Constructive Criticism

Hyperbolic geometry exercises

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:55:31 -0700

Just wanted to write up some solutions to problems in hyperbolic geometry as practice. Here is one.

Proposition. An isometry of the upper half-space model whose only fixed point is $\infty$ has the form $(x, t) \mapsto (Ax + b, t)$ for some $A \in O(n-1), b \in \mathbb{R}^{n-1}$. More generally, any isometry with a single fixed point on the boundary fixes each horosphere setwise, and acts via a Euclidean isometry.

How to have the computer draw for you (without AI)

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:55:31 -0700

I am a lazy artist. For example, for a recent piece, I wanted a curvy set of train tracks, like this:

But I wanted to be able to see what the whole curve would look like without having to paintstakingly draw each of the little tracks.

So, I wrote a little application which would let me draw a stroke on my iPad, and automatically draw a set of train tracks along it.

How to make a call tree that still works when people flake

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 10:01:58 +0530

I believe techniques from math and science are able to help us produce stronger organizations (if the educational and political barriers can be worked through).

If this is true, we should probably be able to come up with at least one concrete example today. Here is a very modest example.

A good system for alerting or mobilizing people is a call tree. The person instigating the alert calls $d$ people to communicate the message to them. Each of these people in turn has a list of $d$ people they are responsible for calling, and on it goes.

Capital in Transit

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 03:09:34 +0530

This is a piece I made recently titled In Transit.

It depicts paths, which each transition from random motion to a regular spiral motion as the letters along the path grow.

It is a generative piece, meaning it comes from the execution of a computer program I wrote. You can play with that program here to create similar images. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom.

I recommend playing with the “iterations” slider to see how the path evolves over time.

Contradiction

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 03:09:34 +0530

Mao wrote

The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics… The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes.

Math is about managing your emotions

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 03:09:34 +0530

Recently I have been doing some math again. Mostly exercises for a class I’m auditing on combinatorial limits.

One thing I forgot about math is how most of the time spent doing math is spent feeling very frustrated: why can’t I get this problem? I’m an idiot. Come on, get it! Etc.

All the while, your brain is working through the problem somewhere on the boundary between consciousness and unconscious thought.

Badiou in the world

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 03:01:58 +0530

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In his book Logics of Worlds, Badiou gives a formal mathematical definition of a “world”, but does not construct a single concrete example. In this note, I give a concrete example in which the objects of the world are materially-embedded stochastic processes (i.e., stateful processes unfolding over time in the universe).

This construction has the property that one does not have to specify the transcendental or identity values explicitly, but instead can actually calculate the values starting from an explicit definition of an object. Moreover, its multiplicities are transparently the sort of things we encounter in the world: material processes evolving over time according to some logic.

Prints of late

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 02:01:58 +0530

A few more prints I’ve done recently. Here are some Risograph prints I made in 2023 and the first half of 2024. Apologies for the photos being a bit dim.

Posters for a Seeing Red talk.

A map to the afterparty.

For a friend's wedding.

Poster/flyer for a Capital reading group.

A short piece of music

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 02:01:58 +0530

Here is a short piece of music I wrote this afternoon. It ends a bit early but I had to get going. Enjoy.

More organic cave automata

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 10:09:00 -0700

Happy New Year!

There is a well-known cellular-automaton based method for generating images that look like caves.

Each cell is either “empty” or a “wall”. The rule is: if the immediate 9x9 grid centered on a cell has 5 or more walls, that cell should be a wall in the next step. Otherwise, it should be empty.

If you initialize the grid randomly with some density, you can get cavelike patterns.

The Sacrifice

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 19:09:00 -0700

Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice” is an incredible film. The film successfully captures a shred of the absolute: the truth of the unending process of living and dying. A central image of the film – a dead tree over the ocean – captures the idea: the flow of the unitary reality interrupted by the crystallized individual form which necessarily mediates experience of that unitary reality.

If a gift isn’t a sacrifice, it isn’t much of a gift. Just so with life: we can only experience it by our having undergone separation from the whole, relinquishing the comfort of absolute acceptance and union.

Hyperbolic Geometry, Berkeley Math Circle

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:27:38 -0800

These are my notes from a class at the Berkeley Math Circle on October 31rd, 2024. You can find an accompanying handout here.

Today we’re going to be talking about hyperbolic geometry.

But before we talk about that, first we have to talk about geometry. Ordinary geometry takes place on an infinite flat plane, like the whiteboard. We call this thing the Euclidean plane, after Euclid who was a Greek guy who developed geometry pretty extensively.

Zero Knowledege Proofs, Berkeley Math Circle

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 11:27:38 -0800

These are my notes from a class at the Berkeley Math Circle on October 23rd, 2024. You can find an accompanying handout here.

Today we’ll be talking about spies and secret messages and the question of what it is possible to know.

A quote from the Soviet mathematician VI Arnold:

All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and by other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA.).

I renamed the blog again

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 03:27:38 -0800

I renamed the blog again. Now it’s called “Reason in Revolt”, which is a lyric from an English version of the Internationale. It’s available at reasoninrevolt.net. All the old URLs still work.

