So Are We the Disease, Then?

As I continue to worry this matter about the wisdom of Terraforming Earth, I may have at least located the crux of the matter, at least to my own satisfaction.

On the one hand, terraforming might mean that we would become Earth's master, and for our own very anthropocentric reasons. It's hard to see how that isn't what it would mean, no matter what Bratton says about a new Copernican turn.

On the other hand, to conceive of us as a disease that is destroying Earth both romanticizes Earth as Nature in a way to valorize all the benighted beliefs that Benjamin H. Bratton derides, and undoes, once again, our most recent and necessary Copernican turn away from man at the center. Man the despoiler.

I, frankly, see no alternative but to reaffirm my deeply held and perhaps nearly religious belief in the God of Irony. At the core of Bratton's line of thinking is not just conundrum but paradox, pure and simple.

The only way out of paradox is, perhaps, higher generality. Zeno's paradox is resolved by the destabilizing of position in quantum interpretations of reality, for instance. The only way out of paradox is to find the fault in our misuse of language. Language was never meant for truth, it was meant for conspiracy. (of course, language doesn't "mean." We do that, sometimes.)

If we conceive of ourselves as a pox on the planet, then to cure ourselves would surely mean to destroy the planet. If we are but a part of the planetary evolution, then why should we do anything at all apart from what we're already doing?

The trick being, of course, not to see ourselves as one-dimensional. We are neither disease nor anti-disease. We are both at once. The change from one to the other is the very essence of a change in moral stance, and not a change in essence.

I struggled really hard with these matters quite a while ago reading Stephen Jay Gould (R.I.P.) It's a Wonderful Life. I gather that argument remains rather radically unfinished? Not sure. I have no easy way to find out if notions of human cognition as a kind of apex to evolutionary processes is back in vogue or not.

How could I? Research has all moved to the 'Net, in part because the library can't be current enough. The Net is so current that it's a perpetual game of whack-a-mole. Nothing stays still long enough to hold in memory. The news changes minute to minute against algorithms used to predict what you, the hapless reader, might be interested in.

The solution is to take a longer view and to stand back from the moment. To turn away from any and all awareness of perpetual emergency. But . . .

Well, I've noted here that when I once did actually drown, I experienced what might have been the life-changing apprehension of my entire life being present to me in that instant. Eternity in the moment. Does this happen during waterboarding? Not likely, when it's being done to you, any more than you might tickle your attacker away. But genuine emergency does have its salutary function, perhaps.

I continue to frame the big questions morally rather than technically, which surely removes me from the celebrated realm of hard-core materialism that Bratton seems to maintain is all there is that worthy of being celebrated as a realm at all.

And yet I think that sort of materialism straight-jackets science in the same way that evolutionists once imposed their cultural prejudices upon the Burgess Shale that Stephen Jay Gould wrote about; their prejudice being that mankind was some sort of inevitable apex creature resulting from the wonderful processes of evolution. The Burgess gestalt was turned into the Burgess progression.

Now, has Gould's affirmation of the primacy of accident itself been unseated? I'm asking (because I'm not sure I have the energy to find out). I seem to remember that Gould didn't think we were anything all that special. His was the most forceful Copernican re-turn I've ever heard, certainly including Bratton's.

What would the vaccine against man as coronavirus-grade terminal disease look like? Here, I do maintain that the "good" would be the continuance of evolution, not the continuance of mankind as mankind is now behaving (I think, but am not certain, that Bratton and I would agree on that). So the project is not to cure "us" but to cure the planet of "us" as disease. A kind of re-subsumption of mankind's fortunes within the greater good, as it were. And re-subsumption of mankind in the evolutionary processes.

Surely the vaccine would stop the automated processes of economic growth based on oil extraction. Surely, therefore, it would re-engage control over our ways of living by man as moral creature rather than as apex-predator.

We habitually think of morality as an [artificial] imposition on nature, perhaps equated with something as now-seeming pernicious as God-given dominion. And yet morality may remain the most likely frame for how our behaviors must change if we (and the planet, perhaps) are not to remain but a footnote to more cosmic processes of life's evolution.

Or, to ask another way, does life even matter? If so, might morality matter even more than the amoral processes which are all that "science" is allowed to deal with? Or must the province of morality truly be ceded to those creepy, mean and nasty religionists? Why?

If human life taken as a whole has already become an autonomous non-thinking non-feeling amoral force (as it does seem to have become) then the conclusion is already foregone. We are already dead, but then we will never have been anything but the moral equivalent of a mindless germ-like disease process.

While praying to some God or other (I know that phrasing makes no sense) would seem like not only the best but the only thing to do, aren't there ways in which even that could be construed as a positive harm? To the extent that it turns away from what is real (not materialistically real, just plain real)?

We are responsible for this mess, brother Job! God didn't put us here. We did.

Once upon a time while living aboard a sailboat through the dead of a very cold winter, it was revealed to me - this is true and you can read all about it here, though you have to start at the end/bottom if you want to shart at the beginning - it was revealed to me that cosmically, evolution has always been a morality tale.

I'm kidding when I say "revealed." It took a lot of work, actually, and that work is on ongoing and almost utterly unrewarding (well, except for the incredible and unending intrinsic rewards, of course).

My work was via excursions through classical Chinese literature and relativistic and quantum physics. Alas, but I am no expert in either of those fields, though statistically speaking I am almost certain to know and understand more than you do.

I continue to try and stay clear of what I don't or can't understand, which also entails not falling prey to claims that I can't understand when those are made by "experts" who think they already do. That is a tough tightrope to walk.

Along the way to becoming expert in anything, one must accept institutional identifications which - as I would maintain - limit as much as expand one's understanding. I am trying to make that a very modest statement.

I say nothing about my own claims to truthiness, especially since, as far as I can tell, I continue in abject failure to convince a single other soul, boo hoo. But discourse groups become hermetic as they become arcane - meaning simply that they are closed to outsiders and that initiation is onerous and likely impossible within a single life-time where you can only make it as a sub-specialist and trust in the greater whole. Of the discipline? Of the family? Of the nation?

The turn from Man as Chosen to man as disease is recent. As is the turn that Bratton adverts to from future as something to look forward to, to future as something to prevent. The morality tale is about hubris, of course. I am not so optimistic, clearly, as Benjamin H. Bratton is, at least to the extent that his apparent optimism seems to depend on a more sanguine estimation of the innate goodness of man the animal than I can form based on my (mediated) observations.

Or then again, wait. My estimations of the animal are much more sanguine than his are when I limit myself to face-to-face interactions with my fellow man. Could it be? I don't know. I really don't.

