Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
*I don't like to play blogger armchair-general about the mayhem in
Ukraine, but I've been collecting mayhem-in-Ukraine memes for many
years now.  You can learn a lot about war and culture-war from the
study of artifacts of these kinds.  I've got hundreds, and I reckon
I'll get hundreds more.

It's harder to get the Russian ones.  They used to dominate.  But
their sponsors in Saint Petersburg's meme-mills seem kinda
preoccupied lately.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/albums/72157645661977864
  

    

I think that civilians will indeed lose interest in a static trench
war that's trying hard to become a locked-down Iron Curtain, but
military professionals worldwide are truly, deeply interested in the
Russo-Ukraine War.   Everyone in uniform in every nation -- navy
guys, air force guys, tank force people, artillery people, even
military space-force people and the bifocalled cyberwar nerds --
they're super into every little nitpicky detail of this fight. 
They've all got popcorn buckets big as oil tankers.

Syria they ignore, they don't care much about endemic middle-eastern
terror-war any more, but a land war in Europe, involving a massive
army that was supposed to be very up-to-speed and is failing
drastically in unexpected ways, they care plenty about that.  Also,
they don't much care if  mere civilians care -- that's not
necessary.  They care if the weapons-providers in the
military-industrial complex care, and they care plenty --
everybody's tossing their old rusty guns into that maelstrom 'cause
they're keen to build shiny new ones.
  

    

Also, I'm impressed by the novelty of OSINT open-source intelligence
nerds like Bellingcat and their ilk,w when it comes to the war in
Ukraine.  They're not Henry Kissinger, they have next-to-zero
understanding of geopolitics or military strategy, but every day
they trawl methodically through satellite shots, and leaked
databases, and indiscreet selfies that they can geolocate. 

 They're not "surveillance marketing'" people -- they're not selling
ads, nobody pays 'em to do it -- but you never saw a civilian
panopticon like that in the "fog of war" before.  Not that they know
everything there is to know, or even know "useful" things, but they
get these very weird, deep, orthogonal glimpses into realities of
warfare that the combatants themselves know nothing about.

I never saw anything like that.  I'll pay plenty of attention to
OSINT zealots this year, though.  They're very 02023.
  

    
As someone who periodically has to conduct analysis of large blocks
of qualitative data, the really useful potential I see for ChatGPT
and its ilk is the opportunity for natural language queries within
bounded sets of novel text. I’m less concerned about high school
students using it to generate essays on Dostoevsky so they can get
out of reading Crime and Punishment (though they will be missing out
on the benefits gained from the linked actions of reading, thinking
about what you’ve read, organizing your thoughts on what you’ve read
into coherence, and writing those coherent thoughts down). What’s
really happening in higher education is still mostly just a
disruption of the ancient and esteemed cottage industry of bright
college students selling ghost-written essays to their lazier
well-heeled classmates.

But to my initial point, when I got my first big break in the
international development sector some 15 years ago, it was because a
company needed someone to do qualitative data analysis (QDA) of more
than 500 pages of conversations transcribed from 32 focus groups
conducted with Pashtun tribespeople in Pakistan’s Federally
Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Even with conventional computer
assisted QDA, this was a grueling task that required multiple
readings of the material, and extensive data cleaning and
preparation to produce meaningful analysis in a systematic fashion.
If I fed those 500 pages of data into Chat GPT today and started
asking it the same questions I’d been asked about the information
contained therein I’d be curious to know:

(a.) How much cleaning is required to make sure that the AI is only
analyzing the correct sections of the text? 

And more interestingly:

(b.) Would it come to the same conclusions that I had?

Answering both questions will require side-by-side comparison of
systematic human-produced and AI-produced text analysis, something
that I’m reasonably (hopefully) sure is happening in more than a few
universities at this very moment. But unintended bias is the bane of
every social scientist, whether they are working with quantitative
methods, qualitative methods, or hybrid (aka “mixed”) methods.
Mixed-methods do provide some hedge against some types of bias by
requiring a triangulating compare/contrast of quant and qual
findings, but this highlights a much more important issue:

As algorithms become more and more deeply integrated into the legal,
financial, social, and commercial fabric of day to day life there is
a HUGE need for professional bias-hunters in the data realm. There
are many people doing this work already in the justice sector, but
not nearly enough. E.g. The recent case of a man identified by a
police facial ID system for a case thousands of miles away in a
state he’d never been to - just one of a growing litany of
consequences that we’ve been watching over the past few years. (
https://apnews.com/article/technology-louisiana-baton-rouge-new-orleans-crime-
50e1ea591aed6cf14d248096958dccc4 ). Law Enforcement agencies do not have to disclose when they use algorithms and facial recognition software to drive arrests, putting defense lawyers at a deep disadvantage. This must change.


