I’d been wondering where this was for a month or so, and it turned out it had been in an inner pocket of my belt pouch all along, with the leather cord wrapped around it. The continual pressure (and probably the warmth) has pulled off a little of the paint, but that’s all. I’m fairly encouraged, overall!

This is seasoned holly, cut from a tree in my garden a few months back when a branch was threatening the elder across the way. I need a new short-bladed carving knife with a full-sized handle, so this is the first step towards that. For the blade, I’m going to use a dismounted Opinel No. 2.

These are always popular, but painting curves on the satin ribbon is awkward enough that I have terrible trouble getting around to finishing them off. One’s spoken for already, but the other will be up for sale when it’s done.

Like the Twelfth Night jewellery I made, these are cut from an old and much-used play script. They’re going to be quite a lot more ornate, though, using the text more as a background than a main feature, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they turn out.

Problem: the world is largely run by muppets.
Observation: the world is largely run by privileged straight cis men (SCM). [Disclaimer: this also includes race, class, disability, &c. issues. Intersectionality applies, so ticking one box doesn't give you a free pass on the rest.]
Observation: there are many fewer SCM than there are of Everyone Else.
Assumption: the ratio of muppetry to non-muppetry is more or less constant across different demographics, ie. if 15% of SCM are muppets then about 15% of Jewish lesbians are also muppets.
Corollary: a nontrivial number of SCM achieve leadership positions despite being muppets.
Corollary: a nontrivial number of Everyone Else are barred from leadership positions despite competence.
Therefore: opening up leadership positions to people who are not SCM is an easy win, expanding the pool of non-muppets available for leadership positions.
However: some SCM do not want to see the pool expanded, because that reduces their chances of a leadership position if they are muppets.
Also: many SCM do not care very much about the inclusion of Everyone Else in the potential leadership pool, for reasons including (but not limited to): because they do not see it as their problem; because they would actively rather things were run by groups of “proven competence”; or because they believe in pure meritocracy.
Also also: it’s a self-perpetuating problem, because SCM are generally bad at listening to people who are not perceived to be in the potential leadership pool.
Therefore: the SCM who Get It must deal with the other SCM, and need to be responsible themselves for promoting Everybody Else. It is not only, or even mostly, their job, but it isn’t Somebody Else’s Problem, and the results won’t be Somebody Else’s Win.

Who made me?
- well you should ask.
It’s now you’re asking, years later
after the rain and the wind.
Not them – they’ve been going round,
talked about wholesale replacement,
gone back inside.
Wasn’t him – he came to write,
never touched a mallet or the fencing pliers,
left in the winter.
Who remembers before then?
The sheep are gone.
So’s the butcher, and so are the women
who cooked lamb on Sundays.
Say it was the family – might as well be, now.
Say it was the ninth generation
in that old stone house there,
fed up with hauling stone and lopping thorn.
Might be the forestry down the road
gave up the stakes, might not.
Could be Taid whacked them in,
could be Huw from the village,
with his shirt off for Fflur to watch.
Could be they married, later,
moved out to Liverpool.
Doesn’t make a difference, now.
The sun’s still shining.

This is another one taken from a digital photo, this time of a tree in the middle of Chesham in Buckinghamshire. (You can see the original, in full colour, below – as usual, click through to Flickr for the full version.) I loved the contrast of the dark branches, the bright fairy-lights, and the multitudinous blues of the sky so much, I had to work on it and turn it into something completely different.

I’m not planning on carving this one, but I shall be selling digital prints when I get everything set up. Watch this space!

For the next six weeks, my work is on display at Slate in Leytonstone—you can walk along Leytonstone High Road and see it in the dedicated street-facing exhibition space on the corner with Church Lane. As usual, you can click through to Flickr for the full-sized versions – they’re not the best of photos, but for December light, street reflections, and (frankly) a hurry to get to the pub they’re not too bad.

Or, Heuristics for History. You know the drill; italics are my own editorial comments or summaries. Everything else is Vinay Gupta’s, and he wishes me to say that he likes being contradicted and argued with.

From the last couple of talks in this series: we understand the system and its limitations. Now, what can we do?

The formation of a political identity in a post-democratic age.

