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"People do not go to hell after death. The designers and builders of hell are human beings. The designs and buildings are almost completed. It is becoming difficult to add more hell."
-Tamo-san
November 17. Continuing on bad technology, thanks Roger for this link, An open letter to all those building AI in 2025. The first half is a concise critique of technological progress as we know it. For more of this kind of thinking, read Ivan Illich.
Long gone are the days when the Internet was a fun novelty that we could choose to use or not. We don't experience childlike joy each morning when we see it up and running, but we certainly panic if it's down. That's because the Internet has sunk into the foundations of our life as infrastructure, without which we are now disabled. It doesn't guarantee security, or - in itself - make any of us joyful or empowered. Having the Internet, or electricity, or a smartphone, simply means each of us gets to fight another day, and to not be left behind by all the others trying to claw their way to illusory security in an ever-changing market.
Loosely related: Seattle, like NYC, has just elected a young progressive mayor. Her name is Katie Wilson, and the weirdest thing about the campaign was that the incumbent made an issue of Wilson's mother paying for daycare for Wilson's daughter. It's weird because under what value system is this bad? Not conservatism. Conservatives love the family and are all about family members helping each other out, so that the government doesn't have to. Meanwhile liberals want the government to help people out so that we're not dependent on family.
What value system is opposed to both government, and the family, helping people out? Capitalism, because if we're all atomized individuals, we all have to work in the Amazon warehouse in the holy project of sucking all the money to the top of the pyramid and calling it growth.
November 14. Quick update on enshittification: I decided to pay five bucks for DeepAI pro, and it's worse. It unlocks the "Genius" level which makes the images prettier but not more interesting, and I'm limited to 60 a month which is nothing. Worst of all, every time I change the style, it resets to Genius to make me buy more, and I have to switch it back. I was hoping it would at least make the regular images generate faster but it does not. The user experience is actually better if I'm logged out.
What I'm seeing here is that there is no comfortable level of engagement with the monetized internet, no point of balance where you can spend a little and just hang out. Whatever it is that you want, either you find a way to get it for free, or you're marked as a rube, and the system becomes predatory.
November 14. No ideas this week. This is a nice link about urban transit, What If Every City Had a London Overground? It's about how much more enjoyable surface trains are than the subway. "The Overground has become more than the sum of its parts, as it prompts people to make journeys they likely wouldn't have made before the improved experience made it comfortable and easy." It's a good bet that one day every city will have an Overground, because humans are not going extinct, and we're not going to get so primitive that we forget how to do trains; but we don't have the resources to keep doing cars.
Related: World's Largest Cargo Sailboat Completes Historic First Atlantic Crossing
November 10. Stray links, mostly optimistic. The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer. On the same subject, from 2019, Why It's Better to Get a Tan Than Wear Sunscreen
How a radical experiment to bring a forest into a preschool transformed children's health. "Scientists think one of the reasons so many people now have allergies is because they were not exposed to microbes that occur naturally in the environment at a young age."
Also from the Guardian, I gave up small talk for a month - and the world came alive
And catching up on a great infrequent blog, The Whippet, with Whippet #187 from August. There's cool stuff about brain weirdness, the high quality of ancient tattoos, and some practical advice to use the word "conditioning" instead of "trauma", because "you avoid getting hung up on the label, and move on to actually working on the problem itself."
November 7. New video! I'm still having lots of fun using images that nobody respects to illustrate songs that nobody likes. This is the third video I've made from a 2014 album that I'm surely the number one fan of, Country Space Junk by an Australian band called Wireheads. The first two songs were illustrated with human-made art, but I ran out of good stuff, and I was happy to discover that AI slop contains nuggets. It's like a video game, except instead of "one more turn", it's "one more image", and there's always a chance that the machine will spit out a good one. It's like gambling, except that what I win is beauty, and what I spend are the world's last nonrenewable resources.
