power
A formal theory of power, developed in the open.
Power is the central concept of a lot of fields and has no formal definition in any of them. Political science argues about it, law reasons around it and cryptography keeps running into it without naming it. This project is an attempt to give it one: a formal account of what it means for an agent to hold power, how institutions compose out of smaller pieces, and what that composition implies for privacy, surveillance, fairness and institutional design.
I am writing it as a sequence of notes rather than as a finished book, and publishing them as they are written. The notes are the public form of a monograph in progress. They build on each other and are meant to be read in order, and new ones are announced in the feed.