Francis Spufford once said that Bletchley Park was an attempt to build a computer out of human beings so the credit for this metaphor belongs to him. But it can be generalised to any bureaucracy. They are all attempts to impose an algorithmic order on the messiness of the world, and to extract from it only only those facts which are useful to decision makers.
With that said, it’s clear that the Vatican is the oldest continuously running computer in the world. Now read on …
One way of understanding the Roman Catholic Church is to think of the Vatican as the oldest computer in the world. It is a computer made of human parts rather than electronics, but so are all bureaucracies: just like computers, they take in information, process it according to a set of algorithms, and act on the result.
The Vatican has an operating system that has been running since the days of the Roman Empire. Its major departments are still called “dicasteries”, a term last used in the Roman civil service in about 450 AD.
Like any very long running computer system, the Vatican has problems with legacy code: all that embarrassing stuff about usury and cousin marriage from the Middle Ages, or the more recent “Syllabus of Errors” in which Pope Pius IX in 1864 denounced as heresy the belief that he, or any Pope, can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization,” can no longer be acted on, but can’t be thrown away, either. Instead it is commented out and entirely different code added: this process is known as development.
But changing the code that the system runs on, while it is running, is a notoriously tricky operation…
-Andrew Brown, “The Vatican is the oldest computer in the world.” andrewbrown.substack.com. Novmber 24, 2025
[Commenting on the above.]
It is.
What I like about this essay is how it suggests a different perspective on other computer-like ‘machines’ that exist in our world. For years I’ve thought of corporations — especially large ones — as ‘superintelligent machines’ (which is why I think that much of the faux-nervous speculation about what it would be like to live in a world dominated by superintelligent machines is fatuous. We already know the answer to that question: it’s like living in contemporary liberal democracies!)
Charlie Stross, the great sci-fi writer, calls corporations “Slow AIs”. Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) writes that since Large Language Models (LLMs) are ‘cultural technologies’ — i.e. information processing machines’ — they belong in the same class as other information-processing machines — like markets (as Hayek thought), bureaucracies and even states. David Runciman, in his book Handover:How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs* makes similar points.
Of course these are all metaphors with the usual upsides and downsides. But they are also tools for thinking about current — and emerging — realities.
-John Naughtons, “Wednesday, 26 November 2025.” memex.naughtons.org. November 26, 2025
Category: blog post
Owning vs. Having
I enjoyed this quite a bit, also available as a Substack article.
Brief Comments on Consensual Hostility
“Once consent becomes the only value by which an individual can assess sex to be good or bad and justify their assessment to their partner or anyone else, all that’s left of seduction is contract negotiation fueled by whatever mix of horniness and loneliness brought the two parties together.
There’s an alternative. As Srinivasan herself suggested, to treat any romantic partner like your oldest friend. Fine attunement to your partner’s wants and needs, a willingness to place them at least on par with your own, and giving your partner the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the same. Since your partner doesn’t want their consent violated that part is a given, but it’s not the main focus or a sufficient condition.”
-Jake, “Consensual Hostility.” putanumonit.com. October 11, 2021
Not much to add here beyond two points:
- Transaction model: A transaction model for relationships is the model of psychopaths, sociopaths and others with Cluster B personality disorders. Framing everything around consent frames every interaction as a transaction.
- Love is a Blank Check: “[M]ake a commitment to put someone else before ourselves over the long haul, over a life, without any guarantees that it’ll work out well, and a virtual certainty, that, for some period, it’ll be a bad bargain. Love is what transforms a bad bargain into a good one, where you give someone a blank check, the ability to ask for and get more than you have, and by some miracle, at the moment it is needed, you find there is enough in the bank to cover it, money you never knew you had.”
The mystery of love is it transcends transactions. If it’s a transaction, it isn’t love.
NixOS for the Impatient
“NixOS is a Linux distribution configured using Nix. It is declarative, meaning that the entire system state can be defined in a single .nix file; and reproducible, meaning you can have multiple computers set up identically.
If this sounds like a bullshit timesink like Arch or Gentoo: it’s not. There was a time when the idea of spending an afternoon typing cryptsetup incantations into a terminal would have been appealing. That time is past. I don’t use distros that lack a graphical installer (running fdisk is frankly beneath my dignity) or that require extensive maintenance. I’m not building my own kernel with some bespoke set of paranoid CFLAGS. I just want something that works.
NixOS works. It actually works great.”
—Fernando Borretti, “NixOS for the Impatient.” borretti.me. May 6, 2023.
I have been meaning to try NixOS for awhile, but I didn’t want to have to figure out how to do the configuration file to get near what I use: mutt, Firefox, ssh, my VPN, etc. I am saving this one for when I finally decide to do it.
Exploit, Explore, Copy
“Instead of looking at two strategies [such as Exploit or Explore], Laland and associates included a third: observe. That is, you can watch other people deal with a situation, and then copy them.
Arnold Kling, “Exploit, Explore, Copy.” arnoldkling.substack.com. May 30, 2023
Exploit seems like optimize. You create efficiencies based on scale, refining processes or whatever.
