Dystopia Climate Control: Why A Sustainable American Revolution Will Take More Than Economic Pain

In response to Martin Ford's thoughtful article/challenge: Could Income Inequality Lead To Civil Unrest in the United States?

Civil unrest on a small scale may occur, but revolution is unlikely and this is why. Because the puppetmasters who's Right and Left hands are the government/corporate world respectively have long been well aware of the potential for revolution and shadow-regime change, and adjust the Dictator-ishness accordingly. The Big-Time plutocracies are too intelligent to fully materialize; it is just a matter of how much pain they can cause the populace, how much daily bread they can steal and get away with it. How much corporate tax they can unload off into the Caymans, how long they can Kangaroo Court the Debt Ceiling debates, how much wealth they can strip via financial shell games and oligopolies. They've got whole armies of financial consultants, pollsters, think tanks dedicated to taking the temperature of the public's anger and making sure it never reaches a boil. We're living in an economic climate-controlled room where they are constantly fine-tuning the fuckedness quotient; they've learned from old King Georgy Porgy and Haiti circa 1791, saw the writing on the Tunisian walls long before Mubarak painted them with his own peoples' blood, dark and anemic from malnutrition. How else do you think The Money People have kept the majority of Americans believing they're doing better than they actually are, anethetized by the fading fumes of "The Greatest Nation on Earth" mythology for the past half century, despite a constant decline of the average American living standard down the economic spiral towards the 3rd world? We're rats in lab cages, watching shadows on our cave walls of flatscreens and touchscreens, telling us how much "opportunity" is out there, keeping us disoriented by disinfotainment and addicted to junk-food media as we're fed a precisely measured dosage of well-being such that we never reach that Jeffersonian threshold of Despotism, never critical-mass and rise up off our couches and Netflix streams of Jersey Shore to "revolt".

Maybe the Overlords have lost control over their capitalism machine, maybe existing webwork will fail. And the HFT shorters and subprime barons with their blood money, like their predecessors, the IBMs and Coca Colas who lifted their Jew skin encrusted gold bars of the Third Reich from that burning viper-den and invested it in America, they will take their spoils and start the seeds of the next Goldman Sachs or the next Stalin to come a few decades down the line

The human desire to compete for wealth and status and prestige and its second-order effects within complex socio-political configurations are routinely glossed over by the platonic hallowed Shangrilahs that permeate much of Marxist ethos and the abundantists, who are its spiritual progeny. You can try to deny that desire to compete, like some communist states and flower-throwing communes and naïve Silicon Valley programmers (now under antritrust investigation), and believe that billions of years of psychological evolution are just going to go away, and we’ve all seen how the Soviet experiment turned out.

Somebody will always come out on top, whether that’s 500 frat brother network of CEOs, a genocidal dictator, an authoritarian People’s Republic, a gated enclave run by robots and AI, defended by uber-Predator drones. Today’s cute anti-authoritarian revolutionary in the bushes is tomorrow’s tyrant on the throne. Today’s “hope n change” presidential candidate is tomorrow’s Wall Street-owned puppet. Today’s grass roots take-back-the-government tea party is tomorrow’s “guns gods n gays” Republican freakshow. Look at Iran overthrowing Teh Dictators in '79, jump-cut to them now repeating history with underground Twitter railroads, riding Ouroboros. Revolution may come, but it is not enough to let the Tzar’s heads roll under your Bolshevik revolution if you wake up the next morning, rub the party hangover out of your eyes, and discover a Stalin at the podium.

It takes, at minimum, an educated, active populace engaged in attempting to create the best of all possible worlds. Closely examine Sweden, Canada, any of the countries with consistently higher well being and happiness levels than the US. The pattern is not "abundance" or per-capita-output but rather the cultural zeitgeist of the general population as a whole, collectively policing their governments and corporations, making sure the next malignant tumor doesn't come into power, actively demanding that their social safety nets remain in place. A populace who is is not checked out of reality into "reality TV" and cyberfantasy worlds, distracted by the nerd-neuroses of Angry Birds and maintaining virtual personas, constantly awaiting the next pellet of online "social" interaction like some wirehead lab rat. And spending the rest of the time watching ten hours of media a day. Marxists/abundantists who prefer to leave these fundamentally non-linear x-factors out of their perfect equations for their model worlds are making their own Procrustean Beds (and the similarly deadly beds of innocent and/or ignorant bystanders). Not unlike the hordes of Gaussian Copula and “Great Moderation” flaunting economists who tried to fit the world to their theories and not vice versa. And we’ve all seen starkly and painfully how that 2008 economic Singularity worked out.

At any rate, dictatorship is a crude, medieval, and ultimately ineffective technique for maintaining control over a large population. A method for South American Banana republics and strategically placed Arabic resource-cows, but not the home town. You don't shit where you eat, or at least, you don't shit so much that the flies start attacking you. Trust that if there are Masters of the Universe -- as there likely always will be lest we genetically hack our brains to quit desiring status, prestige, and wealth (unlikely) -- they will choose Brave New World over 1984. Much more efficient.

Technium: God/Smack

Reflections in response to the Kevin Kelly vs Nick Carr discussion on whether technology is intrinsically moral, even Godly, with its own "will", and it is our sacred duty to be "fruitful and multiply" as much technology as we can.

It's a bit worrying to see technology elevated to a religious status, an uneasy feeling similar to the one I get when I read Singularitarian Time Magazine spreads.

It's difficult to say that technology in the geological-scale view has not increased human options and possibility for utility. But "Happiness" and utility are sticky Gordian issues. As Warren Buffet, one of the greatest beneficiaries of modern technology has said, "Time is the most valuable asset." If this is true, perhaps we apotheoses of tech with our realtime-media absorbed neuroses, overloaded schedules and eternal scarcity of time are really far poorer, ultimately, than the 2-4 hour mongongo nut gathering day of the Bushmen who had all the time in the world to relax and spend with family. Perhaps "technium" is closer to a nerd-equivalent of cocaine. It looks so great on the missionary's TV, so you leave the rainforest to score some. At first you get a euphoric rush and feel like anything is possible. But over time, your high-paying, high-tech digital addiction becomes a cage of Angry Birds, virtual personas you must maintain, social ladder-climbing, and general keeping up with the Hamptons. Soon you discover your most precious asset -- time -- sucked into the black hole that the "technium" drug has left in you, feeding it just to stay afloat.

