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The Open Source Torment Nexus

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One of the most popular memes when it comes to talking about the tech sector is Alex Blechman’s tweet about the Torment Nexus:

"Alex Blechman @AlexBlechman Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus 5:49 PM Nov 8, 2021. Twitter Web App"

One can interpret the tweet in a bunch of ways. As a comment on the level of reading comprehension that billionaire tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or some ghoul that Peter Thiel funded constantly show: Calling one’s products or companies “Metaverse” and “Palantir” does not express an understanding of who and what is criticized in the respective works of fiction. And we are not even asking for nuance here.

Another interpretation is that the products that are being brought to market as massive innovations seem to be less than stellar. Best case scenario they are just weird stuff nobody asked for (think Juicero), most of the time they are “here’s a thing you kinda want but you have to pay rent for it now instead of buying it and we might shut it down any time”. And a lot of the time they are just bad for you, products that insult your existence as a human being.

Obviously there is no objective way to make these calls, to decide what is dumb but meaningless or what is evil. People have different values, different needs and sometimes can accept different levels of crap for a specific product or service.

We talked about this a bit in the Q&A part of my talk at Fluconf that gave a bit of criticism of the Open Source movement and its beliefs. But while my argument in the talk was mostly that the beliefs that Open Source is based on might not actually be based on or support the actual political values that people might have there is value to having Open Source software. Software that you can use and change to suit your needs and demands (if you can of course).

But Open Source software does not happen in a vacuum, it is written by people. Often to serve their needs, sometimes to serve a community’s needs: To provide a better solution for users. The “Open Source Alternative to proprietary X” thing.

If you’ve been on the Internet for about 7 seconds you will have come into contact with guys (using a gendered term here because they are mostly male) who will respond to any criticism of or issue you have with a proprietary software with “Just use this Open Source tool”. It’s a bit annoying because a lot of the time that answer doesn’t come from a genuine desire to help based on empathy and an understanding of the problem the original post expressed. But It’s also oftentimes better than one might think.

The Open Source community has gotten quite good at replacing proprietary tools with open source solutions. The feature set might not be 100% there and some things might not work but there are totally valid alternatives to Slack or Chrome or Microsoft Office (if you really just need office tools and not something that specifically depends on MS’s ideosyncracies). There are whole websites dedicated to listing Open Source alternatives to proprietary tools with at least one of those alternatives being pretty much a copy.

This has tremendous value and provides a bunch of people with the software tools to do their thing – me included. But when building those replacements the Q&A at FluConf made me wonder: Are we maybe doing a tech-bro? Are we not properly reading and understanding the texts we reference?

Any artifact is a text. You can read for example any piece of software as a document about the beliefs and assumptions of the programmer about the users. The software tells you how the programmer sees and understands the user. It’s just a form of text that is maybe a bit harder to read and it might have animations and sounds and can send bits somewhere.

What triggered this train of thought was me thinking about social media platforms. With Meta and X and all US tech companies finding their love for fascism currently many people want to jump off those platforms to find a better home. And there are Open Source Alternatives to Twitter/Instagram/WhatsApp/etc. Which in general is good. Maybe. Sometimes.

(Quick sidebar: I’m gonna use an example of an Open Source project here but don’t read this as me shitting on that project. People can build what they want and have their reasons for doing things. My feelings and needs are not “right” and other perspectives are wrong. I’m using the project as an illustration.)

I don’t use Instagram. Not because I don’t like seeing pictures or because it is “beneath me” and not even because it’s Meta and Mark Zuckerberg bend the knee to Trump. (In fact I have an account I use to follow tattoo artists but that I only use for exactly that research because tattooers live on Instagram sadly) I don’t use Instagram because it’s bad for my mental health. The affordances and the social practices of Instagram have lead to every picture (and the people and lives in it) looking like an ad. Perfectly designed and sculpted representations of better lives of better people. It just makes me feel bad about myself, my looks, my life. For me Instagram is the Torment Nexus.

Now that might just be a me-problem. But when I see an Open Source project like Pixelfed that basically attempts to provide users with a federated, open source drop-in replacement for Instagram I wonder: Are we just building an Open Source Torment Nexus? Because Pixelfed looks like Instagram. Has all the bones of Instagram. The same basic logic of the app (maybe the recommendation algorithms aren’t as aggressive but you can always patch that). There is nothing that would lead me to believe that – should Pixelfed get very popular – it would not also develop similar esthetics. Would also help people feel bad about themselves (if they are vulnerable to that kind of thinking).

And Pixelfed isn’t the only tool here. Bluesky is basically a carbon copy of Twitter a few years ago (not technology wise but in the way that interactions work, the way in which status is produced). Mastodon isn’t that different either. Which in this case doesn’t feel as bad for me – but I also liked Twitter.

It feels like too often we are bound to think about what’s possible in the framing of what businesses think is possible. I recently argued against scale and that topic is a perfect example: Meta needs any new product to scale to millions if not billions of users. Amazon needs to scale products to the whole world. Google needs to scale. Microsoft needs to scale. And they all need to do the things you need to do to scale. Build interaction loops that enforce you coming back to an app or platform regularly ideally daily, to make it a habit. Build tools promising you a view on everything, to give you feelings of power, understanding and control.

