Posts on nomasters

goodbye keybase

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0600

It’s long overdue, but I’m quitting keybase and deleting my account. After the TLS issues today, it was a stark reminder that the Zoom acquisition effectively killed keybase long ago.

https://keybase.io/rjrbt is no more.

If you are interested in communicating with me, you can find an email address to kick off communication at https://n.2p5.xyz/. I’ve also got a signal account, but you’ll have to ask for that number :)

functionally imperative

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 09:23:00 -0600

I’m excited to share that I’ve released my first video “cgi-bin, ftw (part 1)” for a new project I’ve started called: functionally imperative.

I’ve had a lot of little project ideas floating around in my head for a while. Over the last few months I’ve been working with Better Together to dive in deeper and help me reach clarity on my goals and my process for accomlishing these goals.

Expect to see more writing here as well: I just finished reading Seth Godin’s The Practice (highly recommended). It has inspired me to commit to the practice of creation again.

gravity wells

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 03:03:03 -0600

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains. – Rosa Luxemburg

I’ve been thinking a lot about gravity wells. There is something beautiful that emerges from a conceptual model that takes an opaque concept and puts it into intuitive terms. So, at risk of pushing a metaphor too far, I’ve been entertaining a whimsical thought experiment about how we interact and engage with the world around us. Though I’m genuine in my effort, I ask you not to take any of this too seriously.

With the physical model of a gravity well, you might have heard of the idealized, perfectly flat rubber sheet. If a massive object is placed on the sheet, it locally distorts the geometry of that sheet to create a funnel shape around the massive object. The orbital behavior of objects that pass by the massive object and the rate upon which those other objects are drawn to that massive object mimic the effects of gravity we experience in our universe. How this is useful is that we get a simple graphical representation of how objects interact with one another in space-time as we experience it on our timescale and at our size.

There is one big gravity well we are all very familiar with. Earth. We were born on it. We live on it. We are bound to it, and, in fact, we are a part of it. If you really think about it, from a distance, you and I are Earth. Each of us plays a small role in the total mass of the Earth, and each of us collectively plays a role in drawing other massive objects towards Earth. To attempt to leave Earth, to disconnect from it by crawling out of the gravity well, takes an absurd amount of effort and resources. And Earth’s gravity well is just the beginning. Our Earth is bound to the gravity well that is the Sun, and we wiggle in our orbit around the Sun due to the gravity well of the Moon. The Sun and the Moon and all of the planets make the gravity well of the solar system, which itself is bound to the gravity well of the Milky Way galaxy, which itself is a gravity well that influences the behavior of our local cluster. I still don’t get tired of thinking through this, even as I reread my writing here.

More abstractly, I think we are surrounded by things in our lives that hold what I’ll call “experiential mass”. And if these things have “mass”, maybe they bend the fabric of reality around our experiences. Pushing this metaphor, they shape our perception of reality. They can be peculiar, fascinating, boring, unexamined, alluring, and even inescapable and terrifying all mixed together. These things take relatively little energy to be drawn to, but once your proximity is close enough to them, it takes a significant amount of energy to change your relationship to them.

A visceral example of something with experiential mass is a bad habit. It takes a lot more effort to stop a bad habit than it takes to start one. Much like it takes a lot more energy to reach the Earth than it does to enter its orbit. To push the metaphor, we even say things like “I fell into this habit”. Or, “I feel stuck and can’t get out”. And even if you eliminate a bad habit, some part of it always stays with you. A shadow of its influence never fully goes away.

Gravity wells aren’t all bad though. They can certainly be useful. Without the gravity well of Earth and its unique composition and proximity to the Sun, I wouldn’t be writing this right now. I’d argue we need the benefits of gravity wells larger than ourselves. The issue comes from when you decide that you want to live beyond what is available to you in a gravity well or from dealing with problems introduced by attempting to leave the influence of a gravity well.

Experiential gravity wells are those things that bind us to something. Where you live has a gravity well. Your community has a gravity well. Buying a home has a gravity well. Taking a job has a gravity well. Family has a gravity well. Identity, really of any kind, has a gravity well. Debt has a gravity well. Social media has a gravity well. Drinking alcohol has a gravity well.

The common thing here is that, much like gravity wells in our physical universe, there are layers of complexity of engagement. Maybe we find a gravity well in our lives and stay in orbit for a while. We are under its influence, but we haven’t touched down to the surface. While in orbit, it still takes effort to leave the gravity well, but not nearly as much as it would to leave the surface.

If you fully commit to a gravity well, the size of that gravity well (its mass) will influence your ability to ever leave that gravity well. Because of this fact, I’ve really tried to be mindful of what gravity wells I introduce and which I try to put effort into leaving.

Maybe home ownership in a community you love while working a job you love is really helping you find your best life. But if you decide, for whatever reason, you want to make a change, that you don’t want to be part of that community, and you don’t want that job, the level of effort to uproot can be substantial. There are probably familial and community gravity wells that would also have to be addressed. By choosing to leave a gravity well, you also lose the protections and advantages that that gravity well might provide.

To push this physics metaphor unforgivably further, gravity wells in our lives lead to n-body problem complexity. Each gravity well we introduce adds mass to the total system, but the complex orbital patterns that emerge from keeping a large assortment of gravity wells become increasingly hard to predict.

So, over the last three years, I’ve been working to minimize the gravity well count. My family and I exited several large ones when we sold our home, left Austin, and moved to Costa Rica. I also left the use of social media and made other important changes to try simplifying that variable set. I wrote about a core principle here in a post from March of 2018.

Costa Rica life, itself, is a powerful gravity well. It’s one we’ve been orbiting (and enjoying) since May of 2017. Last year, we came very close to buying a home in Costa Rica. A commitment that would have put us on a trajectory that would have bound us to the Costa Rica gravity well for a long time. Later in the year, that deal fell through, and that experience and withdrawal interestingly brought us so close to the surface and set off a change of events that slingshotted us into a new experiential orbit. After deep introspection, Sarah and I decided to leave Costa Rica entirely. Not out of fear or failure, but because it felt right, and we were ready for our next move. It’s funny how this stuff works out sometimes. We’ve settled on Colorado Springs, of all places. We just bought a house. I just took a full-time job that emerged from a long-time client (I’m fortunate enough to continue to work remotely). All of this stuff sort of fell into place after we set our trajectory to leave Costa Rica, not before.

So, as we close one chapter of our lives and start another, I feel very fortunate that my wife, daughter and I were able to take a step back, slow down, heal, introspect, and focus in a way that I don’t think would have been possible in the US during the last two/three years. Honestly. If you have the opportunity to make a big change like that – take it. Listen to your intuition and make that change.

