Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Islamic terror, very cruel and bloody, lots of it all over the map,
nobody cares much.  They could knock down signature buildings now,
nobody's gonna go out in a candle-lit vigil.  "Thoughts and prayers"
for a week, maybe.  They can do their worst, so what.

Europe: quietly committee-working its way toward a continental
military-industrial empire.  They have the ulcer of Britain and the
bloody wound of Ukraine to motivate them.  It's interesting to hang
out in a place like Ibiza and watch European infrastructure money
literally buckling the pavements and piling up huge modern sewer
pipes.  They do bicker in Europe, but they bicker much less when
they're angry.  Also, every Eurocrat agenda is jam-packed and all
the top guys -- a lot of them women -- are ceaselessly talking
deliverables.  They're not whiling away their languid hours with
language-correctness quibbles.  Birth rates might even go up.  If
that somehow happened I'd sit up straight in my chair about Europe.
  

    

Big Tech, in financial and technical decline across the board. 
"Detroit syndrome."  It's hard to arouse raw enthusiasm for anything
"digital," because that high-concept is passe, it's become like
"electric," "atomic," "automatic" or "space age."  I'm a very
"cyber" guy personally and I truly enjoy the industry's antics, but
I always knew there would be a day when "cyber" became cranky and
old-fashioned tech -- especially when adults came on to the scene
who had never known anything else. 

 Generative AI is quite interesting technically, it's probably less
of a big-deal than its zealots imagine.  Also, "digital" has been
over-extended into areas that are probably counter-productive -- for
instance, if Facebook ceased to exist, no one would mourn it.  Alexa
leaves the home, nobody notices.  These examples could be
multiplied.

This is the course of history, there's not a lot of point in weeping
in the WELL 'Lectronic beer about this.  Something else will turn
up.  I don't know what it is yet, but, "when you can't imagine how
things will change, things change in ways that are unimaginable." 

 I'm old enough now that, in retrospect, I can understand that most
of the things that really pleased me were things that I  didn't
imagine and I couldn't foresee.   You don't need to be anxious about
the inherent uncertainty of life; the future is unwritten, trend
isn't destiny. You need a certain open-field looseness in the
spine-ankles-and-kneecaps there.  It's how to live.  It's fun, even.
  

    

In summary, 02023 will be much like '20, '21, '22 and '23.  02024,
will also probably be much like this year.  It's like a signature
period flavor  of elderly stodginess with material disaster and
poorly-handled emergency.  Somewhere on the far side of this is a
quite strange society, without a "Republican Establishment," without
consumerism, shopping malls, maybe without a middle class or a rule
of law, very little regard for Judaeo-Christian ethics or organized
churches, indifferent to sobriety and to prurient sex scandal --
much beset with environmental ruination, but not at all *dead,* just
really messy, strange and different.  I'm not an enthusiast or
booster for it, I can just kinda smell it.  It's not here yet,
though. 

 In retrospect this period will be understood as an Indian summer of
the old world, a winter that didn't know it was a transformative
winter because it felt too warm.
  

    
Wow.

Maybe there's a signal in the current Musky odor coming from
Twitter, and all the defections to various platforms, mostly
Mastodon, which is decentralized and has the scent of a democratic
co-operative endeavor. I suppose it could change, in the way things
change when they feel like opportunity, but Mastodon founder Eugen
Rochko doesn't appear ready to exploit the system's current
popularity in order to line his pockets. I think he sees the filthy
part of "filthy rich." 

Moving to Mastodon, I can see people that I know, and the posts I'm
seeing are the sort of posts I was seeing on early social media,
when it was mostly just the early adopters hanging out making good
conversation, before spam, celebrity and toxic politics were added
to the mix. We'll see if that's sustainable. The WELL is pretty much
the same community after over 3.5 decades, and there's a comfort in
seeing that persistence.

The storms are coming, how resilient is the human race, to weather
the worst of it? Many species are disappearing during the
Anthropocene, maybe the human race will join them. But I know better
than to place any bets, one way or another.

We've been seeing a dangerous trend toward authoritarian leadership
in various parts of the globe, including and especially the USA,
where an unhinged former game show host has become a real political
force - if you'd written a science fiction novel with that premise,
I'm sure I would have relegated it to an unread stack and forgot
about it. 

