I first became infatuated with the diaeresis when I used to read The New Yorker. Archaic in modern English it consists of two dots (¨) placed above a “normal” letter like the in the word naïve or coöperate.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer the diaeresis, but I merely do because it is rare. I am a natural hipster — I shall not deny it — but I do think standing out from the crowd is becoming more and more important these days as people yearn for genuine information and dead internet theory becomes more and more real.

This is exacerbated by the fact that I like using em-dashes¹ — something that has apparently become a “sign” of ai (artificial intelligence) authorship. To rebelliously use the diaeresis (even though spellcheckers and ai resist) acts as a proof that the text is legitimate. I am not saying that this is a sustainable approach — adding some ¨’s to your text is trivial to do — but that does not really matter. The problem with ai is not really a matter of trusting if it has been used or not. Instead it is a problem of saturation.

Writing is something that necessarily requires effort. Not because it is hard to come up with grammatically correct sentences or to press buttons on a keyboard fast enough, but because it requires you to actively challenge your ideas and to present them in a way that communicates the essence of that idea, not of the words representing it. llms allow for the production of lots of pieces of writing that are not the product of writing. Showing that you have actually thought about the subject and actually care is your most important job as an author in a world with llms. The diaeresis is a (small) step toward that.

I expect most acronyms are understood by most readers (take for example the “ai” that I have already used in this text) but there is always someone who has not encountered any given acronym before.² I therefore think it is polite to specify, even when it may seem obtuse.

It helps that I “read out” most acronyms whenever they come up — even in person — both because I like thinking about what they mean contextually and to avoid writings things like “ssd drive”.³

I generally try and avoid contractions in written text. This is for a similar reason as with acronyms, if makes me think through what I am actually writing on a more detailed level. It is however fine to use when quoting or trying to imitate spoken language — such as in rhetorical questions.

Finally there is the question of brand names. These I deliberately choose to swim against the grain on. Capitalization of certain forms is anathema to any degree of respect for the reader. The word “iphone” is a description of an object (both physical and cultural) in the world; the word “iPhone” is an advertisement. In a few cases this form of strange writing is required for the sake of clarity or to retain meaning — Openai instead of open ai — but oftentimes the end result is the perpetuation of a consumer society that worships the idea of objects or services above their actual function.

There is nothing more frustrating than reading a text where the author has translated Chinese terms or phrases in parentheses (像這樣) but written it — not even just in pīnyīn, but in pīnyīn sans-diacritics. This tells the reader next to nothing about what the original word actually was for all but the most common words, but also does inform the reader that the author does not even possess a limited understanding of Chinese (what one might learn in an hour or two of inquisitive study). This is why I try and always offer translations in Chinese characters whenever a concept shows up, and allow the reader to understand the meaning and choose the pronunciation themselves (in whatever Chinese dialect or language they may choose).

Language as a concept is however beautiful. While I am not a master of languages I do find that using phrases and terms from other languages (even from ones that I do not speak) enriches the text and gives a more multifaceted quality. For these I do not usually offer a translation and merely challenge the reader to try and learn new things about the world, its history, and the people that reside within it.

Latin is a particular favourite of mine. When writing in Swedish it is naturally looked down upon to fall back on an English phrase. It shows how one does not fully command the Swedish language in order to express oneself fully. But Latin has, in practically all European languages owing to its ecclesiastical use, formed an exception to this. It acts as a sort of extension of alternative words or phrases that can be bothered to create another meaningful and interesting layer to a text.

This is partly covered in the colophon, but I this website is written in Org mode, and as such its structure is somewhat decided by the medium. Like in markdown or pdf-files each text is a two-dimensional stand-alone work. Said work may exist in an advanced intertextual context, but each (most) work is not a film, audio file, or video game.

But the website is also not a pdf, and treating it as such would be incorrect.⁴ Writing for the web requires a different style; one that is easier to follow and uses shorter paragraphs. Not so short as the recoiling style of Linkedin would expect, but shorter than that of a printed book — perhaps a few sentences.

I also have a sense of pride for my writing, and so I treat its presentation with a corresponding level of respect. The design and appearance of the website is important to me, as I believe it should be important to you. An example of the opposite would be the former Swedish prime minister and later also foreign minister Carl Bildt’s blog Alla dessa dagar (“All these days”). It has a horrendous appearances in my opinion, and is only saved by the ability to be read through and rss reader instead of web browser. At the risk of seeming a bit narcissistic I will quote myself:

If you care about your text you have to care about its presentation. […] This is what is required of you as an artist; as an artist in the sense of a creator of new, radical ideas. If you do not believe that your work is […] “the best in the world” you will not have the confidence to venture out into the world and present it.

Tinkering with the site appearance is therefore an important part of the writing process. They are however still quite separate activities, and I do not often mix the two. Rather it is the case of treating your own text at the level of which you want it to be treated.

There are numerous occasions when you are not in control of the presentation. In those cases nothing can be done. But you should nevertheless try and be deeply involved in how the work will appear when presented. Looking it over, ideally with fresh eyes, is the least you can do before publishing.

The biggest take away from this text should not be to copy or emulate any of these recommendations (but you are of course free to do so). Instead it is the idea that the content of writing and the style of it are inseparable. Even matters as different as using one or two spaces at the end of sentences⁵ creates a small difference.

Perhaps the choice itself is impossible to be noticed in the writing process, perhaps it is even stripped away by an editor or export process, but the deliberate choice made by the writer still matters. It does so by subtly influencing the content by deliberate choices made. ❦

Nuclear strategy (id est strategies involving nuclear weapons) is in many ways the perfect form of analysis for high-stakes conflicts that are not easily solvable. Much nuclear strategy was developed during the cold war; when neither the usa nor the ussr saw peaceful coöperation between the two as a major option. At the same time they realized that a direct conflict would doom humanity, and did their best to avoid one. The same sort of ideas are useful when having to, for example, coöperate with a colleague or classmate on a shared assignment, where performance is more important than a generally cordial relation.

There is nothing rational about nuclear strategy, but it is an attempt to approach the matter with a somewhat rational lens. Conflicts (frozen or hot ones) involving nuclear weapons are always matters of perception and emotion just as much as they are matters of empirical dangers and capacities. These are not opposing forces, but must be used together to full fill your aims.

The most famous strategic concept is of course mad — Mutually Assured Destruction. This is (literally) the nuclear option; the threat that if your opponent acts, you will massively retaliate and leave the both of you in a sorry state. Directly referencing mad is however not all that useful, because the whole idea is to avoid crisis to begin with. Instead you have to deter action by your opponent such that they do not dare act to begin with. This is done through the “Three C’s”:

1. Capability. The ability to actually carry out a threat, even if you do not intend to. It is of course possible to “bluff” a capability that you do not actually posses, but that will dampen your…
2. Credibility. How likely you are seen to carry through your threats, and how likely you are to merely be bluffing.
3. Communication. Most important of all is of course communication. If you do not say what you demand, and what you intend to do if those demands are not met, there is no point in the previous two aspects.

The Three C’s quickly rule out certain strategies: Telling your boss “if you don’t give me 100000 Euro bonus I will burn down the building” is not a credible threat, even if communicated clearly and something within your capabilities, because it is a clear overreaction and moreover does not give either one of you much room to maneuver. If you do not get your bonus you would have to burn down the building or else lose all your future credibility (and you are probably not willing to burn down the building). At the same time your boss is probably not willing to give you a 1000000 Euro bonus and will likely be forced to retaliate (by firing you).

What you need to do is to deliberately give your opponent an off-ramp. This might seem counterintuitive — why help your opponent? But it is intended to increase the likelihood of any deal, rather than a very unlikely “perfect” one. You might instead ask for a more modest sum and be armed (for Capability’s sake) with a job offer from a rival company. That way your boss has an ability to save face (“it didn’t cost that much” and “they were going to leave!”) instead of being forced to fire you.

It is a paradox of nuclear warfighting that more nuclear weapons leads to less destructive strategies. If you only have one nuclear weapon you are most likely going to use it against a large, rich city (a strategic target); if you have very many small bombs you instead target military installations and fleets (tactical targets). In such a situation the probability of using any nuclear weapons is of course higher, but the corresponding destruction is also lower. These two factors combined lead to a much more credible threat. For interpersonal relations this means that conflict becomes more likely the lower the stakes are, but that such conflict is much lower-level that it would otherwise be — neither party has to escalate to mad straight away. If you do not have a job offer in hand you will not be as likely to ask for more money.

The aspects discussed above are not unique to nuclear strategy, they are also ideas used in deterrence theory and game theory more broadly,¹ but they were largely born out of nuclear war because of the incredible stakes involved. But there are older aspects of warfare that are all-too-commonly overlooked.

One of the most influential treaties on modern military thinking was the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz’s² posthumously published work On War. His most famous aphorism is of course that “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, something that is — as we have established — due to the social and interpersonal nature of war. It is therefore that war is merely the final form of a conflict or debate; one possible method by which to force your adversary to act in the way that you wish. On War is a very political work, but its most interesting comments are on how to carry out war itself. His most succinct quote is thus:

In war everything is simple, but everything simple is hard.

This is the summary of his concept of friction — applicable to almost all form of human organisation. For Clausewitz, this was the act of merely moving armies from point A to point B. Doing so was (perhaps predictably) much harder to do than merely giving an order. What exactly will cause this friction is impossible to predict, but managing it is what makes war difficult. This is well-worth remembering when dealing with large groups of people; it is the accumulation of small, individually surmountable problems that make big things hard. This is true regardless of if the problem is waging a continental-scale war, planning a party, or constructing infrastructure.

Another major aspect of conflict is the fog of war, the chaos and complexity of a conflict that makes it impossible to know exactly what is happening as the battle is in its midst. This is naturally true of other things as well — the gathering of intelligence to act upon is the first and most critical step in managing any crisis or unforeseen development. Recently there has been talk of this aspect “disappearing”, particularly in the Russo-Ukrainian context, but this is merely a shift in the fog from the tactical to the operational and strategic levels.

This ties naturally into the last aspect, the fundamental element of chance present in war. The outcome of a battle is always unpracticable, and while you can change the odds to be in your favour you will never know how an engagement will turn out. The Prussian general Moltke therefore said the following:

The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon’s saying: “I have never had a plan of operations.” Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.

“[A] plan of operations” here means a plan on the level between the strategic — the large-scale allocation of resources and ultimate political objectives — and the tactical — the boots on the ground view of how to win specific battles. You never know how a given battle or confrontation will play out, and so planning is wasted on the operational level.

To be clear, this does not mean that all planning is unnecessary. Both the strategic level (what do you want to achieve?) and the tactical (how do you increase the odds of a favourable outcome?) levels benefit tremendously from planning. But keeping Moltke’s (and Napoleon’s) words in minds means always including a level of flexibility in your expectations. The enemy always gets a say in war, and because the nature of war is inherently antagonistic you do not have any way to influence your opponent other than acting yourself. For your actions to actually matter you must put yourself out there and act (in a philosophical sense) in a relation to the world.

It is very common to overlook this dialectical aspect of conflict. We like to think that we are fully in control Even when we can foresee hardship, we like to think that we are good at predicting what hardship will come our way.³ This is true even when there is no intelligent opponent (and merely Clausewitz’ friction) but is made worse when our adversary is able to move against us. A classic example would be how the French built the Maginot line along the Franco-German border, leaving a weak point in the Ardennes that in hindsight the Germans had to use.

The board game Diplomacy is my favourite table-top game.⁴ Playing out in an alternate pre-ww1 world, each player controls one of the great powers of Europe trying to take control over the continent for themselves. There are no fixed alliances, and players all take their turns at the same time — having to decide in advance whether or not to coöperate (or betray one another).

It is a game that has some very interesting implications for computer play, as negotiation and deception are integral aspects of gameplay. There have been some very interesting projects, most notable Meta’s Cicero agent back in 2022. But particularly interesting is how Diplomacy can never be a solved game. France is clearly the strongest nation,⁵ but will still easily lose if ganged up on. The true gameplay is not on the board, but in the minds of your fellow players.

Playing Diplomacy is also a wonderful way to test yourself and practice your persuasion as well as capacity for handling setbacks. You will almost inevitably be betrayed in Diplomacy, and the situation may very well seem hopeless when it finally happens. But it is in situations like that where it is important to remember that conflict is always social, and can be changed depending on how the facts are framed.

Betrayals often beset betrayals (what ir-theory calls bandwagoning) because a weakened opponent is easier to conquer. When this happens, it is a true test of one’s resolve. The hour may appear dark, and initial projections likely show your imminent demise within a few in-game years. This will also become the case if you merely play the board; but success comes from recognizing how to shift the nature of the board itself. In Diplomacy this comes from splitting enemy alliances by appealing to the losing party of your invaders. Real life is surprisingly similar — groups are always composed of parts with clashing interests, and in many cases the inter-group dynamics are much more powerful than any outside threat merely by function of proximity.

I have seen players with only one supply center remaining⁶ claw themselves back to becoming one of the more dominant countries on the board. The only way to do this is through grit, determination, and the help of others.

