Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
At home we had a sense that society was irretrievably divided that
was as strong as what we feel now, divided across lines that weren't
all the same as now.

Some people really believed in the rationale for the Vietnam War,
blocking the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. The observation
that the US was directly continuing French imperialism never gained
much traction, largely because the US never stood to receive much
imperial benefit from the war. For most Americans all the wars in
the Middle East have been more distant and more abstract.
  

    
On covid: February 26 of 2000 - nearly two years ago - I estimated
about a million covid deaths in America. 

Vinay @leashless
https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1232750570668199942
#CoronaVirusPandemic Here's what to expect.

1) >50% of people will catch the virus at some point
2) <1% of those people will die

In America, that means about a million deaths. Sounds a lot? Same as
4 months of normal rate mortality. 50/50 you won't know anyone who
dies of it.

=====

Don't believe anybody who tells you we didn't know it was coming.
We've known something like this, probably a lot worse, was coming
for decades.

Why the governments didn't get on top of it properly I do not know.
It's been an absolute farce.
  

    
(A moment's interruption to request that, if you tweet about this
conversation, please tag it #SotW2022. Thanks! 

We now return you to our regular Welling ... )
  

    
That's an EXTRA burden of four months' worth of normal mortality.
  

    
"Amway for incels" is cute, but a note on incels.

Autism. A very serious percentage of the incel population are on the
autism spectrum: they're wailing in pain about lacking the
capability to interface with society or find partners who will
accept them as they are.

It is, in short, generally ableism of the worst kind.

Sure, there may be some neurotypical incels who are simply assholes
but if instead of "incel" you think "bitter, fucked up autistic
people who can't function in society because of their disabilities,
and are held up for public ridicule by people who have no fear of
being made accountable for their actions" you would be closer to the
mark.

It's pretty obvious when you see it. I don't know whether ASD is 10%
of incels or 90%, but it's a culture absolutely rooted in autism and
their own jokes and memes make that abundantly clear. 

https://www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/radical-online-communities-and
-their-toxic-allure-for-autistic-men/

Mocking people on the spectrum should not be tolerated, and the
incel discourse has to change to reflect that a lot of them are
struggling very, very hard to socialize in this society, without the
neurological advantages that most of us have when attempting it. And
I'm sure their suicide rates are massively elevate - if anybody
cared enough about them to check.
  

    
I'm on the autism spectrum and I take exception to a lot of that
post.
  

    
Interested in hearing your thoughts.

Obviously many incels are on the autism spectrum does not mean that
many people on the autism spectrum are incels.
  

    
Self-identifying incels have murdered at least 61 people in the
last few years but tell us more about how this is ableist.
  

    
How many of those incels were on the autism spectrum?
  

    
Good conversation, all. and thanks again to Jon for roping me into
the State of the World again. I just returned from Cyprus 2 days
ago, where I just curated the latest exhibition at Neme Art Center,
called "Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls" with Wade
Wallerstein of Transfer Gallery, Geert Lovink as our keynote
speaker, and Negin Ehtesabian as our guest artist, live from Iran
(we had to fight the Cultural ministry to get her in the travel
ban). We saw the Eschelon facility in Akrotiri, the Green Line in
Nicosia, and the St. Nicholas of the Cats Monastery. Seems they had
a snake infestation and St. Helen of Byzantium sent St. Nicholas
with cats to cure the infestation. Didn't see a single snake. Lots
of cats.  Cutest monastery on the planet.

And we were on the beach. Too cold to go in, but beautiful
nonetheless.

And hello to Vinay, who I've spent copious time at conferences and
in Dubai, and Bruce, who would ask "What'd ya find cool this year?"
at Jon's.

BTw, I'm back in America. Took a tenure track job at a small liberal
arts college in Minnesota, for family reasons. I miss Dubai, though,
especially with the expo running. That'll be a topic.

I've actually spent a lot of time in Kazakhstan, and did workshops
for the US Embassy there. Weird place; Almaty varies from nice
post-Soviet to proto-Borat near the bus station, traffic control is
optional, and the notions of identity are just odd to me. (The
indigenous Kazakhs identify with BLM instead of US Indigenous
discourses,
 and vary between post soviet atheist, Muslim, Shamanic Tengrist,
and batshit crazy at times) Did you know it's the 9th largest
country by landmass, but only 15+ million...

So, what do I think is going on there? The gas prices are a
pretense, fueled by frustration with the Tokayev administration's
policies. KZ is fairly comfortable if you are rich or connected. But
there have been frequent lockdowns and repressions, and I see
colleagues getting arrested who I've known in my time there.
Vigorous protest scene.

