Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

If you apply this approach to The Donald it gets interesting.  The
Donald has the showman's gift of sucking all the air out of the room
-- so did Obama, actually.  That was one of Obama's major flaws as a
political actor.   

But if you remove The Donald, and then gaze at the Republican
alternatives, the prospect of The Donald improves by comparison.   
A Donaldless world is more disturbing than The Donald is.

For instance, even though he's obviously a con man, a rip-off artist
and thin-skinned egomaniac with zero interest in sane policy  -- Ted
Cruz is worse.   He's LOTS worse.  

Even though The Donald's iconic, and a lightning rod for polarized
anxieties, Sarah Palin is worse at that activity  than The Donald
is.  Sure, Sarah's considered a lunatic now, but The Sarah could
have been vice president, and maybe even President.  Yes, her, that
poor, deluded, blowhard creature.   For a woman with rural rootsy
affinities whose motto is "Faith, Family and Flag," Sarah's pious,
right-to-lifer family is more soap-opera-broken even than The
Donald's  bizarre family.

Paul Ryan, the current Speaker of the House, is, as far as I can
figure, the only guy in the Republican Party with a coherent
legislative agenda, other than looting.   But the guy's a Tea Party
fanatic. His ambitions are eye-blindingly radical, but, well, Ryan
could also easily  have been Vice President, and President.  
However bad Ryan's gonna get in 2017, consider that he could have
been that bad years ago.  Also, consider that the absence of The
Donald would probably empower Ryan vastly.
  

    
People worse than The Donald have been circling the Oval Office for
years and years now.    Carson, vastly worse than The Donald. Carly
Fiorina, about as bad.  Rand Paul, lots, lots worse.  Mike Huckabee,
much, much worse.  Bobby Jindal, really bad, maybe not quite as bad
as The Donald, but surprisingly, thoroughly bad.  Scott Walker,
merely somewhat worse.

They weren't all entirely and uniformly awful politicians: Kasich
sort of okay, Rubio kind of interesting, Bush just a melancholy sign
of  the general political necrosis, but that's a Donaldless world.  
An extensively bad scene with deep roots in years of development.  
Even though The Donald is ludicrously disastrous, he's not some lone
Frankenstein creature.  He's part of the general texture of American
rot.  A society this extensively troubled, for such a long time,
should probably shouldn't be pitying itself for electing a Donald. 
Better if it somehow finds the courage to confront its own deep
inner Donaldness.
  

    

bruce --- not being disputatious but just curious as to how you assess other
potential republican candidates as being -worse- than trump.
  

    
>the courage to confront its own deep
>inner Donaldness

My theory is that Trump (and his Dad too, probably) wanted in to the
world of Manhattan's Upper East Side.  That wasn't ever going to
happen and Donald reacted by building garishness, poor taste,
conspicuous consumption and any other quality offensive to "old
money" into his developments.  It's very tempting to think Trump is
smart enough that he identified this closed clique of the UES as not
just his enemy, but the enemy of a lot of US voters.  Trump may know
more about the mechanics of power in the US (and the world) than we
expect, simply because he's been watching it enviously, from just
outside the clubhouse, for about 40 years.  
  

    
Administrivia
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.
  

    
*Well @loris (and it's nice to see you), I think Trump's former (and
current) Republican rivals are worse than Trump because their ideas
are more pernicious, their intentions are commonly as bad as his,
they're more fanatical than him and they probably could do a lot
more practical damage to the American Republic than he can.

*Ted Cruz, for instance, is a smart-aleck, officious crank Texan
lawyer who's also bitter, scheming and cruel.  He has no friends at
all.  The Republicans who know Ted best hate him worst.  

*Paul is a daffy one-issue Randite zealot who never learns anything,
Huckabee is a lowlife Elmer Gantry schemer,  Jindal completely
wrecked his state through his sheer administrative incompetence, and
Bush is a hapless born-to-the-purple guy really has no proper role
in public life except for his genetics.  

*I could go on, but I don't like to heap partisan abuse on people
already defeated. I think most Republican voters would agree with me
that they're not much good.  Otherwise they would never have voted
for an over-the-top game-show host like The Donald.  But they choose
The Donald, and if that choice was insane, well, they're half the
American population.  If we're really in a madhouse, what else can
one expect but The Donald?  How "bad" is it when you get what you
deserve?
  

