Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
"The 99%" is catchy, but you have to be clear that these global
demonstrations and "occupations" are really just mobs of people. All
we're sure they have in common is that they're pissed off because
they're increasingly aware how powerless they are, and they sense a
potential to be empowered in some way. Whether that's possible is a
question. Has the Arab Spring really changed the power structure in the
Middle East in a way that empowers those people who took to the
streets? Has Occupy Wall Street had any impact on the way we do
(political) business in the U.S.? 

Mobs don't become alternate governments unless they organize, and real
leaders emerge. More likely, a mob will be manipulated by canny
political entrepreneurs. Occupy has resisted that fate, but there's
been no visible organization so far, and no leaders have emerged. In
fact, Occupy resists the concept of leadership in favor of collective
decision-making. Anyone who's spent years working even the smallest
projects will see the problem here.

The developed nations are large and complex and have evolved
bureaucracies that feel stifling to many, hence a move to the right and
a call for less government. But if you have "less government" you also
have less to impede the emergence of tyrannies and the unregulated
exploitation of people and resources. The "opposite" of the mob is
dictatorship, one leader emerges and imposes his will over all.

The best case for governance is that it's balanced, organized around
some set of principles, and we have civility. How do we get there?

Maybe if we could gamify governance, we'd get better attention and
action from the new crop of citizens. My generation worked all day,
then watched television - limited interaction, cognitive surplus
misspent.
  

    
We often say that the Internet is rewiring our brains, changing the
way we think. Here's an inventory of those changes:
http://www.onlinecollege.org/15-big-ways-the-internet-is-changing-our-brain
  

    
Here's a surviving "psychedelic dreamtime" pitch. It's about eating
psychedelic mushrooms as a spiritual adventure. Interestingly, it's (a)
mostly a historical lecture, (b) Dutch, and (c) framed as part of a
Maker scene.

http://www.mediamatic.net/page/233314/en

http://www.mediamatic.net/page/230855/en

Plus, given that it's from "Mediamatic,"  it's probably best described
as a "tactical media bio-art intervention."
  

    
From Anders Nygaard via e-mail:

Interesting interpretation of nordic social culture @#88 - one I do
not particularily recognize myself or any of my friends in :) Which
brought on a thought. Gamification techniques appear to have proven to
be extremely effective for some limited applications, such as the
much-advertised AIDS protein breaktrough. (However, they carry some
extremely worrying side effects, such as a risk of serious
psychological addiction in a small number of users, and the main
commercial application so far have been in enabling social game
designers to sell form with no actual content whatsoever. Is this
something we really want to apply to governance - that is, the
operation of our most vital life support systems?)

The point being that gamification seems to be a new and interesting
angle on a phenomenon we might term storyfication - persuasion carried
out by exploiting our tendency to think and expect in terms of
stories, and experience a feeling of reward when we observe stories
play out as expected. The story of "attaining wealth, but at the cost
of true joy" is a familiar example of such a thought-pattern. While
various subsets of this exploit or blind spot in the human mind is
clearly in use everywhere in the world today and has been for
centuries, isn't the growth of these forms of propaganda - and the
resultant slow reduction of all public debate into inchoerent shouting
matches, wish-fulfilment or even pure grey speech - part of the
problem, rather than a potential part of a solution?
  

    
The Rise of the Megacity via Big Think.

http://bigthink.com/ideas/41833?utm_source=Daily+Ideafeed+Newsletter&utm_campa
ign=bf9f288d0a-Daily_Ideafeed_January_9_2012&utm_medium=email


Today, 600 urban cities generate about 60 percent of the world’s GDP,
according to a recent report by McKinsey Global Institute. By 2025,
some of those cities will fall off the top 600 and 136 new cities will
make the list, all of which are from the developing world and 100 of
which will be from China. The report forecasts “new hot spots emerging
and household wealth surging in little-known urban centers," and
advises that companies may have to adopt "a much finer-grained approach
to tap into the growth that lies ahead.” 
  

    
Why Do Nations Fail?
http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/103766

Re. Arab spring:

"The big question is: Is this going to be a political revolution like
the Glorious Revolution in England, which unleashed a fundamental
process of transformation in the political system with associated
economic changes? Ultimately, such political revolutions are
fundamental to the growth of nations. That’s one of the arguments we
make.

"Or is it going to be the sort of revolution like the Bolshevik
Revolution or the independence movements in much of sub-Saharan Africa
in the 1960s, where there was a change in political power, but it went
from one group to another, which then re-created the same system and
started the same sort of exploitative process as the previous one?"
  

    
People who don't tell stories think stories  count for a lot.  I'm
something of a skeptic there.  I'd agree that "point of view is worth
80 IQ points," but these ideological framing devices aren't the same
thing as "stories."  There aren't that many different "stories" in the
sense of basic, compelling dramatic narratives.  Once you learn how
stories work and how to tell them, stories don't surprise you much. 
There's very little innovation in storytelling.  "Stories" centuries
old work as well or better than contemporary ones.

I don't wanna slander Nordic people for being cliched Ingmar Bergman
Henrik Ibsen gloomsters -- because I hang out with Slavs, who are
second to none in that regard -- but the "Jumbo Book of Scandinavian
Joie de Vivre" would be about ten pages long. 

I really like and admire Holland, and I go there every time I get the
chance -- they look-and-feel like the only real civilization in the
world, sometimes.  But the better I know them, the more I worry about
'em.  They suffer, though I don't know why.  Dutch men in particular 
seem deeply uneasy in the Netherlands.  I've seen Dutch guys in jolly,
expansive, affirmative moods, but only when they're hundreds of
kilometers away from home.  Try telling a Dutch guy, "man, your
country's super, you've really got it going on."  He won't agree with
you.  Your guess is as good as mine.
  

    
I spent four hours tonight as part of a focus group talking about the
future of something - I don't think I'm supposed to say what we were
talking about or repeat what we said, but I can say that I sensed an
optimism, resilience, and trust in the future within that group. Not
that they didn't moan a bit and express occasional fear and loathing,
but overall they were a cheerful bunch.

I've also been spending a lot of time with consumer advocates, and I'm
impressed with their persistent faith in a system of governance, and
their profound hope that wrongs can be set right. Among advocates in
general there's an acknowledgement that the struggle never ends, and at
the same time a belief that things can be better. I admire those
people, and I get a lot of satisfaction from working with 'em.

Last night we watched Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," a film inspired
by the insight that people who're depressed handle the worst situations
better than most, because they expect the worst - it doesn't shock or
surprise them. As worlds collide and heat-death is imminent, depressive
Justine keeps it together while her normally stolid sister Claire
explodes in a fit of panic and despair.

The always cool, possibly coulrophobic Loren Coleman has a top ten
list of evil clowns:
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2012/01/evil-clowns-2011.html
  

    
From Kenny Mann via e-mail:


The obvious way to ridicule "No future," is to point out that we've
had all kinds of no future for, like, centuries. (The future of no
future can only get sillier, even if there isn't one at some point.)
I'm just wondering why we keep wasting lives on pre-staging the
occasional huge nearly-apocalyptic events -- which we actually seem to
get worse at fulfilling, despite all the intricately elaborate planning
that goes into them. Almost -- but not quite -- makes one want to be
there for it, just to see exactly what might resolve the oceans of
detailed anticipation. 

BTW: There was some of the pop version of "The Endtimes" in the late
sixties, too. Maybe an avid follower of Jan Wenner can pull some pieces
out of the Rolling Stone archive. All we ever got was Altamont, which
was almost tolerable from forty rows back, comparatively. Even the
horrible waste of humanity in Viet Nam sputtered out (on some fairly
comic theatrics).

We know better. Why do we find it so convenient to misplace our sense
of these things at regular intervals and go partly off the pretty good
rails? Why do I expect the okay-topian future to be a done-deal? Is it
only about never quite getting the deck sorted well enough for winning
hands all around or do we have jokers who are that maniacally
determined?

The things we add to the mix at each new era portend better than worse
-- and then we find a way to cook it wrong, but even there, the
kibitzers are very nicely prepared, lately.
  

    
One future of new economics, from the ground up:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/mf_neuwirth_qa/all/1

White, gray, and black markets take to tech. May really kick in when
3D printers improve, makers communities, and creatives get involved.
  

    
This link, and quote from the video, were posted to a private email
list I'm on:

"We Will Force You to be Free"
a documentary by Adam Curtis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFjCJFsbS0U&feature=related

Also refer to Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty

"... negative liberty has transformed itself into what [Isaiah] Berlin
had warned against.  it has become a version of its opposite -
positive liberty. Our political leaders  have the power to decide what
is the right kind of individual, and punish those who do not conform to
that ideal.   

"But there is one thing that makes our freedom today different from
positive liberty. Positive liberty is driven by a vision that freedom
is for something, the freedom to do or to become something new, out of
which a better world will come. Negative liberty has no such vision. It
isn't for anything.  At its heart, it has no purpose other than to
keep us free from necessary constraint or harm.

"And in using force to create a world based on negative liberty, the
democratic revolutions have actually led millions of people abroad into
a world without purpose or meaning. This idea of freedom is still
portrayed by many politicians and intellectual commentators as a
universal absolute. They assume that it is only a matter of time before
it spreads throughout the world. But this may not be true.

"As this series has shown, the idea of freedom that we live with today
is a narrow and limiting one that was born out of a specific and
dangerous time, the Cold War. It may have had meaning and purpose then
as an alternative to communist tyranny, but now it has become a
dangerous trend.

"Our [UK] government relies on a simplistic economic model of human
beings that allows inequality to grow and offers nothing positive in
the face of the reactionary forces they have helped to awaken and
unleash upon the world.  If we ever want to escape from this limited
worldview, we will have to rediscover the positive progressive ideas of
freedom, and realize that Isaiah Berlin was wrong. Not all positive
attempts to change the world for the better will lead to tyranny."
  

    
Via email from Walt Dangerfield:

I find the Hoover Institute link pretty hilarious, allow me to
demonstrate:

"Is this going to be a political revolution like the Glorious
Revolution in [China], which unleashed a fundamental process of
transformation in the political system with associated economic
changes? Ultimately, such political revolutions are fundamental to the
growth of nations. That’s one of the arguments we make.

Or is it going to be the sort of revolution like the [American]
Revolution or the independence movements in much of [Eastern Europe in
the 1980s], where there was a change in political power, but it went
from one group to another, which then re-created the same system and
started the same sort of exploitative process as the previous one?"


I guess I'm not that interested in analysis of what Occupy and the
Indignados movements stood for or have accomplished. If you doubt they
have had a material impact on political discourse in the U.S. I
suggest you go back and look at the news cycle before they started.
The only response in the media to the economy had been to trumpet
government concerns about the deficit and the need for austerity.

To dismiss them as "just mobs of people" seems like the most effete
rationalization of instinctive elitism I can imagine. That they are
disenfranchised is a given. What they demand seems pretty clear as
well, if incomprehensible to those in positions of political and media
power. Liberals abandoned the cause of economic justice in the 1960s
and haven't been comfortable addressing the issue since. It's what
caused the working class in much of America to switch parties. At
least the Conservatives had some language about lifting all the boats.

I suspect that once the "meaningless election side-show" ends (a
Taibbi coinage:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/iowa-the-meaningless-sides
how-begins-20120103
) and the weather turns we will begin to see the occupations return to
importance. The networks that occupying public spaces allowed them to
build still exist. As John Robb likes to say, they've built an
open-source market of ideas and now simply need to respond to
innovation.

I like this graph of tactical innovation in the American Civil Rights
movement:
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/occupy-foreclosures-and-a-chart-of-c
hanging-tactical-innovations-in-protest-movements/

That isn't to say I think the Indignados and Occupiers should emulate
the activists of the 60s in anything other than their ability to adapt
to new innovations. Occupations are the opposite of marches and
rallies for good reason. Critics like to talk of the impotence of
Occupy, but nothing is more impotent today than those tired tactics.

In October 2010 the NAACP, AFL-CIO and other groups organized a march
on Washington with tens of thousands of working people and people of
color to demand the government begin to address the terrible economic
situation and make job creation its priority. The march received
almost no media coverage and more than a year later we can see that it
did not accomplish its goals, and did not begin a change in political
discourse. Less than a month after the march a couple of basic cable
TV stars held a rally in the same place to "demand sanity," a
politically nebulous and purposefully meaningless phrase, which of
course attracted the corporate media who loves a spectacle without
meaning.

I'll leave the question of whether that rally achieved its goals to
the reader.
  

    
"ccupy and the
Indignados movements stood for or have accomplished. If you doubt they
have had a material impact on political discourse in the U.S. I
suggest you go back and look at the news cycle before they started.
The only response in the media to the economy had been to trumpet
government concerns about the deficit and the need for austerity."

Demonstrations and media engagement can no doubt have an effect, but
are not necessarily transformative. If there's no effective
organization, we'll be back to business as usual soon enough. And I
don't mean organizing bigger and better demonstrations. Think of the
Civil Rights movement: if it had been nothing but a series of
demonstrations it wouldn't have had the same effect, but the Civil
Rights movement had leaders and was very effective in organizing
politically. If Occupy's doing the same kind of effective organizing, I
can't see it. (I acknowledge that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't
happening at some level).
  

    
http://cnettv.cnet.com/parrot-ar-drone-2-0-unarmed-flying-film/9742-1_53-50117
908.html

On the ever-expanding drone front, I see that the as-yet-unarmed toy
Parrot Drone 2.0 now features bat sonar.

Check out YouTube for a lot of alarmingly aggressive and in-your-face
Parrot Drone videos.  Imagine these gizmos with a single-shot .22
zipgun on board.

http://youtu.be/ht_seyL-quo
  

    
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/invincible-tb-india/

I hate to mention this year's emergence of "Totally Drug-Resistant
Tuberculosis," because it plays into the hands of travel-security
paranoiacs and makes everybody stare in hypochondriac horror at a wet
kleenex.  It's an unpleasant topic, but unwise to ignore.  

Sometimes epidemics trump demographics.  It takes a hell of an
epidemic to do that, because even AIDS hasn't stopped urbanization and
the contemporary age structure; but sometimes there really are  hellish
epidemics. They're in the historical record.  

I've fretted for a long time about a possible confluence of epidemics
and failed states. The free market never cured malaria.

Lately, I've been in a private discussion with some security-minded
futurists about the alleged difficulty of making bio-warfare
supergerms. But you don't have to make them; you can also find them.

Imagine the fun if this new bug were to show up in an Occupy camp.  
  

    
Crowdsourcing tuberculosis research. Hurry, Internet.

http://poptech.org/blog/collaboration_alert_sarah_fortune_and_lukas_biewald
  

    
Walt Dangerfield, via e-mail:

Charlie Stross went off on the possibility of large epidemics in that
link earlier as well. He mentions the increasing exposure of bugs long
hidden in the wilderness to human hosts. It's certainly a real threat
and I'd like to see governments putting more resources into combating
plagues than terrorism.

On the other hand we're still making huge strides in gene sorting.
Tackling tuberculosis @home will be a lot easier when your smartphone
can scan some saliva and tell you which particular strain is infecting
you and which combination of antibacterials to apply. Also I just
noticed the deprecation in the SETI@home suffix when computers go in
your pocket.

Low-cost, accurate gene sorting seems like it will really change the
medical topography. Is this a tech that has been on the horizon long
enough to become passe? Or is it one that will continually recede as
we realize how much more complex its realization would be?
  

    
Walt Dangerfield, via e-mail:

Speaking of iphone doctors, new XPrize to create a Star Trek style
tricorder:
<http://ces.cnet.com/8301-33363_1-57356116/a-star-trek-inspired-x-prize-for-rev
olutionizing-health-care/>
  

    

"Where Is Italy Going?"  Here's an English-language commentator, Alex
Roe, who thinks that Italian politics have taken a major turn for the
better.

http://italychronicles.com/where-is-italy-going/

Roe (@newsfromitaly) says:  "Really, all Monti wants to do is to make
Italy function properly. Whether Monti intends modelling Italy after
the United States, Germany, or the United Kingdom is not clear. 
Denmark has been named in Italy’s newspapers a few times and appears to
be seen as an exemplary nation.  Perhaps Monti would like Italy to
become southern Europe’s equivalent of Denmark?"

Well, that's not going to happen, whether Monti wants that or not.  It
does amuse me, though, because in my new short story collection GOTHIC
HIGH-TECH, there's a story about a future Europe, "White Fungus," in
which this mordant line appears:

"In stark reality, Europe was swiftly becoming a giant half-mafia
flea-market where even Denmark behaved like Sicily."

So if Denmark can be Sicily, then Sicily can be Denmark, right?  You
bet!  If you can build a bakery in an abandoned Fiat plant, then an
abandoned bakery oughta be able to build cars!

Roe: "Beset with cronyism and corruption, Italy is not perceived as
being an easy country to manage by Italians."

I think this has pretty well got it backward.  Italy actually IS
"cronyism and corruption," in the sense that Italy's got amazingly high
"social capital" and terrific personal trust-networks.  Italy is a
civilization that's "beset"  with a government and an economy.  

Italians never had a national government until 1861, because Italians
lived in a set of exquisitely civilized and extremely sinister towns. 
If other people hadn't invented nation-states, Italians would never
have adapted one.  Monti is a technocrat who'd like to see that
artificial thing function properly, but it's worn out better guys than
him.

So "where is Italy going?"  Well, I'm inclined to agree with Roe that
at least it's more-or-less "going," and that alone is a major
difference from a year ago.  

Maybe the speculators will somehow let them live -- because otherwise
the rich will have no place to go on holiday.
  

    
Meanwhile another big quake in Indonesia triggers a tsunami warning:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16497747
  

    
Reality check. Doomsday Clock set to 5 minutes til Midnight:

http://www.thebulletin.org/content/media-center/announcements/2012/01/10/dooms
day-clock-moves-to-five-minutes-to-midnight
  

    

"Doomsday Clock moves to five minutes to midnight
10 JANUARY 2012

(...)

"Few of the Bulletin's recommendations of 2010 have been taken up;
they still require urgent attention if we are to avert catastrophe from
nuclear weapons and global warming.  At a minimum these include:

"Ratification by the United States and China of the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty and progress on a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty;

"Implementing multinational management of the civilian nuclear energy
fuel cycle with strict standards for safety, security, and
nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, including eliminating reprocessing
for plutonium separation;

"Strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency's capacity to
oversee nuclear materials, technology development, and its transfer;

"Adopting and fulfilling climate change agreements to reduce carbon
dioxide emissions through tax incentives, harmonized domestic
regulation and practice;

"Transforming the coal power sector of the world economy to retire
older plants and to require in new plants the capture and storage of
the CO2 they produce;

"Vastly increasing public and private investments in alternatives to
carbon emitting energy sources, such as solar and wind, and in
technologies for energy storage, and sharing the results worldwide.
The Clock is ticking."

-Science and Security Board, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists


*Well, the imaginary supranational entity that could carry out those
demands doesn't exist and isn't gonna do those things.
  

    
An origin of cyberpunk in the work of Bruce Springsteen, via William
Gibson:

"I knew that cyberspace was exciting, but none of the people I knew
who were actually involved in the nascent digital industry were
exciting. I wondered what it would be like if they were exciting,
stylish, and sexy. I found the answer not so much in punk rock as in
Bruce Springsteen, in particular Darkness on the Edge of Town, which
was the album Springsteen wrote as a response to punk—a very noir, very
American, very literary album. And I thought, What if the protagonist
of Darkness on the Edge of Town was a computer hacker? What if he’s
still got Springsteen’s character’s emotionality and utterly beat-down
hopelessness, this very American hopelessness? And what if the
mechanic, who’s out there with him, lost in this empty nightmare of
America, is actually, like, a robot or a brain in a bottle that
nevertheless has the same manifest emotionality? I had the feeling,
then, that I was actually crossing some wires of the main circuit board
of popular culture and that nobody had ever crossed them this way
before."

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-willia
m-gibson
  

    
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost,
I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost,
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town.

~ Bruce Springsteen, "Darkness on the Edge of Town"
  

    
From Julian Bond, via Google Plus:

Re "Darkness on the edge of town". That image and also one by Joni
Mitchell "A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway" have resonated
with me in the past as metaphors for Western and particularly USA
society. You're free and there is freedom just as long as you stay
between the white lines on the freeway. They represent the boundaries
of acceptable behaviour and the big stick of law enforcement. Cross
those white lines and you are straying into the country of anarchy
where be monsters. Similarly with the Town. Everything is safe and
ordered under the street lights. Literally civilised as civilians live
their lives of civic duty and civic responsibility. The social contract
is at it's most pervasive within the civic community. But it only
stretches as far as the street lights. Beyond in the darkness, it's
every person for themselves.

So then we look at a picture of the globe at night. What's out there
in the dark spaces where the enlightenment has not yet reached?