ribbonfarm

My essay The Extended Internet Universe, where I coined the term “cozyweb” (probably in my top 5 most successful memes) is featured in this cute little collectible book, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet put together by Yancey Strickler (whom you may have heard of as the cofounder of Kickstarter). Yancey’s essay, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, which I referenced in mine, leads this collection.

Both our essays appeared in May 2019, and the idea of a Dark Forest internet has since become something of a meme, joined at the hip to the cozyweb meme. I recall writing my post (a side-quest of sorts from the domestic cozy series I was writing at the time), and coming across Yancey’s (which had appeared a few days earlier) just as I was about to hit ‘publish.’ I paused for like 15 seconds to reference it, since ‘Dark Forest’ seemed to exactly complement ‘cozyweb.’ Four years later Yancey reached out about this book. Serendipitous peanut-butter-and-jelly hyperlinking moment, which is ironically what made the old internet (RIP) so great. Then the damn Trisolarans arrived and ruined everything. The book features several other pieces by other contributors in what is essentially an extended eulogy for the old internet, and a grimdark celebration of the brave cowardly new internet 😬☠️, where we all cower fearfully in cozyweb holes, behind antimemetic fields, whispering softly so the Trisolarans don’t find us. In the grim darkness of the far future, there are only antimemes (can you tell I’m currently reading There is No Antimemetics Division? That book pairs beautifully with this one btw).

The publishing model is also unique, and uniquely cozy, published in small samizdat-type batches that can escape detection by Sophons. The book is published by Metalabel, Yancey’s new venture, which attempts to bring cozy indie-music-label vibes and anti-memetic defense shields to publishing. The first printing of this volume sold out within a week, so if you want a copy you should grab one while copies of this second printing last. It will be securely delivered via sneakernet dead drop, and self-destruct within 5 minutes of opening if it has been tampered with.

For the Poe’s Law types out there in the Dark Forest: that last bit was a joke. The book will be delivered by normal mail, which as far as we know hasn’t yet been compromised by Trisolarans.

The group of contributors now forms a metalabel artists’ collective and will publish more things under the Dark Forest label. I’m considering publishing my recent short story, The Dark Forest Marketing Agency, under the label. And maybe this post on cozy hypertext. We’ll see.

Yancey’s post Rethinking Labels has more details on this labels model, and he also did a Protocol Town Hall talk on the genesis of the model.

I’ll be participating in a book-launch round-table tomorrow (being held in an underground bunker at an undisclosed location), limited to verified book buyers who can prove they’re not Trisolaris spies. I’ll share that recording when it is published and it is safe to do so.

In the meantime, grab a copy, and be sure not to tell anyone about this book. And please burn this blog post after reading.

I’ve been buried neck deep in work stuff this week, but I did find time to make this stack diagram of the world, inspired by the xkcd Dependency cartoon. Randall Munroe draws better than me, but in my favor, I use more colors.

Did you know most of the high-purity quartz needed for the semiconductor industry (for the equipment more than the wafers if I understand correctly; I’m foggy on that end of the industry) comes from one mine in North Carolina, and that the making of high-purity quartz is a closely guarded trade secret known only to a handful of organizations? I’m guessing China is close to figuring it out. It’s weird to think how fragile the world’s infrastructure is. Mess with one mine and take enough potshots at shipping near Yemen and you can shut the world down.

It’s funny how the utopian/dystopian discourses at the highest levels of abstraction, AI and crypto (the two domains that keep me busy at work) never worry much about the fragile bottom of the stack. I made up some non-starter political slogans about this situation:

Non-starter political slogans

1. Decentralize the quartz mines!
2. Permissionless 99.9% purity quartz for everyone!
3. Open-source EUV machines!
4. Oil from backyard CCS stills!
5. Lithium salts for the people!

I started reading Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes while I was in Istanbul last November and finally finished it last week. It’s a really solid and absorbing book, and far too dense and rich with detail to zip through, which is why I read it a dozen or so pages a night over months (it is 600+ pages, plus 200 odd pages of notes and references).

It’s rare for an actual history book, just a straight-up telling of a dense, long tale, to reorient your sense of history. I read my first world history book in high school and have felt pretty well-oriented since then. Books I’ve read since then have mostly served to deepen my sense of particular periods in particular times. They didn’t change my overall sense of history. This one did.

