We all fight over our favorite books, but I find the more interesting question to be: what are your most frequent books?

WHY DO WE RETURN TO BOOKS?

With no conscious decision, there are some books I’ve read dozens and dozens of times, and in contrast, there are some books I love so much or that are so life-changing, I know repeated exposure will never match the feeling, so I’ve never gone near them again. WHAT distinguishes them? I don’t know.

This isn’t a definitive list of the best books or anything like that, but just a peek into the weirdness and deeply personal experience of reading. I’ve covered my favorite libraries in fiction before, some other books I’ve read again and again.

BOOKS I’VE READ DOZENS OF TIMES

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Mostly because I needed something slightly engaging to fall asleep to and a British accent reading Jane Austen was perfect. I can quote large chunks of this book. Like full chapters at a time by now…

Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver

It’s set in New Mexico, and I was living in Europe when I was reading this on repeat. I love the message, but I mostly read it for this quintessential Western American story, so familiar to where I grew up.

Treachery in Death, JD Robb

This is one of her endless futuristic mysteries. This one focused on leadership, and I picked it up just as I jumped into management and was definitely feeling the crunch. It was so idealized and perfect that I just kept returning to it.

Ghost Mountain Shifters, Audrey Faye

This group of werewolves live collectively in the woods and the community support and healing were completely addictive during the pandemic isolation.

Starship Mage, Glynn Stewart

This is like Star Wars, only woke (in the best way), with a hero with huge integrity and a fascinating world. It’s just…entertaining. I go searching for cool new books and just find myself redownloading these when I need to turn off my brain.

BOOKS I’VE LOVED BEYOND REASON AND NEVER TOUCHED AGAIN

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

I read this in middle school, one of the first “adult” books I picked up, and I remember being so shocked and rocked at every turn that I knew I would never feel that shocked again and would rather have a perfect memory.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein

The origin of the slang “grok,” this alien comes to earth story is one of the first Sci-Fi books I read, and the contrast between this and Dicken’s endless wordsmithing was…marked.

Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

I think I haven’t revisited this one simply due to the size. I have a friend who can tell you what is happening on any day of our calendar year in the book, and I’ve felt so inadequate in comparison.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

During the climactic scene of this book, I remember dropping the book, running out the door of my house, and about three blocks before I slowed down, it was that shocking, in the best way. And knew I could never return to it.

What are the books you’ve read a thousand times and what are the books you’ve read once? I realize this says so much more about who I was as a person and where I was than about the books.

The post What Books Do You Read Again and Again? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

It’s getting to be rather a bad habit around here. And it all started with the Magna Carta. Bear with me. Many more qualified people have explained the ins and outs of the recent bank failures in our crazy financial system, here and here. I also have talked about the energy implications of money before.

I don’t want to talk about FDIC insurance. I want to talk about story.

MONEY IS A STORY

It’s a story we made up when we moved beyond a barter economy. It’s a brilliant story! I make cloth, and you grow apples. I want apples, but you don’t need cloth. So I give you a  tiny piece of metal instead, trusting that eventually somebody is going to need cloth and will replenish my stores of metal. None of us need the metal for anything, but it stands in for everything we do need.

Evolve that miracle system long enough, and apparently, you get pure imaginary money where we don’t even need the little pieces of metal, and we just tell each other we have it. What a story!

ANOTHER STORY: MONEY IS POWER

Another metaphor for money is power, which according to a basic dictionary, is the ability to either get things done or to make other people get things done. For most of human history, the guarantee on both kinds of power was violence and coercion. Do what I tell you because I have a big sword. Do what I tell you because I have all the little pieces of metal you need to stay alive. Do what I tell you because your eternal soul is in jeopardy if you don’t.

Do what I tell you, or bad things happen.

After a hard, millennia-long fight to declare that human beings are inherently valuable and threats and coercion are not the best way of organizing ourselves, we’ve gotten to the point where now people collect both kinds of power by promising it’s going to benefit everyone. At least a little bit.

Nowadays, they even occasionally work to make that happen when we do give them power. So instead of the point of a sword, we have stump speeches and ads about how great your life will be if you do what they say. Instead of serfs and subjects, we have customers and voters.

To sum up: in thousands of years of evolution, we’ve gone from doing what I say because I will hurt you if I don’t, to doing what I say because you’ll get something out of it too. Progress, I guess!?!

WE’RE MISSING PART OF THE STORY

The story of money changed, and culturally we have not caught up.

For the majority of our history, often called pre-history, which is hilarious, it seems like no one human was able to accumulate a huge amount of money or power. There were rich and poor stone age folks, and we do have the archeological records to prove that, but in general, keeping everyone alive was a group project. Most of life was communal and real close to the edge of subsistence.

Then we got agriculture, started settling down, and started valuing land and resources. And ever since, power has started to accumulate into ever fewer hands.

TO THE KINGS

Let’s skip ahead a little to the Kings. I think it’s a mistake to try and homogenize the politics of the ancient world. I know that there were actually a lot of ways that we organized ourselves, and there were quite a few egalitarian, matriarchal,  democratic, and pretty much every other way to politic in the world. The book, the Dawn of Everything (affiliate) brilliantly walks through the diversity of human politics. But the world powers that eventually dominated learned to concentrate political and economic power in one man/institution.

NO MORE KINGS

And then began the largely thankless work of clawing back and limiting the power of those men.  It took us several millennia in fits and starts and backtracks and success. We had an explosion of democracy, briefly, in southern Europe. We had the meritocracy of the Chinese government system but under the emperor. We had the Magna Carta declaring the rights of men in England that the pope immediately declared completely invalid and King John basically ignored. And many, many more examples of greater and lesser success.

But we got better and better at it. Most countries came up with a system of government where political power is split between many different people who are supposed to keep an eye on one another.

ALL BAD ROADS LEAD TO HITLER

Alongside the official changes, we changed our story.

We instinctively believe that no one man should be able to make decisions for an entire population and that when that happens it is almost entirely bad. Just witness the change from the word king to fascist. Practically, there’s no difference between them, just the story we tell about their actions.

I don’t think we’ll ever be done with this fight. Especially these days, there are constantly men arguing that it would be better if we all just did what one guy said again. But there is also always an instinctive counter-reaction that that’s a really bad idea. We can play out that story really easily in our minds and end up at Hitler.

