Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
With regard to specific suggestions for what each of us might do now, I
offer the following for those who are US citizens in 2024:

Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.

The general strategy should be to focus on get-out-the-vote efforts in
swing States.

Sign up for one or momre of the following to help:

https://VoteFwd.org - Sign up to send get-out-the-vote letters to
"unlikely" voters in swing states/elections.

https://swingleft.org/ - canvass etc. in swing elections

https://www.turnup.us/about-us - Youth voter registration & turnout in
swing States. Donations tax-deductible. EIN 83-3917641

https://indivisible.org/ - Local and national efforts to protect democracy
  

    
Via email from GMcK (in Cypress, TX):

Can you give us your take on the state of microblogging and its
likely future?  TwitterX, in addition to its "For you" and "Spaces"
cesspools, is now becoming technically unusable: The X app just
skipped showing me two days of posts in my "Following" timeline
where posts from @Bruces show up - they're still there on the mobile
website, mysteriously.  What will it take to get mainstream
journalists and government agencies to migrate elsewhere?

In the material universe, from my vantage point in "the energy
capital of the world", JonL's summary of Texas politics <62> is spot
on, but there is some good news to be found, nevertheless. 
Photovoltaic installations produce the cheapest electricity the
world has ever seen, and Texas has more megawatts from them than any
other US state, despite government obstructionism.  

Their last bastion of resistance, now that rooftop solar has been
successfully stifled here, is blocking long distance transmission
projects.  They've even blocked power from the South Texas Nuclear
Project from getting to its largest customer base, so rates near the
plant are sometimes half the price of power in the city.  Not to
mention the West Texas wind farms, where CEOs of bitcoin mines have
admitted that they are really running an energy arbitrage business,
absorbing excess power when the wind blows hard at night and rates
go negative, and being paid by the state to shut down when demand
spikes.

Looming further in the future are new industries aiming to exploit
"enhanced geothermal" which provides stable baseload power without
the scary radioactive problems of nuclear, and thus lighter
regulatory and project-management burdens. And geological hydrogen
might be all over, in places that were previously rejected, and
renewable as well, if you only use assays that are sensitive to it,
and journalists can agree on what color to call it.  Lots of
opportunities for speculative wildcat entrepreneurs.
  

    
May I have this pseud?
  

    

(The advent of GANs has had an unusual effect on me, David GANS)
  

    
Regarding the state of microblogging in its likely future (from GMcK
in TX):

Re government: There is a meaningful number of government agencies
in Europe that have moved off Xitter and into the Fediverse, e.g.
this server operated by the German government:
https://social.bund.de/directory or this EU server:
https://social.network.europa.eu/directory (select "from [this
server] only" at the top to see which accounts post there)

Re press: the news industry as a whole is not particularly known as
early adopters of new technology, I'm told by friends who know this
from the inside. Some press has moved, like the Texas Observer:
https://texasobserver.social/ . Other news sources are available via
bridges. My understanding is that many still look at the much larger
follower numbers on Xitter, but so many people (including myself)
have reported so much more engagement in the fediverse than on
Xitter, even if lower follower numbers, so I suspect there is some
education to be done and it will happen over time.

Re the future, currently Threads is one to watch, which reports
already over 100M active users, and which is gradually turning on
federation with the Fediverse. You can already follow the head of
Instagram/Threads on Threads from Mastodon
(https://www.threads.net/@mosseri) They have also done an excellent
job at signing up high-profile users including, for example, an
account for the US president (https://www.threads.net/@potus)

Also, WordPress, which supposedly powers a very significant part of
the web (think publishers, small businesses etc) has been adding
ActivityPub support including on wordpress.com, enabling businesses
and bloggers to publish into the fediverse right from their own
websites. They haven't marketed this hard yet, because it's not
entirely feature-complete yet, but it could be a game changer: as a
brand, why post from a bland all-accounts-look-the-same account on
Xitter or Instagram, if you can post from your own branded presence?

A journalist has just proclaimed that it is "highly likely that 2024
will be the year the fediverse goes mainstream." He may be slightly
optimistic about this, but all the arrows point in the right
direction I would say.
https://thenewstack.io/web-dev-2024-fediverse-ramps-up-more-ai-less-javascript
/

Hope that helps!
  

    
Hey Bruce that Mickey thing is fun.
  

    
Thanks for bringing up natural hydrogen, GMcK. I follow the geological
science closely and this arena is wide open and very promising. It offers a
whole new energy source with none of fossil carbon's problems, yet is right
down the alley of existing drilling and oil&gas expertise while removing the
energy/price barrier holding hydrogen back.
  