It is equally important to avoid losing the initiative when things are in your favour as it is to avoid destruction when it is not. This may be even harder to do than merely surviving, as the natural state is to perceive a successful power as a threat in any zero-sum game. To do this you have to continuously support an image of goodness to your allies and a aura of invincibility to enemies. If either (or both!) of these begin to crumble it leads to a cascading risk of betrayal and collapse that culminates the bandwagoning situation described above. Machiavelli describes this scenario quite well in The Prince:

It is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved? It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

❦

Nuclear fusion, just like nuclear fission, makes use of the strong force to harness energy. As can be inferred from its name, the strong force is incredibly powerful amongst the fundamental forces of the universe; two orders of magnitude stronger than the electromagnetic force that governs over chemical bonds. The difference between fusion and fission is that while fission (and thus contemporary nuclear power) splits unstable heavy isotopes¹ into smaller ones, fusion takes isotopes of hydrogen (the lightest element) and merges them together to create heavier helium. Both of these release energy in the process, but fusion is considerably harder to succeed in.

Sometimes, when talking about llm alignment or the internet, people will mention “instructions for how to make a nuclear bomb” as something very arcane and secret. In fact, it is technically quite easy — it simply requires a lot of resources.² Nuclear power (and weapons) harness energy by concentrating a lot of fission-material in a small space. The difficultly in doing this for weapons comes from how to quickly concentrate this before the explosion rips the bomb apart, and for nuclear power the difficultly is in controlling the chain reaction — getting a usable amount of power without letting the process spiral out of control.

For nuclear fusion, the process is reversed. Getting fusion to occur at all is quite difficult, and even when you can make it happen it is even harder to (i) create more energy³ than was used to create the reaction and to (ii) extract that energy into some useful form. The American National Ignition Facility is the only experiment that has generated a net-positive amount of energy through fusion, and it did so by firing 192 laser beams into a small pellet. How does one create electricity from such a process? An alternative approach, magnetic confinement, simply heats a homogeneous mass of hydrogen plasma to very high temperatures — insulating it from its surroundings by a very strong magnetic field that keeps it floating in a vacuum. The very high heat means that ions will strike each other randomly at very high velocities, fusing together in the process.

The reason that the hydrogen atoms need to have a very high (relative) velocity is so that they can overtake the initial resistance of the electromagnetic force. Regular hydrogen is only composed of a single proton, and since it is positively charged it will push away any other positively charged hydrogen. Simple hydrogen atoms are also incredibly hard to “hit” because of their very small size. Using larger elements — like helium — makes the repelling electromagnetic force even larger, so instead one uses an isotope of hydrogen that includes either one or two neutrons, deuterium and tritium respectively. Deuterium is naturally occurring in small amounts and can therefore be extracted from plain water in a comparatively simple process, but tritium is faintly radioactive and thus does not exist naturally on earth but is only produced in nuclear reactions. Any fusion plant thus needs to create its own tritium if it wants to be successful commercially.

One of the largest problems with contemporary nuclear power is the (largely unanswered) question of nuclear waste. Of the 31 nations of the world who posses nuclear power, only Finland has a complete solution for long-term storage of waste. This is not a problem with nuclear fusion. Fusion reactions create neutron flux that irradiates materials, but those materials do not have the same intensities of radiation as fissile (or formerly fissile) material. The direct byproducts of fusion, largely helium-3 (an isotope of helium with one neutron) is not radioactive and can be used in various industrial applications or vented into the atmosphere.

Fusion will not be built for a long time. There is an astounding and impressive amount of work being done, much of it useful, but none of it is even in the same league as a commercial power plant, not to mention ballparks. As mentioned above, only a single facility has ever reached a net-positive amount of energy production. Saying that you will soon be building power plants is like keeping a campfire lit in the rain using a flamethrower and then saying you are going to build a coal power plant using your patented 24/7-flamethrower-method.

Even then, building futuristic has-yet-to-even-be-done-in-labs reactors at commercial scale would not give us limitless energy. There are many levels of break-even in fusion; the most simple one is of course the question of raw energy, but much of that energy is in hard-to-harvest forms like radiation of various kinds.⁴ Only the amount of energy released as heat can be reasonably used to boil water and drive a steam engine to create electricity. There are enormous energy losses in this process — fission plants can only harvest a third of the (thermal) energy produced, leaving ~66% as waste heat. Beyond that a power plant needs to be able to produce as much power as was used in the production of deuterium fuels, for the extraction and transport of lithium-6,⁵ the construction and maintenance of the facility itself, and various utility process related to all of the above.

Shrinking the cost of building fusion reactors is meaningless because their operational costs are so large and their benefits non-existent for power production (as of yet). The more you run a reactor, the more energy is lost and the more money you have burned. It is like solving our flamethrower-campfire by making the charcoal cheaper; it does not solve the fundamental underlying problem with fusion power which is that it does not produce energy. From the above article:

Energy Singularity has some advantages. With their stronger magnets, design experience, and domestic supply chain, they believe their reactors will be the most cost-effective in the world. […] Having already built a first-in-class hts tokamak under budget and on time, I trust their estimate.

Lowering costs does not improve your cost-effectiveness if the costs of your reactor are theoretically infinite. This is fine of course for research and development, and is thus not useless, but I can easily build a non-energy-producing fusion reactor myself for a far smaller budget than Energy Singularity’s.

But fear not, for we actually have a working form of limitless green fusion power that can supply the world, is tried-and tested, and has already been deployed at scale: its called renewables.

The problem with energy production is not whether or not it is feasible, but at what cost energy can be produced. Another huge source of power would be if everyone constantly rode electricity-producing bikes at home, but we have all collectively agreed (through the market) that there are more beneficial uses of our time and resources. If you were paid $100 for every hour you spent on such a bike there would likely be a lot more people doing it — thankfully there are better ways of producing large amounts of power cheaply. The main cost of power plants is in their construction, maintenance, and fuelling (if relevant) but for some reason that is conveniently forgotten when talking about fusion.

All renewable power sources ultimately derive their power from the largest and most efficient fusion reactor we are familiar with, the sun. Even fission power, that can in rough terms be summarised as

We found a rock that gets really hot no matter what, and if we put the rock in water it starts to boil and gives us infinite power.

is quite hard to do commercially because it requires expensive machinery, safety equipment, and facilities on top of the cost of obtaining this rock. That building a super-expensive plasma vessel surrounded by superconducting magnets would be cheaper is absurd. By contrast wind power has been profitable for centuries — powered by the sun as wind currents are created through the uneven distribution of sunlight across the planet.

This is not to say that fusion is “doomed” or will never succeed, it is rather just that (i) it is really quite difficult to do as a way to extract energy and thus will likely not happen soon and (ii) would not magically be able to supply everyone with cheap power. Fusion has always been a few-decades away because, while fusion itself is entirely possible to do in a lab, it is difficult to use as an energy source. It did not take all that much effort to go from nuclear weapons to nuclear power (1945–1951) but we have now had fusion bombs for 75 years and have yet to produce electricity from it. That the physics allow for the possibility means that it is hard to comprehend how nobody has just “done it” yet, but so far it has escaped the clutches of the world’s most talented engineers for three quarters of a century. Lewis Strauss said in 1954 that

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter[.]

This is the same sort of language used to describe a future of fusion power. It did not come to pass. Electricity seems to be one of the worst offenders for Jevons’ paradox — it was in fact the production of coal for energy that Jevons originally refereed to. Instead of thinking of a future technology that will swoop in and solve all of our problems with energy (cost, environmental impact, et cetera) we should focus on the solutions that are available today. The world’s energy system needs reform; it needs to be more integrated, cleaner, and in many ways larger as well. But most of all further developments need to be made in “the fifth fuel”, namely efficiency.

Even when fusion power inevitably⁶ becomes a reality, it will likely fulfil a similar niche as fission plants — used by advanced high-tech economies to provide stable base-load power and reduce dependence on energy imports. It will not solve the world’s problems overnight. Nuclear power plants famously take quite a long time to build, and a delicate high-tech machine like a fusion reactor is no different. Once commercial power becomes possible it will thus take many years, perhaps as long as a decade, to get up to speed in large-scale integration with the grid. Don’t hold your breath. ❦

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.

There are many ways to trust, but often what we trust is a person. In many cases that person is hidden from us, represented through the state or a firm.¹ Perhaps in an even greater number of cases (although the internet is making this less and less the case) we are actually trusting people directly when we believe we are trusting those abstract entities — in such simple things as the grocery store employee not being sick when handling our food or the clerk in delivering our paperwork.

I have recently found myself repeatedly enmeshed in discussions about identity and trust, often (but not exclusively) in technical forms. In this case obtaining trust is the method of making sure that the individual is who they say they are. This can be done in numerous ways like passwords,² access to physical items (like keys, sim cards, or an airgapped machine), and through a combination of the above (access to a cryptographic private key). But trust really operates on a deeper level. The point of authentication is to make sure the person carrying out an action is the one you trust, but it does not build that trust to begin with.

Technological development has led to a general decline in trust. Think of the telephone; it has generally meant a detachment from the immediate present, making us more inclined to “check up” on the activities of others. The portable (or cell) phone exacerbated this feeling and made it possible to reach another person practically at all times. It is a feeling that people of my generation now has had as our entire lived experience.

Today’s children do not have the same freedoms that previous generations did. Growing up I was still free to roam around the neighbourhood and visiting friends without anybody knowing our exact coördinates or activities. I got my first phone originally because my parents wanted some way for me to call them for help when i first started walking to and from school alone. This is quite a reasonable use of it, and it does not impose on my freedom if I am the only one initiating a communication.³

But the existence of a phone has more consequences, a child with a smartphone becomes digitized and able to operated on through the connective web. Them being able to call you inevitably means you being able to call them, and that makes you aware of this constant ability to “check up” on what they are doing. Apple’s Find my iphone became simply Find once it became clear that people were using it (or similar services) to track loved ones — to constantly “check up” on how they are doing instead of simply trusting their own agency.

Many people’s anxiety and loneliness stems from a fundamental lack of trust — in others, in themselves, and in other’s trust in them. Not being able to securely expect that the people surrounding you will be there when you most need it means a world where one has to manage entirety alone; a bellum omnium contra omnes. Managing to survive (and thrive!) in such an environment is naturally a challenge, and one that we humans are not made to deal with as tribal creatures.

It is then not strange that we, as non-trusting individuals, choose to reinforce this tradition by building structures that remove the need for trust. I have chosen to reject this. This is surprisingly difficult, it is not natural to trust someone who does not trust you in return. It leaves you vulnerable to betrayal, and thus is really only something that is possible to do if you are secure in your position and confident in yourself. But choosing to unilaterally trust is a requirement for building a generally trusting society.

In numerous developed countries, and at least in the Nordic ones, self-checkout machines are becoming increasingly common. I have no doubt that the reason for this is rooted in the ever-increasing extension of the division of labour (particularly through the employment of capital), but it has had tremendous ramifications for trust. It is now possible to maintain one’s existence in one of humanity’s most dense concentration — namely the city — without coming into contact with another person. You can work remotely, or as a lone delivery driver picking up enigmatic packages and delivering them to doorsteps, and then get all your basic needs delivered or machine-scanned yourself. But equally it has made the employees that are left behind increasingly paranoid and strained.

It is my understanding that there has occurred significant increase in theft following the implementation of these machines. This has led to workers confronting people who look young (to maintain haphazard age restrictions on self-service) or for people who bring bags into the store (who do so in order to carry home the food or items they buy). The age restrictions are particularly troublesome; alcohol, tobacco, and cinemas have age restrictions in order to help protect children for their own sake, but denying them the simple freedom of being able to skip a long line is a small erosion of democracy.

Still, age restrictions on self-service machines does not spell the end of liberal democracy. It is however a sign of how our current state no longer trusts its own citizens. If we can not trust people to buy all the things they take off the shelf in the grocery store how can we trust them to pick the right future of our nation and state in elections?

Similarly the expansion of closed-circuit television (cctv) and other forms of mass video surveillance is also a form of a negative spiral, where a decreased level of trust leads to more cameras, that in turn leads to a further erosion. Fear over crime can only be solved in the long term by a reduction in fear (for crime can never be entirely eliminated) but this can not be attained if the level of trust in society remains low.

There are few democratic nations in the world today that have a civil and collected political environment — strict polarisation has become the norm. Political extremism and division is not the fault of any one political system. It can not be fixed merely in The United States, France, Austria, or Japan. It is a flaw with the overarching system that all of these nations share.

Party membership has seen a long decline across the world, and yet people are in many ways more intensely politically engaged⁴ than ever before. I find it hard not to interpret this as anything other than an dissatisfaction with the system of participation. It is not a mere mechanical system, but also one that is social in nature — it is a question of feelings and of relations between individuals and groups.

Solving this is thus not a technical question; it can fundamentally not be solved through the use of statistics or models. Instead we must tackle it head on, in the grit of intellectual hand-to-hand combat. It must be dealt with personally and intimately. Jesus said “Love your neighbour as yourself”,⁵ and it is thus. Love should be given out unilaterally and unconditionally, with nothing expected in return. The chief requirement for this is trust, and as long as you put your trust in others you will be continuously surprised by how much your investment will pay off.

This lays the basis for a radical new democracy. Radical in the etymological sense of the word — stemming from Latin’s radicalis meaning “root”. Democracy has always been personal, just as all politics is personal in that it is acted on through people. Our abstractions and “political systems” always have their foundation in that personal level, of a politics that is done between four eyes. A truly democratic political system always derives its power from the people, and can always be changed by the people if it does not serve their purpose.