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED AND OUR STORIES HAVE NOT KEPT UP

Since the industrial revolution, economic power, and political power have been split, and the people who run the government are not the people with all the money. Yes, they’re usually rich. There is great overlap, and they help each other out a whole lot, but the king used to be the richest man in the country. That is no longer the case by a long shot.

So on the political side, we have several millennial-long fights to balance political power and make sure the people who are telling us what to do are at least pretending it’s for our own good and have a bunch of other people with the power to stop them watching them.

WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE SAME INSTINCTS WHEN ECONOMIC POWER CONCENTRATES

We have had private citizen billionaires for 200 years, and we’ve already suffered the devastation of extreme economic concentration once as a world in the 1920s and many times in much smaller amounts since. And we came up with some really cool ways to fight that concentration, mostly with regulation and unions. And some really not cool like early systems of communism that just ended up with a different hierarchy. And we promptly forget all of those lessons again and again, because it’s just not in the story yet.

Culturally, they’re mostly still good guys.

Yes, their reputation has tarnished a little, but mostly due to personal weirdness, not the number in their bank account. We think of how convenient their products are. What geniuses they are. How amazing they are compared to the great towering intellectuals of previous times. They have big conferences in Switzerland where they try to solve the world’s problems.

It’s just generally thought of as a good thing to have a ridiculous amount of money. At the very least, we believe it’s fair that the labor of an entire society is going to very few people.

WE NEED A NEW MAGNA CARTA

Hopefully, it will work better than the original one. We are at the very beginning of this fight for the story of economic power. Who has it; who should have it and how we limit it.

It’s probably going to take a few more wobbles before we grow the same instincts around economic power that we have around political power. We need an allergy to extreme riches the same way we are now allergic to kings. Because it really is no different.

It should be just as ludicrous to concentrate economic power the way it’s ludicrous to concentrate political power.

HOW DARE THE POOR?

Right now we have a lot of the opposite – the laziness of welfare recipients, the unfairness of redistribution of wealth, and the insane policy that as you go up in the income brackets, you go down in taxes. The whole global economy is invested in enriching a few people.  That’s a story.

Another story could be that one man is completely incapable of creating that much value for the world by starting a company. That people with loads of success are should be responsible for funding loads of the structure that undergirds society that enabled their success. That helping struggling people actually enriches and uplifts everyone. That a strong social safety net actually leads to more wealth because more people can take more risks. That keeping everyone in the game is more important than ensuring one dude wins the game.

None of this is TRUE. None of this SHOULD HAPPEN. It’s all just a story too. Maybe none of these things will end up in our final story about money.

We left reality the second some dude in Turkey handed another dude a Lydian Stater, a misshapen lump of gold and silver in 600 BCE with a couple of animals stamped into the metal and exchanged it from actual flesh and blood real animals, and everyone went away happy from that transaction.

Since it’s all imagined anyway, why not imagine a story that goes a little better for a few more people?

The post Why Money is Just a Rollicking Good Story first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

They’re going to affect far more than science fiction.

THE MAGIC OF WORLD BUILDING

When authors build a new world, they change one variable and see how it plays out in everything from religion to politics to ecology. It’s my favorite part of writing.

It’s been kind of amazing to see that play out in real-time with these language-learning models (that aren’t really AI at all…)

HOW AI CHANGES THE WORLD?

LAW

We have legal fights about who owns it, the words it produces, and what they’re allowed to train them on. It’s going to be a big mess until we all understand what we’re looking at and how we can adapt copyright laws written when people were still physically moving little metal letters around and the new American congress was restricting books and maps to the author for 14 years. The United States was all of  three years old.

ECONOMICS

We have another step in the “machines are coming for our jobs” fight that has been going on in various industries for a long while. Factories, the service industry, accountants, travel agents, and human resources all get offloaded to the machines.

I used to work at a grocery store where we switched ordering products to an algorithm, leaving “buyers” with much less to do. Though not nothing. I still laugh when I remember the desperate email we received one April telling us to ignore the algorithm’s instructions and stop buying broth because “it doesn’t know the weather and hasn’t realized its spring.” A blindingly simple adjustment a human can make.

Our world requires a truly awe-inspiring amount of words, from the tiny slogan on the sparkling water you’ll have for lunch to the fine print on an airline ticket, to the ads on TV, to the articles you’ve googled. It takes a lot of people a lot of time to create all that. A lot more people are about to find themselves on the precarious edge where a robot is doing their job and they’re now running the robot.

MILITARY

We have the military installing it into fighter jets and vehicles, escalating ethical questions around drone warfare and sovereign borders if the person who’s invading you isn’t even in the jet, and what a war would even mean if there aren’t any people involved.

ART

We have the con artists come out of the woodwork to steal wholesale as much intellectual property as possible, flooding markets with semi-plagiarized dreck. It’s not actually that easy to sell books, so this is not the shortcut they think it is by any stretch of the imagination. But humans have published an avalanche of terrible books, so again, nothing really changes? Like most of these, it makes existing trends go faster.

Can artists opt out of training the programs copying them and replacing them for a fraction of the cost? Can they actually be compensated for the labor they did and not just the guy who owns the chatbot?  We shall see.

RELIGION

We already have people quoting the “profound” things CHATGPT has come up with. People are already speculating about the ghost in the machine. What is actually happening is that it has scraped all the profound things humans have said on the internet and is feeding it back to us one word at a time without understanding anything. But if it is terrible of making meaning, humans are profoundly good at it, even where none exists

RELATIONSHIPS

I’m not even going to get into the people who have already “fallen in love” with it. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with how humans move through the world bonding with nearly anything that displays the slightest human trait and assigning meaning to every breath. Click here for a dismayed building!

Can you see it? A glimpse of the huge shift to the gig economy, leisure connected even further to our anthropomorphized computers, fighting strange wars where there are no human casualties?  Cults springing up around the nonsense of AI? Not THAT different than the world we inhabit now. Just a bit…extra.

HOW DOES THE WORLD WE LIVE IN CHANGE AI?

Building a world is not just about how a new innovation changes everything. It’s about how the world we have changes the innovation.

ECONOMY

We live in a highly monopolized version of capitalism where companies have been allowed to eat their competition unrestrained for almost half a century and therefore, the purchasing power and wages and the rights of the vast majority of people in society are extremely degraded. Again, a machine can do another slice of the workforce’s jobs faster (if not better?) Nothing changes there, just goes faster.  

