Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Keeping the notions of animal and machine largely separate has been
a highly successful strategy for thousands of years. So perhaps it's
not surprising that we struggle to see any aspects of sameness between
then.

But gradual advances in machine learning (which is rooted in our early
understandings of animal neurodynamics) tend to force us to confront
the hard distinctions we have historically made between animal and
machine.

The image of Bruce studying AlphaZero's game play in search of aesthetic
principles brings to mind Ramachandran and the notion of Neuroesthetics:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroesthetics>
  

    
It seems particularly striking that just at the moment we're
creating "real" artificial intelligences (however narrow the
definition of intelligence they assert), and in particular as these
forms of AI reveal themselves to be essentially unknowable to us
(the inscrutability of deep learning) - it's just at this moment
that science and society seems to be tentatively considering
acknowledging the real intelligence of other life. 

The last few years have seen legal personhood granted to apes and
proposed for elephants - based not on inherent rights or dignity but
on 'cognitive complexity' - bestsellers on cephalopod intelligence,
and an increased awareness of the "secret lives" of trees, gut
flora, and so on.

We spent a good chunk of the 20th century reconfiguring our
understanding of ourselves and the natural world in terms of
cybernetic information processing systems: suddenly the brain was a
computer and everything was feedback loops and complex networks. It
must be expected that a true reckoning with the nature of
intelligence - once we've got it working in our little toys - will
lead to a similar reassessment of the world around us - this time
not as systems we can master, but as quasi-alien forces we must live
among and in dialogue, conflict, companionship and cooperation with.

That or the looming Copernican trauma of being knocked off the top
of the intelligence tree will force us to acknowledge that we never
had a monopoly on intelligence all along.

A pity then that the forms of AI currently under development will
turn out to be the exclusive properties of surveillance capitalists
or the Chinese state, which sure aren't planning on being the back
end of any Centaurs.
  

    
Here's a link to a transcript of a TED talk by Svante Pääbo titled
"DNA clues to our inner neanderthal" in which he concludes:

> So to sum up, what have we learned from studying genomes of present 
> day humans and extinct humans? We learn perhaps many things, but one
> thing that I find sort of important to mention is that I think the
> lesson is that we have always mixed. We mixed with these earlier 
> forms of humans, wherever we met them, and we mixed with each other 
> ever since.

<https://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inner_neanderthal/tr
anscript?language=en>

Surely when 'modern' humans emerged from Africa and encountered both
Neanderthals and Denisovans they were experienced as quasi-alien beings.
Living in dialogue, conflict, companionship and cooperation may be our
key human skill.

> A pity then that the forms of AI currently under development will
> turn out to be the exclusive properties of surveillance capitalists...

I trust that will only be a transition phase.
  

    
Via email from Matthew Battles:

I'm enjoying thinking through Bruce's evocative breakdown of the
aesthetics of Alphazero--this windowpane-sized irruption of the
technological sublime. (It calls to mind Stanislaw Lem's idea of
"bitic literature": artistic works undertaken by complex, networked
AI systems for *their own* pleasure; human scholars of such works,
in Lem's speculative vision, would spend much of their time striving
to discern whether aesthetic activity was taking place, identifying
its edges, in logs and outputs.) And I wonder: how does this
aesthetics scale? What does this beauty look like on the scale of
urban policy, public health, or any other more ramified realms in
which we're asking algorithms to tidy up the board? How do we begin
to talk about it? Where do these aesthetics begin to touch on
questions of ethics, of action?

I invoke the sublime because, in its Kantian genealogy, it's
licensed a certain powerlessness (or abdication of responsibility,
anyway): the sublime is specifically that upon which humans are
powerless to act. But sublimity isn't the only approach to snow and
storm, to waterfalls and mountains. At the risk of massive
reductiveness, I want to imagine that one future aesthetic/ethical
strand might be inspired by certain strands of indigeneity... the
anthropologist Eduardo Vivieros de Castro has elaborated the concept
of "multinaturism" from Amerindian cosmology: the notion that myriad
forms and phenomena (game animals, crops, mountains and rivers, even
the weather) are understood to have their own natures, within which
they develop as communities, as societies—and the social obligations
that emerge in those natures web out to touch on other natures,
including the human. We humans seek to propitiate, to gift, to
placate, communities of these other natures; we reach out to
interact with them through dream and vision. This multinatural
cosmology *works* to the extent it helps people think relations of
obligation and interdependence among species and forces and things.
It requires acknowledging that such entities have stakes in the
cosmological game. 

Many have written about connections between the "cannibal
metaphysics" of Vivieros de Castro and a Gaian Anthropocene. We're a
long way from elaborating such a metaphysics at scale (though the
Water Protectors provide one example of a starting point). Is it
crazy of me to wonder if we begin at some point to exercise cultic
relations with algorithms—to entreat them through visions; to offer
them votives? Maybe we're already engaged in such cult activities,
and we don't recognize them as such?
  

