The Anti Puritan
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Dieting for Digestive Comfort: the Anti-Puritin Guide to Smooth Poops
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
What I actually think
Monday, March 16, 2026
Global Envy: the alternative to ZOG hypothesis
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Foid came, foid conquered
Sunday, March 8, 2026
I am taking a new direction for this blog
Sunday, March 1, 2026
Assassination World: Drone Warfare, Prediction Markets, and the Coming Empire of the Trigger
Years ago I went to a housewarming party of a reactionary that I knew back in Denver and during conversations in his backyard I articulated my intuition that drone warfare was going to get democratized, and that a new regime of assassination was going to rise. He dismissed these claims and we laughed it off, but more and more I'm convinced that my initial intuition was correct. Now with the killing of the Ayatollah I know for certain the future I grasped back then is coming true now.
Three things are happening simultaneously and nobody is talking about how they fit together.
First, drones. The US and everyone else now has the ability to kill a specific individual anywhere on earth at low cost, with no risk to their own personnel, and with a reasonable claim to deniability. This is genuinely new. Previous long-range weapons killed in zones — cities, grids, general areas. A drone can, in principle, kill one guy at a wedding and leave the people standing next to him alive. It is distance combined with specificity. More than ninety countries now have some kind of military drone capability. Turkey's Bayraktar TB2, which performed well in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh, proved that effective drone warfare is no longer an exclusive club for superpowers. A middle power can buy or build one. They're getting cheaper, smarter, and more autonomous every year. Eventually the capability to identify and kill a specific person from the air will be available to well-funded non-state actors, private military companies, and wealthy individuals acting outside any institutional framework.
Second, the United States is exhausted. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ate trillions of dollars and produced outcomes ranging from equivocal to catastrophic. The American public has made it absolutely clear it will not accept significant casualties in discretionary overseas conflicts. The national debt is enormous. The force is spread thin across NATO, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. The era of the 150,000-troop deployment is over. So what replaced it?
Targeted decapitation. Rather than deploying an army to occupy territory and reshape the political landscape through prolonged presence, you identify the specific individuals who are the source of the problem and you remove them. The Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA's Special Activities Center between them have built an apparatus for identifying, tracking, and eliminating individuals across dozens of countries. The public knows the famous examples — bin Laden, Soleimani, al-Baghdadi — but those sit on top of a vast pyramid of lower-profile strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere that constitute not exceptional actions but a continuous, routinized practice.
Third, prediction markets now exist that price the survival odds of political figures. Polymarket processed hundreds of millions of dollars in volume during the 2024 election cycle, and its prices were cited alongside polling averages in mainstream media. The information aggregation function of these markets is genuinely useful. They also create a problem that nobody wants to say out loud: if you can buy a contract that pays $10 million if a foreign leader is "out" by December 31st, and you have the capability to make sure he is dead by December 31st, you have turned assassination into a financial transaction. The prediction market becomes a kill market. Not hypothetically — the logic of it is just plain arithmetic. This even allows intelligence services like the CIA to self finance their own operations independent of congressional budget approval.
Put these three things together and you get something that deserves a name: an Assassination World. A global political order in which great powers govern the internal composition of weaker states not through the expensive and visible instrument of occupation, but through the precise, cheap, and deniable instrument of targeted killing.
The empire of the trigger
You don't need to invade a country to control its politics if you can reliably kill anyone who tries to consolidate power in ways hostile to your interests. You don't even necessarily need to do much killing. If foreign elites understand that accumulating too much power or taking too confrontational a posture will result in their elimination, they will self-moderate without any killing being required. The most efficient form of domination is one where the dominated police themselves.
This is not a new idea. The CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile in 1973, and the documented plots against Castro and Lumumba demonstrate that the United States has long viewed the removal of inconvenient foreign leaders as a legitimate tool of policy. What changes now is not the intent but the capability. The tools are dramatically more capable, more precise, and more deniable than anything available to the Cold War CIA. The infrastructure for global assassination management has been built. The question is what gets done with it as the technology matures.
This infrastructure is also not going away. Bureaucracies persist. Capabilities, once built, get used. Programs, once established, expand. The JSOC and the CIA's paramilitary apparatus have their own organizational culture, their own career structures, and their own momentum. Nobody is going to dismantle them when the strategic environment changes; they're going to be repurposed and extended.
