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2025 2

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Guilty as charged.

I took economics. Granted - a “history of economic thought” class that has been influential in getting me to where I am today. Also, other available classes like “bible as literature” (you may as well read the bible like a cookbook if you’re going to treat it like mere ‘literature’) weren’t exactly the Great Books courses that Senior advocated.

Nonetheless, as I wrestle with the likes of Senior, it has occurred to me that something we must unlock is a “poetic mode of thinking”. It is not the only mode of thinking that is useful, but it is actually the bedrock.

I have noticed that much scientific thought is becoming very divorced from reality. Clean, sterile, and behind a computer - rather than in the field, in the trenches. The poetic mode is engaged with the things, it uses metaphor, not principles and abstractions.

This past week I was reading Grass Productivity, when Voisin remarked:

Obviously a technical man would have said: “In view of the too short rest period I have given the grass it will not provide its maximum daily production, since I am not at the maximum of the productivity curve as shown in Figs. 3 and 4: the total output of grass will have diminished, as Zurn’s work has shown (Table 2)." The Breton peasant did not need to see our curves: he, and his ancestors, were intuitively acquainted with them. They knew that by cutting their grass after an insufficient period of rest their annual production would be diminished."

-Grass Productivity by Andre Voisin

This reinforces Senior’s point.

In my reading of the agricultural literature it actually seems that in many ways we have lost the plot by chasing the line. And that’s a great way of putting it - losing the plot. It’s not that the facts were wrong. They just aren’t the story.

Goodhart’s Law

If we lose touch with the facts - if we constantly bring things back to the ‘end results’, we fall prey to Goodhart’s law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Put another way, whenever you make something a goal, everyone starts to game the system to get that metric. Or theologically speaking, we worship the creature (finite) rather than the creator (infinite).

Table that for a moment. As engineers, we want to design/facilitate good systems. Good systems are resilient.

The discussion of resilience has largely been around the idea that we should have ‘fault tolerance’. Or, even, that systems should get better when they are stressed - antifragile. That has some degree of nobility in it but it misses the mark. We need people - with their prudence - in the systems. Not just monitoring the output, but actually having their hands in the systems, because otherwise we fall prey to Goodhart’s law. If we just trust the metric, rather than being involved in the whole process, we lose something.

Men in the System

Let’s follow that to its conclusion: the ideal state of systems is not that people are less involved in them, but that they are more involved with them. But this can’t be just a silly make-work sort of involvement. This has to be a meaningful involvement - what some people point to when they say an “ownership mentality”. The man in the system shouldn’t have a bullshit job.

When machines go wrong, in America, we have PEOPLE that come up to the mark. - Richard Nixon

I’ll probably write about this further, but it’s the difference between a machine operator, who knows how to use a particular machine, but did not set it up, does not really know how to fix it, and is really only there as a stop-gap until “full automation” can occur - and a machinist, who can not only operate, but set up, diagnose, correct, and most importantly - redirect a piece of equipment. This is a matter both of the character of the person, and the freedom he is afforded to act in this virtuous way as a machinist.

But what is the machinist doing, really? If you get to know one, you’ll quickly realize that machinists are actually much less scientific and coldly “rational” than machine-operators. Their knowledge is not theoretical - it is incarnate, and they often think of things not from abstract principles, but from extrapolating actual experiences - from likening what they are facing to something they have in the past. What’s more - each machinist will solve the problem in a different way - even if they may ‘converge’ at a similar result, they will have differences in their art - they will have character.

Against Bugman Science and Towards Poetic Holism

So, how do we get past Goodhart’s law?

In a way, it’s a shaking-off of metrics. That isn’t to say to dive headlong into a cesspool of relativism. It means more that we need to awaken our senses - so that we know the good when we see it.

Nowhere is this more apparent than our food and medical systems. The powers that be would have you believe that overconsumption of simple carbohydrates has nothing to do with type-2 diabetes, which is something you can only say if you’re so head-high in scientific papers that you can’t see reality. Perhaps it’s not exactly the simple carbs. But it clearly is in that direction and only a fool needs exhaustive scientific proof to move away from that direction.

I posit this (it would be ironic to prove it): life is so complex and multivariate that the scientific method cannot produce holistic solutions.

How do we get there, though? How do we navigate the peculiarities of life?