Sweden is quite a high-trust society — it is a fact commonly quoted by politicians and academics alike. But even then this trust is not something that we can take for granted. It must be nurtured and safeguarded. Were we to give, for example, the police (an institution in which there is quite high social trust) unwarranted powers it would inevitably lead to more serious mistakes; “power corrupts”. By then that trust in that institution will be gone, and the societal benefits that come with it as well. For similar reasons it is problematic when politicians like Ebba Busch are disingenuous in debates — not because of the contents of their statements but because it erodes trust in the democratic process and creates feelings like “well, politicians always lie” when it does not have to be that way.

Trusting others does not need to be foolish — you do not need to be a doormat — but the general baseline in our society can and should be raised. In general it means giving people the benefit of the doubt, of not asking needlessly inquisitive questions and giving people the space and agency they need to accomplish tasks and/or maintain themselves.

I have (unfortunately for environmental reasons) been spending a lot of time at airports recently. The airport functions as a good example of a trusting public space. People are free to browse and pick food in little open stores without being constantly watched through cameras or corner mirrors, and in a world otherwise filled with hostile architecture are free to sleep on the ample seating available. As long as you have been “vetted” to enter the sacred space of the airport you are automatically assumed to be good, to follow the rules, and to be trustworthy. This is even more true for the Lounge, whose reputation and storytelling is based on only the most respectable having access to this inner chamber.

This does not have to remain a exclusive privilege of those fortunate enough to frequently visit the oases of trust on the outskirts of major cities. It can be a fundamental value to build our societies through. And it starts with you. ❦

This is something that should be established straight away. It might seem strange to say after having randomly gained quite a bit of money (for 14 year old) on perhaps the largest memecoin of all time (unless you consider Bitcoin a memecoin). But it really is clear to those who are either familiar with crypto and to those outsiders who know very little. The only group of people arguing against this fact are either scammers themselves or their victims who have been tricked into hoping they can “make it”. That most (in absolute number) cryptocurrencies are scams is problematic for the success of major currencies, but it is also a necessary consequence of the ease of creating new currencies, but it is at the same time not a characteristic unique to memecoins.

Creating a temporarily elevated value for something only to rugpull those who fell for it can be done with any commodity – ranging from meme stocks (like those of amc and Gamestop), to legitimate stocks, and of course even Tulips in the 17th century Dutch republic – But memecoins are very potent in this regard. Their largely unregulated (as opposed to stocks) and entirely digital nature (as opposed to physical goods) means that they can spread incredibly quickly to otherwise isolated buyers, and they can be created and abandoned incredibly quickly.

Cryptocurrencies are an incredibly dull topic; a combination of cryptographic has functions and distributed databases that allow for decentralised and trustless transactions. Does this sound like a topic to bring up at a party? Just like how I do not talk about my love of https or of Let’s Encrypt when going on a date, and likewise I do not talk about cryptocurrencies.

The goal of cryptocurrencies in my view is to act as a form of payment that is native to the digital, interconnected world we all live in. Digital Dollars/Euros/Crowns are of course useful, but they are fundamentally ill-fitting and primarily very centralised. When sending to someone (a store, a friend, should it even matter?) you go through a multitude of service companies like stripe, visa, your respective banks, Swift et cetera all to simply send money from A to B. Bitcoin (and even Monero) is comparatively simple and transparent. That is generally a good thing since it is a necessity for allowing trustless transactions. But it is not revolutionary. Crypto will not “change the world”, it will be a back-end infrastructure change that a few companies will do better than preëxisting ones and thus perhaps gain market share.

nfts (Non-fungible tokens) are also dreadfully boring in a good way. Today proving ownership of something requires a physical piece of paper in more occasions than you’d think. High-end artwork, real estate, and land are all incredibly valuable, and if that piece of paper is missing or destroyed¹ that is a very large problem for the owners. How does one prove ownership then? By getting everyone else to agree that you are the legitimate owner of that thing. Having everyone store a copy of that very important paper collectively is practically what an nft is. It is not some form of digital artwork or transformational thing. It is therefore ridiculous to say that one can “steal” and nft by saving an image; the image is not the token! Instead the nft is merely a short contract (maybe)² pointing to an url and saying that whoever owns the token is the owner of the contract.

I generally recoil at the mention of “community” more generally because my personality is fiercely individualist, but this ties into the above point. Creating a community around digital currencies or authentication systems is absurd. As we have established it is generally not interesting to talk about them, except as to the details of their specific implementation. Reading about the crypto community evokes similar feelings as “communities” that build up around certain free software projects (that have their own Discord server, with in-project social hierarchies et cetera). This is more a symptom of our increasingly fractured, isolated, and lonely society where desperate people look for friendship and warmth when there really should not exist any such community. The curl project is perhaps one of the most important libraries making up the modern internet – on its website it is stated that “curl is used daily by virtually every Internet-using human on the globe” – and it is developed by thousands of contributors (although the founder, Daniel Stenberg, has by far the most commits). There exists no curl community, because even though the project is very interesting and impressive it is merely meant to fulfil a task of transferring data between computers in various ways.

Similarity you are not a member of the crypto community if you are not involved in the implementation and development of crypto itself or crypto-adjacent systems – as a free-software developer, proprietary developer, employee at a bank or anything similar. Investing large amounts of money may give you clout amongst those who perform actual work, but it will not itself make you interesting — except from the perspective of being a source of capital for interesting work. Being a small-time retail investor does not even grant you those advantages; you are neither pushing development forward nor funding that development. Being some kind of “crypto”-philosopher or hype man is a fruitless effort since, as mentioned earlier, crypto is innately boring.

These three things are largely the source of all problems regarding crypto and nft discourse. What makes it so exhausting to read or listen to is that there are two primary camps; “haters” who know so little about crypto that they are not even worth listening to, and those who are blinded by greed, loneliness, or both and see (or at least speak of) crypto as either some sort of “people’s revolution” or a guaranteed way to make 100x returns on your “investment”. Both of these groups are sorely mistaken, and the reasons for this are the ones written above.

How to solve this? I see it as primarily a consequence of general economic despair and malaise, of people hoping for a better life and for connection through some shared experience. Solving this is not the task that distributed transaction system should try to do, it is a wider societal problem whose consequences can be seen in gold hype, political polarisation, used car prices, gambling advertising, and much more. As such it is a problem for all of society to try and solve. ❦

As a political science student, writing is a daily activity. And like any serious writer who cares about their writing, I care about the presentation and look of my documents. This has evolved, particularly recently, into an interest in typography — the art of formatting and shaping text. The source of this interest was originally my discovery of gnu Emacs’ ability to convert org-mode documents into \(\LaTeX\) ones back in high–school and even today this is still the basis of my process. It was accelerated by my increasing tinkering with this very website, having to design its appearance largely from the ground up.

Writing in org-mode allows one to focus much more on the pure textual content, leaving the formatting for later. Why not write in word and then copy-paste? Because then you still have to write all of the formatting rules (like emphasis) by hand – and Emacs (or another dedicated text editor like vim¹) is a much more powerful tool for text editing than any rich-text editor that tries to do formatting and content at the same time.

As my interest in typography has grown I have felt more and more under-served by the default \(\LaTeX\) article class. If you are not already using \(\LaTeX\) (or some equivalent like typst) there is likely nothing you can do that has a bigger impact on your typography than switching to it².

But there is a great amount of labour that has been done to improve upon the very high baseline that \(\LaTeX\) provides. This here is my collection of tips on how to give your documents the treatment that they deserve. Since I quite rarely touch .tex-files directly I do not like to rely on elaborate macros, even if they sometimes are very useful to attain the look that one is aiming for. Instead most changes are implemented as simple one-liner latex_header’s in org-mode. There are also no fancy classes involved, everything is done through the standard article-class.

For this post I have prepared a version of my post on the end of history in pdf format that we will successively improve upon. Over the course of this post we will turn the document on the left into the document on the right:

Naturally I should remind the reader of the Latin phrase de gustibus non est disputandum. What I deem beautiful may not seem the same to you. I hope however that the information that you find here can be of use even in the case of disagreement.

Fonts are what most people think of when they think of typography, and it (and perhaps line-spacing) is one of the few choices that normal people make when trying to improve their documents. Fonts are not everything, but since they do make up the majority of your content (if not all) they are very important.

First I would like to point out that no, Times New Roman (tnr) is not good enough. In fact, it is actively detrimental to the appearence of your document. tnr shows how you do not care about typography at all, and that you are okay with your text sitting side-by-side with all the other text that has been typeset in tnr. Whenever I see a text in tnr, I consider it a draft; open to critique and lacking any authority whatsoever. Calibri also has this characteristic, but at least it does not try and entertain the thought at being magisterial in any capacity.

Computer Modern (cm), the default font used for \(\TeX\) documents, is a great improvement over tnr, since it confers \(\TeX\)’s professionalism and academic regard to your writing. But it too suffers from simply being the default – you did not go through the trouble of picking something yourself after all. Nevertheless, if you must use it (and it is a fine font by itself) do yourself the favour of putting the \usepackage{lmodern} and \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} options in your header. This replaces the default version of cm with Latin Modern, a programatically derived version that includes many more characters than the default font.

If you want a more interesting font, I highly recommend browsing through the LaTeX Font Catalogue for something that fits your specific document. Personally I am a fan of Kp-Fonts and eb Garamond. To use them simply add \usepackage{kpfonts} or \usepackage{ebgaramond} respectively to your header. I invite you to try them out in your document right now. Here is our document typeset in (from left to right) the default cm, in Kp-fonts, and in eb Garmanond.

Both of these are good choices, but I am often restricted by page count³ and so I often reach for eb Garamond since it fits noticeably more text on the page. For that reason it is the font that we will continue with for the rest of this post.

Another easy improvement is the utilisation of the microtype package by Robert Schlicht. It provides a single package for lots of different microtypographical improvements — typography that is not (immediately) identifiable to the eye but that contributes to the general appearence of the text.

microtype does not require any configuration at all; it is quite aggressive⁴ by default but does not do anything that is likely to break your document. It provides things like:

For more information see the package documentation. These things will likely not be noticed (that is sort of the point) but will help make the text feel more “proper” and reduce hyphenation. To use it, simply add \usepackage{microtype} to the header and you are good to go.

That is at least the advice that the documentation gives. But amusingly enough, after telling you to load the package in the official documentation, Schlicht also points out that

if you are not interested in fine-tuning the micro-typographic appearance of your document (however unlikely this would seem, since using this package is proof of your interest in typographic issues), you may actually skip the rest of this document.

Since I am abnormally interested in typographic issues I dutifully continued on. These options that I present here are then experimental and, to once again quote Schlicht, “do not unconditionally improve the quality of the typeset text”. You have been warned.

The first thing I do is to enable kerning, tracking, and spacing (kerning=true,tracking=true,spacing=true). While these can give some unappealing effects in some cases I find that they are useful to make the justification more “dynamic” so as to respond better when treated badly. This is especially useful when writing documents in languages with compound words (in my case Swedish and German) since very long words can mean that \(\TeX\) has very little room to work with — creating a lot of hyphenation, a lot of whitespace, or both. Allowing more, smaller adjustments reduces the risk that any single aspect will look particularly out of place.

I also increase the amount of protrusion that occurs. The default value of 1000 is reasonable, but as the documentation says I am “so proud of being able to use this feature that [I] want everybody to see it”⁵. Therefore I increase this from default by 50% to a total of 1500.

The final microtypographical change that I make is increasing the amount of stretch (and shrinkage) that can be done to letterforms. This can be quite noticeable — especially on characters such as O or Q — but it is useful in the same way as the different forms of spacing mention earlier. For this reason it should only be increased significantly from the default 20 in combination with the selected=true option that “restricts” stretching for these especially noticeable characters. With this option I can quite boldly put set a value of stretch=50.

This ends up with a call to microtype that looks like this:

\usepackage[kerning=true,tracking=true,spacing=true,factor=1500,stretch=50, selected=true]{microtype}

With these settings applied our document now looks like this (this time let us also pick a page with more text):

Other than that we fit more text on the page it is difficult to see any specific changes — the words simply appear to have shifted across the page. Look at the text along the left margin to see the protrusion in effect, especially noticeable at the , along the equation.

You may have noticed just from reading this post that I am a big fan of footnotes. On the web sidenotoes are clearly superior since a webpage is infinitely scrollable and the footnotes can therefore appear very far down the page, but a pdf document has many “feet” at the bottom of each page. This means that sidenotes are not as necessary — you can still keep supportive information close at hand — and I generally prefer to format article-style documents with symmetrical margins (with asymmetrical ones reserved for things like books).

The default footnotes are fine, but reading the beautiful microtype documentation made it clear that there is room for improvement. This is done in two ways: making the footnote reference markers into proper, non–superscript characters; and moving them into the margin so that the text does not appear very jagged when many two- or three-line footnotes are present on one page.

These are both done through the enigmatic scrextend package. In addition to merely loading it, I run another simple line in the header that reformats the footnote mark:

\usepackage{scrextend}
\deffootnote{0em}{1.6em}{\thefootnotemark.\enskip}

If you want to move the footnote marks into the body text (so that they do not sit inside the margin) you should adjust the numerical values above.

This is what our footnote-heavy first page looks like now⁶:

At this point we have a document that is in most regards finished⁷. I would not have any qualms about presenting something formatted with the above settings as finished. However, one of the strengths of good typography is making your document stand out from the rest — even before the reader has been allowed to grapple with your argument. For this we may add some embellishments of different sorts.