    
#71 "Of course, we would have to convene a salon in a nice Italian
city
in which we analyze the semiotics"

JDWork, as a guy who does a ton of that activity, I found that
wisecrack genuinely funny. I laughed.  You should keep that up.
  

    
*I do have rather a lot of jolly fun with modern AI, actually.  I
know that, as a science fiction writer, I'm supposed to be all 
handwavey and Vingean Singularity about it, and as a working
creative, I'm supposed to  morbidly figure out that cruel oligarchs
are deliberately building it to choke off my revenue stream and
immiserate me, but its novel, wacky and goofy aspects are
entertaining me.  

By the standards of classical "Artificial Intelligence," these
deep-learner and LLM models aren't "intelligence" at all.   Our 
social attitudes toward them are really confused and archaic, 
peculiar and comical,  and even mystical and mythical.   Using an
LLM and thinking that it's a genuine, general "Artificial
Intelligence," is like eating a peyote butten and being sincerely
convinced that you've met the real Quetzalcoatl.
  

    
So I'm not a big pitch-in crusader about modern AI, in the way that
the zealots and/or grifters around it want to be or get rich and
powerful and famous by deploying it.   It's got a lot of bogus
elements because it's poorly understood, and also the most powerful
people around it are not honest people, they're ugly, conniving
products of a Trumpian society.  But it's got much more
functionality and authenticity, and also long-term staying-power,
than, say, the metaverse, or cryptocoinage, or the
Internet-of-Things, which are basically vogues and phantoms.

Cory Doctorow says that AI is also an over-financed bubble much like
those other things, but I'm not yet convinced.  I mean, I've seen it
play chess and win, and also it can out-blather Alan Turing by a
factor of about a billion.  So, yeah, it's fun for me.  I like to
stroll on the sidewalk and observe its passing parade.  It's a
reason to get out of bed and keep your eyes and ears open.  And that
contents me.

As a novelist once said, “We act as though comfort and luxury were
the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us
happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”
  

    

I'm kind of into "blizzard-of-analysis polycrisis," because it
sounds so hip and digital, but I dunno; I'm thinking that maybe I'm
too old to even care about it.  I've seen too many similar
formulations, and my reaction is Belgrade-style,  "Okay, it's pretty
bad, but so was other stuff, and what happens after that?"   

Yevgeny Prigozhin and his cyberwarriors in the Saint Petersburg
Internet Research Bureau, those guys were the true grand-masters of
the "polycrisis blizzard."  They spent all day every day "flooding
the zone" with elaborate post-truth bullshit, and deploying that in
social media.   Everybody was supposed to be permanently confused,
and unable to keep up, and always barking in packs after red
herrings, and deprived of their agency, and all that.

But what happens to all that glittering tinsel of polycrisis, if
you're overwhelmed by events, and dead on the battlefield of life? 
You can't possibly be dead in some fancy, obscurantist, polycrisis
way.  You're just plain old dead.  The silence of your new grave is
just as silent as anybody else's historic grave.
  

    

Prigozhin was definitely one of Putin's grandest (and weirdest)
viziers, but Putin blew up Prighozin's  private jet and liquidated
him.  Then Prigozhin, and all that he'd built,  vanished like a
soap-bubble.  It's incredible how that ultra-famous guy just
peeled-off and blew away afterward, like some roadside billboard
poster stripped off by  an overnight storm.  

Belgrade used to be full of the Wagner Group's gloating, tough-guy,
spook-soldier artifacts.   Serbian civil society was super-impressed
by Prigozhin, top to bottom.  A few volunteers even laced on their
boots and ran off to join him.  There were fawning newspaper
headlines about him, jackets, patches, bumper-stickers, everything
but Wagner Group snow-globes.  
  

    

In about three days, that whole empire just vaporized.  And even
more remarkably, no one looks back.  There's no historical interest
in Prighozhin, his privatized empire, his concepts and approaches,
and his years of bloody effort.  Nobody even shows any curiosity
about what actually happened to him, the truth of the matter of his
sudden death and disappearance.   He's gone like any other
insubstantial digital fad is gone.  

 It's like asking Google about some discontinued Google product that
once had millions of users.  "Don't even ask, because we just killed
it, okay?  We killed lots of others and we killed lots more."

In the year 2024, I don't need anybody urging me to be dazzled,
overwhelmed and confused.  Frankly, it's not all that confusing. 
It'll be a whole lot like 2023.  That's not "crisis."  That's
tradition and continuity. 
  

