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I, like I’m sure many of you, have spent the last couple days swinging from outright despair to mild anxiety and concern. The situation in the United States right now is, to use the technical term, extremely fucked. I’m an Australian, but there’s no way the damage will be confined to the borders of the United States.

However I have something of a silver lining in the fact that the right in America, in terms of its base and its elites, is becoming increasingly ensconced within its own reality bubble. Musk and Trump have become the idiot kings of their make-believe worlds and have largely been followed by their supporters. That’s an obvious source of friction that will be an incredibly important check on their power going forward.

But it also points toward broader possibilities.

I’m a firm believer in the simple notion that the everyday practices of people shape the politics they enact. Socialism and the labor movement in the 19th century didn’t come out of the brains of leftist intellectuals but was instead borne of everyday practices of solidarity that working class people and the communities they were a part of engaged in. Similarly the ideas of liberalism came in no small part out of the emerging educated people just talking or organizing amongst themselves in an egalitarian fashion.

What people believe is important, but what they do is what ultimately counts. And so everyday habits and practices are critical.

Such habits and practices of currently existing social media, with all its tendencies toward tribalism and misinformation, is clearly manifest in the soon-to-be Trump regime. But is this the only way that networked computers can prompt us to act in the world?

I’m skeptical.

Part of the problem is that few people are aware that there even are alternative possibilities. As a consequence there’s an implicit assumption that we have to go by the 20th century, or in some cases even the 19th century, norms and assumptions about how to communicate and how to organize.

One simple idea that keeps me sane despite everything is that I think we can do significantly better than that. In recent days there's been talk about building new communities and institutions by many liberals, to have a plan beyond just getting people out to protest and vote.

I hope these are successful. But I have grander visions in mind.

The original techno-utopians who were inspired by the possibilities of computers are, at this point, something of a punchline. And this is somewhat justified. Certainly the breathless hype of Wired magazine in the 90s has aged poorly. Many hackers and technologists were largely uninterested in changing the broader social structures they inhabited.

But, if you actually take the time to look into what they thought, this was in no small part because they didn’t see anything serious out there. My favorite example of paths not taken is when Whitfield Diffie, co-discoverer of asymmetric cryptography, called for tech worker unions in the year *2000* at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference to fight against corporate control of the workplace. While nothing came of it, that’s the sort of path not taken that needs to be emphasized more right now.

And I could list any other number of potential divergences – Aaron Swartz not committing suicide in 2013, radical cyberneticians like Norbert Wiener or Stafford Beer getting involved with unions or activists (Wiener was slated to talk at the United Auto Workers convention in 1952 but couldn’t make it for health reasons, while Beer largely disengaged from direct political involvement after the Pinochet coup) or movements like Science for the People figuring out on how to apply “science for the people” in an effective manner, etc.

That there were serious possibilities not taken and connections not made in the past gives me reason to suspect that there still are further possibilities and connections available to us in the present and the future. Moreover it’s not like every potential possibility or connection in the past that could have come into existence is now lost. They exist in potential, even if few are aware of them.

And so I could rant for hours about cool projects that are worth thinking about and supporting or currently disparate scenes that I think need to properly talk with each other. But right now what I’m interested in helping to build and nurture is the creation of software that actively encourages and facilitates networked individuals arriving at accurate maps of the world.

Now the specifics of how we make networked computers into something that is genuinely epistemically empowering are beastly. I don’t have any sort of plan, all I know is that there isn’t a proof that the problem is in NP, that this is likely something we can bootstrap it on existing experiments in protocols like the ATProtocol or ActivityPub and that even incremental progress toward such an end is of considerable value. I’m happy to talk specifics with people elsewhere, but right now I just want to get the idea out there.

Furthermore this is not about creating a more informed electorate. There are strong incentives for swing voters to be low-information, to assume that both sides are roughly the same and so they don’t have to do the work of further inquiry which means that the impact on persuasion will be limited. Sure if we’re successful more people might become more informed about their electoral choices to make the difference. But I see that as a secondary knock on effect.

What I’m really interested in is getting people to engage in high-impact action that leverages insight. Misinformation machines can get people to show up to vote or get angry and engage in violence, but what they can't do is get people to act in a nuanced, thoughtful manner. And if they're going all-in on idiocy, we need to take the high-ground of understanding, insight and audacity because that's where we’ll find force multipliers and efficiencies and exploits that let us punch far above our weight.

And so I’m down to work with anyone who's sincere about wanting to understand the world. In no small part because I think that science is deeply political in ways that were systematically suppressed during the Cold War. That so many physicists and other hard scientists were some sort of far leftist or radically cosmopolitan liberal during the 30s and 40s and that anti-fascism was a driving motivator for almost all of them is no arbitrary grouping but is rather a consequence of what happens when you take understanding seriously.

What we learn from studying reality, and what reactionaries desperately want to deny, is that up until the heat death of the universe, there is no given or natural state of affairs that things must be in. There’s a reason that so few contemporary biologists are gender essentialists or race “““realists””” (and that the few that are are marginalized). When you properly get into things, you can’t maintain such beliefs.

Things could be different. That is a simple truth that reactionaries desperately want to deny. It is also a call to arms for anyone with a shred of conscience in a world as troubled as ours. And the best thing about a politics built around leveraging superior insight and understanding isn’t just that it’s strategically fertile. It’s also the fact that it directly points toward social orders much, much better than the one that let fascism gain power in the first place.