Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We're not yet used to a world where there's fewer people, older
people... and then fewer people, older people...  and that's how it
goes all the time.  

There's eight zillion of us right now, and immigration-panic all
over the place, but that distracts us from a general future
situation where everyday life looks and feels like an Arizona
retirement village in the Philippines.   Sometimes it looks like
daily life looked under the Covid lockdown, when the popular areas
were just uncrowded, de-popular, and untouristed.  Only they stay
that way.  They get more so.  Nobody knows what the "more-so" looks
like.  

That sounds melancholy, but it's not like the human race ends from
that prospect.  We could lose half of us and still have the huge
world population that we did when I was twenty years old.   That was
the back in the heyday of the Population Bomb anxieties.  Four
billion people seemed like a truly alarming number in 1974.  All the
cool dystopian sci-fi of that epoch was about cannibalizing each
other into Soylent Green cookies in an overcrowded madhouse.   A
cultural period is coming where that idea feels cute and nostalgic,
like a Lovecraft shoggoth. 
  

    

People still behave as if human life is disposable, cheap,  booming,
with plenty more foot-traffic always-on-tap.   Antivax sentiment has
a strong undercurrent of that, like, "Well, if that unhealthy wimp
next door dies choking, that's gotta means more for me!"  But it's
strange to me that Russia and Ukraine would fiercely sacrifice huge
numbers of their dwindling, aging populations on their battlefields,
and also from mass emigration, when they don't need that lebensraum
-- not at all.   They're dying en masse for huge, shell-strewn,
newly-ruinous areas of the Earth that they have nobody left to
populate.

You can see those years-old Russo-Ukraine no-man's-zones from outer
space now.  That's fertile soil, they're covered with new weedy
greenery.
  

    

As an author, I don't yet understand this coming-world's literary
sensibility -- the world with the  permanently-shrinking readership.
Suppose you're writing a "Great American Novel" about an America
with ever-fewer, ever-older Americans.  What's that book all about? 
What's the plot?  Also, what if that's a comic novel, Mark-Twain
style?  What's comic about that? There has to be something, right?

If you asked a Large Language Model to write it funny, it would
write it funny.
  

    
https://donellameadows.org/archives/those-who-build-wood-houses-shouldnt-live-
in-chaparral/

"Greed, ignorance, arrogance, social immaturity may all have their
role in disasters like the one in California, but I’d guess the main
human trait that produces wooden palaces in the chaparral is denial.
Well, yes it happened in Oakland, but it can’t happen in Altadena.
It happened in Altadena, but it can’t happen HERE. It was arsonists,
not us."

-- Donella Meadows, 1993

-----

Fire response in LA County is at the top rank, maybe the best in the
world, because its boundaries trace a massive fire-dependent
landscape with a gigantic conurbation flung on top of it.  

The life and property loss this week is shocking, but it could
easily have been much, much worse.  The extraordinary evacuation and
suppression of the Sunset fire -- a hundred acres in Runyon Canyon
perched directly above tens of thousands of people and billions of
property in the high density Hollywood-Sunset corridor -- could only
happen with decades of experience, preparation and agency
coordination. 

Those resources weren't enough for the much more spread-out
Palisades and Eaton (Altadena) fires. No dispersed fire response can
be with winds steadily at 40 mph gusting to 80 and above, relative
humidity well below 15%, and embers spotting like dandelion pods on
steroids to ignite new roof fires burning down structures a thousand
feet downwind.

John McPhee wrote pretty much the definitive piece on the San
Gabriel mountains and foothills communities and the
fire/hydrological cycle 35 years ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1988/09/26/los-angeles-against-the-mountain
s-i

For Palisades and Malibu, in Rebecca Solnit's phrase it's a monument
to forgetfulness.  This article describes how major fires have
occurred twice a decade since the 1920s:

https://malibutimes.com/article_be86d151-e381-5db5-9a85-66cc05586070

Even though it was just six years ago, the Woolsey Fire (somewhat to
the west of the Paradise Fire area this week) has been nearly
forgotten, because it happened the same time as the Camp Fire and
the destruction of Paradise in November 2018.  But the stats are
sobering: over 90,000 acres burned and 300,000 evacuated -- far more
than all the fires this week combined but less loss of life and
property.  And yes, dozens of homes burned on PCH then too.  

Not at all to make light of the tragedy this week, but two
observations: it has happened before and often, though at lesser
scale.  And it will happen again.  Even this week was not the worst
that could be.  

