Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We didn't get traction, ultimately, but we spent some time working
with whoever showed up trying to build enough force that a movement
would form around that idea. A lot of people did show up, and we
make effective use of a platform called Loomio, which was built to
facilitate cooperative collaboration. We didn't quite make, and in
the process of trying to pull it together, I could see how hard it
would be, even if we did eventually build more of a coalition and
had the right leadership. Getting people aligned is hard enough,
creating a gravity that will attract many more people is harder
still. And you can't really create a political organization of any
real force into today's US political environment without money. We
should have put money first, but we missed that point until late in
the effort.
  

    
I'm sure there are all sorts of attempts to build or grow things
like GameB or the Open Source Party... and there are all sorts of
almost-movements where like-minded poeple hang together, like the
intellectual dark web and various people who say they're dedicated
to "sensemaking." Like Platform Cooperatism. Like Team Human. But
I've come to believe that we don't have time to build an
alternative, we have to leverage what exists to take action now. It
would be enough if we could deflate the global authoritarian
movements, and somehow engage billionaires cooperatively to devote
money and energies to making things better, vs the kind of scenario
that led Doug Rushkoff to write "Survival of the Richest."
  

    
#138:  Apologies, I was in a hurry.  I didn't mean geofencing is a
fatal flaw.  Quite the opposite...Waymo found a way to do something
practical and useful by limiting the system's options.  Tesla plans
to  do something similar by enabling "full self-driving" (whatever
that actually means) only on freeways, that is, limiting the problem
set by eliminating cases like stop signs, driveways, crosswalks,
etc.  They're all moving away from the "hard" AI problem as they
realize how hard it really is.  I still like to drift off into those
heady days when Joe Weizenbaum could ask his grad students to solve
the natural language problem over the weekend and bring the answer
to class on Monday.

LLMs and semantic models look a lot like that, maybe enough like it
that they stand in for the real thing in sufficiently bounded cases,
but...uh...ah, well.
  

    
The pointer to (and discussion of) GameB is brand-new to me and
deeply compelling; the flavors of SOTW chaos we’re all trying to
sort out logically makes a humanistic realignment of the world’s
culture, economies and problem space feel “right” at gut level.
 
So if the rising combustion of life on earth isn’t pressure enough
to shift the majority’s over-investment in GameA in that direction,
can we articulate GameB principles using GameA tools? 

Steady activism on a massive scale eventually germinated meaningful
policy like the Civil Rights Act and the Clean Air Act into
existence, but human patterns of bigotry and greed stemming from the
majority’s overinvestment in GameA keep chipping away at the
progress made. 

How do GameB advocates nurture everyone’s hunch that GameA might not
be in their own best interest, let alone the world’s? How can we
build a #metoo-like moment for human existence - or do we just
meditate towards a day when something chucks a catalyst (the
overthrow of Lula, the death of the last wild polar bear, etc.) into
the organic potential of our worldwide discomfort and anxiety?
  

    
If we could understand what gives a movement traction, and then
lasting traction, enough to create real change, enough to outlast
backlash...

I know there are books out there about why movements succeed or
fail. The most recent one I've read is Gal Beckerman's The Quiet
Before. He offers hypotheses, but there doesn't seem to be a single
set of rules--which might be just as well, given the possibility
that applying such an algorithm successfully could go in directions
that most here wouldn't much care for. This is one reason I keep
returning to evolution as a mental model. No one can predict an eye,
or a giraffe, or an opposable thumb. Accidents just happen, and some
of them contribute to survival, some don't. But "accidents just
happen" is a passive description, and in human culture, it appears
that our own inventions and narratives do contribute to the
speeded-up change our species has instigated. But *which* inventions
and narratives become dominant, which don't... history describes, in
retrospect. Fiction speculates, imagination test drives. But
predictive models about what will gain traction seems pretty
inadequate, as yet.

