ribbonfarm

We read an interesting paper today (ht Sachin Benny with an assist from ChatGPT) in the Yak Collective weekly governance study group (Fridays at 9 AM Pacific). Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil War, by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin (World Development, V 39, No. 2, 2011). It compiles, codes and analyzes data about a subset of modern civil wars that could be considered “Sons of Soil” (SoS) civil wars, marked by conflict between an ethnic minority which views itself as being “sons of soil” of a regional base, facing demographic incursions by a larger ethnic majority (possibly with its own adjacent “sons of soil” claim in an adjacent territory) expanding into the minority territory. The paper compiles 139 examples from 1949-2008 (yes, Israel-Palestine is in the set, no the US Southern border is not) and codes them, and concludes that worldwide about 22.3% of civil wars are SoS civil wars.

The paper focuses on the settled (for now) Sri Lankan Tamil case as the main illustrative case study, but obviously the Israel-Gaza is top of mind worldwide. In the US, the southern border migration crisis is equally salient but is unfortunately not coded into the dataset of the paper.

My brief notes on the paper:

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I’m a little late to the party, but I just finished the wonderfully imaginative There Is No Antimemetics Division (2020) by qntm. The premise is that our world is full of things with antimemetic properties. An antimeme is “an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.” Many of these are dangerous and require “secure containment procedures.” The story follows agents of a mysterious bureaucratic organization called The Foundation who chase down an increasingly bizarre menagerie of increasingly dangerous SCP critters.

The book originated in an online experimental fiction community called SCP, which stands for Secure, Contain, Protect. The project’s contributors write their contributions in a dry bureaucratic-reporting language, and seem to take their cues from random real-world things they pretend are dangerous things needing containment.

The title of the book is a line spoken by a Foundation character early on, who has forgotten that the Antimemetics division exists due to the influence of a dangerous uncontained SCP entity. The whole plot is built around agents having to work with things like that. They deal with their own unreliable memories with a mix of puzzle-box protocols and “mnestic” (mnesia being the opposite of amnesia) drugs. The plot is reminiscent of the Doctor Who antagonists Silence — aliens who you can see but forget about immediately once you turn away — but much more fully realized.

The whole thing is very clever (at times too clever — there’s a chapter with large parts redacted to make a plot point), but just charming enough that you don’t mind. The style is somewhere between Lovecraftian cosmic horror and Ballardian banality, with a stiff dose of near-Douglas-Adams camp.

I’ve just started exploring the underlying experimental metafiction community at SCP-wiki and it makes me feel old with its inventiveness. The book is a relatively conventional offtake from a very unconventional narrative corpus with very weird rules that nevertheless work (for example, it makes no attempt to maintain canonicity and everyone can contradict everyone else). No wonder it feels fresh.

Simon De La Rouviere of the excellent Scenes with Simon newsletter, which I’ve mentioned before, did a talk about SCP for the Summer of Protocols last year that tries to unpack the community and evaluate it as a kind of protocol metafiction.

Whatever it is, I like it. I’d like to try doing something like SCP in the future.

Antimemes, as I understand, are just one aspect of the Foundation universe. They’re a very interesting premise. Antigenes make no sense of course; a gene that doesn’t spread would by definition not survive. But the same is not true of memes. Memes happen to be adaptive for humans, since they power our cultural evolution, but they need not be. Clearly there are creatures whose survival depends on antimemetic phenotype traits, like camouflage coat patterns. Humans too make use of secrecy and stealth in some behaviors. The generalized notion here is powerful. Maybe every creature has a communication phenotype that’s X% memetic and 100-X% antimemetic.

I’ve been unconsciously practicing antimemetic blogging here to some degree for the last few years, for example in the anti-SEO numbered entries of the Captain’s Log blogchain. It’s quite amazing but I can’t remember a single idea from that series. It’s a personal memory blank. There are weaker antimemetic patterns, like titles with series parts, blog posts with few/no inbound or outbound linking etc. Newsletters are much more strongly antimemetic than blogs.

There are lots of writing techniques you can use to prevent an idea from going viral, and not even being noticed by people not primed to detect it. You might wonder why you’d ever need such techniques, but once you’ve had your fill of viral writing and meme-making (which I have), and are well known enough the default amount of attention you get is > δ > 0 (which I am), this becomes both creatively interesting to explore and pragmatically useful for some topics (for example when you want to openly write controversial things but go unnoticed by trolls primed to attack you for them). The trick is doing antimemetic writing without resorting to brute-force secrecy, cryptography, or steganography. Any idiot can simply write posts in private cozyweb channels, encrypt posts and only share keys with trusted people, or use steganographic deceptions. The real trick is to write in intrinsically anti-memorable ways where despite the reader wanting to retain an idea they think is important, they forget it. Cognitive burn-after-reading techniques.

