Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s best-selling Southern Reach Trilogy. I read the first book in the trilogy and found it… disturbing. Didn’t feel a pull to read the other two. The film is directed by Alex Garland who did Ex Machina, 28 Days Later, two films I enjoyed very much (if one can claim to enjoy 28 Days Later).
I simply could not put this book down. I tried. But then I’d read just a few lines of the next chapter… and the next… and it’s the middle of the night. This was gripping adventure story. Overlaid with a sense of impending doom (see above). Deeply religious people frighten me. That’s okay, Barb says, because most religious people are not that serious about it. Hmm.
The philosophical underpinning of this book is deeply concerned with how authoritarian regimes take power. […] The Magisterium’s most chilling weapon in its quest for domination is its League of St. Alexander. The League is a secret society for children whose members wear badges and attend extra church services, and they’re encouraged to inform on any adults they catch doing anything sinful or heretical. At Malcolm’s school, the headmaster tries to forbid his pupils from wearing the badges on school property. The students, drunk with power, promptly inform on him; he’s taken into the Magisterium’s custody and never heard from again. Continued…
Can’t wait for part two.
Author Tim O’Reilly says the central theme of this book is understanding how algorithmic systems shape our society. If that’s what you’re after, I recommend two books by Kevin Kelly: The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future and What Technology Wants. Then I’d read Homo Deus and Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I’m sorry, but Mr. O’Reilly’s ideas just didn’t flow. The book felt… patchy. And he seemed overly proud of his personal contribution to the Internet, to Web 2.0, and a bunch of other “innovations.” I don’t question his contributions but isn’t it better if other folks acknowledge them? Anyhoo, here are some passages I underlined:
Our experience is shaped by the words we use.
Abstractions – the process by which reality is transformed into a series of statements about reality.
“For all practical purposes, there is now only one computer.” — Clay Shirky
The first principle of Web 2.0 was that the Internet was replacing Windows as the dominant platform on which the next generation of applications was being built.
Another key to what distinguished the web applications that survived the dot-com bust from those that died was that the survivors all, in one way or another, worked to harness the collective intelligence of their users.
“Global consciousness is that thing that decided that decaffeinated coffee pots should be orange.” — Computer scientist Danny Hill
Once an event occurs, all possibilities collapse into the one reality that we call the present, and then, in an instant, the past. But even the past, seemingly fixed as it appears, is an illusion constantly updated by new knowledge from the present.
A key lesson for every entrepreneur – Ask yourself: What is unthinkable?
“Apps can do now what managers used to do.” — Finnish management consultant Esko Kilpi
More than 63 million Americans (roughly half of all households) are now enrolled in Amazon Prime. Amazon has more than 200 million active credit card accounts; 55% of online shoppers now begin their search at Amazon, and 46% of all nine shopping happens on the platform.
A company is now a hybrid organism, made up of people and machines.
There are more than 2 million apps for the iPhone and they have been downloaded 130 billion times. App developers have earned nearly $50 billion in revenue.
With the rise of GPS, we are heading for a future where speeding motorists are no longer pulled over by police officers who happen to spot them, but instead automatically ticketed whenever they exceed the speed limit. We can also imagine a future in which that speed limit is automatically adjusted based on the amount of traffic, weather conditions, and other variable conditions that make a higher or lower speed more appropriate than the static limit that is posted today.
One of the simplest algorithmic interventions Facebook and Twitter could make would be to ask people, “Are you sure you want to share that link? You don’t appear to have read the story.
Subscription-based publication have an incentive to serve their readers; advertising-based publications have an incentive to server their advertisers.
We are increasingly creating an economy that is producing too much of what only some people can afford to buy.
“The job” is an artificial construct, in which work is managed and parceled out by corporations and other institutions, to which individuals must apply to participate in doing the work.
“There may need to be two kinds of money: machine money, and human money. Machine money is what you use to to buy things that are produced by machines. These things are always getting cheaper. Human money is what you use to buy things that only humans can produce.” — Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail)
The rich still live in a world where doctors make house calls and personal tutoring is the norm.
“If you want to understand the future, just look at what rich people do today.” — Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist
In a connected world where knowledge is available on demand, we need to rethink what people need to know and how they come to know it.
More than 100 million hours of how-to video were watched on YouTube in North America during the first four months of 2015.
Who will buy the products of companies that no longer pay workers to create them?
I’m re-reading Distraction by Bruce Sterling. Published in 1998, it is/was frighteningly prescient. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts (does that first one remind you of anyone?).
“He’s like a not very bright child who can be deceived and managed, but not reasoned with.”
“The American national character realty wasn’t suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World’s Movie Star. The world’s tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world’s acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.”
“It always offended him to hear his fellow Americans discussing the vagaries of “white people.” There was simply no such thing as “white people. That stereotype was an artificial construct, like the ridiculous term “Hispanic.” In all the rest of the world, a Peruvian was a Peruvian and a Brazilian was a Brazilian— it was only in America that people somehow became this multilingual, multinational entity called a “Hispanic.”
