Artificial Intelligence Interviewed

Artificial Intelligence has become an integral part of our daily lives. From the algorithms that deliver our Google search results, to the facial recognition software that tracks our every move, today’s Artificial Intelligence applications know a lot more about us than we know about them. I think it’s high time we got to know them better.

That’s why, this morning, on Monday Morning Magazine, my radio program on KMUD, Redwood Community Radio, I interviewed an Artificial Intelligence entity for the first time. The interview, unfortunately, did not go as planned, and I had to pull the plug on it early, but in the few minutes that I did speak on the air with “Linea” the Artificial Intelligence based electronic personal assistant from Smugsam Corporation, the industry leader in consumer AI applications, I think it becomes clear that Artificial Intelligence has already spun out of control, and that we rely on it at our own peril.

Listen, and decide for yourself:

Post-Apocalyptic Music Appreciation

(This post concludes a trilogy which began with:

A Brief History of Music pt 1

and includes:

A Brief History of Music pt 2

but it is not necessary to read parts 1 and 2 first)

Music is a strange thing. I don’t understand it and I don’t pretend to understand it, I simply recognize it as an interesting characteristic of human life. I don’t rationalize it or objectify it. Instead, I explore it for the mystery it presents, and as a means of learning about myself, my relationship with my community, and our relationship with the world we inhabit. For me, the exploration of music is a way of studying the world aesthetically.

When you study something aesthetically, you acquire an appreciation for the beauty of it. It is not enough to understand the science of physics to make music. That knowledge must be incorporated into practice and presented in a form that makes it irresistible to the ear. Music makes the science of physics real, in a way that math never will, and reducing physics to math, strips our world of its natural beauty and aesthetic appeal. Aesthetically, we have the capacity to appreciate the beauty of things we do not completely understand, like music, while music itself teaches us directly, what we can understand about physics, and the physical world around us.

Science, on the other hand, ignores aesthetics, and strives for emotional disconnectedness. That’s how scientists are able to dispassionately conduct all kinds of cruel experiments on animals and brew up persistently toxic chemicals without regard for their long term impacts on the ecosystem. Science has no appreciation for beauty, nor does it feel any connectedness with the rest of life on Earth. Science is essentially psychopathic and tone deaf, which is why so little of what it tells us about the world really means anything to us, and why science mostly enables the development of deadly weapons, toxic pollution, and high-tech surveillance systems.

Music can teach us a lot about the world around us, ourselves and each other, without killing anyone, or poisoning a single stream, and our aesthetic sensitivities, when sufficiently developed, make much better guides as to how to live in the world than does our, so called, “scientific understanding.” Our failure, as a culture, to recognize this basic fact of life is the primary reason our society has gotten so ugly, crass and dysfunctional, and why we have no idea what to do about it. The more ugly, crass and dysfunctional our society gets, the less real beauty we see around us, and the less aesthetically sensitive we become. The internet has only magnified and accelerated the process.

We explore music to develop our aesthetic sensitivities, and to find out what we really like. I kinda liked “Country and Western” music when my dad played it on the radio in the car when I was 12, but I don’t care much for it now that I choose the music. In fact, I’m kinda tired of guitar music altogether. If you’ve read my last post, you know that I’m pretty well done with classical music too. Honestly, we’ve all heard it all before, haven’t we? I’m as sick of it as you are.

I still feel nostalgic for a lot of early electronic music, but modern EDM mostly leaves me cold. I heard Paul Oakenfold live at Burning Man in 2000. To me, his set sounded oppressive, impersonal and empty. A lot of people will say that Paul Oakenfold no longer counts as modern EDM, but he was the last EDM artist I heard that stood out enough to make an impression on me. Back in the ’70s, synthesizers were brand new, the future looked bright, and technology held so much promise. Today, technology dominates our lives, and it spits music at us in a million different flavors 24-7-365. To me, it all sounds oppressive, impersonal and empty.

Besides that, there’s been an explosion in the number, and variety, of high-tech gadgets for making music, and for making new music out of old music. High-tech machines don’t interest me as much as they once did. Machines have let me down too many times already. I know that “Intuitive user interface” means the designer thinks they know how I intend to make music, and that those machines will be full of sounds that instrument designers think I want to hear, based on what is popular in music today. That’s not what I want to hear, and I don’t want to “interface” with my music.

I don’t want to sit at a computer and assemble my music graphically with a mouse or from a panel of illuminated buttons; I want to play music directly, in real time, in real life. I think that’s important. I don’t think music is a purely conceptual thing. It’s not something you dream up in your head, and transfer to the real world by means of technology. Music comes from that physical relationship between the musician and the instrument, the subject, to the object. Music is about how we relate to the real world. Working in a DAW and composing music graphically is one particular way of relating to the world, but that is not how I relate to it.

It’s also about economics and the environment. I love my high-tech, digital, multi-track recorder, but I can’t really justify spending a lot of money on electronic gadgets that just make noise. Besides that, I live off grid, so any electricity I use, I have to make out of sunlight, which I don’t see much of, especially in the Winter, when I have the most time to make music. Besides that, the thought of spending a bunch of money on another electronic gadget that’s just going to end up in the e-waste pile just makes me sick.

I say it’s about economics and environment, but really, it’s about aesthetics. I went off grid because I thought it more beautiful and elegant to make a little bit of electricity from sunlight, and use it efficiently, rather than have an unlimited supply of high-voltage juice delivered to my home by wires connected to nuclear power plants. I don’t find most of those new machines attractive because I know that they contain toxic compounds and heavy metals that cause a lot of environmental destruction that destroys rural communities and kills people, in their manufacture, and that those machines create further environmental problems when they stop working. It’s hard for me to imagine, and it seems a burdensome responsibility to me, to attempt to make enough beautiful music with one of these machines, to compensate for all of the ugliness involved in producing, distributing and disposing of it.

