n desire and will is entangled with his wife’s, which he discovers he can never fully know or control. Bill is moved from a position of knowledge to a position of doubt. The crux of the film rests on whether Bill will be able to move beyond his doubt to have trust in his wife.

The corruption and cruelty the critic singled out seem akin to Plath’s view of the world after returning from her month-long internship in New York at Mademoiselle

I really there, or had I been hiding behind my camera

As Professor Sutherland observed, "If anyonerebels at the thought of entrusting this power to the nine Justices, he maywell consider for a while to whom he would prefer to entrust it; this canbe a sobering experience."' 22

but also reinforced my belief that this should not really matter.

This could mean working in industries which default to being open rather than those which default to being closed

the path to true professional success may lie not in competing harder for the increasingly unappealing rewards of established paths,

CAPTCHAs attempt to rate-limit automated Sybil attacks by using automated Turing tests to distinguish humans from machines creating accounts or requesting services.

his substrate can be expressed in the form of voting,interpreting, being present in a specific place (physical space or cyberspace) and time orinteracting with others.

that signal unique human identities to enable "one-person-one-vote" systems must becreate

uch atypical conversations yield novel information which, in turn, fosters social recombination, theformation of new groups and solidarities, and ultimately increases the cost of influencing a participant (mitigating defacto sybils).87

et, when it came to voting protocol changes, one-node, one-vote oered an important advantage: accountsin large pools were treated as the same entity with discounted inuence. So although solo accounts were only ~27%

Morally, soloaccounts who joined because of the protocol’s egalitarian ambitions were wary to stay in a network captured bypuppeteers who extracted disproportionate rewards

June 2021 to May 2022, solo accounts shrunk from 62% to 27% of the network. Large pools(> 15 accounts) had

undermining Idena’s egalitarian ambition for one-account, one-vote, one-reward

puppeteer

nd verify their uniqueness in exchange for access to their private keysand controlling their accounts.

periodically perform validation ceremonies

establishing the informational uniqueness of participants—or the extent towhich they cluster with the same interests and biases, leading to tacit collusion that risks monopoly and majoritariancapture

ery 1 to 3 weeks) also increases the cognitive cost and lowers the chance of one person maintainingmultiple accounts.

AFLIP is a cognitive test, consisting of a series of photos generated by other participants that convey an intelligiblehuman story in one conguration and are meaningless in another random conguration.9

participants’ time, attention and their accounts

When referring to “Proof of Personhood,” this paper narrowly refers tothe subset of blockchain protocols that seek to oer a more egalitarian alternative to Proof of Work and Proof ofStak

Achieving de jure sybil-resistance(ltering humans from bots) revealed a deeper challenge of de-facto sybil resistance (ltering humans acting likebots), which could not coherently or computationally be disentangled from the problem of collusion-resistance.

More striking, 3 entities controlled ~19% accounts and ~24% reward

By giving humans economic incentives to periodically dierentiate themselves from bots

Some people have the luxury of working in their own, private offices - or at home. Most computer users don't. They're confined to open floor plan offices, hotel lobbies, bustling trading desks, loud workshops or busy stores. Most of them probably perform tasks where speaking - even if it had been in a quiet and solitary environment - is less efficient than typing, tapping or clicking

Put together, the task for “liberal ironists”—whether activists, intellectuals or elected officials—is to come up with the most compelling, because most accurate, description of how we are living.

In a widely read review titled “Left-Wing Melancholy,” he took aim at the New Objectivity, an artistic movement that satirized the vacuousness of modern life. These artists and writers, he wrote, had abandoned the “gift” of disgust with present material conditions in favor of rote, routine and self-flattering criticism

instead, she believes in the generative understanding that she can’t ever fully understand herself. “What is the point of this diary?” she asks. “There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.”

relationships; it is constituted of associations that constrain or exclude such relationships. Such associative institutions include not only explicit associations but also such things as morality, religions, family structures, community or regional loyalty, manners, and even language itself. Liberalism must seek to undermine these associations and replace them with economic and, therefore, formal relations

Needless to say, all of the factors that created conditions for the expansion of childhood and adolescence have remained in place to the present

as our tools enhance our capabilities, they simultaneously deepen our sense of inadequacy

And what happens in reality, when those that are already productive, only work so much more

It’s fitting that his definition of reality – the part that doesn’t go away when belief does – serves as a reality check for all these grand ideas of meme magic.

