At the tail end of 2015 it became clear to me that I needed a hobby, get out of the house more, see other human beings. I also needed (seriously needed) some exercise. So I decided to find a martial arts program to join.

The first art I studied, in the mid-eighties, in my earliest college days, was hapkido. I later discovered that this had been at one time the favored combat art of the CIA operations division. It was brutal. Extremely violent.

I was about the same height as the instructor, so I became one of his favorite test dummies for teaching techniques. I logged more time in the air than some commercial airline pilots.

It started to mess with my head. You know the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Hapkido was a hammer I couldn’t put down, even though I wasn’t great at it. I managed to put it down eventually.

So in 2016, I didn’t look for another hapkido class. I was more interested in pursuing fitness than ass-kicking, so I decided to find a softer art. One classified as internal, more concerned with body posture and musculoskeletal structure and flexibility and core strength, as opposed to external arts, which are more about strikes and kicks and throws. Ba gua seemed to be one of the softer soft arts, a cousin to tai chi and qi gong. But less trendy.

Once again, I wasn’t a great student. But I lost weight, rediscovered my sense of balance, and straightened out my incipient back issues from decades of office work.

If none of your back issues are too serious, ba gua will fix any of your vertebrae that have become misthreaded over the years, and strengthen all of the muscles that keep them straight. Tightens up your abdominal muscles too, so you’ll look like you’ve lost more weight than you have. That could be a draw to many folks.

None of this is to say that ba gua isn’t absolutely bad ass as a combat art. There’s a basic exercise of ten minutes, half an hour, maybe a whole hour, where every minute is spent taking a single agonizingly slow step, paying careful attention to posture and a balance of tension and relaxation. The end result of this, and many other exercises like this, is…. Um. Let me try to explain it.

You know how you’ve gone drinking with the crew now and then, and sometimes there’s this one guy who drinks too much and needs help to get home. Under ordinary circumstances he weighs maybe as much as 140 pounds, but somehow, drunk off his legs and passed out, he seems to weigh somewhere on the wrong side of eight hundred pounds. It takes four of you, sweating and straining, to get him into the backseat of a car, and once you get him home, you all leave him on the floor of the living room because his bedroom is upstairs, and fuck that.

Ba gua lets you be like that all the time, even in motion, fast or slow. Combatants roll off of you like water or bounce off of you like they ran into a tree. Meanwhile you’re circling and twisting around and tangling an opponent up in your limbs like twirling spaghetti onto a fork, then flinging them away. It’s like you’re the only flesh-and-blood person in a room full of plastic mannequins.

It’s kind of jaw-dropping to watch ba gua employed in a fight by someone who knows what they’re doing. Just watching the exercises, you’d never expect it.

Anyway, after a year and a half of attending classes religiously twice a week, I got downsized out of my job and had to drop out. Then I moved to a place where classes weren’t available—and also there was no room where I lived, indoors or outdoors, to practice. So there’s been a seven-and-a-half year hiatus before I tried to pick it back up. Or, rather, to start practicing the parts I remember.

I remember some of it. I’ve forgotten way more than I remember. The nearest master teaching classes is a little too far away for me to resume classes—or, more likely, start over again from the beginning to make sure I pick up everything I’ve lost. So it’s kind of an insult to the art to keep referring to what I’m doing now as ba gua.

So here. I’m officially doing my own thing, maybe somewhat derivative in principles, but not so you’d notice by looking.

Ϡ

Ars Titubandi: In Theory

The art has many names: ars titubandi in the formal Latin, something like slegneh in the old pre-Sumerian-era language of the Scythian steppes, or, in a more colloquial English, lurchcraft.

Of course it’s not that old. But no one respects an art without the appearance of age and tradition. Not to say there isn’t a tradition to follow here, but in this case it’s a more New-Agey tradition of making a newly invented thing seem to have an unearned historic gravitas so that people will take it seriously. But, in this case at least, as a joke.

In the typical terms for describing martial arts, lurchcraft is an internal, open-handed art emphasizing utter relaxation of every muscle and element not involved in maintaining posture and motion, with poses and movements demonstrating unexpected flexibility and range of motion, often seeming unbalanced but preserving a moving “root.” The practitioner typically exhibits a lack of concern or even awareness, perhaps as if being puppeted like a marionette.

The organizing principles are (you should have guessed) necromantic in nature:

DEAD INSIDE

It’s popular for internal arts to concentrate on an inner source of strength, perhaps from the breath or the center of mass, and to occupy itself with visualizations of filling the body with this strength and moving it around to bolster motion, strikes, and defense. In contrast, ars titubandi prefers to acknowledge an inner void, or an unfillable stillness, into which incoming momentum is dissipated or directed to the underworld through contact with the floor or ground. The feeling of the void fills the body until it seems weightless and responsive to the lightest twitch of the controlling volition.

Motivating force is seen as coming from outside the body, either from redirected energy from an opponent as you pivot from an off-center strike or pull, or from externally initiated motion imagined as strong pulls from ropes connected to the limbs vanishing off into the distance, or gentle guidance from strings from above, as from a puppeteer.

Do not concern yourself with your breath. If you need air, your body’s motions will alternately compress and expand your ribcage and abdomen in due course. Your diaphragm is a key muscle in your core, and it will have better things to do.

DEAD EYES

Vision is your least important sense in a conflict. It centers you inside your head, which should instead be empty. Be aware of your surroundings as if you have vacated your body and have filled the entire space. Be aware of your opponent’s intentions and momentum through light contact with a limb, through vibrations of the floor or ground, through sounds and rustling and air currents, even through smell. A clever opponent will think you rely on vision and will try to fool you.

Through all of your other senses you can divine immediately when your opponent is overbalanced or committed to motion in such a way that you can absorb or direct it.

You should be able to fight in the dark as effectively as in broad daylight.

DEAD WEIGHT

Any unnecessary tension in the body is a tool for your opponent to use against you, so let it drain away into the ground. The only parts of your body that should carry tension are the ones that provide structure to connect a limb used to strike or guide your opponent through your hollow, empty core to the limbs that brace against the ground, either still or in motion, and the tension should be the smallest amount necessary for the task. If someone strikes you or shoves you, you should absorb the force like a sack filled with water. If you shove or strike or guide an opponent, it should carry the force of the spinning earth, transmitted through the minimally reinforced structure of your skeleton and musculature.

In Practice

Here’s the perfect place to list a bunch of exercises tailored to the art, possibly with diagrams, all with arcane-sounding names in Latin, except I haven’t exactly worked out anything beyond a joking suggestion to make a form or kata out of the choreography to Michael Jackson’s famous “Thriller” video.

At some point I should test and describe a set of postures that suitably provide the necessary structure and mix of mild tension and utter relaxation to be useful for training a practitioner to be aware of these dynamics at all times, plus transitions from posture to posture that present a combination of unexpected motion, continuous grounding, and practical strikes, blocks, escapes, and guide-alongs, all of which suit the aesthetics appropriate to a Hong Kong action-cinema zombie movie.

I’ve already (literally) stumbled across a number of these poses and transitions, sort of like a hybrid between ba gua and drunken boxing in appearance, that can be refined and formalized. But as for doing all of this intentionally? I don’t expect to be great at it.

[*]

In a more rigorous publication, even like Wikipedia, each of these would come with a superscript “[citation needed]” at the end. Well, I’m not going to supply links you’re going to ignore anyway that are just going to scare you off from reading this. If you want to read some supporting arguments from the past couple hundred years of scientific and philosophical thought, just hit me up and I’ll help you out. Let’s get on with it.

• Humans are apes when they’re born. Babies are missing a lot of critical knowledge and skills and behavioral performances that it takes to get along in … pick a society. Left uneducated and untrained, they might still have plenty of empathy and compassion—many apes do—and a tendency to develop a rudimentary language among themselves if they grow up together as a group. Many apes do that as well. But if they’re left untrained all the way to adulthood, they’re not suddenly going to figure out how to rent an apartment or buy groceries or wait their turn to sing karaoke. Some people will consider them human anyway. Some will consider them savages or beasts. But nobody is likely to be comfortable having a troop of them as neighbors unless they have specific training in how to get along with wild apes.

• After our babies are born, we spend at least the next dozen years exposing our babies to a suite of infections that each of us carries, where each infection prepares the developing apelet with vulnerabilities to the next layers in the sequence. There’s behavioral training to handle basic taboos and various versions of hygiene—keeping the clothes and diapers on, the use of toilets and basic implements for feeding and staying clean, etc., which are all necessary for being allowed in houses—and then the big one: our own culture’s language. Or languages, as sometimes occurs.

• The language infection opens up vulnerabilities for a suite of others: logic or whatever your culture’s version of rationalizing thinking might be, mathematics, religions and traditions, your culture’s take on history, any sciences you have lying around, etc.

We’re gonna take a shortcut here and call these entire suites of infections “culture.” There are a lot of different cultures. But unless an adult human-ape is infected with our own culture, or perhaps a slightly different culture that is in a short list of compatible ones, we aren’t likely to accept it into our village.

Some of us can get infected with multiple cultures, or parts of multiple cultures, that allow us to be accepted, at least partially, in multiple villages. Any of us can, with effort, be uninfected by one culture and infected with another, with varying degrees of success.

Some cultures appear to be completely incompatible with other cultures, and individuals with these opposing infections cannot tolerate each other’s presence. Sometimes this is one-sided. Not mutual, I mean.

I feel comfortable putting all of this in these terms because there is something similar that happens to hundreds, or maybe thousands, of different species of insects. There’s a classification of bacteria—a genus called Wolbachia— that does the same thing to colonies of insects that cultures do to humans.

Many colonies of insects are infected with their own strain of Wolbachia. When they meet members of their own species infected with a different strain of Wolbachia, they fight, maybe. With some combinations, if they mate, the eggs don’t fertilize or, if they do, what hatches out is nonviable. Give them an antibiotic to get rid of the infection, and suddenly they’re compatible with all of the uninfected ones. Infect them with a specific strain of Wolbachia of your choice … and they’ve magically joined the new colony.

Some species of insects have internalized their own version of Wolbachia as an organelle in their cells in pretty much the same way pretty much all forms of life we know about have internalized mitochondria.

Human cultures work the same way as these Wolbachia strains, making members of human colonies compatible or incompatible with each other, and separating us entirely from the uninfected. Call it parallel evolution if you like. But it’s more than just a metaphor.

All of this is a prelude to one particular concept, and it’s an important one: we have to be able to think of our cultures as separate from us, largely interchangeable, and as organisms in their own right.

Cultures are messier than Wolbachia, though. There’s no cell membrane keeping all of the components of a culture in one tidy package. Individual components of cultures can infect one another at whim. Immune systems in these cultures are weak, inefficient, flawed, or missing altogether.

I guess that’s to be expected. As sophisticated as they might seem to us, as a genus, human cultures—as they exist now, in contrast to ape cultures—are a couple hundred thousand years old. For a new form of life, that’s pretty damned young. I’m sure it took the rudiments of life in the early oceans a lot longer than that to develop a cell membrane worth a damn, and even longer to come up with any kind of immune system.

÷ [I’m sorry… did your eyes glaze over? It’s safe to start reading again.] ÷

If you’re worried that your culture seems to be getting dumber, keep in mind that many historical human cultures did just fine without components like literacy, formal logic, mathematics, and many of the sciences. The cultures without these things employed different survival strategies to survive and compete: increased breeding rates, strongly defended borders, tremendously aggressive and intolerant stances toward their neighbors, and rapid expansion into conquered territories.

These are the strategies a culture employs to survive without the efficiencies in the use of resources that literacy, formal logic, mathematics, and a certain critical smattering of the sciences provide.

These regressive strategies are effective anywhere in the short term. In the long term, however, since they are inefficient and destructive of resources, they only succeed where territory can be expanded and the colony can exploit new or conquered resources. As soon as resources start to dwindle, the collapse of the colony begins—even in the absence of competitors.

I can make these statements with confidence because they are true for colonies of any lifeform. The environment itself selects the colonies for survival that most efficiently and sustainably use that environment for resources.

In order for cultures to survive in the long term, they must exploit their humanoid ape resources more efficiently and more sustainably than their competitors, and this includes encouraging or requiring their infected apes to similarly exploit their physical environment more efficiently and more sustainably than their competitors do.

So when the culture you are in starts eliminating their intellectuals and strengthening borders and becoming increasingly intolerant of untainted individuals or neighboring cultural infections and preparing to conquer other colonies in the name of “lebensraum,” you are witnessing a reinfection of previously de-selected cultural elements that are unhealthy—not adaptive in the long term—and will be selected against by the environment itself, resulting in a population crash of the apes that host the culture.

Additionally it will likely make stupid (that is to say, unscientific) mistakes that will be exploited by neighboring, competing colonies by regressing to superstition and mythological bases for taking actions.

The situation that most effectively opens a vulnerability to this regressive infection is resource restriction among the host-apes. That is to say, scarcity of resources, which can be a true scarcity caused by calamity or conflict, or an artificial scarcity caused by resource hoarding, or infrastructure issues regarding distribution, or simple gross mismanagement. Anyone who wishes to trigger this regression in a culture can take action to cause or exacerbate any or all these issues.

The effectiveness of this transition hinges on the fact that rampant scarcity can, at least theoretically, be rectified by a centralized release of resources to a favored subset of individuals. The promise of such relief is used to select for individuals within the culture with the relaxed moral or ethical standards required for purging members of the culture who are individually incompatible with the new version of the cultural infection and for perpetrating external aggression, both of which include behaviors that most cultures classify as atrocities.

It is critical that this relief is doled out sparingly, and solely as a reward for compatibility with atrocity, usually coded as loyalty or duty or capacity for self-sacrifice or all of the above, among cultures that have words for such concepts. Competing structures that provide relief via channels outside the central authority are automatically a conflict of interest with the infected culture’s survival strategies.

÷

All of the above implies that there are a number of ways to combat this kind of regressive cultural infection. In no particular order:

• Concentrate on reliving the situation of scarcity. If the scarcity is artificial, this means opening channels of resource distribution and exchange outside of the central authority structure. Open the hoards and distribute what you find to those who are most in need.

• Take action to preserve your culture’s intellectual capacity in order to preserve overall problem solving capacity and adaptability to changing circumstances.

• Poison the language used to unify elements that might be compatible with atrocity. Attach negative impressions to terms like loyalty and duty and sacrifice and popularize those impressions.

• At the community level: identify, publicize, and humiliate those who commit atrocities. It’s best if this is done by an anonymous group to prevent countermeasures from the regressive authorities. Attach humiliating imagery to caricatures of individuals who commit atrocity, individually or as a category, or are complacent with atrocity being committed.

• At a more central level, humiliate those in authority. Pantsing and thrown pies are far more effective than bullets. Secondarily, believable scandals may be employed. Only strong authoritarian figures may be trusted to shield underlings from the consequences of committing atrocities. If the authorities are shown to be weak, no one will be convinced to act outside of the existing cultural boundaries and taboos.

• At the bare minimum, make it known that there are many in the culture who are opposed to the regressive infection and are willing to take action to prevent it.

From this list of strategies, it should be possible to prioritize the list according to your culture’s specific needs and assign tasks to subgroups and cells in order to form an effective resistance and heal your own infection.

[*]

Historically, as individual human beings, we’d just find a quiet place to let our guard down, so to speak, and leave behind whatever we’re done with. The environment, as we’ve taken to calling it, has a use for it. We don’t—at least not in any immediate sense. So we leave our poop behind as a gift to whoever or whatever might need it, and we walk away.

The poop does have value. Agriculturally speaking. But it also has a few hazards. Our bodies were done with it for a reason. If it were a good idea to hold onto it, for any reason, evolution would have found a way to do it. But here we are: in the end, we can’t let that shit build up.

But also we like to live in cities. In a city of a mere million people, that’s 125 metric tons of poop being deposited … wherever … every single day. That’s conveniently estimatable as taking up the volume of a cube 5 meters on each side. That’s just the pure stuff, mind. No pee added, no water for washing or flushing, no paper products, etc.

Can’t put all that just anywhere. Can’t let it sit until the end of the month and just deal with it then. So fast-forward to toilets and civic sewage systems: a horrifically terrible solution evolved from a long tradition of just leaving our shit in the street for, you know, whoever might need it, and then gradually making a special street for it—the gutter, so you can at least step over it—to burying the gutter in a tube so nobody has to smell it until it makes it to the river, where it becomes, as they say, a downstream problem.

It’s not a great solution, but it’s the solution we have, and various integration issues (and also housing codes) prevent us from adopting any revolutionary innovations. It’s like a handgun. The principles involved are a couple hundred years old, but despite the desperate need to come up with something better, it’s ubiquitously adopted and there are enormously wealthy individuals and corporate entities actively blocking innovation because they make all their money doing it the old ways.

÷

But let’s imagine a new toilet, springing to life in the modern era without any innovative obstruction. Let’s imagine a centralized household appliance about the size of a washing machine—perhaps with the familiar commode on the front end, because people are used to it and it doesn’t seem like a big frightening change—that takes input from all of the toilets in the residence if you have more than one.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that it leverages the water used to transport poop to it, and a series of filtration screens and centrifuges and gentle heating (watch out for that flammable methane! Collect that separately because that’s useful too) to drive off water and kill bacteria you don’t trust anymore, and then the water can be recaptured and purified enough to be used again for the next flush, and the solids can be collected as concentrated agricultural fertilizer. Further processed to extract nutrients our personal biologies had no safe way to store for later. Pressed into blocks for fuel. Panned for gold and precious heavy metals.

I really don’t care at this point. But let’s just say that, for the price of a modest household appliance, like a window-unit air conditioner or a dishwasher, your household poop output could be monetized and sold.

Stay with me. Shit’s about to get weird.

÷

Economically, there’s a break-even point. Say it’s a single-person apartment we’re using as a template, because that keeps the math easy. The appliance costs $50 to manufacture, $150 to install, and requires $25 in annual maintenance. So … $200 in outlay, but $25 to maintain. What’s the value of the 45-50 kg of poop you produce in a year after it’s been processed? Reasonably desiccated and compressed to around 25 liters of volume—units about the size of a brick for easy transport, and probably significantly lighter than a brick after a bunch of the water’s gone—it comes to about 25 bricks, conveniently enough.