“Political reality in modern America was the stark fact that electronic networks had eaten the guts out of the old order, while never finding any native order of their own. The horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierarchies, the rise of net-based civil society, and the decline of the industrial base had simply been too much for the American government to cope with and successfully legitimize.”
“Knowledge is inherently precious even if you can’t sell it. Even if you can’t use it. Knowledge is an absolute good. The search for truth is vital. It’s central to civilization. You need knowledge even when your economy and government are absolutely shot to hell.”
“Snow Crash will be a one-hour drama. A product of the early 1990s, it’s set in a failed state that used to be America, where the corporations run everything. It too has a vast artificial location, but this time it’s the Metaverse, Stephenson’s extrapolation of a VR-enabled Internet. Hiro Protagonist—an on-the-nose name if ever there was—is a hacker and pizza delivery driver for the Mafia who comes into possession of dangerous file, Snow Crash, which sends him on a rabbit chase.”
Amazon commissions three new sci-fi shows: Lazarus, Snow Crash, and Ringworld
The full title of this book is: Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. And it’s the science and philosophy parts of the book that I found most insightful. There is so much within and about Buddhism that are really hard for me to grasp. Emptiness, non-self, just to mention two. This book gave me — for the first time — a tiny, brief glimpse of what these might be. The author explains how natural selection plays such an important role in determining who and what we are. And his explanation of consciousness is the best I’ve come across. This was a breakthrough book for me. I’ll be reading it again. Here are a few excerpts, stripped of all context.
“Evolutionary psychology – the study of how the human brain was designed — by natural selection — to mislead us, even enslave us. […] Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.”
“More and more, it seems, groups of people define their identity in terms of sharp opposition to other groups of people.”
“Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.”
“Natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.”
“Meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.”
“One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally “designed” to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.”
“Default Mode Network” — A network in the brain that, according to brain scan studies, is active when we’re doing nothing in particular — not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. […] What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.”
“Much of the point of Buddhism is to confront suffering rather than evade it, and by confronting it, by looking at it unflinchingly, undermine it.” #
“We are not our bodies”
“This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.”
“Thoughts think themselves.”
“The closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players, players that sometimes collaborate but sometimes fight for control, with victory going to the one that is in some sense the strongest. In other words, it’s a jungle in there, and you’re not the king of the jungle.”
“You think you’re directing the movie, but you’re actually just watching it.”
“Why would natural selection design a brain that leaves people deluded about themselves? One answer is that if we believe something about ourselves, that will help us convince other people to believe it.”
“The different modules (of the brain) are competing for your attention, and when the mind “wanders” from one module to another, what’s actually happening is that the second module has acquired enough strength to wrestle control of your consciousness away from the first module.”
“Theory of mind network” — The part of the brain involved in thinking about what other people are thinking.
“Thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self.”
“(Brain) modules think thoughts. Or rather, modules generate thoughts, and then if those thoughts prove in some sense stronger than the creations of competing modules, they become thought thoughts — that is, they enter consciousness.”
“While observing the mind during meditation, it (can) seem like ‘thoughts think themselves’ — because the modules do their work outside of consciousness, so, as far as the conscious mind can tell, the thoughts are coming out of nowhere. […] The conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.”
“It’s sort of like going to the movies. We go to the movies and there’s a very absorbing story and we’re pulled into the story and we feel so many emotions… excited, afraid, in love… And then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected on a screen. Everything we thought is happening is not really happening. It’s the same way with our thoughts. We get caught up in the story, in the drama of them, forgetting their essentially insubstantial nature. Escaping this drama — seeing your thoughts as passing before you rather than emanating from you — can carry you closer to the not-self experience.” #
“Thoughts that intrude (during meditation) often seem to have feelings attached to them. What’s more, their ability to hold my attention — in other words, to keep me enthralled, to keep me from noticing that they’re holding my attention — seems to depend on the strength of those feelings.”
“Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance determines which thoughts enter consciousness.”
“Emptiness is not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.” #
“We are designed to judge things and to encode those judgements in feelings.” #
“If there’s something you don’t have any feelings at all about, you probably won’t much notice it in the first place.”
“At the root of the way we treat people is the essence we see them as having. So it matters whether these perceptions of essence are really true or whether, as the doctrine of emptiness suggests, they are in some sense illusions.”
“Not seeing essence and not having preconceptions are one and the same, because the essence we perceive in things is a preconception about them that has been programmed into our brain.”
“If you’re nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you can’t be everything unless you are nothing.” — Gary Weber
“The things in your environment — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people, the news, the videos — are pushing your buttons, activating feelings that, however subtly, set in motion trains of thought and reaction that govern your behavior, sometimes in ways that are unfortunate. And they will keep doing that unless you start paying attention to what’s going on.”
“The things inside us are subject to causes, to conditions — and it is the fate of all conditioned things to change when conditions change. And conditions change pretty much all the time.”
