Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Speaking of women's progress, Amber Tamblyn has an op-ed in the New
York Times about how women will presence themselves at today's
Golden Globes red carpet:

"... hundreds of women from the Time’s Up movement will reject
colorful gowns for black ones on the Golden Globes’ red carpet and
at related events across the country. Wearing black is not all we
will be doing. We will be doing away with the old spoken codes in
favor of communicating boldly and directly: What we are wearing is
not a statement of fashion. It is a statement of action. It is a
direct message of resistance. Black because we are powerful when we
stand together with all women across industry lines. Black because
we’re starting over, resetting the standard. Black because we’re
done being silenced and we’re done with the silencers. Tonight is
not a mourning. Tonight is an awakening."
  

    
i am irked by this entire mishegas. SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ASSAULT ARE BAD. 
TURNING A BLIND EYE TO THEM IS BAD. but DAMMIT, award shows are in the 
business of ENTERTAINING ME PERSONALLY and if you all are wearing BLACK it 
is NOT FUN FOR ME WHAT ABOUT MY NEEDS DAMMIT. give me a moment of escape 
in this endlessly bleak time! ONE TINY JOT OF JOY! i will not think less 
of you if you wear pretty colors. with, you know, a PIN telling me the 
patriarchy sucks, which, hey, i agree, yay us. 
  

    
Such is the state of the world!
  

    

so, maybe a futurist question - it's an oldie but a goodie:
are men necessary?

(I mean, i love 'em myself, but not as much as air and water)
  

    
'kinfolks for nerds'

https://spectacle.com/

i find this wildly depressing.
  

    
Bruce, at SXSW last year, you knocked out a bout 10 possible futures
that have not happened yet....would you have any more additions or
amendments to those futures?
  

    
to jog your memory:

a universal academy, where people devote themselves to learning.
militarization: people serve and receive basic support, which
pleases the right wing.
refugee status, where authorities supply clothing, food, shelter
(“universal basic everything”).
a religious settlement, like living as monks or under sharia
expanded retirement.  “Everyone retires at 40… everyone learns to
mimic the elderly.”
extermination, either First Nations or WWII style.
“health care uber alles”, a combination of hospitals and spas,
focused on preserving and growing wellness.  Transhumanism and life
extension come in here.
intentional rural communes, protected from the rest of society.
urban bohemians.  Getting paid to keep cities weird.
“Enlightenment” in the Buddhist sense, where people seek religious
truth in “a permanent Burning Man”, “a state of general liberation
from desire.”
a combination of religion and army, “all jihad all the time”.
  

    

*Here's the German foreign minister talking about how Europe can't
trust Brexitania or Trumpistan, so they've gotta figure out some way
to soft-power project themselves as the current Leaders of the Free
World.

*American and British diplomats used to talk like this, but now
they're either getting fired, resigning, or raving like lunatics in
rightist social media.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/sigmar-gabriel-we-are-seeing-what-
happens-when-the-u-s-pulls-back-a-1186181.html


DER SPIEGEL: This political toughness is something Germany still
hasn't learned.

Gabriel: In the past, we could rely on the French, the British and,
especially, the Americans, to assert our interests in the world. We
have always criticized the U.S. for being the global police, and it
was often appropriate to do so. But we are now seeing what happens
when the U.S. pulls back. There is no such thing as a vacuum in
international politics. If the U.S. leaves the room, other powers
immediately walk in. In Syria, it's Russia and Iran. In trade
policy, it's China. These examples show that, ultimately, we are no
longer achieving either -- neither the dissemination of our European
values nor the advancement of our interests.

DER SPIEGEL: Are you actually certain that the U.S. still feels
bound to NATO's collective defense principles as outlined in Article
5 of the alliance treaty?

Gabriel: We are pleased that Donald Trump and the U.S. have affirmed
Article 5, but we should not test that trust too much. At the same
time, Europe could not defend itself without the U.S., even if
European structures were strengthened.

DER SPIEGEL: How do you view Germany's role in the world today?

Gabriel: We are a place many dream about today in the way the U.S.
was a place all those looking for freedom, prosperity and democracy
dreamed about from the 18th to the 20th century....
  

    
*If you're into Universal Basic Income, here's a guy who used to be
Ray Kurzweil fan, and got over the Singularity gospel, and is now
way into the UBI gospel.  I don't believe what he says, but this fit
of his interests me a lot.  It's like looking outside the window at
the tech-development weather and seeing that the barometer froze.

*There must be some Trump Make-American-Singularitarian guys around,
but I haven't gone looking.  I'm not sure I've got enough spare time
to parse a set of notions that is that confused.

https://medium.com/@Mark4UBI/america-s-reality-check-709a52eab0f3
  

    
*Speaking of strange but inevitable-seeming mixes of ideology, I'm
wondering why there is still no "FemmeCoin" of feminist safe-space
crypto coinage that's just for women.  

*You can come up with a million just-so stories to explain why not,
but if it happened next week, everybody would just go, "Well, that
was only to be expected."
  