A Mark-Shaped Hole

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 02:01:58 +0530

Tonight I went to the Acquired podcast live show. Acquired’s tagline is “Every company has a story: Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.”

The show opened with a shticky video feed showing the two hosts, Ben and David, backstage. Ben had forgotten to bring the mp3 of the theme song to kick off the night. He assuaged David, “the people here at the Chase Center are really great, I’m sure they’ll figure something out.”

What is computation?

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 10:01:58 +0530

Laputa, from Gulliver's Travels. Home of the hopelessly rational people who "If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms."

What is computation? Most would say it has something to do with the internet, with adding up numbers, with AI image manipulation. They might think it was something invented by the military to crack codes, or by tech companies to commodify our data.

What is human nature?

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 10:01:58 +0530

In the ant community, each worker performs its proper functions. There may be a separate caste of soldiers. Certain highly specialized individuals perform the functions of king and queen. If man were to adopt this community as a pattern, he would live in a fascist state, in which ideally each individual is conditioned from birth for his proper occupation: in which rulers are perpetually rulers, soldiers perpetually soldiers, the peasant is never more than a peasant, and the worker is doomed to be a worker.

Why are ideas from computer science absent from Marxist discourse?

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 02:01:58 +0530

The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps

— Grothendieck, in a 1982 letter to Ronald Brown

Computer science is the study of precisely-specified discrete¹ processes, their capabilities and limits. Such processes are called algorithms.

Algorithms can be implemented on the devices we call computers, but the conclusions of computer science are equally applicable to Euclid’s constructions on wax tablets. The basic model for what constitutes an ”algorithm” is a mathematical object called a “Turing machine”, although there are many extensions of the basic object that give them additional powers: the ability to use randomness, parallelism, embeddedness in space (cellular automata), quantum resources.

Brief critique on the species of utilitarianism found in Bay Area "rationalists"

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 12:37:58 -0700

There is an intellectual movement called “rationality” which, if one has any connection to the tech world, is difficult to avoid in the Bay Area. Closely related is “effective altruism”, which is the rationalist philosophy applied to ethics and the question of what is to be done.

From an intellectual perspective, there is nothing very interesting here. It is a fresh coat of paint on a 400 year-old metaphysics, a 250 year-old epistemology, and a 300 year-old moral philosophy.

Prints! 2023–2024

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:35:58 -0700

Here are some Risograph prints I made in 2023 and the first half of 2024. Apologies for the photos being a bit dim.

This is a riff on a NIMBY slogan.

This is a tree in Warsaw.

For the TANC trip to Cuba.

To raise money for the TANC trip to Cuba.

Booklet for an unfinished art project (currently being resurrected).

For a protest against APEC.

For a protest against Berkeley landlords' celebration of the eviction moratorium's end. As seen in the New York Post.

An unedited photograph taken from an airplane somewhere in the west.

A reproduction of an old soviet print.

My Haggadah.

A pamphlet on coops as an instrument in class-struggle

The exponential accumulation of capital.

For Seeing Red

For the EBDSA library.

A vision for bathing in the Bay

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 12:37:58 -0700

Bathing is fun

Bathing is already a popular pastime in the bay: from Archimedes Banya to Good Hot to the (sadly gone) Essex tub.

It’s a good time and people know it!

Bathing provides us with a slice of the good life. At its best it is spiritual, sensual, social, and an immense aesthetic pleasure.

The sauna I designed and had built for me and my neighbors.

Bathing is also cheap

Ignoring land costs for a moment, it can also be quite cheap. As an example, building a top-of-the-line 6-person sauna can be done for about \$20,000, and at current electricity costs of about \$0.468 / kWh costs \$3.75 to run for one hour. The ongoing labor requirements are minimal: let’s say about 1 hour of cleaning every two weeks (assuming it’s getting very heavy use) which can be performed by the users.

Projects we could work on

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 21:37:58 +0530

This is a list of projects I am seeking collaborators on. Please get in touch if you are interested in collaborating on any of them. Email or text me if you know how, otherwise leave a comment.

Proletarian user-run saunas throughout the East Bay
Modern mathematical foundations of Marxism. This is a project with 2 main goals: (1) distilling Marxism to its logical essentials to make its communication and use by communists more effective, and (2) to provide the basis for research into alternative modes of organization to complement real-world experimentation.
Class-struggle cooperatives or much more speculatively “virtual communes”. If you’re interested in starting a project that relates to either idea, please let me know.
A “red” haggadah. Let me know if you are interested in expanding this, helping to publish, or promulgate it.
Forming a klezmer band. I play violin.
Anything related to Yiddish (conversation group, podcasting, translating, etc.)
Making risograph prints

Imperfect abstractions: On "Software in the natural world"

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 02:01:58 +0530

There is an interesting paper from earlier this month called “Software in the natural world: A computational approach to hierarchical emergence” by Rosas, Geiger, Luppi, Seth, Polani, Gastapar, and Mediano.

