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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
October 11. One more quote on the theme of the human-made world being less alive than the world outside it. This is from one of the letters of H.P. Lovecraft, after he explored a part of Manhattan that had not yet been turned into a grid street pattern.
What awesome images are suggested by the existence of such secret cities within cities! Beholding this ingulph'd and search-defying fragment of yesterday, the active imagination conjures up endless weird possibilities - ancient and unremember'd towns still living in decay, swallow'd up by the stern business blocks that weary the superficial eye, and sometimes sending forth at twilight strains of ghostly music for whose source the modern city-dwellers seek in vain. Having seen this thing, one cannot look at an ordinary crowded street without wondering what surviving marvels may lurk unsuspected behind the prim and monotonous blocks.
October 9. Years ago someone recommended the book The Perception of the Environment by Tim Ingold. Since then I've been reading it sporadically, and I'm still only a fifth of the way through. It's a large book with small print, and dense dense dense -- not hard to read, but full of ideas that take mental effort to integrate.
Ingold is an anthropologist, and a theme that keeps coming up is something I first encountered in Jerry Mander's book In The Absence of the Sacred: that what we see as human mastery or transcendence of nature, is better seen as humans getting deeper and deeper into our own little world. This is from chapter five, and it's basically the same as Monday's quote about AI:
Dogon cosmology envisages a kind of entropic system in which the maintenance of the village depends upon a continual inflow of vital force from the bush, which is worn down and used up in the process. If the village is a place of stability, where things stay put and proper distinctions are maintained, it is also a place of stagnation. In an almost exact inversion of the modern Western notion of food production as the manifestation of human knowledge and power over nature, here it is nature -- in the form of the bush -- that holds ultimate power over human life, while the cutivated fields and gardens are sites of consumption rather than production, where vital force is used up.
October 7. Picking up from a week ago, America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters. "This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening."
Related: How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break?
The AMOC transports a staggering amount of energy. Like a million nuclear power plants. It is such a core element of the Earth system that its collapse would radically alter regional weather patterns, the water cycle, the ability of every country to provide food for its inhabitants.
New subject, sort of. This long Hacker News thread has lots of debates about how well AI is going to work. The popular fear is that it's going to work too well, but I lean toward the opposite position, explained in this comment:
At the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics.
Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain.
LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water.
When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible.
October 4. Music for the weekend. I've finished testing a new playlist, One Song Per Year, 1964-2024. It's not exactly my favorite song for each year, because I subbed out some songs that are not on Spotify, and a few times I put in a softer song for smoother transitions.
Also, in honor of Kris Kristofferson, who died last weekend, this is Johnny Cash's cover of Sunday Morning Coming Down.
October 3. Negative links! From Cory Doctorow, There's no such thing as shareholder supremacy. Supposedly corporations have an obligation to increase profits for shareholders, but that rule is unfalsifiable, because CEOs can do anything they want and claim it's for the shareholders.
Mississippi Town Ran Debtors Prisons. I used to think that small systems are automatically better than big systems, but right now there are a lot of small towns in America that are extremely corrupt, and this will get worse as the federal government gets weaker and less able to intervene.
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age. It's about creative work, which is most satisfying if you're only trying to please yourself, if you're in an "off duty" and not an "at-job" mental state. But now it's getting difficult to stay in that mental state, with so many temptations to measure your success with online stats.
Pro bettors are disguising themselves as gambling addicts. A comment from the Hacker News thread says it all: "The fact that people good at gambling have to pretend to be addicted money losers in order to not get kicked off platforms tells you how predatory these platforms are."
An Ask Reddit thread full of stories about the psychology of power: Women who left a rich guy, why did you do it?
Finally, a positive link from Ask Old People, What qualities of today's youth do you like?
September 30. Continuing on doom, Matt comments:
When it comes to climate change and collapse, I think it's just that hard crashes (for Americans) will happen in poor states and far-flung places. For example, whole communities in Louisiana are still recovering from hurricanes in the past few years and it's not big news. Homes are being abandoned or lived in despite not passing inspection. I think that sort of thing will become more frequent, and for the people in those places it will be a hard crash. They'll have to pick up and move.
