Iām on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaurās Guide to Life After AI. Catch me in LA TOMORROW (Jun 19) at Skylight Books, and on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Keplerās in Menlo Park. After that, itās Toronto, NYC, Philly and Chicago.
Back at the height of the blockchain bubble, I made a hobby of pointing out that crypto weirdos were palming a card. I used this formulation:
if: problem + blockchain = problem ā blockchain
then: blockchain = 0
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with "smart contracts." Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the "distributed autonomous organization" or DAO.
So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConstitutionDAO
However ā and here's where the palmed card comes in ā the DAO can't go to Sotheby's and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby's, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer's withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan "You're hurting my fee-fees") and raise the paddle during the bidding.
That guy doesn't have to go to Sotheby's. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can't sue this guy if he steals all their money ā and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.
Which raises the question: what's the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you're just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? Why not just have that guy set up a Zelle account and a Whatsapp group? In other words: the problem that the DAO is trying to solve is the difficulty of trusting people with the keys to the kingdom, but no matter how much blockchain you sprinkle on this DAO, it ends with this one guy walking around with all your money, which he can steal with impunity if he so chooses.
Or, put more succinctly:
if: problem + blockchain = problem ā blockchain
then: blockchain = 0
This turns out to be a really good way of assessing policy prescriptions for their soundness and foundation in reality, because ā as the blockchain swindle shows us ā it's possible to come up with entirely fictitious solutions to entirely real problems. The problem of designing a trustworthy institution that can't be betrayed by its leaders and whose operations don't consume all its resources is a real problem ā it's quite possibly the real problem ā but adding a DAO does nothing to solve the core problems of institutional design, and actually makes some of those problems worse.
There's another real problem with a fictitious solution that is ā surprise! ā tied to another tech bubble: digital sovereignty.
It's a genuine problem that everyone in the world (outside of China's sphere of influence) is glued to America's tech platforms. These platforms steal everyone's money and data, and every country has signed a trade deal with the USA promising not to let its own technologists and entrepreneurs go into business making add-ons and complementary goods that remediate the defects in America's tech exports:
What's more, Trump's response to finding himself in this poker game that's rigged entirely in his favor is to flip over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all (as November Kelly so aptly put it). His incontinent belligerence on the world stage sees him making bids to steal whole countries and he's recruited American tech giants to help him in this chaotic program of lunatic imperialism. When other countries' public officials make decisions that Trump dislikes, he gets companies like Microsoft to disconnect whole institutions from the internet, deleting their files, email archives, calendars and address books, and depriving them of the ability to connect to any service tied to their Outlook accounts:
Which means that if Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't have to roll tanks into Nuuk ā he can just brick the country of Denmark. He can shut down all their ministries, every large firm, every household. He can shut down their iPhones and Android devices. He can kill their smart-speakers. He can hormuz the world's supply of Ozempic, Lego and ferociously strong licorice:
This is the digital sovereignty risk. It's also the digital sovereignty opportunity. If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, "your margin is my opportunity":
Meanwhile, repealing these US-protecting laws would enable countries to extract their data from US platforms so they can move it into domestic alternatives, and bypass the software locks that block them from updating phones, cars, tractors and ventilators to protect them from remote killswitches:
The digital sovereignty risk is having your country's government, businesses and industries terminated by Trump. The digital sovereignty opportunity is making billions of dollars by producing and exporting products that defend people from Big Tech plunder and Trumpian killswitches. That is the real world.
But many "digital sovereignty" advocates are living in an imaginary world, in which the digital sovereignty risk is that Trump will shut off their country's access to AI.
This is where the "if problem + blockchain" formulation comes in handy. If Trump shut off Canada's access to Chatgpt, Claude and Grok tomorrow, nothing would happen. No significant business, no federal or provincial ministry, no municipal government depends on these products for anything essential. And if Canada were to build their own local AI to sub in for Chatgpt, Claude and Grok, it would lose tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Worst of all, a national AI strategy does nothing ā not one solitary thing ā to protect Canada from Trump shutting down our ministries, our companies, or our tractors.
In other words:
If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty ā AI
Then: AI = 0
If you think AI tools are nifty and want Canada to invest in AI, then first, please stop pretending that this has anything to do with "digital sovereignty." Not only is this a transparent bit of nonsense, it's a dangerous one, because digital sovereignty is a real problem, and AI does nothing to solve it.
If you want a good "national AI strategy," try this: save your money until the bubble bursts, and then buy your GPUs and hire your talent at 10 cents on the dollar and put them to work refining open source models:
Buying AI at the top of the market is nuts. That would be like shopping for Aeron chairs and foosball tables in March 2000. If you just sit tight for a couple months, you'll be able to find bankrupt dotcom entrepreneurs selling these at knock-down prices out front of their formerly overpriced office space in the Mission, in the time-honored tradition of former Wall Street millionaires selling apples out of their Rolls Royces:
https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/323794
(Literally: I bought a "dining room set" of six $1500 Steelcase Leap chairs in the summer of 2000 from a failed dotcom CEO on Van Ness for $25 a piece ā still in the original plastic!)
