We have to have clear minds in order to have clear goals.
This was originally a Lunarpunk Manifesto, however upon deeper thought it became clear that the focus on technology shunted the responsibility of self-reflection away entirely. All "-punks" will fail if the individuals involved are compromised intellectually by any invisible forms of conditioning. We have to "sharpen the saw before cutting the tree", in other words hone the most basic tool of our mind, or we risk building new systems with the same unrecognized defects as the old.
This draft will remain, as it largely reflects a Lunarpunk philosophy, however it will be continued in the future at A Lunarmonk Manifesto.
"CHEESE!"1
At the zenith of your work you and your collaborators have been jailed on charges of practicing applied utopics2. The promise of peace and prosperity for so many in desperate need has been postponed another orbit. Thankfully, the gravity of this movement is greater than its mass of people and ideals. From wells to windmills, cash to communication channels, your tools are open source, permissionless, decentralized and incorruptible in a way our individual identities could never be.
You must defend your future if you expect to have any. You must grow a canopy to eclipse the coercive rays of power, money, violence, mindless consumption, a race to the bottom, a new game with which to supplant the competition whose prize is the most lavish death. You build with cryptography, distributed networks, sustainable infrastructure, open-source code, from biotechnology to synthetic intelligences. You build against corruption in the form of both deliberate attacks and accidental catastrophes.
You build defensively. A defensive system is not a hostile system. A defensive system empowers individuals and communities to maintain autonomy when desired and only when desired. Neither its ends or means are objectively criminal. Your aim is not to topple or break, but to build systems so resiliently antifragile that they inevitably supersede the status quo. Your purpose is not mere survival, nor simply to reclaim your autonomy, but regeneration, not just to protect but to accelerate the flourishing of free societies in an uncertain world. Together we write contracts, in the open so that they can deceive no one, least of all yourself, to be signed or not of your own volition.
However, you are ambassador of the very oppression you seek to obsolesce. Seeds were planted in fortified hothouses well before this tide began to rise; buried and watered by generations of instigators in the forms of social norms, by subtle and explicit jingles and slogans meant to chip away at your free will. Ignorant yeoman, you have invited them in; your own mind sells you out, carefully domesticated by your enemies to suit their cultivation. You fight isolating, illusory, entropic battles against ephemeral shadows in the war for priceless mindshare.
Lunarpunks build, but it is becoming uncomfortably clear that you don't know what you're building. The task of AI alignment has only placed a dark mirror before you; you do not recognize yourself. You are a haphazard accretion, carelessly consolidated stardust, dissolving as quickly as you coalesce. You peer dimly, through splintered lenses colored by myriad unnoticed tints; others' additive spectra clash, blinding everyone in twilight ignorance. You speak past one another, muffled shouts from vain and stilted escarpments jutting from unsteady faults. Your success extends only so far as the cooperation of your fellows in society, aims aligned like polarized light dancing on the gossamer surface of a solar sail.3 Genuflected boughs veil starlight; how can you find them when you are a stranger unto yourself? You risk laying only dimly lit dead ends paved with the rubble of naive hope for a future you don't know at all. You can seek only a toy moon.4
The future is bright but the forest is dark and dawn is further than you alone are capable of reaching. You must work with others so that your tools, your ethos, your love, your compassion, your imagination might precede you. Who are you?
Inward.
1: English-language instruction used by photographers who want their subject or subjects to smile with their lips apart and teeth showing. Also the moon is made of cheese.
2: Utopics: as in the study/practice of utopia.
3: Light waves normally vibrate in all directions perpendicular to their path. Polarized light waves vibrate in one specific direction. The moon naturally polarizes light. See here.
4: “Thou dost seek to walk where no path is, thou dost seek a toy moon…” from a Buddhist parable about desiring the impossible.
The prose above borrows heavily from Eric Hughes' Cypherpunk Manifesto.
Thank you to all who have provided invaluable feedback.
"CHEESE!"1
At the zenith of your work you and your collaborators have been jailed on charges of practicing applied utopics2. The promise of peace and prosperity for so many in desperate need has been postponed another orbit. Thankfully, the gravity of this movement is greater than its mass of people and ideals. From wells to windmills, cash to communication channels, your tools are open source, permissionless, decentralized and incorruptible in a way our individual identities could never be.
You must defend your future if you expect to have any. You must grow a canopy to eclipse the coercive rays of power, money, violence, mindless consumption, a race to the bottom, a new game with which to supplant the competition whose prize is the most lavish death. You build with cryptography, distributed networks, sustainable infrastructure, open-source code, from biotechnology to synthetic intelligences. You build against corruption in the form of both deliberate attacks and accidental catastrophes.
