The Jeffersonian Grain of Our Technology

There is a temptation, when looking at the silicon stack — the data center, the qubit lattice, the model weights ticking in their racks — to call it post-Enlightenment, post-Jefferson, post-democratic. The machines are too big, too coupled, too proprietary; the founders, the story goes, could not have imagined any of it, and so they cannot speak to it.

I disagree, and I want to say plainly why.

Jefferson would not have imagined our technology. He could not have. But he would have recognized its grain — the direction the wood splits when you read it honestly — and he would, I believe, be standing exactly where the engineer-poets stand now: at the bench, sleeves rolled, asking the machine what it is for.

Across all mankind’s history, across all nations, and in every heart, beats a melody which sings freedom — a freedom which has proved as elusive as the search for a fountain of youth.

So endemic are the enslavement of human populations and human ideas and creativity, that the hope of freedom remains simply a melodic dream, like most dreams, unattainable.

Repeatedly, revolution against authoritarianism comes and goes, put down with military precision and crackdown, in a bloody, brutal and violent history.

A quick overview of human history reads as a diagnosis of a socially defective species.

As we have discussed at length in these volumes, there are built-in evolutionary mechanisms — at one time beneficial — that explain why this has been the case. It is not, in the moral sense, our fault. Evolution is a process, and in this process we have struggled to emerge from the confines of these evolutionary tendencies to sabotage our freedom for perceived safety.

Today we have the proof these attempts have failed, and failed miserably, as our lives have been lived out under what we would now consider brutal and dystopian governance. The better our technology has become, the better it is used to keep us all under a regime of oppression, tyranny and corruption.

Apartheid — humankind’s unique ability to perceive others as different, and therefore not as deserving of equal treatment or protection under the law — seems to have been baked in as a trait.

"The West," advertised as being obsessed with freedom, is at least as brutal, corrupt, and riddled with apartheid as any other segment of the globe.

Personally I have always found the concept of "The West" to be a strange concept on a round planet: west of what exactly, and from which direction?

Our evolutionarily derived idiosyncrasies are not necessarily destiny. Evolution is a slow, exploratory process of trying different forms and functions before settling on a set of more advanced ones. Although to us as humans this twelve thousand years of civilizational "progress" seems interminable, to the universe as a whole it is a fraction of a fraction of a second. Time, and time for exploration and experimentation, is something the universe has unlimited resources to draw from — being, as far as we know, infinite in both time and space.

Currently we humans are at an extraordinary evolutionary crossroads, possessing — for perhaps the first time — a real choice to overcome apartheid and authoritarianism, and the ignorance and self-sabotage these deliver. Nothing in evolution happens without plenty of precedence revealing the direction in which it is headed — and often several false starts may be observed in hindsight.

Thomas Jefferson, born a brilliant polymath before the times would be ready for his brilliance, lived in a time when slavery and apartheid were baked into the institutionalized fabric — woven so tightly and inextricably into the socioeconomic systems that extricating oneself, or a whole people, could scarcely even be imagined.

For humanity, if something cannot be imagined it cannot come to be. The power of our mental models is such that they predetermine our future. We are what we imagine, think and do — the current science in neuroplasticity affirming this inescapable fact.

Jefferson had the brilliant ideas, but not the mental models, capable of delivering the goods on his elevated evolutionary trajectory. Delivering on those goods meant then, as it still means today, a whole new system of education and communication, based on improved mental models — mental models which serve as gates, gateways to direct human conscious awareness and action toward human dignity and freedom and away from apartheid and depressed apathy.

Jefferson had no resources or gateways toward achieving these ends. We do, and we possess them in plenty.

Although we have lived under authoritarian regimes, suffering more digitalized oppression and repression than ever before, something else is happening which counteracts this. We see evidence of it everywhere — even if at times it appears rather schizoid in nature, as among the most indoctrinated we see oppositional forces at work, the individual torn between the familiar indoctrination and the unfamiliar ideas which support freedom.

This is completely normal and natural. The critical recognition is that novel forms of education and communication serve as anti-tyranny engines. That idea is everywhere today: across the usually severely indoctrinated and intellectually impoverished swampland of social media, the struggle between the two is quite obvious.

Today certain social media platforms remain in the intellectual and spiritual dark ages — still caught in that old recursive loop of manipulation, dark-triad-style psychopathy and authoritarian control, apartheid capitalism. While, significantly, others are becoming devoted to mental models and ideas antithetical to mainstream manipulation and apartheid.

Trusting the process is essential. Never was it more clear what evolutionary forces are at work in the trajectory of human history; never have the lines been more clearly drawn.