Anyhow, highly recommend the book, the community, and Simon’s talk.

My essay The Extended Internet Universe, where I coined the term “cozyweb” (probably in my top 5 most successful memes) is featured in this cute little collectible book, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet put together by Yancey Strickler (whom you may have heard of as the cofounder of Kickstarter). Yancey’s essay, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, which I referenced in mine, leads this collection.

Both our essays appeared in May 2019, and the idea of a Dark Forest internet has since become something of a meme, joined at the hip to the cozyweb meme. I recall writing my post (a side-quest of sorts from the domestic cozy series I was writing at the time), and coming across Yancey’s (which had appeared a few days earlier) just as I was about to hit ‘publish.’ I paused for like 15 seconds to reference it, since ‘Dark Forest’ seemed to exactly complement ‘cozyweb.’ Four years later Yancey reached out about this book. Serendipitous peanut-butter-and-jelly hyperlinking moment, which is ironically what made the old internet (RIP) so great. Then the damn Trisolarans arrived and ruined everything. The book features several other pieces by other contributors in what is essentially an extended eulogy for the old internet, and a grimdark celebration of the brave cowardly new internet 😬☠️, where we all cower fearfully in cozyweb holes, behind antimemetic fields, whispering softly so the Trisolarans don’t find us. In the grim darkness of the far future, there are only antimemes (can you tell I’m currently reading There is No Antimemetics Division? That book pairs beautifully with this one btw).

The publishing model is also unique, and uniquely cozy, published in small samizdat-type batches that can escape detection by Sophons. The book is published by Metalabel, Yancey’s new venture, which attempts to bring cozy indie-music-label vibes and anti-memetic defense shields to publishing. The first printing of this volume sold out within a week, so if you want a copy you should grab one while copies of this second printing last. It will be securely delivered via sneakernet dead drop, and self-destruct within 5 minutes of opening if it has been tampered with.

For the Poe’s Law types out there in the Dark Forest: that last bit was a joke. The book will be delivered by normal mail, which as far as we know hasn’t yet been compromised by Trisolarans.

The group of contributors now forms a metalabel artists’ collective and will publish more things under the Dark Forest label. I’m considering publishing my recent short story, The Dark Forest Marketing Agency, under the label. And maybe this post on cozy hypertext. We’ll see.

Yancey’s post Rethinking Labels has more details on this labels model, and he also did a Protocol Town Hall talk on the genesis of the model.

I’ll be participating in a book-launch round-table tomorrow (being held in an underground bunker at an undisclosed location), limited to verified book buyers who can prove they’re not Trisolaris spies. I’ll share that recording when it is published and it is safe to do so.

In the meantime, grab a copy, and be sure not to tell anyone about this book. And please burn this blog post after reading.

I’ve been buried neck deep in work stuff this week, but I did find time to make this stack diagram of the world, inspired by the xkcd Dependency cartoon. Randall Munroe draws better than me, but in my favor, I use more colors.

Did you know most of the high-purity quartz needed for the semiconductor industry (for the equipment more than the wafers if I understand correctly; I’m foggy on that end of the industry) comes from one mine in North Carolina, and that the making of high-purity quartz is a closely guarded trade secret known only to a handful of organizations? I’m guessing China is close to figuring it out. It’s weird to think how fragile the world’s infrastructure is. Mess with one mine and take enough potshots at shipping near Yemen and you can shut the world down.

It’s funny how the utopian/dystopian discourses at the highest levels of abstraction, AI and crypto (the two domains that keep me busy at work) never worry much about the fragile bottom of the stack. I made up some non-starter political slogans about this situation:

Non-starter political slogans

1. Decentralize the quartz mines!
2. Permissionless 99.9% purity quartz for everyone!
3. Open-source EUV machines!
4. Oil from backyard CCS stills!
5. Lithium salts for the people!

I started reading Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes while I was in Istanbul last November and finally finished it last week. It’s a really solid and absorbing book, and far too dense and rich with detail to zip through, which is why I read it a dozen or so pages a night over months (it is 600+ pages, plus 200 odd pages of notes and references).

It’s rare for an actual history book, just a straight-up telling of a dense, long tale, to reorient your sense of history. I read my first world history book in high school and have felt pretty well-oriented since then. Books I’ve read since then have mostly served to deepen my sense of particular periods in particular times. They didn’t change my overall sense of history. This one did.

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I’ve been slow-reading Bettany Hughes’ Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities for months now, ever since I visited the city (on Kindle, so I didn’t realize when I started that it’s 600 pages plus another 250 odd notes). It’s dense and absorbing and I’ll probably do a reflections post when I’m done, but the fact that I’ve stuck with it made me think about how good history books scratch the same itch as good science fiction. The past is an alien planet. They do things differently there. Yet you recognize signs of the same lawfulness in the universe that governs life in your own time. You can feel kinship with people in 18th century Istanbul. Or 6th century Constantinople. Or Trantor in 47,000 AD.

