Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Via email from Michael Bravo:

on the topic of the Kazakhstan events, it is being more and more
likely that we're seeing bulldogs under the carpet. Namely, initial
peaceful protests have been coopted to promote and execute
inter-clan wars in Kazakh power circles; it has escalated to first
fase flag riots using less educated  and more indoctrinated parts of
the populace, and even felons, and then Russian troops being invited
to quell unrest, which has additionally and quite irrevocably
tainted the whole thing even more. There's a multitude of ways it
can blow up badly, and almost none that I can see that could end up
somehow positive.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Fri 7 Jan 22 07:38>
  

    
Via email from 'fruitbatpangolin':

"I am a man of principles! And if you don't like my principles,
don't worry, I have others."
- Groucho Marx

Given that walking Denis Leary satires (reference media:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrgpZ0fUixs), have been deliberately
'weaponising aspies' online as an ongoing project of performative
cruelty masquerading as wit, since before 4chan first mestacized,
may I humbly suggest that unless we can here statistically control
for these and other such background levels of social grimness
generated by far larger cohorts of the population, then this attempt
at pop psychiatric epidemiology may in fact be of about the same
amount of use within actual public health and safety policy as the
whimisical opium addled musings of an aristocratic 19th century
caliper fanatic.
  

    
On the WIRED reform:

Yesterday's solutions (coal, oil, natural gas) are today's problems.

Before that horses (specifically horse crap in cities) was the
problem: London was drowning in the stuff and it all looked
completely insoluble.

So getting on top of that cycle - figuring out the downsides first,
smart regulation etc. is a Noble Goal. You can see the current
vaccine shenanigans as a lot of people with excellent reasons to
distrust government (consider how bad they are on global warming,
never mind Iraq and Afghanistan) distrusting government medical
advice and the total immunity from lawsuits which the vaccine
companies have obtained: distrust of technology, distrust of
authority.

We can say "but the vaccines work" and, sure, they do - but if there
were massive problems down the line it's not like you can sue. How
can anybody be expected to blindly trust government under these
circumstances?

So imagine our Problem Solving WIRED grasping the vaccine nettle:
big front cover pieces assessing the vaccine options and evidence,
interviews with scientists/lawyers/ethicists, independent assessment
of claims of large scale vaccine problems and so on... 

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awired.com+mrna&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB943GB943
&oq=site%3Awired.com+mrna&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.3470j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=
UTF-8

I'd say the coverage isn't far from there. Maybe not quite so much
"vaccine consumer reports" but a pretty decent general sense of
critical technology analysis.

I guess what I'm saying is "I don't see why WIRED couldn't make this
turn" and a lot of the stuff coming out of Science and Technology
Studies (Bruno Latour and that mob) might provide the critical
frameworks for actually making a go of WIRED becoming a friendly
critic (or a critical friend) rather than the somewhat gauche
relationship it had with the future back in the day.

MONDO2000 shout out here.
  

    
Most of us think we have a sense of what's happening in the world.
We might follow various news sources and think we're well-informed. 
But by now those news sources are all suspect, we don't really know
what's happening. Who do you trust? There's no authority for truth.
  

    
Anyway, whether or not bitcoin mining caused the Kazakhstan revolt,
that 18% of the mining power is offline right now.
  

    
I triangulate, or quadrangluate.
CNN - BBC - NHK - Al Jazeera - PBS

Look for agreement or correlations. If something smells fishy, it
probably is. Check Snopes.  For things in authoritarian regions like
Kazakhstan or Iran, I can put you in contact with people on the
ground.
  

    
I think good reporting requires actually being curious about the
details and in a world of shallow opinion pieces it does stand out.
Too many stories tell you how to feel and leave you wondering if
they got their facts right.

While my own curiosity often has limits, I am on team curiosity.
Without it we just end up shallow discussions, like when people who
don't know very much cryptocurrency or whatever go on about how
terrible it is and get basic things wrong. This shallow conversation
is happening all over, repeatedly, in many forums, and it's boring.
Interesting critics (and advocates) did their homework.

Geeking out about the details has problems too, though, because it
breaks conversational norms - I don't want to see this conversation
turn into some technical conversation about various algorithmic
details of specific cryptocurrencies that only insiders care about.

So probably the best thing to do is to find and share interesting
facts of broader interest, with sources.

(I agree with the idea of checking multiple sources. Before sharing
an interesting news article, I will do a Google news search to see
if there is a better article.)
  

    
Looks like Signal is still trying to make MobileCoin a thing, though
you can't buy it in the US.
<https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency-payments/>
  

    <scribbled by jonl Fri 7 Jan 22 10:00>
  

    
(Sorry for the scribble, it's the only way to correct a typo on the
WELL, where you can't edit a post once it's done.)

A new culture is emerging, and I'm not sure what to make of it.
Something called (by Eric Weinstein, possibly as a joke) the
"Intellectual Dark Web" started emerging around 2018 as a loose
group of figures consistent in their concern about identity
politics, political correctness, and so-called "cancel culture." It
appeared to me that they were more critical of the left than the
right, but not necessarily because they aligned with the right. I
suppose they were disaffected liberals, concerned about what they
say as authoritarianism within the progressive movement.

