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Let's overturn these tables
Disconnect these cables
This place don't make sense to me no more
-Bob Dylan, Señor
June 12. Today, some Reddit comments and threads about politics, starting with a rant about the USA at 250. The context is how excited everyone was for the bicentennial in 1976, and how depressed everyone is now.
Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs.
A comment about the soul of conservatism:
There is no "left vs right". There's every single political philosophy that believes in a moral system of governance on one side, and an amoral system on the other. The whole point of conservatism is social hierarchies. From Burke to Trump, from Tories to slavers to Nazis to the Taliban to MAGA. It's why conservatism has been on the wrong side of history, always.
We're supposed put right and left on a spectrum, but I see the right as the center of a flowering, the hard core of the freedom of the powerful to crush the weak under their boots. And around it, in all directions, is anything we come up with that works better than pure domination. Stephen Miller famously said, "We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power." If that were true, then every time Miller encountered someone larger and stronger than him, that person would kill him and take his stuff. What he really wants is a world where he has power and nobody else does. I saw another Reddit comment by someone who went to high school with Stephen Miller. Miller was giving a campaign speech for a student government office, and said that he shouldn't have to pick up after himself because that's the janitor's job. He was booed. Someone with that value system can get no power in high school, but can be at the top of the US government, because the US government is fully owned by that value system.
A comment about how Nazis were not ruthlessly efficient but were incompetent thugs. Farther down in the thread there's stuff about fascism and Peter Thiel.
Another comment about conservatism = hierarchy, and farther down in the thread is well reasoned stuff about how Democratic Party centrists and moderates are still conservative because they believe in financial domination.
To them, the second-greatest injustice imaginable is for those [they perceive to be] on top [of social hierarchy] to be bound by the restrictions, scrutiny, and lack of resources reserved for those on the bottom. The first greatest injustice is for those on the bottom to have access to the rights, credibility, and resources reserved for those on top.
Shifting into culture, an answer to the question Why Do So Many Fundamental Christian Cults All Like The Same Puffy Hair On Women?
By voluntarily taking on complex, expensive grooming that is not even remotely comparable to what any man in the congregation is ever called upon to do, especially with that specific erotic undercurrent, a woman with big puffy hair that is still touchably soft is performing for the entire congregation that she is "womanly". She is centering male desire. She has her husband's erotic comfort at the forefront of her mind. She is conspicuous to the other women as a woman who invests time and energy and investment into making men feel like their erotic tastes rule her life. These women are often rewarded in little ways, like being put in charge of Women's Bible Study or the nursery. She may get to organize snacks for Men's Bible Study.
Finishing with some good news: New Yorkers, what changes have you seen under Mamdani's leadership? "It is absolutely wild how fast landlords can suddenly find the money and motivation to fix decades of crumbling infrastructure the exact second the city actually starts holding them accountable."
June 9. Stray links. Dopamine Fracking is a short piece with a really good metaphor. Just as fracking destroys geology to squeeze out the last bits of fossil fuels, the current online world is destroying minds and cultures to squeeze out the last bits of the human capacity to be entertained by screens and pump money up the pyramid. There's also a long Hacker News comment thread, and I want to remind people that dopamine is not a pleasure chemical -- it's an anticipation chemical, and being in a dopamine mental state all the time is hellish.
Neither the post nor the thread contains the word "motivation", but I think that's the most important thing that's going on here. Society is collapsing because everyone is unmotivated, because dopamine fracking has destroyed our ability to be motivated by anything less than concentrated clickbait.
An archive of an Atlantic article (thanks Mr. Quigley) about AI companies hiring philosophers. They would not hire me because I don't think AI is philosophically interesting. Sociologically, it's one of the most interesting things that's ever happened. Philosophically, AI is just a big mirror, and "AI ethics" is nothing more than the question of how AI will reflect human ethics.
Did the Iran war force peak oil? It's funny how the dialogue around "peak oil" has changed. Twenty years ago it meant that when oil production declines, industrial civilization will collapse. In this article, it means the world is finally switching to renewables. Meanwhile society is collapsing for cognitive reasons.
Loosely related: Scientists have found a geospatial link between soil fertility and national intelligence scores
June 5. New Spotify playlist: Ocean, a two hour collection of 14 songs that did not fit on other playlists because they were too long.
