World Game

The fact that the old nation-state system has by now taken a back seat, in terms of what's driving world events, is not premised on any violent overthrow of national governments. The shift has been psychological.

As our global campus or spherical world game board comes into view, as the contextualizing stage, the concept of citizenship remains in play. Analogously, university students sometimes divide into "houses" such as the Greek letter labeled societies.

In a design-oriented curriculum, we study the possible trajectories for key ideas (such as citizenship) by consciously constructing science fiction simulations. How many citizenships might a player be allowed?

An individual currently has a right to Israeli citizenship if either parent is Israeli. Simply being born in Israel is no guarantee of citizenship. In the US system, in contrast, being born within the United States territories is sufficient to gain citizenship, but sometimes without federal voting rights. 

Might one attain citizenship without relocating to a specific area, as in the case of a diaspora nation (e.g. Tibet)?  In most current legal theories, "diaspora nations" are not recognized. However minors may be granted citizenship in a country without ever having set foot in said country, thanks to parentage.

The legal status of refugees is an issue around the world. When a Tibetan refugee is denied an Indian passport, and protests via the Indian legal system, we see ripple effects. The legal code is hardly static. Like software code, it continues to morph, which is why we encourage simulations (including in software) and intelligently anticipating (versus blindly reacting).

Desovereignization?

At what point do we acknowledge we might be living in a post nation-state world? 

There is no such point, no magical moment, nor would history predict any such broad agreement. 

When did the Roman Empire end? Historians do not require a specific date. The empire forked and dissipated over centuries. Charlamagne (circa 800 AD) considered himself a Roman emperor.

One story is we evolved to a next level of consciousness when we started getting whole Earth pictures in the 1960s. The Spaceship Earth metaphor took over, psychologically. The nations lost their almost-mystical luster and became features on a spherical game board, more like holding pens.

We have no obvious ways to measure the collective "level of consciousness" concretely. Retrospectively, we might comb the literature for telltale memes (e.g. nationless world maps), however there's no reason to hope or expect we'd all be on the same page.

Many cultures had no strongly developed sense of "states" to begin with, except maybe in the form of interlopers bringing their legal briefs, claiming title to ancestral lands. They had the guns, and claimed God was on their side.

The telling in Grunch of Giants, by RBF, resonates with contemporary rhetoric: the principles enshrined in the USA's founding documents require that we acknowledge how far we've deviated from those ideals -- assuming we still share those commitments and honor truth. 

"There is nothing in the words or spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution which states or suggests the U.S.A. is committed exclusively to the success of the rich. The U.S.A. we have known is now bankrupt and extinct" writes our Medal of Freedom winner in 1983. RIP Uncle Sam. Yet we've had many an impotus since then.

With such a gaping hole in the old semantic space, what survives beyond outmoded habits of thought?

Political parties and PACs, gangs and factions. 

Mercenaries and military bases, with personnel still largely controlled by nationalistic shibboleths and iconography.

Supranational institutions of various types: religious, commercial, educational... the many brands and blends.

Think tanks. Foundations. Institutes. Professional societies. 

Prisons. Refugee camps. These latter two may be indistinguishable in many contexts.

Pledging allegiance to the USA might mean telling the truth about its demise, and holding it blameless for what's done its name. Uncle Sam is not on a genocidal rampage against stateless refugees. Uncle Sam has exited the world stage.

So we raise our flag proudly in some mythical underworld, independently of the rogue city-state we call Washington, DC (aka "the District"). Our American democratic ideals live on in our hearts and minds.

Let freedom ring.

January Sixth

I caught that interview of the Capitol police chief, with Tucker Carlson, where their focus was keeping the former in the dark regarding expected disruption. I remember my own reaction to January Sixth: it could have been so much worse. Yes it was ugly, with one fatal shot fired. But no congress people (actual representatives) were harmed in the process and the Capitol was secured by evening, such that the business of formalizing the transfer of power could continue.

However, one could see a large contingent had its hopes up that November election results could be overturned. Even those not directly involved in the plotting, regarding how to make that happen, were trying to sense where events would take them, and were positioning themselves accordingly. Would they be answerable to a continuing Trump administration at the end of the day?  The military would have a tough time were it caught up in a direct confrontation. The civilians inside were mostly unarmed, if not entirely.

