Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
In the USA, far-right autocrats apparently supported by external
oligarchs have taken more power than we imagined they could, led by
a charismatic demagogue and working from a cultivated set of
cultural grievances, using sophisticated psyops especially
well-enabled by unregulated social media platforms that were ripe
for manipulation. They've managed to take control of a political
party and elect enough obstructionists to throw the legislative
branch of government into chaos. They've taken advantage of years of
groundwork by conservatives who previously controlled the Republican
party, and they've also leveraged the popularity of right-wing
tabloid news organizations that have gained popularity over the last
couple of decades as cable news channels have become effective
sources of political propaganda. They're related to a global
autocratic movement that has recently lit the fuse on a couple of
major wars as part of a more general global chaos movement to topple
democratic governments wherever they still stand. It's a dark time.
The USA will have an election on 2024 that could be the end of its
long commitment to a democratic intention. This could mean the rise
of global autocracy, a radical change in the way we live and do
business. Democracy, per Churchill "the worst form of government,
except for all the others," will fall to those more-worst forms.
Many who support this potential transition are simply ignorant of
the implications. One of those implications is that we will see an
increase in the carbon burn that will ultimately make this planet
uninhabitable by humans. Extinction will be the likely outcome.

Having said all that, I think I'll wander into the other room and
watch television for a while.
  

    
Well put.
  

    
Well, we're getting close to wrapping up now, so I'll mention what
I'm up to, when I'm not handwaving in pundit-fashion here  at the
WELL State of the World.

So, here's an essay that I wrote this month, which is about the
sculptor Alexander Calder inventing weird objects for his house.  
I'm pretty pleased about this effort, because it involves some
art-critic issues I've been thinking about a long time.  Also, my
essay has a point to make, and it marshals some evidence to back it,
and even if it might be  quite wrong. at least it's clearly stated.

https://link.medium.com/wRQjEPdDkGb 
  

    
I place rather a lot of odd, long-form stuff on Medium, and commonly
people  click on it, look, and  then promptly go somewhere else. 
This particular essay, "The Homemade Limits of Everyday Weirdness,"
takes an ominous 49 minutes to read, and yet, two out of three
people who do click, they somehow sit there fixated, and they
diligently read the entire thing.   That's an unheard-of response
rate, by Bruce Sterling standards.  

 Also, nobody edited it, so it's rather loose and repetitive, and
it's concerned with truly arcane topics like kinetic art and
abstract Modernism.  It's a hit, though, by my Medium standards. 
Somehow, it's connecting with readers.

So, you could go leave the WELL and read it or not bother, but for
the sake of the WELL discussion I'd like to point out how strange
the *form* of this essay is.   Even though it *acts* like maybe it's
some particular kind of writing, it just isn't.   Instead, it's a
mash-up hybrid of many specialized genres of non-fiction writing.  
  

    
It's sort of like a design-school classroom lecture (complete with
slides).   It  talks about household consumer objects and industrial
design quite a lot.  Then there's an extensive break for some
biography of a little kid and his family and their travels.  
There's some extensive psychoanalysis of a guy's wife.  Also there's
a long account of a couple of guys in 1930s Paris, meeting in a
studio and discussing what abstract art ought to properly do.

Then, also, somehow, there's a whole bunch of pictures (which aren't
even proper art illustrations, they're just boldly stolen
screenshots).  The subjects of the pictures are discussed at length
-- and not in some dry, accurate way, but in quite a slippery,
speculative way.

And then, somehow, it ends with a personal confession and a New
Year's resolution, as if the whole thing was somehow intended as a
personal diary entry.  Of course it isn't private at all though,
because it's published on the web.
  

    
So, you might think, optimististically, "Well, this is modern
digital freedom of speech in action!  Nobody asked the writer to
write anything in particular, so he can just gush out whatever he
wants! So, if he wants to be an art critic, and an industrial design
critic, and also a journalist, and a diarist, and a travel writer,
and an arts historian, and he also somehow wants to talk at great
length about home repairs, why shouldn't he just do *all that stuff
all at once*?  You can tell from his tone that he's really anxious
to bave at it, and after he did it, he felt better, so where is the
problem?"