It’s blatantly obvious that democracy has failed, because there are serious problems that aren’t being solved. We have threats on two scales – civilisational and ontological.

About half of the people in the room grew up in the shadow of global nuclear war, the age of false rationality, game theory, death cults and MAD. And those death cults never went away. This is the forbidden history of Western Civilisation.

But there’s rational hope! We can fix the world in the small gap—20 years at the outside—between nuclear death and open-source bioweapons.

The military think of this as “increasing small group lethality” – how many people can two dozen competent, dedicated, well equipped people kill? The answer is in the billions.

The population of Israel is 5.5 million.

“We are within sight of the end of the causes of human conflict”. That is, the (socio)technology for fixing the big problems mostly exists; it needs to be properly tested and scaled up.

What we need is a combined socio-technical system WITH psychological transformation (“not a New Age but a New Us”), ie. a combination of government + engineers. Bad civil engineering is killing the world. We build what we want to, so the trick will be to want something else.

[We do, in fact, have everything we need to bribe the bad actors into not being bad actors—good food, good music, art, comfort, happy people around them. We just have to teach them to want it.]

The four causes of conflict: too little, too much, philosophical beliefs, and psychological traumas, eg. feuding. Poverty can be alleviated; resources can be rationally shared (violence inhibits rational sharing & polarizes people); and the harmful cultural associations that go along with religion can be unpicked from the religion itself. In fact, religions have been doing that a lot already. [I am not convinced about that part. That might be my Quaker background showing, though.]

“Star Trek is like Thelema for everyone.”

PTSD and cultural analogues are substantially curable by therapy, drugs (MDMA), and critical theory. (The Israeli military is dosing their troops up on Ecstasy to make sure they don’t get PTSD from everything they see & do. Israel also has a very thriving rave scene.)

Is the plan of eliminating the causes of conflict impossible, or just unreasonable? Islands of progress are very real.

The energy problem is looking much more solvable than it was 20 years ago. Nanosolar, Konarka, algal turf scrubbers. Renewable energy costs are going down by 7% a year, and by 2019 they’ll be cheaper than coal. [Not convinced all the externalities are included in that price estimate. The energy sector is the worst non-black entity there is for fudging prices and distorting markets.]

The Technological Abyss: that which saves, destroys. There’s almost no global technological regulation. Can we get out of it? – yes!

Recap: inequitable resource distribution, ineffective governance. So, it’s not worth engaging in democracy any longer except as a maintenance activity – 15 minutes every 4 years and that’s it.

Fixing organisations: use a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) model. Let a thousand flowers bloom, prune where needed, compost the dead. The classic capital-investment/directed-labour model of building assets is manifestly inadequate, because there is no possible way that any amount of money could ever have been turned into Wikipedia.

These organisations use non-scarce resources; they’re organic, evolutionary, and bottom-up. They’re labour-intensive, using many minds, with layers of open-source oversight, and inherently resistant to screwups.

How do we apply the FOSS/WP model to governance? – it’ll probably only work for non-scarce resources.

Can we fix scarcity problems with non-scarce resources? History says yes, because there are a lot of occasions where it’s been done—eg. the horse collar, the plough.

Ingenuity is not scarce. (However, the ability to manage it is.)

Imagine a global policy wiki – a global intellectual commons in which smart people work for free, collecting and showcasing best practice in legislation and policymaking for everyone’s use. When lazy policymakers, or their assistants, want a solution to a problem? – check the wiki, cut and paste. Make it easy and obvious and it will get used.

A coordinated sustainable development commons: a roadmap for lifting people out of poverty, governance strategies for very big planetary assets.

The world is full of working solutions and best practices. Most of them aren’t documented. [Known problem: people who Do Stuff generally hate documenting Stuff, and are not very good at it. Also, the kind of things that get documented on the internet are the kind of things that the people who document stuff on the internet like.]

Doing what Governments can’t.
- Pathological incentives exist at every level.
- Every funding stream is contaminated.
- There is no state which is charged with solving global problems. The total UN budget is one-third of what Indians send home to India.

Commons-based peer production.

“If you want to save the world, be prepared to work for free” – because there is no entity whose job it is to pay you to do it.

Complexity control: the people who are good at this are generally engineers. Sciences, arts, and that’s it.

“Richard Stallman is the old white man in a beard that makes the world work.” GNU/Linux is more than free.

Governments are not malicious—they are incompetent. It’s at least a scale problem – there are a number of different pathologies involved. And most people within governments know this, and will grab at any branch they’re offered.

Superempowerment, or, How to become an Actor in History.
1. Focus on the problem.
2. Do not expect to get paid.
3. Work until it is solved. [And we all know what the reward for a job well done is...]

Also: don’t fart around solving local problems. We need you at the global level. [Hm. Not sure about this one. Some people are better suited to local problems... but then a lot of local solutions are scalable and/or generalisable. Think globally, prototype locally?]

Individual responsibility:
- Our power and agency are inalienable, despite having historically delegated them to governments.
- Our current forms of collective social organisation are inadequate to the challenges of now.
- Diabolical new technology requires new forms of management.

Radical new identity:
- build a platform on top of the state. Rebuild collectives as individuals.

Fighting the thing that caused the problem—or the thing that is failing to solve the problem—is not the same as solving the problem.

Wikiocracy. A governance model which clearly gets decision-making right will outperform lawmakers.

The social relationship online favours (and makes easy) collaboration: it’s a positively biased medium. “Nobody’s ever died in a flame war.” [Wrong. The internet has directly enabled many deaths, eg. from cyber-bullying, and a great deal of dangerous harassment. See "highly gendered internet" debate, passim.]

Cooperate with your enemies. Take individual responsibility. Guide the lost. Preserve and protect (eg. from enclosure – CC or GFDL, &c.) Wait for rollover, and keep working. (Rollover: something dramatic is going to happen to the concept & constitution of the state within the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years.)

Post-political identity.
- We’re going to solve the problem, rather than make other people solve the problem.
- Who cares about people who are wrong? Stop arguing with them.
- Embrace and extend old mediums.
- Only individuals can reconstitute.

Practical things: correct language (define every we, so we know who is talking); correct thought (stop waiting for the government to fix things); correct action (work out who can solve the problem, and help them).

If the answer to the last question is “nobody”: then it’s your turn.

Learn to unsee the State and the Organisations.

A few interesting & miscellaneous things that came up in conversation afterwards:

• NESTA: Alliance for Useful Evidence
• Liberate Wednesday / World Design Wednesday (we should have a hashtag for that Edit: the hashtag is #freeweds])
• Writings on open source Druidry, poetic inspiration and other forms of Awen, and related concepts.

After a conversation with Eleanor Saitta at Truth and Beauty.

First: why? Well, it’s because the money we have is clearly inadequate. It embodies too many perverse incentives: specifically, it engenders a desire to hoard it rather than to use it; it provides too easy a metric for point-scoring, and easy metrics become ends in themselves; it’s very easily gameable and algorithmically manipulable; and it accumulates unevenly, which is to say accumulation accelerates the more of it you already have. Which is clearly counterproductive.

So, here’s my rough-cut proposal for a system which would remedy those problems – it’s designed to be used at first as a local currency, on the lines of LETS, to be used amongst a largeish (virtual) community rather than for transactions between strangers, and certainly not for savings accounts. I’ve been thinking of it as Fleuristy, because it flowers and falls, and because that means we can call the currrency units florins. It’s entirely digital native, because that gives us better tools for understanding and managing the money supply than any other currency has had.

The most important feature of the economy is that the total amount of money in it is aggressively limited – when it goes over the threshold (a multiple of the number of users, with some constraints & random factors to prevent gaming the system) that triggers a jubilee. All accounts are reset to a medium-low level, and all outstanding debts are cleared.

Since the jubilee will pretty much always take more money out of the system than it puts in, we need a faucet as well as a drain. That’s community funding, and it works like this.

When Aaron makes a payment to Balqis, he can choose either to fund it from his own account, or to submit it for community funding. If he takes the first choice, it goes through as usual – Aaron ends up with less money, Balqis ends up with more, the total remains constant.

