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"People do not go to hell after death. The designers and builders of hell are human beings. The designs and buildings are almost completed. It is becoming difficult to add more hell."
-Tamo-san
December 12. A few happy links, starting with two about fungus. The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
CRISPR Fungus: Protein-Packed, Sustainable, and Tastes Like Meat
My favorite coming technology, Noninvasive brain stimulation increases idea generation and originality. If we ever get a cheap home unit for this, it's going to be bigger than drugs in the sixties.
And an archive of a Washington Post piece about a guy who has been walking around the world for 27 years. "Bushby said he has learned a lot over the past nearly three decades, but one thing stands out: '99.99 percent of the people I've met have been the very best in humanity,' he said. 'The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.'"
December 10. A few more thoughts on autism. Greg sends this article, "Autism is a Spectrum" Doesn't Mean What You Think. It's not like being farther or less far up the spectrum. It's like what colors you pick out. "...autism isn't one condition. It is a collection of related neurological conditions that are so intertwined and so impossible to pick apart that professionals have stopped trying."
This article, Autism's Confusing Cousins, explains how a bunch of different conditions are getting lumped under "autism" by popular psychology. But you can find the deeper message in this disclaimer: "The diagnostic boundaries between conditions are scientifically unclear and often reflect clinical convention." And the Hacker News thread is full of examples of how diagnosis of autism and related conditions is a total clusterfuck.
Now I'm even more convinced that all of this stuff will be conceptualized very differently when we understand it better. More radically, I suspect that "autism" is a feature of the present age. A diagnosis always reflects a problem, a mismatch between how people are and what society needs. Late stage industrial capitalism is so far from human nature that it's generating a lot of problems that require increasingly fiddly diagnosis. In a few hundred years there will still be neurodiversity, but it will interface with a more flexible and human-scale society in such a way that many ways of being will not be problematic enough to require experts to figure out what's wrong.
But I've changed my opinion on the practical dimension of diagnosis. I think it's good that a bunch of stuff that's not technically autism is getting lumped under autism. This paragraph from the second article explains why:
Social communication disorder is rarely diagnosed in favor of autism primarily because autism provides access to critical services, insurance coverage, educational support, and legal protections that social communication disorder does not reliably offer, creating strong practical incentives for families and clinicians to prefer the autism diagnosis. Additionally, autism has an established evidence base, validated assessment tools, clear intervention protocols, and a large supportive community with a neurodiversity-affirming culture, while social communication disorder has none of these. It has no community, minimal research, no specific treatments, and little professional awareness since it was only introduced in the DSM in 2013. Service delivery, insurance, and educational systems are built entirely around autism rather than social communication disorder, and since both conditions require similar interventions for social-communication difficulties, there's little practical incentive to make the diagnostic distinction, especially when the boundary between them (whether restricted/repetitive behaviors are truly absent or just subtle) is often unclear and clinicians are often unsure the distinction really matters.
December 8. Negative links, starting with four articles about industrial chemicals:
Parkinson's is a man-made disease
Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
Common artificial sweeteners linked to cognitive decline
Prenatal exposure to common insecticide linked to brain structure abnormalities in youth
And a big Ask Reddit thread from last week, What change is coming that people aren't prepared for at all?
December 5. Five Ask Reddit threads loosely related to this week's subject. Redditors with extremely niche interests: What's the one thing you are completely obsessed with that almost no one else you know cares about? Answers include training crows, Medieval coin making, and hunting without killing anything.
What does an uneducated genius actually look like? Have you ever met someone who was incredibly smart but had little or no formal education? A lot of examples are people who are really good at fixing machines, which tells me that after modernity collapses, we're not going back to the stone age, but potentially to a decentralized utopia of garage tinkerers.
Which hobbies attract the kindest people? Pottery, knitting, birdwatching, gardening, and heavy metal music.
Removed by mods, Who is someone everyone branded as crazy but they turned out to be right?
Who died believing themselves a failure, but was judged otherwise by history?
And for Bandcamp Friday, Appalachia Borealis is a cool solo piano album inspired by birdsong.