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I’ve been slow-reading Bettany Hughes’ Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities for months now, ever since I visited the city (on Kindle, so I didn’t realize when I started that it’s 600 pages plus another 250 odd notes). It’s dense and absorbing and I’ll probably do a reflections post when I’m done, but the fact that I’ve stuck with it made me think about how good history books scratch the same itch as good science fiction. The past is an alien planet. They do things differently there. Yet you recognize signs of the same lawfulness in the universe that governs life in your own time. You can feel kinship with people in 18th century Istanbul. Or 6th century Constantinople. Or Trantor in 47,000 AD.

Though history has a stronger cosmetic resemblance to fantasy (the past had actual knights and wizards, and unironic belief in magic), I think it has a deeper kinship to science fiction. Ted Chiang’s much discussed distinction between science fiction and fantasy (he’s made versions of this point in different speeches and interviews but I can’t find a canonical source or quote) makes this kinship legible. He argues that science fiction posits a lawful universe that may have strange laws but they apply to everyone, while fantasy posits a universe that recognizes some people as “special,” with special laws applying to them. Chosen ones. This is the essence of “magic” as the chosen mode of escapism, as opposed to “time travel” or “hyperspace jumps.” I almost made the same point in a 2007 post, Harry Potter and the Concept of Magic, but ended up making an adjacent less provocative and less interesting one.

At a certain level, science fiction is more true than fantasy. The universe really is lawful (though not in ways we might prefer in our idle speculative fancies). The universe really is not magical, in the sense of recognizing specialness in some living beings and responding differently to them.

Aside: I think the appeal of the Three-Body Problem is that it posits not just a lawful universe, but an inconveniently lawful one. Instead of fun affordances like time travel, the universe lobs 3-body chaos and dark forest shittiness on its living beings. Not only is nobody special, everybody is actually worse off than we imagine because the universe is lawful in a shittier way than we imagine. It’s a sort of hyper science fiction.

Good history may not offer clean-edged lawfulness, but it at least obliquely suggests a universe that’s some mix of noisy lawfulness and path-dependent arbitrariness. There is no room for magic. There is no room for Chosen Ones. Or Chosen People. Or Manifest Destiny type narratives. While there is of course plenty that is uncertain in any work of history, it is not uncertainty of the sort that opens the door to magic. Despite the desperate belief in magic that suffused Istanbul through the millennia, the city never actually enjoyed the workings of magic.

In good history books, as in good science fiction, there are no Chosen Ones. There may be characters who believe other characters are Chosen Ones, but you as reader don’t have to (to really appreciate and enjoy Dune, you kinda have to recognize Paul Atreides is not actually special, whatever the Bene Gesserit nuts and Fremen think, but to enjoy Lord of the Rings, you kinda have to buy into the specialness of elves and wizards, even if Frodo is not that special).

There is a genre of history, if it deserves that label, that resembles fantasy: hagiography. Any approach to history that posits the existence of “greatness” of some sort (Great Man theory, Great Nation exceptionalism narratives, One True Religion, One True Ideology) is hagiography. Unsurprisingly, hagiography sells better than history, just as fantasy sells better than science fiction.

Not surprisingly, I don’t enjoy fantasy much, and can’t stand hagiography at all. To fans of those genres, this probably comes across as some sort of weak-spirited reluctance to recognize greatness or Chosenness, and resentment over my own ordinariness, but that’s really not it. Greatness is simply deeply unsatisfying as a feature of an explanation for anything. It’s a deus ex machina. I’m happy to acknowledge and admire exceptional accomplishments by individuals and groups. I’m happy to admit I’m in the wrong half of distributions of many, perhaps most, desirable traits. I just don’t find explanations in terms of greatness (or Chosenness, or Specialness) to be explanations at all, let alone satisfying ones. In both natural and human laws, if you’re forced to posit two kinds of laws for two kinds of people, you’ve basically failed to make sense of your world. (There are two kinds of people in the world — those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t).

There are kings, knights, gods, saints, and wizards aplenty in Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities, but it is not a story about magic or their specialness. There are many characters parading through the book who had “Great” attached to their names (Alexander, Catherine, Suleyman…), but the account of history does not rest upon a presumption of axiomatic greatness possessed by some actors. That many saw them (and continue to see them) as “great” certainly affected the course of history somewhat, but it’s not part of the explanation. It’s not even particularly important as a feature of the story needing explanation.

