Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
   Although I truly admire its honesty, and it even cheers me up to
see it said, this is one of the most wistful things I’ve read in
ages.  November 8, 2016: that dreadful day when Big Tech first
turned evil!  The day when WIRED magazine should have switched from
relentless Industry booster to a moralizing scold!  

   WIRED is a little late at managing that transition, but they’re
done it now.

    Poor WIRED!   If I could have shown this screed to Jane Metcalfe
and Louis Rossetto on the day they first appeared on my Austin
doorstep — “Hi!  We’re starting a cool new magazine in San
Francisco, would you like to write for us?” I bet they would have
run home to Amsterdam and cried.

https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-work-together-fix-mess-we-made/
  

    

https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-work-together-fix-mess-we-made/

    With that said, that said, in my opinion, the tech scene is
kinda overdoing it with the self-scourging tech-lash.  The techies
happen to be top dogs in a particularly rotten era, so people
naturally blame them for most-everything.  Also, the tech moguls
love the limelight and would much rather look like massive baddies
than just blundering morons who ran themselves into a ditch. 
Sometimes a hand-wringing mea culpa is a great way to play drama
queen.

    When you look around, obviously the other major industries are
just as bad or worse than Big Tech is.  Other big American
industries are not moral exemplars of corporate good-citizenship and
kindness to the user-base.  The US has become a crooked country, and
its industries look and act crooked.  

    Real estate is wicked, cruel, unworkable.  The car biz kills and
pollutes. The arms biz, it’s huge and takes whatever it wants. 
Aviation is crashing headlong, electricity blacks people out,
nuclear was an awful, irretrievable mistake in tech development…. 
Cable TV is blatantly corrupt and exploitative, the most fiercely
hated US biz of them all, while Big Pharma kills people outright,
and even agriculture lives on handouts….. The fossil-fuel biz is
super-ultra-terrible,  literal crush-the-world bad.  They’ve become
super-villains, in a trip-to-The-Hague level of
crime-against-humanity.  There’s never been a major industry so
wicked as people who can melt the poles, set continents on fire and
lie about it.  They make Zuckerberg look like a Teletubby.

     Even American church pastors are actively wicked in MMXX,
they’re become pro-Trump race-hate misogynists.  You couldn’t dream
of deriving a serious moral lesson from any major American preacher
— they’re men of God, but they’re starkly obvious nogoodniks.  Bill
Gates has ten times the moral authority of any American theocrat —
because  at least the guy’s a serious philanthropist who puts in the
hours.  America’s full-time ethical leaders are blatant Elmer Gantry
figures that no sane stakeholder would trust with a burnt-out match.
  

    

    You can’t be a morally squeaky-clean commercial enterprise
within a corrupted society.  That can’t be done.  Professional
integrity isn’t possible either — the editor of WIRED is arguing
here that software engineers ought to act more like
engineer-engineers, but China is a Communist-engineering
technocracy.  China’s got engineers out the wazoo, and they’re
engineering Xinjiang and face-surveillance.  Osama bin Laden was an
engineer.  Engineers are just a profession like doctors or lawyers,
and those professions can’t look good when politics are crooked and
the health system kills people.

    The simple truth is, it is humiliating to live in an oligarchy. 
Injustice prevails, and most people have to sacrifice their freedom,
dignity and initiative.  It feels like a bad scene all around
because it’s indeed just plain bad, and with few paths of moral
redemption.   Cool hardware in your hand doesn’t redeem you from the
general air of corruption, arrogance, oppression, repression, and
all-around shame and sleaze.
  

    

     Unlike this WIRED editorial, I don’t think that the tech biz
has the innate ability to grab its own bootstraps, clean itself up
and march ahead manfully.  That’s like expecting American
health-care to miraculously reform itself because doctors and nurses
somehow become more Hippocratic.  

   What will likely happen is no particular reform, or maybe bits
and pieces, while a Black Swan appears that makes all these concerns
seem irrelevant.  Reading this ten years from now will be like
reading about people trying to reform their videotape rental biz.

     Voltaire lived in an Oligarchy, and he was an Enlightenment
figure.  The lesson of Voltaire is that it’s better to be honest
than to try to be good.
  

