Try to see yourself thinking. Take a long look at your mind. You may convince yourself that, when you look, you actually see something there. Are you actually seeing something, or are you imagining?

Tip of the hat to Michael Taft for offering that wicked problem, along with a related insight about emptiness: when I look closely, the words and images in my head seem real, but they don’t seem to be made of much. So many things seem solid in the mind until I look directly at them. In fact, it’s an empty space like the sky, thoughts blow through like clouds. Try grabbing a cloud and tangling with it, as you might do with your thoughts. That cloud is just vapor. And it’s changing shape as it passes through the sky. How substantial is it?

In “Backrooms,” are the liminal spaces manifestations of mind? Are the furnishings and odd creatures manifestations of memory? The possibilities inherent in backrooms as metaphor are compelling... the liminal spaces, like the mind, are empty except when they’re not. In the film, for both Clark and Mary, the backroom manifestations represent trauma in their lives. They battle the manifestations just as some of us, when encountering traumatic thoughts and memories, may find ourselves in psychic conflict with them. Which takes me back to the practice of looking for the origin of thoughts, looking for mind. And finding emptiness.

When we learn to be present and let thoughts and memories move as shadows or clouds, we may stop mistaking them for solid things. We may not erase trauma, or defeat it, or even fully understand it. But perhaps we can change our relationship to it. We can stop wrestling with every apparition that appears in the backroom of the mind. We can notice it, feel it, let it move, and return to the open space in which it appeared.

Long before I thought of myself as a cyborg, I was immersed in stories about robots, artificial intelligence, and technologically enhanced humans. Science fiction trained me early to take the future existence of robots and AI for granted. My first robot was probably Robbie, in “Forbidden Planet,” which was one of the earliest films I remember seeing - I would’ve been 7 or 8 years old at the time. From then on, I took the likely future existence of robots and AI for granted. And I had plenty of exposure after that - robots and AIs were common in science fiction and also in speculative nonfiction.

And then there was the cyborg.

Through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, cyborgs kept appearing in popular culture—from comic books to The Six Million Dollar Man, Robocop, the Borg, and the cyberpunk worlds of William Gibson.

Robots and their cousins, androids, are machines. Cyborgs, on the other hand, are living organisms integrated with technology.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism. At its core, cybernetics is about feedback: systems that sense, respond, and adjust based on the results of their actions. Computers, biological organisms, and many networked systems rely heavily on such feedback loops. So when you move a mouse, the computer takes the input, updates the screen, and uses that new state to wait for your next action. Feedback loops in computers are fundamental for memory, stability, and computation.

In a cyborg, a biological organism combines with technological components linked through cybernetic feedback loops. This sort of thing is common in the 21st century, considering pacemakers, cochlear implants, neural prosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and robotic limbs with sensory feedback. In these systems, sensors detect conditions, information is processed, responses are adjusted dynamically, and the human-machine system becomes partly self-regulating.

In the early 1990s, as we were percolating FringeWare, Paco Nathan and I realized in conversation that we were cyborgs - we were enhanced by, or integrated with, technology. The technologies we were considering, our computers, were external but essential. We were using our computers to process information, and we adjusted our responses according to feedback from or through our computers. We had significant interactions that were mediated by digital technology: more and more of our conversations and our relationships were forming online. Our computers weren’t just tools; they became extensions of our memory, communication, and imagination.

Our world expanded. We could be anywhere and everywhere at once.

Maybe it was a stretch to think of ourselves as cyborgs at that point, but we weren’t alone. Around that time in cyberpunk science fiction, media theory, hacker culture and posthuman discourse the term “cyborg” was extended to include humans cognitively enhanced by computers and computer networks. (Some might argue that this is a case of using tools, which is below the bar for “cyborgization” - but regardless, we thought of ourselves as cyborgs.)

This was at a time when cyberpunk was being seen as, not just a subgenre of science fiction, but a potential way of life going forward, as more and more people were using computers and connecting to the Internet.

What felt like a provocative cyberpunk idea in the early 1990s has become ordinary life. From fictional cyborgs, we progressed to cognitive cyborgs - cognition enhanced by computers and networks. Then we added mobility: smartphones and wearables - it’s common to have sophisticated computers in our pockets and on our wrists, all networked globally through Internet access. And now we’re entering the era of AI-augmented cyborgs. Conversational AI and large language models are becoming another “voice in our heads,” a new cognitive partner that can advise, explain, challenge, and sometimes mislead us. Cyberpunk and other forms of science fiction or speculative fiction suggested potential futures that could align well with our present. So now what?

AI systems are emerging quickly, and I would argue that our technologies are outrunning our understanding by miles. We have yet to understand how to be cyborgs, what that means for humans as humans.

The question is no longer whether we will become cyborgs. In many ways, we already are. The challenge now is deciding what kind of cyborgs we want to be, and what kind of humanity we want to preserve, as our technologies become ever more deeply entwined with our lives.

Absent real leadership from Trump, there’s probably a hub-and-spoke power network where Trump is the brand, a veto point, and a chaos engine. He’s still the source of legitimacy for the executive, any actions or major moves would have to sound like something he would do, flatter him, and/or fit his instincts: vengeance, loyalty, tariffs, immigration enforcement, executive dominance, anti-“deep state” politics.

Susie Wiles, as chief of staff, is probably gatekeeper and operations manager - basically doing traffic control, managing access by various factions and keeping them from overrunning the Oval, controlling the sequence of decisions, trying to stay true to Trump’s presumed preferences.

Stephen Miller is an important policy operator, especially on immigration, domestic security, executive orders, and the use of federal power against perceived enemies. He’s probably the darkest side of the administration, and as deputy chief of policy, has a huge impact in creating actionable directives. He could care less about the Constitution or the law, and this probably explains the persistent lawless actions of the Executive.

Russel Vought is the architect of the new MAGA administrative state, such as it is. He would be responsible for budget control, impoundment theories, federal workforce restructuring, agency pressure, and the Project 2025-style theory of a more unitary executive. He could care less about Congressional oversight, and this probably explains why the Executive is operating as though Congress has no oversight or approval role.

JD Vance is probably not that powerful within the Executive, but he’s the visible representative and a bridge to the post-Trump right: nationalist, anti-institutional, skeptical of the old GOP foreign-policy consensus, and useful as a public explainer of the project. He may also be brokering discussions/dealings with the Silicon Valley right, populist conservatives, and younger MAGA intellectuals.

Marco Rubio is probably responsible for foreign policy and national security. He’s probably overloaded, and a bottleneck, as both Secretary of State and national security adviser.

Otherwise there are dedicated fiefdoms led by various cabinet secretaries. Treasury on markets and debt, DHS on immigration enforcement, DOJ on prosecutions and legal defense of executive action, Defense on deployments, Commerce/USTR advisers on tariffs, HHS on health policy, and so on. The White House sets the political direction; agency heads and loyal deputies operationalize it.

In all this there are competing factions all trying to interpret the the will of the sovereign, flatter him, anticipate what he’ll approve, and move quickly before courts, Congress, the press, or rival factions can stop them. And if he’s truly bored and disinterested, focusing more on his ballroom, gold statues, and viral branding wherever he can get away with it, then there may be less consultation with him. So a potential for a less coherent administration, possibly a house of cards waiting to collapse.

Though I’ve idolized him for decades for his work, I realize taht I would not have liked to spend much time around Stanley Kubrick; Watson’s description of his experience working with the man, as well as other accounts I’ve read, suggest that he was grouchy, picky, angstsy, sometimes pushy. I recall in reading about the making of 2001 that Kubrick almost killed stuntman Bill Weston, then hid from him for 2-3 days to avoid inevitable confrontation.

There’s a lot I don’t know about Kubrick the person, but Kubrick the filmmaker played a role in shaping by world-view. I’ve seen most of his films, but the first I remember seeing was “Lolita.” I was barely a teenager when it was released. I saw it at a drive-in theater a couple of years after it was released, and probably ‘way before I could understand Humbert Humber’s angst. I was precocious, but not that precocious.

However I definitely grasped the next film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” I’d actually read Peter George’s “Red Alert,” so I was primed for the film. It has a particular vibe, and I’ve felt a similar vibe from all the Kubrick films. Not sure how to describe it - clean, sophisticated, knowing. I think the vibe was Kubrick, that you could feel him in the flow of frames regardless of subject or locale. You can feel the vibe in his photos, too. It’s in the light.

