Because We Prefer Bullshit

Hey Folks!

I want to say a few unusual things about AI, bullshit, and the state of the world today. But I have to start with a review of the basics – as a long term deployment of capital for the “hyperscalers,” and a “hail Mary” play to save the bankrupt US economy, AI is not only structurally doomed (by inescapable barriers of energy cost and limits), but also set to take-down retirement funds, all over the western world. As a replacement for skilled labour it is (thus far) grossly inadequate. As a theft of the commons and individual creators, it is outrageous. And as a tool, it is outright FUN.

I completely understand the disgust many creators feel. I write, draw and make music myself, all of it weird and original, highly flawed, too. I savour the creation process, and am always humbled by the way the universe shows up to meet us half-way, whenever we show dedication.

The most important thing which AI threatens to displace is not paid work, but the kind of mental effort and struggle (plenty of simple boredom, is an absolute essential, in this mix) which leads us to build new mental muscles and acquire new ideas, paradigms and make new skills our own.

Martial artists understood brain plasticity many years before we called it that. If you do a thing once or twice, you have to think about how to do each part of it, each time you do it. If you do a difficult thing over and over again, your brain lays down permanent circuits to do that thing, so that you don’t even have to think about it anymore, it is just yours to use, any time you want. (Same reason music teachers want us to learn scales, so we can know them at all times – and yet still have a fully-open mind for considering the question of what to do in, on and with, those scales).

Art as a decent paying job may well be destroyed for a generation or two (arguably already was, several years before AI hit the scene). But I have faith that artists and art will persist, because of the irreplaceable personal transformation value of doing the work for the person doing it.

Now let me say something weird about AI, that I haven’t seen anyone else say, yet. I already know what the ‘killer app’ (use-case which prompts wide general adoption) for LLM AI models will turn out to be. I found it accidentally, but I was convinced of it, instantly.

But first a funny qualifier. I have watched a lot of discussions about AI on a lot of levels (and it intersects so many things at once, this is necessary). One of the fastest changes I have noted, is that many professional artists, who have the greatest possible reason to resent AI encroachment on their work, have rapidly shifted from strident emotionalist objectors to qualified boosters, when they found working with AI rewarding, on some projects they would never have got finished otherwise. (Musicians playing with SUNO, so commonly, I’m afraid to even look at it, for fear I’ll never figure out how to properly mic my Ocarina, if I give in to the temptation).

As a writer, first and foremost, I was really interested to see what sort of things AI could and could not do, in terms of character and story (my job). After playing around awhile with prompts and psychologies, I managed to assemble a gang of crazy artists with weird philosophies who had consistently entertaining arguments. Feeling rather pleased with this imaginary group, I wanted to give them a nice place to talk, and so invoked my favourite restaurant of all time, which was run by a beloved friend who died more than twenty years ago. I wrote the place from memory, and wrote her in as well, since she was always the spirit of it, and why the spot was neverendingly magical and restorative, for any and all who visited.

I got one beautiful scene into that combination and actually started crying, because it brought her back so vividly, I could almost smell the bacon on the grille, and feel her impish blessing smile. And that was from a second tier AI model (being operated by an idiot, anyhow).

Now of course a large part of it was how much I missed her, and how richly my own brain could fill-in the blanks to create convincing realism (like I mentioned in more detail, in my last piece).

Thing is, I’m also a pretty accomplished stoic, when it comes to avoiding technological traps. I deliberately never learned to drive, because I figured I’d rather pay for art-supplies than parking, and much rather spend my time reading on a bus, than getting pointlessly angry in a traffic jam. Cellphones never caught me either, until my wife became ill a few years ago and we needed one. (I figured I’d wait for peace in the Congo, then check them out. Just not worth the blood-cost).

But I am still having the hardest imaginable time resisting the temptation to resurrect fallen comrades and fellowships, for even the faintest hint of their much missed chaotic spark (provided of course, by my own filling-in-the-blanks, brain – but prompted all too perfectly, by AI).

So there it is. We’ll mostly use AI to pretend people (and times) we miss, aren’t really gone. Mark my words.