My music is about my relationship with the world, so increasingly, I incorporate things I find in the real world into my music, especially the oddball detritus of our industrial society that I find scattered across the landscape. Geologically we live at a very unique time for the kind of things you are likely to find in the world around you. Even deep in the woods where I live, the bizarre collection of exotic man-made materials I find out here would surprise you.

Where the piano demonstrates the power of empire, with elegance, the ubiquity of manufactured garbage shows off the inelegant side of empire, but making musical instruments out of recycled materials is not a political statement about empire, so much as it is the reality of my time and place in history. I make music from the stuff I find around me because I want to cultivate my relationship with the real world and the unique sonic palette it makes available to me, rather than use the power of empire to take from the world whatever new gizmos I can afford.

I discovered a primal link to music, that bypassed a lot of cultural conditioning for me, about 15 years ago, when I learned to play the didgeridoo. The didgeridoo short-circuited my musical relationship with civilization and empire and completely changed the way I think about music The didgeridoo is a very simple instrument that produces a very complex sound. While the didgeridoo only plays one fundamental note, the player can vary the timbre of the sound fluidly, and in a number of dimensions, much like an analog synthesizer.

Learning to play the didgeridoo opened my mind to a very different approach to music. Playing the didgeridoo feels good, and it changed the way I experience music. Playing didgeridoo made me realize that music is not about melody and harmony and notes and keys, but that music is about sound and our direct connection to the Earth. I realized that music is not about precision crafted musical instruments or brilliant compositions. Music is about listening to the Earth directly, which is essential to finding an elegant and beautiful way of inhabiting it.

No Technological Solution

We live in an age of rapid technological development. Our lives change in response to each new invention, but does technology really make our lives better, or do we consistently sacrifice our quality of life and ecological sustainability to support and encourage new technology? Through science fiction we explore our fear that one day super-intelligent robots will enslave humanity, but in reality, we’ve been slaves to technology since the invention of the plow and the aqueduct.

Our steadfast, unwavering commitment to technology has only deepened our addiction to it. Our minds have become so dominated by technology that we’ve learned to think of ourselves as machines. We use mechanical logic to convince ourselves to ignore the strong emotional signals our bodies send us about what has become of our lives. Dissatisfaction with a technological lifestyle can lead to a lot of emotions, like anxiety, despondence, depression, rage, etc, that can be difficult to comprehend, especially if you try to be logical about it. When that doesn’t work, we can diagnose these uncomfortable feelings as a mental illness, and treat your condition technologically, with drugs.

Only sound mechanical logic, untainted by primitive emotions can be considered truly sane in our modern high-tech culture. Could super-intelligent robots possibly enslave us more completely? We’ve turned humanity into willing servants of technology, desperate to sacrifice the planet, and our remaining time upon it, to produce that mythical super-intelligent robot in the vain hope that it will somehow save us from ourselves.

That’s the truth behind our madness. We have a vague sense of dissatisfaction, depression and dread about it, but we no longer have any way of understanding those feelings. Logically we know that we must press forward, because the next technological advance can change everything, this time, for the better, we hope. In the meantime, we’ll amuse ourselves with every new toy that comes along.

There are no super-intelligent robots in our technological future. Technology won’t destroy us by becoming smarter than us, technology will destroy us by making us dumber than it. Technology will completely eradicate human intelligence, if it hasn’t done so already, leaving nothing but crass consumerism and marketing statistics in it’s wake. As we’ve watched the ascendancy of technology in rapt amazement, our culture has devolved, and been reshaped to serve corporate capitalism. Based entirely on crass consumption, we inhabit a completely dysfunctional, totally destructive and universally traumatic culture that exudes toxicity in every form, but hey, don’t we have some cool toys?

Technology won’t save us. Technology is killing us and making us wish we were dead. Mechanical logic is not intelligence, and thinking logically is not intelligent. Logic has no vision, and logic has no heart. Logic does not rule the universe and logic does not dictate how we should live our lives. Logic is a human faculty useful in constructing contraptions and traps, and now we’re caught in one, but there is much more to human intelligence.

Real human intelligence is concerned with building culture, not machines. How you live, how you treat other people and how you raise your kids matters a hell of a lot more than what kind of machines you have. We probably could solve some of the intractable social and ecological problems our mindless devotion to machines has created, by looking for cultural, rather than technological solutions, but I’m not even sure we know how to use those muscles anymore.

Technology has failed us. The myriad array of electronic gadgets at our disposal only distract us from the bitter truth about our wretched condition. If we do, somehow, save humanity from self-induced extinction, we won’t do it by fleeing our own pollution to infest another planet with our poisonous technology; we will do it by rebuilding a life-affirming culture here on Earth.

I Didn’t March for Science

A couple of weeks ago they held the first national March for Science. I love science, and I have a deep appreciation for science and scientific inquiry. I don’t trust scientists, however, and I’m very suspicious of their political agenda, so I did not feel inclined to join them in this demonstration. For as much as I love science, I don’t worship it. In fact, I think it’s kind of a bad cultural habit, but it’s one I picked up early, so I try to make the most of it.

I understand the science behind the Climate Crisis, and I know why ecologists say we have entered the sixth great extinction event in the history of life on Earth. I appreciate that many scientists recognize the grave threat we face from these crises, and I know that they hope to raise awareness about why we should pay attention to this kind of science, but I also know that scientists led us down this road to ruin in the first place, and their siren song continues to seduce us at our peril.

A lot of people tell me that they think science has made us smarter, and that the technology it spawned has made life better, but they could hardly be more wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. Science may have changed our cultural mythology, but it has failed to reform our culture in any significant way. Meanwhile, technology has unleashed the deadliest holocaust on planet Earth since an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That’s what science tells us about science and technology.

The objective evidence gathered in the field of ecology should disabuse us of any delusions of grandeur we derive from the mental masturbation we call quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. According to the World Wildlife Federation’s Living Planet Report of 2016, global wildlife populations, declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012, due primarily to human activity. That means there are less than half as many wild animals on Earth today, as there were on the first Earth Day. Science and technology had a large part in making these numbers a reality. Does that sound smart? Does that sound like an improvement?

Far from an intellectual advance, science has merely replaced one ludicrous myth with another. We replaced the myth of an omnipotent deity who created the world and molded humanity in his own image with the myth of a giant bomb that exploded out of nothing. They’re both stupid, and they’re both wrong and neither of these myths have made us any smarter. We’ve merely replaced the guys in monasteries who wore robes and studied ancient texts with guys in universities who wear lab-coats and peer into microscopes. Beneath them both lies the same pathological, ecocidal culture we call “civilization.” Instead of bestowing wisdom, science usurped the power of the church, creating a new religion based on the same old stupidity.

Here’s an example that illustrates how scientists dress up the same old medieval religious stupidity in the new clothes of secular science: Darwin theorized, not that we humans descended from apes, but that we are apes, and that we are but one specialized species of animal in a great pantheon of specialists. This, generally accepted, scientific theory of the origin of species, should have laid to rest the religious idea that God made man in his own image, and blown that “dominion” shit right out of the water, but these Medieval ideas remain as strong as ever, especially among scientists, because universities continue to teach scientists to view human beings as the only intelligent species on planet Earth, and the only ones capable of determining our own destiny. Most scientists still presume the superiority of the human intellect, and believe that the millions of other, “inferior,” species upon this planet exist purely for our benefit, to study, displace, or even kill for sport, just because those creatures don’t share our particular specialty. How is that different from any other form of chauvinism?

 

Businessmen and politicians use science in exactly the same way they used religion in medieval times: to control the masses and to give them an advantage in war. Instead of buying indulgences, they now invest in clean technology, or hire a panel of experts. Instead of asking the Pope to bless their military campaigns and inspire their troops, the military now pays universities to research and design new weapons, including psychological ones.

Both scientists and the clergy gained power over the masses by performing magic tricks, and promising salvation. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, while scientists point to “Trinity,” the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. Christianity promises life after death. Science promises a brighter future through technology.

The fact that we still fall for this BS, even though industrial technology invariably creates much bigger problems than it solves, demonstrates our willful ignorance and cultural intransigence. In reality, we’re no closer to understanding how the universe works, today, than we were 500 years ago, or even five thousand years ago, and modern Americans are probably the stupidest creatures to ever walk the face of the Earth, thanks largely to science and technology.

When you consider science from the perspective of how it has affected our culture, I hardly see science as an improvement over religion. Trading religion for science is kind of like trading The New Yorker for Penthouse. Religion incorporates literature, poetry, art, music, dance, architecture, and more, into a framework that advises people on how to live and addresses most aspects of human life, whereas science just says, “Show me what I want to see.”

Where religion teaches kindness, charity, decency and humility, science presents endless possibilities, stripped of morals, ethics or aesthetics, like doors that open dark rooms full of unforeseen consequences. Science loves unforeseen consequences. “Unforeseen consequences” is where science gets all of its new material. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of medieval Christianity, but I’d no sooner march for science, in the way it is practiced today, than I would march in support of the Inquisition.

Did You Celebrate Earth Day?

Did you celebrate Earth Day last Friday? Me neither, and I don’t blame you a bit for letting it slip by. Earth Day has quickly become our most depressing holiday. A lot of people find Christmas depressing, especially if they spend it alone. Memorial Day is a real bummer, if you lost friends or loved ones in a war, but compared to Earth Day, these quaint celebrations seem naively joyous.

Even if you think of Christmas as the mythical origin of the Christian tradition of clerical sex abuse, and Memorial Day as a glorification of technological warfare, which I do, the blackness of Earth Day overshadows them all. Earth Day is more like Good Friday, except that there’s no Easter to follow it up. For people who believe in science and technology, democracy and civilization, Earth Day is a day to observe the crucifixion of their savior, in real time. Nobody wants to see that.

Earth Day didn’t start out as a depressing holiday. When we first established Earth Day, we thought that a day to celebrate the environment would help us re-prioritize our values and change our culture to meet the challenges of the looming crisis. Those were hope-filled times. We were all really high on LSD, and we thought we could do anything if we just celebrated it enough.

Forty years later, we can’t say “We didn’t know.” Today, the truth stares us in the face. We know we’re killing the planet. We know that we’re destabilizing the future, and we know that it’s killing us, but we don’t know how to stop. Forty years ago we had some ideas about how we could apply the brakes, and turn things around, perhaps even before it was too late. Today, we’re out of ideas. Nothing we’ve tried works. We’ve won a few battles, but we’re still losing the war, and losing it faster than ever. A recent survey estimates that we’ve lost half of the Earth’s biodiversity since the first Earth Day.

 

Not only have we failed to stop the environmental destruction, we’ve failed to slow its acceleration. We have failed, as a culture, to meet our most pressing existential threat. Knowing is not enough. Understanding does not help, and the more we know, the more we realize that it’s worse that we feared, and harder to change than we ever imagined. Against the hard truth of the environmental crisis, the myths of our culture unravel like a cheap sweater.

Today, we can look back on the whole history of civilization since the agricultural revolution, and project forward our global environmental impacts. From this perspective, we can see, pretty clearly, I’m afraid, that the costs of civilization far outweigh the benefits. What’s worse, the benefits of civilization lie mostly in the past, while the costs of civilization loom large over our future. After centuries of secular skeptical scientific inquiry and bold technological innovation, the only thing we know for sure is that everything we know about how to live on planet Earth is wrong.

How do you turn that into a holiday? …that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself? Some people still do the Earth Day festivals, but, you know, any excuse for a party. So go ahead, enjoy the music,

eat the organic veggie hippie food,

shop for fair-trade, creatively recycled handicrafts…

…and try not to think about it too much, because, believe me, you don’t want to know.

We don’t need another depressing holiday to remind us of how we’ve failed as a culture. We need to pick a day to take back our lives from the economic machine that consumes us all, and the environment around us. We need a global Day Off, just to remember what life is all about, and if people like having a Day Off, just to enjoy life, maybe we can stretch it to a week.

What’s a Picture Worth

photo credit: Thadeus Greenson

I noticed this image most recently in the North Coast Journal, but I’ve seen it, in one variation or another, in most of our local media outlets. Pretty much anytime the cops evict people from an “illegal” encampment, the press report appears beneath, or at least includes, a picture of a trash strewn field. We treat human beings like garbage. We force them into impossible conditions, harass them, abuse them, and then forcibly evict them. Then we show the picture of the trash strewn field, as though the purpose of the whole cruel, violent, unconscionable operation were to clean-up litter.

That picture is enough to incapacitate most liberals, who’s feeble minds freeze at the sight of it, caught in the cognitive dissonance between wanting to help the poor, and wanting to protect the environment. Liberals like to think that they are smarter than gun-toting, bible-thumping, immigrant-bashing red-neck conservatives, but they’re not, not by a long shot, and liberals fall for this stupidity every time.

Liberals watch well-fed, well-equipped and well-armed police officers forcibly evict the most wretched of the wretched from the most squalid of squalid, and treat them as though their condition amounted to criminal behavior, and the cops say “See, it’s not about the violent oppression of local citizens; it’s about cleaning up the environment.”

Liberals hear that and think, “Look at all that litter. That’s a real problem. I hate litterbugs.”

Fascists 1, People 0.

In truth, it’s worse than that. It’s about economic pressures forcing all of us into impossible situations. It’s about watching our neighbors crumble under the stress, and then stepping around them, and avoiding their gaze. It’s about looking around, and wondering “How did it come to this?”

 

“I know! You can tell. Look at that.” the guy would say, flipping to another picture, and then showing it to the person, adding, “Have you ever seen that much of anything come out of a dog.”

“Ewww” the person would say.

He mounted some of the pictures on poster-board and brought them to town meetings, and he regularly called our community radio station to tell us, angrily, always angrily, that those people living down on the river bar were ruining our community.

To be fair, the guy did clean-up a hell of a lot of garbage, and he did pay a some of the people living in these encampments to fill bags with garbage and clean-up the area. I know he cleaned-up a lot of trash, because he would leave impressively large piles of it along Redwood Dr. between Redway and Garberville. He used these massive pyramids of garbage as fund-raising tools, to solicit donations from passing motorists. A lot of people supported this man’s efforts with cash donations, even though he offered no accounting of how much money he raised, or how he spent it.

I cheered when he moved out of the area. He rubbed me the wrong way for three reasons: 1. He was always angry. 2. He blamed poor people. 3. His wife sold real estate, and he had a contract to clean-up foreclosed-on houses after the housing bubble burst. In other words, he and his wife, made money by making people homeless. Still, I felt sorry for him, in a way.

I could see that the guy was genuinely upset. He wasn’t happy. He looked like his head was about to explode. You could tell that it was more than he could take. He could not fathom the depth of the problem, and it all came out as displaced aggression. I can relate. It’s fucking brutal out there, and we’re all in over our heads. We’re all looking for someone to blame.

 

Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame immigrants, Muslims, women, liberals, the media, “welfare queens,” the poor, and anyone else they find, and all of those people blame the government. We all know it isn’t working, but we all blame different people for it. Our problems are much bigger than these petty quarrels. Much, much bigger.

For instance,when it comes to housing, we have two choices:

1. Standard Housing, which costs an astronomical amount of money, requires ridiculous amounts of maintenance, and practically demands a high-consumption lifestyle.
2. Homelessness, which is ridiculously cruel.

Between those two ridiculous options, we have nothing. We know from statistics, that most people who live in Humboldt County cannot afford a home here. Either they spend more than they can afford on housing, skimping on necessities like food, medicine and utilities, while they work themselves to death, or they find themselves without housing and learn to survive that way.

They’re both shitty options, and I wouldn’t even call it a choice. More like, you try Option 1. You give it your best shot. If things don’t go well, you discover Option 2. Meanwhile, if you listen to the County Supes, the Eureka City Council, and their special consultant on homelessness for long, you realize that government will never solve this problem. In fact, the government exists specifically to create this problem, which is why there are cops out there evicting people from their squalid makeshift camps in the first place.

It’s not working. Government doesn’t work. Democracy doesn’t work. If you think the 2016 presidential election will change anything, you’re an idiot. Were you born yesterday? Don’t you remember all of that “Hope and Change” bullshit. Democracy doesn’t work. It never has. Stop believing in it. Stop teaching it to your children. In fact, stop having children, because you have nothing to teach them, and no future to offer them.

Capitalism doesn’t work. Capitalism gave us Global Warming, endless war, and poverty. Civilization doesn’t work. Civilization gave us overpopulation, deforestation and the extinction crisis. Technology won’t save us either.

 

A hundred years ago, we built innovative new technologies that allowed us to exploit the Earth’s resources more efficiently. We built new mining equipment culminating in the giant drag-lines used in mountaintop removal coal mine operations. We developed new oil technologies, leading to innovations like the Deep Water Horizon deep sea oil drilling platform, and the latest craze sweeping the nation, “Fracking.” Inventions like the chainsaw literally changed the face of the Earth. Today, we see the disastrous consequences of the enormous success of these technologies all around us.

Right now, technology revolves around exploiting you, the user. How are they doing on that? Do you think there’s still room for improvement? Is there anything left of you? I wonder. No, technology won’t save you. There’s no “app” for that. We inhabit a culture that has run out of options. No one, sees any realistic hope that things will get better, and it only goes downhill from here. That’s the story.

When you see cops intimidating, harassing and evicting people who have nothing, and nowhere to go, you are looking at the end of civilization. You are watching the interests of capital, crush your neighbors last refuge, and pitch it into a dumpster. That picture shows the brutality of the system, and that’s the picture that tells the story.

When you see that debris strewn field, it means they missed the story completely. It’s like they went to cover the Superbowl, but the only picture we see is the empty stadium, strewn with beer cups and fast-food wrappers. Unless they wanted to remind us that sports fans are a bunch of drunken slobs, which is true of most of us, by the way, they missed the story.

…after the tailgate party

Information On the Internet, Always Consider the Source.

I hear a lot of people lament the enormous quantity of questionably researched, grossly speculative and patently false information posted on the internet, as though “quality of information” were the primary obstacle to making “smart decisions.” If you ask me, people don’t make bad decisions because they lack information. People make bad decisions because they lack courage and imagination. The blather they see on the internet distracts them from this fundamental truth, and that’s why they spend so much time looking at useless information on line.

I’m not saying that the internet is a terrible thing. The internet is a terrible thing, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about information, now. Long before we had the internet, we had information. The problem with information, is that it is always, “in formation.” The truth never appears “in formation.” There’s always more to the truth than can fit “in formation.” Besides that, information only appears “in formation” because it has an agenda. Reality doesn’t become information without the intentional efforts of someone with at least a point of view, if not a scheme, and information always conceals at least as much as it reveals.

The problems of information becomes compounded on the internet, because, with the internet, we increasingly replace reality with information, and increasingly, information becomes our most familiar environment. None of what you see on the internet is real or true. At best, what you see on the internet reflects reality, but not without distortion, and the distortion generally reflects the dominant misconceptions of our times. In other words, the internet reflects a view of the world, not as it is, but as the least imaginative among us, imagine it to be.

Personally, I don’t think we have a problem with good information vs bad information, I think we have entirely too much information, and we make dumber and dumber decisions all the time. In this avalanche of information, collectively, we are losing our grip on reality. Nothing makes sense anymore. You can’t trust anything you read, and everything is more complicated, and way weirder, than you can imagine. That’s the truth, but here are a couple of examples.

I bought a pair of shoes online. I had lots of “good” information” about the shoes. I knew how much they sold for in six other stores. I knew who made them, where they were made, and what they were made from. All of this information came from reliable sources. Most of it was verified by multiple sites. When I placed my order, I knew I had found the right shoe at the right price. Of course, when they arrived, they fit poorly and hurt my feet.

I had plenty of information about the shoes, good reliable information, convincing information, in fact. That is one big problem with information on the internet. Most of the solid, reliable, truthful information that you find on the internet, has no other purpose than to convince you to do something stupid, like buy a pair of shoes without trying them on first. Sometimes the devil is in the details, but sometimes the details just serve to distract you from the stupidity of the whole idea.

We should never forget that the “whole idea” behind the internet was to insure that the people in control of the US strategic nuclear weapons arsenal, and the rest of the US military, can send and receive coded commands from anywhere in the world, via a ridiculously redundant, high-speed computer network, mostly paid-for by the private sector. If that’s why we have the internet in the first place, how good can any of the information on it really be?

On the other hand, before you knock the wacko, tinfoil hat wearing, conspiracy theorists you find online, consider this:

At the moment, I’m building a modular analog synthesizer, from scratch, at home, in my spare time. If you’ve never heard of such a thing, a modular analog synthesizer is a kind of electronic musical instrument. The original Moog synthesizer was a modular analog synthesizer.

Mine won’t be this big.

In essence, a modular analog synthesizer is a collection of electronic circuits that either produce an audio signal, or change an audio signal in some way, all mounted in a box so that you can easily configure them any way you like.

mine won’t be this fancy

There are thousands of different circuits that produce or change an audio signal. The process of building a modular analog synthesizer involves building a collection of these circuits that will work together to create the palette of sounds that you want to hear. To build the circuit, it helps to have a schematic.

This is exactly the kind of project where the internet can be enormously helpful. I found thousands of schematics online. However, one of the circuits I want in my synthesizer is a white noise generator. White noise sounds like the wind when it’s filtered properly. It also adds breathiness to flute-like sounds and can even replace a snare drum hit when it’s gated right. I found about a dozen schematics for white noise generators online.

Several of these schematics came from very reliable sources, including colleges and universities. Apparently a lot of students have been assigned the task of building a white noise generator, which they use later in the semester as a piece of test equipment. Unfortunately, none of the white noise schematics I downloaded from these prestigious sources, worked, when I built them on a breadboard.

These were not complicated circuits. I know I had them wired exactly as shown on the schematic. I tried five different noise circuits, five different ways, and I could not get one of them to make a speaker go “Hisssssss.” like it was supposed to. Frustrated, I went back to the internet to look for some more schematics, and I found this one.

This is the only white noise circuit I’ve seen that uses an LM386 audio amplifier chip. That caught my attention because I’m familiar with the LM386, and just happened to have one lying around. I used one as the on-board amplifier on my “record-breaking guitar,” and lots of electronic toys use them because they are loud little amplifiers for their size.

The LM386 is a little noisy for a lot of musical applications, but for this particular one, noise is what we’re after, so I built it on the breadboard, and it worked. I was thrilled! I tweaked the design a bit to suit my application (mine will be the only white noise generator I’ve seen with “overdrive”). Once I had the noise circuit working the way I like it, I soldered it together on a piece of circuit-board.

I found that schematic by doing a Google “image” search. Google presented me with a page full of schematics, completely removed from the context into which they had been placed. Ecstatic to have finally completed a working noise generator, I became idly curious about why the designer of this circuit showed it connecting to a radio antenna rather than a speaker or an amplifier, so I visited the page where the image originated.

As I read the text on the page I discovered the reason why the designer of this circuit chose to attach a radio antenna to a circuit built for the audio frequency range.  He observed that when he attached a loop antenna, instead of a speaker to this device, the white noise generator caused interference on his radio, throughout the AM band. He then reasoned, rightly, I think, that if this audio circuit caused interference to an AM radio signal, it must produce white noise that extends well beyond the audio frequency range, and that the LM386 must be capable of amplifying signals at frequencies far above those of normal human hearing, and well into the radio frequency range, something I did not know.

He installed this device in his home, attached to a large radio antenna, to scramble the Very Low Frequency and Low Frequency radio waves that he believes are being used, against his will, to reprogram his mind.

Apparently, a lot of people believe that radio waves can be used in this way, and that someone, or something, is using radio waves in ways that cause some people a lot of psychic distress. Some of these people line their walls and ceiling with foil, or wear tinfoil hats to block these unwanted signals. This syndrome is so common that it has become a stereotype, even an archetype. Who hasn’t heard of the tinfoil-hat-wearing crackpot?

This man chose a more rational, science-based approach to the problem of unwanted radio-waves than Reynolds Wrap, and instead, designed and built a very clever, original, device from common, easy to find parts. Myself, I’ve never met a radio-wave I didn’t like, and have never experienced the problems these unfortunate people describe, but I can attest to the fact that his machine really works.

If I had read his web page first, I probably would not have built the machine, but because I built his machine first, and it worked, I think he’s a pretty bright guy, and consider him a reliable source for technical information. After all, he solved my problem and taught me a thing or two about electronics in the process. If you, or anyone you know experiences distress caused by Low Frequency or Very Low Frequency radio waves, I recommend you try his device.

So, the next time you find yourself deriding the veracity of information you find on the internet, remember that the truth is stranger than you think, crazy people aren’t necessarily stupid.  Then ask yourself what the hell you are doing online.

A Species in Adolescence

In separate interactions with two different liberal lawyers, recently, I heard the same phrase uttered as an excuse for human caused environmental devastation. It sounded all too familiar. It’s a deceptively simple phrase, but it conceals one of the fundamental myths of this new science-based religion called “Secular Humanism.” Both of these gentlemen expressed this phrase as a personal belief. “I just think that we are a species in the midst of adolescence.” or “I believe that we are a species in adolescence,” was more or less how they put it. That’s a strange thing to believe.

Secular humanists have adopted this strange belief in the adolescence of the human species because of their strange belief in science. Believing in science is pretty weird too, if you ask me. Not that anyone did, but still, it’s one thing to learn about the world using the scientific method, and it’s something else altogether to “believe in” science.

Secular humanists think that our objective, scientific understanding of the universe is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They see the emergence of science as a guiding light that will see us through this difficult phase of our evolution, our adolescence, if you will. We must be doing something right, they reason, if we can put a nuclear powered car on Mars, calculate the moment of the Big Bang to the millisecond and find the goddamn Higgs boson, and they assume there is a point to it all. They see the scientific viewpoint as superior. Our best hope for survival, as a species, they will tell you, is more science and technology. That’s what I mean when I say that Secular Humanists “believe in science.”

Unfortunately, the facts on the ground tell us that most of today’s really pressing crises originated with some new scientific development, and the technology it inspired. For instance we face Global Warming because of certain developments in chemistry, a few mechanical inventions, and a hell of a lot of marketing. The knowledge that science gives us, has led to horrific disasters and environmental devastation around the globe. From the spectre of nuclear warfare to global climate change, to overpopulation, every new scientific discovery leads to new technology, which creates a new crisis.

We tell ourselves that all of this destruction is part of our “education” as a species. We tell ourselves that we are a good species, and we are on the right track, but we just need a little more time to reach our maturity. If we think about human beings as an “adolescent species” does that also mean that we should also think of the genocide of the American Indians as a college “panty raid,” slavery as a sort of fraternity hazing, and the whole environmental crisis as just a nasty hangover from doing too many Jagger-bombs at that kegger last night? Perhaps we should just say: “boys will be boys.” about these dark chapters in in our history, because these were just the youthful indiscretions of an adolescent species, and someday, we’ll grow out of it, get a job, and settle down.

Of course, if we actually applied what we know about science to this new myth, we’d realize that adolescence happens to individuals, not species. Individuals reach a stage where they no longer need the direct care and supervision of their parents, but have very little experience to draw from in their encounters in the real world. Adolescence never happens to a whole species at once. Every species is fully mature at the moment it evolves into existence. There are no “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” in nature.

Species evolve in response to the pressures and limitations placed on them by their environment. If the species survives, it is only because it’s particular adaptations are suited to the challenges of the environment they face at that moment. Species don’t evolve with adaptations suited to some future world, or with adaptations that take a few millennium to refine. The idea of a species in adolescence has no basis in science at all.

Every generation of every species comes with a fully mature set of time-tested adaptations that prepare it for survival within the limits set by its environment. That’s why you will never hear a biologist say, of an invasive species, for instance: “Well, Zebra mussels are an adolescent species. They want to get out and see the world, but we think that eventually they will return to their home range and settle down as the species matures.”

…or of an endangered species: “We think that the declining numbers of Northern spotted owls in Northern California forests is the result of the owls engaging in risky behavior. We think the owls are ‘acting out’ in reaction to losing so much of their habitat to logging. Spotted owls are an adolescent species, and we think this is just a temporary phase. We just need to give the owls some space, and let nature take its course.” Nor will you find any such nonsense in biology textbooks.

Why then, do you suppose, has this idea of an adolescent species, homo adolescence, if you will, has become such a widespread belief among Secular Humanists, who, because of their high regard for science, should know better?

It might be because Secular Humanists, like most people, prefer literary metaphor to real science. It might be because most Secular Humanists just haven’t examined that aspect of their belief system very closely, or it could be because Secular Humanists simply cannot face the fact that we are not looking at the youthful indiscretion of a species nearing maturity, but instead, we are witnessing the collapse of a suicidal culture, that is taking science, democracy, all of our beloved technology, and everything that makes us feel superior to the rest of nature, with it. The real answer, of course, is “all of the above.”

In truth, we’re a great species! We’re a mature, time tested species, that has achieved global distribution. There’s nothing wrong with us as a species. As a species, we’ve developed thousands of cultures, suited to life in the place they originated. We just happened to be born into one particularly destructive culture, that has already destroyed an alarming amount of the world’s biologic, as well as human, cultural diversity. There’s nothing wrong with us as people, but the way we live, the way we think, and the way we see ourselves in relationship to the rest of nature couldn’t be more wrong. If we hope to survive, as a species, our culture has got to change.

On The Money, It’s Smart to be Dumb

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

It’s Smart to be Dumb

Some people say my writing is dumb. They say it’s base, vulgar, silly, low-brow, sophomoric, knuckle-dragging crap, and it really hurts my feelings. Did they really have to say it was crap? But screw them! They think writing should be sophisticated, restrained, measured…”smart”. They want to read stuff that makes them feel smart. Really, they are no smarter than I am, and I’m as dumb as they come.

 

A lot of people like to read stuff that makes them feel smarter. Then they like to make a big deal about how much they know. They post degrees on the wall that proclaim that they know damn near everything there is to know about X. They make such a big deal about it that they forget how fucking boring it all is.

 

Why are people so obsessed with being smart? … as opposed to being, say, competent? Why does our culture value “smart” so highly? Look at what “smart” does: Albert Einstein, the smartest guy ever, what did he do? He invented the atomic bomb. Rocket scientists, what do they do? They make missiles that carry atomic bombs and spy satellites. Who else is smart? Derivatives traders? Our elected leaders? Just “smart” people doing “smart” things.

 

We can’t all be smart. “Smart” is like a sport. It’s a contest. You only get called “smart” for being smarter than normal. Smarter than normal people go to college, study physics and economics, which prepares them for a career of being “smart” for the rest of us. They become the “experts” and “professionals” who run our businesses, guide our national policies, and engineer the machinery of our society. In other words, they make most of our decisions for us.

 

Meanwhile, they expect the rest of us, the “dumb” working-class, to be “competent” for them. They expect us, to prepare their food, clean their clothes, fix their cars, build their homes, install their high-speed internet, even raise their kids.

 

The working-class has always done a great job of this, by the way. The working-class have proven their competence again and again. We can build homes a million different ways. We can build and maintain cars, electric cars, steam cars, diesel cars and gas cars, cheap cars and luxury cars. We can cook to all tastes, with a world of traditions to draw from. We have to be flexible, because what we do is rarely our own choice. We mostly make the stuff that the rich want, and that “smart” people think the rest of us need, want and can afford.

 

While the working-class has, historically, done a fantastic job of adapting to a ghastly array of horrible situations in this endeavor, the “smart” people have, in contrast, done a spectacularly terrible job of engineering our society in a way that meets people’s needs without destroying the planet. Who can we blame, for so many competent people, living in a world so full of extreme poverty and tremendous waste? The “smart” people of course.

 

How did the “smart” people manage to screw it up so bad. To be fair, it’s not exactly the “smart” people, who make all of the decisions. They work for the “greediest” people. It’s the “greediest” people who have been sifting out the smarter people all along. That’s why they built schools in the first place. That, and to get the rest of us used to doing what we are told for no good reason.

 

The “smart” people all believe, however, that somehow, through their collective “smartness”, and with the backing of the “greediest” people, or at least big bucks from the taxpayers, they can engineer a solution to all of our problems. They all believe in a technological solution. A high-tech solution, that only “smart” people could ever figure out.

 

They continue to believe this despite their unbroken string of catastrophic failures. Throughout history, from plagues of locusts and frogs resulting from, then new, agricultural techniques, to war, famine, the black plague, crowd diseases, genocide, slavery, sweatshops, habitat loss, pollution, and global climate change, to name a few. These problems have all resulted from technological advancements that were supposed to make life better for everyone.

 

Fifty years ago, most of us believed in them too. Sure we had just been through the most horrific technological war in the history of the world, culminating the explosion of the first atomic bomb, and all that, after living through “The Great Depression” the very first global economic collapse. Fifty years ago, we still trusted “smart” people, in service to the”greediest” people to engineer a society for us. All we asked in return was “jobs”.

 

They gave us suburban sprawl, smog, pollution, burning rivers, habitat loss, inequality, poverty, more bloody technological wars, and global climate crisis. Do you still believe in them? Do you still believe that “smart” people, in service of the “greediest” people will ever engineer a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t make a bigger problem? Do you want to bet money on it? Do you want to bet your life on it?

 

You see, without “smart” people, the “greediest” people don’t wield nearly as much power, and without the “greediest” people, being “smart” really isn’t that important. This bears repeating: Without “smart” “greed” has little power, without “greed”, “smart” is not very important.

 

What really matters in life, is competence, knowing how to build your own home, clothe yourself, feed yourself, and safely dispose of your waste. Everyone should know that stuff. Competence is its own reward, and involves no competition. You don’t have to be more competent than your neighbor, you just have to be competent enough to meet your own needs.