Of all the Kubrick films, “2001: A Space Odyssey” is the one that got deepest into my skin. Because I was science-fictionized, brainy and weird, people asked me to explain the film when it was a just-released. I saw the film summer 1968 in Scottsdale, Arizona, at a Cinerama theater. And saw it again the following December in Odessa, Texas - a 70mm release. Then again in 70mm in Austin, Texas. Every time, the people I saw it with had questions.

What does it mean, they wondered? And I thought it was cinematic poetry, that the viewer would bring meaning to it, it didn’t have to mean any one thing. However, especially in Clarke’s thinking, there was a more prosaic meaning, it was a fictional story, a novel with a succession of events that were anchored, in his mind, to literal meaning. In his story, aliens who are godlike but not gods, never visible, encourage and manipulate the evolution of the human species. Perhaps the aliens are the source of deity myths, but they’re logical, not supernatural, just far advanced.

Given this explanation, the star-child is likely an advanced being produced from Dave Bowman’s DNA. And in the sequel, “2010,” Bowman appears as Bowman, apparently having grown into conventional human form. But from what I’ve read Kubrick avoided prosaic explanation of those last minutes of his arguably most ambitious film.

Looking back over my life, it’s tiny, microsopic, compared to the Immensity. I’m just an atomic particle of something far beyond my grasp. My first flash of enlightenment on that point came as I stood next to a busy highway in my late teens, looking at the stars in the night sky - I don’t recall why I was standing there, but I do remember that flash of realization: at some level all things are one, and my life is just an effect with many interdependent causes, submicroscopic compared to the larger whole of reality in process.

What did Stanley Kubrick see when he stared at the sky at night? His expansive vision for “2001: A Space Odyssey” seemed to transcend the personal/subjective while reaching for the stars and possibly beyond. To this day, I don’t know where the hell Dave Bowman went or how he bent time, how long it took him to age as he did, how and why he transformed into the “starchild” seen at the end of the film. And why the original intention was to have the starchild hovering above the earth and detonating an orbiting nuclear warhead. That was Clarke’s ending, but Kubrick dropped it, evidently because it would seem too much like the end of his prior film, “Dr. Strangelove.”

The film starts at the dawn of time, with Kubrick’s depiction of apes a coarse, unsubtle, primitive but peaceful. (NOTE: See update posted below this article: I did some rethinking.) Exposed to a monolith that appears, apparently set in place by godlike aliens, the apes become competitive, warlike. In battle an ape, using a bone as a weapon, pounds over bones... a bone flies into the air, and fades into a spacecraft in transit from the earth to the moon. This bit of Kubrick cinemagic appears to suggest that human technological advancement has its origins in competition and war.

How else might we see the apes at the dawn of mankind? Could it be that they were more subtle, thoughtful, nuanced in their action and appearance? Why assume that they were coarse, that they were brutes? Why assume that their advancement was driven by competition, not cooperation? Kubrick advanced a prominent Western bias, an assumption that human evolution is a fight - ultimately a fight won by the white European who is propelled into space at the forward end of human evolution. (If Kubrick was filming in the 21st century, might there be more diversity in casting? We’ll never know. But in Kubrick’s films in general, there’s a lack of diversity.)

A shiny rectangular slab appears for the apes, and seems to catalyze their evolution. Interestingly, the most obvious sign that the apes have grown more intelligent is their sudden realization that competition is possible, that one tribe can use violence to take from another tribe. The common perception is that MoonWatcher the ape and the members of his tribe have discovered the first tool, but it must be meaningful that the first took is a weapon. We see the apparently first-ever attack, Moonwatcher leading his tribe to take possession of a waterhole, pummeling an opponent with the bone/tool/weapon. He slings the bone into the air, and that bone represents the progress of technology, fading to a much more sophisticated weapon, a nuclear weapons platform orbiting earth at the dawn of the 21st century.

In this vision of the future, humans are traveling via a space station to moon bases by the year 2001. Americans on the moon have located a slab, just like the one that apparently influenced Moonwatcher’s tribe - buried 4 million years ago near the lunar crater Tycho. The slab, now uncovered, emits a shrill signal. The signal is apparently transmitted to an area near Jupiter. Realizing this, and realizing this suggests the existence of an alien race, humans decide to pursue the signal, building an AI-operated spacecraft, Discovery One, for that purpose. Two crew members and the AI, Hal, oversee operations while three scientists are stored in suspended animation.

A key aspect of the plot: Hal goes rogue, siezes control of the ship, attempts to kill all the puny humans, thinking in his synthetic mind that they would fubar the mission. One astronaut, Dave Bowman, survives, dismantles Hal, and pursues the rest of the mission. Seeing yet another slab in space orbiting Jupiter, Bowman sets out in a pod to explore it, and is whisked through a stargate, apparently across galaxies, and dropped into an environment where the aliens observe him as he ages, and transform him into the embryonic starchild who returns to earth. At the end of the book, the starchild detonates orbiting nuclear weapons, saving humans on earth form self-destruction. But in the film, the starchild’s purpose remains unknown as credits scroll and the Blue Danube waltz plays.

The aliens appear to be beneficent, so what can we assume about their manipulation of the human race? Since Kubrick didn’t want to interpret, and disregarding the Clarke book which is a bit more straighforward, I’m going to suggest a way to interpret the film as an overview of human evolution catayzed by godlike aliens.

The alien intervention wasn’t meant to manifest as violence, but that was the initial impact of the catalyzed intelligence in the apes. I.e. the violence emerged as a characterisic of the apes, and not as a characteristic imposed by the aliens.

We then skip human evolution into the near-future, and we see that humans have not let go of violent tendencies, though the violence is more subtle and sophisticated. However it’s potentially catastrophic via nuclear weaponry. We even see violence emerge as an aspect of the human-created AI, which, like Moonwatcher, uses its intelligence to kill. So I think what Kubrick is saying here is that the apes that evolved into humans had an innate propensity to violence that is never lost throughout human evolution, that in 2001 we still have wars, however cold, and we still create ever more sophisticated weaponry.

But the god-like aliens are ready to intervene again. With what result? Can they curb the tendency to violence... is that the next evolutionary step?

I just did an online search with the terms “Kubrick” and “violence.” The search overview tells me that “Stanley Kubrick made some of the most iconic, controversial, and deeply analytical films about violence in cinema history. Rather than utilizing action for simple thrills, he used violence to explore the darker aspects of human nature, war, and the power dynamics of society and the state.” It goes on to discuss some of his films that explored the subject of violence: certainly “A Clockwork Orange” and “Paths of Glory,” also “Dr. Strangelove,” “Barry Lyndon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” and “The Shining.” No mention of “2001,” though. I’m not surprised - only now am I realizing that “2001” should be included among these films, and might be the most insightful and expansive exploration of violence ever.

Here’s another piece I wrote 25 years ago about “2001,” called “2001 Blues.” [Link]

UPDATE: I realize an error in my thinking here, based on an assumption that the prehistoric apes depicted were relatively peaceful. In fact they weren’t, they tended to squabble. So I think what Kubrick is saying is that violence was inherent in those creatures, and that it persisted even as we became toolmakers, developed intelligence, and became “civilized.” It makes more sense that the propensity was already there, and we haven’t got past it. h/t Joanna Bryson for helping with this clarification.

I’ve been in some discussions recently, some related to Buddhist practice, and some inspired by Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears.

One idea that keeps resurfacing: the self as interface.

Behind this interface there’s a great deal happening - awareness, which has layers, like an onion. There’s thinking, which is words and images and intentions arising and dissolving internally, guiding us through the waking life. And sometimes tangling us—looping into anxiety when we can’t let go or widen our perspective.

Then there are emotions, powerful, often mechanical forces. Hard to control, sometimes intensely positive or negative, therefore destabilizing. They resist analysis; they live partly beyond our understanding.

And there’s the mystery of sleep: where are we when we’re not awake? Are we still conscious in some sense? What currents are moving through the brain? How do they relate to mind?

A lot of knots to unravel.

That reflection connects to something else I’ve been considering: meditation.

Meditating for relaxation, or even for enlightenment—as a kind of self-improvement project—feels slightly off to me. It risks reinforcing the very self it aims to transcend.

What seems more aligned is letting go of self-interested goals altogether. Removing obstacles to compassion. Staying open to insight without depending on it. Practicing without measuring success or failure.

