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
June 15. State of Surveillance is an episode of HBO's VICE where they interview Edward Snowden. To me, the least interesting thing is how much surveillance is going on and how easy it is. The most interesting thing is from 20:45-23:00, where they argue that broad-scale surveillance is ineffective: The more information the government collects, the harder it is to sort through it and find what's useful.
This reminds me of the unconditional basic income, where it would work better to just give everyone money than to keep a file on every person to try to figure out if they deserve it. The problem is, if you have the power to collect any given piece of information, it's really hard to not use it. I see this as a psychological challenge of letting go of control, but Snowden mentions the political fear that you'll get in trouble for failing to collect some piece of information that turned out to be important. Anyway, this isn't just a weakness of government but also private powers like Google.
Another YouTube video on a whole other subject, Why Poor Places Are More Diverse. It's about the diversity of plant species in poor soil. Where nutrients are abundant, the fast-growing species suck them all up and crowd out the slow-growing species, but where nutrients are scarce everyone can find a niche. Then the video tries to apply this model to human society! This is fascinating, but I think it's a stretch. Notice that their plant argument has detailed evidence for a simple story, and then they project it onto the much greater complexity of human systems with less evidence. And even if they're right, the political implication is ridiculous: that we can make a better world by forcing every place to be poor. Clearly it's better to have abundance and also have laws and social customs to keep the abundance widely spread instead of gobbled up by a few powerful interests.
June 13. A reader reports on the Illinois budget crisis:
Our state did not pass a budget last year. It was a tough year for lots of people, especially those in social services and education. But everybody knew that eventually a budget would be passed, so it was just, Hang on, borrow money to get through, hang on...
But our state also did not pass a budget this year either. Shit is officially hitting the fan. MAP grants for students didn't get funded last year, but schools mostly funded them anyway. This year, students have been told if the government doesn't fund them, the students will have to pay. Universities are cutting staff. Staff are fleeing to more secure jobs. Students are choosing more stable universities.
Public elementary and high schools are unable to begin school next year without funding. Yep, Illinois school children may all be home schooled next year! The homeless shelters in our town for men have closed down. Social services are closing down right and left.
This article explains the political background: Fallout of Illinois budget feud grows. I think the Democrats are being smart and ruthless, allowing a disaster to unfold to gain a long-term political win, while the Republican governor is being stupid and ideological. Republican voters believe that most government spending is waste, but Republican politicians are supposed to know this is bullshit, and promise to slash taxes and spending but never actually do it, because then voters learn through direct experience that government spending is more valuable than they thought.
And a loose end from Friday's post. As I thought, my psychic pain self-immersion idea is not original. Max sends this 2013 Alex Robinson post, strong medicine, where she describes basically the same thing and calls it "sitting with pain".
June 10. For the weekend, some personal thoughts about self-knowledge. I've been practicing meditation for many years, not that often, but it adds up, and I'm understanding better how it works. I don't think posture matters except as a placebo, and actually keeping your mind blank is not the point. The value in meditation is that you have to turn your conscious mind inward, and you notice stuff. It's like the Undercover Boss reality TV show, and you're putting in time as the undercover boss in your own mind and body. If meditation makes you a better person, it's because you find harmful subconscious habits and you grind through the process of fixing them.
I've invented another technique that enhances meditation, and it's pretty powerful on its own. Someone must have figured this out thousands of years ago, but I've never read about it anywhere. You know how you feel when you think about doing something you dread? Try to capture that feeling, let go of the thoughts that brought it up, and just open your soul to that pain, as intensely as you can for as long as you can. Obviously this feels terrible! It's the opposite of the serenity you expect from meditation. But I find, if I can stay immersed in the pain long enough, it wears out, and then it has less power over me in daily life, and I can face more difficult stuff.
My third practice, you guessed it, is marijuana. It lowers my intellectual intelligence while raising my emotional intelligence, so that they're both about average. It also gives me mind-blowing awareness of music, so that's usually where I put my attention, focusing on my strength. But lately I've been focusing on my weakness, combining pain immersion therapy with drug-enhanced emotional awareness to do a full life review. And I wonder if this is why weed gives people anxiety, because they sense the horror of looking at their life with new eyes and seeing all the mistakes.
Anyway, I've learned that I'm not as good a person as I thought I was, but maybe stronger. My subconscious mind actually has more social intelligence than my conscious mind, and it would be a pretty successful Game of Thrones character, except that it's sloppy and erratic. So I need to integrate the different parts of me, and bring the whole thing into sharper focus.
