Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Welcome to this year's "State of the World" conversation, once again
hosted on the pioneering online community platform, The WELL. As The
WELL approaches its 40th anniversary in 2025, we celebrate the 25th
annual discussion about global trends and insights, featuring the
renowned author, journalist, design visionary, and world traveler
Bruce Sterling, alongside me, Jon Lebkowsky. I'm a co-host at the
Plutopia News Network and have had the privilege of hosting several
conferences on The WELL, including this one, Inkwell.vue. Over the
years, I've worn many hats as a writer, editor, net activist, web
strategist, and futurologist, and I'm psyched to continue this
tradition of exploring the State of the World.
  

    
It's 2025, a year unfolding in a complex world shaped by political
transitions, ongoing conflicts, recovery from natural disasters, and
peculiar cultural shifts. While some might see these turbulent times
as evidence that the world is falling (or flying) apart and humanity
is doomed, this sense of impending catastrophe is nothing new.
Throughout my life --- and even in publications from before I was
born --- there's always been the image of a street corner prophet
holding a sign proclaiming, "Repent! The end is near!" By now, we
should be well-versed in the art of anticipating apocalypse.
  

    

Twenty-five years -- I'm grateful for this space and the opportunity
to participate once again.  It's rare to have this kind of sturdy
continuity in one's life, and if it wasn't here, I'd miss it a lot. 
I'd be mournful, even, and yet I'm not, which is good.

I don't often quote Marshall MacLuhan, but it's interesting to see
how the "message" warps and evolves as the "medium" transforms. 
Once upon a time, the "Whole Earth "Lectronic Link" was technically
avant-garde and highly inventive, and quite a crispy and out-there
place.  While in 02025 AD, to have a public discussion that's
structured like this one is like gathering in Belle Epoque Paris to
exchange little blue telegrams through long pneumatic pipes.

So, what do you properly do, in your jar-laden, rusty-bucket public
WELL that's somehow become an archaic "electronic Galapagos"?  I'm
thinking that the proper attitude is to savor that privileged
opportunity!  It feels great to traditionally be here!  Here in this
peculiar, stony, damp but time-honored venue, we can still make our
yearly effort to sip from the aquifer and get our heads on straight.
  

    
Whereas, if we somehow need-and-desire a raging, foaming torrent of
state-of-the-art semi-generated social-slop from AI Doomers,
megacorps,  foreign psyops, far left & far right extremists, crypto
grifters, hostile anons, status-seeking socialites, bot swarms (plus
maybe some artificial, faceless-Facebook pseudo-personalities
powered by giant Louisiana fossil-fuel plants) -- well, I'm pretty
sure that we all know where to find plenty of that.    Just a few
clicks or strokes away from the placid, shimmering depths of the
WELL State of the World is all the  seething "content" that human
beings might ever try to process, and then some.
  

    
These days, in the capering adventures of my wild-and-restless 70s,
I'm often hard-put to  know if the world is old-and-boring or
whether that's just me personally.    When you become old, things
must and do feel same-old same-old, because you yourself are so
factually and actually old -- but also, the Twenty-Twenties are
quite a repetitous time.   Okay, another Trump regime -- there's no
surprise or novelty in that.   I guess I might find the energy to
panic, but the guy's interminable.   He hasn't yet persisted as long
as Jimmy Carter did, but he's older than I am.  He's ancient.   

 It's like trying to become searingly indignant about the timeless
bad scene in Appalachia.  Okay, yes, it's sad-but-true, West
Virginia has the highest death-rate in America, they're poorer than
defrauded megachurch mice in that region, they're elegiac
hillbillies who don't know nothin' about nothin' and they hate and
fear anybody who does, and yet, also Appalachia's  traditional.  It
shouldn't surprise or amaze anybody in the USA that Appalachia
consistently looks-and-behaves like Appalachia, with profound and
granite-like continuity, for centuries-on-end.  It's like Italians
struggling to achieve indignation about Apulia being  Apulia.  
  

    

What's 02025 gonna look-and-feel like, well, if you're American,
it's gonna be very red-state, like Appalachia, the Ozarks, East
Texas and Mississippi.  Combined with a great deal of
good-old-fashioned Florida/New York Trumpian real-estate fraud. 
Also, some oligarch jets and private rockets zipping high overhead
amid a cloud of UFO-looking AI-drones.   