One standard masonry brick of poop derivatives, approximately every two weeks.

Anyway, if the value of each brick is significantly higher than $1 on some market, counting collection and logistics and overhead, then we can postulate that there is, somewhere, at some scale, a break-even point.

And somewhere on the other side of that, a profit margin.

So let’s make this a for-profit venture.

÷

We’ll start with apartment buildings to leverage some scale. That’s eight floors of twelve units per floor with an average of 200 poopers per building, one centralized shit processing unit in the basement, which comes to 5,000 shit-bricks per year. Even at the outset, if you can only net $3,000 in profit for every building, you’re a million-dollar business at 300 or so buildings.

So you keep at it for twenty years. There are 5000 apartment buildings in your town, and if you can keep your competition in line, you can get your friends on the city council to make it a requirement in the building and housing codes to convert to use your technology. You branch out to other cities, as do your competitors, and at the end of that time the national market is saturated.

You’ve done the nation a mighty service. Wasted value no longer poisons people downstream. Valuable chemicals are provided cheaply to agricultural concerns and, well, bomb and munitions manufacturers, because why not? But there’s an issue. You have debts to service and investors who demand dividends, or they’ll trade their shares away and buy shares in a firm that will pay.

But how can you grow? Cheaper technology? Lower maintenance costs? Raise prices on the end product? More efficient logistics? Buy up the competition?

Well, yes. Buy up the competition. That goes without saying. Antitrust regs are 9/10ths dead. The closer to a monopoly you can get, the better. Then you can charge more to install and maintain the technology and at the same time charge more for the end product.

But even then there are limits, and you’ll hit them pretty fast. It’s a national crisis if shit starts stacking up, or if crops can’t get fertilizer or bombs can’t get their boom. Congress will get involved, and that will suck.

So how do you grow revenue? It’s simple.

Get people to shit more. Find ways to get them to eat things that will make their shit, in the aggregate, more voluminous and more valuable.

The brutal min-max Linear Algebra equations maximize your profits in the end-game scenario where every human ass is glued to a toilet while baseline-metabolic-maintenance slurry is pumped into one end and profits are collected from the other. And if you can’t get to to that scenario quickly, one of your federally mandated competitors will get there ahead of you.

So you lobby and bribe and market in favor of nutritional changes that manipulate the diet of your human chemical factories to better suit cheap collection of more marketable output. Sure, having to sit on the toilet all day and eat less appetizing slurry and having a 15% shorter lifespan when all is said and done is a bit of a drag, but the longevity and happiness of your human chemical factories is a metric that nobody measures, and therefore it doesn’t have to feature in any of your equations. Humans are a renewable resource, infinitely replaceable and interchangeable. You’re doing fine unless and until the population numbers actually start declining—because then, finally, that cuts into profits.

You aren’t going to put human wellbeing metrics into your equations yourself, are you? Why would you do that? It’ll just cut into your profit margin.

But in the end it’s obvious. The people who are happiest and healthiest are in those holdout countries where your technology hasn’t yet reached.

What can you do, though? You make billions, you pay billions in dividends, you employ tens of millions, and you’ve cornered the market on poop-management infrastructure. It’s all locked in.

÷

So yes, this is all a metaphor. Unfortunately it’s a metaphor for a number of different for-profit industries. The automotive industry. Housing. Education. Medicine. Oh, dear God, medicine. But the one I have in mind right at this very moment is the Internet.

People need timely information regarding current events and access to an archive of public domain knowledge. People need to express themselves and to communicate with one another. These needs are fundamental. We are all forced to do business in a complicated society where every decision we make must be an informed one. We can’t even buy a product or service in this caveat emptor market, where the burden on of not being screwed by a seller is on the buyer to be informed as a matter of common law, without the ability to read reviews and find advice from friends and/or previous victims.

But also, you know, human contact. Idle conversations. Bonding over experiences. Mutual entertainment. Acceptance. There’s a biological need. People die without it.

The Internet started out with communication devices and reliable news services and encyclopedias and travel guides and market reviews and online businesses and entertainment services and social networks. But, through all of the stages detailed above, the Internet has morphed into a face-toilet that each one of us is glued to, feeding us a scant minimum—and even less at every turn—of whatever it takes to barely keep us alive while our attention is sucked out of our hollowing bodies and sold to the highest bidder. We sacrifice chunks of our days, minute by minute, sifting high-bulk sewage for snippets of news, that one reliable review, the source we need to finish that report for school or that purchase recommendation for work, for a single reliable thread of human connection, and every day it gets harder to break the full-body-hickey suckage seal that keeps us glued to the screens.

÷

Yeah, okay, so I’m a tiny voice in a giant throng shouting about how much the Internet sucks. But I detailed the several tiny steps from valuable service to suckage for a good goddamn reason. So we can see every little crevice into which we can jam a crowbar to keep things from getting as bad as they are. And, wonder of wonders, these are general solutions. They’ll work for any industry that has gone toxic.

Let’s walk the path backwards.

Penalties to profits based on how much your business makes the people who are forced to use your services miserable. (This should be calibrated to absolutely bankrupt the US’s for-profit healthcare/health insurance industry, which eats every available dollar from the households of the dying and provides exactly zero healthcare.)

Barriers to any form of lobbying and market manipulation that trades human welfare for profitability. (This should be calibrated to force the automotive industry to fund public metropolitan transit, rural bus services, and high-speed intercity rail.)

Give serious teeth to antitrust laws. If there is always competition in any particular market segment, then any single corporation can always increase profits and dividends by increasing market share, taking it from shittier competitors and not have to get weird about manipulating consumers into being more profitable cogs in their machines.

And here is my personal favorite: Don’t make any critical part of the maintenance of basic human existence a profit-generating industry. As soon as taking care of shit makes money, some absolute asshole will inevitably discover that the best way to make more profits is to make more shit.

[*]

But the popular approach? That’s all about hope in the cortisol-soaked brains of those doing the observing.

Great Auntie Effie has been kind of still and quiet in her rocking chair for a really long time now. And she didn’t respond when you poked her.

Is she dead? Has she been dead for a while?

The popular approach is to just wait and see.

If she gets out of the chair sixteen hours from now, she retroactively will not have been dead this whole time.

If she doesn’t, and that time stretches to, I dunno, 72 hours, and now she’s in a complicated bed and stuffed full of tubes to keep her hydrated and saturated with high-fructose corn syrup and a nicotine drip because the doctors are worried about the effects of quitting that three-pack-a-day habit cold turkey and a few critical vitamins and minerals, that question is still a bit up in the air.

We hold on to the idea of that steadyish 62 BPM heartbeat, but seriously, does that mean anything if she never deals another hand of Pinochle ever again? We hook up the ’trodes and look for any signs of electronic muttering north of the medulla.

It’s inconclusive, of course. The little squiggles would probably look just the same if she was parked in front of the tube watching her afternoon stories.

Ol’ Great-Auntie Effie’s life runs out at the exact same moment that you—the oldest living relative who isn’t currently in jail, for reason of which you have somehow been declared competent to oversee her network of tubes and wires and attached bags of effluents—run out of hope.

Or run out of cash, I guess, because America.

Go a couple hundred years back in time and it’s a little more simple. We hadn’t worked out the magic of tubes and wires, so it was mostly a matter of whether the circling vultures had landed. Whether they had awkwardly shuffled closer and made a few hesitant pecks, ready to jump back in case of affronted slapping. Whether they had, you know, begun dining, as is vulture tradition, starting with the eyeballs and asshole.

The traditional interpretation of the threshold of death has always left room for the votes of vultures and jackals.

÷

Still speaking as somewhat of a necromancer, I can give you my professional opinion that a financial economy is a living thing, or perhaps an identifiable living function of a larger living system, each categorization of which is alive in its own way, to different extents. Systems of money and networks of money flows are fully optional to functioning human societies, although most develop some system of token coinage just to keep you from having to cart around wheelbarrows full of those bricks you’ve made when you go to the market to buy chicks to raise. Or, if you’re a laborer with no wares of your own to trade, coins are a way to prove that you have worked and that you and your family therefore deserve to eat and sleep indoors.

What makes a coin convenient is the same thing that increases the risk of using it. It’s portable. If you don’t spend it immediately, it’s easy to lose or and easy for someone to steal. If you bury it somewhere and forget where, or die before you tell anyone else where you put it, it’s gone.

Whether your lost coin—and the labor or wealth it represents—is merely temporarily misplaced or gone forever from the regional market and labor economy is a matter of … hope. But also you can do the math. If you’d spend more time and effort trying to recover that coin than you’d spend earning a new one, you’re likely to strike it off your account books and move on.

A coinage economy is centrally regulated, of course. The amount of coins in circulation in a region should match the total value of labor and services and goods that need to change hands at any particular moment. Otherwise you have labor that can’t work because the places that want to employ them have no way of paying. You have food rotting in storehouses because hungry people can’t buy it. The nightmare of keeping the coinage system balanced falls to the state’s treasury, including periodically rounding up and hanging the counterfeiters and trimming fingers off the coin-shavers.

Then there are the hoarders. Money in a hoard doesn’t do anything. The regional economy contracts in exactly the same way as if the coins were just gone. But … maybe it’s just money for a college fund? Maybe it’s a retirement plan. In that case, the money is coming back someday. Ten years, twenty years, thirty-five years. Or so the state treasury hopes.

Once a society has predictable savings habits, it’s just a bit of math to predict how many coins come out of circulation and how long they wait in a hole in the ground before they get back to work making the rounds from laborer to restaurant owner to waiter to babysitter to grocery store owner to farmer and back to the farm laborer, where the cycle repeats.

This is basic, basic stuff. There are still plenty of smallish societies, emotionally and socially and environmentally advanced—but as yet only minimally colonized by greed in the grand Euro-American style—where when someone needs something, they just get it out of the village’s surplus stores, and if they can’t find a way to contribute, someone will help them find a way to be useful. The world on the Internet tends to forget that a fifth of the world’s population does not even use electricity, and those people only have to dig up some money when it’s time to pay taxes or buy something foreign as a gift for a kid’s birthday or a visit to the expensive doctor in the city. But in those places where money is involved in every little transaction, there has to be enough of it, and it has to be in the hands of the people who do the work and make the stuff and care for the kids and sick and elders. Otherwise there’s no point to having it at all.

Otherwise we have no choice but to go back to humanity’s default economic system based on barter and generosity and compassion and, incidentally, burning down the houses of the greedy so they can remember exactly how important compassion and generosity are by being forced to rely on such esoteric things to live.

That’s not exactly some kind of Utopian fantasy. If money were to suddenly become worthless and you just happen to be selfish, or greedy, or an asshole, you’d best study up on those survivalist/bushcraft videos while there’s still a ubiquitous Internet.

How likely is that, though? Money becoming worthless, I mean. Surely the people who rule us through our money addictions understand that if currencies fail, if the “full faith and credit” of the governmental systems backing them fail, then they all have to retreat to their bunkers and stay there until those who can survive make it through the ugly withdrawal process.

Surely they won’t let that happen.

Here’s the deal, though. Here’s the proof that it’s money that attracts money and not, say, brilliance: The people who find themselves in the seats of power through their fortune (pick your favorite meaning of the word here, they all apply) are letting it happen. And they don’t know how to stop it. Maybe the ones who are too far behind to catch up (but who are still powerful enough to buy legislators and precedent-setting judges) are actively pushing the whole thing to the brink in a game of chicken, gambling for a payoff or favorable alliance to stop that shit, or doing it out of spite because they’re old enough to not have to worry about the consequences. Who knows?

I think it’s easiest to assume that they are either ignorant of history of for some reason think that the historical lessons of societal collapse somehow don’t apply to them personally.

÷

But let’s take a sniff of that old possible-corpse in the rocking chair, why don’t we?

The USA is one of these newfangled currency-based economies. If you just happen to work at the top levels of the Federal Reserve Bank, there’s a big ol’ whiteboard with a number at the top representing the current estimate of the supply of dollars in circulation in the system. Somewhere underneath it is a number representing the number of people who rely on dollars for living/comfort expenses, and then a number representing the mean/median/mode (some useful mathematical average or other) representing the needs and desires and, in essence, the wealth that needs to change hands on a daily basis per capita, as it were, and then some really simple math.

That first number really needs to equal that second number times the third number.

But here’s the big question: do you really count the money in the hoards? Is that money in circulation?

It’s not. Or is it? See, it’s in Ol’ Great-Auntie Effie’s rocking chair, and it’s not moving, and it’s starting to smell funny.

The Fed says there’s $2.33 trillion dollars roaming around out there. The Fed also says that one in five of those dollars is trapped in the forever-hoards of people who are paid multiple millions of dollars every year not to spend any of it.

Understand that I’m just talking cash here. Wealth, which includes stocks and bonds and real estate and other less liquid assets isn’t part of the equation right now, because, well, none of that’s what you get paid in when you work and what you need fistfuls of to buy groceries and keep the lights on.

One in five US dollars is in Great-Auntie Effie’s chair, and every year a significant percentage of the US’s GDP is dedicated to keeping it in the goddamn chair—or, rather, by now, the bleach-and-pee-smelling hospital bed. It’s injected straight into Great-Auntie Effie’s bloating meat-sack via wires and needles and tubes, and at some point, as unwilling executors, we have to consider that maybe it’s never coming back.

The whiteboard at the Fed is well aware of the problem.

Every year they make more money to try to keep enough in the system.

Every year they watch a larger and larger percentage of the new cash miss the hands of the people who need it to buy stuff and go straight into Great-Auntie Effie’s various tubes. Every time federal corporate or banking “Too Big to Fail” bailouts happen, the new money misses the economy entirely—doing exactly zero work to keep the machine running—and goes straight into Great-Auntie Effie’s probable-corpse.

In electrical terms, those kinds of bailouts would be supplying more juice in a system with a severe short to ground—but there’s no call to switch to a metaphor that’s even less accessible than the one I’ve been trying to use already.

What I’m saying is that the Fed knows that everything they’re trying to do to keep Great-Auntie Effie alive is at best prolonging the inevitable but is definitely making the situation worse.

The dollars in these hoards are mathematically unspendable. You can only buy so many mansions and jets and yachts because there just aren’t that many made in a year. If you want to buy something bigger—an island, an army, a government—you have to buy it from another billionaire. So the dollars never come out to join the cash economy, where you and I live. They just quantum-tunnel from hoard to hoard while names on titles and deeds change. Frequently it’s easier for billionaires to avoid dollars altogether, swapping shares in stocks or signing over deeds because the cash stops earning interest if you touch it.

So they switch to their own personal economy of barter and favors. The ultrawealthy operate on a barter system.

Are you starting to get it, yet?

In unpopular terms, I can point to the individual financial tissues and systems of metabolism that have failed, where clumps of cells have dissociated and are doing their own thing now, where cancers have metastasized, where there’s nothing but deliquescing necrotic tissue where shit ought to be throbbing and pulsing in harmonic rhythm with the whole.

In popular terms, it’s time for us to come to grips with the fact that ol’ Great-Auntie Effie is gone, and she ain’t coming back.

÷

So … maybe it’s not as bad as all that? Only 20% of the cash supply has gone necrotic. The USA’s wealth is $140 trillion or so, and the trapped cash is less than two percent of that.

Well, let’s not make the common mistake of thinking that money is wealth. Money, if you’re in a society that uses it, is a token that represents a certain volume of wealth that can move. Half a million dollars—in a retirement fund, say—represents ten years of subsistence at $50,000/year if you’re burning it as capital or a perpetual passive income of $20,000/year if it’s invested at a safe, meager 4% APR. Money represents the amount of stuff you can buy, the amount of labor (such as in-home nursing care) you can hire, the amount of education or medicine you can obtain—seeing as you live in a place that does not value you more as a productively healthy and educated citizen who is capable of paying higher taxes more regularly and therefore does not cover such things out of taxes.

The perpetual flow of a disproportionate amount of money into black holes from which it never returns is what has, over fifty years, greased the transfer of 75% of the USA’s actual wealth—the stuff that money can buy—to 10% of its households, leaving 90% of the population scrambling any time a crisis hits: accident, monster storms/earthquakes/wildfires/floods/etc., illness, unemployment, old age. Note that the last crisis mentioned is inevitable, assuming you survive the rest of them.

The point of dismantling the safety nets that civilized countries maintain, of course, is to make sure that the poorer 90% absolutely must auction off their remaining wealth—whether that’s real estate or savings or any extra labor they’d been saving for caring for their own children, ill or disabled relatives, and elderly—to that subset of the 10% whose hoards are still small enough that they’ll occasionally burn capital. But if you watch the money during these crises, you’ll see that the cash flows from the top 10% briefly through the hands of those in crisis and then immediately into the corporations that are in the hoards of the top less-than-1%—the top 60,000 billionaire and centi-millionaire households who will never spend it. Because we pay them not to.

Not only does that trapped $450 billion not move the wealth around that needs to move—not per year, like you might think, but at any given moment—the frozen cash generates a kind of spendable vapor: a passive annual income of $25 billion dollars for these 60,000 households—that’s nearly $400,000 each—if the frozen capital stays put. In terms of subsistence, that vapor, if spent, might be enough for most households in reasonable locations, and in unreasonable ones if they own their own homes. But for the owners of such hoards, there are other sources of income as well, so the bulk of that vapor just accretes onto the hoards. Dividends and executive salaries, interest from loans, rent from real estate holdings, etc., provide for living expenses, with anything left over also adding to the hoards of frozen cash. In these terms it seems like that trapped cash is a small percentage of their holdings as well, and it is, for many, but it’s the stable part. The no risk part.

And if there’s a consequence for a peccadillo you’d like to avoid, it’s your most liquid emergency fund.

But also, you don’t ever need to tap into the hoard. You can get a loan against it—and pay yourself back over time from the proceeds of your other investments or executive incomes or bonuses or what have you, with interest—and never have to touch the trapped money itself.

÷

So here’s what I’m telling you, in unpopular terms:

Twenty percent of ol’ Great-Auntie Effie’s blood has pooled and congealed in her extremities. Any more that the Fed dumps in through the tubes goes straight to the places where the blood is already pooled and gets stuck. And her heart is seriously working overtime trying to move what blood is still liquid.