We here on the open, decentralized, free web don’t need to do that. Pixelfed does not need to scale. Mastodon does not need to scale. At least not in the way that Facebook needs to.

We are doing a tech-bro. Just like Peter Thiel calls his surveillance company after the stones the evil wizards use in The Lord of the Rings because he doesn’t seem to have understood that those are the baddies we are building tools that are built for growth hacks and scamming VCs out of their money because we don’t read them properly. Because we just take what’s there and make it open source.

Just is doing a lot of work in that last paragraph. The amount of work that goes into duplicating those proprietary functionalities is incredible, awe inspiring. Thousands of people put work into building those tools, often without payment, without a lot of thanks. Spending their limited time on this planet contributing to the commons with software.

But recognizing the amount of work and time and life that goes into building this huge pile of software shouldn’t we spend it on something good? Something that is actually good for the people using it? And are we always so sure that the things we build do that, enable that?

We should stop building the Open Source Torment Nexus. Because the problem with the Torment Nexus is not the software license or opaqueness of the code: It’s the part with the torment.

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mrmarchant
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tante
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"It feels like too often we are bound to think about what’s possible in the framing of what businesses think is possible."
Berlin/Germany

Reuters made a little cozy game to explain cozy games

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Cosy Games

Cozy games can be a light in the dark, but the concept is foreign to many gamers and non-gamers alike. To illustrate what cozy games are and the benefits of playing them, Reuters created a tiny cozy game. In the game you are a radish, named Radish. — Read the rest

The post Reuters made a little cozy game to explain cozy games appeared first on Boing Boing.

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mrmarchant
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Once-Private Government Networks Are Now Exposed, Making Cyber-Espionage Easier than Ever

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Over the past month, an unprecedented number of critical government systems, including those at the nation’s nuclear research labs, have been exposed to the open internet. This exposure jeopardizes both U.S. national security and the privacy of millions of Americans.

Notably, this alarming trend seems to coincide with DOGE’s unrestricted access to federal networks.

a group of people standing next to each other
Photo by Robs on Unsplash

The Scale of Vulnerability Is Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Seen

Beginning on January 8, 2025, a surge of U.S. government infrastructure began appearing on what’s known as “the search engine of Internet-connected devices,” Shodan.io.

Federal agencies typically secure their systems behind multiple layers of protection, ensuring that critical services – such as mail servers, directory services, VPNs, internal IP addresses, and remote access gateways – remain isolated from public access.

The scope and severity of exposed government networks is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s hard to even have a baseline to compare it to. But one thing’s for sure–adversaries such as Russia and China are dancing for joy.

Essentially, whatever is causing once-private government networks to suddenly be publicly observable is making the lives of Chinese and Russian hackers much easier–we’re doing the first stage of hacking campaigns, network reconnaissance, for them. With such easy insights into once-secret U.S. networks, the likelihood of data breaches impacting millions of Americans becomes that much higher.

Mapping federal networks is a crucial first step in cyber-espionage. Hackers identify existing systems, open ports, and running services to exploit vulnerabilities.

Once this information is obtained, attackers can:

  • Identify unpatched vulnerabilities in exposed services.

  • Crack passwords via brute-force attacks

  • Harvest credentials from misconfigured LDAP or mail servers.

  • Pivot into internal networks through weak remote access configurations (e.g., RDP without multi-factor authentication).

  • Deploy malware or ransomware targeting government systems.

  • Create backdoors for persistent access

Adversaries of the U.S. can now easily map out the government's digital landscape, identify unpatched vulnerabilities, launch targeted attacks to crack passwords, and deploy malware or ransomware.

Nuclear Risks

a couple of signs that are on a fence
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Between January 14 and February 8, servers belonging to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory have been found with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services exposed to the public internet. This grants malicious actors the opportunity to hack into servers hosting sensitive nuclear research data, a golden egg for spy agencies across the globe.

Alarmingly, a Department of Energy server allowed anonymous login with write access, raising the risk of hackers uploading malicious code or installing backdoors for persistent network access.

Unleashing AI on sensitive government data

My investigation also revealed government servers directly interfacing with AI products, creating yet another disturbing risk to national security that is extremely difficult to reverse or mitigate.

On February 6, the Washington Post reported that DOGE fed sensitive data into AI systems while auditing the Department of Education. The specific AI product used by DOGE was not known to the Post at the time.

However, my investigation reveals that Inventry[.]ai may be one of the AI products in question, with multiple U.S. government IP addresses pointing to its REST API. This indicates a massive flow of government data being sent to the AI company’s servers.

Proof: 8 IP addresses on Amazon’s GovCloud now point to Inventry.ai’s REST API, indicating a massive firehose of data being sent to the AI company’s servers. The IP addresses are: 18.253.166.131, 182.30.117.29, 18.253.153.187, 182.30.154.252, 18.254.229.158, 18.253.160.247, 18.254.175.18, 18.254.191.201

This is a stunning breach of Americans’ privacy that likely breaks multiple federal laws, including the 1974 Privacy Act, the Federal Information Security Management Act, the E-Government Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, among others.