 I can easily make a big rootless-cosmopolitan global-nomad fuss
about that, and how I might wish life might be otherwise, but it
seems corny, self-indulgent.  What if you're some authentic denizen
born in the 21st Century, and you're literally FROM West Virginia,
and you joined the military to escape the coal mines and the opioid
rackets?  Now you're tromping the smoking wreckage of Syria in your
Special Forces boots and wondering if you get redeployed to Panama
and/or Greenland.  That's a plenty weird scene, but that's not
"old-and-boring," right?   That's modern life with some contemporary
authenticity; that's the world of 02025 revealing itself in its
native character as the real-deal 02025.
  

    
Waking this New Year's Day, I see a banner headline in the New York
Times: "At Least 10 Dead as Vehicle Rams Crowd in New Orleans." The
driver was killed in a shootout with police. The mayor of New
Orleans, Latoya Cantrell, says this was a "terrorist attack," and
the FBI is investigating it as such. So we start the year with an
act of senseless violence, possibly political, an act of terror. 

I watched the fireworks last night, controlled explosions, flowers
of fire in the night sky.
  

    
I am in New Orleans and woke up to the news. Bourbon Street on New
Year’s Eve and the eve of the Sugar Bowl. The chaos must have been
horrific. 
  

    
Yeah, there's nothing quite like a public massacre at a street-party
to harsh people's mellow, but of course that's their intent.
  

    
I happen to be logging in to the WELL State of the World from Ibiza,
as I have for several years now, and Ibiza has been manifesting some
rather-novel  Ibizan trends that seem very 2025 to me.

 First, the nearest big-town to the island, which is Valencia, got
hit by a greenhouse rain-bomb at the end of October 2024.   The
global-warmed, over-laden skies opened up like a zipper and a year's
worth of rain arrived in one day.  Valencia's in a river basin, so
the city's river rose up and killed a couple of hundred local
citizens and washed the parked car-fleet downhill.
  

    

These were some spectacular social-media snapshots of a modern urban
disaster, and the standard thoughts-and-prayers, and there's not
much to be done about it.   Most any place on Earth will flood if it
gets a year's worth of rain in day.   It could happen again in
Valencia next week; nobody expects that, but nobody expected that
other flood, either.  

This Wikipedia article details some of the upshot, which includes
drownings, rescue efforts, some mild looting, lots of political
finger-pointing, and vague technocratic sentiment about somehow
rebuilding old river towns so that they become river-proof.  Very
New-Orleans after Katrina,  and New York after Sandy; nothing unique
about Valencia's flood-experience, everybody does that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Spanish_floods


Ibiza likely won't flood like that, because it's simply not big
enough to have a Spanish river-basin, but if you're from little
Ibiza and visiting big-town Valencia,  you're gonna feel a little
nervous henceforth whenever the sky clouds up.  Nothing else to be
done about that; the 2020s have some bad weird skies.  You don't get
to hide from that any more than you can somehow hide from the color
blue.
  

    

A second contemporary local issue is "overtourism," which is a
formula that seems to have been invented in Barcelona and quickly
spread to Ibiza and elsewhere.  "Overtourism" is a kind of Spanish
upscale version of the general ethnonational anti-emigration
sentiment of the present day.  It's a little odd, though, for if the
traditional hordes of tourists were to actually leave Ibiza and
Barcelona, both those places would be in mortal trouble.  

People on Barcelona and Ibiza even know very well what
"undertourism" looks-and-feels like, because during the COVID-19
lockdowns there weren't any tourists and the places were basically
moribund.

So "overtourism" is not a simple angry reflex like "gosh we hate the
tourists and we want to deport them," it's more of a form of vaguely
left-wing Catalan technocracy where you attempt to weed out various
forms of tourists that you think you don't much like.  Oddly, a lot
of the tourist foot-traffic over-cluttering Ibiza comes from
Barcelona.  It's Spanish domestic tourism, which means that you're
trying to get rid of invasive "strangers" who look and act as much
like you as anybody possibly could.
  

    

"Overtourism" is also about policing rentals, but a place like
Valencia, which suffered a large urban disaster, is full of native
Valencians struggling to find some temporary place to stay in their
own town.  I'm not saying that "overtourism" is an impossible idea
and there's nothing to be done about the problem, just that, as a
practice, it's very much about pet leopards trained to eat the faces
of unwelcome house-guests.  
   
I'd also point out that the tourists themselves feel unhappily
"overtouristed."   The tourists themselves are visibly eager to
avoid places for tourists that locals have designed for tourists. 
And that overtourism sentiment is spreading through Europe
generally; Amsterdam is running public relations campaigns to tell
people to stay away, while Berlin is cutting the arts budget to
choke back the fine-arts fans.

I don't see any "solution" for this; it's how-it-is and
gonna-be-more-so.  It's not so much a "problem to be solved" as a
condition.
  

