Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Much appreciated.

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Hi, SotWders.

I think the lst time I dove in was a coupel years ago, or was it
when I was still a correspodant from Dubai (which, oddly I return to
periodically).  There is a lot to say, but I think the reminiscence
chain is apropos, as being here in quaint lille Winona, MN (the
Midwest's version of Ibiza - actualkly, no it isn't - it's more of a
getrifying Lake Wbegone).

The cognitive chain goes back to the early 90's when I was orbiting
Jon, et al by showing up at Fringeware, and beign indirectly
introduced to the Churcjh of the Subgenius indirectly my hometown
hero Mark Mothersbaough (Akronites!)

But lots of things happened, raising hell in the 90's and 2000s as
the animator for a cheeky little activist band, TheYes Men, doign a
lot of writing nad net art, running a mag called Intelligent agent
with the digital curattor of the Whitney, getting up mornings at
SxSW at Jon's to hear Bruce say, "So, what cool thing did ya see
this year, Pat?" to cybirging with Jon, winding up in Dubai only to
hang out with 'Worlder Derek Woodgate, and doing occasional rants on
JKon and Scoop's podcast.

This isn't so much a bragchain, but more of a "What a long, weird
walk it;s been..." sort of thing.
  

    
But there's a moral to this story,  I, and my ethereal Tehrani wife,
Negin, have been on the front lines of global trends sine leaving
Dubai in 2021. Most of it is too long, and probably boring to tell,
but the exciting and heartbreaking part is the journey we had
through the US immingration system.  In short, about 50 months
before I came here and her able to join me, with academic breas in
Turkey or Cyprus (had to get a pass from the Ministry of Culture to
get Negin in), then escaping the war to get her to Weimar for the
past year, only to have to walk away from our place cold to come to
Winona.

And now we live a scant two hours from Minneapolis, which ain't fun.

And I get the aging thing - seeing my slightly forward friends
starting to hit bumps, and at 63, I'm now a full-fledged cyborg,
reading the messages with AI glasses, saving my RP-infested
remainign vision for remarks.

The point to this is that I remember Bruce cry out at an EFF party
at SxSW, "This isn't the dystopis I wrote aout!"

Damned straight, hermano.
 
And we're looking down the barrel ofn climate change - actually I
g=began doign Neo-Romantic art based on my anxieties about climate
change and AI by making AI rehases of the Caspar Friedrich seascapes
I saw at the Goethe Haus or monuments likt the Eiffel submerged 60 m
at the base.

But we're here waiting for Iran internet to open back up, in shock
but the Renee Good shooting, and I'm doing themost anachronistic
thing of all--finishing a tenure portfolio (my 3rd time doing this)
- that venerable ivory-billed woodpecker of academia. I get it, and
we're bunkered in for a decade in Midwest Ibiza, or we go back on
the road.

The point is, again that chaos is de rigueur now--a polycrisis in
the ambient muzak of the time.  When I was eating horse jerky in
Kazakhstan, I had no idea the world was this weird.  

Or maybe so.
I sometimes think that coming home from Dubai was stupid, then I
look again, and maybe it was one of the best options I could have
had.  At least Negin and I had the forst Xmas at home since 2020.

OK, typo laden rant ended for today.
  

    
I wouldn't claim that the Chinese are ten feet tall.  It's more that
everybody else now is two feet tall and some are half-buried in
foxholes.

The manifesto goals in that Tengchong document aren't "new."  It's
more that the Chinese ability to sort-of carry them out is new.  You
can have all the way-out, innovative ideas you can handwave about,
but if the Chinese are really building and selling them and you're
not, then you're basically a sci-fi writer.

Xiaomi is a consumer-electronics company, and they designed and
built a car in two years.  The car didn't fly, but it's a luxury car
and it sells.  Apple spent ten years and several billion
contemplating an Apple car. Then they shrugged and gave up.  Too
far-fetched, not stockholder-centric.
  