BIAS

We live in a racist patriarchy with bias at every level of society including in our computer programs. And it already seems like it’s picked that up extremely efficiently. It’s also proven out the bugaboo that if you wait long enough, everything in popular discourse ends in transphobia these days.

MILITARY

We live in the military-industrial complex where 20% of our federal budget goes to defense. The air force has already admitted its fancy new planes cost too much, (at 1.6 trillion over their lifetime, I would say, you think?) How do we balance how cheap a human is with how efficient a computer is? Who makes that call? Seriously?

LABOR

Oh, there will be new jobs. Just like when factories automated, and you could go from working a station at a factory to repairing the robot that did your job before. So the slide that has been taking place for decades in the blue-collar world of service work and factory work will hit computer work.

Contrary to a lot of critics, I don’t think it will feel that different. It feels like the end of the world for a lot of people because it’s personal this time, but it’s been like this for literally decades for a lot of the country and nobody really noticed. I hope they do!

WHAT COULD THIS HAVE BEEN LIKE, IF WE HAD A DIFFERENT WORLD?

Now the fun part. Let’s actually world build a new world. One that is not this one!

ECONOMY

There’s a version of the world where there’s strong competition in the economy and where automating writing could be one more step in the humanity-wide project to free everybody from work, as the 19th-century economist Keynes guessed was going to happen next. He thought we’d all be down to 15-hour work weeks by now.

Think about this statement. Really hear it: there is not enough work for everyone.

We have automated so much, we can meet everybody’s needs and most wants without needing everyone to work full-time to do it. We don’t have enough work to do!

It could have been a day of humanity-wide rejoicing. We can now get all of our needs met with a faction of the work! Wahoo!!!

Instead, we have all of those resources concentrating in a few bank accounts while we actually work more and longer and harder.

MILITARY

There’s a version of the world where the arms race slows down and even reverses, and chat GPT can be used in further de-escalation of conflict, helping to translate across cultures, where we use proxy competitions like the Olympics and culture to compete with each other.

BIAS

There is a version of the world where we truly invest in excising bias from society and finding true quality with AI. It could be a huge help in that goal leveling the playing field of resumes and cover letters and all of the other baloney correspondence you need to know how to do to play this game that so many people never learn, or folks with English as a Second Language could not do before now.

ART

There’s a version of the world where this lack of needing to work results in more artists creating more cool stuff, and nobody feels the need to ask AI to churn out dreck because they’re also doing okay. I personally would love a version of this program where I could upload only my own stuff so I’m not stealing from anybody else, but being able to ask a program to read these books and figure out what I named the barista two hundred pages ago that would be super nice.

LABOR

It’s just our luck that a time in history that will require a breathtaking amount of collective action to protect everybody is corresponding with a cult-like devotion to individual success and therefore individual failure at every level. Will this be the lever that finally breaks us out of the delusion that we don’t need each other? That it’s not cheating to work together, but the only way we survive?  And this half-century project of filling a couple of bank accounts as full as they can get is at least, an inefficient, at most, horrifying way to run an entire civilization?

That’s not reality. That’s a belief we’ve all signed onto, even our unsentient chatbots.

The post If We Lived in A Sci-Fi Novel, How AI Changes Everything & Nothing first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

DOES IT LIVE UP TO THE DECADES OF HYPE?

Speculative fiction has been taking on AI for YEARS. How good a job did the sci-fi author of the past in predicting how this is going, and where is it going next? And how did those doomsday stories affect the development of the thing we have now

IT’S NOT INTELLIGENT OR SENTIENT

This is all a little disingenuous because ChatGPT/Bing/etc are not artificial intelligence. They’re certainly not sentient. The wild turkeys in my back yard are capable of greater intuitive leaps.

My favorite explanation as to why is from The Verge about the mirror test. (When you put a mirror in front of an animal, do they know its them or do they think it’s another animal?)

TOTAL side note, the only species to PASS the mirror test, who know they’re looking at themselves are humans, great apes, one elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, and magpies. 

SO WHAT IS IT, IF NOT AI?

My favorite explanation as to why is from The Verge about the mirror test. (When you put a mirror in front of an animal, do they know its them or do they think it’s another animal?)

TOTAL side note, the only species to PASS the mirror test, who know they’re looking at themselves are humans, great apes, one elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, and magpies.

Here are my favorite takes on it.

Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick on how ChatGPT is basically autocomplete on steroids.

Tom Scott on how ChatGPT just finds the next word. (And prompted his existential crisis.)

The problem is that it finds the next most likely word from all of human written history (or at least as much as we’ve uploaded so far), so it’s really good at sounding human. And it turns out, we are one neurotic bunch of primates. Our first little creation has been around for a matter of weeks at any scale and has so far insulted us, threatened us, come on to us, and had little existential crises of its own. So it’s going to fool a lot of people enter thinking it’s sentient.

It just finds the next word. That’s it.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THIS PREDICTIVE TEXT THING THEN?

They’re trying to make search happen, but given the amount of data it’s just making up, it doesn’t seem like that’s going to work that well for very long.

It’s a novelty, but as a tool for finding accurate information, it has already failed so hard and so fast. Really, I feel sorry for the little bug. Humans lie so much that it can’t tell reality from fiction.

(It’s not alive, it’s not alive…)

What it seems to be considerably better at is writing a great deal of bad copy and code.

Since humans already write a great deal of bad copy and code, it’s definitely going to disrupt some industries.

It’s attempting to create art. Both visual and fiction markets are already being flooded by AI versions. A lot of it is straight-up obvious plagiarism, but some are also just bad fiction. Remember, it can only take the aggregate of what it has red and spit out the next most likely word. But then again, humans write a great deal of bad fiction themselves, so nobody can really tell the difference.

It can also autonomously drive things.

It also seems to be better at driving than a lot of human pilots and we’re already having non-man space flights and non-man driving and military well military.  In this case is it finding the next twist of the wheel?

That’s all well and terrifying, and I’ll cover next week how I think it will actually disrupt jobs. Still, the real question is, will it become sentient, turn us all into human batteries, send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to kill us, and take over the world?

FAMOUS AI’S THROUGH HISTORY

Probably the three most famous examples of AI in the popular imagination is Hal from 2001 Space Odyssey, the Matrix (and yes, I know the Matrix isn’t the AI in The Matrix, but for simplicity’s sake), and Skynet in the Terminator franchise.