    
*I'm glad to hear, by the way, of Patrick Lichty being kept busy in
Dubai.  Also Astana.

*I've been to Astana.  The new capital of Kazakhstan probably the
strangest city that I've ever seen.  I wouldn't rank it with Dubai
as an axis of future change, because they're an oasis way out in the
steppes instead of being an easy entrepôt for millions like Dubai
is.  

But there's something haunting about Astana.  It's not just some
neat-o planned capital like Brasilia, because it's out there in the
middle of a vast Eurasian steppe.  There's an epistemological
violence to it, like a Saint Petersburg, which also appeared through
one leader's act of will.

*I was kind of sorry to leave Astana, actually.  For some reason,
even though I wasn't doing all that much in my brief visit, I felt
like I had unfinished business there.  It was like some strange
Astana adventure story had started and it broke off on page two.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/albums/72157628317216837
  

    
*Here's the head of Google Cloud explaining that we can get rid of
all kinds of terrible baked-in security and energy problems if we
just run everything on Google Cloud.  They'll haul in some
newfangled AI, kinda crack the old security conundrums one by one,
stepwise, and we'll have a new computational ecosystem that's
progressive, cleaner, safer, more advanced and works great.

*He makes a pretty good case for himself, too, if you don't mind the
obvious, glaring problem that it's Google that runs everything.


https://cloud.withgoogle.com/build/infrastructure/then-now-google-history-urs-
hölzle/

Hölzle: You know, nobody can predict what's gonna happen really five
years from now. Like, we couldn't do it in 2007, so, you know, don't
think we can do it today, but a few things are clear. Machine
learning is really for the first time really working. It's been
around for 25 years, but now it's really working for many problems,
not all, and it's starting to be accessible, right? And I'm
confident that just two years from now it's gonna be much more
accessible than it is today, and two years afterwards, it's even
more accessible, so really it becomes something that everyday people
can use. Very few customers will actually administer applications,
even complicated applications, in a detailed way, the way you're
forced to today because many of these things will just be automated.
The Cloud cannot be only a good economic choice, right? It really
has to be a good operational choice, a good functionality choice. It
has to accelerate your innovation, right? And it has to be the
easiest way to do great security, great compliance, really great —
all of the things that you care about in IT. It is a huge distance
that you cover, but you don't cover it in a huge step. You're gonna
cover it in a sequence of steps, each of which is much less scary
and actually very doable. 

Through the combination of these things, I think there is really a
huge opportunity to improve security for almost every company. Like,
it's a huge problem today both economic and actually technical, and
we're not in a good state almost anywhere, and now all the things
are coming together, and I think it is in our grasp collectively as
an industry to really make a huge step as a sequence of smalls steps
but get to a point where the transition in IT both in terms of what
can you do, how easy is it to do it, how cheaply is it to run it.
has sort of a similar step as it had for consumers to an Android or
an iPhone. This is a really huge step that is possible.

For example, just by moving those workloads to Cloud, if 50 percent
of the world's IT goes to Cloud, we're gonna save countless
gigawatts of energy just because the efficiency of the Cloud....
  

    
> Machine learning is really for the first time really working.

For those who might want to see some successful use cases, I found
this:
https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/1303/1204
  

    
>but DAMMIT, award shows are in the business of ENTERTAINING ME
PERSONALLY and if you all are wearing BLACK it is NOT FUN FOR ME
WHAT ABOUT MY NEEDS DAMMIT. give me a moment of escape in this
endlessly bleak time! ONE TINY JOT OF JOY!

Heh! I suspect that is tongue in cheek, but it brings up an
interesting thought for me.  I found the show riveting, and the sea
of black unexpectedly and extraordinarily inspiring.  Then Oprah's
acceptance speech sealed it as the first important cultural moment
of the new year - at least of my new year.

Which brings me to the SOTW connection: we started here, oh so many
years ago with the Viridian Design Movement.  A new flavor of
"green" - drawing forward environmental change with honey not
vinegar, making saving the planet exciting and desirable through a
deft design-art-culture move/movement.

A few years later, we were talking about how, hey, that sure didn't
work. Design challenges need expiration dates, outlived its sell-by
date, etc, etc.

Well, Veridian Green may not have worked, but yesterday I witnessed
Time's Up Black.  Interesting.
  

    
Maria Popova on "the epidemic of identity politics turning us on
each other and on ourselves":
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/01/john-o-donohue-walking-on-the-pasture
s-of-wonder/

"Paradoxically, in our golden age of identity politics and
trigger-ready outrage, this repression of our inner wildness and
fracturing of our wholeness has taken on an inverted form, inclining
toward a parody of itself. Where Walt Whitman once invited us to
celebrate the glorious multitudes we each contain and to welcome the
wonder that comes from discovering one another’s multitudes afresh,
we now cling to our identity-fragments, using them as badges and
badgering artillery in confronting the templated identity-fragments
of others.... Because no composite of fragments can contain, much
less represent, all possible fragments, we end up drifting further
and further from one another’s wholeness, abrading all sense of
shared aspiration toward unbiased understanding."
  