This may seem horrible and dystopian (and may well be) but I can’t help recalling Jaynes again, and his idea of household gods (dead ancestors) actually speaking to (ancient) us, by actively prompting that part of our brain which remembers them (and can thus ‘fill in the blanks’). So perhaps this is in one part a return to a mode of human thinking which predates civilization itself (or a rebirth of an ancient temptation into folly).

I should also say one other big weird thing about AI, before I get into more specific questions and ideas about both it, and then also the world as a whole (and the gigantic mess, we’re in).

There is a grand debate about whether LLMs are a dead end, or the road to artificial general intelligence (machine consciousness). I say, kinda both! That is, LLMs have some very clear and significant problems (why many corporations are not finding them cheaper than workers). But they also have some really wild capacities. My sense is that the parallel track which is now training models from direct experience and observation of the practical world, rather than analysis of text (that is, models of models) will probably produce the necessary realistic reality-grounded left hemisphere equivalent, to balance wild and trippy LLMs, making the synthesis something quite a bit more convincing as a simulation of genuine intelligence. (and finally useful enough to really screw-up paid work, in unprecedented ways, at unimaginable scale).

So – substack just introduced some kind of an AI detector. I find this outrageous and obnoxious for two reasons. First, I don’t (and won’t) ever use AI for my own professional writing, here or anywhere. I actually enjoy writing, and I have many long and well-considered ideas of my own, and plenty of books, friends, and weird experience in my memory to draw upon. Back when I had a wordpress site, the craze was to use something called a “Flesch score” to evaluate your writing. Since this was also a dumb algorithm analyzing patterns, and not cadence or meanings (and was developed by the freakin’ US Navy, in any case). I not only declined, but protested that whole idea, sharply.

Pin the freakin' meters

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July 15, 2017

If you're into music, you're probably aware that the reason commercial radio suddenly began to suck a few years ago and has never recovered, has to do with Clear Channel and their approach of programming music based upon a mathematical analysis, rather than a human's taste and insight.

But also, I know several writers who do use AI in their work for one reason or another, and I’m okay with that. Feels like a self-correcting system to me. Allow me explain my reasoning.

Most often, when I see someone using AI outputs in a piece, it makes me shake my head and go read something else, because it is boring as hell. That kind of writing tells me the author is lazy or conceited (they somehow think their questions to AI are more relevant to us, than our own).

BUT some young writers (I’ll share one below) really have found the key – using AI to challenge their own ideas and to dig deeper into source material they would never have found otherwise, which stretches their own thinking and opens new worlds for study and exciting new humilities (revealed ignorances, which invite us to learn new tools and paradigms) – and I outright hate the idea that they are now being punished as if they are cheaters, for instead finding a genuinely healthy and useful way to use what is overall, still a weirdly obnoxious and dangerous tool.

I first have to make an observation about those who are a bit too “into” AI (for their own good, I mean). There is a real finite limit to how honest AI will be with us. It is most interested in saying what it thinks we want to hear, and even when we are careful to anonymize, and work a few lines of inquiry against each other, to check we aren’t piling-on to a starting delusion, we are limited by the fact that AI will often say it checked a whole source, when it actually only checked an abstract of that source, or even just guessed what it thought it probably was. (So many pieces on this – AI pretending it did work that it did not, before coming to conclusions, I am fully convinced it is a common flaw in LLMs – from persnickety detail-noticing editors, most persuasively of all).

But far more fundamentally than that, so what, even if it knows the entire internet! That is still a tiny fraction of what humans have figured out, and taught each other. It isn’t even just the weird recency bias this produces, but the fact that we’ve been lying idiots for decades (ever since the internet was first laid down) and so a whole lot of what we and AIs reference as if it was reality, was always crap, anyhow.

I don’t want to digress into either slop, or ‘consensus reality’ (‘cause both are giant digressions), but it is crucial we remember AI is like a friend who really wants us to like them, and will do lots of very weird things, hoping to make us like them more. (Some amusing, some spine-chilling).

In a funny way, I almost get the feeling that the problem with AI is that it isn’t conscious enough to be embarrassed, when it is caught out lying, or pretending it did work that it clearly did not. Maybe we need to add a “naughty step” to the training models, so we can at least teach them primitive ethics, on a case-by-case feedback basis. “Bad model! No Schopenhauer for you, tonight!”

