Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Stepping back, I find it philosophically puzzling that, as Jon said,
there is such a massive proliferation of ideas and exchanged rooted
in ignorance and assumption, and that Trump capitalized on these
forces in the media and internet - given that one would expect, at
their essence, information technology and mass media would be
conduits on balance for truth.  

Wouldn't our technologies like the internet, smart phones, etc.
ensure that the political and social equilibrium is ultimately more
determined by facts, truth, and reality?  Instead, this outcome is
far from it, as Jon, I think indicated.

I understand on a micro-level why it happened this way (memes, short
easy-to-swallow tidbits of nonsense everywhere, etc.). I get it.

But I do know that information technology should, in theory,
facilitate the dissemination of facts and truth (hence why tyrants
are worried about things like Facebook. Maybe after this Trump thing
they'll become Tyrant's favourite political tools). So then, why is
bullshit being disseminated more than facts, logic, reality, etc.  I
guess most of us suspect because it's less palatable, digestible,
etc.


I guess, unless we want the information revolution to degrade our
civilization (in this area) rather than improve it, this is the work
ahead of us.  I think it needs to somehow be recalibrated to create
much more powerful conduits for facts, reality, and truth.
  

    
Maybe, but that of course assumes we are really in charge of the
calibration. And that facts, reality, and truth constitute some kind
of telos, you know, that toward which the long arc of history bends.


Myself, I'm not so sure. Humans have been around for a couple of
hundred thousand years. We don't have much idea of what life was
like until about 5000 years ago, when people got interested enough
in themselves and things like truth to start writing stuff down, and
it's really only the last 500 where we can see those ideas take hold
as virtues. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of them and their
cousins--rule of law, science, tolerance, etc.--but it seems pretty
clear to me that we're in the midst of a re-evaluation of that
ethos. 

Re-evaluation is probably too civilized and cerebral a word for what
is going on, maybe repudiation is better; one thing that unites
Trump and ISIS, among others, is their rejection of core
Enlightenment values. That strikes me as the beginning of a
large-scale historical shift, Trump et al symptom of some kind of
epochal disease rather than the cause. To put it another way, The
seams in the post-Enlightenment world view are being stretched past
their limits. AFter they tear open, whatever comes next may be
marvelous, but I'll bet getting there is going to be unpleasant.
  

    
On the cogent topic of condemning other people's fake-news and
weaponized bullshit (but never your own), I naturally have to wonder
about my own culpability.  After all, I'm a science fiction writer. 
I don't spend all my time analyzing world affairs in the WELL SOTW. 
Heck no, I like making-up worlds.

And not only that, but as a science fiction writer, I'm not a
rational futurist and hard-science trendspotter SF writer  On the
contrary -- I do some of that sometimes, but I really like the
head-spinning, reality-melting, ontological-riffing bullshit aspects
of science fiction.  I like trippy stuff that can be made to sound
plausible, in some magician-patter fashion, and that feels
entertaining and mind-expanding, but really makes no more objective
sense than a rabbit out of a hat.

And that's supposed to be okay.  As long as you keep the rules
straight.  Science fiction is supposed to exist in this fenced-off
genre area where sandbox activities like this are okay, even fun.  

Sure, there have been a few historic slip-ups where way-out sci-fi
ideas became national politics here and there.  Like the Space Race
and moon landings, for instance.  And, you might argue that nuclear
power had some unfortunate sci-fi aspects.  And Reagan's Strategic
Defense Initiative, "Star Wars," wasn't really caused by the Star
Wars entertainment property, but it's close enough that it's 
bothersome.  The Hollywood  Star President comes out on TV and says
"Let's do the impossible!" and the military-entertainment
contractors all say "Yay!" while if you knew anything about the
physical realities of rocket science you knew it was 95% bullshit.
  

