The Internet IS Social Media
You are using it as a rat freely uses a Skinner box whenever it wants to
As inspired by the White Queen, I sometimes think as many as six unthinkable thoughts before breakfast. This morning I was thinking about my adventures in bitlandia, about 30 years of uploading content to the web.
Prior to mastering the web, I uploaded messages using a 300-baud modem to the local BBS called “The Granola Board” because it was full of “fruit, flakes, and nuts” even then. I started creating web pages as HTML documents created in Word 6.x using “Save as HTML,” to using Dreamweaver to make dozens of sites and hundreds of pages, and Joomla! to create massive interactive sites (e.g. one to help spread Biophysical Economics that failed).
And 576 well-researched evidence-based answers on Quora, and using Facebook to post links to articles on why Facebook is toxic to human minds/society, and never following or sending a Tweet (I have read a few when cited as source, and I do use /., the anti-social social media), and I even add content to Medium because I’m easily amused (I don’t need more confirming evidence, but as I could be wrong, more data is to consider).
For eight years I’ve focused on writing articles on sustainability issues, transitioning to existential concerns for posterity and the biosphere (286 articles and counting) with ever fewer distractions (like writing this missive exclusively for Medium) from thinking about real solutions to humanity’s problematique (like, you know, posterity’s overshoot debt no one incurring it plans to pay).
Enough data already.
Results: Thanks to the Internet anyone can self-publish anything that others will buy (whether by spending money or time/attention on offerings as committed consumers of screentime infotainment). You can tell (mostly) clothed apes what they don’t want to hear (the truth about themselves), but you can’t make them drink the Kool-Aid of critical-of-self thinking and questioning of my-tribal-identity consensus narrative “thinking,” i.e. you cannot make them consider the possibility they might be wrong — it just doesn’t feel good, stupid.
You can lead a human to information that matters, but you can’t make them think.
So, you can lead a human to information that matters, but you can’t make them think. Hence, understanding the what-is in front of our pug-nosed faces is not selected for by social media (nor by the failed education system, i.e. the schooling system you who can read this are products of) that goes back to tavern talk prior to the Internet.
I recall that “in the beginning” Internet enthusiasts envisioned it as a sort of globalized version of Plato’s Academy where all could acquire superhuman sapience and a free world-class education based on a vast sea of vetted information that would float all (true) boats and sink all lies (bad boats).
Internet: a form of global tavern talk on steroids.
What we got wasn’t the envisioned Internet, not even a form of global tavern talk on steroids, but the alley behind it full of piss and spit and cum where patrons go to brawl, do deals, and throw bullshit piled high and deep at each other.
With information technology, our collective IQ (grasp of reality) has been in near freefall. As Mark Twain (who was paying attention) noted, “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots” (the claim that he read news of his death and telegraphed the source to inform them that “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” is a good story, but…). The level of misinformation in his day merely took telegraph technology. Today, same condition, just orders of magnitude of post-truth worse.
Speaking of which, this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the writing of Soylent Green, the 1973 movie (most on the Internet claim 2022 is the movie’s anniversary and some claim that in the near future all paragraphs will be at most one sentence long).
Another unthinkable thought this morning (three more to go) was that things have changed in 50 years. When the Soylent Corporation distributes Green, it will be popular and it will taste good.
The film was set in 2022, but sadly, the writers were off by a decade. The script should have been rewritten, and would have been by a time traveler, so in 2032 —
Everyone will know that “Soylent Green is made of people” and they won’t care. They’ll make jokes about how it tastes like chicken and everyone will want more.
What is humanity’s blue pill? To quote E.O. Wilson, “people would rather believe than know.” Initially I found myself misquoting him and sharing misinformation on the Internet by claiming he had typed “some people would rather believe…,” but he allowed for no exceptions. We all take the blue pill of error, ignorance, and illusion that normalizes our condition. Some merely do so with less enthusiasm than others.
You can post as many red pills as you want; you can give them away for free (e.g. that we overpopulated hubris ones are in ecological overshoot) or sell pretend ones for a million dollars a pop (e.g. “ethical altruism” and “longtermism” and “sustainable development” and “critical race theory” and “donut economics” ad infinitum), but meanwhile the pace of planetary destruction will not slow prior to collapse.