‘I don’t want a socialism that, in order to eliminate social injustice, eliminates literature. Because for me, literature is as important as social justice.’

"Hollywood was allowing Jews to progress in an industry where they wouldn't get the breaks otherwise; it was willing to accept them because originally the industry was considered so new and faddish that it wasn't going to last," Abrams tells the BBC.

For Assad’s rule, IS was a thoroughly useful enemy

But seven years on, the sulphurous stink of London’s breweries had become so great that it put the queen off from visiting the city at all if she could avoid it. Apparently assaulting her senses whenever her barge wended its way down the Thames, in early 1586 the authorities ordered the brewers to cease their burning of coal along the river. This time, however, the brewers responded in a way that reveals just far the use of the wood-saving art had spread. The city’s dyers and hatmakers, they said, as well as the brewers, had now all “long since altered their furnaces and fire places and turned the same to the use and burning of sea coal.” Dutifully, they offered to switch two or three of the breweries nearest to the Palace of Westminster back to burning wood, though pointed out that even just this would have a huge effect on the city’s fuel supplies, consuming a whopping 2,000 loads of wood per year.54Nothing more is heard of the matter in the state documents, so presumably the queen accepted their sacrifice

more advanced approach is to use clever cryptographic trickery: for example, industrial-scale (but not consumer) AI hardware that gets produced could be equipped with a trusted hardware chip that only allows it to continue running if it gets 3/3 signatures once a week from major international bodies, including at least one non-military-affiliated. The signatures would be device-independent (if desired, we could even require a zero-knowledge proof that they were published on a blockchain), so it would be all-or-nothing: there would be no practical way to authorize one device to keep running without authorizing all other devices. This feels like it "checks the boxes" in terms of maximizing benefits and minimizing risks:

Bruno’s reconceptualization of the universe, including parts that would not yield to empirical methods until centuries later, was a profound ontological leap.

Of course, other things are generally not equal: there may be excellent practical reasons for designing a transport system that neglects some areas and facilitates access to others. But we can still recognise that in this respect, that transport system is less good than one which facilitates access to all areas of the city equally

By imposing one partition of logical space rather than another, raising a question positively causally influences the probability that our discourse renders accessible information relevant to that partition to the conversational participants.

Why shouldn’t the search engine interpret the search as for pornography? In many searches, it is ambiguous what question is being asked. We need, then, a means of assessing the first task the search engine performs, the disambiguation of the question or set of questions the user is pursuing, and the partition of logical space that imposes. Relative to what set of norms does this assessment take place?

Under certain circumstances, it seems permissible, perhaps even mandatory for good search engines to prioritise some information above other information even when that frustrates the intentions of the user. The reasons for doing so are moral, or political: discouraging violence, or racist, sexist or antisemitic attitudes, for instance.

We need to know what information users should have access to. What information is most relevant for them? We need to dig further into that epistemic question in order to provide the political ideal with a solid grounding.

One way of approaching the problem would be to not simply average over user satisfaction, but to develop a more complex scoring rule, one that took into account, for instance, the strength of user preferences, or the extent of their frustration.Footnote14 But it is hard to imagine such a metric succeeding in arriving at a functional search engine without it also excluding highly morally problematic intentions, or weighting minority interests more heavily to allow them to count against the majority

This is clearly not an attempt to directly answer the question itself. In most other contexts, simply providing a list of resources in response to a question does not constitute a cooperative answer. So what is the kind of inquiry to which an ordered series of webpages could constitute an appropriate response?

