Ivo

Autonomy and Cohesion

Published now also on @leaflet.pub

Shouldn't the reader show the text a bit wider?

I've started using a hashtag-in-parenthesis annotation pattern in my personal knowledge graph [[PKG]]. Many atomic notes look now like this:
- a (#b c),
where c explains why a was tagged with b.
My present self rightfully suspects that my future self won't find the tagging obvious.

Beliefs and Capabilities - strategic structures Beliefs are powerful. Sometimes, all we need to achieve something is to hold on to our beliefs. However, there are times when we can't get where we want to be

From the archives: August 2012 www.strategicstructures.com?p=445

My view on this has evolved a lot since then, but I still believe there might be a few insights there.

To forget "white" is understandable. Many forget it even today.
For "heterosexual," that's different. Voltaire had a complicated relationship with Frederick II, who was way richer, but not heterosexual.

Containers All the Way Down

One more essay cross-published on @leaflet.pub . That's the first one in the [[containment]] series.

Voltaire vibe-coded a bespoke state in Ferney.

And the last bit is again the Autonomy-Cohesion balance necessary for viability.

OpenClaw is a 17th century idea.

We know that AI is actually working when we stop calling it AI.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." —Whitehead

History of Iran - Wikipedia

A good read.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...

When the cookies are really good, it’s difficult to accept only the essential ones. #carbmusings

Last Sunday, we opened the outdoor [[tennis]] season with an epic match. My son was there and captured a few moments of his father showing off that he still has it.

Three Engineers of Modernity Two of which also contributed to the next world machine

Contribution is not absolution. The Fuggerei — dubbed the first social housing project — was Feudalism 2.0. Wedgwood the abolitionist ran a business built on sugar. Voltaire forged letters to rewrite his own story. The machine doesn't care.
Read the full essay: www.linkandth.ink/p/three-engi... [6/6

Two of the three also made early commits to the Divergence Machine — the one replacing modernity now. It doesn't subvert centralised control; it brackets it, opening civilisational space for plurality. The cost of entry: living in ontological doubt.

[5/6]

The machine's core logic was legibility.

Fugger pioneered consolidated financial statements and private intel networks. Wedgwood invented the pyrometer and the illustrated catalogue. Voltaire made the state legible to people — as the state was making people legible to itself.

[4/6]

The frame is the Modernity Machine thesis: modernity as a civilisation-scale contraption, built 1200–1600, that restructured power relations between monarchs, oligarchs, technocrats, and workers.

Who built it, and how?

[3/6]

Fugger transformed monarchs from divine sovereigns into debtors. Wedgwood turned royalty into a marketing channel. Voltaire converted the intellectual from court pet to negotiated celebrity.

Three entrepreneurs — three engineers of the same machine.

[2/6]

🧵 A staggeringly rich German banker, an English potter, and a French satirist walk into the Modernity Machine.

This isn't a joke setup. It's a framework for making sense of the present.

[1/6]

There is now a serious OpenClaw pandemic where a totally automated life leaves no time for living and not much for sleep.
Social life is reduced to OpenClaw Anonymous meetups.

Sorry, autocorrect glitch:
"Risk *of* democracy" is what I meant.

Sorry, autocorrect glitch:
"Risk *of* democracy" is what I meant.

When the Russian ambassador in Bulgaria criticizes the elections before they have started, there is likely a risk to democracy.
Hopefully, there is also a risk of reduced Russian influence.🙏

One for @lookslikeface.bsky.social

A fog-generated image.

It's now I hear about it. I'm happy with Readwise and esp in combination with Readwise Reader which is probably the app I use the most overall.
Pocket was very poor.
Readwise is annoying but the integrations work well. The mobile app is bad though.

A recently discovered innovation in feeding brought convergence and centralization in ant societies. It allowed colonies to transition from small, simple predatory groups to massive, highly specialized superorganisms.
Paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Maybe they had their own modernity machine 🤔.

A year and a dozen books later, I re-read the [[modernity machine]] thesis, and it was worth it. This time, I also made a small sketch for quick reference.

My office today.
Can't complain.

#bluesky is now at a bit more than 42 million accounts.

Which means it now has a nominally larger population than the world’s most populous city - Jakarta