    
Via email from Bruce McLaughlin:

Perhaps “sci-fi notions in contemporary culture” became popular
because people were looking for stories to hang all of the
technological changes we have been going through on.

I think “horrific fantasy imagery and narrative” may be an attempt
by people to come to grips with the global political move to
oligarchy along with the disastrous effects of global warming. In 20
years Game of Thrones may seem like a truer account of the world
than West Wing.

Over the course of history there have been human settlements and
civilizations run by people who did not value the truth. I think
that is where we are headed now. Pointing this out is not going to
be enough to stop it.
  

    
From Alberto Cottica, via a mutual friend:

I enjoyed the broad, grim sweep of Bruce’s “everywhere is kind of
the same” in Posts 5 to 7. But I wonder: where does that leave the
European Union? That’s the one polity that can never go
ethno-nationalist, not without completely disintegrating. I live in
Brussels, with maybe half a foot in the Eurosphere. From where I
stand I can see the EU shudder and lurch, but to be honest I have no
idea where all this is going. The EU does seem to have a chance to
do something completely different – almost an obligation to do so,
just by sheer inertia in a world that has suddenly changed its
direction. The buzzwords are getting weirder (“Green EU Deal”,
“Internet of Humans”), and von der Leyen is still mostly an unknown
quantity.

Any intuition to share from you guys?

Thanks, keep up the good work!
  

    
>>>
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."
>>>

Can we pause for a moment to laugh at, or cry over, what passes for
"far-left" these days in the eyes of a publication like Fast
Company? Most of the positions of today's Democratic Party activists
who are furthest "left" from the party's center would be perfectly
recognizable to FDR or LBJ. And not because those positions are
unpopular; but because one side has done a great job for the past
few decades of spreading reactionary disinformation, while the other
mostly dozed off and let it happen.

As someone whose job involves reporting on and analyzing
environmental and climate politics, I feel desperate for better ways
to describe positions we've called "right" and "left" for the past
150 years.
  

    
"because one side has done a great job for the past few decades of
spreading reactionary disinformation, while the other mostly dozed
off and let it happen."

I would say that differently. I would say one side had declared war,
and the other side didn't have enough of a clue to realize it.
  

    
Very well said.
  

    
I stumbled onto this one while trying to improve my mood and slide
the black dog out the door... One reason we have to be cheerful:
toilets are more effective than ever, and using less water than
ever.

"The long, sustained greening of American johns has been one of the
most transformative factors in keeping drought-stricken western
cities from running dry. The proof is in the water meters: In cities
from Denver to Las Vegas to Phoenix, water use is either staying
stable or going down, even while populations continue to rise."

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/how-toilets-saved-the-west/
  

    
in the spirit of 'as above so below'

larry lessig suing the nytimes for 'clickbait defamation'

the .org top level domain registry sold under stealth of night to
private equity.
  

    

*The new World Economic Forum "Global Risk Report" is out for MMXX. 
I generally leaf through these every year.

*They rarely surprise me, but I enjoy reading the world's problems
framed in anodyne Swiss technocrat-ese.  It's language that's easy
to parody.  I could write just like that myself, if I didn't prefer
to discuss the same topics in a wisecracking, cyberpunk,
jargon-laden bohemian dialect.

*Normally the Davos crowd just worry about what CEOs worry about, ie
economics, but now they're plenty worried about drowning and/or
being on fire.  From a CEO's perspective, of course.

*I'm getting a little worried about the personal safety of the
well-to-do globalists who show up for Davos.  I'm not sure they
understand the moral effect it would have if some ticked-off
oligarch "curator" decided to strafe Davos with a drone.  Of course
everybody would assume it was some commie terrorist or fundie zealot
attacking the rich, but the rich don't get it about the predatory
rich attacking the Establishment rich. They don't get it that the
oligarchs are arming and there's no leash left.

https://www.weforum.org/global-risks
  

    

*Here's a few excerpted quotes from the WEF Risks Report -- I like
the way they class up our WELL discussion here. They should flash by
in the WELL discourse, much like Davos women of the European
mistress-class, sleek, multilingual secretary-assistants with
leather clipboards, who emerge from limos clad in Armani.  For a lot
of Davos attendees, it's basically a week-long event of top-end
sex-tourism, a kind of Swiss Ibiza with celebrity lectures instead
of disco.  You kind of have to see that to believe it, but, well,
that's who they are.

