Posts tagged “essay”
The Nature of Art
Art has always been one of the most central aspects of human lives. It is not unique to the human experience, but it has become more important to humans than perhaps no other species on the planet. The history of Art is one of a continuous crisis and need to reïnvent itself, and as such our current age is no different. The contemporary crisis is one partly caused by the emergence of Large Language Models (llms) and their ability to quickly generate enormous quantities of visual imagery, but it is also caused by a more long-running trend of digital life and of its consequences.
Continue Reading →All is Right With the World
Post-scarcity is here. And with it has the life without meaningful political action. The consequences of this can not be understated, although they have somehow been with us for quite some time, paling in comparison to the ever-growing predictions of science fiction. What shape does this world take, what are the forces governing its structure, and how will it continue to grow?
Continue Reading →Elements of Economic Security
Back in 2024 I was part of the first class of a new course at the Swedish Defence University titled Economic Security in Competition, Conflict and War. Throughout that course it became clearer and clearer to me that the field of economic security has a central element that makes it fundamentally difficult to implement. The subject has only become more relevant as of late, with the People’s Republic of China (prc) showing no sign of stopping its entrenchment into critical sectors of the economy and with ever-strengthening winds in the sails of protectionism everywhere from Warsaw to Washington. As such it is an issue that has continuously been brewing in the back of my mind these past years. But despite increased interest in the topic it has not become any clearer what constitutes economic security, and how it should best be attained and maintained. A crude definition might be the following:
Continue Reading →Exponentials and Artificial Intelligence
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:
Continue Reading →The Qualities of the Totalitarian State
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.
Continue Reading →On Text and Language
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.
Continue Reading →On Attaining European Technological Sovereignty
Europe is in a bind. While we possess advanced manufacturing and research, we have somehow been unable to adequately transform these advantages into a prominent tech industry1. With the large investments in large language models (llms) since the release of Chatgpt a number of years ago there have been increasing pushes for Europe — to the extent that Europe can be considered a single entity — to do something. What exactly to do is of course in contention, otherwise it would likely already have been done, but the discussion regarding the lack of a European tech industry compared to the usa has been occurring for much longer — especially since China has proven that it is possible to build such an industry without American help.
Continue Reading →Deepseek is not a Chinese OpenAI
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.
Continue Reading →The End of History.
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:
Continue Reading →Email as a Revolutionary Medium
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.
Continue Reading →The Role of Geography in Dynastic China
Throughout Chinese history, there have been two great divides. First, that of the east-west, and later the north-south. These two dynamics have been instrumental in how Chinese society looks today and of how the history of imperial and premodern China played out. While China has had contacts with the outside world since time immemorial, it has been isolated from the outside world due to its geographic boundaries. To the north, large steppes and desert that makes settled agriculture largely impossible, as well as major mountain ranges. The west has large deserts and the major obstacle of the Tibetan plateau in the south-west, and further to the south tropical forests and a dense network of mountains. Finally, to the east lies the world’s largest ocean, the pacific, with only the islands of Japan and Formosa, as well as the Korean peninsula before a reaching expanse. These borders have shaped the Chinese frontier, but a multitude of geographic features have also impacted the Chinese interior.
Continue Reading →The Philosophical Impacts of Nuclear Weapons
To answer the question of whether or not the invention nuclear bomb has been the most important event of human history is not an easy task. There are certainly numerous arguments in favour of such a statement; nuclear weapons have given us the thermodynamically most efficient form of releasing energy yet devised; they have given us the ability to quickly and easily destroy the major feats of our ancestors and possibly even those of our descendents; they have given us power beyond humanity’s comprehension. And yet the nature of a question of this broad a nature requires us to think more deeply about technological evolution and of our place within it. What constitutes an invention, and what makes certain inventions more important than others? Have the impacts of nuclear weapons, on both our materialist world and the cultural spiritus mundi, been large enough to warrant such a description? The Manhattan Project, despite its tremendous success from seemingly out of nowhere, was not a gift of Prometheus. The project itself was an industrial effort of incredible proportions, and built upon the recent cumulative advances in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and special relativity. It is therefore difficult to see the invention of nuclear weapons as a being a particularly important event from the left-handed qua limit perspective, while for those looking in from a right-handed perspective may see the Trinity test as a defining point in human history, especially given the role in the popular consciousness nuclear weapons were given during the cold war.
Continue Reading →