December 3. Continuing from Monday, it's unfair to say that I live life through a straw. A better way to say it is that perception can be narrow or wide, like a laser or like a floodlight. This has something to do with left brain and right brain, but until I can stick something in my actual brain, it's more helpful to just say that my attention defaults to narrow. An elite perceiver can switch easily between narrow and wide, and stay effortlessly in either one. I can get to wide focus but it takes an act of will, and a continuing effort of will to stay there. It's not like sliding into a groove, it's like holding up a weight. Lately I've been walking around practicing wide focus, being mentally aware of both sides of my peripheral vision at the same time. Some people who do this report an altered state of consciousness, but I haven't noticed anything except that it's easier to not bump into people.
I don't think there's anything wrong with me. An adequate society would have plenty of social roles for people who perform best with narrow focus and wide time. I say "role" and not "job", because in a job someone is making sure you're in a hurry so that they can make more money from your labor than they're paying you. That's what they mean by "time is money," and it's a recent invention. Medieval crafts and primitive flint knapping were done with narrow focus and no time pressure. These kinds of tasks have been replaced by mechanization. The soullessness of AI writing is not new. The same thing happened over a hundred years ago when physical items went from hand made to machine made. We live in a weird dystopia with miraculous devices and rampant "mental illness" which is what they call it when the way you are has no place in a society that's obsessed with perpetual increase.
December 1. Today, psychology. From the Autistic Adults subreddit, Driving isn't a neutral task for everyone. For many autistic people, it's a high-stakes multitasking nightmare. I think autism will eventually be understood as multiple different conditions, because descriptions of what it's like to be autistic are all over the map, and often contradictory. For example, this thread, your favorite part of being autistic, includes both hyper-logic and hyper-empathy, both intellect and intuition, both sense of style and indifference to style. Even in the driving thread, there's a sub-thread about autistic people who love driving.
I haven't been diagnosed with anything, but it seems to me that neurotypicals have a mode I call "self-driving human". They can "zone out" or "stop thinking" and their body automatically does the right thing while their conscious mind can just sit back and watch. I've never done this. When I'm driving, I have to constantly pump out my attention: look at the white line, look at the speedometer, look at the mirror. If I zone out, I crash. Even in my own apartment, I need fully conscious attention to not bump into things. Even when I'm walking, I have to monitor and instruct my mechanics and posture or I get stiff and slouchy. I live life through a straw. Peak performance is not expansive but contractive, not tuning into some larger being, but tuning out everything but this one little move, which in total isolation, with unlimited time, can be done perfectly. This is the opposite of driving, and the opposite of how this society is tooled.
November 25. A few happy links. From Ask Reddit, What's a company that didn't succumb to enshittification? The thread includes this amazing long comment about what it's like in Morton salt mines.
An archive of a NY Times piece, Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the Air.
And a book recommendation. The Book of I by David Greig just came out this year. It's a short historical novel about three people living on a tiny
Scottish island after a Viking raid in the 800s.
November 21. I've been meaning to make a political playlist, and I finally put it together. As usual I tried to favor obscurities: for Neil Young I didn't pick Ohio or After The Gold Rush, but Welfare Mothers and the de-censored This Land Is Your Land. But I did pick some very popular songs, including Iron Maiden's Run To The Hills, Bob Dylan's Hurricane, and Kaiser Chiefs' I Predict A Riot. Most obscure are Metropes by Orphans and Vandals, Eleanor McEvoy's superior version of Eve of Destruction, and a beautiful song about social breakdown, Johanna Rose's Eat the Rich. I found five different original songs with that title, and decided to use four of them (sorry Aerosmith) so that's what I called the playlist: Eat the Rich
November 19. How to Stay Sane in a World That Rewards Insanity. This is similar to the link I posted Monday, in that the first half is a good explanation of a problem, and the second half is unremarkable advice about what to do about it. The problem:
We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we're missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works. It delivers results. When you pick a side and commit to it wholly and without reservation, you get things that moderate positions cannot provide. You get certainty in an uncertain world. You get a community that will defend you. You get a simple heuristic for navigating complex issues.
...
You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right. Where admitting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than an actual exchange of ideas.
The author doesn't mention how this is all being hyper-charged by social media and the money magnet of Silicon Valley. A key comment from the Hacker News thread: "I found it weird that this person has multiple friends that were able to 'make bank' by having polarizing opinions. I know a ton of folks with polarizing opinions and none of them are monetizing it. What kind of world is this author living in where their social circle includes so many influencers that are cashing in on social media?"
