hello fellow citizen of the Internet
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been upset recently. I think we should talk.
(If you don’t have time for this entire post, read it from the bottom up.)
the crisis
We’re in a computational crisis. Our rights are being eroded in lockstep as Moore’s Law advances. By the hour, our world is devolving into some kind of crazy techno-military-corpocracy nightmare.
Need a refresher? We have the NSA analyzing all Internet traffic. We have the NSA analyzing all phone calls. We have the NSA doubling down on analyzing all Internet traffic. We have the NSA and FBI requiring companies to build backdoors into their products and services for surveillance under unknowable sealed FISA orders. We have the financial sector ruining the world economy, receiving no punishment or condemnation, getting free money, then lining up to ruin everything again. Half our leaders are stuck in the 1800s. They deny reproductive rights. They deny social equality. They’ve become too dumb to rule, but nobody can oust them.
And that’s just this week.
What are people in charge of the world doing? Are they running a God Emperor scenario? Are they trying to be so abhorrent we rebel and never let centralized power structures form again? Should we take them up on their offer of rebellion and reclaim our freedoms? After all, they started it. Never start a fight, but always finish it.
So, let’s do something. Let’s fix our broken world. Me, you, lots of knowledge, practice, learning, experimentation, play, and good ole’ making stuff.
warning: Fixing the world takes effort. Key word: effort. Sitting around hoping for a better future accomplishes nothing. Writing vitriolic comments online accomplishes nothing. Protesting in silly masks accomplishes nothing. We must work towards sealing off corruptions and invasions running rampant in society by growing and advancing around them.
a solution
Let’s save the world. The entire world. Yes, it’s a big, wobbly, ill-defined, and poorly justified goal. Let’s do it anyway.
Why us?
Because: we’re the only ones who can.
A quick breakdown using Science™
- Technology controls the world.
- More precisely, our technology controls the world.
- Except, we’ve let bad people and special interests use our technology against us.
- We’ve let bad people use us against us.
- We build the systems of our own destruction.
- Entrenched special interests see themselves as invincible, unprosecutable, and practically immortal.
- We can’t fight them.
- We can’t break them.
- But, we can work around them.
- We can outgrow them.
- Over time, we can render them functionally inert.
Let’s render them functionally inert.
what’s all this then?
Let’s organize. Let’s focus only on problems moving the world forward. People violating our lives need to feel their hearts skip a beat as they realize “…and they have a plan.”
Inquisitive and creative human brains are the most powerful systems for enacting change on the planet. Let’s push you to be smarter and more useful.
If you keep hiding, how will they know what you can do? Careful hearts might stay protected, but rebel hearts get resurrected.
Careful lives seem so forgiving, but in those lives there’s no one living.
Tell the people abusing your talents and keeping you intellectually downtrodden that we are never, ever, getting back together. Demand to work on real problems instead of another mobile social network for cat picture arbitrage in our age of the parasitic sharing economy.
The only way to fight computational evil is with greater computational good.
get to the point
Okay, okay. Less ideology, more concrete details.
How can we change anything these days?
introducing dx
I’m starting a system to advance the world—to save the world. Let’s call it dx.
dx is a residency program with one goal: make the world better through software and hardware. dx is not a fast-twitch pivot-at-all-costs grab-all-the-users startup. dx is rapid iteration immersive education mixed with research and production quality project work.
The dx residency program covers all expenses for participants including housing, food, transit, providing experimental equipment, and a monthly stipend for miscellaneous expenses.
This isn’t weekend build-a-webapp camp. Residency periods start at three months long. Every three months you’re welcome to leave or stay, provided everything works out.
dx has five tracks: next-generation machine learning, robotics, ambient computing, synbio, and production applications.
- machine learning: real world ai, scalable high dimensional data manipulation, planet-wide knowledge problems
- robotics: autonomous systems, ubicomp, openpilot / diydrones
- ambient computing: body-attached visual, audio, and haptic interfaces
- synbio: igem / biobricks / partsregistry
- production applications: secure software for web things, native mobile things, and upcoming unreleased things.
Not all tracks will be active every cycle. Active tracks depend on who’s in the right place at the right time.
We’re aiming for a mix of fresh minds and experience. Everything is about learning, not knowing. If you’re creative with a strong capacity for picking up material in multiple fields, we want you. The world needs you. The minimum requirement for joining: not being stuck in your ways. Be open to learning and growing alongside everybody else.
How many people can dx accept?
The size of the residency program depends on reaching funding goals. I hope to raise enough to accept at least two dozen people in the first cycle.
Where will everybody live?
The location will be announced when funding goals are further along. (hints: san francisco sadly seems to sort of suffocate me, and london calls me a stranger, so those two are out of the running.)
What about us people unable to relocate?
dx will also be mirrored online. You’ll have access to the same learning material and research systems used in the residency program. Even if you are forming an earth sandwich with us, I hope you’ll play along at home. We will be as inclusive as possible, but, sadly, I anticipate having resources to only support a finite number of physical humans.
{{{joinUs}}}
{{{fundUs}}}
aftermath
Some people will say we’re crazy. They can’t stop us or slow us down—we’ll just develop our hater radar. They need us. We don’t need them. Our eyes are red from staring into the computational abyss of never-ending trivialities for far too long. It’s time to wake up.
They need us, we don’t need them—our eyes are red.
Our minds are stronger than our programs. When we program, it feels like we’re meditating.
We’re made for the stars and we keep our grind in the dark. We’re just your normal casual usual every day type of nerds.
We’re creativity embodied and personified. When we feel inspired at a quarter to three—am—we go for it. We change the world.
endnotes
We live in odd times. But, we’ve always lived in odd times (see Sandman #13). This time feels different though. Due to generically available computational capacity, events and rights-violating behaviors are growing exponentially dangerous. We cannot abide this. We must step up to fix the world.
I’ll leave you with an excerpt of opening words from this year’s defcon program.
I have been observing and participating in the community for a long time, but something about this year is different. There has been a tension and frustration level that I have never felt before.
.
But the balance has swung radically in favor of the offensive, and defense seems futile to some right now.
.
When all of your favorite software, services and infrastructure are wired to be monitored from the beginning, you’ve got to be wondering where this all leads. How do we restore that balance? If it can’t be restored what do we do?
.
Also take some time to talk to others about how we as a community should move forward, I think some introspection will be good for us.
after endnotes
(miscellaneous uncategorized thoughts not appearing here are filed under introduction-notes)