“we can solve any problem, we cannot solve all the problems all at once”
That’s why the key angle of attack: UNIFIED VERSION OF REALITY, this is the problem I would solve first.
One that is affecting everyone: CLIMATE CHANGE. I’m in the camp of threat multiplier, tipping points, feedback loops, obsolete climate models, MBBF (multibread basket failure) and deep adaptation. I take climate change very seriously and I’m how American military is bombing oil depots in Iran, that surely cannot be good for the climate.
I start small with some broad / generic / truthful / politically agreable statements that are difficult to oppose, that’s how I can sneak in some more radical / groundbreaking ideas. Halo effect by being surrounded (not grounded) by the truth.
I make loads of art. Art as an excuse, art as “get out of jail free” card.
It offers me an option to turn everything into some sort of an artistic performance in the genre of “meme realism”. Audience does not know if this dude is for real (or joking, or kidding) but the vibe adds up, it could pass as genuine / truthful / real.
How do you know the vibe adds up? Do you measure it? You said you’re in the feedback loop camp - so do your memes become more effective based on the measured impact?
IN PERSON: microexpressions, people dancing to my music, people laughing to my memes
ONLINE: people asking questions, diving deeper, reacting with emojis, retweeting
The phrase “feedback loops” is deeply embedded in the context of climate change.
I believe in feedback loops.
Rainforest is rainforest beceause the moisture is recycled many times. Convert rainforest to beef production: not rainforest anymore.
Forest fires cause residue to land in Arctic that affects the albedo effect. That’s definitely not cool.
No.
They do become more effective: yes.
But not based on the impact, not based on measured impact.
They become more effective through experience + vibes + inspiration + remixing + timing + pure chance. My AI tooling is not sophisticated enough to know upfront, often it is trial and error, game of numbers, persistence.
I wouldn’t use the word ‘criticize’, what I’m trying to offer is feedback so you can improve your idea. Vibes are good, but not sufficient - number games have to have measurable impact as well in order to guard against self-deception. But if you’re not interested in my feedback, I’m happy to stay silent on the matter.
All advanced civilisations we know existed in the holocene. This is a period of relative climate stability that allowed for agriculture; it was due to last until the next ice age, but now it is prematurely coming to an end and the gradual cooling that Earth would have experienced is instead flipped into an unprecedented heating. What this will look like long term we can’t be sure, but even the mildest of ‘hot house Earth’ scenarios takes us out of the holocene stability.
If it’s not possible to do agriculture, how can there be advanced civilisation? Nomadic tribes is another story.
Maybe you could argue some technologies enable civilisation in hostile environments. The thing with that is, if even ‘just’ 70% of humanity are in survival mode, how long will the stable places that implement such technologies last for?
Moreover, human technology will always degrade with time, and have limitations. If it’s human tech versus the unbridled powers of wider nature, I know which side comes out the victor, given a passage of time.
Maybe I could! Better thinkers than I have grappled with these questions quite a bit, but I do have a bit of flair for curating high quality opinion. Nate Hagens lately has been musing on a variety of scenarios (bad, worser, worstest, best of a bad lot), and I’ve been musing on his musings. Where maybe my thinking might add a bit of value comes from my deep historical reading across many civilizations. I have pretty detailed notions of civilizational spawn and collapse (again, very much informed by all the most capable scholars and thought leaders). So where are we now with respect to that?
The basic Toynbee formula for civilizational spawn is “challenge-response”. I’d put most of your post above into the “challenge” category. Is humanity capable of sufficient response? Given the full span of what we’re adapted to so far (the great bulk of it very non-Holocene), I like the prospects. The core challenge, as you rightly point out, is living within our planetary means. Like many others before me - Malthus, Erlich, Turchin - I see population as a key driver. It’s hard for me to visualize successful human adaptation to this planet at a scale of 8 billion humans or more. Take those numbers down by an order of magnitude or two and it all becomes more plausible. Current demographic collapse across most of the developed world suggests on an unconscious level, great masses of people are sharing that intuition. (This is worth a look: https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941)
A lot of what is likely to happen under current GPD-maximizing stay-the-course scenarios is very Malthusian. That will not be fun to live through. Of course, Malthus’s predictions of impending population limits turned out quite wrong. So did Ehrlich’s. Are Hagens and other current climate catastrophists missing the predictive mark is similar ways? I don’t think so. Turchin seems pretty darn accurate to me and paints a clear picture of what politics looks like when populations outrun their resources. It looks quite a bit like what we have now. Likewise, Peter Pogany’s predictions of global chaos due to entropic limits seems both prescient and strongly grounded in sheer empiricism. The Fat Tony in me says endless GDP growth is for “suckers” and the most intelligent bets are against it.
So I think Hagen’s “Great Simplification” is on the doorstep. Managing through the chaos between here and there is not for the faint of heart! But, for example, if you look at my “doomer” AI session above, of course we can adapt. That is, some Noah somewhere will likely have an ark. The question for most of us is - do we just build a personal bunker? Of can we do something at larger scale to ease the massive transitions we all must endure?