Treasury Department

As early as January 24, Elon Musk and his DOGE entourage may have had partial access to Treasury Department systems, and then obtained full access on February 2. From there, he specifically targeted the Secure Payment System housed under the Bureau of Fiscal Services, which is responsible for disbursing billions of dollars of federal funds totaling more than 20% of the entire U.S. economy. (Southern District of NY Complaint, 2025).

That same day, Treasury Department servers linked to the Secure Payment System were observed on Shodan. Reasons for the Secure Payment System’s appearance on Shodan could include server configuration changes or new services that were not previously accessible. Ultimately, we’re left with more questions than answers–why are our nation’s most sensitive systems being exposed on Beyonce’s Internet?

Further vulnerable Treasury Department systems discovered include:

  1. Comptroller of the Currency’s Citrix NetScaler Gateway – enables remote access to internal applications, desktops, and data. It acts as a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or proxy for users connecting to a corporate or government network. Exposing this gateway to the Internet makes it a highly attractive target for Russia- and China-sponsored hackers.

  2. The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is responsible for investigating fraud within IRS programs, with divisions fighting cybercrime, fraud, and insider risk. On January 14 and continuing to present, TIGTA’s server used for conducting meetings are publicly exposed.

  3. The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General’s Outlook Web login page is now publicly exposed. This allows attackers to attempt brute force password attacks. Once inside, hackers could exploit CVE-2024-21413 to send malicious emails that further compromise government systems. Another Treasury mail server is observed here.

Remember your oath

This investigation has been the toughest of my career. I’ve had many sleepless nights wondering why exactly the DOGE broligarchy thinks they can play games with our nation’s most deeply-held secrets. And honestly, as someone who analyzes terrible things for a living, I believe this is the biggest crisis we have ever faced.

woman with US American flag on her shoulders

The stakes could not be higher. Adversaries like Russia and China now have a roadmap to obtaining our nuclear research, financial systems, and private data of every American.

But we can’t just sit back and let our most personal information be held hostage. This isn’t just a job for Congress and the courts; we have to organize within our local communities and explain what’s at stake to our loved ones.

I know you’re tired too. It’s a lot easier to not care but here we are. Through all this chaos, with our core values and Constitution under blitzkrieg attack, I’ve never felt a deeper love for America or more reason to defend her. In the words of Viktor Frankl, “For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”

Citations

  1. Shodan Searcpartment of Energy nuclear laboratories [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=department+of+energy+country%3A%22US%22

  2. 24.231.209.106 Department of Energy, anonymous login with write access [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/24.231.209.106

  3. Natanson H, Gerrit De Vynck, Dwoskin E, Douglas-Gabriel D. Elon Musk’s DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts [Internet]. Washington Post. The Washington Post; 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 8]. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-doge-ai-department-education/

  4. 18.253.166.131 [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/18.253.166.131

  5. 182.30.117.29 [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/182.30.117.29

  6. 182.30.1.117 [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/182.30.1.117

  7. 182.30.154.252 [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/182.30.154.252

  8. 18.254.229.158 [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/18.254.229.158

  9. 18.253.160.247 [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/18.253.160.247

  10. 18.254.175.18 [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/18.254.175.18

  11. 18.254.191.201 [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/18.254.191.201

  12. Shodan Search Secure Payment System [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=title%3A%22Secure+Payment+System%22+country%3A%22US%22

  13. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK REQUEST FOR EMERGENCY TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER UNDER FEDERAL RULE OF CIVIL PROCEDURE 65(B) COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF [Internet]. [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/new-york-v-trump-doge-treasury-feb-7-2025.pdf

  14. Wyden Demands Answers Following Report of Musk Personnel Seeking Access to Highly Sensitive U.S. Treasury Payments System | The United States Senate Committee on Finance [Internet]. Senate.gov. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-answers-following-report-of-musk-personnel-seeking-access-to-highly-sensitive-us-treasury-payments-system

  15. Shodan Search Treasury email servers [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=org%3A%22United+States+Department+of+the+Treasury%22+port%3A25

  16. 164.95.8.37 Possible Treasury API changes [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/164.95.8.37

  17. 199.83.35.87 Comptroller of the Currency NetScaler AAA Gateway [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/199.83.35.87

  18. 164.95.148.5 Treasury Department Citrix Gateway [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/164.95.148.5

  19. 164.95.159.34 TIGTA meetings [Internet]. Shodan.io. 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 9]. Available from: https://www.shodan.io/host/164.95.159.34



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mrmarchant
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Principles for the Permaweird

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For February, the Contraptions Book club is reading Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz, to be discussed the week of February 24. The chat thread is open for early comments.

I’ve been in Euclidean mode all week, by which I mean in a headspace where I’m constantly looking for candidate theorems, laws, conservation principles, paradoxes, and perhaps even axioms and postulates, for navigating the Permaweird.

We’re deep into a postmodern wilderness and we need to start imposing some authoritah on it. Making up Euclid-like elements for the strange new geometries we find ourselves in is a good place to start in 2025.

The last few years have been confused and chaotic, but I think we’re finally starting to see a good deal of very interesting lawfulness emerging in the contemporary environment. Strange sorts of lawfulness, but not confused chaos. There’s not yet enough for us compile something comparable to Euclid’s Elements, but we’re definitely underway now. The protocols of the future are starting to take shape. We can begin to navigate by coherent principles instead of relying on the mystical pronouncements of self-appointed seers. We can start testing and adopting systematic habits rather than letting heroic mythologies lead us over cliffs.

