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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
November 10. Just spent a couple hours hanging out with Shane, an Irish leftist. He says everyone he knows is happy that Trump won. Not that they like Trump, but that since he took over the Republican party, the Democrats are the standard bearers for terrible American foreign policy.
He also made an interesting point, that while no Trumpers would ever identify as Communist, they want something similar: for a centralized state to make sure there are lots of manufacturing jobs.
November 7, 2024. Columbus, on meeting the Arawaks, famously wrote that they were such saps that "with fifty men we could subjugate them all." That must be how Trump feels right now. While the Dems are trying really hard and failing, he's like, I can't believe how easy it is to rule these soft and guileless people.
Trump is on a different karmic level. I don't mean that metaphorically, nor do I mean the popular concept of karma as a metaphysical enforcer of our own ideas about reward and punishment. Karma is an alien amoral system loosely related to human morality, with levels we do not understand. I don't know how one person can play life on single player cheat mode, while other players have to share the same world, but that's what it looks like.
Trump is Voldemort, and there is no Harry Potter, only a wide variety of Muggles including two unfortunate categories: Muggles who don't know that magic is real, and Muggles who seek power over others by allying themselves with a powerful wizard who doesn't care about them.
Of all the weird things that Trump's followers believe, the weirdest is that he will keep them safe. Sure, now they're safe from nonexistent dog eating immigrants. But it's the Dems who are so desperately safe that they are fatally un-fun, while Trump is clearly bringing the Apocalypse.
I wouldn't take that myth too literally, but I expect something recognizably similar, and I keep thinking of the Neil Young line: Look around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster.
November 1. I'll be traveling for the next two weeks and posting lightly. This is one of the best songs of 2024, and fitting: Sam Abbo - Doomsday
October 30. I voted for Kamala Harris, but I feel like Willy Wonka saying, no, stop, to the bad kids. I must express my disapproval of this tragic and hilarious thing that must happen. Here's one more attempt to explain it:
My D&D Character's Endorsement of Donald Trump
I, Menkalinan the wizard, fell with my party into a strange world. The people are mopey and neurotic, their eyes fixed on a mesmerizing oculus that has the whole population entranced. In this land of miracles, they spend their days in dreary toil, afraid of losing their navel-staring marvels.
The anti-magic field here is so strong that none of my spells work except simple divinations and summonings that never happened. Our ranger finds the land too denuded for even expert foraging. Our barbarian was arrested for public drunkenness and had his battle axe confiscated by a dull bureaucracy. And worst off is our cleric -- her god is dead.
In a pinch, she has turned to the Trickster, whose incarnation, called Trump, promises to upend institutions and shake the people out of their torpor. It is no easy road. Many will suffer acutely, who now only suffer chronically. But we pray that Trump will bookend this sorry age, and bring a new age of magic, so that we can open a portal and get back to Faltramador.
October 28. Back to politics, this election is really frustrating for rational people, because Trump's flaws are obvious, they're exactly what his opponents say they are, while the flaws of the Democratic party are so subtle that it's hard to say why they're losing. The best I can explain it is that the Democrats have obsolete propaganda. In 90 years they have not changed their way of framing economic issues.
I'd like Biden to stand up and say, "My fellow Americans, the state of the union is bad. We live in a declining empire at the twilight of the age of growth, and there's nothing we can do about it. We've been infantilized by social media, we no longer have the skill base to maintain the infrastructure, and we're all going to get poorer except the top tenth of one percent, who pull all the strings including mine. That's why we need boring and competent leadership to keep things from going to absolute shit."
They can't say that because they've dug themselves too deep in the hole of bland optimism. I fully expect Trump to win, if not this year then in 2028, because he has already shown the power to cheat death, and even full-on dementia will not change the reasons people are voting for him. What we have to understand about these times is that there will be no relief.
October 24. I don't feel like posting this week. Here's a classic Reddit comment about science and psychedelics.
We now have our most brilliant minds shackled to an ideology every bit as blinding as the old religious view of Catholicism. "It's all chance" is the "God works in mysterious ways" of our time. It is a fiction perpetrated by an institution invested in a certain way of seeing the world.
October 21. Political links. From 2013, a Reddit comment on the word homeland:
It's hard to explain how weird the word "Homeland" sounds in the ear of a pre-911 American. I can only say that it's not an American word. It's an Old World word.... It's a word used by a besieged, defensive and frightened people; not a word used by a confident, optimistic, powerful people. It's a word for serfs.
From 2017, in simple language, What Is Fascism? A Detailed Guide to a Dangerous Philosophy:
Under the pressures of real economic hardship, the fascist believes the problem can be solved by getting rid of of some undesirable group.... Violence from the bottom up is never to be tolerated. Violence from the top down is seen as equivalent to justice.
From 2019, Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? It's funny, the people who believe in the Antichrist are almost all under Trump's spell. But a few aren't, and this guy has written an impressive comparison of Bible passages and stuff Trump has done.
I don't believe in the Antichrist, but I believe in meaningful coincidences, in the intelligence of chance, and in the Trickster archetype, of whom Trump is an obvious and powerful incarnation. Related, a thread from the Spirituality subreddit, Could Trump actually be the catalyst that awakened masses?
He is an incredibly accurate and complete representation of America's collective shadow. Of course Americans are recoiling in horror, that's what people do when faced with their own shadow.... You don't put your shadow in charge. You accept it, because the suppression and denigration of those traits is specifically what creates the shadow in the first place.
October 17. Fun links. A study in Japan suggests that video games are good for your mental health
YouTube video about a jigsaw puzzle with two distinct solutions
Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Getting Much, Much Stronger
Mysterious gooey blobs washed up on Canada beaches baffle experts (thanks Gryphon). So far we don't even know if the origin is industrial or biological.
And some cool answers to this open-ended question on the Sprituality subreddit, What have you witnessed?
October 15. Part two of my new novel is up. Somewhere I read that a novelist doesn't really know how to write until their fifth novel. After seven years of steady fiction writing, I understand why Witches of the Pinspecked Void never found an audience. My worldbuilding was extremely ambitious, and my clunky exposition did not have nearly the bandwidth to wrap the reader's head around that world.
Exposition is 1) what you tell the reader, 2) when you tell them, and 3) how you tell them. It's basically writing. The most obvious way is usually wrong, and doing it right requires grinding through a lot of choices and developing an intutitive sense for what to say next.
Anyway, in part two, my protagonist leaves town and has some adventures in what is now eastern Washington, one or two thousand years in the future. The name Itchywanna is based on Nch'i-Wana, an indigenous name for the middle Columbia River.
October 14. Today's subject is health. Last month I learned, from this reddit thread, that the human body is really bad at storing water. One comment:
My understanding is that the control system for deciding when to send the water to urine and the control system for whether the parts of your body needs water were put together by different contractors who didn't talk to each other. As a consequence your kidneys can be busily shoving out water to your bladder while your organs are crying out for water.
Since then I've been self-experimenting. My habit for decades has been to wait until I'm obviously thirsty and then drink about ten swallows. So I started limiting it to three swallows, and overall I did not feel more thirsty. Then I tried one swallow every three minutes, for thirty minutes, and it was much more thirst quenching than ten swallows all at once.
You can do your own experiments. More generally, part of getting older and not dying is to give increasing attention to your body. Supposedly young people are physical and old people are mental, but for me it's been the opposite, because when I was young I could afford to ignore everything but my thoughts, and now I can't.
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.