"Powerful economic, demographic and technological forces are shaping
a new balance of power. The result is an unsettled geopolitical
landscape — one in which states are increasingly viewing
opportunities and challenges through unilateral lenses. What were
once givens regarding alliance structures and multilateral systems
no longer hold as states question the value of long-standing
frameworks, adopt more nationalist postures in pursuit of individual
agendas and weigh the potential geopolitical consequences of
economic decoupling. (...)

"Amid this darkening economic outlook, citizens’ discontent has
hardened with systems that have failed to promote advancement.
Disapproval of how governments are addressing profound economic and
social issues has sparked protests throughout the world, potentially
weakening the ability of governments to take decisive action should
a downturn occur. Without economic and social stability, countries
could lack the financial resources, fiscal margin, political capital
or social support needed to confront key global risks." 
  

    

WEF climate crisis MMXX, paging Greta Thunberg:

"Climate change is striking harder and more rapidly than many
expected. The
last five years are on track to be the warmest
on record, natural disasters are becoming more intense and more
frequent, and last year witnessed unprecedented extreme weather
throughout the world. Alarmingly, global temperatures are on track
to increase by at least 3°C towards the end of the century—twice
what climate experts have warned is the limit to avoid the most
severe economic, social and  environmental consequences.

"The near-term impacts of climate change add up to a planetary
emergency that will include loss of life, social and geopolitical
tensions and negative economic impacts.  For the first time in the
history of the Global Risks Perception Survey, environmental
concerns dominate the top long-term risks by likelihood among
members of the World Economic Forum’s multistakeholder community;
three of the top five risks by impact are also environmental (see
Figure I, The Evolving Risks Landscape 2007–2020)....

*The graphics are good in this "Global Risks Report."  I recommend
it. I pay attention, hey, I'm not even kidding.

https://www.weforum.org/global-risks 
  

    
Increasingly often I have to turn off the news feeds, hide the
phone, ditch the computers, shut down the rather imposing flat
screen that fills our living room wall, and look outside the
surrounding windows, where the grass is growing same as it's grown
my whole life. Birds fly by and squirrels scurry along the fence. 
It's much warmer than before, but not yet distressingly so. 

While the world has changed so much in my seven decades, and change
has hyper-accelerated over the last couple of decades, I remind
myself that the computer-mediated world inside my head isn't the
real world; my newsfeeds don't represent reality accurately. When
I'm still, following my breath, everything is change and everything
his changeless.  In the wildest of times, silence is crucial.
  

    
Climate change is giving us a physics lesson on momentum.  Seeing is
believing. The second derivative of ocean temperature is positive.  We are
warming the ocean faster year over year.

FUDDs Law:  If you push something hard enough, it will fall over.

Off to Davos to kick that around.  It turns out to be a banking problem.
  

    
Expand on that last sentence, a little, Bill?

( please ? )
  

    
BlackRock recently said they were going to take climate impact into
its banking decisions.  There’s certainly money to be made in the
transition to green energy.  
  

    
Okay, what is Vladimir Putin up to?  Why does he have to dissolve
his own government and fire everybody, when events seem to be going
great for him?  You’re not supposed to lead a revolutionary coup
d’etat against your own government when you yourself already control
everything in it.  That looks either Maoist or whimsical, and
neither one of those is good.

Maybe Putin’s trying to demonstrate that the legal Russian
government is paper-thin and he can actually rule by secret decree
by just using spies, “curators” and billionaire oligarchs.  Maybe
the facade of legality is more trouble to have to him than it’s
worth.  But people do like to have these cover stories.  If you’re a
spy and you have no cover story, you’re not even a “spy.”  You’re
just some guy standing on a heap of cash with a cluster of
headphones and telescopes.  People can see you.  They might shoot at
you.  You’re like a crab without a shell.
  

