These sources argue about what technology and institutions owe people. Most are essays or manifestos, and one is an allegation in a student newspaper. Pages report those positions without endorsing them. This page lists fifteen sources, oldest first where dated.
The Bay Area Alternative Press (subtitle: Cult of Boredom)
The feature mixes background research with a first-person volunteer visit. It describes the visit as slow and aimless. It ends on an ominous warning from an older article. The two reader comments disagree sharply about it.
Care at Scale
The essay starts from a walk with students along a water main. It uses personal experience, satellite night images and thinkers such as Rawls and Sen. It argues for infrastructural citizenship. It offers argument and observation, not original data.
Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Four: Penetrability
The essay is an argument in a blunt, sarcastic voice. It cites scholars such as Esther Newton and Jack Halberstam but offers no data. It is the fourth part of a series and is slated for a book.
She Warned About Silicon Valley 25 Years Ago. We Ignored Her.
Gil Duran presents Paulina Borsook's late-1990s and 2001 critique of tech libertarians. The post is advocacy that praises the work and asks readers to donate. The evidence is quotes from the book and the author's own lunch with Borsook.
Global Village Construction Set | Hacker News
The thread discusses a project to design about 50 open source industrial machines. Commenters mostly debate whether the project delivered, and whether self-sufficiency makes sense. Evidence is commenters' experience and links, including a 2013 New Yorker article.
The Scariest People in the World: Maniacs, Misanthropes, and Silicon Valley Pro-Extinctionists
Émile P. Torres argues that cheap dual-use technology lets small groups threaten civilization. The essay sorts would-be world-destroyers into types and adds a new type in Silicon Valley. Its evidence is quotations, a probability thought experiment and the author's earlier papers.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto
The manifesto contrasts attention-harvesting platforms with software that supports human values. It sets out five principles: private, dedicated, plural, adaptable and prosocial. It is a statement of values with a long signatory list. It presents no data.
A Bluesky post on a cultural right to make mistakes
The post is two sentences long and offers argument only. Replies from other accounts add brief remarks on abundance and waste. The post names no sources or examples.
The Tree House
The essay mixes a childhood memory, a village visit and American tree house history. Its evidence is the author's own reporting, interviews and an anthropologist's book. Its central claim is that the famous very tall tree house reflects Western expectations.
I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
The thread has 809 points and a long run of replies from Ries. Ries mostly summarizes claims and points readers to the book. Commenters press on Costco, the Long-Term Stock Exchange and Anthropic. The evidence is argument and anecdote.
Ethics is the most important skill in a post-AI world
The essay treats ethics as a trainable skill with parts. It uses well-known cases such as the Dutch childcare benefits scandal. It offers argument and examples rather than data. It is published by a company that sells an ethics assessment.
Viable system model
The article summarizes Beer's model of five interacting subsystems and its rules. It draws on Beer's books, mainly Brain of the Firm. It is a reference summary with citations, not an original argument.
Exit the Cave
The essay uses the author's own failed wrestling career as its main case. It mixes a coach's quote, an ad slogan and song lyrics with argument. It offers no data. Its target is the habit of grinding in private before showing anything.
10 VECTORPUNK THESES
This is a very short page of ten one-paragraph theses. It argues in slogans and gives no examples or sources. The page is dressed as a tracking dashboard with status lines and counters.
Scaling Innovation: Building Ecosystems
Weakly links resilience engineering, social-ecological systems, cumulative culture and operads. The post leans on Ostrom's design principles and Wardley's ecosystem model. It mixes cited research with the author's hypotheses. It is unfinished.
Connections to other subjects
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- Care at Scale and The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-changing Sci-fi Larp, from Games and game design. Chachra treats infrastructure as a system of collective care. Odysseus shows this at small scale, with over two hundred volunteers running a spaceship. One organizer spent about 2000 hours and will not repeat it as a volunteer. So it also shows what care costs its carers.
- The Resonant Computing Manifesto and The Concept of the Aesthetic, from Art movements and theory. The manifesto borrows Alexander's quality without a name and calls it resonance. Shelley's entry traces how hard such value has been to define. New theories either reduce it to something else or treat it as basic. The manifesto's five principles seem to take the first route.
Glossary
- Agency
- The ability to make one's own choices and act on them.
