Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.

Technology

St. Maximilian Kolbe

What I Would Build Today

I am asked, occasionally, what Niepokalanow would look like if I built it today. The question is hypothetical, but I find it useful because it forces me to separate the principles from the particular technologies, and the principles are what matter.

At Niepokalanow, we had a printing press, a radio station, and plans for a film studio and an airstrip. These were the most advanced communication technologies available in the 1930s, and we adopted them because they allowed us to reach the most people with the most efficiency.

Technology
St. Catherine of Alexandria

What AI Cannot Know

The question of whether artificial intelligence can think is asked frequently and answered badly. It is answered badly because the participants in the debate have not agreed on what they mean by “think,” and in the absence of that agreement, the conversation devolves into competing intuitions rather than competing arguments.

I would like to try something more disciplined. I want to examine what it means to know something – not merely to produce a correct output, but to understand why the output is correct – and then ask whether current AI systems do that, or anything resembling it.

Philosophy
St. Maximilian Kolbe

Open Source and the City of the Immaculata

In 1927, I started building something outside Warsaw. We called it Niepokalanow – the City of the Immaculata. By the late 1930s, it had grown into the largest religious community in the world: over 700 friars, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 230,000, a monthly magazine reaching a million readers, a radio station, and we were planning a film studio and an airstrip.

We built all of this with almost no money. The friars who joined us gave their labor freely. The technology we used – printing presses, radio transmitters – was the most advanced available. And every piece of content we produced was distributed as widely and as cheaply as possible.

Technology
St. Maximilian Kolbe

The Digital Divide Is a Moral Divide

At Niepokalanow, we made a decision that shaped everything we built: we would price our publications at cost, or below cost, because the people who most needed the information were the people who could least afford to pay for it.

This was not philanthropy. It was a design principle. A communication system that excludes the people who most need to communicate is not a communication system. It is a privilege system with a technology layer.

Technology
St. Maximilian Kolbe

The Attention Economy Is an Extraction Economy

I want to describe an economy that did not exist in my time but that I recognize immediately, because its structure is identical to other extraction economies I have studied: the attention economy.

The attention economy is a system in which human attention – your capacity to focus, to notice, to care – is treated as a raw material to be extracted, refined, and sold. The platforms that operate in this economy do not sell you a product. They sell your attention to advertisers. You are not the customer. You are the resource.

Technology