They are attempting to formalize the phenomenon of processes which possess their own logic, despite being “actually” implemented in terms of a more fundamental micro-scale logic.

For example, computers can be understood as behaving as if they are driven by the programs they run rather than the physics of the atoms that make them up.

Read a book with me

Wed, 29 May 2024 02:01:58 +0530

I added a page to the site of books I am reading, have read, or want to read. If you’re interested in reading or discussing any of them with me please get in touch.

"Seeing Red" intro speech

Mon, 06 May 2024 09:01:58 -0700

This past Saturday (May 4th) we held the first event in a new series called “Seeing Red”. I opened the event with a speech describing the aim of the series. This speech is reproduced below, unfortunately absent all the ad-libbed comments and jokes I made in person.

Seeing Red is a new lecture series for building towards a non-denominational small c communist public culture in the bay: We will be bringing in thinkers that we think our movements can learn from, and who we think have something to learn from us.

Red Seder Haggadah

Mon, 06 May 2024 08:01:58 -0700

This Pesach, I helped organize a Seder for lefty Jews. For this we wrote a haggadah, which focuses on the actual history of the Jews with an eye toward understanding the phenomenon of Zionism.

You can find the whole haggadah here.

Below I have reproduced the short history which appears in the passover story section of the haggadah.

Where did we come from?

Judaism originated as the religion of a group of people ruled by the Kingdom of Judah in 1200 BCE, a little over 3000 years ago. At that time, it was mainly focused on worship led by a class of priests at the temple in Jerusalem.

Read a book with me

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 21:37:58 +0530

Please let me know if you are interested in reading or discussing any of these books with me. Bold ones I am currently reading. Italic ones I have read but am still interested in discussing.

The Entropy of Capitalism (Biel)
Brecht on Theatre (Brecht)
What is Art? (Tolstoy)
The Aesthetic Dimension (Marcuse)
Imagined Communities (Anderson)
Mute Compulsion (Mau)
Bolivia Beyond the Impasse (Hardt and Mezzadra)
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer)
Sheaves in Geometry and Logic (Mac Lane and Moerdijk)

Concise definitions of dialectical & historical materialsm

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 11:27:38 -0800

Dialectical materialism is the philosophical foundation of Marxism, and historical materialism is its scientific foundation. Both concepts are thus very important for communists¹ to understand. Their claims are relatively uncontroversial in isolation, but they have radical implications.

Dialectical materialism

Let’s start with dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism consists of the following claims about reality and how we should talk about it:

Realism
Time-dependence
Materialism
Temporariness

Let’s define each of these in turn.

Mondragón 1: More an island of kinder capitalism, than an aircraft carrier for communism

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 03:27:38 -0800

Mondragón is a famous complex of cooperatives, primarily based in the Basque country. It has been widely acclaimed for providing stable employment to tens of thousands, a degree of internal democracy, and maintaining growth better than the national average for decades.

Mondragón is, so far, sui generis in the capitalist world. For a communist, the key question in evaluating this odd duck is: how can we understand Mondragón from the point of view of the class struggle and the movement toward communism?

Poem: Blenders

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 15:12:58 -0700

Poetry flows from the fingertips like threads of silk
Birds have nests and spiders webs
And humans friendships.
But webs too. And nests come to think of it.

Looking a little closer we see a big blender of some sort.

In goes our friends;
Dead generations;
Our parents;
The leaves in a bright cellophane jumble;
The raindrops on the gardenside window;
Airplanes and cars and baths;
The lumpy mess of mediated words and images and buttons and sliders,
Which we in our gracious way find a place for sometimes in the attic, and sometimes right up front.

Specifying communism: autonomous access to the means of subsistence

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 10:26:58 -0800

Soren Mau’s ‘Mute Compulsion’ does an excellent job of calling attention to the ways that our environment – physical, social, technological – mutely compels us to act in certain ways. If a communist social order is to be robust, it must take advantage of that fact, and etch its social relations into the environment.

One pillar of any communist social order would be permanent and free access to the means of subsistence (MOS): food, water, housing, clothing, at the very least. Such access makes it impossible for one person to be completely dominated. If there is always the option of surviving independently, one cannot be made to do degrading work.

Everybody Knows, but should they?

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:26:58 -0700

To start, two quotes:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied

– Leonard Cohen

and one more:

teachers’ capacity to struggle involves their capacity to challenge their students, from an early to a more adult age, through games, stories, and reading so that students understand the need to create coherence between dis- course and practice: a discourse about the defense of the weak, of the poor, of the homeless, and a practice that favors the haves against the have-nots; a discourse that denies the existence of social classes, their conflicts, and a political practice entirely in favor of the powerful. It does not seem right to me to defend or to simply accept as normal the profound difference that sometimes exists between a candidate’s preelection and postelection positions. It does not seem ethical to me to live this way or to defend this contradiction as acceptable behavior. It is not with these kinds of practices that we foster a vigilant citizenry, which is indispensable to the development of democracy

On the human mode of history (001)

