Own The Means of Cognition

I keep turning this over in my head. What does it look like when our thoughts are no longer our own? I think it looks like now. Models and algorithms are everywhere, sitting in every interface (Siri and Google on our phones, Alexa in our "smart" switches, food trackers in our fridge doors) to help us with the day to day. They respond to emails, remind us of birthdays, and coordinate with other agents, acting more and more like a collective subconscious.

The problem with a collective subconscious is that some voices are louder than others, and if the model weights are closed you have no idea what is being amplified while you generate a recipe for dinner. In a lot of ways LLMs look like an enclosure movement, a fence line around cognition. Default answers are becoming easy, and the hard answers are slipping away. The models are starting to look like fences to me.

We've seen fences around knowledge before. In 1989 15.0% of US households owned a computer, and roughly 23% of those had modems. A Hayes Smartmodem 2400 went for around $549, a Mac Plus was $2,599, a Mac SE about $3,900, CompuServe ran $6–12 an hour, and The World (an early ISP) charged about $20 a month. Getting online meant having the money. Competence was another fence. Unix accounts lived at universities and employers. Inside the gate people liked to call that merit, extolling user quality and self-selection. Merit came down to who could afford the hardware, and who had institutional accounts.

Eternal September

In 1993 the capital and competence fences fell. Usenet gateways opened around the same time as cheap flat-rate access, coining the term "eternal September" in the process. Over the next few years we got Wikipedia, forums, blogs, Stack Overflow, arXiv, fan fiction, and open code. The largest collaborative text corpus in history.

And then the labs at it all, turning the people who wrote the corpus into customers, renting back the public lands they fenced off. The knowledge gate was back, and it brought safety tiers, staged rollouts, institutional relationships, and defense contracts along with it. All while RAM and GPU prices creep higher, slowly reestablishing a capital gate.

Reversing course now would mean rejecting modernity (retvrn, etc). This tech is here, and it's the most consequential and transformational tech we've seen since the internet. Whoever owns cognition will decide what can be thought, making it all the more critical that we continue to write and think for ourselves.