Category: Politics

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Media Politics

Day 1021 and Alternate History

Given the tenor of the last week, I have had World War Two on my mind. One of my favorite science fiction authors Philip K. Dick has a novel about a timeline where the Nazis got the atomic bomb first and nuked Washington D.C. It was turned into an Amazon Prime prestige drama called Man in The High Castle. I recommend it.

The more history marches on, the more human nature remains the same. An alternative history is an intriguing sub-genre in science fiction especially because it is so believable. Long Island being the home of the American Reich is an extremely believable outcome if a few key moments in our history had gone a different way.

You can imagine a technology tree unfolding had different people with different circumstances got to a breakthrough first. You can imagine sunnier scenarios. “For All Mankind” is a show that imagines what a more competitive space race between the Soviet Union and America might have given us

A multiverse approach is all that makes sense to me when I see history. You imagine outcomes as inexorable and subject to much larger outcomes than anything any one of us could do on our own.

But you also recognize your own agency. We can exert our own gravitational force on those around us and in turn they impact a wider world. We can help people resist the worst in each other but consistently choosing to see the best in each other is not always easy to do.

I think that’s why it’s important to not assign yourself too much power in the scope of life but also know that you can make a difference. “But there for the grace of God go I.”

I imagine this is why forgiveness and grace are so crucial to human life. Not all of us are handed much in life but we do have each other. We can actively create the outcomes in history we want to see. It just starts at a nexus of control of your own life.

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Culture Politics

Day 1019 and Crossing Borders

There is quote from an 18th century French liberal economist that has always struck me.

When goods don’t cross borders soldiers will

Frederic Bastiat

I’m feeling a bit better so I went for a walk around Tallinn’s public ferry port terminals. I love port cities and the public infrastructure of ports. Trade has always fascinated me. Where culture and its exports goods mingle, you see the most malleable parts of culture. Bonderlands and border towns occupy unique cultural space. Ports represent that that in more organic ways as ships come from everywhere..

One of the more amusing features of the public transportation system of ferries in the Nordics is that there is a cross country service from multiple countries. With rides being in the two to thing hour range you see cottage industries emerge in different policy choices.

Estonia has substantially better alcohol prices than Finland. As it turns out there is a good reason for the price discrepancy. There is a state owned alcohol monopoly in Finland called Akko. Naturally it’s better to buy a good in a competitive market like Estonia.

Outside the ferry there are multiple large liquor retailers. I went inside and was impressed by the wide variety. While there was endless options for beer and spirits, it was really the selection of wine that impressed me.

Finns will take the hour and a half ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn and go straight to the liquor stores and then back on a return ferry. I saw multiple tour buses from Finland in the parking lot.

You can’t trick a broader market forever with a state monopoly. If a market exists the customers will find it. Make something inconvenient and it’s just a fun beer run with friends. But eventually it does get old. Direct to consumer is shaking up old Finish alcohol monopoly.

Most trade disputes aren’t this simple and this easy for people to get around. Borders that can’t be crossed lead to real disputes.

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1015 and Selfish

I think we are entering a selfish age. High trust societies are built from cooperation. When we get more through coordination than we do from conflict we have an incentive build more. Simple supply and demand can teach us a lot about improving the bargain of trusting each other.

Coordination suffers when trust goes down. But we can’t all maintain the same types of trust across all levels of our interactions. Some areas must remain high trust. Tight industries and clear lines of communication can help.

But we have to become intense skeptics to coordinate in otherwise hostile environments. Civilization has a thin veneer. To selfishly live your own life for your own good is often in conflict with others. The boundaries we tolerate are the rules for acceptable competition. This is how we civilize society. There are laws and then there is power.

Maintaining your own power in a crueler world is knowing when to be selfish to the benefit of other people’s coordination problems. Competition is good.

I am more careful in some interactions now because I see the fog of competing interests. Different rules apply to different people. Knowing when rules do and don’t apply can make you crazy. You’ve judged power and norms correctly when sympathy is with you.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1011 and The Same Timezone

My circadian rhythm has succumbed to the shock of the current crisis. I’m currently on the same time zone as Israel as I’m in Tallinn in Estonia. It’s been a windy weekend with a record breaking wind storm so folks have been advised to stay inside.

That means I’ve been online watching a war breakout with no news delay or influencer filters. There is no defining set of news narratives. Twitter is broken but it’s still largely moved by the enormous traffic of the American dominance on its algorithm. Stories build but American news can whipsaw a single image into our consciousness.