- AGI
- Artificial general intelligence, meaning AI that matches or exceeds human abilities broadly.
- Algedonic alert
- A pain or pleasure signal that escalates when performance departs from capability.
- AMA
- Ask me anything, an online session where a person answers questions from the public.
- Atrophy
- A skill or muscle weakening because it goes unused.
- Burning Man
- An annual desert festival associated with tech and counterculture.
- Christopher Alexander
- An architect who wrote about what makes places feel alive.
- Common pool resource
- A shared resource that is hard to fence off and gets used up.
- Contextual integrity
- A privacy idea that data use should match the expectations where it was shared.
- Cumulative culture
- How groups build on earlier progress so results exceed what one person could make.
- Cybernetics
- The study of control and feedback in machines, living things and organizations.
- Cypherpunk
- A person who uses cryptography to protect privacy from governments and others.
- Dan Gable
- An Olympic wrestling champion and Iowa coach quoted in the post.
- Defeat device
- Software that makes a car pass emissions tests while polluting more on the road.
- Dual-use technology
- Technology that can serve peaceful or harmful ends.
- Efilism
- A movement that holds all life should end to end suffering.
- Egalitarian
- Holding that all people are equal and should share power and goods.
- Exogenous energy
- Energy that comes from outside the human body.
- Financial gravity
- Ries's term for the pull of financial pressure on a company's mission.
- Front organization
- A group that hides who really runs it behind a different public name.
- Guardrails
- Safety limits built into an AI model to restrict what it will do.
- Hyper-scale
- Growing a product to a huge, centralized user base as the main goal.
- Interoperability
- The ability of different systems to work together.
- Korowai
- A people of the forests of Papua who traditionally lived in tree houses.
- Laleo
- A Korowai word for a walking corpse, now a slang word for Westerners.
- Libertarian
- Someone who favours minimal government and maximal individual freedom.
- Long-Term Stock Exchange
- A stock exchange Ries founded to favour long-term company thinking.
- Makerspace
- A shared workshop where members use tools and machines.
- Metadata
- Data about communication, such as who talks to whom, rather than the content itself.
- MVP
- Minimum viable product, an early version built to test an idea.
- Negative utilitarianism
- An ethical view that the only duty is to reduce suffering.
- Offset press
- A printing machine that transfers ink from a plate to paper.
- Omniviolence
- A term from Daniel Deudney for catastrophic attacks made possible by widely available technology.
- Open Source Ecology
- A project that publishes open designs for farm and industrial machines.
- Operad
- A mathematical object describing how many inputs combine into one output.
- Penetrability
- Being cast as the person who is penetrated during sex.
- Phallus
- A penis seen as a symbol of male power.
- Pinned
- Held with both shoulders on the mat, which ends a wrestling match.
- Polycentric governance
- Governance by many independent centres of decision making.
- Product/market fit
- The point at which a product clearly meets real customer demand.
- Project Kamp
- A community project trying to become self-sufficient on limited land.
- Public benefit corporation
- A company form that lets a firm pursue public goals as well as profit.
- Racial recapitulation
- A discredited doctrine that children pass through the stages of civilization as they age.
- Recursion
- A structure in which a system contains smaller systems built the same way.
- Requisite variety
- Ashby's idea that a controller needs as many possible states as what it controls.
- Social contract
- The idea that citizens give up some freedom to a state in return for security.
- Stone butch
- A masculine lesbian who does not want to be touched sexually.
- The Cave
- The post's name for private, solitary grinding away from outside feedback.
- Top and bottom
- Slang for the penetrating and penetrated partner in sex.
- Tragedy of the commons
- The idea that shared resources get overused when no one owns them.
- Trans panic defense
- A legal claim that discovering a partner is trans excuses violence.
- Transmedicalist
- Holding that being trans requires a medical diagnosis and transition.
- Transmisogyny
- Prejudice aimed at trans women and trans feminine people.
- Ultrastructure
- The essay's word for the social systems that surround and shape infrastructure.
- Utopia
- An imagined society in which life is as good as it can be.
- Vectoralism
- The page's name for the present order, where attention and data become raw material.
- Veil of ignorance
- Rawls's thought experiment of designing a society without knowing your place in it.
- Wardley map
- A diagram placing parts of a business by how mature each part is.