Building in resilience and imaginative responsiveness and also the
ability to simply see what is for what is-- that would feel to me a
good start. 
  

    
I asked Vinay Gupta what might be a good approach, and he suggested
Lester Brown's Plan B: <http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4>

He also sent this link:
<https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1417851922195881988> - talking
about how we can't do business as usual and address climate change.
He links this Vox article:
<https://www.vox.com/22291568/climate-change-carbon-footprint-greta-thunberg-un
-emissions-gap-report> They consider this question: "Since we are all created equal, what would equal carbon rights look like?"

What follows is a really good overview, starting with the fact that,
in order to restrict emissions to their "fair share," the top 1%
would have to cut their emissions by 97%, and the top 10% by 91%.
Most in the USA fall within that range.

"Once we face the numbers squarely, it's clear that deep individual
and systemic changes are needed, including to our view of our right
to the 'pursuit of happiness' and the duties they require of us. Are
we content to merely enjoy these rights as gifts, or will we do the
work necessary to ensure that sustainable versions of those rights
can be enjoyed by our descendants? These cherished rights that our
ancestors sacrificed much for must also be adapted to fit within the
biosphere's limits."
  

    
Having just read Russell Banks's NY Times obituary, posted elsewhere
in the Well, the final quote from him feels to me apt for the part
of this conversation having to do with asking oneself what one might
do:

>>>Mr. Banks’s own intentions as a writer are summed up in his
narrator’s closing lines in “Continental Drift”:

“Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even
wholly invented lives — no, especially wholly invented lives —
deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue
to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s
objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”
  

    
Via email from George Mokray:

I thought Russia's obvious carbon war, climate war in Ukraine would
bring energy into the global conversation in more practical and
urgent ways than before.  From what I can gather here in USAmerica,
it doesn't appear as if Ukraine or the EU has made it explicit that
transitioning off natural gas (methane) and fossil fuels is both a
way to counter Putin's use of energy as a weapon and to meet the
climate crisis.  I know there have been advances in the growth of
renewables and energy efficiency over the past year in the EU
(http://solarray.blogspot.com/2023/01/solar-mandates.html) but there
doesn't seem to be the explicit and obvious linkage there could be. 
It's, at best, a subtext.

And the renewable energy/energy efficiency situation is not helped
by reported supply chain backlogs and a lack of trained people to
install and repair the necessary equipment.

As someone who publishes Energy (and Other) Events Monthly
(http://hubevents.blogspot.com) which collects listings of public
lectures on such topics around the world (thanks Zoom), I've seen
very little discussion of energy as a weapon.  What there is, to my
mind, consists of broad stroke generalizations which only touch the
surface, as my notes from this talk demonstrates
(http://solarray.blogspot.com/2022/12/energy-as-weapon-of-war-russia-ukraine.ht
ml).

Also, as someone who has advocated Solar IS Civil Defense for about
20 years, I know that survival electricity - light, phone or radio,
small battery charging - is practical, affordable, available from
off the shelf products, can be augmented by bicycle or hand-crank to
reduce some of the suffering now being experienced not only in
Ukraine but around the world, and could even be cobbled together
into a kind of personal or family micro-grid.  More at
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2022/12/have-solar-civil-defense-christmas.html

I saw one photo of a Ukrainian woman using her cell phone flashlight
to shine through a clear plastic bottle of water to get more
illumination, that bottle trick being a technique developed in the
Philippines for cheap solar skylights in slums
(https://literoflight.org).  Yet, I haven't read or seen anything
about other simple appropriate technology solutions that are readily
available. It would be interesting to see what the proven innovative
Ukrainian mind can come up with in this sphere but nothing like that
has peaked over the horizon.  Yet.

After over 40 years of looking at climate change, my feeling is that
most people simply can't concentrate on the topic of climate.  They
shy away from it, possibly because it seems so big, so intractable,
and there isn't an easy leverage point to begin to deal with it. 
Considering climate too closely makes too many uncomfortable.  Not
even war and the threat of famine move people to productive action. 
Yet.  

