Dystopian Fiction, Climate Futurism

Do we need an optimistic vision of the future at all?

Why were cyberpunks so successful at becoming the cultural darlings of the new technocratic ruling class? They were a counterculture, who had a dystopian vision that technologists were really excited about. The dystopia got people more excited than the utopia. And it actually succeeded in inspiring a bunch of engineers to build exactly those kinds of tools, the technological ecosystem that produced the dystopia from the stories.

So in that sense, why bother with a positive vision of the future? You just need an exciting vision of the future. It doesn't necessarily have to be positive, or positive for the majority. The only requirement for dystopian fiction is that the protagonist is having a good time, freely roaming around a chaotic, falling apart society. The society's falling apart, but the protagonist is having fun: he's meeting cool, interesting, capable people. He's solving dramatic problems. He's encountering interesting situations: new technologies, foreign places. And he's getting recognized for his contributions—he's the only person who understands what's going on and can really do something about it. So that's why he gets to have a good time, and that's why the people who pictured themselves as those protagonists were totally fine with being agents of disruption, because they thought they would benefit.

OK, so that's what got us into the current state of affairs, that's the psychic fuel that's driven computer people for a long time. What kind of engineers are gonna drive the next wave of change, and what stories would motivate them? Well I keep thinking about climate fiction, which easily has parallels to technological dystopian fiction. You know, the climate's breaking down, there's terrible weather everywhere, but the protagonist is, like, really comfortable in a storm. He's got some cool vehicle that can handle crazy winds, he's got a salvage business maybe, where he goes to disaster areas and picks through the rubble, and discovers something super valuable. He's the boots on the ground for the helpless wealthy, distant financiers, who bankroll him. So that's a vision of climate dystopia. But what are the technologies for that? They're not new technologies. I guess they're new recombinations, maybe. They're things like solar sailboats, and vanlife, and heavy machinery. Vanlife is futuristic gypsy caravans. The future is NOW, we have gypsy caravans, and they're powered by gasoline and solar panels. And people live a miniature, somewhat faux-middle class twentieth century life in them. And they feel okay about it. Even rich people are doing this.

Still searching for a positive vision of the future. So there's the salvage version, where the protagonist is just enjoying chaos. But what's the gardening version? What's the permaculture version? What's the version where something good is actually happening with nature? Good is just a human value judgement. Nature doesn't care, things are going to grow in the rubble. A person who appreciates greenery thinks that's good. A conservationist who thinks greenery is an invasive species thinks that's bad. Weeds don't care either way. The only sense in which environments really need human help is if they are to be environments which are pleasant and appealing for people to live in. Then they need curation. Which plants to encourage, which to discourage, if the landscape is to be a pleasure garden? That's just landscape design, which people have been doing forever. It's not it's not new, it's not exciting, it only unfolds in seasons and decades. It's something that rich people partake in, poor people not so much. Even though it's cheap, or at least it can be cheap.

Climate fiction, what does it look like? A positive vision of the future … what about a realistic version of the future? A realistic vision of the future is a realistic version of the present, which is: inequality, environmental destruction, a comfortably numb middle and upper class who are increasingly dependent on media to maintain their sense of their class status, and collapse that mainly affects the poor, creating hordes of distant refugees. That doesn't seem like a good vision, but it's what's happening, and it's what's gonna continue to happen. So what can we do, given that that's the situation? Well, all we can do is design nice places for people to live, and we can let them live there.

That's the real problem: rich people are clinging to all the assets because they have no felt sense of safety and security. Rich people know that the foundations of their wealth and comfort are shaky, and we've inherited them, rather than building them ourselves, so we don't know how they're built, and we don't have a lot of confidence that we can rebuild them.

So we cling to them. We cling to as much as we can, we cling indiscriminately, and in doing so we prevent anyone else from coming in and building the exact wealth that we've forgotten how to build ourselves.

Ultimately the answer is letting climate refugees in. The answer is giving them a place to exist, rather than saying "This is our land, you can't come here, you're somebody else's problem, go away." If we let them in, and let them build houses and gardens and enough space to live, they would create those things themselves, and, in doing so, generate wealth. That's the essence of what aristocrats do: they extract a tax from the populace, who generates the wealth. But now the means by which most elites do that has become so … clean, distant, removed, abstract, and compartmentalized … that we've forgotten the fundamentals, which was to actually have some peasants living on your land, and every once in a while you'd ride over on your horse, and say "give me some bushels of grain, or else I'll make you a refugee again. I'll torch your house and kick you off my land because I'm a warlord."

So that's the actual skill of aristocrats, and now we have corporations to do that extraction for us, so we're detached from how brutal it really is, and we've lost confidence in our own brutality, which makes us shrink from contact with peasants altogether.

Elites regaining confidence in their brutality is what would allow them to let people start building again, but since we don't have that confidence, we just make people homeless instead, and ask the police to do bureaucratic brutality on our behalf.

Is that it? The way out of NIMBYism is for landlords to regain a felt sense of confidence in their own brutality?

I didn't think it was gonna end up here either.

deep dark big bad

And perhaps the biggest question is: "Why and how and how to name the way our society is so profoundly yet subtly coercive and abusive and hostile and cruel and optimizing?"

And I'm beginning to have an answer. Our civilization has grown into a powerful empire because we have discovered the market as a means of coordinating effort. This is an immensely powerful protocol that seems to outcompete all others. But in order to establish and enforce reliance on the market as our one true protocol, our culture has evolved norms around childrearing that traumatize children in order to render them better market participants.

We do this by damaging the parent-child bond. There are a number of ways this happens, and they don't all happen to everyone, but the point is that in our culture none of them are widely considered outlandish or particularly cruel. -infants being put to sleep in separate rooms and trained to cry themselves back to sleep if they wake up -day care: maintaining the parents' work schedules during infancy, switching caretakers frequently -the school system — based on the prussian model, the prison model, the factory model. Or boarding school. -circumcision -absence of breast feeding, using formula instead -hospital birth, ICU, lack of skin to skin contact

All of these cause infants and children, under the ages of 8 or so, enormous distress and can cause them to permanently distrust their parents. Since the parent-child bond is the model for every subsequent relationship, this limits the child's ability to receive emotional support and reciprocity from others. And the way it works is: the child learns that it has to earn approval instead. Traumatizing children in this way makes them absolutely crave human connection, and it sets them on a lifelong path of striving and overachievement as a way to try to win that back.

It's important to emphasize that, on a collective scale, this has been a profoundly successful strategy for us. We don't just do this for the sake of being mean and evil, it's a behavior that survived and propagated because it works. However much the average person is emotionally damaged, and a certain fraction of people are irreparably destroyed, it is an effective way of turning up the dial on an entire society's work ethic and competitiveness.

I'm convinced that a lot of the weird behaviors we see are responses to this. We traumatize people, and then encourage them to soothe themselves with consumer products. We train them that: "You can always get what you need from the market, at any time, as long as you have the currency. The market will never turn you down, the market will never ignore the needs of a customer."

I'm also convinced that this is the actual root of a lot of seemingly specious "trauma." There's a giant trauma industry right now, lots of people are complaining about trauma, people are getting triggered by micro-aggressions, etc. But one essential response to genuine trauma is to dissociate and block it out. I think a lot of people are in a state where they have a lot of anger towards their parents, and maybe they're beginning to become aware that they have symptoms of trauma, but they lack a conspicuous "charismatic mega-trauma" to blame it on. "They never hit me." And so they go digging through their memories for trauma without finding it, and then feel sheepish and unjustified about the very real hostility they feel towards their parents. They can't figure out why they feel that way, and so again, everything seems to point to personal inadequacy as the answer.

"The vicious cycle of narcissistic self-improvement" is a great phrase I heard for this: the idea that the reason you don't have love in your life is because you haven't done enough self-improvement.

I don't have a good way to wrap this up. It's an idea that will take a long time to digest.

Procedure for making Places For Things

Making a place for a thing actually takes more steps than you might expect.

Pull the thing out of the junk pile. Clean the thing off. Figure out what the thing is.

Then you can begin

1.  create a mental category for the thing 2.  decide on a Location for that category 3.  go to that location, check it out, see what's there, visualize the ideal place

4.  empty that location so there's room for the new place for the thing 5.  move the thing to that new location 6.  decide on a Container for the thing 7.  acquire that container, make sure it fits the thing, install the container 8.  create a Label for that thing & that place 9.  get the tape and markers and whatever else, make the label 10. tell other people about the place

11.  Feel at ease the next time you trip over the thing because you don’t need to THINK about where to put it away, you can just do it, easy. 

“Whatever you do, don’t make me THINK!“

Pitfalls while trying to make Places For Things

1.  Your focus on emptying space leads you to just move stuff elsewhere, and by the time you've emptied and cleaned the space, you're exhausted and you walk away from the situation feeling accomplished, but you haven't resolved anything.

2.  You stay in "Triage Mode" and, using the heuristic of "focus on the most actionable progress in order to keep momentum up", you avoid hard decisions.  Hard decisions require stopping, pausing, and thinking, and that can quickly turn into quitting, so you don't let yourself do that, just keep moving, but that turns into cleaning, not organizing.

3.  You create general piles, but never label them.  There's piles for "go upstairs" or "go to basement" or "go to barn" or "donate"  , but there's never a deadline for actually taking them there, so they end up just staying loosely categorized piles.   "Take all piles to their final destinations"  is not part of your overall procedure, especially your closing procedure.  It needs to be.  It needs to be the last step of this process.  

4.  You never go into these situations with a clear idea of what "Finished" means.  You go in thinking "Oh no, here's a huge problem area, let's just see what we can get done today."  And maybe you do get some stuff done that day, but you get exhausted after a few hours, and it's unpleasant, so you leave the problem and don't have any timetable for coming back to it, so you just ignore it again for months/years until the situation becomes dire again, and then you do the same thing over.  It's a cycle.

5.  There's a sense of hurry involved in these cleaning/organizing cycles, and that's what prevents you from making a place for a thing.  The ideal situation is, you'd sit with a thing until you had an idea for a place for it, and then you'd go create that place.  But creating that place would require starting the whole process again in that place, and it just spirals.  

6.  The ideal scenario might be: you take a box of things to the barn, and most of them have places, and a few of them don't.  The day after you do the cleanout, there's one new box in the barn, and then you have a day of just putting that stuff away in the barn: some of the things are easy, they go in their existing places.  And then the remaining few, you causally, while you're fresh and mentally clear, designate the place for the thing and label it.  

7.  One way to really cement the place for the thing might be: -take a picture of it -speak it's name: "I am creating a place for ________.  The place for _______ is here." -write it down.  Write down what makes it a good place for the thing.  Write down why it's important to keep this thing.  Write down how you'd expect someone to find it in the future, if they were looking for the thing.

Moral Hazard in Creativity Accounting

Accounting is the ultimate moral hazard domain.  Things can be counted however you choose, so there's just so much leeway there, to lie to yourself, lie to others, lie about the value of the work being done.  Especially as you get into more abstract or intermittent domains, it becomes less and less clear when work is being done, and when it's not.  

Creative work, by which I mean all entrepreneurial work, or all self-directed work, or all "non-job" work, is a little like the hypothetical room full of monkeys hammering away at typewriters eventually producing the Encyclopedia.  You're the monkeys, you're showing up at the typewriter, and you're putting in the hours, but you really have no way of knowing how valuable the output of any given session is going to be.  You may be working, putting in the hours, but you're also waiting.  You're also the clipboard-holding scientist peering in through the mirror-glass window, waiting for the moneys' output to prove valuable.  

So let's just imagine that for the first 99 days the monkeys produce gibberish, and on the hundredth day they produce the encyclopedia.  And now you step back to play the accountant trying to figure out when "work" was done?

You could average the work done over the whole hundred days, and say, well, in the big picture, they wrote one percent of the encyclopedia every day.  If you had started with a precisely defined goal, "write this exact encyclopedia", and now you've done it and you're closing down the monkey room, then sure, that's probably the most honest story for the accountant to tell.  

But the thing about creative work is: there's never a precise goal from the beginning.  Once there's a precise goal, it's no longer creative work, it's execution.  

Or you could also say, well no, the first 99 days shouldn't count, because nothing of value was produced during them, we should only count the last day.  And suddenly the monkeys' wage jumps by two orders of magnitude.  They are paid nothing when they produce nothing, and everything during the random spike of value.  

The temptation, as an artist who is also doing his own accounting, is that once you have some verified proof of having once produced a great deal of value in a short span of time, to then start valuing all your time that way.  This is really tempting, because by the time this happens, you usually have years under your belt of having nothing to show for your hours at the typewriter.  Finally, market validation!  

And then the story you can tell is: no, it wasn't random.  Over the first 99 days, the monkeys were learning how to write the encyclopedia.  It's gonna be nothin but Brittanicas from here on out, baby!  

Of course, it may take another thousand days to produce the next encyclopedia.  You could have gotten lucky.  Do you pay the monkeys now, or wait until the next one comes?  

Alright, so you've got a number of factors confusing your accounting: 1.  The output's value is highly variable and random.  Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's nothing.  What period of time do you average it over?

2.  Do you pay for results, or do you pay for hours?

3.  When you go from zero to one, is that a result of learning, or randomness?  

Now this all sounds pretty silly and hypothetical.  But some careers are truly like this.  Screenwriters, for instance.  Maybe venture capitalists.  

How much credit do you give yourself for your success?  How much success should you expect in the future?  How much should you pay yourself every day when you're sitting on one windfall, back to hammering out gibberish?  

Push To Internet Protocols, or Write-Only Twitter

Where to begin?  Well, the problem with the internet is that it derails your train of thought every time you open it.  

We have this imagined perfect role for computers which is modeled by Tony Stark's Jarvis in Iron Man: an all-knowing butler who can answer open-ended questions in helpful ways.  This is a total fantasy.  The only way to achieve that is to insulate yourself with an actual, competent human assistant who uses the internet for you.  Because the thing that all AI's lack is is judgement.  

At the other end of the agency spectrum, the internet could be thought of like one of those cockroach helmets that turn them into little remote control vehicles.  A way for platforms to control real-life humans using apps, maps, bell sounds.  There is a very powerful institutional-evolutionary pressure towards this.  It's what all the big social media platforms are driving towards.  

Somewhere in between is the internet conceived of as an enormous, decentralized library: a giant store of obscure information, in text, image, audio, & video form, but much more wild and chaotic because of the continually evolving and competing systems of IBSN's.  This is the original dream of hypertext: a book with endless layers of instantly-accessible footnotes you can follow along any path you like.  

Now, here's my problem with the internet: I'm addicted to it.  I'm even addicted to the plain old HTML internet, let alone the new apps with notifications.  I will never get tired of reading.  The psychological promise of a hyperlink is far greater than the promise of the next page in a book.  

So how do I deal with this?  The best way I've found so far is to simply put it on a timer.  My modem runs off a power strip that switches on for three hours every morning, and four hours every afternoon.  It's been a major improvement in my life.  Now I can go to sleep at night.  

And I write more.  When the internet is off, I think better, I read books, and I write.  I want to publish my writing on the internet.  But it's deceptively difficult for me to do that, because as soon as I open the internet when it switches on, I'm usually overcome with the distraction of reading.  Or "replying", instead of publishing my original thoughts.

I want a protocol where I can hit publish while the internet is off, and then have the command execute when the internet turns on.  I've looked for this.  I haven't been able to find something that does it.

Why I hate CAD

Cutting edge things are primitive, and primitive things are advanced.  

That’s the premise of my dislike of CAD: it assumes that things don’t move and flex.  When you learn traditional fine woodworking, the first thing that’s hard to wrap your head around is that boards expand and contract with moisture, and temperature, and seasonally, and all that.  And so a lot of the things you learn are clever little tricks for expansion joints that allow that movement to happen.

Same with boats, wooden boats are unintuitive, they creak and move and twist and lots of traditional building techniques are ways of accommodating those shifts and movements in practice that you just can’t theorize your way to in the abstract.  The techniques had to evolve as things were built in physical form—they evolved to solve problems as the problems arose.

Same with Japanese wooden architecture that’s designed to handle earthquakes, and Incan stonework that’s designed to handle earthquakes—the buildings are designed to shift and re-settle into their stable configuration.  

An old bamboo bike trailer I used to have reminds me of this principle too; the flex of the bamboo gave it its resilience because the actual flexibility and seeming flimsiness of the whole structure provided enough suspension that it never needed the kind of tacked-on mechanical spring suspension system a CAD engineer would come up with.  

Not only does CAD not let you model this aspect of reality, CAD encourages you to think in ways that dismiss it, ways that minimize its importance, that refuse to acknowledge the effectiveness of flexible materials.  CAD mentally handicaps people this way. 

It discourages engineers from gaining a practical intuition around these material properties.  All materials flex, all materials move to some degree.  So what is the good way to build intuitions around that?  Seems like only tradition and experimentation hold the answers, but I’d love to hear others.   Maybe some rubber band structure designers are out there?

Disturbed Ecosystem Metaphors

If I had to be stuck with only one go-to lens for looking at problems, ecosystem metaphors is the way I’d go.  Some angles they offer:

-Indicator species—their disappearance functions as “canary in the coal mine”, but their presence can indicate health or balance of a system in ways that would otherwise be prohibitively laborious to measure with science. Recent example of use in thinking: relative size of the advertising industry as a indicator of increases in disposable income.

-Keystone species—all species transform the environment to make it more habitable to them in particular.  A keystone species is one with enough clout and enough tag-along ecological allies to transform an ecosystem into something we recognize as characteristic of a known biome, old growth, etc.   Economic example: regulatory capture as a way this phenomenon goes pathological in human political/economic ecosystems.

-Ecological succession—fast growing plants transform the soil into conditions for progressively slower growing plants.  The whole story of lignin.  Presence of undesirable “invasives” as indicator of disturbance, rather than “border-crossing contamination.” Economic example: wood-brick-stone architecture timelines, parallel to Stewart Brand’s “Pace Layers”

My affinity for these metaphors lately feels like a reaction to the mechanical thinking that served as the foundation for my first career (as a mechanic).  

I suspect many of our problems trace back to Descartes and the mechanistic approach, and the intellectual arrogance that once you understand a mechanism then you can straightforwardly make it produce more of one particular thing you want.  

When actually, in the larger world, you’re in a complex system and you’re tweaking one tiny area of a unknowably self-correcting system that may or may not be in a stable equilibrium.  You see something and you tweak it, but as soon as you do that you may find out that there are any number of agents who come out of the woodwork to nudge the system back against your tweak.  The existence of those forces constitute unknown unknowns.  There may be all sorts of these agents who you’d never know about until you try to change something (see: NIMBYs).  

It’s intellectually so so tempting to think you can change things with one simple mechanism, but that’s usually wrong, or proves to have ruinous, unforeseeable consequences decades down the line.  

We have a lot of anthropology stories about jungle shamans who have seemingly mystical abilities based on this kind of ecological knowledge, but that knowledge is handed down for generations unchanging; it depends on a stable, mature, ecosystem of the old growth forest.  

It seems to me like the challenge of our age is how to develop these kinds of knowledge—heuristics and intuitions—about systems that are highly turbulent and recently disturbed.  

Design and Comedy as Complements

I once heard Jerry Seinfeld say in an interview that the essence of a stand up comedian was to be over-sensitive and easily irritated by minor details--objects and procedures, sayings and points of etiquette.  

That’s the same trait a designer requires: a designer needs to notice how places and objects and the arrangements of things makes them feel.  It’s really noticing how your environment influences you.  That’s why it seems to require a certain delicateness or sensitivity.  

This brings up a point I keep hammering on about the macho phrase “Don’t be so sensitive.”  My point is that what the words actually say is different from what we usually take them to mean.  The colloquial meaning is: “Don’t be so delicate.”  But the literal meaning is: “Don’t be so perceptive.  Stop being aware of small and subtle variations in reality.”  The implication is that if you even notice the ways in which the environment bothers you, then you will be less able to withstand it than you otherwise would be.  That may actually be true: noticing pain does indeed create psychological drag.  And so the reasoning is that you ought to block your awareness in order to function better.  

But I prefer to believe that toughness and perceptiveness are better thought of as independent from each other.  Imagine an extremely accurate scale that measures semi-trucks.  It’s an industrial tool that lives outdoors, and withstands enormous loads.  And yet it’s very precisely calibrated and accurate.  

Anyway, my point is that both designers and comedians begin from this place of being easily bothered by small annoyances—and being able to identify them.  The brilliance of a comedian is that they are able to communicate to the audience that everyone feels this way too.  The moment a joke lands is when people recognize that they have that same feeling but it’s never been spoken.  

A designer doesn’t get the satisfaction of the punchline, what they get is the opportunity to create an arrangement that mitigates the problem.  In a certain way, there’s less of a payoff, because even if people like the design, they’re unlikely to be able to say exactly why.  If the design becomes ubiquitous enough, most people who interact with it might never even know that there once was a problem that this design solved.  

The designer is able to solve their problem, but not communicate it. The comedian is able to communicate their problem, but not solve it.

Something satisfying about the symmetry.

the demoralized person

“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in the accoutrements of mass civilization, who has no roots in the other order of being, no sense of responsibility to anything other than his own personal survival, this is a demoralized person.”

Given that I am one such a demoralized person, what can I do about it?  I cannot seem to escape the accoutrements of mass civilization, because I depend on them to feed me, to clothe me, to house me.  Any efforts to do these things myself seem paltry and pathetic.  The magnitude of effort required to replace the simplest consumer goods with crude handmade substitutes is itself demoralizing.  

I think the best attack surface is to be found in that mysterious phrase: grow roots into the other order of being.  

Against Thrashing

Something I notice across domains is that when people don’t know what to do, and the things they’re trying aren’t working, they thrash. 

I see this in tree work with people trying to move branches.  Branches are not that heavy, but they’re awkward, springy, and really good at tangling up with each other, so they’re deceptively difficult to move around.  You can often spot a new guy by his thrashing: when he’s trying to move a branch that is tangled, he shakes it, pulls at it, it moves in the direction he pulls but then springs back, because it’s hung up.  He tries the same pull again, more violently, and the same thing happens, and now he’s tired and annoyed.

The wizened old tree man will exhibit the patience to look down the whole length of the branch, and notice exactly which twig is hanging up, walk over to it, snap it off, then walk back and move the branch.  Or he’ll give one really powerful, directed pull, following through like a punch, with his feet set and his weight in alignment with the direction of pull. 

I see thrashing in mechanical work, when people can’t free a stuck bolt, so they start pounding the wrench with a hammer. 

Thrashing is even a well-known term in rock climbing; it describes the feeling of getting scared and immediately losing your good technique, reaching frantically trying five different handholds instead of choosing one and examining how it feels, which direction it’s good for, before moving onto it. 

Looking at mammals, fish, and even insects, thrashing is a deeply instinctual reaction to being disoriented, afraid, or stuck.  We’re not going to get rid of the instinct anytime soon, but we may as well try to notice when it’s happening, and pause before we hurt ourselves.