#Omnipedia 19: the Ludocene begins, the Millennials stay lefty, AI should decelerate and much more
Including: Killer whales organising for murder, corps subverting democracy, kick-ass sonnetry, and there's a "carbonanza" over Scotland's land
Welcome to this week’s Omnipedia. Whatever oose has accumulated on the cultural cardigan, it’s now all yours… If you enjoy, and want to support and sustain this, bash the big button below:
Good week for the Ludocene (my coinage: it’s like the Anthropocene, except it’s majoring on play). I came upon two wildly different discourses/voices enthroning play, as a purpose or end-point for humans, facing extreme conditions - like AI singularity, and climate collapse. The unlimited, and the hardest of limits, both made light of by evolution’s salute to high spirits.
The Economist did one of their “news-from-no-one” items, on what we’d do if AI did leap off the chart, and eat up all available cognition-based jobs for humans. Establish a ludocracy, it appears:
There are, nevertheless, some wants that perhaps only humans can satisfy even in a world of supercharged, embodied AI. It is also worth noting that what is intrinsically pleasurable may include work. Consider three areas where humans may still have a role: work that is blurred with play, play itself and work where humans retain some kind of an advantage
Start with the blurring boundary between work and play. Although working hours have fallen over the past century, most of the drop was before the 1980s. Increasingly, rich people labour for longer than poorer people. Keynes’s essay hints at an explanation for this odd development. He divided human desires in two: “Those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.”
Keynes perhaps underestimated the size of this second class of wants. A cynic might suggest that entire academic disciplines fall into it: existing with no apparent value to the world, with academics nevertheless competing furiously for status based on their braininess. Economists would say that, for many, work has become a “consumption good”, offering far more utility than the income it generates.
Games offer another hint as to why people may not stop working altogether. Millions of people are employed in entertainment and sports, competing for clout in activities that some consider immaterial. Perhaps when AIs overtake humans, interest in watching such games will wane. But evidence from sports where humans are already second-rate suggests otherwise. Since IBM’s DeepBlue defeated Garry Kasparov, the world grandmaster, in chess in 1997, interest in the game has only increased.
Other games that have been “solved” by ai, including Go, an ancient Chinese board game, and competitive video games, have witnessed a similar pattern. Across the world the number of video-game players has nearly doubled in the past decade, reaching 3.2bn last year. Nowadays a growing class of gamers compete or stream for a living.
AI might supercharge this interest. As Iain M. Banks speculated, humans might specialise in “the things that really [matter] in life, such as sport, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.” Other humans would presumably want to watch them, too.
Mibbes aye, as the great player Kenny Dalglish might have opined. Yet is this the same “play” (and creativity) as the environmental Cassandra Jem Bendell speaks of in his new book, Breaking Together? Play as an activity which may come to the fore as our existing “Imperial Modernity” collapses around our ears?
It is not inevitable we deny this knowledge [of climate collapse], suppress the emotions and cling to our worldviews more tightly. We can let the despair pull us away from that. We can discover a renewed desire and capacity for lively engagement with the present, including creativity and play, precisely due to a collapse of our old stories of self, society and world.
If that is how you feel sometimes, then you are not alone, as research has found that’s a key way people respond to the latest news and analysis on catastrophic situations for humanity. Indeed, it has proven to be the fuel for a new wave of environmental activism in recent years and what I describe as a new phenomenon of creatively engaged ‘doomsters.’
…Play means shedding old patterns, behaviours and set expectations in favour of open exploration with a beginner’s mind, which allows for the unexpected to emerge… [It] seemed obvious that if our way of life had brought civilisation to the verge of collapse, then humanity needed to find new ways of being, and such ways could only arise through free experimentation and play.
I wrote the book on play, so I’m obviously happy to see it gravitate to the centre of major critiques of the present, and visions of the future. All I would alert you to is that 25 years of thinking and acting as a play-advocate has left me in a more chastened place about its power and potential, as currently amplified by radical technologies, than I was then (and than these current examples show). To hear where I’m at, please go to my SUPERPLAY beta-book pages here - I welcome your interest, and your support.
Following on, and tweeted by me, with this text: “Amazing example of cross-mammalian play. Or metaphor for public reaction to establishment media agenda-setting. Or both.” (Click the four-arrow “expand” icon below for best experience)
So it was Brexit that decisively lost Tories the Millennials? So says this Conservative think-tank report on British Gen Y (and observe the breakpoint below):
The report contains more intrigue: “Millennials are the first demographic cohort not to become more right wing as they age. They are failing to acquire many of the attributes that have traditionally moved voters rightwards: home ownership, secure and stable employment, starting families. Without a stake in society, their political preferences are trending in the opposite direction. In fact, they are the first generation to become more left wing as they age.” For back-up, see this FT report. For more on Gens Y and Z’s progressive turn, see this from Keir Milburn.
Novara Media really is punching above its weight (and certainly funding), in terms of relevancy at the moment. Its co-founder Aaron Bastani, author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, is proving to have the hinterland to take on major writers/activists on the biggest topics. Here’s two interviews displaying this. First with venture capitalist Ian Hogarth, who wrote this AI-cautionary piece for the FT, which Bastani opens out in this interview:
Secondly with Matt Kenner, on how laws are in place to allow corporations to sue nations if their policies don’t accord with the imperatives of business growth:
🐳 🔥Killer whales orchestrating themselves to crack the hulls (and sink) yachts in Gibraltar (Telegraph). Amazing it took them so long…
Yet are we anthropomorphising when we assign revenge, even to fellow mammals like these? See this excellent Guardian Long Read on the vast journey we’re embarking on to understand animal minds, on their own terms:
Even if other species were conclusively found to possess a theory of mind, of course, it would not challenge our monopoly on the kind of “rational soul” that produced the pyramids and monotheism, the theory of evolution and the intercontinental ballistic missile. As long as these quintessentially human accomplishments remain our standard for intellectual capacity, our place at the top of the mental ladder is assured.
But are we right to think of intelligence as a ladder in the first place? Maybe we should think, instead, in terms of what Philip Ball calls “the space of possible minds” – the countless potential ways of understanding the world, some of which we may not even be able to imagine.
In mapping this space, which could theoretically include computer and extraterrestrial minds as well as animal ones, “we are currently no better placed than the pre-Copernican astronomers who installed the Earth at the centre of the cosmos and arranged everything else in relation to it”, Ball observes.
Until we know more about what kinds of minds are possible, it is sheer hubris to set up our own as the standard of excellence.
In an increasingly crowded, nomadic and climate-challenged world, territories like Scotland - relatively empty, sumptuously green - will be a locus for the future. But as my long-standing eco-designer friend John Thackera reports, there is already a mighty struggle going on, around Scotland as a raw resource for carbon offsetting. Thackera’s words are related to Alastair Macintosh’s new pamphlet, The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black Black Carbon
Will Scotland's 'carbonanza' - the rush to monetise the country's land - leave its people, and for that matter nature, behind?
The 'rewilding' agenda, right now, often justifies its urgency on grounds of climate change - but then treats huge swathes of rural Scotland as a colonial 'terra nullius”. This outside-in, top-down approach entails the helicoptering in of external experts to impose their own view of what the land should look like, and be like.
In this powerful, timely, but fair-minded text, Alastair Macintosh asks the crucial long-view questions too easily evaded or skated over in the offsetting boom: what is land for? Who makes the decisions, and who benefits? Where does and should offsetting sit in our respective transitions? How far should society 'commoditise' nature?
As matters stand, offsets can be a licence to carry on with business as usual - to continue to pollute - but alternatives do exist. Macintosh mentions, for example, that Scotland has 500 land trusts of varying types and sizes that are well capable - and highly motivated - towards ecological restoration. They also have generations of experience of living more gently with the land. Government has a crucial enabling role, too. Not, as now, acting mainly as an enabler of free-for-all financialisation, but also in giving communities more power to step in and buy assets in ways that would redress the balance.
Scotland has become something of global test-bed for the fast-emerging nature-finance ecosystem. This is piece is therefore a must-read for all those looking for alternatives to the unrestricted financialisation of land, place, and life itself.
Great Verso Books piece on recent cinema that anatomises the ultra-rich - and nails the superclass’s emptiness at the end: “As in the social world which they swim through seamlessly, so it is in the political realm which they control. Nothing new is being built; everything they don’t like is being destroyed. And whenever we’re allowed to glimpse inside the chambers where decisions are made, we find that it’s much dumber and more grotty than we could ever imagine.”
I recommend this Aeon essay on the power of the sonnet - but it turns out that the modern poem I thought was the ultimate sonnet has too many lines! However it does fit the Aeon prescription: “Sonnets are particularly healthy because they challenge our judgment and cognitive capacity, knocking us about – from triumph to tragedy; misery to humour – in the space of a few lines. You won’t find the sublime or the tragic in your sonnet world, or the slow climaxes of the ode or elegy. But you will find a condensed drama of the movements of the heart as it trundles through life.”
What’s the poem? Maggie Smith’s Good Bones (it’s an ornery piece: if you’re feeling faint-hearted, skipping is allowed). Below is a screen-capture from the Poetry Foundation entry. And below that, my own audio rendition. Often returned to.
Bobbly bits:
🍏🥽Apple’s coming techno-specs: interesting use-case as party wear (but how do you zhuzh the power cable, never mind the battery in the back pocket?). However, Chinese police are already in the market to use them - for facial recognition and instant perp detainment.
RIP Leigh French, editor of Scottish arts magazine Variant, whose archive is here, and whose massive anarchist grumpiness with everything consensual and representative in Scottish life, as it hegemonised its way to a working Parliament across the 80’s-00’s, was bracing and helpful. Always a stern caution against incorporation and complacency. Yours truly was both supportively commissioned (see “Timex and Postmodern Scotland”) and vituperated against by Variant, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Our “C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate” are now becalmed… thanks for reading. And again, if you like this, and want to support its existence, please attend to the big button below. Love, later, PK x