    

As a creative class, American authors are rapidly going broke.

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/authors-guild-survey-shows-dras
tic-42-percent-decline-in-authors-earnings-in-last-decade/

That’s great news from a New Dark perspective, though.  It means
we’re on a much more level playing field with writers who don’t
publish in English — since we’re all in the dark, and nobody’s got a
megaphone.  So if you’re looking for arcane, resolutely
noncommercial literary fiction, how about some Finns or Latvians? 
Or you might try the Bangalore Literary Festival, where they all
read English, yet they long to write and be heard in their 22
official Indian regional languages.

The imminent downfall of the Great American Novel might even raise
hopes for  creative expression from whales, gorillas, elephants and
chess-playing neural nets, who have been all cruelly sidelined in
the sweepstakes for the Pulitzer.
  

    
The Centaur chess thing is indeed interesting (and even has some
roots in a science fiction novel). 

 I also think that Centaur Chess illustrates the  big problem that
any “new aesthetic” for algorithmic or device art tends to founder
in a bad metaphysics.  Especially, the bad metaphysics of AI, which
has been a tarpit for decades.

Centaur Chess has the Walter Benjamin “aura” problem of “who” gets
the credit credit for the game.  If the artist is a mythological
beast (and basically a figure of speech), rather than some
metaphysically identifiable entity, that’s gonna be major problem. 
You can see from the Wikipedia entry here that the problem of
distributing credit is all over the map.  The debating parties have
no basic concurrence on what they’re talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess

Garry Kasparov is gonna stay Garry Kasparov, even if he drops chess
and goes into politics, while “Stockfish” is a radically unstable
entity.  It’s been Stockfish 1,2, 3, 4, currently 10…. “Leela,”
which is the open-source sister of AlphaZero, is crowdsourced and on
GitHub.  

So instead of being a mythic guy crossed with a horse, a modern
“centaur” is gonna be more like a guy — or even a large group of
programmers — crossed with a moving cloud of bees.

http://lczero.org

These metaphysical problems have real-world consequences, because if
you don’t know “who” is doing art, you don’t know who to encourage. 
And it’s unrealistic to think that an artist, even a “centaur” one,
will reach a creative peak without years of focussed effort, a
community of practice, and a sustaining audience.
  

    

I wonder what would happen if somebody programmed a system to play
the “prettiest possible chess,” without necessarily winning a
victory — a king-free fairy-chess variant, played for sheer glorious
wow-factor.  Is that even possible?  Would anybody watch that?
  

    
*Noah Raford on line one.  Google and Amazon may be exterminating
American literature, but the WELL's got the talent in 2019, folks.

From: Noah Raford

Hey guys,

Loving the SOTW this year on my last days of holiday in France
before heading back to the desert tomo. 

Just wanted to add one thing via email since I’m not a WELL member.
I don’t have Jon’s email, so you guys will have to suffer my musings
(thank you). 

While I am deeply sympathetic to the whole “things are breaking and
getting dark” theme of the moment, I do want to throw in one bit of
counter perspective.

Bruce kicked it off this year (as he does so well) with a brief log
of his travels. A lot (but not all of it) was in Europe and North
America. One of his two bright spots was in India, however. 

This year took me to China several times, Taiwan, Korea, India,
Thailand, Singapore, and of course Dubai (where I live) and its
surrounding neighbors.  The one thing I have to say is that the vibe
is quite different than that reflected in the convo so far in some
of these places. 

I mean China just landed a space ship on the moon for God’s sake!
Yes, things are getting weird, but for those outside the walls of
Europe and North America, they’ve been weird for decades. 85% of the
world lives outside Europe and North America. 

It’s hard to understand what life is like in double digit growth
terms, but most of these places have been going full blast into the
unknown for years, often with barely more than a pair of headlights,
a cigarette, and a strong cup of coffee as their guide. 

Everything is challenged all the time around here. Breakneck swerves
to avoid certain death are common and exhilarating leaps into the
void is an everyday experience. So is struggling with less than you
need against unknown forces out of your control, suffering defeat
frequently, but producing miracles often. 

From this angle, none of this feeling of “uh oh wtf?” should be
surprising. It’s what most people feel most of the time in most of
the rest of the world. 

Yeah the future is unclear (“dark”, in James’ lovely words), but
hasn't it always been? Maybe we’re just starting to wake up to what
most of the rest of the world has been dining on for decades. You
don’t lay in bed in these places worrying about the world not making
sense. You get up in the morning, throw yourself into the fray,
fight like hell, do your best, and pray you make a little progress
at the end of the day towards improvement in your circumstances,
whatever those may be. And that’s ok. That’s just life in an
uncertain world. 

