Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
When I was 18 or so I wrote poet Allen Ginsberg, sending a poem and
a letter the nature of which I don't recall exactly, but I think I
was making the kinds of complaints 18-year-old boys usually have as
they take their first cautious steps into the larger world. Ginsberg
sent me a postcard - he said he liked my poem, and as for what he
referred to as the "peter pan yak" in my letter, he suggested that I
take up dyhana meditation. I had read about Zen and zazen, and
figured that would be a path to follow. But I didn't find a teacher,
and I wasn't consistent in my practice.
  

    
Around 1971 or 72 I found Shunryu Suzuki's book "Zen Mind,
Beginner's Mind" - a transcription of his talks with some
instruction about meditation and Soto zen. This little book had a
profound effect on me, and I followed his meditation instructions
from then on, but not regularly until some years later.

You can teach meditation form, but I think it's hard to guide and
impossible to perceive what's happening within a student's mind. And
it's hard to know if you're on the right path if you don't have a
teacher... so it can take a long time and requires much study and
insight to make an effective practice. After 50 years of meditation,
hopefully I have some sense of the dharma.  I hope I'm not deluding
myself, especially as there is so much delusion elsewhere in the
world.
  

    
I follow two Buddhists - you might think of them as rogue months,
since both have left the monastery and created a following for their
regular talks on YouTube. One is Brad Warner, who's written many
books explaining Buddhism and, more specifically, Dogen's teaching.
He calls himself a punk, was in a band called 0DFx (Zero Defex) when
he was younger, worked in Japan for with Tsuburaya Productions (the
company that made UltraMan), and was ordained in 2000. His first
book and his website are both called "Hardcore Zen." The full title
of that first book is "Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies & the
Truth About Reality."

The other guy is Shozan Jack Haubner, who's also written a couple of
books. I'm less familiar with his hisurtory - I discovered him
through his friendship and soft collaboration with Warner. 

Neither is following what you might call a traditional path, and I
suppose that's why I'm paying attention to them vs attending one of
the Zen centers here in Austin or becoming more involved with Upaya
in Santa Fe. The reality at the root of Buddhist teaching is just
reality, it doesn't depend on Buddhist teaching or ritual. Someone
who's never heard of Buddhism is living in/with the same reality and
has the same potential to work through delusion toward
understanding/insight. At least that's my opinion... as they say,
"your mileage may vary."
  

    
Delusion is thought of as pathology - DSM-5 describes delusions as
"fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of
conflicting evidence." But we all have fixed beliefs that are
contradicted by evidence that we tend to dismiss. With a lot of
meditation practice you begin to see this more clearly, and you
learn to let go of fixed beliefs and judgements based on those
beliefs. And you begin to understand the limitations of mind,
thinking, memory. And you might see more clearly the potentially
toxic effects of belief systems. 
  

    
Those who seek power can colonize and manipulate belief systems in
order to create armies of sworn allegiance, ready to deride, and
even torture and kill, other humans. They just need a pathway into
their thinking - and currently there are many pathways via forms of
media, especially including socioal media. Information services that
can as readily be disinformation services. Understanding tricks of
messaging and gamification, one can create armies of dedicated
followers and those armies are a source of political power... 

Those who take time to let go, to understand their own thinking, to
connect to what Buddhists call "emptiness," can inoculate to some
extent against viral hacks of mind and belief. Try sitting for a few
minutes, quietly, letting thoughts come and go without grasping,
without believing. Just breathe.
  

    
@mcdee/99

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

Emoji notwithstanding, I think this is really, really wrong:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-c
hess


The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for
worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud.

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into
your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their
ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them.

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid
everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs
so much to sell on Amazon that between 45 and 51% of every dollar an
independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and
the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of
margins that let them pay 51%. They have to raise prices in order to
avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at
Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the
manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon
is the same as at is everywhere else?"

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon
binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,”
which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge
elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their
prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for
the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled
heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of
ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a
one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users
clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or
drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost
surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios
users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data
to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking
dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re
still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you
can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you
are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own
busted, half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t
actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to
drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into
their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil
for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if
you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’
  

    
<bruces>, it's for surfacing people like zivkovic that i dearly love
what you have  long done in these SOTW
  

    
There is a fascinating intersection between enshittification, and
the lock in that drives this ever further down the slope, and the
problems of war that are now emerging.

