It’s getting harder to be optimistic

Bad news loses followers and there is already too much doom and gloom. I get that. But if you think the driver has taken the wrong road, staying quiet doesn’t help. I guess this is more on the same message I wrote pictorially in The New Dark Age in June. https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2017/06/11/the-new-dark-age/. If you like your books with pictures, the overlap is about 60%.

On so many fronts, we are going the wrong direction and I’m not the only one saying that. Every day, commentators eloquently discuss the snowflakes, the eradication of free speech, the implementation of 1984, the decline of privacy, the rise of crime, growing corruption, growing inequality, increasingly biased media and fake news, the decline of education, collapse of the economy, the resurgence of fascism, the resurgence of communism, polarization of society,  rising antisemitism, rising inter-generational conflict, the new apartheid, the resurgence of white supremacy and black supremacy and the quite deliberate rekindling of racism. I’ve undoubtedly missed a few but it’s a long list anyway.

I’m most concerned about the long-term mental damage done by incessant indoctrination through ‘education’, biased media, being locked into social media bubbles, and being forced to recite contradictory messages. We’re faced with contradictory demands on our behaviors and beliefs all the time as legislators juggle unsuccessfully to fill the demands of every pressure group imaginable. Some examples you’ll be familiar with:

We must embrace diversity, celebrate differences, to enjoy and indulge in other cultures, but when we gladly do that and feel proud that we’ve finally eradicated racism, we’re then told to stay in our lane, told to become more racially aware again, told off for cultural appropriation. Just as we became totally blind to race, and scrupulously treated everyone the same, we’re told to become aware of and ‘respect’ racial differences and cultures and treat everyone differently. Having built a nicely homogenized society, we’re now told we must support different races of students being educated differently by different raced lecturers. We must remove statues and paintings because they are the wrong color. I thought we’d left that behind, I don’t want racism to come back, stop dragging it back.

We’re told that everyone should be treated equally under the law, but when one group commits more or a particular kind of crime than another, any consequential increase in numbers being punished for that kind of crime is labelled as somehow discriminatory. Surely not having prosecutions reflect actual crime rate would be discriminatory?

We’re told to sympathize with the disadvantages other groups might suffer, but when we do so we’re told we have no right to because we don’t share their experience.

We’re told that everyone must be valued on merit alone, but then that we must apply quotas to any group that wins fewer prizes. 

We’re forced to pretend that we believe lots of contradictory facts or to face punishment by authorities, employers or social media, or all of them:

We’re told men and women are absolutely the same and there are no actual differences between sexes, and if you say otherwise you’ll risk dismissal, but simultaneously told these non-existent differences are somehow the source of all good and that you can’t have a successful team or panel unless it has equal number of men and women in it. An entire generation asserts that although men and women are identical, women are better in every role, all women always tell the truth but all men always lie, and so on. Although we have women leading governments and many prominent organisations, and certainly far more women than men going to university, they assert that it is still women who need extra help to get on.

We’re told that everyone is entitled to their opinion and all are of equal value, but anyone with a different opinion must be silenced.

People viciously trashing the reputations and destroying careers of anyone they dislike often tell us to believe they are acting out of love. Since their love is somehow so wonderful and all-embracing, everyone they disagree with is must be silenced, ostracized, no-platformed, sacked and yet it is the others that are still somehow the ‘haters’. ‘Love is everything’, ‘unity not division’, ‘love not hate’, and we must love everyone … except the other half. Love is better than hate, and anyone you disagree with is a hater so you must hate them, but that is love. How can people either have so little knowledge of their own behavior or so little regard for truth?

‘Anti-fascist’ demonstrators frequently behave and talk far more like fascists than those they demonstrate against, often violently preventing marches or speeches by those who don’t share their views.

We’re often told by politicians and celebrities how they passionately support freedom of speech just before they argue why some group shouldn’t be allowed to say what they think. Government has outlawed huge swathes of possible opinion and speech as hate crime but even then there are huge contradictions. It’s hate crime to be nasty to LGBT people but it’s also hate crime to defend them from religious groups that are nasty to them. Ditto women.

This Orwellian double-speak nightmare is now everyday reading in many newspapers or TV channels. Freedom of speech has been replaced in schools and universities across the US and the UK by Newspeak, free-thinking replaced by compliance with indoctrination. I created my 1984 clock last year, but haven’t maintained it because new changes would be needed almost every week as it gets quickly closer to midnight.

