Dear Thomas Friedman

I have long admired your intelligence, and your ability to find new takes on hackneyed reality. I'm not so sure about your take on AI.

Language is the stuff of intelligence, and the artificial sort of intelligence works off that. But human intelligence - as is, incidentally, encoded in the Chinese language - also includes emotion at our center. Heart and mind are combined in a single word in Chinese. 

I was privileged recently to observe a lively discussion, led by educational policy leaders, about AI in education. After a fairly brief formal presentation, when questions were invited, I was gratified to hear each of the Chinese international students point out that emotion is what's lacking in AI. They seemed determined to make that point. It was well taken, and taken well.

Your phases of history are still progressions along a continuum which has already broken. As did most of us, you missed the happening. Humans have become so impressed with ourselves that we never did pause to examine our cosmologies after the Bomb, capital A. The Manhattan Project was perched on a World War; one in which we were desperate to keep at bay what by now has almost fully engulfed us. Totalitarianism is a failure of feeling, and it can't be eradicated by physical means. 

AI represents the totalization of language, just as physical infrastructure now represents the totalization of our planet. It can be very difficult to know anything beyond those facts. Totalitarians are humans who have made themselves inhuman. They have no understanding. Their expression comes from a very immature place. The tragedy of Hitler's rage returns as Trump's farcical buffoonery. A Marxian quip on history. But we have banished all teleology now, and good riddance. We shall never understand the All. And History has no more discernible direction than life as a whole does.

By commission and omission we have been killing more actual people before their time than ever before. Those at the top seem to celebrate this still, as well they might. When no meaning is made from history, only power remains. Power, as we all know, is addictive.

What we failed to notice even after we proved that we could in fact and in deed enact the reality of the mass/energy equation, was that our emotions had been dulled by those phases you recite in your piece in the New York Times: With your second phase, the Age of Information as triggered by the printing press, we had already introduced Artificial Intelligence. We could be emotively moved by a thing, though mostly because we imagined a person behind it, or sometimes God. It was the printed Bible which blew it for the makers of God's artificial meaning. 

Turing, Shannon, and all who work in AI, never understood that there is no information without its comprehension. It's otherwise only noise. We have equated information with its methods for decoding, and not with its meaning, and then we get sucked up into our own tuba. That is idiocy no different from a monkey playing piano.

Books hold no more emotion than does a brick. AI holds an equivalent amount. As with a furry robot, we project our feelings upon a void. 

We express our emotions facially and physically, though there is no one physical medium to make or convey the expression directly. It has to be understood, but in a way quite different from our understanding of the mass/energy equation. While a machine may learn to call out a smile, a machine will never feel it. Among living creatures, there is always reciprocal feeling. To smile at a machine is to give away far too much of yourself, as many of us have learned the hard way.

Our investigations into quantum physics take no emotion into account, despite the paradox of mind/body resolution. We thought we'd resolved the cartesian divide, when all we really did was to eliminate any possibility that mind is apart from matter. Maybe Penrose is taking a look, though he seems still to be looking for mechanism. A quantum aspect of the brain? How about mind as an aspect of reality from the beginning and to the end? Quantum reality has always been an aspect of mind.

Well, Penrose is beyond me, though I doubt it's all that complicated. If one simply supposes, as I do, that emotions are always simultaneous, which means that physical force is absent in if not from the emotion, then there is no medium through which they propagate, apart from all media. We've done away with ether in the physical world, but what we have yet to do, because it can't be done, is to do away with conceptual reality altogether. Conceptual reality allows for void, which perceptual reality abhors. Perceptual reality is understood conceptually.

Part of conceptual reality is the quite bizarre existence of DNA molecules. Our imagination fails to find meaning in their random appearance; and then again we fail to find meaning in evolution over time according to random mutation. Or rather, we posit that meaning itself is made from random connections, which is certainly true. There is vanishingly little about my life that I can attribute to my own choices. In that I might differ ever so slightly from those still jacked by the Manhattan Project. 

We flunked that test - the atomic test - when we let the hard-heads take charge. They dropped two bombs and then some, based on scant understanding. We've been frozen in time ever since. Now the digital adepts believe absolutely that they can make reality; and banish random from reality.

How ironic that early exponent of Geek Rapture Eliezer Yudkowski is now calling the technology evil and deadly. Along with Kurtzweil, he was celebrating the possibility of a cosmos where "intelligence" crowds out all else, imaging that he could perpetuate his disembodied person. Personality? Emotions are always bereft without a body.

Books disempower as much as they empower. Most of us cannot be either authors or authorities, and so we adapt the thoughts of others. Tools (your first phase, Mr. Friedman) had already channeled our actions according to some masters' wishes. Books carry on the same tradition. 

Recognition always precedes understanding. Cognition is always involved, while recognition engages emotion. Emotion triggers physical motion in living beings. Neurological studies demonstrate that decisions are not cognitive; they get made before we're conscious of them. They must be emotive, since cognition is too slow. Trust or fear, fight or flight. These are emotive decisions. Understanding is settled cognition, awaiting only upset. 

Time can only be defined metaphysically, as recognition followed by comprehension. There is no physical definition for time. Physical time surfaces in the same way that trust might arise from a smile. 'This' prior to 'that' has no meaning without emotion. Meaning is comprehension with consequence. One emotively knows what to do.

Now in the face of digital AI, which can feel no recognition though it might easily name you, we require the emotional maturity which we lacked upon the triggering of atomic explosions. As yet, we are not responsible adults. God knows how to organize ourselves globally anymore. 

We don't need leaders and followers so much as we need community. Community is always only local. Digital, as we deploy it now, disempowers community and creates actual physical gods. These, each and all, must be dethroned. Here's a paradox for you: One is Only Authentic when One Plays a Role (Yudkowsky joke)

God has no role. God is Love.

I mean this quite literally, of course. 

The interesting thing about AI is that it has one incredibly singular use. That would be to detect other AI. When declarations are found to be derivative and not initiated by the person who made them, which is trivial to discover by AI, then the person who made them is deploying AI. Thus a C-level spokesman for a corporation says only what he's been self-programmed to say. Emotion has been expunged; an activity long honored in the feminine fearing My Fair Lady West. Which hardly lets China off the hook.

A person with fellow feeling, which is to say a person who is a member of the same community he addresses, cannot be an AI, but can easily be exposed by AI as human. We'll waste a lot of energy and therefore money getting around to universalizing moral behavior, but it still happens willy-nilly. Remember the tobacco executive breaking down in tears?  He had been sorely tested. 

Germs that cause illness have always been a part of life. Who among us wants to relinquish our intelligent fencing off of germs? Recently, the global body politic has been infested by a kind of virus. I use the term advisedly, since viruses are generally found to be not-quite alive. But so deep has our mistrust of government and public institutions generally become that we have now elected a majority in government which has no fellow feeling at all. They work only for themselves.

Will it really take AI to call them out? Or is it that each of us has already been infected so that we think only of ourselves as well. One can't legislate morality. That's why we have elections. But we've all been trained now to look out only for number one. Digitally, that makes each of us a zero. When it's a contest and not a community initiative, getting ahead is immoral. Never mind the economic dogma. 

Anyhow, the really fun thing about quantum physics is that you can't remove mind from the equations. We already almost knew that when the first A-bomb was exploded. We knew that relativity, in addition to establishing the speed of light as a constant, also erased the possibility for any actual simultaneity. Emotion is always simultaneous. Bell theorem. And so we discover and name endless so-called particles without even pausing to wonder that they each may be a reflection of the strange community of strong agreement that is science. 

Alas, even that community has lost its trust. All research is motivated research when we stop stopping to smell the roses. At its most basic science was meant to delineate that knowledge upon which we must all agree. Their sin has also been a totalization of knowledge. 

There are just two books which I sorta kinda liked which I could never finish. I know it's a literary sin to say so, but one is Joyce's Ulysses and the other is The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Now my mind has become too weak, but frankly Joyce the man and his oddity slipped through his lyrics, and, well, Gaddis just cuts too close for my comfort. 

Yes indeed it is our craving recognition which is killing us. Along with our hiding of our basic loving nature. The rest is all outcome.

Notes While Reading The Dawn of Everything, by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow

Lately, I've been amazed at how often my local library has the books I want to read. Sadly, even though I could use the out-of-house time to make the nice and interesting walk to the central library, I mostly get them digitally. Now I have a backlog.

Whatever else I might eventually wish to say about this book, it surely does give the reader enough remove from Western Ways to see that we here in these United States revert to the aristocratic European form we'd meant to leave, far more than we diverge from it. Anymore.