The cloud based connectivity requirement and authentication
lockdowns of everything from tractors to commercial air carrier
components and maritime navigation systems had serious impacts on
the Russian economy when sanctions suddenly cut off everything they
thought was holding up the more modern parts of their economy. In
reacting to this, they created a rather bizarre conceptual framework
to understand what folks here call weaponized interdependence, from
a very clearly losing side. Russian military theorists just dropped
it all into that amorphous and endlessly argued category of
cyberwar. And then, having decided this was a warfare function,
promptly appear to have assigned some of their best offensive cyber
capabilities developers to break these dependencies. Now, for a
national economy facing existential level surprise disconnect from
global commerce, this likely made a lot of sense. But it also meant
that their limited talent base to conduct real offensive operations
lost a step. This was doubly problematic when they also decided that
they needed to withhold a strategic escalation option, below the
nuclear threshold, in an attempt to hold at risk European and US
targets as a mechanism to limit Western involvement in the conflict.
This has continued to be a serious area of tension, as
administrations jockey to find appropriate levels and type of lethal
aid to support Kyiv without triggering wider theatre war. This
becomes a lot harder as strikes against the Rodina itself have
become increasingly credible, in both kinetic and cyber effects. 

It is one thing in the murky world of Russian milbloggers and
mercenaries to see prominent figures die in unclaimed hits, whether
involving an IED carried into a cafe or an unknown encounter with a
hammer alone in the dark. It is another to see military officers
ambushed and shot on their morning runs, tracked by fitness app data
streams; or struck by apparent directional charges coming out of
ordinary buildings that perhaps no one was supposed to know they
were at. But it is another when power plants, refineries, and drone
production factories start breaking. Whilst squadrons of strike UAVs
rain down across multiple cities, including Moscow.

And along the way, the fight over who controls those hunter killer
machines becomes the most critical part of the cyberwar. Especially
as the introduction of fiber optic control systems has removed much
of the EW contest that previously played no small part in
determining who lived and who died at the front. And who profited
from primitive engineering and substandard parts in fleecing the
barely changed former Soviet design bureaus supplying talismanic
black boxen to those condemned to human wave assaults.

These don't lend themselves to the kinds of character centered
narratives that Bruce so expertly crafts. These are sordid matters
of bloody ends at scale. Each single op might have been a major
Hollywood production in a time of small wars. But high intensity
conflict robs us of the ability to keep track, let alone make sense
of, the number of moments where hard men go to the wall.

The sad part is that we risk also losing sight of the heroes that
come through. The fraud and waste of the Soviet defense
establishment creates barely functional air defense systems that
cannot discriminate between a small drone and a full sized civilian
airframe, in an EW saturated environment that is as much
performative rather than protective. Yet somehow a doomed pilot and
crew manage to save lives, when the enemy intended them all to
perish in a watery grave deep enough to hide the evidence of
reckless surface to air missile fires. There isn't a manual for such
moments. Only experience and airmanship saw them through.

The aftermath is also not something one expected to be a very
contemporary story, since we have already seen it play out with
another badly trained crew engaging a civilian flight, for whom
accountability meant only a long and drawn out proceeding in a
quietly impotent European courtroom. Perhaps this time around might
however be different, in the harder way of this new decade.
  

    
<107> Point taken.  The power of monopoly and near-monopolies is all
around us.
  

    
"The WELL: fighting cognitive malware since 1984"
  

    
Citizens of various countries have elected authoritarian leaders,
evidently disillusioned with democracy, thinking it's failed to
deliver on economic or social promises. No pure form of democracy
exists anywhere I know of; it's probably silly to argue the loss of
something you didn't really have, that barely works, that's usually
more an intention or aspiration than a reality. But as Churchill
said, all the other forms of governance are worse, including
authoritarianism, where leaders lack accountability, and dependence
is on a single leader - a single point of failure, relying on
coercion and fear. Authoritarians have short-term focus and
prioritize their power grab over sane and reasonable governance. 

But people make that choice, hoping for better stability and safety,
misled by manipulated media, sucked in by charismatic personality.

So we have Trump in the USA, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey,
Modi in India, and of course Putin in Russia. Orban is a guiding
light for the US MAGA movement. He centralized control over media,
the judiciary, and the electoral system, and MAGA Republicans in the
US have been attempting the same. There's similar focus on
nationalism, anti-immigration policies, and dubious promises of
economic stability.

This authoritarian strain has been present all along in the US, but
it historically hasn't had a long-term grasp of power. I think we're
about to learn, yet again, why that is. 
  

    
>why that is

Because they are unimaginative, indolent, incompetent, and corrupt,
not necessarily in that order, although each leads unerringly to the
next.
  

    
I think of this current era as the golden age of bullshit, which is
about to enter a period of full flowering, but with real teeth.

I have a few old friends who aren't really MAGA but they did vote
for Trump.  These are kind, accomplished loving family people.  They
know full well what this GOP is about. And yet they went for it
anyway, even while bearing no personal resemblance to the loathsome
cretins we tend to see posted about.  I hope at some point to probe
more into how people like that can make such an appalling choice,
but I'm not yet sure how well I can keep my composure should I
attempt it.

But it has to play out. I hope the collateral damage isn't too bad
along the way. Many will be badly hurt as the white Christian male
dominance asserts itself yet again.  

But then I am an old white man.  Not likely to be personally harmed
by this other than still having to live in a society that chooses a
death path. Because that is what it is.  I know..sounds like sky is
falling talk and we have weathered it all before and will again. But
the population keep rising, the resources keep shrinking and the
planet keep heating up.  The only possible way forward is
unprecedented global cooperation. Not happening. Not enough anyway. 
Meanwhile, Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, etc.

