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This Is What Collapse Looks Like

June 21, 2024

This Is What Collapse Looks Like

Every day now, the news is replete with evidence that, everywhere, things are falling apart faster and faster, and nothing of consequence is being, or can be, done about it. Every civilization collapses, but the collapse of our current global industrial civilization is occurring at a breathtaking and accelerating pace.

Today, the city of Philadelphia announced that it has given up trying to deal with its share of the US’s epidemic of mass shootings, and has instead outsourced its handling of the horrific trauma these mass murders create to a private consulting firm. Sure to fix the problem, no? The country’s ‘supreme’ court helped out by ruling that the banning of ‘bump stocks’, devices that turn ordinary guns into rapid-fire machine guns, was unconstitutional. When a hastily-prepared new law was proposed outlawing them, Congress blocked it.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, arguably the country’s most horrifically polluted and dysfunctional state, has its priorities straight: It’s mandating that the Christian “ten commandments” be posted in every schoolroom in the state. Nothing in those rules about mega-pollution, so why not? Honour thy father and mother, ’cause they’re the ones who bought you the guns with the bump stocks. It’ll surely make God real happy to see when the Rapture comes.

And in Europe, the bumbling governments of both the UK and France have called snap elections they’re bound to lose, so out of touch are they with the electorate that they think all they have to do is convince voters that the current economic collapse in their countries isn’t their fault.

And so it goes. I could respond to most of each day’s top news items these days (including the celebrity gossip) by just reciting the title of this post.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Thing About AI

June 15, 2024

The Thing About AI

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with economic, political and ecological collapse, genocides, grotesquely incompetent ‘leaders’, and nuclear brinkmanship, now we also have to worry about AI.

To some extent, as Indrajit Samarajiva has repeatedly pointed out, we have had AI around for centuries, in the form of corporations — separate entities that make decisions, control politicians, overthrow governments, and even foment and manage wars, and which now even have ‘personhood’ rights without any of the commensurate responsibilities to rein in their inherently psychopathic behaviours.

It is they, not the humans whose job is now merely to do their bidding (or be fired), who have the real power in our civilization, and contrary to claims and assurances, they are now so complex and vast as to be completely beyond human control, and increasingly not even subject to human regulation. We have handed them the reins of managing our crumbling civilization with a shrug, as if some divine force of angels will somehow steer them in the ‘right’ direction. Even our government and military administrations, which work hand-in-hand with large corporations, are incorporated organizations, and, Trumpian fantasies notwithstanding, they are not controlled by any ‘one’. They are machines, operating according to their own immortal, self-perpetuating logic. They are AI. It is not just a metaphor.

But new technologies, and massively increased computing power, are now allowing us to create new forms of AI that can mimic other human behaviours besides the management of resources — such as creating art, literature and music, and acting as friends and even lovers.

I’ve seen this evolving for two decades now — we’ve created imaginary worlds like Second Life and the worlds of MMOs and MMORPGs, which have many seductive AI elements to them, and which are now developing “realistic” AI “characters”…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Not Knowing

June 12, 2024

Not Knowing

The verbs we use
to confirm or refute our acceptance
of the beliefs and worldviews of those we know,
comprise a sort of code, like
a hidden handshake, or a shaken fist.

We are asked whether we condone or condemn
a certain behaviour, but
the meaning of condone
(other than as a rarely-used synonym of gift)
dates back only to 1962: first deployed
as a barbed word
in the rhetoric of Cold War brinksmanship.

The words are straitjackets,
and you will be damned — condemned
if you do not wear them, willingly.

You must wear one or the other.

If you wear the condone jacket, you are evil,
a monster, an apologist,
and must be shunned by those seeing you wear it.
If you wear the condemn jacket, you are virtuous,
but must then also be prepared
to condone any retribution
for what you have ‘agreed’ to condemn.

This straitjacket is reversible.

You are with us, or you are with the enemy.
There is no third choice
of just trying to understand, of admitting
to not knowing, but asserting
there must be a reason for everything,
no matter how awful.

To those who condemn, that is condoning.
To those who condone, that is condemning.
Make up your mind, they say:
pick the bad guy, someone to blame.
Not knowing is not acceptable.

You cannot sit on a barbed-wire fence.