A lot people want to analyze the living hell out of books like Master and His Emissary, but anyone who actually READS the book will see right way why art comes first. As for art critics … the line forms way, way down the road!
So yeah, the algorithm on this platform flags your meme-stock as spam. It is spam! That’s kind of the point!
Unfortunately, my account got suspended too, right now I’m shopping around for a lawyer that would take my case on “no win no fee” or “pro bono” basis. Twitter is formiddable opponnent, Elon Musk is skilled in lawfare, it’s an interesting endeavour.
(that is obviously a publicity stunt, I have time and energy to invest into that)
I’m wondering if you already provided feedback or not?
“Criticize by doing better” is my “doocratic” approach. It’s super easy to be armchair strategist saying “mind your numbers”. I’m ready for exponential growth. I would like to build a team around me. Meanwhile I’m getting better at AI and automation, previously I was investing loads of time into images / videos / music.
I’m a new user, as a new user I have a limited capacity to share images and share links, that’s my content was limited in scope and I was prioritising the maximum impact.
One image per post forced my to be ultra succintc. Some of the cool links that contain more than a single image:
Cards on the table, I’ve been getting pulled in the direction of being some sort of media producer for a long time. (Which is borderline ridiculous, because I was feeling those vibes back in my high school educator days). But now - maybe - sort of that! I do rather openly imagine “Second Renaissance” as a major lifestyle brand for the cultural creatives hard at work forging the foundations of the coming post-collapse civilizational revival. So work with me here . … Does the cultural-creative movement of our times need “brands” and “brand campaigns”?
For me, hard “yes!” on those questions! As you would no-doubt point out, such branding without substance is just more slop on top of the slop we already have. Got it. On the other hand, I do deeply believe the esoteric must now rise from the depths and become exoteric. To me, that is where @Mars lives. @Mars will NOT be running the accounting department in my fantasy media conglomerate! But there is lots of room in the art department for his very special skill set. The thing about media is - no art, no cash flow (or eyeballs or engagement or personal transformations or whatever the metric is). So if I had to choose between firing the art department or firing the accounting department, that’s an easy call. I can run numbers on Excel. I can’t pull media properties out of my butt that way. So artists are very, very important in my personal scheme of things.
For throughput and flow and linear diagram purposes, inspiration begets art, art begets media, media begets engagement, engagement attracts people in their masses to whatever we are doing. Presumably, what we are doing is the NEXT BIG THING. But NEXT BIG THING is a nerdy R&D discussion. You know - like all our DMs, for example. But NEXT BIG THING is one thing. Selling it takes way more than just having it. For me @Mars plays nicely in that “selling it” domain.
Given the full span of what we’re adapted to so far (the great bulk of it very non-Holocene), I like the prospects.
What examples of advanced civilisation do you have of adapting outside the Holocene? I’m not aware of any. The Holocene began roughly 11,000 years ago.
Like many others before me - Malthus, Erlich, Turchin - I see population as a key driver.
Generally overpopulation is a major driver but it comes with nuances. How people live is very important: an entire village in Africa generally has a lower ecological footprint than the average family in US.
A growing population could also expand to other planets but we lack the technology or reach to make that feasible.
It’s hard for me to visualize successful human adaptation to this planet at a scale of 8 billion humans or more. Take those numbers down by an order of magnitude or two and it all becomes more plausible.
The dynamics may well be easier, but it still doesn’t change the core climatic and biosphere stats.
Turchin seems pretty darn accurate to me and paints a clear picture of what politics looks like when populations outrun their resources. It looks quite a bit like what we have now. Likewise, Peter Pogany’s predictions of global chaos due to entropic limits seems both prescient and strongly grounded in sheer empiricism. The Fat Tony in me says endless GDP growth is for “suckers” and the most intelligent bets are against it.
Yes, well summarised.
The question for most of us is - do we just build a personal bunker? Of can we do something at larger scale to ease the massive transitions we all must endure?
This is indeed the question to grapple with. I believe that actually the only way is to aim for a larger transition. Barring extreme wealth, there is not even a practical way for an individual to survive to any level of basic comfort by themselves or within a small group. You need a diverse, reasonably large, community - and it’s not just about survival, but creating a seed for renewal. Humans can also play a part in safeguarding life, which is something we (or at least those cognisant of environmental decline) often forget.
In my answer to the core metaphysical question of “why are we even here”, part of it runs like this:
The Holocene enabled the advent of civilization, which is something the universe wanted. Now that civilization was spawned, it now must adapt to different circumstances. Presumably, the universe wants that to happen also. “Advanced” civilization does not require the mass populations and mass resource consumption of what we have now. It took all that biological pressure to crowd people together to get us to evolve complex cognitive and cultural structures. We did that, but now we have it and can repurpose it. But the steel cannot stay forever in the molten forge. It needs to come out of the fire and go through other steps to gain its edge. I imagine civilization will need that tempering as well. (Easy for me to say - I’ll be in the next world sending spirit messages to whoever remains here to do the actual work!)