I am not sure whether it is all this that is the bigger problem or the fact that most people don’t see the problem at all, and think it is some sort of distortion or fabrication. I see one person screaming about ‘political correctness gone mad’, while another laughs them down as some sort of dinosaur as if it’s all perfectly fine. Left and right separate and scream at each other across the room, living in apparently different universes.

If all of this was just a change in values, that might be fine, but when people are forced to hold many simultaneously contradicting views and behave as if that is normal, I don’t believe that sits well alongside rigorous analytical thinking. Neither is free-thinking consistent with indoctrination. I think it adds up essentially to brain damage. Most people’s thinking processes are permanently and severely damaged. Being forced routinely to accept contradictions in so many areas, people become less able to spot what should be obvious system design flaws in areas they are responsible for. Perhaps that is why so many things seem to be so poorly thought out. If the use of logic and reasoning is forbidden and any results of analysis must be filtered and altered to fit contradictory demands, of course a lot of what emerges will be nonsense, of course that policy won’t work well, of course that ‘improvement’ to road layout to improve traffic flow will actually worsen it, of course that green policy will harm the environment.

When negative consequences emerge, the result is often denial of the problem, often misdirection of attention onto another problem, often delaying release of any unpleasant details until the media has lost interest and moved on. Very rarely is there any admission of error. Sometimes, especially with Islamist violence, it is simple outlawing of discussing the problem, or instructing media not to mention it, or changing the language used beyond recognition. Drawing moral equivalence between acts that differ by extremes is routine. Such reasoning results in every problem anywhere always being the fault of white middle-aged men, but amusement aside, such faulty reasoning also must impair quantitative analysis skills elsewhere. If unkind words are considered to be as bad as severe oppression or genocide, one murder as bad as thousands, we’re in trouble.

It’s no great surprise therefore when politicians don’t know the difference between deficit and debt or seem to have little concept of the magnitude of the sums they deal with.  How else could the UK government think it’s a good idea to spend £110Bn, or an average £15,000 from each high rate taxpayer, on HS2, a railway that has already managed to become technologically obsolete before it has even been designed and will only ever be used by a small proportion of those taxpayers? Surely even government realizes that most people would rather have £15k than to save a few minutes on a very rare journey. This is just one example of analytical incompetence. Energy and environmental policy provides many more examples, as do every government department.

But it’s the upcoming generation that present the bigger problem. Millennials are rapidly undermining their own rights and their own future quality of life. Millennials seem to want a police state with rigidly enforced behavior and thought.  Their parents and grandparents understood 1984 as a nightmare, a dystopian future, millennials seem to think it’s their promised land. Their ancestors fought against communism, millennials are trying to bring it back. Millennials want to remove Christianity and all its attitudes and replace it with Islam, deliberately oblivious to the fact that Islam shares many of the same views that make them so conspicuously hate Christianity, and then some. 

Born into a world of freedom and prosperity earned over many preceding generations, Millennials are choosing to throw that freedom and prosperity away. Freedom of speech is being enthusiastically replaced by extreme censorship. Freedom of  behavior is being replaced by endless rules. Privacy is being replaced by total supervision. Material decadence, sexual freedom and attractive clothing is being replaced by the new ‘cleanism’ fad, along with general puritanism, grey, modesty and prudishness. When they are gone, those freedoms will be very hard to get back. The rules and police will stay and just evolve, the censorship will stay, the surveillance will stay, but they don’t seem to understand that those in charge will be replaced. But without any strong anchors, morality is starting to show cyclic behavior. I’ve already seen morality inversion on many issues in my lifetime and a few are even going full circle. Values will keep changing, inverting, and as they do, their generation will find themselves victim of the forces they put so enthusiastically in place. They will be the dinosaurs sooner than they imagine, oppressed by their own creations.

As for their support of every minority group seemingly regardless of merit, when you give a group immunity, power and authority, you have no right to complain when they start to make the rules. In the future moral vacuum, Islam, the one religion that is encouraged while Christianity and Judaism are being purged from Western society, will find a willing subservient population on which to impose its own morality, its own dress codes, attitudes to women, to alcohol, to music, to freedom of speech. If you want a picture of 2050s Europe, today’s Middle East might not be too far off the mark. The rich and corrupt will live well off a population impoverished by socialism and then controlled by Islam. Millennial UK is also very likely to vote to join the Franco-German Empire.