Perhaps this is why we are so aghast
at the possibility that we have no free will.
We will accept any explanation,
no matter how convoluted or lame
that grants us some control, some responsibility,
some room for blame and judgement.

After all, we could never do what they’ve done,
you know?

Are We Communitarian By Nature, or Merely Tribal?

June 9, 2024

Are We Communitarian By Nature, or Merely Tribal?

image above from the wild human initiative

This month, Aurélien has wandered a bit afield and speculated on the fundamental nature of the human animal. I think most of us can agree that the cult of rugged individualism that has prevailed in the west over the past century, encouraging the unrestricted pursuit of selfish goals and zero-sum-game self-interest as virtuous, is in no one’s best interest, except perhaps the hawkers of weapons, fashions, and identity politics.

We could never have survived this far as a species if we were, by nature, preoccupied with our personal welfare to the exclusion of that of other humans. We lack the speed, the teeth and claws, and other attributes needed to thrive as solitary creatures.

So we have, of necessity, evolved to live in groups. The question is whether this is an ideal way of living for humans (one that will make us happier than any other possible way of living), or whether it’s an unhappy compromise. Nature is replete with examples of species that seem perfectly happy to live in large groups, where the individual is, when necessary, willing to sacrifice its life for the collective good. And there are many examples of other creatures where there seems a permanent tension between its members, as if they would actually prefer to live alone but know they can’t survive that way. And there are examples of yet other creatures that coexist only with their mates and unfledged offspring, and only then as long as they must to ensure the survival of the species.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Might We Undermine the PMC?

May 23, 2024

How Might We Undermine the PMC?

Fourteen years ago, I wrote a very long article that became the lion’s share of Chapter Two of Keith Farnish’s book Underminers. My article was about the Tools of Disconnection — the cultural mechanisms by which we became disconnected from each other and the more-than-human world, and hence willing and able to endure civilization and all the atrocities that it has perpetrated. The image from the article is reproduced above.

I think the article still holds up, though if I were to rewrite it today it would be a lot less strident and blame-y. We have conditioned each other, the only way we could have, and with the best of intentions, to live in a way that no wild creature would ever tolerate. In so doing, we have created, with civilization, a pressure cooker culture that, tragically, seems to bring out the worst in us.

The tools of our disconnection — our education system, the media, propaganda, marketing, political indoctrination, and just our well-intended conditioning of each other from childhood and throughout our lives (“If you want to succeed in this world, you have to do this“) — have, I would assert, led to behaviours that have made us physically unhealthy, chronically frightened, angry, distrustful, dissatisfied, and traumatized, so that we have been cowed into accepting a culture that has, in just a few millennia, horrifically overpopulated and desolated the planet.

The “management” of this utterly unsustainable culture, which is now rapidly falling apart, has required the evolution of a caste system, much like the horrific system that arises in groups of rats in similar conditions of ghastly overcrowding and scarcity. The top caste has been labeled (by Barbara Ehrenreich in the 1970s) the Professional Managerial Caste, or PMC.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article..

Happiness is Just Chemistry, and Its Absence

May 21, 2024

Happiness is Just Chemistry, and Its Absence

(like everything on my blog, my graphics are covered by Creative Commons licence)

What is it about us that we never seem to be happy, at least for long? What does it even mean to be happy?

There have been endless studies suggesting that, a year after winning a major lottery, people are no happier than they were before. And that a year after losing a limb, those who suffered that tragedy are just as happy, on average, as the lottery winners.

Robert Sapolsky has explained how our body chemistry drives us to always want more — to never really be happy with what we have. That’s probably part of it. But another part of it, I think, is that our human brains’ constant ruminations — second-guessing, worrying, regretting etc, leave us in a stage of constant low-level anxiety, never content with the present, and obsessed with the past and the future.

This is all, of course, just my theory, just my amateur opinion. But my conditioning is to try to make sense of everything, and to use this blog to help me do so, so here we go.

Based on years of living with, observing, and reading about, non-human creatures, my sense is that, unless they have been abused or constrained under situations of chronic stress, they live most of their lives in a state of what I call alert equanimity (box 1 in the chart above). These are, I am guessing, times when their feelings of natural contentment are not being disrupted by stressful situations and the chemical responses of their bodies to those situations…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Unregulated Capitalism Always Leads to Enshittification

May 20, 2024

Why Unregulated Capitalism Always Leads to Enshittification

(right click to open chart in a new tab, or click here, to view full-size; like everything on my blog, my graphics are covered by Creative Commons licence)

Lots of ideas work well in theory, but many of them don’t work out so well in practice, especially when the idea becomes an ideology, pursued dogmatically without oversight to correct for malfunctions and abuses.