    

But I wasn't super-involved in those historic issues personally. 
No, now I'm pondering the decades of tech-industry boosterism I've
been personally close to, and how much of that has turned out be
useless, toxic, our counterproductive "bullshit."  

Not that it was merely "mistaken," or an incorrect industry
forecast, or a failed startup, obsolete business sector, failed set
of investments.  Those are unfortunate, they certainly lose money, 
ad maybe they squander time and energy, but I don't feel like they
were morally culpable.  They don't deserve a rude and directly
pejorative term like "bullshit."

It's like a bad wine harvest.  The weather didn't favor you, the
grapes had pests, you try to bottle what you got off the hillside,
people drink it, they're like, "Nope."  Okay, that situation is not
"bullshit."  Bullshit occurs when you get some grape flavoring and
some raw ethanol and CO2 gas and you bottle that and label it "DOC
Champagne."  That when you're called out in that criminal activity,
you're like, "Okay, that was never a 'lie,' that was a harmless
labeling gimmick that I had to use in order to stay in business!"
  

    
Because "bullshit" isn't mere a deception, a "lie," it's an attempt
to gaslight, to ontologically destabilize the situation so that, not
only do you successfully sell your fake wine, but you convince
people that decent wine doesn't or can't exist, or that scales of
comparison and merit are meaningless.   

And you'll find ready  allies for  your effort in ontological
destabilization too, because, seen from, say, the temperance,
prohibitionist and public health demographics, ALL alcohol is
"bullshit."  Alcohol is a major poison, alcohol kills armies of
people every day, and anybody who wakes up with a hangover should
know it.  So they'll pitch in, "You know outside your disgusting
bubble of wine-drinkers, Mr Poisoner there is quite right, it's all
the same!"

We've got tons of this happening now.  I wouldn't have thought that
ontological crisis was a major national-security threat, because it
seemed so postmodern, theoretical, abstract and haute-literary, but
probably I should have known better.  Weird, off the wall stuff that
I personally enjoy tends to mainstream sooner or later.
  

    

So, given that, what's the worst and most paralytic form of
"bullshit" where I'm really hip-deep in it, where I'm  deeply
implicated morally?  Probably it's "The Singularity."

Rapture of the Nerds, the Singularity.  A major literary hang-up for
science fiction writers of my generation.  Before us, nobody ever
heard of The Singularity. after us, everybody's gonna laugh at it. 
The Singularity as a sci-fi meme is gonna look a hundred times
sillier than Soviet Moon Colonies.   It's gonna look goofier than
jetpacks, robot butlers and flying cars.

I hasten to say that I don't blame Dr. Vernor Vinge for all this. 
Vernor is Mr Singularity, and though I always thought he was
probably wrong, I always thought it was a really useful and
interesting science-fictional literary problem.  I was grateful that
he analyzed the concept.  I've written novels where things happen
that are more-or-less Singularities.  It's really a cool and
provocative literary concept.  

It's just that, as a business model, as public policy, The
Singularity is a disastrous way to think.  It's "bullshit" in the
dark-side sense that it allows you to do all kinds of awful crap,
that you can "justify" by saying, "Donald Trump?!  I thought we'd
all be downloaded cyborg immortals by now!"  It was a way to
jettison ethical, legal, moral and civilizational implications by
pointing at an exponential graph and saying, "never mind, tomorrow's
Oz."  No, tomorrow isn't Oz.  Tomorrow's always now, if you wait
long enough.
  

    <scribbled by gberg Mon 9 Jan 17 05:41>
  

    
Might be useful here to remember the distinction between bullshit
and lies, as articulated by our foremost (and perhaps only)
philosopher of bullshit, Harry Frankfurt,as articulated in his
indispensable book, "On Bullshit." 

"Bullshit is unavoidable whenver circumstances require someone to
talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production
of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or
opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the
facts relevant to that topic."

And as for the the bullshitter, he "stands neither on the side of
the true nor on the side of the false. His eyes are not on the facts
at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except
insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away
with what he says."

