Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    <scribbled by jonl Sun 5 Jan 25 07:23>
  

    
This quote was posted elsewhere on the WELL... I think it fits here.

"Of all the fates that might befall us, from madness to illness to
the trauma of war, being bored seems, at most, trivial. We tend to
associate the experience of boredom with childhood --- zoning out in
class, long summer days at home with nothing to do. But that's just
because as soon as we get old enough to control our time, we do
everything possible to make sure we never experience boredom. What
parents haven't had the experience of rejecting a child's request
for screen time and then catching themselves immediately going back
to scrolling their phones?

"And yet boredom --- unlike, say, hunger --- isn't a universal human
experience. Anthropologists who work with Indigenous peoples who
live outside industrial modernity from Fiji to Ecuador to Australia
report that these societies spend oceans of time doing nothing,
without complaints of boredom. Their languages often don't even have
a word for boredom. One anthropologist who works with the Warlpiri
Aboriginal people in Australia noted that the lexeme for the concept
is an import, writing, 'When Warlpiri people referred to boredom,
they used the English word, usually embedded in otherwise Warlpiri
sentences.' It turns out boredom is a constitutive experience of
modernity.

"Yet we feel this restlessness; we lament our shrinking attention
spans. But to focus on a relatively narrow question of technical
measures of our attention span misses a deeper truth. The
restlessness and unease of our times aren't simply, in my
experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that
experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the
unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant
we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the
difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds."

<https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/opinion/chris-hayes-msnbc-attention.html?un
locked_article_code=1.mk4.EZrO.L_xjbrQdiTGv&smid=url-share>
  

    
@bruces/77

> However, I'm wondering if maybe this is an actual consumer
*benefit.* Yes, it's bowdlerized and kid-friendly slop-product, it's
helpful-harmless-and-honest, but it's also the Reader's Digest
Condensed Novel version of crabby subcultural material that
unwashed-masses  might find hard to approach.

The problem is that it's not just bowlderized or dumbed-down (I can
and do deliver versions of my talks to audiences of kids, normies,
and suits, using simple words and polite euphemisms).

The problem is that the bowlderized, dumbed-down LLM version of my
talks evince the *opposite* viewpoint to my own. They're not just
simplified, nor even *over*simplified. Rather, they're *wrong*.

When I think of LLM "summarization" I always come back to Jamie Lee
Curtis's magnificent rant in *A Fish Called Wanda*:

>  Aristotle was not Belgian, the principle of Buddhism is not
"every man for himself", and the London Underground is not a
political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.
  

    
Reminding that, when you prompt a chatbot like ChatGPT, you're still
just querying a database, and the response will be data from that
database that fits the query, whether or not it's factually correct.


Over the last half decade I've embraced a heightened skepticism
about "truth" and "facts," and forecasts however well-informed. In
our human experience it can feel like we have a clear perception and
embrace of an objective reality and can bear witness with some
degree of confidence - but that's delusion. The models we're
building are hinky and flawed. Memory is unreliable. Even the
present moment might be misperception. 

These insights haven't radically changed the way I experience the
world, but I lack confidence in the models and narratives that drive
that experience. 
  

    



Michael Brockington, via email:


State of the World - one of my favourite New Year's rituals!  Thanks for
posting the following comment to the discussion:

This concept of "AI slop" reminds me of Philip K. Dick's "kipple" - stuff
like junk mail or yesterday's newspapers, all the physical detritus of modern
civilization that multiplies itself into a vaguely threatening grey tide of
litter when no-one is paying attention.

The First Law of Kipple also maps nicely onto the digital present from PKD's
more analog future: "Kipple drives out nonkipple."

That's certainly true when I search for anything on the internet of late -
dozens of links with machine-generated, cookie-cutter content, pushing more
useful information out to the margins.  Every Google search becomes a Turing
test.

Doubtless many in this forum remember the promise of the early internet as a
utopia of open communication and shared knowledge.  We can probably agree
that threat has been largely neutralized.

I don't suppose everybody thought it was such a good idea at the time.

Power loves information asymmetry, naturally.  Still, the dynamics of greed
are probably sufficient to explain how we got from there to here.

Of course, that First aw of Kipple is a variation of Gresham's Law: "Bad
money drives out good."  The classic example being debased coinage driving
sound currency out of circulation, since people prefer to spend the clipped
coins and hoard the pure article.

In an attention economy, that becomes "Bad information drives out good."
"Bad" in both senses: not just the amygdala-tickling "If it bleeds, it
leads," but also the more troubling tactic of "Flood the zone with shit."
False information spreads faster than truth, and produces more engagement.

Of course, the "reality-based community" has been taking heavy fire at least
since the days of Bush the Younger.  Has the renaissance of psychedelics per-
haps prepared us to accept that consensus reality is a quaint, out-dated no-
tion?  Here, too, echoes of PKD.