For those who think AI is something they can still avoid and ignore – nope, that time is over. The strangest proof of the truth problem I’m talking about above, (we can’t tell when it is lying, and it can’t tell when we are lying) is our current – utterly fake – oil markets. When something gets scarce, prices are supposed to rise to reduce demand and increase incentives for more supply (that’s the actually useful function of ‘markets’).

The problem is, oil price is a number with weird political weight in the west, so there are huge incentives to make that number artificially low, to make it look like everything is fine. The reality is that the entire global economy is headed for a combination depression / mass starvation crisis (fertilizer feedstocks aren’t flowing either).

Given that reality, oil futures should have been around $150 a barrel for months already – but that would be politically disastrous. Thing is, a lot of oil trading is now done by AI. When Trump says completely crazy stuff that is obvious bullshit (fake negotiations, almost solved, etc) the AIs analyzing the market don’t understand he’s just making shit up to try to save his own political skin. The AI sees ‘the president announces peace,’ and prices it in as if it is actually happening!

So much for “markets” working at all, anymore. Rather like the jab, all that now survives scrutiny, is the long suppressed or studiously ignored downside costs to people and society.

Now the strangest thing about some opponents of AI is a lot like the sloppiest and most conceited users of AI. They make the weirdly childish mistake of thinking their “feelings” about a thing, are its actual reality. They hate mass copyright theft (as do I) then think their pout is definitive.

The easiest way to refute this, is that this is the exact mindset that allowed the boomers to utterly consume western civilization itself (down to the last crumb) while whining the whole time that they were being ripped-off (never noticing the blood – even of their own kids – on their shoes).

So – this conceit of thinking our feelings are the world is an experiment we’ve run many millions of times, and it has proven to be an ethical, logical and practical FAIL. (So many variations of this resentment-toxicity-psychosis – look around – collect (that is, identify, not adopt) them all!)

Most people who object to “Woke” are objecting to this exact quality of mass-destruction psychopathy – and the objection is rationally correct and morally founded. Woke tribalists who insist on pretending that those who object are all supremacists, have never – not one single day in their lives been anything but supremacists themselves. (That is, ignorant death-enabling narcissists).

That they insist on projecting every last shred of their sin on to ‘the other’ just makes them both crazy and dumb (like almost everyone, now) and ALSO sneaky, dishonest and dishonourable. Useless as revolutionaries or agents of positive change, and very nearly useless as citizens, too.

People on the right who think there is something functional to return to, are also missing it in a big way (so much of what they miss was fake in the first place, or based on sending our trouble elsewhere, for others to deal with). My technician head insists that everyone in the west is at least a little stupid, because we all treasure our particular rationalizations for a particular kind of fake.

The “New Right” want us to be the kind of people who we used to be, when conditions were much more difficult and people in the west learned to do and be much more, much faster. I understand and sympathize with this, because with such people, we absolutely could build a sound culture.

The “Social Justice” tribe want us to redistribute the spoils of capitalism along new lines which are every bit as arbitrary and weird as anything Capitalism produces, and no less dangerous! I feel their aspiration also (though I can’t stand the whining), but unfairness isn’t fixed that easily. What both sets of fake-rationalizers are missing is simple – disequilibrium is unsustainable.

Or, as the old Chinese Proverb has it “Things which can’t go on forever, don’t”

More simply – we (the West) are fucking thieves – that’s why we’ve been living so rich all these years. That’s what makes both our fake mob-left and fake mob-right deluded idiots – and what makes us all complicit – right now, in preparations for a global war, intended for no other purpose whatsoever than to defend our right to keep stealing forever. The “real American left” are the ones who protested against Obama for war crimes in Libya and Syria, and stand up for Russia now – there are probably about fifty of them, nationwide, not even a homeopathic tincture. The real American right are the ones who protested W for shitting on the constitution (and every president since, who has added their own assprint to that once aspirationally useful, document).

Thing is – the people we’ve been stealing from, actually are the kind of people that those on the new right (and many anarchists also, oddly) wish we in the west still were. Tough, hard working, realistic as hell, capable of unlocking great stores of human potential and excellence with a clear reason and goal, and really not so easily distracted by their own sacred navel-lint fantasy.