Experiential gravity wells are fascinating forces that are all around us. They shape us and guide us and influence us in ways that can be difficult to predict sometimes. But with a little effort and a lot of luck, sometimes the gravity wells can pull you to places you could never have imagined and change you in ways that you couldn’t have predicted. Here is to another year traveling around the largest gravity well in our solar system. I hope it turns out to be a fantastic one for you. I know I’m excited about what the future holds and look forward to sharing what happens over the coming months.

handshake: a peculiar chat experiment

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 21:26:27 -0600

Today I’m excited to share an early prototype of a strange chat experiment that I’ve been quietly obsessing over working on. I’m calling it handshake.

Handshake is designed to be an experiment in one-time key symmetric cryptography. The tool is based on off-line and in-person initialization of communication so that all future transmissions rely exclusively on pre-shared one-time symmetric key cryptography. This is primarily a design for out-of-band communication in which communicating parties aim to mitigate potential compromises in asymmetric encryption methodology ranging from CA poisoning to reliance on trusted centralized service providers for communications technology, and it can even be used to explore patterns in post-quantum readiness.

Design goals:

Completely off-line handshake and configuration exchange.
No centralized user accounts.
Ephemeral per-chat-group identities.
User controlled strategies with per-chat swappable backends.
Sane and modern cryptographic defaults.

So who is handshake for? The honest answer, up to this point, is me (and a small group of folks who I’ve been working through early prototypes with). But, I think we live in interesting times for this stuff. I think there are scenarios in which having ready-to-go out-of-band tooling is important. I’d love input and feedback. I’m hoping there are folks out there that would appreciate a simple-to-use tool that takes respecting privacy and security to the nth degree. That is what handshake aims to do, first and foremost. In some ways, handshake marries some old WW2-era ideas like one-time pads with very modern tooling like QR codes, mobile devices, and NaCl crypto.

I guess I should also outline what handshake isn’t designed to be:

It isn’t a light version of a startup idea. The goal is free software for the sake of free software.
It isn’t a revolutionary new platform. This is designed to work today with existing technology.
It isn’t new crypto. This is a novel application of applied cryptography.
It isn’t meant to replace more practical and flexible security-focused chat apps like Keybase, Signal, Wire, or Telegram.

It’s a strange mix of low tech and high tech patterns and a novel approach to a pluggable user-defined trust model. It’s not a general purpose chat tool, but it is a chat tool that takes its design guarantees very seriously.

The reference build uses a public IPFS gateway for message storage and a light-weight cryptographically signed public key value store I wrote called hashmap server (that acts as an ephemeral, per chat, mutable rendezvous point for “latest messages”). You can read more about how all of this works in the design docs, or explore the source code for the prototype, if you are so inclined.

inspirations

There is a rich history of security focused chat tooling that has been an inspiration to handshake:

If you are unfamiliar with any of these projects, I recommend checking them out. There is lots of great stuff in each project.

what’s next?

This project has been a fascinating journey for me so far, but it is just getting started. Here is a glimpse of what’s on the horizon:

validating claims

I have no desire for this to be some black-box hype machine. I’d love to work with more folks in the cryptography community to review the structure and implementation of some of the tooling and help refine what we have under the hood. I’m under no illusion that a combination of ignorance and bias couldn’t potentially compromise aspects of this experiment. Deeper work here would be amazing.

a mobile app

The initial goal is to have an easy-to-use mobile app available on iOS and Android either through their app stores or as builds you can run on your own. I’ve been putting some serious thought into it. You can check out the art boards here.

dead-drop support

I’d love to allow strange strategies such as running private backend services on something like a PirateBox so that Alice and Bob could exchange messages over specific off-line dead-drop connections.

other strange platforms

I’d love to explore some super tinfoil hat hardware that doesn’t run iOS or Android but is still portable. Imagine something like this tiny Raspberry Pi portable device by N-O-D-E, purpose built for locked-down chat tooling.

exploring post-quantum readiness (PQR) patterns

One of the design goals for handshake is to be post-quantum ready (PQR). We are well on our way to making this claim as far as message integrity goes due to using an off-line handshake and hash-based 256-bit symmetric cryptography for messages, but we can’t currently make this claim as far as the rendezvous mutable storage goes. It relies on ed25519 signatures, which will potentially be vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful general purpose quantum computer. I’d love to get my hands on something like SPHINCS+ and use an ed25519 plus SPHINCS+ multisig (a nod to what Google is doing with NewHope + X25519).

metadata, opsec, and networks

Handshake has been focused specifically on the core tooling itself, not on the network layers. It is important to think about how handshake should be used with mixnets, VPN tech like WireGuard , dead drops, and other interesting tech like LPWAN (think LoRa). Exploring the network layer is important to the larger privacy goals of handshake.

conclusion

I’m happy to finally talk about this project publicly. It’s still very much in its early stages, but I think the ideas and initial prototypes are feature complete enough to speak about intelligently. If this project sounds interesting to you, I’d love to talk to you about collaborating. I want handshake to be a fun project that respects everyone involved, is supportive of one another, helps elevate our skills, and allows us to show work we are passionate about for the love of making useful and interesting stuff.

I want to take a moment to thank the folks who have played a part in helping this project from the very beginning. A big thanks to James Stanley, Jeffrey Dorrycott, and Matt Krueger for helping me think through the design before I wrote a single line of code. I’m also thankful for their feedback on early prototypes as well. Thanks again to Jeffrey for his work on early unit testing for the prototype of hashmap server. Thanks to Connie Yu for her contributions to the demo webapp for hashmap.sh and for working with me on the design boards for the mobile app. Thanks to Martin Whitmore for the logo designs.

If you are interested in providing feedback or getting involved, hit me up on Keybase or open an issue on GitHub.

sxsw 2019

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 15:21:06 -0600

I’ll be in the US in March attending sxsw 2019 as a mentor.

If you’re going, let me know. Maybe I’ll see you at the EFF party.

meaning-less-ness

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 23:15:49 -0600

I’ve been thinking a lot about emergence lately. Maybe it’s the online cryptography class I recently completed, the ideas in Godel’s Proof still fresh in my mind, or recently diving deeper into trying to understand quaternions, but I’ve been dwelling on thoughts about the emergence of meaning from seeming meaningless-ness.

What do I mean by this? Well, I’m not really interested in getting into a philosophical debate about strong emergence or the specifics of reductionism. I want to explore some anecdotes, and possibly a thought experiment or two on that peculiar thing we call the mind and a strange thing it seems to be concerned with: meaning. I’m more specifically speaking of emergence in the sense that emergent properties are those that seem to exist outside of the raw sum of the parts themselves. Be warned: this is a layman’s exploration of this topic. These are some ideas I’ve scrounged together and that I’ve had fun thinking about. I’m sure there are holes in the logic, and I’m making no claim to how the universe actually works.