I let myself believe that I loved her. An event inside my own mind, but with grand consequences. I loved that she loved me, and she loved that I loved her. Now I see that our love was what we made of it. We made it. So now I can let go. I can let go because I know that if I created love once before then I can create love again. I know that there can be a second partner in creation. As for why things ended between me and Katherine—well, that’s none of your business. You’ll just have to have a little faith.

In other words: just go ahead and believe that you love her. That could make her love you. That could be the only thing that makes her love you.

People liked you less when you were sad, not just because nobody loves you when you’re down and out, but because you were untrusting

You delete it and — poof — everything you know about that person disappears from your brain.

In his view, a research program is progressive if the new theories make surprising predictions that are confirmed. In contrast, a degenerating research programme is characterized by theories being fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts.

Popper once adopted the view that natural selection is not a proper scientific theory, arguing that it comes close to only saying that “survivors survive”, which is tautological. “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program” (Popper 1976, 168).

The individual practitioner of magic in a pre-literate society is not necessarily less rational than the individual scientist in modern Western society. What she lacks is an intellectual environment of collective rationality and mutual criticism

This, however, may be as it should since pseudoscience often involves a representation of science as a closed and finished doctrine rather than as a methodology for open-ended inquiry.

To the contrary, the fraudulent scientist is usually anxious that her results be in conformity with the predictions of established scientific theories

mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method or as having the status that scientific truths now have

forms of traditional agricultural experimentation

doctrines, such as creationism, astrology, homeopathy, and Holocaust denialism that are in conflict with results and methods that are generally accepted in the community of knowledge disciplines.

misrepresentations of natural science promoted by creationists and homeopaths.

The common usage of the term “science” can be described as partly descriptive, partly normative. When an activity is recognized as science this usually involves an acknowledgement that it has a positive role in our strivings for knowledge

Science education: The promoters of some pseudosciences (notably creationism) try to introduce their teachings in school curricula.

Rather than waiting for perfect miniaturization, the optimal strategy might involve what I’ll call “hiding in the future”: using relativistic travel to explore vast distances while experiencing only years of subjective time. This isn’t exactly unprecedented, as it has a parallel with biological preservation strategies we see on Earth. Just as bears hibernate to survive winter and tardigrades enter cryptobiosis to endure extreme conditions, relativistic travelers could effectively “hibernate” through dangerous periods of their civilization’s development by being unreachable to others while fighting entropy via time dilation.

Secretary of State shall coordinate with the Secretary of Homeland Security to identify partner nations with proven foreign shipbuilding capability and expertise in icebreaker construction

the United States requires a ready, capable, and available fleet of polar security icebreakers that is operationally tested and fully deployable by Fiscal Year 2029.

Second, we must move backward to the origin of our problem, the anticipated phenomenon that might create a surprise

Strategy is fundamentally about choices; it reflects a preference for a future state or condition and determines how best to get there (p.6)”.

A strategy is not really a plan but the logic driving a plan… A strategy furthers one’s advance towards goals by suggesting ways to accommodate and/or orchestrate a variety of variables –sometimes too many for the strategist alone to anticipate and understand

It takes machine learning to discover and grammatize higher-order motion primitives that exploit the full mobility envelope of a given machine.

“Why do women tear women down? I don’t want to be part of that,” one maternal-mental-health expert says

For Naomi, the breastfeeding support included someone else unboxing her pump, handing her a piece of paper “with someone else’s notes,” and leaving the room. “I felt extremely lost, and had I not had some knowledge from the nurses at the hospital I came from, I don’t know how I would have fed my child,” she says. “I found myself texting into a void and waiting long periods for a response, with care members walking in unannounced.” She never felt comfortable enough to leave her baby in the nursery.

