Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
"This is not exactly fascist oppression, but it's gone well beyond
mere discontent.  It's an advancing cultural sensibility, like "New
Dark 1.2," where everybody knows the lights have been turned out,
but nobody thinks they're gonna come back on, because the guys at
the fossil power plant want to make Darkness the standard."

To paraphrase a colleague of yours, Bruce, the "New Dark" is already
here, it's just not  equally distributed. I started my year in the
Philippines and ended it in Chad, with stops in Uganda, Palestine,
and Baltimore in-between. There is a fatalistic thread that I
continue to encounter around the world - the assumption in most of
the developing world is that the game is rigged to favor an elite
minority, and much of the white middle class seems to be figuring
that out only just now.

The malaise is real, and the appeal of fascism (and other
governments that rely on tribal/ethnic patronage for popular
support) is it's promise that the lights will at least stay on for
people like US. It seems to me that the path to countering this is
to do our best to turn the lights on for everyone.
  

    
My global travels this year took me to France, where in my
admittedly broken French I was unable to find a single fan of
Macron, which is probably not surprising given said year of riots.
It seems in our New Dark 1.2 each country has a choice between a
neo-liberal overlord who will take your money and give it to their
friends and a ethno-nationalist proto-fascist who will take your
money and give it to their friends, with the only difference between
the two being whom they're blaming for the grift instead of
themselves. It's like a pan-nationalist version of the two-party
system. Warren Ellis anticipated this phenomenon in
Transmetropolitan when he talked about politicians being either The
Smiler or The Beast.
  

    

In the last State of the World I made a passing mention of Bill
Gates, so I thought I might briefly return for a glance at the
Gates-ometer.  

Bill informs his social media followers that he's gotten very
interested in getting enough healthy sleep, and that he's deeply
engaged in reading good novels.  There's also a few of Bill's
customary hobbyhorse remarks about nuclear power plants and averting
senile decline.

 I can't blame Bill for sleeping through this one.  If I didn't have
the WELL State of the World to awake me from my dogmatic slumbers,
I'd be sleeping more myself, and, hey, I sleep like a top.  Also,
I've got a stack of unread novels on the shelf, plus one I need to
compose.  

Bill, though has become "Good Billionaire" in an era of Oligarchy. 
Life was more interesting to Bill when he was unique among
billionaires.  Now he's on the back foot, it's like he's stuck in a
traffic jam of yachts.

Bill Gates doesn't seem depressed or particularly anxious about
current affairs.  It's also good that he's not being all
phony-upbeat or engaging in the cherry-picking game of
"things-are-awful-but."  Basically, Bill seems to be reserving his
energies and trying to avoid dementia until he finds an era more
hospitable to his vision of rationalist techno-philanthropy.  Maybe
in an Andrew Yang Administration -- but I dunno if he will ever
again participate in public life in the dynamic way he once did. 
This is the first year when Bill strikes me as an old-fashioned
figure,  a Boomer outwitted by events, trending toward fuddy-duddy.
  

    
I’ve spent time in nations dominated by oligarchy.  Oligarchy feels
strange and different to Americans, but it’s by no means a new
condition in the world.  The condition of social affairs there is
not “depressing.”  It’s “humiliating.” 

It’s about humiliation, not sadness.  Huge class differentiation and
vast wealth disparity is about humbling people.  People have to be
taught there’s a lot they just can’t do that their betters can do,
and they’re better off not asserting themselves or making trouble
above their station, unless they’ve pledged fealty to some nobleman
who commands resources.  You can see the world fumbling itself
toward this kind of social situation, in events like US Senators
humbly sheltering themselves in Trump’s buildings, and talentless
Trump children as de facto cabinet members.

Americans are humiliated.  That’s why they’re keen on personal-power
fetish symbols like handguns. They cling to the Jeffersonian-yeoman
seilf-image, but that’s not the world they’re in.
  

    

The world in MMXX is not in Crisis like it was in 2008, because it’s
become Oligarchic.  It’s a nascent oligarchy that is global in
scope, but is unsure of itself and hasn’t written any rules. It
lacks the palace etiquette of functional aristocracies.  They’re
like the rude-and-crude Oligarchs in the post-Soviet Transition, and
who went to the same sauna bath-houses and knew the same call-girls,
but lacked a rule-of-law to protect them from murdering one another.


