Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
<373> thank you, Rik. Science is facing a stiff headwind of deliberate
falsehood.
  

    
*Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, it looks like the foreign troops called
in by the new regime are declaring victory and promptly leaving.

*There were only about 2,000 of them, and Kazakhstan is as big as
Western Europe all by itself, so it's not like they were gonna be
able to loot the place.

*I'm gonna chalk this one up as a victory for Russian diplomacy.
  

    
Virtual Sea Monkey: the census collects "race" data. They don't
collect skin colour data.

There's a difference.
  

    
Not really touched on in this iteration of SotW:  Belarus (tried
and) said out loud what Russia has been silent about for years now,
using refugees as a strategic weapon to polarize and destabilize the
west. Subtle or overt nudges to create floods of untethered people
to stress social services and political tolerance.
  

    
It doesn't seem to have worked quite as well as Lukashenko imagined
it would.
  

    
Time traveling back to Vinay's earlier <366>:

> It is an act of will: you have
> to *push* in that direction to get the blockchain to behave this
> way.
>
> Otherwise, if you don't, it's a lazy beast that follows the path of
> least resistance, and you get very expensive
> cartoon-monkey-wearing-a-hat jpegs.

Yay! I'm ready to stand-up and cheer for this.

I'm a technologist, but the future isn't really about technology (what
we used to refer to as 'high-tech'), imo, it's really the choices that
we *humans* make that will (and always have) shape the future.

Of course we know there's an intimate relationship between humans and
technology, in the larger sense of 'technology' -- the art, craft, skill
(the techniques) of being human. Language itself is vital tech.

A big problem I think we have (in a State of the World sense) is that
we have allowed the meaning of the very words we use for thinking and
speaking to be corrupted (ever so slowly). But now we have a meaning
crisis.

And binary thinking ends up fracturing meaning along partisan lines.
So we end up with large groups of people who equate "blockchain" with
"Bitcoin" and then reflexively with all the really bad qualities: "hype"
"scam," "fraud," "wasted energy," "climate-change," and the coming
heat-death of the universe.

On the other (binary) hand are those who equate "blockchain" with a
sort of "Utopian Internet" (that rhymes with "A Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace"). This too is big problem.

We need to find a way to avoid excluding the middle: the possibility
that, in the end, "blockchain" will just turn out to be a useful label
for a basket of human-centered techniques for reaching pragmatic
consensus about our desired future State of the World.
  

    
Just a reminder that this conversation's hosted by the WELL. If
you're interested in ongoing participation in conversations like
this on many many subjects, consider joining the WELL:
<https://www.well.com/join/> 

If you're reading this, you're probably already familiar with the
url format:
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/516/State-of-the-World-2022-pa
ge01.html> 

From page 2
(<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/516/State-of-the-World-2022-pa
ge02.html>) onward, there are navigational elements at the top of the page.

If you're not a member of the WELL but would like to add a comment
or ask a question, just send it via email to inkwell at well.com.
We'll post it.

The principals of the conversation (this year Bruce Sterling, Jon
Lebkowsky, and guests Vinay Gupta and Emily Gertz) made a commitment
to post for two weeks, January 4-17. So Tuesday the 17th is our last
day, though people might hang out and keep posting past that date.

We've been doing this every year for the last couple of decades, and
this is by far the most active and enlighting conversation in the
series. Assuming no apocalypse, we'll be back again next year... 
  

    
am wondering if <jonl> perceives this to be a better convo because
the chiliastic 'in the future we will all have our own private
gyrocopter' thinking --- just hasnt been present. always a
distortion factor...
  

    
Craig Maudlin: liking than you're liking it.

Tech will only save us if we make it.

On the language side, I think Hakim Bey's ontological anarchism was
a sort of bridging moment where a particular thread of corrupted
existentialism leapt into the anarchist and subcultural world, and
it's spread from there. Bey has become (with good reason) persona
non grata pretty much everywhere but it's too late: ontological
anarchism took hold.

In the minds of strong, good people the concepts opened up space.
But in the hands of people less able to deal with the wide open
quality we got flat earth cults. I'm not saying "no Hakim Bey, no
flat earthers."