In USAmerica, about two thirds of the energy we produce every year
is "rejected energy," does no useful work, is dissipated in heat,
friction, losses in distribution and transmission.  It's probably
the same around the world, if not worse.  There's a lot of energy
that could be "reclaimed" without repealing Carnot limits.  Pogo may
be right when he said, "We are surrounded by insurmountable
opportunities."  But so is the poet Diane di Prima,
"the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it."

May we have more imagination in the coming year.

PS:  The only commentator I see who has consistently talked about
the war in Ukraine as a carbon war is Yale's Timothy Snyder.  Are
there others?

PPS: By my calculation, about $7 billion RETAIL would provide entry
level electricity to the near billion who don't now have access,
probably a much more humane use for Elon Musk's money than his
Twitter purchase.
  

    
Via email from Toby Scales:

Re: GameB and Jane's comments in 155--

These remind me of Balaji Srinivasan's Network State
<https://thenetworkstate.com/>. For those unfamiliar, here's the
informal definition offered on page 1: "A network state is a highly
aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that
crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains
diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states." (Further in, the
concept of parallel societies
<https://thenetworkstate.com/the-one-commandment#the-concept-of-a-parallel-soci
ety> feels very GameB.) 

I'm curious whether any wellperns have direct knowledge of or
interaction with the societies/states/???s listed on the dashboard
page? <https://thenetworkstate.com/dashboard> 

It seems at least a few of these folks are taking this whole
"reinvent the game" thing seriously. 

(Thanks to all for your insights. One of my favorite times of year,
despite the BANI of it all...)
  

    
The project page for GameB seems pretty unimpressive. There is
Mondragon Corporation and a bunch of tiny or vaporware projects.
Never mind a revolution, it's unclear if a journalist could write a
decent trend article based on these examples.

Mondragon actually is impressive, but they've been around since
1958, they're embedded in the capitalist system, and it's unclear
why they would be a catalyst for radical change? I don't know much
about them, but they seem more like a source of stability in a world
where many businesses don't last and some other long-lasting
institutions are somewhat the worse for wear.
  

    
Sounds like they're hanging in there, though on the defensive from a
cultural point of view:

How Mondragon Became the World’s Largest Co-Op
<https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-mondragon-became-the-worlds-la
rgest-co-op>

> Members of Mondragon’s management defend these overseas plants,
which are often located close to the assembly sites of its large
customers. One executive with experience in running these plants
noted that profit-sharing presupposes profit, and that
worker-ownership requires a successful business for workers to own.
If Mondragon were to situate its factories only in Spain, he told
me, the collective would be unable to compete globally, forcing it
to reduce its homegrown workforce. He also pointed out that in
Mexico, Mondragon has studied the possibility of organizing some of
its factories into coöperatives, but didn’t go through with it. The
Mondragon executive cited a lack of co-op-friendly laws in the
country, as well as insufficient interest among foreign workers.
Similar studies in other countries did not lead to the creation of
foreign Mondragon co-ops. Not everyone has found these arguments
persuasive. Freundlich, the professor at Mondragon University, told
me, "There are worker-owned companies who have figured out how to
share ownership with their subsidiaries overseas. If they can do it,
we should be able to do it."
  

    
In principle, here's a large language model you could run on your
own machine, if it has a good graphics card. In practice, there is
coding to do and it's not ready yet.

<https://twitter.com/AndyChenML/status/1611529311390949376>

Meanwhile, Microsoft considers how to embed GPT into many of its
products:

<https://twitter.com/amir/status/1611755265845780487>

They will need to make it less expensive to run, but there's little
reason to believe it won't happen:

<https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/01/nathan-labenz-on-ai-
pricing.html>
  

    
In the debate about slowing science and useless innovation, I have
to offer the fact that I've never seen anything in new media develop
as fast as generative AI.  As soon as there was some open-sourced
code and dabases that people could jump on and exploit, they were
bolting on new features as breakneck speed.  A week didn't go by
without some jolting development -- it was literally like watching
astronauts ride horses.