While many rural flock to cities, it is equally true that many of the highest-powered cityslickers seek out more tranquil, more sane, lower-tech lives, moving out into the country and trying to live off the land i.e. the organic, local and resilient community movements. it's also debatable whether the millions of Chinese who leave their rice paddies in order to become slave-labor iPad makers working 16 hour days for a dollar inhaling asbestos are improving their lives.

But ultimately, I think my fear is when we project a "morality" on technology such that it is good in and of itself. A hammer is a tool, which can be used for good or evil: you can build a house or you can smash in a skull. Atomic energy can be used to annihilate all life on Earth many times over, or it can be used to keep your lights on. Was hundreds of thousands of people dying horribly in a nuclear blast, many more suffering cancers and other effects of fallout an expression of God's love? Computers can be used to help us communicate more easily, or computers can be used for high-frequency-trading creating a malignant financial system disconnected from reality and ultimately helped a near-global economic meltdown. Games can help surgeons improve success rates, or they can become a distracting time-sink techcrack. In short; technology is not "love" or "godly", but rather a set of inert instruments which allow options that can have both positive and negative effects. Just as "guns don't kill people," so technology is neutral: it is people that give it a moral valence through their use of it.

Net-Gen Memory Sinks and Digital Cautionaries

Nick can certainly hold his own in idea-court, but I felt it would be a useful springboard for me to cross-examine Futurismic editor Paul Raven’s examination of Nicholas Carr’s sober rumination on newly minted studies which reveal that our milieu of omnipresent search access may be making us much better at finding information, but detracting from our ability to actually remember said info.

Just to give you the thrusts of each post, here is the essential thesis from Carr:

“There's a fascinating - and, to me, disquieting - study on the internet's effects on memory that's just come out in Science.* It provides more evidence of how quickly and flexibly our minds adapt to the tools we use to think with, for better or for worse. […] Does our awareness of our ability to use Google to quickly find any fact or other bit of information influence the way our brains form memories? The answer, they discovered, is yes: "when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it."”

And Raven’s snark:

“Ah, here we go again – another study that totes proves that the intermawubz be makin’ us dumb. Perfect timing for career curmudgeon Nick Carr …”

Early in Bruce Lee's tour de force "Enter The Dragon", he attempts to explain an essential concept to a troubled martial arts pupil, "It is like a finger pointing away to the moon." The student, befuddled, stares at Lee's outstretched finger. The master whaps the young padawan on the head, correcting, "Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory." He indicates the spectacular full moon, which the student had ignored, so engrossed with the extended pointing digit.

I think Raven is obsessing over Carr’s finger, as it points away to the moon, all the while missing all that heavenly glory. He focuses, as the study suggests, on the "access point", the link-provider, which he seems to a priori disagree with, rather than the actual *information* and arguments provided by the access point. Or, more specifically, Raven focuses on the many fingers of a projected Jerry Springer-esque , (good for clickthrough counts, I guess) and misses the more subtle, deeper, and untribalized discussion of unfettered ubicomp’s affects on human memory. A discussion which requires a bit more neuronal RAM and drive-space to runtime the large flows of data processed through the webwork of logic/concept-chains. More memory than we’re used to needing for our one-hit tweet-zingers and three-chord napkin-length articles necessary to ensnare the hyperneurotic eyeballs and their preschool-length attention spans for some PPM digital nickels before they alt-tab to greener lulz and hurl birds at buildings. Haute post-moderne and charlatan-like as it is to proclaim the 'death' of a cultural phenomenon, it's difficult not to see the Atlantean sinking of book giant Borders as an ominous reaper's knell. In response to Carr’s article, Raven asks:

“Do we actually store fewer and fewer memories, though? Or do we perhaps store the same amount as ever, while having an ever-growing external resource to draw upon […] Or, to use web-native vernacular: citation needed”

Perhaps this comment is an apotheosis of Carr’s concept of the Shallow mind, pancaked to a great breadth of trivia and buzz wordage, yet sporting a retention window less than the length of what used to pass as a long-form article that is now considered an unpublishable, long-winded novel on the ‘net scene. So short, in fact, that complex arguments built on layers of evidence and inference (including non-Wikipedia non-churnalism citations) located in paragraphs a mere page-down keypress away readily evaporate from our atrophying prefrontal lobes in the time it takes to read and copy-paste a selection into our blogpost editor. From earlier in Carr’s post:

“Does our awareness of our ability to use Google to quickly find any fact or other bit of information influence the way our brains form memories? The answer, they discovered, is yes: "when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.".

It’s not a reckless intellectual quantum leap to say that suggest we’re remembering less important info, unless you’re one of the owners of the Master Nodes i.e. Google, Wikipedia, Apple, who’s marketing epamphlets trumpet the importance of memorizing their URL over storing actual relevant information in your head.
Raven continues:

“I submit that we form similar consolidations on a collective basis using the internet as a substrate; hyperlinks, aggregation blogs, tranches of bookmarks both personal and public.”

Again, I believe Raven is missing the crux here and putting the digital cart before the human horse. The consolidations, embellished by the Emerson hat-tip earlier in Carr’s article (long-filtered through the noodle-sieve, I know) clearly underline the point which is that the influx of sensorineural and linguistic stimuli that we receive are not interpreted in our mind as netflix streaming projections on some internal real3D IMAX by some homunculi (AKA the Cartesian Theater). Rather, we take input through the “webcams” of our senses, but these streams (or “feeds” to the ‘wubzkins) of raw rgb light and sound are then used by our minds to *create* our experiences, accessing the sum total of our memories, our whole human being, our strange-loopy “selves”: and what are we but our remembered experiences? We hear a high trill of frequencies in the 800-200 hertz spectrum and say, “I hear a thrush singing”. But in actuality, all we have “heard” as input from our ear “microphones” is sound, but through our consolidated memories of the sound, of experiences with these whimsical little mammals, we are actively constructing a complex picture of reality: that there is a bird’, with a spotted chest’, sitting in a ‘tree’ nearby, ‘singing’, and that bird is a ‘thrush’. In this sense, the mind-as-computer metaphor is perhaps less accurate than the mind as a Cold War spy submarine, decked out with sensors and information collection data, attempting to construct a blueprint, based on the incoming numbers, of what is actually out there.