Contrariwise, we have Thier's Law, which is the reverse of Gresham's.  It
postulates that good money drives out bad - but only when the bad money has
become nearly worthless.

Are we there yet?

And what might that reversal look like in the information economy?  The
revenge of the paywall is one aspect, it seems, as we finally capitulate to
the notion that good information has a cost, and free is no bargain.

It was an interesting moment when Musk had his Dealbook meltdown over adver-
tisers withdrawing from Twitter/X.  Social media gutted traditional media by
sucking up all the advertising dollars - but along with that comes advertiser
arm-twisting.  Meanwhile, traditional media is being freed - kicking and
screaming - from that pernicious influence, providing a window of opportunity
to come up with a better model.  Cheers,

--Michael Brockington
  

    
TFTP Michael.

My favorite PKD - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in
it, doesn’t go away.”

The TV movie Don’t Look Up! did a marvelous job of illustrating what
happens when the population doesn’t know who to trust. Maybe when
they have to start building serious flood controls in Palm Beach
they’ll figure out that there’s no such thing as alternative facts.
  

    
There, got it loaded.
  

    
Wrt kipple and websearch - my most amazing revelation of 2024 was
trying kagi.com, an *extremely good* search engine that is
effectively kipple-free, and is *also* built atop of Google and a
few other search engines.

What made this find so remarkable was the revelation that if Kagi, a
tiny, low-budget startup, can afford the engineering talent needed
to disenshittify Google results, then it must mean that Google just
*doesn't want* to disenshittify itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
  

    
Everyone has cell phones now and geolocating anything getting blown
up in Ukraine is a thing, and yet amateur journalism doesn't seem to
help all that much with these rumors of UFO's.

(Or does it? I haven't really looked.)
  

    
Thanks for reviving one of PKD's best coinages. I think of "kipple" nearly
every day, because I see it on every roadside and in every Google search.
  

    
Meanwhile I'm enjoying the current moment of frisson over -- wait
for it -- fog.  And of course there is a drone connection, there has
to be.

The climate scientist (with a big pinch of meteorology) Daniel Swain
gave this a once-over and concludes, "But to be very clear: there is
no evidence of anything exceptional, let alone nefarious, regarding
location, duration, extent, or composition of the viral #fog videos"
circulating at the moment! Everything I've seen just looks like good
old condensed water vapor."
https://bsky.app/profile/weatherwest.bsky.social/post/3lepm5jru5l2w

Which is in part an excuse for me to say in the presence of our
Austin fam, "onward: thru the fog!"
  

    
On the subject of the ongoing war -- (it's more or less our
period-standard "Russo-Ukrainian War," but it's extending itself) --
I would like to play WELL State-of-The-World Armchair General.  But,
well, I know that I'm not very good at it.  I totally understand the
APPEAL of doing that, and I can write that way -- it's very "HG
Wells 'Little Wars," science fiction writers tend to like doing
armchair-general -- but that war's ten years old and counting. It's
not sparkly new and 2025.

So maybe I can liven it up and refresh the topic by conveying a
recent, novelistic anecdote.  You see, there's this guy, who was a
long-time player in the Russo-Ukrainian War, and to celebrate the
New Year 02025, he got killed in battle.
  

    

So now this armed hero can belong-to-the-ages, and I think it's fair
to sum him up here and now.   He kinda personifies historical
forces, mostly because he REALLY REALLY WANTED to "personify
historical forces."  This was his full-time job as a geopolitical
activist.

His given name was Bratislav Zivkovic, and he liked to bill himself
as "the Twenty-First Century's Only Living Chetnik."   The original
Chetniks were some armed-resistance guerrillas, or maybe a
government-in-internal-exile, from "the Kingdom of Yugoslavia," or
from the general Balkan region, anyway.   The Chetniks were that
region's ethnonational conservative right-wingers.  
  

    

The Chetniks were completely overshadowed by invading
Fascists/Nazis, and then brushed aside by Tito-style regional
Communists and the invading Soviet Red Army.  In the vast
meatgrinders of these planetary totalitarian ideologies, the
Chetniks were considered mere irrelevant local hicks.  They had some
guns, a few anyway, but mostly they just wanted to remain old-time
men-of-the-soil who faithfully went-to-church and bowed-the-knee to
the Throne.  They were the corny, flyover-zone, old-timers devoid of
the onrushing future; they wore home-made lambskin hats and they
refused to ever read MEIN KAMPF or DAS KAPITAL.