Though history has a stronger cosmetic resemblance to fantasy (the past had actual knights and wizards, and unironic belief in magic), I think it has a deeper kinship to science fiction. Ted Chiang’s much discussed distinction between science fiction and fantasy (he’s made versions of this point in different speeches and interviews but I can’t find a canonical source or quote) makes this kinship legible. He argues that science fiction posits a lawful universe that may have strange laws but they apply to everyone, while fantasy posits a universe that recognizes some people as “special,” with special laws applying to them. Chosen ones. This is the essence of “magic” as the chosen mode of escapism, as opposed to “time travel” or “hyperspace jumps.” I almost made the same point in a 2007 post, Harry Potter and the Concept of Magic, but ended up making an adjacent less provocative and less interesting one.

At a certain level, science fiction is more true than fantasy. The universe really is lawful (though not in ways we might prefer in our idle speculative fancies). The universe really is not magical, in the sense of recognizing specialness in some living beings and responding differently to them.

Aside: I think the appeal of the Three-Body Problem is that it posits not just a lawful universe, but an inconveniently lawful one. Instead of fun affordances like time travel, the universe lobs 3-body chaos and dark forest shittiness on its living beings. Not only is nobody special, everybody is actually worse off than we imagine because the universe is lawful in a shittier way than we imagine. It’s a sort of hyper science fiction.

Good history may not offer clean-edged lawfulness, but it at least obliquely suggests a universe that’s some mix of noisy lawfulness and path-dependent arbitrariness. There is no room for magic. There is no room for Chosen Ones. Or Chosen People. Or Manifest Destiny type narratives. While there is of course plenty that is uncertain in any work of history, it is not uncertainty of the sort that opens the door to magic. Despite the desperate belief in magic that suffused Istanbul through the millennia, the city never actually enjoyed the workings of magic.

In good history books, as in good science fiction, there are no Chosen Ones. There may be characters who believe other characters are Chosen Ones, but you as reader don’t have to (to really appreciate and enjoy Dune, you kinda have to recognize Paul Atreides is not actually special, whatever the Bene Gesserit nuts and Fremen think, but to enjoy Lord of the Rings, you kinda have to buy into the specialness of elves and wizards, even if Frodo is not that special).

There is a genre of history, if it deserves that label, that resembles fantasy: hagiography. Any approach to history that posits the existence of “greatness” of some sort (Great Man theory, Great Nation exceptionalism narratives, One True Religion, One True Ideology) is hagiography. Unsurprisingly, hagiography sells better than history, just as fantasy sells better than science fiction.

Not surprisingly, I don’t enjoy fantasy much, and can’t stand hagiography at all. To fans of those genres, this probably comes across as some sort of weak-spirited reluctance to recognize greatness or Chosenness, and resentment over my own ordinariness, but that’s really not it. Greatness is simply deeply unsatisfying as a feature of an explanation for anything. It’s a deus ex machina. I’m happy to acknowledge and admire exceptional accomplishments by individuals and groups. I’m happy to admit I’m in the wrong half of distributions of many, perhaps most, desirable traits. I just don’t find explanations in terms of greatness (or Chosenness, or Specialness) to be explanations at all, let alone satisfying ones. In both natural and human laws, if you’re forced to posit two kinds of laws for two kinds of people, you’ve basically failed to make sense of your world. (There are two kinds of people in the world — those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t).

There are kings, knights, gods, saints, and wizards aplenty in Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities, but it is not a story about magic or their specialness. There are many characters parading through the book who had “Great” attached to their names (Alexander, Catherine, Suleyman…), but the account of history does not rest upon a presumption of axiomatic greatness possessed by some actors. That many saw them (and continue to see them) as “great” certainly affected the course of history somewhat, but it’s not part of the explanation. It’s not even particularly important as a feature of the story needing explanation.

At most, in good histories, belief in “greatness” helps explain the actions of some actors, just as belief in god helps explains the actions of others. Neither god, nor greatness, is necessary for good history writing, and in fact unironic belief in either on the part of the historian weakens, often fatally, the quality of the history. The effects on fantasy literature aren’t as bad. Positing greatness (or Chosenness or any of many equivalent traits that divide humans into two types based on laws that apply to them) can make for fun narrative premises. Preferring hagiographic histories centered on greatness suggests intellectual weakness to me (the primary failure of Straussians), but preferring fantasy over science fiction seems more like a harmless preference for a particular mode of escapism.

It’s always nice to see trails of thought connect up.

An idea I first encountered and really liked in a 2014 Steve Randy Waldman (interfluidity) post has apparently since acquired a name and a more extended provenance. Waldman’s post, Tax price, not value, presents the idea as a LVT/Georgism-flavored solution to NIMBYism enabled by artificially depressed property tax rates like so:

…There is, of course, a much easier way to gauge what a property would sell for: Solicit from its owner a price.

