Mainstream computing will become highly controlled and integrated with the dysfunction of our political-economic order.
This just raises the importance of irrational guerrilla computing projects that preserve self-sufficiency and freedom of spirit at the cost of utility.
The reason is subtle: it's not that guerrilla computing will ever become politically significant in itself, but maintaining some ecosystem of life outside the totalitarian borg-state is necessary for overall ecosystem resilience, and for the training of new dynasties.
New dynasties sweep in from the steppes and deserts when the borg-states become decadent. They are formed out on the fringes where life is hard but free. This generalizes to new ideas, paradigms, and religions. Not just new elites.
People who aim for nobility should attempt at high cost to escape the law and order of the borg-state. Guerrilla computing is hard, but it's too easy to hack a chip to talk to a screen and keyboard for it to be impossible. It's defensible free space worth investing in.
But even for the enlightened borg-state, there are huge long-term gains in curbing totalitarian ambitions. Allow something to exist outside yourself so that you don't become consumed by hubris and lose perspective. This logic can protect freedom to some degree.
This is the value I see in projects like free software, @urbit, @hundredrabbits, etc. Interesting new models of free computing enable a more sustainable, robust, and generative future. It's going to be hard and will never win the mainstream, but that's not the point.
The point of guerrilla computing is to cultivate novelty and nobility in the free spaces that can be carved out beyond the borg-state.
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Was talking to a friend the other day and this came up again. I'm going to refine the take:
"Based" is becoming what the boomer counterculture was. Radical and interesting at first, but rapidly taken over by imitators and yuppies and people for whom it's a fashion scene.
A fashion scene can definitely be the coolest underground social phenomenon, but it's just that.
The trouble is that because such a thing is so obviously a pile of resources for the taking, anything built on it will be fake, because fakers are faster than substance.
And this is the ultimate condemnation. Once its coolness of something becomes legible, it's all over. It's either already established with a centralized hierarchy (eg apple computing) or it's getting eaten by grifters and watered down (boomer counterculture).
Class oppression in America is largely based on access to secret knowledge that is never written down. This knowledge forms character, habits, social networks, info bubbles, and what positions you get herded into.
This is partially an evolved response to the social/legal inability to discriminate directly combined with the necessity of class hierarchy and distinction. But I wonder whether it has always been this way.
Most people's self-concept is a false consciousness that basically justifies and perpetuates their own oppression.
The reason architecture, the arts, etc collapse between 1914 and 1945 is the obvious one: the people who built things like that lost the wars. Even on the "victorious" side, the people who won were the factional enemies of this aesthetic.
because America is a dysfunctional vampire-state that destructively consumes human capital.
We've been limping along on prewar central European fumes for decades. At some point, we run out.
People act there there is some infinite pile of high-quality human capital overseas, and we can just plunder it indefinitely. It doesn't work like that. At some point, you have to get good at generating human capital.
America has never been good at this.
Human capital generation looks like free independent productive subcultures sharpening themselves over generations.
Instead, we aggressively converge everything into the monoculture, shuffle off the high-quality people into Harvard, and apply their efforts to nonsense. Few kids.
Imagine the pyramids when new. Polished megalithic temples far beyond anything's else. Obviously built by the gods, who rule directly from the big house and have magical powers to make the water flow and the sun shine.
The cosmological implications would be all-encompassing.
We no longer see things the way people did in the bronze age, but imagine actually living then and being faced with what they were faced with. You would have almost no choice but to see things as they did.
The priesthoods probably had secret technology far beyond that mundanely available, and marketed as the power of the gods rather than as mundane techne. For example: it's possible they had electric batteries, intricate machines, could predict eclipses, floods.
Our recent article from @SamoBurja proposed that the industrial revolution was socially incomplete, but destroyed it's pre-industrial foundations, so post-industrial society isn't going to be able to just go back automatically. This poses a big problem of development strategy.
The obvious implication is that we have to complete the industrial revolution by extending or supplementing the industrial logic to a full stack of social technologies, especially in the currently failing family life patterns and human capital creation areas.
What does that completion actually look like? What if it does look a bit like going back? Deliberately rebuild the pre-industrial foundations alongside industry. Not something wholly new, but a novel stabilization of industrial alongside pre-industrial social tech.