It's probably fair to say that the "ideal Chetnik" didn't even read.
Instead, he would be some sturdy yeoman Cincinnatus mountaineer with
the simplest and sternest of moral codes: honor the gods, love the
farm-wife and her  many kids, and drive off that foreign invader.  
This peasant-fireside folk-tale didn't suit the Twentieth Century's
cruel political narratives, and under Marshal Tito's long peacetime
aegis, the Chetnik veterans were basically non-people with a
non-history, shadowbanned people that the installed system did not
allow you to talk about.
  

    

Then there was Tito's death and the Yugoslav Civil War, which was
very ethnonational indeed.  Our story-protagonist Bratislav Zivkovic
didn't have much of a role in that fight; the 1990s were too long
ago, he was too young.  Also, I suspect that merely meddling in some
minor Post-Yugoslav border incidents always felt too small for his 
ambitions.  Zivkovic longed to become a romantic, world-class
Chetnik who would be visible on the world stage.

So Zivkovic ventured to the Russo-Ukraine War, and he was there from
the get-go; he was one of the first adventurers off-the-boat to join
the "Little Green Men" in liberating the ethnic Russians in eastern
Ukraine from the horrifying menace of a democratic,  Europeanized
Kiev.

Zivkovic was the sort-of-commander of a loose international
mini-brigade of about a hundred freebooters, but Zivkovic never
seemed to do much actual fighting on-the-ground.  He had many
colleagues who resembled him, like "Givi" and "Motorola," but those
guys were actual battle-hardened blue-collar warlords who would cut
your throat soon as look at you.  Zivkovic was there to make a
different point.  He was there to re-open the long-closed historical
Overton Window for "being a Chetnik."
  

    
Zivkovic was in the fight for the glory and the girls; he liked to
boast of his prowess as a ladies-man.  That feat comes pretty easy
for a warlord in a war-zone; if you like loose women, there will be
plenty available, and they're "loose" because their house was bombed
flat.  Zivkovic was vainglorious, and also a bald guy, and clearly
upset about that; he generally sported a long, rural-looking black
beard, and always wore towering big furry hats, and never liked his
shiny pate to be visible in his endless selfies.

I used to collect those pics of his, because Zivkovic was making
such a self-promoting social-media effort.  He was a boasty warlord,
but he was an interesting boasty warlord *within a new media idiom,*
a "world-famous guerrilla-fighter" in some MacLuhan media/message
maelstrom where his "fame" was mostly wannabe-meme jpegs.

https://flic.kr/p/o9bh5E
  

    

Back in the Balkans, the local people found Zivkovic embarrassing;
nobody in the ex-Yugoslav mini-states much wants to commit to any
lethal warfare between Russians and Ukrainians.  They had a war
quite like that themselves, and this new, more up-to-date war is so
much vaster in scale than theirs, and so much worse and uglier and
bloodier than their war, that it overshadows their suffering, and
makes their worst war-crimes look like pipsqueak minor-league
efforts.  

Also, they knew Zivkovic well, and could recognize him as a phony, a
pretender and a blowhard wannabe.  He wasn't a squalid *grifter* or
anything, he was never in it for the mere mercenary cash -- but the
modern Balkan situation doesn't much need any "Chetniks."  Chetniks
are royalists and there's no royalty; Chetniks were Yugoslavs and
there's no Yugoslavia; the guy's ambitions were arcane, extremist
and nutty and didn't get popular traction; he was like a
furry-hatted QAnon Shaman figure.
  

    

So, back at home, Zivkovic never got much adulation or applause, but
as a tireless foreign volunteer for the Russian "Russky Mir" side,
he could be useful.   The Russians used to print his rants and let
him show up at major public events.  He had his own call-sign
nom-de-guerre, "Coma,"  a handle which didn't work very well in
English, but Bratislav "Coma" Zivkovic was quite a cool battlefield
name.

Also, among his many colleagues who were also armed Little Green Men
agitators:  Igor "Strelkov" Girkin, Arsen "Motorola" Pavlov, Mikhail
"Givi" Tolstykh, Aleksey Mozgovoy, et al -- Zivkovic was absolutely
the best-dressed fellow.  He was not the only fighter wearing a
strange made-up costume, because they all did, but his camera-ready,
cosplay dress-up gear was always neat, thought-out and well-pressed.
Zivkovic looked refined and gentlemanly, even.  Whenever he was
posing with heavy weapons, they were polished, well-maintained
heavy-weapons, they were never grimy and covered with trench-mud and
use-wear, like the hardware of the other guys.  
  

    
Compared to his rivals/friends, Zivkovic actually looked classy,
rather girl-pleasing, a Balkan knight-on-parade.  There's something
very Belgrade about his attitude; if you're French, Belgrade looks
plenty rough and gritty, but if you're Russian, then  Belgrade looks
like Paris, because it's all sidewalk cafes, fruity eau-de-vie,
tasty baklava and pretty-girls in high heels.

If you line up a bunch of mugshots of the historic Little Green Men
Ukraine-War operators, Zivkovic leaps out from that sordid crowd at
once, like "Hey look, that cool guy dressed as a Chetnik is one of
ours!"   As a political operative and determined
Internet-influencer, that seemed to be the guy's victory condition. 
He was never, in his heart, some committed, covert, armed
other-than-war filibuster determined to overthrow and conquer
Ukraine.  Instead,  he existed to be publicly seen, and hopefully
emulated, as "the Living Twenty-First Century Chetnik."
  

    

Then on January 2 Zivkovic got killed.  Russian war-bloggers on
Telegram announced that Zivkovic had "died as a hero."  I haven't
yet figured out how Zivkovic actually met his end.  Most of his
warlord colleagues from ten years ago are also bloodily dead by now.
However, they tended to get singled-out and vengefully,
methodically, dramatically liquidated by dedicated and skillful
hit-teams.  It's like a slow-motion horror movie, how many of these
pro-Russian zealots have been massacred by shadowy killers,
including their very top guy Yevgeny Prigozhin, who got blown to
bits in a private jet by his own head-of-state.  Igor "Strelkov"
Girkin is more or less the only pioneering Little Green Man of any
standing who is somehow still alive, and Strelkov's not "standing,"
he's sitting like an inert lump in one of Putin's jails with no
likelihood of ever seeing daylight until Putin himself is dead.
  

    

So to see Zivkovic also devoured by this dismal meatgrinder is not
some amazing plot twist.  It is prototypical of that conflict. 
Russians are so eager to bleed on that tormented ground that they'll
literally shell one aother with artillery in order to do it. 
They'll take that war home to Moscow and blow up their own warplanes
along the way.  It's a horrific mire of a war, a gray-ooze
post-truth slog;  it's like the grim evils of the Eastern Front
without the bother of confronting any actual Nazis.

I'm assuming that Zivkovic got killed by some random artillery
round, maybe by a passing drone or a NATO-supplied missile.  His
luck ran out, but he did have the good luck that the Russians didn't
kill him.  Instead, the enemy killed him in combat.  Also, he did
not die as a wicked marauder while looting and subjugating any
Ukrainians.  Instead, he managed to die standing tall on Russian
soil while defending Mother Russia from foreign invaders.  That's a
good narrative for him.
  

    

I don't think death in combat much surprised Zivkovic; he wasn't
overtly kamikaze-suicidal, because he liked being-on-TV too much,
but as the "No-Longer-Living Twenty-First Century Chetnik," Zivkovic
may have achieved an effective martyrdom.  He could have just been
the QAnon Shaman, some colorful demented showoff dismissed and sent
to jail like a loony, but his noble death in a combat zone makes him
a warrior-hero who will likely look pretty-okay on some future
fridge-magnet or tough-guy hoody.  He makes Twenty-First Chetniks
look viable as military players, and, on the world stage, he makes
all the Jake Chansleys of the world also look better. 

 If you're a loose cannon who might senselessly blow yourself up
alone in a Tesla in Las Vegas, you can look at the Chetnik career of
Bratislav Zivkovic and think to yourself: "Wait a minute, I can get
all the attention that I innately crave, but there's a larger cause
of comradeship here!"

That's his achievement, as the new year starts; that's his story.
  

    


Michael Brockington writes:


@ doctorow/83

Thanks for sharing the link to the kagi.com search engine -- it looks great!

When I saw that it was a paid service, I still had a moment of reflexive
aversion.  I clearly have some work to do, training my brain to see that as a
positive signal.
  

    
"If a service is free, you are the product!"  ;-)
  

    
I consider myself a Buddhist. I'm not a very good Buddhist - I don't
participate with a formal sangha and I've never had a one-on-one
Buddhist teacher, though from my perspective I've had many Buddhist
teachers via podcasts of dharma talks and instruction, also books
and a few online workshops. I've never attended a sesshin
(medication retreat) or meditated all day. I don't follow the formal
rituals that the "real" Buddhists follow.

But I do meditate regularly and study the dharma in my own way. I'm
not pursuing enlightenment or any particular goal - I just sit
regularly, sometimes concentrating on something, usually my breath,
and sometimes just sitting with awareness. If I can be called a
Buddhist, it's because I follow instruction from Soto Zen
practitioners, and to some extent Vipassana and Dzogchen
practitioners. I appreciate the wisdom of Eihei Dogen, founder of
the Soto school of Dogen, who captured Buddhist wisdom in various
writings back in the 1200s. And I also regularly ponder The Heart
Sutra or "The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom," which discusses
the fundamental emptiness ([-][-]nyat[-]) of all phenomena. I spend
some time getting my head around the Buddhist sense of "emptiness."