Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    <scribbled by magdalen Thu 3 Jan 19 13:28>
  

    


Bruce posits:

> an aesthetic is how you convince other people
> that the beauty has arrived. 

Cascio notes:

 > openness,
 > bottom-up collaborative movements, democracy, networks
> have by and large been captured by the people and ideologies 
> that privilege winning in the short-term over flourishing in 
> the long-term. Frankly, those people and ideologies seem to 
> do a better job using those tools than we ever did.

Nice to hear from you, Cascio. I think it's important to recognizing that
these 'people and ideologies', the Cambridge Analyticas and Trumps, may use
and abuse all technologies created by well-intentioned, long-term,
progressive thinkers. Whatever potentially lovely, collaborative thing we
come up with next - - whether that looks like an app or a social movement
or an alternative energy source - - can and likely will be co-opted by The
Bad Guys.

Paulina Borsook, author of 'Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the
Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech' in 2000, posted about this with
appropriate crankiness above. Expecting technology to solve technology is
naive. Yet that's been our cultural and economic push for decades, hasn't
it? 

The culture that underlay the push can't be ignored. Culture speaks to
desire and aspiration. It catches us under the ribs with emotion,
tantalizes us with the potential of meaning (not to mention pretty, shiny
things and flashing lights). Many of us in this SOTW discussion have been
part of that culture, whether on the fringes like me or a well-known beacon
like Bruce. Together, we all co-created this culture. We fell for the
idealistic parts we wished would become true - - despite the dystopian
outcomes we loved in our literature, games, and films.

That culture gave many of us a dreamy, snappy vision: we were or ought to
become globe-traveling, everything-experiencing, mind-expanding explorers.
Digital technology and the Internet would unleash us from the earth, would
enable transcendence. Transcending the meat could be a big, semi-spiritual,
upload-yourself, Extropian event. Or it could be simple. The technology
would allow us to transcend our roots to the earth. We'd travel and move at
will, nomadic and brilliant.

In late 1994, I remember getting my first PowerBook (that's an old,
heavy-duty Mac laptop, in case any youngsters stumble across this
discussion). Ironically, I'd already been disabled by excessive computer
use, working on the Internet and The Well, with a virulent repetitive
stress injury. 

A friend gave me an external, 9600-baud modem the size of maybe three
iPhones stacked on top of each other. With this setup, I realized, I could
be free. Paying rent was stupid. (I had a giant space in an illegal
music-live-arts-party warehouse in Oakland, less than ten minutes' drive to
the Mission District in SF… for $225 a month.)  

So I took my laptop, put my books in storage, and hit the road. I was poor
and half-disabled, sporting a ratty blue mohawk, mostly riding buses and
trains. I was no business-class jet setter and I felt too female to
hitchhike America as my Beat heroes had done. It still felt like I was
getting away with something splendid. 

Fast-forward seven or eight years. By then I'd done some actual business
class jet-setting and a whole lot of strategic and creative work on what we
still called "the Web." Now if I could travel *without* taking a laptop
with me? *That* felt like getting away with something splendid. *Then* I
felt free.

What technology allowed me to transcend were the piffling, trifling matters
one might associate with boring hausfraus: a consistent home, with the
commitments that implies. A real-life community I must interact with every
day, for socializing, political organizing, or even to get my basic needs
met. With technology, I could transcend my problematic, partially disabled
body. I could transcend nature. Family. Hearth. Kitchen. Home. 

It turned out I was actually transcending *life*. Life on this green,
imperfect planet. Life in all its messy, domestic, deep, emotional glory. 

Bruce proposes that we need a new aesthetic. I agree, ish. Aesthetics
emerge from and evolve together with cultures large and small. What we used
to consider The Future in all its cyberpunk glory had some freakin' fun and
fantastic aesthetics. No wonder we all signed up. Now that we're old and
cranky and scared, now that we see how this culture contributed to the
giant flaming hot mess that is society today. . .  this time, do we
recognize the potential repercussions of the aesthetics we create? Do we
curate and tread more carefully? Try to clue the Millennials in to what a
steaming pile of Big Data-driven shit we've handed them so they can improve
conditions for the next crew on deck?