    
*It's too early to judge the antics of the new Administration,
although the first day of the new Congress was awful -- they had
their hands in the cookie jar before they even reached the gavel. 
The people around The Donald are awful.  They're lowlifes and
huckster opportunists in it only for themselves, and they have zero
loyalty to him or respect for his judgment, because they know The
Donald doesn't have any.  He always, always wings it, he doesn't
even prep for a debate.  He can't.  Also doesn't need to.

You couldn't trust that Cabinet to run a lemonade stand.  They're
gonna steal everything they can see, and when they look for money to
steal, it's all sitting there in the room with them.
  

    

*Why is The Donald maybe not bad in his obvious badness?  Well,
let's try a thought experiment.  Suppose The Donald was your best
ally.  Imagine the new President was fully on your side.  Would you
be happy about it?  Would you think, "Wow, this powerful, acute
politician is gonna get a lot done for me!  I'm gonna bask in his
favor?"  

*If you were any woman other than a Donald groupie  you'd obviously
be petrified, but really, if you had something  critically important
to do that needed doing well, would you ever hire Donald Trump to do
it?   Would you even let him in the building?

*I mean -- wouldn't you KNOW that it would always end up about The
Donald trying to look good, and everything around him ending up
ruined, Atlantic City style, Trump U style, ex-wives style?  The
guy's a transparent hustler, huckster and blowhard.  Everybody knows
it.   The people who know him best know that best.  I'm quite sure
he's gonna "destroy" a lot of stuff, but not by intention.  Not
through any malignant policy or plan -- he doesn't have one.  Mostly
he's gonna gravely damage the people who are rash enough to trust
him with anything.  That means the people in the room with him,
basically.  For a while that's gonna be members of his own Cabinet.
  

    
I was amused to hear Trump say "I know a lot about hacking." Why
wouldn't he? He uses Twitter a lot, and his son has a computer. Why
would you listen to those 17 intelligence agencies, or to somebody
like Dmitri Alperovitch from Crowdstrike, when you've got your
Twitter feed right there? We live in a marvelous time, when even
someone of limited intelligence can leverage the wisdom of the mob,
er, crowds.

When it comes to global politics, Trump is an innocent. I suspect
Putin loves him because he understands well how to use him, how to
play to Trump's self interest, which is a sure win.  But Trump's
going to have a rough time, I suspect he's in over his head. And
despite common assumption, the President of the USA has limited
power - the checks and balances meant to constrain monarchist
tendencies are not easily defeated, especially by a political naif
who works harder at creating enmity than at building alliances. 
Trump's trouble not because he's a dictator in the making, but
because he's a wild bull in a China shop, and everywhere he looks,
he sees red.

The real "state of the world" question in all this is harder to
read, because his supposedly controlled unpredictability throws off
a lot of strange attractors. He's breeding chaos. He's hiring a
cabinet of wolves to guard the various henhouses of our government.

Meanwhile Ryan is angling to dismantle the New Deal, hoping that
Trump will be a support and not an obstruction. But reality,
politics, and hopefully cooler heads will hopefully stall the most
destructive legislation. E.g. how well can you expect to hack Social
Security and Medicare, with the boomer "demographic bulge" well into
retirement age and depending on those programs?

This is mostly about the U.S. and not about the world, but how well
can we disentangle the various interdependencies that have evolved
over years of trending globalism and deeper connection via the vast
active living intelligent system, the Internet?
  

    
Question via email from Alberto Cottica: 

Hi, thank you so much for hosting this great discussion. My
question: do you have any thoughts on the State of Europe? 2016 was
quite eventful on our side of the pond.
  

    
agree with all analyses about trump, his cohort, and other repubs.
just, they all seem like different forms of nausea, not sure I can
differentiate.
  

    
Via email from William Cunningham:

This article from the Atlantic today nicely frames a real
contemporary problem:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/electoral-college-tr
ump-argentina-malaysia-japan-clinton/512153/

Basically in many countries, including the US, constitutional
representation favors rural constituent priorities over urban,
despite the fact that demographically the vast majority of
populations are urban, not rural.