Frankfurt argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the bullshitter’s capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that the truth matters. Because of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Co-founder Jackson Palmer left the cryptocurrency community in 2015 and has no plans to return, having come to the belief that cryptocurrency, originally conceived as a libertarian alternative to money, is fundamentally exploitative and built to enrich its top proponents. His co-founder, Billy Markus, agreed that Palmer's position was generally valid.[26]

This famous meme was based on a 2010 photograph of a Japanese female Shiba Inu dog called Kabosu

As I was walking out the door to bum a light from someone, Trump came out right where I’d been standing.

it also showed other virtues: when the results were coming out, while many pundits and news sources kept stringing viewers along with hope of some kind of favorable news for Kamala, Polymarket showed the direct truth: Trump had a greater than 95% chance of victory, and a greater than 90% chance of seizing control of all branches of government at the same time

Silver’s claims that the 2024 election outcome is essentially a coin-flip. While this may be accurate—although 67/33 is pushing it—Coplan’s response partially serves to deflect future backlash about the accuracy of the prediction, to remind people that if something has, for example, 33 percent odds of happening, that means it still happens 33 percent of the time. But it also obscures the fact that the odds themselves and their attached returns, not just the events being predicted, are what reel people in.

Polymarket should be seen as “social epistemic tool” useful for the public to get “a view of how important certain events are and what kind of things are likely to happen.”

To name just a few examples: Plato (4th century BCE) had Socrates say, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired” by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness (Ion and Phaedrus)

see Sawyer 2012: 89). But the most influential stage-theory traces back to Henri Poincaré’s lecture, “Mathematical Creation” (1908 [1913: 383–394]), in which he identifies four phases in his own innovative work as a mathematician: conscious hard work or preparation, unconscious incubation, illumination, and verification.

Socrates repeats this view in the Phaedrus: “Some of the greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed madness that is heaven-sent” (244a). He adds that while a poet may have some kind of skill, anyone who aspires to make poetry purely by skill, without the madness or the muse, will fail (245a).

And this development can be substantially aided by learning certain heuristics. Heuristics are indeed a staple of education in creative pursuits from mathematics (draw the figure; consider special cases; consider extreme cases; generalize the problem; look for a related problem, etc.—see Pólya 1945; Schoenfeld 1982, 1987a, 1987b) to creative writing (write what you know; be specific and detailed in describing sensory experiences; practice seeing similarities between dissimilar things; show, don’t tell, etc.—see Bell & Magrs 2001; Anderson 2006; Maybury 1967; S. Kaufman & J. Kaufman 2009). Gaut also identifies several heuristics that might be used to foster creativity in philosophy, even among children (cf. M. Gaut 2010; B. Gaut & M. Gaut 2011).

a genius invents the rules, indirectly, by creating exemplary works from which other artists might extract rules and undertake “a methodical instruction in accordance with rules” (1790: §49 5:318 [2000: 196]).

he talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art … the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art. (1790: §46 5:307 [2000: 186

Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity, but informational or enabling extrinsic motivation can be conducive, particularly if initial levels of intrinsic motivation are high. (1996: 107)

Creative people are not merely able to act creatively. They are, moreover, disposed to exercise that ability, such that they do act creatively, at least some of the time, when the occasion arises. On this view creativity is a disposition, also referred to as a trait

At the outset of a creative act, you have to be to some extent ignorant of the end, or the means, or both. That ignorance opens up room for spontaneity and creativity.

Boden says, “by dropping the home-key constraint”, the rule that a piece of music must begin and end in the same key. Lobachevsky and other mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometry by dropping Euclid’s fifth axiom

ut how could that possibly happen?” (2004: 6). Boden calls this transformational creativity because it cannot happen within a pre-existing conceptual space; the creator has to transform the conceptual space itself, by altering its constitutive rules or constraints

The new idea that emerges is one that was already possible within that space, because it was permitted by its rules

her view, there are “three types of creativity”—combinatorial, exploratory, and transformative—“which elicit different forms of surprise, [and] are defined by the different kinds of psychological processes that generate the new structures” (2010: 1, italics added).