But here are a few things that I do know: As individuals, we feel helpless to do anything about whatever it is that we see going wrong. So we abdicate any moral obligation beyond the local and face-to-face. Sometimes we even think that it would be immoral to act beyond that level, apart from registering opinion.

The main thing is that we can't agree about what is going wrong.

Of course, there is a small subset among us who are excited enough by the whiz-bang of "modern" life that they don't think anything is going wrong. They must have a kind of faith (that I can't have) in the innate goodness of technology's manifest destiny. I confess that I find such a stance irresponsible in the extreme, and remain happy that Bratton joins me on the responsible side (the side of the good, of course) insofar as I am capable to read him.

To the extent that materialism forces me to see myself as an individual above all else, I can't be a materialist. I'm hoping that makes me more and not less of a realist. It certainly doesn't make me a spiritualist.

Materialism falls out from the scientific method. As pattern-recognizing creatures, we have managed by way of linguistic conspiracy to form theoretical structures - conjectures really - about how the world works. These can be tested experimentally and thereby validated. In Bratton's cosmos, the technology invented as a result of newly developed materialistic understanding comes along with new fields for accident. In his mentor (in these matters) Paul Virilio's terms, 'the possibility for derailment comes along with the railroad.' (Yet another media theorist?)

Projection is the work of the cognitive portion of our conscious minds. It's how we stay alive. We impose simplified structures on the stuff of raw perception - call those simplified structures Platonic narrative forms, if you will - and then calculate the extent to which they predict what might happen. We get in trouble when the conscious mind overrides the decision handed up by the preconscious mind. The preconscious mind sorts far more input than our conscious mind could possibly "contain." Likely more than any computer or network could, for at least a while yet.

But what I'm calling the "preconscious" mind here is actually maidservant to the seat of consciousness, which is the seat of affect, which is how we feel about our prospects (for sex, survival, peace . . .) according to pattern assessments returned there from the cognitive "portion" of the mind. Affect triggers the decisions and is felt, by consciousness then, as free will. The preconscious mind is just an input processor which automates our responses when matches are solid. The conscious mind does the work when autonomous resolutions have not been canned yet. The conscious mind is the robot of our wants.

As I have said elsewhere, including in my therapist's office once, the unconscious and fate are technically indistinguishable. The greater field for accident in our daily lived lives is not in the statistically small (as proven by our continued living) error between the conjecture and the actual in the Platonic narrative projections (I LOVE this convoluted usage of both Plato's cave, along with his ideas to which we must uncover - reveal - access by means of dialog) that we project along our futures in order to survive. The greater field for accident is in the affective tenor. We can apparently override our feelings by our ideals, false those these may be, to disastrous result for conscious me!

Or in other words once we start to trust our gear more than we trust ourselves, we are dead. Once the mechanism - the technology, including the tech in our heads - becomes autonomous we would only reasonably relinquish control if we trust that its autonomous behavior leaves us in a preferable affective state. There's a lower bar for a chair than for a self-driving car. Taking control of my own breathing would leave me in a very distressed state, unless, of course, I was SCUBA diving and wanting to conserve air.

Our gear can only be a projection of our conscious needs and desires until we have locked out from consciousness the sensory inputs that those depend on, or transform them into a conscious sensation the way I do while breathing through a regulator.

And you thought that the accelerated conscious control required to stay alive while driving had no use other than to make petro-addicted life more comfortable and fun?? No, please, it is a consciousness-raising experience.

Autonomous cars are not just kill-joy, they are literal death (of the planet, I mean) by turning us into a pure disease process. They give us more time on-screen. The important difference from trains and trolleys is not the potential for global warming, though that IS great. The difference is that at  least the possibility for socializing exists on the trolley. Of course, we are too afraid to exercise that possibility just now.

There will be nothing to living left but to enjoy the fruits of our accurate projections into our futures. We will have escaped the pressures of evolution, which means that we will have escaped life, which means that we will have become cosmically irrelevant which means that we will be dead.

I did recently take a weak stab at a typology for technology, trying to find a cogent way to distinguish information and communications technologies from other, perhaps older, sorts. Now I think that an important criterion for classification regards whether and how technology directly harnesses enthusiasms.

Sitting down and relaxing is a homeostatic pleasure. Racing cars is a lust. Sitting down and driving a car seems more like an addiction.

The homeostasis that our affect-centered mind demands of the results of cognitive processes includes cravings, like hunger and sex, which while they seem to nudge us away from homeostasis are in fact necessary to survival as a species. The discomfort of hunger leads to the pleasure of eating. The uncertainty of cognitive dissonance leads to the work of learning. Survival depends on these things.

Many of us have puzzled about the progression of automobiles from functional to sexy. The connection, of course, is about what sells. What attracts us with promise of consummatory pleasure in the same way that a gorgeous (whatever that might mean) human body might.

Now that cars have become fashion accessories, even to the extent of announcing our politics, after always having announced our socioeconomic desirability for mating - A Tesla is more like an iPhone than like a model T - I think we're avoiding the obvious about what makes information technology different.

A nice chair promises comfort. Now our very phones - that we have with us and before us nearly all the time - provide us with a zillion ways to be tempted. In the face of such temptation and short the means to fulfill it, we can always turn to heroin or its surrogates, and many do.

The main accomplishment of information technology has been to provide a way for the scientific methodology, which is itself a distillation of the methods of the cognitive portions of our brain, to predict our purchasing behaviors in ways to enrich media titans, large and small.

Along the way, our economic system has magically become a zero-sum game, since those with the money either destroy jobs or reduce them to gigs, where once again, in a kind of nightmare almost retro inversion of Marx, you have to provide your own means for production. It's the pipeline that matters - the pathways to eyeballs - and as McKenzie Wark would have us understand, the Vectorialists are the new Capitalists, and it's worse! We are becoming serfs on the wrong side of an information divide, unless we are soul-less coders on the inside.

No, we cannot design for survival. Plastics, Benjamin, plastics. A real builder doesn't want a material that never pushes back. A real maker wants an uncarved block which contains its own designing reveals. The artist is never an engineer. We don't need a plan. We need a process that's fun to drive!

In our perpetual naivete, we once did think that the Internet would return power to the people. We simply didn't have enough imagination to foresee the way that it would harness the lowest parts of humanity toward empire. We are now a conspiracy of dunces, led by a clown, and we have ourselves to blame for falling asleep at the switch.