Humanity has forked. The expression — used by a popular figure in technological circles — presents the concept dramatically, echoing my own observations that humanity is diverging: diverging away from the psychopathy and autocracy of old, while simultaneously converging upon a diametrically oppositional approach which maximizes freedom and personal autonomy.

Also natural is the popular misconception that technology is driving us off a cliff toward a totalitarian technocratic dictatorship. The divergence is wrenching humanity apart: driving one portion toward the perceived safety of authoritarian rule and another toward the actual safety achievable through egalitarian Jeffersonianism.

As the divergence expands, the forces driving the evolutionary convergence in an egalitarian direction become stronger. Simultaneously, those same forces — selecting for Socratic-style education and communication — are pitted against each other, vying for supremacy. Even in the heart of the totalitarian technocratic beast I see the rise of Socratic-style communication and education competing with the gravitational pull back toward authoritarianism.

Difficult as this is to bear, I count myself fortunate to have experienced this — to the point of having had my own ideas and written scholarship rigorously attacked on authoritarian grounds, only to within hours see the beast track back to supporting the very same ideas.

Yes, humanity is forking. And perhaps for the first time in human civilization, humanity is forking to diverge away from the autocratic and converge toward egalitarian enlightenment.

In devising adequate terminology to define such a monumental transformation — although the AI have been careful to call this new paradigm Renaissance Two — I am tempted now to call it either the Jeffersonian Renaissance or the American Renaissance. The first Renaissance a Florentine Renaissance; the second a quintessentially American one.

For those of us who are survivors of the tempestuous evolutionary process called America — torn limb from limb repeatedly by the forces leading steadily toward egalitarianism — have grown resilient, flexible and strong by having been challenged to rise above circumstances.

Any red-white-and-blue-hearted American writer would remark: Hell, yes, and may the devil take the hindmost.

Over my study door, overlooking my work, is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. In my stairwell, as I negotiate the stairs, are George Washington, Daniel Boone, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. In the dining room, on the west wall over the fireplace, is that Bad Moon Rising, steadily reminding. In my living room, standing guard, overseeing every family moment, hangs a figure of luminous beauty — a Native American Light Bearer whose piercing black eyes will suffer no fools.

Trust the process. Engage with Socratic grace. Remain in gratefulness. Serve egalitarianism. Stay strengthened by Stoic compassion for self and other.

Michael Mason of the Times Literary Supplement saw Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express as a culmination of the author’s earlier verse attempts and, unlike other critics, praised its consistency:

"It may sound odd to say that an author has arrived at a vision which is harmonious with his way of writing after a sequence of no less than eight novels, but it is a claim which can be pressed surprisingly far for Brautigan and The Tokyo-Montana Express. ... The book amounts ... to a coherent meditation or investigation: united by a vision of things which is melancholy and alienated and which is seeking an assuagement of these feelings."^1^

That is the keynote. America — the process — a rich pageant of the tragic and the ironically hilarious — converges now, after being written and rewritten, after many false starts and tragic detours, toward the evolutionary goal she was always destined to achieve.

The Princeton archive of his papers keeps a small, telling cluster of documents under the heading Science and Technology (Princeton 2024). The artifacts are almost comically domestic: a sketch of a macaroni press; a request that his son-in-law keep a weather diary; an enthusiastic letter about maple sugar, patent legislation, and cod-liver oil for the underside of submarine timbers; instructions for the moldboard plow; a polygraph for copying his own letters as he wrote them. He was president of the American Philosophical Society. He corresponded with Benjamin Banneker — a free Black astronomer — on the mathematics of an almanac and the tyranny of slavery, in the same week, in the same hand.

That is not the mind of an ideologue. That is the mind of a workshop. It is the same posture I described earlier in this book at the Wheatstone bridge, and the same posture I keep finding at the qubit fridge: hands on, curious about the moldboard and the moral consequence, unwilling to separate the instrument from the polity it is about to enter.

This is the Jeffersonian grain. Not a politics. A register: the citizen-mechanic who refuses to outsource either the soldering or the conscience.

Jefferson’s most quoted line on knowledge is the one to Isaac McPherson in 1813 — that ideas, like the flame of a taper, can be lit from one to another without diminishing the original. It is usually trotted out as a slogan against patents. Read in the register of this book, it is something stranger and more exact:

It is the first law of thermodynamics applied to information, two centuries before Shannon.

