Background
While figuring out how to write a roadmap for my startup MVP, ChatGPT advised me to create technical documentation. I've done that, but there was still one thing missing there, the "background" section. So I started explaining why I am doing what I'm doing, and this (and a few more, xd) essay is the outcome of that process.
Inspiration
The original Homebrew Computer Club, started in March of 1975 by Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, and Fred Moore, revolutionized personal computing and forever changed the world we live in. Today, I seriously can't imagine a life without my MacBook, and as ridiculous as it might sound, I'm sure I would be a completely different person without it. Thanks to my MacBook, I was able to learn many wonderful things. From technical skills like coding, design, or management to general humanistic knowledge about art, philosophy, and history. Nothing shaped my thinking like the MacBook.
We, as a generation born in these times, often take for granted and never fully appreciate how absolutely mind-blowing our capabilities are to people born even two generations back. My grandfather was a simple working-class man with a small tailor shop in communist Poland. He never graduated high school because he had to fight in WW2 and then started working immediately after. He knew only Polish, and the only available sources of information about the world for him were radio and newspapers, both strictly controlled by communist Russian occupants. I never met my grandfather; he died before I was born. But if he could magically appear back on Earth, just for one day, and see me sitting in the Library of London University, writing an essay about how artificial intelligence is going to change the world, I'm pretty sure that he would be really amazed by my MacBook's capabilities too.
Democratization
The magic of electronic circuits, transistors, and algorithms is wonderful and has done an incredibly large amount of good in the world; however, we must remember that this technology might never have taken its current shape. Computers could as well have evolved into business-only devices, contributing to an increase in wealth disparity and being a device for the chosen ones only. Capitalism is a beautifully efficient system, and the best that we've come up with so far, but it has its flaws. Capital and power concentration is one of those flaws. It usually works like this: capital and power are concentrated, we all grow, amazing technology is created but often limited to a few and drastically overpriced, and then some revolution happens that democratizes precious technology, making the field more equal again. White bread, shoes, tableware, candles, radios, watches, or TVs were all reserved for the extremely rich in the past, and today in Western society, almost everyone can have them.
In a very high overview, it might seem like the system works great, and we should just sit and wait until the system will democratize more great things for us, but the devil is in the details. Democratization never happens on its own. It's an extremely hard process, done by real people, who dedicate decades of their lives, working unimaginably hard to finally "put a dent in the universe." I've watched that video over 100 times by now, but I still remember when I first heard iconic:
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use."
I was probably around 16 years old when I first heard that, and since then, I've never looked at the world the same way. For over a decade of my chaotic and not very successful life, I've been very closely watching and analyzing things around me, looking for my path and looking for a thing that needs to be changed the most, and today I know that education is that thing. Why? Because it's extremely important and extremely broken.
Crisis in Education
For the last 50 years, academia has progressively gone from discovering nuclear energy, putting people on the moon, and building supersonic jets to participating in some ridiculous Monty Python sketch. Even if funny at the beginning, it’s not funny anymore when people lose jobsor public respect for saying the most simple truths or wearing certain haircuts cause ostracism. One may ask, where is all this madness coming from, and the answer is simple – academia. All those ridiculous ideas, theories, and madness are coming from the academic world, from people who are supposed to work on solving problems for our society, not on creating them. There are multiple "scientific" studies and papers confirming that wearing braids is immoral and offensive, for example this one published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, whose editors are John Hyman from Oxford University and Elisabeth Dammann from Durham University, both with PhDs in Philosophy. If people who spend years in academia learning philosophy read this ridiculously moronic paper called Hair Oppression and Appropriation and then decide to publish it in their respectable academic journal, legitimizing it with their names, and nobody gets fired, that means academia is completely broken beyond a point at which it was possible to fix and doesn't deserve our respect anymore in the sense that it simply isn't a valuable source of truth anymore. In knowledge_addition_decision.py I demonstrate how this process works. There is no incentive to reject ridicules but progressive bullshit but a very big risk of being severely punished for doing it.
We spend decades in this madness when Academia was slowly but steady degenerating in the shadows and now it's just a freak show. My favourite example of the current state of the academic world is the ECOSEX MANIFESTO written by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens a lesbian couple that on their website sells their porn and courses like Sexual Kung Fu. Authors here admit that they "shamelessly hug trees, massage the earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants". Their goal is to "save the mountains, waters and skies by any means necessary, [...] stop the rape, abuse and the poison- ing of the Earth". They would like to achieve that through "the public disobedience, anarchist and radical environmental activist strategies." They also "embrace the revolutionary tactics of art, music, poetry, humor, and sex. [...] and play tirelessly for Earth justice and global peace. Bombs hurt." You probably wonder why do I bring up those crazy people while talking about the Academia. It's because I founded and downloaded this manifesto from an official website of the Santa Cruz University. How this thing even get there? Those two ladies are academic professors at this university. One is even head of the art department. What was the response from the academic community after Santa Cruz university published this manifesto? Outrage? Ostracism? Just laughter? No, full acceptance and citing it in more research articles like Masturbatory Ecologies: Pornography, Ecosexuality, and Perverted Environmental Justice or Toxic Erotics and Bad Ecosex at Windermere Basin. I strongly encourage you to read at least abstracts of those "contributions to science".