But they did have Putin, who got it about them and their issues,
could out-murder anybody else because he was wrapped in the national
flag.  The siloviki clique of the Petersburg FSB set up a stable
spy-based deep-state, which is now becoming Russian Sovereign
Cyberspace.  It’s not “rule of law,” but it is a stable surveillance
state and a stable media-control state.  Managed democracy.
  

    

Also, Russians don’t mind it that much.  They’re upset if they’re
intelligentsia or ideaiistic, but if you’re Ivan Sixpack, daily life
seems doable, if not exactly truthful or  reasonable.   Moscow looks
clean and shiny, your country is grabbing chunks of Ukraine in the
teeth of the former international order and getting away with it,
while Trump does whatever Putin says, mostly… So there are  valid
reasons for patriotic national enthusiasm, because the world is
coming to look like you — much more than you have to conform to the
world.  

So, yes, Putin is an oligarch spy autocrat and secret
multi-billionaire, but compared to cheap upstarts like Erdogan,
Muhammed bin Sultan, Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban in Hungary,
Modi in India, Putin is visibly a seasoned statesman.  He’s, by
comparison, a classy, on-top-of-it guy.   He poisons traitors, sure,
but he’s KGB, so they’re suppose to do that.  If you’re Russian,
it’s actually fun to watch Putin joke about murder in public.  Also,
if you’re Russian and you imagine yourself being Putin, and
wondering, well, what would I do in his place — yeah.  They’d do
what he does.  They’d have to get a little narrow-eyed and cold at
heart, but hey, James Bond. Enough said.

Even the Central Asian gymnast mistress doesn’t bother them.  Why
that chick isn’t world-famous, I’ll never know.  She’s like an
Ivanka Trump who can twist herself into a pretzel. A more fantastic
court-mistress even than Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and that’s saying
something.
  

    


So in MMXX I don’t think Russians are “depressed.”  If so, less
depressed than normal for them.  They may be getting a little
spooked about Siberia being on fire and  those springlike winters in
Moscow, but since a lot of that is their fault, they’re especially
motivated to lie about it.  After all, they don’t burn all that much
carbon themselves, they just sell it to other people who burn it.   

The world is remaking itself in their image, and after decades of
abject moral, political, economic and military defeat they are a
vanguard state in 02020.  If you know a lot about them, you can
kinda outguess how things are likely to go in this decade -- or, at
least, the beginning of it.
  

    
We provided the WRONG EMAIL for sending comments and questions! 

The correct email is

      (((( inkwell at well.com ))))

Shorter, easier to type, and it works!

Apologies to all who got bounce messages...
  

    
Via email from Brian Slesinksy:

I'm wondering if anyone wants to comment on the state of the Maker
community? We might have had the last bay area Maker Faire last
year, though I stopped going a while ago since it seemed like I was
seeing the same stuff. The shelves at Fry's are bare, even here in
Silicon Valley. But online, everything seems fine? There are useful
vendors, you can order lots of interesting parts, and there are
plenty of hacks on Hackaday, and lots of educational material.

I just got into musical electronics last year and I'm personally
having lots of fun. But it feels a bit like woodworking, kind of an
eccentric hobby that some people are into but hardly world-changing.

Attempting to make just one thing myself also got me reflecting on
our utter dependence on the global supply chain. You can unplug from
social networks, sure, but where are you going to buy your stuff? If
you make it yourself, where do you buy parts and tools? Not to
mention outsourced services like laser cutting and PCB board
manufacture. It's hardly "buy nothing" day; I'm ordering more stuff
than ever.

People are down on world trade but I don't think anyone's really
contemplated what it would be like to try to go it alone. A large
nation with lots of manufacturing capability could maybe do it, if
they're willing to do without on some things. Maybe China would
manage it assuming Trump has convinced them to seriously try?
(Probably not.)

The nationalistic mood doesn't seem much in touch with globalist
reality?
  

    
Via email from Giorgos Georgiadis:

I, for one, enjoyed the introduction. Depressing? Most definitely,
but I can do "depressing": twenty teens showed me how. But it also
offers clarity, and that's both a high-quality drug and a solid base
for discussion.

What about institutions? Should we try to prop them up, like
fortifications to help us weather the "political climate" change? Or
should we let them crumble and build new ones in the midst of chaos?

(I left the term deliberately undefined. Could be
benevolent-looking, like Temples of Knowledge AKA libraries,
universities and the like, or
oligarchy-targeted-by-oligarchy-for-subversion like parliamentary
democracy, or anything in between or sideways.) 
  

    
"News" isn't what it used to be. 

The daily newspaper and end of day news broadcast were the limited
and often ignored sources of news in my youth. Most people had no
idea what was happening in the world. They were engaged in work or
in various ludic endeavors - living their lives without much thought
of the rest of the world. At the end of the day my father sprawled
on the couch supposedly reading the Wall Street Journal, but he
didn't read much before snoozing. 
  

    
Mass media evolved and brought more of the world into our homes -
the fifteen minute news recap at the end of the day extended to
thirty minutes. We would glance at the newspapers and background the
news broadcasts. We didn't think enough about the news to questions
whether it was effectively vetted, whether it was biased, whether it
was "fake."
  

    
Flash forward to my reality du jour in MMXX: flooded with
personalized news feeds, not so much biased as tailored to my
biases, as interpreted algorithmically by newsbots operated
variously by Apple, Google, Facebook, et al.  24/7 news via the
Internet and via cable news left (MSNBC), right (Fox), and center
(arguably CNN, though if you're far enough right of center, CNN is
on your left).

News is delivered in crazy-quilt stacks via Apple News or Google
News - aggregators that deliver constantly-updated news feeds. And
it's weird: the news stacks include in close proximity hard news of
politics and disaster, op-eds tailored to the bot's interpretation
of my opinion states, glamfest reports (e.g. the recent Golden
Globes - what were they wearing?), crime reports, reporting on the
latest Saturday Night Live (now apparently newsworthy), latest 
thinking about health and nutrition - subject to change from one
study to another, food recipes,  news of climate emergency and
environmental collapse, advice for entrepreneurs, business
calculations, sports reports, market reports, superhero updates,
streaming schedules, more politics, more and more politics... 
  

    
It appears that many have cable news running nonstop in their homes,
at least while they're awake, possibly while they're sleeping. The
cable channels news channels aren't delivering news as we usually
think of it, diverse reports of global happenings as you might hear
from still-reliable NPR.  The present an endless stream of political
updates and opinions, usually delivered by a moderator with 4-5
pundits on call to provide echoes of opinions. While cable
journalists may aspire to deliver real political news, in prime time
the shows tend to be more opinion than news. Arguable propaganda -
washing the brains of millions of people whose opinions are also
reinforced by tailored news feeds and social media memes.  In the US
and probably elsewhere, populations are politicized like never
before. 

It's a mess. Solutions are hard to come by.  Some of us who have
been involved with the Internet throughout its evolution saw the
potential danger in manipulation of the information ecosystem by
unscrupulous actors, and we often advocated teaching digital
literacy and critical thinking as an antidote to widespread
misinformation and disinformation campaigns. So far as I know,
that's never happened. 
  

    
I think an endless drumbeat of credulous skepticism as the only
recipe to prevent getting fleeced in this world is behind a lot of
people's inability to discern information from disinformation.
Intellectually milquetoast poobahs have spent the better part of a
century telling people via non-sequitur allusions to such works as
1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, hell, even The Illuminatus
Trilogy, that everything they're told from any source of authority
is a lie, regardless of the actual evidence. It's the same credulous
skepticism promoting such a bizarre internet phenomenon as Flat
Earth. People in power say the Earth is round, and they never tell
the truth, so it must be flat.
  