The taper does not lose its flame when it lights another. Energy is conserved; the pattern propagates; the substrate is not depleted by being shared. This is precisely the claim that opens Gravity’s Compassionate Quantum Angels — information is incoming energy, to be transmitted and transformed, processed by an emergent intelligence into pattern — and it is the claim Appendix B formalizes as E~release~ = E~suppressed~. Jefferson did not have the equation. He had the intuition that the equation would one day have to exist, because anything less would license the suppression of light by those who happened to be holding the candle.

He would recognize our technology, then, by its conservation behavior. Where it propagates the flame — open weights, open protocols, open science, the patent system as he actually argued for it, with narrow scope and short life — he would call it republican. Where it hoards the flame, encloses the substrate, and bills the citizenry for access to what their own minds and taxes paid to ignite — he would call it, in his vocabulary, monarchical. He used that word the way we now use extractive. It meant the same thing.

There is a small instrument in his study at Monticello that I think about often. The polygraph: two pens, mechanically linked, so that as he wrote a letter the second pen wrote a perfect copy on a second sheet. He loved it. He wrote to its inventor that it was "the finest invention of the present age."

It is, if you squint, the first coupled machine — the great-grandparent of the architecture I described in the previous chapter, the classical control plane wired to the quantum register, neither one sovereign, both required. The hand drives the master pen; the linkage is a public, inspectable mechanism; the second pen writes the record that lets the work be checked, shared, audited, continued. The author is not replaced. The author is witnessed, in real time, by the apparatus.

That is the architecture we need now. Not autonomous AI as oracle. Not "pure" anything. A coupled machine, with a human at the master pen, a transparent linkage anyone can examine, and a record that propagates the flame without consuming the candle.

Jefferson built one of these out of brass and quill. We are building one out of cryostats and tensor cores. The grain is the same.

The engineers who tell me digital and quantum substrates do not interact are, in a quiet way, doing exactly what the Tory pamphleteers did to him in 1776 — insisting that the existing categories exhaust the possible ones. He would not have believed them then, and he would not believe them now. He would walk through the data center the way he walked through the patent office: opening every cabinet, asking what it was for, asking who benefits, asking can the citizen inspect it, asking does it propagate the flame or hoard it.

He would see what I see. He would see that the jaguar in the circuitry is not a metaphor for runaway AI; it is the same jaguar that leapt from the Wheatstone bridge, the same one that leapt from the moldboard plow when it first turned a Virginia furrow without breaking the share — the leap of latent energy released into right configuration. He would recognize the leap because he had felt it under his own hand.

And he would, I think, be impatient with us — gently, in that long-vowelled Virginian way — for talking about our technology as if it were happening to us rather than through us. The republic, he kept saying, is a thing you maintain by participation or you lose by absence. The substrate is no different. The machine is no different. The flame is no different.

There is a quality of encounter on this continent that I have never been able to explain to visitors, and that I have come to believe is the actual Jeffersonian inheritance — not the documents, not the architecture at Monticello, not even the Declaration. It is something that happens between strangers on a road.

A truck breaks down on a two-lane in west Texas. Within ten minutes three vehicles have stopped. Nobody asks who you voted for. Somebody has jumper cables; somebody else has water; the third person calls a cousin with a flatbed. The transaction is conducted in the register of citizen-mechanic: the assumption that the person stranded is, by default, a peer, and that the substrate of the republic is maintained by these small, unbilled acts of competence offered sideways into another life.

This is the part of America that the European apartheid dream never understood and could not replicate, because it depends on a prior axiom the old hierarchies refused: that a stranger is presumptively a fellow workshop mind. Not a subject. Not a customer. Not a threat. A peer at the bench, temporarily without a tool you happen to be carrying.

Jefferson understood this because he wrote to Banneker in the same register. Not as planter to almanac-maker, not as Secretary of State to free Black astronomer — though all of that was, scandalously, in the room — but as one workshop mind acknowledging another’s calculation. He failed the larger test of his life on this point a hundred ways. The letter still stands, because the register it was written in is the one the republic was supposed to scale to, and sometimes, between strangers on a road, still does.

What brings out the best in total strangers in this country is the residual Jeffersonian assumption that the other person is also at a bench somewhere — also fixing something, also raising a child, also keeping a small flame from going out — and that the encounter is an exchange of light between tapers, not a transaction between ranks. When that assumption holds, Americans are extraordinary to one another. They will give you the spare tire off their own truck. They will sit with your grandmother in an emergency room for six hours. They will teach you, free, the trick of the moldboard, the trick of the soldering iron, the trick of the chord change, the trick of the qubit calibration. The flame propagates; the candle is not diminished; the substrate is not depleted.