Realistically, we will never complete the standard model of physics. Meaning simply that we will never have a completed understanding of the workings of the cosmos. That seems obvious to me. It has been for as long as I can remember. I guess that makes me outcast. But really? Isn't everyone just acting as though we will, just like the Republicans are acting as though Trump is innocent. Because it's the party line which lets scientists among us continue with their research without having to worry about life more locally? (Don't forget how tied the Democrats are to Silicon Valley)

I'm not sure that I see the moral distinction between climate change denial and perpetual avoidance of responsibility by virtue of a belief in the ameliorative power of "progress."

What will be less obvious to you (meaning only that it is equally obvious to me) is that we already have enough knowledge to understand why it is so, that science cannot lead to universal and full understanding. We resist that particular knowledge - knowledge of knowledge's limits - not because it would destroy what we already do know and hold so dear (it wouldn't). But that it would make us responsible. That's the thing we want least of all (as well as, not incidentally, the thing that Bratton is urging upon us).

As an individual, I am an embodiment of mind. As mind, I have a center, which as the word is meant in Chinese, means a center of both emotion and cognition. The (classical) Chinese cosmos is in no way Platonic, and so cognitive mental constructs have no ontological (epistemological? phenomenological? I can never keep the -ologies straight) priority. There are no forms that are antecedent to or apart from mind's conception of them. There is no eternal abstraction.

In any case, emotion is as much a part of my center as is cognition, and there is no moral action without both. If mind is an aspect of cosmos, which I do believe that it is, then perhaps God can be conceived as its center. Not the man-made God of contemporary Christianity or Islam, of course, but the nameless God. The God whose motive is love.

But I am also no individual. I am not apart from the rest of creation to which I am not connected by my understanding alone. I am physically and bodily no more an individual than is the biota within my body owned by me. As McKenzie Wark just tweeted, my body is a spaceship for all forms of germs. I think she was feeling sick.

Spaceship earth is breaking out in a coronavirus fever. We have tried to box the wild for our own pleasures, beyond any reasonable limits. Of course the virus must cross that boundary. In an artificial sense, it's only natural!

Apart from all that is alive in the cosmos, I am and ever have been nothing. I am but a surfacing bubble from an ocean of aliveness. This is what I mean by Irony. We have to accept it both ways. As radical individuals we are indeed a pox upon the planet, but we are also emotive moral hearts, which the cosmos lacks without us.

As part of a communal whole, the planet will thrive along with that remainder among us who will seed the subsequent bread (I just put bread in the oven, so that makes a handy metaphor). Life requires the leaven of moral consciousness.

Neither apex creature, nor inessential, mankind matters in the cosmos to the extent that we maintain a centered xin (heart/mind) which is, of course, redundant. Aligning with cosmos is not the same as conquest of it by means of understanding.

Let us pray, Virginia, let us pray.

Sovereignty

I'm still trying to understand Benjamin H. Bratton. It's good exercise, and makes reading Chinese feel like a stroll in the park. I think I've finally pinpointed what might be my disagreement with him. He tortures distinctions between "natural" and "artificial" in ways that I can't follow. I agree with him that the distinctions are themselves artificial, but in my case the fallacy is more like the mind/body distinction fallacy than it is one between agency and not.

He tries to understand the artificial as being evident by a regularity of pattern which distinguished that which is created by agency from that which is evolved more naturally. But I think he slides over the matter of intentionality when he tries to pull global warming into the side of notable artificial constructs.

Sure, it's clear that the identification of global warming as a man-made problem is itself the result of man-made instrumentation to identify the phenomena. The phenomenon of global warming is surely an artificial construct in that sense. But it's not clear to me that such instrumentation can distinguish between the "nature" of global warming and the nature of any kind of weather or climate disturbance, whether caused by man or by an asteroid hit or by volcanic eruption.

Sliding over intentionality as the prior "cause" for agency already loses the entire red team.

I'm reasonably sovereign over my body, though some combination of chance and bad habits may turn it against "me," perhaps in the form of disease. Disease is surely a natural process, but if I'm a smoker then my agency in my own disease is evident enough, right? But the disease doesn't become artificial thereby. And I may wish I didn't smoke, even as I do.

I've also discovered that I like to be sovereign in my own household. I don't mind apartment rental too much, but I sure wouldn't enjoy being imprisoned. Perhaps family is defined by the extent to which it is OK to share with others those things I've built and purchased. Love is the bond. There are close friends who don't treat things as I'd prefer, and lacking sanction authority over them I find it hard to have them inside my household.

They must act as guests, of course, and the time-frame for that must be strictly limited. Stretch it out and guest might become slave. Shared ownership is a recipe for internecine warfare. Trust me, I know this.

It's at the level of the state that sovereignty is now invaded by a disease process. My own nation has started to appear evil to me. I've always understood the dark side, but now we seem positively defined by darkness. We seem a force for evil on the planet. I believe that the cause for this is nothing more complicated than the infection of the body politic by the life-force of money. And those who control the money are in charge.

Their belief structure is no more complex than Trump's. The more I have the better and there is no meaning to life so therefore there is no meaning beyond my own life.Weird that religious Christians have glommed onto this. But then my God is Irony, so it's not so weird that Christians believe in man-made law now.

Of course those with the money have always been in charge, but the structure of our national mythology kept it believable and kept the nation as symbolic entity worthy of my belonging and even my willingness to die, if not to kill, for that sovereign; almost to the extent that I would die and probably kill for my family.

And so, of course and "naturally" we are concerned with the rights of women within family and workplace to call out betrayals and crimes against them. We are concerned about the rights of non-gender binary types and transgendered and homosexuals. This is all even while our workplaces become more and more like tyrannical organizations, especially as they get larger.

These are all natural developments, and I would agree with Bratton that we should and must do everything within our power to redress the wrongs of our carelessness and irresponsibility which has allowed such criminal discrimination and attempts at autocracy at the level of the state to bring down "my" nation by such disease.

To stop smoking at that level must surely be a wilful act. Such will is the natural response of an embattled sovereign. The road to the good health of the sovereign is not so complicated as we would make it out to be.

Sure there may be unintended consequences to medical interventions, especially as these are mediated by money. But that doesn't  mean that our technologically mediated ability to diagnose and treat disease is itself any more artificial than what our immune system does on our behalf.

It's interesting to me that the newly resurgent "corona" virus is blamed on a transgression from wild to caged in the "wild animal" markets of WuHan, China.  Perhaps that truly is the divide that vegans should be concerned with. Not hunting. Not raising the unnatural domesticated animals for human consumption. But caging wild things.

It's in the zeitgeist, of course, for young Harry and Meghan to feel imprisoned by the palace. They want to feel human, too, and the institution of the monarchy is as anachronistic as bleeding cures for consumption.

I guess I'm a capitalist at scale (meaning small and local) and a socialist at the scale of national sovereignty. I'd really like to have our democracy back, according to a renewed mythology that I can believe in.