It stands to reason, then that if our memories are increasingly neurplasticizing to remember the “info faucet” *sources rather than actually storing the information in our wetware, then, that our “whole human beings”, our submarine intelligence, that library of dossiers collected on the world may be shrinking, growing dimmer as well.
. (*or source: Google’s got that whole antitrust shennanigans on the front-burner now… hate to say I told you so, but…)

It's either naive or a decimation of human potential (gadgetization, if you're Jaron Lanier) to believe it's enough to be able to access bits of memory from the 'net to answer the pressing question of the moment, then forget again like a vacuum-tube calculator with a three item max memory stack, the data vanishing into the ether after the equation is "solved". Assembly-line robots, phone-calcs and Google can already do that. Any significant thought -- be it a college thesis, an in-depth political analysis, a biting pithy journalistic expose, a novel, a new scientific theory -- these all require vast stores of interlinked memories *inside the neuron constellations*. Why? Because our thought is not a Turing machine algorithm of bit-by-bit search n grab, fill in the blank, then erase, but rather a wholistic electromagnetic symphony of information integration, transformation, permutation happening simultaneously. We must have all the local random-access memory "in mind", precisely because we don't know when our ruminating synaptic storm will pull on this stored memory of the concept of RAM, another brain-file labeled "symphonies", and several neuroscience white papers I read millenia ago in 'net-years, bouncing, mulling, weaving these memories together, organizing sequentially and finally producing a cohesive argument -- as I'm attempting to. We don't sit down at the computer and like some GM robotic factory line pull up our "collective synapses" of hyperlinks, aggregates, and bookmarks then screw, bolt, and mashup the parts together, post, then finally clear it all from our empty sieve-brains for the next unit of "thought production". Of perhaps that's just become the modus operandi of much of our infosphere and its aggergators: just steal Google's bribe-weighted top-10 list for the Hot Topic of the day and round up the last few good tweets, toss it into a blogpost, pepper with a few twenty-byte pseudopithy wisecracks, and send it to the presses Tumblr. We think with out memories, and if our memories shrivel down from muscular Blue Gene/Ls to scant 8-bit registers that hold only "bookmarks" of Google, Twitter, and the other aggregators, then it stands to reason our thought-programs will decrease in power, depth, and greatness to pixelly shits-n-giggles and barfights.

Any of the major breakthroughs in science, our Man-on-The-Moon achievements, our greatest literary works, the world-changing paradigm shifts, have occurred not through some direct problem-solution, search-and-answer, or “hyperlinks, aggregation, and tranches of bookmarks” read and recently forgotten, left for some Watson 3.0 expert system to sort out. Rather, it was through grand synthesizations, imaginative leaps across the entire sweep of the human experience and human knowledge, recalled and recombined, the complex interweavings of lenses shifting until a clearer perspective emerged. Einstein’s relativity crown-jewel could not have been brought to fruition without the vividly remembered experiences of his train ride from Princeton to Boston, along with countless other segments of his life’s journey, not to mention decades worth of mind-melting math and physics stored in his “brainmeat”. Shakespeare could not have spliced the wonderous chimeras of metaphor without a vast and deep catalogue of raw linguistic DNA. Had Joyce offshored his encyclopedic and deeply webbed knowledge to Google, he would’ve been just another middle-class Bourgeouis Dubliner and never have erected his labyrinthian edifices tracing an Ariadne thread through mazes of ancient Greek mythology, the Swiftian streets of 19th century Ireland and countless other realms of human experience without that instantly accessible and vast memory stew, deeply interconnected “meatmap” of the myriad territories. So what happens when we remember only where to find the infoteats, the all-knowing Google and pantheon of aggregator givers of information; focusing our mental powers on the directing fingers till our heads are filled only with pointer pointing to other pointers, yet signifying nothing? Sure, for us, the digital immigrants, the impact is arguable. But what of a generation who grows up phoning-in the answers to their math problems, cliff-noting their way with Google, to whom the “songs of thrushes” are but “sounds”. And what happens later, when these individuals need to synthesize large amounts of info simultaneously into coherent theses and arguments and dissertations and sophisticated political opinions if they are forgetting every bittified tidbit soon after it is read? What will become of these kids, disconnecting from and forgetting the finer details of their train rides and other real-world experiences with their heads buried in the unending firehose of Chattering Class babble, claiming, “It’s ok, I can always watch the Youtube of it later.” Again, it’s not the end of the world. Just food for thought, hopefully still digestible.

Unlike the straw golem of Nick which some have molded to slap around, using Twittified snippets, conveniently (or involuntarily) letting his more balanced arguments slip through their porous noggins, Carr readily admits that the digital revolution(s), the internet, even search engines all provide us with great benefits not off-par with the invention of cities or the combustion engine. From the article:
“Human beings, of course, have always had external, or "transactive," information stores to supplement their biological memory. These stores can reside in the brains of other people we know (if your friend John is an expert on sports, then you know you can use John's knowledge of sports facts to supplement your own memory) or in storage or media technologies such as maps and books and microfilm.”
It is certainly arguable that “we form similar consolidations on a collective basis using the internet as a substrate; hyperlinks, aggregation blogs, tranches of bookmarks”, and I nor Carr would disagree, except perhaps to the degree of isomorphism between a human mind and the internet. However this is completely orthogonal at best, and even bolster’s Carr’s point. Certainly there is something to be said for the intelligence of crowds and expert systemsfor specific species of questions, particularly those with single-output answers such as a stock price, the outcome of an election, or a trivia question (see: IBM’s Watson, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire lifelines). The quantity and ease of accessing info is unprecedented, leading to many positive outcomes such as mass-awakenings and revolutionary twitter grapevines used to overturn a great number of oppressive regimes.