You build defensively. A defensive system is not a hostile system. A defensive system empowers individuals and communities to maintain autonomy when desired and only when desired. Neither its ends or means are objectively criminal. Your aim is not to topple or break, but to build systems so resiliently antifragile that they inevitably supersede the status quo. Your purpose is not mere survival, nor simply to reclaim your autonomy, but regeneration, not just to protect but to accelerate the flourishing of free societies in an uncertain world. Together we write contracts, in the open so that they can deceive no one, least of all yourself, to be signed or not of your own volition.
However, you are ambassador of the very oppression you seek to obsolesce. Seeds were planted in fortified hothouses well before this tide began to rise; buried and watered by generations of instigators in the forms of social norms, by subtle and explicit jingles and slogans meant to chip away at your free will. Ignorant yeoman, you have invited them in; your own mind sells you out, carefully domesticated by your enemies to suit their cultivation. You fight isolating, illusory, entropic battles against ephemeral shadows in the war for priceless mindshare.
Lunarpunks build, but it is becoming uncomfortably clear that you don't know what you're building. The task of AI alignment has only placed a dark mirror before you; you do not recognize yourself. You are a haphazard accretion, carelessly consolidated stardust, dissolving as quickly as you coalesce. You peer dimly, through splintered lenses colored by myriad unnoticed tints; others' additive spectra clash, blinding everyone in twilight ignorance. You speak past one another, muffled shouts from vain and stilted escarpments jutting from unsteady faults. Your success extends only so far as the cooperation of your fellows in society, aims aligned like polarized light dancing on the gossamer surface of a solar sail.3 Genuflected boughs veil starlight; how can you find them when you are a stranger unto yourself? You risk laying only dimly lit dead ends paved with the rubble of naive hope for a future you don't know at all. You can seek only a toy moon.4
The future is bright but the forest is dark and dawn is further than you alone are capable of reaching. You must work with others so that your tools, your ethos, your love, your compassion, your imagination might precede you. Who are you?
Inward.
1: English-language instruction used by photographers who want their subject or subjects to smile with their lips apart and teeth showing. Also the moon is made of cheese.
2: Utopics: as in the study/practice of utopia.
3: Light waves normally vibrate in all directions perpendicular to their path. Polarized light waves vibrate in one specific direction. The moon naturally polarizes light. See here.
4: “Thou dost seek to walk where no path is, thou dost seek a toy moon…” from a Buddhist parable about desiring the impossible.
## Feedback requested Telegram @b0yeu or signal b0y.01 # A Draft "CHEESE!"1 At the zenith of your work you and your collaborators have been jailed on charges of practicing applied utopics2. The promise of peace and prosperity for so many in desperate need has been postponed another orbit. Thankfully, the gravity of this movement is greater than its mass of people and ideals. From wells to windmills, cash to communication channels, your tools are open source, permissionless, decentralized and incorruptible in a way our individual identities could never be. You must defend your future if you expect to have any. You must grow a canopy to eclipse the coercive rays of power, money, violence, mindless consumption, a race to the bottom, a new game with which to supplant the competition whose prize is the most lavish death. You build with cryptography, distributed networks, sustainable infrastructure, open-source code, from biotechnology to synthetic intelligences. You build against corruption in the form of both deliberate attacks and accidental catastrophes. You build defensively. A defensive system is not a hostile system. A defensive system empowers individuals and communities to maintain autonomy when desired and only when desired. Neither its ends or means are objectively criminal. Your aim is not to topple or break, but to build systems so resiliently antifragile that they inevitably supersede the status quo. Your purpose is not mere survival, nor simply to reclaim your autonomy, but regeneration, not just to protect but to accelerate the flourishing of free societies in an uncertain world. Together we write contracts, in the open so that they can deceive no one, least of all yourself, to be signed or not of your own volition. However, you are ambassador of the very oppression you seek to obsolesce. Seeds were planted in fortified hothouses well before this tide began to rise; buried and watered by generations of instigators in the forms of social norms, by subtle and explicit jingles and slogans meant to chip away at your free will. Ignorant yeoman, you have invited them in; your own mind sells you out, carefully domesticated by your enemies to suit their cultivation. You fight isolating, illusory, entropic battles against ephemeral shadows in the war for priceless mindshare. Lunarmonks build, but it is becoming uncomfortably clear that you don't know what you're building. The task of AI alignment has only placed a dark mirror before you; you do not recognize yourself. You are a haphazard accretion, carelessly consolidated stardust, dissolving as quickly as you coalesce. You peer dimly, through splintered lenses colored by myriad unnoticed tints; others' additive spectra clash, blinding everyone in twilight ignorance. You speak past one another, muffled shouts from vain and stilted escarpments jutting from unsteady faults. Your success extends only so far as the cooperation of your fellows in society, aims aligned like polarized light dancing on the gossamer surface of a solar sail.3 Genuflected boughs veil starlight; how can you find them when you are a stranger unto yourself? You risk paving only dimly lit dead ends with the rubble of naive hope for a future you don't know at all. You can seek only a toy moon.4 The future is bright but the forest is dark and dawn is further than you alone are capable of reaching. You must work with others so that your tools, your ethos, your love, your compassion, your imagination might precede you. Who are you? Inward. ## Footnotes 1: English-language instruction used by photographers who want their subject or subjects to smile with their lips apart and teeth showing. Also the moon is made of cheese. 