But that leads to another question: is meditation related to truth? And do we even know what we mean by “truth”?

Truth is slippery. It might mean correspondence to reality - assuming we can agree what “reality” is. It might mean coherence—fitting within a system of beliefs. It might mean what works, what proves effective in practice.

In lived experience, people rarely adopt beliefs because they correspond neatly to reality. They adopt them because they feel right—because they stabilize meaning in a given context.

So perhaps truth is some combination: something that aligns with reality, coheres with what else we know, works in practice, and feels meaningful.

***

If I were filling out a form asking for my religious preference, I’d probably write “Buddhist.”

If you asked me face to face, I’d say something more like “Buddhist-adjacent.” I’ve studied Buddhism for over fifty years, but I haven’t followed a traditional path—no single teacher, no consistent sangha, no formal adherence to one school’s rituals or practices.

Still, I suspect that whatever the Buddha realized—and tried to convey—is not dependent on Buddhism as a system. It would remain true even for someone who has never heard of the dharma.

There isn’t just one path to realization. And there are likely many who believe they’ve arrived, but who haven’t—not really.

New Orleans is one of the most culturally and racially mixed cities in the South, with a majority Black population, a growing Hispanic community, and deep historical roots in African, French, Spanish, and Caribbean cultures — all of which continue to shape its food, music, architecture, and identity.

We’ve been on vacation this week, and as I write this I’m relaxing with coffee in a New Orleans hotel on the last full day of our trip.

Hanging out in New Orleans, specifically in the French Quarter, you get a crash course on the real diversity of cultures that have been slow-cooking in that melting pot boomers were taught to appreciate as a source of American strength, now reviled by the hopefully temporary powers-that-be as a stewpot filled with depravity and malice. This from some of the most depraved and malicious “powers” ever to “be” in positions of leadership - their villainy would be comical if it wasn’t so destructive.

But New Orleans reminds me how wrong they are, how the “melting pot” narrative of our American evolution understood the power of hybrid vigor in the mixing of cultural flows. Our culture prioritized rainbows over monochrome darkness, increasingly so, until recently.

Other than the amazing food, the best part of our visit has been simply wandering the streets, appreciating the diverse crowds and explosions of creativity - street art and street bands, mostly. And noting the inherently friendly and helpful vibe here.

“The map is not the territory...” ~ Alfred Korzybski

Recently driving my 2025 Elantra Hybrid to a meeting with an author friend who’s in town for research, I used Google Maps to find the most efficient route through morning traffic. I do this all the time, but this time something caught my eye that I hadn’t noticed before. The Elantra has a high-resolution map display when you use Apple Carplay, rendering position and context as an abstract 3D display that includes shapes of buildings and trees along the road. I hadn’t noticed the tree shapes before, but this time they captured my attention.

I realized that the cartoonish virtual trees on the map, while suggesting that trees exist in the environment, didn’t conform to the shape or placement of actual trees. This makes sense, considering that the trees are not essential to the navigation, but I wondered how the map application’s algorithm decides placement, size and shape of those trees? And why have them at all? Neither the Google Maps nor the Apple Maps application includes trees on the computer unless you select the satellite view, which is a photographic display including actual trees and buildings.

I did some research, understanding that the trees are symbolic, not literal. I found that, when the map data suggests that an area has trees, diverse tree icons are rendered algorithmically using an evidently random distribution. The tree shapes and colors are fairly consistent, and spacing depends on context (a park may have less density than a forest).

Why have trees on the map at all? While it’s true as I mentioned that they’re not essential for navigation, the presence of the trees can signal types of areas and assist orientation - e.g., trees might help to identify parks or medians. So including them in rendering can help distinguish one kind of area from another. They make the view a bit less abstract and a bit more human-friendly.

This acknowledgement of the presence of trees, even if the placement and size are not accurate, can make the map feel more realistic, more like the real world, more worthy of user confidence.

So it does make sense to include the trees.

This made me think how so many of us are living in a hybrid reality combining the physical with the virtual. And others less so: the author I met at the end of my drive had a cellphone, not a smartphone, like the bulky iPhone Pro Max that I carry, which is a small computer that combines many functions including voice communication, which I use less than many of its other features. It has a camera the quality of which is comparable to my Nikon SLR. It has apps for games and news and aesthetic play of various kinds. It can stream high quality music and video.

My friend’s phone, though, has two functions, voice and text. No apps, no games, no camera, no music, no video. We discussed briefly how different our experiences of reality must be, given that my perception is persistently filtered through a relatively powerful computing device, and his is not. My attention and experience are mediated to much greater extent by a combination of technology and media that captures my attention much of each day.

I wonder if this commitment to a more virtual reality is a good or bad thing. I’m not sure that it’s either, it’s just one way of experiencing the world; it has its pros and cons. I’m considering a media and technology fast sometime in the near future, to assess a different kind of experience. I have sunk deeper and deeper into virtual experience; my attention is divided, my train of thought has many turnouts and complications.

There are those who advocate hugging real trees as a grounding practice, and a way to connect with nature. In Japan, there’s a practice called shinrin-yoku, or forest-bathing, spending time in a forest or similar natural setting. A likely therapy for 21st century stress. Your avatar might hug virtual trees in virtual reality, but I don’t think it would have the same therapeutic effect.

Three decades ago I published a magazine under this title, “Unshaved Truths.” The name stuck with me, long after the publication itself faded into the background of other projects and preoccupations. It had a certain roughness to it, an unwillingness to be too polished, too presentable. Truth, after all, rarely arrives clean and camera-ready. It tends to show up late, half-formed, inconvenient, and often unwelcome.

We live now in a culture that prefers its truths shaved, styled, and optimized for sharing. Information is filtered through layers of incentives: political, economic, algorithmic. Eventually what remains is less a reflection of reality than a performance of it. The question is no longer simply “Is this true?” but “Who benefits from this being believed?” and perhaps even more urgently, “What is being left out?”

Unshaved Truths is an attempt to sit with those questions a little longer than is comfortable.

I won’t pretend to have all the answers - maybe not ANY of the answers.

If anything, I’ll lean into uncertainty, into the spaces where facts are contested, narratives collide, and easy conclusions dissolve under closer inspection. Some posts will look outward, at current events, technology, media, digital culture, and the strange feedback loops that shape public understanding. Others may turn inward, drawing on meditation, philosophy, or simply the experience of trying to pay attention in a distracted age.

Because the search for truth isn’t only external. It’s also about our perception, our filters, and how we react. The same forces that distort public discourse - bias, fear, attachment - operate quietly (though sometimes loudly) inside each of us.

So this is a place for unpolished thinking. For ideas that are still forming. For perspectives that may not fit neatly into established categories. Not contrarian for its own sake, but skeptical of anything that arrives too neatly packaged.

If there’s a guiding principle here, it’s this: truth is not something we consume. It’s something we engage with... imperfectly, provisionally, and always with the awareness that we might be wrong.

That may not be the most satisfying way to approach the world. But it might be the most honest.

Originally published in the last issue of Whole Earth Magazine (aka Whole Earth Review), Spring 2003

History

In the sixties and early seventies my g-g-generation caught fire with concern for the environment; we added it to our charm bracelet of concerns which included world hunger, the Vietnam war (and, for that matter, all goddam wars), gender and racial inequality, haircuts, junk food, television, processed food, the prohibition of Certain Substances, nuclear energy, Republicans, Democrats, polyester, and who knows what else, I’ve lost track. We were definitely going to do something about all this stuff, but most of us were distracted along the way by parties wild and mundane, kids, car payments, mortgages, alcohol and narcotics, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, trips to the mall, Star Wars, fitness programs, etc. We became mainstream capitalists, young urban professionals defined by our diverse purchases and 1significant debt loads.

So we forgot that we were supposed to be doing something about the world’s problems, though to protect the environment we kept recycling, signed petitions to save greenbelts, humpback whales and black-capped verios, bought Sierra Club calendars and drove the smaller, more energy-efficient SUVs and pickup trucks. We did our bit to control population (saving a few childcare bucks along the way). We enjoyed the great outdoors, wore rugged clothes, took our kids to Earth Day celebrations, and did what we could to avoid polluting our little corners of the world. But we were also human and fallible, possibly greedy, and we didn’t always remember in detail why this stuff about the environment was supposed to be a big deal or wonder how separating newspapers and bottles from the rest of the trash was going to save the planet. We heard that there was a hole in the ozone, so we stopped using chlorofluorocarbons and that was okay. We were pumping spray to do our part. We didn’t think to wonder whether ozone healed. What does that ozone layer do, anyway? Our kids probably knew.