I predict that if we don't radically reorganize in the US then a day will come when FEMA is largely incapable of responding to, say, a Fort Myers/Hurricane Ian event. I say that based on the fact that billion-dollar disasters have been on the rise. At some point, we won't be able cover a new one because we're still responding to the last one. The fallout will always be unequal, with rich people fleeing ahead and poor people being managed in (eventually) UN Disaster Camps.
This is my new way of framing collapse: 1) Dumb history will blame it on the biggest most obvious thing, just like the fall of Rome is blamed on barbarians. 2) Smart history will understand that a robust system could have dealt with that thing, but that the system was already declining for many complex reasons. 3) The propaganda of collapsing systems will continue to insist that they're strong, while basing that statement on a decreasing range of regions and people.
4) Many individuals, maybe even a majority, will personally experience a catastrophic event, in their local area or their personal life, from which they do not recover, and for which the state and the economy have no remedy. There is no practical difference between "the system is no longer doing anything for me" and "the system no longer exists."
So paradoxically, the objective story will be a gradual decline, while the two most common subjective stories will be a hard crash, and everything is fine.
September 26. Today's subject, doom. Of the many threats facing global complex society, I think climate change is overrated. It's going to be a long series of local catastrophes that will mainly challenge public institutions through the pressure of refugees.
A bigger threat is infrastructure decay, for example, One Quarter of America's Bridges May Collapse Within 26 Years. Combine this with loss of skills, and increasing technological complexity, and it's an easy prediction that a lot of stuff that now works is going to stop working, unless you have a lot of money. More examples in this Reddit thread, What's a thing that is dangerously close to collapse?
And the biggest threat is that the economy as we know it, and a large part of the meaning of life, depends on perpetual growth, which is now ending. Capitalism will continue to hide it by defining "growth" by increasingly vaporous things, like they've already been doing by shifting the Dow Jones from industrial stocks to tech stocks. They might have such clever numbers that they won't understand why all the workers are angry and unmotivated.
One aspect of the end of growth that I haven't seen mentioned, is investment. Right now, you can just stick your money anywhere and it will automatically grow. But it's getting harder to stay ahead of inflation, and at some point, investment will become a crapshoot.
Back in July I wrote that "historians will look back and see us right now inside the date range of a relatively fast crash." But it's more interesting to imagine how that prediction could be wrong. The most likely way is if there's some big event that hasn't happened yet: a nuclear war, a deadlier pandemic, a very big earthquake, or a solar flare that fries a bunch of satellites.
Hard mode: What it would take for the system to adapt so smoothly that future historians don't even see a crash? I don't think we can do it without an unconditional basic income, and I think the Republican party will get on board with a UBI, when they realize what all that money, percolating up through the economy, can do for churches.
September 23. The reason I've been blogging less is I've been working heavily on a new novel. I started it about two years ago, when my first novel was spinning its wheels. It's really hard to make up a story on the fly, with multiple third person threads, and not have them unravel. That's not a problem in the new novel because it's first person.
I'm not finished drafting it, but I can wrap my head around where it's going, and with the early parts getting polished, I'm ready to start serializing it. The genre is sci-fi/fantasy, although if it's published it will probably be sold as young adult. The precise genre is mellow postapocalypse, just far enough from utopia to be interesting. The tech is like Fallout, mostly low but sprinkled with high, including stuff we don't have. The metaphysics are Roger Zelazny reality shifting, with a twist on the powers of the hero.
It's called The Days of Tansy Capstone, and from that page you can get to part one. I plan to post part two in three weeks, part three in another three weeks, and then nothing until the new year.
September 20. Three woo-woo links. Donald Hoffman has done a bunch of YouTube interviews, and this is one of the best, Proof That Reality Is An Illusion. I especially like the part from 17-29 minutes, about the consciousness of inanimate objects. I always say, it's not that rocks have consciousness, but that consciousness has rocks. Paraphrasing Hoffman, everything we experience is an expression of the universal mind, but our metaphorical VR headset is more tuned into the consciousness behind other humans, and less tuned into the consciousness behind rocks, which is why we see them as mere rocks.
Less coherent but more poetic, a comment from the Psychonaut subreddit on Can the cosmic joke be terrifying and not funny? Edited:
In this zero dimensional non-space I realized that nothing existed outside, there was in fact no outside. The earth, life, time, movement, existence all was made up. I had never moved, never passed a single moment from that zero point. You see the world through the lens of yourself. That means you don't talk to people, you talk to yourself through people. The ego is a narcissistic child. It is also a survival mechanism, but it is not the truth of what any human being actually is. It's just a thought pattern and reaction pattern. Being a subjective center of the universe is a thought pattern, objects existing outside is a thought pattern. When they collapse it can be clearly seen that you never left home. This state is not verbally describable, literally not speakable. You do exist but not in the way that you think because thinking is in the way.