In the terminology of philosopher Margaret Boden, these ideas are “psychologically creative” (P-creative) even though they are not “historically creative” (H-creative). Notice that P-creativity is more fundamental. Anything that is new in all of history (H-creative) must also be new to its creator (P-creative). Thus, creativity always exhibits psychological novelty, though it doesn’t always exhibit historical novelty

According to a common interpretation, Kant defines (artistic) genius as the ability to produce works that are not only “original”—since “there can be original nonsense”—but also “exemplary”

and a product is creative if it meets two conditions: in addition to being new it must also be valuable

As we noted at the outset, the term “creative” can be applied to three kinds of things: a person, a process, or a product (where a product could be an idea, performance, or physical artifact).

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce original works through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves

The task of creating an assemblage of new societal machines to reanimate the dying machine aspect of the world is a task of argument engineering.

This is why a basic and surprisingly robust heuristic works very well: The primary sign that somebody is anti-technological is incuriosity

To truly celebrate the void, you need to construct society as a machine, and subordinate yourself to it to some degree

Neither celebrates the uncaring void that the drive to know relentlessly pushes towards

The faceless bureaucrat and the hacker sneaking into the lab to do unauthorized experiments go together

"I think what I love about Kneale is the doubt and uncertainty that you're left with after watching or listening to his plays," says Hurley. "He's very resistant to explaining too much. I'm a huge fan of writers like Robert Aickman and Shirley Jackson who are very similar in that respect. They don't over-explain, they don't give you the solace of saying, 'It's OK, we can think of it this way.' Those are the stories that haunt you. That's something I really try to emulate. If people go away with more questions than answers, I feel like I've done my job properly."

He smiled giddily the entire time and wore the red coat of an eighteenth-century British soldier, with a gold aiguillette and a powder-blue sash.

Ona telling him. “We’ve gone back to our customary ways. There’s no more meat pies and beer . . . we don’t need money.”

Chomsky has long been an opponent of the statistical learning tradition of language modeling, essentially claiming that it does not provide insight about what humans know about languages, and that engineering success probably can’t be achieved without explicitly incorporating important mathematical facts about the underlying structure of language

In April 2023, Mitsunori, 87, sitting in the family home adorned with photographs of his favoured second son, described how he rearranged the pins on his pachinko slot machines so that everybody in town thought they were a winner. His upfront losses were eye-watering. Then he moved the pins back into place — and started making serious money. Watching his father, Son learnt how to hustle. But the boy’s ambitions went way beyond pachinko gambling

both a result of multibillion euro funds to help east Germany’s largest coal-producing region to exit from fossil fuels.

Remarkably, philosophical theories of secession have not distinguished between having the right to secede and being justified in using force to exercise the right

One difficulty with this response is that it appears unrealistic under current conditions: once a region has achieved full independence, it will have little incentive to continue to share its resources with the remainder state in order to preserve its welfare functions and there is no effective international agency to ensure that it does so.

Wellman, however, takes another approach. He argues that the continued sharing of resources from a newly created independent state with the remainder state need not be limited to instances in which the poorer region would be left unviable without the seceding region’s support

Moreover, the remedial right only approach need not reject claims to independence on the part of nations; it only rejects the much stronger assertion that nations as such have a unilateral right to secede

Given the tendency for unilateral secession to provoke massive violence, the obvious strength of the remedial right only approach

Plebiscitary theories, in contrast, hold that the (pro tanto) unilateral moral claim-right to secede exists if a majority residing in a portion of the state chooses to have their own state there, regardless of whether or not they have any common characteristics, ascriptive or otherwise, other than the desire for independence.

Remedial right only theories analogize the right to secede to the right to revolution, understanding it as a right that a group comes to have only as a result of violations of other rights

Network union. A wholly digital entity, organized in a social tree structure, that engages in collective action on behalf of its members. The collective action is key for building organizational muscle. Network archipelago. A network union that begins acquiring and networking properties in the physical world. The physical interaction is key for building trust. Network state. A network archipelago that gains diplomatic recognition from at least one legacy state. The diplomatic recognition is key for attaining sovereignty.

