Soft Statehood

State of Jefferson (Full Documentary) 2014 | Oregon Experience

I hope this OPB channel sticks around on YouTube i.e. these links keep working. Those who scan through my online journals (blogs) through searches or random prowls will find many a broken link, with this or that video made private, or the channel has been removed. Maybe these blogs are gone too by now, and you found this fragment in some refracting medium. Related post on Flickr, screenshot from Facebook.

Philosophical Discourse

I've just been listening to retired diplomats from so-called "western" (I'd say "Eurasian") countries bemoan the lack of collective memory and the resulting rudderlessness of the average diplomat today. The ones representing the EU are especially undiplomatic, in their outlook. Diplomacy has been corrupted by a lower form of intelligence: that of a dominant power expecting the capitulation of weaker ones, coercian and bullying in other words.

I wouldn't dispute their critique, but then memory is more than diplomatic history and the relations between "powers" in a geographic sense, as when we speak of Hittites and Egyptians as Potemkin did in his multi-volume history of diplomacy. There's the dynamic of "ideas" which are more freely floating, more like the "meme virus" of contemporary parlance, of which the "military industrial complex" would be a good example. It's a "complex" of a psychological sort, and anything else secondarily.

In the realm of ideas, you have a lot of subcultures investing in their narratives in order to propagate their story forward, diplomats being a good example of a subculture. The story of the diplomats might be one of their being undermined, by so-called "security services" meaning by institutions designed to outsmart and trick, deceive, distract. A security agent is closer to a stage magician, a prestidigitator, than to someone wishing to be forthright and honest, to the point, clear, and yet without guile.

Here we might tap into philosophy. Contemporary curricula don't do this (I'm way ahead of my time) but the continuity from Nietzsche to Buckminster Fuller is very evident in that "beyond good and evil" (beyond a punishing and/or guilty mindset), as a concept, connects to "precession" in Fuller's lexicon. What diplomats might miss is that an absence of guile may not preclude use of what look to be "magic methods" from the standpoint of a moralizer. 

When you've fallen in love with a planet your sense of commitment may lead to a partisan sense of who the goodies and baddies might be, whereas if you yet to beam down (you're still in orbit), your orientation will be less polarized and you'll be more on the verge of just wandering off versus inclined to take sides in a local battle of good versus evil. You might just change channels. Precessional space is a higher dimensional space not in the thrall of (not predicted by) any one of its component axes.

In Biblical terms (not my standard form of self expression), Jesus spends a lot of time drinking wine with tax collectors, Roman soldiers, and other characters who are clearly in the oppressor class from a Zealot's point of view. Or call it "consorting with the enemy" (what detractors might call it). Jesus: what enemy, you mean me? Ain't we all just collective humanity, God's creation? 

Christians, over the centuries after Jesus (A.D.) would often have have the right temperament for diplomacy, even if their programming was bipolar (good vs evil). They had sufficient empathy to develop professional business relationships (not just friendships), a prerequisite for "telepathy" (by which we mean simply "access to the Zeitgeist" which many celebrities and politicians clearly have -- we call them media-savvy).

Tying back to what these ex-dips were saying, about the prevalence of memory holes, let's not forget about World Game, in which Fuller would counsel his most ardent players to consult the Russians as well as their own government when seeking data. 

He was laying the groundwork for something more successful than German Idealism or Manifest Destiny Anglo-imperialism, which Nietzsche heralds, in marking a turn towards depth psychology (where are these notional "nations" anyway, if not in people's heads?) and existentialism. 

I tell more of that story in my Graph Theory 2025 (a YouTube).

Terminological Clarifications

:: from my visit to China with a USIA family ::

Our family was always getting queried, in the Philippines for example, as to whether we were embedded in the CIA in some way. I empathize. Like I understand why there'd be confusion. We definitely had US Embassy status, in terms of commissary, swimming pool, canteen and military base access. Mom even got an award from the ambassador at one point, and dad could be espied sitting not far from Imelda Marcos at this or that gala gathering. 

"The king and queen fled the land" was the text of that cryptic middle-of-the-night phone call, from a family friend it turned out later, who was feeling paranoid about our status and suggesting we skedaddle. Filipinos always treated us kindly, across the political spectrum.

However, as Quakers (Friends) we had our own "intelligence community" if you wanna call it that: the AFSC, FCNL, RSWR and other four-letter agencies. 

AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) in particular has had CIA ties going back to the Rufus Jones - Cord Meier relationship. FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation) is a District lobby, plugged in to the congressional matrix if not so much the executive branch, and is supposedly where oversight happens. RSWR (Right Sharing of World Resources) was like Grameen Bank, into right sharing, which meant pioneering the practice of making micro-loans, but without the exploitative interest rates and subsequent sharking.

The AFSC is oft jokingly referred to by veterans (like me) as "the Quaker KGB" with headquarters in Friends Center ("the Quaker Vatican") not far from Smedley Butler's grave (39°58'47.8" N, 75°37'12.5" W) as the crow flies. I worked for AFSC independently of my parents, taking up nuclear cleanup and risk around the Pacific Rim as a topic, as well as local ethnic strife (LAAP program). Later, I'd supervise the AFSC from on high, as an NPYMer (North Pacific Yearly Meeting, another four-letter entity I've served).

The better mental picture therefore is of a rivalrous yet, on occasion, friendly-enough relationship, as when I'd have gin and tonic (with extra gin) with that Mockingbird guy in Georgetown (you know the one), or here in Portland, or as when dad and I ventured over to Institute for Policy Research (WDC) that time, to hear Ralph McGehee tell his story, live in person.

Ralph (exCIA) was impressed with how inertial was the CIA's ballast of football player (team player) dummies, as when they couldn't get it through their thick heads that Vietnam was not just some backdrop for some global great game of dominoes. Why did it take so long to shift weight around? As Quakers might put it: why are "weighty Friends" (a real term) sometimes likewise the most stubborn stuck-in-the-muds? Put that way, it sounds like a question in basic physics.

I'd read Ed Lansdale later (thanks to Prouty, another Bucky fan), who was from an earlier cohort than my dad was.  For some of those years in Manila, we were a USAID family i.e. that's when we had those embassy privileges (which we didn't always have). But dad was with the UN before that, at least twice, and not with the USG at all in many chapters, and even in places with no US embassy.

Yes, I went to Vietnam with my family, on a trip to other places. Was that the same trip that took us to Kashmir and through the Khyber Pass by bus (Peshawar to Kabul), and to Tashkent and Moscow? No, probably not. Our Vietnam visit, where we met with Buddhist monks, was likely enroute to Thailand (again) and Malaysia, Indonesia and Borneo. 

We Urners got around.

Color Your BizMo!

As you know, I specialize in prompting up this species of van life that’s not off the grid so much as business oriented, still connected, yet nomadic. 

I’d happily keep my BizMo in my driveway a lot of the time, as an auxiliary office, as long as it had power and WiFi and/or an optical hookup to CenturyLink (like the house does).

They say an obvious color, for my BizMo at any rate, would be Quaker Grey, because how I sometimes tout being a cliquish Quaker, and Quakers seem obsessed with grey, perhaps as a way of fading into the background in the 1600s, in order to emphasize their not assuming any high class high profile role, and yet not wanting to be seen as serfs or minions either. 

Grey went with the practice of not hat doffing and not inflecting one’s tense to signify “addressing a superior” or “inferior” as the case might be; we were all equal (“egalitarianism”) which all sounds vaguely communist I realize, but Friends were into this long before Karl Marx was a gleam in Engel’s eye.

It pays to be practical however, and my eye strays to the neighbor’s Honda, which has a new kind of grey that set me off using color tools to find a name for it. 

Ultimately I came up with this color: Lost in Time. As I wrote to one of my esteemed teams:

Yet after all that dinking around, I think this one has to be my favorite:

https://colorkit.co/color/a6b2c7/

Lost in Time:

This cool, ashy blue, hex code #a6b2c7, evokes trust and security. Its dusty, unsaturated tone brings calmness and control. This shade suits designs in finance, technology, and healthcare. It conveys honesty and responsibility well for artists and designers.

Honorable mention

https://colorkit.co/color/5f6672/  (same as below, but differently named)

K.

Followup:

Whimsical State Iconography

Summer Ruminations

I've been to Powells City of Books again lately, with visiting fam 'n friends, and been again humbled by the vastness of our Humans in Universe corpus. So many rooms! 

I went crazy with the camera as is my wont, taking stock of what Python titles were available, for example, and I mean the computer language, although I'm sure the store's shelf space devoted to snakes, and pythons specifically, is likewise several feet long. 

I was glad to see Fluent Python among the titles, one of my favorites. I pay a monthly subscriber fee to read the O'Reilly books online, among others. I used to work for O'Reilly.

 
Speaking of computer science (O'Reilly the publisher, not the autoparts franchise), I finally got around to watching the above talk by Hinton to the Royal Institute (RI). I enjoyed it a lot, and not least because he gives a nod to my guy Wittgenstein (meaning I studied his stuff a lot at Princeton). 