And a fun thread from Ask Reddit, What's the most amazing coincidence you've ever seen or heard about?
September 16. More stray links. This comment from the Antiwork subreddit has an optimistic argument about the politics of AI:
I have been experimenting with what you can get AI to say. If you ask for solutions to problems that people have like homelessness, healthcare, etc., or if you ask for the problems that corporations cause and solutions to them, you will get answers that are incredibly progressive. I also have discussions with it as to why it is so apparently biased towards progressive policies, and it refuses to acknowledge the bias, claiming that it is fact-based and politically neutral. The problem seems to be that the progressive ideas are fact-based and right-wing ideas are "alternate fact-based".
The data on extreme human aging is rotten from the inside out, because it turns out that most people who are over 100 in the official records, are actually dead:
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there's the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It's closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.
Gygax consciously excluded the trappings of a medieval society, and filled that vacuum with "real life" American details. Gygax wrote D&D in a country where, 100 years before, frontier land was considered free for the taking. (19th century propaganda depicted the land's original Native American inhabitants as inimical savages, like orcs.) At the same period, the success of America's industrialist "robber barons" taught the country that birth and family weren't the keys to American power; the American keys were self-reliance, ability, and the ruthless accumulation of money.
September 12. Two fun threads from Ask Old People. Have you ever known anyone who simply packed up, left, and ghosted everyone and everything in their old life?
And over 7000 comments about the wonderful days of free roaming kids
Some cool images on this page, Dan Coe Carto - 4K Rivers
And some music. It's not my best playlist, but I've put together some songs about death, some edgy post-punk songs, and some good scraps, as 2000s vol 2
A candidate for song of the year, Fontaines D.C. - Death Kink. This might be the best thing that sounds like Nirvana since actual Nirvana.
September 9. Continuing on motivation, I often wish for life to be easy and fun. But then it occurs to me, if a task is fun, it doesn't matter if it's easy. Sometimes making something harder can make it more fun. That's why games have difficulty levels. And sometimes, paradoxically, making something harder can make it easier.
This summer I watched a lot of Olympics, and it's a good way to approach any task, especially a trivial task, to do it like an Olympic routine, seeking perfection in every little movement. In the short term it's both mentally and physically harder, but it becomes physically easier as your new smoother movements become habitual, and it's mentally less tiring to focus completely on a boring task, than to do it while thinking about something else.
A few years back an old friend asked for advice on self-hate. I said, I'm not qualified because that's not a problem for me. But I was thinking of propositional self-hate, the intellectual idea that I'm worthless or inadequate. I don't get that, but it turns out that I have quite a lot of practical self-hate, in the form of subtle habits, both physical and cognitive, that don't make any sense except as self-sabotage.
The thing that's helped me the most, in noticing these habits, is cannabis. I wonder how much of the anxiety that's seemingly caused by weed, is already there and only revealed by weed. Related: Marijuana Is Too Strong Now. The days of giant Cheech and Chong joints are over, but it's not complicated to just use smaller amounts.
September 5. New post! I'm taking another crack at one of my favorite subjects, motivation. I've said before that motivation is only a problem for humans, but now I'm thinking it's a problem for any organism that doesn't fit its environment. No squirrel ever said, "Oh no, not more nuts to gather." But in captive animals you get a mismatch between what they're made to do, and what they're permitted to do.
With a perfect fit between organism and environment, what you feel like doing and what's good for you to do are one and the same. I have some political ideas on how to get closer to that, to build society bottom-up from intrinsic motivation, instead of top down from money sucking up more money. But realistically, humans are so good at constructing novel environments, that we're always going to be somewhat in a limbo of unfit.
Some people say, instead of motivation, all you need is discipline. Either they're bullshitting, or they're playing on some kind of easy mode. I seem to have good discipline, enough to push myself through the school system with good grades, and do a few jobs where I came home with just enough energy to do basic tasks and sleep. At one point in my 20s, I pushed myself so hard that I started to have nightmares about being dragged to death. Another time, between jobs, I had such fatigue that I could barely walk to the store. Modern medicine drew a blank, and I was advised to have more fun.