Old, difficult to change representative structures empower
conservative minorities over the whole world.

Do you see or feel any energy around underrepresented urban
populations working around national governments that refuse to serve
them?
  

    
One could say then that the electoral College is a form of
affirmative action.
  

    
From George McKee:

Thanks to BruceS and JonL for the annual wrapup.  As a still-current
Texan, I agree with Bruce - the Ted Cruz bullet that just missed was
incredibly lucky.

I think this is becoming my annual question:  What media, if any,
received a death certificate last year?  Were any new media born? 
Does fake news count as a distinct medium?

Politically, it seemed to me that Twitter displaced volunteer "feet
on the ground" as the most cost-effective means of voter
mobilization.  Is this a real trend, or is The Donald just awesomely
talented at media exploitation?
  

    
Thanks for the dead-media hint.  We haven't talked about technology
yet.  Quite the departure from most previous WELL SOTWs.

And why is that?  Is it because we geeks know as little about "The
Cyber" as The Donald does?  No.  It's because it's just not as
interesting this year.

During the past  three or four years, I've been going on and on
about "surveillance capitalism" and the  unprecedented power of the
dominant industries of the Twenty-Teens,  Google Amazon Facebook
Apple Microsoft.  "The Stacks," for short.  

And, in theory, the Stacks oughta be on top of their game in 2017.  
They should be launching a deft and spectacular Internet-of-Things
land grab that hustles all of physical reality into their grip.  Any
effective resistance from the earlier industrial order has ceased. 
The digital imperative has taken command.

The Donald won't stop 'em.  He's a TV and Twitter fan who lacks any
tech policy. Of course he'll sell off "net neutrality" to whichever
hustler agrees to make The Donald look best on a screen, but (a) The
Donald doesn't know who that is (b) they won't really do it and ( c)
he's never gonna look good to the zillions of people who already
hate the sight of him.  So he'll simply "wreck the Internet" without
ever knowing what it was.
  

    
But, "the Internet" is done already.  It had a great historic arc,
but it maxed out on its own excesses and unconfronted issues, much
like the Space Age and atomic power did.   Anybody who still thinks
"net neutrality" is the be-all and end-all of the modern tech biz
can go somewhere where they still enjoy net neutrality -- the
flatness, the small pieces loosely joined, the permissionless
innovation, etc.  

Go to  Iceland, maybe.  Sure: go start a no-permission Internet
website in Iceland.  Birgitta Jonsdottir will be nice to you, you
might even get fan mail from Wikileaks.  Otherwise, it's quite like
building your own crystal-set ham radio.  Nobody will stop you,
because it just doesn't matter.
  

    
I'm starting to think that the Big Five has turned into Detroit --
meaning the  bloated, self-satisfied, chrome and tail fins Detroit
-- with amazing Internet speed.  They're big, but flaccid and
hapless.  I'll run through that a little.

Google: they're harebrained.  Their moonshots all miss the Moon. 
Why are they "Alphabet"?  What was gained by that?   Why all the
fuss over the radically overhyped  car and the silly goggles?  What
do they want from themselves?  Why are they "assembling the world's
knowledge" in a world that depends on them and yet is obviously
saturated with lies, rumor, fear and the madness of crowds?  They
drink their own Google  bathwater.  There's nothing between them and
world domination except the stark fact that they can't get a grip.

Apple: so stodgy.  The rich guy's rose-gold wrist toy.  Why are
their devices "thin"?  Why was that ever a quality to worry about in
a computational consumer device?  Sure, Apple is wreathed in
high-profit fur and diamonds, but they're coming across like Zsa Zsa
Gabor.  Elderly, formerly-daring, an aging diva who is transgressive
in ways that nobody thinks are actually liberating.

Facebook: bitter, toxic, creepy.  Best friends with Nazis, black
martyrs, spies, deceivers, anybody you hate.  Imagine there's no
Mark Zuckerberg suddenly -- (because Mark lost a brother-in-law in a
shocking accident, sadly for him).  Who cries in a world without The
Zuck?  His wife, kid, sister, immediate family will be very upset.  
Everybody else: secret sigh of relief.  The guy's got two billion
friends but nobody likes him.