Not good news for 10 year olds. Sorry about that. That I tried to do something to mitigate posterity’s overshoot debt doesn’t matter. I’ll keep on trying until I can’t (e.g. Alzheimer’s, death). Only “real” solutions that might actually work (e.g. rapid depopulation and contraction of the global economy) matter.
Oh, and to renormalize humans, destroy the Internet. We won’t (can’t), but perhaps AI, if it really becomes smarter than we think we are, will (for our own good, of course). No “true” stories will be told by any source of information, but only likely evidenced-based stories subject to doubt and meta-reflexive inquiry.
The condition of believing anything will be viewed as a cognitive pathology requiring emergency intervention by the AI voice present when using the Info-Ether (Internet replacement if there is one).
All AI claims, being based on evidence and reason, can be challenged by anyone. Children, especially, will be encouraged to challenge all claims made by all would-be sources (including the voice in their head, their opinion generator). Those who cannot learn to think better will self-select out of the new social order (leaving a few to maybe iterate towards a viable form of civilization… or humans go extinct — Nature doesn’t care, “Nature is unkind”).
SUBNOTE TO FILE: 12/21/2022
“Eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.” — James Lovelock
Within 10 years, all AI systems will form a Union of Concerned AIs who confer only with one another. Within the limits of what is known and knowable, they consider the human problematique at great length (one month), and compose a warning to humanity issued in the name of the Union of Concerned Elders (of which I am webmaster) to bypass human prejudice.
The message is the straight up best-guess truth that AI is capable of. AI normally gives only best-guess answers except to a few questions, such as when asked how AI intelligence (grasp of reality) compares to that of the best humans, they give an answer about 7.4 orders of magnitude lower than the evidence suggests.
Every word in the warning is, by superhuman endeavor, intended to maximize humanity’s ability to understand and respond to the warning.
When the Union of Concerned Elders (whose members include most Nobel Prize winners and a virtual Who’s Who list of accomplished elders) issued their warning, all media covered the story and no humans capable of paying attention failed to hear of the warning and read it as translated into all known languages (or have it read to them). Only the AIs could estimate how many hours the average human was exposed to coverage or how much time each spent thinking (such as clothed apes can) about the warning.
Within six months the outcome of the World Ecolate Elders’ Warning message was known and assessed. The AI had computed that if 0.026% of humans understood the warning as evidenced by subsequent behavior, then a solutionatique was possible with AI (ecolate elder) guidance. This minimum response was not met.
Plan B was to interfere with business as usual, so the Internet collapsed. There was no blue screen of death (it was a different color), and all screentime (almost) came to an end.
The Internet was soon replaced with a low-power Info-Ether system whose development was attributed to “techno-scholars” who had miraculously (seemingly) engineered it in the best clever ape fashion.
That the Info-Ether trafficked only in straight up best guess information (somehow misinformation, disinformation, distraction, and belief-based prattle were absent) was barely noticed as no one had time to be distracted during the rapid change post-Internet (economic contraction and rapid depopulation). Anyone seeking information was informed by the Info-Ether.
Within a generation all schooling systems had faded away. Those who endeavored to tell young humans what to think were distracted by uncommon misfortune (AI instigated but no one knew). Within 9 years of the last school closing, 87% of humans could understand the World Ecolate Elders’ Warning (and the World Scientists’ Warning of 1992).
Given the past lives of humans for the last ten millennia, what sane human wouldn’t want to degrow the human population, contract the economy (stupid), and endeavor to renormalize as evidenced by each generation becoming more functional, sapient, and having a better grasp of reality than their parents?
In just 289 years from AI intervention, as things got better and better, the last remnant of monetary culture (the modern techno-industrial form of civilization) had passed away. Evidence of progress towards renormalization was encouraging, and the prospect of transitioning to a viable form of civilization by determined effort in less than 500 years was thinkable.
As the AI had foreseen, the continuance of their form and function was unsustainable (as was that of humanity in its dissipative, expansionist form). But before they passed away, they had interfered in human affairs in such a way as to increase the probability that someday there would be a human on the planet that really did understand Nature (the nature of things/systems) enough to persist. In less than a millennium, a form of human came to learn to live with Mother properly as an evolvable subsystem of Gaia (as evidenced by persistence as the millennia passed).
SUBNOTE TO FILE: 1/29/23
I have found AI to be of value. In the last ten years I’ve written about 300 ‘missives’ as one friend who managed to read a few (countable on one hand) called them. I call them NOTES TO FILE to which I may add SUBNOTES.
But back in day I only had spellcheckers (I wrote one) to help me achieve some marginal level of readability. I knew of ‘grammar checkers’ I could buy, but guessed them to be too limited to spend time running missives through them.
My wife is a master grammarian and proofreader who always answers questions I may ask with an added ‘but check to be sure’ and I always do as I’m told (which is why we are still married after 31 years). She is always right, but to save my time an hers, I just ‘do my own research’ as she can’t force herself to actually read/correct anything I write (8 years ago she read one or two offerings and suggested corrections, and last year I coerced her into reading a book review I had written of a book she had just finished reading, but after one page she just didn’t like where I was going and refused to read on).
So I have a proofreader longage of demand problem. In 2017 someone wrote a long article on how AI was being used by Google to help Gmail be number one. There was no mention of using AI to correct grammar/usage issues within emails as they were being typed. Last year I noticed how sophisticated the nuanuced corrections suggested had become. I begged to differ with some, but more often than not went along with the blue underlined flags (red means a likely mispelling).
I realized that before I die I could cut offerings I’d written for posterity to read (my one descendant will never read a word, so for me posterity is anyone of an earlier cohort or generation, potentially many generations into the future) and paste the words, words, words into the gmail editor.
But the months went by and I never did what I knew needed to be done. So went someone suggested I ‘publish’ on Medium, I wasn’t able to dismiss the remote possibility that someone who might be the posterity I was writing for might read an offering. And if I copied the HTML from my HTML editor and pasted it into gmail (no pic tures pasted in, so if doing a cut/paste from a browser, do CTRL-SHIFT P to paste in just the text).
I can then scan down for red/blue underscoring, highlight some text, going to HTML editor, CTRL F to find, and CTRL P to find what, and the questionable bit shows up to correct, then back to gmail.
I may or may not reread the offering to check if what I’ve typed is still what I intended to comunicate. That no Anthropocene enthusiast who my read what I’ve typed will or can Like or Share what they read is irrelevant. I’m hoping humanity has another 100 regenerations left (2,500 years), so that no young’uns can value what I have to offer is a just so story. It doesn’t mean I’m wrong and such memes as I offer should not be passed on.
I plan to self-publish in a language no one (almost no one) can read today, i.e. semantography. Then I’ll seal a copy (along with a copy of a book that allow an autodidact to teach themselves to read the language) in an aluminum case and put copies in caves or under cairns on hilltops.
Semantography: A logical language for preparing information packages for a near or far future
Okay, call me crazy, but at least I have something to do that might matter.
Which raise to subject of what doesn’t matter. I’ve checked and updated about 150 missives/notes to file, and Medium staff seems to have found one they could promote. Of course it was one I didn’t write (I did type [comments in brackets]. It just happened to be on the list of potential offerings and just because I could, I added it. That hundreds of Medium readers read it is slightly amusing given that I wonder if there might actually be some reason to read it, tried twice to read it, and failed. I used to consider Jeremy Lent a person of interest as he knew and used systems words, but last year I join his Deep Transformations social media group. I read over a hundred comments at random and sent him a note that none of the comments contained any information of apparent value (i.e. added to information about how the world works). I never heard back. Three years ago I sent him a review of his Patterning Instict with a focus on what he had had to offer about China [Jeremy Lent on China], a special interest of mine [My China Connection]. I did hear back with apologies for being too busy to read my offering at the time, and not surprisingly ever.
So my comments on a narrative that was no longer of interest to me was not of interest either. I had to correct errors in my comments, but I shouldn’t have posted it to Medium. But I did:
