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Vinay

18 Nov, 13 tweets, 4 min read

https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1461156309055807500

So I want to talk a bit about being a climate-aware CEO.

I don't mean the daffy greenwashing version, "we're switching to recycled packaging to do our part."

No, I mean a hardcore "we've broken the world and now we pay" type of climate aware CEO. It's a different kind of mind.

https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1461156309055807500

I'm running a company to save lives. Not directly, I'm not making HIV vaccines. I'm running a company to make money, and then I'm going to spend that money saving lives.

Maybe some of our technology will help but that's very much a bonus: goal is vast world-transforming wealth.

We're talking "man who fell to earth" levels of wealth. I figure there are going to be hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and the UN etc. will be totally disorganised and shambolic, as they are now.

Enter philanthropy. $1bn saves 1m families, say. lateralaction.com/articles/the-m…

This is no joke. I have literally no other option left on the table to help these people survive: UN, Red Cross, DoD, Ikea etc. all dead-ended in their own systemic incompetence. They're fucking the refugees who exist today and it will be no better tomorrow. Worked with 'em all.

So now I run a company. Aware that it's a phase, not a route to a private island, but a route to commissioning prototypes, testing and experiments for a few years, then getting hands-on involved in the deep dark details. I'm raising money to go to work on the Big Old Problem.

I got driven to this: Elon Musk tooled up to use capitalism to hit his goals, and it worked. I'd tried Free Hardware, open source/ip, government, civil society, IGOs.

Nothing worked: nothing could make plans for 20 years in the future, although OBVIOUSLY any human alive must eat

So when I ask "if ten or twenty million people a year walk out of flooded or parched areas, what will they eat?" and the people who need to be planning NOW for those people to survive THEN say "we don't really think that far ahead" they're planning to let those people just die.

And that was my universal experience right across the humanitarian world

The idea that we needed to develop *technology* to answer the impossible challenge of keeping hundreds of millions of climate refugees alive after climate change drives them from their homes? Alien language

I'm just trying to drill deep enough into The Future that I hit a gusher of liquid money, doing something which is climate-neutral at worst, radically good for the planet at best. Then then that's going to be used to seed new cities to rehouse the people who will otherwise die.

I would consider this position to be, based on available data, climate realist.

Not a doomer, not even a prepper, really.

I'm just a rational actor looking at the future, saying "this is going to take 30 years to figure out" in 2002, and here I am in 2022 still working on it.

@DevinBalkind

The very kind @DevinBalkind is organising my work here: leashless.softr.app

It's a ton of material. Gets into all the details. Over the next few years we're going to push this through AI-based clustering to make it easier to navigate, put things on timelines and so on.

But I've gotta tell you. Every fucking day "Was this enough? Am I done?" Energy management over 20 years of nobody giving a shit about the work, or people I am trying to reach.

You *know* flood and famine are coming. They're already here. You know people will migrate. They are.

It's only going to get worse. The governments are already sending gun boats rather than rescue helicopters. Can you imagine with another 10 years of warming and breakdown how bad this gets, then another 10 years after that?

I saw it 20 years ago. I've got a little time to work.

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More from @leashless

Vinay

@leashless

18 Nov

https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1461212481020301315

It’s really hard to look at the 20th century and come to that conclusion.

Lifespans got longer. Populations rose.

We wiped out half of the remaining nature, invented atomic and biological weapons, built a total surveillance society.

Are you sure this is going to be alright?

https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1461212481020301315

And this is kind of my problem. I was yelling about the need for masks and research into mask effectiveness in pandemics >10 years ago

20 years into the work on climate refugees. 20 years of “we have to prepare to save the lives of hundreds of millions, homes destroyed by floods

When these things arrive, the “optimists” say “my god who could have predicted this unprecedented event” because *their optimism is rooted in avoiding the data about obvious possible risks*.

Add survivor biases, and we have a risk blind incredibly rich pundit class misleading us

Read 6 tweets

Vinay

@leashless

18 Nov

I've been thinking really hard about people's inability to stare at the darkness of the world and the fate of the poor, without blinking.

It all seems pretty obvious to me: the central fact of human existence is that 5 or 10 million people starve to death each year. The core.

Everything that we do is set against the background.

Everything that we do is set against the constant drum beat of other humans starving to death. Maybe one every ten seconds. I hear that clock. That clock is with me. I wake up with it, I fall asleep with it. Brain won't block.

My brain won't block it because I trained my brain not to: I am "enlightened" - a human that has punched through its own programming. Freedom, certainly, but also awareness - and in that awareness one has a few choices.

Read 25 tweets

Vinay

@leashless

10 Sep

God, I'm tired of trying to persuade people not to destroy their world, and to take care of the victims of prior attempts to destroy it.

People want to stay asleep at the wheel, in their comfy little ruts, even though they are two wheels off the cliff already.

It's Panic Time!

What does it take to move people's attention off their wallets or petty political rivalries on to the core question of the day: how do we regulate technology so that it doesn't destroy all of our lives?

That's the core issue: global warming, mass surveillance, combat robots.

I ploughed this territory 10 years ago, and published Mother of Hydrogen, an SF novel about how the human race survives nanotech and biotech wars, and manages a rogue AI problem.

hexayurt.com/novel

The solution proposed in that book is the only one I believe will work.

Read 28 tweets

Vinay

@leashless

8 Sep

Bull and bear markets mean something different at a two trillion dollar market cap.

You've gotta understand we're turning an enormous ship here. A bull/bear event *now shifts the destiny of nations* not just your college/house/retirement fund. It's a dramatic world-shifting tide

What does that mean?

Well, we still don't have fundamentals - it's almost impossible to evaluate what bitcoin *should* be worth. Everybody's evaluating it based on what it will be worth in future.

That paradox is the most dangerous thing in crypto. We *desperately* need utility

@mattereum

I *started* @mattereum to solve the utility problem, by the way: you wanna buy houses, cars, gold, vacations, wine, art, you name it *in a crypto-native way* we do that

Not "turn your BTC into dollars on the fly". I mean we sell physical stuff *as a cryptographic rights bundle*

Read 6 tweets

Vinay

@leashless

22 Aug

I want to talk about why I'm so bone-deep hostile to the "consciousness movement" while being a life-long meditator.

First, an appropriate soundtrack for this little bit of thinking

Thread on.

So the consciousness movement has basically two phases which are relevant to this discussion. Pre-nuclear bombs and other existential risks, and post-nuclear bombs etc

The movement slips over that historical discontinuity with very little notice but something fundamental breaks.

Before the invention of the nuclear bomb there is no potential for human beings to destroy the plane of existence we occupy.

It simply wasn't a thing. We could cut down a tree, but we could not extinguish all life. Once that became possible, there was a half-assed attempt to fix

Read 54 tweets

Vinay

@leashless

5 Aug

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.