But if Aaron takes the second option (either because he doesn’t have the funds himself, or because he thinks this is a transaction that will benefit the community, or for some other reason) then it will get submitted to a public forum for moderation, with Aaron’s pitch for the funding. If it gets more up-votes than down-votes, it gets funded, which is to say Balqis gets her money and nobody loses it; the total increases. If it doesn’t, or if it goes 48 hours with no votes either way, the transaction fails.

New users start with a zero balance, but will get marked up to the same medium-low balance as everyone else at the next jubilee, or may get a community grant if someone wants to propose that.

As far as score-keeping goes, everyone has three numbers: current balance, lifetime amount received, and lifetime amount spent. Either the last two, or the difference between them, are publicly visible, with leaderboards. (Opt-out leaderboards, that is. Not everyone wants to compete.)

This system tries to embody reputation (using lightweight but persistent identity management – my preference would be for Twitter authorization) and focus on transactions rather than balances. It stops hoarding, since jubilees are unpredictable – the only thing you can usefully do with your money is spend it or give it away. It won’t entirely stop the acceleration effect, but by preventing large balances (unless the system gets stuck in a very inequal state – and even then there are ways for the users to fix it) it will limit the effect severely. It isn’t gameable without intelligent human intervention, since any community-funding request which looks either machine-generated or boring will inevitably draw a community backlash.

Getting it off the ground won’t be an economics problem; it’ll be a community-cultivation problem. One thing the Internet is very much not lacking is people with surplus value looking to exchange it with each other. Some of the numbers will need fine-tuning, but the only way to do that is to try it.

Comments, perceived problems, elaborations on the basic system?

Or, Hacking the Planet Without Voiding the Warranty.

Ed. note—I keep these notes mostly because I’m an artist, and if I don’t have a tool in my hands then I can’t apply half my brain. But it would be a shame not to post them now they exist. I don’t make any claims about comprehensiveness or perfect accuracy. As always, italics indicate my own thoughts; everything else is Cascio’s.

“I don’t like ‘futurist’ as a job description, but I haven’t come up with a better one. I ask questions, I don’t tell you what the future will be like.”

We’re in an age where, effectively, there is no more nature – the Anthropocene, where human activities have a noticeable effect on the climate.

There are two ways that we can potentially remedy global warming: either we can manage the incoming solar radiation, or we can remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Launch capacity rules out flying a classic solar mirror – we just can’t get that much mass up there quickly enough to do any good.

We could fill the air with crap (seawater or sulphur compounds) but that has been shown to alter rainfall. (There’s actually been quite a few large-scale tests on that – volcanic eruptions do precisely the same thing, and so did the oil-field fires Iraqi forces set after the invasion of Kuwait that began the first Gulf War. This is also what we used to call nuclear winter.)

As for carbon dioxide sequestration, there aren’t many ways to embed it reliably. Planting enough trees to embody that much CO₂ would leave no room for arable land, and thus no food. Just pumping the stuff underground will leak, or cause earthquakes in the way that fracking does.

There’s a new company called Calera who say they can sequester carbon dioxide “in the built environment”.

The sequestration/ocean-albedo-changing idea, using iron filings in the ocean to encourage algal bloom, has been shown not to work.

“Rule No. 1: Desperate People Do Desperate Things.” We are, at some point, going to see amateur geo-engineers; rogue states starting geoengineering projects; and climate terrorist groups trying to stop them. States are already seriously considering these techniques as warfare, and evaluating ways to deploy them or defend against them.

One of the things that’s stopping people-or-organizations doing geoengineering is liability. If something goes wrong (and it will), and if you’ve been doing something that could potentially have had an effect on the climate or the weather, then you will be blamed. And sued.

This is not a choice between hubris and humility.

Five steps to doing it right:

1. Transparency. Everyone should know what you’re doing and how.
2. Internationality.
3. Bottom-up thinking: “Ecoscientists Without Borders”.
4. Global dispute resolution mechanisms. We already have models for those, after the CFC row and in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
5. An absolute, and thoroughly enforced, ban on non-state projects.

Not economies of scale, but economies of scope: solutions that deal with several problems at once.

The problems we face in tackling ecological breakage aren’t technological, generally; they’re political and cultural.

