Defender's ORI Entry Point

About me

• Used to be a software engineer in computer graphics / geospatial for 6 years (2018-2024)
• Starting writing independently about memetics after working at a big social media company & understanding how politics & propaganda works
• Have always been very interested in anything that unites art & science.
  • (used to make video games, flash games)
• Have always been very good at translating between domains
  • (a lot of my career has been acting as a dev rel or communicating across teams & orgs, like between engineers & sales people)

Currently trying to create the jobs that I want to exist, so that I can get paid doing them. Like: cultural engineering R&D¹, debugging culture & deploying solutions at scale. So the actual thing I’m spending most of my time & effort on is in “science communication” for memetics, because the more awareness grows, the more expensive it will be to manipulate people, AND the easier it will be to do open experiments with informed consent².

And also: trying to understand how reality works & my place in it.

Where to find me

• Twitter - @DefenderOfBasic
  • I use this primarily like a giant Slack / Discord room, but it’s like as if the company I work for is “spaceship earth”. I prefer being asked questions in public so that others can benefit from the responses, or others can correct me if I am wrong. Win win!
• Substack
  • For long form / more polished writing. A good intro for my writing are the three essays described in the about page here defenderofthebasic.substack.com/about
• Open Memetics Discord
  • This is where the work of pushing memetics as a new scientific field is happening. There are several projects being developed here, primarily lead by Xiq, building the “nooscope”, an open source tool to map how ideas spread. This community includes (1) software engineers (2) researchers / academics (3) “narrative engineers”, aka influencers who are trying to improve humanity’s epistemology, like EtymologyNerd, and SmugBug from the pondscum collective

Funding

Currently fully funded for 2025 via:

• $3.5k from Analogue Group
• $50k from Kanro³
• $20k from Tekne Labs / Ronenv

Active projects

TODO: explain each one

• Good & Evil words & Pudding pitch
• Nooscope - https://github.com/MateusMarta/postscope
• 7 Second Surveys - https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1942706394198655080
  • https://stolaf.dev/7-second-surveys/
• Anatomy of an Internet Argument / In Good Faith book
• Teaching at CodeDay

Currently learning

See my list of ⭐️ Open Questions. Otherwise, here are the “classes” I am taking right now:

• Merkavah Mysticism Seminar - taught by Dr. Justin Sledge from wayne state university (“Esoterica” on YouTube)
• Studying Ogi Ogas’s body of work - he writes on consciousness & math, but also on religion & aliens

Footnotes

1. this technically exists but it’s very secretive & filled with dangerous power games. See New York Times explaining psyops. I want to do an open version of that. See also Graphika and newer things like Blackbird AI’s “narrative analysis” tools. ↩

2. this really is the bottleneck, in my opinion. Every time any open researcher/academic tries to work on this, there is immense backlash (see “university of zurich reddit scandal”). Meanwhile those doing experiments in secret keep going further. The solution is NOT to just destigmatize being tested on without our awareness. It’s to grow our awareness enough to be able to opt-in to what is good and opt out of what is bad. ↩

3. See Open Memetics Grant Proposal I wrote January 2025. ↩