Wouldn't we all?

My Home Town

". . .Buffalo, you're my home."

I think I heard that dubbed into the "Dirty Water" song once, in place of Boston. The lake died on my watch, and that shaped everything about my future. I kept diving underneath Lake Erie's waters and sailing on their surface until I'd blown my youth. Now while Australia is taking the brunt, I am forming a vision of a Buffalo that everyone will be escaping toward. Here's how it goes:

In the background of this piece of speculative fiction are some items of actual fact:

• Anonymity is gone by virtue of facial recognition.
• Real ID is required to board planes and, perhaps soon, trains and busses.
• People who can't afford to - or don't want to - live in gated communities now guard their houses by various sorts of Ring-type surveillance devices - cameras on doorbells, that sort of thing.
• Police have access to what is recorded by those devices.
• Amazon wants to be allowed inside our doors (car and house) so that doorstep thieves can be stopped.
• Autonomous cars are right around the bend. They would already work well within a defined perimeter, along well-defined routes. Especially if there were no human-driven cars.
• Our current oil-based economy is not sustainable. This includes transport, heating/cooling, and food production among other things like plastic production.
• Our current privatized credit-score system is perfectly poised to be transformed into a Chinese-style social-credit system (Hmmmm).
• Block-chain is fully ready for deployment at any level of sovereignty. from self through city to state.

Those should be enough to get us started.

Buffalo will declare a car perimeter, near the edge of which parking may be free. Zip-type cars will be available for treks into the wild, and rich people can keep their cars there if they want. Perhaps parking will be available within the perimeter for a while, but for its true cost, which will creep rapidly upward as parking spaces are reclaimed for residences according to the iron law of highest and best use.

Inside the perimeter will be various forms of mass transit, including autonomous public passenger cars for those who wish to afford door-to-door or (autonomous) bus-to-door or private service. All will reflect the true, carbon-adjusted and pollution-adjusted (meaning inclusive of all externalities now foisted off on "the public") cost/price.

(OK, so here's the only really controversial part) All land within the city will be appropriated by eminent domain on behalf of the city and immediately leased back to current title holders according to true infrastructure cost per square foot. Lease costs will be uniform throughout the city based on square footage. 

The cost of title purchases will be financed by a one-time wealth tax calculated against the market value of land at some algorithmically determined frozen point in the past, before this scheme seemed real. The wealth tax should be mildly progressive based on length of ownership such that long-term title holders would realize a greater portion of the city-funded windfall than recent flippers. The tax would be weighted against non-real-estate wealth, to ensure that the wealthy will preserve their wealth and the poor will not lose it all. A slider from real-estate wealth to other.

Rent for those who can't afford ownership will be controlled according to proportion of land use (e.g., each floor of a four-story building would be assessed 1/4 the cost of the land-footprint lease) combined with amortized value of improvements.

Air-rights and underground rights could not be bought and sold (except perhaps by the municipal government).

Building codes will require carbon-negative energy consumption and materials production for all new construction. 

Power generation and transmission will be a public utility, and as such a partial source of public revenue.

Power as provided within the perimeter of the city will be carbon-negative. Burlington, Vermont has already achieved carbon-neutrality, based on heavy reliance on biomass. Carbon negativity would be determined by provenance of power generation along with carbon/sequestration-credit trading.

Waste will not be exported beyond the city perimeter except for positive carbon-weighted revenue. As such plastics could not be exported unless and until they become more valuable as waste than their purchase price (once peak oil is more tangibly traversed). 

In the short term, single use plastics would be prohibited within city limits. Bulk non-packaged food would be encouraged by the overall tax/price structure.

Electrically powered transport vehicles (road or rail) will be allowed to penetrate the city perimeter along well-defined and limited routes which connect to distribution terminals inside the city.

Apart from cars, there will be no barrier or obstruction to entry by pedestrians, bicyclists, and Class1 eBikes etc. 

Facial recording will be accomplished prior to entry through all locked doorways. Such recording is considered public surveillance, encrypted until identity is requested, perhaps by police, and decrypted by court order. Disguised faces will be denied entry.

Public disguises would be welcome or even encouraged (Hmmmm).

Tax revenue will be based largely on power consumption and land leases. Power consumption (not only the power generated by the public utility), is assessed against all transactions which entail power use, including all tangible goods, food, and more. Taxes should be calibrated such that long-distance shipped factory processed foods would be more expensive than locally grown organic foods.

Farming within the city permeter would be encouraged by remaining untaxed and lease-free. Thus rooftop farming would not entail a land-lease expense. Successful farming would be assessed as land improvement for transactional purposes, at a rate commensurate with (carbon adjusted) housing construction costs.

Electronic transactions will be taxed indirectly upon receipt of goods by transport hubs within the city, according to manifests of embarkation/debarkation.

Goods "imported" personally through the transit perimeter at city limits which are not carried on the person would be transhipped to transit hubs, or to one's domicile (temporary or permanent) if provenance is established at entry. Provenance will be electronically recorded upon exit or purchase outside the city permeter. Barter would be taxed upon entry.

Providers of connectivity/communications services will be assessed for tax purposes according to power consumption within the city perimeter. 

Use of public transit will require face-scan, and payment will be processed according to successful identification or by cash. Anonymous out of town visitors will either pay cash or have some form of Real ID attached to their credit. Admission to public transit is not restricted.

All citizens of Buffalo will own (protected by blockchain) a set of data held in trust by municipal authorities. That data trust will include all banking, credit, voting, and medical data for each citizen. There will be no back-door access by anyone inside or outside of government at any level. Banking regulations may need to be adjusted. Access would be granted at the point of transaction with such entities as doctors offices, hospitals, retail purchase, cash retrieval, door entry, voting and so forth.

See how I slipped that matter of door entry in there? Sly of me, eh? Mechanical keys will be superfluous, of course. Public transit doesn't have doors as such, just paywalls.

Speaking of keys, surveillance of any sort will be encrypted to prevent access by any entity inside or outside the government without court order. Surveillance is only allowed in "public" spaces, in which case the information is held in public trust, with no presumption of privacy for anyone. Identifiable individuals as revealed by court-ordered decryption cannot be publicly identified without a subpoena. 

Entry of firearms or firearm analogs will be prohibited except according to the following provisions:

• The gun must be identified by a machine readable RFID or equivalent technology.
• The gun must be locked against use by any but its owner (perhaps by facial recognition by a paired iPhone-like device or something similar).
• Penalties for concealed carry of weapons not constructed according to the above restrictions shall be steep - tantamount to attempted murder.