Altadena, in particular, is a warning for a new era of "intermix"
urban fire.  That too is far from new.  The Tubbs Fire in October
2017 spread a dozen miles in 6 hours and then spotted half a mile
over 6 lanes of Highway 101 in central Santa Rosa -- a stretch I've
been on many times and probably some here use daily -- and
incinerated Coffey Park to the west, the K-mart and 1400 homes
(which were mostly rebuilt by 2022).

But that too was a reprise:

http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2019/09/the-1964-hanly-fire/

As bruces said, "Climate change has lost all its sci fi tinge in my
lifetime and has become a melancholy and even tiresome reality." 

Forgetfulness is a blessing when it erases pain and allows for
progress.  But forgetfulness is a curse when it turns into denial.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Sat 11 Jan 25 21:28>
  

    
> #175-178

Great string Bruce. Thanks.
  

    
Also 179 and 180.  Thanks guys. Much to Ponder.
  

    
I posted <180> while sniffling with a cold and half-asleep. I see
typos and other issues, so here's a revision:

The population growth rate is declining, but the population is still
growing. Some think the Earth's population may peak at around 10.4
billion people in the late 21st century, possibly around 2080. After
that, it could begin to decline due to lower fertility rates. I hear
that there's growth in developing countries and decline in developed
countries. 

Meanwhile where I live, Austin, still a relatively popular place to
live, population is growing:

* The current metro area population of Austin in 2025 is 2,313,000,
a 1.72% increase from 2024.

* The metro area population of Austin in 2024 was 2,274,000, a 2.06%
increase from 2023.

* The metro area population of Austin in 2023 was 2,228,000, a 2.39%
increase from 2022.

* The metro area population of Austin in 2022 was 2,176,000, a 2.79%
increase from 2021.

(https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/22926/austin/population)

When I moved to Austin, its population was 258,000 - so I've seen a
lot of changes. Businesses we took for granted for years are
starting to fold, artists and musicians who can't afford the rents
are moving to satellite cities or even farther away. 

Also Austin is a blue, blue city in a very red state, and the sorta
people who've traditionally lived here are thinking of moving to
escape the far-right state government and its antediluvian laws and
policies.  One of the legislators keeps proposing a law that would
allow the state to take control of Austin, making it a district, not
a city. It irks them to do business in a city full of woke liberals.


It's hard for me to think of the population declining, since all
I've seen is growth. But I'm not complaining about the changes - the
food here is better, we have a lot of Michelin restaurants now. I
went to one of those a week ago - it was set up as a barbecue joint
but the food was more inventive, and they had vegetarian options.
Barbecue from another dimension.

We have MAGA neighbors but most of the time you wouldn't know their
politics, they don't carry guns or sprout fangs. In fact we get on
really well with 'em. Some think that civil engagement with MAGAs is
like enabling them, but hey, people are just people if you get past
th politics, which I think of as a viral infection that some people
just can't shake. 

In fact it seems to me that MAGA people want a lot of what liberals
like me want, but they're twisted around about culture war bullshit
fed to them by political media - Fox News etc. 

Maybe the culture war stuff is just fake conflict made up to drive
engagement, but people are still buying it. One of the latest points
of contention is Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that Facebook will
stop fact-checking. I've never seen a Facebook fact-check, so I
won't know what I'm missing. I think I'm supposed to leave Facebook
in a huff because he's "Zucking up" to Trump, but I don't commit a
lot of time to that platform anyway. It's "nice-to-have" those
social connections, but everybody seems to be moving to Bluesky
lately.

I was fascinated by the Greubel Forsey watch Zuck was wearing when
he made his controversial announcement - it cost close to a million
dollars. I wonder if it tracks his sleep?

  
  

    
>a monument to forgetfulness

I started posting this after the Camp Fire, but it isn't sinking in:
Sapiens is not a forest ape. I understand that people want a
dramatic homesite with abundant old growth vegetation and stunning
views, but building homes in the wildland/urban interface is just
asking for it. It's not a matter of "if". Likewise fault lines and
coastal frontage. 

>Some think the Earth's population may peak at around 10.4
billion people in the late 21st century, possibly around 2080

Interesting. I think the world population is going to suffer a
massive die-off; roughly 40% of the total population will die
prematurely within the space of a single generation some time this
century, and probably sooner than not.

Large swaths of the earth's arable surface will become uninhabitable
due to climate, triggering mass migration and resource wars (they
won't be fighting for lebensraum, but for what's under it). And it's
going to break our hearts (for small values of "our"; I don't
expect, at 71, to live to see it).