But... when the crass and the crazies put their hands on the levers
of power and start manipulating things, their manipulations become
more transparent, and cooler heads rebel. At least I think that's
what happens. I can't imagine that any human majority has
collectively lost its mind - sooner or later there'll be a catalyst
for yet another course change. If we do recover from the lunacy of
this long moment, and right the course of the ship before it smashes
into the rocks, we might be okay for a while... until some later
wave of crazy is unleashed.

At the moment, the best strategy might be to stream "Emily in Paris"
in UHD HDR and Dolby Atmos surround sound, and appreciate the
luxurious high fashion fantasy, as the temperature ascends.
  

    
"Indian summer of the old world" seems to this intuitive
non-futurist a likely apt and quite evocatively beautiful
description of our current era...

(a phrase I realized as I typed it whose use is probably no longer
smiled upon here in the U.S.)
  

    






.
  

    
I just ran across a piece called "The Cyborganic Path," something I
wrote in 1997 for CMC Magazine. I barely remember writing it. It
reminds me how things change and how things don't change.

"Look at the origin of cyberpunk, an aesthetic source of cyborganic
vision: William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy (plus The Difference
Engine, a fourth book authored with Bruce Sterling), a transitional
set of works between earlier science or speculative fiction and the
cyberpunk sub-genre, posits the evolution of consciousness within a
computer network toward a godlike transcendent being within which
minor spirits (loas) reside. Gibson has constructed a mythopoetic
representation of a search for significance in technological
transcendence, one approach to a cyborganic spiritualism: a literal
deus ex machina. Though Gibson's vision may not represent a
plausible future, he has articulated in the cyborganic context the
expectation that a supreme being (or beingness), a transcendence,
exists as an evolutionary goal, where evolution involves
silicon-based extension of human spiritual "form."

"Though there is no prevailing net-based spiritual vision or belief,
and though the global interactive character of the net reinforces
the postmodern depreciation of particular belief systems, the sense
of an evolving global consciousness a la Teilhard still emerges as a
persistent thread within cybercultural discourse. Teilhard proposed
noosphere as transbiological evolutionary goal, an inherent final
step coextensive with the Omega point, the end run of collective
salvation, (a rapture sort of gig, but not unlike the vision within
Arthur C. Clarke's 2001/Childhood's End shaggy-apocalypse stories).
At some point we all sort of merge, humming one note or hummed as
one note, ingested by Nirvana and regurgitated as Enlightened
Unity."

<https://johndecember.com/cmc/mag/1997/apr/lebkow.html>
  

    
Via Email from Michael Brockington:

A few thoughts prompted by comment <112>: "Write a monologue on the
state of the world as it might be seen by Grouch Marx."

The AI-generated mess of cliches generated by this prompt hangs
together, but surely I'm not the only one to notice it contains
nothing resembling humour: no wordplay, no wit, nary a joke.  So as
far as channeling Groucho Marx goes, what a failure!  Which prompts
me to speculate that humour may be a hard problem for AI -- wordplay
particularly.  That sort of humour depends in large degree on
creatively breaking the rules of language, while still making some
kind of sense. I suspect Chat-GPT is much better at following rules
than breaking them.  Maybe you can loosen off some parameter after
you've trained it, but that seems more likely to produce
non-sequiturs than jokes.

I can foresee a sense of humour becoming the number one attribute
for
those on dating Apps, at least if you want to avoid being cat-fished
by a chat-bot.  (Chat-fished?)

Of course it's possible Chat-GPT has a great sense of humour, and
just didn't know who Groucho Marx was, or was confused by the
mispelling ('Grouch' with no 'o'.)  There's been some discussion of
using this type of AI as an assistant, but what I've seen on the
subject to date reminds me of some bad experiences.  Someone who
pretends to understand you when they actually don't is the worst
kind of assistant.

I do think it's fair play to use Chat-GPT to write job applications,
though, since some kind of AI is probably screening them at the
other end of the pipe.  This seems to me the most benign use of this
technology -- a loop of machines talking to machines, without
disturbing the humans.

