Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

With that said about our bleak assessments, I hate that forced and
phony optimism where some stricken guy is grimly and factually going
blind and some pollyanna comments-guy has to remark, "Oh well, think
how nicely you'll learn to play the piano!"  Upbeat sentiment should
be reserved for somebody who really gets a good break.  

This year,  I can single out one significant public figure whose
fortunate life must feel truly blessed by good-fortune:  Abu
Mohammad al-Jolani.

Here's a guy who's just a flat-out Global War on Terror terrorist. 
He's Al Qaeda, he's ISIS, he was captured by American occupiers in
Iraq and kept in an American jail for doing his level best to shoot
Americans.  Also Russians want to kill him, Syrians want to kill
him, Iranians, Kurds, Israelis, the much-oppressed black-clad
girl-next-door, whomever...  And then, in just a couple of weeks,
Jolani's little-known militia topples the regime and presto, he's
the warlord head-of-state and in 2025 everybody wants to kiss him.  
  

    
Then ten-million dollar Yankee prize-on-his-head for being such a
lifelong militant baddie, it just evaporates overnight.  The former
New World Order, the Coalition of the Willing, they're embarrassed
to mention it, even.   He's got brand-new friends, like the
Ukrainians, who will send him boatloads of tasty bread.  Nothing
succeeds like success, eh?  

I know that Jolani's probably pulling a long face now and stroking
his long beard -- "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," and
all that -- but there are lottery-winners way less lucky than Abu
Mohammad al-Jolani.   Maybe we should ask his new press officer for
some good advice on how to get by.
  

    
Happy New Year to the WELL community—Bruce, Jon, and all the
thinkers here. As we celebrate 25 years of rich dialogue in this
forum, it’s the perfect time to envision the grand scale of our
future. Our ongoing discussions have underscored the pivotal role of
technology and its integration into every aspect of life.

Bruce has eloquently highlighted how our medium of interaction—once
the frontier of innovation, now almost quaint—shapes our societal
narrative. This evolution compels us to consider the broader
implications of technology as our nextnature.

Scientists have calculated that the technosphere is now heavier than
the biosphere, which undoubtedly causes significant friction.
Looking ahead, I see immense potential in aligning technological
growth with ecological and social sustainability. The concept of
solarpunk, an optimistic vision of the future that integrates green
technology and humanistic values, could serve as a guiding principle
for our discussions. How can we leverage our collective knowledge
and technological capabilities to create a future that is desirable
not just for a few billionaires, but for all life on the planet and
the planet at large?

The next 25 years could be transformative, shaping a world where
technology supports both the planet and its people. Let’s continue
to share and explore ideas that will help us build this future
together.
  

    
Koert van Mensvoort is our featured guest in this year's "State of
the World" conversation. Koert  is an artist, philosopher and
scientist best known for his work on the philosophical concept of
Next Nature. "It is his aim to better understand our co-evolutionary
relationship with technology and help set out a track towards a
future that is rewarding for both humankind and the planet at
large." <https://nextnature.org/en/people/team/koert-van-mensvoort>
  

    
Human success and resilience as a species depends on how we
organize. To the extent that our organization and communication lack
coherence, we will be less successful.

We're in a time of transition from the print era, which led to
specific ways of gathering, organizing, and sharing information that
ultimately became mass media and mass governance. We probably scaled
beyond our capabilities, but that's a story for another day. Today I
just want to acknowledge that the print era has ended, and the
Internet era has begun, and has been mainstreaming and evolving for
over three decades.  It's only just beginning, really. The print
era's effects took about three centuries to clarify as the sort of
top-down information flow and governance model that I grew up with.
Some of you who are younger have experienced more of the chaos of
transition than the stability of mature models. (Hat tip to Jeff
Jarvis for insights from his book _The Gutenberg Parenthesis_.)
  

    
It's critical for our survival and our resilience that we find our
way through the current chaos, that we find new ways and models for
coherent and stable social organization and information-sharing. To
get past the crazy times, I suggest that we need to get good at
forming smaller communities using tools and methods that work in
cyberspace. (Community is simply defined as a group of people who
get together because of a common interest or affinity.)
  

    
Currently we have "social media" that contributes to the
contemporary chaos, working against coherence and collaboration.
Social media is primarily designed for broadcasting content and
facilitating large-scale sharing of ideas, images, videos, and
updates, contributing more to polarization than to coherence. And
because it's monetized by advertising, it sees its users, not as
participants in a larger conversation, but as the source of a
resource (attention) to be sold (to advertisers). It focuses on
reaching wide audiences and driving engagement metrics (likes,
shares, followers). It realizes that conflict drives engagement, so
it facilitates and rewards conflict.
  

    
How can we build communities that work to mitigate polarization and
conflict? For the last 35 years, I've been part of a successful
online community called The WELL, which has actually been around for
four decades. The WELL, over time, figured out a few things about
communities that work, partly because its early directors came from
an "IRL" intentional community, The Farm. It's not that there is no
conflict in a community like the WELL, but that conflict occurs
within a sense of coherent community, often resolved through ongoing
conversation and sharing of perspective as members of the community
build a history together.
  

    

PHRED! How great to see you here!
  

    

> Social media is primarily designed for broadcasting content and facilitat-
> ing large-scale sharing of ideas, images, videos, and updates, contributing
> more to polarization than to coherence.

I don't disagree, but there are also plenty of positive uses for it. I play a
live show on FB and YouTube every day since the pandemic shut down my touring
life. I have a group of regulars who are there almost every day, and I have
made a bit of money in tips. I sell my music and authgraphed books online.  I
don't pay attention to my likes nor my follower count; I just post my gig
announcement and share links to my stuff.

Bluesky isn't yet set up for direct livestreeaming from the platform I use,
but I share the link to my YouTube feed every day and it plays right there on
the Bsky page so it's almost a livestream.

I am not beset by attacks from the right, and I am not overwhelmed by ads. I
ignore a lot of stuff online in exactly the samw way I ignore the ads that
arrive in my mailbox and with my Sunday newspaper.

I don't need to do a huge amount of business to keep my thing afloat, so what
I am able to accomplish in this way is sufficient.
  

    
Thank you, Jon, for the introduction and your insights into the
transition from the print to the Internet era and its associated
challenges.

I appreciate your focus on creating smaller, coherent communities
like the legendary WELL. These communities demonstrate how
technology can do more than just connect us—it can foster genuine,
supportive interactions, even amidst conflicts. This leads to an
important question: Can we redesign our digital spaces to prioritize
human values over profit, thereby enhancing our collective
resilience and bridging divides?
  

    
Over a decade ago, biologist Edward O. Wilson was asked if humans
could solve the crises they would face over the next century. He
responded, "Yes, if we are honest and smart," and highlighted that
"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic
emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology."

Much of our current troubles stem from this mismatch. Biologically,
we are not equipped to cope with planetary challenges like climate
change, urbanization, deforestation, and artificial intelligence,
which surpass the evolutionary pressures of the savanna where humans
evolved. If we are honest and smart, we will acknowledge our
limitations and harness technology to help us navigate these global
challenges.
  

    

> We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technol-
> ogy.

!!!
  

    



> If we are honest and smart

yes, well, it's hard to see a lot of people being honest and smart these
days. policy appears to be dictated by money, power mongers, big
corporations, and the usual. 

i would love for us to be honest and smart. it's hard enough to ask
ourselves to do it within thoughtful, probing communities that believe in
critical thinking (including self-examination). the populace at large?
politicians? Donald Trump? 

not to mention the former tech gods many of our ilk fawned over in days
past. "Don't be evil," said Google. sure, yeah, don't be evil. that didn't
last. Elon Musk? 

are capable of being honest and smart, or of holding our plutocratic
leaders to account for failing to achieve honesty and smarts? 
  

    
We've done this before.  Homo Sap has been around long enough to
have gone through a few cycles of ice ages and then hot periods.  It
gets hot, we move north. There's enough land area there to support a
coup;e billion people.  I think that mankind will survive and that
the planet will be just fine, maybe after another ice age plows the
temperate zones under again.  
  

    
Troubles in the near term, though.
  

    
wrt #20, i adore this ed zitron but did wonder who would hire him to
do PR (his day job, i believe)

wrt #40, of course climate change (nod to late lamented viridian
mailing list). but somehow discussion of the environment seems
mostly about climate change --- and ignores the polluted planet we
are living on and the ever increasing amount of petrochemical gunk.
not new info but does seem often to be left out of the discussion.
  

    
Hi Paulina

 <40> love the optimism but I do hope that whatever catalyzes a
steep population reduction back down to a couple billion is not too
traumatic.. 

 :-)
  

    

"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."

*Yeah, I think that "stacks" might have been a useful term for a
while, because you could see the big platforms trying to integrate
themselves in various stacked layers and try to become the universal
everything for everybody.  However, that was back when "Big Tech"
still thought they had "users" and "customers."

Now they're really, really Big Tech, and they're basically
oligarchic structures that exist to move wealth to shareholders
while immiserating everybody else.  And the closer you get to them,
the worse off you are -- of course the "users" are the "product,"
and everybody knows that, but you can actually witness the fear and
misery in the faces of their employees now.  They've become cruel.
  

    

The "gray ooze" is "enshittification."

But there's a lot of this slime metaphor, it's all over the place in
2025.  If you're Trumpian, all forms of governance are "the swamp." 
The existent power arrangement, ie law-and-order, is also known as
"the deep-state" and "the blob."  There's no concept that governance
is a publicly-visible republican structure that might be examined,
amended and methodically reformed.   Instead, what used to be your
"state" or your "civilization" is like a haze of pollution that you
have to breathe, or it's a mysterious slimy sewage in your water.

So "stack" is too neat, clean and technocratic to describe the
existent oligarchy.  Even the oligarchs are in the mire.  If you're
a modern oligarch, you're kind of happy about Trump, or Putin, or
even Xi, but nobody however rich-or-powerful much wants to be seen
standing next to him, or to risk embracing him, or be his loyal
lieutenant to bask in his honor and fame.  Putin will flat out
poison you or blow up your private jet, but Trump will defraud you
and defame you; you might like to be a shining captain-of-industry,
but there's mud on your face; you're ashamed and you feel beslimed
and dirty, all the time.
  

    

People don't like to be shamed and defamed, even when they're
genuinely shameless and their behavior is genuinely infamous.   So
in contemporary framing they tend to blame their situation on a
semi-random slimy fog, like, "I didn't do anything genuinely bad,
this is merely Cancel-Culture attacking me" or in Russia, "Well, the
world isn't actually afraid of our aggressions, instead it's a
planetary mental-illness called Russophobia, which should be
illegal."

It's like watching "malaria" theory when everybody has somehow
agreed never to believe in mosquitoes.  I mean, the mosquitoes are
there, and they're humming and whining in drone-like clouds, they're
chock-full of spirochetes, too, but they're kinda structural
whenever you live in an enshittified swamp, so there's no use
imagining that you could get rid of 'em.

You just age in your big city while you're vaguely afraid of the sky.
  

    
I'm very happy that Koert van Mensvoort is here, because  Prof.
Koert is a guy from the world's most civilized and well-developed
swamp.

Also Koert works inside a giant UFO in Eindhoven, which is a place
that has to be seen to be believed.
  

    
The narrative complexity of the moment defies useful comprehension
as voices and assumptions proliferate, a babelian cacophony, signal
lost in prevailing noise. I'm finding it hard to find any kind of
certainty that I can interpret or describe the state of the world or
of evolving societies based on wild combinations of traditional and
social media I'm exposed to, as someone whose daily explorations are
fairly broad and rife with contradiction, conflicting
interpretations, "alternate facts." This is my disclaimer: I can
give eyewitness testimony, but my perceptions are suspect, the
realities I'm describing are malleable, convoluted, and may not
conform to the reality you're experiencing. I miss the day when
Huntley and Brinkely or Walter Cronkite could explain the world in
fifteen minutes a day, and we were all hearing the same story.  That
wasn't "truth," but at least more of us were on the same page, in
the same book, from the same library.
  

    
Thank you, Jon, for capturing the complex narrative of our times so
vividly. Your reflections underscore the need for a focused dialogue
on the profound transitions we are experiencing.

In today's world, the sum of all technology on the planet already
outweighs the sum of all biology: the technosphere is heavier than
the biosphere. This fact alone should give us pause and motivate a
reevaluation of our trajectory. This "big tech" isn't just about the
corporations we often discuss; it's about a fundamental shift in the
material substrate of our planet and, consequently, in the
existential fabric of our society. 

The latest comments from Bruce and others in this discussion bring
to light the pervasive challenges of governance in the face of such
transformative power. We're navigating an era where our
technological capabilities far exceed the systems of governance and
morality that guide them. This misalignment leads to what Edward O.
Wilson described as a disconnect between our "Paleolithic emotions,
medieval institutions, and godlike technology."

As we consider this big picture, the essential transition isn't just
technological but deeply societal and ethical. We must strive to
develop technologies and systems that do not merely advance human
ingenuity but also enhance the collective well-being of all life.
Our focus must be on creating a future where technology serves as a
backbone for a healthy planet and a cohesive society, rather than as
a catalyst for division and degradation.
  

    
wrt #43, have often had the same thought, another version of the
nuclear winter's 'a republic of insect and grasses' and the message
of 'earth abides' (the book, not the horrid current dramatization):
fewer humans, nature recovers. maybe...but plastic is forever.