The United States won't remain the only actor either. China is rapidly developing armed drone capability. Russia has conducted poisoning operations against dissidents in multiple countries. Israel has run one of the world's most sophisticated targeted killing programs for decades, including the cyber tools (Stuxnet, Pegasus) that are essentially the digital version of the same thing. As the technology continues to democratize, middle powers and eventually non-state actors will acquire comparable capabilities. The assassination world, initially a product of US technological dominance, will gradually become a multipolar regime. Multiple powers competing to eliminate each other's proxies and clients is not a stable equilibrium. It is a recipe for perpetual covert war.
The new tyrant is algorithmic
The tyrant that comes out of this is not the strutting dictator of the twentieth century with his rallies and his gulags. The new tyrant operates through markets and intelligence services and corporations rather than through identifiable institutions of state repression. His instrument is not the concentration camp but the targeted strike. Not the midnight knock but the sudden and unexplained death of someone who might have threatened him.
This tyranny is harder to resist than the old kind because it's harder to name. You cannot organize resistance against an algorithm. You cannot rally public opinion against a kill list you're not allowed to know exists. The traditional mechanisms of resistance to tyranny — collective action, legal challenge, international solidarity — are all severely weakened by a system where the violence is invisible, deniable, and technically sophisticated. And the surveillance required to run targeted assassination at scale is mass surveillance of everyone, because you can't identify specific targets without first watching everyone. The two technologies reinforce each other: better surveillance enables more precise targeting; the demonstrated capacity for targeted killing creates incentives for broader surveillance.
There is no obvious clean solution to this. Revolution requires organizing large numbers of people in physical proximity — targeted surveillance and preemptive killing can prevent that from reaching critical mass. Legal challenge requires courts with jurisdiction, independence, and information. International pressure requires an international community capable of agreeing on what the problem even is, which an assassination tyranny that operates covertly and deniably is specifically designed to prevent.
Distributed and decentralized counter-infrastructure is the direction that makes the most sense, for the same reason that it's hard to kill: you can't decapitate a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) the way you can kill the leadership of a conventional organization. Encrypted communications, open-source intelligence, distributed storage networks, and censorship-resistant financial infrastructure are the building blocks of whatever resistance eventually limits this system. These aren't utopian projects; they're practical necessities for the medium-term future. The tools that will limit the tyranny need to be developed before the tyranny is mature enough to prevent their development. This is the work of decades.
What comes out the other side
Here is the uncomfortable conclusion: the capability for targeted killing cannot be uninvented. The formal prohibition on assassination as a tool of statecraft—enshrined in US law since Executive Order 12333 in 1981—has been consistently violated for decades. Demanding that existing international humanitarian law be applied to drone strikes is not wrong, but it treats the problem as a deviation from norms rather than asking whether the norms themselves require revision in light of capabilities that are now permanent.
If targeted killing capability is going to exist — and it is — the choice is not between a world with it and a world without it. The choice is between a world with regulated targeted killing and a world with unregulated targeted killing. Regulated is better. A framework that narrows the permitted targets to state officials who have themselves committed serious human rights violations—genocide, crimes against humanity, systematic torture—and that requires real procedural accountability before action is taken, is better than a formal prohibition that everyone violates and that therefore provides no constraint at all.
Getting from here to there is likely to take fifty years. It involves the tyranny deepening, the counter-infrastructure developing, and the accumulated weight of documented abuses eventually making the status quo politically unsustainable. It is not a comfortable arc. The generation now entering political consciousness will live through the worst of it.
What I am saying is that history has two possible paths it can take with this technology. First it can take the long route. In this scenario some sort of assassination tyranny sponsored by the nuclear powers of the world rules despotically over the so-called third world and probably its own citizens. This involves a combination of technologies: Palantir style mass-surveillance, lethal drones (from large to microscopic), and assassination market coordination mechanisms into a supercharged tyranny of corporate domination, clothed behind anonymity of the killers and potential obscurity of the victims. It would start as killing political tyrants like the Ayatollah and evolve into lower and lower levels until ordinary local elected leaders, business competitors, and bureaucrats live in fear. Technology gets cheaper the more it is deployed and that means the capability of autonomous killing should get democratized over time. Into this situation a counter-resistance of the distributed autonomous organization first attempts to resist and regulate the assassination system and then attempts to control it. Eventually The tyranny combines with the DAO to form a kind of DAO-Assassination Republic. This arrangement arrives because the Distributed Republic provides moral legitimacy to the process and structure to chaos. Formalized rules let people know where they stand and let people avoid running afoul of the lethal system. The first route involves a long tortuous process where the state actors who initially control the lethal system refuse to give up that control or democratize it and face distributed resistance that eventually overthrows and captures their power. The second path, and the path humans never take because they procrastinate, is to cut to the chase and create the DAR (Distributed Assassination Republic) sooner rather than later. I don't really have a time horizon but this process could last anywhere from 30 to 150 years in my estimation. It will start as a thesis-antithesis dichotomy and eventually arrive at a synthesis organizational structure.
