Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We bloggers (or webloggers) around the turn of the 21st century
argued that our unfiltered and diverse voices would yield a better
perspective on truth, surfacing stories and details that mainstream
media would inherently miss.  Some of us had been trained as
journalists and advocated teaching journalistic process and ethics
to bloggers.  The Internet would bring the democratization of
knowledge, etc.  

Utopian visions of the future of the Internet always looked on the
shiny side and failed to consider the potential for wicked dark
clouds to form.  In fact blogs and social media were ideal petri
dishes for viral growth of malevolent propaganda.  And with the
mainstreaming of Internet access, access spread to populations not
known for critical thinking and discretion. Our efforts had evolved
an ecosystem for distribution of weaponized memes. This only sunk in
when Donald Trump, a grifter know for his Twitter presence and
cultivation of conspiracy theories, was elected President in 2016. 
Since then he's been aggressively constructing false narratives
while taking power (and money) and sharing with affiliated cohorts,
undermining democratic intention and the rule of law. 
  

    
As Bruce said earlier, Trump's ascendance reflects a global trend, a
reaction to globalism, to the sense of eroding borders that is
attributable somewhat to the evolution of the Internet. A backlash,
leveraged by wealthy opportunists and authoritarian bullies. 

That's one view, anyway. But the world is still spinning, artists
are still creating, makers are still making, opposition is
percolating, people (in the US, at least) still have jobs, inner
cities appear to be thriving, suburban dads are still mowing their
weekend lawns, retirees are cruising and watching their investments
appreciate... the world is full of contradictions. 
  

    
Half of America is fearing the worst, the other half feels safe and
secure with Mad King Orange's persistent sales pitch. How long will
they apply snake oil to their various wounds before they realize
it's not working, they're not secure or safe. In fact a storm is
coming, forecast by science, ignored by a faction more concerned
with short-term profit than long-term survival.  The mayor of Amity
Island ignores the malevolent shark approaching. 
  

    
What to do in MMXX? This is a critical time, we have to act on
climate change mitigation now, though now might be so late that we
have to focus on adaptation as well.  As individuals we can find
ways to reduce our carbon footprints, but individual action isn't
enough.  We need acknowledgement of the problem and urgent action to
curb emissions at government/policy levels, and within corporations.
We must vote for candidates who grasp the problem and are committed
to the challenge.  If you march in the streets, focus on addressing
climate change as your cause.

In his 100th Viridian Note, Bruce wrote:

"There are three basic activities we Viridians can fruitfully
pursue: we can create new concepts, we can spread ideas, and we can
be a moral force by example.

"Being small and diffuse is a tactical advantage for those three
activities. We can never expect to rule the planet by Papal decree,
but we're by no means without potential influence. Small diffuse
groups get quite a lot done in the world.

"If we Viridians successfully affect the course of events, it won't
be by lobbying, staging elections, shipping products, or passing
laws. It'll be by making a new world seem plausible, by becoming
early adapters, and by the Vaclav Havel method of publicly "living
in truth."

"Becoming an effective early adapter means finding new things and
processes, and making them modish. It's about cause celebres,
theatricality, publicity stunts, and hype.

"Creating buzz is something at which we Viridians should excel.
Besides, it's fun."

http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/76-100/00100.html
  

    
Via email from Justin Pickard:

In <inkwell.vue.507.5>, Bruce mentions that neither Estonia nor
Dubai are, perhaps, quite as redolent of the future as they once
were. With this overarching sense of clumping or convergence, that
the differences between individual countries' fates are a matter of
flavour or degree, rather than anything more fundamental, I wonder
if a country-by-country weather forecast is the most helpful way to
be slicing things.

With that in mind, are there any smaller places (cities, landscapes,
retail parks, UNESCO world heritage sites, whatever) that feel like
particularly good points of reference, in figuring out the shape of
things to come? What about people? Any individuals we should be
keeping an eye on, or who aren't getting the attention they deserve?
And how about those things that overspill or ignore the borders of
the modern nation-state?
  

