Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
In January 2000 Jon Lebkowsky interviewed Bruce Sterling here in
Inkwell about "The Viridian Future," and in 2001 about "The State of
the Future." 2002's discussion was called "State of the Whirled,"
followed in 2003 by a discussion inspired by Bruce's nonfiction
book, "Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years." In 2004, we had
the "Bruce Sterling State of the World Address," and thereafter we
called it the "State of the World" conversation.

Pundits abound, speaking with real or fabricated authority on a
variety of subjects, and as the year turns spewing top ten lists and
year-end summaries, and confident but subjective prognostications
about the next  year or five. If you're bored with that sort of
thing, you might find this two-week conversation more fun,
interesting, and compelling. Our speakers are not creating
keyword-rich listicles to maximize hits and produce conversions...
but discussing the "state of the world" based on their perspectives
as future-focused mavens immersed in information and contemporary
culture. 

Bruce Sterling's perspectives are especially interesting given his
global perspective as someone who travels and reports broadly, and
his experiences as an author, speaker, teacher and maker attentive
to trends in science, culture, politics, and design. He's known a
novelist, journalist and speaker. While acting as “Visionary in
Residence” at Art Center College of Design in 2008, he wrote
“Shaping Things,” one of the first books about the Internet of
Things. In 2008 he was the curator of the Share Festival in Turin,
on the theme of Italian digital manufacturing. He was one of the
original columnists for Make magazine and wrote the cover story for
the first issue of WIRED. Bruce Sterling lives in Turin, Belgrade
and Austin. http://casajasmina.arduino.cc/team/

Jon Lebkowsky has been making and sharing experiences in digital
culture and media for over 25 years. Currently he's part of Polycot
Associates, a mission-driven digital development co-operative based
in Austin, Texas. He's also President of EFF-Austin, an organization
that’s been supporting digital freedom in Texas since 1990. He's
been an activist, sometimes journalist, and blogger who writes about
the future of the Internet, digital culture, media, and society.
http://weblogsky.com
  

    
This Robert Anton Wilson quote seems relevant as a first post...

"The only 'realities' (plural) that we actually experience and can
talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced
realities, existential realities -- realities involving ourselves as
editors -- and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating,
evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low
resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a
jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast
illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a
large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, and Mahler.

"Alan Watts may have said it best of all: 'The universe is a giant
Rorschach ink-blot.' Science finds one meaning in it in the 18th
Century, another in the 19th, a third in the 20th; each artist finds
unique meanings on other levels of abstraction; and each man and
woman finds different meanings at different hours of the day,
depending on the internal and external environments."

http://www.rawilson.com/trigger1.html

There's also that Vladimir Bartol quote, "Nothing is an absolute
reality, all is permitted" - which was boiled down via William
Burroughs and "Assassin's Creed" to this: "Nothing is true,
everything is permitted." 

But everything you'll read here is Absolutely True...
  

    
*It's pleasant to be back on the WELL, an institution of
unfathomable age in Internet years.

*Let's cozy on up with the shiny new brandy decanter (in the shape
of a frosted light bulb, commemorating Nikola Tesla),  bravely open 
the window onto the planet's crazy weather, and surmise on what
gives for this year!
  

    
Every year on the WELL I decry the climate crisis.  It's always
worse, and I always know it's gonna get worse, and it infallibly
does.  In 2015 the weather was exceptionally sinister.   It's
getting worse faster.

 Already this year, Britain's drowning, the US Midwest is drowning,
the North Pole thawed out in December, and New York City didn't
freeze in December at all, an unheard-of development that ought to
scare even Wall Street.   California has lost millions of fine old
trees to the drought; these organic monuments won't be coming back
within a human lifetime. The Anthropocene has scarred the
Californian landscape.

An international climate agreement showed up during 2015, because
anyone who thinks they can run a country in these conditions should
properly be gravely alarmed.  However, since the Westphalian
nation-state system was itself a major cause of global warming
("Never mind my national exhaust pipes, I'll make money with them
while they empty over there in your 'globe'"), the political
agreement can't make much difference. It buoys the self-esteem of
the political class and its commentariat without actually cleaning
the sky of two centuries of accumulated poisons.  

Despite the accelerating mayhem, nobody will have any particular
change-of-heart on the subject this year.   Those of us who know
about it have known as long as the oil companies did -- since the
early 1970s. Those  who cashed in by denying climate change will be
drowning and parching just like the rest of us, but they're never
gonna admit their culpability; they'll just shrug and cite
Scripture.  They've done something truly awful, but even if these
dismal malefactors were all promptly hanged Nuremberg style, in a
show-trial haze of worldwide  moral condemnation, it wouldn't change
the course of events much.
  