I must have looked at almost a thousand images, all made with the DeepAI generator. Something I mentioned in the interview is that AI is not the artist, it's the palette. It's not the woodworker, it's the wood, and with every video I'm getting better at working with it. For example, I learned that if you put the word "sonic" anywhere in the prompt, you're likely to get Sonic the Hedgehog, so I had to avoid that. In certain styles, "fly off in a spaceship" consistently gave me a house fly, so I substituted the word "zoom". DeepAI has a bunch of styles that are good at different things, and I got the Cave Painting style to make lunar landscapes, by asking for a white plain and black starry sky. You can't say the word moon, or the AI will put the moon in the sky: Wireheads - Sonic Spaces Blues
November 4. Pretty good article, Why do we think hard work is virtuous? It's mainly about Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
What was new, Weber thought, was the moral stance: that working hard, living frugally and accumulating wealth weren't just practical skills for succeeding, but inherently virtuous forms of behaviour.... Over time, these behaviours detached from their religious roots. You didn't need to believe in predestination to feel the drive to work endlessly, or to prove your value through success. The idea of a "calling" lingered on, but hollowed out. Eventually, it looked less like a vocation than an obligation.... Weber's point was that the moral energy that once drove the Protestant ethic has drained away. What remains are mere behavioural patterns, which have become reflexes. People still work obsessively; they still chase success as if it had ultimate meaning. The difference is that now they're unsure why.
Two more stray links. This strange phenomenon could unlock the secrets of the mind. It's about feeling a sense of awareness "without thoughts, images or even a sense of self." You can find it in ancient philosophy, and now researchers are finding it in sleep studies.
And a cool thread from the Ask Historians subreddit, about Ninjas and what they were really like. "Ninja to samurai are what Special Forces units are to the regular infantry today." Only low-level ninjas were assassins. Mostly they were spies and scouts. There's also some stuff about Kunoichi, or female ninjas.
October 30. Recorded three days ago, a new Leafbox interview. That's Substack, and it's also on Leafbox and Apple, thanks Robert! My first Leafbox interview was three years ago, and because it came right on the heels of another interview, I did it with no preparation at all. This time I did lots of prep, reading through my last three years of blog posts and writing a whole page of notes. So this one flows better and has more ideas.
Early on I mention a poem that I keep in the readings section of this site, The Purse-Seine by Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers was an anti-city doomer, but I expect cities to do better than rural areas as the collapse deepens, because they require less infrastructure per person.
October 29. The Decline of Deviance is a good blog post about the world getting less dangerous and less weird. I disagree that all of these trends have a single cause. Probably the decline in serial killers has a completely different cause than corporate logos looking the same. But he has charts and examples of a lot of different things, and there's also a big thread on Hacker News. My favorite bit from the post is about the novelty of sameness:
Whenever you notice some trend in society, especially a gloomy one, you should ask yourself: "Did previous generations complain about the exact same things?" If the answer is yes, you might have discovered an aspect of human psychology, rather than an aspect of human culture. I've spent a long time studying people's complaints from the past, and while I've seen plenty of gripes about how culture has become stupid, I haven't seen many people complaining that it's become stagnant.
Related: a quote from a novel I've just read, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:
I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism -- it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means "the dropping of petals." The world has dropped its petals.
But something new is bound to follow, as it always has.
October 27. After heavy posting last week, this week I'll probably just be posting links. Today, three tech links. Laptops create. Phones consume. It's easy to think of exceptions. But it's important to know how to think this way about technology, to see that no technology is neutral, but that every device steers us in a different way.
The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks. "...future generations may face a sort of 'digital dark age' when they look back for material from the past 50 years or so."
New stuff by Gary Larson. Larson has been learning digital illustration, and he has rediscovered "that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks," by practicing a different process, although the ideas are still not as good as peak Far Side. My favorite is the chicken drive.
October 24. Polishing off this week's subject with a comment from Matt (not the same Matt who often comments) on plant work:
A healthy tree produces enough sugars to fuel its own cellular respiration and still have enough left over to trade with other organisms. They "work" more than necessary to produce this surplus. They give the extra sugars to fungi and microbes underground in exchange for micronutrients, microbial cellular parts and soil conditioning. They could give sugars to nearby trees of a similar species in hopes of growing a cooperative forest. They give sugary nectar to flying insects in exchange for pollination, or to ants for protection. They give sugary fruits to birds, squirrels and humans in exchange for seed scattering. Even though trees can survive on much fewer leaves than they actually grow, they are motivated to grow extra leaves because they want to thrive in a vibrant ecosystem. Their extra-work is to foster a nurturing community; interspecies relationships with willing participants.