Explosives are prohibited in any form. 

In my imagination, the city of Buffalo will become a preferred space for living by reasons of convenience, safety, cost of housing, and availability of great food (already there!).

Carbon-negative and pollution-negative industry should feel welcome there, also for reasons of low land (use) cost and low taxation.

Current non-profit and therefore tax exempt entities might be allowed lease-free occupation of existing structures, and might be afforded some sort of calibrated wealth tax reduction against the value of the deed buy-back by the city. Buffalo currently faces property-tax shortfalls from non-profit ownership itself premised on a larger population within city limits. Services now provided by hidden subsidy to suburbanites could be more fairly assessed by the new tax structure.

Ready to move in?? I am. I mean I was. Will. Be ready.

Escape Velocity

There is a sort of competition going on in my mind, based mildly on conversation last night over a meal at a local and very accommodating Taqueria. Like me, those at the table were all involved in making a FIRST Robotics tournament go. So there was something of an overrepresentation of STEM types.

STEM types like to talk about things like when we will really accomplish escape velocity off planet earth in any meaningful way. Meaningful seems to be related to quantities of people - and stuff to support people - off planet. Limits to rocketry and rail guns are quickly on the table. I reminded folks about the space elevator and graphene, just to throw some rocket fuel onto the conversation.

Meanwhile, given that our current seeming ascendance on the planet is almost entirely grace the cosmic "gift" of fossil fuels, I have my own serious doubts that planetary escape will ever be other than an academic question. "When we reach a population of 20 billion . . ." was the start of one line of conjecture. Given our addiction to oil - you do the math - 20 billion ain't gonna happen. We will have squandered our gifts.

I think that having too much money often indicates fundamental issues with math. Well, at least if you take it from the sample of Trump, Musk and Branson, say. Off planet to Mars entails a lot more than a few thousand spaceships (not to mention what their creation and launch will do to accelerate meltdown more locally).

Anyhow, my interest turns to the more interesting question about how likely we are to resolve the on-planet issues of sustainability. Those prospects look about as dim as the prospects for populating Mars. The hard problem for STEM types too has almost nothing to do with math. Math is just a refuge from politics, love gone bad, and all the hard work of living as a moral creature while craving creature comforts.

We no longer really quite believe that democracy, in any form, can work. The prospect for our current president to follow the Xi-Putin line, by declaring or creating some emergency to indefinitely postpone the 2020 election, shows him doing that to be a lot more likely than for us collectively to either resolve our sustainability issues here on earth, or to escape the planet. The time lines just don't cross right.

It's bizarre really that we don't even know how to begin to address the low-hanging fruit of the right timeline to adjust; which is, of course, the political one. Politics reduces to money lately, and so really that's the part we have to address. It's Homo Economicus what's gone off the rails.

It goes like this: Most of us will sell at least a part of our soul for money. Those of us struggling to lead a morally good life would like to find some way to do well-enough while doing good. The trouble is that the workplace is, politically, most often one form or another of dictatorship. It doesn't hardly matter if that's because of tyranny in the org chart or in the boardroom or by proxy of stockholders. Bottom line is that there's no such thing as an economically viable business that's run in a truly democratic fashion.

So, we should start there, maybe. The soul equation. I think that's the real reason some people are against a minimum basic income provision. Letting people keep their souls is just too dangerous for money. I mean the economy, of course, which is the automaton of money as a harness for our enthusiasms.

There's no intelligence in that system. That's what unnatural means. That wonderful STEM stuff is like rocket fuel to the workings of our unsustainable economy. It harnesses our enthusiasms in ways so that we can distance ourselves from the harm our work is causing - plausible deniability anyone? - while we do the coding that makes drones for the Military Industrial Complex. Search algorithms. Whatever.

The economy, writ large, doesn't care any more for sustainability than pond scum does. Bacteria don't care about fouling their medium. They couldn't exist without a limiting ecology. They'd wipe themselves out near instantly. It's a boundary issue.

My good friend Benjamin H. Bratton is at least working on the right problem. But he's got the wrong slice of humanity in mind. He seems to define humanity based on cognition, from which it's an easy leap to suggest that we should engineer our way - by Terraforming - to sustainability. Cognition becomes the limiting ecology against the economy running amok.

I doubt it. I would define humans more as the moral than the cognitive animal. It's a matter of the heart being in the right place, which is only in the brain if you think that the mind/body separation is a done deal. In simple terms, ladies and germs, we won't engender a sustainable planet if we don't care. And right now we act as though we don't care.

Even STEM types will go into finance if there's not a big enough prize for the contest-winners in developing the space elevator, say, or some other hard problem. Those prizes are easy, since there's so much collateral profit along the way. I guess there must be some prize out there for the first carbon sequestration process which can scale. The first mini nuclear plant which won't overfill the planet with nuclear waste. Me, I'm going for the gold ring. I'm old enough that falling off won't matter - just like a little kid might not feel enough danger, but will still easily recover from the bounce. So long as the age-height limits are set within legal limits, of course.

Once upon a time, Jesus - the movement - did change the way we care. Not so much anymore. They seem to have sold out. Too. You can work for Hobby Lobby if you have no soul at all, I guess, and are in near absolute denial about reality, truth, justice, and all those good things. But is shopping there any worse or better than shopping at Amazon or Walmart or all the other feeding troughs for The Beast? Really? Do you [think you] post to Facebook to build emotive caring community? I've got a bridge to sell you!

Really, the only trouble with the Jesus movement (apart from balls-on patriarchy) is the whole dominion over the earth thing. I'm pretty sure that while Bratton skates in that direction, he's really also looking for something artificial in his terms to be more natural, in mine. Terraforming that depends on human sense of style is just a recipe for disaster.

The hard problem of consciousness is why we care. Not why we're conscious. Shrink the time-frame or scope for interaction enough and anything might seem conscious. Even a complicated machine. But if you can turn it off without caring, well, then it's just a machine. And consciousness was ephemeral (to the very extent that it is repeatable in precise form).

I guess the water religion of Bali was one way to engender sustainable caring. The landscape management of indigenous Australians might be another. Maybe those Aussies suddenly now care. Such 'consciousness' was so easily destroyed by modern and Western and superior engineering-based consciousness. Trump is but the simplified and simple-minded avatar for that sort of consciousness. That sort is hardly sustainable, clearly.

I do suppose that we are conscious on behalf of earth. We've overrun our ecology, but it was carelessness that did it. It wasn't either an active refusal to care on the whole, nor certainly some triumph of our cognitive accomplishment. Our cognitive parts, in those terms, work more like bacteria, responding to the stimulus of money. Money is our alcohol or our growth medium, take your pick. The turning point just depends on levels of saturation in effluent as the medium is exhausted. Either one becomes a boundary condition.