Let us delve into three of these elements. I’ve decided to become a professional delver for the age of AI.

Chiang’s Law

This week’s newsletter got delayed in part because I was busy writing another ambitious essay built around one such law, which I have named Chiang’s Law, after science fiction writer Ted Chiang who came up with the idea. I tried to reduce it to 12 words:

Science fiction is about strange rules, while fantasy is about special people.

I first came across this sometime last year, and I find it’s turning into an increasingly indispensable law to guide my thinking.

You can read all about it in the inaugural issue of Protocolized, a Substack magazine that I will be editing along with my colleagues and of the Summer of Protocols project. I wrote the inaugural issue essay, Strange New Rules, which talks about Chiang’s Law and lots of other stuff. The issue also launches a (free!) eBook of essays from our last two years of research, the Protocol Reader (one of my big editing projects last year) that you should load up in your Kindle and read right away. Several people (ht: in particular) put a lot of work into this.

Protocolized
Strange New Rules
In this issue: (Re)launch notes, Chiang’s Law, Chosen Ones, Great Men vs. Great Bureaucrats, Straussian Romantasy and Idiot Theories, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords, protocolization debt, Whitehead advances, worlds and rules, protocol fiction workshop in Austin…
Read more

If we pull off our cunning plans, this is going to be a very interesting magazine. You should subscribe. Besides helping edit it, I plan to write one piece about protocols there every few weeks.

Related: I’ll be in Austin all next week, and co-hosting a week-long workshop (with pizza sponsored by the Summer of Protocols) devoted to Protocol Fiction. We’ll have bookend in-person coworking sessions on Monday evening and Friday afternoon, with online collaboration through the week. and will be hosting along with me. The goal is to start building up a pipeline of contributions and contributors for the magazine. Subscribe to the Protocolized magazine to stay informed of other such events elsewhere.

Chor-Pharn’s Law

Another law I posted about publicly this week is Chor-Pharn’s Law, named for my friend (CP) Lee, mover-and-shaker of Singapore. CP shared it with me almost a year ago in a private conversation, and I find myself repeatedly citing it in my own private conversations, and using it as an analytical lens for an increasing number of political questions.

Here I didn’t need to do any compactification because CP’s original version is compact enough:

If you know who you are, you get a civilizational war, if you don’t know who you are, you get a culture war.

The law mostly applies to relatively sensitive matters where you don’t want to show your hand, so it is particularly useful for private cozyweb strategery conversations. But here is an example of me using it in a public conversation, in a note about current affairs in the US:

Chor-Pharn’s Law is a fine example of what we in the fledgling protocols science research community call a tension. It is a construct formulated as a tradeoff curve where different people will favor different positions, resulting in a structured conflict framed by the tradeoff. We call such conflicts engineered arguments, which is also one of the main definitions we use for what a protocol is.

You can delve more into tensions theory in the Protocol Reader. It is one of our research threads for the year in the program.

Boyd’s Razor

The last principle I want to offer you today is one I’m classifying as a razor, as in Occam’s razor. A razor is a decision rubric that has an element of paradox or counter-intuitiveness to it, and as a result is particularly challenging and costly to apply. This one is from one of my favorite thinkers, John Boyd, of OODA loop fame. But I’ll need to set the stage for it a bit.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably noticed that OODA loops and Boydian maneuver warfare have gone mainstream in a bigly way. It’s no longer an obscure idea only military history nerds know about. It’s clearly the playbook Elon Musk deployed at Twitter and is now deploying at DOGE. Trump himself, in a less systematic way, has also been a lifelong Boydian actor. And I know for a fact that many people in (or associated with) the 2.0 administration are familiar with Boydian ideas and competent at formally deploying them. So it’s not an accident that unfolding current events look Boydian.

One sign: Several long-time readers I haven’t heard from in a while have suddenly reached out, wanting to chat about OODA loops and my 14-year-old book Tempo. These are topics I haven’t touched in a few years publicly, but here’s the slide-deck I used to use for workshops about this stuff. Maybe I ought to dust it off and update it for 2025 and offer it again.

Opponents of the Musk-Trump assault on the state capacity and machinery of the US generally seem to have no idea what’s hitting them, and seem to be assuming it’s just an amplified form of the noisy, disorganized, and ineffectual confusion that was Trump 1.0. In Chor-Pharn Law terms, they are approaching a civilizational war as a culture war. This time, the sound and fury do not signify nothing.

But the hapless opposition is beginning to get a clue that this time it’s different. This WaPo article (ht ) features a quote from an “education department official” starting to realize what’s happening:

“It’s an incredible snatch and grab blitzkrieg,” one Education Department official said. “We’re like the French in the Maginot Line on the border with Germany, and they’re like going around us through Belgium. They’re just … they’re so fast.”

I don’t want to delve into OODA/Boyd nerdery here (my quoted note above has a couple of pointers on how to apply it to current affairs), but I do want to point out ONE hugely important, arguably axiomatic, element of Boydian maneuver warfare theory that the Musk-Trump blitzkrieg is not following.

