Welcome back to the Stove Top weekly newsletter. As usual, each edition has a few brief stories and finishes with a mix of interesting links, hot takes, and good reads.

Enjoy.

Law 3.0 Is Dangerous

What is an acceptable level of tradeoff between free will and “moral” action? Thanks to technology, that is a question we are going to have to answer very soon.

David McGrogan explains this idea through the UK’s new Energy Bill, which allows the British Secretary of State and his council of technocrats to control the flow of electricity into household appliances like fridges, dishwashers, and washing machines. The issue here isn’t necessarily that the government is micromanaging people’s use of their dishwashers (although that is problematic in its own right). It’s more so that technology can execute the law regardless of your intentions to comply. In other words, technology can now take away your personal agency.

The most famous example of this is the case of golf carts and greens. Would it be permissible to program a golf cart to shut down anytime it gets too close to a green? The benefit is you stop idiots from messing up your green. The downside is you are now treating people like puppets.

That’s a shift we’ve never had to deal with before. The law has always set down hard and fast rules, it is true, but people have always had the ability to accept the consequences of non-compliance. Technology that can self-execute the law takes this option away.

This is what McGrogan calls Law 3.0, named so because it is the next iteration of the relationship between the law and state:

• Law 1.0: Law as rules.

• Law 2.0: Law as policy.

• Law 3.0: Law as uncrossable rules.

Or, as Terence Eden put it:

• Law 1.0: “Thou shall not kill”

• Law 2.0: “Thou shall not pollute. But, rather than specific legislation, we’ll spin up a body to do the tedious work of enacting our policy”

• Law 3.0: “Thou shall not speed. And we’ll fit all cars with a chip that prevents them from doing so”

McGrogan and Eden take differing views of law 3.0. McGrogan sees it as a huge affront to the law’s “inner morality”, as laws that come without a choice take away our moral agency, reducing us to little more than robots. Eden sees it as a natural progression to improve law 1.0, and that we “should embrace technological limitations which protect the majority”. In the case of the Energy Bill, that means letting the government turn off your dishwasher if necessary.

I agree with McGrogan:

• Morality is subjective, and it is always changing. If people don’t have the option to non-comply, how will morality ever evolve? It’s the same problem as censoring speech, even speech you find repulsive or dangerous. The absence of dissension does nothing but stagnate progress.

• And I don’t mean stagnate just in “morality”, I mean stagnate everywhere. A society of robotic sheep is not a society that can continue the long climb upward.

• Even if this power begins with lay-ups like smart guns, the corrupting nature of power will naturally lead it to be expanded to its fullest extent, and I am always wary of giving the powerful more ammunition.

• And that fullest extent doesn’t mean a crime-free utopia. How could it? It’s not like they can program my arms to fall off mid-chokehold (yet). To the fullest extent means the eradication of opposition. Tweeting something critical of the government? Deleted. Driving to a protest? Nope, that car isn’t starting. Donating to an opposition candidate? Good luck with that.

Unfortunately, this is the world we’re heading towards, with the constant attacks on personal privacy, online censorship, and CBDCs. Law 3.0 is just the latest step toward this travesty.

It’s up to us to stop it.

Elon, A Shining Example Of Anti-Safetyism

I read a long article in The New Yorker this week about Elon’s “shadow rule”. The basic idea is that because Elon controls like 6 of the most innovative and important tech companies in the world, he is inordinately powerful for a private citizen.

The example the article gives to justify this premise is Elon shutting down Ukraine’s Starlink access before a planned attack in Crimea. That decision understandably bunched many panties, and when you combine that with Elon’s control of the best rocket company (SpaceX), the best EV company (Tesla), the best underground tunnel company (The Boring Company), and the digital town square (Twitter), not to mention a brain-chip giant (Neuralink) and an AI research company (xAI), and it’s clear why people are concerned.

Some people are so concerned that they are calling for “Congress to exercise its oversight powers and look into both SpaceX’s actions in Ukraine and the extent of American dependence on Musk’s company”. Obviously, the fact that Elon is a “volatile personality” with an “affinity for online trolls” makes this Congressional intervention urgent.

Basically, the anti-Elon crowd’s logic boils down to:

• Elon’s companies are extremely important to America and its allies.

• But Elon is at best a wildcard and at worst a non-compliant piece of shit.

• So we need Congress to “exercise oversight powers”, whatever the fuck that means.

I find this whole situation absolutely hilarious. I have no idea who we think we are to sit on a high horse and judge Elon, but even if you were in a position to do so, what exactly do you want Congress to do about it? Take his companies away? Last time I checked this was America, a land where the government can’t just commandeer private companies.

