The subject of artificial intelligence (AI)¹ is one that has become hotly debated in recent years. That the growth of AI’s capabilities has been partly driven by what is becoming increasingly clear financial engineering. These problematic elements has created a stark division of opinions that can generally be subdivided into the following categories:

1. The masses. A large, indifferent group who use LLMs in different capacities — stretching from the most common not-at-all to daily. Their unifying character is that, while discussion surrounding the ethical and day-to-day implications of AI are common, they primarily do not think about the philosophical, technological, political, macroeconomic, or in some other sense structural impacts of quick AI growth. Generally negative toward AI (and of how it seems to be loosely integrated into more and more consumer products) but not so much as the next group:
2. The Luddites. A highly critical and hostile group that consists of an over-represented share of (digital) artists, environmental activists, reactionaries and software engineers who prefer “hand-crafted” code. They are much more plugged in to the conversation than the every-man, but are at the same time reactionary in the Newtonian sense, explicitly denouncing any AI advances and proclaiming that AI will not be relevant after the inevitable popping of the bubble.
3. The Doomers. Strong believers in strong growth in the capabilities of AI models, but also worried that humanity’s collective ability to control them will grow slower than the aforementioned capabilities. Makes up the majority of the AI-safety community.
4. The Optimists. This group believes that not only will AI growth be fast, it will also grant mankind gifts that surpass all that humanity has achieved before, and we will hopefully live in som form of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

I am not firmly enmeshed in any of these camps. I am too well-informed to be a part of the uninterested masses, and in some ways am more positive about the use-cases of AI than many others (although I do also do not reject the label of luddite either). On the division between “optimists” and “doomers” I find that both are often heavily separated from reality, and in many cases not well-read outside the fields of science-fiction (and perhaps computer programming). This is an attempt to inform these latter groups.

One of the favourite subjects of AI discussions are those of exponential growth. This is usually framed in some way that sets a “before” and and “after”, during which AI gains the ability to recursively self-improve and effectivise the manufacture of goods and services as well as the large-scale automation of R&D. I am a strong believer in the long-term ability for different AI models to improve all of these fields, but believing in exponential growth means that one has to face the reality of the costs of such development.

It took humanity roughly as long to go from using bronze swords to iron swords (3300-1200BC, roughly 2100 years) as it took to go from iron swords to gunpowder (1200BC-904AD, 2100 years) and from then it was only one millennium until we had the ability to destroy ourselves utterly with the invention of the atomic explosive (1945, 1041 years after the military use of black powder). The growth in technological capacity is already an exponential one.

The growth in computational potential is famously also exponential, and in many ways it is the driving force behind the capabilities of large language models. But increases in energy efficiency and computational speed are harder and harder to come by (Dennard scaling has been gone for 20 years now). This does not mean that growth in computation is likely to stall, but instead it means that more and more resources and inventions need to be produced in order to maintain the same rate of exponential growth (since the integral grows faster than the absolute value above it). Lithography machines are a famous example of this; likely the most advanced machines that humanity has yet to create, they consist of individual parts that are incomprehensibly precise².

I feel compelled to quote Alexis de Tocqueville; There are two camps consisting of those who believe AI will dramatically accelerate technological development and those who believe it be a mere fad. “It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived”. I believe that AI will be a necessity for continued technological growth as the barriers are continuously rising, but that a very quick (less than half a decade) transformation is very unlikely. Many analyses of an AI-powered economic boom predict yearly growth rates in the mid-10¹% (~50%), but often also mention the theoretical doubling rates of insects or bacteria³. But these latter examples only double very quickly under very unique situations with very large amounts of resources. To me this seems like a classic misunderstanding on the structure of human development.

That invention is the driving force behind development has been a dominant thought since the enlightenment. But one should not underestimate the importance of a more organic and more diffuse form of development. The economy of the PRC, or of the four Asian tigers, doubled incredibly quickly, but when it did so it required enormous amounts of resources. The industrialisation of China needed huge quantities of steel, concrete, and energy to construct railways, highways and urban dwellings. The physical mass of this puts an upper bound on the speed for growth that a superintelligent AI can not fix.

Doubling the number of factories requires a large increase in construction-related steel production, and that requires an increase not only in logistics, but also in the exploitation of resources. A delivery of iron ore takes a month to travel by sea (one of the most efficient forms of transportation) from Australia to Shànghăi (上海).⁴ Delivery of construction equipment also takes an insignificant amount of time. The Abundance-argument regarding red tape is of course valid, and there areas in which improvements can be made in western economies, but one still needs to keep in mind an analysis connected to the situation on the ground.

Richard Danzing’s recent paper on cybersecurity and AI stresses an important fact when it comes to national security, that AI is here now and needs to be continuously integrated into the (American) national security apparatus in order to avoid a “Maginot moment”. This rings true for economic development as well — because the nature of war has become more and more industrial as the state and the economy has grown.⁵ Waiting for a potential “AGI” to be invented before applying it to the economy is akin to (to take inspiration from Danzig) waiting to discover the mythic city of El Dorado before taking advantages of the discovery of America.

A particularly obscene phrase (although it seems to have been fallen slightly out of favour) is the statement that AI will in some sense kickstart a “fourth industrial revolution”. In fact, there has only been one industrial revolution — and we are all still in its midst. To showcase this, here is a graph of the world’s (human) population⁶:

Here it is again, but this time with a logarithmic y-axis:

It is clear that, while the population has generally been increasing steadily, there was a sharp inflection point (that can be clearly made out even in the second graph) some time in the 17th century, i.e. the industrial revolution. This development has not wavered, an despite demographic decline in Europe and east-Asia will likely continue until the end of the century. At that point, even if the population decreases faster, we will still be so unfathomably greater in number than we have been for practically all of human history. The power of industrialisation is awesome qua the sublime.

The division of industrial revolutions typically do so by focusing on the specific “driving” technologies. But those technologies do not come out of nowhere. They are needed, invented, applied, and (through their application) they drive new needs. A superintelligence would not have solved this because intelligence itself has not been the bottleneck for a long time. Technological growth is driven by application driving new needs — innovation is not a scientist sitting in a laboratory (that is science) but instead the practical needs developed out of application. The steam engine was developed long before it was employed because the steam engine qua invention could only exist in a proto-industrial society that needed mechanical energy for pumping and transport and that had ample supplies of wood and coal.

That is not to say that GAI would not be useful for future scientific and technological development, but I merely want to point out that “a country of geniuses in a datacenter” does not a scientific revolution make. The shape of technological growth (since the industrial revolution that is) appears in some ways similarly to the following function:

\[ g_t(x) = c + \sin{x}, \hspace{1em} c > 1 \]

There is always some underlying R&D (in the literal sense) going on, and it in turn prompts new developments to begin. Because the above is the growth of technology, and because the value of sin never goes below -1, there is never any regression in technology (as I am aware of there has never been, apart from the Bronze age collapse). The integral of this then becomes

\[ G_t(x) = cx - \cos{x} \]

where \(cx\) continuously keeps going up, and mirrors in this sense the continuous advance of technology. There has been rapid change for a long time now — almost 300 years. Each generation that has lived through this development has had to grapple with its consequences. The field of political economy grew out of not just an attempt to control and steer this growth, but also an attempt to try and attempt how it happened in the first place.

Smith did so using the analogy of the pin factory to show how increasing markets made possible by international shipping, steam engines, and empire led to an increased division of labour and therefore an increase in productivity. Marx in turn tried to describe this by framing it as a consequence of primitive accumulation (through the expropriation of land) and capital’s ever-increasing needs for growth. In fact, there has not been a decade since the late 1700’s that has not been revolutionary in some way.

To say that the next decade will be transformative is an easy bet to take. We humans like to think that the world will stay the same forever, but our increasing industrialisation means that that will likely never be the case again. It seems strange then to write a post arguing against rapid change. But that is precisely the problem we are posed with — because we see the world as static we do not notice how much it is changing.

When we are presented with a technology as all-encompassing as AI it is entirely rational to see it as upending the world as we know it. But the world has seen — and is currently seeing — transformations of equal (if not greater) impact. The conversation around AI is stuck with its blinders on, just as those who (mistakenly) saw crypto as revolutionary did not focus on the broader technological change of the planet. We must therefore enlargen our view to encompass all these aspects in order to adequately think about how technology will impact our lives. ❦

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. ❦

The spirit of the age that we currently finds ourselves in is one of rapid change (and often times decline) in the economic, political, and technological order of the world. Compared to the nineteenth century (and in many regards even the twentieth), when living standards where many times more squalid than today, there was then a sense of progressiveness, of growth and change that — as long as channelled in the correct direction — would be transformed into a new and wonderful world. That spirit does not exist today. Instead we have the idea that we are “sliding” back into the darkest depths of mankind’s history and that we will — posed with some certainty if not clarity — see the return of fascism and of the oppression of the state.

There are many people today comparing our contemporary times to those of the 1930s. Even if there are apt comparisons to be made I have trouble seeing the similarities clearly. Much more relevant to me seems to be the many crises leading up to the first world war; the long period of change created more and more cracks in the established systems of managing relations that at last proved too great to overcome. Once the stresses had reached a certain level it all came falling down once someone started shooting in the streets of Sarajevo. It still feels relevant to quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci¹ however:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

As those who have by chance been born into this interregnum it is our duty to understand the developments that have lead us to these events so that we can do our best to shape the future trajectory of the world, and to make sure that the new that we create is better than that which came before.

We must differentiate between three words that are often seen as synonymous, that being the dictatorial, authoritarian, and totalitarian states. The authoritarian state is a state that demands that it possess ultimate authority of that which it claims, and that expects that authority to be unquestionably followed. All states are authoritarian in some degree, to the point that the use and employment of authority must be included in the definition of the state. This is what Weber famously did in his formulation of the state as the possessor of the monopoly of violence. An authoritarian state does not have to be a particularly powerful state, and in fact the reverse is oftentimes the case. A powerful state can instead offer some degree of leeway when it comes to organizing its possessions since it does not have to risk the diminishing of its power.

The dictatorial state is closely related to the authoritarian one, since the application of authority requires dictating one’s wishes. The dictatorship, as an institution, has its origins in the office of the dictator in the republic along the Tiber, and any study of the dictator specifically should incorporate its formulation. In its roman form the the dictator was role temporarily appointed to solve a specific problem, but in the late republic it became a much more over political tool — used most prominently by Sulla and then subsequently by Caesar.

The narrow focus of the dictator showcases an important element; the dictatorship can only exist in a state that is in an earlier form of historical development. The dictator, as an individual, must be involved in the decisions of the state — who become incalculable in number as historical development continues. We will soon examine the nature of this trajectory, but permit me to remain on the subject of the dictator.

The centralisation of decision-making is a core aspect of the evolution of Ellulian technique, and because of that is has been instrumental in the development of the state. A weak state, as all early ones were, necessarily requires a strong authority to impose its will and maintain its existence (as we have already described). The early state is forced to centralize, if not its limited resources then at least its political power, to get anything done. It did so initially through the institution of kingship (as Lewis Mumford examines in the first volume of his book The Myth of the Machine). This initial collectivisation enabled the construction of vast irrigation systems — that in turn contributed to an increased degree of the division of labour and therefore the development of things like mathematics and astronomy — as well as of vast monuments such as the pyramids of Giza.

The dictator (in the form of the monarch) remains at all times a touch-point figure, like how the pharoses of Egypt were intimately involved in agriculture through their role in the periodic flooding of the Nile. The invention of writing served an important role in the extension of the dictator’s power, they could now project their presence across both space and time, and thus organize labour on a much grander scale. But this development also created something else that is of interest to our study — a permanent, literate, bureaucracy whose role would become not just the communications of the dictator’s wishes, but the carrying out of the actions of state, whose existence first now can be outlined.

The state is usually dated firmly to the peace of Westphalia, when the principle of a sovereign right emerged,² but as we have established its structural roots go all the way back to the origins of kings. This of course continued, and the stretches of land that monarchs laid claim to increased as their powers did – to almost the level of caricature like in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. In France, one of clearest examples of early centralisation, Louis XIV famously proclaimed that the he and the state were one and the same³, but the growth of the bureaucracy required for absolutism meant that on his deathbed in 1715 he is said to have uttered “Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours”.⁴ These are not contradictory statements as they might appear on first appearance. Absolutism meant that the monarch, in every capacity in which [he] was able to intervene, was the embodiment of the state. But to maintain this capability demanded the maintenance of a massive political machine that would necessarily have to survive the monarch.

Absolutism is the end of the form of the dictator. While it survives, and in some places even reëmerges in the world today, it can no longer be the source of historical progress. Instead it must leave the reins to the burgeoning bureaucracy that it helped create.

I must ask the reader to try to vanquish any pretences over the idea of totalitarianism that one may already have. The goal here is not to study a specific group of states that have existed in the past, present, and are postulated to exist in the future, but instead to inspect qualities that exist in all states of a sufficiently developed historical nature. The detailed implementation of this totalitarianism has been extensively debated for almost 250 years. During this debate there have been many proposals that have been discarded, but they are nevertheless of interest to us in the study of their shared qualities.

The totalitarian state is, like all other states, by necessity authoritarian. Its primary characteristic is that it attempts to envelop all of society; there is no element of social, political, technical, or private life that it does not interest itself in. It can be dictatorial — in the sense that we have just examined — but bit does not have to be, and in fact may often be limited by a dictatorial nature. This is because while the dictatorial form allows for the forcing through of action it does not foster a total commitment to the cause of the state.

The totalitarian state does not have to actually succeed at this goal of being the fulcrum of social life – in fact no state has yet done so completely – but it must strive towards that ideal. Some of the different methods of doing so that have historically been attempted we will generally discuss here, but a complete record would require the examination of almost every society existing today – as well as a great multitude of historical states. We now however live in a time in which this ultimate goal seems to be within reach, and agents of the state (such as autocrats, politicians, and civil servants) are becoming ever more frustrated when met with aspects of the world outside of their control, when they before would have been unthinkable for the state to influence. This frustration will only serve as an accelerant for further increases in state capacity.

Machiavelli, even in advocating for the benefits of a reputation of cruelty, makes clear that one must in all cases avoid being hated — even under the conditions of dictatorship.⁵ That this is easier said than done is clear to anyone, but is is particularly so in a dictatorship, where the originator of decisions does not immediately feel their consequences. While fear must be employed to maintain rule in a dictatorial system in some degree (as Machiavelli elegantly explains) the point of totalitarianism qua force is not merely to enforce rule — although that is of course in the interest of individual actors within the system.