To be clear, in this tortured metaphor Great-Auntie Effie’s heart is made up of the 20-25% of the population who can/will/must work for money at any given time. The rest are children, the sick and disabled, the elderly, and the people who care full-time for those who can’t care for themselves. The overtime mentioned above is, unfortunately, literal.

Inside the heart, lifespans of individual cells have shortened in the past five years by three or four percent. That’s an average. That lifespan shrinkage is the worst where labor is the hardest and payoff is the lowest. Where skins are the darkest, where the air and water is the dirtiest, where emergency medicine is the farthest away, where education and literacy are the rarest. This means: where food comes from. Where the remaining factories are. Where all the heavy lifting gets done. Some of those lifespans have shrunk below the retirement age, and that’s a problem.

Understand that this whole discussion has been about one single critical part of a hugely complicated and deranged financial system: liquid cash. Now that we’ve gotten to the end of that discussion I can mention it’s not the only system that’s in trouble. The lack of blood flow has absolutely done permanent damage to the brain. I’m not talking about just lapses in judgment, though that goes without saying, but about dementia and delusions and paranoias. Lapses in memory. Lashing out. Failures in bodily control. Frontal lobe issues in self-control, planning, and caring about right and wrong. Hallucinations.

There are connected issues of the metastasized cancers that are part of what started the blood-pooling problems in the first place—and more than a few of the derangements. But the cash problem is a big problem and indicative of other problems that are just as bad, and it’s not a matter of whether it’s a cause or a symptom, because with interconnected systems it’s always a bit of both. But it’s a symptom we can easily monitor, and mathematically the cash issue cannot get better from here.

Not without necromancy, anyway.

Also: the jackals and vultures I mentioned are circling.

Nah, just kidding. They’re not circling. They’re running the hospital.

In popular terms, if ol’ Great-Auntie Effie is gonna move again, the technical term for those motions is “death throes.”

[*]

Look around. This is what Money has purchased.

Money has purchased an endless onslaught of superstorms and has made it illegal to stop making them worse, and even more illegal to try to ameliorate the situation in any way, because it is now illegal to try to make anyone with money make less money—or even make money less quickly than the maximum possible rate.

Money has purchased indefinite indentured servitude for everyone who works.

Money has purchased for you the expedience of popularity-based fund drives to buy a few extra years of life for the injured and critically ill—or for those who have lost everything due to the new unnatural catastrophes—if you still have friends and acquaintances to milk for charity.

Money has purchased a steeply tilted slope to extract real estate and generational wealth from those who have so far managed to hang onto any—and indentured servitude for the rest. See above.

Money has purchased the right to perpetrate for-profit monopolies, letting them determine for themselves what levels of critical services to grudgingly provide and to whom, with the typical case being “as little as they can get away with.” Medicine, health insurance, basic utilities, infrastructure support—wherever it’s been privatized.

That’s not everywhere yet, but I promise you there’s more of that coming.

Money has purchased legislatures and judges to make sure that everything that Money does to fuck society, either as individuals or as an aggregate, is legal, or, wherever it might be somewhat slightly less than legal, is unprosecuted. Money has literally purchased impunity.

Money has purchased all of your private identifying information so that it can show everybody, individually, whatever targeted lies it takes to make you hand over adulation, votes, children to sacrifice as soldiers, enthusiastic support of resource plundering abroad despite every atrocity that comes along with it—and any remaining scraps of money you still have.

Money has purchased laws to make it illegal for you not to hand over more of your remaining wealth to Money at every opportunity in ever-increasing amounts in exchange for mere subsistence.

Money has purchased armies of heavily armed cops to protect their hoarded winnings, especially where those winnings have been converted into material goods.

Money has purchased atrocity after atrocity at ever increasing scales.

Money has done this because these things have been experimentally determined to gather more money to Money. There may be many better ways, but there’s no need to consider any of them. These are proven to work. Change is risky. Therefore, these strategies stay.

The Capitalism game is over. Money has won. Money has collapsed into a black hole in the middle of the board and no remaining money can escape. Any money still outside the event horizon is circling ever closer, waiting to fall in and never come back out.

So today I am here to remind you that money is imaginary. It always has been.

It’s certainly just a number now. The last scraps of money that are circling the event horizon—the last scraps the soon-to-be first trillionaires are fighting over—are the remnants of the scoring system for a video game us amateurs aren’t allowed to play anymore, and nothing more.

Without money there is still land to grow food, and the food itself, and the ability to move it toward hungry bellies. Without money there are still houses and buildings with apartments for people to sleep in, and people and material to maintain them. Without money there are still teachers to teach and doctors to diagnose and treat and workers of all kinds to work to maintain the roads and rails and utilities and care for the sick and young and elderly.

Nobody does this stuff for money. Not as such. You do it for the things that money is supposed to promise you: for enough healthy food and a comfy place to rest in safety and fun things to do in your downtime so you can recharge. For the promise of being taken care of when you’re too old or sick or just too damn tired to work. For the opportunity to travel or pick up hobbies or hang out from time to time with friends or loved ones. For enough slack to support a family full of non-earning children and support a carer, maybe, so you can concentrate on doing stuff that’s useful to other people.

Promise someone all of these things and they’ll be happy to provide what services to others compassion demands of them—so that others have what they need too.

Because it wouldn’t be fair otherwise.

To most people raised like I was, I’m sure that sounds like an unsupportable, idealized claim. But maybe you should ask John Fire Lame Deer, of the Mineconju-Lakota Sioux, whose mother’s name was Sally Red Blanket and whose father’s name was, aptly, Silas Fire Let-Them-Have-Enough. In his book, Lame Deer, Seer of Visions, he says this one thing you might have read before:

“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don't know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.”

This was how things worked for them for at least the five hundred years or more from the founding of the Seven Council Fires (around 1300 CE) to the arrival of who they still, magnanimously, though possibly with more than a little bitterness, refer to as their white brothers.

Investment banking is quite a bit younger in comparison.

I’m saying that, as a system, the Seven Council Fires system has shown itself to be more stable—less destructive to the environment, say, and less subject to outbreaks of mass atrocity—than any economic system based on ownership, hoarding, and enforcing scarcity while also demanding a continuing exponential growth rate for wealth that the simple laws of physics demonstrate cannot possibly be indefinite.

As proof, you can clearly see we’ve hit the functional limit. We are past The $ingularity. We can simply declare that the numbers be larger by 𝕏% every year, but the increase would be meaningless. As of this moment, the only things the ultrawealthy cannot buy are one another. They can buy nuclear reactors and aircraft carriers and military forces and arsenals and space programs and governments at whim. And have. They can only lose money in significant ways to one another or due to terrible, terrible choices in gambling—with one another.

I mentioned fairness above because humans, as apes, are creatures that value fairness and equity. We see the same urges for fairness in our fellow apes in the wild. We invented money as a fairness tool—as a way of keeping score of how much work someone has done so that they can prove that they deserve to bring home enough to feed their family from a market far enough away from home that they aren’t known by sight. Perhaps the root of the problem stems from building a society where proof that one’s children deserve feeding is required. Regardless. If money no longer is calibrated to the value of a laborer’s sweat, then it has no meaning at all. We should consider doing without it altogether.

We know it can be done. We have numerous clear examples to use as templates.

In the meanwhile, our struggle has to be against Money and those who have hoarded it to the point that they’ve broken the whole fucking game. We have to let them know that they can’t have our respect just for racking up a high score on their video game. We have to let them know that we are no longer for sale as livestock. We have to teach them that their huge-ass high score does not insulate them from the consequences of being a massive dick. We have to show them as often as necessary that hoarding what ordinary people need to live will not be tolerated. We have to show them that hiring cops to beat us for trying to take back what we all jointly own will earn them beatings as well—and beatings for the cops too.

When they learn that we are no longer willing to debase ourselves for money—that we are no longer willing to be hired to fight each other for their amusement, to perform for them or pleasure them for money—then they will also realize that their high scores mean nothing. That their high scores don’t even mean anything to each other.

Then we can start a new game on even footing.

[*]

[*]

In this experiment, caged pigeons would be raised in isolation to a standard age of pidgie adulthood, with regular and generous free-feeding schedules and no special attention of any kind from handlers, until at some point the feeding stops and the pigeons are starved down to 90% of their free-feeding weight. (This isn’t considered particularly cruel because a pigeon’s free-feeding weight is typically quite a bit above average for pigeons. But it does cause them a bit of stress and “motivates them for training for which food pellets are an effective reward.”) At this point they are placed in a cage (could well be their old cage) with an opaque cover and a timer programmed to release food pellets at randomized time intervals. They will be fed this way for a period of up to a couple of weeks, so the overall food volume for any day needs to be in the range of a healthy (if not free-feeding) diet.

It is very important that the pigeons be left alone with no variations in visual, auditory, temperature, light-level, or other kinds of sensory input. Whatever environmental conditions you choose, they need to be healthy and constant.

Also: no peeking. Although in modern times, a cheap webcam can be installed in the cage as long as nothing about the camera ever changes.

And in a couple of weeks, you whip the cover off and see what kind of bizarre bullshit the pigeon is doing. And it will be bizarre.

See, with a random reinforcement schedule, the pigeon has no idea when a pellet will arrive. But even pigeon brains are geared to think that the world is made of patterns, some of which are relevant to survival, and that within those patterns actions have consequences. So if a food pellet drops while the bird is meandering counterclockwise, the pigeon will tend to meander clockwise more often. If the next food pellet drops even more quickly while the pigeon is turning clockwise and has one foot in the air, then the pigeon will start turning clockwise while hopping on one foot.

When some of these techniques seem to stop working, they might adopt others. And/or go back to the clockwise hop now and then just in case. But by the end of two weeks, the pigeons are, each in their own way, a deranged mess, each performing nonstop their own little insane mystical food dance, convinced that if they stop, the food might not ever come. And for months and months afterward, even back to regular feeding schedules, the dance, or parts of it, can continue.

This is what Behavioral Psychology defines as superstitious behavior: an action taken in expectation that it will possibly increase the likelihood of an overtly favorable event occurring, regardless of the possibility of there being a causal relationship between the action and the result. It’s so pervasive and universal among the animal classes that the potential to have superstitious behavior induced is considered to be a test of a species’s level of cognitive ability.

I’ve wasted 600 words on this lead-up so I can address the concept of superstitious behavior in the context in which I mean it, without the reflexive/defensive triggers for or against religious or spiritual practice or certain cultural traditions—though there’s likely to be some blowback there regardless. It can’t be helped. But I’ll continue.

+

Social media gives lonely, isolated people access to their friends, remoter family members, old acquaintances, and groups of like-minded people with similar interests. Once upon a time, anyway. This was much more true before every popular venue became advertising-supported and algorithm-driven.

This was the case with the old LiveJournal/MySpace/Friendster/dialup-BBS days. Consider it a time of free-feeding for the lonely and attention-starved. (It’s the current situation with Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse, and a number of similar venues that have yet to cave to algorithmic methods of reducing database access and server/ISP resources and income generation. If you’ve missed the free-feeding era, that’s where it’s gone.)

Abandonment of the chronological presentation of posts from your reading list starts the starvation process. Most services opt for this at the start of algorithmic presentation because it reduces resource load on their end. They want it all to work like newspaper journalism. Put the important stuff at the top of the feed and the least important stuff at the bottom and you can stop scrolling down when you feel satisfied—or when you give up because you feel it won’t happen this session.

Then they install the ability to let viewers participate in the ranking. Posts that generate strong reactions/comments get bumped upward. Of course. So far it’s more annoying, but it’s still kind of predictable and deterministic. But the real issue is that it’s not making money. None of this is making money at all. So you sell advertising space. For every x posts people scroll, show one ad. That seems simple enough, and people expect it. And the truly starved will keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Keep them frustrated enough but not TOO frustrated, and they’ll fund your site all on their own.

But advertisers won’t pay as much for a shotgun ad (show it to anybody, anywhere, anytime) when it’s way more effective to show it to people who, say, read the language the ad is written in, who live in regions where the product or service is available, who are interested in things that place them in demographic categories more likely to buy, etc. This works for the social media site too, because showing the right users the right ads wastes less internal resources and generates more revenue. So here’s where we start the data collection, which we can sell to all kinds of advertisers and marketing research firms so they can see what’s selling where and to whom out-of-band. I.e., they don’t even have to advertise on the site for the info to be useful to them. If they can guess your address, they’ll fill your mailbox instead, or even send salespeople to your door.

Here’s where it gets more wonky: advertisers will pay even more to have their ad near a post that’s relevant to the lifestyle they’re trying to associate themselves with—something high-energy, with video or interesting imagery, with a tone relevant to what they’re selling, and something with a lot of positive reactions/comments. But … this means they now are bargaining for the ability to promote the posts more relevant to their products to get them higher in the feed so they can pay more. The social media venue wants to do this too—to have more posts the advertisers want to pay to be next to higher in the feed, so they can charge the advertisers more.

That’s the first part where shit gets a little nondeterministic. Because there’s a chaotic positive feedback loop between posts the advertisers want to be next to and the advertisers who want to be next to certain posts.

The second part is that, thanks to the fucked-up Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, there’s now a near infinite amount of money for ads and not-quite-ads—propaganda and social engineering of various political and politics-influencing natures—to buy space and shit-up the already deranged feed. Even outright propaganda from any country looking to interfere in the goings-on of any other country, as long as the money laundering makes the money clean enough before it’s accepted by the time it’s paid.

And then there’s the third part: fake users and fake posts specifically created to be promoted/promotable, constructed by ad agencies and propaganda mills, all elbowing each other in the tits to get to the top of your feed.

Somewhere at the bottom of your feed, assuming you can scroll that far in the time you have without hitting some kind of server error and having it all start again from the top, is your food pellet—that actual connection to a friend or family member with a message you need to see (but maybe not too many other people, so it doesn’t get the reactions to promote it). Maybe you get to it, maybe you starve. Maybe the people who need to see what you have to say get to the pellet you leave, maybe they starve. In the meanwhile, we all do our own little pigeon dances, trying to figure out how to encode what we need to say, obscuring, censoring, or euphemizing certain words here, tacking on others or nailing on irrelevant tags, adding meaning-free images or video snippets, so that our actual human friends who need to see it might actually get a chance to see it, so we can get the feedback and responses that let us know we’ve been seen: the stuff we’re all starving for. Maybe our dances work and maybe they don’t. It’s legit superstitious behavior, though, because we can never know, only hope.

AND ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TARP COVERING THE CAGE, the advertisers and political propagandists are doing their own little pigeon dances trying to get their noise to the the tops of our feeds, because the algorithm is automated, adaptive, nonlinear, and positive-feedback-driven chaotic (in the mathematical sense, but, yeah, in that other sense too) with just a titch too much complexity. If you’re familiar with mathematical complexity and chaos, you know all you need is an oscillator—a cyclical process of any kind, or, better yet, a couple that are linked—and an overabundance of positive feedback.

For most of us who are starving for social contact and validation, ad-driven (and now propaganda-driven) algorithm-using social media sites are all dance, no pellet. The knock-on effects of post-pandemic isolation has literally made this life-or-death for some of the loneliest.

What I’m saying is check on your friends. ESPECIALLY those you haven’t heard from in a long time. Somewhere they’re just dancing away until they have no choice but to drop.

[*]

We evolved under the pressure of taking risks—exposing ourselves to the elements or predators or territorial defenders (from venomous insects to other tribes of our own kind) or dangerous terrain or merely wagering calories already consumed in athletic effort—in exchange for obtaining food and shelter. Evolutionarily, this is the struggle we’re designed for.

Not, as it turns out, sitting in office chairs doing favors for business owners in hopes of a scoring enough tokens to pay other business owners for food and the readily revocable right to live indoors.

Not that everybody is cut out for the hunting or gathering work. That was always handled as a tribe. Making tools, preparing and storing the food, caring for the children and elderly and sick, education and training and entertainment—all of this stuff needed doing too. The people who brought back the food shared it to everybody who needed to eat, just like the builders built the houses for everybody and the weavers and potters and teachers and doctors took care of all of those other things for the whole tribe.

When someone needed something, you’d give it to them as a gift, and then you’d feel good because you were useful enough to be helpful.

Also greed and hoarding would get you knocked on the head and fed to the wolves.

Before money was invented, anyway.

Money adds a layer of indirection—one extra layer of complexity—that makes this stuff harder to talk about and think about for many people. Maybe even for most people. Money makes wealth seem less real. This works the same way that chips in a casino make money seem less real, which works for the casinos because it tricks people into taking more risks with their money. Money seems to trick people into taking stockpiled wealth less seriously.

Hoarding all of the village’s grain is obviously terrible. Hoarding all of the village’s money so that no one has enough money to buy grain (apparently) seems somehow less heinous despite having the exact same effect.

But the grain is right there in the warehouse. It’s perfectly legal for you to take some as long as you hand over some money. But (apparently) it’s nobody’s problem but your own if you don’t have any money.

The problem is the hired bastards with clubs who, being well fed/paid themselves, are happy to beat you, no matter how hungry you are, if you attempt to take grain without paying. Under this type of scenario, they have no purpose other than beating hungry and starving people, and perhaps a few people trying to provide for hungry and starving people, for the excuse of protecting the hoard—and to protect the hoard’s owner from being knocked on the head and fed to the wolves. And I guess also to protect themselves from being knocked on the head and fed to the wolves for their complicit glee.

In order for this perverted system to occur and be sustainable, both money and grain have to be hoarded. It’s kind of pointless otherwise.

This is the system that results:

     I need to eat → take food. × BEATING. Oops. Need money.
     I need to eat → take money, buy food. × BEATING. Oops. Need job.
     I need to eat → get a job, get money, buy food. × RIDICULE. Oops. Need to look “presentable.”
     I need to eat → take “business” clothes, get a job, get money, buy food. × BEATING. Oops. Need money.

Ugh.

It’s more complicated than that, even.

Need identity documentation. Need a secure location to store and protect important documents/clothes. Need rest and hygiene facilities. Need a job. And, always, need food, need clean water, need clean air.

Somehow, while fending off exhaustion and exposure and hunger and longer-term malnutrition, you’re supposed to get your shit together enough to get all those fake needs seen to before you can get to the real needs of a safe place to sleep and food and clean water.

