this is not an article. this is unorganized notes from an article.
frontmatter
This is a selection of unorganized notes that were cut or didn’t make it into the dx introduction.
(alternative name for dx: “Society for the Advancement of Advancement”)
the notes
The world’s devolution is a natural outcome of having centralized services, centralized power structures, and centralized economic mechanisms run by silly people with greedy self interests. Just because our current situation is a natural outcome doesn’t mean we can’t steer the world in a better direction.
Don’t go back to them, don’t kill your voice. Make some noise. If we go quiet, how will they know they’re not alone? If you won’t riot, don’t bother coming home.
No more broken. No more falling down. We have spoken. It’s our time tonight to get loud.
What we do isn’t up to them. If the Internet doesn’t sleep, then that makes two.
We are the shamans and healers of modern society. Our technological capacity—our cpus, gpus, data centers, batteries, sensors, industrial design, knowledge of computational models—has converged to a point where only we understand the magic. We are the collective wizard behind the curtain.
We have power over society. We squander it.
We’re unorganized. Companies with uninspired management structures force us to remain stuck at local intellectual minima writing webpages and composing throw-the-cow phone apps instead of pushing ourselves to greater heights.
justification
Computers are the most terrifying thing on the planet besides life and large scale weaponry.
The people in charge try to make it look like they have everything under control. They’re good at faking it. They should confess they don’t know what they’re doing. They make it up as they go—except they’ve gotten it wrong.
We’re stuck just waiting for better luck. We need to stop waiting and make our own luck. If you want, you can play along.
If wisdom says things never change—if wisdom says we are foolish to have goals larger than ourselves—if wisdom says we should be walking away, I’d rather be naive.
Outline
- Things only get done if you try to do them.
- With concerted effort, not wishful thinking and marketing.
- The world is stuck. The world at large celebrates anti-intellectualism.
- We can learn, study, practice, research, experiment, and build our way our of our current societal problems. We don’t need to rely on broken models of mass psychology and big-moneybags-for-private-interest political machinations.
- We are going to build the future—and you’re invited.
- We’re starting with a rolling recruitment process. We accept good people as we find them. We provide food, housing, equipment, self-directed education with peer support, a monthly travel budget, and a budget for you to build what you need to build.
- This isn’t about startups. This isn’t about launching billion dollar companies. This is about building intelligent systems. We fall into three teams: improve the now, research the future, build the future.
- A wise man once said Google uses bayesian reasoning like Microsoft uses the if statement. Now, Google has obviously surpassed even that. They use DBNs for image recognition, they’ve been playing with statistical speech recognition long enough where it mostly doesn’t spit out gibberish, and they release research papers about finding cat faces across their clusters.
- Some people think Google is impossible to beat. We think Google is holding back the advancement of humanity by putting people to work on perfecting advertising.
Takeaways:
- We’re starting a computational army. We are not malicious. We are not childish. We are not anonymous. We are open and inclusive. We don’t exclude or seek to stop you from contributing.
- We’re a residency based program with full online material as well.
- For the ones who cross our paths at the right time, we give you a place to live, food, equipment, a focused reinforced learning environment, and a focused engineering environment to create the future.
- We have an interest in eradicating gratuitous rent seeking behavior in all aspects of society. You are not a special butterfly. Play by the rules. You’ll get there by our hand (and our fingers).
The ones in power act to dehumanize their opponents. “Them damn Liberals.”
Tens of thousands of developers have their brains limited by the technology choices of their employers. If you’re in the midwest and only have 1,000 Java job postings for WebLogic, your brain will rot.
Creepvertising – ambient location, based on tracking, based on samsung astroturf to manipulate your opinions, etc.
How to think about thinking – every thought is a unique brain state reached by the context of your environment, brain chemistry at the time (mood, feelings, depth of capable thought, rest, chain of events you can hold in your head). You can’t always have the “same thought” later, so write down what you have when you have it. When the inspiration strikes. It’ll help you get back into the mood of that thought later when you do want to expand on it.
There’s only one path to future stability and growth, future health and safety, we can pursue: we must get smarter. So, here, this August 2013, let’s start. Let’s form a computational army. Nothing silly or reductive. Nothing exclusionary.
Some people think they have answers. People think protesting changes things. Sitting in parks. Chanting with finger waving. Nothing changes, but you feel like you did something. Good for you. How about actually doing something next time? We won’t give Aaron Sorkin an opening to humiliate us.
We’re bound by our overlords—did I say overlords? I meant protectors, obviously.
We keep the back channels open in hopes of staving off disaster.
We are the priests of the modern age. We are the keepers of morality. Something in us eschews serving special interests and even interests of self perpetuation. We sacrifice for what is right, not what is expedient or profitable or allows corporations to walk around as invincible people immune to prosecution for illegal activities.
We believe in punishment fitting the crime. If you break the world economy on purpose, you get removed from the world economy. If you hold a bag of matter or type innocuous characters into a computer, the punishment should not be more than rape and murder and treason combined.
We believe in punishment based on reality, not bias, and certainly not Americanized racial bias which still permeates society and ruins tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands? thousands of thousands?—of lives each year.
We are not here to fight. We are here out of need. People like to talk about the framers of the US constitution. They didn’t foresee this failure scenario.
Without oversight, the rulers of our techno-military-corpocracy tent their hands and snark, “You should know, I get what I want, since you’ve been gone.”
We are gone no longer. We are here, and you no longer can get what you want. We’re back.