Microsoft:  simply old-fashioned.  Like a office-supply company. 
The place where good ideas in computation go to die, but can't leave
because of the catering.

Amazon:  Actually, Amazon is looking pretty good.  Best of the lot. 
Unfortunately, there's only one guy with any clout there, Jeff
Bezos.  Bezos is a great businessman, but he's now the Washington
Post and therefore out of favor with the regime.  Maybe that's the
right moral place for a business leader of his world changing
caliber now, but obviously the red-staters are gonna try to beat
Bezos up, probably by attacking his sales-tax advantage, which is
bullshit nowadays anyway.   Still, he's got the Amazon Cloud and
Alexa voice-computing, which are new computational initiatives with
users and revenue.  Bezos looks like a genuine captain of industry,
so I'll be spending more time watching him this year than I used to.
  

    

*Why are the Stacks so  inept?   You might argue, "Well, the Stacks
aren't genuinely special, they're really standard American
corporations.  They got fat and dumb because that's the nature of
established American conglomerates.   Outside their fat cat silos, 
'technology' will still race on, bypassing them disruptively." That
sounds plausible, but  you know, where exactly?   How?  Who?  Is
there any objective evidence of that happening?


Samsung?  The self-igniting jet-destroying company.  You can't climb
a plane without a free ad against Samsung.

Huawei.  The South China Sea, industrial espionage, Great Firewall
of China, enough said.

IBM.  Watson, I really really need you, but your pet AI shows up
dead broke.  Watson can't make money fast enough to bail 'em out of
their spiral.

Intel.  The tragic prince.  They make desktop computers in a world
where Moore's Law is dying.  Intel did their level best for Moore's
Law.  They couldn't save it, they couldn't make it pay.  They had to
give up, their idea of a powerful personal computer now is one that
runs Netflix better.  I can't help but think that the death of
Moore's Law marks the general death of an era; the loss of speed and
impetus there is  like the failure of supersonic flight for
aviation.
  

    

Entire industry tech sectors, that are claimed to be novel, 
"innovative" and "disruptive,"  don't just work, can't get traction,
or max out.  "Apps" were supposed to be the be-all and end-all, a
booming free marketplace for  the automated control of anything, but
scarcely anybody makes money there. There are millions of apps
available, and people tend to use just four or five.

Virtual Reality is decades old.  If you put on a VR mask you're in
bondage.  Somebody will steal your purse.  It's an interesting
experience, but so are 3D movies and isolation tanks.  If you look
at other forms of computer gaming, they're pretty much moribund. 
The gaming biz clutches at VR because the rest of that entertainment
biz is in a ditch.

Wearables.  People just don't wear them.  They try, they give up.  I
don't like to cruelly scoff here, I actually like my own wearable,
but the brave and innovative Pebble company went broke right on my
wrist.   Wearables don't work well as watches or jewelry, and health
monitors are of little use unless you're literally sick and dying.  

Ear wearables, or "hearables," are at least different and new, but I
wonder.  Wearables seem to get more attention than their feeble
sales and limited usefulness can deserve.

AR.  I adore Augmented Reality.  Totally dig it.  Always will,
probably.  I really like underground comics and neurofunk
drum'n'bass, too, but that doesn't make them major industries.

Driverless cars.  Okay, Google can't manage to build them, so who
can?  Are they the new "flying cars," forever promised, even sort of
possible technically, but never really around?  The Segways with
four wheels.  It's certainly not a good sign that Uber are pioneers
in driverless juggernauts, because Uber are profoundly malignant and
reckless and would kill you cheerfully.
  

    

Then there's deep-learning AI neural nets for 2017.   Neural nets
are also decades  old, but I'm genuinely impressed by the new tech
advances here.  The new deep learners quite radical, capable and
interesting.  I don't, however, think they're gonna work in the way
that people currently imagine they're going to work.   

People think they are magic fortune-telling Big Data machines when
they're really instruments  more like camera filters.  I know that's
a weak analogy, but these deep learners aren't "smart" even though
they do behave rather like nets of neurons.  Technically, they're
like the retina of the eye: they can take huge blurs and roars of
data and turn them into useful, refined output.  