2: Utopics: as in the study/practice of utopia. 3: Light waves normally vibrate in all directions perpendicular to their path. Polarized light waves vibrate in one specific direction. The moon naturally polarizes light. See [here.](https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/6928#t=aboutBook) 4: “Thou dost seek to walk where no path is, thou dost seek a toy moon…” from a Buddhist parable about desiring the impossible. ## Notes The prose above borrows heavily from Eric Hughes' Cypherpunk Manifesto. Thank you to all who have provided invaluable feedback. ### Lunarpunk vs Lunarmonk This was originally a Lunarpunk Manifesto, however upon deeper thought it became clear that the focus on technology shunted the responsibility of self-reflection. All "-punks" will fail if the individuals involved are compromised intellectually by any invisible forms of conditioning. We have to "sharpen the saw before cutting the tree" or we risk building a new system with the same unrecognized defects as the old. In other words we have to have clear minds in order to have clear goals. ## Edits - Re: “peace and [prosperity](https://read.kernel.community/en/learn/module-metta/start-small/#prosperous-lies)” - Re: [AI Alignment](https://read.kernel.community/en/learn/module-6/participate/) - Something about lunarpunks have to create the maps, the roads, and the vehicles. - Some imagery of an archipelago, navigating it, bridging them ### Earlier Iterations #### v0.1 "CHEESE!"1 At the zenith of your work you and your collaborators have been jailed on charges of practicing applied utopics2. The promise of peace and prosperity for so many in desperate need has been postponed another orbit. Thankfully, the gravity of this movement is greater than its mass of people and ideals. From wells to windmills, cash to communication channels, your tools are open source, permissionless, decentralized and incorruptible in a way our individual identities could never be. You must defend your future if you expect to have any. You must grow a canopy to eclipse the coercive rays of power, money, violence, mindless consumption, a race to the bottom, a new game with which to supplant the competition whose prize is the most lavish death. You build with cryptography, distributed networks, sustainable infrastructure, open-source code, from biotechnology to synthetic intelligences. You build against corruption in the form of both deliberate attacks and accidental catastrophes. You build defensively. A defensive system is not a hostile system. A defensive system empowers individuals and communities to maintain autonomy when desired and only when desired. Neither its ends or means are objectively criminal. Your aim is not to topple or break, but to build systems so resiliently antifragile that they inevitably supersede the status quo. Your purpose is not mere survival, nor simply to reclaim your autonomy, but regeneration, not just to protect but to accelerate the flourishing of free societies in an uncertain world. Together we write contracts, in the open so that they can deceive no one, least of all yourself, to be signed or not of your own volition. However, you are ambassador of the very oppression you seek to obsolesce. Seeds were planted in fortified hothouses well before this tide began to rise; buried and watered by generations of instigators in the forms of social norms, by subtle and explicit jingles and slogans meant to chip away at your free will. Ignorant yeoman, you have invited them in; your own mind sells you out, carefully domesticated by your enemies to suit their cultivation. You fight isolating, illusory, entropic battles against ephemeral shadows in the war for priceless mindshare. Lunarpunks build, but it is becoming uncomfortably clear that you don't know what you're building. The task of AI alignment has only placed a dark mirror before you; you do not recognize yourself. You are a haphazard accretion, carelessly consolidated stardust, dissolving as quickly as you coalesce. You peer dimly, through splintered lenses colored by myriad unnoticed tints; others' additive spectra clash, blinding everyone in twilight ignorance. You speak past one another, muffled shouts from vain and stilted escarpments jutting from unsteady faults. Your success extends only so far as the cooperation of your fellows in society, aims aligned like polarized light dancing on the gossamer surface of a solar sail.3 Genuflected boughs veil starlight; how can you find them when you are a stranger unto yourself? You risk laying only dimly lit dead ends paved with the rubble of naive hope for a future you don't know at all. You can seek only a toy moon.4 The future is bright but the forest is dark and dawn is further than you alone are capable of reaching. You must work with others so that your tools, your ethos, your love, your compassion, your imagination might precede you. Who are you? Inward. 1: English-language instruction used by photographers who want their subject or subjects to smile with their lips apart and teeth showing. Also the moon is made of cheese. 2: Utopics: as in the study/practice of utopia. 3: Light waves normally vibrate in all directions perpendicular to their path. Polarized light waves vibrate in one specific direction. The moon naturally polarizes light. See [here.](https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/6928#t=aboutBook) 4: “Thou dost seek to walk where no path is, thou dost seek a toy moon…” from a Buddhist parable about desiring the impossible.