"What I'm Thinking About" Wednesdays 8.23.23 - Polycrisis

It's not one explosion, it's multiple simultaneous explosions

August 23, 2023

Here we are, back again! California residents experienced a Tropical StormQuake this weekend, and Aeon has a great word for the times: Polycrisis. Which means exactly what you think it means.

An Internet Shutdown Means Manipur Is Burning in the Dark (Wired) & A horrific video sparks a national reckoning in India (Rest of World) There’s been a total internet blackout/shutdown in the state of Manipur, India since late May. Which has led to the usual assortment of atrocities. This is the exact thing Twitter would be used to communicate about, if Musk & Modi weren’t bffs such that Tesla factories get approved in India.

Slain California store owner feared altercation over Pride flags (CBS News) A woman was murdered because she hung a pride flag outside of her shop. It’s a free country right?

Are You Rich? (Bloomberg) Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio (Center for American Progress) & Profit Inflation is Real (Institute for New Economic Thinking) This article by Bloomberg, in context with the tax cut info and corporate profit inflation, really makes you think. I wonder how much the 1-4% of $5mill+ tier who think of themselves as “Very Poor” or “Comfortable,” actually make off the backs of those who are actually poor.

What the heck happened in 2012? (The Intrinsic Perspective) In 1972, 50% of households got color TV, and in 2012, smartphone usage crossed 50%. Looks like we are in the new technological epoch folks. And just as the site WTF Happened in 1971 illustrates about the 50 years before, the shifts in society over the next 50 years will be as, if not more profound.

Fahrenheit 98.6 (Donkeyspace) This piece on AI just bringing more of the same is a wonderful palatte cleanser if you’ve been reading too much apocalypse porn these days. This dunking on Yuval Harari’s panicked clucking is truly incredible:

The AI revolution is bringing us face to face with Descartes’ demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Maya. If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there. ~Harari

If we are not careful? Um, no. These famous concepts are not warnings about what might happen if we are not careful. They are attempts to describe as accurately as possible the existing world that we already find ourselves in. We are, according to these perspectives, already trapped behind a curtain of illusions, and we must find some way to deal with it. Which is, as far as I can tell, what we’ve been doing and, in my estimation, what we will continue to do in the age of AI.

A Seat At The Table Of Success (Defector) David Roth brings it, this time painting a picture of New York City’s Mayor, Eric “The Opposite of Swagger” Adams.

San Franciscans Are Having Sex in Robotaxis, and Nobody is Talking About It (San Francisco Standard) Nobody? The San Francisco Standard is talking about it, I’m talking about it, and you’re probably going to talk about it. So that makes three of us so far.

Is Following An Extradition Treaty An Elaborate Political Hoax? (Popehat) Ken “Popehat” White is a critical follow in the coming months. Indictments Done Four Ways is going to get complicated fast, so expect more from him.

This aerial photo taken on March 31 2023 shows deserted villas in a suburb of Shenyang in China's northeastern Liaoning...

Farmers putting Chinese “never worn” McMansion land to use (Architectural Digest) With China’s real estate bubble doing…not great…there’s finally some space to evaluate land for what it could be best used for or what the country needs. And farmland is absolutely what the Chinese need, not a few acres of ghost mansions no one has never and will never occupy.

Trance Is Back - And It’s No Joke (Pitchfork) & Trance never stopped rolling (NoBells) I’m certainly glad Gen Z is discovering Trance as a genre of music, but this “We’re So Over” x “We’re So Back” crap has to go. Armin, Aly & Fila, Paul Van Dyk, Above & Beyond, and John O’Callaghan show Trance never went anywhere, the beat takes that long to build up, Just ask Armin back in 2004.

Keep your head up,T

(Editor’s Note: Gonna take some time off like a small percentage of the West can, see everyone after Labor Day. Don’t work too hard.)