Or are such concerns silly? Things evolve as they evolve. The street has
its own uses for things. The Bad Guys always find a way to appropriate the
new. 
  

    


me again, with some other voices to share:

When Jon asked me to join this discussion a few days back, I wanted to
bring more than my own voice. I asked a few friends: What issue, invention,
or node of general excitement do you see blossoming in the world right now?
Or destroying it? What matters, globally?

The top three answers were: dismantling oppression, creativity, and
cooperation. One friend in the UK, who's living and working closely with
artists who are women of color and/or immigrants, noted dismantling
oppression means abandoning our own need for perfection, together with our
urge to put a feather in our caps with every positive or charitable act we
make. Social media, it seems to me, makes that last bit kinda hard!

I also asked, "What is tugging most strongly at your own private *heart*
right now?" 

I heard isolation, despair, and disconnection. I heard spirit, hope,
action, and optimism. Susan Prince responded, "How can I put aside my
limited views, based upon 71 years of stories, and see beyond the immediate
'reality' of this life? How can I be available to function beneath/beyond
the artifice?" 

Josh Berger, creative director and co-founder of Plazm (and husband o' me),
began his answer with the word "light." That plays nicely with "puddle of
candlelight" and New Dark we're talking about here. He wrote:   "light. it
is darkest before the dawn. i feel optimistic in spite of the many dark
things happening, optimistic that we are at the beginning of a new era."
  

    

>48

Good call outs. There have been myriad precursors. It just depends
on which of Snow’s two cultures you’ve been hanging out in over the
decades. (Hanging out in both yields some interesting insights if
you can keep your head from exploding.)

To name just a few off the top:

Dark Mountain
Morris Berman (“The Twilight of American Culture”
Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”)
Carolyn Baker (for the prepper set)
Daniel Pinchbeck (for the new age set)
Daniel Quinn
Postmodernists who could connect the dots
Joanna Macy (Buddhist and deep ecology focus)

However, somehow I don’t think Mr. Gates or his followers were
reading much of this material.
  

    

(Sorry, I know you already cited Dark Mountain)
  

    
Discussions of the small school movement:

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/02/17/22marshak.h29.html

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_schools_movement

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-gates-education-20160601-snap
-story.html

I don't think it was a totally bad idea, it's just that in education
nothing is simple.
  

    
my point goes further: it's not just that i dont feel you can use
technology to solve technology's problems: it's that i dont think
technology makes ppl better and kinder, solves the fundamental
tricky dual-nature of humanity (good? evil? discuss).

one thing i thot assange got right vs the original cyperpunks (RIP,
tim may) is he seemed initially to have gotten that transnational
capitalism is just as much a threat as Big Bdg dGovernment.

but whatever. i have never made a living talking about the future,
particularly one where we will all have our own private gyrocopters.


'technology as if people mattered?' nice idea in theory…
  

    
Our kids went to a small school inside Berkeley High.  They studied
media and social justice, taking on projects instead of AP classes. 
Rick Ayers and a few others put it together.  <busy>s son was also
in the school.  

Instead of an academic contest for a GPA and SAT score, they learned
together about the society they were coming of age in.  They met
people they’d never meet in a track system.

When our second oldest got to UC Santa Cruz, she met grammar school
classmates.  I asked if they hung around together.  She said no,
because after all those regimented years, they were ready to party
in college.  The kids from Berkeley had gotten that out of their
systems in high school, she said, so were more focused on their
studies.

It was not simple, but it was more engaging and relevant than the AP
classes that get that GPA up.  
  

    
Via email from Kevin Welch:

Greetings, SOTW participants. Kevin Welch here, lurker for several
years, first time posting. For those who don't know me, I'm a
lifelong Austin denizen and friend and collaborator with a number of
the participants in this discussion. In particular, I was turned on
to these conversations several years ago by jonl, and I consider it
a ritual I now start my year off with to read the musings posted in
these threads. I truly believe there is no more insightful place to
get a handle on the Nowpunk of our moment. My primary
non-pay-the-bills interests these days involve laboring in the salt
mines of digital civil liberties activism, a movement that
continually frustrates me in the net's ever-lurching insistence in
moving towards dystopia, and a movement that equally inspires me in
terms of the amazing people I meet who truly still believe that we
all can build a better world. Candles in the dark indeed.