On a deeper level, the government has no one to blame for the situation they find themselves in but themselves. Elon is not Jesus. He’s not doing things that are impossible. Anybody, including (and especially) the government, could have started Tesla or SpaceX. But they didn’t, because safetyism.

Risk is a necessary ingredient to breakthrough success. Sadly, our culture now preaches avoiding risk at all costs. Nowhere is this worse than the government. As the New Yorker article makes clear, Elon and the government frequently butt heads over risk. He blows up rockets while the government would prefer not even launching. SpaceX itself was seen as so risky that Elon’s friends staged an intervention to talk him out of it. But he went for it anyway, and now he has Pentagon officials groveling to him.

Are we going to punish him for succeeding where the government failed? That doesn’t make much sense. You might as well pass a law saying that no private citizen or company can ever surpass the government in technological ability, and at that point, the country is cooked.

Or is this all because Elon, is, well, difficult? Taking away his power for this reason again doesn’t make much sense. If individuals can lose it all for being “difficult” in the eyes of the powerful, how are we any different than the Soviet Union?

If the powers to be are so concerned about Elon, instead of bitching about it online, they should get off their ass and start working to surpass him. But doing so will require casting safetyism to the curb.

If that is what eventually happens, then Elon would have done us all a great service.

Drip Is Still Important

Some guy named Adam Singer wrote an article about how status symbols have shifted from ‘luxury cars and extravagant timepieces’ to ‘the virtues of mentorship, the free/open exchange of ideas, the art of creative expression, and other intangibles’.

It’s a nice thought, but I have absolutely no idea where he got this idea from. And unfortunately his article doesn’t do much to illuminate me, because instead of supporting his claims with any actual evidence, he resorts to copious amounts of “trust me bro” claims like ‘making art has transcended the realm of self-expression’ and ‘there’s a growing reverence for mentorship’. Besides his immediate social circle, where is he getting this from?

I especially have no idea why he thinks that status as financial achievement is on the downtrend. That’s just not true. In actuality, people have never been more focused on money. Gen Z is literally chomping at the bit to get into finance, the easiest way for a regular person to get rich. The percentage of people who care about money is up-only. As is the luxury goods market. Luxury cars aren’t doing too shabby either.

Ultimately, the article is nothing more than an attempt to push his belief that ‘real wealth resides not in the accumulation of possessions but in the cultivation of wisdom’. That could very well be true. I hope it is. But just because you want something to be true doesn’t mean it’s actually true.

Extras

• Is VR school the future? I’m not convinced. I think the limiting factor for schools is 1) good teachers and 2) an antiquated model. What difference does it make if a kid is sitting in a virtual classroom if they are getting lectured at by a shitty teacher?

• Likewise, I am sympathetic to the idea that educational inequality probably advanced during the pandemic. But the idea that we should’ve ditched Zoom and resorted to “equitable, lower-tech alternatives” like “schoolwork packets” and “delivering school lessons by radio or television” is really freaking stupid. If you want equality, don’t cut off people’s legs. Lift up the stragglers instead.

• Surprise surprise, the entertainment industry pays for reviews too. Who could’ve seen this coming?

• Substack is doing the contrarian thing and leaning into politics. I miss Substack, and sometimes think I made a mistake switching to Beehiiv.

• The NYPD has spent millions of dollars to boost its ability to track social media posts. Those efforts boil down to purchasing AI tools from Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that is being sued by Meta for using 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data on 600,000 users. More tech = more surveillance.

• The 5th Circuit ruled that the Biden administration likely violated the 1st Amendment by bullying tech companies into taking down posts related to COVID and the election. Some in the media (read: The Liberal Media) classify this content as “false or misleading”, which just doesn’t matter lol. It wouldn’t even matter if people were posting Nazi propaganda; the government has no ability to take down speech. This is America last time I checked.

• Facial recognition technology is very dangerous. ‘

• All hail Richard Allan.

• Cops lie on the stand too often. I gotta write more about the police soon. General stance though is that we need to police the police a lot harder.

• If you use the Global Entry Pass to travel, the Feds literally spy on you every single day.

• China is stealing South Korean tech now.

• 22% of workers are worried technology will make their jobs obsolete, including 20% of workers with a college degree. That’s up from 8% in 2021. I think these workers have good reason to be concerned.

• Bavaria is putting people into “preventive detention”. Absolutely disgusting.

• Age limits for politicians, please.

• US interest payments are now equal to the military. We should really be spending more on the military.

• China now produces more nuclear than us. There’s no excuse for that.

• Bring in the skilled laborers, please. This chip situation has become an absolute debacle.

• ESports was a ZIRP.

• Inflation is going back up.

• Impeachment shouldn’t be used as retribution.

Until next time, ✌️

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