The Tortuga Technical Institute
Pirate Engineering For A Post-Legitimacy Age
What Happened to All the Science & Technology?
In May of 2003, the magazine Scientific American released a special issue with the headline, “A New Look at Human Evolution”. Some of the articles in this issue include the following:
The Evolution of Human Birth: The difficulties of childbirth have probably challenged humans and their ancestors for millions of years—which means that the modern custom of seeking assistance during delivery may have similarly ancient roots
The Multiregional Evolution of Humans: Both fossil and genetic evidence argues that ancient ancestors of various human groups lived where they are found today
Early Hominid Fossils from Africa: A new species of Australopithecus, the ancestor of Homo, pushes back the origins of bipedalism to some four million years ago
As a guy who thinks in evolutionary and ecological frameworks, and who earned a degree in neuroscience and endocrinology, this issue strikes all the right chords in my sense of fascination. I’m sure even my 9-year-old self would have learned a lot from reading it.
The articles seem interesting and well-researched; if I weren’t already keeping up with the latest discoveries in anthropology, the tone of those subtitles indicates that the authors possess a level of humility—one that looks at new evidence with clear eyes and offers readers a way to find meaning in the scientists’ discoveries.
Just fourteen years and four months later, the same magazine published an issue with the headline, “It’s Not Just a Women’s Issue: Everybody Has a Stake in the New Science of Sex And Gender”.
Some of the articles in that issue include the following:
The Extraordinary Complexity of Sex Determination: A host of factors figure into whether someone is female, male or somewhere in between
Lessons from before Abortion Was Legal: Access [to abortion] increasingly depends on a woman's income or zip code
How Christiana Figueres Saved the Planet: By harnessing “female energy,” Christiana Figueres convinced humanity to take on climate change
These articles seem far less fascinating—perhaps even deliberately obfuscatory. Determining sex is not complex at all given the iron law of anisogamy, and as far as I can tell, the planet still hasn’t been saved, with or without the seductive appeal of a middle-aged Latina with gray hair—plus her legal right to terminate a pregnancy.
Some may read those titles and become angry about the existence of a perverted ideological agenda. I just end up disappointed. If I were genuinely interested in learning more about sexual difference, I have no faith that reading that issue would help me in that quest.
This shift in Scientific American’s focus mirrors a broader cultural and institutional drift—one that has seen the once-venerable pillars of science and technology increasingly entangled in ideological quicksand. It’s not just about the content; it’s about what this shift represents: a move away from the pursuit of empirical truth toward something more performative, less grounded. Others have already written plenty about the tides and forces that have led to this state of affairs, and I’m not particularly interested in producing the ten-thousandth sociopolitical rant of this nature.
Instead, I will use this canvas to articulate some fundamental principles and practices that will promote good science and technology in the next decade (and possibly beyond that), and how the Tortuga Society plans to become a house for their fulfillment.
Institutionalist Illness
The 21st century is riddled with the hollow rituals of institutional decay. Bureaucracies bloat, credentialism metastasizes, and once-meaningful disciplines have been reduced to memetic theater. Meanwhile, the supposed opposition—meaningless conservative (or, often, “centrist”) hand-wringing—merely fetishizes the forms of collapsed greatness without recovering the spirit that animated them.
While splintered factions waste themselves trying to seize the reins of lifeless institutions, the Tortuga Society sets its sights elsewhere. We are not interested in resuscitating fallen idols. We are building something else—something fundamentally anti-conservative.
By anti-conservative, we do not mean reckless, and certainly not politically progressive. We mean something precise: a rejection of institutionalism as a default mode of coordination. We assert that conservatism is only valuable when in service to a living aim—something dynamic, not defensive, definitely not moderate.
The Tortuga Society must obviously sometimes engage with the very institutions we reject. But we do so tactically, not reverently. Christians understand from John 17:14–16 that they are to be in the world, but not of it. Similarly, in our case, Tortugans aim to be adjacent to and within systems of scholarship, but never assimilated into their senescence.