So, if you’re still with me, I’m about to be getting into some odd and abstract territory, so bear with me. Under this sort of layman’s view, I’m talking about things like the emergence of the mind. I’m going to start with the fundamental assumption that the mind requires the brain, and more broadly the body, to exist. In a reductive sense: smash the brain; the mind is gone. And yet, our concept of the mind isn’t really bound by the body. Our perception of the mind exists in its own way. It has its own sort of meaning. We can imagine things like “the mind living on after we are dead” even if there isn’t the slightest ounce of evidence for this to be true. I think this is why the religions of the world, in their many forms, can be so intoxicating. Each one, in its own way, seems to try to deal with the mind/soul/essence living on in some eternal or immortal way. I am personally of the belief that my experience after my death will mirror my experience before my birth: I won’t have one. But that doesn’t change the fact that we can imagine it. An immortal mind, or soul, or consciousness: these are powerful ideas that are deeply bound into our history and mythology.

What’s interesting to me is that this seemingly odd fixation the mind has on thinking of itself outside of the bounds of its physical reality is linked deeply into how we think and interpret the world around us. To put it bluntly: I think that meaning itself is a figment of our imaginations. I think that any meaning in the universe may come from some sort of emergent system that we’ve cooked up in our heads.

Take cryptography for instance. We dance around these beautiful concepts of randomness. The dance being that a cipher can encrypt a message in such a way that its output is reasonably indiscernible from randomly generated output. And yet, if you plug in the right key and turn the dials just right, a perfectly preserved message emerges from the seeming randomness on the other side.

Take a moment to really think about that. We took a chunk of something we deemed meaningful, folded it into something that seemed meaningless, and then unfolded the hidden meaning on the other side into something meaningful again.

Now take a step back and think about what we’re actually working with here. We’re playing parlour tricks with combinations of elementary particles bound to the causal limits of space-time. Our message, encrypted and decrypted, is meaningless in all forms to the particles holding the state of the information we care about.

In an odd way, meaning seems to be a strange projection of the inner workings of the mind on the universe around us. And it doesn’t appear to really play a role in the function of the universe itself outside of serving the mind. It’s sort of this strange game we play, projecting all sorts of thought, intent, and purpose to everything around us, when in fact, none of it exists outside of the collective experience of the human condition.

So, what if I’m dead wrong? What if our mind is a manifestation of a Universal Mind? I have my doubts. I think our need to feel connected to something bigger than ourselves is a strange artifact of the mind. I think it’s fascinating to think about the big questions that have been explored in religion and philosophy. I’m also not writing off the fact that consciousness may or may not be an inevitable part of complex biological systems, much like nuclear fusion is an inevitable part of the sheer gravitational mass of stars, or chemical reactions are an inevitable part of the byproduct of the output of exploded stars.

But, I’m skeptical that any of this points to a deeper meaning of the universe baked into the fabric of the universe. Instead, I think the idea of a meta-mind or god-head are most likely projections of our own minds’ need to process our sensory data and to connect to other minds.

What I find elegant about this model of thinking is that it doesn’t require an authority figure for the universe. It doesn’t require any sort of “hidden truth” about our minds given to us by a creator. Instead, the universe seems to be a complex system that’s built from fundamental parts. In a strange way, it frees us up to derive meaning from nothing, which I find beautiful.

on avoiding boredom

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 08:00:00 -0600

Boring is an attitude, not the truth. Possibility is where you decide it is. – Seth Godin

I think we, as humans, have a natural inclination to want to avoid boredom. And it’s easier now than ever to reach for the dopamine-infused mental junk food in an attempt to satiate our desires. It’s hard to resist when corporations pour endless amounts of money into building games, apps, platforms, and media by hiring scientists to create systems to modify our behavior and trigger addiction.

In truth, I don’t think that the inclination is really about avoiding boredom at all costs. I think that the inclination is to do something, to feel something, to participate, to engage. There is the low effort path: the dopamine hit of instant gratification, and there is high effort path: the slow release of serotonin that comes from engaging in something deeply interesting and fulfilling.

We need both. Risk and reward are an important part of how our brains work, but I feel that we live in a time in which getting the hit that comes from instant gratification obfuscates a deeper connection we can have with ourselves and the world around us. There are deeply interesting things hidden beneath the surface of boring things everywhere. It takes persistence and introspection to find them, but once you find a way to to acclimate yourself to this form of discovery, your world will never be the same. I honestly can’t tell you why I find what I find deeply interesting, to me it just… is. I can tell you that embracing the hidden contentment in boring stuff will put you on a path you never could have imagined otherwise.

a little back story

Every once in a while, someone makes the mistake of asking me what I do for a living. I inevitably jump through the mental gymnastics that compose theory of mind to try to find an approach to answering that question that won’t alienate, bewilder, or bore the person. More times than not, I don’t quite fully make the leap and have to ask, “Does that make sense?” or “Are you still with me?”. The honest and abstract answer is far too opaque: I’ve found what appears to be a financially sustainable path to continuously learn while working on deeply interesting questions and technical problems.

The more concrete answer at this point in time is very technical, and to most, quite boring. For money, I run my own solo shop as a contractor and consultant to a small number of clients. I work on a range of cloud infrastructure and architecture domains, primarily based around data pipelines, automation, security, and data backends. These days I primarily work with small data science teams to help engineer and maintain the infrastructure to support their work. Before moving to Costa Rica, I was the CTO at a series A funded startup, which put a lot of interesting problems on my plate, both operationally and architecturally. For my personal work, I half joke that I’m working on “cyberpunk vanity projects”. These revolve around subjects that I find deeply interesting such as cryptography, decentralized systems, and anti-censorship. These are amateur projects in the classic sense of the word.

In future posts I’d like to explore what brought my family and me to Costa Rica; why I’ve chosen not to work more than 24-32 hours per week for others; and how and why I run my own contract and consulting business (something I’ve been doing in various forms since 2010). But not today. Today is about boredom and the joys hidden inside.

embracing the tedious stuff

So, why am I talking about boredom? What I really mean is that under the veil of boredom avoidance, what I think we are really trying to avoid is tedious and difficult work. I think there is a reasonable parallel to physical fitness that I’m going to shoehorn here. If you put effort into your fitness over time, you can accomplish things you couldn’t accomplish otherwise. Maybe one day, with effort, you’ll be able to run a marathon, deadlift 500 lbs, or hold a proper astavakrasana pose. One day, you might even make it look easy. But to pull off those skills you had to embrace the process of purposefully making yourself uncomfortable, to grow and to change. You had to keep your mind focused on the bigger picture even when you hit setbacks or when it got boring from time to time.