All of this is strictly optional, and may even be harmful to the typographical quality of your text. But I like it nevertheless, and would here like to document some ways that you can do this if you feel like trying it out some time.

By default \(\LaTeX\) uses the North American letter format, while the rest of the world uses the iso 216’s a4 as the most common paper for documents to be printed to. This is easy to adjust however, and one merely need to add an \usepackage[a4paper]{geometry} declaration to their header. Apparently overleaf uses a4 by default, but specifying is never a bad idea.

The geometry package also allows you to to tinker with the margins of your paper, and I always like to do so as a finishing touch right before officially finishing a document. Having your article end at the bottom of a page makes it look a lot more planned out and thought through than one that has half a page of whitespace and the end. If you do not want to change the margins all too much I also recommend tinkering with the microtypographical settings — they can have a surprisingly large impact on the physical length of the text.

Another benefit of including ornaments at the end of the text is that they mask any slight imperfections in paragraph length. They naturally fill up any whitespace that may be left, and you can resize them and change their appearence to make them fit into the organically appearing gap.

A core value in my document-preparation philosophy is that it should be easy to do good work. If making something look nice means painstakingly manipulating letterspacing or writing an ungodly number of curly brackets then your typographical system has failed. One of the wonders of \(\LaTeX\) is that is separates the art of typography from that of writing and editing.

The goal should be to have strong, opinionated, and elegant typography that gets out of your way when you need it to. It is not the job of the designer to curate your thoughts, and it is not the job of the writer to make your document look good¹¹. These are two separate tasks that should be undertaken separately.

There are many people that think the above and take away the lesson that because they are not “designers” they should not think about the appearance of their text at all. But that is the wrong lesson. If you care about your text you have to care about its presentation. At this year’s Chaos Communication Congress Frieder Nake said that

Somebody who wants to be an artist must be arrogant. […] The artist is in a way so stupid that they do not allow self critique.

This is what is required of you as an artist; as an artist in the sense of a creator of new, radical ideas. If you do not believe that your work is, as Nake puts it, “the best in the world” you will not have the confidence to venture out into the world and present it. To do this one must be a designer and an artist. ❦

The most obvious part of Diplomacy is the map of Europe¹ with the great powers at the turn of the 20th century — England (really the uk), France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and (Ottoman) Turkey. Each power starts with 3 units (except for Russia who starts with 4). These are divided into either armies or fleets, with equal strength.

Territories can only be occupied by one unit at a time, and are divided broadly into land, coastal, and sea territories. Armies can only stay on land and coastal areas, and fleets only on sea and coastal areas.

Territories with dots or squares are called “supply centres”. Each supply centre allows you to maintain more units (more detail under Turns). The player with 17 supply centres (half of the total 32) wins the game immediately. Otherwise the game is a draw between the surviving players.

There are three special territories on the map that each posses two “coasts”; Spain (Spa)², Bulgaria (Bul), and St. Petersburg (Stp). This means that while only one unit can be inside one of these territories, a fleet can only move in or out of it depending on what coast it is located in. For example, a fleet in St. Petersburg’s north coast (Stp nc) can move to Norway (Nwy) or the Barents sea (bar), but not to Finland (Fin) or the Gulf of Bothnia (bot).

The territories of Kiel (Kie) and Constantinople (Con) act as canals, and fleets can travel freely through them even though their coasts are divided into two parts by Denmark and Bulgaria respectively. This does not mean that a fleet can pass through them (from hel to bal for example) in a single turn — they must first pass through the canal territory.

One of the critical parts of Diplomacy is that all players make their turn at the same time — as mentioned in the introduction. This means that you can enter your orders at any time during the day, and at 6am the orders of all players are carried out (or adjudicated). You must coördinate your plans with the other players before this deadline, but you can never be sure that they will stick by their promises…

Backstabbr offers a “sandbox” feature, and I can not recommend it enough. Use it to check if your orders are valid, and what will happen if your oppenent(s) does different things. Backstabbr allows you to input incorrect orders — try moving an army from Liverpool to Syria — but illegal moves will not do anything.

How do you move pieces around on the map then? There are three (four for fleets) possible actions for each piece. They are:

There are three turns; spring, fall, and winter. Units can move during spring and fall turns, but they only capture supply centres at the end of the fall turn (or at the beginning of winter, depending on how you look at it). On the winter turn, each player builds more units in their starting supply centres, or deletes units, so that their total number of supply centres equals their number of units. If a supply centre is occupied during the winter new units can not be built there.

To give each player a starting point into their strategies I have quickly written some recommendations for possible opening moves and general strategies. I have written this before we were given our countries, so it should hopefully not be deceitful in any way.

I highly recommend searching up some “opening moves” or strategies on the interwebs as well to get another perspective, as well as reading what your immediate neighbours are likely to do.

After initially starting to use Emacs back in high school merely for programming, I naturally began to use it for other tasks such as document preparation and note-taking. This introduced me to the surprisingly large overlap between Emacs users and people generally interested in “productivity” workflows.

This is not all that surprising however. It is partly due to how good Emacs’ ecosystem has become for these specific types of tasks (things like Agenda, org-roam, denote, and howm — even org-mode itself — were all created for these uses) but on a more fundamental level Emacs allows you to work with any form of text not just efficiently, but also in a way that is entirely customised to your own preferences and comforts.

As I became more proficient in Emacs and read more perspectives on how other people organised their notes, I tried to evaluate my views on note-taking that I had held before. You may have an idea of what it means to be productive, but this post is instead about another form of productivity, one that does not have to rely on the powers of gnu Emacs, but instead of the agent itself, the author.

Productivity qua measurement is the amount of goods (or products) that are produced per unit of time. For this reason it has become common for people to link improvements in productivity to the aspect of time specifically. But productivity is even more innately linked to the product itself, and it is this aspect that I would like to focus on here.

What I choose to call productive note-taking is fundamentally anchored in not the rate at which one produces notes, or even the quality of the notes, but instead in mental model that one uses when producing them. Advocates for Zettelkästen-based systems argue that notes should form a mental (or sometimes digitally represented) web of thoughts that links each “note” with its equals. What I propose here is instead a form of notes that are different in that they are meant to develop not some separate bank of data, but to develop the cognitive abilities of the author, while still creating a tangible work.

The word revolution, while evoking signs of violent rebellion, has its roots in the term for turning. It of course still means this (as in the phrase “revolutions per minute”, rpm) and it is in this sense that I mean revolutionary notes. I have used it in this sense before, and am quite fond of this mixture of images — of a dramatic change that returns to some earlier state, albeit with new experiences and ideas.

I have taken notes almost daily during my many years in the education system, but have undertaken a more critical view of my use of notes during the first half of this decade. Almost a year ago I published a piece of writing on my evolving experiments with a Zettelkasten system, implemented using org-roam. Writing that piece I subconsciously knew that as soon as it was published I would move away from the implementation I was writing about into a more holistic direction, although I was unsure of what shape that would take. After finishing a course in Contemporary Warfare I feel like I finally have what I can coherently describe as a solution — to the extent that it exists as a vestige of my mind.

Productive note-taking is productive in the ways that it emphasises and highlights the importance of the end product. It is note-taking for the aim of production of a given work, not for the aid of remembrance or recollection. While these latter elements may play a part in the production of the work, they are not in and of themselves goals.

When I was still studying mathematics, I noticed a sharp decrease in my understanding when I redoubled my efforts to produce more comprehensive notes to help me study. Where I had before been able to keep pace with the best of my peers, I had now fallen behind to the middle of the pack. This seemed paradoxical to me — how can studying harder result in a worse performance? The answer seems obvious now, I was prioritising the production of more and more notes over my understanding of the subject material. It is this sort of activity that productive note-taking seeks to avoid.

Sara Imari Walker writes in noema about how ai systems fail to fulfill the role of the scientist because science is a “fundamentally intersubjective” act — where theories (as symbolic representations) are argued out and decided upon in the process of free discourse. When writing, communicating, and debating we are constantly refining, creating, and recreating our ideas, performing science as a societal dialogue. This intersubjective discussion is what things like journaling try and emulate — and it is also what I propose notes can do.

How does one create notes as products? This is a difficult question to answer generally, and will depend on a variety of factors such as the subject material, learning method, audience, and personal preferences. What all techniques should share in common is a centrality in all activity being motivated by the creation of some final work.

The work that spawned the concrete formula of a productive workflow is my collection of notes on contemporary warfare. The exam for that course was structured as an essay about any one of a selection of broad topics, and in place of literature we were allowed 30 pages (15 sheets) of notes, written either by hand, printed, or a combination of the two, covering whatever information we wanted¹.

This meant that my studies did not just consist of me reading Clausewitz all day trying to memorise every word or phrase — the goal was for me to get a good enough understanding of Clausewitz, Mahan, and many other thinkers so that I could condense their theories into this one document. Doing this required a complete understanding of the topics.

Proponents of Zettelkästen often emphasises the ability for their constructs to function as “second brains” — perfectly recording and remembering information that our feeble flesh brains so easily forgets. But as a philosopher² my goal is not to create as much recorded information as possible, it is for me as an individual to understand and master the world around me. Having information written down is useless if I do not remember it, and if I remember it there is no point in writing it down. Seneca writes

We should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it: otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power.

Productive notes are then not principally meant for consumption, but instead their initial omission prompts their creation. The author is required to go out into the world and obtain the relevant knowledge to produce the work — either through reading the scraps of knowledge left behind by those who came before³, or through creating new knowledge by living as an agent in the world.

Performing this approach does not require any specific hardware or software since it emphasises the primacy of the authors mind over the — ironically — product. You can do this with a pen and paper, text files (written in whatever markup you want), a wysiwyg editor like Microsoft’s Word or even using Zettelkasten. Writing short notes is also not “forbidden” as long as they are meant to help record the information required for implementing the final product.

There are no constraints on the shape of the end product either. It may be in the form of a text document (written in whatever style you would like), an email, an interpretive dance, or a physical structure. If you want a more concrete example here are my notes on contemporary warfare in pdf form⁴. They are written as a single .org-file with a header for each lecture/topic, and with a few quotes from selected other works.

ja Westenberg wrote about their experience with building a “second brain”, and the anxiety that comes with an ever growing amount of information that you have to work through and make use of in some way:

The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold.

That self never arrived.

Steve Krouse accuractely points out that vibe code is legacy code — code that no-one understands. In the same way notes or written works that are merely vibed (either written with llms, copied from a primary source, or not mentally processed in another way) turn into legacy information that has to be painfully worked through in order to actually master the information contained within (to extract the gold, to use Westenberg’s phrasing).

The point of productive notes is to make this a unnecessary. I could easily delete my whole ~/Documents/Notes directory today and continue on with my life, without any feelings of remorse or anxiety, because the truly important information is that which I already remember. If I forget something I simply have to search for it again, and in the process will likely discover new interesting things about the universe through my lived experience.

There is however a reason that I have not deleted my notes directory — there is genuine value in recorded information — but one has to be careful to avoid falling into intellectual atrophy. Being discomforted by having to retread old paths is a conscious method for intellectual growth. If recording facts was all that was required then one’s notes should merely consist of written down conversations with llms.

If this approach seems like something trivial to you — great! You might already be doing what I have merely described. It is once again this that I mean by the revolutionary quality of this technique; it is a return to the original state and intention of note-taking.

If you disagree with me vehemently, have some constructive criticism, or have some examples of you doing this or anything similar, feel free to email me. ❦

For a period in high school my cellular data stopped working for some inexplicable reason. This meant that my phone only had an internet connection when I was at home or had access to some other Wi-Fi network. At first this was of course incredibly frustrating, but since I had no time to fix it I simply had to come up with ad hoc solutions. This forced me to be a lot more intentional when it came to my media consumption.

If you want to consume something when you are out of the house (say on your commute) this meant that you have to have downloaded it in advance. pdfs, html documents, music to listen to — it all has to be pre-planned. Most troublesome however was the inability to use gps. Instead one had to memorize or write down addresses and routes, download maps of different areas, and ask strangers for directions. This last practice has practically dissipated from everyday use, but it was of course quite common before. This was perhaps one of the most strongly positive aspects of not being able to find your way around — it gives you a stronger anchor to your surroundings rather than merely gliding past a world of extras. Being consciously aware of what media you are consuming, and for what purpose, also allows you to more critically evaluate that media, rather than just letting it flow through you.

I think doing something of this sort is a good idea for most people. It does not involve any major sacrifices in that you still have access to your tiktok slop feed, but only at home. You don’t sacrifice the security of being able to call for help (you still have your phone) but you also can’t respond to slack messages immediately as they come in. Instead you have these specific moments of prescence whenever you are out partying, walking the dog, or just commuting. The knowledge that you are capable of this stays with you even if you choose to enable mobile data (or in my case your connection suddenly starts working one day).

The biggest downside of not using social media is not getting regular updates in things that are going on. The largest issue I had with this is that I would spend enormous amounts of time trying to read everything there was to know about everything going on at any given moment. Not only was this incredibly draining to do, I also realized that it didn’t give me enough time or energy to think about big-picture trends. The solution for me was twofold:

1. Stop using news apps and read an actual newspaper.

Reading a newspaper — ideally a physical paper one — creates a hard cut-off for consuming news. You can’t read any more about a topic than what is in your hand! It also gives you a nice feeling of being “caught up” on everything that has been happening. Getting your flow of information from an actual reputable source is also better than merely having it filtered through some unknown twitter user. In my case I read The Economist, a general news paper with some extra focus on business and politics². I particularly enjoy the number of graphs and data-driven journalism since I love statistics. Since it is released weekly I also get to read it at a leisurely pace.

