Vaporware

Episode 12: Alexander Bard

This week ⁠Daniel⁠ and ⁠Chase⁠ are joined by ⁠Jack Ek⁠ and his friend, the legendary ⁠Alexander Bard⁠, who describes himself as a “philosopher who writes f***ing books" and who is according to his ⁠Wiki⁠: a Swedish musician, author, lecturer, artist, songwriter, music producer, ⁠TV personality⁠, religious and political activist, one of the founders of the ⁠Syntheist religious movement⁠, and member of the bands ⁠Army of Lovers⁠ & ⁠BWO⁠, amongst numerous other projects. More recently, he cofounded a secret society called ⁠The Grey Robes⁠, AKA the “Freemasons of Decentralization”.

We cover:

How Jack and Bard met through Euroburner culture

Is Bucharest the next Berlin? Or…can there never be a ‘next Berlin’

Property ownership as lynchpin for scene building

The secrets of disproportionate Swedish soft power

America as theater for the rest of the world

Lessons from Urbit: too Kantian

Philosophy’s role in engineering 

Behavioral Economics and ‘Nudge Units’ 

The need for spirituality when grappling with the ramifications of AI

AI as a fundamentally truth seeking technology and therefore a threat to authoritarian governments

The devolution of the internet from Open and flat into a tribal, feudal dark forest.

Decentralization vs Centralization as the only important political axis

Navigating community building in a decentralized world (parallelize it)

Artwork: J.F. Clemens after Nicolai Abildgaard, “Ossian’s Swan Song”, 1787

This week, Daniel⁠ chats about technology, governance and culture with Samuel Hammond, senior economist for the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank focused on bridging the cultures of Silicon Valley and DC. Additionally, Sam has an outstanding substack where he writes about topics surrounding AI development & regulation, as well as the history and future of liberalism, secularism and pluralism.

Topics include: 

The day-to-day of working in a think tank

What it means to bridge the cultural divide between Silicon Valley and DC

The real American power centers (New York (finance/media), Texas (energy), Silicon Valley (tech) and how Hollywood has always been subservient

What it means to embrace pluralism in terms of values, morals and ontological frameworks, and the benefits of such beliefs

How to apply the theory of The Second Best to ones general worldview: “when it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing one or more additional market distortions may lead to a more efficient outcome”

The evolution of liberalism has evolved as a response to periods of extreme conflict (The 30 Years War, for instance)

Debating whether or not crisis is essential for generating new equilibria in society

Accelerationism and capitalism as a general intelligence

Path dependency and historical development

Exploring scenarios about what happens if AI scaling laws breakdown 

Predictions about AI’s impact on regime change and the rise of AI-native institutions

Can open source AI keep up? Why it’s important that they keep trying, despite the widening performance gap

Why Sam isn’t worried about children adapting to technological change

The coming return of Neo-Medieval societal structures

Completing the system of Canadian Idealism

Artwork: Edward Hicks, “Peaceable Kingdom”, 1844-1846

To kick off our new weekly release schedule, we have Chase &⁠⁠ Daniel in conversation with designer, artist, NYU design/media professor & cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot (@being_on_line) 

Ruby’s output is thoughtful, extremely prolific, and multifaceted. His writing on virtual realms, digital communities and AI offers a unique perspective that overlaps with our interests at Vaporware in key ways. Chiefly, how crucial it is for people and small communities to truly own their own means of coordination and memory. But also how the specific affordances of those digital tools dictate the bounds of memory itself.

Ruby’s new habit of buying old film home movies off eBay

The concept of ‘Mnemophagy’: “the devouring of memory” and the ephemerality of online culture

Checkpoints: Ruby’s book about an accidental community that formed in the comment section of a now-deleted YouTube video

His early internet archiving habits and how they sucked him into academia through meme page admin

What he’s learned from teaching young designers at NYU and the new generational attitudes towards technology that he sees crystallizing

How comparing the iPod to the Stem Player made him both optimistic and pessimistic about the future of hardware design

Why it’s a good thing that 64% of Gen Z call themselves ‘creators’

The rise of para-content: content about content

Why we want AI to give us malleable, interoperable, remixable tools, not to repeat forms from the past

The rise of synthetic training data and concerns about its usefulness or creativity

Why it’s important to write more non-dystopian sci-fi, so that founders are inspired to build things besides cyberpunk and ‘the Torment Nexus’

Artwork: Louis Daguerre [inventor of the Daguerreotype and the diorama], “The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel”, 1824

This week, Daniel Keller and Fred Scharmen talk about the cultural legacy of space colonization and its connections to contemporary movements like e/acc, longtermism, and network states.

Fred is architect, educator, and researcher whose work focuses on the history and theory of architecture and urban design in outer space. His first book, Space Settlements (Columbia University Press, 2019) is about Gerard O'Neill's work with NASA and others to design large-scale cities in space intended to house millions of people. His second book, Space Forces (Verso, 2021), is a broader history of human aspirations in space. Fred is an international speaker and has helped speculate about life in future space habitats for NASA and the Museum of the Future in Dubai. In 2015 Fred built a scale model solar system stretching for a mile and a half through downtown Baltimore. He teaches at Morgan State University. 

Topics: 

Historical context of space architecture

The concept of the ‘planetary imagination’

The roots and legacy of Russian Cosmism

The ‘Brick Moon’ vs. ‘Glass Moon’ paradigms of space colonization

J.D Bernal’s early vision for a pluralistic ‘proto-patchwork’ in space composed of numerous self-reproducing bubble space habitats

The Von Braun Paradigm, Operation Paperclip and UFOs

Comparison of Soviet and US space program culture and sci-fi influences

New Space and the quasi-cold war rivalry between Musk and Bezos

Gerard O’ Neill’s influential space habitat work for NASA in the 1970s

What makes those Don Davis and Rick Guidice Space habitat paintings so damn appealing and the Bezos commissioned ones so flat?

Why we can absolutely afford to build a Stanford Torus  

How the aesthetics of space habitats influences public perception

Fred’s work with Brick Moon, a space habitat consultancy

“Don’t Let Them Leave” movement, opposed to space colonization

Space habitats for manatees 

Fred’s incredible GoT fan theory: It takes place on a malfunctioning Truman Show-style Bernal Sphere

Artwork: Don Davis, “Model 3 O’Neill Cylinder ‘Lunar Eclipse’ lighting (Sun in eclipse behind Earth)”, 1975

In a bit of a departure from our normal format, Daniel Keller⁠⁠ interviews Chase Van Etten⁠⁠, founder and CEO of Vaporware about his background and vision for the company. 

We discuss: 

Absorbing the California Ideology by osmosis growing up in Petaluma

How custom car culture informs Chase’s approach to technology

Gaming as CEO Mode trainer Vs. depressive real world agency drainer 

Marketplaces as cooperation tech and the need to maximize informational flow rates

How Vaporware aims to address the complexities of social computing

Right and wrong approaches to standardization in software 

The multidimensional problem space of growing a radical software project as a startup

Taking on megacorp incumbents by doing things outside the scope of their business model

The great app-less future, (that Apple doesn’t want you to have)

The Operating Function as a new paradigm in computing and foundation for a sovereign Exocortex

Functional programming providing the basis for reliable and trustworthy distributed systems and software

Vaporware’s competition and target audience 

The political implications of our technology and legal and ethical challenges

Community sovereignty and individual sovereignty

Some differing views on the pace of AI development 

How insanely high Chase thinks your monthly software bill is going to be in 10 years

Different ways you can participate in our project if you’re interested!

Artwork: Peter Cain, “Z”, 1989