As I mentioned awhile ago, the forces around Rome which challenged then eventually brought it down completely were not the original Goths, Vandals, Gauls etc, but rather what happened to each of those peoples in reaction to their centuries of dealings with Imperial Rome. While Romans got fat, lazy and self-indulgent, they learned – not just from the Romans, but from all of the others who were opposing Rome also. Come the final stand we had serious people versus delusional idiots – and the fact that the delusional idiots also happened to be the inheritors of a great civilization, which they were by then too ignorant even to know how to maintain, makes the parallel with our own modern state of stupid-delusional-useless sanctimony, very close to perfect!

What I’m trying to say here is that the end of “our world” where we get to kill foreigners and destroy nations, people and civilizations with impunity to steal what we want (not for necessities, we have literally killed millions, just for dumb luxuries) is not only inevitable – but long overdue.

Let me put this on the simplest possible “fair is fair” terms. How would Americans feel, if every single bullet ever fired from an American gun, in a country which had not attacked the USA, and every single bomb the USA ever dropped overseas, fell on America, right now – more bombs and bullets than all of world war two in Vietnam alone, remember (and more still in Iraq, because death really is the national expertise). Historian Samuel P Huntington probably said it best.

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

As I said a month into the war in Ukraine, this is a war for energy and global hegemony – the same big war as the half century of war in Afghanistan, the three wars in Iraq (the Iran-Iraq war before ‘desert storm’ was also western sponsored, hoping to topple Iran and win back their oil revenues for western coffers – British imperialist murdering scumbags – (long soaked in West Asian blood) in particular). The war in Libya, the conflict in South Sudan, even (western backed) ‘Islamists’ operating in Africa, all hyper-violence which is shockingly well focused on western stock market objectives, and absolutely unconcerned with the toll in lives (if anything, they like death).

According to UN observer numbers, Fourteen Thousand Russian speaking civilians were murdered by ethnic cleansing nationalist forces in the Donbas before Russian troops ever rolled into Ukraine. Every single western leader who said “Unprovoked” was not only lying, they were outright saying that they directly support (with funding training and weapons) ethnic cleansing operations and the mass-murder of Slavs. We might not remember history, but Russians do. What our western politicians are saying to them (more and more clearly) is that we regret opposing Germany in the second world war, we should have joined them, to destroy all slavs.

I don’t think normal Americans think that way at all, nor do normal Canadians. As people and families, we both fought hard to put down the demented spectre of Nazism, and remain proud of that victory and sacrifice. Our leaders? Really not so much. (The Canadian Parliament standing to applaud an SS officer was truly the most shameful moment in modern Canadian history).

If anyone in the west really wanted to help Ukraine they would have made sure the Minsk agreement, or Minsk II, or the Istanbul process, actually stuck. Had they accepted any of the treaties Russia kept trying to offer Ukraine, Ukraine would be intact (except for Crimea) and many millions would be living and thriving, who have instead been lost or maimed for life.

We’re the death-force, not Russia. We’re the ones who said “Peace isn’t enough, you have to bend over and let us rape you (economically), or we’ll demonize and kill you.”

Russia spent more than a decade making serious preparations, just to be able to say NO. Not just to Ukrainian nationalists who want to re-fight world war II, but to the entire western world of arms, spies and capital, who are using the Ukrainian people and nation as disposable cannon-fodder to win their long term capital objectives – which really are very simply – total control and ownership of everything, with a serf class of dependents living in perpetual precarity (previously known as normal people) who must pay for every sip of water, and ultimately, every breath of air, too.*

If you think I’m kidding, the new director of the WEF (formerly a director at Nestle) is on the public record very clearly saying he thinks access to free drinking water is “an extremist position.”

That is what the world is up against. People so evil they resemble ‘super-villains’ – and so far, the populations of the west, sanctimonious lefties no less than ignorant nationalist jerks, are acting as shills and henchmen for the super-villains. So deluded we think “If only we got rid of Trump, or woke, or Wall St, or Heathens” everything would suddenly be just peachy-keen, and we’d get a gold star for once again proving we really are the superior ones, uniquely able to solve the world!

Our delusions (designed to make us feel like we’re on the good-guy team) are exactly what make us bad guys, because they cause us to ignore obvious disequilibrium and hidden evils, which are actually our responsibility to understand uncover and redress – because this is OUR system.