    
These Chinese companies are not indolent, featherbedding
bureaucracies filling out Red Chinese paperwork.  A lot of them are
being persistently and directly attacked by the US, like, say,
Huawei, where Trump once kidnapped the mandarin's daughter in high
Venezuelan style.  These trade-war assaults didn't even slow them
down.  It seemed to capture their attention and focus their
technical activities.

I see these guys all the time now.  They're forcing their way on my
attention in the way Japanese companies did in their trade-boom.

The Big Tech Platforms, of course:
Alibaba (e-commerce)
Tencent (e-commerce)
Baidu (AI, autonomous vehicles)
  

    

But all these other ones, too:
Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit (DRAM manufacturing)
Huawei (semiconductors, telecommunications and consumer electronics)
BBK Electronics (consumer electronics)
Xiaomi (consumer electronics)
Aviation Industry Corporation of China (aerospace)
CRRC (rail)
Sinopharm (medicine)
Megvii (AI)
DJI (AI, drones)
SMIC (semiconductors) 

BAIC (new energy vehicles)
Geely (new energy vehicles)
NIO (new energy vehicles)
BYD (new energy vehicles)
  

    
If you say, "what does a Chinese flying car look like," that sounds
corny and goofy.  If you ask "what does a Xiaomi-Huawei pilotless
taxi-drone look like when it's a new-energy-vehicle," then the Saudi
investors would fret about that.
  

    

"Room temperature superconductors" are also an old idea, but if ten
thousand Chinese lab engineers ground-it-out force-of-numbers style,
and some Chinese heavy-industry managed to mass-build those, the
world would be set on its ear.  Of course the world would still be
stricken with the ongoing climate crisis, but everybody would kowtow
to them because it would transform the grid worldwide.
  

    
The Xi Jinping "Chinese Dream" is about the kowtows.  It's about
historically overcoming the "century of humiliation" and having the
world bow the knee in awed respect of a rejuvenated hegemonic
techno-superpower.  I get it why that would be a Chinese
ethnonationalist aspiration, but if everybody else is
auto-humiliating themselves by comparison, that makes them look even
more impressive.  I'm not all that "impressed" by them, but I'm sure
I'll be paying more attention to them.  If they're setting the pace,
it behooves you to look.
  

    
The disciplined and energetic Chinese are ascendant compared to the
declining USA, where billionaires are getting fat on grift and the
government has fallen into the hands of a demented former reality
show host who's formed a muddled, violent idiocracy. Meanwhile "the
world's oceans absorbed colossal amounts of heat in 2025, setting
yet another new record and fuelling more extreme weather, scientists
have reported."
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound-impacts-record-oc
ean-heat-intensifying-climate-disasters>

Meanwhile "Trump's first 100 days in office have been the most
harmful 100 days of any administration for climate, clean energy,
public health, and communities -- especially our most vulnerable
communities. His actions have accelerated the climate crisis and
endangered communities' health by kneecapping pollution
protections and
crippling extreme weather preparedness, and have driven up costs and
undermined economic growth through illegally freezing clean energy
investments and launching a trade war with important economic
partners."
<https://www.actonclimate.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/100days100harms.pdf>

Despite this, "Columbia Climate School experts see signs of progress
on the horizon, and climate solutions within reach."
<https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2026/01/07/columbia-climate-school-experts-o
n-what-gives-them-hope-for-2026/> Let's hope.
  

    
It's also worth looking at how fast the Chinese are rising in
control of the world's fastest growing culture engines, with
significant ownership of some of the top global companies in games
and music: 

TenCent Games: Riot (100%), SuperCell (84%) Epic (40%) Funcom (100%)
with big infrastructure for esports/live streaming via Huya/Douyu

TenCent Music: Operates China's leading DSPs: QQ Music, Kugou
Music and Kuwo Music

WeChat is about half the size of Meta with a lot of room for global
growth; FB users spend roughly 35 minutes per day whereas WeChat
users spend 80+ minutes a day because it is a true "super app" with
deep hooks into ecommerce, messaging, gaming and the social fabric
of Asia.
  

