Myopic Centrism — There’s a meme I once saw that I think perfectly captures the attitude and logical justification of centrism. This meme is meant to portray an insight into how the woke progressives have moved into the realm of the extreme while the pragmatic centrists have remained steadfastly true to their origin. In the meme we see a certain billionaire (depicted as “me”) and a conservative staying put in the same location on a political spectrum line from 2008 to 2021, while the liberal moves farther and farther to left. The result ...

Socialism as Radical Entrepreneurialism — If there weren’t hundreds of years of propaganda in our collective psyche, we’d be able to recognize that the goals of free market entrepreneurialism and democratic market socialism are the same: empowerment for every working person and every entrepreneur. It just so happens that neither side realizes, those are the same people. I can still see the words written floor to ceiling across the wall of my company’s office. The CEO and founder of the company had asked for his personal motto, “OWN IT,” to be emblazoned on the wall ...

What separates utopia and dystopia? — Take a moment to think about all the possible futures you’ve ever seen presented in any of the various forms of science fiction media you’ve come across. Although many details may differ between the mutlitude of different worlds that artists and authors have depicted, when you boil them all down to their most fundamental core, there are only two possible future scenarios for humanity: a dystopian future or a utopian future. But what is the fundamental feature that makes the difference between a dystopian and a utopian world.? You might ...

Why a different shade of solarpunk — Solarpunk is in my opinion the movement for a better future. It embraces and amplifies the best parts of humanity: innovation, compassion resilience, freedom, and justice, and focuses our imagination into making those qualities the underpinning of our future society. I’ve become a solarpunk because I think this optimism is essential. In fact, I think the decline of optimism and the rise of “realism” in the 20th century, is the one thing that has stagnated humanity.  Word usage of "optimist" peaked in the 1920s, while usage of "realist" continued to ...

Solarpunk 2050 — I recently read Bill Gates’ book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. While I have a huge problem with the book’s philosophy1, I have taken one thing away from it in this blog’s approach to advocating for a socialist revolution: work backwards from a goal and a long-term horizon. I know many people want a socialist revolution now, and they are working toward that goal either through political process or through yelling at other people on twitter. Sadly, I am one small person with limited ability to effect massive changes, ...

How Market Socialism Could Work — In 2018, Gallup conducted a poll to learn what most people in the US think of when they hear the word “socialism.” The poll compared responses in 2018 and 1949, and pointed out a big change in perception over the seven decades since the beginning of the Cold War. Gallup Poll on US understanding of the term "socialism" One of the most interesting findings is that over that time there has been a shift away from considering socialism to mean “state control of business” to meaning “equality” and “benefits and ...

Carbon Fragility — Our climate is changing, possibly irreversibly. When asked in polls, most everyone understands this. We even know how to stop it and yet in our day-to-day public interactions, very few people seem to be willing to talk about any of this. I’ve developed a theory to explain this, and I’ve termed it Carbon Fragility, an environmental correlate to the phenomenon known as white fragility.  In white fragility, white people build defense mechanisms to avoid directly confronting their implicit role in upholding white supremacy.  In carbon fragility, people build defense mechanisms ...

What is involution — Last week a friend of mine from China introduced me to a new word that popped up in Chinese culture last year to describe the point where competition switches from being productive to destructive. It’s called involution and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you’re missing out on an important concept that helps explain the greatest paradox of our time: Why does everything keep feeling worse the harder we work to make things better? While the term was originally invented by anthropologists to describe a particular kind of agricultural ...

Class Warfare Chess Prototype — This post is out of date. There is a newer, better version of Class Warfare Chess described in this post The narrative embedded in the classic chess board is obvious. Two rows of unskilled and expendable pawns face off to protect the interests of the more talented nobility. All sacrificing everything to protect a bumbling ineffectual king. Well not anymore. It’s time to flip the tables. I wrote new rules for chess that pits the pawns against the nobles. But in this game, the nobles only maintain their special moves ...