The book dives into the question about why we seem stuck in our Western Ways which have revealed themselves to be at such a remove from Freedom, and even survivability. Their main objective seems to be to question the popularly received truths that ours is inevitably the social setup that all history would inevitably tend toward.

Whether in terms of political or financial power, the structure is aristocratic, no matter who the controllers are by any other name. If anything, our new aristocrats are more stupid, more foolish, more juvenile and more selfish than even the court of Louis XIV. I shall see if this book answers the question why.

Of course, to me, from the remove of China, I already have an answer. But China has also become more like than different anymore, and so I'll still want to know what better answers might be hinted in my read. 

The book's grand omission, so far as I can see so far, is the impact of the written language on history. I need to know, and I'm not sure these authors have anything on offer, if (and then how) it might be that the written word has created our most recent and now global prisonhouse. It's hard for me to disconnect the written language from our scientific and technological advances.

Of course history requires writing to be history, which means imposition of narrative onto the raw stuff.   

For sure there is a connection to law, as the sublimated and humanized version of subjugation to God's Word. And then, for equally certain there is the tabulation and recording of money hoards, and their transmutation into property and title (as the root of all evil).

But I think these authors are leaving the obvious alone. They deconstruct our projected histories according to a meticulously scientific method. They unsettle the seemingly obvious progressive timeline, where the "discovery" of agriculture is conceived as a unitary event, which sets us on the way toward our constrained bureaucratized state of complexity, which we can't seem to imagine ourselves getting beyond.

But these few observations threaten to paint these authors as just a newer sort of essentializer about what it means to be human. Or in other words, they stretch humanity to be coterminous with our genetic biological advent, where most of us would place humans in history, which means written history (along with our fantasies about what went on before history, which it is this book's main burden to reveal).

The answer I read for is about whether there might be a way to escape the prisonhouse of the written word without leaving history altogether. A way through instead of a way out. I think that's what they aim for as well.

It seems harder for me to trash our technologies entirely than it does for these authors. I want to keep my feeling that there might yet be something worthwhile about what we may indeed foolishly construe as our human ascendance. (The foolishness would be in our destruction of our earthly body, which makes us cancer, the single most powerful metaphor on offer in my other recent library reads, which would be the works of Ibram X. Kendi.)

Perhaps it is just that our preoccupations focus more on physical pleasures, offered or withheld, than could the primitives which precede us. Perhaps that's what entraps us. But if we are obsessed with pleasures, that might make us collectively one with all of life, which evolves toward fitting in some niche, which is made by all of other life? 

As a whole, must we be cancer? Or might we be fitting in to something even greater than our earthly body? Might we be a channel for the grander schemes of evolution. A scheme which would even entail the destruction of individuality among us. A reversion, in false historical terms, to the most primitive state of all. We become the rhizome, the media for some message that there is no one to read.

And then what will that sort of life look and feel like? Well, no inside, no outside, it will feel like nothing. Which could be a kind of nirvanha, right? Right?

Read on, read on, and see if you are liberated or if you are trapped. Really, this book is only about whether our own internal subversives - those whose books I seem able to find in the public library - have ever been real and in the flesh, or if they have only ever been jesters to the courts of power. Rhetorical devices designed to challenge and seeming to want to subvert the powers that be, but only ever actually bolstering those powers by their own inevitable and highly regularized failures.

How shall we succeed, is the question I want answered.

In partial answer, I would like to offer a smashup of the early reference in this book to Gregory Bateson's "schismogenesis" with Johan Huizinga's calling out of agonistic contest as the "play" which unites us with all animal life. Play is the realm of freedom, that thing which these authors now attribute, in debate, to introductions from American native peoples.

Or, in other words, our recent history is marked by a taking too seriously of our truths. We offer academic degrees in seriousness, and so the sides take up, in deadly earnest, their disagreements with the other side. As Bateson points out, each side moves to some sort of opposite extreme from the other, as now our Red and Blue teams do. The result is, of course, polarization and anger, as, perhaps, between the sexes which is one of Bateson's examples from the “savage” world.

And so the possibility for success might be prefigured in the comedic processes of queerness and transgender, but also in the raw comedy calling out each team for its exaggerations. It only seems that there is no common ground, which is not the reason for our deadly anger at one another. Rather it is our deadly anger which erases all the common ground, which does, in fact exist.

Pull the clothes off our representative leaders, and you will find harlequin fool facing off against harlequin fool; the people having willingly given over our every freedom. 

It would seem that non-Western "primitives," among other things, have a better sense of humor than we do. They might not take themselves so seriously, just as Huizinga once thought about us more recent Americans in contrast to the seriousness of European and Chinese politics. Now we follow the inevitable grim pathways of all imperialists, and we charge along as seriously as did those damnable Jesuits before us.

Would that we could mock our scientific and technological advances! Well, I sure do! There has never been a more Arlequin Sauvage than our kidlets riding their Unicorns worth billions. There is nothing more silly than a sexy car as apex object of desire. Inequality and even lack of freedom may be the inevitable result of divisions of labor according to economic valence, but our arrangements are grotesque by any measure. And most of us do laugh. 

So here's a definition of time, in human terms. Future is a place where things have yet to happen. It can be a source of dread or hope or even ecstasy or despair. But the future is never thought to be the cause for what happens in the now. Primarily, that's because it's not a fact yet.

A fact is something whose causal relation to the now can be proven, in a way, theoretically. An idea can only be related to a fact by way of some sort of documentation. Otherwise, an idea can only be a goad toward some future or other.

Now if I am right (and of course I am) that mind has always been an aspect of reality, since at least the Big Bang, then the distinction between past and future becomes much more interesting. And our problem in the present is transformed. 

Just now, those of us on the literate side of the great red/blue divide feel almost nothing but dread about our collective future. In part, that must feel like a tremendous sense of loss. We've had a near lifetime of experience with our cherished democracy persisting despite the idiots - charlatans, cheats, snake-oil peddlers - who have always been in charge. We developed a sort of faith in the system.

Mostly, we've experienced our fellows as idiots who don't understand the pleasures of comfort over extravagance, good wine over a good drunk, travel to wild places instead of to Disneyland. We've been content to see them deluded by cartoonish religious beliefs, mostly because it keeps them passive. And we've pretty much assumed, qua Steven Pinker, that history moves in an anti-racist ameliorative direction.

But now none of us can imagine how to get out of the mess we've made. Global Warming has become our catch-all, which manages even to lump into its bin all the reddening folk who seem to want to destroy any and all dreams of democracy in the name of a fantasy that things were oh so wonderful in the recent past. About the only thing that reds share with blues - our common ground - is a dread about the future.

Each group probably thinks the other has taken the red pill (blue pill? I honestly can't keep them straight) where fantasy replaces reality wholesale.

Anyhow, our overall trick is to replace dread with something toward excitement. Sure plenty of blueish people do that by way of the cool whiz-bang of our inventive recent history. But those darned redsters keep wanting to tear it all up with their coaling monster trucks.

So which of us is falling into the Somerset Maugham Razor's Edge trap of thinking that if we can think it, it can be real? Which of us is destroying our collective future by our dread of it?

Now along comes this contrarian, anarchistic, view of humanity which I want to believe in just simply because I like the authors so much, but they posit a pre-written language sort of consciousness that I just simply can't see. The writing on the wall tells me something different.

The Writing on the Wall shall be the title of my upcoming science fiction book, which will be about this hinge in time where present and past swap, in a way, and the writing no longer predicts or foretells or guides us into our futures, but as though light started to go backwards, is coming to us from a future which is as far from us as the stars. 

Not everything important is physical Larry Darrell. That's the name I was given as an outlier space cadet at Yale, when we had all just read that book. The only thing I had in common with the prepsters. I did, of course, deserve it. Already a classic, and old. But we had not yet escaped its thrall. 

I was, of course, a mistaken admit who made it in the back door of the engineering school.Worth David  - now there's a name right out of fiction - told me so by a look. He corrected course quickly, to allow the institution more certainty that its recruits would uphold the fiction of merit and talent and be out mostly for themselves, and eventually their alma mater. Most certainly yes.

And so which team, red or blue, betrays the promise of anti-aristocracy? That's the bigger question than the rest, no matter how caught up we all are in that trivia.

To put the matter into other words, has the written word become our prison house, or might it yet be our redemption. Read on, Sailor Moon, read on. Notes from the future take no time at all to reach us. They have been there all the time. It's the parsing takes time.

And nope, no Julian Jaynes, no Johan Huizinga in these authors' bibliography. Tant pis. We all have our blind spots and shortcomings and can't keep up with everything. Hardly. But the term "homo ludens" does appear. Shall I doubt their documentation, then? Of course to cite Julian Jaynes is to court ridicule.