At most, in good histories, belief in “greatness” helps explain the actions of some actors, just as belief in god helps explains the actions of others. Neither god, nor greatness, is necessary for good history writing, and in fact unironic belief in either on the part of the historian weakens, often fatally, the quality of the history. The effects on fantasy literature aren’t as bad. Positing greatness (or Chosenness or any of many equivalent traits that divide humans into two types based on laws that apply to them) can make for fun narrative premises. Preferring hagiographic histories centered on greatness suggests intellectual weakness to me (the primary failure of Straussians), but preferring fantasy over science fiction seems more like a harmless preference for a particular mode of escapism.

It’s always nice to see trails of thought connect up.

An idea I first encountered and really liked in a 2014 Steve Randy Waldman (interfluidity) post has apparently since acquired a name and a more extended provenance. Waldman’s post, Tax price, not value, presents the idea as a LVT/Georgism-flavored solution to NIMBYism enabled by artificially depressed property tax rates like so:

…There is, of course, a much easier way to gauge what a property would sell for: Solicit from its owner a price.

The price at which an owner would be willing to sell a thing has a particularly valuable characteristic. It limits the burden to alternative users of the exclusion in a property right. If the price is set low, a user harmed by exclusion can simply purchase the thing and have at. If the price is set high, alternative users may be seriously burdened yet be unable to buy access.

So, for the sorts of exclusion that do impose substantial burdens to alternative users, a natural policy intervention would be to require property owners to declare a price at which they commit to sell the property (for some period of time), and levy a tax of some legislatively determined percentage against that actual, actionable price, rather than a hypothetical market value. Property owners could pay as much or as little tax as they choose. When they set their price, they face a trade-off, between the risk of being undercompensated for losing the asset if the price is too low, and an exaggerated tax burden if they set a price so high that the risk of sale is negligible or the required overcompensation extreme. The owner is free to choose how much she values certainty of continued ownership, but she must pay for that.

The price set by the property owner might constitute an option to buy for all comers, or just for the state. (I’m not sure which would be best. What do you think?)

Posner and Weyl talk about essentially the same scheme in Property is Only Another Name for Monopoly and trace it to a 1965 paper by Arnold Harberger (which has a Latin American context/motivation — something about LatAm seems to encourage economics experimentation; probably US economists operating under moral hazard in authoritarian labs?). They’ve since written a book about such ideas I’ve been meaning to read, Radical Markets. The idea seems to be becoming increasingly popular in the Ethereum world as a way to actually set real prices in meaningful markets.

Schemes like this tend to be too simple, but in a good way. Starting incentive and mechanism design from a radical core can lead to meaningfully radical systems. A formula can beget revolutions. Vannevar Bush’s introduction of indirect cost support, the Black-Scholes formula, Vickrey (second-price) auctions come to mind. And if we’re lucky in the future, ranked-choice voting etc.

But for a scheme to have such potential there have to be mathematical rather than merely ideological reasons to prefer it. The Waldman idea stuck with me because it suddenly made Georgism make sense. Land-value taxation as such seems simply like non-property owners fighting an ideological battle with property owners. Tax income or wealth? Where you stand depends on where you sit. How much of each you have or expect to have. But Harberger tax? That elegantly threads the needle with a certain mathematical doomsday logic.

For the record, I’m not a pure Georgian/LVTist. The idea that all wealth derived from property stinks of mercantilist zero-sum thinking to me. I’m too Schumpeterian for that. I think wealth is a process not an asset. But Harberger tax… there’s a there there.

A naked Harberger tax would probably have all sorts of unpleasant consequences, but as the kernel of a more complex scheme, hmmm. A good formula is like construction material. You still have to learn to build with it. What can you build with Harberger taxes? Here’s a website I just found that seems to have some ideas.

I’m running the Summer of Protocols program for the Ethereum Foundation again this year. Here is the Call for Applications. I’d appreciate any help getting it in front of the right candidates. The core of it is what we’re calling Protocol Improvement Grants (PIGs): 90k for a team of two to work on improving a real world protocol (any kind, technological, social, organizational) over 4 months. We will be awarding 5 PIGs. We anticipate this is going to be tough because we’re trying to catalyze a new category of entrepreneurship: Protocol entrepreneurship. It exists in the wild of course, but naming and characterizing a wild pattern of behavior is often the first step to consciously cultivating it as a learnable capability that can be refined and systematically made more powerful.

I’ll be unpacking the concept a bit during a live information session on the program next week (Wednesday at 9 AM Pacific; details here). Attend if you’re interested in applying to the program, or even just curious about this idea of protocol entrepreneurship. In the meantime, here’s this Venn diagram I made for the short talk I’m prepping.

There is also a small grants program: 20 development grants of $1000 to work on a creative work, such as a short story or comic, that might “protocol pill” people. This is the PILLs program: Pill Incepting Lore and Literacy.