This ethos animates everything from our embrace of job-stacking to exclusively networked staffing. We are not here to play their game better. We are here to burn the board. Furthermore, not only is economic piracy a good funding model for our endeavors, but it speeds along one The Tortuga Society’s goals: to kill and bury credentialism for good.
Birthing A New (Anti-)Institution
From this anti-conservative orientation, the Tortuga Technical Institute was born.
The Tortuga Technical Institute is an internal initiative of the Tortuga Society dedicated to computational independence. In recent years, it has become apparent that much of what is commonly held to be “Big Tech” is in fact a massive network of dopamine traps managed by geriatric mediocrities and staffed by low wage overseas labor. New social media networks can hardly be called “innovation” with a straight face and are rapidly destroying what remains of our civilization. Hence, it is critical for bold young Tortugans to build an entirely new infrastructure.
There are several paths towards computational independence. One can eliminate expenses associated with the megacorps, optimize your meaningless spreadsheet work away with automation, or build your own products. Tortuga Tech helps with all three.
– tom swift, Chief of Operations
Moreover, because the Tortuga Technical Institute aims to be more than just a reactionary enterprise, it is informed by some regenerative principles of progress that instrumentalize past traditions within a more comprehensive arc of production and deployment.
Regenerative Principles of Progress
My first foray into “anti-institution building” was through David Fuller’s Youtube Channel, Rebel Wisdom. During the height of lockdown hysteria in 2021—a time when I lost nearly everything important to me—I consumed Daniel Schmachtenberger’s five-part series, The War on Sensemaking, with equal parts desperation and aplomb.
It was in this descent through the black labyrinths of Game B and the Intellectual Deep Web that I encountered some foundational principles guiding the proper development cycle of technology: principles that didn’t just critique existing systems but offered developmental scaffolds for what could come next.
One such example emerged in a conversation between two thinkers with extraordinary intellectual horsepower, Jordan Hall and Matt Pirkowski, who coined the terms ‘catalytic closure’ and ‘binding closure’.
Catalytic And Binding Closures
Catalytic closure and binding closure describe two fundamental modes of system development, particularly in how they stabilize or expand their functional domains.
Binding closure occurs when a system locks in a stable and efficient cycle; it stops wandering and starts compounding, ensuring that its outputs reliably feed back into its own processes. This is the “exploit” phase—where energy, information, or structure is harnessed in a predictable and reusable way. Examples range from mitochondria converting glucose into ATP, to the ribosome translating genetic code into proteins, to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mechanism securing transactions.
By contrast, catalytic closure is the “explore” phase—when the system ventures into unknown territory, using existing gradients like stepping stones to discover new affordances. This looks like early life forms evolving new metabolic processes, the waterwheel transforming river flow into rotational energy, or artificial intelligence moving from rigid pattern recognition to higher reasoning.
Here is a practical example of how these development dynamics work together along a technological cycle.
Catalytic: Experimenting with different chemical formulations to make roads.
Early innovators test a variety of materials, exploring options like cobblestones, dirt, and emerging chemical compounds to find what performs best under different conditions.
Binding: Optimizing the formula and production of asphalt.
Through experimentation, asphalt emerges as the dominant material for road-building, standardized to ensure durability and scalability.
Catalytic: Testing different wheel sizes and tire compositions on asphalt roads.
Vehicle manufacturers experiment with tire sizes and compositions, exploring innovations to improve grip, durability, and fuel efficiency on the optimized asphalt.
Binding: Building a series of freeways optimized for high-speed transport.
The system stabilizes with freeways designed for efficiency, optimizing traffic flow for personal and commercial vehicles.
Catalytic: Developing modular transport systems for diverse conditions.
Engineers begin exploring multi-modal transport solutions that incorporate modular systems like rail-enabled trucks, self-driving pods, and detachable cargo units for mixed-use road and rail networks.