June 4. Great Ted Chiang essay, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious. He starts with a clever analogy, that an AI-generated dialogue between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan does not generate conscious versions of those people inside the machine. In the same way, Claude is a third person character, and Claude's new constitution is like a "character sheet for a role-playing game". The most interesting bit is at the end where he argues that if chatbots are conscious, then they're basically child slaves:
Anthropic would have us believe that it is inventing a new category of being whose needs for protection require essentially no divergence from how a software company would treat an ordinary chatbot that lacks conscious experience. That's so convenient that it's simply not plausible.
A few months back, a reader asked me if I think AI images and videos are important. That struck me as a strange question, and when I thought about it, I decided no, they're not important, and that's good. Pretty much every use of AI that tries to be important, is harmful. In a hundred years, if AI still exists (which I doubt), there may be laws that it can only be used recreationally, for the same reason that drugs are good recreationally but not when you're using power tools.
June 1. Five happy links, two Reddit and three science. From Better Offline, The kids are alright is about young people rejecting AI and big tech. "It's also like having had phones from early an age they're just done with them."
From Spirituality, I stopped trying to "raise my vibration" and things actually got better. From the top comment: "Spirituality is about returning to our natural state.... Imagine going out to the woods and thinking everything is dirty and needs to be cleaned.... A lot of spiritual seekers are doing this kind of thing within themselves."
A single dose of psilocybin outperforms nicotine patches for quitting smoking
Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnea. "Regular playing of a didgeridoo reduces daytime sleepiness and snoring in people with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and also improves the sleep quality of partners."
The Dirt That Refused To Die. "A metabolic process that powers much of life is also possible outside living cells." The details are different, but this is basically what Wilhelm Reich did 90 years ago with bions: he completely sterilized organic material and still found life-like action under a strong microscope.
May 29. Two loose ends from yesterday. Mehkabar is a misspelling of Merkabah, the Hebrew word for chariot, now with various woo-woo connotations, and the word pops up again in this apocalyptic Twitter post (thanks Kevin), TRUMP AS THE LAST PRESIDENT. I don't know if this is true but it's poetry:
We volunteered to incarnate into the lowest ring of the quarantine precisely so we could witness the bulldozer phase from within and activate the return codes. While the collective is still fighting over left and right, worshiping or raging, we are cleaning our G-Core, opening our pineal antenna, straightening our spine as the superconducting conduit, and igniting our Merkaba with the frequency of our tribal key.
And An has a suggestion for energy doldrums: to shift all media to 0.9X speed playback. I'm trying it and it does feel comforting.
New Spotify playlist. Since I've been making playlists, I've been struggling to find a place for Big Star and Exuma. They don't fit with popular music from the early 70s, and they don't have enough great songs for a one-artist playlist, unless you just use every Big Star song. I squeezed a few of their songs into other playlists, but not Big Star's best song, Kangaroo, or Exuma's best song, Baal. For this playlist, I used those two and two others, bundled up among other top notch orphans, and some songs I moved over from classic rock deep tracks. It's called Deeper Tracks
May 28. Four doom links that are not necessarily depressing, starting with an archive of an Atlantic article, The Great Depopulation. The birthrate is now declining in every country in the world. Some math: "Let's suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around 2 million people."
It's a simplification, but not wrong, to say that the population explosion was caused by patriarchy: by men having so much power that women did not have the realistic option to not have kids. Ironically, human extinction might be caused by humans becoming enlightened enough to no longer deserve extinction. But I think we can keep the species going with a generous UBI that starts from birth.
A fun Ask Reddit thread, removed by a zealous moderator, Hypothetical question. If society began collapsing tomorrow morning then what are you doing? One answer: "Going to work just like I have been since it really started"
From the Spirituality subreddit, which often has "bad energy" threads, a big one, WTF is going on lately? Bad energy must eventually be followed by good energy, and at the bottom is the most optimistic comment: "You're just getting upgraded, I have been the same as work is done on my Monad and Mehkabar." I don't know what those are, but I've felt exhausted lately. I'm working harder than ever to be fully present, and I feel like I'm dragging my body around through sheer will power. At the same time, lying in bed has never felt better.
