I did not arrive at technology through the front door. I came to it from a culture far from STEM: a philosophy graduate of Universitas Gadjah Mada, disciplined not to design systems but to interrogate systems, the technical ones and the meta-technical ones beneath them. Metaphysics, in other words. My training taught me to ask the awkward second question. Why does anarchism collapse into paradox the moment it must organize itself? Why does authoritarianism collapse into a paradox of its own, needing the very consent it refuses to grant? And why does technology, so often sold to us as neutral, stop being neutral the instant political intention passes through it?

That last question has never let me go. A tool is never just a tool. The way an artifact is designed, deployed, and governed already encodes a politics: a distribution of power, a theory of who decides and who obeys (Winner, 1980; Mumford, 1964; Feenberg, 1999). To build without asking for whom and at whose expense is not neutrality; it is only a politics that has forgotten to declare itself.

We are now living inside the sharpest version of that question the species has ever faced. Artificial intelligence is evolving along two very different vectors at once. On one path, the reach toward AGI, the frontier work of labs like OpenAI and Anthropic: general systems that approximate, and may exceed, the breadth of human cognition. On the other, the quieter rise of the type-safe, System-1 model: narrow, reliable, formally constrained automation that simply does the task, correctly, at scale. Neither path is culturally innocent. The social and political imagination is never separable from the act of creation; it is smuggled in with the first design decision.

Follow AGI far enough and it forks into two futures. One is dystopian: a world where the human is not augmented but replaced, society handed over to a post-human successor, meaning outsourced to something that no longer needs us (Bostrom, 2014; Hayles, 1999; Braidotti, 2013). The other is a total democracy: a world where general cognition becomes a shared function, where half of what we call consciousness is distributed, common, available to all, closer to Marx’s “general intellect” than to any single genius (Marx, 1858/1973; Virno, 2004). Same technology; opposite civilizations.

The type-safe model points somewhere else again, toward the horizon of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Bastani, 2019): labor dissolved into automation, scarcity engineered away, and humanity left to begin again from zero: living communally, re-articulating what it even means to be a social being once hierarchy and bureaucracy are no longer load-bearing. A utopia, maybe. Or maybe just another paradox waiting for its awkward second question.

I do not pretend to know which future is coming. All of it, for now, remains a set of methodical questions, the kind that belong in a research program, not a manifesto. Can blockchain be hijacked back for the collective rather than captured by capital (De Filippi & Wright, 2018)? Is this true? Is that false? What, exactly, is the true, and who has been granted the right to be right (Feyerabend, 1975; Foucault, 1980)? I am suspicious of any answer that arrives too confidently, because confidence, historically, is how power disguises itself as knowledge.

So this is why I am opening this platform. Not to sell certainty, but to keep a culture of interdisciplinary research alive, across engineering, post-humanism, political philosophy, and every adjacent field willing to take the questions seriously. The hope is modest and enormous at once: that careful, honest inquiry here becomes good data, the substrate on which braver, more genuinely intelligent projects can be built. Malatak Code was always meant to make working software. This is where we make working questions first.

Come think with us.

Raisa
Founder, Malatak Code · September 2026

Further Reading