The Mark Blyth Lens
In a nutshell Mark Blyth argues the economic-political justification for Global Trumpism around the world is simple: debts are too high, wages are too low to pay the debt off, and inflation is too low to eat the debt. The Right Trumpist response is to blame immigrants and globalization for pushing wages down and wrecking more »
The Peter Zeihan Lens (part 1/n)
Almost two years ago I started scribbling for a project mapping out LeftTube, but now those guys are basically mainstreaming and I lost steam. Internet archaeology is a capricious art. I want to record some more on geopolitical forecasting and futurism, and if I don’t start immediately the muse might leave me, so here we more »
Constitutional Hardball
Notes from a few papers on ‘Constitutional Hardball’ Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding more »
Filippo San Martino of Agliè
Hyperbolic fantasist real-estate developer becomes spectacle-based political power broker (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) A small pantheon of schemers vs the tolkienic hero Filip St Martin and Power in Fantasy Bruce Sterling and his parter work in an old palace in Turin called the “Vineyard of the Royal Madame”. Their residence is more »
Sterling on ‘Cyberpunk’ in 2019
Some disconnected notes branching from Sterling’s 2019 SXSW talk Contrasting cyberpunk with the mass market New Sincerity aesthetic Changes in the cultural role played by sci-fi, “The New Courtiers” [2012] If Land’s cyber-futurism can seem out of date, it is only in the same sense that jungle and techno are out of date – not more »
Sterling on “How to be futuristic”
Attention Conservation Notice: The value of an ACN is to tell you why you may not want to read the following post. This post is the continuation of a synthesis of Bruce Sterling talks, this time about the ‘process’ of futurism. It is shorter but much dryer than his actual monologues can be, and will more »
Dark Euphoria Notes (Recap)
A recap ofDark Euphoria, for quicker reference. “Dark Euphoria” is Sterling’s terms for the twenty-teens (meant poetically, not that it will stop next year). Dark Euphoria is an opening of the probability space that has a flavor of dread. In the original post I speculated that the main mechanism is chronic institutional failure and the more »
Solastalgia Notes III
Speculations about recovery The CBM-I task may show a patient a situation about a person yawning during their conversation. Then the patient is asked whether that person is “tired” or “bored.” The individual who answers “tired” is told the response is “correct,” and “bored” is incorrect. Through repetition, this type of CBM-I therapy helps the more »
Solastalgia Notes II
Original post on Solastalgia here. The victim has a subjective feeling of having been irreparably damaged and having undergone an irreversible personality change. He or she has a sense of foreshortened future without expectation of a career, marriage, children, or normal lifespan (Istanbul Protocol, 1999, p. 47). Cited from “What is a ‘sense of foreshortened more »
Solastalgia Notes I
These notes were spawned by a series of posts I started writing, inspired by a binge of Bruce Sterling talks I missed between 2018-2019. Original post on Solastalgia here. One more micro-post each day this week. The climate crisis is here […] I always wondered how people would react. I’m pretty sure it’s fantastic catastrophes more »