---
title: Part Three — The Reply
book: Purposive Accelerationism
author: '@jamie247'
position: 13 of 24
canonical: https://whatispacc.org/ebook/#part-three
version: 1.1
language: en-GB
licence: all rights reserved; quote with attribution
---

# Part Three — The Reply

“Look at the world and it seems that containment is not possible. Follow the consequences and something else becomes equally stark: for everyone’s sake, containment must be possible.”

— Mustafa Suleyman, Inflection AI, The Coming Wave, 2023

The good news is that what was taken out can be put back, and everything from here on in depends on that premise. However, critically, what is restored is not a specific destination. Nothing here prescribes what people should want from these systems or where a society ought to end up, because those ends remain with whoever will live under the result. What goes back is the constraint: a reference value the machine is held to, rules executed at the machine’s own speed, and the standing of the people inside it to contest what it does and to change it. A governor of that kind is easy to want and hard to write. Anyone can say these systems should serve human ends, but no one has, as yet, managed to constrain any of techno-capitalism’s various iterations, and saying it should be so again, no matter how convincingly, is not a reply. So the standard we measure ourselves against needs to come before the proposal, in the form of criteria any reply must meet. Five are drawn from failures already on record, from the three roads and the clock to the deletion itself and the maze described in the pages that follow. Three come from a question to put to yourself rather than to history: not knowing which of the runaway’s landings arrives, or your descendants’ standing, what principles would you want the world they inherit to be built on? The only answer that logic allows is a set of capacities, never a place. The two replies already attempted, the platform critics’ and the cypherpunks’ met in earlier chapters, can then be measured against those criteria, as can the only working governor we have today, and my own proposal, a cognitive commons, to be judged on the same terms.

Eight chapters follow. The Test sets the criteria first, five from the failures already on record and three from the question above, and closes with the people the reply is written for, those a bank, a ministry or a platform has already cut off. Two Failed Replies measures the critics of the platform economy and the cypherpunks against those criteria, is honest about where each partly succeeded, and lays out what it keeps from both, which together provide the pieces for a working reply. The Recipe reconstructs Bitcoin, the one place a governor was written into the substrate itself and has held since 2009 with no institution above it, and names the conditions under which that mechanism transfers more broadly to intelligence. The Trinity and On Constitutions turn the freedom met with the kind master, that of non-domination, into the reference value of the whole stack, and name the meta-governor that holds every layer to it. A Cognitive Commons is the proposal itself: five rights built into the internet’s own protocols rather than granted at the benevolence of a power, to constitute oneself, to connect, to create, to transact and to collectivise, a minimal set that people who agree about nothing else could author, carried from money to cognition and tested for whether each part can be made to work. Modes of Voice is how a society steers that commons, through voice, slow deliberation and delegation, with markets settling the facts both depend on, and seven tests show that people keep the judgement to use it, that light regulation does what code cannot, and that a single red line holds. Finally, The Call goes out to the constitutionalists who will build it and to the states that will adopt what no rival can bend, because the window is closing from the inside. Every one of them is answerable to those eight criteria, and you are invited to keep score.