When modern humans work more at their jobs to earn beyond what they immediately need, it's usually for more personal stuff or more money in their individual savings accounts. In order to earn more, they'll usually spend more time away from their home or community while becoming persons narrower in function and vision. Their extra work usually does little or nothing to enrich their surrounding community. Compared to the trees' extra work, it's a very isolated and isolating practice.
On the other hand, I've noticed that an abundance of people are highly motivated to work for free to immediately enrich their community. Feeding the hungry, planting trees, picking up litter, building community gardens are all examples of the same kind of extra-work that trees do, but when we do it, we call it "volunteering".
This is why I think a 100% volunteer workforce is realistic, and why we're still on the ground floor of the human potential. If we get a UBI, or any other mechanism to make us actually free, if it's not only adults but kids who can find their own path of "get to" and not be suffocated with "have to", and if we can keep it going into the third generation, I think they'll look to us like superhumans, and they'll look back at us the way we look at Dickensian workhouses. Right now there are hundreds of potential Mozarts and Einsteins being used up in wicked schemes to leverage wealth into more wealth, and to replace the cooperative nonhuman world with the controlled human world.
October 22. Continuing from Monday, Roger comments:
It's not like plants really get sunlight for "free" -- they have to work for it. They need to expend energy and materials to build leaves to absorb the sunlight, and stems to support the leaves, etc.
Yes, and by that logic, the statement "He who does not work shall not eat" is perfectly compatible with everyone getting free food, because we still have to do work to chew and swallow and digest it. What those guys were really saying is "I believe in a social order in which people must repeatedly do tasks they do not find intrinsically enjoyable, under the threat of starvation." Out of millions of species on this planet, only one species does that, and not even in all societies. Alex comments:
I've thought about this over the last few years and obviously, in the world that formed us all, the hunter-gatherer world, you had to "work" if you were gonna eat, other than if you were injured or sick or a treasured elder etc. But "work" was a lot less like "work" as we understand it now and more like "play" or "something people just do".
No, and yes. It's only in the hunter-gatherer world (so far) that prime-of-life non-elites might feel no pressure to be productive. And putting "work" in quotes is exactly why. Plants don't have to make leaves -- they get to make leaves, they get to express their nature in a way that almost no humans get to do at their jobs.
Even modern people who go out hunting or foraging don't resent people who stay home, and for the same reasons: there's enough food, and hunting and foraging are deeply satisfying when your ancestors have been doing them forever. But as soon as a society gets more technologically complex, it starts adding tasks that are a stretch for human nature, and eventually coercion becomes necessary to keep the game going.
We're not going back to the stone age. Humans are pretty flexible. But right now the human-made world is farther than it's ever been from our ancestral environment. That's why the streets are full of crazy people and everything is falling apart.
October 20. Continuing from the last post, with a comment from my old friend Kevin, who moved to Russia in the 1980s.
There was no advertising in the Soviet Union. It was wonderful. In many ways people were happier and freer there. I will add that in the USSR people's labor was exploited in the sense that you produced more value generally than you were paid for. But, unlike in capitalism, people's consumption was not exploited. In fact, they didn't want you shopping and buying things because that meant someone had to serve you in shops and produce things for you in factories instead of getting drunk with friends and telling jokes to each other far into the night.
For balance, a Reddit thread, People from former Soviet republics. What is something people who never lived under communism just don't get about communism? One comment: "My dad described it as living in a country run by the world's most powerful and vindictive HOA. You can't paint your fence, and if you complain about it, you might just disappear."
I'm optimistic, because if there has been even one society without advertising, that proves that it's possible, and can probably be done without all the drawbacks of Soviet life or Medieval life. So what other things, that Americans don't think can be done, can be done?
It's funny, the guy who ruined Communism, the guy who ruined Christianity, and the guy who ruined America, all said the same thing. Vladimir Lenin: "He who does not work shall not eat." Paul the Apostle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." Ronald Reagan: "There is no free lunch."