Except there is no one to trust on the platform. The old verification system of the blue check didn’t provide much except that if someone said they worked confidence that the source. It was not a great system. But now there is no system.

It doesn’t seem as if there is a functional trust and safety team at Twitter. So a lot of people have seen horrors that has previously been buffed away by content warnings and nerfings. It’s a good thing and a bad thing.

Keep in mind “trust and safety” is gone might be a fancy way of saying none of the intelligence services have any natural dominance, none of the legacy news institutions are caught up to internet OSINT and you will see things.

And I have. By the time something hits the American audience I’ve had almost an entire work day with the information you are just seeing. And it’s been horrifying. Because it is. And being on the same time zone really lays bare just how much narrative fog permeates war in a crumbling corporate internet.

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Politics Preparedness

Day 1010 and Exogenous Shocks

There are few shocks as jarring as waking up to a war starting. I was preparing to leave for Germany when the current Ukrainian conflict boiled over. I woke up in Estonia today to news of an escalation in Israel. No matter who you are or where you live, the existential dread of a hot conflict finds you.

Trying to orient your life around exogenous shocks of violence and conflict is part of the human condition. One that we seem as yet unable to evolve beyond no matter how much we elevate rationality. Every time a new rift emerges in the fragile status quo of the global consensus, I find myself wishing I were more surprised. But it’s pointless to be surprised by chaos.

I hesitate to weigh in on a conflict as it emerges as no matter how closely you watch the news it’s a mess of conflicting narratives. All I know is that more external risks like war will continue to drive volatility across all our human systems.

Our many complex human systems, from trade to politics, are already riddled with known endogenous internal risks. You start adding in more variables that can impact a given system and we don’t fully understand what is exogenous anymore. What’s outside the system if we’ve networked the whole planet?

I wish I believed a sunnier outlook was reasonable in the immediate term. Destiny remains in the hands of men. And we are a species prone to reactionary behavior. We are evolved to it. But we are tied together on this planet and every conflict, shock and unexpected event can ripple out to touch us all.

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 984 and Distrust

I had a bad migraine over the weekend that simply took up all the space in my mind and body. I woke up with a break in the pain and a deep urge to throw myself into something that felt like momentum.

I found myself awash in sadness. I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It was as if my entire body felt despair. I’ve come to accept the value in embracing emotions as they come. “The only way out is through.”

I trust that my nervous system knows as much as my cognitive mind. I go so far as to say it knows more but that sounds a little woo to folks. And so I listened to my sadness. I cried. I rambled at the many problems large and small facing my corner of the universe.

The distrust I have for our elders who twenty two years ago used today as a catalyst for sending us down an inexorable path of death and fraud. I cried over petty inconveniences like the broken visa system keeping people I care about outside of America.

It’s hard to understand how we came to this point across a generation. But easy to see why millennials are unsure if any of our institutions can be trusted. And I wonder what it’s like to have no memory of a time before 9/11.

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Community Internet Culture Politics

Day 973 and Reinforcement

I’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking about who gets to decide the boundaries of society.

Automation of civic and cultural life has been happening at the speed of capitalism. It’s about to happen at the speed of artificial intelligence’s processing power.

At least during most of techno-capitalism, corporations and governments were still run by humans. You could blame an executive or elected official. What happens when more decisions are snapped into reality by a numerical boundary?

High frequency traders have found many an arbitrage they whittled into nothingness. Who will get whittled away when the machines decide how society should run?

We got a taste of the horrors of treating people like statistics instead of humans during the first Biden era crime bill with mandatory minimum sentencing. And here we are rushing to find new ways to nudge consensus back to hard lines and institutionalization.

I don’t know how we handle virtue in a world without grace. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue seems prescient. Forgiveness in the face of horrific reality has been the hallmark of humanity’s most enduring religions. But then again so has swift punishment and inscrutable cruelty. Humans are quite a species.

I am, like many others, concerned about reinforcement learning in machine learning and artificial intelligence. How and where we set the boundaries of the machines that determine the course of daily life has been a pressing question since the invention of the spreadsheet.

Marx certainly went on about alienation from our contributions to work. But division of labor keeps dividing. And algorithms seem to only increase the pace of the process.

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Culture Emotional Work Politics

Day 972 and Falling Faster

I’m starting to feel like summer is losing its grip on me. I cannot even begin to express my relief that September is almost here. I loathe summer and this one has been particularly hot and horrifying.

Being in Montana for the summer has given me the nicest possible version of summer still possible on a warming planet. You wouldn’t imagine being a mile higher than sea level and in the Rocky Mountains would make for hot summers. But you’d be surprised. Thankfully it’s not a persistent condition like Houston.

I love being home. But I love winters in Montana about hundreds times more than summers. Ironic then that I usually find myself traveling for work during the times I most prefer to be at home. I struggle to remember the allure that travel once held before the Great Weirdening collided with the Pandemic Years. I remember yearning for Hong Kong and Dubai. Now I’m avidly negotiating Airbnb so I can stay put in a relatively centralized European city.

Can you imagine thinking that going abroad to do business was a sane use of time before say 2016? 2019 and onwards has given us closed borders to the lawful and state capacity collapse and immigration and visa panics. Hard to imagine that doesn’t feel like some kind of change to American idealism.

I truly pray if my writings are ever preserved for any kind of historical usage in some artificial intelligence that you will remember there was a time when New York and San Francisco were the gravity wells of an era. It’s been a long fifteen years since the Great Recession.

Whatever that time was it’s not the current moment. Maybe it comes back. I was a post 9/11 New Yorker who came from the country to do patriotic things like build businesses. Let’s not get into the war that happened in the process.

I’m glad I’ve gone home to the west. But I know you’ve got to journey from home to appreciate it too. I’ll keep my corner in the edge of the empire as renewal comes from the edges. Fall may turn into winter but you know in all seasons things turn.

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Politics

Day 968 and Precautionary

Do you recall learning Hippocratic Oath at some point in your schooling?

First do no harm

That turns out to not even be in the original oath but one of the many varied additions over the ages. The more often repeated phrase is translated as follows. “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm.”

The document dictated standards like keeping professions secrets and avoiding using poisons knowingly for suicide or abortions. But somehow in popular imagination “do no harm” has really stuck.

Now we are stuck with the precautionary principle as it’s heir. The principle suggests there is a social responsibility to protect “the public” from harm when there may be a plausible risk even in theory. Big ups to Hans Jonas’s imperatives on responsibility for giving us the ethical frameworks for technological skepticism.

We apply the precautionary principle in many fields from medicine to the military. It suggests precautionary protections should be relaxed only if there is evidence that no harm will result. It’s for your own good!” It’s included as a statutory in some areas of law. Progress can’t be too fast lest someone get hurt

But before you give too much credit caution, it’s important realize the cost of inaction can be high.

As Mercatus Center’s Adam Thierer put it, “Where there is uncertainty about future risks, the precautionary principle defaults to play‐it‐safe mode by disallowing trial‐and‐error progress, or at least making it far more difficult.”

The inclination to play things safe can have incredibly high costs for people who need progress. Much the current debate around artificial intelligence is centered on doomsday scenarios. Safety and alignment researchers bring up terrifying scenarios as justification for taking things slow.

But we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss what AI can do to make life better. You want to tell someone with a painful chronic illness it’s better to wait on medical progress because of some theoretical harm? They already live with an all too real harm that we should be just as eager to to fix with powerful new tools like AI.

Fuck Safetyism

I’d rather we adopt a more ambitious attitude towards problem solving. Fuck your safetyism.

We need to put a complete moratorium on the precautionary principle until we’re sure that it doesn’t have any negative consequences

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Politics

Day 958 and Civic Engagement

We hosted a little get together at our house this evening. Montana has been in the midst of a renaissance of optimism. It was encouraging to have thirty or so of our neighbors over to discuss our priorities for Montana’s future.

The state has many challenges ahead of it as a result of increasing growth and desirability. You can choose to approach that as an opportunity with a growth mindset. Or you can shrink back and pass laws limiting trouble and keeping things safe. Here in Montana a diverse set of constituents struck back against government overreach.

We discussed the recently passed YIMBY policies in Montana’s 2023 Legislative Session and the Frontier Institute‘s future plans to ensure Montana is a place that all can thrive.

While we all disagreed about a lot, what cemented the coalition is that we all agree that we want more freedom and less government. And you’d be surprised at how much flows from that basic positive oriented.

It was a pleasant night to stay indoors as it was past 90 outside. We had pizza and salad from Sidewall Pizza. And we chatting about knocking down bureaucratic barriers and ensuring opportunity for all. I know it sounds hokey but I honestly fell hopeful.