A report on one of "nature’s oldest wars", bats versus moths: "a battle featuring echolocation, chemical defense, sonar jamming, stealth pursuit, and acoustic illusions". Acoustic camouflage! Sonar jamming!
In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle reads: "We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?" As you might expect, the piece makes interesting reading here in the actual future, particularly the sidebar of "10 Scenario Spoilers":
The long boom is a scenario, one possible future. It's built upon the convergence of many big forces and even more little pieces falling into place — all of them with a positive twist. The future of course, could turn out to be very different — particularly if a few of those big pieces go haywire. Here are 10 things that could cut short the long boom.
1. Tensions between China and the US escalate into a new Cold War — bordering on a hot one.
2. New technologies turn out to be a bust. They simply don't bring the expected productivity increases or the big economic boosts.
3. Russia devolves into a kleptocracy run by a mafia or retreats into quasicommunist nationalism that threatens Europe.
4. Europe's integration process grinds to a halt. Eastern and western Europe can't finesse a reunification, and even the European Union process breaks down.
5. Major ecological crisis causes a global climate change that, among other things, disrupts the food supply — causing big price increases everywhere and sporadic famines.
6. Major rise in crime and terrorism forces the world to pull back in fear. People who constantly feel they could be blown up or ripped off are not in the mood to reach out and open up.
7. The cumulative escalation in pollution causes a dramatic increase in cancer, which overwhelms the ill-prepared health system.
8. Energy prices go through the roof. Convulsions in the Middle East disrupt the oil supply, and the alternative energy sources fail to materialize.
9. An uncontrollable plague — a modern-day influenza epidemic or its equivalent — takes off like wildfire, killing upward of 200 million people.
10. A social and cultural backlash stops progress dead in its tracks. Human beings need to choose to move forward. They just may not ...
Numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10: check, check, check, check, check, check, check. And a couple of the others rhyme. Take #2: technology did increase production and the economy, but in the United States, this mostly just increased the wealth of a few and did not "trickle down" to the rest.
Note: You can find more Quick Links in the archive.
Well, this looks good: Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby star as Napoleon and Josephine Bonaparte in Ridley Scott's forthcoming film about the French dictator. The film will be out in theaters on November 22 and on Apple+ sometime after that.
Craig Mod recently finished a 16-day tour of jazz kissas in northern Japan. Jazz kissas are bar/cafes where one goes to listen to jazz, mostly on records and not live. Mod loosely defies them thusly:
Mostly defined as: Mid-20th century "listening cafes" for jazz music. But there is a lot of variance in this definition. Lots are coffee-focused cafes, fitting into the broader "kissaten" universe. But some are more bar-like, and some even jazz clubs (but for the most part, live music is rare). You can tie yourself in knots splitting hairs over this stuff. Though they're traditionally known as "jazz kissa" — the shortened version of "kissaten" (fear not: even if you call them "jazz kissaten" you won't suddenly turn into a pillar of salt). Some are seventy years old. Some forty. Some are five years old. The important defining element is simply: A presiding and effusive ever-abiding love for jazz, jazz, and more jazz.
At each stop, he recorded the ambient sounds of each kissa so that you can experience a little bit of the atmosphere at these places — here's the full playlist. The recordings were done with a pair of microphones so that the audio is in stereo. This sounds great with a good pair of headphones!
In a piece from January, Cory Doctorow outlined the enshittification lifecycle of online platforms:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
...
This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
Taking note of various platforms lighting themselves on fire recently, Mike Masnick offers a list of rules for the leadership of these platforms to follow to avoid turning into dumpster fires. Here's rule #3:
Create more value than you capture. This one is not mine, but Tim O'Reilly's, and it's one that constantly sticks with me. As you're developing a business model, the best way to make sure that you're serving your users best, and not enshittifying everything, is to constantly make sure that you're only capturing some of the value you're creating, and are instead putting much more out into the world, especially for your community. Your investors will push you to capture more and more of that value, but again, when you start chasing that, you're also spiraling down the enshittification curve.
IMO, some of what is going on with Twitter & Reddit is not enshittification per se, but more of a pushback against the power of their users. (I always think of Tron in instances like these. "I fight for the users!") I think these CEOs know on some level that they're making their product worse, but bringing their user bases to heel is worth the short-term headaches.
Note: You can find more Quick Links in the archive.
I just finished reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (so good!) and while doing a little customary post-read research on it, I discovered that Butler wrote a sequel in 1998 called Parable of the Talents and, uh... (from Wikipedia):
The novel is set against the backdrop of a dystopian United States that has come under the grip of a Christian fundamentalist denomination called "Christian America" led by President Andrew Steele Jarret. Seeking to restore American power and prestige, and using the slogan "Make America Great Again", Jarret embarks on a crusade to cleanse America of non-Christian faiths. Slavery has resurfaced with advanced "shock collars" being used to control slaves. Virtual reality headsets known as "Dreamasks" are also popular since they enable wearers to escape their harsh reality.
Well, our present reality certainly checks a remarkable number of those boxes, including an absolute bullseye on "Make America Great Again".
And much more in the archives...