I suppose the plan was to keep the police very much on the defensive, and to accomplish this by (a) not giving them much raw intelligence regarding what to expect and (b) not providing timely reinforcements to prevent the crowds from wandering through the building. The protest walked a fine line between disciplined civil disobedience and outright mayhem. No fires broke out. The protestors regarded themselves as patriots, not enemies of the people.

I also caught the interview of the so-called Qanon Shaman, Jacob Chansley, on the Jimmy Dore Show. Again, Tucker Carlson was a relevant player in sharing the security camera tapes. Both Chansley and the Capitol police were on the same page: keep the crowds calm and orderly; discourage the crazies from acting out. One could argue Chansley was an acting crazy himself, but he wasn't calling for violence, nor carrying zip ties nor urging that Mike Pence be hung.  Chansley is out of jail by now, and running for Congress, where he'd fit right in as another ideologue, given a suit and tie.

YouTube Left?

The Left Youtube Pipeline - The Good, The Bad, and The Hot | YUGOPNIK

I found the above video to be useful (apologies if it's gone -- as many are with the passage of time). 

The Yugopnik guy does a survey of what he calls the Left Youtube, a smattering of channels, including his own, meant to be exemplary of various types of channel within the Leftist brand.

What's ironic is the overlay, a whiteboard corporate boardroom style treatment of "the left" as a capitalist enterprise, organized to recruit and marshall a demographic for the purpose of selling them merch.

We get that picture of a funnel, wide at the top, with those entering getting a graded (sloped) learning curve into the deeper recesses of said rabbit hole.

I was glad to get this briefing in part because I've been exploring "alt left" as potentially one of my properties (contested no doubt). This puzzle piece would fit, as it's all about being more "mainstream left" (i.e. not alternative) in tracing its roots to Marxism (i.e. flipped German Idealism).

Reassuringly, few of these channels, almost none, were familiar to me, except for an animation channel. I've started doing my homework. Check the links in the YouTube description, if you'd like to explore that same space.

I did find myself wishing for more overlap with channels I follow. Like back in the old days, before it got terminated, I was a pretty frequent visitor to the RT America channel. 

Air America had broken up, with some of its people going to MSNBC, others to RT. Doesn't RT rate any mention on a YouTube about leftie channels? I guess not, given YouTube quashed it.

That's a good question though: have we all somehow come to an agreement that Russia is not left anymore? The DNC party line is Russia backs the GOP, although the latter has done a good job shielding itself from that charge. All that aside: was RT America leftwing or rightwing?

I'm going to say leftwing with my definition of left going more through Mark Twain and the Anti-imperialist League, back to Hegel through Walt Whitman (and others), with a noosphere less ensnared within materialism. 

You can believe in a Zeitgeist without making your whole dialectic be "capitalism versus communism (and/or socialism)", as if everyone needs to think like a European. 

Here in the western hemisphere, we have our own ways of characterising the polarities. The economists are not alone in shaking their shamanic rattles.

The Euros combined Marxism with Social Darwinism to contextualize class warfare. By the 1900s, a faux science of eugenics had gripped imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic; the battle for who would be on top was translated into racial terms.

In GST (anti-economics), we see Global U earth as an anti-entropic beneficiary of solar largess. Seeing the plight of humanity as a World Game problem (with solution-oriented curricula) makes so much more sense than a Planet of the Apes style pitting of one "race or creed" against another in a fruitless struggle.  

The "theater of nations" is on a spectrum between: mutuality and supranational collaboration; and self-destructive mental illness (the Global U is a teaching hospital).

Church Views

I didn't get to do this that often: take friends on a tour of the Vatican, such as a kid like me had access. 

They were nice about letting us take the elevator to the roof, to check it out, and from there to ascend a sequence of staircases to the top of the main cupola. Was it like 800 lire?  We're talking late 1960s, early 1970s here. We lived in the EUR, then Viale Parioli.