But here is the reason why the globe is now overrun by the imperialistic and very racist police state: it's because we're in a mad dash to our future. We're on the move, and like societies everywhere, we don't dare to allow ourselves to be pushed off course. Our forebears also clamped down while on the hunt.  

The Trumpers are right to detect a kind of illicit coercion in all the sound scientific advice they're meant to ingest. They're right that it's a false future that's being held in trust. That we have construed a (virtual?) state of perpetual warfare, and that's why we're "stuck" (to use these authors' word).

This is a major insight from this massive book. Many societies which predeceased ours had cyclical periods of control and anarchism. The control was never gentle, but the anarchism mostly was. The control was focused on the capture of a kind of annual  plenty. The Buffalo Police of the American plains would viciously corral everyone to corral the Buffalo. Once the plenty is gotten, they revert to gentle anarchy.

And so here we are, so very excited by the plenty dangled in front of us or on our screens. And we want to squash everyone in our way. Some - the Trumpers - are saying enough already, leave us be. We don't want no stinkin' yacht to take care of. The rest - the literate - are just plain excited by the ever-elaboration of high culture, and want to know where it might end. 

Slowing down would be the thing, wouldn't it? But alas, all of us are addicted to speed.

In the back of my mind, and perhaps in the back of everyone's mind, while reading this book, is writing. While focusing on the likely equivalency between the political savvy of primitives and moderns, these authors do conflate pre-literate and post-literate humanity. They make a good case, in other words, for the fictional myth-making nature of our grand political histories, which move Biblically from primitive to modern, while apparently ignoring the forward march of science. 

Who is the sinner and who is sinned against here? It is hardly arguable that the explosion of technology in our contemporary world is disconnected from the warmaking and prodigious bloodletting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Now, we have made the emergencies permanent, but in a tiredly positive sense. We are feeling on the brink of breakthrough, and have for quite a while. Therefore the full regime of control as deployed by the written word is being deployed 24/7/365 as led by these United States. 

The trouble is that you can't follow science if you can't read, and so it was inevitable that the hoi polloi would, as these authors do, conflate political with scientific (anti-religious) thinking. Oppressed politically, the non-literate naturally assume that the oppressive forces extend to science. All authority is bad, unless it be a permanent jester-king, Buffalo Bob's Howdy Doody - Ronald Reagan in all his forms - who has always been meant to amuse us to death. 

Along with the technology inevitably comes social media. But social media with its algorithms of hate-concentration (this is just a law of nature, since anger promulgates far faster and wider than love) misses the main point. Which is that in our red counties, people still check in with one another. That is how they form their political opinions and actions. There is an hermetic distance now between urban and rural, and it is the distance of art from colloquy. 

Scientific discourse is political discourse in only the metaphorical sense. And vice versa. It is our figures that are mixed up. Private property is no requirement of the sciences, and in many cases has become its enemy, where money leads any discourse now.

And, back to the main point. If we are to become hopeful again about our collective future, we will then have to let go of the imminence of completion. We will have to recover seasonal ways of being rather silly. We will have to, periodically, issue get out jail free cards to all those who sinned against our ritual kings when we were stuck in the permanence of the hunt.

* * *

Anyhow, as I continue to read along in this lovely book, I am becoming rather convinced of its main thesis (at least as that appears to me so far, about halfway through). As humans apparently always will, we have imposed our narratives backwards across the vast expanse of time, and seen there all the signs of a narrative progress toward where we are today.

These authors are therefore solidly in line with scientific thinking, which takes evidence first before creating their narrative. They have a theory, sure, which is approximately that subjugation of man by man is not the necessary end of history, along with, of course, exposure of the equally false corollary; that further "progress" will get us beyond this local aberration. Here I find more true believers in human agency, so long as that agency makes allowances for something beyond rational economic ecological adjustments. So long as there is room for quirk.

It must be in the back of every reader's mind that they will have to explain away notions of scientific progress as well, along with the general certainty that this follows, more or less inevitably, upon the advent of writing. Certainly, they will at least localize our particular scientific fluorescence, perhaps following upon the WEIRD thesis.

As I might say myself, science is as stuck as everything else about our now globalized ways, and I hope and actually by now believe that the arguments in this book shall help us to get unstuck. I am puzzled for a moment when they declare that there have been no real scientific breakthroughs since Einstein. Perhaps to them, as to me, it's the physics which really matters?

I awaken this morning after the dire warnings yesterday of a wind storm. Funnel storms have churned a path from Arkansas through Tennessee, centering on Kentucky, as long as any recorded in history. The crows (are they ravens?) have returned to what I lately discover is their highest Buffalo concentration, just beyond my windows. What does their noise portend?

At the very least, I am convinced of the unity between private property and the narrative construction of an individual and highly specific self, housed within the boundaries of our skin. We have reduced agency to these terms as well. And we shall - we must - soon discover the fiction of this arrangement for our thinking right along with exposing the fictions of our grand stories for geologic time.

As these authors describe cars, whose insides are legally inviolate while their disposition and usage are incredibly circumscribed by not only law but by infrastructure and even, dare we say it?, civic norms. (Of course those norms have been massively disrupted in cities now, where loud and law-breaking two and four wheel Mad Max vehicles scream through the nights) . . . as they describe cars, they will certainly describe humans. Ownership of our fetishized self is as much a fiction as are the national boundaries.

Liberty is not available to those who fetishize narrative eternal life. (I also just completed Amor Towles' Lincoln Highway) There is no necessary progression through the agricultural "revolution" to enclosure to the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons also describes the tragedy of dividing of be-souled humans from the rest of life.

We shall see. The crows have dispersed with the sunrise. I remember that the Mad Max marauders are far milder and more funny than that term allows. There are also electric skateboards and unicycles and proliferating bikes. Perhaps my thinking has calmed.

So back to cars for a moment - that focal point for all that is wrong with the way we live now. Our mediated lives tend to lead us to think that the solution to cars is less polluting cars, when the only real solution is not to want the particular life which allows us to live, even in cities, without really having to interact with anyone outside our small circle of friends. 

The same lens needs to be applied to the meaning of all this communications technology and artificial reality. Does it solve a problem or exacerbate one (which might, as ever, be a goad to evolution)? What change in our consciousness - our sense of self - could change this? What are the powers which are desperate to keep us wanting what we want, and how do they infect our lives? Is it even possible that the Trump reaction is actually salutary, in a cosmic sense?

Horror of horrors, right? But where is the desperate rhetoric about what is going wrong lodged, and whom does it serve? Why are we meant to feel the precarity of the anthropocene and the inevitability of cataclysm if not utter ecological and economic collapse? Should these sorts of exhortations lead us to double down to preserve what we have or to dismantle it? We really can't seem to decide. 

Urban elites seem divided between thoaty exotic sports cars (I suppose one would have to include Beemers and Benzes and newly cheap Maseratis and the Japanese luxury models here as well), and the quicker and more acceptable to the authorial elite Teslas and their potential descendants. Meanwhile, the ride of choice in the redder counties is the pickup truck, around whose bed men commune and communicate. 

Could it be that the social networks are not powering social polarization and anti-literate chaos? Could it be that those outside the city still do actually know and go to church with and talk to each other? And form their takes on the world that way?

As tempting as it is - and it is really tempting - to see everything about the Trumpers in terms of racism and even white supremacy, the urban centers remain largely defined by exclusive neighborhoods if not by exclusive politics. Who among us participates in that politics to the level and extent of rural churchgoing?

If one doesn't read all the urban rags but listens instead to the likes of Rush Limbaugh (R.I.P.), or Hannity or that Fucker Tucker, or all the other fabulously wealthy exploiters of ignorance, why, really, wouldn't one be fairly certain that there is a conspiracy afoot which considers its opposition to be a Conspiracy of Dunces. 

I'm about to read this other book, which I consider to be a tract of the opposition. I am certain that its arguments will proceed conspiracy style. It's called Life 3.0, and it will reduce life the universe and everything to that old hardware/software saw. You won't even know what's been denied existence by omission. And I, for one, will be horrified that there are people who actually buy and believe this shit. 

Can't we please just get beyond conspiracy theorizing?

This book Life 3.0 will take to absurdity the procrustean logic which is deconstructed in the book I'm reading now, The Dawn of Everything, which is co-written by an anarchist who wanted to help guide us out from our current nightmares. 

The corrective lens The Dawn of Everything applies to our grand histories of the past can be and must be applied equally to our suppositions about our collective future. Already - halfway through - I find myself deconstructing apocalypse as yet another Platonic Christian imposition. And here I'd thought it was scientifically considered opinion, just like the grand histories Hariri and Diamond wrote.