It takes a minute for the beasts to load, but check out the Seattle Carnivore Spotter. Twenty years ago, when I wrote my first unfinished novel, I put a coyote in the city as a strange thing, which it was at the time. Now we're even getting mountain lions.
May 25. I keep saying people need to be in charge of machines, but it's not that simple. This article, AI put synthetic quotes in his book, is about an author who was happily bossing bots to go out and get quotes for his book about AI. The problem is that they worked too well, delivering "285 outside citations". How do you fact-check that? I guarantee the publisher's fact-checker was not paid enough, and the author couldn't resist the lure of more and more. So even if the machines are under you, there are also machines over you: More is better, time is money, publish or perish, these are principles of the machines of capitalism and progress.
Thanks Peter for sending this Cory Doctorow post from last year, Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox, in which the same kind of thing happened to another writer:
The freelance writer who authored this giant summer reading guide with all its lists had been tasked with doing the work of literally dozens of writers, editors and fact-checkers. We don't know whether his boss told him he had to use AI, but there's no way one writer could do all that work without AI.
In other words, that writer's job wasn't to write the article. His job was to be the "human in the loop" for an AI that wrote the articles, but on a schedule and with a workload that precluded his being able to do a good job. It's more true to say that his job was to be the AI's "accountability sink".
Does every unique AI output need to be checked by humans? Yes, I think it does. If so, how useful is AI? Actually, still pretty useful. Not for replacing all jobs or transcending humanity, but for giving a boost to many particular humans, everywhere from biology to multimedia, who have the autonomy and the discipline to integrate AI into what they do, without going off the rails. This assumes there will still be a high tech infrastructure after the crash. Doctorow forecasts:
After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters. And long after that, there will be the terrible impact on our society's ability to do things, as defunct foundation models grind to a halt, after the people they replaced are long gone and can't step in to pick up the work they fumble. We are busily filling the walls of society with digital asbestos and we'll be digging it out for generations to come. Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible.
May 22. One more AI link, a Hacker News thread, AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills. From the linked post:
...the biggest concern I've seen from my fellow developers is that human developers won't be necessary in the near future, since LLMs will be able to fully design and build projects of all sizes and scales. And, well, I just haven't seen any evidence of that. In fact, it's kind of the opposite. The biggest AI success stories I've seen have been from people who are highly technical, folks with deep subject matter expertise.
...
When we treat LLMs like little autonomous robots, we start to give them more credit than they deserve, and it starts to feel plausible that they could one day replace us. But that's not the right mental model. I think AI tools are more like Iron Man's suit.
From down in the thread, some pessimism: "What is unclear to me is how less skilled people gain useful experience, when using these amplifying tools." And: "We are quickly reaching a point though that programmers will become so reliant on LLMs for coding so much so as people have become reliant on their phones to remember phone numbers, the younger generations don't have a single phone number they can call to memory and soon the same will be true of code."
May 20. I'm foggy-headed this week, but I have a few more thoughts on AI. What people forget about the Machine (as described in books like Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine and Paul Kingsnorth's Against The Machine) is that it's human. It's not an alien force from another galaxy. The Machine an aspect of the great broad human potential, enshrined in our tools, our economy, even our metaphysics: that nothing counts unless it can be called forth at will like the output of a factory, the same for all observers. That nothing counts unless it can be quantified. That detached manipulation is the correct way to engage the world.
I believe this about AI and machines in general: that they are perfectly fine, even miraculous, as long as humans are fully in charge. By humans I don't mean tech executives. I mean the lowest rabble who actually work with the machine: that you can outsource something to the machine, make sure it's being done right, get it done faster, and reap the benefits. If you automate your job you should be able to keep your job and get paid for doing nothing, but under capitalism you're thrown on the streets while the Epstein class swims in money.
And it occurs to me, the same thing has been said about machine-like aspects of human cognition: that detached, rational, detail-focused thinking is perfectly fine as long as it remains subservient to intuitive, holistic, embodied thinking. This video explains it: Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke on The Master, his Emissary, and the Meaning Crisis. The world has become so fucked up because machine-like cognition is totally in charge, and when you take this trend to its logical conclusion, you get culty tech executives trying to machinify everything, and the coming trainwreck of the tech economy.