But he documented ways to eat reason when it was used as an
instrument of oppression, when we were being minemaxed into
submission. It's just a shame that he was a monster cutting his own
chains, dressed as a freedom fighter cutting ours.

hakim bey -> psychogeographers -> weird subcultures -> ironic flat
earthers -> post-ironic flat earthers -> actual flat earthers ->
flat earth is actually operated by aliens to keep us in the Matrix
flat earthers -> crypto flat earthers -> earth is actually a torus
flat earthers.
https://www.ladbible.com/news/news-flat-earthers-have-a-new-theory-introducing
-doughnut-earth-20181106
  

    
Anyone else a fan of “On the Media”? This week’s show is all about
the wave of media attention on whether the U.S. is headed for a
second civil war – why journalists and commentators are circling
around the idea, what “civil war” really looks like in 21st century
America.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/talk-possible-new-civil-war-
useful-on-the-media

Sample quote from host Brooke Gladstone: “Most of the speculative
stuff is a lot of hogwash.”

Guest David Remnick (editor of The New Yorker) on the potential that
Trump, a former president who’s openly embraced the “most violent
and or deluded political actors in the country,” will run for
president again: 

“Is that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson? No. Is it potentially
disastrous for for the future of democracy and this country? You’re
damn right it is. If the metaphor, if that’s what it is, of ‘civil
war’ makes us pay attention, then that is legitimate, because the
facts bear it out.”

Transcription errors mine!
  

    
Emily Gertz:

So much of the problem is critical infrastructure. 20 years ago,
critical infrastructure was as fragile as an egg shell. Tough
against little bumps and bounces, but when it broke, it *broke*.

It's hard to say whether the post 9/11 infrastructure spend has
really helped. But the nightmare scenario is pretty simple: a few
tens of thousands of nutcases, spread out across America and loosely
networked, take their hunting rifles and shoot up the electrical
grid. Maybe they set fire to some natural gas stuff too for good
measure. Backhoeing fibre optic cables is left as an exercise for
the advanced students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-internet-attack-idUSKCN0PA32A201
50630

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis - this, but
with people taking chainsaws to power poles.

Now none of this wins wars. It doesn't even start wars. It's just a
gigantic amount of inconvenience and, in a very cold winter,
possibly death. The economic costs are unimaginable. Entire states
without power for days or weeks, and then just after it's all turned
back on, it goes down again. The perps are super hard to catch
because they're not standing around to get caught: take a couple of
shots, go dormant for six weeks, then pop out and do it again.
Decentralized sabotage campaigns.

It's the resulting state of emergency that creates the political
backlash.

This kind of scenario has been talked about for probably 30 or 40
years as a threat that might come up in a hot war scenario: "the
Russians" and their special forces types dropped in to blow up dams
etc. was a staple for years.

Fear about a grass roots domestic terror threat of this general
model has probably been a thing since the OK City bombing in the
1990s.

As with the covid pandemic, it's not that people don't understand
and study the risk. It's that we don't know to what degree the
measures have been put in place to handle it.

And that's what really worries me. There seems to be no end of these
risks that experts see and try and get action on, and nothing
happens, and then the risk happens, and the folks with power turn
around and say "who knew?"

I don't currently see an ideology which would view smashing the
American power grid through a campaign of decentralized, leaderless
sabotage as a worthwhile goal. So maybe it's just the punch nobody
will throw. But with the right kind of nihilism anything is
possible.

I am glad not to worry about things like this for a living any more.
Those were dark, dark years.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Sun 16 Jan 22 07:24>
  

    
As someone who experienced the Texas power crisis of 2021, aka
snowpocalypse, I think it's worth saying that what people did, when
that happened, was go out of their way to help each other through
it. Notions of political contention were forgotten for a few days,
people were just helping each other survive.
  

    
I'm back in Ibiza (briefly, I hope) so that I can assemble my QR
codes and depart for Texas presently.

The USA might have a violent civil war, but if they do something
that foolish and self-defeating, they'll simply hand their remaining
hegemony to the Chinese.  All the other world power-players will
behave as if the US has gone mad, and they will promptly sidle into
the direction of the nearest Belt and Road.  They won't be able to
dump their iPhones fast enough; Huawei and TikTok will both dance on
The Donald's grave.