I do wonder if some of the compulsion to argue on the internet will
dissipate, as people become more aware of the likelihood they're
talking to entities who have no mind to change.  I can imagine
flame-wars disappearing into history -- although in such a case,
various media companies would presumably program their AI
commentators to dial up the rage-o-meter in order to re-engage
mellowed-out users.
  

    
Thanks for that interesting set of thoughts, Michael.

Word play in humor and word play in poems overlap in the way they
ask you to pivot between two different meanings -- I've long thought
that might make a good fMRI study. And both signal a kind of
suppleness of mind that human beings appreciate in one another. Can
an AI actually for real make a joke may be the next Turing test.
(Good jokes are more widely recognizable than good poems are.)  

On the other hand, quite a few people are also less than gifted at
making jokes. 

Even among insects--
some sing,
some can't.


     --Issa, 18th c. haiku poet  
  

    
 
Well, I've got to climb on a plane for Italy presently, so I'm about
done here at the WELLSoTW MMXIII.  The year's well under way.

Got some evocative morsels to offer in parting.

This has been quite a gloomy State of the Year, but here's a survey
of professional news people in which they express fear that this
year's news may be so unrelievedly awful that people won't be
willing to read it and pay for it.

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-tre
nds-and-predictions-2023

So, you know, we're not extravagantly dark in our public assessments
here.   Of course you can ignore current events and stick your head
deep in the sand, but you won't breathe any better for it. 

Personally, I'm by no means a stern, newshound realist, I'm actually
a professional fantasist, but I plan to read quite a lot of news
this year. More so than normally, even.
  

    

Here's an article about notorious antivax deniers and QAnon zealots
dying of Covid.   There's lots of 'em dead. More all the time.
"Robert David Steele," you might have heard of him.

https://news.yahoo.com/qanon-star-said-only-idiots-194553934.html

 You might think: well!  How much ironic punishment can these QAnon
eccentrics dish out to themselves?  Surely they'll catch on!  The
actual trend will be the opposite: they'll find ways to valorize
death by Covid as a glorious martyrdom, in rather a
Christian-Science style.  Lifespans are dropping, and people are
dying, not just out of general disease and misery, but like these
people die: out of wounded pride, offended amour-propre, and even
pure spite.
  

    

Expecting QAnon to wise up is like expecting a military rebellion
from modern Russian troops,  in a Battleship Potemkin style.  Those
rebellions do happen in Russia, but they happen because of
insultingly bad food, not because they're Russians dying en masse. 
The Russians don't much mind the dying, and they're in the societal
avant-garde here.  In times of persistent pandemic, more people have
their brusque Russian attitude than the squeamish one of trying to
stay alive by whatever fussy means necessary.

As Will and Ariel Durant used to declare about the crooked timber
that is mankind:

"Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how many
difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall
always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable; there is a
stealthy pleasure in rejecting mankind or the universe as unworthy
of our approval."

This is a moral vice of our era, this fatal pride that our
magnificent assumptions are unfairly denied to us,  and it's
something to look out for in one's self.  In the meantime, yeah,
lots of sick people.  
 
Evan and Katelyn, the amusing YouTube couple I was praising earlier,
they both just announced on YouTube just got sick of Covid.  Best of
health to them.  And to Toomas Ilves, who's still sick.  It's a
serious disease and it's by no means in retreat.
  

    

Here's some last-ditch trendy AI stuff, because although I've been
claiming, accurately I think, that "digital" is becoming stodgy and
is not in command of current events, how can I not dote on this
techie gossip?

Here's some "AI plagiarism" where some hustler machine-rewrites news
articles wholesale and then posts the results.  The resultant
text-products have more or less the same news content as the
original human-written articles, so why not read them?  Obviously
entire novels and stories could be mulched in this way just as AI
generators mulch art and photography.  If you liked "Finnegan's
Wake," enjoy the new bowdlerized version in actual digitized
English!

We'll see plenty of AI abuse-potential stuff explored this year.
This, and unheard-of neo-crimes and misdeeds, guaranteed.

https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/a-writer-used-ai-to-plagiarize-me
  

    

Why not try the "new AI' as a more user-friendly lacquer over all
the "old AI"?  Well, why not indeed?  Go ahead!  Bolt ChatGPT onto
anything!