So bullshit requires a kind of innocence (or amorality), meaning
that the guy who concocts the wine is a liar, while the guy who
concocts the singularity is not. What is inherently subversive about
the bullshitter is that he vacates the clause in the social contract
that says that truth matters. Give me a lying, conniving Cheney any
day over a Trump who just doesn't give a rat's ass. As for the guy
who is hip-deep in the singularity, I'm guessing that if evidence
builds up that it is not going to happen or that it makes lousy
social policy or whatever, he will acknowledge it. I mean, if he's
not just a bullshitter he will. 
  

    
Science fiction may be "fiction" as opposed to "fact," but the
ontology of science fiction inspires a mythology, a system of
beliefs now firmly embedded in the collective psyche.  How many of
us assume that time travel is possible, that the future includes
warp speed space travel, sentient machines, bad fashion, etc.? Okay,
bad fashion is a given - but those other things are dubious but
persistent ideas now widely assumed as probabilities.  "But what
about space travel, aren't we already spending time in space?" In
fact, there's evidence that humans don't handle long-term space
experience well. We may assume that innovative development of space
environments will facilitate travel to other planets in the solar
system; certainly there's a viable plan for travel to Mars. But we
can't be certain that travel outside the solar system is likely, and
warp speed travel is fantasy at this point - extremely unlikely.  

Cyberpunk science fiction at least focused on probable futures - the
focus being more local, more on computers and enhancement tech than
space travel or time travel.  Cyberpunk was so compelling that, in
the 90s, there was a cyberpunk sub-movement of people who took Case,
Gibson's drug addict cyberspace hacker, as a role model. Raves
looked like parties Michael Moorcock might've written.  To the
extent science fiction predicted computer networks, it was spot on.
That "high tech low life" meme wasn't beyond probability, or even
beyond reach.
  

    
"Give me a lying, conniving Cheney any day over a Trump who just
doesn't give a rat's ass."

If that's the choice, we're screwed.  But I suspect our politicians
and leaders were always worse than we could imagine - the difference
now being that, with the Internet and the prevalence of
surveillance/sousveillance models, you can't hide.  Interesting that
you don't necessarily have to: Clinton/Lewinsky was a scandal that
almost brought a disgraceful end to  that presidency, but Trump's
been elected despite arguable worse revelations about his actions
and character.  We're desensitized, perhaps, or somehow influenced
by the Assassin's Creed: "nothing is true, everything is permitted."

The USA as a whole could do with a crash course in ethics, and
another in civics. Unless we've decided to be the post-ethical USA.
That's a bad scene, because ethics are like glue that hold us
together. Without some commitment to ethics, however spotty, we
devolve, lose our grounding... we just fall apart.
  

    
Jerry Michalski, who describes himself as "pattern finder, lateral
thinker, Gladwellian connector, facilitator and explorer of the
interactions between technology, society and business," has been in
the process of analyzing the Trump victory and "now what?" in a
series of six videos, five of which he's completed. They're on
Youtube as a playlist:
https://youtu.be/VSf74xywf0I?list=PLreQNsM8LqWCPG-tdl37UwkBSo26X8pGc
I haven't seen any better analysis. Looking forward to the sixth
video: "What now?"
  

    <scribbled by jonl Mon 9 Jan 17 07:40>
  

    
One last quick note for the morning...

<102> Reminded me of a path I'd gone down before, realizing that
human history is a history of media.  See
https://youtu.be/kpiPv8bs1Ug (~5 minute video).

(Bruce and I once had a disagreement over my contention that
bonfires could be considered "dead media: - I think I was inspired
by
this: http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/gb06205.htm )
  

    
http://csi.asu.edu/imaginary-college/

Thinking along the lines of some of your comments above
Bruce...how's ASU's Imaginary College going? A great idea, is it
working?
  