And now we have a way to talk about origins in a realistic way. You’re founding a startup society. You begin as a network union, maybe crowdfund territory to become a network archipelago, and could someday grow into a network state. All of these are types of parallel societies

Thus, the legitimacy of a network state comes not from top-down declamations, but from bottom-up consent, as each netizen has opted in

Assumption: Digital Primary, Physical Secondary

controlled by private keys rather than a username/password combination, then the same encryption techniques that make it difficult for an outsider to seize an individual’s private keys can make it difficult for a foreign rival to steal a legitimate government’s private keys

Diplomatic recognition requires a putative state to have clout, and clout is in turn established by a publicly verifiable on-chain census of population, income, and real estate, to prove that your growing society is as large as you say it is. That’s why the aforementioned census is important

In the meantime, physical law enforcement itself is gradually turning into something done with autonomous robots - whether they be legged robodogs, rolling cameras, or flying drones. So more law enforcement is being done from a command line. And that trend gradually converges with the concept of digital law enforcement by a network state.

but with one enormous difference, which is that if we can build many different startup societies to choose from, then there is much more practical consent of the governed, because there are many startup societies to choose from with explicit social smart contracts.

and more smart devices within those territories are owned by the society

Ford could be a holocracy or a co-op. So long as everyone has consented to be governed by the Ford CEO by signing an employee agreement, and can leave if that agreement is no longer congenial, Ford’s internal arrangements are ethical.

It has a substantial physical component: all the buildings around the world crowdfunded by its members.

Admission to this social network is selective, people can lose their account privileges for bad behavior, and everyone who’s there has explicitly opted in by applying to join

Multiethnic empires like the Soviet Union were not traditional nation states because they had more than one nationality

Either someone thinking about starting new countries must want to create a powerful new military (dangerous!) or else they don’t have any guns and will get crushed by those that do (dangerously naive).

But the Network of the global Indian diaspora is just on an exponential rise. Indeed, I think the 2020s will be for the Indian Network what the 2010s were for the Chinese State - somewhat ignored at the beginning of the decade, but an important global force by the end of it.

The less-obvious point is that BTC — and its adjacent group of web3 users — are becoming a media power that will eventually topple the NYT, much as the 20th century US’s media power eventually outcompeted that of the Soviet Union. Why? Decentralized media. You can see early signs of this with Substack, Mirror, and NFTs…but in brief, the best content creators have better things to do than work for the establishment. They can become publishers of their own, by founding their own media companies. As with the CCP’s transition to a martial power, the BTC/web3 transition to a money and media power is not at all conventional wisdom

Crypto Capital is the international ideology of Bitcoin and web3. It’s stateless capitalism, capitalism without corporations, decentralized censorship-resistance, and neutral international law

Now we see why a focused moral critique is so important

what we call a network state, as it would need legal recognition from an existing government

one that justifies its existence as a righteous yet peaceful protest against the powers that be.107

empowering high-performers in the private sector to positions of influence in the Executive Branch. This impulse, inspired by the American faith in market competition as the

We can synthesize these into a unified theory of cycles. The left cycle starts with a group of revolutionary leftists that then become institutional rightists. The right cycle starts with a group of determined rightists that then become decadent leftists. The libertarian cycle starts with a group of ideological libertarians that end up building a bureaucratic state.

That’s why reopening the frontier may be the most important meta-political thing we can do to reduce political conflict.

Professed ideals were just a mask for tribal interest.

But if you track each of their careers back, you’ll see something like this episode, when Soros was funding Orban and both were on the same side as revolutionary forces against the Soviets. At that point in time, Soros was the philanthropist and Orban his protege, much as a venture capitalist might back an ambitious young founder. That’s a classic example of how backers seek leaders in the market for revolutionaries

More recently, technological and moral innovators have grown to be at odds, because the US establishment now regards its economic disruptors as enemies

So, practically speaking, an “internet frontier” is easier than the other three. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to use the concepts from the network state to reopen the physical frontier, through a hybrid internet/land strategy, as described in this book.

That closing took away paths for ambitious men, and ensured that they couldn’t easily become founders on their own plot of land

Towards the end of this period, authors like Charles Nordhoff in Communistic Societies of the United States noted how important the frontier was, how bad it would be if that avenue for ambitious men was closed off, and how nasty the Trade-Unionists were getting

Stories that decenter the US, in other words, but that still give the world hope

But most of the time biomedical innovators are portrayed as evil, with all the attendant consequences. False histories shape our reality. We all live in Jurassic Ballpark.

that their downranking of dissident voices not fully efficient, that their late-breaking attempt to impose speech and thought controls on a free society not fully consummated, that (a) the initial refutations were even published and (b) that you are seeing some of them combined into one document.

Power over truth. In these incidents, if you stop to count, you often realize that the reports were off not by say 50%, but by 1000X or more. Why do these “reporters” still have their jobs, then? Because their job wasn’t to make money, but to make power. That is, they weren’t trying to predict the future correctly for the sake of making good investments, but to repeat the party line to keep people in line

That Realignment would be the Network against the State

That third way is to support regional rearmament rather than fighting everyone else’s wars on their behalf.

China’s lawful evil ambitions in East Asia should be tolerance for America’s chaotic evil interventions in the Middle East, that defending against a potential Chinese drone armada should mean acceptance of endless destabilization by the US military.

The Iraq War can be seen as a transition point, as can Samantha Power’s R2P doctrine that left Syria in ruins

Up to this point, these pushes have not been thwarted by the “ethics” of the US establishment, but by some combination of political opposition, Constitutional constraint, and bureaucratic incompetence.

Yes, you can argue the Chinese are building colonies in Africa…but they’re functional colonies, with new roads and ports to carry raw materials, unlike the blasted hellscapes left by US military intervention in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the like

The short counterargument is that it may instead be best for countries to rearm, and take on their own defense – rather than having an increasingly chaotic US try to fight a Second Cold War on others’ behalf in the middle of an internal Cold Civil War and what might become a Second Great Depression

The people of the State among the reds are more prominent. These are the secular nationalists, the national security hawks, the people who may not like the left-authoritarians but who will nevertheless reflexively support the US in every foreign intervention. They may agree that the US is trending in a bad direction, but they think China is far worse. As such, they’re still building drones, coding surveillance, and cheering videos like this one where the US admits to fomenting the color revolutions that are often otherwise denied.

They realize on some level that (a) Network > State in many contexts and furthermore that (b) the Network-aided global ascent of tech founders and populist leaders could reduce their control over the State, so they have chosen to (c) strike first by gaining control of those tech companies that have achieved state-like scale.

The left-authoritarians are the main proponents of the political power theory of truth, as “truth” is whatever they find helpful to move political power into action.

Each member of blue tribe will have to make a choice in the years to come: are they loyal to neutral decentralized networks that treat both Americans and non-Americans equally, or are they actually just loyal to the US establishment — essentially nationalists in disguise?

If all you have to offer is a higher standard of living, people may come as consumers, but they won’t come for the right reasons. The consumer-citizen is coming to enjoy a great society, not to sacrifice to make a society great

Synthesis: The Network/State

superhuman answers to difficult questions using the knowledge of all of humanity

Encryption thus limits governments in a way no legislation can. And as described at length in this piece, it’s not just about protection of private property. It’s about using encryption and crypto to protect freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of contract, prevention from discrimination and cancellation via pseudonymity, individual privacy, and truly equal protection under rule-of-code — even as the State’s paper-based guarantees of the same become ever more hollow.