I’ll call this the Boyd Razor:

If your boss asks for loyalty, give him integrity. If your boss asks for integrity, give him loyalty.

This is the ONE element of the Boydian playbook that the Musk-Trump train does not, and ideologically cannot afford to follow. Loyalty-testing (which is the Right-Authoritarian version of doctrinal purity-testing in the Left-Authoritarian sense) is absolutely central to how they operate. It is the biggest shared element of leadership philosophy between Musk and Trump.

In the short term, ignoring Boyd’s razor makes the Boydian playbook radically easier and cheaper to implement. It just degenerates to “operate at a faster tempo” or some such over-simplification. But in the long term, ignoring Boyd’s razor creates a closed-off intellectual monoculture within the entity deploying Boydian strategies.

I’m a mediocre strategist at best, even in domains I know well, and I don’t claim to be great at running the Boydian playbook myself. At best I am able to support others with better warrior intuitions with some coaching. But the one piece I do try to always follow is Boyd’s razor. Even if I’m not doing all the re-orienting and fast-transients and tempo-control particularly well, I try to navigate the Boyd Razor well. Because a sense of your own integrity, once abandoned, is nearly impossible to restore.

Integrity is very easy to kill in a culture. You can simply tag people who dissent as traitors and fire them. You can intimidate people into loyalty. You can rope in the energies of a certain breed of extremely high-energy, high-IQ, but low-orientation grinder who will willingly pull all-nighters, put in 100-hour-weeks for years on end, and even go on suicide missions for you, either because they lack the aptitude for the moral reasoning Boyd’s Razor calls for, or are too young to have cultivated it, since it develops through morally demanding decision-making experience rather than smarts.

Why do people like Musk and Trump operate this way? It’s King logic, the essence of monarchist tendencies, as illustrated in this classic Gaping Void cartoon:

Boyd’s razor is the moral compass of Boydian theory, and monarchism is mostly about throwing it away by becoming a solipsistic self-certifier of your own truths. So loyalty becomes the same thing as truth, and integrity becomes a meaningless concept, since it can only exist in a pluralist context, where sometimes you give others the benefit of doubt rather than yourself. The pawn in this picture will never ever stop to ponder a loyalty/integrity question because they’ve surrendered that moral agency to the king. That is why they can work mindlessly hard with a “maniacal sense of urgency.”

Without Boyd’s Razor, you may win early battles with Boydian strategy, but you will descend into paranoia and increasingly vicious monocultural extremism and excess as you attempt to consolidate your position.

I’m no fan of what Musk-Trump are doing, so I’m happy they are ignoring Boyd’s Razor (and on a massive scale — their entire supply chain of talent is gated primarily by loyalty testing) and setting themselves up for eventual failure.

Respecting Boyd’s razor from Day 1 slows you down, and is generally costly — Boyd himself respected it absolutely, in how he treated both his own commanding officers and acolytes, and paid a heavy price for it. The better-known Boydian “do something/be somebody” fork is downstream of Boyd’s razor. The do/be choice only ever presents itself if you first navigate the loyalty/integrity moral maze successfully.

But paying the cost of following Boyd’s Razor buys you something. It builds up defensible positions steadily over time because it catalyzes pluralism, dissent, and openness to novel ideas. It fuels truth-seeking instincts rather than truth-manufacturing instincts. It prioritizes outcomes over theaters of appearance. It expands your coalition by learning from others, even adversaries, and co-opting them, rather than shrinking it into a cult. It allows you to keep the complete cycle of creative destruction going.

By contrast, ignoring Boyd’s Razor sends you down an intellectual cul-de-sac. The associated paradigm, no matter how powerful, eventually exhausts itself. Aside: this is why Musk’s “first principles thinking” is a fragile and questionable epistemic posture even when practiced sincerely. In complex systems, especially social ones, to keep things generative, you eventually have to deprecate some existing “first principles” and add new ones. And the main way you do that is by listening to high-integrity people whom you don’t immediately behead for disloyalty if they disagree with you.

Boyd knew this in his bones. That is why there is no canonical version of his ideas — he just kept tweaking his famous briefings till he died, and he expected his followers to continue tweaking them. Which they mostly don’t, resulting in Boydianism turning into an uncritical religion after his death. But Muskism has already turned into a religion — you can find several adoring, sanitized, and stylized documentations of his supposed playbook in formats ranging from Twitter threads to genuflecting biographies. This is not a good thing even for the legacy of a dead and buried thinker like Boyd. It is really damaging for a living thinker to be surrounded by such flattering mirrors.

The book we’re reading in the Contraptions Book Club right now, Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz, explores a very revealing class of examples of how the Boydian playbook can go right and wrong depending on whether or not Boyd’s Razor is respected. While the Musk-Trump campaign in many ways resembles the campaigns of Genghis Khan or Timur, in an important way it does not: the most successful steppe nomad military campaigns appear to have respected Boyd’s razor.

I want to share two ideas isomorphic to Boyd’s Razor, because it is so important, it is crucial to internalize it in multiple forms, and to note that it keeps getting independently rediscovered.

First, in Richard Hamming’s classic, You and Your Research, we find a great metaphor for open-mindedness vs. close-mindedness: Whether or not you keep your office door open while you work.