It cost a ton of blue-sky venture money to build these systems, but
now there's some money showing up for the applications.  Generators
have the look-and-feel of the last horse to bet on, though.  I'm not
sure that there's enough room in the generator space to soak up all
the many, many billions that  tech moguls mnight want some financial
return on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/generative-ai-chatgpt-investment
s.html
  

    
Re. Mondragon: I'm sure they included it because it's a co-op -
probably the largest and most successful co-op in the world. I was
involved in a co-operative business, and in the co-op movement
generally, which may be gaining some traction in the USA. But you
could have a business that's built on a more traditional model, and
still make it more democratic and less hierarchical. The late Tony
Hsieh famously brought holocracy, a decentralized management model,
to Zappos: <https://www.zapposinsights.com/about/holacracy> That's
one example.

Might be interesting to attempt a co-operative or democratic
workplace with an AI as a decision support system. I don't think
anyone's done that.

Re. GameB - someone pointed out to me that it's too slow-moving to
have an impact soon enough...  and maybe it's just a bunch of people
arranging sawhorses on the Titanic. 
  

    
Via email from Michael Bravo:

Re: #150 - when developing Open Source Party, were you aware of
quite successful (in places) Pirate Party movement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party

Re: #158 as someone born in USSR and having lived most of my adult
life there and, later, Russia, before abandoning ship for all the
evident signs of it being taken over by plague rats, a bunch of
years ago, I would like to very emphatically state that the war in
Ukraine is not by any means a carbon war to Russia. Yes, it is
related to carbon fuels by way of those being one of the levers the
murderous regime hopes to wield,  but the carbon issue(s) are
neither a reason nor the aim of the whole thing. At risk of
dangerously gross oversimplification, while still being true, what
this war is about is an almost exact replay of the prelude to WWII,
though the response of most (but not all, mind you) the Western
powers this time is somewhat different, which brings certain hope.
  

    
> were you aware of quite successful (in places) 
> Pirate Party movement?

We were aware, though that wasn't our inspiration. We believed that
you could organize a political party with open source principles,
primarily transparency of the "operating code" and a system where
"anyone can access the code and propose modifications, which may be
accepted by democratic consensus, or by executive decision in a
framework decided democratically."
  

    
I was an early participant in what became Game B and lean towards
"smoke and mirrors."  I think it's a mistake to approach social
change with an implicit model of software development.  Humans is
humans and while we have new tools to communicate (FBOW) what
motivates people to band together and push for social transformation
hasn't changed since ancient Ur.  It's got to be solidarity, the
expectation of practical benefits, and the aspiration to build a
better world.  I think Game B emphasizes the last one but is largely
missing the first two.
  

    
wrt #158, am struck as i often am these days how siloized we've
become. i've read so much since the war on UKR about weaponization
of energy and the need to move to renewables, but obv. i'm reading
diff stuff that george.

wrt #165, i think wars can have multiple causes: in this case first
mover is putin's madness, but there are other things about UKR
(resources, for example) that would appeal to colonize and extract.
  

    
I appreciate that Ukraine is now more part of the conversation here.
(And the continuing thoughts about AI, also.) 

Like <loris>, I'd have said I've seen plenty about the use of energy
provision and destruction in that war--about how much it is one of
the weapons, on both sides (missiles used by Russia against power
lines and stations/ sanctions on Russian energy sales by the West).
And then, the nuclear power plant under threat of deliberate or
accidental destruction is a central hostage. 

Michael Bravo's corrective post also greatly appreciated--that
energy is a weapon of this war, not the reason for it.

