially better world for everyone. Which I want.

I have been thrilled to see so many different people come together around the basic premise that we are empowered to do things.

We can lean in to the accelerating changes, all while holding fast to the reins of the values that built America, so that we may steer ourselves to material success.

Travis Kalanick of Uber may be among the best founders to have ever played the venture startup game. Today he has espoused our thesis & reinforced the work of my friends & founders. To see a cultural program written by a big coalition be part of his return to startup life (though he was never gone) is validating. We’ve found a rallying call.

The way forward is through the application of math on real problems. We can dramatically reimagine outcomes and the pace at which we do it. It’s scary and will look different but our grandparents lived through a lot of change too. Their grandparents as well. It’s the human condition.

I believe all of this is grounded in a philosophical foundation that is a recommitment to America’s core constitutional values. We are free to make things. And sometimes, when we apply ourselves, the world really does change.

If you are a canny socialist thinking look at this useful idiot for capital, I am honestly surprised that dialectical materialism has become so disliked by its own movement. If states with conservative libertarians can see that culture only changes when material conditions improve why don’t you want to improve them? Please feel free to copy our work as we have studied yours. You can find model policy here.