However, unless you’re from the woo-woo recesses of the Singularitarian cult-cum-nerd religion, you’re going to be hard pressed to prove that the “Global Brain” is transmuting into anything like a human mind just because we’ve got a lot of URLs, blogs and bookmarks floating around our glorified telephone network. Complexity of a system does not automatically equal intelligence, despite all the evolutionary tendencies we Homo Superstitiens have to anthropomorphize and attribute agency to everything from lightning and ocean gods to robots to the sum total of treehugged “Gaia” to teh internets. Transmission of “information” does not necessarily equal intelligence. Human telegraph and phone networks transmitted great deals of information, and simply increasing the amount and even complexity of information transmission does not automatically make the system as a whole an intelligent gestalt with its own agency. Pure complexity is in fact selected against in evolution, as is illustrated in digital evolution simulations such as Polyworld, where the most complex-brained organisms succumbed to the dire and ever circling wolves of competitive pressure as they lugged their ponderously overgrown, energy-sink grey matter about. A brain's thought processes can be very complex, such as a paranoid schizo's intractably intricate conspiracy theories of Illuminati-driven Area 51 cover-ups. We do not give these people Nobel Prizes and let them run nations precisely because they are spewing complex yet *unintelligent* gibberish. If it exists, 90% of this supposed 'net brain is Russian botnet spam and pirated bootlegs of Transformers, and the next 9% of our new robot Overmind’s neuron firings consist of banal facebook !Likes, sub-literate flame wars, regurgitated zero-sum retweets aggregated by aggregations of aggregations vieing for Master Nodehood, and shallow lolcatey mash-ups. If the internet substrate has an emergent conscious personhood, it is a psycho schizophrenic retard.

And if we accept the premise that this massive internetwork of links and penis enlragement spam and pageranks and Tumblr feeds and auctioned-off Facebook social graph really is consolidating all of this info for us, then we’re implicitly admitting that we indeed are outsourcing our mental faculties, our memory and all it enables, to “The Interwubz”. To our privately owned search engine overlords under investigation for antitrust anticompetitive behavior, and to their technovangelist-overhyped “collective intelligences” which are nothing more than very good indexing and expert systems. Systems which enable exponential communication/info explosions, but which are incapable of inventing a cure for cancer, kicking the climate problem for us, writing a masterpiece of a novel, or doing any of the other heavy mental lifting which requires a fully-developed, whole human being with enough human-unique RAM, and the ability to turn off the infotainment bombardment, focus, and actually do some of that archaic “deep thinking” thing required for said truly significant accomplishments beyond the hoi polloi of sharing, tweeting, tagging, ranking, remixing and slapfight commentary.

Ironically, what the Digital Revolution guarantees us is not that deep, game-changing thought but instead really kickass Jeopardy playing AIs and the ability to never again be stumped at a party-night game of Taboo thanks to our “smart” phones. If the web is really thinking, then as they say in pre-web vernacular: that’s 'game-set-and-match' in favor of the so-labeled “Rejectionistas”. Though “digital cautionary” may be a preferred neologism. Nobody’s setting off EMPs in downtown San Fran and escaping, Walden’s Pond in hand, to some un-GPS located South Pacific isle whenceforth to live out some mid-life crisis Rousseau fantasy. It’s about conscious consumption, drinking responsibly. And, maybe, a little biting of the finger-pointing hands that tube-feed our brains their corporate-filtered version of their aggregated knowledge – and thus the control – which we might do well to keep in mind ourselves, as independent thinkers, and rememberers.

And if the results of the study and Carr’s inferences prove true, I don’t believe it’s a trivial phenomenon we can just brush off by tagging it “handwringing” and handwaving it out of our mental filter bubble as Ludditic fear-mongering. Not when the actual journalism hard won by the few journalists left still walking the lonely beat at state capitols and Big Biz by the digital revolution-produced newspaper Holocaust is increasingly soundbytten to meaningless shreds by bottom-dwelling clickwhore feeding frenzies, cynically and pointlessly aggregated by aggregates of aggregators, “optimized” out of our single-serving universes by Search Giant/Soc-Net filter-bubbles, and finally erased by corporate reputation-scrubbers whose raison d’etre is to intentionally help us forget, as if the weak digital media imprints of events need help vanishing beyond our one-hundred-forty character memory horizon, eroded by an offshoring of our minds to our “lickable” gadgets.

Terminus Machina: Kennedy High

Excerpt: "Kennedy High"

The school was a sagging public husk, the color of dead trees, and now served as the scratch paper for urban-tribal grafitti tagging battles, squatting cubby holes for the Deadweight refugees of the endless economic recess. Frayed steel reinforcements wormed out like bone fragments from fractures in the concrete. The layout itself was indistinguishable from a prison; high barbed walls and claustrophobic passages, CCTV panopticon of a since-failed mini police-state. Since handed on the torch of civ-lib infringement to far more menacing off-balance sheet tentacles of Gnossis and the Olympian cabal of information-financial empires who’d hollowed their nation state Titan-parents into a North American Weimar Republic. The school was an ironic apotheosis of 80’s apocalyptic riot paranoia and resultant fear for children’s safety, infamously designed, like other Cali schools, by the San Quentin architect. Bullet proof polycarbonate windows the size of police car dividers. Several glass panes had been chiseled out of their cavities, leaving random empty sockets of jagged concrete, like the methed-out mouth of a stage four wyre addict. The impervious quartz probably serving now as anti-riotpolice riot shields in guerilla firefights against Cybersec’s drone paramilitary. The school’s star spangled banner was somehow yet waving despite the surrounding entropy, flying bright amongst the red glare of car fires and distant artillery skirmishes burning the night an eternal crimson twilight, some grand sardonic District Ten joke biled up by its collective subconscious. It was nice to see that Americans could still pull together to accomplish great things.

