What is Technical Personae?
A brief introduction
Now that I’ve cleared my throat, so to speak, I want to take a second to explain what this project is about, and what it’s not. This isn’t the grand-tour world building essay I promised previously. The world building essay is still simmering, resting on the stove. It would be very much like me not to finish it, so we’ll have to see if it ever reaches the light of day. For now, you get the Cliff’s Notes. Trust me, it’s probably better that way.
The meaning of Technical Personae can be explained in three artifacts. The reason I must defer to artwork to explain this to you is a result of the haste in which this project was formulated. You whip things together that feel right, hoping they will be right, and for complicated psychological reasons that I don’t quite understand, often this turns out to be true. The brain knows things the mind doesn’t, etc. And among them is the subliminal knowledge of what’s really at stake.
The first object is the image on the poster.
Many of you will recognize the gentleman on the right. That’s Elon Musk. I’m sorry I had to put him on my poster, but I did. You will understand why in a minute.
The other person is Archimedes—known, among other things, for his theory of the lever. You know the one? With a lever big enough, you can move the entire world. That’s his idea.
Archimedes is also known as the first person to shout ‘Eureka!’ after discovering that, if he lay down in a filled bathtub, the amount of liquid that would spill over would be equal to the volume of his body (also known as displacement). He’s also known for being an all-around badass inventor, scholar, and mathematician, who supposedly designed a solar death ray to burn down Roman ships during the Siege of Syracuse (c. 213–212 BC).
The idea of putting these two people—or personae, if you will—on the poster, is to both invoke the lever idea, and to signal that Elon Musk, more than any other person on this planet, is best positioned to press it.
And press he will.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that the sole focus of this blog is to convince Elon Musk to stop being such an asshole (though that would be a worthy cause). The idea is to think about the world through the prism of levers—the technologies, economics, social systems, architectures, politics, most capable of really making an impact, really helping us escape from the shitstorm that we find ourselves in.
One conceit of this blog is that, whether we like it or not, technology is going to be central to that effort, so we might as well get familiar with it. Learn to engage with its mechanics as we would any system of equal majesty. Any sufficiently complex technology is indiscernible from magic, as the expression goes. This blog takes that idea very seriously and refuses to be dismissive about it—or the people that build it—because that kind of gesture is stupid.
The second artifact is the previous name for this blog. The name was never used, but I think it helps explain an important part of the conceptual equation.
Technestack. The word is a portmanteau of two ideas. The first comes from the original Greek word for technology—techne—which, to people like Aristotle, was not just about hard stuff like ship building and medicine and military tactics. It was also about the arts: flute playing, dance, carpentry, painting, running a household.
The Greek’s understood techne, and the world of objects that stemmed from it, as the application of “practical knowledge.” There was no distinction between the creations of the arts and the creations of ‘science’. Techne was often used interchangeably with the word ‘episteme,’ meaning the pursuit of truth through reasoning and logic. It was part of a triad of concepts that, together, described how Aristotle thought knowledge should be approached: techne, episteme, and phronesis, meaning ethics.
The other word—stack—means a number of things, the most obvious of which is that this blog is hosted on Substack.
The sense in which I really mean it, though, is taken from Benjamin Bratton’s 2015 opus, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, about the new geopolitics resulting from the rise of planetary-scale computation.
Bratton is a complicated thinker, and his work is sometimes impenetrable. But The Stack describes—better, I think, than any other work of tech philosophy—the nature of the transition that we are experiencing.
The basic thesis is this: The computing systems currently wrapping the globe—from the cable networks running beneath the ocean to the rare earth mines in Mongolia finding material for our iPhones to the data centers floating in international waters and the media protocols that organize our social lives—are best understood as nodes in a budding megastructure. A global, multi-layered artifice that’s growing spontaneously, quasi-consciously, in pursuit of its own growth and power, by individuals and networks without a point of centralized control.
The governance part of the equation is that this computational system is disrupting the politics we’ve come to accept as standard—most notably, the Westphalian nation-state. This process will happen whether or not we’re prepared, the Stack argues, and it will slowly integrate each layer of society into its orbit, from the design of cities to the tools we use to ‘sense’ shifts in global temperature, to the ways we, as individuals, are ‘addressed’ within the system—ie. recognized as human agents, or in the case of AIs, non-human agents.
The point of inspiration is that instead of viewing technology as a process led by humans and their follies alone, the Stack is an invitation to think about how technology drives us, shapes us. It implies a search for language to describe the shifts that are taking place—and a desire to engage with questions of what this could mean. Sometimes that will mean asking stupid questions, sometimes it will mean travelling to places where the fractures are beginning to show. I plan to use this blog as a starting place for a coming book project, so IRL reporting will definitely make its way in.
The third artifact is a book. It’s a book you might be familiar with, one you might have strong feelings towards. That’s Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia, the edgelord professor known for pissing off basically everyone that crosses her path.
I don’t want to belabor the connection between Paglia’s project and my own. And I should state clearly that being inspired by aspects of her work is not an endorsement of everything she has to say.
But I do think that Sexual Personae is a useful key for getting inside modern criticism of the state, and corporations, and technology. And I mean that in two primary ways.
The first is that, on a basic level, technology (and art) are created by humans—humans whose thoughts, relationships, and politics are dominated by personality, whose conventions are best thought about as personae (or “masks”), worn especially by those with power.
So the reference to Paglia is a commitment to studying these new masks with older tools. Asking what lies behind the domineering sociopathy of CEOs, the femme fatales we see in films, the radical memelords we see on the internet, the sexual proclivities that shape our norms of reproduction.
The second connection is a commitment to meeting people as people. Taking them seriously, at their word, and attempting to understand what’s really driving the proliferation of radicalism. This work is particularly important, I think, given the recent shifts in American political culture—the rise of a new Trumpian Yarvin-esque regime, the return of what Fukuyama once triumphantly called history.
This commitment to fair treatment was the driving force behind my work in Prospera, and it’s a lens I aim to bring with me wherever I go next, whether it’s Taiwan or Dubai, or the Lower East Side.
When asked about the framing device for Sexual Personae, Paglia said it was a project that aimed to “please nobody, and anger everybody.” I’m not nearly as hostile as Paglia, nor as radical. But I’m driven by a commitment to see the world in all its startling complexity, ugliness, brutality, and majesty. Sometimes that will mean speaking to people that I’m not supposed to, for reasons that might seem suspect.
Technical Personae is about walking this tightrope knowing the juice was worth the squeeze.