    
The 2030s are swimming into view: it will be a decade of sudden,
regional calamities and mass migrations.  The poor will of course
suffer more (they always do), but the rich will fear it more.  
Nations will build national walls (many nations are doing ithatnow
-- it's the new vogue, even kindly Brazil likes to do it) but
national walls can't, and don't address, a global problem that is
made of wind and air.   

These physical barriers will suffer the "Fukushima effect:"  the
dikes you built to resist the tsunami only hold those catastrophic
waters in, once the almighty wave comes over the top.  Also, the
industrial complex you are trying to protect from natural disaster
becomes the source of a secondary, artificial disaster.
  

    

"Globalization" is over for 2016.   We have entered an era of
Internet Counter-Revolution.  The events of 1989 feel almost as
distant as those of 1789.  The globalizing, flat-world,
small-pieces-loosely-joined Internet is behind us, it's history. 
The elite geek Internet could not resist those repeated tsunamis of
incoming users.

It turned out that normal people like the "social" in social media a
lot better than they ever liked the raw potential of media
technology.  In Russia and China in 2016, digital media is an arm of
the state.  Internet has zero revolutionary potential within those
societies, but all kinds of potential for exported cyberwar.   The
Chinese police spy and firewall model, much scoffed at in the 1990s,
is now the dominant paradigm.  The Chinese have prospered with their
authoritarian approach, while those who bought into borderless
friction-free data have been immiserated by the ultra-rich.  
  

    <scribbled by jonl Wed 6 Jan 16 18:03>
  

    

In the USA it's an older American story: the apparent freedom of
Henry Ford's personal flivver has briskly yielded to the new Detroit
Big Five of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and, in last place,
Microsoft.

In 2016, everything that looks like digital innovation, "big data,"
"the cloud," the "Internet of Things," are actually promotional
slogans that play into the hands of the GAFAM "Big Five."  Anybody
who lacks broadband and a mobile OS is in deadly peril, especially
the digital old-school likes of IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle…
and the hapless TV networks, whose median viewer age is now in the
60s.

The GAFAM Big Five, the "Stacks," will turn their wrath on the
victims closest to them, well before they complete their lunge for
control of cars and thermostats.  However, their destiny is obvious.
The rebels of the 1990s are America's new mega-conglomerates. 
Google is "Alphabet," Apple pruned the "computer" from its name,
Amazon is the Washington Post. In 2016, that's how it is, and in
2017, 189, 19, much more so.

So the not-evil guys are the new evil guys, but don't be scared by
this.  It's quite like watching the 1960s Space Age crumble from
giant-leaps-for-mankind to launching low-orbit gizmos for profit. 
It's comprehensible, it can be dealt with.   Sure, it's tragic if
your head was in the noosphere, but if you have any historical
awareness of previous industrial revolutions, this is really easy to
understand.  It's already in your pocket and purse, it's written on
every screen you look at  It could scarcely be more obvious.

Yes, Internet Counterrevolution is  coming, much of it is here
already, and it's properly considered a big deal, but it's not
permanent.  This too shall pass.
  

    
User jonl reporting for (shared) duty, with this quote from a
Rhizome interview with Tung-Hui Hu
(http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/dec/16/interview-tung-hui-hu/): 


"The user is a deeply synthetic creation, right? The identity of the
user is actually very odd if you look at it historically, because it
really means a way of dividing up a shared resource. You’re all
sharing the same computer and yet you think of this as private. The
journalist Steven Levy says, 'it’s actually like making love to
someone knowing that they’re making love to many other people.' How
we think of this now as a model for individuality is very
bizarre—perhaps a matter of forty years of indoctrination. Every
user has become a freelance laborer, every user is out for
themselves, everyone can affiliate themselves with whatever company.

"This sounds great in theory, but the very end of the book takes up
this idea of the 'human as a service'—a technologist’s phrase, not
mine. It means that we should all 'Uberize' ourselves—not just to
drive cars, but to let every moment of our day be monetized by an
app. The gruesome literalization of the 'human as a service' is the
captcha workers who are asked to prove that they’re human over and
over again, every ten seconds. If all we need is to get proof of
humanity, then we can make that a service and we can outsource it to
Bangladesh and have that done for us for two dollars per thousand
captchas. It’s confusion between what is really an economic idea of
accounting for how much time we are using, which is called the user,
and the idea of the personal."
  

    
I had a dream...