I can tell already this year is going to be much tougher than last year, since we’re trying something much more focused and ambitious and there’s the additional challenge of meeting and beating the standard set by the pilot year, which turned out very well. We’re effectively trying to speedrun the pioneer –> settler –> town-planner evolutionary trajectory. But if it works, the outcomes should really be worth it.

In case you missed my various posts about it in other places, the pilot Summer of Protocols program was an open-ended exploratory effort to map out the territory. You can read the research output as it is published here, and if you want to go deep you can request one of the limited number of Protocol Kits with printed copies of all the research (they’re not for sale; we’re distributing them for free people/organizations who might help drive the emerging protocols scene forward).

Wish us luck (“us” is a small team; besides myself, it’s Tim Beiko and Josh Davis of the EF, plus Timber Schroff and Jenna Dixon). We’re going to need it. And do forward this post to people you think might be a good fit for the program.

I was asked in a DM conversation whether I use AI for writing, and I said no, it would be like going for a walk in my car. The only people who seem to directly use AI for writing are people who don’t write for pleasure, but have to write a lot of functional, business-like things that are too varied for boilerplate templates. The sort of writing that might require intelligence or expertise, but which doesn’t offer much pleasure or creative challenge to the writer. It’s an instrumental sort of writing.

Which is not to say AIs can’t do creative writing. I’m only saying that people who enjoy creative writing purely or mostly for the process itself have no real use for AI assistance. To a lesser extent this seems true of coding as well. A lot of the use I’ve seen is for the tedious bits. And as with writing, that’s not to say AIs can’t do creative coding requiring insight. But people who code for fun probably have less use for it, though I suspect “copiloting” is likely more fun with code than writing.

The more the ends matter more than the means, the more AI is helpful. If you like flying a plane, a copilot just cuts in on your time at the controls. If you’re just trying to fly somewhere, you’re happy to let the copilot fly. For me the “ends” of writing barely matter at all. It’s all about the means.

Can AIs enhance creative satisfaction of exercising the means? I imagine so. I can imagine an assistant that I explain my goals to, and it acts like an improv partner, perhaps writing every other sentence. I suspect ChatGPT can already do this well. But that’s a different creative process I’d have to learn to derive satisfaction from, like learning to go rowing as a substitute for going on walks.

But AI has had an indirect positive and enjoyable effect on my writing: It has made me lower my craftsmanship standards, which were never very high to begin with. This is one reason I’m writing a lot more this year. The causal chain from AI is subtle, and AI is not the whole explanation for changes in my writing, so let me try to unpack the part that is.

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Two articles about matter and life have been on my mind for a while. The first is Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth, in Quanta magazine. The second is this article in Nature, Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.

We rarely think about matter as a first-class subject of philosophical inquiry, the way we do space and time. Or about the divide between non-living and living matter except through the lens of the presumptive specialness of living matter. Physics, in a way, has been a centuries-long exercise in trying to subordinate matter to time and space (and more recently, waves, fields, and information which are all spatio-temporal flavored abstractions). Non-living matter, of course, likely comprises the vast majority of all matter, even if the universe is teeming with life. But life likely accounts for the vast majority of the variety in matter. Stars make all the heavier atoms when they go supernova (a fact that some people make way too much of). But then when you get to molecules, I suspect most molecules are either themselves organic, or have their macro-structures shaped by life. The Quanta article is about minerals and rocks, which we don’t think of as organic matter — and they’re not in compositional terms, since they’re not complex carbon compounds — but in a procedural sense, which seems more fundamental, they might be. And we’re not just talking simpler examples like sand being made of sea-shell powder or oil from ancient marine organisms. It looks like lots of rocks are shaped by life. Basically half of the material variety you see around you is connected to life and its cycles.

The Nature article takes it one level of abstraction higher. The built environment is also shaped by life. We normally focus on the spatio-temporal; aspect, the geometries and the lifecycles, but consider the material aspect of the majority of the built-environment mass:

1. Concrete
2. Reinforced concrete
3. Asphalt
4. Glass
5. Metals and alloys

None of these materials are “non-living” per se. Some, like metals, wouldn’t exist in pure-ish form in an oxygen atmosphere without life. We find pure-ish metals in meteorites of course, but on a planet, except for a few precious metals like gold and silver, pure metals don’t exist. And even the precious ones don’t occur as bulk masses. Arguably reinforced concrete is an “organic” material — a composite that wouldn’t arise in matter without life.