Nowhere on Earth do these weird fake needs actually trump the real ones when you’re psychotic from having nowhere to rest and starving and sick from whatever scraps you’ve dug up to eat. And if you don’t have help from a friend or family or a kind stranger, you’re gonna either die or turn to crime.

It seems that, in the bizarre terms of “social contract” (in which authorities claim citizens have bought into and endorse the rules by failing to successfully riot and rebel) the bulk of society has decided to let a system like this stand. Perhaps we allow these fake needs exist so we can sort the people with no friends or family from everyone else on the assumption that if someone has been ostracized, it was probably because they somehow deserved to be, either for something they’ve done or for how they act or who or what they are fundamentally.

…even though we know that it’s just shitty luck sometimes that takes away everything. Or an asshole. All we have to do to find this out is ask someone who has been through the transition.

But let’s talk about assholes. Because assholes also take stuff.

Assholes take stuff from vulnerable people because they can, not necessarily because they need it. Assholes take stuff because it make them feel like the Big Dog to be able to take something and get away with it. Assholes also need to eat and sleep somewhere safe and have clean water and air and such, but they go beyond a basic satisfaction of being able to provide for themselves and those who depend on them, and they revel in the demonstrated fact of not being at the bottom of an arbitrary social pecking order. Sometimes they revel in the cruelty and enjoy it. Sometimes they start their own hoards.

The thing that makes someone into an asshole is a lack of compassion and empathy for certain sets of others. This what lets them abuse people weaker than themselves, especially if those people are in these othered categories. This is what helps them think of people weaker than themselves as somehow lesser. This lack of empathy can be taught/trained—and frequently when it appears it _has_ been trained, in much the same way as domestic abuse. Frequently it is trained _by means of_ such abuse.

This is slightly off topic, but needs to be pointed out. Specifically the abuse is of the form of an assertion by an authority—or at least someone stronger—that 1) some categories of individuals are somehow lesser and 2) a targeted individual is a member of one of these lesser categories until that individual “proves” that they are not lesser by means of compliance to with the authority/stronger person’s arbitrary wishes and _possibly_ wins begrudging trickles of approval. This illness is transmissible because adoption of this schema is an obvious part of compliance and the largest part of how the schema has evolved to persist. Any time you see this pattern, especially when it accompanies badges and/or weapons, you must expect trouble.

But also sometimes assholery emerges with no particular training, as some people have lower levels of empathy naturally and cope poorly. Many successfully coping mechanisms exist, but not everyone finds one.

It’s not unconnected that assholes are also frequently hired to stand around hoards with clubs, resenting the fact that they’re not really the Big Dog, but at least they get fed/paid and are therefore not the Little Dog. People with a healthy sense of compassion or empathy could not perform the duties required.

So here are the two main reasons for property crime:

“I was in the middle of a life-threatening crisis, so I took something to help myself out directly (I ate it/drank it/wore it) or indirectly (I hope I can sell it for some money to buy what I need).”

OR

“I didn’t want you to have what you had so I took it/destroyed it to prove to myself (and incidentally to you, and maybe to anyone else who might be looking) that I’m more bad-ass than you. Stronger. More clever. Higher status. Better connected socially. Not lesser. Or at least more bad-ass that you thought I was.”

Justifications are a different matter. Justifications frequently use the term “deserve” and can be ignored. The term “deserve” implies some kind of universal standard of how things ought to be that is 1) somehow mysteriously responsible for dictating actions and 2) never universal and 3) merely serves to deflect the discussion from an individual’s personal motivation, which is always sufficient to explain an individual’s own action.

Consider: “My daughter didn’t deserve to go hungry so I stole food for her” versus “I didn’t want my daughter to go hungry so I stole food for her.” The first version could be debated by any individual inclined to do so. The second version doesn’t require or invite any further discussion. Nor does it need justification.

It seems that the entire system of fake needs exists merely to create a criminal class of the desperate, so that those who refuse to lay down and die may be beaten at whim by the assholes with clubs. It’s telling that those most often divided from what they need by this system of fake needs are of those categories most frequently considered to be “lesser” or “other” by our dominant groups of assholes. This is by design, because sometimes assholes are elected to public office and draft and sign legislation that is designed to tilt the slope of fortune against these othered categories.

If we want to be largely rid of “I’mma just take this” crimes, it would make sense to remove the desperation by providing, universally, shelter and food and clean water, by removing the wall of fake needs between any category of human being and basic survival, and also, incidentally, the ability to find legitimate work or a charitable sponsorship for children or elderly or the disabled or their carers that doesn’t require emotional or sexual indenture to some other citizen, or subjugation to some religious organization, or a corporate sponsorship, or any other equally heinous forced/extorted relationship.

Assholes will fight this, of course. The concentration of the categories they despise in the manufactured existential crises of desperation is how they confirm that those people are “lesser” and “other.” If those people are not more frequently in crisis, then the categorizations start to vanish. Assholes define their own identities in terms of “lessers” and “others” and won’t know how to make themselves feel superior or win approval from their betters by abusing those others or compete among themselves in their pecking orders without them. They risk becoming seen as “lesser” “others” themselves.

The problem here, of course, is that the removal of desperation—as if the assholes would let you do so without a huge struggle—only takes care of one of the major sources of property crime. Because you still have the assholes.

It goes without saying that if you could address the asshole problem—prevent the manufacture of new assholes from otherwise healthy and impressionable young people and treat the condition where it already occurs—you could reduce “I’mma take this” crime drastically across the board by removing the enormous impetus for making and maintaining these artificial “lesser” and “other” categories as well as dismantle these artificial systems for keeping significant quantities of these people in existential crisis.

Perhaps this makes it less of a mystery that most of the best religions start with the premise that “all people are brothers and sisters” and derive their operating ethics from that precept. A religious-authority-mandated abolishment of the concepts of “lesser” and “other” really cuts down on the number of assholes—and the knock-on effects of having them in your society, whether or not they have badges and/or clubs.

[*]

I’m sure you get it. I’ll move on.

The threat to their careers is real, but the reasoning is off.

I can assure you that there are more writers alive now than have ever been on this mudball—possibly more writers than there were _people_ a few thousand years ago, when people started making this complaint—and more literate people, too, who could/might be interested in reading if the circumstances were right: enough free time, a quiet place to concentrate, no constant stream of distractions, affordable access to the material that they would find interesting, etc.

It’s not feasible to address many of those issues right now. Time is being created and distributed at the usual rate. Unless we’re going to give people free rides at near light speed, there’s no plausible way to create more of it. And short of outright economic revolution, there’s no feasible way to kill the need that most would-be readers have for spending all their waking hours in pursuit of money to periodically pay do-nothing owners for permission to remain alive.

Similarly, it’s hard to address things like urban noise and realistic worries over political and environmental catastrophe and the addiction to flicker-media designed to tickle and tease the same “one more, one more, one more” areas of the brain that slot machines and heroin poke, media that somehow manages to nestle comfortably into the crevices of the shattered free time we _do_ have.

But the writing that people would want to read—if they knew it existed and could find it—is being written. I know it is. A bird’s-eye view of the world of writers shows it dribbling out and pooling on the floor. It’s just not making it into the machinery that distributes it to potential readers.

Additionally, the readers who would enjoy some of this writing have never been exposed to anything like it to even know that it’s the kind of writing that they’d crave. Many simply think they just don’t like to read. Just like they’d think that they don’t like to listen to music if they’d never heard anything that would move them.

So there’s only one major disconnect here, but it works in both directions. Readers only get exposed to what goes through the machine and comes out the other end. Writers only get paid for what the machine accepts. So there’s no one reading what’s forming puddles on the factory floor, and there’s no encouragement to write more of it.

Just, you know, compulsion. From the writers who can’t make themselves stop. Until exposure and starvation take care of it for them.

Here is part of the problem:

As of the date of this writing, the interactive graphic on the other end of that link details the five bottlenecks that dominate English-language publishing and the 280+ imprints that they own and control: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette.

There were six bottlenecks before the 2013 Penguin/Random House merger. And this past year Simon & Schuster, previously owned by Paramount, was recently sold to a private equity firm, KKR in this case, which is usually a prelude to being chopped up and sold for parts and financial dodges—like consolidating all of the debt in one little piece and letting that bit go down in flames while selling all the other bits at a profit that more than covers the bankruptcy-moderated loss. This is what happened to Red Lobster and Toys-R-Us. You can look up what happened to them as a roadmap to what’s in store for S&S in days to come. So maybe there will be only four bottlenecks soon.

One of the potential purchasers merely wanted to buy access to the content to feed it into a generative “AI” Large Language Model. I’m not sure what the status of that is at the moment, but believe me, we’ll be mentioning this topic again.

Let’s get back to the main point before I get any further off track.

Any basic economics course will tell you that reduced competition among the owners of commodity distribution networks will screw both the producers and the consumers. They’ll quietly collude with one another to pay the producers less and less and they’ll collude to charge the consumers more and more until they can make the most profit by moving the least amount of product possible. By doing the least amount of work possible. Starving both the producers and the consumers.

Any major player looking to make a play for increasing volume by paying more for raw product and selling more finished goods at lower rates will make themselves vulnerable to a hostile buyout before the profits roll in, so the only secure position (short of seldom-used antitrust legislation stepping in to protect the consumers and producers) is to sit quietly and do what everyone else does.

This is why there are only about as many writers in the market thriving solely by their writing as there are billionaires—and these numbers are decreasing in both categories. This is why bookstore outlets are filled with millions of copies of the same books that you’ve been tired of seeing for ages. This is why the rates being paid to writers for raw materials—the by-the-word rate for short stories, the advances on royalties for longer works, the royalties themselves, the compensation for per-book and sequel contracts—haven’t increased AT ALL since the 1970s.

This is why long-ago-established genre divisions _firmly_ control what’s considered publishable—despite artificial genre categorizations being a mere marketing tool and not at all descriptive of the end-user’s reading experience. This is why pieces that get bought for publication have to have certain lengths—preferably the length of one standard 250 to 400 page novel—instead of however many or few words it takes to tell the story with no uncomfortable chopping or padding. This is why every fiction publisher everywhere accepts only “character-driven” storylines with a Hollywood-blessed three-act frame of establishment/climax/resolution, despite how anything that breaks that model is considered a “work of innovative genius” and becomes wildly popular—assuming it ever sees the light of day. This is why poetry is on Public Assistance life support and short-bite, styleless, lowest-common-denominator prose is the only thing being purchased from new writers anywhere. At 1975 rates.

Despite the fact that many readers are actually interested in reading atmospheric description, world building, and simple “plotless” explorations of concepts and settings. In uncategorizable experimental works. If they’re desperate to find what they like, they have to find it—uncurated and unedited, and also uncompensated—online somewhere. If they have the time, patience, and technical knowledge.

Despite the fact that many of the writers who are selected by the bottlenecks to be published widely enough to support themselves with their writing are well known for being a bit florid, a bit experimental, and a wee mite inaccessible to the hoi polloi.

It’s like the selection process for being blessed for literary promotion is entirely different from the selection process for mass-market genre audiences. I can only assume that the Big 5 think that genre readers are dumber—and that they maintain the genre ghettos as a place to feed readers who don’t like a challenge a steady stream of less challenging material. And that’s putting it as nicely as I can manage. This assumption is misguided. Bigoted, even.

The end result is that your reading material can either contain a bit of a challenge (in language or theme or structure or whatever) as literary fiction _or_ it can contain speculative (SF/Fantasy/Horror) or romantic/thriller/suspense elements _or_ it can serve an established popular or academic nonfiction interest _and also_ it must be firmly written and packaged for one age/interest demographic (with illustrations, if it’s for younguns) _and also_ you must be capable of professional-grade self-editing and willing to market the holy #^@& out of your own work _and also_ it must have a cover added from an underpaid source of some artistic merit that may or may not be relevant to the actual content … _or_ it can #^@&ing languish on your hard drive, unseen, forever. Or be posted in the deepest, darkest corners of Reddit.

There is so much more than can be written that would fit into the established Literary/Genre/Nonfiction categories, and one of those possible things would more than likely be your instant world-changing lifelong favorite. Because it mixes together ALL of your favorite flavors. But you’ll never see it under these circumstances, because—not knowing how to sell the final product—the five entities that control the English language market will never allow those flavors to mix.

...unless/until some independent publisher takes a chance on the work, paying whatever trickle of money they can afford to get it out into the wild somehow. And then an agent of one of the Big 5 poaches the author/work away, if they’re willing to gamble on it, and shelves it in the Literature section, where maybe you’ll find it someday. Because I can guarantee you it’s unlikely to be popular enough for them to promote like the works of one of the as-common-as-billionaires authors. Maybe, maybe not. But not likely.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so think of the world of published works as images for a minute. If the only images that sell are “character-driven” portraits—not mood-evoking landscapes, not detailed diagrams, not collages of elements that build on one another, not abstracts that make the reader work to figure out what they see in there—then eventually the only stuff in bookstores will look like a deck of trading cards: a rectangular frame around the outside, an image of a character in the middle, some vital statistics details at the bottom. Zero flavor.

And then, for some reason, everyone seems to want to look down on the people who find reading these things an acceptable pastime. Maybe it’s what they want and there’s nothing wrong with that. But maybe they’re just that desperate to read _something_ and that’s all the market will provide them for options.

The truth is, however, that these kinds of works are what flood the market only because these just happen to be the only type of product the Big 5 know how to buy and sell in this #^@&ed up market that they’ve crippled by monopolizing distribution.

The writers are unhappy. The agents are unhappy. The editors and book designers and layout artists are unhappy. The printers are unhappy. The bookstores are unhappy. The book buyers are unhappy. The only people who are happy about this situation are roughly fifty hilariously overcompensated board members and the dividend-collecting stockholders.

Every industry where that is the case is broken and needs redesigning from the ground up. But we’re just talking about writing today.

What you can do in the meanwhile, to help find what you might actually like to read (as opposed to what is being offered for sale by the Big 5, only some of which might be vaguely palatable to any particular reader), is to keep your eyes on the independent publishers and support them however you can.

Working strictly from the odds, no particular indie is likely to have the book you want. But notice what they’re selling and recommend it to someone who might like it. Listen to the recommendations of others and pass them along. At some point we’ll be able to make some progress on compiling a massive database of _useful_ tags and categories that readers and publishers will be able to use to connect the right works to the right readers at _fair trade_ prices, with no cuts at all for distribution monopolists.

This will by no means cut the legs out from under the Big 5. In fact, it will improve their market as well by letting them know that there are other products in demand beyond what they’re currently trying to buy and sell and teach them how to find these previously ignored works. They’ll probably have to raise their payout rates for buying rights and offer more services to writers to attract them to their stables, but afterward they’ll sell more books and generate more profits to cover the expenses.

Now is the perfect time to get started on a project like this. The Big 5 (and much of the rest of the publishing world) is currently swamped with the garbage output of make-a-quick-buck hustlers milking ChatGPT for barely edited bulk wordcounts. Readers for all of the publishers are shutting down submission windows until they can shovel themselves out from under the avalanche of bullshit. Human writers (i.e., writers) have nowhere to turn but the indies at the moment, making contact with other actual humans at the publishing house in ways in which they can prove that they’re human and their output is actually worth considering.

The Big 5 have no idea how to rework their systems to make sure any new author is a genuine human being. They’re relying on established relationships with authors to carry them along for now, which means their machine will be starving for input soon if it isn’t already, being, as it is, already tweaked to run super-super-lean, with absolutely skeletal editorial and pre-publication staff.

Systems shouldn’t be hard to come by for cataloging manuscripts to connect them with editors and agents and formatters/typesetters and printers and illustrators and cover artists and voice talent for audiobooks and publishing imprints and readers. There are plenty of databases out there that come close already, fueling WorldCat and every large-scale library cataloging system. Hell, there are _dating_ apps that come close already. I’d be happy to sit down with anyone who wants to develop a system for codifying what each participant in the process wants to offer and what they’re looking for from the other adjacent links in the production chain. Once those are in place, paths should open up from manuscript to reader the same way lightning works, and with similar speed.

Armoring against spammers and scammers will be a problem no matter what the system’s details are, but the key will be to start with a core of actual trustworthy humans and slowly expand a circle of trust—and bounce anybody the instant there is any misbehavior.

I could probably brainstorm for days on the details of how to put something like this together. And I’m willing to, if anyone else out there wants to get to work on it as well.

[*]

Most of you have figured out that I write stuff. Most of you signed up here because you like to read stuff, so I figure it shouldn’t be hard for us to work out a kind of a deal.

Most of you like to read stuff for free, and that’s kind of awesome. I, too, like to read stuff for free. Pound for pound,1 most of the words I’ve ever read have been free, thanks to libraries and the Internet. I’ve paid for a fair bunch, though, because, as a writer myself, I know that writers need to earn money for eating and sleeping out of the weather and buying books to support other writers and—because of the subject matter of some of the stuff they read to fuel their own writing—a bit of money for medicine and therapy to undo some of the damage.2

Also, I like to write words for free. Part of the reason is moral. The words come to me for free after all, and the time I spend writing comes to me the same way—one second after another no matter how hard I try to pen them up—so it doesn’t feel right to charge for them. Also also, the things that words do for us are, in the aggregate, existential necessities [see footnote 2] like A) critical information we need to have about the world in order to be able to survive in it and B) recreational therapy to help us cope with whatever we just learned, i.e., medicine. Another large part of the reason is to pay back—or maybe pay forward—the debt I owe for all of the free words I’ve read.

Seeing as you like to read words for free, we come to our current deal, “human centipede”-like, straight from my keyboard-orifice to your eyeholes.

My outline notes say here to “pause for gagging,” but I’m not sure how to do that in text. I figure you’ll work that out on your end.

However [see footnote 2], I have to find a way to pay for food and shelter and medicine and books from other authors, so I still need money from somewhere.

I am loath3 to ask for any of your money through Substack because they unflinchingly give a platform to monetize a number of bigots and hate-mongers who, in turn, use this platform to organize their readers. I considered trying to locate another platform, which is still an ongoing search,4 but in the meanwhile I’m happy to continue to remain a parasite here and force this one to expend their dwindling resources on my behalf until they fail and/or get bought.

As a more “cruelty-free” option, I invite you to visit my Ko-Fi shop.