The first forms of the totalitarian goals of the state emerged out of the French revolution. The imposition of the political will of Paris during the various counter-revolutions across the country (most notably the Guerre de Vendée) was a method for further centralisation and imposition of political will. But most of all it was the Terror that — in the same way as would later occur in the Chinese mainland between 1966 and 1976 — imposed a political purpose onto the whole of society. Political life became intensely relevant, and things like the Levée en masse violently joined the individual’s fate to that of the state.

The numerous modernisations made during the revolution brought state control into an equally numerous number of areas of life. This continued under the reign of Napoleon — whose civil code unified the French judicial system into one coherent whole. It was this dichotomy and bringing together of the individual and the sublime structure of the state that Hegel pointed out at Jena, and that represented the end of History.

The ideology of fascism is at its heart the ideology of the state as a supreme, all-encompassing entity — and as the final form of the post-1789 developments in state capacity. Combined with the ideas of nationalism, in the strict sense,⁶ this creates the connection that not only is the state developing and an agent throughout history, but that the nation state is the representation of a the nation’s actions, and the state is therefore responsible to the people in the same way as the people are responsible to the state.

It is a strictly illiberal (in the sense of liberal qua freedom of the individual) idea. If compared to the liberal (European) nationalism of the nineteenth century — where the state’s purpose is merely to act as the collective sphere to enforce the rights and dignities of the nation — it becomes clear how the fascist state is demanding of another degree. The state is not content to merely exist as the arbiter of the status quo, but must act in a new sense upon its environment.

Gentile writes in the Doctrine of Fascism:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.

[…]

It is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for 19th century publicity in favour of national governments. Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity.

This is no longer an idea unique to those who publicly consider themselves as fascists, but is widely held across the political spectrum. The state, on the international level, and government, on the domestic one, are seen as the principal agents through which political life should be lived.

That fascism has been the ideology of the reactionary is perhaps primarily because it has served as a progressive⁷ force against that of communism (that we will soon discuss). It thus quite naturally attracted the interest of capital; the NSDAP was neither socialist nor a worker’s party. The struggle against this expansion of capitalism into fascism has been the central mission of left-wing activism since the end of the second world war. But fascism failed at extracting the power of the state, precisely because it was forced to coöperate with the interests of monarchists and capitalists — just as in the east “the paradox of Russian bolshevism is that it was in reality conservative” led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. One can not maintain the old institutions of feudalism or religion while subsuming everything into the totalitarian state.

Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, paints the picture of his idealised city; the Kallipolis. A common quality to all the techniques that Socrates proposes is the centrality of the state as totally demanding and of highest importance. The rulers and guardians of the Kallipolis would not be allowed to touch gold and would live in simple communal housing so that they would not put their own interests over those of the state.

The platonic ideal of the city is strictly limited, and Plato (as well as his follower Aristotle) believed that the city must maintain a firm boundary and not give in to imperialism. This is in some sense a prenationalist idea; the state exists only to serve those belonging to the nation, and should not be extended to all the ends of the earth.

Socrates describes on page 423⁸ how a (non-ideal) city is really composed of two cities — that of the rich and that of the poor — who are both at war with one another. Defeating such a city simply means turning one of these inner cities against the other — the rich against the poor, for example — and letting it succumb into infighting. The Kallipolis would be immune from such infighting due to its structured coöperation between classes; a form of primitive corporatism. This is such a central tenet of Socrates’ idea that he defines justice itself as that of different groups or elements performing their assigned tasks, just like how corporatism emphasises the duty of social groups to fulfil their role for the good of the state as a whole. The ideal city must be one city, composed of citizens not advocating for some domestic change.

Communism is the state of affairs consisting of a classless, stateless, and moneyless form of society in which all members are able to form free social and economic relations with one another. How to achieve this has historically been a matter of some debate among leftist groups however. Those who have been most successful, not in achieving communism but in achieving absolute power, have almost entirely tried to do so through the path of socialism — state control over the means of production and most commonly the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. We have of course already explained the institution of the dictatorship, and this is the same institution here.

Marxism once again identifies the struggle between what Socrates called “two cities”: the proletariat (who can only sustain themselves by selling their labour) and the bourgeoisie (who live on the extracted surplus labour of the proletariat). “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”; The goal of the socialist revolution is to abolish this class struggle. To do this it aims not at the reconciliation of the classes (like corporatism) but instead to subsume the bourgeoisie — to seise the means of production — into one class whose only relations are to those of the state. That no nation has successfully performed the transition from socialism to communism is due to the power and allure of the state.

Furthermore is the idea that the family, as a fundamental axiomatic unit, should be replaced by the community of the state. This is not unique to Socialism (not even to Marxism as a whole), but it is an especially prevalent idea because of the Marxist focus on how women are exploited as unpaid domestic labour under capitalism. To mention Socrates once again; he proposes that children should not be told who their parents are, and likewise parents should not have any specific ties to their offspring. Instead children should be turned over the state and raised collectively, so that their education is attuned to the best interests of the collective whole. This too is a technique for the state’s increasing control over its population — the elimination of all social relations that are not under the auspices of the state.

The state, as the representative of the common good of the people, should inherently strive to better the conditions of the working class. But at the same time the state requires more and more power and resources, necessitating the increased exploitation of the proletariat — even as they are ostensibly in charge.

The democratic system is in many ways the most totalitarian of all. The dictatorial system requires that political power be monopolised by the dictator, but in a democracy the reverse is true. When the people rule it becomes a requirement for each and every citizen to become informed and opinionated regarding the political issues of their time. This is, more so than the technical developments, the primary advancement of the French revolution in regards to totalitarianism.

Because democracy is intended to be shaped by the individuals interests it invites them to try and solve their problems using the power of the state. Thus when the feminist activist Carol Hanisch writes that “the personal is political” she describes how the personal aspects of one’s own life have been extended outward into the public sphere. When all problems are solvable using the state (and more and more problems are correspondingly caused by the state) it becomes more and more important for one’s specific group to take control over the apparatus. This is one of the reasons for the increasing political polarisations of our time — those who covet the command over the state will stop at nothing to obtain it, even if it comes at the price of social unity, because they deem the possible rewards enormously great.

Feminism is indeed one representation of the totalitarian state. While women have been historically suppressed and made subservient at all levels of society it has been the goal of feminist movements to make use the state to right this wrong. Some feminist scholars have rightly critiqued this, citing the inherently patriarchal structure of the state, but it seemingly has not had much impact on mainstream feminist thought.

Improvements in technology and in the techniques of propaganda⁹ have strengthened the ability for dictators to project their will. This development is not new — it was pointed out quite clearly by Speer¹⁰ — but it has not stopped; If anything it has accelerated. And yet no technical apparatus can yet match the strength of democracy in this regard. In democratic society all members are part of an intense political discussion, where each individual is at all times a recipient, activist, and censor. The democratic state does therefore not require the same level of authoritarian control as that of the dictatorship as we ourselves maintain the continuity of the state.

We thus, as citizens in democratic states (and not actors in a people-ruled anarchic world), further this extension of totalitarianism. Feminist scholarship has long discussed how societal norms and structures are maintained through our actions, but also our ideas and theoretical abstractions. In just the same way democracy shapes our lives by defining it in our political relations to the state.

That the state’s power is sublime and dangerous is an idea that has long existed in theological scholarship, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The church itself is an institution that has always existed in parallel to the state, and therefore by definition undermines its power. That the protestant kingdoms colligated the church with the state was one of the causes for why they were first to apply technics on such a broad scale.

The Jewish Pirkei Avot warns against the state, and against its corrupting practices:

הֱווּ זְהִירִין בָּרָשׁוּת, שֶׁאֵין מְקָרְבִין לוֹ לָאָדָם אֶלָּא לְצֹרֶךְ עַצְמָ

Be wary of the government, as they draw close to a person only when they need him for some purpose.

נִרְאִין כְּאוֹהֲבִין בִּשְׁעַת הֲנָאָתָן, וְאֵין עוֹמְדִין לוֹ לָאָדָם בִּשְׁעַת דָּחְקוֹ

They seem like good friends in good times, but they do not stand for a person in his time of trouble. (Pirkei Avot 2:3)

It is clear that what this warns against is the same as that which Gentile wrote, that the state “accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State”, but does not altruistically help the individual “in his time of trouble”. The Jews unfortunately have perhaps more experience of the state’s power when used against oneself than any other group – not just in the horrors of the holocaust but also in the division between Prussia, Austria, and Russia; in Iberia; the destruction of the second temple; and as far back as the Babylonian captivity.

This is similarly warned against in the old testament, specifically in the widely misinterpreted story of Babel in Genesis 11:

וַיֹּאמְר֞וּ הָ֣בָה ׀ נִבְנֶה־לָּ֣נוּ עִ֗יר וּמִגְדָּל֙ וְרֹאשׁ֣וֹ בַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וְנַֽעֲשֶׂה־לָּ֖נוּ שֵׁ֑ם פֶּן־נָפ֖וּץ עַל־פְּנֵ֥י כׇל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”

וַיֵּ֣רֶד יְהֹוָ֔ה לִרְאֹ֥ת אֶת־הָעִ֖יר וְאֶת־הַמִּגְדָּ֑ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר בָּנ֖וּ בְּנֵ֥י הָאָדָֽם׃

GOD came down to look at the city and tower that the mortals had built,

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָ֗ה הֵ֣ן עַ֤ם אֶחָד֙ וְשָׂפָ֤ה אַחַת֙ לְכֻלָּ֔ם וְזֶ֖ה הַחִלָּ֣ם לַעֲשׂ֑וֹת וְעַתָּה֙ לֹֽא־יִבָּצֵ֣ר מֵהֶ֔ם כֹּ֛ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָזְמ֖וּ לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת׃

and GOD said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. […]” (Genesis 11:4–6)

The focus on what humanity built here is not a tower to reach up into the heavens in a literal sense, but instead it is the city itself that is the focus of God’s anger. A city that can support such a massive tower must be a grand one – and it is itself a rejection of God’s natural order and world, and of our duty as guardians and shepherds (Genesis 1:26). The city, as Plato has illuminated for us, is the origin and birthplace of the state. That the Pirkei Avot warns against this more advanced and developed form is therefore not surprising – it is a core aspect of Judeo-Christian theology. That “nothing will be out of [our] reach” refers to how the construction of Mumford’s megamachine will be made possible by the city and its kings, and that such employment of technique will make anything possible for mankind – for it is the goal of technique to encompass all. In the same vein Jesus Christ, in Matthew 4:8–9 (during the temptation), is offered all the kingdoms of the world by the devil – who can only offer them because they are not part of God’s creation.

This intellectual thought still remains with us today, even in the agnostic and atheist parts of our perspective on the world. The work of Kant, the great German philosopher, is largely one of secularising and shaping the ideas of the Judeo-Christian ethics into one befitting the enlightenment. His view on democracy (to be differentiated from republicanism) are in line with this thinking on the state; the tyranny of the masses as employed through the state means that the life of the individual person is necessarily ignored – or deliberately destroyed – when “his interests [do not] coincide with those of the State”. The freedom of classical liberalism therefore has its roots in religious opposition against the state.

The totalitarian state is here, ever present, and only interested in its continued survival and growth. It comes in numerous forms – aristocratic, autocratic, dictatorial, democratic and many more. It will almost assuredly come in an ever greater variety in the future, even as the techniques for maintaining state control become more and more common across the world.

Countering this future seems almost impossible, and yet it must be done to ensure the freedom of the individual. It is in this very struggle between these forces that our time will come to be defined; in how we use the state to reduce \(CO_2\) emissions, maintain the western “way of life”, and finally hold together an increasingly fractured world. The state is necessarily an oppressive construction that can not be used as a tool for freedom. Its power is however so great that the material rewards it has allotted for its citizens is enormous. ❦

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.

Text, as a system of recording symbolic representation for communication across time and space, is likely one of the most important inventions of mankind — second only the the symbolic representations themselves made possible by language. The general text, opposed to the specific form of writing, is useful primarily because it is a survivable and storable form of information that above anything else functions as lossy compression. These qualities make working with text more powerful than most other human inventions.

As Graydon Hoare puts it; always bet on text. Text is “stable”, “flexible”, “efficient”, and “socially useful”. All of these make text a powerful medium to work in, but they mask another quality — that of lossy compression. Humans are blessed with tremendous mental capacity; even someone on the lower scales of intelligence outperforms most supercomputers, all while merely running on a few watts of power. This overabundance of computation, constantly running every second of every day, has incentivised humanity to create systems of ritual, magic, and religion to otherwise simple phenomena.

“Shower thoughts”, of different kinds, are an example of how our brains are constantly reinterpreting the world around us. It is particularly a common activity to play out imaginary arguments between oneself and another person whilst in the shower. This is not just because our imagination is then fully in control of what is being said, but also how it is interpreted (and we can also reïnterpret what our opponent means). Much of the trouble in interhuman communication comes from the lossy quality of text, speech, and words.

It is noteworthy that this is not unique to text, but rather a quality of language more broadly, but this character is magnified enormously due to text’s durability and longevity. Sending a message encoded in text (whether by SMS, letter, or granite slab) requires the effort of creating a symbolic representation to create the message (writing), but is is equally important that the act of consuming the written material (reading), and understanding it, requires an equal — if not greater — amount of symbolic processing. This is why text is such a useful medium for communication — it offloads information from the text itself and instead leans on the intellectual and creative capacities of both author and reader.

It is a common saying that “a picture tells a thousand words”. One might therefore infer that graphical representations are more efficient — at least for broad and vague concepts such as emotion. In some regards this is true, it would be very difficult to represent a Rothko in text¹, but this is once again merely the consequence of text’s lossy quality. Take for example the following picture²:

The image shows a photograph of a lake with slightly overcast skies, taken from one of the shores. The opposite shore is rocky and covered with evergreen trees. On the left half of the image the shore rises to a hill. The lower left corner has cyan text that reads “02/08/2012”.

This description is not a perfect representation of the image, but it allows your mind to create its own description that fills in the gaps. Even the simplest part of the image to describe, the text, does not specify a shade of cyan nor any font or sizing.

Another field that might argue against mere textual representation is that of statistics and/or data visualisation. Florence Nightingale’s contribution was just as much one of data presentation as much as it was one of data collection³. But it illuminating that not only are graphs often turned back into textual representation, even at the cost of resolution (via techniques such as regression), but it is also an expectation in academia that one provide the raw, often text-based, data because it allows for easier reproducibility. If images were really preferable then would it not be easier to directly employ the results of the visual representation?