The idea of investment capital was one such idea, allowing, for the first time, a group of people to pool their money to enable major projects like factories or resource development or large-scale trade that no individual (other than rich monarchs) could finance.

While pooling of capital was a good idea, some people decided to turn the idea into an ideology, called capitalism, and this ideology, in its most extreme, unregulated form, now underlies many of the problems we face today. It has, in short, become utterly dysfunctional, leading to obscene disparities in wealth and income, catastrophic destruction of our environment and many people’s lives, monstrous amounts of waste of all kinds, and a globalized economy teetering on the edge of complete collapse.

Cory Doctorow has dubbed the process by which initial good ideas, without constant attention and oversight, can devolve into dysfunction, as enshittification. (His article is well worth reading in its entirety.) He explains how this has inevitably happened with Amazon, with Facebook, with Twitter, and other “platforms”, and most recently with TikTok and Google Search:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves [ie the managers and shareholders]. Then, they die.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Links of the Month: May 2024

May 16, 2024

Links of the Month: May 2024

Public Service Announcement: If reading my links of the month is unbearably depressing for you, just skip down to the very bottom of this post and at least read Lyz Lenz’s little story on Mothering. Everything else here will probably be the same next month, anyway.

cartoon by Michael Leunig

No, I’m not making fun of protesters. Given the ever-increasing risks that protesters face everywhere in the west, protesters, and especially young ones, are seemingly the only ones brave and sane enough to challenge the increasing repression by our so-called “liberal”, “democratic” and “freedom-loving” governments.

What I take Michael Leunig’s cartoon to be referring to is that it seems to be in the nature of our species that people with power will always move to suppress dissent. Or as has often been observed, no one gives up power voluntarily. As collapse worsens, the ruling caste will either fight with every means at their disposal to hold onto their power, and try to commandeer all the lifeboats for themselves, or they will have power wrenched from them.

At another level, though, I think this cartoon points to the futility of us getting angry at our essential human nature. The atrocities, destruction, oppression and desolation of our planet are all the result of our individual and collective conditioned (and traumatized) behaviour, over which we have no control. We can and will of course be justifiably outraged at this behaviour and its ghastly consequences, but beyond it being outrageous, it is essentially just tragic.

As EO Wilson famously put it “Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth”; the emergence of a species that always wants more, and is capable of endlessly producing more (until it can’t) seems an unlikely and tragic evolutionary turn.

So, thank you, protesters — please keep forcing us to face the truth, and stay safe.

COLLAPSE WATCH

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Curious Propensity to Ignore New Evidence

May 14, 2024

Our Curious Propensity to Ignore New Evidence

What is a “belief” anyway, and how does it get “there”?

The word belief comes from the old Germanic root that also gives us love and it originally meant something (impersonal) we care about and trust strongly.

I would argue that beliefs are unique to the human brain, and that they are the building blocks of our worldview — the coherent sense-making lens through which we judge, filter and assess events and information to assign them meaning.

Wild creatures have no need for beliefs, judgements and abstract sense-making. Their brains were designed for feature-detection, in order to inform their instincts. If they’re conditioned by humans, they will (provided there isn’t too long a gap between the prompt and the reward or punishment) behave in a way that anticipates a reward or punishment (dopamine again), and do what has been rewarded (ie maximize pleasure) and avoid what has been punished (ie minimize pain). There is no need for a worldview or a set of beliefs. As Melissa Holbrook Pierson explained in The Secret History of Kindness :

This is the basis of my dogs’ storied love for me, their one and only. Only I know the real truth. It is not this Melissa they love. If they bark menacingly at someone who approaches, they are not doing it to ensure my safety. There is but one thought in their minds: do not harm this person, for she is my most valuable possession. My large Swiss army knife, the one with all the extra attachments…

The same law of behavior affects all creatures’ actions: we do something, it produces pleasure or it produces pain or it produces nothing, and the result determines whether we continue doing it, stop doing it, or do it differently, and these are the only options.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Immanence of Everything

May 8, 2024

The Immanence of Everything

Tardigrade photo by Frank Fox at www.mikro-foto.de, from wikimedia CC-BY-SA 3.0

Recently I’ve been reading more of the work of Parul Sehgal, whose article laying out the dangers of stories inspired my last article on immanence, which is perhaps the best piece of writing I have ever done. Stories, she suggested, might be a distraction from (and impediment to) seeing the world as it really is.