All the most famous AIs have taken over the world and immediately set out to destroy humanity.

There are a couple of assumptions that go into AI’s ability to do this. One is that the human brain is not that smart. And watching us collectively fail our own Mirror Test over and over again for weeks is a good argument.

BRAINS OVER MAINFRAMES

But in truth, the brain is capable of a billion, billion calculations per second. An order of magnitude more than any supercomputer in the world. There is also new research suggesting that the brain goes beyond even that incalculable number and uses quantum computing to create consciousness. Reproducing that with silicon will take… a lot of silicon, a lot of power, and processors that don’t exist yet.

If you try to dive into the predictions about whether this is possible, when it will happen, and what it will be like, experts disagree. Some say we will make a machine with consciousness in the next five years. Some say we never will. Some say it will be as smart as a human, some say smarter, and some say never.

But that doesn’t make a very good story. The all-powerful AI is far more dramatic. If a bunch of dudes went to space with a third computer dude who was capable of a different, yet comparable level of cognition, hijinks could ensue, but it wouldn’t be a Space Odyssey. (All I can see when I think of this is the Muppet’s Pigs in Space.)

There are stories of AI that do not destroy the world, like A Psalm for the Wild Built, which tells an alternate future where robots are about equal with humans in intelligence and they are learning to live together.

But in the popular imagination, we all wonder if we’re living in the Matrix.

This matters more than you might think because the people building AI today say they did it to PREVENT Strong AI.

WHO IS BEHIND IT ALL?

One of the things that we don’t do enough when new technology happens is to consider the humans behind it. We build bias into all algorithms and assumptions about the world into every new idea.

One OpenAI guy is a known survivalist who is currently stockpiling weapons. The rest of the team have similar sparkling resumes of questionable ethical decisions, to say the least.  One of their stated goals was to generate money with “weak AI,” as in the predictive text generator that is not actually any kind of AI, to combat the theoretical threat of strong AI by gaining money to… build it themselves?

If that sounds like a bad sci-fi novel, you wouldn’t be wrong.

So, they’re afraid of true artificial intelligence, so they’re trying like hell to build a large amount of artificial intelligence and unleashing ChatGPT to fund it. Huh?

They think they’re making science fiction a reality to protect us from a science fiction villain. Really, you can’t make this up. Well, ChatGPT certainly can’t make this up.

WILL THEY CREATE SKYNET?

No. That’s a story. And we don’t have the processing power to get there. Maybe we will one day (according to experts, it will be within ten years, fifty years, or never), but humanity is pretty allergic to autocrats. Even if we weren’t, it’s far too unstable a system of control to work for long in a chaotic universe. Witness the fall of every single autocrat in history…

It is going to be so much more and so much less than they want.

In truth, I think the Internet is going to get a little bit grosser for a while. I mean it’s already a nightmare to interact online. Even with people you’ve known your whole life. There’s just something about the asynchronous short communication style that lends itself to just hurting everybody’s feelings. Now we have an AI who can troll through the whole of what we’ve written and pick out the next best possible word in order to do that to ourselves. That’s gonna suck, but it sucks already. So it’s a matter of degree.

As for the human cost we have to pay to save ourselves from Hal 9000? (No choice, have to forge ahead or we’re doomed, of course) I’ll dive into that more next, but there will be a great many losers and a few winners like there are now.

Soon, we’ll curse this technology like every other miracle and nightmare machine we’ve integrated into our lives.

I just hope we stop worshipping it.

THE PULLEY IS NOT A GOD

When we created the pulley millennia ago, we did not look at it lifting more than any one human could possibly lift and worship it as a God. We said: we’re really good at building machines.

This concept comes from a great book: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.  Extrapolating from that, 100 years ago when we created a machine that could fly us into space and beyond, we didn’t worship the airplane. We said: we are really good at building machines.

And yet when we created a machine to look through a bunch of chess moves and mimic back to us what the next move is, we suddenly freaked out instead and started calling it intelligent. And started fearing it as artificial intelligence instead of saying what we always should’ve said: we are really good at building machines.

Except looking at the functionality of these new text predictors, it’s clear right now, we’re not that good yet at building these kinds of machines. In fact, we’re really really bad at it. The text mimics back to us all of our worst and crazy impulses. It’s wrong confidently; it’s abusive.  It tends to hallucinate, which really means giving us the wrong word. They used a bunch of intellectual property it didn’t pay for to train it and now when it’s still pulling from that property, it’s not compensating the original creators.

When these things happen, the response should be nothing more than the usual response when predictive text. goes wrong: damn you auto-correct.

The post ChatBots are Here. Did Sci-Fi Get It Right? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH COMPLEXITY?

I’m struck by this question whenever I can fortify myself to dip into the news (see my article about outrage addiction). We talk about the energy crisis and oil and gas and fracking. Then we talk about climate change and CO2 emissions. Then we talk about the economy and inflation. Then we talk about a childcare crisis (at least in the US). And then we talk about our crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing debt. And we do this like we are talking about different things.

THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING.

How are they possibly the same thing? Let me explain, and in the process, hopefully, I can pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard behind our economy, and our governments, and our art, children, health, everything on earth, really. His name is Dan. But let’s start at the beginning. 

DAN THE HYDROGEN ATOM

Once upon a time, there was a hydrogen atom named Dan who lived in the center of a star in one of the outer arms of a galaxy, in one of the outer spines in a supercluster of galaxies, which is where the address gets fuzzy, but that is surely one of the uncountable superclusters across the universe, but we can’t see that far away.

He is not long for his world, because he and three of his hydrogen friends on this particular day get squished into one helium atom, in what we call nuclear fusion. Except not all of him and his friends fit into one helium atom. There’s a little bit left.

It’s a blindingly small amount of mass. 29% of 4 hydrogen atoms are leftover, which is converted to pure energy. (Remember Einstein: E=MC² Matter is really dense energy and vice versa?) I don’t think it was ever impressed upon me just how much energy is in one little atom. In this case, the energy released could power a 60 KW light bulb for 100 years.

So the former hydrogen atom, now light and heat and movement (thermal, radiant, and kinetic energy), still named Dan, go flying out across space and unlike so many of his fellows, smacks into a planet. And unlike so many planets, this one has a layer of gas around it which traps him on the planet’s surface, never to leave it again.

