As pluralists, avant-garde explorers in intelligence and network intelligence, and overall tinkerers and believers in the open field of reality, I believe the Ethereum world - or should I say, the Ethereum world of my vantage - should take an active interest in the UAP question. Better put, we should be interested in the specter and promise of high level non-human intelligence, in whatever form. [In lieu of an overview of the UFO thing, I’ll simply link to three major articles: the 2017 NY Times piece, the long-form 2021 New Yorker expose, and the recent Grusch whistleblower revelations (less serious coverage so far, but here it is in The Guardian).] I’ve argued elsewhere that web3 design practice should be a kind of applied psychedelia, ever-concerned with the question of other forms of life. But that question is not the subject of this note.
The majority of us wouldn’t have flocked to or seen the promise of this permissive technology if we weren’t hard coded with the ability to ‘live in more than one movie.’ The dissenting voice of the cryptoverse is one that has learned to withstand the discomfort of seeing the world through different and sometimes alien or unknowable narrative frames, landing settled on practical, techno-material solutionism in the face of that dilemma rather than falling into nihilism, conspiracy or ideological mystification.
If the current UFO or UAP question is as frustrating for you as it is for me, it’s not because of the expansive transformation of world it (could) imply, but because the discourse around it is so thoroughly dictated by State. The existence of some nonhuman technologists remains, even with the Grusch revelations, an open question (it isn’t clear, after all, why we should trust a person apparently trained in disinformation). But that’s not the point. Rather, it’s that all of this signals in one way or another (as the physicist Eric Weinstein has repeatedly pointed out) a project of government obfuscation, one way or another. The last decade of news around this topic has either shown strategic/operational reticence around the issue’s reality, or a very successful misinformation campaign deliberately distorting it.
It matters little if the “phenomenon” is real, because either way this constitutes an occurrence of vantage capture - a disorienting moment where realists have no clear way of assessing the reality of a situation because a closed institution is holding that knowledge captive for the purposes of information asymmetry.
The hard sciences are, in my opinion, troubled by an ontological thrift that needs to be seriously supplemented by a more expansive idea of empiricism, including more esoteric experimental data the likes of which we see in Zen Buddhist texts, or the journals of Terence McKenna. Subjective and intersubjective experiences are valid objects of study and insight in themselves, unmediated through some soft frame of impartiality or objective insight. Nonetheless, the hard sciences correspond to a love of reality I hold close. As a whole, the scientific method and the institutions that traffic in it, however imperfectly, are the best tools we have in the contemporary world for understanding and defending the world as it is.
The starkness of the vantage capture comes into relief when you consider that insular institutions are, strictly, incapable of such scientific inquiry. That’s because they’re missing the crucial element of open peer review by unaffiliated experts, a step that insights about the nature of perception and mediation argue for more every day. Humans in any case, let alone humans in the deeply isolated and potentially epistemically alienating settings that highly classified workloads entail, are prone to delusion, personal bias and ideological or authoritarian influence. If there truly are nonhuman artifacts in the hands of secret, isolated programs, the risk that they are instrumentalized for power or self-serving delusion rather than truth (love of the world) is high.
Whether the revelations of the past six years are distortions or genuine discoveries of exotic truths held hostage, they are a powerful display of the pitfalls of centralized institutions. Any arguments that would redeem them - or call their hazards necessary byproducts of our world’s relative peace - seem to be quickly losing steam, as decentralized technologies emerge that fulfill the same role of peaceful mediation under credible neutrality without the same threats of collusion, enclosure and capture. The public is after all mature enough to manage its own affairs, given the proper tools. To those of us who have been exposed to these tools, the agencies and offices of government and bureaucratic megacorps seem caught in a self-referential sprint: perpetuate the centralization of power by means of the centralization of knowledge, and vice versa, ad infinitum. [1]
We don’t need to know whether the UAP phenomenon is “real” to know that the institutional vantage capture it’s put on display is undemocratic, anti-scientific, and anti-real. If the scientific method is a stalwart ally in the love and loving defense of reality, we can’t let it be sabotaged by the misaligned incentive traps that needless centralized hierarchies so readily generate. There’s another way.
(I believe, as you can probably tell, that the other way is Ethereum.)
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[1] James Bridle makes a great argument that these type of institutions are examples of narrow AI, living paper clip maximizers here and now. I also discuss this concept as it relates to web3 in a piece I contributed to Pluriverse.