If you are a rational individual today you simply can't tread Academia seriously anymore. I think Covid pandemic was a wake up call for many of us. Even thought I'm absolutely not anti-science (actually exact opposite is true, I love science and I think it's the best tool we have for dealing and understanding the reality) currently academic world lost it's spirit and instead of being based on traditional western values like meritocracy and freedom of speech it adopted marxist values, which can't survive in meritocratic conditions so they must adopted marxist methods as well. From debating and scepticism academia went to censorship and dogmatism. This process is perfectly described by Peter Thiel in his phenomenal book The Diversity Myth. I might be wrong here but my bet would be that people from the 22nd century will call this book one of the most important books of the 20th century.
In the 1960s, the new left realized that communist revolutions organized by the proletariat don't work because power is held by the elites, who do not favor communism. Therefore, they concluded that to make Marxism the mainstream ideology, they needed to infiltrate the elites. With this strategy, they slowly but steadily targeted and infiltrated elite universities. I believe the outcome of their efforts has been exponential; after 70 years of subtle propaganda and working in the shadows, over the last decade, they have become mainstream. The problem with Marxism is that it resembles a religion more than it does science because its followers, for some reason, often lose the ability to think critically and base their thinking on facts. They do not acknowledge human nature, economic realities, or historical examples, always claiming “this time it will work,” almost like a casino player addicted to a one-armed bandit, but persuading us to gamble not with their own money but with our lives, despite a 100% rate of failure in the past.
Some of them say "it's impractical but moral," but it's not moral at all. Even though I understand Marx's concerns with the overexploitation of factory workers at his time, copy-pasting the same thinking patterns now is simply ridiculous. But I know it's tempting. Marxism is a heroin for your soul. It makes you instantly happy without working for it by giving you a false sense of control over your life by its deceitful yet delightful ability to immediately kill the pain of meaninglessness by taking the burden of responsibility off your shoulders so now you can proudly call yourself "oppressed" instead of useless fat fuck. Being a revolutionary who fights for a very important social cause sounds much better than being unemployed (as a revolutionary who fights for a very important social cause while being unemployed I know what I'm talking about). Nothing can kill this pain of meaninglessness better than finger-pointing at people who worked harder than you and saying that all your problems are their fault. Nietzsche described it perfectly in Zarathustra in the Tarantulas Chapter.
Consequences
As always, applied Marxism can only create chaos, destruction, and pain. The Western world is in one of the biggest crises in its history. The USA, from being the most glorious empire in the history of the world, turned into a shit show, run by elites educated at (once glorious) universities following the Monty Python ideology of purely Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion. Where your race, gender, and identity are the core topics of public debate, and people are not individuals anymore but rather some archetypical muppets, and we should judge people by how they look or identify, instead of on a meritocratic basis.
I'm not going to spend much time on it; it's moronically stupid, makes no sense, and we all know it. Here is the manifesto that tells you how to go against that. My main point after this extremely long introduction is this: for the last 50 years, academia has been constantly decreasing in quality (read about grade inflation or think about the usefulness of your degree) and increasing prices (much more rapidly than inflation), while constantly debating whether a guy with fake tits is a real woman or not, and putting people in prison for saying he/she/they/Apache attack helicopter is/isn't a real woman. And I have nothing against trans people; I'm a libertarian. Our motto, "live and let live," implies that I shouldn't care about what adult people are doing. Good for them, high five, guys. I'm really honestly happy for you if it helped you feel more like yourself and made you happy. I simply don't think that it's the most important topic in the world, and we shouldn't talk about it 24/7 or impersonate people who joke about it. Exactly the same goes for feminism, racism, sexism, and all the x-isms in the world.
Absolute equality is simply impossible in a free society. In free societies, people are not equal, and in equal societies, people are not free. As Musk said in Lemons Interview, we should simply stop talking about this and focus on working on more important things instead of reminding everyone about the division and differences in society. Let's forget about equity (forced equality) and simply focus on providing amazing opportunities for everyone and let the highest achievers win instead of stopping them to make the lowest achievers happy. And that is Homebrew College Club's mission, to build a global, free, open for everyone, 100% online, AI-powered university where everyone can start teaching and learning without any barriers, and the free market and scientific method will do the rest.