My point here is that this technological arrangement is inevitable and you should just cut to the chase rather than enduring the pain of a century or so of tyranny, humiliation, and resistance. The reason I think that the tyranny will win in the short term, is that assassination markets don't necessarily have to limit themselves to foreign leaders but might be employed by financial oligarchs against judges and politicians themselves. This is a system that can rapidly escape containment by the oligarchs who invented it. It's consolidated power only lasts as long as lower levels of the system don't have access to the same kind of mass surveillance, software, and drone capabilities as the oligarchs. Keeping things consolidated seems plausible until you realize that competition drives innovation and this competition is international. If the Soviet Union had trouble maintaining control of its nuclear arsenal; how much more could foreign powers have trouble containing their software? All it takes is one spiteful regime to develop mass surveillance killing tools and open source them. Since state actors have sponsored terrorism this is probably inevitable. Everything is subject to the law of supply and demand, even nuclear bombs, and even more so drones. Technology has a habit of coming down in cost. In the beginning this system will remain heavily gate-keeped: we might even get a golden age of peace for about 30 years as foreign tyrants are systematically eliminated and US hegemony asserts in a total capacity. But pressure breeds resistance and software is the one thing that gets cheapest the fastest. In the end there will be no "moat" around the assassination system. I had an inkling the things would go down this path when Ukraine started using drones and my view has only strengthened since then. This is also why I was studying DAOs even back then. I saw this thesis coming years ago.
What I see for the future is a sequence of events unfolding like this:
- The military industrial complex builds out the assassination system
- Foreign governments copy this and develop their own systems
- It escapes containment and winds up in the hands of terrorists
- The price of the technology comes down and it gets democratized
- Targeted killing becomes a regular feature of society flattening hierarchies, or perhaps consolidating them. Tall poppies get cut down. Tyranny sets in.
- DAOs rise to contain the threat, first opposing it, and then co-opting it
- A new regime of order is created around basic rights enforcement. The DAOs become DARs, synthesizing the two forces into a new organizational structure
In order to achieve moral legitimacy (and therefore Order) the "network state" must enshrine a Bill of Rights, enforceable only against politicians and corporate officials, that substantially aligns with the attitudes of the public. It should prohibit starting wars without provocation, genocide, terrorism (by both state and non-state actors), and enshrine free speech, freedom of association, freedom from association, and freedom from economic rent seeking laws. These are the crucial ones that make a regime stable. Freedom from state-sponsored rent-seeking is especially important since it gives longevity to government systems. Governments have a habit of accumulating laws and also of making corrupt laws that impoverish the people. The combination of these two forces: legislative accumulation and rent seeking are lethal to nations causing their long-term collapse. If you really want a government to last a thousand years you have to prohibit rent seeking provisions in the laws and limit the total length of the legal code. The architects of the Distributed Assassination Republic won't design it properly, but if they did, it could lead to a golden age of humanity, where all nations respect a set of rights worldwide regardless of whether or not they hold elections. The DAR ONLY ENFORCES RIGHTS AGAINST GOVERNMENTS. Having it make global law is a severe mistake that would lead to another round of thesis-antithesis overthrow of the system on a global scale. There is no one legal or cultural system that is appropriate for all humans everywhere because humans vary in their dominance hierarchies, genetic strategies, and religions that further those strategies, and any single cultural or political order marginalizes one or more of those strategies leading to a backlash of terrorism. Variance is good, actually, prevents all eggs from being in one basket. Genetically diverse cultural and religious strategies are a resilience mechanism of the species. The attempt to create global monoculture is a mistake, so the DAR must only enforce a very minimal set of rights with no feminism/LGBT/woke queer monoculture in the mix. Humans of course won't limit themselves to this sane respect for diversity and history will continue.
