Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Better than the Borg: The Neurotech Era
@ramez naam -- Fortune Magazine

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2013/01/09/better-than-the-borg-the-ne
urotech-era/)
  

    
American risks to life in 2013; off to perish of their cars and guns,
as usual.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324442304578231652153488158.html


Interestingly, the article in the Wall Street Journal doesn't mention
that they perish of the ideology promulgated in the Wall Street
Journal.  In the Balkans an article like this would have been served on
a platter by the booze and cigarettes industries.
  

    
Meanwhile, the American Right struggles valiantly as all hope fades,
darkness closes in, and popular discourse suffocates in a miasma of
left-inflicted fear and intimidation.


Sarah Palin · 3,485,813 like this
Wednesday, January 9 at 11:23pm (10 hours ago) 
 
"Ben Shapiro has a great new book out called “Bullies: How The Left’s
Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.” Ben’s premise about
the left’s silencing tactics is absolutely correct. 

"Obviously I’ve witnessed the left’s bullying behavior up close and
personal when it’s been directed at those so close to me. And, of
course, I’ve seen how nasty it can be for other conservatives as well.
You know, there’s something especially ugly about the way the left goes
after children of conservatives. I still find it highly ironic that
the supposedly “tolerant” left has done nothing but bully, demonize,
and judge my daughter Bristol for making the right decision to keep her
baby and work so very hard as a single mom to care and provide for
him. I don’t know of any conservative “war on women,” but I sure have
seen the left’s war on conservative women!

"Please read Ben’s book and consider his advice about how we must
stand up and push back twice as hard against this bullying. We must not
allow ourselves to be frightened into silence. Yes, it’s hard to “keep
on keeping on” when being pushed around – but like Ronald Reagan said:
when we stiffen our spines, those around us can stiffen theirs, too!
Press in, press on. Don’t retreat, friends!"

- Sarah Palin
  

    
That's amusing. At least "the left" stopped short of waterboarding.
But I'm sure the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch are quivering in fear
of the left-wing bullies, while Fox News and Breitbart, pillars of
civility, promote honest, civil, fair & balanced debate vs the left's
culture of fear and intimidation.

That right-wing propaganda machine never ceases to amaze me.

Meanwhile, we apparently dodged another space-bullet, for now:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/20969893

And microscopic "bullies" have created a public health emergency in
Boston:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/hospitals-flooded-flu-patients-turn-chicago/story
?id=18167245

Our state of the world conversation ends today; I'm finding it hard to
draw conclusions and make predictions with any kind of confidence. But
here's what I'm thinking...

In the USA, right-wing extremists of the Breitbart/Palin/Tea Party
variety will lose steam as average Americans find their way back to
moderation, and legislators are forced to face the realities of
governance, abandoning libertarian small-government (or no-government)
fantasies. The most extreme - those guys who're piling up guns and
dreaming of a violent revolution, may actually take arms and start
shooting, but that will only feed the growing backlash against gun
violence. 

The global economy will lurch and moan but it won't collapse. Climate
change will bring innovative adaptation and open new markets. We'll be
slammed by an increasing number of epic landscape-altering storms, but
we'll brew mitigation strategies that will be more or less effective. 

We'll take Paul Ehrlich seriously again, and wonder what to do about
the "population bomb." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
Wars and climate catastrophes, and possibly space rocks and pandemics,
might "help."

The market for e-books will diminish; we'll keep printing and turning
pages, though e-books will persist as an alternative. People will spend
less time with social media in cyberspace, and more time hanging out
in physpace. Facebook will fail to thrive but, like AOL or MySpace, it
won't die.

Someone somewhere, maybe a terrorist or maybe a state, will trigger a
nuclear explosion or two. This will have a sobering effect and put the
nuclear option away once and for all (best case), or trigger an all-out
global nuclear war (worst case).

Whatever the case, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky will be back here
for the 2014 State of the World conversation.
  

    
Thanks, Jon!   I had just composed this post when yours slipped in
ahead.  I guess I'll put it up anyway...

---
Bruce, I'm catching up a bit, and I found myself pondering some at
your statement back a bit that a war on rape was as pointless as a war
on terror.  Now we see Palin wrapping put-down quotes around the lefty
term "war on women."

I haven't thought about this use of language, but "war on x" seems to
be spreading.  It is almost ridiculously inflated terminology. 
"Campaign" already has a military resolve about it, but "war" makes the
analogy almost ridiculous.

War used to be an extreme somewhat organized horror, mixed up with
dread, determination to survive, the best and worst expressions of
patriotism and mob identity, sanctioned murder, looting and vandalism
on the largest scale the technologies of the day could accomplish, and
all kinds of not-quite sanctioned but expected side activities that
regular society would disdain. For centuries a war was always against
people -- some group of people who held a territory or shared a
culture, seems like. Far away wars, like the crusades, could be
especially applauded by those who stayed home or lived later. 
(Depending on what side your family had been on, and whether revenge
still has to be enacted to finish the story of the crusades in a
satisfactory way.)  

Using the war analogy implies something is must-win, by any means
possible.   Maybe LBJ is to blame for a war on poverty that was a noble
vision, but didn't manage to engage the do-or-die resolve of those on
the other side of a blurry cultural divide. (And didn't divert him from
his literal, killing war across the Pacific.)  Right away, critics of
any particular facet of federal policy could say it felt like war on
the poor.  War on poverty was a crazy abstraction, and the joke about
waging war on poverty by personally getting rich was obvious, too. 

Moving into the world where geopolitical power plays can be made with
drone and intelligence forces hits, war itself is seeming less like
war.  Perhaps it's tempting to have a war on some abstraction since war
itself is morphing so strangely, into something where the battlefield
itself is no longer a stretch of open land?  

But there's Palin, disdaining the hyperbole of "war on women," when
she was making political hay last month with accusations of "war on
Christmas."  (At least women are a group of people, which makes the
metaphor disturbingly coherent, though still dreadfully overblown.)

And somehow, cultural changes happen.  Women have more legislated
rights and general consensus privileges now compared to a century ago
nearly everywhere on the planet.  At least in the US, rape is less
accepted now than a century ago, when it was a capital crime, but the
'virtue' and social standing of the victim was such an important
element that the idea of spousal rape or the rape of a prostitute would
have seemed nonsensical to nearly everybody, as well as not having any
legal definitions.

Back to the link about the outrage about blaming victims for being
raped in India.  I think that "culture war" (another stupid military
metaphor) can have an effect if it is conducted via ridicule as well as
sincere calls for justice.  Changes in what is civil do seem to go
through a time where a lot of people don't agree, but they have learned
to shut up because it is not cool to have their attitude any more.

Maybe we are losing the power of the word "war," but we will still see
shifts in cultures.  Perhaps Indian women can succeed in ridiculing
and demonizing those who excuse rapists.  If they can, I expect there
will be fewer rapes happening, though perhaps a higher percentage of
them reported.  "War on Christmas" presumably gets some Christians all
riled up and motivated to express their religious conviction as part of
the annual consumer excess festivals, when they might otherwise keep
the religious aspects private. I'm horrified by the damage of the "war
on terror," which not only kills people and motivates revenge, but
builds a surveillance society by playing on feelings of terror rather
than eliminating it.  Is it doomed to fail?  While it certainly can't
completely succeed in doing what the name says, it seems to be
accomplishing a lot of what it is actually intended to do,
unfortunately.  

Palin's "don't retreat" plays on that image of a noble war, maybe a
holy war.  I find her language as silly as her values, but I still am
amazed at how war is such a romantic concept to so many people.  I am
from a generation who watched ghastly images on TV every night and
marched in the streets to put an end to it, so perhaps I can't really
understand the terminology as she uses it, even if the resolve is
obvious.

When I do embrace battle metaphors, then I'm still advocating one of
the "tactics" from your book _Zietgeist_ which is pop culture for hope.
 (More authentic pop culture for more authentic hope, perhaps. Not all
rock n roll is created equal or intelligently.) I do sometimes forget
that hope and justice also look different from where Palin, as well as
the Taliban, sit. 

This annual state of the world stint always makes me think and
rethink, in all kinds of directions I don't expect.  

Thanks, Bruce and Jon.
  

    
(And I meant to say that the "war on terror" seems to be accomplishing
a lot of what it is actually intended to do, BOTH fortunately in terms
of purportedly saving many lives, and unfortunately in terms of civil
liberties and freedom.)

   
  

    
That 3DPrinting biz?  It's exciting for 2013, but they'll all be broke
soon enough.

http://voxelfab.com/blog/2013/01/theres-no-money-in-3d-printing/

*In other similar news, some day we'll all run out of stuff to talk
about.
  

    
<gail>, your post makes me think about the perception of (or,
trendier, optics for) war post WWII, sanitized by the many postwar
films and accounts. Those who knew better kept quiet. Meanwhile those
of us who grew up in the 50s were deluded; we played war games, it was
fun. Vietnam taught us better, or I should say, taught us bitter.
Bitter disillusionment.

Drone war reduces risk but, arguably, increases the probability of
collateral damage. In fact, in war all damage could be characterized as
collateral damage, as powerful elders, safely away from the front,
send the young and innocent, true believers, into battle.

Hopefully by now many more of us, a majority, understand that war is a
nightmare to be avoided. And the war metaphor doesn't serve us all
that well.

We won't end rape by declaring war on it. We'll end rape through
education, cultivation of sensitivity and empathy, rethinking the
meaning of gender difference. 

We won't end poverty by declaring war on it, or by throwing money at
it. We'll end poverty by caring about it.

We won't end drug problems by declaring war on drugs. We'll end drug
problems by understanding why and how drugs become a problem, by
treating addiction as a very human issue, maybe a disease, not a crime.
  

    
[Sorry to disappear like that; a switch in arthritis medication seems
to have triggered the onset of the worst arthritis attack I've had in
several years. I've spent most of the last week sleeping. Finally seem
to be coming out of it, but still can't walk.]

The topics covered in the WEF report offer a stark contrast to what
rich guys seem to want to talk about the global economy, at least when
they think nobody's watching. I attended the Astana Economic Forum last
year, a week-long event organized by the Kazakhstan government as a
way to showcase just how eager they are to get in the global game. I
was invited to talk about sustainability, pretty much the last thing
that anyone wanted to hear about. That my only real ally on my panel
was *Bjorn Lomborg* should show you just how skewed the event was.

The final day of the conference featured a roundtable discussion that
I found stunning. Here's what I wrote afterwards:

> The most notable part of the event was the roundtable discussion on
the final night, bringing together political leaders (current and
former Prime Ministers and Presidents), a half-dozen Nobel Prize
laureates in economics, a couple of executives and a couple of media
figures to talk about the world's economic situation. [...]

> ...a single telling example: in the 90 minutes of the discussion,
unemployment was mentioned once (about 45 minutes in), and briefly,
while inequality or similar concepts never came up. What received the
most attention was the need for even more austerity (and how to handle
the annoying groups of citizens who don't like it), alongside casual
discussions of tossing Greece out of the EU.

> Here's the problem: AEF is a prime example of how the global
conversation about development and economics takes place without much
regard for anything beyond the interests of the most wealthy and
powerful. This is hardly a surprise; what was surprising was the utter
lack of subtlety about it. Nobody bats an eye at the obsequiousness of
Nobel laureates and global media executives towards the
President-for-Life of an up-and-coming petrokleptocracy. Jokes are made
about how democracy is ruined by having to rely on voters. The fate of
the planet gets decided over bad (and infrequent) coffee and
semi-functional translation.<

Somebody captured my live-tweets of the roundtable: 
http://turnstylenews.com/2012/05/24/bleak-tomorrow-futurist-jamais-cascio-on-t
he-astana-economic-forum/

I wasn't so much shocked by how venal and short-sighted these world
rulers were as I was by how unembarrassed and blatant they were about
it. There was no attempt to mask their positions with high-minded
language.
  

    
Thanks for pointing out yet another sign of the apocalypse (YASOTA),
Jamais...
  

    
This is a wrap, thanks to all who showed up with comments, questions,
bodily states, mental states, prognostications, rants, etc. Thanks
especially to Bruce Sterling for digging out of the Serbian snow to
join us for a couple of weeks. 

Onward! Through the fog!