I think it is no coincidence that myself and many of the
participants in this discussion have connections to Austin. Lifelong
Austinites like myself love to complain about the many changes that
neoliberal, depersonalized, venture-capital-fueled cosmopolitanism
have wrought on our town, but despite these global headwinds there
is a human energy to this place that is hard to stamp out, no matter
how many cookie-cutter condos the investor class manages to stamp
out. I sometimes joke that Austin must be sitting on leylines, there
is a continual excitation of the noosphere that seems to suck happy
mutants into a vortex centered on this former national capital,
still state capital of a city on a river in the forested hills.
Since the early days of the German revolutions of '48 refugees
settling here, Austin has continually embraced its status as a
candle burning bright amid the dark, endless prairies of Texas at
large.

I think this theme of the New Dark is really nailing our current
zeitgeist. Our technological chickens have come home to roost,
connecting the world connected the bad people as well as the good
people, our utopias couldn't survive outside laboratory conditions.
I think of Ursula K. Le Guin's quoting a mis-translation of Chuang
Tzu in The Lathe Of Heaven: "To let understanding stop at what
cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it
will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven." I feel that this book
(and the excellent 1980 PBS version of it) possibly capture this
feeling of New Dark better than any other. In that book is a world
ravaged by a climate out-of-whack, no nuclear wasteland but no
rapture of the nerds either. Every attempt to control the world, to
solve its problems, like some perverse genie granting ironic wishes,
only makes the situation worse. Every solution creates another
problem. Modernism has failed. The book's solution is positively
Discordian in its idea of embracing the chaos of the world, of a
human mind, of accepting the limits of understanding and control. A
Bodhisattva doesn't light a candle in the dark because they believe
that the light can destroy the dark, the dark has always existed and
always will exist. All the brilliant souls I am privileged to call
my friends in this life agree that the global state of things indeed
feels like a center that soon won't hold any longer, but I look at
their passion for their own small projects that they hope will make
their little corner of the world just a little brighter in the
gloom, and well, I can't help but find myself with nothing but hope
and optimism for the future. The Westphalian order may fall, but
millions of little candles all showing each other the way through
the New Old Dark, well, that might just be a future I would like to
live in.
  

    <scribbled by stml Fri 4 Jan 19 01:06>
  

    
I want to quote from my book, sorry, but since you're all
referencing the New Dark, I want to make this point clearly:

"We have been conditioned to think of the darkness as a place of
danger, even of death. But the darkness can also be a place of
freedom and possibility, a place of equality. For many, what is
discussed here will be obvious, because they have always lived in
this darkness that seems so threatening to the privileged. We have
much to learn about unknowing."

I'm going to keep insisting that this metaphor of bringing light is
not helpful, not least because it's been historically disastrous for
a huge section of the global population as well as the planet
itself, but also because it is fundamentally misconceived. It points
towards dominance and mastery as the only effective form of agency,
instead of engagement, cooperation, thoughtfulness, care, listening,
and attention.

If it's getting dark in here, it's because the whale oil lamp of
entrenched power structures is guttering, and the networks of
computational knowledge are browning out. The response should not be
to set everything that remains on fire, but to let ones' eyes adjust
- and listen to those who've been outside.
  

    
Boy, we have got some mental firepower happening in the discussion
this year.   Wow! I’m tempted to knock it back for a few days to
just eat popcorn and take  notes.

Actually, I’m gonna try to grind up some kind of text on the need
for new aesthetics, and what they oughta look like, while I know
that James Bridle is watching.  It’ll take me a while.
  

    
So yeah, I’ll just peaceably watch with folded hands here….  
However. 

I always knew, that when I got older, I’d see my contemporaries
whine about how great things were when they were young and had
libidos.  I’m kinda immunized to that, though, because this
attitude:  “Boy, things were so groovy back then, you wouldn’t
believe how they ruined everything” is a super Austin, Texas
attitude.  It isn’t even a Cosmic Cowboy baby-boomer thing —
Austinites have been full of annoying, nostalgic Weltschmerz since
at least the 1930s.   Maybe even the 1830s.  When it’s all around
every day, you get to understand how sickening it is.