By the way, over on the about me page I've updated my photo, so you can see the trendy vintage glasses I've worn for more than a year now, and just last week I tried using henna on my beard. Next time I'll leave the temples grey.
June 8. After some reader feedback, I want to apply some logic to the unconditional basic income. Start with the fact that more and more jobs are being automated. Now, this might be reversed in a total technological collapse, which makes the question moot. For the sake of argument, let's assume that automation will continue to increase. What does society do with the people whose jobs are replaced?
Broadly there are two answers, and they can both be framed in moral terms. One is that it's wrong to let people starve and die, and it's right to spread the benefits of technology to everyone.
The other is that it's wrong for people to be given the necessities for survival without doing any work, so people whose jobs are replaced should starve and die. Nobody will stand up and say this, but they'll hint at a more moderate position: if your job is replaced, you must invent a new job serving the big money interests that benefited from replacing your other job, and if you lack the initiative to do this, then you starve and die.
In practice, societies are leaning toward the first answer, to spread the economic benefits of technology to everyone. There are two ways to do this. One is to maintain a massive bureaucracy strictly defining what people have to do to survive, and what they can spend their money on. The funny thing is that some people are comparing the UBI to communism, but this scenario, the most realistic alternative to the UBI, is basically communism. In comparison, the UBI is libertarian: strip down the social bureaucracy, just give people money, and they're free to spend it however they want.
The other day I said this was inevitable, but I've changed my mind after an argument from Anne: the urge to control people is too strong. Even if all jobs are automated and no one is left behind, and even if bureaucracy is less efficient than just giving people money, governments will still distribute benefits in a way that allows them to manage our lives, because that's what governments do. Now I'm thinking that an unconditional basic income is at least a hundred years away, because of how hard we'll have to fight for it.
More generally, my philosophy on economic freedom is that it should be inversely proportional to economic power. So I support a corporate death penalty, a financial transaction tax, and aggressive antitrust laws, but there should be a level of economic power, maybe $20k/year for individuals, below which you're free as a bird.
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. 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. 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.
May 30. How big an issue is the nausea problem for Virtual Reality products? It's a huge issue, even in $80,000 military VR goggles, and the author explains how it's caused by depth perception, momentum, and other differences between what your eyes see and what your body feels, so that most people can't stand to wear the goggles for more than a few minutes at a time.
This leads to one of my favorite subjects, because some people are thinking, "Ha, I knew it, technology will never cheat reality." But this is a religious position, because what unseen law or authority defines "cheating"? If you believe in a fundamentally physical reality in which life is intrinsically meaningless, then you're a transhumanist, because it has to be possible to rearrange matter and energy so we all feel perpetual bliss, and there's no reason not to.
I think life does have a meaning, defined and enforced by something beyond materialist science -- but I'm not totally sure, and in any case we have to test it. Let's try holodecks, happy pills, whatever, and either we'll succeed, or we'll learn something about what's stopping us and what it wants.
This is also how I try to live my life. I feel like a rat in an incomprehensible experiment, and I don't know if the experimenter is the Tao or the human collective unconscious or the alien simulation overlords, but I sense a pattern of punishment and reward that's not completely random, and I'm trying to figure it out so I can get rewarded all the time.
In a related personal story, last week I tried getting high five nights in a row. I still wasn't using a lot -- a nug the size of a black bean in the vaporizer will give me four good lungfuls if I do it right, which will get me to a [7] and linger all through the next day so I never really come down. On the good side, I can't remember ever feeling so happy for so long, and I was able to keep up on dishes and groceries, and maybe write more creatively -- see the degamification post below. I gained intuitive understanding of the creative process through Picbreeder, and recognized a new favorite album.
On the bad side, my body felt constantly washed out, my brain was never over 90%, my sleep was pleasant but unsatisfying, and the days seemed to go too fast. Coming down last night, 48 hours after my last dose, I felt more bored than I ever have in my life. Even fun activities were tedious chores, which must be how depression feels all the time. So I went to sleep at 10 and got up at first light when I couldn't sleep any more, thus today's early post. Now I feel almost normal again, and on balance it was worth it, so I'll do more experiments to seek the optimal balance of nights on and nights off.
Also, thanks to another reader for another generous donation! My financial future is looking safe enough that I now feel awkward taking donations and I don't expect to link to my donation page again.