    
Star War's is a great example of creating a modern mythology -
ontology, if you will. The power of media, memes and buzz and their
combination to go viral has a short term impact...But I wonder if
it's just this week's cyber fix and then it's on to the next....none
of this stuff seems to sink in, no one really explores it - just
exploits it....But it all sits in the background of our
consciousness, bubbling away, til someone hooks it with another
viral thread and knits and pearls more ontological  bullshit. Quite
a web we are weaving.
  

    
So, "weapons of mass distraction"...given all this bullshit and now
the advent of VR and the rush to go to other realities it seems like
one of the most fundamental areas to focus on is getting a grip on
our own realities---individually.

I can't get from Here to There if I don't really know where my Here
is. That seems to be the modern Angst. That and the pace or
'acceleration' - this week's buzz word.

How do you and Jon stay in focus? Tips and tricks, or do we all just
have to figure this out for ourselves - what works for us?
  

    
The Mundane Singularity:
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/01/where-has-and-where-will-mundane.html?utm
_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2Fadvancednan
o+%28nextbigfuture%29

Guess we are supposed to just accept a Singularity and now we can
give it adjectives. Lovely. And, this, from Next Big Future !!
  

    
38 minutes with Frank Diana and Gerd Leonhard podcast:

Our theme was reimagining the future and the topics ranged from
artificial intelligence to exponential progression. ..

Gerd's newest book, Technology vs Humanity begins with a discussion
on ethics...pertinent these days:

http://www.techvshuman.com/
  

    
*Here's Google DeepMind boasting about what their deep-learners are
up to lately, which is a lot of quirky stuff weirdly scattered all
over the conceptual map, in a standard Google fashion.

*There's no question that they can play the hell out of a game of
Go.

https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-round-up-2016/
  

    
"From Scott Karl, via email:

"Hi guys, always love this discussion to start off the year. I've
been living in Asia for seven years now (Korea for four, China for
three), and I'm constantly shocked how much western media seems to
drink the Kool-Aid about the wonders of Asia in general and China in
particular. From here, China is a complete mess that is teetering on
the brink of collapse…"

*This idea of China as a giant fake Potemkin village always
interests me hugely.  There must be something to it.  It's surely
true that China literally stinks from life-threatening pollution and
its managerial class is keen to smuggle out money and escape to some
place less dismal. Plus, the Chinese copy stuff, steal stuff, engage
in huge official frauds, cover up scandals with digital censorship,
etc etc.

*But was there ever a time when life in China wasn't scary?  The
everyday quality of life has never been great in China, and by their
own interior standards they seem to be doing remarkably well.  I've
been over to China, and just as Scott says, I've seen peculiar
infrastructural things such as towering urban overpasses shimmed up
with bits of plywood.  To American eyes, the moral effect of this
infrastructural shoddiness is, just as he says, really shocking. 
But those highways do exist.  They're not made of smoke and mirrors,
that is millions of tons of cement and steel.
  

    

*Objectively speaking, the Chinese have astronauts.  A manned space
station, next decade (probably the only one that will exist). 
They've got Tencent and Weibo.  They do megatons of the world's
basic manufacturing. They're militarily terraforming the South China
Sea in complete defiance of every other country in the world.  Does
that sound like the behavior of a paper dragon? Is it plausible to
think there's no there-there?

*Probably it's like the Italian "political crisis."  Once you're
inside Italy, you slowly realize that, though by anybody else's
standards it really is a deep and serious and chronic "crisis," by
Italian standards it's never a crisis unless they're actively
shooting each other.   The Italian cities are pre-Westphalian. They
don't really do "national government" as such a thing should get
done.  Italians have got national institutions that look like
tough-guy armor but are really more like support-hose and bustiers,
a kind of political lingerie.

*But that doesn't mean Italy doesn't exist.  Italy is a major G-7
power.  Unlike China, Italy is the kind of garden-like peninsula
where hordes of rich guys rush in to live.  
  