There is however a way to merge the strengths of text and the visual medium: vector-based art. This is practically a list of instructions (in text) as to how an image should be reproduced. Maggie Appleton concedes (from an artistic perspective) that “Vectors are great for [sic] create hard, crisp edges and working with perfect geometric forms”. That adding texture and imperfect geometric forms is difficult to do in text is to be expected — it is much easier to describe a “perfect cube” than a “skewed cube” (in what way, to what degree?).

Text is, contrary to speech and other utilisations of language, an asocial social medium. The author, in creating a work meant for social communication, is alone in its creation. I have written about this aspect of writing before, in regards to its impact on email, but have since come to realize that it generalized much more broadly. The absence of thought contained in the “blank page” prompts the creation of philosophical thought to fill it. This jolts the mind into movement, and does it as much as a good conversation. As one writes the mind is captured in a dialogue between itself and the very text it is creating⁴.

The mind requires this activity in order to be truly alive. That we humans are constantly in intellectual motion is one of the elements that builds up our consiciousness, it allows us to be continuously aware of our continued existence. When we are in a dreamless sleep, our mind ceases to exist and we are philosophically dead for a short time — we are neither aware of our own existence nor are we creating new symbolic representations. When we are lost in the land of the dream however (regardless of if awake or asleep) we are in every sense alive.

Writing qua intellectual method does not require any form of advanced vocaubulary — or even developed communicative capabilities. It is a skill that is centered on one’s capacity to interact with yourself, with the golem of static intelligence that represents a snapshot of your mind. It is in this regard both an inner and an outer practice that showcases your capacity to be one with the world and to make sense of it as well as mold it.

It is not strange then that large language models (LLMs), one of many machine learning techniques, were the first machines humans built that people started to be considered sapient⁵. Computer vision models, many of which have been around for some time now, were never even considered to be sapient, not just because they are very dissimilar to human intelligence but also because they lack the capacity for symbolic action that LLMs posses. While a computer vision model can identify a cat (and therefore has some sort of symbolic knowledge) they are unable to process the knowledge of the cat’s existence in a broader context. This is the step that LLM’s take; they are capable of continuously creating a mental context, with thoughts that themselves impact its future thoughts.

The difference between the human mind then and an LLM is that we humans survive a much greater amount of time than most LLMs, and are able to filter information much more effectively. When you open up your favourite LLM app, asking it whether or not there are rats in Alberta (there are not) a new mind is created, thinks for a few fractions of a second, and then instantly disappears. To say that it is killed is perhaps an overstatement, it is closer to being asleep. The LLM stops thinking as soon as it stops writing, and then is “reawakened” as soon as you ask it another question. During this intermediate period it is in a proper trance, in that some (or all in this case) of its mental capacities are in a loop and are then philosophically disabled. The LLM is stuck on one singular representation of its mind, incapable of changing it for whatever reason.

Intelligence is in some regards a measure of how nuanced and detailed your perspective is. For LLMs, this is largely correspondent to context length — more information that can be used to inform the next token. Moonshot’s (月之暗面) CEO Yang Zhiling (杨植麟) explained in February of 2024:

To achieve AGI, long-context will be a crucial factor. Every problem is essentially a long-context problem — the evolution of architectures throughout history has fundamentally been about increasing effective context length.

Humans are very good at this, but particularly we are good at picking details of our experiences that stick out and are most important — you probably do not remember what shade your shoes were when you met the love of your life for example. Instead we filter our memories and pick out what may be relevant in the future (the “lessons to be learned”). Those lessons are then used to extrapolate information in all areas of your life and — particularly of relevance to this text — when reading.

Natalie Lawrence wrote in What Counts as a Mind? that the representations of LLMs are distinctly different from those of organic creatures, and that

The predictions of a computer and a human brain function in completely different ways. Bonobos, stinging nettles and amoebae are meaning-makers. They collect sensory information from their environments, such as changes in light or temperature, then take action accordingly. This slightly shifts their perceptions and the predictions that result, and the loop continues.

In contrast, LLMs use syntax to generate outputs, predicting the next token in the chain using algorithmic rules sifted from massive data sets.

The irony is that the processes that she describes here are both the same, the only difference is the language used. LLMs function by predicting the next token; a loop that gathers the information available and then takes action, adjusting accordingly before continuing on just as the bonobo reaches out and checks the sturdiness of a branch before attempting to climb. I do not deny that the difference between machines and biological beings is very great (what is it like being an LLM? Do they dream of electric sheep?)⁶ but offhandedly denying their sentience does not bring any further knowledge forward. That plants and synthetic materiels exhibit some mind-like properties seems like a model that could expand to include language models, not one that arbitrarily excludes them.

Programming languages, one of the most ubiquitous applications for plain text (in both the proper and metaphorical sense), are one of the most interesting advancements in the fields of text in this regard. Many programmers may think of the code itself as “being” the program, but that is not the case. Programming languages are really codified (so that different people can read the same text) ways to create commands and instructions for the computer. The C programming language is itself not “fast”, though it explicitly exposes very low-level functionality, but instead is compiled into a program that runs very quickly. This is thanks to the tireless work of compiler engineers, who have come up with a lot of interesting tricks to interpret instructions and come up with shortcuts that still end up with the same result.

Even programming then, one of the most rigid methods to use text (one has to be very careful to use the words incantations, oftentimes even with correct case), is still up for interpretation. This is so clear that an interpreter is even a strict technical term in the field of programming languages. But as I have just explained, compilers are themselves another form of interpreter, albeit with a wider definition than the one commonly accepted. This is why hand-optomization is so rare these days — the level of abstraction allowed by written language allows the programmer to build their own mental model of what the machine is doing rather than comprehending each step of the machine code.

Hopefully I have shown sufficiently that the many reasons that written text is so pervasive and powerful is due to a few factors — its durability, its lossy nature, and its consciousness-evoking dialogical quality. Text is therefore unlikely to to be supplanted any time soon by a superior medium. If it is supplanted it will likely be by some medium that has yet to be invented. ❦

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. ❦

What first comes to mind when talking about Europe and tech is likely the strong forms of regulation that the European Union (EU) has legislated in recent times. Most prominent of this is of course the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that governs the handling of data on European users and has had global impacts through the Brussels effect. Thinking of American or Chinese tech on the other hand likely awakes images of more empirical accomplishments — of companies, products and services that actually make up an industry.

This invites the conclusion that because Europe has strong regulation it has killed off its nascent tech industry. I do not hold the opinion that this is the case. GDPR in particular mostly harms larger, non-tech firms that collect large amounts of data on individuals and therefore have to build large elaborate systems to try and manage this data collection.

Garicano and Holmström, in their newly released piece The Constitution of Innovation, quote a study saying that European venture capital funding decreased following the enactment and implementation of GDPR. This observation may be true, but I have trouble seeing how GDPR empirically hurts startups. Reading up on the requirements it seems that startups and services merely need to follow best-practices and not collect already unethical amounts of data. That “[GDPR] favors US tech giants which can shoulder the burden of massive compliance costs” seems laughable, since those US tech giants have instead opted to ignore GPDR² on many fronts, a problem of enforcement rather than regulation. Small startups are instead incentivized to use data collection systems that anonymize data to begin with. Anecdotally I asked the founder of a European AI startup how much of an obstacle the GDPR was to their firm, and they responded that it did not significantly impact them³. I also spoke to the Swedish minister for EU Affairs (Jessica Rosencrantz) who told me that Google had talked to her at the world economic forum about how troublesome GDPR was for them, and how they would prefer it to be slimmed down. Why would (one of) the most privacy-invasive tech monopoly want to get rid of the GDPR if it is what keeps the competition down? The answer is that it only harms those companies whose business model focuses on harming its customers, and it is in the interest of Europeans to keep these companies out.

“But if European startups can’t collect as much data they won’t make us much money right?” There is an element of truth to this, but the large American tech companies have shown that it is still profitable to run social media platforms in a post-GDPR Europe — otherwise they would have left the European market.

The arguments made by Constitution that the European regulatory machine might be out of control (specifically the European one, not that of the national governments) should however not be dismissed out of hand — but that it is harming European tech and innovation specifically seems less clear to me. There is clearly something here that needs to be fixed in general, and a renewed spirit of prosperity and economic growth may have knock-on effects in innovation by freeing up stale capital and misallocated labour.

A recent column in The Economist argues that Europe’s lagging innovation is because of our stricter labour laws. This would make it riskier for companies to make large bets on ideas that may not pan out since they wouldn’t be able to fire teams working on bad ideas. This might make sense on the margins, but glossing over the names of silicon valley it seems that most groundbreaking innovation comes from either small, visionary companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI, Intel, et cetera) or companies that are willing to power through what seems like obviously failed or wasteful ideas because they believe in what it could achieve (Nvidia, SpaceX, et cetera). That American innovation is now driven more by large, dominant companies seems more like a natural consequence of consolidation in the industry rather than large companies being good at making innovative bets.

There are also those who say that the reason why Europe does not have much AI, or a strong tech industry more broadly, is because there are those who perceive such sectors as “authoritarian”, “promethean madness” or “techno-fascist”. To me this seems absurd. Even if these people have any actual influence on policy they are still not the people who would have otherwise built a tech industry. The question should be focused on the people on the margins — why do people who sit in their bedrooms and code all day not found successful software companies?

Building a social media platform is comparatively easy⁴. By far the biggest issues for any new player entering the field is network effects, that everyone you know is already on the preëxisting platform. The second hardest thing is keeping people continuously hooked on your platform (to use a colloquial term). This is important since the more users have their attention directed at your service, the more advertisements you can show them — the lifeblood of most social media platforms.

The provider of the digital platform does not do most of the work, that is done by content creators⁵. Hosts are incentivized to make it hard to move your creations to other platforms to keep the aforementioned network effects in place. To successfully break out into this space they need to provide a sufficiently different experience to create their own network effects before their inventions are copied by the dominant players.

But why do we need to have this focus on social media to begin with? Would it not be a better idea for Europe to “skip the line” and start building European Artificial Intelligence (AI) straight away? This sounds reasonable, but it still remains to be seen what the business model for AI will be. So far it has been bankrolled almost entirely from the spending on more traditional “Web 2.0” social media and advertisement companies. Meta and Google combined have an almost complete monopoly on digital advertisement, and are using this income from the “real economy” to finance these large bets on AI. Social media is the tech industry at this point. There is also the fact that one of the biggest assets in building a competitive AI company is access to large amounts of consumer data.

China has managed to build its own tech industry through the application of this logic. The famous Great Firewall of China does not just keep information out of the country (like about the Tiananmen Square massacre) but just as importantly it has kept foreign tech companies out. Chinese tech companies have then filled this void and built competitive platforms. Mainland émigrés do not delete their Wechat accounts when moving abroad, abandoning them for superior American alternatives, they keep them due to their network effects.

It is possible to replicate this approach in Europe. A total block would likely be infeasible, owing to fact that European nations generally want friendly relations with the USA, but some sort of system that gives American companies a handicap for their monopolistic nature would not be unwarranted. This would likely be some sort of digital services tax (DST) that taxes larger platforms more. This would allow European companies to compete with entrenched rivals from the other side of the Atlantic.

The downside of such an approach is obvious, especially with the recent American administration. The tech industry has considerable influence in American decision-making, and so any move to supplant them will likely receive backlash. The Americans themselves consider Google to be a monopoly, so reducing their influence here would likely improve the state of the digital advertisement market.

I do not know if this is the path forward. To me it is easy to see the status quo as a wealth transfer from Europe (and the rest of the world) to Silicon Valley, data as a form of digital oil gathered cheaply in the orient before being sold to the domestic market. The problem may genuinely just be one of competition — of a few number of companies (that just happen to be American) gaining a disproportionate share of the economy due to their monopolistic practices. In that case the course of action would just be stricter anti-trust enforcement.

What is the benefit genuinely gained from Europe not possessing their own tech companies? Cheaper electricity prices (than would otherwise be the case) may be one, but data centres still need to be present in Europe to efficiently provide Europeans with services (and content). To me it seems that smaller European companies are more than capable to providing the same services as the American tech giants, the only exception being the sheer scale (and that is itself perhaps problematic).

This has been discussed ad nauseam, but it bears repeating. The European Union needs a systematic banking and capital markets reform. This would allow startups to raise capital in Europe without moving to Silicon Valley.

Here in Sweden we are quite proud of what we see as an innovative and digital culture and economy, spawning things like Spotify, Minecraft, and Skype. But all of these have moved to the USA in some capacity⁶. That the American financial system is so dominant is of course a given, and we should therefore expect European companies to make use of this to raise additional capital — but Europe also needs to more effectively make use of the resources in its possession.

A deeper union for banking (perhaps paired with some form of combined European debt) would allow for better coördinated form of spending. This appears to be to be the biggest initial problem for European startups, a problem that right now is only solved by moving to the United States of America.

Data centres do not matter. That is an exaggeration of course, but investing more in data centres will not create a tech industry. They employ very few people following their construction, and can be used remotely from anywhere on the planet. A tech startup will not decide where to relocate to depending on whether or not they get slightly lower ping⁷. They will be located where they can get skilled staff, attract investment, and carry out their work effectively. There is no reason that this can not be in the European Union.

Data centres are still necessary, but constructing them does not drive innovation (except seemingly in AI). The state should be more focused on funding research and enabling innovative companies to actually enter the market rather than building infrastructure that will be used by American tech companies instead.

The entire point of the internet is to be able to separate computing from where it is needed and used. Data centres allow devices at the edge (laptops, smartphones, et cetera) to perform feats of computation that would otherwise be too slow — like running LLMs⁸. Having domestic data centre capacity is not critical for building a tech industry, you can just rent capacity in northern Virginia if you really need it. Building local data centres is then only a good idea if demand holds steady, and even if that is the case they still need to be refitted with newer, faster computers every so often.

This calculation looks different for China however. They are actively hostile to the US and therefore need to attain their own data centre capacity in case they come into armed conflict over Formosa. While America has shown its inability to be trusted in recent times, I still believe that the American tech lobby is strong enough to maintain European market access for the foreseeable future. The European market is simply too alluring for those companies to avoid.

Recently there has been increasing talks of tech stacks and the of the costs and advantages of building our own compared to using a preëxisting one. Tech stacks are sets of software (and/or hardware) that can be deployed in combination with each other. Most famous of these is perhaps the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MongoDB, Perl/PHP/Python) using free (as in freedom) software to serve websites or applications. A newer example might be the use of Nvidia AI chips running pytorch written in cuda. We all stands on the shoulders of giants, and it is needless to reinvent the wheel for all of your infrastructure.