For instance, I avoided running until my mid-twenties. Up to that point in my life, I’d never run more than three miles at one time. It wasn’t until a peer of mine was looking for a training buddy for a half marathon that I decided I’d give it a try. A group of us started training (we were all beginners). Within a couple of weeks of starting training everyone had dropped out but me. But something had clicked and I knew I had to listen to it. At first, it just felt like I was torturing myself, but after pushing through I started learning something about myself. I realized I could run more than three miles at a time. I realized I enjoyed geeking out about breathing techniques, stretching, and water and energy consumption. I also learned that around the four mile mark my first dose of runner’s high would kick in (something I think most people never experience because they never run more than 5K). Before this training, if I ran, it was always on a treadmill. I simply thought, like most folks, that I hated running. Now I was running outside, things were clicking, and my entire perspective changed. I may have been a late bloomer, but I’d somehow become a runner. Three half marathons and one full marathon later, I still love running (and I still hate running on a treadmill).

Persistent effort over time helps you to develop skills that will change you and your ability to interact with the world. And I don’t know if any of us know what, or when, something is going to just “click”, but when it does, embrace it and dive deep. We have to make opportunities to systematically push our discomfort and engage with tedious stuff so that we can discover what we truly find fascinating.

Personally, I spend a considerable amount of time dedicated to learning new things. Maybe it’s exploring the depths of a really cool data analysis library, reading the source code for implementations of ed25519, or researching how to get GPUs working with TensorFlow in docker. In a strange way, I’ve developed a blurry line between work and pleasure. In fact, I’ve found that by keeping that line blurry, I reach an interesting feedback loop in which I’m able to slowly evolve my work for clients out of deep interests I’ve developed on my own.

conclusion

Make time to try boring, tedious, and difficult stuff you aren’t sure you’ll like. At worst, you don’t get a lot out of it, but on the bright side you’ve avoided the addictive boredom-avoiding time wasters that would have otherwise filled that time. At best, you’ll discover a happy little accident of a topic or hobby that takes you down a rabbit hole of new self-discovery. These random joys can’t be predicted, but they can be cultivated through a raw numbers game. The more comfortable you get with making yourself uncomfortable, the more opportunities you’ll have for the universe to pleasantly surprise you.

meditations on authority

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 07:30:05 -0600

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. – Noam Chomsky

I was eleven when I stopped believing in god. I have a vivid memory of the feeling. It was existentially disorienting. It was like I had stopped clinging to the side of a cliff and I was in free-fall. If there was no god, who was in charge? It was as though I’d uncovered a deep secret that no one around me talked about. It was something I’d kept to myself for a long time. I grew up in the Deep South and though my immediate family wasn’t particularly religious (though we did attend church every Sunday), my extended family and the community at large certainly were.

After really letting it sink in, the initial terror of free-fall turned into a liberating weightlessness of being. After all that effort clinging to the side of the cliff, clinging to a set of prescribed beliefs, a view of order, the universe, power, and authority, with the flick of a mental switch it just… vanished. It was at this inflection point that the seed was planted for my life-long appreciation of existential absurdism and Epicureanism, two thought systems deeply rooted in the meaninglessness of gods.

It was the first time in my life that I realized how deeply I could internalize authority and power structures that were presented to me as natural and true from birth. It seems this exploration will continue as a life-long pursuit of introspection and self-discovery, with an intention to continue questioning my assumptions here as well.

It should come as no surprise with a blog named nomasters that I might have a particular point of view on authority and power structures. This post is meant to be an informal exploration of what the role of power structures conceptually means to me, as well as to track a bit of my journey through the inflection points in my life where rejecting authority has worked in my favor (and at times fundamentally changed my perception of reality).

Authority, as described on Wikipedia, is “…a concept used to indicate the foundational right to exercise power…” Authority manifests itself in many forms. Some authority claims are grandiose, as expressed in many religions where the claim to power encompasses the universe and beyond. Some authority claims are bound to geography, and economic systems, as in the nation-state (or coalitions of nation-states). Others are narrowly focused in context such as a police officer, a school principal, a boss, or a parent. These authority claims many times incorporate a time component as well. In the case of religion, some might claim eternal authority, while a substitute teacher might claim authority in the context of the classroom over a single school day.

questioning authority

As one who dabbles in anarchist thought, I’d quickly found the useful tool of questioning authority. It’s useful as a thought experiment and is something I’ve used personally to help me come to terms with my disbelief in god. For me, the question of god came down to my comfort level for living with the fundamental questions of the universe with the idea of “it seems we just don’t know”. It seems that the concept that we either “don’t know” or “may never know” why things are the way they are, and the idea that “no one is in charge” is so terrifying to some folks that we go to great lengths to explain away the seeming order of the universe by putting a god in charge. Once I let go of the folklore, I made room to get comfortable with internalizing that “not knowing” is part of the journey, and that to claim “we know” or “we might know” or “we think we found a path to knowing” should be kept at a very high standard. Brushing up against an “I don’t know” is important in the practice of introspective honesty, and it is a feeling I’ve come to cherish.

When I really accepted “we don’t know, and that’s ok”, god was no longer necessary for my mental model of the universe, so over time, the thought of god grew smaller and smaller until eventually, long periods of time went by without my mind even thinking about it. And what do I think about instead? Anything.

But this goes much further than that. If questioning the existence of god has led to organized religion losing power over me, what other fallacious authority structures exist that can be dismantled?

Maybe you also have lingering questions about your relationship with religion.
Maybe a family member still tries to exact control over you, even into adulthood.
Maybe you’ve accepted a career path that you’ve been told is practical, but it makes you miserable.
Maybe you’ve internalized the patriarchy, and its household expectations or gender roles aren’t in alignment with your personal identity.
Maybe you’re not happy with how your government is doing things and you want to see what it might be like to live elsewhere.
Maybe you suspect that state capitalism, propped up by back-room deals with nation-states and international corporations, isn’t serving us well.

Questioning fundamental assumptions, especially when it comes to authority systems, is a subset of a larger game I like to call “thinking dangerously”. Let the mind wander free. Entertain ideas that might be radically different than your own. Read works from thinkers on ideas that might challenge your own ideas. Entertain conflicting ideas. Poke holes in the assumptions you may have formed without thinking.

Questioning authority represents a sort of introspection that includes societal structures in the thought process.

unconventional path

I have a theatre degree with a focus on design and technology. I’ve worked (in this order) as: an improv teacher, a book store clerk, a copier salesman, an AV technician, a film post-production sound editor, a PC/printer/scanner hardware repair tech, an IT consultant, a CTO at a series A funded startup, and now I work remotely (from Costa Rica) part-time, on my own terms, operating as a contractor focused on cloud infrastructure, programming, and data pipeline work.

