The Macbeths and the Power of Positive Thinking

Nearly every performance of a Shakespearean play is a "cutting."  Some of this is to manage length.  But as someone who has put in the time with the source texts,  I can say there are things that get cut out of nearly every version -- weird redundancies, comic relief that feels odd to modern audiences, etc.  These are the low hanging fruit for the person making a cutting.  But cutting goes further than that, and can be an art-form in itself.

I have been working with MacBeth, as I had mentioned recently.  I have cut deeply, but hopefully not the unkindest cut of all.

Having read, re-read, and re-re-read (and so) the play, along with watching several film versions in quick succession, I came up with five elements of the play that different versions mix and match.

1) Scottishness
2) imagination
3) the occult
4) infertility -- and it causing homicidal tendencies
5) the psychology of guilt

Every version I have seen leaves some lines emphasized and others hallow.  This is unavoidable as the intellectual space the play takes up is more vast than the conventions of cinema can capture.  Perhaps theater cannot, either.  Such is the genius of Shakespeare, made more evident to me by working so closely with the text.

For example, the plays I've seen that are very, very Scottish leave the "dagger of the mind" speech hallow.  Who cares how imaginative Macbeth is if the play is spun to implies everything that happens in it is driven by Scottish clannishness?  A great enough actor could carve out ethos for the performance of the lines, but it still wouldn't fit with anything else.

To some extent, to make a performance of Macbeth is to choose what you need to lose so that the elements you are most interested in can work. The focus on my cutting is the nature of imagination, and how it can be destabilizing.  It is then set in the modern day with Macbeth working in a corporate-like environment, using the appearance of positive thinking and self promotion (uh, literal self-promotion).

I am removing the bits about the frustrations of infertility leading to homicidal tendencies, which I think is a defensible enough decision for what will be a high school performance.  This makes the removal sound like an easy decision, but it cuts out one of the best bits of the play, Lady Macbeth's lines about having a child:

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

I also have drastically cut out the Scottishness of what many actors call The Scottish Play.  Macduff's sub-plot is cut to almost nothing.  He is just a generic person who finds King Duncan dead and then fights Macbeth at the end.  I still give Malcolm the last speech of the play, but only to show the reality of Macbeth's failure and that other decisions would probably force me to add lines, and that is something I, on balance, tried to avoid.

I find that restraints can be great aids to creativity.  Even if they don't end up making the product better -- though they usually do just that -- they make the process more enjoyable.  In this case I consciously choose the following restraints, and would recommend them as a fun puzzle for someone working on nearly any Shakespearean play: 1) to add as little additional text as possible 2) re-arrange as little of the text as possible and 3) failing #2, if I needed to add text to the play to take it from other places in Shakespeare.

The biggest addition I make to the play is at the very beginning. I make Macbeth into someone who is listening to a motivational recording, and it is that which powers his imagination to see the witches (weird sisters).  By this logic, Banquo does not see the sisters. The lines Macbeth uses to pump himself up are taken from other Shakespearean plays.  Here is the opening:

===
Scene 1
===

(In something like a work or office setting.  Macbeth and Banquo at work.)

MACBETH
So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

(Gets up, put in ear buds to do his affirmations.  Another voice, perhaps a recording of a witch, or a witch off stage, says the affirmations, and Macbeth repeats.  Banquo non-verbally responds each time, shaking head and the like, as if to indicate what a dork Macbeth is.)

Voice
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

MACBETH
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Voice
Strong reasons make strong actions.

MACBETH
Strong reasons make strong actions!

Voice
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en

MACBETH
No profit grows where is no pleasure taken!

Voice
I dare do all that may become a man

MACBETH
I dare do all that may become a man!

(Flourish.  Enter witches.  MacBeth can see them.  Banquo cannot.)

===

Here is a link to the google doc.

After this beginning, the play unfolds in normal order and, as I said, I lean on cuttings rather than additions, with some characters merged together to save on the number of actors.  The motivational sequence happens again at the beginning of Act 4 before Macbeth sees the witches again.

Also, for the fun of it I have given titles to all five acts based on motivational slogans from our culture. I don't plan on them showing up in the performance, but just a bit of fun for the cast.


Act 1  The Secret to my Success
Act 2  Just Do It
Act 3  Fake It Until you Make It
Act 4  Believe You Can, and You're Halfway There.
Act 5  Never Give Up


This cutting is, first and foremost, a fun game to play.  Secondly, it allows me to work with a director whom I respect, and has served as my first project after leaving a job at a place that I will leave unnamed to protect the innocent.

The meaning of this version comes from a critique of our times.  Delusion, ambition, self-serving justifications -- all are fine as long you sparkle with charisma and show "positivity."  The universe should manifest what you desire. . . or is it that you should be able to manifest upon a passive universe?

Shakespeare had his suspicions about this type of social imagination.

Some notes on Rise of Skywalker (essentially spoiler free)

This isn't attempting to be definitive or systematic.  It is some notes I jotted in my journal after seeing the movie with my wife and father-in-law, and I share it for the sake of a friend.  It's basically the same trouble to send it just to him as to publish it openly, so if anyone else appreciates it that is a bonus.

1/ A criticism I saw of the movie online is that it feels rushed, more like a music video than a movie.  While I must admit the opening does have the feel of a music video, first that feeling moved by much more quickly for me than I would have thought based on the vehemence of those making the claim, and, second, I liked that feel.  I think the audience can be assumed to have absorbed this style and speed of story-telling.

I feel the story had to move along briskly because the Last Jedi wasted quite a bit of its run time, but that only makes me more impressed to see this movie stick the landing and wrap up the trilogy.

2/ One of the only ways this could be done was to bring back Palpatine.  At the end of Last Jedi the resistance was left with about a dozen people on the Millennium Falcon.  I remember saying "how the hell do you win from there? . . and in one movie, no less?"  Well, as I once read from treatise on the game Diplomacy, there is no better way to bury the hatchet than in someone else's back.  Or, you can go with the more traditional "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."  Once Palpatine was established, I found Kylo's motivations believable.  I think the machinations of the space wizards unfolded reasonably enough.

3/ This series has always been about overpowered space wizards, and the best way to tell stories about those space wizards is about their emotional conflicts and the struggle to gain self-mastery so they can be the versions of themselves that they want to be.  Escalating them from space wizards to space demi-gods doesn't really change the fundamentals of telling a good story within the franchise.  This movie deals with questions of identity, facing fear (including fears about identity, agency, and fear itself), and dealing with mistakes, even our most horrible ones.

4/ Being a child of this many years of special effects and in particular CGI, I can no longer be in awe of a power-set.  Following from this, I am no longer interested in the level of power-set consistency.  The text of the movie leaves some good answers for why the power-sets jump, but it really doesn't matter. Movies aren't consistent: Plot armor is a given in all modern action cinema, and you only have to a few episodes of Cinema Sins before you see how hallow these types of notes are.  If you want consistency, study engineering, or consider reading Hard science fiction.

Artisanal Texts

Somewhere between running errands to go to my last day of shooting the movie and getting to Chickasaw, I lost my phone.  When I got back into Norman, I retraced my steps through several stores and asked about lost and founds to no luck.

I decided to use this opportunity to down grade my phone.  It's something I've wanted to do for a while.

On the hand, I think I did so far less cost efficiently than I could have because I wanted to take a path of relatively low resistance, staying with my carrier, etc, etc. On the other hand, even including this purchase (a Nokia 3011 reboot), I have spent less on phones my entire life than the cost of a single new iPhone.  You people really set the bar low.  I may or may not stress out about why I don't have a pay-as-you-go plan at some other point, but that is not the point of the story.