The Limit of Science - Follow the ‘Direction of Goodness’ only for a while

An engineer at Tesla gave me this philosophy on how to apply laptime simulation to the development of Formula SAE cars. But you can do this with anything. It’s stuck with me. Don’t use calculations (scientific management) of what you’re doing to figure out the endpoint. Use them like a compass - use them to find the “direction of goodness” - the right set of tradeoffs to make right here, right now.

But that’s all it’s for. It’s not for setting the long-term goal. That’s for poetry, philosophy, and your innate sense of things that will be developed as you follow the path.

Eventually, as you walk it, you will become aware of new variables and phenomena. Accounting for these will lead you to make a new compass, with a new magnet.

Again this means we need men in the system - and not factory workers, not button-pushers, not even overseers - but philosophers with dirty hands.

Embrace Repair

We implicitly design systems that don’t need to be rebuilt or repaired. But… what if that’s a wrongheaded idea? Perhaps systems that break and are fragile are actually good?

I have noticed this in developing (complex, automated) systems: build a low-quality version first, or one that’s semi-manual. This way you will be forced to intervene in it, forced to really grapple with what exactly is going on. You’ll learn things by being forced to rip the thing apart.

What if instead of treating any particular system as “finished” - and only in need of a button-pushing operator - we left systems “in development”. We should look at this state not in “need” of further development, but with opportunity for further development.

The example which I have right in front of me is our farm. We adjust what we do every year - it is continuous improvement. But it is different than what auto manufacturers do when they come out with new models - we’re always refining the same land - not ripping it all up and starting again.

The Car Exemplar

What if cars looked more like this? The idea of modularity (swappable components, ship-of-Theseus style) has been harped on with very little success… perhaps because it is simply not radical enough.

Well, the trouble is, that cars (at least, playing their role in suburban transit) require optimization: cheap costs and high efficiency. Maybe it is possible to make a more utilitarian vehicle that meets those criteria. But perhaps it’s just asking too much. Cars demand temporary, high-maintenance pathways to travel on, using wearable parts: roads and tires. They carry an extra 1000 pounds per person. We could go on about the implicit constraints of road transit - but they are really demanding. To make such a system work with a modicum of efficiency requires optimization - scientific management.

Can we envision sorts of transit which meet our needs while doing it in such a way that doesn’t require scientific management? We could just scale back our needs - and then, the Amish cart and buggy seems to fare decently. Bicycles are often more convenient (and repairable!) than cars in dense areas - and e-bikes extend their utility. I don’t know what the replacement(s) for cars would be - that’ll require some creativity.

But it’s not electric cars as we’re coming to see them. EVs are fundamentally the same thing as ICE cars, it’s just that they weigh a little more, and outsource fuel combustion to a centralized power plant rather than an on-board engine.

I think the folks at Edison Motors are going in the right direction of goodness, as they design vehicles which use readily available components rather than custom ones. Plus, the diesel-electric thing is more sensible, and automobile technology makes sense for logging or hauling big stuff over long, unimproved distances.

Lives for People, not Jobs for Computers

Good systems don’t require scientific management.

The management they do require should not need hypotheses, extensive testing, p-values, peer-reviewed studies (cue shrieks of rage from the scientific-industrial complex) and the rest of the appurtenances belonging to the church of scientism.

No, the management should be artful. Intuitive. Embodied.

I’ll be frank: this is infuriating. It’s also very alien to our world where “you can be anything” as opposed to following in the traditional craft of your father. As I read through the books on farming, so much of it comes back to touchy-feely stuff. I can pretty well wrap my head around schematics and drawings of parts that I have never seen, I can analyze them, etc… but no amount of literature is sufficient to describe a plant or animal adequately.

Here’s the rub. Just doing that, not having the touching and feeling… turns you into a Chinese room. You can manipulate symbols, but not meaning.

Poetry does quite the inverse: it manipulates meanings of the symbols. It conveys meaning - it can convey truth (or falsehood) without being syntactically correct. This is an incredibly important skill to have. I have seen it over and over and over again in mechanical design where someone gets to a right solution - not for the wrong reasons - but for reasons that they could not express in a “technically correct” fashion.

This is the mystery of incarnation, and we are to embrace it.

But we the faithful marveling at the mystery cry out with faith:

Rejoice, vessel of God's wisdom;
Rejoice, storehouse of God's providence.
Rejoice, revealer of philosophers as fools;
Rejoice, exposer of the technologists as irrational.
Rejoice, for the fierce debaters are made foolish;
Rejoice, for the creators of the myths have wilted.
Rejoice, breaker of the webs of the Athenians' logic;
Rejoice, filler of the nets of the fishermen.
Rejoice, drawer of many from the abyss of ignorance;
Rejoice, enlightener of many with knowledge.
Rejoice, ship for those wishing salvation;
Rejoice, harbor for life's navigators.
Rejoice, O Bride unwedded.