Nope. Just more mythmaking. It's not that global warming isn't anthropogenic, it's just that the earth has turned more wildly many times before. One gets the feeling that we actually do still evolve and are still evolving and that far from being the end of history, we are closer to its beginning. Pushing back the timeline of the Anthropocene - which the book also implicitly does - also highlights our recent accellerationism.

Yes indeed now is far "worse" than when the dinosaurs were killed or when the earth was crusted in ice and human habits and habitats were squeezed. But as we are, we are hardly poised to prevail in our current disposition. What comes next becomes far more interesting and not necessarily deadly.

Whatever we explode into, supernova-like, it won't be Life 3.0. That sort of cognition riding on fully describable hardware is so very YESTERDAY. The belief system of (mostly male) children who don't even know what love, literature and good living are. Who fervently believe that they have driven the godhead from existence permanently and for all time by good common sense. Now that right there is just nuts.

Right there at the beginning, the author declares:

"But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the laws of physics, so before our Universe awoke, there was no beauty. This makes our cosmic awakening all the more wonderful and worthy of celebrating: it transformed our Universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty and hope—and the pursuit of goals, meaning and purpose. Had our Universe never awoken, then, as far as I’m concerned, it would have been completely pointless—merely a gigantic waste of space. Should our Universe permanently go back to sleep due to some cosmic calamity or self-inflicted mishap, it will, alas, become meaningless.

He then goes on to describe Larry Page as some kind of change-the-world genius. Really?!? These dudes are the reason I should have hope?

I mean the arrogance to suppose that without us the cosmos is meaningless! Our physics tell us that we can't know. What we can see is always from our past, and if one were to suppose that life develops according to the same universal timeline that life on earth has, then we shall never know, even before our inevitable flameout. And so we should fill the cosmos with us? I'd say that right along with Larry Page, these AI folks extend (to infinity, if they have their ways) our private property enslavement culture of totalitarian empire.

Apparently, I am the only non-Godist who understands that there is no time required for emotive contact. God Himself is, of course, just another anthropomorphic imposition on cosmos, in precisely the way that AI is. We reduce life, the universe and everything to our parochial terms and then we declare it ours. I'd say that's what's beyond boring.

We have always been in contact with other life, and it's not cognitive in the way that math could describe it. We just simply aren't paying attention.

Well back to more reading about what is and isn't "common sense."

* * *

And now, finally, by the summary chapter, I see it! As the discoverer of an earth-shaking scientific principle that I've strived to share for most of my life, I've also tortured myself each time - and it's only moments here and there - that I wish for fame and fortune. I see myself being interviewed on TV, say, where I will know what to say, when I can't while writing. 

But I don't need no stinkin' audience. I need only a single interlocutor, and I can't find them.

And so I realize that there is terrorism - and slavery - implied by individualism. If only my name were a title, shared by those in my geographically dispersed clan, I would be able to remain calm about my imminent death, for whatever reason it will come. Though I may never experience a spirit dream of sufficient power to marshal all my clan's power, I may know when one comes along. I would recognize it by obvious ways without possibility for trickery or secrecy, because it would be written on the landscape, in the weather, on the evening news. 

That is what money is for. Selfiness. GDP. GPP. MIT. And all I am allowed - no longer allowed - is the brief ecstasy of copulation. Now even that has been cleansed of smell and shaved and rendered into a commodity with almost all fetish power leached away, though I may still make claim to how amazing it really is to be slingshot into space. Changed forever. So profound. Orgasm and away, with Big Boobs, eh Bezos you big rocket prick?

My nightmare would be to awaken as Zuckerberg. Abandon hope, for your script is written. What does it profit you to gain the entire world? Oh one name men of the world all Ga Ga for the very same thing. So singular. So detached from all that keeps the rest of us alive. 

Sour grapes? You say. Well, I can't know. I don't know. I know that the plot of my own life interests me, and that it remains almost entirely unpredictable. And I'm nobody's slave.

Cycling down toward the end of the book, I find myself feeling hope and despair both. The hope, of course, is the loss of the feeling of inevitability toward the end of history. We've been here before. Perhaps not to this scale, but the pattern is the same. And so the Trumpers fit into the longer sweep of history, and are no more (certainly not less) deluded than the rest of us who have been both mystified and taken in by the arrangements of our modern world. 

As have peoples eternally, we don't even recognize what we've lost, even in the face of extremes of lost liberty (properly so defined) and lost truths and an apology for democracy that could not be more forced, and grotesque for that. And so the despair is that it must always be this way, cycling toward and away from more communal and congenial forms of life, perhaps because the strains of any sort of living can always lead to dreams of something better.

And so I am left wondering what can be preserved? Could we who have inherited the roles of priests and nobles in our brave new world extrapolated from all mystery come down from on high to understand the misery of the masses of people who feel so pushed around? Could that even be what 'woke' could come to be? If we could ever even take the esoteric out of that term.

At least I have a model for our future. We will have titles and not proper names, and we will share these and be therefore less alone. The ego will dissolve as will the state, and we shall be once again a part of nature. Could there be anything more certain than that?

Well, spoiler alert, by the end of this book the authors make a pretty good case that it really is all about private property and its genetic connection to slavery. It's about money, and if agriculture is important, it's because cereal grains can be counted and stored and are fungible forms of edible energy. 

We are not so smart. Our cities are no more complex than the many which came before we could write history. In most ways, our cities are far simpler. We are constrained in our behaviors in ways that were never even imagined before. We actually believe it's all hardware/software and that we are somehow different from all of life because we are conscious. And our definition for consciousness - like any good conspiracy theory anywhere - is perfectly circular. A perfectly empty concept. And round we go, above the earth and under our waters and never even touching life. Just gawking at how boring it would be without us.

Oh Please!

And Thank You Graeber and Wengrow for this wonderful book. It has given me actual, tangible, scientific hope. I'd thought hope was gone, and I am very glad to be proven wrong!

An Ontology of Covid-19

We know it's real, and we know that it probably jumped the bat-human divide, and we know that it's our own immunological response which kills us. We must construct narratives, and they must be but some approximation of true. Truth, in the abstract, is but the old Platonic match of perceived pattern to ideal form. We now must move beyond that.

Far from one single truth, there are as many narratives as there are people in the world, past and present, and imagined future too. We have now been required (oh, passive cosmos, be not taxed) to match our narratives across the globe; to true them. 

Now in retrospect, it feels as though COVID was inevitable, and plenty of people are named for unheeded warnings (What really does go on inside Bill Gate's massive houses? We know what goes on inside his head because he tells us that his brain is a CPU.) 

The pandemic also takes place beside a host of other anxieties of our age. The most relevant linkage among all of them might be absence of trust. We don't really agree about who we want in charge, and how the machinery of power might work if we did agree. This is nothing but the struggle for the right narrative to take us forward.

We are in the final throes of an absurd belief that it is possible to understand everything by way of the scientific method, and to therefore, by agency, make everything alright. For sure, that is as crazy an assumption as are the various ones about some personal God. It's not so hard to imagine the vacuity of a world of perfect understanding. These are the preoccupations of all philosophers down through the ages. If perfect understanding is the end, then we are already finished.

We are confused just now about the differences between happiness and pleasure, when in fact and in deed the two have little to do with one another. Sure the wealthy can enjoy pleasures beyond our imagining, though it is quite apparent that there is nothing of fundamental happiness there. Still, one can endure indefinitely in a state of pleasure. 

Happiness becomes but a distant dream in the throes of addiction, and it's never the right time to go sober.

We can all agree that there is no such thing as a happiness machine. Pleasure machines abound, of course, and it would be trivial to invent an un-happiness machine. There is no cure for the challenges that nature will always pose. 

Happiness may inhere in simple homeostasis, and it may be fleeting. That is a physical fact of physical life.

Me, I find my happiness in the deferred pleasure of after death. No, I don't mean that kind of literal eternity. I mean that my self never did end at my skin, and my mind has always been distributed in the world around me. If happiness is a function only of what you can accomplish before you die, then I'd say you've already pushed happiness off to eternity. You only want pleasure.

The virus doesn't listen to no stongman, it listen to a lady. This is a test of the emergency social agency system. The strongman ain't no use. He talk to hisself and to his bros. They gonna get sick too.

I was young when I babysat Michael Harrington's children (no relation!). He was a good friend of the artist whose children I took care of in return for room and board and a little closet bunk bed in a loft near Washington Square Park. I was introduced to the notion of an artist's loft, art that is challenging, and fine food and wine. It has been my lame attempt at humor to remark that Harrington was an aficionado of fine wine. As though that revealed a contradiction. 