May 16. Today, AI psychosis, starting with an archive of a depressing Wired article, I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI. It's a long read but it really captures the insane vibe of a machine-managed economy.
A mysteriously deleted 2013 Edge.org response, by mathematician Steven Strogatz, which now seems completely prophetic, Too Much Coupling:
In all sorts of complex systems, this is the general trend: increasing the coupling between the parts seems harmless enough at first. But then, abruptly, when the coupling crosses a critical value, everything changes....
I worry that we're playing the coupling game with ourselves, collectively. With our cell phones and GPS trackers and social media, with globalization, with the coming Internet of things, we're becoming more tightly connected than ever. Of course, maybe that's good....
But the math suggests that increasing coupling is a siren's song. Too much makes a complex system brittle. In economics and business, the wisdom of the crowd works only if the individuals within it are independent, or nearly so.
And a Twitter post, I believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis. It's funny because this sounds like our whole society: "Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible.... Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls."
The Hacker News thread adds nuance, explaining the difference between good and bad use of AI. "I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tells you then you have AI psychosis." And, "I'm thinking that it's quite a different experience going all Jackson Pollock with AI in your own studio on your own terms, compared to the sorry state of affairs of having 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota."
I'm happy to announce two more videos, in which I as a human am completely in charge and reject almost everything that AI gives me. These are for the same song, Hawkwind - Infinity. For the first I did the normal thing, spamming the prompt box with lyrics and forging a path through the best images. For the second, I got the idea to use the worst images, but I ended up still using the best, and I discovered that there are two kinds of good bad images: good because they're bad, and good despite being bad. This was a lot of fun: Hawkwind - Infinity (slop version).
May 13. I don't want to post doom all the time but there's so much of it. Four Reddit threads:
What's a "future technology" that already exists but people still don't realize how scary it is? "My car literally tattled on me to my insurance company for 'hard braking'. I was avoiding a deer. Thanks for the rate increase though."
What's a modern problem that sounds completely fake when you explain it to someone from 100 years ago? "I'm having trouble paying for my cat anti-depressants."
What is the worst career to be in right now and why? "I'm a journalist and my industry is dying. Ten years ago we had a bustling newspaper office with 20 employees. Today there are three of us. They just sold the office and closed the building. We got bought out by a larger company and we have limited hours to cover everything we need to cover. And it's happening all over."
And from the Spirituality subreddit, I feel that my days on Earth are dwindling. "Not because you think you're literally about to die, but because of how disconnected you feel from life itself?"
May 9. Some happy links. Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons
An archive of a NY Times piece, America the Undammed: "More miles of the country's rivers were reconnected last year thanks to dam removals than at any other time in history."
From the Guardian, How nature thrives in bomb craters: "At the bottom of these explosions, which go three to eight metres deep, there will always be water in the end, even in very dry periods. It is like establishing a small wetland."
And a Reddit comment transcribing a fun story full of orphaned negatives: "She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it since I was travelling cognito."
May 7. I've just posted two Goodreads reviews: a three star review of the 4.22 average Arborescence, a well-conceived book about people turning into trees, but I didn't like the droopy vibe. And a five star review of the 2.95 average The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year, a wonderfully written dark domestic comedy.
May 5. Quick thought on fakery. For years everyone has been saying that when AI images can't be told from real images, there will be lots of fake photos and videos that people take as real. I haven't seen this happen yet in any important way. Making convincing fake imagery is hard, and people who really want to tell the difference will always stay one step ahead.
Anyway, fake images are not necessary. The best tool for deception, now and forever, is words. If you want to fool people, just tell them what they want to hear, with total indifference to reality, and they will come running to join your cult. And now, when those people see real photos and videos that disprove the words, they can just say, "Those must be AI fakes."
Paradoxically, our power over images has made all images weaker, and fake words stronger.
May 4. A quote from War Bulletin #3 by Vachel Lindsay, in 1909:
Let us send men on a great migration: set free, purged of the commerce-made manners and fat prosperity of America; ragged with the beggar's pride, starving with the crusader's fervor. Better to die of plague on the highroad seeing the angels, than live on iron streets playing checkers with dollars ever and ever.