Being for peace and love - war is over if you want it - sounds so
simple minded.  But I do want it.  Wishful thinking from an old
flower child? Guilty as charged.
  

    
With you all the way, there, tex.
Peace out.
  

    
"And who profited from primitive engineering and substandard parts
in fleecing the barely changed former Soviet design bureaus
supplying talismanic black boxen to those condemned to human wave
assaults."

I like the way that sentence sounds (because as a cyberpunk novelist
obviously I would), but the Ukrainian Navy has just announced that
they have invented little naval drone aircraft carriers that can
ship some armed aerial drones and then deploy them on enemy shores.

I kinda doubt that this modern hack much upsets the military
balance-of-power, but if you're some paranoid drone-fearing guy in
some port city who's nervously watching the unidentified lights in
the sky all the time, you've got  some exciting new reasons to be
publicly paranoid.
  

    
Also, the very first announced targets for these Ukrainian
aircraft-carrier drones were some Russian anti-aircraft radars.  So
that the Russians will be blind, and they won't know what's whirring
and buzzing and blinking-around up there, and they'll have to fret
and worry about it all the damn time.
  

    

"AI as shoggoth analogies have fallen out of favor in tech circles"

Yes indeed, the shoggoths have lost their cachet with the VC crowd
and their courtiers, but the shoggoths also became popular.  I
happen to collect shoggoth memes.  I've got over 300 of them.  The
pace of their creation is accelerating.  

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/albums/72177720306793767/

The shoggoths are no longer seen as immediate forces of
AI-Singularity world-destruction, but they're blending in with many
other popular meme-elements, like everyday crypto stuff and macho
4chan brags.
  

    

Something about the hundred-year-old Lovecraftian concept of
shoggoths seems to have modern resonance -- maybe because shoggoths
are so very "Gray Ooze."  In Lovecraft's original cosmic-horror
concepts, the shoggoths are an enslaved labor-force, but they're
radically debased and deprived of any stable biological form.  
They're a big puddle of mix-and-match scary-monster eyes, and fangs,
and tentacles, which bonelessly pop-up and percolate. 

 They're not even a proper "species" which might be studied by
scholars and categorized. Shoggoths are so frighteningly oozy,
mongrelized, destabilized and deconstructed that that the very sight
of them causes near-instinctive human panic and madness.
  

    

Even though shoggoths are a boneless, skinless chimeric swamp, a
kind of gelatinous operative-platform for mulched monster-bits, 
they're also big, aggressive and fast, and will rip your head off as
soon as look at you.   

This mythic-monster concept has some strange niche appeal to modern
people.  There's always been some shoggoth-fandom, because Lovecraft
is as old as Walt Disney and his creatures have a rather similar
long-abiding international fandom.  But there's a new and different
shoggoth-fandom now; they find the prospect of Lovecraftian cosmic
destruction to be cute.  Shoggoths have become perversely reassuring
somehow.  People make plushies and throw-pillows out of them.
  

    
Via email from Sigmundur Halldorsson:

How much worse is Meta going to get?
The latest announcement from Zuck:

"It's time to get back to our roots around free expression. We're
replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our
policies and focusing on reducing mistakes. Looking forward to this
next chapter."

<https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/1525382954801931/>

Finding facts in the AI sloop and bots on social media will be a
struggle, but this is the wrong approach to information quality.
It's become abundantly clear that the pollution of the information
stream is no lesser issue than the water pollution a few decades
ago. 
  

    
2 weeks until Trump II.  He is who he is. But with this upcoming
coterie of rapacious thugs it is gonna be one nasty sequel.
  

    
According to Mark Cuban, the real reason all his billionaire tech
peers are sucking up to Trump with tribute money is so they can move
unimpeded toward their desire to be the dominant AI driven platform.
  

    
I also think that even if the DOJ reports from Jack Smith get
officially repressed, they will get leaked like the Pentagon Papers.
Might not matter to those who voted for Trump, but in the arc of
history it matters a lot.
  

    
> Something about the hundred-year-old Lovecraftian concept of
> shoggoths seems to have modern resonance...

Possibly because Lovecraft was nature's way of showing us that human
neural networks could be trained to generate hallucinations vastly
more frightening than today's AI  ?
  

    
Shoggoths interestingly combine limited intelligence with brute
power. For xenophobic Lovecraft, the shoggoths were a manifestation
of the much-feared other... sorta the worst thing you could imagine.
"Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs
and processes - viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells - rubbery
fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile - slaves of
suggestion, builders of cities - more and more sullen, more and more
intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative!
Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing
to use and carve such things?"

The Old Ones figured they were creating cyborganic worker-bots, and
found them useful. They evidently weren't put off by the smell or
the slime - maybe for the old ones the stench was rather sweet.