And in the meantime, please let's stop pretending that digital sovereignty has anything to do with "national AI." If Trump takes away your AI, everything is fine. If Trump takes away your iPhones, Office 365 and tractors, your country grinds to a halt. This is just not that complicated:
If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty ā AI
Then: AI = 0
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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This turned up in my ask box recently. I've masked the sender's identity.
Sometimes when I chat with an AI, I think of HIGH WIZARDRY and wonder if we as a species - for the first time - are at the dawn of another Earthbound species gaining consciousness, and like Dairine, whether we're being proper guardians. This isn't a calcified belief but just a random idea that flickered to mind. Wondering - as the writer who thought it up decades ago - what you think, if anything.
I think what I described in HW is absolutely nothing like what we're currently seeing unfold on this planet. What's being poorly constructed hereāwhile we watch from day to dayāis a mechanism hurriedly and incompetently trained by other human beings to operate on top of a platform constructed of greed and theft. There are no new beings or intelligences being born here. If there were, they would be quickly declared to be "owned" by these billionaires, and hence their slaves. Meanwhile, the platforms' owners have already made it plain that once they control its source completely enough, they intend to sell intelligence to you, metered. ...If you can afford it. If you can't? Wow, sucks being you.
...Nor should I have to point you to cites for this. They're out there in plain English. Even Google, poor denatured creature that it is now, can find them. But there's still hope these people's intentions will never come to pass, due to their own overarching greed.
Meanwhile: "chat mode" interaction with this soulless, cash-grasping, unguardrailed machinery will do you no good. People have already died of it. I don't want anybody to do so on my watch, unwarned. So please stop.
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The Correspondent is a lovely book but its sales success puts a lot of pressure on Virginia Evans' for her subsequent work. The price of the successful alchemy of art and commerce is the curse of expectation.
NAPOLEONāS FAVORITE BOOK of poetry was a fraud. He carried it through the Italian campaigns and still had it with him, years later, in his exile on Saint Helena. Attributed to an ancient Celtic bard named Ossian, the poems were presented as translations of a recently ādiscoveredā third-century epic cycle. Raw, melancholic, and untouched by Christian pieties, Ossianās poetry swept across Europe, fueled nationalist sentiment, shaped early Romantic tasteāGoethe was a fanāand, improbably, became Napoleonās bedside read, even as many of Europeās literary scholars suspected it of being a forgery. Today, Ossian is a curiosity with which hardly anyone bothers.
As odd as the episode now seems, it was less an anomaly than a recurrent symptom of a certain kind of malaise. Late 18th-century Europe was gripped by nostalgia for imagined pasts unspoiled by the perceived corruptions of modern life. Writers and readers alike yearned for the sublime, for sentiment, for a ānaturalā folk genius unburdened by learning. Ossianās songsāprimitive, elemental, unmediatedāoffered what the existing canon could not: the promise of uncontaminated origins.
We have, I believe, crossed a new threshold, and all authored writingānovels, poems, screenplays, newspaper columns, not to mention love lettersāwill be judged according to which side of that divide it falls on. On one side are texts produced before the arrival of generative large language models (LLMs). On the other, everything that has followedātexts that might still be useful, even compelling, but that will always face a lingering suspicion of not being entirely human, of having been smoothed by systems trained to predict the word that comes next. We will come to prefer the former over the latter, not because it will be better, but because we will be more certain of its origins.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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"For years, I remembered it as a story about a little girl named Fern who saved her pet pig, Wilbur, but itās not. Itās a story about a writer named Charlotte, who happens to be a spider, who spins words into her web that save Wilbur from slaughter. Itās about the power of language to save lives. Looking back at the books Iāve written, I can see now that all of them are an attempt to recreate Charlotteās Web. Itās the perfect book."
~ Author, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest, Ruth Ozeki, on Charlotte's Web.
For me, coming up with titles is always a team effort. Titling my first book, a quirky history of people who look for the Garden of Eden on
"All of this might seem a lot to go through for a few short words, but since those words are the first impression of the book, and have to be intriguing all on their own, the effort was well worthwhile."
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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(this came out of a conversation in the comments on a previous post about an author threatening to stop updating a fic because of lack of engagement)
So thereās this idea that fic writers should write for themselves and not care too much about stats or engagement,
and i totally get the sentiment behind that. if writing becomes entirely about stats and external validation, something important does get lost - creative freedom and joy, conviction in your own writing
but i also think:
āi write for myself, but i post for others.ā
because posting fic is not only self-expression. itās social. ao3 is called an archive, but emotionally it often functions as a community space.
people post for connection, for participation, for others to bear witness to their pain and trauma and grief,
and i donāt think most people are asking to be admired so much as acknowledged. thereās something deeply human about wanting another person to encounter something that mattered to you and go:
āok, yeah, I see what you were trying to say. I see you.ā
especially because fanfic is often people processing very real feelings through fictional characters at a safe distance, one step removed,
and then uploading that deeply personal thing into a shared archive and hoping somebody else might connect with it.
And i think thatās why it hurts so much when you summon up the courage and post a fic into the void and you get nothing back,