1. Get updates through rss feeds

Reading on an analog paper is lovely, but there are of course some things that can’t be delivered to physically or that come out on an irregular basis. These sort of things are best served through an rss feed in my experience. rss is supported in more places than you might think, and if not there are often ways to integrate it with an rss reader³. Having a fixed, reverse-chronological list of things to read (or otherwise go through, rss can be used for formats other than text) also gives you this feeling of being “done” that a newspaper gives you. There is no infinite feed that can get you stuck scrolling for 6 hours. You can still use get some digital media delivered to your phone, but won’t be glued to it and it will return to “just” a communications device after a short while.

“But what about discovery?” I head you say. For this I recommend Andreas Gohr’s indieblog.page (where you can also find this website). He has rss feeds to a number of random daily indieblog entries⁴. Not every random blog post will be interesting, but sometimes you’ll find someone doing interesting things — at which point you can subscribe to their rss feed. You can read feeds in lots of different ways — I use feeder on my smartphone and elfeed on my laptops and desktop.

1. Actually talk to people

Scrolling through your friends’ social media posts may seem like a good way to keep in touch with them, but in actuality you are not creating or maintaining a genuine connection with them — you are merely interacting with a simulacrum of them. Our brains are not made for distinguishing the differences between the two⁵ but we nevertheless suffer the consequences. The solution to this? Just reach out to people that you might otherwise not have. Either message them directly, email them, or give them a quick call.

There doesn’t have to be any stress about it — and in fact there should not be. Genuine human interaction is by definition messy, and that is okay. Social media often tries to show the existence some of perfect social being, the “pickup artist” that always has the perfect lines that always work, the influencer with the perfect jokes that everyone laughs at (while being at a carefully orchestrated photo-shoot) et cetera. The techniques they are employing is of course just simple cherry picking, but it is easy to fall for it in the moment. Embracing the messiness of human conversation — and the cost and benefits that come with it — is much more rewarding in the long run.

Social media is in practice not a social endeavour. Instead it is a form of entertainment, a means to observe things going on. This does not have to be inherently bad in any way, but it is clear to anyone in the modern day that social media platforms are not your friend, but instead want to keep you addicted while they show you more advertisements. It would be a mistake however to abandon all forms of media.

It has become clearer to me over the period after the covid-19 pandemic that contentedness — although not happiness — can only be attained through active engagement. Victor Breder puts it as “I love having read”. Happiness can be found easily in the individual moment through listening to someone else’s jokes, social media, sex, or drugs but long-term contentedness requires effort to be put in. It requires the mind to be fully occupied with whatever one is doing. It is straining, and it has to be because it should challenge you.

The difference then is not as simple as “stop doing X”. Watching instagram reels is not inherently negative, it is possible to be intellectually stimulated through them, but it is much harder to misuse a physical book or magazine. I also have no problem with movies in this regard because if I am sitting down to watch a film I am entirely focused on the subject matter at hand. A problem would theoretically emerge if I am merely watching it to “pass time” or get some cheap dopamine. The problem merely emerges with one’s interaction with media, not the media itself.

But this still does not mean that we should blame ourselves for failing to restrain ourselves when it comes to these new addictive technologies. They are genuinely problematic, and you need to identify where the line is for you and what media you can regularly interact with without misuse. For me I will confess that this line is quite low — I found most pure social media platforms too addictive — but it might be different for you (although I think that it is really quite low for most people).

The methods outlined here work for me, but they are by no means guaranteed to work for you. Experimenting with different forms of media consumption is not only one of the most impactful changes you can make to your life, but it is also quite fun! Optimising this is also one way to easily challenge yourself — is what you are doing right now really what will satisfy you? If yes; great! Maybe try and do more of it? If not; try and identify what caused you to get into that situation and create frameworks in your life that will effortlessly guide you away from those activities. ❦

I usually always carry a few business cards. This is quite uncommon in this day and age, with the need for remembering phone numbers having disappeared and with the ubiquity of social media for creating, sharing, and maintaining contact. But I reject the use of mainstream social media, partly for ideological reasons but also for practical ones¹. This inevitably requires making certain sacrifices when it comes to what events I can participate in, on how learning about what people I know are up to, and on how I can communicate with the people in my life around me. There are some drawbacks that you might expect — you can not dm someone on instagram if you do not have instagram yourself — but there are hidden drawbacks that may not be immediately obvious.

People want to communicate in the medium that they like the best, that is almost tautological. While I am not shy about my feelings about the wonders of email I still do not expect others to share them. This means I that email is usually not an option. But I still want to use open standards. Thankfully, likely because of their open nature, these standards are next to ubiquitous. Email is one of them, and sms (and phone calls) are another. sms is not a great technology by itself (primarily because it is not encrypted), but it works well enough for planning meetups where you can continue talking about your secrets in person. Signal works very well in combination with this, as you can give out your phone number to people and easily “upgrade” to an encrypted connection if your conversational partner has signal. But people usually do not prefer using sms, and so there will always be some friction in dialogue. This is the use case that business cards serve for me.

When meeting a new person, they will commonly ask for my {snapchat, instagram, twitter et cetera} and I will proceed to have a short conversation where they cycle through the services they use — followed by me saying I do not use them. Business cards instead allow me to quickly communicate my preferences without going through a fruitless conversation, and are usually well appreciated. Since business cards are so rare in regular interpersonal contexts they serve as a good conversation starter and are quite memorable as well. The cards contribute to a memorable interaction, and mean that people are more likely to keep in touch (since they get to keep the card).

My first batch of cards were made in 2023, and I made a total of 250 of them. I usually carry a few (2-5) on my person at all times and give them out to new people I meet. If I am going to some kind of networking event I might bring more, but usually not more than will comfortably fit in my phone or wallet. Having carried them for perhaps 2 and a half years now (and also having run out) I get an average consumption of:

(/ 250 (* 365 2.5))
;;; => 0.273972602739726

So I have on average given out one card every 3-4 days. This does not mean that I meet someone new that often; what commonly happens is that I meet lots of new people in a new context, and proportionally give out lots of cards at once. A common occurance is that I give one person a card, and then that person shows shows other people (“omg look at what Joar gave me”) and then more people ask for them. That means having to carry cards unnecessarily most days and running out almost immediately when I do need them. Nevertheless I have found a target of 5 cards is a good amount.

If you are thinking of getting cards of your own I highly recommend designing them yourself. It is a great opportunity for a truly free form of creative expression. No one is in charge of deciding how your cards will look or be shaped other than yourself, and its a way to express yourself in a new medium. While most printers will give you a generous bulk discount for ordering large volumes of cards I like that smaller orders allow you to experiment with new designs and doesn’t put as much pressure on getting it “right” the first time.

With the new second-generation cards I had a few things that I wanted to do with the design:

1. Move from a Swedish business card format to a more continental size². This is the size of credit cards and ids and so will comfortably fit into people’s wallets. This was a very annoying issue, and I am okay with sacrificing the ability to use certain business card holders.
2. Include my whole name. I think “Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt” looks quite striking when written out in full, and so I would like to include it once again on the card, rather than just the shortened “Joar von Arndt”. It is quite long however, and so requires some creative design work.
3. Make use of the International Typographic Style or elements from 1960’s Swiss-style design. This is a deviation from my old design using the older-looking serif font of im Fell. This might have been caused by watching the wonderful documentary Helvetica (2007).
4. Switch to the new provider-independent email address of “joarxpablo@vonarndt.se”.
5. Use the correct domain for this website, rather than redirecting from my old neocities domain.

This is the first-generation card that is being replaced:

The line at the top is fun, and has on some occasions sparked conversations just by itself, but I did not feel a very intense need to keep it for the next batch of cards as it is quite difficult to work into another design and also may be a bit too narcissistic. The texture on the card is from the paper, 300gsm Conqueror laid.

Throughout the creative process, I saved eight different designs as ideas worth keeping around (so that I could continue working on them or use them as reference). There were of course an infinite number of variations of these, some of which were different enough so that they could very well be regarded as new designs of their own. These are the ones that survived, displayed in as chronological an order as possible.

Compared to the front, this was quite easy. This side should not try to “compete” with the front for attention, but should more just be a supportive space for additional information, chiefly a qr code to this website. For this I had three main approaches.

Designing your own business cards is not just a fun project, but it is also practical. It makes you more willing to give them out, that is why you made them the way they are after all. I highly recommend anyone to do the same, and please email me if you do — I’d love to see what you have made. I made all of my designs in inkscape a wonderful free-as-in-freedom vector design tool. I printed my cards at Pixel Palace, an independent print shop in Stockholm. ❦

Technique is a broad concept intentionally enveloping broad parts of human society and daily life. This was not always the case, but over time it has become so. From my own experience, thinking about technique seems to have a mainly continental European origin, and so it has often been mistranslated to English as technology. This is an infuriating mistake made worse by the fact that technique is a perfect translation; technology is merely a manifestation of technique, but technique has many other forms. It has also been given the following names:

• Capitalism
• Socialism¹
• Taylorism
• Rationalism
• High modernism
• Effective Accelerationism
• Cybernetics
• Globalisation
• Technological solutionism
• The megamachine
• Patriarchy²

This is not an exhaustive list, far from it actually, but it should help give you an idea of technique if you are familiar with some of these concepts. Some of them, especially capitalism, are often blamed for a great number of ills in the world. But all of the above share a belief in the enlightenment idea of progress as both a means and an end in and of itself.

Technique has been present in human civilization for as long as we can remember, simple stone tools are a sign of technology and therefore technique — a tool created for a specified purpose. But it has only been in the historically recent past that technique has come to dominate our lives so intensely. Human society has been fundamentally transformed numerous times in the last three hundred years, and is exponentially changing more and more as time goes on. This has been driven by more and more technical development.

Technique is only ever interested in expanding. It has nothing to gain from decreasing. It will only strive to increase efficiency, but often increase consumption through Jevon’s paradox. It seeks to consume more, at higher performance, to produce more. It impacts our thinking by forcing us to do what is optimal at all times, and punishing us either materially or mentally if we do not comply.

It seems to me that those who witnessed and lived through the second world war, who saw what came before and what followed, were the most aware of this phenomenon. Most famously is perhaps the french philosopher Jacques Ellul, who wrote the book he would be most famous for in 1954. But others who commented on this were Heidegger, and perhaps most eloquently the Nazi minister of Armaments Albert Speer, whose final statement at the Nuremberg Trials is well worth reading for anyone interested in the troubles of modernity.

Being able to recognize technique is valuable in almost every field. It is even useful in recognizing the forces driving you in daily life. But I will share some clear examples so that one can easily recognize how technique manifests itself in the world.

1. How the clock controls our lives instead of our bodies deciding when we rest, eat, play, or work.
2. How the environment is being plundered and extracted for ever-increasing production, and how the solution seems to be ever more production in different ways³.
3. How states are continuously working for increased centralization and control over its population, even when striving for nominally democratic values.
4. How programmers are forced to use llm tools to create code faster, even when that comes at the cost of long-term sustainability. This then creates more work, requiring more labour (or capital).
5. How public schooling has created a standardized system of spelling and grammar that one is shamed for misusing.

Technique is always interested in solutions, but it does not care for what problems those solutions create. Instead, new problems are only opportunities to apply more techniques, expanding it in the process.

When Plato speaks of what is commonly translated as an object’s or occupation’s craft, he uses the Greek word tékhnē — itself the etymological origin for “technique”. In this sense it refers to the abstract activity, goal, and shape of a method. In Book I of the Republic, Socrates speaks to Thrasymachus about not just the tékhnē of horsemanship or of medicine, but also of the tékhnē of ruling.⁴ Technique then does not have to be a purely mechanical practice; although it oftentimes uses language and similar ideas to accomplish its aim.

The extent to which technique already dominates the world can not be understated. On a recent trip to Berlin I was flying over Germany, gazing down upon the fields of Brandenburg when I was struck by a feeling of the sublime extraction of our world. Every square meter is used productively in some capacity, whether that be in the form of agriculture, forestry, or power production from the wind crossing over the mighty fields. We have already taken control over the entire planet and are using its resources maximally for our gain, environmentalism is really only a matter of the sustainability of this current form of operation, rather than of the entire enterprise.

One of the more famous people raging against the advance of technique was Ted Kaczynski, an American mathematician, primitivist, and terrorist. His work The Industrial Society and Its Future advocated for violent revolution against the technical world.

The issue with this approach is that Kaczynski was directly using technique to promote his agenda. Those who make use of technique will always have the upper hand as they are able to foster more resources more intensely, out-competing those who refuse to use technique.

Another example is the degrowth movement that seeks to reign in gdp growth and to instead redirect preëxisting resources toward improving living standards. Even if noble on a first glace, this will not succeed due to technique’s inherent need for expansion. One recent example of prioritizing living standards over gdp growth was the covid-19 pandemic, but even that was a technical decision.

The question posed in the subtitle is actually a trick; wanting to do something is itself a technical solution. A purely atechnical solution would be to not do anything at all about anything. Fighting against it is really to accept defeat as fighting requires the employment of several techniques.

But this does not mean a total nihilistic despair is one’s only option. A reading of Ellul for example is incomplete without including his religious writings on how to life faithfully in the world — something that is atechnical for the most part.