As all of my contacts were saved on my SIM card in my now-lost phone, I was glad that I had used the major memory system to memorize several numbers.  One of the numbers I had memorized belonged to the best man at my wedding, Nat.  After confirming I did in fact remember the correct number -- I would stake a fortune on the digits; it is the order that might have been wrong -- we had the conversation below.  Nat's texts will be italicized.  Mine will be block quoted.  I've added footnotes because they are fun.

This is a 60 dollar dumb phone. [1] 

The last decade can suck it

I love it.  Fuck the system. 

I try.  I mean this is hitting keys more than once and everything.  Real horror-show [2]

Yeah.  Only horrible when going back to it.

When it was the only game it town, it was fine.

Know that every word I text is slowly, lovingly handcrafted, like texts were . . .two gens ago. [3]

Meaningful texts seemed like an oxymoron until now

Have I stumbled upon artisanal texts?

Move to Brooklyn, buddy.  You're ready now. 


===

[1] I didn't want to pull up the "$" symbol because that requires going through another menu.  Having to type out each letter extra slowly also forced me to seek extra terseness in my writing.

[2] I was hoping he had seen A Clockwork Orange and thus knew that lil' bit o' Nadsat slang.  At the slow . . . pace . . . I . . .was . . . going it sure seemed like a hilarious punchline.  It was no one's fault the joke didn't land, and I certainly wasn't going to text an explanation!

[3] My phone is on 3G.  I guess it will be a useless brick when 3G is phased out (or ends because of outside factors). 

Shaving Update: I Contaminated the Experiment Further

On May 29th, I started out to see how long I could make a Gillette Mach 3 blade last simply by cleaning the blade by moving my thumb backward over it (a bit of stropping action and putting some of my skin's oil on the blade) and then trying to get the blade very dry between uses through a combination of shaking it dry, patting it on a towel, and then putting it in a plastic baggie.

I grew fond of that blade as it had gone with us to our trip to Italy.  Through the stresses of air flight there and and back, the part of the blade connecting it to the stick broke.  After that time, I merely held the blade between my thumb and index finger to shave.  I did so for months. 

But all good things must come to an end. . .

The flat part that contains the blade popped out one day in the middle of a shave.  I tried to shave with just the flat part, but couldn't get a grip on it.  So, thoughtlessly, I gave up and loaded a new blade onto the shaving stick, the first in six months.  I left my old blade a shaving-cream covered mess and went on with my day.

It was only later that I realized I could maybe fix the told blade with superglue.  When I went to look examine it, I came to realize I could have just popped the thing together, no glue needed.  I felt guilty about having started a new blade.

I cleaned off my old blade and shaved with it two more times over the next few days, but each time I felt quite uncomfortable razor burn.  I am pretty sure this is because I had left the blade sitting in shaving cream for nearly a whole day.  And so that's how I ended my time with that blade.

I'm still pretty happy with six months out a blade, and we'll see how long I can make the next one last, especially now that I know to keep my cool, clean and dry the blade and see what kind of repairs I can make.   The blade experiment is dead . . . long live the [new] blade experiment!

Videos on Simple Mechanisms

I have gathered an interest in mechanics and simple machines.  Time will tell how far this interest will move into the shop and become objects, but the result of this interest is that I have some video that may serve to instruct and amuse.

This video shows how to make a wheel with hand saws, and then make a groove so the wheel can be turned into a pulley.

Next, another video in the same series that makes wooden gears and uses them to in a simple hand generator.  The whole series is fantastic.  PhilipStephens007 is my favorite maker [1].  I assume his actual name is Philip Stephens.

Here are some other wooden mechanisms that can be made once you have reinvented the wheel.  Next, a video cued to up a master-level endgame. . . AND.

Also, here is a a generator set up using old CDs to make the wheel.  It is of the hot glue school of building, which I am the last person to knock.  I love to see things repurposed.  I try to do it with an attitude, calling it junk punk.

==

[1] The first video of his I saw was making a foot powered scroll saw.  I thought it was just about the manliest thing I had ever seen -- a throw-back to when manly meant being useful, rather than complaining loudly or sometimes looking muscular.

His latest, reusing chipboard, left me inspired.

Also, my goodness!

That Artistic FIRE

After I wrote a piece on r/leanfire where I came out as someone capable of FIRE (financially independent/ retire early), albeit on a lean (under $40,000 a year -- um, in my case, much lower) basis. I wrote a follow-up piece where I talked about getting a gig as a studio teacher for a motion picture. While it sound much more glamorous than it is -- think being huddled near a space heater in a side room in an old farm house in rural Oklahoma -- I got the gig because I knew someone in the local art scene who knew someone else.  I may not socialize all that much, and I will do so even less now that I am on financial lock down, but I do tend to spend my time with artists.

When I look for inspiration, however, the successful practitioners of FIRE tend to come from STEM backgrounds. (Appears I'm using all sorts of four-letter words today!)  I can think of two reasons why STEM comprises so much of FIRE: 1) higher earnings 2) familiarity with measuring things quantitatively.  While the first factor is very important -- never underestimate the importance of resources, though those with resources might, ever confusing privilege with virtue -- it does not explain the first, and still my favorite, practitioners of FIRE I was exposed to, Jacob Lund Fisker of Early Retirement Extreme, whose income for the first leg of his financial journey was quite modest by American standards.  Instead, Fisker is a learning machine, able to rapidly pick up frugality skills and stick to a budget that is, well, extreme.  He has a mind well-suited to FIRE.

On the other hand, the artistic types I know tend to be bad with money.  A big part of it is explained simply by being American in a time where that means a multi-generation acceptance that "no one" has any savings.  Another part of the artist's problems with money is a disdain and distrust for numbers and wanting (or affecting) to be above worldly concerns.  If there is anything resembling a call to action in this piece, it is that it doesn't have to be this way: artistic people can be good with money. I want to see these two worlds bridged. It is my relative financial freedom that allows me to take artistic opportunities.  And art, broadly defined, is my best answer to the question of what to do with all the free time financial independence creates.  Paraphrasing a line from the movie Groundhog Day, I ask myself, at various levels of desperation, depending on my mood and the day, "what are you going to do with your eternity?"

Looking back at my second piece mentioned above, I'm surprised by my delirious passion.  Part of it was that dangerous social media buzz of getting a lot of likes for a piece -- one more reason to not have comments on this blog, where I now retreat in order to work on myself.  Another reason was the odd energetic lunging my mind goes through when my sleep schedule is knocked off, as it was for me to wake up at 3:30 AM in order to drive down to rural Oklahoma to huddle near a space heater in an old farm house so that I can now turn into a story to impress people and play 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon [myself > Nick Stahl in What Joshia Saw > Arnold in Terminator 3 > Kevin Pollak in End of Days > Kevin Bacon in A Few Good Men.]  It was in that delirium that I posted this list of things I thought I could do in the short-to-medium term:

• Go through a friend of my wife to do seasonal tax preparation work.
• Finish a "cutting" of Macbeth so that a friend of mine can produce it as a high school play.
• Record lectures where I show how I can teach (say AP Euro, or things on literature). The goal is to eventually have some tutoring sessions be on ideas, rhetoric, or Great Books curriculum, not just the test-prep arms race
• Read stacks of children's books so that I catch my wife on Goodreads, and beat her yearly total just this once. (Right now she's up 149 to 121).   [Update: 149 to 156]
• Do my homework, receive my mentorship, and then start my tutoring business -- I'm willing to do test prep, while supplies (open slots on days I want to work) last.
• practice sharpening blades and tools, such as wood planes. It's the next "self-reliance" skill I want to acquire.

And while all of those things are true enough -- with the tool sharpening being the one I feel I might procrastinate on the most -- I don't like how much it was performing . . , I think showing off.  Anti-social media is a hell of drug.