Wednesday I ran into a group reading Marc Barnes’ lovely piece on counterproductivity. Once upon a time, we cut the grass to feed it to cows - now, we cut it even more frequently with zero productivity. The peasants got hay in return for their workout - in return for our spent gasoline and fertilizer, we get hearing damage.

What is particularly remarkable is that we cut it right before it grows “rank and file” - what Andre Voison would call the blaze of growth, what Joel Salatin would call the “teenage” period, and more scientific minds would call the “middle of the sigmoid curve”. Here’s a generalized growth curve for grass - from when it sprouts to when it puts out seed heads:

As grass grows, it grows in its ability to grow - leaves reaching out to collect more sun, roots sprawling to collect more nutrients.

But you see, we cut our grass before it even gets to the point that it can really express itself. We do not like its appearance, so we nip it in the bud. If we let it get too long - it will get even longer! Such atrocity to the HOAs of the world!

Now - looking at this honestly, there isn’t a problem with killing or pruning things in and of itself. Castration has its benefits: without it, testosterone will run its course and you’ll end up with beef/pork/lamb that has a foul smell to it. It also is a tool for selective breeding, and bringing out the best of a flock. Pruning has a similar effect. Death can lead to life.

But in all these cases, the goal of the suppression of life is actually so that life may be more abundant.

This is in stark contrast to the contraceptive mindset of our age. We suppress life so that we may be in greater “control” - but it’s a farce: the control is always a control over less. We can better direct our children’s lives if they are fewer - but their lives are not as big - not as vibrant - without other children which make the world of the child.

We want “the best” preschooling and schooling (and formation is good) - but in doing so utterly demolish the organic world which produces the raw material which can be formed. Formation is not creation - “I cut it twice and it’s still too short!”

Not all control is contraceptive - I should hope it is obvious I am not of some fertility cult which would demand the smashing of marriage or prudence in favor of unfettered sexual gratification and procreation. Again, the controls of marriage, of pruning, of selective castration of livestock, serve to prevent “burnout” - their aim is full, sustainable expression, not less expression.

What is contraception, anyways? It comes from the Latin, of course. “contra-” means against. “conceptio” derives from “concipere”: “to conceive, to take in, to receive, to grasp, to form, to devise, to understand, or to imagine”.

… and we have a serious failure to imagine-receive-grasp-understand-conceive the ways of God as a culture.

And I may be projecting my own self-doubts onto the world, but it really seems that over and over in our culture today is the inhibition of conception. “I don’t have time to meet with you” (I actually just don’t want to be bothered). “Having people over sounds like a hassle” (I just want to passively watch TV). “It’s just too messy at our place” (Over-image-consciousness, a lack of intimacy, heaven forbid your neighbor find out that you have a life too). There’s a time and a place to say no, of course - prudence. But there’s a time and a place to say yes. And it’s more than our culture lets on.

Of course at the core of this is - to borrow other sexual language - fetish. The desire for a particular niche aspect of something, at the expense of the whole rest of it, and usually to such a degree that it renders the original thing unrecognizable.

Lawns are a fetish: we desire the niche aspect of… softness? Nature? I’m honestly not sure what the appeal of a lawn is, actually: it’s about as interesting as a beige-painted wall. Again, three-inch-tall grass bears no resemblance whatsoever to a prairie, let alone a mature pasture: the original is so obscured, and the merits of what is natural are only present in the new thing insofar as we imagine a connection to the natural.

A two-year-old with an iPad is imagined to be cute and endearing, but as they are castrated (this is colorful language, but it’s not hyperbolic) with the screen plastered to their face, the actual merits of the child vanish into obscurity and general misbehavedness. We want the child “on our terms”, forgetting that the things we really love about the child come about not on our terms.

Okay, so we don’t want to fall into the sin of contraception - what does it mean to be “open to life” beyond the bedroom?