Also, history. This holiday I read several books about the Ismaili
Assassins, the Crusades, the Malmuks, Stalin’s gulags, Ghengis Khan
and the Mongol Wars in China. You think things are weird now? Try
living back then! Empires were literally springing up and crashing
down around you. Dozens of people were asserting conflicting claims
of being God’s messenger (the Mahdi; the rightful guided one); at
the same time and often in the same city. If that wasn’t bad enough,
an unstoppable horde of literal barbarians was coming your way and
if you didn’t submit to them, they would destroy your entire city,
enslave your wives, kill your sons, burn your buildings, and leave a
pile of bones 50 feet high to send a message to your neighbors. 

I mean, you think we’ve got it tough? Girl, life is a dream compared
to that. How about we all just enjoy the fact that most of us don’t
have to worry about psychedelic religious chameleons living in our
apartment building, poised to murder us with a poisonous golden
dagger to claim their place in heaven. Or fighting Cossacks every
night to avoid working the worst shifts in an open pit gold mine at
minus 50 degrees Celsius in a Kolyma prison camp. 

I know this might sound dismissive of the suffering many of us feel
as we struggle to get to terms with how our lives are changing. It
isn’t meant to be. Stalin was right when he said “the death of one
is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.” 

I guess all I’m trying to say is that there is already an ocean of
candles out there in the dark, with billions of people around them
who are vastly more experienced at dealing with weird, traumatic
things than we are. And that is reassuring, to me at least. 

An example; I had Christmas dinner this year with a guy who walked
from Eritrea to Libya after the government burned his village,
crossed to Italy in a wobbly boat captained by pirates, skipped
trains and boats to get to Norway, got kicked out, and is now a
pastry chef at the local boulangerie in my mother in law’s village
in France. The dude showed up to dinner on an electric bike, was
happy as a clam, and couldn’t stop laughing about the Gilets Jaunes.
“Those guys have no idea how good they’ve got it. It’s hilarious!” 

Again, I find this attitude deeply reassuring. Things really aren’t
that bad, they could be a lot worse, and they are generally getting
better. Yes, there will be train wrecks, genocides, and injustice.
The climate is falling apart and many of us could become homeless or
jobless or worse. But compared to dealing with messianic crypto
zealots trying to slit your throat or crossing the Sahara by foot,
I’ll take first world anxieties any day. 

All best and keep it up!

Noah 
  

    
*There’s a neural-net deep-learner teaching itself to use a
cockroach-like robot crawler to “walk.”  You can see how this ties
my interest in AlphaZero to my interest in kinetic art.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/this-ai-teaches-robots-how-to-walk/

*It’s kind of endearing how “badly” the thing walks at first.  After
it starts waling more “efficiently,” it’s movements are rather less
interesting.

*Now imagine a deep-learner robot that can beat a cockroach at
walking.  Just, you know, outdo an insect in some unpredictable,
previously undiscovered way, much like AlphaZero baffles human
players.  Not monster AI, not a Singularity, just, like, a walker.

What kind of world is that?
  

    
Huge sympathy and gratitude for Noah's points (#108). Thanks Noah.

I'm very much of the view that there's more going on elsewhere than
most of North America / Northern Europe notices, and indeed at
breakneck speed.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot - and this is connected to
my earlier musings on Ghosh, the Great Derangement, and the
future-at-the-periphery - is the forking timeline. 20-30 years ago,
Japan was the future. The sheen, the computing, the teeming life,
the fashion, the noise, the lot. That's where we'd all be living in
our future cyberpunk something-topia. And then the slump happened,
and the future went somewhere else. If you go to Japan now, it's
still a future, but a sort of weird 80s future, a stub future,
recognisable but not the one that most of us ended up inhabiting.

The Silicon Valley / North America / Northern Europe future - which
is not cyberpunk, what's the word for that Bruce? - which half the
world is currently chasing feels an awful lot like it will be
another stub. It's so obviously pleased with itself and complacent
and totally unsustainable for the other 85% of the planet,
environmentally, financially, and socially, that there's going to be
a break, and the mainstream future will branch off in another
direction. SV/NA/NE will continue to exist, might even continue its
radical acceleration, but other things will happen elsewhere, and
they will be the dominant mode.

Dubai, where I had the good fortune to visit Noah this year, is one
possible future fork. It's looked down on so much as this
glitzy-trashy-yet-oppressive seastead by SV/NA/NE, but it's the
bright shining future for most of the world which can't get an EU/US
visa, and far *less* oppressive and brimming with opportunity than
most other places they can get to. (Citizenship is the battlefield
of the 20th C).

So whether EU/US builds walls or just declines, the future will be
defined by which parts of its hegemony India, China and Maybe, Just
Maybe the Mediterranean/Middle East choose to run with, and which
bits they rewire and reinvent. And hopefully the answer will be more
interesting than moon landings, social credit, hologram politicians,
hyper-development and surveillance capitalism. 

(The most interesting place politically on the planet right now is,
for example, the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, an
autonomous but highly contested and widely assailed polyethnic,
libertarian socialist polity focussed on decentralization, gender
equality, and environmental sustainability. Defend Afrin!)
  