The price at which an owner would be willing to sell a thing has a particularly valuable characteristic. It limits the burden to alternative users of the exclusion in a property right. If the price is set low, a user harmed by exclusion can simply purchase the thing and have at. If the price is set high, alternative users may be seriously burdened yet be unable to buy access.

So, for the sorts of exclusion that do impose substantial burdens to alternative users, a natural policy intervention would be to require property owners to declare a price at which they commit to sell the property (for some period of time), and levy a tax of some legislatively determined percentage against that actual, actionable price, rather than a hypothetical market value. Property owners could pay as much or as little tax as they choose. When they set their price, they face a trade-off, between the risk of being undercompensated for losing the asset if the price is too low, and an exaggerated tax burden if they set a price so high that the risk of sale is negligible or the required overcompensation extreme. The owner is free to choose how much she values certainty of continued ownership, but she must pay for that.

The price set by the property owner might constitute an option to buy for all comers, or just for the state. (I’m not sure which would be best. What do you think?)

Posner and Weyl talk about essentially the same scheme in Property is Only Another Name for Monopoly and trace it to a 1965 paper by Arnold Harberger (which has a Latin American context/motivation — something about LatAm seems to encourage economics experimentation; probably US economists operating under moral hazard in authoritarian labs?). They’ve since written a book about such ideas I’ve been meaning to read, Radical Markets. The idea seems to be becoming increasingly popular in the Ethereum world as a way to actually set real prices in meaningful markets.

Schemes like this tend to be too simple, but in a good way. Starting incentive and mechanism design from a radical core can lead to meaningfully radical systems. A formula can beget revolutions. Vannevar Bush’s introduction of indirect cost support, the Black-Scholes formula, Vickrey (second-price) auctions come to mind. And if we’re lucky in the future, ranked-choice voting etc.

But for a scheme to have such potential there have to be mathematical rather than merely ideological reasons to prefer it. The Waldman idea stuck with me because it suddenly made Georgism make sense. Land-value taxation as such seems simply like non-property owners fighting an ideological battle with property owners. Tax income or wealth? Where you stand depends on where you sit. How much of each you have or expect to have. But Harberger tax? That elegantly threads the needle with a certain mathematical doomsday logic.

For the record, I’m not a pure Georgian/LVTist. The idea that all wealth derived from property stinks of mercantilist zero-sum thinking to me. I’m too Schumpeterian for that. I think wealth is a process not an asset. But Harberger tax… there’s a there there.

A naked Harberger tax would probably have all sorts of unpleasant consequences, but as the kernel of a more complex scheme, hmmm. A good formula is like construction material. You still have to learn to build with it. What can you build with Harberger taxes? Here’s a website I just found that seems to have some ideas.

I’m running the Summer of Protocols program for the Ethereum Foundation again this year. Here is the Call for Applications. I’d appreciate any help getting it in front of the right candidates. The core of it is what we’re calling Protocol Improvement Grants (PIGs): 90k for a team of two to work on improving a real world protocol (any kind, technological, social, organizational) over 4 months. We will be awarding 5 PIGs. We anticipate this is going to be tough because we’re trying to catalyze a new category of entrepreneurship: Protocol entrepreneurship. It exists in the wild of course, but naming and characterizing a wild pattern of behavior is often the first step to consciously cultivating it as a learnable capability that can be refined and systematically made more powerful.

I’ll be unpacking the concept a bit during a live information session on the program next week (Wednesday at 9 AM Pacific; details here). Attend if you’re interested in applying to the program, or even just curious about this idea of protocol entrepreneurship. In the meantime, here’s this Venn diagram I made for the short talk I’m prepping.

There is also a small grants program: 20 development grants of $1000 to work on a creative work, such as a short story or comic, that might “protocol pill” people. This is the PILLs program: Pill Incepting Lore and Literacy.

I can tell already this year is going to be much tougher than last year, since we’re trying something much more focused and ambitious and there’s the additional challenge of meeting and beating the standard set by the pilot year, which turned out very well. We’re effectively trying to speedrun the pioneer –> settler –> town-planner evolutionary trajectory. But if it works, the outcomes should really be worth it.

In case you missed my various posts about it in other places, the pilot Summer of Protocols program was an open-ended exploratory effort to map out the territory. You can read the research output as it is published here, and if you want to go deep you can request one of the limited number of Protocol Kits with printed copies of all the research (they’re not for sale; we’re distributing them for free people/organizations who might help drive the emerging protocols scene forward).

Wish us luck (“us” is a small team; besides myself, it’s Tim Beiko and Josh Davis of the EF, plus Timber Schroff and Jenna Dixon). We’re going to need it. And do forward this post to people you think might be a good fit for the program.