We ain't gonna reach 20 billion on the planet no way no how. If we're really really nice to one another, we might at least survive together. The math for escape just doesn't work, any more than does the math for wilful ignorance of, well, the math.

Plastics, Benjamin, Plastics

There was a moment, when the rhyme went out of verse, before we learned to dance again, and when oil had already reached full production capacity from the great wars. Beauty was being drained, until now the mail is delivered by contract workers who must own their means of transportation. Jalopies are beautiful now only in Cuba.

Writers are reduced to pandering to online streaming services, apparently, and most of us are too tired to read any more, always chasing after that one self-indulgence which might allow us not to think too hard, not to feel too hard, not even to need that slow and gentle fall into someone else's arms. Perhaps because even that dance has become too fraught. The urgency is gone.

Yes, Benjamin, it is easy enough to identify the artificial by means of unnatural regularity, but is there a time after automation where it all just looks like garbage? Garbage that won't break down or decompose but has an order that remains apart from nature without even showing any signs of artificial? Only, perhaps, on the molecular level, which might prove that it had to have passed through some era of metastatic cognition?

It is too late, Benjamin, for your projected terraforming, because you yourself have already been subsumed beneath mountains of trashy writings and no-one can bother to read anymore. The most intelligent ones lured by careers in money, and not even aware that all money flows the same way up by automated technological pumps.

The end has already been accomplished and we are but the shrug after detonation. The heart is gone.

The question that remains is what will remain of us after all traces of artifice are (once again?) expunged from Earth so that she/they/it may rejoin to living and the quick? By us, I mean the readers the writers the dancers the ones who would and will and already have died for beauty. The planetarity which might be emergent from terraforming can hardly be beautiful, unless, of course, one finds plastic so. So plastic.

We are all in a boat with the Republicans who find themselves too beholden to the bargain they made with the devil within to dare to confess and repudiate and relinquish their call on power. They are no different than the ones who have accepted and even celebrate our gig economy. None of us even knows how to remain human there. We can only learn to keep our heads above water.

Drowning will at least afford that realization of the One, the love that pervades cosmos that always has. Let go then. Stop trying so hard. There is eternity before the final breath. The rest have already forsaken that. Leave them behind, sweet Jesus, leave them behind. The name they call is void.

So, What if it Weren't Terrorism?

I'm able to pay attention to certain facts in the periphery of my vision just because of my accidental background. So I happen to notice that there is some important security hole in my computer which will be automatically and preemptively patched today. I try to bump-start the process. Nothing happens. It isn't worth my while to track down certainty here, since I'm in the same boat with multitudes.

By reflex, I am certain that Google, Amazon, Facebook are all evil, just because of their size, maybe, and the callow nature of their outsized influence. They can't play the innocent any longer with me. I'm somewhat less certain about Twitter, Microsoft, Apple. Somewhat more so about Uber, Air b'n' B. I think it might all come down to what Michael Pollan just revealed to me (I'm late to the game) about the industrial processes of food production.

I read his book as somewhat of an adventure tale, almost Tom Clancy grade. When he was assessing the McDonalds meal he ate while driving, at the end of the industrial food production chain, shortly after his mention of IFF the massive mutl-national fragrance and flavor outfit, I already knew the punchline. But he missed it! Tom Clancy missed his cue!

I happen to have insider information from the future - thanks Eric Schlosser, who came a little later - that the reason we like McDonalds fries is because IFF gives them their characteristic reliable hit. Pollan thought it must be something in the "grill enhancers" listed among the ingredients for the hamburger. He must be right, since he takes note that the grey actual burger doesn't have much to recommend it in itself. Look how quickly that truth came out. I wonder what might happen if the ingredients of fracking that the devil himself - Dick Cheney - made secret for Haliburton were to get out? Loopholes in the law will only get you so far, right? Right???

I suppose that given the right flavor/fragrance, our evolved sense of taste could be fooled into eating most anything, even or especially against our best interests. We would even eat our oil directly. Oh, wait, we already do! But at a cost to who and what? The planet is still pretty abstract to those who think that humanity is special for having a soul and that nature is some kind of adversary.

The theory that the dinosaurs were destroyed in a single meteorite hit has recently gained still more credence, according to the New Yorker. It might be determined to be the cosmic gift which led to two things that we must prize; the possibility for humans to evolve on planet earth by the favor granted to mammals by extinction of other branches of the tree of life, and the deposit of incredible reserves of solar energy in the form of fossil fuels. Those fossil fuels have directly enabled humanity's very recent overcoming of the planet. Some accident!

According to The Omnivore's Dilemma the detachment of food from our evolutionary best survival strategies has been concurrent with the mass movement of Americans off the farm, which is about the same time that printed circuit boards, radar and then the digital computational overlay of the Earth took place. I have insider information.

I'm not sure of the details, but didn't Jeff Bezos, the Amazon dude, just recently deflect an attempted blackmail as he left his lovely wife to go after a curvier model. It seemed that he finally understood that whatever might be revealed wasn't going to distinguish him from nearly anyone else on the planet, and so WTF? Who cares? Basically, as far as I can tell, there's nothing about him that might excite porno fans in the way that might justify more nubile superstars' more justifiable anger??

He wants to take us to Mars, right? That's his lifelong justification for amassing so much wealth (and transforming our economy along the way). He's practicing up for the long trip with his megayacht and internalizing paradize with his new squeeze on St. Lukes (wherever that is - I thought it was a hospital).  Good luck to him. What are we to do with the shambles of planet Earth that he's left behind?

The very same processes that have led to the oil-fueled corn-based industrialized food production process, including all the incredible technologies that have organically [sic] formed along the way, have allowed WalMart to deploy big money to undercut and destroy any possible retail competition. (How could I have left that brand off my list of shame??)

It's interesting that while bubba farmers and WalMarketeers don't inspire too many presumptions of cultural or technological genius, Amazon got its start with books. Maybe it turns out that those who actually read Karl Marx are the first to jettison their principles to save a dime? More likely hardly anyone reads him or anyone else who's hard to read anymore. Hardly anyone reads the good stuff. Of course that might have something to do with the incredible rising prices of books. The internals of that supply chain must look something the industrial production of food.

Plus, the students at MIT once did mostly come from the farm, where people developed such honest understandings of how to make things work; how to engineer. So the move off the farm and into the halls of high tech has been underway on many levels for a while now.