Still, it's hard not to find it a tad ironic, but then irony be my God. George Carlin be my priest. Science knew irony when its workings gave us the Bomb so quickly, and still it has nothing to say about love. Well let me tell you that I am the genius of emotion, and that is likely because I have some handicap in that regard. Sometimes it takes a blind man or an innocent to point out the obvious.

Now Michael Harrington is resurrected all over again. There have always been two Americas from the very start with the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, the slave states and the free. It seems to be how we are built. But we have now moved beyond even 'truths that are self-evident,' and can't share even the bedrock under our feet. Even the New Yorker from New York can not be trusted, if you trust the New York Times.

I cannot be resigned to Trump again, and yet I must be. Diseases are never eradicated, though they may be displaced. Bedrock truth will always be beyond us. That is how the world spins. Trump is but the pustule on the Nation. Popping him will do nothing but gross us out. Love him and we might be immunized. That is really hard to do. You'd have to give up on narrative truth altogether.

My body is a colony. It has a story. My asshole is far from my mouth, and sometimes I just have to jump in the nearby shower when the toilet paper doesn't cut it, or I run out. I live in a sea of memes, and I can't even handle a good story ark [sic]. My curves are all flat. As though that told the story of the virus. 

I read William S Burroughs as a kid; his Naked Lunch. I had no idea from drugs. I just knew that it described my real world. I only recently learned that he was descended from the wealth of typewriters And now I learn of Iceberg Slim, by way of this Chinese humorist who doesn't know irony, and then back to Bratton, who seems to, but maybe doesn't. And so how could I know that Iceberg Slim articulated the seventies, my formative years.

He was a pimp, and we are all the pimp's whores when our world is so constricted that we need some boss to lord over us with threats so that we do, for our sustenance, what he wants us to, just because his world is somewhat larger. We are all of us wage-slaves and dependent on the water pipes the sewer pipes the pipe dreams of our betters. Better bettors, though they may be.

Why, oh why did I decide to spend so much of my life swimming in sea of Chinese words? It doubles the cosmos that I'm not competent for. This Chinese dude was a technician for the broadcast industry in Beijing and he liked to write. The English version is so much less interesting. He knows how to write fairy-tales, and so do all of our leaders. It's what we need and want to hear. He's my age, but much funnier, and surely easier to read.

They have an entire tab in the Kindle store on Chinese Amazon for the Three Body Problem. Don't they have any other writers? I mean he's good, but not THAT good. He's a nuclear engineer, fer chrissakes. Dharma Bums across the universe. 

Trust is what's required for social agency. Otherwise we have strongman agency, at a time when we can only grab for truth, and when we read only on the surface. 

Half of us neither understand not believe in genetic truths. The virus is defined by genes and pools of genes. Easy to deny. You can't even see them. But there you go!

Science, among other things, is the language of trust.That trust is also broken.

Half of us trust only in what we want to hear. We stop at The Word. And why is it so nearly always halfway always. Can't we write a better story? Our homeostasis is always so ready to explode, held in check by mere balanced anarchy, loosed upon the world. 

Red and Blue, the primary hues, purple and green the story machine.

And yet we use our smartphones, buy our goods on Amazon, and generally know that cities are full of glass and stainless steel and fully automated underground trains, and high speed internet that works, and still half of us believe in creationism. This is just weird! Or is it just Occam's razor? We will do whatever you tell us to, Iceberg Slim.

History has been plagued with plagues, but this is the first time we really know what a virus is. That doesn't seem to have made a difference. Our behaviors haven't changed. Has science jumped the shark now too, Fonzarelli? 

Well, why is there news now about those nasty Chinese trying to steal our valuable intellectual property about vaccines? Shouldn't that be public domain? Do we really want someone to make money by fighting the virus? How can we even think in those kinds of incentives?

The good news and the bad news both is that we do share beliefs. In action, we believe in technology as what brings scientific understanding down to earth. In words, some of us believe in whatever the strong man has to say. But do we really think our high tech guns and shooter games are made by God? Ah, no, those get to be mankind's inventions. Right.

An accident or a rogue player might loose the nukes, and an earthquake could hit at any time - not only along the San Andreas, but farther north where the tsunami might be a lot worse, or inland. 

There are plenty of things we haven't prepared for, but we don't even really believe in agency at the social level. We believe in an invisible hand of capitalism, and we believe in some mystic crowd wisdom for democracy. But undergirding these is a culture of zero-sum gaming, and the politics of adversity borrowed from the adversarial justice we practice in the courtroom.

This all goes on behind the new overlays to our living, which have become so natural. The Stack, as Bratton would call them. The overlays are the overlords at least as much as the virus is. We believe (in?) the virus because we know what it can do. The Stack is as remote as God. We deny what it is doing.

We don't even know whether to thank the fates that so much of our lives had already moved online so that we could isolate without quite being cut off, or to curse them for shrinking the globe so much that we are truly all in the same boat now. Whatever the case, our response seems not much different from that during the flu that ended the First World War, or even the Plague that Daniel Defoe wrote about.

But surely this much is true: we are now one world and we can see what is happening all over. Except that the flood of imagery means we see nearly nothing other from what we want to see. That's how the media makes its messaging now. Is there even the remotest possibility to make sense through all the noise?

I wonder how we can remain so much as we were, given how fundamental we thought the changes have been. 

What is it that hasn't changed? What are we stuck on?

Now that we trade selfies globally, try to emulate the same superstars in looks, money, personality or whatever, or in the other direction to create our most authentic selfie self? What hasn't changed?

We have global time automatically adjusted for any relativistic warpage, linked to the multi-national global positional satellite orbiters. We are about to send a new generation of privatized astronauts out in the direction of those satellites. What is it that hasn't changed, I ask!? 

Well, death for one.

But really, what is a social animal? Do we, collectively, resemble more a beehive? A termite nest? A school of fish. A swarm of bird flu? The best antiseptic for this plague would be a wholesale wiping clean of those in power in these United States. Start with the Republicans, please! And so the question is, how did they get there? Why aren't the proper people in charge? Where are they hiding?

Another thing that clearly hasn't changed is that we believe that each of us individually is special. That's a nice thing too, like our personal God, Lord Jesus, wants us to know. And yet our new notions of how special we are seem highly mediated by our, well, media. Instead of a president, we have a narcissist in chief. I mean, he does channel us as we are, doesn't he?

We are glued to our screens just like Plato's denizens in the cave. So, we haven''t changed at all? We remain at a remove from reality, in our wombs with a view. Now we're stocking our caves with guns. Is this our return to frontier days?  Is there no other story to tell?

The trouble really is that we never quite stopped believing in Plato. We think we have ideas in our heads. We think only humans have them. And we think creativity is ours alone, too. Generating ideas is like getting something from nothing, as though there were no interactions with our media ahead of time. We don't believe in an uncarved block that feeds back as we work on it. We believe in spontaneous generation inside our empty heads. We don't even have a germ theory for consciousness. 

The screens we have are now the real screens - the Dao that can be spoken is the eternal Dao - and they've brought into being what we only thought before. There must be some screen inside our head. We still think that God is out there if only we get the pixels in alignment. Surely they will show us the ideal world as it was meant to be!

I have no license to think, nor certainly to write. I am a handyman. I have fixed some very big and complex things, and many of them remain fixed, though some were beyond my simple means to preserve. A school, a massive distributed computer network, houses, parts of houses, a boat, cars and cycles. I am emotionally attached to my tools, and when I sharpen them, I am attached to the sharpeners. It is like a caress. It makes me happy.

Now, I've given most of them away. I make do.

I maintain that absent belief in God, there is no sense of irony. I mean this in the most ironic way! I've proven this to my own satisfaction by asking an expert in China, where the plague was caused by a routine pun, which got turned into food as medicine. The bat, after all, is an auspicious "sign" in so many ways in Chinese, so why wouldn't they eat it? They have no sense of irony. They only laugh at puns. 

The selfie stick was invented in China, or at least found mass appeal there. The irony is that so was the software which will transform your selfie into something much closer to the ideal look for a black-haired Chinese lass with almond eyes. The miracle is that it will still be recognized as you. Just a better, more ideal, you. Beats makeup!

The other becomes us!

I hold in my hand now the most wonderful tool of all. After my original iPhone 6 - which had as many lives as a cat - started taking me more time waiting than finding, I bought the new one. It's not so much the piece of jewelry the 6 was, but it has the same feeling in my hand. I bought a case as cheap insurance, and it wasn't perfect. I bought another and endured the wait for the Amazon delivery man, wondering if they would go on strike first. Just like Christmas, the new one was a disappointment. I need it to charge wirelessly, to stick to the magnet in my car, and to not add weight. I know I'm asking a lot. But I finally got it!

