Ran Prieur

June 6.

2016-06-06T18:00:50Z

June 6. Paean to SMAC is a massive project by one guy, Nick Stipanovich, writing in depth about the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's a great game, easily the best in the Civilization series, but the most interesting thing about his blog is how obsessed he is.

In this kind of obsession, I see the massive untapped potential of humanity -- not for objective progress, but for subjective quality of life. I think everyone in the world could find something they love doing as much as Stipanovich loves writing about SMAC -- and if they get bored with that they can find something else, and this is possible even if we exclude passive entertainment and crime, because the range of benign creative activities is basically limitless.

Right now the limits are imagination and economics, which are linked, because our imagination must first figure out how to escape the economic emergency of ordinary modern life, before it looks to the vast ocean of activities that are not worth money.

Voters in Switzerland just gave a big no to an unconditional basic income, so it seems to be decades away, even in Europe. But I think it's inevitable if we continue to see improvements in 1) automation, and 2) general support for the poor. The main thing holding back a basic income is the moral belief that money should be connected to work -- a strange idea that's only a few hundred years old. The cultural link between money and work will eventually give way to efficiency, when enough jobs are done better by machines than humans, and when simply giving everyone money becomes clearly cheaper than paying a giant bureaucracy to enforce conditions on money.

By the way, my own obsessions do not include this blog. I keep posting on this page because I keep thinking of stuff to write about and it keeps me connected to other people.

June 3.

2016-06-03T15:30:53Z

June 3. Stray links, mostly from readers. On the subreddit, zenfulmind is very optimistic about virtual reality, and doubts the claims made in Monday's link.

Dutch Firm Trains Eagles to Take Down Drones. This is cool but I don't see a future. It takes a lot of money and human attention to train eagles to attack drones, and these costs will not get any lower, while the cost of drones that attack drones will drop a lot.

Magic mushrooms lift severe depression in clinical trial. I imagine this works by reconnecting the brain, taking apart a network of connections that isn't working, and allowing new connections to form that are better adapted. And I wonder if there's a political equivalent, a way of suddenly rewiring society. My guess is that a psilocybin-like transformation is relatively easy in a group of a hundred people who all know each other, but in a large complex society, it's so difficult that the drug equivalent of historical revolutions is drinking random stuff under the sink.

And a fun reddit thread for the weekend, What are some weird, real life X-files type mysteries? For much more on this subject, check out the books of Charles Fort or John Keel.

June 1.

2016-06-01T13:10:56Z

June 1. From a month ago on reddit, an epic four part comment on environmental history. The author, agentdcf, begins with ideas from new book, Capitalism in the Web of Life by Jason Moore. The basic idea is that before around 1500, value was seen to reside in land, and the peasants who worked the land were seen as part of that value. Then this changed:

The new way of seeing humans and nature divided the universe into the "human" realm and the realm of "nature," with a firm separation between the two, so that all things must fall on either side of that boundary. The human half contains all of the things that register in our metrics of value, order, and control; the nature half contains the world that is unknown, chaotic, and illegible to humans. Humans became the subject, the thing that acts; nature the object, the thing acted upon.

And the boundary, then, is in human labor, which acts upon nature to bring order, to impose control, and to create value by extracting things from nature and bringing them into the human realm. Nature itself has no value in this scheme; only by acting upon it and bundling our labor with it to create commodities do we assign value to it, but in doing so we bring it into the realm of humans, and thus out of nature. Labor productivity became, at this point, the best way to accumulate greater amounts of value... What is labor productivity, then? It is the appropriation of greater and greater streams of unpaid work-energy from the nature side of the binary, so that they may be made into commodities on the human side.

Then agentdcf goes beyond Moore's book into a critique of science...

in which a relatively small group of wealthy European males began to assume both that nature had universal laws that operated the same everywhere and all the time, and that they could apprehend these laws through empirical observation and experiment... It was now up to this group of people to say what was True -- to define nature, in other words. This all fed into the Cartesian binary because it understood nature to be static, defined by its laws, while humans -- at least some of them -- could effect change.

And here is where we begin to use the concept of nature in really contradictory ways. On the one hand, "nature" is a model; it's the way that things are supposed to be... At the same, though, we also think of nature as a thing to be conquered, controlled, improved, bent to our will. Our ability to apprehend universal laws brings the ability and the confidence to manipulate those laws, and to manipulate nature itself.

From here, agentdcf talks about biopolitics, the attempt to transform human nature to better fit the control systems, and also critiques free trade as the dismantling of local economies that still care about ecology and social justice, to fit big money economies that only care about growth.

I want take the critique of science in a different direction, but that's a topic for another post.