A mixture of identifields — What are two totally different sides of your personality that kind of came together to form who you are today? I've always had a love of nature that kind of gave me a sense of awe and spirituality even though I've never been comfortable talking about it. At the same time, I've also always been into science fiction of the space and time travel variety. These stories gave me kind of an intellectual sense of imagination about how limited our current social values might be compared to all the possibilities ...

Three parts to changing the world — The process of changing the world has 3 interrelated parts: Acknowledge where we are Define where we want to be Take steps to move in the right direction In this essay I want to go into why it’s important to remember that all 3 parts have a place and not to let 1 part dominate the others. Criticism: acknowledging where we are Some academics and activists will focus themselves particularly on the first point, drawing much needed attention to the dire consequences of the existing racist, exploitative systems that we ...

More equal rights, more equal power — On tiktok and twitter, I’m seeing the hashtag #leftist trending for the first time in my life. People are coming out of the woodwork showing off their leftist pride. So what does it mean to be a leftist? Do you want to know if you might be a leftist? Sometimes people try to overcomplicate this question, but I’m a simple guy when it comes these ideas. So in this post I want to describe what it means to be a leftist in simple general terms. There are lots of nuanced ...

An introduction to directional radicalism — You might be like me. I’m a millennial living in the US, worried about being a good person and surviving. I was raised to think that politics was mostly just a mess that should be ignored, and that being “into politics” meant you were always pushing your own agenda. I thought politics was working right when Obama was in the White House and I could ignore it. I didn’t like the results in 2016, but, at the time, I thought the US was still a fundamentally fair and decent country. ...

On the emergence of post-speculative fiction — I just ran a work of speculative fiction through a piece of artificial intelligence software that once would have been called speculative. I'm realizing that we very well might be reaching a new era of science fiction and art. I'm wondering if we should call this era post-speculative. To Be Post-speculative Speculative fiction generally works within a world where some things (eg technologies, magic, historical governments) can work in ways where the reader has no way of foreseeing the ultimate impact of these things. This is in contrast to forms ...

Augmented Democracy - Intentional Capitalism | A continuum analysis of collective decision making — tldr; democracy is our ideal. money is a convenient voting system but it has a glitch that breaks it irreversibly when too much is held by too few. therefore, we need wealth redistribution. I've been thinking about how groups make decisions. There are a lot of ways decision-making happens in detail, but I noticed a broad pattern that I wanted to discuss in this post: that the most fundamental component of a decision-making system boils down to how the atomic "decision making unit" (DMU) is distributed across the population. I'll ...

analyzing a.ttent.io/n — Why do written works of fiction ever have to be finished? What if the story's growth was part of the story itself? My first real work of fiction is finished. But I wonder if my first real story is just beginning? What is a.ttent.io/n? While I've previously alluded to the story I've been writing, which has been in the works for more than 3 years, I've never directly covered what it's about on this site. It's a story, to be sure, but it's also meant to be an experiment. Writing ...

Imagining a new economy on the Co-op Trail — I'm honestly grossed out by how our economy works. I never really had the privilege to understand it until now, but now that I'm seeing what it's like for a well-off person, I can't help but recognize the preposterous unfairness of it all. A few months ago I learned about the co-op movement and an idea called the solidarity economy (mostly from following Zebras Unite ❤️). I am learning so much and compiling articles and videos, but as I've learned more and more, I'm really starting to understand just how ...

Renaissance of the Renaissance Person: We should restructure society so anyone can try lots of things. — Inspired by the Break 'Em Up! discussion from People's Action today, I've been trying to imagine what I think fairness and justice would look like in the world. It's a lofty thought, but one that I don't think enough people take the time to envision in their day-to-day life. We all talk about how we want a fair society in an abstract way, but there is a grey area in the definition of fairness between the obviously unfair distribution of resources today, and another extreme of perfectly regimented identical distribution ...

The Ongoing Process of a.ttent.io/n — I feel like my short story a.ttent.io/n will never be finished. But rather than fight that, I'm thinking perhaps I should embrace it as part of the core novelty of the medium I'm building. If I recall correctly, I came up with the core conceit of the novel sometime before I started grad school in 2010. I sketched out the different story arcs, but I languished with the problem that the whole story was just too big. Then in the fall of 2017, I was chatting with a friend at ...

The Lisens: a license to simulate the sense of self — For the past year, my viewfoil project has led me to expand my use of identity publication (aka social media) and consolidate my public technological identity footprint into one portal online. My long-term goal with the project is to form an artificial intelligence simulation of my personal online behavior. In other words, I aim to someday build an algorithm that can replicate and potentially replace the portion of my mind that generates behavioral artifacts on the internet. But this forces me to ask a question: If I can pursue self-simulation ...

Prof Bonkerfield Joins the Ampled Co-op — This summer I started getting very interested in co-ops and the solidarity economy. A big place where I started to learn was during the Zebras United Season of the Dazzle, which led to learning about start.coop. And while watching start.coop's 2020 grad class give their presentations, I learned about a very cool artist-ownership payment platform called Ampled. Ampled is a pretty straightforward replication of Patreon (or onlyfans), but the interesting part to me is that the business is built and run with the intention to keep the fan's funding in ...

How about worker-owned automation? — Epistemic status: I've been ruminating on Fully Automated Luxury Communism and how to make it happen. Can't tell if it'll succeed, but it's something worth working toward. Recent events have reawoken an idea that I've wanted to tackle since I was a teenager. Over the past few months as I've been learning, I've also been reorganizing my life and finances to try to take a new direction. To put it bluntly, I feel like it's time to find a way to ethically get rid of all the crappy jobs in ...

Identifield: information in the material universe — Epistemic status: It should go without saying that I don't have any certainty about the fundamental nature of the universe. This is just a bit of conjecture that gets me through my day. As I moved from physics to biology and now into machine learning, my worldview has shifted from one focused on material reality to one that deals largely with abstractions of information. I've thought a great deal about these two viewpoints and wondered about their relationship. Importantly, as I've interacted with people ensconced in these two fields, I've ...

A Spacetime Visual Explanation — Spacetime Explained It can be tricky to think about where something is in not only space, but time too. Physicists picture the location of objects in space and time using a concept called spacetime. They generally think about this in regard to physical objects, and that's a good place to get an introduction to the concept. As an example, check out this bowling ball rolling in this gif I found. The ball is more or less traveling in a straight line down the alley so at any point in time ...

Redefining Identity: A continuum approach — Epistemic status: This is an attempt to define personal identity for myself. I believe that it is a more developed description than most, but I always welcome new insights. There are two hurdles that I've needed to overcome in defining my personal identity. First, I've had trouble holding onto what it is that makes up "me."" I've changed so much throughout the course of my life, that thinking about what "I" think seems almost impossible. Second, I'm troubled with the concept of identity as labels. I've found myself falling into ...

Philosophical Grind: why assume that your actions matter — Epistemic status: It should go without saying that I don't have any certainty about the fundamental nature of the universe. This is just a bit of conjecture that gets me through my day. What causes us to choose one action as opposed to another? There are, of course, instantaneous needs that must be met, but how do we decide the bigger questions in life? Over the past several months I have formulated a resolution to this question that I believe makes the fewest necessary assumptions about the structure of the ...

Intuition as Unobserved Probabilistic Function Exploration — Epistemic status: It should go without saying that I don't have any certainty about the fundamental nature of the universe. This is just a bit of conjecture that gets me through my day. In my previous writing, I've derived arguments to show that I should act as though the universe has a purpose, and that while the universe's purpose is not knowable with certainty, I should act as though correct action is discoverable. In this work, I wish to lay out my argument for intuition as a way of sensing ...

The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream — Epistemic status: Minimally researched musings from someone who has blogged (poorly) for a few years and has an idea for a thing he wants to make. In the digital circles where I find myself roaming these days, there is an interesting conversation about two different modalities of online content creation, summarized by a potent analogy called the Garden and the Stream. I think I was initially made aware of it from Chris Aldrich's reference to this post by Mike Caulfield. If you aren't familiar with the tale of the Garden ...

