[FRIAM] crackpots and privilege
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Fri May 26 13:36:17 EDT 2023
Roger -
Thanks for the Catalan novel reference!
> Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today. It's
> headlined "Society's refusal to have enough babies is what will save
> it from the existential threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt says". The
> headline is accompanied by a very serious head shot of Eric. Nice
> try, Google, but you're not sucking me down that rabbit hole.
I'm far from as facile with the attribution of different type of errors
in argument/rhetoric as Glen is, but I am always fascinated by how often
we (deliberately?) conflate one thing with the other across
scale/aggregation or personal/collective or individual/statistical. I
don't completely dismiss the likes of Musk's logic/rhetoric that a
collapsing first-world birth rate's will lead to a radical disruption of
"life as we know it" and saddle our (for those of us who have them)
children/grandchildren with an inverted pyramid scheme in everything
from "social security" to "infrastructure". Odd how we think we can
"solve" our problems by jacking up our exploitation tech (let's go haul
asteroids in from the belts to solve our mineral/water shortages?) but
can't be bothered to consider how to manage a *shrinking*
population/economy/footprint?
My *very* limited engagement with/reading on "AI" (what a gross/blanket
term for many things?) *does* give me hope that it *could* be enlisted
to help us solve these problems (shrinking everything) if only we will
allow/ask it?
The inertia of our ideas/attitudes/opinions/instincts about "growth" and
"prosperity" are rooted in an era of scarcity which continues to appear
to exists (perhaps) only because of those very ideas and the limitations
to distribution they cause (and perhaps require?). Wars of
aggression. Chronic poverty. Etc. do seem to be the consequence of the
carrot-on-stick chasing of "more, more, more" for ourselves... hoarding
logic and hoarding consequences?
> Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the rationality of
> disaster prepping and wrote an epic novel about it 40 years ago in
> Catalan. The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol is
> available in English translation and as an ebook on overdrive.com
> <http://overdrive.com> at your local library. The narrator crosses
> refugee swamped Barcelona to check on his mom and gets sent off by her
> to a McMansion'ed medieval monastery high in the Pyrenees where the
> elite are amusing themselves with stories while awaiting the
> resolution of the first war of entertainment. Lots of stories about
> themselves and their friends and acquaintances.
Love the reference to "first war of entertainment" and the (hyper)
failure of (hyper) preppers... to that theme I recommend Cory Doctorow's
Novella the Masque of the Red Death
<https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/>
... I'm also reminded (by the 40 year old reference to de Palol's work)
of the classic 1959 Walter Miller Canticle for Leibowitz
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz>which, when I
first read it (1960s?) located it in my mind at the "Christ of the
Desert" Monastery <https://christdesert.org/> on the Chama River crossed
with Los Alamos/Manhattan Project. I didn't read Pat Frank's (also
1959) "Alas Babylon" until some years later but it is often attributed
as the first "Apocalyptic Novel" in the Nuclear age.
Privileged Crackpot yours,
- Steve
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