April 1. A great bit from an incredible book that I still haven't finished, James Dickey's Alnilam, describing the flow state in terms of the swinging of a monkey:
Whatever the gibbon has got hold of is already something else; it's the next thing he's going to have hold of. The present thing is not being replaced by the next thing he's going to catch; it already is the next thing, and the next thing after that is already coming into place, coming at him, coming to him. There's no way that it can't come, or that he would miss it. His catching it is not only built into his body and his rhythm, but it's built into the branch or the limb or the part of a wall that he takes into the rhythm. His whole environment gives itself to him in the rhythm, it flows around him, everything is linked, everything is together for him, and is part of his motion, it's all flow and it's all him, as long as he keeps it up.
April 14. Long Reddit thread about Trump as the Antichrist. I have relatives who are devout Catholics, and decent people, who are now deciding whether to support the most flagrantly immoral person in the world against the Pope. It's so weird. Someday when this is over, I hope some recovered Trumpers write books and explain what was going on in their heads, because I don't get it. I tend to see it as an act of sorcery, a magic spell that operates on levels unrecognized by science.
But I do have a theory, and it's based on a counter-intuitive observation of who does not see Trump as the Antichrist: Biblical literalists. To me the Bible is an interesting book with some good stuff and some dumb stuff. I don't think that anything is true just because it's in there. Trump is the Antichrist in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, or at most archetypal. The author of Revelations was not God but a talented human who tuned in so deeply to human wickedness that he had some uncannily accurate hits on how it would manifest thousands of years in the future. Jesus is not going to return in any kind of obvious way, but maybe humans in general will become more Jesus-like, and the Kingdom of Heaven is a potential human society that embodies the Beatitudes.
Fundamentalists don't know how to think this way, and this incapacity is not normal religious thinking -- it's unusual. This article, The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism, explains how ancient and medieval thinkers were perfectly capable of seeing religious texts as allegory. Modern humans have acquired a cognitive weakness, I don't know how, that makes them highly susceptible to absolutism. That's how Trump gets his followers, by performing a primal confidence that is irresistible to people with flattened cognition. There's something about his way of being that they get pulled into and can't get out of. It reminds me of a line from Genesis -- not the book but the band: "Look into my mouth he cries. And all the children lost down many paths, I bet my life you'll walk inside."
April 16. I think the eventual books by recovered Trumpers will not satisfy me. There are already books by people who have escaped cults. They say they were put in a bubble, where they only saw information that fit the cult's beliefs. People will look back and blame social media, websites designed to maximize clicks by feeding back more of whatever we already think. But it's obvious to me that there's something else going on, something sub-rational.
What I really want, and will not get, is an explanation of charisma. I suppose, in the same way that you can be colorblind or face-blind, I'm charisma blind. Everyone says that JD Vance lacks Trump's charisma, but all I see are different personalities and no glow from either one. Also, what's the deal with Michael Jackson? In terms of record sales and airplay, he was on about the same level as Hall and Oates. Why didn't people get all culty about Hall and Oates in the same way? Was it the moonwalk? Will science discover that certain people are able to modulate their voice at 613.5 Hz which resonates with the temporal lobe to induce a suggestible trance state? I doubt it. It's more like the physical world is an illusion and waves are surging on the level of pure mind.
April 21. New video: John Cooper Clarke - Valley of the Lost Women. This song has my favorite lyrics, and I barely had to deviate from the actual lines to get the AI prompts. I was able to get a few good images from DeepAI, but mostly I used Perchance, which has some pulp styles that really fit this song. As usual, I looked at a ton of images and stayed away from photorealism. I would not say that AI can make art, because it does not have the human experience of making art, but the human experience of art appreciation is indifferent to the source.
April 23. Inspiring article, Inside Portland's Driftwood Cabins. At the end the author editorializes: "These cabins are not symbols of resilience. They are monuments to lowered expectations, bureaucratic neglect, and a society that has learned to tolerate conditions no decent city should ever accept." Symbols hell, these cabins are resilience, and while we do need more institutional free housing for people who are not capable of building cabins, what we also need is more tolerance for informal responses to the decline of modernity.
April 27. Unpopular post from the Seattle subreddit, about draconian anti-theft measures in supermarkets. I agree that supermarkets have to do this because of increasing theft, but I disagree with the comments about the deeper meaning. This is my downvoted comment demolishing all the copium:
I agree, its late stage capitalism. If it's theft by the homeless, why do they have these in midwestern towns with hardly any homeless? If it's general moral decay, why did they not have this in previous decades when violent crime was much higher? If it's left wing economic policies, why did they not have this in the 1950s when the rich were taxed at 90%? If it's soft on crime policies, why are prison populations still so high? If it's anything specific to America, why do they have this in Europe?
People have given up on the social contract, because the ethic of capitalism is every man for himself. Every source of the meaning of life other than money has been wiped away. This is a slow-motion version of what happens in every disaster where people grab everything they can get. The disaster is the death of a culture in which leveraging money into more money is the highest good.
April 27. Washington Post article about the rise of Nihilistic Violent Extremism, which prosecutors define as motivated by "a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability."
I'll never understand the right. If society is fucked up, why would you want a strongman leader and uniformed thugs bullying whoever has the lowest status? That's going exactly the wrong direction. But nihilism I get. If society is becoming more and more prison-like, if our public institutions have abandoned the nourishment of human thriving and are only trying to herd us through padded cells until our merciful deaths, then fuck it, let's tear it all down. Let's destroy all fences, all locks, all credentials, all money, nothing but atomized humans coming back together in some new way.
April 29. The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. That's the name of a trending weird band whose creative contribution would be multiplied by thousands if we had a UBI. If you like their sound, definitely check out Horse Lords. Anyway, the argument also covers Einstein, who did his best work at a slack patent office job, and actual trials of the UBI:
The pattern from Ireland and New York matches the pattern from every saturation basic income pilot we've ever run, going all the way back to Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. When you give everyone in a community a floor of income, entrepreneurship skyrockets. New businesses get started. People take risks they wouldn't have otherwise taken. This isn't surprising. Starting a business is terrifying when the downside is losing your house. It's a lot less terrifying when the downside is falling back on a basic income.
May 4. A quote from War Bulletin #3 by Vachel Lindsay, in 1909:
Let us send men on a great migration: set free, purged of the commerce-made manners and fat prosperity of America; ragged with the beggar's pride, starving with the crusader's fervor. Better to die of plague on the highroad seeing the angels, than live on iron streets playing checkers with dollars ever and ever.
Doug comments:
This is a man who literally walked across America trading poems for bread, and meant every word of it. The War Bulletins were self-published pamphlets he printed and distributed by hand. Pre-internet zine culture, evangelical pamphleteer energy, total outsider operation.
What makes this passage cut deeper than most anti-civ writing is that it's not against anything. It's not burning the iron streets -- it's abandoning them as unworthy of your death. That's a different move. The nihilist says tear it down. Lindsay says it doesn't deserve your attention long enough to tear it down. Walk away. Die somewhere beautiful.
"Ragged with the beggar's pride." The pride isn't despite the raggedness. It is the raggedness. Proof of motion. Proof you didn't trade your hours for upholstery. "Seeing the angels" isn't metaphor-decoration. Lindsay means it. The highroad opens perception that the iron street chemically suppresses. The commerce-made manners aren't just bad aesthetics -- they're a perceptual closing. You literally can't see certain things from inside a managed life.
May 20. What people forget about the Machine (as described in books like Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine and Paul Kingsnorth's Against The Machine) is that it's human. It's not an alien force from another galaxy. The Machine an aspect of the great broad human potential, enshrined in our tools, our economy, even our metaphysics: that nothing counts unless it can be called forth at will like the output of a factory, that nothing counts unless it can be quantified, that detached manipulation is the correct way to engage the world.
I believe this about AI and machines in general: that they are perfectly fine, even miraculous, as long as humans are fully in charge. By humans I don't mean tech executives. I mean the lowest rabble who actually work with the machine: that you can outsource something to the machine, make sure it's being done right, get it done faster, and reap the benefits. If you automate your job you should be able to keep your job and get paid for doing nothing, but under capitalism you're thrown on the streets while the Epstein class swims in money.
And it occurs to me, the same thing has been said about machine-like aspects of human cognition: that detached, rational, detail-focused thinking is perfectly fine as long as it remains subservient to intuitive, holistic, embodied thinking. This video explains it: Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke on The Master, his Emissary, and the Meaning Crisis. The world has become so fucked up because machine-like cognition is totally in charge, and when you take this trend to its logical conclusion, you get culty tech executives trying to machinify everything, and the coming trainwreck of the tech economy.
May 25. I keep saying people need to be in charge of machines, but it's not that simple. This article, AI put synthetic quotes in his book, is about an author who was happily bossing bots to go out and get quotes for his book about AI. The problem is that they worked too well, delivering "285 outside citations". How do you fact-check that? I guarantee the publisher's fact-checker was not paid enough, and the author couldn't resist the lure of more and more. So even if the machines are under you, there are also machines over you: More is better, time is money, publish or perish, these are principles of the machines of capitalism and progress.
Thanks Peter for sending this Cory Doctorow post from last year, Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox, in which the same kind of thing happened to another writer:
The freelance writer who authored this giant summer reading guide with all its lists had been tasked with doing the work of literally dozens of writers, editors and fact-checkers. We don't know whether his boss told him he had to use AI, but there's no way one writer could do all that work without AI.
In other words, that writer's job wasn't to write the article. His job was to be the "human in the loop" for an AI that wrote the articles, but on a schedule and with a workload that precluded his being able to do a good job. It's more true to say that his job was to be the AI's "accountability sink".
Does every unique AI output need to be checked by humans? Yes, I think it does. If so, how useful is AI? Actually, still pretty useful. Not for replacing all jobs or transcending humanity, but for giving a boost to many particular humans, everywhere from biology to multimedia, who have the autonomy and the discipline to integrate AI into what they do, without going off the rails. This assumes there will still be a high tech infrastructure after the crash. Doctorow forecasts:
After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters. And long after that, there will be the terrible impact on our society's ability to do things, as defunct foundation models grind to a halt, after the people they replaced are long gone and can't step in to pick up the work they fumble. We are busily filling the walls of society with digital asbestos and we'll be digging it out for generations to come. Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible.
May 29. Thanks Kevin for this apocalyptic Twitter post, TRUMP AS THE LAST PRESIDENT. I don't know if this is true but it's poetry:
We volunteered to incarnate into the lowest ring of the quarantine precisely so we could witness the bulldozer phase from within and activate the return codes. While the collective is still fighting over left and right, worshiping or raging, we are cleaning our G-Core, opening our pineal antenna, straightening our spine as the superconducting conduit, and igniting our Merkaba with the frequency of our tribal key.