I’ve had an unconventional career path that’s given me the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting folks, and write and speak along the way. My modus operandi is that I know I’m in the right place if I’m working on interesting problems. It has allowed me to follow a path that has been deeply rewarding and would have come as a complete surprise to the version of myself just graduating from college. I think this has been possible, in part, due to the fact that I continuously try to question some of the self-imposed authority and power structures that I seem to internalize.

I don’t have the right degree.
I should have started down that path earlier.
I have to live in a tech city to stay relevant.

Each time I hit one of these inflection points, I’d work hard to poke holes in my preconceived notions. I’d look for examples of folks who’ve been unconventional successes. If I couldn’t find a good reason why I couldn’t try going down a path I found deeply interesting, I’d simply give it a try. It hasn’t always worked out, but I’ve always learned something valuable along the way.

a parent and authority figure

As a parent of a two-year-old, I’m in a position of authority. To apply the Chomsky litmus to this role, the burden is that as the parent, the life of my child is positively influenced by the power position I hold. My wife and I spend time nurturing a newer member of the human species. At our child’s youngest and most vulnerable stages in life, my wife and I claim the most authority over this other human’s life. With development, my role should naturally shift. As she gains more autonomy, my authority should diminish until eventually my authority ends as she becomes an autonomous adult. At this point, my authority is no longer legitimate and it is dismantled.

conclusion

Emma Goldman said it best, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Actionable philosophical systems have a sort of folk-honesty about them that makes them fun to use. When it comes to authority, for me, brutal honesty is the key. I like to dig deep and explore the nature of power structures and see where I come out on the other side. Sometimes it leads me to “I don’t know”, sometimes it leads me to deeper research, and sometimes it leads me to big changes.

I’ve never regretted dismantling a fallacious authority in my life. I’ll continue putting effort into chipping away at the ones I hope to be rid of one day (and I hope you will too).

unquantified

Sun, 27 May 2018 09:09:00 -0500

The only real valuable thing is intuition. – Albert Einstein

A year ago I got rid of my scale, a simple act that turned out to be the catalyst for a year’s worth of quiet introspection and experimentation in removing quantification from my life. A year later I’m quantifiably more ignorant about myself than I have been in more than a decade, but I’m far more in tune with my intuition, which has cultivated a deeper understanding of my well-being. I have come to the conclusion that the quantified self is a misguided movement and that it isn’t one worth pursuing. For me, it represents a simulacrum of introspection. It’s as if I’d decided that I wanted to go on an adventure through the Grand Canyon, but instead of traveling there and truly experiencing it, I obsessed over creating the perfect map of the Grand Canyon and stared at it endlessly while going through the paces, never looking up to experience the true beauty of being there in the moment.

For context, this post is part of a larger series of introspective posts related to reducing the mindless dopamine fixes we get through variable reward systems. In earlier posts I explored the process of dumbing down my smart phone as well as my reasoning for quitting all social media. In this post, I hope to demonstrate how “unquantifying” has helped me live a healthier and more contentment-focused life that is in alignment with my first principles.

the path

Almost exactly one year ago, I threw out my scale. Looking back, I’m realizing this was a very important step. Something felt right about this decision, but I hadn’t yet developed a mental model as to why it was right for me. The catalyst for this decision was when my wife, daughter, and I sold our house in Austin, Texas and moved to Costa Rica. This was part of a larger plan that had kicked off the year before while on an introspective birthday trip to Marfa, Texas (that story will be reserved for a future post). When it came to moving to Costa Rica, we only brought what we could pack on the flight down here. Everything else was sold, given away, or put into storage. The scale didn’t make the cut.

Once in Costa Rica, I decided to try something radically different: ignorance. Instead of tracking my weight, I decided that I would simply pay attention to my body. This prompted deeper thoughts on the subject and I added two more behavioral modifications to my life:

No more tracking food intake (counting calories/macros/special diet tricks).
No more use of an alarm clock to wake up in the morning.

As someone who has struggled with being overweight since childhood, I’ve gone through cycles of successful dieting and then yo-yoing back again several times. The idea of removing the scale and the dietary monitoring was bit of a radical step for me, but one that has ultimately been healthy. Instead of worrying about what I eat quantitatively, I simply focus on eating real foods, getting proper sleep, and staying physically active. I’ve side-stepped yo-yo dieting and my body fat has gradually decreased over the last twelve months (while still having plenty of fun along the way) – something that is still a work in progress and has been fascinating to experience.

The removal of the alarm clock was also a big change for me. In Austin, I would get up early and go workout, or get up early and work before work (I spent most of my last two years in Austin as the CTO at a Series A funded startup, and the quiet hours of the morning before my wife and daughter woke up were the only real quiet hours I had all day). I’d somehow convinced myself that, though the average person needs seven to eight hours of sleep per night, I only needed five. Mix that flawed notion with an affinity to wind down almost every evening with my good friend Johnnie Walker Black and we’re really talking chronically getting around four hours and some change of sleep per night. Yikes.

Now I get around eight hours of sleep per night because I prioritize sleep. The sun sets very early here, currently around 18:00, so I’m typically in bed by 21:30 and asleep by 22:00 to 22:30, and I wake up between 6:00 and 7:00 the next morning.

In the past year, I read Hacking of the American Mind by Dr. Robert Lustig. The book makes a strong case for how the physiological basis of pleasure-seeking happiness crowds out one’s ability to feel true happiness (contentment), and why a strange mix of corporate manipulation of our minds and bad government policy have created the perfect storm for a failure of willpower. This is a bit entertaining to me because this is not a new concept to anyone who studies ancient religions – this is a topic that has been explored by humanity for a long time. What I find fascinating about Lustig’s work is that it bridges the gap between what some have found as intuitive truths and what is provable by neuroscience.

This book lead to me dumbing down my smart phone and in doing so, eliminating the last portion of my quantified self: fitness trackers. In the book, Lustig spends time reviewing the effectiveness of fitness trackers through scientific studies that don’t seem to indicate that they really help.

I’m a runner, and run trackers have simply been a part of my life for the past eight years or so. I’ve subscribed to services, and I’ve meticulously logged runs and set personal goals for my pacing and distance. I’ve used them to train for three half marathons and a full marathon as well as personal speed goals. I removed all health and fitness tracker apps and OS integrations. I have no idea what my heart rate is over the course of the day. I have no idea how many steps I’ve taken. Now, all of that is behind me and I’m better for it. I don’t track my runs over time. I don’t know my pace. I simply run and I’m having more fun running now than I have in years.

