Fight the Future

Missouri becomes the latest state to make it a misdemeanor for employers to require employees to receive microchip implants. Katherine Albrect, founder of antichips.com says, “The people who oppose it don’t understand how real the threat is, and the people who are gung-ho don’t understand its power.”

Oh yes they do. That’s what scares the living daylights out of me. For me, the proliferation of increasingly intrusive tracking technologies and the constant pressure to make the application of those technologies mandatory is a greater threat to our civilization than terrorism, climate change and rising energy and food costs combined.

Quote of the Day

As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.

          Clander, from Stuff White People Like

Best. Blog. Ever.

  

Feeding Time at the Trough

I’m not sure there’s a category for my beliefs regarding climate change. I’m not a “denier”, and I don’t “reject the science”. In fact, there’s a decent chance that I understood the science before most of the people running around blathering about it today were out of grade school. I believe that climate change is happening, and I believe that human activities are driving a big part of that change and that we should take reasonable, effective steps to mitigate the effects that our carbon-obese economy is having on the global climate (Assuming we actually have the ability to do that at this point.) I also believe that not all proposed solutions being proposed to climate change are

a) realistic and achievable or

b) have anything whatsoever to do with climate change, but are instead cynical, opportunistic attempts to resurrect ancient and discredited collectivist agendas.

What I absolutely do not believe is that the answer to climate change is new or higher taxes, especially when those tax dollars end up being squandered by unelected and unaccountable envirocrats. People can make all the lovely noises they want about “global solutions” and jet off on luxury junkets to climate conferences in Bali with their 50-plus entourages, but I have a long way to go before I’m convinced that these people are qualified to deal with the problem, or even interested in dealing with it. To paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, I’ll start taking the crisis more seriously when the people telling me its a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis – and not just another opportunity to line their pockets.

Lifetime Dose

There are whole categories of news stories whose comment threads I just can’t bear to read anymore. Stories about politics, oil, the economy, scifi TV and movies; computer hardware, particularly stories that feature Apple and Windows in the same article. But the worst category by far, the comments I absolutely dare not even glance at are stories about space exploration. I’ve just had my lifetime dose of “We have no right to pollute space with our filthy human presence”, “Why don’t we solve our problems here on Earth instead of wasting it on something as self-indulgent as knowledge“, “It’s not enough for the Bush/Cheney New World Order to invade Iraq, now they have to claim ownership of Mars”, “The carbon footprint of the Phoenix launch makes me want to kill myself but I’m just going to complain instead” and “Mars has global warming too!”. I just can’t take any more.

“At Last”, a “Blog” for “People” Who “Share” My “Problem”

The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks

If they ever do one for unnecessary commas, I’m sunk.

Via Posthuman Blues

 

OilPunk

How long will it be before there’s a nostalgia movement in scifi art and literature based on the romantic, glamourous and elegant age of oil? The golden age of limitless energy and bounty!

Steam power and its associated Victorianesque esthetic trappings took about a hundred years to acquire an almost magical naieve charm and become a scifi fad. We’ve still got a very rough 20 years or so before the end of oil as a primary fuel source, but people are nostalgic for the good old days already.  I figure we’ll see the first stirrings of an oilpunk movement in as little as ten years. I also predict oilpunk will make about as much logical sense as steampunk does today. I hate to break it to you guys – I love all those brass fixtures and ridiculous widgets as much as anyone – but we left steam power behind for a reason and we were quite happy to do so.

I can only hope that movies (or their equivalent) spawned from the oilpunk movement will be of slightly higher quality than the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. A Victorian car chase…through the streets of Venice. The streets…of Venice…

Reset

Once I passed thirty some kind of genetic switch got thrown and I realized that I was going to spend the rest of my life having to fight obesity at some level. Last summer I lost a ton of weight with the help of the Bernstein Diet Clinic, which despite many rumors and scare stories, I have nothing but good words for. Then in the stress and anxiety of the months leading up to moving to Guadalajara, I totally ballooned up again.

Since arriving almost three months ago, I’ve managed to lose 24 of the 34 pounds I’d put on. Thing is, I haven’t even really been trying this time. We’ve signed up at a local gym, but we don’t go that religiously. I’ve been eating reasonably sensibly, but I haven’t by any means been following a strict diet and I’ve been following just a few basic rules. We keep a minimal supply of food in the house, drink at least two liters of water a day, and so on.

I’m not sure how to describe it, but this weight loss feels different. It doesn’t feel like I’m pushing down on a spring that’s going to rebound as soon as I take my hands away. It feels like the weight loss I’m seeing now is basically my internal metabolic thermostat resetting itself. Maybe it’s the hotter climate and the higher altitude. We do at least an hour of walking every day, and that helps. There’s also the whole different bacterial/viral environment here too of course. I’m still aware of my body being under constant gastrointestinal attack – but very much in the background, almost at a subconscious level. Maybe that’s elevated my whole metabolism to the point where I’m burning more. Whatever the reason, I’m not complaining.

Stupid Boring Sun

There isn’t even anything particularly special about our Sun that makes life more likely to arise here than around others of the same common type. Which is cool, I guess, though I’m not sure who ever thought the sun was exceptionally fine-tuned to permit life in our solar system. Was the Principle of Mediocrity suspended and then reinstated again?

More clues that life is almost certainly common throughout the universe. And by common, I mean the nearest earth-type biosphere might be as close as a few thousand light years away and the nearest technologically developed civilization within a few 10’s of thousands of light years. Crowded!

So, why don’t we see evidence of other alien civilizations? I don’t know –  ask me again when we’ve been looking - and I mean actually looking – for a few centuries, or maybe a few millenia. If you can’t be patient for at least that long, don’t cry to me about it.

Everybody’s Special

If the defining qualities of human intelligence aren’t even unique on this planet, what chance is there that those qualities are unique in the universe? I would feel quite comfortable in saying absolutely zero.

 

OOPS…

Microscopic, high-tech “nanotubes” that are being made for use in a wide variety of consumer products cause the same kind of damage in the body as asbestos does, according to a study in mice that is raising alarms among workplace safety experts and others.

The First Law of Unforeseen Consequences is that there are always unforeseen consequences.

The Second Law of Unforeseen Consequences is that we’re always so dazzled by the promise of new technologies that we suffer permanent collective amnesia with regard to the First Law.  

The Third Law of Unforeseen Consequences is that even after the consequences of a new technology become known a radical fringe will continue to militate for the widespread application of the new technology because…well…because it’s new technology.

Quote of the Day:

The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.

Stephen Pinker

There is no Moore’s Law at work in the medical sciences, much as it might seem like things are accelerating towards some transformative nexus that will force us to redefine our humanity. Only the slow arduous battle against disease and infirmity, which have as much as ever to do with the struggle to define human dignity upwards.

No Upper Limit

We should accept the inevitability of oil hitting $12-15 a gallon in the near future – accompanied by shortages and rationing according to senior energy advisor Robert Hirsch. Well, bring it on then. Part of me is actually relieved that all this shit we’ve been living in dread of for decades is finally coming to pass. Why? Because I have faith that we’re going to surprise ourselves with the speed with which we can transition to alternatives, and the ingenuity with which we’re going to get past oil-addiction. When I see scare headlines on Drudge about oil hitting some new record high I don’t see the end of our civlization. What I see is more impetus for the release of creativity and inventiveness. The only other option is to lie awake at night chewing my nails, and contributing to the climate of fear, which isn’t helpful. Frankly, if we can’t imagine our civilization having a future without cheap oil, we have a problem, but one that has nothing to do with the cost of gas.

Hypothetically Speaking…

Ok, someone comes up to you and says ”I’m working harder and harder all the time, putting in longer and longer hours, using ever more efficient tools and yet I’m making less money and I’m only producing half of what I used to, and it’s getting worse all the time”.

Do you say, “Yeah. That’s just the way things work in our crazy business. Nothing to do but grin and bear it”, or “Holy shit, there’s something seriously fucked up with your way of doing things. You really need to rethink your whole production pipeline from start to finish or you’re not going to last another five years”. I’m not just picking on TV here. This sort of thing’s happening in a lot of industries. I always wonder if it’s happening because we’re all just victims of these global macroeconomic trends that no one has any control over, or whether it can all be traced back to a matter of attitude, and that the runaway train is propelled by nothing more than our shared assumption that we are on a runaway train.

Suggestions for TV Broadcasters

With TV viewership showing the biggest decline in history, here’s some ideas to try that might help turn things around for the Networks:

-More reality shows, with increasingly cruel and denigrating premises. Because those are doing so well and we’ll never get tired of them, EVER.

-More remakes of lacklustre 70s shows that were never particularly popular in the first place but will work this time, seriously, because they’ve been given a “darker, grittier” interpretation. We especially like it when darker and grittier just means that characters are cranky and unappealing. Bonus points for characters that are self-absorbed drunks with constantly shifting motivations and personality traits. It’s so realistic!