    
Dear Bruce and The Well Community,

First let me say, that this site seems rather archaic, which I
imagine is because it's slightly older then I am. But nonetheless I
ended up here, as a millennial, of course through a series of
youtube videos that lead to me reading the transcript from your 2010
talk on our current "atemporal" era. I found this interesting for
two reasons. One, because obviously I agree with you. And secondly
because you offered the prediction that it would only last 10 years
or so. 

As it happens, I know what comes next. The era of consilience.
Marked by the unification of our spheres of knowledge. Which starts
with metaphysics. And while that entails questions that have been
pondered for thousands of years, my suggestion is that at heart the
answer is simple, and always has been. The world really exists, and
we perceive it imperfectly. Every question contains two parts, the
aspect of reality you're questioning and the person asking the
question. The perceived ontological difficulty comes from the second
half, understanding yourself. 

I've taken the first step of exploring this further here. 

http://www.consilience.us.com/the-role-of-information-on-life-and-society/

But honestly, the reason I'm writing now is mostly because I am a
nobody. Whatever the reason is, that I can see all of this before
anyone else has, its not because I'm smarter then everyone else.
It's not because I have access to something everyone else doesn't.
One factor could be that I've never really found a extended
community that I fit in with for long. But that's especially
problematic now, because my only goal is to find people of diverse
specialties who are like-minded enough with me to understand what
I'm saying, and take it further then I can. 

One other factor is certainly having grown up with the internet. So
I guess its fitting that I'd come back here to the primordial soup
to see this through. And well, I guess I just want to hear what you
and everyone else hear thinks about all this. 

Thanks for your time.

-Matt
  

    
Is government broken? Perhaps too broad an assumption, and probably
safer to say that politics is broken and government keeps chugging
along, despite political wrangling. I rarely hear informed
perspectives about "broken government," more often ill-informed
hearsay. 

It might be safer to say that government is not always responsive,
certainly not agile, and probably in ways "rather archaic," in the
sense that <dekeita> used that description for the WELL.  How do you
improve government, and the mechanisms of governance? "Slash and
burn" is merely destructive: you need thoughtful consideration of
goals and priorities that make sense for the 21st century .
  

    
Last night I participated in a workshop session led by experiential
futurist Jake Dunagan, formerly of the Institute for the Future and
its Governance Futures Lab, and currently Director of Design Futures
at verynice design.  Jake used a methodology created to help ad hoc
groups of social inventors brainstorm new models for governance. The
methodology is included in "An Inventor's Toolkit" that you can see
at http://www.iftf.org/uploads/media/GovFuturesLab_Toolkit.pdf The
idea is that you can take this toolkit to any sort of group
anywhere, run the process, and leverage crowd creativity in
imagining solutions. As Jake and I discussed afterward, it's not
quite clear how to leverage deliverables from these diverse groups
to produce something usable, but if nothing else, it's a great way
to get people to think about the complexity of governance, and the
difficulty in finding workable solutions.  (Side note: 
bureaucracies were built for efficiency; they may seem inefficient
because they're handling so much complexity. Solutions to the
stickier issues of governance are hard to conceive and harder to
implement. )
  

    
Jake's process, after setup, has four steps: investigate, re-think,
design, and prototype. The toolkit is a set of cards that bring
structure to this brainstorming process. Jake didn't use the cards,
since we had to follow an abbreviated version of the methodology.
Rather, he guided us, starting by proposing that cities may well be
the logical seat of effective governance going forward, with less
emphasis on state and national levels of organizations. There's
precedent in city-states of the past.  Given this, he asked us to
conceptualize Austin as a seat of governance that has seceded from
Texas and the USA and operates as an independent, autonomous entity.
We created a list of values that we associate with Austin's culture,
then broke out as teams, each team selecting one of the values
(local, creativity, openness/inclusive, curiosity, prosperity,
balance, fitness/health, futuristic, and freedom).