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Vinay Profile picture
@leashless
Aug 5, 2021 • 15 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
I find myself wondering this morning how many people actually get my work - here we are, 20 years in to me continually writing, teaching, communicating, building - and I can't tell if a lot of people get it and are mostly quiet or if very few people actually got it.

Which is it?
It probably helps if I define it: here is my best short summary.

1) The human race is currently running the world like a death camp for poor humans, and particularly for the other species we farm or drive into extinction.

2) Fixing this situation is possible, but requires will.
That's the core thesis. Then,

3) It is possible, by mass collaboration using any available mechanism (open source, markets, new religious movements etc.) to live without this continuous catastrophic violence.

4) Most of the violence is well hidden from us by the machinery of the supply chain: capitalism is a direct continuation of colonialism.

is my book specifically on embedded violence in supply chains. See also a broader critiquethefutureofstuff.store
5) Systematic mapping of our dependency graphs leads to a clear and precise understanding of not only who we are harming, but how we are vulnerable to harm because of our long logistical tails.

provides logistical mapping tools (in "Dealing in Security")resiliencemaps.org
6) Existing political structures perform extremely poorly because they can't handle technically complex long duration multi-actor conflicts - government as we know it was designed for winning land wars in Europe pre-WW2 and can't handle nukes and climate vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/bigdeal/t…
7) It is possible to dramatically increase our psychological resilience through meditation with a specific emphasis on handling difficult emotions like fear and helplessness. Trained people turn away from the difficult situations less, and cope more.

files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_20…
There are also some specific technologies which I've developed and prototyped which can support us in this general mission.

8) and particularly the Quad Dome (by @gelada, a mathematician buddy of mine) as autonomous buildings.hexayurt.com
gallery.burningman.org/asset/661030d0…
@Gelada 9) can also be used to map our critical infrastructure, so that our homes are nearly entirely self-sufficient for energy and for water purification, and potentially we could do a lot of our small manufacturing hyperlocally too.

resiliencemaps.org
shareable.net/the-unplugged/
@Gelada 10) My company, @Mattereum is a system for handling accurate information about physical goods: we pay the bills through anticounterfieting work, but have also deployed systems for bundling CO2 offsets with gold bar NFTs to cover their production costs.

passport.mattereum.com/ntfa.20210319.…
@Gelada @mattereum 11) Finally, on a broader philosophical note, I am convinced that we need new human rights far beyond the rights we currently have. I believe the best place to define and implement those rights is by dramatically expanding the human rights of children.

medium.com/@vinay_12336/a…
@Gelada And here's an interior shot of the Quad Dome gallery.burningman.org/asset/8b995a36…




These two podcasts together do a fairly good job of tearing the mask off the western lifestyle - capitalist, socialist, or other - and showing people the real cost of living this way.

Serious business. Listen at your own risk.anchor.fm/emerge/episode…
anchor.fm/emerge/episode…
12) Extremely deep embedded psychological defense mechanisms prevent us seeing the simple truth that industrial overproduction (and shortage of time) are poisoning our planet and our lives.

People say "polycrisis" to describe this systemic breakdown.

Some more practical suggestions based on affordable risk mitigation in this thread here.

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More from @leashless

Vinay Profile picture
Nov 28
1) D&D's "murderhobo" problem has always been there: it's baked into the game's DNA and indeed much of the source material.

2) But _everybody on earth_ is human by D&D standards. Nobody has _ever_ said "Germans are dark elves" or whatever. It's never been a vehicle for racism.
If there are cultural problems in old school D&D culture they are these:



And severe forms of theseplausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-soci…
The real problem here is trying to fix the "murderehobo" set up with "woke."

The D&D set up is that these critters are absolutely inhuman monsters who will wipe out the human race: it's a zero-sum them-or-us situation. Real humans have only been that way in genocides & frontiers Image
Image
Image
Read 36 tweets
Vinay Profile picture
Nov 22
Here's the thing. Real politics is about money and war.

By 2008 we were losing the wars, and America had gone bankrupt and was living on credit cards.

The "progressives" retreated into a sort of fantasy world: can't talk economy, can't talk war.

So they made up imaginary wars.
But if enough people believe in an imaginary war, it becomes a real war.

Suddenly the entire weight of the progressive movement focusses on a single issue above all others: trans rights.

The rest of society is like "what the fuck do you mean 'female penis'?" and a war starts.
The trans-friendly community say this stuff is "anti trans" but it's not.

It's "trans doesn't exist" and to them it's like saying that the Loch Ness Monster does not exist.

"there is no female penis" == "there is no Loch Ness Monster"

To them: obvious.

pbs.org/newshour/show/…
Read 12 tweets
Vinay Profile picture
Nov 12
This is kinda the usual IQ bullshit.

Go to some MENSA meetings. You’ll have IQ130 brick layers and IQ150 romance novel editors.

A *tiny fraction* of high IQ people do anything interesting. IQ is one of perhaps five capabilities required to do interesting work.

Mostly bullshit.
Here are some of the things IQ doesn’t really capture:

* an instinct and curiosity for the right kind of problem

* not getting side tracked by the history of nutmeg

* maintaining relationships to get access to network intelligence

* endurance on the task until it’s done
Again, a model. But just a model.

Read 19 tweets
Vinay Profile picture
Sep 13
My father, an Indian medical researcher, studied this extensively as part of trying to improve patient care.

He made doctors role-play an IQ85 patient describing an angina attack while carrying a heavy box upstairs.

It takes *practice* to get the clinical data from low vocab.
His conclusion is that without specialised training, and a lot of it, communication is impossible over a 30 point IQ gap.

Average: 100
Nurse: 115
GP: 130
Consultant: 145
Professor: 160

And this is in a setting where the job is about getting clinical data, mind you. Tight focus.
A substantial fraction of the population basically rely on other people to do all of their thinking for them.

You say "these people are inferior."

I say "these people are efficient."

Throughout history there have been a lot of simple, repetitive tasks.

Read 30 tweets
Vinay Profile picture
Jul 17
So I *think* I'm relatively politically sophisticated –– worked with/for a couple of very senior defense bureaucrats, lifelong cypherpunk, watched 90s crypto and 2000s crypto get nuked by the Feds etc.

I have some thoughts on this, but they're a wee bit subtle. It'll need detail
FOSS software went through a similar political hell period: "Free as in beer" ripped off the development methodology of "Free as in Freedom" and stripped the value out of the Free Software ecosystem replacing it with Open Source.

Yes, "Free" and "Open" were at war.

"Crypto" now
So this lays out some of the Free Software vs. Open Source debate.

Note: "human rights" based reasoning from the Free side, and "pragmatism" from the Open side. In practice neither side won: Google ate both of them, nobody got paid, the system is fragile. web.archive.org/web/2004021319…Image
Read 29 tweets
Vinay Profile picture
Jun 18
I’ve been thinking hard about “Mammon” as a concept. As you know I don’t much believe in Moloch: I believe that humans have 600,000+ years of overthrowing Moloch lock-in when it arises.

Mammon is a different animal: “the love of money is the root of all evil?"

There’s more
Mammon conceptually is, I think, **the knowledge that money is the only thing keeping you alive**.

Not the love of money. The fear of dying, and only money stands between you and death.

To get there you need to be unable to depend on nature, family, or society to keep you alive
Mammon is the systematic destruction of ties to/from nature, family and society.

You can’t settle by a river and fish and try to catch some deer, in a little log hut. Your downsized parents don’t have a spare room.

Your society will let you die on the street.

Money alone saves
Read 16 tweets

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