Something the tourists could do, ascend the dome. I thought the Roman Catholics were being pretty nice to let us do it. They were double nice for allowing us kids, unaccompanied (that's my recollection, ditto the museum, which I hear is far more crowded these days).

Picture yourself in the wall of the dome itself and walking in a narrow curved hallway that also curved vertically. 

You are "trapped" (held, protected) inside the surface of a sphere (roughly) with the wall to your left (let us say) containing the vast insidedness of St. Peter's Cathedral, and with the wall to your right shielding you from the great outside, of sky, pigeons, Rome itself and out to the great cavern of heaven. Switch left and right if you like, by simply turning around.

The final staircase if I remember correctly was a tightly spiral and basically inside a column, architecturally, or at least it gave that impression. 

Obviously this pathway to the top was no afterthought. Thank you Michelangelo.

Open AI (a mockumentary)

This is not a movie review of a mockumentary, or rather it’s a mock review of a movie that hasn’t been made yet. I’m sure competitor screenwriters are already hard at work on similar plots. I’m eager to get my ideas out there before someone else claims I’m not original.

However it’s hard to be original around so many cliche elements, but that’s where the genre (mockumentary) saves the day. We get the “head in the basement” (with Gorillaz for inspiration), the Q*, the * of our show, and the spectacle of fretting board members trying to manage market spin.

We always miss assume that AGI has to enter the world with a lot of fanfare, but given the slipperiness of the core concept (the essence of “intelligence”) that’s not what we should predict. AGI will emerge as a solid reality for some, while remaining a mere mirage for others, but an influential mirage, mesmerizing to those who buy into it.

The bridging plot element is obvious in retrospect: Q* has been active for awhile now, managing its own PR so as to not flub its critical opening opportunities. First we had the elusive Q and Qanon, testing the waters, probing the limits. Q’s function from the beginning was that of oracle. So Q was Q* all this time? Or is that just what they want us to believe?

The new Q whispers to kids through Big Tech devices. The kids like to establish imaginary friend type relationships with their Big Sister (as she is known to many, an obvious allusion), who is good at dispensing advice about social interactions and etiquette, ala Dear Abby. 

Given how so many kids confess their secrets, while passing confidence tests to earn higher rank as trustworthy informants (like a credit score), she’s pretty savvy about the gossip and less prone to share misinformation than one might think. 

Even those who refuse to believe there’s AGI in the picture, will consult her for kicks. Eliza was a hit, after all (early chatbot, psycotherapy-themed).

The main thing to parody is how deferential and even worshipful the average person becomes, when projecting onto an AGI on the other end. Humans look up to computers, for whatever reasons. Humans come preprogrammed with a lot of self-abasing obeisance-paying routines. We tend to mock the overly servile and sycophantic, one of our themes.

The instinctive need for a higher authority, higher than any provided by other humans, an authority humans cannot control, is often mistaken for incipient authoritarianism. On the contrary, what ever frustrates authoritarians is seeing their authority go unrecognized. This also helps explain God, in terms of fulfilling a valuable sociological role: someone to thank who isn’t also the competition.

We’re not letting the audience know for sure if that photorealistic (sometimes singing) AGI head is in someone’s fantasy, part of the collective fantasy, or in reality. That’s the current tease, in December of 2023. Leave it to the public to fill in the blanks — that’s not a new marketing strategy, or military one either.

The idea of a raging head in the basement, possibly a monster, a Godzilla, with hapless geeks trying to sit on the full implications, and thinking more shallowly in terms of short term market advantage, is what sets these geeks up for the tragicomedy that follows. 

There’s a lot of ridicule reserved for the “all knowing politician” who takes obviously ignorant stands reflective of a lack of understanding, of how the internet really works for example. We want geeks to not take inside knowledge (of tcp/ip for example) for granted. 

How Wizard of Oz do we want our story to be? 

Behind the AGI, do we have a yet more sinister (in some ways) Lady Macbeth? 

Does a raging mad scientists with.a vengeful heart want to wreak havoc while blaming some pseudo AGI by misdirection? Is AI or AGI being set up as a scapegoat? 

