The Modernity Machine

Monarch-Technocracy : Philip IV’s move against the Templars, who had steadily gained power through the Crusades as a monastic order protecting pilgrims, but had begun to grown independently powerful and wealthy by 1300, was the defining moment for two reasons. First, it acknowledged that political power could arise from codified knowledge (of milit... See more

The rise of AI is perhaps best understood as a working-class positive singularity, as centuries of accumulated technocratic knowledge, in one fell swoop, is gifted to the working classes. It might be compared to the introduction of longbows in our reference period. The models that have been open-sourced are already good enough to permanently weaken... See more

Though the arc is new, the secular trends look like they’re pointed in the same direction — towards continued devolution and decentralization of power. Despite apparent (and mostly unsupported by empirical data) swings back towards hierarchy and centralization, we can expect that in the longer term, the secular trends will reassert themselves, lead... See more

here is an quick-and-dirty informal test: Do you think you could talk to people from a given era as rough cognitive peers, despite all differences in state of knowledge, technological capability, philosophical orientation, and aesthetic attitudes? Or would you end up talking to them like children, to be humored in their Santa Claus type mental mode... See more

The main elements of the modernity machine (European edition) are:

1. A secularly shifting balance-of-power configuration of political actors governed by negotiated contractual relationships that systematically favored previously weaker parties, rather than theological axioms


2. The beginnings of what we’d call a technocracy in the form of the culture of

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