Punitive legal action against these instances must be severe enough
that instead of “move fast and break things (i.e. people)” the legal
risk should motivate these companies to move carefully and do due
diligence. Not just simple fines - we need meaningful threats that
could lead to outright loss of actual proprietary ownership of these
platforms. Of course that’s not happening, and these companies are
still largely in the mode of “better to ask forgiveness than
permission” - but that’s because asking forgiveness carries little
in the way of consequences. There is big money being spent
convincing law enforcement agencies and financial institutions that
these AI/algorithm-driven tools are better, cheaper, faster, and
more reliable than hiring actual people to do actual time and
skill-intensive work, when they’ve really only got as much
credibility as a ChatGPT generated freshman essay on Crime &
Punishment that is agglomerated from everything the AI could locate
on the topic.

Perhaps as the hot money starts to dry up in SV, we’ll see the
cautious money creep back in, but I’m not optimistic. We need to go
on the attack. We must, in a systematic fashion, use lawyers,
lawsuits, and tech-savvy social scientists to peel the algorithms
apart and take the marketing shine off of what they are purported to
be capable of. Put real people on the hook for the machines they’re
setting loose on the world through punitive legal action.
  

    
wrt #176, lovely collection. in the earlier 2014 pix, there's a
kitsch-o-rama painting of a leaderish guy on a white horse, and
standing next to him appears to be a captive, in front of whom is
someone kneeling, and behind the captive a person of darker
skintone.

whatever is this and when was it created?
  

    
Looking around in those photos, I found this:

typewriter
Poem by Ukrainian separatist rebel (from a YouTube video he did)

 
We were told: "You are traitors,
You've traded your freedom
For a stale chunk of bread,
Slave chains you happily don."

Beaten, abused -- just for speaking our tongue.
My sweet mother, they have called her "a whore."
Our ancestors' faith, sacred gift solemnly kept --
They have trampled it under their dirty feet.

Our children they made into strangers,
Taught them to hate us, to disobey.
Those of us who objected they burned --
Simply burned them like hay.

Our victory day shall be your day of mourning
My grandpa, my sole protector,
Whom you have called a "bloody Mongol,"
My grandfather, flesh and blood of mine,
Who, for you, was "Stalin's simpleton" --
If he were alive today,
To kill, to impale him you'd dream?

Don't you dream!
We are finished with talking --
What you deserve aren't words but grenades:
For my Mom,
for my brother,
For my war-hero grandfather.
It's payback time,
And so dearly you shall pay!

Off with the dirt,
We shall sweep our hut clean!
Peace we wanted;
Soldiers we became.
Your satanic orgy is over --
We shall send you
Back to your graves, to hell.

<https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/14528889969/in/album-7215764566197
7864/>
  

    
(That was dated 2014...)
  

    
One reason the post 2/24/2022 poems in response to the new stage of
war have been so very strong it that the writing of these responses
goes back to 2014. Ukrainian poets were prepared and ready--and have
created an exceptional body of work. 

Here's one example (title not given) by a Ukrainian poet whose works
have become much visible here n the U.S. in the past year--from an
anthology published in 2017:


LYUDMYLA KHERSONSKA:

The whole soldier doesn’t suffer —
it’s just the legs, the arms,
just blowing snow,
just meager rain.
The whole soldier shrugs off hurt —
it’s just missile systems “Hail” and “Beech,”
just bullets on the wing,
just happiness ahead.
Just meteorological pogroms,
geo-Herostratos wannabes,
just the girl with the pointer
poking the map in the stomach.
Just thunder, lightning,
just dreadful losses,
just the day with a dented helmet,
just God, who doesn’t protect.

Translated from the Russian by Katherine E. Young

One issue for Ukrainian poets has been whether or not to continue
writing in Russian, if that was their first language. Most are
bilingual.
  

    
re <180>

It's a painting on a Mongol victory over Russians.
Battle on the River Kalka. Artist: Pavel Ryzhenko

<https://www.historynet.com/mongols-on-the-march-the-logistics-of-grass/kalka-r
iver-the-arrest-of-prince-mstislav-iii-of-kiev-museum-state-museum-centre-the-
polotnyany-zavod-estate-kaluga-author-ryzhenko-pavel-viktorovich/>
  

    
thanx for this. just searched on the painter, who is said to have
been xian/monarchist/RU --- and born in 1970. sheesh! he even paints
in a retrograde style.
  

    
Good points about OSINT in Ukraine.

I think it's fine to ignore Ukraine most days. There's no moral
imperative to doom scroll. It doesn't actually help, and there are
often weeks between interesting news. There's a war mapper account I
follow that posts daily, but usually it's "there have been no
notable changes since the last update."

