The tyranny of words

Some reflections during a wake period at 1:30 a.m. this morning... 

Mulling on the tyranny of thought as a ruminating mind calms down and refuge is found in a quiet space from which words rise like wisps or vapors, a space free of subjects and objects in which there can be no hurry. 

Grateful to be experiencing an aging process that enables a dedifferentiating 82 year old brain to experience a return towards its youth, letting go of the clouds of senolytic discourse that have come to clutter it and increasingly experience being the calm and quiet space from which everything rises. 

Feeling sympathy for public intellectuals whose writing I follow, immersed in their addiction to words as they oblige themselves, many due to financial necessity, to keep writing a stream that includes mediocre as well as brilliant work, each generating a rivulet in the streams of discourse diverging and merging in an infosphere that is becoming increasingly contaminated by the words of robots that duplicate and obscure their efforts.  Grateful for the retired professor’s pension that  permits optional association with, or dissociation from, this world of words.

The other shoe is about to drop in 2024 - important closure moments in the state of the world.

I want to pass on a clip (to which I have added some definitions in parentheses) from Venkatest Rao’s most recent Ribbonfarm Studio installment in which he argues that the other shoe is about to drop for many narratives in 2024, a year that feels much more exciting than 1984, 1994, 2004, or 2014.

With the Trump/Biden election, the other shoe is about to drop on the arc that began with the Great Weirding (radical global transformations that unfolded between 2016 and 2020). This arc has fuzzy beginnings and endings globally, but is clearly heading towards closure everywhere. For instance, the recent election in India, with its chastening message for the BJP, has a 10-year span (2014-24). In the EU and UK, various arcs that began with events in Greece/Italy and Brexit are headed towards some sort of natural closure.

Crypto and AI, two strands in my mediocre computing series (the other two being robotics and the metaverse), also seem to be at an other-shoe-drops phase. Crypto, after experiencing 4-5 boom-bust cycles since 2009, is finally facing a triple test of geopolitical significance, economic significance, and “product” potential (as in international agreement that “stable coins” as well as fiat currencies are valid vehicles for managing debt and commerce). It feels like in the next year or two we’ll learn if it’s a technology that’s going to make history or remain a sideshow. AI is shifting gears from a rapid and accelerating installation phase of increasing foundational capabilities to a deployment phase of productization, marked by Apple’s entry into the fray and a sense of impending saturation in the foundational capabilities.

Various wars (Gaza, Ukraine) and tensions (Taiwan) are starting to stress the Westphalian model of the nation state for real now. That’s the other shoe dropping on a 400-year-long story (also a 75 year long story about the rules-based international order, but that’s relatively less interesting).

Economically, we’re clearly decisively past the ZIRPy (Zero Interest Rate Policy) end of the neoliberal globalization era that began in the mid-80s. That shoe has already dropped. What new arc is starting is unclear — the first shoe of the new story hasn’t dropped yet. Something about nonzero interest rates in an uncertain world marked by a mercantilist resource-grabbing geopolitical race unfolding in parallel to slowly reconfiguring global trade patterns.

Managing the human herd

 This post is a dyspeptic random walk through thoughts triggered by the front page photograph of the Wall Street journal of June 17, 2024, showing Masses of pilgrims embarked on a symbolic stoning of the devil in Saudi Arabia under the soaring summer heat. Such enormous mobs of people are those most easily roused to strong emotions by charismatic speakers.

How are the emotions and behaviors of such enormous clans of humans be regulated in a sane and humane way? Can this be accomplished outside of authoritarian or oligarchical governance? Might such governance establish its control of the will and moods of millions through the unnoticed infiltration of AI into all aspects of their daily life (cf. Apple's recent AI announcements). Will the world come to be ruled by a "Book of Elon"? 

Or might we be moving into a world of decentralized everything? a bottom up emergence of consensus governance the from the mosh pit of web 3, cryptocurrencies and stablecoins? The noble sentiments of the Etherium Foundation/ notwithstanding, the examples we have to date of 'rules of the commons' are the chaos of Discord, Reddit, and other social media where the sentiments of idiots and experts jumble together in an impenetrable cacophony.  

Who or what is going to emerge to control this mess? How long will the "permaweird" persist?