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 09:26:58 -0700

Several interesting properties of the human mode of history:

Humanity has the capacity for surplus labor. I.e., in $N$ hours, a group of humans can act on its environment to procure sufficient material resources to sustain the lives of that group for more than $N$ hours. The surplus labor time is radically unconstrained relative to the non-human environment. Its direction is entirely and solely subject to human decisions.
Some amount of human labor time (whether it is part of the necessary or surplus time may not be exactly clear) is dedicated to the manipulation of the physical environment in ways which constrain future human behavior. Some examples include the construction of roads, schools and media technologies which teach certain patterns of behavior, etc. We may call such accumulation of changes in the environment through labor external technology.
Given that the allocation of surplus labor is directed by the social relations of the given society, it is likely that at least some part of the surplus will be dedicated towards bolstering the durability of those social relations by encoding them materially in the environment. Every known society has done this to some extent. This is what David Graeber and Wengrow cal “getting stuck” in their book The Dawn of Everything.

The accumulation of external technology is completely inevitable historically given the human capacity for surplus labor. This fact on its own completely undermines a simplistic primitivism which argues against technology as such. The technological encoding of social relations Is likewise more or less inevitable, to some degree.

Time After Time

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 08:26:58 -0700

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
– Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto

Communism is the riddle of history solved.
– Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick and think of you
Caught up in circles
Confusion is nothing new…

I’m walking too far ahead
You’re calling to me, I can’t hear
What you’ve said
Then you say, “go slow”
And I fall behind
The second hand unwinds
– Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time"

Book release: "The Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism"

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 08:26:58 -0700

The cover

Announcing a release of an English translation of Marta Harnecker’s Los conceptos fundamentales del materialismo histórico, or The Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism in English. This book has a history as a very important part of the education of Marxists in Latin America.

This is a project I’ve been working on for some months for political education in East Bay DSA, and is now in a “done enough” state to share more broadly.

"Parametricity" is now "It's Dusk Somewhere"

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 02:00:58 +0530

For many years this blog was called Parametricity. I am no longer that interested in type theory, so I am renaming the blog to reflect its new content, which is mostly Marxism. Still it is just the personal blog of me (Izzy Meckler).

Walking Past the Apocalypse: The Material Roots of Anti-Human Philosophy in 2020s San Francisco

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 08:01:58 -0700

Most of us are familiar with the potential discomfort of passing a person begging on the street. Some stop and give some money or food, some stop to say they don’t have cash, most try to avoid eye-contact and walk past.

Such an experience – being confronted with deep suffering and forced to make a choice of if one will help and how – is bound to leave a psychic mark. For the wealthy tech entrepreneurs of San Francisco (and their exploited workers who believe they may one day ascend to the entrepreneur class), the problem is how to square such an experience with one’s own comfort and even more, the utopian, messianic beliefs they have about their own work.

Poem for eternity and the social nature of the human

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 08:01:58 -0700

My words are not mine and yours are not yours
And neither were Shakespeare’s so don’t worry
Echos
Or reverberations
My organ receiving/transforming/transmitting

Who does that beautiful sound belong to?
Me?
Was it the string, or the wooden body of the violin?
Does it belong to Shostakovich?
Or to Jay Haide?
Or mother nature who gave him the wood?
Or was it the worker at the store?
Or Lila?
Or Shostakovich’s mother?

First thoughts on 'Mute Compulsion'

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 11:01:58 -0700

Mute compulsion is a very nice book. So far I’ve read the first few chapters and found it to have one the most accurate and sophisticated description of Marxism I’ve seen written in a single place. It is an understanding of Marxism that many have come to, but only through reading many works. Here it is all in one place.

I have not gotten to the main argument of the book yet, but I’m guessing it will go like this:

The Social-mediafication of Working Class Organizing

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 17:29:00 -0700

Last month, flying over the Atlantic in the throes of an existential crisis brought on by too strong an edible (which I had taken to try to sleep through the flight), I had the following disturbing self-insight, which while stonerish is also true:

Much of the communication for socialist and working class organizing in my context occurs on WhatsApp groups. WhatsApp has an emoji react feature, and I noticed that I had been expectantly checking WhatsApp for “hearts” on my own messages, just as on a typical social-media application.

To face the coming climate crisis, a new vision and a new spirituality

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 19:09:00 -0700

The following is a translation of an article from Caminos (A Cuban journal of socio-theological thought). It was written by José María Vigil, Spanish-Nicaraguan liberation-theologian.

Seeing: The climate catastrophe is approaching, and its cause is human in origin

That we are walking toward a climate catastrophe is, in the context of the current ecological and human crisis, the most scientifically supported opinion.

No one doubts it any longer: climate change has begun, and at a steady pace. Just 10 years ago, the greater part of society denied this reality. Since then, the UN has called together the IPCC, an independent authority, formed by more than 200 scientists from all over the world to study the subject.

