Archive

The Fate of Civil Liberties in National Crises

The sys­tem I would want is I would want an assur­ance that if some extra­or­di­nary mea­sure has to be put in place tem­porar­i­ly to deal with a tem­po­rary cri­sis, that the word tem­po­rary” will in fact con­tin­ue to apply. And I will add that this is a moment when I real­ly wish we had a func­tion­ing Congress.

Managing Online Partisan Conflict in r/politics with CivilServant

Liberal users com­prise a larg­er per­cent­age of these r/politics users, while con­ser­v­a­tives will com­prise a small­er per­cent­age. Through those users and through their vot­ing, they can con­trol what is seen and what is not seen. So a lib­er­al user, as a block, will down­vote more often than not some­thing they don’t agree with necessarily. 

Virtual Futures Salon: Beyond Bitcoin, with Vinay Gupta

Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the peo­ple have gone from not hav­ing it around to hav­ing it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a lit­tle younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t real­ly need to be explained. It does how­ev­er need to be contextualized.

Political Thought on the Just Rebellion, part 4

When we talk about rebel­lion, we’re usu­al­ly talk­ing about thought that is couched against the sup­posed ratio­nal­i­ty of the great rev­o­lu­tions of the mod­ern era.

Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin

I think the obvi­ous thing to do with one com­put­er per plan­et is fix cli­mate change before it destroys agri­cul­ture and leaves bil­lions of peo­ple to starve. That seems like a fair­ly rea­son­able kind of an objec­tive. You know, there are all kinds of lit­tle opti­miza­tions you could do with these things, but fun­da­men­tal­ly the big unsolved chal­lenges that human­i­ty faces are cli­mate change and resource scarcity.

The Conversation #32 — The Conversation and the Election

It’s like we’ve got all these proxy wars going, where peo­ple are fight­ing bit­ter­ly over these things. And if you could sort of go back to the orig­i­nal glob­al con­flict almost, of ideas, I think you’d get to some inter­est­ing ara­tional assump­tions. Some of which would be dif­fer­ent. Some of which might be very sim­i­lar. And then you’d won­der why the hell are these proxy wars going on?

From Biomolecular Computing to Internet Democracy

My main point is that Internet tech­nol­o­gy today does not sup­port the right of assem­bly, and there­fore it can­not and does not sup­port democ­ra­cy. The rea­son is that even though we can eas­i­ly form groups on Google, Facebook, you name it, we don’t know who the peo­ple on the group are.