Breaking The Powers? Dreams of a Council of Scientists. We should have a Power Jubilee. Are we condemned to incrementalism?

The moral hazard of technological fixes.

Geoengineering as a phantom tiger – “if the scientists are willing to do THAT, the problem must be worse than we thought.” Asking people their opinions of geoengineering projects has been shown to increase their acceptance of global warming as a problem.

To sum up: Things are going horribly wrong. A solution may emerge, if it’s given time and room. There is, currently, nothing we as individuals can safely do.

Or, Why won’t somebody act?

As before, italics indicate my own interpolations and editorial asides. Everything else is Vinay Gupta, though I’ve rephrased or summarized here & there.

Governance comes in three necessary & inevitable parts: ownership, management, and protection. Owners fund, maintain, & legitimize; managers do the work to keep it going; protectors remove threats. There are an arbitrarily large number of ways to implement all of those, and failure mechanisms for each of them. Owners can turn into rentiers, extracting fees for doing nothing; managers want to stay employed; and protectors want not to have to do anything.

There are a lot of definitions of “state”, and often a lot of overlapping or competing state-like entities, eg. revolutionary movements.

Weber’s classic definition is that the state has a monopoly on the use of legitimate force. Vinay prefers this one: a state is an entity that can grant retroactive immunity, ie. it can find you innocent. Put another way, it can extend protection, at least from its own justice and as far as possible from others’.

I still think that this definition includes a lot of entities not usually considered states, such as separatist/sustainable/hippy communities. Vinay disagrees with me on this, which leads me to think he has never experienced a group of hippies discussing who used the last of the soya milk, when, why, and how they can prevent it happening again. Or, to use a more serious example, sexual harassment/assault in countercultural groups with a TAZ-type or separatist ethos.

The most common state service is jurisdiction over sharing, including but not limited to contract law.

Evanescent micro-states exist – there’s always a fractal quality to states. Describable as a foam of states/jurisdictions – cf. Stross’s Accelerando.

There is no global jurisdiction, which means no global sharing.

The fact that people have chosen to group themselves by geographic areas rather than, say, shoe size could be considered an accident of history. Dubious, given the necessary localization of most resource nodes. But still a useful consideration.

Goat rodeo! This is a situation to which order cannot be brought, and it’s what happens when both goals & actors are different. If you have multiple actors of the same type (eg. all corporations or all charities) with the same goals, it’s a cartel; actors of different types with the same goals cooperate; actors of the same type with different goals compete; and actors of different types, with different goals, have no common ground on which to cooperate or to compete, so we call it a goat rodeo.

Gupta’s law of whole systems thinking: “You know it’s a whole system if the costs show up in one place and the benefits in another.”

“Can we do both rights and good governance?” Is there necessarily a tradeoff?

An example from the UN about free speech & blasphemy laws: the relevant interest groups have been captured by the people most interested in blasphemy laws, ie. the ones who want them.

(In response to a question from the floor) “The best analysis of transnational corporations is as arms of the United States. This is a very reasonable position to disagree with.”

Most people, including us, are fairly ignorant. Popular mandates are badly informed, therefore weak.

“Electoral democracy has failed.” Here we get into nuclear bureacracies (ie. the self-sustaining bureaucracies that have grown up around the control of nuclear weapons and their support infrastructure) and the black state. They have vast budgets and think on immense timelines, eg. the long wait for the Soviet Union to collapse due to its own internal contradictions.

The black state has access to Vast Amounts Of Firepower for a very long time and has successfully not used it, which can be a very hard problem.

States end up with a two-tier governance structure: democratic facing inwards, secret/black dealing with foreign & defence policy. For that reason, solutions to global problems will probably come out of the black state.

Large problems are far more complex than one head can hold; for that matter, the number of heads required to hold them exceeds the Dunbar number.

I’ve been offered an exhibition at Slate in Leytonstone, a display venue for local artists using the windows of the closed council offices on the corner of Church Lane and Leytonstone High Road. That starts on December 17th and runs for six weeks, and I’ll be showing some of everything!

Since I haven’t posted recently about what I’ve been making, here’s some relevant picspam. These all involve photography & quite a lot of obsessive vector art. As always, click through to Flickr for the full-size versions.