This seems like a good time to discuss how the political climate
changed after the war started. Example from 2018:

Google to scrub U.S. military deal protested by employees
<https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-alphabet-defense/google-to-scrub-u-s-milita
ry-deal-protested-by-employees-source-idUKKCN1IX5YC>

> The defence programme, called Project Maven, set off a revolt
inside Google, as factions of employees opposed Google technology
being used in warfare. The dissidents said it clashed with the
company’s stated principle of doing no harm and cited risks around
using a nascent artificial intelligence technology in lethal
situations.

> Google plans to honour what is left of its contract on Project
Maven, the person said. More than 4,600 employees signed a petition
calling for Google to cancel the deal, with at least 13 employees
resigning in recent weeks in protest at Google’s involvement,
according to a second person familiar with the deal.

I wonder how those tech industry protesters updated their beliefs
this year. Are they gung-ho Ukraine supporters now? Do they have
stickers? Do they donate to Ukrainian causes? Are they okay now with
working for a defense contractor?

> Through Project Maven, Google provides artificial intelligence
technology to the Pentagon to help humans detect and identify
targets captured by drone images. Company executives have defended
the contract, saying its cloud computing and data analysis tools
were being used for non-offensive tasks and would help save lives.

Never mind the "saving lives" fig leaf. In 2022, how many people
would protest a contract to apply AI to analyzing drone footage to
better kill Russians?

This year I stuck with my usual charity habit and donated via
GiveWell to theoretically save a few lives in Africa using the power
of bednets. I did wonder, though, if I should have helped a
Ukrainian military engineer who was raising money to buy a used SUV.
And if you're serious about supporting them, why stop there? Might
as well help them buy guns and ammo.
  

    
Another change in 2022 was in attitudes towards nuclear power. In
Japan, the post-Fukushima era is over; they've gone back to being
pro-nuclear energy. I can't tell if Finland's new nuclear power
plant is in "test production" or not, but hopefully it will be
useful to avoid rolling outages. France's energy policy is looking
better than Germany's these days.

I don't expect we'd ever get more nuclear power in California, but
the Diablo Canyon shutdown might be delayed?
  

    
*Here's some young European scientists complaining en masse that war
and plague are driving people out of their minds, and they're just
not gonna be able to make a steady scientific in such a situation.

*At least they're not actually *in Ukraine and getting sick,* or at
least, not all of them are.

https://initiative-se.eu/manifesto/
  

    
Here's Microsoft making their ten-bllion-dollar play to "knife the
baby and steal the oxygen" when it comes to ChatGPT and OpenAI.

A complicated scheme, but it likely makes more sense than investing
in non-fungible tokens for apes bored on their yachts.

https://www.semafor.com/article/01/09/2023/microsoft-eyes-10-billion-bet-on-ch
atgpt 

"Bored Ape Yacht Club," what an incantation that was.  What's the
least likely thing you could be during a plague, and land war, and a
climate crisis?  An ape, on a yacht, bored.  Everyone in the "yacht
club" knows one another, supposedly, so I wonder if they'll get
around to hiring lawyers and trying to sue somebody for their losses
in imaginary wealth and neat-o branding.
  

    
I like following Web3 development by periodically checking on on
"Web3 Is Going Great," which consists entirely of catastrophic Web3
news snippets, tastefully arranged.

You have to wonder if maybe every human endeavor should have an "is
going great" site.  Even the most harmless and arcane human
activities, like, say, underwater basket-weaving, probably have a
lot unsung major debacles that insiders just don't wanna talk about.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
  

    
Speaking of underwater basket-weaving, and to add a note of light
relief to a remarkably bleak WELL State of the World, here's some
YouTube stars weaving underwater baskets.  I find this hugely
entertaining, mostly because it just doesn't fit into any previous
popular-media niche.  What the heck are they "doing"?  They're a
Texan married couple who are always smiling and fooling around with
surreal gadgets while engaging in unscripted in-joke banter.  Other
than that, it's indescribable.

Does it really make any sense to sink thousands of dollars in off
the wall equipment purchases in order to entertain YouTubers with
this kind of Rube Goldberg performance art?  Apparently it does,
because they do it every week. 

 I'm not sure if this form of "makertainment" is a niche with a
future, or just the kind of daffy shenanigans that Bruce Sterling
really likes.  My wife -- a woman fully inured to fab-labs and
maker-spaces -- finds them nerve-racking.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yr1E3NUhDio&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
  

    

"Those kids these days and their nutty digital music, get off my
lawn!" etc.

https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-radar/the-nme-100-essential-emerging-artists-for
-2023-radar-3372061

https://mixmag.net/feature/top-24-artists-djs-producers-rappers-check-out-watc
h-2023
  

    
Just randomly looking at that NME list, I already found a winner,
Alice Longyu Gao: <https://youtu.be/tu52D9RplSE>

We're constantly streaming music from all over the place. Marsha
prefers classic rock, but I explore. Watching streaming festivals,
mainly Lollapalooza, boosted my interest in DJs and EDM. One in
particular that we both like: LP Giobbi, who we just discovered is
from Austin, but we discovered her through a Lollapalooza set. She
has a lot of videos on YouTube: <https://www.youtube.com/@LPGiobbi>
- probably the best way to get into her music. Recently on one of
those videos, she introduced Sofi Tukker, a duo that sparked our
interest: <https://www.youtube.com/@SOFITUKKER> Sofi and Tukker have
some pretty trippy videos along with their live concert videos.