All of this ties into the system of blackmail they are building. Unless decentralized governance wrests these methods away from centralized control we are in for a long dark age. History is proving that classically liberal and rights-based decentralized anonymous governance are the only thing with any chance of surviving the future. Both centralization and governance by identifiable persons are vulnerable to assassination. This Distributed Assassination Republic becomes the only viable form by default. This intuition is one of the reasons why I have rejected—I will admit somewhat inconsistently—the notion of any kind of rule by a dictator. How could fascism possibly protect itself from assassination? Stability requires rights and moral legitimacy, and apparently will also require decentralized anonymous leadership. There is only one form of government that complies with all these requirements.
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Capitalism is self correcting, capitalism is suicidal
1. Family owned production businesses (not allowed to engage in mergers or sell the business, passed down from father to son. If the children don't want to run it then it is transferred to a group of competent tradesmen who are already it's managers. This would be the farming sector, trucking sector, home builders, aircraft manufacturers, logistics, freight, overseas shipping, tool manufacturers, auto companies, parts companies. Also roofing companies, plumbers, and electricians.
2. Worker owned retail and service businesses. This would include all chain restaurants, all supermarkets, and any other retail business with a wide economic footprint. It would not necessarily include bars or coffee shops which would be mostly sole proprietorships. It would include physical infrastructure like cable companies, garbage disposal, electric companies, and general manufacturers. It works like a regular corporate hierarchy but with worker vestment in the company stock. These are not workplace democracies.
3. Customer owned administrative businesses. This would include all banks—which would be credit unions, package delivery companies, Amazon, all dating websites, social media companies, and news businesses. It would also include hospitals and clinics which you would become a member-owner of to get your health care. Each of these businesses will be structured where the consumers review the actions of management and vote to kick out underperforming executives. Executives get their jobs through promotion and lose them through a kind of negative election.
4. Government-owned heavy industry. This would be your steel plants, nuclear power, solar power, oil companies, basically the entire energy sector, mining companies, defense contractors, and anything critical to national security.
5. Partner owned law firms, vet clinics and accountancies.
6. Privately owned businesses. Chinese restaurants, bars, gaming stores, record stores, coffee shops. Basically all the little retail stuff.
7. Pure capitalism. Since nearly everything in the entire economy is worker owned, customer owned, family business, or government owned the capitalist sector is used for financial occupation of foreign countries. The stock market is basically a bunch of corporations owned by Americans that sell to foreigners. The law requires that all domestic companies follow this seven categorization system. Therefore the capitalist system is used as a tool of foreign conquest by financial occupation. This also means that private equity rating of domestic companies is illegal, but not of foreign ones. Pure capitalism is also allowed to sell the domestic bonds of corporations. Domestic companies might also be allowed to issue shares and sell them on the stock market but these shares have no voting power. Only companies whose customers are entirely in foreign countries can issue voting shares, and those voting shares can only be owned by Americans.
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
The Thousand Small Fixes: On Iteration, Selection, and the Perils of Grand Solutions
My Experience in Architecture School
Every semester of architecture school you have these group projects, and because college professors are ignorant communists, they never bother to appoint a leader for each team. The result is that team members often spend as much time trying to escape doing work as actually doing the work. The biggest bully winds up dominating the team, and hot and mid women alike escape their duties because the men of the team don't want to compromise their chance to fuck her.
When I was completing my degree at university, I was on a team with a bully. This was for an urban planning semester, and we were compiling information on a particular neighborhood about all the flaws and problems. I wanted to take a "dozens of solutions approach," where we documented each and every problem in the neighborhood and then proposed small solutions to fix each of them. The bully who dominated our team, a man who happened to be right wing on the only team of right-leaning males, demanded that we all agree to his grand vision to remake the downtown area with big public infrastructure and sculptures. Not wanting to do more battle with him or get ejected from the team, I went along with his proposal. These are student projects, and it's not like any of this is actually going to be built in the real world, though design juries are composed of actual professionals from the real world who occasionally appropriate a student's idea.
During the final presentation, it was a disaster. And to make matters worse, there was an all-female team that independently did the exact "dozen solutions" approach that I wanted to take and received wide praise for all their little innovative solutions. By addressing all the little flaws in the neighborhood, they created a cumulative uplifting of the whole area. They had used my approach and beaten me with it while I gave in to some bully and got trounced. I had to defend a presentation by a man I didn't even like while critiquing a presentation by a team that had taken my own approach. And all for a grade I didn't really care about in a tedious semester I didn't really care about. Thus is my real-life experience with the "great man / fearless leader" archetype.
There's always a "great man."