We got really, really busy with our jobs and our lives. Time passed.

Scientists were still paying attention, though. In the 1950s they started measuring atmospheric CO2 at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory, and by 1983 they were noticing and worrying about increased volumes of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases are essential to the biosphere because they trap and hold heat from the sun’s radiation. However increased volumes were causing a warming trend over the earth’s surface. The Environmental Protection Agency said that, because of warming, “agricultural conditions will be significantly altered, environmental and economic systems potentially disrupted, and political institutions stressed.” In 1988 the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), comprised of the world’s leading climate scientists. They began to organize the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, where scientists acknowledged a need to take some kind of action with to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with human activity…primarily factory emissions and car exhausts. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was established to create commitments by industrialized nations to curb their emissions.

1998 was the hottest year in the last millennium, and a megastrength El Nino caused massive storms in some areas, severe drought in others. This got our attention. Perhaps it was time to hug a few trees.

Warming

I live in Boulder, Colorado, where climate and environmental studies are prominent. The National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both have substantial research facilities in Boulder, and the University of Colorado has one of the best Environmental Studies programs in the country. I dropped in on Dr. James White, director of the Environmental Studies program. He said that the global climate is definitely changing, and there’s no doubt that human activity is a significant driver. “I think that, if you look at the simple physics around how greenhouse gases work, if you look at the fact that greenhouse gases are on the increase, we know we’re having an impact on climate,” he says, adding that the debate is really over how that impact is expressed. It might be heat, it might be megastorms and overall climatic instability.

Can’t we have more certainty? Not according to Dr. White. “My own research tells me that climate change is not this give and take, push and shove kind of linear system where if we increase CO2 by X, we get X climate change; if we increase it by 2X, we get 2X climate change. That is really what the models give us as feedback, because the models don’t have mode changes. If North Atlantic deep water fails, a sophisticated model that can handle that. But if you look at the way climate has changed historically, going back over the history of the earth, it’s not a little bit here, a little bit there. It’s more like my little brother, when we were kids. I would pester him, and he didn’t respond, and I would pester him more, and he would blow up, and yell and scream at me. When Mom asked me what I did, I said ‘All I did was poke him once, Mom.’ But there was all that energy I built up in my little brother with all those other tormenting little pokes. And it’s that kind of nonlinear behavior that makes waiting for the shoe to drop a rather dangerous activity.”

Climate is notoriously hard to predict because of its multidimensional complexity. It’s hard to discern all the potential interactions, subtle and gross, that might influence long-term weather patterns. Because weather is complex, trends are unlikely to have global consistency. For instance, despite the current global warming trend, the southeast U.S. is actually cooling, and temperature trends throughout the U.S. are relatively flat compared to the rest of the world. Bottom line here is that, though we know climate is changing, we don’t know long-term implications of the change. So what do we do?

Unfortunately some believe that, lacking clarity about the implications of climate change, we should do nothing. According to Jim White, this is a tricky debate for scientists, who are taught to think in terms of hypotheses and conditional statements. And as a culture we’re into denial, especially about problems that seem distant, the proactive handling of which involves costs. This is where we have George W. Bush et al dissing the Kyoto Accords as too expensive to implement. For Bush, short term costs outweigh long-term uncertainties about climate. Says Jim White, ” I think the sad reality is that we may, before all is said and done, get a big climate change, and that may be the mobilizing factor. Some people have argued that we’ll need that. We’ll need the big change, the grizzly bear set free in the house before we deal with the bears in the yard.”

Green Teams

White’s been looking forward. ” I see carbon dioxide and climate change as merely step one in many steps, many problems that are going to happen in the future,” he says. “We’re going to have to have global cooperation to deal with them all. So we need to take the first step with something like the Kyoto Treaty. Maybe we’re not going to get the best treaty we possibly can, maybe it’s going to have a little more economic impact than we could potentially negotiate. But let’s take the step. We’re going to have to get to some point of global cooperation in the future, and we’re certainly not going to get there if we take all of our toys and step back from the table, and say no, we’re not going along.”

Meanwhile White and his colleagues in Boulder are working on a solution in a new, cross-disciplinary approach to Environmental Sciences curriculum. The University of Colorado has a National Science Foundation grant for a curriculum called Carbon, Climate, and Society. ” The idea is for graduate students from the natural sciences – specifically biology, geological Sciences, chemistry, etc. – to be co-educated with students from economics, political science, and in particular journalism. At an early stage in a graduate career, they’ll learn team-building skills essential for them to address environmental issues. There’s just no way that a person going through any one discipline can really grasp the full breadth of environmental problems, because it involves the full complexity of humans interacting with the natural environment. So the idea is that they will learn first how to trust their colleagues in these various fields. And we want them to learn how to communicate with the media, and through the media, with the public.”

This is the kind of activism we need. It’s not enough to be educated in one of the relevant scientific disciplines. You also have to learn to develop and leverage synergy with experts in other disciplines, especially media and politics, and that kind of cooperation doesn’t have to be limited to academic environments or wait until students so trained leave school. Working scientists, policy specialists, and journalists can follow the same model, forming teams to raise consciousness and influence policy.

Corporations can do the “green team” thing, too. Managing Green Teams: Environmental Change in Organisations and Networks, a book published in the UK (Edited by John Moxen and Peter A. Strachan; published by The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK; available through Amazon UK, http://www.amazon.co.uk) describes “how environmental teams can trigger changes in core operations and integrate environmental concerns in business decision-making at every level in the organization.” There several projects involving green teams, in fact, a web search on the phrase via Google got over 1,400 hits. This is definitely and idea whose time has come.

Finally, there are obvious things we can all do to mitigate our impact on climate change. We can drive smaller cars, drive less, push for more and better forms of mass transit. We can plant trees (if 250 million of us planted four trees each, that would be a billion new trees sucking CO2 out of the air!)

And we can teach our kids environmental awareness, attention, and care… education and sane tradition are the best remedies.

And what do we do about George W. Bush? Pretty obvious…

Write his mom a nice, long letter.

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The post Being Green in 2001 appeared first on Jon Lebkowsky.

I wrote this in the late 1990s for a book called CyberRevolution, edited by Yoshihiro Kaneda – this was translated into Japanese by Gohsuke Takama, and was published only in Japan. Yoshihiro also interviewed me via email.

It’s time to wake up and do some critical thinking about the information highway, which we know will be a reality, at least next century, because we can already see the construction of infrastructure in Japan, the United States, and other countries (though the nationalist/geopolitical thing is increasingly irrelevant), and because we can sense the demand for expanded information services not just within online cultures but in the proliferation and success of neighborhood video rental stores. The videoplex explosion is an important key to the inforeality of the near future because it reveals a pent-up demand for entertainment software, not just film on video, but games and even audiotapes, all of which can be delivered digitally directly to the consumer over the high-bandwidth fiber optic networks that will comprise the infobahn. The potential power of these networks still hasn’t sunk in; infotainment corporations are still attached to the concept of product embodied in a particular hard medium that can be sold over the counter, like the compact disk or digital audio tape. They haven’t quite got the message that this superhighway we’ll building will render obsolete those vehicles that travel so much slower than the speed of light.

Those of us who live on the cultural fringes might want to consider the advantages and disadvantages of global high-speed digital links forming high bandwidth networks with sufficient capacity for unimaginable numbers of information channels. Those of us who’re hanging out on today’s Internet have already experience some crazy affects of high-volume internetworking, a handful of which I will mention here:

1) Chaos rules. Information spews from every conceivable direction, and it’s difficult to filter any clear sense of stable reality when you’re barraged with this degree of infoglut. This heightens the postmodern sense that there is no real truth, that all laws are relative and all reality is open to multiple interpretations all of which may be pure baloney…as the Firesign Theatre said, “Everything you know is wrong,” and an internetworked reality only serves to emphasize this disquieting fact. Though this is a disorienting perception, it carries the advantage that no single ‘truth’ can dominate, which means that tyranny is difficult to sustain. Politically, networked cultures seem to be more anarchic/democratic. This feels pretty free, though a community that is structurally democratic can sometimes feel like a mob.