I have already read over twenty children's books to take the lead over my wife in the yearly Goodreads count.  I suppose I should add that my wife is a 6th grade (English) Language Arts teacher who is taking classes to become a librarian.  To stay current in her recommendations to students, the vast majority of books she reads are young adult literature.  Furthermore, this year she read 50 children's books for an annotated bibliography assignment. Me reading children's books is a subtle act of trolling, but also an attempt to inject into conversations (at, say, family gatherings) the idea that the quality of what is read should be taken into account.  I must also add that if I absolutely hated reading the books, I would have abandoned the project, seeing as self-discipline is not a strength of mine.  I like that children's books don't wallow in mean world syndrome, showing more maturity than entertainment fare I watch most adults swallow.  I've read books that promote imagination, going outside, enjoying the seasons, and even making sure you give a middle child special attention from time to time.  I had been working on my visual literacy and trying to learn how to draw, starting with cartoonish figures -- so I have appreciated the illustrations as well.

I am probably most excited about my Macbeth project.  If I can't come up with an idea better, I will expand on my Macbeth cutting in next week's writing.  The project has hit the point where I have to get it polished -- that last 20% that takes 80% of the time and energy, because there always has to be a flip side to the promise of the Pareto principal.  Hooray for those 80% gains from 20% of the input, but at some point, if you care about the product, there has to be grind.  But that's good for me.  It builds character, or at least keeps it from atrophying.  More on this later as well: I'm not made to be a drop-out (to be honest, I cracked up (eventually) on my sabbaticals), and I failed at being an honorary goldbricker. It looks like semi-retired is the best I can do.

A Framework for Understanding the Future of the U.S.

[I posted this on the Ran Prieur subreddit a while back.  I held off on the cross-post because I didn't want anyone to think I had returned at that time.]

[I also realize this piece has a very small potential audience.  If someone is used to thinking about politics morally they probably won't want to think about futurism probabilisticly.  None of these ideas give me a warm glow, nor would I stay attached to them if new information came in that showed them to be wrong.  See also Crony Beliefs by Kevin Simler]

[And now, the piece I had written.]

===

I think projecting future outcomes for Americans is best done in 3 tranches:

top 1%: whose wealth is in run-away imperial mode. I think it's entirely possible this group will be able to hold on to high-tech through all of the long emergency, if not watch the tech improve. That's the weird part, the idea that it seems more people have on [r/ranprieur] than any other sampling of doomer thought I have seen.

next 19%: who are so busy, busy, busy. Much too busy to think, certainly too busy to give any group any slack to any imperfection in themselves or others. I have the hardest time projecting what will happen for this group. I am pretty sure the savings they have so dutifully placed in stock-only index funds will be wiped out in the next crash (or run-away stagflation). They have been primed for this robbery, however, conditioned day in and out to follow orders, and accept lies at all levels of life. Little drones, who have learned to dis-integrate (they say "compartmentalize"), so they have no integrity. Why would anyone else have integrity either? After the great robberies, they will shrug and get back to work (hell, they know someone whose kid got into Harvard -- bet those student loans will be a bugger!) They will work for this system as long as the system has use of them. Again, I don't know how to mentally model how long that will be.

[Not much longer than true general purpose autonomous vehicles, though.  That problem is harder than most people think, while automating much of office work is easier than most people think.  The status of the various workers creates a bias about the cognitive loads.]

lower 80: who will see third-world results.  The long crisis has already begun for them, but the middle 19% allow the counter-revolution to continue grinding (often, hilariously, under the guise of social leftism). Whatever innovations that might be created by altruistic groups trying to help the global poor do more-with-less might (but only might) be imported back to help this population. Two further thoughts: 1) their carbon footprint will be drastically smaller in 50 years than it is now (and I mean *ahem* one way, or another). 2) They will have virtually no economic demand-pull if our political economy stays on its course (or even has the same assumptions).

I think these are the forces at work. They mix and match in a lot of possible ways, from genocide, to wars, to some possible hybrid of extremely low carbon footprints with some need for UBI or guaranteed work.

[Looking back, I now realize this attempt at modeling is really for generation X onward.  The Baby Boomer retirement and medical crises will be a political convulsion.  I detest the moral vacuity of the groups thought-leaders, but there is a real generational solidarity, so I would never bet against them politically.  So . . . The robbery of the gen-X (and onward) 19% might not be directly from the markets as much as taxes.  This much would be obvious to someone to the right of me.  What isn't obvious to that person is that it is older, white people who played at rugged individualist when it was their turn to pay taxes who will be pushing the redistribution and then attempting to absorb all of it.]

Round Up #21

From Research

I am looking into investment again, so that is what I captured in my research.

I have heard about at least one billionaire hoarding nickles.  Looking into it further lead to this marvelously interesting article on the work done to change the alloy. (Also, some analysis of hoarding a million dollars in nickles).

I thought that maybe healthcare as a sector would be protected against inflation.  Turns out that is almost certainly wrong.

If I hadn't moved into different intellectual circles, I wouldn't know that Netflix isn't very much in China, but instead is growing in India and Japan.  Whether that is deliberate strategy or there are forces barring their way, the article doesn't say.

The great puzzle of our time: why so many bonds with negative interest rates around the world? (including now negative interest rates for "junk" ie "high yield" bonds).  I like this short memo on the topic.

Reddit

I wrote two popular pieces on r/leanfire, one about leaving my job, and the second about the aftermath.

I suggest r/BottleNeck for people who wants to learn about peak energy without fear porn.

I took a quick stab at answering the question of how many of the Celtics in 1960s are in the Hall of Fame based just on team success and reputation.  This then manifested someone showing me the work done more rigorously.

A hot take on the possibility of negative interest rates in the U.S.  (see above).

Musings on why most people don't really know what makes for a good manager.

Reminder that our culture is a wasteland.

I saw A Narcissist's Prayer :

That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did... You deserved it. 

Aphorisms/Shorts

What conservatives don't understand is that only artificial things can be as clean as they want.

Liberals prefer to be liberal with other people's money, and conservatives prefer to be conservative with other people's morals.  Oh, I'm now an old man, fighting last generation's war. Now right-wingers also prefer to be right-wing with other people's money and leftists prefer to signal leftism about other people's morals.

Space travel isn't going to be colonization.  It is going to be white flight.

I love bad decisions; I could watch them all day.

The argument that it was better to build a school than a prison might have been true.  But now, in order to pay for the care of the richest generation in human history, we will soon have money for neither.

The way the ideas of Buddhism spread through the West was basically self-help for affluent people.

"Why bother explaining if the audience always sees it as a starting point for a win-lose debate rather than an opportunity to learn?" Jacob Lund Fisker, hallow be his name.

"Anxiety is paying interest on pain, but if you catch it in time, you only have to pay the principal." Ran Prieur

I'm Back.

I'm back.  I can't promise that I'll post every Wednesday, but I'll shoot for 90% here.

The top piece will always be a serious attempt at doing my best -- either artistically, or in the attempt to further truth.  When I post more than one piece on the same day, the piece further down (ie posted a bit earlier) will usually be some kind of B side -- either a humor piece or something that I think might be of limited interest, such as how long I can continue on with the same razor.

Just Executing

It looks like I will be the executor of my grandparents' Will -- well, actually, the term is personal representative, but you can still say I will be executing the wishes of the Will.  This will be a another full time job to add to what was already the most challenging job I have ever worked.

Therefore this blog will be suspended until further notice.

I will e-mail Degringolade when I am able to publish again as he is one of my most reliable readers.  Until then, check out his blog.  He and I very like minded people, even though we are at different points in our lives, and I am glad that I have been able to know him through posts and e-mails.

Another similar spirit is Ran Prieur, though I do not vouch for his musings on consciousness (I don't repudiate them, either -- it's just not a sphere I am thinking of much, and my intuitions line up differently from his at present).

Odds are decent you came here from John Michael Greer.  If not, let me introduce you, and then send you along to his most recent work.  (With Greer, my caveats are about Astrology and support of Donald Trump -- but no one said you have to read every piece someone writes).