First the free stuff:

BLACK BAND is the imprint I’m launching to promote and distribute free, professional quality e-book versions of a number of Public Domain titles that I feel deserve better exposure. These works are already available in a thousand other places, of course, offered for free in barely formatted raw text or HTML or zero-effort/auto-converted electronic forms (or massive PDF compilations of JPEGS of scanned pages) via sites like Project Gutenberg, or piecemeal for the shorter works as seed-crystals for pastiche/homage anthologies, or bot-driven slap-on-a-cover-and-upload-it-to-Amazon 99-cent specials—after first ripping out any and all references to the hardworking teams of editors and cleaner-uppers at Project Gutenberg.

Few of these products are very appetizing as they exist now. Our sources of ancestral inspiration deserve better. And they’re fun to re-read as I compile them into hand-polished suitable-for-any-reader ePub or suitable-for-reader-or-print-on-demand PDF formats, complete with legal artwork and legal fonts, and licensed for free distribution, with the only restrictions being you can’t modify them or charge for them or include them in a bundle of other things you charge for.

There are a couple of titles available so far: “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood—a lovely novella of outdoor adventure for a pair of friends in an ill-advised canoe trip down the Danube in the off-season with a hint of cosmic horror—and the unabridged The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, a story collection that firmly established the idea that some literature will permanently and catastrophically damage your brain in the horror genre—an idea pounced on by Lovecraft and his turn-of-the-previous-century playmates.

They each get a custom-made Foreword by yours truly to provide a bit of context.

There are more in the works, of course. Right now I have Lovecraft’s own “The Festival” short story on the slab, and I’m eyeing the elderly Muir translation of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and Mark Twain’s “Letters from the Earth” for suitability. I’ll add one or two monthly as time permits. I’ll also happily hear your suggestions for titles that should be added! (Public domain works or free-distribution-permission-explicitly-granted-by-the-author only!)

BLACK BAND titles are available for the low price of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Unless you care to add a gratuity. I’m in no position to stop you if you feel so inclined.

Now, the less free stuff:

I’m also offering seven self-published works of my own.

You can click on any of the above for a few more details and a closer look, including screenshots, but if you do, REMEMBER TO TYPE IN THE DISCOUNT CODE “THOFK” TO GET 50% OFF THE PURCHASE PRICE THROUGH JULY 21st so I can thank you for reading my stuff here and supporting my wretchedly low-paying calling.

Also if you could recommend my stuff to your friends and share reviews and such in the usual venues, that would be awesome.

→ONCE I GET ENOUGH MONEY←

I would love to turn this all into a legit indie/nonprofit publishing house to benefit the incurably weird, complete with ISBN codes5 and a legit online storefront and relationships with printers and translators and distributors and stuff. If anyone wants to help out with any of that part, or grant writing to get funding to help me get it all set up, let me know. I’m good for A LOT of the labor for the nuts and bolts of making books happen, but I still need help.

[*]

Project 2017 was just as detailed. And about 62% successful. That wasn't because of Trump per se. Because what did he do besides golf and hide and schmooze? He just signed stuff that was put in front of him when they could get him to concentrate and sit still.

This was the sort of stuff he signed. These were the people who drafted it and got it into his hands via his handlers. These were the people who fluffed his ego and praised him for his masterful leadership when he spelled his name close enough to right on the line at the bottom of the page.

There will be a Project 2029. And a Project 2033.

—

There was a reason that prior to Reagan the GOP—annoying as they were—wanted nothing to do with the John Birch Society Libertarians, the NRA Gun Nuts, and the Religious Lunatic Fringe, and this is why:

[ waves hands around generally ]

Not even Republicans—as they existed prior to 1978 or so—wanted this fascist nightmare.

Up to then, these documents would get drafted and passed around and marked up with little humorous caricature sketches of stick figures and genitalia and thrown in the garbage where they belong. But now that current elected officials rely on these global domination death cultists for votes and campaign funds, they have to take these agendas seriously, or they'll get kicked out of their sinecures and replaced by someone who will.

Because of the money laundry part.

Because of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision specifically, unlimited amounts of dark money from all over the world can flow into their bank accounts and be distributed with glee to the campaigns of anyone greedy enough or fanatical enough to not need a Silkwood shower after being in the same room with any of their lobbyists. It's the money. Just the money.

Remember how annoying Hugo Chavez got when the price of oil was so high that Venezuela was actually wealthy, including the expensive dog-and-pony show of joint naval exercises with Russia in the Atlantic? Remember how he faded like a salted slug when the price of oil dropped again? It's just the money that makes these lunatics dangerous.

The Heritage Foundation has collected a ton of it from billionaire donors who control networks of separate funds from their paper empires so no single chunky donation stands out. The foundations aren't required to disclose their donors despite funneling cash directly into politics. We only have lists of US donors because anyone who wants a tax break for a donation has to report it to the IRS, and those records are public. We don't know what comes in from abroad, or when, or why, or who or what it is earmarked for. We only get a glimpse of how much in total when they file their own annual tax forms.

According to those forms, their permanent assets are on the order of a third of a billion $US. Lately they take in about half a billion over the course of four years and spend most of it exactly how you'd think.

And they have very close ties to the State Policy Network and the Council for National Policy, both of which you should look up when you get the free time.

And the Heritage Foundation is by no means the only one of its kind.

I'm not trying to paint these foundations as enormous unassailable giants. They're big complicated machines with many weaknesses, and some of those weaknesses are the human beings that run them, whose names are listed on public documents and whose addresses are a matter of public record, whose businesses are traded on public exchanges, whose assets are listed in public IRS filings. Whose yachts are moored at public marinas. You know what I'm saying. If we cut off the money and make the seats of control too hot to sit in, they will grind to a halt. If we make them a laughingstock, via good old satire, they will wither and rust. Just sayin'. Every giant is killable.

But we really should get to work at it before they do too much more damage.

[*]

There are maybe ten people on Earth who like all that first contact stuff, and they’re all linguists and/or fringe cognitive scientists. Probably French. No hate, but sometimes I’d prefer to try to write for a potential audience of at least twice that.

No reason for an awkward silence here. I try to keep a realistic perspective despite the impact to my mental health.

Anyway, sometimes my alien visitor—MAV--and I watch or read the news together and then we have to hit pause while I explain some things. It doesn’t help that much of the news lately is about goings-on in the legal system in the Unites States, which is kind of a huge mess.

The first thing I have to explain to MAV is that everything is working as designed.

Wealthy and influential people do not get arrested as frequently for crimes compared to those who are less wealthy or to minorities. This is usually because the people authorizing warrants or performing arrests are less wealthy or powerful than those potentially being arrested and are hoping for the benefits of gratitude, either now or later, for the exercise of discretion and restraint. Most of these hoped-for benefits are illegal in these circumstances, but we’re already talking about how many things aren’t as illegal for certain sets of people. Wealthy and influential people are fine with this, however, and they use their wealth and influence to make sure this practice is encouraged and even legalized when possible.

Even when they do get arrested, wealthy and influential people face different consequences for crimes than people with less money or minorities. Same reasons as above.

If the penalty for illegal or unethical behavior is a fine, this means that the misbehavior merely has a price, and that the consequence is not an impediment to those who are wealthy enough that the price is inconsequential.

Once arrested, wealthy people can pay money to not sit in jail until their trial. The money is given back when they show up for their trial. Poor people might be able to get a loan for a non-refundable fee of about a tenth of the value assigned by the judge at the preliminary hearing. Maybe, maybe not. Cash bail has been experimentally outlawed in some places as an obviously unfair practice. As a test to see if we can really do without it.

Corporations establish budgets to pay for fines. Corporations even buy insurance policies to cover fines and penalties. It’s called Errors and Omissions Insurance, or an E&O policy. Very handy if you can afford it. A typical policy might not cover the most egregious offenses, but, well, if you have money….

I don’t know that a lot of wealthy individuals buy E&O insurance for themselves, but what would be the point, really? Incorporation paperwork is cheap and easy for the wealthy, and the whole point of it is to shield the owner(s) of the corporation from a whole range of different liabilities. It’s like wearing a puppet on your hand that you can say said things or did things instead of yourself. It doesn’t work for every offense, but it’s cheap armor for most white-collar crime.

The biggest difference between wealthy people and poor people in a court is the quality of lawyer you can afford. You only get issued a free one in a criminal case, and the free ones are overworked, underpaid, and usually disillusioned to the point of near terminal burnout. If you get arrested and don’t have an expensive lawyer, the police will abuse you at their whim without any fear of consequences—not that cops suffer consequences very often for anything. Cop unions have excellent lawyers. Something called “Qualified Immunity” allows them to stomp on your basic human and civil rights without fear of consequences. And cops are not above taking out their frustrations—usually caused by wealthy people wriggling out of their grasp or seeing that the cops get punished for shitty behavior—on poor people with no defenses.

If you are embroiled in a civil suit, it’s an old-fashioned trial by combat where the champions for each side are the amount of liquid assets they can afford to wager on the contest. This can be the case for criminal trials as well, with the wealth of the defendant (corporate or individual) pitted against the resources of the district attorney.

Somewhere at the bottom of it all are laws and rules and judges, but the system has so many weak points that can be influenced by manipulating the process itself—changing venues, expensive delaying tactics, unending waves of motions and appeals, jury selection, hiring of expert witnesses, wrangling over admissible evidence and tormenting witnesses, settlement offers, post-judgment appeals, leaks to the press, etc.—the actual trial itself is frequently less than 10% of what’s going on.

If you have money.

It’s a matter of statistical fact that poor people and minorities are sentenced to jail more often and for longer sentences, and sentenced to death more often where that’s still allowed, than wealthy people.

And then there are the prisons.

It is illegal in the United States to enslave anyone but the incarcerated. Prisons are businesses., however. Only a smallish percentage are privately operated, but all of them have operating budgets, and those budgets are set against income from renting enslaved prisoners. It might seem a bit off, but the whole point of a prison is to suspend most civil rights and as many basic human rights as possible, largely to keep costs down.

Even state prisons give bonuses to administrators proportional to the amount of money saved on keeping prisoners housed and fed and alive. So the administrators have every encouragement to keep their prisoners as close to death as possible for as long as possible—and to extract as much uncompensated labor from them as possible in the meanwhile.

And of course the system doesn’t work as well unless the prisons are stuffed-to-bursting. The administrators are given budgets to manage that are calculated per person incarcerated, after all. If you have fewer prisoners, you get less money to administer, less implied power, lower bonuses for not spending all of it. Fewer prisoners mean less savings in economies of scale, too. So anyone with any influence makes sure prisons get full and stay full—especially where the imprisonment of people with poor or foreign backgrounds and darker skin is concerned.

This is all taking place in the same economy that would experience measurable growth if these prisoners were rehabilitated and were earning income that could be taxed and fuel consumer behaviors instead of housing them like livestock in battery farms and selling their labor as chattel. But imprisoning people and selling their labor is an industry, and as an industry it has a lobby that bribes legislators to preserve the jobs of the administrators and their contracted suppliers of food and services, and fatten all of their compensation packages, and it works because fattened compensation packages are where the bribes come from.

I call them bribes because that’s what they are, but the legislators have instituted laws and guidelines that make these bribes and election campaign donations perfectly legal. More on that in a bit.

This system creates an artificial perpetual and self-renewing “criminal” class from the unluckiest and most desperate of the darker-skinned minorities, and since the imprisoned are at a disadvantage for accruing generational wealth, this “imprisonable” class becomes hereditary. And the existence of this class serves the purpose of giving the poorest and unluckiest of the non-minority folks someone to look down on and blame for their ills—which works out great for the people with wealth and power and influence who are to blame for the problems of everyone at the low end of the spectrum. It delays the inevitable advance of the guillotines.

It’s weird how everyone in the United States recognizes, however reluctantly, these statements as established facts. It’s weird how most of the citizenry just shrugs, as if to say, “What can anyone do? It’s just how things are.” But then, some of them are actually in favor of things remaining this lopsided. Particularly those who think their majority group memberships (race, religion, political affiliation) protect them from the worst.

And these are just issues with the legal system. The economy is also extremely broken. Education is priced out of the range of anyone who needs it. The housing market is destroyed. Worker protections are nonexistent. Medicine is generally unavailable. Air and water are being poisoned industrially everywhere. The climate has been wrecked. Food is rapidly becoming unavailable. Every last bit of it is slanted to make things even more difficult for minorities, immigrants, and nonconformers. All in the name of profits for those who are already so wealthy it is literally impossible to spend all of their money before they die.

So how can it all be fixed? Can voters fix anything by voting for legislators who actually want to improve the situation?

Well, not really.

Political parties choose candidates for ballots based on which candidates will attract more/larger donations to the party’s coffers. Corporate donors sponsor the candidates who will most benefit them with their legislation. Candidates who will benefit ordinary voters, based on issues, aren’t allowed anywhere near a ballot because they would almost certainly enact laws to reduce corporate influence. That is why, as the seats to vote on wield more and more power at the state and national levels, there are increasingly only corporate toadies and populist idiots on the ballots. The way things are now, the allowed candidates will only ever represent the interests of wealthy individual and corporate donors.

We used to minimize domination by wealthy individuals and corporate influence by allowing campaign donations only from flesh-and-blood human beings, verified to reside in the areas served by the position on the ballot, each donation capped at a reasonable amount that might be affordable to typical wage earners. That scheme is 100% what we need to enact again in order to get the money out of politics. It would effectively restore democracy. But since it would require legislation to be written and voted on by sitting legislators who have been purchased by wealthy individuals and corporate donors, there is no path to this solution that involves the normal process of selecting a candidate who will vote for such a thing, putting them on the ballot, and voting them into office.

From here, the only thing that might help would be protests. Organized protests at party conventions where candidates are selected. Withdrawal of memberships from existing parties to form new ones. Organized protests at the homes and offices of the worst of the corrupt officials. Organized protests to stop business at the sites of massive corporate donors. Organized protests at the homes of billionaires. Organized protests that disrupt commerce nationwide in order to show that the money supply can actually be interrupted. Organized protests at the embassies of countries whose oligarchs flood our politics with outside money.

Voting no longer works, except perhaps to vote for whichever candidates would be less likely to restrict the rights of citizenry to gather and protest.

When voting no longer works, democracy is dead. The next step is protests. And protests had better work, because the only thing left after that is revolt.

—

Lately, these are the things I tell my news-watching Alien Visitor—who is, let me tell you, sick to the teeth of hearing it.

As are you guys by now, I’m sure.

Why do I do all of this? Why do I explain things to My Alien Visitor? It’s simple. It keeps me embedded and paying attention to what I’m doing and to how I’m choosing to spend my limited time here on Earth. It keeps me aware of the pointless absurdity of literally everything we fill our waking hours with beyond the tasks and duties hammered into us by millions of years on the anvil in evolution’s forge.

We weren’t designed for any of this. Every last scrap of 21^st Century civilization has ridden in past our emotional and mental immune systems’ defenses via vulnerabilities in our family and tribal drives, via vulnerabilities in our responses to fear and confusion and insecurity, via a huge abuse of language itself to crowbar open these security holes, and, of course, by the ability of those who were lucky enough to have already fed their greed to compel others with promises of food or sex or secure housing or belonging—or promises of violence from those they’ve already bought.

All of it. Everything that makes us different from Tarzan. All of it is a twisted kind of infection, straining to be at least a little symbiotic so we don’t give up on it altogether.

Recognition of the absurdity of it all, recognition of the arbitrariness of any of the details, recognition of the evolutionary shape of the beasts at the heart of all of our ills—the same kind of shaping force that gives us trees and fish and crabs that look alike but are phylogenetically unrelated to each other—that reveals the true and utterly predictable nature of these beasts. This recognition is critical to my continued survival and any attempts I might make to improve my chances of survival on my own terms, improve my chances of picking a path through the mire. Improve my chances of causing significant long-term damage to the parts that most offend my values.

And this is me, explaining to you, My Alien Visitor, why I explain things to My Alien Visitor.

[*]

First of all, let me state that I am licensed to practice law exactly nowhere on Earth—and yet, along with the rest of you of the age of majority and presumed competence to click-sign the fifteen documents we all have to in order to participate in modern society, I’m required to understand every legal document that whooshes past my face with an “AGREE” button at the bottom. So I give it my best shot.

…even though I know it’s 100% the same situation as Sumerian continuing as the language of liturgy, literature, and science until the first century CE for a certain geographical region, and even more so the same deal as Latin being used exclusively in the Catholic church until the middle of the last century so that the largest division of Christians on Earth would need to retain the services of a priesthood (via cash money and extorted obedience) to translate and interpret their daily relationship to the Divine for them on the threat of inadvertent damnation.

In the end, though, legalese is just a stilted and formal dialect of English, which I have mostly mastered. The grammar and syntax take few liberties. The usage of terms tends to the archaic. But end the end it is a programming language—which means it’s possible for it to be poorly written and buggy, sloppy and obfuscated, or “algorithmically challenged” with parts that do nothing and never get executed, or when executed do entirely unexpected things.

Never forget that a legal document is a program for people to execute. Lawyers specifically, but others, when they sign a contract, are required to execute the program as well … in whatever way their personal untrained-and-buggy internal interpreter dictates.

This programming language is only taught to the wealthy, to the children of the powerful, and to a handful of scholarship kids who are discovered to have the knack. This helps the powerful retain their power, and it’s all a crock, and like the Latin mass it needs to be abolished.

Specific to the claims flying around that Adobe is saying that they own the shit you create:

This is not the first time a software company has been accused of making this claim. It hasn’t even been five years since the last resurgence of this furor from other sources. But the root source of the misinterpretation is the same: fucked-up copyright laws.

So let me explain it again.

Until you say otherwise, YOU own the exclusive rights to publish copies of your creative work. EVEN AFTER YOU HIT “POST” AND PUT IT OUT THERE IN THE WORLD.

But when you hit “Post” you yourself aren’t printing copies and handing them around. Your (extorted, clickware) agreement with the site you post on grants a nonexclusive license for them to make a theoretically infinite number of copies and send them everywhere in the world where they’re allowed to operate and show them to … whatever set of people you have theoretically chosen. This is the end result you want, supposedly, if you’re a user of social media.

Because of the inherent global fucked-upness of copyright law, social media companies feel that they need to click-extort this right from you in order to cover their asses, even though it’s YOU setting viewing permissions and hitting “Post” on a post-by-post basis. It’s because no social media site is considered to be a “common carrier” and can be held responsible for content they didn’t write, and … other stuff like that. They assume via clickware legal bullshit that you’ve given them the license to actually post your crap when you hit post, and that’s pretty much that.

Adobe’s monstrous monolithic Creative Cloud Network has a “Share” function that lets you allow colleagues and your end-clients access to the stuff you make and store on their “cloud”, and that clause that everyone is freaking out about is what they think they need to force you to agree to in order for them to provide access to the people you want to give access to your work. And they feel they need that extorted license to be transferable to third parties because they might hire a third party to write/host/maintain that sharing network for them, since such software is clearly outside of their in-house field of expertise.

And that’s pretty much the end of the issue with that one particular clause that people have been sharing screenshots of on all of the social media sites. I’m not saying their legal code doesn’t have bugs and backdoors and trojan horses elsewhere. I’m just saying that’s not one of them. I’m saying that it’s what they feel they need to include in their T&Cs in order to do exactly the thing you probably want them to do when you try to share your work with other people.

I mean, it’s not like Facebook click-extorting the right to show your face and photos and text and personal data to anyone and everyone their unmonitored and unmoderated algorithm chooses, outside of your personally hand-picked network, in their insidious and insipid “Do you know this person? Do you want to? Maybe you should connect!” suggestions/attempts to reconnect you to old stalkers you thought you’d blocked and shaken off your tail.

Anyway, that’s enough of me defending Adobe. I can’t stomach any more of that. If you’d like a more legitimate reason to hate them, please allow me to continue.

As if you could stop me.

My largest beef with Adobe is that once they discovered that they’d mysteriously gathered to themselves a huge enough chunk of the market share for digital artwork and layout—in which end-users were now requiring that collaborators share their work among themselves in Adobe’s proprietary formats—they changed their business model in a way that no longer allowed struggling creative types to own their own means of production.

Thus turning the bulk of the freelance creative industry, by stages, from farmers into migrant sharecroppers.

You no longer own your tools. You have to lease them from Adobe with a monthly or annual payment that you have to hand over to your new software landlord no matter how much money you’re earning from your output.

The rent you pay to your fief in tons of veggies doesn’t depend in the slightest on how much you were able to harvest this season.

If you work on the Adobe Creative Cloud, you no longer own your farm. If you miss a rent payment, you will get locked out of your fields of crops-in-progress and even from the marketplace where you distribute your own goods to your own customers.

Failure to adhere to their click-extorted Terms & Conditions, as interpreted by their own whimsical lawyers and corruptible executives, can unilaterally get you kicked out of your own shop even if you make all of your payments.

And of course Microsoft was mere minutes behind them in their “Hey, Let’s go back to the Feudal Landlord model!” innovation, both with the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite and then, as soon as they could manage it, their operating system.

If you are a creative business owner, it’s a huge risk to put your all of your eggs in the proprietary software basket. If you’re close enough to the edge, it might be a mistake to put any of your valuable eggs in those baskets.

And it’s not like their “it’s okay to be shitty because we own the whole market” software hasn’t crashed out from under me a number of times destroying untold hours of work, back when I was forced to use it.

Allow me to mention free, full-featured alternatives like Scribus (publication layout) and Krita (digital painting) and Inkscape (digital illustration) and GIMP (image manipulation and retouching) and the LibreOffice suite (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.). I’ve used all of these packages and they work exactly as expected—although GIMP still needs a little help working in the print-friendly CMYK-derived color-spaces and needs help that is freely available from Cyan.

Sharing networks might be harder to recommend since not only do you have to pick one for yourself, you have to convince your clients and collaborators to use them as well. But that’s a discussion worth having.

If you are a creator anywhere near your financial edge, do not let these feudal entities force you to rent access to the tools you use for producing your livelihood. And don’t give them the power to lock you out of your own shop.

Especially if your country is at risk of turning into an authoritarian nightmare and a single edict can make it illegal for them to do business with you on the off-chance you might be a dangerous subversive.

[*]

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that this wealth concentration is also what pushes people toward the dubious comforts of nationalism and fascism. The distrust of strangers builds when resources get scarce (artificially or otherwise), when critical systems of support and security collapse, when calamity hovers one layoff away, one storm season away, one medical emergency away. That distrust turns to hatred the instant you see someone who doesn’t look like you with anything in their hands that you don’t have. You call them thief because they have something you feel you deserve. You fuel your feelings with any cherry-picked bias-confirming bullshit—a fantasy of better genes or an error-free culture, race-based divine blessings from a God that obviously just likes you better, take your pick—whatever salves your envy and tells you that you’re superior and that you deserve to take what others have and that it’s no sin to maliciously thin down the competition, either systemically or with a knife or a gun. And then *poof* you’re a Nazi.

That’s assuming you weren’t raised to believe you were superior in the first place.

Apparently this works even if you’re Jewish.

I swear it’s like watching a kid growing up under the yoke of an abusive father. He finally got out from under that bastard and tried to make good … but now he treats his own kids the same way. And worse.

I’m being unfair. Only some kids pass the violence on. Some kids learn the lesson and swear off the violence, choosing deliberate kindness and compassion. But out-of-control-money always backs the fascists, because kindness and compassion cut way the #^@& into profit margins, so that kind of bleeding-heart “treating strangers in our land the same way we treat one another” and “supporting widows and orphans and the sick and the impoverished and the elderly who have no one” treasury-draining bullshit just isn’t going to fly. It’s best to gut all of that as quickly as you’re allowed to without starting riots and stuff.

Unrestrained capitalism means occasional but inevitable outbreaks of Nazis.

“Look around! Socialism always fails!” you snicker. Well, have you considered the fact that one of the reasons it fails is that capitalists band together to starve them out and send in CIA-backed insurrectionists to overthrow them and set up puppet dictators? Every damned time. It’s not like they’re ever given much of a chance to work shit out. And then there are the propaganda engines that keep highlighting the authoritarian regimes that got their starts by corrupting socialist attempts. But, well, as we can see, capitalist governments aren’t immune to authoritarian corruption either. It’s always the authoritarian part that’s the issue, but nobody is allowed to look at that for too long.

Regardless, this is where we are. Artificial scarcity, wealth concentration, religion-endorsed nationalist fascism. All against the background of out-of-control famine-and-disease-and-poverty-inducing weather because of seventy years of coverups of the atmospheric damage that fossil fuels have been causing, all in order to fuel that very same wealth concentration and artificial scarcity.

It’s all connected, as they say. It’s one huge tangled mess, but anyone with eyes and patience can track every single one of the threads.

Anyway, we’re down to the point of multiple simultaneous outbreaks of fascism, and soon it will be one set of nuclear-armed fascists against another with a generous side dish of all the misery anyone can eat, with all of the people whose hoarding has caused this over the past hundred years in their graves or in their bunkers.

Somewhere between three and five million people died from global mismanagement of a relatively mild pathogen in the past few years. How grown up do you think world leaders will be about reigning in retaliation until all the silos are empty? How do you think “Get Back to Work!!!” capitalism is going to manage nuclear fallout?

It doesn’t matter that the billionaires don’t want any nuclear exchanges. Their magic spreadsheets have revealed that since profiting from misery is A-OK profits are maximized as we all asymptotically approach the line of maximum misery. That calls for a strategy of putting in office the imbeciles who will march right up to that line without caring where the line actually is and hoping enough of the people who can actually do math will sacrifice themselves to (somehow) drag their respective maniacs back from the brink.

Or the mythological Invisible Hand of the Free Market. Which is in fact their own hands, and they’re shoving, not pulling.

So the strategy is a bit unsustainable. Because part of what makes it all work is making sure their bunch puts in office a bigger madman who will come even closer to kicking off the horror show. Like Israel’s Likud Party did by funding Hamas. Like Putin’s band of whipped oligarchs have done by continually shoving Trump into the foreground.

There’s no line for sustainability in the magic spreadsheets. Because that cuts into the quarterly profits. Right now it’s all about getting the bunkers finished on time and making sure there’s a sufficient amount of concrete tradable wealth stockpiled when all of the dollars and yuan and rubles and reals and euros and are burned up. But there won’t be any water or food to buy, because all of the water and croplands will be poisoned. It will be quite a conundrum.

Regardless, eventually someone will kick things off. The doomsday button is a stochastic process.

Here, let me paint you a picture.

The kernels of popcorn are in the skillet with plenty of oil. Everyone is taking their turn cranking up the heat a little bit at a time, knowing that as long as everyone is doing it, they can’t personally be blamed. Also, nobody can predict which kernel is going to pop first, nor exactly when. How can anyone get individually blamed for any particular kernel popping?

But crisis is what makes trapped money—stored money, invested money—change hands. When money is in motion, those who have the most already are the best equipped to skim even more from the flow. Turn up the heat more, a little more, a little more, and a kernel pops. Crisis! Time to make a buck liquidating commodities, assembling packages of medical supplies, transporting aid, rebuilding demolished infrastructure, buying up cheap property, getting a tariff dropped on importing your commodities—and of course profiteering, because when the need is high you can charge what you like. Turn up the heat a little more and more kernels pop. Each pop means a chance at grabbing more money as it flows past. But at some point there will be more popping than anyone can handle, and the lid gets blown off.

This is the machine and it’s working exactly as designed.

No one who wants to turn the heat back down is allowed anywhere near the knob.

One of those kernels in the pan has your name on it.

[*]

The value of your labor is exactly zero. What has value, at least potentially, is the result of your actions. If you think about it—and you should—you can see that the amount of sweat you exude and the results of having acted are different things. These results are only loosely linked to the amount of effort, the difficulty of the effort, the number of calories you expend or the time or care you expend in the action—if they are linked at all. Sometimes your job is easy because someone else has come along before you and paved your way or built your tools or prepared your workspace or refined your process. A long line of people giving you little nudges now and then along your way adds up to a lot of momentum. Sometimes it’s easy because you just walked into the right place at the right time and big results only needed a tiny push.

Sometimes your job is brutally hard because the setup is terrible. Someone before you made a huge mess. Circumstances align to make everything uphill. Prejudices align to make everything uphill. What should have been easy is a monumental effort. But the results are the only things that count.

You see that, right? The value of your presence in someone else’s enterprise is the net addition of the results of your actions to their bottom line. No more and no less. That’s what has value to someone else’s business, not your sweat.

Back in the era of Saturday Morning Cartoons, animated drawings of trickster gods repeatedly taught a generation of children the lesson of how hard work and fervent devotion to a single-minded pursuit could be thwarted, trumped, subverted, and/or entirely subsumed by an agent who saunters in at exactly the right place and exactly the right time and exerts the barest minimum amount of agency—and then blithely saunters away again, unpunished and untouchable, with what was supposed to be the payoff for all that work.

It was funny because it revealed the lie behind everything every grown-up ever tried to tell us about the necessity of working hard, about dedication and commitment and perseverance. We instantly saw the truth in the cartoon and the lie in what our parents and teachers and pastors tried to teach us.

There’s a reason those cartoons aren’t shown anymore.

2.

The value of your money is exactly zero. What has some value is what can be purchased with that money. And that purchasing ability does not scale linearly. Ten dollars typically buys more than a thousand individual pennies can in individual transactions. Ten million dollars buys more than you can buy with a million individual ten-dollar bills. At some point there is a complete phase change with money as well. It changes from pay-the-bills, buy-the-groceries money into money you are paid to own, into investment money. It’s removed from circulation and gathers interest and dividends along with all the dust. The phase changes happens the instant you have more than you might need to spend before you die.

That surplus money is no longer money for just for purchasing stuff. It gives you the power to make other people who are in crisis—people who are experiencing a lack of things that money could purchase—do what you want.

A kind society has the ability to eliminate the ability-to-survive impact of any and every kind of crisis—medical, accident, act of God; unemployment, disability, or death of a breadwinner—but that cuts way down on the number of people that wealthy people could control with their excess money. So wealthy people vote against universal insurances and social safety nets every chance they get. And now you know why.

Strictly speaking, money isn’t even necessary. Everything that can be bought with money can be bought with other things. Barter or trade. Services or promises. Cash and coin were invented as a convenient physical representation of a promise and nothing more. So of course it causes problems when it’s stockpiled. Stockpiled promises are never delivered, never honored.

Having savings is one thing. That’s just long-term budgeting. Saving for emergencies and retirement is another, and is only necessary because there are no serious, functional, protected safety nets or compassionate social programs. But hoarding money you’d never be able to spend in your lifetime is where it gets obviously catastrophic for everyone.

Somebody worked for that money. The things promised to them for that work will never be delivered as long as that money is never circulated.

Seriously, if you have money that could just be given away or taken away without any impact to you whatsoever once all of your needs and whims are satisfied, it should be. For every billion removed and put back in circulation, you should get a gold star. You won the game. Congratulations.

The only thing you’d lose is the full ability to participate in the plutarchy that should never have existed. You’d still have plenty of money to buy the humiliation of the needy on an individual level instead of a national one, if your morals run in that direction.

Anything you hoard that you will never need is wasted. Anything you hoard against the day when you can trade it to someone who needs it in order to profit from their desperation is a curse, and it prolongs and aggravates the desperation and spread the misery, with interest equal to your profit margin.

If someone truly needs something you have that you don’t need right now, ethically speaking you should simply hand it over. The more you are known for this—the more people in general are known for this—the more likely it will be that if you ever truly need something in the future, someone will simply give it to you.

This is what we teach our children as toddlers—and then train out of them again before they leave the nest. Why is that?

3.

There are two different forms of greed at work here. One here is hoarding so you can have power over the disadvantaged, and the other is hoarding because you’re afraid people will treat you in the future the way you treat them now if they ever got an advantage over you, and you need to prevent that at all costs.

These are different from the Envy of Seven Deadly Sins fame, of course, where you just want what someone else has (classically called covetousness). They seem different from the Greed from the same list, also called avarice, at least the way we imagine it in modern times, with Scrooge McDuck rolling around in a pile of gold coins. That form of greed, the one we imagine, is actually closer to Gluttony from that same list, wallowing in extravagance and willful waste. The Greed in this list is about power and the protection and privilege that comes with the hoarding mentality. If you can buy yourself a ticket to the next level up, the laws work for you instead of against you, and wanting that feels like self-preservation instead of the crime against humanity that it is.

Is this all a bit too sermony for you? It is for me, too. I’m putting it in Christian terms mostly for cultural and linguistic context. But the problems here aren’t about what any observing deity might think, they’re about causing real and lasting harm to one another due to the urge to degrade or dominate one another or the fear of being similarly dominated.

Asking people to weigh in on what any god might think just makes things worse, because that just draws and redraws and reinforces the lines around which groups ought to be owned and which you should be irrationally afraid of.

Take note. Somewhere in there is the difference between what’s a crime and what’s a sin. A sin impacts your relationship with your divinity of choice and a crime impacts the mutual circumstances you share with other human beings. It’s an important distinction to make. Because it’s fine, accepted, and beneficial to get the government involved in the case of crimes, whereas it’s oppression to get the government involved in matters of sin.

The levels of greed we’re experiencing clearly mark it as a crime.

4.

Your value as a human being is apparently exactly zero, if we’re working solely in dollars. Your body itself might be worth something as parts or meat, if you aren’t too old and tough, but the difficulties of breaking up and selling for parts any spare corpse you have on hand generally make such a windfall a net liability. You can see that we’ve taken pains to set things up this way on purpose, if you think about it.

You’re assumed to be able to work for…let’s call it 50 years during your life. This assumption is fundamentally busted, largely because we assume it applies to everyone and declare anyone for whom it doesn’t apply defective—a burden. In order to pay for your basic subsistence at the poverty level, you’re expected to earn $15,000 for each of those working years. In theory that covers paying back your parents for those inconvenient years when you were to young to work (or paying that forward to your own kids if you bother to have any) and squirreling a few bucks away for those last ten or twelve years of your life when you’re too old and slow and sore for the grind. Anyway, with the past and future expenditures recast into 2024 dollars, your total lifetime poverty-level living expenses runs about $750,000. Three-quarters of a million dollars.

It’s important for the sake of this exercise to not live too long past 80. Otherwise it screws up the math, and not in your favor. If you’ve actually been living at the poverty line your whole life, you don’t need to worry. You’re not very likely to hit that limit.

It makes sense if you think about it. The octogenarian lifestyle is reserved for those who can afford medicine.

If you’re not healthy enough to work that hard—or if the work you have to do is to take care of other people who are too young or too old or too sick to work, which is literally 30 years of the life of a healthy person and quite a bit more than that of everyone else—that’s cool. You’re expected to be related to or (monogamously or serially) romantically entangled with someone who, in their own fifty working years, can pick up every last scrap of your slack, and hopefully not resent you too much for it. Ditto if you’re one of those people who is being cared for.

So you probably want to be pretty, because God help you if you aren’t.

It would be nice if during those periods of dependency you didn’t have to worry about being emotionally or physically exploited or abused to somehow pay for the breadwinner’s financial investment in your existence. But the way things are now, if you don’t have the money, you don’t get to choose how much crap you have to put up with for meals and a bed indoors for yourself and anyone else in your care. What counts as a minimum circumstances for basic comfort is determined at the whim of whoever has the checkbook. Without many exceptions, the person with the checkbook gets to decide who and how many to support and for how long and at what level.

So you start the clock breaking out of the womb with a $750,000 debt to society that even the corpse of your dead body can’t help defray. If you’re not one of the ones born lucky enough to have a shot at doing more than breaking even, society seems to believe that you deserve all the misery headed your way. Given those facts, it’s all a bit of a wash.

I call this the “Original Sin” model of human worth. It’s absolute bullshit but, honest-to-God, it seems to be how most people are raised to think the ideal human economy should work.

5.

If you take money out of the equation altogether, there’s enough of everything to go around. People in the USA need 131 million homes—that’s both houses and apartments—and there are by now more than 241 million. Only about 15 million of those extra 110 million count as vacant, because the rest are second homes, third homes, fourth homes, or, as you might know it by another name, investment property—the real estate version of stacks of idle cash that earn interest and dividends and generally appreciate in value.

Remember, they only count as vacant if you’re trying to attract a buyer or a renter. If they’re just sealed up, alarmed and guarded to prevent entropy from overbalancing appreciation, that apparently counts as happily occupied.