2) People think they have community when they don’t. “Virtual community” is hot terminology, but misleading. You get some pieces of community online, a sense of unity with others, even a sense of common (virtual) location in cyberspace, but there’s something missing, a 3D flesh-and-blood element that the dictionary definitions of community don’t mention. But it’s clearly an issue: for example, members of the floating online community built around the Leri-L discussion list on the Internet decided that virtual meetings weren’t enough, so they began holding ‘fleshmeets,’ informal gatherings at various geographical locations. I haven’t been to a Leri-L fleshmeet, but I’ve been in similar situations with other groups, and there’s clearly a sense after such a meeting that the virtual community was “community” only in an abstract sense before the face-to-face connection completed the social transaction from which true fellowship is formed.

A related point is that a virtual community may fall apart when it’s carried from cyberspace to physical space. We can make ideal representations of ourselves in online text-based worlds, but our physical reality establishes a different context which I hesitate to say is the more “real,” but it will be judged as reality, and that reality may not measure up to the virtual promise.

3) Access will be limited. Short-term, at least, computer networks will remain more accessible to those who have an affinity for telecommunication gizmonics, and who have relatively high literacy and at least adequate typing skills. This effectively locks whole classes of folks out of the virtual world, which they perceive, if at all, as an obscure netherworld populated by various flavors of geeks. This is a clear advantage for the technical early adopters (in what other context would a Bill Gates become a billionaire?), and (down side, at least in my opinion) it may have a mainstreaming effect on constituents of fringe cultures. This happened to at least some elements of the sixties counterculture, an example being Rolling Stone magazine, which evolved from a radical underground newsrag devoted to arts and music to a middle-of-the-road yuppie scumsheet oriented, like the radio culture of the 90s, to product dissemination.

4) We will always have an audit trail. Everything you do on the information highway will have your digital signature stamped on it (perhaps a representation of your DNA?), so it will be difficult to hide who and what you are from someone with the determination and the technical prowess to find your tracks. This will facilitate a refined targeting of marketing sludge, and it will open a few new business opportunities: authentication, for instance. We will see the proliferation of clearinghouses to authenticate your digital reality to facilitate credit and digicash transactions, among others.

Other businesses will be formed, perhaps underground, to sell strategies for digital camouflage, and to search and hack patterns within data they may reflect digital individual or group identities.

These four infobahn-related issues are a foundation for thinking about the complexity of the digital world, but if you don’t *like* it, what can you do about it? After all, it’s inescapable, we’ve gone too far into this digital frame…we’ve formed identities around digitalia, and digital identities can be hacked, another worry.

The cleanest thing you can do is tell technology to fuck off, move to the mountains and live an idyllic existence by the campfire, eschewing all connection with the digital world. Since I know you’re not gonna *do* that, I won’t address the possibility. Another thing you can do is get involved in the politics of evolving infosystems, which you can do online simply by making your presence known at high volume and with high redundancy.

Or you could drop into a fringe reality, the culture hacker’s alternative world, and hack the media in the Situationist/Immediast sense…subvert the messages of the mainstream top culture wherever you can, and toss subtle packets of dissident memes into the infosphere, allowing the winds of chaos to blow yer memes into hurricane mode. The last great advantage of the information revolution we’re into is that insurgency doesn’t require confrontation, it doesn’t even necessarily require discomfort…it just requires the sharpest possible perception of the cosmic giggle….

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The post InfoReal appeared first on Jon Lebkowsky.

Originally published in 21C, 1997

The global Internet’s awash with email lists, chats, and online conferences for discussion of governance and what goes with it: the politics of issues and of personalities, trad partisan thrashes, visionary thrusts (e.g. Barlow’s Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace), theoretical rants and practical spins. But is this all just talk talk talk? Or do we see action emerging from this hash?

So far no distinct political FORCE or suite of positions has emerged (unless you take seriously the dreamy anarchy of technolibertarians, who thrash about many issues but always return to one, taxation-as-theft). Though dedicated political activists increasingly use the Internet to build organizations and share information, and a growing number of orgs and individual users are finding ways to leverage net access, net.activism has found success on a limited playing field, where the issues are mainly Constitutional (First and Fourth Amendment issues, censorship, search and siezure): issues that can be supported as absolute values requiring no partisan wrangling. The movement, as it stands today, is a RIGHTS movement, without regard to the messier political questions of welfare and healthcare, environment, defense, taxation, etc.

Contemporary politics has a forest-for-trees relationship with technology; in fact, the politics of a postindustrial society is itself a technology for organizing and managing those messy piles of unique, increasingly opinionated individual products of universal education and the global media wash. Though elsewhere (third world) dictators, unrefined jerks, still rule with brute force and terror, they’re like relics, fading from the scene as the postindustrial postmodern wash pumps through media pipes worldwide.

What happens when you funnel information into a culture where force and coercion were the key determinants of power? Force is an external, but information, education and democratization work to internalize control, making the individual responsive to sophisticated forms of communication (sign the social contract, then read the daily updates). This is a reality of the cybernetic world: "they put the control inside!" as a character in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow says. Cybernetics is the science of communication and control theory, and there’s a clear theoretical link between ‘cyber’ and ‘polis’ that predates the age of ‘a Pentium in every pot, a web in every Pentium.’ Broadcast media (a prototype cyberactive technology) changed the face of politics in the era following WWII; during the war Hitler, Roosevelt, and Churchill made especially effective use of radio as propaganda tool, and the concept of ‘news’ was redefined by folks like Ed Murrow and his ‘boys.’ What does news/propaganda/agitprop do but pipe suggestive memes into the heads of individuals with the expectation that the distribution of information will change the power equation big time. The mob reads the handwriting on the virtual wall, and opposes the dictator, whose machinations, once exposed, lose their mojo.

Once you’ve flattened those hierarchies, though, propaganda mode can backfire as manipulation of information replaces brute force as the source of power. After WWII broadcasting and politics coevolved, producing today’s carefully managed media circus that dilutes information with showbiz glitz and leaves a cynical populace and an ever-widening credibility gap. The average high school graduate has more facts and more cognitive skill than the best and brightest of a century ago, and broadcasting’s morphed into narrowcasting and, with the Internet, many-to-many communications that defy control by propagandists. Those who get their information from the Internet have a vastly different (though not necessarily more accurate) picture of the world than those who read newspapers or watch television, or even those who listen to NPR everyday while driving to and from work.

Originally a defense network, then used to support research and development, the Internet was no household word when the first seeds of net.activism were planted in the late 1980s, when a few adolescent "hackers" let their digital explorations carry them to the point of intrusion, just to show that they could do it. Once they’d hacked into a system, they would grab a ‘trophy’ and show it to their friends and rivals, which meant emailing it across various systems.

Just such an incident led to the creation of the seminal online activist organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). John Perry Barlow was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and regular participant in discussions on the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), the BBS on which the concept of virtual community was formed and tested. He had links to the hacker community which led the FBI to question him about the theft of Apple Computer proprietary software by the NuPrometheus League. It was clear to Barlow that the FBI did not understand enough about the technology of computer networks to distinguish prank intrusion for criminal espionage, and this concerned him. Flash! Cyberspace is an electronic frontier, unsettled, poorly understood by those who don’t ‘live’ there. When the powerful misunderstand, great harm can result. Barlow talked this through with Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, and activist/entrepreneur John Gilmore, and EFF was born from those talks. Initially misunderstood as a "hacker defense fund," EFF grew through three major iterations. First, as grassroots activist org, with Kapor and then Cliff Figallo at the helm. (No time to explore the implications here, but consider that Figallo, a communitarian from Stephen Gaskin’s farm, had been director of the WELL, a true fountainhead of the virtual community concept, a conferencing system formed originally by Steward Brand and the Whole Earth bunch, virtual home of Bay Area deadheads, with whom Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, had clear affinity.) Grassroots EFF morphed as a Washington, DC wing was added, with former ACLU activist Jerry Berman at the helm; for a time EFF tried to accommodate two approaches to activism, the grassroots model, from their Cambridge office, and the Washington lobby model, from their D.C. office, with some hope that the two could derive strength from each other. However at a facilitated retreat in 1992, just before a meeting in Atlanta with potential EFF chapters, the group decided to focus on lobbying, legal work, and building industry coalitions. The organization would drop the grassroots aspect of the organization and close the Cambridge office.