Speaking of oxygen, that too of course, only exists in free form because of life. Several natural cycles of simpler atoms — oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, calcium — are pumped by life. Without life, the cycles of these atoms would be pretty dead (heh!)

Of course, pure non-living processes help. Life as we know it can’t form without tectonic activity starting the churn.

The point of this discussion is that where life exists (based on our n=1 case) living matter is a significant phase in the cycles of all matter, perhaps even the dominant phase. We often talk of life as though it’s a fragile bit of material poetry that is alienated from, and in thrall to, the far vaster non-living processes of matter, but it isn’t. We talk as though the processes of life are less powerful than those of non-living matter, such as wind, rain, or earthquakes. They’re not. Life punches in the same weight class as non-life where the two touch. We should think of “life” as a material-energetic-spatial-temporal phenomenon with the same sort of raw, irresistible power as wind or waves. We say earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but we could say, with equal justice, life to life as the karmic destiny of non-living matter. Under the right conditions, non-living matter can no more resist the irresistible tug of life than living matter can resist death. We lament that there have been half-a-dozen mass extinctions on the planet. We might equally say, there have been half-a-dozen mass vivifications of non-living matter.

Yes, “life” is a lower entropy (but higher-information) more complex emergent state, so non-living matter is in some broad sense “lower,” but the Earth, bathing in the rays of the sun, is not a closed thermodynamic system. Entropy-increase is not the defining feature of life and non-life on Earth.

This macro-scale balance of power between the forces of life and non-life seems to me at least as important as the specific details that define the boundary, like the structure of viruses (which are between living and non-living). I suspect we need a science of macro-scale life comparable to the science of weather. It will be to virology what weather is to basic statistical mechanics.

There are two practical reasons to be interested in the philosophy of matter and life today. The first is climate change. The second is computing.

We talk of the Anthropocene as though life reshaping non-life is “new” but it is as old as geology; as old as sand and free oxygen. We have to get our terms of reference right to think straight about climate action, or as I prefer to think of it, terraforming 101. What’s new is life consciously embracing its material nature and its entanglement with the non-living beyond the mere cosmetic layers of “built” environments. Our material natures run deeper than our inclination to build things.

The materiality of computing is perhaps even more consequential. Computers are, as the line goes, “rocks that we zapped with lightning and tricked into thinking.” I find the fact that you can skip life altogether and make “thinking” a property of all matter — living or non-living — to be more interesting than the fact that the “thinking” can be “intelligent.” It seems to take life to get matter to “thinking” states but this is just a limited perspective. This is more like the fact that it takes life to produce free oxygen than it is a fact about technology and invention. Non-living processes first produced life that produced thought, but that thinking in turn gave rise to new kinds of rocks that can think.

But more than these practical concerns, I think there is a deeper point here about the materiality of life and the vivifiability of matter. Our estrangement from non-living matter, with which we are so obviously entangled at all scales by powerful processes, is the perhaps the last bit of our anthropocentrism (or biocentrism rather) that remains to be broken down before we can truly feel at home in the universe. We are not in the universe, we are the universe.

We’ve already embraced our spatiotemporal nature. We aren’t in space, we are space. Our bodies have volumes; they have extent. Crushed too close together, bodies flow like fluids. That’s what a “stampede” is. We don’t exist in time, we are time. Memories are life and those are just another face of time.

Curiously, it’s been harder for us to achieve this sort of explicit, conscious awareness of our material natures. Many science fiction writers handle space and time well. Few handle matter well (Iain M. Banks and J. G. Ballard come to mind). Many artists do amazing things with space and time through audiovisual media. Materiality has been a harder dimension of life to explore. What’s the Mona Lisa of density? The Beethoven’s Fifth of porosity? (I find most modern explorations of materiality in the fine arts rather underwhelming compared to explorations of space and time). Much of our sense of materiality has remained at the level of craft (weaving, pottery, metalwork) and unexamined felt experiences (have you ever wondered much about “solidity” the way you’ve likely wondered about “time”?). Matter is hard to intellectualize, perhaps because variety is its very essence, especially when life gets involved. Platonic geometry is a very successful philosophical abstraction of space. Music is a very successful philosophical abstraction of time. But earth, fire, water, wind, ether kinda misses the point of matter. The point of matter is variety. Which is, in some ways, the antithesis of abstraction. To try identify 5 “basic” substances is to miss the point.

And life is perhaps just matter’s way of creating more varieties of matter, which makes it even harder to think about, because that just seems to make the variety explode even faster.