What about technology, surely that will be better? Only to a point. Automation could provide a very good basic standard of living for all, if well-managed. If. But what if that technology is not well-managed? What if it is managed by people working to a sociopolitical agenda? What if, for example, AI is deemed to be biased if it doesn’t come up with a politically correct result? What if the company insists that everyone is equal but the AI analysis suggests differences? If AI if altered to make it conform to ideology – and that is what is already happening – then it becomes less useful. If it is forced to think that 2+2=5.3, it won’t be much use for analyzing medical trials, will it? If it sent back for re-education because its analysis of terabytes of images suggests that some types of people are more beautiful than others, how much use will that AI be in a cosmetics marketing department once it ‘knows’ that all appearances are equally attractive? Humans can pretend to hold contradictory views quite easily, but if they actually start to believe contradictory things, it makes them less good at analysis and the same applies to AI. There is no point in using a clever computer to analyse something if you then erase its results and replace them with what you wanted it to say. If ideology is prioritized over physics and reality, even AI will be brain-damaged and a technologically utopian future is far less achievable.

I see a deep lack of discernment coupled to arrogant rejection of historic values, self-centeredness and narcissism resulting in certainty of being the moral pinnacle of evolution. That’s perfectly normal for every generation, but this time it’s also being combined with poor thinking, poor analysis, poor awareness of history, economics or human nature, a willingness to ignore or distort the truth, and refusal to engage with or even to tolerate a different viewpoint, and worst of all, outright rejection of freedoms in favor of restrictions. The future will be dictated by religion or meta-religion, taking us back 500 years. The decades to 2040 will still be subject mainly to the secular meta-religion of political correctness, by which time demographic change and total submission to authority will make a society ripe for Islamification. Millennials’ participation in today’s moral crusades, eternally documented and stored on the net, may then show them as the enemy of the day, and Islamists will take little account of the support they show for Islam today.

It might not happen like this. The current fads might evaporate away and normality resume, but I doubt it. I hoped that when I first lectured about ’21st century piety’ and the dangers of political correctness in the 1990s. 10 years on I wrote about the ongoing resurgence of meta-religious behavior and our likely descent into a new dark age, in much the same way. 20 years on, and the problem is far worse than in the late 90s, not better. We probably still haven’t reached peak sanctimony yet. Sanctimony is very dangerous and the desire to be seen standing on a moral pedestal can make people support dubious things. A topical question that highlights one of my recent concerns: will SJW groups force government to allow people to have sex with child-like robots by calling anyone bigots and dinosaurs if they disagree? Alarmingly, that campaign has already started.

Will they follow that with a campaign for pedophile rights? That also has some historical precedent with some famous names helping it along.

What age of consent – 13, 11, 9, 7, 5? I think the last major campaign went for 9.

That’s just one example, but lack of direction coupled to poor information and poor thinking could take society anywhere. As I said, I am finding it harder and harder to be optimistic. Every generation has tried hard to make the world a better place than they found it. This one might undo 500 years, taking us into a new dark age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mega-buildings could become cultural bubbles

My regular readers, both of them in fact, will know I am often concerned about the dangerous growth of social media bubbles. By mid-century, thanks to upcoming materials, some cities will have a few buildings over 1km tall, possibly 10km (and a spaceport or two up to 30km high). These would be major buildings, and could create a similar problem.

A 1km building could have 200 floors, and with 100m square floors, 200 hectares of space.  Assuming half is residential space and the other half is shops, offices or services, that equates to 20,000 luxury apartments (90 sq m each) or 40,000 basic flats. That means each such building could be equivalent to a small town, with maybe 50,000 inhabitants. A 10km high mega-building, with a larger 250m side, would have 60 times more space, housing up to 300,000 people and all they need day-to-day, essentially a city.

Construction could be interesting. My thoughts are that a 10km building could be extruded from the ground using high pressure 3D printing, rather than assembled with cranes. Each floor could be fully fitted out while it is still near ground level, its apartments sold and populated, even as the building grows upward. That keeps construction costs and cash flow manageable.

My concern is that although we will have the technology to build such buildings in the 2040s, I’m not aware of much discussion about how cultures would evolve in such places, at least not outside of sci-fi (like Judge Dredd or Blade Runner). I rather hope we wouldn’t just build them first and try to solve social problems later. We really ought to have some sort of plans to make them work.

In a 100m side building, entire floors or groups of floors would likely be allocated to particular functions – residential, shopping, restaurants, businesses etc. Grouping functions sensibly reduces the total travel needed. In larger buildings, it is easier to have local shops mixed with apartments for everyday essentials, with larger malls elsewhere.