I'm guessing there would be plenty of world military adventurism
during a US civil war, too.  For instance, the French might suddenly
say, "Hey, let's appoint Maximilian the Emperor of Mexico!"  But
mostly, a world with a broken USA would be a new arena for China.  

Even if one US faction quickly won an American civil war, the
winners be in much weaker world condition as the domestic "victors."
Global woes would multiply;  the American dollar's no good, nobody
wants US military bases, the US Big Tech platform companies are in
rags and shadows; all the billionaires have ditched their Green
Cards, Wall Street is a ghost town.  The post-civil-war USA would
become Patient Zero in the Imperial Overstretch Clinic.

That leaves one wondering what a Chinese hegemonic world might look
like.  If it did arrive, it might arrive sooner than we know.
  

    

The obvious answer -- "what is it like"? -- has a ready answer.  
It's like Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong.  If you're Tibet you get
subsumed.  If you're Xinjiang, you react badly and you get some
heavy digital manners and some re-education camps. If you're Hong
Kong, you make some noise about free markets and rule of law, but
the charm of those buzzwords has worn off for the Politburo. 
They've lost respect for these alleged systemic advantages of
Westernization; they believe that all this American-style legalizing
and financializing doesn't make a nation richer or more powerful. 
So the Chinese bosses strangled their supposed golden goose of  Hong
Kong, and the Chinese man in the street was fine with that.  Hong
Kong was decadent and messy, anyhow; modern China doesn't need any
troublesome middle-men to handle the outside world.

There's a fellow named Peng Jingtang, who used to be chief of staff
for the "People's Armed Police" in Xinjiang. He was recently
promoted to be boss of the People's Liberation Army troops in Hong
Kong.  I think this indicates that China is satisfied with their
consistent line over the various elements they've subjugated.  You
won't get loose, no matter how poor or rich you are.  How harshly
you get treated by the Empire is up to you.  

Nothing too amazing about all this, it's pretty standard for
land-empires.  I follow some Chinese wolf-warriors on Twitter who
are keen to compare Xinjiang (a paradise) to what the USA did to
Native Americans (ruthless genocide).  They're swaggeringly
convinced by their historical arguments, too, and keen to dish out
some of the same to Taiwan.
  

    

The major element that seems different in MMXXII is, well,
"Communism."  China is a Communist state with a hammer and sickle on
the flag, and constantly celebrating Communist Party anniversaries,
so how come they don't feed and shelter other people's Communist
Parties?  Shouldn't they encourage other people to become ardent
Communists, to rebel, to overthrow the rich, and to become like
China?  Mao Zedong used to exhort that revolution all the time;
there were Maoist parties all over the Third World, and even some
Maoist cliques in the likes of France and Italy.  

How come there's not eager foreigners waving Little Red Books of "Xi
Jinping Thought" and quoting Xi's aphorisms?  China's much more
powerful now than during Mao's heyday.  Life in Xi's China is vastly
better than life in Mao's China.

I think the reason is that they've become patriots, not Communists. 
They're Chinese ethnonationals with an identity politics.  They no
longer care what you, or they, think about Communism; they want you
to buy into their Belt and Road 5G infrastructure.
  

    
Most imperial hegemons are, normally,  keen on civilizing you to
their standards.  They want to teach you their language and dress
you in their clothes.  Cosmopolitan soft power, "Coca-Colonization,"
all of that.

The Chinese lack a taste for this behavior.  Whenever you imitate
them, instead of patting you on the head and giving you Most Favored
Nation status, they get all annoyed about it.  They even repress
Chinese pop stars who win foreign admirers.
  

    

In MMXXII, the best pupil of Xi Jinping Thought is obviously
Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister of India.  Modi is a guy
who studies China with intelligent care, and is full of autocratic
instincts of his own.  Modi thinks that India's Parliamentary
democracy is a corrupt mess of useless featherbedders and petty
rajahs who get in the way of modernity.   Modi would much prefer a
one-party state of dedicated Hindu activists who rule through
overwhelming moral suasion and example, with him as a benevolent
Emperor Akbar who directs the nation with his sweeping, inspired
decrees.