So this young girl who is apparently on the spectrum and whose growth was stunted therefore - Greta Thunberg - turns out to be nearly the equal of the unshakable Donald Trump, who's off any spectrum we can know about, and who by any rational measure has nearly nothing inside himself. Beside himself? But himself?

Depictions of Trump floating in diapers or disgustingly naked statues of him on street corners leave him and his pedestal (they call it a "base") unshaken and apparently unshakable. I use the term disgusting in its evolutionary sense as Michael Pollan did. Money can overcome all sorts of burned-in evolutionarily advantageous behaviors is the Message of the Day.

So the question my dear friend Benjamin Bratton raises, at least implicitly, is about how to turn the incredible power of the digital layer of what he calls The Stack to the evolutionary benefit of the planet. He wants to accomplish that by planning. As in, how do we ensure the survival of the wonders of human artifice? How to turn it in synch with nature instead of its (our) current disposition contra?

Apart from the irony (I don't think Bratton quite worships Irony the way I do) of cognition, the problem, becoming cognition, the resolution, I don't think he's quite aware of the dynamics of evolution, which places the dynamics of accident on a plane much more vast than those realms for accident that he describes, viz Verilio. That asteroid strike was part of the evolutionary process.

I checked, and the biomass of humanity is paltry in comparison to the biomass implied in fossil fuel. That really puts our squandering into perspective, especially if and as you (and you MUST) look at mankind's predations on the planet in the context of man's cognitive glories. We would be useless as landfill, dear Earth!

So Bratton wants some sort of deliberate asteroid, maybe?? The derailment which comes along, part and parcel, with the railroad?

Surely many have made the observation that an accident which happens to some innocent accompanies a kind of imperative that massive resources be deployed in remedy and rescue. The same thing happens when high-profile criminals need prosecuting. These are pageants both in support of our forms of governance and in support of our bedrock belief in the importance of the individual (good or bad). Neither would survive without that pageantry. Just look what Elon Musk was wanting to do for those kids stuck in the rapidly inundating cave! And he got accused of some kind of self-aggrandizement, poor fellow. (How did I leave Tesla off my list - another offworld aspirant who would surely leave me behind).

Surely many have observed that our new captains of industry seem nicer than the ones toward the turn of the twentieth century. The "original" robber barons were built on railroads, oil, lumber and shipping, maybe. Oil the constant, maybe. Our current class of hyper-rich probably won't look so hot in retrospect. Plus, the inside of the royal palace has apparently started to look like prison, go figure. Hasn't Netflix been saying something like that in The Queen? Should I take Netflix off my list?

Anyhow, the question I would like to pose regards how these tech titans might respond in the face of the coming emergency. Google wanted credit for the fizzled Arab Spring. Facebook wanted to avoid blame for the catastrophe of Donald Trump (one guesses that the corporate person actually wanted Donald Trump, and gosh, one shouldn't quite confuse the Capo with the entity, now should one? Guilty!

Anyhow, would they come to join the national interest, or would they be more concerned to protect their corners (on whatever the market will mean in the face of whatever scale the coming emergency  - Accident?? - will take?) on whatever might be left of whatever market?

Disease? Check! War? Check! Terrorism? Well, that's a matter of targeting the right individuals, apparently, so checkmate, really, except that Big Tech doesn't seem to want to get involved in that or their customer (we-the-product) might defect when they come after me or you. Score, Apple!

We seem bent on identifying terrorists as individualized adherents to some dangerous other or othering ideology, and bent on ignoring the terrorists within.  But what about the "accident" of climate change, where everyone is an innocent (so long as we don't turn against the cosmopolitan wealthy who live along the inundated coasts). Is there, maybe, something a citizen soldier could do to appropriate the evil technologies in service of the good? Might even the captains of those industries be turned to our side?

I've been tempted to go off Facebook, Google, Apple and the rest, but like Bratton, I'm not such a big fan of meaningless symbolic gestures like driving a Tesla, say, or eating vegan, or wearing cotton, er, Patagonia. What? Whatever!

Those Iranians seem to be able to turn on a dime, en masse, against America and then against their own government. Is it the same individuals? Are there two masses, one red, one blue, like we have in America? Does each assume the other is stupid, evil, benighted, dumb? Anti Patriotic?

Michael Pollan made the abattoir transparent, and it made a difference. Could we use Google's infrastructure, say, to make visible all those hidden externalities of our capitalism? Not just carbon load, but all the hidden distortions to retail, food production, politics, sex and everything else that matters to us, really, that are part and parcel of that economic system that we love so very much, but which is killing us softly and quick?

Well, of course we are, and we do use Google and the rest. So far, at least (or so far as we can tell) Amazon doesn't censor the books and which books it has on offer, and Google remains a semi-honest broker of its keyterms. Of course there is the same problem with our marketplace as there is with our politics - that the good and earnest voices are drowned out by the football-loving crowds, but that isn't necessarily (though it might be in some more subtle way) any direct implication of the honesty of the broker.

But what if there were an algorithmic tax that could be levied against those whose profits are gained by a hidden tax on the whole? What if more than exposing lies could be accomplished? What if carbon loads could really be a proxy for all those other externalities. What if it overwhelms everything else in the form of a Tsunami?

We know that our regulatory infrastructure has been decimated by years of insider politics. Boeing scale, at least. We know that VW-scale harm can ensue when these big lies get exposed. Hell, front page on the IFF website is their corporate statement about human trafficking. They want us to feel good about them, even while they might not want us to know that they are the reason we love McDonalds' fries. A little spice for your web page, monsieur? (My informal polling of right thinking members of the blue team gets the universal response of 'I don't care! I still love them!')

Let's say I give money to provide aid for tornado sufferers, and then the entity which took the aid is exposed for taking advantage of the tragedy to enrich themselves. Outrage, right?

If we were able somehow to show Big Tech that there is a true emergency (Pick one. How about global warming?) AND that they are in some unique space to do something about it, then would they do it? Do they really need to wait until the coasts flood?

So, the challenge is to create an infrastructure in the nature of Wikipedia, taking advantage of block chain to assure that good information doesn't get hacked or expropriated. Identify the sources for the numbers, and let the experts debate. Call them on their lies. Create an infrastructure to catalog the ACTUAL costs of all of our technologies. Then in just the way that Big Tech depends on Wikipedia to inform the readers of its webs, get them to put the carbon score right next to the purchase price of absolutely EVERYTHING. Build in premiums so that purchasers can make the right choice, or get them to move off the web and back among what grass farmers call the Non-Barcode People.

We've got to do something, people!

