This is the site of Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt. I write about a variety of topics, from coverage of gnu Emacs web browsing, to graphic design and critiques of industrial policy. You can subscribe here. If you enjoy anything written here (or disagree with me) feel free to tell me about it.
My own personal favorites are the following:
The Nature of Art
Art has always been one of the most central aspects of human lives. It is not unique to the human experience, but it has become more important to humans than perhaps no other species on the planet. The history of Art is one of a continuous crisis and need to reïnvent itself, and as such our current age is no different. The contemporary crisis is one partly caused by the emergence of Large Language Models (llms) and their ability to quickly generate enormous quantities of visual imagery, but it is also caused by a more long-running trend of digital life and of its consequences.
Continue ReadingAll is Right With the World
Post-scarcity is here. And with it has the life without meaningful political action. The consequences of this can not be understated, although they have somehow been with us for quite some time, paling in comparison to the ever-growing predictions of science fiction. What shape does this world take, what are the forces governing its structure, and how will it continue to grow?
Continue ReadingThe Trouble with Fusion
Energy is perhaps the most important input of industrial society. Ever since the taming of fire, mankind has in some sense dreamt of a infinite source of fuel that could be used to drive all sorts of human activities — from cooking, transport, the grinding of grain, to the melting of ore. All these activities require an input in the form of abstract energy, in each case represented in another form. Where to best source this energy has however always been changing. First it was most assuredly the human body itself (through the consumption of food) but it soon extended to the use of natural forces such as the wind (presumably through things like sailing) and the power of rivers and the potential energy bound within. In the mid-twentieth century this hope turned toward nuclear fission, the splitting of heavy atoms. Nuclear power is today a fact of society — even if debate rages on about its practicality or share of grid infrastructure. A long sought answer to the problems of nuclear fission has been to instead use nuclear fusion, that produces no radioactive waste and that needs only as its original input water. But just as nuclear fission did not give us cheap power nuclear fusion will not.
Continue ReadingTrust
Choosing to trust is a decision that is much ridiculed today. It is in many cases easy to see with the benefit of hindsight that it was foolish to trust someone, but doing so in advance is of course much harder. In general we are moving in the direction of trusting less and less; exposure to betrayal is simply too high a price to pay. The consequences of this ripply out across society with tremendous impact.
Continue ReadingRussia is Not a Great Power
Russia is not a great power. It is in no way a contender for the title, and treating it as one of the “power brokers” of the world benefits no one except the autocratic regime that hinges its legitimacy on it but that has simultaneously suppressed the abilities of the Russian people to attain such a status.
Continue ReadingElements of Economic Security
Back in 2024 I was part of the first class of a new course at the Swedish Defence University titled Economic Security in Competition, Conflict and War. Throughout that course it became clearer and clearer to me that the field of economic security has a central element that makes it fundamentally difficult to implement. The subject has only become more relevant as of late, with the People’s Republic of China (prc) showing no sign of stopping its entrenchment into critical sectors of the economy and with ever-strengthening winds in the sails of protectionism everywhere from Warsaw to Washington. As such it is an issue that has continuously been brewing in the back of my mind these past years. But despite increased interest in the topic it has not become any clearer what constitutes economic security, and how it should best be attained and maintained. A crude definition might be the following:
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