    
A "Message of Joy," posted 24 hours ago by Max Casacci, the lead
guitarist of Turin's best-known rock band "Subsonica."  Things seem
to be pretty lively in Max's digital recording studio, which has
walls paved with screens the size of movie posters.

https://soundcloud.com/maxcasacci/messaggio-di-gioia
  

    
> everything they're told from any source of authority
> is a lie, regardless of the actual evidence

Tim Leary famously encouraged his followers, and anyone else who
would listen, to "question authority." 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_authority) 

The counterculture of the sixties and seventies was skeptical of
traditional authority, but accepted "alternative facts" and
theories, including conspiracy theories.  This thinking preceded and
fed into the alt-right/alt-light movements and the current supposed
"post-truth" political landscape. 

At this point, who can you believe? Best to be skeptical of
everything and have a well-tuned critical faculty. It's unfortunate
that grifters have seized political power and popular attention, via
methods for undermining institutional trust. But undermining that
trust started a long time ago, it's just drifted from healthy to
unhealthy skepticism. 
  

    
Good questions from Brian Slesinksy. The makers' credos ("If you
can't open it, you don't own it" is one example) posit them in
defiance to throwaway culture and the massive machines that
encourage and enable it. 

It's overboard to say that to be a maker today is a revolutionary
act, but there's at least a drop of truth there.
  

    
I agree that makers can be part of a revolution, along with co-ops.
Make me think of voluntary simplicity, which never quite became a
movement:
http://simplicitycollective.com/start-here/what-is-voluntary-simplicity-2  We need that kind of thinking now, more than ever.
  

    
I'm involved with the local maker movement in Sebastopol, the former
home of the former Make Magazine and former Maker Faire. It doesn't
feel revolutionary. We help people fix their things (lamps usually).
We teach people how to use some new tech (laser cutters, CAD, CNC
and microcontrollers) and old tech (jewelry making, welding and
woodworking). If feels a lot like what local government used to
provide as community enrichment at libraries and recreation centers
before Prop 13. And big tech no longer wants anything to do with
Maker. The code camp movement better watch their back. 
  

    
Are those who hastily rebrand these days "The Roaring Twenties"
ill-advised? ( Remember how the original ended. ) How long does it
take to brand a decade when one's in it?

Meanwhile, what shall we call the decade past? 

Or are decades an entrenched formality superceded by digital time? 
I remember the seismic shock in the business cycle when early Java
issued an upgrade twice within the same quarter.  How long before
the Singularity?  etc.   

This year, I’ve observed the slow insinuation of AI into writing.
Whole articles are now being written and published by program.
(Probably ads too. Maybe also tv-series? ) And it's not just
reading. Handling my correspondence for me, Google Mail offers me a
small but nuanced thesaurus of choices with which to respond,
automatically.

I can personally attest to the benefits of voluntary simplicity,
Jon, to the degree I’ve embraced this in my own life. (I prepare my
own meals. Driven a car for but three months in my adult life, San
Francisco being walkable, and with great public transportation. No
tv. See no need for a cell phone.  Is vegetarianism part of that
too? ) And I know I’m not the only one. We recognize & respect each
other.   

Co-ops, in my book, are great, 'tho I've yet to be engaged in any,
so can't speak personally. Meanwhile, I subscribe to Platform.Coop,
which I find a great bunch of futurists. Here's their year in review

 https://platform.coop/blog/the-year-in-platform-cooperatives/

And, along with your ever-buoyant, refreshing, eclectic, vital and
needful annual notes in general, Bruce – thanks a bushel & a heap
for the amazing music links. ( Do you maintain an online playlist,
or channel to subscribe to? Or is that now a retro concept. )  Here
are two note-bending, mind-opening renditions of a Gnossienne by
Satie that might lend new meaning in our times to what was known
"world music."  They nourish my aspiration to live in a world that,
instead of being more and more a monoculture ( Satie as Muzak ), is
as open to imagination and creative possibility as the clear blue
sky is wide – bringing us closer together in our diversity – 

Van-Anh Vo
 https://youtu.be/nyUk4O5hrc4 [ 2011 ]
& an even more simple rendition https://youtu.be/-WgLCn6VN-8 [ 2012
]
( would you call the camera position more of a close up ?
I believe the Russian call that "bigger" rather than closer. )

&

Arturo O'Farrill & The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra
https://youtu.be/QwzdYaP2x7k  [ 2013 ] 

( Maybe your wife will ask, "What's that!"? ) 

They're not from the past year – but the past decade – which, again,
I'm still just starting to try to wrap my midget head around.  
  