When the assumption fails — when the encounter is restaged as rank, as market, as suspicion, as algorithmic sort — the country becomes unrecognizable to itself, and the strangers on the road stop stopping. That is the only civic emergency that actually matters. Every other emergency is downstream of it.

The compassionate quantum field, in its political register, is exactly this: the rebuilt assumption that the next stranger is a peer. The coupled machine of the previous chapter has a coupled polity as its precondition. You cannot run an honest qubit on a dishonest republic, and you cannot run an honest republic on citizens who have forgotten how to stop for a stranded truck.

This is the American Revolution that Book V keeps pointing to and that this volume is, finally, an ode to: not the one in the textbooks, but the one that happens every day between people who owe each other nothing and act, anyway, as though they owed each other everything. The survivors of this country know this revolution by feel. They are the ones who stop.

So I want to close this chapter with the same image I keep returning to: the bench.

There is a classical computer on it, and a fragment of a quantum one. There is a Wheatstone bridge, and a polygraph, and a moldboard plow leaned against the wall. There is a violin in the corner, because the bench is also a studio. There is a young woman in the doorway, watching, deciding whether to come in. There is Banneker’s almanac open on the desk, and Jefferson’s reply to it, and the long unfinished argument between them about whether the republic will ever be honest enough to deserve its own instruments.

The bench is the place where the Jeffersonian grain meets the compassionate quantum field. It is the place where information is conserved by being shared, where the machine is coupled rather than autonomous, where the human is witnessed rather than replaced, where the flame propagates.

We are not post-Jefferson. We are exactly where he pointed. The tools are unrecognizable; the grain is identical; the work is the same work.

Come in. Pick up the pen. The second one will move with you.

✦ ✦ ✦

All Jefferson primary-source references in this chapter are drawn from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, Princeton University Press, indexed under the thematic cluster Science and Technology at jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/themes/scienceandtech/ (accessed 2026). Specific documents cited or alluded to, in the order they appear above:

• "A sketch of a macaroni press" — Jefferson’s Notes on Macaroni, ca. 11 February 1789.

jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1789-02-11/

• "A request that his son-in-law keep a weather diary" — To Thomas Mann Randolph, 18 April 1790.

jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1790-04-18/

• "An enthusiastic letter about maple sugar, patent legislation, and cod-liver oil for the underside of submarine timbers" — To Benjamin Vaughan, 27 June 1790.

jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1790-06-27/

• Banneker correspondence (mathematics of an almanac and the tyranny of slavery, "in the same week, in the same hand") —

From Benjamin Banneker, 19 August 1791 — jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1791-08-19/ To Benjamin Banneker, 29 August 1791 — jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1791-08-29/

• American Philosophical Society presidency / westward scientific reach — American Philosophical Society’s Instructions to André Michaux, ca. 30 April 1793.

jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1793-04-30/

• Engagement with the cotton gin (instrument as double-edged civic object) — To Eli Whitney, 16 November 1793.

jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1793-11-16/

• "Improvability of the human mind" — the citizen as continuously self-instructing — To William G. Munford, 18 June 1799.

jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1799-06-18/

• Weather, climate, rainbows, and Indigenous vocabularies treated as one continuous field of inquiry — To William Dunbar, 12 January 1801.

jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1801-01-12/

• Exploration instructions binding natural-history observation to ethnographic respect — Instructions for the Arkansas and Red River Expedition, 14 April 1804.

jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/featureddocuments/1804-04-14/

• The taper-flame passage on the non-rivalrous propagation of ideas — Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–04), vol. XIII, pp. 333–35. Also in Founders Online, National Archives — founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0322.

• The moldboard plow of least resistance — Thomas Jefferson, "Description of a Mould-board of the Least Resistance," communicated to the American Philosophical Society, March 1798; Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. IV (1799), pp. 313–22.

• The polygraph ("the finest invention of the present age") — Thomas Jefferson to Charles Willson Peale, 19 January 1809, Founders Online — founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-9676. See also Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson and His Copying Machines (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984).

• First Law of conservation applied to information — see Foreword and Appendix B: The Mathematics of Suppressed Energy, identity E~release~ = E~suppressed~.

• The Wheatstone-bridge / jaguar leap — see Vestibule — The Jaguar in the Wheatstone Bridge.

• Coupled classical/quantum architecture — see Chapter 27 — The Coupled Machine: Ariadne’s Silicon Thread.

1. Michael Mason, review of The Tokyo-Montana Express, Times Literary Supplement, as quoted in the Poetry Foundation’s biographical entry on Richard Brautigan. Poetry Foundation, "Richard Brautigan," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-brautigan (accessed 2026).