As with climate change, the war seems to be something that people in
general find almost impossible to continuously retain in awareness.
The acute awareness of the earliest weeks has, at least in the U.S.,
stepped back. We've somehow gotten acclimated to it being there, as
brains -- especially when faced with too many crises to take in --
are prone to doing. Watching Ukraine becoming another football in
U.S. partisan political discourse, not least, is grievous.

Other thoughts rise from George Mokray's post-- the part about
letting so much energy dissipate unused reminds of Amory Lovins's
Rocky Mountain Institute work on using basic engineering to assist
with climate change mitigation. Listening to Amory in the past, I
always felt a surge of optimism. Yet his many solution-proposals --
have they been widely adopted? If not, why?

Also from George's post, the reminder of the resilience brought by
small scale and local power sources chimes with the larger theme
brought up by Jon's post about Mondragon: decentralization.

Monopolies of power and culture vs decentralized systems of
invention and organization is another useful lens through which all
these things can be viewed. There've been many descriptions of the
Ukrainian military's surprising success as due to the custom of
small-unit independent decision making (as opposed to heavily
top-down Russian army decision making).  

Co-ops vs Muskian capitalism is another area still. The Sotheby's /
Basel art market vs murals, the infinite expressions found on
Tiktok, Instagram, Banksy, et al. (Some of which become
mainstream-capitalized, to be sure.)

Reality is not an either/or ecosystem. 

People never realized the microbiome existed until the last quarter
century or so--yet all our lives are affected by its basic state of
well-being or diminishment, whether we thought about it or not.
Still, its recognition brought a new tool to the realm.

I suspect that the broader cultural microbiome is not in very good
condition, right now. Centralizing forces act as
antibiotics--sometimes truly needed for curing one condition, yet
leaving other parts of the living system (in polis, in body, in
mind, in heart and spirit) mowed down. 

Another example of that--the way that organized, centralized,
institutionalized religion has so often become part of the problem
of power-amassing rather than a stepping beyond those realms for the
preservation of the sense of the numinous. 

As my earlier post proposed, I think we humans are in need of some
alternative sources of meaningfulness. 


(Apologies for putting so many different thoughts into one post.)
  

    


 *  *  *  *  *  

Hello, people of the Interwebs who are reading this State of the World
conversation, but who are unfamiliar with the hosting platform, The Well!

Just so you know: The Well is an online community with discussion threads
that have been going on for over 30 years. It's a place for thoughtful
discussion, conversation, and developing community (rather than, say,
spewing political attacks at each other in 140 characters or fewer).  It
has made my life richer and far more interesting, since I joined as an
angry young punk thirty years ago.

On the rest of The Well, the conversations are for members only. Membership
is on a subscription basis. Here in State of the World, things flow
differently -- much faster, and with many overlapping conversations in one
thread. But you're getting some idea of how Well members (Welloids,
Wellperns, Wellpeeps?) dig into big issues. Some folks in this conversation
post frequently on The Well itself, including <jonl>, <emilyg>, and <jh> --
Jon Lebkowsky, Emily Gertz, and Jane Hirshfield. Just to pick out a few.

If you want to see the *inside* of The Well, what ticks along every day
below this public-facing conversation, you can sign up at https://well.com
. To join in this State of the World conversation from within the Well
universe, pop over to the conference called Inkwell.vue. 

This has just been a random Well person wanting to post some information. I
do volunteer as a host of several conferences, but I haven't worked for The
Well in many years in any official capacity. This ain't an ad. I ain't a
spokesperson. If The Well resonates for you, I hope you'll give it a
try.

xoxo

mag/tif

 *  *  *  *  *  
  

    
hmm 'this aint no mudd club, no cbgb',...


anyway, i thot this addition to drucker institute an attempt to
address some of the issues raised here:


https://www.drucker.institute/about/kh-moon-center-for-a-functioning-society/
  

    
Via email from Jamais Cascio, responses to some comments and
questions following his earlier contribution:

To answer <emilyg>'s question:

>do you have ideas on why the U.S. and the Global North stand 
>out as unaware of or uninterested in BANI?