About a year ago I was visiting a good friend’s house. He and his wife unfortunately have no biological children. However, the house is full of life. The two very eagerly put me up in the guest room (gratis) for a few days. They rent out an in-law unit to another young couple - and this isn’t a latchkey situation, they actually share life together. There are ducks (a few of which I helped slaughter) and pigs in the backyard, and a humble garden. They are constantly inviting people over for dinner, for conversation, for mentorship in life - informally it appears to me they have a ministry of hospitality. Their home is open to life; they understand that it can be something beyond what they know it can be - it can be God’s instrument for His will. “Will it be a hassle?” is not a question. (“Will it be fitting, is it God’s will?” is - and genuinely so, not just coded language for “Will it be a hassle?”)

They are open to the life of the spirit.

The good mother and father see their child as something (someone) they cannot ultimately control - something they can only really influence. Something they can only shepherd. How will they turn out? Will they be a blessing? Or a terror? Or both?

I sit watching my pregnant ewes, a few weeks from giving birth - and the uncertainty is palpable. What could come? Twins? Triplets? Will they be healthy? Aborted? I can help them to some degree. But ultimately, I am merely co-operating with God.

There’s only one way for me to have ultimate “control”: shoot ‘em and bury ‘em.

But if I want life,

If I want love,

There will be risk.

This quandary lie at the heart of my confusions years ago. Confusions of an engineer, of a materialist, an alchemist, who wished (and perhaps still does) to utilize the truth for some end. To take the sword of truth and with it, cut up and conquer the world. Or at least beat people in stupid debates.

But that analogy of the truth as a sword has its limit.

God is truth. And God is infinite.

We can never fully grasp truth, in the sense that we never know every true statement. We may arrive at a relationship with Him who is the truth. But we never circumscribe Him. We never put our arms around Him, as if to take hold of, to possess an object.

We arrive at truth, in the way that we may finally arrive at a house, or a city, or a garden. We do not grasp it. It grasps us. We must be received into it before we can receive it.

Another way to consider this is that our knowledge and definitions are mere images of reality which lay outside ourselves. As John Henry Newman writes in The Development of Christian Doctrine,

“There is no one aspect deep enough to exhaust the contents of a real idea, no one term or proposition which will serve to define it; though of course one representation of it is more just and exact than another, and though when an idea is very complex, it is allowable, for the sake of convenience, to consider its distinct aspects as if separate ideas. Thus, with all our intimate knowledge of animal life and of the structure of particular animals, we have not arrived at a true definition of any one of them, but are forced to enumerate properties and accidents by way of description.”

Our words ultimately fall short of reality. They are mere signs, pointing to something deeper.

When Moses asks God for His name, His reply was cryptic:

I AM WHO I AM.

Or as rendered in the Septuagint, Ὁ ὬΝ - The One Who Is; The Being One.

When we speak of God we are not speaking of a sort of thing “in the system”, a thing that can be weighed against other things. Christ isn’t on the scale - Christ is the scale. Jesus is not man subject to law, He is the divine law made flesh. He is not a great man, who lived in the right way following from divine principles. The divine precepts are but statements about Him.

Why would God act in this way, and why in the context of a religion with precepts on how to live morally?

On one hand, God could have simply gave himself as a person to emulate without any sort of additional words, commands, or guidance (such as the ten commandments, the sermon on the mount, and continued revelation through the teachings of the epistles, apostles, and magisterium). But the world is incarnational. God acts and reveals himself through particular means and ways - and these ways are not just nice signs, they are reality. Angels, demons, and yes, the sacraments - these things are not just useful models and helpful aids to live life and “love God”. We have models of them in our mind, but these things exist whether or not we believe in them or not.

On the other hand, God could have simply given a set of precepts to follow. But again, God is inexhaustible. The set of precepts to follow would be - like the mind of God - infinite.

The word of God, and the world of God, have inexhaustible comprehensibility, and this follows from our incarnational nature. Infinitely many true images and statements can be made about these real objects.

The Word became flesh and became a little child. The Word became alive. As Newman continues:

When an idea, whether real or not, is of a nature to arrest and possess the mind, it may be said to have life, that is, to live in the mind which is its recipient. Thus mathematical ideas, real as they are, can hardly properly be called living, at least ordinarily. But, when some great enunciation, whether true or false, about human nature, or present good, or government, or duty, or religion, is carried forward into the public throng of men and draws attention, then it is not merely received passively in this or that form into many minds, but it becomes an active principle within them, leading them to an ever-new contemplation of itself, to an application of it in various directions, and a propagation of it on every side.

To believe is not mere intellectual assent, but necessarily results in the application of truth to the world around us - Christ, after all, is the “truth, the way, and the life” - “faith without works is dead”.