    
Via email from Filip Dedic:

So State of the World increasingly looks a lot like a smouldering
hell and outlets even have a regular yearly column "XX Conflicts
to watch in 20YY."

So in the survivor mode of writer Italo Calvino I am asking: What do
we seek and recognize as not part of hell in 2026? What do we make
endure and give space? And how do we realistically maintain that
practice on a personal scale? How can we rewrite that intent for
conditions of 2026?
  

    
How to define not-hell? Perhaps through practices.      

Specifically, these:
Taking a moment where no one is performing for an algorithm.
Do work with care, even when unseen.
Have a conversation without trying to "win."
Give attention freely (a mindful approach).
Humor without cruelty.
Practice with skill, craft, patience.
Take small actions that preserve dignity.

Find practices that don't reduce humans to metrics, enemies, or
resources. Practices that slow us down instead of accelerating us.
Connect instead of sorting. Clarify instead of inflaming.

Take time for silent meditation. Acknowledge complexity. Do some
work that can't easily be monetized, or at least without thought of
monetization. Tell great stories. Change minds. Find and encourage
coherence. Tell the truth.
  

    
bravo jon
  

    
Thank you Jon,  I'm signing off now to teach a free course in making
Calder style mobiles to some local enthusiasts.  All of the above in
#88.  Find some balance in life.
  

    
I get more Chinese news lately because so many Chinese commercial
entities are forcing themselves on my attention.  Also
machine-translation makes it much easier to actively keep up with
what the Chinese say to each other.   The promulgations of the
"Cyberspace Administration of China" are of particular interest to
me.  If China was an aggressive planetary hegemon, I always figured
that these "cyberspace" guys would take a lively interest in me and
my doings, because my colleague made up their name.  

 Their pro-Great-Firewall rants used to be quite Maoist, aggressive
and sinister.  They seem to have suffered some regulatory-capture
from Baidu-Alibaba-Tencent.  Nowadays they sound less peremptory and
more pearl-clutchy.
  

    

The Cyberspace Administration rarely makes any reference to any
actual law or legal proceedings to enforce their will.   Their
"rules" are all about Chinese Great-Firewall norms,  an implicit
Maoist-Taoist etiquette of the "clear and proper harmonious way to
behave."  I doubt that I'll ever understand that ethic, but nobody
in or out of China ever actually performs it, either.  I suspect
that the Cyberspace Administration themselves are very much
on-the-take, nowadays, and harmonizing their way toward some private
villas and vacations in Greece.

Also the hacker legions of the Chinese "Advanced Persistent Threat"
might take some interest in the likes of me, because modern spooks
like hacker novels.  "Operation Salt Typhoon," you guys.  Heck of a
cyberwar coup by you.  I'm sure you're proud of that.  Feel free to
send WELL email under one of your many sock-puppet guises.
  

    
I get quite  a lot of urgent China news from India.  I follow India
rather closely (I used to live there), and they're very much in an
oppo-research yellow-peril mode about China.  

Most everybody else in the world gets along with India.  They know
that the Indians can't be bothered to do anything much outside their
own subcontinent.  The Chinese populace adores Indian popular
culture -- but the regime hates and despises India, to the point of,
like, pointless, bloody fistfights in barren mountain ranges.  
That's odd, because Modi admires and envies Xi Jinping and is doing
his level best to imitate Xi Jinping.  But when other polities mimic
China, they never find this flattering, as any other imperial
hegemon would.  Instead, it unnerves them.  They resent it.
  

    

I'm also in Serbia on occasion, where you don't have to merely read
about Chinese influence because you can see it in the urban fabric. 
The Chinese are very much and visibly on-the-ground there, so it's a
visible model for future actions they would take in other European
states if they could.  Serbia is sentimentally very pro-Russian. 
They're also historically aware that Russians do collapse and fall
apart.  I think they're ingratiating themselves with the Chinese
avant-la-lettre.  