As if life were going back to normal. As if I even want it to.

I was disappointed that the new case from Canada was also made in China. I was only disappointed because I might have been overcharged. As though I wasn't already overcharged by Apple. 

One is black and military style. It feels confidence-inspiring, It was cheap - no bones about China! But it's magnetic disk interferes with the wireless charging The other feels almost slippery, but it works with the wireless. But when I plug in my cable so that I can stream to a bigger screen, its flaw is revealed. The video plug won't make it through the case.

No problem. I like to fix things right? I shaved the cable plug ever so slightly, and here I am having formed a new cathexis - that magical capitalistic transference of my self onto some object. I've had that so powerfully with motorcycles, bicycles, cars, boats, houses, and most of all with my tools. I look at them and feel warm in the recognition. And still, I've given them all away, or have allowed them to transmogrify. My self is in the process of contraction. Death be not proud.

Too bad the road is closed to my tiny house.

My old iPhone was drowned and replaced by one identical. Then it was traded for my daughter's, which had more memory. New battery, then full stop. Now I have an entirely new one, but it feels the same. Like the USS Constitution, which is the iconic Ship of Theseus, I don't want it to change. I was among the first to use a smartphone, and I would have kept my first one if it would have carried the burden. It was very cleverly designed - nothing like it since! It had a keyboard and a stylus!

I don't like the world of digital reality. I feel it accelerating our demise as a civilization. I shall continue to try to find the good in it. Plato doesn't have to be all wrong. Philosophy is not a zero-sum game.

The most exciting book that I'm reading just now is called The Spread Mind, which exposes the fallacy of our seemingly ingrained belief that we have a mental life apart from the life we experience as physical bodies out and about in the world. I find the thesis utterly convincing, while strangely hidebound in certain ways. The author, with whom I've communicated a bit, seems dogmatically bound to a kind of physical causality which is manifestly not true. 

I agree with him that cons-truing time or temperature as the metric for real destroys the real experience we have of time and temperature. Sure, we like to true our experience against the shared standard, but we know that there is also a deviant 'subjective' time which feels very different from the scientific 'true.' Indeed, meteorologists have had to invent the 'feels like' temperature to guide us about going outside. That takes into account things like wind and relative humidity, though it still replaces what we feel with a new external standard for what's real.

The thing is that Riccardo Manzotti complains about scientists with instruments getting in the way of our 'real' at the same time that he wants to do away with subjective experience altogether. I mean, I just simply find that ironic. Mainly because he won't entertain my modification of his theory. He's acting like the scientific authorities that he himself complains about, who would rob us of our authentic experience. 

But there is no subjective experience. Our experience is, literally, one with the objects of our perceptual experience. He and I agree about that.

Where I start parting company with Manzotti is when he makes the claim that it is our experience which defines the 'real' time. We experience change and we are embedded in a physical causal universe and therefore we experience the flow of time. 

I want to say first off that it is my emotions which first determine my sense of lived time, and second that my emotions are as much out there in the world as are my physical, perceptual, experiences are. I asked Riccardo if he had come across the work of Mark Solms, who locates consciousness in the affective regions of the brain stem. I think that question is what ended the communication, though I can't be sure. I probably just sounded nuts. By definition, I always do! No, I'm not nuts. I just sound nuts because I'm not writing or talking like everyone else. And still I feel like I'm in good company.

According to Solms, emotion is the inception of agency. The survival value of acting as near instantly as possible in the face of recognized danger is patently obvious to me. That means acting thoughtlessly. Another way to put it is that we must act automatically, in almost the way that we breathe. We don't have that much room in our conscious mind, and so we use the shorthand of 'stored' memories of similar experiences, and match them up to successful actions. The relationship is felt, emotively. That's what emotion means, in my vocabulary.

Riccardo seems afraid of reifying Platonic ideals, and therefore dances around the existence of a lion in our minds which might help us to deal with the one just now in front of us. I don't see the need for any ideal form of a lion. I only see the need for the shorthand of generalization, which must have happened in the animal realm long before and apart from human consciousness. The brain must engage in a game of pattern matching, which would help it to put away perceptions according to category. Else what would a mind be for? What would be its survival value?

That's what pattern recognition does, and that's what narrative is. It's how we get by. The brain trues the world by fantastic approximation of reality. There is no truth, and numerical control is useless for lived life, no matter how wonderfully it might enhance our perception.

I know that I can find my memories in my lived environment, and especially in those things I made and in my tools. Traditional proponents of neurologically-based consciousness would take issue with my location of memory in things outside me, but Manzotti would not. If our senses are stopped, we hallucinate. Of course I must exist in and with some world apart from me.

As I drift through the landscape, it's pretty clear what's present and what's immediately past. The past quickly merges with the imagined future for vagueness, and then sometimes there's an emotive charge and you might have some enduring image. It's not hard to conceptualize memory as just this preservation from the flow past 'present' into the less urgent past (and future). I see no need to think of memories somehow 'contained' in or by the brain, and have an easier time now just to imagine actual direct perception (no internal images) and a sort of quick falling off of the aftereffects due to variable attenuation, punctuated by a moderate number of "permanentized" impressions kept running in a nearly endless loop.

This strikes me as the great evolutionary value of a complex brain; first, the ability of the organism to project a wise and complex course of action, and second with the outering of words, to allow engagement with other organisms for the purpose of learning, social organizing, and long-range planning. Written words may be memorable in the same way landscapes are.

I look at the world and I find things to be familiar. I find familiar things. That is what generalization means in this context. If you have a proper name, and I know you, then there is only one of you. If you are a type, well then I generalize. This happened long before naming. Reptiles do it. Some things they bite, and some they run away from. Some they screw. (I don't know much about reptiles, but I'm still pretty confident to this extent)

Our sense of what is present in what Manzotti calls the spread NOW, is those perceptual objects that we can interact with. I would go further and locate the now among those perceptual objects on which we can act. It is our ability to act which informs our sense of time, and not just our ability to interact as thoughtless percepts. He seems to want the chicken/egg question about agency to be left open, while I want to preserve some of my own.

It doesn't seem a stretch to locate pleasure in homeostatic motion, and perhaps to locate happiness in a sense of agency about such motion. To be in control and to be surrounded by loved ones does seem to constitute happiness. Well, that plus being able to sit around a mesmerizing fire, sipping wine, perhaps, and smoking s cigar.

In just the sense that my future is constrained, I can know the future in a way similar to how I can know the past. I project onto it a whole host of generalizations to locate where my degrees of freedom lie. If I'm in a building and I have to get out, I'll have to go through the door, unless the catastrophe which meant my exit opens up a wall. If it does and if it's safe I'll take it!

This is no different from the 'reverse' causation of the double slit experiment in particle physics. I disagree with Riccardo Manzotti that time is not a physical dimension like all the others. All of our behaviors are conditioned by realistically available futures. Without agency, evolution goes nowhere and is like the world Riccardo imagines where time stands still. He is right that there would then be nothing; that such a state is not even conceivable. 

For photons, the double slit represents a timeless relation. Manzotti denies relations as real. He's wrong about that. I think it's also wrong to consider quantum entanglement to be about information. It's really about identity. The scale of separation in quantum entanglement just indicates something about the perceptual object. Information relates to perceptual relations between objects.

In my quirky cosmos, emotional relations are less about information and more about timeless matching as a felt prognostication.

Manzotti seems to miss that boundaries between objects are always fractal. Causation becomes predictable only when objects are rather large in time and space. At the scale of our perception without the enhancement of numerically calibrated instruments, predictions are highly reliable. We feel safe much of the time, even while at the wheel of an automobile hurtling along the highway.

But even billiard balls are subject to the butterfly effect, beyond a certain trajectory. Physically linked levers are subject only to accident, or wear and tear for their reliability. Only a fool would push too hard on a rusty lever. Only a fool would play dice with life. But lived life is reliably predictable up to a point.

On the scale of social agency, meshed time and temperature seem to work. If we could but trust them, Google and Apple could end this pandemic almost instantly, provided that usage of their devices saturates our population to the level of herd immunity, which it probably does. And provided that enough people who have such devices would decide to do the right thing. 

This is what my good friend Benjamin H. Bratton would advocate. He won't correspond with me either. I gotta say it baffles me when the stars diss their most enthusiastic fans. It must be that just like Trump, you can't really disagree with them very much. Maybe being a star goes to your head somehow.

Well, who really would want to be in any position of influence in this fucked up world? Trump, that's who, and if we're honest with ourselves, he's only there because we sure as hell don't want the job. We're the ones asleep at the switch here, waiting for our lovely white lives to come back.