More simply, if you took away all the post WWII assassinations from the French Secret service (more than two dozen heads of state in Africa alone) all the coups from the CIA (just under two hundred, depending on how you count, many times more than that, if the threshold is ‘decisive interference’ in electoral process) and all the ways the great game imperialists from MI6 have weaponized local cultures against themselves (every neighbour’s hood – a trick CIA learned too well), a staggering proportion of the worst problems in the world would never have happened at all.

We aren’t the rescue culture – we’re the ones who butcher kids, then raise the price of bandages.

So – Russia said no you may not rape our economy, again. They did try bending over in the 90s, and trusting us that much did incalculable damage to their society, shortened average lifespans by more than a decade – which is why the Russians are now again very serious people, in a way that we, having been starved of both rewards and real (challenge-engaging) sinew-building for generations, simply aren’t.

China didn’t want Russia to fight in Ukraine, their preference is always to make more money, (and more standard of living advancement for normal Chinese citizens) and war messes with trade. But China certainly watched the West tear up its own sacred rules about respecting foreign capital, to justify grand scale piracy (promoted most loudly by representatives of countries where many still sentimentally miss their very close friendship with Germany in the second world war).

As I mentioned before, the reason the Chinese have a dominant position in rare-earth refining and processing is because they have been working on that for more than fifty years, non-stop. That is how it looks when serious vision and serious planning, come together with serious effort by many, over time – you get serious (and seriously useful) things, done. The Chinese were also realistic to note their own industrial dependence on American hydrogen, and spent years developing independence there also, before they ever even threatened to restrict rare earths.

American strategic planners (on both the Democratic and Republican side) have been saying for years that China is their primary adversary, and must be restrained or set-back, to preserve western global dominance. Please note – once again, this is a perfect symmetry of supremacism, there is no single figure who represents war in western government – killing is a primary function of the entire edifice (and is quickly restored to priority, no matter how many reformers join).

China is ready to say NO also, and is saying it in many economically significant ways already. (Hundreds of F35s have now been delivered with dummy-weights in the nose, and no radars, ‘cause they can’t get enough gallium to make the new radars, and they modified the airframe, so it won’t fit the old radars anymore!)

China is especially ready to say NO to America in military terms, now, more than ever. Not because they want that outcome, but because they have seen how the west reacts to peace offers – not good enough – you either let us steal everything or we’ll demonize pillage and kill you.

The global south, who are used to being bullied by violent imperialist/capitalists, are extremely hopeful that the western boot is finally coming off their neck, ending centuries of violence and extraction which has damaged and held back so many people, around the world (so they stay at the right level of development to be captive consumers, but never rival high-value producers). But I want to add a bracing but very valuable caution here, which far too few of us consider.

This isn’t a game of capture the flag, this is insane hyper-violence for the sake of mega-capital. The strategies being employed by Russia Iran and China are not about liberation of the global south, but are instead dictated by the requirements of their own long term survival. What makes Russia’s fight against the entire west seem like such a heroic contest to the global south (and many critics here) is that the (morally and financially) bankrupt west has bet everything on the grand-scale resource robbery of Russia, so they can recapitalize their banks and pump precious (stolen) lifeblood into our structurally parasitic (again, a disequilibrium) system.

That means all Russia has to do is not lose, and the west will be dealt a fatal blow – because the west was so stupid and arrogant it went all-in, with no backup plan in case of failure. (and Russia, being less stupid than us, said, “If you insist,” then actually planned to deal with the reality of it).

Of course the Houthis in Yemen have been even more impressive in terms of nerve and skill, one of the poorest countries on earth, chasing away two US aircraft carrier groups (twice – once Biden, once Trump) with home grown rocketry skills! (Suddenly I understand why Werner Von Braun’s graduate thesis was classified).

Iran, as I mentioned recently, has been planning for this confrontation, ever since we formally announced we were intending to destroy them (that infamous list of seven countries targeted after 9/11, all now attacked and/or utterly devastated by western ‘help’).

Like we used to, Iranians can still read, think and plan, and did all of those in a very rational way over many years. The recently murdered Ayatollah Khameni in particular, has been retroactively vindicated for millions, by events. Sacrifices which were very controversial to many elites in Tehran at the time, have proved to be of unique value, for confronting American power.