    
(*** Citizenship is the battlefield
of the *21st* C obvs)
  

    
Doug Rushkoff's upcoming book, "Team Human," "argues that we are
essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest
aspirations when we work together―not as individuals. Yet
today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that
undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange,
is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to
elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the
internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and
radicalized groups." (That snip is from the Amazon blurb at
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/ref=pe_2418930_385745700_pe_r1_b4/?ASIN=03
9365169X, in case you want to read more.)

Doug is an advocate for the kind of worker-owned co-operative
business that I've been part of for the last few years. We're a very
small company - I had been thinking that we should grow, not just to
increase revenues but to work through the challenges of co-operative
endeavor.  It's one thing for a half dozen people to work from
consensus, much more "interesting" when you have hundreds or
thousands of members. There are few examples like Mondragon
Corporation, a federation of co-ops employing around 75K people,
based in Spain. When we worked with co-op consultants, Mondragon was
offered as an example of what's possible.

We haven't grown our web-development co-operative by that much -
rather, several of us have been involved in building a platform
co-operative (defined by Wikipedia at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative).  This new co-op
would have multiple classes of stakeholders, and working out the
structure for profit sharing and governance has taken months, given
the complexity of the model. We've just recently completed that part
of the planning phase, and we're focusing more on steps to get to
initial launch of the platform.

I no longer think much in the abstract about "saving the world." I'm
doing something real that could make things better, at the same time
putting bread on the table. 

My co-op does some of our web development work for large, global
corporations, and I often wonder what it would take to convert those
organizations to a more co-operative endeavor.  I've never been
close to a large corporation that wasn't operated as a federation of
collaborative teams and divisions, so I tend to think they're really
not far off from what we're doing, though the general structure is
more of an oligarchy.

I should add that I tend to be skeptical about "democracy" as we
usually think of it, but my skepticism is sort of like Winston
Churchill's - democracy is hard, it's messy, it has all sorts of
issues - but it's still the best and fairest way to organize. And
this takes me back to Team Human: "being human is a team sport." We
have to organize socially, and organize as networks, resisting the
will "to other" and to exploit. Leadership can be organic and
transferrable. 

We don't have to follow the familiar model if it doesn't support
empathy & humanity. We don't always have to compete; co-operation is
often a better alternative.
  

    
This was posted earlier, but worth repeating:

Short URL for the world-readable version of this discussion:
http://bit.ly/stateoftheworld2019

Email address for anyone not a member of the WELL to send a comment
or question:
inkwell at well.com
  

    
Quite a few provocative and interesting and broadening posts in this
last round, thank you each.

Especially to Noah, for picking up the early thread and reminding of
the non U.S.-centered world this world actually is and always has
been. I will though take issue one aspect of that post-- to include
'climate change' as one among other equally named concerns seems an
error to me, from where I post (on the near-fringe of two years
running of "worst fires ever seen" here in paradisiacal California,
and many years of "largest fires ever" leading up to this). Without
a viable planet, even the earlier calamities named in that post will
seem minor, local events. Food security for a global population
still expanding precipitously is only one aspect. I don't need to
name the all-too-familiar others. 

Team Human needs to develop some sense of solidarity soon if we are
to address this most over-riding issue.

I also want to say how much I appreciate the thought about our
coming to understand the world's many forms of intelligence as
intelligence. I've been having that conversation with some of my
scientist friends for fifteen years. The speculation that thinking
about AI is causing us to think about other forms of intelligence
more broadly is really interesting.

As an aside, Bruce, I have trouble imagining how a person would
experience the "wow" moves of your proposed no-goal chess game. What
conveys the 'wow,' if there is no arc of direction-intention to the
moving? Never seen before? In dance choreography, novelty of
movement brings pleasure, sure, but not least because the limitation
of the human body is being challenged, and also because the history
of dance sits behind our acts of witness. In the case of a computer
playing a board game, wouldn't it all become entirely arbitrary and
meaningless? Constraint's breaking is a kind of pleasure--but only
if the constraint's presence is felt. The serotonin dopamine
explosion of aesthetic pleasure is dependent on there being *some*
context of customary expectation's transcending.
  

    
>100 Perhaps because the 'natural' and 'constructed' worlds came to
be seen as opposites, it tends to be difficult to keep the ideas of
'animal' and 'machine' in mind long enough to discern the true
cybernetic aspects of each.

I'm concerned about framing the Gaia Hypothesis or the workings of
biological organisms as simply complex adaptive systems whose code
can eventually be hacked and cracked. Presumably we’ve moved well
beyond the long discredited Cartesian notion that animals are simply
machines although Bruce raises a good point that the technology can
be used to connect with and better understand other life forms. In
the meantime, CRISPR is already being widely abused but at least the
Chinese scientist making designer babies is now presumably under
detention. In the meantime, professional ethicists keep making the
usual tepid warnings which get filed under “for future
consideration”. And so it goes.