Since then I've spent decades trying to tease out a compromise, practicing the subtle art of riding little stretches of feel-like-doing, to get some rest from driving myself. I've found that a good thing to do, when I'm unmotivated, is to play video games -- not all day, just for an hour or two. A good game reminds me what it's like to be in a zone of energizing activity, and that mental state often carries over into the outside world.
Lately I've found another trick. I'm working on being fully present, trying to balance my attention on the smallest bits of what I'm doing, in the smallest bits of time. I've reclaimed a habit from my teenage years, of gently touching objects that I pass, to remind myself of where my body is in space. When I do something clumsily, I slow down and do it again with full focus. Coinciding with these practices, I've noticed that chores are no longer painful. It's not like I enjoy washing dishes, but now the task feels barely harder than sitting on the couch. Also, I seem to have more free time.
I suspect that this is the secret talent of elite doers: they are naturally highly present. They have an intutitive knowledge of when to push through and when to ease off, and they work with such micro-scale efficiency that they tend not to burn out, but to slide into some kind of flow state.
September 2. For Labor Day, a repost from July 2012:
The Busy Trap is one of the best essays I've seen about busyness and idleness:
"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write "Childhood's End" and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
If we manage to stabilize in a zero-growth society (instead of an endless series of explosions and collapses) then the culture will change, idleness will seem normal, and busyness and striving will seem strange or even unhealthy. I've read three works of fiction that give a sense of how this world might feel: Richard Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar, John Crowley's novel Engine Summer, and Hitoshi Ashinano's manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
It also occurs to me that nobody is ever doing nothing. Even meditation masters are focusing their consciousness. When we talk about "idleness" we're really talking about potential idleness, the absence of external demands on your time. The freedom to do nothing is the foundation of the freedom to do anything.
August 29. While not blogging, I'm making good progress on another project that might go public before the end of the year, and still cranking out playlists. My latest is a two hour condensation of Tom Waits. As a stylist, he didn't become interesting until Swordfishtrombones in 1983, but he was always a great songwriter, and I gave a lot of minutes to his early ballads. I'm currently obsessed with this song from 1999, Cold Water. Also, it's too difficult for the playlist, but Oily Night is crazy!
Related: Many of Us Have Perfect Pitch Without Knowing It
August 26. Still in repost mode. This is a post from June 28, 2017:
This sports article, Soccer Assassins, describes two coaching styles, where the normal one is to use physically strong but uncreative players as chesspiece thugs. That wins more games in the short term, but in the long term, the best players and the best teams are built on a foundation of individual skill and improvisation.
This confounds modern thinking about "individualism" because it's about how a group can work better if everyone is doing their own thing. The trick is, they're doing their own thing in service to the group. They're thinking "I want my team to do as well as possible, but I'm not going to trust the coach to tell me what to do, I'm going to figure it out myself in the moment."
This is different from "Collectivism says that society thrives if I trust central planners." But it's also different from "Capitalism says that society thrives if I'm totally selfish." It's not a middle ground -- it's a whole other angle, difficult for our culture to imagine. That's when I realized that people like Ayn Rand ruined "individualism" by tying it to selfishness.
Bottom line: the best human collectives, in sports or whatever, are built out of 1) people with all their quirks 2) with strong fundamental skills 3) making it up on the fly 4) for the good of the team. A good human society, which is probably thousands of years away, will be a fractal structure that works like that on every scale.
August 22. Stray links. Scientists reveal a fascinating neurocognitive trait linked to heightened creativity: "Our study found that creative individuals do not perceive unusual information as odd; they process it similarly to typical information." Or maybe creative people perceive all information as odd.
"Frost Crack" Sounds May Come From Sky, not Trees
From Ask Reddit, What's your most accurate description of a drug you've used?
And I have a new video. Back in 2020, I was housesitting with an actual piano, so I set up two Sansa Clip mp3 players, using the voice recorders for the left and right channel, and played a couple jams. At the time, it just felt like I was doing my job. Listening to it now, I don't know how that came out of me, and it's a good fit for the lo-fi recording. I spent yesterday making a slideshow video, with scraps of my image collection that hadn't been used yet: Three Note Dirge