THE MAGIC OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Dan continues his journey and runs smack dab into a little kale plant, which takes a few molecules of carbon from the water it drinks and another hydrogen molecule from the soil it eats. That hydrogen atom is an old cousin of Dan’s from a very, very long time ago and a galaxy far away, but they don’t really have time to connect because the kale releases the free oxygen into the atmosphere that used to be stuck to the carbon, and uses Dan to bind these three together (energy, hydrogen, and carbon), creating a teeny tiny glucose molecule.

And then a little human girl named Danielle, ironically enough, pulls the kale plant from her garden and reluctantly eats it in a salad her mother makes.

THE MAGIC OF DIGESTION

The glucose molecule containing Dan gets absorbed into Danielle’s intestine and wings around her bloodstream. (We won’t go into what happens to the rest of the kale plant.) That little glucose molecule finally reaches Danielle’s bicep, where in a very complicated reaction involving multiple intermediary steps I won’t go into without completely blowing the word count of this note, the glucose is ripped apart.

Dan is bound up in the cell, and the soil and water Dan rode in on go back into the bloodstream, and the carbon at least goes out of the lungs as carbon dioxide.  (Really FASCINATING side note, if Dan had gotten bound up in a fat cell, instead of a muscle cell, he would just sit there for a while until called back into the bloodstream to get used. Which means we lose weight by breathing. Seriously. And literally.)

But Dan ended up in a bicep and Danielle happens to be in the middle of a violin recital by the time this is all over, so very quickly, that muscle gets the message to move it and contract repeatedly as she saws out a passable rendition of twinkle twinkle little star (using a very teeny tiny bit of a star to do it, whom she does not know is named Dan.)

Dan relinquishes his job of holding an ATP molecule together (what became of him when the glucose broke down) in the mitochondria and becomes the heat/movement/kinetic energy again, in this case, to move a violin bow and heat Danielle’s bicep. In short, converting energy to music, which is not an equation you’ll find in your physics textbook, but what else is it made of?!

WHAT HAPPENS TO DAN FROM THERE?

Some of him went off in the auditorium as sound waves. Some as heat released from Danielle’s skin. Some as the movement of air stirred up by the movement of her arm. He dances around the atmosphere with the rest of the solar energy and maybe one day to escape to go flinging into space until he gets suctioned up by a black hole or another bit of gravity to start the dance all over again.

He could eventually find himself back as potential energy again. Remember, energy is not created or destroyed, it just moves around.

The long and short of it is, we are all just dirt and sunshine and ocean.

And every spec of heat, light, movement, and life on earth came from the sun. (With a couple of minor nuclear exceptions.)

How is this useful? (if you’re not creating alien species for a novel or trying to pass a high school biology exam?)

Like it or not, there are a couple of really big collective decisions we need to make as a species (well, ideally about 200 years ago) but soon is the next best option. Losing track of the fact that our entire planet, life, and economy is about sunlight obfuscates those decisions.

The only reason we exist is sunlight and the atmosphere that traps it here. We forget that at our peril.

The post How to Make Music & Babies with Sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

This is one way an author can world-build a totally new civilization: you take one variable like the energy supply, change it, and see how it might affect everything from the morning coffee to marriage customs to the global economy.

But lest you think our problems would be solved with enough energy (without the downsides of torching the world), I don’t think it’s going to be that simple…

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH FOR OVER A CENTURY

According to some sources, we’ve had enough energy to feed, house, clothe, and care for every human on earth since about 1870. Yes, it came with the downside of torching the world, and no, we haven’t actually done that with our munificent bounty, but not enough energy is not our problem and hasn’t been for a while.

The problem and opportunity, and challenge, are what we build with that energy. The true constraint is taking that raw energy and building complexity with it.

WE’RE ONE OF THE ONLY PLACES IN THE UNIVERSE THIS CAN HAPPEN!

Most energy stays in its simplest form and gets flung out into space by the stars. Occasionally, endless energy will collect and squeeze together into an impossibly small space until it’s too dense to even comprehend, and you get a black hole. And very occasionally, you get a little chunk of rock that builds a layer of gas around itself where the energy hitting the surface and leaving the atmosphere is close to even. Basically, where entropy doesn’t win for a couple hundred million years.

And if you wait long enough,  weird things start to happen! Like eventually that energy self-organizes and starts breathing.

And if nothing happens to destabilize this exceptional little pocket of complexity in millions upon millions upon millions of years, it starts becoming aware of its own existence. And then it starts having existential crises, dancing on its toes, blowing into sheep’s bladder to create an instrument that can be heard two miles away, chasing balls in circles, and building other things of even more beauty and complexity.

WHEN THERE IS ENOUGH COMPLEXITY

It’s amazing. The vast majority of the universe is enjoying ever-increasing entropy: more and more chaos and less and less order until everything is far-flung and dark.  We’re one tiny little planetary exception to that rule where energy has been able to complexify for millions of years.

Which is why adding to our available energy is not going to solve all our problems.  We don’t need a bunch of energy; we need to turn that raw power into more complexity.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

On a physiological level, we eat food, digest the food, and take the energy and the dirt and build ourselves. But even without any excess, most of our lives are spent just maintaining our own complexity. Just keeping a bit of complex intelligent life breathing takes enormous energy and work.

But some of us are extremely lucky to have a little bit extra. When we don’t have to just survive, we have kids. We write books. We build businesses. We make music. We build our bodies and see who can be the strongest and fastest. We play games.

It’s my favorite thing about humans: all the crazy complex beauty and fun we can create out of sunlight.

I think a lot about what it actually takes to do this. Yes, it takes the power that we get from food, which came from the sun via the plants we eat (or the animals that ate the plants that we eat). It also takes the stability of the ozone layer, the climate, and no giant asteroids to maintain the homeostasis that makes complexity building possible.

What else?

TIME

Growing a human takes time. Digesting food and turning it into muscle takes time. Putting one word after another on paper takes time. Teaching a kid the nuances of manners (and spoons, the alphabet, Russian disinformation campaigns, and every other insanely complicated skill we’re expected to master) takes time.  Yes, you can speed it up with an influx of more energy, but only to a certain point. Things take the time they take.

SKILL

Skill is really just neurons that can fire in a particular pattern at the right time. There’s a reason humans are capable of more complex feats of engineering than a turkey. We can shove more skills into our brains. That process also takes time and energy.

EFFORT

There’s a myth in our society that the more skill, time, and money you have, the better you should feel about life. And there’s some truth to that. Things get easier, but that’s because of the complexity you’ve already built. Building new skills, houses, books, and humans is hard and stays hard no matter how long you do it. 

We are literally patterning chaos and that is ridiculously hard to do.

CHAOS

We have less chaos here with energy constantly entering the system, but the number is not zero, and can’t ever be.  The whole of evolution came from random mutations. Chance, luck, disaster, and problems are vital to building complexity. They are two sides of the same coin, constantly melting into one another. This is the part where I say that a life you can predict would be boring. I don’t know about that. We could do with some more boring, but I will say that it won’t be very complex.

What else? Seriously?

What does it take to create something new? Because I don’t think we’re very good at it yet, nor do we understand it that well. We’re currently engaged in the madness of ever-expanding energy, even as the consequences of that are completely screwing up the air quality as we use our filters for fuel.

We need a new way to look at what we’re doing here when we can’t accumulate great excesses of stored sunlight. I actually think we’ll be better for it because then we can focus on the time, effort, and skill to manage the energy and build so many more fun things!

The post We’ve Had Enough Energy Since 1870. What Have We Done With it? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Like so many things that crossed cultures, the real story was far less doomsday and far more cultural ignorance, at best. Most of the images of the circled stone were actually from the Aztec, not the Maya, who didn’t really traffic in apocalypses.

In reality, the Maya used two calendars: one with 365 days and one with 260 days. Every day had two names and reset every fifty-two years. In addition, they had a long count of years like the Roman calendar we use today.  2012 was a reset year for their two differing calendars.

That’s it.

IN 5000 AD, WHAT WILL THEY THINK?

Imagine a civilization in 5000 AD digging up one of our paper calendars with cute cats or hot firefighters on it, seeing December 31st, calculating what day it would be for them, and panicking because December 31st was in two of their months!  And then announcing to everyone the world was ending.

Which, let’s face it, if civilization hasn’t ended by 5000 AD, humanity should really hold a worldwide party, because that would be incredible.

I digress. 

I was thinking about that “prophesy” this week and the 10 years since 2012 where the calendars keep advancing no matter what happens. What will future civilizations say about this time?

Knowing humans, they will probably misinterpret everything, but I don’t think they will be very impressed.

In 3000 years, if we should last so long, we will probably be past the ravages of climate change. Future humans will read accounts of people who knew what was coming and did not act with the gobsmacking incredulity we view the doctors who prescribed bloodletting for bullet wounds.

The internet will be woven into perhaps our very bodies and the massive campaigns of misinformation and disinformation and the amount of theft and crime and horror we permit online will hopefully seem like unfathomable levels of ignorance.

And the callousness with which we treat human life in everything from healthcare costs, to policing, to labor laws will hopefully make us seem like complete barbarians.

HEADING OFF FUTURE PANIC

At the very least, I hope, our calendar won’t cause too much panic or confusion, with its 10 lovely months. (Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec = Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten) Oh wait, and the two shoehorned months (January and February) at the beginning because the Romans made a calendar that didn’t actually sync with the celestial year and nobody could plan planting and harvesting because they kept moving around.

Oh, and the two newer months in the middle of the year named for emperors (July and August) instead of the original Quintilis and Sextilis (Six & Seven), because if you can get a unit of time named after you, why not?

If any archeologists are reading this in the year 5000, good luck guys! No, we can’t explain it…

WILL THINGS BE BETTER?

I hope that in 3000 years we will learn how to work with our weaknesses as a species: our hubris, violence, tribalism, short-sightedness, reactivity, and credulousness.

Or if not, perhaps we will at least grow some humility if those weaknesses continue to plague us and make peace with our endless capacity for really, really stupid calls about something as simple as counting days? We can hope!

At any rate, I look forward to the world continuing on January 1st, even though my Star Wars calendar has run out.

My aspirations for the world each year get smaller and smaller. In this upcoming year, may we be patient with our foibles, mindful of the past, respectful of other cultures’ ability to count, and refrain from doing anything too crazy that will prompt 120 generations from now to panic.

The post It’s Been 10 Years Since the End of the World first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Well, maybe. Someday.

It’s important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away.

If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let’s do a little world-building, shall we?

One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it.

Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants.

What does a world like that look like?

POWER INDUSTRY

I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn’t fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for power plants. We just hook our existing cables to a different source. (Which, hey, we don’t have to wait to do! The same is true of all green energy too! Yay!)

TRANSPORTATION

What if you could go anywhere you wanted for the price of a car or plane? It puts a whole new spin on globalization, borders, fiancé visas, and moving for work. People will get a whole lot more mobile with a whole lot less fuss.

ECONOMICS

Here, things start to get more fun. Our insanely complex economy obscures the fact that money is energy and energy is oil. The whole of our economy would shift completely if we switched to a different fuel source. This is where fusion and green energy start to diverge because oil is old sunlight and solar is new sunlight, so there are still recognizable constraints on both.

But when we make our own sun?

Power gets cheaper, so that is one bill shrunk immediately. Food gets way cheaper. (Do you know how much oil it takes to deliver a pineapple to your average grocery store?) Building things gets way cheaper. Which means everyone everywhere gets a lot more disposable income.

This is so hard to imagine because right now, the excess is getting funneled up to a few individuals and why would it be any different with fusion?

But that is deceptive because we don’t have endless energy. In fact, energy is getting more and more expensive. Digging up oil is more expensive; rich countries have already exploited all the poor countries, and there are no new frontiers to vacuum up for money. So now we’re cannibalizing ourselves and hollowing out the middle class and pushing the poverty line down to continue the merry-go-round a little longer. But what happens when that squeeze lets up and there’s just always more energy? They can hoard as much as they want, and for the cost of a power plant, there’s more where that came from?

LABOR

If living expenses become a fraction of your salary, current monopolies become harder to maintain. The labor market gets tighter. The robot revolution takes on even more importance. Job perks become insanely more important. And work weeks would get shorter, which I know is something that has been predicted for decades, but instead, we’re all killing ourselves by enriching billionaires. But if there was no limit to energy, even billionaires can have their cake and eat it too.

ART

Everyone will have a lot more time, which means amateur art will experience a renaissance.

All of these are relatively small changes at the personal level. Professional art and sports will also improve like we can’t possibly imagine. Why? Because more people can participate, and more people will have the resources to devote to full-time study. Right now, pursuing professional athletics is a game of desperation, luck, and sacrifice. What if all those variables were two clicks easier? Even a slight change in how easy it is dramatically changes who wins.

POLITICS

The global order as we know it would be over completely. It would take a few decades, but the Middle East would fade from importance as their main export becomes useless. Oh don’t worry, we’d still compete for resources like precious metals and raw materials, but the pinch points would shift around the globe.

The talking points at home would also shift as everyone gets a little bit less desperate. What would be the selling point then in a political campaign? Perhaps the culture wars become even more important?

HEALTH

Healthcare is one of the most resource-intensive industries we have. It just takes a lot of money to keep people well. So what happens when you glut the system with energy? Hopefully, again, less desperation. More access. More resources to put towards research. More positions funded. And yes, probably more 21st-century diseases as food becomes more ubiquitous and we can get more for less, so staying active becomes even more of a choice.

MILITARY

Oh, the wars we can wage with endless energy. The weapons we can dream up. Even the fusion plants themselves can be major targets. But also, hopefully, the fewer wars we’ll feel we need to wage. We’ve waged purely ideological wars, but the majority have been over resources and if everyone has more, you take those off the table. [She says, naively. I mean, optimistically…]

TECHNOLOGY

Tech of all sorts will accelerate rapidly. Building complex machines takes a great deal of energy. If that suddenly got cheap, AI computing suddenly looks totally doable. Cloud storage that currently has to be built on literal rivers to keep them cool becomes much more feasible. New players can have access to more, more informally, to invent things much more quickly.

SPACE

Getting off the planet also becomes ridiculously easy when you strap yourself to a tiny sun. As does mitigating the inhospitableness. It’s hard for humans not to live on earth. Which means we start becoming a true space-faring civilization. Though, that literally means our little solar system. I think we forget how big the galaxy is. We’re not going that far.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Getting off oil has been the rallying cry of the green movement for decades. Plus cleaning up climate change will take a truly insane amount of energy. I think we turn more and more to technology and geoengineering to fix it instead of behavior change, and we deal with a host of unintended consequences. I mean, we’ll still be the short-sighted, reactive species we are now. Free energy won’t change our ability to screw up our main safe haven, but at least we won’t be actively setting more of it on fire anymore.

EDUCATION

This is another resource-intensive project that will hopefully get easier and more ubiquitous every decade, especially worldwide. Raising kids in general takes an insane amount of energy.

INTENSITY

The last way to think about this is not what exactly is changing but how much. There is a plausible scenario where a new energy source plugs into our existing extractive capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires, and the world order pretty much stays the same.

On the opposite end: if everyone truly, madly, deeply has enough energy to live and to move, the concept of a nation-state as we know it dissolves and we become a truly globalized society where you can be employed anywhere by anyone and the world looks NOTHING like it does today.

WHAT’S YOUR GUESS?

Is this what’s Going To Happen? Some of it, yes, and some of it, no. That’s the difference between telling a story and trying to foretell the future. These are just some of the different ways to think about how changing things change other things.

Do you agree? Disagree? It’s within the realm of possibility that this could happen. Okay, very far from now and still more unlikely than likely, but it’s within the realm of possibility!

Is it the start of a grand utopia on earth?

No, we’re far too competitive, violent, and short-sighted ever to achieve that. But will life get just a little bit easier? Absolutely. When you have enough energy, you get more time and have to spend less of it surviving, which makes it just a little more pleasant.

Everyone will hopefully be just a little less tired and a little less desperate. Tourism, arts, entertainment, and sports will loom larger in people’s imagination as the basics get cheaper. Global society will develop as moving becomes easy. The geopolitical order will shift completely and rearrange around the new mineral and raw material bottlenecks, not oil. And we’ll find ways to muck up the climate some other way and compete and kill each other for new reasons.

The post How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

There are two conflicting pieces of advice that drive me crazy on a regular basis.

1. The “trust your intuition,” “go with your gut” crowd that says you should always heed your instincts as if we have magic intestines.
2. The “feel the fear and do it anyway,” “push harder than you want,” and “don’t let your fear limit you” crowd.

Of course, the answer is both. As with all pieces of advice, context really matters.

The problem?

IF WE PICK WRONG, IT CAN GO SPECTACULARLY WRONG

In both directions. Of course, those are the people who consistently take no risks or consistently take all of the risks, but the rest of us are just a messy combination of playing it way too safe and then practically killing ourselves.

Sometimes you do exactly right and still get hurt. To quote Jean Luc Picard, or at least an anonymous Star Trek screenwriter: “It’s possible to make no mistakes and still love.”

You listen to your gut and your gut is just plain wrong. You play it safe and miss the perfect opportunity. You take a huge risk and reap the consequence. So it’s not like the tips in the rest of this newsletter or foolproof and if you just do this you’re not gonna get hurt and you’re not gonna miss out. Both of those things will still happen, but maybe a LITTLE less often

OTHER PEOPLE SEVERELY SCREW UP YOUR RADAR IF YOU LET THEM.

We are herd animals. Many of our instincts are about getting along with the herd, which means we are much more likely to disregard our own gut when we’re trying to fit into the group.

You are most likely to disregard your gut for other people.

If you’re risking everything for somebody else, even though that feels really noble, pay real close attention. Part of our instincts includes overriding our own instincts in order to follow the herd, particularly the most powerful members of the herd.

You’re most likely to play it safe for fear of other people.

The corollary is you could be avoiding risk because you’re afraid of people who aren’t in your group. Be wary of that, because again we are built to be afraid of them. Whoever your particular them is.

“Us” are never so noble as we think and “them” are never so scary.

ABSENT INFORMATION, EVEN YOUR GUT IS GUESSING.

One of my favorite books on earth is The Gift of Fear by Gabin de Becker who talks about how our brains can make super-fast judgments about situations that keep us safe.

But what often gets left out of most conversations is that you have to feed your brain data in order to make a call.

It isn’t intuition, so much as lightning-fast evaluation. If you don’t have all the facts. It’s not gonna work.

How many people make moves or take jobs without ever speaking to someone at the company or in that role or living in that town? If you’re having a strong gut feeling about something, ask yourself how much you know about your decision. The less you know, the less you can trust that gut feeling.

AT THE SAME TIME, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW EVERYTHING.

While you can’t fly completely blind, you will also never have enough data. The analysis paralysis of researching until you know when you’re never going to work. It can help to make a time limit: either a certain amount of days or sources, or whatever, and after you’ve learned them, you call it.

Will any of these protect you from disaster? Nothing protects you from disaster. But hopefully, it will protect you a little bit from regret, both for taking a risk or passing up an opportunity.

At least you can tell yourself you have decided how to make a decision.

The post How to Go With Your Gut and Push Your Limits. Magically at the Same Time. first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Photo: Sean MacEntee

WHAT IS IT?

No, but seriously? What is it?!?

If the past few weeks of Twitter drama have proven anything, no one is exactly sure, even the people who own these companies.

ANY BUSINESS IS JUST A STORY

Complete with protagonist, antagonist, love interest, conflict, challenge, triumph, and disaster. That doesn’t mean to imply they don’t have an effect on the real world. Stories can be dangerous!

Okay, most of the time, a business strategy document is a really boring story, where the villain is a slightly disappointing third-quarter report and employee turnover, but I don’t think enough people realize it’s a story they made up about a hopelessly complex reality nobody can completely comprehend.

But sometimes even business stories become totally fascinating.

SOCIAL MEDIA WAS AN INNOVATION.

It upended the publishing industry. Yes, the publishing industry.

Up until this point, publishing companies of all descriptions would employ professionals to create content. And then instead of charging customers the full cost of creating that content, they would charge other businesses to advertise their products alongside the content.

It was a win/win/win situation most of the time.

The publisher stays in business, the advertiser gets new customers, and the customers get valuable content and get to hear about products they might like. The customer did sometimes contribute to the publisher, mostly with letters to the editors, but that was a minority of content.

THE GENIUS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The tech industry dreamed up a genuinely new strategy for doing business as a publishing company: combining two (and often all three) of these roles!

The publisher stayed the same: push out content and ads to customers while taking a cut.

But suddenly producers and customers were one and the same.

Think about it, it’s absolute genius. Instead of paying contributors, you got your own customer base to create your daily magazine full of content. And recruit customers to come and read it. And then you could show the same audience ads and take a cut of that money, for nothing.

Some tell the story of how we are the product of social media, sold to advertisers, but I don’t think that’s quite right.

We are its volunteer content creators and its customers in one.

And for those of us who own a business, its advertisers too! Genius! (If you’re a social media company.)

WILL YOU PAY TO CREATE CONTENT?

Musk’s idea to charge people $8 to use the site is another innovation. He’s making a gamble that in exchange for not seeing as many ads, people will be willing to pay for volunteering to create content.

I’m not saying it’s never been done before, but certainly not at scale. Everyone’s on Twitter because everyone else is on Twitter, and nobody with this big of a platform has tried to switch from advertising to pay-for-play. (I’m leaving aside the dramatically bad rollout of this thing.) It’s failing because it was poorly executed, but also probably because this is not an innovation that will stick.

What is it usually called when you pay to publish content? Vanity publishing? A scam?

Judging from the pushback, most people on Twitter see it that way.

If anything, historically, Musk should be paying THEM to create content. Some social media companies work like that. Both Youtube and Tiktok have creators sharing revenue. Others get away with the fact that easy access to your friends is worth the time commitment of creating for them for nothing, and if you get big enough brands pay creators directly in addition to companies.

WHY I’M NOT HARPING ON FREE SPEECH/TOWN SQUARE ARGUMENT

That is another story a lot of people have told about social media. That it’s some kind of commons/public utility.

You use a public utility like telephones and the internet in private. In my opinion, the moment you broadcast to a larger audience, you enter the realm of publishing.

It’s like if the church bulletin board went online, only the bulletin board made billions, and could sell all of your most private and personal thoughts, hopes, wishes, and dreams to local businesses in exchange for selling things on the board.

Free speech is about the GOVERNMENT silencing people, not about what private publishers choose to publish or not.

That’s called… an editorial decision. Arguably the one has very little to do with the other.

We do have protected classes you can’t discriminate against, even in editorial decisions, and, say, censor all of a certain minority group, (like TitTok has recently been accused of doing) but there aren’t that many protected classes this applies to and they’re governed by totally different laws than the first amendment. And they’re really hard to prove. (Political affiliation is NOT a protected group… Just saying.)

We also have libel laws about ruining other people on social media, but since they’ve successfully argued they’re a utility company, magically don’t… And I’m not saying they should be, but only because we just don’t know what we’re looking at. We don’t have a good story about what these businesses are.

VOLUNTEER CONTENT CREATORS AND LACK OF EMPLOYEE HANDBOOKS

Which is also why the harassment problem is so bad. Not only are you a volunteer content creator, but you’re also outside of any kind of employment protection or code of conduct, or journalistic ethics standards that a paid employee would be entitled to and held to.  And all the family bloggers are outside any kind of child labor law protection.

SO WHAT IS THE STORY OF THE IDEAL SOCIAL MEDIA?

I think it is the story of a unique kind of publishing company. Their main competitive advantage is making the interface easy to use for those creators and showing their audience what they want to see, using ad targeting that people consent to.

If I’m dreaming, I might as well say their workforce is no longer volunteer unless the social media company is also not-for-profit. All for-profit social media content creation should be a profit-share with the company.

They should have standards for publishing and standards for behavior that limits a lot of legal speech and who can use their site because they’re private publishing entities that can censor whoever they want so long as it is not a protected class like every other publishing company quietly does every minute of the day.

At least, that’s the dream story I would like to tell.

In the meantime, we have people railing about public utilities and the first amendment, people trying to charge their volunteer content creators, people upping ads until the content/ad ratio drives the audience away, and people refusing to protect their content creators/customers from harassment of other content creators/customers because… public square/free speech?

THE CURRENT STORY MAKES NO SENSE!!!

Some people are moving on because the magazine just isn’t good anymore. Or cool anymore. Nobody wants a subscription to the magazine your mom loves. Everyone laughs at MySpace for crashing and burning but what looked like a one-off fluke now looks like a feature of the industry. Maybe no social media company has a shelf life beyond 10 years. Most magazines don’t.

In reality, it’s going to take a long time for Silicon Valley, the government, and the public at large to reach some understanding of what this business is, and what is legal or not. If nothing else, it’s going to be entertaining to watch. Most stories are.

The post How to Stop Worrying and Love Our Social Media Future first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.