    
 Jernst wrote: “ Re press: the news industry as a whole is not
particularly known as early adopters of new technology, I'm told by
friends who know this from the inside.[… Yet] so many people
(including myself)have reported so much more engagement in the
fediverse than on
Xitter, even if lower follower numbers, so I suspect there is some
education to be done and it will happen over time.” 

As a journalist, I really, really hope so. 
I believe that journalists always had an outsized idea of Twitter’s
importance, because it was a great source of material, and because
trading witty repartee there with one’s clever and informed peers
was so much fun. 

I tend not to bring this up in professional settings (so as not to
be volunteered to work on social media strategy instead of editing
and related work), but leaving Xitter behind cannot happen soon
enough in the news sector. If the goals are to expand the reach of
one’s publication towards people who actually want to read what it
reports, as well as for that reporting to have an impact beyond the
page, then leaving the Muskiverse behind should not be a hard choice
to make.

“Should not…”
  

    
Amen to that!
  

    
Visible politics in the USA is mostly Trumpian so-called
"conservatives" drifting into fascism and confused Democrats
reacting to the fascist drift, anchored by old-school Democrat Joe
Biden who's pursuing successfully a set of policies focused on
relief measures and vaccination efforts to address the ongoing
COVID-19 pandemic, investments in infrastructure, and strengthening
the social safety net. Despite his success, especially with the US
economy, Biden is supposedly unpopular because the voodoo pollsters
say so. The politics of the moment churns along via "news"
organizations that are actually propaganda machines, e.g. Fox News
and MSNBC. News organizations in general are dysfunctional, and as a
result, most Americans don't really know what's happening - they're
getting their "facts" from informal networks of opinion on social
media.

Then there's what has been called (originally as kind of a joke) the
"intellectual dark web." This loose collection of thinkers and
commentators can appear to be right wing and left wing
simultaneously, even wingless in some contexts. In fact it's hard to
connect them to a particular, popular political movement. But there
are some common threads in their thinking.
  

    
I have some thoughts about this group:

Foremost, they oppose identity politics and political correctness.
They argue that focusing on group identities (gender, race, etc.)
hinders objective discussion and individual merit. They criticize
"political correctness" as silencing dissenting voices and limiting
free speech. They're liable to use the term "woke," which is also
typically a term used by the fascist right as a pejorative, a way of
suggesting that a commitment to racial and social equality and
relate sensitivities are BAD.

The liminals are skeptical of social justice movements. They may
endorse some social justice aims, but express skepticism about their
execution. They may voice concerns about "cancel culture" and
boycotts, questioning their effectiveness and potential for
collateral damage. (Whether there really is a "cancel culture" is
open to debate. They tend to argue that it's a phenomenon on the
left, sometimes ignoring the suppressions and oppressions on the
right.)

They emphasize individual responsibility and meritocracy. They're
for individual choice and effort as key factors in success,
critiquing what they perceive as an overreliance on systemic
explanations for inequality. They tend to be critical of affirmative
action and social safety nets.
  

    
They distrust institutions and mainstream media. Many aren't happy
with mainstream institutions like universities and media
organizations, accusing them of suppressing diverse viewpoints and
promoting liberal biases. They favor alternative platforms and
self-described "heterodox" thinking.

They focus on free speech and open debate...unfettered speech, even
on controversial topics. They argue for open dialogue and tolerance
for differing viewpoints, even if they are considered offensive or
harmful by some. They're free speech absolutists. 

They have diverse views on issues like economics, foreign policy,
and environmentalism. Some lean conservative, while others identify
as centrists or independents. I tend to think they lean right - they
sometimes parrot right wing talking points (e.g. the "woke" thing).
Maybe they're more like libertarians that lean to the right. But
some try to be objective and focus on "sensemaking."

Not meaning to suggest here that they agree on everything, these are
just some common themes within this group. The focus on free speech
sometimes comes at the expense of inclusivity and sensitivity, and
the criticisms of social justice movements often rely on
oversimplifications and mischaracterizations.
  

    
There's also another group, the liminal web referred to by Joe
Lightfoot as "an emergent subculture of sensemakers, meta-theorists,
and systems poets."
<https://www.joelightfoot.org/post/the-liminal-web-mapping-an-emergent-subcultu
re-of-sensemakers-meta-theorists-systems-poets>
 
Lightfoot says he "settled on the name Liminal because one
definition of the word is 'to occupy a position at, or on both sides
of, a boundary or threshold' which for me speaks perfectly to the
idea that everyone in the space is in their own unique way
attempting to mid-wife a new kind of regenerative culture whilst
simultaneously hospicing the old."