>That or the looming Copernican trauma of being knocked off the top
of the intelligence tree will force us to acknowledge that we never
had a monopoly on intelligence all along.

>A pity then that the forms of AI currently under development will
turn out to be the exclusive properties of surveillance capitalists
or the Chinese state, which sure aren't planning on being the back
end of any Centaurs.

Excellent points. The means of production and social control and
repression, a growth industry. If there are scenarios by which this
seemingly ineluctable trend can be undone or otherwise thwarted, I
would love to see them. But hard to imagine this happening in the
current generation.

>114 Without a viable planet, even the earlier calamities named in
that post will seem minor, local events. Food security for a global
population still expanding precipitously is only one aspect. I don't
need to name the all-too-familiar others.

Great point Jane. We have to move beyond the “things are ok until
they’re not” mindset. One challenge is how to shift to “seven
generations ahead” thinking when we can’t easily project future
trends in the next 10 or 20 years. 
  

    
I think part of the challenge is to resist the urge to seek quick
answers.

A dawning realization that things long held to be opposite may have
aspects in common, should not trigger a tumble to the other extreme --
that they must now be the same.
  

    
Max Anton Brewer sent us the January 7 edition of his weekly
newsletter, which he says was inspired by the conversation here:

SCIOPS 03.01: Keanu Face
by Max Anton Brewer

On New Year's Eve, I walked miles home into a brutal snowstorm. Snow
doesn't come often to Albuquerque, and when it does the whole town
shuts down. Besides, the Oober drivers here are as drunk as everyone
else.

So I walked headlong into an obsidian wind. The front of the storm
curled down the mountains like a skinning knife. Particles of light
hurtled past the edges of my eyes, but the force of the gale was too
strong for me to gaze ahead. I focused instead on my boots, one in
front of the other and the other in front again.

When I dared to glance up, I could make out, through the dizzying
traces of snow, just the edges of buildings, obfuscated by darkness
and weather and frozen tears. My hometown, made alien by the coming
storm.

Twenty-nineteen, everybody!

It does feel dark. Even in this sun-bleached town, the mood is
cloudy. Everyone's wearing mirrorshades and making Keanu face. The
21st century finally reached Middle America.

All we can see from here are the shadowy outlines of the forces that
will define my generation. But that's more than we had last year.
The carapace of the culture war tears wider, to reveal the coming
crises.

I see two catastrophes that will converge upon us in the 2020s and
define the battle lines of this century – “catastrophe” here in the
topological sense, as a cliff, or a canyon.

One is a tradition-vs-novelty generation divide.

We think of this as normal, but for thousands of years most people
lived just as their parents did. The idea of Progress is relatively
new, and based at first on the exploited energy of slaves and then
on the externalized costs of fossil fuels. Only for a few hundred
years have these great changes happened at the speed of generations.

In the last fifty years, Moore's law accelerated that progress to
unimagined levels. This generational divide is a gaping chasm. The
president of the America place is 72 years old. He grew up in a
world of cars and cassette tapes and unprotected sex and
well-protected sexism. A world where the social order had been
decided, and people called things like Donald were in charge and no
one else.

That world is gone, defied by that veil of ignorance that is the
internet.

I grew up knowing a person first by their thoughts, their words,
their art, their vision. Class and skin tone didn't enter into it.
This is an unprecedented cultural shift to do in a half century.
It's not necessarily about how old you are, though there appears to
be a solid clumping pattern. (In America, the culture war that
culminated with President Cool Black Friend marrying all the gay
people is also a key signifier.)

Patriarchy, racism and class privilege are all on the chopping
block, but they are by no means dead. The culture war is not over.
Those who were promised privilege rage against the evening of the
odds.
The other catastrophe is the climate bottleneck. 

In nature – and we are always in nature – the discovery of a large
store of energy will cause a species' population to spike. Like
yeast in a vat of sugary mash, we humans gobbled up all the oil and
coal and methane and we made more humans.
More humans meant more hives, more engines to power our human hives,
more farms to grow the meats to feed our human heads. Our engines
and more hives ate so much of the world, in fact, that we began to
choke on our own exhaust. We poisoned our environment with our own
waste products, as indeed do yeast. The alcohol we seek is their
excrement. When it's strong enough to kill the yeast, that's when
it's good to drink.

So we have reached the peak of our expansion, at least from fossil
fuels. The climate is destabilized forever – we can now only
navigate our descent. And the oil is running out, the return on
energy invested is declining, the resources for building the
renewable energies are scarce, the water is drying up. The storms
are coming – snow, fire, landslide, hurricane, tidal wave.

Where you find yourself in the climate apocalypse largely depends on
how many resources you have right now. That doesn't mean money or
land, necessarily. It could mean social connections or agricultural
skills or deep wisdom. But the sloshing-about of refugees will not
cease, and the storms will get worse, and the infrastructure is
crumbling. When the food doesn't show up on the shelves, the people
are going to start asking where all the money went.

The money went to people, people!

A few people, with names and highly punchable-looking faces. (That's
an opinion, by the way, not a fact. I said punchable-looking, they
look punchable. To me. As a non-expert, I don't have any medical
advice about which faces are more suited for impacting with your
fist implement.)

Some people got all the money, and they know it. They're sitting
tight, hoping no one comes to ask. They're planning their escapes,
to New Zealand, to Mars, for when the plebes come a-pitchforkin'.

The people who have all the money want economies to grow. This is
because for them, The Economy is equivalent to their bank account.
On the other side of the tracks, the Economy is an omnipresent
monster constantly gnawing at the edges of your sanity. There,
“growth” means the growth of the landfill, the chemical plant, the
refinery – and the weird growths on their lymph nodes.

Simple test: do you have all the money? Do you feel like you got
away with something, through your own skills or luck or (most
likely) nepotism, and now you have the money?

If you do, take a look outside your window and see if anyone's
marching down your street with an actual guillotine this week.

If you don't have all the money, well, you might want to search
“cancer self-check” and start feeling around.

So, two battle lines drawn. If you're the type of person who likes a
nice little 2x2 grid with the axes labeled and the various factions
pinned on, well, go make one, because you're the sort of person who
would like to. Send it to me. You show me yours, I'll show you mine.

For now, to be kind to your attention, I'll just sketch the four
forces I see emerging from the fog:

NEW MONEY: Techno-vampire solutionists intent on becoming immortal
robot wizards whether or not it kills every other form of life in
the known universe. This does have a certain nifty charm, but they
got all the money and I didn't, so I'm sharpening my stakes.

OLD MONEY: Petro death cultists who respond mostly to the eldritch
demon of syphilis whispering in their brainmeats.  The rich of the
20th century, the original 1 percenters, the psychopathic necktie
sharks of the Cold War grown old, bloated, demented. Adventurism and
extraction and opium given way to petulant nuclear arms-boasting.
Their avarice is surpassed only by their lack of concern for the
future.

OLD OLD MONEY: The reactionary movements currently driving a wedge
through electoral democracies worldwide are not a surprising turn of
events, as the pundits and comedians would have it. Nor are they
laughable. They're an insurrectionary form of feudalist bigotry.

They're the old slavery-and-kings crowd, former champion, back for
another taste!

It's the oldest value system still in the ring, and yet “traditional
values” (like killing the unbeliever, and treating people as
property) are making a comeback. Whiteboy jihad.

Because the OLD MONEYs largely agree with these pointy-headed
values, the nationalists have been funded pretty well – so far. The
further they move to the right, the more likely that the
center-right will abandon them and join the centrist liberals in a
MAKE OLD MONEY OLD AGAIN campaign. Plus the antifa supersoldiers are
around every corner…

NO MONEY: Me. Probably you. Most of the world. Trying to get by
day-to-day without losing our minds or hearts or keys or children.
Do I have any children? I don't see any. That's probably good, all
things considered.

NO MONEYs aren't trying to grow our bank accounts, design artificial
minds, or reinstate feudal hierarchies. We're trying to stay alive
in a world that no longer makes sense.

That's the most realistic attitude to take, in the short term. But
in the long term we're going to need myths, visions, a story to tell
us who we are and where world we live. The indigenous futurists, the
tactical artists, the solarpunk utopians point the way.

We have to make a stand for harmony, for Balance, in the face of
ever-burning Growth. And at the same time we have to fight a rear
guard against the reactionaries, who would have Balance in the form
of a return to the Dark Ages.

The Green New Deal is the tip of something emerging from the gloom,
but it has to be a trojan horse for a fully egalitarian, ecological
future. We need to capture the imagination of the world, change
completely the way we relate to our planet.

How do we do that?

Stay tuned for volume 3 of SCIOPS, coming to your inbox every Monday
this year barring acts of Gods or hangovers! Now with more salt and
hand-tossed shade! Share with your friends! Attach to your permanent
record!
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I love doing this, and
you're who I do this for. Way to go.
  

    

great stuff there!

and great stuff from everyone posting here. i take Sundays off digital
media, and logged back in tonight to marvel at the many interesting words
of jane, jonl, tvacorn, bruces, keta, james bridle, and those who emailed
in. 

fabulous.
  

    
*I like it when a pundit predicts a bunch of stuff, and then looks
back later and gleefully praises himself for his own acumen and
accuracy.  There's something touching about it.  It's like a guy
tying trout flies and then he brags that he caught some actual fish,
somewhere, sort of.

https://battellemedia.com/archives/2018/12/predictions-2018-how-i-did-pretty-d
amn-well-turns-out
  

    
@bruces/105: "As a creative class, American authors are rapidly
going broke."