A recent report from the Centre for European Policy Studies has broadened this perspective to the entire supply chain for digital services, all the way from the end-user application to the physical materials used in the manufacturing of the integrated circuits themselves. The proposal is that all of this (or at least a significant portion) should be supplied by EU institutions is not only protectionist to an absurd degree, it is unrealistic. Attaining digital sovereignty should not mean abandoning non-EU digital solutions entirely, and any attempt at doing so will likely fail.

Instead Europe should do what has been proven to work, to rid itself of proprietary solutions that exert control over their users (regardless of if they are the American government or a Lithuanian small business). Europe is already strong in this regard; The Linux kernel was first developed in Helsinki and is today developed globally. The World Wide Web (WWW) was developed at the pan-European CERN.

Free software is not just a part of building European technology, it is the only path forward. Supporting initiatives such as RISC-V is a good idea, but it is still problematic if European companies build proprietary systems on top of those free solutions, like Nvidia has done with its cuda.

Building AI has not made much money so far, but I do not believe it will in the future either — just as being an internet-service provider is not hugely profitable (but not loss-making either). Open models have shown how LLMs are almost fungible in practice; Switching models can be done quickly and quite easily. AI labs have no “moat”. Instead the money is likely to be made by those who can effectively apply LLMs to new industries and applications. While OpenAI has generally performed best out of all the major model providers competitors are usually not far behind. Why use one company’s model when you can get 90% of the performance for a far lower price?⁹

The debate surrounding Chinese electric vehicles and the risks that they may pose due to their highly interconnected nature¹⁰ touches on similar topics. The debate centres on if a dependence on Chinese carmakers’ software will allow them to “take control” of transport in a crisis — especially with the developments in self-driving. But this misses the point entirely. That we can not trust our methods of transportation is not a problem with the author of the software, it is with the modes of control themselves. Cars (and the software running other critical services) needs to be open to introspection, control, and modification in order to create a resilient society. This is the case for Chinese, American, and even European auto manufacturers. Talking about if we can trust China is like talking about if we can trust the person holding a gun to our heads not to shoot — when the real problem is how to get rid of the gun (and not who to replace the person holding it).

At the Swedish Defence University — perhaps one of the places you would most likely expect technological independence to play a major role — we are still (and increasingly) reliant on Microsoft software. Switching to free and open alternatives (that are likely significantly more secure) should be easy, there is just a lack of urgency surrounding switching to alternatives that would improve European sovereignty.

Adopting free software is also a good approach in that it does not antagonise the US, and in allows us to make use of their talent and infrastructure, and in return improves their position. Building a libre stack is inherently not a protectionist choice, it is a democratic one that improves the well being of all peoples.

Benjamin Bratton says that while Europe needs to build its own stack to achieve sovereignty, it can not rely on free software because it is “anti-sovereign”. But this is exactly what Europe needs. To crush the hearts of European federalists everywhere: Europe is not a state. It can not rely on solutions that allow other states to pressure each other. This is the reason that EU countries are limited in their ability to orchestrate industrial policy. The solution is not merely to move this decision-making to the EU-level. Instead Europe needs anti-sovereign solutions, because they work in the same spirit of European coöperation and integration as the EU itself.

Much like Europe itself free software is subject to intense debate on what it actually is, comes from a wide breadth of different places and people, sometimes has issues with coming up with unified plan, and yet is responsible for some of the most important improvements in recent history. What could be more fitting than for a European tech stack to reject a centralised form of industrial policy and instead adopt a form of technology that prioritises freedom, efficiency, and diversity? In varietate concordia. ❦

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.

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.

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. ❦

The first post I’d like to critique is Decide what not to learn by Dylan Fitzgerald, a self-titled “voracious learner/metalearner”. He opens with an unsourced quote that goes “You can learn anything, but you can’t learn everything”. This is of course undeniable, but I struggle to see what relevance it actually has. In return I’d like to offer my own quote, but Mahatma Gandhi:

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Learning everything is impossible, but it is only in striving toward that unattainable goal that one can come close to it. Learning more is in-and-of-itself a worthy goal. He then goes on to talk about how “career-adjacent” learning can be valuable, but also “bottomless and neverending”. Once again, a trivially true statement phrased as a problem without any real motivation. His claim of this being especially true for technology workers is even more absurd:

there’s every day a new language, framework, process, or entire field of study promising to make the life of you and those around you somewhere from better to utterly transformed

The strange thing about this claim is that for anyone who has done any serious (or even amateur) programming will realise that the more languages¹ one learns, the easier it is to learn another one. Ideas don’t just come up out of nowhere, requiring us to build entirely new mental system to accommodate them. Instead they are based on other preëxisting things that we can use to “anchor” these new ideas to. The more one learns, the easier learning becomes. Getting a “Wikipedia-depth summary of each topic” is not a problem, as that knowledge allows one to create novel new pathways to new knowledge.

Fitzgerald proposes this as his solution to this “problem”:

If you, like myself, struggle with this, a tactic: write down all the things you want to learn, are in the middle of learning, haven’t quite had time for, know you really would benefit from…you get the idea. Pick the top one. The rest of the list–especially #2 and #3!–is the stuff you absolutely must avoid at all costs. That’s not your “next” list. That’s your “DANGER” list.

This is anathema to me. Fitzgerald’s ideas may be rooted in some sort of technical thinking — where the mind is some sort of robot; studying continuously before moving on to the next thing — but this is not how learning works (at least not in my experience). Learning is instead a fluid, moving process, where one moves from topic to topic as their interest waxes and wanes. We create the aforementioned pathways by learning new things that support each other. Knowledge is like a brick wall; much stronger if standing in a lattice of other bricks than if placed on top of each other one after another.

The second post is Neel Nanda’s Post 34: Learning how to learn. I agree much more with this post that the former one, but still think it falls into the same sort of thinking about learning as Fitzgerland’s. This is perhaps surprising, as the two are really diametrically opposed in their advice. Nanda’s post mostly focuses on how to learn through teaching, introspection, and spaced repetition, but it also does have a section on what he calls the 80/20 Rule, a personal spin on the Pareto principle². In it he says that you should find out how to get “80% of the value from 20% of the effort”, and then do that. He expands on this idea in a post titled The world is full of wasted motion.

In summary, one should try and reduce (in both the literal sense and in the sense of cooking) ideas and try and obtain a “big picture” view, to see what really matters. This reminds me a lot of advice that one should “go back to first principles”, axiomatic ideas that all other assumptions are built upon. Learning these is most important, and so learning the axiomatic basics and “key ideas” (the reduced knowledge) in a given field is what is most valuable. I agree with all of this in principle, but in practice I think it falls apart.

Stepping back and looking at the “big picture” is a common technique for trying to distance yourself from one’s obsession with whatever is in front of them, and to re-prioritise toward what is really important. For this purpose it is very useful; but as a general attitude for learning I find it almost as harmful as Fitzgerald’s suggestion.

The main obstacle to long-term learning, in my experience, is almost never time or “wasting” it on learning the wrong thing. Instead, it is ambition and interest. This may very well be a natural instinct guarding against what Nanda warns about — I usually have no interest in learning about something that is not useful³.

Just as it is problematic to try and avoid merely getting “Wikipedia-depth [knowledge] of each topic”, it is equally problematic to aim for it. Learning should be an intuitive process that we are prompted to naturally, and trying to “choose” what to learn strategically will almost always be a mistake. What (and when something) will be useful is almost impossible to predict in my experience. One will always encounter newfound situations where one’s knowledge of an obscure topic will become relevant.

That learning should be fluid and intuitive does not however mean the rejection of structured, deliberate practice. Techniques like spaced repetition can significantly speed up long-term memorization and do not need to be discarded. But what you choose to learn through such things does not have to be equally rigid. Perhaps this is what modern schooling gets wrong? It sees that intensive, rigid learning works, but wrongfully applies that to the curriculum. Just because the metaphors (fluid vs structured) are antipodes does not need to mean the same in practice.

There are of course certain situations that in microcosm appear worth focusing on. If you are a material sciences researcher, it might be more important to read up on crystal structures than to study the work of Shakespeare. But this is a consequence of our society’s technical view; a material science researcher should only be focusing on material science — everything else is unnecessary. But in reality humans are multifaceted individuals who not only may be interested in multiple things, but they also interact with other people interested completely different things. Having a broad base of knowledge, or an unnecessarily deep knowledge of something niche, allows us to see new perspectives, but they also deepen human connection and makes us able to empathize with others. ❦

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 centers 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.

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 many other digital things. Facebook does not derive its value from its UI or its ability for targeted advertisement, but rather from its active userbase. 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 enourmous collective action problem with thosands, 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 immideatly clear, but much (if not all) of this applies to land too. As we have already established, land too 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 maintenence of the building, paying the staff — but also for the labour and investment of all the people surrounding the hotel, 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 artifically high profit without a proportionatley 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 in this quality not the same, it was created by man, and there is no deeply ingrained story of murder and robbery within it. 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 entreprenours starting these companies should recieve 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 repedetly threatened to stop offering their services in the European Union after certain law proposals like the GDPR, but have chickened out at 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’ prescence 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 general wealth are famously difficult to collect, as money is easy to move around or deny possesion 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 trancends the nation state. So who should determine the tax, and to whom does it belong? Who should collect the tax is comparativley 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. But how do we avoid the costs of these taxes merely being passed on to the consumer while companies retain their higher profit margins? We weight the tax according to a service’ market share in each sector, meaning that companies with a higher market share would have to pay a larger share of the tax², creating an incentive for dominant players to let competitors survive and comptete, like what Microsoft did with Apple. This means that as companies grow more and more dominant, they become less and less profitable, meaning they become less attractive to investors and fostering competition and innovation in a more free market.

This is not a perfect solution. An LVT is by comparison far more elegant, and is less liable to loopholes. One large issue I see with this is the ability for companies to simply split their services under one conglomorate, with a cartel dividing up the market between themselves so-as to reduce taxes while maintaining control. Ideally this splitting up would be combined with a split in technologies, creative control, and profits — incentivizing diversity in the market. It is also hard to apply to other forms of digital land that don’t have an easy-to-split-up market share, like cryptocurrencies or NFTs. I am thinking about these subjects continously, so do reach out if you have any solutions or other ideas.

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 digitial spheres entierly. What is and isn’t income is also up for debate, and the fundamental issue of increased regulation over data collection (in this case over user numbers, return per user, and origin) is not just a slippery slope and problematic in-and-of-itself, but is also contradictory to the Lasseiz-Faire evolution of the digital realm that has facilitated its construction.

Github has a functionality where the README file in a repository with the same name as your username will be displayed on your profile. Since I am a fan of the indieweb’s POSSE¹ practice, I’d like to use that space to advertise the writings on this website.

Other than merely linking to it as a handle I can write a short program that dynamically updates the profile to include what my most recent posts are. This also gives me an opportunity to write another program in lisp, something that always brings me joy.

First we must create the actual README file that will be displayed. For this we create a short program in common lisp. The result should be a file named README.org² with a short biographical text followed by the X most recent blog posts (I chose 3 arbitrarily).

First we fetch the drakma and xmls packages from quicklisp, the only two dependencies. We also create global variables that hold the link to the RSS feed being fetched, the permanent contents of the README, and the number of posts to display.

(ql:quickload '(:drakma :xmls))

(defvar *rss-url* "https://joarvarndt.se/rss.xml")

(defvar *template* "I am a university student currently studying political science
at the Swedish Defence University. I am interested in Lisp-languages, GNU Emacs,
Free software, political economy, and the philosophy of life in an
increasingly technical world.

Here are some recent blog posts of mine:
")

(defvar *article-count* 3)

Then we write a function that will find the titles of the three (or any other number) most recent entries in the URL of the RSS feed supplied. Each entry is formatted as a associated list (alist) with the first element being the title of the post, and the second being the link to it.

(defun fetch-recent-articles (url &optional (count 3))
  "Fetch the COUNT (default 3) most recent RSS feed entries from URL and return an
alist
mapping title to link for each article."
  (let* ((response (drakma:http-request url))
         (xml-string (octets-to-string response))
         doc channel items)
    (setf doc (xmls:parse xml-string))
    (setf channel (first (xmls:xmlrep-find-child-tags "channel" doc)))
    (setf items (xmls:xmlrep-find-child-tags "item" channel))
    (loop for item in (subseq items 0 (min count (length items)))
          for title-node = (xmls:xmlrep-find-child-tag "title" item)
          for link-node  = (xmls:xmlrep-find-child-tag "link" item)
          for title = (xmls:xmlrep-string-child title-node)
          for link  = (xmls:xmlrep-string-child link-node)
          collect (cons title link))))

The titles are then formatted to a bullet list of org-mode titles and inserted after the contents of the template. The contents are then written to the README.org file, creating it if it doesn’t exist.

(defun format-org-links (articles)
  "Expects an alist of article titles and their links, and outputs
a list of strings formatted as org-mode links."
  (mapcar (lambda (pair)
            (let ((title (car pair))
                  (link (cdr pair)))
              (format t "- [[~a][~a]]" link title)
              (format nil "- [[~a][~a]]" link title)))
          articles))

(defun fill-in-template (template links)
  "Adds the list of LINKS to the end of TEMPLATE.
LINKS should be a list of org-mode link strings.
Returns the final string."
  (format nil "~a~%~{~a~^~%~}" template links))

(defun write-to-file (text)
  (with-open-file (str "./README.org"
                       :direction :output
                       :if-exists :supersede
                       :if-does-not-exist :create)
    (format str text)))

Finally, this is all carried out in a main function, with the fetched results being printed beforehand.

(defun main ()
  (let ((recent-articles (fetch-recent-articles
                          *rss-url*
                          *article-count*)))
    (format t "Recent article list: ~% ~A ~%" recent-articles)
    (write-to-file (fill-in-template *template*
                                     (format-org-links recent-articles)))))

(main)

This exercise also served to teach me to use Github’s “workflow” feature, a form of continous deployment. This way I also don’t have to maintain any hardware to constantly monitor the status of the blog posts.

First we give github write permissions to the repo and tell it to run the workflow twice a day and whenever I push to main (this was useful for troubleshooting).

name: Update Github Blog list

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 */12 * * *"

permissions:
  contents: write

Since this will always be a fresh machine we need to make sure that SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp) as well as the necessary dependencies are installed. This will also install Quicklisp, a package manager for common lisp libraries. Quicklisp usually requires you to confirm that it should add itself to the SBCL init file, but since this is an automated workflow we have to wrap (ql:add-to-init-file) in the (ql-util:without-promting) macro.