To summarize, I no longer track my:

weight
food intake
sleep
fitness

There is a secondary benefit that I’ve addressed in the post nonparticipation, in that I also no longer share those intimate details of myself to startups and third parties who are pressured to monetize that data. By going unquantified I’m in complete alignment with nonparticipation in the toxic adTech driven panopticon of surveillance capitalism.

conclusion

As normal as tracking all that stuff used to feel to me, after stopping I realized what a mental toll quantification was taking on me. Some quantification ties right into the variable reward pattern, some quantification (or lack thereof) leads to failed expectations and goal setting that really misses the point of setting goals to be healthy. I realized I should spend more time listening to myself for what I am and what I need instead of telling myself how I should be. Each day I go through little meditations for my feedback loop. There really isn’t any formality whatsoever. As part of that, I ask myself questions like:

Are the foods that I ate today in alignment with what I know I should eat?
What have I done to push myself physically today?
Did I put as much effort into X (interval sprints, runs, push-ups, double-unders, etc.) as I know I should have?
Did I feel like I gave myself enough time to slow down, read, and introspect before bed?

This might seem super obvious to some. I know it seems obvious to me now, but it was not obvious to me one year ago. I was over-connected, over-stimulated, and fixated on hitting arbitrary numbers that represented some sort of success in my mind. Despite all the effort, I wasn’t really making myself happier. Now I understand that part of turning down the volume on dopamine means making room for quiet contentment. It also means choosing mindful ignorance and finding the joy in not knowing.

It’s even spilled over into non-personal stuff. For this site and killcord.io:

I don’t use any analytics tools to track readers (I don’t even run JavaScript, check out the source code).
I don’t keep access logs for S3 and Cloudfront (you can check out my terraform config here).
I have no idea who or how many folks visit my sites (I’m completely fine with that).

I’m not claiming to have figured this all out (I’m only one year in). I’m also not claiming that I’ve discovered some great truth. What I can tell you is that I’ve learned that trusting my intuition and introspecting honestly have been far more valuable for my health and happiness than any amount of data ever collected could try to accomplish.

Minimalism is a powerful design choice. It doesn’t just apply to visual aesthetics. What and how we quantify is also a design choice. When it comes to quantification, I prefer the path of the minimalist.

dumber phone

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 17:05:19 -0600

Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike

Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do.

For the humor of it, let’s use this webMD post and only slightly modify the key signature behaviors outlined to describe smart phone usage addiction:

You keep using your phone after it’s no longer needed to solve a problem.
You spend more and more of your time on your phone to get the same effects.
You feel strange when you don’t have your phone.
You can’t stop yourself from using your phone, even if you don’t want to.
You have a hard time giving yourself limits. You might say you’ll only use it “so much” but then can’t stop and end up using twice that amount. Or you use it more often than you mean to.
You have begun having trouble doing normal daily things without your phone.
You drive or do other dangerous things (like use heavy machines) while you are on your phone.
You borrow money to pay for your phone.
You hide some phone use or the effect it is having on you from others.

The smart phone represents something quite unique when it comes to the human mind. It opens an always on, always connected portal to a large assortment of variable reward machines. Pick your poison: email, stock trackers, social media, news feeds, link aggregators; the list goes on and on. But despite all of the tooling and potential it provides, it introduces an entire swath of repetitive behavior modification that isn’t appealing.

It’s a strange mix of variable rewards, pocket casino, and surveillance capitalism that hooks us. The pocket casino’s price to play is your attention and it pays out a seemingly never-ending supply of dopamine to your brain. This hijacking of our pleasure sensors does really strange things to our brains.

If it didn’t feel good to share your personal details with Facebook, you wouldn’t do it. So Facebook works hard to make it feel good. And when it feels good and you come back for more, you start behaving in ways you wouldn’t have otherwise acted. You come back for the likes, you craft updates in your mind when you aren’t even on Facebook, and you walk around your life thinking about ways to engage with Facebook. In exchange for your dopamine fix, Facebook packages up your behaviors linked to your stated and unstated profile data and sells them to the highest bidder (an audience who is also hoping to further alter your behavior).

But this isn’t a post about Facebook, right? This is a post about smart phones. Yep. I’m just picking on Facebook for effect. Facebook might provide the fix, but the smart phone is the delivery method. With its portability, push notifications, and proximity to sensory organs, it acts like no other device in our lives. To continue the arguments from my earlier post on nonparticipation, we can choose to opt out. But does this mean we go back to feature phones? Is that a viable option? How about no phone at all? There are plenty of folks who have reached this conclusion.

Though going completely “phoneless” is interesting to me, I wanted to explore another option: dumbing down the smart phone. Can we leverage the aspects of smart phones that are amazing, while minimizing the addictive aspects? What if we could make our phones so boring we just look at them when we have to? What if we could strip out most, if not all, of the dopamine-inducing features and leave the phone in a state that is useful but boring. This is what I’ve been experimenting with for the last month and this is what I’d like to outline here.

step one - cut out the entertainment

No games.
No video streaming apps (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc.).
No social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap, etc.).
No news aggregations.

If you “kill time” with the app, delete it. These are obvious, and probably the most painful for most. The most successful of these are designing addiction into their services (mention Fortnite to a fourteen-year-old and see how this goes). If you must use some of these, use them on your computer. I’d been off all social media for a while; for me the problem was YouTube. I’ve probably got thirty-plus channels I subscribe to, and I wasted more time than I’d like to admit “keeping track” on my phone. Instead, I spend deliberate “YouTube channel time” once per day and leave it at that.

step two - move variable reward apps to a folder

On my home screen I have:

Settings
Password Manager
Units Conversion tool
Music
Audio Books
Interval Training Timer
Translation tool
an “everything else” folder

Boring right? The purpose here is to leave utility apps that don’t cause dopamine responses on the home screen, while moving all other apps into a folder which requires a bit more effort to get to. This means any chat app, calendar, email, etc. Move these one folder deeper into your phone.

step three - turn on “Do Not Disturb”

I schedule my phone to be in Do Not Disturb between 21:00 and 6:00. This is also automatically set while driving.

step four - turn off unnecessary notifications

Turn off all lock screen notifications (this is better for privacy anyway).
Turn off vibrate and sound notifications – I leave badges for important things like messaging apps.
Turn off notifications for apps that really don’t need them.

For the rest of the day, it’s time to purge the notification insanity. Go through your notifications settings for each app on the phone and set them to the minimum level possible. For me this meant that I turned off email notifications, including badges. I also put my email app in the folder outlined in step two, so that if I do want to check email or send email on my phone, I can, but it is inconvenient and gives me no information when I open my phone.