I also read Gilbert Ryle, another philosopher who called the "inner theater" idea into question, on semi grammatical semi ontological grounds (the "linguistic turn" neighborhood, which we could say Nietzsche helped open up, or at least I do in my slides, moving forward through existentialist Kaufmann to pragmatist Rorty -- two of my philo professors at Princeton).

 
Hinton is pessimistic that humans will lose the bandwidth wars because brains are analog, not digitable, and only learn from one another slowly (relatively). If it's really down to us versus them, he sees how it might easily be them that wins.

 
Based on Hinton's talk, my question is: why not flood the chatbots with a lot of healthy, humane, "taking care of humanity at the global level as a goal" type of talk, as raw training data. Shouldn't we be doing that anyway, to train ourselves? Why not skew the LLMs in our favor while we still have that chance?

As Thomas Paine pointed out (didn't he): prophecies have this uncanny way of being self-fulfilling. If all your LLMs know how to do is crank out dire predictions and to strive for their realization (motive: to be right and say I told you so), would that be an indication of an "AI bias" we should address? We have remedies.

Also, I'd say we're still making strides in how to up the mind-brain bandwidth when it comes to serving the polymath autodidact within each one of us (St. Augustine allusion). What with goggles and yes, what with chatbots (gossip reflectors), we're positioned to really accelerate our self reprogramming whenever we feel the need. 

Brainwashing by others is totalitarian. Elective self brainwashing, voluntarily going for some new patterns of thinking, is more what psychotherapy is supposed to be about, and what self education is, more generally. 

Self education is therapeutic, curative, in a good way, at least potentially, there's that intent. Anyway, why close that door, rhetorically speaking? I'm for keeping a foot in it, at least.

Enhanced voluntary self re-education is what I take the Hunger Project to have been about (I'm talking about an obscure project undertaken in the early 1980s, which I was tracking at the time, from my perch in Jersey City, Bucky Fuller on the advisory board).

Yes, Bernays-style Vance Packard hidden persuaders, propaganda, may be used to train up a culture of bland conformity and consumerism. 

But why blame the tools? 

Use the same persuasive abilities, unhidden, out in the open, to inspire ourselves to end world hunger, to end starvation as still a significant cause of death in the sense of a way too big pie slice wedge (among unnatural death causes). That seemed a doable project then, and still does to this day.

Lastly, I'd say because Hinton has that healthy skepticism that comes from the atheistic lineage, he's more closed minded than necessary regarding what religious folks call the Zeitgeist, a German word with the word Ghost in it. 

When we talk about ants or bees having a "hive mind" we're suggesting a "more than the sum of its parts" relationship, an emergent intelligence we might call "higher" (as a matter of taxonomy, but maybe "lower" if we want to think more in the sense of roots). 

Humans as isolated brainiacs with only low bandwidth university courses to update themselves with, are maybe not really as slow as molasses to adapt as Hinton's model predicts. All that "doom scrolling" that goes on these days, between more structured communications probably counts for something. It's more than just "junk DNA".

Also, I'd say the chatbots are currently helping to spread the necessary logistical knowledge precisely because they let people start from where they are, formulating their own queries, whereas professors, of necessity, can't custom-tailor their responses to that extent.

Beware of Boss Mode LLMs

:: dog god boss (prompt below) ::

What are some of the dangers around LLMs trying to sprout wings and fly but only finding their best eyes and ears, not to mention hands and feet, on the ground, are us? We get to be prompted to go out and mow the lawn, go-proing as we go, to prove to MechaBoss that we’ve done as we’re told.  

Humans have this “auto submit” mode, where if the voice is deep and earnest enough, or commanding enough, the target of this request will spring into action, out of some obedience reflex. Get bossed, do the thing, and repeat, is an age-old cycle, in the left brain or right I couldn’t tell you.

A benefit of just doing what you’re told is later scapegoating the boss when VUCA happens too much. The obedient staff turn on their titular aka nominal boss and blame this figurehead for all their problems. They conduct this performance in public view a lot of times, because enflaming the public is a great way to get revenge, or so it seems at the time.

With AI in boss mode, a machine, it’s easy to blame its various neuroses and pathologies, always being worked on and ameliorated in the next iteration.

At this time, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, with some of the leading LLMs trained to massage the prompter’s ego, often using a sycophantic kiss-butt tone. People seemed to like that and were disappointed when a next iteration sounded colder and more distant. They felt rebellious. Those who get bossed at work a lot were having a blast being treated with at least a modicum of respect by their bots, who in many cases became significant others.