Sheriff Andy is dead, Mayberry's been bulldozed and replaced with
mixed use developments, condos rising high into the carbon-saturated
air, hopefully not too fragile to resist the increasingly turbulent
"weather events" driven by climate change. The sheriff's posse is
still there, gathering petitions and electing officials, stubbornly
resisting the obvious transformations and the science behind them,
even burning the texts. Clever politicians, seeing an angry mob
forming in the streets, soapbox emotional rhetoric, accumulate votes
and power, ultimately cycling money and resources into their own
coffers, hoping to build future-proofed bunkers...
  

    <scribbled by jonl Tue 5 Jan 16 03:35>
  

    
Internet Counterevolution doesn't mean a return to the status quo
ante of the world before the Internet.  Globalization goes on, it
just loses its glamour; where there was spreading prosperity there
is offshored exploitation, where there was free-moving discussion
there are cyberwar trolls, where there was your happy face in a
Facebook there's in instant police dossier that you foolishly built
yourself, where nobody knew you were a dog you are now
branded-and-sorted Stack livestock, and so on.  

Twenty-teens globalization looks less like jet-set free-spending
yuppie tourism and more like hordes of illegal Syrians arriving via
Facebook support groups.  The wanderers are mostly Moslems, because
the effect of the digital "Arab Spring" on their somnolent societies
was catastrophic.  It's amazing how badly that harmed them, and they
show no sign of getting over it; on the contrary. But refugee life
is for anybody, now.  Rich or poor, they can all be fleeing, at a
moment's notice, if they get a sudden deluge of Greenhouse rain. 
People everywhere are afraid of immigrants now because they see
their own face in that mirror.
  

    

I had a chat at a New Years Party here in Belgrade with a young
female stranger.  Naturally she wanted to know what an American was
doing in town, and I said, as I often do, that Serbian society has
pioneered a lot of situations that spread elsewhere.  Today's
religious wars, economic sanctions, breaking of economic sanctions,
financial collapse, ultra rich moguls robbing the middle class,
major air powers blowing the daylights out of an unfriendly regime
with allegedly precise bombs:  daily life in Serbia 1999 is
something most everybody understands now.  It's the "Globalization
of Balkanization."

But weren't there any POSITIVE aspects of Serbian cultural exports?
she demanded.  That question caught me flat-footed, because as a
futurist I just don't do "positive" and "negative".  I actively
avoid that kind of value judgment.  Wishful thinking and fearful
thinking gets in the way of an objective understanding of
change-drivers.   Change occurs from pent-up energies: it's like
asking if a battery's voltage is "good" or "bad."  All potential
change has positive or negative potential: otherwise it isn't even
"potential."

But I had to spare my Serbian interlocutor that blandly amoral
lecture; because it was one in the morning of Jan 1 02016, and we'd
been drinking.  So I had to flatter her, and quickly invent some
"positive" aspects of the ongoing Serbian cultural imperialism.  

Thinking fast, I told her that Serbs excel at prospering in other
people's countries.   Although Serbia the country has a rough
reputation, the Serbian emigre communities in dozens of other
countries cause scarcely any trouble.  They prosper, in fact.  

Also: given that they're a small, thorny country, Serbia does
remarkably well at kissing up to major powers when those powers
themselves get thorny.   The Serbs actually thrive during cold wars.
They know how to cleverly exploit other people's stupid clashes for
their own benefit.   

And, lastly, Serbs are also exceedingly good at dealing with
disasters.  They complain incessantly in normal daily life, but when
ever life gets genuinely hazardous, they scarcely beef at all. 
Everybody diligently stacks the sandbags,  and nobody wrings their
hands or slacks off.  That's a difficult virtue to acquire, but it
is indeed a virtue.
  

    
Speaking of Internet globalization...

A few years ago, Charles Wyble of the Free Network Foundation
envisioned a fleet of balloons carrying broadband access points,
blanketing formerly under- or un-served realms with gigabit
connectivity. Great idea, I thought, but what would it take to pull
it off?

One of the stacks could do it, and Google was up to the inspiration,
and in 2013 filed a patent that was a first step on the path to
Project Loon: https://www.google.com/loon/  

"Many of us think of the Internet as a global community. But
two-thirds of the world’s population does not yet have Internet
access. Project Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge
of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, help
fill coverage gaps, and bring people back online after disasters."

"Project Loon balloons float in the stratosphere, twice as high as
airplanes and the weather. In the stratosphere, there are many
layers of wind, and each layer of wind varies in direction and
speed. Loon balloons go where they’re needed by rising or descending
into a layer of wind blowing in the desired direction of travel. By
partnering with Telecommunications companies to share cellular
spectrum we’ve enabled people to connect to the balloon network
directly from their phones and other LTE-enabled devices. The signal
is then passed across the balloon network and back down to the
global Internet on Earth."

