Society

Strangeness

July 5

This planet is genuinely strange. If we were all flown to the moon or to Mars and walked around on them, they wouldn’t seem that strange to us because there would be no yardsticks or anything to measure their strangeness by—they’re just vast museums of geology. Whereas the Earth is a deranged zoo, and somebody left the doors of the cages open. We have real strangeness because we can measure the degree to which things are or are not what they ought to be.

~ J. G. Ballard

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A vast con

June 7

I’m frequently, acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of everything I create. As I’m writing—right this moment—I’m sitting outside. The notebook computer I’m typing upon has a display—the “lid”—which is maybe one quarter inch thick. It even feels thin when I reach out and grasp it on both sides between my thumbs and forefingers; Thin, like grabbing a pinch of salt feels thin. Visually, around the display I see the table, the lawn, a tree, a garden, a shed, then other trees, houses… an entire, real world that I could, in but a moment, stand up and move into. Then I grasp this little display… everything I create is “within” the pinch of my fingers… then I tip the display towards me, and glance behind the display… nothing I create is behind the display either… from the other side—say, a passer-by’s perspective—I’m just a person, hyper-fixedly staring into the other side of the small, opaque, grey rectangle they see.

We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.

~ Edward Zitron from, https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/

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But, boy howdy! what a universe is pinched into that thin, living, little square that I see, from my point of view.

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But can you actually see anything?

November 29

I love metaphors about hills and valleys. If it’s an uphill struggle, imagine the view. Hills and valleys is a great metaphor for the concept of a local maximum: It’s visually clear (standing atop a hill) and mathematically clear (at a local maximum) that it is “down” in every direction. But only a special sort of hilltop is actually interesting. A hilltop that is really large becomes a flat tabletop. And a hilltop socked in with fog is easily mistaken for not a hilltop. Only hilltops which are pointy enough, and from which we can see other things, are interesting.

[…] our economy—resource allocation based on employment […]—is a local maximum and we cannot expect to arrive at a good outcome without activism.

[…]

But, unless we automate a lot more, we the species will never have enough wealth to offer a decent basic income, and everyone will continue to waste half their lives at work.

~ Gavin Leech from, https://www.gleech.org/automatic/

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Is it clear that every direction is “down”? Can we see anything else; if we can’t see anything else we can’t be sure this is a local maximum. How can we explore “down” in some of the directions… when we’re talking about global scale culture and human lives?

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Powerful questions

July 25, 2023

[P]owerful questions are the ones that cause you to become an actor as soon as you answer them or even reflect on them. You no longer have the luxury of being a spectator of whatever it is you are concerned about. Regardless of how you answer these questions, you are guilty Guilty of being an actor and participant in this world. Not a pleasant thought, but the moment we accept the idea that we have created the world, we have the power to change it.

~ Peter Block

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