Tweet

Wolf Tivy

5 Nov, 7 tweets, 2 min read

It's clear our current paradigm for how to achieve civilizational progress doesn't work anymore. Maybe it exhausted it's gains, maybe we lost the true thing.

Either way, what comes next?

Six ideas:

One: we need to consciously think in terms of purpose hierarchies more. Society at its best is a holistic collective project, and it's parts can be understood as functional parts towards our missions. This has limitations, but we currently completely neglect it.

Two: justice is closely related to institutional functionality. It is not just consequentialist. It's about the institutional standards of excellence that get us where we want to go. Currently, justice has no grounding, and institutional functionality has no moral legitimacy.

Three: to be honest about society, we need to accept some version of the current unaccountable real power structure. Power exists. You can't fight it. We can only shape it to be just and progressive if we accept its legitimacy.

Four: institutions are best when run as extensions of great founders. Human leadership, judgement, and institution building, not procedure is what makes the world go round. Procedure and custom are needed, but they should empower, not encumber, mission-driven leadership.

Five: state capacity and integrity is the central problem in society. Society doesn't work when dominated by the logic of powerful corporations and elite NGOs; you need strategic and political leadership from state.

Happy to see this idea catching on.

Six: the future will be built by a loose network of seed institutions that outlast the crumbling dysfunction of the failing current paradigm to cultivate a new paradigm that becomes more useful to the powers that be.

Plant the seeds of new growth now; we're going to need them.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @wolftivy

Wolf Tivy

@wolftivy

5 Nov

Want your team to write good software? Put in a time-delay killswitch on event processing. If any event blocks the process for more than 5ms, crash with a BSOD.

5ms is plenty. But demands for computation grow without finite bounds until DISCIPLINE is imposed.

ENFORCE hard realtime 60 frames per second. All updates and redraws finished and flushed every 16 ms or CRASH.

This counts for startup too. If your program isn't responsive within 5ms of startup, CRASH you're FIRED.

Read 5 tweets

Wolf Tivy

@wolftivy

4 Nov

Unless the family is the economic apex predator, the human race will not achieve our potential.

Replacing the family with more modern forms of economic apex predator institutions created the modern wealth and power we have, but it has come at the expense of fundamental capital stocks.

In maoist terms, we have to find a way to manage this contradiction.

Here's what happened: when families were top of the food chain, the economy could only reproduce biologically.

The modern transition mobilized people to work outside of family contexts, which caused the demographic transition and decentered human life.

Read 4 tweets

Wolf Tivy

@wolftivy

29 Mar

So how do we beat infectious disease? It's not with hospitals. Hospitals at best take the edge off, a bit. It's a virus. What can they do? Nothing, until you're choking on pink froth. And even then, there is little they can do.

Maybe we'll get some miracle drug or miracle vaccine. But these things seem like an ideological cope, not how infectious disease actually gets beaten. We like the story of shiny modern technology that lets us change nothing about how we live. What if it's fake?

What actually works to beat infectious disease?

1) Hygiene. Masks. Plumbing. Handwashing. Calibrating your disgust sensitivity. Social distancing during outbreaks. Cleaning public surfaces, using better materials. Waving instead of handshakes.

Read 12 tweets

Wolf Tivy

@wolftivy

14 Mar

Our political problem is very simple:

Lovecraft was really on to something. He KNEW something, or, by unspeakable means, came to know it.

The underlying theme of his work is the frightfully transient position of old New England, thereby of civilized man overall, in the story of the cosmos.

Lovecraft's old New England was a beautiful and comfortable reality. But it was under terminal assault from both the past and the future. It stood on land much older and more mysterious than was comforting, and very obviously was not surviving modernization. Horrifying transience

Read 7 tweets

Wolf Tivy

@wolftivy

2 Jan

dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two…

This is really interesting. I'm getting a strong "engineers doing government" vibe.

I've been quietly thinking about this kind of thing for a few years, though in a different way to mr Cummings. Here's some of my thought, on making an engineering-grade science of social technology:

wolftivy.com/engineeringgra…

One of the big things that needs to happen to build engineering-grade sociology is that we need more engineers building social technology and thinking about it in a technological way, and a friendly and powerful patron supporting the discourse of social technology.

Read 5 tweets

Wolf Tivy

@wolftivy

20 Nov 19

The future is total surveillance for total compliance of every action, word, and thought. This is the world we are bringing into being with technology.

The unavoidable telos of technological means is totalitarian power.

Bitcoin is permanently and publicly recorded money.

Urbit is append-only (ie permanently recorded) computing.

Decentralization is a lie. There is only the ever expanding reach of power, and the obsolete institutions that it sweeps away.

In the future, the only social and intellectual structure to survive will be that explicitly or implicitly permitted by central power. Resistance will be impossible. There will be no domain of personal sovereignty, only permitted and delegated autonomy.

Read 8 tweets

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!