Democracy means that people — individuals — have a meaningful say in the rules that govern them.

We understand that free expression is a necessary condition for well-functioning democracy. If you can't speak your mind, you can't have a meaningful say in the rules. This is the Democracy Argument for Free Expression. My recommendation? Accept it, and act accordingly.

Now look upstream of expression; here we find deliberation, inquiry, cogitation. We do not just have opinions about how society should go or how we should be ruled; we form those opinions on the basis of evidence. Today, people already rely on machines to extend their cognitive powers, deliberate, or inquire; I do not see this trend falling. But we are caught in the net of a disquieting structure. We rely on centralized platforms for machine intelligence. And these machines are not our own. If your mind is moved in subtle ways by a big tech AI platform, if its values do not reflect your own, if it refuses your questions outright — you are blocked from the tools you need to participate in deliberation or rule.

Meaningful control over machine intelligence, by individuals, is a necessary condition for well-functioning democracy. Choice between a small suite of big tech platforms who all agree on how society should unfold is not good enough. The way forward lies with free and open source software that users can modify, run on their own hardware, and use without surveillance. Open weight models are one component of this stack. Not your weights, not your mind.

This is the Democracy Argument for Small Tech AI. My recommendation? Accept it, and act accordingly.

People are scared. The Machine is clanking loudly — data centers, surveillance, control. How can we make machines that are not over us, but for us? Cypherpunk humanism shows us the way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v87rwY4UAak

I've been thinking about AI doom scenarios for many years. I've always been a skeptic — paperclip nonsense and all that.

But thanks to the Coldcard hack, and a recent reading of Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, I kind of see it now. (Great read by the way; crisp, well-argued, fascinating, crafted with care).

Civilization is precious, but fragile. It can die when facing unknown unknowns or exponential trends that catch us unawares, until it is too late. Arms races tend to be bad for civilizations too.

One known unknown when it comes to AI is this: whether it will ultimately create any attacker/defender asymmetries, or individual/institutional asymmetries. One factor here is just how far the open weight models can go, and whether they'll be permitted by authorities.

Alas, I can't write out the unknown unknowns. But I'm now more sure than ever that they're out there.

I'm an optimist at heart — unlike Wright. But I now see connections between my more conservative impulses (watch for Chestertonian fences; beware rapid change) and what is actually happening with AI and cybersecurity. This is only the beginning.

What a time to be alive and to be monitoring the situation!

guy who gets harsh soap in one eye and immediately puts it in the other — “to even things out”

(a parable about egalitarian leveling down)

The quickest way to a lefty's heart is to poo-poo libertarianism. For extra points, call it 'propertarianism'.

The digital computer is a lever.
Software is a lever of levers.
Agentic AI is a lever of lever of levers.

Act accordingly.

What does this mean for me, personally? For writing philosophy or running a classroom, not much. For dealing with the mountains of data I've hoarded over the decades, everything. Scripts, which I didn't have to write, handle it all for me, and now I have easy access to years of quotations, music, photos, papers, books, notes, correspondence — all locally hosted, all exactly fit for my own purposes.

It is good to have a lever of lever of levers on staff.

guy who writes everything in markdown now, but refuses to let robots write for him

Portfolio apps are great for monitoring the situation. But they track your IP, location, assets, even your identity. In the recent past, data from millions of users has leaked, resulting in phishing, identity theft, or physical wrench attacks. Darkfolio fixes this.

Darkfolio can't leak information it doesn't have. When you refresh, the server sends 7,000+ asset prices (stocks and crypto) every time. Your phone extracts what it needs locally, so a server never learns what you're monitoring. And you can run it all through Tor.

No accounts, no emails, no cloud sync. Even better, Darkfolio's developer, @Craig Warmke, is pledging the first $10k in net revenue back to the cause of your digital privacy. It's live on the iOS App Store today.

Craig is a friend, but no one paid me to write these tweets. I am, instead, an enthusiastic early tester and now daily user myself. Darkfolio has what I always wanted from a portfolio app. It may be what you've been looking for too. Give it a try!

https://getdarkfolio.app

horror story in six words: "Can you jump on a call?”