Similarly, for every five meals’ worth of food farmed or slaughtered, cooked, assembled, packaged and handed over, only three meals make it to bellies. The rest is thrown away, and the bulk of that food rotted or otherwise aged out of edibility because the people who wanted it didn’t have enough money to buy it, and the people who owned it could claim the loss of those phantom profits against their tax burdens.

The money to buy these homes and this food exists. These cash-promises to allow people buy them were printed right on schedule. But they were never handed over to the workers who earned them. For fifty years, these undelivered promises went increasingly disproportionately into investment capital stockpiles owned by the same people who owned the companies that should have been paying their workers, because for some reason it’s never been a law that a fair share of a company’s profits has to go to the workers who made those profits happen. All of the safeguards we’d put in place since the Great Depression to prevent this kind of assholery occurring again have been pried off one by one since the onset of Reagan’s Voodoo Economics and globalized hooligan-style Neoliberalism.

Instead…we now have a replay of the Gilded Age. Record profits for the owning class, robber barons, money and private interests dominate the holy #^@& out of politics and military ventures, privately owned (and failing) infrastructure, and an excellent economy on paper—but the bulk of the workforce one or two paychecks away from complete chaos. Also rising flirtation with fascism and entirely justifiable civil unrest.

And now even those who are still maintaining a white-knuckled grip on middleclassdom are playing the popularity lottery on social media any and every time there’s a catastrophe to convert social capital to cash to cover the shortfalls—and hoping the crises happen far enough apart that their friends and family can recover between donations. The cracks are widening and people are falling through in droves. Doesn’t show up in the DOW or S&P 500 though, so who cares, right?

None of this is news. What’s weird is that, while nobody thinks this is normal, people think it’s somehow better than tentatively adopting any of the strategies we’ve seen tried and tested in other countries that are doing better in any of these arenas.

And somehow this disease is spreading to otherwise healthy countries.

6.

You understand that a human being’s real value can’t be measured in tokens you might earn working to make profits for someone else, right? Children have value. Retirees have value. Sick and disabled and unemployed people have value. Absolutely the people who care for all of those non-working people have value. If employers were clear thinkers, they’d realize that all of these nonworking people are the ones who keep their workers sane and stable and give their lives meaning. But it goes beyond that, because the we can’t keep recasting the world to revolve around dollars when we talk about the value of people. It’s like solving an algebra equation for the plus sign.

The value of people comes from the knowledge and experiences we store in them, and the experiences they create in us and one another, and what they pass on to the next generations. This is also the value of our tools and our homes and our enterprises and our communities and communal structures. All of that is outside of profit and money and, when you get right down to it, outside of the concepts of property and ownership. We’ve forgotten how to talk about things like that, forgotten how to talk about things owned by everyone and no one because they’re beyond ownership and don’t have a concrete physical form or a location that someone can build a fence around, then install a gate and sell tickets for entry.

It’s simple when you think about it. Your value to society—that is to say your value to other people—is 100% how you make them feel, what you teach them, what cool things you show them, what advice you give them, what favors you do for them, what sense of purpose you give them, what secrets you keep for them, what things you let them help you with so they feel useful, what problems you help them work through that you might not even know about, what hope you give them. This is human culture, constantly generated and renewed and transmitted generation to generation, and everyone participates.

There’s no place in any of that for money. To hell with anyone who tries to find a way to put a price tag on any of that or who tries to tell you that you have to choose who you can afford to keep in your life.

[*]

English is the mine I excavate almost exclusively for what I’ll laughingly call a living at the moment, and sometimes it makes me very angry. Usually it just makes me tired and somewhat disappointed. Most of the reasons why are English’s fault.

I’d be happy to fix it, but languages don’t work if they’re one-sided. Everyone has to be on the same page or it’s all just gibberish.

Pronouns are pointers. They refer to previously established knowledge. I is a pronoun and it’s pointless for me to use it unless I’m sure you have at least a working good-enough-for-now idea of who I am. Unless it’s an actual puzzle or a riddle, and the whole point is for you to guess or work it out.

In just these few sentences so far, that’s more than two dozen uses of pronouns. You can count them if you like. I’ll wait.

The largest amount of discussion concerning pronouns at the moment are the ones that are coded to convey information about gender. Pronouns that convey a little information are very handy in a language like English. Some sentences are basically just a handful of different pronouns and maybe a verb, so having pronouns that offer a few extra clues to help untangle their references is useful.

So some pronouns are used with referents that are singular and others are used for those that are plural. Some can be used only with human/sapient/animate referents. Some are for the active agents of sentences, some are for whoever is being affected or acted on. Some are for near referents, some are for far ones, and of the human/sapient/animate pronouns, those are split to refer to referents of the two most popular genders. English has easily more than a hundred pronouns because English has a bult-in allergy to repetition.

Since pronouns carry these little tidbits of information and can be used to refer to people like yourself, especially stuff like gender information, then they are effectively part of your name.

I’m firmly of the opinion that you should use the pronouns that the referent would like you to use, should the referent be capable of having its own opinion, because they are part of the name in question. It’s somewhere between rude and an outright attack to use a name for someone other than the name they have given you to use.

There’s a significant amount of pushback from people who haven’t figured out that someone else’s preferred gender to perform doesn’t have to match what an observer might expect, nor do you have to make sure that any particular gender is reflected in wardrobe or behavioral cues.

These are people who will wear a business suit to make themselves feel like someone to be reckoned with in a meeting with clients or camouflage trousers to make themselves feel more bad ass like a hunter or a soldier—and yet they’re also people who don’t seem to understand that a person they think of as a woman might not want the psychological impact of wearing a dress or uncomfortable shoes or makeup or any other feminine-associated trappings for the exact same reasons that the observers would prefer not to dress like that themselves.

And then there’s the gripe that using they or them or the rest of the associated suite of pronouns to refer to a singular individual when gender is unknown or unconfirmed loses them the bit of information that the term used to convey and mucks up the ease of sorting out referents in a long sentence—despite the fact that English has made room for that since Shakespeare and they themselves have been doing it unconsciously their whole lives.

The gender part of it all isn’t my gripe, though.

English provides a fairly firm suite of pronouns for referring to gender-neutral referents, except those pronouns are for non-humans, non-sapients, and non-animals. Or at least animals we don’t care much about. There’s the first hint of the problem, but I’ll absolutely elaborate.

In plenty of other languages, inanimate objects have genders, and it seems kind of arbitrary. A table is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. In English, however, a table is an it. In English a human can be a she or a he or a they, should be a who instead of a that. Referring to a human with it is a deliberate insult.

Inching closer now….

One of the least charming things about Western thought is how it’s saturated in concepts of dominance and exploitation. Humanity is not only apart from Nature, is it somehow in our nature—and in everything else’s nature—for us to own or exploit everything that isn’t human. And for some of us, there’s a constant drive to have others of us declared as not quite human enough so we can own, dominate, and exploit them as well. Honorary its, if you will.

Imagine going up to a buffet table that someone has laid out for us all and immediately designating grazing territories, gambling with our enormous surpluses for a little bit more of someone else’s share, until luck has the entire table in the hands of a lucky few, who now build a huge fence around the whole table. Then they distribute piles of tickets to those who can best get the people who showed up late to the table to demean themselves to earn those tickets so those latecomers can spend those tickets on food that was never scarce.

You’ll have a hard time explaining to many Westerners that every society doesn’t work like that. At the same time, you’ll have trouble explaining to many Westerners that people who don’t think like that aren’t ignorant savages. That alternatives to Western societies are actual societies worthy of respect or critical appreciation. That members of non-Western societies aren’t less than fully human, and therefore aren’t morally part of the buffet.

English is part of the problem. The language we use, specifically the suite of pronouns, codes for whether a referent is someone—a someone—to be encouraged to humiliate themselves for tickets or something—a something—that should be part of the buffet. He or she versus it. Who versus that.

Another part of it has been glossed over until now is the language of possession.

This is my cow. That is her land. She thinks I must pay her because my cow ate roses planted on her side of the fence.

I’m not going so far as to say that English causes this mindset of ownership and exploitation, but the way we English speakers use these words certainly reinforces the worst of it. The world is full of phenomena that are critical to continued existence for everyone universally, but we apply the term resource simply so chunks of it can be referred to as mine or ours or theirs.

We can make an effort to try to claim critical elements of Nature as everyone’s, but no one seems to have room in their everyone for literally every entity on earth. Once the term is interpreted inside a skull with typical Western formatting, it means no more than the 150 humans nearest that skull in terms of geography and ideology.

For details on the why of that, see “Why Do People Suck?” and specifically pay attention to the Dunbar Number phenomenon. But as to why everyone applies only to humans, see the it problem detailed above, because everyone and everything are mutually exclusive categories. If it’s a thing it’s not a one and vice versa. So the term ours can’t even apply without significant indoctrination and reeducation to people outside of one’s tribe, much less to Nature in general. Because to Western thought, us and Nature are exactly as separate and mutually exclusive as everyone and everything.

So how do we talk about the world’s air and water, or the world’s bounty, to which everyone (actually everyone, including everything also) is due sufficient access for an equal opportunity to thrive? How do we talk about how our grandparents, who got to the world’s bountiful buffet before us merely by being born first, have fenced it all off so they can sell tickets for chances at bare survival to their own grandchildren?

I understand the he/she problem, and I sympathize. Hell, I don’t want to bother to resolve which pronouns to use for myself because, while I feel that she doesn’t seem to apply, he is so overburdened with emotionally repressed Cult of the Bad-Ass machismo crap that I don’t want it to be part of my name either. Some days I’m so ashamed to be human that the question of my chosen gender expression, should I bother to have one, doesn’t even come up.

That said, I still feel the worst pronoun problem by far is the he-she/it distinction, because that’s the one that keeps English-speakers utterly detached from the natural world that begrudgingly sustains them and reinforces the idea that everything can be owned and exploited.

That mindset might be a smidge less likely if the air was he and the water was she and the world itself was us. But the language in which we think controls how we can think. At least until we give it some conscious thought.

[*]

Cue Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control.”

What good does it do to be angry? What good does it do to be depressed? What good does it do to tell anybody how you feel about how absolutely fucked up things are?

Well, it’s true that humans put an awful lot of stock in feelings. If you don’t seem to have any, they call you “inhuman,” and that’s a dangerous categorization. Humans have an abysmal track record for things they consider to be nonhuman. Nonhumans, according to the terms of unforgiving set theory, are either animals or objects, and, as either, they can be owned or exploited or destroyed at whim—though sometimes some of us can be a bit precious about animals. The cute ones, anyway. Probably not mosquitoes.

We have entire genres of speculative fiction dedicated to the trope of some beast or artifact stapling on a soul or crowbarring open that mysterious inner portal to magical emotions to join the ranks of humanity—albeit second-rate, just-barely-qualifying, automatic-targets-of-unceasing-bigotry humanity.

Welcome to the bottom rung of the ladder. Better hold on tight. Sometimes they even get a medal or a badge to go along with their tattooed-on “KICK ME!” sign.

It’s not a great look for humanity is what I’m saying. Especially when emotions are just the monitors for internal states that we were issued by evolution before we developed anything like common sense or rational capacity. The more we study animals in the wild—hell, the more we study mushrooms—the more we begin to suspect that most life forms, even microbes, get basic emotions for free.

Here’s how they work: “Hmm. I appear to be unhappy. I guess I should refer to the checklist…. Let’s see. Am I hungry or thirsty? Is something choking off my air supply? Is one of my limbs missing? Am I being devoured? Is my environment killing me? Have I lost my cushy social status in the troop?”

You know the list.

If what you can do about the emotion is covered by instinct, you’re golden. Just do that, whatever it is. Eat, screw, sleep, whatever. But if instinct isn’t enough, you have to rely on something more recently learned. Something most people are kind of bad at, to be honest. Logic. Math. Rational behavior. Long-term thinking. Self-restraint. Any term complex enough to require a hyphen.

Every emotion is a sum at the bottom of a spreadsheet of a number of easily measurable internal states, presented to us as squirts of juice from internal glands, just in case something has changed internally or externally that we might not have otherwise noticed, because no part of emotion hinges on wherever the hell that spotlight which is our attention might be pointed. Emotion interrupts.

There’s the value. There, by logical extension, is the concrete value of what some people swear up and down is the totality of the human soul. (They’re wrong, and that’s covered in detail in a lecture or two in the official lecture halls, so I won’t get into it here.) It’s a device that can slap you in the face with information when you might be concentrating on something else.

And we’re trained from birth to learn to ignore our emotions by (and for the exploitative purposes of) the systems into which we are born—our families and extended tribes and economies or whatever else you want to call them. We spend millions of years as a species developing these fancy systems that squirt juices at us when it’s time to notice a situation that affects our very survival, and then we, individually, spend a couple of nifty decades being told that our families, our tribes, our economies, and our governments will straight up kill us if we don’t ignore all of that shit about how we feel and just do what they want us to.

And now somehow we’re all mentally ill. Somehow it’s all these squirting juices that are out of whack, making us miserable or, worse, secretly giving us joy when we do something destructive or antisocial.

This diagnosis of illness comes from within the Exploitation Engine, of course.

So what good does it do to feel bad? To feel anxious? To feel happy?

Here’s where we find out that we don’t have to define “good” after all, which is kind of a relief. Here’s where we find that it doesn’t do anything to feel anything. Nothing happens. Your internal system just rewarded you or punished you for something, but whatever that something was, it literally no longer has anything to do with survival in the modern world, so it doesn’t matter. Might as well ignore it.

You are disconnected from the Circle of Life and embedded instead in the Exploitation Engine, which I picture as something akin to one of H. R. Giger’s biomechanical fantasies, which was, I would dare to guess, the entire point he was making by painting them 40 or 50 years ago.

The Exploitation Engine maintains you, or milks you, or remakes you, or discards you as it sees fit. These emotion thingies give it an approximation of control, but only up to a certain point. The refinement process is ongoing, however. If you can’t function inside the machine then you are pushed out. Or straight up murdered.

Some good news: as a species, adaptation should only take about ten or twenty thousand years or so, where it will only be a few sports and throwbacks that are lost every year instead of, at the current point in time, literally millions. Wars and famines and plagues are a function of the machine. They’re how the Exploitation Engine prunes those who are unfit to be incorporated. Breed millions, incorporate dozens, purge the rest. Call it artificial selection. Or selective breeding, if you prefer.

It might sound wasteful, but it’s a viable strategy. Nature does it all the time. It’s how all the niches get filled after extinctions, after new niches open up. Just look at where the lifespans are the shortest. You’ll see it.

Where human life spans are shortening, that’s where it’s happening on the human scale.

Back to that Joy Division track.

The transition point between a society and a society-scale exploitation engine is where you no longer have a voice to make changes, have complaints heard or have a vote. If there are those who have no voices in your society, then it’s a society for you and an exploitation engine for them. In the United States, society is still and always has been an exploitation engine for indigenous people and people of color and for women and anyone else who fail to find themselves represented fairly in positions of power and influence. But since the Great Disconnect between GDP and compensation for ordinary workers that coincided with Reagan’s arrival in the White House, everyone is increasingly disenfranchised. That misplaced GDP drains straight into huge-ass towers of incorporated money that buy up every chunk of government from every branch as soon as it gets put up for sale. And since those towers are controlled by bigots and racists, every scrap of equity and self-determination won by all of those who have been traditionally exploited and reviled is now under dire threat.

It’s been 45 years since the Great Disconnect, and the USA is now an exploitation engine for absolutely everyone who isn’t wealthy enough to buy themselves a cozy pocket of immunity from the machinery. Every organization that tracks the health of democracies worldwide can show you the receipts.

We’ve lost control. We’ve lost control again.

Look around at all the crazy shit our Federal Republic—a government supposedly for and by The People—is doing. Banning elements of critical healthcare for women. Imprisoning refugees and splitting up their families. Banning books and dictating “sanitized” educational curriculum. Pumping weaponry and manpower and know-how into genocides. Making a big show of pretending to hold megacorps responsible for fouling the water and sky and earth itself and letting them buy their way out of their punishments with back-end bribes. Letting individual billionaires buy Supreme Court justices. Letting individual billionaires interfere in foreign policies and foreign wars. Letting foreign investors buying up bits of the government even faster than the local guys.

Did we vote for that? Would we ever? Would we elect representatives who would? No. We’ve lost control.

This exploitation engine—as it applies to all of us now, and not just minorities and outcasts—was more than fifty years in the making. Every year it gets more and more efficient at exactly two things: manufacturing record profits for its owners and thinning the herd of all those who fail to comply.

So what good does it do to be angry? What good does it do to be anxious and upset?

Well. It doesn’t do any good in and of itself. It just keeps you aware that you’re in the big ol’ Giger-esque biomechanical landscape, being driven by the gears and pistons behind you and driving those in front of you in turn, being milked of whatever you’ve got in you until you’re a dry husk than can be ground to a paste and recycled.

If there’s good to be done, it’s whatever you do with that awareness.

One of the other things I like to stay aware of is that complicated engines are far easier and faster to break than they are to build. That may literally be the only thing going for us.

[*]

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar hypothesized that there was some kind of link between brain size or brain complexity and the maximum number of relationships a primate could maintain—or at least maintain some sort of functional awareness of—and this dictates the maximum size of a person’s tribe. There’s significant debate about the nature of the links, especially whether there’s any causal relationship, but I’m not focusing on that right now. The research I’m interested in is in the size of tribes, observed in nature, as it were, that were the raw data for Dunbar’s study. I don’t care about any supposed links to brain size or brain complexity.

I’m also assuming 150 to be a kind of average, and that a number that high also assumes some kind of overwhelming reason for a group to stay together, whether it’s effective sharing of very limited resources or wolves at the door. But 150 is the number, and that seems to be the (average) cap on a human’s ability to think of people as being real people. These are your neighbors in the neighborhood. These are the actual players in your MMORPG mob, and everyone else is just an NPC.

Yeah, consider me hesitant to leave these concepts in gamer terms. There are too many of the “ALL OF THIS IS A SIMULASHUN!!!1!” crew around for me to be comfortable even accidentally throwing gasoline on that idiotic fire. But one of the things that makes the “simulation theory” appealing is how that tiny piece of it, that only a small number of people actually feel real, seems to validate the whole scenario.