OK, here's the real ontology of COVID-19. The virus is money. If you have it, you don't need agency. You can buy your pleasure, even if you can't buy your happiness. The viral qualities of money were never evident before information technology. Once upon a time, money was used to exchange value, in much the way that the brain delays ("stores") perceptions. 

Our mythical narratives would have us believe that there is some relation to the value of a person according to how much money they might amass. Trump certainly believes that (His world is winners and losers - in that we agree. We disagree about the moral valence of being a winner in his terms). That's what the perverted version of  'work ethic' means. By "perverted," I just simply mean when we assert absence of work-ethic where racism is at work. Our economy has become a lottery, and young white males like it that way.

We have to find ways to trust our institutions again, we have to find ways to trust our neighbors (defined by Žižek as those who smell [bad]) and we have to find ways to trust even our enemies. If they demonstrate they can drive a bus and have self-interest in keeping the bus on the road, then we should let them drive the bus. China has demonstrated that it can drive the bus of Covid-19, and we should learn from them rather than to vilify them.

I mean please, this is a pretty mild catastrophe that nature has tossed us. It's a slow pitch, and we should figure out what to do. For trivial starters, how about a $2K universal basic monthly income for the duration. Yay Democrats! 

And if we don't want to institute universal healthcare (which would be so much cheaper than to keep the economy closed because of the chaotic ways that poor people have to access healthcare) we could at least mandate that nobody gets charged (I'm talking money, but you can leave the pun in if you will) in any way for Covid-related testing and illness. 

Ditto immigrants whether with or without papers. Do we really want people hiding from the law now instead of feeling protected by it? Do we want people ducking exposure (more puns) because they need to go to work? Are we nuts? The illegals have always been essential workers. What choice do they have? What choice do we have?

So yes, I don't see Covid-19 as some external menace. I see it as yet another natural challenge in the non-zero-sum game of evolution for our planet. These 'emergencies' will continue to escalate until we get a clue. That's just how the game works. 

Prayer won't help, and science won't help either so long as it's subject to the virus of money. How much trust should we have in science now that funding for research is motivated by profit? How much confidence should we have that the price is right when Wall Street money is deployed to destroy an industry in order to monopolize the business and ultimately set the price however they want. 

Walmart is established on that crime, as are, obviously, Uber, or Doordash. Instead of the public spending money on research that we really need, we now practice sugar daddy science.

Money wasn't viral before the Internet. Who even remembers that now? When big pharma couldn't advertise and neither did lawyers. Being able to afford shelter and rent with whatever lousy job you wanted to do was better than a universal basic income. I've never been happier than I was as a minimum wage bike mechanic! I had a very nice penthouse apartment, furnished with comfy things of my own making!

I do believe that we are at the end of Science as a way to know or to control our lived environment. I don't believe in social agency on the China model, and I've lost my faith in social agency on the model of the United States. But I still recognize the promise at our inception.

I think it's time to reinvent ourselves all over again. This will surely mean getting away from our various screens and engaging with the real real again, not the fake real of represented reality. As Manzotti says (I know, that's even more rude than to use his first name), we cannot have experience of a representation. We experience only the screen. Information defines only the interaction between our bodies and some distant object. It can't inform our minds. And yet we still act on it. 

Get me an alarm on my phone (for proximity to proximity to COVID-19 infection) and I will act. But not until you do too. I'm ready to come out and play. Covid-19 is a natural goad to social agency. We should thank the gods for it. Without it we would already be back to normal, which has long been the most dangerous way to be. Of course that's self-serving of me!

Covid-19 is pure information. It isn't even alive. Viruses have always been with us. They fuck with the plans. There is no plan for our minds, unless and until we start acting like robots. Which we did at about the same time that the robots started acting like people.

It's time to open our eyes and wake up. Hello World! I've been asleep at the switch. Sorry! Knowledge doesn't inhere in information (I love what you can do to mangle English!). Our brains don't store information. Our brains mediate familiarity and agency, and by means of consciousness, to promote the survival of our selfish genes. 

And once we had a written language to turn our words into durable objects for perception, we could think (Jaynes was almost correct). And once we could think we could share our thoughts. And once we started to share our thoughts and science took off, we started up an hyperbolic curve which can never be flattened. 

That sort of narrative is very exciting, but it doesn't end well.

We have to accept that there are limits to what we can know. These are limits in principle and not only practical limits. Our interaction with the cosmos is not only perceptual. It is conceptual and driven by emotion. This things are real and out in the world just the way that percepts are.

In order to go back to living, we have to let go of certain fantasies. We have to be in touch with the world as it actually is and not how we wish it were. There is no ideal world, no utopia, no final understanding. There is only growth and decay, and I am rooting for growth to the whole. Personal decay is always a done deal.

OK, so I have to get back to work. I sure do wish that I had ever learned to write a story. But I do know that if we cure the money virus, all the other ones will fall into line.

The Story is Over, Really

I woke up today to a kind of paranoia. I'm certain that I had plenty of company in that. I woke up today to this notice from Quora.com. It adverted to a book "by Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, from 1999, Unrestricted Warfare: China’s master plan to destroy America." Conspiracy theories are always plausible. They just hide their premise; in this case that China wants to destroy the U.S.

The original book is easy enough to find on Chinese Amazon. There is no such subtitle. As far as I can tell, it's in a line of books, including books on non-violent resistance and the overall obsolescence of war, which have been written for a long long time. Destructive weaponry is, of course, the least likely way to defeat the US. That doesn't mean that China set up this current mess just so that they could take over the world, even if it ends up that way.

The more interesting story is only beginning.

I don't believe for a second that China plotted anything to do with what's going on right now. Nor do I tend to agree with some on Fox News - the real fake news - that we should (as if we could) disentangle ourselves from China.

But the Quora post was bracing, somehow. It was a reminder about how increasingly unlikely it is becoming that we will ever return to the way it was before COVID 19.

I doubt the virus will kill us all, but the economy will have collapsed. For the moment, it does seem obvious that China will come out on top.

I'm glad that people like Benjamin H. Bratton try to understand what's going on, and continue to deploy their superior brainpower for the sake of good. But I don't believe for a second that their good sense will prevail. I doubt that they do either.

We are much more likely to be taken in by a feel-good story which requires that we do nothing. Oh wait. That's the story we've been living. The one that's over. The End.

As one lively comic noted, we insist on democracy in governance when we go to work for corporations which are run the way that Genghis Khan ran his armies.

Well, we are hardly insisting on democracy now, but it would be hard to believe that Bernie's prescriptions are sufficient anymore. That sort of socialism was a long dream for those of us well-read enough to know that the story we have been living couldn't end well. We never could believe that such policy would be voted in.

Now we exist in a state of exception, and most of us are only wondering what those in charge are going to do. Will they think of eminent domain over empty hotels and motels so that we have enough sick-wards. Will they commandeer the negative pressure isolation units that we have been calling RVs, like documented private ships in times of war? Will they finally begin to test all grocery and pharmacy and delivery/postal workers and provide public notice of where infected vectors touch?

Will they even do the simply obvious? Our scientific community understands stochastic sampling. Combined with protecting those who deliver essential services, this should be easier than knee-jerk setting up of drive through testing which quickly has to be shut down.

Could we possibly do worse than the upside-down manner in which teams are being set up now? Can't we please place an expert in charge? I mean someone who knows how to run a team to get the best results. You have to allow team members to speak truth to power. I have this on the highest authority.

Apparently, we don't even have enough testing capacity for any but hospital workers and the very sick to be tested. The rest of the world has done better, though there is no point to complain about that now, any more than there would be any point to berate myself for not selling of my meager stocks when I knew they were flying too high.

Our financial choices won't matter because I don't think that our familiar economy is ever coming back. For one thing, if it does, it will still never be prepared for states of exception. I don't think China is the case to follow, though. Of course their authoritarian government was prepared. Of course we don't wish to emulate them.

I have quit plenty of jobs when my boss wouldn't let me do my work, but wanted me to be subservient to their orders. I have had plenty of other jobs where the decisions were made at the level of the knowledge, and I found those satisfying. There was never any distinction in the nature of the work, or even how nice the boss was.

Given the openness of our networks and the freedom of our speech, it seems unthinkable that we can't find a way to ensure that decisions about this virus are made at the appropriate level. Our leaders don't have time and likely aren't qualified to monitor the media and spread the best ideas. Their organizational training seems to be contrary to our aspirations for our politics. The literal idiots are in charge.

Some workers these days are made to be robots. Their productivity is relentlessly surveilled, and rewards are for efficiency. In my personal experience, such jobs would include account inquiry servicing, insurance claims evaluation, fast food servicing, shipping (driving and delivery), along with many many more.