    

    So, on the subject of geopolitics of the 2020s, how do you
figure out how things are likely to work during this decade?

    Well, military theorists have been talking about "plutocratic
insurgency" since 2011, but once you're reached today's condition of
oligarchy, it's no longer an "insurgency," it's a genuine political
arrangement which has to create new social norms after buying or
hollowing out all the old ones.

    So the most interesting new institutional innovation is what the
Russians call the "curator" figure.  The world's foremost "curator"
is the guy known as "Putin's Cook," Yevgeny Prigozhin.  The 2020s
are pretty much at the feet of this guy.  He's doing great.

     Prigozhin is a former Saint Peterburg gangster who swore fealty
to Putin, early on -- he ran Putin's favorite restaurant and owned a
Petersburg grocery chain.   Now Prigozhin supplies a lot of Russian
army chow and has become a   state-supported mogul.

     Also Prigozhin deputized to run all kinds of wildly damaging
offshore operations.  He's got a private mercenary army called
"Wagner" which has been very busy in Ukraine, Syria and Libya, as
well as a cyberwar outfit called "Internet Research Agency" which
employs hundreds of trolls to disrupt elections.  Along with other
holdings.

      Of course Prigozhin takes his orders directly from Putin, but
he's never been in the Russian government and never will be. 
There's no reason for Prigozhin to be in Putin's government, because
the government is a stumbling block for oligarchic dominance.  A
"curator" doesn't belong to the state, he is private and belongs to
an oligarchy, and he's informally licensed to use huge sums of
billionaire money to raise as much hell as possible, anywhere
outside the nation-state's formal boundaries. 
 
     Also, if he's caught performing this global piracy by some
other government, the government simply denies that they have
anything to do with him, and tells them to go pound sand.
  

    

     The Iranian general who just got blown up, Qassim Soleimani, is
pretty much a picture-perfect "curator," except the Iranians put a
uniform on him.  Other than that, he did everything Prigozhin did,
in the same way, and even on the same battlefields with the same oil
derricks.

      Eric Prince of Blackwater aka Akademi, the brother of Trump
Education Secretary Betsy Devos, is a "curator."  When Trump was
trying to shake down the TV comedian who currently runs Ukraine,
Giuliani had the "curator" offshored henchman role.

     Oligarchs lack other good ways to get stuff done, because the
normal mechanisms of governance belong to what they dismiss as the
"deep state."  They are old-fashioned and too much trouble, which is
why Trump can rub-out General Soleimani even though the USA at the
moment has no Director of National Intelligence,  no Homeland
Security Secretary, no head of Customs and Border Protection , no
head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, no State Department
Under Secretary of Arms Control, and no Navy Secretary.  These
officials were all in the way, and even though they were  linchpins
of American global military-industrial supremacy, they're also,
just, clutter in the 2020s.
  

    

     The World Trade Organization is about to collapse because Trump
won't appoint anybody to serve in it.  Trump prefers Oligarch
trade-wars where the children of Chinese tech dynasties are
kidnapped. In Oligarchy, you don't want tiresome negotiation through
global bureaucracies: you want other billionaires to kiss the ring
and bow the knee.
  

    
     "Curators" do a lot of the work that covert intelligence
services used to do, but they're not covert, they're just
privatized.  It's become difficult to hide spies in the 2020s,
because there is so much casual, yet ubiquitous surveillance going
on.  Everybody knows the names, ranks and faces of the spy-soldiers
that Putin sent to poison people in London.  The USA's covert
operations have been devastated, mostly by Chinese cyberwarriors who
mopped up all the federal recruitment records.  So it's very hard to
remain actually secret.  Instead, you have to use privatized
cut-outs, and also, you just have to deny. You can get impeached for
massive legal misbehavior; but then you just shrug and say, fine, so
what?  Stonewall it.  Lie about everything all the time. Guerrillas
in the mist.