First of all it should be established that the study of technique is by far the most studied subject in human history. The difference is just that what is studied are special cases of the application of technique for specific goals; it is a technical form of study. The only fields that are not technical are those that do not aim for any sort of goal, product, or accomplishment. Theology can therefore be both technical or non-technical, depending on the objectives and methodology.

It is an interesting observation that the study of technique achieved its peak (and quick decline) immediately following the second world war. My personal belief is that this is because while European and chiefly German thinkers clearly saw the ugly nature and consequences of the technical machine when fully employed, those in North America did not experience qua whole-of-society this force.

When the American mode of thought became the dominant one in the west it reinforced this technique at all costs mindset, just as it did in the Soviet Union. That Europeans continued the study of technique after the war (through things such as the Frankfurt Schools inheritance of Heidegger’s technological critiques) undermined their dominance in the technical world.

That the war left the regions most aware of this aspect devastated and weak (and those left comparatively unharmed proportionally unaware and strong) is itself a method by which technique expands its employment — those that more efficiently apply technique will conquer those who do not. Special attention should not be taken to this specific example however, it is a general fact that applies to human society for as long as there has existed anything that could be called as such⁵. ❦

Adam Smith divides the economic forces into three areas for, the profit obtained from labour, that from capital (or stock), and that obtained from land. The value extracted from land is here the natural resources of the earth, the sunshine and rain that lands there (allowing for agriculture), the timber that can be cut down, or the ore to be mined. But there is another value that can be obtained from the land.

In the movie Up (2009) the protagonist Carl Fredricksen refuses to let his villa be demolished despite the large amount of development occurring around him. Since he owns the land that the house is built on, the construction companies can not develop it, even as it is surrounded by soon-to-be skyscrapers. Mr Fredricksen is offered “twice [as much as the] last offer”, showcasing the value of the land. But Mr Fredricksen has not exploited the land at all, he has simply continued living in his house as the area was developed. So where has this value come from?

It has come from the labour and capital of others, in its proximity to services provided by the rest of society. This is the observation made by Henry George, one of the great (but quite overlooked) economists of the 19th century. The value of land is then partly the natural resources in and on the land, but the value of the land is also a social construction originating from how much the rest of society wishes to make use of that land.

When American settler colonialism spread over the North American continent, the us government gave out the lands settled for free. This perhaps sounds like an amazing deal today, but it is easy to overlook the fact that the value of the land was perhaps zero, or at least close to it. It had no significant infrastructure present, was located far away from centres of industry and trade, and was surrounded by a hostile nomadic population. And yet today the value of land in the Las Vegas Strip, built in the close-to uninhabitable Mojave desert, is extremely high simply due to the amount of wealth and development in Las Vegas.

While land may have some innate value, the value of land is mostly a social construction created by the labour and investment of society.

Digital land is however practically infinite. Much like the vast expanse of the empty American continent, it is mostly worthless, with a few islands of “civilisation”. The most obvious example of this are domain names. google.com may be the most valuable domain name right now, but it does not obtain its value from any innate quality, but merely from the service that is running when one connects to that domain. gooåle.com does not have any value, despite being “close” to google.com.

Short domain names, like the (in)famous x.com or the more wholesome x.org are by some measures valuable due to their rarity¹, but many very short domain names are still very cheap. Something that makes a bigger difference is if the domain is a word in any language, or an acronym for a series of words (although it turns out many of these are also unused). That domain names that are words are more valuable makes clear that their value is of a social nature; had the names and words been different we would expect different domain names to be valuable. To summarise, the value of a domain name mostly originates from what is built on it, not any innate quality, just as the value of land originates mostly from where it is relative to other valuable land.

But this observation is not limited to domain names, but also to “digital platforms”. Facebook does not derive its value from its ui or its ability for targeted advertisement, but rather from its active user base. The conceptual location of Facebook derives its value from the fact that there are many other users there to interact with.

This is likely not too surprising for many readers, who may have even tried to ditch Facebook specifically (or thought about doing so) but given up due to the fact that “everyone else is on there”. In economics, this is called a network effect, where the more people use a service, the more useful it becomes. But this is not always beneficial to the consumer.

When a service has obtained enough market share, it becomes impossible for the user to change to a different provider, as the dominant player absorbs all new users with it’s huge network effects, causing an enormous collective action problem with thousands, if not millions, of individual actors. This inability to switch means that the dominant player can extract extra costs on to the consumer, either via directly raising prices or through indirectly exposing them to more and more advertisement. This is in effect a tax on the consumer, not connected to the costs of costs of providing a service, but instead a mere increase in the share of profit.

It may not be immediately clear, but much (if not all) of this applies to land too. As we have already established, land derives its value from the fact that other people are using it, or at least people nearby. But what we have not covered is the fact that controlling land that is in demand — land in cities especially — allows the owner to charge exorbitant prices to those who wish to make use of it. You can rent out a plot of land in the middle of Manhattan for much more than you could a similarly sized plot in the Libyan desert, for example. If there were two identical hotels in each of those places, the prices I could charge would both differ. There would of course be running costs that would be incorporated into the price, and the price in the desert may even be higher, but the share of profit I could take from the one located in New York is far greater. This is because my customers are not only paying for the services of the hotel — the food, the maintenance of the building, paying the staff — but also for the labour and investment of all the people surrounding the hotel, who you might want to visit, for which I do not have to pay anything at all. This is how digital services expose their quality as land, as a digital space where the labour of others is used to extract an artificially high profit without a proportionately high amount of investment or work.

No human being created land, and so no one has claim to it originally. In Das Kapital, Marx, as part of his reasoning behind primitive accumulation, describes how the origin of land and wealth ownership is where “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part”. Henry George concurs, saying that

Historically, as ethically, private property in land is robbery. It nowhere springs from contract; it can nowhere be traced to perceptions of justice or expediency; it has everywhere had its birth in war and conquest, and in the selfish use which the cunning have made of superstition and law.

It is then morally unjust not to tax the increased value granted to land by the rest of society. But digital land is not the same, it was created by man, and there is no deeply ingrained story of murder and robbery within it, except perhaps wasted time. Is it then simply the case that the rent earned on the network effects of digital communication is the reward earned by those early movers who dared to risk their money and time? The answer is no.

Obviously the entrepreneurs starting these companies should receive a financial return on their investments (and it may be the case that they are dominant in their sector simply due to being the best) but they are not responsible for the returns owing to network effects. Companies should then be taxed for the value of these effects, since the users are those responsible for creating this value in the first place. Some major tech companies have repeatedly threatened to stop offering their services in the European Union after certain law proposals like the gdpr, but have chickened out of doing so. This is because their profit originates from those users, and their ability to not only use them to create the very value of their digital land, but at the same time to extract rent from our digital neighbours’ presence there.

This system of taxation is called a land value tax (lvt), a tax on the underlying value of the land, excluding any buildings or improvements to it. This has many benefits, such as the ethical merit of returning the stolen money to those who deserve it, improving economic growth by not hurting developers of land (like a property tax does), and allowing people to live where they want to live by giving workers a larger share of the value they produce. But one massive benefit is the ease of collection.

Taxes on wealth are famously difficult to collect, as money is easy to move around or deny possession of. But land is far more difficult. A plot of land with a given value should return a set amount of money, or else be seized by the state and sold. Who owns it doesn’t matter, and denying ownership doesn’t prevent losing it. Land can not be moved to a tax haven overseas or hidden away, it is not difficult to determine what tax jurisdiction it is present in. But digital land does not exist in any tax jurisdiction. It is a purely anational concept that transcends the nation state. So who should determine the tax, and to whom does it belong?

Who should collect the tax is comparatively easy, the country where users are present. A German-focused website should not pay any taxes to the Indian government, and an internationally used service (like Facebook) should pay taxes the each jurisdiction corresponding to its share of users. This has in practice already been proposed under the name of a Digital Services Tax (dst) although the name might make you think it is a tax on digital labour rather than digital land. dsts are quickly becoming increasingly popular, especially in rich-world countries that lack a significant presence in these digital spaces such as India, the eu, The Commonwealth, and Israel. That these states have in practice independently discovered the teachings of Henry George almost 150 years later, albeit in cyberspace rather than the real world. If that fact does not convince you, I would recommend you read Progress and Poverty yourself and email me your thoughts on it.

This is not a perfect solution. An lvt is by comparison far more elegant, and is less liable to loopholes. One of the elegances of an lvt is the ease of collection and of its undeniable nature, but a dst is much harder to “pin down”.

Companies could deny user metrics, and the very fact that one needs to track users in the first place is problematic. It is not only concerning from an ethical viewpoint but for technical reasons as well; and it philosophically contradictory to the Laissez-Faire evolution of the digital realm that has facilitated its construction. It is also hard to apply to other forms of digital land that don’t have easy-to-split-up revenues, like cryptocurrencies or the value of nfts.

The implementation is also perhaps more formulated as a response to digital rent-seeking as a whole, rather than a system to reduce rent-seeking in collective digital spheres specifically. I am thinking about these subjects continuously, so do reach out if you have any solutions or other ideas. ❦

In my musings on deepseek I wrote on the general economic environment in the prc, and how it differs from the central-planning-oriented one that has come to dominate the view in the west, even if subconsciously. Here I wish to offer a less “big picture” perspective, one that is more focused on the boots-on-the-ground perspective of travelling around China. It will not be representative of anything except my own perspective, and they will by definition misrepresent the truth as it is merely a sample size of one.

I travelled in to China in early June 2025 with my girlfriend, and as of writing this¹ will soon be leaving in early July, having visited for roughly one month. While here I have been trying to rapidly learn Standard Chinese, although the extent to which I have been successful is dubious. I have however learnt a lot, significantly more than I could have predicted before coming here. The majority of my time was spent in the capital of Beijing (北京, literally “Northern Capital”), but I also took an excursion to Nanjing (南京, literally “Southern Capital”), and to the beautiful mountains of Huangshan via Huangshan City (formerly Tunxi) and the tiny tourist-dependent town of Tangkuo. I have then been in cities with a population of 22 million, 9 million, 1.5 million, and less than 15000 people respectively.

In the build-up to travelling, we asked numerous friends and friends-of-friends who had travelled to the prc if they had any concrete tips. While of course helpful and welcomed, most where superficial and therefore largely fruitless². Instead these are some of the major obstacles I encountered that were not trivial.

I have found the Chinese people very welcoming and friendly. There is a noticeable absence in foreigners, not just in my personal experience, but also in seeing the reactions of the Chinese people to my presence. It is not uncommon to receive stares when walking around in public from people of all walks of life, but especially from children and the elderly. This is more prominent outside of Beijing. Many would very kindly ask to take pictures, leading more people quickly working up the courage to ask. This, combined with general compliments regarding one’s appearance, boosted my ego quite a bit and created an aura of celebrity.

There is also what seems to be a complete inability to understand the existence of other languages among many people, with people continuing to speak in fast and difficult Chinese despite the obvious limitations in both my communicative abilities and understanding.

This is quite puzzling, as I understand English is still taught in schools and the English signage, to the extent that it exists, is a reminder of the broad variety of language across the world. But perhaps schools teach quite limited English (similarly to the level of German, French, or Spanish often taught in Swedish schools), compounded with a lack of opportunities to practice often.

Many seemed to have a positive view of Sweden, perhaps as a consequence of the beautiful name in Chinese — ruidian (瑞典), auspicious canon. One inebriated Chinese man thought that the Swedes were great friends of the Chinese people. He was however very sure that we were eastern Europeans, something even an eastern European would deny.

I generally enjoyed my trip tremendously, although the cost of accommodation, travel, and administration (such as a visa) made the initial cost quite high. In comparison it was very cheap to travel around in the country, as well as to eat out — and the food was very good. I would like to return again some day, but my economic situation will likely mean I’ll have to wait.

I wish the people of mainland China all the best, and was continuously reminded by the wise words of the French author Victor Hugo that he wrote when prompted upon his thoughts of the burning of the Yuanmingyuan (圆明园) in 1860⁵:

The crimes of those who lead are not the fault of those who are led; Governments are sometimes bandits, peoples never.

❦

I have been using gnu Emacs for about three years now. I initially began using it after completing a semester of introductory programming classes exclusively in gnu Nano, with a series of shell scripts to compile and run C# code, and to set up a trio of terminals; one for code editing, one for compilation, and one to actually run the cli program I was writing. I had practically created my own little system for terminal multiplexing. This might sound like hell, and in hindsight it was. I was not even aware of some of the abilities of nano to perform syntax highlighting, display line numbers, indent lines et cetera. I merely needed something quickly to write text in, and was horrified at my classmates who had to sit idly and wait for visual studio to start or restart after crashing, it did not help that visual studio was not even available in platform of my choice. In the beginning I only needed to write short programs, simple loops, input and output and the like, and so the simplicity of nano was not in any way a burden — in some ways it was even a boon due to its quick startup time and lack of clunky ui. But eventually I found it annoying having to create and resize my layout of terminals and writing long commands to get Microsoft’s Windows-centric tooling to compile on Linux became a chore. So I created little scripts to optimize my workflow. Nothing incredibly complex mind you, just little fixes here and there. When what is called “fall break” in Sweden came around I decided to ditch Nano entirely. I had friends who used Vim, but being a staunch hipster I decided I couldn’t copy them, at least not without trying the alternatives.

