novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
February 12. Today, technology. This article, 10 Futuristic Materials, is utopian because it's childish. Aerogels could insulate a dome on the moon, carbon nanotubes could make towers that reach up to space, metamaterials could make invisibility cloaks, we could fly diamond fighter planes and live in metal foam floating cities and swing transparent swords. Sure, but once the Christmas morning novelty wears off, how exactly will this stuff improve our quality of life? There is a hint of intelligence in the final paragraph: "We'll develop clothing that can constantly project the video of our choosing (unless it turns out being so annoying that we ban it)." Yeah, remember when TV commercials were so annoying that we banned them, and now there are no more TV commercials?
In practice, technologies will be used by control systems to maintain their power and stability. This is especially true of weapons, but even information technology is in danger of being used this way. This reddit comment makes a thorough critique of ebooks, which can be locked down, controlled, and leveraged into economic domination in ways that paper books cannot. The author continues:
Let's say we invent the Star Trek replicator. Finally -- goods can be made out of thin air. Food can be made out of thin air. Replicators would be a scarcity destroying machine with the possibility of both destroying labor AND ending world hunger. It'd be a major shift for society. But insert the corporation and the capitalist who would wrap this machine's usage up in license fees, laws restricting usage, etc. They would use it to destroy labor, but they would prevent the device from destroying scarcity. It's too threatening to the power structures that control capital. You'll never technologically innovate yourself out of the exploitation of capitalism.
What about just using technology to make ourselves happy? Here's an article, illustrated with a great comic, about a Dutch biologist and his research into supernormal stimuli:
Tinbergen succeeded in isolating the traits that triggered certain instincts, and then made an interesting discovery. The instincts had no bounds. Instead of stopping at a 'sweet spot', the instinctive response would still be produced by unrealistic stimuli. Once the researchers isolated the instincts' trigger, they could create greatly exaggerated dummies which the animals would choose instead of a realistic alternative. Songbird parents would prefer to feed fake baby birds with mouths wider and redder than their real chicks, and the hatchlings themselves would ignore their own parents to beg fake beaks with more dramatic markings.
Of course the point is that humans play these tricks on ourselves when we eat junk food and watch TV and so on. The conclusion is that we have to learn the awareness to hold these urges in check. But as technology continues to make stimuli more powerful, can our awareness keep up? Here's a 2007 article on the subject, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.
February 11. Thanks Jef and Yelena for a $20 donation.
And another reader contribution: a long subreddit post about extraterrestrial biology.
February 10. So it's probably a permanent change that I'm writing more about culture and sports and less about politics. I want to explain this, but first I need to distinguish between different levels of politics. Local politics is where the action is. If you have great social instincts and high energy, you should get involved in local politics and maybe even run for city council. You could lead a movement to deregulate small-scale urban farming, or change the building codes to allow rocket mass heaters, or start a local currency, or build free municipal wi-fi with net neutrality. If you're really good, you might even make a difference at the state level. But as you go farther up the hierarchy, there is less freedom to do or say anything that doesn't reinforce the control system.
The only reason to follow national-level politics is for the stories. A good story can broaden your perspective and deepen your understanding and motivate you to live better. But the stories in high-level politics are almost completely scripted, and they're scripted badly. It's better to watch a good movie or read a good book where the stories are well-written and honestly fictional. And it's better to follow sports, where the rules are set up so that great stories emerge unscripted. Even the stories around sports are better than similar stories around politics, because sports reporters have not been conditioned to coat everything in bullshit. For example, the NFL is about to get its first openly gay player, Michael Sam. If you follow this, you will see more clearly and learn more than in any story about a gay politician.
This brings me to today's link, an exceptional epic blog post, The Big Book Of Black Quarterbacks:
It took a long time and some real work, but we were able to put together what we think is the most comprehensive list of black NFL quarterbacks ever compiled. More than a compilation of names, this was an opportunity to find and publish these men's stories. Some are brief; others are long. We penned longer pieces on the most notable players, like Fritz Pollard, Warren Moon, Steve McNair, Michael Vick, the immortal Akili Smith, and many more, but every player on this list is part of a broad narrative that traces the history of football and its relationship with the broader society.
February 7. Some personal stuff. I never got called back to jury duty after being dismissed the first day, which was lucky because over the next few days we got snow and then very low temperatures. The night before last it got down to -3F (-19C), and it's not going to get above freezing until Tuesday. So we've been holed up in the house, making pizza and watching Netflix. I didn't know this before but Netflix streaming has almost every good TV show and almost no good movies. We did watch a great indie film called Safety Not Guaranteed, and we just finished the final season of Fringe, which I highly recommend.
I'm worried about my bees. They're still alive, but they should be eating through their massive honey stores and instead they're staying at the front of the hive and their population is steadily dropping. I wonder if, when I took out a few frames in August to keep them from swarming, I accidentally took all their pollen. If they die, I'll still get lots of honey and can buy a new package of bees, but it's unlikely the next queen will be as good as this one.
Leigh Ann and I have been working out using the book 7 Weeks To Getting Ripped. It takes way longer than seven weeks because unless you're a super athlete you're going to be repeating weeks, but it does work well for a modest time investment. My weight is over 155 (70kg) for the first time ever, and last night I did seven pull-ups.
And some music for the weekend. Fuck Buttons are an English electronic duo. Their latest album, Slow Focus, is their best, and my favorite track is Hidden XS.
The Black Heart Rebellion are a Belgian band. Their first album, Monologue, was mediocre post-rock with death metal vocals (or maybe black metal, I'm not a metal specialist). Their second album, Har Nevo, has a good sound that's harder to classify and much better vocals. Maybe the best song is The Woods I Run From. I learned about them and Fuck Buttons from this reddit comment.
Some background on post-rock: it was sort of invented by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and maybe perfected by Mono, but few bands have tried to put vocals into it. Black Heart Rebellion and Toy are leaning in that direction, and here's one smashing success, Have A Nice Life - Earthmover.
February 5. Two smart links about technology from last year. Thanks Kevin for this transcript of a speech by Bret Victor on the future of programming. He argues that just as programming languages made direct binary coding obsolete in the 1970's, in the future programming languages will themselves become obsolete. To understand what's going to replace them, you'll have to read the speech, but there's some stuff about computers figuring out what to do from operators declaring goals and drawing pictures. My favorite bit:
So the most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing. Because once you think you know what you're doing, you stop looking around for other ways of doing things. And you stop being able to see other ways of doing things.
In terms of what computers will actually do, that guy seems to be a naive techno-utopian. Here's something smarter from Norbert Wiener in 1949. The NY Times asked the famous mathematician to write an essay on the coming machine age, but mistakes by editors kept it from being published. In 2012 it was rediscovered. My condensed excerpt of their condensed excerpt:
These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.
...
Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists. There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently.
Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.
Completely unrelated, today I made this quick reddit comment about a dumb article arguing that globalization has reduced poverty:
Dollars per day sounds like a good definition of poverty, but it isn't. Globalization goes with monetization: goods and services that were formerly outside the money economy are brought into the money economy, so now you can't get them without money. Having more dollars per day is meaningless if the things you need for quality of life also cost more dollars per day.
It's true that global poverty is decreasing, but you measure it with stuff like infant mortality or access to clean water. An article that measures it purely in terms of money changing hands has no credibility.
February 3. One more football link: From a UK perspective, American football looks downright socialist. Basically he admires how our draft system, which gives the best players to the weakest teams, creates parity and makes better games. Since 1992 there have been only five different winners of the English Premier League, and 14 different Super Bowl winners.