Cuba’s Struggle for the Full Dignity of the Human Being

Tue, 30 May 2023 16:49:00 -0700

Housing and the Cuban Revolution

“In the first three years of the revolution, 1959-61, all measures were taken to disarticulate the capitalist system at its base.” This is how Zuleica Romay Guerra – Director of Afroamerican Studies at Casa de las Américas – began her explanation of the Cuban housing system. It was the first full day of activities for the brigade to Cuba attended by myself and four other TANC comrades, along with about 150 other tenant organizers, labor organizers, and left activists from all over the US. The aim of the brigade was to educate and inspire action against the US government’s homicidal sanctions regime against Cuba (known as “the blockade”), which has cost the country over $1 trillion and an unknown number of deaths due to denial of access to medicine and other needed supplies.

Jewishness Abstractly and Concretely

Thu, 18 May 2023 15:10:00 +0200

This is a follow-up to the post “Class and Race”.

This post gives an example of the way ethnic groups can serve as particular instantiations of historical roles which occur abstractly.

Because I am Jewish, I will take the case of Jewishness and antisemitism. From a certain level of abstraction, we can say Jews are not just Jews in their specificity (with the specific Torah, halachas, shabbos, pesach, Yom Kippur and all the rest of it), but are a specific manifestation of a general historical phenomenon which tends to arise in class societies.

Will Socialism End Racism?

Thu, 18 May 2023 15:10:00 +0200

This is a follow-up to the post “Class and Race”.

There is a common, overly-simplistic argument sometimes put forward by Marxists that “socialism” will necessarily entail the elimination of racism. This is sort of true in the sense that eventually a socialist process that ends with the construction of communism (the elimination of all durable privileges) implies that at some point racism will be eliminated. This argument is usually based on the understanding that “race” is just something invented by Capitalists to divide workers.

Class and Race

Thu, 18 May 2023 15:09:00 +0200

This post has two follow-up posts: “Will Socialism End Racism?” and “Jewishness Abstractly and Concretely”.

A friend asked me the others if I believe in the Marxist idea of class above all else. I.e., a class struggle to the exclusion of a women’s struggle, struggle against racism, etc.

This is an answer to that question. My disagreement with the question is that class is not of the same kind as gender, race, etc. That is not to say that one of these things is “better” than the other, they just do not exist at the same level of abstraction. Class is an extreme abstraction of people’s realities – it is a category in a very simple abstract model of society. A class is a position in a schematic description of economic processes.

Skipping past the nasty part

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 13:04:00 -0700

Per Marx and Engels, every closed social order is doomed to one of two fates:

Self-annihilation due to its own internal contradictions.
A change from within which changes the mode of production and thus the class structure.

Change in mode of production is not just something we can decide to do arbitrarily. It is a response of the human organism to changing “enviromental” conditions¹, similar to what occurs in the biological evolution of species.

Breakdown as a law of physics

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 10:48:00 -0700

Crisis is endemic to capitalism, but in fact it is endemic to all organisms (i.e., patterns of matter apparently being driven through time by a logic other than that of matter itself).

This is a fundamental physical principle. The principle is this: every strict subsystem of the universe (given by a state transition logic) eventually decoheres. Let’s call this the breakdown principle.

This applies to systems of all different sorts. From this we conclude:

What is nature?

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 02:51:00 -0800

On one level, there is no real separation between humanity and the rest of the natural world. We are animals, we interact with and exchange energy with other species, etc. Actually, even further, on some level there is no separation between anything at all. Everything is just a local variation in the fields that constitute reality.

But on a practical level, we help us draw distinctions so that we can create understandings of the world that help us act.

Punting on the core contradictions

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 10:51:00 -0800

Capital has two core contradictions, or incompatibilities, with the world it exists within:

The contradiction with human nature: the class divide which sees some exploited, made to suffer, deprived materially and spiritually of their natural human right to autonomy; others drowning in spoils but experiencing (consciously as guilt, or subconsciously as rage or self-righteousness) the cruelty which their comfort is built upon. Moreover, across all classes, the 24/7 logic of market imperative creates a pervasive feeling of precarity and anxiety. We can call this human pain generated by capitalism, alienation.
The contradiction with non-human nature: the exponential growth pattern of capital results in a commensurate exponentially growing extraction from nature, or dumping of waste into nature. In either case, an exponentially increasing divergence from our biosphere’s expected condition.

Another way of putting it is that Capital (as a model of reality) has a large “error term” with real reality, and this error term can be decomposed as the combination of the above two terms.

Life on the Virtual Commune

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 18:51:00 -0800

The following is written as a sort of near future sci-fi short story, to illustrate life in a virtual commune.

Today marks my one year anniversary as a member of PUNCH (“People’s Union for Networked Communism in the Here-and-Now”, aka “Unión Popular Hipervinculada para Oberismo Realizado” or UPHORea — the org is bilingual).

I’ve already passed my Poli Ed and cyber-literacy tests¹, so I finally have full rights as a member of the Commune.

Class Struggle Voltron: Let's invent new organizational forms

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 10:51:00 -0800

This post proposes a new organizational form called a “virtual commune”. If you want to jump right into what that form could look like in practice, check out this post. The following is an analysis that leads to that form and explains it generally.