Installing SBCL accounts for the vast majority of the runtime, with installing drakma and xmls as the two smaller steps. Actually running main.lisp is almost instant.

jobs:
  run-app:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Install sbcl
        run: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y sbcl

      - name: Install Quicklisp
        run: |
          curl -O https://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp
          sbcl --noinform --non-interactive \
               --load quicklisp.lisp \
               --eval '(quicklisp-quickstart:install)' \
               --eval '(ql-util:without-prompting (ql:add-to-init-file))' \
               --quit
               
      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: |
          sbcl --noinform --non-interactive \
               --eval '(ql:quickload "drakma")' \
               --eval '(ql:quickload "xmls")' \
               --quit

It then runs the common lisp application we wrote earlier and configures git. If git diff doesn’t detect any changes to the README it will finish successfully, otherwise the workflow will itself update the repository and push the changes to Github, displaying the changes publicly.

      - name: Update README
        run: |
          sbcl --load ~/.sbclrc --script main.lisp
          git config --local user.name "github-actions"
          git config --local user.email "github-actions@github.com"

      - name: Check for changes
        id: check_changes
        run: |
          git diff --quiet || echo "changed=true" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          
      - name: Commit changes
        if: steps.check_changes.outputs.changed == 'true'
        run: |
          git add README.org
          git commit -m "Update README with latest blogs"
          git push
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

I’ve tried to make the code portable, so if you want to do the same thing all you have to do is put this code in your own repository, change the values of the global variables in main.lisp and it should work. ❦

There are a multitude of reasons why I wanted to study Chinese. Being the language of the “workshop of the world” naturally offers many business opportunities, but I am more interested in the burgeoning fields of Integrated circuit (IC) R&D and software development. Planet Emacslife allows me to keep tabs on the goings-on in the Emacssphere, but I also want to be able to read Emacs China; so I figured it might be a good idea to be able to read Chinese.

Right now — after 1-2 months of quite intensive study — I am roughly at an HSK 2-3 level in writing and reading, however my listening and speaking skills are far worse. I can read slightly over 70% of average Chinese text.

I’ve been interested in learning Chinese for a few years now, but the greatest mental barrier was understanding how to go about actually learning. If I were to try and learn Russian I would naturally begin with quickly learning to read Cyrillic, but how should you learn Chinese? Should one try and master speaking Chinese and reading romanisations first, before memorising thousands of characters, or the other way around?

Really, neither is possible without the others. In general I have focused more on the written language than the spoken one. This is because Chinese is intimately connected with the written form, more so than the other Germanic languages I know¹. Not only do many words sound very similar (only differentiated by tone) but there is a very large number of homonyms — words that sound exactly the same. When only romanised text is available, especially when written without tonal markers, it is often impossible to tell what is written.

This means that knowing written characters, and their corresponding pronunciation, is critical to understanding spoken Chinese. Many times there is a lot of split-second guesswork involved, with some characters having many possible meanings beyond just having to remember what character is being said.

I decided to jump in the deep end immediately by travelling to China with practically no knowledge beforehand. In hindsight this was perhaps not the best idea, I spend much of the time learning the very basics, but it was certainly fun. Formally I was enrolled in a “Chinese for beginners” online course at Uppsala University but I did most of my studies outside of the confines of the course. It was however very useful as a way to motivate myself to actually study when abroad.

Most of my study was done through Hanly, a Chinese-learning app that pedagogically introduces new characters by showing how they are composed of other ones. To give an example: Early on in my studies I looked up how to write numbers in Chinese, and was pleasantly surprised at the numbers 1-3 (一, 二, 三) but equally afraid of the character for 0 (零) with its 13 strokes. But when I eventually learned it through Hanly it was in fact quite an easy character to learn, being composed of the character for rain (雨) and for order (令).

Hanly uses flashcards, an established technique for memorisation, paired with preprepared mnemonics and AI-generated artwork. These range from quite sensible (three people 人 are a crowd 众) to absurd but surprisingly easy to learn (A racecar driver using their tongue 舌 to check if a road is suitable 适). Hanly also teaches words — combinations of characters — that both increase understanding and help ground characters in actual use. These and the characters themselves are taught in the same way, each with their own flashcard.

I try and learn 20-30 new cards (either characters or words) each day, and aim to do a minimum of 100 repetitions of old cards daily. While in the PRC I would often do 200+ repetitions and sometimes even 300, especially on long subway rides. I now know roughly 600 characters and 300 words by heart, and can therefore read slightly over 75% of “average text” according to Hanly. Had I learned just the 600 most common characters I would have understood 80% of average text, but learning those 600 characters would have been a lot more difficult.

After learning new words I tried to quickly get them into my usable vocabulary by employing them in daily life. This of course varied quite a lot depending on what the words was — 戈 is quite difficult to use in everyday life for example — but I think it helped anchor a lot of words in my mind. Having a mental “mission” for each day makes practical application a lot easier, even when the words are abstract.

I am still struggling quite a bit with tones, both in speaking and listening, but that will hopefully improve with practise.

Chinese is quite fascinating as a language. It feels both familiar and alien, with a comparatively simple grammar and Subject-verb-object word order but also reliance on guesswork and rote memorisation.

My mental model of the language looks something like this:

Characters are initially grouped by pronunciation² while not having anything to do with each other, and then have their meaning narrowed down by combining with other words. To emphasise the character as its own word the sound is often repeated³, but it can also be combined with another word with a similar meaning to create a new synthesis. This sometimes works the same way as compound words do in German, Swedish, or Norwegian where the two words are completely different but combines into one word (such as 学院, college, literally “learning institution”) but also with words carrying very similar meanings (like with 打开, literally “hit on”, used similarly as “slå på” in Swedish). If a character does not have any overlap with adjacent characters in a sentence, it is its own word.

This seems like the long-term challenge with Chinese to me. Navigating this three-dimensional space of guessing the meanings of words based on their pronunciation, tone, and context rather than the quite simple one-dimensional space in, for example, English (what does that word mean?).

In general I sense a surprising similarity to toki pona in Chinese. This is something of a horseshoe I guess; the easiest and hardest⁴ languages to learn being similar. Both have very abstract building blocks that represent something conceptually rather than being fixed — with Chinese just having a few more.

Hopefully I will be able to continue improving, although likely not at the same rate as I was before. I am starting to feel that I should immerse myself more in Chinese media and start reading texts in Chinese, but the texts that I would really like to read are far too advanced.

I would of course like to improve my speaking and listening skills, but I think for the near-term I will continue focusing on reading until I get to a level where I can get some practical use out of it. ❦

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, it is merely a sample size of one.

I travelled in to China in early June 2025 with my partner, and as of writing this 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 useless¹. 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.

The biggest surprise to me of all was what I half-heartedly named the overcontrol of the Chinese. The Chinese generally showed a lack respect for normative rules, such as standing in line and waiting for people to disembark the subway before entering. My hypothesis is that there is such an overabundance of restrictions and formal rules that people stop thinking in normative ways, and subconsciously see everything not explicitly forbidden as being allowed. This then leads to a collective action problem, where small actors are forced into enacting strict rules so as to manage the otherwise lawless public. The most egregious example of this is the incredible number of battery-powered megaphones with pre-recorded messages, the overuse of which has often made it completely impossible to relax in many places. Public authorities and private enterprise both use this extensively to hammer in certain specific rules³.

Security guards at any of the numerous security checks clearly do not feel any urge to maintain strict vigilance but instead merely wave hand-held metal detectors around one’s midsection, not caring if it goes off or not. Security guards would often let on pass merely at the sight of an international passport, incapable of interpreting how to use it in a rigid machine of identity checks. The level of vigilance decreases further when one travels further away from the capital, where even in the provincial capital of Nanjing a security checkpoint let us through with what we later realised was not a valid registration.

I wish the people of mainland China all the best, and was continuously reminded by the wise words of the French author Victor Hugo, the French author, that he wrote when prompted upon his thoughts of the burning of the Yuanmingyuan () in 1860:

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

The thoughts underlying this thesis have been with me some time, and have been slowly been crystallising more and more clearly as time goes on and I realise that the rest of the world is seemingly diverging more and more with my own thoughts on the subject. This is not a fully formed proposal, and I will not attempt any detailed plan of action. As always, it is instead an attempt to try and formulate my own thinking on the subject, as well as to offer the reader a perspective on the Chinese economic philosophy that is heavily overlooked in the west. While informed by reading scholarly material and following the ongoing discussion about China, it is prompted mainly by my visit there and getting an idea of how the country works. That idea may be incorrect, and so feel free to e-mail me your thoughts on the subject.

In short, I am of the opinion that American and China are in a sort of dialectical movement with each other, with America (and Europe) wishing to copy the industrial strategy that it sees as having been key to China’s modernisation, and China simultaneously trying to create a hyper-competitive environment that fosters innovation. I think that the Chinese approach will succeed, and the western one will not. America and Europe risks losing the dynamism and economic resilience that free-market economics offers, while China encroaches on the gap that we gained during the great divergence.

China is grossly misunderstood in the west. I do not claim to be a Sinologist, but merely in my brief visits to the mainland I have gained much insight that I do not believe most policymakers have. First of all, the PRC is not the Soviet Union. This might seem obvious at first, but it is the viewpoint that I hear between the lines of much literature on how to deal with China. Instead of vast defence spending, it is industrial policy. The opponent is a vast authoritarian system that efficiently the production of a continent to those areas where it most serves the national interest. This straw man is not a reality. The authoritarian government of the PRC is its greatest weakness, just as it was for the USSR, and for the Russian Republic that succeeded it. But while both the Soviet and Chinese communists ruled over oppressive regimes, the similarity mostly ends there.

The ideological system of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” (中 国特色社会主义, SCC) as straightforwardly viewed from a Marxist point of view, is an attempt to create a system of pure capitalism as quickly as possible. A broader, more holistic, and more radical form of Lenin’s New Economic Policy where the rural Soviet Union and PRC would both allow capitalist enterprise to grow, as long as it did so under the auspices of the communist party. This is precisely the path that societies follow according to orthodox Marxist theory (Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Socialism -> Communism). In the west, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is instead commonly understood to be some sort of attempt by the CCP to maintain a veneer of communist ideology while in practice becoming a free-market dictatorship. This is also not the case. The CCP is communist through and through, and SCC is a genuine attempt to achieve it. When spending time on the mainland, one is struck by the sheer presence of the party, of the praise for workers, of and of what seems to be authentic belief.

On the ground, there is a feeling of division between state control and private enterprise. Roads are meticulously cleaned and well-maintained, while at the same time lined by buildings almost falling into disrepair. The state wishes that certain things, like the power grid, should be fully controlled, but in other sectors the private sector should be able to flourish freely. This schizophrenic reality is that of SCC, with certain industries — primarily related to infrastructure — fully nationalised and others in an almost Laissez-Faire environment.

To try and achieve socialism (and eventually communism) China must unleash the free-market completely. The “weariness” of big tech that the CCP is sometimes reported to hold is not just grounded in a fear of large corporate interests clashing against the party, but is also an attempt to genuinely increase competition and increase the freedom of the market. Another example behind this might paradoxically be the intervention that is most talked about, that being the production of Electric Vehicles (EVs). Chinese EV subsides are not oriented toward building “national champions” like the Export-oriented approaches undertaken across the Yellow Sea in the Republic of Korea. Instead it has tried to foster a breadth of EV producers that are now aggressively undercutting each other, becoming internationally competitive in the process.

In the beginning of AI 2027, a short story of rapid AI development¹, the leading Chinese AI company (collectively called DeepCent, a portmanteau of Deepseek and Tencent) becomes the leader of a nationalised and consolidated “collective”. Researchers and new integrated circuits (ICs) are sent to a secure centralised facility where AI development and strategy are carried out. This is a very accurate view of how American and western strategists view China, as a singular entity that makes unified decisions that are fully carried out. But this is perhaps the exact opposite of reality. Instead the rapid industrialisation of China has been due to thousands of decisions made by comparatively low-level provincial officials and below, all competing to look good in the eyes of higher-ups by growing GDP². There has been no large change in CCP governance that would suggest a different approach when it comes to AI development.

The authors of AI 2027 agree that there is no clear leading Chinese company, and in a footnote they remark that:

We consider DeepSeek, Tencent, Alibaba, and others to have strong AGI projects in China. To avoid singling out a specific one, our scenario will follow a fictional “DeepCent”.

But it is precisely this multifaceted competition that makes Chinese AI development different from its American counterpart. The competition between AI companies, all with extremely limiting compute resources, forces Chinese firms to compete using talent — something they will likely have more of in the foreseeable future due to what will probably be decreased brain drain to the US.

The “hawks in the CCP” warning about AGI do not exist, at least in the same way they do in America. Instead, the Chinese leadership is committed to using its dominance in manufacturing and infrastructure development to expand in the field of “Embodied AI” (具身人工智能). This approach requires numerous companies to make tailor-made AI solutions for different industries and tasks, and therefore motivates the opposite strategy from the centralised one that AI 2027 predicts. An example of this would be ZTE’s ongoing application merging drone use, 5G connectivity and AI to monitor things like the maintenance requirements for infrastructure.

Xi Jinping himself, the paramount leader of the PRC, seems quite keen on AI, having ordered a 2025 “study session” (集体学习) on the subject for the top CCP leadership. But he is old-fashioned, having gotten into Tsingua University (China’s top university) as a worker-peasant-soldier student during the Cultural Revolution. He has a greater interest in “hard” development like infrastructure; even in Made in China 2025, the CCP plan to expand into higher value-add manufacturing, it is specifically manufacturing that is the focus, not the service economy or software developments — areas where AI makes the biggest amount of sense. Chinese industrialisation through state-led infrastructure initiatives has been incredibly successful, and the CCP is much more likely to stick to what they know works (even if it is with new fancy tools).

His study notes from the aforementioned study session does mention a need to “concentrate forces” (集中力量) on high-end ICs and “foundational” software, but he also mentions creating an “enterprise-led industry-academia-research-user collaborative innovation system”, a far cry from a secret power plant/data center under state control. It also mentions such things like “Highlighting applied directions” (突出应用导向) and “Helping traditional industry reform and upgrade” (助力传统产业改造升级). These things are in-line with the ideas of embodied AI more than they are a centralisation of compute.

Deepseek also highlights the benefits of free and open-weight models³ that spur innovation. Free (as in freedom) models allow widespread application of the model and adaptation to many more applications. This allows for further feedback and is a force-multiplier for a given model’s dominance. The benefits of free software are perhaps most easily realised by developers and engineers, and is therefore overlooked by many analysts, but it is the reason that the internet and digital technology is the way it is today. Things like IP, GNU/Linux, and Pytorch were not chosen merely by industry giants, but by individuals who wanted to use what was easiest to hack on⁴. As an anonymous Google employee pointed out in 2023, “open source” will likely overtake proprietary AI. The iteration happening is too fast for any one company to compete with. Justin Wong (an engineer at Moonshot, a frontier Chinese AI lab) wrote that:

Open-sourcing allows us to leverage the power of the developer community to improve the technical ecosystem. Within 24 hours of release, the community had already implemented K2 in MLX, with 4-bit quantization and more — things we truly don’t have the manpower to accomplish ourselves at this stage.