Another trait [of great scientists], it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

A big tell of whether you are an “open-door” type person is whether you tolerate a high degree of apparent inefficiency, interruption, and refractory periods of reflection that look like idleness. All are signs that your mental doors are open and are taking in new input. Especially dissenting input that can easily be interpreted as disloyal or traitorous by a loyalty-obsessed paranoid mind. Input that forces you to stop acting and switch to reflecting for a while.

Conversely, if you’re all about “efficiency” and a “maniacal sense of urgency” and a desperate belief that your “first principles” are all you need, you will eventually pay the price. A playbook that worked great once will stop working. Even the most powerful set of first principles that might be driving you will leave you with an exhausted paradigm and nowhere to go.

This is starkly visible when you analyze Elon Musk’s career. The “Elon Way” clearly worked brilliantly at Tesla (where I consulted briefly for one of his executives) and SpaceX. But it equally clearly did not work at Twitter. The acquisition is a financial disaster. The so-called “town hall” has degenerated into the court of a petty algorithmic tyrant who treats outbound links as marks of disloyalty. And a hugely valuable and important pluralist cultural institution, a veritable Library of Alexandria, got tagged as a stronghold of a manufactured “woke” adversary and burned down. That Musk subsequently made political lemonade out of the lemons he grew on the corpse of Twitter does not make it a success on its own terms.

Yet, talk to Elon loyalists, and they will refuse to acknowledge this failure and get into desperate contortions trying to paint X/Twitter as being as big a success as Tesla/SpaceX. Even bigger, if they’ve bought into his political ambitions uncritically.

Equally, talk to knee-jerk Elon haters, and they will refuse to acknowledge that despite all his problems, he did something very right at Tesla and SpaceX that is worth taking seriously and learning from. Even if it isn’t whatever his self-mythologizing emphasizes or his hagiographers highlight, he did something right. I have some conjectures about what that is, but I’ll wait till the full Elon arc plays out before theorizing.

Elon himself seems to believe he’s been equally successful at all three (if not in his smaller, more obviously speculative ventures). That his is an infallible Midas touch. One sign: he tweeted a meme image showing the Twitter episode as an obese figure wearing a “Twitter” t-shirt being peremptorily commanded to get on a treadmill, and being transformed into a svelte woman in an “X” t-shirt, with a parallel bit of imagery for what DOGE is up to.

Perhaps it’s just putting on a brave face, but I don’t think so. He appears to have genuinely convinced himself that the X chapter has been as unambiguously successful as Tesla and SpaceX. That it is worth repeating at DOGE. Why would such an obviously smart person develop such an inaccurate perception of himself and his track record? Isn’t it good to know where your behaviors are working vs. not?

He got there because he only asked for loyalty, and fired all those who only offered integrity in return.

This brings me to the second isomorphic idea, having to do with Steve Jobs.

It is useful to contrast Musk with Steve Jobs, whom he is often compared to. Jobs too had an autocratic, bullying personality. But he appears to have respected Boyd’s Razor. One senior executive who was close to him said that the way to succeed at Apple was “do the right thing, and make Steve happy.” In Jobs’ world, there was room for integrity to survive. Room for you to try and do your idea of “the right thing.” In Musk’s world, the razor has apparently degenerated to “Just make Elon happy; he knows what the right thing to do is.” (though it wasn’t always this way).

And it’s not about whether or not people can withstand autocratic, scary bosses who demand a lot and practice a sadistic management style. In many ways, Jobs was worse than Musk, for example in imposing a very secretive need-to-know communication culture instead of an open flow (10 points to Musk on that front). It’s about whether or not you can hold the excruciating moral tension of Boyd’s razor in your head. Jobs could. As far as I can tell, Musk cannot.

What truly burns people out is not that their boss is too demanding, hot-tempered, or even sadistic. What burns people out is not being allowed to exercise their integrity instincts. Being asked to turn off or delegate their moral compass to others. Plenty of people have the courage, the desperation, the ambition, or all three, to deal with demanding and scary bosses. But not many people can indefinitely suspend integrity instincts without being traumatized and burning out.

Another comparison. Jeff Bezos too has a reputation as a scary and demanding boss. I consulted for several years for an Amazon executive as well, and the public picture of what it is like to work there is basically accurate. But like Steve Jobs, and unlike Musk, Bezos too appears to respect Boyd’s razor. An important (in my opinion the most important) management idea at Amazon is “disagree, but commit.” A principle that allows people, especially very powerful and senior people others might be terrified of, to systematically accommodate high-integrity dissent. When you hear an idea from a smart, weaker person that you don’t agree with, but bet on anyway, that’s a disagree-but-commit move. Everybody can occasionally work up the courage to disagree with a scary boss in a fit of healthy-minded integrity, but rarely is it a systematically encouraged tendency. If you reliably call them stupid and fire them while they are quivering before you under the stress of doing what they think is the right thing under hostile conditions, a certain process of elimination of all integrity gets underway.

At Amazon, the disagree, but commit principle is supported by another one: great leaders are right… a lot. It takes the confidence that comes from being right a lot to be able to tolerate and underwrite risks being taken by weaker underlings that you don’t necessarily agree with. That is in fact how you build up courage in others, and make them “right… a lot” in turn. In fact, all of what I saw of Amazon management culture seemed consistent with Boyd’s razor.