The bombed-out factor of Kennedy High was extreme, even among the municipal dereliction all around, and the rubble lay with a certain archaic mothy stillness that suggested it had been hit long before the Intellectual Property Wars or the Plebland Riots. Caused, perchance, by some unforeseeably Gaiagenic Black Swan disaster turned armchair humanitarian sink, or more likely, a stray Killerhunter missile whose iffy slave-labe North Korean QA allowed a buggy AI to swing AWOL. Or, perhaps, active human malfeasance, the only commodity in abundance nowadays. Whatever the culprit, the truth was now redacted from the universe’s cache by the sandblasts of time. The digital media footprint of the event equally vanished beyond the one-hundred-forty character memory horizon, eroded by a half-century’s outsourcing of mental faculties to ubicomp. History washed away like unnoticed dead bodies swept down the Hudson amongst shoals of shredded bank paper, to be swallowed by the vast sea of last-moment’s Shiny #trend, the bitrotting remains of actual journalism soundbytten to meaningless shreds by bottom-dwelling clickwhore feeding frenzies and corporate reputation-scrubbers.


KrashKourse

Dad was a company man. Put in the hours to keep our sterile McBoat afloat. Grafted his brain onto his Flexbook ‘Maginepad. Coming up with new names for the same flavor of coffee. Played checkers with spreadsheets trying to eat the red tokens with the black. Trim the fat. “Stanford and Dillingham are bluest of blue chip. A collapse there has virtually negative probability, it’s a Sigma seven-plus event. It is more likely that the sun won’t come up tomorrow than Stanford and Dillingham will go under.” I looked outside, the sun buried under metric fuckloads of pollution and the black fog of class war, devouring the sky like nuclear winter. Thought, “Gee, maybe the house gave you the wrong odds on that one.” Maybe that was the point. Perhaps for a moment I understood what it meant to “sell short”: to gamble that an enterprise will fail. The Real Money People had their chips stacked on civilization rolling snake eyes.

You knew it was bad when the power realty agents in their pink Miu Miu and their Emu Egg fertata open-house hors d’oeuvres were pulling up like lost Eurasian-Agg tourists in District 10, polishing the turd-colored Section 8 housing with pointless Premium Web holotours, charging more TorrentCoins for a three-mouseclick credit check and “processing” fee than it would cost to buy all four stories of rust-bleeding cinderblock.

He tried to explain “net present value” to me once. The memory itself is a smear of numerati-speakage; labyrinthian CDO cash flows deluging mean variance voodoo wrapped around paradoxes like “time value of money”, and, somehow extricated from the intractable Cthulu-knottage of number theoretics a single dollar output, like some system-analysts’ Houdini escape act. It was at that moment I’d come, fully and irrevocably, to the conclusion that the art of finance was fundamentally the art of escape, an axiom corroborated by the fact that the previous two false-alarm Global Meltdown/Looting double features had gone off without a single senior-tranche indictment.

“See, Krash, this is how much we’ll be worth in 30 years, adjusted for 2050 dollars.” So many trailing zeros, like strung pearls, typefaced in sixty-point custom minted “Legal Tender” font, as if dressing the projection in dark suit and red tie might infuse it with truth. Portfolio graphed in interlocking Gaussian-Copula curves of gold and azure, accelerating exuberantly beyond the bounds of the finite spreadsheet’s gridded money-time continuum, like the exponential stairways to Singularity heaven trumpeted at some Silicon Valley technovangelist summit, before the tech collapse 2.0 and San Fran Revolts. Poetically, by 2050, there would exist no dollars with which to measure one’s “net present value”, and all those dead president and cryptohologram-etched cotton rectangles would be cold ash residue left by a trashcan fire or woven into post-post-modernist kilts, or preserved in vacuum-sealed zero-humidity Pluto museum vaults like original papyrus gospels archived in the bowels of the Vatican. Money to be preserved, rightfully, as the most holy documents of 20th Century America’s true religion.

Dad dealt in, traded futures. Like the financial barons, bankers, who were also in the business of trading futures. They traded the futures of the next generation away for a few more billions, a few more zeros on the Excel scoreboard, a few more pearls to string on the plastic-stuffed empty manikin of a trophy wife, a few more summerings in Cayman Island tax haven/resorts. That was his problem. He was in the business of futures in a world that was rapidly becoming very post-future. Generation Hex was the sledge-hammer pendulum swing about to be reeled in by our so-called “parents”, who left us to wallow in the ash of a squandered Golden Age. The life draining Great American Lie of The Future was overdue for a hard-takeoff iconoclasm by the post-future bastard children.

Later mom and I discovered he wasn’t worth those 2.4 million 2050 dollars. Dad was very mark-to-model. Ran off to mark Icelandic models in some Plutocrat Enclave’s playland he’d managed to cocksuck his way into, discarded mom and me like last-season’s smart phone, and left us to pick up the pieces of his mid-life crisis “family phase”, when I was fourteen.

He never called me Krash, I made that part up. I was just another statistic in an itemized list of yearly deductables, a “1.2 kid” checkmark in some misplaced aspiration toward American-gothic middle class normalcy that had curdled into mocked TV cliché decades ago. But in Generation Hex, I wasn’t just the wrong bubble in some multiple-choice exam. In Generation Hex, I was Krashkoarse, one of the elite hackers resisting the Puppetmasters, the future-selling bastard fathers of the world. In Generation Hex, I mattered.

Published!

The Ghosts of Cloud City, a post-apocalyptic short storified episode of my earlier fiction is up over at the scintillating bunker of wonders that is Mythaxis. And a special shout out to Gil, webmeister and editor thereof, a man who truly does his darndest out of curatorial love. For while we highfallutin 'authors' lounge about in Starbucks spewing daydreamt hallucinations, those in the editorial cutting room toil unceasingly to polish the material into gleaming publishability!

I also particularly liked the header art he created for my story. Spot on interpretation.

Be sure to check out some of the other stories as well, I am truly honored to be situated amongst such talent.

My Google Worries Confirmed by FBI Investigation

Google under antitrust investigation.

I hate to say I told you so, but..

I kinda told you so.

It’s not about ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, this is not a Spaghetti Western. You could have Mother Theresa running a thermonuclear weapon company who makes the fabest cutesy pastel Easter-themed neutron bombs, supports anti-African malaria charities, is carbon neutral and who shits hummus-flavored granola. The fact that Larry and Sergei are nice geeky engineers you’d like to have a Red Bull with who don’t really want a monopoly on the world’s communication and knowledge acquisition systems does not change the scaryness of the consolidation of power inherent in Google and similar tech companies. Every dictatorship starts out as a well-meaning revolution.