Okay, I wouldn't call this essay a big problem -- (I can't even call
it an "essay," because essays don't have pirated fine-art jpegs) --
but when I looked at this text  a few days after hitting the
"publish" button, I realized that it was one of the most peculiar
things that I ever wrote.  Normally, when I'm writing some extensive
text, I have in mind some idea of an editor, a publisher, a
demographic of readers.  It's gonna be a publishable work of
fiction, or a journalistic article, that fits into some kind of
genre or category.   

It might possibly be a new subgenre or else some little-explored
category, but it shouldn't be ten different categories all at once
in the very same piece of prose.
  

    

But that's what it is.  And also, the readers don't seem at all
confused.   They don't recognize its radical  formal disorder, they
just kind of breeze right through the thing.  They don't feel jolted
that it is radically switching subjects, topics, and approaches,
every eighty words or so.  

 I'm thinking that maybe the habit of scrolling has inured them to
this.  It feels okay to them that they're reading a loosely-linked
bouillabaisse, a kind of associational fish stew.   It's not that
it's just a verbal rant or farrago, some guy on stage, riffing in
stand-up style -- on the contrary, it's kind of persistently
chewing, ruminating, on a central cud of a problem that's posed in
the very first sentence -- but it's like an entire herd of cows is
chewing that haypile,  ten different animals biting and tearing from
ten directions.
  

    

So, when I finished it, I thought, "Well, this looks-and-feels like
a new, compelling approach for me, I may be writing a lot more of
this henceforth."  Which is okay, I guess, but....  What the heck is
it?

Suppose that someone wanted to reprint it.  Reprint it as *what*? 
Reprint it where?  What conventional publisher could reasonably do
that?  Or suppose that it won some nice writerly award.  An award
for what, exactly?

If some other writer had written this piece and I'd stumbled across
it, I think I would have said to myself, "Well, I guess it's great
that this arcane topic hooked his interest and he had such a mental
snowstorm about it, but where is this supposed to go?  What does he
do for an encore?"

And I don't know, but in this year I suspect there will be more of
that happening.  I'd like to do a better job of it.  I'm not sure
how.
  

    
I hope t.v. wasn't playing "Don't Look Up," Jon. All seriousness
aside, you said a mouthful ~ & how many others, or how few, are
aware of what your lucidity points to? 
 
Extinction.   Human extinction.   Once province of science-fiction,
now science has caught up to fiction as fact. No other living
species contemplates its own collective demise.  Honestly, isn't
this is the worst suffering inherent in these times:  witnessing
great suffering in which we feel powerless to intervene?

Reminds me of the American war in Vietnam, as an era pervaded by a
sense of collective impotence to end the needless suffering visible
daily on network news.  Having since taken up a career of
mindfulness, of Zen, do I see our similar situation differently?

Yes. That's <252>. One part of me wants to provide an island of
solidity in the oceanic multi-polycrisis, to ameliorate the
suffering of others, those aware or unaware of <251>, and for those
less visible, whether bipoc, lgbqt, disabled, etc.  One part of me
wants to do the same thing but so as to ameliorate my own suffering.
So for me the unfolding multi-polycrisis is thus for me a Great
Calling: simply to look inward and outward at the same time,
awakening from the illusion of separation.  

Regardless of outcome, it would feel unconscionable to me not to
join voice with others.  As here.  The state of the world as the
state of ourselves, as well.   

And what’s the point of seeing the state of it if we don’t act upon
it?   Everybody doesn’t have to do everything.  We can each do just
one thing.    
  

    
< slippage > between Jon & Bruce.
  

    
I confess I have little confidence that humanity will summon the
will to do the hard work that they must undertake to forestall
extinction. Extinction itself is ultimately inevitable, of course.
In about 800 million years, the sun is going to go through its own
bardo of self immolation and earth and every living thing on it is
going to turn into a cinder. So the prospect of sapiens EOLing is
less daunting perhaps than it ought to be, taking the long view.

But it does seem inescapable that roughly half the human population
of the planet will die within the space of a single generation
sometime this century, and likely earlier than even the most
pessimistic projections.

And it's going to break our hearts (for very small values of "our";
I will count it fantastic luck if I see another twenty years). My
hope is that the collective grief over what hubris and neglect will
have wrought will impel the survivors to adapt in ways that inform a
gentler relationship to the planet. 

My working hypothesis is that roughly 40% of any species (chordata,
anyway) are net maladaptive. They serve to feed the next higher link
on the food chain, and to make the mistakes the rest of the herd
learns from. The problem with sapiens is that it has no natural
predators. Thus we've historically squandered much of our creative
capacity inventing ever novel strategies for reducing the population
by misadventure. 