I can identify with this group - Lightfoot says they are
"individuals who often have a long history of feeling as if they
don't wholly belong in any particularly scene or space, as such they
tend to hold onto any sense of group identification quite lightly."
They don't follow any general set of common beliefs, but in trying
to describe them Lightfoot draws from a series of tweets by Tyler
Alterman
<https://twitter.com/TylerAlterman/status/1305265874157395976>. "The
metatribe is neither nihilist nor locked onto an ethical system. It
has political opinions without being left, right, or center. These
opinions are provisional, nondogmatic, but strongly investigated, so
metatribers often appear to be "'heterodox'." 

I could go on about the Liminals, but I'd just be quoting Lightfoot.
Really, read his fairly long analysis. These might just be the folks
who "save the world."
  

    
Are there mechanisms, techniques, movements, programs, etc. emerging in our
world now as effective counters to the impact of disinformation?

Disinformation has (I think) been with us as far back as hu8man
civilization, but the advent of mass communication technologies and the
structures that have been built up upon them have made the spread of
disinformation and its impact much greater recently (not without precedent:
one could argue that the Nazis used disinformation very effectively and
that resulted in a huge war that killed tens of millions and disrupted the
entire world's human organization)

The scope and speed of disinformation is now very great, and human culture
worldwide is (I believe) measurably altered by it in ways I consider bad -
a self-licking ice cream cone of increasing control by fewer and fewer
people.

So, my question again:

Are there mechanisms, techniques, movements, programs, etc. emerging in our
world now as effective counters to the impact of disinformation?
  

    
And the Give-Me-A-Break Award goes to...white victimhood.
  

    
Here's my answer to the question in <95>, hopefully others will
chime in:

The Internet is still relatively new. Consider that it took decades,
even centuries,  for the effects of print to evolve. I tend to think
that we're in a phase of the Internet's evolution - a point where
bad actors have learned to make malicious use of the technology, and
before we've learned to deal effectively with the downsides. 

But stuff his happening. We see more fact-checking and verification.
E.g. automated tools like Google Fact Check Explorer
<https://toolbox.google.com/factcheck/explorer> and Lead Stories
<https://leadstories.com/> sift through info, flag potential
misinformation and provide verified sources.  Platforms like X and
Facebook have tested algorithms that highlight the provenance of
information, exposing bias and hidden agendas. (I'm not sure that
Elon's X is still on board, though.)
AI-powered technologies can be used to create deepfakes, but can
also be used to spot manipulated images and videos.

There's media literacy education, initiatives like NewsGuard
<https://www.newsguardtech.com/> and The Factual
<https://www.thefactual.com/news> that help with critical thinking
skills needed to evaluate information sources and identify
disinformation tactics. Investigative journalism and fact-checking
organizations like ProPublica <https://www.propublica.org/> and
Bellingcat <https://www.bellingcat.com/> are holding bad actors
accountable and digging stuff up that might otherwise be buried.

Some platforms are tightening content moderation policies to take
down bad info, and governments are considering how to hold platforms
accountable for the spread of harmful content, e.g. the EU's Digital
Services Act. There are organizations like the Global Disinformation
Index <https://www.disinformationindex.org/> and the Paris Call for
trust and security in cyberspace
<https://pariscall.international/en/> fostering collaboration among
governments, tech companies, and NGOs to combat disinformation on a
global scale.

So we're seeing responses and initiatives, for sure.
  

    
The kids who grew up with social media are, in my experience, pretty
savvy about how the social media sausage is made, and that savviness
has led them to be unimpressed with it. 

The window for using Twitter as an effective method of spreading
propaganda may turn out to be as narrow as the window for using
radio.
  

    
My grandson is quite hooked om YouTube.  For awhile he was trying to
make videos, but lately he mainly just consumes.  His sister reads
books more than obsessing about social media.  She does a lot better
in school.
  

    
Everybody thinks that social media is poisonous and bad for people
-- but always for somebody else.  I don't think I've ever read a
frank confession from some one who was like, "Yeah, the online life
was especially bad for me;  I myself was pitifully vulnerable, and
utterly fooled by my encounters with a keyboard, and alas, my
personal assessment of the state of the world was tragically
divorced from reality."

I've heard people many say that about cryptocoinage.  And various
religions, or political parties.  I've even heard people say that
about their professions, along the line of, "my job was always
bullshit and I should never have done that."  

People even cheerfully say, "I'm addicted to social media," or "the
firehose of data is beyond rational interpretation,"  but they never
ever say, "Well, I'm just hopelessly addled now, and I should be
gently taken by the hand and led to some kindly asylum  that lacks
Internet and cellphone coverage."