    

Nobody seems to have seen this event coming, especially inside
Russia.  They’re just kinda standing around gawping.  I hope that
Vladimir hasn’t simply wigged-out, just gone unilateral and guzzled
his own bathwater.  Vladimir never drinks vodka, but he’s an old man
who still fancies himself as a muscular judo tough-guy.  An aging
man who dumps the mother of the children for a much younger gymnast
mistress, that’s the kind of guy who is gonna skin-pop a lot of
performance enhancers. Maybe his judgement is wandering, and he’s
getting impulsive.

I don’t think that Vladimir takes the Libya thing seriously, because
he shouldn’t be pulling an internally destabilizing stunt while also
launching a daring, offshored imperialist adventure.  Something’s
just not adding up here.  I guess it’s time for some Kremlinology.
  

    
The Guardian has this Putin quote: "We all have to think together
how to build a structure of power so that it better corresponds to
the pre-election period and prepares the country for the period
after the presidential election in March." Their interpretation:
"Today's events suggested that Mr Putin was determined to install
trusted allies in positions of influence before his departure from
power next year."

CNN: "By taking steps to tighten his grip on power, Putin is also
sending a message to the wider world. More Putin in Russia means
more Putin on the international stage. And if the last few years
have taught us anything, that means a Russia willing to go to
extraordinary lengths to act as a direct rival for influence to the
US-led world order -- and create more headaches for America and its
allies."

Maybe he's making room in his government for an expatriate Trump? 
  

    
As far as Putin’s objectives in Russia and in Libya, he’s definitely
becoming concerned with his legacy. His actions in Russia are most
likely the result of cognitive dissonance between his desire for a
Russia with strong institutions that will survive him, crossed with
his desire to have those institutions subject to his singular
authority. You can’t have both, but he’s still going to try.

The Libya thing is far more complex, and raises the topic of what
Russia’s goals are in Africa altogether. The allure of having
leverage over a weak oil-rich state with Mediterranean port access
and (relative) proximity to both southern Europe and the Atlantic is
pretty evident. Overland access to armaments markets are also an
obvious plus, given the popularity of cold war arms and vehicles
across the continent. Just about every African country I’ve been to
that has an air force has a few MI-24s and MI-17s in their air, and
the reality is that you can buy 40 used MI-17s for the cost of a
single used Blackhawk helicopter. And like software, armaments
aren’t just a product anymore, they’re a service with ongoing
training and maintenance contracts that persist beyond the initial
weapon purchase (AAAS? Armaments as a service?). The utility of
Russian activity in a place like Madagascar is much less obvious,
but it’s definitely happening.

All of this happens at an interesting time for both French and US
military engagement in Africa. Recent French casualties from the
helicopter crash in Mali have spurred some reconsideration of their
role in the Sahel, but Macron’s paternalistic attitude towards
Francophone Africa has also triggered a “don’t let the door hit you
in the ass” backlash on the part of the various African leaders. The
US DoD is also rethinking their AFRICOM footprint and general
commitment to their African allies. This would shift the burden for
US security assistance in Africa almost exclusively to the State
Department, which is far less able to operate outside of major urban
centers in the more unstable countries. I mention this because
target locations for groups like AQIM, Boko Haram and ISIS in Africa
seem to be moving to weaker and weaker states that are less able to
control their own territory. The circumstances in Burkina Faso and
Mali, for example, have degraded dramatically just over the past
year, with extremist groups killing hundreds of soldiers, and
thousands of civilians in those two countries alone.

Understanding that there are plenty of good arguments for
anti-interventionism, what should be done for countries that are
outgunned by malicious non-state actors in their midst and
desperately asking for assistance?
  

    
> Russian governmental reorg.

Perhaps the simple story is not only simple but true: oil.

There was something I read at one point that I never followed up
upon: the biggest single part of the backstory to the collapse of
the Soviet Union had to do with a price of oil which, after the Arab
oil shocks in the 70s, cratered again in the 80s.  Apparent here:

http://chartsbin.com/view/oau

One part of that story is price-supply push: the price rises of the
70s greatly aided both North Sea oil in Europe and Alaskan oil for
the US.  It'd be interesting to do the research to see just where
elsewhere further new supply came online.

It takes time though for things to play out and it took something on
the order of 10 yrs before this really undermined the finances of
the Soviet Union.

There's a thing to keep in mind.  I worked these numbers once (but
don't have that in front of me now) - oil is king of commodities and
may represent half or more of all natural resource revenue
worldwide.  So as much as the SU/Russia has all these other natural
resources - diamonds, etc - income from oil is crucial and there's
no substitute.

John D Rockefeller said something to the effect of: oil is the best
business you can be in - and the second best.  When times are good,
profits gush.  Might be hard to know what to do with all the cash.

Proximately, oil again crashed from > $100/bbl to its present range
of 50-60 in 2014, so it's been half its former value for something
like 5-6 yrs.  It takes time for things to play out - and Vlad just
reorganized his govt.

The Russians are an ingenious people and I imagine there are a lot
of inside stories of the brilliant successes they've had
maintaining, and even [somewhat] increasing oil production in
Russia's aging fields.  That's a lot of the story why their interest
in the Arctic is so acute.  Even supposing effective Arctic
geopolitical brinksmanship, and the Russians seize a very large part
of the Arctic for exploration, the capital costs are going to be
astonishing.  This is not your grandfather's west Siberian field. 
It's part of the Russian shtick though to believe they can rise to
heroic deeds in particular (historically) those that attach to
taming new, and impossibly difficult, geographies.  We'll see. 
Declining demography doesn't help.

So Vlad, and the Russians generally, are in a pickle.  I think we
ascribe a Russian, or Soviet, govt more stability than is justified
and it's pretty clear how that worked out last time.  On the
positive side for them the economics of kleptocracy probably are
better historically understood than Communism so that helps - if
you're Putin & Co.

Cyberwarfare?  Still a sideshow to oil.  Hopes are high.  As far as
I can see the most successful cyber attack wasn't anything either
the Russians or Chinese did - rather it was Stuxnet which was the
product of an Israeli-US collaboration.

It would seem that the Soviet Union's, and Russia's, perennial
geostragtice role is spoiler and while it's a less expenisve
proposition than say hegemon, it still has its bills to be paid and
there's nothing even remotely on the horizon that can pay those
bills like oil.
  

    
This is always useful.  Where does Russia make its money on export
markets?  

https://oec.world/en/profile/country/rus/

It's dominated by the dark brown industrial category on the left
whose official name is "Mineral Products" where in Russia's case
that means hydrocarbons.  If I total the 4 largest numbers I get 

(+ 28 17 5.8 4.7)
55.5

55.5% of all exports by dollar value.  Actually, that's better
(less) than other oil exporters such as Saudi Arabia or Venezuela
whose intl income is pretty much all oil.

Wheat is tiny - in dollar value.  What about Russian arms sales?

https://www.army-technology.com/features/arms-exports-by-country/

For 2018, #2 behind the US but, while geopolitically important, arms
bring in only $6.4 bln.  Which leads me to wonder: is the Russian
arms industry even profitable and if it isn't it's a drain, but a
small one.  The Soviet Union massively subsidized arms production
(and one assumes oil income helped in that regard) and arms
production may well still be subsidized.  Probably provides a lot of
employment in a country that doesn't have many industries - to speak
of in volume terms.
  

    
https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/the-chefs-global-footprints

Here's an article about attempting to follow the "curator" Yevgeny
Prighozin by following his private jets.  Jets are still subject to
planetary regulation, so they're a traceable stand-in for Prigozhin
himself.  Even though there's no particular reason that Prigozhin
should be inside any particular plane (he has several). Occasionally
his wife and kids release a selfie from within a plane, because
they're not spooky "curators" themselves, they're just common,
everyday rich people.

 Maybe Prigozhin could cover his tracks in future by buying a fleet
of time-share jets, and then hopping on and off of them.  

Since Prighozhin came to prominence after the seizure of Crimea,
he's been in a lot of odd places.  Generally he sets up some
commercial enterprise on the ground in Whatever-stan, as well as
shuffling in some tough-guy militia.