So Modi likes to swing the sceptre: he often does unexpected Xi
Jinping-like strikes against the Indian status quo, such as
abolishing paper currencies, and naming-and-numbering all the
subjects on Aadhaar computers, and, especially, pulling a fierce
Xinjiang on the restive province of Kashmir.

I think Modi has it figured that the Chinese are the way forward. 
Modi perceives that the British have stupidly pulled a Yugoslavia,
while the Americans are electing obvious frauds and hucksters who
aren't worth his time.  Modi's ideal future India is dynamic,
trade-centric, high-tech.  It's an India on the Moon and Mars, with
Indian smart cities and Bangalore tech giants and a blue-water
global navy.  A grand, much-respected, jewel-resplendent India
that's the awe and wonder of all the locals: Bangladesh, Burma, Sri
Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal.
  

    

I may not personally approve of imperial ambitions, but at least I
can see that it's a rational realpolitik that Metternich or
Kissinger would have no trouble understanding.  Most non-Indians
aren't much troubled with India; the world's diplomatic corps is
cordial about India.  India is "non-aligned," they're easy to bribe,
they mostly mind their own internal business.  You rarely see India
pick a big bloody fight with anybody, except for their evil
twin-brother Pakistan.  Small client states nearby are plenty afraid
of India, but nobody else is.

So why does China want to start and sustain a Cold War border-fight
with India? Why harass them?  Why now, in MMXXII, when there are so
many better issues than some barren mountains?  You'd think that the
Chinese would flatter Modi.  Modi does imitate the Chinese, so they
ought to patronize him.   By his tacit agreement that their methods
work best, Modi validates them. He makes them look like the
avant-garde.
  

    

A friendly India would offer China big benefits.  There's plenty of
profitable belt-and-road development work to be done in India, with
a huge consumer base for Chinese products and services  If China and
India were trade allies, clearly the Chinese would dominate. 
Despite being Communists,  they're much better at business.

Also, an armed border quarrel with India gains the Chinese anything,
except for a loud and visible quarrel with India.  Nobody else sees
fit to pick quarrels with India, so the spat makes the Chinese look
cranky, peevish and bent on acts of humiliation.
  

    

But the Chinese are jealous.  The Indians annoy them.  They can't
abide an India that seeks to out-China China. Especially, one
semi-divine technocrat can't bear the presence in Asia of another
semi-divine technocrat. 

 Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi are too much alike to be pals.  
China's the aggressor in the Sino-Indian relationship because China
lacks tact.  They'd rather punch noses than form an axis of
authoritarianism.

A wilier China would blandly assure India that "Some day -- in the
future --you'll be the greatest!"  That's what everybody else always
tells the Indians, feeling secure in their conviction that India is
the country of the future and always will be.   But China can't
imagine a geopolitical situation for India that Indians might be
content about.  The Chinese have a grievance, so they need to make
sure that India has a worse one; not the grievances India already
has, which are plenty, but some brand-new grievances stamped "Made
in China."

I suspect that a China that was the greatest power on Earth would
have even  harder time with India.  It's not some standard
international fuss, about trade wars, the ideology, the religions or
the lack thereof.  The Chinese don't even hate the Indians, or have
any particular sense of historic, revanchist grudge,  or feel a
genuine military threat from them.  It's a clash-of-civilizations
that a planetary hegemon ought to be able to serenely overlook. 
They can't seem to be suave about it.  I wonder why.
  

    
I wonder what's the best way to handle hypothetical threats. I'm a
big fan of disaster preparation, and I think we don't do enough.

On the other hand, we get one shoe bomber and then everyone has to
take off their shoes for decades. Is this sensible?

So I wonder about this scenario about an organized group of
malcontents taking out the electrical grid. How do we weigh that
against all the other hypothetical scenarios and come up with
sensible disaster planning? Is it another shoe bomber thing, or is
it more like preparing for a pandemic?

Hurricanes and ice storms are also threats to electrical grids and I
think they need to be given their due as well. It seems like
usually, in rural areas anyway, we assume that sometimes electrical
grids go down, and we need to plan to get by off-grid for a while
and repair them afterwards. Hopefully we can learn some things from
what happened in Puerto Rico and Texas.

