Ian Vanagas

Our relation to ideas is an inextricable symbiosis, like that between plant and pollinator, a mutualism in which neither can survive without the other. At the dawn of civilization, a covenant was made between humans and these alien entities that live in our minds—honor and respect each other and all will flourish beyond their wildest dreams.

If you’re familiar with the “Great Filter”; this is our great filter. If we go inward, we will never find that intelligent life beyond, or won’t be around for that intelligent life to find us.

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem i... See more

What do people actually want from their interactive experiences? The first insight from the pandemic era is that most formal presentations should simply be abolished. The sad reality is that hardly anyone is listening, or for that matter should be.

Given these realities, I find the furthest extreme of the free and open source philosophy not only unethical in its own right in that it incentivizes wide-scale consumption over production and thus impoverishes the software world, but divorced from reality in that it misunderstands the economic forces responsible for the production of software (and... See more

The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than “above”). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic.

The group chat doesn’t have the same feeling of presence or provide an environment to interact with that in-person hangouts do.