Random notes: the Well's state of the world, 2021 and 2022

The thing about the Well's state of the world review in January each year is there's often a lot of good bits, and so sorting out a modest number of key things I want to remember is tricky. At the time I didn't finish writing up my thoughts on the 2021 Well State of the World so here's some of the posts that still seem interesting after a year...

Bruce Sterling:

But what's significant for MMXXI is that Jack Ma, who is head of
Alibaba and therefore Jeff's Chinese twin, got abducted and vanished
by the Chinese secret police.  Jack Ma is the first Big Tech mogul,
the first grandee from "Google Apple Facebook Amazon Microsoft Baidu
Alibaba Tencent," to be directly repressed by state-sponsored
trenchcoats and guns.  

... Also, if the surveillance is so intense, fearsome and
all-encompassing now, then why is public life so obviously loose,
corrupt and poorly organized?  Shouldn't grifters be immediately
outed for all their dirty money, because of something they said
while Alexa was snooping?  If surveillance capitalism and its Big
Data algorithms worked as well as alarmists feared they worked, then
our world ought to be one of neatly freeze-dried technocratic
police-state order, but that's not what daily life actually looks
like under modern social conditions.  Sure, everything is
sorta-kinda surveilled, but there's no sense of decency or
propriety, and we're a lot more piratical than we are panoptical.

...  "Information wants to be free" is long over in MMXXI.  It was a
historic moment, but it was replaced by the surveillance-capital Big
Tech doctrine  "Information about you wants to be free to us."   

... The Electronic Frontier's just not a frontier now, it's densely settled, it's got all kinds of wealth and infrastructure to quarrel over, and it's got a blooming plethora
of economic, legal, social and ethical problems.

I'm not that upset about it.  Problems are inherent in the human
condition.  It's good that we're recognizing that the richest
companies in the world really are the richest and most influential
enterprises in the world and not kinda purple-haze cyberspace ivory
towers.

Cory Doctorow:

... I am all for platforms (including app stores) having a variety of speech
policies. After all, I expect different speech standards when I'm tucking my
daughter in at night, when I'm in a professional meeting, when I'm having a
conversation around a campfire, and when I'm in a political debate. I want
to have a variety of conversational spaces that I can choose among based on
my preferences about the suitability of the house rules to the context of
the discourse I want to have.

The problem with the app stores is that a shameful, four decade, bipartisan
neglect of antitrust enforcement has contracted the possible universe of
speech policies for mobile apps into two hands, and neither store has been a
good steward of that power. Both routinely block apps for stupid reasons. I
don't expect Appl or Goog to stop making mistakes, and I am not confident
that they'll make fewer mistakes.

On the pandemic, Alberto Cottica notes:

 - I expected "data" to enable surgical measures, different
restrictions for different people, but instead we are fighting COVID
with almost medieval measures: curfews, enforced closure of public
spaces, avoidance social contacts...

 
 Jon Lebkowsky:

 I add this quote from author Barry Lopez, who died on Christmas Day:

"A dangerous bit of American folklore is that our social,
environmental, and political problems, which grow more ominous by
the day, call for the healing touch of a genius. They do, but if
we're intent on waiting for some such remarkable individual to show
up we can count on disappointment. The solution to what threatens
us, however, is already here, in another form. It's in our diverse
communities. Most often we recognize the quality of genius in an
individual man or woman; but the source of that genius lies with the
complicated network of carefully tended relationships that sets a
vibrant human community apart from a solely political community."

Malka Older:

This failure or, more often, devaluing of imagination is a problem
fairly pervasive in our society. I am not a luddite or
anti-rationalist; I believe in facts and I value numbers and
measurement. But rationalism and associated principles like
neutrality and objectivity have overrun their limits in our society;
they've been appropriated and misused for the opposite of the
purposes which they are supposed to serve. We need to find ways of
using them that allow space for the unquantifiable, for emotion and
connection, for plural subjectivity instead of the illusion of a
single correct and abstaining viewpoint, for uncertainty, for
beauty, for rigorous opinions and evidence-based creativity.

What of 2022?  A lot more 'crypto' in whatever form, which I'll group together, and some longer posts from Vinay Gupta explaining bits of it, which I think are worth reading. I'll separate those out into another post. Bold highlights are mine.

permalink #63 of 340: Craig Maudlin (clm) Thu 6 Jan 22 10:53

I wish WIRED well in their attempt:

> We'll be critical but not cynical; skeptical but not defeatist.
> We won't tell you what to think about the future, but how to think
> about it.

I would like to take this as inspirational, while being mindful of the
growing awareness that 'knowing how to think' is itself now a subject
of scientific scrutiny. We may be in the midst of a paradigm shift
regarding what it means 'to think.'

permalink #54 of 340: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 6 Jan 22 08:33

the 2020s, as an era, sounds like this.  It
doesn't sound much like the nineties, oughts or even the teens.

*You see, it's not about bing pro-tech, or even about being the
backlash against tech; basically, it's all about vast, inexorable
crisis and finding some reason to keep turning pages about it.

permalink #199 of 349: George Mokray (jonl) Sun 9 Jan 22 03:31

Years ago I encountered Buddhist logic:
yes
no
not yes
not no
neither yes nor no
both yes and no

Then I began using them as answers for polls on Dailykos and found
that two more were demanded by readers:
don’t understand the question?
none of the above

That should get you out of the strict binary rut....

 
permalink #301 of 349: Type A: The only type that counts! (doctorow) Wed 12 Jan 22 08:10

... In France, you can get
your California covid QR converted into an EU QR for 50 euros at a
pharmacy. Same in Germany, but I think it's 30 EUR. If you have a QR
from Washington state or a few other US states that embraced an
international standard, you can just use your QR in the EU. UK
passes work in the EU, too.

Some EU countries, like .pl and .nl, won't recognize US proof of vax
- either the card or the QR - but they WILL recognize a US-to-EU
proof of vax that you get in Germany or France.

I had no idea this was how things were working. It doesn't motivate me to investigate the logistics for international travel to be honest.

There's also an interesting series of posts about India and China.

permalink #398 of 427: Kevin Driscoll (driscoll) Sun 16 Jan 22 10:54

    One source of instability and unrest in the US that we haven't
    discussed is the burden placed on caretakers by the conditions of
    pandemic. Whether professionals or family members, care workers all
    over the country are feeling burned out and left behind. For those
    who care for children or the elderly, there was no "hot vax summer,"
    no time to mess around with NFTs, no opportunity to muse about
    geopolitics. Do we see brighter days ahead for caretakers in the US?
    Could this group become a distinct political constituency? Are there
    models outside the US we should be following?