-Shorter seasons. It’s hard to believe that a typical TV season used to consist of 26 episodes. Who has time to sit through all of that? 10 episodes is a nice round number, with the ultimate goal being 0.

-Longer hiatuses and mid-season breaks. Breaking up seasons with a year of down-time wins the hearts of viewers and keeps them wanting more! It’s especially great if your show takes place over a few months of islandtime yet your characters have visibly aged a decade or more from start to finish.  

-Less is more! A typical hour episode in prime time used to run 52 minutes. Boring! Today, we’ve got that down to just a hair over 40 minutes. Cutting into original airtime with ever-lengthier recaps was a bold step on the path to the 15-minute hour, but much work remains to be done in the field of creative corner-cutting.

-More shows that start out strong and then fly off the rails in their second seasons because the key visionaries and showrunners lose interest or get parachuted in to rescue other productions. We LOVE those.

-Endless public whining and bellyaching about how expensive and difficult TV production is. Everyone loves a complainer, and as we all know, Television is the ONLY INDUSTRY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD that has to cope with rising costs and production challenges.

 

Shorter Google:

Given the fact that a few teenagers occasionally post indiscreet things on Facebook, it shouldn’t be a big deal for us to scan all of your email.

 

Peak Privacy

You hear a lot of crap going around about how we’re entering a “post-privacy world” and how we’d better just get used to it. Most of it comes from certain futurists of a particularly fascist/totalitarian bent (of which there are many, I assure you) or from security/military thinktank types who have an ideological and, more often than not, a vested financial interest in hastening the decline of privacy worldwide. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of being scattered amongst a number of different databases, all the information about an individual could be acessed from a single database? No, actually, it wouldn’t be great. It would be incredibly dangerous.

But all that people really mean when they talk about the death of privacy is that privacy will become more expensive. If you’ve ever been to a fancy country club or private gym, you can’t help but notice that the most important thing membership buys you is not just comfort, but privacy and personal space. Spacious lockers, private shower stalls, and so on. In fact, a sizeable chunk of what wealthy people spend their money on is privacy, from gated communities to personal jets. So if privacy is something that we’re not supposed to worry about losing, why are wealthy people willing to spend ever greater amounts to secure it?

The answer is that the death of privacy futurists and security strategists get all lovey-dovey and dreamy-eyed about only applies to the masses; not the superclass. And if the masses are suckers enough to believe that being able to see Steve Jobs’ mansion on Google Earth or see pictures of Brangelina dining at Cannes makes the loss of their own privacy bearable, then so much the better, as far as anti-privacy activists are concerned. That’s the myth of ” two-way transparency” or the “If OK if they’re watching us because we’re watching back” fallacy. It’s a fallacy because one of the growth industries of the future will be the very expensive service of making sure that the people who think they’re watching back see only what governments and the superclass want them to see.

The Future Has Seen Us

There aren’t that many modern thinker-journalists I tend to take seriously. Naomi Klein is one of them:

Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as “Golden Shield.” The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out.

When I wonder why paternalistic totalitarianism is advancing unchallenged all over the world, the only answer I can think of is that, regardless of our complaints and apparent show of anxiety, we want this. I think many people feel a deep infantile craving for an omniscient surveillance state to give shape to an otherwise overwhelming social matrix that’s become too confusing for individuals to process by themselves. Believing that the State, at some level, sees the whole of the Big picture is secretly comforting to many, maybe even most people. For the rest of us of course, it’s a nightmare that threatens to make the world a place not worth living in.

Speaking of Movies…

Went to see our first movie in Guadalajara last night- Iron Man in Spanish. Luxury 19-screen air-conditioned practically brand new cineplex – about 52 pesos each, which is about five bucks US/Canadian. Not exactly sure how that works, given the cost of movie tickets elsewhere. I think maybe the absence of unions – especially the obnoxiously militant, paleo-marxist projectionist’s union  – might have something to do with the more reasonable prices here.

Don’t Waste Your Breath

Please don’t tell me there’s a Global Climate Crisis and a Global Food Crisis and a Global Economic Crisis and a Global Energy Crisis and that we’re all screwed and that it’s all coming down on our heads like a house of cards when people can still find the time and the energy to get outraged about this.

 

When You Waste More than Half Your Food…

Screaming at the farmer to grow more won’t solve anything.