I could obviously speculate on whether our stories are “all we are”, such that the ‘story of me’ is a ‘loud’ fiction that obscures and dumbs down our capacity to see things in all their complexity. Or that all stories, including the ‘story of me’ are lies and propaganda, describing what we want to believe happened (or is happening, or will happen), rather than what actually is happening (which can never be contained in a story). Or that immanence, the simple ‘being-ness’ of things without thoughts or stories or meaning-making about them, is what radical non-dualists are referring to when they say “All there is, is this.”

Parul’s follow-up is a critical attack on the modern prevalence of ‘trauma plots’ — novels, films and other stories (including some people’s summing up of their ‘life stories’) that attribute everything that happened to their characters to their traumatization. She ascribes this to lazy writing (and, I suppose, to the propensity of many in our bewilderingly complex world to want to hear stories that are simple and pat). Some have even described it as “trauma porn”.

That got me thinking about my recent use of this ‘cycle of trauma’ model.

Am I guilty of over-relying on this ‘simplistic’ model to explain too much modern human behaviour (the genocide in Palestine, for example)? It’s certainly possible…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s All Chemistry, Isn’t It?

April 28, 2024

It’s All Chemistry, Isn’t It?

This is #29 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.

Chart above is my own invention, having studied the various chemicals that scientists believe are involved in feelings of intense love.
The title of this post is a quote attributed to Jimi Hendrix, when he was asked in an interview to explain the special chemistry he had with his audiences.

It’s impossible not to look at them. They are possessed, so utterly consumed by the flood of chemicals feeding off each other that they are oblivious to everyone else in the café. Their feral passion for each other is at once riveting and disconcerting. A man noticing their antics looks disapprovingly. A woman looks at them with a torn expression, a mixture of what might be dismay and (perhaps nostalgic) envy…

… But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Back to this couple in a moment.

This body has taken me for a walk, today, to the nearby lake. It’s a rare sunny spring day here on the temperate rainforest coast, and there are lots of people about.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about bonobos and chimps, our cousins from which we separated evolutionarily about six million years ago, and with whom we still share almost 99% of our DNA. As Robert Sapolsky discovered with his suddenly-matriarchal and peaceful baboon troupe, the rather extraordinary differences in behaviour between chimps and bonobos in the wild (most people can’t tell them apart) are not biologically, but culturally conditioned. Chimps and gorillas evolved on the north side of the Congo river; bonobos on the south side. The river was too wide for the species to cross…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Childhood: Conditioned to Pretend to Know

April 24, 2024

Childhood: Conditioned to Pretend to Know

barsotti-nobody-knows-anything
New Yorker cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti
When I was a young child, I would look at my parents and other adults interacting with each other, with a mixture of bewilderment and amazement. “Surely”, I thought to myself, “they don’t really believe what they’re saying. It must be like an act, like the adult form of playing — they’re just pretending to know what they’re talking about, ‘playing’ at being adults.”

I was always a ‘slow learner’. I didn’t mimic adults’ behaviour like a lot of kids. I had been conditioned to try to understand what was going on, and why it was happening, before emulating anyone. And I was conditioned to always speak the truth, no matter what, which meant waiting until I thought I had some idea of what the truth in a particular situation really was. In many situations I never did have any idea what the truth was, so my conditioning drove me to stay open and assert no opinion — which drove other children and adults crazy.

So lots of kids learned ‘social graces’ — like how to behave in ritual situations (church, parties, school), and how to converse (what was permissible and advisable to say, and not permissible or advisable to say, to certain classes of adults, to get their approval, regardless of what one really believed). Not me.