I don't, however, think they're gonna "revolutionize computing,"
because their workings are so opaque.  You can't mathematically
prove that you have an accurate answer with a deep-learner.  You
just get cool Ouija-board hints.  They strike me as a form of
decadence for computer science, frankly.  They have a baroque,
visionary, suggestive, occultist quality when at this historical
moment that's the very last thing we need.
  

    
For Alberto Cottica:

http://www.politico.eu/newsletter/playbook/

Yeah, in fact I find European developments just as remarkable as you
say; for Americans it's an encouraging sign that we haven't gone off
the deep end alone.

Brussels news was deliberately designed to never be exciting.  Now
Brussels news is in fact pretty exciting, which is not good news if
you're a fan of the European Union.  This huge rickety technocratic
structure may be one of those things that can only be understood in
historical retrospect.
  

    
http://www.politico.eu/article/dirty-dozen-kaczynski-vestager-flynn-sarkozy-ba
rnier-eu-2017-selmayr-beppe-grillo/

*That's a pretty good list of the weirdest political actors in
Europe for 2017.  It's a listicle, and it's trying to be funny,but
yeah, that's where a lot of the fault-lines are on the Old Continent
these days.
  

    
"Then there's deep-learning AI neural nets for 2017".. my own take
is that the current work is developing the low-level components that
will make real AI possible later on. This is similar to what
happened when the electronics industry developed transistors and ICs
that were the basis for much else.

I am very interested in Bayesian methods as these have many of the
benefits of neural nets, but can provide a coherent answer as to why
they reach a particular conclusion.
  

    
"[Machine learning has] a baroque, visionary, suggestive, occultist
quality when at this historical moment that's the very last thing we
need."

I agree wholeheartedly, but there's a strain of automation bias
going around--especially in government and regulatory circles--that
has pointed a fairly sizable amount of money and resources toward
leveraging machine learning in the never-ending quest for
efficiency. I doesn't appear as if this train will be slowing any
time soon, and there are a growing number of us in law and
technology circles who worry about the effects, especially in police
and military applications. 
  

    
Bruce got me thinking about my own ongoing experience with "the
stacks," and the experiences of others around me, including my
grandchildren, who are grown now, and have lived their lives with
the Internet - they've never known a world without Google, Facebook,
Twitter, IOS, Instagram, etc. 

        When Bruce and I first met, we lived a few miles from each other
but rarely visited. We could call each other via landline, and we
crossed paths on an early computer bulletin board system (BBS)
called SMOF, for "Secret Masters of Fandom," run by a modest
guy/secret master, Earl Cooley, whose handle was "shiva." I had my
first computer, an early Intel-based PC made by PCs Limited, a
company that later changed its name to Dell Computers. It was a
heavy box with a monitor on top - a monitor that could only display
ascii text, an amber monitor - which meant it displayed dark orange
text, a change from the usual green displays. It had a 300 baud
modem. I bought it because I'd learned, via the Whole Earth brigade
and their various publications, that computers could be  used for
conversation and community.  Forward thinkers, the Whole Earthers
had picked up on the new world of BBS communities and had started
their own, called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link or WELL.  An avid
reader of Whole Earth publications and eager to meet them and write
for them, but I was 1800 miles away, plane fare was expensive - and
long distance calls were relatively expensive, around $9 an hour.
Add that to the WELL's rate, around $2 and hour, and it would cost
me $11 an hour in 1990s dollars to connect. 

I learned all I could about the Internet when the WELL connected to
the network, because I could then use telnet to access it for free.
There was no such thing as a consumer-level Internet Service
Provider at the time, but I had Internet-pro friends that I'd met
through my nascent connection to the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
and they hooked me up. Though I knew barely enough to be dangerous,
I was an Internet expert, compared to most people. That was the
start of a new career, though I didn't suspect it at the time.

Some might say it's amazing how that primitive technology evolved
into the vast pervasive system we have now, but in the early 90s we
suspected that computer networks would eventually be prevalent.
Idealists compared the potential to Teilhard de Chardin's concept of
the "noosphere," where humans evolve a connected cognition, a
network of minds. Cyberpunk authors had a dystopian interpretation
of the potential futures at that point. In fact the Internet, like
the human race,  is wonderful and it is terrible.