Together, these phases form a cycle: exploration breeds stability; stability creates the foundation for further exploration. One phase without the other leads to either entropy or stagnation.
The Yeoman Farmer for the Age of Compute
In his letter to George Washington in June 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I think the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,” and as a lifelong friend of the cacti, this notion just tickles me pink. I’ve had half-baked fantasies about going back in time and teaching the Sage of Monticello how to brew a prickly pear Tepache—a small but meaningful act of reciprocity to one of America’s original agrarian idealists.
By thoroughly breaking the tradition of interpretive textual originalism to which Jefferson held, however, I might offer a rather revolutionary re-interpretation of this phrase: that in the 21st century, the greatest service to one’s country might be to seed and nurture a plant of a different sort—a native chip-manufacturing plant. This isn't just a cute aspiration. In an era where digital infrastructure rivals agricultural supply chains in strategic importance, localized manufacturing of compute hardware becomes a civic virtue. It embodies the Jeffersonian spirit of stewardship, scaled to the age of silicon.
Of course, major chip plants require staggering capital investment, sophisticated machinery, and highly specialized knowledge. In this way, they seem to stand in direct opposition to the image of the self-reliant yeoman farmer. But perhaps the dichotomy is false. Perhaps the spirit of the yeoman can be reborn—not in rows of corn, but in racks of servers.
We envision a future where the yeoman farmer evolves into the yeoman technologist: someone who can build, repair, and operate compute infrastructure on local soil, unshackled from institutional capture. This archetype sits at the heart of our vision for the Tortuga Technical Institute: men (and women, if they choose) working out of garages, attics, and pole barns—bootstrapping resilient technologies not out of nostalgia for agrarian simplicity, but out of necessity, curiosity, and patriotic duty.
This vision cannot just be merely theoretical; it will need investment from those see America not just as an abstract territory, but a particular land to care for.
We are beginning to see major defense and tech companies, like Anduril, relocate operations from coastal strongholds back to the American heartland. Anduril’s move to Ohio is more than a logistics decision—it is a homecoming, a nod toward rebalancing power and ingenuity away from increasingly deranged elite enclaves. It suggests a future in which serious technological development is no longer geographically tethered to decaying cities or ideologically captured universities.
The yeoman technologist will play the same role in our time in much more decentralized manner—seeding independence in the substrate of code and circuits, not just within the soil.
Moving From Training Power to Inference Power
When DeepSeek-R1 was released in January of this year, it marked a subtle but critical inflection point in the development arc of machine intelligence. As an open-source model with reinforcement learning capabilities and emergent reasoning, it didn’t just represent a technical achievement—it embodied a philosophical one. Several technologists, including Gab founder Andrew Torba, quickly began hosting local R1 instances for use in their own communities, platforms, and tools.
Training power—best represented by behemoths like OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Anthropic’s Claude—relies on a binding closure approach: massive centralization of data, compute, and control. These models are optimized for generalization at scale, operating within tightly regulated environments with billions of parameters and inhumanly vast training corpora. There’s a reason these models sounds so effeminately corporate. They are designed to stabilize and exploit existing knowledge, feeding it back into the system with ever-increasing efficiency.
What we are witnessing here is a quiet pivot away from training power as the sole currency of progress and toward inference power as a more local, applied, and catalytic modality.
Inference power shifts focus from monolithic training toward context-sensitive application. It's about deploying AI in smaller, tailored settings—models fine-tuned on local knowledge bases, aligned with specific values, and responsive to unique needs. In this sense, inference becomes a regenerative act: not just extracting meaning from a universal corpus, but embedding intelligence into the lived, material, and communal realities of a group.
The new millennium saw the wedding of monetization to centralization of web and payment infrastructure across the information technology stack. Finally, a quarter-century into it, we are seeing the first opportunities to break apart the forces of monetization from state-funded and state-backed projects. The rise of blockchain-based payment systems and open-source language models offers a chance to reimagine how innovation is funded and sustained.