The Best Solutions Are Many Small Solutions
There's a fundamental recursive nature to reality going on here, and that is that every big, great solution sets off a chain of many small recursive side effects. Big solutions generally cause more problems than they solve—think Communist revolution. You would think that a conservative would understand that, but give a man power and watch him change. I have described before the problems-solution cycle. This is a cycle where every problem demands a solution, and every solution creates one or more problems of varying magnitude. The libertarian response is to throw up their hands and say that the government shouldn't bother doing anything. This is a mistake and fundamentally misunderstands the situation. The correct approach is to create new solutions whose side effects diminish in magnitude. If every solution creates a new problem, then the new problem needs to be much smaller than the old one. If enough cumulative solutions like this are put in place, then the total uncontrolled entropy in the system can be reduced to an absolute minimum. This is probably a principle of physics itself, a principle of systems in general, and you could probably plot it on a graph: that the first solution has a high-level magnitude of negative side effects, while each successive one (when done correctly) has smaller and smaller severity.
You can see this principle in action with history. The invention of agriculture was supposed to solve starvation and the human calorie deficit problem. It created the problems of feudalism, slavery, and pandemics. Slavery has never been completely abolished in the world, and the problems of democracy are legendary. Everyone thought pandemics were abolished until recently.
It goes on and on. Air conditioning solves a problem, creates social isolation as another problem. Smartphones solve a problem, create social isolation even more. Cars solve a problem, create auto-dependent cities as another problem. Birth control solves a problem, crashes birth rates and creates nasty women as another problem. Wherever there is a solution, I guarantee there is another problem created by that solution. This is especially true with technology but is also true with law. Most of what governments do is try to fix problems created by their predecessors. The problem-solutions cycle is recursive, with each new solution producing the next set of problems like turbulence in the flow of a liquid. This is why good solutions inevitably reform existing systems; they straighten out that turbulence into a laminar flow. When it's done wrong, the magnitude of chaos in society increases. This is why I consider modern internet technology to be more trouble than it's worth; it has obviously increased the magnitude of total chaos in the system.
This is also why revolution is disastrous. When you have a revolution, you are just starting the whole process over from the beginning. First, you start with a big solution, and then you iterate continuously through its problems-solutions cycle, trying to solve each little problem created by the previous solution. Far easier to just take a known political form or policy and improve upon it. Civilization does this instinctively anyway; the modern Chinese system is an improvement on the old imperial exam system. The modern Constitutional order is an improvement on ancient Greek democracy. Even religions get upgrades to make them better at being whatever they are supposed to be doing. The only mystery here is why it takes so long to iterate through new organizational forms and why politicians are so uninterested in running beta tests.
The Location of Natural Selection May Move But Its Existence Is Not Abolished
People do this thing where they scoff at selection effects. They do everything in their power to argue that selection effects don't exist or that discussing natural selection is social Darwinism, as if one could object to a fact using a moral injunction. If you know anything about reality, you know that moral injunctions don't change it. But since humans never really grow out of the childhood activity of make-believe, there is a gigantic subset of the population for which saying that something shouldn't be true is adequate justification for establishing it as false. These people engage in "ought therefore is," a form of logic that says things ought to be a certain way and therefore they are. I heard this excellently described as "wishcasting" and may explain why so many people on the left used to love Harry Potter. When you think language is a spell, then reciting the correct language changes reality, and therefore good people have good opinions, and evil people have evil opinions. Since talking about reality contradicts the wishcast, it is an evil activity. This is the old "facts don't care about your feelings" and "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed," both of which are true statements and both of which go in one ear and out the other. (The first of these two statements comes from Ben Shapiro, and the second from Ayn Rand).
Anyway, there is a greater point at play here, a more sophisticated and high-resolution picture, which is that the location of natural selection may change but not its existence. Let's go through some examples:
If one creates artificial womb technology, then reproduction is handled by the corporations or governments that breed humans. This means that the location of natural selection is moved to the government or corporation, or perhaps the future fathers that pay for the gestation of their children. Right now, the location of natural selection is the traditional heteronormative patriarchal family unit (or whatever you want to call it).
If androids replace humanity, then the location position of natural selection is moved to the factories that make them.
If consciousness lives on a machine, then the position of natural selection is moved to the software update.
If the controller of natural selection is a religion, then the location at which natural selection occurs is the ideological corporation (the church), and the church is partially or fully in control of the direction of natural selection.
