Not sure how many folks here are aware of the annual “State of the World” dialog that Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky [and for this round, Emily Gertz] post on The Well (launched in 1985, truly a Dawn of the Innernets pioneer). It is a conversation, visually it’s IRC-posted-as-HTML-pages, simultaneously Big Picture, wide-ranging, and curiously specific. Various Well members post questions and get answers, hot takes, anecdotes.
I make myself read these SOTWs once a year.
It’s a bit like cod liver oil for my brain.
Or a reframe as I get out of my own mental rabbithole(s).
Here’s their roundup of 2023 in review:
Fast loading, text-only (no minimal contextual hyperlinks! way more basic!), and dense. In a good way. Historically it’s been pretty male-centric and heavily tech-focused. Not without its moments though. Caveat emptor and all that.
Disclaimer: some people find Bruce Sterling’s ideas and works something of an acquired taste.
ETA: oho–SOTW is a’ gittin’ all fancy and they do have a few hyperlinks thrown in
So, Bing has decided:
"US presidential election: The race for the White House is heating
up, with former President Donald Trump announcing his bid for a
second term in 2024, despite being impeached twice and banned from
social media platforms. He faces a tough challenge from the
Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, who became the first woman and
person of color to serve as vice president under Joe Biden.
Wow, that’s quite a prediction there, Bing!
Yeah, I read that and was mildly amused.
Sterling acknowledges the trippy nature of AI-driven chatbots.
*Thanks so much for that input, Bing! Any WELL reader can witness
that Bing directly validates what me and Jon Lebkowsky are also
saying about the state of the world. The year 2024 is all about
climate crisis and warfare (it’s great that he agrees). As for
“President Kamala Harris,” her formal nomination is especially
exciting and unusual. I bet you really didn’t expect that “black
swan,” eh?*With Bing “hallucinating” for us in this way, we WELLperns won’t
need the long-established, continuous WELL-user tradition of
gobbling psyechedelic [sic] substances at the keyboard. Because, man,
Bing excels at that.
There’s a moment in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem where the inanity-ization (“inanition”) of the Ret (the internet) is explained.
The Ret was at one time flooded with ‘crap’, seemingly correct documents and other media with slight errors in them. The Ita devised a method to distinguish legit documents from tarnished ones.
“The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists … for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons as we call them.”
We are at a point in our own narrative where we are spotting bogons and inanition in the wild, here, now, thanks to Bing and ChatGPT etc.
Yikes.
This is my surprised face.
Search engines making it seem like supremacist conspiracy theories about replacement have already come true, combined with AI-generated fake news about violent crime, both lead to increased GOP turnout at the polls.
I hate it. My own “profit and power motivation” theory is that these are neither accidental nor a mistake. A lot of time and effort went into creating consumers of rumors who will believe initial reports are true, while the facts used in a correction are part of a cover-up.
Yeah, it’s definitely not good timing for not ready for market yet AI to be all the rage right now. 
This report about about the Xinjiang region of China left me with some questions:
Yes and.
It’s all about the money.
And for the Chinese, money and stability are nearly the same thing. Having grown up in that culture, twas ever thus.
Money. Profit. Power.
Be it natural resources, humans to work in factories, keep its armies busy and later after re-education keep up active duty “enlisted” (<-- ironic quotes), insulate its borders from countries that China is not friendly with, and find more places for its many many ye gods that’s a lot of Chinese to find living space for:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/china-population
China Population 2024 (Live)
1,425,490,616
It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice
Chinese saying advocating pragmatism, possibly coined by Deng Xiaoping (1904–97). 1997 Daily Telegraph
see also:
Anyone who has been even loosely tracking this:
and reasons why this was and to this very day still is A Thing will be unsurprised to learn that the Uyghurs are only the latest [publicly known] to be at the sharp end of China’s “Marketplace Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” (aka state-centered capitalism).
The interesting and near-miraculous thing to be celebrated is how all this bad news is seeing the light of day.
We have the opportunity to question our assumptions, that when we see a “made in China” sticker on whatever we buy, that the thing we North Americans are paying for is something that may well the product of prison-labor factories, sweatshops, or child labor.
… Whereas the canopies of most living mangrove trees reach around 43 feet (13 meters) high, S. barrocoloradoensis grew to around 82 feet (25 m) and could tower up to 130 feet (40 m). …
… The mangrove fossils were all in a similar state of preservation, prompting the researchers to think the forest was wiped out by a single volcanic eruption that flooded the landscape with mud. …
Good reminder that we can get frustrated too easily, and even wrongly, when change isn’t quick.
This definitely did not conclude how I thought it was going to conclude:
I wonder if there’s an app yet that identifies which available flights are a Boeing plane or not.
Has the “society of the spectacle” finally arrived, in the realm of “culture” at least?
More than ever, marketing and the phenomena and “movements” it generates that swirl hysterically around a product matter far more than any quality or worth of the actual product.
Seems true of things like Tesla vehicles too, where the hype around them prevents otherwise discerning consumers from seeing the product’s crappy and sometimes dangerous features.
Barbie,’ ‘Saltburn,’ Louis Vuitton: When Culture Becomes a TikTok Craze
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/opinion/social-media-tiktok-marketing.html
