The Mysteries of Money

June 20, 2012 By

There was a brief period early in the life of ribbonfarm when I thought the blog was about business. But I was never quite comfortable with that idea, though I do write a lot about business matters.

(2017 update: You can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

I finally realized where I was going wrong: businesses, markets, products, even society, culture and civilization itself: these are all clumsy constructs that revolve around money. Money is the most basic stuff in this universe of consensual fictions that we call civilized life.

I am terrible at making money, but I have never understood people who don’t take money seriously, and have even managed to develop a disdain for it. I suspect it is sour grapes, pure and simple. Which is a pity, since money is absolutely fascinating stuff even if you don’t have enough of it to appreciate close-up or swim around in, like Scrooge McDuck. It is the fabric of social reality — stuff that is real because we collectively believe in it — the way space-time is the fabric of physical reality.

So with that bit of purple prose, I give you: the fourth and last sequence through the ribbonfarm archives, 2007-2012.

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Getting Ahead, Getting Along, Getting Away

June 13, 2012 By

Sometimes I think that if I were much more famous, female and in Hollywood instead of the penny theater circuit that is the blogosphere, I’d be Greta Garbo. Constantly insisting that I want to be left alone while at the same time being drawn to a kind of work that is intrinsically public and social. Simultaneously inviting attention and withdrawing from it.

(2017 update: You can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Which I suppose is why ruminations on the key tensions of being a self-proclaimed introvert, in a role that seems better suited to extroverts, occupies so much bandwidth on this blog. That’s the theme of this third installment in my ongoing series of introductory sequences to ribbonfarm (here are the first two). This is the longest of the sequences, at 21 posts, and also has the most commentary. So here you go. I hope this will be useful to both new and old readers.

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Towards an Appreciative View of Technology

June 5, 2012 By

Recently I encountered the perfect punchline for my ongoing exploration of technology: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. The timing was perfect, since I’ve been looking for an organizing idea to describe how I understand technology.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Looking back over the technology-related posts in my archives over the last five years, this technology-is-nature theme pops out clearly, as both a descriptive and normative theme. I don’t mean that in the sense of naive visions of bucolic bliss (though that is certainly an attractive technology design aesthetic) but in the sense of technology as a manifestation of the same deeper lawfulness that creates forests-and-bears nature. Technology at its best allows for the fullest expression of that lawfulness, without narrow human concerns getting in the way.

I will explain the title in a minute but first, here is my technology sequence of 14 posts written over the last five years. The organizing narrative for the sequence comes from this technology-is-nature idea that informs my thinking, whether I am pondering landfills or rusty ships.

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The Art of Refactored Perception

May 31, 2012 By

When I made up the tagline, experiments in refactored perception, back in 2007, I had no idea how deeply that line would come to define the essence of ribbonfarm. So in this first post in my planned month-long retrospective on five years in the game, I decided to look back on the evolution and gradual deepening of the idea of refactoring perceptions.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

I’ve never attempted an overt characterization of what the phrase means, but over the years, I’ve explored it fairly systematically. This sequence of posts should help you appreciate what I mean by the phrase. I’ve arranged the sequence as a set of fairly natural stages. There is some commentary at the end. Here you go:

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Roundup: January – May 2012

May 24, 2012 By

First off, a big thank you to all those who have signed up to sponsor ribbonfarm in 2012 so far. The total has already hit $2550, about 25% more than last year’s total. This has opened up many more interesting possibilities for activities online and offline, compared to last year. Stay tuned for more on that front.

Here is the roundup of new posts since January. The last roundup can be found here, and from there, if you so desire, you can backtrack through the entire history of this blog, roundup-by-roundup, through approximately 300 posts. I wouldn’t recommend doing that, since there’s more crud in the archives than I like to admit, and because a better option is brewing.

  1. 2012 Reading List, January – June
  2. Seeking Density in the Gonzo Theater
  3. The World is Small and Life is Long
  4. Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures
  5. How to Name Things
  6. The Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region
  7. Refactor Camp 2012: Generativity and Captivity
  8. Glimpses of a Cryptic God
  9. Just Add Water
  10. Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law
  11. Reviewing Refactor Camp 2012
  12. Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch?
  13. How Do You Run Away from Home?
  14. Lawyer Mind, Judge Mind
  15. Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet
  16. Go Deep, Young Man: 2012 Call for Sponsorships
  17. Rediscovering Literacy
  18. Welcome to the Future Nauseous
  19. Discussion Note: Sartre’s Nausea vs. Future Nausea (guest post)

Not counting administrative/meta posts and the sole guest post, I’ve managed 13 real posts so far this year. There has also been plenty of excellent discussion. I am pretty happy with these dozen posts, since a lot of themes that have been evolving over several years appear to be cohering in interesting ways. This was one of the reasons I was able to draw a conceptual map of ribbonfarm and its neighborhood (item 6) and write several pieces that I think capture the learnings from the writing/thinking process I’ve been developing (2, 5, 9 and 16).

Speaking of cohering themes, I am posting this regular biannual round-up a month earlier than usual. This is because I am planning something a little special for June, in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of this blog on July 4th (I started the blog on July 4th 2007).

In June, there will be no new content. Instead, I plan to go back through five years worth of archives and create 4-5 themed summaries of all the good posts, along with some (hopefully helpful) commentary.

For the significant number of people who have started reading this blog relatively recently, this should be helpful, since I back-link extensively through my older stuff (though I only rarely do true series posts, my posts generally make more sense in the context of older ones). Since many new readers attempt to read through the entire archives (otherwise known as the Ribbonfarm Absurdity Marathon), I am hoping to cut down the time necessary for this brave catch-up attempt by somewhere between 50 to 70%. This will probably mean some tough elimination decisions.