The phase of centralized foundation models has opened the door to a new era of modular, community-aligned intelligence.
The Tortuga Technical Institute sees itself as a fulcrum in this cycle.
It is within these crevices that it aims to make its impact, first in software, and later in hardware, all while making bank.
Our Current Goals
Our work begins not with grand abstractions, but with executable steps—moves that embody our pragmatic ethos and give us leverage that can expand our influence over time.
Build a component database.
Catalog the full software-development stack used by Tortuga members, then build open-source, non-proprietary alternatives—some of which we’ll monetize to bootstrap our independence.Deploy a local LLM.
Train and host a locally-run, locally-trained large language model that reflects and operationalizes Tortuga’s research values and development culture within our Telegram group.Prototype American-made hardware.
Publish technical papers and proof-of-concept builds for hardware compute components that are either sourced from or printable within the United States—and that comply with right-to-repair principles.
Our Longer-Term Goals
Looking further ahead, we’re charting course for the following projects:
A vertically integrated, garage-friendly server kit.
A modular, PC-style system that can be assembled and deployed for a few thousand dollars—by someone deep in rural Illinois, without needing a tech degree.A new kind of tech magazine.
A 21st-century successor to Popular Mechanics—a publication that sparks the minds of tinkerers, builders, and sovereign engineers who want more than productivity tips or startup porn.
These projects aren’t just grounded in quaint libertarian notions of individual freedom, they are downstream of something deeper: a loyalty to those who build with us, and a commitment to making that loyalty generative—for us, and for the communities we choose to call home.
Design architecture is a sacred undertaking, one that cannot afford to be plagued by feckless centrism nor ideological moderation via democratic gridlock. The design architect undertakes the responsibility of deciding how his tool will organize and direct his user’s intention. He is more king than architect.
The best-designed technologies, at a minimum, must be grounded in the pursuit of empirical truth; more than that, they must offer groups a means to coordinate their impulses toward reasonable shared goals; as well as situate such groups within an ecology of accountability toward their aims; and, perhaps, most importantly, they must allow individuals within those groups to use them with a sense of personal sovereignty.
Sailing Strange, Secret Waves
The age of compute does not belong to the cathedral. It belongs to the cottage industry. To the stackable node. To the pirate lab.
My senior yearbook has a page within it that awarded me the superlative of Most Likely To Cure Cancer. I’ve never had much of an interest in becoming a medical professional, let alone an academic, but as a 17-year-old budding anorexic, I would have placed an asymptotically higher probability on curing cancer than ever associating with any form of white identitarianism.
Yet, through some strange machination of fate, I struck up a deep friendship with a schizoid alt-right propagandist, and precisely one year later here we are collaborating together on the creation of an organization that serves as a beacon for science and the arts as we enter into a world that is being eaten up by artificial intelligence.
On today’s equinox, I am committed to making sure the Tortuga Society springs forth as a bed of innovation. The world will only grow stranger—but we’re not here to save it. We’re here to build the tools that will help us save ourselves.
This perfectly captures why I’m proud to be a Tortugan. We don’t retreat and wait for collapse, nor do we surrender and become cogs in the machine. We build. We create. We make our mark. The naysayers keep doubting—yet we keep proving them wrong.
This is a great summary of the scope and objectives of the Tortuga Technical Institute. The best portion was your comparsion of Scientific American covers. The degradation of the credentialized world is hidden largely by the ever-present nature of the internet, and such time-lapse photography is the only way to make it apparent to the common man. For the reasons outlined here, Tom Swift magazine aims to capture the market of popular science and engineering coverage. It has recently expanded beyond a personal blog to include cross posts of technical articles written by Tortugans. If you are curious, check this great airship piece from Centaur Write Satyr out.
https://undergrounddesigns.substack.com/cp/159492588