Corporations in the U.S. are losing approximately 300 billion dollars a year from stress-related absences and seven out of ten employees report being disengaged from their work. So there's certainly a problem... The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions rather than launching kind of a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large.
Rex sends a 52 minute video, The Plant Ecology of Concrete, Garbage and Urine. As described by one of the comments: "Imagine a guy with a camera walking through homeless people territory and a dump place, getting all scientific about plants." Also with lots of fun and cynical social commentary.
A new Paul Graham post, The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius, arguing that the most important factor in doing great work, is to be obsessed with something with no expectation that it's useful, like people who collect old bus tickets.
This week I got obsessed with making a video of an obscure song, using images from two classic books of sci-fi paintings. I've just uploaded it: Wireheads - Sagan.
All abusive relationships begin between two individuals that believe they are both in love and that they can meet each other's varied needs. But over time several negative things occur. First, the parameters of the relationship are subtly changed to the disadvantage of one of the parties. Second, that party becomes less and less capable of recognizing what is happening to them and breaking free of the abuser. So perfectly independent and emotionally stable men and women can in theory become shells of their former selves after being trapped in an inescapable web of abuse that, sadly, they come to believe that they deserve. This is a good metaphor for [Langdon] Winner's own formulation of the control problem. Technology can be "autonomous" in the sense that humans may enter into relationships with technologies with the goal of improving their lives. However in reality people end up finding themselves hopelessly dependent on the technologies and deprived of any meaningful control or agency over them.
New subject. It's getting close to the end of 2019, and I'm ready to list my favorite music of the decade. I have a chronological 2010's playlist on Spotify, but two of my top three songs are on neither Spotify nor YouTube. Those two also happen to be from my two favorite albums of the decade, which you can find from the Bandcamp pages. The top three:
The Lovely Eggs - Wiggy Giggy
Wireheads - Holiday
Big Blood - A Watery Down Pt II
I am reading some family stories of my 92 year old neighbor, whose father and grandfather are prosperous farmers. They write a lot about the vital importance of being a prominent member of the local community. Not prominent in status or power, but prominent in the ability to help, to meet needs, in their local communities. It's their obligation, but also, their honor. They don't buy seeds from the fancy store far away for half the price; they buy seeds from the local guy, because that is what a community is all about.
Why did we stop doing that? I reject any kind of moral judgment, that people were better in the old days. People are the same as ever, we always do what seems like the best thing at the time, but our environment has changed so that abandoning local communities seems like the best move.
For the answer to both questions, I blame technological complexity. In a hunter-gatherer tribe, or a medieval village, or even the USA a hundred years ago, the human-built world was intelligible to you and your friends. You could wrap your head around the importance of whatever you were doing, and if something went wrong, you knew someone who could fix it.
Now the human-built world is so complex that you can't possibly know enough people to stay on top of it. We have to constantly deal with specialists who we might never talk to again. And the specialists, even if they're doing something useful, are doing the same thing over and over for strangers, so they're not really into it. And at the same time, we're supposed to be super-nice to each other and pretend to be happy, which means hiding our gnawing awareness of how many things could go wrong, that we have no idea how to deal with.
Lots of people have written about the costs of complexity. Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies is mostly about physical stuff rather than human psychology. However you frame it, three things are certain: 1) More complexity, more problems. 2) It's easy to gradually raise complexity, and really hard to gradually lower it. 3) So when complexity falls, it tends to fall a lot.
Usually the way this happens, is that people withdraw their emotional support, and then their practical support, from old, overly complex systems, and give it to new and simple systems that make them feel better. Beyond that, I have no idea how this is going to play out, but I'm curious to see it.