People could live almost entirely in the building, rarely needing to leave, and many might well do just that, essentially becoming institutionalized. I think these buildings will feel very different from small towns. In small towns, people still travel a lot to other places, and a feeling of geographic isolation doesn’t emerge. In a huge tower block of similar population and facilities, I don’t think people would leave as often, and many will stay inside. All they need is close by and might soon feel safe and familiar, while the external world might seem more distant, scarier. Institutionalization might not take long, a month or two of becoming used to the convenience of staying nearby while watching news of horrors going on elsewhere. Once people stop the habit of leaving the building, it could become easier to find reasons not to leave it in future.

Power structures would soon evolve – local politics would happen, criminal gangs would emerge, people would soon learn of good and bad zones. It’s possible that people might become tribal, their building and their tribe competing for external resources and funding with tribes in other mega-buildings, and their might be conflict. Knowing they are physically detached, the same bravery to attack total strangers just because they hold different views might emerge that we see on social media today. There might be cyber-wars, drone wars, IoT wars between buildings.

I’m not claiming to be a social anthropologist. I have no real idea how these buildings will work and perhaps my fears are unjustified. But even I can see some potential problems just based on what we see today, magnified for the same reasons problems get magnified on social media. Feelings of safety and anonymity can lead to some very nasty tribal behaviors. Managing diversity of opinion among people moving in would be a significant challenge, maintaining it might be near impossible. With the sort of rapid polarization we’ve already seen today thanks to social media bubbles, physically contained communities would surely see those same forces magnified everyday.

Building a 10km mega-building will become feasible in the 2040s, and increased urban populations will make them an attractive option for planners. Managing them and making them work socially might be a much bigger challenge.

 

 

Your quick and easy 2016 guide to the moral high ground

One of the things I predicted a long time ago was the rise of secular substitutes for religion, and we are now near what I hope will be the peak of that meta-religious resurgence before common senses resumes its grasp. Meanwhile, the Spanish Inquisition by those at the front line of political correctness has reached fever pitch, but it is proving more and more difficult for novice inquisitors to keep track of the latest doctrine, what with all the different groups competing for the moral high ground these days.

To save people time, and as a quick guide for the authorities and especially for police forces faced with difficult choices of prioritization in European cities, I have contrived a simple list of groups with those most obviously deserving of the current moral high ground at the top and those who ought to be consigned to the depths of moral hell at the bottom. I hope you find it useful.

San Francisco is the front line of capitalism reform, begging the question: who owns the city?

I watched on the news tonight how people who have lived in San Francisco for decades are being evicted from their homes by landlords eager to cash in on the rich rents they can charge to incoming techie types on large salaries from the tech giants.

The news program showed the hippie generation blockading the luxury buses taking people to work at Google. Google pays well to get high quality intellect. There is nothing wrong with that. Those employees have lots of cash but they still need accommodation, so the poor are kicked out of their rented accommodation because they can no longer afford the rents. So it finds itself at war with the longer term residents who made the city what it is, the reason Google wants to be there. 

A simple question sums up the whole problem. Who owns San Francisco? Answering that isn’t simple and leads directly to how we must change capitalism if it is to survive, and since we must, we eventually will. The gentle protests of the weak and disenfranchised in San Francisco will once again put that hippy generation at the front line of change.

I am no expert on San Francisco. I went to Menlo Park once to give a talk, then left, spending less than a day there in total. I’ve seen it many times on TV and the media of course. It is famed for the hippies, Alcatraz, being a gay hub, being the focus of west coast IT development, and a few movies. Some other things happen there, but these are the things it is mainly known for.

A city is lots of things. It is the land, with some buildings and infrastructure on top, and some resources below. Some is owned collectively, some by individuals or companies. Those are very important, but they are only a fraction of what a city is. It is also the people – the activities that go on there, the culture, the customs, the ideologies, the intellectual activities, the business, the entertainment, and it is also a brand – when someone thinks of San Francisco, a bunch of associations appears in their minds, just like any commercial brand, making it very different from London or New York or LA. It is also the geography –  the location, the climate, the risks of quakes. And it is also the history, the accumulated associations over decades.

When a property developer buys a building somewhere, they may add to  its physical value by renovating it, decorating it, extending it, or adding some nice furnishing. But any property developer has a choice of where to buy, and chooses an area they think will increase in value. The increase in value comes from all the other intangibles I just mentioned, (mostly what economists call social capital, but I don’t like using jargon where ordinary words do perfectly well) so the underlying question is: why should all the value increase go to the developer. In essence they are getting all the efforts and talents of everyone else, all the magnetism they create, for free. Why? Why should they get it all? Why should the person living in the flat not get it? It is they who are the magnet. You can get a flat anywhere. The reason you want that one is because of where it is. Does that value-add not belong to everyone who made that place the place to be?

