Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
This is our 20th annual State of the World conversation.  The longer
we go, the weirder the world gets! SOTW 2021 promises to be the
weirdest yet, with the world evolving along the lines of the most
extreme cyberpunk fever dreams.

Every year this conversation is hosted by the WELL, an online
community that started as a BBS and has been around for 35 years.
You can learn all about the WELL via Wikipedia:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL>

The annual State of the World event is a showcase for the WELL: if
you want to have conversations like this every day, consider joining
<https://www.well.com/join/>.  Its long form conversations are a
welcome change from drive-by posting on systems like Facebook and
Twitter. Most conversations on the WELL are available to members
only, but we're having this conversation in a special part of the
WELL, called Inkwell.vue, that was set up for public conversation.

For an idea what's in store over the next two weeks, here are links
to the last three "State of the World" conversations:
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/507/State-of-the-World-2020-Br
uce-St-page01.html>
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/506/State-of-the-World-2019-pa
ge01.html>
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/503/State-of-the-World-2018-Br
uce-St-page01.html>
  

    
If you're not a member of the WELL and want to add a comment or
question here, just send via email to inkwell at well.com - include
"state of the world" or "SOTW" in the subject of the message.

Bruce Sterling, Malka Older, and I will be posting our observations
and having a conversation here for two weeks (January 5-18) - so if
you find it interesting, keep coming back. Other members of the WELL
will also be posting here, and anyone reading can send a comment or
question as noted above.

Who's posting:

Bruce Sterling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterling) is a 
futurist, journalist, science-fiction author and design critic. He's
written many science fiction novels including his seminal work on
the Mirrorshades anthology, which defined the cyberpunk genre. 

Jon Lebkowsky is a digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, and
dabbler in strategic foresight thinking. He cohosts the Plutopia
podcast (https://plutopia.io), weekly livestream, and Radio Free
Plutopia show. He's been a member of the WELL, and a host of WELL
conversations, for almost three decades.

Our special guest Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and
sociologist. Her science-fiction political
thriller _Infomocracy_ was named one of the best books of 2016 by
Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. She is the creator of
the serial "Ninth Step Station," currently running on Serial Box,
and her short story collection _And Other Disasters_ came out in
November 2019. She is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State
University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and her
opinions can be found in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign
Policy, and NBC THINK, among other places.

And, as mentioned above, members of the WELL will likely be adding
their thoughts, and others who send comments or questions via email.
  

    
Just speaking for myself, not for Bruce or Malka, I want to include
this disclaimer...

Our contemporary media reality is a world of opinions, and opinions
of opinions. Our media sense organs are clogged with the cruft of
opinion, we hear little else.  Factual accounts are occluded by
excess of interpretation. 

Like everyone, my sense of the state of the world depends on what I
perceive through intermediaries.  My sense of reality is inevitably
distorted, especially as I'm sheltering in place and depending more
than ever on media for access to the world. 

So I encourage you to take my  "state of the world" observations
with a block of salt. The experiences I can best and most accurately
describe are daily life experiences on the home front, with
occasional forays into the surrounding environment - walking around
the 'hood, or driving around the city, rarely stopping to enter a
store. Other than that, there are virtual social experiences via
platforms like Zoom - I have plenty of those.  
  

    
I appreciate that caveat, because when I think about the
proliferation and apparent seductiveness of disinformation- surely
an ongoing theme that is likely to continue into the new year -I
think about the levels of abstraction in the areas of knowledge we
are expected to deal with. To take one example, we are all expected
to make decisions (vote) or at a minimum hold opinions about "the
economy"; and yet, there is literally no way to know anything about
the national economy first-hand, and even if you are a trained
economist with access to "the data", that data itself is limited and
largely made up of proxies for other, uncollectable data and its
interpretation is contested. Even before we became varying degrees
of shut-ins, our sense of those larger or distant or invisible or
complicated "realities" - epidemiology, the personalities of
politicians, the intentions of nation-states, the environment - have
always been heavily mediated. 

I'm not saying that we can't form opinions - that would make this a
very short conversation. But while I ask you to add the same block
of salt to my observations, I'm suggesting that the levels of
abstract and specialized knowledge required for participation in the
world are setting some high expectations. A time-limited experience
of being confined and local may work as a metaphor to help us see
that. 
  

    
I made a top ten list of subjects or conditions that have been on my
radar as 2020 was accelerating for its collision with 2021 (I'm not
sure who got the ticket).  Ten became eleven. I'm posting that list
here, and I expect to post more about each of these over the next
two weeks (but I'm also waiting to see what Bruce and Malka get
into).

1. Effects of global pandemic, including relation to climate crisis
(Zoonotic diseases), supply chain disruption, changes in cities,
virtualization of work and social connection, and politicization of
public health.

2. Political manifestation of cult craziness (Trumpism, Q Anon)

3. Fragmented philosophical conversations about sensemaking via
frameworks like GameB; the potentially visionary hashed with the
idealistic and speculative.

4. Fake news, and related confusion about cultural authority, 
including authority for the social construction of reality.

5. Re-enchantment/intimacy with nature .

6. Tech industry/'stacks'/monopoly (business)/monopoly (attention).
Leasing our perceptual apparatus to social media companies in
exchange for payment in dopamine and free access to blather.

7. Robot revolution: automation vs human labor. Related question: 
what's driving the economy when consumers can't consume?

8. Science denial: Ascendance of challenges to scientific method and
practice. Denigration of expertise. Ascendant anti-intellectualism. 

9. Cyberwar; global tension, destablilization, confusion and and
unrest.

10. Governance crisis in the US and elsewhere. Emergence of
autocratic movements. Challenges to democracy. ("It always happens."
- Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker).

11. Race/BLM/equality & justice. Also related on the dark side:
political correctness, woke ideology, cancel culture.
  

    
TFTP

Thanks for the Pseud

"Pseud" is the part of the heading that shows before your user name
-- in my case 
 <af>

It's regarded as a well honour (yes, British spelling) to adopt
someone's comments as a pseud.

If you are ON the well you can click on the <af> and it will tell
you who I really, really am -- no anonymity here.

In real life : Alan Fletcher
Member since : April 29, 1997 (Actually, a bit before that under a
different ID)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
I've lurked (read, but not posted) in your SOTW for many a long
year. and look forward to a  brand (pun) new, hopefully brilliant
(another pun) contributor, Malka. In latin, I'd guess female ... 
but on the well, nobody knows you are a god.
-- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Meanwhile ... back to the show!
  

    
> 2. Political manifestation of cult craziness (Trumpism, Q Anon)

I call poltical party foul.  There are no groups left of center that
have "cult craziness"?

How about Greens who still support Jill Stein after she met with Putin
in the same dinner with Michael Flynn?
  

    
> Malka. In latin, I'd guess female ...  but on the well, nobody
knows you are a god.

I didn't read the intros carefully enough : Missed a personal
pronoun!

> Our special guest Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and
sociologist. **Her** science-fiction political thriller
_Infomocracy_ 
  

    
> 4. Fake news, and related confusion about cultural authority, 
including authority for the social construction of reality.

I have a special interest in that one.

Bunk, de-bunk- de-de-bunk ... meta-bunk
(dang! Just today I read a debunking analysis. Might have been cdc,
but I can't find it)

On the well I've been insulted as a 'contrarian' ... 
A Contrarian since 1966 and proud of it! 
  

    
Chinese Year of the Ox, MMXXI!

I take deep comfort in the two-decade continuity of this State of
the World assessment.  I have few other rituals that are so
long-standing, and also not somehow quarantined now.

I doubt we'll have much thematic trouble this year: the State of the
World is best described as "diseased."  There's a huge pandemic well
under way, and if you're looking for the major change driver in
world affairs, that disaster is pretty much it.

The year 2021 is not merely about the Rona, but the Rona's
implications will touch everything and everybody.  Adversity is 
revealing of character, and nine months of world plague to date have
been revelatory.

Once again the start of a year finds me in Ibiza.  
  

    

In other years that were devoid of major epidemics,  the wife and I
were often flitting out of a small apartment in Ibiza; we could be
on and off the island in a matter of hours.

But nowadays -- like a lot of other families during pandemic --
we're in a multigenerational household.  We occupy a larger Ibizan
house, with the Texan guy, the Italian guy, the Serbian Mom, the
Serbian Grandmother, and also -- the Tiny Spaniard.

The Tiny Spaniard is the new MMXXI arrival on the scene -- for she
was born in 2020.  Now three months old, the Tiny Spaniard (an Ibiza
native) -- instantiates futurity.  Although the Tiny Spaniard is
often fretful, life for everybody else around the Tiny Spaniard is
less fretful and more focussed.  Her cogent demands for attention
realign everybody else's priorities; everybody always has somebody
cogent to talk about; even though nobody's got much of a job, to
speak of, our expenses are pretty low;  so the epidemic has doubled
as an extensive parental leave.

Whatever income we have is pooled because we share the same roof,
eat the same meals and no one travels.  So it's a contemplative
life, slow-paced, intimate and oddly rural. An Ibiza devoid of
tourists is well-nigh depopulated -- we even sometimes gather fruit
and eat wild-caught fish.

If there were any economic justice in the world, I'd likely be
starving to death at the moment, because I'm scarcely doing anything
that would qualify as  my "labor."   I don't travel consult, speak,
teach, or even publish much.  Europe's in a cultural blackout;
movement's as restricted as life in the Warsaw Pact.
  

    

Even the discos of Ibiza, some of the world's biggest, have been
shuttered for months and have the affect of slumbering dragons.

This is truly one of the strangest episodes of my lifetime, and it
compares best with long-distant idle summers that I used to spend,
as a schoolchild, with my grandparents on their rural Texan farms. 
I happen to be playing the grandparent at this cycle of the
generations, but my life has regained that modest, slow-paced
feeling of rural Texans who were veterans of a major Depression. 
They didn't have fancy electric appliances or any Internet, but
there was a similar ruminative feeling of each new day being much
the last, with gathering and preparing food being the focus of
family life, and not a lot of hairy-eyed talk about exponential
trends or explosive Singularities.

So it's rather a cud-chewing Year of the Ox idyll here, and I
wouldn't complain about my privileged and cozy lot amid difficult
circumstances, except that there's so much illness and death on my
screen.  Every day the Rona empties a shotgun at my extensive flock
of global acquaintances; a few are dead, but many, many sick;
reality is full of buckshot holes, and I'm direly aware that the
course of this year will have more, and more, and more of that great
and sublimely awful trend.
  

    

It interests me that the major change-drivers of this decade are
illness and political upheaval.  I've read a lot about earlier eras
of history in which that was so, but the reflex of my contemporaries
is that such matters should  all be subsumed by technological
advance.

Now life is indeed subsumed by technology -- Big Tech is saving
lives because it enables so much social distancing -- but nobody
construes that as "advancement."  On the contrary, a lot of these
seemingly all-potent trends are now dismissed as "bullshit," or
disinformation, or noise, or deceit, or oppressive surveillance.

I'd like to list some of this "bullshit," from some of the venture
capitalists I follow on Twitter.  I think they're being morbid and
cynical here, because hustling rich guys are just as shell-shocked
by plague as everybody else, but I think it's illustrative of the
new social tone.  

Practically every one of these things has been valorized in WIRED
magazine and in stock-investment pitches; so, if they're bullshit
they've been exceedingly profitable.  It's true that most big cool
ideas get debased into wooden-nickel cliches for motivational
speakers, but in our year MMXXI there really AREN'T any motivational
speakers left.   They're not around to prime the pumps.   "Come to
my TED Talk and catch Covid-19," that's not an appealing elevator
pitch.

Most every one of these bullshit ideas could have motivated an
interesting, crowd-pleasing panel at South By South West
Interactive.  However, when the great halls are deserted, even the
hottest techno club banger anthem sounds hollow.
  

    
So I'll list them, and you can taste these stale buzzwords on your
tongue here and wonder, "hey yeah, where did their sense-of-wonder
go?"  Well, MMXXI can be understood as a year in which those
concepts have lost their charmedl life;  for that's indeed how we
used to live, but that's not life as it is in the Year of the Ox. 
History is not just about new things but also the absences of old
things.


Thinking about a list of terms that tell you the speaker is almost
certainly bullshitting."

AI
5G
Smart city
IoT
Surveillance capitalism

Singularity 
Big Data 
Exponential 
Orthogonal
VR AR XR MR 
Digital Transformation 

the Spotify of ... the Netflix of ...
Content is King
Neoliberalism ruined  ... 
Synergy
Disrupting the industry 
Mobility As a Service 
4th Industrial Revolution
Sustainable, Equitable, Inclusive
Machine Learning
Customer first Customer centric Customer experience
Omnichannel
agile lean 
Paradigm 
Future-proof 
Seamlessly
Cloud as an Innovation Platform
Responsible AI
Edge Computing
Nanotechnology 
Machine Learning
Quantum anything
Uberization 
 
  

    

Okay, if all that variegated stuff is "bullshit," then practically
every corral on the Electronic Frontier has been full of bullshit
for forty years.   What we're seeing here is a loss of happy
aspiration and the glum imposition of Big Tech consolidation.

It's not "bullshit" when Jeff Bezos gets all the money when people
can't talk to each other.  Events have played into Jeff's hands, and
every world-busting scheme he's ever tried has been decried as
"bullshit" by some Industry nay-sayers -- that dismissal is why he
wins.

But what's significant for MMXXI is that Jack Ma, who is head of
Alibaba and therefore Jeff's Chinese twin, got abducted and vanished
by the Chinese secret police.  Jack Ma is the first Big Tech mogul,
the first grandee from "Google Apple Facebook Amazon Microsoft Baidu
Alibaba Tencent," to be directly repressed by state-sponsored
trenchcoats and guns.  This guy was Mr Chinese Tech-Dream, too --
nobody ladled out the Moore's Law gung-ho we-can-do-it like Jack Ma
did.

Commentators are comparing Jack Ma to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose
arrest by Putin marked the sudden end of the post-Soviet freebooter
oligarchs and the sudden, icy domination of the Putin "siloviki" spy
regime.  But I think it makes more sense to compare Jack Ma directly
to Jeff Bezos.  Because Jack Ma was no mere finance hustler and
paper-shuffling privateer like Khodorkovsky; Ma really was a
technical innovator and it was the threat posed by his innovations
that led to his abduction.

Ma was actually abducted by the Party for much the same reason that
Huawei Princess Meng Wanzhou was near-abducted by the Trump
Administration -- the plan here was to put a spoke through the
wheels of Chinese tech "advance."
  

    
So even though Big Tech blatantly dominates daily life, and is far
outstripping Big Oil and other Big rivals in revenue, their charming
ideology is collapsing and they've never been so directly
imperilled.   The Chinese-US trade war now is about hacking and
screwing up the other guy's tech supply chain; just, befouling his
high-tech gizmos to the point where he can't make 'em or nobody
trusts 'em or uses them.

So I follow developments there with particular interest.  "When
elephants fight the grass gets trampled," so if you're a lean and
agile little player like say Estonia or Dubai, your life gets a lot
more cramped and hazardous when state-supported half-spooks are
wrecking your networks and Great-Walling your global markets.  The
extent of the damage is hidden by the fact that we've also got
quarantines, so if you're Estonia or Dubai you're also in the
ox-like slumber of global Ibiza.  But that plague might lift, while
Xi Jinping's determination to turn the Middle Kingdom into a giant
autonomous Xinjiang Galapagos is another geopolitical matter.

I don't like to sound too monotone about this.  It truly interests
me, and even inspires and uplifts me, to see the 2020s as so
entirely and unexpected different, so off the apparent historic
trend-line.  Normally social change starts within niches and filters
out, but the Rona's so swift and universal that it makes Moore's Law
look irrelevant; it's a profound change in lived experience that
affects everybody from tot to granny.

Even heads of state are sick; maybe even, especially the heads of
state.
  

    
> 5. Re-enchantment/intimacy with nature .

While I'm sure there's some direct re-engagement going on, I'm also
reminded by artifacts like this:
https://www.cnet.com/news/make-lego-bonsai-trees-flower-bouquets-to-relax-with
-new-botanical-series/
about how the Victorians became fascinated with taxidermy as they
became more urbanized and industrialized and farther from living
nature.
  

    
If a lot of Big Tech is starting to lose its conjuring power, there
is one technology that manages to be both hype and, to some, fake
news: the vaccine(s). Grateful as I am for the incredible effort
that went in to accomplishing the vaccines so quickly, my concern
for the coming year and beyond is how the story is being rewritten
into a fable that our technological prowess omnia vincit. It might
be hard to imagine now that the history of the pandemic could be
turned into a triumphant narrative of human control over nature, but
lost battles have been transformed into glorious conquest before.
Already some are losing sight of the failures in organization, in
humanity, in preparedness that have made the vaccine glow like a
grail. 
This is unlikely to be the only challenge we see in the coming
decade, or the coming year, that can be solved more easily, quickly,
and cheaply through changing human behavior and which we prefer to
attack using money and technology. The climate crisis leaps to mind.
I hope that we can engrave some of the lessons of this past year
into our collective consciousness, but I have little confidence that
they will function any better than the Japanese stones warning "Do
Not Build Below This Point" that became so celebrated after the
tsunami hit.
  

    
For our readers:

"State of the World 2021" is a discussion hosted by the WELL, an
online community with a 35 year history, still active with in-depth
conversations about myriad subjects. If you're interested in
becoming a member, learn more at <https://www.well.com/about-2/>. 

Most WELL conversations require membership, but this is conversation
is in a part of the WELL that is readable by anyone: 
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/>

The conversation will continue asynchronously for two weeks. Short
link for the conversation is <http://bit.ly/SOTW2021>. Please share
widely. Bookmark the conversation and keep coming back to follow its
progress.

Hashtag is #SOTW2021

If you have a comment or question you want us to post, email it to
inkwell at well.com, preferably with the hashtag in the subject of
your message. 
  

    
From <jet> in <inkwell.vue.510.6>:
> There are no groups left of center that
> have "cult craziness"?
>
> How about Greens who still support Jill Stein after she > met with
Putin
> in the same dinner with Michael Flynn?

No doubt true that I should have found and listed some movement on
the left that qualifies as a cult. Honestly, I can't think of any. I
certainly don't see the Green Party as a *cult*, however ill-advised
their activities may be, however misguided their leaders might be. 

I'm checking myself here: what's the definition of "cult"?

My Junior Woodchuck's Guidebook has this: "a system of religious
veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or
object." Or "a relatively small group of people having religious
beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister."

Is Jill Stein subject to "religions veneration and devotion"? I
haven't seen it. And I don't associate the Green Party with
"religious beliefs or practices," but maybe they've gone full Druid
since I last looked.

The point of listing Q Anon and Trumpism is that they're truly
religious, and there is certainly (and oddly) a "veneration and
devotion" directed toward Trump. There is a real and very strange
belief among many Trumpists that this wannabe mobster was sent by
God to save us all. That's definitely cultish behavior.

In fact, Trumpism and Q Anon have nothing to do with "right" or
"left." They operate outside political norms. They seem to suggest a
kind of mass shared psychotic break with consensus reality. 

And the real reason I mentioned those and not others: they have real
power, unlike most cults that are relatively contained and off-grid.
They're leaking into the mainstream culture and creating a dangerous
spreading infection, a Rona of the mind. So they are top of mind
right now.
  

    
<16> Malka – Gary Snyder once pointed out that when the common
existence wolves in europe began to diminish is when wolves appeared
in modern fairy tales.

If I may at the outset add to the enthusiasm a couple points of
focus from my Year of the Ox monitor –

• civil war
Giorgio Agamben notes that in ancient Greece, to not take sides
during a civil war was to be ostracized as punishment. After the
civil war, however, it was considered ok, in retrospect. 

• economics
Putting the finger on Control-P merely (IMHO) moves the perilous
cliff a little further off each time, & also makes it steeper. 
Meanwhile, Venezuela wants to make her currency all-digital 

• regenerative agriculture / regenerative everything
Absolutely right, Bruce. "Sustainable" needs to be cashiered.
(Sustaining what for whom via how?) 

• zoom culture & the virtual life
Will Rona make virtual life the default mode? 
What was the last concert play movie public talk anyone attended in
a theater? ( Will 3D come to the rescue in time to keep movie
theaters on life support ? )  I know a teacher in Iran who cannot
teach Spanish without being f2f with her class. Telemedicine, I'm
told, has enabled 5 times more liver cancer surgeries at the big
hospital where I recently had one; I didn't ask how the staff was
coping with five times more work.

h a i k u

     dead of winter
           i freeze
            on zoom


Welcome back, Bruce & Jon – and welcome Malka! I look forward to
lighting up a big juicy stick of incense, sitting back, and
listening as you convene this oasis of sanity in the breathing
desert of daily life. Just to put a finer point on that – I think
I'd soon go mad if I'd tried to wrap my midget brain around the
depths and complexities of the current state of the world without a
community.

Thank you.  

   
  

    
Via email from Alberto Cottica:

Hello Jon, Bruce and Malka, thanks for SOTW!

About Jon's point 2 in <inkwell.vue.510.4> (I am not 100% sure I
understand it, disregard if I am off topic). It seems that
sensemaking is not only in crisis because things are objectively
complicated and contradictory, and cultural authority is in crisis.
The other issue is the increasingly strategic use of information,
even in contexts where that was not common practice. I am thinking
of how difficult it is, after 15 years of "data is the new oil",
"the panopticon is here", "data-based personalized medicine for
all!" to get hold of open data over the pandemic. In Italy, where I
am from, there is a minority of activists fighting it out. In
Belgium, where I live, no one even knows how many people we are
vaccinating. Not sure whether this is a capacity issue too (likely),
but definitely spin doctors are at work.

In general, would you not say "data" have shown to be useless in
2020? I expected "data" to enable surgical measures, different
restrictions for different people, but instead we are fighting COVID
with almost medieval measures: curfews, enforced closure of public
spaces, avoidance social contacts, see you at the end.

Not much of a futurist, me :-)
  

    
I found this game designer's analysis of Q Anon fascinating, in
relating the concoction/buy-in of its ever more fantastic beliefs to
game theory, as in "A game that plays people."

<https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-58097
2548be5>
  

    
Hi Alberto,
I'm working through a number of articles about data and
quantification now as preparation for my course
https://malkaolder.wordpress.com/2020/12/17/syllabus-predictive-fictions/ and so many of them rail against misuses of data - and then use it to prove that very misuse. Our problem, as usual, is not with the mechanism, but that we expect the mechanism to do all the work for us; further, when offered examples, we imagine the mechanism has done all the work even when heavy-lifting came from powerful people or organizations with an agenda. It is similar to the way people rail against "social media" when they are angry at the specific configuration of social media created by Twitter or Facebook. Data isn't useless; data is misused. 
  

    
Re: Jon's mention of GameB in point #3:

"Fragmented philosophical conversations about sensemaking via
frameworks like GameB; the potentially visionary hashed with the
idealistic and speculative."

This brings to mind the current manifestation of self-governance
practiced in many parts of the Kurdish regions of Turkey and NE
Syria, where for more than half a decade they've been operating
within a sort of democratic confederalism (a la Murray Bookchin via
Abdullah Öcalan).

BruceS has more than passing familiarity with some of the political
dynamics of that region, so I'd be interested in whether he sees a
place for that within the larger...um...Zeitgeist.
  

    
"Political manifestation of cult craziness" is way too narrow a
frame in which to examine a culture-wide epistemic divide. The "cult
craziness" is rejection by a large fraction of Americans of the ways
of finding truth that western civilization has followed for the past
half millennium.