I Present To You

A series of writings that were feverishly written in the grip of an illness, an illness that happened to force me to slow down enough and isolate for a minute, carving out the time to write the durn things. Good luck!

Gettin It Done

You'd think that out here doing much more ourselves in the woods - free from the so-called red tape - we'd be getting it done right quick. Well, kind of, for certain basic tasks. It depends on what you mean by getting it done though. The more you do locally, the more you try to really pack it in - stacking functions so to speak to maximize the density of work done, maximizing efficiency - which is an important permaculture principle, though permaculture was not the discipline to discover this principle, which is itself a very old principle.

Say you fell a tree for resources. There is a whole lot to that tree beyond just felling it and bucking it up. You might get some lumber out of it, and then use less suitable sections for firewood. And then you get a bunch of branches, which could be used for crude building material, kindling, landscaping and hugelkultur fill, or chipped up to be used as mulch, pathways, and finer fill. The finer branches could be scattered for forest food, or they could be moved to be used for fill, mulch, or compost material somewhere else. 

The type of tree and location of the tree could be selected for getting more sunlight where it is felled, and changing the mix of trees in the area, or opening up a wider flight corridor for birds of prey, which could help control rodent populations in a particular area. What's done with the stump? Is it cut flush with the earth? Is it left to stand for seating or for a table out in the woods? Does the species coppice and will that coppice be managed in the future? Or will the whole thing need to be yanked out to clear for useable space?

All these separate forms of work draw out the process of felling and processing a tree substantially, so the process takes a lot longer, and is much more involved than one initially thinks, and at first glance it doesn't look like much is happening. But these different scattered forms of work also make maximal use of the felled tree, which itself makes for a somber sacrifice and significant transfer of resources to many disparate processes and functions, which will hopefully work together synergistically to a produce a more powerful outcome over a longer period of time. 

And perhaps this is a better meaning for "red tape," that seemingly sticky, constricting bramble that slows everything down to a state of ineffectiveness and paralysis. But slowed down for what purpose? To what end? Regulations tend to crop up through greater guiding visions for larger processes, and those visions can have a tendency to degrade and lose coherence, with various countervailing interests getting involved where there is weakness and vulnerability, and then the regulations can crop up into convolutedness with a dispersing purpose, and then you may really have the fabled "red tape" on your hands. 

My life activity now could be analyzed in these terms. On the day to day, I'm getting a whole lot of little things done, which all relate to certain broader goals. In the short term, it seems like it is taking forever to get anything substantial done, but all of these smaller efforts are hopefully accumulating across disparate functions which will hopefully act synergistically to produce a larger outcome further down the road. The trick is angling all of these disparate functions towards a broader coherent purpose, stacking as many harmonious activities as possible in service to that coherent purpose, and not just dispersing all of that energy out into the ether. 

I guess my point to all this is that the fastness or slowness of getting certain things done is relative and appropriate to what needs to be done, and how. Emergencies certainly need to be handled in a timely fashion, but then there are plenty of other things that should be done slowly and with care, stacking their functions together so that they work well together.

And sometimes slowness is a desired property in itself, as it gives things time to breathe or ferment, and it gives time for deliberation and the proper guiding of larger processes on a longer timescale, processes whose initial velocity need to be carefully managed, as the later velocity of them becomes more difficult to influence as they really get going. 

Dark Age Ahead

Yeah, I know the term has become quite contentious. Dark ages are not necessarily evenly distributed through time, or even space. And their meanings are somewhat relative depending on the observer. Dark for whom? What is the meaning of the "darkness" and is it a bad thing in an absolute sense? As far as the common historical-mythical imagery goes, you typically have a divide in which civilization - or a series of empires - represents the light and order, and then on the other side of that divide, the lack of civilization, or its collapse, represents the dark and the chaos. And these separate spheres can mean prosperity and opportunity for different groups and interests depending on who and where they are in these spheres. 

These are all very interesting lines of inquiry, and I'm going to bypass much of them for now and just use the term "dark age" for its common imagery to make a couple of limited points in the realm of knowledge and ideology. 

Let's begin with some very basic imagery. Light takes a lot of energy to produce. It is energy. The sun, that admired and envied fusion generator out there in space, conveys most of our light, at least directly. Artificial light takes plenty of energy on its own, and it takes work to construct it. And we are largely visual creatures. "Monkey see, monkey do," to put it very, very crudely. The average individual looks at where they want to go, and navigates there with the help of feeling their way along, and hearing and smelling, and then looking at the things they want, and then doing with the help of looking as feedback, all with the help of light bouncing around and entering the eyes, conveying that information. 

Language works kind of like this in perception and communication and imagination too. It takes work to produce a language that describes and accords with the things one largely looks at, according to a certain convention which is communicated through verbalization, and it takes even more work to write that language down, and then even more work to process what is written down and re-combine it and then write that processed re-combination down. If all of this is working right, it bounces off certain realities and enters the mind's eye and illuminates those particular realities, which can be further improved upon or even acted upon. 

And if you take into account this schema in the illuminations afforded by knowledge, higher resolutions of constructed knowledge require larger complexes of written word and symbol, which are not only maintained on various media, but have to be continually refreshed through research, verification, contention, ideological and technological revolution, advances of method and technique, maintenance of tradition through repetition, and so on. 

All of this takes a lot of time, and consumes a lot of energy in the brain. You typically need a decent stable life with decent nutrition to continually do this in a coherent way. So you see the dominance of rational thought - making sophisticated and dense use of symbol and logic, and the general availability of more recorded data - correspond with later stages of development and accumulation of resources, and a long enough period of continuity in a given civilization. 

You see in the ancient world more chaotic and tumultuous periods where the writing output goes dark and we know less about what is going on. The Roman Empire's Crisis of the 3rd Century is a good example of this; there are many others. 

In earlier developmental periods of knowledge production on the other hand, you see something a little different. You see in old myth and religion for example an attempt to convey as much as possible with less, with a large portion of that unable to be expressed in the writing even. Looking at the immediate writing, you can get some of it, but the rest is only hinted at, which you can pick up on through experience and feeling and through understanding what is attempting to be conveyed. 

I think of myth as sort of waving a torch in the darkness, its limited light hinting at what is there, and then you have to feel around to get a sense of the rest. And you have to know how to make and use the torch, without it going out too soon or burning up. Reading myth and getting the most out of it is a little different than just reading it too. 

And it can be pretty nice to have a torch or candle for when the lights do go out. Out here in the canyon, all it takes is for a storm to come through, or even a stiff wind, and then when one of the multitude of leaning trees next to the sketchy power lines falls over and knocks the line down, the power goes out, usually for a couple of days. If you took some time and effort to become a little more comfortable with knowledge, resources, and activities that don't require the power to be on, you don't have to run around with your hair on fire when it does go out. 

And we have a lot of metaphorical sketchy powerlines exposed to metaphorical leaning trees in our society don't we? And there is the matter of those increasingly frequent and increasingly violent storms. I'm not saying though that we have to turn and embrace wholesale some stone age ethic. Having a healthy dose of interest and respect for an ethic like that could be good. But you don't have to give up the good shit either. 

I like my LED string lights just fine, and solar technology rocks. Heck, I even adore the grid and the tube amp it powers. I'm a voracious reader, and I'm grateful for the Internet as it still exists, feeling good and connected to everything out there. It does feel a little more secure, a little more satisfying though, to have a growing knowledge of all those lower tech alternatives out there. As John Michael Greer put it, "collapsing now and avoiding the rush" doesn't have to necessarily mean jumping ship altogether all at once. It just might be good to slowly climb a few more rungs down on the jungle gym as the thing starts getting more creaky.  

Indeed, painting with a broad brush here, but one really unattractive aspect of early Christian ideology - which still survives in various forms - was that hatred and loathing of everything to do with the earthly realm, of carnal needs and desires and functions, of the forces of nature. Certainly over time the ruling elite amplified this message for purposes of social engineering, but you did have a lot of people thinking, "gross, these oppressive pagans with their nature-love and their carnal indulgences, and now everything has come crashing down and what is it all good for?" 

It is easy enough to foresee a deepening technology-hatred which crystallizes into part of a new ideology as everything becomes progressively more poisoned and unstable, with the ruling class pushing high-technology at the expense of everything else, a lot of which will become unusable anyway as the infrastructure breaks down. You can't eat a gatdamn crypto coin. You're already seeing it popular conversation too. 

But the thing about pushing hard on a pendulum and setting it in motion, to get it as far from you as possible, is that eventually it comes back to hit you in the ass. 

Stuck Lever

We're seeing more and more of these sticking points crop up, where the ruling class pushes the contradictory tensions between rhetoric and action so far that the formal logic breaks down, and the mass consent with it. You can spin a lot of this every which way if you don't go too hard, and you can lie to a lot of people through a given crisis, and a lot of people will buy it, desiring to get on with their lives. But what if you do go too hard and its harder to spin away? And what happens when crises like that are more sustained and destructive, and happening more frequently? And then you have more people who can't get on with their lives because their lives are simultaneously falling apart? 

The Ukraine war is really doing this on a higher economic and professional statecraft level, implicating processes like arms manufacturing, military alliances, military doctrine and prowess, global trade and finance, and so on, the effects coursing most powerfully through Europe, but which are being widely observed as well. 

And simultaneously you have the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, doing immense damage to questions of international law and basic issues of morality and modern ethics which have formed a bulwark of our national mythology since at least the World Wars. 

You also have the Epstein fiasco wreaking havoc domestically, with huge swathes of the political spectrum completely inflamed over the issue, casting into sharp contrast the separate tiers of justice and public morality based on wealth and class, gulfs which are only growing and deepening.

Larger and larger swathes of the body politic are no longer accepting the manufactured consensus attempted around these crises, letting the open wounds stand and fester. Or to put it another way, the steel is losing its temper. 