    
Via email from Brian Slesinsky:

Besides show-biz, it seems like the other way for makers to ship is
using Kickstarter? Then you really need to figure out how to
manufacture stuff. It seems like a lot of Kickstarter campaigns fail
at various stages. They can fail up front by raising money, or raise
the money and then discover manufacturing is harder than they
thought and fail to ship. Or sometimes they do eventually manage to
ship, but months or years after they said they would.

Seems like if you succeed then you've started a small business,
which is great if that's the business you want to be in.

As a retired tinkerer I was thinking about what my deliverable would
be, and since I'm a software guy who's dabbling in hardware, I think
my shippable is a video and a recipe. So, I'm thinking about some
kid who watches the video and wants to build the thing for cheap.
What tools do they need, what parts do they buy? I could buy fancy
equipment for myself, but I'm not going to if it limits the audience
for my recipe. Downloading a pattern and ordering something cheap
from a laser-cutting service seems pretty doable, along with buying
some parts at Home Depot. There are services where you can have a
PCB board made, but I'll want to make sure the soldering is easy to
do with a cheap soldering iron and basic skills, or avoid it
altogether if there's a way.

If it's popular, maybe one of the musical electronics companies will
have someone in Shenzhen manufacture a nicer copy of it and then you
won't need to build it yourself anymore.

I'm paying some attention to the computer keyboard enthusiasts, who
pay surprising amounts of money to have a computer keyboard made
just the way they like it. (Or maybe to make videos with keyboards
in them? Hard to tell.) The keyswitches are made by a handful of
companies and there are tiny vendors who apparently buy parts in
bulk and sell them in smaller quantities, or assemble a keyboard if
you're willing to pay. I need to buy keyswitches too, so I'm glad
they exist.

This all seems like rather consumer-oriented behavior? It's what you
do when you can't find exactly what you want on Amazon and you're
enough of an enthusiast that you won't settle for what's out there.
The companies aligned with this behavior sell parts and services, so
you're still buying stuff, just different stuff.

It seems like show-biz and making stuff aren't entirely distinct?
People who watch cooking shows do cook themselves sometimes. This
might be more the lighter side of education. YouTube seems to be how
people learn things nowadays, if they just want to do it and not get
credentials proving you learned it.

Maybe education and show-biz are merging a bit? You have the
theoretical side where they teach stuff that there's no way you're
going to do yourself but is conceptually interesting, and then
there's the more practical side.
  

    
Via email from Brian Slesinsky:

Regarding the Internet of Things, it seems like a large subset is
the Internet of Cameras?

At our house it is mostly my wife who buys the cameras. We have
cameras outside pointed at the front porch where the packages get
dropped because we once had a package stolen. It's reassuring when
we're traveling. Also, we have a dash-cam because the other drivers
are crazy, though the dash-cam isn't on much and doesn't seem to be
effective for much of anything. A lot of this seems to be about
which side of the camera you're on, if it's pointed at someone else
you feel better.

I did buy a camera for my mother in the form of a Google Nest Hub
Max. This was strictly for easier video chat and it does the job. We
chat every morning, it's great. It's a nice photo frame too. But
getting through the install up to the point where we could video
chat was honestly scary for her. Particularly the part where it
insisted on learning to recognize her voice. It's like, a normal
phone doesn't insist on this, so why now?

But suppose it didn't need to be trained? It feels like this is a
matter of product design and technology getting a little bit better.
She is happy with the switch. You turn it off and it says
"microphone and camera are off!" This is just what people want.
Geeks may want a physical shutter or verifiable open source
binaries, but if your product says "microphone and camera are off"
in an authoritative voice, I think a lot of people will go for it.
  