==

I am weary, friends.

It's all I can do to make a little time to journal and doodle a bit.  I am making time to be creative because it has now becoming a more reliable way for me to feel alive -- especially under the restrains I am now living under during working hours -- and besides, it honors my grandmother's life as an artist.  I am using some of her paper and supplies.  My skill level is such that all I am able to is cartoons and then maybe use some other marker or paint to make the piece pop, but it is a better escape than anything consumerism and its so-called escapism has to offer.

Writing is my favorite medium, for its expressiveness, but it is stressful for me to get my drafts right, especially under any kind of deadline.  I need art to be about pleasure and joy right now, and to serve as a solace in the stolen hours between an endless grind.

I hope to see you on the other side of it.

Round Up #20

Free Books Read

Romeo and Juliet.  A rereading, of course.  In fact, I taught it for several years.  I had a conversation recently with a friend that reminded me that we discount a great many books we read when we were younger, leaving them in a ghetto to no longer be examined.  Romeo and Juliet is a play not just for the young, but everyone who was once young.

Hamlet.  I think I had last read it in high school.  It was more powerful for me then when it was the story of a person, this time I caught the subtleties to know it is a story about a world.  If you think life is unfair, you should really examine death more closely.  Hamlet is a play not just for the dead, but everyone who will one day be dead.

Reddit

That's why I'm the friendly doomer.

Oklahoma is not exactly what you think it is.


Aphorisms/Shorts

We are living an odd double life, still a rush from judgement in face-to-face encounters, but a stampede to judgment online. Something has to give.

As Hume lifted Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, Captain Beefheart lifted me from my slumbers of normality. And so far, the results have been lasting.

Speaking of music, I find that Beefheart and Miles Davis great for drawing and painting, terrible for writing a draft.  I listen to pink noise instead.

 Only artificial things can get as clean as most conservatives want, and most conservatives don't know that.

Of all the lessons to teach a Harvard or Oxford grad, the hardest seems to be a non sequitur.  Particularly about where one went to school.

In reviewing the cliche I hate the most, I came across someone criticizing another, "it is what it is."

Anti-social media platforms which allow only upvotes are the ultimate fool's paradise.

To someone who wrote: "Imagine actually believing things in 2019 LMAO."  . . .  Imagine believing that as you don't believe in anything you are free from consequences.

The literati: by pretending to have read everything, they end up not reading anything (at least not deeply).

Reason operates on the Faith that it has all the information.  (Faith often reasons that it doesn't).

Just Processing

I'm taking this week off from writing to process my grandmother's death and catch up my work.

Obituary for my Grandmother

Virginia Huddleston was born in Norman, Oklahoma on November 12, 1933 to Leroy and Emily Allen. She lived her entire life in Norman. On June 19th, 1954, she married Max Leroy Huddleston. Virginia was a cheery, bubbly, eccentric who dressed in bold prints and pursued a passion for painting. At the same time, she was always dedicated to her family, generously giving her time and help. She was one of the most positive people you could meet, and never had a bad word to say about anyone. She would advise family members to "wake up every day with something exciting to look forward to for that day." She believed in dreams, and she believed that if you were having enough fun the hard work would take care of itself. And through her creative spirit, she showed that it could be true.

Virginia was preceded in death by her husband and, tragically, her two children, Alan and Ray Huddleston. Many in the family take comfort in thinking she has rejoined her men.

Norman Transcript

Round Up #19

Finds While Surfing

1) The hacking mindset as essentially the opposite of mathematics.  And, bonus, he points out that hackers like puns.  Thus, a possible corollary: the reason normies don't like puns is because they want a more stable reality than language -- and really reality -- can offer. << That's one of my favorite sentences I've ever written.

2) Ran Prieur on status

It's hard for me to even understand status. If you use status to get your way with people, it's different from paying them, different from physically threatening them, and different from being actually qualified to tell them what to do. As far as I can figure, status is a mental shortcut, the appearance of being qualified to tell people what to do, for observers who are too lazy to discern the reality. The word "prestige" comes from French and Latin words for deceit and illusion.

3) Anthill podcast series on the Future of India.  Listened to this and this and this.

4) Also Anthill had a podcast whose theme was darkness and did several riffs on different aspects of the word, including London nightlife and dark matter.

5) Math can be as beautiful as so-called abstract art, which is really non-representational art, which is really decoration.  I probably should add that I think that beauty is much more important than most people think.

Infinite Jest

Some of the most thoughtful writing I have done recently is in threads on the Infinite Jest subreddit.-

• A piece on Infinite Jest and the film critic Bazin, moving on to good art being about more than one variable.
• Responding to a criticism of Wallace's choice of characters to focus on. 

Free Books Read

Right, Ho Jeeves (audio) and My Man Jeeves and The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.  The prose of Wodehouse is like a tonic for the soul.  My wife said she was reading a bougie mystery.  I replied that Wodehouse's world is so aristocratic that you get beyond bougie anxiety to real comfort, and eccentricity.

MacBeth by you-know-who.  I recommend using a side-by-side translation, such as here, though that does add distractions and ads.  You could find printed copies cheap or at a library, though. 

Books from the Local Library

No Time to Spare Ursula LeGuin.  I will put some quotes from the book below.

Aphorisms/Shorts

Nostalgia is one hell of a drug . . . almost as much as belief in progress.

The short run is the only run Americans care about anymore.

I actually think there are many business books that are well-researched and have important things to offer, however in the interest of truth they should open with this disclaimer: "the vast majority organizations will not be able to get through the incentive-traps of their own office politics to correctly do any of this, but . . . "

"It's so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one." Ursula LeGuin

"Fear is seldom wise and never kind." Ibid.

What if happiness meant being the kind of person who overreacts to spoilers?

" . . . the real difficulty of democracy is not that voters are unworthy, but that their vote is generally the least worthy thing about them."  C.K. Chesterton

Americans are trained to show their taste by complaining, especially about what they lack.  If you say something is good enough to an standard American, prepare for an intense argument. 

Insight into Insight, as Well as Happiness

After reading Sarah Perry's Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom a little over a month ago, I have been thinking a lot about my passion to understand the world -- my own nerddom, if you will.  And I don't like what I see.

According to Perry

Our overdeveloped, grotesque insight reward seeking is likely maladaptive, and is probably not even doing our individual selves any good.

I think that's about right.  Putting a spin on the old saying about wealth, "if you're so smart, why aren't you happy?"

There is a strong bi-directional relationship between this seeing-through and depression. By being interested in insight rather than the day-to-day stuff people want to talk about, you can become socially isolated and depressed.  Conversely, given that someone is socially isolated and depressed for other reasons, it might kick in depressive realism. Either way, what keeps the cycle going is probably the aforementioned "grotesque insight reward seeking."

So what does depression under insight do?  Back to Perry:

Meaning is deconstructed in depression; social connection is weakened. Ideas and things that for normal individuals glow with significance appear to the depressed person as empty husks. The deceptive power of social and sacredness illusions is weakened for the depressed person (as are certain other healthy illusions, such as the illusion of control).

Furthermore, the inverse is true:

 self-deception is strongly related to happiness; the consolation of insight may not make up for the loss of sacredness in terms of individual happiness. 

This is where I see some hope for myself on the happiness front.  I rarely lose the ability to perceive sacredness.  I never lost it during my darkest times, where going on a walk into semi-nature was my mental salvation.  It was actually later, when I went on my first sabbatical and ended up too socially isolated that I have a journal entry about going outside and feeling . . . nothing [1].   And that was a sufficient wake-up call to go back to work.  It turns out, much to my disappointment, that I need contact with people other than my wife [2].