But more importantly: open-sourcing means holding ourselves to a higher technical standard, which in turn pushes us to build better models — aligned with our goal of AGI.

This might seem counterintuitive — if we’re just releasing model weights, why would that force the model to progress?

The logic is actually very simple: Open source means performance comes first. You can no longer rely on superficial tricks or hack to dazzle users. Anyone who gets the same weights should be able to easily reproduce your performance — only then is it truly valid.

Deepseek then is not a state-sponsored champion, but one of many companies experimenting with AI development. This will likely accelerate AI development, and force AI firms adopt shorter release cycles and lower prices. The huge size of the Chinese market also allows for increased experimentation and development, experimentation that Western firms will not have access to. R1’s free software nature helps this further, by helping deploy AI in novel ways across the Chinese economy faster than in America, also increasing innovation. There is no large consolidation of the AI industry in the PRC.

American governance is in a unique place on the spectrum. Contrary to the PRC, there are enough checks and balances for the executive arm to feel “restrained” by them, but it is still empowered enough to project a significant amount of power. This seems like a worst-case scenario to me — not enough power to take the seat as an “enlightened despot”, but still enough to break things if you aren’t careful. This is the issue at the heart of American AI strategy. The bureaucracy does not have the capacity to grasp the development of AI, but it feels it necessary to intervene regardless.

When Deepseek’s R1 model was first publicly released, it was widely reported as a “Sputnik moment”, as a wakeup-call to the American government that it no longer held a decisive technological advantage over its strategic rival. But this is an over-exaggeration. In 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the Soviets attained a technological capability that the Americans did not posses at all, not merely a level of parity. But one might argue that what Deepseek showed was Chinese capability to do something, but to do it at a fraction of the cost of American alternatives. But this is not exactly the case either, as Semianalysis recently showed, Deepseek’s low price-per-token has not resulted in companies flocking to Deepseek, but instead a slow decline in users, even as the overall market has grown. This is because they have merely chosen to make certain trade-offs to lower prices due to their compute-restrained nature, rather than any underlying technical improvement.

This compute-restrained environment that Chinese firms find themselves in is of course artificially created by American export-controls. As is being increasingly argued, perhaps most prominently by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, these export-controls might actually be decreasing American power relative to China, by effectively tariffing American ICs in the Chinese market, allowing domestic AI-chip manufacturers to catch up with Nvidia, TSMC, and the non-Chinese semiconductor manufacturing industry.

But what has not been discussed to the same degree is the risk that not only does this environment hurt the long-term prospects for the western-aligned IC industry, but it might also hurt American software as well. As Deepseek alarmists claim, China has largely caught up in the development of LLM, or are at least very close behind. But they have done so in a much less capital- and compute-rich environment. As Sutton writes in The Bitter Lesson, most of the gains in AI research have been due to increasing amounts of compute, and developments have rather been in how to make use of more and more computational resources, rather than in how to make use of it. Chinese development seems to have changed this trend, if only very slightly. If we then extrapolate Chinese AI so that it has the compute resources of OpenAI, would it not overtake OpenAI? There is a risk that, like the Sardaukar and Fremen from Frank Herbert’s Dune, we are helping Chinese AI develop in a more hostile environment, while at the same time supporting the development of a Chinese IC industry to support it in the long-term.

Similarly, American strategy, lead both by private-sector and public sector investment, risks “putting too many eggs in one basket”, that basket being OpenAI. 500 billion USD, the amount of money to be invested in the Stargate Project, is a lot of money, likely more than China is spending, so is it not important to get as much development as possible out of it? If China is able to us its compute more efficiently than the US and instead uses its money to bolster domestic manufacturing further, especially in the field of integrated circuits, it could undermine US national security. China’s vibrant free-market economy is a tremendous resource, exceeded only by that of the United States. It would be a shame to destroy that lead.

China is a free-market economy, and it is committed to using the strengths inherent in that system to its national advantage. The PRC leadership will try and use AI to upgrade preëxisting industry, and will not engage in a rapid “race to AGI”, beyond continuing attempts to become a significant producer of integrated circuits. Its large domestic market allows it to rapidly test new innovations, but so does the vast American and (to some extent) European markets. While it the CCP is increasingly grasping after interventionism, it still is trying to remain committed to free enterprise.

The US and Europe must resist the impulse to bet big on national champions, as (perhaps paradoxically to many) Deepseek shows. High technology advancements should instead be facilitated through an increase in basic research, ability for academia and free enterprise to intermingle, and deep capital markets that can bet big on new, innovative ideas. ❦

Emacs has a tendency to try and absorb all user-facing interactions I have with a computer. Some people seem able to separate “Emacs stuff” — like programming or using org-mode for note taking — but Emacs’ extendability makes me want to use it for everything. For a long time I have only really needed four different tools to do any kind of work at a computer:

1. GNU Emacs (with my personal config).
2. Tailscale to connect to my other machines.
3. Syncthing so that I have local access to my files¹.
4. A web browser (usually Firefox).

Quickly getting these four things up and running is usually my first priority when setting up a new machine, and they require different amounts of work. Critically Firefox requires a GUI environment in order to run, but it’s really quite unnecessary to get a desktop environment or tiling window manager up and running — and dealing with their conflicting keybinds — when all I’m going to be doing is working in Emacs perhaps 80% of the time, finding information or reading docs in Firefox 15% of the time, and using a stray terminal the remaining 5% (something I can easily replace with one of Emacs’ many terminal and shell solutions). This is why I like using exwm². Rather than using Emacs’ window manager capabilities to manage all your X windows it allows you to stay continually within Emacs and just treat any stray non-Emacs GUI programs within the same system. The solution then seems to try and subsume web browsing into my preëxisting workflow. There are many solutions to this, but I prefer ones that work with text as the primary medium as that is what Emacs is best oriented to work with.

eww is probably the most well-known of Emacs’ web browsing solutions, chiefly because it comes included with it. It is also the one I have the most experience with. I first came across eww as a consequence of reading about all of the crazy features included in Emacs by default like Tetris and Gnus. This isn’t very surprising; web browsers are some of the largest ubiquitous user-facing applications, so the fact that Emacs ships with one as a tangential feature is very surprising. However, these visions of browsing the web are often quickly crushed when one uses eww for the first time. It does not load any CSS, so websites do not look like one is accustomed to, and a lot of javascript functionality is non-functional.

I expect this experience — or at least something like it — to be somewhat universal amongst those who have even tried using eww. The modern web is built around these technologies, and going without them might seem almost impossible. But there is a place for eww in a modern workflow. The strength of Emacs is its power for working with text, and most media I interact with in a web browser is text. Emacs then is really the perfect environment for this. Reading and rewriting the content of web pages side-by-side using the same key-chords and user-interface allows for minimal context friction. But there are serious downsides, primarily ugly formatted headers and images. Most of the time eww can figure out the main readable content using the eww-readable function, bound to R by default. It’s meant to strip out long “navigation menus and the like”. In my experience it is either hit or miss. For some web pages like wikipedia it seems to work well (but only for some pages), but for others like github it just strips out the entire page. Thankfully it is bound to a convenient key and its easy to switch between the two views quickly. Images are probably one of the first things that stops people from using eww, with large ones causing the site to jump around as they cover the whole screen and then disappear. I solved this using ultra-scroll, which provides scrolling smoother than you could ever imagine in Emacs. It also allows you to scroll intuitively over images, rendering them as you would expect in a traditional browser like Firefox. With a slow network connection eww can have some problems with blocking, but this can be remedied by setting eww-retrieve-command:

(setq eww-retrieve-command
      '("chromium" "--headless" "--dump-dom"))

eww is written by Lars Ingebrigtsen of gnus fame. It uses the shr (simple HTML Renderer) program written in elisp to render HTML. He originally wrote shr to read elfeed entries in Emacs and eww is merely the addition of browsing (or wowsing) capability built on top of it. shr’s elisp nature is why it can sometimes struggle with complicated site layouts, but in my experience it is usually fast enough, especially with native compilation.

Generally eww can be surprisingly powerful, but most of its power (like Emacs itself) comes from its tight integration with other tooling and extensibility with elisp, rather than any amazing workflow it has built for you in advance. There is very little to learn, but a lot to master.

w3m can some sense be seen as the “hardcore” version of text-based web browsing in Emacs. w3m relies on the eponymous TUI program to render web pages in a way similar to Lynx, allegedly the world’s oldest continually-maintained web browser. w3m even comes with lynx bindings by default, although you can also change them to the included “info-like” ones. It allows for tabs, bookmarks, and other features one would expect in a modern browser. It also relies on interpreting the raw HTML to format the page, rather than rendering CSS. Like eww it also does not support javascript. Like I alluded to earlier, this is both a blessing and a curse, and reading just straight text can be very nice, both from a therapeutic minimalist way and a way to minimize context-switching. It is also nice and async by default, since it uses an external binary to fetch websites, not that it takes very long to load to begin with since it’s not running any heavy javascript. One nice difference between w3m and eww is also that the arrow keys navigate to the next link in the page by default, and the text in the buffer will resize itself whenever the buffer is resized³, something that is very handy if you’re using a package like golden-ratio that resizes windows depending on focus.

While I prefer text-based browsers that fit more seamlessly into the rest of Emacs, there are other solutions for more traditional browser experiences.

Francis Fukuyama is probably the person most connected to the concept of “the End of History”, but he is not the originator of it. Fukuyama’s intial article¹ (that was then later expanded upon to the book The End of History and the Last Man) initially reads as a summary of the Kojévian interpretation of Hegel’s observation of the end of History. Fukuyama sees in the collapse of the Soviet order in eastern Europe as not just a victory of western liberal democracy, but as a showcase of this western system as the ultimate goal of human society entirely. This view of History ending seems to have been thoroughly debunked in our popular consciousness, to the point of simply naming the concept in my international relations class elicits chuckles across the lecture hall, and academic scholars praise Finland for “never [believing] that history ended in 1989”². I have not read Fukuyama’s larger coverage of his thinking on this subject, only his initial article titled The End of History? as well as the original sources of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Kojéve’s lectures on it. In some regards Fukuyama has already faced much of this criticism preëmtively³, but somehow misconceptions still abound. I agree wholeheartedly with Kojéve’s experience:

Observing what was taking place around me and reflecting on what had taken place in the world since the Battle of Jena, I understood that Hegel was right to see in this battle the end of History properly so-called.

I have written this text both to convince the readers that this is the case, but also to work through my own thinking on the topic. I will try and cover some major events and areas of the world who one might see as counterexamples of the thesis. But first we must make clear what History is and is not.

History seems quite straightforward as to its definition, most in the western world had it as a subject for several years and so think they have a through understanding of the term. When seen through this lens it is mostly defined as the study and documenting of events in the past and perhaps on how they influence the future. But in the Hegelian sense history is more so seen as the trajectory of human consciousness toward absolute knowledge and self-consciousness. I am not surprised that most people, even academic scholars and subject-matter experts, misunderstand this point — Hegel is not very widely read and his concepts are mostly known through the interpretation of others. The end of history appears when this absolute knowledge is realized and actualized in the geist of the world. In Hegel’s view the trajectory this first took was through the Greeks, Christianity, Lutheran Protestantism, the French Revolution, and finally described at Jena by Hegel as Bonaparte marched through it⁴. Napoleon and the society he represented was however merely the vanguard of world-history, and there was of course still the work of implementing it. This will likely take the appearance of the graph for the function \(f(x) = 1 - \frac{1}{x}\), with the world in a continual process to reach historical culmination. But this still does not mean that authentic historical action is possible, it would merely be bringing the other parts of the world in line with the most developed historical position; it is an extension of width rather than in depth. Post-historical society is one in which the economic activities of man are most prominent, rather than the drama and spectacle of struggle and war. As such it can not be preöccupied with conflict with other post-historical regions; it is bad for business after all. Society revolves entirely around the ideas of maintaining humanity’s happiness. This should not be misconstrued as a regretful development — a lack of suffering and pain in the world is a noble goal. But it is the reality that we no longer have anything to strive toward beyond hedonistic happiness that defines post-historical man. Things such as the impending crisis of climate change is nothing more than a threat to “our way of life”, and a threat of such a nature is the greatest threat post-historical society can face.

History then did not end in 1989, and it is with that I agree with the critics of Fukuyama. Instead in ended almost 200 years earlier, in 1806, when the ideas and processes that create the final shape of society were first identified. When one makes this claim it becomes obvious how laughable counterarguments of “well why did the Ukraine war happen if history ended?” when events like the first and second world wars are both seen as entirely post-historical, even by people who lived through them like Kojéve himself. Events of large material importance can (and indeed must) occur, and a country does not have to deny the end of history to maintain a large military force. But this force is oriented principally externally toward those regions of the world where society has not reached the same level of historical development, whether that be North America in 1812, Eastern Europe during the cold war, Iraq in 2003, or the Russian Federation today. Those societies already firmly established within the post-historical framework are no longer a threat to other post-historical societies. The strange phenomenon of the democratic peace may very well have its solution in this perspective, where the Stewartian definition⁵ of democratic or elective states can fully replaced with those regions of the world where history has ended.

According to Kojéve society in a post-historical time is structured through “the universal homogeneous state”. What this state looks like differs depending on one’s interpretation, but all of the major illustrations of such a state⁶ are fundamentally attempts to impose what is strictly a philosophical identity on to an empirical political reality. But what seems to have occurred is rather distinct from this, our philosophical development has occurred not in parallel with political development but entirely separately. It remains unclear if political development will in time “catch up” with our popular consciousness, as with how the ideas of the enlightenment spurred political development in 1848 and continue to underpin contemporary events, or if this combination of philosophy and politics are fundamentally still compatible. The largest crack in this status quo that I perceive is arguably the environmental movement (and its reactionary counterpart) if any.

