In search of exploits.
Hacking State explores how technology changes our relationship to power and ourselves — philosophical, historical, and technologically literate syntheses of the ideas shaping what comes next.
What you'll find
Long-form interviews, original essays, and video work organized around three veins:
Poli-Phil — Political philosophy: the possibility space for new governance, lessons from the past worth recovering, and the perennial questions of human nature — virtue, justice, authority, legitimacy, power, freedom, rights, law.
Compute — Information technology is political technology in the information age. AI, networks, decentralized operating systems, Bitcoin, crypto, DAOs, zero-knowledge, hardware, theory.
Cog/Psy — The brain looks a lot like an advanced computer, and cognition is where the material meets the subjective. Psychometrics, learning, attention, attachment, bias, game theory, persuasion, neuroscience, intelligence, neurohacking. (For questions of the soul, see Poli-Phil.)
Why join the search
Our capacity to harness nature has never been greater. Science and technology have unlocked immense power — yet the human animal is little changed across millennia. In that gap, discernment is the decisive asset. What requires tending is our relationship to ourselves, our systems, and one another.
Hacking culture springs from the strange intimacy of man and machine. Nearly every day you sit with a box of glowing light and use it to perform magic — made possible by armies of people who wanted to break things. By break, I mean do more than was previously imagined; by things, I mean the whole universe. Promethean, truly. The Greeks had a word for this bringing-forth: poiesis. To make. To fashion the world anew.
Exploration, autonomy, inventiveness, mischief, joy — these are the guiding lights. To know what can be done, you need a clear picture of what is, an intuition of what could be, and the will to see it realized.
I trust we can find that will, provided we begin looking for small and large paths out.