It is going to be pretty challenging to partition over 300 posts, averaging 2000-3000 words, with a ton of  cross-referencing, into 4-5 decoupled and linearly sequenced series, but it’s about time. This blog is becoming too much of an illegible slum even for my own slobby, unshaven tastes, so a few guided tours wouldn’t hurt. It won’t be pretty, but I hope machetes will no longer be necessary once I am done.

For those in the US, here’s wishing you a Happy Memorial Day and a good start to your summer.

Discussion Note: Sartre’s Nausea vs. Future Nausea

May 17, 2012 By

This is a guest post by Christina Waters, who writes about art, wine, and food for the greater Bay Area community at christinawaters.com and teaches Critical Theory and wordplay at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In last week’s post I idly wondered about whether the notion of ‘future nausea’ that I talked about had any relationship to the term in the sense of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous 1938 novel, Nausea. Reader Dan L. suggested a connection between Sartre-nausea and the idea of mindfulness, which further intrigued me. Christina, who did her PhD work on Sartre’s theory of the imagination,  posted a comment confirming my suspicion that there was indeed a relationship. So I asked her to do a guest post highlighting some possible connections worth exploring.

So here you go. You may want to read the Wikipedia entry about the book, linked above, for context first.

***

Venkat muses about Sartre’s Nausea seen as a perspective on mindfulness. Perhaps, perhaps not—and we’ll return to that idea a bit later. But nausea is a perspective which makes him (or rather his literary avatar, Roquentin) sick.

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Welcome to the Future Nauseous

May 9, 2012 By
This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Thinkability

Both science fiction and futurism seem to miss an important piece of how the future actually turns into the present. They fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives.

Sure, we can all see the small clues all around us: cellphones, laptops, Facebook, Prius cars on the street. Yet, somehow, the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening; future perfect rather than present-continuous. Even the nearest of near-term science fiction seems to evolve at some fixed receding-horizon distance from the present.

There is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing-reality-as-experienced and change as imagined, and I don’t mean specifics of failed and successful predictions.

My new explanation is this: we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak.  To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.

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Rediscovering Literacy

May 3, 2012 By

I’ve been experimenting lately with aphorisms. Pithy one-liners of the sort favored by writers like La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). My goal was to turn a relatively big idea, the sort I would normally turn into a 4000-word post, into a one-liner. After many failed attempts over the last few months, a few weeks ago, I finally managed to craft one I was happy with:

Civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary.

Many hours of thought went into this 11-word candidate for eternal quotability. When I was done, I was tempted to immediately unpack it in a longer essay, but then I realized that that would defeat the purpose. Maxims and aphorisms are about more than terseness in the face of expensive writing technology. They are about basic training in literacy. The aphorism above is possibly the most literate thing I have ever written. By stronger criteria I’ll get to, it might even be the only literate thing I’ve ever written, which means I’ve been illiterate until now.

This post isn’t about the aphorism itself (I’ll leave you to play with it), but about literacy.

I used to think that the terseness of  written language through most of history was mostly a result of the high cost and low reliability of writing technologies in pre-modern times. I now think these were secondary issues. I have come to believe that the very word literacy meant something entirely different before around 1890, when print technology became cheap enough to sustain a written form of mass media.

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Go Deep, Young Man: 2012 Call for Sponsorships

April 25, 2012 By

It’s that time of the year again. Last year, sponsorships amounted to about $2000 (not counting  the “buy me a coffee” micro-payments, which added another $400). This year, they’ve already crossed the $500 mark without me doing a call.

Sponsorship and “coffee” money represent a fairly small fraction of my income, but on a dumb-money to smart-money spectrum, it is the smartest money I make.  I’d trade two dollars of any other kind of income for a dollar of sponsorship income any day. The “smart” in the smart money is the unadultrated goodwill it carries. Though there are no strings attached, I feel a strong urge to reinvest sponsorship income back into the blog and related activities rather than using it to pay the bills. In a way, the money comes with the opposite of a moral hazard attached.

So if you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and sponsor away.

When I did the call last year, I shared a line (the only line, actually) from my fledgling business philosophy: go where the wild thoughts are.

This year, I’ve added another line: go deep, young man.  At 37, I think I get to call myself young man for at least another three years.

Read on for more, if you are interested in my evolving philosophy of blogging. If you are a blogger yourself, chances are you won’t learn much. I am increasingly realizing that my approach to blogging says more about me than about blogging. If you’re not a blogger, this is your annual peek behind the scenes.

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Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet

April 18, 2012 By
This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

Sometime in the last few years, apparently everybody turned into a hacker.  Besides  computer hacking, we now have lifehacking (using  tricks and short-cuts to improve everyday life), body-hacking (using sensor-driven experimentation to manipulate your body), college-hacking (students who figure out how to get a high GPA without putting in the work) and career-hacking (getting ahead in the workplace without “paying your dues”). The trend shows no sign of letting up. I suspect we’ll soon see the term applied in every conceivable domain of human activity.

I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization.

I’ve concluded that we’re reaching a technological complexity threshold where hacking is going to be the main mechanism for the further evolution of civilization. Hacking is part of a future that’s neither the exponentially improving AI future envisioned by Singularity types, nor the entropic collapse envisioned by the Collapsonomics types. It is part of a marginally stable future where the upward lift of diminishing-magnitude technological improvements and hacks just balances the downward pull of entropic gravity, resulting in an indefinite plateau, as the picture above illustrates.

I call this possible future hackstability.

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