Explore is when you are looking for novel approaches. This is searching the answer space for a new direction.
Copy is the easiest, where you just copy what someone else is doing. Often a great place to start or expand. But, hard to get any kind of competitive advantage from merely copying the work of others. There is also cost. You’ll have to strive to understand what they have done and why they did it. You will also not have a full understanding of the constraints decisions were made under. Still, it can be a very productive way to approach the world, particularly when multiple sources are used and things are combined into novel ways. So, possible for this to move into a hybrid solution.
Lowering Our Boggle Threshold
“Paranthropologist Dr Jack Hunter, editor of the newly released anthology Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience, notes that psychical researcher Rene Haynes coined the concept of the ‘Boggle threshold’ to describe this phenomenon – “the point at which a researcher says ‘no I’m not taking that, I’m not accepting that any further, it’s too weird’.”
Hunter believes that we need to lower our ‘Boggle thresholds’ a little bit, and start paying paying attention to the more bizarre paranormal experiences – because “when we do that, we can start to look for parallels or patterns across experiences, and we see that there are striking similarities even between some of the most outrageous ‘high strangeness experiences’ and some of the most widely accepted transpersonal religious experiences.”
-Greg, “Deep Weird: The varieties of high strangeness experience.” DailyGrail.com. February 23, 2023.
Reality vs. Dualism: Raw or Pasteurized Dairy
“There exists a tendency to see all dairy foods as being either raw or pasteurized. Like most dualistic concepts, this is a oversimplification, and there exists a rainbow between black and white. If we want to move beyond what is actually a legal definition, to understand how different ways of processing milk impact the microbiology and nutritional value of dairy foods, we need to transcend this dichotomy. Drawing hard lines and fighting over which side one is on, is the task of fools. There is hyperbole, ignorance, sectarian childishness, and misinformation from both Pasteurian proselytizers and raw milk renegades. I hope to show that there is a spectrum of levels of heating applied to milk that alter its microbiology in various ways. This microbiology is never static, and after the heating process, microbial communities continue to evolve and have new members join….
….My whole point is that placing cheese into a binary definition denies the complexity of microbiology, of life. Maybe instead of trying to simplify everything and imposing a false sense of order on the world, we can embrace complexity and uncertainty, and humble ourselves in the process. While simultaneously seeking knowledge, quantifiable data, and learning from other ways of knowing, of working with microbes to preserve food.”
-Trevor Warmedah, “Beyond the Raw/Pasteurized divide.” milktrekker.substack.com. September 18, 2022
Learned a lot about cheese and microbes in this brief blog post, but I think I like the larger philosophical point more. What’s true of cheese is true of pretty much every dualism. Dualism is the stripping away of nuance. You’re either for us or against us. Sociologically, it’s fine, I suppose. Dualism is creating a sense of group cohesion. But, as epistemology? Dualism isn’t truth. It’s fiction. And, this fiction has a tendency to shape our reality beyond our social ties.
Cargo Cult X
“Good listeners do often reflect words back—but not because they read it in a book somewhere. Rather, it’s cargo cult advice: it teaches you to imitate the surface appearance of good listening, but misses what’s actually important, the thing that’s generating that surface appearance.
The generator is curiosity.
When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head. When a friend says, “I’m furious with my husband. He’s never around when I need him,” that one sentence has a huge amount underneath. How often does she need him? What does she need him for? Why isn’t he around? Have they talked about it? If so, what did he say? If not, why not?
It turns out that reality has a surprising amount of detail, and those details can matter a lot to figuring out what the root problem or best solution is. So if I want to help, I can’t treat those details as a black box: I need to open it up and see the gears inside. Otherwise, anything I suggest will be wrong—or even if it’s right, I won’t have enough “shared language” with my friend for it to land correctly.”
-Ben Kuhn, “To listen well, get curious.” benkuhn.net. December 2020.
I liked this notion of cargo cult as an adjective. I was trying to think of other types of cargo cult advice. Most self-help is cargo cult advice. There is rarely one right way to be in the world, and as the rest of this text suggests, perhaps all advice given without understanding the context a person lives in has the potential to be cargo cult advice.
Then, it occurred to me that cargo cult can have more expanded use as an adjective. Facebook friends might be cargo cult friends.
Belief systems around romantic relationships and “finding the one” might be another. Doesn’t make more sense to think about relationships as a skill, and it is possible to have meaningful relationships with many “the ones”, if we could only learn those skills?
When you start thinking about it, much of what is going on in our culture is cargo cult culture. There are many people, following the same paths, subscribing to the same ideas, and it gives them a sense of belonging to a group, which helps them form their identity. But, much of it is a display that denies our experience and requires us to gaslight ourselves and deny our lived experience.
There’s to lot to unpack in this idea. Perhaps something to think on further and write a longer essay about.