The DC/Beltway version of EFF lasted until, in 1994, financial and personnel problems, along with flak from the activist community over support for compromise Digital Telephony legislation, led to a split. Jerry Berman formed his own Center for Democracy and Technology; EFF moved to the Bay Area and continues to work effectively as an activist organization, considering a possible return to grassroots development, but focusing primarily on development of a Silicon Valley pro-user response on issues of privacy, access, free expression, etc. This is market-oriented political activism: convincing the Silicon Valley companies that their markets depend on a free and open cyberspace.

From EFF’s influence several influential cyberactivist groups have emerged. "Electronic Frontiers" groups span the globe: EFF-Austin, EF-Australia, EF-Canada, EF-Florida, EF-Georgia, EF-Houston, EF-Ireland, EF-Italy, EF-Japan, EF-KIO (Kentucky, Indiana, Idaho), EF-New Hampshire, EF-Norway, and EF-Spain, in addition to CDT and its spinoff, CIEC (the Citizens’ Internet Empowerment Coalition), VTW (Voters Telecommunication Watch), and New York’s SEA (Society for Electronic Access), which was originally named NTE for "Not the EFF."

Online activists focus on issues like censorship, privacy, encryption, intellectual property, and universal net access, i.e. issues associated with transmission and protection of, and access to, information. Organizations and coalitions emerge ad hoc from hot issues of the moment, though momentum’s not always sustained as issues lose their sense of urgency, e.g. activist energies diminished after Steve Jackson won a decision against the government, and after the Communications Decency Act was overturned by a lower court in Philadelphia. However activists still don’t focus on the partisan model to build support. Rather than constructing elaborate philosophies and platforms, cyberactivists build networks, replacing belief systems with cycles of information and opinion.

Given the brief of the history of net.activism, it’s hard to draw conclusions about potential long-term efficacy and feasibility of a broader appeal. Consider the barriers to entry, not only for the activists themselves, but for their constituents. Moving to the Internet with a sense of purpose requires a commitment of money (for the technology) and time (for the learning curve and ongoing maintenance of the information flow). "Netizens" are inherently members of an elite group, well educated, with discretionary money and discretionary time. Some have decent incomes, others are students with decent potential incomes…but it’s not a large group, compared to traditional political parties. Traditional politicians don’t get the smell of cash from the Internet just yet, and many of the issues of relevance to net activists are considered fringe issues. Cyberactivists have yet to establish focused and well-financed (i.e. "real") political clout, and have been unable to influence legislative initiatives in major ways.**

**But what we call ‘technopolitics’ or "net activism" is not about politics as usual and not a short-term blip on the radar of political evolution. A focus on core civil liberties issues narrows the scope of netizen activity so that consensus is possible among those with diverse political positions. On the net.politics scene we see broad-based coalitions formed ad hoc with minimal partisan wrangling and little reference to any particular agenda other than constitutional integrity.**

When Senator Jim Exon and friends proposed a bill to squelch ‘indecent’ speech on the Internet, opposition to the bill was initially unfocused, but had the advantage of established paths through electronic networks to spread the word, the warning, of Exon’s proposal. Activists thought the bill was dead ’til it was glommed onto the Omnibus Telecommunications Act as a rider, a political trick that called for quick response. Shabbir Safdar and Steven Cherry of Voters Telecommunication Watch organized an online campaign with just the focus and energy that urgent issues demand. CDT and EFF joined in, too. They didn’t succeed in blocking passage of the CDA, but the thousands of phone calls and letters to legislators that resulted from VTW’s bulletins led to some revisions, and psyched the ACLU and other opponents of the bill, leading to a court challenge fought successfully by a coalition of activists and civil liberties organizations. The bill was overturned, but that decision’s been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, as Mike Godwin noted, the findings of fact in the lower court decision, informed as it was by highly effective opposition arguments (assembled with substantial online support), make it difficult for the Supreme Court to reverse.

When VTW emailed bulletins to its email list, those bulletins were retransmitted to others who again retransmitted them, so that the CDA updates were reaching many thousands of "netizens." A political force was building, ad hoc, and the campaign was so successful that opposition to the CDA seemed near universal among Internet users. If there were online critics of VTW’s campaign, they found fault only with the lack of focus on other potential problems within the Omnibus Telecommunications Act. However many opponents of the CDA found the OTA otherwise acceptable if not desirable; VTW showed smarts in keeping the message focused on the issue about which broad agreement was possible.

This ad hoc opposition to the CDA demonstrated the potential of online organizations to build powerful organizations around particular issues. This kind of networking’s not new, but computer mediated communications enhance the speed and effectiveness of networking by factors of magnitude. There’s a sense that decisions could be made within global online communities so fast that legislatures and executives will always lag, and will eventually be considered archaic. It’s the virtual equivalent of taking the power to the streets, creating either more effective democracy (if you listen to the angel on your right shoulder) or inchoate mob rule (if you listen to the devil on your left shoulder).

Partisan politics reflects the government’s hierarchical structure: parties, like nations and states, have leaders, committees, hierarchical bureaucratic structures, and set articles or principles to which members of the party (or subscribers to the doctrine) must adhere. Computer mediated chaos politics is way different: there are no established parties, no hierarchical structures, no established principles; groups form around particular issues, but group members may agree with each other only about this one issue.

This isn’t new. Traditional politics emerges from the same tendency to form constituencies around issues; partisan politics hardwires these constituencies and holds them together from election to election, hoping to have the winning numbers. Participation in partisan politics is still limited; no party has the numbers to win an election. Political parties build and sustain power by playing to the ‘great silent majorities’ of the world, appealing and winning votes on focused, carefully researched issues, with more or less charismatic personalities fronting the elections.

With computer mediated, relatively instantaneous communications, you can toss this institutional approach. Netizens respond in blocs to particular issues but are increasingly reluctant to join parties or vote party lines. Technolibertarians particularly share this mindset. Libertarian thinking is widespread in virtual communities on the Internet, its proponents voluble in their opposition to the complexity, intrusiveness, and evident inefficiency of big government. Libertarians are at the edge of a movement to dismantle government bureaucracies and decentralize governance wherever possible. This resonates with the tendency to move away from established, monolithic political parties. Even the big-L Libertarian party has difficulty recruiting small-l libertarians.

Netizens, libertarians, and cyberactivists orgs are not going to replace party politics in the near future, but given the mood of cynicism and the growing opposition to large institutional approaches to damn near anything, and you wonder whether this is the handwriting on the wall.

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2017 was a nervous year of overwrought blustery political cultures, a year of normalized psychosis amplified by media distortion, a year in which we all learned to live in the upside-down, losing our hats in the process of flipping.

Wary though I am of year-end top-ten lists, I couldn’t help assembling such a beast as a way to organize my thoughts and generally keep track. These were the blips on my radar…

1. The normalization of deceit in US politics, melting reality into surreality, a postmodern politics constructing “alternative facts” and liquid narrative. Donald Trump is in the lead here (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html), and Russian propaganda engines have contributed many bits of misinformation and disinformation. Reliable, accountable news sources have been labeled “fake news,” undermining the credibility of accurate news reporting vs false narratives polluting the information ecosystem. Don’t get me started about Fox News (and a shout out to Shepard Smith, still trying to practice real journalism in that difficult context.)

2. Mainstreaming of fringe whack, dismissal of evidence-based research and science, resulting potential for institutional rupture. Alex Jones at Infowars accurately says “there’s a war on for your mind!” Hopefully Jones and his ilk aren’t winning.

3. Climate change kicks into higher gear while we argue whether the scientific consensus is just another shaggy apocalypse story, or whether economic interests have priority over human sustainability. Meanwhile ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events probably related to climate change are wreaking havoc. (I say “probably related”: always important to note that weather and climate are different but related things.)

4. The blockchain, still confusing, with use cases unclear, has become more of an established phenomenon, even as Bitcoin seems imperiled by the expansion of an apocalyptic bubble. Related: hard currency is increasingly replaced by plastic cards and electronic transactions (electronic fiat), but not so far by cryptocurrency. Will there be meaningful and sustainable alternatives to fiat money? See the infographic at https://holytransaction.com/blog/2014/07/bitcoin-vs-banking-infographic.html

5. Platform Cooperativism. Emerging interest in egalitarian worker co-operatives meets platform-based business structure (as in gig economy platform-based powerhouses Uber and Freelancer.) Platform co-ops have multistakeholder governance that is, as with worker co-ops in general, more democratic and inclusive. See https://platform.coop/about – “Platform cooperativism is a growing international movement that builds a fairer future of work. It’s about social justice and the bottom line. Rooted in democratic ownership,co-op members, technologists, unionists, and freelancers create a concrete near-future alternative to the extractive sharing economy.”