All resource requirements per capita get easier with a smaller denominator. There are parts of the world that can run on geothermal, for example. It’s just that not all humans can move to those parts. I imagine more selective land and water use by smaller populations will be generally more adaptable. Instead of Gross Domestic Product maybe we can track Subtle Domestic Product and push growth into new dimensions.
I wasn’t working on traffic as the monetisation wasn’t enabled, now that I have a something that looks like online shop I am likely to focus more on the algo game, numbers game.
I brand myself as an artist. I call my genre “meme realism”. It is up to the audience to decide if it is for real.
I often invite audience to participate in the process.
Some people described “it gives me hope”. I know “doom and gloom” is easy, finding a solution to metacrisis is hard, and yet time after time a new hope arrives.
Literally yesterday as I was posting about about METAPOSSIBILITY and memetic virus, something very synchronistic happened, it was everywhere in the media, around the world:
Practically speaking, this makes sense. The billionaire fantasy of bunkers in New Zealand or orbiting luxury space platforms is pretty much that - fantasy. More likely, we all rise or fall more or less together.
The long history of collapse (there have been many) suggests impacts will be most acute on local and regional scales, however. For example, yesterday I saw news reports of 41+ degrees in Europe (melting German tram tracks) and hotter still on the US East Coast. Where I am, it was 18 degrees, cloudy and moist. My whole bioregion is a sort of insulation bubble against the very worst. So if we get another Eocene Thermal Maximum or something like that, there will be locations at some altitude or another that will remain relatively favorable for grains or potatoes or something we can eat. Assuming of course “we” fits whatever that favorable acreage turns out to be.
Looking at it from a purely personal dimension, if anarchic collapse happens very quickly, I will just die, because I am not well armed, my house is not defensible against determined looters, and my food supply depends on global supply chains and digital assets. Of course, even if the next couple decades are pure Golden Age, I’ve already exceeded my actuarially expected life span and in effect, am playing in extra time already. So any palace I build for myself alone can only be a tomb. Not especially interesting. A better project seems like spending whatever life and assets I have left doing what you suggest above - seeding the future.
If our sense of “self” becomes very extended - to the point where humans on the far side of the world also count as “me” - then it seems like the non-sucker, Taleb-endorsable approach would be to spread the good ideas all over the place, start ecovillages (or something like that) in every conceivable geography, and then hope that at least some of them make it through the great collapse of the Holocene imperial era. Black Swans are not exactly Black Swans just now, because its hard not to seem them coming. But hedging bets in lots of different ways is very anti-fragile, and although each and every one of us personally is entirely fragile in the end, the meantime we can work towards species-level and eco-level anti-fragility on a global basis.
If someone shows their interior-oriented plan to solve the meta crisis, I ask to see how it stays in touch with the exterior, measurable side. If someone shows a techno-optimistic, exterior-biased plan, I’ll ask about the interior. Generally, we could all benefit from outside perspectives that help put us in touch with the view from the other side.
As Bruce Lee would say, fight a boxer, box a fighter. (Though there’s nothing combative in my replies whatsoever! Personally I’m fully on board the Peace Train!)
On the level of personal action, that sort of pure balance makes total sense. At collective levels, however, specialists often prove quite valuable for the good of the order.
Playing Mad Scientist for a moment, let’s say we are engineering a Carroll Quigley-esque “instrument of expansion” for the coming civilization that will follow the generalized collapse of the current one. (Or maybe prevent the collapse of the current one, if we are really, really lucky!) Will that instrument of expansion involve perfect artistic-accountancy balance amongst the entire population? Or is it more likely that some artists will mostly art, and some accountants will mostly account? To me, the later seems more likely. In Wilberian terms, must All Quadrants, All Levels extend to All People, All the Time? (AQALAPAT). To me, that sort of perfection is absolutely the enemy of the good. Humans with rougher edges strike me as generally more interesting.
I very much like the well-rounded Bildung approach for primary and early secondary education. I also like interdisciplinary project-centric approaches for all ages. But yes, specialists matter also. All of England at the moment thanks God above that Harry Kane is a pure goal scorer! I have no idea if he cleans up around the house, or says pleasant things to people in the street, or is of any use in an auto shop. Does anyone really care about any of that? Kane has one job to do, and to the great joy of all England fans, he really, really did it! We all likewise can Harry Kane against our own particular goal mouths.
To me, the civilization of the future will still have its specialists, because that is kind the definition of what a civilization is. The question at issue is not so much, will we have specialists? It’s more like, will there be any connective tissue that allows the different specialists to be collaborative and communicative with one another? All my Mad Scientist work is currently bent towards those collaboration and communication issues, not so much into verifying that every scout in the troop earns every single merit badge.
I certainly wasn’t arguing against specialization. If you ask Harry Kane how his team scores goals, he can give you a pretty straightforward answer, even though it’s not his specialty. It’s about teamwork, and being aware of where one’s gifts complement/are complemented by those of others.
I’m unsure where my plan fits into that picture? How would you describe my approach of changing the consciousness of the planet through art and imagination?
I mentioned some options here:
And here:
It all starts from the belief that change is possible.
too extreme.