The “if people don’t like it they can just hop on over to some other search engine” argument is about as naive as the belief that anything like a free market actually exists in the real world. Perhaps in the Ivory Tower where Homo Economicus denizens frolick in ideal worlds hewn of theory, there we might actually have perfect or even functioning competition. It’s nice to theorize about how all inefficiencies and bad aspects of companies get magically worked out by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, but in the real world we have to look at how people actually behave. It’s like saying, “If people don’t like Coke, they can always drink Pepsi.” Don’t like eBay? You can always exert vast amounts of your personal time and energy hand-peddling your products to the 3 billion people on the internet for a fraction of the targeted eyeballs you’d get from eBay. Companies in the search business, like companies in the soft drink business, follow a Power Law distribution, that is, the vast majority of market share is inevitably controlled by a tiny minority of companies, and the barriers to entry of any new entrepreneurial venture into an existing mature industry, such as soft drinks or search, are so immense that the free market competition factor is so distorted it becomes essentially nil, ultimately resulting in a universal attractor state of near-monopoly. Oligopoly, if you like. This is why almost all small businesses ventures are in smaller, non-Power Law sectors (What Nassim Taleb calls “mediocristan”) like restaurants, or are inventing some new business niche who has not yet developed a monopolistic stasis (as the venture capitalist who started Google once did).

This effect goes DOUBLY for internet companies who, on top of the business Power Law, have the monstrous advantage of software lock-in and network lock-in. Software lock-in manifests as the substrata of established code, protocols and API upon which new programs are built become exponentially more difficult to dislodge and revamp as time passes. Network lock-in is best illustrated in the eBay example where the user utility of the service (internet auctions) increases dramatically with increase in user base, thus creating a winner-take-all feedback loop causing the company with the most users to become the Master Node for that particular market. The best utility for auctions (most eyeballs, cheapest prices) can be garnered via eBay, so users will naturally continue to flock there until either they shut down for whatever reason or people stop wanting to auction their stuff off (not likely). In the case of Facebook, since they've become the only SN game in town, "opting out" puts you at a crippling networking disadvantage in the business sector, and leaves you out of the conversations and connections between friends and family near and far. Ultimately this free market spiel "I can leave anytime" is an illusion of choice: for their particular service there is no competition and the opportunity costs are so great that many simply cannot afford to choose abstinence. In the same way that nobody had to go around with a prod "forcing" people and businesses to get online: the internet simply became so ubiquitous you either got with the cyber-program or you got left in the dust(bins).

Peak Humanity: Strangle-Economics and Why Abundance Is A Myth

Before I get started: sci-fi guru Charles Stross, writer of widely acclaimed and loved singularity-centric skiffy such as Accelerando has actually goneant-singularity. And his anti-nerd-rapture diatribe is much in-line with much of my own previously published rants, and others are are turning away from the glittery computational ball of wish-fulfillment.

Ah, my work here is finished.

Ok, not quite.

Oh, and bonus! In another vindication of my "Google is not cute" post, the FTC is gearing up to conduct a serious antitrust investigation against Google!

I was recently in a discussion with a future-optimist (white-hat futurist?), who was not at all concerned about the potential economic upheaval coming down the line resulting from the AI/Robotics revolutions in tandem with our currently FUBARed system. In a nutshell: "As new technologies are created, old jobs go away but new jobs are created, there is always more demand for some new product. The jobs will come somewhere, just as they have in the last 200 years. They won't be like the jobs we have today, just as jobs of today aren't like the jobs of yesterday. Autonomous machines will leave people with lots more money to spend on things like therapists, yoga instructors, musicians and artists, actors and writers, more tourism related services, e-books about the meaning of existence, high-quality bloggers, and especially medical services."

Demand for music has increased exponentially given the cascade of digital media revolutions/upheavals with most people listening to hours and hours of music each day, yet musician and artist wages have gone down or stagnated over the past decade. The fact that practically any song or movie you want can be had in mere seconds or hours via the internet, effectively decoupling demand from market value certainly doesn’t help. Music is already being automated by algorithmic song-generation software in some sectors (pop especially). There is only so much therapy and yoga instruction one can take and that is a drop in the bucket when you consider the number of jobs in low, mid-skill, and managerial jobs that will be jeopardized. Therapy is already turning into a kind of marketing arm for pharma companies to push mental disorder drugs. People are already consuming on average 5-10 hours of media per day, not counting the reading, not sure how much more actors and producers and writers are going to be employed. And the production costs (AKA salaries) along with actor salaries are way way down — look at the massive influx of “white Mexican” cheap British and Australian actors. Medical services are also entering a tidal wave of automation that is only just ramping up — IBM’s Watson was primarily targeted at health care analytics and the mid-level and office work which employs huge swaths of the medical sector. Then we’ve got “efficiencies” (salary loss) in the form of remote care, self-monitoring systems, and if many of the diagnostic functions can be handled by AI, that will take out a sizable chunk of the average doctor visit and nurse check-in work.

The main take away I think is that, while it may be heart-warming and a nice mantra to tell your kids that human potential is unlimited, in reality, there is a range of possible human physical and cognitive abilities which have value in the market, and if even the lower and mid-level human abilities are eclipsed by machines, that will create immense unemployment given our current market system that cannot be easily remedied.

