Ran Prieur

March 17.

2018-03-17T17:10:17Z

March 17. Linked the other day on the subreddit, an interview with indie rock star Julian Casablancas about money, music, and politics. I'm not sure where to start. Of course I agree with him that this is a dark age for popular music, but I see his music as part of that dark age. His band's biggest hit, Reptilia, has 95 million YouTube views, and sounds to me like by-the-numbers indie rock, nowhere near as creative as someone like Ezra Furman.

This is a good point:

The Oscars obviously have blind spots, but with movies it's generally the authentic artistic endeavors that get recognized. But when you look at what gets nominated for a Grammy? I don't understand what the hell it's all about.

It's also interesting to compare music with TV, which has been in a golden age for a while now. The 1970's cannot hold a candle to the last ten years of television, so we're not talking about a general cultural decline. I think there's something about the medium of music, in the context of our economy and technology, where popularity has become strongly correlated with blandness.

Casablancas sees the evil music industry excluding the best artists, but I see it the other way around: with cheap home recording and internet distribution, the best artists no longer have to fight for a place at the table of big money. They're happy to stay independent and do exactly what they want, and big money is happy to go on with beautiful people and algorithmic songwriting.

Is it better this way? With all the great TV shows out there, there still has not been a single episode that speaks to my soul the way my favorite songs do. Maybe some future technology will enable visual storytelling to be cheap enough to take the risks to reach that level.

By the way, a 2018 album has emerged as my favorite non-Big Blood album of the decade: Insecure Men. That's the album on YouTube and here's an article about it. I would tag it as space lounge music. The songs have the structure and melody of classic pop, with so much strange beauty layered on top that I guess people find it hard to wrap their ears around it. For an argument that music is getting better, compare Dire Straits' 1985 hit "So Far Away" with Insecure Men's "I Don't Wanna Dance With My Baby".

March 14.

2018-03-14T14:40:40Z

March 14. Taking the week off from heavy thinking, here are four links from Nautilus. The Case for Making Cities Out of Wood, specifically, wood processed in a new way that makes it as strong as steel but only one sixth the weight.

Why Is There So Much Hate for the Word "Moist"? People imagine that it's about the sound of the word, but studies show that it's completely about the meaning, which people project onto the sound. Similarly: "In one study that exposed Americans and Canadians to different British accents they were unfamiliar with, they couldn't guess with any accuracy which ones belonged to people in the upper classes and which ones to people in the lower classes." But once we know, then the sounds of the accents sound upper or lower class.

Inheritance Is Moving Beyond Genetics and Epigenetics, to weird neo-Lamarckian stuff that we can't completely explain.

This Neural Net Hallucinates Sheep. It's about how artificial intelligence works more by correlation than understanding. So given the kind of landscape that often contains sheep, an AI will identify anything white as a sheep -- yet actual sheep, colored orange, it will mistake for flowers, and it's terribly confused by goats in a tree. The practical upshot: "Want to sneak something past a neural network? In a delightfully cyberpunk twist, surrealism might be the answer. Maybe future secret agents will dress in chicken costumes, or drive cow-spotted cars."

March 12.

2018-03-12T12:20:18Z

March 12. Some doom from reddit: What significant changes to the environment have you noticed throughout your life?

And some techno-optimism mixed with some doom: What BIG THING is on the verge of happening?

On the lighter side, Concert venue workers, what band/genre of music has the worst fans? Which has the best? There are a lot of nominees for worst, but everyone agrees that metal fans are the best.

March 9.

2018-03-09T21:50:19Z

March 9. Important new David Graeber essay, How to change the course of human history (thanks MakeTotalDestr0i). The whole thing is worth reading, but I'll try to summarize it.

Graeber wants to overturn the "conventional narrative": that primitive life was good, agriculture changed everything, and now we're stuck in big systems that can only work with hierarchy. Recent archaeology refutes this. There were complex civilizations before agriculture. Then agriculture didn't suddenly capture us -- it was one of many food options, tried and sometimes abandoned over thousands of years. Hierarchy also didn't capture us -- there were cultures where politics were seasonal, authoritarian in summer and anarchist in winter, or vice versa. Prehistory wasn't a row of falling dominoes -- it was a time of massive experimentation.

In Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, "cities with sophisticated civic infrastructures flourished for over half a millennium with no trace of royal burials or monuments, no standing armies or other means of large-scale coercion, nor any hint of direct bureaucratic control over most citizen's lives." This leads Graeber to his most radical point, made explicitly in one of the comments: "there is no correlation between scale and hierarchy."

This gives us hope for a better world. But it also leaves a void, by taking away a beautiful answer to an important question: How did the world get so fucked up? If it wasn't agriculture or cities, what was it? If our ancestors experimented and found Utopia, how did they lose it? It's suspicious that we have no written record of a non-repressive large scale society. Did the world get fucked up by writing?

Taking another angle, imagine we're in Utopia now. I mean clearly we're not -- even with all the antidepressants, depression is probably higher now than it's ever been. But imagine if someone from Gobekli Tepe traveled to the present day. What would they like most about our world?

March 7.

2018-03-07T19:30:25Z

March 7. Loose ends. This new subreddit thread, social bumper cars, has some good discussion of Friday's post. Gene makes an important point, that people with social disorders find each other difficult to be around. So we can't build a social utopia out of total incompetence. But I still think bumper cars are a good metaphor. If we can all develop the skill of being thick-skinned, then we don't need to develop the skill of not saying anything offensive.

Also linked from the subreddit, The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized. I would go even farther, because if you look deeply at things other than luck, it still comes down to luck. What is talent if not luck? Even "hard work" might come down to genetic stamina, or having people around you who are skilled motivators, or that you happen to really enjoy doing something that society happens to find valuable.

New subject: several ex-doomers are writing fiction now. James Kunstler has his World Made By Hand novels, John Michael Greer has written Lovecraftian fantasy, Tim Bennett wrote a novel about aliens, All of the Above, Paul Kingsnorth wrote an acclaimed historical novel called The Wake, and an ex-peak-oiler and reader of this blog, Gregory Jeffers, has just released his second novel.

I find fiction much more rewarding than nonfiction, and I'm only continuing this blog through force of habit. My unusual fear is that my novel will get popular too soon, and complicate my life so that I can't continue writing at the same level.

March 5.

2018-03-05T17:10:49Z

March 5. I don't have a post today, but do I have some news. This summer I'll be in Europe for a month, from July 10 to August 10. Leigh Ann will be there for a class, so I'll be based with her in Bonn. During the last two weeks we'll be traveling together, and during the first week my sister might join me. If anyone wants to host me, or me and one other person, for a night or two, let me know, ranprieur at gmail. Trains are very expensive, so I'll have to stick to an efficient route. I still need to research buses and possibly hitchhiking.

March 2.

2018-03-02T14:40:21Z

March 2. Continuing on psychology, this new Nautilus article is about schizophrenics and how they do lot better in developing countries, supposedly because their cultures are more collectivist and value "empathy and social competence".

But the article also mentions autism, which in one model, is the opposite of schizophrenia: "Where an autistic person's sense of self is cripplingly narrow, schizophrenics' selves are cripplingly expansive."

So I'm wondering, would someone on the autism-aspergers spectrum also do better in a more traditional culture? Or worse? This smart Twitter thread (thanks Gabriel) argues that even the developed world demands too much social competence:

You don't need to be on the autism spectrum to lack social tact or find yourself disgusted with the need to demonstrate social tact everywhere. When people talk about "neurodiversity" it's not because there's giant group of oppressed Aspies. It's because Aspergerdom is a cultural symbol of what it means to be undersocialized.

I like Starcraft but my reaction time is never going to get up to the level necessary to compete with the pros. So I play casually. I'd get destroyed if I played with people of even a moderate skill level. This is how undersocialized people see the world of oversocialized people.

I've never been to a professional for a diagnosis, so I don't know if I would come out neurotypical, aspie, or schizoid. But when I imagine my ideal culture, it's like social bumper cars: everyone is having fun, because no matter how big of a mistake you make, nothing bad can happen.