Is that true? It's definitely not a universal rule, just look at all the plants getting free sunlight. It's not even true for all humans. I've mentioned before how some primitive cultures don't even have the concept of freeloading. I finally got around to digging up the actual quote, from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, pages 851-2:
A third fact about hunter-gatherer economies also runs counter to the notion of economic man central to modern economic theory: no necessary connection exists between production by individuals and distribution to individuals. Economists argue that sharing has an economically rational basis. The person we share our catch with today may feed us tomorrow when our luck or skill fails. In this view, sharing is a kind of insurance policy that rationally spreads the risk of not having anything to eat. Sharing in hunter-gatherer cultures, however, is much more profound than this. In many cultures at least, there is no connection between who produces and who receives the economic output. According to Woodburn, for example, some members of the Hadza do virtually no work their entire lives. Many Hadza men gamble with spear points, and many are reluctant to hunt for fear of damaging their gambling "chips", yet these men continue to get their full share of the game animals killed. Although "freeloading" is always a potential problem in all cultures, disdain for those not engaged in productive activity is evidently a culturally specific emotion.
October 18. On a tangent from the last post, an easy question: Why do we demand novelty from screens, so much more than we demand novelty from the outside world? It's because screens are a lot smaller, and ultimately shallower. You can dive a long way into Wikipedia, but not as far as you can dive into reality. Because screens are smaller, they need novelty to earn our attention, and the thing about novelty is you always need more of it.
I remember getting addicted to Mattel electronic football when I was about the same age as kids who are now getting addicted to smartphones. That football field has, count em, 27 pixels. Now my phone has a million pixels and I'm like, been there, done that. The other day I got bored with our 40 inch TV and looked out the window at traffic and trees. An 80 inch TV wouldn't work any better.
My point is, the ability of screens to hold our attention, while potent, is well into diminishing returns. We're burning more and more resources just to keep the same level of engagement. AI is the big new thing, and it's pretty neat. If you're alive at this moment in history, you should have as much fun with it as you can. But artificial intelligence is intelligent in the same way that artificial trees are trees. It's not going to gain sentience any more than plastic trees will put down roots.
I've been reading a book, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, and listening to a lecture series on Medieval Europe. The most amazing thing I learned is that under the guild system, advertising was illegal! I would give up a lot to live in a world with no advertising. I would give up my smartphone this minute if it was easier to live without a smartphone than to live with one. That day will come.
October 15. I've got a ton of negative links that I don't want to post. For all the apparent chaos, the political spectacle feels very deterministic. It's like watching buildings collapse in slow motion, with people inside. I've been putting song lyrics into AI image engines because I want to look at my laptop screen and say, "Wow, there's something cool that I didn't expect." The closest thing I have to a positive link is this short thread from Stoner Thoughts: Would be gutted to miss the end of the world
October 12. I've made another AI video. I don't think any good can come from arguing that something is "art" or "not art", but I want to talk about the process of creativity. The myth of creativity is that the Creative person, through Talent, is able to tune into the magical land Where Ideas Come From, and it arrives fully formed on the page or canvas or whatever, the Art. And sometimes that's exactly what happens. But usually there are at least two more elements. One is that whatever you channel still needs a lot of work -- filtering, arranging, modifying -- before it's good enough. Another is that creatives get a ton of ideas from stuff that other creatives have already done.
Let's call these three things channeling, sorting, and copying. AI does no channeling at all, unless there's a metaphysical aspect that we don't understand yet. And AI is bad at sorting, because it has no taste: AI cannot look at its own images and pick out the good ones. But AI is spectacular at copying. It's so good that it can look at a bunch of impressionist paintings and make an image of an apparently new impressionist painting on any subject.
From the perspective of a human creative, this works just like channeling, and it's wonderful. If you enjoy sorting and you're not talented at channeling, you can plug in prompts and get an endless supply of raw material to work with. But you still have to be good at working with it, and it's not exactly endless. AI servers are burning way too much energy, and it's anyone's guess how long we have until the bubble bursts.
That's why I'm not holding back. Luckily, one of my favorite Melissa Kassab songs was not yet on YouTube, and the lyrics are packed with good prompts: Fix The Leak
October 10. Continuing on non-political subjects, an interesting article about why the Yankees always lose in the playoffs. The author lists a bunch of examples of obvious bad decisions about which pitchers to use, and argues that Yankees manager Aaron Boone "is handed an analytical roadmap by general manager Brian Cashman and the front office, and that he follows it, unwaveringly, regardless of the circumstances." Most damning is the accusation that the analytics department doesn't believe in players getting hot. This is an example of how being too smart makes you stupid. Because they're able to run the numbers on a player's entire career, they get fixated on those numbers rather than following the flow of the game.