Ideological Amazon & Punk Nazis
“The words are violence crowd is right about the power of language. Words can be vile, disgusting, offensive, and dehumanizing. They can make the speaker worthy of scorn, protest, and blistering criticism. But the difference between civilization and barbarism is that civilization responds to words with words. Not knives or guns or fire. That is the bright line. There can be no excuse for blurring that line—whether out of religious fanaticism or ideological orthodoxy of any other kind.
Today our culture is dominated by those who blur that line—those who lend credence to the idea that words, art, song lyrics, children’s books, and op-eds are the same as violence. We are so used to this worldview and what it requires—apologize, grovel, erase, grovel some more—that we no longer notice.”
-Bari Weiss, “We Ignored Salman Rushdie’s Warning.” Common Sense. August 13, 2022.
Thinking for yourself is never going to line up with any kind of ideological orthodoxy. Free speech is ultimately about listening to unorthodox voices. But, if it is used to drown them out, giving certain orthodoxies the greatest share of voice, then do you really have free speech? What often pretends to be “free speech” isn’t about free speech. It’s about something else. As Steve Bannon would have it: “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
The disorientation is to make it more difficult to come to independent conclusions, and it is also designed to limit the kind of traction unorthodox ideas can get among the population. Both are very much designed to promote established ideas and the status quo.
To use a metaphor, who is the Amazon of ideology in a culture? Often, thee are driven by political elites, whether they be based on religious, business, or some other orthodoxy. Ideally, free speech is about expanding the Overton window, the things that we can talk about. Shouting down the opposition isn’t free speech. Giving room for dissenting voices is free speech.
Of course, if that is the view, people will claim their views are somehow dissenting. They’ll espouse the most mainstream ideas, and they’ll exclude some portion to signal that their ideas are in the minority or unique.
There’s also the other direction. You may have some unique ideas. But, it’s very possible that they aren’t interesting to many other people, even if you believe they should be. Tolerance for people that do not share your views has to flow in all directions. A minority that thinks they are on the right side of history and doesn’t have to listen to people that don’t agree with them have all the same problems of the dominant ideologies without the political clout. For people on the sidelines, it is hard to see the advantages of switching out one for the other.
So, it’s a complex business. The Dead Kennedy’s offered good advice though in Nazi Punks Fuck Off, i.e., our default mode should be to listen to new ideas and voices. But, a punk Nazi, or one that shares some of our ideas or aesthetic, isn’t necessarily an improvement over the choices of the ideological Amazon.
Punk ain't no religious cult Punk means thinkin' for yourself You ain't hardcore 'cause you spike your hair When a jock still lives inside your head Nazi punks, Nazi punks Nazi punks fuck off! Nazi punks, Nazi punks Nazi punks fuck off! If you've come to fight, get outta here You ain't no better than the bouncers We ain't tryin' to be police When you ape the cops it ain't anarchy Nazi punks, Nazi punks Nazi punks fuck off! Nazi punks, Nazi punks Nazi punks fuck off! Ten guys jump one, what a man You fight each other, the police state wins Stab your backs when you trash our halls Trash a bank if you've got real balls You still think swastikas look cool The real Nazis run your schools They're coaches, businessmen and cops In a real fourth Reich you'll be the first to go Nazi punks, Nazi punks Nazi punks fuck off! Nazi punks, Nazi punks Nazi punks fuck off! You'll be the first to go You'll be the first to go You'll be the first to go Unless you think
Tragedy vs. Comedy Modes
As Brown notes, Meeker argues that Western Civilization is mostly founded on the “tragic mode,” inspired by the great tragedies in which a “larger-than-life character attempts to bend the world to his (and it’s always his) image.” The character’s success “is also his undoing,” and tragedies end in bloodshed, death, and a funeral of some kind. Our civilization has been built on the tragic idea that we can bend nature to our will, the result of which has been complete ecological catastrophe.
Meeker proposes an alternative for surviving our disastrous times: the “comic mode,” inspired by comedy:
Comedy is not a philosophy of despair or pessimism, but one which permits people to respond with health and clear vision despite the miseries the world has to offer. Its mode is immediacy of attention, adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances, joy in small things, the avoidance of pain wherever possible, the love of life and kinship with all its parts, the sharpening of intelligence, complexity of thought and action, and strategic responsiveness to novel situations. It permits people to accept themselves and the world as they are, and it helps us make the best of the messes around us and within us.
Upon reading this, I was immediately struck by how well the tragic and comic modes map to Brian Eno’s concept of genius vs. scenius, with one being a egosystem and the other being an ecosystem. Our world is an ecosystem inwhich our only real chance at survival as a species is cooperation, community, and care, but it’s being lead by people who believe in an egosystem, run on competition, power, and self-interest.
Comedy and scenius show us a way forward. A chance at survival that, in Meeker’s words, “depends upon our ability to change ourselves rather than our environment, and upon our ability to accept limitations rather than to curse fate for limiting us.” Comedy, like scenius, gives all the characters in the story a surviving role and a chance to live to see another day.
-Austin Kleon, “The comedy of survival.” austinkleon.com November 19, 2020
Make the best of the messes around us and within us is great advice. Recommend the whole bit.
cafebedouin.org 