I work in tech and I understand that being “on call” can be a nonstarter for some. I’d keep those tools in the “necessary notifications”. I used to be on call all the time and feel very fortunate that I’m not in that spot anymore.

conclusion

And there you go: a dumber, much less interesting phone. This is still a work in progress for me, but this is where I am right now. Overall, it’s been really interesting to watch myself transition from mindlessly unlocking my phone and poking around to forgetting about my phone for relatively long periods of time.

This setup will cause you to be less responsive on chats and email, but that’s sort of the point. Your phone shouldn’t dictate to you what you focus your attention on, and the behavior it cultivates in keeping you “always ready” is unhealthy and spills over into other parts of your life in a way that isn’t serving you well.

There is a phrase I’ve been using recently in describing things like nonparticipation and dumber phones, which is that I’m trying to “turn down the volume” of stimulants and reward centers. This is part of a hypothesis that pleasure-seeking behaviors physiologically block your brain’s ability to be content. There is modern science and ancient wisdom that seems to support this and anecdotally I concur.

killcord alpha

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0600

Over the past four months, I’ve been quietly working on a project that I’m really excited to share. It’s still in its very early alpha phase and needs a healthy dose of vetting, testing, and refactoring, but I’m proud of the initial implementation and it’s a starting point for an open source project that I’m excited to work on.

the background

I’d started casually diving into the technology behind Ethereum smart contracts and IPFS. I started wondering: if Ethereum can run unstoppable and decentralized code and IPFS can create undeletable storage on the network, could I build a censorship-resistant deadman’s switch?

This was the birth of the idea for killcord.

the initial thought experiment

Imagine you are the next Edward Snowden. You have a payload of important leaked information in the public interest that you are worried could be destroyed if you vanish. So, you want to be able to release this information to the world in the case that you are disappeared before you are able to release the information in a controlled manner. You want the public to know that you have a deadman’s switch. To your adversaries, this acts as leverage. If you disappear, the information that could be damning goes public. They have an incentive to keep you alive and free to check in. To your allies, they know where to find this information in the case that you are no longer able to check in. The payload is accessible to the public.

This isn’t a new concept on its surface. In fact, Snowden actually used a deadman’s switch. What is new is how killcord operates.

public audience IPFS, Ethereum, and trust models

It really comes down to trust models. The initial release of killcord specifically focuses on public audience disclosures. The reason killcord uses IPFS and Ethereum is the resiliency and anti-censorship guarantees each service offers.

With IPFS, once data is added to the network, it is virtually undeletable, unless every node participating in seeding the data is taken off-line (or the seed is universally purged). When it comes to resiliency, IPFS truly shines. In the case of killcord, you could actually run N number of IPFS nodes specifically configured to host the seed for the killcord project on a wide range of hardware, from Raspberry Pis to cloud providers. As long as the location of those nodes remains hard to shut down, the IPFS storage for killcord remains incredibly resilient. In the hypothetical Snowden example, spreading the IPFS seed nodes across multiple regions around the world and, even better, encouraging the community to seed the data as well, would add to the resiliency of the availability of the payload. You can think of IPFS as a really interesting new take on BitTorrent-style seeding.

Ethereum is used as a “trustless” state backend for the killcord project. For killcord to operate, it needs to be able to:

Authorize that only the owner or publisher accounts interact with the backend.
Restrict access to specific functions of the backend to specific accounts.
Keep track of the storage IPFS endpoint address.
Keep track of the last check-in of the owner account.
Keep track of the published decryption key.

With Ethereum, you can write “backend code” that is stored on the blockchain; this means that the code is wide-open to the public. It also means that variable state is recorded to the blockchain. This is useful when you need a trustless guarantee that the response from a getLastCheckin function holds the accurate answer. It also means that once a payload is uploaded to IPFS and the decryption key is recorded to the blockchain, it can’t be deleted without taking down the seed from the IPFS network and the blockchain on the Ethereum network.

The autonomous part of killcord is based on the publisher tooling. This is a low-privileged account that uses the backend to publish the decryption key in the case that the project owner stops checking in. Because the publisher holds the secret decryption key, as well as the credentials to access the backend, where it runs needs to be protected and resilient as well.

Because the publisher runs privately with no external interaction, it can run from any internet-connected device that can run Unix. This means a publisher could run from a Raspberry Pi, AWS Lambda, a docker container on your personal computer, or in a data center in Iceland. It doesn’t actually matter where it runs as long as it is trusted. Of course, the more publishers that are operating, the less likely the publisher is to fail.

what’s next

So what’s next with this project? Four answers to that: private audience, more storage and backend providers, easier install tools, and a GUI.

private audience

Though killcord is designed to be as resilient as possible, very few folks will ever want or need public disclosure deadman’s switch software; it will always be baked into the core of killcord. With solid initial feedback and brainstorming with folks close to me, a private audience feature seems to be at the top of the list. This is the idea that instead of releasing a payload publicly, your release has a targeted audience. One could imagine this being useful for activist groups with co-organizers, business partners and investors, or passing down documents to loved ones. I think the idea is really cool and I’ve got some ideas on what needs to be added to killcord to make this happen, which brings me to the next topic: storage and backend providers.

storage and backend providers

With private audience features, a project owner will want to identify their risk and threat models, and this means that choosing a storage and backend that works best for their needs will be important. Imagine using Keybase, Perkeep, Upspin, Dropbox, or Google Drive as the storage backend. Imagine using another private backend self-hosted on your own servers or on a cloud provider like AWS, or even just a simple versioned state file in GitHub or S3. I find the idea pretty exciting and I think the existing patterns of killcord would work quite nicely with pluggable providers.

easier install tools

Though the killcord cli tool is pretty easy to install, getting a killcord project set up is still a multistep process, and getting a solid publisher in place is not trivial. I’m continuing to work on tools to make this easier to understand and simpler to deploy and maintain.

GUI

A graphical interface has also been a common request. I hear you, and though work hasn’t started on one, early ideation has. I think the first area where this could really shine is on a status page for active projects, so that will be the first graphical interface that is developed when the time is right.

conclusion

Working on killcord has been a lot of fun and getting feedback on a project that I’ve been working on under the radar has already inspired so many cool new ideas to hack on next. If you are interested in getting involved with killcord or you have feedback that you think could help the project, please reach out to me on Keybase or GitHub.

nonparticipation

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 11:00:00 -0600

As I’ve attempted to live on first principles, one of the most powerful tools at my disposal has been the ability to opt out of participating in systems that I feel are harmful, unjust, induce deep skepticism, or give power to those who I feel gain such power undeservedly.

Nonparticipation is a powerful and transformative tool. It is a pillar of self-governance. Exploring this principle has had a transformative effect in my life. This idea is so powerful, in fact, that it can seem a bit bewildering in its simplicity. The power in nonparticipation hides in the fact that power relies on participation. If you choose to not participate, you choose to not give power to those who mean to take it.