And so I started out with gnu Emacs. The approach of an environment I could extend in-situ, rather than having to deal with a multitude of different tools obviously appealed to me greatly, having done so earlier using shell scripts. I completed my assignments much faster than I was expected to, and used the extra time in class to read An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp from within Emacs, making me more and more inclined to extend and shape Emacs to my own needs. Eventually I found out about org-mode and started to use it for very simple notes, quickly jotting down grocery list and project outlines. The big threshold came when I discovered the in-built functionality for \(\LaTeX\) exports. I had some early encounters with latex, but most of my knowledge was limited to what it was conceptually and how to write \frac{}{}. However, the default article class that is used when exporting from org-mode looks very nice, at least compared to what I was writing in LibreOffice or Google Docs. It is of course possible to get a similar quality in output from a wysiwyg¹ editor, but the amount of time you’d have to put in to do so is much larger than simply writing the text in org-mode and pressing C-c C-e l p. This of course does not have any impact on the quality of output, but as a fan of typography I like to think that a nicely formatted document enhances ones Aristotelian ethos, in that your credibility as a writer is improved in the eyes of the reader. Emacs therefore became relevant in not just my programming classes and microcomputer classes, but also all classes that involved some sort of essay or technical writing — Swedish, English, religious studies, history, engineering, and management. But there were two main subject that took up a considerable portion of my time where I had to put my cohesive Emacs workflow aside and resort to traditional techniques: physics and mathematics.

For taking notes I started out with a simple notes.org file, separating subject and topics organically with headers. I would recommend other to do the same. Initially, simply writing things down is the goal, and any optimisations will likely result in a net loss. I was inspired by Gilles Castel’s next-to famous series of blog posts on his note taking in LaTeX and vim, particularly his emphasis on “no delay [being] acceptable”. Of course, there are significant deviations in mine and Castel’s approaches and, to be perfectly honest, I think his notes are of a far superior quality. The primary difference is in medium; while the mathematics are written in latex, I prefer to write prose in the much lighter syntax of org mode or markdown, no \emph for me. Instead, I use org-latex-preview and org-fragtog to display latex inline and use the org documents themselves as notes instead of exporting them to pdf. Here is an example of a quick step-by-step way to solve first order differential equations using the integrating factor:

While Karthink has shown that you absolutely do not need to rely on writing snippets as Castel does, I still take that approach. Karthink relies heavily on auctex, an amazing suite for writing latex in Emacs, but most auctex functionality can not be used directly in org-mode. cdlatex, by the same author as org-mode, is however very useful through the org-cdlatex-mode minor mode. It allows for auto-completion of commonly written things like \(^{\text{super}}\) / \(_{\text{sub}} \text{-scripts}\) and Greek letters. It also creates a “just press tab whenever you want to continue writing” workflow that will move point in or out of delimiters and complete symbols. This combined with a liberal set of custom expanding templates using yasnippet creates a fast and coherent system since yasnippet also uses TAB as a key by default, meaning that you can spam it throughout writing, only thinking about the math conceptually as you’re listening to the lecturer.

But Emacs is not limited to writing mathematics merely in a documentary fashion, but also in a practical one. While theoretical mathematics operate on the syntax of math itself (algebraically), physics is often times interested in the actual values of the operations. For this I often quickly wrote mathematics in polish notation directly, also known as Emacs lisp. I find algebra difficult in polish notation, and so I usually do it in latex first, only performing the last numerical calculation in lisp.

This is what I would call the “killer app” of org-mode compared to other note taking applications like obsidian or pure \(\TeX\) files. Being able to instantly tap into a programming language is really powerful, but it also feels very powerful, even when doing trivial things. Quickly being able to jot down numerical calculations (and having them written down for future reference) is quite useful. While I am sure one can write notes in Jupyter notebooks and other computational documents I have yet to hear of someone do this². Emacs’ configurability means that one can easily adapt it to one’s own needs rather than either writing your own incomplete tooling or learning someone else’s workflow.

After high school I have taken a break from the hard sciences and studied a few different subjects at Stockholm University and the Swedish Defence University. What strikes me as fundamentally different is that while mathematics builds on itself very clearly, where you directly use earlier knowledge to explore new topics, the social realm is a lot more “flat”. One can jump directly into Foucault’s postmodernism or Hegel’s Phenomenology and, while of course missing valuable context, still enjoy a degree of understanding. Comparatively it is quite difficult to get any sort of a grasp for quantum chromodynamics without firm knowledge of the structure of the atom. I also felt that studying depended much more on obtaining a breadth of ideas and perspectives rather than sitting down and mastering whatever new topic the lecture had covered. This then called for a radically different approach.

I ditched my former monolithic “one large file” approach and instead, somewhat reluctantly I admit, began using Org roam. I was critical toward the preaching I observed being done by users of various Zettelkästen systems and felt like the idea of a “second brain” encompassing all your knowledge were useless. Having used the system for almost a year now I still feel the same way. It is quite useful to be able to link ideas, since broad concepts and actors often show up in multiple areas³.

I also took inspiration from Gregory Stein to create an org-mode bibliography that combines notes of books and articles with their respective bibtex entries. Here I am back to the monolithic file approach, with each book or article read merely separated into different broad categories⁴. I have quite a backlog of saved .pdf files that I would like to convert to this new bibliography, but I do not have the time to do it all manually. To start I instead just asked an llm to convert my hand-written citations for coursework into bibtex entries and sorted them into the file. I will let it grow organically from there.

Academia is in the end a forum for the exchange of new ideas, and the most efficient mode for the spread of ideas is text. While we may see some change in the structure of academic writing, particularly for those less experienced, as a result of large-scale llm usage I doubt that text will be dethroned as the primary mode of communication for human society, but this is really a subject too deep to cover in a text about using Emacs as a student. For the time being writing reports and essays is still relevant to one’s daily life. I of course do this in org-mode, simply adding some latex headers to the document when I am done:

#+title: The Meiji Restoration and Modernisation of Japan
#+subtitle: IR1.1 Seminar 1 Preparatory Assignment
#+author: Joar von Arndt
#+options: toc:nil
#+latex_header: \usepackage[a4paper, top=2in, bottom=2in, left=1.7in, right=1.7in]{geometry}
#+latex_header: \usepackage[activate={true,nocompatibility},final,tracking=true,kerning=true,spacing=true,factor=1100,stretch=10,shrink=10]{microtype}
#+latex_header: \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
#+latex_header: \usepackage{lmodern}

For longer assignments I usually use a two-column layout. I tweak the values for the margins when I am done writing and ready to submit or print so that the text nicely fits the page, since I think it looks more “complete” and planned out that way. Otherwise I just write plainly in org-mode, using footnotes for citations.

Emacs is a tremendously useful tool, and I hope that this either serves as a motivation for beginning to use Emacs (showing of what can be done in it) or to inspire someone else to take inspiration in their own daily activities. I was prompted to writing this by Daniel Pinkston’s talk at EmacsConf 2024, and saw an earlier version of myself in him. I particularly want to emphasize that one approach does not fit all, not even when it comes to personal preference. Some lifestyles/subjects require different techniques, and so you should both experiment and iterate continuously to see what works for you. This is in-line with the Emacs philosophy of complete and instant extensibility, and so I therefore could not imagine a better platform to be writing or taking notes in. ❦

This site exists in the overlap between a landing page, a traditional blog, a hypomnemata, and what is called a “digital garden”. I originally used the domain merely to host services and small programs over the open internet, and to have a place to point to and say “this is where you can find me online”. I started writing things because I found that certain topics kept coming up in discussion with the people around me, and I wanted to summarise my thoughts on them. A website was the perfect place for that.

I write many pieces concurrently, and publish them either when I feel they are finished or when my motivation has drained and I feel like I need to “just get it out there”. In some cases I also get a large boost of energy and write a post in even just a day or two, although I often try and stop myself from publishing immediately in order to let my thoughts simmer for a bit.

I then expand on topics if I come up with new perspectives or need to respond do a new development. In this way posts exist in a space between being mere ephemeral blog posts that were written at a given time and a continually rewritten and updated page. I try to avoid changing the main theses of a post after initial publication — even if I have come to disagree with myself over time — and so they still reflect the version of myself when they were first written.

The website is written in gnu Emacs and in org mode, because I find the markup to be intuitive, natural, and easy.¹

The website does deliberately not use any analytics or track you in any way, for both yours and my sake. I used to use tinylytics² for simple hit-counters and amusing statistics on what countries my readers came from, but I have since removed it. This is partly because I do not want to contribute to a culture of mass data collection and partly because of the impacts it had on my mind itself. Seeing what received clicks shaped my writing priorities away from what I myself actually wanted to write about. This may well be useful for those wanting to make money from their writing, but that is not what this website is intended to do.

The primary font used is Sabon. Code uses the Cartograph font. The headers are all typeset in the beautiful DaVinci by the nyc creative bureau Virgile Flores. For 中文 (and other cjk languages) I use Kai Ti since the default Noto font installed on many devices clashed quite a lot with the thin serif fonts I otherwise use.

Optimizing font delivery is one of the largest performance improvements you can make to a static website like this, and unfortunately requires some quite ugly solutions. For example, each initial character (the fancy I at the start of this post) is supplied as its own font file because the intricate designs are quite large when packed together. The cjk font is also huge due to the large numbers of character that it contains — a full collection with packaged in the older .ttf format is a whopping 12 Megabytes. I therefore have an elaborate and ugly script that I run periodically to create a font file containing only the characters used on the website. Doing that manages to bring the size down to just 22 kilobytes,³ a reduction of roughly 99.8%!

I jump quite often between fonts, especially for the serif font for body text. In this way having a website is quite useful; it allows me to experiment widely with design in an actual production environment.

I generally took a lot of inspiration from others using the same tooling as me, as well as from Gwern, Maggie Appleton and various other blogs and homepages I have read over the years. The colour scheme is a slightly adapted version of Protesilaos Stavrou’s modus themes (for the light theme) and the paradise theme (for the dark). I find them visually pleasing, and the Modus theme is very accessible to those with impaired vision. I have used them in Emacs for a long time, and so they fit nicely on my desktop when looking at my site.

The one-rule css implementation of the drop caps is taken from Michał Sapka, while the font files were downloaded from Gwern using a quick curl-script I had an llm write.⁴ They are however “raised” above the expected height of the characters, and so I had to lower them a bit to fit properly. The font is “Baroque Initials”, more information here. The indented paragraphs were inspired by Miró Allard.

The little arrows following external links (of which there have been quite a lot in this section) are from Alex Wennerberg, whose simple design I find admirable. Using email as a comment system was taken from Marcel Wichmann.

The blog is generated using Bastian Bechtold’s org-static-blog. I have an elisp file that runs the necessary configuration code and acts like a declarative configuration for the deployment of the static site. It looks like this:

(setq org-static-blog-publish-title "Joar von Arndt")
(setq org-static-blog-publish-url "https://joarvarndt.se/")
(setq org-static-blog-publish-directory "~/Documents/blog")
(setq org-static-blog-posts-directory "~/Documents/blog/posts/")
(setq org-static-blog-drafts-directory "~/Documents/blog/drafts/")
(setq org-static-blog-enable-tags t)
(setq org-static-blog-enable-og-tags t)
(setq org-static-blog-image "./vonArndtCrestWhite.png")
(setq org-static-blog-use-preview t)
(setq org-static-blog-no-comments-tag "nocomment")
(setq org-static-blog-enable-tag-rss t)
(setq org-static-blog-index-length 3)
(setq org-static-blog-preview-link-p t)
(setq org-static-blog-preview-ellipsis "<span class=\"ellipsis\">Continue Reading →</span>")

These are all simple configuration values that are unique to org-static-blog, and where most of the values are themselves unique to this blog specifically.

(setq org-static-blog-enable-social t
      org-static-blog-social-nick "Joarxpablo"
      org-static-blog-social-description "The hypomnemata and blog of Joar von Arndt"
      org-static-blog-social-avatar "https://joarvarndt.se/social.png")

The configuration for integrating the blog with the Org Social decentralized social media network. If you use org-social, simply add the following to your social.org file:

#+FOLLOW: Joarxpablo https://joarvarndt.se/social.org

(setq org-export-with-toc t)
(setq org-export-with-broken-links t)
(setq org-export-with-smart-quotes t)
(setq org-export-with-section-numbers nil)
(setq org-image-actual-width nil)
(setq org-html-stable-ids t)

;; For syntax highlighting of code (Like this).
(setq org-src-fontify-natively t)
(setq org-html-htmlize-output-type 'css)
(setq org-src-preserve-indentation t)

org-static-blog uses org-mode’s built-in html export functionality for much of the “dirty work”, and these variables are used for all org-mode exports. The latter part allows Emacs to transform its own syntax highlighting into css classes that I can then highlight with css variables depending on dark/light theme. This is all done at the rendering stage, meaning things like highlight.js are unnecessary. Without setting these variables Emacs will hard-code the current Emacs theme colours into the html. org-html-stable-ids is a bit of a special case, coming from an external package, that turns the randomly generated header ids into deterministic kebab-case ones that do not pollute the git history.

(setq org-static-blog-display-git-date t)
(setq org-static-blog-title-link nil)
(setq org-static-blog-add-initial t)
(setq org-static-blog-index-tag "essay")

(setq org-static-blog-hidden-directory "~/Documents/blog/hidden/")

(setq org-static-blog-generate-og-images t)
(setq org-static-blog-og-image-directory "post-images/")
(setq org-static-blog-og-image-font "ACaslonPro-Regular")

These are variables used in my own custom fork of org-static-blog. This toggles the display of the “last edited” date at the top of the post page, derived from when the .org-file was last changed. All the original org-mode files are uploaded to the website, and can be accessed by navigating to “https://joarvarndt.se/posts/postname.org”.