So you know, I have to scold that.  Even when things truly *are*
objectively worse in many ways, it’s just so corny!   “We had it
great when I was young, but the Bad Guys took it and that’s why we
can’t have nice things” — when was that ever not so?  Has any
generation, ever, failed to blather that stale sentiment at people? 


You’re eliding your own participation in history!  “Only the young
die good!”  You’re not stuck in a bad traffic jam with your good
dune-buggy, your dune-buggy is always a part of the traffic!

It’s like watching Scarlett O’Hara say “fiddle-de-dee” while
Atlanta’s on fire.  
  

    
*Massive political leak/hack apparently transpiring in Germany at
the moment.

Julian Röpcke
‏
Verified account
 
@JulianRoepcke


The leaked data, which was illegally collected until October 2018
and released December 2018, but just found now, is still publicly
available.

I searched through it 5 hours last night, read maybe 3%of it  and
already found cases of corruption and bad political scandals.
#BTleaks

The scale of the attack is unprecedented
Mobile phone numbers, addresses, private family conversations,
vacation pictures, bills, communications between politicians, work
emails etc. were leaked

In most cases, Outlook was hacked, in some cases also Facebook,
Twitter etc.
#BTleaks

#BREAKING
Germany faces the biggest hacker attack in its history.
Private data of almost 1000 German #Bundestag, #Regional Parliament
& #EU delegates was leaked.

I worked through the leaked data all night. It's shocking!
Not affected so far: #AfD.

https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/politik-inland/hacker-angriff-daten-von-pol
itikern-gestohlen-und-veroeffentlicht-59349480.bild.html …
#BTleaks


*Also includes some German artists, which is sort of amazing.

Also hacked were around 40 German public TV journalists and 10
artists, most of them known for their left-leaning political stance.
Also from the artists, comedians, moderators etc partially very
private data was leaked, in some cases nonetheless only mobile
number.
#BTleaks
  

    
I dunno, I kinda liked it better when you could drive 90 mph on the
L.A. freeways in what was then called "the fast lane."

I think there's a middle point between blind nostalgia and
recognizing that things can get objectively worse and thinking about
why, what that means, and what might be done about it.  I'm afraid
we'll have to wait for the coming human population crash to sort out
traffic in L.A.
  

    

Extraordinary post in 59. Thanks Kevin.
  

    
Indeed. It's worth repeating Kevin's conclusion following James'
post ("the darkness can also be a place of freedom and possibility,
a place of equality"):

"A Bodhisattva doesn't light a candle in the dark because they
believe
that the light can destroy the dark, the dark has always existed and
always will exist. All the brilliant souls I am privileged to call
my friends in this life agree that the global state of things indeed
feels like a center that soon won't hold any longer, but I look at
their passion for their own small projects that they hope will make
their little corner of the world just a little brighter in the
gloom, and well, I can't help but find myself with nothing but hope
and optimism for the future. The Westphalian order may fall, but
millions of little candles all showing each other the way through
the New Old Dark, well, that might just be a future I would like to
live in."
  

    
While it's tempting to assume the worst, I see plenty of reminders
that the (human) world is actually getting better by some measures,
e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/good-news-at-last-
the-world-isnt-as-horrific-as-you-think

"... while it is easy to be aware of all the bad things happening in
the world, it’s harder to know about the good things. The silent
miracle of human progress is too slow and too fragmented to ever
qualify as news. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of people
living in extreme poverty has almost halved. But in online polls, in
most countries, fewer than 10% of people knew this.... Our instinct
to notice the bad more than the good is related to three things: the
misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and
activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad, it’s
heartless to say they are getting better."
  

    

Great point Jon. There are a slew of positive developments taking
place globally in little pockets and corners that never see the
light of day in the mainstream media. Scotland's massive use of
windpower is just one example and Qatar's desalinization experiment.
You have to do some hunting and gathering so to speak. Steven
Pinker's latest book is a good source of specific data points along
these lines, however flawed the overly sanguine macro-level
perspective. It seems we can only chip away...developing any kind of
accurate perspective given the snowballing degree of change may not
even be possible.
  