A very visible example of nonparticipation exists with dietary restrictions. Vegetarians opt out of participating in the meat industry. Vegans opt out of any animal product farming entirely. While the reasoning for such decisions ranges widely from health to ethics, the collective nonparticipation allows these folks to live in accordance with their principles while still eating food required for sustaining existence.

One powerful example in my life is my nonparticipation in social media. Years ago I deleted my Facebook account. When I decided to move out of the US, I also deleted my LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. This represented a liberation from the private surveillance systems constructed in the name of behavioral analytics that are sold to advertisers. A sort of voyeuristic panopticon that exploits our weakness for variable reward and pushes us to participate in a strange sort of corporate surveillance that is ever-consuming in our lives.

I’ll be direct in saying that quitting social media has been one of the most important decisions for my mental and physical health in the last ten years of my life. I spent too much time on Facebook and Twitter keeping track of what was going on. I was hooked on the dopamine rush that comes from the variable reward system that is social media. Architecturally, your Facebook Timeline or Twitter feed isn’t different than playing the slot machines. Very occasionally you hit the jackpot. Hitting the jackpot feels good. A little more often you get a small coin return; that feels ok. Most of the time you get nothing; that doesn’t feel great. You still remember how great getting the jackpot feels, so you pull again. Social media, casual gaming, and email all fall into the variable reward pattern. Our phones and our computers quickly turn into little crowd-sourced dopamine casinos.

And what’s in it for Facebook? What’s in it for Twitter? Our attention and our behavior. That data is sold to the highest bidder so that they can return value to their investors. It’s fascinating to think about. We’ve taken the internet, something that represents a vast commons of decentralized servers, and largely replaced it with the equivalent of hanging out in privately-owned virtual shopping malls.

The social media industry is entirely reliant on participation to survive. Your participation is, in fact, the product that these companies sell to their advertisers. I’m not comfortable with that arrangement, and so, I don’t participate.

Of course, cutting off ties to social media might sound inconceivable to some. How will people reach me? How will I keep up with friends and family? What about Facebook groups with people who share common interests? If you have an audience and community, are you supposed to just leave all of that behind? For me: yes, and it has been wonderful. First of all, the important people in your life, and I mean the truly important people, will accommodate a social media free you. I use a combination of messaging apps for various parties, primarily: Signal, Keybase, and WhatsApp. I use email and the telephone for everyone else. I no longer spend any time “crafting” a status message. I don’t check to see if a Tweet, Instagram post or Facebook update got some validation threshold of likes. Instead, I reinvest the time I’ve gained from sparing myself from constant distraction into working on deeply rewarding projects and occasionally writing for this blog.

My nonparticipation in social media lead me to turn down the volume on dopamine-inducing reward seeking, and the deep quiet and clarity of mind have lead me to work on personal projects that are deeply important to me, such as killcord. The focus on reducing the over-stimulation of reward centers stemmed from my discovery of Robert Lustig’s The Hacking of the American Mind, which helped me deepen my understanding that our diet and behaviors have such a deep physiological influence on our ability to be content. But that is a topic for another post.

sans copyright

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 09:41:24 -0600

Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbor, is a terror tactic. – Richard Stallman

You might have noticed this site is uncopyrighted, and I thought I’d explore a bit my reasoning behind my decision and the underlying principles that brought me to declare that all content on this site is in the public domain.

The modern concept of intellectual property is puzzlingly complex. The topic operates on certain assumptions about human nature, innovation, and the role of the state in the market that I feel are worth questioning, and, if you are willing to follow me down the rabbit hole, ones worth opting out of.

Before we dive into the topic of copyright and the public domain, I’d recommend reading the criticisms section of intellectual property on Wikipedia. It holds a rich set of knowledge from important thinkers on the topic, such as Richard Stallman and Lawrence Lessig.

The primary argument behind intellectual property law is that it is a crucial incentive for innovation. Without this government-enforced monopoly on creative work, innovation wouldn’t happen. By creating intellectual property laws, the government protects the creator, allows for a livelihood for the creator, and enforces penalties on those who copy work without permission.

Are copyrights and patents truly the only means for innovation in creative work? Can markets support creators without the need for government-enforced monopolies on ideas? There is an ever-growing body of evidence that intellectual property laws are actually slowing down innovation.

There is no doubt that both individuals and corporations have made great fortunes due to modern copyright laws, but instead of getting in the weeds on the technical history of copyright law, I’d like to pose a much simpler question: Can you choose not to participate and still thrive as a creator?

Linux and GNU GPL

Linux was initially released in 1991 under the GNU GPLv2 license, protecting source code as free and open source, but also requiring that all derivative works carry the license. This model has worked remarkably well for Linux and many free and open source software projects. It has also worked remarkably well within the framework of copyright enforcement of the will of the copyright holder.

It’s important to note that modern tech company IT infrastructures, cloud computing providers, and the Android operating system wouldn’t be possible without Linux. Arguably an entire generation of innovation stands on the shoulders of the amazing collaborative work that is free and open source software.

Linus Torvalds, creator and maintainer of Linux, has never charged a penny for his work and yet he’s found a community deeply committed to his success as a creator. As of this writing, his net worth is over $150 million.

the public domain

The GNU license enforcement relies on the state, though. So although it protects software’s ability to be free and open source, it is still a restrictive license. You can’t just do whatever you’d like with code. Of course, this is by design, but for my personal views, it makes it less interesting to me. The only “stateless” option, one that holds no level of enforcement of behavior, but honors an ancient view on idea creation, is the public domain. This can be expressed through the Creative Commons Zero (public domain) license, the unlicense, and found in works like zen habits’ uncopyright (the inspiration for my site’s uncopyright)

For me, the public domain represents the natural state of knowledge transmission. Without any form of enforcement body, once an idea is unleashed into the world, it’s just there and belongs to everyone. Anyone can use it, anyone can make derivative works. In a way, this is the most honest way of paying homage to our history as a civilization.

simplicity

The most important aspect of uncopyrighting my work, for me, is the simplicity in my life. You can’t take what is given away freely. I’m liberated from the fear-based thoughts of “that’s mine” and acknowledge that my world-view is inextricably linked to everything around me.

Selected sources for diving in a bit deeper:

the beginning

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 15:26:09 -0600

The purpose of this project is to capture my thoughts and work on a journey towards living in accordance to a set of first principles revolving around freethought, skepticism, and libertarian socialism.

Because of my work as a technologist, this project will tend to cover topics that are technical in nature, but also explore guiding principles as they relate to the focus of this project.

Anything published by this project exists in the public domain.
Content written for this project uses the uncopyright.
Code written for this project uses the unlicense.