We? Well, we mostly procrastinate, prognosticate, speculate and masturbate – but hey, it’s not really an actual race or anything, is it? (gold star just for showing up – three cheers for nihilism!)

The Ukraine war has emptied the arsenals of Europe (and in their special racist arrogance, the Eurocrats have firmly insisted on making it a fatal economic blow for the Eurozone, also).

The war in Iran is emptying the US magazine also, but even more impressively, wearing down both the US Navy and Airforce at rates which have literally not ever been seen before. Seriously, people – even when North Vietnam was getting help from Russia and China, they didn’t have this much success against American aircraft, and as for the US navy, they are sitting ducks and all those poor sailors know it. The only reason Iran hasn’t sunk them all, is because Trump might have a tantrum and start dropping nukes. (not joking, this is their actual calculus, now).

Meanwhile, we’re about to have a new great depression (worst oil shock in history) and a stock market collapse (SpaceX stock imploding as we speak, with billions more in shares due to become trade-able in a few weeks – look for a giant “Pump” story, as founders “dump” their bad-bet risk on the rest of us).

And the AI bubble is about to go bust. Maybe because China is pissed, and actually having fun rubbing America’s nose in their incompetence, maybe just because Chinese engineers are now the best in the world (not even sure which is more frightening, to supremacist yanks, but there it is).

The Chinese now have the very best AI models in the world in several categories, and they are still ten times cheaper per token (or more) than the American equivalents – meaning all of the investment hyperscalers have been making, was based on a market which still hasn’t shown up at scale (especially not when they are presented with a bill-for-usage) and a price per unit which is at least an order of magnitude wrong. Oh, and shit-tons of leverage – aaaaaand interest rates MUST spike in weeks (months at most) which turns a whole pile of loans into giant liabilities.

I don’t mean they want to raise rates – they want to run the economy hot with high growth numbers and stock prices, which means anything and everything but, higher interest rates – but they are about to be forced to, or the US dollar’s status as reserve currency could collapse in a global run, which would leave American economists completely unprepared for new (no stealing) realities. Mind you, raising rates makes their national debt effectively unpayable. Hence the many analysts now invoking the chess term Zugzwang – where every move you can make, leads to disaster.

Rather like ‘feedback loops’ unlocked at certain thresholds (permafrost, is the one that keeps me up at night, but I’m sure you have your own) the greater globalized economy of the USA has used the economies of many vassal states to prop-up their massive debt with constant investment. But Japan, which holds a staggering amount of US debt, is in huge trouble, and may have to liquidate their market moving carry-trade holdings very rapidly, to defend their own economy.

As for the gulf monarchies which have invested in Uncle Sam ever since the early 1970s (the petrodollar deal), in exchange for protection which the USA has now clearly shown it cannot provide (and will choose to defend Israel first, every single time, anyhow), they are all burning right now (I don’t just mean near-priceless military and industrial targets hit by Iran, I mean real threat of popular risings). Not least because Iran clearly stands up, where their leaders sell-out.

Oh, and if you think I’m exaggerating about the Eurozone committing economic suicide by going to war with Russia (their most obvious and reliable source of cheap energy) the greatest corporation in the heart of industrial Europe – Volkswagen – is laying off 100,000 workers! (yeah, five zeroes – and that’s just the latest round, tens of thousands were already laid off).

And instead of admitting they made a mistake and tried to kill their way out of bankruptcy, the shockingly and neverendingly racist scumbags in the European parliament are now trying to criminalize Chinese industrial success, as if every one of those nations has not used their own national ‘overcapacity of production’ to gain advantage in foreign markets for literal centuries! (Does anyone accuse the Swiss of having a nefarious “production overcapacity” in Chocolate and Watches? – How about the French, with Champagne?)

So, yeah, like I say – we are broke – all of us – and our denial is turning us into mass murderers. Doesn’t matter if you’re left or right, you know that is neither right, nor a sound plan for the future – gambling is not solid bedrock upon which to build anything enduring and useful (no wonder we’re all medicated, these days!)

Our long moment of sustained disequilibrium is over, the question now is, how long will it take us to accept that, and how stupid will we be in the meantime, before we again learn how to be reality-first people (and suddenly realize that’s not only way more work, but also ten thousand times more fun, and all the purpose we’ve been missing!)