Energy shortages linked to crypto? If so, it isn't Kazakh, but
likely Chinese. I do know that the Tehran outages were due in part
to Chinese crypto farms leeching energy off the grids in south Iran,
and I would not be surprised with the One Road plan that China might
have mega coin farms there too.  Don't take any of this stuff at
face value. The truth is that the Qazaqs have been bristling at the
social problems there, and this isn't about gas at all. They want a
Western-style parliamentary democracy.

And interesting that a lot of the topics have been Western, lots
more to discuss.

Musk, Don't Look Up, and the Starlink/Chinese controversy,
Bruce's comments on Wired.
Much more.
  

    
And how many incels have taken their own lives in that period?

What are their suicide rates like?

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/20/17314846/incel-support-group-therapy-black-pill-
mental-health

Some very very bad stuff is happening here. Stopping it is not going
to come from further demonizing these people: a lot of them probably
need professional help, and their subculture is going to have to be
dismantled very carefully indeed if more people aren't going to kill
others or themselves as it gets done.

I don't even know which agency would do it. Homeland security? The
FBI?
  

    
This is fascinating. 

I have to wonder if empathy/sympathy/understanding/tolerance comes
more easily to men, as they're not the targets of the hatred and
even violence generated by that community. 

As a journalist of many years, I've got a fairly well-controlled gag
reflex. But skimming those sites for research - well, let's just say
there aren't enough showers in the world. And the idea that we could
"demonize" people spewing that stuff is hard to swallow.

I don't know that drawing a connection between those "communities"
(hellholes) and those with autism helps the causes of understanding
and tolerance, ultimately. Autistic or not, it takes a certain kind
of wiring, and a vile hatred of half the people on the planet, to
find any of that acceptable.

I don't have autism. I think if I were on the high-functioning end
of that spectrum*, my reaction to an assertion that I'm
over-represented among incels would hit me in a very bad way.

I'd like to hear more from Peter about how that post strikes him. 

*I'm working to be careful and respectful in my language here. If
I'm mistaken in my choice of words, please correct me.
  

    
Addendum: I'm off to read the article Vinay linked, and will weigh
in with any changes to the above.
  

    
Mozilla backed off their crypto nonsense. Well, they are "reviewing" it.

<https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1479143342495744009>
  

    
This is a worthwhile topic while we're at it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qhwjo/eli5_how_come_we_ha
ve_twice_as_many_female/

Basically about 60% of the men who ever existed didn't succeed in
passing on their genes to the present generation. Most of them just
didn't have kids.

Hard to find stats on non-paternity in America but it seems to be
that 10% to 20% of men have zero children.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/17/male-childlessness-not-re
producing-what-am-i

My suggestion is that the incels are the first large group of people
(remember: there are a fair number of female incels, they are not
all men - I think?) who are actually reckoning with these kinds of
facts in a collective way. We've gone from "a couple of folks in the
village who didn't marry because nobody would have them" through to
vast numbers of people talking about their feelings of total
rejection online together.

I think a parallel case *might* be the "pro-ana" communities where
young women (mostly, I'm sure there are men too) herd each-other
into the jaws of suicide by voluntary starvation. Same general
degree of toxicity, but with an absence of violent murder as an
outcome: mostly women rather than mostly men, I guess. Fewer guns.

An awful lot of people who feel broken and mal-adapted in ways which
they think, sometimes with good reason, will never get better,
talking about what life is for and what life is worth...

It's not that surprising that a few percent conclude it is worth
nothing.

I don't have a solution for this, but I know that demonization and
stigmatization will make it worse rather than better, and push the
"less radicalized" towards the horrible extremes.
  

    
Thanks, all for your points. <axon>'s quip started this side loop and can we
close it now?
  

    
Ok, I will change the subject. 

I am becoming worried (I guess you could call it) that the people
who planned the "Green Bay Sweep" stuff where a bunch of GOP
Congresspeople would work with Pence to de-certify the electoral
count and remand it all to the states, where they control more state
houses and thus would win the Presidency, will not be found by the
DOJ to have committed a prosecutable crime with their coy
explanation that they were interpreting the wording of the
Constitution differently, but legitimately, and that they never
planned for the mob to go violent. Thus none of them pay any legal
price while all the shock troops go down,though they will stand back
and stand by wearing that badge of martyrdom for the next time.

So, then it remains to be made clear whether or not Trump, gleefully
watching TV while it was all going down, in his "supreme dereliction
of duty" did in fact commit a crime by doing nothing, given that he
said "peacefully" and all that other BS in his speech at the rally.

