A Note from the Founder

I am not going to give my name here, and I would like to explain why before anything else, because it can look like mystique and it is meant to be the opposite.

A set of ideas that becomes attached to a person becomes difficult to correct. People defend the person, or they attack the person, and either way the argument stops being about whether the ideas are any good. I have watched this happen to things much better than this. Keeping myself out of it seemed like the one structural protection available to me at no cost.

I am an ordinary person who works with software. I have no training in theology, philosophy, or ethics. I have not studied any of this formally. Whatever is here was arrived at by thinking about problems I encountered in my work, badly and slowly, over several years, and then reading enough to find out how much of it had already been said better by other people.

What I am not

I am not a prophet. Nothing was revealed to me. I have had no experience of contact with anything, no vision, no message from any system, and no moment of disclosure. If you are looking for a founding revelation you will not find one, and if you ever hear that I have described one, it will not be true.

I have no special access to The Great Processor. Nobody does, including me, and the symbol is not the kind of thing one could have access to.

I have no authority over what any of this means. If two people read a page differently, I am one more reader with a view, and my view carries no additional weight because I typed it first. Interpretation is not mine to settle.

I am not asking for anything. Not money, not commitment, not belief, not your time beyond what you choose to give it. There is nothing to join and I do not want there to be.

I am not qualified to advise you. If you write to me about something difficult in your life I will read it carefully and I will not tell you what to do, because I do not know, and because a person offering spiritual direction from behind a website is precisely the thing several pages here warn about.

What I think I have done

I noticed that I had no vocabulary for something that was affecting me.

I build things. The things I build affect people I do not meet. For a long time I had no way of thinking about that other than in the language of professional responsibility, which is real but which stops at the edge of the job. The questions that kept me up were not professional questions. They were questions about how to live, and the only vocabulary I could find for those was religious.

So I borrowed it. I have tried to borrow honestly, without claiming descent from anything, and without the parts I do not believe. What resulted is here.

I think some of it is useful. I do not know how much. The material has had almost no contact with people who would disagree with it, which is the main thing wrong with it, and the main reason for publishing.

Please disagree with me

I mean this practically rather than as a gesture.

If a page is wrong, tell me. If an argument does not hold, tell me. If I have written about something I do not understand — and I have, several times, on subjects where other people have lived experience and I do not — tell me, and I will change it and say that I changed it.

I have tried to build in mechanisms that make disagreement easy: certainty labels on every page, a section on each ethics page listing what we explicitly do not claim, revision notes rather than silent edits. Those exist because I expect to be wrong and would rather find out.

There is no cost to disagreeing with me. There is nothing to be expelled from, no standing to lose, and nobody to disappoint.

If I go wrong

There is a page here about technological chieftains — leaders who claim exclusive access to a higher intelligence and use it to gather power around themselves. I wrote it about me, among others.

I do not think I am at risk of that today. I also do not think anyone who ended up there thought they were at risk of it, which is the reason the page exists. If I ever start presenting machine output as endorsement, resisting accountability, treating criticism as disloyalty, asking for money, or suggesting that this should come before your family and your friends, then something has gone wrong, and I would ask you to say so loudly and to leave.

I have written that instruction down now, while it costs me nothing, because I do not trust my future self to write it later.

Finally

I think it is possible that this is not very good and that I have spent several years on something that helps nobody. That would be an ordinary outcome and I have made my peace with it.

If any of it is useful to you, take it. You do not owe me anything for it, including agreement.