I can remember when, in Austin, it was a big deal to get the local
coffee shops to add wifi, via our "Austin Wireless City" project:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2004-06-11/215435/

I'm quoted in that article, saying "We're at a turning point now,
and it's one we predicted, where right now free Wi-Fi has moved from
being a value that you could add on to your business to being a
necessity that you have to offer in order to remain competitive. Any
kind of venue where you want people to hang out now needs to have
free Wi-Fi. It's just that simple and it's just that important."

That seems quaint.

Today access to the Internet is spreading far and wide, along with
relatively low cost mobile devices accessing cellular and/or wifi
services that are increasingly fast and furious. The connectivity
has accelerated beyond our comprehension of its implications. 

Interesting logistics: how many devices, endpoints, destinations,
networks can you add before the scaling issues overwhelm the
systems? I'm surprised daily that the thing just works, that it's
unusual to lose access to even the most obscure points on the
Internet map.

This is background to our conversation of the next couple of weeks,
for sure...


 
  

    
(This asynchronous conversation will continue for two weeks, so
check back every day or two if you find it interesting.)

(Only members of the WELL can post directly to the conversation, but
others can send questions or comments to inkwell at well.com, and
our hosts can post them here.)
  

    
GOPOD, I've missed this ...rational conversation at last...sail on
boys, while I gather my thoughts. This day has been all too much at
once. You be peace, I'll be quiet (What About Bob)
  

    
Adding the public short link for sharing this discussion:
http://tinyurl.com/SOTW2016
  

    
 Slippage,

Ok, I'll try one...I'm thinking that the only real question about
the impact of climate change and what we can institute now, is
whether or not we will be living above or below ground by 2050?
Thoughts on that guys? Any optimists left among us?
  

    
Facebook's Free Basic service was shut down in Egypt and India.  This cloud
thing is controversial because 1) it usurps the powers that be?  or 2) it
data mines the serfs?  or 3) both? or 4) neither?
  

    
Re: #1 nearly choked on my coffee Jon. After those beautiful quotes:
<But everything you'll read here is Absolutely True>

Shameful self promotion, but I just blogged on perceptions and
realities
a few days ago
(http://tcnewcomb.com/2015/12/31/reality-reality-reality/

So, what's going on in your noosphere re: climate change and the
Stacks?
Can you speak to Bruce's spot-on summation of where we're at? What
are some possible bright futures?
  

    
carefully worded that last sentence after reading Bruce's comment in
<12>:

"I just don't do "positive" and "negative".  I actively
avoid that kind of value judgment.  Wishful thinking and fearful
thinking gets in the way of an objective understanding of
change-drivers."

That is going to be posted on my monitor Bruce, right next to
Margaret Mead's "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing
that ever has"

Thanks for capturing that trap so well. 
  

    <scribbled by tcn Tue 5 Jan 16 13:16>
  

    <scribbled by tcn Tue 5 Jan 16 12:31>
  

    <scribbled by tcn Tue 5 Jan 16 13:13>
  

    
Sorry for the scribbles, algorithmically handicapped
  

    
Ted asked me to weigh in on climate change and the stacks.

Oddly, there are still climate skeptics, and they're entrenched. But
they don't know anything, and the best minds ignore them now and
struggle with the very real issues of mitigation, and more likely
adaptation, and the impact fragile economies and complex global
logistics. We haven't done enough because it's so hard to do what we
really should about what we can control. 

Someone on Facebook argued that, because climate changed before
humans could have an impact, that climate change must not be
anthropogenic. Weird logic, there. "Fire existed before humans
walked the earth, therefore humans don't set fires." 

The issue's politicized and part of the arsenal of gut-level appeals
that stir the mob into a voting frenzy. 

Personally, I think we've already made the catastrophe; at this
point it's just a matter of time. However we humans have a way of
thinking our way out of wicked dilemmas, so there's always hope.
More so, if we can save science from the Republican party, and save
the Republican party from its dangerous slide into darkness. But
that's another subject for another day.

Re the stacks, I'm wanting to read Robin Chase's book, "Peers Inc,"
about an emerging collaborative economy leveraging Internet
platforms including those spinning out of "the stacks." I'm also
interested in recent conversations about "platform co-operativism,"
where you would have platform-based commercial entities (think Uber,
Lyft, AirBnb) that are organized as co-operatives. Having recently
turned my own company into a worker-owned co-op, I'm looking to help
others that want to take the same path toward a more just, fair, and
democratic workplace. Maybe "democratic" isn't the best word, it's a
loaded term. Maybe "participatory." (I find myself thinking and
arguing that "democracy" describes a system that can't work, but I'm
attentive to the Churchill comment... "is the worst form of
government, except for all the others.")

A lot of power concentrated in those "stacks," let's be glad they're
benign, and hope they remain so.