This to me is their path into the clear.  Coupled with the Supreme
Court keeping it hands off of stopping these voter suppression laws
in the state, or nullifying or neutering whatever this year's
Congress passes relating to voter suppression - which I think they
will do if it assume too much authority over the states to their
liking.

Some of us here well remember Watergate and its details and how it
unfolded. It was the GOP turning on Nixon that changed it all. Yes
the tapes made it easier for them. But fast forward to today: will
whatever is equivalent that, when it comes out from the January 6
Congressional Panel, cause the GOP to change because the principle
is just too big to ignore?
  

    
"Principle? I'm not familiar with this term." - every Republican
  

    
 Two points for possible expansion …

<58> Is China/Taiwan parallel to, or extremely different from …
Russia/Ukraine?  ( Comments welcome. )

<74> I gets the debt chain and thence VISA, SWIFT, banking (
including but not limited to fractional reserve ), consumer finance.
I wouldn't mind, on the other hand, a post breaking out / unpacking
/ elaborating on "how IPOs work and the stock market in general."

Bonus:  shining the light upon pension funds & State pension
systems, and the shadows that might cast … on State of the World 

This year's State of the World may be starting off better than the
state of the world in and of itself: may it continue.  Thank you,
one and all 
  

    
just a regular middle aged fellow here.

I don't get cryptocurrency
I don't get NFTs
I don't get FB Meta
I really don't see any utility in blockchain *at all*. Feel like my
declining cognitive dexterity takes a bad hit every time I mentally
process some tiny aspect of the implications of it. complexity for
complexity's sake seems not just pointless, but actively
hostile/destructive. Not everything requires more orders of
magnitude of abstraction to be useful. yet still another case of
'less is more'.
  

    
Re: Politics, Jan. 6th, etc.
Having been outside of the USA for the whole tenure of the Evil
Carrot, my take is that Americans (myself not considering himself
one, but a hybrid, as half my family is Iranian) were building this
situation for a long, long time. The value of the US-built from WWII
has been sucked out but the plutocrats, sent overseas; the distrust
of the government has been eroding since Nixon, Neoliberalist
destruction of the middle class since Reagan (freezing of wages,
reconfiguring of the educational system for minimum critical
thinking, privatization, post 9/11 militarization of police and
populist culture).  But Americans just have this idea that America
is unassailable, and Fortress America will never fall. Such is the
way of American Exceptionalism.

For all its issues, I often have a better quality of life in places
like Turkey, Bulgaria, and I won't say the UAE, as that was a posh
life, but at least they had their shit together in regards to
vaccination and organization.

Watching from afar, I watched Predators lazily sailing out to the
Gulf, and every time Trump didn't get to touch the glowing orb
F-22's roared over my apartment in Abu Dhabi.  My wife said, "At
least there was;t a bomb...", as she was bombed by Saddam for the
first 10 years of her life.

My point is that in the 5 years I was overseas, I saw an absolute
power vacuum in the US, the world stopped caring about us for
leadership, and American politics became The Apprentice.

I don't think Jan. 6th is being taken a tenth as seriously as it
should. It was a Domestic 9/11, and articles like yesterday's 5 ways
to clean up the mess might need a little more toughness, like taking
a German approach to hate speech and fake news (making them jailable
offenses), and mad gods like Musk, Bezos, etc. who haven't the basic
inkling of martian geodynamics (no magnetosphere [solar wind would
rip an atmosphere off] and maximum .34 atmosphere density) - No
planet B discourse is spot on.

I for one loved Don't Look Up.  I also loved the criticisms that it
"wasn't fun enough", which was just Inception-esque. Bravo to
DeCaprio for being brave enough for invoking Network's "I'm mad as
hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore" speeches are a real
application of the trope. Also, the lunatic billionaire and the
"acceptable risk" of 40-odd percent of people not surviving in the
Ark (sorry, spoilers), shows Musk's utter madness in his recent
tweet that he's willing to coup any country not willing to give him
lithium.

Not to mention that few are talking about the Twaites Ice Sheet in
Antarctica, which, _when_ it goes, will raise global seas by 10
feet.

Sorry to be a downer (the American way of eternal "awesomeness"
being thrown to the side a minute), but while I enjoyed Biden's
speech,  I thought he should have gone Network, and walked up to the
camera lens and told America to get it together or else we risk
everything.

But in the end, America has become amazingly irrelevant after Trump.
I mean, the Dubai Expo has its pageants about incredibly
unsustainable futures. I hope the world can clean up our mess for
us.

Yikes.
  

    
Regarding Wired (with best respects to Bruce, who I hope I can
consider at least a collegial breakfast partner)

I was a columnist for Artbyte Magazine (as part of the activist
collective RTMark) and editor of Intelligent Agent at the Whitney
for 10 years, as well as part of the cometary clouds of 21C and
Mondo 2000, which I regret fell to Wired. I also got to know Jon a
little through Fringeware Review, back in the day. Bravo to Mark
Frauenfelder, Cory Doctorow, and so on for keeping their stuff
running. There's a point to this.

Wired and boingBOING.com are generally the survivors, which is
great.   I also read WIRED and MIT Technology Review, and I'm
grateful for Bruce's stalwart contributions, which I feel constitute
a lot of the "heart" of that magazine. WIRED has also had great
interviews with thinkers like Paul Virilio and introduced concepts
like "The Long Tail" which I find immensely useful to this day.

This issue that I have with Wired, and I hope this does not fall on
dead ears, is that likely in wanting to satisfy CondeNast, there has
been a lot of the "VC/CEO of the month club" or the "Isn't this
cool, and we really aren't thinking about how this will cause the
digging up of Cameroon" articles.  I realize I might be too
critical, but I have to swallow WIRED's corporate reprinting of tech
press releases along with the incisive bits. I look at it like
Playboy, I read it for the cultural articles.

But in the Meta hypercapital age is there a place for a cultural
magazine dealing with tech, or are Hyperallergic, boingBOING, and so
on the places for this?  Or, in the age of plutocratic nation-states
and oligarchic platforms, is culture stripped of a voice unless it
bows to the Stacks?

With diversity and equity being a key conversation, what about
cultural equity? Even though the exhibition I curated last month
featured largely privileged artists, I intentionally included a few
non-western emerging artists, and we need to not always worry about
the behemoths. 

As I can ramble, I'll summarize. I appreciate bruce's repost of the
WIRED editorial mission, and I get it. Personally, I think that
there is a world involving technology that is far, far cooler than
what they publish, and thanks again to Bruce for being part of that.
But Wired might be more interesting if it had an article or two of
the Mondo vein (Updated, as we are not in the Tragically Hip '90s of
the Johnny Mnemonic MTV Amp or Matrix era).

I swear that I will make a few posts that are not screeds, but this
conversation seems to be pussyfooting around far too much.  I wish
Barlow was still alive to jump in, but he'd be far more nuanced. 
I'm swinging a baseball bat, if only to break some ice.
  

    
Any truth to the story that the revolt in Kazakhstan is due to
bitcoin mining there using so much energy that prices rose?
Looks like it's true that Kazakhstan does 18% of all bitcoin
mining, and that the revolt started over energy prices, but
connecting those two dots is more iffy.
  

    
Screeds are welcome here, Pat, and you're probably right that we're
pussyfooting around. And perhaps hoping/expecting for some authority
or other to fix the world so that it's suddenly better again, vs the
brutality we see in the daily infotainment reports.

I just read an E.O. Wilson quote, saying that we have “Paleolithic
emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.” h/t Prem
Chandavarkar via Nettime.

We see politicians du jour leveraging angry and brutal emotions,
emotions they've manipulated into being, like small children playing
with sticks of dynamite. We saw an explosion on January 6, 2021, and
since then some have pretended that the deadly dynamite was a mere
fireworks show for the tourists.

I don't know what Barlow would do, exactly, but we have to do it
without him. In fact, we have a dearth of great souls to guide us
from the brink; I keep looking... and hoping... for cooler heads to
combine with the kind of toughness it will take to prevail over the
chaos and misery of the moment.
  

    
Re:
"Any truth to the story that the revolt in Kazakhstan is due to
bitcoin mining there using so much energy that prices rose?"

it's a pretense.

If anything, sparks to the tinder. Kazakj=hstan has been fighting
oppressive regimes for a long time. No one is telling the real
story, possibly due to petropolitics, as Kazakhstan is a petropower.

And there's a general helplessness in light of nation-state
platforms, mad Westphalian dinosaurs panicking about their
irrelevance,and godlike oligarchs.  Mammon rules these days, while
Rome burns. As someone who has been involved with The Yes Men,
resistance is essential, but even the Facebook Papers didn't seem to
dent that behemoth. My take is that there is a possibility of the
beasts to collapse under their own weight.

We'll try to fix things when they look too broken, but the question
is whether it'll be too late or not.

BTW, Musk is just a mad god. Mars is not terraformable, and cobalt, 
lithium, and tantalum already are subjects for war. He's a rich
autistic convinced with his own genius.

HOWEVER, I do like discussions about green hydrogen and using
gravity as a battery system for hydrogeneration. super interesting.