I listen to jazz quite a lot. Austin's Pedro Moreno's been bringing
cutting edge free jazz performers to Austin for two decades or more,
via Epistrophy Arts. Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Haker Flaten lived
in Austin for a while and produced an annual event called Sonic
Transmissions featuring an eclectic blend of new and adventurous
music. He returned to Norway during the Covid epidemic - a real loss
for Austin. Pedro and Ingebrigt together were creating an amazing
scene, given Austin's allergy to jazz in general.

Contemporary pop of the kind that you see on something like the
Grammy awards show can be dense, complex, and somewhat interesting
if you lean into it. And visual: music's not enough, these days they
create visual environments that they can transport from festival to
festival.  And post-Covid, the festivals are packed and there's a
real surge in creative stagecraft, from what we've seen via
streaming (we don't actually go to those festivals anymore, or
anywhere we have to stand for hours, bouncing).
  

    
Meanwhile on the last day of this conversation I'll be MIA - under
the surgeon's knife, acquiring a metal/plastic hip replacement. When
I mention this in any crowd, there's always a few people who've also
had the procedure, or who know someone who had it. I wonder if
anyone's keeping count? 

"According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, more
than 450,000 total hip replacements are performed each year in the
United States."
<https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/treatment/total-hip-replacement/>

It's routine surgery these days. In fact, as I grow older I stumble
over all sorts of remedies that didn't exist a few decades ago. I
hear many complaints about healthcare, but the real state of the
world is that we have amazing healthcare systems and protocols, an
evolving sense of the patient's role as more than an object in the
healthcare environment, and (arguably) better access to health
insurance.

I'm a participatory medicine advocate, and a cofounder of the
Society for Participatory Medicine:
<https://participatorymedicine.org/> "The Society of Participatory
Medicine thinks differently about solutions. We think medicine is
best practiced as a collaboration between Patients/Family/Caregivers
and Clinicians." A patient movement was already emerging as we
started the Society and an associated journal. Over the years we've
seen a mainstreaming of participatory thinking - which started with
the late Dr. Tom Ferguson, who among many other things was a
contributor to the Whole Earth Catalog, as an advocate for medical
self-help. His final work was in creating a white paper called
"e-Patients: How they can help us heal healthcare."
<https://participatorymedicine.org/e-patients-white-paper/>

For all the issues with "the healthcare mess" and the evils of "big
pharma," medical knowledge continues to evolve, advance, and
improve.
  

    
Beams for a successful procedure and smooth speedy recovery, Jon.
  

    
And beams for us all, around the planet, to have similar access to
these modern advances.
  

    
<196> amen to that.
  

    
and another whole-hearted amen from here, and all wishes your own
surgery and recovery go seamlessly well (well, a tiny seam may be
left, neatly sutured),

plus appreciation for the multi-dimensional expansion of where and
what is being looked at in this latest burst of posts.
  

    
Talk of AI is all the rage, but what about cyborgs?

At Sandy's site, I found a link to an interview Paco Nathan, David
Demaris and I did with her for Mondo 2000:
<https://sandystone.com/pupik/Mondo-interview>

"in cyborg technology the boundary between you and the machine
disappears. It becomes a true prosthetic, which is to say, an
invisible, impalpable and unconscious extension of your own agency,
where you no longer struggle with the keyboard, and you no longer
think about this barrier between you and what it is that's going on.
It becomes part of your presence, and that's what ubiquity is all
about. It becomes invisible by changing shape, not being a box on
the desk any more, just the way mainframes stopped being big things,
and shrank to the size of a box on the desk. That took many many
years...IBM only saw the writing on the wall this year! Now we've
still got the little boxes to contend with, but some people, very
fortunately, are getting beyond the box to the hand held computer,
and shortly they'll go beyond the handheld computer to the wearable
computer, and beyond the wearable computer to the ubiquitous or
cyborg computer. And of course that's not a computer at all, any
more. It's something new."
 
  

    
> wishes your own surgery and recovery go seamlessly well

I had some anxiety about it, but since there are apparently 450,000
hip replacements a year in the US alone, and having found so many
others who've been through it, it's starting to feel more like
getting a root canal than major surgery!