6. #MeToo: Sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein triggered an avalanche of similar reports by women and some men, shining a light on a whole, previously hidden, culture of misogyny.

7. Net neutrality interpreted as damage, and routed around by the Trump/Pai FCC, arguing that net neutrality rules are heavy-handed, stifling the Internet. In fact, net neutrality was a support for digital freecom and equality. It’s not clear yeat how this will play out: most likely result is that the Internet will be more expensive. (See https://boingboing.net/2017/12/26/creeping-blackmail.html.)

8. UFOs get real, Oumuamua suggests a rendezvous with Rama scenario. As the supposed asteroid Oumuamua shot through the solar system, its odd properties caused speculation that it might be an alien ship or artifact. Meanwhile the government revealed a secret UFO study program and two F-18 gun-camera UFO videos. A boon for the credibility of UFO research, at least, though Scientific American says “The world already knew that plenty of smart folks believe in alien visitors, and that pilots sometimes encounter strange phenomena in the upper atmosphere – phenomena explained by entities other than space aliens, such as a weather balloon, a rocket launch or even a solar eruption.” (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-those-alien-alloys-in-the-new-york-times-ufo-story/)

9. Transportation meltdown, probable ascendance of autonomous vehicles and mass transit. The transportation infrastructure in many parts of the world isn’t up to managing the increasing load, and individually-owned vehicles burning fossil fuels, as primary contributors to the climate change problem, seem less sensible (unless you’re a climate change skeptic and/or fossil fuels enthusiast). Some cities are adjusting urban infrastructure away from support for individual vehicle traffic, and all sorts of transportation alternatives are under consideration – even gondolas, which do a great job of moving people up and down mountains. Something’s gotta give… I suspect a combo of increasing use of mass transit, more “transportation on the fly” services like Car2Go, ascendance of autonomous vehicles, and – of course – more bicycles on the thoroughfares.

10. Psychedelics reconsidered for therapy, especially the treatment of depression and PTSD. When I first heard about LSD in the sixties, it was through and account of Cary Grant’s therapeutic use of psychedelics, before hippies took it to the streets. (Grant’s use was recently documented in a Guardian article, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/12/cary-grant-how-100-acid-trips-in-tinseltown-changed-my-life-lsd-documentary) LSD and other psychedelics became class 1 drugs (i.e. illegal) via the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. This means that, in the eyes of the government, they have no accepted medical use – so your physician or psychiatrist can’t prescribe LSD for therapy. However there’s a renewed interest in therapeutic use: see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/upshot/can-psychedelics-be-therapy-allow-research-to-find-out.htmls Will psychedelics be legal to prescribe in the near future?

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THE LAW

Why should the average cyberdawg have any interest in Lenny Bruce?

One of the young turks of cyberpunkdom was finding my interest in Lenny hard to understand: wasn’t he just a junkie who spiked himself to death? Would I have wanted to live next door to this guy, have him shooting up in my bathroom while my kids peered through the crack in the door, wondering why Uncle Lenny wants to give himself a shot in the vein?

Drugs. It’s obvious that cyberpunk fictionoids are packed with references to drugs, and to somatic technologies mimetic of drugs, so the junkie thing might be Lenny’s link to today’s world, but oddly enough I seldom think about drugs when I think of Lenny. It’s not a drug thing, but a fringe thing. When I think of Lenny, and when I think of the sixties, I see grainy b&w Alphaville visions of urban and academic fringes, my first exposure to an alternative culture where, at the time, Lenny Bruce was as fringe as you could get…along with his compadre Paul Krassner of The Realist, who’d been a standup comic himself and was writing a column called “The Naked Emperor.” And there was Thomas Pynchon, who’s since become a course of study unto himself, but at the time was a surreal sponge slopping over with reams of drug-stained prose…and Bob Dylan, Philip Dick, William Burroughs, Maurice Girodias (of Olympia books and Evergreen Review), Charles Bukowski, Tuli Kupferberg, Tim Leary, etc. Tech wasn’t central to this picture. It was an evolving concern, especially in the context of McLuhanesque media study (though nobody’d quite envisioned the PC, since we were still using punch cards to feed data to monolithic flea-brained CPUs). Tech was the subject of a few crazy sf novels and, of course, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (“They put the control inside!”)

What these guys and obvious others had in common was that they were on and of the fringes, living the truth of the street, alienated from the bourgeois world of calculated denial. It would have been easier to deny the immorality of a culture whose subsistence depended on oppression, repression, the exploitation of hidden masses; to go along, buy into denial, live with the war machine hidden in the basement and the hate generators buried beneath tv whitenoise. But denial can be tough for some who’re so sensitive that Truth is like a thorn in the side, a nagging concern that won’t go away.

Lenny was like that, he couldn’t go along, couldn’t buy into the denial of a world that included motherfuckers, cocksuckers, queers, perverts, and hidden demons. The police busted him for obscenity something like three or four times, they hauled him into court where, he said, he had to defend somebody else’s interpretation of his act. Yet he kept performing the same kind of act, in fact evolved a meta-act which included commentary on the court’s interpretation of his various bits. The cops and the court simply didn’t understand, they were ignorant of the street and ignorant of the voices of the street, including Lenny’s, which had transcended the street and threatened to become public record.

Compare this to what Bruce Sterling calls the “hacker crackdown,” where cops raid bbs nodes the contents of which they can’t begin to understand. It’s the same principle, and Lenny did a bit about it, about police mentality. The simple origins of law are in tribal customs that set a social contract to protect everybody, so that we literally don’t dump on each other. As the laws grow more complex and diffuse, we hire enforcers, i.e. cops, and we create courts to ensure balance. At the same time, it’s harder and harder to interpret what constitutes a crime. It’s tough for the cops to know who to bust. If a concerned, apparently upstanding, citizen reports a crime, and the cop doesn’t know enough about the context to determine whether a crime’s actually been committed, he’ll make the bust and leave it to the courts to decide…meanwhile, the bustee is out megabucks for legal defense. Ruined, perhaps, financially and psychically. That’s what happened to Lenny: is it any wonder that he spiked himself? The courts were breathing down his neck, he was broke and dependent on others for his legal defense. Drugs made him feel better, and the ultimate injection took his pain away for good.

THE BIT

Okay, this is the bit. Steve Martin said “comedy is not pretty,” and he was right. Not pretty, and often not funny, at least not anymore. How much standup can you take, vs how much you can actually see if you watch the stuff on all the cable channels, HBO and MTV and Arts & Entertainment, and you go to your local comedy clubs, all of ’em, and you watch some late night stuff, too, Jay Leno plus Arsenio times about three comix per week, that’s six more routines, however many bits per routine…how funny can all these folx be?

But that’s not really the subject of my rant, we’re talking about Lenny. He often gets the credit (blame) for the evolution of the kind confessional comedy that standups perform today, comedy that doesn’t know the restrictions on language and thematic content that Lenny fought.

The best standup routines are a form of storytelling…maybe there’s something of the epic poet in there, if you can imagine Homer standing on a rock doing ‘bits,’ and stringing these routines together so that the form the epic poems we know today, which were refined by retelling and further refined by recording…maybe someday Lenny Bruce’s bits will have evolved through bastardization into a kind of epic poetry, told originally by the master, then retold by one neurotic exhibitionist after another, a web woven from all the standup routines that ever were….(Okay, okay, epic form has dignity and heroism, the antithesis of mud dawg neurosis…it was just a thought…..)

DENIAL

Lenny Bruce was different from today’s average standup in a couple ways: first, he was truly funny, and second, he told the truth. When lamebrain psycholiterates rave about Lenny’s contribution to the free speech movement, they convey the twisted impression that Lenny suffered the slings and errors of the judicial circus so that Eddie Murphy could fuck-you- motherfucker all over the stage. Well, if you believe that, then fuck you, motherfucker! Lenny Bruce wasn’t busted because of his language, and it wasn’t for free speech that he continued to stand and fall, one bust after another. It was for Truth. Lenny made it clear, if you read his stuff, that he really wanted to respect authority, that he didn’t want to fight the establishment or any of that crap. What he wanted to do was tell the Truth, as he saw it. Actually this was more than what he wanted to do, it was what he *had to* do. He saw the world pretty much as it was, the emperor’d left his stuff at the laundromat and, as Lenny once said, we’re all the same schmuck. And in his world there were people who wanted to fuck and would play any kind of twisted game to make it happen, and there were perversions of power on every streetcorner, and there was such amazing denial…big problem in the 50s, denial, not much better now. These were the subjects of his monologues, the realities of everyday life, told in a language he heard every waking street moment, but that respectable society, whatever the fuck that might mean, chose to suppress and ignore.

Think about how weird it would be (is?) to see the “real” world of midclass establishment America totally ignoring the facts of your life! When they busted Lenny, it was like they were trying to tell him that his life, his reality, had no existence. This word, cocksucker, that got him into such trouble, was an Evil Word representing a closet reality. Amazing repression in 1950s America, and as I said, it’s not much better today. Do you think it’s better because these words are no longer taboo? Do you think it’s a better world where Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay can appear right there on television and talk gutterphile blue streaks?

Naw, man, we’re still in denial. We still lie about the essential barriers that stand between us, pretend they’re not there, avoid community, avoid heart, avoid real love… Lenny Bruce loved the characters he described, you could tell. He loved his audience. Could you say that about Eddie Murphy or any of the ten dozen standups that parade across the teevee screen every week of the year?

We’re still in denial, yes. Maybe not about the mechanics of sex, but about the gestalt of Love.

“My concept? You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person — you can only do one thing to make it dirty: kill it. Hiroshima was dirty. Chessman was dirty.”

“…this lady here is not obscene to me at all. And I damn anyone who will say that my mother’s body or my daughter’s body or my sister’s body is dirty. No.

“You tell me about this god of yours that made this body – but then you qualify it. You tell little children to cover up. You make it dirty. The dirty body. Well, I’m going to tell you something: this is the most decent-looking chick I’ve seen since I’ve been in town.”

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Photo By Unknown. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection (Library of Congress). - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3c21441.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons: Licensing., Public Domain.

[I posted this on Facebook, seems it struck a nerve based on the likes and responses. Reposting here, perhaps time for a blog revival.]

I argued in the early 90s that the Internet would connect creatives on the fringes and fringe communities would form and have more impact on social and political cultures. What I didn’t see was that communities or armies of ignorant, racist, fascist, paramilitarist, arguably insane, rabid right, false Christian gremlins would form and seize control of an existing political party, that they would undermine their own interest and dismantle the middle class, that they would endeavor to promote dark-age philosophies over advances in reason and science, and that they would not be opposed, but cultivated by politicians and wealthy business and media interests who would see them as a source of potential power, missing dangerous signals from the emergent mob and their unholy alliance with it. These people may be a vocal minority, but they seem to have growing force. I’m not so sure the Internet has proved to be a Good Thing. It may be the catalyst for the rapid unraveling of civilization.

I added a link to Jennifer Granick’s post, “The Dream of Internet Freedom Doesn’t Have to Die.” And Hoder’s just posted “The Web We Have to Save” on Medium. He says “the web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.”

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Here’s a list of trends I see going into 2015, created for this year’s “State of the World” conversation.

Privatization of outer space: A number of companies are developing spaceware, and there’s one nonprofit that’s formed to colonize Mars by 2023 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One). Is the investment entirely speculative, or do we have clear business models driving a potential new space age?

Currency revolution: a number of alternative currencies have appeared, most notably the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. There are also technologies for digitally mediated barter. How will these be integrated into existing economic systems? Are we really looking at a (more? or less?) radical transformation of global economies?

AI/robotics: we’re beginning to see practical, usable applications of robotics, and there’s much talk of evolving artificial intelligence and possible singularity.

Alan Turing, via Benedict Cumberbatch, is getting some attention. When asked in “The Imitation Game” whether machines will ever think like humans, he scoffs – that’s the wrong question. Machines may think, but not “like humans.” Much of the singularity talk doesn’t get this point, but is rooted in anthropomorphism, which makes about as much sense as a golem emerging from a carefully-shaped clay effigy.

We like to think there’s no intelligence that ain’t human, but that’s a shadow of anthropocentric hubris. As we get into robotics and AI in a bigger, industrial-strength, way, what will they teach us about intelligence, human and other?

Practical backlash against 1% and hyper-neoliberalism: the political pendulum swings persistently, and it doesn’t make human sense to roll backwards to some sort of feudal society. Also propaganda only works so far before practical intelligence engenders some degree of critical thinking. Okay, I’m being hopeful here, but I believe the extreme factions in the civil cold war du jour will be overcome by those who are more balanced, reasonable, and practical. 2015 could be the turning point; waiting to hear the alarm ring.

Internet of things: There’s buzz around the IoT now, probably not altogether practical, but driving investment that could fund innovation. We ask the wrong questions about it, i.e. “why do I want my toaster to talk to my refrigerator?” We should be considering what “things” are most practical to network, and the pro and con implications. Are there security implications? Are we depending too much on networks, creating too great a vulnerability to network failure?

Cyberwars, hacktivism, crypto activism: Networked information systems have inherent vulnerabilities, increasingly exploited by various actors for various reasons. To the extent that we live our lives online and invest in our online identities, we’re subject to these vulnerabilities. This is increasingly obvious, and the question for any one of us is, how vulnerable have I become, and how to I mitigate risk? This is a question for individuals, corporations, and governments. Mitigation can create obstructions and limit the value of networks, so we have to think hard about the risks we’re willing to take the measures we’re willing to adopt to limit those risks. It’s also clear that governments (and non-governmental movements) will engage in cyberwar – to what extent will some of us suffer collateral damage from those engagements?

Network fatigue: Expect to see more strategic cord-cutting: limiting online activity generally and persistently, or perhaps periodically (“no Facebook for 30 days”). Response to information overwhelm is inevitable.

“New democrats”: Liberal entities like the Democratic party in the U.S. have proved ineffective as alternatives to well-organized corporate conservatives. The health of societies depends on a balance of the two approaches characterized simplistically as “left vs right.” Correction of the current imbalance is inevitable, but will likely involve entities that are nascent or don’t exist yet, vs the established entities of the left, which seem irrelevant and obsolete, partly because they have sought to compete by identifying with their opponents, rather than by emphasizing alternatives.

One possible trend could emerge from a middling trend, i.e. a rejection of polarization and an emphasis on a practical middle path between “left wing” and “right wing.”

Demilitarization of police: Militarization of police after 9/11 may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but none of us wanted to create a police state, which is a potential effect. Going forward, we’ll be reconsidering the roll of police departments in communities and considering how to undo the downside of the militarization efforts. We’ll be rethinking the role of police departments in communities, and how to respond effectively to potential terrorist acts within borders without confusing police objectives with military objectives.

Crowdsourcing medical solutions: smart patients will have more of a role in evolving therapies, and have more input into our understanding of human systems and response to disease. Participatory medicine will become more established. Medical research will consider patient feedback to get a better sense of complex contextual factors affecting health. More people will do granular “quantified self” tracking, and there will be systems to aggregate and analyze this information, impacting our understanding of prevention as well as disease.

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Now John Oliver on HBO takes on civil forfeiture:

The Institute for Justice is tackling civil forfeiture: website here: http://endforfeiture.com/

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In comments on the video at Youtube, someone posted this Bukowski quote:
“I think my writing is really pretty fucking powerful stuff but I think after I’m dead and safe, they’re going to trot me out, I’m going to really be discovered you know.”

Here’s another quote from Bukowski:
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

He lived 74 years, which is longer than you might expect if you knew something of his habits. He drank heavily, perhaps he was pickled? He also wrote a lot, and his writing had power.

air and light and time and space
by Charles Bukowski

“–you know, I’ve either had a family, a job, something
has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have a place and
the time to
create.”
no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment,
flood and fire.
baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

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“June was the 352nd consecutive month in a row with temperatures that were above the global average,” per Climate Central.

Why?

“The lengthy stretch of hot months is being driven primarily by the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Human activities are responsible for much of that rise and with recent carbon dioxide milestones passed, emissions show no sign of slowing.”

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