May 27. For the weekend I want to write about TV shows. Like everyone we're following Game of Thrones, and I appreciate how it has made fantasy morally complex, but I'm sick of all the boring pompous verbal arguments. Also, if there are multiple plotlines, a good storyteller will link them so that events in one plotline affect events in others, and GOT does that clumsily and not enough. And why hasn't winter come yet? At the beginning I was expecting White Walkers at the gates of King's Landing by season four at the latest. My new favorite character is the girl who stick-fights with Arya. Faye Marsay is great in everything I've seen her in, and they should have made her the next Doctor Who companion.
Doctor Who: We've almost finished watching the whole new series from 2005, and anyone who likes sci-fi will find it worth watching, but not every episode. These are my subjective opinions: Peter Capaldi might be even better than David Tennant. Eccleston failed because he was never convincingly cheerful. Matt Smith is the opposite, so fluffy that none of his episodes had any depth except The Angels Take Manhattan. River Song is easily the best side character. Companions should never have boyfriends -- I thought Mickey was annoying but he's great compared to the others. Donna Noble was the best companion and the next best was Martha Jones. They should have had seven year old Amelia Pond be Matt Smith's companion the whole time. 2005-2007 had the best opening theme and the newest seasons have the best opening visuals. Top five episodes: The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, Listen, The Family of Blood, Heaven Sent.
Leigh Ann is watching Hemlock Grove, an attempt at high quality horror, but for me it's too slow and broody and it's hard to tell what the characters want. And we continue to follow Grimm because the ideas have potential, but it's written like the audience are morons. If it were up to me, the villains would win and everyone would die except Trubel and Wu, who would roam the postapocalypse wasteland in a spinoff series.
Right now my favorite show is Orphan Black. Season three was a bit weak because they got too epic and lost storytelling discipline, but season four is back to the incredible quality of the first two years. It's smart, funny, surprising, the plot moves fast, the different stories are well-connected, and there's never a scene that just gets the story from one place to another -- it always earns your attention.
Finally, thanks DN for a $50 donation!
May 25. This 1916 Guide Shows What the First Road Trips Were Like. The article looks at "Blue Books" that were densely packed with maps and instructions to navigate the extreme complexity of local roads before state and federal highways. What jumps out at me is how much fun this would have been! Every minute you're being challenged, feeling a sense of reward for staying on the route, and being right in the middle of new places. I can't think of any kind of travel that I would enjoy more (except see below).
As more people got cars, governments made driving easier with highways and signs, and driving gradually changed from something fun you do for its own sake, to some shit you have to do to get from one place to another. In a few years someone will ride a self-driving car across America, while giving all their attention to a video game that simulates the kind of exciting exploration that they would get to in the real world if it hadn't been improved so much.
I call this technological degamification. Gamification is when a boring activity is tweaked to make it more fun, and it's often done for marketing and other sinister purposes. Technologial degamification is when technology is applied to an activity with the goal of making it easier, but the result is to make it less rewarding by removing too much fun stuff from human awareness, and not enough tedious stuff.
Now that I have this idea I'll probably start seeing examples everywhere, but I want to continue on the subject of driving, by imagining Road Trip Utopia:
It's the year 2116, and the world is finally recovering from the deep economic and infrastructure collapse of the 21st century. High tech never went away, but the old highways are weedy rubble, and nobody drives fast except on race tracks. Long-distance travel is done on trains or hybrid airships, and short distance travel is done by foot, bicycle, mule, or sun buggy (a small electric vehicle with giant wheels for bad roads and a maximum speed of 20mph, powered by hyper-efficient solar panels, or maybe liquid fuel from artificial photosynthesis).
All of these transports are used by adventurers who spend their unconditional basic income on high-grade water condensers and concentrated food, and travel the old roads through the wilderness and the ghost suburbs, alone or in small groups. They navigate with computer maps that are constantly updated by microdrones, but sometimes they turn off the map for fun, and they don't ask the computer which way to go, because the point is to discover it themselves.
May 24, 1am. Been obsessed with Picbreeder. Here's my panel of images, with the most recent at the top, and you can see that it only took a few hours to learn to use the interface and develop a personal style. (Weed helped.)
May 23. I've linked to this before and I'll probably link to it again, because it's really good: Stop Trying To Be Creative. It's about Picbreeder, a website where you can gradually evolve images until they look like something interesting, and how all creativity works this way. You don't create something good by planning to create that exact thing -- paradoxically, focusing on a specific objective blocks you from getting there. Instead you have to go through a process of following unexpected new ideas, and letting go of old ones. This reminds me of a quote from my favorite songwriter about avoiding comprehensible lyrics, because "a word pins you down."