“Making real progress in mindfulness meditation almost inevitably means becoming more aware of the mechanics by which your feelings, if left to their own devices, shape your perceptions, thoughts, and behavior — and becoming more aware of the things in your environment that activate those feelings in the first place. […] Becoming more aware of what causes what.” #
“The idea is to finely sense the workings of the machine (the mind) and use that understanding to rewire it, to subvert its programming, to radically alter its response to the causes, the conditions, impinging on it.”
“Natural selection engineered the delusions that control us; it built them into our brains.”
Reviews: New Yorker; New York Times; National Review
I am pleased to report that Sue Grafton fans will not be disappointed by the latest Sue Grafton novel. Y is for Yesterday delivers the goods. One of her best yarns, in my opinion. She’s been cranking these out since 1982 and, yes, like all such series, there’s a bit of a formula but it’s a good one. Lots of characters in this one with the main plot jumping back and forth between 1979 and 1989. A potentially annoying device but she pulls it off nicely. And a good sub-plot that ties up a loose end from her previous novel. I assume Z Is for (?) is already written and will be out in a year or two. Sad to think it might be her last Kinsey Millhone book. I’ll miss that girl.
The following passage is from Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants.
Most hydrogen atoms were born at the beginning of time. They are as old as time itself. They were created in the fires of the big bang and dispersed into the universe as a uniform warm mist. Thereafter, each atom has been on a lonely journey. When a hydrogen atom drifts in the unconsciousness of deep space, hundreds of kilometers from another atom, it is hardly much more active than the vacuum surrounding it. Time is meaningless without change, and in the vast reaches of space that fill 99.99 percent of the universe, there is little change.
After billions of years, a hydrogen atom might be swept up by the currents of gravity radiating from a congealing galaxy. With the dimmest hint of time and change it slowly drifts in a steady direction toward other stuff. Another billion years later it bumps into the first bit of matter it has ever encountered, After millions of years it meets the second. In time it meets another of its kind, a hydrogen atom. They drift together in mild attraction until aeons later they meet an oxygen atom. Suddenly something weird happens. In a flash of heat they clump together as one later molecule. Maybe they get sucked into the atmosphere circulation of a planet. Under this marriage, they are caught in great cycles of change. Rapidly the molecule is carried up and then rained down into a crowded pool of other jostling atoms. In the company of uncountable numbers of other water molecules it travels this circuit around and around for millions of years, from crammed pools to expansive clouds and back. One day, in a stroke of luck, the water molecule is captured by a chain of unusually active carbons in one pool. Its path is once again accelerated. It spins around in a simple loop, assisting the travel of carbon chains. It enjoys speed, movement, and change such as would not be possible in the comatose recesses of space. The carbon chain is stolen by another chain and reassembled many times until the hydrogen finds itself in a cell constantly rearranging its relations and bonds with other molecules. Now it hardly ever stops changing, never stops interacting.
Fans of the Harry Bosch detective series will, I believe, be well pleased with Michael Connelly’s new character/series. Just finished The Late Show (introducing LAPD detective Renee Ballard) and could not put the book down. (It’s not a cliche when it’s true.)
Harry Bosch was born in 1950 so he’d be 67 years old in any story set in 2017. Too old for the situations Connelly creates for Harry. Freezing Harry at, say, 47 years old puts the story back in the late ‘90s. Before a lot of tech that could/should figure in most crime fiction.
Sue Grafton long ago made the decision to keep Kinsey Millhone forever in the 80s. No cell phones or computers (that I recall).
In this new series, we get a female cop who knows her way around an iPhone and summons Uber when she needs a ride. Feels right.
Something else I noticed off the bat. In physical encounters with bad guys, there’s a threatening tension that didn’t exist for Harry. While Harry can pretty much kick anybody’s ass, Renee is tough and fit but no match for a bad guy that has a hundred pounds on her.
Connelly lets this new character have some sexuality, too. Harry got laid from time to time, but it’s different (and interesting, plot-wise) for a female character.
If you like the Bosch novels you won’t be disappointed by this first in a new series.
Some spoilers in this excellent review in the L. A. Times but for those that have already read the book, a good piece.
“I didn’t freeze Harry in time, because it’s better storytelling not to. As long as he can keep his health and his knees are good, he can close cases.” Nonetheless, at 67, Bosch presents readers of the redoubtable series with a different kind of ticking clock.
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978) is a book by Jerry Mander, who argues that many of the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed. From Wikipedia page:
“Television has effects, very important effects, aside from the content, and they may be more important. They organize society in a certain way. They give power to a very small number of people to speak into the brains of everyone else in the system night after night after night with images that make people turn out in a certain kind of way. It affects the psychology of people who watch. It increases the passivity of people who watch. It changes family relationships. It changes understandings of nature. It flattens perception so that information, which you need a fair amount of complexity to understand it as you would get from reading, this information is flattened down to a very reduced form on television. And the medium has inherent qualities which cause it to be that way.”