And a reader comment on Friday's post:
I've seen that strategy referred to as "Leading from the Middle". In the middle, you can have as many leaders as there are things that need some leading. Instead of relying on very few hierarchically placed Leaders to lead on all fronts at once all the time, you can have the best person at each time and for each purpose, working in an over-lapping and hopefully non-competitive, collaborative, fluid, organic, ebbing and flowing kind of way.
February 1. So the Superbowl is tomorrow, and it's strangely related to yesterday's post about "building the alternative that the centre has to contend with." That's what the Seahawks are doing, except what they're challenging is not the NFL control system, but the usual NFL team culture. Here's an article from the beginning of the season, The Seahawks believe their kinder, gentler philosophy is the future of football, describing how they use meditation, positive reinforcement, staff psychologists, and cutting edge technology to maximize everyone's mental and physical health. This article from last week is about how much fun the practices are, calling the Seahawks "the Google of football." And in a recent survey where players were asked which head coach they would most like to play for, Seattle coach Pete Carroll was the overwhelming winner. Of course this can all be dismissed if they don't win, but the more they win, the more other teams will want to follow the same path.
American football has been described as "chess with giants". Here's a mind-blowing reddit comment about communication before the snap, in which the offense and defense go back and forth making high-speed and extremely complex adjustments. Denver is in the Superbowl because their quarterback Peyton Manning is the best in the game at this. This is the first Superbowl where the top offense (in both points and yards) has faced the top defense. Seattle defensive back Richard Sherman is famous for his trash talk, but he's also the best pass interceptor in the NFL. Here's a great video, Richard Sherman - Student of the Game, about how he meticulously studies film and tricks quarterbacks into throwing interceptions. Somewhere I read a quote from Sherman about how he likes to get inside the heads of quarterbacks, but he can't do it with Peyton Manning because you just get lost in there.
This game was supposed to be interesting because of the potential for extreme winter weather, but it looks like NYC will be a balmy 48 degrees tomorrow. The other big factor is Seattle wide receiver Percy Harvin. He's an incredible athlete but very delicate, so he'll probably leave early with an injury, but if he plays the whole game he'll be MVP. (Update: after the total thrashing by Seattle's defense, they had to give MVP to a defensive player, but check out Harvin's kickoff return. The way he accelerates between the 20 and 30 yard line, it's like he's a different species.)
January 30. Stray links. First, a great reddit comment by Erinaceous on how to change the system. You should read the whole thing but here's a condensed excerpt:
Resistance only defines the edge of the system. It might be important to define that limit but it's just the limit. And the social limit is a hard place to be. What defines the centre is the institutions, the permanent effective networks that are space filling and area preserving. More interesting though is that the control points in these hierarchical systems are not the centres. They are lower down. It's the sales guy who moves between the management and branches and talks to all the people on the shop floor. It's the minor bureaucrat who actually makes the government run. It could be the bottom up institutions that people know to go to because they are so much more effective than the government services that are constantly cut back and falling apart. The ones that make them less dependent and more capable of being fully realized people. The institutions that are working to put themselves out of job instead of trying to maintain their power. So taking the centre is not really the strategy either. It's building the alternative that the centre has to contend with.
In case you missed it, Cannabis during pregnancy endangers fetal brain development. I've also seen studies about mild brain damage if you use it as a teenager. Still no evidence that it's bad for adults, and I'm looking forward to buying it legally in a few months.
And a reader sends this good news link, School ditches rules and loses bullies.
January 28. Obama is giving a State of the Union speech tonight, and I'm wondering: how bad would things have to get for a president to stand up and say that the state of the union is bad or weak or desperate or anything negative?
