Annotations ¶

1981 book Critical Path, architect Buckminster Fuller

Antarctica: The Battle for the Seventh Continent,

Erwin S. Strauss’s frankly bonkers 1984 book How to Start Your Own Country: How You Can Profit from the Coming Decline of the Nation State,

How to Build a Dinosaur

In other words, a single data center outage broke a large part of the internet. Even though it had been built to withstand the force of a nuclear bomb, it turns out that the forces of capitalism—of advertising, economies of scale, and near-monopolies—are in some ways even stronger than nukes. As a result, large parts of the internet are once again brittle, relying as they do on a few single services with their single points of failure. It’s worth highlighting that this outage at AWS, like most cloud-hosting outages, was unintentional: this one was caused by a mere routine upgrade that went off the rails.[

In 1984, Ken Thompson—the man who designed and implemented Unix, the progenitor of the operating systems most computers and phones run on—produced a paper called “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” which reached the same conclusion: “The moral is obvious,” he wrote. “You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you . . .” By “totally create yourself,” Thompson doesn’t just mean a program that you wrote, but one you wrote the entire stack for: everything down to the compiler. Very few people have the time, skill, and money to build a computer from the ground up, including all the software on it. This would seem to be a bullet in the head for trusting computers with anything. And honestly, if you’ve ever felt like laughing villainously, now would be the time.

Most things we use computers for—heck, most things we encounter in real life—either don’t share all those properties, or if they do, their stakes aren’t nearly as high. People use their credit cards online with confidence, but that’s only because the credit card companies are willing to cover the fraud that happens as a business expense: it’s worth it to keep the money (and income) flowing freely. Banks make the same financial calculation when they promise transfers using their websites are secure: sometimes criminals do get away with money, but in those cases the banks cover the loss because the value of everyone trusting their website is worth more than what the fraud costs.

In the early twentieth century, a Russian movement for immortality emerged, called the Biocosmists. (They also believed in conquering space for all humanity, hence the name.) Remarkably, Biocosmists believed that defeating death should be something that benefits not just those currently alive, but also the complete mass of humanity who had come before them. The living, they thought, shared a grave moral obligation to restore all who’d ever died to life—though they disagreed about the specifics of how this might be accomplished.
			Resurrecting everyone who has ever lived is, unfortunately, slightly beyond the scope of this book.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

			“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

			Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

			Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

			Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

			The lone and level sands stretch far away.

			—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818)

Every good story needs a villain. But the best villains are the ones you secretly like.
			—Stephanie Garber (2018)

Explorations in Automated Language Classification

“This place is a message . . . and part of a system of messages . . . pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”

“There are forces at work in this world that are so much bigger than anyone, whether they’re economic forces, climactic forces, political forces, and so on, and the possibility of anyone affecting those forces in any way—let alone in a positive way—is basically close to zero,” he said. “But that does not give you permission to not care. That does not give you permission to not participate.”

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