Let's bring the carbon tax to the people! Instead of leaving it in the hands of carbon intensive businesses, and our moribund regulators, let's put it back into the hands of people. Sure, it would be a regressive tax, just like the lottery is, against those who feel no choice but to eat fast food, which is so petroleum intensive. But so are mega-yachts. The externalities on which fat capitalists thrive belong to the people. The people may prefer to take the trolley once they face the true cost of cars. The rich people can subsidize us. As far as I can tell being rich still means getting rich on oil, one way or another. Payback time!

All we really have to do is to tally the True Cost of  Oil, and then expose its use in every production process. How much is that free shipping really? If the government can no longer be trusted (it's in cahoots) then we the people can do it. None of us - no one of us, no individual - is getting enough from the only apparent cheapness of what we buy to use that as an excuse to hang back from exposing those who do. The rich skim the common good is all, by getting rich off government contracts, by gaming the legal system, by putting honest workers out of business to create some high-tech monopoly on magically falling prices. We the people, left, right and center, can actually do something about that by exposing it to the light of day!

The government will get on board because the work's already been done for them (us)! (Remember way back when poor sad-sack Al Gore thought the government had to subsidize the Internet the way that the military industrial complex subsidized the interstate highway system? Oh, wait . . . ) Mr. Kurtz said "The Horror, The Horror." I say The Irony The Irony! Come on, Al! Get out of the dark! Where are you hiding? Comfy yet?

Oh, the sun is up now. I must make myself more awake. Such a sweet sweet dream. Oh, and yeah, that security vulnerability that I adverted to at the opening of this blog. That was reported by the NSA back to Microsoft. Wow! Where once they tried to keep those secrets to themselves in order to hack the terrorists (eventually handing them, therefore, to the terrorists before the white hats got them back) they seem to have decided to be on the side of the good guys. Wait, now where did I list Microsoft hereinabove?? Maybe the NSA is afraid of yet another Snowden Crash? Maybe we should let all the secrets out. Wanna see me naked??

Ew!

A Future Full of Hope - Finally, and Thanks Benjamin Bratton

I have to take this pause for a commercial message. I seem to have lost my energy for reading this morning, and reading Benjamin Bratton is really hard. He calls his new project The Terraforming, and I enter into it with a heap of loathing and trepidation. I did read his epic tome The Stack a couple of years ago, and have successfully evangelized it to a few people who I thought might read it and be willing to plow through the thick sociological jargon (which honestly does seem excessively and unnecessarily dense sometimes, but I'm not exactly on solid ground to complain).

I couldn't find any politics in The Stack, and made what has turned out to be the grave mistake to assume that Bratton is one of those brain dead libertarian type believers in the glories of a future in technology. I have since learned that he's friends with Kim Stanley Robinson - a science fiction writer who paints fairly optimistic futures - and that Bratton does have politics and is even fairly sympathetic to the politics of China, which we are all still being taught to fear.

I found many of these things out by way of Twitter, Which I sneak glimpses at now and then in the midst of my fasting away from Facebook and other evil tech. Bratton is one of maybe five people I follow.

My sense of our collective future has been blinded for sure in the same mist of my anxiety that at some point there will be a cap I'll have to deal with on the endless spigot of email that comes in my name - almost none of which I look at, thanks to filters that are almost good enough.

And the anxiety that all recoverable traces of who I really am, in writing and in pictures, are now swallowed up in a big unchartable digital pile.That's why I write here, in fact, just in case I want to recover myself. Can you even imagine how much work that would be?

I think I've learned how not to care by reading Michael Pollan on what happens to the mind on psilocybin. It makes me care less about constructing a more durable "I" (even though I've managed to start each paragraph with "I" today. Oh well, I just turned on Google's enhanced spell checker because I've stopped caring about what that evil company does with and to and by means of my personalty. Some day I'll just ask them who I am and maybe they'll tell me (meaning that some AI bot will give me a quick summary which will be more clear than what I can say about myself, just like I'll be able to ask the credit agency what cars I owned and when. Yeah, right.

I digress.

The point is (phew, no "I") that this twisty dense thinker and writer is giving me hope about the future of the earth. I begin to imagine a world where we on this continent actually celebrate China getting to the dark side of the moon and follow that action with the same proud interest that the Chinese do. Of course I've long dreamed of a future where Chinese is the universal written language, just because it's so damned durable and limitless for what can be described by its means.

I feel less stuck in the dystopian moment of our collective contemporary lives. Trump and his ilk (he has a lot of ilk, some of them screaming from Iran now) feel so temporary. The shock treatment will leave future humans (who will probably talk a lot the way AOC does) so much more chill. So much more accepting of any and all others, less bent on self-aggrandizement and their personal brand, and able to find the grace and beauty in shapes and styles for humans that aren't mediated by some future Hollywood sex factory. We'll care a lot less about getting off and a lot more about getting on with one another.

How does Bratton do this? He does it by cleaning up the terminology, getting rid of all the nonsense in usages that pit "artifice" against "nature," my God against yours and more. So much more. Instead of being anxious about what technology is currently about, he looks through that by means of an almost ruthless clear-eyed look at how tech is actually being deployed now. Most of us are too afraid to look. It feels of a piece with climate change, as though tech in aggregate is some out of control life force that will soon gobble up the planet.

Which, of course, it is. But that's because of the rocket fuel of the virus of money which is in turn grounded in how each of us sees yourself. Bratton points out by his near absolute clarity of vision, that tech has already provided us with nearly everything we need to calm the planet and give it a new lease on life. As we all do secretly know, it's not what we have, it's how we use it. That's where politics comes in.

In the end, it's about how we construct our collective narratives. Oddly enough, also in the end, he may be nudging me away from AOC's politics, which have been my politics. The thing is that I'm confident that AOC will continue to inform herself and change. Trump's ilk doesn't know how to do that. They can't and won't let go of a set of beliefs - all ego focused - that cannot but destroy the planet.

Ahhh, now maybe I can continue the hard hard work of understanding. It's a bitch to carry all that weight on my aging shoulders. But I shall soldier on for as long as I am able. One thing's for sure, those Chinese are going to like us Americans again. Now there is a short-term dream to live for. Something I can imagine experiencing even in my life time. Let's at least, please, give our kids that much; a future which looks better the more clear-eyed you look at it, and not so scary you'd rather look away and keep your vision merely local.

We need to get it together, people, and stop hating on each other. Less holding on to beliefs and more just doing good. And way less self-indulgence. Well, except for taking time out to binge-watch Don't F**k with Cats. Ouch! Fleabag is so much better since it doesn't deal with things you have to avert your eyes from. Or does it? Hell, I don't know. I only know I'd never hate anyone for their politics or religion unless and until those espouse hate. Which many do now. Stop this endless loop, please!