Related: a video from last summer, Candidate Obama debates President Obama on Government Surveillance. Anyone who thinks Obama was secretly evil all along must be autistic, because if you have any ability to read people, it's obvious that candidate Obama believes what he's saying and president Obama does not. I continue to believe that Obama came into the presidency with good character, good intentions, and high competence; and this is not an idealistic position -- it's the most cynical position possible, because it means it doesn't matter who's president. The presidential race is a giant distraction, channeling the energy and attention of millions of people out into a ditch somewhere, because on the important issues the president is a figurehead and the system is completely locked down. Sure, if Elizabeth Warren runs in 2016 or 2020 I'll vote for her and feel good if she wins, but I won't expect it to make any more difference than the winner of the Superbowl. The good news is, economic inequality is getting so ridiculous that even corporations and the elite are starting to see the need for wealth redistribution. So I think that's going to happen eventually no matter who is president.
By the way, if anyone is curious about jury duty, here's the story. They sent me a summons a month ago, I had to go online and fill out a form, and then I had to check in at the courthouse by 8:30 Monday morning. There were about 160 of us in a big room. I know because they did roll calls for five groups of 30-35. After an orientation, they called up the first two groups, gave them badges, and sent them to court. Then they called names for the other three groups, sent the fifth group home because the defendant didn't show up ("he's in a lot of trouble") and told the third and fourth groups that we wouldn't be needed until 1:30. I was the only person there who came by bicycle. I rode home for lunch, came back, and they called the third group again and sent them to court. After about 20 minutes, they told us in the fourth group that the case had "gone to bench", which means the judge decides instead of a jury, and they sent us home. We all have to continue to check in every evening to see if we have to come in the next day, until our two week term is up. In this state employers are required by law to give you time off for jury duty, but they're not required to pay you, and the state pays $10 a day. Here's a comparison of the American and European jury systems, arguing that the European system of paid professional jurors is better. I'm not going to waste my time forming an opinion until there is a serious proposal to change it.
January 26. Tomorrow I have jury duty and might be offline all day, so I'm doing a Sunday post. My big project yesterday was completely rewriting my books page to reflect my current interests and views, instead of the ones I had ten years ago.
Also, this morning I read this mostly evil NYT article, What Drives Success?, co-written by that awful "tiger mom" woman. It identifies three personality traits that lead to "success" and talks about how they arise from culture, but it's evil because of the framing, taking for granted that "success" is a good thing that we should all want. Here's a comment I made on reddit:
I'm not sure that what they call "success" is a good thing. At least they admit (about 2/3 of the way down) that these three personality traits are not all good. But do we want to live in a society where the rules are set up so that people with these traits have vastly more wealth and influence than people who don't? Do these traits lead people to use their wealth and power in a good way once they have it?
Would it be a better world if we could somehow set it up so that the wisest or most generous people had the most wealth and power, instead of the most narcissistic, insecure, and self-controlled people?
And whoever is most "successful", we should ask how much of this success is zero-sum. For example, if I make lifestyle changes to improve my health, it doesn't require someone else to be sicker. But with wealth and power, success often requires someone else's failure. I'd rather live in a society that guarantees happy and comfortable lives to everyone, than one that condemns people to poverty for having the wrong personality.
Loosely related, a new video/article from the Onion: Laid-Off Man Finally Achieves Perfect Work-Life Balance.
January 24. Some happy stuff for the weekend. India's forest man is about a guy who spent decades singlehandedly planting a 550 hectare forest. That's more than two square miles.
Legal Pot: The Gateway Drug to State-Run Banking? Basically state-run banking is better for everyone because the money gets recycled inside the state instead of being sucked into the giant global pool of money that seeks only to grow itself at the expense of almost every actual person. And an unintended consequence of cannabis legalization is that states will be forced to set up their own banks because federal laws prohibit the big banks from handling pot money.
Finally, some music! My latest favorite band is a Connecticut duo called Have A Nice Life. (Thanks Leigh Ann for finding them on the postpunk subreddit.) Their sound includes elements of shoegaze, ambient, post-rock, and drone. Here's a link where you can listen to their upcoming album The Unnatural World. (Go to the upper left and hit "toggle track list".) The first song, "Guggenheim Wax", sounds exactly like Built To Spill put through a doom filter. And here's their entire first album, Deathconsciousness on YouTube.