The Serbs don't want to suddenly buckle and bend, in the way they
suspect the Russians will.  What kind of geopolitical deal can you
safely make with the Chinese?  The closer you are to them, the worse
it gets: if you're Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong-Kong, then you're in for
heavy-imperial manners and cultural erasure.  If you've got a
mountain range in the way, like India does, you might be able to
toss them all out bag-and-baggage, and they might behave with more
circumspection.
  

    
A guy named Jeff Ding has a newsletter called "ChinAI" that I should
plug here.  It's nice that he doesn't baldly do his own hot-takes,
it's mostly English-language translations of Chinese AI developments
that he considers of significance.

https://chinai.substack.com

Reading stuff like that used to be like eating ground millet and
washing it down with maitai, but the intellectual quality of those
science and technology papers has been going up considerably.
  

    
I am impressed by the Chinese every time I visit Dubai. Dragon mart
is twop kilometer long malls of whaterver you could want, with a lot
of shiny tech baubles you didn't know you did.  And Chinese signs
all over construction projects there, and when I ventured into North
Africa.

But in the USA, you don't hear so much about the wakign dragon, and
I have to search for Chinese space news, and there's a lot of it. 
Chinese progress goes against the narrative of American
Exceptionalism.

And by the way, the Iran matter is another topic...
  

    
Here's an interesting quote from Doug Rushkoff's latest "Team Human"
episode:

"The billionaires are not imagining underground cities after a
nuclear war, but creating private cities deep within real ones right
now. Think Sao Paulo, or a gated and highly militarized mini-city
inside a big one, like the walled palace in a medieval city
surrounded by guards, or South Africa before apartheid, or most of
the Middle East. 

"That's not a science fiction future, it's what's happening right
now. What they're building right now - the ultra wealthy are
creating walled gardens while draining what's left of the
commonwealth and getting us used to seeing the army in our own
cities being used against civilians today, because they'll be using
these troops to protect their enclaves from the rest of us
tomorrow."

<https://youtu.be/LgPIiB0iWos?si=btvY1PhS2duUCGDC>
  

    
It's been a few years since AI tools started affecting computer
programmers in a big way and the discussion around it has gone on
long enough that it's become tedious. But the AI companies keep
moving even if you're bored with it. Just in the last few months,
there were some upgrades and it's become evident that now it WORKS
and there's no going back.

I've been on the sidelines, early-retired for ten years now, but
I've been thinking I should check it out again instead of just
reading about it. Over the holidays I saw a post about a new website
that sounded promising and dived in.

I didn't expect it to be so much fun, addictive like a video game
with "one more turn" energy. I built a dumb little personal website
for sharing links, just to kick the tires, not expecting to use it.
Then I had a few links I wanted to stash so I started using it for
real. Every time I think of a new feature I post a bug report and
the AI implements it, maybe not perfectly, so I prompt it again to
fix it.

If writing code yourself is like driving your own car, this is like
having a personal driver / mechanic on call and never having to
drive again if you don't want to. I'm giving directions from the
backseat and I can watch to make sure it's going in the right
direction. Or not. I can surf the Internet or close the laptop and
come back later to see what it did.

Since I've got power tools now, I got a little excited, feeling like
I want to fix all the software, going back to old programming
projects to a fix a few things, because I imagine it will be easy
now and it's just a matter of finding a spare moment.

It's still important to know what you're doing and have taste,
because sometimes it makes a mess and you need to recognize that.
But also, if you want to *clean up* that mess, it's just a matter of
looking at the code and telling it what to clean up. If you care
what your code looks like and not just how it works (and I do),
you've got a power washer and can get it sparkly clean and
well-tested. It's up to you what to focus on.

The Free Software Foundation made a big deal out of the people being
able to change their own software, but even software engineers
mostly don't bother because we know it will be complicated. I'll
just file a bug and hope someone gets to it someday. Coding agents
are making running your own personal software *practical*. Maybe not
for everyone, but I think there's going to be a lot of people doing
it.
  

    
> If writing code yourself is like driving your own car, ...

Did you just invent the "Backseat Coder?"
  

    
I do think it's an apt metaphor! The AI ghost doesn't mind.