    
I've been involved in experimental and speculative projects,
sometimes cutting edge stuff, over the years, projects like
FringeWare, EFF-Austin, Plutopia, Worldchanging, SXSW - and the work
I did with Bruce on his Viridian Design project. I've done a lot of
writing and blogging about technology, culture, and media. I've
worked with the WELL here in various ways, including this annual
State of the World conversation. More recently I relaunched the
Plutopia News Network with the great producer (et al) Scoop Sweeney
and our highly creative colleague Maggie Duval.

Great projects, all, but aside from some of the writing I've done
professionally, they haven't paid a cent. Since the 1990s, I've put
whole-grain bread on table by working on various Internet projects,
including a large ongoing e-commerce attempt by Whole Foods Market
around the last turn of the century. That work with Whole Foods made
me a web developer as web development was just emerging as a
discipline, and that's how I've supported myself since then. 

I cofounded Polycot Consulting, where we used open source tools and
agile methodologies vs the bloated top-down approaches I had worked
with in the corporate world. My Polycot Consulting partners took a
different direction, so I continued working as a web developer,
renamed Polycot Associates, after a failed attempt to get into
consulting based on my work with social networks and what was
eventually called "social media."  It didn't make sense for me to
borrow a lot of money, get a building, and hire developers to work
with me. (I was a project manager, not a developer or a designer).

Instead I found projects, brought in contractors, and managed their
work. While we no longer had an office, others were doing similar
virtual work, and coworking was becoming a thing.  And there were
plenty of web contractors available - the Internet had "died" with
the dotcom bust of 2000, and was only slowly reviving. 

Getting to the point: I eventually had a group of developers I
wanted to work with persistently, and we were in conversation about
how to work together.  One of those, Benjamin Bradley, was not just
a brilliant developer but also forward-looking, focused on potential
new economies, and new ways to organize for work. Benjamin suggested
that we form a worker-owned cooperative vs. a typical company or
partnership. We caught fire with the idea, and hired a local
consultant who was working with the national Democracy at Work
Institute.  We found that our transition to co-operative
organization was happening in the context of a co-operative movement
forming.  We found that there were several other worker co-ops in
Austin, and we later learned about a new form called platform
co-operativism (which fed into another project we've been working
on, which I could discuss later).

As we got into co-operative thinking I had a thought: how can any
country hope to work as a democracy if its businesses are formed and
run as oligarchies? 

I had paid a lot of lip service to various ideas about changing the
world for the better, but in the co-operative movement I found a
practical way to do just that, in my day to day income-producing
work.  We've been very successful with our co-op so far - partly
owing to our skill and experience, but also owing to our deeply
collaborative spirit and our ability to find consensus in the
collaborative governance of our business.
  

    

Here's a little more on Pinker from an informative article in "The
Nation":

"Pinker devotes two-thirds of Enlightenment Now to surveying the
stupendous advancements that the human race has made in modern times
according to a dizzying range of metrics: life expectancy, hate
crimes, famine deaths, leisure time, nuclear proliferation,
pollution, democracy, human rights, “liberal values,” literacy,
levels of extreme poverty, “life satisfaction,” and much, much more.
He previewed some of this material in The Better Angels of Our
Nature (2011), in which he argued that the world has seen a decline
in violence and war, but now he’s attempting to generalize about
virtually all of modern existence, complete with more than six dozen
charts to visualize his flood of data. “The Enlightenment has
worked—perhaps the greatest story seldom told,” Pinker proclaims. We
still face many challenges, he continues, but if we trust scientific
experts, we can overcome them.

To be fair, Pinker is right that much good news today tends to be
underreported, even unreported. Most Americans probably don’t
realize that rates of extreme poverty worldwide have fallen over the
past few decades, along with the worldwide rates of battle deaths
and deaths from infectious disease. Pinker is also right that many
prominent observers in the past grossly underestimated the ability
of the human race to extract more resources from the environment and
grossly overestimated the odds of imminent apocalypse. He quotes, to
comic effect, a long string of mid-20th-century Cassandras who
confidently predicted that civilization would come to an end long
before now thanks to nuclear war, overpopulation, or environmental
catastrophe. (Of course, one could also point to a long string of
intellectuals, from the Enlightenment onward, who predicted the
imminent arrival of paradise upon earth—but no matter.) And he is
right that even if some of the predicted disasters do come to pass,
humanity will probably not be reduced to fighting for survival in a
Mad Max–style dystopia. “Even Hiroshima continues to exist,” he
points out, though the statement is not quite as comforting as he
seems to think.