From the post: "The writer who says 'this issue has nuance and I can see valid concerns on multiple sides' gets a pat on the head and zero retweets." You know how else you can get zero retweets? Stay off of fucking Twitter. But I'll admit, I went down this road myself back in the days of web 1.0, writing essays with the goal of being inspiring and slaying dragons. I got hundreds of dollars in donations, and there were two or three different online communities based on my writing, that all became toxic. People got mad at me for not being the person in their head, and at some point I decided to start filtering my audience, intentionally writing stuff that's less inspiring and harder to think about. This decision was easier because I have a psychological aversion to being fawned on and sucked up to. It makes me feel dirty, otherwise I might have become a cult leader. But here's my advice: Practice being less of a warrior and more of a scout. Instead of trying to beat the enemy, try to actually figure stuff out.
November 17. Continuing on bad technology, thanks Roger for this link, An open letter to all those building AI in 2025. The first half is a concise critique of technological progress as we know it. For more of this kind of thinking, read Ivan Illich.
Long gone are the days when the Internet was a fun novelty that we could choose to use or not. We don't experience childlike joy each morning when we see it up and running, but we certainly panic if it's down. That's because the Internet has sunk into the foundations of our life as infrastructure, without which we are now disabled. It doesn't guarantee security, or - in itself - make any of us joyful or empowered. Having the Internet, or electricity, or a smartphone, simply means each of us gets to fight another day, and to not be left behind by all the others trying to claw their way to illusory security in an ever-changing market.
Loosely related: Seattle, like NYC, has just elected a young progressive mayor. Her name is Katie Wilson, and the weirdest thing about the campaign was that the incumbent made an issue of Wilson's mother paying for daycare for Wilson's daughter. It's weird because under what value system is this bad? Not conservatism. Conservatives love the family and are all about family members helping each other out, so that the government doesn't have to. Meanwhile liberals want the government to help people out so that we're not dependent on family.
What value system is opposed to both government, and the family, helping people out? Capitalism, because if we're all atomized individuals, we all have to work in the Amazon warehouse in the holy project of sucking all the money to the top of the pyramid and calling it growth.
November 14. Quick update on enshittification: I decided to pay five bucks for DeepAI pro, and it's worse. It unlocks the "Genius" level which makes the images prettier but not more interesting, and I'm limited to 60 a month which is nothing. Worst of all, every time I change the style, it resets to Genius to make me buy more, and I have to switch it back. I was hoping it would at least make the regular images generate faster but it does not. The user experience is actually better if I'm logged out.
What I'm seeing here is that there is no comfortable level of engagement with the monetized internet, no point of balance where you can spend a little and just hang out. Whatever it is that you want, either you find a way to get it for free, or you're marked as a rube, and the system becomes predatory.
November 14. No ideas this week. This is a nice link about urban transit, What If Every City Had a London Overground? It's about how much more enjoyable surface trains are than the subway. "The Overground has become more than the sum of its parts, as it prompts people to make journeys they likely wouldn't have made before the improved experience made it comfortable and easy." It's a good bet that one day every city will have an Overground, because humans are not going extinct, and we're not going to get so primitive that we forget how to do trains; but we don't have the resources to keep doing cars.
Related: World's Largest Cargo Sailboat Completes Historic First Atlantic Crossing
November 10. Stray links, mostly optimistic. The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer. On the same subject, from 2019, Why It's Better to Get a Tan Than Wear Sunscreen
How a radical experiment to bring a forest into a preschool transformed children's health. "Scientists think one of the reasons so many people now have allergies is because they were not exposed to microbes that occur naturally in the environment at a young age."
Also from the Guardian, I gave up small talk for a month - and the world came alive
And catching up on a great infrequent blog, The Whippet, with Whippet #187 from August. There's cool stuff about brain weirdness, the high quality of ancient tattoos, and some practical advice to use the word "conditioning" instead of "trauma", because "you avoid getting hung up on the label, and move on to actually working on the problem itself."
November 7. New video! I'm still having lots of fun using images that nobody respects to illustrate songs that nobody likes. This is the third video I've made from a 2014 album that I'm surely the number one fan of, Country Space Junk by an Australian band called Wireheads. The first two songs were illustrated with human-made art, but I ran out of good stuff, and I was happy to discover that AI slop contains nuggets. It's like a video game, except instead of "one more turn", it's "one more image", and there's always a chance that the machine will spit out a good one. It's like gambling, except that what I win is beauty, and what I spend are the world's last nonrenewable resources.