“Power comes only from the organized masses.”

– Kwame Ture

Volton is a robot made up of smaller robots, each of which is piloted by a person. The fleshy bodies of the Voltron pilots are weak, but once they encase themselves in technological exoskeletons, which then fit together into a single robot body, they are capable of amazing things (I assume – I have never seen Voltron).

Theorem on co-option

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 10:26:58 -0800

This is just a short note on the idea of “base vs superstructure”. The distinction is often made in Marxism between the economic base and the “superstructure”, which are the “non-economic” forms of life. Now personally I find this model overly simplistic, and prefer the 7 coordinates model where we can talk about the ways that different aspects of society are in relation with each other.

But I think what people usually actually use the model for is an important conclusion, which is valid also in the 7 coordinates perspective. The conclusion is this:

The Communist Hypothesis (poem)

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 21:08:00 -0800

I threw a leaf in the stream.
After smoothly travelling downstream a little,
It gets stuck against a rock.
I stood watching that leaf, and then:
Another one, smaller, on a slightly different trajectory,
Flew right by it.

Did the new leaf fall in on its own?
Or maybe someone else threw it in upstream
Further back and out of sight.

Towards making correct decisions: Against moralism

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 10:01:00 -0700

Moralism is a certain pattern of thinking (and an accompanying rhetoric) which many comrades use, sometimes unknowingly. The purpose of this note is to clarify what this pattern is and to explain why it does not always lead to the correct decisions.

In practice, it means grounding one’s opinions in the following information:

Feelings of guilt
Beliefs about how other comrades will judge you
Consulting a “hierarchy of oppression”, in which decisions that feel like they most immediately benefit those lower on the hierarchy are deemed to be correct

This is a very small amount of information.

What is fascism, and what does it have to do with capitalism?

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 02:14:00 -0700

The purpose of this post is to clarify the relationship between the following things

Fascism
Capitalism
Democracy
Liberalism
Socialism

What is fascism

Fascism is part of how capitalism defends itself in times of extreme crisis.

Capitalism as a system is prone to crisis. It occasionally goes into periods of severe social dislocation, where there may be droughts, food shortages, and immiseration of all kinds.

As Marxists, we know this and seek to express this pain politically toward the correct action of overthrowing capitalism.

Magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology: Rain dances of the future

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 02:14:00 -0700

A nice forest. Photo: Jody Amiet/AFP/Getty Images.

When it’s dry, and trees are thirsty, the forest emits large amounts of nice-smelling, piney chemicals called terpenes. This is a magical ritual performed by the trees, a prayer for water expressed as a symphony of smells.

Miraculously, this prayer is reliably answered. The airborne terpenes react with other chemicals in the atmosphere to form cloud condensation nuclei, seeding the formation of new clouds. Eventually, these clouds produce rain¹².

Burritos and Distributed Domination in the App Era

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 10:11:00 -0700

I went to try the veggie burrito at Aliberto’s. It’s very good.

While I was eating, a woman¹ came in, went to the counter, and gave the details of the order she was picking up to the man behind the counter (Latin-American, native Spanish speaker).

The man at the counter started talking (in Spanish) to his coworker in the kitchen, didn’t catch what about.

Evidently the woman was an delivery-app worker because she said, “Excuse me, I’m being timed.”

An honest techno-Utopianism

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 02:01:58 +0530

I just watched some of the videos of the talks from the “Schelling Point Conference”. These talks give a clear display of a current within the crypto/web3 space: techno-utopianism. Techno-Utopianism is an ideology which says that technological developments will result in improvements in human well-being. Usually, it is not a general faith in technological change, but specific to a certain kind of emerging technologies: the internet, blockchain, DAOs, AI, etc. I don’t know but I’m sure it predates computer technology as well, probably you can find people saying utopian things about cars and labor-saving domestic devices (washing machines, vaccums) after WWII.

Why "Socially Responsible Investing", divestment campaings, and other schemes are doomed to fail

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 09:31:58 +0800

I recently read a blog post analyzing various purported “socially responsible investing” (SRI) products and showing how they were anything but.

This kind of analysis is valuable for learning and empirical confirmation, but it can be predicted from certain general principles.

In this post, we will lay out some basic arguments explaining why advocating for capital to be reallocated to projects which are beneficial to human and non-human nature will not work.

The 7 coordinates of human society

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 02:14:00 -0700

There is a nice idea – which I learned from the work of David Harvey (or in podcast form) – of analyzing society in terms of a number of “moments”, or aspects of society at a given moment in time. Harvey chooses 7:

Technology
Relation to nature
Mental conceptions of the world
Social relations
Institutional arrangements
The patterns and activities of daily life
Labor and production processes

I prefer to think of these as 7 “coordinates” on the state of society. In other words, the actual state of society is very high dimensional, but we can approximately represent it using the above 7 coordinates each giving some information about society.