This is one reason I never wrote off Blue Origin the way many people did. That company had problems of course, but it did eventually manage to get to orbit with the first try, with a big rocket, which is a truly remarkable thing. I know nothing about the internals of the company, but I love the motto, gradatim ferociter. Step-by-step, ferociously. A motto that says you’re prioritizing thoroughness over efficiency at least some of the time. It’s a playbook that takes much longer to run, more tortoise than hare, but involves fewer things blowing up along the way. The more you deal with human systems, the more important it is to be thorough rather than efficient (it’s called the Hollnagel’s ETTO principle, and an upcoming essay in Protocolized by will tell you all about it).

We’ll never be able to truly test this counterfactual, but I think the Twitter saga would have unfolded better with the gradatim ferociter playbook, because it is a nearly pure people-system. DOGE too would have worked better with a thoroughness-oriented gradatim ferociter playbook, but again we’ll never know. Musk has Trump’s ear, not Bezos.

And finally, to connect all this to my current obsession, steppe nomad culture, the difference between Genghis Khan and Timur, and the reason the former left behind a relatively long-lasting 3-generation empire (even if in multiple shards) while the latter’s empire unraveled immediately, is that Genghis respected Boyd’s Razor and Timur did not.

Boyd’s Razor is going to slit the throat of many otherwise brilliant strategists who don’t think a costly moral compass that prices integrity over loyalty is worth paying for and installing into your operations.

They will deserve it.

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Microsoft research: Use AI chatbots and turn yourself into a dumbass

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You might think using a chatbot to think for you just makes you dumber — or that chatbots are especially favored by people who never liked thinking in the first place. It turns out the bot users report this themselves.

The new paper from Microsoft Research, “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers,” surveys 319 people who resort to chatbots on the job: [Microsoft, PDF]

Higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking.

This paper is a haunted house catalog of all the LLM-induced workplace stupidity we’ve seen take root in the chatbot era.

Who trusts the chatbot? Users who don’t think: “Knowledge workers’ overall trust in GenAI was negatively correlated with perceived effort for four of the six cognitive activities.”

If you trust the bot, you let its output pass: “The higher the participant’s confidence in AI, the greater is their perceived reduction in effort.”

It was already known that “users with access to GenAI tools produce a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task.”

It’s vastly easier to just let the bot do it all for you — LLMs “reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI.”

Workers on quotas particularly lean on chatbots — in this case the stupidity is structurally mandated.

Dumbasses are eternal. But the chatbots encourage them and make them worse.

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The "Need for Chaos" Voter

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Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This article was released many moons ago—for paid subscribers only—but given that the US presidential election is approaching, I figured it was worth releasing it again more broadly.

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A few years ago, after I had just appeared on television, I received one of my favorite hate e-mails of all time.

Dear Brain,” it began. Already, I could tell, we were on a winning trajectory. He thinks I’m smart. Then, alas, it took a turn for the worse:

You are a hate-filled poorly educated Nazi clown. A leftist cancer on humanity. You are EVIL.”

It concluded as follows.

Best wishes,

Max


Well, at least he was polite. These kinds of e-mails appear regularly in the inbox of anyone who writes about American politics or comments on it on television. They get particularly vitriolic if you’re critical of Trump, as I have been for years, and they’re much worse if you’re a woman. I’ve heard horror stories.

Every so often, there are death threats. (Thankfully, for me, there’s usually an ocean between me and the people issuing them, and I’d place a fairly large bet on them not having an up-to-date passport, nor a penchant for the delightful cultural curosity that draws one to international travel).

But here’s the thing: ignore the disturbing nature of these e-mails for a moment, and consider them as a sociological phenomenon. What did Max hope to achieve from this e-mail? Did he think that he would deliver the crushing blow with his biting prose that would make me reconsider my political viewpoints? “Maybe I really am a Nazi clown?” I would wonder, as I cried myself to sleep, clutching the Panzer tank I had made in balloon form.

Or, was Max not trying to achieve anything, but was rather lashing out in anger, flinging word salad into the internet ether as he flailed about in frustration?

A few months ago, researchers provided a new answer to those questions. They’ve identified a personality trait that was best captured by Alfred, Batman’s confidant, in the film The Dark Knight. His character explains why some people have an impulse to destroy, to lash out, to cause mayhem—not for any instrumental reason, but for fun and for status.

"Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

These people, according to the new research, share a desire to “unleash chaos to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.” This trait now has a name — and an established psychological profile.

It’s called the “Need for Chaos.” Understanding it provides an important insight into the destructive world of modern politics, in which the trolls have taken over, and politicians are no longer problem solvers, but are rather political influencers. It’s not about making the world better. It’s about burning down the world of people they hate.

So, how does it work — and how can we spot these traits?

The Puzzle

The researchers—Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen from Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux from Sciences Po in Paris—focus on a specific behavior to create a typology of “Need for Chaos” individuals. Specifically, they focus on those who share “hostile political rumors,” which they note, “portray politicians and political groups negatively and possess low evidential value.” In plain speak, they like spreading malicious political lies.

What kind of person are they talking about? Well, if you follow the weird world of US politics closely, perhaps you will remember Jacob Wohl, the political huckster, provocateur, and malignant prankster. (Wohl has recently been implicated in a bizarre “AI lobbying scheme,” using fake names). At one point, Wohl tried to discredit Special Counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller by inventing a false accusation about him, then hyping it for the press.

But Wohl made a rookie mistake. When reporters tried to track down the “intelligence company” that had allegedly uncovered the accusation, they called the phone number that was publicly listed for the “company.” It turned out to be Wohl’s Mom.

Let’s just say that if I ever wrote an e-mail to Jacob Wohl, I would not begin it, as Max did, by saying “Dear Brain.”

More recently, Wohl pleaded guilty to another hare-brained scheme in which he tried to suppress voter turnout among minorities by spreading lies about election procedures. (Wohl will now have to spend 500 hours helping to register voters to atone for his idiotic crimes).

This fits the Need for Chaos profile perfectly. As the researchers explain:

We outline a theoretical framework about an over-looked psychological strategy for acquiring social status—the incitement of chaos—and demonstrate the relevance of this strategy for contemporary politics. We build on research showing that status-oriented personality traits combined with social rejection can push people toward an escalation of aggressive motivations. We argue that such motivations, when sufficiently strong, take root as a general destructive mindset.

In particular, people who score high on this metric tend to answer that they agree with several of these statements:

  1. I get a kick when natural disasters strike in foreign countries.

  2. I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.

  3. I think society should be burned to the ground.

  4. When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking “just let them all burn.”

  5. We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.

  6. I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.

  7. Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.

Then, to make sure that people weren’t just ticking the box next to every question mindlessly, the researchers included two additional statements that were the opposite of the other seven:

  1. We need to uphold order by doing what is right, not what is wrong.

  2. It’s better to live in a society where there is order and clear rules than one where anything goes.

Interestingly, when they looked at other toxic personality profiles — such as psychopathy (being a psychopath) and social dominance orientation (an urge to assert social dominance) — they found that the Need for Chaos was a separate dimension to destructive individuals. It wasn’t just capturing the same impulse.

It’s a unique trait.

What about Democrats vs. Republicans?

But the researchers wanted to know how Need for Chaos interacts with partisanship. To study that in the American context, they split research participants in two groups—Republican and Democrats. What they found was, as you’d expect, that Democrats were more likely to spread baseless political rumors about Republicans and Republicans were more likely to spread baseless political rumors about Democrats.

Here’s the interesting twist: this relationship breaks down once a person scores high on the Need for Chaos index. At that point, the person just wants to spread everything that could cause damage, regardless of partisan affiliation. It’s not about political agendas; it’s about destruction.

The role of status

The Need for Chaos trait is particularly damaging for individuals who also feel that they’ve been failed by society, manifesting in their loneliness. For them, sowing chaos is a way to lash out against the system while asserting their power and trying to establish some form of social status. As the researchers write:

These individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone. Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.

As you might expect, this means that perceptions of a loss of status are really important. And if that’s true, then there will inevitably be a group that’s particularly worrisome, because they feel a relative loss of status in recent decades. That group, they found, is white men.

That creates a strange dynamic, in which most white men—by virtue of their historically privileged position in society—tend to score lower on Need for Chaos than other groups. However, when white men do score high on Need for Chaos, it’s particularly dangerous. To put it plainly, the research suggests that of those who have this chaotic trait, it’s most destructive when that person is a white man.

As the researchers explain:

White men—experiencing both less marginalization and less fear of opposing the system—express a Need for Chaos because of extreme reactions to any perceived status threat including, for example, the expansion of racial and gender equality."

Why does this matter?

A relatively small group of people with Need for Chaos traits can now inflict a lot of damage in society. That’s partly because of the advent of social media, in which malicious lies travel much faster than they used to; partly because it’s easier for like-minded chaos agents to mobilize and organize; and partly because these individuals are more prone to political violence—a particularly important finding in the context of a post-January 6th United States political environment.

The researchers explain that this is nothing new, but that the trait may have more impact than in the past. “Every society contains disoriented radicals,” they write. “In the age of social media, however, these radicalized individuals can more easily find like-minded others and can more easily share their views.”

Their studies also show that people who score high on the Need for Chaos index express a greater willingness to participate in violent acts on behalf of a political cause.

The challenge for modern politics, then, lies with figuring out a way to deal with the inevitable perceived loss of social status that accompanies a society that’s becoming more equal, while mitigating the damage that these aggrieved chaos agents can inflict on everyone else.

Next time you’re on social media and you try to engage with a vicious troll, keep in mind that you’re likely not dealing with someone who cares about truth, or social progress, or justice. Instead, odds are that you’ve just encountered someone who wants to watch the world burn, because they’ve got a destructive trait: the Need for Chaos.

Or, maybe, just maybe, you’re interacting with a comically polite chaos agent named Max. Please give him my best wishes.


Thank you for reading! If you’d like to support my writing and research and keep this little intellectually curious corner of the internet sustainable far into the future, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I rely exclusively on reader support.

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P.S. I know that I’m a tiny bit obsessed with my majestic Border Collie, Zorro, but I have now taken things to another level. I have spray painted this custom stencil—which captures his heroic, regal personality—just above his dog bed and figured that some of the fellow dog lovers who read my work would understand.

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