I think that you're giving a pretty limited survey (and patchy
analysis) more credit than it deserves. Here's what I wrote on BB:
https://boingboing.net/2019/01/07/nonrepresentative-surveys.html

"Blame authors' fortunes on monopolism, not university professors,
booksellers and librarians"

 The New York Times weighs in on an Authors Guild survey that shows
a "drastic 42% decline in authors' earnings over the past decade.
John Scalzi offers some important perspective.

Here's the summary:

* Authors Guild: authors' incomes are way down, thanks to Amazon's
monopolism, which is crushing indies and traditionally published
authors alike; universities are relying on fair use and Google Books
for coursepacks, and big tech overall is "devalu[ing] what we
produce to lower their costs for content distribution."

* New York Times: yeah, it's mostly Amazon.

* Scalzi: This isn't a very good study. They surveyed 5,000-ish,
self-selected authors (and the Science Fiction Writers of America
didn't participate). Comparing the fortunes of authors today to
Hemingway may not be very representative -- think instead of writers
like John Brunner, who lived a writerly life that's pretty
recognizable to writers today. Was there really ever a guilded age
of writerly incomes, or just a bunch of survivor bias?

My take: Amazon and the other monopolists are a huge problem. But
big tech isn't uniformly culpable. Facebook and Twitter are
certainly big social problems, but, they're not hurting authors. The
idea of "devaluing what we produce" by letting people talk to each
other for free is incoherent, intellectually bankrupt nonsense,
ripped from the pages of "Home taping is killing music" and "Home
cooking is killing restaurants."

Also a problem: consolidation in publishing (we're down to five big
publishers, and rumor has it that Simon and Shuster will be a
subsidiary of Harper Collins within a year). Consolidation in
bookselling (letting the chains merge until only B&N existed was
great for looter hedge-fund sociopaths, not so much for
bookselling).

The Authors Guild recommendations are a mixed bag. Letting authors
unionize and negotiate for good rates with Amazon is a great idea.

Establishing a lending right that charges libraries for the right to
lend books is a terrible idea. If we're going to fund authorship
through state grants (which I totally, absolutely support), let's
break up digital (and publishing!) monopolists, make them pay their
fair share of taxes, and fund the NEA and other institutions. But
attacking libraries' funding in the midst of the human race's
neoliberal extermination crisis is an attack on literally the only
institution left in the country where you are welcome even if you're
not spending money or praying.

It's not just libraries that the AG is taking aim at, it's also
booksellers. The AG is worried about returned books entering the
stream of new book sales. This is, as far as I can tell, not a
problem. Making life harder for indie bookstores will not win the AG
any friends. Librarians and indie booksellers are authors' class
allies, as are university professors. Our adversaries should be the
tax-dodging, Fortune 100 Big Tech/Big Content vampire squids with
their blood-funnels jammed down our collective throats.

This is a category error that is often made by copyright maximalists
when they argue over "piracy" and tech: they locate the problem with
readers, technology, public lending, etc -- not with monopoly
capitalism that reduces the competition for our works and starves
the public coffers of the social safety net that has made a career
in the arts survivable in years gone by. The problem with Big Tech
is "big," not "tech." 

==

References:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/01/07/author-incomes-not-great-now-or-then/

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/authors-guild-survey-shows-dras
tic-42-percent-decline-in-authors-earnings-in-last-decade/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/books/authors-pay-writer.html
  

    
I think we accept uncritically the argument that Amazon is
"monopolist," as though it was producing and delivering all the
goods it sells. However Amazon specializes in fulfillment, not
production. It's allowed small companies, authors, and artists to
bring to market items that otherwise would never have been sold.

Amazon is actually the realization of the vision we had with
FringeWare back in 1990 or so. Some remember FringeWare as a
synthesizer of virtual cultures, a community of smart geeks sharing
within an emerging digital culture, or publisher of a cool 'zine
that had affinities with Mondo 2000, bOING bOING, and CoEvolution
Quarterly (an important influence for us and many others).  However
our original idea was to create an online market so that creatives
and techs who couldn't get their products to market otherwise
because of the benchmark cost of getting into stores could sell
online with minimal overhead. If we had been successful at this, we
might have been similar to Amazon.

I don't see in Amazon a platform that is killing small business. I
see it as a facilitator of many small, medium, and large businesses,
extending their sales, not destroying them.

I'm not saying there are no issues with Amazon. In fact, I think
someone should challenge them with a platform co-op with similar
capabilities, though that could be tough: Amazon has spent its many
years as a company refining fulfillment processes and leveraging its
power to make deals that facilitated cost-effective last mile
delivery of products.  That was a bugaboo of e-commerce.  When I was
involved in a relatively large e-commerce operation, we could only
be cost-competitive by offering free shipping, which cut into our
profits quite a bit - especially with heavier products that were
costly to ship. Since shipping and fulfillment is a big part of its
offering, Amazon focused all these years on tackling that problem. 