Quantum Multiverse Bifurcator at Burning Man... in Another Universe — Last night, I learned that Black Rock City isn't going to be built in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm grateful the Burning Man organization made that choice. It was the right thing to do in this time. I had been waiting to announce that my friends and I had gotten a Burning Man Arts Honorarium until I knew what was going to happen. But now that I know the event isn't taking place, I feel much more comfortable showing off our plans! Based on our previous quantum multiverse ...

Why building an AI chatbot that passed as human convinced me to put my whole life on the internet — In my free time, I like to build stuff and put it on the internet. Two months ago, I built an AI comment generating chatbot and deployed it on reddit. The chatbot was designed to leave pertinent, realistic replies to other redditors' comments. I figured it would say a bunch of weird stuff and then get flagged and blocked. To my surprise, the chatbot was practically perfect at writing coherent English sentences. And it was also pretty good at understanding the context of a reddit comment and generating replies that ...

Thoughts on the #hivemind after trying social media for the first time — I was born in 1988, but I somehow resisted any serious engagement with social media until January of 2020. I want to explain what changed my mind, and why I’m going to stick around. Can social media actually do any good? Like a lot of people, when first confronted with social media back in the 2000s I said (out loud) something like, “Tweet my stupid little thoughts, that’s a waste of everybody’s time.” It sounds like a reasonable rebuttal, but even back then I was being disingenuous. I still wrote ...

Viewfoil: Experimenting with Radical Transparency — I've been contemplating privacy and anonymity, and speculating on what those ideas will mean in the future of our society. During conversations with my friends and family, I've started questioning whether maintaining strengthened privacy is possible, and more importantly, whether strengthened privacy is even still a good thing. But in the spirit of this site, I'm not just theorizing anymore. I'm currently working on putting myself into an experiment on radical transparency. I have a whole bunch of reasons why I think this is the right thing to do. Below, ...

Visualizing the Identifield — Edit: I've revised the term for the concept described below to be identifield. I was originally calling it a bonkerfield but realized that is too confusing. For the past few weeks, I've been trying to figure out how to visually describe a philosophical concept that I've come up with called an identifield. It's something I find fascinating, but quite hard to wrap my own head around entirely. I've been ruminating on how to convey it for a while now, trying to be able to get the idea across and not ...

Short Post on Short Showers — I finally was able to reduce my flying this year to just two flights to visit family for the holidays. My partner still points out that I take long showers so I should get off my high horse. I've decided to fix that. A little math I found several calculations of the amount of carbon dioxide produced by a shower. This varies by energy source so I tried a quick calculation for my own residence. Assuming 2.5 gallons/minute of shower, and that I'm heating the water by about 60 degrees, ...

Sub-Identity Suicide — Epistemic status: In this post, I attempt to describe a thought experiment that allowed me to overcome chronic depression and existential doubts. This is a metaphysical proposition and may not be amenable to a determination of its validity. For many years, I was experiencing what I later learned to be existential depression. I remained externally happy and productive, but I had rational doubts about whether there was any purpose to life. As such, I could never commit to the belief that life was worth living. And it followed that I ...

Making Better Eyes — Epistemic status: Currently engaging in exploratory experiments to determine validity of hypothesis. 10% confidence of success, but experiment is low risk, which makes it worth pursuing. In May 2017, I had an eye exam with my new optometrist. During that visit, my optometrist made a passing remark about a quirk that he noticed in my old glasses. That tiny remark completely changed my perspective on optometry and near-sightedness. And I'm hoping that it might just change my life. Why had I never thought of that before? All this started when ...

The Stedden Constitution — Epistemic status: Strongly convinced of personal utility, haven't fully considered all ramifications of broader adoption. In order that we might form a more perfect union, we aim to adopt this constitution as a set of guiding principles for our partnership. --Preamble to the Stedden Consitution The founding of a partnership On September 2nd, 2017, Claire Grace Stevenson and William Michael McFadden are going to enter into formal partnership. Oftentimes, this type of partnership is called a marriage, but Claire and I are trying to think of our marriage differently. We ...