    
Via email from Sigmundur Halldorsson:

One of  the most remarkable TV series of 2019 was HBO's Chernobyl -
a story many of us are familiar with. The show was so relevant to
2019 as it had a very powerful comment on truth vs.
disinformation/propaganda "It [truth] is always there, whether we
see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care
about our needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our
ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time.” These
words from nuclear scientist Valery Legasov, who would then be
quoted "What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them
for truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we
no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else
is left but to abandon even the hope of truth." - so have we reached
that point? Where we should abandon all hope of truth? Because there
was a very strong warning embedded in that TV series (and the
Chernobyl disaster as a whole) in that "Every lie we tell incurs a
debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid." - so this
seemed to reflect the situation we are in right now. What with
alternative facts, climate change deniers, disinformation efforts
and all that - are we seeing a way out? At least I'm seeing some
tools to enable me to spot bots on Twitter - or is this state of
affairs working in favor of the oligarchy? So we'll get lots more of
it in 2020? Have we generally come to the conclusion that the
removal of quality control (aka editors) from the distribution of
"news" and "information" in the name of "democratization of
information" was a mistake and that we need solutions (be those
based on biased AI or biased people) in order to get away from a
world of alternative facts? Are we seeing serious efforts in this
area? 
  

    
I would note that it's very interesting to see Jon talking about
voluntary simplicity on one page, and the Veridian movement on the
next. I still remember Bruce's excoriating remarks about "hairshirt
environmentalism" from way back when.

But it's not a bad juxtaposition to be making. If you look at the
Millenial generation, we've been were propelled by a combination of
relative poverty and a sense of environmental responsibility to
pursue not-always-voluntary simplicity. But at the same time, we
were a more connected generation than any before us. Phones, tablets
and laptops were cheap. Rent, cars, property and all the traditional
accoutrements of the middle class weren't.  So you had "hipsters"
riding around on bicycles, growing organic vegetables in square-foot
raised beds, and making their own jam, while meticulously
documenting everything to their friends on Facebook, Instagram and
Twitter. It's been a kind of favela chic environmentalism.

And now Gen Z is coming of age, and they're more connected and more
economically disadvantaged than ever before. They're going to be
interesting to watch -- how they practice environmentalism, how they
organise, and how they vote, especially as the Boomers start dying
off. The statistics I've seen seem to suggest that Gen Z is more in
favour of race and immigrant rights, more in favour of gender and
LGBTQ+ rights, and more in favour of socialism than any before them.
  

    
As we think about the rise of nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment
across Europe and the US (and elsewhere), I was struck by something
I noticed in Uganda. Uganda is one of the larger refugee-hosting
countries. They have a population of about 42 million, and they’ve
taken in more than a million refugees, mostly from South Sudan and
the DRC. This type of activity isn’t exclusive to them, but it’s
worth noting in the context of their past history. In the late 80s
and early 90s, during the Rwandan civil war, Uganda absorbed many
Rwanda refugees, and future President Museveni incorporated them
into his military/security apparatus (even to the point of
appointing future Rwandan president Paul Kagame as his head of
military intelligence). There are those who see echoes of this in
the current Ugandan stance towards refugees – the DRC and South
Sudan are deeply unstable neighbors, and their refugee populations
provide touchpoints for Uganda’s regional intelligence networks as a
bulwark against current and future border conflicts and regional
upheavals.

Similar stances can be seen in Jordan and Turkey’s attitudes towards
the Syrian refugee networks – better to have fugitives from an
unstable neighbor who want or owe you favors than to make them your
enemies. This was also the US attitude towards Cuban refugees from
the 60s well on into the 90s, while the Pakistani government has
used FATA-based Pashtun factions to render parts of Afghanistan
unstable and persistently ungovernable since the Russians invaded.

In this context it’s useful to see where similar gates are open in
response to ethnonationalism’s rising tides. Certainly the
government of Bangladesh is absorbing Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar,
and if the BJP in India succeeds in its anti-Muslim agenda, both
Bangladesh and Pakistan will have to accommodate outmigration or
even expulsion of substantial numbers of Indian Muslims (in India,
even small percentages result in big numbers). Ethiopia hosts large
numbers of Eritreans refugees as well, despite minor thaws in their
respective relationships.