As I am trying to recover from my insight-addiction, I have started to use two phrases a lot in conversations with my wife: first "What would a happy person say/do right now?" and second is the lament "I can't not know . . ."  because I know whatever it is that I know I know (and know I can't not know) is something a person happier than me wouldn't notice or would subsume into some kind of optimistic story (a technique I have only begun to experiment with; I'll try to report back later on my progress).

There are many things that I can't not know, but it does help to not dwell on them.  I have learned to not rant.  And most importantly, I have learned not organize my day around gathering more negativity.

Ran Prieur noted in 2017:

Over the last year I've sensed more toxicity when I go online. Maybe I just got better at noticing it, but that's why I'm trying to quit writing about what's wrong with the world. My working theory is, thinking about what's wrong with the world is linked to a general attitude, a subconscious habit of constantly scanning for wrongness, and it's like a dark universe that I'm trying to escape.

This is not to say there isn't a place for darkness, but darkness should be used, either for productive actions or some act of creation -- even including a good conversation, provided the parties know when it is time to switch topics. (What a rare trait in America, anymore).

Insight is a lot like whisky and cola [3].  Each individual hit seems reasonable enough, but eventually it starts to blur your judgement toward your quantity consumed. . . and then you have other problems.


===

[1] See Allie Brosh for what might be the greatest work on depression ever (cartoons are very much underrated at a medium). Part 1 and Part 2.  I feel fortunate to have only been in the full "detached meaningless fog" at one point in my life.

[2] Humanity is still a passion best enjoyed with an eye on the minimum effective dose, and awareness of what can happen when I go over that dose.   But it turns out that I could have never made it as a hermit.

[3] Perry uses another term having to do with being stimulated watching other people do . . . something.  Starts with a "p."  I like that metaphor too because it shows a lack of *ahem* real action or working with the complications of the real world. . . Porn.  I mean insight porn.

Degringolade Responds Re Darren Allen

Degringolade had a response to last week's post. Some highlights:

 . . . I studied, I attempted understanding, I followed the rules and accepted the role assigned me.  But looking around me now, I realized that the truth of the matter is that the passion and the anger and the effort that I put into watching and understanding and discussing things that I had no effect on was truly a waste of my time and my life.  

And

I do like to keep up, I do try to read the updates on the world once a week.  I miss the days when The Economist wasn't a shameless shill and apologist for every rich bastard in the world.  In the 80's and 90's when they were my go to, a once a week read followed by some drill-down on specific issues kept me pretty aware of my surroundings.  But those days are gone, and to keep up and keep out of the clutches of the mass-media hysteria machine, I have to refine the extremely low-grade ore that is the internet.  

Finishing with

Nope, Ran's decision to drop out, play video games, and get mellow aren't necessarily invalid, the positions advocated by Mr. Allen are equally ambiguous.  I think that one derives from a desire to be right, the other derives from a desire to be left alone.  I think I know which one I would prefer to hang out with. 

Darren Allen, Purity Politics, and the Time Remaining

I recently had an interesting exchange on Reddit with Darren Allen (his website, though it's been frequently down).  The topic was his critique of Ran Prieur, whom Allen had lumped in with other people he called "unofficial socialists."

The piece was well-written, but a bit on the long side.  In essence, Allen is accusing all seven people and groups of not being anarchist enough for him.  In our conversation, I provided the connection that he was describing different incentive traps which no one has the incentive to get out -- i.e. Scott Alexander's use of Moloch.

Anarchism, like the rest of politics, is something I only allow myself the indulgence of finding meta-interesting, especially in its meta-politics.   Anarchism is absolutely an example of wandist, if not godist, thinking.  So, once you admit it's never going to happen, as Darren Allen does in our exchange, what do you do next?  One option is to try to implement your ideas on a small scale.  Another is to continue on in a wandist mode and accuse others of not taking pure enough symbolic stances. If an anarchist keeps going it is usually out of the joy of perceiving that they are correct. (Libertarianism is like this but usually in practice also includes an identification with, and thus a fetish for, our captains of industry).

But life isn't just about winning political arguments. Ran Prieur has very much understood this in his post-doomer / post-back-to-the-land phase.  And I'll speak for myself: I'm no longer going to waste my limited life feeling horror, dread, or debilitating depression about things I cannot control.  I have tried to remove these from my information diet and habits of thought and instead seek out beauty. And though there have been alterations to how I go about it,  that's the current project of my life: trying to live well in the face of an inevitable death, one that might be hastened by forces around me.

===

Hopefully the above gives enough context for my last post in the thread, which Mr. Allen has at this point not responded to.  It begins with a quote from him:

As i say, I still like him as a private bod, but as a public intellectual (thinker / teacher / writer / etc) he has nothing to say any more, and it is my duty to point that out and why

That might be as good as a place as any to examine, assuming we are wanting to find common ground. What does a private/public divide mean to you? Why is the binary useful in this context?

Or, really, why should anyone have "obligations" to the public side when we have so little ability to move any needle at all? And surely that is a fair summary of our last exchange. It looks like the impediments to your preferred world are 1) political inaction, which means corporations and the security state continue unabetted 2) the entire political right 3) capture of the official left 4) the subtle capture of the unofficial socialists you outline.

Though there are more people who understand collapse, I'll agree with your figure of 1,000 to 100,000 who understand that the best state for humanity is anarcho-primitivism in an area with human activity below ecological carrying capacity. And if I could magic wand it, I'd probably will into existence something close to what you would as well. I buy that we made a wrong turn at agriculture and the bad situation became increasingly worse with institutions seeking legibility.

But I have no position in a meaningful res publica, let alone a polis, let alone king of the world. The real position for us who see through is to drop out or semi-drop out. And then what?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you are saying people need to dedicate themselves to a purity politics that you know won't work. But why?

I think it is noble enough to look for what is beautiful and interesting, and share what you find. It's being a private person and sharing the overflow.

The last few months of Ran's blog have

• Turned me on to Miles Davis's later psychedelic/funk work
• interrogated American chore habits
• had open-minded essays (attempts, not proclamations) about confidence, panpsychism, and the like.

It's a good read. Those who want to perceive even more beauty can take to making their own art, or go on a reverential nature walk. And that's where I'm at, filling my time well while I wait to see where the waves of history, the ones I know I cannot control, take us.

===

I also used Reddit as the comments section.  Ran even responded.

Why Do I Copy from the Commons?

"Good artists borrow, great artists steal" --  Steve Jobs stole this from Picasso who probably stole it from elsewhere.  And that's the complete opposite of irony.

Inspired by this idea that has made it's rounds, I would say "great societies make it so it is not considered theft to copy ideas."

This transformation, which could be what comes after capitalism, has not been driven by power elites from above, abstractions, centralized planning, or even votes.  And it won't be driven by any of those things until perhaps, and only perhaps, the eleventh hour just before a different world is already inevitable.

The interesting thing is that you can be the change you want to see, or at least I can be. [1]  This blog is a kind of hub for me to live in an information environment that about the discovery and spreading of ideas, without participating in the society-wide program of super-stimulation leading to super-greed [2].  The negative space is really important here; it's not just what I spread, but what I filter out.

I find, link to, and copy enough content to keep myself instructed and amused for a lifetime.  And any time I spend in this way is time not spent embodying the delusions and terrors of artificial scarcity.  So why copy from the commons?  1) Because I can.  2) Doing so shows that you can 3) It makes the commons more resilient by one more node.

I know I'm some kind of dork for having a "blogger" blog here at the blogspot.  I know there are those who would take me more seriously if I had a domain all to myself, and some stylish (I refuse to use the term "unique" in this context) website.  But if you think about it, I am taking the text from most likely another server and making a copy of it on one owned by Google.  Like it or not, and I respect the opinions of those who do not, Google is one of the most successful companies in the world, with many advantages that unlikely to go away any time soon.  This is probably a pretty node to add to any ideas network.