I never learned how to sweet-talk, how to coerce, how to ridicule, how to deceive, how to persuade. Why would one ever want to learn and practice such dishonest skills? So I didn’t talk much, and largely withdrew from social contact both with other kids and with adults. I couldn’t understand their behaviour, and didn’t much want to learn it, even if would make my life easier.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Blameless Explanation of Why Everything is Falling Apart, for Schoolkids

April 18, 2024

A Blameless Explanation of Why Everything is Falling Apart, for Schoolkids

If I were invited to talk to a group of students (of any age) today, to explain why everything seems to be hopeless and falling apart, this is what I think I would tell them.

When I was young and idealistic, back in the 1960s — back when your grandparents were your age — everything seemed possible. We’d apparently forced an end to the ghastly war in Vietnam through our massive protests. We were strident environmentalists, really believing we could avert the global ecological disaster many were already predicting.

There were seven things in particular we thought were true and important to fight for, and there seemed to be nearly universal agreement that these goals were both possible and desirable to achieve:

world peace
an equitable (re-)distribution of wealth (and power) — enough that everyone could live a comfortable life, and not so much for anyone that it would inevitably lead to waste or abuse
radical action to halt and reverse ecological destruction — we already knew back then about the risk of catastrophic climate change
women’s equality, and autonomy over their own bodies
free, universal, quality health care, education, employment security, old-age security, and public transportation
enforced regulations to rein in capitalist excesses and oligopolies, and ensure clean, safe communities and workplaces, and
a truly democratic polity — a system where the citizenry was well-informed, and the political system was democratic and responsive to the citizens’ collective will.

We didn’t believe that any of these goals would be easy to achieve, but in the late 1960s we thought they were possible. In fact, it was generally considered the absolute responsibility of governments to work towards and sustain these seven goals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Acceptance, Forgiveness, Gratitude

April 14, 2024

Acceptance, Forgiveness, Gratitude

Since I’ve come to the (tentative) conclusion that we have no free will (and that in fact there is no ‘self’ to have free will), it’s utterly changed the lens through which I see the world. I now see that our behaviour is completely conditioned by our biology and our culture, given the circumstances of the moment, and that ‘we’ have no ‘choice’ but to do what we do. We are all doing our best (though that is often, seemingly, pretty awful), and no one is to ‘blame’. For anything. Even though our conditioning, so often, causes us to inflict, and to suffer, horrible violence and trauma.

As I’ve internalized this, my writing has morphed from describing what I think ‘should’ be done to instead just trying to understand why (ie as a result of what conditioning and what circumstances) things are as they are. So I now use the ‘reminders’ list above, to cope with the accelerating collapse of our civilization and its component systems, instead of any action or preparation list. We can’t act, after all, other that how we’re conditioned, and we can’t prepare for something we cannot possibly predict.

Still, even this list is really wishful thinking. I cannot ‘choose’ to do or not do these things. I can, perhaps, by keeping it in front of me, track the degree to which my behaviour does or does not align with these ‘reminders’. If that helps me to cohere somewhat to these reminders, it is only because that is what my conditioning already inclines me to do. Everything is determined (ie a consequence of our conditioning, and of the circumstances of each moment, neither of which we have any agency over), but nothing is determinable (ie predictable, because, unless we are gods, we cannot know how we are next going to be conditioned, nor what the circumstances of each moment will be).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How De-Dollarization is Likely to Play Out

February 13, 2024

How De-Dollarization is Likely to Play Out

Much has been written in recent years about “De-dollarization” — the shift from the use of the US dollar as the “international reserve currency” in favour of more diverse bi-lateral and multi-lateral currency agreements and transactions.

The current system has a long and complicated history, but its most essential features are as follows:

In 1944, with the war grinding on and currencies in crisis, most countries signed on to the Bretton Woods Agreement, which “required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce”. The US dollar hence replaced the “gold standard” with US dollar reserves, rather than amounts of gold, being what each country was required to maintain to support the fixed rates of exchange. The IMF was simultaneously established to enforce the Agreement.
This replacement of gold with the US dollar created for the US what is called exorbitant privilege. It means that basically they can create (print into existence) additional US dollars without limit and without any requirement that they be supported by assets, and other countries are required to honour them as ‘real’ money. As a result, the US can run up unlimited deficits (eg through reckless military and ‘security’ spending), deficits that would render any other country bankrupt and lead to a crippling devaluation of their currency and severe IMF-imposed restrictions on future spending (as has happened to many ‘developing’ countries in the Global South).

…click on the above link to read the rest…

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