Colophon

What this is

Slow Variables is an essay series about science, technology, artificial intelligence and the Internet. The name is borrowed from systems theory, where a slow variable is a quantity that changes gradually — soil depth, institutional trust, the cost of copying — but sets the conditions for everything that changes quickly on top of it. Most technology writing is about the fast variables. This is about the slow ones.

Editions are numbered and appear roughly monthly. Each one has the same shape: an essay, a short round-up of fast-moving things and what they are attached to, a section on the people who already had this argument decades ago, a ledger of falsifiable claims, and a log of revisions.

The rules

Second-order effects only. Never what a technology does; only what it does to the things around it — incentives, institutions, attention, epistemics.
Predictions are graded in public. Every claim about the future carries a confidence and a date, and is scored on the ledger whether or not it was right.
Nothing is silently rewritten. Corrections are made in place and logged under Revisions on the edition. Old positions stay on the record.
No engagement machinery. No comments, no likes, no trackers, no newsletter pop-up. There is an RSS feed and an email address.

Epistemic status

Every edition carries one of four labels at the top.

Speculative — an idea being tried out in public. Argued seriously, held loosely.
Exploratory — the default. The writer believes it, has checked what can be checked, and expects to be partly wrong.
Confident — the position has survived pushback and revision. Would bet on it.
Revised — a substantive part of the argument has changed since publication. The change is described under Revisions.

Who writes this

One person, under a pseudonym, and that is going to stay the case. Not out of fear of the arguments — they are all here to be attacked — but because a name attracts a different kind of reading. Once a piece of writing has a face, a job title, and a follower count attached, readers weigh those before they weigh the sentences. Removing the name is an attempt to make the sentences carry the whole load.

Practically, it means: no biography, no photograph, no employer, no city. If you need to know whether the writer is credentialed to hold an opinion, the honest answer is that nobody is, and the arguments should be checked on their own terms. Correspondence to the address in the footer is read, and answered when it is interesting.

Also available as

Plain text (…/issues/001/index.txt) and gemtext (…/issues/001/index.gmi) versions of every edition, and a feed. See Subscribe. A Gemini capsule mirroring the .gmi files will be listed here when it is live.

Technical

Static HTML built with Eleventy from plain-text files, hosted on a CDN. Type is Anton for display, Newsreader for text and IBM Plex Mono for everything that should look like it came off a machine — all served from this domain, so no font foundry sees you read. No JavaScript is required to read anything here. The design owes a debt to the dark editorial tradition on one side and to Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic on the other, whose numbered, dated, sectioned editions proved a blog can still have a spine.

§ What this is

§ The rules

§ Epistemic status

§ Who writes this