And so our chase after truth is not so much a series of syllogisms, argumentation over right and wrong, or a trying to create a list of facts. It is an act of purifying our spiritual senses so that we can perceive the reality of God’s will more perfectly, and may follow in the way of our Blessed Lord:

Then Jesus answered, and said to them: Amen, amen, I say unto you, the Son cannot do any thing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner.

Or as we were commanded:

The light of thy body is thy eye. If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be lightsome.

There have been several books that I’ve encountered in my life that really were moments not of revelation, but of cementation: all the random jostling thoughts in my head coalescing in another’s writings. Or perhaps, “permission to think” a certain way.

Arthur Penty’s Restoration of Gild Systems is such a book.

We say over and over again, “if you’re not paying, you’re the product, not the customer” in regards to social media. But Penty said it better and much harsher:

the tyrrany of consumers… forces the majority of producers in self-defence… consumers generally are so wanting in loyalty to honest producers, and are so ready to believe that they can get sixpennyworth of stuff for threepence, that they deliberately place themselves in the hands of the worst type of producer.

Chilling. We are so accustomed to “it’s the corporations fault” that we completely reject all our agency as consumers. We get what we pay for. You get what you incentivize.

People complain about the state of goods. That quality of goods sucks - or more importantly - that they’re gimmicky. But I am astonished that so many people are unwilling to invest in higher-quality things. Sure, it’s often the case that because of this tyrrany of the consumer, we can’t find quality goods. But when we do, are we prepared to actually pay for the change we want to see in the world?

Penty distinguishes between two different sorts of competition: the cost-basis and the quality-basis. Guilds offered restrictions such as working hours, conditions, number of employees, etc. that made it difficult for competition on a cost-basis to go too far. Competition to produce higher-quality goods is great. Competition to see who can burn the candle at both ends is detrimental to the health of economy.

Penty begins to conclude though with a focus on five points that are needed for regeneration:

1. The stimulation of right thinking on social questions.

2. The restoration of a spirit of reverence for the past.

3. The dissemination of the principles of taste.

4. The teaching of the elements of morality, especially in relation to commerce.

5. The insistence upon the neccessity of the personal sacrifice as a means to the salvation alike of the individual and of the State.

The free-market thesis was that we can devise a system where imperfect men can achieve good ends. This thesis is seriously challenged today as we try to build a system where downright vicious men can achieve good ends.

Moral restoration is imperative, saith Penty.

We need to desire good things before we can get them:

Until we can reform popular taste it is to be feared we shall have to submit to commercialism, since commercialism has its roots in the vulgarity of modern life on the one hand, and the general debasement of taste on the other. The need of the hour is not more schools of art, producing an unlimited supply of amateur artists with an exaggerated sense of their own capacities, but schools of taste which would teach them how little they know.

But in the end, we need to plunge forth and act:

A man may read and think as much as he pleases, but if he be without the courage to test his conclusions by practice he can possess no vital knowledge. His thoughts will lack precision. It is only by living his thoughts that they may be focussed to the surrounding circumstances of life. As was said of old, "If thine eye be single thine whole body shall be full of light."

MXD-2025-1

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This zine, which began as a paper, then a blog, then a podcast, was born out of an intense frustration many years ago. Frustration with modern technology.

It seemed that the technology was taking on a life of its own. A life that did not coexist well with the human life that concieved it yet sought to continue promulgating and controlling it.

The term "deus ex machina" is a term from theatre. It means, "god from the machine": something inexplicably brought from who-knows-where and brought onstage to resolve a problem through "divine" intervention. Many products of modernity are marketed in this way: the miracle drug, the one-stop-shop, the only tool you'll ever need.

What if we inverted this phrase?

What if we sought not gods from mechanisms, but mechanisms from God?

The Machinae Ex Deo.

For years, I pondered the ways of God, and what they might imply for such machinery. As I trodded through my frustration and came back to agriculture it hit me like a ton of bricks: ruminants, like cows and sheep, are Machinae Ex Deo par excellence.

Of course, it's not just them, but all biology - the cosmos itself even. The mechanisms of our salvation abound. They are given to us. They have a nature and complexity with inexhaustible comprehensibility. We tend to ignore it, or at least we assume that only what we fabricate or that which we alter is worthwhile.

It's prideful, really.

