A Second Amendment for Compute

My written Senate testimony on the centrality of Bitcoin to securing our digital rights.

It was a cold, gray morning in Washington, D.C. — the kind that opens gritty movies about the inside operator who breaks all the rules, well, the bad ones, anyway, and saves the day, saves the country, saves the world, well, until tomorrow, anyway. A bleak end to a bleak year, “uncertainty” hung over everything like a second, spectral scrim, and if I hadn’t been summoned to the Swamp to assume the position in the hot seat most recently occupied the week before by (if I recall correctly) Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, I would have felt as if I were there for something approaching that reason. It was a vibe, and the vibe was bad.

I had, as some of you now know well, seen things, things that were about to not make sense to various high-ranking members of Congress. This went beyond, or perhaps deeper than, the kind of meme-ready incomprehension or mangled understanding Members had evinced and would continue to evince as the sequence of hearings targeting Silicon Valley and its figures of the moment began to unfold in earnest.

For this concerned not sophisticated elements of hard tech, such as whether or not TikTok uses the smartphone’s camera to determine whether content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by its algorithm, but whether the medium of digital technology had worked over our inner and outer lives to such a degree that ruling factions within our own regime would seek to replace our pre-digital institutions of republican governance with an alien new system of cyborg control.

To the credit of the Senate staff that had reached out to me that winter, I had been asked to provide a sort of worst-case forecast concerning the prospect of such a wrenching transformation of American life, and, what is more, I had resolved to go beyond that, illustrating not just the nightmare scenario that was the likely case — the already presently occurring case — but the good news, the proper response, the only true alternative.

Of course, this was more than a few rounds of oral Q&A could bear, especially coming from the more bemused-to-hostile Senators to show up that day. Nevertheless, my spoken testimony managed to plant the seed, and I was heartened and honored to receive written questions following up on the hearing, and to answer them as best as I promptly could.

Here, for the first time, are those answers.

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Written Questions Submitted by Honorable John Thune to Mr. James Poulos, following testimony to the December 9, 2021 hearing of the Communications, Media, and Broadband Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, entitled “Disrupting Dangerous Algorithms: Addressing the Harms of Persuasive Technology.”

Question 1.  I was intrigued by your prepared testimony, where you talk about addressing digital harms by passing a “Second Amendment for Compute.”  Can you elaborate further on what you mean by that?

Response. The idea of the Second Amendment for Compute is to legally identify and enshrine the basic American rights to build and use digital computational technologies. Notably, these rights are already implicitly included in the First and Second Amendments, because the two uses of the technologies are as communications tools and as offensive and defensive weapons. The deepest roots of American culture, civics, and civilization are found in the conviction that, as a matter of justice and sound political theology, the rights of human persons who have come of age to communicate and bear arms are natural and God-given, things no just government can infringe, abridge, abrogate, or deny.

In this sense we and our Constitution already have all the justification and legal authority needed to protect and defend American citizens’ rights to keep and bear digital tech. Now, in the early debates of the founding era, the Antifederalists warned that while a federal Constitution of enumerated powers blocked tyranny and unjust rule, enumerated rights did the opposite. And there is something powerfully true to the insight that a people have likely already lost their shared faith or conviction in what they must make explicit.

Nevertheless, one glance today shows that the brazen and systematic violation of the rights to keep and bear digital technologies that are implicit in the First and Second Amendments is foundational to our emergent political and economic order. Our unelected rulers in public and private life work hand in hand every moment of every day to preempt and defeat those rights. Control of digital life is consolidated in the hands of the military-intelligence complex and the tech oligarchy, upon whose economic performance America’s administrative class and financial system now utterly depends. Under their control, Americans are being coercively conditioned to accept the wholesale expropriation of their private lives as well as the “public square” into the cyberspaces operated, owned, and policed by the major tech corporations, which are properly understood as the core strategic governance organs of the administrative state, including the military-intelligence complex.

What is unfolding is—by design—the founding of a new, digital regime, one hostile and fatal to our distinctively American way of life and our constitutionally guaranteed form of government, and one resting on a political theology that repudiates and destroys our most venerable Western principles of natural right and Man’s relation to his Creator. As the turmoil of the Trump years made inescapably plain, the operators of this regime are increasingly naked in their use of media of all kinds, through the digital technologies that now rule them all, as weapons against Americans who dare resist or even object to their extension and consolidation of digital power and authority.

This means that it is now too late legally, and technology is advancing too quickly, to any longer leave merely implicit the natural and God-given rights that Americans already possess with regard to digital technologies. To save those rights, and our civilization and form of government with them, we must enumerate Americans’ digital rights—come what may. Congress must be undaunted by administrative state objections that Americans are too stupid, crude, hateful, sinful, inexpert, or simply dangerous to be allowed such rights and their free exercise. America’s global adversaries and enemies will not seize control if Americans begin that free exercise. Quite the contrary: our technological rulers today are railroading us into a post-American order where elites who see America (correctly) as the main obstacle to founding a new globalistic cyborg order. Nor will the free exercise of natural and God-given digital rights crash our financial system, as the SEC and other agencies and officials insist on arguing. Our financial and regulatory leaders across the public and private sector have already repeatedly crashed our financial system. Grievously and irreparably harming generations of Americans, these ostensible elites have suffered virtually zero accountability or punishment, in fact only growing more powerful, more wealthy, more impudent, and more divorced from our American identity, our American norms, and our American principles. They simply cannot be trusted to tell us the truth about the likely effects of Americans’ free exercise of digital rights—aside from their implicit admission that their illegitimate stranglehold on our fates and fortunes cannot survive a restoration of American constitutionalism in digital life.

That brings us to the explicit terms of legal protection envisioned by the “Second Amendment for Compute.” They begin simply with the right of Americans to buy, sell, and build high-powered GPUs—a right already being stealthily infringed by “energy regulations” in several states including California itself. The entire canard that powerful computation is too “eco-unfriendly” to be allowed to America’s digital serfs—a charge laid aggressively against bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—is a fallacy Congress must recognize as such. Americans’ use of high-powered GPUs to freely build digital tools and cultural and economic institutions expends far less “energy” than, say, the petrodollar and its form of economic life, or than the military-intelligence complex; still more deeply, since John Locke and well before it has been a fundament of Western life to understand that the just building and maintenance of life and flourishing in our human and natural spacetime requires as its price the expenditure of energy, in the form the sweat of our brows and the ache of our bodies, of the productive calculations of our minds, and of our creation and use of the tools and weapons we need to achieve both our most basic and fundamental ends and our higher forms of creativity, genius, worship, and wealth.

By extension therefore it is equally clear that the right of Americans to buy, sell, mine, and mint bitcoin and other digital coins must not be infringed, neutralized, or destroyed. It is essential that lawmakers realize bitcoin, to take the most important example, is not simply a new currency among many, a new asset class among many, or a new fad among many. It is a computational protocol that supervenes upon or obsolesces a host of previous forms of digital architecture, because of its tremendous power and adaptability. It is, in this sense, a computer that can and likely will very soon grow large enough in its development to supervene upon the entire world, “ruling” it in a way no one person or group of people, no matter how brilliant, willful, expert, or ambitious, can any longer plausibly imagine to rule the world. Without the explicitly protected right to use this protocol to build new but quintessentially American institutions of culture, economics, finance, and religion on a securely digital footing, Americans will lose more and more of their initiative, ingenuity, and identity until they surrender before their rulers’ efforts to merge them into their technologies and become cyborg serfs: a permanent underclass of passive, sullen, demoralized, self-loathing, mentally and physically unwell posthumans bearing no recognizable relation either to their American forebears or indeed to any human who has ever heretofore lived.

Hammering out the ins and outs of the “Second Amendment for Compute” will not be swift or easy work, but it can be done, as it must be, with sufficient speed and efficacy to save Congress, and America, from digital obsolescence. But to do so, lawmakers must find and wield the courage necessary to resist what will be extraordinary concerted pressure from the rising post-constitutional regime ruled by the triumvirate of the administrative state, the military-intelligence complex, and the tech oligarchy. It is very likely that 2022 will rank among the very last possible opportunities to begin this fateful struggle in earnest at the federal level.

That said, the federal level is not, as Congress knows well, everything. Perhaps one of the most important things federal lawmakers can do to ensure Americans’ natural and God-given digital rights are not infringed is to pass legislation that gives state governments as wide as possible a berth to pass their own digital rights legislation and to erect their own legal and regulatory regimes around digital rights, free from fear of federal retaliation, punishment, or budgetary blackmail. The “laboratory of democracy” will quickly show exactly how powerful and precious digital rights are in our digital age as Americans gravitate toward and rally around states with the most courageous and clear-sighted protections of digital rights.

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