Selection is never abolished; it is simply relocated. If the selection is not genetic, then it is ideological. Everything undergoes natural selection: language, culture, nations, businesses, business models, political forms, laws, the practices of individual families. If it takes a thousand years for the welfare state to cause the genetic decay of humanity, it might only take three generations to cause cultural decay within the family, as drug addicts and wife beaters out-reproduce everyone else. Decay does not have to be genetic to happen, it does not have to occur within the family to happen; natural selection is everywhere and operating at all times. Social Darwinism is the only view consistent with actually existing reality. Social Darwinism just is, and no transcendent leverage exists that could defeat it, since it is something we are within. Social Darwinism, and Darwinism of every form, is the actually existing nature of the universe that encompasses us. There is no moral that can rise above it because morals themselves are within it. Even moral codes undergo natural selection, as those with morals that contradict survival fail to survive and reproduce and to transmit their morals to future generations. Survival doesn't mean you're right, but death definitely means you're wrong. Survival is the beginning of morality but not its totality. For something to be moral, it must at minimum facilitate its own survival and reproduction, but that only establishes a minimum criterion of not-wrongness. An ideology that leads to your death is automatically wrong, but an ideology that leads to your survival is not automatically right.
Different locations of natural selection create different incentive structures. A corporation has incentive structures radically contradictory to things like individual liberty and human ability. The incentives of corporations that use artificial wombs are much more like those of ant colonies and other eusocial animals. Take the naked mole rat, for example; it has lost the ability to experience pain because it has been selected as a eusocial creature to take care of the offspring of the queen. Say what you want about the nuclear family, but parents have a strong incentive to educate their children and make them capable, since capable children are better equipped to navigate the world and reproduce the genes of their parents. The competitive nature of sex and reproduction between families, combined with the altruistic nature of a healthy parent relationship, pushes humans toward greater capability and intelligence. Oh sure, there are abusive parents, but those represent failures of the model, which would normally be eliminated by selection forces in the absence of the welfare state. The "compassionate" welfare state creates more dysfunctional families and more abuse by breeding more abusive families into existence, and this happens independently of any genetic component, since selection affects the culture of the family and not just its genes. The incentive structures of a selection system are tremendously important because we want to live in a world where human rights exist, and if the selection structure goes against that, then human rights must constantly swim upstream against the material force of incentives. A crashing birth rate creates a profound incentive for government to care about the conditions of the population. An infinitely expanding population creates a disincentive to care about human rights and an incentive to treat humans as disposable. Creating a moral paradigm that respects the rights of individuals is not achieved through wishcasting but through incentive engineering. When the right incentives are engineered, the selection system then favors the preservation and expansion of human rights. While moral systems may have no transcendent leverage to abolish natural selection, they may access leverage to manipulate natural selection by closing off the worst and most degrading potential futures it could evolve into. Natural selection may be forced in a particular direction with incentives. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" is exactly the technique you use to preserve and expand freedom, and you do that by choosing the location of your selection. You don't allow corporations to use artificial wombs, for example, but you do allow single men to use them. You don't allow the factory to mass-update android code, but you do allow the androids to trade code amongst themselves. Since selection is never abolished but its location can be changed, controlling the location is controlling your destiny. This is an understanding with parallels in The Art of War, since one must be subjected to selection forces, one can choose the location at which the battle for survival occurs, and thus give oneself an advantage over adversaries and adversarial conditions.
The patriarchal family unit is a known commodity, a big solution with countless small recursive compensatory mechanisms to limit its abuses. It has gone through the problems-solution cycle and come out with laws, cultural limitations, and even reproductive technologies that limit its power. It may be oppressive, but so is every location at which survival and reproduction take place. The question is not whether it oppresses but whether or not it oppresses in the manner in which you get a tactical advantage for your flourishing and human rights. Since there is nothing outside of nature, and since wishcasting does not make things real, all we can do is choose the location of our battle for survival. The goal is not exactly to maximize chances of survival—survival is only the beginning of ethics—we can do even better than merely survive. The goal is to control all iterative branch points going forward so that every battle works in favor of our rights and flourishing.
Changing the point at which natural selection occurs creates a new big problem, which then requires countless secondary recursive solutions. Changing the point at which natural selection occurs is more than likely going to be a disaster that creates horrors beyond comprehension, but humans cannot help themselves where technology is concerned.
The patriarchal family unit is a known commodity, a big solution with countless small recursive compensatory mechanisms to limit its abuses. It has gone through the problems-solution cycle and come out with laws, cultural limitations, and even reproductive technologies that limit its power. A corporation with a warehouse full of artificial wombs has none of those compensatory mechanisms limiting its power and abuse.
—Fin—