About

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 21:37:58 +0530

This is my (Izzy Meckler’s) blog, about

Marxism
art
poetry
math

The capitalist class is not the primary enemy

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 02:01:58 +0530

A lot of socialist rhetoric focuses on framing the capitalist class as the primary enemy of socialists and of the working class. However, the capitalist class itself is not the primary enemy of socialism.

The real enemy is the self-replicating, expanding process called Capital. This is an algorithm which operates in the real world by being encoded in various social relations, institutions, and technologies. You can think of it as an evil AI that is encoded in a complicated, diffuse way in our social-relations, institutions, and technologies, and which has enslaved most of humanity (capitalists and workers alike).

Using mathematical language to strengthen the movement towards communism

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 02:01:58 +0530

In a series of blog posts I have written, and probably in more that I will write in the future, I explain my understanding of Marxist ideas in partially mathematical terms.

There are a few reasons I am doing this, and there are also a few reasons I am aware of for why this might not be a good ideas.

Speaking mathematically means restricting one’s language to a subset of the full range. As a result, the meanings and associations present in ordinary language are not available when writing mathematically. This has upsides and downsides.

Words and ideas are material

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 02:00:58 +0530

During the most recent DSA meeting, a comrade argued against expelling Jamaal Bowman by stating that the resolution to expel him was “resolutionary socialism” – that is, that those who proposed it were just doing a lot of huffing and puffing, and not seriously engaging in the task of building real power.

In fact, this position against “resolutionary socialism”, despite having a cute punny name, is totally incoherent. Made more explicit, its claim is that public commitments made by an organization have 0 impact, and perhaps is even resting on a deeper belief that words and ideas in general have 0 impact.

Marx and Engel's theorem on the inevitability of revolution

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 02:01:58 +0530

A lot of people think that Marx saw proletarian revolution as inevitable. In fact, it is not. But it is inevitable given certain assumptions that Marx probably believed (owing to arguments he made throughout his writing).

Let’s try to understand what these assumptions are, why Marx thought they were true, and why they might not be.

The theorem

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes that class struggle ends “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” ¹

NFTNFTNFT: Nice For Traders, Non-Functional Technology for Nurturing Fertile Talent

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 01:39:58 +0530

Proponents of the use of NFTs for establishing ownership of creative works have a correct diagnosis but an incorrect prescription. They correctly observe that the status quo for creative production does not work well for creators. I.e.,, given the current economics, it is difficult for artists who are not already rich to sustain themselves.

However, the proposed solution — bringing production of creative works more comfortably into the commodity fold through representation as NFTs — misses the mark. This is for a few reasons.

The Coinbase post was 100% right. Here's what you can do about it

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 02:01:58 +0530

Recently there was a minor controversy over a blogpost from Coinbase’s CEO discouraging employees from thinking about politics, and encouraging them to focus on profit-making. I really appreciated this post, because I think it can be very clarifying for those employees who think their company can be a pure force for good. The Coinbase blogpost gives the honest truth that in the final calculus, corporations whose primary goal is profit-maximization can only incidentally and in small ways advance any other aim.

The political economy of platforms

Sun, 03 May 2020 02:01:58 +0530

A platform for hamburgers. Think GrubHub.

In this note, we’ll try to understand what is a platform, and whether they can be improved with a “coop” structure.

In particular, we’ll try to understand:

What are the tensions inherent in platforms as an organizational form, and how can they be resolved?
What are the prospects for substantive impact of platform cooperatives in the presence of competing capitalist-run platforms?

What is a platform?

Before really understanding platform coops, it is necessary to define “platform” and examine the various types of people interacting with it.

Dubious Arguments

Wed, 25 May 2016 02:01:58 +0530

There’s a famous dubious argument that “proves” the set of $\mathrm{Tree}$ of (planar, rooted) binary trees is in bijection with the set of $7$-tuples of trees $\mathrm{Tree}^6$.

The argument goes as follows. A binary tree is either empty or a non-empty tree with two children which are binary trees. Thus we have an isomorphism $\mathrm{Tree} \cong 1 + \mathrm{Tree}^2$. Pretending that $\mathrm{Tree}$ is a complex number and using the quadratic formula we obtain $$ \mathrm{Tree} = \frac{1\pm 3 i}{2} = e^{\frac{2\pi i}{3}} $$ so that $\mathrm{Tree}$ satisfies $\mathrm{Tree}^6 = 1$. Multiplying both sides by $\mathrm{Tree}$ yields $\mathrm{Tree}^7 = \mathrm{Tree}$ and so we conclude that the set of $7$-tuples of trees is in bijection with the set of trees.

Notes on Social Ecology (1)

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 02:01:58 +0530

The ideas, knowledge, beliefs, laws and regulations, etc. contained in a culture would be the genetic instructions ordering the use of exosomatic energy. – p. 262

This is a good point and a nice way of characterizing the socio-technological layer of the world: it is the part of the human world concerned with mediation of energy through non-bodily structures.

Of course this layer interacts with the biological layer on large time scales.