October 8. I have no ideas this week, but I'm reading two books on the same subject, in very different styles. The subject is entities from outside the reality recognized by physicalism. One book is academic: Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits, edited by Michael Ostling. Academics will never write about what the entities actually are, or even say whether they're real or unreal. They just write very carefully about what people believe, and about what words mean. A sample:
Thus the "demonic" is properly understood less as a specific category of supernatural being than a collective reflection on unfortunate occurrences, on the ambivalence of deities, on tensions surrounding social and sexual roles, and on the cultural dangers that arise from liminal or incomprehensible people, places, and activities.
I can learn stuff from this book, but it's difficult and not fun to read. The other book is for a popular audience: The Eighth Tower, a.k.a. The Cosmic Question, by my favorite paranormal author, John Keel. Keel writes constantly about what the entities actually are, but rather than settling on a truth and defending it, he just spins out wild speculations with no attempt to make them consistent. It's great fun to read. A sample:
Over and over again the Bible tells us how men were instructed to create solid gold objects and leave them on mountain tops where the gods could get them. The gods were gold hungry. But why? ... If the ancient gods were real in some sense, they may have come from a space-time continuum so different from ours that their atomic structure was different. They could walk through walls because their atoms were able to pass through the atoms of stone. Gold was one of the few earthly substances dense enough for them to handle. If they sat in a wooden chair, they would sink through it. They needed gold furniture during their visits.
October 5. When I did my covers playlist, I had a bunch of softer songs left over that were good enough for their own playlist. So I did a lot more listening to fill it out, swapped some songs between the two lists, and in the end the overflow list is maybe better, and definitely more listenable. I renamed the original list "wild covers", and I was going to call the new one "soft covers", but other Spotify playlists with that title are very, very soft, so I'm calling it Dreamy Covers.
Because the songs all have a similar sound, the order was wide open, so I put them in order of the release date of the original. It's strange that there's a huge gap for most of the 70s, almost like that decade was more about style than songwriting. For the image, I used the best of the sixty plus images that I got by putting the prompt "crimson and clover" into DeepAI, for a video that I decided not to make.
The songs are mostly obscure, with more under 100k listens than over a million. Lowest, at 8000, is Please Don't Go by Valentina Gaia. You can listen to sappy songs for hours, I know because I did, and not hear a sappy song that good. I also discovered Larkin Poe, two sisters who have done a lot of very good home-recorded covers on YouTube, my favorite being CSN's Southern Cross.
September 30 - October 2. This week I'm wrangling with AI images. For a video project, I wanted a lot of them on the same theme, so I tried several free online image generators, and not surprisingly, almost all the images were lame. While trying to get better images without running into paywalls, I downloaded a desktop program called Easy Diffusion, and the results were even worse. But it has a feature where you can set an initial image and apply a prompt, so at some point I decided to try something random. I took a phrase I got earlier in the day from bibliomancy, "the death of the bishop", and impulsively picked an image from my colorscapes folder, Carving the Crescent. The result was this strange Medieval image. I liked it so much that I used the same prompt to make a bunch more images, all of which were lame, but I was hooked. Everyone thinks of AI as an agent of control, whether for good or evil. But given how hard it is to create exactly what you want, and how easy it is to create something surprising, I'm seeing AI as an agent of chaos.
After more tinkering, I settled on the DeepAI Image Generator. It has more than 100 different styles, and I ended up using a lot of them to get variety. I found that the "Olde Model" option, which appears when you select quality over speed, gave much better results. Then it was just like making a playlist: assemble a bunch of stuff, whittle it down to the best stuff, and put it in the right order. AI is not going to transcend humanity, but it's a great toy, and this was satisfying project with a lot of interesting choices.
It started with a song, a cover of Chim Chim Cher-ee from Mary Poppins, by an obscure band called Branches. On Discogs they're known as Branches(6) and the album with this song is not even listed. I found the mp3 on Soulseek, buried in a massive folder of covers by a user called Stealth. And the song is so good that it led me to make this video: Branches - Chim Chim Cher-ee
July 31. My novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing.