Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
On a more hopeful note, the field of robotics is (finally) coming into
its own.  See the below-linked article about robotics news from the
last year...

http://robohub.org/robotics-year-in-review-top-10-stories-of-2012/

Oh, and as host of the Augmentation & Robotics conference <augbot.ind>,
I appreciate the mentions of augmented reality in <16>, <29>, and <30>.

Check out the essay in the right column of this, last modified nearly 
a decade ago...

http://www.well.com/user/satyr/755/augbotics.html
  

    
Resilience: I'm in New Orleans, and I was thinking today how laughable
it is that, post-Katrina, some believed this city was done. Everywhere
we go in New Orleans, it's packed, and everybody's spending money hand
over fist. 

We had a chance to tour the city today and see some of the
still-obvious evidence of the flood, especially in the 9th Ward, where
many houses are still boarded and empty. Many others have been
recovered, though. One great project: Musicians' Village
(http://www.nolamusiciansvillage.org/about/), conceived by Harry
Connick, Jr., and Branford Marsalis. Cheerful rows of affordable houses
built by Habitat for Humanity, housing local musicians. 

I was impressed by how few of the people I'm seeing in the streets
here have their noses buried in electronic devices, though they carry
them and occasionally consult them. There's just too much life on the
streets, boredom's unlikely if not impossible.
  

    
<slippage>
&, taking stock of the world that seemingly didn't end in 2012, might
anyone find bearings on the current American experiment called economy?
  

    

On the subject of this Catalonian secession movement, I'm not intimate
with the many details, but I do have some thoughts on the matter.

I get it about the national aspirations of submerged minorities. 
Generally speaking, Americans have been in favor of nations breaking
free from other people's Evil Empires.  It's very Woodrow Wilson:  let
them speak their minds, let them have a vote, let a free people stand
alone and chastely independent, etc...  

Of course, that's kind of easy for Americans to say, as by European
standards the USA is scarcely a "nation" at all. The USA is more like
some johnny-come-lately empire of multiethnic emigres who are unified
by ideology, law and the dollar rather than by a European-style
national identity.

So I sympathize, and can understand why the Catalans would want to be
more Catalan.  It's a great area, beautiful, thriving (not now, but
most of the time), super architecture, awesome furniture, the food's
great and the women are good-looking, it's been a nation before, etc
etc; they've got as much right and reason to be a nation as most
anybody else.

 However, as somebody who's spent a lot of time in a region where such
a devolution was actually carried out in real life, I need to warn
Catalans about a few consequences of such a victory.

First, you're never going to unite all the ethnic Catalans on some
definite patch of ground.   You're sure to create new minorities who
share your ethnicity outside whatever patch you successfully claim. 
These abandoned guys are going to be a lot of trouble for you.  There's
also going to plenty of woe from multi-ethnic families, families newly
divided by new borders, and so on.

Also, you'll have new non-Catalan national minorities inside your own
area.  Naturally you think you're going to be really nice to them, much
nicer than they were to you when they were the majority, and ruling
over you.  That isn't true.  In a national secession, the
sweet-tempered, nice guys are not going to win.  Otherwise they would
have already been nice and sensible in the statehouse in Madrid.

Your former fellow-citizens are suddenly going to become foreigners. 
Places that you used to visit casually, properties you own, will become
alien territory.  Towns and cities on the new national borders will be
economically strangled.  Long-established businesses will pull out or
shrink in size.  Expect property courts clogged for decades.

Even though you're finally getting your own way politically, you're
going to be a small country with a small ruling class.  You're just not
going to have the manpower to behave like a major power -- like Spain
for instance -- and the long-term debilitating effects of this are
wicked.  Who will man your new embassies?  What about your health
system, transportation network, your military?  What happens when
you're trying to arrange a simple business deal with Norway or
Nicaragua?  Nobody answers the phone.  Your political parties are going
to be county-sized cliques of a few dozen ward-heelers.  Your pundits
will all know each other personally and all meet in the same cafe.

As soon as you're a nation, you'll have a new "national language." 
You'll have to change all the names on the street-sign, the school
textbooks, re-write and republish the ancient classics, harass guys who
blog without the proper spelling, insist that the EU translate all
previous documents into your lingo, and so forth.  You will never
complete this orthographic reform work.  It's impossible.  The more
energy you waste on it, the more you're going to look like  chintzy,
niggling fanatics.

Imagine your relationship with your fellow citizens in the brand-new
Basque Republic, who are naturally going to follow your example as soon
as they can.  Are these guys gonna become your best pals?  Will you
respect them and tenderly look after their fraternal interests?  Or are
you going to consider them a bunch of insular weirdo hillbillies? 
Well, that's exactly how they're going to think about you.  In fact,
the whole world will think that about you.  And them, too.

You imagine that Brussels and the EU are going to look after your
national interests.  Have you ever talked to a small European EU state
about how this works out in practice?  Like Slovenia, for instance. 
You're about to become Slovenia.  Do you take Slovenia really
seriously?  Do you think they matter a lot, do you ever ask their
advice on big problems?  Should they get lots more money?  Are you keen
to give them some? 

Let's imagine you have some military problem, like say, a bunch of
Catalan tourists  get kidnapped by Colombian drug gangs.  Do you plan
to send in your own SWAT team?  Who do you plan to ask for help in
these matters?  It's not going to be Madrid or Brussels.  You might
need to ask the Americans.  Do you know what the Yankees are going to
say to you? Oh, they'll shoot them dead for you, all right, but before
that and after that, they'll say: "What's in it for us?"  They always
say that.

Barcelona is a cool tourist town.  Have you ever seen what happened to
Venice, which also used to be a cool tourist town?  How many people in
your tiny, newfangled government do rich guys have to bribe to just
buy all of Barcelona?  Mexicans, Venezuelans... there are some pretty
rich oil guys in those countries, quite keen on their Spanish heritage,
only you're not Spain, you're much smaller and prettier.  Are you sure
you've got enough clout and smarts to avoid just being picked up and
put in their pocket?

And, last of all, there's something morally repulsive about rich areas
of a country wanting to secede from the poorer areas.   You've got
plenty of company in that regard: the Italian Northern League, for
instance.  Do you Barcelona lefties like the Lega Nord? You trust them
as political allies, you think they're your kind of European movement?

Your economic scheme is basically Mitt Romney talking.  It's all about
freeing yourself from that shiftless 47% of the lazy drifters and the
ethnic dross.  I'm sure we can all admire you for being rich, but are
we supposed to admire you for that attitude?  Do you love your new
gated community that much?  What is going to happen to you, when you
blow a tire on your station wagon somewhere out in Cricket-Chirping
Land?  Are those strangers gonna be your friends out there, in that
world you abandoned to beggary?  Did you pack your prepper arsenal?

I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't secede and form a new nation. 
It's not a new story or a new aspiration.   If the euro collapses and
the EU comes apart, anything's possible.  We'll be looking at a
Depression Europe of the kind nobody's seen since the 1930s. So: do you
remember those 1930s?  The Spanish Civil War?  Did the good guys win
during that business, a hundred years ago?  Were the aspirations of
Catalonia crowned with victory in the 1930s?  What exactly do you think
has changed in your peninsula since then?  

Have you thought that all through?
  

    
Living in Portugal and watching the middle class slowly dissembling,
impoverishing or fleeing (especially the qualified workers), I find it
awkward to read about Central and Eastern Europe with optimism. We seem
to be by and large slowly subsiding into cultural irrelevance, and I
wonder how (if ever) we'll bootstrap creative thinking to get out of
this mess.

Case in point: <http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2012/08/24/2240>
  

    
Again, resilience: the question is how much the system in question can
be changed before it's no longer able to recover. New Orleans, slammed
by Katrina, had so much that was unchanged and recoverable, that
recovery was imminent despite predictions (or at least concerns) at the
time.

The resilience of the human species is suggested by the 7X population
growth over two centuries... and the 2X population growth over four
decades. However that same population growth, if sustained, might prove
to be a systemic change from which recovery is difficult, if not
(ultimately) impossible.

Political leaders respond to 21st century scenarios with 20th century
thinking; that's not helpful. Substantial innovation in technology is
unmatched by political innovation. Political innovation will depend on
individual and social rethinking, and adjustment that diminishes our
attachment to so much that is inarguably unreal.

We have to be mindful. I'm not talking about being mindful of anything
in particular - mindfulness is a practice, the state of being present
and seeing the world as it is right now. The past is gone and
persistently misremembered. The future doesn't exist. Our deepest
neuroses are fueled by attachment to imperfect memory and speculation.
Clearly we depend on memory and speculative thinking to live in the
world, but amplification of and attachment to our memories and our
fears are a misuse of the equipment, voiding the warranty.
  

    
The year 2012 in Korean pop music.  I suppose I should qualify that
and say "South Korean pop music."

http://www.markjamesrussell.com/2012/12/31/the-year-in-korean-music/
  

    
Longer and IMHO more complete article about K-Pop in The Quietus.
<http://thequietus.com/articles/11001-psy-gangnam-style-k-pop>

Really funny to see AKB48 recapitulating Sterling's Zeitgeist and
Gibson's Idoru. I wonder, is Yasushi Akimoto enjoying playing his part
as Leggy Starlitz and is he consciously stealing ideas from the books?
Is this Anthropophagy, Neophagy or Retrophagy? (to coin some fairly
horrible neologisms!) 

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for C-Pop, M-Pop and I-Pop (China, Malaysia,
Indonesia, natch) to become a global thing, not to mention Khazakhstan.

Maybe one day, the EU will become a country or some kind of federated
republic states of Europe and it will become possible for regional
sub-divisions like Basqueland, Catalonia or the Scottish Lowlands to
have autonomous self rule within the federated EU and apart from their
current countries. But that feels further away now than it did even a
year ago. First we probably have to deal with the  pressure of the next
set of recruits. Does the EU still have the stomach for Turkey, never
mind places like Lebanon or Tunisia?
  

    
> <81> (jonl) However that same population growth, if sustained,
> might prove to be a systemic change from which recovery is difficult,
> if not (ultimately) impossible.

> <65> (bruces)There are mountain guys in Pakistan and Afghanistan who
> think just like Mr Njegos now.  They're not going away.  They're not
> even losing their wars, and they've got the highest birth-rates on
> Earth.

If population growth were evenly distributed, that would be cause for
concern in that an increase in the population of the developed nations
places a disproportionate pressure on resources.

On the other hand, being as unevenly distributed as it is, we risk
a future in which belief systems which would not otherwise stand a
chance of dominance win through fecundity.
  

    
Places to look for stuff you might want to 3dprint.


Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com
3Dpartsource: http://www.3dpartsource.com/search
Turbosquid: http://www.turbosquid.com/3d
Grabcad: http://grabcad.com/library
3Dvia: http://www.3dvia.com/search/
  

    
There is a mess of legal stuff going on with Thingiverse that I don't
really understand so I've been not posting stuff there.

However, there's also a lot of people posting objects/models
to github and sourceforge, and shapeways is a nice commercial site for
distributing your designs to people who don't have a personal 3d
printer.

(I can go on far too long about home-based 3d printing, but not in
this thread.)
  

    
<81> "The past is gone and persistently misremembered. The future
doesn't exist. Our deepest neuroses are fueled by attachment to
imperfect memory and speculation. Clearly we depend on memory and
speculative thinking to live in the world, but amplification of and
attachment to our memories and our fears are a misuse of the equipment,
voiding the warranty."

I would suggest that everyone read a talk given by Warren Ellis
earlier this year at the Improving Reality conference. It's very
pertinent to a number of things in this discussion, and as always,
Bruce and Jon, thank you for this.

<http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314>
  

    
Another example of European regionalism is my country Belgium (small
country, but rather core in the Union, Brussels being the HQ of the
Commission, of NATO...). For some reason financial markets are pretty
satisfied with our politics. However, everybody in Belgium knows that
2014 will be the mother of all elections, the flemish-nationalist party
N-VA is tremendously popular in Flanders - the discourse is similar to
that of Catalan regionalists. 

The issue is that social realities evolve much slower than
technological ones. In Sweden there are still regional tensions related
to old industrial regions which feel discriminated vs. the merchant
regions - an old history which still has huge political implications.
In Belgium there's a similar story of a rich industrial region
(Wallonia) which got hit by a structural downturn in the coalmine and
steel-industries and which turned politically leftist while the former
poor region of Flanders turned more right-wing because of the
importance of small family companies, important harbors and
concentrations of the chemical industry. 

These developments often take tens of years or rather a century to
work through the political and cultural dimensions of a society. My
feeling is that we'll end up with huge groups in society moving too
slowly to catch up with tech and structural changes, and a kind of
super class of cosmopolitan people disconnecting themselves from
regional loyalties. 
  

    
I was about to ask whether Flemish is a Celtic dialect, like Breton 
in Brittany, but thought better of it and consulted Wikipedia, which
states that Flemish is actually Dutch.

Now, my question is how long has it been since it wouldn't have seemed
gauche to simply ask the question, rather than look it up, and what
impact has this application of the RTFM meme to online resources had
upon the art, quality, and content of conversation, online or otherwise.
  

    
In 2012, Oscar Niemeyer the architect died at 104, while Rita
Levi-Montalcini the scientist, a Nobelist chick so entirely with-it
that she was a cover girl for WIRED ITALIA, has died at 103.  When
we'll see the first famous super-centenarian, a celebrity who lives
past 110?

The author Ernst Juenger lived to be 102 -- a German veteran of World
War I, later seen dropping LSD in a psychedelic caftan, and at that
point ol' Ernst was just cruising along -- he started a new magazine at
80, and lived to see Germany re-unified.

The world's currently oldest person, 115-year-old Jiroemon Kimura, is
the oldest male human being in history.   He lives in Japan, where he's
being looked after by his grandson's widow.

I envy this profound ability to time-travel into a distant and quite
alien future, at the placid rate of one second per second.   It's not
so much the mundane pleasure of not dying that I admire, as it is the
breadth of the historical experience.

Meanwhile, work continues on that ten-thousand-year clock.

http://longnow.org/clock/
  

    

In a rare episode of random Belgrade street-violence, it seems that
half a dozen people were stabbed in Belgrade's most popular square
during New Years' celebration.  None are dead but three are badly off. 
Good thing that this lunatic, who is still at large, apparently lacked
an automatic weapon.

The wife and I might have been there in Republic Square, if we hadn't
decided, in our ivied, contemplative, literary fashion, to venture up
into the mountains rather than partying.  Things couldn't be prettier
and more peaceful up here in the snow-covered forest.  Of such
disjunctures of fate is a human life made.
  

    
"Longplayer" has been playing for 13 years.

http://longplayer.org/
  

    
<roland> "My feeling is that we'll end up with huge groups in society
moving too slowly to catch up with tech and structural changes, and a
kind of
super class of cosmopolitan people disconnecting themselves from
regional loyalties."

I moved from the NYC area to a small city in Wisconsin a couple of
years ago, and while the difference in economic opportunity is
dramatic, it's not the result of differences in access to technology.
The jobs in Wisconsin rely just as much on cutting edge information
tech as those in the big cities, but they're just less desirable jobs.
Call centers, logistics services, contract business services. Move the
jobs that you don't want to pay as much for to the more economically
marginalized areas.

The Market (or Business or Capital or whatever you want to call the
trade aspect of production) uses technology to extract profit from
variations created by social disparity. In that sense technological
development can become a conservative social force. In the US, the
one-party politics developed to institute Jim Crow oppression of Blacks
has moved smoothly to promote the anti-union, anti-tax, and
anti-regulation policies that appeal to non-racist global corporations.
Rather than the South becoming like the rest of the nation, we've seen
policies and tactics developed in the South spread north to states
like Wisconsin and Michigan, in the name of modern economic
development.

So it seems more like the changes in technological realities and
changes in social realities are moving on different tracks. In the US,
the changes in technology spread pretty evenly because of educational
infrastructure and well-developed markets and so forth. But there are
still plenty of formal and informal limits on how easily any person can
get themselves into a position to derive the best economic benefit
from their ability to use the tech. Ethnicity, regionalism,
nationality, and religion are just some of the social tools that groups
have used to create and preserve disparities in economic opportunity,
for thousands of years. They will continue to be salient unless they
are actually replaced by social institutions expressly designed to
spread economic opportunity more evenly.

Obviously egalitarian social institutions will be most effective using
cutting edge technology. But Christianity did significant damage to
the social order of the Roman Empire, just using papyrus manuscripts
and institutions of communal dining. The Christianity parallel presents
another interesting element, in that the Christians actually practiced
ideas of equality and cosmopolitanism that a well-educated Stoic like
Seneca would pay lip service to, but they had plenty of beliefs and
practices that would have kept said Stoic from letting any Christians
into his house. What if the strongest force for more economically
egalitarian and geographically open social arrangements ends up being
Nigerian Pentacostal exorcists, leaving idealistic technophiles of the
cities of the US, Europe, and Japan looking like a bunch of elitist
philosophers?
  

    
To Bruce Sterling: How will India and Bollywood respond to the 
gang-rape/murder and current protests?
What is your take?
  

    
We walked down Bourbon Street in New Orleans last night, if you can
call it walking. It was more like swimming through a human stream,
filled with chaotic eddies and vortices. High volume controlled
insanity; pretty wonderful, actually, My brother commented later that
it would've been a far different experience "if the crowd wasn't
happy." Indeed. But the crowd was elated and, on average, quite drunk
on microbrews and hurricanes. It was diverse; you couldn't image where
they all came from. At the dropping of the fleur de lis, one of the
voices onstage asked who all was having their first New Years' Eve in
New Orleans, and there was a huge roar. I suspect the locals not
working the French Quarter stayed home.

I'm always amazed to see civil gatherings of such intensity - amazed
at the level of friendly cooperation - no evidence anywhere of anger or
hostility.

Our theoretical and conceptual interpretations of the world - various
screeds about the political and economic realities and what it all
might mean - seem shallow and empty compared to the complex mess we
have before us. But we have these moments of grace, where anonymous and
autonomous people come together in crowds and beam at each other, help
each other along.

Someone was talking about the economics of south bleeding into the
larger body politic. There's something to that - so much of the
economics and the politics of the U.S. is about getting work done and
distributing resources, who does and should benefit at what level.
Slavery was about free labor, and the labor movement was about making
labor more expensive, so there's a connection between business/labor
and the business/slavery. I'm not an economist but I don't think it's
hard to understand why businesses want to keep labor costs as low as
possible, which creates all sorts of sociopolitical issues and
opportunities for exploitation. This is why I'm exploring the
possibility of an economy based on a proliferation of worker-owned
cooperatives, which I think can be more fair and more resilient.
  

    
The worst Hindi films of 2012.

http://rajasen.com/2013/01/01/the-worst-hindi-films-of-2012/

The Bollywood community is very upset indeed about the ghastly
rape-murder scandal, especially since it's apparent that the dead woman
and her male companion were innocently coming back from a movie when
they were tortured in a bus and thrown on the side of the road.

This was a particularly brutal crime, but the six men who committed it
are all in police custody, and I rather imagine they are doomed. 
There's a great deal of "we must never forget" sentiment in India right
now, but people in Bollywood are pop stars; of course they will
forget.  

Maybe some of the young people in the protests won't forget; they'll
forget that crime in particular because there will be others, but maybe
they won't forget meeting each other.  They are learning who the
problem is, too, because there are plenty of scaly crocodiles in the
Indian establishment who really don't much care that female college
students sometimes get killed inside slum buses.  It can be a little
hard to get sentimental about a medical student when your core
demographic of voters are Untouchables.

It can be motivating when somebody in power casually alerts you to the
political fact that your own life is cheap.  "But wait!  My life isn't
cheap!  My life is sacred!"  "Sorry, girlie, but this is India. 
You're an Indian woman and your life is, in fact, pretty cheap.  Be
glad you're not Afghani."  "Why, how dare you!  You shouldn't even be a
Congressman."  "They all say that.  Come back with some voters, or
else just move along."

That's the story as it stands at the moment.  It really is a lot like
watching the furor over American gun crimes.
  

    
Bruce Sterling, looking back at your year 2000 conversation (Item
number 61 in the forum list at http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/ ) 
-- this quote came up:

  There will probably be Big Corporations 
  selling Big Wind and Big Solar
  sometime soon.  Shell and BP-Amoco 
  probably in the foremost among them,
  because they see themselves as 
  energy companies, not oil companies.
  If there are thousands of wind-derricks 
  offshore in the the North Sea. it'll 
  be big business like other kinds of 
  big business; sweetheart deals,
  subsidies, dumping, white-collar crime, 
  substandard materials, embezzlement,
  stock-jobbing, whatever.  The advantage 
  is that they won't be selling
  poison.

All that doesn't seem to be happening fast. (There seems to be a
company in California that pays to put solar cells on your house then
sells the power to you at a better rate than the utility would pay, but
that's one of the few business innovations we've seen around this.   

How has your sense of the future (energy future and other stuff too)
gotten changed from back then?
  

    
Following on from John Payne's comments in <76>, are the robots coming
for our jobs? Is a certain amount of unemployment going to end up as
part of the system and, if so, what happens next?
  

    
Well, back in 2000, nobody had invented "fracking."  Also, it was hard
to get it that the Chinese would underprice everybody on solar -- so
drastically that the domestic solar industries collapsed.

If, in 2000, I'd managed to speculate accurately about the upshot of
the Iraq War, the failure of Kyoto and the Finance Crisis, people would
have thought I had a death-wish.  We're in a worst-case scenario
situation with climate, by the standards of 2000.  But we're in a Peak
Oil best-case scenario: fracking, the technical miracle cure that every
oil-doomster scorned.

I think what you're seeing from me there is an example of the kind of
"futurism" that Jamais Cascio complains about in this essay:

http://www.openthefuture.com/2012/01/the_future_isnt_what_it_used_t.html

In other words, that is narrowly focussed techie-talk that's trying to
handicap some of the big industrial players in a race of tech
development.  It has nothing much to say about the giant aspects of
modernity that a historian might tackle in the humanities department
some day.

As Jamais puts it:

" ... while those of us in the futures world have been talking about
nanotechnology, fast mobile networks, bioengineering and such over the
past decade, very few of us even came close to imagining back in the
late 1990s/early 2000s that by the early 2010s we'd see:

"The effective collapse of American hegemony.
"The inability/unwillingness of world leaders to respond to global
warming.
"The death spiral of the European Union.
"Accelerating economic inequality.
"Major changes to global demographics, especially population
forecasts.
"The unregulated expansion of financial instruments based on little
more than betting on other financial instruments.
"That the Koreas would remain divided.
"That there hasn't been a major biological, radiological, or nuclear
terror event.
"The speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world.
"The Arab Spring, Occupy, Tea Party, and similar bottom-up political
movements.
"And on and on. If futurists have become almost too good at
technological foresight, we remain woefully primitive in our abilities
to examine and forecast changes to cultural, political, and social
dynamics."

*We futurists are still pretty good at jumping the gun there, because
American hegemony hasn't collapsed yet, and Europe isn't in any death
spiral.

*Also, if we ever get around to taxing carbon, I'm betting that my
remarks up there will still be rather prescient, merely premature:

"It'll  be big business like other kinds of big business; sweetheart
deals, subsidies, dumping, white-collar crime, substandard materials,
embezzlement, stock-jobbing, whatever.  The advantage is that they
won't be selling poison."

*It'll be much worse big business than it might have been, because we
wasted a decade damaging the middle class and wrecking every ecosystem
from pole to pole, but a clean energy business will still be a big,
relatively cleaner, energy business.  It will not be a mindful reform
carried out through acts of enlightened conscience by green communards
in geodomes with personal energy decks.
  

    
That post reminds me of "The Gernsback Continuum"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum,
http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt):

"During his assignment to photograph 1930s era futuristic
architecture, Parker begins to realize a "continuum," an alternative
reality containing the possible future of the world represented by the
architecture he is photographing – a future that could have been, but
was not, thereby contrasting modernism to postmodern reality. Parker's
glimpses of this fantastical utopian future, characterised by massive
multi-lane highways, giant zeppelins and Aryan inhabitants become
increasingly frequent and disturbing until, on the advice of a friend,
he immerses himself deliberately in the grittiest 'realities' of our
world (such as pornography and news stories about crime and war) that
are at odds with the idealised world of Gernsback and others. Slowly
the images fade to insubstantiality and the story ends with Parker able
to ignore the sight of a nearly transparent flying wing. Parker
realizes that he would rather live in a world characterized by
pornography, crime, and random events than that of the Gernsback
continuum."