    
<inkwell.vue.503.89>: I would argue that Viridian Green did work,
spectacularly, in surfacing the issue of global warming especially
within futurist and design communities, and that it had an effect of
mainstreaming the conversation beyond the environmental movement and
into the larger public conversation. That's quite a lot to
accomplish when confronting a wicked problem.
  

    
Via email from Stefan Jones:

I want to simultaneously write:

Sheesh, it has been a year already?

and

Cripes, that was one long year.

2017 more or less began with me going on my first political protest
since 1967 or so (most of that one was in a stroller),  and more or
less ended with getting hit by a car (not badly,) with my career
ending (just a year or so earlier than I hoped) in between. I've
given up on thinking about the future more than tactically. I'm
currently feeling mildly optimistic; I'm pinning my hopes that
something like  Enantiodromia will result in progressives getting
their asses in gear and at least put a check on Trump. Doing my bit
volunteering for a local political party, helping with press
releases and social media and such. Quite a change from software
testing.

I'm not sure what to think of learning algorithms and such. On one
hand, my career started amidst early-90s WIRED gushiness and
witnessed the Dot Com era bust and a financial smackdown; I am thus
a bit skeptical of pronouncements about Game Changers. OTOH, maybe
this time the gushiness is validated and the damn things will be
used to cement the hegemony of greedheads and assholes.
  

    
I share the hope that Urs expresses that cloud computing will make
it easy to do the right things to implement more secure computing.
Whether anyone has implement that yet is another question. This will
require a lot of good user-facing design as well as the high-tech
stuff he talks about. Neither Google nor Amazon has demonstrated yet
that they're on the right track to achieve this.
  

    
am amused that i received a '404' error message with #87. what could
go wrong?
  

    
Try this:
https://cloud.withgoogle.com/build/infrastructure/then-now-google-history-urs-
h%C3%B6lzle/
  

    
Thanks for bringing in Maria Popova's piece, jon. I was deeply
heartened to see her addressing this question of current identity
politics on the first day of a new year. There are technological
revolutions, and there are re-framings of our human conceptions of
individual thread and social fabric, and whether it's noticed or
not, these are not separate realms of change. Not-noticing is not
erasure.
I've been known at times to mutter: "Architecture is fate." We live
in a built environment of structures, ideas, symbolically mediated
exchanges of value (bitcoin, paper money, Wall Street valuations).
But it is human longings, whether for power or connection or safety
or [x,y,z] that thus far are still building these structures. And
the  whole history of them makes the shiny new city as much as it
shapes Rome, Damascus, Xian, and London.    
  

    
> "Architecture is fate."

That statement spurs me to mention an unusual bright spot.  In a
former life, I did town architectural history surveys, a job that
required me to look carefully at 10s of thousands of buildings -
this was back in the 1980s.  

It quickly became obvious to me that once you filtered out the
relatively tiny number of serious architect-designed buildings, most
houses build in the US built since 1930 or so ranged from banal to
hideous.  And this was not true of buildings built before 1930. 
WTF?

After I moved on from that job, things got even worse as we entered
the mini-mansion era.

Now suddenly we're building some very nice houses in the US again,
mostly revivals of c. 1880-1925 styles.  What this means about the
zeitgeist, I don't know, but if architecture mirrors the spirit of
the culture, maybe it's hopeful.
  

    
Nice observation, that. I hadn't really tracked that new non-cookie
cutter buildings are getting better. (I certainly was awestruck by
the sheer inventiveness of the big buildings on the new side of the
river in Shanghai...   an architects' wild playground, it looked;
but that's different from what I think you're talking about here.)
The period you mention ranges from Victorian to Frank Lloyd Wright,
so more than one useful model. 

I remain grateful every time I see an old WPA construction. Increase
of beauty as well as utility was part of the presumption.

I've long wondered about the relationship of the Maker culture to
William Morris et al.  While it can sometimes feel the dominant
ethos is bread & circus passivity and screen-hypnosis,
post-industrial aridity is also awakening, in at least some, old
thirsts for a world in which some human hand and thought and feeling
are evident. 


(for anyone who didn't look at the Maria Popova piece mentioned
above, by the way, it argues for a wider and Whitmanesque, not
narrowly fragmented, possibility of identity.)
  

    
The show of Walker Evans's work we saw a few weeks ago reminded me
that he worked on a project that reviewed and recorded some aspects
of the history of the architecture of American homes.
  

    
*Here's an add-on to Christopher Brown's anecdote about visiting a
small Mexican town that has two names for two different tracks of
history.

*Instead of getting all atemporal by mixing and matching the time
they're in, they're switching the government on and off.  They're so
harassed by narcocultura that they've hired militia and built a
walled community to guard the avocados.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/world/americas/mexico-state-corruption.html


*Sure puts a twist on the old hipster avocado toast.  Now you can
have blood-money avocados with legal marijuana.  Legal except for
Jeff Sessions, that is.