I must have looked at almost a thousand images, all made with the DeepAI generator. Something I mentioned in the interview is that AI is not the artist, it's the palette. It's not the woodworker, it's the wood, and with every video I'm getting better at working with it. For example, I learned that if you put the word "sonic" anywhere in the prompt, you're likely to get Sonic the Hedgehog, so I had to avoid that. In certain styles, "fly off in a spaceship" consistently gave me a house fly, so I substituted the word "zoom". DeepAI has a bunch of styles that are good at different things, and I got the Cave Painting style to make lunar landscapes, by asking for a white plain and black starry sky. You can't say the word moon, or the AI will put the moon in the sky: Wireheads - Sonic Spaces Blues
November 4. Pretty good article, Why do we think hard work is virtuous? It's mainly about Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
What was new, Weber thought, was the moral stance: that working hard, living frugally and accumulating wealth weren't just practical skills for succeeding, but inherently virtuous forms of behaviour.... Over time, these behaviours detached from their religious roots. You didn't need to believe in predestination to feel the drive to work endlessly, or to prove your value through success. The idea of a "calling" lingered on, but hollowed out. Eventually, it looked less like a vocation than an obligation.... Weber's point was that the moral energy that once drove the Protestant ethic has drained away. What remains are mere behavioural patterns, which have become reflexes. People still work obsessively; they still chase success as if it had ultimate meaning. The difference is that now they're unsure why.
Two more stray links. This strange phenomenon could unlock the secrets of the mind. It's about feeling a sense of awareness "without thoughts, images or even a sense of self." You can find it in ancient philosophy, and now researchers are finding it in sleep studies.
And a cool thread from the Ask Historians subreddit, about Ninjas and what they were really like. "Ninja to samurai are what Special Forces units are to the regular infantry today." Only low-level ninjas were assassins. Mostly they were spies and scouts. There's also some stuff about Kunoichi, or female ninjas.
October 30. Recorded three days ago, a new Leafbox interview. That's Substack, and it's also on Leafbox and Apple, thanks Robert! My first Leafbox interview was three years ago, and because it came right on the heels of another interview, I did it with no preparation at all. This time I did lots of prep, reading through my last three years of blog posts and writing a whole page of notes. So this one flows better and has more ideas.
Early on I mention a poem that I keep in the readings section of this site, The Purse-Seine by Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers was an anti-city doomer, but I expect cities to do better than rural areas as the collapse deepens, because they require less infrastructure per person.
October 29. The Decline of Deviance is a good blog post about the world getting less dangerous and less weird. I disagree that all of these trends have a single cause. Probably the decline in serial killers has a completely different cause than corporate logos looking the same. But he has charts and examples of a lot of different things, and there's also a big thread on Hacker News. My favorite bit from the post is about the novelty of sameness:
Whenever you notice some trend in society, especially a gloomy one, you should ask yourself: "Did previous generations complain about the exact same things?" If the answer is yes, you might have discovered an aspect of human psychology, rather than an aspect of human culture. I've spent a long time studying people's complaints from the past, and while I've seen plenty of gripes about how culture has become stupid, I haven't seen many people complaining that it's become stagnant.
Related: a quote from a novel I've just read, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:
I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism -- it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means "the dropping of petals." The world has dropped its petals.
But something new is bound to follow, as it always has.
October 27. After heavy posting last week, this week I'll probably just be posting links. Today, three tech links. Laptops create. Phones consume. It's easy to think of exceptions. But it's important to know how to think this way about technology, to see that no technology is neutral, but that every device steers us in a different way.
The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks. "...future generations may face a sort of 'digital dark age' when they look back for material from the past 50 years or so."
New stuff by Gary Larson. Larson has been learning digital illustration, and he has rediscovered "that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks," by practicing a different process, although the ideas are still not as good as peak Far Side. My favorite is the chicken drive.
October 20-24. It's funny, the guy who ruined Communism, the guy who ruined Christianity, and the guy who ruined America, all said the same thing. Vladimir Lenin: "He who does not work shall not eat." Paul the Apostle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." Ronald Reagan: "There is no free lunch."
