Loose thoughts from 2026-05-30 and -31.
Permacomputing
I had a great conversation with a friend from the Permacomputing club yesterday; it was framed as an interview for their dissertation, so was a perfect outlet for indulgently thinking out loud. One particular line of thought, or at least constellation of related thoughts, crystallised for me.
If we accept (which is not guaranteed) that bits and transistors are neutral technologies free of original sin, and that the industrial complexes they now support are patently evil and hostile to society (more readily apparent!), then there is a question of where along that line we have erred.
There is a motif spanning STEM-supremacists, crypto bros, tech entrepreneurs, right-leaning podcast bros and more, a condescension to the subjectivity and soft edges of the arts and humanities. I see this most prominently in the “code is law” idea of the crypto industry, the horrifyingly misguided suggested that the failure of modern law and bureaucracy is all the subjectivity and indeterminacy. It bears observing that all the sub-cultures I just listed are visibly male-dominated, by the way.
Having studied maths, I feel I can construct a guess at the life story that produces this belief among people skilled with technology/maths/code. There is an unbelievably peaceful beauty to the kinds of truth one can uncover through these subjects. They are truths that live in the cold, rarified air of Hesse’s “Immortals” - unassailably, quitessentially, platonically true statements. When you reason about linear algebra or a state machine, each logical step is a firmly placed stone. I think it is very seductive to believe that everything in life could be subjected to this kind of transcendently objective reasoning, if only everyone else thought the way you do.
Or, to paint a picture with a clear character at its centre, I can very easily imagine a young man when first seeing the beauty of these clear, objective fields. He has always found all the nuance and delicacy of human relationships uncomfortable; thinking about his and others’ behaviour feels like treading on eggshells, like grasping at clouds; even more so now, when it feels like culture could turn and brand something he’s never thought about as condemnable. Maths and code is a sublime retreat from all of this confusion; things are concrete and real, true or false, unknown only when his mind hasn’t yet conquered the challenge.
Isn’t this what’s missing from everything else? Surely everyone would feel better if everything was as clear as this? He knows for a fact that all the people making personal interactions confusing don’t understand code and maths; it’s hardly surprising that they can’t find the right solutions, when they haven’t experienced how concrete and true things can be, if you just know how to think about them.
And so, a man like this (and I do think it is a mindset that men are distinctly vulnerable to, being much more able to avoid a forced encounter with the inescapable nuances of human behaviour) inducts himself into a cognitive elite. He’s really doing something good; everyone will appreciate what he’s doing once all of their lives can be as simple and objective as code. He becomes deeply susceptible to thought-terminating cliche, as long as it’s packaged with the language of objectivity and rationality - these speakers must have reached the same state of enlightenment, they are thinking the right way, so he can trust them to solve the problems on their stretched of the intellectual frontier.
Combined with the conditions of capitalist realism that recent technological revolutions were born into, I find this a very believably explanation of how the “evil” in these industries took root.
breaking the (g)loom ii
With all these thoughts in mind, the second installment of Mat Hill’s breaking the (g)loom was perfectly timed. I couldn’t attend the first, but it was the write-up notes from it that introduced me to the Permacomputing club. For the second installment, Mat decided that another space for critique and shared misery would add very little, and that instead a celebration of the small, the specific, the beautiful and human things in digital culture was needed.
I think Mat is exactly right that those creative experiences are the right “radicalising” moments against the drive to make the world pure and objective and mathematical. These hyper-specific, frankly weird moments that people presented and find beauty in live in the vast long tail of the distribution of possible creations, that statistical models will never generate. This is what breaks you out of the thin, icy air of pure maths and abstract code - realising that the beauty captured there is actually very simple, that it pales in comparison to the complexity in the spark of joy in a person presenting art that has moved them.
Mathematism
Proving that the world wants me to continue thinking about this, this morning I watched a Three Arrows video critiquing a Kurzgesagt video about Germany. It’s an excellent critique of a pretty mundane failure mode for cultural commentary; insisting that you’re not being political, you’re just discussing cold hard facts, objective realities that politicians and their ilk just aren’t brave enough to deal with (while coincidentally reproducing the centre-conservative framing of the issue beat for beat).
What caught my attention is how often Kurzgesagt resorts to the punchline that “this is just demographics; it’s just maths”. “The maths isn’t math-ing”. Three Arrows points out that Friedrich Merz himself has used these exact words as well. This all adds to the stack of examples that have made me want to describe the phenomenon of appealing to pop-maths as the ultimate thought-terminating cliche.
I’ve tentatively labelled this “mathematism” by analogy to “Scientism”, “an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)”. Mathematism is perhaps a specialisation of this effect, an all-consuming deference to arguments robed in the aesthetics of maths (rather than the actual substance of solid mathematical argument).
I want to extract my thoughts on this more thoroughly at some point. For now, an inexhaustive list of examples:
- Conservative appeals to fiscal discipline and household analogies for the national budget
- Malthusian arguments about demographic shifts and birth rates
- All of neo-classical economics (really my prime example and nemesis in this area)
- “Decentralised governance”, “vote with your dollars” models among crypto evangelists
Of course, my biases need to be clearly acknowledged - ultimately, all of this mainly pisses me off because it pains me to see shitty mathematical arguments be treated with respect that should be reserved for good maths. “My noble abstractions vs. their barbaric appeals to authority”, and all that.