Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We're stumbling into the new year, and it's time for the 23rd annual
State of the World conversation. Bruce Sterling and I will be
posting our thoughts over the next two weeks, along with our invited
guests, members of the WELL, and readers who send comments and
questions via email.

The year is 2023, which brings to mind the 23 enigma
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma>. William Burroughs, Robert
Anton Wilson, Arthur Koestler, "Principia Discordia" and others
consider 23 a significant number, i.e. "lucky, unlucky, sinister,
strange, sacred to the goddess Eris, or sacred to the unholy gods of
the Cthulhu Mythos." Wikipedia mentions that the 23 engima may be a
case of apophenia, "the tendency to perceive meaningful connections
between unrelated things." And there's a lot of that going around
lately, just ask Q.
  

    
Our invited guests:
Toomas Hendrik Ilves, diplomat, journalist, and former President of
Estonia. He's co-chair of the World Economic Forum working group The
Global Futures Council on Blockchain Technology, a Visiting Fellow
at Stanford University, a member of the advisory council of the
Alliance for Securing Democracy, and one of the 25 members of the
"Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent monitoring group
unaffiliated with, but created in response to, the Oversight Board,
Facebook Inc.'s content moderation review board. Toomas will be
joining us assuming he's spared from Covid...

Allucquere Rosanne "Sandy" Stone, an academic theorist, media
theorist, author, and performance artist. Sandy ran the University
of Texas ACTLab <https://actlab.us/>, and (in various incarnations)
she has been a filmmaker, rock 'n roll music engineer, neurologist,
social scientist, cultural theorist, and performer. She is the
author of numerous publications including "The Empire Strikes Back:
A Posttranssexual Manifesto" and "The War of Desire and Technology
at the Close of the Mechanical Age"

Emily Gertz is a journalist who covers climate, energy and
environment from diverse angles including politics, regulation,
technology, science, activism, and community impacts. Her stories
have appeared in national publications that include HuffPost,
Reveal, Sierra, The Revelator, Audubon News, Popular Science, The
Guardian, Scientific American and TED Ideas.

Patrick Lichty is an artist, writer, curator, engineer, futurist.
TED 2010 exhibitor, Alpert/CalArts Fellow, activist, VR/AR/MR/media
pioneer. He is currently Assistant Professor at Winona State
University in Minnesota.
  

    
Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, editor, critic in Turin,
Austin and Ibiza. 

And I'm Jon Lebkowsky, writer and podcaster, co-wrangler of the
Plutopia News Network and co-host at Radio Free Plutopia.
<https://plutopia.io>.

This is our 22nd annual State of the World conversation. We'll be
here for two weeks, so keep checking for new posts until we wrap up
the conversation on January 16.
  

    
Well, here we are on the WELL for our traditional, long-established
state-of-the-world assessment. I'm mildly surprised at how much
cultural continuity this particular decade has to offer.  It's like
the year 2020 started, and that year has never stopped since.

One year ago, I was assessing that "the State of the World is
'diseased.'" That's entirely true of this year, too.   Here I am, a
year later,  and lo, I'm sick.  It's not Covid this time, because
I've got no fever and I can smell fine, but I suspect it's the
"syncitial virus" that's overrunning Ibiza. So  I'm not all that
badly off, but yes, it is a big public contagion -- an aspect of the
"tripledemic."

Also -- after heroic repression efforts for all of this
decade-to-date -- Covid-19 has overwhelmed China.  The Chinese
simply lost their epic, dramatic health-war, and then they promptly
and stoically clammed up about the shame of it.  Their miserable
disease is  just not allowed to become news -- the scandalous
reality is sternly Great-Firewalled away.   That's the year 02023,
though; Covid thrives worldwide, more global than kudzu.
  

    

To censor Covid in China seems quite nutty and  even
self-destructively spiteful of them, but there's also something
avant-garde and modern about it.  You can easily imagine a
groundswell of denialist-activists wanting to make it illegal to
talk about Covid -- just, de-platform the virus wherever you can. 
"What's to be done?"  Get used to it and ignore it, that's what!