Is that true? It's definitely not a universal rule, just look at all the plants getting free sunlight. It's not even true for all humans. I've mentioned before how some primitive cultures don't even have the concept of freeloading. I finally got around to digging up the actual quote, from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, pages 851-2:
A third fact about hunter-gatherer economies also runs counter to the notion of economic man central to modern economic theory: no necessary connection exists between production by individuals and distribution to individuals. Economists argue that sharing has an economically rational basis. The person we share our catch with today may feed us tomorrow when our luck or skill fails. In this view, sharing is a kind of insurance policy that rationally spreads the risk of not having anything to eat. Sharing in hunter-gatherer cultures, however, is much more profound than this. In many cultures at least, there is no connection between who produces and who receives the economic output. According to Woodburn, for example, some members of the Hadza do virtually no work their entire lives. Many Hadza men gamble with spear points, and many are reluctant to hunt for fear of damaging their gambling "chips", yet these men continue to get their full share of the game animals killed. Although "freeloading" is always a potential problem in all cultures, disdain for those not engaged in productive activity is evidently a culturally specific emotion.
Roger comments:
It's not like plants really get sunlight for "free" -- they have to work for it. They need to expend energy and materials to build leaves to absorb the sunlight, and stems to support the leaves, etc.
Yes, and by that logic, the statement "He who does not work shall not eat" is perfectly compatible with everyone getting free food, because we still have to do work to chew and swallow and digest it. What those guys were really saying is "I believe in a social order in which people must repeatedly do tasks they do not find intrinsically enjoyable, under the threat of starvation." Out of millions of species on this planet, only one species does that, and not even in all societies. Alex comments:
I've thought about this over the last few years and obviously, in the world that formed us all, the hunter-gatherer world, you had to "work" if you were gonna eat, other than if you were injured or sick or a treasured elder etc. But "work" was a lot less like "work" as we understand it now and more like "play" or "something people just do".
No, and yes. It's only in the hunter-gatherer world (so far) that prime-of-life non-elites might feel no pressure to be productive. And putting "work" in quotes is exactly why. Plants don't have to make leaves -- they get to make leaves, they get to express their nature in a way that almost no humans get to do at their jobs.
Even modern people who go out hunting or foraging don't resent people who stay home, and for the same reasons: there's enough food, and hunting and foraging are deeply satisfying when your ancestors have been doing them forever. But as soon as a society gets more technologically complex, it starts adding tasks that are a stretch for human nature, and eventually coercion becomes necessary to keep the game going.
We're not going back to the stone age. Humans are pretty flexible. But right now the human-made world is farther than it's ever been from our ancestral environment. That's why the streets are full of crazy people and everything is falling apart.
Matt comments on plant work:
A healthy tree produces enough sugars to fuel its own cellular respiration and still have enough left over to trade with other organisms. They "work" more than necessary to produce this surplus. They give the extra sugars to fungi and microbes underground in exchange for micronutrients, microbial cellular parts and soil conditioning. They could give sugars to nearby trees of a similar species in hopes of growing a cooperative forest. They give sugary nectar to flying insects in exchange for pollination, or to ants for protection. They give sugary fruits to birds, squirrels and humans in exchange for seed scattering. Even though trees can survive on much fewer leaves than they actually grow, they are motivated to grow extra leaves because they want to thrive in a vibrant ecosystem. Their extra-work is to foster a nurturing community; interspecies relationships with willing participants.
When modern humans work more at their jobs to earn beyond what they immediately need, it's usually for more personal stuff or more money in their individual savings accounts. In order to earn more, they'll usually spend more time away from their home or community while becoming persons narrower in function and vision. Their extra work usually does little or nothing to enrich their surrounding community. Compared to the trees' extra work, it's a very isolated and isolating practice.
On the other hand, I've noticed that an abundance of people are highly motivated to work for free to immediately enrich their community. Feeding the hungry, planting trees, picking up litter, building community gardens are all examples of the same kind of extra-work that trees do, but when we do it, we call it "volunteering".
This is why I think a 100% volunteer workforce is realistic, and why we're still on the ground floor of the human potential. If we get a UBI, or any other mechanism to make us actually free, if it's not only adults but kids who can find their own path of "get to" and not be suffocated with "have to", and if we can keep it going into the third generation, I think they'll look to us like superhumans, and they'll look back at us the way we look at Dickensian workhouses. Right now there are hundreds of potential Mozarts and Einsteins being used up in wicked schemes to leverage wealth into more wealth, and to replace the cooperative nonhuman world with the controlled human world.
July 31. My novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing.