I laugh, but what I love about the early 80s is how much we thought that computers (especially MICROcomputers, computers for the people) would expand our intelligence and help create a smarter, better humanity.
But maybe they did, and our problem now is that it's not intelligence we need, but wisdom?
Problem is wisdom often takes the form of empathy - which looks, to pure intelligence, like stupidity.
So to make the quantum jump from individual-level intelligence - profit-maximising, game-playing, advantage-seeking - to a species-level intelligence necessary for solving the species-level problems we now face, it looks like we're stuck in a whole bunch of local maxima and we can't just smoothly evolve our way there. Whoever goes first has to sacrifice something to pioneer the transformation. Or we all get stuck here and just fade away in a big war.
That sense of impending social and personal transformation is what's been missing from the zeitgeist since last those early 80s days.
We talk about 'disruption' as if it's inevitable but that vision is really dark. Millions thrown out of work, erosion of democracy, a vast wealth shift to private billionaires. It's the wrong direction and we all know it. We all have a sense of deep unease with our times because we want a true transformation for the better.
Can we disrupt disruption? Can we imagine and then build a fairer world, a society of cooperation and human dignity, that sees rich and poor human lives as equally precious, within the shell of venture capital and corrupt government? Is it already too late?
One thing I strongly believe is that it's never too late.
@natecull In disruption -- Jill Lepore's New Yorker classic is well worth reading:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine
@natecull remember 1980 in context. Twelve years since Woodstock. 35 years since the end of WW2. Vietnam had ended a few years before. Reagan and the forces of modern conservatism were just really getting going. Abortion had recently become legal.
@pnathan Yes - also, strong early adopters of 8-bit microcomputers were science and education, and these communities' utopian and non-commercial views plus the pioneer and hobbyist aspects of just getting the darned things running meant, eg, magazines like Byte and Creative Computing felt more socially transformative than the culture as a whole. It was a small scene, optimistic, friendly, but growing. Like the mid-90s Internet years, a spacey boomtown, not the grim capital death match SV is now
@natecull All we can do is look to the future, taking lessons from the past.
I spent a *lot* of time digging into antique computers and old Lisp systems. There were tremendous & transformative ideas there that were dropped on the floor, both socially and technically.
Very aggravating, but I've come to believe the thing to do is simply to press on and keep running the race without turning into a pillar of salt.
@pnathan but what if you could reverse the polarity and turn OTHER people into pillars of salt
Help now I am shipping King Midas with Lot's Wife
@natecull you probably want to go to Ao3 to do that kind of shipping.
@pnathan Good grief, they were closer in 1980 to Woodstock than we are now to 9/11.
And yet they flipped hard right and elected Reagan.
I still find that hard to grasp.
@natecull There was an ENORMOUS backlash. The entire West was on fire from the changes of the past 20 years. Look at England, Ireland, France, Germany. The squares revolted.
@pnathan 1968 was pretty terrifying for a lot of people. A year of global riots. That plus the drug+crime wave plus Vietnam easily sold a message of national decay that could be remedied with Strong Discipline from Strong Leaders. And at the same time, paradoxically, of an overbearing Nanny State that had to be reined in and cut down to size before it strangled Freedom.
No, I still don't get how people hold those two ideas, but I know my parents saw Reagan as 'protecting NZ from the Russians'
@natecull sigh. I get how society has fragmented and that's scary.
But I think that's more an after effect of having the entire West in the conformity machines of the military in WW2... As we moved away and rediverged, it was scary.
@pnathan The more I look at it the more WW2 seems to be a very odd anomaly in 20th century history.
Arch-conservative (Churchill), liberal-centrist social democrat (Roosevelt) and reddest of the Red Terror Russians (Stalin), plus a temporary truce between Kuomintang and Maoists in China, all working together to fight... a Germany-Italy-Japan axis? What the?
And predictably the Allies all fell apart instantly even in 1945, because wow, how *did* they get and hold together in the first place?
@natecull existential threat to all 3 political and social systems.
in a very definite sense, the leaders can be seen as a crystiallization of the country's society. the societies rejected the Nazis.
Italy went along for the spoils, and Japan too, sort of.
The US and the UK actually built NATO out of the Roosevelt and Churchill connection (North Atlantic Treaty of '42).
Churchill was a liberal from a different time, for sure. I don't think he maps neatly onto modern mpas.
@pnathan It is interesting to ask just WHY Hitler scared so many people, given that Stalin had killed a lot more.
The traditional answer is 'because things changed so fast in Germany, and Germany was considered an advanced, cultured, scientific country while Russia was a peasant backwater, That Place in Europe where Those Things Happened'...
.. but I'm not sure I entirely understand, even so.
Like just two years after WW2 everyone flipped back to the status quo: hating and fearing Stalin.
@natecull The 20s had a nasty red scare. And it was true that 1918/1925 Russia/USSR was a backwater.
Nazis were understood to be in a very brutal and nasty business, rebuilding and unifying the entire society along socialist lines for the good of the nation. (contra traditional socialisms, which were supernational). Germany was also understood to be incredibly militaristic, so they were "naturally" inclined to invade, etc.
@natecull in many ways, the perception of Trump mirrors, however imperfectly, the perception of Hitler. I spent 2016 reading well regarded academic literature on fascisms. Trump is right up in that part of the world, tho' he's not very competent at it.
A militaristic society with an erratic dictator and a history of provoking war does not make for a comfortable neighbor.
consider that Prussia/Berlin had been involved in wars of conquest since the 1840s.
@natecull I can't summarize it here, but Prussia focused on Anschluss and incorporating the German Peoples through war since maybe 1840 or so. This partly sparked the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
It was understood that for years and years the Germanies should unite. That was the background of the invasion of Austria and formed the background noise of the 1920s, 1930s.
@natecull Austris is the Osterreich, the East Kingdom, to shift a perception: the East Kingdom of the German People. :-)
@natecull anyway, er, maybe email me if you want to continue this discussion? this discussion is something like a 10K word discussion, not a 500 word discussion, haha.
paul@nathan.house
@pnathan Or maybe we should join @dredmorbius 's Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/ , because he's also a big long-form poster.
I'm not a super huge fan of email for this kind of discussion because it feels like taking things to a private channel, and I don't feel this material is especially private.
@natecull yeah that's fine.
If he doesn't mind us crashing his party. :)
@pnathan @dredmorbius @natecull #dreddit is probably a pretty good place for this kind of discussion. I would say blogs, but the turnaround between posts and the lack of integration wouldn't let it work.
Actually, this is about the only use-case for Medium's janky-ass response system.
@pnathan Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis movie always freaks me out.
Why? Because it's a very appealing story to me: torn between abusive capitalism and destructive Bolshevik revolution, society must find a Third Way, informed by Christian religion: 'a mediator between the Mind that plans and the Hands that build'.
Then I realise that this idea of a spiritually socialist Third Way was literally the Nazi position: and Lang and his wife were torn apart because they each took different sides.
@natecull @pnathan Keep in mind that Russia had changed Very Quickly as well, in 1917.
Germany, though Is In The Middle of Fucking Europe. It's also about 2x the size of the next largest country (France), and had massive industrial might, again: coal.
Europe's coal belt, roughly: Scotland, through England, then France, and Germany, into the Saarland and Czech Republic. A crescent. A smidge in Northern Spain.
You don't get industrialisation without coal.
@dredmorbius @pnathan Ooh! I hadn't really thought about the geopolitics of coal in the 20th century, but of course it would have been a huge factor even into the oil age.
It's very surprising really that nuclear didn't pan out so well as a power source - a lot of people were pushing for it and it would have changed 1970s geopolitics a LOT.
(I mean surprising given what people knew about fission in the 1950s; not quite so much in hindsight).
@natecull @pnathan Manfred Weissenbacher, "Sources of Power":
"Weissenbacher brilliantly explains the connection between the availability and use of energy sources and social infrastructure development at different stages in history. At times, necessarily, the text digresses into discussions of history, technology, or politics, but the influence of energy is present throughout."
@natecull @dredmorbius @pnathan Nuclear turns out the be Hard, Inflexible, Highly Centralised, and Expensive.
There are long-term (and highly uncertain) risks. I like to contrast the Banqiao disaster against Chernobyl and Fukushima. In terms of immediate impacts, there's no question, Banqiao, a Chinese hydroelectric and flood-control dam failure in 1975, was vastly worse: 170k dead. But it is now completely resolved. At best, Chernobyl is 10% over.
@pnathan @dredmorbius @natecull The exclusion zones will remain for at least 300 years, and the on-site contamination for many thousands. That's longer than all of human history, and we have /no/ institutions (governments, schools, religions, companies) which have lasted that long.
There's also far less nuclear fuel (at least readily available) than you'd think -- another 60 or so years at present rates, far less if scale is increased.
@pnathan @dredmorbius @natecull There are scenarios in which the fuel supplies last longer -- uranium from seawater, breeder reactors, thorium. Maybe, if we can get it to work, fusion. But those are all phenomenally /more/ complicated.
And they don't address a more fundamental problem: that we've got to /accept/ and /embrace/ our limits.
@natecull @pnathan WWII makes a lot more sense if you put it in terms of oil, and consider the aftermath of WWI (also about oil), and the Sino-Russian war.
Germany: reparations, lacked oil, sought it from Russia (Baku) and Romania, as well as North Afrika & ME.
Italy: Also in North Africa. Unlike Germany, Italy /also/ lacks coal.
Japan: Access to Indonesian and SE Asia offshore oil, blocked by US.
Allies: US + ME oil, + Indonesia.
Yergin's "The Prize".
I feel a generational shift in the air, and it gives me hope. But I wish I could see how to get involved. What direction to push in. What's real, vs what's just illusion.