“Jobs will come from somewhere” assumes that there is a “where” sizable enough within the mental and physical capabilities of the human species to replace the obsolesced sector of jobs. The Luddites who were replaced during the Industrial Revolution by the loom (and not without violent and vehement protest) and the Industrial Revolution assembly line workers who were supplanted by robots were both engaged in jobs on the very lowest tier of human capability — that is, simple, repetitive, rote tasks. These are the very easiest of automatable tasks in the design space of machines; they are essentially a four line algorithm: “wash, rinse, repeat”. All the examples you mention have been replacement by machines of small slices of human potential, and so have been absorbable as new “oil wells” of human potential have been tapped into and utilized — rote work replaced by slightly higher service industry and knowledge work skills, but the difference in the coming AI/robotics revolution is that we’re going to run out of “wells” of potential to tap. And even the automation thus far has proven to have massive destabilizing effects on society as a whole. The manufacturing was first outsourced in the US in the Reaganomics era to third world slave-labor and robots, and this again causing massive upheavel in the low and middle class. There was not some wonderful cornucopia of new money to spend as people saved all their cash from the reduced costs of production; all the extra wealth was siphoned up to the Blue Blood Owners of the companies. Their wealth has continued to go exponential as the middle and lower class wages have stagnated or declined, and living standards per-work-hour have drastically fallen. So this notion that the rising tide of innovation and technology raises all boats certainly has not been true for the past four decades at least. And the manufacturing sector, along with our economy’s supposed “replacement” sector – the service industry – are only being more and more automated — self-checkout is spreading like a contagion and most US manufacturing is done by robots, just have a look at a video of an IBM factory. We have been and continue to feel the effects of machine-sourcing, and it is only going to get worse as the machines get better.

While there may be an unending litany of new products to come out (next season’s iPhone, a better electric car, some other as yet uninvented tech), there is not an unending litany of new human physical and mental abilities being pumped out every season. What we’ve got is what we’ve got; the human body and mind are a finite resource and we are rapidly approaching peak humanity. We humans have low-skill rote work abilities (automated), knowledge work abilities — manipulating, analyzing, and applying information (being automated as we speak), creative abilities like writing, musicianship, art (harder to automate, but its happening and those sectors are already in dire straits because of other “technological innovation”). Biological evolution of our brain is happening at a rate magnitudes slower than technological evolution, and it is ultimately only a matter of time before our technology — robots and AI — can do anything that we can do, but better. It doesn’t matter what new “product of the future” comes out: if the machines can do what we can, then it will be *them* being hired for the new jobs, not us primate meatbags. This is the crux of the problem. Automation does not automatically make everyone richer but rather exacerbates income inequality and unemployment as the ultra-wealthy simply rake in more of the pie. And it is not even necessary that machines do 100% of the jobs: even if they do 50% of the jobs, and humans do the very highest-order intellectual-creative science and invention, that would completely break our current system.
As computer automation of the mid-skill and knowledge work begins to really set in, more and more people are going to be squeezed out of the workforce, with limited human-employability pie. The for-profit college loan ponzi-scheme scams are a symptom of this: you need a four year degree to even start competing for jobs that pay anything livable, and yet even with these degrees, almost half of the new college graduates leave school without a job, and are unable to find a good one. Indeed that great wave of “economic growth” we’ve been riding for the past decades has been art dropout brand-pushing AKA marketing — a zero-sum non-wealth-creating tug of war over customers — and the best and brightest going for that MBA to engage in plutocratic wealth-stealing schemes consisting of sandcastles of financial paper shuffling built on clouds of shadow mark-to-model systems. Culminating spectacularly in the recent global financial meltdown, and continued shambling of the zombie financial system which still permeates the world like a cancer of toxic debt. And this monstrosity, coincidentally, was enabled by automation of the stock market via algorithmic and high-freq trading, obsolescing another swath of the formerly human field of “systems analysts” the star children of the 80′s and 90′s.

Now enter Watson 2.0 AIs who start edging out the knowledge workers and parts of the creative class, evicting whole floors of glass-pyramid offices, pulling out that entire trophic crown jewel of the US, the “middle to middle-upper class” and forcing the former white collars to compete with the service jobs – the last bastions of human value, till android developers close the uncanny valley. The already struggling lower class, finding themselves competing with flailing PhDs for culinary and car repair jobs being eclipsed by robomechanics, are thus forced into…. Central America-grade crime or bloody revolution, possibly both. That’s I think why this blog’s owner suggests that we’re not going to make out so well as a species unless we can figure out some better way than our status quo of getting the wealth more fairly distributed and not just rely on the economics establishment’s tagline “the jobs will come from somewhere”.

Now before you leap screaming from the nearest 4+ story window, I should say that it's not all doom-n-gloom: there is yet hope. While I’m certainly not optimistic, I try not to be too pessimistic (though I think it better to err slightly toward caution as a rule of thumb). Ultimately, optimism and pessimism, utopia and dystopia are two sides of an idealist coin, a natural but unfortunately common human duality. Realism should ultimately be aspired to, but in a pinch, be prepared.

I don’t think that some horrible post-apocalyptic scenario is inevitable: quite the contrary, but I don’t think we can afford to just sit back and relax, let our civilizational ship go on autopilot while the techno-cultural icebergs are looming through the mist, and expect things are just going to work themselves out like some Bruckheimer summer blockbuster.

I've been asked (or strawmanned as the case may be) on more than one occasion if it's fair to say that I am a Marxist (ohnoes teh red future-commies!).

I think reality is a far more intractable Gordian Knot than any Enlightenment Era Rosetta Stone-theorist can account for, be it capitalism, communism, or any of the other long procession of tenure-track isms that we’re intellectually shackled by collectively as a society. There are some things which Marx was right about, in the sense that he was a kind of steampunk equivalent of the modern day Silicon Valley technovangelist: he was concerned about a day when machines really did subsume the entire means and labor force of production in response to the machinization of everything. (It is in fact difficult to distinguish much SV rhetoric with readings of Das Kapital) His suggested chain of events that magically solve all our problems, however, seem woefully misguided. For one thing, who the hell is going to “frolick about in the dandelion fields during the day, reading classics and poetry to one another and practicing archery in the afternoon”? This idea that “capitalism would inevitability lead to social revolution where private property in the means of production would be superseded by co-operative ownership and production would be organized for use” is terribly naive.