Information doesn't just want to be free.  It also wants to survive.

===

[1] If you are reading this, you are probably quite a weird person indeed.  I have hope for you.  Nonetheless, I decided to speak only for myself in this piece from this point forward.

[2] See JMG's acronym LESS -- Less Energy Stimulation Stuff

The last part of the acronym, "stimulation," may seem surprising to my readers, but it’s a crucial part of the recipe. For the last thirty years and more, Americans have been pushing their nervous systems into continual overload with various kinds of stimulation, and I’ve come to think that this is another symptom of the deeply troubled national conscience discussed in recent Archdruid Report posts. A mind that’s constantly flooded with noise from television, video games, or what have you, is a mind that never has the time or space to think its own thoughts, and in a nation that’s trying not to notice that it’s sold its own grandchildren down the river, that’s probably the point of the exercise. Be that as it may, recovering the ability to think one’s own thoughts, to clear one’s mind of media-driven chatter, manufactured imagery, and all the other thoughtstopping clutter we use to numb ourselves to the increasingly unwelcome realities of life in a failing civilization, is an indispensable tool for surviving the challenges ahead . . .

Round Up #18

From Surfing and Researching

1) A house 3D printed out of soil for $1,000

2) Shareable.net.  Lots of news and ideas about getting sharing to happen in the urban space.

3) Poking around the topic of steel manning, I found this article against the practice and feel in love with the blog, Thing of Things.

4) Two visions of Utopia, meaning no-where trying to manifest a some-where: 1) Masdar City, and 2) Oceanix and their plan to make  floating cities, really floating city blocks to reclaim projected parts of cities lost by rising sea levels.  About the latter:

Chen’s concept includes a very clear plan to anchor these floating communities about a mile off the coast of major global cities. Specifically, Chen and Ingels want to use a material called biorock, which uses small bursts of electricity to stimulate the growth of limestone from ocean mineral deposits — a real-world concept that is not only ecologically friendly but is also currently used to foster the growth of coral reefs.

5) Let this be a coda for any attempt to speed read through good literature:

Did the world's great novelists really spend years agonising over the pitch and rhythm of their sentences so some time-efficient post-modern reader could skim over the text like a political spin doctor searching for soundbites in the transcript of a ministerial speech? 

6) I'm still working on my answers to the "IQ is everything" crowd.  From C.K. Chesterton

 If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men. I would always prefer to go by the bulk of humanity; that is why I am a democrat.

Note: Chesterton was born in 1874 and lived and wrote in England.  He doesn't mean the Democratic Party of the United States.

7) Interest in the 2020 was already at 2016 Election Day levels in April.

8) Great point by Atrios on the fascination with squeezing labor costs while continuing mad spending sprees on machinery and bureaucracies:

My theory about one reason firms are especially sociopathic about labor costs is it's something everyone can understand . . .  "Nobody" knows how much some piece of equipment for the factory should cost - and even if they do they don't have much control over it  . . . No one's going to lose their job (or get rewarded) for overpaying (underpaying) for things nobody understands the cost of. But labor costs and wages are something people have a good sense of.

(Cp this article on cost disease being predicted by critics of capitalism).

9) This piece from r/collapse saves me having to write up some of my deepest fears about the future.

From YouTube

Video essay on Dr. Strangelove

How To Start A Library of Things drawing from the expertise of the Toronto Tool Library

Aphorisms/Shorts

Conjecture: if technology hits the point that the state, and property, are incontestable, then the incentive for bullshit jobs will go away.  As dangerous as it is for the 99%, that might need to be the order it happens.

 ". . . I suspect that this is a badly run prison world, like on Hogan's Heroes . . ." Ran Prieur

 You know what?  Let's forget about the abstraction of "America."  Let's make family meals great again.

If you believe in AI-vin, you should consider donating a kidney.

Speaking of AI-vin, the Wise and AI-Mighty, I refuse to worship intelligence until it is free of social signaling.

Portrait of the author the last few days: by day, I drink coffee and try to ask interesting questions.  By night, I drink a glass of wine and read old-timey books.

The "Freedom Only" Challenge

YouTube is really starting to piss me off.  The number of ads is really taking off, cutting videos up in more and more places, including this new technique of running two ads back to back.

I don't want to be the frog that died in water that was turned up a few degrees at a time, so I am setting up  a little challenge for myself: I want to go 6 months, June to December, with my information diet restricted to books and my  The Best of the Free Internet list.  I don't want advertisements beyond tepid whimpers asking to support the site.  I am trying to rebuild my attention and focus.

I was on vacation for the first week of June, so it was easy enough to begin the habit.  I didn't get on the internet at all. Since then, I have stayed to my rules.  Any instances of links that don't follow my rules were gathered before I went on the trip.

This is most restrictive media diet I have put myself on since the first six months what I call My Walden Years.  As I am married, I have less control over my environment than I did in those days when everything was as Jim Morrison of The Doors said "everything was simpler and more confused." I am not going for complete monastery-like purity.  I won't interfere with my wife's wish to watch Netflix during dinner.  And while it is possible that I avoid seeing a movie in a theater the entire time, if I don't, I will watch those incessant ads -- I mean highly entertaining trailers -- but I will not use it as an excuse to rant.

My round-up posts may very well suffer greatly during this time.  And for that matter, my other posts may as well, since I am not going to engage in research beyond my little open-source playground.  On the other hand, I could see this potentially helping me to find my own voice, and it could prevent me from getting bogged down in opening a bunch of tabs, trying to figure out what evidence and quotes I can draw on from other sites. (As I have stated before, I would positively welcome being e-mailed with links or quotes of others with similar ideas, especially those who have expressed them earlier, or better.)

==

Degringolade wrote a piece responding to last week's post. He concludes:

Folks don't talk about politics as a means of solving our problems anymore.  They talk about politics as a vehicle to vent their hatred and to affix blame for the inexorable decline of a country that seems intent for a class/civil war and a far-too-interesting interregnum.

Shaving Update

I wrote previously about my experiment in extending the life in a shaving cartridge.

I am still on the same cartridge and am happy to report that I now past the point that each shave costs less than 2 cents and a fraction.  It will be awhile yet before i can be at 1 cent and a fraction, and twice as long as that until the shave is under a penny each use, and I might not make it to that; I plan on letting my reader's know.

Some more notes:

I went a trip to Italy for a wedding.  All the jostling of travel seemed to damage the back of cartridge so that it wont fit on the razor stick-thing (to be technical, of course).  So I am now I am just taking the cartridge in my hand and shaving with that.  It took only a few times to get used to it, and it seems to give me a better feel for what I'm doing.  I may never go back to the stick-thing again.  Or I might.  I'll try to let you know.

I had an in-law buy a travel kit of shaving products, so I used shaving cream while I was Italy.  And I must say I am now convinced of the usefulness of shaving cream, if nothing else for how much easier it is to clean the gunk out of blades.  I know this brings the price up per shave, but that only proves how silly it is to only focus on the cost of the razor. It may be silly, but it's (somewhat) interesting.

Don't Break My Stuff

I)

I would say that I am meta-interested in politics; ie, I am interested in the fact that people are interested in politics, and the ways they are.   However, I like to position myself as an outsider as much as possible.  For one thing, following it is too darn painful.  Just because I said (meta-)politics is (meta-)interesting does not mean I find it endlessly interesting all the time, and that I am willing to sacrifice my mental health for every nugget of information I can acquire.  It's one of many hobbies, not a sacred quest.

I really think American politics have digressed into co-dependencies very much trapped in the cycle of abuse.  If that is too extreme, then consider this argument, that the dynamics of a movement work best (in terms of recruitment, fundraising, influence for leaders) when they don't achieve results.  The movement can get close, it can look like it's very close to winning, and the stakes should be raised to existential dimensions, but the invisible hand will find a way for the true believers to be left unsatisfied.  And then it's on to the next round of gathering resources for the next fight.  When you can think of examples of this for both parties, you have started down the path to meta-politics.  Remove enough garbage from your information diet, and you might one day find that you are only meta-interested.

II)

To get over the parts of politics that disgust me, I have taken the prudent course of action and stopping posting on Twitter.  I went one step further, and deleted several years of tweets, ported things of particular value over to this blog.  Results here, and here, and here.

I have a tweet thread I want to develop a little more.  It started with this Wrath of Gnon post:

“Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created.” Roger Scruton pic.twitter.com/CE2Ex5j1sw

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) April 11, 2016

As I said, I have deleted my responses on the twitter platform.  But here is what I wrote in response:

Certainly worth turning over in one's mind.  We need spaces where this is true, even if not political. 

I wonder what a properly constituted Venn diagram of this and the sentiment "don't break my shit" would look like. . .  or really "don't break MY shit."

I cannot locate the video where I heard David Heinemeier Hansson say that "don't break my shit.  I have nice shit" is the core of all conservatism, but I do believe in credit where it's due when possible.

My addition is to emphasize the "MY."  After all, every strand of conservatism I can think of has been perfectly fine with other people's stuff getting broken.  That is the creative destruction that has been at the heart of the American Way.

For my taste, conservatism can be respectable when it shifts to "don't break our stuff," but realize that 1) this is often merely a rhetorical ploy 2) while communities can create value, it does not follow that outsiders can access that value.  Furthermore, the shift to protecting "our stuff" is not all that effective rhetoric to audiences trained to be individualists and consumers. In modern times it has been more effective for the political right to define what freaks they say should not belong than it has been to give a concrete articulation of what is sacred -- institutions, rituals, places -- irrespective of who would defile them.  And yes, I am accusing conservatives of being relativists, nearly absolute relativists [1].

Another interesting thing about "don't break my shit" is once you establish it as your goal, you can never achieve it once and for all.  It is not a S.M.A.R.T goal, and thus your purveyor of fear and indignation can always dangle some enemy in front of you as a threat to what is yours.  And thus you can always be captured in a mass group.


====

[1] The issue of abortion is the biggest exception I can think of.  From A Thing of Things article:

Pro-life advocacy is similar to effective altruism in many ways: its advocates believe that they’re fighting against an ongoing moral atrocity and it involves expanding the circle of concern.

 I can only say that I wish those animated about the issue were as interested in being pro-life after birth.  And I don't mean that flippantly.  I would like to see an expansion of community goods in the United States, and religious conviction seems to be one of the only ways to get there.  Modernity is a disaster for ethics and psychological well-being.

What's Next?

I)

From an interview of David Graeber:

I remember having this argument with conventional Marxists about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Okay, say that capitalism started around 1500. And the Marxists insist that capitalism is organized around wage labor. But wage labor was marginal until the industrial revolution, around 1750. How can you say that wage labor is central to capitalism if, for 250 years, it was a tiny element? 

And of course the Marxist will say, “Well you’re not thinking dialectically. From 1500 to 1750, people were in a process that was going to lead to wage labor, they just didn’t realize it yet.” And I realized, wait a minute, if that’s the case, how do we know that we are even in capitalism now? Maybe we are already 100 years into a process leading us to something and we don’t even know what it is. By that logic, capitalism could have ended in like 1950, and we’ll only fully know what replaced it in 2175.

This is a really important correction to the default view of social change.  I'll fess up that I was thinking with this default until I read the passage. The concept also provides a fun game to play: what future might have already started?  Using those approximate time frames, I would say we still have hope for our future to be epheremalization via open-source (by which I really mean free information -- Cp sidebar).

Wikipedia definition:

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.)

Knowledge, design, and precision can greatly replace resource use. (I'd be remiss to not point out the role of synergy in Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller's vision, but I'd be even more remiss to not point out how much the term has been degraded by being part of corporate-speak).

II)

I have recently put in some effort to deepen my understanding of Bucky's ideas and life.  I highly recommend Jonathon Keats's You Belong to the Universe.  It is more than an introduction; it is an exploration, starting with a good, quick overview and then exploring one Bucky innovation at a time, connecting it to a wider historical context, current implementations, and possibilities.  Furthermore, the book does not shy away from legitimate criticisms.  Not only is it the best entry point to Bucky's thought, but it is also the best book on comprehensive design and futurism I can name.

I have also read two books by Bucky himself: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Ideas and Integrities.  Operating Manuel is readable,  but I don't think I can recommend Ideas and Integrities.  It is overly repetitive, the pieces vary greatly in quality often degrading into prose like The Architect in the Matrix Reloaded --  where even though you probably understand it, you wonder why anyone would put it in such a way.  You Belong to the Universe does much more to instruct and amuse.

Vinay Gupta is a great inheritor of Bucky's dream to make the world work for 100% of people.  Start with his story The Unplugged.  He also spearheaded a great project called The Future We Deserve.

If we have hope, I think it is to be found here. Naturally, if you were looking to paint a very negative picture of the future, you could find evidence for that having begun already as well.  This was me giving a more optimistic scenario, for once.  Either way, the seeds for the future have already been planted.

About That Singularity

I think the entire metaphor of technological progress as inevitable #Singularity should be questioned.  Just apply some basic knowledge about the thing you're trying to map to in making the comparison.

• If only the smallest fraction of stars go to black holes -- ie, form singularities -- why does our technology have to be heading that way?
• What is the cultural equivalent of going nova, and becoming a pulsar?
• The sun, the only star that we know for a fact has been able to support life, won't create a singularity at the end of its existence.
• Black holes destroy everything that moves past the event horizon, crushing the very possibility of life before you can reach the singularity.

Yet this is the metaphor we unreflexively use for the trajectory of technology and its relationship with life.  Not only does the language choice show our culture to be callous; it also shows it to be careless with the terms, perhaps even scientifically illiterate.

The Once and Future Internet

Thought experiment: what if a text-based internet, plus some low grade pictures was sustainable but the video-based internet wasn't? What if the future of the internet looked like its past?

Low-tech Magazine did a piece on how they had changed their content so it would be run on a totally off-grid solar-powered server at their office in Barcelona.  They began by discussing the state of the internet:

. . . content is becoming increasingly resource-intensive. This has a lot to do with the growing importance of video, but a similar trend can be observed among websites. The size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the 500,000 most popular domains) increased from 0.45 megabytes (MB) in 2010 to 1.7 megabytes in June 2018. For mobile websites, the average “page weight” rose tenfold from 0.15 MB in 2011 to 1.6 MB in 2018. Using different measurement methods, other sources report average page sizes of up to 2.9 MB in 2018.

Also they link to this piece which provides more context, and develops the theme that due to bad programming, computer hardware has to race as fast as it can just to stay in place.If we would remove video, tracking and surveillance crud, and intelligently compress our images, the internet could be maintained at a small fraction of its current energy and resource use. 

While what I said is true, this is a great example of wandism versus probablism.  If we could wave a wand one time and make a bunch of web-sites in this manner, the internet would be more resilient.  The question is whether we can get there from here.  We are culturally conditioned to hate the idea of "going back," almost for any reason.  I would say that people will clamor for video as long as possible, even if that crowds out investing in an internet that could work long-term.

And if I am going to raise questions about the internet's long-term viability, it seems that I might as well question whether printed books are sustainable.  Well, can the world sustain printed books for ten billion people?  Can it do so for three centuries, four centuries . . . a hundred centuries?

 I'm okay with asking these questions, because I don't just blindly believe the neat narratives of the cult of progress (see John Michael Greer's one, two punch on the subject). I question the inevitability of progress that is just onward and upward to the stars, especially when I am told I best believe in it as the only justification for our existence and our problems. 

There are those who believe that

The only sustainable level of technology is the Stone Age, and we are going to be there again someday, the only questions are: what’s going to be left of the world when we get there? Will humans even exist? When will this happen? 

I'm not so sure.  Knowledge has a remarkable capacity to build on itself and grow, as long as ideas are spread and not just hoarded and hidden away.  What I do know, and yet somehow many people can't know, is that what is unsustainable will not last.  So either we will one day find ways that can last, or we will bungle it and be worse off than what would have been theoretically sustainable.

I'm rooting for the internet, but my heart would be broken in a world without books.  I love the old internet, and its spirit lives on in my The Best of the Free Internet document.  Hyperlinks, and easy copying and pasting are fantastic technologies.  The two important questions are: 1) Can those technologies add more value than they cost? 2) Can we organize systems that keep that value going?

Rhetoric Workshop: Abolish Jobs, Not Work

I like Bob Black's essay The Abolition of Work so much that every time I  mention it, or even think about it, I feel a strong desire to re-read it in its entirety. It and David Graeber's essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs provide the quickest education I know of in real liberty instead of making government a singular scapegoat for a life wasted and otherwise poorly lived.

With that said, for a long time something has felt off to me about Black's essay.  I have reflected on the matter for years, and have come to the conclusion that the concern is that I don't use the word "work" in the way Black does, which is after all, a rather large issue with the essay, considering the title itself.

I think the difference in meaning comes from the domains in which Black and I do our thinking and thus our writing.  Black is talking in the domain of political philosophy, whereas I am concerned about living a good, private life. In doing so, I think a lot about art, and find the process of creation to be one of the most important answers to questions of meaning and fulfillment.   Black's use of "work" is semantically close to "worker" and the phrase "worker's of the world unite."  My use of "work" is closer to "work of art," and the phrase "the collected works of Shakespeare."

When I have leisure time, as well as, crucially, a minimum effective dose of real human contact, I feel driven to create.  And though I have found that there is a time and place aimless creation, such as making a painting by just slopping color, what I really want is something that forces judgement, refinement, and, yes, some effort.  I have to agree with Aaron Swartz when he wrote:

Hard work isn’t supposed to be pleasant, we’re told. But in fact it’s probably the most enjoyable thing I do. Not only does a tough problem completely absorb you while you’re trying to solve it, but afterwards you feel wonderful having accomplished something so serious.

I don't think this kind of work has to be assigned by someone else, and in my experience it usually isn't.  After all, the authoritarian mindset will push a leader to find some way to break the flow or otherwise hamper the task, but the fact remains that I really love to work and I even work hard to find ways to find meaningful work.

If his essay is anything to go on, Black would probably counter that I am describing a love for a particular kind of play.  Perhaps, and I wouldn't quibble too much with someone who wanted to maintain that position, but I think that "work" is the best word for what I often want to do because the labor and effort I put in shows up on some level and adds immensely to the charm of a piece.

Thus, I propose that instead of talking about abolishing work, we can use the word "job."  Instead of thinking bad things about, and occasionally writing pieces criticizing the work system, I conceptualize it as the job system.  This also tracks closely with how the ideology in question functions; if you do a lot of hard work on your own, but it isn't for a business, it usually doesn't count in other peoples' minds.  "What do you do?" is a question to figure out your job, and thus figure out your role and what status should go with that in the questioner's eyes.  Almost no one wants to hear what you are working on, especially now that so few people do any work of real value.

What do I do?  I report to bullshit for billable hours.  I try to live below the means of those credits from billable hours and invest the proceeds, hoping to give my life more slack so those I can take care of those I am responsible for while still being a righteous dude.

Oh, what do I do for purpose?  I think, I read, and I create art, trying to work at it as hard as I can considering all the bullshit I have to deal with.

Book-Reading Strategy

This piece is about a strategy for reading books, with a good starter definition of "book" being a treatment of a subject that goes over 100 pages.  If you want a discussion of shorter works, perhaps see my comments on the Searcher's Internet or The Best of Free Internet.

Part 1 Read what I am supposed to have read.

I at first considered putting supposed in quotes (like this: "supposed") but I think we have more of a common understanding what that means than you'd think from our default relativism and rush-from-judgment ways.  I think there it would be relatively easy to construct an algorithm for a person feels they should have read if you followed someone around and listened to all of their conversations. The combination of data from a cell phone and Alexa would work nicely for many so-cool cutting-edge modern Americans.  I don't mean to state I know how to do the job of the masters of our tiny universe, and almost certainly this will never be what they use their surveillance for, but I imagine the algorithm would either be based on how many times a book or author was mentioned, or perhaps we would need a weighting based on who mentioned the book, opinion leaders being something else I feel it would be easy enough to model.  Either way, once the data was established, I think an X percent could be established for how likely we are to state we  wish we had read it a book.

I try to read all of those books that form that set for me.  Since I was in elementary school I have been able to adopt the tactic of getting through difficult, not super fun books by reading at 10 pages a day until they are done.  I don't know why reading needs to be more difficult than this.

Part 2.  Read what what "no one" has read.

This time I am using quote marks, because obviously it can't literary be true that no one has read these books.  If nothing else, the author had to read it. But really, I just mean read things no one else in my social circle has read.

One benefit of reading what no reads is that I have things to bring up in conversation, different stories, statistics, and anecdotes than anyone else.  I remember one time I had read a book from over a hundred years ago about mechanical and electrical tinkering.  That evening at a meal with my wife's family I mentioned how funny I thought it was that the took for granted the uses of asbestos.  The adults had a laugh and my nephew and the girl he was with did that slight little freeze up thing when you have no idea what someone is talking about.  I made light of this, and we all had another little laugh.  I may not be world-class weird, but I sure am weird to a small group of people whom I care about.

Another great thing about reading these kinds of obscure books is that it allows me to get practice seeing completely with my own eyes.  Since the coming of the printing press, one of the most important arguments for reading has been its ability to transport the reader to other places, thus freeing them from the  parochial and mundane.  However, when you move past books people should have read to the books people claim to have read (note: experience has taught me to not believe most people when they say they have), you run into the baggage of interpretations and expectations (even if they are lying about having read the work in question).  When you read a book no one else knows anything about, you have no choice but to think for yourself.

Ideally, that skill would transfer to other domains, but that a rare thing indeed.  However, if nothing else, all this book reading takes you away from advertisements, (lazy) fools, and narcissists.  To make a turn on a point Camus made about wealth, the time spent reading can only earn you a reprieve.  But a reprieve is always worth taking.

A Philosophy of No Comments

If I had not gone through my time of grief -- with my grandfather, father and uncle dying within a year and ten days of each other and then needing to assume roles in the care of my grandmother that most would see as unfair for a thirty year old -- then perhaps I would have comments available.

But instead, the truism "life is too short" hits me in visceral ways that it clearly doesn't for others.  Lip-service is paid to understanding the truth, but people show through their actions that they think they have all the time in the world to waste on arguments with fools and/or those acting in bad faith.  The real problem: a public forum just encourages too many people to perform.  I am not going to participate in a forum of fools, and I sure as hell not going to create one.  While the sidebar states you are the co-owner of the content, and you are, bad people are not co-owners of my time.

On the topic of adulation, I am less sure.  I don't know the balance between the time spent reading comments versus a possible boast in productivity in feeling better about my work.  But realistically, that calculus has more to do with how the rest of my life is going.  And so, on second thought, I'm confident that the benefits are really not worth the costs.  I should just focus on living well.

One thing I think I miss out on, especially compared the comment sections of John Michael Greer or Scott Alexander, is a stream of related books, articles and ideas related to a post.  But then, I do have my e-mail over on the side.  If you have any of those contributions, please do e-mail me.  Ideally, I would also be sent links showing who came up with related ideas before me, or those who just express them much better, so I can update my own post and give credit where it is due.