Which brings me to my point of curiosity – who’s going to do this
for the Uighurs? There’s 11+ million of them in China, and maybe
they aren’t fleeing in large numbers at the moment, but China’s
obviously concerned enough to toss 5% of Xinjiang into concentration
camps just on the off-chance that the Muslims there might continue
to feel less “Chinese” than would otherwise be desirable. If
outflows increase, it’ll be interesting to see who’s willing to host
them in ever-increasing numbers.
  

    
https://www.politico.eu/article/fayez-al-sarraj-tentative-ceasefire-russia-tur
key-takes-hold-in-libya/

Here’s current developments in Libya, where the United Nations, the
European Union, and the USA are just sorta staring in bemusement as
Erdogan, plus Putin and his deniable offshore curator-army, have
arranged a Libyan cease-fire.  If there really is a genuine
cease-fire in Libya that is sustainable, then I’m not sure what kind
of hold the Turks and Russians have on the violent factions in
Libya.   Why would the Libyan warlords do anything that Turks or
Russians say — out of sheer gratitude?   

The Russians and the Turks are by no means natural allies, so it’s
hard to understand how they would jointly maintain a client state in
Libya.  How do they divvy up the loot without backstabbing each
other?

I'd be guessing that they somehow establish a duopoly-on-violence
and then settle in to drain different Libyan oil-patches, but that’s
not all that easy, either.   Everybody thinks the oil will pay for
the invasion and it never does.   So what are they getting into,
what’s on their mind?  How would they protect Libya from all the
other interested parties who have been destroying Libya all this
time, such as Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates. ISIS and
various Chinese drone manufacturers?  

Russian couldn’t defeat Afghanistan and Turkey can’t defeat Kurds,
so why are they begging for this new trouble?  Is it just Napoleonic
hubris from two tough-guy male oligarchs? 

Also, what if they win?
  

    

It makes me wonder if “frozen conflict” might become a more general
situation.  Why can’t more people live  just like “Abkhazia,”
“Transdnistria,” “Crimea,” “Novorussia,” “South Ossetia,” which are
all fake-states under Russian protection?    As for Turkey,  it has
long possessed illegal “Turkish Cyprus” and also the new Turkish
protectorate zone in Syria that Trump retreated from, which doesn’t
even have a name yet.   I don’t expect the Turks to leave that area,
by the way.  At least: not Erdogan.

Maybe the Russians and Turks could become so geopolitically
influential that they can legitimize these various places they’ve
grabbed — (or, from their domestic point of view, places that fell
into their laps and that they are nobly defending from the likes of 
savage Greeks and Ukrainians).

In the case of “Turkish Cyprus” that’s been an unrecognized area
ever since the early 1970s.  It’s an anomalous zone, generations
old, that sustains itself mostly with gambling, retirees and heroin.
Imagine a vast planetary proliferation of Turkish Cypruses.  I’ll
give it one thing: Turkish Cyprus is a heavily armed Turkish
military occupation zone and it sure is “peaceful.”  I’ve been
there: you can hear a pin drop.
  

    

Then there’s other people’s post-Westphalian land-grab problems,
occupied Palestine, Golan Heights, Kosovo… and endlessly “failed
states” like Congo, Yemen, Afghanistan…. If you add in the
possibility of waves of refugees,  as ixak23 remarks, due to ethnic
purges, or rising seas, in a planetary landscape that’s physically
unstable from climate change, you might be looking at a 22nd century
where national walls and borders are physically unworkable.  The
nation-state system, of staking out the acreage with gates and
barbed wire,  has to be abandoned like the Maginot Line.   You end
up with a different, novel, planetary security order, as in: what
mercenary army do you pay mafia protection to, and are you on
somebody’s belt-and-road trading system… 

A situation where nobody obeys nation-states any more, they’re
archaic, and you’ve got an oligarchic situation that looks more like
Dark Age Italian city-states.  Not any post-national “world
government,” but a pulverized world that’s got some networked
patches of high-tech governance on it, here and there, with vast
barbarian hordes of AirBnB nomads.
  

    
London looks like a city-state with an archaic nation state
inconveniently attached.
  

    
"The
nation-state system, of staking out the acreage with gates and
barbed wire,  has to be abandoned like the Maginot Line.   You end
up with a different, novel, planetary security order, as in: what
mercenary army do you pay mafia protection to, and are you on
somebody’s belt-and-road trading system…"

Well, GPC is back at the top of the agenda for the US State
Department

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-12-10/age-great-power-competition


But internally they've changed a key word in the acronym. In a
telling revision (despite its usage in the linked article), it no
longer stands for "Great Power Competition" but now refers to
"Global Power Competition."
  