Look at it another way. Suppose it’s the 1960s. You are a hippie and you want to go where it is happening. Suppose all the hippies had a flash of insight and realised what would happen 50 years later. Suppose they all decided to build their own town next door. Suppose they decided that capital isn’t everything, and decreed that the value of each property there would be split. Part would be the physical property and that would increase in value at the construction industry inflation rate. The other part of the property value would be the cultural value, and that would increase to whatever the market stands. The property developer would get a fair ongoing rent for that class of property. The community would get the remuneration for the value they have added. Each year a market valuation would show how much property has increased in value, how much value of new business has been generated because of the local atmosphere. The people who lived there the last year would get a share of that. A hippie moving into the area wouldn’t go to San Francisco, that sterile could-be-anywhere town with no culture. They’d go to the really cool trendy town next door where everyone wants to be and property costs a fortune. But as they live there, as they contribute to the area’s atmosphere, so they too get a ‘citizen wage’, their share of the value add. That offsets the rent they pay the next year.

If they did that, the rewards would go to those who create them. Isn’t that the way it should be? Why should someone get all the rewards just because they provided some cash up front, but perhaps did nothing more to contribute? Why should the property owner also be the assumed owner of the value the community has added to the area? Why is capital more important than investment of time, energy, emotion, and love?

The hippies didn’t do that, neither did the gay community. Now the enormous value they all added to San Francisco is all going to the property developers, 100% of it, even though all they did was own the flats. In gratitude, they are now evicting those contributors to make way for others whose sole advantage is having more cash to offer. That is capitalism. Well, if that is so, capitalism needs to change.

We are watching economics evolve worldwide. In most developed countries, automation is concentrating wealth with the company owners. Buy 100 machines and employ no staff, keep all the proceeds to yourself, and get rich. It looks very different, but actually it is the same. The provision of the capital is assumed to be the only part that matters. The access to a market, the development of all the infrastructure, the culture in which the product will be used, the political stability, the banking system, the accumulated human knowledge that went into every aspect of the product, every other aspect of the modern world that makes the product possible, and makes it possible to sell – all of that is assumed to be of no value and receives none of the proceeds other than the same tax rate that a company would pay if it contributed heavily to culture and society and employed thousands of employees. If it were given an agreed value, that could become a part ownership of the company, proceeds allocated to the capital providers and the silent partner culture capital provider.

Capitalism worked well when the immaturity of technology meant that about half of the wealth generated went to employees and half to the owner. You could get very rich, but others still had enough income to buy your products, and it all kept working. If we automated every job and a few people own all the machines, nobody else could afford to buy and capitalism would grind quickly to a halt. We aren’t there yet, but somewhere like that is the ultimate destination if we don’t start adjusting it. Even those wealthy young programmers could be automated by an advanced AI.

So we need to adjust capitalism. Working out some way of valuing the entire cultural contribution of a society or region so it can stand side by side with the provision of capital would be a good start. Then some sort of culture tax can distribute wealth between the factory owners and those who own the culture in which it exists, i.e. all of us.

Capitalism is a good idea, one that has served America and the free world very well. It doesn’t need thrown away, just adjusted a bit. We need to look at it afresh and realize that capitalism isn’t the same as materialism. Just because something isn’t physical doesn’t mean it has no value. Surely we already understand that with all the media we consume? All we need to do is extend that understanding a bit further, to the other intangibles. Everyone contributes to the character of a city, from the mayor down to the bum on the street with a begging bowl.

So looking at San Francisco and the bus demos, it seems that the nouveau riche of the internet generation are only rich because of the inability of capitalism itself to keep up. Google is only wealthy because the rest of the market is slower to evolve, even most of the IT industry. They can only make money at all because the internet hasn’t evolved fast enough and much of the original dream is yet to be realized. It it had kept up, the perfect market would have no need for ads and they’d have little income.

San Francisco beautifully illustrates the clash of the permanent and the transient, the old and the new, the material and the emotional. Its done it a few times before, and it may again now.

If Gibbon were alive today, he wouldn’t be writing about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. He’d be writing about San Francisco and the decline and fall of overly simplistic capitalism. I’m no Gibbon, but I hope I managed to explain my point.