On basically the same subject, Upside of Distraction. It's about writers who cut everything out of their life except their writing project, and they become so narrowly focused that they lose touch with reality and write badly. Obviously too much distraction will also prevent good writing, and what you need is balance between your creative work and other stuff that might seem to be useless or even unpleasant.
May 20. Today's subject is techno-dystopia creep. Hyper-Reality is a brilliant new six minute film about a potential future where physical and virtual reality are merged into a bizarre nightmare world. A great novel about the same kind of thing is Feed by M.T. Anderson.
This long article, How Technology Hijacks People's Minds, explains in detail how we accidentally lose our agency to technology, and suggests some reforms, like smartphones that estimate the time cost of a click, or an "FDA for tech" that enforces standards for stuff like how easy it is to cancel a digital subscription.
Comment thread from Hacker News, What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore? These are people who love technology and have influence in the tech world, and they're still powerless to stop good things from changing into bad things. This happens in a thousand ways, but what they mostly have in common is that short-sighted decisions take less effort than far-sighted decisions, and this effect is multiplied as systems get bigger.
Quick note on another subject. The other day I posted a reader email about mold toxicity and motivation to the subreddit and there are some good comments.
And some music for the weekend. A reader sent me some links to Moondog videos. He was a weird street musician who dressed like a viking, and is one of those artists like Captain Beefheart that I eventually want to listen to deeply but haven't got around to it yet. But after listening to one album, Invocation is incredible, ten minutes of primal space rock with a barrage of low horns playing the same two notes over and over. And I might like Torisa even better. Like Invocation it's hypnotic and emphasizes the one-beat, and it also has epic high notes and gets gradually louder. Now that I think about it, these remind me of two Hawkwind songs -- Invocation is like Space Is Deep and Torisa is like Wind of Change.
May 18. Two tangents from Monday's subject. From the final paragraph, here's my point reframed without having to know anything about Gattaca or genetic engineering: 1) Our culture loves activity and accomplishment so much that if some technology promised to double our productivity, it wouldn't even occur to most people to wonder if that was a good thing -- doing twice as much stuff means the world is twice as good. 2) All kinds of technology are giving us ever greater powers of self-transformation and self-enhancement. 3) Put this together and there is a danger that, with good intentions, we'll make ourselves extremely harmful.
Of course this has already happened. Ten thousand years ago the whole rim of the Mediterranean was covered with forests. We have extracted rare elements from deep underground and refined them into bombs that have burned whole cities. We've burned so much oil to push air out of the way of our cars, that it's causing a global climate catastrophe. The age of insane overactivity is probably not about to begin, but about to end. Still, it might get worse before it gets better, and not everyone will survive the shift to doing less.
From the second paragraph, where I bashed the idea of "magical virtue", what if I was wrong? I mean obviously, in this economy, being successful is largely a matter of luck, and even when it seems to come from hard work, there is still deeper luck in genetics or culture, or being in the right place where something you already love doing happens to be worth money. But if you keep thinking in that direction you end up with determinism, which is boring and empty. Strong-definition free will is much more interesting: that sometimes, when you make a choice, it comes from a place that is deeper than biology or physics or causality, but is still you.
Now we're getting into religion. I identify as a taoist/pantheist, but in practice it's not that different from monotheism. When football players score touchdowns and point to God, they're saying, "This is not about me, it's about my part in something so vast and incomprehensible that we can only come close to understanding it through a life-long practice of being humble and receptive." I think identity is an illusion, but one we have to work with, by viewing the self as the interface between different aspects of the Divine. And choices that involve true free will have something to do with that.
May 16. I want to go back to the subject of motivation. Yesterday I finally finished my kitchen work table project. Here's a side view and front view of the table. The top is IKEA butcher block, trimmed down to five feet long, the other wood is all scraps or cheap lumber, and Leigh Ann made some important design suggestions and chose the color. I'm very happy with it, but it took me a really long time -- I think that butcher block has been in my basement for more than three years. Last fall I got serious about it, but I could never get in a groove where doing the work made me want to do more work -- it wasn't like going over the top of a hill and coasting, but like pushing constantly uphill. So every few days when I felt a bit of energy I would go out to the garage and work for a bit until I got burned out.
Meanwhile, some people love building furniture and could never keep a blog going for twelve years. What is it that makes a person want to do a thing? The popular belief is that highly successful people have some kind of magical virtue -- it's virtue because (in western culture) doing is more valued than not-doing, and it's magical because nobody looks for a deeper cause. I can't prove it, but I suspect that all virtue is luck.