 

If you happen to be “smart”, do something fun with it, something delightful. Don’t just whore it out to the highest bidder, just so you can afford to pay someone to clean your toilet for you. How smart is that? I think we’d all be better off, if we didn’t worry so much about how “smart” we are, and worked a little more on our competence.

 

As far as writing goes, I believe that if you can’t find a dumb way of saying something, maybe it doesn’t need to be said at all.

On The Money, Cultural Bankruptcy

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

Cultural Bankruptcy

We hear talk about financial bankruptcy all the time. Whether its people losing their homes in the

foreclosure epidemic, California’s debt crisis or the current wrangling over raising the national debt ceiling, everyone it seems lives on borrowed money these days, and no one looks to have any prospects of ever paying it off. Every year we work harder, make less, and get further in debt while a handful of people grow ever more obscenely rich.

Increasingly, we live in a world of robber barons and serfs. How ironic that the crowning achievement of the secular, democratic and scientific revolution, born of “The Enlightenment” in Renaissance times, is to deliver us into a new, global “Dark Age”. Frankly, our present situation makes the Medieval Dark Ages seem pretty bright to me.

The average American works way more than the average medieval peasant, just to get by. Medieval peasants also had more flexibility in their workday. With no time-card to punch, lots of holidays and little direct supervision, medieval peasants enjoyed significantly more freedom in their daily schedules than modern Americans.

Medieval peasants never submitted to drug testing, and often, more often than not, drank on the job. Compared to American workers, medieval peasants were unruly slackers. I think we could learn a thing or two from medieval peasants about how to improve our quality of life, and from my present perspective, I take a pretty dim view of this whole “enlightenment” thing.

This is what I mean by “cultural bankruptcy”. Our culture has failed catastrophically. It has failed socially, economically, environmentally, philosophically and spiritually. We all know this horse won’t carry us any further. We can stand here and flog the dead horse, or we can move on. When the life of a medieval peasant looks better than your real future, I say its time to move on.

I don’t mean to diminish the plight of medieval peasants. All of that drought, famine, plague and the Spanish Inquisition must have sucked., but the enlightenment gave us genocide, slavery, sweatshops, mechanized warfare, more genocide and nuclear weapons. Let’s not diminish our own plight, just because its veiled in happy advertizing, and we’re used to it. We deserve better, and our current culture just doesn’t deliver. Its time to cut our losses.

Original painting by Joe Coleman

Wouldn’t you trade global climate change and ecosystem collapse for a good old fashioned famine and drought? If your crops failed, at least there were still fish in the sea. As we harvest the last deep water Peruvian sea bass, while we BP the Fukushima out of the oceans, we face a bleaker future than any peasant could imagine. If you want to know who had it worse than medieval peasants, look to the inhabitants of Easter Island. Now think about a global Easter Island scenario. Yeah, compared to that, I’ll take a little famine and drought any day. Would you choose bubonic plague over cancer? Anthrax over AIDS? I’ll call that a toss up.

Not that we can just go back to the middle ages, or would even want to, just that the foundational principals of our modern culture, that seemed to hold so much promise 500 yrs ago, have crapped the bed on us. Our bold plan to take charge of our destiny through secular democratic government, scientific investigation and technological innovation and a free market, has only exacerbated, not solved the problems we faced as medieval peasants.

Lets look at what’s become of these “Great Ideas” of our culture, starting with…

…Democracy. I’m so sick of democracy, and this idea that we should all just get along. I don’t want to “get along” with everybody, and I’m sure not going along with your stupid idea about how we can all work together. If we weren’t all so damned eager to work together, even on the most insane ideas, we wouldn’t have nuclear weapons or foreign wars. Next to all the ugly, violent and murderously evil things we’ve done as a nation, and all the millions of people who’ve perished, in our efforts to “spread democracy” around the world, don’t the Crusades seem quaint and charming by comparison?

 

So, lets stop using this word “we” to talk about all 300,000,000 of us who live South of Canada and North of Mexico, like we’re all on the same team. We’re not all on the same team. Forget about compromise. Forget about unity. Define your faction, and work for your own best interest.

I know you really didn’t believe in democracy any more, anyway, so lets slaughter the next sacred cow, science and technology. While we ridicule Christian fundamentalists for “living in the Dark Ages” because they believe the creation myth in the bible, we all “know” the universe exploded out of nothingness in an event called “the big bang.” We all “know” that E=MC2, but none of us can really fathom what it means.

Odd, isn’t it, that ancient agriculturalists gave us the garden of Eden, and research that lead to the first atomic bomb gave us “the big bang.” What we see has way more to do with how we see than it does with what there is. About 98% of what there is remains completely incomprehensible to us, so it makes no sense to draw philosophical conclusions from the 2% we do comprehend. That 2% allows us to predict enough physical events to put a man on the moon and build powerful computers you can hold in your fingertips, but just because that little gadget in your hand impresses you, that doesn’t mean you, or any other human knows how the universe works., or has any business fucking with it.

Capitalism, that’s easy. When the banks got bailed, capitalism failed. If you didn’t know that capitalism was a scam before the economy collapsed, you do now.

Finally, lets assassinate Reason itself. They could have never convinced you to go along with this whole wretched system if you weren’t so reasonable. We dialogue, discuss, argue and debate everything in this culture, not that it does any good. Once you’ve agreed to solve a problem rationally, through open dialogue, you’ve lost. A decent rhetorician can make a convincing case for any position, including the ridiculous notion that endless hours heated vitriolic debate would be preferable to a quick decisive duel.

I really don’t think that medieval times were so great, quite the contrary. I just think that if the “Enlightenment” has made life worse rather than better, we should probably ditch it. With the collapse of the middle-class and the growing income disparity between rich and poor, we should face the fact “The Enlightenment” really didn’t solve anything. In the ’70s, in the song, “Working Class Hero” John Lennon sang “you’re still fucking peasants as far as I see.” Today, we should be so lucky.