Digital Plowshares

Announcing The Hinternet’s First Essay Prize Contest

1. Announcement

In spite of all our misgivings, and in full awareness of its dark side, we at The Hinternet remain, withal, children of the Enlightenment. Part of our mission is to ensure that several of that era’s most salutary traditions endure in this dark time, perhaps even bearing us through to the other side of it.

One such tradition is the essay prize contest. In 1746, Émilie du Châtelet was awarded a prize from the Académie des Sciences of Paris for her essay on the question: “What is the nature of fire, and how does it propagate?” In 1754 Jean-Jacques Rousseau won a prize from the Académie de Dijon for his essay on the theme: “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” In 1770 J. G. Herder won a prize from the Berlin Academy of Sciences for his essay in response to the question: “Can the origin of language be explained on purely natural grounds?” And so on. After the French Revolution, such essay contests still existed, but for the most part they went the way of the salon — their centrality to intellectual life dwindled, and in the 19th and 20th centuries other practices were developed for injecting new ideas, and new solutions to old problems, into the cultural bloodstream.

But now, in 2025, The Hinternet proposes to revive the old-fashioned essay prize. For our inaugural contest, the question is: “How might current and emerging technologies best be mobilized to secure perpetual peace?” The prize winner will receive $10,000 USD.

Regular readers will know by now that The Hinternet operates according to a fairly precise formula: 51% inscrutable and surreal experimentation, 49% sincere and on-the-level truth-seeking. In fact, we always insist, the work we do in both of these modes has the truth as its exclusive aim, but we do want to be clear that today’s announcement is positioned entirely within the space of that latter 49%. We really do want you to help us to answer this question, which we ourselves have been reflecting on long and hard, but which we find we are just not smart enough, alone, to solve. And we really are going to pay you for your effort, if our judges deem that your work makes a real contribution towards a solution.

2. Description

We do not want to say too much about what we are looking for, since any winning essay is sure to be one that expresses ideas we’ve never considered. But at least a few paragraphs are in order, if only to help potential contestants understand how we arrived at this contest’s theme.

Sometimes it seems to us that we are living in an age of paradox. Today humanity can grow bespoke organoids in vitro, receive hi-res live video direct from the surface of Mars, build nanobots to perform remote surgery, interact with artificial minds that realize in their essentials the old alchemical dream of the omniscient Brazen Head. Yet we still find ourselves cowering like Bronze Age villagers at the never-ending threat of the arrival of marauding warlords. They “maraud” differently today, with warships and satellites and network hacks. But the fear is the same, and no less legitimate today than millennia ago.

We at The Hinternet find that we simply cannot accept this arrangement. It’s got to go. And with this in mind we wonder whether humanity might not use some of the knowledge it has acquired in manipulating nature towards its own ends, and some of the devices it has conjured to help it in this manipulation, to help it, instead, to secure what the great Enlightenment philosophers still dreamed of, and what seemed like a real possibility, discussed seriously by serious people, until sometime after World War I: perpetual peace.

Perhaps the situation we initially described, of a world of high technology and brutal political reality, is not really a paradox at all. There is no reason prima facie why we should suppose that technological innovation in itself has any eirenic leaning at all. One might sooner suppose the contrary. In his 1588 work, Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli [The Diverse and Elaborate Machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli], roughly 190 of the 194 machines illustrated and described by the titular Italian captain are war machines: new variations on the pyrotechnically driven battering ram, the catapult, and so on. The few apparatuses that are not specifically designed for killing are what we might describe as “information machines”, including the famous “book-wheel” that many have cited as an anticipation of hyperlink technology. Even when you’re doing something as pacific as reading, it turns out, you’re using a technology whose initial applications were intimately connected at least to one subdomain of humanity’s war-making enterprise.

Truly, it seems sometimes, human ingenuity is primarily a response to the constant threat of war, not just in the Renaissance, but in every age. There would have been no boom in industrial, commercial, and eventually household applications of computing, to provide another historical example, had great leaps forward in computer science not been made under pressure to innovate in the domain of automated cryptography over the course of both world wars. One fears that as a rule our machines are always war machines first, and only subsequently do we find other things to do with them, as a sort of afterthought.

But this rude fact should in no way prevent us from seeing what might be made of our afterthoughts, seeing how our war machines might be reconfigured to prevent the very thing they were originally conceived to facilitate.

Of course, as long as the global economic system continues to incentivize wealth accumulation, inequality will endure, and there is no real hope for lasting peace under such conditions. Our economic order practically requires all of us to behave like latter-day cattle-rustlers at nearly every moment of our lives, hoarding for ourselves what our neighbors have equal reason to wish to hoard for themselves, and often compelling us, out of desperation, to steal from our neighbors outright. This is an arrangement that cannot but regularly erupt into violence.

Still, short of a radical change to the global economic order —which at least some of us here at The Hinternet sincerely hope to see within our lifetimes— is there anything that can be done to make war-mongering a less attractive career option than it has been up until now? To offer at least a somewhat apt comparison, we have not yet extirpated evil from the human heart, yet there is much evidence that serial-killing as a form of life has declined considerably since its statistical peak in the 1980s. This seems to have something to do with the rise of new methods of sophisticated DNA testing, as well as with the proliferation of ubiquitous recording devices. Slinking around and sadistically slaughtering innocent victims just isn’t worth it any longer!

The serial-killer comparison is particularly useful, as it highlights one of the real hazards of “solutionism” that our essay-prize contestants should be watching out for: on balance, a reasonable argument —if not a decisive one— could be made that we would have been better off living in a world with as many serial killers as we had before, but without universal surveillance, and without private companies that now claim ownership of our very genomes — the most intimate “data” we have. Sometimes, indeed, the cure is worse than the disease. We might, similarly, imagine a perpetual peace in which the Planetary Emperor Nole Ksum instantly annihilates, with a satellite-based laser beam, any one of his subjects who has even a passing thought of committing violence against their neighbor. That is a perpetual peace, we presume, that no one wants.

Any perpetual peace is of necessity going to be a compromise, and so the trick is to come up with the least painful one imaginable, the one that deprives us of the least amount of our inborn human excellence and our potential for thriving. As we have already admitted, we ourselves are not smart enough to figure out what that might be. Are you?

The Essay Prize Contest is open to absolutely everyone. We do not wish to exclude academic specialists, but we do note at the outset that we are not particularly impressed by what they have accomplished so far. What, indeed, have political scientists, or faculty members in schools of “government”, done, concretely, to end war? Relatedly, neither are we averse to quantitative methods in principle, but we do consider that data-mongering is often an evasion, concealing the absence of any real bright new ideas. We consider that our historical moment is one that requires people to say bold new things, without much concern for disciplinary allegiances or identification with particular traditions or schools of thought. We consider, finally, that, for better or worse, this is an era in which rhetoric counts — you might have some good ideas, but still be so boring in the way you express them that no one is ever going to pay attention long enough to learn what they are.

What we need, then, are essays that are not just intelligent and innovative, but independent-minded, unfettered, bold, and stylish — only with a combination of all these attributes can we really hope to change the world.

—The Hinternet

3. Dates and details

By May 15, we will announce the panel of judges. There will be three of them, coming from a variety of backgrounds and domains of expertise. The Hinternet’s Editorial Board will vote only in case a tie-breaker is needed.

Submissions are due by September 1. These should be sent to editor@the-hinternet.com.

The Prize winner will be announced around October 1, and the Prize money will be paid to the winner immediately. We will record a podcast with the winner sometime in October. As many as three “runners-up” will be given the opportunity to publish their essays at The Hinternet.