Via, here’s a video on the social good (or not) of everyone being outted by the death of privacy. It’s an interesting meditation on capitalism and exploitation and how maybe the future is a reflection of the past instead of a repudiation of it:

This is being juxtaposed by my new media job, where I got a blast from someone who is in PR for the city asking for industry stories to highlight in an upcoming mass media drop. I need access to PR people, so I followed her back. Recall that this is all in a business context — here’s the death of privacy in action, her last couple of messages:

Here’s a pic of me and X looking pretty at the porn awards!

I don’t know how it happened but I’ve become someone that porn stars recognize and give hugs to. How the hell?

Now if I could only add James Deen to the list I’d be a happy gal.

Just to be clear: I ain’t hatin’. But it’s *possible* that another business contact, or someone at the mayor’s office, for example, might.

I actually think being totally real on social media is awesome (and the irony of blogging that anonymously isn’t lost on me — more later on that). This is just evidence of collapsing public/private life boundaries.

Maybe the new norm is: if you look at someone’s profile it’s your own fault.

Congrats to my sugar-pie Jill on crushing the ethics exam her pro college requires of all inductees. It’s scored relatively and she got about 2.6 sigmas — or over 98% in normal person talk apparently I don’t speak normal. It was 91st %tile on 1.7 sigmas.

Silly Jilly: I told you so

How will the Internet change government, ultimately? What if Elections Canada became a PKI overseer and just tabulated verified Twitter opinions? Can we get rid of representatives? What if the top bureaucrats were directed by direct representation? What if the response to Kony (which I haven’t looked into at all) was both necessary and sufficient to mobilize the military?

Discuss?

The recent Joe Rogan Podcast with Sam Harris, a fight-the-fight atheist neuroscientist with deep experiences in both meditation and powerful psychedelics, is pretty decent.

It’s a sometimes-intense convo about: the ethics of remote and asymmetric warfare*; collapsing the distance between the subject/object perception without drugs; ecstasy without MDMA: mehta meditation?; the solution to fanatical terrorism: LSD — you have to believe in religion, but LSD already believes in you! You can turn it off once you get to the parts about the strictly skeptical scientific method — that shit is so played (kidding, I’m just well enough versed that it was a bit “blah blah blah”).

Rough quote: “psychedelics were important to me because I was highly skeptical about introspective experiences. I had to be thrown over the wall.”

Good topics, all around, and a lower dose of the usual ultramasculinity.

* Would you be more comfortable if your granddad firebombed Dresden or beat a German family to death with a shovel? Probably the former. Why?

Via Jill, a trainwreck straight outta Idiocracy:

His fourth child came into the world while he was cavorting with another woman. That woman eventually gave Sean his first son, six months after his fifth daughter was born to yet another girlfriend.

The Stanley Parable is a game about gaming, insanity, and existentialism, with aggressively unreliable narrator(s). It’s short. This 1/2 hr video contains, supposedly, all of the playthroughs.

I’m looking for an essay by Zerzan on the rise of the word “like”. He thinks it’s because we no longer engage directly with reality and can only understand it through simile. I disagree, but there you go.

An unhealthy amount of my daydreaming time involves categorizing things*. For example, I’ve recently started thinking about getting a business card along these lines:

The odd title is down to another bit of musing: the more I learn about Music the more I think it’s actually the same art as Film and that Game Design is a more-general version of that super-art. Roughly: games are about making NP-hard decisions. Film/Music could be an immense graph of mathematical/physical relationships with individual works as traversals. Music, then, could be a particular problem space within the set of possible Games, which might be why Rock Band works so well.

“Aleatoric” because I like incorporating nondeterminism into things. “Bit” because everything I do is digital. “Sequencing” because everything involves an ordering in time.

* Buddhism says you might not want to spend time making up more illusions to layer over reality. Or, as Marvin the Paranoid Android put it: “Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

I believe that carbon emissions should be reduced just enough to stop environmental disaster. Most people are not explicit about this, but I think it’s a view almost everyone shares if they think about it: the climate can absorb some carbon without disruption, so there’s no problem in that amount of emissions. Besides, eliminating all emissions would require the end of civilization if not the end of mammals.

I would go further and say that some climate change is probably acceptable. The problem right now is that since carbon emissions are an externality, there’s no decision process over how much is acceptable. If carbon were properly priced, the market could weigh the trade-off between carbon-emitting activities and climate change. Will economic growth now be enough to make up for environmental consequences later?

This long, self-reflective essay gives a good counter-argument:

[Sustainability] means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so…The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul…This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon.

The environmental movement used to be about protecting the environment for the environment’s sake, but then it became co-opted by capitalism into this utilitarian economic thinking that I presented above: the environment is a big truck you can dump a certain amount of shit in before the tubes get clogged.

In Canada this is expressed by the tension between the Green Party, which sometimes acknowledges the trade-off between social justice and environmental justice (but mostly just promises all the justice!), and the NDP, which is a social justice party that added some sustainability policies. And the BC Liberals introduced a carbon tax because sustainability is just good business.

It doesn’t really matter because ecocentrism failed and now even sustainability is failing because the majority have decided (if subconsciously) that economic growth now is worth any amount of environmental pain later.

(via)