I also wonder what we should learn from California, where the big
vulnerability for the electrical grid is the risk of bankruptcy from
starting a fire. You don't need to take out infrastructure. You just
need the power company to be sufficiently afraid of what might
happen to refuse to provide service.
  

    
One source of instability and unrest in the US that we haven't
discussed is the burden placed on caretakers by the conditions of
pandemic. Whether professionals or family members, care workers all
over the country are feeling burned out and left behind. For those
who care for children or the elderly, there was no "hot vax summer,"
no time to mess around with NFTs, no opportunity to muse about
geopolitics. Do we see brighter days ahead for caretakers in the US?
Could this group become a distinct political constituency? Are there
models outside the US we should be following?

See also: Anne Helen Petersen's latest newsletter, "Why No One Can
Hear Parents Screaming."
<https://annehelen.substack.com/p/why-no-one-can-hear-parents-screaming>
  

    
Meanwhile we probably should pay more attention to attackers who
have a business model:

Hackers disrupt payroll for thousands of employers — including
hospitals
<https://www.npr.org/2022/01/15/1072846933/kronos-hack-lawsuits>

> In the weeks since the attack knocked out Kronos Private Cloud — a
service that includes some of the nation's most popular workforce
management software — employees from Montana to Florida have
reported paychecks short by hundreds or thousands of dollars, as
their employers have struggled to manage schedules and track hours
without the help of the Kronos software.

> Though Ultimate Kronos Group, the company that makes Kronos, says
that it expects systems will be back online by the end of January,
affected employers say they don't yet know for sure when they will
actually be able to access their systems and information.

I'm wondering when the ransomware wave finally peaks?

One thing you can say about Bitcoin is that miners getting chased
out of China and Kazakhstan doesn't seem to have affected
operations. On the other hand, so far it makes for a lousy payroll
system. Good enough for paying ransoms, though.
  

    
Bruce: a shotgun of minor footnotes.

* I think you're spot on about China. I don't follow Chinese
internal political nearly as closely as I should, given their
enormous power and importance, so it's really nice to get a read of
how they're wielding it. 

Do you think the Chinese can apply the HK/Tibet model to any place
that isn't ethnically and culturally deeply influence by China
already? Singapore is a little more diverse, but I'm thinking Dubai
or Namibia. 

* My 2100 prediction: China, with an excellent history of handling
steady state centuries, has taken over administration of earth
within climatic boundaries. They've centralized essentially all
manufacturing because it's more efficient that way particularly in
ecological terms.

But America does nearly all the space colonization, because American
culture is a frontier culture in both myth and mindset and the
living conditions are hard, the dangers intense, and the profits (if
you live long enough to see them) staggering. 

* Modi -> BJP -> RSS -> Nath Sampradaya. (BJP = Republicans, RSS =
Hindu Identarians, Naths = Knights Templar army blessing priest
group).

The history goes back to the original Muslim invasion of India, an
event that many Hindus regard as fondly as the Irish recall the
British invasion and for similar reasons. Some choose to fight
rather than to submit, and Nepal becomes their stronghold. They
tough it out without falling under the yoke for roughly a thousand
years.

Yogi Adityanath (a Nath Sampradaya monk turned politician, roughly
equivalent to the Governor of California - runs UP which is 260
million people) and his predecessors are of the form of Hinduism
which was sheltered in Nepal by the battles fought by (among others)
the Gurkhas, who are the lineage brothers of the Naths. The Naths
have been agitating at flash points like Ayodhya since the middle of
the last century. It's basically a Reconquista as the Naths and the
Nepali strain of Hinduism in general tries to recolonize the rest of
India.

https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/6778?lang=fr - Yogi
Adityanath, the RSS and so on.

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

* full disclosure: I am now almost 20 years in the Nath Sampradaya.
I don't agree with all of the politics folks like Adityanath are up
to these days but I am far from a disinterested observer of these
events.

* final point: water, water, water. Huge disputes about the water
coming out of the Himalayas
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/brahmaputra-river-china-dam-
india-china-relation-7061644/ as the Chinese begin to exploit their position.