I have no definitive answers, but a couple of possibilities come to
mind:

* Not a good fit for The Algorithm. It may well be that BANI and its
components use language that doesn't get pushed by typical US social
media networks, so my posts get seen by friends and colleagues, but
not much more than that. I'm sure that there are SAOs (social
algorithm optimizers) out there that can help tweak my language. If
there aren't now, there probably will be soon.

* It's a voice from inside. I'm an American, for better or worse,
and talking about chaos in America makes me one of a mass cacophony
of people talking about how America is falling apart, in its last
days, on the brink, etc. etc. For people in other parts of the
world, my same observations come from outside but still speak to
what the folks in other countries are experiencing.

* Despite everything, people in the US/West don't feel the chaos as
acutely as people in Brazil, Sri Lanka, Russia, etc. This is the
most likely of the three, I think. The feeling of desperation and a
world spun out of control gets a great deal of lip service here, but
is probably not as deeply and fully experienced as it is in parts of
the world suffering from real uprisings (as opposed to a thousand
LARPers who couldn't figure out what to do once they broke into the
building) and economic collapse (vs. "uncertainty").

<bruces>:

> I have to confess that BANI is a complete novelty to me.

Glad to be of service. I developed BANI back in 2018 for an
Institute for the Future event, mostly for my own amusement, and got
some tepid support from the members (although the folks from Brazil
were all over the concept). In March of 2020, I did a piece on
Medium that recapitulated my 2018 talk, with some updates, and
*that* took off like a rocket. Although I coughed up BANI well
before the pandemic, it was an ideal fit, at least for a lot of
people.

<jh>:

> three of the BANI concepts--brittleness, anxiety, 
> incomprehensibility--feel to me emotional-intellectual
> constellations that shut down and stymie exploration,
> experimentation, and thoughtful response

I disagree, but won't argue too strongly against it. I do see what
you mean, but that's in part the intent of using those terms. Not to
shut down exploration, etc., but to better illuminate why
exploration, experimentation, and thoughtful responses don't seem to
be working as well in the moment. Arguably, that's part of their
value: the language gives solidity to what had been for many an
inchoate feeling of confusion about the world. It's descriptive,
rather than richly analytical. (Similarly, VUCA had the same
utility: providing language for articulating a changing world.)

> *How* you get from this to that, I suppose Cascio speaks about at
> greater length in the full talks.

Ha. Well, I try. Having spent years writing about the need for big
societal changes to fight climate disruption, I'm familiar with the
process of making noises in the void.

I do go into more depth about what to do about all of... this
(gestures helplessly) in this follow-on piece on Medium that I
haven't transferred over to Age of BANI yet:

<https://medium.com/@cascio/human-responses-to-a-bani-world-fb3a296e9cac>

Non-BANI:

I'm actually pretty excited for how ChatGPT derivatives will be
integrated into big computer games (of the Skyrim variety). The
ability to have NPCs respond to context (and in a completely unique
and realistic computer generated voice) will be transformative for
the game industry, I think. And will mean even more money for the
groups behind the software (which, by the transitive property of
reality, means more problems).
  

    
Thanks for the new link-- and my comment may have sounded more
critical than I intended it to--I meant it more as you yourself go
on to say--that the ever worsening situation leads to ever worsening
sense of impotence of response.

I look forward to reading your piece. First though, there's a little
break in rain and some daylight. I'm going out to look for edible
wild mushrooms.
  

    
MIT Technology Review "Breakthrough technologies" for 2023 include
battery recycling, mass market military drones and abortion pills
you can send through the mail.  I guess those do "break" something,
but I'm not sure what direction they're breaking.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1066394/10-breakthrough-technologi
es-2023/
  

    <scribbled by bruces Tue 10 Jan 23 02:11>