    
Ever see the Marx Brothers classic comedy "The Cocoanuts"?  It's got
some great songs and big dance numbers, and it's all about deranged
Floridian real-estate grifters.

"The Cocoanuts" has just come into the public domain in 2025, and
yet, it's nevertheless plenty topical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cocoanuts
  

    
We interrupt the conversation briefly for this public service
announcement:

The annual State of the World conversation is publicly accessible,
meaning anyone can read it, whether or not they are a member of the
WELL, which is the online community platform hosting this two-week
discussion.

For non-members, here's a short link for easy access:
<https://tinyurl.com/sotw-2025>.

The full link is:
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/551/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Leb
kowsky-page01.html>.

Either link will open the first page of the public conversation. If
you are not a WELL member, we encourage you to visit regularly as
the discussion will expand across multiple pages. Use the pager
(dropdown menus at the top and bottom of the page) to navigate
through the conversation as it evolves.

Feel free to share either link via social media, email, etc.

If you're not a member of the WELL, you can't post a response
directly. However we welcome your comments and questions - you can
email them to inkwell (at) well.com, and we'll post them here on
your behalf.

If you'd like to participate in more discussions like this, consider
joining the WELL: <https://www.well.com/join/>. The WELL is an
online community with vibrant, thoughtful conversations on a wide
range of topics---an excellent alternative to the fast-paced,
drive-by posting on social media.

This conversation will continue for at least two weeks, through
January 13, assuming the state of the world is relatively stable for
that long and we aren't zapped by an electromagnetic pulse...
  

    

It's remarkable how much of of your Ibiza narrative here, <bruces>, could
take replacing Ibiza with today's Bali, the Ibiza of Southeast Asia.

Am I correct in getting that your curious addition of a zero in the leftmost
place in 02025 is a gesture to the, what is it, culture of the Long Clock?
  

    
Looks like the 2025 discussion started early this year? Glad to see
it again.

On the subject of everything old is new again, cyberattacks are
bigger than ever, just like every year.

Ransomware is routine now, but in two cases, it was a bit closer to
home for me. A relative's hospital's network got attacked (not that
she noticed), and so did the credit union that my wife and I use,
resulting in minor inconvenience.

Meanwhile, China hacked several US phone networks, so they could
geolocate whoever they want and listen to live calls at will. The
Feds were reduced to recommending people use encrypted apps like
Signal. (Not by name, of course.)
  

    

 (pssst, the feds recommend Signal by name. SEE:

 
<https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mobile-communication
s-best-practices.pdf>
  

    


Alberto Cottica writes:

Happy new year, Jon, Bruce and all the WELL crowd!

I submit that 2025's avatar might be Luigi Mangione. At least in my bubble,
there is a distinct feeling that late-stage capitalism has overstayed its
welcome, and now many people will privately admit that some collateral damage
might be acceptable to put society back onto an acceptable track.

Meanwhile, for the first time in my adult life, economics is making some
promising breakthrough. Degrowth and post-growth macroeconomics, needs-based
approaches, modern monetary theory, job guarantee, universal basic services,
carbon coins... the toolbox for moving on from the current model seems to be
there, at least in part. It's so close I can almost touch it, this solarpunk,
engineering-driven economy that tries to meet human needs with minimum
consumption of labour, materials and energy instead of coming up with
nonsense products and services that solve nothing.

A major problem with all that (among many) is that things to people in the
Global South look very, very different to those in the Global North. Even if
we can agree on the principle, disentangling loss and damage is going to
be... problematic.

Stay kind and strong, in the best WELL tradition.

A.

Sent with Proton Mail secure email.
  

    
Thanks for another yearly discussion!

Talking to some friends from college who still live in Houston about
the political situation there.  Abbott has it in for Houston, being a
big blue city.  I'm living in greater Pittsburgh now for the past 20
years and it's a bit like Austin -- smaller blue city surrounded by a
lot of red.

Looking back at 2024 and thinking about 2025, a few things come to
mind.

I pass the Tree of Life Synagogue several times a week while running
errands.  The day of the massacre was also the day of Carnegie
Mellon's graduation, none of my friends were graduating so I gave it a
miss.  Instead, I went on a leisurely bike ride, unaware of what was
happening a few miles away.  They've finally broken the ground on new
construction, in 2025 I will watch the building of a new temple.

Polarization will continue, and continue to make things worse.
Someone I know, Catholic, posted to social media that anti-semitism
was the result of the Protestants... I mean, WHAT?  Who was behind the
Crusades?  I didn't respond but if I did I'd probably also ask wtf
Pius XII was doing during WWII.

Healthcare continues to improve but isn't distributed evenly in the
US, to paraphrase Bill Gibson.  In 2024 three of my friends and my mom
died of incurable diseases, another friend by suicide after being
social media shamed.  At the same time another friend of mine kicked
cancer's ass thanks to the amazing advances in cancer treatment.  I
had a cataract removed (1 hour surgery!) and genetic testing revealed
that my bonkers cholesterol levels are genetic, not from diet and
exercise.  Maybe 2025 will be my Year of No Surgeries.

Fly-by-wire driving is finally here, or maybe it was and I'm just a
late adopter.  I traded in my 2013 RAM for a 2024 Ranger and quickly
discovered there are CPUs and motors between my steering wheel,
pedals, and even my transmission.  I turned my truck "off" while in
Drive, it literally downshifted me to Park by moving the lever.  I've
turned this next feature off, but on cruise control I can get feedback
from the steering wheel that I'm getting out of my lane.

This is very local, but some of the best restaurants in greater
Pittsburgh survived covid and we're getting newer ones that change the
dining landscape.  When we moved here in 2005 the closest we could get
to Cali-Mex was a local chain, Mad Mex, where they serve sort of
healthy Cali-style "mexican" food.  It's good but it's nowhere near a
Mission burrito.  Now?  We have Tepache serving a wide range of food
from Jalisco, a Latino grocery store that sells street tacos on the
sidewalk, and all sorts of other good regional foods.  Great Indian
restaurants (thanks to Westinghouse and the cold war but that's
another story), really good sushi, and a local pub-and-grub that makes
everything from cole slaw to their own chips and french fries.

Oh, and beer.  My god there are so many local breweries cranking out
amazing seasonal stouts that I might have to go to the gym more days a
week.
  

    
Hi and HNY to all from a long time lurker.  And bruces, good to see
you again providing sage bon mots in this sturdy virtual raft on the
vast interwebs river heading toward the Class V rapids.

You've often talked about "the stacks" -- Meta/FB, MSFT, AMZN and
the others who turned early visions of online global solidarity into
history's most effective machine for enclosing the cultural commons
and turning it into the maze of gray ooze, pervasive surveillance
and hyperaccumulator of money and power we now swim in.  

My specific question is about the recent emanations from Meta
indicating they will now unleash AI-managed Facebook "accounts" to
mix and mingle with us hoi polloi and presumably with "each other,"
whatever that means.

Among many who have already jumped on this is Ed Zitron,
increasingly a prophet in his own high-tech comms land.  Yesterday
on Bluesky he said quite a bit, this being the mildest: 

"If they do this to advertisers it would be fraud, by the way! Very
obvious easily detected fraud that would get them obliterated. They
want the AI accounts to cover up the fact that Facebook's engagement
is cratering and their users are leaving and going nowhere else."
(https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com and also see his cogent if
rather long-winded pieces: https://www.wheresyoured.at)

What can we expect going forward from the recent course of actions
by The Stacks, including this and the overall dire digital
colonialism of the AI bubble?  

At moments like this -- in fact, all the time -- I recall the
prophetic vision of the Fugs in "Wide Wide River" (1968, the real
song title was obscured due to the public discourse sensibilities of
the era): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFTzZwH1LM8
  

    
"So, the WELL, is it?  Can I post a video selfie on this thing?  Can
I mass-troll my followers?  It doesn't appear that I can!" 
#ElectroEpisoded #02025AD

https://flic.kr/p/2qD3edq 
  

    



PHRED!!

Great to see you, and of course you posted smart clever things. Big
yay.

Maybe AI is just another fleet of sick puppets. 
  

    <hidden>
  

    
Sick sock puppets yep.
  

    
For those tuning in to the WELL State of the World for the first
time, it's very common for us to moan here as if we wouldn't survive
the dreadful state of the onrushing next year.   There's never been
any year in the 21st Century where the WELL participants were
markedly perky, cheery and convinced that civilized life was on the
upswing.

And yet we've survived twenty-five years, and I'm growing mildly
concerned that we might pull a Jimmy Carter and somehow survive yet
ANOTHER twenty-five years.  I guess I'm willing to go through with
that -- I'll be in my late 90s, and it'll be 02050 -- but am I
really supposed to extend my radar and gather my indignation and
beef about every major thing that seems to be ominous?  Once you're
in your 90s, everything's ominous without exception -- next week you
could get knocked over by a feather, so why trouble your precious
self to pine and fret about any particular thing?  Every day is a
gift!