So Amazon could stand some competition, and it could treat its
employees better. But I don't buy the argument that it's killing
small business, or that it's a detriment to authors. In publishing
specifically, Amazon and on-demand presses like Lulu have removed
barriers to entry and given authors a cost-effective way to
self-publish and find an audience. They don't have the marketing
power of big publishers, but at least some authors have found ways
to market their works online with various degrees of success.

I can't see how "Amazon's monopolism ... is crushing indies and
traditionally published authors alike," except perhaps by
facilitating more competition from authors that don't follow the
"traditional" path? What are the characteristics of membership of
the Author's Guild, that it would have an issue with a platform that
is stimulating sales and distribution of books? I understand where
small, independent book stores might have issues (though I see that
some of those appear to be thriving, apparently by diversifying
offerings and creating a compelling store experience). But I'm not
clear why authors would have a beef with Amazon.
  

    
I think you're right on the money here, Cory. 

One way monopolism shows up is in the terror the companies inflict
on their editors, which gets passed along to writers in a couple of
ways. First, most obviously, in the stingy advances on offer. It
used to be that no one really expected every book to earn out; the
idea was that the few books that did, and bigly, would support the
ones that didn't, so that every writer who wasn't Stephen King could
make a living. That's still sort of the case, but editors, at least
the ones I know, feel pressured to make every book a "winner." One
editor I know well left the business because, as she put it, "If I
had to produce one more P&L instead of editing a book, I thought I'd
go nuts."

A more insidious effect is that editors seem more likely to kill
books. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but in the last couple of
years I've heard a similar story from three good, established
writers. They got a decent advance (in the $200K neighborhood), but
then found themselves pressured to show their early work to the
editors, who gave detailed critical feedback and demanded changes,
and then, when the author didn't "fix" things, threatened to force
the writer to hire an editor or a ghost writer, or just to kill the
book and demand repayment. None of which is particularly helpful to
the creative process, and seems more intended to get the author to
give up (or to give the publisher a way out) than anything else. 
  

    
Slipped by Jon. And while I think you may be onto something about
Amazon in general, I think that when it comes to books, they are
monopolists plain and simple. Sure there are little guys selling
books via amazon marketplace, but most of the books I see (and buy,
and sell) on amazon are coming from amazon. Plus which the last book
contract I signed had a special clause in it lowering my royalty on
books sold when the publisher has to give Amazon its special low
wholesale price, which i s like always.
  

    

>119

Interesting little piece in a recent "New Yorker" on the challenges
involved in predicting the future. Snippet:

"Two things are true about “Toward the Year 2018.” First, most of
the machines that people expected would be invented have, in fact,
been invented. Second, most of those machines have had consequences
wildly different from those anticipated in 1968. It’s bad manners to
look at past predictions to see if they’ve come true. Still, if
history is any guide, today’s futurists have very little
credibility. An algorithm would say the same.

Carlos R. DeCarlo, the director of automation research at I.B.M.,
covered computers in the book, predicting that, in 2018, “machines
will do more of man’s work, but will force man to think more
logically.” DeCarlo was consistently half right. He correctly
anticipated miniature computers (“very small, portable storage
units”), but wrongly predicted the coming of a universal language
(“very likely a modified and expanded form of English”). One thing
he got terribly wrong: he expressed tragically unfounded confidence
that “the political and social institutions of the United States
will remain flexible enough to ingest the fruits of science and
technology without basic damage to its value systems.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/what-2018-looked-like-fifty-year
s-ago
  

    
From my own corner of the publishing world, there is one major way
that Amazon has aided authors' incomes: the long tail availability
of older, back list books that simply would not be found on the
shelves of even the largest bricks and mortar store. And there is
one major way that Amazon has damaged authors' incomes: the one
click availability of used copies of books from the first day they
go on sale, directly cutting the author and publisher out of the
income stream from that book. 

My best guess is that in the case of my own books, the latter has
lowered my royalty income more than the former has augmented it. But
there's no way my books would be nearly as easily and broadly
purchasable, even on pub day, if Amazon didn't exist. Pre-Amazon,
I'd be lucky if a normal, independent bookstore ordered two copies
(poetry sections are not large); if they sold out, they would
usually not be re-stocked. And I'm with major NY publishing houses,
previously HarperCollins, now Knopf.

Of course in my field, even T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and
Elizabeth Bishop (at the end of her life, at the height of her fame
as a living poet) had day jobs. 

The one million-copy selling, NY Times #1 bestseller in recent
memory by a poet is Rupi Kaur, who built a following on Instagram
before being picked up by a press. That perhaps says something about
the future of self-supporting authorship, though not too much about
the future of the art form.

Ivan Illich's shadow work isn't something we've given a lot of
attention to in this conversation. But as mentioned much earlier
here, by T, a working ecosystem, whether biological or cultural,
lives by such uncharismatic, small-level, often unnoticed labors.