Around these same conversations were folks who were talking about
"sensemaking" and various kinds of philosophical theory. Joe
Lightfoot recently published a list of media platforms that he
characterized as "the liminal web":
<https://www.joelightfoot.org/post/the-liminal-web-mapping-an-emergent-subcultu
re-of-sensemakers-meta-theorists-systems-poets> He says "the Liminal Web is made up of a collection of individuals who often have a long history of feeling as if they don’t wholly belong in any particularly scene or space, as such they tend to hold onto any sense of group identification quite lightly." He defines it as "a collection of thinkers, writers, theorists, podcasters, videographers and community builders who all share a high crossover in their collection of perspectives on the world." 

I'm flittering around the edges of these conversations, and don't
pretend to have a clear sense of their scope - but Lightfoot does a
pretty good job in the piece I've linked providing an overview the
projects, platforms, questions and challenges emerging from this
space, and the sometimes vague connections betwee them. 

One observation I would make: from what I can see, the folks
associated within this loose cluster come from the apparently
disappearing American white middle class. They seem to be aware that
we're in a moment of crisis, and they're trying to make sense of it.
I was in a recent talked that mentioned the idea of "a religion that
is not a religion" (apparently an idea from John Vervaeke). 

Also in the mix: the idea of Web3 (not exactly the same as Web 3.0),
which is related to blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized
finance (DeFi), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). A
decentralized web enabled by blockchain technology. 

I have more questions than answers, but I thought I'd bring all this
into the conversation. Like <bslesins>, I'm on team curiosity.
  

    
When I say "incels", I mean it as a synonym for "toxic misogynists",
which is their brand equity. As someone residing comfortably on the
functional bandwidth of the spectrum, I reject wholesale the notion
that mocking incels is hostile to neurodivergents as a class. Toxic
misogyny deserves no such fig leaf.

And while I cannot assess all of the people involved in
cryptocurrency, the ones humping my leg to speculate thus fully
validate their reputation for being unfuckable.

Just for clarification. Please do carry on.
  

    
always cranky:

- have thot for years because of the way everything has blurred into
everything but there is no joan didion anywhere, i dont necessarily
understand what a 'wired' story would be as opposed to something
that might get published elsewhere. 

- reality check: beloved suck.com truly gone. it had a
mirror/archive site for awhile but that's now gone too. its best
days predated the internet archive so suck is truly lost. it really
mattered in so many ways — and as i used to keep yelping about,
bitrot is real…

- as for barlow, sheesh. he was so wrong about so many things — but
i know people miss his gift of gab.

- as <jonl> knows, am working with a friend on hindsight institute
(she's dealing with mom in hospice so we wont get back to it in
awhile)..

https://www.prabapilar.com/hindsightinstitute

with another friend we are planning to do a fakenews/parody
metaverse business association website, with similar intent as HI.
however said friend has a different background than praba (she has
all the art/theory background). his background was as
futurist/software engineer/market researcher/advertising exec) so it
will of necessity have a different tone/look/feel than HI.
  

    
Followup from fruitbatpangolin:

Besides, even if we ignore the social epidemeology/asshole cohort
statistical issues, on first take any significant numbers of autists
going off on crazy killing sprees because of their desperate need to
fit in with the volksgeist, would seem on the face of it maybe the
basis for a darkly sardonic farce written by Trey Parker or
something, rather than an actual likely challenge of the modern age.
Hell, give em all time machines with which to hunt down a robot Hans
Asperger, while we are all busy Hollywoodising stuff. Go nuts.

And, I'm no brainologist, however I am an inveterate gambler, so
given the circumstances and the festive season, I am very much
willing to make a polite bet that maybe, just maybe, most of these
people's primary/most serious psychological diagnoses may, and I
know this sounds absolutely crazy, right, but it might possibly not
be autism. Even if these people were technically somewhere on the
spectrum in DSM-V. Or even the ZX81.
  

    
More from fruitbatpangolin:

...in reply to the problem about suspect news sources in our brave
new mediaverse;

Perhaps you can still trust that which you can reliably still
measure.

Once you start looking, there are lots of useful metrics. For
instance, reporters are a pretty tight bunch, so it is hard for
published ones to just vanish without other reporters noticing,
therefore one reliable figure you can still broadly trust in this
day and age, is the current measured height of the pile of dead
investigative journalists, within a given geographic region. Say, to
give a rough measure of the trustworthyness of any public
information kiosks you may encounter, or the likely reliability of
local hotel reviews and taxi companies, that kind of thing.
  

    
(interesting slippage)

> This shallow conversation
> is happening all over, repeatedly, in many forums, and it's boring.

But it's also so very human. It seems that Gideon Lichfield began his
WIRED article with his hyperbolic statement about "the blockchain"
simply to illustrate the need for his main point:

   "To me, the answer begins with rejecting the binary."