If Pinker had simply made these points, Enlightenment Now would have
its uses. But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of
exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than
good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all
else fails, a contempt for “intellectuals” straight out of
Breitbart. Pinker might not have intended the book to do so, but it
will bolster the claims of populist politicians against
intellectuals and movements for social justice while justifying
misguided, coldhearted policy choices in the name of supposedly
irrefutable scientific rationality.

Let’s start with the exaggerations. For all of Pinker’s apparently
exhaustive command of statistics, the situation of humanity is
hardly as rosy as he claims. The number of refugees worldwide, for
instance, has climbed vertiginously over the past few decades, and
is now approaching levels not seen since World War II. Pinker
dismisses concerns about rising economic inequality with the blithe
assertion that inequality matters less than actual levels of income
and comfort. He barely raises the question of what it might mean for
a society to have the lion’s share of its economic resources and
power concentrated in a tiny number of super-wealthy hands. He
acknowledges only in passing that real wages in the United States
and many other economically advanced countries have stagnated for
several decades, and he has even less to say about the increasing
precariousness of employment for millions of workers."

https://www.thenation.com/article/waiting-for-steven-pinkers-enlightenment/
  

    
re: Austin/ Weltschmerz / Wyrdness

One of the 10,000 concepts I've internalized from Jim Dator (via
Gabriel Fackre in this case) is "aiglatson." Nostalgia spelled
backward, and signaling a yearning not for things lost, but for
things yet to come. Five years of living in Austin, and besides the
cedar fever, I'm still in the honeymoon phase of this relationship. 

One of the aiglatson-infused seeds I'm trying to plant here in
Austin is the idea that weirdness comes from wyrd--seeing signs and
portents of things to come. I started the by fabricating a 150 year
backstory for the Club of Wyrd/ Office of the Weird:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGEzmrYsJfg


If we are going to be true to our slogan and "keep Austin weird," we
have to keep our eye on the future(s). 

Keep your ears on for Club of Wyrd meetings in Austin, and
elsewhere. No Weltschmerz allowed. 
  

    
"Things are getting better and better, and worse and worse, faster
and faster"--Tom Atlee
  

    
This is an exceptional SOTW conversation this year, thank you to
each contributing.

I particularly appreciate James's reminder of the indispensability
and importance of darkness. In traditional cultures and in our own,
the dark hours are when the stories of multiple meaning are told.
The stories that tell us who we are, who we can be, what it's useful
to be afraid of, what it's possible to hope for-- all the stuff of
the human psyche. Pinker's overly optimistic view is a story. The
futurists' most dire predictions are stories. We think, feel, and
make decisions on the basis of narratives as much as by logic and
that elusive and needed thing, reason. ("The heart has its reasons
of which the reason knows nothing" puts reason in its more true
perspective--what we think is reason shifts, to serve the more
hidden stories behind it, to give us what Robert Burton has
described as "the feeling of certainty.")

I don't mean the above in some postmodern dismantling way. Only to
say that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others
are not fixed. And they matter, they are crucial, and they are told
in the dark hours when mysterious changes take root. I have found
among the most dismaying things of the shift in American discourse
that so many have taken up the stories of paranoia, of othering, of
fear. Such stories separate, build forts in the heart and weaponize
us against one another. They are not untrue--there is much worth
fearing afoot in the world, and I among those who have almost no
hope for our ability to leave our grandchildren a habitable ecos.
But how the story is framed at the largest level--who and what we
mean when we say "we"-- is not a passive observation. It is the
engine of culture.

The story of business as cooperative Jon tells. The stories on the
goodanthopocenes website James pointed to. They lighten, by some
number of perceptible molecules, my despair. 
  

    
And your words lighten mine, thank you.