I admit, the answers to my questions exceeded my virtue. A part of me still wanted - perhaps still does want - to appropriate what is given…

If you have hung around in alternative circles long enough, you’ve probably come across this fringe book titled “Bechamp vs. Pasteur”. With all the talk about raw milk and pasteurization, the collective subconscious is thinking about germs again. And… re-thinking them, since we’re realizing all this stuff about “gut health”, “soil health”, “probiotics”, “prebiotics”, “biological inoculants” and so forth. So… what’s the controversy? Germs exist, right? So germ theory must be “true”, yeah?

Well, here’s what the mainstream says: "In the 1860s, French chemist Louis Pasteur developed modern germ theory. He proved that food spoiled because of contamination by invisible bacteria, not because of spontaneous generation. Pasteur stipulated that bacteria caused infection and disease. Before Pasteur’s discovery, scientists believed that living matter (like bugs and disease) were born from non-living organisms (like dust or dirt)." - Johnson & Johnson’s website

Modern medicine accepted germ theory not by appending it to terrain theory (as it ought to have), but by supplanting it. We have now reached the end of the usefulness of germ theory. We seem to think that we can eradicate or cure disease - but this is not even the right frame of mind.

Consider the following:

1. Upwards of 25,000 bacteria can be present on a square inch.

2. Cleaning, antibiotic materials are advertised as killing "99.9% of germs". Twenty five bacteria remain on this square inch, not zero.

3. Bacteria multiply readily in the right conditions.

What this means is that pathogens will always be among us - practically speaking, spontaneous generation is true. Consider also the fact that diseases killing Americans are not caused by germs. Cancer: 30% of deaths. Heart disease: 30%. Alzheimers: 6%. Stroke: 5%. Diabetes: 4%.

Tricks such as antibiotics have reached the end of their usefulness.

It is time to admit: Germ theory and terrain theory are both true.

Health is not the absence of pathogens. It certainly is not caused by their absence. Pathogens cannot thrive, or at least not cause havoc, in a healthy body.

I submit that, just like weeds, pathogens diseases cannot be eradicated. We claim to have "eradicated" many, but the pathogens still roam the earth, albeit in pockets, or in labs. Any approach to health that depends on genocide is flawed. It is flawed in large part because it refuses to acknowledge the role of weeds, pests, and pathogens: to clean up the world. We know that insects only eat low-brix (that is, nutritionally deficient) plants. We don't want nutritionally deficient plants. The pest is only a sign of a deeper problem which must be addressed, not covered up.

The same logic applies to higher species as well. We must address the mineral-nutritional-biological imbalances that allow pathogens, or the human body system itself, to inflict harm upon the body.

Look, the internet used to be simple: your computer sent a request, another computer sent back some information. Now, you send a request, and another computer sends you back a boatload of information. Way more than you wanted. And a lot of it is either trying to sell you something or it’s trying to farm engagement. Boo.

What if you could just… watch the video you wanted to on YouTube with no other cruft? What if you could just… get caught up with your friends on Twitter/X in a few minutes, and then put away your phone? I have good news: less is possible!

Yes you can just go full dumbphone and ignore the internet. I’ve done it. If you can it’s a great option! But let me throw some other tools in the tool store to choose from if that isn’t something you can do. They will require a little bit of tinkering to get working right, but consider this: would you rather spend an hour once setting up a tool that will benefit you, or several hours being sucked into a whirlpool of doomscrolling?

Get your life back.

To start: Get Firefox.

Why Firefox? Because you’ll have a mobile browser that supports extensions: those bits of computer-side code that run and block all the cruft.

Extension 1: UnTrap for YouTube

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/untrap-for-youtube/

With this add-on you can block shorts, block comments, block suggestions… so much. Here are the most handy improvements, and my thinking behind it:

1. Block suggestions: don’t be a slave to shiny new objects. You should go on YouTube to seek particular knowledge, not chase a rabbit hole.

2. Block shorts: we all know short-form content demolishes the ability to focus.

3. Set the homepage to Watch Later: this encourages you to curate your videos. When you go to YouTube, rather than whatever nonsense a bunch of rocks in Silicon Valley say you should watch, you say what you should watch. Curate this wisely.

Extension 2: Control Panel for Twitter

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/control-panel-for-twitter/

What’s this one do?

1. Use the “following” timeline by default: you want to hop on, see what’s new, and get off. Chronological feed does this.

2. Hide the “for you” tab: do not listen to what the rocks in Silicon Valley are trying to get you to look at.

3. Hide “Grok”, “Subscriptions”, “Jobs”, etc.: just declutter the whole thing.

Extension 3: Fluff Busting Purity (Facebook)

Unfortunately, this one isn’t on the extension stores. That’s how you know they’re poking the bears: https://www.fbpurity.com/

Also unfortunately, Facebook seemingly is constantly changing how they deliver information, to combat this extension. The things you can do with it are in constant flux.