There's something very Twenty-Twenties about attempting and failing
to "turn the page" on inconvenient truths that can't and don't go
away.   That's why each year tends to repeat the last.    I wouldn't
call that "moral cowardice," because people do not, and cannot,
really ignore the pervasive problems -- they do see them, and tend
to complain quite consistently about the same issues, year after
year.  But, without ever getting much done about them.  It's rare to
see any public problem that's analyzed, agreed-upon, confronted,
dealt with and dismissed.  All the "crises" tend to thrive, and to
mutate into long-term shambolic debacles.  It's a decade that feels
the need to marinate in its own distresses -- doomscrolling as a
way-of-life.

"When you can't imagine how things are going to change, things
change in ways that are unimaginable."
  

    
And yet, it doesn't feel like any breakdown is near at hand in
02023.  On the contrary, there's a strange and interesting stolidity
to this era, a lack of fervor, and a sense that this might become a
long-emergency way of life.  It's bad, but not in the way people
previously assumed.  

For instance, consider the act of legalizing gay marriage, marijuana
and psychedelics.  Substantial parts, even majoritarian parts, of
the US population were absolutely confident that this grotesque
mistake would mean utter moral anarchy and complete, perverse,
satanic decay.  And, yeah, it sorta does "mean" that -- but it
actually doesn't *do* that.  Astonishingly, it seems that people
could shovel raw marijuana off dump trucks into gay bars worldwide,
and that doesn't seem to make any practical difference.   

How about if you counterattack by banning abortion?  Okay, that is
"culture war," but is the victory sweet?  Where's the successful
achievement?  Everything just feels worse.
  

    

In 02023, people are becoming poorer, their lifespans are shorter;
food costs more, and housing is worse.   You'd think there would be
more focussed, radical indignation about such an obvious bad scene
-- a culture in visible decline -- but the temper of the times seems
to welcome it, somehow.  It seems to have the glum peasant
resignation that you see under many  historical oligarchies, and yet
also a strange proletarian resilience, like "Who cares for your
edicts, your so-called highness?  Do your worst, you posh fool!"  

Events are indeed pretty bad, yet it doesn't feel like any collapse
is near at hand; there's a mood almost of public penitence, like,
"Man, we've got this punishment coming, but it could have been so
much worse, considering what we deserved!"  It feels quite like life
in "frozen conflict zones."   You can get by in there, but you have
no legitimate path by which you can accomplish much.  All the ways
out have been land-mined.

I don't like begin a year with gloomy, elaborate whining;  that like
a privileged luxury that people have when Mom's not chased in exile
and Dad's not under arms in a trench.  And yet,  I do realize that
my customary futurist speculative habits have become old-fashioned. 
I'm from a tech-obsessed subculture, so it's my habit to look for
scientific and industrial innovations and assume they're gonna alter
the world's situation. 

 That's not what happens in this decade.  I'm aware that I need
better methods.
  

    
The habits of mind of  previous decades  -- they don't align with
reality.  

So what *does* align?  Well, the State of the World is a chance to
try and figure that out!  Let's have at it!
  

    
I like to start the conversation with a kind of top ten list - you
might say a list of trends, or conditions, posted here in no
particular order.

1) Medical meltdowns: has Covid changed us forever? People are
"doing their research" about public health issues, vs. listening to
experts who really know something. Certain people counseled their
followers to dismiss expertise, energizing the anti-vaccine
movement. Meanwhile we have a new concept: tripledemics, the
three-way punch from Covid + flu + RSV.

2) War and peace: Impact of the war against freedom for Ukraine,
rumblings about a possible World War III. Also potential for Civil
War in the USA. After years of relative peace and relative quiet,
authoritarian chaos agents are poking various bears and creating a
new concern about global war and nuclear armaments. Related: Nuclear
hope and fear. With a revival of the nuclear threat, we also have
the possible promise of nuclear fusion to replace many uses of
fossil fuels. But is the promise well-founded?