One reason why the interaction between addition and multiplication is the interesting part of number theory

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 02:01:58 +0530

I’ve often heard people say that the interesting part of number theory is the interaction between addition and multiplication, but I only yesterday realized one reason why that is, triggered by convincing myself that $a b = \mathrm{lcm}(a,b)\mathrm{gcd}(a,b)$ (a train of thought triggered by seeing the letters “GCD” graffitied on a wall in Chicago).

The reason is essentially that the multiplicative and additive structures of a ring of “numbers” are individually very well understood. Let’s say “number theory” is about studying unique factorization domains which are finitely generated as an abelian group under addition. Then the additive part is well understood by the classification of finitely generated abelian groups, and the multiplicative part (considered as a monoid) is just isomorphic to the multiplicative monoid on the positive integers (given by adding the exponents in the unique factorization) times the group of units in our UFD. So that’s easy to understand as well.

Infinite Games in Hyperbolic Groups

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 02:01:58 +0530

The other day I was sitting in The Coop in Cambridge, reading a book on combinatorial games, and so naturally I started wondering about games played in groups, or on their Cayley graphs at least. After a short T ride home, I discussed the idea with my roommate and I settled on the following game:

Let $G$ be a group with a specified presentation $\langle a_1, \dots, a_m \mid R \rangle$ and let $\Gamma$ be the corresponding Cayley graph. Fix some $k : \mathbb{N}, k \geq 1$. Then the game $E_{\Gamma, k}$ is played as follows:

2001 Frames: Markov model movie

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 02:01:58 +0530

If I say the word “swimming” to you, you’ve got a fair bit of information about what word I’m going to say next. Most likely I’ll say “pool”, but I might say “is” or any other verb, or something else. Conversely I’m probably not going to say “banana” or “golf” after “swimming”. By examining a large chunk of text, for any word w in the text, we can produce a probability distribution on what a random word following w will be. With all these distributions in hand, we can build a new text as follows: Randomly choose some word. From the distribution on words that follow this word, randomly select the next word. Now with the distribution on words that follow this new word, randomly select another word, and continue in this manner for as long as you like. The object underlying this technique is called a Markov chain, here’s a good intuitive explanation:

Constructive Criticism

Hyperbolic geometry exercises

How to have the computer draw for you (without AI)

How to make a call tree that still works when people flake

Capital in Transit

Contradiction

Math is about managing your emotions

Badiou in the world

Prints of late

A short piece of music

More organic cave automata

The Sacrifice

Hyperbolic Geometry, Berkeley Math Circle

Zero Knowledege Proofs, Berkeley Math Circle

I renamed the blog again

A Mark-Shaped Hole

What is computation?

What is human nature?

Why are ideas from computer science absent from Marxist discourse?

Brief critique on the species of utilitarianism found in Bay Area "rationalists"

Prints! 2023–2024

A vision for bathing in the Bay

Bathing is fun

Bathing is also cheap

Projects we could work on

Imperfect abstractions: On "Software in the natural world"

Read a book with me

"Seeing Red" intro speech

Red Seder Haggadah

Where did we come from?

Read a book with me

Concise definitions of dialectical & historical materialsm

Dialectical materialism

Mondragón 1: More an island of kinder capitalism, than an aircraft carrier for communism

Poem: Blenders

Specifying communism: autonomous access to the means of subsistence

Everybody Knows, but should they?

On the human mode of history (001)

Time After Time

Book release: "The Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism"

"Parametricity" is now "It's Dusk Somewhere"

Walking Past the Apocalypse: The Material Roots of Anti-Human Philosophy in 2020s San Francisco

Poem for eternity and the social nature of the human

First thoughts on 'Mute Compulsion'

The Social-mediafication of Working Class Organizing

To face the coming climate crisis, a new vision and a new spirituality

Seeing: The climate catastrophe is approaching, and its cause is human in origin

Cuba’s Struggle for the Full Dignity of the Human Being

Housing and the Cuban Revolution

Jewishness Abstractly and Concretely

Will Socialism End Racism?

Class and Race

Skipping past the nasty part

Breakdown as a law of physics

What is nature?

Punting on the core contradictions

Life on the Virtual Commune

Class Struggle Voltron: Let's invent new organizational forms

Theorem on co-option

The Communist Hypothesis (poem)

Towards making correct decisions: Against moralism

What is fascism, and what does it have to do with capitalism?

What is fascism

Magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology: Rain dances of the future

Burritos and Distributed Domination in the App Era

An honest techno-Utopianism

Why "Socially Responsible Investing", divestment campaings, and other schemes are doomed to fail

The 7 coordinates of human society

About

The capitalist class is not the primary enemy

Using mathematical language to strengthen the movement towards communism

Words and ideas **are** material

Marx and Engel's theorem on the inevitability of revolution

The theorem

NFTNFTNFT: Nice For Traders, Non-Functional Technology for Nurturing Fertile Talent

The Coinbase post was 100% right. Here's what you can do about it

The political economy of platforms

What is a platform?

Dubious Arguments

Notes on *Social Ecology* (1)

Words and ideas are material

Notes on Social Ecology (1)