I don’t really use Facebook. I think an extension to pretty much make it so only the “Events” and “Marketplace” functionality worked would be great.

Extension (and app) 4: BlockSite

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocksite/

Generic site blocker. Block websites. You can set schedules and limits. There’s also an app for phones that you can block apps with too. It really works! It’s worth the purchase.

Bonus: Tree Style Tabs

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

Okay, this doesn’t work on mobile. But it’s the greatest thing for desktop if you have way too many tabs. This lets you group tabs, collapse groups, and also just puts them on the left side of the screen so you can actually read all the titles. It’s just darn handy and honestly is the reason I started using Firefox.

Others?

Please comment any other great extensions or add-ons in this vein.

MXD-2024-7

5MB ∙ PDF file

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And for those who don’t have a printer, here’s each spread:

It seems that for many people, Lord of the Rings is their tragic tale whereby an invading force not only conquers, but in fact taints the very fabric of the society.

For me, my LOTR is MOTHER 3.

Undoubtedly much more quirky...

thanks to the Japanese.

And while LOTR ends with the heroes coming back to the shire

and realizing that the geist of evil forces has tainted everything, forever...

MOTHER's dragon renews the face of the earth.

(or at least, this is how it seems)

MED-2024-6

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Print this out, double-sided (flip on long edge), fold in half, staple.

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MED-2024-6-DECODED

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You can take the more digital-friendly option here, which is just each page in order. Boo. This takes the fun out of it.

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Yesterday, I was directed towards my bookshelf and in particular, Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage. Today, my favorite YouTube channel released a video, “Fasting (of the) Eyes”. Okay, I get the message.

This August I will be taking a media fast. Not a social media fast. A _media_ fast. No YouTube. No Twitter, no forums. Discord on Sundays. Things that are “direct messaging” are permissible. Email is fine.

But no listening to music, no videos, no podcasts, nuh-uh. I have a lot to work on in August, just need to shut up and execute.

I encourage you to try something similar. Maybe be more hardcore than me and ditch the phone. I’ve done this sort of thing in the past - full dumbphoning it even. Different stages and periods of life demand different things though. Don’t make excuses though. Do what is truly best.

Hey, this sounds like a great zine topic. So that’s the next zine title:

(Instead of feasting your eyes, get it? ha…)

If you have content you’d like to submit - poetry, an essay, a quote, art, whatever - join the discord and post it there, or write to mail@machinaeexdeo.com . I love to include content from more than just myself. It doesn’t have to be directly topical, but anything about media, about feasting, about fasting, the intersection thereof, that’s the focus.

Thank you for everything,

-Thad

Next issue is a MOTHER 3 themed one. Maybe that’s a bit esoteric but I’m very excited. Here’s some sneak peeks:

The last zine felt kind of… thin. I’m hoping to focus more on quality-over-quantity, and have slightly bigger, quarterly zines. I think I need more time to ruminate.

I will say this: the farm is changing my thinking a lot. It hit me recently that biological processes really truly are the Machinae Ex Deo. Expect to see more in this vein. The zine format has also been fun as I’m able to more directly tie into and point at my influences. I hope that’s appreciated and not just idiosyncratic.

A few people have expressed interest in getting zines mailed to them. To that end, I’ve opened up a paid tier on the substack here: https://www.machinaeexdeo.com/subscribe

If you subscribe to the paid tier, and send your mailing address to mail@machinaeexdeo.com, when a new zine is printed, you’ll get it mailed to you before it’s even published digitally. Excess proceeds will go towards proliferating the zine in the wild.

- Thad

The authentic Christian does not desire merely that the world of the "sacred" be preserved. The Christian mission is NOT the growth of the realm of the sacred. The Christian desires that the sacred overflow and convert the profane.

Download the fifth 2024 issue of the zine here:

MED-2024-5

2.31MB ∙ PDF file

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Print this out, double-sided (flip on long edge), fold in half, staple.

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MED-2024-5-DECODED

2.18MB ∙ PDF file

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You can take the more digital-friendly option here, which is just each page in order. Boo. This takes the fun out of it.

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They made a wonderful distinction between:

1. Raw intelligence, maybe best considered as number-crunching ability

2. Rationality, the ability to be logically consistent

3. Wisdom, the ability to make good decisions

Rationality is made not by faster computing, but by self-correction. There's the old joke that a computer is a machine that makes a million mistakes a second - what is lacking is the ability to check itself. A lot of algorithms are starting to do this. It requires a lot of computational power, but it can be done - at least in part. It requires the algorithm to contemplate; to do work that is not directly tied to an output. This raises flags, but they become obvious when we start considering wisdom.

Wisdom is a trickier nut to crack.

They argue that wisdom requires care, and care requires embodiment. That caught me off guard by just how right it is. It's actually at the core of the Christian ethos, which is fundamentally incarnational.

If something is not embodied - if it does not recieve feedback from the world, if it does not understand that it is a part of the world in which it affects (even if by mere word or computation), then why should it act in such a way to make the world better? Indeed, how could it? Secondhand accounts are always lacking. We understand partly when we are given information, but understand fully when we experience directly.

This raises all sorts of lovely questions about the mind-body connection that I don't want to get into because it's out of my depth and beside the point . Let's jump over that.

If we want wise AI, it will necessitate that it be embodied. The AI would need limbs, sensors, etc. - maybe humanoid, maybe blob-like, who knows. The key thing is that it have these faculties, so that it understands its dependence on the world and place in it.

But... why?

Why are we making these machines at all? Vervaeke and Schindler propose a potential future (even if unlikely) where such beings become enlightened and then help us be enlightened. Maybe. I think there's some people driving AI in this camp. But honestly?

We’re not making AI to become enlightened. We want dumb robot slaves.

At first we wanted our fields tilled and things built without lifting a finger. With AI, we want our taxes done and books written with the same lack of effort - and while you're at it, write me a sonnet! We want the result, we don't want the work.

So, we enslave someone and make them do it. Well, we have a sense that isn't right. Alright, well, let the guy be free and pay him. But that's expensive. Well, replace him with a machine. Now the guy is out of the picture entirely. Is removing our neighbor from the picture, and ushering in self-reliance, island existence, very Christian, though?

Adding rationality and wisdom to artificial intelligence fundamentally subverts the objective of these machines. The point of these machines is to wield the power of rationality and wisdom, without the cost of doing it ourselves, or being faced with the reality of the other. The desire to make machines rather than relationships is a love of power over neighbor.

But it's actually even worse than that. We do not want to face the reality of the other precisely because the other is a judge. We ought not enslave our neighbor not because it is unseemly, but because our neighbor is Christ - the judge.

If these AIs truly rise to the occasion of rationality and wisdom, they will judge us.

I don't mean that so much in the way of how God will judge us. I mean that in the sense that the presence of any rational, wise person, invokes a sense of judgement within us - in the way that Peter falls before Christ and asks him to leave, for he is a sinful man - in the way that another person in the room reminds us that we are not God.

I wouldn't argue that we should usher this along, in the hopes that the AI will succeed, and cause enlightening bliss, forcing us to contend with our not-Godness.

What I am saying, is that succeeding in making a good AI is fundamentally at odds with the goals of an AI: to have the power of being wise, content in a state of vice. That’s strange.

Oh, and it uses a lot of electricity. Like a lot of electricity. For all people talk about how religion is a waste of time, I think it's more energy-efficient than AI.

Prayers go unanswered, questions get questioned. Christ calls us to metanoia. Such a change is not simply filling in blank spaces of our mind, or erasing filled in portions. Such a change is often deep and profound - structural.

Download the fourth 2024 issue of the zine here:

MED-2024-4

6.98MB ∙ PDF file

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MED-2024-4-DECODED

1.77MB ∙ PDF file

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You can take the more digital-friendly option here, which is just each page in order. Boo. This takes the fun out of it.

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Building is joyous. And terrifying. And stressful. And difficult. And painful on so many different levels. But it is amazing, and a wonderful honor that we have to continue the same process that the Divine Creator took up.

This issue of the zine looks at this process a bit - why and how we take it upon ourselves to build.

And yes, we need to build, not just talk.

Well, sometimes rushing into the building doesn't work so well. Some hammocking is required. But we must eventually build.

Download the third 2024 issue of the zine here:

MED-2024-3

5.88MB ∙ PDF file

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Print this out, double-sided (flip on long edge), fold in half, staple.

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MED-2024-3-DECODED

5.89MB ∙ PDF file

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You can take the more digital-friendly option here, which is just each page in order. Boo. This takes the fun out of it.

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