(which is also a deliciously binary thing to say). And, true to our
nature, we missed the point and engaged with the topic that's become
today's poster-child of the non-terminating conversation (*so* much
more interesting than the old "tabs vs spaces" rants of yesteryear!)
  

    
Well, Bitcoin may have crashed Kazakhstan, but it looks even more
likely that Kazakhstan has crashed Bitcoin for a while.

That's because Kazakhstan is full of coal-powered Bitcoin factories
that China kicked over its border.  I don't see any evidence that
any of these Kazakh Bitcoin farms have come to physical harm, but
there's nothing more jumpy and bipolar than a cryptocoin bro. 
They're in the toilet, but they'll clamber out.

It's not looking pretty in Kazakhstan.   The current honcho declared
a state of emergency, said the rioters are criminals and murderers,
and gave shoot-to-kill permission to the armed forces.

In the meantime, some ragtag masked youth in social media have
declared themselves to be "the Kazakh Liberation Front" and
brandished arms at the camera.  I dunno -- maybe the Russians will
promptly restore order, like they did in Afghanistan, Syria,
Libya...  They did pacify Chechnya, sort of, or the rubble of it,
anyway.

It's the kind of situation that could be over and forgotten in a
week or could fester for ten years.  The Curse of Oil is notorious,
but the curse of coal-powered crypto is a new one.
  

    
I'm getting most of my Kazakh rumors from people on Twitter who have
been commenting on the Ukrainian war, and operations other than war,
ever since th Euromaidan back in 2013.

At first, that was just a "spontaneous urban uprising," too.
  

    
From John Robb on Twitter (@johnrobb):

When Kazakhstan's dictator shut down the Internet to halt protests,
"a full 12% of Bitcoin's worldwide computational power vanished"

Rampant corruption + cheap energy + Internet connectivity = Bitcoin
mining
  

    
This was the link that accompanied that post by John Robb:
<https://t.co/8P3Vytr0BU>

A piece from Fortune magazine, "Kazakhstan internet shutdown sheds
light on a big Bitcoin mining mystery"
  

    


i just want to comment that it's nice to see so many Mondo 2000 shoutouts.
(marginal Mondo contributor/model myself...) Ken/rusirius had a serious
medical event recently. if you'd like to join a Well tradition that sounds
kinda woo woo, you can send him "beams" for healing and wellness. 

i miss barlow, but see <loris>/Paulina Borsook's point. if JPB were alive,
i'm not convinced he'd be helping us make sense of a world in which our
collective failure to act with decency and responsibility, for decades,
just may kill us all.

also, <axon>'s #112 is kinda magnificent.

that said: demonizing any group that has built itself around a
self-demonizing ideology (or is it just a self-demonizing brand?) isn't
going to change that group of people. so maybe the author of the article
posted way back, the one about "the community" of allegedly ASD spectrum
incels, does have a few salient points to make. note: i didn't tl;dr. i
read the whole thing.
  

    
tying together a few themes, c19 and monopolies:

moderna and pfizer have a lock on the US vax market. yet there were
vaxes being developed in italy and cuba that sounded interesting;
and am particularly interested in novavax and one developed out of a
texas hospital. these rely on a different older vax technology  and
are being used in various non-US locales. but will these ever make
it to the US market? i ask out of enlightened self-interest: my
@#%^*( immune system suggested i wouldnt do well with the
pfizer/moderna vaxes — but could probably better tolerate the more
old—school vaxes. but i am doubting that i'll ever get the chance to
try any of them out.

and oh, an incoming airbnb guest is a last-quarter computer science
undergrad at uc-santa cruz — who is from kazakhstan. i am dying to
ask how he + his family ended up here, with he and his sister
attending various UCs (his sister is at berkeley) — but dare i? he
just arrived back in the US about a week ago — don't know if he'd
feel safe talking me to about his homeland. 

as for barlow, the antipathy between me + him was long established
so i wont pretend i miss his take on things. i dont wish suffering
on living beings or those who have passed beyond. that being said,
cant say anyone comes to mind who might be called inspirational. all
i know/can suggest is to work locally — as ms. tiff has done — and
for now maybe that is the best we can do.
  

    
Novavax announced good Phase 3 trial results in December.
<https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116185>
Might submit to the FDA soon. 

Its big advantage is that it has a long shelf life at regular
refrigerator temperatures. "The technology is the same as that used
in the Flublok influenza vaccine, and is similar to other vaccines
that have been around for a long time, like the hepatitis B
vaccine."

(The well has a dedicated <covid19.> conference, linking topics from
other conferences.)
  

    
right, have been tracking the good news about novavax.  just hoping
-market conditions- lead it to being widely avail in the US.
  

    
I read through the Liminal Web article from <111> and was a bit
surprised that none of the names were familiar to me. Perhaps I’m
showing limited curiosity here, but does anyone have recommendations
for interesting reading? I don’t want to pick at random.