    
I can't read the whole article at Foreign Affairs (pay wall), but I
see this in the second paragraph:

"... the United States is gearing up for a new era—one marked not by
unchallenged U.S. dominance but by a rising China and a vindictive
Russia seeking to undermine U.S. leadership and refashion global
politics in their favor."

The current administration has seemed to facilitate the undermining
of U.S. leadership, and the State Department appears to be in
Trump's pocket, so I'm wondering just how the United States is
"gearing up"? I suppose I should subscribe and read the whole
article.
  

    
https://www.fastcompany.com/90450641/total-chaos-how-trumps-washington-is-kill
ing-the-next-generation-of-tech

That Fast Company article says that ideological chaos and government
dysfunction are undermining technology development in the U.S.: "But
Washington’s extreme dysfunction forces decision-making onto cities
and states. To make matters worse, extremists on both the far left
and the far right—who make up the majority of voters in low-turnout
local primary elections—now hold most of the power. When that
happens, balanced decision-making goes right out the window. So
instead of weighing the pros and cons of each public policy,
reaching a compromise, and then giving everyone certainty and
resolution, tech regulation today is a battle zone."

Consequently: "A world where Washington is unable to accomplish
virtually anything and where local governments are dominated by
ideological interests is a world that only puts us further behind
countries and governments that are still able to logically regulate
technology. It’s a world where we can’t protect kids from online
predators or consumers from overreaching monopolies because every
issue has to be relitigated dozens and dozens of times, rather than
patiently debated and resolved once and for all. It’s a world that
drives away new jobs and tax revenue for the sake of likes and
retweets."
  

    
Re: the Foreign Policy article, it's worth noticing that both
authors are Trump apparatchiks who left the administration to start
a think tank called the "Initiative on great power competition for
U.S. and allies/partners".


Re post-Westphalian limbo-states, how about Puerto Rico or Hong Kong?
  

    
Justin Pickard remarks: 

“I wonder if a country-by-country weather forecast is the most
helpful way to be slicing things.

“With that in mind, are there any smaller places (cities,
landscapes,
retail parks, UNESCO world heritage sites, whatever) that feel like
particularly good points of reference, in figuring out the shape of
things to come? What about people? Any individuals we should be
keeping an eye on, or who aren't getting the attention they deserve?
And how about those things that overspill or ignore the borders of
the modern nation-state?”


“Well, yeah — people from superpowers tend to overestimate
governments and what they can achieve.  It’s often rather
superstitious, like the assumption that the Archbishop can lead
prayers about the weather. 

*When you’re in a small, weak country with a dinky, indifferent
government, people tend to tackle their big problems culturally.
“It’s really shameful and inappropriate that scandalous-person there
should be doing something so wicked that is so unlike
Us-Here-in-Ruritania.”  There’s a ton of that scoldiness in modern
social media because there’s no such thing as a legislative remedy.

*So if governments are less potent and worth less attention, what
matters now? — and I’m thinking it’s most likely oligarchs.  Why
waste time fretting about Republican elected officials, when
right-wing Congresspeople don’t care about each other?  Obviously
they care about Trump, the Murdochs and the Kochs.
  

    


*It would be good to have some authoritative, vetted publication
along the line of “Foreign Policy” that covered the politically
active ultra-rich.  Admittedly, they mostly work though cut-outs and
think-tanks, they don’t hop out of the limo and personally kick ass
and take names, but it would make interesting reading.  Especially,
oligarchs themselves would read it.

*it’s not unusual that the wealthy should dominate governments.  But
the semi-covert breed of oligarch called “curator” is new — rich,
offshored warlords.  Maybe they’re better understood as rich people
usurping what are normally nation-state prerogatives.  Certainly
they’ve got as much wealth as many nation-states, and they also have
arms and soldiers. 