Many forms of modern techno-utopianism, such as Singularitarianism, transhumanism, and belief in global shared abundance suffers from the same myopic delusions of grandeur and human magnanimity as Marx’s communism. It’s hammered in again and again like an Apostles creed by the Singuvangelists that we’re going to have all our Earthly primate problems solved, Deus Ex: the Omniscient Machine in its ineffable wisdom shall cure all our diseases, bring peace to all our intractable conflicts, bring us into eternal life, elevate us into eternal blissful joy where every potato chip tastes like a thousand orgasms, said 89 Dark Elven virgins, the answer to every question, the meaning of life, the question who’s answer is 42, etc etc.. The same goes for the post-scarcity “Abundance” people who think that if we just have enough productivity capability up our sleeves, if we just “build all the machines” universal wealth and happiness “will come!” where we can work one hour and have enough to buy food shelter and health care for a month.

But guess what? We already have the resources, the wealth, to give every man woman child a 1st world or near 1st world life style. Every bank-puppeted economist will sing to you the undying praises of the modern globalized free market and how thanks to business and technological innovation we’re many times better off than we were half a century ago. However, as any major non-Koch brohers funded study will tell you, as if you didn’t already know, the wealth gaps have been and are only growing into ever more impassible chasms, EVEN as the sum total of pie to go around is getting bigger. As the Barclay’s head honchos buy their fourth tropical island nation as their personal getaway, we’ve got half the planet still starving and grinding their cartilage to dust 14 hours a day for a dollar, and even in the Greatest Country on Earth we’re seeing steady decline or stagnation in living standards. Simply adding better tech to the equation does not equal better or more even distribution of that wealthier future to everyone. On the contrary, if the pattern continues, we should expect a Singularital heaven, a super-intelligence run orbital Villa Straylight on which only the long WASP procession of royalty clones shall remain, literally disconnected from the hell below. Tell the rioting Greeks and Brits losing their prized social safety nets to “austerity measures” that are being used to pay retroactively bankster billionaire bonuses to “trust our democracy, it’ll all work out!”. Tell the Wisconsonites and Michiganers and other states who are rapidly losing their bargaining rights among other things to pay for the toxic debt the 500 Frat brothers have saddled us and our childrens’ children with to “be optimistic!”. Tell the invisible “other half” of the planet that works for less than a dollar a day, “Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll be frolicking in the dandelions soon!”
I don’t doubt that we as a species and a society have the *potential* to solve the challenges ahead. I don’t think that these problems are “easily solved”, or that they can be solved with our current level of engagement, although I certainly applaud the tens of thousands in Wisconsin and Michigan, and all the people who are truly trying to move and shake this thing up. But our so-called “democracy” is surely in jeopardy when the spineless marionettes we call politicians side with The Money over the government workers, teachers, fireman, policemen, nurses, and everyone else who turned out in force. When popular support was 300:1 against the bank bailout/Theft of 700 billion dollars from the American people and their children, and yet it still passed. I’m not seeing a lot of “hope and change” optimism abounding when the Washington “outsider” put into office to shake things up hires the unholy Wall Street triumverate who dismantled Glass-Steegle and helped seed the financial FUBAR onto his economic advisory, and continues to play sweetheart to the banks despite pretty uplifting but empty Oprah-book-club speeches. I’m going to have to temper that optimism with a strong chaser of realism. And if you think things are going to start getting better soon: we haven’t even had the *first* shoe drop with our financial mess, let alone the Great Automation. Give it a year or two of Japanese-style lost-decade and wait till we *actually* take the pain.

The human desire to compete for wealth and status and prestige and its second-order effects within complex socio-political configurations are routinely glossed over by the platonic hallowed Shangrilahs that permeates much of Marxist ethos and its spiritual progeny. You can try to deny that desire to compete, like some communist states and flower-throwing communes and naïve Silicon Valley programmers, and believe that billions of years of psychological evolution are just going to go away, and we’ve all seen how the Soviet experiment turned out. Somebody will always come out on top, whether that’s 500 frat brother network of CEOs, a genocidal dictator, an authoritarian People’s Republic. Today’s cute anti-authoritarian revolutionary in the bushes is tomorrow’s tyrant on the throne. Today’s “hope n change” presidential candidate is tomorrow’s Wall Street-owned puppet. Today’s grass roots take-back-the-government tea party is tomorrow’s “guns gods n gays” Republican freakshow. Revolution may come, but it is not enough to let the Tzar’s heads roll under your Bolshevik revolution if you wake up the next morning, rub the party hangover out of your eyes, and discover a Stalin at the podium. And marxists/abundantists who prefer to leave that fundamental non-linear x-factor out of their perfect equations for their model worlds are making their own Procrustean Beds (and the similarly deadly beds of innocent and/or ignorant bystanders). Not unlike the hordes of Gaussian Copula and “Great Moderation” flaunting economists who tried to fit the world to their theories and not vice versa. And we’ve all seen starkly and painfully how that 2008 economic Singularity worked out.

“More leisure time” is a myth: we’re working longer hours when you count all the work we have to take home, both parents and often kids need to work just to stay afloat in more cases than not, half of all Americans have no health insurance or have dismal coverage, and we’ve got multiple families stuffed into houses or apartments that used to be affordable by a single working parent half a century ago. It’s true, we have a lot more cheap crap nowadays, gadgets and xboxes and bling with which to tweet our neocortices into net-gen comas to keep us distracted and anesthetized from what’s going on. It’s also crappier crap that breaks easy — it’s five times cheaper but break five times faster than it used to, and you can count how long an iPad lasts with any children in the household in days. And the notion that capitalism is doing such a fantastic job making stuff so cheap has been as imaginary a gain as the 600 trillion in derivatives paper bullshit still orbiting the planet like some invisible Cthulu-entity patiently awaiting the next sovereign default / bubble burst that gets counted as “GDP increase”. That bargain iPad you picked up at Futureshop is provided by slave labor by some suicidal one-legged teen working in a Shenzen Foxconn factory 16 hours nonstop in a cloud of asbestos snapping together “lickable” beige plastic for a dollar a day, forget overtime or benefits. Externalized costs: shift the red off to someone else and frame the black in gold, and call it “progress”, that’s what we have to thank our “capitalist free market” system for in modern times (more like “kleptocratic distorted market”). Personally, I’d like the health care, an affordable home, and more leisure time to spend with family and friends over a bunch of cheap flat screens and gizmos and poison baby formula covered in negative karma.