The division of learning has meant that I've never had to endure such jobs myself, or maybe it's just that I've aged out from that economy faster than it's been virally spread.

There is a different trend that could be as good as it could be bad. The new gig economy encourages contract workers to own their means of production again, and manage how they accomplish efficiency. Just now, it seems to be devolving toward slave labor and the undermining of established businesses. But that doesn't have to be the was it always stays. The leaders of such businesses have been something less than inspiring. We seem to be letting them get away with something. They're too damned young.

I just know that there are far better cooks and salespeople and delivery people and inquiry responders than the ones now treated so poorly by their overpaid managers working for massive Wall Street backed brand names.

Now might be the time to take back our lives and write our own stories. We have to start by putting sensible laws in place. None of us should be characterized by the surveilled behaviors of a slice of us we can't control.

Badges for the immunized - and the immune by virtue of recovery - wouldn't be a bad idea. They should not become permanent is all. The tech can help with that. The behaviors captured would be in the category of no-fault behaviors.

Now that they have dominated our economy by predatory methods backed by Wall Street speculation, the giants of Amazon, Walmart, Google, Microsoft and Apple, among many lesser gods, will do the right thing. That example will encourage the rest of us to take heart.

And then we need to reconstruct our government so that such predatory behemoths are never again allowed to appear. The destruction of creativity in the name of creative destruction has been unfathomable. We never took proper warning from the collapse of Wall Street back in 2008ish. It was not different from what is happening now.

The earlier collapse of our economy is framed similarly as an act of nature; something periodically inevitable if we wish for capitalism to work. But we never did ferret out the forces of evil represented within that system.

The evil was benign, in the sense that those perpetrating it must have largely talked themselves into feeling that what they were doing mattered only locally. From earth's perspective, the COVID 19 virus is benign as well.

Sure Daniel Defoe's Journal of the of the Plague Year might be as much a novel as true reporting. But it's still instructive to note how little has changed. Work for Amazon - cart off the dead bodies - until you can get your jobs back.

But it's different this time. The difference is that we are globally aware. The angels of our better nature are about to take flight. Even the obscenely rich know that the incentives are misaligned. That know that Wall Street needs tweaking. They know that massive socioeconomic divides will spell their own doom. They know that chief executives have to stand for something good and not just the short-term bottom line.

We are not yet the best America that we can be. But we cannot let this experiment fail.

I have to say that I find China to be a largely benign force. But they define themselves in recialist fashion, have largely closed borders, and don't have anything near the freedom of speech that we do.

Our trouble is that in net result, we don't actually speak. We drown out thought that matters, much of the time. I don't believe for a second that China suffers any absence of freedom of thought that's much different than ours is.

Consider this: On Chinese Amazon there has been a dedicated tab for the Three Body Problem for well over a year (likely much longer, but I haven't been paying that close attention). It's a fabulous book, and full of challenging thought (I haven't read the English translation). But what is going on with that? Can you even imagine one single author with such dominance here? Can you imagine a leader for life?

I hope not.

It's a Wonderful (Digital) Life (Style)

OK, so I'm going to come right out and say it. Stuff that everyone knows but is afraid to sound stupid saying. There's something evil about digital.

I don't kow if I mean that literally or figuratively, but then there's another binary distinction for you. I heard on the radio that those two words are prime examples of this new category for words, contranyms, (no way I was going to remember that word without looking it up!!) which are often used in a manner opposite to their, well, literally proper usage.

So, like, there was literally the world's largest fireworks display last night, except well how could I know, but they called it that! Anyhow, everyone understands or should understand that there's a distinction between a machine and a living thing. But when you pursue a formal distinciton, it's damned hard to pin one down. You get all bogged down in that art vs. nature stuff. Articficial vs. natural.  Created versus evolved.

The funny thing is - if you think it's funny now - that evil in practice has all shifted sides too. The evil ones now are the religionists, the ones who really really need to believe in digital, binary reality. As in men are men and women are women and the Word is literal and abortion is murder and the border is absolute between your country and mine and life and death and good touch and bad touch and all the rest.

Anti-creationists, without irony, try to "reverse engineer" the brain even while they insist that the brain was never engineered in the first place, because that would be just plain ridiculous even to contemplate. But the assumption is that the brain is, at it's root, a machine because what the hell did you think it was? Magic?

But machines, at root, if they work properly, don't do random except for flaws in them, and you generally don't want to build-in such flaws. Digital reality allows perfect machines to be built, but the trouble is that in order to work - building in some fault tolerance, which is nowise the same thing as flaws - they really have to work perfectly, as in, no random. Ever.

On or off is on or off and someone outside the machine has to make that decision (you can make fuzzy machines which use fuzzy logic more like my logic, but that's a digression without all that much interest here, trust me). Now, sure, lots of people understand that at the most basic reaches of "modern" (is it now "post-modern?" Are we there yet?) physics, there is no on or off up or down this or that until the probability function for propositional but not quite actual reality gets collapsed by an act of touch. Lot of people understand this.

But some of those very same people actually believe and have probably even concocted elaborate proofs to demonstrate that this makes no nevermind about the whole machine versus life thing.

Which is just nuts unless you want to include conjectural reality among the living. What will or might or would have happened were the probability function to collapse. Were to have collapsed. What has ever been and yet to come.

There is no conjecture with well-oiled machines. You set them in motion and they go where they were designed to go. (Unless they're as complex as the CERN supercollider and then you just hope and pray)

Some enterprising souls, much much smarter than I will ever be (I'm on the decline, don't worry) try to build in this quantum stuff to the state of the brain, to put it in touch as it were with the fundaments of the cosmos so that we can partake holographically and at a Star Trekkie kind of distance from those things with which we demonstrably interact to introduce a dose of random to the buggy machine inside our heads.

OK, cool, but that's a pretty roundabout way to resurrect the ol' ghost in the machine (which is a misuse of allusion, by the way). I don't want to digress too much, but I just love the way that old-world economists still think that business is about profit and loss in the here and now. The inside-the-tent corporate economists who so overpower the ones on our side have such fun seeding the MSM with snippets like "Amazon loses money on each Kindle book sale" while Amazon keeps building power in the form of market share which represents future earnings after the rest of the world has been wiped out which is a manner of incorporating conjectural reality with the stuff we think of as real, and in ways which might as well be equated with seeing actual ghosts, except that when it works, it's foolproof, like Walmart coming in and undermining by capital over-power any and all local business and you call that losing money? Loss leading?

I call it virtual reality, but I said I didn't want to digress. And I don't. But obviously if you own the future you control the cosmos and money hardly matters. Money is all here and now, and the funny thing is (or is it actually the proper use of the term "ironic"???) that this all puts the scientists qua scientists on the side of the religionists on the good v. evil continuum. Which I for one find rather funny.

Still, I'm not wanting to trash either of them. They're a lot smarter than I ever was (or ever shall be, but I've already exposed that about myself). Truly. I couldn't hold a candle to the least of them, and I'm including the well-educated religionsists. I'm not just talking scientists here. No, I'm not kidding. I don't want any of them, qua humans, to stop anything that they're doing.

I would, however, like to stop the machine. So, back to that.

It's not really necessary, you see, to find some fabulous and incredibly complex quantum machinery by which to link the stuff of our corporeal machine with the stuff with which we're out of (ahem, "literal") touch. Touch is mediated by particles and limited by the universal constant represented as the speed of light.

But prior to touch, as it were, there is emotional connection. Connection in the mind. Conceptual relations among actual things which have yet actually to touch. That's not terribly complicated and has the distinct advantage, written about, to be expressible in pretty natural language. No math. No complicated constructs only comprehensible by uber mathemeticians on the edge of utter insanity in their thinking. Percept/concept motion/emotion, touch/feeling, (perception/conception). Trivial,. really.

I know, touchy feely and the words all shift shape literal to figurative, conjectural to actual because your feeling is my reality or vice versa since we don't, technically speaking, any of us occupy the same time and space. Well, we couldn't actually unless you were right inside my skin and I don't want much of a crowd in here.

But it is true that on the quantum level there is no shortage of actual perceptual touch to collapse those (im)probability functions into actual actuality, but it's all each to other and not yet to me the one who wants to know. Still, they do conspire upward, as it were until, I actually can tell, in aggregate, what I"m about to like and what I'm going to run from. Even before I actually confront it, in the case of telegraphed signals like a boxer might make.

Oh worra worra, I have to go ride a float in the Labor Day parade alongside Mother Jones, and thus I'll have no time to finish this off. But you can do that for yourself if you try. You don't have to try very hard. It's not like Fermat's theorem or anything, where I write in the margins and then don't leave my proof behind. It's all in the words and they're all in black and white. Binary. But not evil  . . . .