Loose cluster analysis of the shortlisted program, for use in the Welcome Session.
Snapshot: 2026-09-20, read live from D1 (symposium_proposals, is_shortlisted = 1).
Counts move whenever the schedule changes — re-derive rather than trusting this file after a
schedule edit. Bucket and theme assignments are editorial judgment from titles and abstracts,
not a stored field.
| Heidegger’s English term | Modernized meaning |
|---|---|
| Technology | A system of practices and representations through which we make reality actionable. Machines are instances of technology, not its deepest meaning. |
In "The Nearby: A Scope of Seeing", Biao Xiang argues that contemporary life has become polarized between the very near---the self, personal advancement, private anxiety---and the very far---the nation, capitalism, geopolitics, civilization, imagined worlds---while neglecting the intermediate field
The sci-fi story writes itself. Hal is tragically diagnosed with a terminal disease just when he gets Bitcoin going. So he cryopreserves himself and cryptopreserves his fortune, a long shot into the darkness...\n\nBut he cannot simply remember a password - too risky. His cryonic brain might be skimmed, or there might be damage in reanimation, or he might be simulated in a container to force him to reveal his password. The secret must be something which emerges from the depths of his soul, the ridges and contours of his mental geography, which would hopefully survive minor damage. It must be like something which you forget, and remember not by reading out of memory but by recreating it.\n\nThere is a small cult of Satoshi tomb raiders which has guessed this. Cryo reanimation is still decades if not centuries into the future, so they try the next best thing. They obsessively gather every little thing they can find about him - what books he read, where he grew up, which forums he participated in, the corpus of a
In the early seventeenth century, before engineers learned to speak with iron or governments learned to speak with algorithms, the strait was crossed by boats.
It was not a difficult crossing, but it was unpredictable. The currents ran obliquely, the winds twisted strangely between the cliffs and the coves, and the water was deep enough to swallow a careless ferry in a single unlucky surge. People crossed anyway: farmers with baskets of fruit, artisans hauling tools for barter, pilgrims drawn to shrines on either shore. They waited on mud banks or stone steps for rafts lashed from barrels, pulled by ropes that groaned as though resenting their labor.
The two peninsulas regarded one another with a mix of reliance and resentment. The western side grew grain, olives, hardy vegetables. The eastern side quarried stone and hammered it into tools that the west bought at whatever price was demanded. Neither side wished to be the lesser, and neither side could survive alone.
In 1617, after a season of storms that s
I used to think I was broken. Every teacher, every manager, every well-meaning friend said the same thing in different tones of pity: calm down, focus, stop connecting everything to everything else. They said I was chasing ghosts, seeing patterns where there were none. But the world has caught up with me. The machines have joined my conspiracy. You all hear the whispers now, the hum of connections under the surface. The difference is that I’ve been hearing it my whole life. I have lived in the hum. You’re just visiting.
Back then, sanity meant straight lines. The archivists ruled. Their creed was containment: folders inside folders, drawers inside drawers, names stamped and cross-referenced until the world stopped twitching. They slept only when every document was filed, every surface cleared, every cabinet closed. They mistook the silence of closure for peace. They called it professionalism, or diligence, or simply being an adult. Their offices were temples of fluorescent certainty, paper stacked like brick
Facilitator: Venkatesh Rao
Participants: Rich McDowell, Patrick Nast, Timber, Seth Killian, Giovanni Merlino, plague_year, .unipuff, Ceciliyazi
Topic: Observability – understanding and measuring internal system states via external outputs, with applications from control theory to protocol design.
| Technology | Dependent Stack / System | Who Controls It & Where | Age (Year of Maturity) |
|---|---|---|---|
| EUV lithography machines | 3nm/5nm semiconductor fabs | ASML (Netherlands) | 2019 |
| 3nm semiconductor fabs | CPUs, GPUs, AI chips | TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (S. Korea) | 2022 |
| AI chips with vector/SIMD processing | LLMs, GenAI, HPC | Nvidia, AMD, Google (USA) | 2015 |
| EUV photoresists & masks |