We all understand that this limit isn’t a problem for everybody. Well, it is and it isn’t. But the thing to understand isn’t that Dunbar’s Number is 150. For some people it might be 400 or more, and for others only 20. The problem is that Dunbar’s Number isn’t 10,000,000,000. The problem is that it exists at all, and that it takes hacking your own brain to get around the issue. The Dunbar Number is itself an evolutionary hack to allow us primates to exist in extended tribes at the stone-age level, and it’s never gotten a chance to get larger because the world population has shot up from 150,000 to nearly ten billion in a mere thousand generations, and that’s not enough time for evolution to take a decent stab at a helpful tweak.

First, let’s look at how Dunbar’s Number #^@&s things up.

You know who you know. At some point, your brain is full of people and their relationships to you and to one another, and you just run out of the ability to follow the cast in your own personal show. This is when you start to take shortcuts. Entire populations of people become represented by any individual you might know that you think shares characteristics with them. And if you don’t know anyone like them at all, then those entire populations are represented by caricatures and fables and the various tools of bigotry: stereotypes and the loud opinions of other people in your in-group who you don’t want to be on the outs with.

If you know only one person of a certain demographic, that that one person becomes the template for a whole demographic. If you know two who are pretty much alike, then that template is reinforced. If you know two who are significantly different, however, then you might realize that the demographic has some range and you should be careful applying the stereotypes. But if you don’t know any, then your racist uncle’s loudmouth blatherings stand as gospel.

This is why diversity in representation is important. This is why travel is important, especially while you’re young. Especially before your ideas of what certain groups of people in the world are like get fixed.

If you grow up having known no one in the world who isn’t pretty much exactly like yourself, odds are excellent that you’ll end up being that racist loudmouth uncle to the next generation of children, voting your ass off to keep the walls up and gates closed so that the next generation, and the next, and the next, will never meet anyone who can prove you wrong.

Unfortunately, exposure to a little diversity doesn’t change much because there’s still the problem that the people outside of our personal network still won’t seem like real people to us. We have to exercise our empathy and sympathy daily to remind ourselves that the people we only read about or see on shows or in the news are actually real—and even so there’s the undermining voice that wonders whether we’re getting the whole story, whether it’s all propaganda or paid actors or any amount of conspiracy theory bullshit, because in our heads they go away when we stop looking. Because we’re out of space for storing them.

Some of us have trained ourselves to maintain a kind of amorphous awareness of the rest of the world. Some of us simply have a heightened capacity for such things—but sadly, not as many of us as would like to make the claim. And some of us have only ever had a tribe of one, and those are narcissists—and if they keep track of people at all, they keep track of them like property and assets.

There’s the clue for how we might naturally treat the people that are on the wrong side of our own personal Dunbar Number boundary: as objects, as assets, as pawns on the board on our side or the other side, as resources to be captured or expended. And it doesn’t immediately feel wrong because they don’t feel like people to us.

So instead we have to know it’s wrong and know they’re people, and we have to actively allow the part that knows to be in charge.

—

Dunbar’s Number isn’t the only design flaw in our brains that forces us to find ways to think around it. I think everybody knows this. And this is why my fangs pop out every time I hear a politician say anything resembling the phrase, “Yeah, but what does your gut tell you?” Because we’ve spent ten thousand years trying to make things work beyond what our guts tell us, stockpiling myths and parables in our cultures and formalizing logic and science to back them up, so we can all make space for one another to exist and thrive—and here is one more asshole trying to tell us to act like baboons because a troop of baboons would do exactly what he wants, give him more power, dump more wealth in his pockets. And at the same time our baboon actions would trigger some decrepit and misguided reward circuits in our own brains that we haven’t figured out a way to unplug yet that will make sure we do it again and again.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, there is a baboon-level dopamine-drip bliss that we get for acting like brutes because historically, evolutionarily, there was an upside to defending our territory and beating the shit out of an aggressor. But when we’re shitty now, we’re being told to imagine that we’re defending our territory and brutalizing an actual human being that we’re only imagining is an aggressor, because that gets us our addictive dopamine reward.

And now it’s too late, because we’ve gotten hooked on acting like baboons. But some aware portion of our brains lets us look around and wonder why we’ve all regressed 150,000 years in behavior.

—

Breaking that addiction takes shame and grief and pain, and, like for any addiction, it’s easier to just not. It’s easier to blame it on the other guy, whoever that hapless bastard was, and claim that we’ve become who we are because of that set-up. So many of us never recover. Many of us trigger baboon behavior in the next generation of whelps so we don’t feel alone in our guilt, so we can point to them and say, “See? It’s only natural!”

Drill sergeants trigger the baboon regression in their infantry, stripping off decades of grandmothers’ hard-fought “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you” in six weeks of training with absolutely no idea of how to restore it when the war is over. So it becomes easier to make sure that the war is never over than to try to reintegrate soldiers back into civilian society.

Many soldiers get so addicted to their baboon juices that the war will never be over in their own heads when they get home. They drift around and cause more trouble, baboonizing the next generation in their own families, baboonizing members of the kiddie sports teams they coach, forming little radical clubs among themselves for “correcting the evils that have been allowed to creep into society.” Or maybe they just die of the grief and shame when it all comes crashing down, or of the drugs they self-medicate with to blunt the grief and shame.

Or maybe they snap out of it.

Hell, maybe most of them snap out of it. Eighty percent, even, as a guess—at least in functional terms, ignoring the private breakdowns and quiet recoveries we never get to witness. But the ones that never recover are excellent for keeping the infection going with domestic violence, domestic terrorism, with infection of law enforcement branches. You name it.

But we’re taught to respect and #^@&ing worship our veterans instead of treating them like the potentially infectious agents of baboonery and unexploded bombs that they are. Perhaps this society-wide fawning behavior is designed to try to keep them from going off. I’d prefer they get mandatory therapy, frankly—actively trying to rebuild the elements of civilization that we required them to shed so they can go back to normal. It’s literally the least we can do.

—

Considering how Dunbar’s Number predisposes us—especially those of us too poor for doses of travel and cultural enrichment for ourselves and our family—to racism and various other kinds of bigotries, and the ease of how we get addicted to the internally generated opiate rewards for acting like shits to one another, and the actual #^@&ing monsters who find greed-motivated and political-power-motivated reasons to turn us into opiate-addicted baboons and keep us that way, there isn’t much hope of utopia breaking out.

It takes a sensible implementation of diversity and inclusion programs to break the generational patterns of bigotries that are a natural outgrowth of the Dunbar’s Number phenomenon. Those take decades to build and fine-tune and can be undone in a single session of a baboon-infected legislature.

The baboon infection itself is nearly unbreakable once it has taken hold. An addicted person needs a safe place constructed for them to have and survive their crisis of conscience, with the right mix of privacy and non-judging emotional support, and that’s not something you can usually find naturally occurring. It has to be purpose-built and funded. And then it takes an array of healthy human connections to prevent relapses. It is so much easier to interfere with recovery and rehabilitation than to support it.

And then there are the greed-and-power monsters. Our society churns them out like it’s our #^@&ing job, because they’ve worked for decades to incrementally fine-tune the machinery of our society to perfect their production. That machinery needs systematic dismantling, and they’re going to fight us at every step, and sometimes they’ll even use their baboon armies to do it.

So this, this right here, is the explanation for why people suck. When you really look, it’s clearly only some people that suck. Somewhere between twenty percent and half, depending on where you draw the line. Because everybody sucks at least a teeny-tiny bit, and the ones who are true monsters are pretty freaking rare, but that 20% rat-pack of true baboon bastards is a well-and-intentionally-maintained population purpose-made and actively employed to suck on demand because they generate wealth and power for the wealth-and-power machine that is attached to our barely functioning society like a bloated tick that’s almost ready to pop.

The implication of all of that is that people don’t have to suck. The implication is that people who don’t suck are going to have to work together to rescue and slowly drain the suck out of some of the baboons to restore their humanity and to reduce the rate of infection and relapse. We’re going to have to search for and exploit the weaknesses in the monsters and their greed-and-power machine, and somehow work even harder to keep the machinery of society that they have parasitized running while we do it. And at this point it’s going to take at least a generation of hard work. Could be half that if some kind of calamity disrupts the machinery for us.

I don’t know how to make it sound like fun. Or even hopeful. We just have to do it, because there’s even less hope for us if we don’t.

[*]

We got it backwards. Maybe it was just shitty luck back then, but in a modern crowded world it’s living people who bring about these tragedies.

There is a more sensible social component to the taboo. Even the most monstrous might have been lovable to and beloved by someone kind who is grieving, someone who might overhear. On some days I can try to be a little sensitive to that when I’m feeling generous.

Today is not one of those days.

When we talk about the dead, we should keep in mind all of the dead—including those dead from undermining a peace deal in progress designed by seated duly elected officials, undermining done with the clear goal of scoring political favor and a permanent seat of power and influence—and adding unforgivable years of unconscionable atrocities to a bloody and brutal war (originally joined on a pretext) that was churning soldiers, civilians, fertile cropland, livelihoods, and the spirits of multiple nations into rotting sausage.

The conditions of the final end to the conflict set the stage for millions more to die in a bloody genocidal massacre. Those dead also need speaking for.

We should also remember the dead from bloody revolutions and coups where many nations’ democratically elected governments were overthrown on the advice, recommendation, and detailed planning of our dead man, and those dead from ensuing decades of purges and tyranny and oppression and sheer economic mismanagement from the thugs and warlords and despots installed by those he advised simply because despots and tyrants are friendlier to bribes and kickbacks from corporate interests bent on plundering natural resources and cheap labor. And, of course, the victims of the violence directed at our own nation when these monsters fed and funded on this dead man’s advice are finally cut off from our support and come after us in a last-ditch effort to feel important again.

When it was a living man who brought about disease and illness and misfortune, invasions by barbarians, droughts and floods and famines, genocidal pogroms and ethnic cleansings, and decades of corruption and impoverished misery and subjugation for the survivors of the literal millions of the dead, we owe it to the unquiet spirits of his uncountable dead victims to staple the medal of blood-drinking perfidy and venal corruption’s highest service—Satan’s Puckered Asshole, duly cast in depleted uranium and decorated with a ribbon of rotting tripe—to his carefully preserved and powdered corpse, and promise them that we’ll do our dead level best to make sure that the world of their surviving children will never see another like him.

And then, afterward, maybe we’re in the clear for offering condolences to his living family.

[*]

One is that I’m short. While that’s not necessarily a flaw, there are real-world biases against short people, both in people’s attitudes and in the design of just about any mass-produced clothing or technology, even down to simple furnishings and fixtures. There are absolutely worse biases, to be sure, but as a white guy playing the game of the world on just about the easiest setting there is, it was high on my list as something to fix if it were ever to become feasible.

Second is that I treated my body like a bag to carry my brain around in. Even in my twenties I had an inkling that this wasn’t a viable long-term strategy for a long and healthy life, but struggling as I was to earn a living, that was about when it occurred to me that having time in my schedule for exercise was a luxury. Having time and money for a gym membership was a luxury. Having spare money to handle the extra medical maintenance of an active body was a luxury. It was even a luxury to buy the extra calories that an active body needed for fuel.

So the tentative strategy was to let this body tick over with minimal maintenance for as long as it could and save up for any upgrades that might eventually become available. Including any mental performance enhancers, like extra senses, extra memory, extra computational power, etc.

Cyberpunk was big back then. But the stories explained it in realistic terms—the best enhancements would always be for the wealthiest of humanity first. Which means that any wealth gap would be multiplied into a performance gap that would accelerate the wealth gap even more, which further implied that the wealthy were planning to keep the hoi polloi priced out of the market altogether in a race to turn themselves into cybernetic undead monstrosities—one-person empires trying to out-compete one another on every playing field and trampling the unaugmented into the dust.

Actual wealthy humans made it into a religion, even, and they called that religion Trans­hu­man­ism.

There were those who thought that the religion of Trans­hu­man­ism was a little on the selfish side, so in addition to the principles of whatever affordable self-improvement one could buy and nail onto one’s physique or brain, they added some minimal consideration that society itself should benefit from all of these improvements, as long as said society was optimistic in practical ways and open and rational and open to intelligent technology and onboard with all of this radical self-transformation. They called this denomination Ex­tro­pian­ism. You know. Positing extropy as an antonym to entropy.

Then there’s Sing­u­lar­it­ar­ian­ism, which postulates that there will be some sort of impossible-to-describe point-of-no-return of technological development, the Singularity, beyond which the future will be impossible to imagine and, from the viewpoint of the future, before which history will have very little meaning indeed—and that somehow this is probably going to be a good thing. At least for the survivors. This Rapture of the Nerds is definitely something to look forward to if you think the world is so terrible that it’s better to basically start over.

Cosmism is the next term in the Nerd New Age SHAZAM! Religion acronym, but it should really be up front, being the oldest. It has Russian philosophical roots from the Jules Verne era, and I guess it’s best to think of it as a kind of “Manifest Destiny” for humanity to conquer all of space and time and the laws of nature. It’s kind of a core of the last century and a bit of Russian national philosophy, and the driving force behind the East-West Space Race.

The Rationalism part seems like it could be more sensible but … well, it’s in the list for a reason. I like logic as much as the next moderately smart guy, but logic is just something you apply to facts to multiply a simple fact or two into a large stack of slightly less trustworthy facts. You can build a castle out of whipped cream and be totally in love with the beautiful symmetries and seemingly iron-clad structure of it, but no way are people going to be able to live there. In the end it’s entirely dependent on stuff you measure directly, and you can’t spread that stuff too thin and still have a reliable knowledge-base. At some point you have to stop wanking with the rational part and measure and test, measure and test, and also rely on imagination to help direct future observations. Rationality is just that stuff in the middle, between those two things.

The Rationalists seem to have developed some decidedly cult-like practices, which I guess is fine to the extent that it teaches the basics, but, you know, serious scientists get by with, say, a printout of the 19 Rules of Inference and some None-Some-All set theory stuff and do just fine without much more than that.

The Effective Altruists are next, I think. Imagine using Linear Algebra to try to min-max acts of compassion so that the least amount of effort/money/time/resources helps in the largest way. This one seems reasonable on the face of it too, maybe, except one of the ways acts of compassion improve the world is by improving the state of the person performing the act of compassion, to give their hours and expenditures of effort and resources meaning, and how much improved will you be if you know that you continually do the absolute least you can possibly do?

It’s great for a philosophy for spending your government’s tax money to improve the general welfare, though. On the national scale it leads you to the realization that Universal Healthcare and Universal Basic Income and putting homeless people into empty houses and actual rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes is cheaper and more effective and 1000% better for the overall economy than any of the other approaches we continue to try. But as an individual philosophy, it sucks big ol’ rocks. Human contact and human attention are the largest part of compassion on a personal level, and people in dire straits need that human contact as much as they need a spare sandwich or a place to get a shower. Somehow the hands-on intangibles, if I can use that turn of phrase, are always left out of the Effective Altruist equations.

Next we have the Long­term­ists, who think that we should maximize future humanity’s capabilities even if it’s at the expense of actual currently living human beings. This is right up there with saving fetuses and letting the grown women bearing them, in whom society has already invested years of resources and enrichment and culture, drop dead. It’s accelerating environmental collapse for the exact reason of increasing the pressure on society to evolve past the need for an environment altogether. It’s rooted in an obvious hatred for things as they are in contrast with an imagined pristine future untainted by human sin.

They’ll put it in terms of letting thousands starve to death while building a machine that will feed millions in the future, which oddly devalues the life of anyone actually here and puts an awful lot of weight on the possibility of success—and the possibility that the machine under construction won’t be destroyed or made illegal to prevent the disruption of traditional commerce or bought outright by a billionaire for the purposes of catering private parties or selling concessions at mega­buck concert venues.

Every single one of these movements/religions/philosophies at their cores assumes the supremacy of humanity and human intelligence with respect to the rest of creation, assumes that human intelligence is the only kind of intelligence that exists or should exist, that humanity has already reached the pinnacle of organic development and needs to proceed no further, that humanity is the teleological point of evolution, and that human domination of everywhere else in the universe is the undeniable next goal.

None of these movements seems to recognize that humanity is supported by solely by agriculture for food and a natural atmospheric scrubbing system to consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, both of which require diverse ecological environments in healthy seas and on land and a stable climate in order to function and that we, as humans, have yet to develop any real ability to live outside of that environment any more than that fish flopping around on the floor that’s jumped out of the tank.

I’m sure the goal is to escape into machine bodies eventually, but we don’t have those yet. The reality we live in is one in which it’s super hard to keep a toaster oven working for more than five years, and if you want a steady supply of new toaster ovens, you have to maintain the whole goddamn planet in order to preserve a self-renewing human army of manufacturing workers on the other side of the world that you don’t even have to think about.

Like air and water, this support system is invisible. So it won’t be noticed until it’s absent due to war or famine or pestilence or whatever other new horsemen of greed, neglect, and short-term thinking are waiting in the barracks by the stables. I’m sure the dream is that eventually these new perfect bodies will be easier to maintain and able to maintain themselves and one another, but that means no one has paid much attention to the 140-year transition from horses to cars, or to the fact that there are definite further drawbacks to moving into a form that can be hacked and hijacked. Or moving into a simulation where by default you don’t get legs until you transfer assets or are extorted into an ongoing labor contract.

The whole point of entire genres of fiction is to warn people about such issues in extreme alarming detail, and yet … this. This is how I know these are religions. There is so much faith in “these problems getting worked out somehow” despite everyone’s knowledge of how humans have treated one another for the millennia of recorded history up to this point. Despite the professed love of rationality, they’ve clearly abandoned all rational thought.

It should worry us to no end that the majority of the world’s billionaires have joined (or indeed founded elements of) the TES­CRE­AL nightmare religion, with their eyes so firmly focused on that brilliant pinpoint future that will look so much different when it actually gets here, with actual zero awareness left for where they’re putting their goddamn enormous feet. The dream of the original Trans­hu­man­ists has come true, except their monstrous undead cybernetic bodies are made of articles of organization and operating documents and corporate bylaws and financial instruments of colossal proportions in a Wild West frontier where they can only see one another. Everything else is literally beneath their notice.

Until something goes mysteriously wrong with the air and water, I guess.

[*]