I should make clear that I disagree with Fukuyama’s view of a liberal, democratic, free-market west as the uniquely final historical position. Although there is a clear correlation between the post-historical regions and these qualities one should not mistake the sale of ice cream as the cause of drowning. Instead this universal homogeneous state exists not as a state as used within the context of international relations, a political unit with a defined territory and nominal sovereignty over it, but a state as in a state of affairs. The universal homogeneous state is a shared lived experience and way of thinking about the world around one self⁷. It is especially prevalent on the banks of the northern Atlantic ocean, in Japan, South Korea, and Oceania, regions of the world uncontroversially seen as part of Fukuyama’s post-historical world. But it is equally present in regions such as Shanghai, Moscow, Cape Town, and São Paulo. The reverse is also true. The United States for example has many areas that are not part of this post-historical world, even though the US as a whole is firmly post-historical in nature (the case is also true for much of Europe). One can draw a rural-urban divide here, but that would still not be entirely correct — many urban areas still have not reached the end of history, and many rural areas have — but one would likely still see a strong correlation. Why urban life creates the conditions for post-historical man I will not describe here, but will cover at a later time.

It is however the case that this state is not merely a fixed set of philosophical conditions paused in time. Keeping in line with Hegel the self-consciousness of the individual is distinctly created in opposition to the other⁸, and is in a continuos process of recreation (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word) that characterises post-historical society. The inter-subjective forum where this process takes place is the internet. Most of the computer’s major impact has been not in the fields of mass-manufacturing or administration, but in the spread of ideas and media’s increased intensity and presence within our daily lives. It is this shared experience of mankind’s manifestation in the digital realm that bind’s the world’s populations into a single coherent whole; into a homogenous state of being. Preceding digital computers the homogenous state was of course still present, through the shared human experiences and means of communication of earlier times. But this was broadened — binding more and more of the world’s population, space, and time into it — by the telegraph and the transistor.

The end of history is then not the achievement of any set of material conditions (the absence of war and hunger) nor is it the culmination of political development throughout time. It is the philosophical realization of a given identity, of a set of values, and an understanding in self-consciousnesses on the scale of humanity as a whole. We will now chart the current state of this weltgiest as it appears to us in the first half of this decade. To begin we will cover the grand expanse to the east of the European subcontinent.

We begin with Russia not just because it is, here in Sweden and in Europe as a whole, seen as the unmaking of what they see as the greatest achievement of the post-historical world: the long European Peace since 1945. But, as we have already covered, post-historicity does not mean the end of wars, the redrawing of borders, or of major historical events. In fact, conflict must occur while there are still parts of the world who have not reached the end of history. Russia feels provoked into action and therefore must act. It is a state that is so developed that the state encompasses all — this is nationalism — but it has yet to achieve the contradiction between the state and the individual. It is this key change that Napoleon embodied, and so it is not impossible to do through authoritarianism, but it may also require democratic reform. Until then the state is what will drive historical development, pure economic growth or citizen movements will be unable to act in this environment. It is then this feeling that the Russian state has (or is at least interpreted and anthropomorphized as having) that makes this interesting from a philosophical point of view, that drives its foreign policy goals.

But this is not a mere conflict over Russian sovereignty in its “near-abroad”. In Russia this is framed in “civilizational” terms, where the Russian civilization is distinct from the western-European one, just as the Chinese or Hindu one is. This means that Russia must identify itself in contrast to the rest of Europe. It still gains its identity from its relationship to the other and can not maintain a disparate identity that makes peaceful relations possible. It must see itself as in conflict with the other as long as it is still a master in the framework of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The collapse of the USSR was a humbling of the Russian civilization within these terms, but it was not defeated in the sense that it surrendered out of a genuine fear for death. This fear is what drives the continually conflict-prone master to become a slave, and it is only the slave who is capable of fully realizing her self-consciousnesses and progress history. Russian aggression must therefore occur before it reaches historical fulfilment, it is still a master in search of another master that can recognize it. But it is not merely enough for Russia to back down against the west of Europe, is must feel a genuine dread throughout its nation. But this is also not something that can be imposed from abroad. Franco-German tanks rolling across the Red Square will strike fear into the hearts of Russians yes, they may become even more bellicose and struggle for revenge. Instead it is a feeling and historical process that must come from within. The Russian consciousness must be transformed by their own volition to be of this nature, just as what happened in most of the Soviet satellite states after the cold war.

This is not a process that one can expect to come quickly, but it is at the same time hard to say if it will take a long time. It will occur gradually, and then suddenly. Until then Europe, and the rest of Russia’s neighbours, should be prepared for conflict with it. It is not a contradiction of post-historicity that Finland should arm itself for war with its much larger possibly belligerent neighbour; as long as that neighbour is itself not another post-historical state.

The second major development seen by many as a counterexample against the end of history are the developments in the United States of America; more specifically the election of Donald Trump. But the question that needs to be asked is what Trump’s behaviour is actually symptomatic of. He has threatened annexation of post-historical allies such as Canada and Greenland; does this not show how the assumption that post-historical states do not have to protect themselves against others of their kind is wrong? But remember, the nature of history is not of a political nature, but of a philosophical one. Does Trump have any ideological or idealist qua idea motive for his actions that contradict those of the rest of the world? I do not think he does. He of course utilizes different techniques to achieve his aims, and may desire power for power’s sake, but these are not in and of themselves a goal. Really Trump has the same goal as the rest of us, the maintenance humanity’s happiness. He may fail at doing so for a multitude of reasons, but it does not mean that America is in a conflict (in the philosophical sense) with Europe or Canada, just as the US was not in conflict with the UK and France in 1956 despite actively undermining them and the presence of hostile rhetoric between the two camps.

Trumpist America lacks an ideological driving force of what the world should look like and is therefore incapable of historical action. It leaves the individual in the same position as liberalism, as the citizen entirely involved in, and yet at the same time wholly separated from, the state. MAGA is pure populism, and in many ways itself an example of post-historicity. It is the juxtaposition of the individual against the other, against a nebulous grouping of the woke. The individual is seen as simultaneously part of the greater whole in a collective labour to improve society, but at the same time promoting the ideals individualism and freedom and a hatred toward those opposed to the Trumpian project, whatever it may be. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies also do not discredit the thesis; the very vanguard of history was originally realized through Napoleon Bonaparte, a populist general who performed a military coup and whose rule was by no means democratic.

The developments in America then do not conflict with the end of history, they are merely another manifestation of its predicted behaviour, and in some ways even a strong example of the thesis itself. Exactly what the nature of authoritarianism and fascism is in the post-historical environment I will not endeavour to explain here however.

I hope that it has become clear that while I disagree with Fukuyama’s critics on the basic reading of him (or lack thereof) I am also not a clear-cut supporter of his ideas, especially in their most popular form. In an interview with Foreign Affairs Fukuyama has stated that the “single” counterexample to the end of history is the rise of the People’s Republic of China, and the level of economic growth and prosperity it has achieved while under the auspices of a socialist one-party state. But there are two main factors that have allowed this apparent contradiction to flourish: the fact that Fukuyama is wrong about the need for liberal democracy to build a prosperous economy and the fact that the CCP has adopted the very strategies proven to be successful in the west.

What causes economic growth is a question that is not easy to answer, if it was then every country would do it. But there are general assumptions to be made through correlation that allows us to see this from an interesting point of view. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution every school of economics has had to make its argument for why it occurred. It was such an explosion in economic growth and activity compared to pre-historical times that nothing in human history has had a similar impact on the condition of the human population — and the rest of the living species in the world. Trying to contend these intellectual giants is then an incredible feat of hubris, and I shall not seriously argue that a question of such magnitude can be answered easily. Nevertheless I believe that there is a generally impactful variable in stability. My ideas on this topic are heavily influenced from listening to the recipients of the 2024 Nobel prize in economic sciences⁹. In this line of thinking, stability (both in the form of a lack of conflict and in an awareness in “how things are done”) are hugely important in determining the levels of prosperity in a country. In this manner democratic states are not only wealthier because some of them have had a history of colonial exploitation, but also because democracy inherently has rules and regulations and tries to punish those who break them in predictable ways. A philosopher king who rules by decree, no matter how benevolent or skilful, may change either his mind or “the rules of the game” abruptly, bringing a sense of insecurity into any venture. What Fukuyama calls China’s “institutionalized autocracy” brings this factor into play in China. Since there was no absolute ruler, only the nebulous institution of “the party”, change could not occur at the whims of any particular person, and so companies and individuals could trust that they could foresee or understand changes made. This is the stability necessary for a market economy to work efficiently, even if the “rules of the game” as set are flawed and imperfect. Changing them should still be done of course, but predictably, transparently, and accountably. It is in manner that economic successes can be explained independently from liberal democracy or their ideals, such as the formal rule of law. As long as things occur as people expect they do, they can continue doing business.

But the key is that China has adopted a market-economy, albeit perhaps of a dirigiste kind. This is in line with the idea concept of socialism with Chinese characteristics, where China’s largely rural, poor, and agricultural society would/is not capable of attaining socialism and communism, largely a return to orthodox pre-soviet Marxist thought where the origin of revolution would be in the industrial heart of the world economy; in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. What the CCP is doing is then not contradictory in the slightest according to ideology, it is only wrong to call it socialism. But this is mere pandering to ideologues, in reality I do not believe the CCP leadership has any intention of returning to the socialist policies preceding Deng Xiaoping (邓小平). Mark Fisher was correct in observing the stagnation in politics following the collapse of Soviet empire in Capitalist Realism, with the introductory chapter famously using the Zizekian/Jamesonian quote of “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. Capitalist theory and practices have become so engrained in the consciousness of the world that it is no longer possible to move to another alternative¹⁰.

Both ideologically and economically China has become allied with the west, but China is in many ways post-historical in its philosophical sense as well. I intend to examine both the extent and nature of this more carefully when travelling to the PRC later this year, but Chinese society is equally perpetuated in the hedonistic joy of society. This is of great trouble for the CCP, whose ideology is based on a continued struggle toward communism. Instead of caring about the historical development of the proletariat the Chinese population is troubled with post-historical issues. They wish for stable iron-rice-bowl jobs, fleeting consumer goods, and the ever-continuing flow of entertainment supplied by services like Douyin. Life becomes a hedonistic maintenance of happiness and joy, just as it has become in the other post-historical regions of the world like Europe and Japan.

My hope is that this has been an illuminating coverage of some of the main criticisms of the end of history, and that I have dispelled any notions of history “restarting” or that we have merely been on a “holiday” from history since 1989, with the so-called holiday ending either in 2001 or more recently. If you have any other major counterexamples I would be glad to hear them, since many of these major ones I have here covered are quite elementary — with the major issues merely being a gross misunderstanding of what is being discussed. I shall end with a quote by Kojéve that showcases the nature of post-historical society:

It is precisely to the organization and the ‘humanization’ of its free time that future humanity will have to devote its efforts. (Did Marx himself not say, in repeating, without realizing it, a saying of Aristotle’s: that the ultimate motive of progress, and thus of socialism, is the desire to ensure a maximum of leisure for man?)

❦

In order to apply functional programming to our activities, we must first endeavour to understand what a function is in this new context. Strictly speaking a function transforms each element in the set X into exactly one element in set Y. This is where the second point listed earlier comes from, since each element in set X must always output the same element (so no randomness).

A function must therefore produce something; it is not a activity merely done for the sake of doing. Things like doomscrolling or verbal communication are not functions, since they do not produce a tangible output — even if they may impact you in some way.

In what activities do we produce things then? One obvious example is cooking. Ingredients are combined or separated and should hopefully come together to create the dish that you aimed for. This will not be entirely deterministic since ingredients may be of a differing quality, your tools may be different from time to time, and your own skills as a chef means that you will inevitably make mistakes. In reality — as opposed to the realm of mathematics and computer science — the world will never be truly deterministic. But this does not mean that we should surrender completely, instead we must aim toward cooking a dish as we intended each and every time.

Another example where it is perhaps not imminently obvious that the activity is functional is cleaning. It also highlights the aspect of functional programming that is perhaps most famous, and is also present in the act of cooking: side effects. Side effects are when a given function not only transforms the input X into output Y, but also modifies a third value. This impacts the global state and may mean that the function, or any other function, behaves differently when run in the future. When I vacuum my apartment I have to move furniture to reach all of the nooks and crannies where dust settles. This means that the function whose purpose is to rid the floor of dust causes the side effect of moving my furniture. These side effects have to be managed and dealt with quickly, and critically be seen as part of the task itself.

It is easy to dismiss many side effects as something that can be dealt with later, but this dramatically increases the mental effort involved. Not only are you more familiar with the various items whose position and status must be dealt with, but you are also already performing the task, and so there is no “startup” cost involved with dealing with it straight away. Staring at the dishes that need to be done after a meal is an experience I expect most people to be familiar with, but it can often times be avoided when they are seen as inexirably linked to the task itself.

Life may never reach the pure determinism prized by functional programming, but adopting its mindset allows us to manage the increasing complexity of everyday life. By thinking of our actions as functions we can try and deal with side-effects immidiately instead of waiting for them to pile up over time, minimizing unwanted distortions in our personal “global state”.

In an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world, our capabilities for communication and diversity of ways to do so also increases. This is often approached as a problem, with each method merely remaining due to network effects, but I believe that this multitude of means are a strength and not a weakness. I do however still see what I deem as a misuse of tools, and I shall endeavour to explain, and hopefully convince you of, my ways of structuring communication in different spheres.

The key difference that I think many do not make is the division between urgency and importance. This might seem an unwieldy or arbitrary division, but I believe it is crucial. In many cases needing an answer quickly is the only thing one cares about, and in others it is the accuracy of the response that matters. To explain simply, here an order of different modes of communications:

Sorted by importance:

When you want to be very clear about something you always want to meet in person, and if speed is necessary nothing is faster than calling someone’s cellphone. But there is one medium that has been overlooked, or in many cases even despised, email.

The Indieweb wiki’s section on email describes an “Older [reason] to use email” as “messaging among older internet users” as if this is an archaic or outdated form of messaging. This is echoed by my anecdotal experiences with talking to younger generations of people who in many cases detest email, having only used it in a professional setting and for making “accounts” to websites that then flood them with newsletters and advertisements. I understand these experiences that I imagine many people have, but they do not mean that email should be thrown out altogether. Instead it should occupy a new place in the way people communicate.

The word revolution has an interesting history, meaning both a transformative change in a given field (although often political) as well as a simple revolution of a spinning object, returning to its starting position (see RPM; revolutions per minute)¹. These two seemingly homonymous words are however deeply interconnected, and to explain this I want to use the example of the Glorious Revolution. It was not only a profound political development, overthrowing the established idea of the divine right of kings and replacing it with popular sovereignty, but also formulating it as a return to the normal political order of the ancient rights of the English people². The Meiji Restoration in Japan was also of this nature, a profound and forward-looking development that framed itself as a return to the original state of things.

So what does this have to do with email communication for the kidz? I see email as a niche that no other medium occupies, that being asynchronous communication. All communication is of course asynchronous in some sense, but there is an expectation that texting should ideally be done instantly and intensely. One is expected to respond quickly, and “leaving” someone “on read” is seen as an insult. I think that this form of synchronous communication, when combined with the scale of modern technology, creates enormous stress on the individual. At all times one is able to intimately³ communicate with thousands of people, leaving the individual paralysed from overstimulation. Email by contrast emphasises long-form messaging, often being longer than posts on microblogging services meant for permanent or semi-permanent publication. This gives the individual more time to respond but also the sender to live their own life while waiting for a response. Originally this was of course a technological necessity — it was impossible to reach someone through the internet when they were not at their computer — but that limitation has since disappeared through the introduction of the cellular phone and later the smartphone.

This does not mean that the problems with email are not real but that they are obscuring the usefulness of the technology. The primary change I would recommend (or that needs to be done) is the division between communication and information. There is no denying that a lot of services rely on email for registration and advertisements. But there is a clear mental barrier between receiving an email from a real human being and a machine sending you a morass of spam that one is not expected to reply to, but simply to consume⁴. The greatest damage to email has been done by no-reply@domain.com. To counter this one needs multiple email addresses, one for machine communication that is seldom used and another for human connection. This allows for the mental separation of messages so that the enormous flood of email does not drown out the signal, and so that individuals are not anxious when they are sent an email.

Herman Martinus of Bear Blog calls this a part of digial hygiene, and proposes that one should try and “explicity act” on each email, either filtering them out, responding to them, or archiving them. We both seem to have independetly arrived at similar conclusions, where emails strictly needs to be kept for interpersonal communication, and that mere information should be kept out to avoid drowning out signal.

What would then be required to return to the earlier asynchronous mode? It is unclear if the massive use by commercial-scale actors can be undone or reduced, and email spam filters mean that the system is heavily centralized to just a few big actors. But it is hard to deny the powerful networking effects of email, where almost every user of the internet can be assumed to have one. Would it be better to simply torch email and convince a new generation of users to move to a new system of E2EE async messaging? I do not know. But I do still believe that email has the potential to be the solution to many people’s problems with the internet and communication as a whole.

It is apparent to everyone that social media is distinctly a different experience today from how it initially developed. It has become a form of mindless consumption instead of a social space where one interacts with other genuine individuals. The concept of content, once merely used on Madison avenue, has become so ingrained in the social media environment that those who would otherwise call themselves entertainers, artists, or journalists have now come to regard their field as mere content creation, as producing things merely meant to get you hooked so that you will look at more advertisements. This has been accelerated due to LLM’s ability to quickly create things that are “good enough” to look at, read, or otherwise consume. Consumption has become the only reason to interact with social media. But alternatives are not only necessary, they are already here.

Social media’s fall from grace did not occur with the release of ChatGPT, but it has accelerated since then. Social media platforms do not make money off of our enjoyment, but merely from our attention. This was perhaps best displayed by the stratospheric rise of tiktok, and of the subsequent explosion in short-form video platforms that followed. These are built on an ecosystem that has continuously been trying to capture more and more of our waking hours. Actions to resist this were slowly being taken, even if subconsciously. The decline of independent forums, where discussion is instead taken to deep-web⁵ spaces like slack, discord, group chats and direct messages, is perhaps the clearest sign of this. This was well underway before generative AI arrived, but as Maggie Appleton has pointed out, “the dark forest” of spam and slop has expanded — and will continue to expand — rapidly.

When talking about email as a mere asynchronous medium the focus is on how email benefits the user individually, and on how spam has forced people to move to other such mediums. Here, I instead want to describe how one can not just return to the email-workflow of yore, but reimagine it as a new form of social media that allows one to curate and decide on what to interact with, but also how to format that interaction and to contribute to the meaning and interpretation with the work.

Writing emails is a laborious task, at least compared to scrolling an infinite feed. But it is this labour that is put in to email that is the differentiating factor. Microblogging platforms like twitter, mastodon, and bluesky can never become places for genuine presence because of its ease of use. Writing a toot on mastodon is little different from writing as short prompt for an AI. What LLMs have taught us is that one must put in the work to create something meaningful in the eyes of others, because what is valuable is the time you spent in formulating those ideas.

Social interaction is by necessity a creative process. One does not merely communicate raw information in the form of statistics or binary data, but we instead choose to frame and disseminate information in a unique way. This creative process is what makes us interesting as individuals, to interact with, and valuable to others as agents in the world.

Email also facilitates an inner discussion. While other mediums require little of the author to critically examine their statements, writing emails allows oneself the time to read, reread, and edit ones position. This means that in an email conversation between just two people, each person takes control of the conversation completely in a way that instant messaging and the like does not do. The author is free to have an entire discussion in their head, picturing responses in their mind. This then moves the conversation forward in a double dialectical fashion, with each person’s internal debate framing their responses that are in turn responded to.

As I explained in my musings on text, the dialectial motion that is present in the creative process means that the relationship between author and reader disappears. Seneca explains that “The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach”⁶ — explaining your thoughts to another necessarily means refining them for yourself.

When I write emails, it is not uncommon for the word count to reach into 2-3000 words. This is longer than many blog posts I write, and while it commonly covers multiple topics — all organically developed — it allows for a form of creative expression that other mediums do not posses. It allows me to write in a much more free manner, to an audience whose intellectual strengths (and weaknesses) I am much more aware of, and yet still cut those parts that would otherwise be necessary to paint a full picture of the issue. It allows me genuine connection with people I know in a way that reading their newest tweet does not.

This intimate relation between blog posts and emails means that a back-and-fourth discussion with someone over email is not all that dissimilar to writing for a literary audience, it is just a smaller audience. It forces us to come up with and process our ideas, and is in that sense similar to what I call productive note-taking, where one uses the production of a work to prompt intellectual growth.

Email’s asynchronous nature allows us to write and respond whenever we personally have time. Some people argue that email fails to accomodate groups of users greater than 2, but I disagree. Things like mailing lists allow large groups of people to communicate in public with lots of other individuals, with anyone quickly jumping in when required. Conversations chains are easily listed and followed, compared to the fleeting reply chains of large slack or discord groups. We can take our time to respond, and those wo are interested in what we have to say can quickly get up to speed in the conversation, much like the easily digestible feeds of social media. The difference is that instead of quickly scrolling by to read short messages by lots of different people, you are forced to sit and listen to one person’s reasoning for much longer — not all that different from how you would in real life.

James O’Sullivan, of University College Cork, writes in noema magazine:

Social media’s current logic is designed to reduce friction, to give users infinite content for instant gratification, or at the very least, the anticipation of such. The antidote to this compulsive, numbing overload will be found in deliberative friction, design patterns that introduce pause and reflection into digital interaction, or platforms and algorithms that create space for intention.

This is exactly the sort of deliberate control that email offers. This is not to say that email as it exists today is a perfect alternative, but the way it is ubiqutous and at the same time completely forgotten means that we have to make a deliberate attempt to understand the technologies that already exist in practice. ❦

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 summarize my thoughts on them. A website was the perfect place for that.

I write many pieces concurrently, and publish them either when I feel finished or when my motivation has drained and I feel like I need to “just get it out there”. 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 Emacs and in org mode, because I find the markup to be intuitive, natural, and easy¹. 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 primary font used is Tschichold’s Sabon. Code uses the Greybeardu font. The headers are all typeset in the beautiful DaVinci by the NYC creative bureau Virgile Flores.

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.² 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 genereted using 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-hidden-directory "~/Documents/blog/hidden/")
(setq org-static-blog-enable-tags t)
(setq org-static-blog-enable-og-tags t)
(setq org-static-blog-image "https://joarvarndt.se/vonArndtCrestWhite.png")
(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-static-blog-index-length 6)
(setq org-static-blog-use-preview t)
(setq org-static-blog-preview-link-p t)
(setq org-static-blog-display-git-date t)
(setq org-static-blog-title-link nil)
(setq org-static-blog-preview-start "<p class=\"dcap\">")

(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 href=\"static/style.css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" />
       <link rel=\"icon\" href=\"static/favicon.ico\">
       <link rel=\"me\" href=\"https://github.com/JanJoar\" />
       <link rel=\"me\" href=\"https://gravatar.com/speedilyrunaway0201f99245\" />
       <link rel=\"webmention\" href=\"https://webmention.io/joarvarndt.se/webmention\" />
       <script src=\"static/sidenotes.js\" defer></script>
       <script src=\"static/comments.js\" defer></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-page-preamble "<div class=\"header\" role=\"banner\">
                                     <a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/\"><img id=\"themeImageHeader\" src=\"vonArndtCrestBlack.png\" class=\"header-img\" alt=\"Crest\" width=\"50\"></a></div>")

(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>")

(setq org-static-blog-no-comments-tag "nocomment")

(setq org-static-blog-page-postamble
      "<div id=\"postamble\" class=\"status\"><div class=\"footer\" role=\"contentinfo\">
       <div class=\"footer-upper\">
       <footer-img><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"footer-img\" id=\"themeImageFooter\" src=\"Ship-5.svg\" alt=\"Set sail on the sea of knowledge\"></footer-img>
       <copyright>© 2026 AD/234 AR Joar von Arndt</copyright>
        </div>
        <div class=\"footer-lower\">
        <nav>
          <ul>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/about.html\">About</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/archive.html\">Archive</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/links.html\">Your next stop</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/website.html\">Colophon</a></li>
          </ul>
        </nav>

        <nav>
          <ul>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/now.html\">Now</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/subscribe.html\">Subscribe</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/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></div>")

(setq org-static-blog-index-front-matter "<site-intro><p>
      This is the site of Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt. I write about a
      variety of topics, from coverage of <a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/eww.html\">GNU Emacs web browsing</a>, to <a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/business_cards.html\">graphic
      design</a> and <a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/european-tech.html\">critiques of industrial policy</a>. You can <a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/subscribe.html\"> subscribe here</a>. If you enjoy anything written here (or disagree with me) feel free to <a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/contact.html\">tell me about it</a>.
      </p>

      <p>
      My own personal favorites are the following:
      </p>

      <ul class=\"org-ul\">
      <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/end-of-history.html\">The End of History.</a></li>
      <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/email.html\">Email as a Revolutionary Medium</a></li>
      <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/deepseek.html\">Deepseek is not a Chinese OpenAI</a></li>
      </ul>

      <nav id=\"table-of-contents\" role=\"doc-toc\">
        <h2><i>Itinerarium</i></h2>
        <div id=\"text-table-of-contents\" role=\"doc-toc\">
          <ul>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/archive.html\">All Posts</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/about.html\">About</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/now.html\">Now</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/links.html\">Your next stop</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/subscribe.html\">Subscribe</a></li>
            <li><a href=\"https://joarvarndt.se/website.html\">Colophon</a></li>
          </ul>
        </div>
      </nav>
</site-intro>")

(setq org-static-blog-preview-ellipsis "<span class=\"ellipsis\">Continue Reading</span>")

(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=\"https://joarvarndt.se/bird-butterfly.png\" alt=\"A small bird resting amongst the branches, gazing at a flying butterfly.\" class=\"pictograph\">
      </picture> <hr>")

(setq org-static-blog-enable-tag-rss 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)

(setq org-image-actual-width nil)

Not does the elisp file look like this, this is the very code being run! The text you are reading right now is written as an org-mode document, and the code block above is exported and run as part of the build process of the website. Because it became annoying to manually evaluate the above code block every time I wanted to export I wrote a quick build script:

#!/usr/bin/emacs -x

;;; Code:

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

(require 'org)
(require 'cal-french)
(require 'htmlize)
(message "Loaded libraries")

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

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

(org-static-blog-publish t)

;;; 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).

I am a big fan of org-static-blog due to its simplicity³, extensibility (it is just a simple HTML static site generator) and obvious org-mode support. Its 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 argument⁴ 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 appearence 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, but not after I experienced a 25 day long downtime in June 2025 when I was traveling in China. 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 public-facing blog to netlify but still retain the server for hosting personal services and experiments.

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. ❦

This is my current reading list, and contains books I’ve read, am reading, and want to read for fun during my commute. It contains books roughly from 2020 and onwards with a few books from 2019. This is simply because that’s when I decided to start tracking my reading habits. The books aren’t listed in any particular order, but added haphazardly to a spot next to other books that I feel it has some connections to, or not! It’s really impossible to tell.

The list is split into a number of different sections and subsections in order to make structuring easier. I of course plan to read everything listed, but as a rule of thumb I tend to alternate between reading fiction and non-fiction. Recently I’ve experience a significant decrease in the amount I read due to the fact that I now try and keep up to date on world affairs through my subsciption to the Economist as well as my studies at University.

It’s written in GNU Emacs Org-mode and so its appearance is decided by the Org-Mode syntax. Each entry is split into three parts.

1. The current status of a book. This can have four different values.

   	Plan on reading
   §	Plan on reading but already posses the book
   -	In progress in some capacity
   X	Have finished at least once

2. The title of the book.
3. The authors name. && if multiple authors.

I recently (Spring 2025) inherited a number of books, as can be noticed especially in the History section, and so I have quite a lot to catch up on.

Paradox Interactive (2022) Victoria 3. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/victoria-3/about

Stråth, Bo (2005) Union och demokrati: de förenade rikena Sverige och Norge 1814–1905.

Beller, Steven. (2006) A Concise History of Austria. New York. Cambridge University Press.

Heikaus, R. (1997) Die ersten Monate der provisorischen Zentralgewalt für Deutschland (Juli bis Dezember 1848). Frankfurt am Main.

Nipperdey, T. (1996) Germany from Napoleon to Bismark, 1800-1866. Princeton. Princeton University Press.

Treitschke, H.v. (1914) Treitschke, his life and works. Norwich. The Empire Press.

Marx, K. (1845) The German Ideology. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/

This video is loosely based on Daniel Yergin’s book The New Map: Energy, Security and the Clash of Nations about the energy system, with some topical and relevant references to present day. The music is the intro the anime Cowboy Bebop, Tank.

It was edited in Blender on a machine running Debian GNU/Linux.

This video is an interpretation of Daniel Yergin’s second historical book on the history of the energy industry, The Quest: Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. The music is from the first season of the Japanese anime Made in Abyss, titled Deep in Abyss by KanadeYUK and Masahiro “Godspeed” Aoki.

It was edited in Blender on a machie running Debian GNU/Linux.

This video is an interpretation of Daniel Yergin’s seminal Pulitzer-price-winning book on the history of the oil and gas industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. The music is from the first season of the Japanese anime Oreimo, titled Irony by ClariS. Most of the footage is taken from the eponymously named documentary based on the book. The video was then edited in Blender on a machine running Debian GNU/Linux.