January 22. Today, some criticisms of modern life that you probably already know. First, George Monbiot rants about freedom and consumerism. He never says exactly what freedoms he supports, but this bit is great:
Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves, but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves? ... Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.
Hunter Gatherers vs 21st Century Desk-sitters. Basically we spend too many hours under stress and sitting down.
Reddit comment on automation and unemployment. Automation is making more jobs unnecessary, the economic benefits are being sucked to the top of the pyramid, and our obsolete agricultural-age work ethic is preventing us from seeing the obvious solution: pay people to do nothing.
For the Love of Money is a confession by a former seven-figure-income hedge-fund trader. It's no surprise that all those people are addicted to making money. More generally, I would say that any human, in any position of power, will be tempted to narrow their consciousness to compulsively chase rewards that are harmful to society as a whole. I see only two ways out: everyone is enlightened enough to resist that temptation, or no one is in a position of power.
January 20. By popular demand I'll mention David Holmgren's new article, "Crash On Demand." Here's a pdf link, and here's a long summary and analysis by Nicole Foss, and a more concise analysis by Dmitry Orlov.
Orlov's post includes a chart by Albert Bates that puts doomer writers on a grid, and here's a subreddit post wondering where I would be. I posted a comment explaining why I disagree with the whole framework of the chart. If I made my own chart, I would have one axis for tech crash vs no tech crash, another axis for pessimist vs optimist, and two different charts for what the writers want and what they predict if everyone doesn't do what they say.
So Derrick Jensen would be a low-tech optimist on the first chart and a low-tech pessimist on the second, because he believes in an inevitable and permanent hard crash that will be worse if the earth is dead. Al Gore would be a high-tech optimist on the first chart and a low-tech pessimist on the second, because he thinks climate change will crash our wonderful world but we can stop it. Ray Kurzweil would be a high tech optimist on both charts, because he believes techno-utopia is unstoppable. John Michael Greer would be low-tech, balanced between optimist and pessimist, and the same on both charts because he knows we can only change our local environment and not the world.
Ten years ago I was a low-tech optimist. Now I would be high-tech and balanced between optimist and pessimist. Energy decline and climate change will cause decades of global poverty, there will be violent political upheaval in the weakest systems, but technology will keep grinding on, especially information technology. The good news is, hardly anyone in the first world will starve to death, and entertainment will be better than ever.
January 17. The new Edge.org question is out. Every year they ask a bunch of supposedly smart people one question, and this year it's "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?" I've just spent hours skimming them, and I've never seen an Edge question with so many lame answers. Maybe it's because it asks people what they're against and not what they're for. I like the answer by Ian McEwan, "Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing!"
There are some answers that are unsurprising but at least I agree with them. Alex Pentland in "The Rational Individual" and Margaret Levi in "Homo Economicus" argue against viewing the world in terms of rational individuals.
Hans Ulrich Obrist in "Unlimited and Eternal Growth" and Cesar Hidalgo in "Economic Growth" argue that these cultural myths are now obsolete. I like Hidalgo's idea that the age of growth is neither eternal nor a dead end, but a phase transition.
Luca De Biase in "The Tragedy Of The Commons" explains how Elinor Ostrom (unlike Garret Hardin) looked at actual commons (commonses?) and found many systems throughout history that have managed a commons for the good of all without depleting it.
Sherry Turkle in "Robot Companions" and Roger Schank in "Artificial Intelligence" argue that we should stop expecting robots and computers to replace humans or think like humans. Shank writes, "the name AI made outsiders to AI imagine goals for AI that AI never had."
Back to science, Max Tegmark argues that we should stop using the concept of infinity, and Martin Rees hesitantly suggests the obvious: "maybe some aspects of reality are intrinsically beyond us, in that their comprehension would require some post-human intellect -- just as Euclidean geometry is beyond non-human primates."