But this is how everything works too. Ukraine was another piece in the grand scheme of the everlasting Pax Americana and the homogenization of the world system under neoliberal capitalism. And Israel was the "aircraft carrier of the Middle East," getting its ethno-state colony purified as part of that deal. And Epstein was one of the multitudes of middle men that emerged in the nexus of global finance and geopolitics, who was able to facilitate the movement and laundering of massive global wealth flows, while maintaining delicate balances of personal and political power, until his monstrous nature caught up with him anyway.   

These were the increasingly desperate and ad-hoc processes put into place to keep the world system running as it was continuously breaking down, forming the masses of duct tape and glue slapped onto groaning forms and wobbling motion that now need to be changed fundamentally, as their pathologies have advanced too far, which the ruling classes refuse to do, if they were even capable of doing so anyway. And now these very processes are doing much of the dismantling as they proceed to their logical end. 

Digital Accumulation

AI, as a very broad technological concept, has a very broad set of applications that will continue to expand and evolve as the technology is developed and applied. However, as a high-value and resource-intensive technology, it lends itself naturally to consolidation and concentration, and as such will be used in certain dominant ways depending on where the economic power and resources are concentrated. 

We have to be careful here though. This doesn't have to mean fully-automated dystopia. There are ways to concentrate power so that power can be intentionally re-distributed in broader and broadly effective ways, which influences how technology manifests socio-politically and economically, and how it is ultimately put into practice. Ian Welsh - one writer I repeatedly return to for his particular gift for distilling complex and challenging subjects into clear and direct pieces, all the while accomplishing the difficult part in the process: getting it right - explains how the technology is developing very differently in China. 

I'm not going to explore here whether these differing historical-geographical developments will lead to their relative successes or disasters, and I won't say that China doesn't have its own unique troubles particular to its historical character, as much as you can isolate that particular character from the greater world system anyway. But it is certainly useful to be able to observe contrasting lines of development and their relative effects and effectiveness. 

I still have this huge piece on AI brewing which will seek to address some of these larger issues, which gets bigger and more complicated every day as the technology continues to develop and more stories come out on it, which is kind of a pain in the butt and an albatross honestly. But for now I just wanted to turn to a particular phenomenon that is pretty interesting. 

In this brief post, I'm going to focus on the Western approach. Here you have all of these wildly varying speculations about what AI can do and accomplish, and then a certain band of dominant applications where it is really displaying its efficacy as it manifests in actually-existing society in the West. 

Structurally, the prevailing pattern in the West has been an intensifying and accelerating process of rolling expropriation, which beginning with colonization, made for continuous acts of robbery which had to - roughly paraphrasing Hannah Arendt again -  continuously be repeated lest the whole process break down. And now the process is indeed breaking down, as there is less and less weak and vulnerable outer to rob which hasn't collapsed into flame and chaos anyway, and the robbers have had to take more of their share from the inner, while dreaming of pillaging the bigger stronger powers in the outer but not actually carrying out that dream, to condense a complicated story into so many words. 

This process came to mind recently because I've repeatedly observed my site being scraped. This is crude inference; I don't actually have the technical skills to inquire as to whether this was actually the case, but there have been a number of instances when I've seen a huge amount of single pageviews for a large amount of posts all at once. If it really was scraped for AI, good luck to the AI in making sense of this stuff; that AI is going to get a bit weirder. 

But it doesn't matter whether my stuff was personally scraped or not. We know that this is happening all over the Internet, and that AI systems are hoovering up all of the data they can get, leading to various problems like fights over digital property, and then a particular kind of garbage in, garbage out issue, where the AI runs out of raw input and begins taking in AI output. Which got me thinking. 

Every next technological revolution we have comes in the context of Western political economy: in which waves of self-interested, state-backed private actors advance contemporary technological suites through a process of expropriation, in which they appropriate first natural and indigenous resources and then later on appropriate collectively produced and public resources in subsequent waves, destroying the integrity of those resources in the process while producing a fresh wave of initially public resources, which are steadily enclosed and captured, socializing the costs and privatizing the gains. 

This is also a telescoping process, in which the window for the even distribution of public resources constricts and shortens in time with each subsequent wave. There was a very brief period when AI tools were more broadly distributed to tinker with, before they were rapidly rolled up, and are now quickly being siloed off into proprietary systems, raising costs socially, while also the sclerotic technical monopolies brute force the additional energy requirements without a more thorough innovation in operating efficiency, so that energy and data requirements are rising steeply. 

There are all kinds of dynamics to be analyzed in there, but what I'm getting at is this limited observation: that we can see the bots scrape our socially produced digital materials, passing by like hungry ghosts, our remaining scraps of digital production stripped away and chucked into the great food processors as more grist for corporate AI slop, to be distributed through highly centralized corporate troughs, a mudslide of content slurry we didn't ask for, giving us essentially nothing of substance in return for our unending time and energy and attention, in compensation for the Internet commons they have been in the process of destroying in the previous wave.