*Also, armed oligarchs, the curators, want to kill each other. 
They’re not, like, cordial rich-guy pals at Davos Forum.  For years
Erik Prince of Blackwater has been urging anyone who listens to
assassinate the Iranian General Suleimani, and Prince finally got
his way.  So you have to wonder if maybe it’s open season on armed
billionaires from now on.  
  

    

*There are places on earth that aren’t in nation-states, like those
frozen conflicts and state-failure areas that I mentioned earlier. 
However, the truly novel development for 02020 is the
Xinjiang-style, Kashmir-Style, Internet blackout zone, inside a
functional nation.  

*You just shut down the cellphone towers and the routers and leave
the rebels to stew in their info-darkness.  India even blacked-out
their own capital for a while.  It would not surprise me to see this
practice spread or even get written into law: like, Kashmir is on
double-secret probation!  They can’t have any Internet or phones
until they bow the knee!!

*So what is daily life like in these newly-deprived areas?  We know
what a pre-Internet situation looks like, but a post-Internet
situation — what are the political implications?  If you live there,
what are you supposed to do with yourself?  

*In Cuba they have long had what they call “the Weekly Packet,”
which is a terabyte thumb-drive of, just, samizdat copied Internet
stuff for the blacked-out Cuba-zone.  It’s rather like a monthly
State of the World summary, but with lots of stolen entertainment.  

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

So should EVERYBODY read that “packet”? Would it do any good in
Kashmir or Xinjiang?  Should somebody build a USA Paquete, just in
case the Washington Post and New York Times get blacked-out as
enemies-of-the-people, or maybe a QAnon Paquete so you can continue
your heroic struggle against pedophile pizza parlors after Facebook
bans you?  Nobody has thought any of this through.
  

    
Speaking of curators... all television news in Russia is in a
relationship to the state similar to Fox News' relationship to the
Republican party (which is attempting to become synonymous with "the
state," seeking complete and total dominance of government). 

A 2017 Guardian piece describes how it works: "... reporters working
for state news outlets – which effectively are almost all news
outlets in Russia – are public servants first and journalists second
(if at all)."

Interesting comment: "... in the US and in Russia, the media are
often distracted with outrage over absurd behaviour and nonsensical
public statements while ignoring what those in power want to be
ignored."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/24/putin-russia-media-state
-government-control
  

    

"vast barbarian hordes of AirBnB nomads."

chortle!




i would love to see what a post-Internet something looks like. i would miss
y'all, but i'd welcome people existing in real life, engaging with their
real communities, coming out of their global-bubble-pods  to break bread
and fix roads and take on climate collapse together.
  

    
Online relationships are valuable, we don't have to ditch those
connections in order to have physical community. They sorta work
together, in fact. We just have to define the real problems, and
deal with 'em. Spending time together online is not a problem, but
jacking in obsessively to the exclusion of other aspects of our
lives is most certainly a Bad Thing. It's okay to look through the
window of your device from time to time, but it's wrong to fall
through a virtual rabbit hole, to lose your sense of reality, to
confuse media with experience.

One of my talks was about a confusion driven by the persistence of
sci-fi notions in contemporary culture. Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel
Universe et al have become myths that we almost believe. And we
believe without real evidence that time travel could be a thing,
that interplanetary travel is inevitable, that ships might travel at
warp speed through wormholes, that artificial intelligence will
evolve to resemble human intelligence/awareness. Our constant media
exposure to fictional narratives leaves us confused about what's
real.

Perhaps we should take more time to just be, to see things as they
are, to get to know our minds apart from embedded narratives.  

I've noticed in media an increase in horrific fantasy imagery and
narrative, and wonder what that's doing to our heads... to our
beliefs... to our expectations.

Garbage in... what's coming out?
  

    


totally with you on that, jonl! GIGO for sure. 

>  Perhaps we should take more time to just be

yes. i find it surprisingly difficult. my mind wants to spend all its time
chunking away at geopolitics and gender issues and community politics and
and and and. some of us require substantial amounts of time away from
screens and news media in order to recover a bit of sanity and balance. a
one-hour walk a few times a week doesn't cut it.