The State is Still A Leviathan

This is, on balance, a good thing — the fact that tech is no longer highly dependent on the triple dysfunction of SF/CA/USA is crucial to the world’s future

As incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of writing itself, as it’s a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system

As a complement to mobile, the Network offers another way to opt out of State-controlled physical surroundings: namely, to put on a VR (or AR) headset, at which point you are in a completely different world with different people surrounding you and different laws

COVID-19 lockdowns may be just the beginning of State attempts to control Network-facilitated physical exit. But in normal circumstances, smartphones are helping people move ever more freely, while the borders of physical states are frozen in place.

people who live geographically near each other share values and (b) therefore laws should be based on geographic boundaries. The alternative is that only people who are geodesically near each other in the social network share values, and therefore the laws that govern them should be based on network boundaries

Encryption > State Violence

When we say that the Network is the next Leviathan, which we can abbreviate as “Network > State”

So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation.

We have more examples that show that some facts really are determined by societal consensus, while others are amenable to decentralized verification.

We can now think of written history as an (incomplete, biased, noisy) distillation of this full log

But a full log, a cryptohistory. The unification of microhistory and macrohistory in one giant cryptographically verifiable dataset. We call this indelible, computable, digital, authenticatable history the ledger of record.

It is the most rigorous form of history yet known to man, a history that is technically and economically resistant to revision.

The people under the microscope are fogging the lens.

America’s religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose. The slightly longer answer is that in a startup society, you’re not asking people to buy a product (which is an economic, individualistic pitch) but to join a community (which is a cultural, collective pitch).

We use these tools to discuss the emergence of a new Leviathan, the Network

Similarly, it’s one thing to operate as a mere citizen of a pre-built country, and quite another thing to create one from scratch

and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world

Could a startup society follow a similar path? Yes. A cryptographically auditable census could prove that a growing startup society had 1-10M committed digital citizens, large cryptocurrency reserves, years of continuous existence, and physical holdings all over the earth. That numerical traction could then be used to achieve the societal traction of diplomatic recognition.

This in turn leads us to the societal definition: a new country is one that is diplomatically recognized by other countries as a legitimate polity capable of self-determination

we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values

And finally we arrive at our preferred method: the network state. Our idea is to proceed cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with the digital community

Because we want to build something new without historical constraint

As the population and economy of a startup society grow comparable to that of a legacy state, with millions of citizens and billions in income, it should eventually4 be able to attain recognition from existing sovereigns

should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.

Physical access is granted by holding a web3 cryptopassport

moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition

we believe

The Dominican Republic has been a political and economic success story in contrast to its neighbor and, unlike Haiti, is secure enough for the secretary of state to spend the night.

Still, some think Próspera may already be too far along to fail: There is simply too much capital already invested, too many commitments made, to have them torn apart in Tegucigalpa. The government is making “emotional arguments more than anything else,” González told me. “If they had the legal right to do what they’re trying to accomplish, they’d have already done it.”

He said he was inspired to help found Próspera after reading Machiavelli’s writings on the impossibility of reforming a system from within. “The idea is that if you go to a place where nothing, nobody has a stake, there’s no entrenched interests, you can make really deep reforms that won’t affect any of the players,” he said. Years of dysfunction and corruption would be replaced by radically simple governance. A free market and political stability would attract top innovators and investors from the West while empowering Latin America’s legions of microentrepreneurs — the guys on the side of the road selling oranges or “a chicken leg in a bag,” Delgado said — to grow real businesses.

In turn, jobs, technology and educational opportunities would pour into the host country, which would share in the revenue, too

This ruling country would act as a “guarantor” to the host country and write its own laws and regulations, which would attract private companies to invest and build the cities

There are about three dozen charter cities currently operating in the world, according to an estimate from the Adrianople Group, an advisory firm that concentrates on special economic zones

Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera

Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. Businesses can choose a regulatory framework from a menu of 36 countries or customize their own.