But even taking Mozart, Einstein, and Taylor Swift into
consideration, we're still barely conscious primates; brainstems
with appetites. If humanity was a tech stock, I'd short it.

Maybe cetaceans will make a better go of it. 
  

    
well, i liked the whatever it was, <bruces>. it sort of read like
the life and works of the person you were writing about; meandering
about/finding its way...
  

    
> Extinction. Human extinction. Once province of science-fiction,
now science has caught up to fiction as fact.

I'm going to pick on this a little not because it's unusual but
because it's a common trope, all too typical these days. We aren't
extinct (obviously), so this is not a fact. The future isn't a realm
of facts, but of forecasts, scenarios, and make-believe. It isn't
known to us, and it may surprise us. It certainly has before.

The notion of human extinction is a meme, a mental construct, a dark
scenario. It's also not new; it's been commonly talked about since
World War II, at least.

Dark scenarios are important to think about, sometimes practical for
disaster planning, and a venerable science fiction tradition.

But taking possibilities in your head and transmuting them into
immutable "fact" is a common symptom of depressive thinking. A
little ad-hoc cognitive behavioral therapy might be in order? You
need to notice exaggerated thoughts like that and argue with them a
bit.

I'm not exactly a fun and cheerful guy. I entertain this stuff and
encourage disaster planning. But the dark scenarios need to be put
into perspective. There are others.
  

    <scribbled by tnf Sat 13 Jan 24 14:55>
  

    

Michael Brockington writes:

 If the State of the World in 2024 seems a bit boring, perhaps this
 owes something to a feeling of post-pandemic letdown.  We were
 promised an apocalypse!  All we got was enshittification.

 Picking up on comment 220, the "pseudo-speakeasy trend" is well
 entrenched here in Vancouver, Canada.  One place comes to mind that
 operates as a dumpling restaurant - but if you order a particular
 off-menu item, you're ushered into a bar hidden behind what looks like
 the door to an industrial freezer.  There are enough similar joints
 here to populate a good-sized listicle.

 Vancouver has also long been known for progressive drug policy.
 Cannabis was de facto legal in Vancouver for a couple decades before
 being legalized across Canada.  We did pioneering work with
 safe-injection sites, and this past year saw the decriminalization of
 many hard drugs in small amounts for personal use.

 It's yin and yang, I believe.  As drugs lose their stigma (eroding
 their glamour, likewise), people grow nostalgic for a time when
 mind-altering substances were illegal, or at least disreputable.

 Circling back, perhaps boredom is an appropriate response to a world
 where LSD has become an efficiency hack, akin to a coffee break.
 "Turn on, tune in, and get back to work!"

 I guess we can blame Big Tech for that as well.
  

    
Great essay in <253>. In Calder's origins I'm reminded of an older
tradition of American inventors and tinkerers. Based on memories of
my grandfather's farm and my Dad's work around the house, it seems
like farmers were (are?) accustomed to making do and building stuff
out of old scrap lying around, and this was very much about saving
money. There's plenty of space for old junk. Some of those weird
objects remind me of artifacts I'd see of unclear purpose in the
tool shanty. It was a complete mess and finding stuff was a hunt.

They were accustomed to risk. Tractors and chainsaws and home-built
wood splitters and woodworking tools are dangerous and you don't
want little kids messing with them unsupervised, but have their
uses. They wouldn't have worried about the food safety of a homemade
wooden spoon.
  

    
Bruce, you have written an essay in its original sense, un essaie, a trial,
a stroll around the square. Yours is a sure-footed, refreshing wander around
the outer and inner Calder. A good look around that bust of Calder in the
public hall of honor, front and back. Many thanks!
  

    
Thank you Bruce for <253>.  I'm teaching my class in making Calder
mobiles on Saturday and was preparing the tools and materials.  Then
while reading your article an email came in from a person across the
country who is learning to make mobiles from my book from 20  years
ago and can't find the stock number of the rivets I was using then
and could I help?  I get him onto a current supplier that is
internet friendly and go back to your article.  Just where I want to
be. I'm thinking that 02024 might not be so bad after all. 
  

    
*Our friend Captain Bing Copilot is being sued by the New York
Times.  I hope he's not convicted of a felony and deprived of his
right to vote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-micro
soft-lawsuit.html

(...)

