Thread by @deontologistics

Here's a final thought for this evening. I often give a hard time to Marxists talking about the 'contradictions' inherent in capitalism, usually because this is methodology turned metaphysical bombast. But there are concrete absurdities around us that bear the weight of history.

Much like Lakatosian research programs, societies accrue anomalies/exceptions that can be handled in more or less progressive ways. Ad hoc solutions beget ad hoc solutions, and the result is ramifying technical debt: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical…

These accrued debts to future generations can persist long enough that they seem like pillars of the world, rather than failures of administration. There are many such debts in the post-industrial West, addicted as we are to avoiding infrastructural investment of every kind.

Many of these are obvious to anyone that pays attention to politics, at least when they have the time and mental energy to suspend the assumptions baked into the every day and reflect on its underpinnings. Speculative housing. Medical financing. Essential workers.

But there are others that are not so obvious. Let me point to two absurdities that continually occur to me, and try to say something about their significance: 1) online signature services, and 2) non-alcoholic CBD beer.

Signatures. We still run all our legal authentication mechanisms on signatures, even when we do most of our day to day communication, organisation, and negotiation through digital means that make such things completely meaningless. Worse, they are never checked, by anyone, ever.

Every time I get a form emailed to me as a PDF (or worse format) that I'm expected to print out, sign, then scan, the sheer absurdity of the current system shines forth. The only thing worse are online services that let you type your name such that it displays in an odd font.

Every time it feels like I'm being expected to slit open a chicken and read its entrails to perform a basic business transaction: 'What do the innards say?' 'Yes. They always fucking say yes.' 'Good! Rub the blood on your laptop to signal your agreement to the legal gods.'

It makes absolutely no sense. By comparison, the Japanese Hanko system is sensible (japanoblog.com/hanko-101), insofar as it will naturally transition to secure ownership of a private keychain/security fob. Signatures aren't even single factor authentication at this point.

They're a fractional authentication system in which the main obstacle to abuse is petty inconvenience. An email address is the de facto authentication system for most transactions these days, backed up by physical address, and then possession of government issued IDs.

The vast majority of politicians have no clue how far behind the curve we are on cryptographic governance, in large part because at almost every turn they've agitated and/or voted for weakening public access and adoption of cryptographic tools in the name of short term goals.

Even as increasingly powerful companies are competing over who gets to integrate authentication mechanisms and interpellate users in-the-last-instance, and increasingly large communities of cypherpunks build distributed anonymised institutions, they fail to see the stakes.

Here's the flip side of this issue: the problem of homelessness is not simply one of speculative assets and rent inflation, but one of addressability. The perennial absurdity of urban social death is the catch 22 of being locked out of welfare by one's inability to claim it.

This is superficially similar to the catch 22 of being locked out of the job market by one's lack of experience in the job market, and these tragically overlap in many cases. But the failure of addressability is the failure of authentication as such, not a species of validation.

Signatures and homelessness. Deep pools of technical debt that exist at the intersection of a whole host of pressing political issues. Infrastructural questions that simply are not and perhaps cannot be addressed by the current liberal order. As such, they are worth focusing on.

Let me turn to non-alcoholic CBD beer. The fact that I have easy access to this substance now still astounds me, precisely because it's a completely ad hoc exception to a more or less global regime of prohibition whose catastrophic inertia continues to immiserate millions.

'We took the vaguely psychoactive component out of this thing, so now you can finally use it for pain relief, as a muscle relaxation, an anxiolytic, or any of the large range of self-medicative uses it provides the perfect balance of risk and effectiveness for.'

Thanks, I guess? Better little than nothing. Better late than never. How small are our dreams that this feels like such a victory over pervasive somatic suffering? The medical-carceral complex defines our era, an adjunct to the military-industrial complex defining the last one.

The flip side of psychopharmacological prohibition is geopolitical madness of perpetual drug war and the democidal consequences of selective enforcement, treatment, and infrastructural corollaries such as urban planning and development. These issues bleed back into homelessness.

The overarching methodological flip side of all of these concerns is the correlate of technical debt: generative entrenchment (philpapers.org/rec/SCHGEA). It's not just that these are modes of oppression inhibiting pre-constituted positive freedoms. They're constitutive tragedies.

The social infrastructure that enables and allows us to cultivate our personal autonomy can be warped in ways that worsen the trade-offs they encode. The implicit social contract written into the legal, economic, and cultural institutions we depend on degenerates alongside them.

It is our dependence on these institutions that gives powerful interests leverage over us, allowing them to split us into separate constituencies and play us off against one another. It's a very old story, but there are some distinctly modern twists in the examples I've chosen.

Here's the moral I've been building to: the balance of generative entrenchment/technical debt embodied by these concrete absurdities is inherently cognitive in ways that are systematically overlooked. These capacities/oppressions concern cognitive conditions of personal autonomy.

In the case of signatures and authentication, what we see are de jure procedural obstacles to de facto norms being articulated around our continuously evolving cognitive prosthetics. We get intimations of enhanced capacity (crypto) and revelations of wasted potential (address).

In the case of psychopharmacological prohibition, what we see are real limitations suspending ideal possibilities, an even slower cancellation of the future than we might have suspected, leading back to the smothering of experimental psychedelic counter culture in its infancy.

There's much more I could say about the social, political, and economic trends bound up in all this, but I must cut my threads somewhere. The fates demand it. The destiny I recommend is this: cognitive liberation through collectivisation. Pool resources and think differently.

We must work smarter (together), not harder (on our own). There's a generational shift that's only just getting underway, and seemingly impossible things will be made possible, especially if we have the infrastructure needed to capitalise on these new opportunities.

Technical credit and generative dislodging begin at home. There's not a single massive contradiction that gets resolved all at once, but a bundle of exceptions that get handled piecemeal. Solidarity in absurdity guys. 🖖

CODA: If you want to read some other things I've written on these issues, here's a brief list:

1. 'Autonomy and Automation' - this provides the historical and theoretical context that all of the above thoughts are situated in:

2. 'Uncanny Solidarity' - a longer Twitter essay on social structure that engages questions of authentication, addressability, and homelessness: deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/uncann…

3. 'Nicotine, Self-Medication, and Cognitive Liberation' - a thread on the politics of psychopharmacology and neurodiversity:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1358588167973142532?s=20

4. My discussion of the cognitive tragedies of homelessness with @vgr:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1356030698931556353?s=20

That'll do for now guys. 🖖