For someone my age who doesn't go to a gym, my legs are really strong, and it's because of a medical condition that makes me feel terrible if I don't do vigorous leg exercise. Our sedentary culture calls it a disorder, but if my prehistoric ancestors had it, they probably called it being a good hunter -- look how aggressively that guy chases down antelope! So I'm wondering, what if high-achieving modern people have a similar condition that forces them to do stuff that we happen to find valuable?
There's evidence that depression is an infectious disease, and here's an article about the cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii and how it affects human psychology. So if one medical condition can energize me physically, and another one can dampen someone psychologically, there might be one that energizes people psychologically, and we haven't identified it as a disease because we like what it does.
I've mentioned the film Gattaca before because I hate its message: that Ethan Hawke's drive to succeed makes him a better person that Jude Law with his genetically engineered physical perfection. The movie does not acknowledge that drive to succeed also has a deeper cause, maybe not even that deep. And when we figure it out, given our cultural bias toward highly driven people, I fear that we'll engineer ourselves into all being insanely motivated, which is much scarier than making ourselves healthy and lazy.
May 13. Taking a break from politics, two links about DIY traffic engineering. Can we banish the phantom traffic jam? It's about how self-driving cars can stop traffic waves on freeways, but it's also about how we could do it without "intelligent" cars if we were more intelligent ourselves. This reddit comment goes into more detail on driving technique. The idea is to change start-and-stop traffic in front of you to smooth traffic behind you by watching carefully in both directions. There's also good stuff about the psychology of driving:
If a car merges into your gap, will you be late to work? What if ten cars jump in ahead of you, O the Humanity! Nope, even if 60 cars get ahead, that only delays you by a minute or two. Such a small a delay is insignificant for most commutes. It's down in the noise, a tiny fluctuation. Compared to a line at the grocery checkout, one shopping cart equals 50 to 200 cars ahead of you on the highway. But it doesn't feel that way!
I've been awake since 4am because I had terrible restless legs, not coincidentally because I haven't used marijuana for 13 days. I got up and did a bunch of squats, and then heel lifts while pushing hard at the top of a doorway, and then I went for a predawn run. Normally my legs get tired before my heart and lungs, but this morning my heart and lungs were totally drained and my legs were nowhere near satisfied. So I'll try to do this more often.
And some music for the weekend. I was just reminded of a great obscure song by a question on the Record Store subreddit. There are a lot of bands who I don't particularly like, except for one song that's at the fringe of their usual style. This is a minimalist outtake from American Music Club's weirdest and darkest album, Mercury: Love Connection NYC.
A newer, better band with a similar low-pitched slow style is Timber Timbre, and my favorite by them is Grand Canyon.
May 11. Major new post from Anne, Unnecessariat. It's about the death epidemic among poor rural white Americans, mostly from suicide and opiates. Anne compares it to the AIDS epidemic of the 80's and 90's, which also affected a low-status population that the authorities didn't care about, and had similar death numbers. But AIDS victims were much better at organizing to help each other. Why?
Anne writes, "If there's no economic plan for the Unnecessariat, there's certainly an abundance for plans to extract value from them." Later she links to this article, Death predicts whether people vote for Donald Trump. Now that poor rural whites have been drained economically, Trump is extracting their political value, and if he becomes president I don't expect him to do anything for them -- although maybe he's already done something by overthrowing the Republican establishment.
Of course my solution would be an unconditional basic income, which would free all poor people from a constant state of financial emergency -- but it still wouldn't solve their boredom, their lack of meaningful participation in something larger. I can't even imagine a full solution for this, but I see a partial solution that's maybe good enough for now, and it comes back to why AIDS victims were better organized.
I think it's because they lived in cities. The population density of cities enables networks of high-quality face-to-face connections that are almost impossible in rural and small town living. Maybe it was better in the 19th century, or the 13th century, but 20th century technology has separated rural Americans from their landbase and from each other. Unless you live like the Amish, or live in a city, you probably do not have the technological and economic foundation for a healthy culture.
A hard crash would make this much worse. Even in the Great Depression urban people did better than rural people, and imagine how many practical skills have been lost since then. But it might not be too late for better government. Here's a larger version of an image from Anne's post, Overdose deaths in 2014 per 100,000. What jumps out at me is New York state, like a blue lake in the orange desert of the northeast. There can't be much cultural difference between the New York's rural counties and the neighboring counties in other states, but the drug deaths are much lower, which suggests a connection to state-level policy.
Also, backing up my guess about the Amish, they live in that tiny blue island in Ohio. And I wouldn't have guessed that South Dakota and Nebraska would be so much better than Washington and Oregon.