BurnZero:About

In the blink of an eye, information has moved from being scarce to ubiquitous, inert to dynamic. Meaning our much-lauded, ancient learning institutions with their authority built upon dusty books find it difficult to keep up with the ever-changing world. Technology is fractal in nature. In a famous myth related by Plato in the seventh book of The Republic, some men are chained at the bottom of a dark cave and see only shadows cast upon a wall by a fire behind them. They think that this is reality. One of them frees himself, leaves the cave, and discovers the light of the sun and the wider world. At first the light, to which his eyes are unaccustomed, stuns and confuses him. But eventually he can see, and he returns excitedly to his companions to tell them what he has seen. They find it hard to believe.

We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science. Scientific thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This ad- venture rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change. The world is boundless and iridescent; we want to go and see it. We are immersed in its mystery and in its beauty, and over the horizon there is unexplored territory. The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don’t know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.

BurnZero is an anonymous collective working to flesh out new ideas about how we might make a parallel society.

The intention of the writing style is brevity without oversimplification:

1. Repetition, in the style of expanding TD;LR format <short/bold>, <medium>, <long> is intended for people with short attention and low time.

2. All articles should strive for a graphical representation of the key concepts. This could be a simple diagrammatic image or a short video embedded from a streaming service.

3. All notable points should be referenced to robust scientific literature prioritising via this protocol (https://burnzero.com/Referencing).

4. Where possible, all data should be presented as embedded data feeds linking to live dynamic data.