In one example of how A.I. systems use The Times’s material, the
suit showed that Browse With Bing, a Microsoft search feature
powered by ChatGPT, reproduced almost verbatim results from
Wirecutter, The Times’s product review site. The text results from
Bing, however, did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they
stripped away the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to
generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations.

“Decreased traffic to Wirecutter articles and, in turn, decreased
traffic to affiliate links subsequently lead to a loss of revenue
for Wirecutter,” the complaint states....
  

    



2023 was the year I started finding AI tools useful in my work as a
documentary film editor.


On a fairly mundane level, AI audio transcription is pretty good now.
Not good as a human, but much cheaper and faster.  (i.e.
<https://www.rev.com/pricing>)  Quality is less critical, since these
transcripts are a tool for the editor, not a final product for an
audience.  AI transcription certainly works well enough to be useful
plowing through interviews (likely that's been true for a few years,
now, and I'm late to the party), but it doesn't change anything
fundamental - although it may make transcription possible for some
lower-budget projects that couldn't otherwise afford it.  It does seem
certain to replace many human transcribers.


More interesting are the AI image enhancement tools provided by Topaz
Labs (<https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-video-ai>).  These allow
upscaling video by 200-400% or more, for instance, with quality good
enough to use in a final program.  Of course upscaling could be done
easily before, but the  results of mathematical  interpolation
generally looked pretty crappy, at scale factors well below 200%.
These AI tools are not interpolating so much as inventing missing
detail that looks remarkably convincing.  This tool does expand
possibilities, allowing me to work with footage in ways I would have
rejected before.  It isn't replacing human labour, though - I doubt
any human was ever OCD enough to stipple in the missing detail between
the hundreds of thousands of pixels of a blown-up image, 24 frames per
second.


I would be curious to hear how other members of this very diverse
group might be incorporating current AI tools in their work.

Cheers,
--Michael Brockington







(I added angle brackets around the URLs to make them clickable)
  

    
I use chatGPT4 for web design (small but complex code in shell, php,
JavaScript, html5, css). Productivity up to 10x for initial version.
Enhancements, not clear yet. 
  

    
I just discovered that Audio Hijack Pro now has a transcription function. I
used it the other day and found it pretty decent.
  

    
Well, it's been quite a glum State of the World for us, but it was
honest in its glumness, which contents me.   In retrospect these
becalmed, enshittified years will be seen as the Good Old Days of
the twenty-first century, a touchingly archaic time when herds of
grandpas and grandmas were still behaving as if they were in the
Twentieth Century they once knew and understood.

This, too, shall pass.  As I myself experience more years, I become
more aware that "every day is a gift."    I take consolation in the
understanding that, no matter how you confront the billions of
pssing years, whenever you've had one pleasing day, that experience
can't be taken from you; yes, it passed, but it was precious.
  

    
It's like the poet  Czeslaw Milosz wrote, when he escaped his rather
crappy existence under Communist domination in the Warsaw Pact, and
he married a comely Californian woman who had a nice garden. 
Eventually she died, and he went back to Poland as a widower, but
for a while, there can be edenic paradise within the moment.

GIFT by Czeslaw Milosz 

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
  

    
I never expect to find enlightenment in these annual conversations,
but they do stimulate my thinking and (often) my feeling. This one,
combined with a personal slight IRL, had the effect of throwing me
into a deep funk. Friends stepped up to help me along, and that's
the best you can hope for. Fake friends may wound you, but real
friends show up with band-aids and neosporin.

Today is the formal last day of this conversation, though members of
the WELL can continue posting as they see fit. 

Bruce and I have been members of the WELL for 33 years. It's a
for-real virtual community where members have come to know each
other pretty well, and where there's always a few folks with
band-aids when you need 'em. The community is aging, but a few
younger people are showing up and plowing the fields with the rest
of us.

It's bitter cold right now in Austin, and I find myself thinking of
homeless people who don't have a warm table like the one where I'm
sitting right now. My best hope is that they have other people
around who care whether they're cold, whether they're hungry,
whether they're lost. 

I'm thinking about the Lord of the Rings this morning... we have our
own Sauron, who rules Mordor, and is capturing our Middle-Earth with
with his kind of magic - not by killing hobbits, but by getting into
their hearts and minds with is whispery evil vibes. It's a magic
called influence.

I'm wondering, who has the ring?

If you don't believe in Sauron, just look around you. His dark
influence is everywhere these days.