By default org-static-blog renders the post title of each page as a link pointing to itself. I found this quite distracting as it means displaying responsive changes whenever the title is hovered over. This variable thus disables that functionality.

org-static-blog-index-tag allows me to add a specific tag on the index page, in this case posts tagged with essay.

The hidden directory acts as a sort of middle-ground between drafts and posts; I have the drafts directory marked in the .gitignore file and can therefore not use git to track changes made to files in that directory, but I do not want pages like subscribe, about, or the link page to show up in the archive page as a proper “post”. For this I use the hidden directory.

The last three options are all related to the automatic generation of unique Open Graph-images for each post using Imagemagick.⁵ Images are only generated if they do not already exist, and so do not significantly impact build time.

(setq org-static-blog-preview-source 'paragraph
      org-static-blog-preview-start "<p class=\"dcap\">")

I have added the ability use the #+description: parts of posts as the summaries, and changing the value of org-static-blog-preview-source to 'description enables this behaviour instead of the default of using *-preview-start and *-preview-end.

(setq org-static-blog-page-header
      "<meta name=\"Joar von Arndt\" content=\"Joar von Arndt\">
       <meta name=\"referrer\" content=\"no-referrer\">
       <meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"initial-scale=1,width=device-width,minimum-scale=1\">
       <link rel=\"describedby\" href=\"./llms.txt\">
       <link rel=\"preload\" href=\"static/style.css\" as=\"style\"/>
       <link href=\"static/style.css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" />
       <link rel=\"icon\" href=\"static/favicon.ico\">
       <link href=\"./public-key.asc\" rel=\"pgpkey\" type=\"text/plain\">
       <link rel=\"me\" href=\"https://github.com/JanJoar\" />
       <link rel=\"me\" href=\"https://gravatar.com/speedilyrunaway0201f99245\" />
       <link rel=\"me\" href=\"https://vonarndt.se/@joarxpablo\">
       <link rel=\"pgpkey\" href=\"/key.pub\">
       <link rel=\"webmention\" href=\"https://webmention.io/joarvarndt.se/webmention\" />
       <script src=\"static/sidenotes.js\" async></script>
       <script src=\"static/comments.js\" async></script>
       <link rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.33/dist/katex.min.css\" integrity=\"sha384-fgYS3VC1089n2J3rVcEbXDHlnDLQ9B2Y1hvpQ720q1NvxCduQqT4JoGc4u2QCnzE\" crossorigin=\"anonymous\">
       <script defer src=\"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.33/dist/katex.min.js\" integrity=\"sha384-YPHNAPyrxGS8BNnA7Q4ommqra8WQPEjooVSLzFgwgs8OXJBvadbyvx4QpfiFurGr\" crossorigin=\"anonymous\"></script>
       <script defer src=\"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.33/dist/contrib/auto-render.min.js\" integrity=\"sha384-JKXHIJf8PKPyDFptuKZoUyMRQJAmQKj4B4xyOca62ebJhciMYGiDdq/9twUUWyZH\" crossorigin=\"anonymous\"
       onload=\"renderMathInElement(document.body);\"></script>")

(setq org-static-blog-post-comments
      "<div class=\"comment-by-email\">
         <form class=\"comment-by-email-form\">
           <textarea id=\"comment-by-email-textarea\"
             placeholder=\"Write a comment\"></textarea>
           <button type=\"submit\">Send</button>
         </form>
       </div>")

This is quite self-explanatory, it formats the header for each page so that the correct css, javascript, favicons et cetera are loaded. It also includes various rel="me" links that are used to form a web of authorship proving that I am the owner of this website and those accounts. The rel="pgpkey" points to my public key in plain text format.

While the website does make use of javascript I have as an utmost priority that it should be accessible and readable without it. There are really only three elements that require javascript:

1. Comments, who quite simply creates a mailto: -link that is filled in with the appropriate information (including recipient, subject header, and content inserted on the website). All of this can of course be done manually by emailing me the old-fashioned way.
2. Client-side \(\LaTeX\) rendering using \(\KaTeX\). This should be possible to render server-side and therefore remove, but I have yet to build a way to do so using my ssg. A project for the future.
3. Sidenotes. I cover this further down.

(setq org-static-blog-page-preamble "<div class=\"header\" role=\"banner\">
                                     <a href=\"./index.html\" class=\"home-link\"><img id=\"themeImageHeader\" src=\"vonArndtCrestBlack.png\" class=\"header-img\" alt=\"Family arms\" aria-label=\"Primary navigation\" width=\"50\"></a>

<input type=\"checkbox\" id=\"menu-toggle\" class=\"menu-toggle\">

<label for=\"menu-toggle\" class=\"menu-button\" aria-label=\"Open menu\">
  <span></span>
  <span></span>
  <span></span>
</label>

<nav class=\"menu-panel\">
  <ul>
    <li><a href=\"./archive.html\">Archive</a></li>
    <li><a href=\"./tags.html\">Tags</a></li>
    <li><a href=\"./subscribe.html\">Subscribe</a></li>
    <li><a href=\"./website.html\">Colophon</a></li>
    <li><a href=\"./links.html\">Your next stop</a></li>
    <li><a href=\"./now.html\">Now</a></li>
    <li><a href=\"./contact.html\">Contact</a></li>
    <li><a href=\"./about.html\">About</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>


</div>")

(setq org-static-blog-page-postamble
      (format
       "<div class=\"footer\" role=\"contentinfo\">
       <div class=\"footer-upper\">
       <img loading=\"eager\" class=\"footer-img\" id=\"themeImageFooter\" src=\"Ship-5.svg\" alt=\"A sailing ship\">
       <copyright>© %s <span class=\"small-caps\">ad</span> / <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar\">%s <span class=\"small-caps\">ar</span></a> Joar von Arndt</copyright>
        </div>
        <div class=\"footer-lower\">
        <nav>
          <ul>
            <li><a href=\"./about.html\">About</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"./archive.html\">Archive</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"./links.html\">Your next stop</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"./website.html\">Colophon</a></li>
          </ul>
        </nav>

        <nav>
          <ul>
            <li><a href=\"./now.html\">Now</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"./subscribe.html\">Subscribe</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"./contact.html\">Contact</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://webmention.io/joarvarndt.se/webmention\">Webmentions</a></li>
          </ul>
        </nav>
    <script src=\"static/theme.js\" defer></script>
    </div></div>"
       (format-time-string "%Y")
       (calendar-french-date-year)))

The header and footer of each page. The header contains two things; the heraldic achievement that acts as a “home” link and — on mobile devices — an easy navigation menu. The table of contents that appears on some pages (including this one) is a part of the post itself and is generated by org-mode’s export functionality. It simply moves to the top of the page using css and is not part of the header.

The footer has comparatively quite a lot going on. Its multi-column design was inspired principally by Jonas Hietala, from whom I was also partly inspired by the choice of using git to track post changes (although the idea of tracking changes to a post came from Appleton’s “planted X time ago”). I also chose to prominently display webmentions as a technology since they are used by an unfortunately few number of people, and I myself often forget to check if a site does or not when linking to them.

(setq org-static-blog-index-front-matter "<index><site-intro>
<i>Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt</i>.
<hr>
<p> This site is my place for experimentation
  in writing, development, and the exploration of different ideas; my
  hypomnemata. </p>

<nav class=\"index-nav\">
 <ul class=\"link-ul\">
   <li><a href=\"./archive.html\">All posts</a></li>
   <li><a href=\"./about.html\">About</a></li>
   <li><a href=\"./food/index.html\">What I am having</a></li>
   <li><a href=\"./subscribe.html\">Subscribe</a></li>
   <li><a href=\"./contact.html\">Contact</a></li>
 </ul>
  <picture>
   <source
    type=\"image/webp\"
    srcset=\"leaf-174.webp 174w, leaf-256.webp 256w, leaf-512.webp 512w, leaf-1024.webp 1024w\"
    sizes=\"12rem\">
   <img
    src=\"leaf-174.png\"
    srcset=\"leaf-174.png 174w, leaf-256.png 256w, leaf-512.png 512w, leaf-1024.png 1024w\"
    sizes=\"12rem\"
    width=\"174\"
    height=\"153\"
    alt=\"A leaf.\"
    class=\"pictograph\">
  </picture>
 </nav>
</site-intro>
<div class=\"essays\"><h1>Essays</h1>")

(setq org-static-blog-index-end-matter
      " <a href=\"./tag-essay.html\" class=\"archive-link\">All Essays</a>  </div></index>")

This is the hand-crafted html for the index page, that itself has no corresponding org-mode file. It is generated on each rebuild with this introduction and a series of posts governed by org-static-blog-index-length.

(setq org-static-blog-archive-front-matter "<picture>
        <source srcset=\"https://joarvarndt.se/bird-butterfly.webp\" type=\"image/webp\">
        <source srcset=\"https://joarvarndt.se/bird-butterfly.png\" type=\"image/png\">
        <img src=\"./bird-butterfly.png\"
          alt=\"A small bird resting amongst the branches, gazing at a flying butterfly.\"
          class=\"pictograph\">
      </picture> <hr>")

Finally another custom-fork-feature; archive front matter! This can be used to display anything on the page listing all of the posts, but here I use it to insert a beautiful illustration that I got from Tom Chalky.⁶

The above lisp code is not just a series of example code snippets, it is directly the code that is used to build the website! The text you are reading right now is written as an org-mode document, and the code blocks above are exported into a corresponding Emacs lisp file and run as part of the build process. Because it became annoying to manually evaluate the above code block every time I wanted to export I wrote a quick build script, whose contents can easily be embedded⁷ into this post like this:

#+INCLUDE: "../build" src emacs-lisp

#!/usr/bin/env -S emacs -x

;;; Code:

(package-initialize)
(message "Initialized package.el")

(require 'org)
(require 'cal-french)
(require 'htmlize)
(require 'exec-path-from-shell)
(require 'ox-html-stable-ids)

(org-html-stable-ids-add)
(exec-path-from-shell-initialize)
(exec-path-from-shell-copy-env "PATH")

(message "Loaded libraries")

(load-file "~/programming/org-static-blog/utils.el")
(load-file "~/programming/org-static-blog/org-static-blog.el")

(org-babel-tangle-file "~/Documents/blog/posts/website.org")
(load-file "~/Documents/blog/posts/website.el")

(org-static-blog-publish)

;;; build ends here

This makes use of the very underused scripting capabilities of Emacs (#!/usr/bin/emacs -x), allowing you to use the power of lisp combined with Emacs’ extensive libraries. It also loads my personal fork of org-static-blog that makes some small opinionated changes (like the git-edit and french republican dates). The french republican dates are one of the clearest examples of the usefulness of Emacs as a standard library — Emacs ships with a library to translate to and from the french republican calendar.

I am a big fan of org-static-blog due to its simplicity⁸, extensibility (it is just a simple html static site generator) and obvious org-mode support. That I wrote my own fork is testament to the great work done by Bechtold. It is incredibly featureful, simple to read and to modify. If you ever wonder how a given piece of html is generated you can quickly C-s around in the source code (all of which is in a single file) between function definitions and implementations.

It is also quite fast — the majority of the build script is usually just start-up time from Emacs loading libraries — but not fast enough to offer anything like real-time previews. Unless org-static-blog-publish is called with a prefix argument⁹ it will only re-render those files that have actually changed and thus doesn’t take very long to re-render the site. Only when tinkering with site-wide html changes (such as for the footer) do I need to re-render everything, and even then it just takes a few seconds.

I used to use Hugo, a widely praised static website generator, but it only has nominal org-mode support and requires a special non-org-mode yaml frontmatter that I really dislike. When writing a post, I prefer to leave formatting mostly out of it, and with my main focus on text. Tinkering with the website’s appearance is great fun of course, but I like to keep the two as separate activities. Keeping them separate means that if I improve the appearance of a new post all previous posts also benefit. Writing any sort of special syntax also brings me out of the experience, and that is partly why I wrote my own javascript to create sidenotes out of basic pandoc (and therefore org-mode) style footnotes instead of using tufte-css.

The website used to be hosted on my own server at home, on an Intel nuc machine, running at first nginx and then Caddy.¹² After I experienced a 25 day long downtime in June 2025 when I was traveling in China I however decided to not host the public-facing blog from home. These types of downtimes are not acceptable to me and my residential internet connection is simply too unreliable to maintain a high uptime anyways. For that reason I have moved the blog to Netlify but still retain the server for hosting personal services and experiments.

Unfortunately this means that I can not fully control the hosting, and this does have many downsides. One of them is that I must rely on Netlify’s servers not using renewable energy, and so this means that reading my website has an increased carbon footprint. Nevertheless, I have tried to make it as lean (for reasons of both ethics and speed) as I reasonably can:

Netlify requires a git repository at one of a small list of git forges, so I have a private repository of the blog on Github that is automatically pushed to from the main repository on Codeberg.

I use loopia as my domain registrar, primarily due to having been recommended them from someone I trust, however I have made no significant research into alternatives myself.

I use magit to interact with git and push changes to the blog to a remote repository that then causes netlify to update. ❦