I didn’t notice this until tonight–and I kinda wish it occurred to me two years ago–but Pegg and Wright’s, 2013 movie, World’s End can be viewed as a metaphor for the Brexit referendum. The galactic network of alien robot overlords promising enlightened peace and plenty is the EU and the UK is Simon Pegg’s Gary King drunkenly shouting up from a beery, smelly pit full of broken refuse. Just watch this scene and tell me this doesn’t summarize the whole mess in six minutes:
The whole thing plays out in a lot of ways. Perhaps the movie ends optimistically that human perversity defeats the group think of alien conformity. But at the same time it’s the defeat of the Wellsian paternalism of imposing a better world on the unenlightened masses despite of themselves.
Pegg and Wright don’t pull punches or take the easy way out with the ending of the movie. The aliens leave and global civilization collapses. It turned out that the robots had been helping our advancement for a lot longer and much more subtly than our individualist bravado lead us to believe. Gary King is happy in his new role in this newly savage world so it could be argued the movie ends happily. But on the other hand, human civilization has fallen and we are abandoned, with no outside help to rebuild it again. A perfect encapsulation of the UK’s post Brexit world.
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It’s so hard to get a diverse bunch of people to make common cause. Especially when there is a tiny elite (Some of which aren’t flesh and blood human beings even if legally they they are.) with huge amounts of wealth and political power working very, very widely and very, very subtly to keep us all divided, diverted and unable to change the status quo.
And even when we do get together and fix something, human nature being what it is, soon we all forget, fall to diversion and arguing and the whole process starts all over again. And all solutions go out of date eventually. The world never stands still.
This is what Orwell was talking about when he said, “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” This is what Billy Bragg was singing about when he wrote “Great Leap Forward.” Maybe this will never go away as long as we’re human.
So, in waiting for an enlightenment that will never come, I listen to some of the unexpected and deeply stirring intersectionality of dinosaur pop:
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What’s happening to my generation’s children, the Millennials, is similar but also worse than what happened to my generation, Generation X. At least my generation had a lot of terrible, entry level jobs in the service sector to start in. We knew late stage capitalism was shit but at least we had something.
Way back in 1991, when I was working in one of a spotty, desperate career of endless entry level jobs in small businesses, I had a lengthy conversation with my boss about what computers, robots and automation were going do the economy in the long run. I was in my 20s then and it all seemed far away so it was still safely interesting instead of alarming. We were both smart, if seemingly directionless, guys. The work we were doing was staggeringly dull so we hashed it out for a couple of days of conversation. The conclusion for me seemed pretty hopeless, I knew exactly what the problem was–eventually more jobs would be destroyed than created–but he and I couldn’t find a satisfactory solution. It was depressing if distant.
Fast forward through the 1990s, the gigantic, planetary, intergovernmental project called the Internet was opened to the public. This gave a giant shot in the arm to the US economy. The Internet, specifically the World Wide Web, gave me first decent job: temporary work at Microsoft doing data entry. This, in turn, got me another temp job in another group at the same company where I maintained a subsite below the Microsoft domain.
In July 2000, Microsoft offered me a full time job as programmer–even though I wasn’t really a programmer, my boss and his brother wrote the code. I just maintained and tweaked it. Anyway, I turned it down for complicated reasons that I’ve only begun to fully articulate now. (Another essay at some point.)
In one sense this was a terrible mistake, I could have had a lot more green in my savings and investments that I currently do, my retirement prospects could have been lot better than they are now. But now, nearly 30 years later, I’m older and can’t be so cavalier as I was back when I was 37. It is very likely I will continue to work even into retirement, all the way until death. Anyway it’s water under the bridge now so let’s move on.
I only outline this personal history to explain that, even though I don’t have any kids myself, I can understand the desperation they currently feel.
(Honestly, I’ve always felt just a shade too much empathy for the kids, that’s why I didn’t want to bring any into this hellworld. But that’s another essay.)
Anyway, in the last 5 years I did learn of a practical solution to the discussion I had with my friend back in 1991. It is one that has existed in one form or another, almost two centuries. And now the discussion around this idea, basic income, is heating up. More and more people are taking notice of it. Is it a small step on the way to fully automated luxury gay space communism or, even better, Iain Bank’s Culture?
Given the current political climate it seems very unlikely to me that UBI will be instituted in the United States any time soon. I mean my country is still so utterly ignorant and barbarous as to think that the idea of a national health service is godless commie talk. But I wrote this essay in my tiny, neglected corner of the Internet as a way to quickly sum up my thoughts on the matter and as a way to quickly reply to skeptics of the idea.
First, fix the Electoral College. Many people still view the EC as some brilliant move of statesmanship worked out by our supernally wise founders back 1787. This is not supported by history. The founders of this country weren’t superhuman and the creation of the Constitution was just as messy, slow moving and controversial as today’s politics–this despite restricting the meeting only to white, male, landowners.
Instead the EC was a messy, last minute, hacked ploy to get the small states to ratify the Constitution. The EC has never worked as advertised. But abolishing it w0uld require a lengthy and difficult amendment process. But we do have an alternative way, that’s already in the Constitution (And has been since 1787.), to fix its most serious flaw: how electors are assigned. And this reform is already halfway to completion; we just need several more states to join in ratifying NPVIC laws. If this happens the EC vote shall always follow the popular vote.
Removes the most of the incentives for gerrymandering.
Removes the spoiler effect
Several states and countries already have variations on STV in place and we need to make this much more common across the United States. These days there is a common refrain among voters that the system doesn’t represent them and they feel not stake in it. Representation of minor parties will bring these alienated voters back into the system. Not being worried about the spoiler effect will us all free to vote our conscience instead of handing victories to the opposition; this will also bring alienated voters back into the process. And, as gerrymandering becomes a thing of the past, people will find their government more representative of their neighborhoods.
This can be fixed in a wide variety of ways. We can start at the local and state level and eventually push the anti-corruption reforms all the way to Federal level. In fact, fixing points one through three might go some of the way there.
So, if we fix the electoral college, change the way voting works, broaden the franchise and bust all the money and corruption out of politics, someone like Trump won’t happen again–at least for the near future.
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Some ten or twenty years of upgrades later, they have vaulted onto the world stage, stolen most of the market share from Starbucks only to lead by diversifying into many industries, like Amazon or General Electric.
They are still a privately held workers coop of some twenty or so people; everything else is robots and software. They are not the first bloodless transnational business, Amazon and others would likely beat them to that, but they are the first bloodless transnational workers coop–without sacrificing their ideals of worker ownership of the means of production.
Silly Crab Coffee becomes the business version of Skynet. Not incinerating us with nuclear weapons and killer robots but essentially taking over our global economy and leveraging government corruption and human nature–like Asimov’s “Evitable Conflict” or his “All the Troubles of the World”–to get what it wants. Or maybe not, maybe the software remains true to its core directives and does whatever it can, legally, financial, politically to protect it’s tiny 20 stake-holding workers?
I wrote about five pages of stuff but, the problem is I know too many details. The story gets bogged down with a lot of dull explanation and then I ran out of steam. Maybe I’ll take a another swing at later.
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Deep philosophical questions about the nature of God and the meaning of existence aside, I can point to many religious scientists who have no trouble accepting and refining our understanding of evolution by natural selection, abiogenesis, cosmology and the Big Bang without muddying the waters with mythology. I just wish more ordinary people were like this.
The acceptance of this, provided you’re philosophically sophisticated, is not an attack on a person’s religious beliefs. Science has accumulated more than 500 years of evidence that the forms and functions of nature don’t require an engineer. As I said, there are many religious scientists who accept the whole of Darwin’s idea and who have no problem with accepting natural explanations in the Big Bang or the Standard Model.
I realize this is hopeless semantic hairsplitting but, I just wish we’d stop seeing lazy headlines that read, “…the Designs of Nature….” Case in point, this Vox video about engineering by biomimicry:
Sloppy use of language causes so much needless confusion in understanding these subjects. This is not just another cliched complaint about nonsense like creationism and intelligent design. This sloppiness bleeds into many areas of science that are not closely related to the evolution of human beings. For example, artificial intelligence, cosmology, chemical evolution and cognitive science still contend in flushing out magic, teleology and mysticism in new forms. It’s my thinking that these all areas contend with two problems:
Sloppy use of language as described here
Understanding how chaos dynamics generates complexity through emergence.
This complaint of mine is a huge subject. I could point to endless examples where this same confusion comes up again and again. But I’m not a scientist or philosopher. Maybe I should just leave it here.
Since doing the clean install of my site on the 19th, my security has noted that my first spambot attack came from IP blocks in Malaysia, Poland and California at three in the morning, Seattle time. These were searching for file exploits in, of all things, Movable Type.
I even got some lazy taps from Microsoft’s Bingbot spider for files that haven’t existed on my site for over five years now–hard to interpret that one. Either Bingbot needs to have old data flushed out of the spider or, much more likely, one tiny tendril of Bingbot has been compromised. I now suspect the latter because the IP numbers that trace back to Bingbot were also looking for more obviously suspect files (Boner pill shit.) on my server.
Am I going to alert Microsoft? Ha! Never mind that I’m just inexpertly misinterpreting my log files and could be disastrously wrong but, being a good Internet citizen by informing Microsoft would be like, to paraphrase the immortal Douglas Adams, trying to attack a lunatic asylum with a banana!
And for days afterwards the spambots came from all over the world, looking for things that didn’t exist anymore, generating 404 errors. I shouldn’t be surprised over how quick this was. Mere minutes after setting things up again, the botnets attack. Robots are infinitely patient, I guess. That and my domain has been stable since 1999 so, I guess, it’s a high value target for spambots trying to SEO links for boner pills.
It’s the invalid log attempts that worry me the most. 175 attempts in the last four days alone! These try with a short list of obvious usernames combined with combing my content for less obvious strings. In all this dictionary attacking, some of these actually got my account name right. I’m going to have to change my username to a long random string to protect at against this.
In the same span of time, the spambots only bothered to comment spam me 3 times. The operators of these botnets know better these days. Injecting linkspam into the main content counts for more in SEO than merely injecting it into comments. And such spam harder to fix.
The Internet is a jungle. For this and many other reasons I can see why so many, less technically inclined, have abandoned the Web for the walled gardens of Google, Twitter and Facebook. These aren’t all that safe either but at least you can find someone to blame. Me? I’m stickin’ it out. I learn important stuff fighting this.
About two years ago I wrote a brief update on a longer essay I wrote back in 2005, titled “Education Stinks.” The gist is that despite all the new forms of technology and multimedia we dumped on students over the last century, education really hasn’t improved. It still takes about 20 years to make a mathematician or brain surgeon. There isn’t a science fictional Mandarin language course in pill form. The educational revolution of Van Vogt’s nexialism still doesn’t exist.
In the second installment of this ongoing series of essays, I pointed to YouTube smart guy, CGP Grey‘s video about “The Digital Aristotle.” There he hinted that technology may allow for super-individualized education–every computer a tutor–tuned to each student’s idiosyncratic learning style. What I didn’t know was that another YouTube smart guy, Veratasium, had made a video rebuttal to “Digital Aristotle.”
In that rebuttal Veratasium covered the history of technology introduced in classrooms and how each change never quite gave us the revolutions promised. In a later video, shown below, he explains why education is so difficult. Basically it’s down to the way the brain has evolved. It’s hard to get people to deeply learn and memorize complicated subjects:
These machines don’t exist yet but, they only require modest refinements in current technology. They are only a few years into the future. Make no mistake, the militaries of the world are spending millions to make this happen. Turns out the Terminator franchise had it backwards, the swarm intelligence of the nanobots that comprise the T-1000’s body will come first. Machines don’t have to be that smart to become very dangerous. Behold:
Take it Lenny, “I’ve seen the future, brother It is murder!”
In the intervening twelve months, the true nature of one in five people in this country has manifested. Why do I say one of five? Because that’s how many voted for Donald Trump. Approximately 65 million people in this country didn’t consider his racism, his religious intolerance, his jingoism and xenophobia, let alone his sexism a deal breaker. And the deeply broken Electoral College handed him the White House even though over 3 million more people voted for Clinton over him. And then there are the 118 million people who, through active voter suppression, disillusionment over our winner take all election system, annoyed with a lack of an alternative to the two flavors of neoliberalism endorsed by both parties, didn’t vote at all.
Anyway, if the politics here offends random folks on the Net, believe me, it’s far less Bolshie than my Facebook wall. I, and many like me, were silent for too long and look where that got us. If people like me want that promised Star Trek future, we’re gonna have to fight for it!
Okay, so around September of last year, I had a second