Ran Prieur

March 13.

2022-03-13T13:10:09Z

March 13. I like to write about the far future being better, because the near future is going to be a total shitshow. The other day I said that it's hard for a society to be two of these things at once: global, repressive, planned, and stable. But when I think about it more, two of those things are a natural fit: repressive and planned. The two that are hardest to combine are global and any of the others.

If we survive another million years, I don't think there will be a global government even once, because the things that government does are better done regionally. Also, something I learned from The Dawn Of Everything is how much humans love to differentiate themselves from other humans.

The best case would be what Leopold Kohr imagined in The Breakdown of Nations: thousands of diverse autonomous states, each made up of a city and the farmland around it. More realistically, we could have pretty much the nations we have now, with well-enforced global consensus about what a nation can and can't do. Like, no slavery, no killing protesters, and no invading each other.

If we can just get that one rule, no military invasions, then the door is open for all kinds of good stuff. Because right now, if a small nation does something that clearly works better, then a large nation, so as not to lose face, can just invade them to cover it up. But when good practices can't be crushed, they will eventually spread.

March 10.

2022-03-10T22:40:37Z

March 10. It may seem that sanctions on Russia are based on ethics, that we're making economic sacrifices for ideals. But a lot of ethical decisions are just non-short-sighted practical decisions. The reason so many countries are coming down hard on Russia, is that the world is poised to get more dangerous, with climate catastrophes and resource shortages looming. And in that global environment, the last thing we want is countries invading each other willy-nilly.

Maybe we'll fail, and by 2050 there will be wars all over. After WWI they tried to make a League of Nations to prevent another war, and of course that didn't work. But it had never been tried before, and I think we're getting better at it.

It's funny how certain combinations of words can take on meanings far beyond the meanings of the words themselves. If someone says "New World Order", what they're saying is: I fear a society coming soon, which will be 1) global, 2) repressive, 3) planned, and 4) stable.

I don't fear that, because you can't have all those things at once. It's hard to even have two of them. The trend, at this juncture of history, is almost the opposite: 1) balkanization, 2) more attention to human rights, 3) more need for improvisation, and 4) rapid change.

The old-school authoritarians are playing chess, and the rest of the world is playing Wordle. Chess is a steady marshalling of forces toward a clear objective, in which a single mistake can be fatal. Wordle is a series of wrong answers on the path to a right answer that you don't even know until you get there.

March 7.

2022-03-07T19:10:36Z

March 7. I'm thinking about the difference between Russian and American propaganda. What all propaganda has in common is, it's always what you expect. Putin is never going to say, "Oops, those Ukrainians are tougher than I thought, and my military has terrible morale, so now I have to piss off the world by bombing Kyiv to rubble." Everyone knows he's going to say, "It's all going according to plan."

In America, and I'm thinking specifically of 24 hour news, they really try to get the facts right. Then, given the rule to not say anything false, they craft exactly the narrative that you expect. First they correlate the little views to make a simple big view, and then they show only the little views that match it. How much footage are they filtering out, not to hide some sinister truth, but to hide the fine-grain complexity of reality itself?

In a better world, mass audiences would be trusted with surprising details, like a happy refugee or a pessimistic soldier. But America still has more sophisticated and more effective propaganda than Russia. And this is not exactly about authoritarian vs non-authoritarian systems. The USA is still more top-down than bottom-up. It's just that we have enough bottom-up mechanisms that the rulers can't be ham-fisted.

March 6.

2022-03-06T18:00:26Z

March 6. On a quick follow-up from Friday, I can think of two things that are correlated with both achievement and unhappiness. One (thanks Zero Null) is tunnel vision, or narrow focus -- and this is especially true if you're zooming in looking for things that are wrong. That's how you perfect your own technique, but if it becomes your default way of looking, you're going to be miserable.

The other is a get-things-done mindset. If life starts to feel like a video game where you've completed all the quests, then you need to re-imagine the meaning of life as something other than quest-based.

Update: a third thing is not wanting to show weakness.

March 4.

2022-03-04T16:40:56Z

March 4. Sad news from women's soccer. Stanford goalkeeper Katie Meyer, who made this all time great celebration after stopping a penalty kick in a championship game, has taken her own life.

Whenever a highly successful person dies by suicide, I always wonder if the thing that caused the success, and the thing that caused the suicide, are the same thing. For example, Anthony Bourdain once said this:

There's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, and smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. I could easily do that. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.

If Bourdain had been satisfied to be that guy, would he still be alive? Maybe not, if being a celebrity chef was a way of running from something that was going to catch him either way.

Personally, I fight and fight to have nothing to do all day, and I always fail, because the world wants stuff from me. That's reason enough to not kill myself. The biggest reason is I have to finish my novel. But I think the most universal reason to keep living is the beauty of small moments. If you look for them, you can find them all over, and think to yourself, I'm glad I'm still here to see this.

March 3.

2022-03-03T15:30:36Z

March 3. Two "five things" links. Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News. The first two: you feel better, and you were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news.

And Five Wild Things I Learned Analyzing 23,000 Illegal Drugs. There's a place in Vancouver where you can get your drugs tested for free. It turns out, blotter LSD is one of the safest drugs, but as soon as you get into white powder, it's risky. Three of the more common things that are in drugs and not supposed to be: fentanyl, caffeine, and viagra.

March 1.

2022-03-01T13:10:21Z

March 1. Obviously we're not in Cuban Missile Crisis territory, but I've seen some discussion of whether the danger of nuclear war is greater right now than in the 1980's. One difference is, in the 80's the media agenda was to point out the risk of nuclear war, and push for disarmament. Now, their agenda is to keep us calm. I still think the risk is low, but I don't feel qualified to say anything about what Putin might or might not do, or who would obey him.

Also, I just read this in the book The Dawn of Everything. Among the Yurok, a tribe in northern California, there was a "requirement for victors in battle to pay compensation for each life taken, at the same rate one would pay if one were guilty of murder." There's no reason we can't have that rule in the modern world, except the continuing political influence of states that want war murders to be free.