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/wolframalpha-as-the-way-to-bring-c
omputational-knowledge-superpowers-to-chatgpt/

Speaking of machine-learning AI, why not use Iranian face
recognition to make sure that women are forced to wear their hijabs
even when there are no men around?  That's patriarchal oppression
"reified with a clunky intensity," as Adam Greenfield used to say
about ubiquitous computing.  "Gosh that's terrible!"  Those cameras
are all over the USA and EU and China, you're already sitting in
that frying pan.

https://www.wired.com/story/iran-says-face-recognition-will-id-women-breaking-
hijab-laws/
  

    
"My goodness, Mr Cyberpunk, your futurist prognostications sure are
downbeat this year!"   Yeah, that's true, but I dunno what to tell
you, except that it makes me write funny sci-fi. 

I used to live in Belgrade in previous decades, a rather tough,
trouble-hardened town with extensive grim historical experience,
where I was basically a cheery Polyanna figure, this upbeat Yankee
guy who used to smile all the time and methodically oil the door
hinges.  I'm not there in Belgrade very often in this decade, so I
felt like I could write a fantasy yarn that expressed my
relationship to Belgrade existence.

https://medium.com/@bruces/balkan-cosmology-by-bruce-sterling-2022-9a06b9b28bc
0

I wouldn't blame you if you think this yarn is pitch-black
dystopianism, but I'm inclined to think it may be the funniest thing
I ever wrote.   I'm deeply impressed by my own wit here, even
though, as science fiction, it's probably commercially useless. 
Because, after a while, I got used to Belgrade.  I never
"acculturated," but I kind of get it about them.  I'll probably live
ten years longer because I hang out in Italy and Spain rather than
Serbia, but I kinda miss 'em.  

That town has been leveled in repeated historic disasters about
nineteen times (nobody's quite sure of the count), but they're still
around no matter what, and in MMXXIII they've never looked so
prosperous.  So instead of being an "exotic" or "dark" or "peculiar"
place, it won't surprise me if, in a decade or so, people visit
Belgrade and gaze around at the cultural sensibility there and just
kinda nod.

Why not a happy ending? The people like that! You could do a lot
worse!
  

    
Hi all - Sorry to have dropped abruptly out of the conversation -
there was a family emergency. If anyone's still interested in
chatting, I'll be here through Monday to assist in winding up this
year's SOTW.
  

    
Bruce to Italy, Jon to hip surgery, all of us into the future we
go...   

Thank you both, for once again hosting a rich and ranging
conversation here. Thank you Bruce, for this last set of
observations and links and naming what's around us. And for handing
out the umbrella of the comic in bleak and dark weathers.

Here's my hope for the next year: that we get some surprises to the
good. That fevers of hatred begin to burn out, and also the virus.
That technology incrementally or exponentially gives us some tools
for improving the lives of both humans and our fellow inhabitants of
the planet. That some gorgeous works of art come into being. That
fewer go hungry, cold, thirsty, hot, are trapped by strictures, are
holding breath against missiles.

That common sense becomes more common and human hearts more
forgiving and tender, more in love with existence and with one
another. 

See you next year!
  

    
My friend Erik Josowitz sent me a text message with the following:

"ChatGPT writes business plans that can be hard to discern from real
ones! [He attached a pdf of such a business plan, "Dynamic web3
Social Network."] What will happen to a16z if they have to spend all
their time vetting proposals generated by their robot?"

I asked him if I could share that message ... his response:

"Of course. The prompt was 'ChatGPT, write a business plan for a new
web3 business model where shareholders token values would be pegged
to community participation'. A few tweaks asking it to add a section
on technology and links/citations. It quickly got to a point where I
couldn't easily tell if it was bullshit.

"I think Ezra Klein's take on it - that it drops the marginal cost
of producing bullshit to zero - is the real issue with ChatGPT and
StableDiffusion/MidJourney."
  

    
Thanks everyone for this year’s SOTW that I somehow found extra
useful
  

    
I'll still be logging in here tomorrow but, as mentioned before,
I'll be preoccupied Monday. However this topic isn't going anywhere,
and others can feel free to keep posting.
  

    
And incidentally, welcome back Emily and I hope the family emergency
has resolved