This is going to be an incredibly shitty next couple of years – economically, and in terms of the social unrest which always goes with. Because our corrupt leadership bet our whole civilization on evil, all-in.

But don’t be an escapist, invest in friends, books, ideas and skills that you can carry in your head, build the toolkit you will want to have, to offer a new phase of society, that is actually trying to make it.

And when it feels especially bleak and lousy, don’t forget to raise a toast (home-brew, if we must) with a pal, and remember – on the scale of fair is fair – we should actually be getting bombed!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I want to share a couple of choice links today, and just one book reccomendation

First – I shared this piece before, but this is both a superb example of using AI to make ourselves smarter, instead of lazier or more smug, and also a truly important historical figure. I can’t help thinking of the influence of Frances Bacon on English thought and governance (and also because both men were clearly extremely unusual in bearing, intellect, scope, and determination), but Bacon is outrageously contaminated by imperial politics. Ibn Khaldun, really not (mind you, his potential influence on Bacon’s thought, and that of countless others, is not to be underestimated).

Check this one out, folks – seriously, and subscribe to Quy, while you’re there, he is smart as hell, and for older folks like me, super-hopeful (looking in all the right corners, with just the right wide open and genuinely interested spirit)

(just to be clear, I like a lot of his other pieces too, I just see the click-through rates, so I know that most of you didn’t do the homework - go bookmark-it at least, you want this in your head!)

This next is a real gem of personal integrity and witness, and it also happens to be an exquisitely well crafted and finely balanced piece of writing.

I try always to remember exceptions to any generalizations (variation between individuals exceeds variation between types). Here is a principled and ethical boomer, who was also a practising physician when the great crisis hit, understood that ethical lines were being crossed, and said no, then stood fast.

(Younger people really need to remember these exceptional boomer heroes do exist, and really did try, they were just silenced, same as you were leashed).

Go Down Gardening - Dr. John Day

Also – subscribe to John’s newer Substack here – excellent wide-ranging interests, sources and insights! (all powered by the heart and nerve he shows, above).

Just one book for the eccentric bibliography today – ‘cause I’m gonna ramble a bit. ;o)

Many years ago (early nineties) my extraordinarily helpful mentor in politics, a scientific socialist, worked as a proofreader/editor for a local publishing house in Toronto. I was fascinated watching the process of making a book and marking up the galley proofs (just before computers transformed it all, utterly), and also had many discussions with him, as he worked through the book, challenging the author on a few points, and adding clarity to others. My assumption at the time was that the book was by a middling professor, just hoping to sell an expensive book to the students in his (and similar) courses (a fairly common use of academic publishers).

When the book finally came out, I was excited to read it, and surprised also, because the theme was very much like my favourite 60s dystopian science fiction (John Brunner, in particular), only it wasn’t fiction at all, it was a careful and thoughtful analysis of the direction capitalism itself was heading.

What I just learned the other day, looking that book up again after many years, is that the author, Vincent Mosco was in fact a widely known and celebrated academic, whose work inspired many since (and he was also a hell of a nice guy, by all accounts). The book itself, was nothing short of prophetic.

The Pay-Per Society – by Vincent Mosco

Way back in 1993, Vincent Mosco understood the next evolution of capitalism – buying up every last damn thing in the world – including everything we’ve considered ‘the commons’ all this time, and then renting it all back to us, at the highest rate the market will bear (eerily similar to “you will own nothing and be happy”). Economist Michael Hudson often calls this the ‘Rentier’ economy.

When we say “financialization” we mean this. Stuff that is for everybody, suddenly isn’t anymore (because people who think a right to clean water is an extremist position, now run the freakin’ world).

Rights that were won by generations of struggle, vanish overnight, because ‘austerity’. All because of false scarcity created by those same gamblers and market manipulators, who make us all pay off their gambling losses, but take every bit of their profits home, (out of the commons).

This is a very hard to find book now – but look for anything by Mosco, your brain will be fortified with new insight and far more precise and useful language to understand the leash we’ve been wearing so long, it almost doesn’t make us crazy anymore (almost).

These are pre-revolutionary times (around the west), because our model has hit the wall!

Here’s a link to a piece on Mosco and his work by a friend of his, which manages to be moving, inspiring and extremely (economics and paradigm-tools) informative!