Doug comments:
This is a man who literally walked across America trading poems for bread, and meant every word of it. The War Bulletins were self-published pamphlets he printed and distributed by hand. Pre-internet zine culture, evangelical pamphleteer energy, total outsider operation.
What makes this passage cut deeper than most anti-civ writing is that it's not against anything. It's not burning the iron streets -- it's abandoning them as unworthy of your death. That's a different move. The nihilist says tear it down. Lindsay says it doesn't deserve your attention long enough to tear it down. Walk away. Die somewhere beautiful.
"Ragged with the beggar's pride." The pride isn't despite the raggedness. It is the raggedness. Proof of motion. Proof you didn't trade your hours for upholstery. "Seeing the angels" isn't metaphor-decoration. Lindsay means it. The highroad opens perception that the iron street chemically suppresses. The commerce-made manners aren't just bad aesthetics -- they're a perceptual closing. You literally can't see certain things from inside a managed life.
And four doom threads from Reddit, starting with a tangent from Friday's post: US birth rates just hit another record low, what do you think is the leading cause of this?
Anyone else in US noticed food quality degrading recently and if so what product in what way?
What's a recession indicator that you’ve noticed lately in your everyday life?
What is an industry that is currently on fire (in a bad way) behind the scenes, but the general public hasn't noticed yet?
May 1. For Mayday, a new video of a good political song: Meatraffle - The Wickerman. Usually I prompt the images line by line, but this time I mainly just generated a ton of wickermen. I decided to go square instead of landscape because wickermen are taller than they are wide. Another thing I noticed about this song was that the rhythm didn't vary at all. Sometimes it takes me hours to do the timing, but they must have used some kind of digital metronome because every measure is 4.00 seconds.
Today is Bandcamp Friday. You might want to give a listen to the album Bad Vibes OST by Sexfaces, a D.C. punk band that I went and saw last weekend. It was strange, the entire crowd was old. There were no Gen Z in the whole place. I hope Gen A restarts the cycle of listening to noisier music than their parents. If you like non-noisy music, I want to give another plug to Melissa Kassab.
On a tangent, I saw somewhere that Gen Z is having less sex than any generation in history, and probably also prehistory. It reminds me of the mouse utopia experiment, where mice were given unlimited food in limited space and lost interest in procreating. Modern society is doing something similar, where all measures of quality of life are being ignored except for not dying. "What do you mean you don't want to bring children into this world? The world is better than it's ever been as measured by the number of cures for cancer." If I saw a giant mushroom cloud on the horizon I would probably be relieved that I no longer have to do two factor authentication.
April 29. Some optimism, starting with a great article, The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. That's the name of a trending weird band whose creative contribution would be multiplied by thousands if we had a UBI. If you like their sound, definitely check out Horse Lords. Anyway, the argument also covers Einstein, who did his best work at a slack patent office job, and actual trials of the UBI:
The pattern from Ireland and New York matches the pattern from every saturation basic income pilot we've ever run, going all the way back to Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. When you give everyone in a community a floor of income, entrepreneurship skyrockets. New businesses get started. People take risks they wouldn't have otherwise taken. This isn't surprising. Starting a business is terrifying when the downside is losing your house. It's a lot less terrifying when the downside is falling back on a basic income.
Ireland did not do this because it was a nice thing to do for artists. Ireland did it because art is an enormous economic and cultural engine, and the current system is incredibly wasteful of the people who run that engine. The Irish government calculated a monetary value for art and discovered what should have been obvious: investing in art pays more than it costs. We can apply that same math to everything a basic income unlocks.
The no-go zone paradox: Chornobyl's wildlife thrives amid pro-nuclear shift. I used to be against nuclear power because disasters are inevitable. Now I'm for it because disasters are inevitable, and any place that humans can't go, non-human life does better.
And here in Seattle, Pike Place Market Pedestrianization Pilot Boosts Sales and Visits. They finally closed off cars from driving right through the middle of the market, so of course people would rather go there.
On a tangent, I kind of agree with right wing opposition to renewable energy, not for the reasons they give, which are dumb, but because every time humans get more energy, we use it to make the world worse. I used to think society would collapse from running out of energy. Now I think, if we had magical unlimited energy, society would collapse faster.
July 31, 2025. My novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing.