Excerpt: Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out by Neal Stephenson

Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out
By NEAL STEPHENSON
Published: June 17, 2005

"Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think. Trust your instincts," says a Jedi to the young Anakin in Episode I, immediately before a pod race in which Anakin is likely to get killed. It is distinctly odd counsel coming from a member of the Jedi order, the geekiest people in the universe: they have beards and ponytails, they dress in army blankets, they are expert fighter pilots, they build their own laser swords from scratch.

And (as is made clear in the "Clone Wars" novels) the masses and the elites both claim to admire them, but actually fear and loathe them because they hate being dependent upon their powers.

Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents - not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology - and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work - as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.

Industrial Evolution

I've found a by-product of writing a lot is the accidental coining of a new (for me) useful phrase that captures a large concept.

In zillions of dialogues I've tried to place myself on some ideological map, and having half-on half-off resonance with capitalism, anarchism, conservativism, liberalism and consumerism.

Maybe what I depend on, enable, and can heartily endorse 100 per cent is Industrial Evolution.

This means no hard coded allegiance to Wall Street capitalism or our current energy infrastructure, it allows me to have no long term allegiance to any current political/economic regime (e.g. a specific corporation, political party) or technological configuration (the oil market).

It does create a permanent blockage to my being anti-industrial, or placing capital N Nature (everything not produced by humans) as a higher or equal priority. It also places religion, mysticism, and subjectivism in boundaries.

This Industrial Evolution concept may supplant my Athena, Goddess of War and Technology religious aspiration.

Reply ( or extension of thesis ) from Seth Galbraith:

The cult of Athena followed the sun with exponential acceleration until the period between 1900 and 1950 when the light of progress finally shone on every nation, day and night, the humanistic phase of Industrial Evolution became saturated, the concept of human rights encoded in the law of the United Nations, and history came to an end, with the marginal exception of sorting out the widespread hypocrisy of dictatorship disguised as democratic, republican, socialist government.

Then the posthuman phase of Industrial Evolution began, leading to much confusion. Those who measured the success of Industrial Evolution in terms of employment (the size of the Industrial Working Class, sometimes combined with "service sector" jobs) pronounced the end of the progress.

Those who measured the success of Industrial Evolution in terms of consumption (profits, growth, productivity, GNP, GDP, trade deficits, etc.) faced the horrible stagnation of saturated demand and the looming spectre of finite resource depletion.

This left only two measures of progress that provided people with any optimistic predictions:

(A) Measuring progress by how completely we have returned to Nature: dismantling civilization, reducing of the human population to a utopian society devoted to the pursuit of one superstition or another. Various parties are advocating such societies based on the dogmas of islam, nature worship, racial supremacy, christianity, existentialism and other religions.

(B) Measuring progress by adaptability: not the sweat we put into the machine, or the tonnage of manufactured outputs, but the increasing variety and utility of the machines themselves. Technodiversity of economies modeled after the biodiversity of ecologies. This then becomes the antithesis of the return to Nature, which insists upon the reduction of economic technodiversity.

The Nature metric requires that we sacrifice all of the benefits of civilization, including our freedom and our lives, for a higher moral purpose. (Our bodies are - after all - merely dust given form via the stored energy of buried Carboniferous forests.) The Adaptability metric allows us to count the continuation of civilization as progress without requiring either expansion or contraction of the built world or human population.

The Revolutionary Viral Darknet Software Driven Resilient Community

John Robb, the guy who introduced 4GW to me, is getting all worked up over a new substrata of his Resilient Communities, 4GW, DIY Security/Governance/Economy/Energy-Production. The new muse of his is a virus-like software darknet global badass thingy.

1. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/new-book-freedom.html
   ( I just ordered the book Freedom. Already read Daemon. Most important fiction I've read outside Stephenson.)
2. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/journal-resources-for-small-group-superempowerment.html
3. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/a-darknet.html
4. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/journal-a-quantitative-examination-of-open-source-warfare.html

   "What makes this very interesting to me is not the scientific support it provides to open source warfare, but rather that it provides me with additional clarity on how open source warfare could be instantiated in Darknet software."

5. Finally: He is actually trying to realize this software:
   http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/thanks-and-onto-the-next-year.html

Half-thoughts I have to add:

Daemon offers a new means of revolution. Basically, a virus takes up the classical class warfare ( especially crushing rich oligarchs ). This is quite different compared to Marxist ideas of workers owning the means of production. Also, in John Robb's vision of post-centralized governance and economy, it is the Makers (aka "Creative Class") (urban farmers, fabricators, hackers, home micro-energy production, and any industrial artisans) combined with the community providing more of their own services (security, local legal regimen for drug use and taxation, etc). Would their be a clash between this Creative Class and a Badass Distributed Deamon?

I don't think so, but hope to see some words and vision statements from someone -maybe in new book Freedom, or John Robb, or someone on this thread.

Digression to Marxism and Zizek

I'm reading First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Zizek. He is openly and proudly a capital L Leftist and capital C Communist. I am reading him because I kept picking up his book at the bookstore, reading a passage, and seeing so much wit and intelligence. Now I'm ten or so pages into the book, still think he'd be fun to hang out with in a beer hall if at least for a vigorous argument, but sensing a giant dustbin of history for the capital C Commies. I can sum up my contempt with this: Seize the means of production and I will point out this is only 20 % of the solution. The rest is more important: Seize the means of innovation. Oh wait, more irony is embedded in this deconstruction! It is not seize, but rather Free up the means of innovation. Without innovation, production becomes that process of making things...poorly. Like the dogshit Soviet Russian factories were famous for.

Back to Zizek, I'm getting a hint he is going to deliver a solution to social justice, but leave off with what humans need more than a symbolic social catharsis in which undeserving elites are beheaded -technological innovation. I do not mean in the form of better high definition televisions or a faster SUV. I mean technological innovation manifest in food production, energy production and use, shelter, and health care. For starters. I'm referring to anything urgent and necessary.

I'm all for a revolution, but believe social justice addicts miss the forest because of the trees. Social justice, if it happens, will be as a side effect while humans innovate in realms more technical and mechanical.

The Dubliner Dialogue: A List of Issues and Ideas

On Friday December 4, 2009 a few of my friends and I gathered at the Dubliner(Seattle) to celebrate my birthday and talk politics, culture and art. Below is a condensed remainder of the questions we opened up in our meandering conversation. Note the topic headings for giving a hint of the section topic.

Radical New Individual Types

Choices humans make in who they mate is one of the great shapers of society and the bounds of what human is. Certain behaviors result in a person not being chosen for producing offspring. I know we could site an over-conservatism America was prone to in the 1950's -such as taboos in inter-racial marriage, or a "good" girls who don't date geeks or guys who smoke weed. I certainly believe we've had a cultural renaissance and technological explosion, beginning in the 1960's, due in part to society's boundaries as to what is acceptable.

I contend that the unbounding of boundaries has gotten so mature that we are no longer loosening the strictures so as to have more/better art and technology, we have entered into a phase of unboundedness that is producing, ehem...reproducing, pathologically insane scumbags, often of the needless murdering persuasion. Exhibit A (almost harmless non-murdering type): http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/19/father-and-son-sport.html.

This thread of thought might provide ammo for Right Wing Christian Culture Warriors, I'm not endorsing that. I'm just saying at this point we need to prepare for more crazies in the world -the sick needless murdering kind, mainly because they are finding mates and producing offspring. Previous political/religious agendas for healing and emancipation have sited our economic excesses as points of change (e.g. Marxism, Catholicism). The addition of a needless-murdering class of humans should make for some new ideologies offering solutions. Or maybe this is a post-ideology domain of inquiry, one in which personal choice has more power than great social movements.

Islam. My honest question: Is there a good and bad kind?

First I want to promote how I think of religions. Specifically, the names and boundaries of religions. To me, if a people claim they are of a religion, they are. If a socialist agenda Catholic org says that are Christian, they are. If a group believes donating to Isreal's military and killing Catholics will be the first thing Jesus does if he returns to Earth, then they to are Christians. Same wide girth of inclusion goes for Islam, Buddhists, and Communists.

So, yeah, I assume their are cosmopolitan and tolerant Moslems. I also assume their are racist, intolerant, and country hick Moslems also. The historical record is full of examples of cosmopolitan Moslem nations -in the Kiev, in Irag, in lots of places.

I've said all the above to set-up for a specific question to my friend Brian [http://www.eye-ontheworld.blogspot.com/] , who just taught a college course on Islam and is writing a book on it. I've just heard of a division in Islam: Inclusion versus Exclusion. I need to know more about this.

My own personal stance is a support for the tolerant and cosmopolitan versions of every political/religious construct. For a globally interconnected world, exclusion seems like a poorly equipped construct.

Racism

I've pursued a narrative that has focused on black on white crime. (See this detailed entry, with personal accounts.). I want to reiterate something I said at the bar, what I see as the positive and negative directions we can go. Positive: mixed income and race neighborhoods, interracial marriage, and education/employment scenarios in which merit performance is the holy grail for respect and rewards; these are sure routes away from racism. Negative: oppressed classes sticking together and viewing all others as contemptible and worthy targets of violence, wealthy classes moving to remote or gated communities, whites fleeing to sidewalk-less suburbs -these are progenitors of misery and re-enactment of the worst scripts humans read from.

The Homeless Technologist

We are in the midst of D2, The Second Great Depression. For the struggling people who have the means to prepare before they become homeless, here is a battle plan: put aside enough money to have an iPhone, Droid or Blackberry phone with connection fees covered for at least a year.

The Creative/Technological Class, which will own the 21st Century, can be virtual nation inhabiting every monetary strata and racial group on Earth, including being homeless.

The slum (thinking more of the types in India and South America) will be the engine room and R&D department for what works in this century. Large and wealthy institutions will be hampered by hindbound vision or communication rules ( such as polite-speak ) that limit lateral adaptation. The slum resident will be have two pressures that ignite positive change -concentrated population and poverty.

I am not pining that homelessness and poverty are cool, and something to be sought after, I'm saying slums are a place where dynamic forces are at play that push people upward. In the US we often cast being homeless, or living in the poorest neighborhoods with an eternal status -a place of absolute zero, I'm countering that with a sense of optimism and opportunity within the context of dire straits, properly equipped with the right technology and knowledge, there is reasonable hope.

And now for my out-there idea. I know this may never happen, but I think we should have a slum-to-astronaut program. Most or all astronauts must be from slums. This would break the current assumptions of class and access to privileged, hypermodern opportunities.

Philosophers and the Equality of Barbarians

Ancient philosophers designated some as barbarians, opposed equal rights of barbarians, and religious zealots ( often barbarians themselves ) fought for the equality of barbarians.

Modern or progressive philosophers support the ubiquitous spread of technology, an egalitarian enterprise, as the great equalizer. But this agenda of equality is often opposed by barbarians in privileged positions of power, who want their slaves or adorers to stay in a relative servile position. The opponent of progressive philosophy wages a war on mass consumption technology -the supply line that aids the barbarian in becoming ( often a peaceful ) equal.

Fortress or Resilient City?

In economic or social collapse, which will fair bette, or will both fair well but in different ways(?) :

1. Underground fortress. [link]
2. Resilient cities. [link]

I think certain cities will have the advantage of talented people, trade of diverse goods (e.g. computers and potatoes). Their downside may be criminal/terrorist class predators. For the fortress, all the opposites are in play: a shallow talent pool due to small group.

One vision of the future might tip the advantage to an underground fortress: A world where inventions and knowledge are open sourced and shared efficiently across the internet, and travel of any kind become an anomaly because of extreme expense. In this case a fortress able to secure its own food, water and electricity would have access to the "world mind".

The Insurgents and the Vigilantes

Maurice Clemmons and those who aided him were insurgents -nihilistic murderers believing in a narrative in which they are legitimate, and police (and the society police are protecting) are not. Their aggression against police come less than a month after a cop killer waged a war on the police with bullets and bombs (Guns, Bombs Found In Shooting Suspect's Apartment).

All the people above are African-American. Seattle is a liberal city, where the dialogue that emerges after a crime committed by a black man usually tends towards a critique of the society more than the perpetrator, with a usual wish list of better schools, community services and other government interventions, for the statistically disadvantaged. Something new has happened in public sentiment after Maurice Clemmons. No one in mainstream dialogue is crying out in regards to a history of social injustice as a contributor to the murders. It seems most are glad Clemmons is dead.

For a city of the political profile Seattle has, this unanimity is significant. I believe we've entered a new age, one that can see some as simply wrong and evil, and we proceed to eliminate them without the infinite regress of self-critique.

Then there is the woman who shot man at bus stop, and won't be charged. We may be moving into a golden age of Charles Bronson style public safety in Seattle thanks to Maurice Clemmons. The Seattle PI wrote this story (State cuts to criminal supervision 'are a tragedy waiting to happen') focused on an assumed pacifism and defenselessness on the part of daytime commuters, but what if these criminals face honest folk that put a bullet in them?

Returning to the infinite chasm of self-critique liberal dialogue has tended towards since the 1960's, where America's previous social injustice sins are referenced in the labeling of mainstream society and economy as inherently immoral, and in an eternal debt to those who might have suffered. This ethical framework manifested itself in huge government initiatives designed to right past wrongs. These government programs cost money.

2009: NOW WE ARE BROKE.

A shrinking economy will mean less jobs, locally and globally. If insurgents and criminals are mostly caused by unemployment and poverty, we can expect more waves of angry murderous criminals and insurgents than ever before.

Paradigm over: Hopefully, the era of the wealthy compassionate liberal who directs all guilt to their own economic heritage is over. The wealth is gone, and maybe there have been enough nihilistic murders that the stupider portions of the compassion is gone also.