3) AI is becoming more visible and usable, and just as misunderstood
as ever. A good example is ChatGPT, a conversational AI that bends
over backwards to distinguish itself from human intelligence. Also
popular: image generation AIs like Dall-E and Midjourney. Questions
abound: will AI become dangerous, and if so, what is the nature of
the danger? Will AI replace humans in the workplace? Will and AI
driver your car? If so, when your car runs a pedestrian down, who's
responsible? It just goes on and on.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Mon 2 Jan 23 16:09>
  

    
4) We see increasing, ongoing economic changes related to monopoly,
monopsony, and consolidation. We have some number of billionaires
whose thoughts and practices are getting attention, especially Elon
Musk. His supposed genius isn't holding up well with increasing
visibility and scrutiny. Meanwhile delusional big tech bros seek a
safe place to weather the storm, and this triggers a great thought
piece by Doug Rushkoff, called  "Survival of the Richest." And
here's a piece by Doug on "the year the tech bro lunacy was
exposed": 
https://rushkoff.medium.com/the-year-tech-bro-lunacy-was-exposed-fe220426397b

5) Politics has become an infection. Will  the fever break, or will
the patient die?

6) We're seeing heavy weather: unstable, extreme manifestations of
anthropocentric climate change.
  

    
7) State of social media: Twitter is forever changed with a Musky
odor. Many are fleeing to Mastodon, where it feels like old home
week - an interactive microblog without marketing, without an
algorithm to manage the content flow, with many servers and many
moderators. A virtual place where you see the posts and people you
want to see. Facebook ambles along. TikTok takes over the world.

8) Southwest Airlines' collapse - a metaphor for the state of the
USA? A warning about the skewed priorities of pure capitalism?

9) A new era of psychedelic therapies and the potential for legal
recreational consciousness expansion. But is it really an expansion?
Or do we just want to get high?

10) Will China become the pre-eminent world power? Or just another
nation struggling to hold together?
  

    
This year’s conversation is off to a great start. Thanks to both of
you. I wonder if China is not talking about Covid for fear of
renewing the rumor that it started in one of their labs. Any opinion
on that?
  

    
>1) Medical meltdowns: has Covid changed us forever?

There also seems to be old diseases changing their behaviors --
hepatitis in children, more contagious monkeypox, Group A strep
showing up with new symptoms.  I wonder if COVID exposure has
changed enough of the human immune system worldwide that these
things are popping up now, or that we've just gotten incredibly
sensitive to medical deltas.
  

    
Big fan of Toomas Ilves on twitter.
<https://twitter.com/IlvesToomas>

Or if Twitter's muskification becomes complete:
<https://mastodon.social/@toomas_ilves>
  

    
This conversation is world-readable, i.e. can be read by anyone on
or off the WELL. Here's a short link for access:
<https://tinyurl.com/state-world-2023>. The full link is
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/522/State-of-the-World-2023-Br
uce-St-page01.html> 

If you're reading this conversation, and you're not a member of the
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If you're not a member of the WELL, but you'd like to participate in
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conversations about many subjects - a great alternative to drive-by
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This conversation will last for at least two weeks, through January
16. In order to read the whole conversation, we encourage you to
return regularly and use the more link and the pager.
  

    
The Year of the Rabbit is opening with an unprecedented European
midwinter heat wave.  Temperature records are shattered all over the
continent and the weather feels more like mid-September than January
-- it's "the most extreme event ever in European climatology." 

The most extreme event *so far,* that is. It's just January.
  

    
asking through the lense of how i seem to view everything in the
last year: how does this affect the war on ukr? life less hard in
the trenches? tanks having poorer traction? i have no idea
  

    
<7> is my big question this year too.  I don't know if a decade is
large or apt enough handle, as was The Roaring Twenties.  It's
post-post-Modernism … but what is it now!?  

Post-Lockdown is not a return to normal (as if normal ever was).  I
taught a university term, and the students, having been virtual for
a couple of years, came back to masked presences (no facial cues)
with Virtual as now their referent.  One student explained why they
all get up at the end and walk out en masse … no After-Class
Conversation … no visiting the professor in office hours … … : "It's
like closing the lap top.  Closing the phone."  

BOOM!  The Virtual is now THE reality.  

K-12 kids return to class feral.  Office towers are vacant.  etc.

Is the Virtual Era the flip-side of the Anthropocene – reshaping our
interior environment, so far guided by our lowest common dominators
of fear greed & ignore-ance ?

Good morning.  

It's time for State of the World.
  

    
I don't have a lot of confidence that the Covid pandemic will mark a
permanent watershed that changes us *foreever* given how we did
manage to almost completely forget the "Spanish" flu pandemic which
nearly killed my grandfather.

But I do wonder whether there might be some kind of shift in the
age-old tug of war / balance between personal health concerns and
public health concerns.
  

    
We're losing all the bugs and birds. The Wild is disappearing. We
need to get the fuck over ourselves(humanity), and consider the
whole planet. Our current modus operandi is to the planet as Covid
is to our species. So far we're just talking about ways to sustain
the status quo(Humanity First!). 

That's the change of consciousness that's required. That's a long
row.
  

    
Seems like the same topics we discussed last year are back again,
but the vibes have shifted.

---

Cryptocurrency is more diseased than we thought, but still with us.
Bitcoin and Ethereum dropped to a third of last years' prices. There
is presumably a corresponding decrease in energy usage for Bitcoin,
and for Ethereum the news is even better. The shutdown of Ethereum
mining means you could use it without environmental guilt now, and
transaction fees are below 50 cents, versus $2-5 last year.

Assuming you want to bother with it at all. Multiple financial
meltdowns culminating in the FTX / Alameda Research bankruptcy made
Bitcoin and Ethereum look relatively stable, for crypto, and showed
how strangely trusting skeptics of the traditional financial system
can be. Traditional values like having accountants and oversight by
financial regulators gained in status. Meanwhile, abstract moral
theorizing lost status, via the connection to effective altruism.

Not bothering with crypto seems easy enough for those of us in
countries with stable currencies, but I found this article about
cryptocurrency use by illegal currency exchanges in Argentina pretty
interesting:

<https://www.freethink.com/hard-tech/crypto-argentina-black-market-cash>

I would be interested in reporting about the financial aspects of
daily life in other countries. How has the way transactions are done
changed in Ukraine due to the war, for example?

---

In last year's conversation there were: 14 occurrences of Ukraine, 2
of Belarus, 41 of Russia, 5 of Taiwan, 57 of China, and 51 of
Kazakhstan.

I don't follow Kazakhstan other than in these yearly updates. Last
year we were talking about mass protests and Bitcoin mining. More
recently, Kazakhstan has been in the news as a place where many
Russians have fled, which is not something I would have predicted.

---

Last year I briefly speculated about abortion drug smuggling in the
US. In 2022 it became a reality:

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/illegal-abortion-pill-netwo
rk/>
  

    
No Light, No Heat in Minus-30-Celsius Cold Sparks Anger in
Kazakhstan

<https://www.voanews.com/a/no-light-no-heat-in-minus-30-celsius-cold-sparks-ang
er-in-kazakhstan-/6871001.html>

> The plight of a city in Kazakhstan left without heat for more than
a week in temperatures that dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius has
sparked anger and highlighted the deplorable state of the country's
Soviet-era infrastructure.

> This month [December], the northeastern city of Ekibastuz, with a
population of around 150,000 people, descended into an icy hell,
highlighting the dire consequences of power disruptions in winter as
European countries struggle with shortages thanks to Moscow's
assault on Ukraine.

[...]

> On November 28, authorities declared a state of emergency in
Ekibastuz after a malfunction at a thermal power plant deprived
several districts of electricity and heating.

> The state of emergency was lifted on Thursday [December 8] and the
situation has gradually improved, but the problem has sparked
outrage across the country.
  

    
I'm curious how the influx of some 300k middle-class Russians have
affected life in places like Kazakhstan.  Every single interview I
saw with a Russian guy fleeing the draft, he was an IT person.  Have
they found jobs?  Is Kazakhstan now an IT center? Or did they move
on to somewhere else? 

I know some places, such as Georgia, they weren't particularly
welcomed in the first place.
  

    
not clear what the relationship with the war on UKR has to do with
those poor kazakh residents freezing in the dark. i dont think RU
has cut off power supplies to kazakhstan --- which til quite
recently was a finlandized extension of RU.
  

    
Yes, it doesn't seem to be directly related.

I think it's just that Ukraine has been in the news all year, so
it's easy to make a glib comparison: here's another city somewhat
near Russia that suffered a severe infrastructure disruption.
They're not even being bombed!