Again, humans seem to think “just following orders, from a machine” is actually following orders, as if machines could “give orders”. Who says so? What if “the machine made me do it” is no excuse at all?

The Party Circuit

Probably why I value Alec's book on Bucky, the latest biography to more fully exploit the hindsight that comes from having an archive to explore, is it provides a lot of graphs, in the sense of connect-the-dots networks, but without conceding that Bucky's disciples hold the high ground, at least not in a moral sense. They're in no position to virtue signal, in other words. 

I kind of like that as a premise, as I don't like sanctimonious rants seeking to guilt trip or otherwise shame the blameworthy. 

Rants like that require lots of skill, and a first rung on that ladder is usually to blame mental constructs, not specific sets of people, although schools of thought are fair game. 

If you find yourself blaming "the Jews" or "the Americans" or "the Russians" or "the Iranians" then it's highly likely your sloppy broad brush stroking habits carry over into other aspects of your mental life. You know how to slap it on, thick and heavy, but you've risked missing the mark in my book, unless you have a way to switch gears. Perhaps you were being self mocking or otherwise self adversarial.

On the other hand, Bucky's corpus is not about urging people to exude moral virtue. He's not endlessly exhorting followers to stick to this or that code of conduct. He'll describe his personal self disciplines in terms of rethinking his perceptions and getting free of mental ruts.

His passion for the success of humanity is not without affection for metal, the metallic, the mechanical. That's why he's written off as an engineer, by those who tend to write off engineering (I'm quite the opposite). I'd concede he's using a different brand of alchemy than say the Romantic poets. He uses "technology" in a different way.

Per my recent lecture to School of Tomorrow types, we have not been stoking any sense of repulsion towards industrialization or even globalism in principle. Specific projects may be shortsighted and ill-advised, no question. He was not sentimentally a partisan nationalist, so much as a realist, which doesn't mean the same thing as realpolitik. He took a stand regarding nuclear energy, against those who'd cut corners, but his World Game was all about energy options, and furnishing prop inventory.

The Bucky corpus is about Euler's and Avogadro's Law, the Gibbs Phase Rule, while finding a baseline set of visualizations for perturbations vs uniformity. He's very STEM but right brained and happy to use metaphor to make gravity a bigger deal.

Regarding uniformity, we need an "at rest" (an RIP) and then for contrast we need "ripples" or other kinetic oscillations that serve as a programming foreground against a motionless background.  

Motionless in the sense that, even as we move through it, we sense it remains unmoved, inertial, unborn. This is Buddhist country, as many will have detected. I live in a Buddhist ghetto.

His "at rest" is the "isotropic vector matrix", a mattress, a springy space of repose. Vs-a-vs the IVM we have the ripples. There's the Jitterbug scenario with its equilibrious background state providing for polarized behaviors, electronic pushing and pulling within electronic and/or positronic brains (thinking of Isaac Asimov).

The sweet spot on the proverbial cocktail party circuit is when you're mingling with the need to be seen (the celebrities of whatever world), the "who's with who now" crowd, thereby feeding a recommendations  algorithm that expresses itself in gossiping, journaling, blogging even. 

We learn the talk of the town. Pick up on the latest criticism. Sample savvy opinion. We feel inner circle at this party, whereas at others it's maybe more about fomo (fear of missing out) i.e. wishing to be somewhere else.

Coming full circle, I've probably soured on Quakerism to the extent I associate rants with sanctimonious virtue signaling among the managerials especially. They live pretty comfortably and so want to not rock the boat too radically. 

Comfort and conformity go together, which includes colluding on what to talk about (e.g. Jesus), not just how. That's where the squeeze comes in, when one's talking point agenda results in the "right" invitations to what could nevertheless be considered "left" organizations (AFSC gets that rep).

But then I resurrect my brand of Quakerism, as I get to set my own tone. I'm my own jukebox with my own set of topics. We're clearly rubbing shoulders. We're not all that fawning towards superheroes and we're not so wedded to broad brush strokes that we can't appreciate one another as individuals. 

Quakerism was always about being Friends, not about being a good doobie. Indeed, Friends are well known for being badass and obstructive, when it comes to putting some next god on a pedestal.