Note about this project's genesis

This research project was established out of some back-of-mind thoughts about the potential parallels of Vitalik's d/acc paradigm with the naturalist metaphysics of Baruch Spinoza, as well as the possibility of reading the "technology" in technological accelerationism through the lens of cybernetics and information science (read through N. Katherine Hayles and David Deutsch, respectively). The former seemed to enable a more nuanced (and ultimately more psychedelic) reading of democracy and the ethical significance of technology while the latter promised to supplement it with a bit of empirical and analytic rigor.

I believe, in short, that technology capacity is common to all organisms in the form of information habitating matter in order to reproduce itself (in this vision, our skulls are as much a material prosethesis for the reproduction of the DNA within us as our clothing or our homes).

When information reproduces itself, physical reality becomes more robust and is able to generate more different things. Because I see the generation of novelty as an end and a good in itself, I see the thriving of this process as having tremendous ethical stakes. And because I see no strong distinction between information that reproduces itself through biological processes and information that reproduces itself through other means, I see a wide range of types of beings existing on this same ethical horizon, which is the technological production of reality.

Notice that this implicates all species of life in the technological question. Such a reading at first seems to conflict with Vitalik's d/acc premise, especially given his emphasis on humans as "the brightest star" in the conclusion of his essay. However, on a practical level, the differential negotiation of the reproductive capacities of the plant and animal kingdoms along defensive lines is coherent with the prerogative of decentralization (in the most radical sense) and maximal distribution of agency as well as (human) defense, as robustly diverse ecosystems make for healthy natural commons upon which humans can thrive.

It's along similar lines that I hope to explore a technological account of democracy as a constitutive negotiation between agents of reality-production, broadly defined, as they generate positive-sum habitations that embolden new trees of novelty, new paths for information to embody, reproduce and elaborate itself. (This frame is meaningful even in a naive realist account, but it shares features with comments by the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin on reality as an infinite game between quantum observers.) Such an account might provide metaphysical color to the practical intuitions laid out in d/acc.

It's my hope that critical engagement with the key elements of the d/acc frame can provide many such unlocks, where radical new possibilities might be seen as continuous and coherent with a basic set of ethical and practical assumptions about the nature of technology. It speaks to the strength of the d/acc philosophy that it may contain trap doors, so many branches of potential that lay out before you when you start to think the magic alignment between ethics, technology and freedom. All of this being said, I intend this research to be extremely open ended and permissionless - contributors should take their critical engagement in whatever they direction they feel appropriate, even if it conflicts with this particular strand of thinking.