If I got to answer this question, I would write about objective truth, the idea that "there is" one reality "out there" on which all observers must eventually agree. This is a useful shortcut for everyday life, but careful scientists and philosophers should never talk about truth, only experience. I think we should expect different perspectives to have inconsistent experience, and consistency is something that emerges (imperfectly) when multiple experiencing perspectives 1) want to share the same universe, and 2) compare notes.
One answer is close to this, Amanda Gefter on "*The* Universe". First she mentions "horizon complementarity", where physicists resolve a black hole paradox by imagining the inside and outside of a black hole as different universes. Then she takes it farther, "to restrict our descriptions not merely to spacetime regions separated by horizons, but to the reference frames of individual observers, wherever they are. As if each observer has his or her own universe."
January 15. Today, some smart links about technology. A reader sends this page of 2013 links by Bret Victor. It's all over the map and I'm not going to try to summarize it, but here are the final two paragraphs:
Think about modeling phenomena, modeling situations, simulating models, gaining a common-sense intuition for nonlinear dynamic processes. Then think about a society in which every educated person does these things, in the computational medium, as easily and naturally as we today read and write complex logical arguments in the written medium.
Reading used to be reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses. Today, it's just what everyone does. Think about a society in which science is not reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses, but is just what everyone does.
Next, from a post on the Dark Futurology subreddit I learned about philosopher Nick Land, whose writing is almost incomprehensible. From Meltdown:
Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated sucessively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process.
If I read his stuff carefully, I think he's actually saying something, but he's deliberately making it hard to read, and if he made it easy to read it would be easier to see where he's wrong.
And a techno-design movie review, Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report. The idea is, instead of technology being all in your face, it will "fade into the background" and the world will look superfically low-tech.
January 13, 2014. Some future predictions while the new year is fresh. The other day I got an email from a reader who recently graduated from high school, asking for advice in these difficult times. Ten years ago I would have said to get some land and learn low-tech skills like foraging and metalworking. Now I'd say the best skills are meta-skills like mindfulness and quickly noticing opportunities, and you should only go low-tech if you love it so much that you don't care if it's impractical.
I'm embarrassed that I ever predicted a technological crash, because the arguments are so hand-wavy. Instead, I expect artificial intelligence and biotech to spice up a decades-long economic depression as the global system muddles through climate change and the end of nonrenewable resources. Low quality manufactured items and industrial food will remain affordable, but good food, transportation, and services from actual humans will be more expensive. I think the best place to live is in a small house with a big yard in a city with a seaport or railroad hub. You want to be close to the supply lines, but have enough land to grow luxury foods like blueberries and really good tomatoes. As you move farther into the country, the money you save by growing more of your own food will be dwarfed by the money you spend on transportation and shipping. Total self-sufficiency would be a good thing to write a novel about.
My generation was the first in American history to be poorer than our parents. Now the Millennials are poorer than us, and this trend will continue until the global infrastructure adapts to feed from a growing base of renewable resources, maybe around 2060. Meanwhile, if you can stay out of debt and find a low-stress job to build up savings, you'll be relatively well off. "Debt" is exactly as real as we believe it is. Mostly it's a trick to make people feel ashamed that they have no political power. Not that it would work any better if we felt angry. The system is totally locked down, and the most revolutionary political change of the 21st century, the unconditional basic income, will be necessary to keep the system stable, to turn the unemployed majority from hungry militants back into consumers.
Technology will promise revolution, but in practice ninety percent of the new powers will be used to keep the remaining ten percent from doing anything dangerous. By the year 2200 there will be no poverty, no disease, and no opportunity for anyone to make a difference, except by more quickly closing off the opportunity for anyone to make a difference. Reasonable people will know that they're better off than us, but still fantasize about living in our time. Suicide will be the leading cause of death, and by 2300, any death not from suicide will be global news. By 3000 we will either be extinct or moved to another level of reality through some technology of consciousness that would seem completely loony if you described it today. Related: a clever image of reddit in the early 3000's.