Mass migration is already under way, of course. We moved to Eugene
from Chico in 2019, right after the Camp Fire. We are climate
refugees; it's not all subsistence farmers from the tropics
migrating to more congenial weather. The Covid resettlement urgently
amplified and accelerated this trend (as did remote presence tech).

But the current of younger rural folk deserting the places of their
birth and migrating to urban centers will continue to hollow out
BFE. These small towns throughout the agrosphere are declining in
population, economic opportunity, and demand for commodity outputs.
And yes, youth start planning their exit strategy while still in
middle school. Higher education aspiration for this population is
less about knowledge value, skills acquisition and workforce
development and more about gaining a foothold on escaping the
futureless badlands. The hamlets they are fleeing are becoming open
air assisted living facilities by default.
  

    
Russia doesn't want lebensraum. It's hard to say what they
do want. Resources? A buffer zone? A sink for unwanted excess
population?

Ukraine doesn't want lebensraum either, they just want the Russians
to fuck off back to Russia.
  

    
If you want a little schadenfreude about the likely outcome of the
prepping and bunkering by the 1%, I highly recommend <doctorow> 's
short story take on The Masque of the Red Death.  

You can listen to the audio version read here: 
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/
  

    
keep thinking of sainted mike davis and john brunner, looking down
at us still here...
  

    
I see the Ukraine war as a continuation of old-fashioned imperialism
by one of the few countries that didn't get the memo that it isn't
profitable anymore.

Is there a reason we shouldn't blame the Ukraine war entirely on
Putin? If he dies, is it over, or is the imperialist meme going to
infect the next Russian leaders?

From the outside, you can't do anything about a country in the grip
of an obsolete ideology, but maybe it's a reason to build bomb
shelters:

Russian threat pushes Norway to build bomb shelters for ‘worst-case
scenario’
https://www.politico.eu/article/norway-bomb-shelters-russia-threat-borders-arc
tic-circle-security/

Russia is in the headline, but there are other disasters to worry
about. It sounds like these shelters are dual use.
  

    
That the growth rate declines while the population continues to
grow, eventually stabilizing at a larger size, is the expected
pattern of a demographic transition. It's how humans adapt to a
change in the economic conditions that had pushed us to have large
families.
  

    
https://donellameadows.org/archives/those-who-build-wood-houses-shouldnt-live-
in-chaparral/

"Greed, ignorance, arrogance, social immaturity may all have their
role in disasters like the one in California, but I’d guess the main
human trait that produces wooden palaces in the chaparral is denial.
Well, yes it happened in Oakland, but it can’t happen in Altadena.
It happened in Altadena, but it can’t happen HERE. It was arsonists,
not us."

-- Donella Meadows, 1993

-----

Fire response in LA County is at the top rank, maybe the best in the
world, because its boundaries trace a massive fire-dependent
landscape with a gigantic conurbation flung on top of it.  

The life and property loss this week is shocking, but it could
easily have been much, much worse.  The extraordinary evacuation and
suppression of the Sunset fire -- a hundred acres in Runyon Canyon
perched directly above tens of thousands of people and billions of
property in the high density Hollywood-Sunset corridor -- could only
happen with decades of experience, preparation and agency
coordination. 

Those resources weren't enough for the much more spread-out
Palisades and Eaton (Altadena) fires. No dispersed fire response can
be with winds steadily at 40 mph gusting to 80 and above, relative
humidity well below 15%, and embers spotting like dandelion pods on
steroids to ignite new roof fires burning down structures a thousand
feet downwind.

John McPhee wrote pretty much the definitive piece on the San
Gabriel mountains and foothills communities and the
fire/hydrological cycle 35 years ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1988/09/26/los-angeles-against-the-mountain
s-i

For Palisades and Malibu, in Rebecca Solnit's phrase it's a monument
to forgetfulness.  This article describes how major fires have
occurred twice a decade since the 1920s:

https://malibutimes.com/article_be86d151-e381-5db5-9a85-66cc05586070

Even though it was just six years ago, the Woolsey Fire (somewhat to
the west of the Paradise Fire area this week) has been nearly
forgotten, because it happened the same time as the Camp Fire and
the destruction of Paradise in November 2018.  But the stats are
sobering: over 90,000 acres burned and 300,000 evacuated -- far more
than all the fires this week combined but less loss of life and
property.  And yes, dozens of homes burned on PCH then too.  

Not at all to make light of the tragedy this week, but two
observations: it has happened before and often, though at lesser
scale.  And it will happen again.  Even this week was not the worst
that could be.  

Altadena, in particular, is a warning for a new era of "intermix"
urban fire.  That too is far from new.  The Tubbs Fire in October
2017 spread a dozen miles in 6 hours and then spotted half a mile
over 6 lanes of Highway 101 in central Santa Rosa -- a stretch I've
been on many times and probably some here use daily -- and
incinerated Coffey Park to the west, the K-mart and 1400 homes
(which were mostly rebuilt by 2022).

But that too was a reprise:

http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2019/09/the-1964-hanly-fire/

As bruces said, "Climate change has lost all its sci fi tinge in my
lifetime and has become a melancholy and even tiresome reality." 

Forgetfulness is a blessing when it erases pain and allows for
progress.  But forgetfulness is a curse when it turns into denial.
  

    





Michael Brockington writes:




Thanks for posting the following to the SOTW:



Re/177 (Bruce Sterling)

"People still behave as if human life is disposable, cheap,  booming,  with
plenty more foot-traffic always-on-tap."

This calls to mind medieval Europe, post-Black Death, when the economic con-
ditions of the peasantry radically improved due to the sudden shortage of
labour.

Sadly, I think we're too far gone down the road of AI and automation to ex-
pect a similar effect from population decline in the current era.  If humans
aren't needed to produce value, human life becomes very cheap indeed.
  

    

Ethnonational politics is about women disappearing from public life
(unless they're ethnonational women), so I'd like to throw in a WELL
SoTW anecdote about a disappearing woman who seems very 02025 and
also very Gray Ooze to me.

She is (or possibly was) Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, the CEO of
"BAC," a modest electronics company that sold  cheap Chinese pagers
in Europe.  Cristiana also dabbled in other interesting, hobby-like
retail stuff, like pretty jewelry and rare mushrooms, and she
sometimes dabbled in feminist green issues, like "conflict
resolution" and "sustainable development."
  

    

Then it turned out that Cristiana was an Israeli cyberwarfare asset,
and her Chinese pagers were packed with plastic explosive.  Those
suicide belt-bombers of Hezbollah had been cleverly sold thousands
of little personal belt-bombs, which all exploded from a one-time
mass signal, pagers blowing up at their waistlines, and also in
their hands, and next to their eyes and ears.

That Lebanese Shi'ite militia was the Pretorian Guard of the Assad
regime in Syria. They were thrown into utter disarray by this
weaponized-telecom attack.  Their capo wasn't harmed, but he could
no longer talk to his followers with his pager text messages.  So he
had to meet them physically, and he was watched by drones, and  then
he was  fatally blown up with missiles. So, in a way, the attack got
the top-dog, too.
  

    
Then the Assad regime fell, while the nervous Iranians were
flinching at anything with a battery in it.  This was a wildly
effective modern cyberwar attack.  It may have toppled a 50-year-old
regime with direct Russian support.

This was quite a feat by Cristiana, so who was she?  Nobody's gonna
ask her to explain herself, because she split overnight from her
apartment in Orban's Hungary, and she's never been seen since. 
Cristiana may have committed a couple of dozen major war-crimes, but
nobody anywhere is putting up any public WANTED posters for her.

Cristiana just vanished into the Gray Ooze place where successful
Mossad assassins go, and there's not just a few of these operatives.
Many people do Mossad wet-work and then retire into the
wherever-they-go.  Sometimes they slip up and get arrested and
charged with something and go to a jail for a while.  But  rarely.

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

    

There's 70 years of this activity, it's even got a rhythm like the
tides.  So I wouldn't make room here to fuss about them, except that
Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono is someone that I  myself might
personally know.  She's a brainy Italian chick, speaks English and
other languages, earned a degree in quantum physics and never used
it, and loves dancing and draws artwork.    I happen to be the art
director for an art fair in Turin, and  so I've personally met,
like, dozens, hundreds of Cristianas.  Cristiana is even our 
festival's core audience: female, cultural, techno-artsy,
computer-literate, has her own web biz, probably reads Italian
fantascienza novels.

I may have even met Cristiana.  If it's so, that wouldn't surprise
me.  It would surprise me even less if Cristiana knows who Bruce
Sterling is, or has read some of my books.  For instance, "Holy
Fire," which is a cyberpunk novel that artsy European women tend to
like, because it's all about being a woman in Europe who is artsy.

The heroine of this novel is a clandestine refugee who  goes
underground, drops her old life and vanishes into a new one.  And
that's what Cristiana did.  Except, the novelty here is that she's
an Israeli asset but not Israeli.  Cristiana doesn't have any
military or intelligence background.   There's no plausible reason
for her to become Mossad, so if you're Hezbollah and buying your
gizmos from her (or her online  tech partner, an equally-unlikely
Indian Norwegian guy) there's no reason for you to suspect her.
  

    

She's deep underground now, she's become Ms Gray Ooze, she's
unfindable.  But she's been working undercover for years.  She's not
some  fly-by-night flunky who was recruited for one caper with a
one-off reward.   I think she was an everyday, rootless, unmarried,
self-employed  Internet-hustler who got slowly and methodically
recruited and inveigled into a long-term, ongoing cyberwar.

My uncharitable assumption is that she was selling dope for
Hezbollah, namely, Bekaa Valley hashish and Syrian captagon.  These
are the products which Hezbollah routinely sells in Europe, because
they're a rather standard narco-terror outfit and some European has
to do that profitable work for you.   If you're buying hashish
online in some crypto dark-market, and you look up Cristiana's
public face on her personal website, you're like "gold jewelry, rare
mushrooms," and she's Sicilian? Heck yeah, that's a European doper
chick.   A child would know that.  She's even  New Agey,  top-end,
classy.  She's got the good stuff.
  

    
It makes no sense to me that Cristiana is just idly sitting there
behind her shell-company front,  patiently waiting for her
pager-bombs to explode.  Cristiana is a small-town Sicily girl who
earned a quantum-physics degree in English, she won't idly drum her
fingers.  Cristiana's scrolling, clicking, and tapping every darn
day, and she's very type-A overachiever, always connected and up to
something.  The pager-bomb attack is an episode in a 70-year-old
struggle that's not gonna stop.  It's just that it has very modern
characteristics.  One is, that you can be an online woman from
outta-nowhere, and become a lethally serious participant in that. 
You can topple a government while you're eating goulash,
tango-dancing and drawing nude pics of yourself.

I don't know what becomes of Cristiana this year, and henceforth. 
I'm pretty sure she's still alive, because Mossad is not going to
want to unecessarily alienate future possible Sicilian
physics-chicks recruits.  Clearly they're on to quite a good thing
here, she works remotely out-of-office, but she's an effective
agent.  They had a human-smuggling pipeline to lift her out of
Hungary without a trace.  They've got a safehouse elsewhere, with a
new ID for her.  Irish passport, Canadian passport, Mossad loves
forging those, they're great at it.  That's not any problem.
  

    

I might even encounter Cristiana in the future, because she looks
and behaves like so many people I already know.  If she does 
ego-searching on the web, Cristiana might even know of my interest
in her.  An *abiding* interest, Cristiana.  I'm a journalist,
novelist and futurist, I don't have it in-for-you in any spooky way,
but for my ilk, you're truly good material.
https://www.pinterest.com/bruce2385/cristiana-barsony-arcidiacono/

So I'm wondering what's the worst problem for Cristiana, now that
she exists hidden in the Gray Ooze?  One might think that her worst
threat must surely be Hezbollah, eager for vengeance.  Or else Iran,
because they really like bashing in the heads of inconvenient women.
Or maybe Russia, because she dealt a serious blow to their long-term
Mideast ambitions and that's gonna be behavior hard to stomach from
some jumped-up Internet girly amateur who doesn't even have FSB or
GRU training.
  

    

But I'm suspecting that her worst threat may well be  AI.  Just,
getting blindsided, stripped of her traditional protections, by some
unheard-of inventive AI technique.  Like some Salt Typhoon attack,
it grabs and analyzes every phone message in Sicily and she pops out
because she was burner-phone-calling her Mom,  Or a video traffic
cam that glimpses Cristiania through a windshield, and then some
big-eyed AI matches the unusual shape of her jaw.   

Or maybe it's the boyfriend, because an Italian woman who
tango-dances and draws nude portraits of herself, she's gonna feel
the need of one.  And even if this beau is just some schmoe, some
smiling overtouristing tourist, putting her arms around him is gonna
blast open an enormous uncontrollable attack-surface.  He might put
her on Tiktok or Instagram.
  

    

So she might get bluntly and suddenly outed by near-accident, more
or less like Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov got very publicly
outed as GRU nerve-gas poisoners, not because their tradecraft was
bad, but just because sometimes people, or even unmanned analytical
systems, just look stuff up, and collate it, and compare it, and
recognize things, and people.

If I met Cristiana (and I knew that it was her), I wouldn't know how
to open the conversation.  I guess I would interview her, maybe buy
her a prosecco.  I wouldn't be keen to publish the results, but I'd
quite like to know her story.   She's a modern technothriller
protagonist, very John LeCarre' .  She's what's going on nowadays,
out there in that gray-ooze cold.