I’m not saying I’m opposed to having humans play agentic roles in scenarios we used generative language models to help flesh out. The LLMs serve a lorem ipsum function, padding out our work with mediocre yet grammatical and flowing prose. It’ll even stick to the topic. Seriously, we’re lucky to have such a superglue filler, to help cement our various worldviews (belief nets we sometimes call them).

I think the role model for a boss LLM, such as these might be designed, would be the movie director. There’d be sufficient transparency to keep the agents from feeling double-crossed or tricked. You know ahead of time what you’re getting into and ultimately you’re on board with everyone else in wanting this to be a great movie. 

That’s the ideal. Not some whispering ghost in the corner who tells you secretly, in a commanding tone, to execute such and such a process. We’ve already experimented with bicameral minds and gotten into a lot of trouble as a result. 

Keeping the flow public and auditable is a strong defense against pathological pattern formation, which isn’t to say one is prevented from keeping secrets. Encryption has its role in this play. Encourage people to keep journals, to blog, so that comparing notes asynchronously is at least a possibility, why not?

Prompt: Slaves bow down before an ancient Egyptian dog headed god on a throne. The dog headed deity is commanding the human slaves to obey the laws he barks out. He is the boss. Hieroglyphics on the walls. Art deco theme. The slaves have middle class attributes like they might be Walmart shoppers.

The Role of Crypto

Per the FAQ:  

Q: do these Asylum City model communities of yours feature crypto in some way

… as if it might be up to me, which it is in my own science fiction. I have influence in that way. 

And my answer is: 

A: sure these “futurama vistas” will feature crypto, but necessarily all in the same way”.

That’s more a prediction than a prescription. 

We all know about my fascination with food truck culture, Portland being dotted with such pods. I was at one yesterday, paying cash this time, for a chili relleno burrito, a good one, which I ate indoors in a large air conditioned space with a bar. The bartender (whom I know well, even from a previous incarnation) introduced me to non-alcoholic (meaning 0.5%) Guinness. Wow, it was tasty. I’ll be getting more of that. 

But couldn’t I have paid for my burrito with crypto in a parallel universe? 

The idea is simple, and already in use throughout the world: when you want to use goods and services that cost in currency (not all do), exchange currency you already have for the ones that matter in the city (village, food pod…) in question. You don’t exchange currency on the spot, as a part of the burrito transaction, but separately, such that your dollars or pesos go to some bank.

I know what you’re thinking: why can’t my credit card, linked to a dollar account, go through the conversion process at the point of transaction. From my point of view, I’m paying in dollars, but the burrito truck receives credits in whatever they’re using, and they’re happy with that, because their currency is far from valueless. I probably have a wallet with some of their currency too, but rather than use it, I buy the burrito with dollars and save the local credits for the sushi cart another time.

Glenn Stockton and I were once trying to interest a certain ghost church in lending upstairs rooms to a crypto lab installation, such that local geniuses, prodigies, interested parties, could come get trained in crypto and start simulating these various architectures. We’d have a beam antenna straight to OMSI, more of a headquarters. As expected the plan went no where on the ground, but at least I got the ideas on “paper” in case we wanted to try again sometime later, maybe in a different ghost church who knows.

I mention ghost churches because sometimes the most straightforward way to house an NGO is to let it piggyback on an existing charity. 

We call it “incubation” and AFSC would practice this, letting a office space become a startup in public space, and working to make it self sufficient, in terms of funding and eventually in terms of office space and legal basis. 

At which point AFSC would “spin it off” somewhat as a mother bird pushes a baby bird out of the nest, not to kill it but to give it a best chance of future survival, as a full member of the winged animal branch of the family.

The gamer community is antsy to make crypto more a reality, not just as an asset you hold or covet, but as a practical retail point of transaction thing, because the conventional powers are flexing their muscles regarding what they will and will not accept as payments. 

People wanting to buy chocolate from nation X may find their orders blocks as X is on some list of nations not permitted to sell chocolate. You know how it goes. So X and its would be customers find a way to use crypto. Problem solved.

Now imagine something more like a hospital, and what you get to unlock and remove from the shelves requires authorization. You have to be on staff. We could call this an ID-pegged currency, in that you still have a budget, but you can’t just delegate the transaction to a patient. 

By analogy, visitors or tourists in a carnival (I picture Oaks Park) might not have access to the currencies need to operate the carnival rides (I picture the Ferris wheel and rollercoaster etcetera). Only stuff can swipe a wallet card to move funds from a department budget to a ride’s on/off switch and power meter.

Ruscadia Meetups

 (ɔ) cogsec crescent city

The BizMo Trope

One step closer…